The 4 years of the Trump administration have represented a litmus test as dynamics that have already been underway over the past few years have manifested blatantly. In fact, during the Trump tenure, there has been a definitive reorientation of the American strategic posture which has embarked into the renewed great power competition against revisionist powers. These revisionist powers such as the Russian Federation (RF) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) are willing to disarticulate the so-called Liberal International Order (LIO). Moreover, the authoritarian challenge they pose has thus been linked with a gradual decrease of the overall number of democratic regimes throughout the world. This trend has been defined as a crucial challenge towards one of the main pillars of the LIO led by the US, which is the high quota of democratic countries that populate the international arena. On the other hand, the global democratic footprint has allegedly suffered an even more serious challenge from within the LIO, namely the foreign policy carried out after the Trump presidential election win in 2016. Terms like nationalism, isolationism and economic protectionism have crowded Trump administration's international stance. It is due to this fact that many commentators hailed the Trump tenure as the final blow to the LIO which was already in decline given that its main sponsor, the US, claimed to no longer be willing to sustain it. The expected outcome was thus the overall decrease of the global democratic grip that was fatally destined to end because of the two above-mentioned reasons. Firstly, the rise of authoritarian revisionist great powers in the international stage and secondly, the withdrawal of the US from its pivotal role in spreading democratic values worldwide.
Conversely, the newly elected democratic administration of President Joseph Biden has been hailed by many analysts as the return of the US to a more orthodox approach in international affairs; the same role prevalently played since World War II. According to this interpretation, the Biden presidency will likely feature a return to a more traditional liberal internationalist course. Hence, unlike President Trump, the new American administration is thought to be committed to the global struggle against the rise of revisionist challengers by reinforcing a values-oriented agenda that aims to reverse the democracy decreasing trend. Following this explanation, the US's swinging commitment to their global duties as the main architect of the LIO should be examined according to the individual preferences of each American president, affected by his own political and cultural background and the related constituency which elected him.
Gabriele Natalizia's volume has the merit to innovatively challenge this belief by presenting a theory-rooted and empirically tested work that takes into consideration both the alternative phases of democracy promotion and retreat, sponsored by the hegemonic and main architect of the LIO, the US. This volume has the credit to debunk the assumption that the American domestic political landscape and the individual preferences of the American presidents play a sole role in shaping the American swinging policy of democracy promotion around the world. Instead, by adopting an International Relations-based approach, the author aims to creatively reverse this belief, by granting to some structural features of the hegemonic order the role of causal variables of the aforementioned phases of democracy promotion and retreat.
Renderli simili o inoffensivi choreographs the whole work through a solid theoretical framework. In order to extend this preliminary knowledge, the author draws from different IR schools and approaches, maintaining the power transition and hegemonic stability theory as its theoretical linchpin. Nonetheless, he spares no efforts in connecting the dots taken from several fields. Therefore, this volume works as a useful tool, which proves to be able to summarize and match elements from the study of International Relations – paying particular attention to the structural and neoclassical realism – the American foreign policy studies and the democratization studies. After a meticulous review of the literature which allows the author to anchor his study to a solid theoretical base, Natalizia's main endeavour is to tackle the following questions: what is the relationship between the international order and the domestic sphere of the secondary states that compose it? How do the international hegemonic orders influence the domestic regime of the second-tier states? And finally, is there a relationship between the so-called crisis of the LIO and the process of global regression of democratic countries in the world?
As previously claimed, the main finding of this study is that the American policy of democracy promotion is better understandable if bound to the structural conditions underpinning the LIO. This volume has thus the merit of bringing the system-level dimension and the unit-level analysis together and of contributing to closing the gap between IR and foreign policy analysis. Particularly – the work argues – the crucial structural constraint which is able to give momentum or to slow down the policy of democracy promotion lays in the stability of a US-led international hegemonic order. The distribution of power among international actors proves indeed to be more influential than the individual preferences of any American administration considered. This does not completely rule out the role of domestic variables in shaping the American foreign policy agenda. Natalizia's aim is rather to shed light on some major international constraints which have the power to overcome the influence that the domestic sphere may play in shaping the American international posture.
At this point, the author presents his ‘democracy dilemma’. By anchoring the American foreign policy preferences to the stability of the international order, the US is called to deal with the following dilemma: whether to make secondary states ‘similar’ or ‘harmless’. The final aim of both policies is however the same: the perpetuation of the US-led hegemonic order. According to these assumptions, the more stable the international order is, the more the US, namely the hegemonic power, can embark itself in making the secondary states ‘similar’, giving prevalence to the maximalist option. In fact, the absence of would-be revisionist challengers to the American hegemony allows the US to focus its attention on the long-term, expensive efforts and non-existential interest of shaping the domestic and foreign policies of the second-tier states. By investigating such alternatives, the author implicitly demonstrates another hypothesis made at the theoretical level: the steadily erosion of the differentiation line between the international arena and the domestic sphere that has been affecting the secondary states in the post-World War II era. Therefore, this assumption also hints at the need for orthodox realists to doubt and rethink the concept of sovereignty. Except for the major powers, the vast majority of countries, when facing an overwhelming power gap, are no longer allowed to pursue freely their international and domestic goals.
On the contrary, when the international order turns out to be unstable, displaying a more balanced distribution of power, the US needs to close the ranks by throwing its own weight into the great power competition. Especially given that this competition could challenge the very existence of the US-led hegemonic order. In this case, the American preference turns towards the cheaper and short-term policy of making the secondary states ‘harmless’, which represents the minimalist and core option.
The last merit of the author is to test empirically the theoretical hypothesis, tracing the swinging nature of the US foreign policy diachronically over the whole length of the LIO's existence, which spans from the World War II to the Trump presidency. For instance, by focusing the attention on the most recent two American administrations, the author underscores the same reluctance demonstrated by Presidents Obama and Trump to lead a new wave of democratic promotion policies, despite their opposite party membership and radical difference between political culture backgrounds. The reasons behind their cautious approach lay into the structural framework within which they found themselves to act and, particularly, the re-emergence of potential challengers to the LIO like Russia and China. This long-term structural condition led them to temporarily dismiss the more expensive maximalist option and instead to make the secondary states ‘harmless’. The election of the new Biden administration gives this volume's framework further ground to prove its effectiveness. Following the presented assumptions and given the likely increase of the instability which will affect the international arena, we should expect that even President Biden will undertake a similar pathway to his last two predecessors'.
