Introductory remarks: Who killed the liberal international order and what comes next
Date: 17 September 2025
As a recovering practitioner of Australian diplomacy, I am delighted to offer some introductory comments to this inaugural professorial lecture and to introduce our speaker.
Australia is a country that can neither buy nor bully its way in the world. We are therefore particularly dependent on an international order which operates by rules not just power.
For the last 80 years, we have had the extraordinary good fortune of having such a system. Today that, together with many other features of the international system, face a bonfire of certainties.
It is not just that we had a congenial if imperfect international order but that it was an order built around the principles of a liberal democracy and led by a global hegemon which, for all its contradictions and hypocrisies, held a sophisticated world view which was anchored in the premise that its own hard interests were served by an international order designed to deliver economic growth through liberalising economies, upholding the core principles of the UN charter, and constructing a multilateral system built around inclusive institutions.
This is not how hegemons have traditionally operated. It reflected an extraordinarily broad view of US interests. It would be wrong to say that it represented a sublimation of power by the US but, in the way in which it linked US interests to the success of other countries, it did reflect a much more subtle exercise of power. It was an historic aberration and it was tailor made for Australia.
It was of course never the case that the post war international order, largely constructed by the US in its own image, displaced power politics or great power rivalry. And Indeed often the multilateral system was held hostage to those larger forces. But still it delivered for countries like Australia a platform where our influence was not defined solely by our economic or strategic weight.
The multilateral system, as opposed to the liberal international order, is not dead. It survives in the UN and international and regional organisations.
But global multilateralism is for now in suspended animation and it cannot be revived for as long as the US stands outside it.
The days of negotiating global agreements through structures with universal membership where nothing is agreed until everything is agreed by everyone is gone. It only existed because of US leadership
Constructing a global system without the US is a fool’s errand and nor is it in our interests for China to position itself as the successor to US multilateral leadership even if China were actually prepared to play that role. Just as the US brought to its leadership of multilateralism the principles of liberal democracy – the “liberal” in liberal international order - a China led system would reflect China’s authoritarian Leninist political character and that is problematic for a liberal democracy like Australia.
Reviving the old system, at least for now, looks well beyond our reach. The best we can hope for is to save as much of the furniture as possible. And to look for new arrangements, less global in scale, which can nevertheless keep the pilot light if not the flame alive.
Take, for example, the adjective-laden Comprehensive and Progressive Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement. It is a high-quality agreement. It is not restricted to regional countries. It holds the promise of broader membership. If we avoid exerting a geopolitical veto over potential members who can meet its high standards, we might achieve something bigger than regional but short of global.
And if global arrangements are currently a bridge too far we are likely to see more coalitions of the willing: countries that come together to achieve a shared and more narrow objective in arrangements which one commentator has described as limited liability partnerships.
Transactionalism, never far from the surface of international relations, looks set to again become a guiding principle of diplomacy.
And even where our institutions struggle to achieve anything substantial, we should still look to keep them alive because once gone, institutions are very hard to reconstitute. If there is one thing we have learnt in the post war period it is just how important institutions are to the stability of our societies. That applies to the international order as much as to individual nations.
These are just some of the issues raised by the topic of tonight’s lecture.
Our speaker, Professor Andrew Phillips, is well placed to guide us through these complex questions in this his inaugural professorial lecture.
Andrew is Professor of International Relations and Strategy in UQ’s School of Political Science and International Studies, and is a current Australian Research Council Future Fellow.
He is widely published on subjects ranging from great power rivalry and terrorism, to the centuries-long history of international orders.
His books include:
- War, Religion and Empire: The Transformation of International Orders,
- International Order in Diversity
- Outsourcing Empire
- and How the East Was Won[1]
… all exploring how history shapes today’s strategic landscape.
Andrew also has the rare ability to communicate complex ideas clearly.
He has brought the big questions of international politics to many wider audiences, including through the ABC.
In this lecture, Andrew will address if the liberal international order was killed by rising authoritarian powers?
Did the United States, once the order’s chief architect, let it die?
Or did the order simply get too old, overtaken by fading memories of world wars, and by the economic and political shocks of recent decades?
Whatever the answers, the implications are profound – for Australia, the Indo-Pacific, and the world.
I suspect Andrew won’t be able to give us simple answers, nor should he.
But he will help us think more clearly about the forces reshaping our world, and what might rise up from the bonfire of certainties.
And it’s always instructive to view the dilemmas of the present against the sweep of history.
We need to imagine what kind of order might emerge from the one now fraying, and how we can help shape it.
It is a pleasure to introduce and welcome Professor Andrew Phillips to deliver his inaugural professorial lecture: Who Killed the Liberal International Order and What Comes Next?