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Paulo Aguiar's avatar

The age of liberal internationalism didn’t collapse because people stopped believing in values; it collapsed because it stopped delivering power. You can’t run a 21st-century foreign policy on 1990s moodboard optimism. The reality is that most countries now pursue strategic autonomy, not ideological alignment. They trade with China, sign defense pacts with the U.S., and vote against both at the UN. That’s not hypocrisy; it’s sovereignty.

The liberal internationalist elite, especially in the U.S., mistook their post-Cold War monopoly for permanence. They outsourced manufacturing, overreached militarily, and tried to export a value system that looked more like a sales pitch than a model. The global South didn’t buy it, and now even parts of the West don’t either.

Real power lies in adapting to multipolarity, not pretending it's still 2003 and every crisis is another chance to play global savior. If liberalism has a future, it’s as something practiced, not preached. The world’s moved on. Time the foreign policy class did too.

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Mark-Anthony Bowen's avatar

with the rise of econophysics even maths & statistics institutions are starting to rise against neo-liberalism (though those subjects were always anti-universal for those in the know)

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