The brouhaha over the explosive executive orders issuing from the Oval Office tends to drown everything else out.
The Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye has dubbed president Donald Trump’s style “policy by thunderbolt”, and it is understandable that many are too dazed to take in lesser details when disruption is so swift, and a lack of coordination in the White House makes long-term clarity about the consequences of these lightning strikes hard to discern.
During Theresa May’s visit to the United States, however, she said something that, coming on top of Mr Trump’s own words, was highly significant. Speaking to a Republican gathering last Thursday, she insisted that the “days of Britain and America intervening in sovereign countries in an attempt to remake the world in our own image are over”.
Following the president’s declaration at his inauguration, that “it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first. We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone”, this amounts to a remarkably explicit repudiation of liberal interventionism by the two countries most responsible for inflicting that doctrine on the world.
This is not to overstate the United Kingdom’s importance. American disavowal matters far more. But for decades, the US has sought military allies for its foreign misadventures in order to pretend that it is “the international community” acting, rather than Washington alone.
In 1964 president Lyndon Johnson even begged the British prime minister Harold Wilson to send a band of bagpipers to Vietnam to show that it was not just the US’s war.
Mr Wilson refused. But too often the junior partner in “the special relationship” has obliged, most notoriously when Tony Blair told George W Bush “I will be with you, whatever” eight months before the invasion of Iraq.
From 1980s British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s decision to allow US aircraft based in Britain to bomb Colonel Qaddafi at Ronald Reagan’s behest in 1986, to the two countries uniting to support his removal 25 years later, this partnership has caused death and destruction, including the death of Mr Qaddafi’s adopted daughter Hanna in the first case, and the destruction of the Libyan state in the second.
Liberal interventionism may spring from a desire to do good, but it starts from a flawed assumption: that there is a template of governance, rights, values and legitimacy that all countries should follow, and may be rightly forced to follow; and that template is the property of the West.
For all the talk of liberal, open societies encouraging children and citizens to ask questions, the idea that there might be other acceptable ways of ordering a country’s affairs is never remotely contemplated. Indeed, to suggest that it might be so can earn accusations of being patronising. “You don’t think the people of x or y state are ready for liberal democracy, do you?”
Which is not the case at all. For that would imply that history’s arc bends inexorably towards western-style liberal democracy, and that the rest of the world is just waiting to embrace European post-Christian values – when there are myriad reasons, from a rise in overt and political religiosity in many developing nations, to the electoral victories of populist strongmen, to think otherwise.
Religion is necessarily universalist in its claims. A revealed truth cannot be a matter of opinion. It has to be true for all people at all times. But a political philosophy is ultimately a matter of opinion, and the values associated with it observably shift with time.
Faith in western liberal democracy may have much of the force of religious conviction. I have argued before that it has inherited the mantle of certainty once provided by Christian universalism in a now largely post-Christian Europe. But it has none of its foundations. It is only one system among many that have been tried, one set of values that have changed enormously during my lifetime.
It is, yes, only one opinion. And not just to seek to impose it on others, but to say one has the right – indeed, the obligation – to do so is arrogance of the most monumental order.
From a purely practical perspective, liberal interventionism has been a disaster. Its overall effect has been to destroy state institutions, create ungoverned spaces where groups such as ISIL have thrived, and displace millions. As I wrote in these pages in September 2011, when the situation in Libya appeared momentarily to be more hopeful: “Liberal interventionism has left too many corpses in its wake. We don’t want it back.”
But from a principled point of view, too, if liberal interventionism is justified by sheer force of belief in the universalism of its creed, then it must be accepted that communists were equally justified in imposing their system on many unwilling countries after the Second World War.
The “right” comes first, and then gives licence to “might” to act with no consideration of the wishes of the relevant populations.
That is surely not a world to which we want to return. If Mr Trump and Mrs May really mean what they say, history may judge theirs a partnership far greater than Ronnie and Maggie – for saying goodbye to a doctrine that came clothed in the concepts of freedom and democracy, but which left a trail of lawlessness, terrorism and death.
Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia