Photo Chrystia Freeland, Canadas foreign affairs minister, speaking in Parliament, June 6, 2017. Credit Chris Wattie/Reuters

THE RETREAT OF WESTERN LIBERALISM By Edward Luce 234 pp. Atlantic Monthly Press. $24.

On June 6, 2017, the Canadian foreign minister made an extraordinary speech to that countrys Parliament. Rather than outlining a specific policy proposal or program, Chrystia Freeland chose instead to defend the current international system what many call the liberal international order and argue that Canada must play a vital role in defending, supporting and strengthening it. The reason for this urgency, she implied, was that it faced various threats, not least that the United States of America, the country that had built, nurtured and sustained this order, now seemed disposed to shrug off the burden of world leadership. To say this is not controversial, she noted. It is simply a fact. In an almost elegiac fashion, she thanked the United States for its seven-decades-long contribution to our shared peace and prosperity, implying that the era of America as steward of the international system was over. She never mentioned Donald Trump by name, but the speech was about him.

That the foreign minister of one of Americas closest and most like-minded allies should feel the need to deliver a eulogy to American leadership tells us that many around the globe sense a systemic crisis. To understand the nature of this crisis, we could not find a better guide than Edward Luces The Retreat of Western Liberalism. An important caveat: Luce, a highly regarded columnist for The Financial Times, is not using the word liberal in its American, partisan sense, but rather in its older sense. Liberalism here means the tradition of liberty and democracy and, by extension, the open, rules-based international economic and political system that has characterized the Western world since 1945, and many more parts of the globe since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Luce argues that the ideas and values that organized these societies internally and externally are now under mortal threat.

I suspect that Luce came to the view that animates this book while working on his last one, Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent. In that book, Luce documented in unsparing detail the ways in which the United States was in economic decay. He painted a vivid and prescient picture of the hollowed-out towns and counties that once made up Americas manufacturing, mining and agricultural heartland, places that are now well known and much talked about. He described the world of what he called everyday Americans, who had not seen a rise in their incomes in almost a generation and who, as a consequence, watched their communities and families fall apart. As Luce says in this new book, the key problem is the backlash of the Wests middle classes, who are the biggest losers in a global economy that has been working for most everyone else.

He argues that just as economics has been failing to deliver, so has politics. The end of the Cold War ushered in an age of technocracy in which both parties huddled around the center, offering a variety of tax cuts on the one hand and targeted government interventions on the other. Referring to the left-wing parties move to the center, Luce quotes a scholar, Jan-Werner Mller, who said, The third way turned elections into a mere choice between Coke and Pepsi. If economic divisions seemed to narrow, cultural ones have grown, involving issues like immigration, race and religion, over which divisions are stark and compromise is seen as betrayal. The result is two angry teams, unable to trust the other at all, no matter what facts or evidence suggests. Despair about their circumstances and bitterness toward elites have left Middle America so cynical about the truth, Luce writes, that it will take its script from a political version of pro wrestling. All this has made American politics dysfunctional and paralyzed. If Americas share of the global economy has declined, its political model has slipped even more in global esteem.

At the same time, Luce points out, there is the challenge to the Western order from newly rising powers. He quickly sketches out a mostly familiar story of the economic emergence of China and the inevitable expansion of its influence in Asia and perhaps beyond. This is bringing it into conflict with the global superpower and, under Trump, Luce writes, the two great countries seem almost destined to stray into some kind of crisis. He doesnt dwell on this prospect much; he is far more consumed by his larger story of the economic and political decay of the West.

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What Happens When Liberty Fails to Deliver - New York Times