This ambitious book offers a commendably concise account of two hundred years of liberal internationalism. It also offers a defense of an ideology widely viewed as in crisis today. The central claim of A World Safe for Democracy is that the legitimacy and sustainability of democracy and liberalism at home are best served by the constitution of a particular kind of liberal international order.^{Footnote 1} This is an important argument that sets it apart from most other products of the “democracy-defense industry”—to use Reference MüllerJan-Werner Müller's (2019) memorable phrase—and deserves close attention from political theorists, who have tended to overlook the international sources of domestic political order.

An influential scholar of international relations (IR) and leading liberal internationalist in the US foreign policy establishment, John Ikenberry began this book as a lecture series in the wake of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential election. Its title draws on Woodrow Wilson's famous words, spoken in April 1917 before the US Senate to justify his demand for a declaration of war on Germany. Rather than read Wilson's plea that “the world must be made safe for democracy” as a call to promote democratization abroad, as IR scholars usually do, Ikenberry joins historians in arguing that it is better understood as a much broader vision of postwar world order (xi–xii). The point was not so much to spread democracy as to refashion international order in such a way as to create a friendly environment in which it could flourish. Like Wilson himself, A World Safe for Democracy places this effort in a longer tradition, rooted in the Enlightenment and the Atlantic revolutions, which achieved political hegemony in the wake of the twentieth century's global conflicts: 1919, 1945, and 1991. These years are symbolic founding moments of international orders dominated by Britain and the United States, the leading liberal states, or “hegemons,” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Ikenberry writes in the first two chapters, the international orders built in these moments differed from each other in many ways but shared four principles: (economic) openness; multilateralism built around rules and institutions; solidarity among liberal democracies and cooperative security; and the pursuit of progressive social purposes (33–42). This account builds on Reference IkenberryIkenberry's (2000; Reference Ikenberry2011) earlier work on liberal hegemony and order-building.

About half the book (chaps. 3–6) contains an account of the rise of liberal internationalism. Particularly refreshing for a work of IR—a field that rarely looks back further in history than 1919 or even 1945—is that Ikenberry devotes serious attention to the ideology's origins in nineteenth-century movements like Cobdenite free trade, international law, or the transnational peace movement (chap. 3). These various strands were tied together into a coherent political project in the 1910s, during World War I, and, in Ikenberry's telling, primarily by the agency of one man, Wilson (chap. 4). This resulted in the creation of the League of Nations, which failed in the 1930s, leading to the reinvention of liberal internationalism, a process that Ikenberry names the “Rooseveltian revolution.” National and social security became the fundamental ends, and activism at both the national and international level the means to achieve them (chap. 5). Ikenberry makes no secret of his admiration for this model of liberal international order, which flourished in the Western Bloc during the Cold War. As in his previous work, he emphasizes that order's dual, liberal and hierarchical character (chap. 6): dominated by a hegemon, the US, but defined by rules, norms, and institutions, like NATO or the Bretton Woods system, that both tied the hegemon down and other members (Western Europe and Japan) to it.

The last third of A World Safe for Democracy offers a defense of liberal internationalism against many critiques. To a significant extent, this section revisits arguments first made in Liberal Leviathan (Reference IkenberryIkenberry 2011), which argued that the liberal international order could persist even without US hegemony, weakened by the international aggression, treaty-breaking and economic fiasco presided over by President George W. Bush. Chapter 7, like Liberal Leviathan, considers liberal internationalism's problematic links to empire and war, as in the League, with its Covenant drafted by British imperialists, and its Mandate system of internationalized colonialism. Ikenberry concedes this but rejects the idea that this left a long-term legacy, pointing to the equally old tradition of liberal anti-imperialism, which, aided by US ascendancy, helped usher in a world order based on self-determination by 1950. This story is far too neat and US-centric. Few would deny liberal internationalism's mid-century transformation. However, this took place primarily in political economy, as chapter 5 makes clear. As Adom Getachew and many others have shown, it took until the 1960s and 1970s for liberal internationalists, including in the US, to fully come to terms with the end of empire, under constant pressure from anti-colonial nationalists (cf. Reference Garavini and Richard R.Garavini 2012; Reference GetachewGetachew 2019).

The final two chapters, again much like Liberal Leviathan, address the important question of how liberal internationalism could go from hegemonic ideology to crisis within less than 25 years, and what to do about it. Remarkably, unlike in 2011, Ikenberry now points to the international-political and socioeconomic bargains underpinning liberal international order as the problem rather than the solution. As the order expanded from the Western Bloc to the world, these were not adjusted to accommodate new, nonliberal members like China and Russia, or to protect labor and capital in the old Western core from global competition. The result was fragmentation, inequality, and, eventually, backlash in the form of Trump and Brexit. While he also notes that its fragmentation has increased the order's durability, as states can pick and choose where they engage, Ikenberry does advocate reform, primarily to make the order work better for democracies and their peoples. In essence, he proposes to restore some of the hallmarks of Rooseveltian internationalism, such as managed protectionism and greater unity against nonliberal states—without jettisoning cooperation with China and Russia on matters of common interest, like climate change. Unsurprisingly, his book was on the Biden transition team's reading list (Reference HirshHirsh 2020).

That alone should make clear that liberal internationalism is far from a spent force. Ikenberry has clearly written an important book, which powerfully restates the case for liberal internationalism in terms of its ability to marry idealism to pragmatism, and domestic to international political order. It offers a simplified and overly sympathetic account of the tradition's history, especially of its dark sides, but one that would serve well as an introduction to the topic.

That is not to say the book is without its shortcomings. First, it tells an almost exclusively Anglo-American tale, which virtually ignores even the most obvious non-English-speaking liberal internationalists, like the French, let alone non-Europeans. A World Safe for Democracy does not try to be comprehensive, but it is hardly even representative. Second and relatedly, it completely ignores women, even though suffragists were among the first to theorize the symbiotic relationship between democracy and international order, to name but one example. But the book's most puzzling and problematic omission is democracy itself. Throughout, Ikenberry refers interchangeably to “democracies,” “liberal democracies,” and “liberal states,” implying that democracy is necessarily liberal and vice versa. But that simply does not apply to many liberals, from Friedrich Hayek and the “Geneva School” of neoliberalism (Reference SlobodianSlobodian 2018) to NATO (Reference SayleSayle 2019). In reality, the relationship between liberalism and democracy is fraught and full of tension. The negative concept of liberty that is so influential in contemporary liberalism is in fact rooted in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century counterrevolutionary politics opposed to democracy, as Reference DijnAnnelien De Dijn (2020) has recently shown (cf. Reference BerlinBerlin 1969). The same tension applies to liberal internationalism, as indicated, quite beyond Trump or Brexit, by the European Union's democratic deficit or the highly problematic record of UN interventions in, say, Haiti. If Ikenberry is right that the future of democracy depends on the international order that supports it, then the kind of democracy that liberal internationalism promotes (not to mention opposes) deserves much closer inspection than he offers.