The US has taken a decidedly illiberal turn. However, as a hegemonic state that is simultaneously creator and primary manager of the current liberal international order (LIO), its turn to illiberalisation is categorically distinct from other instances of democratic backsliding. The US has promoted the liberal ideals of the LIO as universal, but US illiberalisation highlights, if not exacerbates, the contradictions around universality of the order’s principles and structural inequities that deliver uneven benefits.
The accelerating turn away from the very ideals the US embedded in the order is producing both material disruptions (loss of aid funding, uncertainty in security guarantees, unreliable trade relationships) and ideational disruptions (loss of faith and institutional legitimacy, changing norms, heightened nationalism, lack of predictability). States are not simply losing a partner; they're losing the scaffolding they've built their foreign and domestic policies around.
However, not all states experience the impacts of US illiberalisation equally. Where a state sits in the global hierarchy, its degree of US dependency, and its own regime type determine to what degree disruptions from US illiberalisation land and how. These factors are not independent — hierarchical position shapes the degree of US dependency, and both condition how acutely regime type determines which disruptions land hardest. Western states have more institutional resources, alliance frameworks, economic and military capacity, and historical proximity to order building than non-Western states, giving them more tools to adapt and respond, making their struggle a “crisis of adaptation.” In contrast, non-Western states incorporated into the order on uneven terms (or never meaningfully incorporated at all) have fewer buffers, resulting in more of a “crisis of survival.” This makes the impacts of US illiberalisation both quantitatively different (the degree to which it affects a country) and qualitatively different (in what ways they are impacted). Without attention to hierarchy and uneven incorporation, the field cannot account for why the same hegemonic disruption produces existential crisis for some states and manageable adaptation for others.
