自由主义国际秩序的终结？
卡托研究所副总裁Christopher A. Preble对当下美国国内关于自由主义国际秩序的担忧经行了综述。
《国家利益》（2018.8.3）
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/end-liberal-world-order-27792
over the last several weeks, beginning with the NATO summit in Brussels, quickly followed by the meeting in Helsinki between President Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin, reporters and pundits have been mourning the demise of long-standing U.S. foreign-policy nostrums, and lamenting the emergence of a dark and dangerous new world order .
过去几周，从布鲁塞尔的北约峰会，到赫尔辛基会议唐纳德·特朗普和俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔•普京的会面，记者和学者一直在哀悼美国传统外交政策的终结，并哀叹一个黑暗和危险的世界新秩序的出现。
Writing in the Washington Post after the Brussels summit, the Brookings Institution’sRobert Kagan concluded, simply, “things will not be okay. The world crisis is upon us.”
在布鲁塞尔峰会结束后，布鲁金斯学会的罗伯特•卡根在“华盛顿邮报”上写道，“事态不妙，世界危机正在袭来。”
Kagan’s colleague James Kirchick is more sanguine, however.
The liberal order, he writes at Foreign Policy, cannot “simply be destroyed by the whims of a single individual, even the president of the United States.”
但卡根的同事詹姆斯•基切克则更为乐观。他在《外交政策》上称“自由主义国际秩序不会简单地被一个人的心血来潮所摧毁，即使这个人是美国总统。”
The liberal world order is “sticky” in that it contains fundamental elements . . . which outlast any one president’s time in office. While it’s certainly possible that Trump could seriously—or even permanently—wreck these elements, it is too early at this point to state definitively that he has.
自由主义国际秩序是有“粘性”的，因为它包含基本要义……这比任何一位总统在任时间都要持久。尽管特朗普可能会严重地（甚至是永久地）破坏这些元素，但目前下此断言还为时过早。
These two individuals share a common belief in the value of the liberal international order (LIO), even if they disagree on its relative durability.
这两个人对自由主义国际秩序(LIO)的价值有着共同的信念，尽管他们在相对持久性上存在分歧。
But we should question both propositions. The world order under American leadership always had its share of struggles. As Paul Staniland notes at Lawfare, “Proponents of the order . . . often present a narrow and highly selective reading of history” in which “problematic outcomes are treated as either aberrant exceptions or as not truly characterizing the order.”
但我们对这两种观点都应持怀疑态度。在美国领导下的国际秩序总是存在斗争的。正如保罗·史坦利在《法律战》中所指出的，“秩序的支持者……”通常呈现的是对历史的一种狭隘和高度选择性的解读，在这种解读中，“有问题的结果要么被视为异常的例外，要么被视为不实的特征。”
In short, we have reached this latest crisis in a crisis-filled Trump presidency mostly because the foreign-policy establishment has relied on nostalgia and myth to avoid reckoning with that order’s shortcomings. Kagan and Kirchick’s commentaries are a near perfect reflection of that mindset.
简言之，我们之所以在危机四伏的特朗普总统任期内感到这种威胁，主要是因为外交政策建制派依赖怀旧和神话，以避免对这一秩序的缺陷进行清算。卡根和基切克的评论几乎完美地反映了这种心态。
Such nostalgia “impedes Washington from undertaking a needed reassessment of its grand strategy,” explains Patrick Porter in a recent paper for the Cato Institute. “Endless recall of the ‘liberal order’ . . . damages the intellectual capacity to diagnose the failures of the recent past” and “harms the effort to construct a workable design for the future.”
这种怀旧情绪“妨碍了华盛顿对其大战略进行必要的重新评估”，帕特里克·波特在最近为卡托研究所撰写的一篇论文中解释道。“无休止地缅怀自由秩序’……损害智力能力，也损害了反思过去、总结教训、并对未来经行”可行的设计“的努力。
Constructing this “workable design” begins with an accurate assessment of what the old order delivered, and failed to deliver, during its heyday. It also includes an honest accounting of what risks and burdens the American people will tolerate under a future order that is less dependent upon American power, and less deferential to the preferences of Americans.
构建这种“可行的设计”始于对旧秩序的准确评估，这在自由主义国际秩序的鼎盛时期未能实现。它还包括对美国人民在未来的秩序下，所能承受的风险和成本负担的忠实描述，这种秩序不那么依赖美国的力量，也不那么服从于美国人的喜好。
“Citizens seeking a better foreign policy ought to be engaged, not ignored,” Thomas Meaney and Stephen Wertheim write, but foreign-policy elites “rallying behind the lowest common denominator of ‘anything but Trump,’ . . . are disengaging the public’s discontent, [and] pulling up the drawbridge until the next election.”
“广大民众应该参与到寻求更好外交政策的行动中，而不是被忽视，”托马斯•米尼和斯蒂芬•韦特海姆写道。他们正在消除公众的不满情绪，并在下次选举前做好。
Thankfully, serious foreign-policy observers—includingBruce Jentleson , Graham Allison , Heather Hurlburt , Rebecca Friedman Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper , and Nick Danforth —are admitting that we can’t go back to the old ways, even if we wanted to.
值得庆幸的是，严肃的外交政策观察家们（包括布鲁斯·詹特森、格拉汉姆·艾利森、希瑟·赫尔伯特、丽贝卡·弗里德曼、米拉·拉普·胡珀和尼克·丹福斯）都承认，即便我们想回到过去，也回不去了。
Kirchick suggests that Trumpism is a passing phenomenon, but he and other nostalgists ignore the dramatic geopolitical changes that have occurred since the order was first established. “In the LIO’s inception and for many decades,” Jentleson explains, “the United States had the power and wealth to sponsor and buttress the system. What it gave the world…and what it took…were generally seen as in balance. To the extent they weren’t, . . . others had limited power to do much about it.” But today “no one country has sufficient dominance to set the rules largely on its own and in its own image . . . More countries are actors, rather than acted upon.” For this and other reasons, “There is no going back to the role and system we reveled in before.”
基尔克奇认为，特朗普主义不过是昙花一现，但怀旧人士忽略了自该秩序形成以来发生的戏剧性地缘政治变化。布鲁斯·詹特森解释道:“在自由国际秩序的诞生和几十年里，美国有力量和财富来支持和支持这个体系。大多数人认为美国对其付出的和从中获取的是相平衡的，而在某种程度上也不尽然……其他国家的力量有限，无法对此做很多事情。但如今没有一个国家拥有足够的主导地位，能够独立制定规则……更多的国家是参与者，而不是采取行动。有鉴于此，我们不可能回到我们以前喜欢的角色和体系。”
Lissner and Rapp-Hooper agree. “The erosion of American military, economic, and political power,” they write in a recent issue of The Washington Quarterly, undermines the order at its very foundation and, critically, “will not evaporate with Trump’s departure from the Oval Office.”
莱斯那和米拉·拉普·胡珀也赞同这一观点。他们在最近一期的《华盛顿季刊》上写道:“美国军事、经济和政治力量的削弱，会破坏其根基，关键是这种破坏不会随着特朗普离开椭圆形办公室而消失”。
One wouldn’t exactly characterize these musings as optimistic, but these authors admit to the need for solving a problem, as opposed to simply bemoaning our fate—or blithely assuming that all is well. Our focus should be on developing credible alternatives to the world order that served a good part of the planet reasonably well for most of the last seventy years. After all, even skeptics of that order concede that, as world orders go, it had a pretty good run.
我们不能断定这些反思是乐观的，但是这些学者承认解决问题的必要性，而不是简单地对命运发出哀叹，或是假装一切安好。我们的重点应该是建立世界秩序的可靠替代方案，在过去70年的大部分时间里，这一秩序在全球大部分地区都是相当好的。即便是对这一秩序持怀疑态度的人也承认，随着不断发展，这一秩序已经相当不错了。
“At issue here is neither the legitimacy of American power in the world nor many of its benefits,” Porter admits. “If there was to be a superpower emerging from the rubble of world war in midcentury, we should be grateful it was the United States, given the totalitarian alternatives on offer.”
波特承认:“问题既不是美国在世界上的权力的合法性，也不是它的许多好处。”“相比极权主义的替代方案，如果本世纪中叶一个超级大国在世界大战的废墟中崛起，我们应该感激是美国”
But past performance is no guarantee of future results. Nostalgia for the old U.S.-dominated order based on a selective reading of history, and a willful ignorance of the present balance of political and economic power, cannot deal squarely with the order’s limitations and shortcomings. It makes it nearly impossible for us to construct a reasonable alternative for the future.
过去的表现并不能对未来做出保证。缅怀旧美国，以及对历史的选择性解读为主导的秩序，故意忽视当前政治经济实力平衡，不解决秩序的局限性和缺陷，将导致我们几乎无法为未来构建一个合理的选择。
Whereas Kagan and Kirchick despair that any such alternative exists, or is even needed, the wealth of informed commentary cited here gives one hope that the broader foreign-policy community is more willing than they to scrutinize the comfortable nostrums that have sustained American foreign policy for decades.
尽管卡根和基奇克对是否存在这样的合理选择感到绝望，但本文引用的大量信息却给了我们一个希望，即更多的外交政策团体比他们更愿意去仔细研究维持美国外交政策的合适方法。