Professor Joseph Nye in 2017 ever wrote an article titled “American Leadership and the Future of the Liberal International Order.”¹ In that article, he listed three possible challenges to a U.S.-led liberal international order - economic and financial capability, interventionism, and domestic political division. According to his observation, the real challenge to a U.S.-led liberal order among these three would be of domestic division. In other words, the real challenge to American leadership in a liberal world would come from the U.S. inside such as the domestic political division and the rise of populism, rather than from its outside like the threats from other powers.²

Given the strength of the U.S. power in a number of core areas including the economic, military, and technological aspects of the U.S. power as well as its soft power, Nye argued that a U.S.-led liberal international order would continue. Yet he also indicated that the liberal order could be altered in certain ways. One of the phenomena could be that, with the rise of other powers and the complexities that could generate, the U.S. would feel more difficult to organize actions. Another phenomenon under a new liberal order is that, with part of the power being transferred from states to non-state actors alongside the advancement of information technology, there could be more unfamiliar complexities for governments.³

While agreeing with the above assessment on the possible phenomena to appear under a new liberal order, this analytical paper would meanwhile focus on the exploration of values and their impacts on a future liberal international order. To do so, it would assume a view that the values for driving changes and forging a future liberal order might be enriched and be more pluralistic alongside certain non-western values with a liberal nature possibly gaining more influence on the global stage.

Among a number of challenging factors to the liberal international order, apart from what having been examined by other observers, this piece would assume that the way how liberal values have been promoted has significantly affected some people’s understanding and impression to liberal values themselves, as well as to a U.S.-led liberal order; and these kinds of understanding and impression could still generate a challenging effect to the U.S. aspiration and effort in facilitating a new liberal order.

Over the past decades, the promotion of liberal values and of a liberal order has generally borne a purpose of serving the U.S. strategic interest. Yet in the process of doing so, numerous repercussions have also been arisen on both the domestic and international levels. This paper will begin by briefly analysing the origin of liberal values; then it will assess the repercussions emerged in the process of promoting liberal values; and finally, it will try to foresee how a future liberal international order might be like. The purpose of doing this analysis is to see whether there could be a prospect for states, in particular, the major powers, to jointly forge and sustain a new liberal international order.

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