The Crisis of Liberal Internationalism: Japan and the World Order

Japan’s challenges and opportunities in a new era of uncertainty

Henry Kissinger wrote a few years ago that Japan has been for seven decades ＂an important anchor of Asian stability and global peace and prosperity.＂ However, Japan has only played this anchoring role within an American-led liberal international order built from the ashes of World War II. Now that order itself is under siege, not just from illiberal forces such as China and Russia but from its very core, the United States under Donald Trump. The already evident damage to that order, and even its possible collapse, pose particular challenges for Japan, as explored in this book.

Yoichi Funabashi is co-founder and chairman of Asia Pacific Initiative, an independent Tokyo-based think tank (formerly Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation). He was the editor-in-chief of Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s foremost newspaper, from 2007 to 2010. His books include Meltdown: Inside the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis (Brookings, forthcoming), The Peninsula Question: A Chronicle of the Second Korean Nuclear Crisis (Brookings, 2007), Alliance Adrift (Council on Foreign Relations, 1998) and Managing the Dollar: From the Plaza to the Louvre (Institute for International Economics, 1988).

G. John Ikenberry is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on the liberal international order. He is the author of seven books, including Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American System (Princeton, 2011) and After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, 2001). Ikenberry is also Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea.