POPULISM, LIKE tyranny, is a “danger coeval with political life,” Leo Strauss wrote. It has been around for as long as human beings have lived together in political communities advancing claims to justice, set down laws in accordance with these claims, and witnessed the perversion of these same claims by opportunistic individuals who advanced their particular or private interests to the detriment of the common good of the political community (politeia in Greek, translated conventionally as regime and in the modern context somewhat restrictively as state, nation-state, or country) in the name of advancing those same claims. It is sufficient, for present purposes, simply to reference the presentation of both the speeches and deeds of perhaps the first notable populist (demagogos, rabble-rouser) on record, Cleon of Athens.

Aristotle may have been right that man is by nature a political animal, but it is hardly inappropriate to suggest that man is by nature a populist animal as well. The populist temptation is sempiternal and inherent to humanity, bearing in mind that humanity’s distinguishing characteristic is logos. Paul Rahe artfully defined logos as that which makes it possible for human beings “to perceive and make clear to others through reasoned discourse the difference between what is advantageous and what is harmful, between what is just and what is unjust, and between what is good and what is evil.” And what can be differentiated by logos can be misused by logos just as easily, for no human being is identified purely with logos.

The perfect state of perfect justice is exceedingly rare in individuals and even rarer in political communities. In the latter case, postulates Socrates, a philosopher king needs to rule in order to keep everything in balance, and the conditions for that to take place are presented in such a way as to make it clear that it never actually happens. The greater the disbalance between logos, thumos, and epithumia, the greater the likelihood that a given political community will move away from justice, ultimately degenerating into tyranny. And on that road to tyranny lies populism—one possible result of the spirited part of the community suborning itself to the appetitive instead of the rational. It’s hardly encouraging to recall that Socrates thought the rational part was more, not less, likely to be captured by the spirited or appetitive parts of a democratic political community than any other type. His own experience with direct democracy in Athens immediately rises to the mind. So do statements by two contemporary American political scientists: Jan-Werner Müller’s that populism is a “permanent shadow of modern representative democracy, and a constant peril,” and Shawn Rosenberg’s stark warning that “democracy seems now poised, as it has been always potentially, to devour itself” and be replaced by the lure of populism with its “offer [of] an alternative, less demanding view of politics and society.”

However that may be, it follows from the above that populism is at least partially about persuasively telling “lies like the truth” (to quote classicist Seth Benardete’s striking phrase) in combination with the commission of deeds whose purpose is to ensure sufficient control of the mechanisms that shape the way the political community conducts itself in the domain of domestic politics.

But what happens when populism in domestic politics intersects with great power competition in the international arena? Is it an accident that a resurgence in populism within leading political communities (states) is occurring amidst the resumption of rivalries among major players in global politics?

SIMON TAY, chairman of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs, anticipated in January 2016 that populism and great power rivalries could influence the other in shaping both regional and global security. The fusion of the two—we call it “great power populism”—introduces an additional degree of unpredictability in an international affairs environment already beset by a condition reminiscent of an individual in the midst of a nervous breakdown, itself due at least in part to ongoing strategic realignment and cleavages. Something new and quite worrisome is afoot.

Most experts treat populism (in the domestic context) and great power rivalry (in international relations) as separate phenomena. The prevailing view is that populism, its nature assumed to be isolationist and xenophobic, is antithetical to the precepts of foreign policy and, in fact, is driven largely by domestic conditions. Yet the emergence of populist movements in contemporary democratic political communities and the use of populist themes by leaders of less democratic ones are both directly connected to the breakdown of the post-Cold War liberal international order. In turn, rivalries among both great and middle powers are fueled, in part, by an assessment on the part of both leaders and citizens that trusting in an amorphous “international community” to guarantee national security and prosperity is a risky proposition. In other words, foreign policy action (competition in the international arena) is driven in response to domestic stimuli or, in everyday terms, populist agitation.

Thus, “great power populism” is not about withdrawing from foreign affairs; it is about revising the international system. It is based on an assessment that “win-win” solutions are largely chimerical, and that contemporary global affairs are more likely to be conducted on zero-sum lines. Therefore, leaders of political communities must be prepared to take direct action to grab their fair share, and to avoid situations where other political communities use international institutions or legal frameworks to shift burdens to their citizens or to where others can extract benefits.

Great power populists are jealous of their sovereign prerogatives and are inclined to view foreign policy in starkly transactional terms. Sovereignty above all, independence from others, and the ability to rewrite or ignore rules when they conflict with core national interests are all features of the great power populist foreign policy handbook. As of April 2020, a credible case can be made that a plurality, if not majority, of G20 or OECD members are either engaged in great power populism (Brazil, China, Russia, Indonesia, Turkey, India, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States) or are being significantly influenced by it (France, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Germany). As U.S. president Donald Trump proclaimed from the rostrum of the United Nations in September 2019: “The future belongs to sovereign and independent nations who protect their citizens, respect their neighbors, and honor the differences that make each country special and unique.” Walter Russell Mead has identified Andrew Jackson as the vanguard of such an outlook on international affairs, at least in the American context. As a recent Politico article put it: “Jacksonians are content to let the world sort itself out, except if they perceive a threat, in which case they react with great ferocity.” It does not seem accidental that Jackson’s portrait now hangs in the Oval Office. Policies adopted in the wake of the appearance and global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in the aforementioned countries have further brought to light the credulity of the case for the importance of taking into account great power populism in understanding contemporary international relations.

THIS IS not how the post-Cold War world of the twenty-first century was supposed to unfold. The fall of the Berlin Wall was going to herald the integration and interconnectedness of the nations of the world in a rules-based liberal international order largely set and determined by the advanced industrial democracies of the United States and Western Europe. The bargain between the elites and the citizenry rested on three promises: economic globalization would lower costs and bring benefits to all, everywhere across the globe; enlarging collective security agreements based on the commitment that an attack on one was an attack against all would make the world more secure; and that expanding and deepening integration would make war far less likely to break out anywhere on the planet.

Mutual dependence would reduce incentives for political communities to engage in destructive competition—an assumption codified in cute turns of phrases like the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” (no two political communities in which McDonald’s is present will go to war) or the “Dell Theory of Peace” (political communities that are part of the supply chain for producing Dell computers cannot interrupt their relations). This process was to be spearheaded in Europe, where the transformation of the Common Market into the European Union and the expansion of NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact would create a borderless Europe “whole, free, and at peace.”

Politicians’ “democratic enlargement” was complemented by Silicon Valley’s vision of a post-national, borderless, and digital world. A recent MasterCard commercial featuring Cuban-American singer Camila Cabello epitomizes this worldview; the pop star, walking down a street holding a smartphone, is able to deliver goods to her fans with a few touches to the device. Questions of where the raw materials, energy, labor, transit infrastructure, and even currency needed to pay for these transactions are assumed to be superfluous; all that seems to matter is that the individual possesses the requisite technological device. The world envisioned by this is a place where the national citizen has given way to the global consumer.

All of this was packaged under the rubric of the “Washington Consensus” and, in the era of the “end of history,” was seen as the inevitable road to human progress. Center-left and center-right parties throughout the advanced industrial democracies embraced the proscriptions designed to produce a world system defined by open societies and free trade where disputes would be settled in boardrooms rather than battlefields. Samuel Huntington used the dismissive term “Davos Man” to describe critically the political and economic elites who were prone to view international affairs as the means to promote investing, producing, marketing, and consuming across boundaries. Over time, there would no longer be an imperative to distinguish “us” from “them” because the entire world, bound together in a common market under a common set of rules and regulations, would be “us”: the very grammar of the world would be upended. But in the meantime, political leaders would stay the course, taking as their guiding mantra the traditional practitioner view of American policymakers that foreign policy consisted of a “group of wise men doing what is right and then fighting off the ignorant yokels west of Washington,” in Huntington’s phrase.

BUT SCARCELY was the ink dry on some of the publications promoting this brave new world order before current events disproved the essential thesis. The 1999 NATO bombing against Serbia over Kosovo, Israel’s military incursions into Lebanon, and the 2008 Russia-Georgia clash disproved the Golden Arches Theory, while the more sustained Russia-Ukraine conflict flared into open military combat even though Ukraine served as a transit country for Russian energy to Europe and Russia and Ukrainian companies were bound together in tight supply chains, notably in the defense and aerospace industries.

Today, more than thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, world leaders are no longer so sanguine about the promise of the post-Cold War future. Right around the anniversary celebration, two of the Old Continent’s most famous leaders—Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron—sounded particularly pessimistic notes. “The values on which Europe is founded—freedom, democracy, equality, rule of law, human rights—are anything but self-evident,” the German chancellor said; NATO is experiencing a “brain death,” the French president remarked. Taken together, the statements suggest that the two most important pillars holding together contemporary Europe are less solid than most are wont to admit. Reactions to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic by leaders on the Old Continent and beyond, in both word and deed, have lent additional credence to the veracity of this point.

Much of the post-Cold War idealist optimism about globalization dissolving boundaries and making conflict impossible assumed that the fall of the Berlin Wall would magically trigger human beings to seamlessly transcend their nature (or undergo a quick and easy historical transformation). The optimists fantastically claimed that, somehow, the result of a spontaneous and collective refashioning of the balance between logos—humanity’s distinguishing characteristic—thumos, and epithumia would produce a homo economicus: economic personhood relating to the world primarily through the lens of consumption. In such an environment, the warning of Athenian representatives, as noted by Thucydides, that conflict between societies erupted largely because of “fear, honor, and interest,” along with their judgment that “it has always been the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger” would become irrelevant as people focused on their bottom lines and the acquisition of ever-more creature comforts.

Furthermore, those pushing the homo economicus thesis claimed, citizens’ attachment to particular political communities was waning. However, they failed to account for the lack of enthusiasm or even a willingness to sacrifice or fight for an “international community”—or even novel political forms like the European Union.

Moreover, the fragility of these global networks to disruption was also glossed over. Cabello may enjoy skipping through Brooklyn dispensing cupcakes to her fans, but Mastercard, Google, or Amazon would not be the entity to ensure that the cargo ships carrying flour were not intercepted by pirates, natural gas flows to the power plants powering the bakeries were not interrupted, or the currency she was using to pay for these treats retained value—nor would it be some amorphous “international community.” Indeed, without access to electricity, her smart phone would end up being a 200g lump of plastic and metal. In the end, citizens still look to their particular political communities for security and prosperity, not international organizations or multinational corporations.

Indeed, the sad experience of the Kurds over the past three decades, from Iraq in 1991 to Syria in 2019, demonstrates the unreliability of putting one’s trust in an “international community” to secure rights or freedoms. Observing all of this, Amitai Etzioni concludes: “…people’s first loyalty and sense of identity is still invested largely in their nation-states. One can readily argue that these feelings are obsolete, that we need a sense of global, or at least regional, post-national communities,” he continues. “However, as long as public leaders continue to fail in forming such communities, advancing post-nationalistic, ‘globalisitic’ policies that entail free flows of people (and goods) across national borders will both undermine the inchoate transitional international formations”—and, by extension, feed the growth of populism.”

BUT CERTAINLY the citizens of the major powers might have a different take than the stateless or the residents of failed or failing states? The conventional international relations expectation is that great powers assume the responsibility for maintaining peace and security in the international system and are willing to sacrifice either power or wealth (or both) as a condition for achieving that status. The problem here has been that the costs and benefits of this new global order have not been distributed equally, both within and among the great powers.

Ultimately, a borderless digital world of democratic enlargement needed both “bill-payers” and “stakeholders” in order to function. In other words, some of the great powers would be expected to pay the costs in blood and treasure to keep the system running, while others would be expected to accept a status quo set of rules they had little or no hand in formulating and which hardly constituted their optimal set of outcomes.

The bargain was that a political community like the United States would offer economic and technological incentives, even at the expense of its own citizens and companies, to bring another power like China into a rules-based liberal international order, and, sticking with the China example, Beijing would accept these rules without possibility of revision in order to reap the economic benefits. In the context of the European Union, the major powers would pay a disproportionate share of the costs while the smaller ones were expected to accept the social and political guidance of their betters.

These bargains seemed to work for a time: in the 1990s, during a period of economic expansion and relative peace. Politicians could push the democratic enlargement agenda because it appeared that the bills could be postponed—especially the costs related to the enlargement of the European Union and NATO. At the same time, rising and resurgent great powers were looking to secure their seats and positions within a U.S.-led global “board of directors.” Accepting Euro-American guidance as the price for admission was an acceptable trade-off, at least in a tactical time horizon.

Since the turn of the millennium, popular acceptance of these bargains has waned. In the United States, the impact of the 9/11 attacks, the Afghan and Iraq wars, and the global financial crisis undermined the claims of the Western political and economic establishments that they could chart a pathway forward to national security and prosperity by having America underwrite global and regional security and free-trade arrangements.

In countries such as the United States or Great Britain, therefore, sectors left behind or most negatively impacted by the push for global interconnectedness have increasingly used their power at the ballot box to change the political dynamics to favor a shift towards economic nationalism and a foreign policy more closely connected to immediate interests.

In rising and resurgent powers—whether democracies or authoritarian or some mix of the two—the pattern has been different. Even if globalization was a spur to economic growth and development, these political communities began to resist the notion that Western standards equal universal ones, or their rules and regulations must be assessed for compliance against the preferences of the status-quo powers. In particular, there was a palpable feeling of resentment and push-back against the aspects of what the former U.S. assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland characterized as the “spinach treatment”—namely that non-Western powers would need to swallow a whole host of American and European policy preferences in order to be admitted to the club.

And as the global balance of power shifted more in their favor, they increasingly pushed back against mechanisms designed to give them a “voice but no veto” over how the Euro-Atlantic world sought to manage international affairs. Here, the use of populism differs in that this is not structured as a revolt against the establishment but rather the harnessing of resentment that “our people” are being denied their rightful place in the world order.

GREAT POWER populists take as their common starting point that there is no such thing as an “international community,” arguing instead that the international system is made up of a series of specific political communities to which citizens owe allegiance and expect protection and preference. Every great power populist typically privileges the interests of “our people” over a generic humanity, and is suspicious of transnational elites and institutions that exist beyond the control and purview of political communities. Just as we can speak of right-wing and left-wing populism in domestic politics, populism in foreign affairs takes two broad forms: the populism of retrenchment and the populism of aggrandizement.

Within the rising and resurgent great powers—including Brazil, China, Russia, Indonesia, Turkey, India—the populist message is to push back against the efforts of the West to impose its rules, principles, and values, and also to argue that the international order must be modified in order to secure their rights and place. Failing that, it follows the path charted by political scientist Steven Weber and his colleagues a decade ago, where the great power populist aggrandizers create alternatives:

by preferentially deepening their own ties among themselves, and in so doing loosening relatively the ties that bind them to the international system centered in the West, rising powers are building an alternative system of international politics whose endpoint is neither conflict nor assimilation with the West.

Within the established, status-quo great powers—especially the United States and the United Kingdom—populism in foreign affairs is reflected in what Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relations defines, citing Chinese interlocutors, as “a retreat to advance”—a withdrawal from extended commitments and support for broad-based multinational systems and a scaling back of global missions in favor of renegotiated bilateral relations with partners.

In particular, when at both the global level as well as in specific regions of the world, there is a gap between the demand for economic and political security and the supply that other political communities are willing and able to provide, the United States or the United Kingdom will be far less willing to automatically fill that deficit—unless of course there is a direct threat to specific interests or some form of compensation is forthcoming. The Trump administration has been quite open about its plans to rebalance America’s security commitments with its economic interests. At the same time, it has sent a remarkably consistent and clear message to existing allies and partners that a continuation of the security relationship with Washington rests on the intensification of the benefits America receives, particularly its companies.

For instance, when Polish president Andrzej Duda visited the United States in June 2019, Trump contrasted the bilateral security relationship with Poland with the imbalance in U.S.-German relations. Warsaw committed to purchase American fighter aircraft and billions of dollars’ worth of American-produced natural gas, and, in return, for the plan to station U.S. forces, “the Polish government will build these projects at no cost to the United States,” he said. Meanwhile, Germany relied on American security guarantees from Russian aggression but preferred to purchase energy from Russia than the United States. In Trump’s own words, “we’re protecting Germany from Russia. And Russia is getting billions and billions of dollars of money from Germany.”

IN BOTH its forms, however, great power populism is revisionist when it comes to the post-Cold War liberal international order that assumes an indivisible set of global commons which are the common responsibility of all but where certain powers are prepared to underwrite the costs and other great powers are expected to adhere to the rules.

In other words, great power populism is not a retreat from the world but rather a recalibration of engagement. However, it is based on the assessment, as Leonard concludes, that international politics will be defined by “competing blocs and protectionism rather than cooperating states”—with a much more clearly transactionalist approach.

Consider, for instance, the antipiracy mission off the coast of Somalia. The U.S.-, NATO-, and EU-led task forces start from the principle of securing the global commons—in essence, of providing a universal common good to all vessels. In contrast, the Chinese government deployed vessels to the Horn of Africa with the stated mission of “safeguarding and providing security for Chinese vessels and personnel sailing through the region.” The Chinese task force has tended to focus its effort on escorting Chinese-owned and flagged vessels, and does not see as a primary mission the protection of non-Chinese vessels—even those that may be carrying goods to or from China. When the Chinese navy assists other naval forces in patrolling the region, or comes to the aid of non-Chinese vessels, it does so based on an assessment that China benefits from this by generating goodwill, gaining expertise, or banking favors. This focus on transactionalism is likely to increase in the coming years.

Great power populism could lead to open conflict, although the realities of the twenty-first century mitigate against major warfare in favor of what the Eurasia Group Foundation’s Devin T. Stewart has described as “gray power competition”: economic diplomacy, surveillance, information warfare, political interference, industrial espionage, and trade conflict. It could just as easily lead to some novel form of concert of great powers working to promote common action when interests align and to find ways to minimize the negative consequences of disagreements.

IN A new era of great-power populism, we are likely to step back from talking about an “international community” (which implies commonly accepted standards and norms, the existence of a shared approach to policy questions, and an acceptance of burden-sharing in the name of solidarity) in favor of an international society or an international system in which political communities find ways to coexist and reach mutually-accepted regulations to facilitate transactions. Three decades after George H.W. Bush proclaimed the onset of a “new world order,” populist reactions across the globe mean that the world of the twenty-first century is going to share more similarities with the past. Otherwise, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic would not have met with a range of responses by leaders strongly reminiscent of those taken by their predecessors a century ago in attempts to contain the global influenza outbreak that had infected one quarter of the world’s population or the Great Depression that followed a decade later.

The postmodern fantasy that the broken shards and remains of the Berlin Wall somehow constituted the secret ingredient to a hitherto unknown formula enabling the spontaneous inception of radically new modes and orders has come to naught. In sum: human beings are still driven to live in political communities by the bonds of blood or history, and their actions remain predominantly driven by considerations of aspiration, fear, honor, or national interest. As has always been the case, great powers will keep playing by rules different from those of smaller powers. And populism, like tyranny, will persist in being a “danger coeval with political life.”

Nikolas K. Gvosdev is the Captain Jerome E. Levy chair at the U.S. Naval War College, Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

Damjan Krnjević Mišković, a former senior Serbian and UN official, is Director of Policy Research and Publications at Azerbaijan’s ADA University, having taken a leave of absence as Executive Director of the Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development (CIRSD), a Belgrade-based think tank.

The views expressed in this essay are their own.