The End of the Liberal Era

An Interview on Our Interesting Times with the Italian magazine of Geopolitics, Limes

The good people of the Italian journal of geopolitics, Limes, have published a wide-ranging interview with me. We discuss America’s cold civil war, the rise and fall of neoliberalism, my thesis of post-1989 “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” the foreign policy of the Trump administration, American elite formation, and more. Though my answers are framed more for a European audience, they should interest those beyond Europe as well. You can read the whole thing in Italian on their website. At the very least, you should check out the fascinating maps of the world they’ve drawn to try to make sense of the new nomos of the Earth.

If you prefer English, my lightly-edited English translation of the interview follows below.

Enjoy!

LIMES: You argue that the United States’ use of neoliberalism to dominate the world and neutralize its rivals has led us into a post-liberal world.

Why?

PINKOSKI: Neoliberalism is not merely an economic project, as it is usually presented—that is, a belief in the self-regulating capacity of markets. It has always been linked to a geopolitical project. There are two ways to examine it from this perspective. The first concerns its utopian ambition: all countries must march toward liberal democracy, the only ideology remaining at the end of history. Behind its seemingly neutral facade, it had a political objective, aiming to expand the sphere of the free market to encompass countries like China and Russia. In different ways. From 1995 onward, the conviction took hold in Washington that Beijing should be admitted to the World Trade Organization because it could become a reliable, or at least friendly, ally. Meanwhile, the Clinton administration decided it would adopt a more suspicious attitude toward Moscow, beginning to use the term “neocontainment” in private.

The second way to view the geopolitical aspect concerns liberal international institutions: they should be fair, impartial, and applicable to all. After the Cold War ended, they began to make increasingly glaring exceptions for political reasons. The International Monetary Fund, for example, was created after World War II to enforce the Bretton Woods rules and guarantee fixed exchange rates. But when the Bretton Woods system collapsed in the 1970s, the institution began to operate differently. That was the first sign that we were no longer operating within the postwar liberalism paradigm. Since the 1990s, the Fund has been used for specific political objectives. Consider Clinton, who pressured the Fund to issue a financial loan to Russia when President Yeltsin appeared on the verge of electoral defeat. A glaring example of the subordination of an international institution to the foreign policy of the United States.

Larry Summers himself, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, said in an interview with Rawi Abdelal that the Fund was in transition, no longer operating as it had in the past, and that new rules needed to be devised. An admission that institutions designed to function impartially had ceased to do so and were moving in the opposite direction. Many describe neoliberalism as economic legalism: keep your budgets in order or we’ll prevent you from taking on further debt. In reality, the 1990s saw the emergence of a state of post-legalism: the legal order is subject to numerous political exceptions.

LIMES: Has neoliberalism behaved in the same way within the United States?

PINKOSKI: It’s less obvious, but here too we see a distortion of legalism—the idea that rules must be applied equally to everyone—following the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, an unequal application of the law has emerged: one for the majority and exceptions for minorities. The most famous example concerns affirmative action: different standards for minorities and the majority—what political scientist Eric Kaufmann calls asymmetric multiculturalism. This applied not only to college admissions but also to the private sector. The result is that many employers cannot recruit according to their own needs, but must obey the civil rights apparatus and give preference to certain minorities. When it was conceived, it was clear to everyone that this system created a double standard, but it was thought to be temporary. Over time, however, since it failed to achieve the desired results, it was accepted as a structural feature of the American model. The Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer’s intellectual itinerary captures this shift: initially critical of affirmative action because it was counterproductive, in the 1990s he switched his position and defended the multicultural model. What changed?

In his view, he became convinced that, because of the pervasiveness of racial inequality, that system cannot be temporary. It was the price America paid for having a diverse, unequal society. Call it melancholic multiculturalism, if you will. Born in the American context, this system began to expand after the end of the Cold War. And the United States became less melancholic and more enthusiastic about it over time. It increasingly encouraged other countries to adopt anti-discrimination laws, tying aid, loans, and its general goodwill to the implementation of its asymmetrical multicultural model.

LIMES: How has all this eroded American power?

PINKOSKI: We need to go back to the collapse of Bretton Woods. That system relied on the United States guaranteeing the financial markets with the promise to convert dollars into gold. When that promise could no longer be kept—because the United States didn’t have enough gold relative to the liquidity in circulation—Nixon suspended the convertibility of the dollar into gold. A consensus ensued: if Washington could no longer honor its commitments, it would inevitably decline. The opposite happened: the dollar became the anchor of the financial system. The most powerful country in the world is the same one that regulates financial transactions—theoretically neutral—based on the willingness of its central bank, the Federal Reserve, to print money and keep transactions open and accessible. But what happens if the United States begins to use its leverage over the financial system for political purposes? One of the first examples of its financial power is the 1988 Basel Accord: it is a commitment among various countries to adopt anti-corruption standards. On that occasion, Washington said: “If you want access to our banks, you must sign this agreement.” This power was initially exercised sparingly. Also because not everyone in the United States government agrees on using it. When al-Qaeda began to be a thorn in the side in the late 1990s, US intelligence agencies asked the Treasury to leverage its power to gain access to the financial transactions associated with al-Qaeda. But the department refused because doing so would make it clear to everyone that the rules of the banking system are subordinate to Washington’s interests.

September 11 swept away these cautions. The Patriot Act and executive orders endow the government with pervasive powers that erode the old ideals of impartiality and neutrality. Washington approaches the banks and says: give us information on your customers or we’ll sanction you. Not only that, it puts pressure on private international organizations such as SWIFT, which facilitates global interbank communications. After 9/11, the U.S. government secretly required them to share transaction data. It’s as if the postal service had decided to open everyone’s mail, keep track of it, and pass the information on to the government—all without anyone knowing. Initially, the target was terrorists, then it shifted to rogue states (North Korea and Iran). The peak was reached with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when the United States relied heavily on all financial instruments to destabilize the Russian government and, openly, to try to overthrow it. Such tactics had never been used on this scale against a major power like Russia. It is a revealing moment for the entire world: if you conduct business in dollars, if you participate in the American financial system, you are at risk and subject to Washington’s geopolitical interests. It is a long story, but 2022 has shown that the United States is ready to use the full arsenal of financial power and has laid bare that the liberal order exists only in our imagination.

LIMES: In short, if the United States uses the global economy as a weapon, its hegemony is over. But if hegemony is no longer possible, what is the Trump administration’s underlying goal?

PINKOSKI: That’s a difficult question. The only thing we know for sure is that it’s not liberal internationalism. The government itself is divided into three factions. The first is for Cold War 2.0. The United States’ goal is to maintain global supremacy in a protracted struggle with China. The priority is for America to reorganize itself to defeat Beijing, not necessarily in a military conflict but certainly in an economic showdown. It must work with allies to cut out the Chinese out of international trade as much as possible; a very difficult task given the size of that country.

The second faction advocates for dominance in the Western Hemisphere but cautions against global entanglements. The world is multipolar, and the United States must accept that other countries have their own spheres of influence, consistent with our overseas interests.

The third faction advocates for civilizational primacy; this argument is the key to understanding the 2025 National Security Strategy and the way it speaks about Europe. The Old Continent is seen as afflicted by many of the same ills as America: collapse of social trust, an identity crisis, multiculturalism, mass immigration, the decline of free speech, political censorship, and so on. The U.S. government’s aim is to help Europeans reclaim their identity, get control over their borders, and recover the natural rights they have lost in the meantime.

There are, of course, some overlaps. For example, the latter two schools of thought are based on a different view of China than the first. They believe that Beijing’s objectives do not pose as urgent a problem as those that the USSR did in the early years of the Cold War; they are not as expansionist as the Soviet Union was then. If the threat is different, the approach can also be different and the room for accommodation is perhaps greater. Furthermore, we can see signs of all three at work, depending on the issue. So, one week we have a bid for control of Greenland and a regime decapitation strike on Venezuela, which illustrates a quest for hemispheric dominance; another week it’s tariffs on China; and yet another week the State Department supports organizations in Europe to combat EU-endorsed censorship.

LIMES: Is Trump’s revolution a continuation or a break from the post-liberalism you’ve described?

PINKOSKI: My argument is that we have already been living in a post-liberal world for some time. The attempt to establish a hegemony of liberal internationalism was short-lived and gave rise to a world very different from the one envisioned. If we look closely, we can even see continuities between the Clinton administration’s approach to exercising economic power and the way the Trump administration operates. The Biden administration used many of the tools employed during Trump’s first term; it was very interested in the Cold War 2.0 approach to China (and Russia) and had tried to align the European and North American economies into a force to counterbalance China.

LIMES: And what about the continuity with George W. Bush’s Republican Party?

PINKOSKI: The Trump administration is by no means averse to using force; as Venezuela shows, they also use it, if not to occupy a country, then change its regime. We live in a world where Americans may have acknowledged the failure of the long-running operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but have no qualms about using more covert methods, such as proxy wars. Furthermore, we see Trump’s interest in vivid and aggressive demonstrations of U.S. military power. In the 1990s, there was talk of the “CNN threshold”: the number of missiles to launch that would ensure to got coverage on CNN. This is the best way to understand the summer 2025 bombing of Iran. It demonstrates that any country developing its own nuclear program risks facing these displays of force. Symbolism is very important. It reveals that the Trump administration is not rearming merely to reserve military force for specific acts of self-defense in the name of the national interest. The symbolic use of the military was already present under Clinton; the difference is that in the 1990s in Bosnia, for example, it was tied to a long-term humanitarian, nation-building agenda. This aspect is not on Trump’s radar.

LIMES: Given all these continuities, is Trump accelerating the crisis in the United States?

PINKOSKI: We need to look back at the 2022 attempt to cut the Russian Central Bank off from the financial system. Since then, we’ve seen more hesitation on the part of many countries to conduct transactions in dollars. This precedes Trump’s return to power and the systematic use of tariffs to rebalance the trade deficit. Even the former director of the International Monetary Fund, Ken Rogoff, admitted this in May 2025. Perhaps the new administration is accelerating this, but we must understand a crucial point. Trump’s America has realized that time is running out: it has some years, a decade, or perhaps two, to use all the tools at its disposal and recalibrate the economy to its advantage, revive manufacturing, and shift from a consumption-centered model toward a more production-centered one.

LIMES: Why is time running out?

PINKOSKI: The current tools won’t have the same power in the future. You can only threaten to cut a country off from the dollar if everyone trades in dollars. When other options emerge, when currency baskets multiply, and when cryptocurrencies gain traction, the threat of removing a country from the U.S.-led system will lose much of its force. This trend is already underway, particularly since 2022. If the plan is to change the national economic model, you must act while financial dominance still holds. Hence the urgency of tariffs and, more broadly, of a paradigm shift in the international system.

LIMES Turning to the domestic front, the Trump coalition has two components: national-populists and technocapitalists. Are their respective visions of America compatible?

PINKOSKI: The tensions run deep. I see at least three: the rise of a new elite, artificial intelligence, and immigration. Those who speak the language of Trumpism are calling on Silicon Valley to believe in the nation and are calling for an elite capable of acting in the country’s best interests. Let’s be honest: for the most part, the technocapitalists are liberals who have switched sides because they are hostile to the excesses of wokism or the limits placed by Democrats on artificial intelligence. Perhaps they pay more attention to the nation than other cosmopolitan elites who travel the world without any sense of attachment. But, as some have noted, their substance is shallow. They are liberal orphans with a thin nation-building ethos who have joined Trump’s camp for business opportunities. On the other side, we have a populist camp that struggles to have elite representation but is concerned about the issue dearest to the tech elite: artificial intelligence, particularly its disruptive impact on the economy and society. Trump’s driving force since 2015 has been deindustrialization; his electorate demands jobs for workers who did not attend college. Embracing artificial intelligence, on the other hand, means another round of “creative destruction,” capital and investment in data centers rather than onshoring, and so on. Finally, immigration. The populist right demands border control, immigration reform, and incentives for companies and universities to train the necessary workforce without seeking quick and convenient alternatives abroad. This is what is at stake in the debate over H-1B visas, which has often flared up during early 2025.

The question is: when the tech industry needs highly educated workers, should it look for them in the United States, or can it offer a lower salary to an Indian worker? Populists urge the industry to look for them in America and, if they aren’t there, to invest in new kinds of training. The tech-right, on the other hand, wants to recruit workers immediately even if they’re on the other side of the world or culturally incompatible with America. This divide is bound to widen in the coming years.

LIMES: Is it possible to nationalize the elites?

PINKOSKI: It’s very difficult in America because we don’t have a single hub of education. We have Silicon Valley, the center of technological innovation for decades, far away on the West Coast. We have New York, the capital of the financial elite, which creates a very different dynamic. We have the governing class, concentrated in Washington and the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland. These centers overlap, but there are also many tensions. If you make a career in one, you often harbor frustrations toward the other. Hanging over everything is the failure of the university education system in recent decades. Although there are a few colleges that everyone wants to attend (Yale, Harvard, Stanford), these institutions do not believe their mission is to train a national elite. Princeton’s motto was once “in the nation’s service”; “and in the service of humanity” was later added to it. There is another aspect: in American history, there is less of a national elite per se, and more of a regional elite that takes control of the nation’s trajectory. The famous WASPs were the establishment of the Northeast. Their decline also reflects the decline of that region’s influence in national politics, to the benefit of other parts of the country. For these reasons, it is very difficult to establish a new national elite. America’s dynamism means that these numerous centers of power compete with one another and study each other to understand what the others have to offer. It is easier for a dissident group to secede. Take Silicon Valley: the frustration of many entrepreneurs with the dominant culture in California gave rise to the tech right, which has moved to Texas. Elon Musk is a good example. Is this enough to create a new national elite? I don’t know, but it certainly shows dissatisfaction and a desire to depart from established centers in order to create new institutions that, in theory, could incubate a new ruling class. But then, the pressure to homogenize managerial mediocrity is also very strong.

LIMES: In previous decades, the deep state was still able to secure the cooperation of private actors. Now the techno-capitalists are telling the state: step aside, you’re not capable of defending the country. What has changed in the balance of power?

PINKOSKI: Critics of neoliberalism have long argued that the rise of capital would sooner or later subordinate politics. I think, however, it is better to view contemporary developments as a sort of public-private partnership that manifests itself in different ways. It is very difficult for capital to act against the interests, pressures, and imperatives of the national security state. Any analysis of the triumph of capital must reckon with the extent to which these bureaucracies control the system—a power that has only increased in recent years. For example, it has become more difficult to maintain a prominent political profile by criticizing the national security state. You end up having to speak well of it. Not long ago, we had people in Congress proposing to abolish the CIA or break up the FBI. Today, those figures have vanished. The Trumanite security apparatus, created at the beginning of the Cold War, has expanded its powers since 9/11 and shows no sign of reversing course. The most successful companies in recent years are those that have joined forces with state bureaucracies. Palantir is a prime example.

LIMES: With one key exception: China. The divergence between geopolitical interests and private interests has enriched Beijing and weakened America. Can the capitalist elite still be harnessed for major strategic objectives?

PINKOSKI: Good point. Perhaps it is possible, but a careful and calibrated strategy is needed. With the invasion of Ukraine, the government put enormous pressure on companies to cut off business with Russia. But the system of secondary sanctions depends on the private sector; it is the latter that enforces the rules, not the state. Regarding China, the difficulty lies in the enormous size of its economy. This brings us back to the question of the Chinese threat: is it like that of the USSR, or can it be managed differently? In the first case, we must apply the same pressure to the private sector as we did with Russia. In the second, we can be more flexible. For now, the focus is on a couple of vital technology sectors, and the approach is not to redirect the entire flow of capital, but rather to add state oversight. One example is the government acquiring stakes in Nvidia: it could have prevented the company from doing business with China, but instead the government chose to give itself a seat at the table and shape decisions from within. This was an unimaginable option in the so-called neoliberal era. It also shows that we have not yet decided on the best way to frame and address the China issue.

LIMES: Is America at risk of civil war?

PINKOSKI: Some people talk about a “cold civil war.” I find this a useful concept because it suggests that we won’t see a new Civil War, a country splitting into regions at war with one another, or ethnic conflicts like those in Bosnia. If we ever have a new civil war in the United States, it will resemble the Spanish Civil War. A nationalized conflict. It will divide homes, families, and neighborhoods. I find that highly unlikely in the short or medium term. The “cold civil war” evokes a hardening of positions, an ideological conflict perhaps without major outbursts of violence, but rooted in the idea that we can no longer live with people who hold an opposing ideology. A conflict in which the question is: wouldn’t we be better off if that ideology and its supporters didn’t exist at all, if they were no longer part of the country? In the Spanish Civil War, it was that impulse that provoked the desire to exterminate the other side and shaped the character of the conflict’s violence. In the United States, we are not at that point; however, there is the deeply destabilizing aspiration to remove the enemy from society. In the short term, this translates into low-intensity violence, political murders like that of Charlie Kirk. If you want to participate in public life, you’ll need a vast security apparatus to defend you. We’ve had attempts to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh and J.D. Vance. Recently, someone was charged with the attempted murder of the founder of my organization, Russell Vought. Sooner or later, an assassin will succeed. To be in public life, you will need 24/7 security and surveillance. People who cannot endure that lifestyle will withdraw from the public arena. We are moving very quickly toward a low-trust society, where we hesitate to speak openly with neighbors or fellow citizens, because deep down in our hearts we fear encountering someone who wants to eliminate us.

LIMES: Trump is attempting a revolution of constitutional powers. What is the risk of institutional chaos?

PINKOSKI: I don’t think it fuels chaos among the branches of government. If anything, it fits into a broader sociological and legal debate that has been ongoing for some time in the United States regarding the powers of the executive branch. The Trump administration is attempting to restore the so-called unitary executive by offering a different interpretation of Article 2 of the Constitution. That’s the legal aspect. The sociological aspect lies in the fact that, since the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, the president has been viewed as a threat, at least in the imagination of the baby boomer generation. Exercising too much authority is seen as authoritarianism. The full exercise of the president’s powers puts the Constitution at risk. With the gradual passing of the baby boomers, these anxieties are receding. The question from now on will not be whether, but how to exercise the powers of the presidency. The desire for a strong executive is growing, not the consensus on what it should do. It could be a “blue Caesar” for the Democratic Party’s priorities or a “red Caesar” for the conservatives’ priorities. Since everyone wants this sort of Caesar who does what he says, the issue is not so much chaos as the fact that every presidential election will be seen as existential. This is how people will mobilize, even those least attentive to the political system. The current Supreme Court favors this interpretation, being composed of as many as six originalist justices, a school of thought that has invoked the unitary nature of the executive branch since the Reagan years, if not earlier. The Court will grant the president increasing discretion, and this will raise the stakes in the election.

LIMES: How important is race in the nationalist revolution?

PINKOSKI: The top issue for people is immigration. It’s important to specify this because it relates to a broader concern: assimilation no longer works; we no longer have a unified American culture. It’s not an ethno-nationalist aspiration. It’s not an effort to preserve or restore a particular racial homogeneity. Of course, there are people who care about race, genetics, and IQ. But that is not what drives the movement; if anything, it is the anxiety stemming from the fact that mass immigration has diluted our shared culture and weakened the economy. If we survey MAGA voters, we find that few fear the country will become less white. If anything, they fear that immigrants are not incentivized to assimilate. I do think, however, that some cases require us to consider the ethnic aspect. One concerns the Somali fraud scandal. The debate is not that some particular race should be excluded from the United States. Instead, it is about noticing that some groups we have legally accepted for quite some time have very little interest in assimilating. Therefore, we remove the special legal privileges that make it easier for them to enter into our country. I think this is an acknowledgment that some tribes in the world do not find a suitable place in the United States and view the country more as one to exploit than one in which to assimilate.

Another point to consider is that we no longer live in the 1960s, when the country was 90% white and 10% Black. For the left, the central struggle for decades has been reconciliation between whites and blacks. Many debates, right up to Black Lives Matter, centered on one question: what responsibilities do the former have toward the latter? Since the country’s racial composition has changed profoundly, that debate is no longer as relevant as it once was. I believe that much of the left and the conservative old guard feel nostalgia for the clarity of debates during that biracial era. But both are thinking of a demographic map of the country that no longer exists. The real problem is the cultural fragmentation among various ethnic groups that has emerged in recent decades and whether it is still possible to revive civic nationalism.

LIMES If it isn’t, does that mean democracy becomes impossible too?

PINKOSKI: That is the real challenge. I believe immigration is a political priority precisely for this reason: if we want a homogeneous country, in the sense where everyone shares the same civic and constitutional culture, we must be able to adjust immigration accordingly. If we accept a million people a year—not to mention illegal immigration—in an already fragmented context, we make the task more difficult.

LIMES It seems to us that assimilation no longer works among Americans of different backgrounds, precisely because of what you were saying just now: mutual hatred for those who don’t think like you. Is democracy possible under these conditions?

PINKOSKI: No. If the atmosphere is so heated, if we are so fragmented, we cannot have a functioning democracy. Instead, we will have a strong security state to prevent violence from erupting. It is a different kind of government, not a democratic one. That is why the next ten years are decisive: they will show whether the experiment of mass democracy is still possible or whether it will be gradually eroded and set aside in the name of peace and stability. That is why we must follow very closely what is happening in the United States, because it is a massive political experiment to make that entire system of mass democracy work. Tensions and conflicts continue to mount. The new technological order in which we live reinforces ethnic identities and ideological loyalties. Digitalization and instantaneous communications do not consolidate equality. They do not consolidate freedom.