The liberal order did not simply make miscalculations. It rested on a deeper conviction that was flawed from the start: the belief that scientific reason, applied with sufficient rigour to human affairs, would bend history toward peace.
That conviction deserves an autopsy of its own. To understand why the liberal order is unravelling, it helps to understand what its architects thought they were building, and why they trusted science to hold it together.
The myth of the neutral method
There is a general tendency in the story we like to tell ourselves about science. It is set in a pristine, sterile laboratory or a remote observatory somewhere away from human settlements, where a dispassionate mind—devoid of feeble human passions, guided by reason and evidence alone—peels back the layers of illusion to reveal universal truths. We picture the methodical transformation of chaos into coherence, of profound civilisational ignorance into enlightenment. This narrative, as immaculate and compelling as any myth, is perhaps best captured by the iconic photograph from the Apollo 8 mission, Earthrise. Our planet, a delicate swirl of blue and white, hangs in the silent, black expanse. It is an image of sublime objective reality, a portrait of ourselves delivered by the most advanced application of our scientific knowledge.
The Age of Discovery that propelled the scientific revolution, meticulous work of the botanist classifying new species or the cartographer charting an unfamiliar coastline was inseparable from the imperial project it served. The world was mastered not just with guns and ledgers, but with taxonomies and sextants. To imagine science as a dispassionate pursuit of universal truths, observing the political order from a neutral distance, is to indulge a narrative as mythic as any creation story. Science is not outside the ambit of power. It is entangled with the architectures of power, identity, and historical contingency that it purports merely to describe.
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Not policy failure, but an epistemic one
Liberal internationalism, armed with the scientific method, imagined that democracy, free markets, and rational governance could be exported like a validated scientific theory—its value presumed universal, its implementation a technical matter. The spectacular failures of this vision, from the jungles of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, are often diagnosed as policy miscalculations or a simple failure to account for the brute realities of nationalism and power politics.
However, this critique does not go far enough. The failure was not merely political; it was epistemic. It was a failure born of a worldview that treats complex human societies as if they were variables in a vast geopolitical experiment. The technocratic confidence that a nation’s political and cultural life could be engineered with the same precision as a microchip does not reflect the rigour of science so much as its domestication within the logic of managerialism. In that translation, science stops being a restless mode of inquiry and becomes a fetish, a talisman wielded by a managerial elite to legitimise intervention under the banner of evidence-based policy.
Realism, of course, has always stood as the cynical corrective, reminding us of the tragic chorus of power politics and security dilemmas. The structural realist elegantly models an anarchic world where states, like billiard balls, career across the global baize according to immutable, impersonal laws of power. It is a particularly seductive, clean, and predictive model. Yet it occludes more than it reveals, for states are not inert billiard balls; they are incandescent assemblages of identity, memory, desire, arrogance, and trauma. Their behaviour is shaped not just by rational calculations of interest, but by their ghosts of history and the affective, often irrational, intensities of belonging. A discipline that aspires to the predictive economy of physics keeps discovering that its objects refuse to behave like matter. Here lies the essential tension.
Why nationalism beats the model
Science, in its ideal form, seeks truths that are universal. Nationalism, by contrast, thrives on the singular, the irreducible, and the mythic. A nation, after all, is an imagined community, a social construction whose power lies not in its empirical validity but in its capacity to weave individuals into a narrative far larger than themselves. It is, in this sense, a kind of anti-science—not because it rejects facts, but because it privileges myth over measurement and memory over data. It reveals a profound and uncomfortable truth: science cannot fix the human condition because the human condition is not a technical problem to be solved. It is a predicament to be narrated, endured, and perpetually contested.
This is why the liberal wager keeps losing. The liberals assumed that as societies grew wealthier, better informed, and more rationally governed, the particularist passions would recede. The opposite has occurred. The nationalist turn in the United States, the populist surge across Europe, the authoritarian consolidation from Moscow to Beijing, none of these are deviations from a modernising trend that better data would have predicted and better policy could have averted. They are evidence that the model itself was wrong about what moves people.
The liberal faith ran deeper still. The belief that scientific advancement would lead inexorably to moral and political enlightenment is a secular eschatology, a story of salvation without gods. History mocks such linear narratives. The 20th century stands as a monument to this paradox. The same scientific rationality that allowed us to map the human genome also gave us the bureaucratic precision to engineer genocide. The space race, a triumphant symbol of ideological and scientific supremacy, was haunted by the shadow of mutually assured destruction. It became the epitome of logical insanity, where survival depended on the promise of total annihilation. The nuclear revolution did not make war obsolete; it reconfigured its calculus from a contest of conquest to one of existential deterrence. Progress and catastrophe are not opposites in this story. They are produced by the same machinery.
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The 21st-century stress test
We now find ourselves in a new century, facing a fresh wave of disruptions. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and cyber warfare are not merely new tools; they are forces that defy our traditional categories, blurring the lines between civilian and military, public and private, human and machine. The US-China contest over advanced computing is not a conventional arms race that arms-control templates can manage; the technology is dual-use by nature, diffuse in ownership, and faster-moving than any treaty cycle. They reveal, with terrifying clarity, the inadequacy of political frameworks forged in the post-war, post-colonial age to grapple with transnational risks that recognise no borders.
Most humbling of all is the predicament of climate change. Here is the ultimate, planet-sized irony: the most profound existential threat of our time is a direct byproduct of the very industrial rationality that promised to liberate humanity from the fickle tyranny of nature. The Anthropocene is not merely a new geological epoch; it is a testament to the unintended consequences of Enlightenment ambition. The relentless quest to master nature has, in the end, destabilised the planetary systems upon which all human life depends. This is not, to be clear, a failure of the scientific method itself. It is the catastrophic failure of the narrative that framed science as a tool of unambiguous and unending human progress, the same narrative that underwrote the liberal order’s confidence in its own trajectory. The algorithm that optimises a global supply chain can equally be turned to systems of targeted surveillance, reducing individuals to predictable data points in a model of consumption and control.
Living with what science cannot do
What, then, is the proper place of science in the grand drama of nation-state and international relations? It can be neither saviour nor scapegoat. It is a contingent, historically situated practice. Science can explain the world, but it cannot redeem it. Its truths are provisional, its applications ambivalent. To grasp its place in national or global politics is to resist the seduction of both technocratic triumphalism and reactionary scepticism, and to hold instead a critical sensibility that recognises science as at once a form of knowledge and a site of power.
The realist reminders remain true as far as they go: the world is anarchic, power matters, and ideals often shatter against the wall of strategic necessity. But the deeper lesson is that realism, like liberalism, is just another story. It is a framework that imposes a semblance of order on a world that is fundamentally resistant to coherence. Science belongs to the same narrative economy. It offers not only explanations but orientation, a way of locating ourselves in a vast and indifferent universe. That is a real service. It is not the same as a guarantee.
The order now being mourned was built on the opposite assumption: that reason, sufficiently advanced, would deliver a destination. As a lengthening line of former believers concede that the destination was never reached, the temptation will be to locate the policy error that cost us the arrival. There was no such error, because there was no such destination. The question was never whether science could fix the human condition. It was how we live with the knowledge that it cannot. That is the tragic wisdom modernity keeps trying to forget. Our greatest achievements are inseparable from our deepest vulnerabilities. Our task, then, is not to seek salvation in the laboratory, but to bear witness to this paradox—to trace, with unflinching eyes, the fragile and often unsettling threads that bind knowledge to power, hope to despair, and progress to its profound and enduring discontents.
Pranav Sharma is a historian of science who lives and writes from New Delhi, India and Paro, Bhutan.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)