CRINK rising: Is the liberal world order already dead? This book says it’s cracking fast

The manifold convulsions of international politics in the past decade have undermined the foundations of the post-Cold War liberal international order. The power shift entailed by China’s rise lies at the core of the unravelling of the liberal order. But the Western architects of the liberal order also see lesser challenges from Russia, North Korea, and Iran. For some analysts, the increased tendency of these revisionist powers to band together against the West warrants analytical recognition. Taken together, the CRINK group are said to be driven by both shared interests and ideology in their revisionism.Revisionists Rising: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea in the Global Order, an edited volume by Harsh V Pant and Rahul Rawat, seeks to illuminate the dynamics of the CRINK challenge to the liberal order. With contributions from foreign policy analysts at the leading New Delhi-based think tank Observer Research Foundation, the slender book investigates the phenomenon of international order revision through a concrete case study. The volume treats the international order as composed of multiple functional areas with a differential logic of engagement and contestation. Consequently, it offers an analysis of the CRINK bloc’s behaviour across security, geoeconomic, nuclear, information, maritime, and technology sub-orders.The authors in the volume do recognise the growing synergy among the CRINK revisionists, manifest most clearly in the case of the Ukraine War. While Russia is the attacker violating the norms of sovereignty and territorial integrity, it has relied on China, Iran, and North Korea in varied measures for support. China has supplied dual-use items and purchased Russian oil and gas to cushion the impact of Western sanctions. North Korea provided both artillery munitions and fighters to support Russia in its war. Iran's help has come in the form of the supply of drones and the establishment of production facilities in Russia. In ideological terms, the authoritarian nature of their domestic political systems serves as the binding glue for the CRINK states. The liberal democratic values are treated as athreat, especially as the leading state in the international system promoted them by force or encoded them in the ordering principle until recently. As Kalpit Mankikar and Vivek Mishra recognise, the CRINK bloc's alternative ideological vision manifests in their support for state control, regime security, and strategic autonomy.The CRINK collaboration to undermine the existing order relies on mechanisms of coercion, clandestine operations, diplomatic coordination, and institutional designs. Their strategic interaction with the liberal ordering norms and institutions reflects patterns of selective compliance, outright undermining, obfuscation, and building alternatives. The prospects for countering the order revisionism look particularly bleak due to a combination of four factors. The US, under President Trump, has abandoned the liberal order that it had done so much to promote earlier. China's position as a great power pole requires its support for any configuration of international order to operate meaningfully at the current juncture. Instead, it has embarked on a course of selective revisionism. On the other hand, Western liberal democracies might be inclined to preserve the existing order but lack the capability to enforce it. The leading states from the Global South do not fully buy into the status quo offerings of the West-led order. Moreover, their pragmatic, national interest-centrism does not preclude cooperation with the revisionists.Despite the gloomy prognostics for the future of the liberal order, it would be an analytical misjudgement to overestimate the internal cohesion of the CRINK grouping. Factors, including the presence of internal contradictions, asymmetrical nature of core national interests, differential dynamics with third-party actors like India, etc., serve to limit the efficacy of the revisionist nexus. Even more importantly, as a shared sense of threat from the US has spurred the alignment, the future of the CRINK grouping would be contingent on the US actions. By going aggressively against the revisionist states, the US risks manifesting its worst fears by causing them to band together even more firmly. Further, strategic acumen demands that the US and its western allies prioritise the revisionist threat in rank-order terms. A prudent approach for an overstretched US would involve a combination of deterrence to secure core interests, reassurance to prevent unwarranted escalation, and wedging to weaken the intra-revisionist bloc coherence. Both the US and India would also do well to be open to issue-based cooperation with the revisionist actors whenever feasible. Much of the discussion on the revisionist challenge to the existing order displays a pejorative connotation. In this understanding, the status quo is painted as the desirable state of affairs; revisionism gets treated as disruptive and problematic. However, as the classical realist scholar E. H. Carr cautions, the moral tenor of the status quo often serves to advance the interests of entrenched actors in disguise. From an Indian perspective, the volume highlights the undesirable elements of the CRINK revisionism. At the same time, it also recognises that India and other Global South actors would occasionally demonstrate a harmony of interest in revising certain aspects of the order. The book’s analytical focus on the CRINK grouping, however, elides the major revisionist challenge to the liberal order in the form of Trump’s stewardship of the US foreign policy. It would also have been desirable to incorporate New Delhi’s approach to the issue of status quo/ revision across various sub-orders. Nevertheless, Revisionists Rising offers a timely and nuanced analysis of an important dynamic in international politics.