LIBERALISM AND PAN-ATLANTICISM (I): REALISM VERSUS LIBERALISM IN THE ATLANTIC BASIN

Likewise, today, under conditions of eroding unipolar hegemony and the fraying of the liberal international order, a liberal perspective could eventually frame the Atlantic Basin as a potential ‘second best’ regional space for ’pan-Atlantic’ economic cooperation – and potential nearshoring -- in the face of the rollback of global governance and the fragmentation of the global jurisdiction. [...] By leveraging the possibilities offered by the evolving ‘multilayered, multipolarity’ (as described by Len Ishmael), these states could engage in both pan-Atlantic cooperation (through initiatives like the PAC and the Atlantic Centre) and other South-South regionalisms (such as the revival of the Zone of Peace and Cooperation of the South Atlantic, the AASP and a renewed Africa-South America, or A. [...] For a discussion of the relationship between the structure of international power (including the nature of its ‘balance’) and the waxing and waning of strategic competition and the prominence of geopolitical and geoeconomic tools in foreign policy, see Braz Baracuhy, “Geo-economics as a dimension of grand strategy: notes on the concept and its evolution,” Chapter 2, in Mikael Wigell, Sören Scholvi. [...] More so than at the end of British hegemony, and even more than at the close of the Cold War—a period of bipolarity marked by minimal economic connections between the liberal market democracies of the Bretton Woods system and the command economies of the Communist East and Comecon. [...] Isbell is the author of Energy and the Atlantic: The Shifting Energy Landscapes of the Atlantic Basin (2012); co-author and editor of The Future of Energy in the Atlantic Basin (2015), and of Energy and Transportation in the Atlantic Basin (2017).