Everybody's flipping out about the "liberal world order" quote, but that's literally what they've been describing it as since at least the end of WW2. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's not a secret, it's just the set of institutions and policies designed to ensure peace and spread liberal principles of democracy and free trade, including the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, and the GATT now WTO.
There are certainly adverse and even sinister consequences, but there are also positive ones. The core institution is the UN, and by creating a forum where countries can vent their grievances and where they regularly just sit down and talk, it defuses tensions, reduces mistakes, and humanizes the opposition. It generally promotes free trade by providing a set of standards and a means of resolving disputes. This has interlinked world economies, which again reduces conflicts, because hurting your trade partners hurts you. That's been a major plus, because while there's been a lot of smaller and internal wars, there haven't been any of the global conflagrations that marked the first half of the 20th century.
Of course the negative effects are also becoming apparent. By linking the world economies, they've become more vulnerable to failures anywhere, and economic downturns and shortages sweep the world with little impedance. By giving more power to the supernational institutions, there's been a centralization of power in vast unelected entities with murky accountability. With the diminishment of religion in many of the leading states, there's been a tendency to transfer that sentiment to national ideals and ideologies, including the idea of a unified world order, which has sacralized these institutions. Which of course if absurd, because they represent all countries, which leads to inevitable and natural absurdities like putting China and Iran on human rights commissions. Treating the Wesphalian nation-state and thus the existing national borders as sovereign and sacrosanct has led to innumerable ethnic conflicts, because the post-colonial and post-World War borders were drawn as straight lines on a map by people thousands of miles away, ignoring the peoples and geographies, and thus severing or uniting unnaturally. It's also created a global class of elites, educated in the same universities and sharing many of the same ideals, who socialize with each other and move around the world freely, and who have become ever more distant from the people they supposedly represent, and from the unique local needs of distinct areas.
While that concept of classical liberal principles as the *ideal* is true, the fact remains that all of the entities involved are corrupted beyond redemption because they've attracted corruptible people.
When you have people who sit on interlocking corporate boards who are also tied to NGO and supranational entities where they collude with similar other people, it's a problem. We should not have allowed a Bill Gates to have any relationship with the UN or Peter Daszak while buying up farmland in the upper Midwest at the same time as Chinese entities are doing the same. We should not have allowed the Biden crime family to sit on UKR energy board or broker deals with China.
When you have oligarchs influencing foreign sovereign nations, it all turns to shit.
Those aren't classical liberal principles. Classical liberalism fears the state, wants strong constitutional protections, believes in checks and balances, and sees elections as primarily a mechanism for throwing the corrupt out of power, because power always corrupts. It supports local autonomy, small states, secession, sound money, federalism, and heavily armed populaces. It supports the primary of the individual.
Liberal in the sense of the "liberal world order" is more post-FDR American liberalism. This is the Brain Trust twist on liberalism, informed by European ideals of collectivism and socialism, and American progressivism. The idea that history is an inevitable upward arc, and the belief that all problems are fixable by sufficiently educated and intelligent people, with all the pseudo-religious consequentialism that entails. It is strongly in favor of powerful governments, centralized control, endless meddling, massive social programs, fiat currency and fiscal and monetary dictates, and supernational organizations with teeth. It is a utopian vision, with the technocrat replacing Plato's philosopher kings.
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