The principles
of liberal internationalism were first articulated by Woodrow Wilson as
World War I limped along in April 1917. The American military, the
president told a joint session of Congress, was a force that could be
used to make the world “safe for democracy.” (The United States would
decide, of course, which countries counted as democracies.) Wilson’s
doctrine was informed by two main ideas: first, the Progressive Era
fantasy that modern technologies and techniques—especially those
borrowed from the social sciences—could enable the rational management
of foreign affairs, and second, the notion that “a partnership of
democratic nations” was the surest way to establish “a steadfast concert
for peace.” Wilson’s two Democratic successors, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, institutionalized their forebear’s
approach, and since the Forties, every president save Trump has embraced
some form of liberal internationalism. Even George W. Bush put together
a “coalition of the willing” to invade Iraq and insisted that his wars
were being waged to spread democracy.
Given liberal internationalism’s unquestioned dominance in the halls
of power, it’s not surprising that the dogma still has the support of
Washington’s most influential think tanks, which have never been known
to bite the hand that feeds them. Members of the Council on Foreign
Relations, the Brookings Institution, and the Center for a New American
Security consider U.S. hegemony to be an essential condition for global
peace and American prosperity. According to these stalwart backers of
U.S. supremacy, the fact that a major war between great powers has not
broken out since World War II indicates that U.S. hegemony has been, on
balance, a force for good.
This is not to say that liberal internationalists are living in the
past. They appreciate that, unlike during World War II or the Cold War,
most countries agree on the rules of the game. Neither China, nor even
Iran and Venezuela, reject the Western international order in the way
that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union did. While states may break rules
to advance their interests, few countries are genuine pariahs; in fact,
Russia and North Korea might be the only ones. In the modern era, even
adversaries interact extensively. During the Cold War, the United States
and Soviet Union barely traded with each other. Now, China is one of
the United States’ largest trading partners.
This raises a question for liberal internationalists: How should the
United States compete in this new world and contain “threats” to the
established order? Unfortunately, most have converged on an answer from
the past: whether they call it “democratic multilateralism,” “the
strategy of reinvigorating the free world,” or “a fully developed
democracy strategy,” liberal internationalists hope to establish a
coalition of democracies akin to the one that existed during the Cold
War, although this time centered on democracies (or, at least,
non-autocracies) in the Global South. While claiming to reject the
framing of a “new Cold War” with China that has permeated U.S. media,
liberal internationalists promote what is effectively a Cold War-era
strategy with a few more non-white countries added to the mix.
Like their Cold War predecessors, liberal internationalists believe
that their struggle for democracy—and against China, which they regard
as the major threat to U.S. power—will last indefinitely. As Michael
Brown, Eric Chewning, and Pavneet Singh asserted in a recent Brookings
Institution report, the United States must prepare for a “superpower
marathon”—“an economic and technology race” with China that is unlikely
to reach a “definitive conclusion.” American society, the liberal
internationalists avow, will have to remain on a war footing for the
foreseeable future. Peace is unthinkable.
The Chinese military, which employs more active personnel than that
of any other nation, is of particular concern to liberal
internationalists. To combat the threat of Chinese coercion in East
Asia, they endorse a strategy in which the United States retains tens of
thousands of troops in Japan and South Korea. This aggressive posture,
they argue, will convince Chinese leaders that any anti-American actions
they take will fail. And, ironically for those who have spent the past
few years lambasting Russia for interfering in the 2016 presidential
election, liberal internationalists also want to wage an information war
against China, smuggling unflattering or damaging information into the
country in an attempt to foment anticommunist dissent.
When it comes to the economy, liberal internationalists are bedeviled
by the question of whether and how much to confront China—a country
that has repeatedly stolen U.S. intellectual property and rejects
liberal capitalist ideals of the free market. On one hand, they worry
that China could wield its economic power to force other countries to
abide by its wishes. On the other, they believe free exchange is vital
to the United States’ economic health. Liberal internationalists thus
recommend that the nation adopt an approach whereby it pressures China
economically, but within the bounds of international rules, norms, and
laws. In this way, they hope to combat China without discrediting
liberalism writ large. As this suggests, liberal internationalists are
well aware of the beating that American prestige has taken in recent
years, especially after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2008
financial crisis. If the United States is to dominate, it has to abide
by rules that in the past it was all too happy to break.
In effect, liberal internationalists want to have it both ways, to
challenge China without risking a shooting war or economic decoupling.
The problem, however, is that international relations are not nearly as
manageable as liberal internationalists assume. The Russian invasion of
Ukraine—which was at least partially impelled by NATO expansion into
Eastern Europe—is a clear example of the way in which behavior meant to
deter war might very well incite it. Yet these basic facts are difficult
for liberal internationalists to admit. For them, the American Century
can only be restored by facing China head-on.
Restrainers, by contrast, understand that the
American Century is over. They maintain that the expansive use of the
U.S. military has benefited neither the United States nor the world, and
that charting a positive course in the twenty-first century requires
taking a root and branch approach to the principles that have guided
U.S. foreign policy since World War II. Restrainers want to reduce the
U.S. presence abroad, shrink the defense budget, restore Congress’s
constitutional authority to declare war, and ensure that ordinary
Americans actually have a say in what their country does abroad.
The origins of restraint can be traced to George Washington’s
farewell address of September 1796, in which the president warned
against “entang[ling] our peace and prosperity in the toils of European
ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice.” Twenty-five years
later, on July 4, 1821, the secretary of state, John Quincy Adams,
likewise insisted that a defining characteristic of the United States
was that it had “abstained from interference in the concerns of
others. . . . She goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”
Restraint remained popular for much of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries; during World War I, for instance, Wilson received
substantial criticisms from those who argued that the United States
should avoid undertaking messianic projects to remake the world. Of
course, the history of U.S. foreign policy is far from one of restraint.
From its beginnings, the United States expanded westward, displacing
and killing indigenous peoples and eventually seizing a number of
populated colonies in the Pacific and Caribbean.
Nevertheless, if restraint did not always apply in practice, the
strategy attracted many adherents. Things changed during World War II,
when restraint became associated with anti-Semitic “America Firsters,”
politically marginal libertarians and pacifists, and discredited
“isolationists.” In the Democratic Party, the former vice president
Henry Wallace and other progressive restrainers were sidelined, as were
Senator Robert A. Taft and other Republican anti-interventionists.
Although restraint continued to percolate in social movements like the
Vietnam War resistance of the Sixties and think tanks such as the Cato
Institute and Institute for Policy Studies, it remained a negligible
position until the foreign policy failures in Afghanistan, Iraq,
and Libya.
In the wake of these blunders, interest in restraint has been
reignited, as evidenced by the fact that two think tanks—Defense
Priorities and the Quincy Institute, where I serve as an unpaid
non-resident fellow—were recently founded with the goal of advocating
for its fundamental principles. Gil Barndollar of Defense Priorities has
usefully summarized the restrainers’ limited set of foreign policy
goals: helping to realize “the security of the U.S. itself, free passage
in the global commons, the security of U.S. treaty allies, and
preventing the emergence of a Eurasian hegemon.” Because the major
problems of the twenty-first century cannot be solved by U.S. military
force, but instead require multilateral cooperation with nations that
have adopted different political systems, there is no reason for the
United States to promote democracy abroad or act as the global
police force.
Accordingly, restrainers do not consider China an existential threat.
When it comes to East Asia, their goal is to prevent war in the region
so as to facilitate collaboration on global issues such as climate
change and pandemics. This objective, they maintain, can be achieved
without American hegemony.
Restrainers thus promote a “defensive, denial-oriented approach,”
focused on using the U.S. military to prevent China from controlling
East Asia’s air and seas. They also want to help regional partners
develop the ability to resist China’s influence and power, and argue
that the United States should place its forces far from the Chinese
coast, in clearly defensive positions. A similarly hands-off approach
applies to Taiwan and human rights. If China wants to seize Taiwan,
restrainers assert, then the United States should not fight World
War III to prevent it from doing so. If China wants to oppress its
population, there’s not much that the United States can or should do
about it.
The fundamental disagreement between the two schools of thought is
this: liberal internationalists believe that the United States can
manage and predict foreign affairs. Restrainers do not. For those of us
in the latter camp, the withering away of the American Century cannot be
reversed; it can only be accommodated.
Protesters at the G20 summit in
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2018 © Maximiliano Ramos/ZUMA Wire/Alamy
The question of which strategy the United States
should pursue is fundamentally a matter of historical interpretation.
Was U.S. domination during the American Century good for the United
States? Was it good for the world?
When one takes a long, hard look at U.S. foreign policy after 1945,
it’s clear that the United States caused an enormous amount of suffering
that a more restrained approach would have avoided. Some of these
American-led fiascoes are infamous: the wars in Korea, Vietnam,
Afghanistan, and Iraq resulted in the death, displacement, and
deracination of millions of people. Then there are the many lesser-known
instances of the United States helping to install its preferred leaders
abroad. During the Cold War alone, the nation imposed regime changes in
Iran, Guatemala, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, British Guiana,
South Vietnam, Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, Indonesia, Syria, and Chile.
As this record suggests, the Cold War was hardly “the long peace”
that many liberal internationalists valorize. It was, rather, incredibly
violent. The historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin estimates that at least
twenty million people died in Cold War conflicts, the equivalent of
1,200 deaths a day for forty-five years. And U.S. intervention didn’t
end with the Cold War. Including the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Libya, the United States intervened abroad one hundred and twenty-two
times between 1990 and 2017, according to the Military Intervention
Project at Tufts University. And as Brown University’s Costs of War
Project has determined, the war on terror has been used to justify
operations in almost half the world’s countries.
Such interventions obviously violated the principle of
sovereignty—the very basis of international relations. But more
importantly, they produced awful outcomes. As the political scientist
Lindsey O’Rourke has underlined, countries targeted for regime change by
the United States were more likely to experience civil wars, mass
killings, human rights abuses, and democratic backsliding than those
that were ignored.
When it comes to the benefits that ordinary Americans received from
their empire, it’s similarly difficult to defend the historical record.
It’s true that in the three decades after World War II, armed primacy
ensured favorable trade conditions that allowed Americans to consume
more than any other group in world history (causing incredible
environmental damage in the process). But as the New Deal gave way to
neoliberalism, the benefits of supremacy attenuated. Since the late
Seventies, Americans have been suffering the negative consequences of
empire—a militarized political culture, racism and xenophobia, police
forces armed to the teeth with military-grade weaponry, a bloated
defense budget, and endless wars—without receiving much in return, save
for the psychic wages of living in the imperial metropole.
The more one considers the American Century, in fact, the more our
tenure as global hegemon resembles a historical aberration. Geopolitical
circumstances are unlikely to allow another country to become as
powerful as the United States has been for much of the past seven
decades. In 1945, when the nation first emerged triumphant on the world
stage, its might was staggering. The United States produced half the
world’s manufactured goods, was the source of one third of the world’s
exports, served as the global creditor, enjoyed a nuclear monopoly, and
controlled an unprecedented military colossus. Its closest competitor
was a crippled Soviet Union struggling to recover from the loss of more
than twenty million citizens and the devastation of significant amounts
of its territory.
The United States’ power was similarly astounding after the Soviet
Union’s collapse in the early Nineties, especially when one aggregates
its strength with that of its Western allies. In 1992, the G7
countries—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and
the United States—controlled 68 percent of global GDP, and maintained
sophisticated militaries, which, the Gulf War seemed to demonstrate,
could achieve their objectives quickly, cheaply, and with minimal loss
of Western life.
But this is no longer the case. By 2020, the G7’s GDP had dwindled to
31 percent of the global total, and is expected to fall to 29 percent
by 2024. This trend will likely continue. And if the past thirty years
of American war have demonstrated anything, it’s that sophisticated
militaries do not always achieve their intended political objectives.
The United States and its allies aren’t what they once were. Hegemony
was an anomaly, an accident of history unlikely to be repeated, at least
in the foreseeable future.
There are also more fundamental, even ontological,
problems with the liberal internationalist approach. Liberal
internationalism is a product of the fin de siècle, when Progressive
thinkers, activists, and policymakers across the political spectrum
believed that rationality could achieve mastery over human affairs. But
the dream proved to be just that. No nation, no matter how powerful, has
the capacity to control international relations—an arena defined by
radical uncertainty—in the ways that Woodrow Wilson and other
Progressives hoped. The world is not a chessboard.
Furthermore, liberal internationalists’ democracy-first strategy
assumes a Manichaean model of geopolitics that is both inconsistent and
counterproductive. For all their crowing about democracy, liberal
internationalists have been just fine collaborating with dictatorships,
from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, when it has served perceived U.S. interests.
This will probably remain true, making any kind of democracy-first
strategy a primarily discursive one. Nonetheless, discursively centering
democracy could have drastic repercussions. Dividing the world into
“good” democracies and “bad” authoritarian regimes narrows the space for
engagement with many countries not currently aligned with the United
States. Decision-makers who view autocracies as inevitable opponents are
less likely to take their interests seriously and may even misread
their intentions. This happened repeatedly in the Fifties and Sixties,
when U.S. officials insisted that the very nature of the Soviet system
made it impossible to reach détente. In fact, détente was only achieved
in the Seventies, after decision-makers concluded that the Soviet Union
was best treated as a normal nation with normal interests, regardless of
its political structure. Once Americans adopted this approach, it
became clear that the Soviets, like them, preferred superpower stability
to nuclear war.
Because it’s difficult to know precisely what a government like
China’s is up to, liberal internationalists tend to flatten the
complexities that shape its behavior, and assume that China will expand
to the limits of its power. This idea owes much to the classical realist
school of foreign policy, which, following the émigré political
scientist Hans Morgenthau, maintains that nations have an animus dominandi,
a will to dominate. (The United States, unsurprisingly, is assumed to
act according to more noble motivations.) For this reason, some liberal
internationalists claim, China will fill any power vacuum it can.
But is this an accurate description of China—or indeed, of any modern
nation? Classical realism was born of the traumas of the Thirties, when
two great powers, Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, considered the
conquest of foreign territory vital to their futures. The experience of
German and Japanese expansion profoundly shaped the work of midcentury
thinkers like Morgenthau, who insisted that the search for lebensraum
reflected more general laws of international relations.
Unfortunately for those liberal internationalists indebted to
classical realism, states make the decisions they do for many reasons,
from regime type (is a nation a democracy or an autocracy?) to
individual psychology (is a particular leader mentally well?) to culture
(what behavior does a given nation valorize?). When it comes to trying
to explain why China—or Russia, or Iran, or North Korea—acts as it does,
it’s not particularly useful to ignore everything that makes the
country unique in favor of emphasizing immutable factors.
The historicist approach of restrainers is a far better way to
analyze international relations. Restrainers focus on what China has
done, and not what it might do; for them, China is a state that exists
in the world, with its own interests and concerns, not an abstraction
embodying transhistorical laws (which themselves reflect American
anxieties).
And when examining what China has done, the evidence is clear: while
the nation obviously wants to be a major power in East Asia, and while
it hopes to one day conquer Taiwan, there’s little to suggest that, in
the short term at least, it aims to replace the United States as the
regional, let alone global, hegemon. Neither China’s increased military
budget (which pales in comparison to the United States’ $800 billion)
nor its foreign development aid (which is not linked to a recipient
country’s politics) indicates that it desires domination. In fact,
Chinese leaders, who tolerate the presence of tens of thousands of
troops stationed near their borders, appear willing to allow the United
States to remain a major player in Asia, something Americans would never
countenance in the Western Hemisphere.
Ironically, liberal internationalists are imposing their own goals
for hegemony onto China. Their commitment to armed primacy—a commitment
that has led to war after war—threatens to increase tensions with a
country that Americans must cooperate with to solve the real problems of
the twenty-first century: climate change, pandemics, and inequality.
When compared with these existential threats, the liberal
internationalist obsession with primacy is a relic of a bygone era. For
the sake of the world, we must move beyond it.
U.S. president John F. Kennedy
meets with the president of the Republic of the Congo Fulbert Youlou in
Washington, D.C., 1961 © AP Photo
At the present moment, however, a majority of
Americans side with the liberal internationalists: in a Pew poll taken
in early 2020, 91 percent of American adults thought that “the U.S. as
the world’s leading power would be better for the world,” up from
88 percent in 2018.
Nonetheless, there’s a growing generational divide over the future of
U.S. foreign policy. A 2017 survey by the Chicago Council on Global
Affairs, for instance, discovered that only 44 percent of millennials
believe that it’s “very important” for the United States to maintain
“superior military power worldwide,” compared with 64 percent of
boomers. In a poll from 2019, zoomers and millennials were more likely
than boomers to agree that “it would be acceptable if another country
became as militarily powerful as the U.S.”
The fact that younger Americans are waking up to the manifold and
manifest failures of liberal internationalism presents the United States
with an enormous opportunity: it can abandon an irresponsible and
hubristic liberal internationalism for restraint. This will, admittedly,
be a difficult task. Americans have ruled the world for so long that
they see it as their right and duty to do so (especially since most
don’t have to fight their nation’s wars). Members of Congress,
meanwhile, get quite a bit of money, and their districts even get a few
jobs, from defense contractors. Both retired generals and pointy-headed
intellectuals rely on the defense industry for employment. And restraint
is still a minority position in the major political parties.
It’s an open question whether U.S. foreign policy can transform in a
way that fully reflects an understanding of the drawbacks of empire and
the benefits of a less violent approach to the world. But policymakers
must plan for a future beyond the American Century, and reckon with the
fact that attempts to relive the glories of an inglorious past will not
only be met with frustration, but could even lead to war.
The American Century did not achieve the lofty goals that oligarchs
such as Henry Luce set out for it. But it did demonstrate that attempts
to rule the world through force will fail. The task for the next hundred
years will be to create not an American Century, but a Global Century,
in which U.S. power is not only restrained but reduced, and in which
every nation is dedicated to solving the problems that threaten us all.
As the title of a best-selling book from 1946 declared, before the Cold
War precluded any attempts at genuine international cooperation, we will
either have “one world or none.”