Indispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in a Turbulent World 9780300268782

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. What Went Wrong?
2. Is the United States a Disruptor?
3. Alternatives to the United States: Europe
4. Alternatives to the United States: China, Russia, and Spheres of Influence
5. Is the United States Still Indispensable?
6. Politics, Society, and Culture
7. Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership
8. Indispensability Then and Now
Notes
Index

Citation preview

IN DISPE N SABLE NATI ON

Also by Robert J. Lieber As author: Retreat and Its Consequences Power and Willpower in the American Future The American Era No Common Power The Oil Decade Oil and the Middle East War Contemporary Politics: Europe (co-author) Theory and World Politics British Politics and European Unity As editor or co-editor: Foreign Policy: Ashgate Library of Essays Eagle Rules? Eagle Adrift Eagle in a New World Eagle Resurgent? Eagle Defiant Will Europe Fight for Oil? Eagle Entangled

INDISPENSABLE NATION American Foreign Policy in a Turbulent World

Robert J. Lieber

New Haven & London

Copyright © 2022 by Robert J. Lieber. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Yale New & Alternate Gothic types by Integrated Publishing Solutions. Printed in Great Britain. ISBN 978-0-300-25695-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) Library of Congress Control Number: 2021950982 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. What Went Wrong?  14 2. Is the United States a Disruptor?  43 3. Alternatives to the United States: Europe  70 4. Alternatives to the United States: China, Russia, and Spheres of Influence  95 5. Is the United States Still Indispensable?  124 6. Politics, Society, and Culture  145 7. Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership  161 8. Indispensability Then and Now  189 Notes  203 Index  237

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In thinking about this subject and in the writing of this book I have profited from the insights, arguments, agreements, and disagreements provided by friends and academic and professional colleagues. It is a pleasure to acknowledge them here. They include Bob Barylski, Russell Berman, Douglas Besharov, Robert Burkett, Benjamin J. Cohen, Sally Cowal, Ivo Daalder, Ann-Sofie Dahl, Donald Downs, Colin Dueck, Desha Girard, James Goldgeier, Louis Goodman, Jeffrey Herf, Bruce Hoffman, Dan Hopkins, Lise Howard, Robert Hunter, Arie Kacowicz, Matthew Kroenig, Keir Lieber, Nancy Lieber, Charles Lipson, Tim Lynch, Michael Mandelbaum, Peter Mansoor, H. R. McMaster, Benny Morris, Musallam A. Musallam, Henry Nau, Ronald Radosh, Dan Schueftan, Robert Silverman, Kiron Skinner, Angela Stent, Ruth Weisberg, and the two anonymous reviewers for Yale University Press. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that not all of those cited above will agree with my arguments in this book. I have gained from the opportunity to present my work in seminars, debates, and lectures to scholarly and public audiences at home

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Acknowledgments and abroad. Among these, in addition to Georgetown University, are Arizona State University, the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, Miami University of Ohio, Ohio State University, the University of Southern California, Southern Methodist University, the College of William and Mary, Tokyo University, and Melbourne University. I have also had the opportunity to present conference papers foreshadowing the ideas in this book at the Université Laval Montréal Workshop on U.S. Allies and Power Transition in Montreal, Canada, and at annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, and the International Studies Association as well as at the International Political Science Association World Congress in Brisbane, Australia, the Baltimore Council on World Affairs, and the Sarasota Institute of Lifetime Learning. In writing this book, I have selectively drawn upon arguments I have made in my recent work. Where I have done so directly, I have cited the sources. These include my two most recent books, Retreat and Its Consequences: American Foreign Policy and the Problem of World Order (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Power and Willpower in the American Future: Why the United States Is Not Destined to Decline (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and a paper, “American Decline: Destined, Chosen, or Contingent?” presented at the Université Laval Montréal Workshop on U.S. Allies and Power Transition, August 28, 2018, and at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, Massachusetts, September 1, 2018. In revised form, the paper appears as a chapter in Justin Massie and Jonathan Paquin, eds., America’s Allies and the Decline of U.S. Hegemony (Routledge, 2020). I have adapted some of the ideas from that chapter in chapter 5, and I appreciate the permission from Routledge/ Taylor & Francis for its use here. In addition, chapter 2 updates and

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Acknowledgments substantially expands on my essay “Is the U.S. a Disruptor of World Order?” which originally appeared online in the 2018 edition of the Raisina Files. I appreciate permission from the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. My writing of this book began with the support of a Senior Faculty Fellowship from Georgetown University, for which I am grateful. Throughout my long career at Georgetown, in the Government Department and the School of Foreign Service, I found it a congenial place to develop my ideas, to do my writing, and to teach my students. Last, but by no means least, I am delighted to thank my Yale University Press editor, William Frucht, and his invaluable editorial assistant, Karen Olson. Bill is unique in his ability and willingness to delve deeply into the argument and subject matter and thus to make it a better book. I deeply appreciate his engagement and willingness to engage with me about the ideas expressed in the work.

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IN DISPE N SABLE NATI ON

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INTRODUCTION

At a time when the United States appears diminished abroad and at home, it might seem quixotic to describe its global role as indispensable and to envision a rejuvenated American leadership. Yet this book seeks to make that case. To be clear, indispensability does not mean serving as the world’s policeman or sending U.S. combat troops into forever wars. It also does not mean that the country must be omnipotent. What is indispensable, I argue, is America’s active performance of a critically important leadership role that no other country is able to take on. Many factors create this indispensability: the absence of desirable alternatives, the shortcomings of other proposed strategies, the harmful consequences of retrenchment for allies and likeminded countries, the unique ability of the United States to resolve dilemmas of collective action among allies, and the importance of a stable, open, rules-based world order for America’s own national security, interests, and values. In recent years it has become fashionable to decry America’s global role. Voices are raised on both the populist right and the progressive left against foreign commitments and “forever wars.” Jour-

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Introduction nalists, politicians, and public intellectuals call for retreat and disengagement. Condemning what they see as a prodigious waste of blood, treasure, and political capital, they advocate relinquishing America’s leadership role abroad in order to refocus on domestic priorities. The nation, they argue, should rely on allies, regional powers, or international institutions to maintain order and resist foreign threats. Their heated demands for inaction mostly rest on the assumption that America can shed its burdens without jeopardizing its own security and national interest. Many of these critics describe themselves as “realists.” But realists become unrealistic when they disregard the consequences of abandoning long-standing commitments and downplay the dangers to America’s national security and values. They advocate “restraint” or “offshore balancing” in which the United States would largely pull back to the Western Hemisphere and withdraw from Europe, the Middle East, and—for some—even Asia, leaving it to others to deal with rising threats and intervening only when necessary to face rising hostile hegemons in those regions.1 Realists also attribute foreign antagonisms to America’s long-standing policies of foreign intervention, laying these problems at the feet of a foreign policy elite they deride as “the blob.”2 But cost-free alternatives are an illusion. In today’s world, the United States plays a unique role, but one that is easily misinterpreted. While critical, that role is neither unlimited nor inevitable. Those who call for pulling back fail to take into account the adverse consequences of such a course. They assume that disengagement by the United States from the Middle East, East Asia, or Europe would motivate regional states to join in balancing against hostile powers, especially Iran, China, and Russia. But collective action problems make it difficult for such alignments to emerge without the geopolitical influence and economic and military power

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Introduction the United States can bring to bear. Absent both the deterrence and reassurance that American involvement entails, regional states are at least as likely to free-ride, to bandwagon with predatory powers, or to submit to geopolitical blackmail. Liberal internationalists, meanwhile, embrace the ideals of a liberal world order and urge the United States to bind itself to international institutions. They recognize the importance of these bodies but overestimate both their capabilities and the prospects of cooperation.3 Liberal internationalists thus tend to downplay the need to set priorities among competing claims for U.S. engagement. Their inclination to favor the appeals of global solidarity over those of national interest undercuts domestic support for their policies. Moreover, they often understate the disruptive impact of revisionist powers like China, Russia, and Iran within these institutions.4 The past few decades’ liberal internationalist predictions of a world order characterized by benign and ever-increasing globalization and flourishing international institutions with “constitutional characteristics” now seem quaint.5 The lesson here is that in their embrace of international institutions and their downplaying of national identity, liberal internationalists give insufficient weight to the importance of power in sustaining world order. They also undervalue the unique character of the American role as well as the costs their prescriptions entail. Another, more disparate group of authors propose U.S. foreign policy strategies that recognize the importance of maintaining an active world role while avoiding both the realists’ neo-isolationist temptations and the liberal internationalists’ exaggerated expec­ tations about international cooperation. They recognize that the United States no longer enjoys the predominance it possessed after the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago, and they urge that

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Introduction America exercise more selectivity in its global commitments. If these authors have a shared limitation, it is that they underestimate the hard and soft power the United States continues to possess and the uniqueness of its strengths.6 As a case in point, Jennifer Lind and Daryl G. Press argue that if America were to drop its quest for primacy, this would cause hostile powers such as China and Russia to mitigate their own behavior and be more open to cooperation on global issues of mutual interest. But this call for retrenchment deprives adversaries of agency, in that it downplays the critical importance of their own histories, ideologies, and regime interests in shaping behavior toward the United States.7 They and other authors also tend to downplay the importance of values and to see support for democracy and liberty abroad as a burdensome distraction rather than a significant asset that enhances America’s influence. An interesting example is the proposal for a global concert of major powers advocated by two prominent authors with extensive experience in government: Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Charles Kupchan of Georgetown University.8 Their proposal has the virtue of offering an alternative to the well-plowed fields of realist and liberal strategic thinking. Drawing on the model of the Concert of Europe from the long nineteenth century, Haass and Kupchan envisage a grouping of the world’s six leading economic and military powers: China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States. This consultative body would meet privately and informally while supported by a standing headquarters. Its purpose would be to manage the members’ geopolitical and ideological differences, address emerging crises, promote stability, and “deliberate on reforms to existing norms and institutions.” The authors deserve credit for thinking big, but the idea has a

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Introduction fundamental flaw. Two of the six, China and Russia, are not status quo powers and don’t agree on key fundamentals. The states participating in the Concert of Europe system were all status quo powers, and that system began to break down in the late nineteenth century with the rise of a powerful, unified, and dissatisfied Germany—­ precisely the kind of revisionist power that Russia and China are today. Neither country accepts the norms and rules of the international order, and both have flagrantly exploited international institutions with predatory economic and political behavior. Russia in recent years has repeatedly violated its neighbors’ sovereignty. China has used economic coercion against countries that displease it on political, legal, ideological, and human rights matters, including criticism of its oppression and genocide of the Uighur and Tibetan populations.9 Its demands on Australia, for instance, include infringements on the free press. In a meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2021, a high-ranking Chinese foreign policy official even asserted that the United States must “stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world.”10

——————— This book was written at a time when the entire logic and strategy of America’s relationship to the external world have been called into question, both abroad and at home. I seek to make the case for the nation’s indispensability in a way that acknowledges the past few decades’ major changes in world order. Consider that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the prospects for a peaceful and prosperous world appeared boundless. Modernity seemed to require that countries adopt a market economy and representative government if they hoped to enjoy the benefits of contemporary civilization and meet the needs of their populations. In that spirit, President Bill

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Introduction Clinton proclaimed in his second inaugural address that “America stands alone as the world’s indispensable nation.”11 The United States seemed to have assumed a unique and benign role enabled by economy, technology, lifestyle, culture, and military power. Critics complained of the American “hyperpower.”12 That was then. Today, despite unprecedented economic development and prosperity, the world is beset with disruptions, crises, risks of war, and the prolonged consequences of a pandemic. Rising powers challenge America’s role and the existing international order. Threats of nuclear proliferation, failed states, and regional disorder have increased. Illiberal democracy and the specter of trade wars have become commonplace. The United States faces challenges from an increasingly formidable China as well as from Russia and even Iran and North Korea, and it does so with many of its allies in disarray.13 Turbulence is evident not only in international affairs but in the domestic arena as well. Wherever countries maintain representative political systems, the rule of law, and some version of a market economy, there is discord within and without. Everywhere we look we see demographic stagnation, popular dissatisfaction with elected governments, and discontent with the effects of globalization. What went wrong? And what has happened to the onceimpregnable optimism about the future world order? Are we approaching a political and historic turning point—or do we exaggerate our malaise? What explains the rise of revisionist powers, and what accounts for the difficulties of the advanced economies and modern democracies? Above all, what are the consequences for national security and international order of diminishing American engagement? In an effort to provide answers, I ask three fundamental questions. First, is the U.S. role still indispensable? I argue here that it is,

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Introduction but it is not by itself sufficient. America’s size, resources, values, and other attributes give it great advantages, but its capacity is not unlimited. Failure to appreciate what America can’t do jeopardizes its security and vital interests and can make the world a more dangerous place. But so can the failure to appreciate what the United States is capable of accomplishing and the consequences of disengagement. While domestic and international obstacles have become significantly more difficult, the need remains. No other power or institution is both willing and able to sustain a decent international order. The reality is that not only America’s security and economic well-being but its values are bound up with its world role. Second, given that no other country has the capacity to play such a role, does America? Probably, but compared with a generation ago it is less dominant in relation to its great power competitors and so must prioritize among its foreign policy commitments. To be sure, America’s capacity has never been unlimited, but the constraints upon it are now much greater than they were at the end of the Cold War. Much depends on domestic and foreign policy choices, even though its material strengths remain impressive.14 Here, problems of domestic politics, society, and culture have become significant obstacles. Resolving these, at least to the extent that the United States can conduct a consistent and effective foreign policy that these times require, will depend on leadership, public attitudes, and the easing of political polarization. The prudence and careful calculation needed to create effective economic, political, and military commitments require a subtle blend of power and diplomacy that today seem to be in short supply. On the other hand, America’s institutions are deep-seated and resilient, and over the generations the United States has overcome crises more daunting than the present one. Change might only come belatedly and in response to a

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Introduction major, unambiguous external threat. Nonetheless, the United States retains the capacity to play a leading international role. Third, what are the consequences if it is unable or unwilling to lead? They are likely to be grim. Allies and other regional states will have a hard time offsetting threats from revisionist powers, and most lack the will or capacity to do so in America’s absence. Without an active and engaged America, the world will be more disorderly, less prosperous, less free, less democratic, and more violent. Of course, there are alternatives to America’s active engagement in world affairs, but they come at a severe cost to U.S. interests and values. The international order to which China aspires, for instance, would be one in which human rights and democracy are disparaged and neglected, corruption and mercantilism flourish, and free trade and international cooperation give way to Beijing’s commercial and geopolitical interests. Alternatively, the existing international order could fragment into regional blocs and rivalries resembling those of the pre–World War I era, with an increased likelihood of instability, violence, and war.

——————— I begin this book by asking what went wrong. W ­ hat happened to the once widely shared optimism about world order and America’s “indispensable” place within it? How and why did the nation’s long record of Cold War and post–Cold War leadership give way to a much more uncertain role? I examine the extent to which the sources of disruption are explained by the rise of China and other revisionist states; the diffusion of economic wealth and geopolitical power; and political, social, and cultural trends within America itself. Chapter 2 then asks whether the United States can be considered a disruptor of world order. Critics point to its wars in Iraq and

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Introduction Afghanistan, its interventions elsewhere in the Middle East, and its campaigns against terrorism in parts of Africa and Asia. Many realist authors are deeply critical of what they claim to have been a longterm grand strategy of liberal hegemony pursued by presidents of both parties. Liberal internationalists, meanwhile, are more concerned about the consequences of disengagement from international cooperation and institutions. While these and other criticisms can be debated on their merits, I argue that the principal agents of disruption are the revisionist powers. China’s seizure and militarization of disputed reefs and islands in the South China Sea, its repeated use of economic blackmail, its “wolf warrior” diplomacy, and its obstructive behavior concerning Covid-19 are cases in point. Russia’s annexation of Crimea, its invasion of eastern Ukraine, and its aggressive use of cyber hacking provide additional examples. Iran’s interventions in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen likewise represent egregious disruptions of international order. There is a crucial difference between committing violations of an international order one essentially supports and rejecting that order entirely. To the extent that the United States is at fault, the issue in recent years has been one of retrenchment, not efforts to impose liberal hegemony. One answer to the question of U.S. indispensability is to seek alternative sources of order that might render such a role unnecessary. Chapter 3 assesses whether international and regional institutions can provide these alternatives. The United Nations and other international organizations exist to address common problems, but the functioning of the U.N. itself is typically limited by lack of agreement among the five permanent members of the Security Council, and in many of the U.N. agencies as well as in other global insti­ tutions, disagreements among the major powers make it difficult

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Introduction to achieve effective measures. To be sure, important international norms have emerged on the law of the sea, nuclear proliferation, the environment, trade, human rights, war crimes, and other issues, but significant violators are rarely held to account. At the regional level, some see an opportunity for the European Union to assert itself. But the E.U. is constrained by its own institutional limitations and policy disagreements among its twenty-seven member states, illustrated in recent years by its internal divisions on how to deal with Russia and China as well as its initial disarray in coping with the pandemic. Chapter 4 continues the inquiry into alternatives to U.S. leadership by looking at how geopolitical spheres of influence may prevail in an increasingly fragmented international system. China has become the predominant power in East Asia, with aspirations for global leadership, but its conduct is manifestly mercantilist, illiberal, and predatory. Russia, Iran, Turkey, and others seek to enhance their own regional dominance in ways that threaten their neighbors. A world in which the United States largely abdicates its long-standing role is most probably a world of perpetual conflict among rival spheres of influence. Chapter 5 confronts the core issue of whether the United States is still indispensable. In doing so, it addresses the obstacles to maintaining an open, stable, rules-based international order and the question of whether the United States is experiencing the kind of fundamental decline that some analysts have posited. Chapter 6 examines the domestic conditions on which the international role of the United States ultimately depends and asks whether Americans still want their country to lead. America in the 2020s is a very different place from what it was even at the end of the twentieth century. The economic and social impacts of globalization, the prolonged and deep recession, and the significant economic crisis caused

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Introduction by the Covid-19 pandemic, along with pronounced changes in cultural values, have contributed to political alienation and the rise of populism among many blue-collar and middle-class workers. Political polarization, social and cultural conflict, and the erosion of a sense of common identity are critical obstacles to an effective and engaged world role. Indications of this can be seen on both the left and right of the political spectrum. The rejection of election results by an outgoing president, Donald Trump, and the unprecedented storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, provided dramatic evidence of how serious these divisions have become. In Chapter 7, focused on Barack Obama and Donald Trump, I turn to presidential leadership. Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, while pursuing their own foreign policies, all accepted as a given the importance of American engagement and leadership. In contrast, responding to what they viewed as worsening problems of overcommitment, both Obama and Trump pursued strategies of retrenchment—despite sharply diverging in their policy preferences and personal styles. While both used force selectively, Obama emphasized outreach to adversaries and the international community. He summoned other states to step up in the face of common problems, but with limited results.15 By the end of his presidency, Obama had come to recognize America’s fundamental indispensability. For Trump, disengagement took the form of a nationalist, transactional foreign policy that included harsh criticism of allies, withdrawal from international agreements, the constant threat of trade wars, and friendly words about authoritarian leaders. Despite increases in NATO burden sharing, destruction of the ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq, initial steps to strengthen U.S. policy toward China, and support for the Abraham accords between Israel and its Arab neigh-

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Introduction bors, his approach left the United States more embattled. Relations with European allies had fallen into disarray, tougher sanctions failed to halt Iran’s nuclear program or North Korea’s development of ballistic missiles, China’s expansionism continued, and punitive tariffs failed to reduce America’s trade deficit even as they increased costs for domestic manufacturers. Trump, like Obama, dialed back on foreign commitments and reduced American combat troops in the Middle East, but both former presidents left the United States facing a more adverse foreign policy arena and with diminished global influence. Chapter 8 concludes by comparing the meanings of “indispensability” a quarter century ago and now. America’s relative power and influence have diminished even as it faces stiffer challenges abroad and serious difficulties at home. It would be reassuring to think that international institutions alone can sustain an open, stable, and nonthreatening world order, or that a new concert of great powers can successfully manage a world no longer dominated by the United States and the West, or that the capabilities and self-interest of all those who have benefited from an American-led order are sufficient to maintain it. For the United States, indispensability does not mean a false dichotomy of endless military interventions or else complete abdication. Painless disengagement from foreign involvement is impossible, and domestic prosperity, security, national interest, and values cannot be separated from what happens abroad. In contrast to his two predecessors, President Joseph Biden entered office promising to restore America’s global leadership. He pledged to rejoin international organizations and agreements from which his predecessor had withdrawn, restore relations with allies, confront China, withdraw from Afghanistan, support human rights, and much else. But implementation of these objectives has proved

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Introduction fraught. The chaos surrounding final troop withdrawal from Afghanistan was viewed negatively by the U.S. public, even though the policy itself had majority support. The event led allies and adversaries to question the capability and competence of the administration to carry out its own policies. In addition, relations with European allies have been marked by continuing differences over trade, policies toward Russia and China, and Aukus, a nuclear submarine deal with Australia and Britain. Moreover, the U.S. domestic environment included a deeply divided and polarized public, a progressive wing of the president’s own party skeptical of an American global leadership role, and issues competing for presidential and public attention such as climate, the economy, immigration, continuing impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, and Biden’s controversial legislative agenda. The American global role remains necessary, even indispensable, but by itself it is not sufficient to preserve world order. That requires the engagement of allies and others, a reality that highlights the critical importance of skilled leadership, of prudence in choosing when and where to actively engage, and of the use of national power hand in glove with diplomacy. Although the United States faces formidable obstacles in confronting China, in rejuvenating collaboration with allies, and in overcoming domestic problems, there remains a powerful logic to America’s leadership role. Whether it can succeed in that effort is a matter of choice and even chance, but the reasons for it remain compelling.

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Chapter 1

WHAT WENT WRONG? It is not that the United States has ceased to exist—far from it. But it has left behind any ambition of global leadership and any function as a global inspiration. —Former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, 2020

A quarter century ago, the United States enjoyed unique global primacy. No other country seriously contested it for international power and influence, and America’s dominance extended across the entire range of criteria by which dominance is measured: military strength, power projection, economic scope and wealth, technology, innovation, science, medicine, agriculture, research universities, financial markets, the role of the dollar, cultural influence, and lifestyle. In addition, even in population (third after China and India) and land area (fourth behind Russia, Canada, and China), it ranks among the leading countries of the world. These advantages seemed so pronounced that the historian Paul Kennedy, who a few years earlier had written a best-selling book on the trajectories of great powers and had warned that the United States might be on the verge of its own precipitous decline, now described America’s situation as unprecedented. As he wrote in the Financial Times, in February 2002:

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What Went Wrong? Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing. . . . Charlemagne’s empire was merely Western European in its reach. The Roman empire stretched farther afield, but there was another great empire in Persia, and a larger one in China. There is therefore no comparison.1

America’s Cold War superpower rival, the USSR, was gone. In its place stood the Russian Federation in utter disarray, with just half the population of the former Soviet Union, discredited institutions, a floundering economy, and a dispirited population. China was little more than a ­decade past its 1978 opening to the outside world. The majority of its population was still rural, and in 1989 it had undergone mass political unrest, culminating in the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests. The path to realizing its enormous economic potential had been constructed but would not fully open until its admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001. At the same time, the most important foreign centers of economic power, Japan and the European Economic Community, soon to become the European Union, remained allied to the United States economically as well as dependent on it for security. In this final decade of the twentieth century, the United States stood at the apex of a triangle of powers. American preponderance in the post–Cold War era was unusual, but Washington had played an indispensable leadership role at least since the end of World War II. Yet a generation later, the benign post–Cold War visions of world order seem quaint, as do the exuberant assumptions of America’s role within it. Understanding this reversal requires an examination of three broad causes of change: first, the rise of revisionist powers—most importantly China—seeking to disrupt the prevailing liberal order and the role of the United States within it; second, a

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What Went Wrong? growing diffusion of economic and geopolitical strength previously concentrated among the triumvirate of Europe, Japan, and America; and third, changes within the United States itself, involving the economy, domestic politics and culture, immigration, the impact of globalization and technology, the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and perceptions of over-extension in foreign policy.

Indispensability and Primacy After World War II In retrospect, the U.S. role immediately following World War II and in the early Cold War was remarkable in scope and scale. Much of Europe and Asia had been devastated by the war, and the former Axis powers of Japan and Germany had been defeated and were now occupied. Of America’s great power allies, the British Empire emerged severely weakened and drained of resources. The Soviet Union had suffered 27 million military and civilian deaths and faced a massive task of post-war reconstruction. By some estimates, in 1945 America’s economy represented nearly half of the world’s total gross domestic product. As the war neared its end, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration had long been thinking about the post-war world. Hoping to avoid the economic disarray and return to great power conflict that marked the two decades after World War I, they sought to construct a series of international institutions and embed the United States within them. They created the United Nations in cooperation with their wartime allies, including Britain, Russia, China, and France. Its charter, signed in San Francisco in June 1945, set out four principles that the peoples of the member countries were determined to uphold. As enumerated in the document’s preamble,

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What Went Wrong? they offer a benchmark against which the U.N.’s subsequent performance can be judged: To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war . . . To reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights . . . To establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and To promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.2

As a critical part of their design for the post-war era, American leaders hosted key economic planning meetings. At Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944, they worked with allies to create the vital post-war financial institutions, especially the International Monetary Fund (IMF), established to maintain monetary stability, and the World Bank, created to reduce poverty and support economic growth. Other important bodies created during and immediately after 1945 included the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Initially, the Roosevelt administration and that of Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, expected to maintain international security through close cooperation with Britain and the USSR, the victorious Big Three powers. The U.N. Security Council was created with that aim in mind, though with its permanent membership expanded to include China and France. Washington policymakers assumed that the American public would be unwilling to maintain

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What Went Wrong? large troop deployments in Europe after the war and that the British would play the major role there and in the Middle East. These assumptions quickly proved wrong. Once the war ended, Stalin resumed the ideological warfare the Soviet Union had waged against the West during most of the 1920s and ’30s and moved to assert control over the Eastern European nations that the Red Army had occupied in defeating Nazi Germany. In March 1946, in a speech in Fulton, Missouri, former British prime minister Winston Churchill warned that an “iron curtain” had descended across Central Europe, one that stretched “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.” American officials did not rush to embrace Churchill’s rhetoric, which they saw as overly confrontational, and in this they were supported by the American public. Among the more than two-thirds of poll respondents who were aware of the speech, 40 percent disapproved of Churchill’s proposal for what was effectively a military alliance between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States; only 18 percent approved. Yet the same Gallup poll reported that 71 percent of Americans disapproved of Russia’s foreign policy, and half favored strong action to counter it.3 Churchill’s words proved prophetic. Soviet-supported Communist parties gained increasing dominance over post-war coalition governments in Eastern Europe, and during the winter of 1946–47 the political and economic situation in Western Europe also became more fraught. Economic recovery from the war was proving painfully slow, and large Communist parties were fostering instability in Italy, France, and Belgium as well as waging civil war in Greece. Britain, despite having been on the winning side, emerged from the war virtually bankrupt. In June 1946 it adopted bread ration­ ing, a measure not needed even during the war, while meat rationing

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What Went Wrong? would continue for another nine years, and in July 1946, the British government turned to Washington for an urgently needed loan to support the pound sterling and pay for imports of food and raw materials. A critical foreign policy turning point came on February 21, 1947, when the British foreign office notified the U.S. State Department that it could no longer afford to provide economic and military assistance to Greece and Turkey. In Washington, policy planners including Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson had begun weighing responses to the increasingly urgent situation in Europe and the wider threat posed by Soviet Communism. President Truman’s reaction to the British pullback came on March 12, 1947, in an address to a joint session of Congress in which he spelled out what would become known as the Truman Doctrine. At one level, he announced that the United States would send $400 million in economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey. More important, however, he committed the United States to a transformation in strategy, saying, “I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Moreover, he depicted stark differences between the West and the Soviets. One way of life was “based upon the will of the majority” and “guarantees of individual liberty” while the other was “based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority” and marked by “terror and oppression.”4 The American grand strategy in the Cold War would have two additional elements. One was the containment doctrine, foreshadowed in Soviet expert George Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” a confidential document sent from Moscow in February 1946 that soon became widely circulated in Washington. A version of it was pub-

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What Went Wrong? lished under the pseudonym “X” in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs. “Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the western world,” Kennan wrote, “is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points . . . but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.”5 He urged a U.S. policy of “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansionist tendencies” in words that would prove prophetic: It would be an exaggeration to say that American behavior unassisted and alone could exercise a power of life and death over the Communist movement and bring about the early fall of Soviet power in Russia. But the United States has it in its power to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate, to force upon the Kremlin a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection than it has had to observe in recent years, and in this way to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.6

The third major building block of the Truman administration’s Cold War strategy was the Marshall Plan, set out by Secretary of State George Marshall in his commencement speech at Harvard in June 1947. In it he called for a massive program of economic assistance to promote European recovery in which European countries would be urged to cooperate with each other in allocating the aid. (Japan, not included in the Marshall Plan, received aid under a separate arrangement.) Within four years, European economies including Germany were well on their way to recovery, with industrial production and GDP levels above those of 1939.

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What Went Wrong?

Cold War Leadership Together, the Truman Doctrine, the containment strategy, and the Marshall Plan marked the start of America’s peacetime commitment to Europe and its entry into an increasingly global Cold War with the Soviet Union. Critically important for the creation and implementation of these policies, as well as for the United Nations, was support from the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan. He played an essential role in galvanizing bipartisan backing and distancing his party from the isolationist sentiment of the pre-war era. Successive crises pushed the United States deeper into the Cold War. During the late 1940s, Soviet-backed governments tightened their control in Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Russian-occupied East Germany, which in 1949 was renamed the German Democratic Republic. With the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, the last remaining non-Communist government in Eastern Europe was violently ousted and replaced by a pro-Soviet regime. Soon after, in June 1948, the Soviets violated the four-party agreements with the United States, Britain, and France on the occupation of Germany by imposing a blockade on road, rail, and canal access to the German capital of Berlin. The city and its two million people, located 110 miles inside the Soviet zone of occupation, were cut off from the West. But Truman, along with British leaders, made the decision to resupply Berlin by air. The Berlin airlift not only provided critical supplies but favorably shaped German public opinion toward the United States. The Soviets ended the blockade in May 1949. During this period Washington’s commitments rapidly increased and intensified. The most critical of these was the decision to create a formal military alliance to provide defense, deterrence, and reas-

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What Went Wrong? surance to Western Europe. Under the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in Washington in April 1949 by the United States, Canada, and ten European countries, the alliance established a military body, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).7 The treaty’s key provision, Article 5, provided that an attack against any one of its members would be regarded as an attack against all of the members. With this step, the United States undertook an unprecedented peacetime commitment to the defense of Europe. NATO’s first secretarygeneral, British diplomat Lord Ismay, quipped that the alliance’s aim was to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”8 It would successfully meet all three of these aims. As the Cold War expanded beyond Europe to Asia and deepened militarily, so did America’s foreign policy commitments. In August 1949, the Soviets successfully exploded their first atomic bomb. The test shocked Washington policymakers, who had thought the U.S. monopoly on such weapons would last longer. Nearly simultaneously, in China, Mao Zedong and the Communists prevailed in their war against Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist forces. On October 1, 1949, Mao announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of China while Chiang and his remaining troops and supporters fled to the island of Taiwan. Eight months later, North Korean forces, supported and supplied by Russia and China, invaded South Korea and advanced rapidly against the South Korean army and the small U.S. occupation force. President Truman made the fateful decision to resist the invasion and commit America to the defense of South Korea. On June 28, 1950, the U.N. Security Council authorized the use of force to repel the invasion. The U.N. commitment was made possible because Soviet diplomats had walked out in protest over the council’s refusal to accept Mao’s representatives as the rightful holders

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What Went Wrong? of ­China’s seat. With the Soviets temporarily absent, the Security Council soon reached agreement on the creation of a U.N. Korean Command under U.S. leadership. With the deployment of additional American forces, increased numbers of South Korean troops, and the arrival of troops from Britain and other countries, the tide of battle turned. After a successful amphibious landing at Inchon in September 1950, American and South Korean forces advanced into North Korea, nearing the Chinese border. However, in late October and November, Chinese forces began to enter the war in large numbers, aided by Soviet pilots flying aircraft with Chinese or North Korean markings. Allied forces were driven back in intense fighting and with heavy casualties. During the war, the U.S.–United Nations operation was joined by military personnel from twenty-one countries, although Americans would constitute some 90 percent of the troops and suffer thirty-six thousand deaths. In October 1952 the Republican nominee for president, Dwight Eisenhower, promised that if elected he would go to Korea, and weeks after his victory, he did so. Soon after coming to office in January 1953, he intensified the pressure on China and North Korea, including a veiled threat to use nuclear weapons. An armistice finally ended the fighting in July 1953, with a cease-fire close to the 38th Parallel, the pre-war border separating North and South Korea. In these early years of the Cold War, defense spending climbed sharply, much of it as recommended by a National Security Council memorandum in April 1950 known as NSC-68. That document, prepared by the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff at the request of Secretary of State Acheson, described a world divided between the two great powers and advocated large buildups of America’s conventional and nuclear forces to contain Soviet expansion.9 Truman at first resisted such a huge peacetime increase in defense spending,

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What Went Wrong? but the Korean War proved a decisive turning point. By September 1950, NSC-68 had become U.S. Cold War policy. Immediately after 1945, the United States had made huge reductions in the size of its armed forces amid expectations of a peacetime world without major threats. Whereas wartime defense spending had peaked at 37 percent of GDP in 1943–45, by 1948 it had plunged to a low of 3.3 percent.10 But with the events of the late 1940s and then the Korean War, the defense budget again soared, peaking at 14.2 percent of GDP in 1953. It stayed in double digits throughout the 1950s and remained substantial for the remainder of the Cold War, averaging 8.7 percent in the 1960s and just under 6 percent in the 1970s and 1980s. The Cold War was a time of heightened threat, regional proxy wars, and great power crises, punctuated by interludes when tensions eased. During these years the United States remained committed to an extensive network of military bases, troop deployments, alliances, covert operations, and military and economic aid for allies and others. Washington also waged an ideological struggle, making the case for the free world that had been set out by Truman in 1947 and reaffirmed by successive presidents of both parties, most notably John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. It developed ambitious programs for public information, international broadcasting, and cultural exchanges including artists, performers, authors, academics, professionals, and students. The United States was criticized for its support of anti-communist dictators during the Cold War and for its excesses in the worldwide struggle against Soviet communism and was later derided by realist critics for its policy of “liberal hegemony” (described as the longstanding U.S. foreign policy of seeking to impose a global order based on democracy, free markets, and human rights), but the U.S.

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What Went Wrong? achievements in the seven decades after the end of World War II speak for themselves.11 Its leadership of its European and Asian allies during the Cold War, and then even more widely in the years afterward, stimulated an unprecedented level of human development, economic interdependence, and political freedom. Consider that the massive crowds of demonstrators thronging Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the spring of 1989 to demand political liberty erected as a symbol of their aspirations a huge papier-mâché version of the Statue of Liberty. That same year, Francis Fukuyama, looking back over a century that had seen the defeat of Nazism and fascism and anticipating the collapse of Soviet communism, captured the sense of profound transformation when he wrote, “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”12 This line is often cited nowadays as the epitome of naive triumphalism, but the successes were real.

——————— The United States position in the years after World War II and in the aftermath of the Cold War is often described as hegemonic. Dictionary definitions of the word denote influence or authority over others, often supported by norms of legitimacy or ideology. The term is most often used pejoratively. For example, the Italian neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci defined hegemony as the concealed domination of all the positions of institutional power and influence by the members of one class.13 In contrast, leading scholars such as Charles Kindleberger and Robert Gilpin have described America as providing he-

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What Went Wrong? gemonic stability by playing the same liberal great power role that Britain had maintained with its nineteenth-century Pax Britannica. Kindleberger and Gilpin argued that by virtue of their economic weight and military might, Britain and the United States proved critical in sustaining an open, rules-based international economic order.14 They provided the means for increasingly stable and prosperous commerce, investment, monetary relationships, rule of law, and international norms and institutions. In the post–Cold War era, some analysts believed that an American-­led unipolar order was conducive to stability. They maintained that the presence of a great power military hegemon tended to diminish conflict by tamping down regional confrontations and reducing the likelihood of arms races and wars.15 Others, especially realist authors, however, have assessed the U.S. role differently, arguing that regional stability could be maintained by local countries acting to balance against powerful neighbors and that America should relinquish its expansive commitments and alliances, intervening only if its immediate national security is threatened.16 In practice, over nearly seven decades, America played a role that was not only unique but also, for much of that time, indispensable, enabled as it was by its power as well as its identity. In that role, it supported European and Japanese recovery, the creation and continued effectiveness of international institutions, regional stability, deterrence of military aggression, opposition to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, trade liberalization, economic development, and— though perhaps too intermittently—human rights and democratization. America thus served as leader of the liberal democratic world and upholder of the norms of a wider international order, although this did not preclude sometimes acrimonious disputes among allies.17 Notable examples of these disagreements during the Cold War in-

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What Went Wrong? cluded German rearmament, the British-French-Israeli Suez expedition, policies toward Mao’s China, the Vietnam War, nuclear doctrine, and periodic trade quarrels. Nonetheless, the Soviet threat and, for many, a sense of shared values provided sufficient basis for allied cohesion.

Optimism in the Post–Cold War Era Following a struggle of forty-four years between the two superpowers, from 1947 to 1991, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States appeared preponderant. With China not yet a major factor, the United States was able to conduct foreign policy without having to take into account the interests of opposing powers. It would be another two decades before America found itself in a new era of major power competition.18 Meanwhile, it had the opportunity to play a unique leadership role and to promote a liberal brand of international order. It could promote trade expansion; economic growth; the spread of democracy, liberty, and human rights; and the role of the U.N., the World Trade Organization, and other institutions to transcend narrow national interests and to try to foster more peaceful relations in an increasingly globalized world. Exuberant optimism about the post–Cold War world and America’s role in it flourished during the 1990s. An early confirmation of this outlook was the successful outcome of the Persian Gulf War of 1991. In August 1990, after Iraq had invaded and occupied the Persian Gulf sheikhdom of Kuwait, Washington and Moscow managed to cooperate to gain U.N. condemnation of Iraq’s aggression and then to secure a Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force to expel Saddam Hussein’s army. During the following months, the United States deployed 550,000 military personnel, and dozens

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What Went Wrong? of other countries provided ships, planes, and an additional 200,000 troops. On January 16, 1991, after the U.N. ultimatum expired, American forces led Operation Desert Storm, a five-week campaign of air attacks and naval bombardment followed by a stunning ground assault that liberated Kuwait in just one hundred hours. Two weeks later, President George H. W. Bush spoke to a joint session of Congress and invoked the idea of a new world order of global cooperation, peace, and international law: And now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a “world order” in which “the principles of justice and fair play . . . protect the weak against the strong.” A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations. The gulf war put this new world to its first test. And my fellow Americans, we passed that test.19

These years saw extraordinary and rapid change. The countries of Eastern Europe regained their autonomy after decades of Soviet domination, and their people opted for democratic political systems. The Soviet Union dissolved at the end of 1991, and its fifteen former republics initially chose representative governments. In practice, however, except for the Baltic countries, Ukraine, and Georgia, independence for most former Soviet republics resulted, at best, in illiberal democracy if not outright failure. In Latin America, Asia, and parts of Africa, insurgencies or wars came to an end, as in El Salvador, Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, Cambodia, and elsewhere. The rapidity of political change can be seen in the increased

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What Went Wrong? number of democracies. In 1989, 114 countries had authoritarian governments, and just 41 were democracies, but within a decade the number of democracies had grown to 86, compared with 90 autocracies. By 2009, democracies had come to outnumber autocracies 100 to 78. The transformation is still more remarkable when contrasted with the end of World War II, when only 12 democracies existed versus 137 autocracies.20 Throughout the first post–Cold War decade, the expansion and enhancement of Western institutions accelerated. Under American leadership, NATO began a process of enlargement by granting membership to former member states of the Warsaw Pact, followed by three former Soviet Republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, whose annexation by the USSR in 1940 the United States had never recognized. In later years, realist critics would fault the United States for provoking Moscow in this way. But this critique devalues the Eastern Europeans’ powerful desire for NATO entry, both as a part of their reintegration into Europe and as a hedge against Russian domination, as well as the broad support for enlargement among NATO’s European members.21 With the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, the European Community became the European Union, deepening its economic and institutional integration, implementing the euro as a common currency, and later widening its membership by adding Eastern European countries. These developments were an especially influential expression of post–Cold War optimism. If Europeans could overcome three centuries of major power conflict and millennia of war to create shared institutions that integrated key aspects of national life and exercised authority formerly held by nation-states, perhaps they could lead other regions of the world in overcoming age-old antagonisms and transcending national sovereignty.

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What Went Wrong? Meanwhile, China’s opening to the world began to quicken. Its export-led economic growth increased, and its population began to enjoy wider personal—though not political—freedoms, especially in contrast to the all-encompassing repressions of the Maoist era. ­China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001 accelerated a vast expansion of its exports and its worldwide impact on other economies and societies. Established in 1994 to replace the less comprehensive GATT, the WTO was formed to promote trade liberalization, to institute shared rules, and to provide an effective and binding means for resolving trade disputes. Over the next quarter century its membership grew to more than 160 countries, encompassing not only advanced and middle-income countries but many developing ones as well. The first post–Cold War decade did, however, see sobering reminders that conflict, violence, tragedy, and war had not been eliminated. These years witnessed sectarian conflict in Afghanistan, civil war in Bosnia, genocide in Rwanda, and ethnic cleansing and chronic warfare in Sudan, Somalia, and Congo. A number of America’s decisions about foreign intervention proved problematic. In Somalia, a U.N.-authorized intervention, initiated in the final days of George Bush’s presidency, brought trouble for the new Clinton administration. Lack of coordination, opaque rules of engagement, and relief efforts that morphed into “nation building” led in October 1993 to an ill-fated special forces operation in Mogadishu. The “Black Hawk Down” incident saw nineteen U.S. troops killed as well as hundreds of Somalis, and pictures of the debacle were telecast to the world on CNN. The political backlash not only left the administration reluctant to intervene but caused it to actively discourage the U.N. Security Council from interceding when Rwanda erupted six months later. The United States and the major powers largely remained aloof

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What Went Wrong? as some eight hundred thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered. Four years later, Clinton apologized to the Rwandans for America’s inaction. Bosnia too remained in crisis, torn by civil war among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. From 1992 to 1995, the Clinton administration remained largely disengaged from the troubled U.N. and European intervention. Finally, after the massacre of seven thousand Muslim men and boys at the U.N.-designated safe town of Srebrenica in July 1995, the United States led a NATO intervention to halt the fighting, impose a cease-fire, and broker a complex agreement to end the conflict. Late in the decade, the administration again found itself intervening in the Balkans, this time leading NATO in a controversial air war in 1999 against Serbia to protect Kosovo. Despite these events, which reflected both the difficulty of resolving foreign conflicts and the limits to the efficacy of international institutions, confidence persisted. Scientific achievements, innovative technology, the advent of the internet and cell phones, and the expanding world of information media helped foster a technological optimism along with the notion that the world was becoming a “global village.” At the end of the decade, President Clinton predicted in a lecture at Johns Hopkins University that “in the new century, liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem.”22 Declaring his support for China’s entry into the WTO, he expressed confidence that the agreement would trigger major changes within China and that trade, technology, and economic liberalization would be transformative, hastening the removal of the Beijing government from people’s lives. “The genie of freedom,” he assured his audience, “will not go back into the bottle.” The Clinton speech embodied both the heady technological optimism and the economic determinism of the time. Not only would

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What Went Wrong? access to the internet and the outside world be transformative, so would economic progress. As Clinton put it, “Bringing China into the WTO doesn’t guarantee that it will choose political reform. But . . . the process of economic change will . . . make the imperative for the right choice stronger.”23 The idea that economic change and the development of a middle class would create imperatives for political change has long-standing antecedents. One of the most widely cited and influential political scientists of the last half of the twentieth century, Seymour Martin Lipset, saw a robust relationship between economic development and democracy. Emphasizing cases from Latin America and Europe, he posited that industrialization, urbanization, wealth, education, and thus the development of a large middle class provided conditions favorable to democracy. Lipset did not draw a simple causal relationship between per capita income and democracy, but he identified these factors as correlated with democracy, even if on their own they were not sufficient to bring it about.24 Other social scientists were even more assertive about the links between socioeconomic development and political order. Barrington Moore Jr., for instance, asserted, “No bourgeois, no democracy.”25 In 1960, long before Fukuyama’s end-of-history argument, the withering away of prevailing political ideologies had been foreshadowed by another prominent thinker, but less optimistically. Daniel Bell’s influential book The End of Ideology argued that the older humanistic ideologies originating in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had become exhausted and that new parochial ideologies would arise in their place.26 Four decades later, in the introduction to the 2000 edition, Bell argued that with the end of communism, a return of history was occurring and with it a return to traditional ethnic and religious conflicts.27

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What Went Wrong?

Sources of Change: Revisionist Powers With the end of the Cold War, defined as either the opening of the Berlin Wall on the night of November 9, 1989, or the dissolution of the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact on March 31, 1991, it was widely assumed that great power rivalry had ended as well. New threats could emerge from non-state actors or from epidemics, climate change, population pressures, or failed states, but the perils of the twentieth century were seen by many politicians, pundits, scholars, and the general public as receding into the past. In the academic world, security studies programs found themselves obliged to emphasize new kinds of threats rather than dwell on “old thinking.” A similar change occurred in the discourse of political leaders. In the last years of the Cold War, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had called for “new thinking” in foreign policy, with an emphasis on the U.N. and international law, an aspiration echoed by President George Bush after the Gulf War. This perception remained strong into the twenty-first century. Senator Barack Obama in 2006 could write in his book The Audacity of Hope that the world of expansionist states and great power competition “no longer exists.”28 In 2008, Richard Haass, president of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations and a former senior foreign policy official in both Bush administrations, testified to the U.S. Senate that “great-power competition and conflict is no longer the driving force of international relations.”29 As president in 2012, Obama reiterated the theme in an election debate with the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney. Citing a prior quotation in which Romney had described Russia as “the biggest geopolitical threat facing America,” Obama retorted, “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”30

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What Went Wrong? Despite optimistic assessments, another dynamic was at work. Political ideology per se no longer played the role it had under fascism and Soviet communism, but authoritarian regimes had their own motivations and logic for opposing both the prevailing international rules and the U.S.-dominated regional and global order. While Russia, China, and Iran were more than willing to utilize existing rules and institutions to their benefit, they did not hesitate to violate established norms or even to seek to disrupt or overturn them when it suited their interests. They continually found opportunities to undercut the role of the United States, the E.U., and their regional allies. Although Russia, China, and Iran differ enormously in their geography, history, ethnicity, size, and power, they share important commonalities. Each is dominated by a dictatorial and corrupt regime that constantly needs to find ways of justifying its rule to its own people. With increasingly educated and aware populations and with communications increasingly open as a consequence of information technology, this problem has grown more acute. In China, for example, three decades of double-digit economic growth have created a vast middle class. But since the early years of the last decade, that growth has been slowing, and it provides less support for the regime’s legitimacy. Not surprisingly, the Chinese Communist Party under President Xi Jinping has played to revanchism and xenophobia to kindle public support. Foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum has identified this pattern in the behavior of rulers in Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran where, “lacking recourse to tradition, ideology, economic success and democracy, the revisionist regimes turned to aggressive nationalism to ensure their continuation in power.”31 Regional conditions in East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East

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What Went Wrong? differ considerably, but in each case, local developments have made disruptive behavior more feasible for revisionist powers. In Asia, China’s enormous economic weight and large budgets for modernizing and strengthening its military have widened the gap between it and its neighbors, as has its willingness to use trade and investment to persuade, bribe, blackmail, and threaten those it wishes to influence. In the case of Russia, Putin’s armed forces modernization, massive oil and gas resources, and willingness to employ covert and cyber technologies have given him the means to intimidate and destabilize neighboring countries. Moscow also employs disinformation techniques to influence or discredit the political systems of Western democracies. In Iran, the ruthless control exercised by the mullahs, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and their proxies, such as the Quds Force and Hezbollah, have allowed it to extend its influence into Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. I will discuss these revisionist states in Chapters 2 and 3; my point here is that the conditions for them to act aggressively have been significantly bolstered by ongoing shifts in the global distribution of power and changes in the capacities and policies of the United States.

Sources of Change: Diffusion of Power During the Cold War, the global centers of economic weight, military and political strength, and geopolitical influence in the free world were located in Western Europe, Japan, and North America—the trilateral powers. But regional states were swiftly gaining in importance. Countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East that had been

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What Went Wrong? ruled by European empires gained independence throughout the 1950s and 1960s. With time, and especially after the shadow of the Cold War had been lifted, many of them became important actors in their own right, though some succumbed to disorder, corruption, and misrule. In Asia and its neighborhood, the increasingly significant actors have included not only China and India but Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. In the Middle East, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates have the ability to shape events. In Africa, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa emerged as countries with large populations and significant regional influence. In the Americas, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico became increasingly relevant. As globalization and economic growth progressed rapidly in Asia as well as in parts of Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, America’s European allies and Japan have experienced lagging economic growth. The great financial crisis of 2007–9 intensified the problem. Recovery for most European countries was slow and prolonged, with weaker economies continuing to experience high unemployment, especially among younger workers. Many had not fully recovered when the coronavirus pandemic of 2020–22 worsened these effects and exacerbated relations among E.U. members. As globalization and technological change have brought about a more open world economy, discontent has become more pervasive in the most developed and modernized societies. Competition from China and other lower-cost exporters has introduced hundreds of millions of manual workers into the international workforce. There they compete with working-class sectors in the more affluent countries. This competition in manufactured products and consumer goods has disrupted many industries in the United States. A similar

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What Went Wrong? effect is now being felt in some of the service sectors, as off-shoring has become common for technical support and clerical functions. At the same time, changing social mores and elite beliefs, together with immigration and the attrition of traditional values, have left working-class populations feeling not only bypassed by prosperity but devalued and disparaged. Together, these phenomena have triggered the rise of populism, nationalism, and discontent within the democratic order, making it harder to achieve alliance cooper­ ation and burden sharing. In Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere, the mainstream political parties of the center-left and center-right have been seriously weakened as people have increasingly embraced illiberal parties, sometimes on the left, but especially on the right. Brexit in Britain, the National Rally (previously the National Front) in France, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, the Lega in Italy, and Fidesz in Hungary have all brought populist ideologies into the political arena. In the United States the Trump presidency and its aftermath have had a significant political impact on the Republican Party. Diffusion of power extends far beyond economics and trade. Asian countries have increasingly become important players in investment, technology, entertainment, tourism, and the airline industry. Some have also developed significant military capability. The consequence of these shifts, some occurring slowly, others more rapidly, has been a further dilution of the relative power and influence of Europe and Japan. This can be measured in different ways, but an obvious indicator is the share of world GDP. In 1980, Europe accounted for 35 percent, Japan 10 percent, and the United States 25 percent of the total. Together, the three regions constituted 70 percent of global GDP. By 2020, while America’s percentage remained largely unchanged, Europe and Japan had declined to 21 per-

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What Went Wrong? cent and 6 percent, respectively, dropping the combined share of world product represented by the trilateral powers to 52 percent.32 The erosion in Europe’s and Japan’s relative global influence is still more apparent when we make comparisons based on population size and military strength. The countries of Southeast Asia, for example, encompass 700 million people, which is more than the entire population of the European Union plus Britain and Japan. As The Economist points out, if it were a single country, Southeast Asia’s economy would rank fourth in the world after adjusting for the cost of living, trailing only China, the United States, and India.33

Sources of Change: Trends in the United States The United States itself has experienced major changes and not a little disruption. On one hand, it still possesses the world’s largest economy and continues to hold advantages in many of the categories by which power and influence are measured. While still predominant in many sectors, its position has eroded over the past generation, especially in more intangible forms of influence, reputation, and soft power. It now faces intense competition, especially from China. It would be simplistic to extrapolate the paths of American and Chinese development as straight-line trends. In the case of the United States since 1945, years of peak material and geopolitical influence have been interrupted by reversals and occasional crises. America has had a commanding presence for long stretches of time, from 1945 to the late 1960s, and again from the mid-1980s into the first decade of the twenty-first century. But the decade from the late 1960s to the late 1970s saw bitter divisions over the war in Vietnam, urban violence, shocking political assassinations, race riots, the Watergate scandal, a humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam in

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What Went Wrong? 1975, and international oil shocks that triggered recessions, inflation, and high unemployment in 1974–75 and 1979–81. Each of these troubled periods caused questions to be raised about America’s domestic strength and international influence, yet recovery and resurgence followed, reflecting institutional resilience and underlying strengths. Today, however, the United States again confronts a major challenge, this time from China as a rapidly rising power and formidable peer competitor. Moreover, this is taking place at a time when America’s alliances are shakier, its allies weaker, and its global power more dispersed than at any time in recent history. Meanwhile, the United States faces the task of completing its recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and the accompanying economic disruption resulting from the shutdown while experiencing deep internal divisions over politics, race, and culture. It does so in the aftermath of the unprecedented storming of the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, which also dealt a blow to its worldwide stature and reputation. America’s prolonged foreign military interventions have weighed heavily. Shorter and more successful actions in which U.S. forces could win quickly and get out, as in the Gulf War of 1991 and the Serbia/Kosovo operation in 1999, did not create lingering problems at home. Long, unresolved wars have been another matter, as in the case of Korea from 1950 to 1953 and Vietnam from the early 1960s to 1975. The interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, began with public support, which then faded as these wars proved costly and prolonged. Not surprisingly, the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as deployments elsewhere, have affected the willingness and ability of presidents, Congress, and the public to support an active global role. The defense budget of the early 2020s amounted to

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What Went Wrong? approximately 3.6 percent of GDP, which viewed one way is a great deal of money but might not seem disproportionate when contrasted with Cold War–era military spending, which in the 1980s averaged 5.8 percent of GDP. But these calculations take place in a different budget environment. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, trilliondollar budget deficits were already anticipated for at least the following decade as a result of an aging population and the 2017 tax cut in the face of steadily rising costs to pay for entitlement programs, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans’ benefits. Subsequent measures in response to the medical and economic costs of the pandemic during the final year of the Trump administration and the initial year of the Biden presidency have added more than $6 trillion to that burden. While mitigated by historically low interest rates, these budget pressures weigh on the ability and willingness of Congress and the president to allocate larger sums for diplomacy, foreign aid, and economic development abroad as well as for the maintenance and modernization of the armed forces. America thus could find itself at a disadvantage, especially when competing with China, not only militarily but also in the use of aid and investment as foreign policy tools. Funding issues aside, internal American debates about politics and foreign policy became increasingly rancorous with the onset of the Iraq War in 2003. Intense polarization in domestic politics has continued to shape public and congressional attitudes about the U.S. global role and made it difficult for Democrats and Republicans to cooperate on national priorities. Growing frustration with long wars gave rise to calls for reducing America’s commitments abroad, and both Barack Obama and Donald Trump sought to recast U.S. foreign policy, though in manifestly different ways. Both tried to reduce the

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What Went Wrong? costs of global leadership, but their results were uneven, incomplete, and sometimes contradicted by the need for action in response to foreign events. Although he was much admired abroad, President Barack Obama’s calls for the international community to “stand up” often seemed to reflect a misunderstanding of the difficulties of collective action. The international community cannot “stand up” without American leadership—at least, not in any way that would further American interests or that most Americans would find morally palatable. In the case of Donald Trump, assertions of “America First” and his transactional approach to foreign policy marked a still more serious failure to recognize the unique importance of the United States and the consequences of backing away from or even disparaging that role. Most of the problems facing the world—such as nuclear proliferation, regional aggression, terrorism, international economic and financial crises, climate change, disease epidemics, drug running, human trafficking, and even the rules of the road for the high seas and outer space—cannot be solved simply by cracking down on one bad actor or one region. They require cooperation among many nations. Whatever America’s difficulties, especially its deep and intense political polarization, on many of these global issues it remains the only country among its allies with the capacity to galvanize or lead such efforts and to provide deterrence, defense, and reassurance to its allies and friends in Europe, Asia, and parts of the Middle East. No other country, alliance, or regional grouping possesses that capacity or the will to play this role, especially when it comes to sustaining a rules-based international system. Exhortations for others to “step up” do not elicit meaningful responses unless the United

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What Went Wrong? States is credibly engaged. Because of its size and capabilities, the United States simply cannot be a free rider. This is why, in a world with rising revisionist powers, the American presence remains critical.34

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Chapter 2

IS THE UNITED STATES A DISRUPTOR? Our closest ally, the United States of America, under the current administration, rejects the very concept of the international community. —German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier, 2020

This book began by asking whether the United States is still the indispensable nation in sustaining a decent world order, but what if that is the wrong question? Could it be that America itself is now a disruptor of that order?1 At first glance, it might seem so. While he was in office, President Donald Trump expressed repeated skepticism about the international institutions, agreements, and treaties to which the country has been committed. He questioned the wisdom and the cost of these arrangements and used his executive authority to withdraw from a number of them. He renounced the effort to negotiate a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact; forced renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement; imposed punitive tariffs on imports from China and, to a lesser degree, from Europe, Canada, and elsewhere; announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord; imposed financial and travel restrictions on the authoritarian regime in Cuba; withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear agreement, known as the

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Is the United States a Disruptor? JCPOA; aggressively used sanctions to conduct what The Economist termed “financial warfare”; expressed skepticism about the European Union and America’s commitment to NATO; pulled the United States out of UNESCO; criticized the United Nations as irrelevant; threatened to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea in retaliation for its illegal nuclear and missile programs; and ignored the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons by suggesting that Japan and South Korea ought to acquire such weapons.2 Even when Trump did negotiate agreements, they often did not conform to existing international norms. For example, an interim trade agreement with China in January 2020 took place outside the existing arbitration procedure of the World Trade Organization. Meanwhile, the WTO’s dispute resolution system was paralyzed by Trump’s refusal to appoint new judges to it.3 In all, Trump’s policies and his “America First” language suggested that his administration was turning its back on America’s historic role in sustaining the international economic and security order that it had done so much to create in the years after 1945. This concern has been bluntly expressed abroad, most notably by anxious and frustrated European leaders. Two previous American presidents also took actions—though not as extensive—that drew criticism as departures from support for world order. President Barack Obama, reacting against what he saw as the excessive interventionism of the George W. Bush administration, was inclined to pull back from seven decades of America’s international leadership. Instances of Obama’s inclination to turn inward included his relatively passive response to Russia’s invasions of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, his precipitous troop withdrawal from Iraq in December 2011, the abandonment of his previously proclaimed “red line” over Syria’s use of chemical weapons, his “strategic patience” (that is, inaction) toward the North Korean nuclear

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Is the United States a Disruptor? program, his de-emphasis of international human rights issues, and his willingness to permit the decline of military readiness generally. These and other decisions, some of which were opposed by senior officials in Obama’s own administration, alarmed allies and emboldened adversaries.4 Prior to Obama, President George W. Bush was denounced by his critics for pursuing foreign policies they deemed excessively unilateralist. Among the actions most often cited were withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia; the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 without formal authorization by the U.N. Security Council; withdrawal of the U.S. signature on a major climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol; and refusal to join the International Criminal Court. Indeed, Bush even rejected lesser agreements including a small arms treaty and another aimed at combating bioterrorism. In reaction, a long-time Republican author and commentator, Clyde Prestowitz, observed that what characterized the administration was not its conservatism but the extent of its unilateralism.5 Another critic, Richard Ned Lebow, a prolific author on inter­ national relations and geopolitics, is skeptical about the value of foreign engagement altogether. Rejecting the idea of America as the “indispensable nation,” he writes that the United States “constitutes as much a threat to global order and stability as it is a pillar of its preservation.”6 Lebow downplays past and present threats from Russia and China and claims that the world is better off without American leadership, not only economically but in security, the environment, and human rights.7 Before offering judgment on whether the United States has become a disruptor of a rules-based world order, it is essential to identify the sources of disorder and clarify what we mean by world order. All too often, the term disorder is applied not to the most urgent and

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Is the United States a Disruptor? dangerous problems of regional and international security but to narrower issues involving the prerogatives of international institutions or the conventional wisdom about multilateralism and globalization.

Limits of Order: The U.N., the Paris Climate Accord, and the Iran Nuclear Agreement First, consider the United Nations itself. One of the purposes it was founded for, arguably the most important, was to prevent war. The U.N. has had successes in other realms and has sometimes functioned effectively, even admirably, in peacekeeping missions. But war prevention and peacemaking have proved far more difficult. The U.N.’s ability to function is frequently blocked by the opposition of two authoritarian—and rule-breaking—regimes, Russia and China, through their ability to veto resolutions of the Security Council. As for humanitarian intervention, the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) has been enshrined in U.N. Security Council resolutions since 2006, yet mass atrocities as in Syria in 2011, Iraq in 2014, Myanmar in 2017, and Ethiopia in 2021 have taken place without effective U.N. intervention.8 In addition, the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) makes a mockery of human rights by including such members as China, Cuba, Eritrea, Russia, Sudan, and Venezuela, all of which are conspicuous violators of those rights.9 The UNHRC’s disproportionate emphasis on condemning Israel for its real or imagined sins, while ignoring or minimizing far worse abuses elsewhere, seriously harms its credibility. For example, the UNHRC has largely ignored China’s fierce repression of its Uighur Muslim population and its aggressive actions in the South China Sea, India’s policies in Kashmir, Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus, Morocco’s control of Western Sa-

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Is the United States a Disruptor? hara, and Russia’s seizure of Crimea as well as its use of force against Ukraine and Georgia. To round out the picture, those who know it best understand that the U.N. is inefficient, overstaffed, and subject to corruption. The problems are by no means new, and U.S. ambassadors such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Nikki Haley have repeatedly criticized these and other shortcomings as contrary to the U.N.’s basic purpose. The Trump administration reacted even more strongly: it withdrew from UNESCO and gained agreement to a 5 percent cut in the overall U.N. budget for 2018–19.10 Nonetheless, America continues to provide 22 percent of that budget plus 25 percent of peacekeeping costs, and its chronic disagreements with the U.N. and criticisms of its agencies hardly count as disruption. Its conflicts with the U.N. have much more to do with the U.N.’s failures to uphold the international order than with any American efforts to undermine that order, and in any case, after the Biden administration came into office in January 2021, it proceeded to undo the Trump withdrawals from U.N. agencies by rejoining them. A second example of supposed American disruption is its withdrawal (now reversed) from the Paris Climate Accords originally signed in 2016. The problem of climate change is real, but the Paris agreement was never destined to solve it. Even in the unlikely event that its 195 member countries achieve their proposed targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, they would still fall far short of their proclaimed objective: holding the increase in global average temperature to less than 2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Moreover, China’s widely heralded commitment to the agreement, often proclaimed as evidence of its embrace of world order and America’s rejection of it, amounts to far less than it seems. China, which produces more than twice the carbon dioxide emissions of the

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Is the United States a Disruptor? United States and continues to build large numbers of coal-fired power plants, has only committed itself to halt the increase of its global emissions by the year 2030. The United States, which was vilified over Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris treaty, did nonetheless achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, in part through increases in solar and wind power, though more significantly through a largely marketdriven shift from coal to natural gas in generating electricity. An important driver of this change was the use of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) combined with horizontal drilling to produce copious quantities of natural gas. As a result, gas has displaced coal as the leading domestic source of electricity generation. New fuel efficiency standards in the U.S. automobile industry as well as state and federal incentives and subsidies for wind and solar power have also contributed to reductions in CO2 emissions. The carbon intensity of the U.S. economy declined at a fairly constant rate from 2009 through 2019 and was unaffected by the Paris climate pact withdrawal—or, for that matter, by the Trump administration’s energy and climate policies. According to the International Energy Agency, the United States from 2000 through 2019 experienced the largest total decline in carbon dioxide emissions of any of the member countries.11 The absence of U.S. participation in the Paris Accords was certainly meaningful—as a symbolic matter, it made it harder to demand other countries’ compliance with the terms—but it qualifies as only the mildest form of disruption, and here too, the Biden administration subsequently rejoined. A third example can be found in the case of the Iran nuclear agreement. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), concluded in July 2015, was widely heralded as freezing the Iran nuclear program and sometimes as preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear

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Is the United States a Disruptor? weapons. In 2016, Vice President Joseph Biden claimed that the agreement “removed . . . the specter of Iran gaining a nuclear weapon.”12 Yet the JCPOA did not require a halt to Iran’s nuclear enrichment or its development of advanced centrifuges, and its key provisions included sunset clauses. Even if it complied with all of the terms of the agreement, Tehran would still emerge after ten to fifteen years with modern centrifuge capacity for enriching weapons-­ grade uranium, an advanced nuclear infrastructure, and the ability to produce nuclear weapons whenever it chose.13 In essence, the agreement provided a legal path for Iran to become a full-fledged nuclear power. Prior to the JCPOA, Iran had been subject to serious U.N., European, and U.S. sanctions over its decades-long pattern of cheating on its nuclear non-proliferation obligations. Pre-existing U.N. and International Atomic Energy Agency restrictions on Iran, especially economic sanctions and prohibition of uranium enrichment capacity and missile development, were largely abandoned in the effort to secure agreement on the JCPOA. Despite claims about anytime-anywhere inspections and “snapback” sanctions (measures that could be implemented quickly, without long bureaucratic delays), the agreement’s inspection regime was full of loopholes. This made it extremely difficult for the IAEA to gain access to military areas while accepting Iran’s self-­ inspection. For example, at the Parchin military site, the only soil samples were those provided by the Iranians themselves, yet this procedure allowed Tehran to claim compliance with the agreement.14 The remaining limits on Iran’s missile programs expire in 2023, and Iran is already testing reentry vehicles, which have no real purpose other than to carry nuclear warheads. In view of these shortcomings, although the Trump State Department initially certified Iran’s compliance, it subsequently opted

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Is the United States a Disruptor? not to recertify. Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged the Congress and foreign leaders to tighten sanctions on Iran and called for amending the JCPOA in order to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons or intercontinental ballistic missiles. In May 2018, Trump announced formal U.S. withdrawal along with in­ tensified sanctions aimed at transforming Iran’s behavior. The renewed sanctions themselves were controversial, with other signatory ­countries—China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany—refusing to go along. However, the unique importance of the U.S. financial system, the role of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and the reach of the Treasury Department’s sanctions enforcement caused major European and Asian firms to comply rather than risk losing access to the American banking and credit systems. The sanctions gained additional force when the Financial Action Task Force, a grouping of thirty-seven countries with sizeable economies, financial sectors, and populations, added Iran to a blacklist of countries failing to uphold international restrictions on money laundering and terror financing.15 In sum, American withdrawal from the JCPOA certainly could be seen as disruptive, but the case for that decision rested on whether or not the actions taken would prevent or delay Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon and the grave consequences for regional and international order that could result. As a contrast, the subsequent effort by the Biden administration to rejoin the agreement and lift sanctions, provided that Iran complied fully with the JCPOA, presented a dilemma of a different kind. On one hand, rejoining an international agreement constitutes a form of international cooperation. On the other hand, doing so without significant changes to the original means abandoning not only nuclear sanctions on Iran but also the terrorism and missile sanctions that the Obama administration had insisted were independent

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Is the United States a Disruptor? of the nuclear agreement. Abundant evidence has also shown the existence of unreported Iranian nuclear sites in addition to existing military ones to which the IAEA inspectors had little access.16 Absent tangible steps to renegotiate the agreement in order to make it “longer and stronger” (in the words of Antony Blinken in the Senate confirmation hearing for his appointment as secretary of state in 2021), the consequences of rejoining the original JCPOA could lead to an outcome—Iranian nuclear weapons—far more disruptive of regional and international order.

Sources of Disorder and Real Disruptors Sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the rule of law are fundamental to a rules-based international system. Outright aggression, territorial conquest, torture and other atrocities, mass murder, and genocide are rightly considered the most serious “disorders.” This is a matter not only of what the countries of the world have agreed to in signing the U.N. Charter but of long-established practices that have developed over millennia. Two of the most noteworthy steps in this evolution are the seminal contributions to international law by the Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius, especially On the Law of War and Peace (1625), and the precedents established by the Peace of Westphalia beginning in 1648. From this perspective, the leading sources of world disorder are the revisionist powers, especially Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as non-state actors such as Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State. In contrast, the bluster, narcissism, name-calling, exaggerations, rude pronunciamentos, and “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) rhetoric of former president Trump pale by comparison. Consider each of the real disruptors in turn.

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Is the United States a Disruptor? Russia. Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia’s post-Soviet efforts at democracy have been perverted, and a deeply corrupt authoritarian regime has emerged. Since Putin became president, Russia has blatantly violated international law, the U.N. Charter, and multiple treaties and agreements. The seizure of Crimea in 2014 through the use of hybrid warfare constituted the first change of a European border by conquest since the end of World War II.17 Russia has used local proxies and its own troops to wage war in the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine, and Putin has threatened countries in Eastern Europe, especially the former Soviet republics of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, while using disinformation and cyber attacks against their economies and political systems. In addition, Moscow has employed military advisers, air power, and weaponry to intervene in the Syrian Civil War, bombing hospitals, inflicting civilian casualties, and causing massive flows of refugees. These actions played a critical role in rescuing the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad. Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is especially revealing for what it suggests about the consequences of American inaction to uphold the international order. In December 1994, Ukraine signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, which required it to relinquish a powerful arsenal of nuclear weapons it had inherited from the former Soviet Union in exchange for Russia’s specific assurance of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. The original signatories were Russia, the United States, and Britain. France and China later signed as well, lending the imprimatur of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to the agreement. The language of the document was explicit: the signers “reaffirm . . . their commitment . . . to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or

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Is the United States a Disruptor? political independence of Ukraine.”18 Yet in 2014, after Russia forcibly annexed Crimea, Ukraine’s appeal to the signers of the Budapest agreement fell on deaf ears. President Barack Obama called for the international community to respond and supported modest sanctions against Moscow, but until nearly the end of his term in office he would not send defensive weapons to the beleaguered Ukrainians, instead providing non-lethal assistance that included blankets and three hundred thousand battlefield food rations. Putin’s Russia has promoted the geopolitical concept of Eurasia, revolving around irredentist appeals to Russian speakers in adjacent European and Asian countries. He also has emphasized close cooperation with China.19 In the early post-Soviet era, Russia aspired to embrace Western concepts of politics, economics, and society, but under Putin it has undertaken deliberate efforts to undermine Western European democracies and weaken the European Union. It has employed cyber war technologies, bribery, sophisticated disinformation campaigns, and covert funding for anti-establishment populist parties. British intelligence has identified a prolonged effort by Russia to disrupt its politics and institutions, and it has held Moscow responsible for the assassination of Russian dissidents in Britain.20 U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia intervened covertly in the American presidential election campaign in 2016, largely by planting false information and advertisements on the internet. In addition, Russia tried again to interfere in the 2020 election. Russia has also used its extensive resources of oil and natural gas as a tool of influence and as an economic weapon. Control of those resources embodies another trait of Russian policy, the seizure and expropriation of assets from domestic and sometimes foreign businesses by alleging tax, environmental, or regulatory crimes. One of

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Is the United States a Disruptor? the most notorious cases was that of the huge Yukos oil firm and its billionaire primary owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was arrested in 2003 after he had begun to fund opposition political parties. He was imprisoned for a decade on charges of financial crimes, and Yukos assets were eventually seized by the state oil company, Rosneft. Despite Russian denials and claims of non-jurisdiction, the Permanent Court of Arbitration and later a Hague district court ruled in 2020 that Khodorkovsky and other owners were entitled to $50 billion in compensation.21 Critics of Putin and his regime, especially outspoken Russian journalists and politicians, have suffered intimidation, imprisonment, poisoning, and, in the case of Boris Nemtsov, one of Putin’s leading political opponents, assassination in sight of the Kremlin walls. In another egregious case, in August 2020, a prominent opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent by Russian agents and became gravely ill while on an internal flight. He was hospitalized in the Russian provincial town of Omsk, then flown to Berlin where he received specialized care to recover from the poisoning. In January 2021, he insisted on returning to Moscow to face the trumped-up charges against him. There, he was rearrested and jailed under dire and potentially life-threatening conditions despite protests by European and American leaders. The Kremlin’s attacks on dissidents have not been confined to Russia. A report in July 2020 by the British Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, for example, identified fourteen killings of defectors and dissidents on British soil.22 In the realm of international security, despite Russia’s formal membership in European and international agreements and arms limitation treaties such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Intermediate-­

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Is the United States a Disruptor? Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and the NATO-Russia Council, Moscow has undertaken a major rebuilding and modernization of its armed forces, deployed new missiles and nuclear weapons, and at times used its air and naval forces to violate the airspace or territorial waters of its neighbors in northeastern Europe. These changes in Russian policy have occurred relatively quickly, as evident in two contrasting assessments by Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2008, he insisted to the Senate that hostility between great powers no longer constituted the primary thrust of international affairs. Yet just ten years later, Haass could write that we now find ourselves in a “Cold War II,” wherein “Russia has become a revisionist country, with few if any qualms about overturning the status quo by whatever means it judges necessary.”23

——————— China. Under Deng Xiaoping and his successors, China has achieved extraordinary economic growth, developed its own form of authoritarian capitalism, and made itself into a formidable world power. After the end of the Cold War, as European political scientist Andrew Michta has observed, globalization offered a convenient way for the United States and its European and Asian partners to explain away their economic concessions to Beijing. China enjoyed unfettered access to Western technology in exchange for providing attractive profits for Western businesses.24 This pattern was supported by the widespread belief that economic development and modernization in China would almost certainly bring social and political liberalization. During these years, China’s leaders proclaimed their objective of “peaceful rise.” In this, they were following the advice of Deng Xiaoping, quoting an ancient Chinese proverb that ran, “Hide your ca-

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Is the United States a Disruptor? pabilities, bide your time.” But with the passage of time, the meteoric expansion of China’s economy, the global financial crisis of 2007–9, and their sense that the United States itself was in decline, they began to adopt a more assertive foreign policy. Moreover, under Xi Jinping, who consolidated power in 2012–13 as general secretary of the Communist Party and China’s president, the regime undertook to reverse the emerging domestic political liberalization. In a memo known as Document 9, issued in 2013, senior Communist Party leaders were ordered to eradicate seven “subversive” currents within Chinese society: Western constitutional democracy, universal human rights, independence of media, civic participation, pro-market neoliberalism, criticisms of the Party’s traumatic past, and questioning the socialist nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics.25 The Biden administration has made it a point to criticize China’s revisionist conduct. In one of his first overseas trips, Secretary of State Antony Blinken castigated Beijing. Speaking at a news conference in Tokyo in March 2021, Blinken said, “China uses coercion and aggression to systematically erode autonomy in Hong Kong, undercut democracy in Taiwan, abuse human rights in Xinjiang and Tibet and assert maritime claims in the South China Sea that violate international law.”26 Economic expansion has given China the resources to make enormous increases in its defense budget, carry out extensive modernization of its armed forces, and expand its territorial reach. It has seized disputed outcroppings, islets, and territorial waters in the South China Sea, built air bases there, and threatened neighboring countries that sought to assert their rights under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. For example, the Philippines brought a case before an international tribunal in The Hague, which

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Is the United States a Disruptor? in July 2016 ruled in its favor and found all of China’s claims in the South China Sea invalid.27 Faced with China’s disproportionate size and power and willingness to deploy both economic rewards and punishments, the Philippines, sensing that the United States could no longer be relied on, reluctantly acquiesced in China’s maritime expansion and intrusions into its territorial waters. Yet, with time and continued maritime intrusions by China, including at the Whitsun Reef in the South China Sea (which lies much closer to the Philippines than to China), as well as Beijing’s failure to deliver on Belt and Road investments, the Philippines has been seeking to reestablish defense ties with the United States.28 China has benefited profoundly from international economic rules, embodied not only in the World Trade Organization but also in the World Bank, the IMF, and multiple laws and institutions concerning investment, financial flows, market access, and property rights. Yet it has not hesitated to violate those arrangements when doing so suits its interests. These violations include intellectual property theft, currency manipulation, illegal state subsidies, cyber warfare, bribery, and corruption. China has also rigged its own internal procedures and manipulated its legal and regulatory systems to make it increasingly difficult for foreign businesses and investors to operate on an equal basis inside the country.

——————— Iran. The Islamic Republic has made itself the leading source of disorder in the Middle East. By itself or through proxies, the sole Shiʽa power in the region exerts a major influence on—some would say dominates—neighboring countries and threatens key Sunni states and Israel. Since the mullahs consolidated power after the

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Is the United States a Disruptor? 1979 revolution, Iran has become a theocratic dictatorship with some trappings of democracy but not the reality. Real power is held by the mullahs, the Guardian Council, the Assembly of Experts, the Expediency Council, and the heads of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), all under the rule of a reactionary theocrat, currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As an observer of the region put it after the signing of the Iranian nuclear deal, “The political fate of the Middle East, and perhaps a great deal more, now . . . rests on the opaque perceptions and calculations of an aging, provincial, autocratic, fiercely anti-Semitic, anti-Western, and anti-American Persian cleric.”29 In Iraq, Iran exercises its political and military influence through closely allied political parties and powerful Shiʽite militias. These played an important part in combating ISIS after the near collapse of the Iraqi army in 2014, but they also made Iran a dominant actor in the country after the insurgents had been largely defeated. In Syria, where it deployed the IRGC’s Quds Force and Hezbollah, Iran played a major role in saving the Assad regime and turning the tide of battle against the rebel groups. In Lebanon, via its Hezbollah proxy—arguably the world’s most capable terrorist organization—it possesses a military force more powerful than the Lebanese army and exerts a veto power over the elected Lebanese government. Moreover, with a massive missile arsenal supplied by Iran, Hezbollah has the capacity to hit Israeli cities and civilian targets in the event of another war, comparable to the one it triggered with its cross-border guerrilla attacks in 2006. Iran and Hezbollah are the principal supplier of weapons, especially rockets and increasingly sophisticated missiles to Hamas in Gaza. This was dramatically ­evident in the May 2021 conflict between Israel and Gaza, which erupted after Hamas launched missile attacks on Jerusalem.

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Is the United States a Disruptor? Hezbollah has also conducted lethal terrorist operations not only in Lebanon but also as far afield as Argentina, and its agents have carried out political assassinations in Europe. In Yemen, Iran and Hezbollah support and arm the Shiʽite Houthis in their war against the ousted government supported by Saudi Arabia and (until recently) the United Arab Emirates. The fighting there precipitated a massive humanitarian disaster with no end in sight. Iran’s leaders frequently reiterate their aim to destroy Israel—a state with which they have neither a common border nor territorial claims—in effect proclaiming their intent to commit genocide. That the Iranian state acts as a powerful disruptive force in the Middle East region should not be in question, but how to deal with Iran has been a matter of dispute throughout the foreign policy community and sometimes between Washington and European capitals. Ever since the seizure of the American embassy hostages in Tehran in November 1979, in violation of centuries of long-standing international law, Iran has repeatedly been a disruptor. Apart from an eight-year interlude during the Iran-Iraq War in 1980–88 (when the United States, fearing the spread of Tehran’s Islamism, tilted toward Baghdad), the Islamic Republic has consistently acted against the interests of the United States and its allies and has repeatedly been responsible for the killing of Americans. Besides the embassy hostage seizure itself, notable attacks included the suicide bombing in April 1983 of the American Embassy in Beirut, causing the deaths of 83 people, and a suicide truck bombing that October that destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks, killing 243 service personnel. In Iraq, Iranian proxies caused the deaths of hundreds of U.S. troops between 2005 and 2011 and wounded many thousands through the use of explosively formed penetrators,

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Is the United States a Disruptor? a powerful type of land mine capable of destroying armored vehicles. This took place under the leadership of Major General Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, who was later killed in a U.S. drone strike.30 Despite this long record of deep, ideologically driven hostility central to the identity of Iran’s ruling theocracy, administrations in Washington have repeatedly reached out to Tehran in an effort to improve relations. One constant element, from Presidents Jimmy Carter through Barack Obama, has been repeated apologies for American involvement in a coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. The CIA’s role in that coup has long been exaggerated. British intelligence played a more significant part, and domestic opposition to Mosaddegh among Iranian merchants, clergy, military officers, and much of the public is largely what drove him from office. As the Iranian historian Ray Takeyh has concluded, “The CIA’s impact on the events of 1953 was ultimately insignificant.”31 During the Reagan administration, overtures to Iran for help in gaining the release of American hostages in Lebanon and for aid to Afghan fighters opposing the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan led to a fiasco. The White House was embarrassed when word leaked of its convoluted plans to make covert arms sales and a secret trip to Tehran in May 1986 by a former Reagan national security adviser seeking to present a key-shaped cake to Iranian officials.32 Two decades later, in 2006, a prestigious and bipartisan Iraq Study Group, headed by former secretary of state James Baker and Lee Hamilton, a prominent former member of the House of Representatives and a leading Democratic voice on foreign policy, issued a report advocating a “diplomatic offensive,” including negotiations aimed at encouraging Iran to play a constructive role.33

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Is the United States a Disruptor? These efforts at rapprochement took on renewed emphasis during the Obama administration. The president, whose chief foreign policy speech writer, Ben Rhodes, had participated in the Iraq Study Group, hoped to encourage Iran to become a responsible stakeholder in the region. Seeking to establish rapport with Tehran, the administration tried to “open some daylight” between the United States and its long-time Middle Eastern friends, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and even Turkey. As part of this strategy, the administration avoided offering even rhetorical support to peaceful mass demonstrations in June 2009 protesting the corrupted outcome of the Iranian presidential election. It also delayed the release of documents revealing Iran’s relationship with al-Qaeda that had been captured in the Special Forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011.34 The culmination of Obama’s Middle East strategy, to which these and other efforts were directed, was the nuclear agreement of July 2015 with Iran. But, as noted above, the JCPOA did not alter Iran’s foreign policy behavior. Even though that was not part of the agreement, U.S. policymakers had hoped the arrangement itself and the release of tens of billions of dollars in frozen Iranian funds would be an incentive for moderation in Tehran’s behavior. Instead, after the agreement was signed, Iran and its proxies became more rather than less aggressive. The Trump renunciation of the agreement was widely criticized as disruptive and even ineffective, but the long-standing pattern of Iranian behavior hardly represented a benign status quo. Illustratively, the leader of Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, broadcast calls for his followers to “kill every American soldier in the Middle East.”35 The statement followed the U.S. killing of Soleimani, but Iranian leaders, from the Supreme Leader on down, have

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Is the United States a Disruptor? long led ritualized chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” and through the provision of deadly munitions, Soleimani had led a bloody covert war against U.S. troops in Iraq.

——————— North Korea. Kim Jong-un, like his father and grandfather before him, heads one of the most oppressive governments in the world, responsible for a vast network of prison camps and the deaths of untold numbers of its own people. It continues to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, threatens South Korea and Japan as well as American forces in the Pacific, and has avidly sold nuclear and missile technology and components to other nations. More recently it has developed what it claims is a new, more powerful intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking anywhere on the U.S. mainland with multiple warheads. The history of formal agreements with North Korea, such as the Agreed Framework of 1994 and measures seeking to provide assistance to Pyongyang in exchange for a halt to its nuclear and longrange missile programs, is not encouraging. Every agreement eventually broke down as North Korea kept many of the benefits but reneged on its obligations. The Trump negotiations, which were preceded by hyperbolic threats between Washington and Pyongyang and then unfolded as an unprecedented meeting of the two leaders, complete with lavish accolades about presidential friendship and denuclearization, proved as fruitless as the earlier efforts. North Korea’s rulers developed the nuclear program with the idea of ensuring the survival of their impoverished totalitarian regime. They have done so at immense human and material cost to their country but were determined to maintain power and not to be absorbed by their free and vastly more successful neighbor, South

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Is the United States a Disruptor? Korea. China is the one country with the means to moderate North Korea’s behavior, but it has been restrained in doing so by not wanting a failing North Korea ultimately unified with South Korea or to receive millions of refugees if the regime collapsed. Beijing has also found it useful to serve as the main intermediary for a proxy state given to threatening statements and actions that discomfit South Korea, Japan, and the United States.

——————— Most of these revisionist states, not only China, but also Russia, Iran, and North Korea, have benefited from the open liberal international order, yet each makes it a practice to violate the rules and precedents of that order and seeks to supplant it, at least at the regional level. It is this policy—the cynical use of the international order only when its rules serve the state’s interest, combined with the effort to subvert or even dismantle that order entirely—that defines these nations as disruptors of world order. They have company among non-state actors. Violent radical jihadist groups, most prominently the Islamic State and al-Qaeda but also Hezbollah and Hamas, have been lethal disruptors. These states share, at least to some degree, what the historian Jeffrey Herf has termed “reactionary modernism.”36 He originally applied the idea to German fascists’ rejection of the rationalism of the Enlightenment while fully embracing modern technology. Herf later noted that the term also fit the culture of Iran’s ruling Islamist clerics and radical terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS.37 The paradox for these organizations and governments is their readiness to adopt the most advanced technology, especially for conventional and even nuclear weaponry, yet still reject key elements of modern rationality as well as the values of liberal democracy. Reactionary modernism

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Is the United States a Disruptor? applies in a more limited way to today’s revisionist states than to groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS. They do not share the same irrationality, cult of martyrdom, or dream of redemption in the next world, but they do display a blend of technological modernity and illiberalism. For China and North Korea, it can be found in the cult of the great leader and ruling party. For Russia and some others, there is also an embrace of extreme nationalism and paranoia about external threats. Any overall compilation of disruptors should include less powerful states whose leaders act in ways that are at least partly disruptive to the regions or institutions. Populist leaders such as Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have prided themselves in taking unorthodox domestic measures that flout regional norms. Examples include Duterte’s extra-judicial killings of alleged drug peddlers, Bolsonaro’s similar actions against gangs as well as his indifference to the environmental effects of massive land clearings in the Amazon region, and Orbán’s flouting of E.U. regulations on corruption and democratic governance. Finally, social and economic forces themselves can precipitate disruption and upheaval. History has no end point. Modernization, rapid technological change, and globalization are themselves disruptive. Cell phones, social media, high-speed internet, instantaneous financial transactions, and open international trade have spread widely, with mostly positive effects, but they have also had unanticipated consequences. These technologies’ effects are evident in the rise of populism across many of the advanced democratic market economies. The reactions have taken various forms, but support for populist movements has been evident on both the right and left of the political spectrum, and populist leaders have largely disdained regional or global institutions.

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Is the United States a Disruptor?

The United States and the Problem of Collective Action Following the surprising election victory of Donald Trump in 2016, foreign observers and Americans themselves sought to comprehend what a Trump presidency would mean for the domestic and foreign policies of what still remains the most powerful country on earth. Trump’s rhetoric and transactional approach to international relationships caused alarm not only among liberals and Democrats but among many conservatives too. Leading conservative political figures and public intellectuals such as William Kristol, Max Boot, Jeb Bush, Ross Douthat, David Brooks, and George Will were often scathing in their words about Trump. Fifty leading Republican foreign policy experts and former officials signed a letter stating that Trump “lacks the character, values and experience” to be president, “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being,” and “would be the most reckless president in American history.”38 The prominent liberal internationalist scholar G. John Ikenberry worried that “the world’s most powerful state has begun to sabotage the order it created. A hostile revisionist power has arrived on the scene, but it sits in the White House.” Trump was instinctively opposed, he wrote, to the ideas that have underpinned the post-war international system, including free trade, alliances, international law, multilateralism, environmental protection, and human rights.39 Former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley was even harsher, writing in the Washington Post that “Donald Trump is a fascist” because he “sincerely believes that the toxic combination of strong government and strong corporations should run the nation and the world.”40 In Europe, some writers drew explicit comparisons with Mussolini’s Italy of the 1920s or Germany in the 1930s.41

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Is the United States a Disruptor? Alarms about Trump and his foreign policy resulted partly from his own rhetoric as well as his unscripted tweets and his tendency to contradict his own administration’s declared policies. At their worst, these statements included abusive language, lack of interest in or outright disparaging of U.S. allies, disregard for America’s long-standing economic and security commitments, a poor grasp of details, lack of consistency, and a tendency to wild exaggeration. Nonetheless, despite the persistent confrontational tone and occasionally disruptive polices, including protective tariffs and withdrawal from a number of significant international agreements, some elements of Trump’s foreign policy did not represent a radical departure from the past. Like his predecessor, Trump sought to rebalance the burdens of U.S. alliance leadership and collective action. Not only NATO leaders but even some prominent European officials acknowledged that Europeans had carried less than their proper share of the cost of the continent’s defense. Allied public opinion concerning NATO illustrates the problem. A Pew Foundation survey in 2020 found that 53 percent of European publics in sixteen member countries held a favorable view of the organization, while just 27 percent had a negative view. In the United States the figures were similar, 52 percent versus 26 percent. Yet in a remarkable example of free-riding, the Europeans were reluctant to bear the burdens of an alliance from which they so palpably benefited. Collectively, a median of 50 percent said that their own country should not defend a NATO ally against a Russian attack, with just 38 percent saying that they should. Yet by a margin of 60 percent to 29 percent, they believed that the United States would defend NATO allies against such an attack.42 It is therefore not surprising that, like most U.S. presidents during the past half century, Trump sought to pressure European members of NATO to

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Is the United States a Disruptor? substantially increase their own defense budgets and thus their contributions to allied defense. In trade and international institutions, the Trump administration also sought to shed what it saw as disproportionate burdens. Elliott Abrams, a senior Republican foreign policy official, wrote that at least some of the policies Trump pursued would have been expected of any Republican president, regardless of the extra emphasis Trump’s overheated rhetoric gave such decisions.43 The National Security Strategy (NSS) of December 2017, for example, was in many ways a reassertion of traditional U.S. foreign policy themes.44 Concerning Asia, the NSS pledged to increase quadrilateral cooperation with Japan, Australia, and India at a time when the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” had already begun a movement toward closer and more supportive mutual relations. There was also growing cooperation between the American and Indian militaries. The NSS identified shared interests with Asian partners while expressing concerns about China’s growing power. Statements such as these are commonplace, but it is no less true to point to these countries as including the world’s largest democracies. They express common beliefs in the rule of law, market capitalism, and open trade as well as a shared interest in countering China’s disruption of international order in the Indo-Pacific region. Renewed great power competition did cause Trump to moderate some of the more controversial positions he took during his 2016 election campaign. He eventually embraced NATO, strengthened U.S. forces in the Baltic countries and Poland, backed away from a rapprochement with Russia, maintained a U.S. presence in the Persian Gulf, espoused friendship with Japan, warned against North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, and urged China to apply pressure on the North Korean regime. Though portions of Trump’s for-

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Is the United States a Disruptor? eign policy were consistent with America’s post-1945 world role, other key elements represented a serious retreat from long-time U.S. commitments. In addition, unresolved policy struggles among advisers, disarray in policymaking, and reckless rhetoric alienated allies and affected America’s credibility with friends and adversaries alike. On another sensitive topic that had commonly featured in ­Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns before Obama, Trump made the decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The move was symbolically important as an acknowledgment that Jerusalem had been Israel’s capital since the state’s creation in 1948. It drew predicable criticism in the U.N. General Assembly, but contrary to warnings, it did not interrupt relations with moderate Arab regimes or cause upheaval elsewhere. Instead, by reaffirming Israel’s permanence, it may have contributed to the ground-breaking agreements Israel made with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. At the time in 2020, these were labeled the Abraham accords, but after Biden’s inauguration, American officials preferred to avoid the Trump terminology, instead referring to them as normalization agreements.

——————— Beyond comparing foreign policies of the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, it is important to reflect on the accomplishments of U.S. leadership over the three-quarters of a century since the end of World War II. The United States and its allies built a system that, despite its imperfections, provided unprecedented security, prosperity, and political freedom to hundreds of millions of people. For example, there were steep reductions in the percentage of the world’s population killed in wars compared with the era from 1600 to 1945.45 Human well-being, measured in terms of infant

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Is the United States a Disruptor? mortality, life expectancy, and prosperity, was vastly improved. Before World War II, approximately two-thirds of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, whereas by 2015 less than 10 percent did.46 More than half the world’s population now lives in democracies, compared with just 12 percent in 1900. Of course the United States did not achieve these results by itself, but they are in substantial measure due to the rules-based system created, sustained, and defended by America and its allies and from which the rest of the world has largely benefited. The United States is not without fault, of course, and there is ample room to disapprove of specific policies, but it is not the disruptor of world order that domestic and foreign critics have asserted. Instead, its principal deficiency in recent years has been insufficient engagement in sustaining the rules-based international order that it did so much to create. Indeed, Secretary of State Blinken reiterated that original aspiration in his initial meeting with Chinese officials, describing the Biden administration’s aim to “strengthen the rulesbased international order” and pointedly adding that the alternative “is a world in which might makes right and winners take all, and that would be a far more violent and unusable world for all of us.”47 In recent years, America’s sins have been more those of omission rather than of commission. The true disruptors are the revisionist states opposed to the American-led order.

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Chapter 3

ALTERNATIVES TO THE UNITED STATES Europe The international community needs to step up our game and build the 21st century world order. —French president Emmanuel Macron Today, the world sees Europe as the last geopolitical vegetarian in a world full of carnivores. —Former German foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel

One way to answer the question of U.S. indispensability is to seek alternative sources of regional and international order that might render such a role outdated or unnecessary. This search for alternatives has intensified in reaction to real or perceived retrenchment by successive U.S. presidents. One alternative that is often mentioned is to rely on international or regional institutions, not only the U.N. but also the European Union, which has been seen as a paradigm for the evolution of other regions. That search for alternatives was already evident early in this century, especially in foreign—particularly European—reactions to the policies of the George W. Bush administration. Those policies in-

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Alternatives: Europe cluded Bush’s rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming in 2001, U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. A decade later, President Obama’s tepid responses to Syria’s use of chemical weapons and to Russia’s assault on Crimea were widely seen as additional reasons to seek alternatives to American leadership. Subsequently, Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, the Paris climate treaty, and the Iran nuclear agreement also met with intense foreign and domestic criticism. These decisions, along with his transactional approach to allies and institutions and his disparagement of the European Union and the United Nations, amplified the belief that America was backing away from global leadership and intensified the search for alternatives. More recently, the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 again prompted European calls to build up its military and assert itself on the world stage. To be sure, criticisms of America’s foreign policy and strategy were commonplace even at the height of its post–World War II and post–Cold War predominance. They came not only from those, such as President Charles de Gaulle of France (1958–69), who sought greater autonomy from the U.S.-led Western alliance, but also from those who had grown impatient with Washington’s inaction. French president Jacques Chirac (1995–2007), for example, remarked that “any community with only one dominant power is always a dangerous one and provokes reactions. That’s why I favor a multipolar world in which Europe obviously has its place.”1 Yet he later issued a scathing criticism of President Clinton’s lack of leadership in the Bosnia crisis. A few years after that, the European Commission president Romano Prodi of Italy called for the creation of “a superpower on the European continent that stands equal to the United States.”2

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Alternatives: Europe American scholars and policy analysts have also, on occasion, prophesied a world without American leadership. The late Kenneth Waltz, one of the world’s foremost international relations experts, predicted NATO’s demise after the collapse of the Soviet Union, writing in 1993 that “NATO’s days are not numbered, but its years are.”3 Waltz’s calculation was based on a profound change in the international distribution of power, in which Soviet-American bipolarity had given way to U.S. unipolarity. In the absence of an overarching threat, he concluded, the Europeans would lose their motivation for alliance with Washington. He did not seem terribly distraught at the prospect. A decade later, in 2003, Charles Kupchan, who later became the senior director for European policy on Barack Obama’s National Security Council, forecast that “NATO, far from being in the midst of a rejuvenation, is soon to be defunct.”4 He also argued that within a decade, the European Union would rise to counterbalance the United States.5 He was writing at a time of an increasingly bitter European-­ American rift over the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein’s regime along with what it believed to be his effort to acquire nuclear weapons. Despite the logic of their arguments, neither prediction came to pass. Although the Soviet Union was no more, the countries of Eastern Europe, with their painful memories about Russian power, sought security with Western Europe and especially the United States as a hedge against the future conduct of their eastern neighbor. Moreover, despite acrimony over the Iraq War, the underlying commonalty of Western values lent support to alliance continuity. In addition, the European Union’s own institutional limitations and its inability to muster a sufficiently coherent security policy and credible deter-

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Alternatives: Europe rent power provided additional motivation for sustaining NATO and the European-American relationship.

In Search of World Order After Great Wars The search for alternatives to great power leadership and viable foundations for stable world order is by no means new. It typically gains importance in the aftermath of major wars. A classic case occurred following the Napoleonic Wars. The Congress of Vienna was created in 1815 to establish a balance of power among the major European countries, and it maintained an equilibrium that endured for nearly a century. It broke down when the might of a unified Imperial Germany became too great to be balanced successfully by the other European powers, culminating in World War I.6 Following the appalling devastation of that war, the major powers signed the Treaty of Versailles. In doing so they created the League of Nations, seeking to maintain world peace through collective ­security. For the League’s members, collective security meant that aggression by any state was to be opposed by all other states acting together. To authorize an armed response to one country’s invasion of another, the entire membership had to agree: every member held effective veto power. By this logic, no one predominant country, or group of major powers acting in concert, was responsible for enforcement: it had to be the entire League or nothing. But this dilution of responsibility meant that no one was in charge of marshaling the members’ combined efforts. The League was further weakened by the absence of the United States, which by the end of World War I was emerging as the world’s most powerful country. It soon became apparent that the League lacked the means to preserve world peace.

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Alternatives: Europe The apogee of this diplomatic quest to end war came in 1928 with the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, named after the American secretary of state, Frank Kellogg, and French foreign minister Aristide Briand. In a breathtaking burst of idealism, forty countries, including all the major powers, signed a treaty to “outlaw war as an instrument of national policy.” But because the agreement lacked enforcement provisions, its signers’ shared aspirations proved utterly meaningless. As for the League of Nations, despite limited initial successes, it proved impotent in the face of Imperial Japan’s invasions of Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937, Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and Nazi Germany’s violations of the Versailles Treaty and its intimidation and then seizure of Czechoslovakia in 1938–39. In retrospect, both the League and Kellogg-Briand showed the weakness of well-meaning diplomacy unsupported by power.7 Even before it became apparent that the Allies would win World War II, American leaders were determined to engage the United States in support of a rules-based post-war order, and they drew lessons from the failures of the post–World War I agreements. Beginning in 1943, they worked with the major Allied powers to establish the United Nations and provide it, through the Security Council, with a means to enforce its decisions and act against aggression. The only remnant of the unanimity requirement from the League of Nations was the stipulation that the five permanent members of the Security Council—the United States, Britain, France, the USSR, and China—had veto power over Council resolutions. This meant that Soviet actions and hostility toward the West soon limited the scope for U.N. action in the post–World War II world, but the United States developed other means to provide security, stability, and economic development for its allies in Europe and Asia. These included NATO, the Marshall Plan, the World Bank, the International Monetary

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Alternatives: Europe Fund, and mutual defense treaties throughout the non-communist world, backed up by American military bases and other support. Nearly a half century later, with the end of the Cold War, a brief period of improved relations between Washington and Moscow made possible the U.N.-legitimized liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. In functional realms like refugee aid, health, and peacekeeping, the U.N. has played a major role, as have other global and regional international organizations. Nonetheless, aspirations for a new world order have foundered as the limits to U.N. effectiveness again became painfully evident. The U.N. failed to prevent civil war, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder in Bosnia in 1992–95; state breakdown and clan warfare in Somalia in 1993; genocide in Rwanda in 1994; chaos in Libya following the uprising and overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011; the Syrian uprising of 2011 followed by more than a decade of civil war there; and Russia’s annexation of Crimea by force in 2014 along with its invasion of southeastern Ukraine by means of hybrid warfare. At the global level it has also been helpless to stop the return to great power competition. Efforts at a more far-reaching global order following the end of the Cold War thus fell far short of their objectives and of the ideals of those who had supported them. Even so, below the level of war and geopolitics, other forces were at work. Rapid technological change played a fundamental role, but so did ideas. Some of these could be traced back to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points set out in 1918 near the end of World War I as well as the Atlantic Charter issued by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in August 1941, months before America’s entry into World War II. Wilson’s vision included not only an end to war but also freedom of the seas and free trade. Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter advocated economic and social cooperation among nations. These ideas, expressing consistent American

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Alternatives: Europe goals, would help to accelerate globalization, including transformations in economic and trading relationships, and major changes in regional order, especially in Europe.

Globalization Recent decades have seen rapid changes not only to the post–World War II order but also to the international distribution of power that emerged after the end of the Cold War. Modernization, economic development, and technological change have led to an increasing diffusion of economic and political power and have enhanced the salience and autonomy of states in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Important international institutions and norms have developed or expanded across a wide range of issues, including agreements over the law of the sea, nuclear proliferation, free trade, diplomatic relations, air travel, financial and commercial transactions, and—to a more limited extent—human rights. This vast expansion of international commerce, communication, and interdependence gave rise to hopes that the international community itself might take on an enhanced role. Liberal internationalist scholars posited that an international order with “constitutional characteristics” had begun to emerge and could be self-sustaining.8 The appeal of this idea has not been limited to academics. For example, in an April 2018 address to the U.S. Congress, French president Emmanuel Macron called for the international community to step up and build a twenty-first-century world order. This appeal echoed previous language by Barack Obama, who in seeking to reduce America’s foreign commitments had also called upon the international community to “stand up.” Obama used the phrase in response to the horrors in Syria and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the

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Alternatives: Europe absence of effective response at the time should have made it obvious that international institutions themselves could not take responsibility without active leadership by one or more major powers. These limitations have not stopped scholars from continuing to argue for institutions. For example, Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, while acknowledging the reassertion of illiberalism, nationalism, protectionism, and “territorial revisionism,” nonetheless insist on the virtual inevitability of cooperation: As long as interdependence—economic, security-related, and environmental—continues to grow, peoples and governments everywhere will be compelled to work together to solve problems or suffer grievous harm. By necessity, these efforts will build on and strengthen the institutions of the liberal order.9

This argument assumes that globalization is a largely benign and irreversible process, and it fails to take sufficient account of politics and the role of state power in underpinning the liberal order’s stability. Imperial Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States after 1945 provided the kind of power, leadership, and resources that helped to make globalization flourish. But in the 1920s and 1930s, the weakness of Britain and the limited engagement of the United States left the system vulnerable to trade protectionism, economic collapse, and the rising threat of the fascist powers. In today’s world, would a continuing reduction in America’s global engagement and an increase in great power competition in the twenty-­ first century also have serious negative effects? Globalization and international order do not depend only on the support of powerful states; domestic determinants also matter. As the historian Harold James has argued in his account of the Great

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Alternatives: Europe Depression of the 1930s, the political and psychological consequences of interconnectedness triggered demands to limit immigration, increase trade protectionism, and reduce capital flows.10 Contemporary globalization has reduced production costs, fostered a vast expansion in the cross-border flow of goods, services, and people, and led to enormous reductions in poverty in much of the developing world. But in the advanced economies, the adjustment costs of globalization have fallen disproportionately on working-class populations. To a certain extent, these pressures have led to the same demands as in that earlier era, for example that the United States and other market economies reduce immigration, limit trade, and restore greater economic and technological sovereignty.11

The European Union Despite shared history and strong alliance and economic ties, relations between the United States and Europe have often been marked by disagreements, even at the height of the Cold War. As early as the mid-1950s, differences over German rearmament and the BritishFrench-Israeli invasion of Suez in 1956 caused open acrimony. Other differences emerged in the decades that followed. In the 1960s there were serious arguments over trade relations and the Vietnam War; in the 1970s, over the role of the dollar and Middle East policy; and in the 1980s, over deployment of American intermediate-­ range nuclear weapons to counter Soviet missiles deployed in Eastern Europe. After the Cold War ended, arguments erupted over the Bosnian conflict and the Iraq War, climate policy, and the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia.” Throughout the entire period, differences over sharing the financial and military costs of the Atlantic alliance were a hardy perennial.

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Alternatives: Europe In the late 1940s and early ’50s, the United States was truly indispensable to European recovery and security as well as to the creation of the conditions for European economic integration and the growth of the institutions that would evolve into the European Community. Nonetheless, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union diminished the sense of common threat that had helped to underpin Atlantic partnership. In the 1990s, the E.U.’s increasing economic integration, its deepening and expansion of common institutions, and its enlargement to incorporate most of Eastern Europe led to calls for it to take on a more prominent and independent role. Europe’s size and capabilities as well as its policy differences with the Bush and Obama administrations provided the impetus for these aspirations. The differences became especially acute with Donald Trump’s election and his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and the Iran nuclear agreement, his trade policies, and his skepticism about NATO and the U.S. commitment to Europe’s defense. There had always been some ambiguity within the movement for European unity. Did the continent’s future lie in a continuing partnership with the United States, or should it become an autonomous great power in its own right? Calls for Europe to assume primary responsibility for its own foreign and security policy found a receptive audience. A European Union of twenty-seven countries with an advanced economy, common currency, shared institutions, 447 million people, and a GDP comparable to that of China seemed to provide the material attributes for Europe to adopt a leading international role.12 And these calls for European autonomy were by no means unprecedented. In the 1960s, Charles de Gaulle had sought to promote the idea of France and of Europe itself (“L’Europe des patries”) as an implicit third power between the Americans and the

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Alternatives: Europe Soviets. With the continent then divided between American and Soviet spheres of influence, these efforts were largely unsuccessful, but the Gaullist current of thought persisted in France and to some extent in Germany. A telling example of Europe’s limits came at the end of the Cold War. Beginning in 1991, Yugoslavia’s six republics—nominally equal but largely dominated by Serbia—began agitating for independence. In this fraught situation, the European Union dispatched Luxembourg foreign minister Jacques Poos to the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade. His mission was to mediate the crisis and try to restrain efforts by Slovenia and Croatia to seek self-determination against the wishes of the Yugoslav federal government. After meeting with the protagonists, Poos grandly proclaimed, “This is the hour of Europe,” and added: “It is not the hour of the Americans.”13 Despite these exalted ambitions, events soon revealed the limits of Europe’s ability to preserve peace and stability in the Balkans. In some cases, open conflict arose, the most violent occurring in the former Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In April 1992, following E.U. recognition of Bosnian independence, war erupted there among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. Serbian forces led by Radovan Karadžic´ and supported by Belgrade besieged the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, occupied large parts of Bosnian territory with the aim of creating a Bosnian Serb republic, and committed atrocities against local Muslims and Croats. Despite the deployment of a European-backed U.N. protection force in 1993, the conflict did not end until the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995 prompted an American-led NATO intervention. The European Union does act as a power in trade, financial and business matters, energy, and environmental standards. On these and many other issues, it is a regulatory great power. Foreign busi-

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Alternatives: Europe nesses mostly comply with European standards in order to avoid the costs of preparing multiple versions of their products. Key responsibilities for trade, commercial relationships, competition, product standards, energy, environment, agriculture, sub­ sidies, and more have shifted from member countries to Brussels, which has developed an extensive body of European law. Nonetheless, member states retain sovereign authority over many of the most politically sensitive issues, and Europe remains constrained by its internal problems. These are, above all, a consequence of its structure. The European Union, despite its size and remarkable achievements, does not constitute a United States of Europe. Defense and foreign policy especially reflect this reality. There is no European army and no equivalent of the Pentagon that can order French, German, Italian, or Polish soldiers to deploy to foreign lands and risk their lives on behalf of the European Commission in Brussels. All such authority resides in the national capitals: Paris, Berlin, Rome, Warsaw, and others. Soldiers from European countries do deploy for humanitarian intervention, peacekeeping, and anti-terror campaigns, and some have died in doing so, but they serve at the behest of their national authorities, in NATO campaigns, or as participants in U.N.-authorized efforts to which their national governments have agreed to contribute. Moreover, as a result of British voters’ “Brexit” referendum decision in 2016, the European Union lost a key member state. Britain’s international stature, financial and economic weight, nuclear arsenal, institutional traditions, and permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council had been important for a more powerful and influential Europe, and with the completion of its formal withdrawal at the end of 2020, those assets left the E.U. Even outside the realm of foreign and defense policy, Europe’s

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Alternatives: Europe most significant accomplishments are hampered by the weakness of its central authority. The creation of the euro, which did away with separate currencies for nineteen countries, was a remarkable achievement. Since the euro’s adoption in 2002, the French franc, German mark, Italian lira, Spanish peseta, and others have all disappeared. The problem of the euro, however, lies in the fact that Europe has created a financial union without a fiscal union. Unlike true national federations such as Canada, Australia, or the United States, Europe has no common federal tax structure or federal authority that can utilize fiscal policy and deploy national resources to assist member states that are weathering national disasters or financial crises. When Greece entered a financial crisis in the Great Recession of 2008, for instance, it could not correct its massive trade imbalances by devaluing its currency—because it no longer controlled its currency—nor could it limit imports under E.U. rules. At the same time, there was no central European government to provide fiscal relief: Athens was on its own in paying its citizens’ unemployment and social insurance. The result was a massive fiscal deficit that could only be resolved by borrowing from German banks—which, as a condition of the loans, demanded fiscal austerity in a time of deep recession. The coronavirus crisis of 2020 further illustrated the E.U.’s ­federalism problem. The lockdowns and quarantines undertaken by member countries to halt the spread of the virus brought economic activity to a screeching halt. National governments, which remain responsible for health care, scrambled to ensure sufficient supplies of face masks, protective clothing, and ventilators. Italy, which was hit very hard by the virus and sought desperately to obtain muchneeded equipment, initially received little support from its neighbors. France and Germany even imposed temporary bans on the export of face masks in violation of long-standing E.U. regulations

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Alternatives: Europe on the single market for goods and services. Germany and many other member countries also applied border restrictions in an attempt to curtail the spread of the virus, despite long-standing E.U. rules on free movement of peoples, especially the Schengen Agreement of 1985, which abolished border controls among most of the union’s member countries.14 After weeks of widespread criticism, European leaders sought to redress their lack of solidarity with Italy. France agreed to supply one million face masks and Germany announced it was donating seven tons of medical supplies. E.U. Commission president Ursula von der Leyen apologized directly to the Italians for Europe’s selfish response, writing in the newspaper La Repubblica that in the first days of the crisis, “too many had thought only of their own problems.”15 She promised that the E.U. was now ready to allocate up to 100 billion euros to aid the hardest-hit member countries. But even with widening recognition of the gravity of the crisis and the need for extraordinary measures, Europe’s institutional limits remained evident. In April 2020, the European Union’s top scientist, Mauro Ferrari, a specialist in nanomedicine, who had been appointed three months earlier to head the prestigious European Research Council, quit his position with a blast at the E.U.’s handling of the pandemic. The E.U. Commission had refused his proposal to recruit leading scientists for an urgent and coordinated scientific program to combat the virus; in resigning, Ferrari bluntly criticized “the complete absence of coordination of health-care policies among member states.”16 In an effort to mitigate the financial impact of the pandemic shutdown, the European Central Bank (ECB) loosened monetary policy and reduced interest rates to near zero; but on its own, Brussels could not provide the vast sums needed to support businesses

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Alternatives: Europe and employees throughout the European Union. In contrast, the federal government in Washington was able to authorize huge domestic stimulus spending, but the E.U. lacked the authority to do the same. Wealthier European countries passed stimulus measures to support businesses, subsidize employee salaries, and defer taxes. Germany, for example, committed more than $700 billion for that purpose. But Germany, the Netherlands, and other mostly northern members of the E.U. were unwilling to subsidize the weaker economies of Italy, Spain, Greece, and others or to underwrite their huge debts. So when France, Italy, and Spain, among nine member governments, initially proposed the issuing of joint European bonds that would not be attributed to any one country’s debt and could be floated at a lower interest cost, they initially met strong resistance. These “coronabonds” would be designed to help finance the massive fiscal stimulus needed to offset the crisis’s economic impact. But even after the E.U. finance ministers agreed to approve a rescue package worth some 540 billion euros ($590 billion), Austria, Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands (the “Frugal Four”) continued to reject the idea, arguing that this joint financing of debt would turn the eurozone into a transfer union in which the richer states are obliged to financially support the poorer ones.17 Political leaders in these mostly northern countries also feared a domestic backlash if they appeared to be taking on the debts of less frugal member countries. Indeed, in her La Repubblica article apologizing for past callousness and promising a more helpful attitude in the future, von der Leyen avoided any mention of coronabonds. A dozen years earlier, the European Union had experienced similar problems in coping with the great financial crisis of 2008–9. Then the wealthier member states were reluctant to support the more vulnerable member countries of the eurozone—Greece, Italy,

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Alternatives: Europe Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. The financial assistance that the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund eventually did provide came with rigorous conditions attached. By the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, lingering high levels of unemployment among southern European countries still had not fully receded, nor had popular resentment of austerity policies. This time, facing a new economic crisis caused by the pandemic, the E.U. finally reached agreement to create a recovery fund amounting to $880 billion, with more than half of that amount to be disbursed as grants rather than adding to severely indebted members’ burdens. The crisis-driven decision marked a major change in Germany’s position in that it included the critical step of financing the fund by issuing common European debt in the form of bonds.18 Another deeply sensitive national issue, migration, also serves as a telling example of Europe’s institutional and political limitations. Civil wars in Libya and Syria as well as continuing instability in Afghanistan, Iraq, other parts of the Middle East, and the Sahel region of Africa resulted in a massive increase in people seeking refuge in Europe. In 2015, responding to the desperate plight of those fleeing across the Mediterranean, German chancellor Angela Merkel unilaterally opened Germany to these refugees and migrants. As a result of her decision, taken without consulting the other E.U. member states, Germany admitted more than 1.1 million people and touched off a political crisis. Migration raises the most sensitive issues of national identity and sovereignty, and the European Union lacks an effective common policy on asylum. Yet because of the Schengen Agreement, those reaching the shores of Greece and Italy or securing legal entry into Germany became free to travel elsewhere within the E.U. In reaction, a number of E.U. countries took steps to strongly limit or even close

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Alternatives: Europe their borders to asylum seekers and refugees. Even Sweden, known for its openness, found itself clamping down on migrants. In September 2015, at the peak of the crisis, national leaders in the European Council authorized quotas to allocate 160,000 asylum seekers among member countries. The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland refused to comply, setting off a dispute that lasted several years before the European Court issued a judgment that these states were in violation of European law.19 Even then, however, implementation of the Court’s decision remained contested. The migrant crisis not only triggered disputes among national leaders, especially on the numbers of people each country would accept, it also significantly affected domestic politics. Populist leaders angrily opposed immigration, claiming it would compromise sovereignty and national identity. Their vehement expressions of antiE.U. sentiment touched a nerve in national politics and weakened the previously dominant parties of the center-right and center-left. In Germany, for example, where Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Helmut Schmidt had once shared some 80 percent of the popular vote, their combined total fell to just 47 percent in federal elections held two years after the start of the migration crisis.20 Four years later, in the elections of September 2021, the combined total of the two parties was only slightly better, at just below 50 percent (SPD 25.7%, CDU/CSU 24.1%).21 If the European Union were to overcome the obstacles to its taking a more effective international role as well as assume primary responsibility for its own security, Germany would be the key. It is the most economically powerful member of the E.U. and the most populous. For Europe to achieve its potential, Germany would need to play a leadership role, and there has been no shortage of calls for Berlin to step up. Many of these calls have come from those favoring

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Alternatives: Europe a stronger E.U. with a more assertive world role. French president Emmanuel Macron and others urged that Europe build its own “autonomous” military strategy and capability.22 Chancellor Merkel, striking a similar tone, argued, “[We] must take our fate into our own hands.”23 President von der Leyen called for the E.U. to develop “credible military capabilities” so as to have a greater say in influencing world events and as the building blocks of a European defense union. But as a former German defense minister, she made sure to add that such measures should be both “complementary to NATO” and “different,” ambiguously managing to imply both partnership with the alliance and greater autonomy alongside it.24 Concerns about America’s capacities and about Washington’s policies contribute to the belief that Europe must do more. European public opinion toward the United States has grown more negative during the past two decades, though attitudes have oscillated wildly. The early years of this century saw intense disapproval of George W. Bush, followed by unabashed enthusiasm toward Barack Obama after he ascended to the presidency. But the European reaction to Donald Trump was deeply negative. By the end of the George W. Bush administration, only 14 percent of Germans regarded the U.S. president positively, with British (16 percent) and French (13 percent) respondents holding similar views.25 German and European opinion then flipped after the election of Obama, so that by June 2009, 93 percent in Germany, 86 percent in Britain, and 91 percent in France believed Obama would “do the right thing in world affairs.”26 Enthusiasm for the newly elected president was so fevered that within less than two weeks of his taking office, the Nobel Committee chose him for its Peace Prize. They did so, as Obama himself noted, before he had done much of anything as the nation’s chief executive. Opinion in Europe surged

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Alternatives: Europe in the opposite direction after Trump was elected in 2016; he received negative poll numbers comparable to Bush’s. More important, attitudes toward the United States itself—not just its presidents—have become more negative. Among Germans, a 2020 Pew poll found only 39 percent holding a favorable opinion of the United States, and as evidence of how negative these views had become, 70 percent of Germans favored remaining neutral in a conflict between the United States and Russia, while only 12 percent wanted Germany to take the U.S. side.27 This coolness and even distrust of the United States is due not only to wildly different attitudes toward successive American presidents but to controversies both old and new. For four and a half decades after the end of World War II, the United States was an occupying power, with troops stationed in Berlin and facing Soviet forces on the border with East Germany. German security in NATO was guaranteed by the American presence, and even after the end of the Cold War, Germany and Europe continued to rely on the United States for their security. Dependence bred resentments on both the right and left of the German political spectrum, and periodic incidents contributed to the distrust. One of the most heated of these erupted in 2013 after a former CIA contractor, Edward Snowden, revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency had tapped Chancellor Merkel’s cell phone. The Snowden revelations came on top of a range of disagreements over environmental policies, the Iran nuclear deal, trade, tariffs, taxation, and information technology, all of which contributed to a growing distancing from America. Policy differences mattered, but elements of German politics, culture, and history came into play too, in ways that have inhibited Germany from playing a more ambitious global role. Here, Lord Acton’s widely quoted maxim that power corrupts

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Alternatives: Europe could be inverted: lack of power can also corrupt. In the three-­ quarters of a century since the end of World War II, deep-seated cultural and political attitudes in Germany have been transformed. The consequences of German history and especially the horrors of Nazism have been acknowledged and absorbed. Germany has accepted responsibility for the Holocaust and has become a civilian power. A deeply knowledgeable German expert, Josef Joffe, has observed that “seventy years under the umbrella of the United States have set in motion an unprecedented cultural transformation.”28 Yet as he bluntly noted, this cultural transformation and Germany’s role as a civilian power depend on the U.S. security guarantee. These changes in German culture have fostered an entrenched anti-militarism. Given the catastrophes of the twentieth century, there is a certain irony here, and history should remind us that there are far worse things than peaceful Germans. Germany thrives economically, though its focus is sometimes accompanied by a sanctimonious commitment to international institutions, an inclination to tell others what to do, and a propensity to insist on peaceful conflict resolution even in circumstances where there is no hope of peace. This emphasis can serve as a convenient excuse for evading harsher realities. These traits are further amplified by the increasingly complex politics of German coalition governments. To be fair, Germany has deployed troops for peacekeeping and anti-terrorism in Afghanistan, the Sahel countries of sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, and elsewhere and has suffered scores of casualties in doing so. At times, German leaders also have acknowledged that they should do more to fulfill their obligations to NATO as well as to the European Union. In contrast to the position taken by France in advocating a more autonomous Europe, Chancellor Merkel focused on maintaining a solid working relationship with the United States.

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Alternatives: Europe More explicitly, former German defense minister Annegret Kramp-­ Karrenbauer, who was briefly the head of the governing Christian Democrats, was outspoken about the need for the Federal Republic to spend more on defense and to match words with deeds. Addressing an audience at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, she observed that “we Germans are often better at declaring our good, even morally motivated intentions, placing high demands on ourselves and others, than actually proposing measures and implementing them.”29 She was also blunt about Europe’s inability to go it alone, calling French president Macron’s vision of strategic autonomy “an illusion” and contending that “without America’s nuclear and conventional capabilities, Germany and Europe cannot protect themselves. Those are plain facts.”30 Policies to strengthen Germany’s defense capability have received little political support, and Kramp-Karrenbauer chose to relinquish the party leadership in 2020 after disappointing regional election results. She was replaced in early January 2021 by Armin Laschet, minister-president of Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine– Westphalia. However, even after modest additions, the defense budget remained at 1.53 percent of GDP. The effects of these spending limits were palpable. Numerous reports about military readiness identified severe deficiencies in equipment and personnel. Half the fighter aircraft were unavailable to fly, many tanks could not function, and none of the navy’s six submarines were seaworthy. In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, any German government that might have wished to increase defense spending would be hard pressed to do so, and even more so for the coalition headed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the Social Democrats with the Greens and the Free Democrats.

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Alternatives: Europe

Energy, Technology, and Power Aspirations for German (and European) autonomy also face policy and practical limits in energy, technology, and artificial intelligence. Of these, the energy issue, together with its environmental implications, has been the most conspicuous. German governments have put in place an extensive—and costly—program to expand solar and especially wind power sources for generating electricity. In the aftermath of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in March 2011—even though the cause was an earthquake and the resulting tsunami, not an inherent fault of the reactor technology—Chancellor Merkel decided to close all of Germany’s nuclear power plants. These had provided more than 20 percent of the country’s electricity and were its principal source of fossil-free energy. As the nuclear shutdown proceeded, Germany found itself needing to burn more soft coal (an especially dirty source of greenhouse gases) and increasingly reliant on imports of Russian natural gas. Instead of sharply reducing its greenhouse gas emissions and despite a remarkable increase in renewable power generation, Germany’s emissions largely stagnated for half a decade, and it missed its emission reduction targets. The reductions that did occur were largely the result of lagging economic growth and warmer weather.31 Germany’s policies also ran counter to E.U. efforts to avoid excessive dependence on Russia and develop an internal energy union. Russia and Germany completed the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a costly joint project led by Russia’s Gazprom, that was meant to double the capacity of an existing 750-mile pipeline running under the Baltic Sea that delivered gas directly to Germany. In building it, Moscow had two motives: to increase Europe’s energy dependence and to weaken Ukraine. Forty percent of Europe’s natural gas was delivered via pipelines that ran through Ukraine, and the transit fees earned

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Alternatives: Europe that country $2–3 billion per year of much-needed revenue. Gazprom had made it clear, however, that with the completion of Nord Stream 2 it planned to drastically reduce the volume of gas supplied through the Ukrainian route. The E.U. Commission and several of Germany’s European partners opposed the new pipeline. In addition, the Trump administration imposed commercial sanctions on companies involved in its construction, which for a time delayed work on the project. Yet Berlin insisted on seeing Nord Stream 2 through to completion, and in May 2021, the Biden administration decided not to sanction the company in overall charge of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, even as it retained sanctions against a number of other companies and ships engaged in finishing the project.32 German efforts at greater European autonomy in technology have also been controversial. The minister for economics and energy in Merkel’s coalition government, Peter Altmaier, promoted ambitious ideas of European strategic autonomy in quantum computing, chip technology, digital sovereignty, and artificial intelligence. His proposals reflected an increasingly common inclination to distance Germany and Europe from China, Russia, and the United States. Yet here too, Germany was often inclined to favor its own business interests over European solidarity. This became a major issue in the choice of equipment for the much-anticipated fifth-generation (5G) mobile network. Despite the proclaimed desire for technological autonomy and the European location of two of the world’s three 5G manufacturers (Ericsson in Sweden and Nokia in Finland), Chancellor Merkel approved the use of 5G mobile network equipment from Huawei, China’s state-supported manufacturer. The decision, motivated in part to protect Germany’s auto export market, increased Germany’s dependence on China and did so despite strong

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Alternatives: Europe concerns by the European Commission and the E.U.’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, which labeled China a “strategic rival.”33 The lack of European solidarity on this key commercial and technological issue was not only Germany’s fault. The European Council, representing the E.U.’s twenty-seven heads of state and government, failed to agree on endorsing a tougher position on China.34 This was not surprising, given China’s extensive efforts to court E.U. members like Hungary, but it again reflected Europe’s difficulty in reaching agreement on collective action. Previous efforts at European technological autonomy and collaboration also have had limited accomplishments. Aside from the successful development of Airbus as Europe’s champion in passenger aircraft design, some important projects have failed to meet expectations. For example, even the Airbus A400M military transport plane, originally designed to provide a common aircraft for Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, suffered huge cost overruns, serious technical problems, and long delays. Deliveries of the aircraft began in 2013, but despite expenditures of more than 20 billion euros, many of the planes remained unreliable in their early years. In the case of Britain’s Royal Air Force, at one point in early 2021, only two of its twenty A400M aircraft were available to fly at any given time.35 Yet another effort involved the quest for a European search engine, to be named Quaero. Proposed by France and Germany in 2005 as an alternative to Google, it became a 400 million euro failure. A more substantial and costly European project has been the Galileo Satellite system, designed as a counterpart to the American Global Positioning System (GPS). But Galileo faced long delays, technical problems, billions of euros in cost overruns, and disputes over funding. First proposed in 1999 and funded by the E.U. and European

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Alternatives: Europe Space Agency in 2003, the system was supposed to become operational in 2008. It did not go live until 2016, and after a series of outages, its full operation finally took effect in 2020. These experiences in energy, the environment, and technology, as well as in migration, foreign, and security policy, and in coping with the coronavirus crisis, reflect the inherent limits of the E.U.’s broader role. Despite its size, population, wealth, and international influence in trade, product standards, climate, agriculture, development, and foreign aid, Europe’s aspirations to offer an alternative to the United States, or even to increase its geopolitical power, face daunting obstacles. It possesses neither the internal coherence, nor the institutional structure, nor the popular support necessary to take on such a role. Thus, as a writer in Britain’s leftist publication The New Statesman has observed, “The EU’s fundamental flaw is that it is incapable of discharging the protective functions of a state.”36

——————— The erosion of European affinity for the United States is also a consequence of generational change. It was amplified by widespread disapproval of the Trump presidency but has also fluctuated in reaction to different occupants of the White House. Yet despite this skepticism, Europe’s connections with America in economics, values, and security are in no way equivalent to its relationships with China or Russia. The underlying reality is that America remains indispensable for maintaining Western security, for sustaining a liberal international order, and for overcoming Europe’s own collective action dilemmas.37 The European Union cannot provide an alternative to the American global role.

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Chapter 4

ALTERNATIVES TO THE UNITED STATES China, Russia, and Spheres of Influence The major alternatives to a modernized world order supported by the United States appear unlikely, unappealing, or both. —Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations

If the United States is in retreat, the European Union lacks the institutional basis and political foundation to sustain a rules-based world order, and the United Nations is not up to the task, what about the People’s Republic of China? With 1.4 billion people, a generation of meteoric economic expansion, rising international influence, and massive wealth to deploy, China certainly possesses the size and resources to play such a role. Under the authoritarian rule of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and President Xi Jinping, China has revealed its aspirations for regional and even global leadership. But a China-led order would be very different from the politically and economically liberal order fostered and sustained by America. Angela Stent, a leading expert on Russia and Eurasia, writes that China and Russia are seeking to create “a ‘post-West’ global order that takes their interests into account and is conducive to authoritarian rule.”1 Beijing has avidly courted Asian, African, and European lead-

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence ers with financial inducements, large-scale projects, and covert—­ sometimes overt—arm twisting. In the past decade, Beijing has established institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a regional counterpart to the Western-created World Bank that has funded projects in some eighty member countries. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), with potential expenditures of one trillion dollars in loans and grants, serves to advance infrastructure projects in Central Asia and Europe, including the development of ports and other facilities for expanded sea routes reaching to Africa, the Middle East, and coastal Europe. The World Bank describes the BRI as an “effort to improve connectivity and regional cooperation on a trans-continental scale through large scale investments.” But as The Economist candidly observes, “The Chinese Communist Party is using the BRI to reshape a world order more to its liking.”2 China also has undertaken ambitious efforts to expand its influence within existing global institutions such as the U.N. and the World Health Organization, where it has systematically worked to influence the selection of organizational leadership. It now controls, either directly or by proxy, at least five of the fifteen U.N. agencies. In addition to the WHO, these include the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and the International Civil Aviation Organization.3 In these efforts and wherever its diplomats and media are present, China has been unwavering in its efforts to prevent dissemination of any negative information about its human rights violations, massive abuses in the treatment of its Uighur Muslim population, and other excesses of its authoritarian rule. Beijing has also sought to influence foreign publics with skilled media operations, language programs, and other measures. It has employed propaganda and disinformation to promote its views, dis-

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence credit its critics, and portray its authoritarian governance in an overwhelmingly positive light. Not least, it has ambitiously modernized and upgraded the capabilities of its armed forces. In sum, American and foreign leaders as well as many economic policy analysts had long hoped that giving China a leading place in the world community would turn it into a “responsible stakeholder,” but China’s behavior has contradicted that vision.

China and the Coronavirus Pandemic Beyond these generalizations, it is worth examining China’s behavior during the Covid-19 crisis. Beijing tried to present itself as a benign global leader in combating the disease and providing needed medical supplies and doctors to other countries.4 Yet this image has obscured much duplicity in the information China provided to the outside world and its own people. Its authoritarian insistence on controlling information and its lack of transparency delayed measures that would have mitigated the spread of the virus, and it deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence that would have enabled the United States and others to take preventive actions earlier.5 The first known case of Covid-19 occurred in Hubei province on November 17, 2019, possibly a result of human exposure to a bat or another caged wild animal in a Wuhan “wet market” or the consumption of contaminated animals at the city’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.6 An unconfirmed but increasingly plausible ­explanation is that the virus may have accidentally spread from a nearby scientific laboratory, the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology, both of which had been studying coronaviruses in order to prevent future outbreaks.7 American diplomats who had made

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence repeated visits to the Wuhan Institute of Virology had written cables to the State Department two years earlier expressing serious concerns about the safety risks there.8 The virus soon began to spread, infecting numerous medical personnel involved in treating those affected. By mid-December, it was clearly evident that person-to-person transmission was occurring. According to Caixin Global, a Chinese international business and economics media group, by the end of December local Chinese laboratories had identified the Covid-19 virus and sequenced its genome, but regional CPC officials, reluctant to send bad news to Beijing, sought to suppress the information. They forced the lab to end its work, destroy the specimens it had identified, and refrain from publishing its findings.9 On December 30, 2019, a young doctor, Li Wenliang, sought to warn other Chinese doctors and nurses of the risk. He was arrested, accused of “spreading false rumors” and “disrupting social order,” and forced to recant. Weeks later, on February 7, 2020, he died from the disease at the age of thirty-four. His death, which was reported and disseminated in the independent Chinese media, caused public outrage. CPC leaders then changed course, placing the blame on local authorities and portraying Dr. Li as a hero.10 Beijing also provided false information to the WHO. Despite possessing evidence to the contrary, China’s leaders propagated the message that the coronavirus did not spread via person-to-person transmission. They persuaded the WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (a former high official in the Ethiopian dictatorship and not a medical doctor), to convey that information to the rest of the world. On January 14, 2020, even though it had not yet sent an official delegation to China, the WHO announced that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” A few days later, while visiting Beijing, Tedros praised China’s “transparency,” “openness to sharing information,” and leadership in “setting a new standard for outbreak response.”11 In 2017, when Tedros was a candidate to head the World Health Organization, he had been strongly backed by Beijing, but not without controversy. He had been accused of covering up three cholera epidemics while serving as Ethiopian health minister.12 Nonetheless, thanks to vigorous lobbying by China and inattention on the part of the Trump administration, which gave pro forma support to a British candidate, Dr. David Nabarro, Tedros was elected. Just as in the election in 2006 of Tedros’s predecessor, Dr. Margaret Chan, a Beijing-backed candidate prevailed while the Bush administration was preoccupied elsewhere. This example illustrates China’s effectiveness at promoting its agenda and persuading others to fall into line, especially when the United States is insufficiently engaged. Remarkably, China exercises strong influence within the WHO despite the disproportionately meager funding it provides. Its assessed contribution was just 0.21 percent of the organization’s 2019 budget, while the United States’ assessed contribution was 14.67 percent and an American-based philanthropy effort, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, provided a voluntary contribution of 9.76 percent.13 Although China and other countries also make substantial voluntary contributions, these numbers reflect a disproportionate relationship between funding and influence. Washington’s impact in the organization was also weakened by the fact that the American seat on the WHO board had been vacant since 2018—and the Trump administration did not move to fill the seat until March 2020, once the pandemic had found its way into the headlines. Subsequently, in July 2020, U.S. officials

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence notified the U.N. of their intention to withdraw from the WHO, following up on an announcement Trump had made in May. Under prevailing rules, the action would not have taken effect until July 2021, but it was reversed by the Biden administration.14 In sum, during the first two months following the virus outbreak, CPC officials, with a compliant WHO, suppressed essential evidence about the epidemic and deliberately dispensed inaccurate and misleading information.15 In contrast, as early as the end of December, Taiwanese officials had begun screening airline passengers from Wuhan to identify travelers carrying the disease, but Beijing and the WHO deliberately ignored their warning about the coronavirus. President Xi Jinping did issue orders to combat the outbreak on January 7, but authorities continued to deny that it could spread between humans. There were also conflicting messages. On January 14, 2020, the same day the WHO stated that no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission had been found, the head of China’s National Health Commission held a teleconference with regional health authorities to convey the severity of the coronavirus and the danger of a pandemic. Yet a day later, the head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced on state television that “the risk of ­human-to-human transmission is low.”16 Not until January 23, more than two months after the initial case was discovered, did Chinese officials order a lockdown of Wuhan and three other cities.17 Even after they acknowledged the pandemic, CPC authorities continued their obstruction. U.S. health officials contacted the director of the National Biocontainment Laboratory at the University of Texas, which maintained a research partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in an effort to obtain samples of the virus. Initially, the Wuhan Institute agreed to provide samples, but on

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence January 24—a day after the Wuhan closures—authorities in Beijing blocked all lab-to-lab transfers.18 China had already shared the virus’s genetic sequence on January 11, but it never provided live virus samples from the initial batch of Covid-19 cases despite continuing requests from the United States and other countries.19 Indeed, U.S. intelligence later confirmed that Beijing directly ordered the destruction of all virus samples.20 China also falsified data on its Covid-19 cases and deaths. In late March and early April 2020, in an effort to paint a picture of successful accomplishment, Beijing claimed success in the lockdown of Wuhan and minimized the numbers of new cases there and elsewhere in China. The official account was meant to portray the ability of the CPC-led government under President Xi to act swiftly and effectively and to offer a not-so-subtle contrast with the Western countries’ missteps in combating the pandemic. The Chinese claims were at first widely accepted, with the result that by April 2020, U.S. figures for total cases and deaths appeared to be several times those of China. But U.S. intelligence agencies began reporting that Beijing had intentionally provided inaccurate data.21 Though the intelligence study itself was classified, a detailed report by Derek Scissors of the American Enterprise Institute found massive falsification. Based on reporting from a Chinese media outlet, the China Global Television Network, vetted by the CPC itself, he concluded that while “the Communist Party has deliberately made estimation difficult, . . . outside of Wuhan city and Hubei province, [announced] cases are low by a factor of 100 or more.”22 Perhaps Beijing’s most implausible claim was that there had not been a single case of Covid-19 among the two million troops of the People’s Liberation Army.23 Another author, the journalist Isaac Stone Fish, identified official

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence underreporting from China’s Xinjiang region, where one million Uighur Muslims have been confined to reeducation camps. By early April 2020, out of a regional population of 24.5 million people, only seventy-six were said to have been infected, with just three deaths. On a per capita basis, Stone Fish reported, the official numbers would have meant that “roughly 300 times as many people have contracted the disease and more than 180 times as many have died in the United States than in Xinjiang.”24 The data manipulation in the official numbers was obvious. China’s disinformation and suppression of information about the outbreak contributed to delays by other countries in taking measures to combat the disease. The misleading data made it more difficult for medical and scientific authorities to construct accurate models of the virus’s progression and lethality. Even worse, the CPC continued to spread disinformation while scientists raced to develop a vaccine. In mid-March, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Zhao Lijian, seeking to counter growing criticism of China’s failure to contain the virus before it spread outside of Wuhan, falsely promoted a conspiracy theory that accused the U.S. Army of creating the virus as a bio-weapon and introducing it into the city.25 The allegation was angrily denied in the United States and rejected by the European Union’s disinformation watchdog agency. Even some senior Chinese diplomats pushed back against what they saw as their own foreign ministry’s crude propaganda, but the allegation received some support within the Chinese population, where Beijing’s strategy played into the nationalist mood. In the spring and summer of 2020, Beijing mounted an ambitious effort to demonstrate its benign global leadership, sending medical teams, masks, test kits, ventilators, and protective gear to Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia. These efforts were accompanied

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence by relentless propaganda. Chinese state media circulated numerous accounts of masks being delivered to some one hundred countries and peddled stories alleging that the virus had originated in the United States or elsewhere.26 In Europe, some of these efforts resonated, for example among populist politicians in Italy, Hungary, and Serbia who were known to be sympathetic to China and strident critics of the European Union. However, some of the protective material China provided, especially the masks, proved to be faulty or even counterfeit and had been sold by Beijing rather than donated.27 In addition, China’s heavy-handedness in seeking favorable publicity, which extended yet again to providing disinformation, offset the benevolent image China had sought to convey. The governments of Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, and Sweden lodged protests with Chinese officials.

——————— China’s efforts in Africa initially gained traction, aided by its status as the leading source of foreign investment there, as well as by extensive propaganda. The campaign was partly underwritten by Jack Ma, the founder of the Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba, whose philanthropic foundation organized shipments of essential supplies to every one of the fifty-four African countries.28 Despite this conspicuous distribution of supplies and orchestrated information campaign, a backlash erupted over the treatment of Africans in China’s southeastern province of Guangdong. In an overreaction to the pandemic, hundreds of migrants there were forced to sleep in the streets after being evicted from their residences and banned from businesses and restaurants, triggering a wave of critical media reports and anti-Chinese criticism throughout Africa.

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence African ambassadors in Beijing lodged formal complaints, and in a dozen countries, including Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda, foreign ministries summoned Chinese ambassadors to protest.29 In all, among the wealthier countries of the world, China’s heavyhanded response to the pandemic produced more criticism than praise. Its obstruction of evidence, clumsy efforts to manipulate information and curry favorable publicity, and vitriolic attacks on those who posed critical questions served to discredit the image it had sought to convey. China’s early statements about the pandemic were increasingly discredited, and in May 2021, President Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to investigate the origins of Covid19 and the possibility that the virus might have leaked from the Wuhan laboratory.30 At the June 2021 G-7 summit, the European Union joined with the United States in calling for the inquiry.31 Among many developing countries, China gained credit for more rapidly distributing its own Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines, though their efficacy, at approximately 50 percent, was far lower than the Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca vaccines. In some cases the Chinese vaccines were donated, in other cases sold. In a number of countries, including Bahrain and Indonesia, questions arose as to whether the vaccines were sufficiently effective in preventing Covid-19.32 But the initial speed and quantity with which China acted to distribute vaccines abroad initially outpaced U.S. and European measures.

China and Global Order Speaking to the Nineteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China in October 2017, President Xi Jinping said he envisioned that by 2049 (the one hundredth anniversary of the People’s

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence Republic of China), China would be a “global leader in terms of composite national strength and international influence.”33 In pursuit of that vision, China has sought to expand its power and influence in Asia but also far more widely. The effort has encompassed trade, investment, financial leverage, technology, international institutions, diplomacy, information operations, enforced technology transfer, intellectual property theft, spying, and geopolitical muscle flexing with modernized military forces. China’s Ministry of Education sponsors Confucius Institutes at colleges and universities throughout the world with the official purpose of promoting Chinese language and culture. The first such institute in the United States was established in 2004, and with growing demand for Chinese-language instruction, the number of programs expanded rapidly, reaching a peak of 103 in 2017. In recent years, however, academic organizations such as the American Association of University Professors and the National Association of Scholars have complained of political pressure from the Chinese government, saying that the Confucius Institutes have censored teaching materials, restricted debate, and otherwise tried to exert control over faculty and curricula. Concern over these issues has been aggravated by accusations of China’s intellectual property theft and unauthorized access to cutting-edge scientific data.34 Officials in the Trump administration had criticized the Confucius Institutes, and the Biden administration has emphasized the need to confront the challenges posed by China. As a consequence, by the end of 2021, the number of Confucius Institutes on U.S. campuses had fallen from over 100 to just 31.35 Since the late 1970s, China has sent increasing numbers of students abroad, initially to study technical and scientific subjects and then across a wide array of disciplines. In America, Chinese make up

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence the largest group of foreign students, peaking at some 350,000 in 2019, and many tuition-dependent universities have come to rely on the revenue from these enrollments. China has sought to use this dependence to leverage its influence within these institutions. It has pushed back against professors and even students who have expressed views inimical to the CPC narrative, and university officials have at times sought to placate China in order not to jeopardize their funding.36 Chinese students also are encouraged to report to Chinese officials about fellow students who criticize their country, and pressure can be applied to family members back home. Sometimes this pressure can affect even non-Chinese students. Drew Pavlou, a twenty-year-old philosophy student at the University of Queensland in Australia, for instance, faced expulsion because of his outspoken criticism of China’s abusive treatment of its Uighur population, its policies in Hong Kong, and its operation of the Confucius Institute on campus. After a Chinese diplomat with ties to the university labeled him an “anti-China separatist,” the school, which publicizes its close links to China and had hosted more than eleven thousand Chinese students in the previous five years, charged Pavlou with damaging the university’s reputation and alleged that he had engaged in intimidating and disrespectful conduct and in disrupting the running of the university. After some twenty-five thousand people signed a petition in support of Pavlou and an article about the charges appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, university officials issued a denial: they were not, they insisted, penalizing Pavlou for his political beliefs.37 Yet they suspended him for two years (later reduced to one), banned him from the campus, and removed him from his elected position in the university senate.38 The sensitivity of the university officials reflected the growing dependence of Australian universities on tuition revenue from Chi-

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence nese students, which at the time was estimated at $12 billion per year. An extensive economic relationship between the two countries had developed, with 36 percent of Australia’s exports going to China and Australia actually running a large trade surplus in the two countries’ bilateral trade.39 Events surrounding the pandemic illustrated both the depth of Australia’s dependence on China and China’s willingness to use it to apply pressure. In April 2020, after Australian officials called for an international investigation into the origins of the pandemic, China’s ambassador not so subtly threatened economic retaliation, suggesting that ordinary Chinese would say, “Why should we drink Australian wine? Why eat Australian beef?”40 Reactions in Australia varied, with mining and agricultural businesses expressing particular concern. However, public opinion became more critical of China after Beijing, in October 2020, restricted imports of Australian coal, wine, meat, cotton, barley, and lobsters and set out fourteen harsh demands. These included reversing Australian laws concerning Chinese covert influence operations in Australia and censoring criticism of China in its press and universities.41 Far from causing Australia to capitulate, China’s trade embargoes and political threats, combined with mounting evidence of its efforts at political interference up to and including espionage, led to a backlash.42 Australian authorities, including political and military officials, adopted a visibly hawkish stance toward China.43 And though some businesses faced significant losses, many commodity exporters were successful in finding other markets. Moreover, China’s alternative sources of some crucial imports were limited, as with iron ore, where Australia represents 60 percent of seaborne exports.44 Australia is not alone in having been targeted economically. China has also blocked or threatened to block exports from Norway,

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence Canada, Sweden, Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere. In one noteworthy instance, it used economic leverage against the National Basketball Association after Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, expressed support for Hong Kong protestors.45 China’s massive infrastructure and loan programs have also served a geopolitical purpose. According to a study by three economists, Sebastian Horn, Carmen M. Reinhart, and Christoph Trebesch, over $200 billion of China’s external lending to developing countries—more than half of its total lending to these countries— has been concealed from public scrutiny and does not appear in data provided by the World Bank and the IMF. The authors estimate that by 2017, fifty developing country recipients had increased the debt they owed to China to over 15 percent of their GDP, compared to an average of just 1 percent in 2005. A dozen of these countries, including some of the poorest in the world (Djibouti, Tonga, Maldives, the Republic of the Congo, Kyrgyzstan, Cambodia, Niger, Laos, Zambia, Samoa, Vanuatu, and Mongolia) now owe China more than 20 percent of their GDP.46 Debt diplomacy provides China with economic and political leverage over these borrowers. The authors find that China mostly does not match the concessionary terms offered by the World Bank and many other official lenders but typically lends at higher market rates. That the terms are secret creates significant opportunities for bribery and corruption. These loans tend to be secured with tangible assets, such as ports, railways, or commodity earnings, and with repayment provisions that favor China ahead of other lenders. Borrowing countries are thus dependent on China when they need debt refinancing. Sri Lanka, for instance, gave China a ninety-nine-year lease on a strategic port in exchange for the port’s construction. In Djibouti, where China holds 70 percent of the country’s debt and

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence local officials hoped that Chinese investment could make their country the “Singapore of Africa,” Beijing was allowed to construct a strategic naval base.47 Though some countries have grown wary about this debt trap, it is not surprising that many recipient countries are responsive when China states its political preferences. They are especially likely to side with China on matters that don’t affect them directly. China’s use of loans and inducements is not confined to the developing world. Together with seventeen countries of Eastern and Central Europe, Beijing in 2012 established an organization known as the Cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European Countries. The ostensible purpose of this group, commonly described as the 17+1, is to promote business and investment, particularly projects connected to the Belt and Road initiative. But as with so many of China’s other foreign engagements, its purpose is less expanded trade and cultural engagement than the enhancement of Beijing’s strategic influence. The existence of the 17+1 also has the potential to exacerbate differences between eastern and western members of the European Union. Former communist countries are not about to embrace Chinese domination to replace that of the USSR, but several of them, at odds with Brussels, are perfectly willing to accept Chinese funding and inducements. Serbia, with $6 billion of loans for major infrastructure projects, as well as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, the countries where most of the Chinse investment is concentrated, have tended to be more receptive to Beijing than their E.U. partners. As with the reactions to China’s unsubtle information operations around Covid-19, there has also been pushback in Eastern Europe over rising indebtedness. Together, the 17 Eastern European countries owe Beijing more than $75 billion. Czech president Miloš Zeman,

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence once known as a proponent of closer ties with China, snubbed Beijing’s invitation for a 17+1 summit while expressing disappointment with existing arrangements and complaining of an “investment letdown.” A critical report prepared by China scholars at a Prague research institute urged that the European members of the 17+1 work to develop unified demands on issues such as better market access in China and imposition of constraints on Chinese tech companies operating in Europe. The authors also urged their governments to resist Beijing’s heavy-handed efforts at political influence. They cited, as examples of these efforts, a diplomatic incident in Lithuania, covert funding and Chinese interference at the Charles University in Prague, and the influence of the Confucius Institutes.48 In reaction to these and other experiences as well as China’s conduct during the pandemic, Lithuania withdrew from the 17+1 bloc in May 2021 and urged others to join them in the gesture.49 Alongside the vast expansion of China’s trade and investment, Chinese-language teaching has flourished abroad, as has attention to its culture and history. While much of this enhances China’s influence, these far-flung efforts to persuade the world of China’s virtues have had mixed results. There is no doubt that China’s economic might, internal development, and military capacity—its hard power—have expanded enormously. But its efforts at exercising soft power (the term coined by Joseph S. Nye Jr. to describe a country’s ability to persuade others without force or coercion) have been far less successful.50 China’s one-party state, restrictions on personal freedoms and human rights, treatment of minorities, lack of judicial due process, imposition of increasingly tight central control, and pervasive corruption do not make it a magnet for others. The people of Taiwan and Hong Kong manifestly do not want closer links with the main-

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence land. As a land that migrants might want to enter, China is also vastly less appealing than Europe, the United States, Australia, and other democratic countries. Even in commercial relationships China’s attractions have been diminishing, and not only as a by-product of the Covid-19 crisis and growing concerns about reliance on vulnerable supply chains. ­China’s increasingly predatory practices have put many investors on notice. Not surprisingly, a composite “Soft Power Index” ranks China twenty-seventh among the thirty leading countries measured. The top twenty states are all democracies. Among them, France ranks first, followed by the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, and the United States. China comes in ahead only of Hungary, Turkey, and Russia.51 In addition to creating distrust abroad, the CPC’s compulsive need for secrecy and control has fostered cynicism and resentment among its own population. Covid-19 made these traits and their consequences widely visible, but there have been many antecedents. In its handling of the SARS epidemic in 2002–3, the regime largely displayed the same characteristics: denial and distortion followed by belated efforts at correcting course and regaining control of the story. The same pattern appeared in Beijing’s attempts to deflect responsibility for its failures in responding to an earthquake in 2008 and a train crash in 2011; in those cases the intended audiences were mainly domestic. In a more recent example, after French experts warned of potentially harmful radiation emissions from the Taishan nuclear power plant, a French-Chinese joint venture, Chinese authorities reacted by more than doubling the permitted emissions limit to a level above French safety standards and denouncing the warning as “American imperialism.”52 China’s information campaigns have sometimes worked against

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence it as well. In February 2020, for example, a diplomat from the Chinese consulate in Chicago contacted the president of the Wisconsin State Senate, Roger Roth, urging passage of a resolution recognizing China’s heroic measures to combat the coronavirus. Among other things, Roth was asked to say that China had been “effective in curbing the virus from spreading to other parts of China and the world” and “transparent and quick” in sharing information. The senator flatly rejected the request and instead introduced a resolution condemning the CPC for intentionally misleading the world about the virus.53 Awkward efforts by Chinese diplomats have been reported in other countries as well. International public opinion polls show growing wariness about China: 86 percent of Japanese and 85 percent of Swedes, for instance, now view it unfavorably.54 Nonetheless, Beijing’s demands are often effective, especially when backed by economic threats. After the European External Action Service (the E.U.’s diplomatic arm) drafted a report about the coronavirus pandemic that criticized Chinese and Russian propaganda and stated that China “has continued to run a global disinformation campaign,” Chinese officials who learned of the report pressured the European Union to soften the language. The union’s diplomatic officials ordered changes, and the report was published without any specific mention of “disinformation.” An official E.U. spokesman denied that Brussels had succumbed to pressure, but disgruntled staff members candidly cited the self-censorship.55 In Europe too, however, as with Australia and Lithuania, there have been signs of pushback against Chinese pressure. In December 2020, for example, at the urging of German chancellor Angela Merkel, the European Union signed a commercial deal with China, the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, which was seen as part of a policy of “equidistance” from the United States rather than

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence strategic alignment with it. Within months, however, rather than ratify the agreement, the European Parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution refusing to ratify the agreement and citing the “totalitarian threat” from Beijing, its record on human rights, its sanctions of Europeans critical of China’s government, its treatment of Muslim minorities, and its suppression of democracy in Hong Kong. In the words of the resolution, China’s sanctions on European critics “constitute an attack against the European Union and its Parliament as a whole, the heart of European democracy and values, as well as an attack on the freedom of research.”56 More insidiously, Chinese agents undertook disinformation campaigns using some of the same methods employed by Russian trolls. The New York Times reported that American intelligence officials as well as bipartisan research groups in the United States had identified fake text messages and social media posts disseminating false information and conspiracy theories about the coronavirus and federal measures to combat it. The purpose of these efforts was to exacerbate political divisions within the United States and Europe. The directives to carry out these disinformation campaigns originated with high-level Chinese officials.57 Hard power, the ability to use military and economic means to influence others, is another story. The PRC has systematically moved to massively modernize its military forces, including land, air, and space capabilities. The most important change has been the upgrading of its naval forces and its land- and ship-based missile capabilities. These have been designed not only to intimidate Taiwan as well as China’s immediate neighbors but also to implement its anti-­ access/area denial strategy (known as A2/AD). By threatening American aircraft carriers, these weapons will make it far more challenging for the United States to project power in the western Pacific. In

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence addition, Beijing’s militarization of contested islands and coral reefs in the East and South China Seas has exacerbated tensions with most of its neighbors. Brunei, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam all have maritime disputes with China concerning territorial waters, fishing grounds, and Special Economic Zones, and many of their ships have had threatening encounters with Chinese military vessels. In sum, by its economic, political, and military conduct, Beijing has repeatedly demonstrated its unsuitability to serve as a substitute for the United States in upholding a rules-based international order. Were it to achieve global predominance, its role would be one of exploitative and predatory economic behavior, political repression, and geopolitical domination. As much as other democracies and market economies might chafe at America’s shortcomings, a Chinese-led world order would doubtless be far worse.

China, Russia, and Spheres of Geopolitical Influence Even as China has sought to extend its influence far beyond its immediate region, so has Russia. Moscow’s capabilities, other than in nuclear and conventional weaponry, are far less than those of Beijing, which overshadows it in economic might, competitiveness, and population. Nonetheless, under the leadership of President Putin, Russia has sought to increase its influence over both its Soviet-era inner empire (former Soviet republics such as Ukraine, the Central Asian countries, and the Baltic states) and countries that had been members of the Warsaw Pact.58 It has done so by both overt and covert means. The former includes seizing Crimea from Ukraine, controlling territory in the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine,

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence and supporting Abkhazia and South Ossetia in their efforts to break away from the Republic of Georgia. More covertly, Russia has used economic incentives and disincentives, bribery, and subtle and notso-subtle threats to influence its neighbors, though it has had less success with countries whose economic, political, and social institutions are more stable and developed. Putin’s Russia has functioned as a revisionist power, making use of those international institutions and norms from which it directly benefits. These give Moscow a voice on a wide range of issues as well as in commercial arrangements for exploitation and export of its vast energy resources, even as it seeks to undermine other elements of the rules-based international order. As Eurasia expert and former diplomat Philip Remler has written, Russians have been skillful in using the U.N. system to promote their interests. In doing so, they along with China advance a “definition of sovereignty [that] promotes hegemony, spheres of interest, and the absolute legitimacy of national governments.”59 Beyond its efforts aimed at the former Soviet sphere, Moscow has promoted authoritarianism and has sought to erode the stability and legitimacy of Western democracies, especially the European Union, but also the United States. Its agents have waged secret campaigns via social media and cyber technology to spread false information and conspiracy theories in Germany, France, and elsewhere in Europe. Despite denials, Moscow or its proxies also targeted the U.S. presidential elections of 2016 and 2020.60 In addition to disruptive actions aimed at the Atlantic alliance, Russia has provided critical military support to the embattled regime of President Assad during the Syrian civil war; supported dictatorships in Venezuela and Cuba; and, with China, warded off efforts at sanction for these actions in the United Nations and in human

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence rights forums. With these countries and in its relations with other countries such as Turkey and Iran, Putin’s Russia has opportunistically sought to disrupt America’s alliances and undercut its influence. The Russian regime is deeply corrupt.61 Unlike China, however, its means are more limited and its aims less comprehensive. Its principal assets are its territorial size, energy resources, and the military and nuclear forces it has rebuilt and modernized since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Despite rivalries dating back to the centuries of czarist expansion across Central Asia to the Pacific, up to and including the twentieth-­ century clashes over ideology and borders, Moscow and Beijing have developed a deepening symbiotic relationship. China provides a huge market for Russian energy and weapons exports, and the two countries have significantly increased their military cooperation. As authoritarian powers, they share an interest in stifling criticisms of their political systems, human rights abuses, and foreign policies. They cooperate to prevent critical examinations of their treatment of their minorities (including Uighurs and Tibetans in China and Chechens in Russia) or of their encroachments on territories along their peripheries. Since they hold two of the five permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council, they can use their veto power to ensure that nothing can be passed without their concurrence or at least abstention. They typically vote together to block human rights inquiries as well as to prevent use of the U.N.’s power to intervene in the internal affairs of other authoritarian regimes. In view of the rising challenge both of these revisionist powers present to the United States and its allies, a number of scholars, strategists, pundits, and politicians have suggested that America adopt a spheres-of-influence strategy. The United States, they say, should be less outspoken in criticizing the internal affairs and regional con-

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence duct of Beijing and Moscow and less engaged in supporting their neighboring countries, even democratic ones. It should pull back from its relationship with Taiwan, express less concern about China’s maritime expansion, cease to criticize Russia’s depredations in Ukraine, and possibly be less committed to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Washington should also be less vocal about abuses of freedom and human rights occurring within the borders of its great power rivals. With friction over such issues a thing of the past, goes the thinking, opportunities would arise for cooperation on common problems like climate change, terrorism, conflict resolution, and nuclear proliferation. One of those making this case, author and commentator Fareed Zakaria, puts the onus on America, writing that the United States “risks squandering the hard-won gains from four decades of engagement with China, encouraging Beijing to adopt confrontational policies of its own.” He recommends instead that “Washington should encourage Beijing to exert greater influence in its region and beyond as long as it used this clout to strengthen the international system.” And he urges that “Chinese participation in efforts to tackle global warming, nuclear proliferation, money laundering, and terrorism, should be encouraged—and appreciated.” If Washington followed his advice, he argues, some future scholar might look back on this as a successful plan “to expand the zone of peace, prosperity, openness, and decent governance across the globe.”62 Graham Allison of Harvard’s Kennedy School has written in Foreign Affairs that at a time when Washington identifies “a new era of great power competition,” and with China and Russia both asserting their power, America should accommodate itself to a spheres-ofinfluence policy, in which great powers “demand deference from other states in their own regions or exert predominant control there.”63

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence Robert Zoellick, former World Bank president, U.S. trade representative, and deputy secretary of state, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “China has decided to combine recovery at home with advocating for a world ‘community of shared interests.’ ” He added that Beijing is doing so with “the underlying aim of promoting ‘globalization with Chinese characteristics.’ ”64 Zoellick is an experienced and dedicated official who played a key role in promoting China’s entry into the WTO, but the disjunction between the two ideas here is startling. His conclusion that Beijing aims for globalization with Chinese characteristics is logical. But China’s conduct during the past decade provides compelling reason to distrust its intentions. Even a cursory listing of its behavior—the seizure and militarization of islands in the South China Sea, rampant technology theft, consistently predatory economic behavior, threats against countries that have allowed peaceful protests against China’s actions in Hong Kong, the forced resettlement of a million of its own Uighur population into concentration camps, massive increases in military spending, and policy choices that allowed coronavirus to spread more rapidly abroad—makes the assertion that Beijing desires a world of “shared interests” sound like wishful thinking. Wishful thinking also characterizes Fareed Zakaria’s contention that the policy he recommends might promote “openness, and decent governance” across the world. Everything in the PRC’s authoritarian rule points toward control of information and against transparency and openness. As for governance, China not only maintains dictatorial and oppressive domination at home, it supports corrupt and antidemocratic regimes abroad and actively opposes benign governance. Other authors have offered variations on these arguments. Almost all share similar limitations.65 For example, a think tank in Washington, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, advo-

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence cates American foreign policy retrenchment and withdrawal from foreign commitments in the belief that this will make the United States safer and more secure. Its deputy director, in a formulation that makes Zakaria and Zoellick sound like Otto von Bismarck, has taken the United States to task for its failure to “live in harmony with the world” and has claimed that his new strategy would “democratize” the global economy.66 That revisionist powers might have other priorities than living in harmony with America seems not to have crossed his mind. Allison, to his credit, does not exhibit similar optimism about Beijing’s benevolence, but like the others, he offers an assessment that deprives Beijing (as well as Moscow) of sufficient agency. That is, the policy recommendation for spheres of influence carries an implicit assumption that China’s and Russia’s conduct is mainly driven by grievances against the United States and that, to the extent that America pulls back, there will be less reason for antagonism and more scope for stable relationships, even outright cooperation. Yet in both Beijing and Moscow, as well as in Tehran, history, ideology, regime interests, and the domestic political uses of xenophobia provide deep sources of support for assertive, aggressive, and confrontational conduct. There is little reason to hope that America’s pulling back from Europe and East Asia would satisfy either China or Russia. A related shortcoming of the spheres-of-influence argument concerns “strategic narcissism,” the habit of basing U.S. foreign policy on the assumption that other countries’ actions are largely a product of what America says and does. H. R. McMaster, the former head of the National Security Council and a retired lieutenant general, recently observed that “Americans, as Hans Morgenthau noted long ago, tend to view the world only in relation to the United States

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence and to assume that the future course of events depends primarily on U.S. decisions or plans, or on the acceptance by others of our way of thinking.”67 He adds that this tendency underpinned the widely held assumptions that China’s closer integration with prevailing international institutions would promote its liberalization and reshape its behavior. The world has changed since the peak of America’s post–Cold War moment of unipolarity; we now live in a world of great power competition.68 Nonetheless, a critical limitation of the spheres-ofinfluence argument is the overestimation of Chinese and Russian power, even apart from the tendency to underestimate America’s underlying strengths and the resilience of its institutions and society. Allison, for example, uses a dicey statistic to underpin his position on China: the U.S. share of global GDP, he says, has dropped from a quarter in 1991 to a seventh today.69 But that calculation rests on GDP defined as purchasing power parity (PPP), a measurement that is appropriate for comparing non-market economies but not developed ones. China no longer fits the non-market category, and based on market exchange rates, the method preferred by the IMF and the one most widely used by authors and leading journals (among them The Economist), the United States still accounts for some 24 percent of world GDP and China 16 percent. Moreover, not only is America’s GDP still larger, but its GDP per capita is more than four times that of China.70 Despite China’s impressive rise, it has fundamental weaknesses that are easy to overlook when one is focused only on the effectiveness of its authoritarian party and leader. Its economic productivity is declining, its national debt has climbed to three times its annual GDP, a dangerous level, and its economic statistics are known to be manipulated. For these reasons China may find it hard to avoid the

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence middle-income trap, the tendency of poor countries to achieve rapid development but then stall before they can advance into the ranks of the most developed states. Demography is another important limitation. China has an aging population, a falling birthrate, and a shortage of women resulting from the long-term effects of its former one-child policy and the practice of sex-selective abortion. There are also potential political limitations. The intensifying authoritarian control exercised by Xi Jinping and the CPC can ultimately become self-defeating. Dictatorships are not adept at flexibility in response to changing circumstances. This makes it difficult for them to accept realistic feedback and undertake course correction. These characteristics make major failures, even disastrous ones, more likely. In addition, an increasingly educated and prosperous pop­ulation that is well aware of the outside world can become restless under the enforced conformity of ideas and beliefs, resulting in serious political instability. Important evidence of the enduring advantages of democracies can be found in political scientist Matthew Kroenig’s important study of great power competition between democracies and autocracies. Examining cases ranging from classical Greece to the Cold War, he finds that over the long term, democracies benefit from the strength and resilience of their institutions and the flexibility and adaptability of their political systems.71 Russia’s weaknesses are much more pronounced than China’s. President Putin has reversed the freedoms put in place by his predecessors, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, and even by his temporary presidential stand-in Dmitry Medvedev. The free press, independent courts, freedom of speech, genuine political competition, government transparency, and civil society have all been suppressed while Putin plays to the Russian sense of grievance, self-pity, and

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence nostalgia for the old Soviet Union.72 Widespread corruption discourages investment. The quality of health care and education is declining, and Russian authorities at every level of government are viewed as “thieving, incompetent, and callous.”73 During Putin’s presidency, the share of the economy controlled by the state has risen to 60 percent, a substantial part of which is influenced or dominated by Putin’s cronies. Not coincidentally, for the past decade, Russia’s economic growth rate has averaged just 1 percent a year. A respected Russian polling organization had found that 53 percent of people aged eighteen to twenty-four, and 21 percent of all Russians, want to leave the country permanently. As their major reasons for wanting to emigrate, respondents cited concern for their children’s future, the economy, Russia’s political situation, and the availability of better medical care abroad.74 Even Russia’s vaunted relationship with China is more opportunistic than deep-seated and is full of latent tensions. Moscow and Beijing do share strategic interests, and Russia is China’s primary supplier of natural gas, oil, and weapons. Even so, it has accused China of technology theft. The Russian state defense organization, Rostec, charged that China was illegally copying the designs of its weapons, especially of its most modern Sukhoi Su-35 fighter planes and its cutting-edge S-400 anti-aircraft missile system. Rostec’s head of intellectual property projects described these transgressions as a “huge problem” and complained that “there have been 500 such cases over the past 17 years.”75

A World Without the United States The idea held by many realists and progressives is that the United States should drastically pull back from Europe and Asia, perhaps

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Alternatives: China, Russia, Spheres of Influence even quit NATO and abandon its security guarantees to its Asian and Middle Eastern allies, and that this would leave those regions more peaceful. This is a position belied by reality. Far from a recipe for stability, spheres of influence are at least as likely to generate conflict. As H. R. McMaster observes about the aims of China’s rulers, “The party has no intention of playing by the rules associated with international law, trade, or commerce. China’s overall strategy relies on co-option and coercion at home and abroad as well as on concealing the nature of China’s true intentions.”76 A sphere-of-influence strategy, or its equivalent in the form of extensive disengagement, would generate conflict, and important regional states would not be reconciled to falling under the domination of their more powerful neighbors. India, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Australia all have their own agency and selfinterest and are likely to resist China’s effort to create a tribute system. Ironically, a withdrawal policy designed to promote stability and avoid war would most likely have the opposite effect and could well draw the United States into conflicts it hoped to avoid.77 America’s indispensability here is palpable. China’s neighbors have good reason to resist its efforts at dominance, but only the United States has the capacity to serve as the catalyst for the necessary regional counterbalance. Such a role is more likely to serve as a deterrent to conflict than as a cause of it.

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Chapter 5

IS THE UNITED STATES STILL INDISPENSABLE? America stands alone as the world’s indispensable nation. —President Bill Clinton, Second Inaugural, January 20, 1997 America has withdrawn from moral and material leadership of the world. —Author and historian Margaret MacMillan, May 9, 2020

So far I have argued that the world order is most seriously threatened by revisionist powers such as Russia, China, and Iran, not the United States, and that for different reasons, neither Europe nor China—the only two plausible options—is a candidate to take over the role of maintaining that order. But the question remains: is it antiquated to think of the American role as needing to be filled at all? An entire generation has gone by since the end of the Cold War, and more than three-quarters of a century has passed since the end of World War II. Why is a major power committed to sustaining a rules-based international order still necessary? And even if such a power remains desirable, can the United States still provide the requisite leadership?

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Indispensability and World Order The coronavirus pandemic provides a stark example of a problem that can be far better managed through international cooperation than by national responses alone. The need for such management, however, does not guarantee an effective response. U.N. secretarygeneral António Guterres described the pandemic as the most challenging crisis since the U.N.’s founding, yet the Security Council showed itself unable to act. Despite pleas from the General Assembly, deep disagreement between the United States and China over the pandemic’s origin precluded agreement on a joint effort, causing the director of a prominent non-governmental organization to complain about the Council’s “shambolic disunity.”1 While the U.N.’s paralysis was not unusual, the Trump administration’s disengagement was widely seen as unprecedented. As The Economist put it, “This is the first international crisis since 1945 in which America has not only spurned global leadership but, by cutting funds to the World Health Organization, actively undermined a coordinated international response.”2 If the pandemic has been notable for its severity and the disarray of national responses, it also illuminates two broader realities. One is the need for a major world power to galvanize international action on common problems. The other is the importance of the role the United States has customarily played as leader and catalyst for collective action. Beyond the pandemic, there is a familiar list of shared global problems, including nuclear proliferation and arms control, terrorism, climate change, financial crises, rules and norms for international trade, refugees, human rights, and the rule of law. Each of these problems calls for a collective response to what is a mostly shared challenge, but there exists no global government to resolve

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? them. The resulting dilemma for relations among nations was memorably conveyed by Thomas Hobbes more than three and a half centuries ago: “Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common power to keep them in awe, they are in that condition which is called war.”3 However much we might wish for alternatives to American leadership, the most prominent possibilities are either inadequate or undesirable. A great deal therefore depends on the United States itself.

Can America Still Lead? Time and again, in the coronavirus pandemic, in global financial crises, or in humanitarian emergencies, the presence of the United States, the form of its engagement, or the fact of its absence becomes a matter of central importance. Sometimes America’s leadership is praised and encouraged, sometimes it is criticized or condemned, but rarely does an urgent international problem fail to elicit vigorous debate about Washington’s response. Recently, America has been widely depicted as a declining hegemon, increasingly prone to pull back from its long-time commitments. The rise of revisionist powers and the global diffusion of economic, geopolitical, and military strength make it more difficult for Washington to exercise its customary role. Added to these external challenges are multiple domestic constraints. The financial crisis of 2008–9 and the pandemic-caused recession of 2020–21 both caused massive budget deficits that limited the resources America has available for global engagement. The passing decades have seen the dis­ appearance not only of the World War II generation but also of those whose memories were shaped by the Cold War and America’s achievement in overcoming the threat posed by the Soviet Union.

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? Succeeding generations are less likely to prioritize foreign policy, more likely to resist the use of power abroad, and more inclined to be skeptical about the virtues of the United States in comparison with other countries. Moreover, the American people elected two recent presidents who, often to the dismay of allies and friends, sought to shed vital international responsibilities. Their successor, Joe Biden, who rhetorically embraced an international leadership role, pledging that “America is back,” seemed to abandon it with a chaotic Afghan withdrawal that left allies and NATO partners in the lurch. This disposition contrasts vividly with the ambitious vision of John F. Kennedy’s presidential inaugural speech in 1961, in which he promised that America would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” Taken literally, Kennedy’s rhetoric would have amounted to endless overreach, but the intent of his words was much more symbolic, to rally the American people to a shared sense of national purpose in the lengthy Cold War and to signal U.S. determination to its allies, friends, and adversaries. The current willingness of Americans to bear foreign burdens remains very much in question. Not only is the degree of public support for such leadership in doubt, so is the desirability of playing that role at all. A number of recent works offer sweeping condemnations of America’s global role. For example, former U.S. Army colonel and professor emeritus at Boston University Andrew Bacevich is sweepingly critical of U.S. foreign policy since World War II. He paints Russian hostility as largely a reaction to U.S. policies and downplays the importance of Stalin and Soviet ideology during the Cold War. He portrays America as “coming apart at the seams” and castigates an “intoxicated elite” for having pursued disastrous poli-

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? cies of “globalized neoliberalism and militarized global hegemony” since the end of the Cold War.4 Bacevich’s arguments reflect the world view of the Quincy Institute, the Washington, D.C., think tank he heads. The institute itself, with deep-pocketed funders from the political left and right (who are thus part of the very elite that Bacevich demonizes), advocates a definitive retreat from America’s world role. These condemnations and exhortations are sometimes amplified by bitter political polarization at home and by criticism from abroad. But it is more useful analytically to step back and assess America’s overall accomplishments over the past seventy-five years. From that perspective, the American contribution is much clearer, regardless of its imperfections and at times costly foreign policy mistakes.5 Its leadership position, its role in creating and sustaining the framework of a rules-based and market-oriented international order, and its ability to bear disproportionate costs in doing so have brought unprecedented advances in global living standards, regional security, the expansion of democratic governance, and the protection of U.S. national interests. Without U.S. leadership, the world would have been poorer, dirtier, less free, and less secure. There is abundant evidence for this conclusion. The security and stability of Europe and Asia since 1945 contrast vividly with previous eras. The number of democracies and the percentage of the world’s population living in democratic societies have greatly expanded over the same period, despite serious backsliding in recent years. Of the 193 countries examined in the widely respected Freedom House’s 2021 annual report, 82 were rated free, 59 as partly free, and 54 not free.6 Global figures for life expectancy, infant mortality, and literacy have greatly improved, bringing major advancement to more than a billion people. Whereas in 1981, 42 percent

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, the current proportion is less than 10 percent.7 Nearly two decades ago, reflecting on the long-term significance of the United States, the prominent French public intellectual and essayist Dominique Moïsi said this about America’s unique importance: Viewed over the long course of world history, I would argue that never before has a country had as much power as the United States and used it, on the whole, with such moderation. I would go even further to say that if the United States did not exist, it would have to be invented. The world would be infinitely more chaotic were it not for the United States. That America is far from perfect, we all agree. . . . But there is also an America that is indispensable, without which the history of humanity in the twentieth century would have been infinitely more tragic.8

That continuing reality, as well as the obligation it implies, was expressed by Barack Obama in the letter he left on the White House desk for Donald Trump. Sobered by his eight years as president and by the difficulty of persuading other nations to take up more of the burden of global leadership, Obama wrote: “American leadership in this world really is indispensable. It’s up to us, through action and example, to sustain the international order that’s expanded steadily since the end of the Cold War, and upon which our own wealth and safety depend.”9 Martin Wolf, an economic journalist at the Financial Times who was often sharply critical of Trump administration policy and pessimistic about the durability of the liberal international order, also has offered a perceptive observation about the historic importance of

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? America’s leadership, writing, “Close cooperation among the highincome countries was largely a creation of U.S. will and power.”10 Judgments like those of Moïsi and Wolf are not limited to Europeans. The prime minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong, has written, “What made Asia’s stability and prosperity possible was the United States. The United States championed an open, integrated, and rules-based global order and provided a security umbrella under which regional countries could cooperate and peacefully compete.”11

Obstacles Foreign and Domestic Given, however, that America has been indispensable in the past, the question remains whether it can fulfill some version of this role in the future. If indispensability means global hegemony, then the answer is surely no. Former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt has called the coronavirus pandemic “the first global crisis of the postAmerican era,” while numerous authors and pundits have proclaimed the end of American hegemony.12 Consider just a small sampling of headlines in recent years describing America’s worsening problems abroad: Our Days as a Superpower May Be Numbered How Hegemony Ends: The Unraveling of American Power Two Central Asia Summits Challenge the United States American Vow to Defend Gulf is Facing a Test: Hesitation to Act May Embolden Teheran Outfoxed and Outgunned: How China Routed the U.S. in a U.N. Agency In This Crisis, U.S. Sheds Its Role as Global Leader Retreat From Germany: Withdrawing U.S. Troops Would Be a Win for Russia—and China13

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? More widely still, in print and online, a legion of authors and commentators proclaim the arrival of a post-hegemonic or postAmerican era. But they describe what was already evident by 2010: we no longer live in a lone superpower world. Here it is useful to recall the insight of the late Charles Krauthammer. In 1990 he celebrated America’s post–Cold War predominance and authored a widely read essay heralding its “unipolar moment.” Yet at the same time, he struck a cautionary note: “No doubt, multipolarity will come in time.”14 In 2003, following the terror attacks of 9/11 on New York and Washington, a war in Afghanistan, and another about to begin in Iraq, Krauthammer summarized the 1990s as a “holiday from history.”15 The United States was now in the midst of a harsh return to reality. Of course the United States no longer enjoys the predominance it had less than a generation ago. It certainly is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, but it never was. Even at the peak of its relative power, it experienced periodic policy failures and often could not secure the outcomes it sought. Since the end of World War II, despite its military, economic, and political predominance, America has not been able to avoid major foreign policy reversals. In 1945–48, the Soviets imposed Communist regimes on the countries of Eastern Europe. In August 1949, years ahead of what had been thought possible, the Soviets ended America’s nuclear monopoly by successfully exploding an atomic bomb. That October, Mao’s Communist forces prevailed in the civil war in China, defeating the American-supported Nationalist government. In June 1950, North Korea, supported by Russia and China, invaded South Korea. The attack propelled the United States into a costly regional war that cost 37,000 American lives before reaching a stalemate in 1953. A year later, France’s National Assembly rejected an American-backed

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? proposal for a European army as a means of rearming Germany and sharing the U.S. burden in defending Europe. In 1959, revolution in Cuba brought Fidel Castro and the Communist Party to power. In April 1961, a CIA-supported exile invasion at the Bay of Pigs turned into a fiasco that deeply embarrassed the new Kennedy administration. In October 1962, the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba triggered a nuclear crisis that brought Washington and Moscow to the brink of war. The Soviets withdrew the weapons, but the Castro regime remained in power. Throughout the Cold War, the allies constantly disagreed over burden sharing, with many NATO members failing to meet what in the 1970s became the organization’s military spending target of 3 percent of GDP (later reestablished in the post–Cold War era at 2 percent). France often proved recalcitrant on alliance issues, and in 1966 President Charles de Gaulle withdrew French forces from NATO’s integrated military command and forced its headquarters to move from Paris to Brussels. Then there was South Vietnam. From 1963 to 1973, U.S. forces fought a bloody and ultimately unsuccessful war that killed 58,000 U.S. soldiers and caused bitter domestic conflict. American troops withdrew in 1973, and the North Vietnamese, supported by the Soviet Union and China, achieved victory in April 1975. Added to these reversals were costly oil shocks in 1973–74 and 1979, the fall of the shah of Iran followed by the rise of an Islamist regime deeply hostile to the United States, and the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, where fifty-two American diplomats were held hostage for 444 days. To these events can be added foreign interventions and failed efforts at nation building in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Haiti, Libya, and Somalia. The point of this litany of failures is to demonstrate that past and

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? present reversals and shortcomings do not tell us whether the United States possesses the strengths and resources it needs to play a role no other country can play. If we listen only to narratives about loss of influence and leadership abroad, we might easily conclude that the United States has been in a condition of profound decline since the end of the Second World War. Is the United States in Decline? Nothing lasts forever, and it is well worth asking whether the end of the long era of American global predominance is foreclosing the possibilities for U.S. leadership. The material and ideational basis of that leadership does appear to be eroding, but measuring this is not easy and can involve arbitrary assumptions. Among the most useful historical assessments of hegemonic decline and power transition is Robert Gilpin’s seminal work War and Change in World Politics.16 Gilpin draws upon the examples of ancient Athens, Imperial Rome, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States to identify three broad causes of great power decline. The first of these concerns the cost of maintaining hegemonic leadership, similar to the phenomenon Paul Kennedy identified as “imperial overstretch.”17 Collective action dilemmas and the burdens of maintaining an alliance mean that the strongest state typically pays a disproportionate price to sustain existing power relationships.18 The American complaint about allies failing to meet agreed-upon thresholds for national defense spending is simply one instance of a chronic problem for dominant powers. Blunt threats by the Trump administration did generate increased financial commitments, but as of 2021, only ten of NATO’s thirty members (the United States, Greece, the United Kingdom, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Lithuania, France, and Croatia) met the recommended

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? benchmark.19 Germany, with Europe’s largest economy, devotes only 1.53 percent of its GDP to defense.20 Beyond Europe, America’s defense spending in Asia also imposes a substantial burden, and not just in comparison with its allies there. The United States maintains a power projection capability involving extensive naval and air deployments. Added to these have been the costs of two long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, though America’s intervention in Afghanistan has ended and its role in Iraq has been greatly reduced with the withdrawal of almost all U.S. troops. U.S. defense spending amounted to 5 percent of GDP in 2011 and by 2021 had declined to 3.52 percent.21 Compared with the Cold War era, in which the defense budget reached more than 10 percent in the 1950s and 6–8 percent in subsequent decades, current military burdens might seem quite manageable. The difference, however, lies in America’s current and long-term fiscal deficits, which create an altogether different set of constraints. Here, a second long-term cause of hegemonic decline comes into play, the phenomenon of rising domestic consumption. In the United States, an aging population and the steadily increasing burden of entitlement payments for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans’ benefits, along with increasing budget deficits and national debt, unless offset by tax increases, impose limits on America’s capacity to sustain the costs of global leadership. These limits affect not only defense spending but many other key elements of national power as well, including education, infrastructure, science, technology, foreign aid, and the maintenance of numerous core government functions.­ The increasing federal deficit has become a policy preference, with both Republican and Democratic administrations and congressional majorities unwilling or unable to undertake serious budget reform even in times of economic growth. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, federal

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? deficits were already projected to reach $1 trillion per year, despite strong economic growth and historically low unemployment. With the Covid-19 crisis, multi-trillion-dollar federal spending to ward off financial collapse and to sustain the national economy has hugely increased the national debt. During the first half of 2020, Congress and the Trump administration enacted an unprecedented fiscal stimulus amounting to 12.3 percent of GDP.22 Subsequently, the Biden administration succeeded in passing legislation to spend an additional $2 trillion and sought additional measures with potential costs of up to $5 trillion. As a result, the federal budget deficit surged, reaching $3.1 trillion in fiscal year 2020 and $3.7 trillion in FY 2021.23 Some economic analysts expressed deep concern about the debt and its inflationary long-term consequences.24 Others countered that the enormous increase in spending might not produce these effects. Until mid 2021, the Federal Reserve Bank was able to increase the money supply and to keep interest rates at historic lows. Market economists noted that the Fed had made massive purchases of debt, as had central banks in Britain, the European Union, and Japan. In addition, the U.S. Treasury had been able to borrow and spend vast amounts, and yet until mid-2021 inflation had remained at low levels. As Sebastian Mallaby noted, the United States benefited from the fact that nearly two-thirds of foreign central bank reserves are composed of dollars. In addition, the Federal Reserve’s huge purchases of Treasury bonds increased their price and caused the yield on the ten-year bond to drop to historically low levels. This had the effect of constraining the percentage of GDP required to service a national debt that has surged by trillions of dollars.25 The United States also faces a looming demographic problem. Half a century ago, there were five people in the workforce for each

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? person receiving Social Security and Medicare benefits. That ratio is now three workers for every beneficiary, and it will continue to shrink as the baby boomer generation (those born between 1946 and 1964) retires. The declining birthrate makes the problem worse. Figures from the CIA indicate that the total fertility rate (TFR, the average number of live births per woman in her lifetime) has dropped to a post–World War II low of 1.84. That figure falls well below the benchmark TFR of 2.1 percent needed to avoid long-term population decline.26 A Brookings Institution analysis of U.S. Census data finds that the 2010s may have seen the slowest population growth in U.S. history, with a 7.1 percent overall population increase for the decade.27 Even so, that figure remains higher than in much of Asia and Europe. Although immigration could partly offset the decline, a declining birthrate has negative long-term implications for the size of the workforce. National strength rests partly on population size and growth. But the United States is doing better demographically than China, which has an estimated 2021 TFR of 1.60, an aging population, and an unbalanced male/female ratio due to its former one-child policy. Russia likewise has a TFR of 1.60 and is facing population decline.28 A third cause of great power decline is the diffusion of technology. Late modernizers, such as Japan after 1864 and again in the 1960s and ’70s, as well as China after 1978, can move quickly up the technology curve as erstwhile cutting-edge ideas and scientific breakthroughs are widely shared. In the post–World War II era, U.S. achievements in nuclear weapons, aircraft, missiles, and electronics were quickly matched by the Soviets, and in more recent decades, advances in high-speed computing, precision weapons, and advanced technology of all kinds have been adopted by China and others.

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? While many of China’s recent advances have been accelerated by intellectual piracy as well as by forced technology transfer from firms wanting to invest in China, Beijing’s massive investments in science and technology have also become a factor in both military and civilian fields. In 2018, its total spending on scientific research was for the first time estimated to equal or possibly even exceed that of the United States.29 China and Russia are ambitiously pursuing research and development of advanced weapons such as hypersonic missiles, a technology in which the United States is thought to be lagging, and in October 2021 China conducted a successful global test flight of such a missile. Another example is the military use of drone technology. Once the near monopoly of the United States and Israel, this has spread so widely that Iran and even the terrorist group Hezbollah are now able to produce and deploy these weapons. The National Science Foundation’s Center for Science and Engineering Statistics describes the U.S. predominance in science and engineering as contested. Though America continues to lead in “fundamental research” (theoretical and applied work that generates new knowledge), China is putting proportionately more money into experimental development (work that develops new materials and devices).30 A Council on Foreign Relations task force warns that America risks losing its edge in technology. It urges increased investment in artificial intelligence, data science, advanced semiconductors, genomics, synthetic biology, quantum information systems, 5G cellular networks, and robotics and warns that American leadership is threatened by the “accelerating pace of innovation, the diffusion of multiple-use technologies, and the rise of China.”31 The importance of technology diffusion in undercutting America’s advantages may be set against what the defense policy expert and realist author Barry Posen calls America’s “command of the com-

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? mons.”32 Posen’s assessment, published in 2003, at the height of America’s post–Cold War power, identified unique U.S. military and technological advantages in the air, in space, at sea, and under the sea. With such an overwhelming edge, he argued, the United States could readily afford to reduce its overseas deployments without endangering its strategic predominance. But since he made that argument, the extensive spread of technology in both the military and civilian spheres has eroded America’s lead in the global commons. Its edge in the air, space, sea, and subsea has not entirely disappeared, but it is far more contested than in the 1990s. A Word of Caution Despite these indicators, we should be skeptical about the reports of decline. For one thing, they are nothing new. From the revolutionary era through the Civil War and into the twentieth century, America’s fate has often seemed to hang in the balance. Baleful projections of its internal weakness, waning international influence, and impending downfall are a hardy perennial in scholarly and popular discourse. As far back as the 1760s and 1770s, the widely read French naturalist and author Count Georges-Louis de Buffon disparaged not only the American people but their plants and animals.33 Many European natural historians of that era held the bizarre belief that everything in the New World was shrunken or degenerate. Buffon claimed that all things there “shrink and diminish.” Benjamin Franklin, as U.S. ambassador to France, made it a point to counter Buffon’s claims. At a Paris dinner party, he invited the Americans and the French, seated on opposite sides of the table, to rise so that their height could be compared. Franklin wrote to his successor, Thomas Jefferson, that the Americans were of the “finest stature, while the French were diminutive.”34 Both during and after his tenure as ambassador,

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? Jefferson followed Franklin in speaking and writing in opposition to Buffon’s views. Fully a chapter of his book Notes on the State of Virginia in 1785 was devoted to a specific rebuttal of Buffon.35 During the 1930s, at a time of severe economic depression and massive unemployment, many voices at home and abroad argued that American-style capitalism and representative democracy were finished and that the only viable pathways forward were those of European-style fascism, Soviet-style communism, or some other form of authoritarianism. For example, Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s The Wave of the Future, published in early 1940, expressed fore­ boding about war and the American future. Her book advocated isolationism, as her husband Charles Lindbergh had done with the “America First” committee, and she urged an accommodation with Adolf Hitler, who was then in the early phase of his European conquests.36 On the other end of the political spectrum, in the late 1930s, the American Communist Party, under its leader Earl Browder, launched a campaign with the slogan “Communism is 20th Century Americanism.”37 Yet during World War II, the United States played an outsize role in fighting and defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. It emerged in 1945 as the strongest power on earth, accounting for fully half of world GDP, and led its allies in creating the key institutions of the post-war liberal international order. The fascist challenge had been crushed, and all three Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) soon became American allies, but the Soviet threat was longer-lasting, and at times it occasioned dire warnings that the United States had fallen dangerously behind. The Soviet launch of the world’s first space satellite, Sputnik 1, in October 1957 gave rise to fears about America’s lagging competitiveness, loss of focus, and the supposedly sorry state of its educational system,

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? especially in science and technology. There were fears that the Russians were opening up a dangerous lead in military and space technology, and critics of the Eisenhower administration warned of a looming missile gap. In the presidential election of 1960, John F. Kennedy ran on a pledge to get America moving again, but the concern soon proved to be exaggerated. Improved satellite surveillance technology revealed that the United States had remained well ahead of the Soviets, and in 1969, the country fulfilled Kennedy’s pledge that America would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Another wave of declinist projections emerged in the 1970s and early 1980s, during a time of serious reversals abroad and crises at home. These included the Vietnam War, the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis, major Soviet inroads in the developing world, and warnings that the “correlation of forces,” meaning the overall balance of national and geopolitical power, was turning in favor of Moscow.38 At home, urban riots, the Watergate crisis, the effects of two major oil shocks, the worst recession since World War II (including record post-war levels of unemployment and inflation), and the depleted presidency of Jimmy Carter also contributed to a sense of disarray and decline.39 The challenge came not only from the Soviets. In the mid-1970s and 1980s, America also seemed to be falling behind Japan. Here the challenge was not ideological and military but economic. Japan had emerged as a dynamic modern manufacturer and exporter, not only in important consumer industries such as automobiles but in electronics and modern technology. The same week in 1989 that the Berlin Wall came down, a leading Japanese business leader and his co-author, a prominent politician, were quoted in the New York Times, “We are going to have a totally new configuration in the balance of power in the world,” and “there is no hope for the US.”40

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? Some Americans shared this pessimism. The prominent trade expert Clyde Prestowitz wrote the same year that “Japan has . . . become the undisputed world economic champion.”41 Even as late as 1993, one of America’s most acute strategic thinkers, Samuel Huntington, expressed deep concern about Japan’s rising economic power, its expanding lead in key military technologies, and declining U.S. influence in other countries.42 Yet the Cold War ended in 1989–90, and the Soviet Union itself disintegrated in 1991. In a rich irony, its model of society wound up in Karl Marx’s “dustbin of history.” Japan, which had seemed to be such a formidable economic juggernaut, slipped into a period of economic stagnation that lasted for two decades and, due to its aging population, experienced demographic decline. America, which had not after all suffered debilitating overstretch, spent the 1990s in a position of seemingly unchallenged economic strength and geopolitical power. In material terms, though America’s relative edge has certainly eroded over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, it continues to possess strengths that are largely unmatched by other countries, even its foremost peer competitor, China. Among these are the size, breadth, and depth of the American economy and financial markets, as seen in the resilience of its institutions as well as its competitiveness, technology, superior research universities, capacity for innovation, energy and natural resources, all of which are distinctively bolstered by the unique role of the dollar in global trade. The financial crisis triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020– 21 inflicted a heavy toll on the United States and the world economy, yet like the Great Recession of 2007–9, it had the paradoxical effect of highlighting the degree to which America remains the world’s leading financial power.

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? The extent of this dominance is set out by the economist Jeffrey Frankel, a professor at Harvard, former member of the Council of Economic Advisers, and member of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee. In an article on Project Syndicate, Frankel addressed the question “Who Has the World’s Largest Economy?”43 He acknowledges that the World Bank’s comparative data for 2020 show China’s GDP narrowly ahead of the United States in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), $19.6 trillion per year versus $19.5 trillion. Figures like these have inspired excited newspaper headlines that China was about to surpass the United States as the world’s top economic power or indeed had already done so. But Frankel offers two huge caveats. The first is that China’s per capita income is only slightly greater than that of Egypt and trails those of Brazil, Iran, Thailand, and Mexico. Moreover, while PPP is the preferred method for comparing per capita incomes, it is not ideal for assessing total national income and geopolitical power. For that, GDP at actual market exchange rates is the better indicator, and by that measure, America’s economy still remains 50 percent larger than China’s ($19.5 trillion versus $12.1 trillion). Another leading financial expert elaborates on America’s advantage. Ruchir Sharma of Morgan Stanley Bank points out that while the first decade of the twenty-first century saw the weakest U.S. economic growth in half a century, the century’s second decade brought a return to impressive growth and did so without a recession for the first time since 1850. By 2019, the U.S. percentage of global GDP had increased to 25 percent, exactly where it stood in 1980, on the eve of China’s great economic surge.44 Sharma cites other U.S. advantages over China, including being home to seven of the world’s ten largest companies and having a working-age population that is still increasing while China’s is shrinking. Despite efforts by China

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? and others to find an alternative to the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, only 2 percent of world bank reserves are held in yuan. And as the 2020–21 financial crisis again demonstrated, the U.S. Federal Reserve in effect functions as the world’s central bank. Although China has experienced extraordinary growth since opening its economy in 1978, there remain valid reasons why it might never overtake the United States. Under Xi Jinping, the state has increasingly reasserted control over the economy, and state banks are funneling more and more of their loans to inefficient state industries. Xi’s efforts to constrict freedom of information, reimpose ideological orthodoxy, and tighten Communist Party control over the educational and university curriculum are likely to retard rather than enhance scientific and technological progress. China’s accomplishments have been remarkable, but we should not overstate its potential for ascendency. Its rapid economic progress since the 1980s has followed a trajectory similar to Japan’s in the 1950s and ’60s and South Korea’s and Taiwan’s in the 1960s and ’70s. These were developing countries that greatly benefited from large-scale capital imports and export-led growth, but in each case, the trajectory eventually slowed—just as China’s is now doing.45 In addition, China’s foreign policy behavior, including the “wolf warrior” aggressiveness that its foreign representatives have adopted in their diplomatic behavior, has been counterproductive. Polls in the United States, Canada, and Australia provide strong evidence of increased public concern about China.46 Even though Beijing’s conduct may have successfully intimidated some countries, most of its neighbors have reacted negatively, including Japan, Australia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, and India. In addition, Beijing’s behavior has alienated much of Europe and the Americas, and parts of Africa and the Middle East.

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Is the United States Still Indispensable? China’s cyber spying and its passage of a law requiring Chinese firms to comply with any request Beijing’s intelligence agencies make of them have also made European, North American, and East Asian countries increasingly wary. This is evident, for example, in foreign buyers’ caution about purchasing Huawei’s 5G cell phone technology. Britain and the United States both have halted acquisition of the systems, in part because European firms like Ericsson (Sweden) and Nokia (Finland) as well as possibly Samsung (South Korea) represent potential alternatives as telecom suppliers. An innovative software-related technology, O-RAN (Open Radio Access Networks), could also provide an eventual alternative to the Huawei hardware.47 As for the United States, despite the China challenge as well as apocalyptic warnings about domestic threats to its democracy, the country’s long-standing institutions and rule of law remain deeply rooted and have withstood greater challenges than today’s. The material dimensions of American power remain unique, and even though they are increasingly contested abroad and at home, their importance should not be underestimated. But the political, social, and cultural context for the exercise of America’s indispensable role has become increasingly problematic.

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Chapter 6

POLITICS, SOCIETY, AND CULTURE Much depends on health and vigor of our own society. —George Kennan, “The Long Telegram,” 1946 Social capital had seen a deterioration over the decade—the only pillar of prosperity not to have improved. While personal and family relationships had strengthened, social networks, trust in institutions, and civic and social participation had all weakened. —The Legatum Institute, 2021 A country convinced that it is irredeemably racist can’t lead the world as the “indispensable nation.” —Political scientist Daniel Schwammenthal

America’s international leadership remains unique. Its indispensability consists in the importance of its active engagement and its role as a catalyst in addressing collective action problems. The rulesbased liberal order can be sustained only by America in cooperation with allies and others. Despite formidable challenges abroad, the United States retains the material strength to play such a role. In short, America is indispensable, and it has the capacity to lead. But a central problem concerns the domestic basis on which its international en-

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Politics, Society, and Culture gagement ultimately rests. Do Americans and their elected policymakers still want to lead? Strident differences within civil society and intense political polarization pose challenges not only to an active U.S. world role but to the very idea of what it means to be American. Fierce internal debates have erupted over fundamental issues of politics, culture, and society. Underlying causes can be found in previous decades, but those disagreements have intensified in recent years. At the same time, the ideational elements of national power have been shaken by events. The confluence of the Covid-19 pandemic, a massive financial and economic shock as a result of the virus, and widespread social protests and riots triggered by the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department (which exposed long-simmering racial tensions) intensified that dissensus. In addition, the specious claims by Trump and his most avid supporters that the 2020 election was stolen, which led to the assault of January 6 on the Capitol, intensified the sense of disarray. The election of Joe Biden as president brought to the White House a proclaimed moderate committed to reaching out to all Americans and acting as a domestic unifier while also aiming to restore America’s position of international leadership. Yet despite the change in presidential rhetoric and style, intense partisan divisions have remained largely intact, as is evident both in a closely divided Congress and in attitudes expressed by the public. In office, responding to the increased weight of the Democratic Party’s progressive left, Biden’s appeal across party lines was quite limited. In policies and appointments, he tilted toward that activist base rather than following the more measured and bipartisan approach that some moderate and independent supporters had anticipated. Perhaps surprisingly, opinion polls about the Biden presidency found even

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Politics, Society, and Culture greater partisan gaps in approval than had been the case for his predecessors. Gallup reported that among Democrats, 96 percent gave positive job approval ratings to Biden, but among Republicans, only 10 percent did so. The 86 percent gap between the Democrats and Republicans was actually greater than that for Trump (77 percent), Obama (56 percent), George W. Bush (57 percent), and Clinton (50 percent).1 In order to assess the meaning of these divisions and their wider implications, it is useful to begin with reference to the long-standing tradition of robust and at times angry debate that has characterized American politics. From there, I turn to the contemporary period in order to take into account not only diverging political preferences but also the cultural, social, and intellectual divides that underlie them. In today’s America, those on the right and the left hold genuinely different world views. Nonetheless, there remains a nuanced foreign policy approach that has the potential to draw support from both sides and thus enable the United States to sustain its leadership role.

From the Federalists to the Twentieth Century: The Rough and Tumble of Politics In taking stock of American life, it is well to remember that its politics, society, and culture have always had a rough-and-tumble quality and that domestic disagreements have foreign policy implications. As far back as the late eighteenth century, bitter differences erupted between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans over whether to side with revolutionary France in its war with Britain. At the time, the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798–1801) temporarily restricted freedoms of speech and the press. In America’s earliest years, inflammatory rhetoric marked most presidential elections, especially that of the year 1800, in which Thomas Jefferson defeated

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Politics, Society, and Culture John Adams. And not to be forgotten, in 1804, Alexander Hamilton, a leader of the Federalist Party and former treasury secretary, was shot to death in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr. Intractable differences over slavery threatened to tear the country apart, and by the mid-nineteenth century they actually did. As early as 1838, Abraham Lincoln warned that “the approach of danger” from within threatened the survival of the American experiment. Lincoln was alarmed by “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.”2 The Civil War that followed took the lives of some 660,000 Americans and was followed by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Despite passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, full civil, political, and legal rights for African Americans were bitterly resisted in the South, and it took another hundred years for these reforms to be legally recognized and implemented through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. By the beginning of the twentieth century, labor rights, ­women’s rights, and the size and power of Gilded Age corporate monopolies were also becoming subjects of intense political dispute. The twentieth century also brought angry arguments about foreign intervention and war. During World War I, anarchists and opponents of the war were jailed, and the immediate post-war years saw deportations of radicals and Bolsheviks. The rise of Jim Crow laws early in the century brought racial hatred to levels that at times proved lethal. In 1921, a white mob in Tulsa, Oklahoma, burned a prosperous black neighborhood to the ground and in two days killed some three hundred of its residents. The 1920s saw the revival of the Ku Klux Klan,

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Politics, Society, and Culture with lynching remaining a vile stain on American democracy during the interwar years. A 1924 law sharply curtailed immigration by setting restrictive national quotas based on the 1890 census, with the practical effect of discriminating against those from Southern and Eastern Europe, especially Catholics and Jews. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, struggles between left and right included sharp and sometimes violent conflicts over labor rights, politics, and race. Isolationists and those on the right such as Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, and the notorious anti-Semitic Roman Catholic priest and radio broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin agitated against intervention in Europe while expressing sympathy for Nazi Germany, excoriating President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and scapegoating Jews. The isolationist America First Committee, established in 1940, quickly gained eight hundred thousand members and became the largest anti-war movement in the country. On the left, an influential Communist Party (CPUSA) attracted followers and sympathizers with the claim that “Communism is 20th Century Americanism,” yet it faithfully followed policy dictates from Moscow. In 1935, after years of hostility to parties of the democratic left (calling them “social fascists”), the CPUSA switched to advocating an inclusive liberal and leftist anti-fascist Popular Front. But after the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed their NonAggression Pact on August 23, 1939, followed a week later by Germany’s invasion of Poland, the CPUSA suddenly switched to ad­ vocating neutrality for the United States and criticizing British and Western imperialism. The party line was suddenly reversed less than two years later, with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Only this time, with the USSR under attack, the CPUSA pivoted to active support of the war effort and collaboration with anti-fascist forces. On the right, war abroad also impacted politics

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Politics, Society, and Culture at home. The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, propelled the United States into World War II and led Charles Lindbergh to rally around the war effort, bringing the immediate collapse of the America First Committee. The end of World War II, followed by the start of the Cold War and the outbreak of the Korean War, also saw the rise of McCarthyism, initiated by the Texas congressman Martin Dies and the House Un-­ American Activities Committee (HUAC). From 1950 onward, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and others led a highly publicized and mostly contrived search to expose Communists in government. Before and during World War II, Soviet spies had penetrated government agencies including the Treasury, the State Department, the Office of Strategic Services (antecedent of the CIA), and the Manhattan Project (responsible for the atomic bomb), but during the immediate post-war years most Soviet spying had been discovered and its networks disbanded.3 McCarthyism featured reckless and demagogic attacks on domestic political opponents, not just the smaller number of Soviet supporters but also leftists and liberals who were smeared as Communist sympathizers or traitors. At one point, McCarthy even claimed that under Truman and Eisenhower, America had lived through “twenty years of treason.” This era reached its end in December 1954 when the Senate voted by a margin of 65 to 22 to censure McCarthy for conduct “contrary to senatorial traditions.” The early 1960s witnessed violent and sometimes deadly resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, followed by the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy. By 1970, America was experiencing massive dissent over the Vietnam War, urban riots, and incidents of domestic bombings and terrorism carried out by the Weather Underground and other extremist groups.

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Politics, Society, and Culture These episodes of the turmoil that has occurred throughout American history, including periods of angry, vitriolic, and sometimes violent division and debate, should not be forgotten. Yet this history also serves as evidence that this vast and diverse country possesses deep-seated, resilient, and durable democratic institutions that have shown themselves able to withstand daunting crises throughout the lifetime of the republic.

Common Experiences More often than not, America has been held together by common experiences. Over the past century, two world wars and the Cold War brought a sense of shared purpose, not merely for those who experienced them at first hand—as millions did in military service— but also for the vast majority of the civilian population. These common experiences also helped the nation assimilate huge numbers of immigrants. Urban life, public schools, sports, radio, and the movies exposed people to shared images, memories, and ways of life. From the 1950s through the 1980s, television played a similar role, with a limited number of major broadcast channels and network newscasts. Newspapers too exercised a mediating and filtering function. For a majority of the World War II generation and their offspring, America and its government retained a mostly positive reputation and record of achievement. At home, the country had overcome the Great Depression, resettled its World War II veterans, delivered education and prosperity, and passed the civil rights acts of 1964–65. Abroad, it had partnered with Britain and the USSR to defeat fascism, led in the creation of the post-war order, won the race to the moon, and prevailed over the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

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Politics, Society, and Culture Of course America was—and is—imperfect. The Watergate scandal and Nixon’s 1974 resignation, Vietnam, urban riots, the oil shocks of 1973–74 and 1979–80, excesses by the FBI and CIA, the Iran hostage crisis, severe inflation and unemployment in the late 1970s and early ’80s as well as racial inequality led many in the successor generations to take a more critical view of American government and society. Much of this was mitigated during the latter part of the 1980s and 1990s thanks to renewed economic growth, the end of the Cold War, and a widely heralded U.S.-led victory in the Gulf War of 1991. Just after this, the onset and rapid advance of the digital era sparked a period of technological optimism. With the passage of time, however, America in the twenty-first century has again seen increasing signs of eroding national cohesion. The situation is often conflated with arguments about a decline or even collapse of American power, but as described above, the material components of that power remain strong and resilient. The end of the Cold War and the absence of an overarching and unambiguous threat on the scale of the two world wars and the Cold War have played a part in the loss of common purpose. This lack of shared purpose as well as perceptions of rising inequality and unresolved issues of race and class have also tended to lessen public attention to foreign affairs, making it harder to sustain domestic support for America’s global role and contributing to the difficulty of gaining agreement with allies.4

Cultural and Political Polarization Cultural and social factors lie at the root of these problems. Opinion polls show major generational differences, with younger voters increasingly displaying a loss of confidence in America’s power and

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Politics, Society, and Culture purpose. For example, opinion polls conducted by the Pew Research Center have found that 36 percent of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine are more likely to say that other countries are preferable to the United States, compared with 24 percent of those who are thirty to forty-nine, 14 percent among people fifty to sixty-five years old, and a mere 9 percent of Americans older than sixty-five.5 Opinion polls also reflect what the author James Kirchick has described as the end of liberal confidence in American power.6 Cultural change has played an important part in this disillusionment with America. Culture here can be understood using the definition set out by Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University, for whom it means the beliefs, values, and preferences in society that are capable of changing behavior.7 At the same time, differences among the public have widened over race, immigration, and traditional values, including religion and the family, as well as in attitudes regarding sex and gender. Interpretations of American history are at issue too, including claims that the very foundation of the United States is racist. In August 2019, the New York Times Magazine published its “1619 Project,” claiming that America’s founding should be dated from the first arrival of slaves in that year and that the American Revolution was fought not for the values and beliefs expressed by the founders and in the aspirational wording of the Declaration of Independence but as a means of preserving slavery.8 Leading historians such as Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, and Gordon S. Wood have assessed this view as a distortion of history and described the work as ideologically driven and marred by significant factual errors.9 Even a Trotskyist publication, the World Socialist Web Site, criticized the project as a “politically motivated falsification of history.”10 Nonetheless, the magazine’s editor, Jake

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Politics, Society, and Culture Silverstein, and the project’s lead author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, rejected the criticism and the Times went on to extensively promote the project and its use in the curricula of primary and secondary schools.11 Several months after the initial publication of the suite of articles, the Times quietly edited its website to delete the claim that this initial arrival of African slaves in America had been the “true founding” of the country.12 One of the ironies of this controversy is that some of the most detailed and in-depth reporting on the 1619 Project first appeared in the Trotskyist website. Rather than endorsing the newspaper’s radical critique of the U.S. founding and its subsequent race-based history, this work provided compelling criticism of it as “a racialist falsification of American and world history.”13 The approach reflects a profound ideological division, in that Trotskyists adhere to a Marxist analysis of history, determined by class and economic structures, whereas the 1619 Project’s emphasis is based on identity, primarily race, in its aspiration to explain and criticize American history and society.

Ideas and Intolerance There is also evidence of an increasing level of intolerance for the expression of ideas that diverge from prevailing beliefs and policies. On the political right, many moderate Republicans and anti-Trump conservatives have become unwelcome as political nominees or as commentators at a number of pro-Trump publications, networks, and media sites. As an example, the highest-ranking Republican in the House leadership, Representative Elizabeth Cheney of Wyoming, was ousted from her position as conference chair after blaming Trump for the January 6 insurrection, voting for his impeachment,

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Politics, Society, and Culture and backing a bipartisan congressional investigation into the matter. Trump supporters have also tried to purge their ranks of officeholders who refuse to take up the claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Ironically, this loyalty to Trump is more personal than ideological. The candidate who replaced Cheney in the House Republican leadership, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, had a much less conservative voting record than Cheney. Conservatives have no monopoly on intolerance, however. Today rigidity and exclusionary thinking are a prominent feature of leftwing discourse. The political scientist and free speech ad­vocate Donald Downs, for instance, finds that since the late 1980s, censorship of campus speech has shifted to come more from progressives than from conservatives, reversing what had been evident in previous decades.14 In addition, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written of a tendency for conservatives to evince a slightly more complex morality than liberals.15 Intolerance about free speech certainly exists on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but many observers feel that the McCarthyist impulse in contemporary life has become more pronounced on the political and cultural left. There, a “cancel culture” seeks to condemn and silence the expression of words and views that fail to conform to prevailing cultural tropes in much of the national media. This phenomenon has become widely evident in universities, foundations, and even on many corporate boards. In reaction, a group of mostly liberal and leftist journalists, intellectuals, and artists including J. K. Rowling, Noam Chomsky, Gloria Steinem, and Margaret Atwood expressed their unease in a widely circulated letter in Harper’s Magazine. They wrote, “While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for

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Politics, Society, and Culture public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”16 As a case in point, in a stunning resignation letter to the owner of the New York Times, a prominent politically moderate writer and opinion editor, Bari Weiss, not only detailed her deep concern about an atmosphere of intolerance toward divergent views but added a stinging criticism about the “paper of record.” Increasingly, she wrote, it has become “the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people. This is a galaxy in which . . . the Soviet space program is lauded for its ‘diversity’; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history include the United States alongside Nazi Germany.”17 Other factors are at work too. Divisions among Americans have been exacerbated by technological change, social media, and a process of “sorting” whereby people are much more likely to associate primarily with others who hold similar political and cultural views; read and watch the same publications, websites, and cable news programs; and even live in the same neighborhoods.18 The phenomenon is not entirely new, but it has been considerably intensified by the digital revolution. It has also contributed to extreme levels of political polarization, whereby people hold deeply divided views about politics as well as matters such as abortion, gun control, gender, presidential politics, and other contentious domestic and foreign policy issues. Opinion polls suggest that those who identify as liberal or conservative increasingly attribute malign motives to those on the other side and are even reluctant to socialize with them, let alone see their children marry someone with the opposite views. A Pew Research Center poll found that in describing conflicts between various groups,

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Politics, Society, and Culture Americans ranked partisanship above race, income, age, or urban/ rural residency.19 Indeed, according to another study, almost 60 percent of Republicans and more than 60 percent of Democrats viewed the opposite party as “a serious threat to the United States and its people.”20 And the American Values Survey indicates that 82 percent of Republicans believe socialists have taken over the Democratic Party and that 80 percent of Democrats believe the GOP is controlled by racists.21 Political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels find that intensifying polarization in voting, in the Congress, and in public opinion is driven by cultural attitudes and by social and group identities more than by individual rationality.22 Together, these factors make it hard to gain the needed consensus to legislate or implement desired policy measures and reforms. Here, the outside world intersects with domestic politics and society in a profound way. Over the past four decades, globalization and technological change have played a significant causal role in hollowing out the working class and contributing to inequality. Many traditional industries have moved abroad or been depleted by lowercost foreign products, especially from China. During the first decade of the 2000s, as William Galston of the Brookings Institution has pointed out, the United States lost more than five million of its approximately fifteen million industrial jobs, a development that was accompanied by a drop in working-class wages of about 10 percent.23 Authors Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis emphasize the impact of Chinese imports as the leading cause of these job losses.24 As a result, stable job opportunities for white and black blue-collar workers have been harder to come by.25 In recent years, before the Covid-19 pandemic, the gig economy helped to bring full employment, but often at wages that made it

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Politics, Society, and Culture harder to sustain families and stable patterns of life. At the same time, prospects for social mobility have become more difficult. The resulting discontent has been a factor in the racial justice protests that erupted in 2020, but also in the opioid crisis and “deaths of despair” from drug abuse, alcoholism, and suicide impacting significant parts of rural and middle America.26 Elite disdain and rapidly changing cultural values have also played a part in political alienation on both the right and left of the political spectrum.27 Political sociologists Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Garrett use elaborate data analysis techniques to document the erosion of community in American society.28 Their recent work builds on Putnam’s book Bowling Alone (2000), which analyzed declining social capital as evident in the membership of churches, Rotary organizations, and bowling leagues.29 Putnam and Garrett find that participation in civic organization and union membership have plummeted, religious attendance has fallen, income inequality has worsened, social mobility has become more difficult, and political polarization has intensified, all of which contribute to an ongoing unraveling of social and communal life. These cultural, social, and economic changes have had adverse long-term consequences for political parties of the center-left and center-right across the world. In America, this has contributed to the decline of moderate or liberal Republicans and moderate or conservative Democrats. The effect is felt not only in the United States but also in many of the industrial democracies during the past quarter century.30 Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon make a compelling case, supported by cross-national data from twenty-four countries, that the economic and political consequences of globalization have deeply eroded the willingness of Western publics to support liberal inter-

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Politics, Society, and Culture nationalism. Britain’s “Brexit” vote to quit the European Union, the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and the rise of populist parties in Europe are symptomatic of these longer-term changes. Voters have reacted against government policies of trade liberalization, immigration, and what they perceive as threats to national sovereignty. Trubowitz and Burgoon assess these shifts by arguing that “Western governments came to rely increasingly on economic globalization, internationalized cooperation, and multilateral governance” and that mainstream political parties that supported these policies have been losing support to populist parties of the radical left and the anti-globalist right.31

Do Americans Still Want to Lead? The issues posed here bear directly on America’s ability, together with its key allies, to sustain a liberal world order in the face of eroding domestic support. Given the country’s problems of deep political polarization and cultural divide, can there be a sufficient domestic basis for a foreign policy strategy that, while seeking to reduce the risks of over-extension, nonetheless remains actively engaged abroad? Opinion polls on foreign policy suggest that the answer is yes. Overall, there is evidence that most Americans still favor continued U.S. global leadership. Consistent with survey results over the past twenty years, a Chicago Council on Global Affairs annual poll has found 64 percent remain in favor of the United States taking an active role in global affairs, versus 35 percent who prefer to stay out. In addition, 66 percent want the United States to maintain its economic power and 57 percent its military superiority as key elements in American global influence. Majorities also approve of using U.S. troops to support NATO allies, South Korea, Israel, and Taiwan if these countries were attacked.32

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Politics, Society, and Culture In addition, although the numbers have declined in recent years, a Gallup poll has found 63 percent of U.S. adults responding that they are proud to be Americans. A caveat here is that expressions of national pride have become politicized, with Democrats and younger age groups expressing less positive views than Republicans and older respondents.33 Nonetheless, a solid majority of Americans continue to express positive views about their country. Evidence from America’s allies also supports America’s role. A Pew Research Center poll of sixteen countries finds U.S. favorability ratings to have risen from just 34 percent in 2020, the final year of the Trump presidency, to 62 percent in 2021, Biden’s first year in office. Moreover, 61 percent of those in NATO countries remain favorable toward the alliance.34 Domestic support for NATO, America’s alliances, and the stationing of troops abroad also reflects shared concerns across political party lines about the threats posed by China and Russia. These factors appear to make Americans more attentive to foreign policy and suggest that the domestic basis on which that policy rests can remain viable. While domestic political polarization, culture change, and social conflict make it harder for America to play a leadership role abroad than at any time since the end of the Cold War, the possibility and the desire for doing so has not been foreclosed.

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Chapter 7

OBAMA, TRUMP, AND THE PROBLEM OF LEADERSHIP We have been very clear to the Assad regime . . . that a red line for us is that we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. —President Barack Obama The U.S. does not lack the economic or financial power to sustain its 75-year leadership of the international order. But under Trump, it has forgotten why that leadership position is important, and is flushing its power and reputation down the drain. —Economist Jeffrey Frankel

Looking for continuities in the foreign policies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump might seem counterintuitive. The glaring differences between the two recent presidents are more than obvious. One of them, polished, Columbia- and Harvard-educated, cerebral, cosmopolitan, multi-racial, is beloved by liberal audiences and elites at home and abroad; the other, a blunt, bombastic real estate developer from Queens and former TV impresario of The Apprentice, sustained by a fiercely loyal base of populists, working-class and rural whites,

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership especially men, and a portion of the conservative intelligentsia. Yet both presidents identified U.S. overcommitment abroad as the country’s major foreign policy problem, and despite major differences in policies and rhetoric, both sought to rebalance through retrenchment or disengagement. For Obama, this meant seeking to reduce geopolitical burdens and military commitments by emphasizing multilateralism via the United Nations and other international institutions. He called on the international community to step up, encouraged burden sharing by allies, sought to reset relations with adversaries, tried to reduce troop deployments abroad, and presided over reductions in the defense budget in four of his eight years in office. Trump pursued a nationalist foreign policy under the slogan “America First.” In practice, this included seeking to lessen or avoid the deployment of U.S. troops to foreign trouble spots, including pulling back from some—though not all—of America’s Middle East commitments, even while increasing the defense budget. Trump’s term in office also brought the browbeating of allies to bear more of the economic and military burdens of partnership, the selective withdrawal from treaties and agreements with international organizations, the imposition of punitive tariffs against China and numerous other trade partners, the courting of authoritarian leaders, and the de-emphasis of democratization and nation building abroad.1 Both presidents had mixed records. Obama’s abandonment of his “red line” in Syria, for instance, disheartened allies and emboldened adversaries. It signaled to China, Russia, and Iran that they could be less risk-averse, as was soon evident in the South China Sea, Crimea, Ukraine, and the Middle East. For Trump, though his pressure on allies did get them to raise their contributions to defense spending, his impulsive conduct and penchant for ad hominem at-

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership tacks left foreign leaders wary of close cooperation with Washington. Neither the British, nor the French, nor the Germans, for instance, supported his administration’s call to reimpose U.N. sanctions on Iran. In different ways, both Obama and Trump left the U.S. global position and its standing abroad, as well as the international order itself, in more disarray than when they came to office.

Presidents and Foreign Policy Through Midcentury American presidents make critical choices about foreign policy, though in an international context that creates both opportunities and limitations. Some observers, especially those who adopt versions of the realist perspective, argue that the contemporary international distribution of power requires America to seriously curtail its foreign policy objectives. Many frame this as a virtual necessity. Yet Kenneth Waltz, the most important theorist of structural realism, cautioned against this kind of determinism, writing that “structures shape and shove. They do not determine behaviors and outcomes, not only because unit-level and structural causes interact, but also because the shaping and shoving of structures may be successfully resisted.”2 That is, structures favor certain behaviors but don’t, by themselves, determine them. Leaders have a wide range of choices in foreign policy. Thus, when it comes to determining America’s global role, presidents really do matter. While the structure and rules of the world order of states and sovereignty are often traced back to 1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia, U.S. policies over the past century have deeply influenced the modern form of that order and alignments within it. We can only imagine how different history might have been without

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman. Roosevelt broke a powerful isolationist tradition, motivated and led the country in the massive World War II effort, and laid the groundwork for the United Nations and the post-war security, economic, and political arrangements the United States would lead. Truman, rising to his responsibilities after FDR’s death in 1945, presided over the post-war settlement, the formation of alliances, and the creation of the institutions that became the hallmark of the Western order during the Cold War. He made major decisions: to drop the atomic bomb on Japan in order to bring World War II to a close, to counter the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, to recognize the newly declared state of Israel, to order the racial integration of the U.S. military, and to resist the North Korean invasion of South Korea. Dwight Eisenhower managed the transition in relations with the Soviets after the death of Stalin in 1953 and maintained a steady hand in stabilizing the Cold War balance. John F. Kennedy navigated the Cold War’s most dangerous confrontation, the Cuban missile crisis, narrowly avoiding what could have become a nuclear war. Lyndon Johnson, who presided over major legislative achievements on civil rights in 1964–65, made the fateful decision to commit large numbers of combat troops in order to prevent Communist insurgents backed by North Vietnam from taking control of the South. But the Vietnam War became a quagmire, costing lives, resources, and political capital, and ending only after North Vietnam’s military victory in 1975. Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, and his national security adviser and secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, negotiated America’s exit from Vietnam, but their chief accomplishment was the opening to China in 1972, which allowed them to play the China card in the Cold War competition with Moscow.

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The Reagan and George H. W. Bush Presidencies Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush presided over the last decade of the Cold War and its non-violent end. Reagan came to office after a period of reversals and disarray under his predecessors Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. These included the fall of South Vietnam, gains by pro-Soviet movements in Africa, Asia, and Central America, a revolution in Iran that triggered a costly oil shock and saw a major regional ally replaced by a hostile Islamist regime, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and serious domestic economic trouble marked by soaring rates of inflation and unemployment. Ford did deserve credit for restoring a sense of integrity to the White House after the Nixon-Agnew administration. Carter based U.S. aid on respect for human rights and successfully negotiated the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt, the most successful and lasting Middle East peace agreement. During his eight years in office, Reagan, who his political opponents feared would pursue dangerously hawkish policies, presided over a series of measures that dramatically restored America’s standing. He undertook major increases in the defense budget, embarked on an effort to develop an anti-missile system (“Star Wars”), and aggressively confronted both the power and the values of the Soviet regime. Along with his secretary of state, George Shultz, he outlined what came to be known as the Reagan Doctrine, which provided increased support to anti-Soviet movements (as in Afghanistan) and to vulnerable regimes threatened by pro-Soviet forces without requiring the deployment of American combat troops. Despite intense political opposition, especially from peace movements in Europe, Reagan in 1983 implemented a NATO plan to deploy intermediate-range missiles in Western Europe to offset those

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership the Soviets had deployed in Eastern Europe. The decision proved to be a turning point. In 1987 Reagan reached agreement with the USSR’s leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, on a treaty to eliminate the entire class of these weapons. For Moscow, the sense that it was losing the economic competition with the United States, the mounting costs of the arms race and of supporting far-flung client states, the military quagmire in Afghanistan, and cooperative signals from Washington helped shape Gorbachev’s decisions that were so crucial to ending the Cold War. The Soviet leader deserves enormous credit for persuading his colleagues to recognize that for the Soviet Union, the arms race with the United States had become unsustainable. As he told the Soviet Politburo on October 4, 1986, “Our goal is to prevent the next round of the arms race. If we do not accomplish it, the threat to us will only grow. We will be pulled into another round of the arms race and we will lose it because we are already at the limit of our capabilities. . . . If the new round begins, the pressure on our economy will be unbelievable.”3 Reagan’s successor, George Bush, and Secretary of State James Baker offered assistance and reassurances to Gorbachev in avoiding confrontation, negotiating an end to the Cold War, and creating conditions for a stable peace. The result was an extraordinary end to a worldwide confrontation that, unlike great power rivalries over the previous two centuries—the Napoleonic Wars and World Wars I and II—did not culminate in a cataclysmic war. The end of the conflict in 1989–90 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 left the United States as the world’s only superpower. Many of the USSR’s former client states and ex-Soviet republics sought integration into a Western-led order. But America’s predominance

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership would last less than a quarter century, due both to over-extension and the rise of revisionist powers.

Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush As the first two post–Cold War presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were far less constrained than their predecessors had been. For those who preceded them in the Oval Office, America’s deep engagement and leadership had been a matter of national self-interest, but continuing in that role now became much more a matter of choice. Clinton had run for office in 1992 by emphasizing the importance of rejuvenating America’s domestic base. Other than offering support for free trade and for reconfiguring the armed forces for a post– Cold War environment, foreign policy had not been a major issue in his election campaign. Reality soon intruded. Though the end of the Cold War seemed to offer a chance to focus on domestic affairs, a series of foreign policy events captured Clinton’s attention. These included an American intervention in Somalia that had begun as a humanitarian commitment under U.N. auspices during the first George Bush’s last month in office but during Clinton’s first year morphed into nation building. In October 1993, a bungled raid that left nineteen Special Forces soldiers and hundreds of Somalis dead created a serious political embarrassment for the new administration. There was no respite from crises: deadly ethnic conflict in Bosnia, upheaval in Haiti, genocide in Rwanda, and continuing ethnic sectarian warfare and death in Sudan, Somalia, and the Congo. During the first of Clinton’s two terms as president, senior foreign policy officials spent much of their time coping with distant crises, often

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership absorbed in tactical details rather than focusing on relations with more important powers, especially Russia and China. This preoccupation led Michael Mandelbaum to label their approach “foreign policy as social work.” Mandelbaum, who had been a key foreign policy adviser to Clinton during the presidential campaign, observed that rather than focus on America’s core national interests, the Clinton White House during its first three years in office had dissipated its efforts by attending to peripheral problems involving internal economic, social, and political conditions in Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti.4 He later extended this criticism to the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, arguing that success in those lands and others, including Afghanistan and Iraq, would require internal economic, social, and political transformations that the United States was in no position to accomplish from outside.5 Sobered by his first term in office but presiding at a time when the United States did not yet face a resumption of great power competition, Clinton used the phrase “indispensable nation” in his second inaugural address. During his second term, Clinton supported the enlargement of NATO and championed the entry of China into the World Trade Organization. Both decisions became significant for America’s great power relations. Opening the WTO to China played a key part in its meteoric economic rise, while NATO enlargement served as an irritant in U.S.-Russia relations. Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, entered office in January 2001 having pledged to implement a more “humble” foreign policy that did not commit the military to the tasks of nation building. That resolve vanished with the shock of the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Suddenly, terrorism, by both state-supported actors and non-state actors, loomed as the compel-

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership ling national security threat. Bush launched a military campaign less than a month later to oust the Taliban regime and its al-Qaeda allies from Afghanistan. In responding to these dramatically changed circumstances, the Bush administration developed an expansive new grand approach, its National Security Strategy, or NSS, unveiled in September 2002. It featured four key themes. The first was an expressed willingness to employ preemptive military action against hostile states aiming to develop weapons of mass destruction. The second feature, military primacy, included the assertion that America would not permit any hostile foreign power to challenge its military strength. Third, the NSS embraced multinational cooperation, but not at the expense of national security. The fourth element was a commitment to spread democracy worldwide and promote the development of “free and open societies on every continent.”6 These objectives were consistent with the American strategic tradition, but in their directness and ambition they were possible only in a world where the United States possessed an overwhelming preponderance of power. The ambitions expressed in the NSS were soon tested with the military intervention of March 2003 against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Though it took just three weeks to defeat the Iraqi army, the Bush administration was unable to quickly withdraw the American troops. Instead it found itself seeking to transform the Iraqi political system and to maintain stability there in the face of growing disorder and terrorism. The intervention became a quagmire. American and Iraqi forces did achieve major success in 2007–8 with a “surge” that overcame most of the insurgency, but by the end of Bush’s second term, with the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts still ongoing, there was a growing sense that America was becoming over-extended.

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The Obama Presidency: Strategies of Retrenchment Barack Obama thus arrived in the White House with the belief that the United States had overreached and had become too dependent on force as an instrument of policy. Two long and ongoing wars and the array of other commitments the nation had undertaken had become unsustainable. While Afghanistan was the necessary war, Obama believed, Iraq had been a war of choice that had only damaged American legitimacy and leadership. He thus sought to pull back from overseas commitments and curtail the nation’s propensity to intervene abroad.7 In contrast to Bush’s emphasis on preemption, primacy, and democratization, the Obama foreign policy was based on very different themes. One was that, after a Bush administration that had been criticized as excessively unilateralist, the United States would re-­ engage with international institutions. The Obama administration made it a priority to participate actively in the talks culminating in the Paris Climate agreement of 2015 and, to an even greater extent, to play a leading role in the negotiations that led to the nuclear non-­ proliferation agreement of 2015 with Iran (the JCPOA). As president, Obama urged the U.N. and other international actors to take more responsibility for addressing common problems as well as for regional security. On several occasions, he made this appeal explicit, for example in 2013 regarding the civil war in Syria. In the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukrainian territory in 2014, he criticized Moscow, but his administration was slow to offer tangible support to Kiev. Obama’s exhortation “to mobilize the international community to put pressure on Russia” and his description of Putin’s actions as “19th-century behavior in the 21st century” were widely seen as empty words.8 A second major theme in Obama’s foreign policy concerned out-

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership reach to America’s adversaries. Here, the operative idea was to assure Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and others that the United States bore them no ill will and would seek to reduce tensions and find areas in which to collaborate. Thus, in November 2009, seeking to improve relations with Moscow, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton presented Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov with a symbolic “reset” button. Unfortunately, the Russian word on the device translated instead as “overload,” turning the well-­ publicized event into a minor fiasco. The Obama administration also reduced the priority it placed on democratization and human rights.9 This stood in sharp contrast to the Bush administration’s approach in its National Security Strategy of 2002 and Bush’s widely publicized address in 2005 to the National Endowment for Democracy. Not only were public expressions of support downplayed but funding for international democracy promotion was reduced as well. Foreign policy was to be conducted on the basis of mutual interests and respect, and this meant avoiding giving offense to authoritarian regimes in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Havana, and elsewhere. A third major component was the de-emphasizing of hard power. In reaction to what he saw as Bush’s overreliance on the military to solve global problems, Obama prioritized diplomacy, alliances, institutions, and the uses of soft power. His identification of the Iraq intervention as a profound blunder permeates the lengthy and revealing interview he gave to The Atlantic during his last year in office.10 Obama’s remark that “multilateralism regulates hubris” was clearly directed at his own country, though by the time he said that, nearly eight years had passed since his election and thirteen years since the invasion of Iraq. His preoccupation with hubris and over-­ extension seemed far less relevant at a time when the United States

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership had increasingly absented itself from crises involving Russia, Iran, Syria, China, and other nations. Obama had spoken ambitiously of seeking to bend the “arc of history” toward a more just and peaceful world, but much of his presidency was characterized by his reluctance to act and his unanswered calls for the international community to step up.11 The penchant for inaction became an issue on multiple occasions and led to divided opinion among senior foreign policy officials within his own administration. From the beginning of the Syrian conflict in early 2011, for example, Obama resisted calls to support the moderate rebels then seeking to oust the corrupt and authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad. In August 2012 he had set out a “red line,” warning Assad against the use of chemical weapons. A year later, after the Syrian dictator employed sarin gas to kill more than a thousand civilians in a Damascus suburb, Obama initially seemed ready to act, asserting that inaction “risks making a mockery of the global prohibition on the use of chemical weapons.”12 Ultimately, however, he backed away from doing so, instead securing a face-saving agreement with Russia and Syria that the chemical weapons would be removed and their manufacturing facilities demolished. After initially seeming to comply, the Assad regime later violated the agreement by resuming production and conducting attacks with chemical weapons. The reaction to Obama’s decision not to respond was immediate and overwhelmingly negative. Assessing his Syria policy, The Economist later observed that “rarely has an American president so abjectly abandoned his global responsibility.”13 Despite the criticism, Obama in the Atlantic interview expressed deep satisfaction at having broken with “the Washington playbook.”14 Obama’s reluctance to have the United States take the initiative in crises was clearly evident. When asked whether there was an Obama

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership Doctrine, he seemed to dismiss the need for strategic thinking at all, remarking, “I really don’t even need George Kennan right now.”15 Speaking later to reporters, he added a remark that was subsequently widely circulated: “Don’t do stupid shit.”16 Some felt that if they could sum up his foreign policy in four words, those were the words. Members of Obama’s own cabinet pushed back and asserted the need for a strategic vision. Hillary Clinton, who had been Obama’s secretary of state during his first term, observed that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff ’ is not an organizing principle.”17 Obama’s second secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, was even more explicit, stressing the need for American leadership and saying in a TV interview, “I think the U.S. has to lead in this effort because what we’ve learned a long time ago is that if the U.S. does not lead, nobody else will.”18 Obama did have his defenders. The editor of Foreign Affairs, Gideon Rose, praised his grasp of the big picture and credited him with having preserved the core of the liberal world order by downsizing America’s global role and reducing its commitment of resources, especially its military.19 The author and foreign policy thinker Derek Chollet praised Obama for challenging the conventional thinking that produced the Iraq War and for having rescued America from “strategic insolvency.”20 The Obama presidency’s actual foreign policy record after eight years was a good deal less impressive, particularly in the Middle East. Obama’s efforts at retrenchment had costly unintended consequences, especially in Iraq. In 2007–8, the U.S.-led surge there, carried out in close cooperation with the Sunni tribes, had succeeded in defeating the insurgent forces of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). By 2011, with the number of American troops in Iraq having been steadily reduced from 144,000 when Obama took office in 2009 to 47,000 in 2011,

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership the president was intent on completing a full troop withdrawal. Military officials had argued for leaving a residual force of 5,000 to 10,000 soldiers as evidence of America’s continued commitment to stability in Iraq. But both Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, preferred withdrawal. The administration was unsuccessful in negotiating a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the elected Iraqi government, and the last U.S. forces were withdrawn in December 2011. In a speech at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Obama heralded the pullout, proclaiming, “America’s war in Iraq will be over,” and “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq.”21 As soon as U.S. forces were gone, Iraq’s Shiʽite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, proceeded to purge Sunnis from the government and the military while ignoring an agreement to absorb some 100,000 Sunni tribal fighters, who had been pivotal in defeating AQI, into the Iraqi army. Maliki’s deeply corrupt and increasingly repressive rule alienated the Sunni population and left the army badly demoralized. By the spring of 2014, a radical Islamist insurgency incorporating the remnants of AQI and now known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had emerged as a major threat. In early June, it defeated a far larger Iraqi army, seized Mosul, the country’s second-­ largest city, and overran vast areas of the Sunni heartland in northern Iraq as well as large swaths of adjacent territory in Syria. There remains disagreement as to whether maintaining a force in Iraq, rather than removing all of the troops at the end of 2011 as the Obama administration did, might have prevented this bloody debacle. But U.S. military leaders have been quite critical of the decision, seeing it as squandering a hard-fought military victory. In the words of one officer who served in Iraq during the 2007 surge, “Obama spiked the football on the two-yard line.”22 In 2014, with ISIS forces pushing toward Baghdad and Iraq

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership forces in disarray, Obama was forced to act. That June he announced the dispatch of American forces as advisers and trainers, and in August he authorized the use of air power against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. With the reintroduction of some 5,500 U.S. military personnel, Obama became the fourth U.S. president in a row to commit American forces in Iraq.23 The focus of Obama’s Middle East strategy, however, was not Iraq but Iran. He sought to transform American policy in the region by reaching out to Iran and persuading the mullahs to abandon their hostility to the United States. To do so he sought to loosen America’s close and long-standing ties with both Israel and Saudi Arabia, both of which the Iranians regarded as bitter rivals. The experience of U.S. presidents and secretaries of state since the time of Jimmy Carter might have suggested more caution. They had repeatedly sought to mollify the Iranians by apologizing for the CIA’s involvement in the 1953 coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh but had been unsuccessful. Obama’s approach rested on a view of Iran that underestimated the ideology and self-interest of those leading the Islamic Republic and overestimated his own persuasive ability. Much the same applied to the leaders of other hostile countries, whose antipathy was more a product of ideology, regime interest, local history, and path dependence than it was a response to American actions or rhetoric. The centerpiece of Obama policy was the Iranian nuclear agreement. In seeking the accord, Obama went to great lengths to avoid actions that might irritate Tehran. For example, the administration restrained its criticisms of the regime’s violent suppression of massive public protests over the manipulated outcome of the Iranian presidential election in June 2009. Obama was also cautious about taking actions in Syria that might cause confrontations with pro-Iranian

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership groups as well as about responding to provocative Iranian actions in the Gulf. The administration went out of its way to portray the choices before it as either the nuclear agreement or advocacy of war. Critics argued, however, that in its quest for a deal, the administration had accepted significantly weaker terms than should have been available, given the Iranians’ vulnerable position. As for the accord itself— framed as an agreement, not a treaty, to avoid the need for Senate ratification—administration officials oversold what had been achieved, claiming, for example, that “the core of the Iran agreement is an explicit commitment from Iran that it will never seek, develop, or acquire nuclear weapons.”24 Yet over the next several years, Iran systematically violated provisions of the JCPOA concerning access for inspectors, facilities, and overall limits on its nuclear weapons program.25 It also accumulated far more than the permitted amount of low-enriched uranium and took steps to install advanced IR-2M centrifuges at its Natanz facility.26 More important, rather than moderating its behavior in the region, as Obama had hoped, the Islamic Republic intensified its actions against its neighbors, typically by using proxy forces such as Hezbollah and other Iranian-aligned militias. By the end of the Obama presidency, Iran had become the most powerful outside actor in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon and was fighting Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in the Yemen civil war. The State Department continued to designate it a leading state sponsor of terrorism, a determination it had made every year since 1984. The Obama administration did not altogether eschew the use of force. It increased the use of Special Forces units and the extensive American capacity in drone warfare, especially in anti-terrorist op-

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership erations. The president took credit for the successful raid that killed Osama bin Laden at his Pakistani residence in May 2011. The administration also supported the U.N. Security Council authorization in March 2011 for the use of force in Libya and later deployed U.S. air power in the initial stages of the conflict, supplied allies with advanced weaponry, and provided key military assets. But it failed to plan effectively for the consequences of the Libya intervention, just as the Bush administration had neglected to do in Iraq. With the defeat and death of Muammar Gaddafi, Libya descended into chaos. The overall strategic situation of the United States and its allies was weaker at the end of Obama’s eight years in office then it had been at the start. His inaction in Syria and abandonment of the red line damaged the credibility of America’s deterrence and diplomacy and was widely understood as a sign of American retreat­. The agreement with Iran had not mitigated its behavior. Elsewhere in the region, relations with Turkey had worsened, and a prolonged effort to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and two-state solution had failed. In Europe, Obama had rebuffed Ukraine’s call for defensive weapons against Russia’s intervention in the Donbas region. Moscow’s seizure of Crimea and its actions in southeastern Ukraine violated major international agreements: the U.N. Charter, the Helsinki agreement of 1975, the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances of 1994, and a multiplicity of arms control accords, but the transgressions were met with only mild sanctions. Meanwhile, Putin engaged in an ambitious rebuilding and restructuring of Russia’s nuclear and conventional forces, which now posed a more explicit threat to NATO, especially in the Baltic region. Elsewhere, as a consequence of the Syrian civil war, Europe found itself coping with a

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership massive refugee influx, arguably worsened by Washington’s unwillingness to take action earlier in the conflict when support for moderate rebels might have forestalled the refugee crisis. As for the Far East, Obama’s pivot to Asia did see the transfer of some air and naval assets, but otherwise it was more a matter of rhetoric than of tangible actions. China embarked on rapid development and modernization of its military, especially “anti-access” air and naval assets aimed at countering the U.S. forces’ ability to operate in the region. Beijing also asserted claims to distant outposts in the South China Sea, building air bases there and infringing on the territorial waters of its neighbors. Ironically, in his last months in office, Obama expressed an almost melancholy sense of the importance and indispensability of the United States and did so in ways that seemed to contradict what he had said when entering the office eight years earlier. “The United States,” he asserted, “really is an indispensable nation in our world order,” adding that if it did not play a central role fighting pandemics, countering aggression, managing global institutions, and speaking up for human rights, the world would become far more dangerous. “Then it collapses and there’s no one to fill the void. . . . There really isn’t.”27 Restating the message, Obama left a note for the incoming Donald Trump on the White House desk, emphasizing the indispensability of American leadership for the maintenance of international order as well as for America’s own safety and security.28

The Trump Presidency: A Nationalist Foreign Policy Donald Trump’s surprising election victory in 2016 was met with anguish and disbelief among his domestic political opponents and

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership much of the mainstream media. It also evoked deep concern among America’s European allies. Trump had defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose views were familiar and whose election was widely assumed to be nearly certain. During the election campaign he had bluntly disparaged allies, referred to NATO as “obsolete,” suggested that Japan and South Korea should develop nuclear weapons, praised President Putin of Russia, and dismissed the United Nations as irrelevant. Some critics described the new president in apocalyptic terms, labeling him as a new Mussolini or suggesting parallels with Weimar Germany before Hitler’s rise to power. These concerns were exaggerated, but Trump’s “America First” slogan explicitly echoed the domestic isolationist and reactionary movements in the late 1930s and implied a rejection of America’s long-standing world role. During the campaign, Trump had not emphasized foreign policy, and the subject received only limited attention prior to the election. Defining a Trump doctrine is thus a matter of examining the impulses that seemed to underlie his platform and that became characteristic of his presidency. One useful means of understanding Trump’s approach to the outside world is to describe his view of America’s role as to some extent Jacksonian. At a pre-inaugural dinner, he even compared his political movement with Andrew Jackson’s. As defined by Walter Russell Mead, a Jacksonian is a nationalist and populist who “believes that the most important goal of the U.S. government in both foreign and domestic policy should be the physical security and economic well-being of the American people. . . . Jacksonians believe that the United States should not seek out foreign quarrels, but when other nations start wars with the United States, Jacksonian opinion agrees with Gen. Douglas MacArthur that ‘There is no substitute for victory.’ ”29

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership Trump’s foreign policy fits into a set of categories provided by the international affairs expert Colin Dueck. He argues that for more than a century, the Republican Party has contained three competing foreign policy groupings. One element is non-interventionist, opposing America’s overseas military commitments. A second is hawkish, hardline unilateralist, or nationalist and favors robust national defense and use of force against threats while avoiding multilateral commitments. Third are the conservative internationalists, who favor maintaining America’s international position. For much of the century, the last group was the dominant element in the GOP.30 Dueck writes that Trump upended the internationalists’ dominance in favor of a conservative American nationalism, but that in practice his foreign policy involved a mix of all three tendencies.31 Approaching Trump’s foreign policy both conceptually and in detail, foreign policy expert Henry Nau of George Washington University argues that Trump pursued a nationalist foreign policy to preserve and not undermine the current world system. Nau asserts that rather than dismantling the post-war global order, Trump sought a better balance by persuading U.S. allies to carry more of the burdens of defense and trade and persuading China to accept the rules of a market-based world economy.32 From Nau’s perspective, failure to achieve these objectives of burden sharing and changing China’s behavior would cause the liberal world order to deteriorate, because the American people would not sustain the U.S. role if other countries remained free riders. While criticizing Trump’s bombastic style and “openly nationalist policies,” Nau describes himself as “an internationalist who would prefer a value-oriented and less crude approach.”33 Nonetheless, he concludes that Trump’s transactional style reflected core premises of national self-interest and “a realist commitment to rebalancing the postwar global system.”34

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership Other conservative thinkers sought to situate Trump policies in a wider context. Most acknowledge Trump’s personal foibles and the aspects of his character, language, and conduct that have attracted extensive criticism. Some grapple with how much damage these shortcomings did to the very objectives Trump sought to achieve, and others are scathingly critical. Kevin Williamson, in National Review, wrote that “Trump’s low character is not only an abstract ethical concern but a public menace that introduced elements of chaos in U.S. government activity. . . . Trump’s problem is not etiquette, it is dishonesty, stupidity, and incompetence.”35 At the same time, National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru added that the Trump presidency had “accelerated the growth of our divisions and so been a gift to radicals of the left and of the right.”36 An especially damning result of Trump’s conduct in the presidency was the extraordinary turnover of senior foreign policy officials. In the four years from 2017 through January 2021, he cycled through four chiefs of staff, six communication directors, five national security advisers, two secretaries of state, two defense secretaries and four acting defense secretaries, two CIA heads, two directors of national intelligence, and five secretaries of homeland security. These rapid comings and goings hindered policy continuity and the effectiveness and credibility of diplomacy. Fierce criticisms of Trump were leveled by several of his senior appointees who later resigned or were fired, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Chief of Staff John Kelly, and National Security Adviser John Bolton. Among the criticisms, Bolton’s stand out because he and Trump largely agreed about policy. Yet Bolton described Trump as “stunningly uninformed” and a “danger for the republic.”37 Similarly, even while offering a nuanced assessment of the Trump presidency—in itself a departure

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership from the one-sided and partisan treatments that characterized so much of press reporting—the Wall Street Journal observed that “his bullying and impulsiveness have needlessly soured relations with allies. . . . He is needlessly polarizing, luxuriates in petty feuds, and trashes aides who served well as they walk out the door. He seems not to care if what he says is true, which has squandered his ability to persuade in a crisis. . . . His narcissism is his own worst enemy.”38 Nonetheless, Trump supporters argued that he did a great deal to rebalance the economic and security burdens of America’s world role. They pointed to his delivering on his promise to draw down U.S. military personnel in the Middle East even while successfully battling ISIS in Iraq and Syria and depriving the insurgents of their vast territorial gains and their “caliphate.” There had been approximately 100,000 U.S. troops deployed in the region when Trump came to office, and he reduced that number to just over 8,000 by the end of 2020 (4,500 in Afghanistan, 3,000 in Iraq, and fewer than 1,000 in Syria). Trump’s defenders also credited the intensified economic sanctions and political pressure placed on Iran and applauded the successful killing of terrorist leaders, especially Iran’s Qasem Soleimani and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS. Soleimani, a major-general in the Revolutionary Guard Corps and leader of its Quds Force, had masterminded covert operations and Iranian proxies including Hezbollah and was responsible for hundreds of American deaths in Iraq and elsewhere. Despite widespread skepticism, Trump’s Middle East policy achieved a dramatic and unexpected success in brokering diplomatic recognition and wider cooperation between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. This was soon followed by similar accords involving Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. These were the first such agreements of this kind in more than a quarter century. The achievement was all

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership the more notable because it followed decades of failures by previous administrations in seeking to resolve the Palestinian problem as a precursor to wider Israel-Arab peace in the region. The deal was partly made possible by a profound shift in the region, whereby Sunni Arab states had come to identify their predominant security threat as emanating from Iran. The sense of common interest and shared threat with Israel had for years led to covert and informal cooperation, and the willingness of the Israeli government to suspend annexation on the West Bank allowed the Sunni states to put aside concerns about the Palestinians. The Trump administration’s unorthodox approach in breaking with foreign policy taboos was often counterproductive, but in this instance it brought results. The prevailing assumption in Middle East diplomacy, especially under the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, had been that Palestinian-Israeli peace was a prerequisite for wider peace. A pristine example can be found in the words of John Kerry, secretary of state for Obama’s second term, a few weeks before leaving office, responding to claims that “the Arab world’s in a different place now”: “No, no, no, and no. . . . I can tell you that . . . there will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace.”39 But the passage of time did much to undercut this long-standing assumption. There had been no outright war between Arab states and Israel since 1973, Egypt and Jordan had long since made peace with Israel, the ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003 had greatly weakened Iraq, no Palestinian leader had been prepared to make peace on terms acceptable to Israel, and Trump’s move of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Israeli territory in West Jerusalem had taken place without serious incident. Conditions were ripe for the administration’s Middle East initiative.

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership In Europe, Trump’s intense pressure—and angry warnings— helped incentivize NATO members to increase their defense spending by $130 billion over 2016 levels. Simultaneously motivating NATO countries were Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its threatening behavior toward NATO members in northeastern Europe. In Ukraine, the administration authorized the sale of powerful anti-­ tank weapons for defense against Soviet-supported forces in the Donbas region, though Trump withheld funding for several months in an effort to extort a political favor. Trump administration officials also ordered increased sanctions on Russia, closed Russian consulates in San Francisco and Seattle, and expelled sixty Russian diplomats on charges of spying, in addition to strengthening U.S. troop deployments in Poland and the Baltic countries. Trump intensified his administration’s pressure on the Berlin government and threatened sanctions on European construction companies in order to at least temporarily delay the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project to deliver natural gas directly to Germany and thus doubling its dependence on Russian gas while bypassing Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic countries and depriving them of vital pipeline transit revenues. Yet, years of Trump’s disparaging remarks about French, German, and other leaders; his threats to leave NATO; and disputes over trade, climate, defense, and the Middle East left most European leaders ill disposed to support the United States on issues of mutual concern. Relations between Trump and Angela Merkel of Germany became especially bad. In a fit of pique, Trump announced that the United States would withdraw 12,000 of the 36,000 troops it had stationed in Germany, redeploying some to Belgium and Poland and bringing others home.40 On its merits, rather than provide any real benefit, the plan would have increased costs and weakened logistical

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership and combat capability for American forces in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. However, the incoming Biden administration reversed the decision before it could go into effect. Elsewhere, Trump confronted China, tightening measures to restrict the transfer or theft of highly sensitive civilian and military technologies. His trade emissaries threatened and in some cases imposed stiff punitive tariffs while seeking to redress a steep trade imbalance and unequal tariff treatment. He did reach a limited trade agreement with Beijing designed to increase Chinese imports from the United States, but the accord had minimal impact on the trade deficit. Moreover, Trump withdrew the United States from negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—an agreement that Hillary Rodham Clinton also had opposed during the 2016 election— which, with twelve countries and 40 percent of world GDP, would have been a more effective counterweight to China than the mostly costly and counterproductive tariffs. The Trump tariffs covered nearly two-thirds of imports from China with an average effective cost of 20 percent compared with the previous figure of just 3 percent, thus imposing an additional burden on U.S. manufacturers by raising the cost of required inputs. Farmers were also hurt by China’s retaliatory tariffs. This resulted in the Trump administration paying more than $20 billion to domestic agricultural producers in an effort to compensate them for the damage done to their market positions abroad. Toward the end of his presidency, Trump was also outspoken in condemning China’s brutal treatment of its minority Uighur Muslim population and China’s imposition of authoritarian control over Hong Kong, which involved the suppression of political freedoms and violation of the one country/two systems agreement with Great Britain. Trump achieved minor revisions to the North American Free

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership Trade Agreement (NAFTA), renaming it the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). He also negotiated adjustments to trade deals with South Korea and Japan. However, the net effect of Trump’s protectionist tariffs and policies, according to a Federal Reserve study, cost the American economy approximately 1 percent of economic growth in 2019, though gains from tax cuts and deregulation did help to offset the damage.41 By Election Day 2020, the trade deficit with China was exactly the same as it had been when Trump came into office, and the overall trade deficit had increased substantially.42 Announcement of withdrawals from existing international agreements, the Paris climate agreement, the JCPOA, and the World Health Organization mostly had the effect of alienating allies, though withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty did enable the United States to begin testing missiles of the type China was deploying in large numbers, but which the treaty had prevented the United States from developing.43 Some of Trump’s policies did earn approval from foreign or domestic critics who would not otherwise be supportive, such as reinforcement of NATO in the Baltic region, tougher opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, condemnation of China’s repression in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and completion of the Abraham accords. However, major elements of Trump foreign policy drew criticism as deeply flawed and harmful to America’s overall national interests. The heralded troop drawdown in Syria largely abandoned the Free Syrian Army, a coalition of Kurds and Arabs that had proved itself the most effective anti-ISIS force in the area. The withdrawal also gave virtually free rein to Russia and Turkey, both of which pursued regional policies harmful to the United States and its allies, and led to confrontations between remaining American Special Forces and Russian

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership mercenaries. Meanwhile, ISIS fighters who had gone to ground but still had access to weapons and funds began to reemerge in parts of Syria and Iraq from which they had been ousted. In the case of Iran, the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA and Trump’s badly frayed relations with allies meant that none of the other participants were willing to support the American demand for “snapback sanctions.” This left Washington applying the sanctions unilaterally. Though Iran’s economy remained under severe strain, which constrained its funding for Hezbollah, the regime retained tight domestic political control. Tehran showed little willingness to alter the course of its nuclear and missile programs or to curtail support for its proxies in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. Meanwhile, Trump’s seeming affinity for authoritarian leaders— most notably Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, and Kim Jong-un in North Korea—and his often disparaging treatment of allied leaders proved diplomatically counterproductive. Despite effusive comments and sometimes warm exchanges of personal messages, Putin, Xi, and Kim made no significant changes in policy. Trump’s deference toward Putin was a particular puzzle. While the State and Defense Departments were implementing tougher policies toward Russia, Trump himself continued to treat Putin with kid gloves, downplaying, for example, Russia’s domestic repression and the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny with a chemical nerve agent. Trump largely ignored the massive freedom movement in Belarus, dismissed the evidence of Russian covert efforts at influencing U.S. elections, and even suggested that Russia should be invited to rejoin the G-7 meetings, from which it had been expelled after its seizure of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Evidence for the harm Trump did to America’s international standing also can be found in the results of a Pew Research Center

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Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership poll in 2020, which identified historically low levels of favorable views about the United States. The survey, conducted among the populations of thirteen democratic countries in Western Europe and East Asia, showed that 64 percent held an unfavorable opinion of the United States. Only South Koreans (59 percent) expressed a positive view. Notably, the poll found especially harsh judgments about President Trump, with just 16 percent confident that he “would do the right thing concerning world affairs.” During Obama’s presidency, the poll’s positive results had ranged between 68 and 93 percent. Remarkably, the respondents expressed greater confidence in Putin (23 percent) and Xi Jinping (19 percent) than in Trump.44

——————— Despite some tangible achievements, the overall impact of Trump’s foreign policy was to further weaken America’s long-established international leadership and damage its national interests. In taking a transactional approach to rebalancing economic and security burdens, Trump deemphasized or even ignored the historic importance of the role the United States has played as coordinator and leader of collective action on matters of common interest. That role had encompassed not only security and economic order but also values. He left the country weaker in all three areas.

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Chapter 8

INDISPENSABILITY THEN AND NOW No major issue of world peace and stability can be resolved without U.S. leadership. —Former Singapore prime minister Lee Kwan Yew

If indispensability requires America’s active leadership in world affairs, it necessarily means something different now from what it meant immediately after World War II. For perspective, the gap between the end of that war and the present day is about the same as the span of time between the end of the Civil War and America’s entry into World War II. We are in a different era, and it calls for different policies. When the guns fell silent in 1945, the United States possessed massive and undamaged economic capacity amounting to nearly half the world’s GDP as well as unsurpassed military power that included a monopoly on nuclear weaponry. In the early post-war years, the United States led in creating and sustaining international institutions, rebuilding war-ravaged allies and adversaries, and restoring representative government in societies where it had previously existed. As the Cold War intensified, Washington used its geopolitical strength and military power to provide defense, deterrence, and re-

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Indispensability Then and Now assurance for its allies in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. It eventually presided over the end of the Cold War and an interlude in which it enjoyed uncontested predominance. But that has given way to rising great power competition in a much more globalized world. Now, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, America faces an international arena in which economic strength, military capacity, and regional influence are more widely diffused. The capabilities of many countries have been transformed, and even though the United States retains unique capacities and still leads in many of the dimensions by which national power is measured, its unchallenged global standing has become a relic of a bygone era.

What Hasn’t Changed Yet much has not changed. It would be reassuring to think that international norms, rules, and institutions have become self-sustaining and that the capabilities and self-interest of America’s allies and those who benefit from that order are more than sufficient to maintain it, but the evidence suggests otherwise. The United States remains the necessary catalyst for international collaboration. The regional predations of Russia and Iran and the aggressive economic and geopolitical behavior of China have met with a limited or inadequate response. Realist assurances about counterbalancing by neighboring states against regional hegemons have proved largely empty. And in real-world collective action problems, allies mostly remain reluctant or unable to act effectively absent America’s indispensable role in galvanizing cooperation. For the United States, this situation does not present a false dichotomy of all or nothing, of endless military interventions or de facto abdication. Instead it highlights the critical importance of skilled

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Indispensability Then and Now leadership, of prudence in choosing when and where to engage, and the need to combine national power with diplomacy. But although it is important to avoid overcommitment abroad, it is also essential to appreciate that the world offers no cost-free options. Alternatives such as offshore balancing, neo-isolationism, or the hope that the United States can sit back while allies and international institutions assume the tasks of maintaining international security and economic order are an illusion. Leadership abroad has costs, but failing to act also has costs, especially when national interests, security, and Western values are at stake. Exhibit A for realist critics of U.S. foreign policy has been the rise of Russian hostility toward the United States, the European Union, and the West, allegedly triggered by an ill-advised NATO enlargement that absorbed former members of the Warsaw Pact as well as the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into the Atlantic alliance. But a recent study by Andrey A. Sushentsov of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and William Wohlforth of Dartmouth concludes that the root issue for Russia was NATO itself rather than its expansion per se. They write that “much of the debate about NATO expansion misconstrues its stakes and arguably exaggerates the likelihood that fallout for US-Russian relations could have been avoided.”1 The alternative of a strategy of restraint, they add, in which NATO did not expand and the United States sought cooperation, would not have been reciprocated by the Russians. Instead, Russia would likely have asserted some form of primacy averse to America’s interests. To this analysis should be added the Eastern European countries’ profound desire for NATO membership. They believed the alliance would ensure their autonomy and political freedom against any future Russian effort to reassert regional dominance.

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Indispensability Then and Now Not only Russia but China, Iran, and Turkey, in their revisionist behavior and their quests for regional dominance, are exercising their own agency. The histories, ideologies, and interests of their ruling regimes have a powerful life of their own and are not simply reactions to the policies and regional alignments of America and its allies.

What to Do Abroad The United States possesses a unique ability to galvanize cooperation on common threats and against shared problems. In recent years, however, it has underperformed. Exercising leadership abroad is not mainly a matter of altruism. It is the most effective way of pursuing America’s own economic and security interests and protecting its values. There certainly are costs to playing this role, but doing so is a matter of enlightened self-interest. Reinvigorating the U.S. role in international organizations needs to be a part of America’s recovery of this role, but not every institution or agreement can or should be uncritically embraced. Rejoining the Paris climate agreement is useful, at least as much for the symbolism as for substantive reasons. The United Nations remains seriously flawed, but at a minimum Washington needs to work more closely with others in pushing back against China’s disproportionate influence in addition to monitoring the political corruption of agencies such as the Human Rights Council. Joining the Trans-­ Pacific Partnership (now known as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership), the eleven-country trade agreement the Trump administration abandoned in 2017, would be a major step toward counterbalancing China’s influence and economic power. Arms control arrangements have often served American interests,

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Indispensability Then and Now but returning to the Iran nuclear agreement is a different matter. Not only has Iran repeatedly violated terms of the agreement, but the JCPOA itself is also gravely flawed, with sunset provisions that encourage Iran to wait it out. The agreement also lacks any effective restraints on Iran’s ballistic missile technology, weapons imports, and aggressive behavior. A better strategy would be to use the possibility of rejoining the agreement as an inducement for Iran to renegotiate it even as the United States and its major allies maintain sanctions on Iran and the capacity to act against an Iranian nuclear breakout. Opposition to “forever wars” has been a common slogan for those frustrated with America’s long involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq. As a candidate Trump played to that theme in his 2016 campaign, and the words are still common on the political left and right even though the U.S. troop presence has ended in chaotic fashion in Afghanistan and been reduced to a residual role in Iraq and Syria. Reassessing the costs and benefits of America’s foreign in­ terventions is logical and necessary, but arbitrary abandonment of long-­standing commitments is not. Slogans to the contrary, playing an indispensable role does not mean never-ending wars, but it does require maintaining a strong and effective military presence as a deterrent to threats and as a mainstay of alliances in Europe and Asia. Force can and should be used judiciously, but it remains a necessary geopolitical tool. Even in far-off lands, the U.S. military can be effective in specialized roles and its ability to use advanced weaponry and air power can be a force multiplier. It need not be deployed in large ground combat operations or for the elusive task of nation building. The U.S. presence adds credibility and effectiveness to American commitments and can provide reassurance and stability. For example, the United States retains air and naval bases in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and elsewhere in the Middle East. As Gregory

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Indispensability Then and Now Gause has observed, existing U.S. deployments provide important benefits in regional and global influence: By itself, [the American basing structure] cannot support a policy of military intervention and occupation in the interest of democracy promotion or regime change in larger regional states. But it can support a robust counter-terrorism strategy, afford Washington influence with regional governments, and act as a deterrent to efforts by other actors to disrupt or dominate the world’s most important oil patch.2

Relations with our allies also need to be rejuvenated. Retrenchment under Obama and antagonism under Trump have been seriously counterproductive. The onset of the Biden presidency initially seemed to offer a timely opportunity, but implementation has been flawed and relationships remain troubled. The New York Times has described European criticism of the United States as “loud and persistent.”3 Initial Biden administration polices, as in the Afghanistan withdrawal, trade policy, and the nuclear submarine agreement with Australia and Britain that displaced a French contract with Australia, have led to European complaints about lack of consultation and questions about the Biden administration’s reliability and competence. Allies and other democratic and pluralistic countries need to improve their performance too. Countries like Germany have been conspicuous free riders, inclined to pursue narrow national interest in trade relationships with Russia and China as well as in defense spending. European and Asian allies’ recent experience in facing the increasing challenges from revisionist powers should make them more receptive to U.S. outreach as well as more willing to bear some

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Indispensability Then and Now of the costs of collaboration, but stubborn differences persist on whether or how to respond to threats posed by Moscow and Beijing. Coping with China requires far more effective cooperation ­between the United States and friendly countries in Europe and Asia. Together, these countries can limit Beijing’s ability to employ economic blackmail to coerce others. Over the long term, this kind of collaboration has the potential—though by no means the certainty— to persuade China to play by the rules. Similar coordination is essential to countering the behavior of Russia, Iran, and Turkey; incentives and disincentives are more effective when they are widely agreed upon and enforced. In addition to combating threats from China and other revisionist powers, the list of potential topics that cry out for productive collaboration between the United States and its allies includes nuclear proliferation, international terrorism, regional security, cyber warfare, pandemics, trade practices, climate change, mass migration, human rights, and, in the broadest sense, the many elements needed for a liberal rules-based order. Meanwhile, liberal democracy around the world has become increasingly embattled, largely as a result of the effects of globalization and technology on middle- and working-class populations as well as the impact of two major economic shocks within a dozen years and the Covid-19 pandemic. In some cases, disinformation spread by Russia and China has contributed to this malaise. Strengthened collaboration among the countries of the global West (meaning the liberal democracies and market economies) can help to counter these trends. America and its allies can encourage emerging democratic governments, not by military intervention but by deliberate use of economic and diplomatic incentives as well as more effective dis­ incentives for backsliding. For this task, something resembling the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) needs to be re-created. That agency

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Indispensability Then and Now played an enormous role in communicating the ideals of freedom, democracy, and human rights during the Cold War—not least as an advertisement for America itself—but it was dissolved and folded into the State Department in 1999. In an age of social media, major improvements are needed to amplify cultural diplomacy as well as to combat disinformation and conspiracy theories, especially those spread by revisionist countries and non-state actors. For some, the most effective course of action would be for the United States to reduce the costs of engagement and economic globalization by becoming less ambitious in what it seeks to achieve abroad. For example, as Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon argue, the United States and other advanced democracies need to find ways to alter the impact of international trade and markets as well as the operation of multilateral institutions to make them “more responsive to the desires of national electorates and more supportive of policies aimed at national cohesion.”4 Others have referred to the combination of less ambitious engagement with reduced expectations about large global institutions as “conservative internationalism.”5 This approach means supporting those arrangements that matter most to the security and values of America and its like-minded allies and friends. At the same time, it recognizes the importance of American power along with the capacity to use force selectively and where it matters most. Henry Nau, one of the original users of the term “conservative internationalism,” differentiates it from liberal internationalism and realism in four key ways. First, it seeks a world of limited government or separate sovereign nations, not big international institutions. Second, it sees national security as a function of ideological differences, so that the democratic peace is a much safer world for America than balance of power or reliance on the United Nations. Third, it

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Indispensability Then and Now recognizes the need to use force and its close relationship with diplomacy. And fourth, it advances democracy selectively by prioritizing regions where strong democracies exist nearby (today Ukraine and Korea).6 Dartmouth professors Jennifer Lind and William C. Wohlforth also advocate a policy that avoids the twin perils of retrenchment, on one hand, and overly ambitious efforts to extend American power and values on the other. Their version of conservative internationalism, they insist, provides “a prudent option that seeks to preserve what has been won and minimizes the chances that more will be lost.”7 Despite differences of emphasis, what these authors (Trubowitz and Burgoon, Nau, Lind and Wohlforth, and others) as well as a number of policymakers have in common is the idea of consolidating the achievements of the American-led order over the past seventyfive years.8 These recommendations for adaptation in foreign policy can be effective, but they should be understood as means of adapting the form of U.S. leadership rather than providing an alternative to it.

What to Do at Home America’s engagement and leadership abroad requires a base of support at home. There is—and always has been—no shortage of debate about that role, but political and cultural divisions now pose serious obstacles. As Eliot Cohen, a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a former senior Defense Department official, has observed, support for “America First” on both the populist right and the progressive left has become increasingly problematic. It risks being replaced by an “America First” of the exhausted middle or by a new consensus that the United States should accept a more modest role in world affairs.9

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Indispensability Then and Now The Biden presidency presents an opportunity for renewed American leadership on the world stage.10 Biden’s policy statements initially acknowledged that the international community “does not organize itself,” and he came into office embracing the “necessary” American role. His pre-election essay in Foreign Affairs, titled “Why America Must Lead Again,” offered ambitious words in its opening pages: “I will take immediate steps to renew U.S. democracy and alliances, protect the United States’ economic future, and once more have America lead the world,” and “no other nation has that capacity.”11 These views represented a sea change from those of Biden’s immediate predecessor, Donald Trump, but also of Barack Obama, and implied a significant shift to a more robust foreign policy. In practice, Biden’s implementation has proved much more ­uncertain than his earlier rhetoric would suggest. Even commentators otherwise supportive of him have seen the initial phase of his presidency as a weakening of America’s global position. Bret Stephens, pointing to serious unforced errors, has written that “America desperately needs the Biden presidency to succeed. And the world desperately needs a successful America. The alternative to a failed Biden presidency isn’t a change in administration. It’s a transformation of the global order that leaves us poorer, more vulnerable, and more susceptible to the siren songs of illiberal populists, including those at home.”12 At the same time, on the domestic front, America remains sharply divided, and political polarization stands in the way of successful policymaking. Assessing these deep political divisions within the American public, Michael Barone defines the United States as the “49 percent nation.” Following a Cold War–era equilibrium in which either major party was, on occasion, capable of defeating its presidential election opponent by more than eighteen points, Democrats

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Indispensability Then and Now and Republicans have both received support within three percentage points of that 49 percent figure in every presidential election since 2000 (with the lone exception of 2008).13 One frequent result is divided government, with one party controlling the presidency and the other at least one house of the legislature. In 2018 that meant a Republican president facing a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives; then, as a result of the 2020 election, a newly elected Democratic president having to operate with the slimmest possible Democratic majority in the Senate and a similarly narrow majority in the House. Bipartisanship is not only desirable but often necessary under these circumstances. Yet political gridlock has been far more common. Though there is much the president can do in foreign policy without formal legislation, the absence of congressional consensus creates significant obstacles. Polarization in Congress also affects public views on international issues, as Americans tend to take their cues from political elites. While Biden explicitly recognized the importance of renewed American leadership, that approach faces domestic obstacles in implementation. Ironically, the need to gain the cooperation of Senate Republicans could give Biden a rationale for not adopting politics favored by the Democratic Party’s progressive left, which has not shared Biden’s enthusiasm for a return to international leadership. However, resources for defense and foreign policy are also constrained due to fierce competition from domestic priorities. In the wider culture, especially among younger voters, there has been serious erosion in the sense of national identity and shared purpose. This divisiveness is made worse by the bitterness of political antagonisms, with some tending to see their opponents as enemies and even traitors. Conspiracy theories, spread by social media, inflame these divisions on both the left and the right. A Pew Research

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Indispensability Then and Now Center survey, for example, found that 25 percent of Americans think the theory that the coronavirus outbreak was intentionally planned by powerful people is probably or definitely true. Those percentages included 18 percent of people who identify as Democrats and 34 percent of Republicans.14 Then, too, there is the lingering damage to institutional legitimacy from Trump’s repeated false claims about the 2020 presidential election results as fraudulent. A large subset of the Republican base, 59 percent according to a CNN poll in September 2021, continues to embrace Trump’s narrative.15 Some Democrats also have been unable to resist the temptations of election fraud claims, though on a lesser scale, as in the case of Hillary Clinton’s complaints about her loss in the 2016 presidential election, and in Georgia, where Stacey Abrams persisted in challenging the results of a 2018 gubernatorial election. The global context of America’s leadership is also more difficult. China has become a formidable economic and military rival, and Russia has modernized its armed forces. Both countries are actively asserting their regional power and have grown increasingly hostile to the United States. They have also extended their in­terventions more widely, to the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia. Moreover, diffusion of advanced military technology means that America’s previous dominance is being rapidly eroded. Ballistic and hypersonic missiles, drones, anti-ship and anti-aircraft tech­nologies, and other weapons pose serious threats to U.S. and allied forces. Notwithstanding these obstacles, there remains a powerful logic to America’s indispensable role in world affairs. After the rigors of the past two decades, which saw the terror attacks of 9/11 in New York and Washington, lengthy and grinding wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, two major economic shocks, the deadliest pandemic in a

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Indispensability Then and Now century, and recent presidents who sought to pull America back from international leadership, a renewed opportunity exists. Whether Biden can implement a renewed U.S. leadership remains far from certain. That leadership will necessarily be more selective and less far-ranging than in the past, but the United States possesses the wealth, resources, resilient institutions, and willing partners to act accordingly. Painless disengagement from leadership abroad is a mirage, despite its attractiveness to opposite ends of the political spectrum as well as to a worrisome tally of authors, academics, and commentators. America’s prosperity, security, national interest, and values cannot be separated from what happens abroad. Whether it will act accordingly is a matter of choice and even chance, but the reasons for embracing that indispensable role remain compelling.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. See especially John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “The Case for Offshore Balancing,” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 4 (July/August 2016): 70–83 at 71; Barry Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); Christopher Layne, “The (Almost) Triumph of Offshore Balancing,” National Interest, January 27, 2012, nationalinterest.org/commentary /almost-triumph-offshore-balancing-6405, accessed September 29, 2021. 2. John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); Stephen Wertheim, “The Price of Primacy: Why America Shouldn’t Dominate the World,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 2 (March/April 2020): 19–29; Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). 3. As a prominent example, see Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, “Liberal World: The Resilient Order,” Foreign Affairs 97, no. 4 (July/August 2018): 16–24. See also G. John Ikenberry, After Victory (2001; rev. ed. Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 2019). Ikenberry’s most recent work assesses the historical origins and conceptual evolution of liberal internationalism and expresses a more sobered view of the challenges it faces. It also gives more weight to the need for domestic support. See Ikenberry, A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). 4. As a case in point, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Gordon LaForge overstate the autonomous capabilities of international institutions and avoid holding China to

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NOTES TO PAGES 3–5 account for its disruptive behavior in the South China Sea and in deliberately concealing the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus while manipulating early reports on the pandemic by the World Health Organization. See Slaughter and LaForge, “Opening Up the Order: A More Inclusive International System,” Foreign Affairs 100, no. 2 (March/April 2021): 154–62. 5. Ikenberry, “The Future of the Liberal World Order,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 3 (May/June 2011): 56–68. 6. Jennifer Lind and William C. Wohlforth, “The Future of the Liberal Order Is Conservative,” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 2 (March/April 2019): 70–80; Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon, “The Retreat of the West,” Perspectives on Politics, June 23, 2020, doi.org/10.1017/S1537592720001218, accessed September 29, 2021; Jeff D. Colgan and Robert O. Keohane, “The Liberal Order Is Rigged: Fix It Now or Watch It Wither,” Foreign Affairs 96, no. 2 (May/June 2017): 36–44; Jack Snyder, “The Broken Bargain: How Nationalism Came Back,” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 2 (March/April 2019): 54–60; Robert Gates, Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post–Cold War World (New York: Knopf, 2020). 7. Jennifer Lind and Daryl G. Press, “Reality Check: American Power in an Age of Constraints,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 2 (March/April 2020): 41–48. Also see the critique of them and others in H. R. McMaster, “The Retrenchment Syndrome,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 4 (July/August 2020): 183–86. 8. Richard N. Haass and Charles A. Kupchan, “The New Concert of Powers: How to Prevent Catastrophe and Promote Stability in a Multipolar World,” Foreign Affairs, March 23, 2021, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2021-03-23 /new-concert-powers, accessed September 29, 2021; see also Charles A. Kupchan, Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 9. According to a dataset compiled by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, China has employed economic coercion as a tool for interference in Europe and North America sixty times since 2000. See Lindsay Gorman, “Pineapple War Shows Taiwan Won’t Be Bullied by Beijing,” Foreign Policy, March 16, 2021, foreign policy.com/2021/03/16/taiwan-china-pineapple-war-economic-bullying -democracies-boycott, accessed September 29, 2021. 10. Yang Jiechi, quoted in “Remarks: Secretary Antony J. Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Director Yang And State Councilor Wang At the Top of Their Meeting,” Anchorage, Alaska, March 18, 2021, U.S. State Department, Office of the Spokesperson, press release, www.state.gov/secretary-antony -j-blinken-national-security-advisor-jake-sullivan-chinese-director-of-the-office -of-the-central-commission-for-foreign-affairs-yang-jiechi-and-chinese-state -councilor-wang-yi-at-th, accessed September 29, 2021.

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NOTES TO PAGES 6–20 11. President William Jefferson Clinton, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1997, www.bartleby.com/124/pres65.html, accessed September 29, 2021, emphasis added. Though Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was widely identified with the idea, her first use of it took place more than a year later. See “Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Interview on NBC-TV ‘The Today Show’ with Matt Lauer,” Columbus, Ohio, February 19, 1998, Office of the Spokesman, U.S. Department of State, 1997-2001.state.gov/statements/1998/980219a.html, accessed September 29, 2021. 12. In 1999, French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine warned, “We cannot accept . . . the unilateralism of a single hyperpower.” See Charles Krauthammer, “Not for Moi, Thanks,” Washington Post, November 26, 1999. 13. On Europe, see especially James Kirchick, The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). 14. Michael Beckley, Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018); Robert J. Lieber, Retreat and Its Consequences: American Foreign Policy and the Problem of World Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 15. I make that argument in Retreat and Its Consequences; Kori Schake enlarges on this in a review essay, “Will Washington Abandon the Order? The False Logic of Retreat,” Foreign Affairs 96, no. 1 (January/February 2017): 41–46.

Chapter 1. What Went Wrong? Epigraph: Carl Bildt, “Opinion: The Post-American World Is Now on Full Display,” Washington Post, May 19, 2020. 1. Paul Kennedy, “The Eagle Has Landed,” Financial Times (London), February 1, 2002. 2. Charter of the United Nations, signed in San Francisco, June 26, 1945, www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text, accessed September 29, 2021. 3. R. J. Reinhart, “Americans’ Views as the Iron Curtain Descended,” Gallup Vault, March 2, 2021, news.gallup.com/vault/330926/gallup-vault-americans -views-iron-curtain-descended.aspx, accessed September 29, 2021. 4. For the full text, see “Truman Doctrine (1947),” www.ourdocuments.gov /doc.php? doc=81, accessed September 29, 2021. 5. “X” [George F. Kennan], “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, July 1947. For a definitive account of Kennan’s role, see John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin, 2011). 6. “X,” “Sources of Soviet Conduct.”

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NOTES TO PAGES 22–26 7. In addition to the United States and Canada, the founding members of NATO were Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. 8. Quoted on the official NATO website, accessed November 4, 2020, www .nato.int/cps/en/natohq/declassified_137930.htm, accessed September 29, 2021. 9. See NSC-68, 1950, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, ­history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/NSC68, accessed September 29, 2021. For the document text, see National Security Council Paper 68 (NSC-68), Atomic Heritage Foundation, www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/national-security -council-paper-68-nsc-68, accessed September 29, 2021. 10. For annual U.S. defense spending as a percentage of GDP and by decade, see Lieber, Power and Willpower in the American Future (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Table 5.2, 123–25; sources: Table 6.1, Composition of Outlays: 1940–2016, “Historical Tables,” Fiscal Year 2012 Budget of the U.S. Government, United States Office of Management and Budget, www.whitehouse.gov/omb /budget/Historicals; Table 8.7, Outlays for Discretionary Programs: 1962–2016, “Historical Tables,” Fiscal Year 2012 Budget of the U.S. Government, United States Office of Management and Budget. An update is available at www.whitehouse.gov /wp-content/uploads/2021/05/hist06z1_fy22.xlsx. 11. For complaints about “liberal hegemony,” see Walt, Hell of Good Intentions; Andrew Bacevich, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020); Mearsheimer, Great Delusion; Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Posen, Restraint. For an insightful critique of several of these realist authors, see Michael Fitzsimmons, “ ‘Liberal Hegemony’ Is a Straw Man,” American Interest, January 23, 2019, www.the-american -interest.com/2019/01/23/liberal-hegemony-is-a-straw-man, accessed September 29, 2021. 12. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18. 13. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, www.oxfordreference.com/view /10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095928290, accessed September 29, 2021. 14. Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression: 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 15. For example, see Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). I elaborate on these arguments in Retreat and Its Consequences, 83–84.

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NOTES TO PAGES 26–32 16. See especially Barry Posen, “Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony,” International Security 28, no. 1 (Summer 2003): 5–46; Posen, “Pull Back: The Case for a Less Activist Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 92, no. 1 (January/February 2013): 116–29. 17. This discussion extends my arguments in Retreat and Its Consequences, 89–90. 18. A related point is made in Lind and Press, “Reality Check”; Graham Allison, “The New Spheres of Influence: Sharing the Globe with Other Great Powers,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2020): 30–40. 19. Transcript of President Bush’s Address on End of the Gulf War, New York Times, March 7, 1991, www.nytimes.com/1991/03/07/us/after-war-president -transcript-president-bush-s-address-end-gulf-war.html, accessed September 29, 2021. 20. Data from Max Roser, “Democracy,” Our World in Data website, 2019. The site uses multiple data sources, especially the Polity2 measure but also the Boix-Miller-Rosato dichotomous coding of democracy and Freedom House. For details, see ourworldindata.org/democracy#number-of-democracies, accessed September 29, 2021. 21. See especially M. E. Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 22. Excerpts from President Clinton’s speech at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, March 9, 2000, can be found in “Clinton’s Words on China: Trade Is the Smart Thing,” New York Times, March 9, 2000. 23. “Clinton’s Words on China.” 24. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 41; Seymour Martin Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review 53, no. 1 (March 1959): 69–105. For a nuanced assessment of Lipset’s writing on modernization and democracy, see Julian Wucherpfennig and Franziska Deutsch, “Modernization and Democracy: Theories and Evidence Revisited,” Living Reviews in Democracy, September 2009, cis.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz /special-interest/gess/cis/cis-dam/CIS_DAM_2015/WorkingPapers/Living _Reviews_Democracy/Wucherpfennig%20Deutsch.pdf, accessed September 29, 2021. 25. Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon, 1966), 418. 26. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960; rev. ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

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NOTES TO PAGES 32–45 27. Bell, End of Ideology. 28. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (New York: Crown, 2006), 305. 29. Quoted in Uri Friedman, “The New Concept Everyone in Washington Is Talking About,” The Atlantic, August 6, 2019, www.theatlantic.com/politics /archive/2019/08/what-genesis-great-power-competition/595405, accessed September 29, 2021. 30. Cheyenne Haslett, “Mitt Romney Finally Gets Credit Years Later for His Warnings on Russia,” ABC News, February 26, 2019, abcnews.go.com/Politics /years-mitt-romney-finally-credit-warnings-russia/story?id=61330530, accessed September 29, 2021. For the debate transcript, see “The Third Presidential Debate,” New York Times, October 22, 2012. 31. Michael Mandelbaum, The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 141. 32. Figures cited are for world GDP at market exchange rates. Data for 1980 and 2020 from Ruchir Sharma, “The Comeback Nation: U.S. Economic Supremacy Has Repeatedly Proved Declinists Wrong,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 3 (May/June 2020): 70–81 at 72. For detailed country data, as well as for intervening years available at International Monetary Fund, see World Economic Outlook Database, www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/faq.htm, accessed September 29, 2021. 33. “The Rivalry Between America and China Will Hinge on South-East Asia,” The Economist, February 27, 2021. 34. I elaborate on the indispensability of the U.S. role and the disruptive consequences of retrenchment in Retreat and Its Consequences, 89–111.

Chapter 2. Is the United States a Disruptor? Epigraph: Quoted in David Ignatius, “The Rest of the World Is Preparing for Four More Years of Trump,” Washington Post, February 20, 2020. 1. This chapter enlarges and substantially expands on my essay “Is the U.S. a Disruptor of World Order?” Raisina Files, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi, India, January 2018. 2. “America’s Aggressive Use of Sanctions Endangers the Dollar’s Reign,” The Economist, January 18, 2020. 3. Bob Davis, “U.S.-China Deal Upends Trade-Dispute Status Quo,” Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2020. 4. I elaborate on this in Retreat and Its Consequences. 5. Clyde V. Prestowitz, Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (New York: Basic, 2004).

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NOTES TO PAGES 45–52 6. Richard Ned Lebow, A Democratic Foreign Policy: Regaining American Influence Abroad (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 27. 7. Lebow, Democratic Foreign Policy, 201. 8. “Responsibility to Protect” resolutions passed by the U.N. Security Council include especially UNSCR 1674, passed in April 2006; 1706, in August 2006; 1970, in February 2011; and 1973, in March 2011. 9. “Current Membership of the Human Rights Council for the 15th Cycle, 1 January–31 December 2021,” United Nations Human Rights Council, www .ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/Pages/CurrentMembers.aspx, accessed September 29, 2021. 10. The United States had previously withdrawn from UNESCO in 1984, later rejoining in 2003. The Trump withdrawal took effect in 2019, and Biden rejoined in 2021. 11. International Energy Agency, “Global CO2 Emissions in 2019,” February 11, 2020, www.iea.org/articles/global-co2-emissions-in-2019, accessed September 29, 2021. The IEA, created in 1974, includes thirty member countries plus associate members. Participants must already belong to the OECD. 12. Joseph R. Biden Jr., “Building on Success: Opportunities for the Next Administration,” Foreign Affairs 85, no. 5 (September/October 2016): 46–57 at 51. 13. See, for instance, Eric Edelman and Ray Takeyh, “The Next Iranian Revolution,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 3 (May/June 2020): 131–45 at 142. 14. For a detailed treatment of the JCPOA’s shortcomings, the limits of IAEA inspections, and specific violations of the agreement by Iran, see Yigal Carmon and A. Savyon, “Is the JCPOA Working?” Middle East Media Research Institute, Inquiry & Analysis Series No.1354, October 30, 2017, www.memri.org/reports /jcpoa-working, accessed September 29, 2021. 15. Maria Abi-Habib and Salman Masood, “Iran Remains on Antiterrorism Blacklist, Continuing Sanctions,” New York Times, February 21, 2020; “FATF Membership Policy,” Financial Action Task Force, www.fatf-gafi.org/about /membersandobservers/fatfmembershippolicy.html, accessed March 11, 2020. 16. Elliott Abrams, “Iranian Compliance and the JCPOA Negotiations,” Pressure Points, Council on Foreign Relations, May 5, 2021, www.cfr.org/blog/iranian -compliance-and-jcpoa-negotiations, accessed June 5, 2021. 17. Hybrid warfare denotes the use of a broad range of subversive means, mostly below the level of conventional conflict, as tools of power and influence. See Mason Clark, “Russian Hybrid Warfare,” Institute for the Study of War, September 2020, www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/Russian%20Hybrid%20 Warfare%20ISW%20Report%202020.pdf, accessed October 24, 2020.

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NOTES TO PAGES 53–60 18. The text of the Budapest Memorandum, signed December 5, 1994, is available on the United Nations website at www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf /cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/s_1994_1399 .pdf, accessed September 23, 2021. 19. For an incisive treatment of Russia and the Eurasian idea, see Angela Stent, Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest (New York: Twelve, 2019). 20. Mark Landler and Stephen Castle, “ ‘No One’ Protected British Democracy from Russia, U.K. Report Concludes,” New York Times, July 21, 2020. 21. Isabelle Khurshudyan, “Russia Ordered to Pay $50 Billion to Former Owners of Oil Giant Yukos,” Washington Post, February 18, 2020. 22. “Russia,” report by the British Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, 21 July 2020, presented to Parliament pursuant to section 3 of the Justice and Security Act 2013, int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/intelligence-and-security -committee-s-russia-report/9c665c08033cab70/full.pdf, accessed September 23, 2021. 23. Richard Haass, “Cold War II,” Project Syndicate, February 23, 2018, www .project-syndicate.org/commentary/new-cold-war-mainly-russia-s-fault-by -richard-n--haass-2018-02, accessed September 23, 2021. 24. Andrew Michta, “Bipolarity Is Back,” The American Interest, January 17, 2020, www.the-american-interest.com/2020/01/17/bipolarity-is-back, accessed September 23, 2021. 25. Chris Buckley, “China Takes Aim at Western Ideas,” New York Times, August 19, 2013. For the full text of the document, see “Document 9: A China File Translation: How Much Is a Hardline Party Directive Shaping China’s Current Political Climate?” November 8, 2013, www.chinafile.com/document-9-china file-translation, accessed September 23, 2021. 26. Quote in Alastair Gale, “Blinken, in Japan, Challenges Beijing’s Regional Claims,” Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2021. 27. Jane Perlez, “Tribunal Rejects Beijing’s Claims in South China Sea,” New York Times, July 12, 2016. 28. “As China Grabs More of the South China Sea, It Is Losing the Philippines,” The Economist, May 29, 2021. 29. Michael Mandelbaum, “The Iran Deal: It’s the Deterrence, Stupid,” American Interest, July 30, 2015. 30. Soleimani was killed in January 2020 at Baghdad International Airport. See Alex Horton, “Suleiman’s Legacy: The Gruesome, Advanced IEDs That Haunted U.S. Troops in Iraq,” Washington Post, January 3, 2020. 31. Ray Takeyh, “What Really Happened in Iran: The CIA, the Ouster of Mosaddeq, and the Restoration of the Shah,” Foreign Affairs 93, no. 4 (July/August

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NOTES TO PAGES 60–67 2014): 2–13; Takeyh, The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 32. The trip was made by Robert C. McFarlane and others and included a bible signed by Reagan. The key-shaped cake was to symbolize the hoped-for “opening” to Iran. See Bernard Gwertzman, “McFarlane Took Cake and Bible to Tehran, Ex-C.I.A. Man Says,” New York Times, January 11, 1987. 33. “Iraq Study Group,” United States Institute of Peace, www.usip.org /programs/iraq-study-group, accessed September 23, 2021. 34. This story and the results of repeated efforts at outreach to Iran are recounted in Matthew Continetti, “The End of Obama’s Middle East,” Commentary, February 2020, 11–12. 35. The broadcast took place on January 5, 2020. Quoted in Edy Cohen, “Hezbollah Chief: ‘Kill Every American Soldier in the Middle East,’ ” Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1419, January 23, 2020, besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/hebzollah-threatens-americans, accessed September 23, 2021. 36. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 37. Jeffrey Herf, “The Totalitarian Present,” American Interest, September 1, 2009, www.the-american-interest.com/2009/09/01/the-totalitarian-present, accessed September 23, 2021. 38. David E. Sanger and Maggie Haberman, “50 G.O.P. Officials Warn Donald Trump Would Put Nation’s Security ‘at Risk,’ ” New York Times, August 8, 2016. 39. “The Plot Against American Foreign Policy: Can the Liberal Order Survive?” Foreign Affairs 96, no. 3 (May/June 2017): 2–9. 40. Michael Kinsley, “Donald Trump Is Actually a Fascist,” Washington Post, December 9, 2016. 41. For a more sober and informed view, see Tom Nichols, “Chill, America. Not Every Trump Outrage Is Outrageous,” Washington Post, February 2, 2017. 42. Moira Fagan and Jacob Poushter, “NATO Seen Favorably Across Member States,” Pew Research Center, February 9, 2020, www.pewresearch.org/global /2020/02/09/nato-seen-favorably-across-member-states, accessed September 23, 2021. 43. Elliott Abrams, “Trump the Traditionalist: A Surprisingly Standard Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 96, no. 4 (July/August 2017): 10–16; National Security Strategy of the United States of America, December 2017, trumpwhitehouse.archives .gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf, accessed September 23, 2021. For the unclassified synopsis, see U.S. Department of Defense, Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America,

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NOTES TO PAGES 67–73 dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy -Summary.pdf, accessed September 23, 2021. 44. National Security Strategy of the United States of America, December 2017. 45. Data from Ash Jain and Matthew Kroenig, Present at the Re-Creation: A Global Strategy for Revitalizing, Adapting, and Defending a Rules-Based International System, Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, Atlantic Council, November 2019, atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Present-at-the-Recre ation.pdf, figures for GDP and poverty 13–15, accessed September 23, 2021. 46. Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Global Extreme Poverty,” Our World in Data, May 25, 2013, ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty#declining -global-poverty-share-of-people-living-in-extreme-poverty-1820-2015-max -roserref, accessed September 23, 2021. 47. Quoted in Clifford D. May, “The End of the Rules-Based Order? China’s Rulers Have a New and Improved Version,” Washington Times, March 31, 2021.

Chapter 3. Alternatives to the United States: Europe Epigraphs: “France’s Macron Urges US to Help ‘Reinvent Multilateralism,’ ” France 24, April 25, 2018, www.france24.com/en/20180425-frances-macron -urges-us-help-reinvent-multilateralism, accessed September 23, 2021; Sigmar Gabriel, quoted in “Insights from the 2019 AFIRE European Conference,” August 18, 2019, www.afire.org/of-note/2019-european-conference-report, accessed October 18, 2021. 1. James Graff and Bruce Crumley, “France Is Not a Pacifist Country,” Time, February 24, 2003, content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,423466,00 .html, accessed September 23, 2021. 2. “Divide and Rule?” The Economist, April 24, 2003, www.economist.com /europe/2003/04/24/divide-and-rule, accessed September 23, 2021. 3. Waltz, “The Emerging Structure of International Politics,” International Security 18, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 75–76. 4. Charles A. Kupchan, “The Waning Days of the Atlantic Alliance,” in Bertel Heurlin and Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, eds., Challenges and Capabilities: NATO in the 21st Century (Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies, 2003), 25. 5. Kupchan, The End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Knopf, 2002). 6. See, for instance, Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castle­ reagh, and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).

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NOTES TO PAGES 74–86 7. Kellogg-Briand, despite its failure, did help to establish a critical norm that war, especially aggressive war, was wrong. See Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017). 8. See Ikenberry, After Victory. 9. Deudney and Ikenberry, “Liberal World,” 16. 10. Harold James, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 11. Robert J. Samuelson, “Why Globalization Is in Retreat,” Washington Post, September 9, 2019. 12. After Britain’s withdrawal in 2020, the European Union was reduced to twenty-seven countries and a total population of 447 million people. 13. Quoted in Alan Riding, “Conflict in Yugoslavia; Europeans Send HighLevel Team,” New York Times, June 29, 1991. 14. See, for instance, Ilona Kickbusch and Susan Bergner, “The Big European Shut Down,” Think Global Health, March 16, 2020, www.thinkglobalhealth.org /article/big-european-shut-down, accessed September 24, 2021. 15. Quoted in “Von der Leyen Apologises to Italy but Baulks at ‘Coronabonds,’” Euractiv, April 2, 2020, www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/news/von-der -leyen-apologises-to-italy-but-baulks-at-coronabonds, accessed September 24, 2021. 16. Clive Cookson and Michael Peel, “EU Science Chief Resigns with Blast at Coronavirus Response,” Financial Times, April 8, 2020, www.ft.com/content /f94725c8-e038-4841-a5f6-2e046ae78e95, accessed September 24, 2021. 17. Sam Fleming and Mehreen Khan, “Eurozone Strikes Emergency Deal on Coronavirus Rescue,” Financial Times, April 9, 2020, www.ft.com/content /b984101a-42b8-40db-9a92-6786aec2ba5c, accessed September 24, 2021. See also Pierre Briancon, “Why the ‘Coronabond’ Dispute Is Tearing Europe Apart,” Barrons, March 31, 2020, www.barrons.com/articles/why-the-coronabond-dispute -is-tearing-europe-apart-51585659936, accessed September 24, 2021; Ishaan Tharoor, “Coronavirus Reopens Europe’s Angry Divide,” Washington Post, April 1, 2020. 18. “Growing Up at Last,” The Economist, October 3, 2020. 19. Jennifer Rankin, “EU Court Rules Three Member States Broke Law over Refugee Quotas,” The Guardian, April 2, 2020, www.theguardian.com/law/2020 /apr/02/eu-court-rules-three-countries-czech-republic-hungary-poland-broke -law-over-refugee-quotas, accessed September 24, 2021. 20. In the 2017 federal elections, the CDU received 26.8 percent of the vote, its coalition partner the SPD 20.5 percent. The CDU’s Bavaria-based allied party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), received 6.2 percent, which is added to the CDU total above since the two parties do not run against each other. See “Germany’s Election

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NOTES TO PAGES 86–90 Results in Charts and Maps,” Financial Times, September 25, 2017, www.ft.com /content/e7c7d918-a17e-11e7-b797-b61809486fe2, accessed September 24, 2021. 21. For September 2021 results, see “German Election 2021: Full Results and Analysis,” The Guardian, September 27, 2021, www.theguardian.com/world/ng -interactive/2021/sep/26/german-election-results-exit-poll-and-possible-coalitions, accessed October 18, 2021. 22. “Emmanuel Macron in His Own Words,” The Economist, October 21, 2019, www.economist.com/europe/2019/11/07/emmanuel-macron-in-his-own -words-english, accessed September 24, 2021; see also Rick Noack, “Macron Says Europeans Need to Stop Being Naive and Assert Independence from the United States,” Washington Post, September 28, 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/world /europe/macron-us-independence/2021/09/28/5d900056-205d-11ec-a8d9 -0827a2a4b915_story.html, accessed November 2, 2021. 23. Merkel’s remark came after a contentious G-7 meeting. See “Merkel: Europe Must Take Fate in Hands,” BBC News, May 28, 2017, www.bbc.com/news /av/world-europe-40078188/merkel-europe-must-take-fate-in-hands, accessed September 24, 2021. 24. Address to the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, quoted in Stephen Brown and David M. Herszenhorn, “Von der Leyen: EU Must Develop ‘Credible Military Capabilities,’ ” Politico, January 22, 2020, www.politico.eu /article/ursula-von-der-leyen-eu-military-capabilities, accessed September 24, 2021. 25. Data here and below from Jacob Poushter and Christine Huang, “Despite Some Improvements, Americans and Germans Remain Far Apart in Views of Bilateral Relations,” Pew Research Center and Korber-Stiftung, November 25, 2019, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/25/americans-and-germans-remain -far-apart-in-views-of-bilateral-relations-2, accessed September 24, 2021. 26. “Confidence in Obama Lifts U.S. Image Around the World,” Pew Research Center, July 23, 2009, www.pewresearch.org/global/2009/07/23/confidence-in -obama-lifts-us-image-around-the-world, accessed September 24, 2021. 27. “Trump Ratings Remain Low Around Globe, While Views of U.S. Stay Mostly Favorable,” Pew Research Center, January 8, 2020, www.pewresearch.org /global/2020/01/08/trump-ratings-remain-low-around-globe-while-views-of-u -s-stay-mostly-favorable, accessed September 24, 2021; Susi Dennison, “Give the People What They Want: Popular Demand for a Strong European Foreign Policy,” European Council on Foreign Relations, September 2019, www.ecfr.eu/page//popular_demand_for_strong_european_foreign_policy_what_people_want.pdf, accessed September 24, 2021. 28. Josef Joffe, “Europe Does Not Exist,” Commentary Magazine, February 2019. 29. Cited in Colin Dueck, “Eastern Promises: Our German Problem,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, January 13, 2020, www.realcleardefense.com/2020/01

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NOTES TO PAGES 90–95 /13/eastern_promises__our_german_problem_311615.html, accessed September 24, 2021. 30. Quoted in Andreas Kluth, “France and Germany Agree on the U.S. More Than They Realize,” Washington Post, November 26, 2020. 31. Efforts to increase future reliance on renewables face problems of electric grid expansion, policy issues, and energy supply security. Benjamin Wehrmann, “Renewables Overtake Coal as Germany’s Most Important Power Source,” Clean Energy Wire, July 10, 2018, www.cleanenergywire.org/news/renewables-over take-coal-germanys-most-important-power-source, accessed September 24, 2021; Kerstine Appunn, Freja Eriksen, and Julian Wettengel, “Factsheet: Germany’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Climate Targets,” Clean Energy Wire, January 23, 2020, www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-greenhouse-gas-emissions -and-climate-targets, accessed September 24, 2021. 32. John Hudson, “Seeking ‘Stable’ Russia Relationship, Biden Won’t Sanction Pipeline Firm,” Washington Post, May 20, 2021. 33. European Commission and HR/VP contribution to the European Council, “EU-China—A Strategic Outlook,” March 12, 2019, ec.europa.eu/commission /presscorner/detail/en/fs_19_6498, accessed September 24, 2021. 34. See Theresa Fallon, “Germany’s Faustian Bargain with China,” The Diplomat, November 8, 2019, thediplomat.com/2019/11/germanys-faustian-bargain -with-china, accessed September 24, 2021. 35. Dominic Nicholls, “RAF Nato Row after ‘Totally Unacceptable’ Engine Problems Keep £2.6bn Fleet on the Ground,” The Telegraph (London), July 10, 2019, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/07/10/raf-nato-row-totally-unaccept able-engine-problems-keep-26bn, accessed September 24, 2021. 36. John Gray, “Why This Crisis Is a Turning Point in History,” New Statesman, April 1, 2020, www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/04/why-crisis-turn ing-point-history, accessed September 24, 2021. 37. On Europe’s unavoidable dependence on the United States for its security, see the authoritative assessment by Hugo Meijer and Stephen G. Brooks, “Illusions of Autonomy: Why Europe Cannot Provide for Its Security If the United States Pulls Back,” International Security 45, no. 4 (Spring 2021): 7–43.

Chapter 4. Alternatives to the United States: China, Russia, and Spheres of Influence Epigraph: Richard Haass, “How a World Order Ends and What Comes in Its Wake,” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 1 (January/February 2019): 22–30 at 30. Haass

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NOTES TO PAGES 95–98 served on the National Security Council under President George H. W. Bush and was also head of policy planning at the State Department in the George W. Bush administration. 1. Angela Stent, “Russia and China: Axis of Revisionists?” Brookings Institution, February 2020, www.brookings.edu/research/russia-and-china-axis-of -revisionists, accessed September 24, 2021. 2. “China Wants to Put Itself Back at the Centre of the World,” The Economist, February 6, 2020. 3. Michael C. Bender, “WHO Funding Threat Tied to Hiring Practices,” Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2020; Tung Cheng-Chia and Alan H. Yang, “How China Is Remaking the UN in Its Own Image,” The Diplomat, April 9, 2020, thediplomat .com/2020/04/how-china-is-remaking-the-un-in-its-own-image, accessed September 24, 2021. 4. See the analysis by Nadia Schadlow, former deputy national security adviser, “Consider the Possibility That Trump Is Right About China,” The Atlantic, April 2020. 5. This is the conclusion of an assessment prepared by Western intelligence agencies of the “Five Eyes” group (United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand), reported in Sharri Markson, “Global Dossier into China’s Covid-19 Deception Highlights a ‘Deliberate Cover-Up,’ ” Daily Telegraph (Australia), May 4, 2020, www.dailytelegraph.com.au/coronavirus/bombshell-dossier -lays-out-case-against-chinese-bat-virus-program/news-story/55add857058731 c9c71c0e96ad17da60, accessed September 24, 2021. 6. The date was cited by the South China Morning Post, based on Chinese government information to which it had access. See John P. Walters, “China Is a Bad Coronavirus Role Model,” Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2020. 7. See the measured account by David Ignatius, “How Did Covid-19 Begin? Its Initial Origin Story Is Shaky,” Washington Post, April 2, 2020. 8. Josh Rogin, “State Department Cables Warned of Safety Issues at Wuhan Lab Studying Bat Coronaviruses,” Washington Post, April 14, 2020. 9. The Caixin Global account is cited in “World Health Disinformation,” Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2020. 10. There are numerous accounts, including those by independent Chinese journalists, of the initial suppression of Covid-19 news by Communist Party officials and their forcing a halt to early medical research as well as to communication with foreign medical specialists. See “Death of an Everyman,” The Economist, February 15, 2020; Nicholas Eberstadt and Dan Blumenthal, “China’s Deadly Coronavirus-Lie Co-Conspirator—the World Health Organization,” New York Post, April 2, 2020, nypost.com/2020/04/02/chinas-deadly-coronavirus-lie-co-conspirator -the-world-health-organization, accessed September 24, 2021.

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NOTES TO PAGES 99–101 11. Cited in Kathy Gilsinan, “How China Deceived the WHO,” The Atlantic, April 12, 2020; see also Schadlow, “Consider the Possibility That Trump Is Right About China.” 12. Donald G. McNeil Jr., “Candidate to Lead the W.H.O. Accused of Covering Up Epidemics,” New York Times, May 13, 2017. 13. List of World Health Organization contributors, open.who.int/2018-19 /contributors/contributor, accessed September 24, 2021. 14. Helen Branswell, “Trump Administration Submits Formal Notice of Withdrawal from WHO,” STAT, July 7, 2020, www.statnews.com/2020/07/07/trump -administration-submits-formal-notice-of-withdrawal-from-who, accessed September 24, 2021. 15. For timelines of these events, see “How China’s Authoritarian System Made the Pandemic Worse,” editorial, Washington Post, April 18, 2020; Hudson Institute, “Coronavirus Timeline,” April 14, 2020, www.hudson.org/research/15920 -coronavirus-timeline, accessed September 24, 2021. 16. See the account by Marc A. Thiessen, “China Should Be Legally Liable for the Pandemic Damage It Has Done,” Washington Post, April 9, 2020. 17. For a comprehensive account of these early months, see Jeremy Page, Wenxin Fan, and Natasha Khan, “How It All Started: China’s Early Coronavirus Missteps,” Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2020. 18. Thiessen, “China Should Be Legally Liable for the Pandemic Damage It Has Done,” and the detailed account in Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey, Ellen Nakashima, and Greg Miller, “The U.S. Was Beset by Denial and Dysfunction as the Coronavirus Raged,” Washington Post, April 4, 2020. 19. Markson, “Global Dossier into China’s Covid-19 Deception,” Daily Telegraph (Australia), May 4, 2020; Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker, “Chronicle of a Pandemic Foretold: Learning from the COVID-19 Failure—Before the Next Outbreak Arrives,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 4 (2020): 10–25 at 16. 20. Former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, citing declassified intelligence information, on 60 Minutes, March 28, 2021, cited in Glenn Kessler, “A Timeline for How the Wuhan Lab-Leak Theory Suddenly Became Credible,” Washington Post, May 26, 2021. 21. Nick Wadhams and Jennifer Jacobs, “China Concealed Extent of Virus Outbreak, U.S. Intelligence Says,” Bloomberg, April 1, 2020, www.bloomberg.com /news/articles/2020-04-01/china-concealed-extent-of-virus-outbreak-u-s-intelli gence-says, accessed September 24, 2021; see also Markson, “Global Dossier into China’s Covid-19 Deception.” 22. Derek Scissors, Estimating the True Number of China’s COVID-19 Cases, American Enterprise Institute, April 7, 2020, www.aei.org/research-products

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NOTES TO PAGES 101–105 /report/estimating-the-true-number-of-chinas-covid-19-cases, accessed September 24, 2021. 23. The claim was made in March 2020. See “Virus Exceptionalism,” The Economist, May 2, 2020. 24. Isaac Stone Fish, “Why Do We Keep Treating China as a Source of Reliable Information?” Washington Post, April 7, 2020. 25. Zack Budryk, “China, Pushing Conspiracy Theory, Accuses US Army of Bringing Coronavirus to Wuhan,” The Hill, March 12, 2020, thehill.com/policy /international/487308-china-pushing-conspiracy-theory-us-army-bringing -coronavirus-wuhan, accessed September 24, 2021; Didi Tang, “China Accuses US of Bringing Coronavirus to Wuhan,” The Times (London), March 13, 2020, www.thetimes.co.uk/article/china-accuses-us-of-bringing-coronavirus-to-wuhan -c9rrfbrs7, accessed September 24, 2021; Middle East Media Research Institute, “On China’s Official Arabic-Language TV: COVID-19 Does Not Appear to Have Originated in China; Evidence Suggests It Came from the United States,” Special Dispatch No. 8704, April 17, 2020, www.memri.org/reports/chinas-official-arabic -language-tv-covid-19-does-not-appear-have-originated-china-evidence, accessed September 24, 2021. 26. Gerry Shih, “China’s Bid to Repair Its Coronavirus-Hit Image Is Backfiring in the West,” Washington Post, April 14, 2020. 27. Alexandra Stevenson and Stephanie May, “China Pushes to Churn Out Coronavirus Gear, Yet Struggles to Police It,” New York Times, March 27, 2020. 28. “Thanking Big Brother: China’s Post-Covid Propaganda Push,” The Economist, April 16, 2020. 29. James Palmer, “Why Chinese Embassies Have Embraced Aggressive Diplomacy,” Foreign Policy, April 15, 2020, foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/15/chinese -embassies-embrace-aggressive-diplomacy-coronavirus-pandemic-misinforma tion, accessed September 24, 2021; Chun Han Wong et al., “Africans Allege Chinese City Targets Them,” Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2020. 30. Colm Quinn, “Reviving Lab Leak Theory, Biden Calls for COVID-19 Inquiry,” Foreign Policy, May 28, 2021. 31. Silvia Amaro, “EU and U.S. to Call for a Deeper Probe into Covid Origins,” CNBC, June 10, 2021, www.cnbc.com/2021/06/10/eu-us-summit-fresh-calls -to-investigate-the-origins-of-covid.html, accessed September 24, 2021. 32. Beth Mole, “Early Adopters of Chinese Vaccines See Case Surges; China Plows Ahead Anyway,” Ars Technica, June 4, 2021, arstechnica.com/science /2021/06/china-ramps-up-vaccinations-as-other-countries-back-away-from-its -vaccines, accessed September 24, 2021. 33. China Daily, “Full Text of Xi Jinping’s Report at 19th CPC National Con-

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NOTES TO PAGES 105–107 gress,” October 17, 2017, updated November 4, 2017, www.chinadaily.com.cn /china/19thcpcnationalcongress/2017-11/04/content_34115212.htm, accessed September 24, 2021. 34. Bill Chappell, “Acclaimed Harvard Scientist Is Arrested, Accused of Lying About Ties to China,” National Public Radio, January 28, 2020, www.npr.org /2020/01/28/800442646/acclaimed-harvard-scientist-is-arrested-accused-of -lying-about-ties-to-china, accessed September 26, 2021. 35. “How Many Confucius Institutes Are in the United States?” National Association of Scholars, September 8, 2021, www.nas.org/blogs/article/how _many_confucius_institutes_are_in_the_united_states, accessed October 18, 2021. Congressional Research Service, “Confucius Institutes in the United States,” In Focus, December 2, 2021, accessed December 27, 2021. See also Elizabeth Redden, “Colleges Move to Close Chinese Government-Funded Confucius Institutes amid Increasing Scrutiny,” Inside Higher Ed, January 9, 2019, www.insidehighered .com/news/2019/01/09/colleges-move-close-chinese-government-funded -confucius-institutes-amid-increasing, accessed September 26, 2021. 36. Karin Fischer, “Is This the End of the Romance Between Chinese Students and American Colleges?” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 11, 2021; Fischer, “Instruction Under Surveillance,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 30, 2020; Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, “China’s Long Arm Reaches into American Campuses,” Foreign Policy, March 7, 2018. 37. Shashank Bengali and Maria Petrakis, “An Australian Student Denounced His University’s Ties to China. Then He Became a Target,” Los Angeles Times, December 21, 2020; “Queensland Student Drew Pavlou’s Suspension Reduced but Will Remain Out of University Until 2021,” The Guardian (London), July 13, 2020, www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/13/queensland-student -drew-pavlous-suspension-reduced-but-will-remain-out-of-university-until -2021, accessed September 26, 2021; “Australian Student Activist Faces Expulsion After Criticism from Chinese Diplomat,” Radio Free Asia, April 16, 2020, www .rfa.org/english/news/china/australia-student-04162020145247.html, accessed September 26, 2021; “Australian University Sets Expulsion Hearing Date for Student Critical of China’s Communist Party,” Radio Free Asia, May 5, 2020, www .rfa.org/english/news/china/student-05052020094519.html, accessed September 26, 2021. 38. Toby Crockford, “Drew Pavlou Banned from UQ Campuses, Booted from UQ Senate Position,” Brisbane Times, August 3, 2020, www.brisbanetimes.com .au/national/queensland/drew-pavlou-banned-from-uq-campuses-booted-from -uq-senate-position-20200803-p55i2m.html, accessed September 26, 2021. 39. Figures from Gerry Smith, “Debates Grow over Australia’s Deep Economic Ties to China,” Washington Post, May 2, 2020.

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NOTES TO PAGES 107–111 40. Quoted in Gerry Smith, “Debates Grow.” 41. “China Is Curbing Imports of More and More Australian Goods,” The Economist, November 12, 2020; Matt Pottinger, “Beijing Targets American Business,” Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2021. 42. John Lee, “China’s Laughable Double Standards Fool No One,” The Australian, August 26, 2020. 43. Keith Johnson and Jack Detsch, “Australia Draws a Line on China,” Foreign Policy, May 4, 2021. 44. Eric Meijer, “Australia’s GDP Bounce Defies China’s Trade Pressure,” Nikkei Asia, March 4, 2021, asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Australia-s-GDP-bounce-defies -China-s-trade-pressure, accessed September 26, 2021. 45. Laura He, “China Suspends Business Ties with NBA’s Houston Rockets over Hong Kong Tweet,” CNN, October 7, 2019, www.cnn.com/2019/10/07 /business/houston-rockets-nba-china-daryl-morey/index.html, accessed September 26, 2021. 46. Sebastian Horn, Carmen M. Reinhart, and Christoph Trebesch, “How Much Money Does the World Owe China?” Harvard Business Review, February 26, 2020, hbr.org/2020/02/how-much-money-does-the-world-owe-china, accessed September 26, 2021. 47. Aadil Brar, “Djibouti Story Resembles Hambantota, Has the Same Chinese Script,” The Print, April 14, 2021, theprint.in/opinion/djibouti-story-resembles -hambantota-has-the-same-chinese-script/639249, accessed September 26, 2021. 48. Konstantinas Andrijauskas, “A Diplomatic Incident in Lithuania Troubles Its Relationship with China,” China Observers in Central and Eastern Europe, September 17, 2019, chinaobservers.eu/a-diplomatic-incident-in-lithuania-troubles -its-relationship-with-china, accessed September 26, 2021; Keegan Elmer, “Europe’s ‘17+1’ Countries Dissatisfied with China Relations, Report Says, as Summit Is Postponed,” South China Morning Post, April 7, 2020, www.scmp.com/news /china/diplomacy/article/3078830/europes-171-countries-dissatisfied-china -relations-report-says, accessed September 26, 2021. 49. Stuart Lau, “Lithuania Pulls Out of China’s ‘17+1’ Bloc in Eastern Europe,” Politico, May 21, 2021, www.politico.eu/article/lithuania-pulls-out-china-17-1 -bloc-eastern-central-europe-foreign-minister-gabrielius-landsbergis, accessed September 26, 2021. 50. Joseph S. Nye Jr., “Soft Power,” Foreign Policy 80 (Autumn 1990): 153– 71; Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Succeed in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). 51. The Soft Power Index was created by Jonathan McCloy of Portland Strategic Communications, a consulting firm, in cooperation with the University of

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NOTES TO PAGES 111–117 Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy. See The Soft Power 30: A Global Ranking of Soft Power, 2019, softpower30.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10 /The-Soft-Power-30-Report-2019-1.pdf, accessed September 26, 2021. 52. Lily Kuo, “Chinese Nuclear Plant Denies Dangerous Radiation Leaks,” Washington Post, June 15, 2021. 53. Edward Wong and Paul Mozur, “China’s ‘Donation Diplomacy’ Raises Tensions with U.S.,” New York Times, April 14, 2020; Melanie Conklin, “Chinese Government Asks Wisconsin Senate for a Commendation,” Wisconsin Examiner, April 10, 2020, wisconsinexaminer.com/2020/04/10/chinese-government-asks -wisconsin-senate-for-a-commendation, accessed September 26, 2021. 54. “Torment of the Uyghurs,” The Economist, October 17, 2020, 10. 55. See “China’s Coronavirus Censorship,” Washington Post, May 1, 2020. 56. Jack Ewing, “European Lawmakers Block a Pact with China, Citing Human Rights Violations,” New York Times, May 20, 2021. 57. Edward Wong, Matthew Rosenberg, and Julian E. Barnes, “Chinese Agents Spread Messages That Sowed Virus Panic in U.S., Officials Say,” New York Times, April 22, 2020. 58. The Warsaw Pact, established by the Soviet Union in May 1955 and including Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania, was dissolved in July 1991. 59. Philip Remler, “Russia at the United Nations: Law, Sovereignty, and Legitimacy,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 22, 2020, carne gieendowment.org /2020/01/22/russia-at-united-nations-law-sovereignty -and-legitimacy-pub-80753, accessed September 26, 2021. 60. Ellen Nakashima and Devlin Barrett, “U.S. Charges Russian Intelligence Officers in Several High-Profile Cyberattacks,” Washington Post, October 19, 2020. 61. On the Putin regime, among numerous devastating accounts, see Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020); Joshua Yaffa, Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia (New York: Tim Duggan, 2020); Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); Luke Harding, Expelled: A Journalist’s Descent into the Russian Mafia State (New York: St. Martin’s, 2012); Isaac Chotiner, “How Putin Controls Russia,” New Yorker, January 23, 2020. 62. Fareed Zakaria, “The New China Scare: Why America Shouldn’t Panic About Its Latest Challenger,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 1 (January/February 2020): 52–69 at 53, 67, 69. 63. Graham Allison, “The New Spheres of Influence: Sharing the Globe with Other Great Powers,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 2 (March/April 2020): 30–40 at 30.

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NOTES TO PAGES 118–122 64. Robert B. Zoellick, “The World Is Watching How America Handles Coronavirus,” Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2020. 65. See also Richard Ned Lebow, “On Learning the Scholar’s Craft,” H-Diplo Essay No. 212, International Security Studies Forum, April 8, 2020, issforum.org /essays/PDF/E212.pdf, accessed September 26, 2021; Peter Beinart, “America Needs an Entirely New Foreign Policy for the Trump Age,” The Atlantic, September 2018; Hugh White, The China Choice: Why We Should Share Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 66. Wertheim, “Price of Primacy,” 19, 25. 67. H. R. McMaster, “What China Wants,” The Atlantic, May 2020, 69–74 at 73; McMaster, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World (New York: Harper, 2020). McMaster cites Morgenthau’s use of the term “strategic narcissism.” 68. The term “unipolar moment” attracted attention through the writing of the late Charles Krauthammer. See “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (1990/1991): 23–33. 69. Allison, “New Spheres of Influence,” 32. 70. See also the extensive data and detailed argument in Beckley, Unrivaled. Note that the IMF and the CIA’s World Factbook include technical footnotes concerning the pros and cons of comparing GDP using market exchange rates versus purchasing power parity. In weighing the uses of the two methodologies, the CIA concedes that “many economists prefer this [market rate] measure when gauging the economic power an economy maintains vis-à-vis its neighbors, judging that an exchange rate captures the purchasing power a nation enjoys in the international marketplace.” See “GDP (Official Exchange Rate),” CIA World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/gdp-official-exchange -rate, accessed September 26, 2021. Tim Callen of the IMF concedes that “PPP is harder to measure than market-based rates.” He adds that “there is a large gap between market- and PPP-based rates in emerging market and developing countries. . . . As a result, developing countries get a much higher weight in aggregations that use PPP exchange rates than they do using market exchange rates. The weights of China and India in the world economy are far greater using PPP exchange rates than market-based weights.” See “Purchasing Power Parity: Weights Matter,” International Monetary Fund, February 24, 2020, www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft /fandd/basics/ppp.htm, accessed September 26, 2021. 71. Matthew Kroenig, The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy Versus Autocracy from the Ancient World to the U.S. and China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 72. Sergei Medvedev, The Return of the Russian Leviathan (New York: Polity, 2020).

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NOTES TO PAGES 122–128 73. Leon Aron, “Putin Pays Backhand Tribute to Democracy,” The Atlantic, January 16, 2020, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/putin-pays-back handed-tribute-democracy/605035, accessed September 26, 2021. 74. Poll conducted by the Levada Analytical Center from a survey of 1,601 respondents in fifty Russian regions, cited in “Young Russians’ Desire to Leave Hits 10-Year High—Poll,” Moscow Times, November 26, 2019, www.themoscowtimes .com/2019/11/26/young-russians-desire-to-leave-hits-10-year-high-poll -a68320, accessed September 26, 2021. 75. James M. Dorsey, “A Fragile Anti-US Alliance: Russia Accuses China of Technology Theft,” Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,467, March 4, 2020, besacenter.org/perspectives-papers /russia-china-technology-theft, accessed September 26, 2021. 76. McMaster, “What China Wants,” 71. 77. Hal Brands makes a strong case against spheres of influence and emphasizes the risks of conflict that may result. See Brands, “Don’t Let Great Powers Carve Up the World: Spheres of Influence Are Unnecessary and Dangerous,” Foreign Affairs, April 20, 2020, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-04-20/dont -let-great-powers-carve-world, accessed September 26, 2021.

Chapter 5. Is the United States Still Indispensable? Epigraphs: Clinton, Second Inaugural Address; Margaret MacMillan, “The Pandemic Is a Turning Point in History,” The Economist, May 9, 2020. 1. Richard Gowan, a director at the International Crisis Group, quoted in Rick Gladstone, “U.N. Leader Describes a Grave Threat, but the Security Council is Mum,” New York Times, April 5, 2020. 2. “How the World’s Most Powerful Country Is Handling Covid-19,” The Economist, May 28, 2020. 3. Leviathan, 1631, ch. 13, emphasis added. 4. Bacevich, Age of Illusions, 4–5, 186, 199. 5. For a critique of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama foreign policies and especially of nation building, see Michael Mandelbaum, Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post–Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 6. It should be noted that the proportion of not-free countries is at its highest level in fifteen years, and additional erosion among democracies has been occurring. Data from “Freedom in the World 2021: Democracy Under Siege,” freedomhouse

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NOTES TO PAGES 129–133 .org/sites/default/files/2021-02/FIW2021_World_02252021_FINAL-web -upload.pdf, accessed October 19, 2021. 7. Poverty figures as defined by the United Nations. See Nicholas Kristof, “This Has Been the Best Year Ever,” New York Times, December 28, 2019. 8. Quoted in “L’Amérique: ange ou démon?” Le Nouvel Observateur, December 13, 2002, 60–61. The translation is by Stephen Brooks, in his insightful review of Lebow, H-Diplo Essay No. 202, International Security Studies Forum, March 12, 2020, issforum.org/essays/PDF/E202.pdf, accessed September 26, 2021. 9. Kevin Liptak, “Exclusive: Read the Inauguration Day Letter Obama Left for Trump,” CNN, September 5, 2017, www.cnn.com/2017/09/03/politics/obama -trump-letter-inauguration-day/index.html, accessed September 26, 2021. 10. Martin Wolf, “The New World Disorder and the Fracturing of the West,” Financial Times, January 2, 2018. 11. Lee Hsien Loong, “The Endangered Asian Century,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 4 (July/August 2020): 52–64 at 53. 12. Carl Bildt, “Welcome to the Post-American World,” Project Syndicate, April 28, 2020, www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/covid19-ushers-in-post -american-world-by-carl-bildt-2020-04, accessed September 26, 2021. 13. Max Boot, “Our Days as a Superpower May Be Numbered,” Washington Post, March 21, 2019; Alexander Cooley and Daniel H. Nexon, “How Hegemony Ends,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 4 (July/August 2020): 143–56. Seth J. Frantzman, “Two Central Asia Summits Challenge the United States,” Middle East Forum, June 15, 2019, www.meforum.org/58777/two-central-asia-summits, accessed September 26, 2021; David Kirkpatrick and Ben Hubbard, “American Vow to Defend Gulf Is Facing a Test: Hesitation to Act May Embolden Tehran,” New York Times, September 20, 2019. Colum Lynch and Robbie Gramer, “Outfoxed and Outgunned: How China Routed the U.S. in a U.N. Agency,” Foreign Policy, October 23, 2019, foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/23/china-united-states-fao-kevin-moley, accessed September 26, 2021; Steven Erlanger, “Another Virus Victim: The U.S. as a Global Leader,” New York Times, March 20, 2020; “Retreat from Germany: Withdrawing U.S. Troops Would Be a Win for Russia—and China,” editorial, Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2020. 14. Krauthammer, “Unipolar Moment,” 23. 15. Krauthammer, “Holiday from History, Washington Post, February 14, 2003. 16. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 17. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987). 18. More than half a century ago, Mancur Olson Jr. and Richard Zeckhauser,

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NOTES TO PAGES 134–137 focusing on the United States and NATO, outlined an economic model to explain why larger member states usually bear a disproportionate share of the burden in international institutions. See Olson and Zeckhauser, “An Economic Theory of Alliances,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 48, no. 3 (August 1966): 266–79. 19. In 2006, at a NATO summit meeting in Latvia, NATO adopted a non-binding policy “guidance” of 2 percent. At a subsequent meeting in Wales in 2014, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, NATO formally adopted the 2 percent figure. Member countries that did not yet meet the target were called upon to do so by 2024. 20. Data for 2021 from “Defence Expenditure of NATO Countries (2014– 2021),” NATO press release, Communique PR/CP(2021)094, Graph 3, June 11, 2021, www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2021/6/pdf/210611-pr -2021-094-en.pdf, accessed October 20, 2021. 21. U.S. defense spending peaked at 14.2 percent of GDP in 1953. For data and figures covering the period from 1940 to 2016, see Lieber, Power and Willpower, 121–25. U.S. defense/GDP figures for 2021 from “Defense Expenditure of NATO Countries (2014–2021).” 22. Greg Ip, “U.S. Digs Deep to Steady Economy,” Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2020. 23. For federal deficit data for fiscal years 2020 and 2021, see “Federal Deficit,” in www.usgovernmentspending.com, accessed October 20, 2021. 24. Robert J. Samuelson, “The National Debt Is Out of Control,” Washington Post, May 11, 2020. 25. Sebastian Mallaby, “The Age of Magic Money: Can Endless Spending Prevent Economic Calamity?” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 4 (July/August 2020): 65–77 at 68–71. But for a note of caution about the longer-term consequences, see “Governments Must Beware the Lure of Free Money,” The Economist, July 23, 2020. 26. “Total Fertility Rate,” CIA World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/total-fertility-rate, accessed December 28, 2021. 27. William H. Frey, “The 2010s May Have Seen the Slowest Population Growth in U.S. History, Census Data Show,” Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., January 2, 2020, www.brookings.edu/research/population-change-and-the -projected-change-in-congressional-representation, accessed September 26, 2021. 28. TFR data for China and Russia from CIA World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/total-fertility-rate, accessed December 28, 2021. 29. Ben Guarino, Emily Rauhala, and William Wan, “China Is Increasingly Closing the Science Gap,” Washington Post, June 4, 2018.

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NOTES TO PAGES 137–141 30. Ben Guarino, “Science and Engineering Report Shows Continued Loss of U.S. Dominance,” Washington Post, January 15, 2020. 31. “Innovation and National Security: Keeping Our Edge,” Council on Foreign Relations, Independent Task Force Report No. 77, September 2019, www .cfr.org/report/keeping-our-edge, accessed September 26, 2021. 32. Posen, “Command of the Commons”; see also Posen, Restraint. 33. See, for instance, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Variétés dans l’espèce humaine [1749] in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Imprimerie et Librairie Générale de France, 1859), 5:441. 34. Cited in Andrea Wulf, “Thomas Jefferson’s Quest to Prove America’s Natural Superiority,” The Atlantic, March 7, 2016, www.theatlantic.com/science /archive/2016/03/jefferson-american-dream/471696, accessed September 26, 2021. On the bizarre views of European naturalists and especially of Count Buffon, see the authoritative account in Philippe Roger, The American Enemy; The History of French Anti-Americanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 6–14. 35. Thomas Jefferson devoted a chapter to refuting Buffon in his book Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), available online from the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/jeffvir.asp, accessed September 26, 2021. 36. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940). 37. Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party During the Second World War (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), 14. 38. See Mackubin T. Owens, “The ‘Correlation of Forces,’ Then and Now,” (Ashland, Ohio: Ashbrook Ashland University Publications, February 2004), ash brook.org/publications/oped-owens-04-cof, accessed September 26, 2021. 39. On the domestic and international consequence of the oil shocks, see Robert J. Lieber, “Energy, Economics, and Security in Alliance Perspective,” International Security (Spring 1980); Robert J. Lieber, The Oil Decade: Conflict and Cooperation in the West (New York: Praeger, 1983). 40. Akio Morita and Shintaro Ishiara, The Japan That Can Say “No,” quoted in Flora Lewis, “Foreign Affairs: Japan’s Looking Glass,” New York Times, November 8, 1989. 41. Quoted in Joshua Muravchik, “The New Gloomsayers,” Commentary 113, no. 6 (June 2003): 24–29 at 24. 42. Huntington, “Why International Primacy Matters,” International Security 17, no. 4 (Spring 1993): 68–83 at 75–80.

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NOTES TO PAGES 142–150 43. Details and data from Jeffrey Frankel, “Who Has the World’s Largest Economy?” Project Syndicate, May 28, 2020, www.project-syndicate.org/commentary /top-economic-power-us-or-china-by-jeffrey-frankel-2020-05, accessed September 26, 2021. 44. Ruchir Sharma, “The Comeback Nation: U.S. Economic Supremacy Has Repeatedly Proved Declinists Wrong,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 3 (May/June 2020). 45. Gerard Baker makes this point in “China’s Crisis Exposes a Badly Flawed Model,” Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2020. 46. Craig Kafura, “China Needs Diplomats, Not Wolves,” Pacific Forum, PacNet No. 42, pacforum.org/publication/pacnet-42-china-needs-diplomats-not -wolves, accessed September 26, 2021. 47. David Ignatius, “In the Tech Battle with China, Advantage U.S.,” Washington Post, July 22, 2020; Jeanne Whalen, “Lagging in 5G, U.S. Finds Hope in Surprising Place: Idaho,” Washington Post, June 30, 2020.

Chapter 6. Politics, Society, and Culture Epigraphs: Kennan’s telegram cited previously as “X,” “Sources of Soviet Conduct”; The Legatum Institute (London), “New Report Shows Pre-Covid U.S. Prosperity Had Been Rising but Social Capital Had Fallen,” The United States Prosperity Index, 2021, www.li.com/news/new-report-shows-pre-covid-u-s-prosperity-had -been-rising-but-social-capital-had-fallen, accessed October 25, 2021; Daniel Schwammenthal, “To America, from a Worried European Friend,” Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2020. 1. Polling based on average approval in surveys conducted during the period between the presidential inauguration and March 31 of the same year. Jeffrey M. Jones, “Biden Sparks Greater Party, Education Gaps Than Predecessors,” April 15, 2021, news.gallup.com/poll/346622/biden-sparks-greater-party-education -gaps-predecessors.aspx, accessed September 26, 2021. 2. Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Address, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions: Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,” January 27, 1838, www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm, accessed September 26, 2021. On Lincoln’s speech, see Peter Berkowitz, “Regrounding U.S. Diplomacy in America’s Founding Principles,” Real Clear Politics, July 19, 2020, www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/07/19/regrounding_us_diplomacy_in _americas_founding_principles_143744.html, accessed September 26, 2021. 3. For a definitive account of Soviet spying and the interception by U.S. intelligence officials of communications (the Venona files) from the Soviet Embassy

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NOTES TO PAGES 152–154 in Washington, see John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 4. In an earlier work, I emphasized the implications of a loss of shared threat in terms of its impact on alliances and on domestic support for key policies and collective action: Robert J. Lieber, ed., Eagle Rules? Foreign Policy and American Primacy in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Prentice Hall, 2002), xii, 1–15. 5. Hannah Hartig and Hannah Gilberstadt, “Younger Americans More Likely Than Older Adults to Say There Are Other Countries That Are Better Than the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, January 8, 2020, www.pewresearch.org/fact -tank/2020/01/08/younger-americans-more-likely-than-older-adults-to-say -there-are-other-countries-that-are-better-than-the-u-s, accessed September 26, 2021. 6. Kirchick elaborates on this in his review of George Packer’s Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (New York: Knopf, 2019). See Kirchick, “Our Man of Little Importance,” Commentary, July/August 2019, 54–56 at 56. 7. Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press, 2018). 8. “The 1619 Project,” New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019; “The 1619 Project Curriculum,” pulitzercenter.org/lesson-plan-grouping/1619-project -curriculum, accessed September 26, 2021. 9. For serious critiques of the 1619 Project, see the letter to the New York Times Magazine by five distinguished historians including Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, and Gordon S. Wood, December 29, 2019; Sean Wilentz, “A Matter of Facts,” The Atlantic, January 22, 2020, www.theatlantic .com/ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-project-new-york-times-wilentz/605152, accessed September 26, 2021; Cathy Young, “The Fight over the 1619 Project,” The Bulwark, February 9, 2020, thebulwark.com/the-fight-over-the-1619-project, accessed September 26, 2021. 10. Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman, and David North, “The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A Racialist Falsification of American and World History,” World Socialist Web Site, September 6, 2019, www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/06 /1619-s06.html, accessed September 26, 2021. 11. See Jake Silverstein, “We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued the 1619 Project,” December 20, 2019, updated January 19, 2021, www.nytimes.com /2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619 -project.html, accessed September 26, 2021; “The 1619 Project Curriculum.” 12. For the original and revised texts of key passages, see Tom Mackaman and David North, “The New York Times and Nikole Hannah-Jones Abandon Key Claims

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NOTES TO PAGES 154–157 of the 1619 Project,” World Socialist Web Site, September 22, 2020, www.wsws.org /en/articles/2020/09/22/1619-s22.html, accessed September 26, 2021. 13. Niemuth, Mackaman, and North, “The New York Times’s 1619 Project.” 14. Donald Alexander Downs, Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Donald Alexander Downs, Free Speech and Liberal Education: A Plea for Intellectual Diversity and Tolerance (Washington, D.C.: CATO, 2020). 15. See Roy Wood, “The Psychology of Liberals and Conservatives,” Wired, October 25, 2012, www.wired.com/2012/10/the-psychology-of-liberals-and -conservatives, accessed September 26, 2021; Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon, 2012). 16. “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate, Harper’s Magazine, July 7, 2020, harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate, accessed September 26, 2021. 17. Bari Weiss, “Resignation Letter,” July 14, 2020, www.bariweiss.com /resignation-letter, accessed September 27, 2021. The term “doxxing” refers to the internet posting of private or negative information about a person done with malicious intent. 18. See, for instance, Analía Gómez Vidal and Charles R. Hunt, “The Growing Influence of Social Sorting on Partisan Voting Behavior,” University of Maryland, College Park, 2018, gvpt.umd.edu/sites/gvpt.umd.edu/files/Gomez%20Vidal %20and%20Hunt%202018.pdf, accessed September 27, 2021. 19. Pew Research Center Poll, December 19, 2017, cited in Philip Bump, “Republicans Would Least Like Their Kids to Marry a Transgender Person. For Democrats? A Republican,” Washington Post, February 21, 2019. 20. Nielsen poll in 2018 on partisan moral disengagement cited in Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason, “Lethal Mass Partisanship: Prevalence, Correlates, and Electoral Contingencies,” paper presented at the January 2019 NCAPSA American Politics Meeting, Washington, D.C., www.dannyhayes.org/uploads/6/9/8/5 /69858539/kalmoe___mason_ncapsa_2019_-_lethal_partisanship_-_final _lmedit.pdf, accessed September 27, 2021. 21. “Fractured Nation: Widening Partisan Polarization and Key Issues in 2020 Presidential Elections,” Public Religion Research Institute, October 20, 2019, www.prri.org/research/fractured-nation-widening-partisan-polarization-and -key-issues-in-2020-presidential-elections, accessed September 27, 2021. See also “Partisan Antipathy: More Intense, More Personal,” Pew Research Center, October 10, 2019, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/10/10/partisan-antipathy-more -intense-more-personal, accessed September 27, 2021. 22. Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections

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NOTES TO PAGES 157–158 Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 23. William Galston, “The Search for Balance Among Four Americas,” Washington Post, June 13, 2021; William A. Galston, “The Bitter Heartland,” American Purpose, March 31, 2021, www.americanpurpose.com/articles/the-bitter-heartland, accessed September 27, 2021. 24. Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis, Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). 25. See, for example, J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2016); Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown, 2013). For an analysis focusing on the cultural and ideational roots of social conflict as early as 1970 when construction trades workers in Manhattan clashed with anti-Vietnam protectors, see David Paul Kuhn, The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 26. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton find that for White Americans ages forty-five to fifty-four, these “deaths of despair” tripled between 1990 and 2017, with the impact especially severe among non-college-educated white men. See Case and Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). 27. Andrew A. Michta identifies a disconnect of elites and a leadership class from America’s founding and values and argues that the blame ultimately lies with our schools. See Michta, “The Corrosive Decline of Our Elites,” American Interest, June 5, 2020, www.the-american-interest.com/2020/06/05/the-corrosive -decline-of-our-elites, accessed September 27, 2021. 28. Robert D. Putnam with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020). 29. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 30. Michael Kimmage argues that the idea of the West, which provided valuable coherence for U.S. foreign policy during two world wars and especially during the Cold War, has been abandoned as a result of cultural changes within society. He identifies the contradictions that existed within that vision and advocates reviving a new and revised version of it. See Kimmage, The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (New York: Basic, 2020). See also Tom Nichols, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

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NOTES TO PAGES 159–169 31. Trubowitz and Burgoon, “Retreat of the West.” 32. Dina Smeltz, Ivo H. Daalder, et al., “A Foreign Policy for the Middle Class: What Americans Think,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, October 7, 2021, www .thechicagocouncil.org/research/public-opinion-survey/2021-chicago-council -survey, accessed October 22, 2021. 33. Megan Brenan, “U.S. National Pride Falls to Record Low,” Gallup, June 15, 2020, news.gallup.com/poll/312644/national-pride-falls-record-low.aspx, accessed September 27, 2021. 34. Data based on median national responses across sixteen allied countries; Richard Wike et al., “America’s Image Abroad Rebounds with Transition from Trump to Biden,” Pew Research Center, June 10, 2021, www.pewresearch.org /global/2021/06/10/americas-image-abroad-rebounds-with-transition-from -trump-to-biden, accessed September 27, 2021.

Chapter 7. Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership Epigraphs: President Barack Obama, speaking on August 20, 2012, quoted in Robert Farley, “Obama’s Blurry Red Line,” FactCheck.org, September 6, 2013, www.factcheck.org/2013/09/obamas-blurry-red-line, accessed September 27, 2021, emphasis added; Jeffrey Frankel, “Is China Overtaking the US as a Financial and Economic Power?” The Guardian (London), May 29, 2020, www.theguardian .com/business/2020/may/29/is-china-overtaking-the-us-as-a-financial-and -economic-power, accessed September 27, 2021. 1. Henry R. Nau argues that Trump was not seeking to dismantle the global order but to persuade allies to assume more of the common defense and trade burdens, and to get China to accept the rules of a market-based world economy. “Course Correction,” The National Interest 167 (May/June 2020): 49–57 at 49. 2. Waltz, “Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to My Critics,” in Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 343. 3. Quoted in Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War: Reevaluating a Landmark Case for Ideas,” International Security 25, no. 3 (Winter 2000–2001): 5–53 at 29. 4. Michael Mandelbaum, “Foreign Policy as Social Work,” Foreign Affairs 75, no. 1 (January/February 1996): 16–33. 5. Mandelbaum, Mission Failure. 6. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 20,

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NOTES TO PAGES 170–173 2002, www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/national/nss-020920.pdf, accessed September 27, 2021. 7. Arguably, the single best primary source for understanding Obama’s view of foreign policy can be found in the extended interview he gave to Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” The Atlantic, April 2016, www.theatlantic.com/magazine /archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525, accessed September 27, 2021. 8. Quoted in Ross Douthat, “Our Thoroughly Modern Enemies,” New York Times, August 23, 2014. 9. Remarks by President George W. Bush at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, D.C., October 6, 2005, www.ned .org/remarks-by-president-george-w-bush-at-the-20th-anniversary, accessed September 27, 2021. 10. Goldberg, “Obama Doctrine.” 11. Obama’s repeated use of the term “arc of history” was borrowed from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s remark, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” 12. “Text of President Obama’s Remarks on Syria,” New York Times, August 31, 2013. www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/world/middleeast/text-of-president -obamas-remarks-on-syria.html, accessed September 27, 2021. 13. “The Cost of Inaction,” The Economist, September 24, 2015. 14. Goldberg, “Obama Doctrine.” 15. Quoted in David Remnick, “Going the Distance: On and Off the Road with Barack Obama,” New Yorker, January 27, 2014. 16. The phrase, lightly edited for family consumption, was originally cited by Christi Parsons and Paul Richter in “Obama Argues Against Use of Force to Solve Global Conflicts,” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 2014. Shortly thereafter Obama used the same cleaned-up version of the phrase in his interview with Mark Landler in “Obama Warns U.S. Faces Diffuse Terrorism Threats,” New York Times, May 28, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/us/politics/obama-foreign-policy-west -point-speech.html, accessed September 27, 2021. Later accounts reported that the president’s words in private had been, “Don’t do stupid shit.” See Mike Allen, “ ‘Don’t do stupid sh—’ (stuff ),” Politico, June 1, 2014, www.politico.com/story /2014/06/dont-do-stupid-shit-president-obama-white-house-107293.html, accessed September 27, 2021. 17. Quoted in Jeffrey Goldberg, “Hillary Clinton: ‘Failure’ to Help Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS,” The Atlantic, August 10, 2014. 18. Interview, Meet the Press, NBC TV, November 22, 2015. 19. Gideon Rose, “What Obama Gets Right,” Foreign Affairs 94, no. 1 (September/October 2015): 2–12.

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NOTES TO PAGES 173–180 20. Derek Chollet, The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Re­ defined America’s Role in the World (New York: Public Affairs, 2016). 21. Quoted in “Remarks by the President and First Lady on the End of the War in Iraq,” Fort Bragg, North Carolina, December 14, 2011, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/12/14/remarks -president-and-first-lady-end-war-iraq, accessed September 27, 2021. 22. Retired U.S. Army Colonel Peter Mansoor, who served as executive officer to Multi-National Force-Iraq commander General David Petraeus during the surge in Iraq, 2007–2008, interview with the author, November 1, 2016. 23. For a more detailed assessment of Obama’s Iraq War policies, see Lieber, Retreat and Its Consequences, 59–61, 97–101. 24. Obama’s energy secretary Ernest J. Moniz wrote, “The core of the Iran agreement is an explicit commitment from Iran that it will never seek, develop, or acquire nuclear weapons.” See Moniz, “On Iran and North Korea: Don’t Trust, and Verify, Verify, Verify,” Boston Globe, March 27, 2018. 25. David Albright with Sarah Burkhard, Iran’s Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Science and International Security, 2021). The authors also find that Iran has had a long history of violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970. 26. Data from a report of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which found Iran to have accumulated 2,443 kilograms of low-enriched uranium, more than ten times the limit of 203 kilograms under the agreement. Cited in Lawrence Norman, “U.N. Says Iran Nuclear Stockpile Grows,” Wall Street Journal, November 12, 2020. 27. Quoted in Julia Eilperin, “Wrapping Up His Last Foreign Trip, Obama Tries to Make Headway on Syria,” Washington Post, November 21, 2016, emphasis added. See also “Press Conference by President Obama in Lima, Peru,” The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, November 20, 2016, obamawhitehouse .archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/11/20/press-conference-president-obama -lima-peru, accessed September 27, 2021. 28. Liptak, “Exclusive.” 29. Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Routledge, 2002), xvii. 30. Colin Dueck, Age of Iron: On Conservative Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 2–3, 31–32. See also Michael Mandelbaum, “Will the American Global Order Survive Donald Trump?” The American Interest, December 30, 2019, www.the-american-interest.com/2019/12/30/will-the-american-global -order-survive-donald-trump, accessed September 27, 2021. 31. Dueck, Age of Iron, 4–5.

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NOTES TO PAGES 180–188 32. Nau, “Course Correction,” 49; Henry Nau, “Trump and America’s Foreign Policy Traditions,” in The Trump Doctrine and the Emerging International System, ed. Stanley Renshon and Peter Suedfeld (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 71–98. 33. Nau, “Course Correction,” 52. 34. Nau, “Course Correction,” 57. 35. Kevin D. Williamson, “Hell, No,” National Review, October 27, 2020. 36. Quoted in Peggy Noonan, “Raucous 2016 Gives Way to Subdued 2020,” Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2020. 37. John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 2; Bolton’s ABC-TV interview quoted in Allyson Chiu, “ ‘I’m Not Going to Vote for Him’: John Bolton Calls Trump a ‘Danger for the Republic,’ ” Washington Post, June 22, 2020. 38. “The Trump Disruption,” editorial, Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2020. 39. Secretary Kerry’s remarks to the Brookings Institution’s annual Saban Forum, December 4, 2016, quoted in A. J. Caschetta, “History Proves John Kerry Wrong . . . Again,” Middle East Forum, December 22, 2020, www.meforum.org/61565/history -proves-john-kerry-wrong-again, accessed September 27, 2021. 40. Missy Ryan, Karen DeYoung, and Loveday Morris, “U.S. to Pull OneThird of Its Military Force from Germany,” Washington Post, July 30, 2020. 41. Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce, “Disentangling the Effects of the 2018– 2019 Tariffs on a Globally Connected U.S. Manufacturing Sector,” Finance and Economics Discussion Series No. 2019-086, Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C., 2019, doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2019.086, accessed September 27, 2021; Robert B. Zoellick, “Trump’s Pyrrhic Trade Victories,” Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2020; “How to Judge President Trump’s Economic Record,” The Economist, October 17, 2020. 42. “A Losing Trade War,” editorial, Washington Post, November 2, 2020. 43. See, for instance, Nau, “Course Correction”; Marc A. Thiessen, “The 10 Best Things Trump Did in 2019,” Washington Post, December 26, 2019; “The 10 Worst Things Trump Did in 2019,” Washington Post, December 30, 2019. 44. Richard Wike, Janell Fetterolf, and Mara Mordecai, “U.S. Image Plummets Internationally as Most Say Country Has Handled Coronavirus Badly,” survey of 13,273 adults, June 10–August 3, 2020, in thirteen countries (Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, South Korea), Pew Research Center, September 15, 2020, www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/09/15/us-image-plummets-internationally -as-most-say-country-has-handled-coronavirus-badly, accessed September 27, 2021.

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NOTES TO PAGES 189–200 Chapter 8. Indispensability Then and Now Epigraph: Lee Kwan Yew, quoted in Peggy Noonan, “A Statesman’s Friendly Advice,” Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2013. 1. Andrey A. Sushentsov and William C. Wohlforth, “The Tragedy of U.S.-Russian Relations: NATO Centrality and the Revisionists’ Spiral,” International Politics 57 (June 2020): 427–50 at 428, doi.org/10.1057/s41311-020 -00229-5, accessed September 27, 2021. 2. F. Gregory Gause III, “Should We Stay or Should We Go? The United States and the Middle East,” Survival 61, no. 5 (2019): 7–24 at 20, doi.org/10.1080 /00396338.2019.1662114, accessed September 27, 2021. 3. Steven Erlanger, “Afghan Fiasco Raises Hard Questions for Europe,” New York Times, August 23, 2021. 4. Trubowitz and Burgoon, “Retreat of the West,” 16. 5. See especially Henry Nau, Conservative Internationalism: Armed Diplomacy Under Jefferson, Polk, Truman, and Reagan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Lind and Wohlforth, “Future of the Liberal Order Is Conservative.” 6. Nau, “Why ‘Conservative’ not Liberal Internationalism?” Orbis 62, no. 1 (2018): 22–29 at 22. 7. Lind and Wohlforth, “Future of the Liberal Order Is Conservative,” 71. 8. See Kupchan, Isolationism; Colgan and Keohane, “Liberal Order Is Rigged”; Snyder, “Broken Bargain”; Gates, Exercise of Power. 9. Eliot A. Cohen, “America’s Long Goodbye: The Real Crisis of the Trump Era,” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 1 (January/February 2019): 138–46. 10. “The Power of America’s Example: The Biden Plan for Leading the Democratic World to Meet the Challenges of the 21st Century,” joebiden.com/american leadership, accessed November 11, 2021. 11. Joseph R. Biden Jr., “Why America Must Lead Again,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 2 (March/April 2020): 64–76 at 65, 76. 12. Bret Stephens, “America’s Crumbling Global Position,” New York Times, October 27, 2021. 13. Michael Barone, “We’re Still Living in a 49% Nation,” Washington Examiner, November 10, 2020, www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists /were-still-living-in-a-49-percent-nation, accessed September 29, 2021; Michael Barone, “The 49 Percent Nation,” National Journal 33, no. 23 (June 9, 2001): 1710. 14. Katherine Schaeffer, “A Look at the Americans Who Believe There Is Some Truth to the Conspiracy Theory That COVID-19 Was Planned,” Pew Research Center, July 24, 2020, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/24/a-look

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NOTES TO PAGE 200 -at-the-americans-who-believe-there-is-some-truth-to-the-conspiracy-theory-that -covid-19-was-planned, accessed November 11, 2021. 15. CNN poll results cited in “59% of GOP Voters Say ‘Believing’ Trump Won 2020 ‘Important’ to Being a Republican,” Newsweek, September 12, 2021, www .newsweek.com/59-gop-voters-say-believing-trump-won-2020-important -being-republican-poll-1628281, accessed October 28, 2021. In contrast to those beliefs, an excerpt from a book by ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl describes the view of Trump attorney general William P. Barr regarding Trump’s electoral fraud claims: “It was all bulls- - -t.” The Justice Department “realized from the beginning it was just bulls- - -t.” Quoted in George T. Conway III, “America Owes Thanks to Trump’s Lawyers—Even William Barr,” Washington Post, June 28, 2021. See also Jonathan Karl, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show (New York: Dutton, 2022).

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INDEX

Abkhazia, 115 Abraham accords, 11, 68, 186 Abrams, Elliott, 67 Abrams, Stacey, 200 Achen, Christopher, 157 Acheson, Dean, 19, 23 Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, Baron, 88–89 Adams, John, 148 Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Tedros, 98–99 Afghanistan, 85, 89, 168; sectarian conflict in, 30; Soviet invasion of, 60, 165; U.S. intervention in, 9, 16, 39, 131, 132, 134, 169, 170, 193, 200–201; U.S. withdrawal from, 12–13, 71, 127, 182, 194 Agreed Framework (1994), 62 Airbus, 93 Albania, 21 Albright, Madeleine, 205n11 Alibaba (e-commerce firm), 103 Alien and Sedition Acts (1798–1801), 147 Allison, Graham, 117, 119, 120

Alternative für Deutschland, 37 Altmeier, Peter, 92 America First Committee, 139, 149, 150 American Revolution, 153 American Values Survey, 157 Angola, 28 Anti–Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty (1972), 45, 71 Argentina, 36, 59 artificial intelligence, 91, 92, 137 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), 96 Assad, Bashar al-, 52, 58, 115, 172 Atlantic, 171, 172 Atlantic Charter (1941), 75 Atwood, Margaret, 155 The Audacity of Hope (Obama), 33 Aukus agreement (2021), 13 Australia, 5, 13, 36, 67, 106–7, 123, 143, 194 Austria, 84, 103   Bacevich, Andrew, 127–28 Baghdadi, Abu Bakr al-, 182

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INDEX Bahrain, 68, 104, 182, 193 Baker, James, 60, 166 Baltic states, 28, 29, 67, 114, 184, 186, 191 Barone, Michael, 198 Bartels, Larry, 157 Bay of Pigs invasion (1961), 132 Belarus, 187 Belgium, 18, 93, 184 Bell, Daniel, 32 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), 57, 96, 109 Berlin airlift (1948–49), 21, 164 Berlin Wall, 33, 140 Biden, Joseph, 40, 49, 92, 160, 201; Afghanistan presence ended by, 12–13, 71, 127, 182, 194; allies’ misgivings about, 194; China criticized by, 56, 104, 105; fiscal stimulus backed by, 135; as internationalist, 12, 42, 69, 146, 198; Iraq withdrawal backed by, 174; public opinion of, 146–47; Trump’s policies reversed by, 47, 48, 50, 100, 185 Bildt, Carl, 14, 130 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 99 bin Laden, Osama, 61, 177 “Black Hawk Down” incident (1993), 30 Blinken, Antony J., 5, 51, 56, 69 Bolsonaro, Jair, 64 Bolton, John, 181 Boot, Max, 65 Bosnia, 30, 31, 71, 75, 80, 132, 167, 168 Bowling Alone (Putnam), 158 Brazil, 36, 64, 142 Bretton Woods system, 17 Brexit, 37, 81, 159 Briand, Aristide, 74 Brooks, David, 65

Browder, Earl, 139 Brunei, 114, 143 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances (1994), 52–53, 177 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de, 138, 139 Bulgaria, 21 Burgoon, Brian, 158–59, 196 Burr, Aaron, 148 Bush, George H. W., 11, 28, 30, 33, 165–68 Bush, George W., 11, 88, 147, 168, 177, 186; Afghanistan invasion launched by, 169; European disaffection with, 70–71, 72, 79, 87; unilateralism ascribed to, 45 Bush, Jeb, 65 Bynum, Victoria, 153   Caixin Global, 98 Callen, Tim, 222n70 Cambodia, 28, 108 Camp David Accords (1978), 165 Canada, 14, 22, 36, 43, 143 carbon emissions, 48 Carter, Jimmy, 60, 140, 165, 175 Castro, Fidel, 132 Central Asia, 96, 114, 116 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 60, 132, 152 Chan, Margaret, 99 Chechens, 116 Cheney, Elizabeth, 154–55 Chiang Kai-shek, 22 Chile, 36 China, 2–4, 11, 14; African links forged by, 103, 108; aging population of, 121, 136; as alternative to U.S., 95–114; arms buildup by, 56, 97, 105, 113–14, 118, 137, 178, 186, 200; Australian dependence on,

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INDEX 106–7; as authoritarian state, 55, 95, 96–97, 116, 118, 120, 121, 143; bellicosity of, 143, 190; Budapest Memorandum signed by, 52; communist takeover of, 22–23, 131; during coronavirus pandemic, 9, 97–104, 111, 112, 118; debt diplomacy of, 108–10; diminished luster of, 111; disinformation spread by, 96–103, 111–12, 113, 195; economic and technological rise of, 30, 34–35, 36, 55–56, 95, 120, 136–37, 142, 143, 200; E.U. divisions over, 10, 13; exports from, 30, 36, 143, 157; foreign students from, 105–7; GDP of, 120, 142; German links to, 92–93, 194; global aspirations of, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 95, 105, 192; greenhouse gases emitted by, 47–48; human rights violations by, 5, 8, 15, 46, 96, 113; intellectual property theft by, 105, 118, 122, 137, 185; Iran sanctions rejected by, 50; Japanese invasion of, 74; in Korean War, 23; language and cultural programs of, 96, 105, 110; North Korea tolerated by, 63; North Vietnamese backed by, 132; Obama’s overtures to, 171; personality cults in, 64; Russian links to, 53, 116, 122; South and East China Seas militarized by, 9, 46, 56–57, 114, 118, 162, 178; on U.N. Security Council, 17, 46, 74, 116, 192; U.S. interim trade agreement with, 44; U.S. rapprochement with (1972), 164; U.S. trade deficit with, 12, 185, 186; U.S. vs., 5, 6, 13, 34, 36–40, 42, 43, 143; western policy toward, 27, 39, 195; world insta-

bility fomented by, 51, 67, 113; as WTO member, 30–32, 57, 118, 168 Chirac, Jacques, 71 Chollet, Derek, 173 Chomsky, Noam, 155 Churchill, Winston, 18, 28, 75 Civil Rights Act (1964), 148 Civil Rights Movement, 150, 164 Civil War, U.S., 148 Civil War Amendments, 148 climate change, 13, 33, 78, 117, 125, 195; Bush’s indifference toward, 45; Paris Accords on, 43, 47, 48, 71, 79, 170, 186, 192; Trump’s denial of, 43, 79 Clinton, Bill, 5–6, 11, 30–32, 71, 124, 147, 167–68, 182 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 171, 173, 179, 185, 200 Cohen, Eliot, 197 Cold War: cultural diplomacy during, 196; end of, 33, 141, 152, 166; fading memories of, 126; intra-­ alliance disputes during, 26–27, 132; shared purpose during, 21, 127, 151; Soviet threat during, 18, 27, 139–40, 151, 164; trilateral powers during, 35; U.S. commitments during, 16, 19–25, 189–90; U.S. defense spending during, 134 collective action, 1, 2, 41, 94, 133, 190 collective security, 73 Colombia, 36 communism, 18, 36; in China, 22–23, 95, 98–102, 106, 111–12, 121; decline of, 32; in U.S., 139, 149; U.S. struggle against, 24 Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, 112–13 Concert of Europe, 4, 5

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INDEX Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 54 Confucius Institute, 105, 106 Congo, 30, 167 Congo, Republic of, 108 Congress of Vienna, 73 conservative internationalism, 196–97 containment, 19–21 Cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European Countries (17 + 1 bloc), 109–10 coronavirus pandemic, 6, 195; China and, 9, 97–104, 111, 112, 118; conspiracy theories surrounding, 200; in European Union, 10, 36, 82–85; in Germany, 90; populism linked to, 11; in U.S., 10, 13, 39, 40, 126, 130, 141, 146 Coughlin, Charles, 149 Crimea invasion (2014), 9, 44, 47, 52, 114, 162; agreements violated by, 177; G-7 response to, 187; tepid responses to, 53, 71; as U.N. failure, 75 Croatia, 80, 133–34 Cuba, 43, 46, 115, 132, 171 Cuban missile crisis (1962), 132, 164 cyber warfare, 9, 35, 52, 53, 57, 115, 143 Cyprus, 46 Czechoslovakia, 21, 74 Czech Republic, 86, 103, 109–10   decolonization, 35–36 de Gaulle, Charles, 71, 79, 132 Democratic-Republicans, 147 democratization, 28–29, 69, 128 Deng Xiaoping, 55 Denmark, 103 Deudny, Daniel, 77

Dies, Martin, 150 disinformation: by China, 96–103, 111–12, 113, 195; by Russia, 35, 53, 195 Djibouti, 108–9 Donbas region, 114, 177, 184 Douthat, Ross, 65 Downs, Donald, 155 drones, 137, 176–77, 200 drug trade, 41 Dueck, Colin, 180 Duterte, Rodrigo, 64   Eastern Europe, 52, 191; Chinese links to, 109; NATO nuclear weapons in, 165–66; Soviet aggression in, 18, 21, 131; after Soviet collapse, 28, 79; western security guarantee sought by, 29, 72 East Germany, 21 Egypt, 36, 142, 165, 182 Eisenhower, Dwight, 23, 140, 150, 164 El Salvador, 28 The End of Ideology (Bell), 32 environmental agreements, 10 Ericsson (telecommunications company), 92, 144 Eritrea, 46 Estonia, 29, 52, 117, 133–34, 191 Ethiopia, 28, 36, 74, 98–99 ethnic cleansing, 75 euro currency, 82 European Central Bank (ECB), 83–84, 85 European External Action Service, 112 European Research Council, 83 European Union (E.U.), 4, 34, 72, 89; Britain’s exit from, 37, 81, 159; during coronavirus epidemic, 82–83, 104; debt purchases by,

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INDEX 135; divisions within, 10; enlargement of, 79; formation of, 29; GDP of, 37–38, 79; Hungary’s disdain for, 64; limitations of, 81–85, 94; as model, 70; as regulator, 80–81, 94; Russian antipathy toward, 53, 191; Trump’s disdain for, 44, 71; U.S. aligned with, 15   failed states, 6, 33 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 152 Federalists, 147, 148 Federal Reserve, 135, 143 Ferrari, Marco, 83 Fidesz (Hungarian political party), 37 Financial Action Task Force, 50 Finland, 84 5G mobile networks, 92, 136, 144 Floyd, George, 146 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 17, 96 Ford, Gerald, 165 Ford, Henry, 149 Foreign Affairs, 20 Fourteen Points (1918), 75 fracking, 48 France, 16, 21, 93, 111, 115; Budapest Memorandum signed by, 52; communists in, 18; during coronavirus epidemic, 82–83, 84, 103; illiberal populism in, 37; Iran sanctions rejected by, 50, 163; as NATO member, 132, 133–34; on U.N. Security Council, 17, 74; U.S. military plan rebuffed by, 131–32 Frankel, Jeffrey, 142, 161 Franklin, Benjamin, 138–39 Free Syrian Army, 186 fuel efficiency standards, 48

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (2011), 91 Fukuyama, Francis, 25   Gabriel, Sigmar, 70 Gaddafi, Muammar, 75, 177 Galileo Satellite system, 93–94 Galston, William, 157 Garrett, Shaylyn, 158 Gates Foundation, 99 Gayse, Gregory, 193–94 Gaza, 58 Gazprom, 91–92 Georgia, Republic of, 28, 47, 115 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 17, 30 Germany, 5, 111, 115, 184; anti-­ militarism in, 89; during corona­ virus epidemic, 82–83, 84, 103; defense spending by, 90, 134; domestic politics in, 86; energy policies of, 91–92; as free rider, 194; illiberal populism in, 37; as imperial power, 73; Iran sanctions rejected by, 50, 163; under Nazis, 63, 65, 74, 89, 139, 149; postwar recovery and rearmament of, 20, 27, 131–32; refugees and migrants admitted to, 85–86; Soviet nonaggression pact with, 149; technology policy of, 92; U.S. mistrusted in, 88; World War II defeat of, 16, 18, 139 Ghana, 104 gig economy, 157–58 Gilded Age, 148 Gilpin, Robert, 26, 133 globalization, 76–78; in developing world, 36–37, 55; disaffection with, 6, 64, 10–11, 157, 159–60;

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INDEX globalization (continued) disruptive effects of, 46, 64; idealized views of, 3, 77; U.S. transformed by, 16; winners and losers from, 78 Global Positioning System (GPS), 93 Google, 93 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 33, 121, 166 Great Britain, 13, 17, 60, 93, 111, 194; Brexit vote in, 38, 81, 159; Budapest Memorandum signed by, 52; Chinese technology eschewed by, 144; debt purchases by, 135; illiberal populism in, 37; Iran sanctions rejected by, 50, 163; in Korean War, 23; Middle East presence of, 18; NATO contribution by, 133–34; as nineteenth-century power, 26, 77; on U.N. Security Council, 74; World War II devastation of, 16, 18–19 Great Depression, 77–78, 149, 151 Great Recession, 82, 84, 126, 141 Greece, 18, 19, 82, 84, 85, 133–34 Grotius, Hugo, 51   Haass, Richard, 4, 33, 55, 95 Haidt, Jonathan, 155 Haiti, 132, 167, 168 Haley, Nikki, 47 Hamas, 58, 63 Hamilton, Alexander, 148 Hamilton, Lee, 60 Hannah-Jones, Nikole, 153–54 hegemony, 25–26 Helsinki agreement (1975), 177 Herf, Jeffrey, 63 Hezbollah: drones deployed by, 137; Iranian support for, 35, 58–59, 61, 176, 182, 187; terrorist operations by, 51, 59, 63

Hitler, Adolf, 139 Hobbes, Thomas, 126 Hong Kong, 56, 106, 108, 110–11, 113, 118, 185, 186 Horn, Sebastian, 108 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 150 Houthis, 59 Huawei Technologies, 92, 144 human rights, 10, 12, 45, 76, 165, 171, 178, 195; Chinese violations of, 5, 8, 15, 46, 96, 113; U.S. support for, 25, 26, 27 human trafficking, 41 Hungary, 111; Chinese links to, 93, 103, 109; European norms flouted by, 64, 86; right-wing populism in, 37; in Soviet bloc, 21 Huntington, Samuel, 141 Hussein, Saddam, 27, 72, 169, 182 hybrid warfare, 52, 75 hydraulic fracturing (fracking), 48   Ikenberry, G. John, 65, 77 illiberal democracy, 6, 28 India, 4, 14, 36, 38; Chinese rivalry with, 123, 143; Kashmir policies of, 46; U.S. military cooperation with, 67 indispensability, defined, 1, 12 Indonesia, 36, 104, 123 industrialization, 32 infant mortality, 68–69, 128 inflation, 39, 140, 152 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, 54–55, 186 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 49, 51 International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), 17, 96 International Criminal Court, 45

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INDEX International Energy Agency, 48 international institutions, 12, 46, 70, 76, 115; Chinese integration with, 129; German commitment to, 89; liberal internationalist support of, 3; limitations of, 31, 72, 77, 85; Trump’s skepticism toward, 43, 44, 47, 66–67, 71, 99–100, 162, 179; after World War II, 16, 17, 26, 27, 29, 79 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 17, 53, 74–75, 85, 108, 120 International Telecommunications Union, 96 Iran, 2, 3, 6, 36, 137, 195; domestic politics in, 61, 187; foreign adventurism by, 9, 35, 176; GDP of, 142; economic sanctions against, 12, 49–50, 163, 182, 187, 193; norms violated by, 34; nuclear program of, 12, 43–44, 48–51, 61; Obama’s overtures to, 171, 175–76; regional aspirations of, 10, 57, 162, 190, 192; terrorism backed by, 58–60, 62, 176; as theocracy, 35, 58, 60; U.S. demonized by, 119, 132, 165; U.S. hostages held by, 132, 140, 152; world disorder fomented by, 51 Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), 35, 59 Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), 59 Iraq, 8, 9, 11, 16, 85, 168; Iranian influence in, 35, 58, 62, 176, 187; Kuwait invaded by, 27, 75; U.S. invasion of, 39, 40, 45, 71, 72, 78, 131, 132, 134, 169, 177, 193, 201; U.S. withdrawal from, 44, 173–74, 182 Iraq Study Group, 60–61 Ireland, 85

iron ore, 107 ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), 11, 51, 58, 63–64, 174–75, 182, 186–87 Ismay, Hastings Lionel Ismay, Baron, 22 Israel, 36, 137, 159, 177; Arab accords with, 11, 68, 165, 182–83, 186; Iranian hostility toward, 57–59, 61–62; Obama’s policy toward, 175, 182; U.N. bias against, 46; U.S. recognition of, 164 Italy: asylum seekers in, 84; coronavirus epidemic in, 82, 83, 103; domestic politics in, 18, 37, 103; economic weakness in, 84–85; under fascism, 65, 74; World War II defeat of, 139   Jackson, Andrew, 179 James, Harold, 77–78 Japan, 4, 15, 44, 123; China invaded by, 74; Chinese pressure on, 108, 114; during Cold War, 35; debt purchases by, 135; economic rise of, 143; economic stagnation in, 36, 37–38, 141; Manchuria invaded by, 74; modernization in, 136; North Korean threat to, 62, 63; nuclear disaster in, 91; postwar occupation of, 16; postwar recovery of, 26, 139; U.S. and, 20, 67, 140–41; during World War II, 164 Jefferson, Thomas, 138–39, 147–48 Joffe, Josef, 89 Johnson, Lyndon, 164 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, 2015), 88, 170, 175; Biden’s attempt to rejoin, 50–51; ineffectiveness of, 48–49, 61, 176, 177, 192–93; Trump’s withdrawal from, 43–44, 50, 71, 79, 186, 187 Jordan, 182

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INDEX Karadžic´, Radovan, 80 Kashmir, 46 Kellogg, Frank, 74 Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), 74 Kelly, John, 181 Kennan, George F., 19–20, 145 Kennedy, John F., 24, 127, 140, 150, 164 Kennedy, Paul, 14–15, 133 Kennedy, Robert F., 150 Kenya, 104 Kerry, John, 182 Khamenei, Ali, 58 Khodorovsky, Mikhail, 54 Kim Jong-un, 62, 187 Kimmage, Michael, 230n30 Kindleberger, Charles, 25–26 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 150 Kinsley, Michael, 65 Kirchick, James, 153 Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 47 Kissinger, Henry, 164 Klein, Matthew, 157 Kohl, Helmut, 86 Korean War, 22, 23, 131, 150 Kosovo, 31, 39 Kramp-Karrenbauer, Annegret, 90 Krauthammer, Charles, 131 Kristol, William, 65 Kroenig, Matthew, 121 Krygyzstan, 108 Ku Klux Klan, 148–49 Kupchan, Charles, 4, 72 Kurds, 186 Kuwait, 27, 75 Kyoto Protocol, 45, 71   Laos, 108 Laschet, Armin, 90 Latin America, 28, 32, 36, 76 Latvia, 29, 52, 117, 133–34, 191

Lavrov, Sergey, 171 law of the sea, 10, 41, 56, 76 League of Nations, 73–74 Lebanon, 9, 35, 58, 59, 60, 176, 187 Lebow, Richard Ned, 45 Lee Hsien Loong, 130 Lee Kwan Yew, 189 Lega (Italian political party), 37 Leyen, Ursula von der, 83, 84, 87 Libya, 75, 85, 132, 177 life expectancy, 69, 128 Lincoln, Abraham, 148 Lind, Jennifer, 4, 197 Lindbergh, Anne Morrow, 139 Lindbergh, Charles, 139, 149, 150 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 32 Lithuania, 29, 52, 110, 117, 133–34, 191 Li Wenliang, 98 lynching, 148–49   Ma, Jack, 103 Maastricht Treaty (1992), 29 MacArthur, Douglas, 179 Macmillan, Margaret, 124 Macron, Emmanuel, 70, 76, 87, 90 Malaysia, 36, 114, 143 Maldives, 108 al-Maliki, Nouri, 173 Mallaby, Sebastian, 135 Manchuria, 74 Mandelbaum, Michael, 34, 168 Mao Zedong, 22–23, 27, 131 Marshall, George C., 20 Marshall Plan, 20–21, 74 Marx, Karl, 141 Mattis, James, 181 McCarthy, Joseph, 150 McFarlane, Robert C., 211n32 McMaster, H. R., 119–20, 123 McPherson, James M., 153

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INDEX Mead, Walter Russell, 179 Medicaid, 40, 134 Medicare, 40, 134 Medvedev, Dmitry, 121 mercantilism, 8, 10, 77, 78, 186 Merkel, Angela, 85, 87–92, 112, 184 Mexico, 36, 142 Michta, Andrew, 55, 230n27 middle class, 32, 34 middle-income trap, 121 migration, 195; to China, 103, 111; to Europe, 85–86, 94; resistance to, 37, 78, 85–86, 149, 159; from Russia, 122; to U.S., 13, 16, 78, 136, 149, 151 Moïsi, Dominique, 129 Mokyr, Joel, 153 Mongolia, 108 Moniz, Ernest J., 233n24 Moore, Barrington, Jr., 32 Morey, Daryl, 108 Morgenthau, Hans, 119 Morocco, 46, 68, 182 Mossadegh, Mohammad, 60, 175 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 47 Mozambique, 28 Mussolini, Benito, 65, 74   Nabarro, David, 99 Napoleonic Wars, 73, 166 Nasrallah, Hassan, 61 nationalism, 37, 64, 77 National Rally (French political party), 37 National Security Council, 23 nation building, 30, 132, 162, 167, 168 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organi­ zation), 11, 74, 81, 87, 168; in Bosnian conflict, 31, 80; burden sharing within, 132, 133–34, 182–83; formation of, 21–22;

France’s diminished role in, 132; missiles deployed by, 165–66; obsolescence forecast for, 72–73; post–Cold War enlargement of, 29, 191; public opinion of, 66, 159; realist and progressive views of, 122–23; Trump’s skepticism toward, 44, 66–67, 79, 179, 184 NATO-Russia Council, 55 natural gas, 48, 53, 91 Nau, Henry, 180, 196–97, 231n1 Navalny, Alexei, 54, 187 Nazi Germany, 63, 65, 74, 89, 139, 149 Nemtsov, Boris, 54 Netherlands, 84 New York Times, 153–54 Niger, 108 Nigeria, 36, 104 Nixon, Richard, 152, 164, 165 Nokia Corporation, 92, 144 non-state actors, 33, 51, 63, 168–69, 196 Nord Stream 2 pipeline, 91–92, 184, 186 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 43, 185–86 North Atlantic Treaty (1949), 22 North Korea, 6, 12, 44–45; Chinese toleration of, 63; nuclear program of, 62, 67; Obama’s overtures to, 171; personality cults in, 64; South Korea invaded by, 22–23, 131, 164; world disorder fomented by, 51 Norway, 107 Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson), 139 NSC-68 memorandum, 22–23 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, 54 nuclear energy, 91, 111s

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INDEX nuclear weapons: in Eastern Europe, 78, 165–66; Iranian agreement on (JCPOA), 43–44, 48–51, 61, 71, 79, 88, 170, 175, 176, 177, 186, 187, 192–93; North Korean development of, 12, 44–45; proliferation of, 6, 10, 26, 41, 76, 117, 195; in Russian arsenal, 116; in Soviet arsenal, 22, 52, 78, 131, 136; in U.S. arsenal, 78, 136; U.S. use against Japan of, 164 Nye, Joseph S., Jr., 110   Oakes, James, 153 Obama, Barack, 33, 44, 72, 79, 127, 168, 198; Asia policy of, 67, 78, 178; global enthusiasm for, 87, 188; as internationalist, 76–77, 129, 162, 170; Iran policy of, 50–51, 60, 61; Iraq withdrawal completed by, 173–74; Israel policy of, 175, 182; public opinion of, 147; Syria policy of, 71, 161, 162, 170; tentativeness of, 172–73, 177; Trump’s policy similarities with, 11, 12, 40–41, 161–63; Ukraine assistance limited by, 53 oil shocks, 39, 132, 140, 152 On the Law of War and Peace (Grotius), 51 Operation Desert Storm, 29 O-RAN (Open Radio Access Networks), 144 Orbán, Viktor, 64 overpopulation, 33   Pakistan, 36 Panetta, Leon, 173 Paris Climate Accords (2016), 43, 47, 48, 71, 79, 170, 186, 192 Pavlou, Drew, 106

Pax Britannica, 26 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 51, 163 Pearl Harbor attack (1941), 149–50 Persian Gulf War (1991), 27–28, 39, 152 Pettis, Michael, 157 Philippines, 56–57, 64, 114 Poland, 21, 67, 86, 109, 133–34, 184 Pompeo, Mike, 50 Ponnuru, Ramesh, 181 Poos, Jacques, 80 populism, 11, 37, 64, 86, 103, 159 Portugal, 85 Posen, Barry, 137–38 poverty, 17, 69, 78, 128–29 preemptive military action, 169, 170 Press, Daryl G., 4 Prestowitz, Clyde, 45, 141 Prodi, Romano, 71 protectionism, 8, 10, 77, 78; through tariffs, 12, 66, 88, 162, 185, 186 proxy wars, 24, 52, 61 purchasing power parity (PPP), 120, 142 Putin, Vladimir, 116, 170, 188; arms buildup by, 177; authoritarianism of, 52, 54, 121–22, 187; Eurasian vision of, 53; international institutions exploited by, 115; neigh­ boring countries intimidated by, 35, 52, 114; Trump’s admiration for, 179, 187 Putnam, Robert, 158   al-Qaeda, 51, 61, 63–64 al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), 173, 174 Qatar, 36, 193 Quaero, 93 Quds Force, 35, 58, 60, 182 Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, 118–19, 128

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INDEX reactionary modernism, 63–64 Reagan, Ronald, 11, 24, 60, 165–66 recessions, 39, 140 Reinhart, Carmen M., 108 Remler, Philip, 115 Rhodes, Ben, 61 Romania, 21, 133–34 Romney, Mitt, 33 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 16, 17, 75, 149, 164 Rose, Gideon, 173 Rosneft (oil company), 54 Rostec, 122 Roth, Roger, 112 Rowling, J. K., 155 rule of law, 6, 26, 51, 67, 125, 144 Russia, 2–4, 6, 14, 45, 111; arms buildup by, 137; as arms exporter, 122; assassinations by, 53, 54; as authoritarian state, 52, 116, 187; Baltic states threatened by, 114, 177, 184; Budapest Memorandum signed by, 52; businesses looted by, 53–54; Chinese links to, 53, 116, 122; corruption in, 53, 122; Crimea annexed by, 9, 44, 47, 52, 53, 71, 75, 114, 162, 177, 187; disarray within, 15; disinformation spread by, 35, 53, 195; E.U. divisions over, 10, 13; German links to, 194; human rights abuses by, 116; Iran sanctions rejected by, 50; Middle East policies of, 186; nationalism in, 64; neighbors’ sovereignty violated by, 5, 9, 35, 52, 55; norms violated by, 34, 52; as nuclear power, 116; Obama’s overtures to, 171; oil and gas reserves of, 53, 91–92, 115, 122; population decline in, 136; regional aspirations of, 10, 53, 114–15,

190; Ukraine invaded by, 9, 44, 47, 52, 75, 76, 114, 117, 162, 170, 177, 184, 187; on U.N. Security Council, 46, 116; Trump’s policies toward, 67; weaknesses of, 121–22; world instability fomented by, 51, 115 Rwanda, 30–31, 75, 167   Sahel region, 85, 89 Samoa, 108 Samsung Electronics, 144 SARS epidemic, 111 Saudi Arabia, 36, 59, 61, 175, 176, 193 Schengen Agreement (1985), 83, 85 Schmidt, Helmut, 86 Schwammenthal, Daniel, 145 Scissors, Derek, 101 security studies, 33 September 11 attacks, 39, 131, 168–69, 200 Serbia, 31, 39, 80, 103, 109 Sharma, Ruchir, 142 Shi’ites, 57–59, 174 Shultz, George, 165 Silverstein, Jake, 153–54 Singapore, 36 “1619 Project,” 153–54 Slovakia, 109 Slovenia, 80 Snowden, Edward, 88 social media, 64, 113, 115, 156, 196, 199 Social Security, 40, 134 Soft Power Index, 111 solar power, 48, 91 Soleimani, Qasem, 6, 61–62, 182 Somalia, 30, 75, 132, 167, 168 South Africa, 36 Southeast Asia, 38

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INDEX South Korea, 36, 44, 62–63, 108, 143, 159, 188; North Korean invasion of, 22–23, 131, 164 South Ossetia, 115 Soviet Union, 17; Afghanistan invaded by, 60, 165; Baltic states annexed by, 29; Berlin blockaded by, 21; as Cold War threat, 18, 27, 139–40, 151, 164; collapse of, 3, 5, 15, 27, 28, 79, 141, 166; in Cuban missile crisis, 132; fading memories of, 126; German nonaggression pact with, 149; in Korean War, 23; North Vietnamese backed by, 132; as nuclear power, 22, 52, 78, 131, 136; U.N. Korea debate boycotted by, 22–23; on U.N. Security Council, 74; U.S. containment of, 19–21; World War II devastation of, 16 Spain, 84, 85, 93, 103 spheres-of-influence strategy, 116–20, 122–23 Sputnik launch (1957), 139–40 Srebrenica massacre (1995), 80 Sri Lanka, 108 Stalin, Joseph, 18, 127, 164 Stefanik, Elise, 155 Steinem, Gloria, 155 Steinmeier, Frank-Walter, 43 Stent, Angela, 95 Stephens, Bret, 198 Stone Fish, Isaac, 101–2 strategic narcissism, 119 structural realism, 163 Sudan, 30, 46, 68, 167, 182 Suez crisis (1956), 27, 78 Sunnis, 57, 173, 174, 183 Sushentsov, Andrey A., 191 Sweden, 86, 103, 108, 111 Syria, 11, 177, 193; chemical warfare

by, 44, 71, 161, 162, 172; civil war in, 52, 75, 76, 85, 115, 170, 172, 177–78; Iranian influence in, 9, 35, 58, 176, 187; U.S. withdrawal from, 182, 186   Taishan nuclear power plant, 111 Taiwan, 22, 114, 117, 123, 159; Beijing’s intimidation of, 56, 110–11, 113; economic rise of, 143 Takeyh, Ray, 60 Taliban, 169 tariffs, 12, 66, 88, 162, 185, 186 technology diffusion, 136–38 territorial integrity, 51–52, 117 terrorism, 9, 41, 45, 50, 81, 117, 168–69, 195; Iranian support for, 58–60, 62, 176 Thailand, 36, 142, 143 Tiananmen Square protests (1989), 15, 25 Tibet, 5, 56, 116 Tillerson, Rex, 181 Tonga, 108 trade agreements, 10 trade wars, 6, 11, 12, 27, 43 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 43, 71, 185, 192 Treaty of Versailles (1919), 73, 74 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 51, 163 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, 44 Trebesch, Christoph, 108 Trubowitz, Peter, 158–59, 196 Truman, Harry S., 17, 19, 150, 164; arms buildup backed by, 23–24; Korean War joined by, 22 Truman Doctrine, 19, 21 Trump, Donald, 12, 37, 40–41, 92, 127, 159, 160; agreements

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INDEX abrogated by, 11, 71, 48, 50, 61, 71, 79, 186, 192; appointees’ departures under, 181; authoritarians admired by, 187; China policy of, 105, 185; as conservative nationalist, 180; European disdain for, 87–88; election results rejected by, 146, 200; fiscal stimulus backed by, 135; Iran nuclear program and, 49–50, 61; as isolationist, 11, 43, 44, 47, 66–67, 71, 99–100, 178–79, 198; North Korean deception and, 62; Obama’s policy similarities with, 11, 12, 40–41, 161–63; Republicans in thrall to, 154–55; rhetoric of, 51, 65, 66, 68; transactional approach of, 11, 41, 65, 71, 180, 188; unpopularity of, 65–66, 94, 129, 147 Tulsa massacre (1921), 148 Turkey, 10, 36, 61, 93, 111, 116, 177, 192, 195; during Cold War, 19; Middle East policies of, 186; northern Cyprus occupied by, 46   Uganda, 104 Uighurs, 5, 46, 96, 102, 106, 116, 118, 185 Ukraine, 28; natural gas transported through, 91–92; Russian depredations in, 9, 44, 47, 52, 75, 76, 114, 117, 162, 170, 177, 184, 187 unemployment, 39, 85, 139, 140, 152 UNESCO, 44, 47 United Arab Emirates, 36, 59, 68, 176, 182 United Nations, 9, 16–17, 21, 33, 70, 96, 162; in Bosnian conflict, 80; Budapest Memorandum signed by, 52; Chinese influence at, 192; formation of, 74; goals of, 46; Iraqi

invasion of Kuwait condemned by, 27–28; Korean Command authorized by, 22–23; peacekeeping by, 75; Security Council of, 17, 46, 74, 116, 192; shortcomings of, 47, 75; Trump’s disdain for, 44, 47, 71, 179; U.S. support for, 27 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982), 56 United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), 46, 192 United Nations Industrial Development Organization, 96 United States, 111; aging population of, 134, 135–36; budget deficits in, 40, 126, 134–35; China vs., 5, 6, 13, 34, 36–40, 42, 43, 143; Chinese interim trade agreement with, 44; Chinese technology eschewed by, 144; at Cold War’s end, 14–16, 25, 27; criticisms of, 8–9, 43–69; defense spending by, 24, 39–40, 134; divided government in, 199; domestic constraints on, 126; domestic politics in, 10–11, 37, 39, 40, 146, 157, 199; GDP of, 37–38, 120; entitlement programs in, 40, 134; European public opinion toward, 88, 94; European Union aligned with, 15; fiscal stimulus in, 84, 135; greenhouse gas emissions from, 48; inequality in, 152, 157, 158; in international institutions, 16, 22, 26, 192; Iran vs., 6, 34; Israel policy of, 164, 175, 182; in Korean War, 131, 164; League of Nations shunned by, 73; liberal internationalists in, 3; NATO contribution by, 133–34; Nazi sympathizers in, 149; as nuclear power, 78, 136;

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INDEX United States (continued ) opioid crisis in, 158; in Persian Gulf War, 27–28, 39, 152; polarization in, 7, 11, 13, 40, 41, 128, 146, 152–58, 198–99; postwar reconstruction led by, 19; racial segregation in, 148; “realists” in, 2, 9; Rwandan conflict neglected by, 30–31; strengths of, 1, 4, 7–8, 38, 39, 120, 201; twenty-first-century disengagement by, 11–12, 40–41; on U.N. Security Council, 74; USSR and Russia vs., 6, 20, 21, 29, 34, 191; in Vietnam War, 132; world standing of, 160, 187–88 U.S. Capitol attack (2021), 11, 39, 146, 154 U.S. Information Agency (USIA), 195–96 U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), 186 urbanization, 32   Vandenberg, Arthur, 21 Vanuatu, 108 Vedrine, Hubert, 205n12 Venezuela, 46, 115, 171 veterans’ benefits, 40, 134 Vietnam, 36, 114, 123, 143 Vietnam War: dissent over, 27, 38–39, 78, 150, 152; end of, 140, 164; U.S. casualties in, 132 Voting Rights Act (1965), 148   Waltz, Kenneth, 72, 163 War and Change in World Politics (Gilpin), 133 war crimes, 10, 51 Warsaw Pact, 29, 33, 114, 191 Watergate scandal, 38, 140, 152

The Wave of the Future (Anne Morrow Lindbergh), 139 Weather Underground, 150 Weiss, Bari, 156 Western Sahara, 46–47 Whitsun Reef, 57 Wilentz, Sean, 153 Will, George, 65 Williamson, Kevin, 181 Wilson, Woodrow, 75 wind power, 48, 91 Wohlforth, William, 191, 197 Wolf, Martin, 129–30 Wood, Gordon S., 153 World Bank, 17, 53, 74, 96, 108 World Health Organization (WHO), 17, 96, 98–100, 186 World Trade Organization (WTO), 15, 27, 44; Chinese membership in, 30–32, 57, 118, 168 World War I, 73, 148, 166 World War II, 74, 139, 151, 164, 166   Xi Jinping, 100, 101, 188; authoritarianism of, 56, 95, 121, 143, 187; global aspirations of, 104–5; xenophobia exploited by, 34 Xinjiang, 56, 102, 186   Yeltsin, Boris, 121 Yemen, 9, 35, 59, 176, 187 Yugoslavia, 80 Yukos (oil company), 54   Zakaria, Fareed, 117, 118 Zambia, 108 Zeman, Miloš, 109–10 Zhao Lijian, 102 Zoellick, Robert, 118

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