EXPANDING AMERICA’S SPHERE OF INFLUENCE
After the Cold War ended, U.S. officials might have concluded that there were no longer any serious threats to contain and that extensive overseas commitments and a global military presence were no longer needed. Or they might have sought to preserve a few key alliances as a hedge against future troubles while shifting most of the burden onto local powers that had more at stake in key regions. But consistent with a strategy of liberal hegemony, U.S. leaders instead chose to expand U.S. security commitments in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East and to take on demanding new missions in Africa and Latin America. They did so in part to spread liberal ideals, but also because they believed that doing so would make conflict less likely and enhance U.S. security even more.
In Europe, the United States drove the process of expansion that grew NATO from sixteen to twenty-eight members by 2009.33 This policy sought to consolidate democratic rule in Europe, safeguard these states against a resurgent Russia, and forestall a new division of Europe. But because many new NATO members were small, weak, and close to Russia, expansion in effect committed the United States to protect a group of vulnerable and hard-to-defend states that had little military capability of their own to contribute. Washington was at best ambivalent about European efforts to develop military capabilities outside the NATO framework during this period, for fear such steps would reduce U.S. influence over its European partners and create a counterweight to U.S. power over the longer term.34
Concerns about China drove a steady increase in U.S. security commitments in Asia, and the focus on balancing China intensified as Beijing grew stronger and more assertive. The United States reinforced its bilateral alliance with Japan in the mid-1990s and moved closer to Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam, and the Bush administration eventually negotiated a new “strategic partnership” with India. This process continued during the Obama administration, which emphasized Asia’s growing economic and strategic importance and began a well-publicized “rebalancing” of U.S. forces to Asia.
U.S. involvement in the Middle East expanded even more dramatically, and at much greater cost. Despite the strategic importance of Middle East oil and the country’s long-standing commitment to several local powers, the United States had previously relied on local allies to uphold the balance of power and had kept its own ground and air forces out of the region. That approach changed in 1993, when the Clinton administration announced a new policy of “dual containment.” Instead of preserving a balance of power in the Persian Gulf by playing Iran and Iraq off against each other, the United States would keep significant ground and air forces in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait, in order to contain both.35
The United States plunged even more deeply—and fatefully—into the Middle East after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when the Bush administration first invaded Afghanistan to remove the Taliban and disrupt Al Qaeda, and then, in 2003, invaded Iraq and ousted Saddam Hussein. Regime change in Iraq was intended to demonstrate U.S. power, send a message to other rogue states, and begin to transform the Middle East from a source of anti-American terrorism to a sea of pro-American democracies.36 But instead of producing a stable democracy and enhanced U.S. influence, the invasion and occupation triggered a violent insurgency that left Iraq deeply divided, enhanced Iran’s regional position, and eventually allowed an even more radical extremist group—ISIS—to establish itself in parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014.
Barack Obama won election in 2008 by pledging to end the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but his effort to do so was only partly successful. He eventually withdrew the bulk of U.S. ground forces from both countries and relied instead on airpower, drones, special operations units, and targeted killings of suspected terrorists. But U.S. troops were still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan when his term ended, and the United States was still actively involved in counterterrorism operations in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and many other countries.
The growing list of U.S. burdens did not end there. In 1998 the United States had begun providing military training and several billion dollars’ worth of economic assistance to the Colombia government to help it defeat the FARC insurgency and to limit illegal narcotics flowing to the United States. The war on terror also led to a dramatic increase in the U.S. security role in Africa, including repeated interventions in Somalia, expanded drone operations, and a host of military training and advising efforts. By 2016, in fact, nearly two thousand U.S. Special Operations forces were “active in twenty [African] nations in support of seven major named operations.”37
Under liberal hegemony, in short, the United States kept taking on new security commitments without reducing any of its other obligations. As noted in the previous chapter, by 2016 the United States was committed to defending more countries than at any time in its history, while simultaneously trying to pacify several distant war-torn societies and conducting violent counterterrorism operations in many other places.38 America’s “sphere of influence” had never been greater, though how much influence the United States actually exercised in these places was far from clear.
PROMOTING LIBERAL VALUES
Expanding U.S. security commitments was closely linked to the larger goal of spreading liberal values and institutions. Strengthening democracy in Europe was a key justification for NATO expansion, for example, and a major motive behind the U.S. effort to broker peace in Bosnia in 1996 and the decision to wage war over Kosovo in 1999. The United States also backed the pro-democracy “color revolutions” in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004, and subsequently supported a popular uprising against Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2013.39 This almost-reflexive instinct to spread liberal values—including religious tolerance and women’s rights—also helps explain why Washington spent billions of dollars and thousands of lives trying to create workable democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This enduring commitment to building a liberal world order also accounts for the Obama administration’s haphazard and ultimately unsuccessful response to the “Arab Spring.” After a brief period of vacillation, Obama declared, “It will be the policy of the United States to promote reform across the region, and to support transitions to democracy,” and Washington subsequently backed Tunisia’s fledgling democracy, the removal of the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya later that same year.40 And when antigovernment protests began in Syria, the Obama administration quickly concluded “Assad must go” and eventually gave millions of dollars in covert aid to groups seeking to oust the regime.41 Washington also midwifed the creation of a short-lived democracy in South Sudan, attempted to bolster democracy in Yemen by orchestrating the removal of the strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2012, and successfully pressed for a partial end to military rule in Burma.42
Washington’s approach to economic globalization sought similar objectives in less obvious ways. By definition, globalization involves reducing barriers to international trade and investment and allowing market forces to operate more widely, a goal that U.S. leaders believed would increase global wealth, strengthen emerging democracies, and reduce the likelihood of war. Moreover, economic institutions such as the World Trade Organization and multilateral trade pacts like the TPP or the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) increasingly included provisions on transparency, shared labor and environmental standards, and compatible legal and regulatory frameworks. In actual practice, therefore, globalization required participating states to conform their domestic politics to a broad set of international norms, most of them heavily influenced by U.S. preferences and values.43
To be sure, the commitment to spreading liberal principles did not prevent Washington from supporting authoritarian governments in such countries as Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, or Singapore or keep it from turning a blind eye to human rights abuses practiced by close allies like Israel, Egypt, or Turkey. Nor did Washington seem overly concerned about the human costs its policies inflicted o
n others. These inconsistencies led to predictable (and valid) charges of hypocrisy, which undermined America’s image as a consistent defender of liberal principles. These lapses notwithstanding, U.S. leaders were genuinely committed to expanding a liberal world order, even if some of their actions fell well short of that ideal.
Indeed, as described at length in chapter 1, the energetic pursuit of liberal hegemony was mostly a failure. The United States was still very powerful, but its strategic position declined sharply between 1993 and 2016. Extending U.S. security commitments far and wide did not make Europe, Asia, or the Middle East more peaceful and in some cases caused wars that would not have occurred otherwise. And as we have seen, the broad effort to spread liberal values did not succeed. By 2017, in fact, democracy was in retreat in many places and under considerable strain in the United States itself.
WHY DID LIBERAL HEGEMONY FAIL?
At its core, liberal hegemony sought to remake world politics in America’s image and for America’s benefit. Despite its overweening ambition, it is not surprising that the strategy attracted wide support in the wake of America’s Cold War triumph. By portraying U.S. values as the ideal model for others and assigning Washington primary responsibility for peace, prosperity, and progress, the strategy appealed to Americans’ sense of virtue and self-regard. It also gave the foreign policy community in Washington a new and lofty purpose, while making those idealistic goals seem easy to achieve.
Moreover, the strategy’s promised benefits were undeniably appealing: Who wouldn’t prefer to live in a world where war is rare; where goods, investment, and people can move freely; where evildoers are contained or, better yet, punished; and where human rights are increasingly respected—especially if all these wonderful things could be achieved at little cost or risk? Given how most U.S. foreign policy experts saw the post–Cold War world, it might have been more surprising if the United States had not succumbed to these idealistic visions.
Yet as we have seen, the bipartisan pursuit of liberal hegemony led to repeated and costly failures, and its shortcomings became increasingly apparent over time. What were its main deficiencies and negative consequences? What exactly had gone wrong?
FRAGILE FOUNDATIONS
For starters, liberal hegemony rested on a distorted understanding of international politics, which led its proponents to exaggerate its expected benefits and underestimate the resistance the United States would generate while pursuing it. The liberal internationalists who ran foreign policy in the Clinton and Obama administrations believed that the spread of democracy and rising economic interdependence would attenuate existing conflicts and create an increasingly harmonious world, with robust international institutions taking care of any minor conflicts that remained. The neoconservatives who shaped the Bush administration’s foreign policy were less enamored of global institutions (which they saw as constraints on America’s freedom of action), but they believed that forceful demonstrations of American power and resolve would intimidate potential opponents and encourage most states to jump on America’s bandwagon. Despite minor differences, both liberal and neoconservative proponents of liberal hegemony assumed that the United States could pursue this ambitious global strategy without triggering serious opposition.
Unfortunately, the theories that underpinned these optimistic expectations are flawed. Although it is true that liberal democracies have fought few wars with each other, there is still no satisfactory explanation for why this is the case. The absence of a compelling theory means that some other factor besides regime type may account for this phenomenon, and we simply do not know if a world with a significantly greater number of democracies would in fact be more peaceful or make the United States more secure.
Even if it did, however, history also warns that newly democratized states are especially prone to internal and external conflicts. Even if the long-term effects proved to be salutary, efforts to spread democracy make trouble more likely in the short-to-medium term.44 Democratic peace theory also says little about how liberal states should deal with authoritarian regimes, except to suggest that overthrowing them is the path to perpetual peace. As a guide for policy, therefore, democratic peace theory promises more than it can deliver, and it is a potent recipe for trouble between liberal and non-liberal countries.
Liberal theories of economic interdependence are also of limited value. To be sure, lowering barriers to trade and investment is good for global economic growth, and high levels of economic interdependence may reduce the likelihood of war in some cases. But as the two world wars and many civil wars remind us, high levels of economic interdependence do not make war impossible and thus do not free states from having to worry about what powerful rivals might do to upset the balance of power.45 Even extensive economic globalization will not eliminate the possibility of rivalry, suspicion, and war, and may in some cases exacerbate these problems. The most recent wave of globalization also led to recurring financial crises—most notably in 2008—and has had wrenching social and political effects in many countries. Contemporary globalization is no panacea, in short, and certainly does not herald an end to traditional geopolitics.
Finally, liberal hegemony overstates the ability of international institutions to regulate relations among states and to resolve deep conflicts of interest. There is no question that even a world of sovereign states needs rules to manage interactions among them. To take an obvious example, modern international aviation would be impossible without detailed arrangements for governing and regulating access to airspace and managing daily flight operations. As multilateral organizations such as NATO, the World Bank, or the World Trade Organization have shown repeatedly, international institutions can facilitate cooperation when states have clear and obvious incentives to work together, but they cannot stop powerful states from acting as they wish and thus cannot remove the danger of conflict and war. International institutions are simply a tool that states use to advance their interests, and they inevitably reflect the interests of the most powerful states.46 Most present-day institutions have long conformed to U.S. preferences because the United States was by far their most powerful member; it is equally unsurprising that China now seeks a greater role in existing forums and in some cases is seeking to create parallel institutions of its own.47
U.S. leaders have also recognized that masking the exercise of power within a multilateral institution can make U.S. dominance more tolerable to others and help overcome some of the obstacles to effective international cooperation. Yet even the most powerful institutions could not bring peace to the Middle East; eliminate terrorism; create stable states in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or Sudan; prevent the 2008 financial crisis; reverse the centrifugal forces in the European Union; resolve maritime disputes in Asia; or produce a timely and effective response to the long-term problem of climate change.
BALANCING, BUCK-PASSING, AND BLOWBACK
At the same time, liberal hegemony ignores an even more important principle of international relations: imbalances of power make other states nervous, especially when the strongest state uses its power with little regard for others’ interests. It was entirely predictable that the so-called rogue states would look for ways to keep American power in check, for example, because the United States had made spreading democracy a centerpiece of its grand strategy and taken dead aim at a number of these countries. It was equally unsurprising that China, Russia, and a number of other states were alarmed by U.S. efforts to spread liberal values, because such efforts, if successful, threatened existing political arrangements in all non-liberal states and the privileged positions of their ruling elites.48
Yet America’s dominant position also alarmed some of America’s closest allies, including some fellow democracies. The French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine repeatedly complained about American “hyperpower” during the 1990s, and he once said that “the entire foreign policy of France … is aimed at making the world of tomorrow composed of several poles, not just one.” The German chancello
r Gerhard Schröder echoed this concern, warning that the danger of U.S. unilateralism was “undeniable.”49 Not surprisingly, both states actively opposed bold U.S. initiatives—such as the invasion of Iraq—on more than one occasion.
Their concerns were well-founded—not because the United States deliberately used its power to harm friendly countries like France, but because America’s vast capabilities made it easy to hurt them by accident. The invasion of Iraq is a perfect illustration: it eventually led to the emergence of ISIS, whose online recruiting and brutal conduct inspired terrorist attacks in a number of European countries and contributed to the refugee crisis that engulfed Europe in 2015. European officials were correct to oppose the war back in 2003; they understood that destabilizing the Middle East might harm them in ways they could anticipate, if not entirely foresee. Removing Saddam Hussein also eliminated Iran’s principal regional rival and enhanced its position in the Persian Gulf, thereby threatening close U.S. partners such as Saudi Arabia. Washington obviously did not intend to harm its allies when it decided to invade Iraq, but that is precisely what it did. As the Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash noted in April 2002, “the problem with American power is not that it is American. The problem is simply the power. It would be dangerous even for an archangel to wield so much power.”50
Even as they were alarmed by U.S. dominance, key U.S. allies also took advantage of it by free-riding, thereby forcing Washington to bear greater burdens in places like Afghanistan. Such behavior was only to be expected: Why should other states take on difficult and costly burdens when Uncle Sam wanted to do most of the work? Letting Washington do the heavy lifting allowed these states to spend their money on other things, and it had the added virtue of placing additional constraints on the overeager American Gulliver. And then, when Washington tried to get its allies to do more on matters where their own interests were more engaged—such as the Balkan Wars of the 1990s or the Libyan intervention of 2011—it discovered that its allies could not do the job without considerable U.S. help.
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