The authors make their case through the usual rhetorical devices and arguments. The United States is portrayed as an exceptional nation with “the unique ability to lead but an imperative to do so—for the protection of its own national interests and values.” The United States “remains in an extraordinarily strong position globally” (which makes an ambitious foreign policy possible), yet “the challenges confronting U.S. interests and values remain substantial and complex.” These challenges range “from a full spectrum of security threats” to economic, environmental, ideological, political, and humanitarian challenges. Moreover, the Internet and globalization have “ushered in an unprecedented empowerment of individuals and small actors” and created “unprecedented risk.” The United States may be a global superpower with no peer competitors, but it still faces a troubled and dangerous world.
The solution, as always, is American “leadership,” with the ultimate aim of spreading democracy. The United States “must play an active, day-to-day role in shaping events” and “work to advance a liberal, democratic world order” through “tangible and sustained actions” (including the use of military force).
To be sure, the report acknowledges that fiscal pressures may require the United States to “absorb some reductions in defense spending.” But not to any significant degree, for it also calls for the United States to maintain “the capacity to deter any potential military rival and defeat any potential adversary.” In addition, the United States must protect the global commons, curb nuclear proliferation, conduct counterterrorism operations around the globe, and “anchor regional stability” in several distant areas. Washington should act with allies when it can but still preserve “the capacity to conduct successful operations on its own, anywhere in the world.”
Why? Simple: because vital interests are everywhere. “Europe remains crucial to our common efforts to manage global challenges,” the report opines, and “the United States must also … give priority to alliance relationships in the Asia-Pacific region” while “[s]imilar efforts are needed with our security partnerships in the Middle East.” But that’s not all: the United States should upgrade its partnerships with Brazil, Indonesia, and Turkey, keep Iran from achieving a nuclear capability, prevent reversals in Afghan stability, rebuild cooperative ties with Pakistan, counter Al Qaeda (everywhere), and end the civil war in Syria (among other things). By the time one finishes reading, there isn’t a square inch on the planet left to itself.
Mindful of economic constraints, the report also recommends prompt action to reduce the national debt, strengthen economic competitiveness, and maintain a level playing field in global markets. Revealingly, the justification for these actions is not the well-being or comfort of the American people; instead, the report places “a priority on strength at home in order to underpin a strong U.S. role in the world” (my emphasis). A strong economy is desirable not because it would allow Americans to lead more bountiful or fulfilling lives; it is necessary so that the United States can swing a big stick around the world.
EXTENDING AMERICAN POWER: STRATEGIES TO EXPAND U.S. ENGAGEMENT IN A COMPETITIVE WORLD ORDER (2016)
A final example of a blue-ribbon defense of liberal hegemony is the Center for New American Security’s Extending American Power, released in May 2016. Like the reports already discussed, it views the United States as the “indispensable” linchpin of the present world order, warns that any alteration of America’s role in the world would have catastrophic consequences, and offers up a lengthy to-do list of projects Washington must undertake around the globe.
Given the composition of the task force, these conclusions are precisely what one would expect. The cochairs were former Clinton-era State Department official James Rubin and the ubiquitous neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan. Participants included experienced foreign policy VIPs: Michèle Flournoy, Robert Zoellick, Kurt Campbell, Stephen Hadley, James Steinberg, and Eric Edelman, and the witnesses invited to testify at the group’s working sessions were equally familiar faces, including Stephen Sestanovich, Elliott Abrams, Dennis Ross, Victoria Nuland, and Martin Indyk. The only mildly contrarian witnesses were Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group and Vali Nasr of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, but neither occupies a position outside the foreign policy mainstream.
The result—surprise!—is another well-worn defense of liberal hegemony. The report begins by lauding the “immense benefits” the current world order has produced and declares that “to preserve and strengthen this order will require a renewal of American leadership in the international system.” Yet it never tells the reader exactly what that “order” is or acknowledges that recent U.S. efforts to “extend” it have produced costly quagmires and deteriorating relations with other major powers instead. Nor does it ask if there are elements in the existing order that should be rethought. Instead, the report simply posits that a liberal world order exists and that it cannot survive without the widespread application of American power.
To maintain America’s “leadership role,” the report calls for significant increases in national security spending and recommends that the United States expand its military activities in three major areas: Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It leaves open the possibility that the United States might have to do more in other places too, so its real agenda may be even more ambitious.
In Europe, Washington must “stabilize Ukraine and anchor it in Europe,” “establish a more robust US presence in Central and Eastern European countries,” and “restore capacity for European strategic leadership.” The latter goal is not something the United States can do alone, however, and the contradiction here is hard to miss. Why should one expect Europe to develop a renewed capacity for “strategic leadership” if the United States reserves that role for itself and Europe’s leaders can still count on Uncle Sam to ride to the rescue?
In Asia, the United States should continue the Obama administration’s “pivot” and implement the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and it may have to “impose regional costs” on China for its actions in the South China Sea and inflict “commensurate economic penalties to slow Chinese dominance.” At the same time, Washington should “facilitate China’s continued integration so as to blunt its historical fears of ‘containment.’” In other words, the United States should make a sustained effort to contain China—and maybe even work to retard its rise—but Beijing won’t mind if Washington does so politely.
In the Middle East, the task force wants to “scale up” the effort against ISIS, with the United States taking the leading role. It also calls for a no-fly zone in Syria and says that Washington “must adopt as a matter of policy, the goal of defeating Iran’s determined effort to dominate the Middle East.” The report does not explain how Persian Iran will manage to “dominate” the Arab Middle East with a defense budget that is less than 5 percent of America’s and in the face of potential opposition from more heavily armed states such as Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and several others.66
In short, the CNAS report recommends that the United States maintain every one of its current international commitments, double down on policies that have repeatedly failed, and take on expensive, risky, and uncertain projects in several regions at once. Although some of its individual recommendations may make sense, the overall package is the same boundless vision of U.S. “leadership” that has guided U.S. foreign policy since the Soviet Union broke apart.
And like the two earlier reports discussed above, Extending American Power is silent regarding America’s geographic position, resource endowments, demographic characteristics, underlying economic interests, or core strategic requirements. It does not try to rank vital interests, assess potential threats to those interests, or consider different ways these dangers might be reduced. Like its predecessors, the CNAS report simply declares that the U.S. has vital interests everywhere, says that a liberal world order will preserve them, and maintains that preserving this order requires deploying and using America
n power in every corner of the world.
My point is not that these three studies (and others like them) provided specific blueprints for action that had a direct and immediate impact on the foreign policy of particular administrations. Rather, such reports are simply a revealing window into the mind-set of the U.S. foreign policy community. Indeed, they tell us more about the way this community thinks than they do about the actual strategic challenges the United States faces.67 Such documents define the range of “acceptable” opinion within the community and thereby serve to set limits on the policy options that can be proposed without jeopardizing one’s professional reputation. By ruling out alternatives from the beginning, such exercises help keep U.S. grand strategy within the same narrow and familiar contours.
What is perhaps most striking about these three exercises in mainstream grand strategizing is how insensitive they are to the actual state of the world. It doesn’t matter where the United States is located, what its internal condition is, where principal dangers might lie, how the balance of power in regions might be changing, or whether the main challenge the United States faces is a large and well-armed peer competitor like the former Soviet Union, a rising revisionist power like China, a complex multipolar world of contending regional powers, or a shadowy terrorist network like Al Qaeda. No matter what the question is, the answer is always the same: the United States must take the lead in solving every global issue, and it must keep interfering in other countries in order to keep the liberal world order alive.
MIND THE GAP: ELITES VERSUS THE PUBLIC
The American people, however, have a different view. Members of the foreign policy community may share similar policy preferences, but in the words of the political scientists Lawrence R. Jacobs and Benjamin I. Page, “the general public stands somewhat to the side.”68 The foreign policy community has been firmly wedded to liberal hegemony, but the American people have a more sensible and realistic view of what is desirable and feasible.
According to Page and another coauthor, Jason Barabas, “the most conspicuous gap between citizens and leaders is a familiar and long-standing one: more leaders than citizens tend to be ‘internationalists,’ at least in the simple sense that they say they favor the United States taking an ‘active part’ in world affairs.”69 More recently, Page and Marshall Bouton of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs have documented a persistent “disconnect” between elite and mass attitudes on foreign affairs, one they believe presents “serious problems for democratic values.” In their words, “official U.S. foreign policy often differs markedly from the policies most Americans want” (i.e., a less costly, ambitious, and burdensome foreign policy).70
Needless to say, this is precisely the sentiment Donald Trump tapped into in 2016. On the one hand, most Americans reject out-and-out isolationism, with more than 60 percent saying that the United States should “take an active part in world affairs” (as opposed to “staying out”). On the other hand, most do not believe that the United States should be the only “global leader,” and they remain wary of unilateral U.S. action. This percentage, it is worth noting, has been more or less constant since the late 1970s.71 In 2016, for example, fewer than 10 percent thought the United States should be the “preeminent world leader in solving international problems,” and only 37 percent thought it “should be the most active of leading nations.”72
U.S. citizens also believe that the United States is bearing too large a share of global burdens, and they are far more skeptical about an “activist” foreign policy than most members of the foreign policy community appear to be. In 2002, for example, immediately following the 9/11 attacks, public support for U.S. military action and general interest in world affairs rose significantly. Yet even then, 62 percent of Americans believed that the United States did not have the responsibility to play the role of “world policeman,” and 65 percent felt that Washington was playing that role “more than it should.”73 In 2006, 57 percent of Americans said that the United States was “doing more than its share” to help others in the world.74 By 2013, more than 52 percent of Americans surveyed agreed with the statement “the US should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own”—the highest percentage ever recorded since the question was first asked in the 1960s. In 1964, 54 percent of Americans believed that “we should not think so much in international terms but concentrate on our own national problems and building up strength here at home”; by 2013, the number endorsing that sentiment had risen to 80 percent.75 And in 2016, 64 percent felt that “the United States is playing the role of world policeman more than it should be.”76
The gap between elites and the public is equally evident when specific scenarios are invoked. In 2009, for example, 50 percent of Council on Foreign Relations members supported Obama’s Afghan “surge” and said that U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan should be increased, but only 32 percent of the general public agreed. Eighty-seven percent of CFR members thought the initial U.S. decision to use force there was correct, but only 56 percent of the public shared that view. (Ironically, CFR members also had a gloomier view of the U.S. military effort, with 90 percent believing the war was not going well, as compared with 57 percent of the general public.)77 A similar gap between elites and the public was apparent in 2013: 51 percent of the public believed the United States “did too much” in world affairs, and 17 percent thought it did “too little,” but only 21 percent of CFR members thought the country was doing too much and 41 percent maintained that it was doing “too little.”78
This same pattern recurred as the Obama administration debated military action in response to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war. According to a New York Times poll, although 75 percent of Americans believed the Assad regime had used chemical weapons and 52 percent saw this act as a potential threat to the United States, majorities in excess of 80 percent said they were either “very” or “somewhat” concerned that U.S. intervention would cause civilian casualties, be long and costly, and “lead to a more widespread war.” And contrary to the foreign policy community’s reflexive commitment to spreading U.S. values, when ordinary citizens are asked whether the United States “should try to change a dictatorship to a democracy where it can” or “stay out of other countries’ affairs,” 72 percent choose “stay out” and only 15 percent say “change where it can.”79 A CNN poll yielded similar results, with 69 percent of respondents saying it was not in the U.S. national interest to get involved in the Syrian conflict.80
Public support for global activism continued to decline in subsequent years. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in April 2014 found that only 19 percent of those asked wanted the United States to be “more active” in world affairs (down from 37 percent in 2001), while the percentage favoring a “less active” role increased from 14 in 2001 to 47.81 As the 2016 election campaign intensified in the spring of 2016, the Pew Research Center reported that 57 percent of Americans believed that the United States should “deal with its own problems and let other countries deal with theirs the best they can,” while only 37 percent felt that the United States “should help other countries deal with their problems.” Forty-one percent now felt that the country was doing “too much” in world affairs; only 27 percent thought it was doing “too little.”82 In 2007, public opinion was evenly split (39 percent to 40 percent) over whether the president should focus more on domestic or foreign policy; by 2013, 83 percent said the former and only 6 percent (!) chose the latter.83
Public opinion can be fickle, and it often responds to vivid events or to the cues provided by elites. For example, support for military action against ISIS soared after the extremist group beheaded two American journalists in the summer of 2014, only to fall to earth again a few months later.84 Furthermore, when elites are strongly united behind some foreign policy action, public opinion tends to follow along.85 As the next chapter will show, Americans have tolerated an overly ambitious foreign policy
in part because the foreign policy establishment keeps telling them it is necessary, feasible, and affordable.
Nonetheless, there is a persistent and significant gap between the foreign policy community’s enthusiasm for liberal hegemony—with the costs and risks it entails—and the views of the American people at large. The latter do not want to retreat to Fortress America, shut down the Department of State, or sever all foreign alliances, but the broader public is far less supportive of the ambitious crusades that the foreign policy establishment has conducted since the end of the Cold War and far more concerned with conditions back home.
The obvious question, therefore, is how has the foreign policy elite overcome the public’s reluctance to take on costly overseas commitments—a reluctance borne of the remarkable security that the United States already enjoys? I tackle that question directly in the next chapter.
4. SELLING A FAILING FOREIGN POLICY
WHEN A STATE is as secure as the United States, convincing its citizens to seize the mantle of global leadership will not be easy. Indeed, a long tradition of American thinking about foreign affairs emphasizes the need to preserve the nation’s exceptional qualities—such as its deep commitment to liberty—by remaining aloof from the intrigues, rivalries, and cruelties associated with power politics. In his Farewell Address in 1796, for example, George Washington warned his fellow citizens not to become entangled in the affairs of other nations, arguing that America’s “detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course.”1 Or as Charles Ames, a prominent anti-imperialist figure, warned in 1898, “Once we enter the field of international conflict as a great military and naval power, we shall be one more bully among bullies.”2 Aware of this tradition, Bill Clinton told the White House press secretary George Stephanopoulos early in his presidency, “Americans are basically isolationist.”3 Given the country’s providential geopolitical position and fortunate history, convincing Americans to pursue liberal hegemony should be a tough sell.
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