8. In a March 2016 interview with The New York Times, Trump said, “We’re not a rich country. We were a rich country with a very strong military and tremendous capability in so many ways. We’re not anymore. We have a military that’s severely depleted.” See “Transcript: Donald Trump Expounds on His Foreign Policy Views.”
9. Trump was not alone in this view. For criticisms of recent U.S. foreign policy from a variety of perspectives, see Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010); Barry R. Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); Chas W. Freeman, “Militarism and the Crisis of American Diplomacy,” Epistulae, no. 20, July 7, 2015; Michael Mandelbaum, Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post–Cold War Era (New York: Oxford, 2016); Robert Lieber, Retreat and Its Consequences: American Foreign Policy and the Problem of World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder (New York: Sentinel, 2014); and Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (New York: Nation Books, 2013).
10. George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 564.
11. Thus, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama are all “liberals,” in the sense that all were equally committed to the ideals of individual freedom, democracy, rule of law, and competitive markets.
12. On the foreign policy establishment, see Michael J. Glennon, National Security and Double Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (New York: Viking, 2016); and Scott Horton, The Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Warfare (New York: Nation Books, 2015).
1: A DISMAL RECORD
1. For useful discussions of alternative U.S. grand strategies, see Andrew Ross and Barry R. Posen, “Competing Visions of U.S. Grand Strategy,” International Security 21, no. 3 (Winter 1996/97); and Robert J. Art, A Grand Strategy for America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
2. See Eugene Gholz, Daryl Press, and Harvey Sapolsky, “Come Home, America: The Strategy of Restraint in the Face of Temptation,” International Security 21, no. 4 (Spring 1997); Christopher Layne, “From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing: America’s Future Grand Strategy,” International Security 22, no. 1 (Summer 1997); Eric Nordlinger, Isolationism Reconfigured: American Foreign Policy for a New Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Ted Galen Carpenter, Beyond NATO: Staying Out of Europe’s Wars (Washington, DC: CATO Institute, 1994).
3. See Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S. Plan Calls for Ensuring No Rivals Develop,” The New York Times, March 8, 1992; and James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), pp. 209–15.
4. George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 564.
5. Richard N. Haass, “Defining U.S. Foreign Policy in a Post-Post Cold War World,” Arthur Ross Lecture, Foreign Policy Association, April 22, 2002, at http://2001-2009.state.gov/s/p/rem/9632.htm.
6. See “US GDP as Percentage of World GDP,” at https://ycharts.com/indicators/us _gdp_as_a_percentage_of_world_gdp.
7. See Barry Posen, “Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony,” International Security 28, no. 1 (Summer 2003).
8. R & D data drawn from “Historical Trends in Federal R & D,” American Association for the Advancement of Science, at www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/DefRD.jpg; total defense expenditure data from The Military Balance (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, various years).
9. See Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (1990).
10. See William C. Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World,” International Security 24, no. 1 (Summer 1999); William C. Wohlforth and Stephen Brooks, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
11. This was also a recurring theme in the writings of Joseph Nye, including his Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990), and more recently, Is the American Century Over? (New York: Polity, 2015).
12. In 1998, for example, Cuba, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and North Korea had a combined GNP of roughly $165 billion and combined defense spending of roughly $11 billion. By contrast, U.S. GNP in 1998 was more than $10 trillion and its defense budget was more than $266 billion.
13. Quoted in “Communism’s Collapse Poses a Challenge to America’s Military,” U.S. News and World Report, October 14, 1991, p. 28.
14. See Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest (Summer 1989); idem, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1993).
15. John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Random House, 1989); and idem, The Remnants of War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). Hoffmann is quoted in Thomas Friedman, “Friends Like Russia Make Diplomacy a Mess,” The New York Times, March 28, 1993.
16. For example, countries seeking to join the World Trade Organization must have “full autonomy in the conduct of its external commercial relations,” provide extensive information about any national policies and economic conditions that could affect these relations, and agree to abide by WTO rules and dispute resolution procedures. See World Trade Organization, “How to Become a WTO Member,” at www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/acc_e/how_to_become_e.htm.
17. Thomas Friedman, “A Manifesto for the Fast World,” The New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1999.
18. See Paul I. Bernstein and Jason D. Wood, The Origins of Nunn-Lugar and Cooperative Threat Reduction (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2010); and “The Nunn-Lugar Vision,” at www.nti.org/analysis/articles/nunn-lugar-vision-20-years-reducing-global-dangers/.
19. The Clinton administration seriously considered preventive air strikes against North Korea’s nuclear facilities in 1994, a step they would never have seriously considered had the Soviet Union still been intact. South Korea and Japan were both opposed, however, and U.S. officials ultimately chose to pursue a diplomatic deal instead. See Daniel Poneman, Joel S. Wit, and Robert Gallucci, Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2004); and Scott Silverstone, Preventive War and American Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2007), chap. 6.
20. See in particular Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam’s War Against America (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 407–18.
21. See Warren Christopher, “The Shifting Priorities of U.S. Foreign Policy, Peacekeeping Downgraded,” Testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, November 4, 1993, Department of State Bulletin 4, nos. 4–5 (January–April 1994), p. 43.
22. Kennan’s views are quoted at length in Thomas Friedman, “Now a Word from X,” The New York Times, May 2, 1998.
23. In January 1990, the West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher publicly declared that German reunification should not “lead to an impairment of Soviet security interests” and proposed that NATO rule out “an expansion of [its] territory to the east.” In February, the U.S. secretary of state James Baker met with Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and made the case for anchoring a reunified Germany in NATO, together with “iron-clad guarantees” that “NATO’s jurisdiction or forces would not move eastward.” In particular, Baker told Gorbachev, “If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction or forces of NATO one inch to the east.” See “NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard” (Washington, DC: National Security Archive, December 12, 2017), at https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansio
n-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early. See also Joshua Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal?: The End of the Cold War and the U.S. Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” International Security 40, no. 4 (Spring 2016); and Mary Sarotte, “A Broken Promise?: What the West Really Told Moscow about NATO Expansion,” Foreign Affairs 93, no. 5 (September/October 2014).
24. See “Russia’s National Security Concept,” in Arms Control Today 30, no. 1 (January/February 2000), p. 15.
25. As former secretary of defense Leon Panetta wrote in his memoirs, “I said what everyone in Washington knew but we couldn’t officially acknowledge: that our goal in Libya was regime change.” See Leon Panetta with Jim Newton, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace (New York: Penguin, 2014). For a careful sifting of the evidence showing that regime change was a U.S. objective nearly from the beginning, see Stephen R. Weissman, “Presidential Deception in Foreign Policy Making: Military Intervention in Libya 2011,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 46, no. 3 (September 2016). See also David E. Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (New York: Crown, 2012), pp. 345–55.
26. Peter Baker, “U.S.-Russian Ties Fall Short of Reset Goal,” The New York Times, September 2, 2013.
27. See John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” Foreign Affairs 93, no. 5 (September/October 2014); Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015); and Rajan Menon and Eugene Rumer, Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post–Cold War Order (Boston: MIT Press, 2015).
28. The relevant passage read “in pursuing advanced military capabilities that can threaten its neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region, China is following an outdated path that, in the end, will hamper its own pursuit of national greatness. In time, China will find that social and political freedom is the only source of that greatness.” The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: The White House, 2002), at www.state.gov/documents/organization/63562.pdf.
29. See Bonnie S. Glaser and Matthew P. Funaiole, “The 19th Party Congress: A More Assertive Chinese Foreign Policy,” Lowy Interpreter, October 26, 2017, at www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/19th-party-congress-more-assertive-chinese-foreign-policy.
30. For a summary, see Christopher Johnson, “President Xi Jinping’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’: A Practical Assessment of the Chinese Communist Party’s Roadmap for Chinese Global Resurgence” (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2016).
31. See Charlie Campbell, “Donald Trump’s Pledge to Withdraw U.S. from TPP Opens Door for China,” Time, November 22, 2016, at http://time.com/4579580/china-donald-trump-tpp-obama-asia-rcep-business-trade/.
32. See John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), chap. 10; Aaron Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015); and Graham T. Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2017). For a Chinese perspective, see “Yan Xuetong on Chinese Realism, the Tsinghua School of International Relations, and the Impossibility of Harmony,” at www.theory-talks.org/2012/11/theory-talk-51.html.
33. On the Afghan War, see Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014); and Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General’s Insider Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2014).
34. On the U.S. failure in Iraq, see especially Peter W. Galbraith, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007); Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012); Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005 (New York: Penguin, 2006); and Emma Sky, The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (New York: Public Affairs, 2015).
35. See Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (New York: Nation Books, 2013).
36. Michael Mullen, “National Security Priorities for President-Elect Trump,” Washington Ideas Festival, November 21, 2016, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=buu9IZYzmUo&app=desktop.
37. See Martin Murphy, “The Importance of Alliances for U.S. Security,” 2017 Index of Military Strength (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 2017) at http://index.heritage.org/military/2017/essays/importance-alliances-u-s-security/.
38. See Jennifer Kavanagh, U.S. Security-Related Agreements in Force Since 1955: Introducing a New Database, RR-736-AF (Washington, DC: The RAND Corporation, 2014), p. 22.
39. See Richard Haass, “The Unraveling,” Foreign Affairs (November/December 2014). General Dempsey is quoted in Micah Zenko, “Most. Dangerous. World. Ever.” Foreign Policy, February 26, 2013, at http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/02/26/most-dangerous-world-ever/. Kissinger’s statement is from “Opening Statement by Dr. Henry A. Kissinger before the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services, at a Hearing to Discuss ‘Global Challenges and National Security Strategy,’” January 29, 2015, at www.henryakissinger.com/speeches/012915.html.
40. See William J. Clinton, A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (Washington, DC: The White House, 1995); and George W. Bush, “Preface,” The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: The White House, September 2002).
41. Aides strongly committed to liberal objectives include James Steinberg, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Michael McFaul, and Anne-Marie Slaughter. Steinberg was deputy secretary of state during Obama’s first term, while Power served initially on the National Security Council and later as ambassador to the United Nations. Susan Rice was UN ambassador during Obama’s first term and became national security advisor in the second term. Michael McFaul served on the NSC staff and as ambassador to Russia, and Anne-Marie Slaughter was director of policy planning in the State Department from 2009 to 2011. See James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power (New York: Penguin, 2015).
42. Obama also told the Assembly, “[E]xperience shows us that history is on the side of liberty; that the strongest foundation for human progress lies in open economies, open societies, and open governments.” See “Remarks by the President to the UN General Assembly,” September 23, 2010, at https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2010/09/23/remarks-president-united-nations-general-assembly.
43. A partial list of activities undertaken to promote democracy is in Enduring Leadership in a Dynamic World: The 2015 Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 2015), pp. 28–32.
44. See Eric Patterson, “Clinton Declares Religious Freedom a National Interest,” First Things, September 12, 2012, at www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2012/09/clinton-declares-religious-freedom-a-national-interest.
45. “About NED,” at www.ned.org/about, downloaded December 20, 2014.
46. Victoria Nuland, “Remarks at the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation Conference,” December 13, 2013, at www.voltairenet.org/article182080.html.
47. Economist Intelligence Unit, Democracy Index 2012, p. 2; and Democracy Index 2015: Democracy in an Age of Anxiety, p. 9.
48. See John Nichols, “The Economist Just Downgraded the United States from a ‘Full’ to a ‘Flawed’ Democracy,” The Nation, January 26, 2017.
49. See Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2018: Democracy in Crisis, at https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2018.
50. See “A Notable Year of the Wrong Kind,” at http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/a-banner-year-of-the-wrong-kind/, downloaded December 26, 2013.
51. See Ty McCormick, “Unmade in the USA,” Foreign Policy, February 25, 2015, at http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/25/unmad
e-in-the-usa-south-sudan-bush-obama/.
52. See Larry Diamond, “Democracy in Decline,” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 4 (July/August 2016), p. 151.
53. See Klaus Armingeon and Kai Guthmann, “Democracy in Crisis?: The Declining Support for National Democracy in European Countries, 2007–2011,” European Journal of Political Research 53, no. 2 (August 2014); see also Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, “The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect,” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 3 (July 2016); and Marc Plattner, “Is Democracy in Decline?” Democracy & Society 13, no. 1 (Fall–Winter 2016).
54. See Thomas Carothers, “Democracy Promotion at 25: Time to Choose,” Journal of Democracy 26, no. 1 (January 2015).
55. See Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008); James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (New York: The Free Press, 2006); James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014); and The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation (New York: Melville House, 2014).
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