The Case for Questioning U.S. Leadership

Reuters
September 13, 2020 Topic: Security Region: Americas Tags: WarAmericaFree WorldDemocracyNATO

The Case for Questioning U.S. Leadership

Donald Trump boasts that “America is leading again on the world stage.” In both cases, the basis for this leadership role remains undefined. The original question remains: Whom is America leading and why?

The abandonment of the Free World occurred at about the same time and for some of the same reasons as the abandonment of the West. But those who rejected the West did so explicitly, whereas the Free World faded from view as unobtrusively as it had first appeared. As a result, attempts to revive the West have typically encountered outspoken resistance. The logic underpinning the Free World, on the other hand, has remained readily deployable. In the 1970s and 1980s, the idea of a fundamental struggle between freedom and its opposite continued to structure the United States’ relations with the Soviet Union, although references to the Free World itself appeared infrequently, and the government’s insistence on a strict global dichotomy became much less intense. Then in the 1990s, after the sudden collapse of the Communist bloc, many American policymakers assumed that it might finally be possible to “make the world itself at last free.”  

The destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, brought a reversion to a dichotomized world. George W. Bush immediately proclaimed a fundamental global conflict between freedom and terrorism. In 2004, he appealed to the Free World directly, using the phrase more often than any president in any year since 1964. But the term did not stick, and the Bush division of the world proved politically controversial. In 2008, Barack Obama swung the White House back to a “One World” position, promising to end the “War on Terror” and to promote cooperation with the “international community.” By the end of his second term, however, his administration had recognized a divide between the “liberal international order” and a collection of authoritarian adversaries. For much of the foreign policy establishment, the election of Trump provided further proof of the unavoidability of this global conflict. In 2018, Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution wrote that “there is no prospect on the horizon of a universal liberal order. Instead, there is a free world competing with a neo-authoritarian world.” 

Trump’s presidency represents a crossroads not because he is somehow “non-Western,” but because he has seemingly rejected the premise that a threat to freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere and that only American leadership in confronting this menace will allow democracy to flourish in the United States and to continue its natural expansion across the globe. This assumption lay at the core of the concept of the Free World and has played an important role in American foreign policy for much of the last century. In light of this history, what can be said about the country’s future course? 

One possibility is a return to orthodoxy. In a recent Foreign Affairs article, Joe Biden explicitly promised to revive a Free World foreign policy: “The triumph of democracy and liberalism over fascism and autocracy created the free world. But this contest does not just define our past. It will define our future, as well.” According to Biden, the United States must once again “rally the free world” because “no other nation is built on that idea.” And so, in the first year of his presidency, Biden would have the United States “organize and host a global Summit for Democracy to renew the spirit and shared purpose of the nations of the free world.” 

 This foreign policy has the advantage of long familiarity and the support of much of the Washington establishment. The difficulty is that the new “free world,” like the old, lacks positive content, deriving much of its meaning from the stated fact of American leadership and the presumed threat of existential adversaries. After all, the renewed interest in the Free World and the discovery of the “liberal international order” came in response to a rapid rise in apparent challenges to the United States’ established position in the world. Yet again, recognition of the Free World required the prior identification of its enemies. The difference is that American policymakers in the early 1950s constructed the Free World on the assumption of a geographically and ideologically monolithic antagonist—one who happened to divide the globe along similar lines. The internal eclecticism of the “neo-authoritarian world” makes it a far less productive opposite pole. What deeper “shared purpose” would unite Biden’s “free world”? And how would he decide which states to invite to his summit? The political failure of the War on Terror shows how difficult it can be to mobilize a “free world” when the enemy is too diffuse to define. It also demonstrates the difficulty of ever achieving a decisive victory. Even when the “free world” has ultimately prevailed, as in the Cold War and the two world wars, the ensuing pursuit of “One World” has always encountered new obstacles and produced new global dichotomies. 

One possible escape from this cycle is to limit the U.S.-led bloc to an entity that does not define itself against an existential antagonist or identify itself with the entire world. This is the course that Kimmage advocates when he calls for the revival of an American idea of the West. The problem is that “the West” never guided the conduct of U.S. foreign affairs to the extent that Kimmage claims. Although it is true that Americans had a much greater sense of civilizational belonging in the past than they do now, the foreign policy of the postwar presidents was always more global than Western. Meanwhile, the conservative champions of an explicitly pro-Western posture—from James Burnham and William Buckley to Patrick Buchanan and Steve Bannon—have mostly remained marginal critics of establishment policy. It, is of course, possible that a “new cold war” with China would revive the notion of an “East-West conflict.” But as before, a Free World framework would likely predominate, allowing the United States to continue to make appeals to allies and potential partners in Africa and Asia.  

A final possibility is for the United States to abandon the project of long-term leadership altogether. This is the position seemingly represented by Trump and, in a different form, by Bernie Sanders. There is certainly a long tradition of envisioning America apart, from John Winthrop’s city on a hill to Washington’s warning against foreign entanglement to Monroe’s Doctrine of hemispheric separation. But American commitments around the globe have ratcheted up to such a degree that a return to “isolationism” in the foreseeable future is impossible in purely practical terms.  

A second problem with a policy of retrenchment is the lack of a clear ideological basis for the country’s new role. A defining characteristic of both the “isolationist” and “internationalist” eras has been a more or less continuous belief in American exceptionalism. The country would stay separate in order to remain superior. It would lead because “no other nation is built on that idea.” Both Sanders and Trump have rejected this faith. The first invokes Scandinavian socialism as a superior system. The second conceives of American greatness as a goal, not a given. But so far, neither has come up with a successful alternative ideology. Although they might argue against endless wars, burdensome alliances, or unfair trade agreements, they tend to offer mostly ad hoc solutions that ultimately remain within the previous framework of American foreign policy. On his website, Bernie Sanders declares that “the U.S. must lead the world.” In the 2017 National Security Strategy, Donald Trump boasts that “America is leading again on the world stage.” In both cases, the basis for this leadership role remains undefined. 

The original question remains: Whom is America leading and why?

Peter Slezkine is a PhD candidate in history at Columbia University and a fellow at the Clements Center at the University of Texas.

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