The world emerging before our eyes is one of increasing power struggle. It is likely, then, to increase the dilemmas of ordering. It will confront the USA with ever more agonizing choices that betray values or even partners or allies. In navigating that world, fictions about a rules-based liberal order, or the image of the USA as the natural occupant of a single global ‘throne’, are of limited value. Such strategic visions have proved to be disappointing before. They helped put the USA in its current position. Clinging to this same mythology will produce the same results, reinforcing America’s state of overstretch, polarization and exhaustion.
There is one more argument to deal with. It is usually made not in writing but in person as a last-ditch objection. ‘Of course’, people say, ‘you are right. All this “rules-based” order is a charade. It is a darker story.’ No sooner does the edifice crumble than it is rebuilt. ‘But we need our myths.’ Of course, they say, there was a history of hierarchy, hypocrisy and violence. We need, though, an America that goes abroad to lead, to solve problems. Or, as one Deputy Defense Secretary put it, ‘There is just too much to do in the world, and we need clever ideas on how to be everywhere.’1 Too much truth-telling about the past, people argue, will damage America’s sense of mission. America, for all its blemishes, has a liberal conscience, or so the logic goes, one that gives hope to the world. If we snuff that out with critical scrutiny, what is there left? How, it is asked, will we impel young people to go out in the world to do good, without benign stories? Isn’t it counterproductive to gaze too long at this dark sun?
There is an irony here. The complaint that we should avert our eyes and tell stories in order to re-enchant the world, hardly pausing to wonder what it leaves out, comes from the same worldview that presents itself as the force of reason, expertise and enlightenment, against post-truth barbarism. And myths simply retold, without rude interruption, will not serve us well. It hasn’t done so historically. The view of the world as a problem to be solved by enthusiasm has not produced uniformly excellent results. The wages of utopianism in the twentieth century were the concentration camp and the gulag. Powered by uplifting myths – the revolutionary proletariat, the chosen race, manifest destiny – our species has practised barbarism almost without limit, or unleashed chaos by accident. Many problems of international relations cannot be solved, only lived with. Solutions, the pursuit of decisive resolutions, themselves often generate further problems. There are parts of the world still recovering from the deadliness of great powers’ good intentions, the benevolent military campaigns, the incitements to revolt, the structural adjustment programmes. In our time, some of its best efforts have made a refugee crisis and metastasizing transnational jihadism worse.
The very attitude, that we should tell stories to incite people to ‘be everywhere’, to go into the trenches to do good in a spirit of youthful altruism, ‘like swimmers into cleanness leaping’,2 is part of the problem. Left unchecked and uninterrogated, the suggestion of liberal order leads to mischief. It offers the bewitching notion of ‘who we are’, the claim that consensual internationalism defined the order, while somehow its darker aspects were aberrations that don’t reflect its essence, an attitude that encourages complacency, carelessness or worse. After decades of paeans to ‘global leadership’, it is surely time for something else, a little clear-eyed sobriety.
The task of scholars, if not to eradicate myths, is to help civilize the impulse, to caution against the notion of a pure essence, to keep a sense of humane irony alive. Only by confronting the darkness of history can we turn attention to the real choices decision-makers now face, and their possible consequences. Other powers tell misleading and dangerous stories about themselves. China, for instance, claims that it has no history of empire or aggression, a claim that in itself becomes a warrant for atrocities. If the West isn’t willing to confront its own past, why should it?
At the core of liberal order storytelling is an anxiety about American uniqueness. A most unsettling historical truth, one that lurks in the shadow of the panegyrics, is the suggestion that the USA is not exempt from historical patterns of rise and fall. It is a constitutional republic but also an empire, of sorts, and it too could destroy its republic through its empire. Other powers, too, have been beset by the issue of how a republic can secure itself in a hostile world. It will be recalled that Rome, a state more or less in permanent war year-on-year, destroyed its own republic. Ever greater concentrations of wealth and ever more military campaigns led to the unravelling of constitutional constraints, and to warlords who, in partisan days, set themselves up as the people’s tribunes against the wicked elites, turned their armies on the state. America is not Rome, of course, and has no recent equivalent of war or mobilization on a Roman scale. But the republic has taken on the normalization of war, undeclared and almost routine, for two decades. It is now gripped by destructive partisanship, and ruled by a corrupt potentate with a penchant for martial display, whose personal court debauches the public sphere, heightening the spiral of domestic strife and international crisis. Violent ordering leaves its mark.
These are all ancient questions, and the most acute classical witnesses are still our best source of inspiration. Tacitus, born in the provinces and close to power, empathized with the ‘barbarians’, those on the receiving end who had to taste the realities of empire. He also feared what empire fuelled at home, the rising corruption, deference to the armed forces, the love of triumphal monuments, the absolutist terror of the autocrats. His purpose was not to reject the exercise of power abroad. A Roman senator who had served at the front, he regarded the empire as more than just one large act of nihilism. If his reproach had a purpose, it was more exact. It was to puncture the sweet words and affectations that blinded and deceived. He sought to retell brutal acts of power unsparingly. In the rhetorical schools it was known as sub oculus subiectio, or ‘putting it before their eyes’.3 To see the choices before us, and what they cost, we should open our eyes.