2: WHY LIBERAL HEGEMONY FAILED
1. For a classic statement of the strategy of liberal hegemony, see William J. Clinton, A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (Washington: The White House, 1994). Subsequent national security strategies issued by Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama are consistent with this approach, as were a number of prominent task force and think tank reports published between 1993 and 2017. I discuss this broad consensus in detail in chapter 3.
2. In his March 1947 speech to Congress announcing the so-called Truman Doctrine, President Harry S. Truman declared, “At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life … One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.” See “President Truman’s Address Before a Joint Session of Congress, March 12, 1947,” at http://
3. The intellectual case for liberal hegemony is found in G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis and Transformation of American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Robert Lieber, The American Era: Power and Strategy for the 21st Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Robert Kagan, The World America Made (New York: Vintage, 2013); Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William Wohlforth, “Don’t Come Home, America: The Case Against Retrenchment,” International Security 37, no. 3 (Autumn 2012/13); and Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). For critiques of its core assumptions, see John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018); Barry Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), chap. 1; and David C. Hendrickson, Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), chap. 1.
4. The literature on democratic peace theory is now enormous. Core works include Michael W. Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12, nos. 3–4 (Summer–Autumn 1983); Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); and John M. Owen IV, Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). For valuable critiques, see Sebastian Rosato, “The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory,” American Political Science Review 97 (2003); and Miriam Elman, ed., Paths to Peace: Is Democracy the Answer? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
5. The idea that economic interdependence will reduce conflict and prevent war goes back to the eighteenth century. Extended discussions of the logic and evidence behind this claim include Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State (New York: Basic Books, 1986); and Dale C. Copeland, Economic Interdependence and War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
6. See especially Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
7. See “THE 1992 CAMPAIGN; Excerpts From Speech By Clinton on U.S. Role,” The New York Times, October 2, 1992.
8. Clinton, National Security Strategy, pp. i, iii.
9. See Samuel P. Huntington, “Why International Primacy Matters,” International Security 17, no. 4 (Spring 1993), p. 83.
10. Madeleine Albright, “Interview on NBC-TV The Today Show with Matt Lauer,” February 19, 1998, at https://
11. The full quotation reads, “The land mine that protects civilization from barbarism is not parchment but power, and in a unipolar world, American power—wielded, if necessary, unilaterally.” See “Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World,” Irving Kristol Annual Lecture, American Enterprise Institute, February 10, 2004, at www
12. See, for example, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century (Washington, DC: Project for a New American Century, 2000); G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, eds., Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Project on National Security, 2006); America’s National Interests (Washington, DC: Commission on America’s National Interests, 2000); Setting Priorities for American Leadership: A New National Security Strategy for the United States (Washington, DC: Project for a United and Strong America, 2013); and CSIS Commission on Smart Power: A Smarter, More Secure America (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2008).
13. That Obama held this view is hardly surprising. In 2008, a group of prominent Democratic Party officials released a report detailing how the United States could “reclaim the mantle of global leadership.” See Anne-Marie Slaughter, Bruce Jentleson, Ivo Daalder, et al., Strategic Leadership: A New Framework for National Security Strategy (Washington, DC: Center for New American Security, 2008). The report’s authors all received prominent appointments in the Obama administration.
14. “President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address,” at www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4460172.
15. The phrase “focused enmity” is that of William Wohlforth, whose 1999 essay on unipolarity argued that it was uniquely stable provided the unipolar power (i.e., the United States) did not disengage from Europe or Asia. See his “The Stability of a Unipolar World,” International Security 24, no. 1 (Summer 1999), and also Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
16. This was a central theme of Samantha Power’s Pulitzer prizewinning book “A Problem from Hell”: America in the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
17. America’s National Interests (Washington, DC: Commission on America’s National Interests, 2000). The commission’s cochairs were Robert Ellsworth, Andrew Goodpaster, and Rita Hauser; its executive directors were Graham Allison of Harvard, Dmitri Simes of the Nixon Center, and James Thomson of the RAND Corporation.
18. Quoted in Patrick Porter, The Global Village Myth (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015), p. 19.
19. Leading Through Civilian Power: The First Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 2010), p. xii.
20. Ibid., p. iii.
21. See Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955).
22. On the tendency for liberal states to engage in idealistic crusades, see Mearsheimer, Great Delusion. Also relevant are Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); and A Pact with the Devil: Washington’s Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise (New York: Rutledge, 2007).
23. This recommendation was contained in a draft of “Defense Guidance” that was leaked to The New York Times in early 1992. It prompted a heated response from key U.S. allies and was subsequently rewritten, but its core goals were never abandoned. See Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring 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. 208–15.
24. See Strobe Talbott, “War in Iraq, Revolution in America,” John Whitehead Lecture, Royal Institute of International Affairs, October 9, 2009; at www
25. Barack Obama, National Security Strategy (Washington, DC: The White House, May 2010), p. 14.
26. The United States spent a higher percentage of its GDP on defense than China did every year, and a larger percentage than Russia between 2004 and 2013. Calculated from “Military Expenditures” (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2015), at http://
27. See “Total Military Personnel and Dependent End Strength by Service, Regional Area, and Country,” Defense Manpower Data Center, July 31, 2015, at www
28. For a map of the regional combatant commands, see www
29. See Michael McFaul, “The Liberty Doctrine,” Policy Review 112 (April–May 2002).
30. See Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol, The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), p. 112.
31. The invasion of Afghanistan could be seen as a direct defense of American soil insofar as the Taliban government in Kabul had refused to turn Osama bin Laden and his associates over to the United States after the 9/11 attacks. Yet the United States did not limit its goals solely to catching bin Laden and has been trying for seventeen years to create a stable and effective democracy there at a cost of more than $1 trillion and more than two thousand U.S. soldiers’ lives.
32. See Micah Zenko and Jennifer Wilson, “How Many Bombs Did the United States Drop in 2016?” January 5, 2017, at www
33. The first wave of NATO enlargement occurred in 1999 and brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined in 2004, and Albania and Croatia followed in 2009. This policy reached its apotheosis (or perhaps its nadir) in 2016, when mighty Montenegro joined the alliance.
34. See John L. Harper, “American Visions of Europe After 1989,” in Christina V. Balls and Simon Serfaty, eds., Visions of America and Europe: September 11, Iraq, and Transatlantic Relations (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2004), chap. 2.
35. Dual containment was the brainchild of Martin Indyk, who first articulated it while working at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and implemented it as Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs. According to Kenneth Pollack, who worked with Indyk at the Brookings Institution, dual containment was undertaken to reassure Israel and make it more pliable in the Oslo peace process. See Kenneth Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America (New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 261–65.
36. On the goal of regional transformation, see John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), pp. 255–57.
37. See Nick Turse, “U.S. Special Operations Numbers Surge in Africa’s Shadow Wars,” The Intercept, December 31, 2016.
38. The United States is now committed to defend sixty-nine countries, which together produce about 75 percent of global economic output and contain nearly two billion people. See Michael Beckley, “The Myth of Entangling Alliances,” International Security 39, no. 4 (Spring 2015). Beckley argues that these commitments do not increase the risk that the United States will get dragged into unnecessary wars, but they do shape U.S. defense requirements, and some of America’s recent conflicts—including the Kosovo War and the two wars against Iraq—were partly inspired by a desire to protect nearby allies.
39. During the uprising, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland handed out pastries to antigovernment demonstrators in Maidan Square and was secretly recorded telling U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt that opposition leader Vitali Klitschko should be kept out of the government and Arseniy Yatsenyuk should become acting prime minister instead. See “Ukraine Crisis: Transcript of Leaked Nuland-Pyatt Call,” BBC News Online, at www
40. For Obama’s speech, see “Remarks by the President on the Middle East and North Africa,” May 19, 2011, at www
41. The Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency provided arms and training for various anti-Assad forces and cooperated with other foreign efforts to bolster opposition groups. See Christopher Phillips, The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 141–43; David Ignatius, “What the Demise of the CIA’s anti-Assad Program Means,” The Washington Post, July 20, 2017; and Austin Carson and Michael Poznansky, “The Logic for (Shoddy) U.S. Covert Action in Syria,” War on the Rocks, July 21, 2016, at https://
42. “Senator Kerry Statement at Hearing on Sudan,” March 15, 2012, at www.foreign.senate.gov/press/chair/release/chairman-kerry-statement-at-hearing-on-sudan-.
43. According to Denise Froning of the Heritage Foundation, “Free trade helps to spread the value of freedom, reinforce the rule of law, and foster economic development in poor countries. The national debate over trade-related issues too often ignores these important benefits.” See her “The Benefits of Free Trade: A Guide for Policymakers” (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, August 25, 2000), at www
44. See in particular Edward Mansfield and Jack L. Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
45. Germany and Great Britain were each other’s largest trading partners in 1914, and Japan went to war in 1941 to try to free itself from economic dependence on the United States and others. On the latter case, see Michael Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security 1919–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). A comprehensive recent study of this subject finds that interdependence reduces incentives for war when states expect close ties to continue, but not when they fear these connections could be cut off. See Dale C. Copeland, Economic Interdependence and War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
46. See especially John J. Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions,” International Security 19, no. 3 (Winter 1994/95).
47. This argument is convincingly made in Lloyd Gruber, Ruling the World: Power Politics and the Rise of Supranational Institutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
48. See Stephen M. Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), chaps. 2–3.
49. Quoted in Craig Whitney, “NATO at 50: With Nations at Odds, Is It a Misalliance?” The New York Times, February 15, 1999.
50. Timothy Garton Ash, “The Peril of Too Much Power,” The New York Times, April 9, 2002.
51. In November 2009, for example, Major Nidal Hasan, an army psychiatrist, murdered thirteen people and injured more than thirty others at Fort Hood. Hasan had been in email contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, an influential Al Qaeda cleric, and had increasingly come to see the United States as a threat to Islam. In 2014, while awaiting execution for his crimes, Hasan wrote a letter expressing his desire to become a citizen of the “Islamic State” (i.e., ISIS).
52. See Murtaza Hussain and Cora Currier, “U.S. Military Operations Are Biggest Motivation for Homegrown Terrorists, FBI Study Finds,” The Intercept, October 11, 2016.
53. Serbia, Libya, and Iran all made concessions in the face of U.S. and/or multilateral pressure, but they also held firm on key principles, bargained hard, and eventually extracted their own concessions in exchange.
54. Quoted in Mark Landler, “The Afghan War and the Evolution of Obama,” The New York Times, January 1, 2016.
55. Chas W. Freeman, “Militarism and the Crisis of American Diplomacy,” Epistulae, no. 20, National Humanities Institute, July 7, 2015.
56. See “President Delivers State of the Union Speech,” January 29, 2002, at http://
57. Critical assessments of U.S. diplomacy in the Kosovo War include Michael Mandelbaum, “A Perfect Failure: NATO’s War against Yugoslavia,” Foreign Affairs 78 (September–October 1999); Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwarz, “Kosovo: For the Record,” National Interest 57 (Fall 1999); and Alan Kuperman, “Botched Diplomacy Led to War,” The Wall Street Journal, June 17, 1999. On the concessions Milosevic gained by resisting, see Stephen Hosmer, The Conflict Over Kosovo: Why Milosevic Decided to Settle When He Did (Washington, DC: RAND Corporation, 2001), pp. 116–17. Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon defend the Clinton administration’s handling of the negotiations preceding the war, but they concede that the United States and its allies greatly exaggerated the ease with which Serbia could be compelled to accept NATO’s demands. See their Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution), pp. 89–90.
58. In negotiations with several European states in 2005, Iran offered to confine enrichment to LEU levels, limit its enrichment capacity to the amount needed to fuel its nuclear reactors, ratify and implement the Additional Protocol of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and accept enhanced IAEA monitoring of its nuclear facilities. Iran had fewer than three thousand centrifuges installed at that time, and the British foreign minister Jack Straw later maintained that “had it not been for major problems within the US administration under President Bush, we could have actually settled the whole Iran nuclear dossier back in 2005.” The Bush administration pressed the Europeans to reject the proposal, and serious talks did not resume until 2009, by which time Iran had more than seven thousand centrifuges available. See David Morrison and Peter Oborne, “U.S. Scuppered Deal with Iran in 2005, says then British Foreign Minister,” OpenDemocracy.net, September 23, 2013, at www
59. In 2010 Brazilian and Turkish mediation (the so-called Tehran Declaration) produced an agreement that would have swapped 1,200 kilograms of Iran’s low-enriched uranium in exchange for 120 kilograms of fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor. The Obama administration had initially encouraged Brazil and Turkey’s efforts, but it backed away when the declaration threatened to derail the fragile consensus in favor of new United Nations sanctions. See Trita Parsi, A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), especially chap. 10.
60. In June 2012 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejected Iran’s participation in the Geneva I talks, saying, “It is hard, for the United States certainly, to imagine that a country putting so much effort into keeping Assad in power … would be a constructive actor. And we think this would not be an appropriate participant at this point to include.” The point, however, was that any effort to end the conflict had to include all the stakeholders, and especially those in a position to derail an agreement. See U.S. Department of State, “Remarks with Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu After Their Meeting,” June 2012, at www
61. See Christopher D. Kolenda, Rachel Reid, Chris Rogers, and Marte Retzius, The Strategic Costs of Civilian Harm: Applying the Lessons from Afghanistan to Current and Future Conflicts (New York: Open Society Foundation, June 2016), p. 9.
62. See Elisabeth Bumiller, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint,” The New York Times, April 26, 2010.
63. Among a large literature, 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); Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); Emma Sky, The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (New York: Public Affairs, 2015); Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014); Carter Malkasian, War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier (New York: Oxford, 2013); and Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014).
64. John Spencer, “How to Rethink the U.S. Military’s Troop Deployment Policy,” Politico, July 27, 2016, at www
65. See Sayed Salahuddin and Pamela Constable, “U.S. General in Afghanistan Apologizes for Highly Offensive Leaflets,” The Washington Post, September 7, 2017.
66. As a top Afghan official told a group of senior U.S. officials, “corruption is not just a problem for the system of governance in Afghanistan; it is the system of governance.” Quoted in Corruption in Conflict: Lessons from the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: U.S. Special Inspector-General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, September 2016), at www
67. See Carlotta Gall, “Afghanistan: Obama’s Sad Legacy,” New York Review of Books, January 19, 2017, p. 32.
68. See Mohammad Samim, “Afghanistan’s Addiction to Foreign Aid,” The Diplomat, May 19, 2016, at https://
69. See John Judis, “America’s Failure—and Russia and Iran’s Success—in Syria’s Cataclysmic Civil War,” TPM Café-Opinion, January 10, 2017, at http://
70. See Jonathan Monten and Alexander Downes, “FIRCed to be Free: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization,” International Security 37, no. 4 (Spring 2013); Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George W. Downs, “Intervention and Democracy,” International Organization 60, no. 3 (Summer 2006); Jeffrey Pickering and Mark Peceny, “Forging Democracy at Gunpoint,” International Studies Quarterly 50, no. 3 (September 2006); and Stephen Haggard and Lydia Tiede, “The Rule of Law in Post-Conflict Settings: The Empirical Record,” International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2014).
71. See Porter, The Global Village Myth.
72. See Chris Heathcote, “Forecasting Infrastructure Investment Needs for 50 Countries, 7 Sectors Through 2040,” August 10, 2017, at http://
73. See especially Bruce W. Jentleson and Christopher A. Whytock, “Who ‘Won’ Libya?: The Force-Diplomacy Debate and Its Implications for Theory and Policy,” International Security 30, no. 3 (Winter 2005/2006), especially pp. 74–76; see also Ronald Bruce St. John, “Libya Is Not Iraq: Preemptive Strikes, WMD, and Diplomacy,” Middle East Journal 58, no. 3 (Summer 2004); Flynt Leverett, “Why Libya Gave Up on the Bomb,” The New York Times, January 23, 2004; and Martin Indyk, “The Iraq War Did Not Force Gaddafi’s Hand,” Financial Times, March 9, 2004.
74. I am indebted to Barry Posen for this line of argument. Fears that the post–Cold War order might collapse completely if America retrenched is explicit in Brooks, Ikenberry, and Wohlforth, “Don’t Come Home, America,” and Kagan, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire.”
75. For comprehensive analyses of America’s dominant global position, see Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad; idem, World Out of Balance; Nuno Monteiro, Theory of Unipolar Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 116–22; and Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder (New York: Twelve, 2014).
76. On the “free security” produced by America’s geographic location, see C. Vann Woodward, The Age of Reinterpretation (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1961), p. 2; and Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 13–14, 19–20, 363.
77. See Jeremy Shapiro and Richard Sokolsky, “How America Enables Its Allies’ Bad Behavior,” April 27, 2016, at www