The American Century began in 1941.1 It is ending now. While the United States remains the world’s military giant and an economic powerhouse, America no longer dominates geopolitics or the world economy. Its military can defend the United States against attack but cannot decisively determine the direction of geopolitics, or even local politics in places where it intervenes. The key task of American foreign policy, as I see it, is to work with other nations to foster a multipolar world that is peaceful, prosperous, fair, and environmentally sustainable. America’s current policies work directly against these goals. A new foreign policy is a tall order that requires a fundamental and realistic rethinking of our world and America’s place in it.
The United States has long viewed itself as an exceptional nation, even as God’s New Israel chosen to redeem the world.2 This view has bipartisan support and deep roots in the country’s history, culture, and religious traditions. Recent paeans to American exceptionalism include Ronald Reagan’s description of the United States as “the shining city on the hill” and Madeleine Albright’s as the “indispensable nation.” Reagan was harking back to the Puritan leader Jonathan Winthrop, who quoted Jesus (Matthew 5:14) in declaring the colonial settlement as “a city upon the hill,” with the world’s eyes upon it. American exceptionalism has been called the nation’s civic religion, cast in secular terms with a religious aura, as in Lincoln’s invocation of America as “the last best hope of Earth.”
One part of American exceptionalism is relentless war. Noting more than 280 “military interventions and nuclear standoffs on every corner of the globe,” plus twenty-nine wars with the country’s indigenous peoples, historian Harry S. Stout declares, “The norm of American national life is war.” Part of the exceptionalist tradition has been to find divine purpose in war—to place “America’s faith in the institution of war as a divine instrument and sacred mandate to be exercised around the world.”3
In this book, I will argue that American exceptionalism is profoundly and dangerously anachronistic. Americans have believed in the righteousness of their cause in part because of the repeated military triumphs throughout history. Not only has war been justified in God’s name, but also victory has been interpreted as God’s providential backing of the United States. Yet this kind of exceptionalism is especially misguided in the twenty-first century. The United States lacks the relative economic and military power, not to mention the knowledge and prudence, to redeem the world through American-led military interventions and regime-change operations. In recent decades, such actions (in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria, just to name a few) have led to repeated bloodbaths and disasters, not American victory and security.
Donald Trump’s vision of America First is a racist and populist variant of traditional American exceptionalism. As a racist strategy, it will divide American society. As a populist strategy, it is doomed to fail and could create economic mayhem. As an exceptionalist foreign policy in a postexceptionalist era, it is likely to strengthen rather than weaken America’s main competitors, especially China. Yet the most dangerous part of America First is that it could easily lead to war, even nuclear devastation. Foreign policy narcissism is extraordinarily perilous.
Since the late 1970s, the United States has been embroiled in wars and political upheavals in the Middle East. Before that, from the 1950s to 1970s, the United States was embroiled in Southeast Asia, and in the first half of the twentieth century in Latin America—different regions, same methods. As in those other regions, it would be both wise and timely for the United States to pack its bags and withdraw from Middle Eastern wars. These have been wars of choice, not wars of necessity, and they have been chronically poor choices.
The current nationalist wave makes even less sense than in the past, now that the entire world faces the challenges of severe environmental degradation and other global threats (such as newly emerging diseases and mass migration). These new challenges require global cooperation and international law, not nationalism and gauzy dreams of past glory (which are, alas, far more myth than reality). The world more than ever needs a United Nations configured for the twenty-first century and a commitment to shared objectives of sustainable development. At the core, U.S. foreign policy needs to shift from military might and warmaking to technological dynamism and global cooperation.
The logic of sustainable development should also draw us to the doctrine of subsidiarity. This important political and social doctrine holds that problems should be solved at the lowest feasible level of governance, the one closest to the people. Those problems that can be addressed by local governments (e.g., at the city level) should be. But not all can. Some require national solutions. Many, such as tapping renewable energy or controlling epidemic diseases, require strong regional cooperation at the scale of the European Union, or North America, or East Asia. Still others, such as controlling human-induced climate change and the massive loss of biodiversity around the world, require strong global cooperation and diplomacy.
I will take up these arguments in four sections. The first section discusses the history and limits of American exceptionalism, especially in an era when the rise of China and other parts of the world economy diminishes America’s relative economic and military might. I discuss Trump’s America First in the context of traditional American exceptionalism. The second section reconsiders America’s addiction to regime change as a key, if not the key, instrument of foreign policy—especially in the Middle East, where the United States has been in nonstop war for a generation. I argue for the end of U.S. military engagement in the region. The third section takes up the economic merits of Trump’s strategy and finds it likely to accelerate the relative decline of the United States. The fourth and final section offers my thoughts about how to restore U.S. diplomacy, especially to meet the challenges of sustainable development.
We stand poised between two possible futures—one of conflict, even nuclear war, and one of peaceful cooperation. To avoid the first and achieve the latter, we need a new American foreign policy, and a mind-set beyond exceptionalism. Our strength lies in our diversity and our ability to connect with all parts of the world in a cooperative spirit. These are the core messages I hope to convey in the coming chapters.