The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
—attributed to Edmund Burke
Our world has reached the tipping point.
What began as a pro-democracy uprising in Syria has become a tornado of conflict, sucking regional and global powers into an accelerating cycle of violence. The Islamic State terrorist group has carved out a massive power base across Syria and Iraq, and is battling to expand it. Iran and Saudi Arabia are fighting a proxy war for regional dominance; the terrorist groups al-Qaeda and Hezbollah are trying to carve out their own spheres of control; Russia is using Syria as a stage on which to posture as a superpower reborn and challenge American dominance.
The effects have already reached far beyond the shores of the Mediterranean and the streets of Damascus. Islamic State bombs have caused carnage in Paris and Istanbul, Beirut and Brussels; jihadist groups inspired the San Bernardino and Orlando shooters to commit the deadliest terror attacks on US soil since 9/11. The conflicts in the Middle East have sent millions of people fleeing into Europe, straining to the breaking point the continent’s ability to take them in. Russia’s Syrian power play provoked the most dangerous armed clash since the Cold War, when a Russian jet violated the airspace of NATO member Turkey and was shot down.
In Syria and Iraq, Yemen and Libya, the body of the state as we know it has collapsed, and hostile powers are gathering like vultures to pick over the remains. Not since the Balkans a century ago has one region held so much potential for global disaster. Shia against Sunni, Russia against Turkey, Iran against Saudi Arabia, Islamic State against the West: Any one of these contests could provide the flash point for a global conflagration.
In this age of interconnections, it has become a cliché to talk of the “global village.” Right now, the village is burning, and the neighbors are fighting in the light of the flames. We need a policeman to restore order; we need a fireman to put out the fire; we need a mayor, smart and sensible, to lead the rebuilding.
We need America to play all these roles. No other country in the world can do it. Russia is obsessed with rebuilding the empire the Soviet Union lost; China is still primarily a regional actor; Europe is weak, divided, and leaderless; the old powers of Britain and France are simply too small and exhausted to play the global role they once did. Only America has the material greatness to be able to stop the slide into chaos; only America has the moral greatness to do it, not for the sake of power but for the sake of peace.
And yet right now, the call for isolationism in the United States is growing louder by the day. More and more politicians and commentators are giving in to the temptation that the twin bulwarks of the Atlantic and Pacific have always offered: the temptation to say, “Let the world out there do what it wants; we can pull back the troops, pull up the drawbridge, and be safe.”
This is a terribly dangerous philosophy because it is so wrong. History has shown time and again that the bulwarks of the oceans are no defense against a hostile and aggressive world. Imperial Germany proved it in 1917; imperial Japan did it again in 1940; al-Qaeda did it on 9/11. The main thing that has changed since then is the rise of the Internet, with all the dangers of radicalization and cyber-crime that it offers. It would be hard to argue that this has made the world a safer place.
The same way we talk about the global village, we talk about the “international order.” For most of us, it is an order that has dominated our whole lives. It has become a shared ideal, a shared dream: The idea that nations can, and should, work together for the greater good. The idea that there are rules that apply to all nations, the great as well as the small. The idea that some rights and values are universal—freedom, democracy, the dignity of the individual. The idea, in the compelling words of the preamble to the United Nations Charter, that all nations should stand together “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.”
Yet that order is neither an ideal nor a dream: It is a system of rules that was created out of the wreckage of World War II thanks to American leadership. America was the father of the international order; America was its champion in the darkest days of the Cold War; America held the pillars of the world steady when the Soviet Union collapsed, allowing the former Soviet countries to find their place in the international order peacefully.
And now it appears that America is in danger of stepping back and allowing the pillars of the world to crumble. When Russia illegally annexed Crimea in March 2014—the first gunpoint landgrab in Europe since the end of World War II—Secretary of State John Kerry called it an “unbelievable act of aggression” and went on, “You just don’t, in the twenty-first century, behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext.”
As a statement of principle, this is admirable, but as a guide to policy, it is dangerously naive, because whether it was believable or not, it happened. The problem is exactly that many countries in the world are acting in a nineteenth-century fashion: Russia and China are not the only ones, simply the biggest. And when the world’s largest country and the world’s most populous country seem bent on treating their neighbors in a thoroughly nineteenth-century fashion, the world’s most powerful country badly needs a clearer policy than “You just don’t do that.” The twenty-first century’s rules are only as good as twenty-first-century nations’ willingness to enforce them; and if the United States cannot be bothered to enforce them, who will?
Indeed, the current foreign-policy debate in the United States is truly frightening for those of us in the twenty-first-century world who believe in the rule of law. On both sides of the US political spectrum, politicians are railing against “free riders” and against “paying for other people’s security”; they are dismissing NATO as an unnecessary cost, and foreign engagement as a pointless effort.
These commentators seem bent on dragging America down the wrong road—a dead-end road that looks attractive at the start but hides incalculable pitfalls just around the corner. In the age of globalization, they want to shut the United States off from the globe; in the age of international cooperation, they argue for a retreat into isolation. They want to close the door and tell the rest of the world to go away, but the rest of the world has a tradition of ignoring such warnings.
As a former prime minister of Denmark, I would love it if my country were a superpower, capable of enforcing the rules, but we are not. We are no free riders; we have always done our bit, but we can only work as part of an international team. We cannot be its captain.
We need America to be the captain, to lead and inspire our societies, so that we defend, together, the principles of democracy and individual liberty, the rule of law, and the freedom of trade. If America makes a wrong turn, it is those principles that will suffer, and the cost of reimposing them in ten or twenty years’ time will be an order of magnitude greater than the cost of defending them.
Yes, some countries do act in nineteenth-century fashion, and only America can rally the twenty-first-century world in defense of the rule of law. Of course, intervention is neither simple nor easy. The United States has made mistakes in the past; this book will discuss some of them. But my belief is that the only fatal mistake is to turn away from the world and pretend that its problems are not America’s problems. Whenever the United States steps back, the actors of evil are emboldened to step forward. In the words attributed to the eighteenth-century British statesman Edmund Burke, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
A century ago, in the Balkans, the world reached its tipping point, and the result was the most disastrous and destructive war that history had ever seen. Now, in the Middle East, we have reached the tipping point again. Only strong, determined American leadership can stop the international community from falling into the abyss. America needs to shake off the appearance of hesitancy, which has dogged it over the past eight years, and take the lead with renewed energy.
This book is my plea for US leadership, and it falls into three parts. The remainder of this chapter will examine the cauldron of the Middle East and how we got to this tipping point, through a mixture of good intentions, bad decisions, and misunderstood communications. The next three chapters will examine the careers of three US presidents—Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan—who exemplified US leadership on the global stage. The concluding chapters will examine the debate between isolationists and realists, and explain why, and how, America must take the lead to uphold the international order that she did so much to build.
There is no easy way to describe the upheavals that have shaken the wider Middle East and North Africa since the beginning of pro-democracy demonstrations in Tunisia at the end of 2010. Almost without exception, the traditional regimes, power structures, and even borders of this vast region have been swept away on a wave of bloodshed. Libya has collapsed; Yemen is on its knees; Iraq and Syria are at the epicenter of the brutal struggle between Shia and Sunni, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Farther afield, Afghanistan is clinging by its fingernails over the precipice of civil war.
These conflicts are so chaotic and wide-ranging that it is hard enough to explain them, let alone extinguish them. They have been fueled by struggles between and within tribes and families as well as nations; they have been driven by religion and the deepest cynicism; they have led to the proclamation of holy states—caliphates—that are built on the profits of slavery, narcotics, torture, and extortion. But I cannot rid myself of the belief that they have one thing in common, and that is that these conflicts took off when the United States stepped back. It is as if American engagement is a lid clamped down on bubbling cauldrons of violence and chaos, and once the lid is off, the cauldron boils over.
It has become customary among America’s enemies to blame the United States for all the troubles of the world. According to their narrative, the US campaign in Afghanistan began that country’s descent into bloodshed; the US-led invasion of Iraq sparked the fires that are raging there now; and the NATO-led operation in Libya, in which the United States played a crucial role, was what destroyed that country.
In fact, the opposite is true. Every one of those interventions was necessary and justified—in Afghanistan, to close down the terrorist safe haven that the Taliban had given the 9/11 plotters; in Iraq, to stop Saddam Hussein from flouting the will of the international community and defying the United Nations; in Libya, to stop Mu’ammar Gadhafi from massacring his own people. The anarchy did not begin when America sent the troops in; it began when America pulled the troops out.
The first of those decisions chronologically was the decision to end our NATO-led Afghan combat mission, which we made in late 2010. I was deeply involved in that decision as secretary-general of NATO, a post that I had taken up in 2009. Throughout the early months of my mandate, it became more and more clear to me that the NATO member countries were growing increasingly war-weary. In order to maintain their support for the mission in the short term, it was necessary to set up a clear perspective, goal, and timetable for our mission in the medium term. At the NATO summit in Lisbon in 2010, we therefore decided that the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) operation in Afghanistan should cease by the end of 2014, and responsibility for security would gradually be transferred to the Afghan security forces.
No one argued to prolong our presence in Afghanistan. Afghan president Hamid Karzai complained about the night raids and received a rather robust answer from German chancellor Angela Merkel. But all participants were so eager to leave Afghanistan that I had to caution a bit, saying that the process would be condition-based, not calendar-driven. “We have to make sure we don’t leave Afghanistan prematurely,” I said.
At the time, this decision was carried by its own political logic: It was essential to emphasize that we were not in Afghanistan as occupiers, and it met an Afghan desire to be masters in their own house. We also needed to preserve NATO’s own unity and make sure that there was no talk of a “rush for the exit”: The Dutch had already pulled out of Uruzgan province, and there were fears that others might follow, shattering our cherished principle of “in together, out together.”
But in retrospect, it was a mistake to let the withdrawal of troops be calendar-driven rather than driven by conditions on the ground. By the end of 2014, the Afghan security forces were not yet fully capable of taking over complete responsibility for security throughout the country. They needed more time, but that was not something the Lisbon agreement allowed.
In short, when NATO and partner combat troops left Afghanistan, they left behind a job that was only partly finished, a task that the Afghan forces were not capable of finishing on their own. The rising tide of violence in Afghanistan since then is the indirect consequence of our decision in Lisbon, well intentioned but ill judged, to end our combat mission by the last day of 2014, whether or not there remained an enemy to fight.
If Afghanistan shows the dangers of what happens when international help withdraws too soon, Libya shows the dangers of what happens when it arrives too late. The NATO-led air and sea campaign for Libya remains, to this day, one of the most effective military operations ever carried out: seven months of air strikes with unprecedented precision that minimized civilian casualties and collateral damage. It saved tens of thousands of lives from almost certain destruction, and it enabled the Libyan opposition to overthrow one of the world’s worst and longest-ruling dictators.
However, the political follow-up to the military operation was no less than a disaster. I had expected the UN to lead determined efforts to help the new authorities in Libya. After the fall of the Gadhafi regime, the new political leaders in Tripoli were faced with the daunting task of building new government institutions and a new security system from scratch. But no one was there to help them. The UN resolutions did not allow NATO to have troops on the ground: Once the air mission was completed, we had no choice but to leave. Some people have called this an excuse; it is nothing of the sort. Does anyone seriously believe that a single NATO member would have been willing to occupy Libya illegally, without a UN mandate? We had to wait for the UN to decide what sort of international support was needed.
But the UN did not step into the breach. The truth is that no master plan for the rebuilding of Libya existed, and no urgency was given to the task of drawing one up. And while the UN dithered, the countless factions in Libya took the law into their own hands. It was not just anarchy but anarchy with AK-47s. Soon, the security situation deteriorated and it became almost impossible for international institutions to deploy people and resources to the country. In a crowning irony, at length the then Libyan prime minister asked NATO to help build new Libyan security forces, but before we could send help he resigned, and nobody in Libya was willing to repeat the offer. Now Libya has descended into the abyss. It is a tragic example of the consequences when the international community fails to act—and the tragedy is that it did not have to happen. The chance was there to build Libya anew, but nobody took it.
This is not to say that the United States could, or should, have tried to carry out the stabilization of Libya by itself. But my experience has been that the United States has a unique ability to make things happen, to rally international support, and to forge international consensus. No other country has a similar combination of political, diplomatic, economic, and military capabilities. Put bluntly, the United States can make things happen in a way that no other country can—but only when it is willing to lead from the front.
In that regard, the most disastrous message to come out of Washington in 2011 was undoubtedly the notion that the United States had entered a phase of “leading from behind.” As a concept, leading from behind makes no sense: If you are not in front, you are not leading—you are either following others or hiding behind them. And as a policy, it simply doesn’t work, because the people you claim to be leading will either stop and wait for you to overtake them or go off in their own direction. The American president must lead from the driver’s seat.
The term “leading from behind” appeared in an article in the New Yorker on May 2, 2011, and was attributed to “an adviser” to the president. It has never been officially embraced by the administration, and I have never heard the president or any of his secretaries use that expression. But the mere fact that it was disseminated, though anonymously, sent an unfortunate signal to those wicked forces that were looking for new chances to fill the vacuum left by a hesitant sheriff. It was interpreted as meaning that, after masterminding the withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States had no intention of getting involved in yet more overseas missions—in other words, that the forces of chaos and oppression could commit as many atrocities as they liked, and America would let them get away with it.
It is only fair to point out that the distaste for foreign intervention in the wake of the Afghan and Iraqi wars was by no means limited to America. I well remember a meeting of NATO foreign ministers I chaired as secretary-general of NATO in December 2012. The Syrian civil war had been raging for over a year; we knew that government forces had been attacking civilians indiscriminately, even firing Scud missiles. I argued that it was time for the world’s greatest military alliance to begin “prudent planning” for all eventualities in Syria—so that if international action was judged to be necessary, we could act swiftly and decisively. But apart from a few ministers, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and British foreign secretary William Hague, there was little support for this proposal. On the contrary, there was a strong pushback from a number of other ministers. I still remember a foreign minister from one of the major European countries who argued vigorously against even thinking of prudent planning. He also asked his ambassador to make the same point to me separately, and even took hold of me the next morning to be sure that I did not start any kind of prudent planning.
I had to shelve the plan, since all decisions in NATO require unanimity, but it was to my regret, because I believe that it is the essence of a security organization like NATO to be prepared for all eventualities. I had not proposed a specific action, but only prudent—that is to say, very discreet—planning: When even that was excluded, it tells a lot about the distaste for intervention that predominated.
The phrase “leading from behind” changed the whole tone of the debate. If it had never been spoken, the narrative might have been of a general Western reluctance to act. Once it was spoken and published, it became the prism through which all foreign-policy decisions during Obama’s presidency were viewed. Thus, the 2010 decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, the 2011 withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, and the 2012 decision not to enforce the White House’s “red line” on the use of chemical weapons in Syria were woven into a narrative that claimed, in essence, that Obama had given up on foreign policy and foreign military action, and that the most he would ever do was to “lead from behind”—if he acted at all.
I have no doubt that the decisive moment in this narrative was President Obama’s decision not to strike Syria in 2013. Early in the conflict, President Obama declared that the use of chemical weapons would be a “red line,” which would trigger US action. On a number of occasions, chemical attacks were reported, but were judged not to have been on a scale that would constitute crossing the red line. However, on August 21 of that year, chemical munitions were fired from Syrian government–held territory into the small but strategically located town of Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus. Human rights organizations and journalists on the ground reported gruesome scenes: deaths of men, women, and children consistent with chemical attacks, possibly sarin gas. It was estimated that more than a thousand people were killed.
At last, Obama declared that the line had been crossed. American forces moved into position, ready to strike; French and British forces moved up to support them (although the British Parliament then refused to sanction British action). The world held its breath, waiting for an American strike. It never came. At the last minute, literally on the eve of taking action, Obama changed his mind. He called off the strikes and offered a diplomatic way out if Assad would get rid of his chemical weapons. First Russian president Putin, and then Assad himself, agreed to the deal, and a UN Security Council resolution was passed authorizing the UN and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to mount an operation to dismantle Syria’s chemical stockpile. Just over two weeks later, the UN/OPCW team was on the ground receiving reasonable cooperation from Syria, and while we cannot be sure that all chemical weapons were actually declared and removed from Syria, the great majority appear to have been.
In terms of chemical weapons it was an effective move, but in terms of the bigger picture it was a disaster. In the eyes of the world, Obama had gone eye to eye with Assad, and it was Obama who had blinked. This, more than anything else, gave the impression that America simply would not take action in the Middle East, no matter what the provocation—and that emboldened both Assad and Putin.
In an interview with the Atlantic, President Obama has thrown more light on his motives. Four years earlier, the president believed, the Pentagon had “jammed” him on a troop surge for Afghanistan. Now, on Syria, he was beginning to feel jammed again. In addition to this, he had four concerns. He stated that the first and most important factor was “our assessment that while we could inflict some damage on Assad, we could not, through a missile strike, eliminate the chemical weapons themselves, and what I would then face was the prospect of Assad having survived the strike and claiming he had successfully defied the United States, that the United States had acted unlawfully in the absence of a UN mandate, and that would have potentially strengthened his hand rather than weakened it.” Second, “I had come into office with the strong belief that the scope of executive power in national-security issues is very broad, but not limitless.” Third, he would not fire a shot, as long as there were UN inspectors on the ground in Syria. And fourth, it played a role that Prime Minister David Cameron had not been able to find a parliamentary majority for British participation in a possible joint action.
Whatever his motives were, there is no doubt that the decision not to strike Syria had a crucial, serious, and lasting impact on America’s credibility among both friends—France and traditional allies in the region—and foes. In Congress as well as in the administration, the president fell out with those who had previously supported a tough and consistent line. America’s enemies saw new opportunities in the American hesitation, among them Russian president Putin. The conclusion is clear: Once the US president says he will strike, you have to strike. There is no choice.
It seems to me that President Obama was aware of the political costs: “And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would cost me politically. . . . I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make.” Jeffrey Goldberg, who interviewed Obama for the Atlantic, calls August 30, 2013, Obama’s “liberation day,” the day when he defied the foreign-policy establishment and its cruise-missile playbook.
If August 30, 2013, really is perceived as Obama’s liberation day, it bodes no good for the rest of his presidential term. For I believe that this day could be remembered as the day he let the Middle East slip from America into the hands of Russia, Iran, and the Islamic State (IS). In fact, by 2013, America’s enemies felt confident that she no longer wanted to lead. The world’s policeman had gone into retirement.
That perception had dire consequences on the ground. I am convinced, for example, that the reason President Putin annexed Crimea and launched an undeclared war in Ukraine and a declared one in Syria is that he thought the United States would let him get away with it. In the same way, I believe that Iran made such an aggressive push into Syria and Yemen because it thought the Obama administration only cares about the 2015 nuclear accord. Fear of American power has always been the one overwhelming factor that kept a lid on these countries’ geopolitical ambitions. Now, rightly or wrongly, that fear has disappeared.
The narrative that President Obama is somehow a soft or inactive president does not entirely square with the facts. When the US military called for a troop surge in Afghanistan in 2009, he provided it; when NATO allies demanded action over Libya in 2011, he made sure that the US military provided the capabilities that the other allies simply did not have. He ordered US Special Forces into Pakistan to take Osama bin Laden; he greatly increased the use of targeted drone strikes; he launched air strikes against IS in 2014, enabling Kurdish forces on the ground to retake much of the territory lost to the group.
Nevertheless, it is clear that, for Obama, military action is only something that he will take reluctantly, and after all other options have been obviously exhausted—and that has emboldened America’s foes. Perhaps unsurprisingly in a president who was elected on the promise to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he has been the most vocal president since Jimmy Carter in his opposition to the early use of military force. In what was arguably his defining foreign-policy speech, delivered at West Point on May 28, 2014, President Obama outlined what could be called his “last resort” doctrine on the use of military power: “Since World War II, some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences.”
He made the point even clearer in his State of the Union speech on January 20, 2015, when he stated, “When the first response to a challenge is to send in our military, then we risk getting drawn into unnecessary conflicts.”
Let me stress that I have no quarrel with Barack Obama. I regard him as an insightful and sincere political leader with strong personal integrity and a belief in justice, the rule of law, and a rules-based international order. And on a personal level, my relationship with Obama is the very best. After all, he was instrumental in getting me elected NATO secretary-general in 2009, and it was Barack Obama who, over a midwestern specialty—a root beer float—in Chicago in 2012, asked me to extend my mandate as secretary-general for another year. I am not the guy who turns his back on colleagues with whom I have collaborated closely, and throughout my mandate I had the very best cooperation with the president and his team.
Nor do I doubt that President Obama, in his demonstration of restraint, is in line with a large portion of the American population. Surveys from the Pew Research Center show that a majority of Americans believe that the United States is doing too much, rather than too little, to help solve the world’s problems, and a majority agree that “the US should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.” Other surveys, including the annual Chicago Council Surveys, indicate that while a majority of Americans are in favor of the United States playing an active role in world affairs, there is also a long-standing public aversion to the use of military force. Thus, Obama’s own preference for focusing on domestic issues clearly reflects that of most American voters. This is wholly understandable; after all, politicians are elected, first and foremost, to look after their own countries, not other people’s.
This noninterventionism sentiment pops up regularly in both political parties. Since President Herbert Hoover and the prominent senator Robert Taft in the 1930s, there has also been a strong noninterventionism movement in parts of the Republican Party. While it was marginalized under the leadership of President Reagan and Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, it has resurfaced in recent years, and you will often hear noninterventionist, even isolationist-like, speeches from the right wing of the Republican Party, including the Tea Party groups. So President Obama is not the only one to represent this foreign-policy thinking. It is rooted in American history, in political traditions, and in the inmost sentiments of many Americans.
However, noninterventionism, not to speak of isolationism, is a troubling approach in today’s world. We live in an era of civil wars, ethnic conflicts, insurgency, and terrorism, which will drag on for many years. There are, of course, many reasons for this political upheaval: Resurgent and rising states are looking for conquest rather than compromise. Autocrats are seeking to hold on to power, whatever the cost. Ideological and religious extremists and fanatics will take any opportunity to spread their creed and kill for it. And the most challenging aspect about such extremists is that they mistake restraint for weakness and become encouraged by it. In fact, the problem facing the United States is this: It is not enough for America to be strong or to play the role of world leader. The United States has to be seen to be strong and to be playing the leader’s role.
It is that need for visible, determined leadership that lies at the heart of this book.
To have to play the part of leader of the free world is a hard, and perhaps unfair, calling. No other leader, no other country in the world, faces such a challenge. But the way America’s enemies work makes it inevitable. Autocrats and terrorists are tempted to test their room for maneuver and the determination of the free world, and in particular the United States, if they sense they can carry out their illegal and heinous acts without serious consequences. If the United States retreats or is perceived to retreat, a vacuum will be left that will be filled by the “bad guys.”
Recent history is sadly full of such examples. While there may be many good reasons why the United States has refrained from interfering directly in the Syrian civil war, the US absence likely weakened the moderate opposition to the Assad regime and strengthened the extremists, creating space for President Putin. While the threat of air strikes against Syria after Assad’s use of chemical weapons eventually ended with the regime agreeing to let the chemical weapons be destroyed, the failure to act more strongly in defense of President Obama’s “red lines” sent a dangerous signal to both Damascus and Moscow about hesitant and wobbling US leadership.
While the US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 can be explained, the American absence most likely created space for more sectarianism, paved the way for IS, and indeed tempted Putin to seek rapprochement with Iraq. While the United States made a crucial contribution to NATO’s successful air operations in Libya, the American absence in the post-conflict period most likely hampered the new Libyan authorities’ reconstruction of the country and created a breeding ground for extremism, terrorism, and sectarian conflicts and violence. While there were good reasons for the American rebalancing from Europe to Asia and the “reset” with Russia after the end of the Cold War, the diminished American presence in Europe is likely to have given Putin an appetite for more room to maneuver and an expansion of the Russian sphere of interest.
Because of America’s strength and dominant global position, all powers and actors in the world orient themselves with reference to the great superpower. Allies detect American firmness and evaluate America’s steadfastness. Adversaries are lying in wait for signs of growing or fading clout or resolve. When the United States looks to retrench and retreat, her allies will be concerned while her opponents will see new opportunities.
The global village needs a policeman, and over the past hundred years, it has been shown time and again that the United States is the only state capable of acting in that capacity. When America is willing to step forward and defend the rules-based order that it did so much to create, the results are peace and stability. When America steps back, the world’s actors of ill will think they can break the rules and get away with it, and the result is conflict and chaos.
Over the past two decades, the world has changed fundamentally. What has not changed is its need for stability, security, and peace. Only the United States can provide that; and so I believe that the next US president will need to articulate a new foreign-policy doctrine, to guide the free world through the new era in which we live. That doctrine will have to set out more clearly than ever before the concept of American leadership.
It is a role that other presidents have played before. Harry S. Truman shaped the world after the wreckage of World War II, as a master of effective conduct. John F. Kennedy faced down the greatest danger ever to threaten the West, as a master of inspiring communication; Ronald Reagan brought the Cold War to a bloodless end through his conviction in the American people and the American Way. The new president must aspire to the standards of these outstanding leaders if he, or she, is to stop the fires of chaos from spreading and, ultimately, put them out.
The goal of this book is to set out why the world still needs American leadership and what it should look like. But first, we will turn to three pivotal presidents, Truman, Kennedy, and Reagan, and examine how they steered their country through times that were as challenging as our own.