They can start with the protean figure of Mead himself. His first work Mortal Splendor, published in 1987 at the height of the Iran–Contra debacle, chronicled the failures in turn of Nixon, of Carter and of Reagan to restore the American empire—bluntly described as such—to its lustre. Criticizing the archaism, involution and corruption of the Constitution, Mead lamented falling popular living standards and escalating budgetary deficits, ending with a call to Democrats to put an end to a decaying ‘bureaucratic and oligarchic order’ with the creation of a ‘fourth republic’, recasting the New Deal with a more populist and radical drive, and projecting it outwards as a programme for the world at large.1 Fourteen years later, his standpoint had somersaulted. A virtual pallbearer of empire in Mortal Splendor, by the time of Special Providence he had become its trumpeter, though the term itself now disappeared, the US featuring for the most part simply as ‘the central power in a world-wide system of finance, communications and trade’, and ‘gyroscope of world order’. International hegemony, it was true, the nation did enjoy. But Americans were insufficiently reflective of its meanings and purposes, about which more debate between their national traditions of foreign policy was now needed. His own inclinations, Mead explained, were Jeffersonian.2
These did not last long. Mead’s response to the attacks of 2001, a few months after the appearance of Special Providence, set its taxonomy to work with a difference. Power, Terror, Peace and War (2004) set out a robust programme to meet the challenges now confronting the ‘American project’ of domestic security and a peaceful world, whose failure would be a disaster for humanity. Fortunately, the US continued to combine the three forms of power that had hitherto assured its hegemony: ‘sharp’—the military force to prevent the Middle East becoming a ‘theocratic terror camp’; ‘sticky’—the economic interdependence that tied China to America through trade and debt; and ‘sweet’—the cultural attractions of American popular movies and music, universities, feminism, multinationals, immigration, charities. But the socioeconomic terrain on which these should now be deployed had shifted. After the Second World War, Fordism had provided a firm ground for US ascendancy, combining mass production and mass consumption in a way of life that became the envy of the world. With the end of the Cold War, the American example appeared to promise a future in which free markets and free government could henceforward spread everywhere, under a protective canopy of US might.3
But that was to forget that capitalism is a dynamic system, again and again destroying what it has created, to give birth to new forms of itself. The bureaucratized, full employment, manufacturing economy of Fordism was now a thing of the past in America, as elsewhere. What had replaced it was a ‘millennial capitalism’ of more freewheeling competition and individual risk-taking, corporate downsizing and hi-tech venturing, shorn of the props and protections of an earlier epoch: a force feared by all those—governments, elites or masses—who had benefited from Fordism and still clung to its ways. Restless and disruptive, it was the arrival of this millennial capitalism that underlay the revolution in American foreign policy in the new century. Its champions were now at the helm, remaking Hamiltonian conceptions of business, reviving Wilsonian values of liberty, and updating a Jacksonian bent for preemptive action.4 The Bush administration might have offered too thin a version of the rich case for attacking Iraq, since weapons of mass destruction were less important than a blow to regional fascism and the prospect of the first Arab democracy in Baghdad. But this was no time for Jeffersonian misgivings. Strategically, the Republican administration had made most of the right choices. If its execution of them had been somewhat choppy, TR and Wilson had on occasion stumbled at the start of their revolutions too. With US troops on the Tigris, the correct strategy for dealing with Arab fascists and terrorists, indeed all other enemies of freedom, was moving ahead: ‘forward containment’, complete where necessary with preventive strikes at the adversary.
Three years later, God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World encased these themes in a vaster world-historical theodicy. Behind the rise of the United States to global hegemony lay the prior ascendancy of Britain, in a relation not of mere sequence but organic connexion, that across five hundred years had given the Anglo-American powers a succession of unbroken victories over illiberal enemies—Habsburg Spain, Bourbon and Napoleonic France, Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Soviet Russia. The secret of this continuous triumph lay in a culture uniquely favourable to the titanic forces of capitalism, crossing Anglican religion and its offshoots with the Enlightenments of Newton and Smith, Madison and Darwin—a form of Christianity reconciling reason, revelation and tradition, allied to a ‘golden meme’ of secular conceptions of order arising out of the free play of natural forces, and their evolution. In due course, out of the combination of an Abrahamic faith committed to change—not a static, but a dynamic religion in the sense described by Bergson—and the explosion of human potential released by capitalism, came the Whig narrative of overarching historical progress.
Such was the cultural environment that nurtured the monumental creativity of Anglo-American finance, first in London and then New York, the core of capitalist efficiency as a system of rational allocation of resources, with its ingenuity in developing ever-new devices in banking, trading, stockjobbing, insurance, all the way to the credit cards and mortgage-backed securities of contemporary prosperity. The power of mass consumption, in turn, harnessed by flexible markets to the economic interests of the talented—‘perhaps the most revolutionary discovery in human history since the taming of fire’—generated the cascade of inventions in which Britain and America took the lead: white goods, railways, department stores, automobiles, telephones, popular culture at large. It was little wonder these two countries proved invincible on the world stage.
But the very success of Anglo-America bred its own illusions—a persistent belief that the rest of the world must of its own accord follow, if not sooner then later, the path to liberty, diversity and prosperity where it had led the way. Capitalism, however, could emerge smoothly and gradually into the world only within the privilege of its Anglican–Whig setting. Everywhere else, its arrival was harsher—more sudden and disruptive of old ways; typically infected, too, with resentment at the prowess of the first-comers, and the rough justice others had reason to feel these meted out to them—a ruth-lessness draped with many a pious expression of regret or rectitude, in the spirit of the Walrus and the Carpenter. That kind of resentment had been true of successive continental powers in the Europe of the past, and remained widespread in the extra-European world today, from the Russian bear licking its wounds to the Chinese dragon puffing its envious fire, not to speak of assorted Arab scorpions in the Middle East.
After the end of the Cold War, dangerous forces were still afoot. In confronting them, the United States should show tact where other cultures were concerned, whose sensibilities required the finesse of a ‘diplomacy of civilizations’. But it had no reason for doubt or despondency. Command of the seas remained the key to global power, and there US supremacy remained unchallenged: the maritime system that had assured Anglo-American triumph over every foe, from the time of Elizabeth I and Philip II onwards, held as firmly as ever. Europe, united and free, was an ally; Russia, much weakened; China could be balanced by Japan and India. In the Middle East, Islam as a faith belonged to the conversation of the world, in which all peoples and cultures were entitled to their collective recognition, even as the ghost dancers of Arab terror were crushed. The Pax Americana would persist, for it was wrong to think that all empires must inevitably decline or disappear. Rather, as the example of China showed, they may wax and wane over millennia.
By this time, the invasion of Iraq had ‘proved to be an unnecessary and poorly planned war’, after all. But US engagement in the Middle East would have to deepen, and Mead looked forward to the arrival of centrist Democrats for a course correction. Imbued with the tragic sense of history and American responsibility bequeathed by Niebuhr, and sustained by the awakening of a new Evangelical moderation, the nation could recover the dynamism of that ‘deep and apparently in-built human belief that through change we encounter the transcendent and the divine’. Capitalism was taking us into a future of accelerating change, and there lay the country’s opportunity. For the American project was not simply to bring personal freedom and material abundance for all. It had a higher meaning. In leading the world on a ‘voyage of exploration into unknown waters’, that is ‘both our destiny and duty’, its maritime order would be sailing towards an as yet unimagined horizon: there, where ‘the end of history is the peace of God’.5
The extravagance of this mystico-commercial construction might seem, on the face of it, to remove its author from mainstream discourse on foreign policy, and it is true that unlike most of his peers, Mead has never worked in government. But if he nevertheless remains central as a mind within the field, that is due not so much to the brutal energy of his style and restless ingenuity of his imagination, but to the indivisible fashion in which he has embodied in extreme form two opposite strains of American nationalism, each usually expressed more temperately: the economic and political realism of the tradition represented by the first Roosevelt, and the preceptorial and religious moralism consecrated by Wilson. Drumming out the blunt verities of capitalism, without flinching at—even rubbing in—the misdeeds of Anglo-American expansion, on the one hand; sublimating liberal democracy and higher productivity into a parousia of the Lord, on the other. The flamboyance of the combination has not meant marginalization. As he had foreseen, a Democrat was soon in the White House again, intoning the wisdom of Niebuhr, as Mead had wished, in a speech to the Nobel Committee he could have scripted. When Francis Fukuyama broke with the journal that had made him famous, The National Interest, on the grounds that it was tilting too far towards Nixonian Realpolitik, forgetting the salve of Wilsonian idealism that ought to be its complement, it was Mead who joined him in creating a new forum, The American Interest, to restore the balance of a true Liberal Realism.6
More typical of the field than this ecstatic hybrid are thinkers who belong without ambiguity to a particular tradition within the external repertory of the American state. There, as noted, the dominant has since the mid-forties always been Wilsonian—never more so than under the last three presidencies, all of which have proclaimed their devotion to the goals of the Peacemaker more vocally than any of their predecessors. The leading theorists within this camp, Michael Mandelbaum and John Ikenberry, each with a spell in the State Department, offer alternative versions of this outlook, substantially overlapping in intellectual framework, if diverging at significant points in political upshot.7 Mandelbaum is the more prominent and prolific, producing five widely applauded books in less than a decade, beginning with a trio whose titles speak for themselves: The Ideas that Conquered the World (2002), The Case for Goliath (2005) and Democracy’s Good Name (2007).
For Mandelbaum, the story of the twentieth century was ‘a Whig history with a vengeance’: the triumph of the Wilsonian triad of peace, democracy and free markets. These were the ideas that finished off the Soviet Union, bringing the Cold War to a victorious end as its rulers succumbed to their attractive force. In part this was an outcome comparable to natural selection, eliminating the economically unfit. But it was also an effect of the moral revelation wrought by a superior creed, comparable to the religious conversion that in late antiquity transformed pagans into Christians—Gorbachev, even Deng Xiaoping, had become latter-day Constantines. The result could be seen after the outrage of 2001. Every significant government in the world declared its solidarity with America, for all ‘supported the market-dominated world order that had come under attack and of which the United States served as the linchpin’, to which there was no viable alternative. To be sure, the full Wilsonian triad was not yet universally entrenched. The free market was now the most widely accepted idea in world history. But peace and democracy were not secure to quite the same extent. The foreign polices of Moscow and Beijing were less than completely pacific, their economies were insufficiently marketized, their political systems only incipiently democratic. The highest objective of the West must now be to transform and incorporate Russia and China fully into the liberal world order, as the earlier illiberal powers of Germany and Japan were made over from challengers into pillars of the system, after the war.
In that task, leadership fell to one nation, because it is more than a nation. The United States was not simply a benign Goliath among states, the sun around whom the solar system turns. It was ‘the World’s Government’, for it alone provided the services of international security and economic stability to humanity, its role accepted because of the twenty-first century consensus around the Wilsonian triad. American contributions to the maintenance of peace and the spread of free markets were generally acknowledged. But the importance of the United States in the diffusion of democracy was scarcely less. Historically, the ideas of liberty and of popular sovereignty—how to govern, and who governs—were analytically and chronologically distinct. The former predated the latter, which arrived only with the French Revolution, but then spread much more rapidly, often at the expense of liberty. Democracy, when it came, would be the improbable fusion of the two. Its rise in the twentieth century was due in good part to the dynamism of free markets in generating social prosperity and civil society. But it also required the magnetic attraction of the power and wealth of the two great Anglophone democracies, Great Britain and—now over-whelmingly—the United States. Without their supremacy, the best form of rule would never have taken root so widely. It was they who made it ‘the leading brand’ that so many others would want to acquire.
In this construction, Wilsonian devotion presents an apotheosis of the United States in some ways more pristine even than the syncretic version in Mead, with its jaunty allowance of a dark side to the history of American expansionism. Not that the World’s Government was infallible. Mandelbaum, who had counselled Clinton in his campaign for the presidency, had a disagreeable surprise when he was elected: the new national security adviser to the White House was Anthony Lake, rather than himself. Three years later, taking direct aim at Lake, he published a withering critique of the international performance of the Clinton regime, ‘Foreign Policy as Social Work’, dismissing its interventions in Haiti and Bosnia as futile attempts to play Mother Teresa abroad, and attacking its expansion of NATO to the east as a foolish provocation of Russia, jeopardizing its integration into a consensual ecumene after the Cold War.8
Nor, as time went on, was all well at home. A decade into the new century, The Frugal Superpower (2010) warned of widening inequality and escalating welfare entitlements amid continuing fiscal improvidence—Medicare potentially worse than Social Security, Keynesian deficits compounded by Lafferesque taxcuts—and the need for the country to adjust its overseas ends to its domestic means. That Used to Be Us (2011), co-authored with Thomas Friedman, extended the bill of anxieties. America’s secondary education was in crisis; its infrastructure was collapsing; it was spending too little on R&D; it had no coherent energy policy; its welcome to immigrants had become grudging. Many individuals offered inspiring examples of altruism and enterprise, but the nation needed to pull itself collectively together with a set of public–private partnerships to regain the economic success and social harmony of old. For that to be possible, shock therapy was needed to shake up partisan deadlock in the political system—a third-party presidential candidate upholding the banner of a ‘radical centrism’.
The urgency of such reforms spells no disaffection with America or retraction of its guardian role in the world. ‘We, the authors of this book, don’t want simply to restore American solvency. We want to maintain American greatness. We’re not green-eyeshade guys. We’re Fourth of July guys’, they explain, in Friedman’s inimitable tones.9 What follows from the tonics they propose? Mandelbaum’s cool view of Clinton precluded conventional contrasts with Bush. In substance the foreign policy of the two had been much the same. Humanitarian intervention and preventive war were twins, not opposites. The occupation of Iraq, hailed in an afterword to Ideas That Conquered the World as a mission to bring the Wilsonian triad—‘the establishment, where they had never previously existed, of peace, democracy and free markets’—to the Middle East, had four years later shrunk in Democracy’s Good Name to a quest for peace—depriving the regime in Baghdad of weapons of mass destruction—rather than democracy. By the time of The Frugal Superpower, it had ‘nothing to do with democracy’, and stood condemned as a bungled operation.10 Still, though the immediate costs of Bush’s invasion of Iraq were higher, Clinton’s expansion of NATO was a much more lasting and graver blunder: not attempting, if failing, to solve a real problem, but creating a problem where none had otherwise existed. The US should eschew military attempts at nation-building, and seek international cooperation for its endeavours wherever possible. But major allies were not always reliable; if the West was faltering in Afghanistan, it was due to underperformance by a fragmented Europe, rather than to an overbearing, unilateral America. In the Middle East, war might still have to be waged against Iran. There closer cooperation was required with ‘the only democratic and reliably pro-American country’ in the region, one with ‘a legitimate government, a cohesive society, and formidable military forces: the state of Israel’.11
III
Mandelbaum’s writing is the most strident version of a Wilsonian creed since the end of the Cold War, but in two respects it is not the purest. Of its nature, this is the tradition with the highest quotient of edulcoration—the most unequivocally apologetic—in the canon of American foreign policy, and by the same token, as the closest to ideology tout court, the most central to officialdom. Mandelbaum’s edges are too sharp for either requirement, as his relations with the Clinton administration showed. Their perfect embodiment is to be found in Ikenberry, ‘the poet laureate of liberal internationalism’, from whom the dead centre of the establishment can draw on a more even unction. In 2006, the Princeton Project on National Security unveiled the Final Paper he co-authored with Anne-Marie Slaughter, after some four hundred scholars and thinkers had contributed to the endeavour under their direction.12 With a bipartisan preface co-signed by Lake and Shultz, and the benefit of ‘candid conversations with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeleine Albright’, not to speak of the ‘wisdom and insight of Henry Kissinger’, Forging a World of Liberty under Law: US National Security in the 21st Century sought, Ikenberry and Slaughter explained, to offer nothing less than ‘a collective X article’ that would provide the nation with the kind of guidance in a new era that Kennan had supplied at the dawn of the Cold War—though NSC–68, too, remained an abiding inspiration.
How was a world of liberty under law to be brought about? Amid much familiar counsel, half a dozen more pointed proposals stand out. Across the planet, the United States would have to ‘bring governments up to PAR’—that is, seek to make them ‘popular, accountable and rights-regarding’. At the United Nations, the Security Council should be cleansed of the power of any member to veto actions of collective security, and the ‘responsibility to protect’ made obligatory on all member states. The Non-Proliferation Treaty needed to be tightened, by cutting down leeway for civilian development of nuclear power. In the interests of peace, the US had the right where necessary to launch preventive strikes against terrorists, and should be willing to ‘take considerable risks’ to stop Iran acquiring nuclear capability. Last but not least, a worldwide Concert of Democracies should be formed as an alternative seat of legitimacy for military interventions thwarted in the UN, capable of bypassing it.
Ikenberry’s subsequent theoretical offering, Liberal Leviathan (2011), revolves around the idea that since the American world order of its subtitle ‘reconciles power and hierarchy with cooperation and legitimacy’, it is—emphatically—a ‘liberal hegemony, not empire’. For what it rests on is a consensual ‘bargain’, in which the US obtains the cooperation of other states for American ends, in exchange for a system of rules that restrains American autonomy. Such was the genius of the multilateral Western alliance enshrined in NATO, and in bilateral form, of the Security Pact with Japan, during the Cold War. In the backward outskirts of the world, no doubt, the US on occasion dealt in more imperious fashion with states that were clients rather than partners, but these were accessories without weight in the overall structure of international consent it enjoyed.13 Today, however, American hegemony was under pressure. A ‘crisis of authority’ had developed, not out of its failure, but from its very success. For with the extinction of the USSR, the US had become a unipolar power, tempted to act not by common rules it observed, but simply by relationships it established, leaving its traditional allies with less motive to defer to it just as new transnational fevers and forces—conspicuously terrorism—required a new set of responses. The Bush administration had sought to meet the crisis with unilateral demonstrations of American will, in a regression to a conservative nationalism that was counterproductive. The solution to the crisis lay rather in a renewal of liberal internationalism, capable of renegotiating the hegemonic bargain of an earlier time to accommodate contemporary realities.
That meant, first and foremost, a return to multilateralism: the updating and refitting of a liberal democratic order, as ‘open, friendly, stable’ as of old, but with a wider range of powers included within it.14 The expansion of NATO, the launching of NAFTA and the creation of the WTO were admirable examples. So too were humanitarian interventions, provided they won the assent of allies. Westphalian principles were outdated: the liberal international order now had to be more concerned with the internal condition of states than in the past. Once it had recovered its multilateral nerve, America could face the future confidently. Certainly, other powers were rising. But duly renegotiated, the system that served it so well in the past could ‘slow down and mute the consequences of a return to multi-polarity’. The far-flung order of American hegemony, arguably the most successful in world history, was ‘easy to join and hard to overturn’.15 If the swing state of China were to sign up to its rules properly, it would become irresistible. A wise regional strategy in East Asia needs to be developed to that end. But it can be counted on: ‘The good news is that the US is fabulously good at pursuing a milieu-based grand strategy.’16
At a global level, of course, there was bound to be some tension between the exigencies of continued American leadership and the norms of democratic community. The roles of liberal hegemon and traditional great power do not always coincide, and should they conflict too sharply, the grand bargain on which the peace and prosperity of the world rest would be at risk. For hegemony itself, admittedly, is not democratic.17 But who is to complain if its outcome has been so beneficent? No irony is intended in the oxymoron of the book’s title. For Hobbes, a liberal Leviathan—liberal in this pious usage—would have been matter for grim humour.
IV
Within the same ideological bandwidth, an alternative prospectus can be found in the work of Charles Kupchan, once a co-author with Ikenberry, who has since drifted somewhat apart. On the policy planning staff of the State Department under Baker, during the last year of the first Bush presidency; promoted to director of European Affairs on the National Security Council under Clinton; currently holder of a chair in the School of Foreign Service and Government at Georgetown and senior fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations, Kupchan feared for liberal internationalism as the second Bush presidency neared its end. During the Cold War, it had been the great tradition of American statecraft, combining a heavy investment in military force with a strong commitment to international institutions—power and partnership held in a balance that commanded a bipartisan consensus. Now, amid increasing polarization in Congress and public opinion, broad agreement on American foreign policy had faded, and the compact on which it was based had broken apart. For under the second Bush, power had overridden partnership, in a conservative turn whose fallout had greatly damaged the nation abroad. A new grand strategy was needed to repair the balance between the two, adapted to the changed circumstances in which the country now found itself.18
Chief among these was the predictable loss of the absolute global predominance the United States had enjoyed at the conclusion of the Cold War. As early as 2002, Kupchan had sought to come to terms with this in The End of the American Era, arguing that while the US still enjoyed a unipolar predominance, power was becoming more diffused internationally, and the American public more inward-looking. Speculative excesses on Wall Street, moreover, were troubling.19 So far the European Union, a huge success to date, was the only major competitor on the horizon. But the US would be prudent to meet the challenge of a more plural world in advance, lending it form with the creation of a ‘global directorate’, comprising Russia, China and Japan as well, and perhaps states from other parts of the earth too. That would involve ‘a conscious effort to insulate foreign policy and its domestic roots from partisan politics’, where regional cultures and interests were unfortunately diverging. A ‘self-conscious political ceasefire’ was required if liberal internationalism was to be revived.20
A decade later, the diagnosis of No One’s World (2012) was more radical. Economically, educationally and technologically, not only were other major powers closing the gap with the United States, but some—China foremost—would in due course overtake it in various measures. The result was going to be an interdependent world, with no single guardian or centre of gravity, in which the West could not, as Ikenberry implied, simply corral others into the institutional order it had created after the war. Rather, Kupchan argued, they would seek to revise it in accordance with their own interests and values, and the West would have to partner them in doing so. That would mean dropping the demand that they all be accredited democracies before being admitted to the shaping of a new system of international rules and conduct. Modernization was taking many different paths around the world, and there could be no dictating its forms elsewhere.
Three types of autocracy were salient in this emergent universe: communal, as in China; paternal, as in Russia; and tribal, as in the Gulf. Theocrats in Iran, strongmen in Africa, populists in Latin America, ‘democracies with attitude’ (less than friends of the US) like India, added to the brew. The United States, which had always stood for tolerance, pluralism and diversity at home, must extend the same multicultural respect for the variety of governments, doctrines and values abroad, and it could afford to do so. Since ‘capitalism had shown its universal draw’, there were few grounds for anxiety on that score. There was no need to insist on reproduction of Western forms of it. It was not liberal democracy that should be the standard for acceptance as a stakeholder in the global order to come, but ‘responsible governance’, enjoying legitimacy by local standards.21
Meanwhile, the task was to restore the cohesion and vitality of the West, threatened by re-nationalization of politics in the European Union and polarization of them in the United States. At home Americans were confronted with economic distress and increasing inequality, in a political system paralysed by special interests and costly campaign finance. To overcome partisan deadlock and revitalize the economy, centrists should seek to muster a progressive populism that—without abandoning Western principles—would accept a measure of planning, ‘combining strategic guidance with the dynamism that comes from market competition’. To strengthen the cohesion of the Atlantic community, NATO must not only continue to be employed for out-of-area operations, as in the Balkans or Afghanistan, but converted into ‘the West’s main venue for coordinating engagement with rising powers’—an endeavour in which, if it could be drawn into NATO, Moscow might in due time play a sterling role.22
The emerging multipolar landscape abroad, and the need to restore solvency at home, imposed a modest retrenchment of American commitments overseas. To husband resources, more reliance should be put on regional allies and a few bases might be closed. In compensation, Europe should step up its military spending. Kupchan ends his case with a general admonition: ‘The United States still aspires to a level of global dominion for which it has insufficient resources and political will. American elites continue to embrace a national narrative consistent with this policy—“indispensable nation”, “the American century”, “America’s moment”—these and other catchphrases like them still infuse political debate about US strategy. They crowd out considered debate about the more diverse global order that lies ahead.’23
Ostensibly, in such declarations, No One’s World marks a break with the axiomatic insistence on American primacy as the condition of international stability and progress that lies at the core of the foreign-policy consensus in the United States. Kupchan’s intention, however, is not to bid farewell to the ‘liberal internationalism’ that served the country so staunchly during the Cold War, but to modernize it. Partnership needs to be brought back into balance with power. But the putative partners have changed and there is no point scrupling over assorted shortfalls from the norms of the Atlantic community, since all are en route to one form or other of capitalist modernity. Refurbishing partnership does not, however, entail relinquishing power. In the necessary work of constructing a new global consensus, ‘the US must take the lead’. The purpose of a ‘judicious and selective retrenchment’ is not to wind down American influence at large, but ‘to rebuild the bipartisan foundations for a steady and sustainable brand of US leadership’. In that task, ‘American military primacy is a precious national asset’, whose reconfiguration need not impair ‘America’s ability to project power on a global basis’.24
Nor, in admitting responsible autocracies to the counsels of the world, need America forsake its historic commitments to democracy and human rights. The ‘responsibility to protect’ was entirely consistent with it. Rogue states like Iran, the DRPK or Sudan must be confronted, and tyranny eradicated, where necessary by preventive intervention—optimally multilateral, as in NATO’s exemplary action in Libya, but in all cases humanitarian. Empires, like individuals, have their moments of false modesty. The kind of retrenchment envisaged by Kupchan belongs to them. Between the lines, its motto is an old one: reculer pour mieux sauter.
___________________
1‘The reforms must go far beyond those of the Roosevelt period’, Mead insisted. ‘The next wave will have a more socialist and less liberal coloration than the first one’: Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition, New York 1987, pp. 336–8.
2Mead, Special Providence, pp. 323–4, 333–4.
3Mead, Power, Terror, Peace and War, New York, 2004, pp. 26–55.
4Mead, Power, Terror, Peace and War, pp. 73–103. By this time, Kissinger himself—another supporter of the invasion of Iraq—had adopted Mead’s taxonomy for the purposes of criticizing American conduct of the Cold War prior to the Nixon administration and his own assumption of office, as an overly rigid blend of Wilsonism and Jacksonism, forgetful of Hamiltonian principles. See Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, New York 2002, pp. 245–56, a volume whose intellectual quality rarely rises much above the level of its title.
5Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World, New York 2007, pp. 378, 387–402, 409, 411, 412.
6After coming to the conclusion that most of his fellow neoconservatives had been too warmly Wilsonian in their enthusiasm for bringing democracy to Iraq, Fukuyama then decided that others were becoming too coldly Kissingerian in a calculus of power detached from the values of democracy. Getting the ideological temperature right is no easy task, but on it the good health of America’s relations with the world depends. I have not included Fukuyama in the literature considered here, though his work America at the Crossroads (2006) is an eminent example of it, having written about that earlier: see the annexe below. Fukuyama and Mead keep up a running commentary on questions of the hour, national and international, in the American Interest, which bills itself as having broader concerns—notably in ‘religion, identity, ethnicity and demographics’—than the National Interest, under a former editor of the latter.
7Mandelbaum worked under Eagleburger and Shultz in the first Reagan administration; Ikenberry under Baker in the Bush Senior administration. Characteristically of such ‘in-and-outers’, partisan affiliations were not involved, the personal links of both men being Democrat rather than Republican.
8‘Foreign Policy as Social Work’, Foreign Affairs, Jan–Feb 1996; followed by The Dawn of Peace in Europe, New York 1996, pp. 61–3: ‘NATO expansion is, in the eyes of Russians in the 1990s, what the war guilt clause was for Germans in the 1930s: it reneges on the terms on which they believe the conflict in the West ended. It is a betrayal of the understanding they thought they had with their former enemies’, which could ‘produce the worst nightmare of the post-Cold War era: Weimar Russia’.
9Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used To Be Us: What Went Wrong with America—and How It Can Come Back, New York 2011, p. 10.
10Mandelbaum, The Ideas That Conquered the World, New York 2002, p. 412; and Democracy’s Good Name, New York 2007, p. 231 (where he reflects that if the US had taken hold of Iraq in the nineteenth century, it could eventually have created the institutions and values needed for a democracy as the British did in India, producing a local equivalent of Nehru); The Frugal Superpower, New York 2010, pp. 76–7, 153 (which continues to hope that ‘the American efforts in Iraq might someday come to be considered successful’). The modulation is not specific to Mandelbaum; it is widely distributed in the field.
11Mandelbaum, Frugal Superpower, pp. 98, 189–90.
12Slaughter, author of A New World Order (2004) and The Idea that is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World (2007), can be regarded as a runner-up in the stakes won by Ikenberry. Director of policy planning (2009–11) under Clinton at the State Department, she has, however, been ahead of the field in clamouring for interventions in Libya and Syria.
13A discreet footnote informs us that ‘this study focuses primarily on the international order created by the United States and the other great powers. It does not fully illuminate the wider features of the world order that include America’s relations with weaker, less developed and peripheral states’: Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis and Transformation of the American World Order, Princeton 2011, p. 27.
14In the kind of metaphor that comes readily to anyone’s mind: ‘If the old post-war hegemonic order were a business enterprise, it would have been called American Inc. It was an order that, in important respects, was owned and operated by the United States. The crisis today is really over ownership of that company. In effect, it is a transition from a semi-private company to one that is publicly owned and operated—with an expanding array of shareholders and new members on the board of directors’: Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, p. 335. Like the metamorphosis of News Corp, one might say.
15Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, p. xi; ‘Liberal Order Building’, in Leffler and Legro, eds, To Lead the World, p. 103.
16Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, pp. 343–4 ff; ‘Liberal Order Building’, p. 105.
17Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, p. 299.
18Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz, ‘The Illusion of Liberal Internationalism’s Revival’, International Security, Summer 2010, arguing against complacency: it was wrong to maintain that liberal internationalism was in good shape in America. A vigorous new programme was needed to restore it to health.
19Kupchan’s awareness that a financial bubble had developed under Clinton did not prevent him gushing that: ‘The economic side of the house could not have been in better hands. Rubin will go down in history as one of the most distinguished and talented individuals to grace the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton’: The End of the America Era: US Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-First Century, New York 2002, p. 25.
20Kupchan, End of the American Era, pp. 296, 244. Kupchan’s confidence in the political credentials of his country for global leadership remained unimpaired. Since it was ‘not an imperial state with predatory intent’, he informed his readers (in 2002) that ‘the United States is certainly more wanted than resented in most regions of the world, including the Middle East’: p. 228.
21Kupchan, No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest and the Coming Global Turn, New York 2012, p. 189.
22Ibid., pp. 171, 111; ‘NATO’s Final Frontier: Why Russia Should Join the Atlantic Alliance’, Foreign Affairs, May–June 2010.
23Ibid., p. 204.
24Ibid., pp. 7, 179, 203; ‘Grand Strategy: The Four Pillars of the Future’, Democracy—A Journal of Ideas, Winter 2012, pp. 13–24, where Kupchan observes that the US ‘must guard against doing too little’, especially in the Persian Gulf and East Asia, where ‘retrenchment must be accompanied by words and deeds that reassure allies of America’s staying power’; while in general, since ‘there is no substitute for the use of force in dealing with imminent threats’, the US needs to ‘refurbish its armed forces and remain ready for the full spectrum of possible missions’.