After Hegemony

A Zen Buddhist teaching runs, “After enlightenment, the laundry.” You may suddenly rethink everything, looking at the world anew—but then you still need to live in it. Enlightenment does not change what you have to do; it changes how you experience doing it. Something similar could be said about the future of U.S. foreign policy: after hegemony, the laundry. Washington has decided it is fed up with the hassles and burdens of global leadership. But what does that actually mean for how it manages the system it uses to run the world?

Like all countries, the United States has material interests, seeking security and prosperity, but it also has ideological interests. From the start, it was understood to be both a country and a cause, a distinct national community and the standard-bearer of a global political revolution, working on behalf of liberty everywhere. In every era, therefore, American strategists have had a double challenge: figuring out how to pursue both the country’s material interests and its national ideals.

In the country’s youth, it seemed prudent to focus on protecting the revolution and perfecting the union. The aloof grand strategy that emerged, however, could work only because the United States was protected by geography and British naval supremacy. By the twentieth century, British power had declined, and the United States now dominated the Western Hemisphere, patrolled the oceans, and drove the global economy. American interests had once been served by keeping apart from the world. Now those interests called for engaging with it. But what kind of engagement was possible for a country built on a rejection of traditional amoral statecraft?

Over the course of the century, the answer gradually emerged, and it proved oddly familiar: export the logic of social contract theory from domestic politics to international politics, in hopes that it could work there, too. Autonomous countries could cooperate for mutual benefit, officials decided. And gradually, interactions could turn into relationships and then communities—first functional, eventually institutional, and maybe one day even heartfelt.

This approach promised to resolve the tension between American interests and American ideals by achieving them simultaneously, on the installment plan. The United States would protect its interests by amassing power and using it as necessary, and it would serve its ideals by nurturing an ever-growing community of independent countries that played nicely with one another. Cooperation would lead to integration and prosperity, which would lead to liberalization. Slowly but steadily, Locke’s world would emerge from Hobbes’s.

The new grand strategy produced the dense web of benign reciprocal interactions now known as the liberal international order. President Woodrow Wilson first tried to establish it after World War I. He failed but gave his successors a model and some cautionary lessons. Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman put a new and improved version into place in half the world during the Cold War, and Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton extended it from the West to the rest during the post–Cold War era.

Since 1945, accordingly, U.S. foreign policy has featured five core elements: lead a team of like-minded nations in creating a zone of peace and collective security; avoid war with great powers outside the zone; police the global commons; maintain an open global trading system; and help provide global public goods. The results of this approach have been extraordinary. The order the United States built has produced unprecedented great power peace and unprecedented increases in economic, social, and political development—not just for itself, and not just for its allies, but for much of the world at large.

And yet in recent decades the system has run into trouble. Military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the war on terror tarnished Washington’s reputation for military competence and soured the American public on an activist global role. Then the 2008 financial crisis, the Great Recession, the stagnation of middle- and lower-class wages, and the rise of unprecedented economic inequality tarnished Washington’s reputation for economic competence and soured the American public on neoliberalism. Partisan sorting, smash-mouth politics, and the rise of social media helped fuel populism and shatter what was left of a national consciousness. All the while, American allies were disarming and stagnating, and American enemies were arming and growing.

The challenge for the United States today is figuring out how to operate in a world that has not evolved in the liberal direction once hoped for, even as large sectors of the American public see few gains from active global engagement. Popular opinions to the contrary notwithstanding, the postwar American strategy of playing international relations as a team sport rather than an individual one has worked well in many ways. But with the current approach increasingly unpopular at home and abroad, simply repeating that mantra will not work. Humans have short memories, expectations rise, and vibes beat data. So, something must change.

But which elements of the existing order should be saved, which must be discarded, and which new elements need to be added? And how much time, effort, and attention should be given to new issues such as artificial intelligence, climate change, and the demographic revolution, all of which are racing toward us at a speed and scale that will change everything, everywhere, very soon? As the commercial said, inquiring minds want to know. Speaking to students at the National War College in June 1947, George F. Kennan tried to explain the difficulties he faced as the State Department’s first director of policy planning. He likened the world to his farm in rural Pennsylvania. On each of its 235 acres, something was always in need of maintenance—a rotting fence, faded paint, overgrown weeds, a loose hog.

A nimble and astute person, working furiously against time, may indeed succeed in getting himself to a point where he thinks that with respect to 1 of those 235 acres, he is some 3 or 4 months ahead of events in his planning. But by the time he has gotten his ideas down on paper, the 3 or 4 months have mysteriously shrunk to that many weeks. By the time he has gotten his ideas accepted by others, the weeks have become days. And by the time others have translated those ideas into action, it develops that the thing you were planning for took place the day before yesterday, and everyone wants to know why in the hell you didn’t foresee it a long time ago.

Meanwhile, other things are occurring with maddening persistency on every one of the other 234 acres, and throngs of people are constantly plucking at your sleeve, looking knowingly in a certain direction, and saying in effect: “Say, do you know that the bull is out there in the strawberry patch again?”

Kennan realized that the United States needed help to make sure its global farm ran smoothly, and he and his colleagues put together a system to make sure it did. From the Marshall Plan and NATO on down the line, the cooperative, team-based order that he and his colleagues built turned out to be successful and durable. Hundreds of millions of Americans and billions of others have benefited hugely. Now the team is drifting apart, and Americans seem interested in downsizing the operation and trying to handle everything alone. We can only hope that the results of the new approach are remotely as successful as the old one.

More from the Future of American Strategy >>