Dr. Robert Kagan has written a fascinating book on the future of American foreign policy: The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World. His main points are laid out in this excerpt available at Amazon.com:
“The American-led liberal world order was never a natural phenomenon. The past seven-plus decades of relatively free trade, growing respect for individual rights, and relatively peaceful cooperation among nations – the core elements of the liberal order – have been a great historical aberration. … Our own era has not lacked its horrors …. Yet by historical standards…, it has been a relative paradise. … The great Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union ended peacefully, a historical rarity. … Since the end of the Second World War the world has also enjoyed a period of prosperity unlike any other …. Since 1945, some four billion people around the world have climbed out of poverty. … But all this has been an anomaly in the history of human existence. The liberal world order is fragile and impermanent. Like a garden, it is ever under siege from the natural forces of history, the jungle whose vines and weeds constantly threaten to overwhelm it. …
Unfortunately, we tend to take our world for granted. We have lived so long inside the bubble of the liberal world order that we can imagine no other kind of world. We think it is natural and normal, even inevitable. …
People today ask what threatens the present order, but that is the wrong question. The order is an artificial creation subject to the forces of geopolitical inertia. … The question is not what will bring down the liberal order but what can possibly hold it up?”1
As Dr. Kagan says, the United States did not take the lead in establishing and maintaining the liberal world order as a charitable endeavor. The United States took the lead because, as it found out in World War II, it is cheaper to maintain a world order than to re-establish one.
Still, the question is whether the United States should continue to take the lead in maintaining the liberal world order.2 Or should we back off, letting others (or, more likely, nobody) do the job? While I think the United States should take the lead, I also think many Americans would not agree.
I understand the U.S. has made mistakes over the past 70 years, but in my opinion we have tried our best, not only to do what benefited us, but also to do what was good. How can you explain George H.W. Bush not “dancing on the Berlin Wall” as anything other than a good man trying to do what was right? Also, while we have made mistakes, the good that has come from the liberal world order we led (see the list in the quote above), far exceeds the cost of the mistakes.
I am not sure, however, the next generation of Americans agrees with me on this. Some, and I think Barack Obama may fit into this category, see the United States as too often making things worse when we intervene abroad. They think the world would be better off without the United States interfering (as they would say) and want us to focus on nation building at home, instead.
Others take an even darker view of the United States. They see the U.S. as hypocritical, unprincipled, imperialistic, etc. They have been taught in school that our Founders should be seen as hypocrites for saying “All men are created equal” while they owned slaves and that Abraham Lincoln should be judged not on what he did but on how his views on slavery and blacks compare with what we think today.
They view the United States as invading Iraq for its oil, as committing war crimes upon war crimes in Vietnam,4 as being the cause of the Cold War because we didn’t give the Soviet Union a fair chance, etc. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo expressed this view when he said the United States “was never that great.”5
While I think it would be good, both for the United States and for the world, if we took the lead on protecting the liberal world order, I see many people on both the right and left who think we should just focus on ourselves (either disagreeing with or ignoring Dr. Kagan’s view of the costs of doing so). And I see others who think the United States isn’t good enough to lead.
All of which may result in a depressing future for the United States – and the world.
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1 An essay by Dr. Kagan adapted from the book can be found in The Wall Street Journal here. A video of a speech by Dr. Kagan to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs can be found here. (The latter has the advantage of not being behind a paywall.)
2 Perhaps I should say that “the question is whether the United States should once again take the lead in maintaining the liberal world order.” Clearly, Donald Trump isn’t interested in doing this. He thinks that the United States should be in it for itself, as he said at the United Nations, and that other countries should do the same. It is unclear, however, how different President Trump’s view is from Barack Obama’s approach (other than that President Obama was less obnoxious and abrasive about it). President Obama was happy to leave Iraq in 2011 (though he had to return when our exit did not work out), and he wanted to leave Afghanistan though he eventually realized he couldn’t. He was willing to “lead from behind” or do little at all. Perhaps this was because he thought we so often make things worse. Or because what he really wanted to do was to focus on nation building at home. In his speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (see footnote 1), Dr. Kagan said that, of the main figures in the 2016 election (Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders), only one stood for the U.S. continuing the approach to foreign policy that it had followed since World War II.
3 As Dr. Kagan said, in the excerpt on Amazon: “We see all [of the] flaws [of the liberal world order] and wish it could be better, but it doesn't occur to us that the more likely alternative to it would be much, much worse.”
4 As John Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. (Also here.)
5 Governor Cuomo may have overstated what he meant to say, both in reaction to President Trump and because he thought it was what his audience wanted to hear.)
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