Power and Its Malcontents

By Brian Stewart

Sunday, November 09, 2025

 

A review of The Case for American Power by Shadi Hamid; 256 pages; Simon & Schuster (November 2025)

 

I. A Reluctant Case for American Power

 

If power is judged by its fruits, then two costly wars in the broader Middle East would seem to justify Americans’ declining confidence in their country’s hegemonic role. Critics of US foreign policy on the Left and Right believe that America should respond to the disappointments of the post-9/11 era by retrenching and defending a much narrower conception of its national interests. A new book by Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid, however, dissents from this popular narrative.

 

In The Case for American Power, Hamid argues that America should continue to care about order beyond its borders. Since power continues to dominate the strategic contest between nations, he rejects the notion that the end of the Pax Americana will be anything like a peaceful utopia. To the contrary, the price of a world without the singular strength of the United States will be recurring conflict, just as it was before the rise of the American order.

 

But when it comes to the positive vision suggested in the title, The Case for American Power has less to offer. Hamid refrains from a simplistic foreign-policy analysis that sets “realism” against “idealism,” but he never fleshes out a compelling hybrid approach. While recognising that power and values go together, he does not grapple with the main dilemma—that the tension between power and morality cannot easily be made to disappear.

 

Hamid is theoretically reconciled to the unceasing struggle for power and interest in a fallen world, but his analysis betrays a reluctance to actually exercise power. This is why, in spite of his advocacy on behalf of American global activism, he is constantly tempted to impugn American policies for their stupidity, brutality, and hypocrisy. Sometimes this judgement is understandable, but it can also be misleading. Although there has been no shortage of stupidity and brutality and hypocrisy in US foreign policy through the years, there has also been ingenuity and flashes of nobility. It’s weird to discover that the virtues of US statecraft hardly figure in Hamid’s ostensible defence of American power, while the vices—real or imagined—are lavished with attention.

 

Hamid opens his book with this declaration: “The world needs American power, it needs more of it—and it needs it now.” At a time of growing great-power rivalry on both sides of Eurasia, he acknowledges that the importance of hard power was supposed to have diminished after the Cold War. Unconstrained by bipolarity, it was widely presumed that geopolitical competition would fade away and that we would all progress towards a more peaceful and prosperous world. In those happy circumstances, Hamid recounts, power effectively lost its purpose. Most Americans instinctively felt they “could afford to imagine a world with less of it.” The governing class seized upon a presumed “peace dividend” to announce a “strategic pause” and began to eviscerate the defence budget.

 

In this brief unipolar moment, business interests surged ahead of national security and moral priorities in the conception of foreign policy. (Recall the decision in 2001 to admit the People’s Republic of China into the WTO on the dubious premise that market access and commercial success would breed more liberal politics and a transition to democracy.) Despite nasty flare-ups of chauvinistic nationalism and atavistic ideology in the Balkans and the Middle East, many thought-leaders wanted to believe that the world had been transformed and that international institutions would henceforth manage to keep the peace. By all appearances, Americans were on the verge of relinquishing their “indispensable” role in upholding world order.

 

This “holiday from history” ended abruptly in the autumn of 2001, when a spectacular act of terror led the Bush administration to discard these illusions about the primacy of soft power, and shore up a distinctively American internationalism “combining power with high purpose,” as Theodore Roosevelt once phrased it. For the first time in a generation, Americans relearned that there is no final victory or redemption within history. Even so, doubts about the efficacy and morality of power lingered, and they were only aggravated by two forlorn wars.

 

Without succumbing entirely to these doubts, Hamid has not been immune to them, either. In his introduction, he confesses that his relationship with American power has always been “complicated.” On 11 September, Hamid had just begun his freshman year in college, and he was drawn to the banner of “anti-imperialism” then being unfurled in cities and campuses across the West. Although he had no sympathy for al Qaeda, or for the popular left-wing argument that the attacks on New York and Washington were a justifiable revolt against American hegemony, Hamid’s instinct was to blame America first. After all, the United States had long indulged the Arab tyrants whose rule had incubated fanaticism and terror, and so Hamid spent the following years devouring the work of critics like Noam Chomsky who inveighed against the United States as “a uniquely malevolent force in global politics.” (It was Chomsky who wrote in 1968 that the United States had become “the most aggressive power in the world, the greatest threat to peace, to national self-determination, and to international cooperation.”)

 

Hamid can be effective, especially when he methodically exposes the parochialism of his former anti-imperialist comrades. But his apologia for Pax Americana often feels oddly defensive and sometimes disjointed. He describes the limitations of the anti-American worldview, but lingering progressive assumptions are distracting and disfiguring. His soft-shoe shuffle away from progressives’ aversion to power has brought him a long way, in other words, but not quite far enough.

 

There is, Hamid maintains, a need for proper policing of the world since order is not a natural feature of the international environment. Whatever order obtains does not arise by consent among the great and the good, it is an imposition by the strong. And if America does not uphold a world order that reflects its interests and ideals, it will begin to lose strategic advantages. American decline and disengagement would allow the People’s Republic of China to gain a position of hegemony, at least in the Pacific Rim, which forms the geographic core of the world economy. This, in turn, would pit nations into rival trading blocs and sharply reduce global prosperity. It would also effectively dethrone liberalism as the world’s default philosophy. The rise of a multipolar order would thus leave the majority of mankind not only materially poorer, but considerably less free.

 

To those familiar with his byline, it may come as something of a surprise that Hamid would make a case for an expansive policy of international engagement backed by American arms. Indeed, he seems somewhat surprised himself. He is commendably frank that he hasn’t reached this conclusion “easily or enthusiastically,” and he says he still feels “conflicted” about it. But he contends that his natural reluctance about American power is actually an asset that makes him precisely “the right person” to testify on its behalf.

 

I appreciate this irony along with its dialectical advantages. In one breath, Hamid can grant that American hegemony has “unsettling implications,” while in the next he insists that it is superior to the available alternatives. This is not quite the ringing endorsement one usually hears from exponents of American preeminence, but it might be more palatable in progressive quarters.

 

II. America and Iraq

 

As a result, The Case for American Power contains several concessions to the anti-American worldview that a less timid advocate would surely challenge. At various points, Hamid accepts specious bits of conventional wisdom used to oppose a robust and effective application of US power and influence in the service of a liberal world order. At others, he echoes calumnies about honourable American policies, past and present. These blotches undermine his argument and will leave sceptical readers unsure about Hamid’s commitment to his own thesis. And as he traces his ideological evolution and sifts through his old beliefs, it’s not always clear how he separates moral concerns he still believes were valid from the dogmas he ended up rejecting.

 

“In the shadow of September 11,” Hamid writes, “the world America made came with a question mark. It still does.” If this statement is supposed to mean that 11 September revealed the failure or indecency of the American order writ large, it’s overwrought. The achievements of Pax Americana were not implicated in the jihadist assault on the American homeland, nor were they diminished by America’s martial response. But if Hamid’s declaration refers exclusively to the post-9/11 order in the Middle East, it seems hyperbolic to attribute so much blame to the United States. Despite being underwritten by America, the authoritarian order still holds sway there because powerful and entrenched local forces have resisted America’s (admittedly halting) regional reform strategy. A Middle East torn by religious fanaticism and dictatorship is hardly a decisive test case for the legitimacy of American power.

 

It’s certainly regrettable that regional autocracy survived the American storm that blew through Iraq in 2003. But those regrets are presumably shared by George W. Bush, whose post-9/11 refrain held that the United States had pursued stability at the expense of liberty and achieved neither. Although Hamid professes to “loathe” the Bush administration, he plainly admires its impulse to break with a long history in which the United States served as an agent of political reaction in the Middle East. He laments the lost momentum of the “freedom agenda” as the new order in Iraq was cut down by a fierce Baathist-jihadist insurgency, and then entirely discarded upon President Obama’s arrival in the White House.

 

Still, it’s hard to make sense of the sheer venom he harbours for the Bush administration. For instance, Hamid indicts the Bush administration for “running roughshod over international norms and using military force as if it were the first line of defense.” This seems to be a reference to the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime, but any honest account of the road to that war needs to include the Ba’athist regime’s intransigence and duplicity. Whatever one thinks of the war itself, it was not “unprovoked”—the decision to invade Iraq involved important elements of fear, national interest, and deterrence that Hamid does not consider. It was also an opportunity to reassert values and beliefs.

 

I was left wanting a more thorough enumeration of the “evils” of the Iraq War since that enterprise is what first propelled Hamid’s initial (and lingering) despair with American power. Hamid contends that the United States became a “rogue state” but it was Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship that answered to that description. Its congenital brutality and aggression made it a perpetual menace to regional order, and by 2003, as Hamid acknowledges, it had long since “forfeited both its legitimacy and its sovereignty.” It is therefore reasonable to conclude that its removal was not only justified, it was also the postponed fulfilment of a solemn international responsibility. Hamid rejects that conclusion, but he does not bother to tell us why. He also declines to sketch out a viable alternative policy that would have mitigated the Ba’athist threat, which in time would have been inherited by Saddam Hussein’s vicious sons.

 

Hamid argues that the post-9/11 era constituted a “hinge point” in which “the American era came to an end,” but his rationale for this claim is terse and unconvincing. Did the American-led order lose its lustre in Mesopotamia and the Hindu Kush? Do America’s allies resent an order imposed by a stronger power? Has the United States now ceded the mantle of global leadership, or lost the capacity to uphold it? To ask these questions is to answer them. Although power is generally a wasting asset in the order of nations, America has shown impressive resilience, and there is little reason to conclude that inexorable forces beyond its control will soon lay it low. The ubiquitous reports of the death of the American order remain what they have been for decades: greatly exaggerated.

 

After 11 September, Hamid argues, America descended into a “culture of patriotic deference” and committed itself to the “indiscriminate” use of power, which “produced some of our darkest moments—darker even than what the Donald Trump era would bring.” But was the Patriot Act—which sailed through Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support and had a negligible impact on civil rights—a greater threat to American liberties than Trump’s attempt to overturn an election? Was the liberation of Baghdad—which Hamid deems “a profound injustice”—really more damaging to American moral leadership than Trump’s contempt for allies and undisguised admiration for dictators from Moscow to Beijing?

 

It is at moments like this that the reflexive Chomskyism Hamid says he discarded can still be glimpsed. Hamid confesses that, while travelling and living abroad during the Iraq War, he felt “ashamed” to be an American. “For a generation of Americans old enough to remember the attacks, their formative experiences were ones in which American power was used for ill.” Hamid seems to believe this statement is an axiom, but I belong to the same generation, and his formative political experiences were also mine. Only, my memories of that critical era, which incidentally were also formed on foreign soil, are quite different from his—diametrically opposed, in fact.

 

The fall of the Berlin Wall was followed by some damaging restraint in foreign policy. The undoing of Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait in 1991 was correct, but leaving Saddam Hussein in power emboldened him and guaranteed future conflict. The belated rescue of Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s showed how much good humanitarian intervention could do while the unchecked slaughter in Rwanda exposed America’s shameful capacity for inaction, which President Clinton later identified as his greatest regret in office. Most notably, the unwillingness to take al Qaeda more seriously and to deploy the US military as an expeditionary force to dismantle it was a grave mistake. To many observers—including Osama bin Laden himself—this passivity and pseudo-engagement was proof of American impotence.

 

The calamity that befell the United States on 11 September 2001 was a high price to pay for a feeble foreign policy. Afterwards, it was urgently necessary to dispel America’s reputation for weakness, and to restore its shattered deterrence. The power employed in Afghanistan and Iraq advanced these national interests and also redounded to the benefit of long-oppressed peoples. Whatever the moral and material costs incurred, a more reticent posture in the war on terror would only have made matters worse by emboldening jihadists and giving a free hand to Arab dictatorships. It is said that a policy carried out badly becomes a bad policy, but even the shoddy execution of American policy in Iraq yielded real benefits and initiated a halting but necessary resistance against the new totalitarianism of the Muslim world.

 

After decades in which US foreign policy neglected the jihadist threat while sustaining the despotic rulers that extended it succour and support, an ambitious campaign to confront Arab radicalism at its source and promote consensual rule was justified. The main problem with that cause was not that it was forceful and protracted, but that it was fitful and impatient. Nevertheless, President Bush understood that idealism had to be backed by power, and that the enemies of civilisation could not be defeated by withdrawing from the world. This helped to ensure that there was not another mass casualty attack on the US homeland, and that Bin Laden and his confederates would eventually be brought to justice. It also established a strategic beachhead in the region from which hostile regimes and jihadist outfits could be decisively checked for years to come.

 

As a believing Muslim, Hamid is acutely aware that legions of his co-religionists have in recent years “found themselves on the wrong side of American power.” But he fails to discuss the doctrines of martyrdom and murder that help to account for this stark fact. There is one spare reference to Muslims’ “contentious relationship with modernity,” but little wrestling with the nontrivial levels of sympathy in the umma for a theocratic cult of death, conspiracy theories, and ferocious animosity toward Jews and freethinkers.

 

Hamid says the war on terror once tempted him to view “America’s role in the world in a primarily negative light.” He was even convinced that “American hypocrisy made the United States unfit to lead.” Although he has since jettisoned the rhetorical stridency, it is not clear that he has developed a more balanced view of American power. He now appears to believe that the virtues of that power, at least in recent times, are largely theoretical: “the United States has caused untold destruction in the developing world,” he writes in one characteristic passage, but “the power we still have can be used for good.”

 

In ceaselessly invoking the vicious side of American power while only sporadically evoking its virtuous side, Hamid seems never to consider that, at a time when large and growing numbers of people—not all of them non-American—question the merits of American hegemony, this “compromise position” is more liable to reinforce doubts than allay them.

 

III. Hypocrisy and American Power

 

Hamid’s case for American power reminds me of Camus’s quip: “To justify himself, each relies on the other’s crime.” This is hardly abnormal. The legitimacy of power has always involved a comparative analysis of the alternatives. If American power is broadly perceived as legitimate today, it is faute de mieux. But this kind of argument also discomfits Hamid, since he retains a strong utopian bent. He is all too aware of the manifold blunders, hypocrisies, and wrongs committed by the exercise of American power, and he does not seem to be ready to surrender an idea of American innocence.

 

But the only viable alternative to a loss of innocence is an outright refusal to use power at all. This amounts to a wish that history would leave Americans alone. It is only by abjuring power entirely that individuals and nations can hope to keep their hands clean. This may preserve a certain innocence, but it would also permit the wicked to inherit the earth. Without power, a nation will eventually find itself the prey of predatory forces and unable to protect the weak and the innocent.

 

Realistically, a degree of self-serving hypocrisy is the inevitable price of leadership. But since its rise to global power, the United States has generally avoided using its clout exclusively for its own enrichment and expansion. This unfettered colossus has been blessed with a margin of freedom not even enjoyed by the greatest empires of history, and yet it has resisted the lure of its unprecedented power and distinctly lacked the appetite for conquest. Even if no one is innocent in the great game of nations, not every party is equally guilty. On balance, the United States has performed admirably in upholding a decent world order—although this owes as much to its location as to its virtue, since its remoteness has given it the ability to wield immense power without provoking widespread fear and countervailing alliances.

 

If the United States were ever to forswear sins of commission, it would find—indeed, it has already found—that it could not avoid sins of omission. The challenge, then, is for Americans to remain engaged in the world and to use their power judiciously but aggressively, in the knowledge that doing so will entail its share of costs, both materially and morally. The content of the American character and its liberal ideology allow for no other option. From the founding generation onward, Americans have aspired to national greatness while attempting to reconcile power with morality and ambition with honour. Since Thomas Jefferson conceived of the United States as an “empire of liberty,” the leaders of the United States have resolved that extending “the blessings of civilization” was the moral justification for the aggressive advance of American power. The greatest way to live with honour, Socrates said, is to strive to be what we pretend to be.

 

This is why the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr insisted that, despite all its flaws, America’s “sense of responsibility to a world community beyond our own borders is a virtue.” In a fallen world where human lives are at stake, keeping one’s hands clean is not particularly virtuous. “The pretensions of virtue,” Niebuhr insisted, “are as offensive to God as the pretensions of power.” His explanation of the role for American power in the postwar order was at once unnerving and stirring:

 

We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous action to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent of particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimated.

 

Wielding great power is a complex business.

 

In an extended meditation on the interplay of hypocrisy and power, Hamid rightly disdains any “whitewashing” of America’s historical record. But in so doing, he fosters another misconception. His evaluation of contemporary US policy in the Middle East leaves the impression that the United States is waging a vendetta against the Muslim faith and its adherents. In addition to being an obsessive piece of Islamist propaganda, this is obviously false. Hamid omits any mention of the Muslim multitudes that, within living memory, have been the beneficiaries of the exercise of American power and the readiness of Americans to fight for the freedom of others. In Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the United States has used military force to protect vulnerable or oppressed Muslim peoples. Surely the case for American power rests not merely on the colossal power at its disposal, but also on the way it has been used to protect and rescue.

 

Yes, the exercise of American power has sometimes been selfish, solipsistic, capricious, incompetent, and treacherous. Given the perennial frailties of human nature, it would be astonishing if it weren’t so. But if the United States has been both “the arsonist and the firefighter,” it must also be acknowledged that defending and managing the international order is fiendishly difficult. Any serious ethical balance sheet of US foreign policy must therefore weigh the costs alongside the benefits, the achievements against the miscalculations and failures. In this vein, America’s general policy of undermining Arab democracy must be judged against its various humanitarian interventions, its active deterrence of real and potential aggressors, and its centuries-long suppression of piracy and barbarism.

 

In the face of a frightening threat from transnational jihad, Hamid never expounds what an effective substitute for military force might have looked like. At the time, the main alternative proposed to thwart the forces of Bin Ladenism was an extended legal effort to arraign and convict them as if they were criminals and not enemy combatants. Perhaps sensing the futility of this approach, Hamid does not even pay it lip service, but nor does he advance a realistic plan that would have degraded al Qaeda and its allies, who remain a threat to democratic countries today.

 

IV. Israel and Ukraine

 

Hamid’s blind spot for jihadism is no less evident in his analysis of the Middle East after 7 October 2023. In the two years since Hamas’s massacre, Hamid has been consistently alarmed by the destruction of Gaza and stridently critical of Israel, which he depicts as the main culprit in the bloodletting. He describes the war as a “breaking point,” as if Israel’s spirited military campaign caused him to rethink the entire premise of his argument.

 

The catastrophe that has befallen Palestinians in the Gaza Strip has indeed been horrific. In addition to deploring this concentrated human suffering, though, Hamid deems it “arguably the most destructive war of the twenty-first century.” This is a peculiar judgment, which he arrives at by citing per-capita, per-day death tolls from “the Iraq war, the US-led campaign against the Islamic State in Mosul and Raqqa, the Syrian regime’s siege of Aleppo, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” Hamid concludes that the butcher’s bill in Gaza far outstrips these other conflicts.

 

This methodology is tendentious. If a single-day conflict managed to kill many thousands of people before it was rapidly terminated, it is unlikely that any serious analyst would declare it the worst war of the century because of a staggering rate of death over 24 hours. This sleight of hand breeds more serious obfuscations and fabrications, such as altering the definition of genocide. It also elides crucial differences, including the fact that ISIS fighters did not burrow within an elaborate tunnel system and were therefore more vulnerable to conventional warfare. The Syrian opposition, meanwhile, had no reason to believe that Assad and Putin would be deterred by human shields and no reason to think that civilian suffering would advance their cause one iota. Had they thought otherwise, like Hamas, the “collateral damage” during the Syrian Civil War would have been far worse.

 

In any case, a destructive war is not necessarily an unjust war. The proper assessment of a just cause depends upon the reasons for taking up arms and on the balance of ends and means. By any reasonable standard, the defensive campaign that Israel has prosecuted in Gaza (and beyond) since 7 October to rescue its hostages and defeat a mortal threat on its border was just and proportionate. There is little hope of assuring Israel’s future security without the deterrence that can only come from inflicting a clear and decisive defeat upon the enemy.

 

This is not to say that Israel has been without blame in its historical treatment of Palestinians, or flawless in its conduct of the present war. The absence of a viable postwar strategy has been fraught with danger. Unless a decent provision is now made to Gaza, and until its people are supplied with effective governance, anarchy will descend on the Strip, sowing terrible resentment and enmity that will, sooner or later, ensure the resumption of hostilities.

 

At the same time, as Machiavelli pointed out, unless the enemy is thoroughly defeated and humiliated, their children will remember their parents’ fate and will wait for the victor to stumble. In an ideal world, the devastation of Gaza would spell the end of Hamas’s credibility for all time. After all, Hamas assaulted a superior enemy before retreating into its underground fortress while regular Gazans were left to bear the brunt of Israel’s retaliation. But in light of extensive indoctrination in Islamist theocracy and “resistance” ideology in the enclave, along with Hamas’s vicious means of repression, the green flags are unlikely to vanish soon. A ceasefire that leaves Hamas in command will also allow it to claim victory and resume hostilities at a time of its choosing. In other words, this would be a bellum interruptum, not peace.

 

Without venturing a judgment regarding this painful dilemma, Hamid insinuates that, as Israel’s chief military patron, the United States is implicated in a fully criminal enterprise. In addition to condemning President Biden’s emergency arms shipments to Israel after 7 October, Hamid focuses on his administration’s rhetorical “one-sidedness” that demonstrated solidarity for Israel but little sympathy for Palestinians. Somewhat bizarrely, he berates Biden for failing to feign greater empathy for the victims of war, which “would have cost him little.” That may be, but this cosmetic adjustment would have done nothing to alleviate civilian suffering or shorten the conflict.

 

Hamid shows no sign of wrestling with the dilemma that Israel faced after 7 October: a sustained assault on Hamas in Gaza that would kill multitudes or a deal to secure the peaceful return of the hostages that would have rewarded Hamas and incentivised further terrorism. Hamid’s verdict about the ethical ramifications of America’s posture in this conflict is as unsparing as it is unbecoming: “Americans are no longer, if they ever were, in a position to lecture the rest of the world on human rights, international law, or the protection of civilians.” Put differently, the tragic nature of war—exacerbated by Hamas’s cynical and criminal tactics—is somehow a reason to dispute America’s moral authority and undercut its global vocation.

 

With these qualms, Hamid hopes that America can “modulate” its relationship with Israel, remaining its “defender of last resort” but no longer being so closely tied to its regional ambitions. In the meantime, he remains prepared to advocate for “American power and, dare I say it, American dominance.” This is not “an argument for an uncritical or unreflective use of what remains by far the world’s largest and most advanced military.” It is simply a recognition that a liberal hegemon is the essential buffer between civilisation and barbarism. “In a better world,” Hamid observes, “the United States would be less of a superpower and more akin to a giant human rights organization that also happened to have an air force.” But in the world as it is, a “lousy, disappointing, and maddeningly hypocritical” America will have to do. Uncle Sam has seldom earned three cheers for its conduct abroad, but in The Case for American Power, it struggles to earn even one.

 

Russia’s savage war in Ukraine is the great exception, where Hamid unapologetically identifies with Washington (and Kyiv) in their resistance to a straightforward case of imperial aggression. He also chastises the “antiwar” movement across the West for blaming this war on sinister forces, not in the Kremlin, but in the US political and defence establishment. By focusing on the largely imaginary offences of NATO, this provincial faction exculpates the authors of that war by assailing others for provoking Putin to do something he was planning to do anyway.

 

In this context, Hamid identifies the “national narcissism” that “elevates the sins of one’s own country as more deserving of scorn than the sins of others.” This masochistic mentality portrays the United States as characterologically malevolent. For the daft “anti-imperialists” of our day, not even Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine is its own doing since America is the ultimate prime mover, the omnipotent force behind nearly every evil in the modern world.

 

But if Hamid appreciates that America is not culpable for Russia’s imperial designs and predatory wars, he fails to draw the obvious inference that Hamas also has agency, and that its implacable hostility towards “the Zionist entity” carries inescapable consequences of its own. For whatever reason, he does not grant Israel’s military campaign the same dispensation that he grants that of Ukraine. The glaring contradiction almost certainly owes to Hamid’s solidarity with Palestinians, which entices him to take up a position with all the hallmarks of anti-war and anti-imperialist solipsism. He condemns America’s stake in Israel’s “punishing” war in Gaza, as if urban combat against a vicious foe that defies every civilised convention of warfare could ever be anything but. He is appropriately appalled by the terrible arithmetic of war, but he is largely unmoved by the theocratic tyranny that struck the first blow. It is only in this conflict that responsibility, somehow, never lay squarely with the perpetrators.

 

V. A Better Case for American Power

 

For sincere liberals, a solution to the problem of power is to treat it with neither sentimentality nor sanctimony. The preservation of a relatively benign world order requires a philosophy of power that is at once realistic and idealistic, and that can accommodate a sober understanding of human nature and warfare. The beginning of wisdom on this matter is a hardheaded recognition that power is a fact, and that war, though tragic, is innate to the human condition. Any ideology unwilling to acknowledge these truths will fail.

 

“One of the most common errors in modern thinking about international relations,” the classical scholar Donald Kagan once observed, “is the assumption that peace is natural and can be preserved merely by having peace-seeking nations avoid provocative actions.” In fact, war is “the father, the king of us all,” said the philosopher Heraclitus. Even the utopian Plato agreed: “War is always existing by nature between every Greek city-state.”

 

This grim understanding of what Kagan called “the ubiquity and perpetuity of war” should not be mistaken for a callous or reckless acceptance of organised violence. But the pervasive modern bias against any resort to arms except as “a last resort” can be no less callous and reckless. An appreciation for the necessity of American power must grasp the danger that arises when disturbers of the peace are not awed by the power of those that keep it. In a world where force remains the ultimate arbiter, actual or perceived weakness will breed countervailing attempts to change the international situation by violence.

 

To demand that the United States only fight “wars of necessity” when its “vital interests” are at stake means that it should only use armed force when it is a matter of life and death for the country. There are good reasons—in history and in principle—to be sceptical of this standard. When such thinking has tempted American leaders to embrace a policy of reduced responsibility, it has been the cause of the worst wars in modern times. And if such thinking persisted at the highest levels of the American government, it surely would have spawned many more. Any instinct to revive this crabbed view of America’s power and America’s purpose in our day would undermine the general peace of the world. Instead of wishing away the realities of power and competition in the world, we should ready ourselves, materially and spiritually, for competition on behalf of a just international order, and resolve to exercise our power prudently but vigorously and effectively in its defence. “Warlike intervention by the civilized powers,” as Roosevelt insisted, “would contribute directly to the peace of the world.”

 

No clear-eyed patriot should nurse illusions of American innocence. The annals of the American role in history are written in blood extracted for ends high and low, generous and venal. But even in the most righteous causes, power can only be a blunt instrument, and innumerable errors and evils will necessarily attend its use. “Power,” as David Frum has written, “is never wielded innocently in this guilty world.” And since its earliest days as an imperial republic, America has wielded immense power. The key question is this: to what cause has that power been put? The architects of liberal hegemony adamantly believed that America’s power needed to be tempered by a moral sensibility and placed in the service of something higher than narrow, selfish national interest. After the Second World War, they reluctantly concluded that it fell to the United States—as much for its own sake as for that of the world—to construct a more durable international order than the one that had collapsed in the 1930s.

 

Instead of swinging feverishly between heedless isolation and unchecked moralism—between a longing to escape history and a temptation to command it—these statesmen sought to avoid standing aloof from the world until all hell broke loose and vast land masses were engulfed in war. America was compelled to venture into the world and establish a permanent “onshore” military presence in key regions and strategic chokepoints of the world economy. If this grand strategy was to be successful, it would have to endure without an exit strategy, using its power to establish and then to sustain a liberal order conducive to its interests and its ideals. In deploying power to fulfil its international “responsibilities,” Americans disavowed what Reinhold Niebuhr called the “innocence of irresponsibility.”

 

Left-wing sceptics tend to see the United States as a greedy imperialist brute maintaining a military-industrial complex to the detriment of national liberation movements around the globe for the profit of capitalist interests. The New Right critique exemplified by President Trump is less bothered by empire’s inequities and iniquities, but it shares the belief that the United States has long depleted its power and prosperity on behalf of sordid interests at home and abroad. Both factions agitate for an end to America’s exceptional role in the world, and to bring its extraordinary military power and defence expenditure into line with other states in the international system.

 

If conservative America believed that global dominance could be maintained on the strength of technological and economic success without the taint or burden of a far-flung empire, then progressive America believed that global dominance was not worth having at all. In the age of Trump, those positions have converged, with self-identified conservatives questioning the value of American dominance while even the most hardheaded progressives seem to imagine that the American order will somehow outlive the eclipse of American power.

 

“Progressives bristle at the idea that power is everything,” Hamid observes. But that is not quite right. Progressives don’t seem to believe that power is anything. When was the last time Senator Sanders or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for increasing—or even maintaining—the defence budget? The distinguishing characteristic of the progressive mindset is a certain sentimentalism evinced by those who want a better world and think their good intentions will make it happen. They give every appearance of believing that with the enemies of civilisation, conflict can always be avoided, and that erasure of differences in rhetoric will lead to the erasure of differences in reality. This aversion to power is nearly all-encompassing. This would explain the repeated failures of deterrence from recent Democratic administrations that sowed doubt about America’s staying power and commitment to world order. The combination of America’s evident weakness, overstretched military, and apparent lack of will encouraged Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine and the Islamic Republic of Iran’s unceasing terror against Israel. In an age of growing great-power competition, neither President Obama nor President Biden consistently defined or defended the role of American power in a violent and dangerous world.

 

In the aftermath of 11 September, the liberal writer George Packer anxiously asked: “Can a civilization remain liberal when it’s as heavily armed as ours? Can a fight for democracy be led by the world’s greatest power?” The answers are even clearer today than they were back then: whatever risks to liberty have arisen in the free world, they pale in comparison to the risks posed by a civilisation bereft of military power and the evident willingness to use it.

 

The Case for American Power features some useful insights about the resilience of democracy and the comparative brittleness of autocracy that deserve wide attention amid America’s recurring national bouts of defeatism. It also contains some erudite reflections about the nature of the international system. On the evidence, however, its author has not yet accustomed himself to the full role and responsibilities of American power in that system. Hamid has an uneasy conscience, and he doesn’t yet know what to do with it.

 

The American order has been called a flawed masterpiece, much like the exceptional nation that willed it into being nearly a century ago. But its shortcomings do not indicate that it is headed toward oblivion. Although the Pax Americana is embattled on the world stage, it will not soon be vanquished unless the United States and its allies lose the will to preserve it. As the superpower grows ambivalent and complacent, however, its enemies are correspondingly incentivised to take greater risks to dislodge the US from its global perch and build a new order more suited to their own interests and values. In this way, American self-doubt may eventually produce a world order led by those without any moral scruples at all.