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.
