After the Cold War, the United States could imagine that its military was all-powerful. America seemed capable of taking decisive action anywhere in the world. This awesome war-making potential gave rise to an idealistic grand strategy. It involved building out a rules-based international order, an empire of ideals that would be supervised by American hard power.
The moral promise of this ambition was obvious. The rule of law stands as a crucial foundation for the common good. It orders civic affairs toward the end of justice and establishes procedures for the nonviolent resolution of conflicts of interests. Civilization advances dramatically when disputants may appeal to duly appointed judges rather than fighting it out in the streets.
After World War I, the League of Nations pursued the goal of international arbitration in preference to war as the means of resolving disputes among nations. It failed spectacularly. After World War II, the United Nations was seen by many idealists as an opportunity to resurrect the dream of a rules-based global system. But the UN Security Council was designed to accommodate the realities of hard power. A permanent member can veto any proposal, should it run counter to its nation-based foreign policy. This design, a concession to the fact that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had any intention of surrendering its sovereignty to an international body, ensured that the United Nations would offer little more than speechifying theater in a world defined by contestation between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The fall of the Soviet Union gave fresh impetus to the idealists’ dream of establishing a global order. In the 1990s, the United States possessed sole and supreme worldwide military power. A weakened Russia and an aspiring China posed a chance to consolidate the emerging American-led system. Western elites thought they had a world-historical opportunity. The World Trade Organization was up and running by 1995. In 2002, the International Criminal Court was established. The United States eschewed talk of national interest, adopting instead the language of “international norms” as justification for its global hegemony.
There were limits. Russia and China retained nuclear deterrence. We could not do to Vladimir Putin what we had done to Saddam Hussein. Moreover, the American people manifested a limited appetite for military adventures, a longstanding feature of the American national character. Nevertheless, the elite dream of a post-national system of international law and global norms waxed strongly in the new millennium. In 2005, the United Nations adopted the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, which vests the “international community” with the duty to protect vulnerable populations from mass atrocities and other crimes against humanity. This doctrine meant tasking American power with the highest moral purpose: protecting human rights.
In this seemingly noble role, America has been characterized as the global policeman. At first glance, it’s a benign metaphor: The London bobby with his nightstick standing at the world’s street corners to enforce law-abiding behavior. But note well the reality of police power. Because of man’s fallen condition, its exercise must be ongoing and never ending. And note as well that the London Metropolitan Police established a specialist firearms command in 2005. Now more than 2,500 London police are armed, some with tactical military gear.
The ensuing record of many large and small interventions by the U.S. military proves the point. Idealists’ ambition to create a rules-based international order amounted to a doctrine of perpetual war-making. During the 1990s, the U.S. engaged in a war against Iraq, bombed targets in Yugoslavia, and deployed special forces in Somalia. After 9/11, the pace of operations accelerated. For more than two decades, the United States military has been killing people (and training proxies to kill people) week in and week out. According to some estimates, more than one million people have been killed in America’s post-9/11 military operations, with many millions more dying in collapsed societies and sectarian conflicts.
Perhaps still more people would have been killed in wars had the United States not adopted the role of global policeman. Who knows what would have happened had America not invaded Iraq in 2003? But I don’t wish to litigate counterfactuals. My point is this: The post–Cold War grand strategy of building a rules-based international order has not delivered peace. Moreover, as a grand strategy it has failed on its own terms. Russian aggression and Chinese economic and military power now operate according to their own rules, not those formulated by the “international community” and underwritten by American power. Even as some continue to insist upon “international norms,” the normal state of international affairs has returned: great power rivalry.
It’s a widespread view that this return marks moral regression, sending us into the lawless condition of the war of all against all, a world in which might makes right. I disagree. Good statesmanship can manage great power rivalry by encouraging a relatively stable balance of power. The goal of balance rejects the utopian ambitions of the idealistic grand strategy. It accommodates the “selfish” imperatives of national interest. But a balance-of-power grand strategy can create relative peace, and it can sustain broad areas of international cooperation.
Nineteenth-century Europe enjoyed one hundred years of relative peace under that model. The continent had been upended by the idealistic ambitions of France and her revolutionary citizen-armies. After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the most powerful (but not all-powerful) country, Great Britain, constructed a system of alliances that shifted in accord with an overriding imperative: No single nation shall be allowed to dominate continental Europe. In pursuit of this goal, Germany, France, and Russia were to be favored or disfavored as circumstances dictated.
This approach is easily dismissed as cynical. Shouldn’t Great Britain, the economic powerhouse and relative hegemon of the nineteenth century, be “true” to her allies rather than “betraying” them to maintain the balance of power? (We hear similar moralizing today as U.S. foreign policy shifts toward a global balance-of-power grand strategy.) There can be no doubt that a balance-of-power grand strategy requires hard-nosed realism. This accommodation outrages idealists. But during the years that stretched from 1815 to 1914, the outcome of this strategy was very good for all Europeans. The continent experienced few wars, and those that occurred were limited in scope. International commerce expanded, and standards of living rose dramatically.
The conflagration of World War I did not discredit balance-of-power international politics in principle. The rise of Germany as a dynamic industrial power in the late nineteenth century destabilized the system, as did the even more dramatic rise of America, which insisted on remaining outside the system. And in any event, nothing is forever. The wheels of history turn, and every system breaks down. Good statesmanship must respond to realities and be prepared to change tack as circumstances dictate. The post-1945 American-led internationalism was thus fitting—for its time. But we are no longer living a world defined by World War II and the Cold War.
The Trump administration appears to be animated by a strong consensus in favor of shifting American foreign policy away from the grand strategy of the rules-based international order and toward a strategy of establishing a global balance of power. Today’s media seem unable to grasp this shift. Editorials warn us that Trump is destroying NATO and alienating Canada. Trump’s desire to strike a deal with Moscow is framed as kowtowing to a tyrant. I do not wish to gainsay the bitter feelings of the European heads of state who have been manhandled by the current administration. But reality suggests that the media rhetoric is misguided. The Europeans have committed to spending massive amounts in order to rearm. Canada recently announced a program to install advanced Australian radar technology in the Arctic. These and other measures would not have happened had Trump not exploded the old, idealist grand strategy. Rearmament will strengthen America’s allies. In the new grand strategy, designed to moderate great power rivalry, countries like Germany will be less comfortably supine and far more useful as allies.
As was the case with nineteenth-century Great Britain, the United States stands as the most powerful (but not all-powerful) nation in the global system. Although we cannot pretend that it dominates the entire globe, our military remains the most feared in the world. Our economy has vulnerabilities. Our debt poses a problem. But American economic power remains substantial. And American culture has an aggressive streak, one that at times is openly militaristic. Possessing these assets imposes on America the duty to play the role of balancer, tilting toward and against other nations in accord with judgments about how to prevent any one rival from becoming too powerful and thus upsetting the system.
In my estimation, the Trump administration’s desire to implement a new balance-of-power grand strategy is wise. Moreover, although it eschews the idealistic promises of the old grand strategy, sustaining a balance of power in the global system has a clear moral purpose. If executed well by prudent statesmen, the new grand strategy can create something of the peace and prosperity that characterized the nineteenth-century European system.
