Empire Under Siege

A storm is coming. Earlier this year, I wrote about the cultural and political disruptions sure to arise from mass migration, and how they would combine with collapsing birth rates in the West, and the economic madness of the green transition (“Engines of Destruction,” January 2024). The results of the June elections for the European Parliament indicate that discontent is rising. Unfortunately, our problems are likely to worsen. The United States anchors the security of the West, and our foreign policy is in disarray.

As the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, America pursued an ambitious program. Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs traveled to Moscow to advise the Russian government on how to manage its rapid transition to a free-market economy. American political consultants, NGOs, and intelligence operatives put their shoulders to the wheel of “democracy promotion.” These efforts may have been haphazard, even incoherent and counterproductive. But the promise was clear: The arc of history bends toward capitalism and liberal democracy. Russia, our Cold War adversary, could (and would) be brought into the aborning “rules-based international order.”

A similar promise was made about China. The World Wide Web networked the Middle Kingdom into the global village. Hollywood exported movies. Chinese students flooded American universities. In 2001, China was invited into the World Trade Organization. Yet another adversary would embrace our way of life, we were told. It might take time, but a prospering China integrated into the “rules-based international order” was thought to be a sure thing.

These promises were bipartisan. In his second inaugural address, George W. Bush insisted that freedom was for the whole world. Barack Obama struck a different but closely related note in his second inaugural address, when he solemnly announced that the world envied our diversity. The rhetoric of America’s benevolent triumph was nearly universal. America was not building an empire. We were inviting the entire world to receive the glorious inheritance of all mankind (which came to include tutorials on why we’re not to use words like “mankind”). America was but a custodian of this inheritance, the argument went, not an aggressive power.

The plausibility of this dream of global prosperity and cultural progress has been collapsing for quite some time. Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014. Secretary of State John Kerry denounced the Russian military action as “an incredible act of aggression” and harrumphed, “You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in a nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on [a] completely trumped-up pretext.” History (of which, again, America is but the custodian) will not countenance such actions!

The year 2022 saw another Russian outrage, a failed blitzkrieg in Ukraine that has turned into a grinding war on the borders of Europe. Moscow seems poised to digest the eastern provinces of that unfortunate country. On October 7, 2023, an Iranian proxy slaughtered more than one thousand Israelis. Another proxy fired missiles into northern Israel. Yet another proxy shut down the Suez Canal. Meanwhile, China has continued to militarize the South China Sea.

I don’t wish to detail the international situation, only to highlight the obvious. After the Cold War ended, the United States invested ideological, economic, and military resources in a grand project of global unity. The enterprise was not undertaken naively. Planners knew that there would be tensions. Nations might compete. We would need to face down bad actors like Saddam Hussein. But the ambitions were grand—and the pursuit of them was embraced by very nearly our entire establishment, right, left, and center. Human rights would undergird a worldwide consensus. International institutions would mature into effective instruments of economic, technical, and legal coordination. Open trade would bring prosperity to everyone. And the whole system would be backstopped by American military power, at no great expense and without domestic backlash.

You need not follow the news closely to recognize that this project has failed. After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration imposed “super sanctions,” promising that such measures would bring the Russian economy to its knees. These measures, and the confidence with which they were imposed, reflected the old consensus, which presupposed the end-of-history dream world. But the outcomes contradict that fantasy. Countries commanding nearly half of global GDP refused to join our sanctions regime, exposing the obvious fact that the “rules-based international order” is not international and never has been. It has always been an instrument of American power.

I’m reluctant to use the word “empire.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States did not establish colonies. But the term has become unavoidable. The international order was made in our image, an ersatz empire, as recent events have revealed. Faced with the prospect of Russian aggression, the demilitarized nations of Europe are forced to operate as American vassal states. When it comes to independent foreign policy, is Germany all that different from Belarus? The same question can be posed about the State of Israel, as well as Japan, Australia, and other nations in the deepening shadow of China’s military buildup.

The rise of a coalition of nations opposed to U.S. global leadership poses difficult challenges. But I fear those challenges will become crises. And they will do so because of the persistence of self-serving illusions.

This late June morning, as I write, a Wall Street Journal article details the ways in which China, Iran, and North Korea have buttressed Russia’s military and economic power. The Journal reports, “The speed and depth of expanding security ties involving the U.S. adversaries has at times surprised American intelligence analysts.” Surprised? Are our “experts” so cocooned in post–Cold War confidence that they fail to recognize the widespread resentment of America’s presumption to run the world? I fear the question answers itself.

I’m not a foreign policy expert, but I venture to guess that the combined military firepower of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran (and its proxies) is substantial, perhaps equal to any force that the United States and its allies can bring to bear on short notice. How is it that we have allowed such a coalition to emerge? The Journal reports this expert opinion: “Russia and the other nations have set aside historic frictions to collectively counter what they regard as a U.S.-dominated global system.” I marvel at the formulation, “what they regard.” In effect, our policymakers suggest that the Russia-China-Iran-North Korea alliance rests on a misconception. Putin and Xi need to wake up to the truth. The
“global system” is not U.S. dominated but U.S. sponsored—for the sake of world peace, prosperity, and the triumph of abortion and gay rights . . . er, human rights. It is nothing so narrow and parochial as the imposition of America’s national interests or our activist ideologies.

Maybe the Great and the Good in Washington recognize reality, and they mouth the old pieties out of habit; or perhaps they sense (accurately) the political danger of being the first to break with established orthodoxies. Can you imagine the domestic furor that would be visited upon a Secretary of State who suggested (again, accurately) that a foreign policy promoting gay rights and other progressive causes is a virtue-signaling luxury we can’t afford in an era of great-power competition? But I worry that we are led by true believers. Some imagine that the United States has been ordained by God to defend “democracy.” Others think that we have a secular mission to promote “reproductive freedom” and LGBTQ rights around the world (the arc of history, and so on). Others are technocratic worker bees, animated by the falsely modest ambition to be evenhanded administrators of a rules-based international system—if only the “revisionist” powers would stop undermining it.

I am not a hard-hearted “realist.” I harbor the hope that the United States can be a force for good in the world. But we are living in the ruins of the failed utopian project undertaken after the end of the Cold War. It was gestated by the hubris of men and women who imagined that the United States, the country that uniquely combined vast wealth with a twentieth-century tradition of militarism, possessed a nearly unlimited power to shape world events. Recent years have shown the limits of our power. I expect harsher lessons before the decade ends. America won’t be a force for much of anything, good or bad, unless our leaders master their hubris. Only if they do so, and get on with the grim task of determining what can be saved and what must be sacrificed, will we be able to maintain our republic, ensure our prosperity, and sustain our freedom of action so that the next generation may dream new—and one hopes less utopian—dreams.