The greatest empires have collective consciences. And, for this reason, they envision a universal world state based on their own ideals. Rome, Great Britain, and France, as cruel as they could be, stood for a higher form of civilisation than was common at the time. Rome offered citizenship to worthy individuals far beyond the Italian peninsula. The British Empire constituted an early form of globalisation and outlawed the slave trade. France offered a form of equality through acquisition of the French language. Then there were the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, which offered relative political stability and protection for ethnic minorities in Central Europe and the Middle East, especially compared to the horrors of what was to follow. In other words, values and national myths can be essential to power. Great powers are usually on a mission of some sort.
The United States is no different. Ever since it became (in functional terms) an empire following the Second World War, it has had its own vision of a universal world state built on the ideals of liberal internationalism. Liberal internationalism was not only for liberal Democrats, but for Republicans, too, even if they have since abjured the term. Both major parties believed in spreading democracy, or at least paid lip service to it, even if they differed when it came to the pace and methods. American diplomats often dealt with dictators not because they preferred to, but because they knew they had no choice. Of course, that universal world state of democracies was a distant and unrealistic goal: not an immediate objective. But it was, nevertheless, a goal. And that goal made all the difference to the way that America saw itself and the world saw America. The fact that the world was frequently disappointed with America was precisely because it expected better of it. For better and for worse, the American imperial experiment had values at its heart: whether it was “a city on a hill” that would mind its own business and yet shine as an example to other nations, or aggressively seek to implant democracy abroad.
This was true of even our most flawed post-Second World War presidents. Take Richard Nixon, whose opening to China was not a case of naked, cynical transactionalism. Far from it. Higher principles were involved. They were rooted in an essay Nixon published in Foreign Affairs in October 1967, “Asia After Vietnam”, in which the future president argued that global stability required inviting Communist China into the family of nations. In fact, there was relatively little transacted in Nixon’s historic February 1972 trip to China. Basically, both sides stuck to their principles while the Taiwan circle was virtually squared, with the United States essentially recognising only one China, while Beijing’s rulers essentially accepted that they could not conquer Taiwan by force. The point of Nixon’s trip was less to negotiate than to make it clear to the world, through a series of ceremonial meetings, that the United States now had a civil relationship with Communist China and sought an understanding with it. This gave Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger the leverage they needed to achieve détente with the Soviet Union and stabilise the Cold War.
“The American imperial experiment had values at its heart, for better and for worse.”
Nixon’s ideals were masked behind a complicated and at times sordid reputation, which would be forever tarnished by Watergate. But America’s yearning for a more democratic world was more obvious in the Carter and Reagan administrations, where openly expressed ideals were a vital element of national power. Kissinger and President Gerald Ford negotiated the Helsinki Accords with the Soviets, which subsequently provided a vehicle for Jimmy Carter to hold the Eastern Bloc to account on human rights. Ronald Reagan’s stark rhetorical differentiation between the American and Soviet systems gave hope to tens of millions in Communist Eastern Europe, as I can attest from being a reporter there at the time.
American power mixed with idealism held fast, even when it least seemed to. In July 1989, a few weeks after the Tiananmen Square massacre, with the media and intellectual community outraged at China and demanding tough action, President George H. W. Bush sent his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, and deputy secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger, on a secret visit to Beijing to reassure Chinese officials that relations would not be broken. This laid the groundwork for stable relations as the Chinese regime proceeded to further liberalise the economy in the aftermath of Tiananmen, as well as sending more and more students to the West to be educated, creating untold prosperity for its people. It also helped stabilise the Asia-Pacific region. Bush’s action, though it seemed cynical, actually wasn’t. It was built on a realistic interpretation of American ideals.
The three Democratic presidents of the post-Cold War era — Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden — may have made mistakes in office, as all presidents do, but they were consistent in their support for democracy, human rights, and compassion for refugees. It infused their foreign policies, perhaps to a fault, as critics allege. But what stands out is the prominence given to the human rights, refugee, and international development bureaus in the State Department under their watch. Those bureaus were legacies of both the Cold War and its aftermath. They were legacies of the Cold War in the sense that such bureaus were meant to telegraph the humanitarian concerns that differentiated the ideals of the United States from those of the Soviet Union. They were legacies of the post-1991 age because of the way they addressed what came to be called global concerns: those beyond great power politics. Those bureaus may have lost their way to an extent since, and were certainly in need of reform and belt tightening. But their decimation by the Trump administration does violence not just to the tradition of Democratic presidents, but to Republican ones, too. Some of the greatest work done by those bureaus was under the Reagan presidency, as I detailed in my 2021 book.
Obviously, there was Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But all these wars were, in addition to much else, about idealism run amok. They began as quixotic struggles and ended up destroying presidencies. Poignantly, in painting portraits of military veterans, George W. Bush may have found a way to psychologically deal with the foreign policy disaster he unleashed. Though a requirement for American greatness, idealism can also be dangerous, since it can lead one into unnecessary fights.
That leads us to Donald Trump, who says his policy is to avoid leading the United States into more wars. That is an admirable goal. But shorn of any vision for a better world, it can be interpreted as mere weakness or isolationism. After all, the United States is not Sweden or Canada. It is a great power. And great powers project force in defence of principles. Those principles may involve cynicism and self-delusion, but the very fact of having to morally justify one’s actions can be disciplinary. Russia does not even bother to defend or justify its mass killing of civilians in Ukraine. In America’s case, a certain amount of idealism has led to great periodic miscalculations throughout the decades, in which presidential reputations have been held to account, but idealism remains the basis on which power is employed in the first place.
This is because without ideals or principles there is no trust, and therefore no reliable allies. What has held Nato together for three quarters of a century has been a large dose of idealism. When the United States, led by Trump, stopped believing in Nato and the ideals that sustain it, the Western Alliance was undermined.
In a claustrophobic world, where geography has been shrunk by technology, a weakened Western alliance in Europe will only make America’s Asian allies nervous. This is because in terms of geography, population, and economics, China is the natural organising principle of the Asia-Pacific region. The United States, situated on the other side of the globe, is present in the Asia-Pacific only because it wants to be. And it wants to be because of a vision of free societies — call it liberal internationalism, if you will — which works in tandem with economic and strategic interests, strengthening them rather than conflicting with them. It is all of a piece. Were America to remove values from its relationships with Japan, South Korea, and its other Pacific allies, it could force them to seek greater accommodation with China, their biggest trading partner. This is how transactionalism turns on itself. A nakedly transactional world is a world of no rules, and, therefore, no order.
Actually, none of this conflicts with realism. True realists, like Nixon, Kissinger, and the elder Bush, had a sense of history that provided them with a mature sense of the tragic. They knew that things could go horribly wrong if they were not extremely careful. In foreign affairs, they worshipped truth because the truth of a situation is often unpleasant. Trump is no realist because he has a disregard for the basic facts. He believes in nothing beyond a mechanical exercise in dealmaking. Whereas true realism is not merely a technique but something more, which is ultimately not in conflict with America’s idealistic mission.
Trump may succeed here and there, in making this deal with the Saudis or that deal with the Qataris. But because there is no higher purpose to anything he does, American power itself — a blend of material interests and moral values — is undermined. The presidencies from Franklin D. Roosevelt through Joe Biden, including both Democrat and Republican, with all of their mistakes and disappointments over 80 years, manifested the apex of American power because of the higher purpose they aspired to. That era is over and has been replaced by something consciously amoral and therefore decadent. This is what decline looks like.
