Yet Hirsh is not really an outlier. In addition to Friedman, for example, The New York Times’ lineup of foreign affairs columnists also includes David Brooks, Bret Stephens, Nicholas Kristof, and (less frequently) Roger Cohen. Each of these commentators would use U.S. power for somewhat different purposes, but all are dedicated internationalists who believe the United States should pursue a wide array of goals in distant lands. Brooks is a neoconservative who wrote for the National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and The Weekly Standard before coming to the Times; he was also an ardent proponent of the invasion of Iraq, and he continues to favor a muscular approach to U.S. foreign policy. In 2014, for example, he complained that President Barack Obama’s handling of foreign affairs suffered from a “manhood” problem, and he warned of a “spiritual recession” that might discourage Americans from pursuing idealistic missions abroad. “If America isn’t a champion of universal democracy,” he fretted, “what is the country for?” Stephens has a similar profile to Brooks; he is an unapologetic neoconservative, a former columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and the author of America in Retreat, a polemical attack that accused the Obama administration of “isolationism.”62 Cohen and Kristof focus more on human rights issues and are less inclined to favor military solutions than Friedman, Brooks, or Stephens, yet each is a strong proponent of using American power to right wrongs in faraway places, even when U.S. vital interests are not engaged.63
The editorial stances of The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal are even more consistently interventionist than that of the Times. Since the end of the Cold War, for instance, the Post’s op-ed page has been given over to regular columnists such as Charles Krauthammer, Robert Kagan, Richard Cohen, David Ignatius, former Bush administration speechwriter Michael Gerson, George Will, Jim Hoagland, the late Michael Kelly, Max Boot, and William Kristol (longtime editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard and briefly a columnist for The New York Times as well). Each of these pundits supported an interventionist foreign policy, though Will became increasingly skeptical of military intervention as the failures continued to mount.64 Guest commentators skeptical of liberal hegemony or in favor of a more restrained U.S. role appear occasionally in the Post, but they have never been part of its regular stable of writers. Needless to say, the editorial page editor Fred Hiatt is an enthusiastic proponent of liberal hegemony as well.
Such views deserve a place in America’s elite press; the problem is that alternative views are largely absent. In particular, none of these newspapers features any regular columnist representing a libertarian view of America’s global role, or even one that might be characterized as consistently “realist” in orientation. The latter omission is especially striking insofar as realism is a venerable tradition in the academic study of foreign policy, and realists such as Henry Kissinger, George Kennan, Brent Scowcroft, Richard Nixon, and Colin Powell were prominent and influential figures in the past. Yet one would be hard-pressed to find someone regularly espousing a similar worldview in any major media outlet today.
In fact, rather than broaden the range of views they present on foreign policy, the Times, the Post, and the Journal have been doubling down on mainstream hawkish pundits instead. The Times hired the hardliner Bret Stephens away from the Journal in 2017, and in 2018, the Post added the neoconservative writer Max Boot and the Journal selected the right-wing historian Walter Russell Mead. All three men are ardent defenders of liberal hegemony (and each was an enthusiastic proponent of the Iraq War); more to the point, their hiring merely duplicated perspectives that were already well represented at all three publications.
What about right-wing media outlets such as Fox News, Breitbart, and the Drudge Report? Although these outlets were consistently critical of Clinton’s and Obama’s handling of foreign policy, they did not call for significant reductions in America’s global role. Moreover, these outlets feed viewers an alarming diet of stories about the growing threat from Islam, terrorism, a rising China, immigrants, etc., along with any number of other global dangers. Far-right media outlets are skeptical of the global institutions favored by liberal internationalists (if not actively hostile to them), but they are strongly supportive of U.S. military primacy and do not believe the United States should decrease its global role significantly.
America’s media landscape is not a monolith, of course, and mainstream media figures such as Dana Priest, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Jane Mayer, Matt Lee, and James Risen have produced important critical accounts of key aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Outside the mainstream, people such as the late Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings, Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, Tom Engelhardt of Truthdig, and the left-wing broadcaster Amy Goodman of Democracy Now have offered well-informed critiques of America’s imperial tendencies. The Public Broadcasting Service documentary series Frontline has produced a number of hard-hitting programs questioning key elements of recent U.S. foreign policy, and satirists such as Jon Stewart, Trevor Noah, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, and Stephen Colbert have been sharp-eyed and witty critics of some of America’s foreign policy follies. The work of these individuals reminds us that media coverage of foreign affairs is not one-dimensional and that alternative views are available if one knows where to look. But on the whole, the commanding heights of U.S. media are still dominated by individuals who favor an active U.S. foreign policy—however much they disagree over specific priorities or programs—and that view shapes what they tell readers, viewers, and listeners about world politics in general and U.S. foreign policy in particular.
Last but not least, the academic institutions most relevant to issues of foreign policy exhibit many of the same traits as the rest of the foreign policy community. This tendency is especially evident at schools of public policy and international affairs, whose raison d’être emphasizes identifying global problems and proposing solutions for them. And despite academia’s reputation as a bastion of dovish, left-wing thought, most of these institutions do not question the strategy of liberal hegemony.
This situation is to be expected. The leadership and faculty at most of these institutions tend to be leading figures in the foreign policy community, and they are inclined to favor maintaining U.S. leadership. Past deans of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government include Joseph S. Nye, Albert Carnesale, and Graham T. Allison, who all held senior foreign policy positions in the U.S. government or important advisory posts. The current dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University is former NATO supreme allied commander James Stavridis, and his predecessor was Ambassador Stephen Bosworth, a career diplomat who served as Obama’s special envoy to North Korea. Former deputy secretary of state James Steinberg was dean of the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and now heads the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse. The arms control expert and former State Department official Michael Nacht ran the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC-Berkeley, and Anne-Marie Slaughter was dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School prior to her appointment as director of policy planning and her subsequent hiring by the New America Foundation. The list goes on: the career State Department official Robert Gallucci was dean of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service before assuming the presidency of the MacArthur Foundation, and former Clinton-era NSC staffer James Goldgeier was until recently dean of American University’s School of International Service.
There is nothing conspiratorial about the tendency of these institutions to favor liberal hegemony and active U.S. leadership. After all, students enroll in schools of public policy and international affairs because they care about the real world and want to make it better. Faculty members at these institutions write books and articles and serve in government for similar reasons: they want to make the United States more secure or more prosperous or to benefit humankind more broadly. It would be odd, therefore, if most scholars working on international topics—especially those working
in professional schools—opposed an active U.S. role on the world stage or were consistently skeptical about the wisdom of using American power to advance supposedly worthy ends.
This commitment to improving the world is admirable, but self-interest and ambition play important roles as well. The more foreign policy problems that the United States tries to solve, the greater the demand for trained experts to work on them and the greater the need for schools in which they can receive this training. Identifying new and urgent problems facilitates fundraising from foundations and alumni and creates more opportunities for ambitious faculty members to go to Washington to address their pet issue. Support for liberal hegemony also minimizes cognitive dissonance: if you’ve invested years of your life defending the necessity for U.S. global leadership, thinking about its shortcomings, costs, or failures might be uncomfortable if not actively painful. To a large extent, therefore, the most important academic institutions concerned with the real world of foreign policymaking will be strongly inclined to support the strategy of liberal hegemony.
The existence of an “activist bias” within the broad foreign policy community does not mean that this approach is necessarily wrong or imply that the policies that this community develops, promotes, and implements are always misguided. Similarly, to point out that people within the broad foreign policy community have an interest in lots of U.S. involvement overseas is not to suggest that they embrace liberal hegemony solely for selfish, greedy, or vainglorious reasons.
Rather, it is simply to observe that there is a broad and strong consensus uniting most people who work on a regular basis on issues of international affairs and foreign policy. Until the Trump experiment, this consensus was shared by the two main political parties, most government officials, and the bulk of the policy analysts, journalists, editors, and academics who work on these issues. Despite repeated failures over the past two decades, liberal hegemony was largely unchallenged within the foreign policy community.
LIBERAL HEGEMONY UNDAUNTED:
A TALE OF THREE TASK FORCES
To see this phenomenon more clearly, let us examine three prominent efforts to identify what U.S. grand strategy should be in the twenty-first century. The first attempt was conducted in the aftermath of September 11 but before the 2008 financial crisis; the second was written after the crisis hit, and when it was also clear that the Iraq and Afghan wars were going badly; and the third emerged near the end of the Obama administration and after the Ukraine crisis and the emergence of ISIS. All three reports were bipartisan efforts, and each offered remarkably ambitious and strikingly similar blueprints for America’s role in the world.
THE PRINCETON PROJECT ON NATIONAL SECURITY: FORGING A WORLD OF LIBERTY UNDER LAW (2006)
Between 2003 and 2006 the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University sponsored an ambitious bipartisan initiative, known as the Princeton Project on National Security, with the goal of developing “a sustainable and effective national security strategy for the United States.” The project was directed by Anne-Marie Slaughter and G. John Ikenberry, and the honorary cochairs were former secretary of state George Shultz and former national security advisor Anthony Lake. Funded by grants from the Ford Foundation and the philanthropist David Rubenstein of the Carlyle Group, the project brought nearly four hundred participants from the foreign policy community together in an extended series of conferences, workshops, round tables, and working groups. Its stated purpose was “to write a collective ‘X article,’ to do together what no one person in our highly specialized and rapidly changing world could hope to do alone.”65
Completed in 2006, the result was a dense, sixty-page report entitled Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century (hereafter FWLL). It is a textbook expression of the strategy of liberal hegemony that has united neoconservatives and liberals since the end of the Cold War.
FWLL’s first sentence begins with a stern warning: “On the fifth anniversary of September 11, the world seems a more menacing place than ever.” The United States “feels increasingly alone,” and faces “many present dangers.” A far-reaching and ambitious response is needed: U.S. national security strategy “must address all the dangers we face—diffuse, shifting and uncertain as they are—and seize all the opportunities open to us to make ourselves and the world more secure.” In short, like most national security documents, the report begins by portraying a world brimming with numerous threats, all of them requiring a U.S. response.
The report then prescribes a breathtaking set of national security imperatives based on the overarching belief that “America must stand for, seek and secure a world of liberty under law.” In short, the ultimate aim of U.S. foreign policy is not to protect the well-being of the American people, but rather to ensure that every citizen on the entire planet lives in a stable and well-governed liberal democracy. To do this, the United States cannot simply be a status quo power; it “must develop a more sophisticated strategy of recognizing and promoting the deeper preconditions for successful liberal democracy.” In particular, U.S. power must be used to create “Popular, Accountable, and Rights-regarding (PAR) governments” around the world, a process it describes (without irony) as “bringing the world up to PAR.”
But that’s not all. Washington must also “make UN reform a top priority, as part of a broader effort to rebuild a liberal international order.” The report recommends creating a “Concert of Democracies,” calls for “reviving the NATO alliance,” and says that Washington must lead “efforts to reform the main international financial and trade institutions.” High levels of defense spending are necessary to preserve “a balance of power in favor of liberal democracies,” and the United States must simultaneously maintain a strong U.S. nuclear deterrent while working to “revitalize the Non-Proliferation regime.” The latter goal will require “a range of counter-proliferation measures,” including (as a last resort) “preventive military action.” America’s “primary task” regarding a rising China is to convince Beijing that it can “achieve its legitimate ambitions within the current international order,” though it is left to Washington to decide whether Beijing’s ambitions are “legitimate” or not.
Wait, there’s more! The United States must also “make critical investments in our public health system,” “establish an East Asia security institution that brings together the major powers,” “invest more in public education,” and “do everything possible to achieve a peace settlement” between Israel and the Palestinians. Nor can Americans shy away from interfering in other countries’ political systems: on the contrary, “U.S. strategy must include the creation of institutions and mechanisms whereby the international community can … encourage sound practices within states without using force or illegitimate modes of coercion.”
This list is but a sample of the report’s recommendations; and admonitions to “rectify our irresponsible fiscal policies” and reallocate “enough public resources to provide sufficient economic security for American workers” are thrown in for good measure. By the time one is finished reading, it is hard to think of any international issue the authors do not regard as a vital concern for the United States, even though no president could attempt—let alone achieve—more than a handful of these initiatives.
The Princeton Project’s overweening ambition was partly the result of its inclusive design: if you ask four hundred experts to devise a grand strategy, everyone’s pet project will have to be mentioned and a lot of logrolling is inevitable. Yet FWLL is hardly an outlier insofar as it mirrors other important statements of post–Cold War grand strategy, including the Clinton administration’s National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (1995) and the Bush administration’s post-9/11 National Security Strategy (2002). Like these earlier documents, FWLL depicts a hostile world where diverse dangers lurk, sees U.S. power as a consistent force for good, and believes the United States must remake the world in its image without compromising th
e very principles it is trying to promote. The report ends with Henry Kissinger observing that the “ultimate test of U.S. foreign policy” lies in protecting “the extraordinary opportunity that has come about to recast the international system.” If that lofty goal is indeed the “ultimate test” of U.S. foreign policy, then the United States has an awful lot to do.
“THE PROJECT FOR A UNITED AND STRONG AMERICA” (2013)
Roughly ten years after the Princeton Project began its deliberations, a second bipartisan task force presented a new set of recommendations for U.S. grand strategy. Cochaired by James Goldgeier of American University’s School of International Service, a Democrat, and Kurt Volker of Arizona State University’s McCain Institute, a Republican, the bipartisan Project for a United and Strong America had a similar objective: to examine the role “the United States should play in the world.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Though written in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and after the Bush Doctrine had crashed and burned in Iraq and Afghanistan, the project’s final report is every bit as ambitious as the earlier Princeton version. Indeed, its central message is that setbacks abroad and financial pressures at home are no reason to scale back U.S. global involvement. Convinced that “any short-term savings would come at significant long-term cost,” the report calls for the United States to “remain true to the principles of advancing democratic values and exercising strong American global leadership.”
The Hell of Good Intentions Page 14
