56. On U.S. policy toward Egypt, see Jason Brownlee, Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the U.S.-Egyptian Alliance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). In the case of Turkey, the United States has ignored the government’s increasingly authoritarian behavior, growing limits to press freedom, and the use of politicized prosecutions and show trials to intimidate potential opponents. Regarding Israel, not only did the United States do nothing to halt Israel’s attacks on Lebanon in 2006 or on Gaza in 2008–09—campaigns that killed or wounded hundreds of innocent civilians—U.S. officials protected Israel from censure by the UN Security Council and defended its actions in public.
57. See Harriet Sherwood, “Human Rights Groups Face Global Crackdown ‘Not Seen in a Generation,’” The Guardian, August 26, 2015, at www.theguardian.com/law/2015/aug/26/ngos-face-restrictions-laws-human-rights-generation.
58. See Branko Milanovic, “Why the Global 1% and the Asian Middle Class Have Gained the Most from Globalization,” Harvard Business Review, May 13, 2016, at https://hbr.org/2016/05/why-the-global-1-and-the-asian-middle-class-have-gained-the-most-from-globalization.
59. See Martin Wolf, “Inequality Is a Threat to Our Democracies,” Financial Times, December 20, 2017. In 2018 the World Inequality Lab found that “Income inequality in the United States is among the highest of all rich countries” and reported that incomes for the bottom 50 percent of Americans had “stagnated” since 1980 while income growth for the middle 40 percent had been “weak.” “By contrast,” they write, “the average income of the top 10% doubled over this period, and for the top 1% it tripled, even on a post-tax basis.” See World Inequality Report 2018, at http://wir2018.wid.world, pp. 78–81.
60. Technological change (e.g., the development of robotics-based manufacturing) eliminated far more U.S. jobs than expanded global trade or the emergence of low-wage states such as China or India. See Brad DeLong, “Where U.S. Manufacturing Jobs Really Went,” Project Syndicate, May 3, 2017, at www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/manufacturing-jobs-share-of-us-economy-by-j—bradford-delong-2017-05; idem, “NAFTA and Other Big Trade Deals Have Not Gutted American Manufacturing—Period.” Vox.com, January 24, 2017, at www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/24/14363148/trade-deals-nafta-wto-china-job-loss-trump.
61. A nuanced and sensible analysis of the downside of contemporary globalization is Dani Rodrik, Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), especially chap. 1 and pp. 27–29.
62. See Uri Dadush, “The Decline of the Bretton Woods Institutions,” The National Interest, September 22, 2014, at http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-decline-the-bretton-woods-institutions-11324.
63. According to Gordon I. Bradford and Johannes F. Linn, “Global institutions are not working well individually and as a group. For example, the global institutions at the core of the international system, such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the G8 Summit, are to varying degrees fragmented, unrepresentative, and ineffective. They generally suffer from a corrosive decline in their legitimacy. They are increasingly undemocratic and unable to address the global challenges of the 21st century.” See their “Reform of Global Governance: Priorities for Action,” Brookings Policy Brief no. 163 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2007).
64. On this point, see Rodrik, Straight Talk on Trade, pp. 24–29.
65. Jonathan Kirshner, “The Global Financial Crisis: A Turning Point,” Forbes, November 8, 2014, at www.forbes.com/sites/jonathankirshner/2014/11/08/the-global-financial-crisis-a-turning-point/#7909a1a34c2f.
66. See Foundation for Middle East Peace, “Comprehensive Settlement Population, 1972–2011,” at http://fmep.org/resource/comprehensive-settlement-population-1972-2010/; “Settlements,” from B’tselem, at www.btselem.org/settlements/statistics; and “Israeli Settlement” at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_settlement.
67. For varied accounts of this long series of failures, see Jeremy Pressman, “Visions in Collision: What Happened at Camp David and Taba?” International Security 28, no. 2 (Fall 2003); Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors,” New York Review of Books, 48, no. 13 (August 9, 2001), pp. 59–65; Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit: How the United States Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013); Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004); Aaron David Miller, The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Middle East Peace (New York: Bantam, 2006); Charles Enderlin, Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995–2002, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2003); Ron Pundak, “From Oslo to Taba: What Went Wrong?,” Survival 43, no. 3 (Autumn 2001), pp. 31–46; Jerome Slater, “What Went Wrong?: The Collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process,” Political Science Quarterly 116, no. 2 (July 2001), pp. 171–99; Clayton E. Swisher, The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process (New York: Nation Books, 2004); Martin Indyk, Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); and Ben Birnbaum and Amir Tibon, “How the Israeli-Palestine Peace Deal Died,” The New Republic, July 20, 2014.
68. On the pledge to Gaddafi, see Bruce W. Jentleson and Christopher A. Whytock, “Who ‘Won’ Libya?: The Force-Diplomacy Debate and Its Implications for Theory and Practice,” International Security 30, no. 3 (Winter 2005/2006), pp. 70, 74, 76, and 82.
69. Barack Obama began his presidency with a well-publicized speech saying that he wanted to lead the world toward a nonnuclear future, but his administration eventually proposed a $1 trillion program to modernize the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal and improve its ability to wage a nuclear war. See Philip Ewing, “Obama’s Nuclear Paradox: Pushing for Cuts, Agreeing to Upgrades,” National Public Radio, May 25, 2016, at www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/05/25/479498018/obamas-nuclear-paradox-pushing-for-cuts-agreeing-to-upgrades; and also Austin Long and Brendan Rittenhouse Green, “Stalking the Secure Second Strike: Intelligence, Counterforce, and Nuclear Strategy,” Journal of Strategic Studies 38, nos. 1–2 (2015).
70. When the United States and its allies intervened in Libya in 2011, North Korean officials called the earlier bargain over Libya’s WMD programs “an invasion tactic to disarm the country,” and said “the Libyan crisis is teaching the international community a grave lesson.” See Mark McDonald, “North Korea Suggests Libya Should Have Kept Nuclear Program,” The New York Times, March 24, 2011. In January 2016, North Korea’s official news agency defended its latest nuclear test by saying “the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programmes of their own accord.” See “North Korea Cites Muammar Gaddafi’s ‘Destruction’ in Nuclear Test Defence,” The Telegraph, January 9, 2016, at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/12090658/North-Korea-cites-Muammar-Gaddafis-destruction-in-nuclear-test-defence.html.
71. Bureaucratic resistance within the U.S. government and foot-dragging by key allies such as Saudi Arabia hampered efforts to develop an effective counterterrorism strategy, and major attacks took place throughout Clinton’s term. On Saudi Arabia’s reluctance to cooperate with U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the 1990s, see James Risen, State of War, pp. 180–86. The sluggish bureaucratic response to concerns about terrorism is described at length in The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), chap. 3.
72. The Clinton administration believed that a pharmaceutical factory might be producing nerve gas for terrorist use, based on reports that bin Laden was a part owner of the facility and a soil sample taken near the factory that reportedly contained a precursor chemical for VX nerve gas. Administration officials described the eviden
ce as compelling and said that there was little internal dissent over the attack, but other senior officials later claimed that the available information was ambiguous. For a dispassionate summary of the evidence, see Michael Barletta, “Chemical Weapons in the Sudan: Allegations and Evidence,” The Nonproliferation Review 6, no. 1 (Fall 1998), pp. 115–36. See also Tim Weiner and James Risen, “Decision to Strike Factory in Sudan Based Partly on Surmise,” The New York Times, September 28, 1998; and James Risen, “To Bomb Sudan Plant, or Not: A Year Later, Debates Rankle,” The New York Times, October 27, 1999. For a defense of the administration’s decision, see Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 351–63.
73. On the motivations for the 9/11 attacks, see 9/11 Commission Report, p. 48; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), pp. 209–10; and John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), pp. 65–70.
74. The Bush administration had downgraded counterterror efforts after taking office, and the FBI and other intelligence agencies failed to “connect the dots” that might have allowed them to derail the plot ahead of time. As the 9/11 Commission noted afterward, “information was not shared … Analysis was not pooled. Effective operations were not launched. Often the handoffs of information were lost across the divide separating the foreign and domestic agencies of government.” 9/11 Commission Report, p. 353.
75. “President Bush’s Remarks at Prayer Service,” The Washington Post, September 14, 2001. By declaring war on “terrorism”—a tactic that many states and groups had employed for decades—the United States had committed itself to an open-ended campaign that had no definable end point and therefore could never be won. On this point, see Paul R. Pillar, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2001), p. 217.
76. In particular, Bergen and Cruickshank found “a stunning sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks … Even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one-third.” See Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, “The Iraq Effect: The War in Iraq and Its Impact on the War on Terrorism,” Mother Jones, March 1, 2007.
77. “Inquiry Begins into Motives of Shooting Suspect Hasan,” The Washington Post, November 7, 2009. Hasan later testified that he had intended his attack to help defend the Afghan Taliban.
78. See Bruce Hoffman and Fernando Reinares, “Conclusion,” in Bruce Hoffman and Fernando Reinares, eds., The Evolution of the Global Terrorist Threat: From 9/11 to Osama bin Laden’s Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), p. 638.
79. As the International Crisis Group warned in 2005, “counter-terrorism efforts in Somalia have won a few key battles against extremists, but they have been steadily losing the war for Somali hearts and minds.” See “Counter-Terrorism in Somalia: Losing Hearts and Minds?” International Crisis Group Report No. 95, July 11, 2005, p. 15; and for background, Jeffrey Gettleman, “The Most Dangerous Place in the World,” Foreign Policy, September 30, 2009, at http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/09/30/the-most-dangerous-place-in-the-world/.
80. According to Nabeel Khoury, former U.S. deputy chief of mission in Yemen, “Drone strikes take out a few bad guys to be sure, they also kill a large number of innocent civilians. Given Yemen’s tribal structure, the U.S. generates roughly forty to sixty new enemies for every AQAP operative killed by drones.” See Nabeel Khoury, “In Yemen, Drones Aren’t a Policy,” Cairo Review of International Affairs, October 23, 2013, at www.aucegypt.edu/GAPP/CairoReview/Pages/articleDetails.aspx?aid=443#.
81. See “Feinstein, ‘Terror Is Up Worldwide,’” CNN.com, December 1, 2013, at cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2013/12/01/feinstein-terror-is-up-worldwide/; and “Statement by Director Brennan as Prepared for Delivery to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,” June 16, 2016, at www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/2016-speeches-testimony/statement-by-director-brennan-as-prepared-for-delivery-before-ssci.html.
82. Quoted in Eric Schmitt, “Using Special Forces Against Terrorism, Trump Hopes to Avoid Big Ground Wars,” The New York Times, March 19, 2017.
83. See Nick Turse, “U.S. Is Building $100 Million Drone Base in Africa,” The Intercept, September 29, 2016, at https://theintercept.com/2016/09/29/u-s-military-is-building-a-100-million-drone-base-in-africa/; and idem, “The War You’ve Never Heard Of,” Vice News, May 28, 2017, at https://news.vice.com/en_ca/article/nedy3w/the-u-s-is-waging-a-massive-shadow-war-in-africa-exclusive-documents-reveal.
84. Based on the post-9/11 record, Mueller and Stewart estimate that the chances of a U.S. citizen dying in a terrorist attack each year are roughly one in 3.5 million. See John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, “The Terrorism Delusion: America’s Overwrought Response to September 11,” International Security 37, no. 1 (Summer 2012); and idem, Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
85. Stephen Biddle, “American Grand Strategy after 9/11: An Assessment,” Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College (Carlisle, PA: 2005), p. 14.
2: WHY LIBERAL HEGEMONY FAILED
1. For a classic statement of the strategy of liberal hegemony, see William J. Clinton, A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (Washington: The White House, 1994). Subsequent national security strategies issued by Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama are consistent with this approach, as were a number of prominent task force and think tank reports published between 1993 and 2017. I discuss this broad consensus in detail in chapter 3.
2. In his March 1947 speech to Congress announcing the so-called Truman Doctrine, President Harry S. Truman declared, “At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life … One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.” See “President Truman’s Address Before a Joint Session of Congress, March 12, 1947,” at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/trudoc.asp.
3. The intellectual case for liberal hegemony is found in G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis and Transformation of American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Robert Lieber, The American Era: Power and Strategy for the 21st Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Robert Kagan, The World America Made (New York: Vintage, 2013); Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William Wohlforth, “Don’t Come Home, America: The Case Against Retrenchment,” International Security 37, no. 3 (Autumn 2012/13); and Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). For critiques of its core assumptions, see John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018); Barry Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), chap. 1; and David C. Hendrickson, Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), chap. 1.
4. The literature on democratic peace theory is now enormous. Core works include Michael W. Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12, nos. 3–4 (Summer–Autumn 1983); Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); and John M. Owen IV, Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). For valuable critiques, see Sebastian Rosato, “The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory,” American Political Science Review 97 (2003); and Miriam Elman,
ed., Paths to Peace: Is Democracy the Answer? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
5. The idea that economic interdependence will reduce conflict and prevent war goes back to the eighteenth century. Extended discussions of the logic and evidence behind this claim include Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State (New York: Basic Books, 1986); and Dale C. Copeland, Economic Interdependence and War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
6. See especially Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
7. See “THE 1992 CAMPAIGN; Excerpts From Speech By Clinton on U.S. Role,” The New York Times, October 2, 1992.
8. Clinton, National Security Strategy, pp. i, iii.
9. See Samuel P. Huntington, “Why International Primacy Matters,” International Security 17, no. 4 (Spring 1993), p. 83.
10. Madeleine Albright, “Interview on NBC-TV The Today Show with Matt Lauer,” February 19, 1998, at https://1997-2001.state.gov/statements/1998/980219a.html.
11. The full quotation reads, “The land mine that protects civilization from barbarism is not parchment but power, and in a unipolar world, American power—wielded, if necessary, unilaterally.” See “Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World,” Irving Kristol Annual Lecture, American Enterprise Institute, February 10, 2004, at www.aei.org/publication/democratic-realism/print/.
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