H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-20 on Cox, Agonies of Empire61 min read

Agonies of Empire is the product of years of thinking about the United States. Michael Cox reflects on the recent past—the decades of what we still refer to as the “post–Cold War”—to understand the difficulties and limits of US global power.

H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum

Roundtable Review 16-20 

Michael Cox, Agonies of Empire: American Power from Clinton to Biden. Bristol University Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-1529221541.

30 December 2024 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-20 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo

Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Joshua Shifrinson
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Katie A. Ryan

 

Introduction by Susan Colbourn, Duke University. 2

Review by Paul C. Avey, Virginia Tech. 4

Review by Linde Desmaele, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 10

Review by John A. Thompson, University of Cambridge. 15

Response by Michael Cox, LSE. 21

 

Agonies of Empire is the product of years of thinking about the United States. Michael Cox reflects on the recent past—the decades of what we still refer to as the “post–Cold War”—to understand the difficulties and limits of US global power.

A collection of essays, Agonies of Empire is not a comprehensive or overarching analysis of US foreign policy and its evolution over the last three-plus decades. Nor does it attempt to make a grand or unifying argument about this period of recent history. Cox is up front about that. “The volume has no single message,” he writes in the preface, “than the obvious one that overcoming its communist rival created just as many challenges for the United States as opportunities” (xii). Paul Avey sees this as a “missed opportunity.” Linde Desmaele, for her part, sees Agonies as a book that recognizes that its central, animating question of why the United States has had such trouble managing international affairs in a period when it has wielded immense and largely unrivalled power has no simple, singular answer.

Since much of Agonies draws on or reproduces earlier writings, it offers an interesting, episodic snapshot of the times. John A. Thompson points to the value of these essays that “reflect the climate of opinion in which their subject took shape.” Avey, too, sees the benefits of capturing contemporary popular and scholarly debates for readers.

Each of the reviewers finds much to like about Cox’s Agonies. Desmaele, for instance, praises it as “a highly readable account that helps clarify the current state of America and its role in the world.”

Though one could object to labeling the United States an “empire”—certainly, Cox anticipates that critique in the first pages and touches on the subject below—the reviewers assembled here for the most part resist that siren song. Instead, they turn their attention to the connective tissue linking the various essays in this collection together.

In their reviews, Avey, Desmaele, and Thompson raise key questions about continuity, agency, and perspective. Was the foreign policy of President Donald J. Trump all that different from that of his immediate predecessors? Is a focus on the president the best way to understand US foreign policy and its evolution in recent decades? What are the implicit assumptions in focusing on the president? And how does Cox’s own perspective shape how he approaches and understands the recent past? Cox tackles each issue in his response while also reflecting about how much has changed in global politics in the time since the book went to press.

Like all the other essays in Agonies, the final, brief piece captures a snapshot in time that is indicative of the debates and anxieties of the day. Cox makes the case that the biggest challenge facing the United States in the early 2020s is not “a lack of power” but rather the trajectory and tenor of its domestic politics (158).

 

Contributors:

Michael Cox was appointed to a Chair in International Relations at the LSE in 2002. He was later a Founding Director of LSE IDEAS and is now Emeritus Professor in the Department of International Relations. He is the author, editor and co-editor of several books including works on the Cold War, US foreign policy, E.H. Carr and John Maynard Keynes. His most recent volume, Agonies of Empire: American Power from Clinton to Biden, appeared in 2022 (Bristol University Press) and is now translated into Italian published by Vita E Pensiero Press in Milan. He has also just brought out a volume with LSE Press entitled Afghanistan: Long War—Forgotten Peace and is now working on a study of the China-Russian relationship entitled Comrades? to be published by Polity Press in 2024.

Susan Colbourn is Associate Director of the Program in American Grand Strategy and Associate Research Professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She is the author of Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO (Cornell University Press, 2022).

Paul C. Avey is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. His research interests include nuclear politics, US foreign policy, and academic-policy engagement. He is the author of Tempting Fate: Why Nonnuclear States Confront Nuclear Opponents (Cornell University Press, 2019), and author or coauthor of articles in multiple academic and policy journals and sites.

Linde Desmaele is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the MIT Security Studies Program and Senior Associate Researcher at the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy (CSDS) at the Brussels School of Governance. Her research interests include US-Europe relations; the evolution of US grand strategy; deterrence and alliance interdependence; and the role of leaders in IR theory. She holds a PhD from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium), and is the author of Europe’s Evolving Role in U.S. Grand Strategy: Indispensable or Insufferable? (Routledge 2023).

John A. Thompson is an Emeritus Reader in American History and an Emeritus Fellow of St Catharine’s College at the University of Cambridge. His principal research interests have been American liberalism and US foreign policy. His publications include Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Woodrow Wilson (London: Longman, 2002), A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role (Cornell University Press, 2015) and numerous articles and book chapters.

Michael Cox has compiled a timely and compelling account of the United States in the world since the end of the Cold War. The book is part critique and part explanation of US policies. It considers domestic and international reactions to those policies as well as broader global developments. Several of the chapters have appeared previously. Set in a longer timeline they take the reader through the twists and turns of the past 30 years of great expectations dashed upon the rocks of reality. The prose is lively and quick. The book is full of astute observations and will be of interest to audiences in the Ivory Tower and beyond.

For Cox, the US imperial experience is a long one. He provides a brief account of the various forms of empire-building and management dating back to the founding of the Republic. At the same time, there was a general refusal, with notable exceptions, to accept the “empire” label (3, 63-74). The Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump administrations pursued an array of means to channel American power within this imperial context. No president is spared reproof, though Cox is most critical of Trump. Each administration faced its own agonies of empire. Policies at opposite ends of the spectrum fell short. For instance, problems arose when pursuing free trade or protectionism and asserting or withdrawing US military power. In the rest of this review I first outline Cox’s general narrative for each administration. I then turn to three questions that arise when comparing the chapters.

The first two post-Cold War presidents operated in an environment in which US dominance seemed clear. The world had just witnessed the spectacular Soviet collapse and the US victory against Iraq in 1991. Clinton advanced along three axes: strengthening US economic competitiveness and expanding global trade, conditional democracy promotion, and, in a combination of the first two, supporting the Russian state’s transition to market democracy (5). On the first two Clinton enjoyed mixed success. The third was not to be, with plenty of blame to go around.[1] Cox provides a compelling case for a Clinton grand strategy, albeit one with some internal contradictions. This is at odds with the general notion—fueled in part by Clinton’s occasional dismissal of the concept—that the administration lacked such a vision (5, 98-99). The Bush administration, by contrast, possessed a vision but lacked humility.[2] After the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, the United States “flexed its muscles” (57). Gone was the hesitancy to use force for democracy promotion. The assertion of imperial power, most importantly in the invasion of Iraq, was more likely to fail than not, however (55). The Bush approach ran up against the limits of power that are inherent in all empires, strained relations with NATO allies, and weakened US legitimacy in the eyes of others to exercise influence and leadership in global politics, thus making managing and sustaining empire more difficult (65, 97-102,73-75). If that was not enough, the war on terror proved divisive domestically and economically costly (74-75).

The next two US presidents were left to deal with an eroding US position. Obama attempted to reduce the US role in the Middle East, restore transatlantic ties, reset relations with Russia, and cautiously engage with and hedge against China’s rise. Yet by the time Obama left office the United States was still conducting military operations in the Middle East and the transatlantic relationship faced an uncertain future as the US pivoted to Asia (88-90, 102-105). Tensions rose with both China and Russia, and the two powers in turn developed “an increasingly close relationship” largely rooted in opposition to the United States (85-87, 90-94, 106-122, quotation at 109).

Trump’s election was one of the most shocking and consequential ones in US history (135). “Perhaps no single president since the Second World War,” Cox writes, “has had such a disruptive impact on American politics or on America’s position in the wider world as Trump” (147). In the Middle East Trump abandoned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was designed to constrain Iran’s nuclear program but generally continued Obama’s efforts to reduce the US role (138-139). The United States’ NATO allies had new reasons to fear the durability of US commitments (139-140). Trump sought warmer relations with Russia, which put him at odds with his own administration (142). The United States clearly identified China as a competitor. Globalization, climate change, and democracy and human rights promotion were all close to four letter words (142-143). Trump refused—and continues to refuse—to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election, sought to overturn the results, and precipitated a riot on the US Capitol.[3] By the end of Trump’s term, the United States itself was “more divided than ever” (137).

The chapters occasionally reference one another, but Cox provides little direct overarching narrative. “The volume has no single message to deliver other than the obvious one that overcoming its communist rival created just as many challenges for the United States as opportunities,” he writes (xii). This is a missed opportunity. The chapters relate to one another and inform the question Cox ends with: Is America back? The book would have benefited from a more robust opening or concluding chapter that tied the pieces together. In addition, the chapters themselves rarely incorporate new evidence or discussions that emerged since they were written. This approach has the benefit of allowing the reader a sense of the scholarly and public conversation at the time of each president, but comes at the expense of placing the chapters in a broader context. These are less critiques than an invitation for more. I conclude this essay with three questions that arise when putting the chapters in conversation with one another.

First, were the Clinton and Bush policies a major cause of Trump’s victory? Clinton and Bush—as well as Obama—pushed an array of free trade and neoliberal policies (14-16).[4] Clinton in particular adopted what Cox calls a “somewhat uncritical attitude towards globalization” (22, see also 83). True, elements of these policies predated Clinton and Bush. The point is that they embraced an agenda which contributed to domestic challenges in the forms of lost jobs and increasing inequality in the United States (84-87, 131-132). As Cox argues, Bush’s decision to invade Iraq further sapped US strength and sowed internal division. There is a good case to be made that Bush’s deficit-financed military buildups contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.[5] The legacy of the financial crisis and Iraq reduced confidence in the establishment (133). Trump adroitly exploited the resulting grievances, promising to lift up those left behind and pursue a foreign policy that sought to take care of Americans first.

Second, how unique was Trump’s foreign policy? Foreign policy was not identical across administrations. Yet Cox’s discussion provides ample reasons to see some policies as having been consistent with those of past presidents and/or rooted in broader Republican Party preferences.[6] To start, many in the Clinton administration worried about national economic decline and sought to win “the struggle for economic supremacy” through an “energetic, indeed aggressive, pursuit of US economic interests” (21). The Clinton and Trump approaches differed, yet it is worth noting that several of the critiques aimed at Clinton that Cox cites sound similar to those leveled at Trump. The Clinton team was accused of causing “growing tension in trade relations” through a “new and more confrontational approach;” adopting an agenda that was “at best incompetent and at worst a step down the slippery path towards protectionism;” and attempting to “beat the world into economic submission” (13-14). In the Middle East, Obama and Trump sought to reduce the US presence and critiqued the US invasion of Iraq (80, 133, 139).[7] Trump’s campaign against ISIS largely followed Obama’s script. Biden followed through on Trump’s February 2020 agreement with Taliban (139, 155). True, Trump abandoned the JCPOA.[8] Yet opposition to the deal was widespread in the Republican Party (90). Indeed, in 2015, 47 Republican Senators told Iran that the next president—and how many predicted it would be Trump?—could reverse the agreement “with the stroke of a pen.”[9] NATO allies in Europe were at odds with the United States over Iraq in 2003 and later worried about US commitments under Obama (96-105). Indeed, hardly a year goes by without some crisis leading observers to fret that NATO is on the precipice of collapse.[10] Complaining about allies’ defense spending is a time-honored presidential tradition. The shift toward a more confrontational approach to China predated Trump (85-87).[11] Biden has arguably adopted more assertive economic policies toward America’s great power competitor (144-146).[12] Even in relations with Russia and President Vladimir Putin—for whom Trump seemed to have a peculiar affinity—the differences across administrations can be overstated. As Cox points out, successive US presidents sought to engage or reset relations with Russia while the two sides pursued policies that raised suspicions within the other (40-54, 90-94, 142).

None of this is to say Trump was a normal president. As his former Secretary of Defense James Mattis put it, “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try.”[13] Most alarmingly, he sought to overturn a free and fair election at home.[14] As of this writing he is the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination for president, and opened a March 2023 campaign rally by celebrating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.[15] His actions on January 6 and other election interference efforts are at the root of multiple legal challenges that he faces.[16]

Third, how have various US agonies compared to others over the last thirty years? Cox is persuasive in his argument that successive US presidents have struggled and often failed to achieve their stated goals. That is arguably the best gauge for judging success. The United States is hardly alone in falling short of its ambitions, though. Japan was once seen as positioned to overtake the United States, at least economically, but the transition never took place. The European Community became the European Union and expanded to include more countries. Yet it remains a troubled union and in 2016 lost one of its largest members.[17] Populists are challenging liberal visions beyond just the United States. For example, Cox locates populist impulses animating voters for Brexit in the United Kingdom and Viktor Orbán in Hungary (125-134). It is worth mentioning that Cox balances his critique of populism with exploring the concerns animating populists. The point here is that populism is not unique to one country. Russia has struggled throughout the post-Cold War period. Its 2022 expansion of its invasion of Ukraine has been enormously costly in terms of blood and treasure, doing more to harm than advance its geopolitical position. China faces pushback abroad and massive internal problems.[18] China and Russia are moving closer together, but the United States retains far more friends. The “damaging” US withdrawal from Afghanistan has done little to weaken US alliances, which have expanded and/or deepened (158).[19] In the end, as Cox notes, the United States may be weary, but it remains “the only titan in town” (157).[20]

Perhaps, to borrow a phrase from the most recent president whom Cox discusses, we should judge the United States not against the Almighty but against the alternatives.[21] And, as Cox reminds us, “few great powers in history have ever refused to be greater still” (4).[22] The temptation to use power to shape the international environment in the absence of a structural counterweight is great.[23] This does not absolve US policy from criticism, and there is plenty to critique. The United States would very likely be in a better position today if it had more effectively executed its initiatives and avoided some altogether, most notably the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But placing American behavior in a broader perspective can temper expectations.

Cox concludes that the “US’s biggest foreign policy problem in the 21st century will not be caused by a lack of power…but by what has been going on in America itself” (158). I suspect he is correct. Understanding how past foreign policy choices contributed to those divisions is critical to overcoming them as well to designing a more effective foreign policy. I say more effective both because there have been successes and because no approach will ever be without tradeoffs and challenges. Such are the agonies of international politics.

In Agonies of Empire, Michael Cox brings together a series of his past writings on US foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. The stated purpose of the book is to explain why, in spite of America’s very great power, Washington finds it so difficult to manage the world around it. While some scholars see great consistency in US foreign policy over the past three decades, Cox takes a more nuanced view, and he appreciates the differences that have emerged from one president to the next.[24] Cox avoids the trap of oversimplifying complex issues and acknowledges that the book’s guiding question does not allow for a single, definitive answer. Nor does he put forward his own recommendations on how the United States should have conducted its post-Cold War international affairs. Instead, Cox traces how different US presidents, from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden, have grappled with the question of how to reorganize US foreign policy for an era in which it no longer has a well-defined rival around which to organize its affairs. Cox presents a very balanced account, and he argues that there have been both triumphs and setbacks. In examining them, he offers a highly readable account that helps clarify the current state of America and its role in the world. His book sheds light on why the once influential notion—that the American empire was unassailable—has become increasingly unconvincing to observers of US foreign policy. Agonies of Empire does not claim to cover all aspects of the complex object that is US foreign policy, but it highlights important issues for further exploration. In particular, Cox stresses the interdisciplinary and multifaceted nature of the United States’ evolving role in the world. Although one can disagree with some of his arguments on the administrations he analyzes, Cox’s book undeniably offers valuable insights into both past policies as well as the challenges that President Biden is facing today.

While there is no shortage of books on the United States’ post-Cold War foreign policy, Cox’s account stands out due to his ability to problematize how economic imperatives and international relations have shaped one another. His exploration of the relationship between geopolitics and geo-economics in US foreign policy is both sophisticated and accessible, which sets it apart from other recent works that often focus on one of these areas without exploring their interrelationships.[25]Agonies of Empire describes economics as both a means as well as an end of US foreign policy in. For one thing, Cox emphasizes the importance of domestic prosperity and a strong economic base for US foreign policy, or what he refers to as the “link between economics and empire.” He argues that maintaining “a healthy domestic base,” getting “a reasonable return” on overseas investment, and to the extent possible, transferring “the burden” of “imperial rule” to overseas satellites is and has remained crucial for most, if not all, “successful empires in history” (74). He describes how even at the height of US unipolarity in the early post-Cold war era, Clinton’s primary foreign policy task:

was not to go out an fight unnecessary wars abroad, but instead build the United States from the ground up through a series of well-coordinated economic measures—beginning with deficit reduction, continuing with a marked shift from defense spending to infrastructural investment in education and training, and moving forward over the longer term with government encouragement to key high-technology industries deemed to be vital to US power (9).

This was the case because these actions would enable the United States to compete more effectively in a globalizing economy and continue influence abroad by winning “the economic battle” (7).

Cox does not do a deep dive in the Biden Presidency—after all, the book was published in 2022—but his analysis does help contextualize the 2022 National Security Strategy’s commitment to rebuild the US “economy from the bottom up and the middle out…to sharpen our competitive edge for the future.”[26] The NSS then goes on to state that “around the world, nations are seeing once again why it’s never a good bet to bet against the United States of America.”[27] To be sure, Biden has advocated for a “foreign policy for the middle class” and he has emphasized the need to better align economic policies with the interests of US workers.[28] He has left no doubt, however, that he also views a resilient domestic economy as a critical tool for geopolitical competition. By examining related policies of previous post-Cold War presidents, Cox provides useful context to better understand Washington’s evolving view on the relationship between the United States economic power base and its behavior abroad.

At the same time, and relatedly, Cox’s narrative also explains how the international economy has always been an end of US foreign policy. He skillfully pushes back against the popular notion in the literature on US grand strategy that economics and foreign and security policies operate in separate realms, or the notion that international markets are somehow apolitical.[29] Instead, and as alluded to, Cox describes how Clinton’s approach was to advocate for economic globalization as the primary solution to address economic problems back at home. President G.W. Bush, for his part, employed geopolitical tools of warfighting to some extent with the aim of ensuring the safety of globalizing free market capitalism.[30] President Barack Obama attempted to broaden US economic influence in Asia, such as through the Transpacific Partnership (TPP). President Donald Trump, finally, connected economic globalization to China’s growth and viewed the Chinese economy as a threat to US national security. He also started what has been referred to as a “trade war” against China that was meant to put an end to what he saw as China taking advantage of the United States economically.[31] Taken as a whole, Cox’s chapters trace how in recent decades, subsequent US presidents have upheld the idea that an open global economy and free trade are the best method for safeguarding US security and prosperity. However, since the Trump administration, there seems to be an increasing agreement that this is no longer the case. The outcome of this shift in thinking remains uncertain. Again, Agonies of Empire provides the tools one needs to grasp the current US role in the world, and the state of the US-China relationship, especially. By discussing the evolving US vision for the international economy, in particular, Cox raises an important issue that requires further investigation. The book also cautions against giving more priority to tackling economic competitors overseas than resolving domestic economic issues in the US.

Like any book, however, Agonies of Empire also has weaknesses. Cox hangs his story together by organizing the book by presidents. Rather than relying on the popular practice of engaging in a category-mapping exercise of US presidents and their foreign policies, Cox avoids such rigid classification. This allows for a more nuanced and flexible analysis that is unburdened by the limitations of trying to fit complex empirical data into predetermined typologies that often fail to reflect the complexities of the real world. The decision to focus on presidents as drivers of foreign policy nonetheless carries certain theoretical assumptions that require further substantiation. A focus on individuals also raises methodological issues that Cox does not explicitly address. The question of the degree to which political leaders control events or are rather controlled by events has of course been a long-standing issue in the field and remains a challenging one to solve.[32] The most straightforward way to establish presidents as causal forces is to think about whether different presidents follow different policies in similar situations, and whether they behave similarly even when the circumstances change.[33] This is no easy feat and any such exercise will inevitably be imperfect. In addition, there are important data constraints for anyone writing about current events or recent history. Important records and archives often remain classified, and internal documents that could offer additional perspectives on foreign policy decisionmaking are not readily accessible.

Without seeking to downplay the scale of the limitations outlined above, Cox could still have addressed more explicitly the relative weight he places on the role of president’s as opposed to other factors such as domestic politics or international constraints. In his discussion of Clinton’s push to put the United States at the center of a regionalized world economy, for instance, he writes that “Clinton was building here on an agenda sketched out by Bush […and] he pursued this particular objective with much greater determination and purpose” (10). While the remainder of the chapter tells a compelling story about Clinton’s energetic pursuit of US economic interests, the reader is left wondering just how much Clinton differed from his predecessor in this regard. Cox also opens his chapters about the Trump administration with the statement that “perhaps no single president since the Second World War has had such a disruptive impact on American politics or on America’s position in the wider world as Trump” (147). At the same time, he also appears to argue that Trump was both a symptom as well as a cause of a “wider global phenomenon known as modern populism” (147). He concludes his overview of the different understandings of populism, which all in some way reflect a deep suspicion of the prevailing establishment, with the statement that “someone like Trump espousing the views he did was simply waiting to happen” (132). This leaves the reader wondering about how much Trump himself is to be held responsible for the course of US foreign policy during his presidency. After all, without true agency, one cannot logically hold US presidents responsible.[34] In fact, Cox’s book triggers an important follow-up question about why certain policy ideas gain traction whereas others do not. It would certainly be unreasonable to expect him to comprehensively address this question over the course of a mere 190 pages. However, in the absence of suggestions or propositions regarding the matter, the reader is left wanting more.

Interestingly, Cox’s discussion of the Sino-Russian relationship appears to downplay the so-called first image (or the role of individual leaders) as a significant causal factor.[35] The book includes a full chapter of the evolving relationship between Moscow and Beijing, which is also a significant topic of discussion in Western punditry. Cox’s argument here is twofold. On the one hand, he makes the case that the relationship between Russia and China has become increasingly close over the post-Cold War period. On the other hand, and more provocatively, Cox finds this development to be relatively unsurprising. Although his discussion is empirically rich and well-written, the reader is eventually left on the fence. This is the case because it is not entirely clear what Cox considers to be the driving forces of this strong relationship. While he first implies that the two nations’ shared dislike of unipolarity is a major factor, he also discusses their concerns about regime security and dislike of the liberal domestic regime of the unipole (the United States).

This raises the question of how and whether their relationship would be different if faced with a non-liberal unipole. Additionally, it is notable that Russian president Vladimir Putin, who is a major factor in Cox’s discussion of the US-Russia relationship during the Clinton era in chapter 3, is not heavily emphasized in the discussion of the Sino-Russian relationship. The lack of a clear theoretical explanation of how these different levels of analysis intersect leaves room for doubt about Cox’s argument, and one may caution against the risk of cherry-picking examples that confirm one’s own priors. Stated differently, one requires expertise in order to evaluate Cox’s claims about the Sino-Russian axis. For example, Cox describes how Beijing has strengthened its relationship with Russia since the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Alternatively, observers who are more skeptical about the Sino-Russian relationship have pointed out that China’s support for Russia is by no means as strong as the support the West has given to Ukraine.[36] The key issue here is not that Cox’s assessment is wrong. Rather, it is merely that the chapter does not provide sufficient guidance for lay readers to navigate the discussion on the Sino-Russian axis with much certainty.

In short, Agonies of Empire builds on some assumptions that could have been made more explicit. In spite of those minor quibbles, the book is a major contribution and a great read. Cox’s book offers valuable insights and raises new avenues for research and questions for scholars to explore. It is an extremely useful reference for any observer of US foreign policy, and provides both great guidance as well as inspiration for future related work.

Michael Cox has for many years been one of the leading British commentators on world politics, and particularly on US foreign policy. Most of this book is based on essays published between 1995 and 2017. So although it does, as the subtitle suggests, constitute a sort of history of American policy over the last 30 years, this does not take the form of a continuous, comprehensive narrative. Rather, each chapter focuses on a particular issue or theme that policymakers at the time saw as central. They are all based on wide reading in a variety of contemporary sources, primarily public commentary in books and newspaper and journal articles but also some congressional hearings and administration statements. Throughout, Cox offers his own appraisal of the decisions policymakers made, and of the internal debates that gave rise to them. These appraisals are informed by his knowledge and understanding of the intellectual atmosphere from which policy emerged but also reflect his own outlook. The prime role of Presidents is emphasized, with the book divided into five parts entitled successively “Clinton,” “Bush Jnr.,” “Obama,” “Trump,” and “Biden.”

An advantage of reviewing history by re-visiting essays written at the time is that the chapters reflect the climate of opinion in which their subject took shape rather than a later perspective. This is especially striking in the first of the chapters on the Clinton presidency, which highlights the administration’s initial focus on improving America’s economic competitiveness, particularly in response to what was seen as a “high-technology trade conflict with Japan”—which, Cox points out, was a concern expressed in several of the acclaimed books of the time (11).[37] As Cox portrays it, the promotion of trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) and the Uruguay round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was part of the effort to enhance America’s international competitiveness. In the second chapter, which probes the relationship of the Clinton administration’s promotion of globalization to the nation’s historic commitment to the extension of democracy, Cox suggests that it was the desire to identify a basic foreign policy objective to fill the void left by the end of the Cold War that led, particularly through the advocacy of National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, to the adoption of “democratic enlargement” as an explicit goal.

The third chapter on the Clinton administration concerns a recurring subject in the book as a whole—the relationship of the United States with post-Soviet Russia. Helpfully, it takes the form of a step-by-step narrative of the evolution of thinking in Washington which shows the extent to which policymaking was responsive to both changing perceptions of external developments and contending domestic attitudes. Cox brings out the combination of optimism and deeply embedded assumptions that underlay the initial aspiration to establish what Clinton’s adviser, Strobe Talbott, in 1993 termed a “strategic partnership with Russian reform.” It was hoped that this would not only turn Russia into a market democracy but also produce a harmonious bilateral relationship that would enable the United States to substantially reduce its defense spending (40-44). On an issue that has been the subject of some historiographical dispute, Cox writes that “a promise it seems had been made to Moscow that NATO would not be expanded eastwards.” (46, also 93)[38].

However, after the 1993 Duma elections had starkly revealed the unpopularity in Russia of the market reforms (which had not, Cox observes, attracted “very much material aid” from the United States [42]), the administration gave ground to domestic critics of its loyalty to Boris Yeltsin, such as former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who advocated building stronger relations with Russia’s neighbors, including other former Soviet republics. This led to the decision in 1994 to admit Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to full NATO membership. The second half of the 1990s brought further deterioration of the situation in Russia from the American point of view with conflicts in Chechnya, the stalling of the reform process, and the collapse of the nation’s financial system in August 1998. Although Vladimir Putin, on acceding to power at the turn of the century, undertook to continue both the reform process and cooperation with the West, the emergence of “crony capitalism,” and Putin’s commitment to rebuilding Russia’s power and prestige clearly signaled the failure of the administration’s initial aspirations. But Cox’s concluding judgement on this outcome is strikingly detached from those prevalent in Washington: “Russia was not lost by the West. Rather, Russia found its way after a decade of humiliation and setbacks” (41).

The two chapters on the presidency of George W. Bush are naturally centered on the response to the attacks of 9/11, 2001. The first recalls how the shock of the attacks gave rise to the feeling that “the country would never be the same again” (60). Cox’s brief review of the response brings out two central features. One is its essentially military character. The sense of a continuing threat generated bipartisan support not only for a huge increase in the Pentagon’s budget but also for retaliatory action. The targets for such action swiftly broadened from al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that harbored it to other “‘rogue states’ …which had no intention of attacking the United States,” most immediately Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (contrary, Cox notes, to “much advice from more cautious analysts—including many in the international relations profession”) (61).The second feature of the response that Cox emphasizes was its unilateralism—a general characteristic of US policymaking at most times, but one that “some in the Bush administration appeared to have taken to an altogether different level, especially those who worked closely with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld” (62).

The second, longer, chapter on the Bush presidency begins by observing that “long before the election of George W. Bush, the intellectual ground had been prepared for a more aggressive policy” by “a new cohort of conservative intellectuals.” Cox is particularly interested in the fact that some of these writers challenged “the deep resistance by many Americans of thinking of the United States in terms of empire” (64-65).[39] As indicated in the title of the book, Cox himself believes that this is the proper term for the role that the United States has played in world affairs, at least since 1945. In this chapter, in which he expresses his own opinions more extensively than elsewhere in this collection, Cox defends this view against common criticisms of it.[40] In response to the objection that, in Dominic Lieven’s words, “there has to be some sort of direct rule over the dominion for the power to be classified as an empire,” he makes two points. One is that historically the United States has expanded the territorial scope of its rule, principally in North America but also in Hawaii and the Philippines. Secondly, Cox invokes the concept of ‘indirect rule” and argues that “empires can assume many complex forms; and a study of the most developed would indicate that they have invariably combined different forms of rule” (69). If such informal influence has its limits, territorial and otherwise, “no empire worth the name has ever been able to determine all outcomes at all times within its own imperium” (61). To the objection that the United States from its origins has been committed to an anti-imperialist ideology and promoted national self-determination, Cox both points to the many exceptions that there have been in practice to this policy, and invokes the authority of “the great American historian William Appleman Williams” in support of the observation that “this moral purpose more often than not worked to its own particular advantage” (70). Cox’s concurrence with neo-conservative portrayals of the United States as an empire does not lessen his criticism of the 2003 Iraq War and its consequences: “far from the ‘new’ imperial strategy making the empire more secure …it has, if anything, made it a good deal weaker” (73).

The next chapter reviews the range of problems that Barack Obama faced in the aftermath of not only the Iraq war but also the 2008 financial crisis. As elsewhere, Cox links US policymaking to the evolution of opinion in contemporary commentary. Obama came into office when books that attracted a lot of attention were stressing the transformational nature of globalization. Consequently, Cox suggests, he “appeared to see the world less in terms of a ‘zero-sum game’ fought out between rising and falling powers—the Classical Realist view—and more in terms of an interconnected order in which all nations had a stake” (80). But Cox points out that this approach proved hard to sustain in several areas. Initially good relations with China (symbolized by an exchange of presidential visits) came under pressure both from an increasingly assertive Chinese attitude, especially in the South China Sea, and from those at home who blamed American job losses on Chinese competition. The administration gave ground to domestic, mostly Republican, critics by adopting a somewhat harder line and announcing a “strategic pivot” to the Asia-Pacific region in 2010. This was intended to reduce America’s involvement in the Middle East, but the difficulty of doing this was increased by the Arab Spring in 2011. In the face of the conflict this gave rise to between Americans’ sympathy with other people’s desire for liberty and democracy and the interest of the United States in stability, the administration, Cox points out, adopted contrasting approaches in different places, backing regime change in Egypt (initially) and Libya, but not in Bahrain, Yemen or, in an active way, Syria. Putin resented the western intervention in Libya and this contributed to ending the cooperation with Moscow that Obama had achieved in the early years of his presidency. In recounting the further worsening of relations as the conflict in Ukraine escalated from 2013, Cox again shows some understanding of Putin’s perspective that “Russian interests had been ignored time and again since 1989” as “the US enlarged NATO” and “the EU had tried to pull Ukraine into the Western fold” (93).

The remaining chapters in this part address particular themes. The first surveys the evolution of the Atlantic alliance since the end of the Cold War, which had initially and for many decades served as its principal rationale. As Cox recalls, some had hoped that the threat of Islamic terrorism would “serve a similar purpose” (99). But even sympathetic European commentators like Michael Howard critiqued the whole concept of a “war on terror,” while the serious split over the Iraq war led the neo-conservative Robert Kagan to discern a fundamental difference of mentality between American “Martians” and European “Venutians.”[41] Relations improved with the election of Obama, who was greeted with “quite extraordinary enthusiasm” on his early visits to Europe (102). But this warmth was not reciprocated on the other side of the Atlantic, where long-standing grievances about the inadequate contribution of other countries to NATO were accentuated by a sense, both among the general public and among policymakers who were increasingly focused on Asia, that Europe now mattered less than it had.

Global geopolitics are the subject of the following chapter, which begins by recalling the divergence among American commentators about the rapid economic growth of China, with the optimistic views of “economists”s and liberal International Relations scholars contrasted with those of Realists who doubted that China would be able “to rise peacefully” (107-8). However, the bulk of the essay (originally written in 2018) is about “why it is that China and Russia have managed to form an increasingly close relationship in spite of what most experts predicted might happen” (109). The main bond, clearly, is a common hostility to “the liberal West” and the world order it has sought to uphold (114-17). Cox is enough of a Realist to see this as an example of “classic balancing behaviour,” but interestingly he also links it to parallel memories of World War II, and more particularly to a shared reading by the two regimes of more recent history (109). According to this, the collapse of Soviet power (and the Tiananmen Square demonstration in 1989) “were all part of a larger Western plan to ensure the West’s and the United States’ continued primacy”—a plan aided by the naïve folly of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev (112-113).

The following chapter suggests that, from a different perspective, Cox has some sympathy for the view that the end of the Cold War had negative consequences. Seeing Donald Trump’s surprise election victory in 2016 as part of a “populist” revolt in many countries against globalization and other aspects of “this new neoliberal order,” he links these phenomena to “the enormous impact long term that the failure of communism and the collapse of the USSR has had (and still has) on the world in which we live.” Before then, “there seemed to be a kind of balance in the world: some built-in limit to the operation of the free market.” Once this had been “swept aside,” in domestic as in foreign policy, “hubris and over-confidence” had led to the feeling that “anything was now possible, and even if it caused pain to some, this was a price worth paying for the general good, and anyway there was now no serious opposition. Or any alternative” (132). But if Cox shows understanding of the hostility directed at a self-confident and condescending cosmopolitan elite, this does not lead him to take a more indulgent view of Trump’s presidency. His review of Trump’s foreign policy in the final substantive chapter of the book concludes by pointing out that it left “the US in a more isolated position by 2020 than at any time since the end of the Second World War” (148). A short chapter appraising President Joe Biden’s early conduct of foreign policy (clearly written after the retreat from Afghanistan but before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) rounds off this interesting volume.

Much of the interest derives from the distinctive perspective from which Cox views and judges the events and policies described. One aspect of that perspective is that it is that of a non-American; despite his extensive familiarity with the American scene, Cox retains a certain detachment from it. Relatedly, he is better able than most US commentators to understand and portray the way American foreign policy is seen in other countries, particularly by states that are hostile to it. A less positive aspect of this external perspective are traces of the resentful skepticism with which members of the British elite (like many in Paris) long regarded an American idealism that is seen as being self-serving as well as self-righteous.

The most basic feature of Cox’s viewpoint is a self-conscious and explicit Realism. This seems to owe less to theory than to certain man-of-the-world assumptions about the character of international politics. Running through many of the chapters is criticism of the liberal illusions on which US policy has been based. As well as specific examples, such as those shaping policy towards Russia after the Cold War and neo-conservative aspirations to bring democracy to the Middle East, are more general ones like the Clinton administration’s belief “in spite of what many saw as irrefutable evidence to the contrary,…that there was a positive, rather than an ambiguous or even non-existent, connection between capitalism and democracy” or the “cozy assumptions” discredited by 9/11 that globalization would diminish international conflict (33, 57). Cox’s apparent belief that it is in the nature of states (or at least great powers) to seek to expand their influence may lead him to a better understanding of the outlook and behavior of illiberal regimes like those of China and Russia, and a less moralistic attitude towards them than that of most American commentators, but it serves to limit and somewhat distort his portrayal of US policy, and particularly of its history.

This is most apparent in the four-page introduction on “The Rise of an Empire” in which Cox seeks to discredit what he describes as “a comforting narrative in which America, we are told, became ever more powerful but without meaning or wanting to” (4). Adopting, with full acknowledgement, the interpretation of Williams, Andrew J. Bacevich, and other progressive historians (as Robert Kagan and other neo-cons did), Cox portrays the United States as seeking throughout its history to expand its power beyond North America.[42] Thus, he interprets the Monroe Doctrine as “laying claim to the whole of South America,” and states that in 1898, after “President McKinley enthusiastically waged war against Spain,” the United States acquired “the territory” of Cuba as well as Puerto Rico and the Philippines (3). As well as sharing American progressives’ dislike of the commonly self-congratulatory character of the traditional narrative, Cox’s rejection of it also reflects his assumptions about the uniformity of states’ behavior. “Like all dynamic powers in history,” he writes, “as soon at it began to ‘rise,’ America very quickly started to look for new fields to conquer,” and it did so for reasons that were “really no different from those supporting European expansion elsewhere” (3-4).

But one does not need to attribute special virtue to Americans, or to their ideology, to appreciate that a country benefitting from such a high degree of self-sufficient security and prosperity as the United States did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had little incentive to incur the costs of exercising power abroad.[43] In that context, the anti-imperialist ideology that Cox discounts as an influence on US actions was nevertheless a crucial element that policymakers had to take account of, particularly if they sought to muster political support for an active foreign policy. Cox recognizes this in his observation that President Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic rhetoric (so castigated by early Realists) was better suited to securing domestic support for his foreign policy goals than would have been “dry talk of a clearly defined American national interest” (36-39).

The problem would seem to arise from the attempt to identify a single interpretative thread for the whole history of US foreign policy. More persuasive is the earlier historiographical orthodoxy that the cumulative effect of the two World Wars and the Cold War wrought a “revolution” from a tradition of non-involvement to full-scale global engagement.[44] Whether the result is appropriately described as an “empire” is largely a lexicographical issue, but it is hard to argue with Cox’s contention that the sheer power that the United States has possessed since 1945 has generated in Washington “its own kind of imperial outlook in which other states are invariably regarded as problems to be managed, while the United States is seen as having an indispensable role to perform” (72).

In essence, the essays in this book by a detached but well-disposed observer provide a shrewd analysis and appraisal of some of the ways in which Washington has performed this self-appointed role since the end of the Cold War.

Response by Michael Cox, LSE

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