What is the optimal role for the United States in contemporary geopolitics? Robert Lieber, a distinguished emeritus professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University and a specialist on American foreign policy, gives a succinct answer in the title to a slender but pithy monograph: Indispensable Nation. Lieber’s title borrows from the moniker that President Bill Clinton coined and that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made famous.[1] As Lieber sees it, we live in exceedingly dangerous times, and there is no geopolitical problem of significance that will get better with less involvement from the United States. The world requires American leadership to preserve what is worth preserving and to change what needs to be changed. The benign form of “disruption” that the United States has provided is preferable to the malign disruptions of Russia, China, Iran and other states that are hostile to the American led international order. If American political leaders and the American political process do not provide the requisite global leadership, the turbulence is likely to worsen in ways that harm American interests. In short, whatever its shortcomings, American leadership is preferable to the plausible alternatives on offer.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Roundtable Review 15-28
Robert J. Lieber, Indispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in a Turbulent World. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022. ISBN: 978030025695-6.
12 February 2024 |PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt15-28 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Diane Labrosse
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Bethany Keenan
Contents
Introduction by Peter D. Feaver, Duke University. 2
Review by Edwin Martini, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. 5
Review by Kori Schake, American Enterprise Institute. 11
Review by John A. Thompson, University of Cambridge. 14
Response by Robert J. Lieber, Georgetown University. 19
Introduction by Peter D. Feaver, Duke University
What is the optimal role for the United States in contemporary geopolitics? Robert Lieber, a distinguished emeritus professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University and a specialist on American foreign policy, gives a succinct answer in the title to a slender but pithy monograph: Indispensable Nation. Lieber’s title borrows from the moniker that President Bill Clinton coined and that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made famous.[1] As Lieber sees it, we live in exceedingly dangerous times, and there is no geopolitical problem of significance that will get better with less involvement from the United States. The world requires American leadership to preserve what is worth preserving and to change what needs to be changed. The benign form of “disruption” that the United States has provided is preferable to the malign disruptions of Russia, China, Iran and other states that are hostile to the American led international order. If American political leaders and the American political process do not provide the requisite global leadership, the turbulence is likely to worsen in ways that harm American interests. In short, whatever its shortcomings, American leadership is preferable to the plausible alternatives on offer.
As he makes clear in the very first paragraph, however, by leadership Lieber is not suggesting that the US police every corner of the globe; nor is this a manifesto for sending combat troops into every hotspot (1). In this way, Lieber is at pains to distance himself from the caricature of a “three year old with a hammer who sees the world as a nail,” a cartoon image of advocates of American leadership and the recent record of American foreign policy that is often painted by academic realists and other advocates of “restraint.”[2]
Instead, Lieber sets out to make the case for a prudent American leadership, one that is wise in the tools it uses and skeptical about the siren song of neo-isolationism. Lieber recognizes that the audience might not be reflexively receptive to this message given the uneven record of American successes and setbacks of the past several decades. Accordingly, he spends a significant part of the book explaining how and why the unipolar moment that was ushered in by the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union gave way to the dangerous mix of great power competition and the possibility of a new Cold War (or worse). In his telling, American leaders made many missteps, but the important ones were rarely the mistakes that the “restrainers” emphasize (173-178). On the contrary, Lieber argues, the geopolitical situation got worse every time American presidents opted for policies that had the effect of wishing problems away by doing less or making concessions to adversaries. Here Lieber is bipartisan in his judgments, critiquing President Barack Obama for his controversial deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and his abandonment of Iraq (173-177) and President Donald Trump for the chaos within his administration (181) and his deference to Russia’s dictatorial president Vladimir Putin (187).
Not unlike Lieber’s evaluation of the American foreign policy record, the reviewers in this roundtable find things to praise and things to criticize. In toto, they credit Lieber for writing an intriguing book that distills decades of history and foreign policy debate into a coherent and engaging argument. But they each identify aspects of that argument that leave them unpersuaded, thus prompting Lieber to make one more attempt in his response.
John A. Thompson finds Lieber to be “clearly in command of all the relevant data” and the book to be “clearly written” and “vigorously argued.” But Thompson is ultimately not persuaded because, he avers, Lieber presents something of a lawyer’s brief (my words, not his) in avoiding the hard facts that count against his case. Thompson argues that Lieber’s narrative does not fully appreciate the extent to which America’s own behavior has undermined the liberal international order—or at least made American appeals to that order sound hypocritical and off-putting to global audiences who might be wary about American primacy.
Kori Schake’s review is a bit more generous in its praise, suggesting that the book “will be a terrific teaching book for courses on American foreign policy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” She finds Lieber’s historical narrative mostly reliable, though she wishes he had dug into the distant past more fully, and she dings him for buying into the myth of a “golden age in the misty past when the US was prudent, strategic, and reliable.” In her telling, many of the deficiencies Lieber identifies with recent American foreign policy are matched, if not eclipsed, by greater deficiencies in an earlier age. Schake’s pessimism about the past allows her to be optimistic about the future. And she asks Lieber to address John Ikenberry’s question about whether the liberal international order can persist without American power.[3]
Edwin Martini credits Lieber for updating his traditional defense of American power in light of new evidence and developments. However, Martini suggests that Lieber errs in identifying “false equivalencies” between the flaws of the far left and far right wings of the foreign policy spectrum. Martini finds Lieber’s framework more useful as an interpreter of the more distant past rather than of the last decade or so, let alone as a guide to the conduct of American foreign policy today and to the future. In particular, Martini does not share Lieber’s optimism about American power and the capacity for that power to be used to good end. Martini offers a conventional critique of the Iraq war and accuses Lieber’s more benign revisionist take to be based on a “very selective reading.” Martini argues that some of the contemporary challenges at the top of the policy agenda today, such as cybersecurity and climate change, require a very different approach than the one advocated by Lieber.
In his response Lieber rightly thanks the reviewers for their many favorable comments and pushes back on a couple critiques. He suggests that it is Thompson’s account which underplays an inconvenient fact, namely the malign disruptions to the international order pursued by President Xi Jinping’s China. He takes up Schake’s challenge and states, categorically, that there will never be a satisfactory global order that does not need American power. And he chides Martini for indulging in a reductio ad iraqum that exaggerates the importance of that strategic choice.
Contributors:
Robert J. Lieber is Emeritus Professor of Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University and has written or edited eighteen books on US foreign policy. He has also advised presidential campaigns, the State Department, and the drafters of National Intelligence Estimates.
Peter D. Feaver is a Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke University. He is Director of the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy and Co-PI of the America in the World Consortium. Feaver is author of Thanks for Your Service: The Causes and Consequences of Public Confidence in the US Military (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Edwin Martini is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, where he serves as Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. He is the author or editor of several books on the history and legacies of US militarism, including Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty (2012), and, with David Kieran, At War: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (2018).
Kori Schake leads the foreign and defense policy team at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of Safe Passage: the Transition from British to American Hegemony (Harvard University Press, 2017).
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.
Review by Edwin Martini, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
In Indispensable Nation, Robert Lieber argues that the United States, despite its flaws, challenges, and missteps in foreign policy, remains the indispensable nation, and that its leadership is critical to maintaining a stable and prosperous world order. Lieber asks three key questions in his book. The first is whether America is still indispensable. Lieber argues that indeed it is, and while its capacity is not unlimited, there is simply no other nation, or group of nations, that is capable of filling this role. Second, he asks whether the United States still has the capacity to play this role. Lieber argues that indeed it does, although the limitations of and constrains on that capacity are greater than they have been in quite some time. Finally, he asks, what the consequences would be of the United States becoming “unwilling or unable” to play this role. The alternatives, of which he explores several, would effectively lead to chaos. “Without U.S. leadership, the world would have been poorer, dirtier, less free, and less secure,” Lieber writes (128). “Without an active and engaged America,” in future years, “the world will be more disorderly, less prosperous, less free, less democratic, and more violent (8).”
In tackling these questions, Indispensable Nation builds on arguments and themes that will be familiar to readers of Lieber’s previous work, including Power and Willpower in the American Future and The American Era: Power and Strategy for the 21st Century. They emphasize the importance of American power and leadership in maintaining global stability and promoting democratic values, while recognizing the challenges and complexities of the post-Cold War world.[4] In these works, Lieber argues forcefully against the concept of America in decline, and particularly against the idea that such a decline, real or imagined, is inevitable. Pointing to its geography and demography as well as its history, he argues consistently across his body of work that the United States has been, and continues to be, uniquely positioned to lead on the global stage. Indispensable Nation thus connects directly to arguments by International Relations scholars such as G. John Ikenberry in predicting that the United States will maintain its hegemonic hold on the global system, even if Ikenberry places greater emphasis on international institutions and cooperation and less on US leadership than does Lieber. The book also engages with a diverse range of largely realist critics who hold that the current international order led by the United States is doomed to fail. This group includes scholars such as John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, and Andrew Bacevich, who approach the problem differently but largely agree that US post-Cold War foreign policy has been marked by overreach and hubris and that the United States should seek greater balance in its policies and in the international order overall.[5]
In the decade or two since Lieber’s previous works arrived, the world has changed significantly. It has moved further away from the Cold-War mindset that informed so much of the conventional foreign policy wisdom of the last century (despite recent events that sometimes suggest a renewed Cold War). China’s international role and strength have grown exponentially, with its leaders presenting the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a true competitor, if not a potential replacement, for the role of the US as the indispensable nation. And, in arguably the most significant development that shapes the arguments presented in this book, we have witnessed a profound polarization of American politics over the last decade in particular, even if the primary causes were much longer in the making. To his credit, Lieber not only acknowledges these changes but addresses them throughout the book. Even so, I remain unpersuaded by some of his specific characterizations of those changes, particularly in what I see as his drawing of false equivalencies between what he calls the “progressive left” and the “anti-globalist right” (159), and between the words and actions of presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
Lieber’s narrative is at its best when looking backwards, particularly to the days of the Cold War and beyond. He uses historical context to illuminate the present moment, reminding readers that many of the events we have witnessed over the past decade, while seemingly unprecedented (and constantly being described as such), are in fact not. Similar contextual approaches, along with a sprinkling of relevant data, also help to show convincingly that despite China’s remarkable rise over the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it remains in many ways a far cry from the economic and military capacity of the United States. What is not as clear, however, is the usefulness of Lieber’s approach to help craft prescriptions for the future, including the ultimate question of whether, and how, the United States should lead in an increasingly polarized world, both domestically and internationally. At a time when the very concept of “consensus” seems to be a pipedream, it is not clear that the lessons of the past necessarily offer us a way forward. In assessing the last decade in particular, Lieber often draws questionable parallels between the shortcomings of liberal and conservative actors. His narrative fails to move beyond broad and overly optimistic solutions that speak to a worldview that is rooted in the past century rather than designed for the next. The book thus does not offer a full accounting of US actions and policies that have led to questioning and threatening its legitimacy as a global leader. Whatever the evidence might suggest in looking back on US global leadership from 1945 to 2000, there is little to suggest that the US is prepared to lead on these issues in the decades ahead.
Lieber offers a very selective reading of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. A good portion of the argument rests on the idea that the United States is a largely benevolent power that promotes democracy and human rights around the world, and which ultimately promotes the stability of the “rules-based” international system (41). He contrasts this at several points with “revisionist” powers such as Russia, China, and Iran, which make “cynical use of the international order only when it serves the state’s interest, combined with the effort to subvert or even dismantle that order entirely” (63). It is not at all clear that China is trying to “dismantle” the current order, certainly not in the same way that President Vladimir Putin’s Russia appears to be, although it is fair to suggest that the Chinese have selectively engaged globally when it suits them. But the point here is that the same is certainly true of the United States. There can be little question that the profoundly misguided invasion and occupation of Iraq showed that the US government was willing to use military force to pursue its own misguided interests, even if it meant ignoring international law and disregarding the opinions of other nations and a large segment of its own population. That ill-fated decision undermined, and continues to undermine, US moral authority and credibility on the world stage, making it harder to persuade other countries to support its strategic objectives.
The narrative does not account fully for the actors who drove that reckless decision. The war on Iraq was most certainly a bipartisan affair, with most leading Democrats joining Republicans in supporting military action. But Lieber suggests that the strategy that led to the invasion of Iraq was a response to the attacks of 11 September 2001, rather than the outcome of the neoconservative approach to foreign policy that was being developed well before 9/11. Lieber describes the National Security Strategy that was released in September 2002 as a response to “dramatically changed circumstances,” rather than the radical doctrine of preemptive warfare and unchallenged military supremacy that it was, which groups like the Project for the American Century and many of its key leaders had been developing for years (168-9). Similarly, the narrative adopts the passive voice in Lieber’s characterization of the woefully inept planning and execution of the ensuring occupation of Iraq. In his telling, the Bush administration “was unable to quickly withdraw American troops” while the “intervention became a quagmire,” as though the administration did not willfully ignore the warnings of such possibilities, most notably by its own Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Chalking such missteps up to events, rather than ideology and politics, leads to a partial accounting of recent history. It also fails to offer a full reckoning with how and why the United States invaded Iraq and how and why it failed, which are critical to the ongoing challenges to, and questions about, American global leadership in the twenty-first century.
Lieber’s narrative flows smoothly when it is focused on more traditional forms of conflict, such as the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and the roles of the United States in those conflicts. And while more traditional conflicts, including the current one caused by the Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine, or ongoing geopolitical tensions with China over Taiwan and other parts of the Pacific, are sure to continue, it is the non-traditional, newer, and emerging security threats of the next several decades that present the greatest challenges to American leadership on the global stage.
Consider first the still emerging, rapidly changing, and increasingly complicated nexus of cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence, and autonomous weaponry. Any considerations of security and warfare for the next fifty years need to account for such factors. Lieber does make several references to cyberattacks, but most often in the context of Russian and Chinese efforts to disrupt American elections and prey upon the political divisions in the US. He does not address the ethical and strategic implications of these emerging areas that will almost certainly pose major tests of US global leadership in the twenty-first century.
The rapid development of autonomous weapons presents a new security challenge, with the potential to lead to a new arms race and an increased risk of conflict, which will only be further exacerbated by a parallel arms race in artificial intelligence. Moreover, the use of autonomous weapons raises ethical questions about the use of force and the potential for human rights abuses. A report from Human Rights Watch warns that the development of autonomous weapons could lead to a “global arms race to develop them, leading to new and dangerous forms of warfare, as well as increasing the likelihood of grave human rights abuses.” The report further notes that the use of autonomous weapons could undermine the principles of distinction and proportionality, which are central to international humanitarian law.[6] The lack of international regulation and governance of autonomous weapons also poses significant challenges. While the United Nations has been discussing the regulation of autonomous weapons for more than a decade, progress has been slow, and there is no emerging consensus. The development of autonomous weapons is a global phenomenon and requires international cooperation and leadership to address the ethical and strategic implications of these technologies. How is the United States positioned to lead on this issue, particularly given its well-deserved reputation for remote, drone-based warfare? How does this issue relate to Lieber’s larger concerns with the historical commitment of the United States (which had admittedly been unevenly applied over time) to human rights?
Similarly, while Lieber makes note of climate change at several points in his book, it is largely through a focus on the 2015 Paris Accords and the shortcomings of the Trump administration’s diplomacy and leadership in ending the US commitment to that agreement. What Indispensable Nation does not address are the challenges that lie ahead related to climate change, and what they mean for US national security strategy and the US ability to lead on the global stage. The changes caused by global warming are increasingly being recognized as a security threat and source of enhanced and escalating conflict. The effects of this warming are felt in multiple ways, including rising sea levels, more frequent and severe weather events, and the displacement of millions of people. In fact, the World Bank estimates that by 2050, there could be as many as 143 million climate refugees worldwide, in one of the most significant sources of displacement in human history.[7] The impacts of climate change are not only felt by individuals and communities but also pose significant strategic threats to national and international security.
As early as 2014 the US Department of Defense was describing climate change as a threat multiplier that could exacerbate existing political, social, and economic conditions, leading to instability and conflict.[8] This recognition of climate change as a strategic threat to national and international security further emphasizes the need for a comprehensive and collaborative approach that also includes non-state actors and non-governmental organizations, which are largely absent from Lieber’s framework as well. The US military has also been grappling with the potential impacts of sea-level rise on military installations, with some projections suggesting that more than 1,000 US military sites could be at risk.[9] Given the scale and complexity of the challenges posed by climate change, it is clear that American leadership alone cannot solve this issue. Given the at best uneven record of the United States on carbon emissions and climate change, to say nothing of its woefully inconsistent approach on refugees, the US is not well positioned to provide strong leadership in this area. It is not clear how the lessons Lieber draws would help move the US forward in this area.
This bring us to politics and the false equivalencies Lieber’s narrative draws around recent history. Unlike, say, the invasion of Iraq, the failure of US leadership on climate change is not a bipartisan affair. One of the two major American political parties believes climate change is real and a major threat to the planet. The other does not. Lieber rightly criticizes the Trump administration for its failures on the Paris Accords but does not further interrogate the larger conservative opposition to even accepting the realities of climate change, which is not driven solely by Trumpism on the right. This shortcoming points out a larger weakness of the book. Lieber relies in his optimistic outlook about the ability of the American people and American institutions to ultimately find common ground and return to a position of agreed upon leadership on the world stage, but his fair and balanced approach to a number of issues like climate change does not acknowledge the radical nature of contemporary conservatism, which poses the greatest threat to the “durable democratic institutions that have shown themselves able to withstand daunting crises throughout the lifetime of the republic” (151).
Lieber’s approach in these sections of the book, particularly chapters six and seven, which explore contemporary American politics and culture, smacks of “both sidesism,” unfairly equating the missteps and shortcomings of both American political parties, which he argues have been taken over by more radical elements of their base, with “liberal Republicans” and “moderate or conservative” Democrats being squeezed out by the “radical left” and the “anti-globalist right” (159). As he rightly notes, this is part of larger global pattern seen in Europe and elsewhere, but it is not wholly accurate in describing the state of the two American political parties, let alone their threats to American institutions. Lieber frequently relies on data from the Pew Research Center to support his case; a recent study by Pew shows convincingly that while it is true that Democrats and Republicans on Congress are further apart ideologically than they have been in at least fifty years, that is largely because Republicans have become “much more conservative.”[10]
Yet the narrative tends to excuse or explain the more radical actions of Republican leaders while also equating them with actions by Democratic leaders. While Lieber attributes the colossal failures of the Bush administration on Iraq as a result of external forces, he places the blame for the fumbling of the Syrian conflict directly on President Obama himself. Obama’s words and actions are rightfully and carefully scrutinized in chapter seven, “Obama, Trump, and the Problem of Leadership,” but the words and actions of Trump do not receive equal treatment. “Both presidents had mixed records,” Lieber writes, yet he is harder on Obama, even chiding him, for reasons that are not at all clear, for “taking credit” for the operation that killed al-Qaeda founder and leader Osama Bin Laden (177). No mention is made of similar credit-taking by President Trump when leaders of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria movement were killed on his watch. Lieber describes Trump’s comments about the need to reduce US forces and military commitments abroad as a promise being kept, and an “effort to rebalance the economic and security burdens of America’s world role,” which not only contrasts significantly with his portrait of the Obama years but seems to run counter to Lieber’s overall argument in the book (182).
Lieber’s definition of a “doctrine” based upon Trump’s erratic foreign policy results in a quite generous reading of a president whose approach he describes as “Jacksonian” (179). Unlike his use of President’s Obama’s own words however, Lieber almost never quotes directly from Trump, even when he is critical of Trump’s behavior. Instead, he consistently relies on assessments of conservative scholars such as Henry Nau to assess Trump’s record (179-181).[11] The chapter’s epigraph quotes directly from Obama on the Syrian “red line,” while citing economic Jeffrey Frankel to vaguely criticize Trump. It is not clear why Trump’s own often incoherent ramblings on foreign relations are not used to critique his approach.
Throughout the book, Trump, like George W. Bush, gets the benefit of the doubt. Trump is “unorthodox” (183), while Obama is “cautious” or “reluctant” (172). Obama’s clumsy efforts to draw and redraw a “red line” in Syria are rightly skewered, while Trump’s brazen effort to extort the Ukraine by withholding aid in exchange for an investigation of President Biden’s son, Hunter, an act that rightly led to Trump’s first impeachment, is dismissed in passing as “an effort to extort a political favor” (184). His meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is “diplomatically unproductive,” and his bizarre approaches to any number of things related to Russia are “a particular puzzle” (187). This is an understatement, to say the least.
This both-sideism approach extends beyond foreign policy. Lieber offers extended discussion and criticism of the New York Times “1619 Project,” without any mention of the conservative, Trump-backed “1776 Project.” The list goes on. As a result of these less-than-full accountings of the past decade, Indispensable Nation ends with less than convincing solutions to restore American leadership. In his closing chapter, Lieber outlines “what hasn’t changed,” with the US still prepared, he argues, to exercise “skilled leadership,” “prudence in choosing when and where to engage,” and “the need to combine national power with diplomacy” (191). But his prescriptions—including “rejuvenating” relationships with allies and selective use of force abroad, along with reconstructing “something resembling” the United States Information Agency, which supported American public diplomacy efforts during the Cold War, to counter disinformation are unhelpfully broad and dated, and not useful for dealing with the complexities of problems like climate refugees and autonomous weaponry, let alone the combination of weaponized social media and artificial intelligence (195-6).
Perhaps most troublingly, Lieber equates the questions about voter suppression and election fraud in 2016 from the campaigns of Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia Stacey Abrams and Democratic nominee for President Hillary Clinton as a similar form of “damage to institutional legitimacy” and Trump’s “repeated false claims” about the result of the 2020 election (200). In doing so, he inexplicably makes no mention of the January 6th insurgency. Those who believe strongly that American democratic institutions are indeed both resilient and critical to the future of both the republic and its global leadership must acknowledge and critique the threat that Trump, Trumpism, and the current GOP pose to those institutions and to the republic itself. Just as with the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the United States cannot move past its current crises and resume the mantle of leadership without a full and honest accounting of poor decisions and ongoing threats.
Review by Kori Schake, American Enterprise Institute
“Indispensable Nation?”
The debate about “realism” as a theory of international relations is vampiric: no matter how much refutational data, number of silver bullets shot, or wooden stakes pounded into the theory, we continue to treat it as foundational to the study of state behavior externally.[12] We should stop. So-called realists are to be commended for shrewdly choosing a wildly advantageous and inaccurate eponymous description, but we ought not to keep engifting their ideas with serious scholarly attention. Yet sadly, we continue to need Buffy for as long as there are vampires. As such, Robert Lieber’s book is necessary. It will be a terrific teaching book for courses on American foreign policy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Lieber’s argument is that as flawed and reluctant as the US is to engage in shaping the international order, it is indispensable to sustainment of any order that will provide security and prosperity for its citizens. Lieber defines indispensability as “active performance of a critically important leadership role that no other country is able to take on” (1). And he makes a strong case that the United States is the only country in the international order that can perform that function.
As Lieber ably describes, challenges to the US-led post-cold war order are multiplying as revisionist powers like China and Russia cooperate in order to advance their shared values of predation to corrode or destroy that order, with assistance from increasingly illiberal democracies. This book seeks to explain why a reluctant US built the liberal order from the ashes of World War II, and in its serviceable history largely succeeds in doing so. But it is probably too scholarly to appeal to the broad public audience in need of that perspective to achieve domestic consensus for return to a sturdy internationalism by Americans.
One weakness of Lieber’s analysis—and it is a common one for the defenders of the liberal international order—is its assumption there was a golden age in the misty past when the US was prudent, strategic, and reliable. He writes “The prudence and careful calculation needed to create effective economic, political, and military commitments require a subtle blend of power and diplomacy that today seem to be in short supply” (7). This ahistoricism does a disservice to the past and exonerates the present. Those elements are not newly in short supply for the US; they always have been. Dragging a reluctant American public into caring about the rest of the world, expanding the narrow self-interest so often evidenced by American politicians, and crafting a coherent policy given the diversity of American interests and the structural disaggregation of power inherent in the design of the American government is always challenging.
In his biography of George Washington, Joseph Ellis argues that by casting the founding fathers in marble Americans both underestimate the magnitude of their success and excuse their imperfect selves from doing the hard work needed in our time. Lieber casts Cold War America in marmoreal terms and exaggerates the difficulty of the present challenges.[13] The unvarnished truth is that the United States is a country of such vitality and dynamism that it could quickly produce not just one but three effective vaccines during a global pandemic, it is a country of such prosperity that it could not only provide those vaccines for free to every American but also give a million doses to other countries…and it is a country in which a full third of Americans declined to take a free, life-saving vaccine. It is all of those things as a country, and it always has been.
My favorite example is that despite the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords (Lieber notes the withdrawal and emissions reductions, but not the sole achievement by any signatory of meeting the goals), and regulatory rollback in the US, it was actually the first country to meet the goals outlined in the accord—because of philanthropist Michael Bloomberg’s money assisting adaptation in major metropolises, the virtue signaling of Apple Computers, the great state of California setting more stringent goals than the federal government, and the increasing normative commitment by American consumers to cleaner energy (46-48). Lieber’s narrative could have more forcefully driven the point that American disruption is often counterbalanced by the US finding different and more effective ways of achieving international aims.
Lieber poses the interesting question of whether the US is a disruptor (43). His exposition of the more destructive and lethal ways in which China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are disruptive is compelling (51-63). He also makes the excellent point that those states have benefitted from the order they are seeking to destroy, and that American domestic politics have always been rough and tumble (63, 147). But Lieber’s concern that the US is newly disruptive again casts a veil over the actuality that it has always been a major disruptor. President Donald Trump was much less consequential in his decisions than James Monroe was in declaring the Western Hemisphere off limits to European colonialism, or Andrew Jackson in disestablishing the Bank of New York, or James Polk in instigating the Mexican War and Oregon boundary crisis, or in William McKinley pivoting from fighting Spain in Cuba to taking Spanish possessions in the Pacific, or Woodrow Wilson with self-determination as the organizing principle in wrenching the international order in a different direction. George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump were substantially more constrained by Congressional action and public opinion than prior American leaders. And by over-torquing to recent examples, the account already feels a little dated.
The best part of the book is Lieber’s speculative evaluation of the alternatives that exist to US order: sole reliance on normative and institutional multilateralism or a Sino-Russian order (74; 114-123). His aperture is too narrow in judging the success of the Sino-Russia alternative, though. As Nadège Rolland has argued, China is succeeding in the global south with a mix of infrastructure, debt relief, the tools of the surveillance state, and a winning argument that China’s order does not have either the bossy intrusiveness of the US or the upheaval of western politics and economics.[14]
The worst part of the book, and of virtually every book on American power, is the section on domestic constraints. “Imperial overstretch” of American power is a red herring when defense spending is four percent of gross domestic power and the driver of national spending is entitlement programs (133). Debt is worrisome but curiously and enduringly indulged by purchasers. Demography and skills deficiencies have always been overcome by immigration, and “technological dispersion” is speculative but unproven. As Lieber acknowledges, polarization is not new, and his assignment of increasing intolerance lacks supporting data (152).
Lieber is right that America’s relative power and influence have diminished (36). I wish he had addressed G. John Ikenberry’s argument that the ultimate success of the liberal international order will be when American power is no longer needed.[15] The diffusion of power he describes may well serve to spread the norms and strengthen the institutions in ways that make US power less crucial to sustainment of the order.
The wide margin for error the US has also means that it has the luxury of being wrong. In fact, many of the early experiments in constructing the liberal international order were hotly disputed or outright failures, as Lieber’s account makes clear (26-27). The mistakes of the past 30 years are neither the first nor likely the most damaging the US has made and will make in the time of its indispensability for the international order.
Fortunately for America and the international order it constructed and sustains, the American public remains persuadable that the international order merits its active involvement—and for exactly the reason Lieber argues: “not only America’s security and economic well-being but its values are bound up with its world role” (7). That is, who Americans are as a political culture ultimately drives their international engagement. Surveys of public attitudes that James Mattis and I commissioned for our book, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military, demonstrate that Americans are ill-informed about most aspects of shaping the international order, but their fundamental judgments are sound.[16] Values drive them to care about the world; what they ask of leaders is a reasonable explanation of what needs doing, and a persuasive case that the outcome they are seeking merits the costs of achieving it. The mistakes of post-Cold War American foreign policy drove a temporary retrenchment because the costs of Afghanistan and Iraq were so much greater than the public was led to believe.
Lieber’s concern is that value drivers on international engagement might kick in too late to save the current beneficial order (8). But it is precisely the preventative or press for early engagement that drove most of the policies he labels as mistakes. His policy recommendation is that “leadership will necessarily be more selective and less far-ranging than in the past,” which is not much help for policy makers who are struggling to act early, and effectively, without doing so much that a balky American public will refuse (201).
Review by John A. Thompson, University of Cambridge
This book is the latest salvo in the campaign that Robert J. Lieber has been waging for more than fifteen years against suggestions that the United States should substantially reduce its international commitments and involvement in overseas conflicts.[17] As he makes clear in the introduction, Lieber seeks to counter the influence of those “journalists, politicians, and public intellectuals” who “call for retreat and disengagement” (1-2). “Realists” who advocate “restraint” or “offshore balancing” are a particular target, but he is also critical of liberals who, in his view, invest too much hope in the capacity of international organisations or economic globalization to shape world politics. Such views have been expressed by scholars and commentators in books and in articles in such journals as International Security and Foreign Affairs.[18] Clearly written and vigorously argued, this comparatively brief book is a contribution to this debate but, as it assumes little prior knowledge, it seems to be addressed also to a wider readership. Nonetheless, Lieber is clearly in command of all the relevant data, and there is merit in his contention that advocacy of alternative strategies sometimes rests on “wishful thinking” (118). However, the course Lieber himself favors is sketchily presented, somewhat ambiguous in its conceptualisation, and skirts some difficult issues.
It may be also that Lieber takes insufficient account of the extent to which the world has changed since he began his campaign, and is continuing to do so in ways that are hard to predict. But in this uncertain situation the only guide we have is the past, and so it is reasonable that Lieber bases his argument on that. In the first chapter, entitled “What Went Wrong?”, he provides a brisk review of US policy since 1945, stressing its “indispensable” (26) role during the Cold War and the nation’s unchallenged position in the following two decades. He includes some telling quotations on the optimism this generated, not only about the durability of America’s pre-eminence but also about a permanent transformation of international politics. The chapter ends by highlighting three “sources of change” since then: the rise of states governed by “revisionist” regimes, the wider diffusion of world power, and the negative effects on the American public’s support for active international involvement of the unsuccessful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, budgetary pressures, and political polarization (33-42). The second chapter, based on an essay published in India in 2018, seeks to counter charges that the United States itself has been a “disruptor” of world order (43-69). It covers a lot of ground: an emphasis on the United Nations’ weakness and proneness to corruption, a defense of the record of the United States on climate change, criticism of the nuclear agreement with Iran embodied in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of July 2015, and an assessment of how far the actions of the Trump administration represented a departure from previous US policy. The central argument, however, is that the “real disruptors” of “a rules-based international system” are “the revisionist powers, especially Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea,” along with non-state actors that promote terrorism (51). The chapter concludes by observing that the period since 1945 has witnessed “steep reductions in the percentage of the world’s population killed in wars” as well as great increases in global life expectancy and economic prosperity, and claims that these advances “are in substantial measure due to the rules-based system created, sustained, and defended by America and its allies and from which the rest of the world has largely benefited” (68-9).
The following two chapters consider possible alternative ways in which world order might be maintained in the absence of “US leadership” (68). The failures of the League of Nations, and of the United Nations following World War II and again after the Cold War, Lieber argues, show that “international institutions themselves could not take responsibility without active leadership by one or more major powers” (77). An increase in economic interdependence will not in itself create a self-sustaining international order because such globalization is not an autonomous process; it depends upon a political support that is vulnerable to domestic backlash and the assertion of nationalist priorities. Nor could the United States hand over its leadership role to others. Although the scale of its economy has made the European Union “a regulatory great power” on such matters as trade, finance and environmental standards, “it possesses neither the internal coherence, nor the institutional structure, nor the popular support necessary to take on such a role” (80, 94). If Europe lacks the capacity to maintain the liberal international order, other centers of power in the world lack commitment to it. In particular, hopes that “giving China a leading place in the world community would turn it into a ‘responsible stakeholder’” have been “contradicted” by its behaviour. After a very negative assessment of China’s response to the COVID-19 virus, and its efforts to expand its power and influence in the world through trade, investment, and the propagation of cultural and information programs, as well as by the build-up of its military strength, Lieber concludes that “by its economic, political, and military conduct, Beijing has repeatedly demonstrated its unsuitability to serve as a substitute for the United States in upholding a rules-based international order” (97, 114).
It is in this context that Lieber takes issue with those who advocate some sort of “spheres-of-influence strategy” that would concede regional dominance to other great powers, and downplay such issues as human rights and democratic government, in order to facilitate cooperation on problems that are of mutual concern, such as climate change, terrorism, conflict resolution, and nuclear proliferation (116-19).[19] “Wishful thinking” underlies this approach, Lieber insists, along with what former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster has characterised as “strategic narcissism:” the assumption that other countries’ behavior is largely shaped by what the United States does. Rather, “in both Beijing and Moscow, as well as in Tehran, history, ideology, regime interests, and the domestic political uses of xenophobia provide deep sources of support for assertive, aggressive, and confrontational conduct” (116-20). In these circumstances, Lieber argues, for the United States to yield to such powers spheres of influence would not lead to stability and peace, because “important regional powers would not be reconciled to falling under the domination of their more powerful neighbors.” In the case of China, this would be true of India, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Australia (122-3).
Finally, Lieber seeks to counter the view that some retreat or disengagement on America’s part is dictated by a decline in the nation’s capabilities. Arguing persuasively that market exchange rates are a better way to compare output figures than purchasing power parity (PPP), he points out that by that measure, the United States still accounts for some 24 percent of world GDP, and China only 16 per cent (120, also 141-142). In all, given the size of its economy and financial markets, and the global role of the dollar, “the material dimensions of American power remain unique” (144). But, in “the absence of an overarching and unambiguous threat on the scale of the two world wars and the Cold War,” the political will to bear the costs of exercising power in the world is more in question (152). Attaching great importance to presidential leadership, Lieber is critical of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump for failing, in very different ways, to uphold the rules-based international order robustly and consistently. He is disturbed by political polarization in the United States, and the contribution to it of both a populist right and a progressive left that lack patriotic feeling. But he takes comfort from a 2021 Chicago Council of Global Affairs poll in which 64 per cent of those questioned favored the United States taking an active role in global affairs, with majorities also approving using US troops to support NATO allies, South Korea, Israel, and Taiwan if these countries were attacked (159). Although clearly writing before the Russian attack on Ukraine, Lieber also draws encouragement from the “shared concerns across party political lines about the threats posed by China and Russia,” which “appear to make Americans more attentive to foreign policy and suggest that the domestic basis” on which the commitment to the country’s alliances and the stationing of troops abroad rests “can remain viable” (160).
The general objective of the active engagement in world politics that Lieber calls for is the maintenance of a form of global order. In various places, this is called “a rules-based international system” (51), “a liberal international order” (94), and “the American-led order” (69). The difference between these designations is of significance. Ever since President Woodrow Wilson first made the establishment of an international body a goal of US policy, there have been crucially different conceptions of the form this should take and of the values it should seek to foster and protect. When the United States was neutral in World War I, Wilson proposed “an universal association of the nations…to prevent any war begun either contrary to treaty covenants or without warning and full submission of the causes to the opinion of the world—a virtual guarantee of territorial integrity and political independence.”[20] As Lieber points out, the establishment of such a rules-based system was a goal that can be traced back at least as far as the writings of Hugo Grotius and the Peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth century (51). Then and ever since, the prime motivation for supporting such a system has been to avoid the effects of devastating war through the acceptance by all states of rules that provide other means of resolving disputes between them. But when Wilson came to call for the United States to declare war on Imperial Germany, he declared that “a steadfast concert of peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic governments;” “peace must be founded upon the tested foundations of political liberty.”[21] Advocates of a modus vivendi with autocratic powers are seeking to achieve it through the former, more conservative, variant of internationalism: a focus on problems that states share regardless of regime type or ideology.[22] Lieber disregards the difference between these two visions of an international order. In itemizing “the many elements needed for a liberal, rules-based order,” he includes “human rights,” along with collaboration over nuclear proliferation, international terrorism, pandemics, trade practices, mass migration, and climate change (195).
The term “the American-led order” that Lieber uses at one point (69) raises another issue, which is the relationship between the liberal international order and the preponderant position of the United States in world politics. Lieber’s basic argument is that the first is dependent upon the second, but the relationship between the two is more complex than this. Indeed, recent events (some since he wrote the book) have illustrated how they may come into conflict in various ways. The Russian attack on Ukraine in February 2022, an invasion of a state whose sovereignty is internationally recognized, was a clear violation of a principle that is basic even to the most conservative versions of world order. Yet many countries have failed to co-operate with the sanctions imposed on Russia afterwards, and have thereby greatly weakened their impact.[23] National self-interest has of course been an important motivator here, but so too has been the perception that the sanctions are an exercise of American power, and the failure of co-operation thus shows the desire not to submit to this, or play along with it. Indeed, such independence may be seen as an example of the “balancing” behavior predicted by realist scholars during the era of “unipolarity” (and which was discounted by those confident that the United States would be generally accepted as a benign hegemon).[24] But the non-cooperation with collective sanctions is justified by the argument that the US claim to be upholding international law and the principles of a liberal order reeks of hypocrisy given America’s own actions in the past, notably the illegal attack on Iraq in 2003. This charge has been given additional color by the protectionist and discriminatory measures currently being enacted as part of what amounts to an economic war on China, measures which have done severe damage to such key elements of the liberal order as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).[25]
Yet, if the association with American primacy can weaken the respect other nations show for the authority of an international order, it has always been crucial in sustaining support within the United States for the transcending of the nation’s own narrow interests that commitment to this broader objective has involved. Advocates of such a commitment have consistently argued that it would promote not only the nation’s values, but also its influence. “At present we have to mind our own business,” Wilson declared as he campaigned for the League of Nations, but under Article 11 of the Covenant “we can force a nation on the other side of the world to bring to that bar of mankind any wrong that is afoot in that part of the world.”[26] Likewise, it seems that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was persuaded to support the United Nations Organization (UNO) over his initial preference for a concert of great powers by the argument that it would give the United States greater influence.[27] American internationalism has been a child of American nationalism from the beginning, and it is hard to imagine the former without the latter. But it may be in this context, rather than in that of direct national comparisons, that the decline of the United States’ economic pre-eminence is most significant. In the decades following World War II, that pre-eminence was so great and so assured that the nation was willing to subordinate its own specific interests to the establishment and maintenance of an open system. It seems that this is no longer the case, which may also weaken the commitment of other nations to such a system.
The importance in international politics of sentiment, and the impact on this of events, has been highlighted by the war in Ukraine. The shock, outrage, and even fear that Russia’s attack aroused in Europe led Finland and Sweden to seek to join NATO and in Germany to a reconsideration of policy that involves the substantial increase in defense spending that US officials have been calling for in vain for decades. The European response also confirmed the validity of Lieber’s observation that realist criticism of the eastern expansion of NATO as a provocative western intrusion into Russia’s back yard “devalues” the powerful desire for it in the countries concerned (29). As the history of the Concert of Europe system established after the Napoleonic wars illustrates, agreements between great powers that are designed to maintain peace between them are vulnerable to what the political scientist Bernard Brodie described as “the common desire of peoples everywhere to be ruled by persons who, whatever their shortcomings, are at least not felt to be foreigners.”[28]
Such conflicts between order and liberty are common, as are those between peace and justice. As Lieber writes, “the world offers no cost-free options” (191). In seeking the necessary balance between competing desiderata in the face of the pressures generated by changing events both at home and abroad, policymakers must make judgment calls that we can hope are informed by thorough knowledge of the particular situations involved, and by a sense of history. But they can gain little helpful guidance from abstract formulae like liberal internationalism or realism, or from some “grand strategy” such as “offshore balancing” or the “tilt to Asia.” The debates over these also suffer from being too inward-looking. A liberal international order is desirable, but it can no longer be established (as it essentially was in 1945) by and in Washington. An international order needs to be constructed internationally, and the current power struggle between the United States and China presents a threat to what remains of the one we have.
Response by Robert J. Lieber, Georgetown University
It is a pleasure to thank Peter Feaver for the introduction and for his characteristically insightful reviews of my writing on American foreign policy. I also very appreciate the time and attention that Edwin Martini, Kori Schake, and John A. Thompson have taken in their close reading and thoughtful contributions to this roundtable review of my book, Indispensable Nation.
John A. Thompson offers an appreciation of my overall argument and the proposition that the United States should not forgo its active involvement in international affairs. Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, after the book went to press, and the conflict there provides significant reinforcement for my argument about the indispensable nature of America’s commitment. Note too that this engagement does not call for US combat troops, but weapons, intelligence, and critical intelligence assistance. Under the circumstances, this role is absolutely critical, and it is essential in resolving a collective action dilemma. After all, is it really conceivable that NATO countries would have contributed military forces to Ukraine without the United States? And which of these countries would have been willing to support Ukraine without American backing?
Though Thompson takes my argument seriously, he seems not to agree that in the end America really is indispensable. As a rejoinder, I ask what would have happened in late February 2022 had the Biden administration not rallied to the support of Ukraine, but instead opted to stand down, as the Obama administration did in 2014 when the Russians seized Crimea and invaded portions of the Eastern Donbass region. Is it even imaginable that European countries would have risked the wrath of Putin and the Russians in supplying copious quantities of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, artillery, missiles, and vast amounts of ammunition if the US had not already been engaged with them? In essence, the Russian invasion of Ukraine yet again reminds us that there are urgent circumstances where there is simply no substitute for the United States.
Thompson is also correct to cite my observation about the limits of the capacity of the United Nations due to the veto held by the five permanent members of the Security Council. The problem really does lead to a situation in which the US remains indispensable, a point which Samuel P. Huntington long ago highlighted:
A world without U.S. primacy will be a world with more violence and disorder and less democracy and economic growth than a world where the United States continues to have more influence than any other country in shaping global affairs. The sustained international primacy of the U.S. is central to the welfare and security of Americans and to the future of freedom, democracy, open economies, and international order in the world.[29]
Curiously, however, Thompson minimizes China’s disruptive role in economics and security. This could have been understandable at the beginning of the twenty-first century when China was admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO). At the time, there were widespread hopes that prosperity, economic development, and the burgeoning of China’s middle class would play a significant role in shaping Beijing’s behavior and moderating its ideology, even if it did not become an outright liberal democracy. But this kind of economic determinism has not characterized the China of President Xi Jinping in recent years. Instead, China’s leader has doubled down on emphasizing the rule of the Communist Party. In economics, commerce, and technology it has followed mercantilist and predatory policies, and in recent years Xi has shown himself determined to insure that giant Chinese businesses do not gain the autonomy their leaders would have sought in a completive economy. Moreover, in demanding political fealty, Xi has squeezed those early areas of political relaxation that had seemed to be developing in Chinese society and has followed with an aggressive “wolf-warrior diplomacy” including threats to Taiwan, the seizing of rocky islets and disputed islands from China’s neighbors, and the buildup of Beijing’s armed forces in order to present a profound challenge to the US.[30]
I am struck by a contrast between Kori Schake’s observation concerning the audience for Indispensable Nation and that of Thompson. She observes that “the book is probably too scholarly to appeal to the broader public audience.” Yet, in stark contrast, Thompson writes that while the book is, “[c]learly written and vigorously argued…this comparatively brief book assumes little prior knowledge. It seems to be addressed also to a wider readership.” I will leave it to other readers to judge, but in this 250-page book I sought to make an argument accessible both to scholars and the wider public.
Schake credits me as a “vampire slayer” for my critique of realism, but is critical of my call for prudence in foreign policy decisionmaking. Yet she acknowledges that the American public is often reluctant to see the country deeply committed abroad when she writes that in her book with James Mattis, “what they ask of leaders is a reasonable explanation of what needs doing and a persuasive case that the outcome they are seeking merits the cost of achieving it.” In turn, I am puzzled by the implication that I don’t fully appreciate the vitality, dynamism, and prosperity of the United States. In not only in this book, but in articles, papers, and a previous book of mine, Power and Willpower in the American Future: Why the United States is Not Destined to Decline, I have made exactly that case.[31]
Schake acknowledges that America’s relative power and influence have diminished and wishes I had addressed John Ikenberry’s argument that the ultimate test of the liberal international order will be when American power is no longer needed. [32] If it is a question of the global order, the answer is never. In the book, I cite the familiar deficiencies of the League of Nations and of the United Nations. In today’s world, Russia’s war on Ukraine would not have met with an effective response if that reaction had been the responsibility of the UN, and Ukraine would have been reduced to the status of a rump or vassal state of Moscow had it not been for US support. That support provided sufficient reassurance to allies that did not need to fear the risk of abandonment in the face of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s angry, violent, and aggressive Russia. This is an especially relevant example of how deterrence incorporates not only defense but also reassurance, as Michael Howard wrote a generation ago, and it adds to the evidence concerning America’s indispensability.[33]
Edwin Martini’s review provides a study in contrasts. On the one hand, the first part of the review conveys a thoughtful treatment and well-written analysis of the arguments I make in the book. However, it soon becomes apparent that he finds my references to the Iraq war unconvincing, and in drawing out the differences, the review slips into what I’m tempted to call the reductio ad Iraqum. Of course, Iraq was important, but Martini’s review reveals fixed ideas about the conflict that reflect an interpretation all too common at the time, suggesting a fixation on neoconservative motivations and claims that the Bush administration was in pursuit of America’s own misguided “interests” while ignoring international law and the opinions of other nations. Absent from this Manichean interpretation is a sense of context including what at the time seemed to be legitimate concerns about nuclear and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s flagrant violations of UN Security Council resolutions, and support from the governments of a majority of America’s European allies. Martini faults me for failing to offer “a full reckoning of how and why the United States invaded Iraq.” That would have required an entirely different book; fortunately, Melvin Leffler had just produced a careful and deeply researched assessment of the Bush decisionmaking process with Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq.[34]
Martini also finds fault in my failure to prioritize future security issues involving artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, cyber warfare, climate, and refugees, which once again suggests a preference that I had written a different kind of book. Still more pointed is the complaint that I am too even handed, exhibiting “both sideism” in assessing severe domestic problems of political polarization. He believes the emphasis should fall largely on conservative Republicans. Here too I can refer readers to another authority on the subject, the moderate leftist and social democratic public intellectual Ruy Teixeira, who has been a sophisticated critic of the progressive left, as for example in his essay, “Democrats Should Embrace Patriotism: No, America Is Not a Racist, Dystopian Hellhole.”[35]
Martini argues that I am insufficiently indignant in my criticisms of Donald Trump and the Trump presidency. Thus he criticizes me for making “no mention of the January 6th insurgency.” In fact, my criticisms of Trump for the January 6th insurgency are explicit and can be found on page 11 (the book’s introductory chapter) and on pages 146 and 154 (in the chapter on Politics, Society, and Culture) whose subject matter otherwise draws particular attention and criticism from Martini.
[1] See “Is the U.S. Still the ‘Indispensable Nation?’: A Conversation with Madeleine Albright,” Wilson Center, May 28, 2015. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/the-us-still-the-indispensable-nation-conversation-madeleine-albright
[2] Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), John Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[3] G. John Ikenberry, “Why the Liberal Order Will Survive,” Ethics & International Affairs. 32:1 (2018): 17–29.
[4] Robert Lieber, The American Era: Power and Strategy for the 21st Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Lieber, Power and Willpower in the American Future (New York: Cambridge University Press 2012).
[5] See G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), and “Why American Power Endures,” Foreign Affairs, 1 October 2022 (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/why-american-power-endures-us-led-order-isnt-in-decline-g-john-ikenberry); John Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); Stephen Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of US Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018); and Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008).
[6] Mary Wareham, “Stopping Killer Robots: Country Positions on Banning Fully Autonomous Weapons and Retaining Human Control,” 20 August 2020. https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/08/10/stopping-killer-robots/country-positions-banning-fully-autonomous-weapons-and .
[7] Kanta Kumari Rigaud et al., “Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration,” World Bank Report, March 3, 2019, available at http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29461.
[8] “Quadrennial Defense Review 2014,” https://www.acq.osd.mil/ncbdp/docs/2014_Quadrennial_Defense_Review.pdf and John D. Banusiewicz, “Hagel to Address ‘Threat Multiplier’ of Climate Change,” US Department of Defense, 13 October 2014, https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/603440/.
[9] Quil Lawrence, “The U.S. Military Takes Measures to Protect Bases from Flooding,” NPR, 25 November 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/11/25/1139231006/the-u-s-military-takes-measures-to-protect-bases-from-flooding
[10] Drew Desilver, “The Polarization in Today’s Congress Has Roots that go back Decades,” PEW Research Center, 10 March 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/10/the-polarization-in-todays-congress-has-roots-that-go-back-decades/.
[11] In particular, Lieber points to Henry Nau, “Course Correction,” The National Interest 167 (May/June 2020), 49-57, and to Stanley Renshon and Peter Suedfeld, eds., The Trump Doctrine and the Emerging International System (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
[12] John J. Mearsheimer, “Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order,” International Security. 43:4 (2019): 7–50; Charles L. Glaser, “A Flawed Framework: Why the Liberal International Order Concept Is Misguided,” International Security 43:4 (2019): 51–87.
[13] Joseph Ellis, His Excellency George Washington (New York: Vintage, 2005), ix.
[14] Nadège Rolland, “China’s Southern Strategy: Beijing Is Using the Global South to Constrain America,” Foreign Affairs 9 June 2022.
[15] G. John Ikenberry, “Why the Liberal Order Will Survive,” Ethics & International Affairs 32:1 (2018): 17–29.
[16] Kori Schake and Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2016), 3.
[17] The campaign began with “Falling Upwards: Declinism, The Box Set,” World Affairs, (Summer 2008). Since then, the most substantial prior statements of Lieber’s position and arguments have been Power and Willpower in the American Future: Why the United States Is Not Destined to Decline (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Retreat and Its Consequences: American Foreign Policy and the Problem of World Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
[18] On the “realist” perspective, Lieber cites particularly John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “The Case for Offshore Balancing,” Foreign Affairs 95 (July/August 2016), 70-83; Barry Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2014); Christopher Layne, “The (Almost) Triumph of Offshore Balancing,” National Interest, 27 January 2012; Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2018); and Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 2018). Among the liberals whom Lieber cites are Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, “Liberal World: The Resilient Order,” Foreign Affairs 97 (July/August 2018), 16-24; and Anne-Marie Slaughter and Gordon LaForge, “Opening up the Order: A More Inclusive International System,” Foreign Affairs 90 (March/April 2021).
[19] While recognizing significant differences in the policies they advocate, Lieber cites in this connection Fareed Zakaria, “The New China Scare: Why America Shouldn’t Panic About Its Latest Challenger,” Foreign Affairs 99 (January/February 2020), 52-69; Graham Allison, “The New Spheres of Influence: Sharing the Globe with Other Great Powers,” Foreign Affairs 99 (March-April 2020), 30-40; and Stephen Wertheim, “The Price of Primacy: Why America Shouldn’t Dominate the World,” Foreign Affairs 99 (March/April 2020), 19-29.
[20] Address to the League to Enforce Peace, 27 May 1916, Papers of Woodrow Wilson [henceforth PWW] (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 37, 113-16.
[21] Address to Congress, 2 April 1917, PWW, 41, 519-27.
[22] For an elaboration of the distinction and an analysis of its relationship to the later evolution of US policy, see John A. Thompson, “Wilsonianism: The Dynamics of a Conflicted Concept,” International Affairs 86 (January 2010), 27-47.
[23] On the differences between the response to the Ukraine conflict in the West and in other countries, see The Economist, 15-21 April 2023, 51-53.
[24] See, notably, Stephen M. Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (New York: Norton, 2006), especially chapter 2.
[25] For some detail on these measures, see The Economist, 14-20 January 2023, 19-21. See also The Economist, 1-7 April 2023, and 17-19, 8-14 10-11.
[26] Address in Indianapolis, 4 September 1919. PWW, 63, 27,
[27] On this, see Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 141-144.
[28] Bernard Brodie, War and Politics (London: Cassell, 1974), 3-4.
[29] Samuel P Huntington, “Why International Primacy Matters,” International Security, 17: 4 (Spring 1993): 68-93 at 83.
[30] See Zack Budryk, “China, Pushing Conspiracy Theory, Accuses U.S. Army of Bringing Coronavirus to Wuhan,” The Hill, 12 March 2020; Matthew Kroenig, The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy versus Autocracy from the Ancient World to the U.S. and China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Elizabeth C. Economy, The World According to China (New York: Polity, 2022).
[31] Robert J. Lieber, Power and Willpower in the American Future: Why the United States is Not Destined to Decline (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
[32] See, for example, G. John Ikenberry, “Why the Liberal Order Will Survive,” Ethics & International Affairs, 32:1 (2018): 17-29.
[33] Michael Howard, “Reassurance and Deterrence: Western Defense in the 1980s,” Foreign Affairs Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter 1980), 309-324.
[34] Melvin Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W, Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).
[35] Ruy Teixeira, “Democrats Should Embrace Patriotism,” The Liberal Patriot, 6 October 2022, https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/democrats-should-embrace-patriotism.