The Lost Battle for a Certain Idea of America
"America First" is all the rage. Is it too late to reverse course?
I suppose I have a tendency towards masochism. At a difficult time in our history, when so many are losing faith, I took it upon myself to lay out the case for American power — for an America that proudly shoulders global responsibilities and takes it distinct moral mission seriously not just at home but abroad. It is an unpopular case to make, to put it mildly. Sometimes I wonder if I have a knack for finding myself on the losing side of big, ideological battles.
The tide has turned against a more expansive morally-infused definition of American self-interest. Normally, I’d say something like “it’s in America’s self-interest to be moral and to exude some semblance of that morality in its conduct of foreign policy.” Reasonable, I think. And, of course, reasonable people can disagree on what exactly that means in practice. But the Trump administration’s new 2025 National Security Strategy is something else entirely. It’s, well — I don’t know else to put it — a must-read, because it very clearly and unapologetically lays out the case for a smaller America that defines its national self-interest in exceedingly narrow terms.
It makes for a chilling read, in part because it does away with any pretense of a distinct moral mission. (For instance, there is basically nothing about promoting democracy abroad, except for a call to support “genuine democracy” in Europe, the one region of the world where almost every country is already democratic. Genuine democracy, in this context, seems to imply a Europe dominated by right-wing populist governments on the premise that this would be a more accurate reflection of the will of the people).
But the Trump-ified National Security Strategy is unsettling for another reason: I found myself sympathizing with parts of it, somewhat to my surprise. It’s a no-nonsense approach that can be straightforwardly communicated to American audiences who are skeptical, rightly, of foreign entanglements. It correctly calls out elites of both parties for making a mess of things post-September 11th, including through “forever wars” that gave interventionism a bad name. Interventionism is not intrinsically bad — like anything else in life, there are good interventions and there are bad ones. But it’s hard to make that case when you have to go back to the 1990s to cite positive ones: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the first Gulf war. (I’d cite the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya as a more recent “positive” case, but I’m pretty much the only one left who seems willing to make that argument. If you’re interested, see my full-throated defense of the Libya intervention here. I stand by every word).
In a fascinating and thoughtfully critical review of my book The Case for American Power, the political theorist
poses a fundamental challenge to my argument — wondering “[whether] the America Hamid admires and idealizes still exists or even if it ever existed.” He goes on: “We may believe it is now a historical footnote — something that attempted to build a legal world order grounded in enlightenment principles is now not only under significant threat but is arguably crumbling into dust.”Of course, contra Trump, that world order wasn’t all bad. It was quite good, at least some of the time. But now we are quite willingly throwing out the baby with the bathwater. There is something admirably honest about this. We will no longer even pretend to be better than we actually are. There is no real moral aspiration or sense of moral responsibility in Trump’s National Security Strategy. Maybe that’s a good thing: to do away with the pretending, the hope, the ambition, the aspiration. But as I’ve argued, hypocrisy — which arises when we try to be better than we actually are — can be a good, necessary thing. Morality can’t exist without hypocrisy, for better or worse. In doing away with hypocrisy altogether, be careful what you wish for.
And in doing away with any pretense of moral aspiration, Trump — with the apparent support of a big chunk of the country — is cutting us down to size. In 2017, Trump famously defended Vladimir Putin’s brutality by pointing the finger towards towards: “You think our own country’s so innocent?” He was partly right: we’re not so innocent, as any dutiful reader of Noam Chomsky will easily recognize. But that’s different than saying we’re basically the same as Putin’s Russia. We’re not, and we never were.
In another perceptive review of my book
cheekily observes that I might be the last true neocon. I don’t love this, in part because I hated the Iraq war and cut my political teeth opposing it, but bear with me. Polansky writes:In an ironic sense—particularly given his sharp criticisms of U.S. policy toward Israel—Shadi may be one of the last true neoconservatives. Though one still hears the term tossed around as an epithet, nearly all of the fin de siècle neocons have either died, retired, turned their attention primarily to anti-Trumpism, or weren’t really neocons to begin with.
Mostly, Polansky notes, this is because I have an abiding faith in democracy and democracy promotion abroad, which was a core precept of neoconservatives that most of the neoconservatives themselves couldn’t be bothered to live up to, which raises the question of whether they ever really believed in it. They turned half-hearted on democracy in short order, when free elections in the Middle East started producing Islamist governments. I get it. It’s hard to be a small-d democrat.
But I lost that battle during the Arab Spring, and now democracy promotion in the Middle East is rarely discussed. Worse, it’s seen as self-evident folly. I wish it were otherwise.
I also know, however, that the pendulum tends to shift. The impossible, somehow, becomes possible. Now, “America First” is all the rage, but that might not last, in part because of its close association with a president who is loathed by so many Americans. Yes, perhaps, the America I believe in is ceasing to exist, but that doesn’t mean the movement can’t be reversed. It will be an uphill battle, and it might take a generation. At the same time, I have to acknowledge the possibility that the battle will be lost. That, though, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth fighting.
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