Ricardo Tomás
The United States has pursued two grand strategies in the 80 years since World War II. One was an extraordinary success: the policy of “containment” that guided American economic investments, foreign relations, and military deployments during the Cold War, which led to the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the United States as the world’s lone superpower.
The same cannot be said, unfortunately, about the strategy adopted at the Cold War’s conclusion: an attempt to leverage superpower status to establish a “liberal world order” that Washington would secure and dominate. That strategy went by names including “enlargement,” as defined by President Bill Clinton’s first national security adviser, Anthony Lake, and “benevolent hegemony,” in the words of the neoconservative thinkers William Kristol and Robert Kagan, writing in these pages. This vision promised an enduring Pax Americana in which no other country could or would challenge U.S. supremacy, all evolved inevitably toward liberal democracy, and the global free market’s warm embrace rendered borders irrelevant while spreading prosperity worldwide.
By some measures, the strategy worked. U.S. GDP and stock prices steadily rose. Technology and trade stitched the world closer together. World War III did not start. But a clear-eyed appraisal of the post–Cold War era reveals a less rosy reality. Far from producing a utopia of shared prosperity and stable peace, American strategy in the past three decades has instead yielded a global economic order that allows other countries to exploit Washington’s largess, an ascendant authoritarian adversary in China, and simmering conflicts around the globe in which expectations of American commitment far outstrip the reality of American capacity—all of which have contributed to economic and social decay in the United States.
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