How will people remember and describe the first couple of decades of the twenty-first century in US foreign policy? To date, there is still no slogan or epithet for them. There is no single adjective, with the partial exceptions of “post-Cold War,” still somewhat in use, or “global,” which is inadequate because few people agree when “globalization” began. Slogan setting will track what happens in the years to come: This period is likely to rate as one of the richer ones for debating the complicated relations the American people and their government have with others around with the world, and with the many issues that they try, separately and in combination, to manage and solve.
The following selection of essays is the work of two writers, Goodby, a diplomat, and Weisbrode, a historian. Our book is neither a monograph nor a social science primer on current events or on the sum of US relations (economic, cultural, scientific, etc.) with other countries. It is tailored narrowly to the topics and issues on which we specialize—diplomacy and political history—and is meant to illustrate the evolution of these aspects of foreign policy, not as substitutes for any others but as the focus of our professional analysis. Our reason for compiling it is to show how the administrations of three American presidents—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—disregarded or misapplied to differing degrees the main organizing principle of a peaceful and, on balance, stable world order that they inherited from the twentieth century: collective security.
What do we mean by collective security? That it must be defined at all speaks to the senility of our era, for not too long ago it was taken to be a mantra among most educated citizens. Since the 1990s, however, it has diminished to the status of a quaint relic if not otherwise taken for granted. 1 It prescribed something more durable than a military or political alliance or, to use the more popular term today, “partnership.” Collective security meant that security is indivisible, both geographically and functionally, in all civilian and military fields of human action. It meant alliances that are underwritten not only by treaties and other agreements and understandings, but also by multilateral institutions and, as we discuss below, international regimes that transcend defense, economics, and politics. These regimes, along with treaties, agreements, understandings, and institutions are grounded, in turn, in the realities of power, not in principled opposition to them. And those realities of power correspond to geographic, economic, and cultural affinities and relationships that are, we believe, best constructed and nurtured in and among historic regions. 2
The reasons for today’s widespread neglect of such realities are debatable and complex, but on balance they come, in our view, from a combination of ignorance and arrogance, both of which have been widely and persistently noted in the administration of Donald Trump.
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In its foreign policy, the Trump administration follows a dark logic in its view of the world (“It’s a vicious place”—Trump). Its foreign policy could fairly be described as Realpolitik in its impulses but mixed in its execution of that policy. The administration’s relations with Russia and China are clearly not based on realism.
Henry Kissinger and George Kennan were proponents of realism in American foreign policy, partly in reaction to what they saw as misguided policies espoused by Woodrow Wilson and excessive US devotion to unenforceable international law, especially between the two world wars. Both Kennan and Kissinger advocated policies rooted in power politics, but both recognized the limits of American power and sought to put in place policies of containment and détente in dealing with the Soviet Union. 3 These policies relied on American military force for their ultimate effectiveness but depended in their day-to-day practice on American diplomacy.
Kennan and Kissinger worried that Americans would not be able to pursue a consistent foreign policy over a long period of time, given the changing leadership and the need for public support in democratic governance. Yet from the end of the Second World War through the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a foreign policy consensus enjoyed the support of both major parties. It enabled American presidents and their cabinets and national security advisers to carry out a remarkably stable and consistent diplomacy (at least one that appears so in retrospect) in which negotiations with adversaries became an increasingly prominent component.
This generation of realists has passed from the scene. 4 In our essays commenting on issues of the post-Cold War period, we recorded how the single-minded focus on containment of Soviet power was gradually replaced by policies that were intended to respond to perceived new threats and opportunities. During that period, the immobility of the Cold War was superseded by a variety of threats from internal instability in strategically located nations, some of which had been subservient to the will of Moscow. International terrorism fostered by disputes in the Middle East became a major challenge to US security . Existential threats grew with the spread of nuclear weapons capabilities, climate change, and the ability of human beings to manipulate the genetic code.
US foreign policy in the twenty-first century has been confronted with challenges that few states appear to have known before. Issues that statecraft was once called upon to manage required tools that have not been well developed in the foreign policy machinery of any government. Military force could deal with some of these issues, though not in traditional ways. Others require scientific and technological skills in short supply in most governments. The implications of social media and other developments made possible by the digital revolution, like cyber war, have only begun to be incorporated into the conceptual underpinnings of foreign policy. The management of global economic integration has not yet been mastered. No wonder that governance of foreign policy seems muddled and that critics of the United States and the conduct of its foreign policy have such a rich menu of complaints.
Into this rapidly changing and not yet fully understood environment came the Trump administration, headed by a president with little experience in foreign affairs. That could have been an advantage. Fresh challenges require fresh eyes, and Trump, despite much criticism, had the political backing necessary to adopt a different set of foreign policy guidelines to respond to the complexities faced by the United States and other nations. But the principles of the administration’s foreign policies had to be derived from the president’s particular view of the world and his conviction that the way to create the conditions necessary to achieve American success in foreign affairs was to begin most relationships with threats in order to extract concessions. Trump revealed in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2017 that his attitude toward world order was probably rooted in the philosophy of the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes is best known for portraying human life as a “war of all against all.” 5 In Hobbes’s major book, Leviathan , he argued that human beings are inherently selfish and that an absolute monarchy is the only form of government capable of dealing with this situation. One can argue about Trump’s philosophy of government, but that international life is a war of all against all in his psychology is clear. “America First” is his response to this perceived state of the world. “Protection” was Trump’s answer to predatory nations out to steal America’s jobs and its wealth. Tariffs and trade wars have been the natural result.
The Trumpian outlook requires a world order in which international cooperation is a low priority and, in fact, something to be suspected. Peace is something abnormal and conflict the natural order of things. Threats are the most effective way to achieve results. International organizations are designed to restrain American freedom of action and deserve support only if America is paid for services rendered. Selfishness is the reigning human instinct and ignoring that reality can only lead to defeat in this world.
It is not critical, really, how Trump came to hold these views or whether his views correspond closely with those of a seventeenth-century philosopher. The important point is that the world order Trump perceives and accepts as normal is one very similar to the dog-eat-dog world that others before him saw and that many citizens in many countries perceive today. And they are acting on that premise.
Thus, one can observe a strong impulse in Europe, in the Western Hemisphere, in Russia, and in China, the latter of which not too long ago was called “the honor student in the school of globalization,” for a world order that is based on the ideas that conflict is normal and cooperation unnatural, and that self-interest narrowly conceived outweighs any appeal to generosity or even empathy. 6 In a foreign policy resting on such a philosophy, demonstrated increasingly and vividly to friends and foes alike during Trump’s first term in office, there is very little room for ethical and moral principles in the creation of a foreign policy. That does not mean that principles were not being established. They boil down to “Never trust any other nation and do unto them before they do unto you.” This is not the type of realism that George Kennan and Henry Kissinger practiced. Both men recognized that to be successful and, above all, to be sustainable, US foreign policy had to be consistent with, or at least pay regular homage to, the American people’s self-identification as a moral nation.
Have the American people always reacted to external events in ways that were ethical and based on religious or moral principles? No, of course not, although perhaps more self-consciously than many other nations. But their lapses from justice and ethical behavior were seen as lapses, especially in retrospect, rather than as proper behavior justified by American needs at the time. Cold War foreign policy was able to be as consistent, and in the end as successful, as it was because the American people thought of it as morally correct. American presidents spoke of it that way, too.
Trump’s sense of ethics is summed up in his slogans: “Make America Great Again” and “America First.” He proclaimed himself a “nationalist.” Not for him what previous generations of American leaders thought of as “enlightened self-interest.” Their idea was that America could thrive best in a world where many nations and peoples shared the ideas upon which the United States was founded. American leaders sought to support democratic nations and movements, not just as a bulwark against adversaries in the Kremlin and elsewhere but most importantly because they were dedicated to building a world order based on democratic principles. Perhaps this was itself a form of imperialism, but if so, as was said of British colonialism, it was a self-liquidating form of imperialism. 7
“Where there is no vision, the people perish” was one of John F. Kennedy’s favorite biblical quotations. The vision of most American presidents of the twentieth century was a world in which the United States would thrive and prosper among a universe of like-minded nations. 8 Even adversaries, it was hoped, would someday become persuaded of the righteousness of that vision: “The end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama put it when it seemed to have turned out that way.
The Trumpian vision has not embraced Fukuyama’s liberal democratic notion and, hence, the norms that go with it. Most previous administrations sought to put in place internationally accepted norms designed to...