The aftermath of the Cold War has seen the emergence of what neocon gurus Robert Kagan and William Kristol have called “benevolent global hegemony” of the United States. Throughout this period, key figures of both major parties have asserted that America’s unchallengeable military might was essential to the maintenance of global order. This period was marked by military interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and (less overtly) in Syria. Each violent exercise of hegemony was validated by the rhetoric of “promoting democracy,” “protecting human rights,” “confronting aggression,” and by the invocation of alleged American exceptionalism.
That bipartisan consensus was codified in the official strategic doctrine. George W. Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy declared that the U.S. would “extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent,” and—furthermore—bring about an end to “destructive national rivalries.” The Obama Administration’s 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance (“Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense”), which is still in force, claimed that the task of the United States was to “confront and defeat aggression anywhere in the world.” Such continuity of utopian objectives reflected the chronic refusal of the policymaking community in Washington to establish a rational correlation between strategic ends and means, or to see America as a “normal” nation-state pursuing limited political, economic, and military objectives in a competitive world.
As a result, one major source of instability in contemporary global order is the tendency of the most powerful player to reject any conventionally ordered hierarchy of American global interests. Traditional foreign policymaking may be prone to miscalculations (e.g. Vietnam), but in principle it is based on some form of rationally adduced raison d’etat. Deterritorialized strategy of full-spectrum dominance, by contrast, had its grounding in ideological assumptions impervious to rational discourse. It consistently creates outcomes—in Iraq, Libya, etc.—which are contrary to any conventional understanding of U.S. security interests.
Over the years, American “realists”—who accept that the world is imperfect, that violence is immanent to man, and that human nature is immutable—have often lamented the absence of grand-strategic thinking within the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. For the past quarter-century at least, successive administrations have displayed a chronic inability to deploy America’s political, military, economic, and moral resources in a balanced and proportionate manner, in order to protect and enhance the country’s rationally defined security and economic interests. Washington’s bipartisan, ideologically-driven obsession with global primacy (“full-spectrum-dominance”) has resulted in a series of diplomatic, military and moral failures, costly in blood and treasure, and detrimental to the American interest.
The 2016 presidential election, on the subject of foreign affairs, seemed to confront two polar opposites. On November 8, it appeared that Donald Trump, an outsider victorious against all odds and predictions, had a historic opportunity to make a fresh start. The moment was somewhat comparable to Ronald Reagan’s first victory in 1980. Reagan used grandiloquent phrases at times (notably the “Evil Empire”), but in practice he acted as an instinctive foreign policy realist. Likewise, Trump’s “America First” was a call for the return to realism based on the awareness that the United States needs to rediscover the value of transactional diplomacy aimed at promoting America’s security, prosperity, and cohesion in a Hobbesian world.
Some resistance from the upholders of hegemonistic orthodoxy was to be expected, as witnessed even before Trump’s inauguration by the outgoing administration’s frantic attempts to poison the well on every front possible. Giving up the neurotic desire to dominate the world, and recognizing that it cannot be shaped in line with the bicoastal elite class “values,” was never acceptable to the controllers of the mainstream media discourse and the government-subsidized think-tank nomenklatura. More seriously, some key components of the intelligence, national-security and military-industrial conglomerates proved effective in resisting Trump’s attempt to introduce traditional realist criteria in defining “interests” and “threats.”
Hillary’s World—Hillary Clinton was a leading exponent of the hegemonistic consensus. In 2002 she voted in favor of the Iraq war, the greatest foreign policy disaster in recent American history. In 2011 she tipped the balance within the Obama Administration in favor of the Libyan intervention, with devastating consequences for Libya, the region, and the world. She was the first major political figure in the world to compare Vladimir Putin to Hitler. She routinely saw military power as a tool of first resort: In the Obama cabinet she had been “the most hawkish person in the room in every case where she was in the room in the first place.” According to her aides, she subscribed to “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.”
Clinton’s strategic vision was a “known-known” of the 2016 campaign: open-ended global commitments in pursuit of hegemonistic goals. During the campaign she still advocated providing arms to the “moderate” Syrian rebels, which in reality meant further enabling non-ISIS jihadists supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Her speech at the American Legion National Convention (August 31, 2016) was an exultant restatement of the doctrine of global hegemony. “The United States is an exceptional nation,” she declared,
“and is still the last, best hope of Earth . . . And part of what makes America an exceptional nation, is that we are also an indispensable nation. In fact, we are the indispensable nation. People all over the world look to us and follow our lead . . . [W]e recognize America’s unique and unparalleled ability to be a force for peace and progress, a champion for freedom and opportunity . . . U.S. power comes with a responsibility to lead, with a fierce commitment to our values . . . [W]hen America fails to lead, we leave a vacuum that either causes chaos or other countries or networks rush in to fill the void.”
Clinton’s triumphalist vision reflected the post-Cold War consensus, to which both ends of the Duopoly subscribed with equal zeal. Bipartisan consensus which she embodied prompted many establishment Republicans to support her. The continuity of duopolistic key assumptions, and the escalation of risks and tensions resulting from their application, was clearly predictable in case of her victory.
Donald’s Vision—Trump’s strategic concepts seemed less ideologically coherent than Clinton’s, but he was more rational in espousing his stated guiding principles and certainly more “realist” in policy detail. In the early days of his candidacy he repeatedly asked why must the United States be engaged everywhere in the world and play the global policeman. He raised the issue of NATO’s utility and core mission, a quarter-century after the demise of the USSR which it was created to contain. He even suggested creation of a new coalition in order to put America’s resources to better use, especially in the fight against terrorism. He repeatedly advocated rapprochement with Russia. He criticized the regime-change mania of earlier administrations, pointing out the “disastrous” consequences of toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq. He said that he would leave Syria’s Bashar al-Assad well alone and focus on degrading the Islamic State.
