When it comes to understanding America’s place in the world, prospective presidential candidates could do much worse than read just three pieces of writing: Charles Krauthammer’s Weekly Standard essay “Decline Is a Choice” (Oct. 19, 2009); Robert Kagan’s New Republic article “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire” (May 26, 2014); and, now, Bret Stephens’s America in Retreat. This book is the Wall Street Journal columnist at his best: substantive, historically informed, and with the kind of cutting style that helped him earn his Pulitzer Prize two years ago.
Examples abound:
The tragedies of the 1930s are well known. What’s forgotten is how they flowed from the illusions of the 1920s, the same illusions that conservative advocates of the Retreat Doctrine harbor today.
Regarding Thomas L. Friedman’s unfavorable comparison of China’s high-speed train with the Washington, D.C., subway system, he writes, “It’s vintage Friedman: mistaking anecdote for data, making an apples-to-oranges comparison, and reaching a morally dubious conclusion.” As the book’s title and subtitle make clear, Stephens’s chief target is the rise, on both the left and right, of a desire to turn away from America’s post-World War II role in leading and protecting the liberal international order—and the consequences of doing so.
Like Krauthammer, Stephens is at pains to note that the present policy of retreat is a choice, not a necessity based on objective conditions. As he details, America’s longer-term prospects, when compared with those of possible rivals such as China and Russia, actually look quite good. Nevertheless, for different reasons, a considerable portion of Democrats and Republicans have coalesced around a posture of retrenchment.
In the case of President Obama and his partisan allies, the “higher purpose” is “to build America anew” by way of a social democratic domestic agenda paid for by global disengagement and deep, deep cuts in military spending. For conservatives, the logic for retreat is more complex, ranging from confusion about what a “small government” agenda should mean to a strain of old-style realpolitik that is in fact not realistic about the nature of power or about modern democratic politics. Add a dollop of “tea party leftism” that sees most foreign engagements as part of a conspiracy to drain away American strength, and you have a mix in which left and right meet not at the center but at their extremes.
According to Stephens, this tendency is a product of recent events: difficult wars, a poor economy, and a president who thinks “leading from behind” is actually leading. But Stephens believes there is a more deeply ingrained ambivalence in the American psyche about how the country should interact with the larger world—an idea first expressed in John Winthrop’s address to his Puritan brethren in 1630, when he said that the Massachusetts Bay colonists should be “as a Citty upon a Hill.” They were to be an example of right rule to the rest of the world—no more, no less.
As evidence that this ambivalence has lived on, Stephens points to the examples of “Mr. Republican” Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio (in office 1939-53) and Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president during 1941-45. Both Taft and Wallace were willing to disengage from Europe and Asia despite the evident threat posed by Soviet communism and the incredible cost in blood and treasure resulting from the isolationist policies of only a few years past. Neither, of course, commanded a majority, but they were, nevertheless, major policy figures.
To Stephens’s credit, he doesn’t summarily dismiss the arguments for retrenchment. What he does show, however, is that the proposed alternatives to American leadership—be it collective “security” under the United Nations, the fantasies of a self-sustaining liberal peace, or a balance of power model that fails to understand that “the nature of power is that it seeks preeminence, not balance”—all fall short in providing the kind of general stability that has proved to be in America’s interest, let alone the world’s.
None of this leads Stephens to trumpet a higher call to arms. If anything, the logic for American global leadership is, as Tocqueville might have put it, an example of self-interest rightly understood. “We live,” Stephens writes, under Pax Americana “not because it is easy or costless, but because the alternatives have all proved wanting or illusory. The alternative to Pax Americana—the only alternative—is global disorder.”
What that disorder might look like is detailed in the book’s later chapters. Adversaries (such as China, Russia, Iran, and jihadists everywhere) see “a strategic opening to revise regional and global order,” while allies (such as Japan, South Korea, and Israel) begin to “consider their security options in ways they haven’t for many years.” Altogether, “this creates a geopolitical environment that is less predictable, less manageable, and potentially more violent.”
To reverse course, the United States must accept that it needs to be the world’s policeman, although Stephens cautions that this doesn’t mean it should become the world’s priest, trying, as George W. Bush advocated in his second inaugural address, to save it by ending tyranny everywhere. Instead, Stephens endorses, among other proposals, upping defense spending, adopting a policy of punishing violations of geopolitical norms quickly and decisively, abandoning notions of regional “pivots,” and using local proxies where possible. No less important, he wants the American policy debate to move beyond describing every possible new military intervention as “another Iraq,” noting correctly that “the cliché of the slippery slope incapacitates rational debate.”
But speaking of Iraq, Stephens ascribes too easily our problems there to a decision by the Bush administration to move from a more limited goal of getting rid of a security problem (Saddam Hussein) to building a liberal democratic state. The change of mission, he argues, was a problem both there and in Afghanistan and is something to be avoided.
Yet, if anything, it was the Pentagon’s and State Department’s policies handling post-Saddam Iraq and post-Taliban Afghanistan with as light a footprint as possible that allowed, in the first instance, chaos to grow and, in the second instance, the insurgency to return. Arguably, neither Iraq nor Afghanistan had anything close to the institutions that could have been called upon to establish stability or take up the mantle of governance. Indeed, as Stephens admits, it was only after the Bush team deepened its efforts in Iraq that it could hand over to the Obama administration an Iraq that was capable of conducting peaceful elections and was up and running as a country. State-building may not be anyone’s first choice, but, as with America’s need to be the global order-setter, it may be a necessary one in certain instances.
Although the book’s title captures Stephens’s concern about the rise of isolationist sentiment among both policymakers and the general public, Stephens does note toward the conclusion that the consequences of the policies of retreat are beginning to make themselves evident and that “perhaps . . . thinking is beginning to change.” Certainly, exit polling from November’s congressional elections affirms that worries about national security are much more on the public’s mind than they were in the immediate past. This, plus the fact that American isolationism has been more the exception than the rule, suggests that Winthrop’s paradigm for dealing with an imperfect world has rarely been a deeply held sentiment among most Americans. And the truth is that it held little writ among other colonists or, for that matter, among succeeding Massachusetts generations.
That said, as Bret Stephens also notes, “Americans have lived in a relatively orderly world for so long that we have become broadly oblivious to how good that world has been for us”—and, one might add, what it takes to sustain that world. In short, it’s not so much that most Americans are inherently isolationist but, rather, that they need to be reminded of the facts of international life to avoid reacting with too little too late.
Gary Schmitt is director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
