What is America’s role in the world?

What does “America” mean to the world today? The foreign-policy consensus in Washington, D.C., has broken apart, and the conclusion of America’s mission in Afghanistan represents the end of an era, a two-decade post-9/11 posture. It is therefore time to reassess what America’s role in the world is now, and what it should be going forward. The Washington Examiner asked 11 of the sharpest observers of foreign policy that question. Here are their answers.

NOAH ROTHMAN

When the practitioners of U.S. foreign policy find themselves in a self-excavated pit, it’s often because they have committed to upholding an idea of what America’s role in the world should be rather than what America’s role in the world is.

The United States is the world’s sole superpower, the only nation capable of sustained power projection to any theater on Earth. It is the world’s largest economy, with a capacity for innovation and growth relatively unencumbered by the retributive political fetters on prosperity that are common in most other nations, attracting a steady flow of migrants who continually revitalize its body politic. It is a nation founded on the liberal principles that emerged in the Enlightenment: Religious liberty, inviolable property rights, and the freedoms of expression and association are foundational. Without them, the edifice collapses.

These truths attract their share of critics, some of whom long for an America that does not exist. They wish that it could retreat into itself, and that its manifest power would not attract rivals. They pine for a state that was not riven by the disaggregating and disorienting effects of commerce — one with a more homogenized and, therefore, predictable sociopolitical culture. They sneer at the idea that nihilists and authoritarians rise in rivalry to our freedoms, their competing theories of social organization unable to survive alongside the model we set. They wish that all these challenges would somehow disappear. But they will not.

To the extent that any sort of “consensus” exists among those who cycle in and out of government, it is around the idea that America’s conduct on the world stage can be administered independent of these facts. It is an assumption that leads the United States to sacrifice willingly its power in deference to international organizations and talk shops. It’s an idea that convinces politicians that “soft power” can succeed without the necessary collateral of “hard power.” It is an idea that animates those who believe that America is more an idea than a state.

Joe Biden likes to say that the United States leads as a beacon to the world not by “the example of our power, but by the power of our example.” But the United States is not merely a collection of liberating ideas, nor a machine dedicated to the protection and preservation of its interests through force. It is both. Any successful American foreign policy will acknowledge this and proceed accordingly.

Noah Rothman is associate editor of Commentary magazine.

DAMIR MARUSIC

President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was met with howls of dismay from various quarters. While the bulk of the criticisms rightly focused on the messiness of the retreat and raised moral questions about the debt we owed the wretched Afghan people left in the lurch by our departure, some went further. Would the hit to America’s credibility abroad hamper our efforts in the coming generational struggle with China?

The question of credibility in international relations has been debated since at least the time of Thucydides. It has never been resolved, and it repels simplistic declarations one way or the other. It last bubbled up during the wrenching debates that convulsed the country in the wake of the withdrawal from Vietnam. That departure did have complicated effects on Cold War American foreign policy but was not as catastrophic as the most impassioned warnings at the time would have had us believe.

One argument against overinterpreting the Afghanistan withdrawal’s hit to credibility suggested itself in the subsequent weeks. The Biden administration’s announcement of the AUKUS coalition against China, partnering with Australia and the United Kingdom, completely transfixed the global foreign-policy community. The Chinese, in particular, protested vociferously. No one suggested that America’s commitment to the new Anglo alliance was less than completely credible.

That said, the withdrawal from Afghanistan will certainly affect the idea that the United States can and will remain equally committed to providing security and order across the world. It has prompted every current client of the United States to wonder just how high it sits on Washington’s hierarchy of priorities. Most profoundly, Europeans are waking up to the reality that if a shooting war between the U.S. and China were to happen tomorrow, America would unhesitatingly shift many of its forces away from the continent.

Overall, this is a healthy correction in expectation. Nothing is more damaging to the United States’s reputation than standing by commitments it no longer can fully honor.

Damir Marusic is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and co-founder of Wisdom of Crowds.

ANNE R. PIERCE

How many moral and strategic setbacks must America endure to see that unless free people are vigorous in defense of the ideals and security of democracy, forces of oppression and domination grow? With World War II and the conquests and horrors of fascist Germany and Japan, we learned this lesson the hard way … for a time. When the Cold War ended, largely because the United States prioritized alliances and deterrence, contained and pressured the Soviet Union, and upheld an appealing democratic alternative, many believed it would be the last time such military might or Free World ardor would be needed. They unlearned the lesson of the post-World War II order.

Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. administrations have continuously reinvented American foreign policy as if the power and influence we’d achieved, and the global pull of our democratic example, weren’t worth preserving. True, there are new challenges of terrorism, WMD proliferation, Chinese and Russian expansionism, and adversaries’ use of terror sponsorship, paramilitary groups, disinformation, and cyberwar. But, for that very reason, American foreign policy must rediscover moral and strategic resolve. Instead, there has been an untethered, experimental quality to our world posture, with defense priorities changing with each presidency, concern for human rights wavering, and relations with allies and treaties in flux.

With Afghanistan an egregious example, America too often squanders hard-fought gains, exhibits moral relativism, and appeases enemies while undermining friends. Barely consulting NATO while “coordinating” with the brutal Taliban, the United States withdrew forces without securing weapons and intelligence, or evacuating all imperiled U.S. citizens and Afghan allies. U.S. troops’ limited presence achieved outsize good. When their withdrawal resulted in chaos and horrors, the U.S. sent troops back — to a vulnerable, surrounded position — then withdrew again, still without completing the evacuation. America thereby left our own behind, condemned Afghan women and civilians to a terrible fate, relinquished counterterrorism surveillance, ceded influence to Russia, China, and Iran, and destroyed trust.

We must rethink retrenchment that is designed to avoid “endless war” yet only emboldens aggressors and terrorists, who in turn escalate hostilities and atrocities. We should “never again” legitimize or empower genocidal regimes or groups. We must fortify and modernize our military, multiply and connect European and Asian alliances, and stand up for human rights. The world suffers when American foreign policy is unprincipled, unwise, and unreliable, and would benefit from a Trumanesque/Reaganesque foreign policy revival.

Anne R. Pierce, Ph.D., is the author of A Perilous Path: The Misguided Foreign Policy of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry and other works. For information about the author and her books and articles, see www.annerpierce.com. Twitter: @AnneRPierce.

SHADI HAMID

Sometimes, I’m tempted to conclude that, despite laying claim to the skills and talents of the best and brightest, America is uniquely bad at foreign policy, particularly as it relates to anything having to do with Muslims or the Middle East. American strategy can be frustratingly inelastic: Presidents will insist on rigidity and stubbornness despite a changing context. But it’s more than that; there has been a certain callousness displayed by the last three presidents. As one person put it to me on Twitter, “Obama was regretfully callous, Trump was proudly callous, Biden may be sanctimoniously callous.”

I supported the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, although President Joe Biden’s bungling of it, and the apparent inability to extend sympathy to those left behind, made me doubt myself. But the bigger question, now that Americans seem to have stopped caring about Afghanistan, is what comes next? Does the Afghanistan withdrawal allow for a deeper reassessment of a failed bipartisan consensus?

Well, it depends on how one defines the consensus.

On the Middle East and South Asia, the consensus, as I read it, still lives, although not necessarily in the way one might expect. Each of the last four presidents — Biden, Trump, Obama, and Bush — maintained American support for some of the region’s most odious dictators, including in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. To be sure, George Bush initially put pressure on authoritarian allies but quickly backed down once he saw that democratization in conservative societies benefited Islamists rather than so-called “moderates.” Barack Obama’s enthusiasm for Arab democracy lasted a few months in the early, euphoric days of the Arab Spring. But here, too, democratization was messier than expected, leading to the election of groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the young, English-speaking liberals in Tahrir Square whom Americans loved to idealize. Just two years later, the Obama administration refused to call the 2013 coup in Egypt a coup and gave the military an effective green light to end the country’s deeply flawed, though still very real, democratic experiment.

Getting serious about democracy promotion is often viewed as part of the old bipartisan consensus that must now be discarded — a product of hubris and grand, misguided ambitions. Yet, this is where things get mixed up. Not supporting dictatorships, by using our economic and military leverage to pressure dependent regimes to be less repressive, is very different from the folly of 20-year nation-building adventures.

If the central struggle of our time is one between democracies like ours and autocracies like China’s, then it seems odd that we would choose to deemphasize further the role of the democratic idea abroad. Ideas, ideals, and ideology are likely to become more rather than less important, whether the rest of us like it or not.

Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, co-founder of Wisdom of Crowds, and the author of Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World.

MICHAEL RUBIN

A lesson from the pre-9/11-era: What happens in Afghanistan doesn’t stay in Afghanistan. Critics say President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan returns us to that time and re-empowers al Qaeda, but what is at stake is, in fact, far greater.

Biden justified the withdrawal as part of his promise to end “forever wars.” In reality, he is turning his back on traditional deterrence and containment. While White House partisans compared the Kabul airlift to Berlin’s, the former was about abandonment in the face of totalitarian terror, while the latter manifested a commitment to fight it. The same logic that compelled Biden to abandon Afghanistan could just as easily lead America to leave Japan, Korea, or Germany.

At stake is not just the Taliban but rather the post-World War II liberal order. North Korea, Iran, and China seize and trade hostages for diplomatic concessions. Syrian President Bashar Assad flouts the post-World War I prohibition on using chemical weapons. The Islamic State operates from Mosul to Mozambique. Under the slogan “The world is bigger than five,” Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan attacks the privileges of the permanent members of the Security Council. When pundits and practitioners preach multipolarity, few conceptualize what it would mean to make autocratic regimes like Russia and China co-equals. They now have a taste, as China openly perpetrates genocide against Uyghurs and international organizations such as the World Health Organization and the World Bank manipulate or repress data in order to assuage Beijing’s communist rulers.

When Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously told President George H.W. Bush, “Don’t go wobbly on me now.” The United States remains the world’s most powerful country, but its political leadership needs a Thatcher-like intervention, for if the United States refuses to project its power, the order that allowed democracies, economies, and human rights to thrive for 75 years will collapse.

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

BRIAN KATULIS

The ship of U.S. foreign policy is adrift and taking on water, the consequence of the corrosive effect of a combination of factors: increasing global disorder, a quarter-century of unforced errors by U.S. foreign policy leaders and practitioners, and an increasingly bitter, politicized domestic debate about national security.

A shared sense of national purpose has been steadily eroded by the domestic tribalism over U.S. foreign policy, a mix of dysfunction and division at home exploited by America’s competitors and adversaries in the world.

The captain of this ship, President Joe Biden, has sought to chart a new course in the world, yet despite grand pronouncements, it is not that far off from the one charted by his immediate predecessor. Like all large ships, U.S. foreign policy is hard to turn in a different direction, all the more so when the combination of forces that keep America adrift in the world are still in place.

If there’s a common thread between the foreign policies of the current administration and the two previous ones, it’s the worldview of a “gated community” mindset. Pull back from the world, take care of our own, build walls, and don’t try so hard to pursue joint actions on transnational threats. The gated community mindset doesn’t worry so much about what happens on the other side of national borders. As a result, the value of human life and respect for the common good have declined in U.S. foreign policy debates.

President Biden will redouble efforts to achieve some progress on climate change, and his administration will organize a summit for democracy aimed at signaling virtues without being willing to bear much of a burden or pay much of a price on the toughest of cases, such as Syria or Afghanistan. The efforts to shore up America’s ability to compete with China will continue, but it will likely be hampered by the internal political divisions between and within the two leading parties.

The political sectarianism over U.S. foreign policy at home will only heat up as 2022 and 2024 draw nearer. Yet most of the divisive debates will serve to confuse ordinary Americans and make Russia, China, and Iran happy as they see America stymied by its own dysfunction. A handful of leaders and thinkers in America will try to reach across ideological divides to dump buckets overboard and plug holes from stern to bow.

But the ship of U.S. foreign policy will continue to take on more water without a revised sense of an inclusive nationalism and a captain who inspires a broader swath of the public to keep things afloat.

Brian Katulis is a senior fellow at American Progress, where his work focuses on U.S. national security strategy and counterterrorism policy.

VICTORIA COATES

Over the last decade, it has become clear that the People’s Republic of China poses a generational threat to the United States and will challenge America for superpower status in short order. The post-Cold War assumption that the trend toward liberal democracy and capitalism was evolutionary and inevitable has proven to be not only false but also China’s opening to exploit and pervert the very institutions we built to encourage that trend.

The good news, however, is that despite China’s impressive economic growth, the predatory and aggressive practices it uses to attain that success also make prospective partner nations wary. This is to America’s advantage so long as our leaders unapologetically promote the rewards of being on our team — and make clear that it is going to be necessary to choose a side in this fight.

As China has demonstrated with the Belt and Road initiative, global influence in this struggle will not be exclusively expanded by military might. Investment and development are now equally if not more powerful, and while the PRC has prioritized providing the cheapest and easiest product, the United States can offer a vastly superior solution. Chinese investment is targeted at either harvesting resources for domestic consumption or adding assets to the PRC’s ledger. It is fundamentally rapacious, and so exploitative of its erstwhile partners.

In contrast, American economic partnerships can strengthen our allies because true market dynamism flourishes only in an atmosphere of mutual profit. But in order to fulfill the promise of that dynamism, U.S. leaders must stimulate competition and creativity in the sort of free marketplace China abhors.

As we emerge from the COVID-19 crisis, the world faces, to borrow a phrase, a time for choosing. Whether wittingly or not, the virus originated in the PRC, starkly demonstrating the devastation China is capable of unleashing on the world. But the United States cannot simply assume others will “make the right choice” if we want to continue to shape global outcomes to our advantage.

America has the opportunity to show the world that while the People’s Republic of China wants vassals and subjects, we seek partners and allies who will share in our security and prosperity. The United States can promise a radically different future for the world, one fueled by abundant energy and filled with the promise of unlimited innovation, if we have the will and purpose to offer it.

Victoria Coates is the director for the Middle East and North Africa at the Center for Security Policy. She served as deputy national security adviser for the Middle East and North Africa and as senior policy adviser to the secretary of energy in the Trump administration.

TOOMAS HENDRIK ILVES

The changing American role abroad is illuminated by the adjustments its own allies are contemplating. In a world in which the U.S. has fundamentally redefined its security posture, Europe needs seriously to redefine its own.

For at least two decades, America’s long “pivot to Asia” should have been foreseen as an obvious foreign and security policy response to China’s inexorable move from its “peaceful rise” phase to “near peer” and now to “peer adversary” status. Russia is no longer an existential threat to America but rather a semirogue nuisance power. Terrorism is a persistent threat to be dealt with ad hoc, but one that does not require a global war on terror or the democratic transformation of failed states. In this world, it has been aptly put, China is climate change, a fundamental reordering, while all else is weather.

Europe needs to find its own umbrella and galoshes. Minimally, that means truly taking charge of its own security. Yet 30 years after the end of the Cold War, Europe persists in an adolescent rebellion toward the U.S. from which it touts a vague “strategic autonomy.” This defines European security not in terms of the all too real threats it faces but rather as autonomy from an imaginary American “other.” The U.S. today sees its own national security in Asia, not, as it has for most of the years since 1945, Europe.

The abrupt departure of the U.S. from Afghanistan, where Europe was treated as an afterthought, seems to have woken up some on the continent to the new reality: “Strategic autonomy” has thus far meant inaction. In dealing with its most immediate adversary, Russia, the European Union has failed to respond to at least a decade of unacceptably aggressive actions, including invasions, failed coups, murders, and terrorist acts on EU territory; support for and encouragement of European separatist movements; massive anti-vaccination disinformation social media campaigns and repeated attempts to sway European elections, most recently in Germany. While existential for Europe, for the U.S., these fall merely in the category of “Russia as a nuisance power.” NATO will still defend Europe in the improbable case of Russian war-making, but the rest are now Europe’s challenges, not America’s.

After 70 years of a strong U.S. presence, it would not be unreasonable for Europe to play a role in the Middle East and North Africa as well. Like it or not, the American focus on its “Quad,” with AUKUS and its military deployments in the Pacific, counts on Europe to step up to the plate to deal with at least its own and nearby security threats.

Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former president of Estonia, is a distinguished nonresident fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

ALBERTO M. FERNANDEZ

The debacle that capped the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan seemed a clarifying moment in American foreign policy. As shocking as the details were, as high the cost in blood and treasure, a reckoning on what America’s role in the world should be was long overdue. A clear bipartisan majority of the public wanted out of Afghanistan, even if people were troubled by the handling of the withdrawal.

Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump were right to focus on China’s adversarial character and to recalibrate defense efforts accordingly. But the United States faces an even bigger existential risk in becoming a Western version of the old Soviet Union: a decaying population, a creaky economy and ideology, but armed to the teeth. Deadly, broke, and woke is not sustainable. The fact that the dollar still remains the world’s fiat currency has allowed us to borrow billions to maintain a still formidable military edge over other nations.

But military might cannot be divorced from real dynamism forever. America’s dominance abroad in the 20th century rose on the back of its economic success. The U.S. does too much on the global stage, is still too distracted and spendthrift, its power still too diffused into too many exotic causes driven by Beltway globalist paternalism. In 2020, we discovered the dangers of relying on the Chinese to make our medicines and communication technology. Everything else should be secondary to reestablishing a national economic base that fills our coffers and employs our citizens.

Opposing China, reforging atrophied U.S. ties within the Western Hemisphere, and nurturing our traditional relationships with Israel and our Arab allies are all commonsense, logical stances, but they are complementary to and flow from an economic nationalism on which a strong and disciplined foreign policy must be grounded.

Alberto M. Fernandez is vice president of the Middle East Media Research Institute. Previously, he served as presi­dent of the Middle East Broad­casting Networks and coordinator for stra­tegic counterterrorism communications at the State Department.

REBECCAH HEINRICHS

The world watched America retreat under the shaking fist of the Taliban, strengthen Russia by waiving sanctions on Nord Stream 2, and leave France out in the cold when secretly striking a security alliance with Australia and the United Kingdom. It is no wonder allies are questioning America’s role in the world.

Pax Americana has reigned since the end of World War II. Accurately assessing what’s at stake now requires understanding how that era came about and what kept it going. The era’s relative peacefulness was not the result of an evolution of human behavior, as some would think, as if it was inevitable or intrinsic. Neither was it thanks to the march toward global government, permanent multilateral institutions, and fixed treaties, as if bureaucracy had finally triumphed over sovereignty. No, that era was earned by American power and shaped by the prudent decisions of patriotic statesmen. Now, with multiplying threats and the Chinese Communist Party’s determination to supplant the U.S., what can be done to prolong American preeminence?

First and foremost, we must strengthen our primacy. This means bolstering our economy through deregulation and freeing critical supply chains from a Chinese chokehold. It means energy independence is a nonnegotiable national security imperative for the free world. And it means the economy must support and encourage the building and flourishing of families enough to arrest the country’s demographic spiral.

Second, we must invest wisely in our military. Focus on the weapon systems we need to deter the most serious peers — China and Russia, both of which are engaged in rapid nuclear weapons buildups. We should leverage modern technology to make our weapons more lethal while training our warfighters to be a step ahead of any peer or rival.

Third, we should put to much better use the collective strength of our alliances. We need a strong NATO to deter Russia. We need a strong Quad to weaken and deter China. We need Israel and Gulf partners and others to help us destroy terrorist cells and counter the Iranian regime.

It seems daunting. President Joe Biden seems clearly unable to understand, let alone do, what is necessary. But perhaps we still have enough cumulative strength and the sheer grace of Providence until we as a people demand leaders who are.

Rebeccah Heinrichs is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and an adjunct professor at the Institute of World Politics.

JONATHAN SCHANZER

OBITUARY: The U.S.-Led World Order died in Afghanistan on Aug. 30, 2021, three days shy of its 76th birthday. Cause of death was internal bleeding from self-inflicted wounds.

The Order was born Sept. 2, 1945, on the USS Missouri. Early on, it protected the world from socialism and communism. Later, it defended millions of people from terrorism. Though it was maligned in recent years, the U.S.-Led World Order was a devoted champion of democracy around the globe. Its enduring legacy is the spread of unprecedented technological, medical, and economic advances worldwide.

Death was slow and painful. It began with the 2003 partisan debate about the war on terrorism and was compounded by the 2008 Great Recession. These challenges, among others, led to the election of President Barack Obama, who openly questioned whether the USLWO was a force for good. He yielded billions of dollars in sanctions relief to the Islamic Republic of Iran while minimizing the threat of Islamism and other malign ideologies.

Obama was succeeded by President Donald Trump, who cajoled “free-riding” allies to spend more on collective security, straining the U.S.-Led World Order. He reversed some of Obama’s worst policies, notably on Iran, but his transactional “America First” foreign policies eroded the Order further.

Succeeding Trump was Joe Biden, who vowed to heal these wounds, but instead made them worse. Exacerbating the decline was a foreign policy establishment (née Blob) funded by clicks, big business, China, and Qatar.

The U.S.-Led World Order is survived by the Five Eyes and NATO, as well as allies in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. But without a strong America, they are all justifiably worried about the rise of China, which is the most likely candidate to inherit the world order.

Futile attempts by the current administration to revive the USLWO will continue regularly at the White House briefing room. Successful resuscitation will require summoning the ghost of Ronald Reagan.

Jonathan Schanzer is senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.