This piece (by me) is cross-posted at Blue Blaze, as part of a roundtable on progressive foreign policy.
Hegemonic decline can be a violent process, but the same could be said about the era of US dominance that has gradually come undone. 25% of America’s nearly 400 wars since its founding have occurred after the Cold War, during its global primacy. That statistic should haunt anyone with anything to say about US foreign policy, and correcting for it ought to be a priority for any intellectual project aimed at reforming statecraft.
The most urgent task, therefore, is restoring a sanity to US foreign policy that has proven elusive since at least the War on Terror began. The world needs a US state with the capacity to comprehend the full costs and benefits of its actions. A state that respects international law, does not cower at the prospect of sharing power with or accommodating others, and feels a responsibility to confront its many hypocrisies.
But change must come from within. External attempts by foreign actors to alter America’s role in the world carry a real risk of “nuclear fire” that spares none of us.[1] The promise of a progressive foreign policy worthy of the name is precisely that it circumvents that problem—foreclosing on World War III by midwifing a domestic shift toward social democracy and stable regional orders abroad.
As a former national security practitioner, I once embodied the pathologies of America’s national security elite—American exceptionalism, military solutionism, a fixation on spatial fixes to security problems, and the conflation of zero-sum conceptions of power with the common good. These prejudices are incompatible with using the state to realize human liberation. In the best of times, they make the United States far more dangerous in world affairs than most policymakers realize.
And we do not live in the best of times. The United States is not only undergoing hegemonic decline; it is also repudiating the relatively minimal obligations of public-goods provision that hegemony requires in favor of a more predatory statecraft—a trend that is most vivid now but predates the Trump administration.[2] Under these conditions, attempts by non-Americans to accelerate US decline or coercively induce restraint in US behavior risks bringing on the nuclear fire.
The world’s best chance of averting such a fate, then, does not depend on using US statecraft to discipline America’s constantly growing list of adversaries. Neither does it hinge entirely on trusting that the rest of the world can figure out how to stabilize international order while the planet’s preeminent military and economic power is openly revisionist, coercing enforcement of its arbitrary and ever-shifting rules. Instead, Americans themselves must demand a graceful decline—that their government relate to the world in less violent ways.
That means abandoning primacy, taking risks for peace, and treating social democracy at home as a prerequisite for power-political competitions with other states and empires. Accommodating US relative decline in this way would truly be in the national interest because it would benefit most Americans.
For policymakers committed to this project, the task involves a mindset shift, but one that retools the US national security state. The policy agenda that responds to this analysis—adapting to hegemonic decline and power diffusion with egalitarian reforms and peacemaking—could take several forms depending on what principles or assumptions take priority. But the urgency of our moment and the growing popular demands in the streets of the United States tell us what is to be done if we are willing to listen.
Bridle the imperial presidency. The War on Terror has allowed the Executive Branch of the United States unlimited powers in the realm of national security. It is this unilateral power that has made it possible for the United States to engage in endless wars abroad without declaring them, and for those wars to visit American communities as hypermilitarized policing and the spectacle of military occupations of US cities on partisan grounds. Congress must reassert its war powers and repeal—not replace—the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) that started the War on Terror. It must restrict the president’s ability to unilaterally order nuclear strikes. It must closely oversee CIA and DoD drone operations. It must re-establish a firewall between the military and domestic law enforcement, restricting the president’s emergency powers to deploy US troops on US soil. It must slash or eliminate the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. And it must shrink the overall capacity of the national security state.
Avoid war except in self-defense (and reshape military force structure accordingly). The US national security state has become habituated to planning for and actually deploying military force for what Arnold Wolfers identified as “possession goals” (the pursuit or expression of national values) and “milieu goals” (attempts to structure the international system in favorable ways). To disproportionately sacrifice working-class people for such purposes is an abuse that must end. Meanwhile, US entanglement in proxy wars—that is, arming client states in conflicts—should meet a three-part test: it contains a theory of least-harm; it serves the aims of territorial defense or national liberation, not foreign conquest; and it is paired with policies that address the root causes of a conflict.
Initiate defense conversion. Portions of the US defense-industrial base need to be converted to productive economic, future-oriented, and climate-friendly uses. Detailed proposals for how precisely to undertake defense conversions are readily available and date back to the early 1990s. I articulated the reasoning to support this process in my recent book with Michael Brenes:
The “job multiplier effect” from federal spending on the military (6.9 jobs in the defense industry and supporting supply chains for every $1 million spent) is lower than the same amount spent in any other industry. During the first sixteen years of the War on Terror, the United States lost the opportunity to create between one and three million jobs in other sectors and, consequently, lost the opportunity to create a healthier, more educated, and more economically secure nation. We should expect a similar outcome from the era of great-power competition.
Replace Sino-US rivalry with a new détente. Great-power competition is bad for the working class, heightens divisions within politically polarized societies, and empowers reactionary political forces opposed to democracy. Sino-US détente, by contrast, was imperfect, but for more than 40 years served as a bulwark against great-power conflict while fostering an environment favorable to wage growth, improved labor standards, and modest political liberalization in China. For strategic reasons—as part of an effort to forge a new détente—the US should unwind its tariff regime toward China and instead marry Western capital with Chinese green tech “overcapacity” (low-cost production for export). Helping—not impeding—China’s export of affordable, subsidized renewable energy technologies to the global South will accelerate a much-needed green energy transition. China might also be willing to take losses on some of its sovereign debt holdings if they are offset by US tariff rollbacks and a more benign geopolitical environment. This grand-détente bargain would be a boon to the American and Chinese worker because a global South with a climate-proofed economy, free from the yoke of unpayable debt, will be more able to absorb goods, services, and foreign investment.
Pursuing these tasks intelligently unlocks the ability to incite cooperation spirals rather than conflict spirals. And many more policies should follow the reorientation I discuss above, including: Opposing Israel’s destabilizing primacy in the Middle East by ending the policy of “qualitative military edge”; eliminating the ICBM leg of the nuclear triad; terminating the 6th-generation fighter program; converting the US sphere of influence in the Pacific into a strategic buffer ensured through regional autonomy; and undertaking dozens of other specific recommendations I detailed in a report last year meant to address the growing problem of nuclear precarity.
The point of my interjection here is not to advocate for a laundry list of specific policies that reflect feel-good values or a preferred identity—that is one of the most common misconceptions about progressive foreign policy. Rather, it’s to repudiate “hair of the dog” logic in global affairs. If militarized geopolitics is a problem, its solution will not be reducible to still more militarized geopolitics.
We must all be realists in the sense that it is imperative to both meet a dark world as it is and act based on sober accounts of why the world is this way, which means also facing up to our role in making it rather than indulging in fairytales about America’s intrinsic heroism. Only then can we direct statecraft toward changing the context within which others’ decisions about war and peace get made.
[1] “Nuclear fire” comes from George Jackson’s Soledad Brother: “…We [blacks] are on the inside. We are the only ones (besides the very small white minority left) who can get at the monster's heart without subjecting the world to nuclear fire.”
[2] Global stability is the foremost public good that hegemons are supposed to provide. But stability is predicated on maintaining stable international rules and norms, lending legitimacy to international institutions that maintain hegemonic ordering, perpetuating the illusion that security alliances are fixed and reliable, and ensuring the predictable functioning of global political economy.
