As we struggle through the COVID pandemic and look for a way back into relative “normalcy,” now may not seem the right time to ask bigger questions about America’s political trajectory over the last three post–Cold War decades. But this is precisely the time to take stock and consider why and how we have reached what could reasonably be seen as a point of national crisis. In just one generation, a country that in 1991 stood at the peak of its power and influence has been hobbled by internal spasms and external political pressure that is increasingly testing the extant international order America claims to have put in place. Today the very viability of the United States’ democracy is under strain, and yet we hear that when it comes to our foreign and security policy, “America is back,” presumably signaling the return to the status quo before the Trump administration.
At the root of America’s decline since its victory in the Cold War lies ideological hubris that has defined the path to globalist empire that would manifest fully in the decades of post–Cold War triumphalism. In foreign and security policy for three decades now, our elites have pursued with near-religious zeal the fantasy of a “liberal global order” underwritten, presumably indefinitely, by American military power. Amidst the declarations that “history has ended” and the United States had a duty to seize its “unipolar moment,” few paused to think of the ghastly collectivist nature of the imperial project that was suddenly on offer. As our political establishment’s imperial ambitions grew, its concern over the impact at home largely dissipated, with trillions invested in overseas projects rather than spent on modern infrastructure, education, and the health of American citizens. At that moment of Washington’s triumph over the Soviet Union, the only question asked — now that America’s power was no longer checked by a superpower adversary — was what the United States could do to reshape the world in its image. Not once did it pause to ask if it should do this just because it could.
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