Traditionally, skeptics of America’s longevity as the world’s predominant power have been a fickle lot. In the late 1980s, the scholar Paul Kennedy predicted the coming collapse of American power due to “imperial overstretch.” A decade later, Kennedy reversed himself and declared that never in history had there been such a vast “disparity of power” as that between the United States and the rest of the world. The foreign affairs commentator Fareed Zakaria followed the opposite trajectory. In 2004, he asserted that the United States enjoyed “comprehensive unipolarity” unmatched since Rome, but a mere four years later he proclaimed the imminent arrival of the “post-American world.”
Declinists pronouncing the American order finis can be found across the political spectrum, and their arguments take various, even opposing, forms. In the aftermath of the Cold War—when the world order shifted from “bipolarity” to “unipolarity”—some trembled at the prospect of a “Leviathan unbound,” free of the harsh discipline imposed by the nuclear standoff in the long, twilight struggle. Others immediately predicted that the world of U.S. unipolarity was beginning to wane.
Today, by any measure of power—economic, military, diplomatic—the United States remains preeminent. To grasp the breadth of support for U.S. leadership, one need only recall the phalanx of European leaders that recently crowded the Oval Office in search of American reassurance in the effort to halt Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine. This remarkable spectacle is made all the more so when one considers that Europe, until recently, had been a culture dominated by “post” prefixes—“postmodern,” “postnational,” and “postheroic.”
Yet, in her new book, First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World, Emma Ashford, a columnist at Foreign Policy and a senior fellow at the Stimpson Center, fleshes out the case for the end of American preeminence with such doggedness that one can scarcely imagine her retracting her thesis and boosting Pax Americana a few years hence.
The bleak outlook of First Among Equals has become fashionable in foreign policy circles in an era of mounting geopolitical rivalry. Concurrent with palpable public resentment of military aid for Ukraine and Israel, it is now common to hear that the age of American unipolarity has run its course. In this view, the United States can no longer afford to bear the burden of sustaining a liberal order that demands an active defense not merely of its own interests but those of many other nations. Ashford’s book is thus representative of a strong current in the national mood.
It is also an expression of contemporary realist thought. Despite its academic pedigree, First Among Equals is largely free of the jargon that characterizes much realist scholarship. The book is divided into two sections. The first analyzes the post–Cold War trajectory of U.S. foreign policy while scorning the strategic thinking that has bred deep global engagement. The second half sketches out a vision for American power on behalf of what she calls “a strategy of Realist Internationalism.” This program, she explains, conceives of “a substantially more limited set of interests than those claimed by some other grand strategic approaches to the world.” With fewer interests to defend in the world, the United States could pare back its foreign involvement while vigilantly defending its “vital interests.”
The realist school regards America’s long-standing grand strategy as at once profligate in the use of military force and self-defeating. It takes as a given that the classical structure of world order is of great powers vying and warring for security, advantage, and aggrandizement—and that it’s incumbent on America to work with these powerful historical forces, not against them. But it does not seek to translate America’s singular strength into enduring global dominance. It seeks only for America to command a surplus of deterrent power and for other great powers to do likewise.
To put it another way, realism does not generally advocate for usable power. It advocates for negative power, the age-old checks and balances of international politics.
For so-called realists, not only does the United States have no vested interest in extensive defense commitments and far-flung military deployments, but these aspects of its international posture actually tempt imperial overstretch while eliciting adverse behavior from allies and adversaries alike. Realism supposedly offers a pragmatic method for “integrating American resources and national interests.” For its proponents, the process of aligning means and ends necessarily entails a policy of “selective engagement” and husbanding strength rather than augmenting it. Taken as a whole, this amounts to a drastic reduction in America’s global responsibilities and a meek acceptance of “a more diverse international system” in which an array of roughly equal great powers has substantial clout.
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There is good reason to doubt this melodramatic reading of the factors supposedly diminishing American influence in the world. National power may be more static today than at any time since the dawn of the industrial age. If a modicum of global peace can be successfully preserved over the next decade or two, this fact may well forestall the outbreak of dangerous hegemonic rivalry and a catastrophic great-power war for many years to come.
This is not an idle hope. As the political scientist Michael Beckley puts it in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, “For the first time in centuries, no country is rising fast enough to overturn the global balance.” Pointing to trends that suggest that “the rapid ascents that once defined modern geopolitics have yielded to sclerosis,” Beckley concludes, “The world is now a closed club of aging incumbents, circled by middle powers, developing countries, and failing states.” In such circumstances, American power is unlikely to be displaced.
For historical guidance in this new epoch, realists tend to look back not to American statesmen, but rather to Otto von Bismarck, whom Ashford dubs the “realists’ realist.” It was Bismarck who led Germany’s unification in 1871 and crafted the new nation’s diplomacy around the strategic dilemma of being surrounded by great powers and bereft of defensible frontiers. In his drive to secure Germany’s shaky new perch in the heart of the Continent, Bismarck sought to prevent strategic encirclement by cementing better relations with all contenders than they might establish among themselves. For realists, it was this fear of a combination of rivals—what Bismarck called the “nightmare of coalitions”—that is urgently relevant to a United States that enjoys primacy but not supremacy. It is the Iron Chancellor’s sort of managerial diplomacy that Ashford proposes as the best model for America today.
Her proposed system, premised on self-containment and offshore balancing, is ultimately insufficient for America’s critical status in the world. But Ashford’s analytic presentation is lucid. Realism, she expounds, “is fundamentally a nationalist rather than an internationalist philosophy” that spurns “collective notions of global good” and “nebulous concepts” like liberal order. Realism takes as its primary objectives “the maintenance of American security and prosperity,” the creation of a “manageable balance of power among key states in the international system,” the prevention of the “rise of a regional hegemon in core global regions,” and, most of all, “the avoidance of catastrophic great power war.”
What is striking about this theory, however, is its failure to notice that, more than three-quarters of a century since the United States began to exercise global hegemony, these salient objectives have largely been met. In the postwar era, the “onshore” presence of American power in vital strategic theaters has maintained a world order of relatively free trade that has been a boon for billions of people while securing core American interests. America’s ability to project power and provide security in parts of the world, such as Europe and Asia, that have previously known endless cycles of warfare, has preserved a broad measure of peace. What’s more, though it does not rank among realist priorities, democratic government, a rarity in the world before the dawn of the Pax Americana, has flourished on every continent. The persistent realist critique of American power resembles the economist who asked, “Yes, it works in practice, but does it work in theory?”
Ashford gives short shrift to true vulnerabilities and threats to peace, such as inadequate U.S. defense spending. Russia and China have quintupled military spending relative to the United States and its allies since 2000. Nonetheless, Ashford argues for even less robust American military capabilities. “Realist internationalism,” she writes, “would shift U.S. military emphasis significantly, focusing not on military primacy (the goal of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War) but rather on military sufficiency—that is, creating and maintaining the forces needed to defend the United States and its core security interests.” Although Ashford favors a “substantially heavier emphasis on naval and air forces,” her overall scheme for America’s defense posture would result in a conspicuously smaller military unable to perform its customary role in deterring or defeating aggression across wide swathes of the earth.
Turning to current events, Ashford describes Donald Trump as the first “post-unipolar president” who is actively “seeking to accelerate the process of global fragmentation.” Without explicitly defending “America First” foreign policy, Ashford sympathizes with its stated goals of conserving U.S. power and reducing foreign commitments. She makes an exception on China, however, which presents “the only truly significant threat to American interests.” It’s not yet clear how, or whether, the Trump administration plans to counter this formidable threat, but Ashford echoes many realists in arguing for “rigid prioritization of U.S. resources to combat China.”
But realism is a liability in that effort. To begin with, it’s impossible to fully grasp the Chinese Communist Party’s obsession with Taiwan and its determination to reunify with the “breakaway province” without taking stock of the CCP’s imperialist ideology—and the subversive threat that Taiwanese democracy poses to it. What’s more, a policy dismissive of human rights is as injurious to the anti-CCP coalition as a policy narrowly tailored to economic interests. President Trump’s failure to muster moral outrage against the growth of Chinese totalitarianism is strategically inept.
Ashford grants that the United States, along with China, will remain “ahead of the pack” for some time to come, but she insists there will be no enduring bipolar cold war between these two rivals. Instead, she discerns an emerging multipolar era in which military and economic power in the international system “are diffusing to a broader variety of middle powers.”
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Reports of America’s declining power have been ubiquitous for decades. Ever since Henry Kissinger proclaimed that “political multipolarity” was at hand in 1968, making it “impossible to impose an American design,” it has been de rigueur to write off the staying power of the Stars and Stripes. Yet the United States has stubbornly defied these predictions.
The “rise of the rest,” long foretold by declinists, has simply not materialized. On the contrary, other great powers suffer chronic problems that have slowed or stalled their ascent. Even if those rising powers somehow manage to escape the demographic crisis or the middle-income trap (in which poor countries struggle to grow more than moderately rich), they will have a hard time converting their newfound economic heft into lasting geopolitical influence.
Which is a good thing. Ashford, like many who continue to forecast a post-American world, appears to welcome it. As a historical matter, however, a diffusion of power in the international system does not tend to breed peace and comity among nations, but rather bitterly contested spheres of influence that yield incessant friction and violent conflict. In the heyday of the balance of power, the ambitions of nations bred fear and hostile alliances, and recurring war was the result.
Such vast and bloody contests have subsided in the American order as predatory regimes are frequently isolated or punished. Yet the real cause of consternation among these critics, one suspects, is not the fine points of international order, but rather the aversion to any order enforced by singular power, especially one bearing an American imprimatur. Whatever order may come next, they do not want it to be Made in the U.S.A.
Although Ashford concedes unspecified dangers involved in an “unbalanced multipolarity,” she nonetheless implores Americans to “learn to live in a world in which theirs is no longer the indispensable nation.” She should remember the ancient Greek curse: “May the gods fulfill your wishes.” The problem with the brand of realism prevailing today is not simply that a world of diminished American power and engagement could hasten the emergence of unseen dangers. It’s that it would bolster bellicose revisionists whose far-reaching ambitions are already in plain sight. If realist counsels are heeded, the future may not be the dark one they foresee. It may be even darker.
Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images
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