America Is Cursed by a Foreign Policy of Nostalgia

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U.S. foreign policy is adrift between the old order and one that has yet to be defined. Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election awakened many in Washington to the reality that despite the political elite’s presumption of an unassailable foreign policy consensus, many Americans questioned the assumptions that had guided decades of the U.S. approach to the world—in particular, the idea that an international order backed by American military hegemony was self-evidently worth maintaining, no matter the cost. The 2024 election has confirmed that 2016 was not an anomaly. The old Washington consensus is dead.

But Trump’s “America first” approach is not a viable alternative. Despite often being mislabeled as isolationism, what Trump offers is in fact aggressive unilateralism, or what the political scientist Barry Posen has termed “illiberal hegemony”: a vision of the United States unbound by rules and unashamedly self-interested, no longer getting ripped off by a self-dealing and entrenched Washington political establishment and free-riding international allies and clients. In his speech to the Republican convention, Vice President-elect JD Vance built on this theme, weaving his own personal story of disillusionment with the Iraq war, in which he served, into a broader narrative of elite failure and impunity. Democrats neglected to respond adequately (even bafflingly touting the endorsement of one of the Iraq war’s key architects, former Vice President Dick Cheney), leaving a lane wide open for Trump to present himself, however cynically, as the antiwar candidate.

Americans need an alternative to the choice between “America first” unilateralism or “America is back” nostalgia. Putting a new coat of paint on the old liberal internationalism will not do—neither for Americans nor for most of the world’s countries and peoples, who understandably see U.S. leaders’ appeals to a “rules-based” order as a thin varnish for an order ruled, and often bent or broken, with impunity by the United States and its friends. Progressives and Democrats now have an opportunity—and obligation—to map a better way forward.

The goal of any country’s foreign policy is to promote the security and prosperity of its people. In today’s deeply interconnected world, however, where key challenges such as climate change and pandemics are shared, the United States’ global approach needs to include another priority: the common good. This will require a United States that acts in solidarity with others, considers the effects of American foreign policy on people around the world, and seeks to promote U.S. security and prosperity while not exporting insecurity and economic precarity onto them. Such an approach will benefit Americans more as well.

A DECISIVE BREAK Although there is now a greater recognition that Washington needs to break away from failed approaches of the past, much of the foreign policy establishment remains committed to American global military hegemony, whatever the cost. To paraphrase the musician Rick James, primacy is a hell of a drug. Yet it’s a habit that must be kicked, as feeding it necessitates a struggle for dominance that both neglects the urgent domestic needs and infringes upon the liberties of Americans. Simply put, building a healthy and secure democracy is incompatible with an endless quest for global dominance.

Even though the United States’ relative share of power is declining, it still boasts the largest economy and military in the world, with an unmatched set of alliances and partnerships and relationships that shapes the global agenda. It’s important for Washington to use its power and influence to support genuinely shared rules that can help guide global affairs beyond the simple brute equation of might makes right. Addressing urgent common challenges requires a nuanced approach recognizing that global engagement is vital not only to defending liberal values and human security but also to assuring each country’s prosperity.

Although President Joe Biden took some steps toward a new approach, they were not nearly enough. His administration’s clearest break from the neoliberal model of globalization, articulated in an April 2023 speech by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, marked an important if belated recognition that the old economic order had failed. Reducing global inequality and economic insecurity by adhering to equitable trade, labor, and investment rules could have enormous positive consequences for American workers—including those drawn to Trump’s populist economic rhetoric in this election campaign—as well as other communities around the world.

Many in the developing world are watching closely as the United States moves away from the old neoliberal logic while their own economies remain trapped within its austerity mandates. It is essential to reform neoliberal institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund to cede more influence over decision-making to the lower-income countries whose development these entities claim to support. The United States and its allies should also support a program of targeted debt relief to free populations from the crippling debt imposed by their own often-corrupt, undemocratic governments and predatory multinational corporations which would help them tackle urgent climate change and public health crises.

Progressives and Democrats now have an opportunity—and obligation—to map a better way forward. Any benefits yielded by a break from neoliberal economics would be squandered, however, if the United States continues to filter its approach through the lens of strategic competition. Nowhere has this been demonstrated more graphically than in the Middle East, where Washington’s rhetoric of peace and normalization masks a frantic effort to sustain American hegemony. In its struggle to prevent inroads by China and counter the pernicious roles of Iran and Russia in the region, the United States fed the very dynamic that those actors exploit. Witness the U.S. role as broker in the Abraham Accords, in which the United States offered arms for normalization of ties between Israel and Arab partners, or how the United States backed a catastrophic war waged by Israel on the captive people of Gaza in response to Hamas’s October 2023 attack. Rather than embrace a shift from bad policy and use its considerable leverage to rein in Israel’s assault, the United States has spent the past year mainly trying (and failing) to contain the spread of the conflict beyond Gaza, hemorrhaging resources and international credibility while abetting a humanitarian catastrophe. Instead of offering a genuine foreign policy for the middle class, let alone the working class, Washington has pursued global military hegemony for the ruling class.

The United States can advance a more equitable global order, or it can try to maintain global primacy, but it can’t do both. A global order that seeks to entrench American primacy is undemocratic on a global scale and will not benefit the populations most disenfranchised within the international system. Many in Washington, invested as they are in the old order, will wrongly equate calls for drawing back from U.S. military hegemony as retrenchment or, worse, isolationism. But the reality is that the projects of political elites in the 21st century—defined by militarism and the embrace of global economic and trade systems that prioritize corporate profits over economic and social well-being—have had vast costs. They have contributed not only to global instability but also to the slide toward authoritarianism and the reactionary anger on display in recent democratic elections. Americans’ safety and prosperity require Washington to participate in every possible international arena. But U.S. leaders must put people over governments—especially over the authoritarian ones that Washington has long considered partners and allies—and over corporate and plutocratic elites.

It’s going to require a true overhaul of foreign policy paradigms and personnel. U.S. policymakers should start with a decisive break with the era of the global war on terror. Biden deserves credit for the courageous step of ending the Afghanistan war, although the shambles of the final 2021 withdrawal, combined with the United States’ failure to honor its commitments to Afghan allies seeking a safe exit, is an enduring shame. His administration also dramatically reduced drone strikes, and with them the civilian casualties that too often accompanied those strikes. But there is so much more to be done. Despite Biden’s false claim to be “the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world,” American forces remain engaged in multiple countries in the Middle East and elsewhere under two different congressional authorizations for the use of military force, passed in 2001 and 2002. These authorizations should be repealed. The proposed National Security Powers Act, introduced in 2021 by Senators Bernie Sanders, Mike Lee, and Chris Murphy, is an excellent, comprehensive bill that would not only accomplish this but also aim to restore Congress’s authority over war-making, a role that has been allowed to ebb in the face of years of executive branch overreach. In addition, the bill proposes to reform the arms export control process, requiring an affirmative vote in both houses to approve certain types of arms sales, and it would adjust the process around declaring a national emergency to prevent the president from exploiting a crisis to increase executive authority.

STARK CHOICES Once Washington has truly closed the book on the global war on terror, however, it should not simply look to slot in a new enemy. Embracing a worldview of a great-power competition, the Trump and Biden administrations and much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment are fixated on reducing China’s presence and influence around the world. U.S. leaders should not understate the challenges posed by the government of China. Yet their dangerously unquestioned need to counter or even beat China in region after region across the globe is not only reactionary but also subordinates U.S. interests to a fight that drains resources and goodwill while foreclosing opportunities for cooperation and peaceful coexistence. Great-power competition will not revitalize democracy in a global or domestic context. By fostering international hostility and xenophobia, it will more likely empower those domestic political forces unfriendly to democracy.

The United States needs to recognize and secure its interests in the reality of a multipolar world rather than futilely attempting to forestall multipolarity through a costly and self-defeating effort to disadvantage China. The challenges that the United States faces globally—among them climate change, irregular migration, unregulated artificial intelligence, nuclear proliferation, political instability, and pandemics—require global cooperation; they cannot be solved militarily. The United States should approach cooperation on climate change—such as working with China to leverage non-debt-creating climate finance investments and to provide critical technical assistance to developing countries—as an opportunity to build trust and identify areas of mutual benefit on other issues.

To break out of the zero-sum competition that dominates strategic thinking on both sides, a new approach to defining success in global influence is required. Washington and Beijing should both focus on global public goods, such as universal public health infrastructure and green energy. They must marshal greater and more responsible development investment in countries and regions that have been starved of capital for decades. And they need to consistently protect human, political, and labor rights globally. Building international cooperation around such a transformation of the global economy would reestablish U.S.–Chinese relations on a new foundation, begin to relegitimize international norms by applying them to people of all countries, and address the truly existential threats humanity faces today.

Finally, it will be impossible to repair U.S. foreign policy without repairing U.S. politics. No foreign policy agenda, however well defined, can long endure amid the country’s current polarization, in which every issue becomes yet another weapon in the culture wars between left and right. Overcoming this challenge means confronting the fact that American democracy is constrained, if not torpedoed, by a campaign finance system that is tantamount to legalized bribery. The Biden administration rhetorically elevated anticorruption as a major national security goal, but corruption is not primarily a foreign policy problem. It is very much an American domestic problem, entrenching elite control and depriving the country of the opportunity for leadership by diverse and talented minds in fair debate. The reason why extreme nationalists get traction with claims that the system is rigged is because the system is, in fact, rigged—though often by the very interests funding those nationalists’ campaigns.

Another core political challenge is the need for accountability, domestically and internationally, which is crucial for the success of any reforms. The perception that a foreign policy that privileges diplomacy is weak stems from a misunderstanding—namely, the idea that diplomacy seeks to end conflicts without demanding reparations or accountability, thereby seeding future conflicts. Fortunately, as laid out above, there is an alternative that transcends the antiquated left-right divide. The vision described here is unlikely to take shape in the short term, but the time to set out on this alternative path is now. Americans must choose between integrity or corruption, accountability or complicity, impunity or the rule of law. These choices are stark, and making the right ones will require real political courage, leadership, and coalition-building. But ultimately, this is the only way to ensure the future of a United States and a world that are safer, more prosperous, and freer.

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