America Can’t Retreat from the World

Despite its troubles at home, the U.S. remains uniquely placed to lead on the global stage.

 
Can America defend the liberal world order it created when its own liberal experiment is in peril? More than a year after the January 6 insurrection, this question hangs over the debate on America’s foreign policy. For decades, the United States stewarded an outrageously ambitious geopolitical project that—for all of its imperfections and failures—produced unprecedented peace, prosperity, and freedom in the world. Now, many believe America must turn inward to focus on saving itself.

“America can’t promote democracy abroad,” argued one writer after the Capitol assault. “It can’t even protect it at home.” Richard Haass, the dean of America’s foreign policy establishment, concurred that America should curb its global ambitions until its “own house is in better order.” Last month, the Biden administration’s “Summit for Democracy” was met with widespread derision. The United States, Chinese propagandists taunted, should stop its meddling and heed the maxim “Physician, heal thyself.”

This idea that America should pull back from the world and salve its wounds goes beyond the decision to end a frustrating “forever war” in Afghanistan. It often implies that the United States should dramatically scale back its post-1945 efforts to protect a favorable balance of power, promote democracy and human rights, and contain hostile authoritarian states. Yet this prescription, common as it has become, misreads both American history and the needs of the current moment.

Since America’s founding, democratic perfection has never been a prerequisite to global leadership: The United States has shaped the world even as it has struggled to overcome its own deeply rooted evils. An ambitious foreign policy is hardly a distraction from democratic rejuvenation. Historically, the need to overcome authoritarian rivals has motivated America to become a better version of itself. And America’s wisest policymakers have long understood that the fate of democracy at home is linked to the balance of power and the balance of ideas abroad. Today as before, an America that allows the forces of authoritarianism to run rampant will eventually inhabit a world that is unsafe for liberalism in America itself.

The current moment feels so precarious because the key pillars of the old order are under strain. After World War II, the United States sought to ensure its own freedom, prosperity, and security by creating a larger international system in which America and likeminded countries could flourish. That system, commonly known as the liberal international order, required the United States to bear extraordinary burdens. It also delivered extraordinary benefits: averting global wars of the sort that plagued the early 20th century, lifting billions of people out of poverty, and creating an environment in which democratic values could spread more widely than ever before. Yet that system is now being challenged from without and within.

 
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Πηγή: persuasion.community