>The United States has pursued two grand strategies in the 80 years since World War II. One was an extraordinary success: the policy of “containment” that guided American economic investments, foreign relations, and military deployments during the Cold War, which led to the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the United States as the world’s lone superpower.
>The same cannot be said, unfortunately, about the strategy adopted at the Cold War’s conclusion: an attempt to leverage superpower status to establish a “liberal world order” that Washington would secure and dominate. That strategy went by names including “enlargement,” as defined by President Bill Clinton’s first national security adviser, Anthony Lake, and “benevolent hegemony,” in the words of the neoconservative thinkers William Kristol and Robert Kagan, writing in these pages. This vision promised an enduring Pax Americana in which no other country could or would challenge U.S. supremacy, all evolved inevitably toward liberal democracy, and the global free market’s warm embrace rendered borders irrelevant while spreading prosperity worldwide.
>By some measures, the strategy worked. U.S. GDP and stock prices steadily rose. Technology and trade stitched the world closer together. World War III did not start. But a clear-eyed appraisal of the post–Cold War era reveals a less rosy reality. Far from producing a utopia of shared prosperity and stable peace, American strategy in the past three decades has instead yielded a global economic order that allows other countries to exploit Washington’s largess, an ascendant authoritarian adversary in China, and simmering conflicts around the globe in which expectations of American commitment far outstrip the reality of American capacity—all of which have contributed to economic and social decay in the United States.
>Any grand strategy is, in part, a bet on a particular theory of political economy. The bet on investing to rebuild a bulwark of market democracies whose prosperity would eventually overwhelm Soviet communism was a wise one. The subsequent bet, on the ability of globalization and free markets to render political economy irrelevant, was not. The time has come for a new wager. The best way to create a sustainable trading and security bloc is a strategy of reciprocity: an alliance among countries committed to engaging with each other on comparable terms while jointly excluding others that will not fulfill the same obligations.
>Demanding reciprocity would counteract the beggar-thy-neighbor policies that have created unsustainable imbalances with U.S. trading partners, curtail Washington’s dependence on adversaries for critical goods, and limit the free-riding that has slowly eroded U.S. alliances and partnerships. By embracing reciprocity, the United States would also be rejecting an asymmetric order featuring a dominant power and its clients in favor of one in which participants all stand on equal footing with equal expectations. This would represent a healthy development in how the nation conceives of itself, moving away from an American empire and back toward an American republic.
>Perhaps counterintuitively, the relative decline in American power has strengthened Washington’s hand when it comes to negotiating the terms of a new global order. The status quo is predicated on an American commitment to hegemony that precludes the possibility of pulling back. That commitment made sense as long as the United States remained dominant. But owing to the self-enfeeblement of its allies and the ascent of China, the United States can no longer maintain its predominance.
>And so it seems plausible that a dramatic retrenchment—pulling back from global economic and military engagement and relying chiefly on the strategic depth and sizable market provided by the North American continent—could produce a better outcome than the ongoing descent into late-imperial exhaustion. Simply put, Washington can now consider walking away from the table if the terms of its relationships do not improve. Allies and partners know this and want to avoid that outcome, because the U.S. market and military remain indispensable to their own prosperity and security. Which means that, for the first time in the lives of contemporary policymakers, the United States is in a position to frame its demands around narrow self-interest, back them with credible consequences, and expect them to be taken seriously. The question that will define the next era of American statecraft is, What should those demands be? In his second term, President Donald Trump has made progress toward developing a strategy of reciprocity. He and his administration deserve credit for recognizing the need for change, and they have been persuasive in signaling that they see walking away from the table as preferable to tolerating the status quo. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has conceded that European countries have been “free-riders,” taking advantage of the United States, and the most recent NATO summit concluded with an unprecedented commitment by members to raise their defense spending from at least 2.0 percent of GDP to at least 3.5 percent. Credibly threatened with tariffs, Canada and Mexico have begun reducing their economic ties with China; Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and the European Union have all worked toward agreements to reduce their trade imbalances with the United States.
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Archived Link: [https://archive.ph/FMPr7](https://archive.ph/FMPr7)
>The United States has pursued two grand strategies in the 80 years since World War II. One was an extraordinary success: the policy of “containment” that guided American economic investments, foreign relations, and military deployments during the Cold War, which led to the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the United States as the world’s lone superpower.
>The same cannot be said, unfortunately, about the strategy adopted at the Cold War’s conclusion: an attempt to leverage superpower status to establish a “liberal world order” that Washington would secure and dominate. That strategy went by names including “enlargement,” as defined by President Bill Clinton’s first national security adviser, Anthony Lake, and “benevolent hegemony,” in the words of the neoconservative thinkers William Kristol and Robert Kagan, writing in these pages. This vision promised an enduring Pax Americana in which no other country could or would challenge U.S. supremacy, all evolved inevitably toward liberal democracy, and the global free market’s warm embrace rendered borders irrelevant while spreading prosperity worldwide.
>By some measures, the strategy worked. U.S. GDP and stock prices steadily rose. Technology and trade stitched the world closer together. World War III did not start. But a clear-eyed appraisal of the post–Cold War era reveals a less rosy reality. Far from producing a utopia of shared prosperity and stable peace, American strategy in the past three decades has instead yielded a global economic order that allows other countries to exploit Washington’s largess, an ascendant authoritarian adversary in China, and simmering conflicts around the globe in which expectations of American commitment far outstrip the reality of American capacity—all of which have contributed to economic and social decay in the United States.
>Any grand strategy is, in part, a bet on a particular theory of political economy. The bet on investing to rebuild a bulwark of market democracies whose prosperity would eventually overwhelm Soviet communism was a wise one. The subsequent bet, on the ability of globalization and free markets to render political economy irrelevant, was not. The time has come for a new wager. The best way to create a sustainable trading and security bloc is a strategy of reciprocity: an alliance among countries committed to engaging with each other on comparable terms while jointly excluding others that will not fulfill the same obligations.
>Demanding reciprocity would counteract the beggar-thy-neighbor policies that have created unsustainable imbalances with U.S. trading partners, curtail Washington’s dependence on adversaries for critical goods, and limit the free-riding that has slowly eroded U.S. alliances and partnerships. By embracing reciprocity, the United States would also be rejecting an asymmetric order featuring a dominant power and its clients in favor of one in which participants all stand on equal footing with equal expectations. This would represent a healthy development in how the nation conceives of itself, moving away from an American empire and back toward an American republic.
>Perhaps counterintuitively, the relative decline in American power has strengthened Washington’s hand when it comes to negotiating the terms of a new global order. The status quo is predicated on an American commitment to hegemony that precludes the possibility of pulling back. That commitment made sense as long as the United States remained dominant. But owing to the self-enfeeblement of its allies and the ascent of China, the United States can no longer maintain its predominance.
>And so it seems plausible that a dramatic retrenchment—pulling back from global economic and military engagement and relying chiefly on the strategic depth and sizable market provided by the North American continent—could produce a better outcome than the ongoing descent into late-imperial exhaustion. Simply put, Washington can now consider walking away from the table if the terms of its relationships do not improve. Allies and partners know this and want to avoid that outcome, because the U.S. market and military remain indispensable to their own prosperity and security. Which means that, for the first time in the lives of contemporary policymakers, the United States is in a position to frame its demands around narrow self-interest, back them with credible consequences, and expect them to be taken seriously. The question that will define the next era of American statecraft is, What should those demands be? In his second term, President Donald Trump has made progress toward developing a strategy of reciprocity. He and his administration deserve credit for recognizing the need for change, and they have been persuasive in signaling that they see walking away from the table as preferable to tolerating the status quo. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has conceded that European countries have been “free-riders,” taking advantage of the United States, and the most recent NATO summit concluded with an unprecedented commitment by members to raise their defense spending from at least 2.0 percent of GDP to at least 3.5 percent. Credibly threatened with tariffs, Canada and Mexico have begun reducing their economic ties with China; Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and the European Union have all worked toward agreements to reduce their trade imbalances with the United States.