The U.S. Likes Being a Factional Leader

So long as dominance is the goal, U.S. foreign policy will be defined by worsening tensions with adversaries and a “with us or against us” mentality that forces fencesitting states to take sides.

Stephen Wertheim criticizes the U.S. for its poor leadership:

Never in the decades since the Cold War has the United States looked less like a leader of the world and more like the head of a faction — reduced to defending its preferred side against increasingly aligned adversaries, as much of the world looks on and wonders why the Americans think they’re in charge.

The factional leadership that Wertheim identifies is unfortunately the sort that comes most naturally to U.S. policymakers. Washington is always on the lookout for adversaries that it can rally other states against, and the foundational myths of modern U.S. foreign policy tell of how the U.S. led “the world” (i.e., the states on its side) against the menaces of the age. American leaders have a great need to identify an enemy or group of enemies that the U.S. can define itself against in order to justify the dominant position that they want the U.S. to have. It doesn’t occur to these leaders that the pursuit of dominance itself is what creates so many enemies or that the U.S. would be far more secure by renouncing the pursuit.

As Wertheim observes, the root of the problem is the pursuit of dominance. Any state that seeks dominance will never truly be capable of the magnanimous, cooperative style of leadership that Wertheim proposes as an alternative. So long as dominance is the goal, U.S. foreign policy will be defined by worsening tensions with adversaries and a “with us or against us” mentality that forces fencesitting states to take sides. In this respect, the Bush era was a preview of what is to come if nothing changes for the better.

The revival of the old concept of the “free world” is another sign of this factional leadership. A generation ago, using the phrase would have seemed weirdly dated. After all, it was a throwback to the bad old days of the Cold War. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism in most other places, referring to the “free world” was unnecessary. Losing the Soviets as an enemy created a hole in U.S. foreign policy that Washington desperately tried to fill with anything our leaders could find, but the substitute villains (Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, etc.) were so weak by comparison that the threats had to be massively inflated. Thus a weakened Iraqi dictatorship that didn’t fully control its own territory was turned into a global menace supposedly so grave that the U.S. insisted that it simply had to attack.

I will have to disagree with Wertheim on one point. The U.S. has looked very much like the head of a faction on other occasions since 1991. The illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 is at the top of the list. It is true that the Bush administration tried to use U.N. resolutions as cover for its war of aggression, and Bush had plenty of help from liberal hawks that tried to dress up his illegal war as somehow upholding international order, but the reality was that the U.S. and its armed gang of followers decided to attack another country in flagrant violation of the U.N. Charter because they could. The Iraq war was a massive crime for which no one has ever been held accountable, and many of the people still running parts of our government today had some hand in helping to commit that crime.

The vast majority of the nations of the world opposed the war, and even some prominent U.S. allies condemned it. In 2003, the U.S. wasn’t even leading everyone that was officially aligned with Washington. Instead, it was leading a ragtag band of whichever states it could bully or bribe into joining its “coalition of the willing.” If there were still any illusions in other parts of the world that the U.S was a benevolent hegemon, they were quickly dispelled.

As the Iraq war example shows, this sort of factional leadership is bad for the U.S. and the rest of the world. It not only puts the U.S. at odds with most other nations, but it encourages the U.S. and its allies in their worst instincts and delusions. When the U.S. poses as the leader of the “free world” or the “coalition of the willing,” it gives itself license to bend and break the rules whenever it wants and it lets its allies and clients off the hook for any crimes they might commit.

Unfortunately, the U.S. seems set on the path of acting as the head of one armed camp, and it has no vision for the future except to amass more weapons that it can use to “deter” its growing list of adversaries. Our leaders don’t want “to make peace and build resilience.” Like the Bush administration, they want to threaten and to use force to cow others into submission. The difference between the Bush era and today is that the others are now able to push back and resist to a degree that wasn’t possible then. The “with us or against us” approach didn’t work out well for anyone twenty years ago, and it is going to have even worse results in the years to come.