The EconomistApril 4th 2020 711T
he united states, Andrew Bacevich
writes near the start of his account of
post-cold-war America, is like the man
who won the Mega Millions lottery: his un-
imagined windfall holds the potential for
disaster. Things are not quite that bad. But
almost three decades after America
watched the Soviet Union fall apart, victory
feels like a disappointment.
The end of the cold war established
America as the most powerful country in
history. Its armed forces were unmatched
and its governing philosophy seemingly
had no rival. Yet it has struggled either to
prevail against illiterate tribesmen and tin-
pot dictators or to get to grips with a newly
assertive Russia and a rising China. In a
pandemic its allies might have expected
America to co-ordinate a planet-wide re-
sponse. Instead, it has turned inward. Just
as startlingly, America itself fell prey to bit-
terness and division, culminating in the
presidency of a man who won office by re-
jecting many of the values which had
helped bring about that original victory.
This is the sombre backdrop for three
very different books about America’s place
in the world. Joseph Nye, a former dean of
the Kennedy School at Harvard, looks at
how presidents have struggled to embody
their country’s moral leadership. Michael
Kimmage, a fellow at the German Marshall
Fund, teases out the contradictions in the
idea of an American-led “West”. And Mr Ba-
cevich, a professor emeritus at Boston Uni-
versity, depicts the construction (and then,
he argues, the demolition) of a post-cold-
war doctrine of American power.
None of these books is the last word on
an important question. But each offers tan-
talising insights into how victory soured.The worried West
Before getting to the moral conduct of each
president, starting with Franklin D. Roose-
velt, Mr Nye takes on the argument of his
book’s title: “Do Morals Matter?” His target
is foreign-policy “realists” who claim that,however they dress it up, countries are
amoral and put their own interests first.
Mr Nye is surely right to counter that
most American leaders have contrasted
themselves to cynical, balance-of-power
Europeans. He quotes Theodore Roosevelt:
“Our chief usefulness to humanity rests on
combining power with high purpose.” Mr
Nye—a thinker who in the 1980s formulat-
ed the doctrine of soft power—is also right
to stress that this high purpose is itself a vi-
tal component of American influence. The
international order the United States con-
structed depends on legitimacy, he ex-
plains, and legitimacy depends on values.
Every president has had his blemishes,
of course. Mr Nye has seen too much of the
world to have illusions about that. But—
and here you suspect is the real purpose of
this book—none has abandoned the rheto-
ric or the practice of right and wrong in for-
eign policy quite as shamelessly as Presi-
dent Donald Trump. No president has so
enthusiastically embraced both autocrats
and the Hobbesian idea that might is right.
Only Mr Trump and his officials have
sought to dismantle the international or-
der that his predecessors built and main-
tained, but which the Trump White House
sees as “Gulliverising” America.
Mr Nye takes the underpinnings of
America’s moral leadership as read. Not so
Mr Kimmage. For him the West is not a
place, so much as a set of ideas articulated
at the end of the 19th century in America as
it prepared to take on the mantle of a great
power. At its best, the West has stood for
capitalism, science, the Enlightenment,
the rule of law and human rights, all ofGeopolitics
The victor’s curse
America won the cold war. What went wrong?
Do Morals Matter?By Joseph Nye. Oxford
University Press; 268 pages; $24.95 and
£18.99
The Abandonment of the West.By
Michael Kimmage. Basic Books; 368 pages;
$32 and £25
The Age of Illusions.By Andrew Bacevich.
Metropolitan Books; 239 pages; $27Books & arts
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