March/April 2020 41JENNIFER LIND is Associate Professor of
Government at Dartmouth College and a
Research Associate at Chatham House.
DARYL G. PRESS is Associate Professor of
Government at Dartmouth College.adversaries with a fraction o the United
States’ resources could ¥nd ways to
resist U.S. eorts and impose high costs
in the process. Today, Washington’s
primacy mindset—its disregard for the
core interests o potential adversaries—
is even more counterproductive. With
China on the rise, Russia de¥ant, and
the United States’ liberal international
coalition weakened from within,
Washington faces a much more con-
strained environment. A foreign policy
that neglects that fact will stymie
cooperation and set the United States
on a collision course with its rivals.
To avoid that outcome, U.S. foreign
policy must adapt both in substance
and in mindset. In the coming decades,
the essential question will be a new one:
What global aims can the country
pursue that its allies can support and
that its geopolitical rivals can accept?
Taking this approach will open up
possibilities for compromise with Beijing
and Moscow and will help establish
mutually acceptable, i imperfect, equi-
libriums around the globe.THE TEMPTATIONS OF PRIMACY
To understand where U.S. foreign
policy went wrong, compare the two
pivotal moments when the United
States reached the pinnacle o world
power: once at the end o World War II
and again at the end o the Cold War.
In 1945, the country’s economic and
military might was unmatched. The
United States had emerged from the
war as the only major power to have
avoided both large-scale bombing and
the occupation o its mainland. The
country had lost an estimated 0.3
percent o its population in the war—
compared with four percent for Japan,Reality Check
American Power in an Age
of ConstraintsJennifer Lind and Daryl G. Press
F
or the past three decades, as the
United States stood at the pin-
nacle o global power, U.S. leaders
framed their foreign policy around a
single question: What should the United
States seek to achieve in the world?
Buoyed by their victory in the Cold War
and freed o powerful adversaries abroad,
successive U.S. administrations forged
an ambitious agenda: spreading liberal-
ism and Western inuence around the
world, integrating China into the global
economy, and transforming the politics
o the Middle East.
In setting these goals, Washington did,
to some extent, factor in external
constraints, such as the potential objec-
tions o important regional powers
around the world. But for the most part,
foreign policy debates focused on what
a given measure might cost or on whether
spreading Western institutions was
desirable as a matter o principle. The
interests o other countries, particularly
adversaries, were secondary concerns.
This approach to foreign policy was
misguided even at the peak o American
power. As the endless wars in Afghani-
stan and Iraq and Russian intervention-
ism in eastern Europe have shown,COME HOME, AMERICA?