Jennifer Lind and Daryl G. Press
48 «¬® ̄°±² ³««³°® ́
interests near its borders. At the time,
hawks disparaged containment as too
accommodating or immoral. Now,
Americans venerate containment as
brilliant statecraft.
I the United States wants to avoid
war and cooperate on matters o shared
interests with powerful countries, its
leaders need to shed the primacy
mindset and combine their laudable
ambition and creativity with a pragma-
tism appropriate to an era o great-
power competition. The question is no
longer what the United States wants to
achieve. It is rather what the United
States can achieve that an increasingly
fractured coalition can support and that
its rivals can live with.∂Together, those shifts leave the
United States little option but to adapt.
For roughly 25 years, the United States’
all-surpassing power allowed the
country to take a vacation from geopoli-
tics. That Zeitgeist was captured by a
senior adviser in the George W. Bush
administration who, in a 2004 conversa-
tion with the writer Ron Suskind,
scoed at what he called “the reality-
based community” for its judicious
policy analyses o pros and cons. “That’s
not the way the world really works
anymore,” the o¾cial said. “We’re an
empire now, and when we act, we create
our own reality.”
Because no other country had the
power to mount a powerful resistance,
U.S. leaders felt free to reimagine reality
largely unconstrained by the objections
o those who opposed the global liberal
project. Scholars will debate the wisdom
o the path they took—some arguing
that, on balance, the United States’
project o liberal hegemony achieved
many o its goals, others saying that the
country squandered its power and
expedited a return to multipolarity. Yet
whatever the verdict, it is clear today
that the United States’ geopolitical
vacation is over and that a major course
correction is due.
To some, such a change may feel like
a traumatic revision, but it would in fact
be a return to normalcy. For almost all
countries throughout history, the essence
o¤ foreign policy has been to pursue
pressing national interests in a world o
constraints and competing powers.
Indeed, this was the mindset o U.S.
leaders during the Cold War, when
they settled on a policy to compete
intensely with the Soviet Union around
the globe but to defer to its core