Back in the 1990s, it was fashionable to complain about what Hubert Vedrine, then the French foreign minister, called American hyperpuissance, or “hyperpower.” The left-leaning diplomat believed the “question at the center of the world’s current powers” was the United States’ “domination of attitudes, concepts, language and modes of life.” What was needed, he argued, was a “balanced multipolarism,” which might counteract American “unilateralism,” “unipolarism” and “uniformity.”
With President Trump, Vedrine has finally gotten his wish, though probably not in the way he would have imagined, much less liked.
It isn’t exactly easy to make sense of the Trump administration’s foreign policy after its first bombastic weeks in office. Does it have a governing concept, beyond a taste for drama and the assertion, based on scant evidence, that this or that neighbor or ally has treated us “very unfairly”?
In an intriguing guest essay in The Times this week, Rutgers University historian Jennifer Mittelstadt made the case that Trump was a “sovereigntist,” a tradition she dated to 1919 and the Republican rejection, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, of U.S. membership in the League of Nations. Sovereigntists, she noted, also looked askance at U.S. membership in NATO, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and especially the Carter administration’s decision to relinquish the Panama Canal.
That seems about right. Sovereigntism means a country doing what it wants to do within only the limits of what it can do. It means the end of self-restraint within a framework of mutual restraint. It means an indifference to the behavior of other states, however cruel or dangerous, so long as it doesn’t impinge on us. It means a reversion to the notorious claim, uttered (according to Thucydides) by the Athenians before their sacking of the neutral city of Melos, that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Sovereigntism also means an end to something else: Pax Americana.
Though it takes its name from the Pax Romana of the first and second centuries and the Pax Britannica of the 19th, Pax Americana was something different: The application of American power for the benefit of more than just Americans.
Even as Vedrine was bemoaning U.S. unipolarity — and, by implication, French impotence — the Clinton administration was putting an end to Serbian depredations that European powers lacked the will or means to stop. Previous U.S. presidents had guarded Europe against the Soviet Union, stopped North Korea from swallowing the South and China from swallowing Taiwan, and saved Greece and Turkey from Russian domination.
Did the practitioners of the Pax sometimes blunder? Yes, sometimes spectacularly. Did its beneficiaries take advantage of our largess? Yes, often outrageously. Did our allies always reflect our values? Not at all.
But the fundamental rationale for the Pax was always sound. The United States had been dragged into two world wars because “sovereigntism” wasn’t adequate to our security challenges. We had a stake in the independence of friendly states against aggressive and subversive dictatorships. We understood that the prosperity of our friends enhanced our own. And we preferred freeloaders to freelancers: allies who might spend less on defense than they ought, but weren’t going to break with us on core strategic concerns.
This is what Trump now seems to be in the process of abandoning. It’s one thing for the administration to cajole a state like Panama to withdraw from China’s insidious “Belt-and-Road Initiative,” or strong-arm Mexico into doing more to police its side of the border, or even impose tariffs on Beijing for its brazen violations of U.S. intellectual property and international trade rules.
But the insane trade threats against Canada (reminiscent of the “Blame Canada” song of the original “South Park” movie, minus the laughs), or not ruling out military action in Greenland or the Panama Canal, or the cruel and utterly un-American arrangement with the socialist dictatorship in Caracas to repatriate potentially hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan refugees, represent a more fundamental turn in American policy. We are now behaving not as a Great Power — with “great” entailing moral considerations — but as a Big Power, one that frightens other countries, including our shaken friends.
Can there be short-term gains from all this? Sure. NATO states, fearful that Trump might pull out of the alliance, are now boasting of their readiness to pony up for their security. Iran suddenly seems interested in discussing its nuclear program after treating the Biden administration with ill-disguised contempt. Perhaps U.S. financial pressure can also get the near-bankrupt autocracies in Jordan and Egypt to accept Gazans who’ve been locked into Gaza — not to permanently dispossess them, but simply to take care of them while Gaza is rebuilt.
But there are long-term costs, and not simply in the risk of beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies of the kind that deepened the Great Depression. American leadership depends on more than just power. It also depends on our dependability and on our decency — two virtues the old critics of the Pax Americana didn’t always appreciate, but many others did.
Those things aren’t gone yet, but they are at risk. Is there a Democrat willing to summon the spirit of Harry Truman to show Americans how we can do better?
