Francis P. Sempa
Hal Brands, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, has laid out in an essay in Foreign Affairs the key differences between what he rightly calls “American Globalism” and what has been called the “America First” approach to global affairs. Brands clearly is in the “American Globalist” camp, but unlike other supporters of the “liberal international order,” he does not label “America First” as isolationist. Instead, he lauds the global benefits to the post-1945 world order and worries that they will eventually disappear if Donald Trump regains the presidency. Brands doesn’t want the United States to be a “normal” country that only looks after its own national interests. What he fails to appreciate, however, is that the post-1945 world order he supports is already gone.
The geopolitics of 1945-1991 disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The war in Ukraine, despite the claims of many globalists, has not recreated the Soviet threat to Europe. If Ukraine, or parts of Ukraine, remain under Russian control, U.S. national security will not be endangered. Nor will Europe’s. NATO has doubled in size since 1991. Russia in relative power is considerably weaker than the Soviet Union was throughout the Cold War, and its ruling class no longer has a revolutionary ideology that legitimizes its continued rule and motivates international aggression. Of course, Russian imperialism has not disappeared from Russia’s foreign policy DNA, but the Russian empire of the Czars was never considered to be an existential threat to the United States (although the Monroe Doctrine included Russia in its restrictive warning), even when it occupied Alaska and parts of California in the 19th century. And today’s Russia is having difficulty holding on to the eastern provinces of Ukraine, and has once again sent out feelers for a ceasefire to end the war.
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