Hal Brands
What would become of the world if the United States became a normal great power? This isn’t to ask what would happen if the United States retreated into outright isolationism. It’s simply to ask what would happen if the country behaved in the same narrowly self-interested, frequently exploitive way as many great powers throughout history—if it rejected the idea that it has a special responsibility to shape a liberal order that benefits the wider world. That would be an epic departure from 80 years of American strategy. But it’s not an outlandish prospect anymore.
In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency on an “America first” platform. He sought a United States that would be mighty but aloof, one that would maximize its advantages while minimizing its entanglements. Indeed, the defining feature of Trump’s worldview is his belief that the United States has no obligation to pursue anything larger than its own self-interest, narrowly construed. Today, Trump is again vying for the presidency, as his legion of foreign policy followers within the Republican Party grows. Meanwhile, fatigue with key aspects of American globalism has become a bipartisan affair. Sooner or later, under Trump or another president, the world could face a superpower that consistently puts “America first.”
That version of the United States wouldn’t be a global dropout. On some issues, it might be more aggressive than before. But it would also be far less concerned with defending global norms, providing public goods, and protecting distant allies. Its foreign policy would become less principled, more zero-sum. Most broadly, this version of the United States would wield outsized power absent any outsized ethos of responsibility—so it would decline to bear unequal burdens in pursuit of the real but diffuse benefits the liberal order provides.
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