Presidential Priority

Abstract

Restore American Leadership U.S. foreign policy today is failing every test by which a great power's foreign policy can be judged. America is not feared by her enemies, nor trusted by her friends. Neither the American people nor the world-at-large understand any more the purposes of American power, or, even worse, the principles that shape them. Indeed, after a decade and a half of conflict in the Middle East and South Asia, some Americans have concluded that the best thing to do is to pull back from the world and its troubles. Some argue that America's role as guarantor of global order is no longer necessary, history having "ended" with the Cold War; others think that "nation-building at home" is some kind of alternative to engagement abroad. But through all this white noise of confusion and dismay, one thing stands out as clearly as it has since the end of World War II: a strong United States is still essential to the maintenance of the open global order under which this country and the rest of the world have prospered since 1945; that the alternative to America's "indispensability" is not a harmonious, self-regulating balance of independent states but an international landscape marked by eruptions of chaos and destruction. Clearly, and understandably, past policies have had their successes and failures because to lead is to choose, and to choose in the world as it is, is inevitably to sometimes err. Indeed, This article was adapted from Choosing to Lead: American Foreign Policy for a Disordered World published by the John Hay Initiative.