The rise of the United States from being part of the first British Empire to becoming a world power by the 1890s, a superpower by the end of the Second World War, and finally the only significant player in the international system by the late 20th century, is one that has been told many times before. Viewed by critic and defender alike as one of the most extraordinary transformative events in modern world history, there is little doubting that this most ‘dangerous’ of nations, as one writer with impeccable conservative credentials once called it, would in time go on to change the world. Blessed by geography, surrounded by nothing more threatening than Mexicans, Canadians and fish, and with two vast oceans protecting it from the threat of invasion, the United States grew up in what the American international relations scholar Hans J. Morgenthau might have described as a ‘security rich’ environment. But not only was it secure from external enemies. It also benefited from an abundance of ‘free’ land (mainly stolen from Native Americans), a surfeit of capital (much of it foreign), a highly profitable system of plantation slavery producing America's most vital commodity (King Cotton), and last but by no means least, one of the largest movements of people in human history which drew nearly 30 million Europeans to American shores between 1850 and 1920. Aided and abetted by a powerful federal state, a raft of measures designed to protect the American economy from foreign competition, and a legal order that treated private enterprise and private property as sacrosanct – ‘government should not do for its people what they can best do for themselves’ declared one court in 1899 – America's rise was about as inevitable as any event in international history was likely to be, but only after it had successfully navigated the most traumatic moment in its history: the Civil War.

The history of the Civil War itself is invariably told in terms of its famous battles, its sometime less than competent generals, the huge losses suffered on both sides, and of course through the biography of the man who led the North to victory: Abraham Lincoln.

When Clinton departed the White House, America – and indeed the vast majority of Americans – had never felt so secure. Tragically, not only did this secure world collapse on 9/11, but so too did a number of cosy assumptions, one of the most influential being that under conditions of globalization the propensity for international conflict would more likely diminish than increase. As the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington revealed only too graphically, American-style globalization not only appeared to have as many determined enemies as well-meaning friends, but enemies of a quite novel character. What it also revealed – again to the discomfort of those who assumed the world was becoming a safer place – was that the worst sometimes happens. But even the most imaginative of right-wing conspiracy theorists could not have predicted that a group financed by the multi-millionaire son of one of the richest Saudi families could have carried out an attack which devastated two apparently indestructible buildings in the heart of New York, nearly destroyed the Pentagon and then go on to make a series of ghoulish videos boasting of the fact to loyal followers around the world. It was all too unreal for words.

The president whose responsibility it was to respond to all this was, of course, the inexperienced George W. Bush. Less than hugely popular when he entered the White House, within a few short weeks of the attack he had moved from being what many regarded as the questionable winner of a contested presidential election into becoming America's commander-inchief leading a nation in a war against a dangerous foe. If nothing else, this bolstered his position in the eyes of the American public. But something else changed too: America's willingness to deploy all that hard power it had been storing away in its locker for so many years. Indeed, as America flexed its muscles and launched its deadly response to the initial attack, one pundit was even moved to observe that it was no longer useful to describe the US as a mere ‘superpower’ but rather a veritable ‘behemoth’ strutting its stuff ‘on the planetary stage’. Even that old guru of US decline, Paul Kennedy, had to recant on past intellectual misdemeanours.

For a president who saw as his role as healing the nation after eight very turbulent years, Obama turned out to be a most controversial president. Some claimed that he was not hard-nosed enough when it came to dealing with the ‘real’ world; progressives, on the other hand, felt he was far too cautious; meanwhile, conservatives on the right (including his ultimate successor, Donald Trump) accused him of being a dangerous liberal who was undermining US national security. Some of the more conspiratorially inclined even claimed that not only was Obama not an American – and thus ineligible to be president – but he may even have been a Muslim planning to undermine America from within. Clearly, a large part of the more lurid tales spread about the 44th president had to do with race and the fact that Obama was the first African-American in the White House. But there were also long-standing differences, both over domestic politics (many Republicans accused him of being a socialist) as well as foreign policy. Indeed, from day one he was attacked on almost every front from his willingness to engage with America's rivals to his determined efforts to push forward on climate change. Multilateralist by inclination but realist in outlook, his subtle diplomacy certainly made itself an easy target for those advocating simple solutions to deal with complex global problems. Obama, however, always remained optimistic when it came to the United States. He did not agree with the fashionable idea that America's best days were behind it. On the other hand, he did accept that the world was becoming less of an American playground and that the US would have to make the necessary adjustments to deal with the new situation. However, his first task, as we show in Chapter 6, was to pull the United States out of the deep economic recession it found itself in following the 2008 financial crisis before it could go then on to address America's many other global challenges. One of these, as we indicate in Chapter 7, was how to breathe life back into a transatlantic relationship which under Bush Jnr had suffered one setback after another.

There have been many shocks in American electoral history but probably none more shocking than the election of Donald Trump in November 2016. Hardly any pollsters ever thought he could win; when he did it was by a mere 80,000 votes spread across the three crucial ‘swing states’ of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania; and as if to rub salt into Democratic wounds, he didn't even win the majority of the votes cast across the country as a whole. Yet, after one of the more bruising campaigns in recent times, he secured the White House against one of the most experienced US politicians of modern times. Inspired in part by what had earlier happened in the UK when the British voted to leave the European Union – the first great shock of 2016 – Trump the outsider managed to tap into a vein of discontent among millions of working-class Americans who either felt that their position in society was under threat from changes at home and abroad,2or found it difficult to connect with an increasingly liberal Democratic Party whose candidate only rarely seemed to speak to their concerns or connect with their fears. Nor did Trump ignore other important sources of support. Indeed, as a result of a very well organized campaign which left no stone unturned, he scored very heavily among three other significant constituencies: the evangelical right (80 per cent of whom voted for him), the US military (who voted 2-to-1 in his favour), and the better off and the wealthy who were attracted to his banner by promises of tax breaks and deregulation. With enough additional support coming from Latinos and even women (and Clinton losing some ground among African-Americans, Latino and younger voters) it turned out to be a winning combination.

How and why Trump won an election he was predicted to lose will no doubt be debated for years to come. But one thing became clear even as the dust began to settle: that a political earthquake had occurred which was bound to have huge consequences both for the United States and for the rest of the world.

As a BBC journalist remarked not long after Donald Trump was elected:

No doubt some then expected that he would very quickly be ‘domesticated’ and behave like any ordinary ‘decent’ Republican. Some even entertained the hope that the establishment, which included more than a few Republicans – the ‘adults in the room’ – would gradually pull him back towards the centre and that America would once again return to normal. He was, after all, a businessman and a billionaire, and thus far men like him tended to act just like businessman and billionaires had always done in the past: as upholders of the status quo. However, anybody who had studied Trump's campaign and the speeches he made when on the presidential trail should have known that he was not your average candidate. Very rich he may well have been; however, inspired in part by what had happened in the UK where the Brexiteers had scored a stunning victory over their rivals by calling on ordinary people to ‘take back control’, and in part by a group of advisers like Steve Bannon who sensed that a radical populist platform would appeal to enough Americans, Trump became the attack dog candidate of the 2016 election. And attack he did: the rich and the powerful, whom he said had benefited from globalization while working-class Americans had been losing their jobs; China, for taking advantage of a trade system that worked in its favour; European ‘free riders’ who refused to spend their own money on their own defence; immigrants, who were flooding into the country over the US–Mexican border; Muslims, who ‘hated us’; and of course, all liberals who, he claimed, controlled the media and ran the intelligence services, not to mention those bastions of political correctness – the universities.

At the end of the two great wars that did so much to define America's position within the international system, American leaders talked in grandiloquent terms about a future world order based on international law, justice for all and liberal values. Just how seriously American policy makers took their own rhetoric has, of course, been the subject of a good deal of comment, and while supporters feel that US efforts to make the world a more enlightened place should be taken at face value, others have dismissed such pronouncements as so much rhetorical hot air. It was perhaps George Kennan, the ‘father of containment’, who more than anybody else, articulated the most persuasive critique of what he termed this ‘diplomacy of dilettantism’. In a far-reaching series of lectures delivered in the intellectual home of realism at the University of Chicago, Kennan did not pull his punches when it came to attacking those American leaders of the past – Woodrow Wilson most notably – who had always been inclined (he believed) to substitute hard thinking about the balance of power with idealistic statements about how the world ought to be, rather than how it was. In principle, there was nothing wrong with democracy as such or even promoting it. However, if the US defined this as its main goal, then this could easily lead to overreach at best, or at worst, conflict with those states which did not share American values. As one of Kennan's latter-day admirers put it, an American foreign policy ‘motivated largely by liberal ideals’ would very soon land the United States ‘in trouble’.

With the end of the Cold War, one might have predicted that this somewhat overheated debate would have died out. But this was not to be. Indeed, the apparent urge in some quarters to find a new post-Cold War ‘mission’ for the United States led to renewed speculation that America was once again succumbing to the old temptation of wanting to refashion the international system in its own liberal democratic image. George Bush Snr was more or less immune to this particular temptation. The same, it was argued, could not be said of his successor, William Jefferson Clinton.

As we showed in Chapters 1 and 2, Clinton concentrated his not inconsiderable talents on first making sure America could compete effectively in the emerging global economy and then attempting to square the circle (not always successfully) by linking this to a defined strategy of enlarging the number of democracies in the world. Clinton was liberal enough to know that his main task was to strengthen a liberal order from which America benefited; but he was realist enough too to understand that a post-Cold War order without the Soviet Union offered up huge opportunities that would afford the US a lengthy breathing space within which it would be able to consolidate its own hegemony, strengthen its position within the family of advanced liberal democracies, and where feasible, extend market capitalism to those countries attempting to make the transition out of planning and economic autarchy. Taken together, these formed what we might call the ‘core’ of America's strategic mission in the 1990s. Getting Russia right however was central to all this. If the US could facilitate the transition to a more Western-style political economy (as was beginning to happen in Central and Eastern Europe) then according to Clinton the future looked bright indeed. If, however, reform in Russia failed, the United States would face a very insecure future with the strong possibility, according to one very senior official, of ‘a renewed nuclear threat, higher defence budgets, spreading instability, the loss of new markets and a devastating setback for the worldwide democratic movement’. Engaging with reform therefore was not just in Russia's interest, but in America's too.

The discussion which follows attempts to chart the history of the US–Russia relationship through the 1990s. The argument advanced is a simple one: that in spite of various American interventions, facilitating an American-style transition in Russia proved to be an almost impossible task. Whether this was because of a failure on Washington's part to grant Russia the respect it felt it deserved, the decision to enlarge NATO, or the complex legacy left behind by the old Soviet Union followed by its headlong economic collapse after 1991, will no doubt be debated for many years to come.

The essays collected together in this volume are the result of many years reflecting on a country that is more than just a nation-state but is, what I would prefer to call, an empire. Some would no doubt question this designation. Some would even argue that it makes no sense at all calling the United States an empire when it doesn't control the territory of other countries and has never sent ‘settlers’ overseas to pacify other nations. My response is not to deny the obvious fact that the United States is not another British Empire or Washington another Rome – though there are some similarities between the two cities and both empires – but simply to observe that in terms of its military reach, its position at the centre of the world economy, its capacity to shape or limit the choices of others, and its promotion of a certain idea of modernity, the United States comes as close as anything in history to resembling what I would call an empire. As one wit once put it, ‘if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck’ then it is almost certainly a duck. Many might prefer that America was not so influential and have been predicting – perhaps even looking forward to – its decline for the better part of half a century. Others even wonder whether we should even call it an empire at all when we have so many other terms at our disposal such as superpower or hegemon. But empire in my view captures something about the sheer power of the United States and the role it purports to perform – with ever-decreasing success – in the wider international system.

Many of the ideas here have benefited from lengthy discussions and debates with a whole range of writers and academics, many but not all American, covering the spectrum from radical to neoconservative, liberal to realist with a dash of ‘English School’ thrown in for good measure! Some of the thoughts expressed here also build on work I have done at Chatham House over the years, so special thinks must go to it and its directors for indulging me for so long.

Introduction

If all history according to Marx has been the history of class struggle, then all international history, it could just as well be argued, has been the struggle between different kinds of empires. Empires, however, were not just mere agents existing in static structures. They were living entities that thought, planned, and then tried to draw the appropriate lessons from the study of what had happened to others in the past. Thus, Rome learned much from the Greeks, the British in turn were inspired by the Romans, and the British liked to think that they were passing on their imperial knowledge to their Atlantic cousins at the end of the Second World War, remarking as they did so that like the sophisticated ‘Greeks’ of old, they were now transferring responsibility to those untutored but extraordinarily powerful ‘Romans’ who happened to be living besides the Potomac.

Nor were the Americans themselves unaware of the historical stage onto which they were now stepping. Certainly, one of the more important architects of the post-war order was quite clear in his own mind about the importance of empires in history. A great admirer of the British Empire himself, Dean Acheson talked in almost glowing terms of the indispensable economic and strategic role played by Britain in the previous century, the obvious conclusion being that what the British had done for the peace and prosperity of the world after Waterloo, the Americans would now do in an era turned upside down by war, revolution and the rise of a modern revolutionary state in the shape of the Soviet Union. His British peers could not have agreed more. Indeed, like Acheson, they took the long view, pragmatically concluding that if they had to pass on the imperial torch to anyone, far better it went to their white Anglo-Saxon allies across the Atlantic than to anybody else.

In historical terms, the relationship between the US and Europe constituted one of the most intimate in modern times. Indeed, if the US began life as a distinctly European project, Europe's very own ‘Thirty Years’ War’ between 1914 and 1945 brought about a major role reversal. This left the Western powers on the continent less masters of their own house and more dependent on an all-powerful, liberal, hegemon situated 3,000 miles away across the Atlantic. There was no inevitability about any of this. But as one of the more perspicacious international relations theorists noted as early as 1920, if one global war had already tilted the balance of power towards the US another – which he thought was inevitable – would almost certainly finish the job completely. Trotsky did not live to see one of his more brilliant (and this time more accurate) forecasts come true. Nor can we be sure that he would have been altogether happy with this prospect, given the role the US went on to play after the Second World War. But as the dust began to settle after 1945, one thing must have been patently clear to all: the continent that in 1900 could claim the title of ‘world hegemon’ was hegemonic no more. To all intents and purposes, ‘the European age was at last over’.

Inevitably, the international system after 1945 was the very entity of that which had existed before, no more so than in terms of America's relationship with Western Europe. In strictly formal terms, the US and its European allies formed part of a voluntary alliance entered into by self-determining, equal, sovereign states. In effect, the relationship was to be shaped by two realities: a massive imbalance in power and strategic dependency by the Europeans on their American protectors from across the ocean. This was not something that brought much joy to the hearts of all Europeans; even less did it please those who for a short time after the Second World War believed it would be possible to build a third European pole between the superpowers. But the brute facts of the matter meant that the Europeans had little choice but to invite the Americans to become their benign imperial protectors.

One of the observations repeatedly made about American foreign policy after the end of the Cold War was that its primary point of reference gradually, but perceptibly, shifted away from a concentration on more traditional security matters to a new agenda, in which the main preoccupation now was less to worry about ‘the Soviet bear in the woods’ and more to focus on how it could compete more effectively in an increasingly globalized economy. Indeed, according to this view, the United States had previously been unable to do so because of the constraints imposed on it by the superpower conflict. As the US Trade Representative Mickey Kantor observed, prior to 1989 the United States had ‘often neglected’ its ‘economic and trading interests because of foreign policy and defense concerns’. But it would no longer be doing so, he argued, and henceforth would be pursuing its material goals without the Cold War compromising its economic interests.

Naturally enough, in this new environment, the rules of what one economist termed the ‘new game’ were bound to change. So too were US needs as it quickly became clear that America's main assets in the new world order were not so much rockets, tanks and warheads, as were its trained workers, educated entrepreneurs and high-tech industries. Moreover, the object of the game now was not to prevent the spread of an alien ideology, but rather to maintain and, where possible, increase market share. This, however, did not make it any the less serious as a contest. For if the United States succeeded in ‘winning’ the economic battle it would mean domestic prosperity and continued influence abroad. But failure could easily lead to decline internationally and rising social tensions at home. The stakes in the post-communist era were every bit as high as they had been during the Cold War itself.

This somewhat oversimplified picture obviously requires some qualification. Military power, after all, did not become completely irrelevant after the end of the Cold War, no more than did the threat posed by the spread of nuclear weapons and what Washington defined as ‘backlash states’.

I became engaged in thinking about Clinton's foreign policy largely because I could not understand why so many American writers on the subject had very little that was positive to say about what he was attempting to do in a world no longer shaped by the Cold War. ‘Incoherent’, ‘lacking in strategic clarity’ and ‘without direction’ were perhaps some of the more charitable things said about the former governor from Arkansas who was now sitting in the White House. Some of the criticism was reasonable enough. But a good deal of it, I felt, either came from realists who did not much appreciate a liberal running US foreign policy, or Republicans who were unhappy that Bush Snr – a foreign policy president if ever there was one – had lost the election in 1992 to someone who by his own admission had little or no international experience. Either way, what I set out to do was try and make sense of how the Clinton administration tackled some of the big challenges facing the US. Three seemed to me to be critical at the time, the most important of which was how to develop a ‘grand strategy’ that would allow the United States to compete more effectively in an increasingly globalized economy. Linked to this was a second initiative: the promotion of democracy both as an end in itself but also as a means of achieving international stability and global prosperity. And the third piece of the puzzle – on which Clinton spent an inordinate amount of time – was how to bring about a transition in post-communist Russia so as to prevent it becoming (as it subsequently did under Putin) an authoritarian enemy of the West.

The spectre of populism

Well, it would seem that there is another very different spectre haunting Europe in the 21st century, but it is no longer communism. That clearly has been consigned into that proverbial dustbin of history. But there is another dangerous ‘ism’ threatening the liberal world order, and that ‘ism’, of course, is something that has come to be known as populism. Of course, there have been varieties of populism in the past: Russia had its own species of the same during the 1870s and 1880s; a similar though politically less radical version of populism grew up in the United States during the 1890s and reappeared in different iterations several times thereafter (McCarthyism was in its own way a populist revolt against liberalism); and then, of course, there were the many varieties of populism, which as a student I was told was the main problem in Latin America during the post-war years. Peronism in Argentina was, it seemed, a particularly nasty kind of populism – largely, I gathered, because Peron liked speaking to the masses and did not much like the British. So, in some regards the study of what is known as populism is not new. Indeed, I can well recall reading my first book on the subject in 1969 when I was studying politics; and that was a rather fine LSE study edited by the very great duo of Ernest Gellner and Ghiţa Ionescu, titled Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics.

So we might conclude that there is nothing new here. But that would be wrong; for clearly there is something rather significantly new happening in the modern world. For one thing, the populist ‘problem’ (if that's what it is) appears to have migrated towards Europe where it did not have much of a hold before; and for another, it has assumed a much more widespread form. Indeed, whereas previous populisms were specifically national in character, this new populism has assumed a more international form.

Introduction

As we have shown in previous chapters, both Clinton and Bush faced challenges of a quite different character: in Clinton's case these arose out of victory in the Cold War and in Bush's out of a devastating attack on the American homeland. Barack Obama's stunning electoral victory in 2008 came at yet another critical point in the post-Cold War history of the United States. Already five years into a costly and increasingly unpopular war of choice in the Middle East, the US was suddenly confronted with something it neither chose nor expected: a financial crash that quickly morphed into something far more threatening. Born out of a combination of economic hubris, cheap money, an overheated housing market and a lack of proper oversight by the rating agencies, all embedded into a complex financial system which the economics establishment had predicted would never fail, the situation confronting Obama when he assumed office was, in the words of one economic notable, probably as bad, if not ‘actually worse’ than that which had faced the United States back in the early 1930s. Clearly, this was no mere blip but a profound crisis of the whole system, which was to bring Wall Street to its knees by the end of 2008 before going on to cause the worst global downturn since the end of the Second World War.

Moreover, what happened did not just have economic consequences. At home it changed the course of the election while internationally dealing a major body-blow to the oft-repeated claim that the American model of capitalism represented the wave of the future. As Roger Altman, a former Clinton official, observed in a much-cited piece published in Foreign Affairs just as Obama was settling into the White House, ‘the financial and economic crash of 2008 […] the worst in over 75 years’, represented a ‘major geopolitical setback’ for the liberal world order as a whole, one which would not only have a material impact on people's everyday lives but would also have major international repercussions as well by ‘accelerating trends’ that were already ‘shifting the world's center of gravity away’ from the United States and the West towards other rising powers in the world, China most obviously.

Few successful candidates have ever entered the White House with quite so much experience as Joe Biden or with so many challenges to deal with. Sworn into office only a couple of weeks after the assault on Congress in a city where over 25,000 troops had been drafted in to maintain order, the circumstances of his inauguration were extraordinary by any measure. Faced by an outgoing president who refused to accept defeat in a deeply polarized nation where the COVID-19 pandemic still continued to kill Americans in great numbers – on the day when Biden officially became president the virus had already claimed over 400,000 lives – Biden faced an uphill struggle even to restore some degree of normality into American political life, let alone successfully tackle the many problems the US was facing both at home and abroad. As one newspaper of a decidedly liberal bent commented at the time, the passing of power from what it called a ‘dangerous man’ to one set on healing his country was a relief. Even so, American democracy still remained at peril. Biden, however, was clear in his own mind that if America was to regain its equilibrium it had to end what he termed ‘this uncivil war’ that was pitting red state against blue state, ‘rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal’. He was equally clear that the foreign policy he would be pursuing would be very different from that of his predecessor, and that once elected he would repair America's ‘alliances and engage with the world once again’. Biden did at least attempt to make good on this promise, much to the relief of US allies around the world. Yet, one suspects that his foreign policy will be increasingly viewed through the prism of Afghanistan and his controversial decision to pull US forces out by a specific date. Meanwhile, he faces a whole range of other problems, one of which of course is the increasingly deep divide within America itself. The United States may indeed remain the most powerful country in the world, but one suspects that until it can heal itself, then there is every chance it will remain what one American called many years ago a ‘crippled giant’ with more power at its disposal than any other nation in the world, but so polarized at home that it will be unable to use it wisely or well.