Every U.S. president comes into the White House with a preconceived notion of how the United States should play the game of high politics. George W. Bush entered office in January 2001 with a realist bent, only to be subsumed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a broader ‘Freedom Agenda’ in the Middle East. Joe Biden’s liberal internationalism, meanwhile, often felt like a return to the immediate post-Cold War period, when the United States was the predominant world power, faced little strategic competition and enforced the so-called rules-based international order to its own liking.
Donald Trump’s return is upending this age-old conversation among U.S. foreign policy elites. The first year of Trump’s second term, in which the United States is throwing its weight around through sporadic uses of military force, threats of territorial expansion and punitive tariffs, has challenged the inherent benevolence so often associated with America. Seemingly, the ‘shining city on a hill’ is getting dimmer. Therein lies the central premise of Shadi Hamid’s latest book, The case for American power, which seeks to tackle the moral, geopolitical and historical aspects of U.S. power at a time when many on the far left and far right of America’s political spectrum are questioning whether the United States is a force for good at all (pp. 1–26). Hamid’s conclusion is a resounding yes, and that America’s exceptional role in the world is worth fighting for because the alternatives are a whole lot worse: ‘If American power declines—and if such decline is accepted without resistance—other countries will step into the void’ (p. 3).
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