Decline is still a choice

And Americans made their decision on November 5

President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, March 2, 2010. The White House.

In 2009, Charles Krauthammer delivered a speech at the Manhattan Institute in which he famously argued that “Decline is a choice.” He was reacting to “angst about America in decline,” which he argued had become “conventional wisdom” two decades after the end of the Cold War. “New theories, old slogans,” he said. “Imperial overstretch. The Asian awakening. The post-American world. Inexorable forces beyond our control bringing the inevitable humbling of the world hegemon.”

This was a period when many conservative intellectuals thought the presidency of Barack Obama would inaugurate an era of particularly rapid American decline, and that was the focus of Krauthammer’s speech. Obama’s critics accused him of going on an “apology tour” after he took office. They said he was retreating from the United States’ role as the “indispensable nation.” They believed he was naive about the threats the United States faced, too optimistic about multilateralism, and too reluctant to use American power.

Obama once said, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Obama’s critics treated this quip as a pivotal moment in the history of the United States after World War II — the first time a postwar American president repudiated his country’s robust and vital role in the world. Krauthammer had an even darker view — he claimed that Obama only regarded America as “exceptional in moral culpability and heavy-handedness, exceptional in guilt for its treatment of other nations and peoples.”

While it’s one thing to have a “distrust of and distaste for American dominance,” Krauthammer argued, Obama’s restrained foreign policy was “rooted in the conviction that America is so intrinsically flawed, so inherently and congenitally sinful that it cannot be trusted with, and does not merit, the possession of overarching world power.” Here’s what Obama actually said moments after his comment about American exceptionalism:

I’m enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world. If you think about the site of this summit [he was speaking at a NATO summit in Strasbourg, France] and what it means, I don’t think America should be embarrassed to see evidence of the sacrifices of our troops, the enormous amount of resources that were put into Europe postwar, and our leadership in crafting an Alliance that ultimately led to the unification of Europe. We should take great pride in that.

Obama observed that the United States has the “largest economy in the world,” “unmatched military capability,” and a “core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.”

Obama explained that he sees “no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships.” This rhetoric made diplomatic sense at a time when the United States’ allies were wary of what they saw as a turn toward American unilateralism during the Bush years. The Iraq War split NATO, and while individual members contributed to the war, the alliance as an organization had no formal role.

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of the Obama doctrine, which was in many ways a product of dubious assumptions about the shape of the post-Cold War world. But these assumptions were made by Obama’s predecessors, too. Consider the Iraq War, which was the cornerstone of a grand effort to permanently transform the politics of the Middle East — what President Bush described as a “forward strategy of freedom” in the region. This was the sort of project that could only be undertaken by a great power full of self-confidence in a period of relative (historically speaking) global calm and stability. Yes, the September 11 attacks were a jolt that showed Americans the post-Cold War era wouldn’t be as tranquil as they assumed. But terrorism was never a civilizational threat, and Russia and China didn’t seem like particularly menacing foes at the turn of the century.

Nearly three years after Vladimir Putin launched the largest conflict on European soil since World War II — and at a time when a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is a serious possibility in the near future — the United States no longer has the luxury of extending itself as it once did. It’s difficult to imagine any American president committing the country to a massive nation-building project in the Middle East today.

The Iraq War is often presented as the ultimate example of post-Cold War American hubris, while Obama’s comparatively modest foreign policy is presented as an example of humility and restraint. But in many ways, these different conceptions of America’s role in the world arose from the same basic assumption: that the age of great power conflict was over. The interventionists of the Bush era believed the United States could do as it pleased, as there was no significant countervailing force in the world to check Washington’s ambitions. However, the swing toward restraint in the Obama era was similarly optimistic. While the extent of Obama’s non-interventionism is overstated,¹ many aspects of his foreign policy suggested that he had faith in the post-Cold War hope of inevitable global liberalization and integration.

For many decades after World War II, there was a bipartisan consensus in Washington that the United States should continue to function as the anchor of the liberal international order. Despite the handwringing of Obama’s critics, his worldview was firmly rooted in the idea that the United States has a responsibility to uphold this order. Although Obama had reservations about the deployment of American power and he underestimated the threat posed by the United States’ greatest adversaries, he never questioned the fundamental role of American-led alliances and institutions.

This fact is all the more obvious today, because the United States just reelected a president who really doesn’t believe in the value of the liberal international order. If Obama’s critics could have seen what would come after him, they may have tempered their outrage. While the world has changed dramatically over the past decade and a half, American politics has changed, too — and not for the better.

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Fifteen years after Krauthammer’s speech, as Donald Trump prepares to take office for a second time, concerns about Obama’s alleged anti-Americanism and “declinism” seem quaint and anachronistic — like the geopolitical equivalent of the tan suit controversy.

We will soon have an American president who encourages the Russians to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO members that don’t spend what he deems to be enough on defense. We will have a president who, during his first term, questioned the Article V principle of collective defense and suggested that the United States wouldn’t come to the aid of a NATO ally under attack. Obama’s conservative critics often said he had a “blame-America-first” mentality, but Trump blames America first like a reflex. He describes Putin as a “genius” for invading Ukraine while accusing the United States of waging a “proxy battle” in the country that risks igniting World War III. Instead of blaming Putin for invading his neighbor, Trump blames the “globalist neocon establishment that is perpetually dragging us into endless wars, pretending to fight for freedom and democracy abroad, while they turn us into a third world country and third world dictatorship right here at home.”

Imagine the reaction in 2009 if Obama had said this: “Our foreign policy establishment keeps trying to pull the world into conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia based on the lie that Russia represents our greatest threat. But the greatest threat to Western civilization today is not Russia. It’s probably, more than anything else, ourselves.” Or this: “We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all those countries.”

Obama was wearing a light suit, but it was a dark day for the republic. Photo taken with U.S. Ambassador to Russia John F. Tefft on August 28, 2014, the White House.

Trump’s contemptuous dismissal of American global leadership represents a fundamental shift in how the country sees itself. When Bill O’Reilly described Putin as a “killer” in a 2017 interview, Trump responded: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?” Of course, it’s true that the United States has done horrible things, from slavery to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What made Trump’s comment jarring was the attitude that underpins it. He has a completely amoral conception of international relations, in which values play no role. To Trump, the United States has no moral authority over China, Russia, or North Korea — there’s only one variable that matters in the international system, and that’s power. Trump has no reverence for the United States’ founding documents or democratic institutions, which he regards as impediments to his own power. He doesn’t value America’s democratic allies, which he views as weak freeloaders. Trump’s comment to O’Reilly wasn’t a sober observation about the dark aspects of American history — it was an expression of the nihilistic and cynical beliefs he holds about America’s role in the world right now.

Krauthammer outlined what he saw as the logical implication of Trump’s relativistic view of the United States, which he mistakenly attributed to Obama: “Our shortcomings are so grave, and our offenses both domestic and international so serious, that we lack the moral ground on which to justify hegemony.” He had the right idea but the wrong president. Unlike Obama, Trump really does believe the United States has no special role or responsibility in the world. He regards American alliances as purely transactional, and he says allies should treat the United States like an “insurance company.” He doesn’t believe America has any kind of moral high ground — in fact, he believes its “sick and corrupt establishment” is instigating World War III by refusing to accept Putin’s ingenious unprovoked war in Ukraine.

This is the sort of reflexive anti-Americanism that could once be found on the fringe of the ultra-nationalist right, embodied by figures like Pat Buchanan. But it has gone mainstream in the Trump era. Major MAGA pundits like Tucker Carlson don’t just present the United States as a uniquely destructive force in the world — they also celebrate anti-American dictatorships.

After hosting a cringing interview with Putin earlier this year, Carlson took a tour of Moscow to inform his viewers that Russia is a paradise on earth with stocked shelves, brilliant innovations like grocery carts that require a deposit, and magnificently opulent subway stations. It was a mirror image of Soviet-era communist agitprop, only it was in support of a country that is now idolized by the nationalist right around the world. Carlson believes Putin is on the right side of a global culture war, he blames the United States and NATO for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and he has built a career around a narrative of American decline. Like Trump, he has long presented the United States as a collapsing society, captured by wokeness, overrun by immigrants, and awash in criminality. Many right-wing intellectuals have come to a similar conclusion: that Putin’s Russia represents a bulwark against the decadent, decaying West. Carlson recently returned to Moscow, where he interviewed Russian officials like Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to figure out why the United States insists on marching toward the brink of World War III with their misunderstood and unfairly maligned country.

If there was a single theme of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, it was American decline. He said the United States is becoming a “third world dictatorship.” He blamed the United States for the war in Ukraine. He said his political opponents are “doing more damage to America than Russia and China could ever have dreamed.” He suggested that it may be necessary to deploy the military against those opponents. Trump doesn’t just have a dark vision for the United States in his second term, which will be focused on retribution against his foes and endless loyalty tests for his friends. He has a dark vision for the world, in which Putin is empowered to reap the rewards of his imperial aggression in Ukraine while fellow democracies are forced to wonder if the United States is still on their side.

Krauthammer’s attack on Obama is a sign of how far our expectations have fallen for the rhetoric and conduct of an American president. For many of Obama’s critics, an offhand joke about the limits of American exceptionalism was a sign that the United States would soon relinquish its role as a global leader. They argued that Obama’s effort to build trust in the Muslim world by acknowledging the United States’ ugly record in the Middle East demonstrated that he was instinctively anti-American. Despite Obama’s frequent insistence that the United States is, in fact, the one indispensable nation, his critics accused him of regarding America as an ordinary country with no special capabilities, responsibilities, or achievements.

But compared to Trump, Obama was firmly embedded in the postwar tradition of American global leadership. You can disagree with how Obama chose to wield the United States’ power without accusing him of anti-Americanism, declinism, or the other bad faith charges that were routinely directed against him. Obama acknowledged the United States’ offenses in the Middle East and elsewhere in an effort to improve American credibility, build trust, and shift toward multilateralism. He wanted to move the United States beyond the era of unilateralism, and he believed this shift — combined with a more judicious use of force — would make American global leadership more sustainable.

Trump, on the other hand, has no strategy. He’s planning to abandon the United States’ NATO partners in Europe — and even considering a withdrawal from the alliance altogether — because he thinks NATO is a protection racket that has hit diminishing returns. He’s threatening to launch a trade war against the United States’ allies at a time when they’re essential for helping Washington check the rise of Beijing and Russian aggression. He talks tough on China, but his commitment to Taiwan is as shaky as his commitment to any other ally. And the most dangerous aspect of the coming Trump 2.0 era is that he’s more concerned about the “enemy within” than the United States’ actual enemies abroad.

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Obama once claimed that “alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War” no longer made sense. Krauthammer asked: “What does that say about NATO? Of our alliances with Japan and South Korea?”

It’s true that Obama was slow to realize that great power conflict had only taken a temporary hiatus after the Cold War. When Putin invaded and annexed Crimea, then-Secretary of State John Kerry could barely comprehend what he was witnessing: “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.” When Mitt Romney said Russia was the United States’ greatest geopolitical adversary in 2012, Obama replied: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War has been over for twenty years.”

Putin formalizes the Russian annexation of Crimea on March 18, 2014. The Kremlin.

Obama was elected amid exhaustion and frustration with the Iraq War, so it’s no surprise that he was wary about using American power abroad. This led to several major blunders, such as his failure to enforce his “red line” over Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria. Even when Obama took forceful action — such as the military intervention in Libya — he was so desperate to disengage that he withdrew too quickly, leading to resurgent violence and instability. Obama even told lawmakers that he wanted the NATO intervention in Libya to take “days, not weeks.” The intervention lasted for seven months, and Libya descended into civil war once again after the United States and its partners’ premature departure.

Essential aspects of Obama’s foreign policy were based on flawed assumptions about the character and evolution of the international system in the twenty-first century. He was elected at a time when the United States’ post-Cold War “unipolar moment” was finally coming to an end, and he believed the transition to a multipolar world would be smoother than it was. He took office when Xi Jinping was still several years away from becoming president of China and a decade away from eliminating term limits to become dictator for life. This was a period when it was still possible to imagine that China would eventually join what Obama described as the “community of nations.” While Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and annexed Crimea in 2014, the possibility of a full-scale war with Ukraine still seemed remote when Obama was in office. In fact, this possibility seemed difficult to imagine right up to the moment it became reality.

In one sense, decline is inevitable — at least if we’re talking about the decline of America’s relative power in the world. There was little the United States could have done to arrest China’s rise, and the reforms Washington most wanted to see — such as the shift toward a market-based economy and global integration — actually accelerated that rise.² American policymakers are often derided for assuming that economic liberalization would eventually lead to political liberalization in China, but the prescriptive element of this critique is unclear. Should Washington have assumed that conflict with China was unavoidable? Didn’t it make sense to at least attempt to integrate China with international political and economic institutions?

Still, the United States was ill-prepared for the return of great power conflict, and Obama deserves part of the blame for that. There was always a possibility that a more nationalist and authoritarian leader would come to power in China. Putin’s imperial ambitions were never a secret. It’s remarkable how long it took the West to acknowledge this new global reality — the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was still an active project until Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border. While the United States opposed Nord Stream 2 and Obama warned Europe about becoming too reliant on Russian energy, Washington could have exerted more pressure than it did. Obama launched what he described as a “reset” with Russia when he took office, and Putin annexed Crimea five years later. A year after that, Russian warplanes were in the air over Syria in support of Assad.

In a 2016 interview, Obama said: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” That’s the rhetorical equivalent of dumping blood in the water for Putin — an invitation to be even more aggressive. Obama argued that Russia will always care more about Ukraine than the United States, and he believed Moscow would have escalatory dominance in any conflict over the country. This is why he refused to provide lethal aid to Kyiv. He challenged those who called for a stronger American response to the annexation of Crimea and the Russian proxy war in the Donbas:

There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what is not. Now, if there is somebody in this town [Washington, D.C.] that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it.

It’s difficult to see how announcing the hard limits on American support for Ukraine upfront could possibly serve as a deterrent. At the very least, some strategic ambiguity is warranted (this is certainly Putin’s approach, as he routinely threatens the United States with nuclear annihilation). Obama acknowledged that a declining Russia poses a threat to global stability: “The temptation to project military force to show greatness is strong, and that’s what Putin’s inclination is.” But he was simultaneously dismissive of this threat: “He [Putin] understands that Russia’s overall position in the world is significantly diminished. And the fact that he invades Crimea or is trying to prop up Assad doesn’t suddenly make him a player.” It’s safe to say Putin is a “player” now, and Obama should have realized this much earlier than he did. If Moscow’s relentless subversion of European democracies and the invasion of Georgia weren’t enough to prove that Putin was a serious adversary, then the annexation of Crimea should have been.

The authoritarian threats to the United States were increasingly clear during Obama’s presidency, but they’re blatant now. There’s no longer any question that a new era of great power conflict — along with a global confrontation between the democratic and authoritarian worlds — is upon us. Today, the war in Ukraine is the largest conflict on European soil since World War II. Xi is more bellicose than ever, and he has ordered his generals to be prepared to invade Taiwan by 2027. The authoritarian world — from Russia and China to lesser powers like Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela — has become increasingly cooperative in an effort to evade Western sanctions, step up internal repression and corruption, and undermine liberal democracy.

Those who criticized Obama for failing to police his “red line” in Syria should take a hard look at the incoming Trump administration. Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, met with Assad as he was massacring his own people, questioned the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that he used chemical weapons against civilians, and argued that the United States should join forces with Russia as it pulverized Syrian civilians in one of the most destructive and indiscriminate air campaigns this century. Now that Assad has fallen and fled to Moscow, the full extent of his depravity is only beginning to be exposed — from tens of thousands of executions in Sednaya prison to years of torture and abuse suffered by innumerable victims, including children. Before the Trump era, it would have been impossible to imagine putting someone like Gabbard in charge of the entire American intelligence apparatus — someone who thought the United States should be on the same side as a murderous dictatorship supported by another murderous dictatorship.³

When Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Gabbard blamed Biden for failing to address “Russia’s legitimate security concerns.” Trump blames Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the war, arguing that he “should never have let that war start,” and he constantly blames the United States for antagonizing Russia with support for Kyiv. In Trump’s orbit, the only person who always seems to escape culpability for the war is Putin.

It’s one thing to underestimate the threat posed by the United States’ authoritarian adversaries as Obama did. It’s something quite different for an American president to make excuses for those adversaries while directing the full weight of his ire at the United States’ friends. Trump is promising to dismantle foundational elements of the post-World War II security architecture when the threats America and its allies face around the world are more ominous than at any time since the Cold War. Nothing Obama did even came close to threatening global stability and security — or the United States’ interests — as much as Trump’s plan to abandon Europe and Ukraine while undermining the entire U.S.-based alliance system.

American voters have chosen a president who wants to shrink the United States’ role in the world, cowers from conflict with Moscow, and has far less faith in American exceptionalism than Obama — or any other president. They’ve chosen a president who wants to punish America’s allies right as they make historic investments in their own defense. They’ve chosen a president who believes his political opponents — their fellow Americans — pose a greater threat than the United States’ great authoritarian foes. Decline is still a choice, and it’s what Americans want.

1. Obama approved a major troop surge in Afghanistan, led the NATO intervention in Libya, and authorized the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

2. One of the few checks on China’s economic rise and regional hegemony would have been the United States’ membership in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the negotiation of which was a signature Obama administration achievement. After Trump withdrew from TPP, Biden didn’t try to revive it. The agreement lives on as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), and Beijing is now trying to join. Republicans and Democrats have evidently decided that free trade is a bad thing, which will haunt the United States for many years — probably decades — to come.

3. It’s worth noting that the fall of Assad never would have happened but for the heroic Ukrainian resistance to Russia. This isn’t just a reminder that the global authoritarian axis exists — it also demonstrates that authoritarian countries aren’t as strong as they look.