Last Friday, I had a murderer’s row of commentators from across the political spectrum on the show to debate one of the big questions: what will be the role of American power abroad in the twenty-first century? My interlocutors—the Washington Post’s Shadi Hamid, the American Conservative’s Andrew Day, and the University of Washington’s Daniel Bessner—duked it out (politely!) over the fate of American imperialism, the uses of American military power, and our role in Gaza and Iran.
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One of the remarkable features of the conversation was how much the leftmost and rightmost participants (Danny and Andrew, respectively) agreed on matters of foreign policy. Both of them put hard questions to Shadi, whose latest book, The Case for American Power, advocates for the robust use of American military power abroad in order to maintain the U.S.’s preeminence among the world’s nations and to intervene in humanitarian crises.
Shadi’s emphasis on America’s capacity to act as force for good in the world, despite our inconsistent record of doing do, was at odds with Andrew’s preference for U.S. leadership to focus on domestic problems rather than geopolitics and Danny’s longstanding critiques of American empire. Given the resistance Shadi faced during our stream, I wonder how much appetite there is among the electorate for the position he outlines. After Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Gaza, and Iran, hawkishness on the left, right, and center seems to be out of vogue. Trump is suffering a hit to his popularity, even among his base, after getting us into what many see as an unnecessary war that’s disrupted the global economy.
This conversation may model the country’s political dynamic in the coming years, with the center-left and center-right advocating for the revival and reform of older models of U.S. military projection, while the right and left galvanize grassroots support by taking, for different reasons, anti-militaristic positions. Perhaps the days of blank-check budgets for the military are coming to an end. As someone who’s become far more skeptical of U.S. military intervention than I once was, and who sees unaddressed domestic problems mounting at home, I can’t say that would be a bad thing.
