American Empire is marching into the sunset — can we handle it?
Author Daniel Bessner thinks it’s time for reckoning, and restraint is the way ahead.
JULY 25,
2022
Written by
Tevah Gevelber
RS sat down for a Q&A with Bessner about his views
on restraint, his recent article in
Harper’s, and his vision for the multipolar future.
Bessner is an associate professor at the University of
Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, a non-resident
fellow at the Quincy Institute, and co-host of the American Prestige podcast.
His research focuses on the intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy,
left-wing foreign policy, and restraint.
Bessner on restraint:
Q: How did you come to restraint?
A: I’m mostly a product of my historical experience. I
came to political consciousness in the run-up to and then during and after the
Iraq War, and the war in Afghanistan. I clearly saw the devastation
caused by American hubris in U.S. foreign policy abroad. My research focused on
left-wing political thought and I was becoming more involved in debates about
socialism and social democracy. I think those two things worked together to
make me very skeptical of the United States’ ability to use military power to
create good in the world.
I came to restraint before it was really on the lips
of people within Washington, DC. But I think that’s a common story for elder
millennials, like myself, who came of age during the War on Terror. Basically,
the United States has just been failing for most of our lives, something that
was really brought home during the recession of 2008. And I think all those
things combined to engender a broader skepticism within me about the United
States’s ability to do what it says it’s going to do or to do what was promised
in the 1990s. And because I decided to focus on foreign policy, that inevitably
led me to restrain or what I’m now calling for myself: restrain and
reduce.
Q: What do you mean by reducing U.S. power?
A: If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail,
or if you have a hammer, rather, everything looks like a nail. And I think that
as long as U.S. leaders have recourse to using an extraordinary amount of
military power, they’re going to use it abroad. So I think that restraint isn’t
enough. You just need to do more than restrain the power, but actually, get rid
of the United States’s capacity to do things like bomb other countries and or
use special forces all over the globe. It’s not just about restricting U.S.
power — although that’s an important first step — it’s also about reducing U.S.
power, which I also think will have positive domestic benefits, such as
redirecting resources from weapons to welfare and things along those lines.
Q: What are some of the pushback that you get when
advocating for U.S. restraint and reduction of power?
A: The common pushback that I get is that people think
the United States should lead the world, people believe in the American empire.
People believe that the United States has done more good than
harm. And I fundamentally disagree with those positions. I think if you look at
what the United States has actually done in the world, it has oftentimes made
things worse, and that a lot of the benefits that the world has seen– in
particular more peace in Western Europe and Central Europe– could have been
achieved without U.S. imperial action.
In Bessner’s article: “Empire Burlesque: What
comes after the American Century?”
Q: How would you explain the premise of your new
article?
A: The article is meant to explore a debate that I
have been noticing going on between liberal internationalists and restrainers
and it attempts to prove why I believe the restraint case is right. It focuses
on what people are actually saying today on both sides of the debate and then
it goes through the history of U.S. foreign policy — mostly since 1945 — and
tries to demonstrate that the United States does cause an enormous amount of
destruction abroad. And it also tries to explore what I consider to be the
philosophical problems with the liberal internationalist approach to the world:
both how they understand the world and how they understand other countries and
their actions.
Q: Your article primarily focuses on China but
how do you think that the war in Ukraine is affecting the restraint and liberal
internationalist camps?
A: What has happened in the aftermath of Putin’s
invasion of Ukraine is that you see a lot of people who would have otherwise
placed themselves in the restraint camp really embrace a more interventionist
foreign policy.
I think Americans really feel a yearning for romantic
wars. And I don’t mean romantic, as good, but as something that puts a bad
actor against a quote-unquote “good actor” that is defending their own space.
I think that looking from a global scale, the Russian
invasion is not nearly as dramatic a breach as people have pointed to. We
could obviously point to the U.S.’ various interventions that have violated
international sovereignty, but I don’t think that the invasion augurs a new era
of geopolitics. I think it’s bad. I think it’s illegal. And I completely
understand and respect Ukraine’s desire and Ukrainians’ desire to push Putin
out. But having said that, I don’t think it really changes the global
distribution of power in a meaningful way. And that was really what I was
focusing on in that piece.
Q: When you wrote the piece, who were you trying
to reach?
A: I think any strategy that is meant to promote
restraint needs to reach both the American public and politicians. I would say
right now, empirically, the public doesn’t have much influence in foreign
affairs. But I think it’s almost a moral action within a democracy to educate
the public as much as one is able to and build a more democratic base for
future foreign policy.
Q: If you were to predict 50 years out, where
would you see the world in terms of polarity and power dynamics?
A: It’s always difficult to know because history
always throws surprises. But my guess is that China’s going to be roughly
hegemonic in East Asia and the United States is not going to be as embedded in
the region as it presently is. The United States will still continue to
dominate the Western Hemisphere, even if I wish it was otherwise. Now, maybe there are going to be some changes. We’ll see once Millennials begin to enter
power positions if their perspective will actually result in new foreign
policies. That’s what I can’t predict. And that’s what I hope for– that there
will be a shift in how the U.S. approaches the world.
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