Christopher R. Hill — Reclaiming American Internationalism

US President Donald Trump has managed to attract support for his "America First" isolationism not by dint of his own arguments, but because the US foreign-policy establishment abandoned its own values. After decades of thoughtless military interventionism, it is little wonder that Americans would seek an alternative.…

A grownup speaks on semi-official channel. The voices of the grownups have been suppressed in the corporate media and only found expression in alternative media.

One can be for liberal internationalism but against liberal interventionism as both against international law unless mandated by the UNSC, and also as not only unproductive but also damaging, without being "unpatriotic" by opposing US foreign and military policy.

Liberal interventionism, neoconservatism, and war hawkishness have all but destroyed American soft power through reliance on hard power.

What US leaders don't seem to understand is that they are killing the goose that lays the golden egg out of lust for power and greed for global hegemony.

Actually, if America created "empire" by pursuit of liberalism through soft power, it would be win-win for all, since it would facilitate commerce and raise the level of global prosperity while also increasing the level of collective consciousness.

Empires have advantages but those advantages are lost when they get in their own way by decreasing the common good instead of increasing it through greater efficiency and lower transaction costs, while spreading positive values culturally through exchange.

Instead, the US has adopted a policy of "My way or the highway," and "If you are not with us, you are against us." The result is the winding down of the unipolar world order operative since WWII and the rise of a multipolarism that is tending toward a resumption of great power politics.

Dumb and short-sighted. It will end badly.

Project Syndicate
Reclaiming American Internationalism

Christopher R. Hill |  formerly US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, US Ambassador to Iraq, South Korea, Macedonia, and Poland, a US special envoy for Kosovo, a negotiator of the Dayton Peace Accords, and the chief US negotiator with North Korea from 2005-2009; nos Chief Advisor to the Chancellor for Global Engagement, Professor of the Practice in Diplomacy at the University of Denver, and the author of Outpost.

Also at PS

Mark Leonard makes some good points but puts the US blame on President Trump when the issues began with JFK's invasion of Cuba and Vietnam, LBJ's escalation of the war, Richard Nixon' s expansion of the war to all of Indochina, Jimmy Carter's unwise embrace of Zbigniew Brzezinski and his grand chess board policy, Ronald Reagan's jingoistic foreign adventures, G. W. H. Bush's invasion of Kuwait, Bill Clinton's invasion of Yugoslavia and advance of NATO, G. W. Bush invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Barack Obama's invasion of Libya and Syria. Donald Trump's appointment of John Bolton and Nikki Haley are continuation's of that failed approach. So Leonard's recommendation to return to it is nonsense.

Present at the DestructionMark Leonard | Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations

Doug Bandow — Washington’s Endless Sanctions Are Finally Backfiring

Uncle Sam’s failure is unsurprising. As Lord Acton famously intoned: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It doesn’t matter whether the intentions of Washington policymakers are good. The consequences of American policies have been bad, often disastrous.

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

The American Conservative

Washington’s Endless Sanctions Are Finally Backfiring

Doug Bandow | senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan

Paul Grenier — America’s Men Without Chests

America’s way of acting in the world, the violence it often does to the truth while asserting its will, cannot be explained simply through its alleged “interests.” The U.S. acts the way it does because of the peculiar American way of understanding what gives life and action meaning.

At the core of the American philosophy is voluntarism, the justification of action based purely and simply on the will. The distinguishing characteristic of voluntarism is that it gives pride of place to the will as such, to the will as power, the will abstracted from everything else, but especially abstracted from the good. The notion of the good is necessarily inclusive of the whole, of all sides. Concern exclusively for oneself goes by a different name.

The clearest and perhaps the best expression of American voluntarism come of age was expressed by Karl Rove during the George W. Bush administration, as reported by Ron Suskind in New York Times Magazine on October 17, 2004:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

This oft-quoted statement is naively assumed to have been the expression of a single moment in American politics, rather than a summation of its ethos by one of its shrewder and more self-aware practitioners. The point of the voluntarist order is to act, to impose one’s will on global reality by any means necessary. The truth is not something to be understood, or grasped, still less something that should condition one’s own actions and limit them in any way. Truth is reducible to whatever is useful for imposing one’s will....

The American Conservative

America’s Men Without Chests

Paul Grenier, founder of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy