Heg bad – leads to unnecessary and catastrophic interventions, such as in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya, and Iraq, which destabilize regions and spawn global resentment.

Enter Ukraine. Ergo, a resurgence of American hegemony standing in the way of tyranny. Certainly, the December 2022 U.S. visit of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy enthralled Washington and an America much in need of a hero. U.S. support for Ukraine appears popular. President Joe Biden’s success in mobilizing European and Asian allies in support of Ukraine has been impressive, a Cold War-like consensus.

The advocates for perpetual U.S. global primacy do have a point. All things considered, U.S. primacy with its enlightened self-interest — in defense of principles — has broadly been a source of stability and prosperity. Nevertheless, it is a specious argument to say that realists conceive national interests only as direct attacks on U.S. soil. Rather, realists argue for balances of power, opposing Russian and Chinese attempts at hegemony over Europe and Asia, and occasional intervention to restore that balance. They are skeptical of foreign meddling for other ends, which can lead to overreach.

Many advocates of perpetual U.S. primacy dismiss such concerns. They see failed foreign adventurism as stemming less from the folly of an expansive definition of U.S. interests, than as an aberration of liberal hegemony. They tend to discount those failed U.S. interventions that ended in catastrophe, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya, and especially the 2003 Iraq War. Both neoconservatives and liberals were cheerleaders for these fiascos. The destabilizing destructiveness of these unnecessary interventions spawned lingering global resentment and cannot be easily airbrushed from Americans’ collective memory.

Kagan and others argue that, in the aftermath of 9/11, Americans saw Afghanistan and Iraq as matters of security. A good case can be made for the initial effort to overthrow the Taliban. Iraq was an unwise contrivance, however, as many in and outside the Bush administration warned at the time. A chaotic, unsettled Iraqi state, like a Communist-led Vietnam, was not the undoing of the Western world. It is difficult to argue, however, that past debacles did not undermine American power. Was that merely the price of liberal order maintenance? Or does the logic of exceptionalism to “make the world like us” compel us to ignore the costs?

Kagan echoes the inflated threat rhetoric seen from the Vietnam and Iraq wars to the current Ukraine conflict and debates over Taiwan: “The liberal world order will be threatened if Ukraine falls.” The international order is rules-based, but, Kagan candidly cites Reinhold Niebuhr’s observation, that “these rules themselves are a form of American hegemony.” He adds, “They are not neutral but are designed to sustain the international status quo, which for eight decades has been dominated by the American-backed liberal world. The rules-based order is an adjunct to that hegemony.”

Is more continuity in a recycled binary world of China/Russia strategic competition the predetermined future? In a word, no. The U.S. rise of the past 130 years has essentially peaked. Wealth and power have diffused. Witness much of the Global South — including democracies like India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and Turkey — rejecting the Western consensus on Ukraine. This is symbolized by new groupings like the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), and associations—Xi Jinping’s warm welcome in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and Turkey’s provision of drones to Azerbaijan.