The Case for American Power ft. Shadi Hamid

Yeah, there's a segment in your book that's interesting where you kind of take other portions of the left, which clearly you sympathize with to some extent, but you take them to task a little bit.

for this kind of America is always bad worldview that anytime anything bad happens in the world, it must be tied to America somehow or that every intervention that America has is either evil or it fails or that, you know, look, you can probably say that about certain things America has done, but certainly you can't say it about everything that America has done.

Exactly.

And it's an interesting tension within the left right there, I think.

Yeah, and three interventions, just to kind of name them for folks who might be skeptical that these things actually exist, i.e. good interventions.

I mean, the first Iraq war was an example where without U.S. power, we wouldn't have been able to stop the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait.

I think that was a good thing.

Or the fact that we got in too late, but eventually we intervened in Bosnia to end the genocide there.

Then later in the 1990s, there was the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, which again, we did intervene there and we stopped that.

So those are just three kind of obvious examples.

Well, and I would go back even further to, you look at like in the post-war era, The fact that our greatest adversaries, that genocidal regimes like Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, ended up becoming some of our strongest allies just a few decades later and were healthy, rich, capitalist democracies.

And, you know, I think like how many how many countries that you would have called an empire in history would have taken a vanquished foe like that and turned them into rich, thriving democracies in the same way that we did with Japan and Germany? I actually think we were so successful with that, that it negatively influenced the belief that we could just intervene everywhere and it would always go well.

following decades that prove not to be the case.

But I think you can point back to successes like that as well.

Exactly.

I mean, post-war Europe.

I mean, people kind of forget about that maybe because it's so obvious, but Europe's reconstruction and its democratization after being ruled in large part by um nazis and other fascist parties that is a great that is a great success if the us didn't provide europe with a security umbrella if we didn't have things like the marshall plan and the set of intertwining institutions that shape the post-war world um the the european union wouldn't have been possible and this is one of the great examples of peace building of our time, really perhaps of any time, for Europe to go from what it was to what it would become is a remarkable success and the US is at the center of that story.

If you look at the numbers just in terms of the raw data, at the end of World War II, only 8% of the world's countries were democracies.

By the 1990s, that number was over 50%.

And it's not a coincidence that that massive expansion of democracy across the globe happened while America was a superpower and especially intensified after the US became the sole superpower in the 1990s.

It's again, it's very easy to kind of be like, oh, well, you know.

Well, what about all these other things? And I don't deny that in the book.

I mean, I have a whole chapter on hypocrisy where I go through America's sins during the Cold War.

For example, the fact that we supported right-wing authoritarian regimes in Latin America, that's a moral stain on us.

And we have to atone for that and account for that, no doubt.