The Case for America Needs More Than Theory

Shadi Hamid is a strange advocate for American hegemony. The Washington Post columnist is a liberal, a Muslim, and a vocal critic of the US-Israel alliance. And yet his latest book, The Case for American Power, is an attempt to explain why the Republic is “the last best hope of the earth.” However well-intentioned Hamid is, it is perhaps unsurprising that his case is not wholly successful.

That said, any defense of America—however qualified—is a welcome undertaking in an age when the Left and Right alike have become so unpatriotic. If Hamid’s book rallies readers on the Left or in the center around a more robust foreign policy, he will have done a service. But Hamid’s America is little more than an abstraction, a hopeful avatar of democratic ideology unrooted from a deeper tradition. I regret to say that he does not offer the full-throated civilizational confidence Americans must rediscover if we are to overcome the gathering storm.

From the outset, Hamid gets off on the wrong foot by resting his case on the notion that America can “change and improve on itself” because it is an “idea.” More specifically, he writes that the American idea “represents a fusion of power and morality” manifest in a universalist “mission.” To be sure, ideas are vitally important to American nationhood—but we are also constituted by something more tangible. Universals, our Founders understood, are only incarnate in particulars. Hamid’s reduction of America to a mere creed is little more than a terrible simplification.

It seems, though, that Hamid understands the limits of his creedalism more than he lets on. At one point, he cites Sir Roger Scruton’s concept of “oikophobia,” the fear and hatred of home, to critique those on the Left who hyper-fixate on American abuses of power. Hamid argues quite cogently that both left-wing oikophobia and right-wing xenophobia are manifestations of “declinism,” a lack of faith in American exceptionalism.

And yet Hamid does not fully recognize that all these forms of declinism are rooted in our disappointments with abstractions. The ideals held up by oikophobes and xenophobes alike have little to do with the actual country—they are, in fact, attempts to escape the realities of American life altogether. Ideology traffics in fantasy even when its proponents adopt the pose of hard-headed realists. The columnists and “thought leaders” and influencers who dominate social media reduce the American people to an abstraction to be manipulated at will. Is it little wonder the chattering class faces a crisis of public trust?

The stronger aspects of Hamid’s case lie in the contrast he makes between “American democracy” and revanchist autocracy as different ways to exercise power. Taking the example of Vladimir Putin’s Russian war machine, he warns that autocratic power always violates human dignity. “The experience of living under authoritarian rule twists the soul and distorts natural moral intuitions,” he writes. Especially as new technologies make autocracies stronger, Hamid argues that the United States must boldly stand against the tide of illiberalism.

Hamid’s book would have been much stronger, though, if he more directly confronted the many errors made by the liberals and progressives ostensibly on his side of the aisle. Though he heaps scorn on Obama-era arrogance and Biden’s half-hearted support of Israel, he rarely recognizes the ways that liberal foreign policy has appeased autocrats for decades. Liberal foreign policy since the end of the Cold War has really been a kind of self-deterrence, a horror at using any kind of power to advance American interests. Adversaries such as the Chinese Communist Party, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and even Putin himself have been treated more like potential partners than the intractable antagonists they really are. Coexistence, not victory, has been the aim of liberalism.

Perhaps Hamid is reluctant to confront the shortcomings of the foreign policy left because he imagines them as his principal audience. I certainly do not envision his book selling many copies outside of the Acela Corridor. But I suspect his reticence has a deeper cause; despite Hamid’s paeans to America, he shares the Left’s fundamental lack of faith in America. Though he praises our regime’s “potential for change,” he simply does not think America has ever really lived up to the promise of her ideals.

This is the fundamental problem with liberal ideology—it is fighting with one hand tied behind its back. Abstractions do not stiffen the spine, and theory cannot overcome crisis all by itself. Indeed, as Edmund Burke warned near the end of his life, “a blind and furious spirit of innovation, under the name of reform” can be “the greatest of all evils.” Merely claiming that America is great because she has the capacity for change is by no means the strong argument Hamid seems to think it is. In fact, it seriously undermines the civilizational confidence we must recover if we are to fend off the threats of autocracy in the modern world.

The real case for American power is not dependent on vague and unattainable “democratic values.” It is, rather, rooted in our people’s real history and actual virtues and the spiritual inheritance of liberty we have received. Ultimately, the case for American power can never be made in liberal terms; it must, rather, be conservative.