America Revived | Council on Foreign Relations

The nine pillars of primacy are as follows:

For both its own national interests and the largely U.S.-engineered world order, primacy proclaims that the United States should abide as the world’s sole superpower.³⁷ In the primacist view, the United States as the single global hegemon, unrivaled in its ability to project diplomatic, military, and economic power, furnishes the public goods essential to world peace and prosperity.

Primacists believe that the United States should block threats not only to American national interests but also to the interests of Washington’s allies and partners.³⁸ Enforcing a U.S. alliance system dissuades nations from conflict with each other and deters potential adversaries.³⁹ No lesser coalition of like-minded middle powers can muster the necessary military force and political will to deal with predatory international aggressors and shepherd world order. Without sustained American hegemonic power and leadership, conflict among contending major powers is potentially only a crisis away. “The alternative to Pax Americana—the only alternative—is global disorder,” columnist Bret Stephens opined in 2014.⁴⁰

Preponderant American might is the cornerstone of primacist grand strategy. Only dominant U.S. military power provides the basis for effective deterrence; diplomacy regarding China, Russia, aggressive rogue states, terrorism, and proliferation; and the promotion of democracy through force. It underpins and assures the stability of American global leadership and world order. As former Secretary of State George Shultz stressed, “Strength, strength, strength. Never let it leave your mind.”⁴¹

Critics of primacy argue that it was constructed during a brief twenty-year bygone era, as extinct as VCRs. Conceived in a transitory unipolar moment, it misreads a current world in which power is widely diffused and a peer competitor—China—increasingly challenges U.S. regional and global dominance.⁴² Primacy breeds global dynamics that compel Washington to contend with ever more problems with limited resources, too much ambition, and too little regional knowledge. American preeminence encourages partners to free ride on the U.S. taxpayer and to act recklessly because they are confident of rock-hard American assistance.⁴³ Primacy’s weaknesses echo Senator J. William Fulbright’s 1966 assertion that “power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence.”⁴⁴

The nine pillars of liberal internationalism are as follows:

Liberal internationalism seeks a world order based on international law, intense diplomacy, multilateral institutions, and the global spread of democracy, human rights, and prosperity while avoiding using major U.S. military force.⁴⁶ According to this school, the international system should be upheld by collective institutions such as NATO, the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, as well as ad hoc coalitions of like-minded states, with the promotion of democracy as a central guiding principle. Liberal internationalism facilitated democratic transitions and economic liberalization globally. It created a framework for post–World War II economic rebuilding and fostered alliances where former enemies became partners. It established a decades-long deterrence and defense strategy that avoided war among major powers. There are not sufficient reasons to abandon this extraordinarily successful grand strategy.⁴⁷ As Kennedy insisted in 1960, “peace must be based on world law and world order, on the mutual respect of all nations for the rights and powers of others.”⁴⁸

Even if American relative power and influence wane, liberal internationalists assert that their grand strategy can survive.⁴⁹ That is because if the rules-based international order is stewarded through a partnership of nations large and small, rather than through balance-of-power rivalries, then the system’s stability will endure even if one state’s influence diminishes.⁵⁰

Unlike proponents of the other schools of grand strategy, liberal internationalists also call for greater U.S. engagement with nonstate actors such as civil-society groups, nongovernmental organizations, social media platforms, multinational businesses, and even private individuals. As New America CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter argues, “without these stakeholders, the world does not have the resources, reach, expertise, or energy necessary to achieve the agendas it has set for itself.”⁵¹

Critics charge that liberal internationalism rests on wishful thinking about both the conduct of nation-states and the character of humanity. They point out that in the past fifteen years, liberal internationalism has failed to halt China’s militarization of the South China Sea and resist its mounting pressure on Taiwan; to punish Russian aggression in Crimea and the Donbas, which emboldened Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022; to quickly send the most advanced weapons to Ukraine to defend itself; to halt Iran’s proxies, which grew in strength and capability across the Middle East; to permanently prevent Iran’s enrichment of uranium well beyond the 3 percent threshold for civilian use; to enforce its “red line” on Syria’s chemical weapons use; to avoid an unwise and disastrous withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan with severe damage to American credibility and competence; to defend the international trading system that brought untold global prosperity; and to safeguard the U.S. southern border.⁵²

Moreover, according to critics, many countries essential to advancing U.S. national interests fail to meet the democratic standards of liberal internationalism—including Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Vietnam, and the Gulf monarchies. That traps liberal internationalist governments in a permanent bind—either adhere to their core democratic principles and thus compromise American national interests or shelve those principles to protect the nation.

Finally, some liberal internationalists are what could be called multipolar pessimists.⁵³ In their worldview, the fundamentals of world order have permanently shifted, and American power has so thinned that the United States can no longer decisively shape the international system. That means that in this new world, the United States needs to reexamine every principle of liberal internationalism, since none now has prima facie virtue.⁵⁴

Their critics argue, however, that those strategists chronically underestimate the American capacity to decisively mold world order. The United States commands roughly the same share (26 percent) of global gross domestic product (GDP) as it held in the early 1990s.⁵⁵ It fields the world’s most powerful military, devoting $849 billion to defense in 2025.⁵⁶ It possesses global diplomatic reach, if deftly exercised. Its treaty alliances and close partnerships in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East remain intact. And its power outmatches all the emerging nations combined, which in any case harbor sharply differing views on many global issues.⁵⁷

The nine pillars of restraint are as follows:

Proponents of restraint echo Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1821: “Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”⁵⁹

Deeply scarred by what it regards as failed wars, including those in Afghanistan, Iraq, Korea, and Vietnam, the restraint school argues that U.S. military interventions consistently weaken the nation.⁶⁰ However good the intentions, using force inevitably makes bad situations worse through U.S. overreach, arrogance, ignorance, deeply flawed policies, unintended consequences, and eventual loss of public support. Thus, diplomacy should in almost every case be the sole instrument to protect and promote U.S. vital national interests.

Promising to dramatically cut costs and risks, a grand strategy of restraint aims to reduce American global commitments, lower the defense budget, shrink U.S. force structure, bring home most U.S. military deployments abroad, and reject using military force unless there is an immediate threat to the homeland. In that context, U.S. allies and friends should shoulder responsibility for their regions’ security, with the United States providing diplomatic support and, if hostile hegemonic objectives arise such as in Ukraine, with it supplying financial aid and military equipment too.

In short, if the United States continues to search abroad for dragons to slay, it will continue to find them at the nation’s expense.

According to critics, it is delusional to suggest that the United States can safeguard its national interests and preserve world order by substantially diminishing its international power and influence, markedly pruning its global security commitments, dismantling its extensive network of U.S. foreign bases, and assuming U.S. allies and friends will effectively fall in behind.⁶¹ American withdrawal would spawn security vacuums in every vital region, which adversaries (such as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia) would exploit. Because prospects for resistance without U.S. support would dim, allies and partners would grow ever more vulnerable to hostile pressure, while the United States itself would lose the ability to prevent regional hegemons from dominating areas vital to its economic and security interests.⁶²

Strategist Frank Hoffman underlined the point in 2016: “Were we living in the 1990s, at the apex of the Unipolar Era, this strategy [restraint] would be relevant. Today, it risks power vacuums, entices regional aggression, and puts U.S. military forces at both a strategic and operational disadvantage.”⁶³

Finally, critics allege that there is no reason to believe that the planet’s other major challenges—climate, sanctity of sovereign borders, the global economy, pandemics, international terrorism, and mass migration—can be effectively addressed without decisive American global involvement and leadership. “The price of greatness is responsibility,” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill admonished in a 1943 speech. “One cannot rise to be in many ways the leading community in the civilized world without being involved in its problems, without being convulsed by its agonies and inspired by its causes.”⁶⁴

The nine pillars of American nationalism are as follows:

For almost the entire post–World War II period, the Washington elite took for granted that American leadership to advance a stable and interconnected world order best served U.S. national interests. American nationalists reject that view and the historic bipartisan consensus on U.S. vital national interests.

They seek to reclaim a bygone era—before the United States underwrote, indeed largely created, the world order after World War II. At its core, that grand strategy prescribes limited global engagement and champions a foreign policy that cements American dominance in the Western Hemisphere and locks in advantageous access to foreign markets. It asserts that since 1945, U.S. allies have taken advantage of American power, global institutions have handcuffed the United States, and foreign crises have dragged the country into a string of failed wars.⁶⁶

Global trade is a central foreign policy concern for American nationalists. They charge that globalization, incompetent U.S. negotiators, and unfair trade agreements have prevented prosperity for U.S. workers over the decades. To ensure a healthy economy in which middle-class Americans flourish, only protectionist trade policies, tariffs, and a positive balance of payments will deliver the goods.⁶⁷

Finally, American nationalists dismiss threats to U.S. vital national interests from China (except as they menace the U.S. economy); the outcome of the war in Ukraine; Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon; or the plight of billions in the developing world.⁶⁸ They believe that those dangers do not touch the prosperity and quality of life of the American worker and certainly do not justify using U.S. military force, which should be confined to the Western Hemisphere, including against illegal migration across the U.S. southern border.⁶⁹ U.S. statesman Henry Cabot Lodge in 1919 expressed the essence of American nationalism: “The United States is the world’s best hope, but if you fetter her in the interests and quarrels of other nations . . . you will destroy her power for good and endanger her very existence.”⁷⁰

Opponents of American nationalism point out that the U.S.-steered post–World War II world order served as the basis for the most extraordinary advances ever in the human condition, including in the United States, and brought safety and prosperity to billions around the globe.⁷¹ It averted war among the great powers for the longest period in five centuries and prevented the use and slowed the spread of nuclear weapons.⁷² It is that enormously beneficial world order that American nationalists aim to deconstruct.

Critics argue that by scorning diplomacy and alliances, American nationalism abandons a crucial U.S. advantage against China: the United States’ network of collaborative democratic allies and regional partners with shared national interests. If Washington does not contest Chinese hostile actions in the Indo-Pacific and beyond, Beijing would eventually squeeze the Western Hemisphere and U.S. regional and global trade, at which point the United States would be compelled to respond from a weakened position. It would blunt the U.S. ability to capitalize on some of the largest and fastest-growing global economies. It would deny Washington access to critical resources required for emerging high technologies. It would embolden Russia to further territorial aggression in Europe, which would again pull the United States into war through the NATO Article 5 commitment or, worse, leave it to watch as hegemonic powers subjugate Eurasia. It would disrupt the Middle East, risk terrorist attacks on the American homeland, and destabilize world energy prices.

Further, opponents assert that American nationalist protectionist tariffs would hobble the U.S. economy based on the false premise that the United States can resurrect the industrial economy of the 1950s.⁷³ Though framed as tools to dominate high-tech industries such as AI or to reduce the trade deficit, those measures would sap U.S. innovation, investment, and supply chain efficiencies that spring from global economic integration, and over time would erode the quality of life of American workers.⁷⁴

In short, critics believe that American nationalism would leave the United States poorer, weaker, and more vulnerable to the very dangers it seeks to avoid.

The nine pillars of Trumpism are as follows:

The heart of Trump’s vision is that the liberal internationalist world order is irreparably broken because it is based on naïve assumptions—chief among them, the belief that international institutions, multilateral cooperation, and shared global norms can override raw power, national interests, and bilateral dealmaking.⁸⁴ Nations hustle, claw, and fight for power and influence, while ignoring international rules and norms that get in the way.⁸⁵ Therefore, there should be no long-term U.S. commitments and obligations, only a permanent quest for American advantage.⁸⁶ To the contrary, previous presidents have been hesitant to use the many instruments of U.S. power, especially economic threats to bludgeon acceptance of their preferred policies. Trumpism has ended that pusillanimous approach.

As Trump’s allies see it, in the first year of his second term he has reestablished the United States as the globe’s most powerful and influential nation.⁸⁷ He has strengthened the U.S. economy through high tariffs and a massive influx of foreign investment, stopped illegal immigration across the U.S. southern border, prevented or ended through his unique negotiating skill at least ten conflicts around the world, forced U.S. allies to finally pay their fair share of collective defense, and obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons programs.⁸⁸

“Rather than pursuing a traditional establishment foreign policy, Trump is weighing all these international engagements through the lens of U.S. national security. In other words, he is guiding his policies on what will contribute to the security and prosperity of the American people rather than in pursuit of some abstract greater good,” argued Victoria Coates of the Heritage Foundation, Trump’s former deputy national security advisor.⁸⁹

For Trumpism, trade is the cornerstone of U.S. national interests.⁹⁰ In Trump’s view, global trade has gutted American manufacturing, and the imposition of tariffs and trade barriers is not just a tool of negotiation but a central requirement to redress the systemic inequities of previous trade policies.⁹¹ He uses international crises as an opportunity for dealmaking and to elevate the U.S. global role under his singular leadership, but shrinks from employing military force that risks American casualties.⁹²