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Hegemony? What Hegemony?

The U.S. has gained little or nothing from its foreign wars over the last half century, and it has lost a great deal in the process.

Tim Kane makes a dubious claim:

Critics call it empire. Academics call it hegemony. Some of its champions have called it unipolarity. But the data show a distinguishing feature beyond those descriptions: The projection of universal liberty has been the beating heart of U.S. foreign policy [bold mine-DL].

That’s not really true. The U.S. has long been the “well-wisher” of the cause of liberty in other lands, but its foreign policy has not been driven or defined by this. That may be unsatisfying, but it happens to be true. There are simply too many examples of U.S. actions that are contrary to the “projection of universal liberty” to accept that this forms the core or heart of our foreign policy down through the years. It’s a story that ideologues tell to make the maintenance of U.S. hegemony seem more admirable and principled than it is. Whether during the Cold War or in more recent years, the U.S. has frequently collaborated with very ugly illiberal and authoritarian regimes to achieve its larger goals. This has been true when the U.S. has pursued so-called “freedom agendas” and when it hasn’t. The more ambitious our foreign policy has been, the more often the U.S. has had to make deals with such regimes, so that maintenance of U.S. hegemony and the “projection of universal liberty” are always going to be opposed to one another.

It doesn’t help Kane’s argument that he doesn’t seem to understand that hegemony is a description of a state’s relatively greater power and not a moral judgment of it. He writes:

America’s presidents and her soldiers were willing to make selfless sacrifices for the liberty of others. This is not hegemony.

The U.S. doesn’t cease to be a hegemon because it has sometimes used its power in ways that benefit other nations. The U.S. is the world’s hegemonic power because it continues to have the greatest economic and military strength, and it makes use of both to wield influence and project power throughout much of the world. Neoconservatives used to boast about the benevolence of U.S. hegemony, but Kane is reduced to denying its existence while arguing for its continuation.

However, he inadvertently helps to make the case against it:

U.S. military interventions have come, in all cases, in situations with limited benefit to the American bottom line.

True enough, which is why it has made so little sense for the U.S. to intervene in so many places. The U.S. has gained little or nothing from its foreign wars over the last half century, and it has lost a great deal in the process.

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