When I clicked on the website of The American Spectator Saturday morning and began to read Matthew Omolesky’s lament for the end of the American empire, I thought for a moment that I mistakenly accessed the Council on Foreign Relations’ journal Foreign Affairs or The Economist, which specialize in Trump-bashing and genuflecting at the so-called “rules-based international order.” Then, a friend sent me Fareed Zakaria’s latest column in the Washington Post about Trump making America “small” again. President Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy, which prioritizes U.S. national security interests and seeks to get America out of the protectorate business, has upset the Wilsonians and neoconservatives among us who weep for the end of U.S. global hegemony.
Trump has replaced the Reagan NSS’s goals of “world freedom, peace and prosperity” with the goals of American freedom, American prosperity, and American peace.
Omolesky, a human rights lawyer who apparently longs for a return to the foreign policies of Jimmy Carter or Woodrow Wilson, calls the NSS a “declaration of geopolitical contraction, if not outright retreat, presaging the end of the global American empire.” He mourns the loss of America bestriding the globe as a benevolent hegemon enforcing universal “rights” and protecting the weak against the strong. For Omolesky, as for Zakaria, a U.S. foreign policy that prioritizes U.S. interests is too parochial, too selfish, too 19th century, too isolationist. They are reminiscent of British imperialists who shouted “Rule Britannia” as British soldiers died to maintain Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden.”
Perhaps Omolesky and Zakaria miss being part of great crusades to save the world from this or that dictator. It’s so much more exciting to confront the evil Putin, even though Ukraine has never — never — been considered a vital interest of the United States. Perhaps they forget that toppling Saddam Hussein didn’t make the world a better or safer place. Multipolarity in international relations is the norm, yet Omolesky and Zakaria don’t want its return. They appear to want American global hegemony to last forever, but that is not how the world works.
Ironically, Omolesky notes the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran — weaknesses and vulnerabilities that, he writes, should not “put an end to our global ambitions.” But what are America’s “global ambitions”? Woodrow Wilson wanted to make the world safe for democracy. Franklin Roosevelt wanted to universalize “freedom from want.” Jimmy Carter wanted to spread human rights. George W. Bush wanted to end tyranny throughout the world. All of those imperial projects failed. None made America more secure.
The 2025 NSS is not isolationist and does not make America small. Instead, it seeks, in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s words, to make the U.S. once again a “normal country.” Normal countries prioritize their national interests. Normal countries don’t “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” in the memorable phrase of John Quincy Adams. Normal countries don’t go on crusades to fulfill their “global ambitions.”
Omolesky invokes President Reagan’s 1987 NSS as a guide for U.S. foreign policy today. But what President John F. Kennedy called the “long twilight struggle” of the Cold War ended more than 30 years ago. Trump has replaced the Reagan NSS’s goals of “world freedom, peace and prosperity” with the goals of American freedom, American prosperity, and American peace — those are our “global ambitions” in the 2025 NSS. They might not be hefty enough to satisfy the imperial longings of Omolesky and Zakaria, but they’re plenty hefty for normal Americans who don’t dream of empire and who want their leaders to always put America first.
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