The Case for the Greater West

In Washington, there are two broad frameworks for understanding the aims of U.S. foreign policy. The first is the long-established orthodoxy of liberal internationalism, which envisions the universal reign of democracy and human rights as history’s natural end-state. In anticipation of this outcome, the United States must defend a liberal order against alien elements, such as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.

The second is an increasingly influential position of restraint proposed by an eclectic coalition of academic neorealists, progressive anti-imperialists, and Republican isolationists. Whereas proponents of the liberal order start with the globe and work backwards by subtracting regimes they consider irredeemably illiberal, proponents of restraint begin at the U.S. border and proceed outwards by adding areas they deem strategically vital to the national interest.

Both groups miss the mark. The goal of achieving liberal universalism is as unrealistic as the expectation that the United States might cut the myriad ties that bind it to the network of allies and partners it has built beyond its borders. U.S. officials should align foreign-policy objectives with the capabilities and interests of the actually existing Pax Americana, which is much smaller than the globe and much larger than the nation. The first step in formulating such a policy is to define the full extent of the United States’ extraterritorial empire—or, to put it more politely, the greater West.

The Anglosphere provides the foundation of the greater West. The North American colonies were a crucial component of the early British Empire, and the American Revolution did not sever these economic and cultural connections. During World War II, a deliberate transfer of power from London to Washington resulted in the latter becoming the unquestioned senior partner in an enduring special relationship. The other British settler colonies also found a place at the core of the American order. The United States signed the ANZUS mutual security treaty with Australia and New Zealand in 1951, and the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network, which includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, continues to circumscribe the United States’ most trusted inner circle.

For much of U.S. history, the Western Hemisphere represented the canonical extent of the United States’ influence. George Washington’s warning against foreign entanglements and James Monroe’s doctrine against European encroachment served as the twin pillars of a hemispheric foreign policy. In the late 19th century, U.S. administrations inaugurated a period of gunboat and dollar diplomacy in Latin America and the Caribbean. At the same time, they built substantial hemispheric ties under the framework of Pan-Americanism. This effort at institution-building reached its apogee with the signing of the 1947 Rio Pact, the first mutual security alliance ever joined by the United States. (NATO did not come into existence until 1949.) Although World War II and the ensuing Cold War put Latin America on Washington’s backburner, the United States’ comparative indifference to the region has concealed a continued insistence on hemispheric preeminence. Any possibility of an external great power establishing a foothold in Latin America has elicited an outsized reaction from Washington, none more dramatic than the Kennedy administration’s threat of global nuclear Armageddon during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Europe has always been a prime focus of U.S. foreign policy. At first, the Old World was to be kept at arm’s length—precisely because persistent cultural, economic, and political connections could tempt entanglement. After the onset of the Cold War, the United States finally embraced an enduring political and military association with Europe. The collapse of the Soviet bloc resulted in an eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union, which in no way lessened the region’s dependence on the United States.

Aside from its ties with the Anglosphere, the Western Hemisphere, and Europe, the United States maintains a somewhat haphazard collection of allies and partners acquired in the aftermath of World War II. It was the first country to recognize Israel in 1948 and has been its principal champion since the late 1960s. The Philippines was an American colony until 1946 and has been a treaty ally since 1951. Japan surrendered to the United States in 1945 and signed a mutual security agreement with the country in 1951. South Korea concluded a mutual defense treaty with Washington following the 1953 Korean armistice. The United States made a defense pact with the Taiwan-based Republic of China in 1954, withdrew from the treaty after transferring official recognition to Beijing in 1979, and has maintained considerable—though ambiguous—support for Taipei ever since.

Beyond these bilateral and regional ties, the United States maintains an extensive network of military bases, a central position in the global economic system, and a considerable soft-power infrastructure that includes the entertainment industry, multinational corporations, universities, and nongovernmental organizations.

The United States largely completed the construction of this hegemonic complex in the early 1950s but neither designed nor recognized it as a self-contained system. Instead, U.S. officials declared leadership of the much larger “free world,” which they defined negatively as containing all non-communist countries. Today’s liberal order is a direct descendant of this original concept. The dissonance between the claimed and actual extent of the U.S.-led bloc was thus built-in from the very start.

The logic of free-world leadership created a series of persistent problems for U.S. policymakers. The insistence on total opposition between communist and non-communist “worlds” resulted in a strategically unsustainable policy of global containment, an intolerance of non-alignment, and a reliance on the apparent persistence of an existential menace as the only force that could make the heterogeneous free world cohere. This binary worldview has continued to underpin the American order ever since, resurfacing most clearly during the Reagan era’s rise of neoconservatism, the George W. Bush administration’s global war on terrorism, and the Biden administration’s declaration of a global divide between democracy and autocracy. As a result, the problems that frustrated policymakers in the 1950s still plague us today.

The first adjustment to U.S. foreign policy should therefore occur on the conceptual plane. Washington should recognize that the U.S.-led sphere is unlikely to grow much beyond its current scope, and there is no reasonable prospect of it ever becoming a global order. The next step is to consider how to apportion U.S. power within the greater West to maximize its assets and opportunities.

The Anglosphere should be relatively simple to sustain, given existing cultural, political, and security connections. Its expansive and secure geographical configuration extends the reach of U.S. power at a comparatively low cost.

The Western Hemisphere remains safe from any conceivable great-power challenge. The recent influx of Chinese investment, like the communist movements of the 1960s to the 1980s, is largely the product of Washington ceding the field, not proof of Latin American vulnerability. Instead of imagining Latin America as a source of problems from which the United States must protect itself, Washington should remember the historic advantages it has derived from hemispheric policies. This should not be a return to Yankee imperialism but a revival of the best traditions of Pan-Americanism and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration’s Good Neighbor policy. Economic investment and diplomatic attention directed toward Latin America are currently at a bare minimum, while damage control takes up considerable resources. Washington should seek to reverse this ratio.

Europe’s relative weight in the world is declining, but it remains a core component of the U.S.-led order. Rather than withdrawing from the continent to economize and reprioritize, as the restrainers and China hawks counsel, Washington should seek a strong, stable, and clearly delimited Europe that remains fully integrated in a U.S.-led bloc. The United States might eventually be able to reduce the number of troops stationed on the continent, but it should not seek to foster European strategic autonomy. Since the 1950s, Washington has made several attempts to shift the primary burden of European defense onto its allies—all to no avail—and the prospects of Europeans agreeing on an effective collective security arrangement remain slim. Meanwhile, a stable and prosperous Europe under the U.S. security umbrella is a proven asset.

At the same time, U.S. policymakers should recognize the EU and NATO for what they are—finite regional institutions, not building blocks of a potentially universal liberal order. As part of a settlement in Ukraine, the United States should finally shut NATO’s open door. Once a durable line has been drawn between Russia and the U.S.-led bloc, the two sides could slowly progress toward a new détente.

Finally, the United States should not seek to pull European countries into an Asian theater where they would be of little help. Economic de-risking and strategic export controls to help maintain the greater West’s relative power can be considered, but policies that overstretch and weaken Europe to slow the rise of China should be avoided.

In the Pacific, the United States should maintain its hub-and-spokes alliance model but cease efforts to build a larger anti-China coalition as part of a pivot to Asia. A united Asia under U.S. leadership is an unlikely proposition. A half-hearted attempt to establish the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization as an Asian NATO met with failure in the 1950s. The Asian nations are too culturally disparate and geographically dispersed, and the postcolonial states among them are too protective of their sovereignty. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines might cooperate more closely to balance China’s growing power, but this process is only likely to go so far. The prospect of Indonesia, Vietnam, and, especially, India, choosing to join a U.S.-led bloc is even more remote. And, whereas the United States alone retains overall military superiority over China, it will always be operating at a significant disadvantage in a region so far from its shores. Instead of endlessly seeking to strengthen a weak hand, Washington should realize that certain limitations are likely to endure, no matter how many resources it redirects to the region.

Strict containment of China need not be a U.S. priority in any case. Liberal internationalists feel the need to confront Beijing because the existence of an influential and imposing autocracy is incompatible with their vision. But if U.S. policymakers abandoned the objective of a universal liberal order, then China’s increased activity on the world stage would not necessarily pose a major problem. Meanwhile, many realists advocate competition with China because they see its rise as challenging U.S. national power. But the greater West matches China in population and significantly exceeds the country in wealth, technology, and territory. China’s weight in the world is considerable and growing, but it is nowhere near an existential threat to the U.S.-led order.

The one area where deterrence is currently crucial is Taiwan. To avoid a potentially catastrophic clash with China, Washington should maintain its military aid to Taipei while publicly and privately reassuring Beijing of its continued commitment to the “One China” policy and its openness to the possibility of peaceful reunification at some point in the future.

The United States’ bilateral alliances in Asia represent the outer edge of the U.S.-led order. Israel, meanwhile, is an isolated fragment of the greater West that exists entirely beyond the bounds of the U.S.-led bloc. Washington’s efforts to create an alliance system in the Middle East have all failed, as have direct military interventions in the name of democracy promotion. To better lead the greater West, the United States must complete its withdrawal from the Middle East. Washington will not succeed in extricating itself from the region until it reconsiders its longtime policy of total and reflexive support for Israel.

Finally, the United States should more carefully calibrate its instruments of global power. First, Washington should pull back from military bases that risk pulling the United States into unwanted conflict through political pressure to retaliate in the case of American casualties. Second, the United States should maintain dollar dominance but use its power passively rather than actively. Washington’s weaponization of the dollar has not brought desired behavioral changes in Moscow or Tehran and has raised anxiety about the global economic system in capitals around the world. Instead, the United States should seek to restore confidence in the dollar as a seemingly natural store of value. Third, the U.S. government should cease supporting NGOs that seek to promote political change outside the greater West. The democratic peace theory only applies within the Pax Americana. Active attempts to spread liberal political systems beyond the bounds of the U.S.-led order are much more likely to create chaos and conflict. Fourth, in concert with the greater West, the United States should substantially increase its diplomatic outreach to the rest of the world—not to pressure countries to pick sides, but to meet them on their own terms in search of mutually beneficial opportunities and solutions to common challenges.

A U.S. foreign policy explicitly aligned with the actually existing U.S.-led order would eliminate many enduring tensions in Washington’s relations with the rest of the world. Such a policy would provide a positive basis for coordinated action within the greater West, simplify communication with the global south, and reduce the risk of war with potential rival powers. On one hand, the vast U.S.-led bloc would be more self-sufficient and secure. On the other, it would be sufficiently powerful and attractive to never be isolated from the outside world. Best of all, a policy that promotes the interests of the greater West should be simpler to execute than either the untangling of networks and alliances or the pursuit of a global liberal order. To start, all that is required is a recognition of the current extent of American power.