Emma Ashford reviews Ivo Daalder and James Lindsey’s The Empty Throne: America’s Abdication of Global Leadership:

Meanwhile, they reject the pragmatism of Barack Obama, criticizing him for “failing to rebuild American leadership,” and repeating again the idea that Obama actually pursued a foreign policy of restraint. Obama’s policies were undoubtedly better in this regard than his predecessors, notably his realistic and hard-headed approach to Iran. But as others have pointed out here at War on the Rocks, it’s impossible to make the argument that regime change in Libya, support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, or increased deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan qualify as foreign policy restraint.

In short, the authors accept hook, line, and sinker the idea of America as the indispensable nation, the leader of a magnanimous order in which “countries willing to follow America’s lead would prosper.” Their chapter on the birth of the liberal international order cites none of the recent scholarly research on its origins and realities, work which shows that conceptualizing international relations and American foreign policy in this way is profoundly ahistorical.

The cult of American global “leadership” is every bit as ideological and divorced from reality as the “credibility” obsession that so many of its members have. Adherents of this cult don’t feel the need to justify the extraordinary, hyperactive U.S. role in the world, and as Ashford points out the authors don’t bother to do this in their book. Their account of the origins of the present international order seems to be mythology rather than history, and the purpose in telling the story is not to understand what happened but to inspire veneration for the status quo. They simply take for granted that American “leadership” has been and always will be essential for international order, and they are quick to condemn presidents when those leaders show insufficient devotion to the oversized “leadership” role that they unquestioningly champion. Because Obama was not as activist overseas as the authors wished he had been, he is labeled as a restrainer despite ample evidence that the former president brought into all the same major assumptions that the authors hold about what the U.S. should do in the world. There would be nothing wrong with calling Obama a restrainer if that is how he had actually governed, but Ashford points out that he did no such thing.

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https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-empty-throne-and-the...