Not Your Grandparents’ Grand Strategy: Rethinking Liberal Hegemony
Since the end of the Cold War, America’s commitment to a grand strategy of liberal hegemony has habitually set the parameters of foreign policy debate. The bipartisan consensus in Washington D.C. sees the United States as the indispensable nation whose leadership is required in perpetuity in the name of upholding the liberal international order. Liberal hegemony is liberal in the sense that it vows to use American power to defend and spread traditional liberal values such as individual freedoms, democratic governance and a market-based economy. The strategy is one of hegemony because it identifies America as the benevolent hegemon that is uniquely qualified to spread these principles abroad. This universalist logic sees the advancement of a liberal international order as not only essential for American security and prosperity, but as desirable for the rest of the world. As such, a moralistic fervour has become axiomatic in US foreign policy making […]