America’s failures abroad and its failures at home have something in common: too many leaders confused protecting their own power with serving the people who had to live with their decisions. Abroad, that meant trying to manage other societies through force. At home, it meant celebrating competition while giving established interests advantages their smaller competitors could never obtain.
That is where I would begin an account of what went wrong. Before accepting another promise of a golden age, we should understand why the previous promises lost their credibility.
Which commitments failed?
In his critique of the Wilsonian century, Colin Dueck argues that the failures of that foreign-policy framework helped produce Trump. There is something to that argument. But “international commitments” needs a definition. A mutual-defense alliance, a trade agreement, an inspected nuclear agreement, and a prolonged occupation impose very different obligations.
Dueck himself supports alliances and trade. The useful disagreement is over what failed within the broader tradition. Cooperation among countries is one thing; assuming that American power can reconstruct another country’s politics is another. Treating both as one failed project obscures the choice we actually face.
I have already addressed the gap between America’s professed principles and its conduct in When America Abandoned Self-Determination. Wilson’s hypocrisy is part of that record. The principle of self-determination remains worth defending precisely because leaders have violated it.
War helped destroy trust.
Americans were asked to accept enormous costs for wars whose purposes shifted and whose promised outcomes receded. People elsewhere bore the consequences of decisions made without their consent. Counterinsurgency repeatedly forced American leaders to confront a problem that superior weapons could not settle: who has the legitimacy to govern?
That record created an opening for a politician who said the establishment had squandered American lives and resources. Research by Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen found an association between local military sacrifice and Trump’s support in 2016. It supports taking war weariness seriously; it does not establish that war alone explains the election.
Economic dislocation mattered too. Research on exposure to Chinese import competition documents political consequences of concentrated trade shocks. Communities that lost industries had real grievances. A credible argument for trade has to acknowledge those losses and offer people a practical route into new opportunity.
But bringing every inexpensive household product back into American factories is a poor substitute for a development strategy. I want America to lead in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and space enterprise. That requires education, energy, research, skilled production, and businesses that can actually get started.
A market should be open to challengers.
My domestic argument is about fair taxation and fair competition. Wealthy people and large corporations should pay a fair share of the institutions they depend on. Startups should face a lighter, simpler burden while they establish themselves. Success should come from making something better, not obtaining privileges unavailable to the next competitor.
A fire department, a court system, and dependable infrastructure are ordinary foundations of a functioning society. I explained that distinction in Public Institutions Are Not Socialism. Paying for those foundations fairly is compatible with private enterprise and unequal rewards for different achievements.
Corporate size alone does not prove monopoly. The question is whether a business wins customers or can shut out rivals. Taxing dominant firms more fairly would not, by itself, make prices fall. That also requires enforcing competition, reducing barriers to entry, and preventing incumbents from writing the rules for everyone else.
Nor should public assistance become an excuse to leave the structure of an unfair market untouched. Workers still need help when they need it. The deeper ambition should be more employers competing for their skills, more businesses competing for customers, and fewer arrangements that make dependency profitable for powerful firms.
Iran is a test of the distinction.
The immediate objection to military restraint is familiar: we cannot allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. Preventing nuclear proliferation is a serious objective. It does not answer the separate questions of who should act, through which institutions, with what evidence, and at what cost.
The 2015 nuclear agreement involved the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, the European Union, and Iran. Its machinery included nuclear restrictions, international verification, and sanctions relief. Cooperation on this problem has already extended beyond America’s allies.
In its May 2018 response to America’s withdrawal, the EU cited ten consecutive IAEA reports finding Iran was implementing its commitments. That is a historical record, not a claim about compliance today. It demonstrates why verified diplomacy deserves more than dismissal.
Rivals can share an interest in limiting proliferation while disagreeing about enforcement or pursuing competing regional interests. Diplomacy is difficult for exactly that reason. Its difficulty cannot make invasion the default answer. Any proposed use of force still needs a convincing account of its necessity, its consequences, and what happens afterward.
Recover the capacity to build.
America needs allies and the capacity to defend itself. As I argued in The Peace Americans Inherited, peace takes work. Restraint and cooperation belong within that work.
The failure was a loss of discipline about what American power should accomplish and whom government should serve. Trump exploited the resulting distrust. A promise of national renewal becomes credible only when people can see how it will expand their own ability to build a life.
That is the next question: what would a golden age actually contain? My answer begins with technology, abundant energy, and opportunity for new businesses—including how strategic cooperation can strengthen competition.
Continue with A Golden Age Worth Building →