As hungry revisionist powers challenge the existing world order in the Middle East, Ukraine and the South China Sea, American foreign policy looks increasingly lost. In World War II, we had a plan: beat Germany first, then Japan, and then try to build a robust enough peace to prevent World War III. During the Cold War, the plan was to contain the spread of communism without a nuclear war until the Soviet Union’s inner failings brought it down. After the Cold War, the plan was to use America’s moment of unipolar dominance to build a peaceful, rules-driven world order.
While America’s World War II and Cold War strategies worked out well, our post-Cold War strategy failed. The unipolar moment is over, but today’s world isn’t peaceful, orderly or rules-driven. Instead, we are looking at an era of geopolitical competition driving a wave of wars.
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