Jerry Hendrix wisely starts with Lord Palmerston’s famous quote, “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” These are ageless lines and represent sound advice for today’s statesmen. But Hendrix didn’t have to go outside our own country for such prudential guidance. 

George Washington cautioned—in his Farewell Address a half-century before Palmerston—that we should avoid “permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others.” Washington thought both were dangerous, as the nation could become “a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.” 

Regardless of whether you go with a Brit or an American, the language of interests is the language of political realism. And realism is the surest guide to foreign policy success. But that language is not the native tongue of today’s DC foreign policy establishment. Instead, its members often speak in the language of ideals, of defending a so-called rule-based or liberal international order or putting human rights concerns higher up on the agenda. This is especially true when they discuss alliances and, more generally, the springs of our foreign policy. President Joe Biden, for example, talked about our NATO alliance as a “sacred obligation,” sacralizing what realists would argue are merely ordinary and changeable means in international politics.

However, we should admit that pure idealism is rarely expressed in debates on foreign policy. Instead, liberal internationalists on the left and neoconservatives on the right frequently conflate ideals with interests. For example, in his second inaugural address, President George W. Bush argued:

The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.

To our foreign policy establishment, the United States’ ideals and interests are intertwined such that the advancement of our ideals abroad is a means of achieving our security interests, but that advancement of ideals is also an interest itself. Thus, according to the establishment, Kosovar independence, Ukraine, or women’s rights in Afghanistan—given our ideals—are goods in themselves and worthy of our sacrifice, but there is also a story about how fighting for these things will reinforce more material interests such as security and prosperity. 

Unfortunately, the last 30 years of American foreign policy have stood witness to how such idealism has worked against our vital permanent interests. Idealism and interests have not gone hand in glove, even when linked to the rhetoric and thoughts of our foreign policy elites. Indeed, even our ideals at home have suffered. Democracy promotion abroad has harmed rather than helped our security and prosperity, with Americans dying in the deserts of the Middle East while our forever wars cost taxpayers trillions. Our allies and partners have taken advantage of us, practicing what might be considered a higher-level realism—free riding and buck passing—allowing those countries to prioritize their domestic needs while ours suffered. And as we were promoting democracy abroad, the quixotic quest for pure security at home contributed to the decline of domestic liberty, as the federal government increased its surveillance capabilities, executive power grew, and our civil liberties were eroded.

Hendrix unfortunately repeats this error of conflating ideals and interests. Sure, he takes a shot at how “democratic expansionism … invited the current competition” with Russia and China. But he can’t escape an idealistic framework. Hendrix still thinks in terms of regime type—and thus ideals—when developing his strategic vision. Specifically, he argues that our “interests cannot be defined purely in terms of economic, political, or even military power” but emerge “from the force of our founding ideals.” He rejects the view that we should play classic power politics in the vein of Palmerston, Bismarck, Metternich, or Kissinger. Instead, we need to emulate those who “understood what their nation stood for, and where it sat within the global geostrategic system.” Therefore, we need to recognize that while “Security guarantees are not the eternal interest of the United States,” a “broad alliance structure made up of self-determined democracies pursuing free market economies, Jefferson’s ‘Empire of Liberty’ is.” This vision is reminiscent of Senator John McCain’s proposed “League of Democracies.”

While Hendrix is unclear about exactly what that means for non-democratic allies and partners, it could follow that states like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Vietnam could be tossed out on regime-type grounds. He also argues that “there are treaty allies today who fall short of our national expectations, and it is both right and just to consider excluding them from our confidences.” He also warns that our relationships with states that change their “internal character or form of government” in the wrong direction could be downgraded as a result. One could imagine a progressive administration following his advice and upsetting relations with Israel or Hungary, regardless of their strategic value.

Hendrix might counter that our interests as defined by our ideals aren’t our only guide here. We’d also need to look to our more “traditional” interests. But then the question is, what is the key margin we ought to look to when the rubber hits the road? If we fall back on material interests, then is there much bite to Hendrix’s approach? Indeed, why reject the realpolitikers in that case? If our ideals must instead carry the day, then is this really the best way to proceed in a potentially dangerous, anarchic system in which relationships with unsavory states might be valuable? We need not think about our alliance with Stalin during World War II alone. For other examples, we can look to our alliance with Turkey during the Cold War or our constructive relationship with Egypt since the Camp David Accords.

And in Hendrix’s world—one of emerging multipolarity—we might want more, not less flexibility in our partnerships, as being able to pivot flexibly is a hallmark of the balance-of-power game in that type of system. Moreover, if the “dragon-slayers” are right about China, it would be foolish to rule out non-democratic states as potential allies a priori since not every potential balancing partner would be a Japan or a South Korea. The demands of the future could even summon a new Kissinger to split Russia and China, with Russia a partner in balancing the Middle Kingdom.

By focusing too much on regime type—and perhaps there is a problematic assumption of a harmony of interests in that focus—we can overlook the ways in which democracies themselves can have different interests and even clash over them. We often forget that the United States was on the opposite side of Britain, France, and Israel during the Suez Crisis in 1956. Or that the United States and Britain almost went to war in 1895–96 over Venezuela. In the latter case, a Britain less concerned with changes to the balance of power in Europe might have given us a very different outcome. Alliances and partnerships are simply going to be more robust when they are built for realist reasons rather than based on regime type or values.

Hendrix is also a bit one-sided in how he characterizes the American political tradition and its impact on our foreign policy. There is no doubt that there’s an important strain of thinking in our political culture that “summons Americans to spread their sense of individual liberty and national self-determination across the world.”

But there have been other important strains that did not encourage the same messianic activism. Indeed, the dominant strain of thinking for much of the nineteenth century—exemplified by Washington’s Farewell Address and John Quincy Adams’ July 4, 1821, speech—was characterized by cold realism married to the ideal that our experiment with liberty and democracy required separation from the Old World and a rejection of both entanglement and activism abroad. Our political culture was so allergic to entanglement and activism that some of the diplomacy we take for granted now—like offering our good offices to resolve conflicts abroad—was controversial. Moreover, we had no peacetime alliances from Washington’s time until after World War II, and the US was generally hesitant to enter foreign wars until after World War II.

Hendrix doesn’t touch on this strain. The reason it matters is that this aspect of our heritage and political culture provides the basis for going in a very different direction than the one Hendrix or the foreign policy establishment might have us go. Namely, we could pursue a grand strategy of realism and restraint, and it would be fully in keeping with a major tradition in American history—a key strain of thought that has never disappeared from our political culture.

Lastly, it is worth touching on a key assumption of Hendrix’s discussion of the future of American foreign policy. In his analysis, we face “an emerging multipolar environment” of rising powers, including China, Russia, and maybe other states as well. The last includes the possibility of a European pole that diverges from the United States.

The notion that we are moving into or are already in a multipolar world is broadly embraced, even by non-establishment, restraint-oriented scholars. But we should be hesitant to embrace this emerging consensus that the system has escaped American unipolarity. Despite its impressive growth over the last few decades, China still has a lot of work to do to bridge the power gap between itself and the United States. It faces many fundamental challenges ahead. And even if China were another great power pole in the system, for the world to be multipolar, it would need to be joined by another state—and none, even Russia, is close to great power status. Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, both of Dartmouth College, provide the richest argument against multipolarity. Their scholarship not only debunks the idea that the world is multipolar; Brooks and Wohlforth also take on the idea that China’s rise has made the system bipolar. The two show that no one is really in the United States’ league militarily or economically—even China. For example, they argue that China’s official GDP figures overstate its actual material wealth, which is still behind ours, and its technological abilities can’t come close to ours. On the military side, they argue China is a regional power that can’t contest US command of the global commons. It simply doesn’t have the quantity or quality of naval capabilities to do so. And one could add that China has little experience in combat and would likely find combined arms fighting quite challenging, not to mention that it lacks power projection capabilities to rival ours.

This doesn’t deny that the world has changed. As Brooks and Wohlforth note, “To argue that today’s system is not multipolar or bipolar is not to deny that power relations have changed”—or that a unipolar power can do anything it wants. That has never been the case. Even the Roman Empire couldn’t do anything it wanted, and often took a lot of punches to the mouth. Instead, we are in “partial unipolarity” rather than the “total unipolarity” the world witnessed at the end of the Cold War. Given limited space, suffice it to say that Russia’s problems besting Ukraine show how far it is from being a true pole in the system. After China, Europe—should it get its act together politically and militarily—would have the best shot at being a pole in the system. But a European superpower is very far from a reality.

Regardless of whether Hendrix and others are right or wrong about the polarity of the system, we should resist making too much of system polarity as a key factor in our current choice of grand strategy. Many, including myself, have argued elsewhere that a foreign policy of realism and restraint is best for the United States today—and the case for this approach doesn’t hinge on the outcome of the polarity debate. Even if the world remains unipolar, the costs of primacy or deep engagement can’t be justified given the world as it is. Unipolar powers—either total or partial—have never been able to simply do anything they’d like without substantial costs. Witness Iraq. Moreover, as Robert Gilpin reminds us, maintaining hegemony can undermine the power position of the hegemon given the costs of providing public goods to the system. So better to avoid those costs and safeguard your material and military strength rather than deplete them. 

Given America’s favorable geostrategic position (oceans as moats, distance from other powers, weak neighbors, and Mearsheimer’s “stopping power of water”) and some key elements of the international system today beyond polarity (defense dominance and the nuclear revolution foremost among them), the US is in a great position to retrench. Indeed, if the US is still the unipolar power and other states can do very little to alter that position anytime soon, then it speaks even more in favor of the idea that the US can change its approach. It doesn’t need to go in search of monsters to destroy, nor does it need a web of alliances—entangling or otherwise—to be safe and prosperous. Even Brooks and Wohlforth admit that the US would still be on top of the heap in the event Ukraine and Taiwan are lost. It is hard to imagine any particular middle-sized power (like Japan or Germany) being at risk of being swallowed by China or Russia anytime soon and changing the global balance. As for multipolarity, it too would provide opportunities for restraint, as Ashford and Cooper point out. Therefore, I’m hard-pressed to think we need more active engagement, with a “League of Democracies” or otherwise.