Why I choose to root for U.S. dominance
In a dangerous world, America needs its political, economic and cultural edge.
This article was adapted from the introduction to Shadi Hamid’s new book, “The Case for American Power.”
When American power seemed uncontested after the Cold War, a growing number of Americans could afford to imagine a world with less of it. It was peacetime. The United States had no real competitors, and political elites in Western democracies took for granted their own permanence. Around the globe, Americans saw more friends than enemies, but even our enemies — weak as they were — could be transformed into friends. Or so the thinking went. Those easy assumptions are now lost to history.
Today, the world needs American power, it needs more of it — and it needs it now. But power on its own isn’t enough. The world needs American dominance, too. This means maintaining America’s political, economic and cultural edge over its competitors. This is not because competition itself is bad; it is because the only country that comes close to competing with the U.S. is a brutal authoritarian regime that has only grown more brutal with time. Of course, I am referring here to China.
The case for American dominance rests on a simple premise, albeit one with unsettling implications. Power is a fact. Someone must wield it. The only question is who. If American power declines — and if such a decline is accepted without resistance — other countries will step into the void. Seen through this comparative lens, America’s dominant role, for all its very real faults, becomes more attractive. The alternative to America isn’t some morally perfect superpower of our own imagination. Such an alternative does not exist and never will.
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America is a democracy, which means that at some level we get the government — and the policies — that we deserve. If we, as citizens, don’t like how things are, we can vote, participate and organize in an effort to change how our elected officials behave. This is the promise of power under democratic conditions: that as disappointing as its exercise may be at any given moment, it is never static or unyielding, at least not entirely. Since Donald Trump was elected in 2024, it can seem even more hopeless as America’s leaders further squander the nation’s goodwill, undermine allies and attack the very principles on which the country was founded. Sometimes it can seem as if America is destroying itself. But this means only that we must redouble our efforts to fight for the country we believe in.
Power is corrupting. More power is more corrupting. Without something resembling a world government, true checks and balances — on a global scale — are hard to come by. And so the restraints must come from within, either from citizens themselves or from a nation’s self-identified ideals, preferably both. In a democracy, citizens are empowered by such ideals, providing them a standard on which to judge their leaders. Ideals, in turn, draw strength from the fact that citizens care about them and take them seriously. Government officials are also constrained by what they believe citizens are willing to go along with.
Policymakers in democracies aren’t as responsive or accountable to the people as we might hope. But at least, unlike in dictatorships, citizens have real avenues to influence public officials and change their behavior. We know this because elected leaders do change; they recalibrate in the face of public pressure.
If power is a fact, then it must be wielded. If it must be wielded, we should always prefer that it be wielded by leaders who are more, rather than less, constrained by their people. Saying this doesn’t remove the doubts I have about my own argument and my own country, doubts that weighed on me over the course of the Gaza war and that have only intensified during the early months of Trump’s second term.
As younger generations come of age, they will exert greater influence over the uses of American power and — hopefully — correct its abuses. The word hopefully is doing a lot of work, I admit. But that hope itself is possible only because of what America is and has been: a democracy. Progress isn’t inevitable. It isn’t rained down from the heavens. It happens or it doesn’t, depending on what individuals do and how they choose to act in times of difficulty. We have that agency. And this is certainly a time of great reckoning.
This reckoning, however, should not be confused with decline. While we grapple with our failures and internal contradictions, it’s crucial to maintain perspective on America’s position in the world order.
Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine and China’s increasing aggression toward Taiwan, frightening as they are, have helped put matters back into perspective. The question of whether the U.S. is a uniquely malevolent force in global politics has been resolved: In an era of great-power competition, the U.S, for all its faults, is preferable to the available alternatives. It might be unfashionable to say so — even I struggle at times to say it — but the U.S. is better. In 2022, skeptics of American power got a taste of what a post-American world might entail. Russia’s war on the nation and people of Ukraine was the decisive moment when it became easy to imagine a dark descent into a new kind of global catastrophe.
Progressives have always had a utopian bent, believing that life — not just for Americans but for millions abroad — can be made better through human initiative and solidarity (rather than, say, simply hoping that the markets will self-correct). The problem is that the better, more just world that so many of them hope for does not appear on its own; it must be willed into existence. Our values are not freestanding; they must be guaranteed, and in global politics nothing can be guaranteed without the credible threat of force. To move beyond the temptations of the passive voice, who exactly provides this guarantee? In most cases, for better or worse, there is only one obvious candidate: the United States. Morality, or in this case a more just global order, is impossible without power. And as it turns out, it’s not only impossible without power. It’s impossible without American power.
What readers are saying
The conversation explores a critical examination of American power and its role in maintaining a just global order. Many participants express skepticism about the current state of American leadership, drawing parallels between the U.S. and authoritarian regimes, and questioning... Show more
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