Battlegrounds

by H.R. McMaster

America’s stature as the only superpower encouraged narcissism, a preoccupation with self, and an associated neglect of the influence that others have over the future course of events. Americans began to define the world only in relation to their own aspirations and desires.

First, many accepted the thesis that the West’s victory in the Cold War meant “the end of history,” what political philosopher Francis Fukuyama described as “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Second, many assumed that old rules of international relations and competition were no longer relevant in what President George H. W. Bush hoped would be “a new world order—a world where the rule of law, not the rule of the jungle governs the conduct of nations.” The

Third, many asserted that American military prowess demonstrated during the 1991 Persian Gulf war manifested a revolution in military affairs (dubbed RMA) that would allow the U.S. military to achieve “full-spectrum dominance” over any potential enemy.

Those three assumptions underpinning U.S. policies not only were over-optimistic, they also led to complacency

An underlying premise of the New Left interpretation of history is that an overly powerful America is more often a source of, rather than part of the solution to, the world’s problems. To return to the Icarus analogy, under the Obama administration,

Across multiple administrations, U.S. foreign policy and national security strategy has suffered from what we might derive from Morgenthau’s essay “Strategic Narcissism”: the tendency to view the world only in relation to the United States and to assume that the future course of events depends primarily on U.S. decisions or plans.

“being successful in a competition requires knowing and understanding both one’s competitors and oneself.”