Over the past three and a half years, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has faithfully echoed her boss, U.S. President Joe Biden, by invoking pretty much the same hegemonic worldview that every American president has embraced since World War II. As Harris put it in a 2023 speech—quoting a favorite phrase of Biden’s—“a strong America remains indispensable to the world.”
But the United States may be downgraded to a humbler status if Harris is elected president in November, based on the thinking of her chief advisors.
In their written work, Harris’s national security advisor, Philip Gordon, and deputy national security advisor, Rebecca Lissner, have sketched the outlines of a new worldview in which Washington frankly acknowledges its past excesses and dramatically lowers its ambitions. Or as Lissner put it in An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for 21st Century Order, the 2020 book she coauthored with another Biden administration official: The United States should give up on strategic primacy and the “increasingly obsolete post-Cold War ‘liberal international order.’”
Instead of seeking to remain the unquestioned hegemon, the United States should seriously downsize its global role, wrote Lissner and her co-author, Mira Rapp-Hooper, who is currently Biden’s National Security Council director for East Asia and Oceania. It’s past time for Washington to discard the “messianic” goal of transforming the world in its image—the United States’ basic policy approach going back to Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. Instead, it should ratchet down to a much narrower role: merely preserving an open global system in which the United States can prosper.
“As the unipolar moment wanes, so too must any illusions of the United States’ ability to craft order unilaterally and universally according to its own liberal preferences,” Lissner and Rapp-Hooper wrote. “Insisting upon the United States’ international leadership role but departing from reliance on primacy as the cornerstone of a messianic liberal mission, a strategy of openness departs from post-Cold War liberal universalism, Cold War-style containment, and the traditional alternative of retrenchment.”
This new approach would mean a lot of accommodation of autocratic and illiberal regimes and a discarding of ideological crusades or containment strategies—all in the pragmatic interest of keeping trade open and bolstering cooperation on critical issues such as climate change, future pandemics, and artificial intelligence regulation. To put it simply, Lissner and Rapp-Hooper argued that policies of containment and hegemony should be supplanted by the far more modest goal of ensuring an “accessible global commons.” The United States has one critical task left as the “indispensable” superpower, they wrote: It is “the only country that can guarantee an open system.”
Gordon would likely agree—at least about leaving behind, at long last, the messianic strain in U.S. foreign policy. His own 2020 book, Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East, is a fierce dissection of various failed U.S. efforts in the region dating back 70 years to the CIA-orchestrated ouster of Iranian President Mohammad Mossadegh.
Though he lumped in Afghanistan—which is technically in central Asia—with the failed U.S. interventions in Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria, Gordon was right to see a common theme: regime change almost never works. And like the proverbial lunatic who tries the same thing over and over thinking he might get a different result, U.S. policymakers never seem to learn the right lessons, he argued.
In every case, from 1953 (Mossadegh), to two disastrous episodes in Afghanistan (the 1980s and post-9/11), to the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003, and to fitful efforts in Egypt, Libya, and Syria after the 2011 Arab Spring, Gordon identified a pattern.
“As different as each episode was, and as varied as were the methods used, the history of regime change in the post-World War II Middle East is a history of repeated patterns,” he wrote, “in which policymakers underestimated the challenges of ousting a regime, overstated the threat faced by the United States, embraced the optimistic narratives of exiles or local actors with little power and vested interests, prematurely declared victory, failed to anticipate the chaos that would inevitably ensue after regime collapse, and ultimately found themselves bearing the costs—in some cases more than a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives—for many years or even decades to come.”
Gordon noted that critics, especially the few remaining neoconservatives in Washington, would argue that in some cases regime change had worked very well. This is most notably true in the case of postwar Germany and Japan. But he argued persuasively that these were unique circumstances: two highly advanced countries after a devastating world war. And had it not been for the strange annealing effect of the subsequent 40-year-long Cold War, even the successful transformations of Germany and Japan might not have worked as completely as they did because U.S. patience would have grown thin very quickly—as it has in subsequent cases. A faster U.S. withdrawal from Europe and Japan might well have undercut the effort to fundamentally change Berlin and Tokyo.
Grim and exhaustive as Gordon’s assessment is, it actually understates the case for change. That’s because, added all together, these failed U.S. attempts at transformation contributed mightily to the growing obsolescence of the current liberal international order that so concerns Lissner and Rapp-Hooper.
The history that Gordon recounts is a history that keeps on giving. Today the number-one menace keeping the United States tied down in the Middle East is the very same Islamic Republic of Iran that rose to power fueled by its opposition to the American “Great Satan,” produced by the 1953 coup and empowered by the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In fact, a U.S. Army study completed in 2018 found that “an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor” in George W. Bush’s Iraq war—the exact opposite of what Bush and his neoconservatives sought.
The vicious spiral set in motion by these misguided policy choices undermined U.S. legitimacy—or its primacy, to use Lissner’s and Rapp-Hooper’s term—as global overseer. The unnecessary and fraudulently justified invasion of Iraq, and the drain on U.S. resources and attention that resulted, laid the groundwork for Washington’s 20-year failure in Afghanistan (which led to Biden’s declaration in August 2021 that he was putting an end to “major military operations to remake other countries,” which of course put the president in accord with Gordon’s advice). The Iraq catastrophe also exposed U.S. military vulnerabilities on the ground in the worst way, tutoring Russia, China, and the rest of the world in how to outmaneuver and fight what was once considered an unassailable superpower. Moreover, the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles projected an image of panicky U.S. retreat, from which Russian President Vladimir Putin may have drawn encouragement to invade Ukraine. (Putin also invoked the unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq to justify his own aggression in Ukraine.)
As counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen wrote in his book, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, also released in 2020, the rising challenge to U.S. hegemony from countries such as China and Russia is linked to the United States’ “repeated failure to convert battlefield victory into strategic success or to translate that success into a better peace.” Over the past two decades, the lone superpower has allowed itself to get bogged down in a “seemingly endless string of continuous, inconclusive wars that have sapped [its] energy while [its] rivals prospered,” Kilcullen wrote.
And so the postwar international system, at least as once conceived, went down the tube as Beijing and Moscow began to declare that U.S. hegemony was no longer acceptable to them.
Beyond that, these failures helped to create the deep divisions in the American polity that led Lissner and Rapp-Hooper to conclude that traditional U.S. leadership is no longer tenable. Together these titanic errors of policy also helped to discredit the political establishment in Washington and open the way for former U.S. President Donald Trump and his “America First” neo-isolationism.
There were, to be sure, other U.S. failures that undermined U.S. legitimacy as global leader, Lissner and Rapp-Hooper wrote—especially the 2008 financial disaster generated by Wall Street greed and the fecklessness of Washington regulators. But it’s clear that—far more than any fundamental flaws within the international system itself—it was largely the excesses of America’s postwar agenda and the arrogance with which it was pursued that squandered the world’s trust.
Gordon didn’t go quite as far as Lissner and Rapp-Hooper in his conclusions. Known as a passionate trans-Atlanticist—he served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs in the Obama administration—Gordon acknowledged that “the regime change temptation will never go away.” He wrote: “The bias of American political culture, resulting from the country’s record of achievement and belief in its own exceptionalism, is to believe every problem has a solution.” Rather than reconfiguring U.S. policy entirely, he suggested that in most cases when it comes to rogue regimes “the best alternative to regime change looks a lot like the Containment strategy that won the Cold War.”
So where does this all leave us? There’s no use trying to unwind history and restore the old system. In many ways, despite their different conclusions, Gordon’s and Lissner’s books fit together like two big pieces of a puzzle: Thanks to the policy disasters detailed by Gordon (in which he took part, as a National Security Council official under then-President Barack Obama), some sort of humbler approach, along the lines proposed by Lissner and Rapp-Hooper, may be needed. And this strategy will likely be bipartisan to some degree.
Indeed, in their writings there is little doubt that Gordon and Lissner—the two chief foreign policy advisors to the woman who could soon be the next U.S. president—are in the process of codifying, perhaps for decades to come, the anti-interventionist impulse becoming ingrained in both political parties.
If Trump is elected instead of Harris, of course, he’s unlikely to embrace Lissner’s strategy of openness—at least not openly. (Trump continues to rhetorically demean U.S. allies and tout new tariffs as his main foreign-policy instrument.) What Trump is likely to do, however, is to continue to downgrade the United States’ global policeman role. Trump was instrumental in setting in motion the withdrawal from Afghanistan and, as Gordon wrote, also eager to pull out of Syria. Indeed, it is striking that after five years of dithering by Obama over whether to help the Syrian rebels, it was Trump who best put his finger on the problem. He questioned why the United States was helping to topple Syria’s dictatorial leader, Bashar al-Assad, when, as Gordon quoted Trump as saying, “Syria was fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. … Now we’re backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are.”
Lissner and Rapp-Hooper’s prescriptions may be ambitious, but at the same time they are refreshingly modest in scope. Nothing has gotten Washington into more trouble over the decades than its continuing eruptions of hubristic policy. These extended from Wilson’s quixotic desire to make the world “safe for democracy” after World War I to then-Defense Department official Paul Wolfowitz’s uber-hawkish defense policy guidance from 1992, which embraced a frank post-Cold War policy of preventing the rise of rival military powers. It was this sort of thinking by Wolfowitz and his fellow neoconservatives that later helped justify the Iraq War.
Lissner and Rapp-Hooper’s open world concept also jibes with the changing calculus of our times: In economic terms, the divide between left and right wing is all but gone; instead, as Fareed Zakaria wrote in his 2024 book, Age of Revolutions, for the two political parties the old left versus right divide has been replaced by a struggle between those who want to keep the United States open to the world versus those who want to close it down more than ever. It is no accident that trade skeptics on the progressive left in the United States have come to lionize Trump’s former trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, for his tariff policies. (In his 2023 book, No Trade is Free, Lighthizer makes a point of thanking U.S. union leaders and acknowledging Lori Wallach—a progressive trade expert—as “a longtime friend and co-conspirator.”)
So Lissner and Rapp-Hooper may have chosen just the right battlefield to die on—or not. If we can salvage some degree of openness, we can save something of the old system. As they wrote: “Openness does not, of course, incorporate the totality of American strategic objectives. Other threats, like nuclear proliferation, disease, or terrorism, may menace vital U.S. interests. Yet closed spheres of influence—whether exercised regionally or in particular domains—present the greatest danger to the United States’ security and prosperity” because they preclude necessary international cooperation.
Another fundamental problem that Lissner and Rapp-Hooper hint at is that the United States may no longer be up to the task of fully managing the international system it created. There is a growing mismatch between the complexity of this world system and the level of knowledge in the U.S. populace because of laggard education and dysfunctional political systems. Americans may simply no longer understand the system—how global free trade works, how military alliances keep them safe—well enough to maintain it. At the very least, Americans now have very little sympathy for that system.
The United States’ domestic polarization may also wreak havoc on some of the solutions Lissner and Rapp-Hooper propose. The authors propose a plan to “harness the private sector for national advantage” and bring the tech sector and Washington closer together. “The next administration should consider elevating the Office of Science and Technology Policy to a National Emerging Technology Council (NETC) on par with the National Security Council and National Economic Council,” they write. Yet the leaders of the United States’ tech sector have long tried to keep their distance from Washington—especially on defense policy–except for a few oddball pairings such as Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Perhaps the most fundamental question is whether the international system is really as obsolete as Lissner and Rapp-Hooper suggested. Yes, many problems the duo analyzed four years ago remain, including the increasing irrelevance of the World Trade Organization. But some of their views are dated. Lissner and Rapp-Hooper tended to echo the fears of Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, and Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, who warned in a 2019 essay in Foreign Affairs, “Competition Without Catastrophe,” of the menace of “China’s fusion of authoritarian capitalism and digital surveillance.” Similarly, Lissner and Rapp-Hooper wrote that “China is at the forefront of a new model of ‘techno-authoritarianism’ that could confer considerable competitive advantages.” Yet in the four years since the book’s publication, it’s become far clearer that China under President Xi Jinping has only fallen behind thanks to this new model, with its economy seriously stagnating and Xi pleading for more foreign investment.
Moreover, in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Washington has been forced to revert, to some extent, to its old role of global enforcer. This has proved especially true as the European Union has fallen behind the U.S. economically. As the Carnegie Endowment concludes in a new report that highlights how difficult it is to bring about strategic change in U.S. foreign policy, “the administration’s response to that crisis has been to expand America’s security role in Europe and thereby create a new status quo.” Much the same can be said of the United States’ role in the Middle East following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, as Biden found himself sending carriers and submarines to the Mediterranean and forced to defend Israel from the air.
Yet we are also clearly moving into some kind of a new anti-interventionist era wherein Washington’s default mode—regardless of who occupies the White House—will be to stay out of global conflicts wherever and however possible. And it seems likely that if Harris wins, Gordon and Lissner will be major players. Gordon, to be sure, is more of a traditionalist who would be reluctant to tamper too much with the United States’ global security role. But it’s noteworthy that Lissner had a significant role drafting Biden’s national security strategy—and yet she chose to join the vice president’s staff in 2022 to influence policy for the next generation.
Asked whether Harris embraces Gordon’s and Lissner’s views, an aide to the vice president said only that Harris “is advised by a range of people with diverse views, and their previous writings reflect their personal views. Anyone looking to understand the vice president’s worldview should look at what she has said and done on the world stage.”
As for Harris’s current superior, perhaps Biden’s most enduring legacy—one that a President Harris would surely continue—will be that he sought to conduct a sort of halfway-house foreign policy that bridges the global policeman era and this new era of restraint. Biden has also attempted to find a workable compromise between the old consensus on globalization and the emerging cross-party consensus in favor of protectionism and industrial policy. As foreign-policy expert Jessica T. Mathews argued in Foreign Affairs, Biden has “unambiguously left behind the hubris of the ‘unipolar moment’ that followed the Cold War, proving that the United States can be deeply engaged in the world without military action or the taint of hegemony.”
At the same time, however, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s attack on Israel, Biden has often gone back to invoking the old postwar view of the United States’ role, calling the United States the “arsenal of democracy” (FDR’s phrase) and declaring that “American leadership is what holds the world together.”
And given the ongoing crises around the world—especially in Europe, the Middle East, and possibly East Asia if the Taiwan issue heats up—it’s highly questionable whether the United States can adjust downward when there is no other major power that even comes close to approaching Washington’s global sway. If it can, then maintaining global openness may be a worthy—and perhaps achievable—goal.
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