According to Emma Ashford, the answer is yes—even if we can’t be sure what comes next. In her new book, First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World, Ashford makes the case for what she calls “realist internationalism,” a decidedly less ambitious and more nationalist foreign policy tailored for a world in which the United States is still the biggest player, but no longer an overly dominant one.
I spoke with Ashford on the latest episode of FP Live. Ashford is an FP columnist and senior fellow at the Stimson Center. Subscribers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: You declare on page one, “The old world is dead.” What does that mean?
Emma Ashford: That insight is from Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist in the 1930s best known for developing the word “hegemony.” He wrote a book in prison about the ways in which the old world was dead, and how the new hadn’t yet been born. He meant that everybody accepted that the political structures, the institutions that had characterized politics in Italy and in Europe up to that point, weren’t working anymore. But their replacements hadn’t yet emerged. Elites were casting around for something; inertia was carrying people forward, but there wasn’t yet a new order. That is what is happening in international politics today. We have moved past this unipolar period of unchallenged U.S. dominance. We’re heading for something new, but we’re still in the transition phase of figuring out what that new world looks like.
RA: When you describe [Donald] Trump as the first post-unipolar president, what does that mean? Do you think he knows that?
EA: Some of it is actually about his intentions, or the way he expresses U.S. interests. If we’re going to talk about data and trends, then you can argue that the unipolar moment ends at the financial crisis in 2008, all the way to the war in Ukraine or beyond. But if we are talking instead about U.S. policymakers accepting this, you can make a case that Trump and his administration are basically the first since at least the 1990s to accept that America is no longer this indispensable nation. America may still be very powerful, may still be the top dog. But we don’t control everything. We’re not trying to transform the world anymore. And to me that’s a fundamental shift in opinion that makes them quite different from their predecessors.
RA: You’ve used the term “unbalanced multipolarity.” What does that mean, and how does it make sense of the moment we’re in?
EA: There’s been this huge debate among IR scholars and foreign-policy folks in D.C. about polarity. Are we entering a bipolar world? Is it the U.S. and China? Are we entering the multipolar world with lots of powers? Is the U.S. still an unchallenged unipolarity? It all gets a little academic, but the point that I would make is the U.S. certainly is no longer unchallenged. China is rising to meet the United States. The U.S. is not in decline, but it is in what we might call relative decline. Other states are rising to meet it. And there is this growing cohort of middle states—everything from European states to Indonesia or Nigeria or South Africa or Brazil—that are playing bigger roles in their region, independent of the United States. When I look at all this data—military, economic, technological, et cetera—I see the U.S. and China ahead of the pack, but there are a lot of other important countries. That is what scholars would call unbalanced multipolarity.
RA: And we’re not in a bipolar world—because of the rise of the rest?
EA: Exactly. You can look at different data and draw different conclusions; it’s very much a cherry-picking exercise, unfortunately. But if you look at the abundance of power resources that states hold, whether that’s military power or economic power, the U.S. and China have a lot today. But if you compare them to, say, the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the 1950s, it’s not nearly as much. The rest, everybody other than the U.S. and China, are now making up more of that global power balance. And so to me, that’s a different feature than we had during the bipolar Cold War.
RA: You came up with a useful classification of four tribes in Washington to try to make sense of what America should do in this new world. And these four tribes have four visions: the “America First” hawks, the proponents of liberal primacy, the progressive world-builders, and finally the realists and the restrainers. Can you describe each of these four groups?
EA: I discuss in the book that these foreign-policy debates are not just because of all those trends and shifting power dynamics. It’s also partly that there have been these failures of the unipolar moment which has broken open the foreign-policy debate in Washington. That’s visible to anyone watching. I looked around and tried to categorize the arguments around me, not necessarily in terms of old academic grand strategy debates, but what people are actually arguing today. I came up with these four options. Two of them should be more familiar than others.
The America First hawks resemble the Trump administration fairly closely. They’re nationalistic, focused on sovereignty, very unilateral, inward-looking, and willing to use military force. The liberal internationalists, that’s the Biden administration. They care about the U.S. role in the world, but mostly in terms of preserving order and institutions that the U.S. has relied on for years. So they’re not revisionist. They’re actually very much trying to sustain what they think the U.S. is losing.
The last two groups are less influential in the policymaking process, but you can still see their influence. One is this progressive wing of the Democratic Party. They are more dovish than the other two groups and also have extremely ambitious goals for how they might bring about a more peaceful world through fighting autocracy or kleptocracy. Finally, there’s the group of realist restrainers—I would probably bracket myself in that group—who, again, are somewhat more dovish, more cautious about the use of military force and worry about stumbling into great-power conflict. But they also are inclined toward seeing the U.S. in the national interests. It’s not about making the world a better place, it’s about living with the world as it is.
RA: Which of these four schools shapes the way U.S. foreign policy currently works?
EA: It’s a really tough question. I would say that there are two schools influencing the Trump administration, and that is the realist restrainers, but perhaps more so, these America First hawks. A lot of the issues the Trump administration engages in a tug of war over—whether it’s Ukraine or Europe or other issues—are between those two groups and how forward-leaning the U.S. is on force.
But at the same time, I would caution against saying that’s the direction of U.S. foreign policy, because that is a very fairly nationalist vision of foreign policy. On the other side, we have Democrats trying to figure out what their foreign policy is. That debate looks much more internationalist, and it really hasn’t solidified yet.
RA: What is “realist internationalism,” and why do you think it would meet the moment for what America needs?
EA: I call it realist internationalism in the book, but it is a fundamentally nationalist philosophy. It is a fairly middle-of-the-road, ecumenical, realist understanding of narrow U.S. interests. Unlike the very ambitious, transformative goals we pursued in the unipolar moment, this is a U.S. foreign policy that prioritizes national interests and the prosperity and security of Americans here at home. It would seek very much to prioritize threats and assess whether something is actually a significant threat to the U.S., to the homeland, to the American people, or whether it can be dealt with by other states.
Policymakers need to think a lot more carefully about crisis flash points. For the last 30 years, we have expanded America’s scope in terms of alliances and NATO and other things. We need to think more carefully about the places, like Ukraine or Taiwan, that could spill into a great-power conflict.
And then the final point I would make here is, if the U.S. is to be successful in this multipolar world, then it needs to empower its allies. So this is burden-shifting, burden-sharing, to try to even the stakes. Rather than trying to build a unified global alliance against China and Russia, the U.S. could empower its allies to build their own capabilities. And in doing so, increase the diversity of at least somewhat friendly states around the world. For me, this is about a strategy of adapting to a multipolar world and trying to make it work for us.
RA: The proponents of liberal primacy would say that the world that will emerge from realist internationalism won’t necessarily be orderly. They’d say that in the last 80 years after World War II, you needed American values to backstop geopolitics, to enforce liberalism, and that, for example, Europe left to its own devices would fall into war once again. While there’s much to criticize America for, you needed a global policeman to keep the peace and that under a liberal order, the world became more democratic and wealthier. How do you push back against that school of thought?
EA: Let me make two points here. One is that they are correct in some ways. The world that will emerge will be more chaotic and less orderly. That is simply a function of the shifting balance of power. I don’t choose this as a policy because it is something that I prefer, but because this is the best of the available options. I don’t think there is an option on the table that sees continued U.S. primacy in an orderly world. Instead, I see options for where the disorder comes from. Do we see more great-power wars? Do we see more minor wars in different regions?
A second point is that it’s worth interrogating the assumption in these critiques that the U.S. has governed some liberal order unchecked, in a continuous fashion since 1945. The Cold War and the post-Cold War period, the unipolar moment, are very distinct. During the Cold War, the U.S. often pursued values, but the leaders—Dwight Eisenhower or Richard Nixon—often made choices that were realist in nature: putting burdens onto allies, sometimes abandoning other countries, sometimes striking deals with the Soviets in order to achieve U.S. interests. It’s really only in the post-Cold War period where the liberal order prioritized values almost all the time. I am not necessarily saying we should abandon values entirely, but we need to get back to at least that Cold War version of it.
RA: How and where does democracy promotion fit in? It was such a big part of a certain era of American foreign policymaking. Human rights also informed how many American policymakers thought about America’s purpose in foreign policymaking. Where does that fit in a realist international framework? Would multilateral organizations need to fill some of that gap?
EA: At the start of the book, I have a chapter plotting the history of the last 30 years. America pursued very transformational policies in these areas during that period: democracy promotion, but also human rights and the responsibility to protect, the Bush freedom agenda, NATO expansion, and globalization. All were designed to transform the world and, in most cases, lock in U.S. primacy around the world. After about 2008, it became apparent that these things are not achievable. We can’t democratize the Middle East by force. We can’t necessarily protect civilians in every conflict everywhere. The reality sets in.
I think democracy is a wonderful thing. I think the United States would benefit from living in a world with better human rights with more democracies. I am also highly skeptical, based on that 30-year history, of our ability to actually achieve these goals. And so I would not prioritize these transformational approaches to foreign policy. I would instead focus on protecting and preserving democracy at home and in the other places in the world where it exists already.
RA: Let’s come to an America First critique of some of your ideas. In your book, you made the point that the American people agree with some of Trump’s ideas about America’s place in the world. And so in that sense, the people were ahead of the policymakers. Do you think the American people want America First instead of some of what you’re prescribing? And how much should public opinion matter when it comes to proposing the best foreign-policy vision?
EA: I think the American people want America First. I don’t think they necessarily want the version of it being proposed by President Trump. If you look at trends in polling, it has become clearer over time that the American people want a U.S. foreign policy that centers U.S. interests to some extent. They like U.S. values, but they want to pursue policies—not just foreign policy, but trade, migration, and all of these things that are tangential or touch international relations—that focus less on the global good and more on the national good. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they support everything that the Trump administration thinks that means. You can draw some very clear examples of migration policy or trade policy on that question.
But on whether public opinion actually should matter for foreign policy, having just cited a bunch of statistics, let me now say that I am very skeptical of data and polling and foreign policy. We understand some of what the American public wants through polling on foreign policy. You can see that best in trends, in how the American people think about big concepts like U.S. leadership in the world over time. But when you look at foreign-policy polling on specific issues, they’re often all over the place. A fascinating recent example was a poll that was in the field when the Trump administration bombed Iran. And in the polling, it jumps 20 points in support of bombing Iran between the time before he bombed and the time after he bombed. So, they’re very easily led by elites, too. I think the important thing about public opinion is to be aware of these very high-level trends about how people think about what role America should play in the world.
RA: We’ve talked a lot about some of what Trump might be getting right, at least directionally in terms of following the American mood. What do you think he’s getting wrong on foreign policy? And will that lessen American power?
EA: The major difference between what I propose and the way the Trump administration has pursued foreign policy comes down to hostility. There are ways to push U.S. allies to do more for their own defense. There are ways to rebalance trade so it’s a little fairer that don’t involve bad-mouthing the presidents of other countries, or slapping random tariffs on Canada, or threatening to conquer Greenland. So they are taking steps that may undermine their goals. If they would try a more cooperative approach, it might be easier to achieve these goals.
I do think the most problematic part of the Trump agenda is trade. And that’s not just because I am a proponent of free trade—there are certainly issues with unfettered globalization—but the U.S. needs to offer the world a positive economic vision. Our markets, our innovation: These are part of our attraction for other countries in the world. And if we’re not going to be out there with our military, this is another way to connect in the world and work with other states. The Trump administration seems very determined to tear down the fabric of global trade and industry. And that concerns me a lot, because once you’ve done that, and if you pull back militarily, what are you left with? It’s basically sanctions and trying to make other countries hurt to do what you want. And that’s not a particularly good strategy.
RA: Let’s discuss the progressive world-builders. Do they have a stake in a conversation about what a post-Trump foreign policy could look like? Or have they lost the argument entirely?
EA: They still have a fairly significant stake in debates inside the Democratic Party. And there’s a few reasons. One: Because Democrats effectively have no leader at the moment, the only place where we might see these debates is in Congress. They’re having these debates on a very limited set of issues, mostly related to Gaza or foreign aid. Those are areas in which progressives on the Hill are actually major players and major figures.
The second reason is that we’ve seen very, very clearly in the Democratic Party that younger voters really do not want Democrats to return to the Biden-style foreign policy. This is, again, precipitated by Gaza, but it is broader than that. Younger voters in the Democratic Party lean progressive on foreign policy. They want to promote democracy and provide aid, but they don’t want the U.S. military to be everywhere. These debates are happening now, and any candidate for 2028 is going to have to take this seriously.
RA: In our whole discussion about trends, generations are part of it. Gen Z, millennials, Xers, and boomers all might see America’s place in the world differently. I’m curious how much that prism matters when you think about foreign policymaking.
EA: Generationally, the events that have shaped people’s worldview are starting to play their way out in policy. So, 10 or 15 years ago, people were saying that the Iraq War was a mistake and we need to get out of the war on terror. But the policymakers were mostly folks in their 50s and 60s who remembered the triumphalism of the late Cold War and early post-Cold War period. In the Trump administration now, we have a vice president who’s a millennial and served in the war in Iraq. There are a number of veterans inside the Trump administration whose views were shaped by the failures of the war on terror. We’re not there yet, but in 15 years or so, we will start to see young people whose formative foreign-policy experience was watching the war in Gaza. And while I don’t want to overstate the effect this has, it does change the worldview of the people making policy over time.
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