Francis Fukuyama argues in the Financial Times that the United States should have traded European missile defense and/or Kosovar independence in order to pacify a resurgent Russia. This strange proposal of strategic charity work for the Kremlin, is animated by his belief in an inevitable diminution of American moral authority by course of the Iraq War, and alleged American provocations of Russia which have in his view, inaugurated a decline of American global power.
Francis worries that he will be mistaken as an apologist for Russian imperialism in making this case, but it’s the acute inequity of confidence in power that is more apparent. At some point Francis has acquired that peculiar habit of so many American foreign policy theorists, of having an instinctive optimism and respect for machtpolitik when practiced by foreign adversaries, but an automatic disdain and despair for it when practiced by the United States.
It occurs to me that this broken confidence in the efficacy of American power and its future has become a new kind of American exceptionalism for post-Iraq geopolitical pessimists. Afterall, it can’t escape attention that the rule and perspective are almost never applied to any other great power.