Eliot A. Cohen teaches at Johns Hopkins University and served as Counselor of the Department of State 2007-2008. He is the author of The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force, from which this is adapted.

It only took Donald Trump a few minutes as president before he, in his inimitable way, took the lid off a simmering debate about American foreign policy: whether or not the United States should step back from the role it has until now played of sustainer of global order.

“From this day forward,” Trump proclaimed in his inaugural address, “it’s going to be only ‘America First.’” He’s followed up those words with actions in the days since, withdrawing the United States from the long-negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and promising to begin renegotiating NAFTA as soon as he meets with the leaders of Mexico and Canada.


Yet, as in other respects, Trump is as much a manifestation of change as its agent, an object example of a shift in the underlying currents of how many Americans think about politics. Trump’s tweets and erratic off-the-cuff remarks should not disguise the grave implications of his views, and those of others on other parts of the political spectrum who agree with him that it is time to step back from the role it has played for more than seventy years.

Those of us who believe in American international leadership—and who reject Trump’s historically loaded “America First” slogan—must seriously look at the five major arguments in favor of America pulling back from global commitment. And we must show why, precisely, these five arguments are so bad.

Bad Argument #1: In the long run, the world is getting better. Thus, America doesn’t need to be a global leader.

The first bad argument—that the world is, despite what you may think, becoming a nicer place—may be found in Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels. It has been echoed by President Obama, and it goes like this: humanity is becoming more pacific. Large-scale violence is decreasing, and the norms against it are getting stronger by the day. The terrible exceptions, like Syria, are just that. Large-scale war is on the way out, much as dueling, once a constant of human nature, has pretty much vanished.

This is all very well, until you realize that precisely the same argument could have been made in 1900. And, indeed, some of the advocates of this position contend that the world wars were mere blips in our long march to peace. Even if that were so, one has to ask what further blips may lie in our future? Moreover, the relative peace since World War II stems from many things, but not the least of these has been shrewd and generally consistent American leadership, a possibility ignored by the Better Angels school of thought.

Bad Argument #2: The global balance of power is more or less self-sustaining.

The second argument comes from (supposedly) hard-headed foreign policy realists, who argue that the balance of power will now operate to maintain international peace. Rising powers like China will be counterweighed by a kind of automatic mechanism which will bring coalitions to bear to contain it. Revanchist Russia too will be matched by the much richer western European states. The United States can be an “offshore balancer,” putting its thumb on the scale only as needed.

Similar mechanisms supposedly operated in 1914—or, for that matter, in 1750. They did not prevent protracted, bloody war.

So-called ‘realism’ is one of the less realistic political creeds out there because it cannot take ideology seriously, thinks that states are the only important political units of account, and because it dismisses values in the name of interests. But surely beliefs (jihadi faith, for example) do matter; the disintegration of states in the Middle East has a real impact on the security of us and our allies, and our values of free speech and rule of law are part of our core national interests.

Bad Argument #3: America’s considerable soft power is powerful enough on its own.

A third case is that soft power—everything from diplomacy to sanctions to American cultural magnetism—can replace what Theodore Roosevelt called “the Big Stick” of hard, military power.

Undoubtedly the tools of soft power that can actually be wielded are important. But ferocious sanctions have not stopped the North Koreans from creeping up on developing nuclear weapons that can target the United States. And American cultural magnetism in the form of an undergraduate degree from a North Carolina university did not prevent Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, from plotting the murder of thousands. Diplomacy is indispensable, but often it works only when there is muscle to pack it up.

Bad Argument #4: The track record of American involvement in other countries is bad.

A darker case is that the United States is simply too incompetent to exercise global leadership—the evidence being the experience of the last 15 years of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and also Vietnam a generation earlier.

Even acknowledging America’s foreign-policy failures, however, there are countervailing successes—America’s effective support for the Colombian government’s fight against FARC revolutionaries; the peace maintained in South Korea; the long history of Europe’s recovery and defense against Soviet aggression, to name just a few. Even in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a strong case that our successes were not negligible (for instance, millions of Afghan girls getting an education), and that our failures neither inevitable nor complete.

What is missing here, as in so many of the arguments for abandoning leadership, is an awareness that America’s activities abroad turn on the quality of individual politicians, diplomats, and generals. Individual leaders—a team like General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker in Iraq during 2006-2008, for example—make an enormous difference.

Bad Argument #5: We should nation-build at home instead.

This justification has been advanced by President Obama himself: the case for nation-building at home instead of using our resources to secure a more peaceful world. Behind this are two implicit propositions: that global leadership costs too much, and that it distracts from domestic priorities. It does neither.

Today, we spend spend somewhat more than three percent of our Gross Domestic Product on defense. Other vibrant economies spend roughly the same or more, including Singapore and Israel. Historically, our current levels of defense spending are quite modest— including periods of rapid economic growth and the rates of 6, 8 or 10 percent during the Cold War.

As for global leadership as a distraction from America’s domestic concerns, the fact is that some of our most important domestic advances have come at times of maximum external effort, including during wartime. Whether it is the Homestead and Morrill Acts during the Civil War, the GI Bill in the wake of World War II, the Civil Rights Acts during Vietnam, or the Affordable Care Act in recent years, major domestic legislation and change goes forward in times of external crisis.

Of course, to say that these five bad arguments fall apart is not the same thing as making the case for global leadership, with the burdens—particularly in the preparation and use of military of power—that that entails. That is a separate matter (for more, see my book, The Big Stick).

What is most disturbing and problematic about these positions, however, is that they seem to deny the importance of political leadership and the potential for real catastrophe. All of them depend, one way or another, on the idea that individual leaders here or abroad do not matter very much. But surely it does matter that Vladimir Putin, a ruthless, cunning, and aggressive revanchist, leads a Russia bent on dismantling the post-Cold War order in Europe. When we think about history, we think—we know—that leaders matter; we know that a Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a John F. Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan all left indelible imprints on this country and the world. We know, in short, that choice is real.

We also know that things can go badly awry. The story of the 1920s and 1930s is not just the tale of the rise of uniquely dangerous and murderous dictators like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. It is a story of an international system coming unglued because the great powers lacked the wisdom, conviction, and strength to prevent it. In the early 1940s, Winston Churchill was asked what to call the conflict in which he, with FDR, led the West in its greatest struggle: “the unnecessary war,” he replied.

Things can go very badly, indeed. Syria, with its half-million dead and 12 million refugees, is an example of what happens when American presidents choose not to lead, or do so ineffectively. What should trouble all of us is that it is very far from being the most terrible case we can imagine, and a lack of U.S. global leadership makes those terrible outcomes more likely, not less. The last time “America First” was an appealing slogan to many Americans, we got enormously destructive wars in Europe and Asia, and eventually, Pearl Harbor here.

In a world in which a rising and aggressive China seeks to extend its domination of Asia, jihadi movements promise generations of bloodshed in the Middle East and North Africa, dangerous states like Russia, North Korea and Iran seek to overturn regional order in their favor, and the ungoverned space and great commons of humanity like space and cyberspace are at risk, the United States needs, more than ever, to lead—and, while speaking with un-Trumpian moderation, to stand ready to use the big stick.