According to Walt, the dominant narrative after the conclusion of the Cold War was that history was on America’s side, even, as Francis Fukuyama put it in a famous 1989 essay in The National Interest, that so-called history had ended and all that remained was economic materialism. Globalization would lead to what Karl Marx had called in the Communist Manifesto a “universal interdependence” among nations; warfare would become a thing of the past. America’s mission was to push other states to protect human rights and to help them transition to democracy.

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In Walt’s view, “despite minor differences, both liberal and neoconservative proponents of liberal hegemony assumed that the United States could pursue this ambitious global strategy without triggering serious opposition.” But the very steps that America took to enhance its security, Walt suggests, ended up undermining it. He reminds us, for instance, that George F. Kennan warned in 1999 that NATO expansion eastward was a “tragic mistake” that would, sooner or later, ignite Russian nationalism. Under Vladimir Putin’s leadership, Russia became a revanchist power that launched cyber attacks on the Baltic States, seized Crimea, invaded Ukraine and interfered in the 2016 American presidential election. In Walt’s telling, “the energetic pursuit of liberal hegemony was mostly a failure. … By 2017, in fact, democracy was in retreat in many places and under considerable strain in the United States itself.”

Walt reserves his greatest ire for what Barack Obama’s adviser Ben Rhodes dismissively referred to as the “Blob,” or Washington’s foreign policy elite. Some of his vexation is personal. He reports that the advertisement he signed attacking the invasion of Iraq has disappeared into the foreign policy memory hole: “In the 16-plus years since the ad was printed,” Walt observes, “none of its signatories have been asked to serve in government or advise a presidential campaign.” Walt’s own zest for intellectual combat, though, can lead him into rhetorical overkill. “Instead of being a disciplined body of professionals constrained by a well-informed public and forced by necessity to set priorities and hold themselves accountable,” Walt writes, “today’s foreign policy elite is a dysfunctional caste of privileged insiders who are frequently disdainful of alternative perspectives and insulated both professionally and personally from the consequences of the policies they promote.”

Walt points to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council and the Center for New American Security, among others, as constituting a kind of interlocking directorate that fosters groupthink and consists of mandarins intolerant of dissenting views. But Walt’s depiction of these organizations misses the mark. There’s plenty of debate in Washington; whether it amounts to much is another question. He also focuses excessively on several rather obscure academic projects that he believes epitomize the sterile moribundity of American strategic thought. It would have been more illuminating had he zeroed in on those few organizations that really do exercise outsize influence in Trump’s Washington, like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is helping to shape Iran policy.

Walt persuasively contends that Washington’s bungled interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya helped propel Trump, who has consistently derided foreign policy experts, to the presidency. But so pervasive is the influence of the foreign policy elite, Walt argues, that it has managed to capture Trump himself. In Afghanistan, Trump ditched his campaign vows and bolstered American force levels, claiming that they would engage in counterterrorism rather than nation-building. Trump has presided over an approach toward Russia and China that is driving them into each other’s arms, precisely as realist doctrine would predict. Walt also drubs Trump for his embrace of foreign autocrats, which amounts to a pursuit of illiberal hegemony: “The United States still sought primacy and its global military role was undiminished, but it was no longer strongly committed to promoting liberal values.” With foreign policy hawks like the national security adviser John Bolton and the secretary of state Mike Pompeo on the White House team, Walt perceptively observes that, far from being an isolationist, Trump has enabled a return to the confrontational unilateralism of Dick Cheney.