Review: America's Fatal Leap 1991–2016, by Paul W. Schroeder

Paul Schroeder, an American historian who died in 2020 at the age of ninety-three, was chiefly renowned for his The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (1994) where the Congress of Vienna (1815) is shown to have marked a relatively long (and hitherto unsurpassed) period of peace in European history. Schroeder, a conservative and an ordained Lutheran pastor, was highly critical of US foreign policy, particularly of its policy towards Iraq and Afghanistan. In the light of Donald Trump's return to the American presidency and the widespread left-wing belief that, in matters of foreign policy, the Democrats are preferable to Republicans, it is worth examining Schoeder's contributions. These could be found in highly conservatives journals such as the National Interest, the American Interest and the American Conservative (founded in 2002 by the right-wing 1992 presidential candidate Pat Buchanan). The American Conservative took a clear stand against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (unlike, for instance, the Observer and the Labour government) and for a less aggressive foreign policy; but the journal also defended the nuclear family, condemned same sex marriage and favoured deregulation.

Schroeder's articles on US foreign policy have now been collected in a single volume by the left-wing publisher Verso, with a highly valuable introduction by Perry Anderson. Verso has also published Schroeder's writings on the origins of the First World War under the title Stealing Horses to Great Applause.

The conservative journals to which Schroeder contributed do not advance what are commonly labelled neo-con ideas but are the voice of so-called paleo-conservatives whose views found their way in the notorious Project 2025 (sponsored by the Heritage Foundation) which seeks to drive the USA into an authoritarian and socially conservative direction strengthening presidential powers. No wonder Donald Trump likes it even though before the elections, in an unusual display of prudence, he distanced himself from the project. By the day of the inauguration a clear majority of his executive orders came straight out of Project 2025.

Paleo-conservatives are nationalists, religiously traditional, anti-immigration, protectionist and isolationist. In foreign policy they are decisively anti-interventionist. Schroeder does not tick all these boxes—and neither does Trump. Political and ideological positions are usually difficult to define.

Schroeder is no pacifist, but he thinks that most wars are useless, including virtually all wars the USA fought since 1945. He bases such views on positions not dissimilar to the so-called realist school associated with John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt—though he strongly distances himself from them. To add to the confusion, he claims that the USA is an imperialist power, but he does not use this term in the traditional left-wing sense. He defines imperialism as the ‘exercise of final authority and decision-making power by one government over another.’ It does not have to include colonial or semi-colonial appropriation, but it includes hegemony. He lists the failures: failure to unify Korea under its control, failure to stop North Vietnam from taking over South Vietnam and ending up having to accept Mao's China—and not Taiwan—as the legitimate government of China. Then there was the mess resulting from US interventions in Iraq and Libya, and the fiasco in Afghanistan. In America, a bigger fuss was made about Clinton's blow-job than about the torture and prisoner abuse perpetrated by American troops in Abu Ghraib during the Iraq war: ‘Put bluntly, most Americans still seem to believe that anything done at home or abroad to make them safer from terrorists is fine regardless of legal niceties.’ And he added that the American public thinks that ‘It's a dangerous world out there, if we play by the rules we will lose because they don't play by the rules so we have to play dirty because we are the goody and they are the baddy.’

Sometimes the baddy turns out not to be so bad or at least a little better than the worse: the awful regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria was ousted by the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) an organisation which was on the US terrorist list. Once HTS had won, it was no longer a terrorist organisation. Schroeder could have reminded us that hysteria has long been a major element in US foreign policy—all the more absurd for western European countries, and particularly Labour governments, to follow it so blindly, a mistake they are discovering gradually and painfully. Over sixty years ago, in a famous essay the American historian Richard Hofstadter (a Cold War liberal) discussed ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’. The theme is a recurrent one. Once the American administration even peddled the ridiculous ‘domino theory’ which regarded ‘communism’ as if it were a disease which, if unchecked militarily, would spread throughout South East Asia and perhaps, who knows(?), would be landing on the shore of California. So, it had to be stopped in Vietnam, or in Laos or Cambodia. Now communist Vietnam, instead of spreading communism, produces trainers such as Adidas, Nike, Puma and Converse, which Americans can wear happily with no political after-effects.

Schroeder strongly believes that, at least until recently, American hegemony had done more good than harm and that the true political American tradition is one of anti-imperialism. Schroeder also notes that ‘the history of the US in international politics is a success story … all rise and no fall’. How that squares with his view that all American wars since 1945 were useless is not clear.

American intervention in Iraq in 2003 was, according to Schroeder, an imperialist adventure precisely because it sought to decide who should rule in that country. The war was not just about ‘regime change’ but the acquisition of the power to decide which regime should be established. And this is imperialism regardless of the noble ends used to justify it—human rights, liberal capitalism, et cetera. Ideological justifications were often used to defend old-style colonialism. After all, the French in the nineteenth century called their acquisition of colonies a mission civilisatrice, while British imperialism had their ‘white man's burden’ expression, coined by Rudyard Kipling whilst exhorting the USA to accept the burden of fighting ‘the savage wars of peace’.

The first essay in this collection was written in January 1991 as Operation Desert Storm to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait was being launched by George H. W. Bush. Since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait offered no moral justification there was no defence of it from any quarter. Paul Schroeder did not disagree. What he objected to was that the idea that the Iraqi invasion should have been repelled by a war when, in the longer term, the real solution would have been a complete blockade of Iraq. This, he thought, would have led to the collapse of the regime by internal forces and not just to its withdrawal from Kuwait. This would have taken longer than a war.

In today's world, however, politicians, especially elected politicians, cannot afford to have a long-term view. They need results and need them quickly. To paraphrase Keynes: in the long term you are out of office. But pandering to public opinion, argues Schroeder, is often an excuse. Some Americans wanted a tough answer to Iraqi aggression, but most Americans did not really care about Kuwait (or Vietnam). And some had never heard of Kuwait (or Iraq).

In any case, Schroeder seems to overestimate the effectiveness of sanctions. Though they cause damage, they are not working on Iran or Russia, and they did not work on Cuba. Today the USA currently deploys various kinds of sanctions which affect more than fifty countries—figures in a recent report by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the US Treasury. Some sanctions are simply inane, such as those directed against Russian oligarchs (a name given to rich Russians but not to rich Americans such as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, until Biden, in his final address, belatedly used the term when he found out they no longer supported his side). The Russian ‘oligarchs’ are being punished for being unable to stop Putin's invasion of Ukraine—as if they could have. Of course, such sanctions are not meant to achieve anything, they are a symbol of disapproval and, anyway, no-one likes the ultra-rich.

In 2001 Schroeder proceeded to examine the events of 9/11 which led to the second war against Iraq. These events, unlike Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, required a response. But, as Schroeder wrote at the time, ‘a great power must avoid giving the terrorists the war they want’. It must calculate the wider effects of its actions as well as the ‘risks of victory’, that is, in this case, the risk of getting even more embroiled in Middle Eastern politics. He makes a parallel between 9/11 and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo, an event which sparked the First World War (a parallel also made later by Christopher Clark in his 2012 The Sleepwalkers. How Europe Went to War in 1914). Gavrilo Princip (the terrorist responsible for the assassination) may have hoped to start a war, but it was Austria-Hungary's response which unclenched it. One should also bear in mind that there had been many important political assassinations in the fifteen years preceding Sarajevo, including the Kings of Italy, Portugal and Greece, the presidents of France and the USA, and the prime ministers of Russia and Spain. None of these led even to minor wars.

Terrorism works only if the reaction to it is out of proportion to the damage inflicted by the terrorists. Terrorism is the weapon of the weak. As Schroeder puts it: ‘The attack comes in the form of terrorism because they have no other more effective means of reprisal.’ The danger of terrorism, he claims, is overrated. The fear of terrorism is more dangerous than terrorism itself. Other threats are failed states, inequalities, poverty, and so on. One of the objects of terrorism was to prove that the other side can be hurt even if not defeated. Retaliation will open the way to more terrorism something Israel and its supporters pretend not to have realised.

Bin Laden was weak and isolated. Most states, for obvious reasons, were and are opposed to terrorism. Most states (including Russia, China and almost all Muslims countries) condemned 9/11. If Bin Laden had had a powerful army and an air force he would have used them. If Hamas had an air force it would have bombed Tel Aviv and not just killed innocent ravers. Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda have few international allies. The United States, unlike them, is extremely powerful and, in 2001, was not short of allies. This is not quite true today. After Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, America's allies are perturbed, all the more since US internal politics is so unknowable, particularly for having given rise, for the second time, to an imponderable president who seems to care little for traditional allies.

Recently opened documents revealed the growing frustration of the UK government with the US's control of its military operations in Iraq after 2003. Documents, released by the Cabinet Office in December 2024, contained briefings that raising concerns over whether the US had a grip on its invasion while a separate document from the UK embassy in Washington as the invasion was just beginning revealed that then-US deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, believed that Bush ‘thought he was on some sort of mission from God in Iraq’ and that the US had ‘no coherent strategy’.

Schroeder pointedly writes that since one of the objectives of the 9/11 terrorists was to prove that the US could be hurt even by small groups of dedicated fighters, American reaction played into their hands: ‘By endlessly rehearsing the magnitude of the loss, labelling it a national tragedy, disaster and even catastrophe, by hyperventilating in denouncing the action and demanding vengeance … we have encouraged the terrorists to believe that the United States really can be badly hurt by actions like these.’ That may be the case, but the fact remains, contrary to Schroeder's claim, that there have been no serious foreign terrorist attacks on the USA in the twenty odd years since 9/11—and hardly any in the previous twenty years. Of course, political violence in the USA has increased, but it is mainly the work of loners. The biggest threat to Americans comes from Americans: in a single year the number Americans killed by other Americans is about 20,000, the same number as those killed in Afghanistan in twenty years of war and, in proportion to population, six times more than in most west European countries, including the UK. And, of course, the US, by a substantial margin, has the highest rate of overdose deaths in the world with 108,000 people dying of overdose—mainly of opioids—in 2022 alone.

The ‘war on terror’ is not a real war. Like the ‘war on drugs’, the ‘war on poverty’ and the ‘war on cancer’, it is a metaphor. Schroeder does not like the term because using it is giving the terrorists what they wanted: a war. He calls it a ‘sham, a charade’. What was Bin Laden's objective with 9/11? Unconvincingly Schroeder thinks Bin Laden did it to establish his leading role in the struggle against the USA. Whatever the motive—and I wish we had a moratorium on the low-level journalism which constantly ‘discovers’ the ‘real’ motive behind Putin, Xi Jinping and tutti quanti—Bin Laden obviously failed to galvanise Muslims around the world around him though he succeeded in getting the USA into more foreign wars.

Schroeder does not find anything ‘particularly objectionable … about American hegemon’ and has plenty to object to any return to isolationism. What he wants is ‘benign’ hegemony and not ‘unstable’ hegemony which is what America is contributing to. Schroeder seems to have an exalted belief in American virtues and fears that its foreign policy is a betrayal of such virtues (but then betrayal of virtues is part of the history of most countries). He argues strongly against the idea that Saddam Hussein's possession of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) would justify it, partly because he believes—correctly as it turned out—that he did not have them, partly because if he had them, he would not use them against the West which has far superior WMD. The Western worries about other countries having WMD is vacuous, he rightly points out. Stalin too had them and did not use them. Pakistan, India and North Korea have them and do not use them. The only state which has ever used an atomic bomb is the USA.

Why should not Iran want nuclear weapons when it neighbour, Israel, is run by genocidal maniacs? It should be added that Ayatollah Khamenei (the Supreme Leader) has regularly declared that it would be religiously wrong for to Iran to develop nuclear weapons. Iran could, of course, change its position. To put in another way (mine): the USA does not know how to be benignly hegemonic because it does not apply rational thinking to international politics. The chief danger is for the US to ‘use its power to wipe out evil regardless of the consequences’. And, of course, we never really know the consequences. Not knowing the future keeps a whole army of futurologists employed, but important events keep on taking us by surprise. Once we used to slaughter goats and examine their entrails; now we have think-tanks and organisations which constantly revise their forecast. They are kept funded because we all have a visceral need to know what is going to happen.

Writing in 2002, just a year before the attack on Iraq, Schroeder argued that pre-emptive wars are illegitimate, harmful and unnecessary, for he prizes order over justice and peace. By 2004 he argued that the international order must be defended from threats and that the most important of these threats comes from the USA. Twenty years later a similar point, but for entirely different reasons, was made by the liberal-conservative anti-isolationist American commentator Fareed Zakaria (Foreign Affairs, January 2024) who wrote that

… the most worrying challenge to the rules-based international order does not come from China, Russia or Iran. It comes from the United States. If America, consumed by exaggerated fears of its own decline, retreats from its leading role in world affairs, it will open up power vacuums across the globe and encourage a variety of states to try to step into the disarray.

If the US intervenes, the international order will crumble further. If the US does not intervene the international order will crumble. The ‘international order’, like the so-called ‘international community’, is an ideological construct constantly redefined to suit the policies of the West. The USA is all in favour of international organisations, but refuses to abide or become a member of those it regards as diminishing its sovereignty. It is not one of the 114 member-states of the International Criminal Court (as I write Trump even imposed sanctions on it). It is not one of the 196 states supporting the Paris Agreement on climate change. It will no longer be one of the 194 member states of the World Health Organisation.

Reading this book shortly after the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States can lead one to the slightly reassuring understanding that personalities matter far less than is commonly assumed and certainly far less that their presence in the media would suggest. It is also evident that supporters of so-called ‘liberal humanitarian intervention’ were soundly defeated in the 2024 elections. The victory went to an unpredictable and flawed buffoonesque man who promised something new, something different, though, of course, he may turn into an interventionist like his predecessors, and he may also turn out as the man who resolved the conflict in Ukraine. The clown—though a clown who makes no-one laugh—and his supporters have taken over the Republican Party in a thorough way, control Congress and the Supreme Court, while Kamala Harris and those like her have been totally defeated and they still do not understand why.

Given the power of the USA, the reaction to Trump in the West has been cautious and timid. European leaders have not moved on from the Cold War dogma that we'd better stick with the USA when faced with the threat of communism. Today the threat in Europe does not come from Russia, or China. It comes from the far right whose advance is owing, at least in part, to the pathetic incompetence of Europe's left-liberal and conservative politicians. As Einstein is supposed to have said: ‘It may be possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism separately, but when they come together there is no hope.’