Benign American Hegemony — Restorable?

Michael Hirsh thinks it is, in this tightly argued piece in the latest edition of the Washington Monthly. He takes on the new conventional wisdom that the global system will have to be fundamentally reordered in the wake of the Bush Administration’s “lethal mixture of arrogance and incompetence.” The article singles out Obama and his foreign policy crew (Samantha Power and Anthony Lake notably among them) for this mindset. But, as Hirsh quite accurately observes

In this impulse, they are far from alone. The last year has seen a slew of efforts by foreign policy thinkers, academics, journalists, policy wonks, and politicians to envision a new international security system, and a new U.S. foreign policy to go along with it. These varied proposals often have little in common except the assumption that, through some combination of the end of the cold war, the new threat of stateless terror, and the failures of the Bush years, the old system is dead, and an entirely new one must now be created. Intellectually, like the Khmer Rouge, we’re back at the year zero.

The piece includes a useful catalogue of various efforts to redefine American foreign policy from the ground up (Concert of Democracies from Anne-Marie Slaughter, Progressive Realism from Robert Wright, and realistic Wilsonianism from Francis Fukuyama among them). Hirsh argues, by contrast, that the old system of benign American stewardship can be reestablished, once the Bush team exits. “What’s needed is not a new birth of liberalism or of conservatism—or cleverly titled ideological mergers of the two—but just one good Democrat or Republican with the courage to say, repeatedly, that invading Iraq was irrational, that the entire war on terror has been misconceived, that the last six years have been such an aberration as to constitute the most disastrous foreign policy in the nation’s history, and that reason will now rule again.”

I tend to agree that America’s credibility can be restored by the next Administration. Remember how much the Europeans hated Reagan? If anything, the international community now better understands that we shouldn’t be held collectively responsible for the sins of our leaders. That said, I very much doubt that we’ll revert to the old world of diplomacy and top-down global management from Washington. The twenty-first century is unlikely to be an American one in the way of the twentieth.

Update: Looks like Hirsh got Obama wrong, judging from a foreign-policy address he delivered yesterday in Chicago. See this summary from Democracy Arsenal. Pretty much in the America-as-the-beacon-of-freedom tradition.