I just read a book that Barack Obama and Donald Trump would both enjoy.
It argues that the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy were an aberration – an era when America became so overwhelmingly more powerful than any rival that it got geopolitically drunk and decided that it didn’t just want to be a cop on the beat protecting our nation but also a social worker, architect and carpenter doing nation-building abroad.
It was all done with the best of intentions and, in some cases, did save precious lives. But none of the efforts achieved the kind of self-sustaining democratizing order we wanted, which is why neither this president nor the next wants to be doing any more of that – if they can at all avoid it.
But can they?
The book is called “Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era,” by Johns Hopkins foreign policy professor Michael Mandelbaum.