The Case for America Needs More Than Theory

Shadi Hamid is a strange advocate for American hegemony. The Washington Post columnist is a liberal, a Muslim, and a vocal critic of the US-Israel alliance. And yet his latest book, The Case for American Power, is an attempt to explain why the Republic is “the last best hope of the earth.” However well-intentioned Hamid is, it is perhaps unsurprising that his case is not wholly successful.

That said, any defense of America—however qualified—is a welcome undertaking in an age when the Left and Right alike have become so unpatriotic. If Hamid’s book rallies readers on the Left or in the center around a more robust foreign policy, he will have done a service. But Hamid’s America is little more than an abstraction, a hopeful avatar of democratic ideology unrooted from a deeper tradition. I regret to say that he does not offer the full-throated civilizational confidence Americans must rediscover if we are to overcome the gathering storm. 

From the outset, Hamid gets off on the wrong foot by resting his case on the notion that America can “change and improve on itself” because it is an “idea.” More specifically, he writes that the American idea “represents a fusion of power and morality” manifest in a universalist “mission.” To be sure, ideas are vitally important to American nationhood—but we are also constituted by something more tangible. Universals, our Founders understood, are only incarnate in particulars. Hamid’s reduction of America to a mere creed is little more than a terrible simplification. 

It seems, though, that Hamid understands the limits of his creedalism more than he lets on. At one point, he cites Sir Roger Scruton’s concept of “oikophobia,” the fear and hatred of home, to critique those on the Left who hyper-fixate on American abuses of power. Hamid argues quite cogently that both left-wing oikophobia and right-wing xenophobia are manifestations of “declinism,” a lack of faith in American exceptionalism. 

Read more in Providence.