Decline Is a Choice America Keeps Making
Trying to make sense of our national meltdown
The late Charles Krauthammer played a small part in provoking my exodus from the right a little more than two decades ago.
He was one of a couple dozen second-generation neoconservative pundits who went all-in on providing a full-spectrum endorsement of the invasion of Iraq. By “full spectrum” I mean that he and others presented the decision about whether to topple the government of Saddam Hussein as self-evidently correct on every level: It was the right decision for America’s interests, for the interests of our allies, for the interests of the Iraqi people, for the interests of all civilized human beings on the planet, for the interests of democracy as a form of government, and it was also the right thing to do in purely moral terms. All good things went together, with beautiful wrapping paper and an elegant bow on top.
My study of political philosophy and history taught me something different—that all good things almost never go together, that trade-offs are nearly always necessary. And so I decided to part ways with those analysts who denied this base-level insight into the character of the human condition.
But that didn’t stop me from continuing to read them, if only to confirm I’d made the right decision.
It was in that spirit that I read one of Krauthammer’s first extended statements after the end of the Bush administration. Its title fully conveyed its argument: “Decline is a Choice.” In Krauthammer’s view, the newly elected president Barack Obama was uncomfortable exercising power, was suspicious of American motives, and preferred to let other countries take the lead. But this was an act of irresponsibility that would issue in a diminishment of American power rather than its preservation or enhancement. We would become weaker, initiating our own decline as a global hegemon, and we needed to understand that this would be was a function of our own decisions. We were choosing decline when we could, and should, choose the opposite.
It was a powerful argument cogently made, though I recall thinking it was quite unfair to Obama, whose Niebuhrian awareness of tragic ironies at play in America’s actions on the world stage was far closer to my own outlook on the world than Krauthammer’s variation on the Green Lantern theory of geopolitics. (Yes, Virginia, sometimes decline happens for structural reasons that aren’t at bottom a function of specific choices at all.) And anyway, wasn’t the previous president’s decision to topple a foreign government on the basis of faulty intelligence and without a plan to secure the post-invasion peace also a choice that contributed in real ways to the decline of America’s stature in the world?
But despite my deep disagreements with Krauthammer, I’ve never forgotten the essay and its argument—not through the remainder of the Obama administration; not through the first Trump administration, when the Republican president went much further than Obama ever did in antagonizing allies and shirking our obligations around the world; not through the Biden administration, when the president reversed course to reassert American leadership in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia; and certainly not today, when the second Trump administration appears more eager than ever before to hasten America’s decline.
