Some US commentators are advocating a recalibration of America’s full-spectrum global posture, while others, including Condoleezza Rice, energetically beg to differ – naturally for the good of the world.

One apparent example from the first category (recalibration) is a recent essay in the journal, Foreign Policy, by Michael Hirsh. He reviews two books written, we are told, by close advisers of the Democratic Party’s new presidential candidate, Kamala Harris (replacing the 81-year-old, Joe Biden, who was ardently persuaded to step aside).

First there is: “An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for 21st Century Order” co-written by Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper published in 2020. Next: “Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East”, written by Philip Gordon, published in the same year.

Hirsh notes how, previously, Harris essentially invoked:

“The same hegemonic world view that every American President has embraced since World War II. As Harris put it in a 2023 speech — quoting a favourite phrase of Biden’s — ‘a strong America remains indispensable to the world’.”

Now, though, he suggests, real change may be afoot, arguing that:

“The United States may be downgraded to a humbler status if Harris is elected president in November, based on the thinking of her chief advisers”.

Yet Lissner and Rapp-Hooper still argue that, as the Western-crusading, “unipolar” moment wanes:

“A new, more open system would still have to guarantee an ’accessible global commons’ where the US would remain ‘indispensable’ as it is the only country that can guarantee such an open system.”

As such a system would have to accommodate “autocratic and illiberal regimes” it would need American policing, according to this argument. For the rest of the world — and especially the Global South — this claim, today, stands eviscerated. What American global-policing credibility is left after anyone seriously considers how the US has “policed” Israel as it prosecutes its vengeful, unending, brutal Gaza genocide?

Would a Trump presidency make any difference? Not a lot, it seems, as Trump is likely “to continue to downgrade the United States’ global policeman role”, according to Hirsh.

Moreover, in his conclusion, Hirsh, still feels the need to embrace indispensability:

“Given the ongoing crises around the world — especially in Europe, the Middle East, and possibly East Asia if the Taiwan issue........

© Pearls and Irritations