American foreign policy may have fallen victim to excessive political correctness, to the “woke” culture. Let me explain: During the Cold War, Washington did not choose its friends and allies based on who upheld human rights and protected minorities; its priorities were devoid of such concerns, driven purely by geopolitical expediency. This is why the US had such close ties with the Greek dictatorship, disregarding its brutal suppression of democratic rights.
Washington viewed the Middle East and its powerful dictators through exactly the same prism for several decades.
Then the Cold War ended and with it, for many, came the end of history. There was no rival anymore. The Americans believed they had secured their ideological hegemony forever. They started to look at the rest of the world as a well-tended “garden” that would grow according to US values and economic and geopolitical demands. Globalization strengthened this belief and for a while at least, there was just one pole.
American embassies became more interested in soft politics and multiculturalism. The intervention in Kosovo was the product of a way of thinking that saw America in the role of an armed peacekeeping force that would protect minorities and prevent a humanitarian crisis. In Iraq, it labored under the delusion that some utopian Middle Eastern version of democracy could emerge after the invasion. Such delusions prevailed when the Arab Spring began, leading Washington to throw its old and close ally Hosni Mubarak under the bus. Barack Obama realized that he could not keep drawing red lines and Mubarak fell – but democracy did not really come to Egypt, just as it will not come to Syria.
In the meantime, the “garden” America had been dreaming of was starting to look like a jungle, as American historian Robert Kagan has described it. The rest of the planet, and the South especially, kept shouting at America to stop shaking its finger at others and only the narrow core of the West saw the US as a beacon and protector of Western values. Now even America doesn’t want this role anymore.
Donald Trump pulled down all the veils. From now on, American foreign policy will be unabashed and brutally transactional. Its diplomatic representatives will only be interested in who is buying what. We are returning to a past state of affairs – from the hegemony of a single pole to a planet in a state of anarchy, where right is determined by might, and might alone.