The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy.

• Author: Postma, Brittney Nichole

The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy

By Stephen Walt

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018, 400 pages, $28.00, ISBN: 9780374280031

The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy offers readers a persuasive explanation that aims to define exactly where everything went wrong with American foreign policy, and how it can change its course. Stephen Walt frames his introductory lesson on the aspects of liberal hegemony, explaining its problematic failures and how its main supporter, the foreign policy community, has played a crucial role toward ensuring that the current status quo is maintained. Walt suggests that a foreign policy strategy called 'offshore balancing' can be a remedy that ensures American dominance while appeasing the international community. The issue lies that there is very little support for offshore balancing as it opposes the mainstream agenda that is prevalent throughout foreign policy.

Currently, there is an inherent belief that America by its very nature, should be geopolitically engaged everywhere as a sort of fulfillment of its unique destiny as a nation. Having no global rivals, a massive economic budget, and external strength unseen since the Roman Empire, America occupies a unique position of global influence post-Cold War. This idea, which Walt calls liberal hegemony, has three distinct objectives to ensure U.S. global supremacy: to remain dominant within the military sphere, to expand the areas of U.S. influence, and to promote liberal democratic norms and human rights (p. 58). The main intent is to shape the global community in a way that suits U.S. preferences, with this plan then sold off to the American public by means of inflating external threats, and exaggerating the benefits gained while concealing the costs of the operations (p. 8). Walt cites such failures as the interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, and Libya as having very little positively gained (p. 80). Liberal hegemony is largely to blame for the current international failures in foreign policy with very few successes to boast of.

Clinton, Bush, and Obama, though in differing ways, adopted liberal hegemony as the modus operandi of American foreign policy. Aside from American leaders, those who support liberal hegemony aren't just the policy makers themselves; the mainstream media, scholars, politicians, and civil society members actively promote...