For its part, the United States sought to bolster its relative position in a zero-sum battle for global market share by consolidating a North American bloc (NAFTA) and preventing America’s exclusion from Asian and European markets by means of U.S. participation in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) and failed proposals in the 1990s for a Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Area (TAFTA). The United States hoped in vain that membership in the WTO would encourage China to abandon its catch-up mercantilist strategies for market liberalism.

The relative decline of Japan and the rapid rise of China as a military and industrial power changed U.S. and European calculations without changing the zero-sum nature of geoeconomics. When their dreams of dominating China’s huge domestic market were thwarted by the Chinese government’s attempt to build up its own industrial “national champions,” many American and European corporate and political elites supported the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) as a way of creating a common Euro-American bloc that could write the rules of world trade in ways favoring Western companies and industries. Meanwhile, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is best understood as the economic corollary of the new hub-and-spoke U.S. military alliance system, including old allies like Japan and new ones like Vietnam, which Washington is constructing to encircle China in East Asia.

In the period Mandelbaum describes as one of rule-governed globalization under benign American global governance, authoritarian, mercantilist China has been even more creative in its use of trade in the service of military or economic nationalist goals. China’s proposed alternative to the TPP is the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a proposed trade agreement between China and its Asian neighbors that excludes the United States in the same way that the U.S.-backed TPP excludes China. China has participated in the creation of new international financial institutions, including the New Development Bank (formerly the BRICS Development Bank) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which, unlike the World Bank, the IMF and older international agencies are not controlled by America and its allies. By means of its “one belt, one road” policy, China is promoting overland pipeline and travel infrastructure between China, Europe and the Middle East in order to achieve a goal that is simultaneously geopolitical and geoeconomic—reducing the need for China to rely on imports of energy and exports of manufactured goods by means of shipping lanes vulnerable to the U.S. Navy.

Mandelbaum and other theorists of liberal hegemony argue that, without the United States acting as a global pacifier, rule-governed international trade might collapse into the sort of protectionism and beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies to which World War II is often attributed. But the dichotomy of a rule-governed economy and global economic chaos misses the point. Both developed and developing countries want more regional and global trade—but on their terms. The purpose of today’s blocs, including the EU and NAFTA and the projected Euro-American TTIP bloc, is to write rules that favor particular domestic producers in international commerce and investment. China, India and Brazil want rules that allow them to promote their infant manufacturing industries. The United States emphasizes rewriting international intellectual-property rules to guarantee streams of royalties, patents and other forms of intellectual property to Silicon Valley firms, Hollywood studios and the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, among others. The debate is not over whether there will be rule-governed trade among nations, but what the rules will be and whom they will benefit.

If the period since the Cold War has been one not only of limited yet real great-power rivalries but also of limited yet real mercantilist struggles for global market share, then Mandelbaum’s description of the post–Cold War era as an age of liberal economic globalization under benign and widely accepted U.S. military and diplomatic hegemony cannot be maintained.

MANDELBAUM’S THIRD major thesis—his claim that the U.S. wars of regime change in the Middle East since the end of the Cold War have been motivated by idealism, not strategy—is no more persuasive than his vision of a generation of benign, mutually beneficial globalization made possible by the suppression of great-power competition under American hegemony. In his view, for two decades after the post–Cold War period “the goals of American foreign policy changed fundamentally. . . . The Cold War involved the defense of the West; post–Cold War foreign policy aspired to the political and ideological extension of the West.” Mandelbaum qualifies his bold claim almost immediately, by writing that the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations did not deliberately set out to replace a traditional U.S. foreign policy with one based on democratic transformation of foreign societies. He acknowledges other motives, or pretexts, for U.S. interventions: the protection of populations in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo; combatting terrorism in Afghanistan; and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nevertheless, according to Mandelbaum, “all three administrations ended in the same place”—namely, “efforts to transform the political institutions, the political practices, and the political values of China, Russia, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and the wider Arab world.”

Sometimes Mandelbaum cites the influence of domestic politics, as in the case of the Clinton administration’s decision to expand NATO. But most of the time, he takes the public rationales for post–Cold War U.S. interventions like humanitarian concerns at face value. But as Lyndon Johnson’s National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy said of the Vietcong attack on U.S. advisers in Pleiku, South Vietnam in 1965: “Pleikus are like streetcars”—that is, if you miss one public pretext for a policy, another one will appear shortly.

In his 1859 lecture on “Discoveries, Inventions and Improvements,” Abraham Lincoln, who had opposed the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–48) observed,

“[Young America] is a great friend of humanity, and his desire for land is not selfish, but merely an impulse to extend the area of freedom. He is very anxious to fight for the liberation of enslaved nations and colonies, provided, always, they have land, and have not any liking for his interference. As to those who have no land, and would be glad of help from any quarter, he considers they can afford to wait a few hundred years longer (original emphasis).”

Today one would substitute oil and gas reserves or ports and potential military bases for land.

Many foreign policies have multiple rationales, and the ones offered for public consumption may not be the most significant. In a 2003 interview with Sam Tanenhaus in Vanity Fair, Paul Wolfowitz said,

“The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but . . . there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there’s a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two.”

Other possible reasons, unmentioned by Wolfowitz, were the desirability of turning Iraq into a permanent U.S. ally hosting U.S. military bases, and the prospect of having U.S. allies in charge of Iraq’s oil production.

Mandelbaum also sees the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s as idealistic ones. “The two Balkan wars, however, unlike other conflicts, were waged explicitly and exclusively for moral purposes.” Explicitly, yes, but exclusively? In 1996, the same year in which Mandelbaum published “Foreign Policy as Social Work,” I published an essay, together with Jacob Heilbrunn, in the New York Times entitled “The Third American Empire.” It suggested that the United States would continue to expand its influence into Eastern Europe and the Greater Middle East:

“President Clinton is depicting his decision to send 20,000 troops into Bosnia as a natural outgrowth of America’s European alliance. But instead of seeing Bosnia as the eastern frontier of NATO, we should view the Balkans as the western frontier of America’s rapidly expanding sphere of influence in the Middle East. . . . The regions once ruled by the Ottoman Turks show signs of becoming the heart of a third American empire. . . . Since the Persian Gulf war, the United States, to the fury of Islamic militants, has expanded its permanent military presence in Saudi Arabia and the surrounding emirates—even establishing the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in the gulf. . . . The main purpose of NATO countries, for the foreseeable future, will be to serve as staging areas for American wars in the Balkans, the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.”

This classical realist explanation of U.S. geopolitical expansion into the Eastern European and Middle Eastern power vacuums opened up by the collapse of Soviet power may explain the events of the last quarter century better than Mandelbaum’s theory of American policymakers enjoying a holiday from historical necessity. The pretexts have varied, but the strategic result has tended to consolidate U.S. military power and influence in the formerly contested Greater Middle East, by, among other things, encouraging the replacement of anti-American regimes by pro-American clients or allies by means of elections, as in Egypt, or American-led wars, as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya.