Dilemmas and Pathways of Liberal International Order - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 224

renew America's commitment to a multilateral, rule-based system. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton has also emphasized the need to return to the liberal hegemonic logic of fostering
collective action and partnerships for problem solving. “We will lead by inducing greater co-
operation among a greater number of actors and reducing competition,” Clinton argued in her
first major speech, “tilting the balance away from a multi-polar world and toward a multi-
partner world.” 64 These are indications of a recognition within the American foreign policy
community that the United States moved dangerously off course in the recent past, leaving
the country in a weakened position to pursue its interests.
Finally, a return to a pre-Bush era foreign policy of strategic restraint and multilateral
commitments is further reinforced by new assessments of the trajectory of American power.
The Bush administration's strategic unilateralism was premised on a very optimistic view of
American power. It appears to have calculated that the United States had the unipolar cap-
abilities to go it alone and to cover the costs associated with lost authority and legitimacy.
As one top advisor to President Bush is famously reported to have remarked to a journalist,
“We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” 65 In retrospect, it is
clear that this assessment of American power was simply not accurate. The Obama adminis-
tration does not need to be declinist to make more modest assessments of power and costs.
Even if a return to multipolarity is a distant and slowly emerging future possibility, calcu-
lations about the relative decline of American power reintroduce the importance of making
investments today for later decades when the United States is less preeminent. For these reas-
ons, incentives exist—and are perhaps growing—for the United States to rebuild and expand
the rules and institutions through which it exercises power and pursues its interests. 66
Political Identity and the Rule of Law
A final source of American support for open, rule-based order is from the polity itself. The
United States has a distinctive self-understanding of its own political order. This has implic-
ations for how its leaders and citizens think about international political order. To be sure,
there are multiple political traditions in the United States that reflect divergent and often com-
peting ideas about how the United States should relate to the rest of the world. 67 These tra-
ditions variously counsel isolationism and activism, realism and idealism, aloofness and en-
gagement in the conduct of American foreign affairs. But behind these political-intellectual
traditions are deeper aspects of the American political identity that inform the way the Un-
ited States seeks to build order in the larger global system. The Enlightenment origins of the
American founding have given the United States an identity that sees its principles of politics
as having universal significance and scope. 68 The republican democratic tradition that en-
shrines the rule of law reflects an enduring American view that polities—domestic or interna-
tional—are best organized around rules and principles of order. America's tradition of civil