Power Is a Privilege, Not a Burden
To really put America first, the United States must build partnerships and cooperation.
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In 1941, the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt fled totalitarianism in Europe for New York City. Her transatlantic escape propelled a lifelong inquiry into the nature of political power—a line of inquiry that offers incisive lessons for America today.
Arendt made a sharp distinction between violence, strength, force, and power. Violence is coercion. Strength belongs to an individual. Force is animalistic. But power, she argued, arises when people organically act in concert toward a common goal. It’s not imposed—this action is generated through consent, legitimacy, partnership, and trust.
And so, from Arendt’s analysis, we can determine that America’s comparative advantage in international relations does not lie in its ability to wage unprecedented violence or act unilaterally (though we have those options at our disposal). Rather, this power is derived from the United States’ ability to construct alliances, institutions, and norms that others willingly join—not out of fear, but because they seek mutual benefit. The postwar world America built was far from perfect, but it offered predictability, relative prosperity, and a peace that was genuinely new in the international system.
That system, now under deliberate erosion, was not a charity project. It was a strategic architecture that served U.S. interests—and still does. This architecture upheld and reinforced U.S. power while delivering untold benefits to the United States. The Trump Doctrine of unbridled unilateralism dismisses institutions and allies as liabilities, and treats diplomacy as weakness and rules as obstacles. Short-term gain is valued more than long-term stability.
By bemoaning America’s global leadership, sprawling alliance systems, development organizations, free trade agreements, and international organizations—and instead pursuing economic frugality and cost-cutting—the current administration does not factor in the astronomical cost of insecurity, recession, and renewed autocratic territorial expansionism. Too often, critics of the postwar order revert to stale critiques of “globalism” or idealistic overreach to critique America’s accumulated power. But this ignores cold strategic logic. Building international systems has made America richer, safer, and more powerful. America’s role as global rule-setter isn’t a burden; it’s a privilege that pays dividends. Being the country others work with gives us leverage that bombs never will. This is the root of American power and the cost of instability.
When the United States persuaded others to follow international law, join alliances, rely on the dollar as the global reserve currency, or sign on to global institutions, it wasn’t surrendering sovereignty or being ripped off. It was shaping the world in line with America’s vision—one that aimed to be more peaceful and prosperous than what came before.
Contrast that with countries like Russia, which rely on brute force to control outcomes. If Moscow wants to influence its neighbors, it rolls in with tanks and violence. Its alliance system is brittle, and it has few international partners. That’s not power in Arendt’s sense—it’s insecurity masquerading as strength. America, in its better moments, showed another path: one where power rests not on the ability to destroy, but on the capacity to build.
Undermining the institutions that enforced peace and legitimized American power doesn’t lead to stability; it opens the door to renewed conflict. When it squeezes allies for marginal trade concessions or defunds and undercuts international bodies, America signals that the rules it so painstakingly built to avoid conflict no longer apply. The consequence of this abdication of responsibility is that power reverts to force—and force is always more expensive.
America has broken its own rules, often in damaging ways. Yet America also ballasted a world where disagreements were more often mediated by lawyers, diplomats, and bureaucrats than by tanks. Rather than assessing national interest in the narrowest possible terms, America built a world where it benefited alongside others. Stability was engineered not only by American force, but by expectations that power would be held to account, predictably, through law and shared investment.
One of the flawed assumptions made by those who believe America is safer without international cooperation is the belief that war will always be someone else’s problem. In the 21st century, the proliferation of conflict will not follow neat geographic logic. Arendt, along with fellow post-war practitioners like Zbigniew Brzezinski, understood that war is not a relic of the past, nor necessarily relegated to faraway lands. To deal with conflict, one must systematically strengthen the political, economic, social, and military levers that prevent erosion of rules and intuitions. The thinkers of the past were shaped by the collapse and total war of their own societies and by the memories of rubble and authoritarianism. That memory shaped a generation of American leadership that viewed international cooperation not as idealism, but as an insurance against the worst of humanity.
War costs more than peace. Investing in this peace means investing in the capabilities to prevent war like a credible deterrence posture, robust diplomacy, economic partnerships, and political stability. When America eliminates some of these tools, or treats them as charity, we ignore their true return: fewer wars, fewer crises, and a world that still wants to work with the United States.
And yet, today, some leaders celebrate the dismantling of these structures as an overdue correction. In reality, the more we inhibit our cooperative nature, the more we invite a return to a fragmented world of power struggles. In this world, America will be less powerful.
America put itself first by building systems others wanted to join. That system is not self-sustaining. It requires maintenance, revision, clarity, and leadership grounded not in grievance, but in long-term strategy. Power, as Arendt reminded us, exists only as long as people believe in it and act together to sustain it. If America wants to remain powerful, it must remember the true sources of its strength: cooperation and partnership.
Zak Schneider was a Young Global Professional in the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative, and is currently based in Warsaw, Poland, at an intergovernmental organization. He is also a Policy Fellow at the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, and an M.A. candidate at Georgetown University in Government and International Security.
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It hardly takes a philosopher to see the sheer common sense of this take on Trump’s utter lack of same.