Shadi Hamid is a columnist at The Washington Post and a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. Hamid’s new book is The Case for American Power.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Shadi Hamid explore why the world still needs America, how to improve U.S. foreign policy, and to what extent their views on the Iraq War have changed.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Shadi, you’re Muslim, you’re an Egyptian American, and you were in college during 9/11. For a long time, you were a critic and a skeptic of American power and American imperialism. Now, in the well-timed moment of Trump’s second presidency, you’ve decided to write a book defending the idea of American power. What made you change your mind? What is at the heart of the personal journey that took you from seeing American power and America’s influence in the world very critically to recognizing its moral shortcomings and limitations, but thinking that, in the wake of American power, if it declined, worse things would await us?
Shadi Hamid: I came of age post-9/11. I was a freshman in college when September 11th happened—two weeks into my time at Georgetown. I was living away from home for the first time and trying to figure out where I belonged. Like a lot of people in college, I found a lot of inspiration on the left side of the spectrum, and I was reading Noam Chomsky—he sort of became my foreign policy guru.
I think a lot of it had to do with that particular post-9/11 moment when it seemed like America was doing a lot of bad things in the world. The Iraq War, of course, is paramount there. I was very active in the anti-war movement—I was organizing teach-ins and die-ins on campus. A die-in is when you get a bunch of people to just lie on the ground as if they’re dead. It’s quite evocative and powerful. I was one of those guys who was outside the White House with signs. We even had a small tent encampment for the full duration of the war, making sure that one person was in the tent at any given moment.
That was before tent encampments were cool, though. Through all of that, I, like many others, saw America as a force for bad—a font of destruction and evil throughout the world, the kind of traditional socialist, pseudo–left-wing, anti-imperialist approach.
There was some truth to that. America did have a terrible record in places like Latin America during the Cold War. It still has a terrible record in the Middle East, and that’s something I’ve been outspoken about for a long time. We facilitated democratic transitions in other parts of the world after the end of the Cold War—except for the Middle East—and that continues to this day. I’m not here to whitewash America’s sins, and I don’t want people to perceive the book that way.
A large part of the book documents America’s sins in the Third World. It’s important to say that you can be a staunch patriot but also be very self-critical about what America has done. Oftentimes, those two seem to be mutually exclusive, but they shouldn’t be.
In terms of how I came to have a deeper respect for America’s role and the idea of American power, the Iraq War was also a key moment in that regard. We were organizing and protesting the war. There was actually a single day of protest when millions of people across the globe had a coordinated day of demonstrating, which was a very powerful day as I remember it.
Mounk: I don’t know whether you might be a year younger than me or a year older, but I think we’re about the same age. I was in college during the Iraq War too, and I was in the streets of London on what must have been that day, protesting with a few million people against the impending war.
Hamid: We thought people power would be enough. I became quite disillusioned after the war happened because I wanted to ask myself how it could have occurred if so many people were against it in major capitals throughout the world. One of the conclusions I reached was that there was something very different from people power.
On the other side, there was a small group of ideologically committed neoconservatives. They were able to capture the levers of power. They knew each other in grad school, they had an idea, and they were able to realize it by being in the government rather than on the outside looking in. I thought to myself that I didn’t want to be on the outside looking in. I didn’t want to feel powerless. I wanted to think of ways that American power could be used for good, because I started to see it as a fact.
American power was a reality. It was only a question of who was going to wield it. That remains true to this day. There is nothing intrinsically bad about American power. It is up to us to decide what America does in the world. We are still a democracy, however flawed. That is the great thing about democracies, and also the frightening thing about them: we get the government we deserve, and we also get the foreign policy we deserve. If we as Americans don’t like our foreign policy, then presumably we can do something about it.
Mounk: One of the interesting things here is the relationship that the left has to power, or what we in general should have to it. It is sometimes hard to know whether, when people dislike American power, it is because they dislike America or because they dislike power. I think there’s a little bit of the former, but a lot of it seems to me to be the latter. The reason why there are so many forms of anti-Americanism around the world is that America has been the most powerful country for the last century and more than that. When you have a lot of power, you often end up doing things that are rather troubling.
I think there’s a coherence to this. Journalists, for example, should in general be much more skeptical of people in power. I think one of the problems of contemporary journalism is that we’ve sometimes lost the instinct to ask tough questions of the “good guys.” This is where journalism has sometimes gone wrong. I think there’s actually something proud in the left-wing tradition of being genuinely mistrustful of power, of saying, if you have power, you’re probably interested in keeping it. You’re probably using it to extract rent. You’re probably corrupted by the power you have in various ways, which is also a core liberal insight. So we’re going to encounter you with a certain degree of skepticism.
You make the important point in the book that it would be a mistake, however, to think that in the absence of power the world would be better—that it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that a world without power would somehow be better for human rights or better for equality or better for those in the world who are weak, and that we are going to need some kind of power. That, I think, is the necessary premise for your conclusion that if we have to have some kind of power, perhaps American power is better than the realistically available alternatives.
Talk me through that argument. Why is it that you’ve grown comfortable with power—not in the sense that you hang out with the Trump confidants who are now colonizing the city in which you live, Washington, D.C., but in the sense that you think we need power, and so we better hope for it to be good.
Hamid: The first thing I’d say on your previous point is that it’s not that the left is mistrustful of all power, because parts of the left were sympathetic to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Soviet Union was one of our two superpowers in the world. It was exerting its power near its own borders and quite far away, and doing so in ways that were very unapologetic.
Yet we didn’t always see the kind of backlash from people who were leftist or social democratic when it came to the Soviet Union’s abuses. I don’t want to overgeneralize—I’m just talking about certain parts of the far left that are very indulgent of what other people do with their power.
Mounk: This is a complete side note, but it’s one of the things that frustrates me about the term democratic socialist, which I think actually has a very proud history. What it meant to be a democratic socialist in the days of Dissent and the New York intellectuals was to be on the left, to have a set of socialist economic commitments that I personally don’t share but that I think were honorable, and to be in the minority of the intellectual left—those people who were not making excuses for Joseph Stalin, those who were willing to see the corruption of Soviet power, and who took very courageous steps in proactively opposing those abuses of power.
They stood up when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary and Budapest in 1956, and when it invaded Czechoslovakia and Prague in 1968. One of the things that irks me about the way people nowadays talk about democratic socialism is when they assume that those two terms naturally go together—that the “democratic” is not a qualifier of “socialism,” but rather, “of course I’m democratic because I’m a socialist, I’m a socialist because I’m a democrat.” They get to call themselves democratic socialists even if they are shamefully silent about the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro, in the kind of way the original democratic socialists certainly would not have been silent about Joseph Stalin or figures like Nicolás Maduro.
Hamid: That’s been a key divide on the left for a long time. I think you see some of this divide even more recently when it comes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There was a significant part of the left that was a little too understanding of what Russia was doing and almost blamed the victim, as if the Ukrainians had invited this upon themselves.
There’s a strain that will always be there that actually sees American power as the problem. When so-called anti-imperialist powers use power, it’s considered acceptable because it’s against America. That’s one of the things I want to push back against. We have to be self-aware that this is what’s happening, and we have to be very careful, because there is a certain degree of self-loathing and self-hatred in some parts of the left.
The polling on this is quite clear. I was looking at it again this morning to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. According to Gallup, about 90% of Democrats in the early 2000s were either extremely or very proud to be American. By 2025, that number dropped to 36%. Only 36% of Democrats are extremely or very proud to be American. This isn’t just a left-wing issue—it’s a left-of-center problem we are facing in America, where we feel that we are, in some sense, bad, as though we are tainted by a moral stain that can never go away.
Mounk: I was struck by something like this—not at the level of popular opinion, but of high politics—at the meeting in Anchorage between Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan on the American side and the two top Chinese foreign policy officials. It was the first big meeting between U.S. and Chinese officials in the Biden administration. The Chinese delegation started off with an incredible broadside, attacking America in every way and listing all the bad and evil things that America had done.
I can understand that Blinken and Sullivan had organized and planned the meeting, and they were trying to get important things out of it. They didn’t want it to derail, so they had incentives to soft-pedal. But the response they gave was not an arousing defense of America—saying, yes, we’ve gotten things wrong, but on the whole our record is pretty decent, and it compares perfectly fine with the record of the PRC. Instead, the response was to say, yes, America is a deeply flawed place, and all of these things are wrong.
Those were even the main emphasis of what they were saying. We were still close to the peak “woke” era. At least we can criticize ourselves. I think the ability of democracy to criticize itself is important, and you talk about that in the book. That absolutely is one of the things that we should be proud of. But to reduce us just to that, in that kind of way, and in a confrontation with a regime that has done very impressive things internally—and that I think is sometimes caricatured in U.S. foreign policy discourse but certainly has committed its fair share of moral outrages—to basically grant the moral high ground and say, yes, you’re right, we’re terrible in all these ways, but at least we can criticize ourselves, was really a striking testament to that left-of-center, certainly far-left, mindset.
Hamid: It has polluted, I think, a lot of the Democratic Party. There’s a term I use in the book that was coined by the British philosopher Roger Scruton: oikophobia, which is the reverse of xenophobia. Xenophobia is the fear of what is strange or unfamiliar—the fear of what is foreign. Oikophobia is the fear of home and the fear of what is familiar to us.
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That fear of home, or fear of what is familiar, is actually something dangerous. It goes to the point that you can be self-critical without being self-loathing. To get to the other part of your question on coming to terms with power, for me—I’ll go into some controversial territory here—there were things George W. Bush did that made me realize the United States is capable of being better. Even if it has done bad things in the Middle East for sixty years or more, there was that brief moment—it was called the Arab Spring, the first Arab Spring, which is now largely forgotten—in 2004 and 2005, during the time of George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda.
For the first time in a long time, the United States was using its leverage and military aid packages with countries like Egypt, putting pressure on them to open up their political systems. When I saw that, I saw an alternative possibility—that we could actually use our power as leverage and push these autocratic allies to alter their behavior. That’s still what I think we should do with autocratic allies, or even democratic allies who have done awful things.
Israel during the Gaza war is an example. I think the answer to that is to use American power to pressure Israel to change its behavior—not to say we’re done with the Middle East, we’re out, and we’ll cut Israel off entirely and leave it to its own devices. There are many ways to think about power in that sense. Power is a reality, and someone has to wield it. The idea that if the United States removes itself from the arena things will somehow become better—as if there aren’t other competitive powers ready to fill the void—is naïve. Those competitive powers are autocrats, brutal to their own people. Why would we expect them not to be brutal to others outside their borders?
I’ve had to come to terms with this because there is no alternative to power. Power, as political scientists define it, is the ability of A to get B to do something they might not otherwise do. That’s real life. We’re always trying to get people to do things they might not want to do. Even in our personal lives, we try to persuade people. We try to use soft power, and that’s something I talk about in the book—it’s not just hard power we’re discussing. It’s also persuasion and soft power, but that can only be effective if you have an example to offer and if you’re proud of it.
Why should people follow our lead in terms of soft power if we are full of self-loathing and not even proud to be American?
Mounk: On power, I want to make two basic points. The first is one that really stands at the heart of the modern tradition of political thought and theory. It starts with the observation by Thomas Hobbes that if you have no form of power, even domestically, you won’t get the great harmony some might imagine—you’ll get fear.
In one slightly heterodox interpretation of Leviathan by Richard Tuck, what really motivates Hobbes is the desire to liberate us from fear. On his account, when you’re in the state of nature without any state power, everything is threatening. If your neighbor feels a little threatened—and everyone has reason to feel threatened—and they pick up a stick, you’ll see that as a potential attack. You’ll think, I’d better get a stick and attack them before they attack me, so they don’t come in the night and kill me.
The reason why life is famously “nasty, brutish, and short” in the state of nature for Hobbes is not that he thinks human beings have a bad nature or that there’s something wrong with our character. It’s that, in a situation without any form of coercive power, there’s a structural problem that inevitably leads to conflict.
You can easily scale that up globally and say that without some kind of power to impose rules and structure in the world, you’ll get terrible wars like the one in Ukraine, terrible civil wars like the one in Sudan, state failure, ethnic cleansing, and genocides like Rwanda, and so on.
The other point is that, realistically, we live in a world in which, if the United States completely retreats from a global role, we won’t get an absence of power. Someone else will fill that vacuum. The most likely candidates at the moment are Russia, China, and perhaps states like Iran. If you conduct a comparative analysis of which countries are likely to use power in a more constrained and reasonable way, you might conclude that American power is preferable to theirs. That leads to the next question: why do you think American power would actually fill that potential vacuum better than the countries that would rush in to fill it if America truly vacated it?
Hamid: I think part of it is that the way we use our power abroad is constrained by our democracy at home. For example, Americans concluded that they really didn’t like the Iraq War, and they started to vote accordingly. They voted for people who were more anti-war, namely people like Barack Obama. George W. Bush lost popularity and eventually had to shift course and rethink his Iraq strategy because he saw that domestic support was no longer as strong as it once was. Those are things that wouldn’t be possible elsewhere.
In China, if you’re a Chinese citizen, or in Russia, if you’re a Russian citizen, and you’re really angry at what your country is doing—whether it’s Taiwan or Ukraine—there are no levers you can pull. There are no avenues of redress you can use to persuade your leaders to change course. You have to rely on the will of the autocrat, and ultimately, it’s one person in these countries who makes the final decision on questions of statecraft.
That’s a frightening thought. Just ponder that for a moment—there is no way to change these policies of Russia and China toward Taiwan or Ukraine. We are able to change our own policies. It doesn’t mean we always will. That part is still up to us, and we have to organize, participate, and advocate. We have to be in the system. But we can try to persuade our leaders to change course on something we disagree about, and there are many examples of that happening.
The very election of Donald Trump twice shows that people were fed up with the old establishment elite and how they were conducting themselves in matters of economics and foreign policy. There was a bipartisan elite that people simply got tired of. The idea of a liberal world order that America was leading—Donald Trump came and said, I don’t care about that all that much. I’m going to have a more transactional approach to foreign policy. A growing number of Americans found that more appealing than the alternative.
We see many examples of how American foreign policy changes. It’s that ability to change that lies at the heart of what makes American power better and morally superior. There is something morally superior about democracy over autocracy. Maybe that’s an obvious thing to say, but when people hear me use words like “morally superior,” they sometimes get the ick about it.
We should feel that we’re morally superior. It’s our country. We believe our country was founded on a certain moral mission. There are things to be proud of—our commitment to certain inalienable rights, for example. Those are the things that make me more comfortable with the idea of American power. First, it’s my own country. Second, my own country stands on certain ideals that Russia and China do not, and never will.
Mounk: To play devil’s advocate here, one thing that people in Iraq or in other countries around the world might say is, I don’t care whether you could change your mind. I care about what you actually do. If your country ends up making decisions that are bad—using its tremendous power in the wrong way—then the fact that you could have chosen differently is cold comfort. In fact, perhaps it makes it worse. You could choose differently, but you don’t. You could vote for people who are not going to go on adventures in Iraq, but you do.
Perhaps you choose a candidate like George W. Bush in 2000, who sounded not exactly like an isolationist but like someone who wanted to focus more on domestic policy, be a compassionate conservative, and pursue big plans for educational reform. Maybe he wanted to privatize Social Security. He didn’t run on a promise to invade Iraq—and then he did.
People either vote for the wrong kind of candidates or vote for candidates under false pretenses. But either way, if I’m sitting in Iraq in 2003, isn’t it a little cold comfort that America, in theory, could have done something different?
Hamid: It is cold comfort on one level, but it’s also true that when people across the globe are struggling for their freedom or trying to defeat an occupation or end autocratic rule, they appeal to America. They ask, if only America could step in and help our situation. They’re not saying, China, Russia, where are you? Come and save us. They almost never say that.
During the Syrian uprising from 2011 onward, this was a recurrent theme of the Syrian opposition: America, where are you? We believe in you. We think that you can be better. We think that you can actually intervene now and stop our mass slaughter. I remember that during the Arab Spring in Egypt, in Tahrir Square, people were holding on to Obama’s every word because they understood that if Obama withdrew some support from Mubarak, the dictator, it would actually facilitate a transition—and ultimately it did.
Obama didn’t continue supporting democracy in Egypt—that’s a long story on its own—but there are key moments where you see people calling on America’s better angels, even more so than we do sometimes. It’s almost as if they believe in us more than we believe in ourselves. You’re right that we don’t always meet those expectations, but there is something powerful about the fact that we can and that we should.
America has also done good things, including more recently. In the first Gulf War, we ended the occupation of Kuwait. We ended the Bosnian genocide. We intervened too late, but still, at the end of the day, America was the only power that could stop what was happening to the Bosnian people. We again stopped ethnic cleansing that was taking place in Kosovo in subsequent years.
I’m one of the few people who still believes that the intervention in Libya was the right thing because there was an imminent mass slaughter, and we had the opportunity to stop it. It was the right thing to do. For all of its civil conflict and the fact that it’s doing badly in many ways, Libya is still preferable to what it would have been under the totalitarian autocracy of someone like Gaddafi.
We have to be more nuanced in how we look at the uses of American power. We also have to look at the times America didn’t use its power and how that didn’t lead to better results. In Syria, for example, I was a staunch supporter of military intervention against the Assad regime. Obama did not intervene, and we saw hundreds of thousands of people killed. Could it have been different if America had used its military force to stop the killing, or at least reduce it?
There are many examples where we don’t have to go back to World War II or distant history. America has done good things abroad, even somewhat more recently.
Mounk: When it comes to the Middle East, what do you think are the lessons for American power? We can rerun the last twenty years and see that America has tried nearly every type of approach. It has tried very robust intervention in Iraq, non-intervention in Syria, and semi-intervention in Libya.
While some of those conflicts ended up being less disastrous than others, the outcome wasn’t particularly positive in any of them. Your point is well taken that if America simply left that power vacuum to others, things would probably go badly in other ways. Syria is, in large part, an example of that.
Hamid: Russian intervention in 2015 is the perfect example of what happens when America cedes ground.
Mounk: One point is to say, I’d rather have America hold power than Russia or China, and I broadly agree with that. But what does that mean for what America should actually do with its power?
Hamid: I might disagree a bit that we’ve tried everything. As you know from my previous book, The Problem of Democracy—which I came on the pod to discuss—I don’t believe we’ve ever fully tried the pro-democracy approach in the Middle East. We did for very brief moments in 2004 and 2005, for about a year or a year and a half, and then again briefly during the Arab Spring before we decided that democracy was chaotic and we didn’t want to deal with it. We went back to the old dictators.
I think we haven’t stayed with it long enough to see whether democracy could provide a better path in the Middle East. Some might say, Shadi, you’re not being realistic. The U.S. isn’t going to be able to stick with it if there’s all this chaos and uncertainty. Maybe, maybe not. But I do believe there was an alternative—a kind of counterfactual history during the Arab Spring. There were key decision points when the Obama administration could have acted quite differently, and they could have done so realistically.
Mounk: You’re thinking, for example, of the Muslim Brotherhood–led government in Egypt after Tahrir Square. What are some examples of where the United States could have put more trust in democracy in the Middle-East?
Hamid: To have not greenlit the coup that happened in 2013 against the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood–led government. The United States was more involved in that than initial reports suggested. That’s one of the things I’ve focused on in my own work, research, and interviews with people who were with Obama and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel at key moments in the same room. The United States did more than just turn a blind eye. I believe the United States made the coup possible and could have stopped it.
That’s just one example. We have consistently undermined democratization in the Middle East in other cases as well. Jordan is another that comes to mind. Algeria is another where we didn’t play a great role in the 1990s. Generally speaking, America has claimed to want democracy in the Middle East, but then we say, if this is what democracy looks like in practice, maybe we don’t want it.
My argument has always been that democracy is messy sometimes. The idea that we can get from democratization to perfect democracy overnight is unrealistic. We have to acknowledge that there are going to be growing pains. But Americans get impatient so quickly. When something isn’t working well, they say, okay, let’s just go back to the way we were doing it before. But that hasn’t worked either.
The focus on allied dictators and depending on them has led to instability for decades. At some point, we have to admit that we’ve been trying that approach for most of the last eight decades, and the Middle East is not exactly what we would call a font of stability and predictability. I think we can all agree the Middle East has been, and still is, a mess in any number of ways.
My argument is that we still have to try something else. We haven’t tried the democracy option fully. It’s risky, yes, but you have to take risks sometimes if you want to put forward a bold policy.
Mounk: My hunch is that there are going to be two types of critics of this book. One we’ve talked about explicitly and implicitly so far—left-wing critics, progressive critics who say, are you out of your mind? Look at what America has done around the world. How can you possibly want to preserve or enlarge American power? American power is dangerous and evil in all of these ways.
Another kind of critic might be a more hard-nosed international relations scholar, or perhaps even a right-of-center critic, who says, well, this all sounds very nice, but in reality, American power is declining, and America is on the down and down, while China is on the up and up. So while this is a nice kind of lament for how good American power was around the world and how sad it will be when it’s gone, that seems like an inevitable conclusion. That’s just the way things are going.
I know that you’re skeptical of that argument—that you think we’ve overstated the extent of American decline and perhaps overstated the extent of China’s rise. Explain why you think that.
Hamid: There’s a whole chapter I’ve written titled Decline because I really wanted to examine how Americans view their own decline. What I found—and it won’t surprise a lot of people—is that every generation seems obsessed with the idea of decline. From the end of World War II onward, each generation has had its own story of American weakness: that we’re being eclipsed by the Soviet Union, that communism is the new future, that America is entering a deep malaise.
If we were living in the 1970s, we’d probably be having a similar conversation. You’d be asking me, isn’t it too late for America? Look at the post-Vietnam years. Look how badly we’re doing. We’re on the decline. Others are on the rise. We have to be very careful about that bias—the tendency to see the worst in our own experience.
This goes back to a kind of self-loathing. Sometimes it’s framed as self-criticism, which is a great thing about us, but I don’t think it’s as common in other countries. People there aren’t sitting around—well, I was going to say in smoke-filled rooms, but it’s not like that anymore—still, they’re not sitting in salons talking about how lousy their own country is. It’s a bit of a uniquely American, or perhaps European, thing.
Being aware of the history of this idea of decline helps because it reminds us that this isn’t new. Some people say, this time is different, but how do we really know that? I think China’s rise has been wildly overstated—wildly. I lay out a case for why I think that, if you look at the economic data and other metrics in various ways.
Mounk: Take us inside that case a little bit, because that is the key question here. When we’re talking about American decline, I’m inclined to agree with you. One of the striking things that I’ve discussed on the podcast with Larry Summers, Martin Wolf, and others is that America has barely lost any share of global GDP over the last thirty years, whereas Europe’s share has gone down significantly. When you look at many of the technologies of the future, there is real competition from China, but artificial intelligence remains very strong in the United States. The American stock market still makes up around 60 to 65 percent of the world’s total market capitalization. The strength of the American economy is astonishing.
Despite understandable complaints about inequality in America and stagnating living standards for the non–college-educated and lower middle class, America remains a vastly affluent country. I feel the difference in affluence between America and Europe very strongly when I’m in either place. Certainly, the idea that the life of the average Chinese person is somehow superior in material terms to that of the average American is absurd.
I agree that there is a lot of complaining and foretelling of American decline, which may one day turn out to be true, but certainly isn’t true yet. At the same time, I’ve been spending some time in China, trying to understand the country better. I’ve written a series of articles on my Substack about both China’s weaknesses—which are very real—and its strengths. It’s astonishing how superior China is to America in its ability to build infrastructure, high-speed trains, and highways, and to bring online massive amounts of electricity, which will be key in the AI arms race.
While China may be weaker on GPT-style artificial intelligence—DeepSeek, while impressive, lags behind OpenAI and is probably behind Anthropic and xAI as well—it is very strong on embodied AI, robotics, and drones. It leads in several areas that may turn out to be more consequential, even within the world of artificial intelligence.
I was at a conference on AI at Harvard in September, surrounded by people far more expert in the field than I was. When the audience was asked whether the U.S. or China was ahead on AI, the room was roughly evenly split, and a few more hands went up for China. These were American tech experts saying this, which is striking. Among all the doomers in America, I don’t think the people most deeply involved in developing artificial intelligence are the most doomerist of all. So tell me your argument about why you think China does not look as though it’s about to rival or eclipse American power.
Hamid: The first thing I want to emphasize is just how massively well the United States has done economically. You touched on it, but to actually look at the numbers: we were at around 14 trillion in GDP around the time of the Great Recession. We’ve almost doubled since then—we’re now at around 28 to 30 trillion, depending on exactly how you measure it. That’s remarkable, especially when Europe has stayed stagnant around the 14 to 15 trillion mark. The U.S. doubled its economy. I think Americans don’t know these basic things about their own country.
On China, one of the main cases I look at is how it dealt with COVID. This might seem like the obvious example, but it’s also the most important one because it shows what happens when a single leader—Xi Jinping—has an obsessive, personal view of what fighting COVID should look like. As a result, China’s economy ground to a halt because there was no way to challenge or change the leader’s view. There were no other inputs into the system that could question his decision-making. The policy was so tied to his personality and even his cult of personality that reversing course would have been a direct rebuke of him.
That was an example of how China could not easily self-correct. But you’re right that China’s strengths are also obvious. China can build things very quickly. I remember those memes showing time-lapse footage of how China was able to build a hospital in seven days—these “insta-hospitals” that came up during COVID. I’m not pretending that autocracies are bad at everything. They are better at some things. They can build better, faster and easier because they don’t have to deal with a parliament, opposition parties, or dissenting voices.
When there’s no opposition, the government can simply decide what the policy is and implement it. That can seem very appealing, but it’s also dangerous. Without any institutional “speed bumps,” everything depends on the wisdom of the leader. If the leader is wise and makes the right choices, you’re in a good position and can ride it out. But what we know about human beings is that they all have flaws. They all lose their way and make mistakes. The problem with autocratic regimes is that when they make mistakes, you’re kind of effed.
Mounk: One way of thinking about the different scenarios here is that the very pessimistic one is that America is about to decline and disintegrate in a way that’s truly different from its previous history. We shouldn’t exclude that possibility. There have been all kinds of empires and great states that held enormous power for centuries or even millennia and then came apart at the seams. It was true for eighty years for the Soviet Union. It was true for centuries for the Holy Roman Empire. It was true for a thousand years for the Ottoman Empire. It was true for some five hundred to two thousand years for the Roman Republic and then the Roman Empire.
So we must recognize conceptually that, despite American power having proven resilient for 250 years, there will probably come a moment when it declines. But I agree with you that I don’t see the signs of an impending collapse of American power like that. It would be a very significant change from the trend of the last two centuries. I think at some point in history that likely will happen, but it’s not clear why we should think it’s about to happen next year. It might—but it’s not obvious why we should assume that.
There’s a different kind of reversal, though. The post-1989 moment, in which the United States really was a unipolar power unrivaled by any other country in its influence on the world, was itself extraordinary. During the nineteenth century, the United States shared power with Britain and other influential nations. During the second half of the twentieth century, it shared power with the Soviet Union—a dysfunctional place in many ways, but one that, while smaller and more dysfunctional than China today, still rivaled the United States.
So why shouldn’t we think that this extraordinary unipolar moment is about to give way? Even if the United States isn’t about to enter the kind of decline that the true pessimists imagine, the exceptional unipolar moment that both you and I grew up with may be ending. That wouldn’t require any dramatic reversal of trends. It could simply be seen as a return to normality after the strange aberration of the post-1989 decades.
Hamid: It’s helpful to look at, as you mentioned, Yascha, the longevity of other empires. The United States has only had unparalleled dominance for about thirty-five years. If that ends up being all we have in the broader sweep of history, we would be one of the most short-lived dominant empires in human history. Usually, really successful empires have a longer shelf life. So this idea that we only had thirty-five years where we could truly say, hey, we were the best, is very short-sighted when you look at it from a broader perspective.
The other thing I’d say—and this is at the heart of my argument—is that, while others have made the case that China’s rise is overstated, what I offer that may be a little different is an argument that China’s system, and by extension other autocratic systems, are fundamentally misaligned with human nature. Because they are fundamentally misaligned with human nature, they cannot sustain themselves over the long durée. At some point, you start to see the internal contradictions, because God created us a certain way, and these regimes completely disregard that. They treat people as subjects—mere subjects to be dominated.
Mounk: That sounds to me like a version of the argument my esteemed colleague Francis Fukuyama famously made in The End of History.
Hamid: Yeah, there are certainly others who have made that argument—sure, that democracies are better aligned with the realities of human nature. I think this is something that presidents have also talked about. JFK, for instance, gave a particular speech where he discussed this in a really powerful way. He talked about the “magic power.” It’s a bit clunky and corny, but he said the magic power that is on our side is the desire of every human being to be free.
He said, “It is because I believe our system is more in keeping with the fundamentals of human nature that I believe we are ultimately going to be successful.”
That idea is really core to the American project—that because we’re a democracy, we are fundamentally aligned with human nature. It actually means something in policy terms; it’s not just a nice sentiment. Governments that are more aligned with their people and with human nature will last longer than governments that are not aligned with human nature and with their citizens’ desire to be free.
Of course, this hinges on whether you agree with my premise about human nature. It also depends on whether you think Chinese people, at some level, have a deeper desire for autonomy and agency over their own lives. Reasonable people can disagree on that point. Yascha, I’m sure you have a view on that based on your travels to China.
I would note that when Westerners went to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the common line was that the Soviet people seemed to be doing pretty well—they seemed happy, their basic needs were met, they had health care. There was a tendency not to see what was happening underneath. It’s very hard for any foreigner—or even for Chinese citizens themselves—to truly know what their fellow citizens believe in their deepest hearts.
It turned out that people’s commitment to the communist system in the Soviet Union was skin-deep. It wasn’t something deeply held. So it’s possible we might see something similar in the Chinese case. But I’d be curious what you think.
Mounk: I’ve thought a lot about this, and I’m certainly not a China expert either. From the time I’ve spent there, my impression is that this is clearly the best period in Chinese history in a very long time. That’s largely because the last five centuries of Chinese history have, by and large, been very difficult. There was the declining Ming dynasty, then a brief period under the Qing dynasty when things looked up and became more organized, followed by a long decline of the Qing dynasty. After that came the incredibly chaotic Chinese Republic, which was basically a series of warlords fighting one another. Then came the disaster of early communist rule, with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
China was a society that had been incredibly poor for many centuries and is now going through a very rapid period of economic growth. On the international stage, China was humiliated for centuries—particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but to some extent before that as well. So, of course, many Chinese people look at how much more affluent they are than their parents or grandparents, and at the increased standing of China in the world, and think something seems to be working. They feel grateful to the system that has delivered that.
At the same time, many people are skeptical about the realities of life in China. They know there is a great deal of corruption. They know they are cogs in a machine that is unforgiving and doesn’t truly care about their well-being. Many are critical, even openly critical, of the current leader. There isn’t a deep love for the system. If it stopped delivering for them, I think people could, within the limits of a dictatorial system, become quite vocal about that.
More broadly, life has clearly become better for people in China, as it tends to for societies going through an economic growth spurt. The same was true under the South Korean dictatorship and later its democracy, as it was in Taiwan when the country emerged from deep poverty, and to a lesser extent in India, which is still far behind China but experiencing some positive economic developments.
Hamid: You said something very important, Yascha—you said if it stops delivering. This is the key point. The Chinese system, and other autocratic systems, depend on what’s called performance legitimacy. In other words, they are legitimate only insofar as they deliver material goods to their own people. Our system, and democratic systems more broadly, do not depend—or at least do not depend as much—on performance legitimacy. Their legitimacy is tied to the consent of the governed. There’s a deeper legitimacy there.
Even if our government isn’t building things or delivering a lot of visible material progress, it doesn’t mean the whole system will fall apart, because the system is based on a deeper set of contracts and understandings between rulers and those who are ruled. That’s a strong advantage we have: we’re not falling into what might be called the affluence trap that countries like China might face.
When a country becomes more affluent and successful, people’s expectations rise—they always want you to keep delivering. But can you always deliver at the same level? Sooner or later, an economic growth spurt starts to plateau, level off, or even decline slightly. What happens then? There are already signs that some of that may be happening. That’s the real challenge for a government like China’s.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Shadi discuss the Iraq War and how they feel about it today, and American power in the age of Donald Trump. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
