So far, U.S. policy on Ukraine has been pragmatic and arguably restrained. But President Joe Biden and his team routinely talk about the war in ways that suggest an outmoded, moralistic, and recklessly grandiose vision of American power. Aligning his administration’s rhetorical posture with a sober assessment of the true stakes involved in Ukraine might allow Biden to wean the establishment from its obsession with hegemony. Demonstrating that Americans do not need their country’s role in the world explained to them in the style of a children’s bedtime story would be a bonus.

The victory in World War II bestowed a new sense of purpose on U.S. policy, which was subsequently codified in NSC-68. But it also imposed a straitjacket. As the scholar David Bromwich has recently written, “The Second World War is the picture that has held us captive.” In important respects, the story of U.S. national security policy over the past seven
decades centers on an effort to preserve and update that picture. The overarching aim has been to engineer another such victory, thereby delivering security, prosperity, deference, and privilege—or, more broadly, a world run on American terms, a dominance justified by a self-assigned mission to spread freedom and democracy.

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Behind a mind-set that invites the burden of policing a rules-based global order is a conventional assumption: War, though tragic, is a boon for economic vitality and patriotic vigor. This assumption is at best outmoded. The economy is no longer fueled by wartime industries in the same way. When wars are fought by a smaller corps of volunteers and financed by borrowing from financial institutions and foreign governments more than taxes and war bonds, a public spirit of common cause hasn’t materialized. In fact, America’s most recent military misadventures contributed to the steady accumulation of more than $30 trillion in debt — now being weaponized by partisans in Congress for political gain.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, Elliott Abrams, who led Middle East policy in the Bush administration and Iran and Venezuela policy in the Trump administration, insisted that the United States should seize the “new Cold War” opportunity to foster bipartisan consensus.