The Case for American Power, Shadi Hamid, Simon & Schuster, 2025, pp. 256, $28 hardback, $14.99 ebook.
If Irving Kristol was a liberal who had been mugged by reality, Shadi Hamid is a progressive who has been mugged by foreign policy realism. While not quite a full-fledged realist, he has nevertheless written a profoundly conservative book in an incongruously progressive idiom. The Case for American Power is a robust response not just to progressive anti-Americanism but to conservative advocates of American “restraint.” It is therefore a book that conservatives can profit greatly from reading.
“The world needs American power,” Hamid begins, “it needs more of it—and it needs it now.” He continues: “the world needs American dominance, too.” (2) Why? Hamid’s central argument can be summed up in a line from the British satirical TV show Yes, Prime Minister: “If the right people don’t have power … the wrong people get it!”
Americans, argues Hamid, are the right people. Why? Not because they are angelically virtuous or never make mistakes. If men were angels, no global hegemon would be necessary. But because power is inevitable, and the alternatives to American power are all so much worse: the wretched despotism of China and Putin’s gangster state. This is an anti-utopian argument grounded in realistic pessimism: “the United States, for all its faults, is far preferable to the available alternatives.” (12)
Conservative “restraintists” like Tucker Carlson should reflect on this. A large and increasingly influential current on the American Right celebrates the decline of the global liberal international order. The most principled current in this restraintist faction focuses its critique on the liberal part of this order, connecting perceived American aggression—“forever wars” fought to turn Pashtun tribesmen into Washington Post-reading liberals—to the aggressive imposition of extreme liberalism at home under the progressive hegemony displaced, for a time at least, in 2024.
Thus, Philip Pilkington’s insightful recent book The Collapse of Global Liberalism argues that we are entering a “post-liberal world order.” Pilkington, an economist at the Hungarian Institute for International Affairs and host of the Multipolarity podcast, illustrates the logic of post-liberal restraintism by celebrating the ability of small nations to chart their own sovereign courses without the specter of liberal imperialism hovering over their shoulders. We might call this position—with no intended sarcasm—the “Budapest Option.”
Yet the irony of this perspective is that, like its domestic analogue the Benedict Option, its viability must be safeguarded by a larger liberal order on which it is parasitic. Just as internal exile to BenOp communities can only happen within the framework of a larger polity committed to some kind of classical liberalism, so, too, the Budapest Option must reckon with the question of small nations’ safety. Hungary spends less on its military than New York City spends on its police force. Who is to protect such countries (and the jobs of many restraintist exiles!) against the world’s many potential aggressors as they experiment—as they should—with social conservatism, pronatalism, and public religion? To ignore this question is to ignore the inevitable reality of power.
Hamid, a Muslim American of Arab descent, and a card-carrying (moderate) progressive, has had to overcome more sources of personal resistance to embracing American power than most of us. His book is thus filled with descriptions of his own emotional journey to his realist destination, a journey that “wasn’t easy, and … took a long time.” (18) Struggling with the progressive assumption that misuse of American power is the cause of many of the world’s problems, Hamid gradually came to realize that the solution to badly-used American power is for America to use its power better—and in doing so, to be more fully American.
Hamid begins with a clear-headed statement of the necessary truth that some global actor or other will wield power: “Power is a fact. Someone must wield it. The only question is who.” (3) While we can imagine a “multipolar” world with power dispersed between many nations, there is no reason, Hamid argues, to think this world would be less violent than our present one, and good reason to think the opposite. Since the American unipolar moment began in 1989, average annual battlefield deaths around the world have declined by over seventy percent. (10-11) The reason is simple: where one global power dominates, the rules of the game, however unfair in the eyes of some, are stable and predictable. Peace thrives on stability. While we can wish that this or that American policy were more effective or moral, Hamid reminds us that “morality is impossible without power.” (21) There’s no point having the right values if you lack the power to act on them.
Having established the basic premise—the inevitability of power—on which his argument depends, Hamid spends the rest of his book defending the claim that America is, on the whole, always going to use power more morally than its closest rivals. His first chapter, after a potted history of various thinkers’ reflections on the nature of power, culminates in a discussion of JFK’s identification of America’s unique “magic power.” (35) This “magic” derives from the fact that “America’s system of government is more closely aligned with human nature than the alternatives.” (36)
“Human nature” becomes the thread that unites Hamid’s various arguments. The “misalignment” of autocracy with human nature makes this regime type less stable than “democracy.” (53) It also makes its foreign policy predictably less moral. The occasional benign autocrat may come along from time to time, but autocracies lack any way of institutionalizing concern for morality. Our fallen nature being what it is, power will always tend to corrupt and to attract the already corrupt, so an autocratic state is always more likely to end up with a Putin than a Lee Kuan Yew. And once such a man is in power, the country is, short of revolutionary upheaval, stuck with him.
By contrast, democratic states have a mechanism to correct immoral decisions without regime change. Citing Tocqueville, Hamid identifies democracy’s “superabundant force” as the ability of citizens to expel leaders who betray their values. While democracies rarely produce “talented politicians who are loved by the people,” they are uniquely good at limiting the harm that the other kind can do. (95-6)
And America is not an ordinary democracy. For America, unlike most other democratic nations, is self-consciously committed to a democracy as a universal value. While France may make similar claims about the universalism of its republican brand of liberalism, it lacks the hard power to make good on them. (21) America is the only state with significant military might that also professes to believe in the universality of what Hamid calls “the only system of government aligned with our nature.” (96)
Conservatives should agree with Hamid about human nature. Hamid grounds his claim in references to “the worldview of the Abrahamic traditions” (174) and in a “natural law,” which affirm a “transcendent and divine” human capacity to freely choose virtue and avoid vice. (36) This same human nature, “designed and determined by God” (49), also gives rise to an ineradicable desire to “associate in decisions.” (96) These abbreviated remarks point to one of the central insights of American conservatism: man, made in God’s image, both desires liberty by nature and requires liberty to fulfil this nature—a liberty that is not the unbounded license to pursue self-destructive impulses but the precondition for the authentic and unforced choice of virtue.1
Nevertheless, we should take issue with Hamid’s fixation on “democracy” as the institutional form that protects this liberty. As Hamid himself points out, America’s founders did not intend to create a democracy but a constitutional republic. (75-77) And the best available evidence suggests that American policy decisions rarely track majority opinion, anyway.2
What really aligns with human nature is not living in a state that is governed by majority whim, but living in a society that accords individuals a measure of personal freedom and the right to question their governments. The reason America predictably makes more moral use of its power than any other hegemon is its commitment to the universal value of this freedom combined with its capacity to peacefully course-correct through responsive, republican institutions—not any supposed commitment to majoritarian “democracy.” This is the real case for American power.
There are two obvious objections to this thesis, both of which Hamid disposes of effectively. The first is the declinist argument that America no longer has the power to dominate the world; and the second is the progressive complaint that, whatever we might expect in theory, America has not, in practice, actually used its power more morally than its rivals, but has deployed the rhetoric of liberty as window-dressing for imperialism. The declinist thesis is unserious: America’s military lead over its nearest rivals is uncontestable.3 The real cause of so-called decline, Hamid points out, is moral exhaustion: the Western self-hatred that Roger Scruton called “oikophobia.” (62-4)
Hamid’s response to the hypocrisy objection is more intriguing. “Hypocrisy,” he writes, “is a necessary component of a moral life.” (146) Since real-world politics inevitably involves unpleasant trade-offs, hypocritical statements and behavior simply show that a country wishes it could be truer to its ideals. But “the real terror lies when the masks are gone”: we cannot call the foreign policy of autocrats like Putin hypocritical because they do not even claim to care about the values that America imperfectly tries to live up to. (152) Ultimately, to think that American hypocrisy undermines the goodness of its hegemony is to indulge a decadent and irresponsible delusion. Whom do we imagine would wield power better? The answer to America’s failures, then, is for America to be more fully itself: there are, after all, “few things more American than wishing and wanting America to be better.” (58) Hypocrisy is just the price we pay for caring about values in a corrupt and imperfect world.
Hamid shows us (and shows conservative “restraintists” most saliently) that the deepest roots of conservatism—the theistic anthropology and the Burkean insight into power’s inevitability—in fact ground the case for American dominance. We can rightly criticize the grand nation-building projects of liberal imperialism without forgetting America’s duty to contain China, Russia, and other evil regimes.
Conservatives will find the tone of Hamid’s book irritating. Tiresome cliches about “Trump and his allies” trying to “attack” American values abound. (5) Conservatives will also likely disagree with Hamid’s views on the present conflict in Gaza. But abstracting from these details, Hamid has vindicated the conservative philosophical case for American dominance. He has written elsewhere that his guiding values are “respecting democratic outcomes … and opposing mass slaughter.”4 There is nothing specifically “progressive” about either of these values, at least once we qualify “democracy” as really a stand-in for republican self-government.
The structure of Hamid’s basic argument—a philosophically conservative defense of a broadly liberal world order—is remarkably congruent with the worldview of early neoconservatives such as Kristol and Daniel Bell. To pretend we can embrace a “conservatism in one country,” while ignoring responsibilities to the world, is to abandon that world to permanent domination by revolutionary tyrants. Independent nations will not last long in a world without American dominance.
Hamid has, perhaps inadvertently, not only made the case for American power, but for a realistic American conservatism too. When a progressive is mugged by reality, it seems he stops being a progressive. Come on in, Shadi. The water’s fine.
Jacob Williams is an Oxford Ph.D. candidate in political theory, where he is researching the postliberal movement and its critique of the liberal regime. He has published academic work on religion, conservatism, and Western culture, and his commentary has appeared in First Things, The Imaginative Conservative, The Critic, and elsewhere. Williams appeared in AQ in summer of 2025 with “A War for the Soul of Germany,” a review of Multiculturalism and the Nation in Germany: A Study in Moral Conflict by Paul Carls.
1 Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1963).
2 Martin Gilens, Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014): 564–81.
3 Peter Robertson, “China’s Military Rise: Comparative Military Spending in China and the US.” CEPR, 2024, https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/chinas-military-rise-comparative-military-spending-china-and-us.
4 Shadi Hamid, Razib Khan, “10 Questions for Shadi Hamid,” Razib.com, 2017, https://www.razib.com/wordpress/2017/03/09/10-questions-for-shadi-hamid-2/.