This is obviously a good question but, forgive me, but I’m going to do what historians like to do. There’s a joke that their response to any question is to say: well, it started earlier, and it was more complicated. I’d like to do that right here because I think it’s important to understand the trajectory of US-European relations.

When George Washington gave his farewell address in 1796, which, interestingly enough, was actually not an address but a printed letter, he warned against what historians have termed foreign entanglements. But what Washington was really warning about was getting politically and militarily involved in the old world. So although the US, early on in its history, had an alliance with France, noninterference was the norm until World War I, which you’ll remember, the United States joined as an associated power, not a formal ally, and obviously changed totally in World War II, where the United States, for a variety of complex reasons, decided to pursue a strategy of what people have now termed primacy, that is, global military and economic hegemony. Europe has been very crucial to that project of American global hegemony.

Yes, one can even imagine the North Atlantic world as a single polity, in the sense that it has — or imagines itself as having — a shared cultural heritage. These are, after all, the major colonial powers. They’ve been working against each other, but also to some degree against the Global South, for five hundred or so years.

American foreign policy thinkers determined in the postwar era that the United States needed control and/or influence over major industrial bases around the world. Obviously, that included those in the United States itself, but also in Central and Western Europe and Japan. This was the essential geostrategy of US hegemony, that you needed to control these industrial bases that would give you security and ensure prosperity.

World War II was a demonstration of what happens when the US did not act as a hegemon. Obviously, there are precedents for US involvement on the continent going as far back as the 1920s. The Dawes Plan, the Young Plan, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, were all multilateral agreements set up to prevent the reemergence of war in Europe. But none of this compared to the level of US military and political involvement after World War II.

So this is a gigantic transformation in US foreign policy in the postwar era, really an epochal transformation. The United States wanted to do two things. It wanted to ensure that the Soviet Union didn’t invade Western Europe because the Soviets just had many more troops on the ground, they needed to develop nuclear weapons, and they basically needed to enfold Britain, France, and what was becoming West Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany, into a Western alliance.

The major countries of Western Europe, of course, have long, proud martial traditions, but it’s the United States that really comes in there under the guise of NATO to quote-unquote guarantee European security. Lord Ismay, the first general secretary of NATO, famously described the organization’s aims as threefold: keeping the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Soviets out, and these essentially remained its objectives throughout the duration of the Cold War.

This state of affairs has been good for Western Europe in the sense that whereas previously a lot of their economic activity had been geared toward arms races — Britain and Germany’s naval arms race in the late nineteenth century up until the World War I is a prime example — Europe was able to refocus resources, particularly in France and West Germany, and also in Britain, to some degree, toward social welfare programs.

Yeah. I mean, I think the right-realist and the Atlanticist story are both correct. Fundamentally, the American national security state is a quote-unquote liberal project, and its pursuit of hegemony is understood in those terms. The hegemony the US has sought to pursue essentially under every president until Donald Trump has been motivated by a desire to create a more progressive world order, or a more humane world order. And the argument advanced by defenders of liberal hegemony was that World War II demonstrated that could only be done on the basis of security protection from the United States to ensure the continued existence of the global capitalist order.

If you’re a Western European leader and the United States is going to guarantee your security, why wouldn’t you divert resources to social welfare? And then there’s also the ideological project of what you just referred to as the Atlanticist. These are people who believe, genuinely believe, that global security, a liberal global world order that is stable and prosperous depends, effectively, on US military and economic primacy. The national security state, the American empire, is a liberal empire, which is one of the reasons that Trump is so strongly opposed to it. What he is doing is returning to an almost nineteenth-century vision of great power politics. Tariffs and threats of territorial acquisition appear so strange and bothers so many liberals because they are forms of geopolitics ruled out by liberal internationalism. They are the stuff of the pre–World War II era.

Multilateralism is part and parcel of liberal rationalism. This is part of the twentieth-century progressive ideology about the way to end wars: bring all the states together because doing so will allow them to rationally exchange ideas and come to shared agreements. In practice, this international consensus politics morphs over the first half of the twentieth century into a form of liberal American imperialism that really gets going with Woodrow Wilson, is continued with [Franklin D. Roosevelt], and is then institutionalized by Harry Truman in the late 1940s.

When you just look at what someone like Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was saying, or Secretary of State Antony Blinken was saying in public, they literally just say, we thought Kiev was going to be overrun within weeks. When it wasn’t overrun and the Ukrainians mounted a defense, we realized that we could just give them weapons in order to bog down Russia, basically for as long as the Ukrainians are able to keep on fighting. So it’s literally just using Ukraine as a chess piece in a great power politics chess game. That’s literally it.

USAID is a Kennedy-era program and the way to think about it is as part of this broader project that stretched, roughly, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. This was the great moment of institution building in American national security policy, and USAID, the Peace Corps, and the International Development Association were all part of this. They were essentially instituted by Kennedy — the Cold War liberal president par excellence — in order to undergird the security guarantees of NATO with an economic promise of development and modernization. And, of course, development and modernization become particularly crucial when it comes to the US’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

Essentially, USAID is sort of the smiling face of American imperial dominance. And I want to emphasize this isn’t to say that USAID has never done positive work. It absolutely has. But it needs to be seen as part of this larger imperial structure, because that’s just what it is.

I have a philosophical position on this issue, and people that disagree with it will likely be unconvinced by my defense of it. But I think, generally speaking, we are more likely to get a just and humane world if countries and regions are allowed to work out for themselves what type of international ordering arrangement they desire to have. This is not to say that power doesn’t matter. Clearly, for example, in East Asia, China is going to be the most influential power shaping what happens in that region. But I still think philosophically, it’s actually better for regional powers to shape regional orders than it is for the United States to travel thousands of miles away and try to shape the affairs of countries along American lines.

The desire to shape something thousands of miles away is doomed to fail. Geography can’t be ignored. So, for example, I think the United States is eventually going to be forced to leave its hegemonic position in East Asia. Ideally, that happens peacefully and without war, but if we don’t plan for it, there’s a good chance that that could result in an actual war between the US and China. So the alternative to me — and I know not everyone on the Left agrees — is to oppose empire in all of its forms and to force the United States to restrain itself.

This means that America should close down the hundreds of military bases it has around the world. It needs to allow other currency regimes to emerge. It needs to stop sending weapons abroad. So my fundamental position is that regional powers, regional states, should determine their future, that the United States can’t do it, and, moreover, that you are simply never going to get the good parts of the empire without the bad parts of the empire. They go together.

So for those two reasons, I think the left-wing anti-imperialist position should demand that, over time, the United States draws down its empire. Now, it shouldn’t do that willy-nilly. It shouldn’t do that out of nowhere. The United States has made obligations to people. It has funded, for example, Western Europe’s defense for a long time. Various countries in East Asia, you could say the same thing. So there should be a managed transition. But we need to focus on that transitional moment away from imperial domination. And we almost never do.