- It's tempting to be skeptical of idealistic notions of American power, the indispensable nation that some have talked about, when the history of the last 25 years is of misguided conflicts in the Middle East and democratic backsliding at home.

But through it all, today's guest takes readers through a compelling case for American power.

He's Shadi Hamid, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is a great writer.

Shadi Hamid is a columnist for the Washington Post and the author of an important new book, "The Case for American Power."

He's coming to us today from Washington, D.C.

Shadi, thank you so much for being with us today.

- Thanks for having me.

- You know, "The Case for American Power" is not your first book, I think it's your sixth by my count, and it's a tremendous read.

Do you wanna give us just a quick overview of the book and then we'll get into it in some depth?

- Yeah, sure, I mean, in some ways, it's a love letter to America despite its faults.

It's part anguished manifesto, part memoir, part foreign policy analysis.

I'm trying to persuade, especially young people, progressives and other skeptics to believe in America and fight for it, that it's still worth fighting for and that we can't give up hope just because Donald Trump has won two terms or just because we don't like the things America has done in the world over the last 25 years.

And we do have a very checkered record.

We've done terrible things in different regions in Latin America during the Cold War, the list goes on, but that can still coexist with a certain kind of pride.

And without that pride, then what do we really have?

And I think there's also the fact that power is a reality.

Power is inevitable.

Someone has to wield it.

The only question is who.

And I think that America is preferable to the alternatives.

- There's so much to unpack there.

Is the lamentation of the things that America has gotten wrong in the last X number of years, 25 years, let's go back just to the start of this century.

Is it that America didn't live up to its ideals or is there something else that it's at the course of that, at the core of that skepticism?

- I think the US, yes, it didn't live up to its ideals.

We have ideals that we should be proud of that we're a country founded upon a distinct moral purpose.

Each president from the beginning until Donald Trump with the exception of Donald Trump has kind of spoken to those greater moral aspirations.

That's part of who we are.

Now, we often fall short of that.

The Iraq war is the most obvious recent example.

It was not just a mistake, but a blunder of epic proportions.

But just because we've done bad things in the past doesn't mean we're doomed to repeat them in the future.

And I wanna break this kind of assumption that American power is intrinsically bad, that we're a font of evil and destruction throughout the world.

I think that American power isn't, it's dependent on what we as Americans want it to be.

We get the government we deserve.

We get the foreign policy we deserve.

We're a democracy.

So citizens do have input into that.

- Yeah, so when you talk about power, particularly when we're talking about American power on the global stage, what are we really talking about?

- Power is often defined by political scientists as the ability of A, to get B, to do something they otherwise wouldn't do.

So there's a kind of, some of it can be through coercion, through the use of force, but some of it is persuasion.

There's different kinds of power.

There's hard power and there's soft power.

And sometimes this is talked about as the example of our power versus the power of our example.

So I think that American power contains multitudes and we should be nimble in how we use our power.

We shouldn't over rely on military force.

That was one of the mistakes during the Iraq war.

We saw a problem and we automatically thought, well, our military has to solve it.

But oftentimes there are non-military and diplomatic means to solving problems.

So I think it really just depends on what kind of example we're talking about.

- Yeah, when I was a young defense analyst in DC, we used to talk about how, if all you have is a, at that point, a $500 billion hammer, all of your problems start to look like nails.

- Yeah.

- Have we organized the US government for the kind of power that you're talking about?

- Unfortunately with cuts to USAID, cuts to the state department, and firing people who actually play the role of diplomacy and are key people in different parts of the world, the fact that that has happened under the Trump administration means that we're less equipped to that kind of diplomatic purpose.

And I worry about that.

Of course, that can be changed again if a different president in 2028 comes in and says, let's rebuild our diplomatic capacity.

And I think it's really important for us to not lose sight of the fact that people look to us and the example that we provide in our own democracy at home is a source of inspiration.

If people look at us and say, look, their democracy is failing, their democracy is crumbling, look how polarized they are, look how much Republicans and Democrats are fighting, then that means we're not going to be seen the way I think we should.

So the domestic and the foreign are intertwined in complex ways.

- What's the root of that American power?

- I think it's that we aspire to be better than we actually are.

That other countries, most other countries were not founded upon a moral purpose.

They're just normal traditional nation states.

So like Denmark, Denmark doesn't have really a mission abroad.

Its mission is primarily to take care of Danish people.

That's the focus of most countries.

But because we have our Declaration of Independence, because we have the Bill of Rights, because we have our constitution, we think that those things are universal, that all human beings deserve those kinds of rights, liberties and freedoms.

So therefore we want to share them with more people throughout the world.

And JFK talked about our magic power.

He said the magic power is the desire of every human to be free.

And the fact that the US actually stands for that abroad.

Now, we don't, as I said before, we don't live up to it.

But at least the aspiration is there.

That aspiration serves as a kind of North Star.

So if we're losing our way, that North Star can help orient ourselves.

- So it has something to do with our democracy, the belief in sort of universal values.

Does the nature of the principal adversaries the United States faces today, does that also contribute something to American power?

Just in sort of the negative of what the United States stands for.

If you look at Russia, if you look at China, if you look at regional powers like Iran, do the nature of those regimes themselves contribute to American power internationally?

- Yeah, like in some ways we know who we are.

We know who we are when we know what we're against.

And we are against autocracy, we're against totalitarian regimes.

And the fact that the main competitors to America are brutal, repressive dictatorships that clarifies the stakes.

We're talking here about China and Russia primarily.

So we have to be realistic.

We shouldn't compare America to some morally perfect superpower that doesn't actually exist.

We have to compare America to the actually available alternatives.

And we've seen China's aggression towards Taiwan, we've seen Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

These are countries that are not animated by any kind of moral purpose.

They're animated by raw power without the morality part.

We're animated by power, but with the morality part.

And what I want to be able to make the case for is to say that our power has to be combined with our moral sensibility.

Power alone is not enough, and morality alone is not enough.

You sometimes have leftists and progressives, they talk about America being this kind of like an NGO in the world, that giant human rights organization that just promotes ideals.

That's not realistic.

There is still a defense component.

We still have to have a military budget.

We still have to protect ourselves from threats.

There is evil in the world.

And that requires us to be realistic about that evil and the fact that someone has to oppose it.

- Yeah, a couple of things you've said have evoked the speech that John Kennedy did not give in Dallas in 1963, particularly about this idea of the attractive force of American power.

But I think it was Madeleine Albright, your fellow Georgetown guy, I think it was Madeleine Albright who first said it.

Bill Clinton popularized this idea of America as the indispensable nation.

So let me ask you this quite simply, is the United States an exceptional nation?

- Yeah, I think we are exceptional and I think it's okay for Americans to acknowledge that and to be straight up about it.

And one thing that's bothered me a little bit is my fellow progressives, oftentimes they're not comfortable with that language of love of country.

There's actually a remarkable poll that in the early 2000s, over 85% of Democrats were either extremely or very proud to be American.

That number has dropped down to 36% in 2025.

We're falling into a crisis of self-confidence and even self-loathing.

And I've been in situations where I'll say something like, "I love America," unironically.

And then some of my liberal friends will look at me as if I'm crazy, like, "Shadi, why are you using that language of love?"

And I think it's possible to be self-critical, but to also love your country.

And I've mentioned the sins of the past.

There are many, I don't wanna whitewash those sins, but it was James Baldwin who says, "I love my country and therefore I insist "on the right to criticize it perpetually."

So these two things can coexist.

We love, but we're also self-critical.

- Do you think in the current context that there is some of it is sort of the conflation of national identity with who's the president in power?

I've seen just the casually observing American public opinion polling over successive presidential administrations.

There's sort of almost a mere imaging after inauguration day when parties switch power, where Republicans become more critical, Democrats become more supportive, if a Democrat's the president, and then vice versa when the parties change hands.

Have we too conflated who the president is with whether or not we're proud of what it means to be an American or America's role in the world?

- Exactly.

I mean, the country is much more than just who the president happens to be at any given moment.

And I worry sometimes, and I'm a fierce critic of Donald Trump, but he himself does not change the character of America.

We still are who we are.

We still have our founding documents.

We still have our founding ideals.

If America isn't strong enough to withstand two terms of Donald Trump, then was it really worth fighting for in the first place?

So I do worry that especially Democrats, when they see a Republican in office, they lose faith very quickly and they sour on the American project.

But I think that's why it's so important to separate the president from the country.

But we've become such a centralized state.

The president has so much power, so much executive authority that sometimes it's hard to see past that.

- So we had recently, the president of the United States hosted the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, a man who the US intelligence community has said is responsible for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian columnist working for the Washington Post, your former colleague, right?

When we're talking about the moral authority of the United States in a context like that, how much damage does the conduct of a President Trump in that moment defending the Crown Prince due to American power, both domestically and internationally?

- Yeah, Donald Trump doesn't even pretend to care about those ideals.

He doesn't even talk about them.

And that lack of pretense for some people can be refreshing that he says the quiet part out loud.

He doesn't put on airs.

But I think sometimes you gotta put on airs a little bit.

You gotta pretend.

You gotta say the things that you're supposed to say based on our own history and our own values.

And the fact that Donald Trump has completely discarded any sense of propriety in that regard.

I mean, to welcome someone to the White House who was responsible for the killing of a journalist and to basically brush aside any of those concerns, it just shows that America is forfeiting its moral authority in a way that maybe it hasn't before.

And people can see that.

- Do you think that the American public appreciates sort of the value, the attractive value of American power?

In other words, that our ideals and the conduct of our democracy, the health of our democracy matter internationally?

- The polling is mixed on this and it differs from Republicans to Democrats and how you phrased the question.

But I think there is a general sense that we want our country to be successful in the world, that we want America to play a global role.

I mean, most polling does show that Americans might differ on the specifics and how involved we should be.

But most of them agree that we should be involved and we shouldn't completely be isolationist.

I don't think there's a big, like complete isolationists are relatively rare because people do have a built-in sense that America is powerful, it matters in the world stage.

And do we really want our country to kind of disappear from that world stage?

I think the answer most Americans would say when you push them is no.

But what that means in practice is always the question that people are going to disagree on.

- Yeah, yeah.

You, I think, actually provide, there's a substantial discussion of the health of American democracy in the book.

And you make a, I think maybe the best diagnosis I've read so far of what the opportunity that this current wave of American populism offers or tells us about the American electorate, the American body politic, more generally speaking.

Do you wanna walk us through what that is and the opportunity that that offers to America in this moment?

- Yeah, well, first of all, the great thing about democracy is that it can self-correct.

It renews itself.

Even if someone you don't like wins the election, you can live to fight another day at the ballot box in four years.

So you do have avenues of redress.

My parents came from an authoritarian regime where if the dear leader says or does something, there's no way to undo it.

So I want Americans to not take that for granted.

Democracy is a beautiful thing.

And this is where the question of populism comes in.

Populism can seem scary, but in some ways it's a corrective.

You have a lot of Americans who are angry at the establishment, however they define that word.

They said, oh, the establishment brought us into the Iraq War.

It presided over the Great Recession.

There's a list of grievances that people have.

So people have a right to be angry.

And if they have populist options, that's a way of showing the establishment that they can't take their own power for granted.

There has to be renewal.

- Do you think that that means that the next round of Democratic presidential candidates will look and sound more populist in their approach to some of the economic challenges facing the American people?

- That's what people want.

We've seen that with the rise of someone like Zohran Mamdani in New York.

Maybe that can't be replicated across the country, but there is this kind of sentiment of anger and disillusionment.

I think also a lot of Democrats, they want a Democratic Party that opposes.

There isn't really a strong opposition party in this country.

Democrats have been weak and feckless and haven't really put up a strong fight.

I think people wanna see that.

They wanna see candidates with genuine moral conviction who stand for something.

I think that's the future of American politics.

- So what do you say, if you spend any time on social media, the left seems dominated by a number of voices who are saying that, look, this president is a would-be authoritarian.

It's an open question whether or not we're gonna have free and fair elections in 2026 or 2028.

You're making a case that democracy is corrective and the source of our power, really.

What do you say to those voices who are worried about what comes in the next, in the midterms and in the presidential election of 2028?

- Look, we should all be worried.

I mean, I think Donald Trump is destroying things about this country that make it great.

And he's attacking the foundations of what we stand for.

But at the same time, I don't think we should be too alarmist and say that there won't be free elections any longer in 2026 or 2028.

I don't see any evidence that the elections are going to be rigged.

It's very hard to rig an election.

It's, and especially in a free country where people are debating openly, where you have three branches of government, where you have checks and balances, when you have a federal system, all of that means that it's hard for the president to just, he can't just do whatever he feels like doing whenever he wants.

There are limitations.

So I think people have to be careful about not stoking too much fear about that.

They should focus.

If you're angry at Donald Trump, then focus on opposing him at the ballot box.

Try to run a good campaign in 2028 that actually inspires people and rallies them around a cause.

I think Democrats failed to do that last time around with Kamala Harris, who I think it's fair to say was not the most inspiring candidate.

- Yeah, and he got handed a very short runway to try to, you know.

- Yeah, that too.

- You write in "The Case for American Power" that the old centrism of the right and left in American politics is probably not going to come back.

And if you think about the sort of period from 1945 till the present, there's been a centrism that has defined America's engagement with the world with some variation.

But there, but even, you know, Barack Obama gets elected president in 2008.

He takes three years to withdraw from Iraq, right?

There's a continuity in American foreign policy that has persisted.

What challenges emerge if that old centrist consensus between left and right, particularly about America's role in the world, does not reestablish itself?

- It means that American politics and foreign policy will be more like a pendulum shifting from one extreme to another.

That elections will matter more because whoever's president will be able to reshape American policy as we know it.

Donald Trump shattered that bipartisan consensus.

In some ways that was bad, but in some ways it was good.

Sometimes a consensus needs to be shattered if it's not working well and if people aren't happy with it.

So I think now you'll see people maybe more with the vision of someone like Bernie Sanders on the Democratic Party side who offer a kind of left-wing version of populism.

Maybe that's where the party will go.

And that means that foreign policy will look different.

It won't be the same old thing that we've seen in the post-World War II era.

- Can America though still play the role that it has played as a beacon of freedom and opportunity and all of the positive things that you celebrate in the book if there's this pendulum swinging back and forth with every presidential election?

- It means that it's gonna be harder for other countries to count on America because every election will bring about a very different result and the rest of the world will be shaken from that.

They won't know what to expect, will be unpredictable.

But I think there's also an argument that unpredictability can be good because it forces people to kind of wake up.

This is one of the reasons I think that under Donald Trump, European countries have committed more of their budget to defense spending because they realize that America is not a sure thing anymore and they don't know what Donald Trump will do at any given moment.

So they're saying that they have to take care of their collective defense in a more serious way.

So sometimes that shaking up of the system can lead to good results, but it also means that there's a kind of inherent unpredictability to the system and that's definitely not always a good thing.

- You know, earlier in the interview, you mentioned that we're facing, the Americans are facing a crisis in self-confidence about themselves, about the country's role in the world.

This is not new, right?

If you think about it, there have been cycles of this throughout American history over the last century.

1930s with the German economic miracle, the fear about Soviet science and progress in the 1950s.

Even if you think about an ally like Japan in the 1980s and the Japan that can say no, right?

There were these moments where Americans have felt insecure in themselves and in America's role in the world.

Why are we so quick to be that critical of American power and America's position?

We've got about 90 seconds left.

- Yeah, decline is an American pastime.

Every generation from the end of World War II onwards has kind of indulged in this idea that America is falling.

America is falling behind.

And I think that there is something about the American psyche.

Sometimes it's quite optimistic, but it can also become almost the opposite of that, quite negative.

And that's why I think we have to remember that those previous eras of decline didn't actually lead to decline.

Some people might say this time is different, this time is worse, but I'm not so sure.

America does have a way of muddling through in the end.

- You know, Shadi, we talked about this a little bit during the pre-interview that I could see you grappling with a lot of these issues as you were explaining it to your reader.

At the end of this, how comfortable are you in the second Trump administration making this particular case about American power to the public?

- Look, I have some doubts about my own argument.

And I say early on in the book that I came to my conclusions neither easily nor enthusiastically, 'cause I don't wanna be seen as whitewashing the bad things that we've done in our past.

But I also think I'm the right person to make this argument because I'm not like some old normie white guy.

I'm a child of immigrants.

I'm brown, I'm Arab, I'm Muslim.

So I can kind of see both sides of American power.

And I think that I can make the case more effectively because I'm wrestling with it.

And I want the reader to wrestle with me.

- Well, you're also a great writer.

Shadi Hamid, "The Case for American Power" and "The Washington Post."

Thank you for spending some time with us today.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square" you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter.

Where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

Thank you for spending some time with us this week.

I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) (bright music)