When the U.S.S.R. fell, elites envisioned a new U.S.-led order. Voters were skeptical.
.. The roots of the problem go back to the late 1940s, when the U.S. set out to build a global order in the aftermath of World War II. America helped create a long period of integration and growth by rebuilding Europe, promoting development in the decolonizing Third World, encouraging free trade, and providing safe passage for global commerce across the seas.When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment was united in seeing a historic opportunity to deepen the liberal order and extend it into the rest of the world. Yet the public had always been skeptical about this project. Jacksonians in particular believed that American global policy was a response to the Soviet threat, and that once the threat had disappeared, the U.S. should retrench... American voters have never shared the establishment’s enthusiasm for a foreign policy aimed at transforming the post-Cold War world. When given the choice at the ballot box, they consistently dismiss experienced foreign-policy hands who call for deep global engagement. Instead they install untried outsiders who want increased focus on issues at home. Thus Clinton over Bush in 1992, Bush over Gore in 2000, Obama over McCain in 2008, and Trump over Clinton in 2016.
Today the core problem in American foreign policy remains the disconnect between the establishment’s ambitious global agenda and the limited engagement that voters appear to support. As Washington’s challenges abroad become more urgent and more dangerous, the divide between elite and public opinion grows more serious by the day.
The establishment is now beginning to discover what many voters intuitively believed back in the 1990s. Building a liberal world order is much more expensive and difficult than it appeared in a quarter-century ago, when America was king. Further, Washington’s foreign-policy establishment is neither as wise nor as competent as it believes itself to be.