A review of The Case for American Power by Shadi Hamid; 256 pages; Simon & Schuster (November 2025)

I. A Reluctant Case for American Power

If power is judged by its fruits, then two costly wars in the broader Middle East would seem to justify Americans’ declining confidence in their country’s hegemonic role. Critics of US foreign policy on the Left and Right believe that America should respond to the disappointments of the post-9/11 era by retrenching and defending a much narrower conception of its national interests. A new book by Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid, however, dissents from this popular narrative.

In The Case for American Power, Hamid argues that America should continue to care about order beyond its borders. Since power continues to dominate the strategic contest between nations, he rejects the notion that the end of the Pax Americana will be anything like a peaceful utopia. To the contrary, the price of a world without the singular strength of the United States will be recurring conflict, just as it was before the rise of the American order.

But when it comes to the positive vision suggested in the title, The Case for American Power has less to offer. Hamid refrains from a simplistic foreign-policy analysis that sets “realism” against “idealism,” but he never fleshes out a compelling hybrid approach. While recognising that power and values go together, he does not grapple with the main dilemma—that the tension between power and morality cannot easily be made to disappear.

Hamid is theoretically reconciled to the unceasing struggle for power and interest in a fallen world, but his analysis betrays a reluctance to actually exercise power. This is why, in spite of his advocacy on behalf of American global activism, he is constantly tempted to impugn American policies for their stupidity, brutality, and hypocrisy. Sometimes this judgement is understandable, but it can also be misleading. Although there has been no shortage of stupidity and brutality and hypocrisy in US foreign policy through the years, there has also been ingenuity and flashes of nobility. It’s weird to discover that the virtues of US statecraft hardly figure in Hamid’s ostensible defence of American power, while the vices—real or imagined—are lavished with attention.

Hamid opens his book with this declaration: “The world needs American power, it needs more of it—and it needs it now.” At a time of growing great-power rivalry on both sides of Eurasia, he acknowledges that the importance of hard power was supposed to have diminished after the Cold War. Unconstrained by bipolarity, it was widely presumed that geopolitical competition would fade away and that we would all progress towards a more peaceful and prosperous world. In those happy circumstances, Hamid recounts, power effectively lost its purpose. Most Americans instinctively felt they “could afford to imagine a world with less of it.” The governing class seized upon a presumed “peace dividend” to announce a “strategic pause” and began to eviscerate the defence budget.

In this brief unipolar moment, business interests surged ahead of national security and moral priorities in the conception of foreign policy. (Recall the decision in 2001 to admit the People’s Republic of China into the WTO on the dubious premise that market access and commercial success would breed more liberal politics and a transition to democracy.) Despite nasty flare-ups of chauvinistic nationalism and atavistic ideology in the Balkans and the Middle East, many thought-leaders wanted to believe that the world had been transformed and that international institutions would henceforth manage to keep the peace. By all appearances, Americans were on the verge of relinquishing their “indispensable” role in upholding world order.