Condoleezza Rice hopes that by singing the hymns of liberal universalism she will lull the Four Horsemen of the Trumpian apocalypse to sleep.

From 1966 to the early 1990s, the Republican Party enjoyed a winning streak the likes of which it had not seen since the four-and-a-half decades from Grant to Taft, when all but one president hailed from the GOP. By some measures, the reign of the Cold War Republicans overtook even the impressive record of the New Deal juggernaut that preceded the age of Nixon—the era of strong presidents bookended by FDR and LBJ, aided by an extremely efficient congressional machine.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Democrats of that generation won on domestic policy and that the Republicans, from the last act in Vietnam through the fall of the Berlin Wall, won on foreign policy. The Old Right of Coolidge, Hoover, and Taft proved impotent against the politics of the new leviathan. By the onset of the Great Society, hardly any remnants of the Old Right remained. It was only the fear of conquest overseas, the sense of a real clash of civilizations, that kept the Republicans alive as an electoral force.

And so, besides placing the nation at a fork in the road, the end of the Cold War plunged the conservative establishment into an identity crisis, as the common enemy against whom foreign policy hawks, cultural traditionalists, and free market capitalists had united vanished almost overnight. There were a few (notably Pat Buchanan in the ’92 and ’96 campaigns) who made sincere efforts to recalibrate their understanding of America’s place in the world once the singular threat of global communism had been vanquished. By and large, though, the Washington establishment split into two camps, each ending conveniently in a foreign policy of overseas engagement.

In the first camp were the militarists: doctrinaire hawks unable or unwilling to come down from their Cold War high, who refused to leave great power conflict behind in the 20th century. General officers and diplomats were heavily represented in their ranks. They turned on its head the famous admonition of John Quincy Adams that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” For them, the Cold War never ended. At most, the enemy relocated from Moscow to Beijing. In every century, in every age, the world is a simple game of Risk.

Second were the imperialists, who saw in the downfall of our only serious rival both an opportunity and a moral imperative for America to stretch its reach over the globe. The Cold War had ended, and we had won—decisively. Their interest was less in destroying monsters than in winning their hearts and minds. To these idealists, every tyrannical backwater and every hostile state was merely a democracy in waiting. The second-generation neoconservatives, led by The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, were perhaps the most important imperialist contingent.

Each of these camps found a welcoming home in the administration of the younger president Bush; each, though driven by different motivations, formed a key contingent of the domestic coalition behind the Iraq War. One camp was driven first by the hard-nosed logic of geopolitics (even if their analysis was almost always off the mark); the other swore sincerely by the philosophy of universal liberalism, tweaking a Brezhnev Doctrine for the 21st century. The end result was the same: reckless adventurism, focused on the Middle East but extending to the rest of Asia and beyond whenever opportunity struck.

Sometimes the lines did not cut neatly, as with Condoleezza Rice. First as national security advisor and then as secretary of state, the longtime Stanford professor was at the very heart of the disastrous foreign policy of the Bush years. Rice straddled the two camps uneasily, perhaps because neither particularly wanted her. (The militarists especially, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, viewed their colleague as an amateur and an interloper.) Or perhaps it was because she was not an exile from the same Cold War establishment as the rest of the Bush appointees. She did not have the same commitments, the same concerns, the same rivalries as the men who had played the game under Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. Rice was a Republican only because her father had been one; and her father was a Republican because he was a black man in the Jim Crow–era South. She inherited a sincere liberal idealism, with the requisite understanding of a world divided between the forces of progress and the forces of reaction; her more recent books, especially Democracy: Stories From the Long Road to Freedom are dripping with the liberal universalism that animated the Bush-era imperialists.

Still, though, Rice’s background tilted her toward the militarist camp. As an academic and as a diplomat, her sensibilities were all attuned to the logic of great power conflict. Rice, like all the major statesmen of the postwar era, liked to see herself as the grandmaster moving pieces expertly on the chessboard. Besides her father, Rice’s most important early influence was Josef Korbel, a Czech refugee, ex-diplomat, and academic who had fled the Nazi invasion in 1939 and mentored Rice in graduate school during the Carter years. (Korbel’s own daughter, Madeleine Albright, was the only woman to precede Rice as secretary of state.) And so Rice’s statesmanship—and her punditry—often seesawed between the sentimental democratism of the one camp and the other’s tough-talking insistence on meeting force with force. A dangerous combination, to be sure.

Twenty years past the age of waterboarding, Condi Rice is still a woman divided. In a long essay published in the September-October issue of Foreign Affairs, “The Perils of Isolationism,” Rice makes the militarist argument explicitly: “The United States again faces an adversary that has global reach and insatiable ambition, with China taking the place of the Soviet Union.” She offers an increasingly common addendum: Relations with China in the 21st century are actually “more dangerous” than the Cold War, because China is more pragmatic and ideologically flexible in its engagement with other states than the Soviet Union ever was.

This is true enough, in its way, and the ounce of sense in Rice’s thought is what has always made her dangerous. Condoleezza Rice is almost without contest the most influential foreign policy mandarin since Kissinger at the height of his mystic powers. She has not endured for 40 years without reason. She is convincing—often frustratingly so. And if her comments in Foreign Affairs were limited to the race against China on AI development and the way tangled animosities in Asia could be played to American advantage, she might be worth engaging in good faith. A militarist operates on logic, even if it is bad logic; this is what made Rumsfeld the most compelling of the Bushies. The imperialist creed is sola fide. 

Rice likes to play the pragmatist, but she has faith in abundance. Faced with two nationalist powers no longer willing to bow under the U.S.-led world order, her bright idea is to massage reintegration by appealing to Russian and Chinese youth. First and foremost, this means extensive and coordinated efforts to bring exchange students from the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China to study in American universities. 

Behind this suggestion is the core tenet of the imperialist creed: all people and all nations, given enough choice and enough time, will choose democratic liberalism over any alternative system or any competing commitments. This is the same faith that inspired the establishment of a gender studies program at the University of Kabul; it is the same faith that ended in panic and bloodshed as the Taliban retook that city after 20 years of waste.

It is also a slight variation on a practice that extends back at least to the Egyptians, one that was essential to the Romans’ scheme of imperial control: strategic hostage-taking. Of course, the capture of hostages for ransom or leverage has gone on for as long as one tribe has gone to war with another. In the classical era, though, the practice took on a new dimension as imperial powers began to raise and educate the children of the conquered in the ways of their new rulers. And so, by the time he took the throne, a client king might be as Egyptian as he was Syrian or as Roman as he was Judean. 

Our own imperialists would use this method to raise up a new elite, as American as it is Russian or Chinese. It is a long game founded in remarkable hope: that a generation from now, the functionaries of the Russian state and the dynasts of the Chinese economy will remember fondly the lessons of the “Intro to Social Contract Theory” courses they taught at Berkeley or New York University, and act accordingly.

That hope will prove futile for any number of reasons. First, there is the question of position. When integration of this kind was effective in the classical world, it required a massive power imbalance. That is, it could only be perpetrated by a secure imperial power on a thoroughly conquered vassal as a means of translating military into cultural conquest. No serious nation would consider
attempting it with an active rival.

Of course, in the case of active rivalry, there is not only the question of effectiveness but the very real risk to national security. It is possible that the importation and exportation of hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals through U.S. universities will result in a million little beacons of democracy in the back rooms of Beijing and the backwaters of Xinjiang. It is at least as likely that the experiment will produce a thousand little outposts of CCP influence in schoolrooms and boardrooms all across America.

Already more than once, Chinese researchers have been convicted of espionage while working on sensitive projects at American universities. And while a congressional crackdown in 2018 forced the closure of almost all of the hundred or so Confucius Institutes in the United States, the fact that these cultural outposts existed at all is highly instructive. The CCP would not, as Condoleezza Rice seems to hope, view the prospect of more exchange students as a threat to its domestic political control. On the contrary, it would welcome the opportunity to infiltrate further into the American academic and scientific establishment, just as it has done effectively for decades.

Even if we accepted Rice’s premise that we should raise up a foreign elite sympathetic to American interests and traditions, we would first need to reckon with the fact that our universities cannot even raise an American elite sympathetic to our own interests and traditions.

Then, there is the question of our own institutions. Even if we accepted Rice’s premise that we should raise up a foreign elite sympathetic to American interests and traditions, we would first need to reckon with the fact that our universities cannot even raise an American elite sympathetic to our own interests and traditions. In the age of decolonization studies, of ubiquitous soft-Marxist economics, of Critical Race Theory and its attendant anti-history, how can we possibly expect the American academy to serve as a tool of American empire? 

A Chinese exchange student in 2024 will not be exposed to the wonders of democracy and return home a changed man. He will spend four years in a closed system now virtually designed to undermine the American way of life and the schools of thought upon which it is ordered, among peers every bit as disillusioned with their own regime as he might be with his, with professors who confirm every assertion of the CCP propaganda machine, under administrators every bit as petty, as tyrannical, and as anti-American as the party apparatchiks who control his life back home.

As Neetu Arnold reported earlier this year in an excellent feature for Tablet on the “takeover” of our universities, more than 5 percent of all students at U.S. universities are foreigners, with the largest contingent hailing from China. These foreign students are dramatically overrepresented at the most elite schools: There is no Ivy with fewer than 1,000 foreign students, and the worst, Columbia, logs an astonishing 38 percent foreign enrollment. Has the promised wave of enlightenment swept across the globe? The plain fact of the matter is that we have been trying the integration method for decades without limit or reservation. The result—illustrated starkly over the last year—has been militant Hamasniks camped out on every quad, and the worst strategic position for the U.S. in the world in living memory. 

Condoleezza Rice does not consider seriously any of these factors. For someone who has experienced so much of the world, who has sat face-to-face with some of our republic’s most dangerous enemies, her naivete is stunning.

Rice cites George Kennan’s famous Long Telegram, with its observations on the “internal contradictions” of the Soviet empire, as a guiding light for the diplomacy of tomorrow. And our own “internal contradictions”? Hardly a word is said of them.

She warns of “the new Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—populism, nativism, isolationism, and protectionism,” which together undermine “support for an internationalist foreign policy”—that is, for American empire. The inverse must be assumed: GDP-first economic strategy, replacement-scale immigration practices, military engagement overseas, and unchecked free trade go hand in hand—and all must be embraced, lest the free people of America, of Ukraine, of Xinjiang, and Taiwan and Tigray all go to our ruin together.

Rice gestures at lessons learned over the last 10 years. There is the obligatory admission that “internationalists must admit that they had a blind spot for those Americans, such as the unemployed coal miner and steelworker, who lost out as good jobs fled abroad.” There is the almost-sly promise that America “will not suffer the demographic calamity that faces most of the developed world” if it can “summon the will to deal with its immigration puzzle.” And there is the usual misdirection about “deterrence” and peace through strength. Wise readers will not be fooled.

The great lesson of 2016 is that the conventional wisdom was all bunk. Donald Trump won the presidency on a platform that prioritized domestic policy and explicitly rejected the internationalism of his Republican predecessors. Among his (and his voters’) priorities were stanching the immigration flood that was already transforming America into a country that its own people could not recognize, mitigating the damage that the global economy had done to the American heartland and the American family, and righting the power imbalance that had rendered unchecked control to Washington and corporate powers.

On foreign policy especially, Trump’s success in office was limited by a reliance on “expertise.” While most imperialists wound up as devoted NeverTrumpers, plenty of arch-militarists—James Mattis, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, et al.—secured key posts in the Department of Defense and at State. Even when the president attempted to exercise political force in this sphere, as with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, entrenched and unelected powers simply ignored him. The same institutional inertia that kept us entangled in Afghanistan ensures that Condoleezza Rice will be published in Foreign Affairs, honored in the halls of power, and consulted in the conduct of our statecraft until the conventional wisdom is laid to rest.

The betrayal of the military-foreign policy elite in the final moments of Trump’s first term was especially egregious, however, as exemplified most clearly by the highly political Gen. Mark Milley. This betrayal is clearly front-of-mind for the once and future president, as signaled by frequent social media posts alluding to Milley’s transgressions. Perhaps a lesson has been learned. Milley will already spend his last years in the wilderness—though a lucrative book deal is surely in the works. Rice and the rest may meet the same treatment in Trump’s potential second term.

Objections from The Weekly Standard (requiescat in pace) notwithstanding, they were never an essential part of the formula for Republican victory. Trump has come frustratingly close to unlocking that formula, which requires a resolution of the internal contradictions of the American order not by a consummation of empire but by a restoration of the republic. If Trump takes one lesson into November and beyond, let it be that. Let Condoleezza Rice fall where she may and let her new Four Horsemen ride again.