The American Moral Empire: Part I
Realpolitik and Strategic Culture Theory
The American Moral Empire is my three-part series exploring why American foreign policy seems to lurch between extremes—from Woodrow Wilson's moral crusade to "make the world safe for democracy" to Trump's "America First" isolationism. Using Strategic Culture Theory as a lens, we'll trace how America's unique geography and history created two competing impulses that have shaped foreign policy for over two centuries.
The Pattern of Failed Idealism
Why would a U.S. president abandon a democratic country aligned with the West? This is a question I’ve seen asked dozens of time when discussing Ukraine, and it genuinely puzzles people how Trump could be so apparently hostile to Zelensky, despite his apparent affinity for the West and opposition to our long-time rival, Russia.
When Trump repeatedly criticized support for Ukraine, many interpret this as appeasement of Russia, or even outright subservience to Putin. The idea has sparked conspiracy theories about kompromat and shadowy foreign influence, despite the lack of evidence and obvious asymmetry in power, wealth, and global status between the two countries. Similarly, why would Russia sacrifice a million casualties and endure crippling economic isolation for a few bombed-out regions smaller than 1% of its territory? Most Americans simply can't conceive how any rational leader could imagine this serves their national interests, so they assume these leaders must be sacrificing the national interest for personal ego or power.
These behaviors seem completely irrational—until you understand that "national interest" isn't an objective, static thing. It's always an interpretation, shaped by history, geography, culture, and inherited narratives. What looks like madness from the outside often makes perfect sense from within a nation's strategic culture.
This insight comes from Henry Kissinger, whose personal history allowed him to grasp better than anyone else how culture and history shape the national interest. After reading thousands of pages of Walter Isaacson's biography and Kissinger's own Diplomacy, what emerges is a man who spent his career fighting an uphill battle against American foreign policy instincts. Kissinger advocated balance over dominance, neutralizing enemies rather than converting them, treating international relations as a chess game rather than a moral crusade. This theory of international balance, while nothing new within the European tradition, was completely foreign to the American conception of its role in the world.
Born in 1923 in Weimar era Germany, Kissinger found himself at an extremely inopportune time to be a Jew. His hometown of Fürth was in Bavaria, a hotbed of Nazi activity even before their electoral success. The town saw frequent anti-semitic beatings and verbal abuse from Nazi vigilantes, and after Kissinger's tenth birthday in 1933, official state-sponsored oppression began. In August 1938, 15-year-old Kissinger fled to the United States as a refugee. Considering over a dozen of his family who stayed in Germany didn't survive the camps, and it's unlikely he would have survived if he had stayed.
It was from this experience that Kissinger developed his conception of "correct" foreign policy. But here's what's remarkable: instead of joining the chorus of critics who blamed European and American appeasement of Hitler—a critique that ignored the Kobayashi Maru circumstances leaders faced—he diagnosed the cause much earlier, with the Treaty of Versailles and its aftermath. Kissinger understood that by the time appeasement became the question, the real damage had already been done.
The treaty had left a resentful Germany surrounded by weak neighbors without credible security guarantees. President Woodrow Wilson's push for ethnic self-determination as outlined in his famous 14 Points carved up Central Europe into vulnerable new states that couldn't sustain their independence. The system might have worked if a strong power had remained committed to maintaining this new order through the League of Nations. That was supposed to be the United States. Instead, barely as soon as the war ended, America abandoned the League entirely.
Despite America's reluctant entry into World War I, Wilson seized the opportunity of victory to redesign Europe around his idealistic principles of self-determination and collective security. The new map looked beautiful on paper: oppressed ethnic groups finally had their own nations. The reality was messier. Many of these new states contained large ethnic minorities, had little historical basis for independence, and faced larger neighbors with both ethnic and historical claims to their territory. When the idealistic project required sustained American commitment to maintain, America simply walked away.
Twenty years later, Nazi Germany exploited this exact chaos—the resentful Germans, the weak neighbors, the power vacuum left by American withdrawal. The road to Auschwitz ran through the well-intentioned failures of Versailles.
Fast-forward to 2003. America toppled Saddam Hussein's regime in weeks and announced plans to build a democratic Iraq. After years of nation-building efforts and hundreds of billions of dollars, Iraq today is effectively aligned with Iran—America's regional rival. In Afghanistan, after twenty years, $2,000,000,000,000, and countless lives lost, we managed to return Afghanistan to exactly where it started.
The pattern is unmistakable:
Launch moral mission to transform foreign societies
Overcommit resources and expectations
Fail to achieve sustainable transformation
Withdraw in exhaustion or frustration
Watch as outcomes turn opposite to original intentions
But why does America keep making the same mistake? And why do behaviors that seem irrational to outside observers or with hindsight make perfect sense to the people making these decisions in the moment?
The answer lies in something much more fundamental than policy failures or individual personalities. It's found in the cultural currents that shape how nations understand their interests in the first place, as described by Strategic Culture Theory—hugely influential, but so rarely discussed it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.
I. Beyond Realism: Strategic Culture as Explanatory Framework
1.. The European Balance of Power Legacy
The European system prior to the First World War was based on a single concept: balance. The idea was simple. No single European power should be allowed to gain hegemony over the continent, so once a nation like France, Germany, or Russia gained too much of an advantage over the others, the remaining powers would band together to counter this force. In theory, this balancing act would prevent any hegemon from gaining control over the continent and discourage massive wars. No power would have enough advantage over their rivals to justify a war costing more resources and lives than the objective was worth.
This system reached its most sophisticated form in the Concert of Europe, established by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 after Napoleon's defeat. Leading up to WWI, however, the flexible balancing of previous decades had been replaced by rigid systems of alliance. Neutral powers switching to the weaker side became unlikely, due to long-term treaties and commitments that closely intertwined the interests of powers like France and Russia, or Austria and Germany.
After an Entente victory, the European powers abandoned all semblance of a balance of power. France, having borne the brunt of German invasion, insisted on permanently neutering Germany to prevent future threats. Meanwhile, Wilson pushed his 14 Points, demanding that nations be created based along ethnic and linguistic boundaries rather than in terms of what nations could sustain their own independence. Such a system would be theoretically fine, so long as there was a strong power dedicated to the maintenance of this new system of collective security through the League of Nations. In theory, that was to be the United States, as the entire push for ethnic determination was made by Wilson in his 14 Points. Yet barely as soon as the war was over, America had left the League.
Kissinger saw this halfhearted attempt at a moral crusade for individual ethnic autonomy as exactly the cause of the subsequent international disorder. A Germany that was kept down through punishment rather than balance wouldn't stand the disgrace for long, and the Baltic and Central European nations simply did not have enough power to withstand the much larger forces of their neighbors, who had both ethnic and historical claims to their lands. In Czechoslovakia, there wasn't even a single dominant ethnic group, making it no surprise that a day before the Nazi invasion, half the nation rose up in revolt in favor of establishing their own state.
2. Realism's Flaw
Kissinger's approach reflects a broader political theory known as Political Realism or Realpolitik, which looks at nations as self-interested entities seeking their own interests without regard for anything but what can be enacted by force. If the United States can gain oil from the Middle East by invading it, then the United States should, contingent on its ability to legitimize its invasions to the international community. Instead of the Middle Eastern wars of the early 2000s being an attempt to overthrow hostile nations and replace them with friendly powers, Realism would look at it instead as a Machiavellian ploy to gain the resources of the Middle East, while slyly justifying the invasion to the international community on grounds of morality and collective security.
The problem with this framework, which claims that nations pursue their own interests, is that it doesn't actually define what those interests are. Some are obvious, like security and economic prosperity, but these are so broad that they give little to no suggestion as to what paths nations should take to achieve these goals. Without a definition of national interest, Realism fails to offer any meaningful predictions as to how nations will or should behave, making it nearly useless.
Kissinger's insight goes deeper: Idealism without realism becomes failed Idealism. Idealism sets noble goals without concerning itself with what's actually possible, while realism operates within the realm of the achievable. When nations pursue idealistic goals without a heavy dose of realism to guide implementation, they don't achieve noble failures—they create half-baked ideals that are often worse than what a more realistic assessment would have achieved. Wilson's ethnic self-determination was a beautiful ideal, but without realistic planning for enforcement and sustainability, those vulnerable new states became stepping stones for Nazi and Soviet expansion.
3. Strategic Culture Theory Defined
This is where Strategic Culture Theory comes in. Essentially, it's a framework that identifies national interest based on the unique cultural and historical conditions of any given nation, revealing the goals that can then be assessed through the lens of realism. Codified during the Cold War to explain the widening gap between U.S. and Soviet behavior, Strategic Culture Theory holds that nations act according to what it has learned, consciously or not, about how to survive and project power in the world.
Consider the lack of understanding between America and Russia in the post-WWII reordering of Europe. As Soviet troops occupied much of Central Europe, Stalin viewed those territories as essential to the USSR's security—a hard-won buffer zone on a historically dangerous frontier. The United States, meanwhile, insisted that these nations hold free elections. American leaders believed that a universal right to democracy was self-evident, viewing their demands to the Soviets as moral, not strategic. Stalin saw these demands as an attempt for the US to dislodge the Soviets from their new protective buffer, a prelude to a Western threat on the Soviet heartland. After all, why else would a distant power be so concerned about the political systems of Poland or Romania if not to directly weaken the Soviets?
While there were certainly some Machiavellian men in Washington who saw their moral justification as a convenient excuse to weaken their rivals, the strategy pursued by Washington was clearly suboptimal and ultimately unlikely to succeed. The Americans were pursuing a policy of universal freedom and democracy—clearly idealist—while a more pragmatic approach would have recognized that Russia, having just survived the Second World War, would never willingly accept independent nations it couldn't control so close to its borders.
This breakdown of diplomacy shortly after the end of the Second World War was a failure of comprehension of the other’s national interests. The Soviets, and more specifically the Russians, shaped by centuries of invasion and steppe warfare, believed security could only come from controlling territory up to natural defensive barriers. The Warsaw Pact wasn't only opportunism; it was a continuation of Tsarist strategy to expand influence to the natural borders of the nation—seas or impassable mountains that would prevent any outside invasion.
America, by contrast, had no such need for buffer states. With vast oceans on both sides and no serious threats from Canada or Mexico, the U.S. had the luxury of prioritizing ideology over geography. It could project values, not just power, and had no need to see anything outside the Western Hemisphere as a buffer from foreign threats. That geographic insulation made the idea of buffer zones or "spheres of influence" seem parochial, or even sinister.
“The Americans are truly a lucky people. They are bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors and to the east and west by fish."
—Otto von Bismarck
A simple comparison makes the different attitudes clear: Russia has endured dozens of invasions throughout its history, while the United States has faced just one. Who is more likely to prioritize self-defense to the point of paranoia? The man whose home has been invaded dozens of times and family members killed, or the man who had one break-in and is now best friends with his former attacker?
4. American Strategic Culture: Two Competing Currents
Before we can understand why the United States oscillates between global crusading and sudden retreat, we need to understand the two foundational currents embedded in its identity. From its inception, the United States has been pulled between two foreign policy approaches: Crusading Idealism—the belief that America's founding values are not only meant to be realized at home, but extended to the rest of the world; and Protective Isolationism—the instinct to wall itself off from the world and perfect its own national experiment in peace.
"Crusading" because it implies mission; "Idealism" because it treats liberal democracy not as a national preference, but a universal good. "Protective" because it seeks to preserve American values from foreign corruption; "Isolationism" because it prioritizes American independence from foreign entanglements.
These aren't just strategies for furthering the national interest—they are conflicting expressions of America's identity: one separatist, the other revolutionary. Most nations are constrained by geography, history, or hostile neighbors into a fairly consistent strategic culture. America's unique position—protected by vast oceans, blessed with weak neighbors, endowed with enormous resources—gives it the luxury of choice between these two fundamentally different approaches to the world.
This geographic advantage is what enables the oscillation. Russia must always worry about buffer zones because it has no natural barriers. China, which literally calls itself the 'Middle Kingdom,' has for millennia seen itself as the natural center of its world, surrounded by tributary states that acknowledge Chinese superiority. This historical experience of the tributary system informs China's current strategic culture and expectations of regional deference. America can choose to engage or withdraw because its homeland security doesn't depend on controlling distant territories or maintaining complex alliance systems. This choice, this luxury of oscillation, is itself a core part of what determines American interests.
Next week in Part II, I'll examine how these competing impulses developed from Puritan "city upon a hill" theology through Manifest Destiny to the Spanish-American War—showing how America's oscillating pattern became embedded in our national DNA.1
Thank you for reading.
And for those of you who remember my previous failed promises to write follow up posts, no need to worry, as I’ve already finished and scheduled the Part I & II.
Good post. Looking forward to the next installment.
Is there a connection between the two strands of foreign policy and the four groups outlined in Albion’s seed?