Studying the history of XX century US foreign policy, means for us historians to explain the fundamental difference between the United States and other major powers of the past: namely the capacity of the United States to build a mostly consensual form of hegemony and world leadership.

How has it been possible to make the costs, commitments and inevitable interventionism of America’s rise to global primacy acceptable in the United States and to the rest of the world? This is the complex problem that, historically, has been faced by US internationalists of all schools of thought. In order to play a greater and a proactive role in world affairs, America needed domestic and international agreement on her choices, actions and strategies. Domestic consensus was obtained by justifying choices and actions as necessary for US national security, or by presenting them as a way to fulfil America’s historical mission to spread freedom, democracy, and free trade. Making US global primacy palatable, or at least tolerable to other countries, or to their ruling elites was more complicated. Clearly defined common interests and enemies – as was the case during the Cold War – made this task easier. The United States played a leading role in designing the rules of the international system – defining the rewards for inclusion and the price of exclusion. This also allowed the US to assume a more or less commonly agreed global leadership. However, the real asset in America’s rise to superpower status was the extraordinary attraction of the American model of modernisation and mass consumption.

During the first 20 years of the Cold War, Washington was able to preserve and even expand domestic and external consensus. Most Americans supported the post-1945 internationalist agenda pursued by US administration, endorsing the policy of global containment of the Soviet Union and communism. Outside the United States, the American model of modernity and prosperity proved almost irresistible, and became the benchmark for the other experiences of modernization and economic development.

Nevertheless, the complementary relationship between domestic and international consensus was neither given nor natural. What became known as ‘Cold War Liberalism’ began to crumble in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The United States suffered what was, in many ways, a crisis of hegemony. In the end, Washington weathered the crisis by re-launching a new, albeit more fragile and contradictory, internationalist discourse. Domestically, calls for more international action were justified through a strongly nationalist and exceptional narrative, reaffirmed in Ronald Reagan’s belief that America was “… still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home”. Outside the United States, consensus on US primacy was promoted through a model of globalisation based on deregulation of capital flows, liberalisation, and greater economic integration. Consensus was achieved by accepting various forms of interdependence that, in the end, limited America’s sovereignty, as evidenced by the increasing US dependence on foreign investments. A typical expression of such dependence was the significant growth of the US public debt, with substantial amounts of Treasury securities being held by Japan and China.

Domestic and international consensuses were nevertheless based on very different and barely compatible premises. This has been made very clear by several foreign policy choices of the United States over the past three decades. Moreover, the processes through which the domestic and international consensuses were built stimulated resistance and protest, both inside and outside the United States. Within the United States, opposition to greater interdependence was often justified in nationalist terms. These took the form of invoking protection for American products and jobs from outside competition or denouncing the violations of American sovereignty by intrusive international institutions, such as the United Nations. Outside the United States, US nationalist hyperbole and messianic exceptionalism – the idea expressed by Madeleine Albright that America is still the “indispensable nation” that “stand[s] tall” and “see[s] further into the future” – were often received with hostility and outright contempt.

The dilemma of America’s world primacy – contradictorily based on two incompatible instruments of consensus-building, nationalist mobilisation, and greater interdependence – has greatly increased over the past eight years. Now that America’s unilateral turn has come to an end, the new administration of Barack Obama is called to deal with this contradiction, amidst domestic pressures to concentrate more on internal matters and international requests for more American involvement in multilateral and global initiatives. Obama has an effective voice, globally as well as in the United States, and the time has now come for him to reconcile the two separate and diverse discourses.