How The World Sees Us: “Leading From Behind” May Work With Grazing Sheep. It Does Not Work In Wolf Country.

Denmark’s former prime minister exhorts Americans to resist retreat.

By Josef Joffe

Sept. 27, 2016

When you chance on a book by a former NATO chief, your eyes glaze over. Please, not another “Whither NATO?” or a compendium of boilerplate, stitched together by a ghostwriter. Yet crack open “The Will to Lead” by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who also served as Denmark’s prime minister for eight years, and the glaze will vanish.

This book reads like a letter to an American friend, written by a “European classical liberal who has always counted on American leadership.” On the cusp of a new administration, this European doesn’t pine for yet another pledge of American allegiance. Instead he exhorts the U.S. “not to abandon its vital role as champion of freedom and guarantor of the global order.”

He sees the “global village” burning while its inhabitants bicker. So “we need a policeman to restore order; we need a fireman to put out the fire; we need a mayor, smart and sensible, to lead the rebuilding.” That sums up the role the U.S. ditched after World War I—and brilliantly reclaimed after World War II.

Why the alarm? Because, as Mr. Rasmussen writes, neo-isolationism, economic as well as strategic, is on a roll on both sides of the ocean. TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, is on the way to the morgue, as may be TPP, the Pacific version. Under Barack Obama, the U.S. has pulled out of Iraq while downscaling in Afghanistan. He has turned away from old allies in the Middle East, working hard to secure a nuclear deal with the theocrats of Iran. He has given the Russians an all but free ride in Ukraine and in Syria.

When Mr. Obama trumpeted the “audacity of hope,” he forsook the first rule of statecraft: It is better (and cheaper) to man the lines than to return. Being there deters; pulling out suggests indifference, if not an invitation to rivals. “Leading from behind” may work with grazing sheep. It does not in wolf country.

Mr. Rasmussen’s hero is Harry S. Truman. The “little haberdasher from Missouri,” as his detractors had it, was a giant on the world stage. While FDR trusted in “Uncle Joe” Stalin, foreshadowing America’s withdrawal from Europe, Truman rearmed with a vengeance. His historic achievement was a new global order that endures to this day. Behold the alphabet soup: U.N., NATO, IMF, the World Bank, GATT (now WTO, the World Trade Organization). It still nourishes the rest of the world.

Call it “empire,” but it was one by invitation, not by imposition. It served American interests by serving those of others, be it security or free trade. It was rules, not rule. Never was awesome power so nicely enveloped in the common good.

Naturally, Mr. Rasmussen is no admirer of the 44th president, though his critique never strays from the polite. But you get the point when he muses that “Yes, we can” should actually have read “Yes, only we can.” For “only superpowers have the necessary capabilities to get things done.”

Alas, America is tiring of the burden, as the “come home” reflexes of the Obama years show both right and left. Hillary Clinton is trying to outbid Donald Trump on protectionism. The GOP, once the party of liberal internationalism, has now nominated a man whose campaign slogan is “America First.”

Mr. Rasmussen marshals two arguments against this downsizing of America. To “pull up the drawbridge” is, first of all, “morally repugnant.” It is “letting bad things happen and standing idly by.” Second, retraction embodies the erroneous belief that “if America stays away from the troubles of the world, the troubles of the world will stay away from America.” That wasn’t even true in the 20th century when Germany and Japan conquered Europe and much of Asia as prelude to war against the United States. Today the speed of travel and communication has shrunk distance to near naught, as this month’s terrorist attack in downtown New York demonstrates.

Hence Mr. Rasmussen counsels a global “broken window” strategy, just as the Romans did: respice finem, consider the end. He pleads for robust American interventionism: Hit them hard and early. If the “indispensable nation” won’t do it, nobody will. When the U.S. doesn’t act, it gets genocide, as in Rwanda. When it does, as against Serbia, peace has a chance. The author sticks to his guns even on Iraq, which he considers a legitimate war. The problem, he avers, was “not the military mission” but what he delicately calls the “political follow-up”—that is, restoring governance and the economy.

Let’s go back to his triple-image of America as “policeman, fireman and mayor.” The American temper lends itself perfectly to the firefighter role. The trucks rush in, the guys break down the walls and flood the building. Then back to the station house. But the police have to stay forever; so does the mayor. That’s not the American way of war, leaving aside the miraculous exceptions of postwar Europe, Korea and Japan, where U.S. troops still deter and reassure. In general, democracies do not like long, indecisive wars in faraway locales. In the end, they pull out. And the locals know it.

Iraq was a disaster not simply because of the “political follow-up.” It also comes with a cruel realpolitik lesson: By eliminating Saddam and the Iraqi army, the U.S. acted as unwitting handmaiden of Iranian power. Iraq used to be the mightiest bulwark against Tehran’s ambitions, whether under the shah or the Khomeinists. Today the country is practically a Persian fiefdom, and Iranian forces and surrogates now range all the way to the Levant, carving up Syria and threatening Israel.

So take Mr. Rasmussen with a spoonful of salt. Intervene only if moral duty aligns with inherently limited means and strategic interests. Above all, don’t go after the wrong enemy, which was not Baghdad but Tehran. Always the strongest player in the Middle East, Iran is now challenging the “Great Satan” for primacy from Basra to Beirut. Neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama grasped this elementary point.

That said, “The Will to Lead” delivers an altogether salutary counter to Obamism as well as Trumpism, not to mention those feeling the Bern on the left. There is no other “indispensable power”—and there won’t be for a long time.

Mr. Joffe is editor of the German weekly Die Zeit and a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he teaches U.S. foreign policy.