Realizing that run-of-the-mill anti-war activism wouldn’t deliver results inside the Beltway, America’s foreign-policy “restrainers” founded the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, with funding from Charles Koch and George Soros. Its goal, according to the press release announcing the group’s December 2019 Capitol Hill launch reception: to work the policy process to “reverse the historical trend by which military intervention has become the default, armed dominance an end in itself, and peacemaking the rare exception.”

In the year that the Quincy Institute has been around, it’s earned a reputation as a rogues’ gallery of disreputable actors. Sarah Leah Whitson, the organization’s former managing director, faced allegations of anti-Semitism after lamenting on Twitter that COVID’s toll on Israel was “missing a tablespoon of blood.” A federal court found in 2012 that the work of Quincy’s vice president, Trita Parsi (then president of the National Iranian American Council), was “not inconsistent with the idea that he was first and foremost an advocate for the [Iranian] regime.” (Parsi had sued a blogger who had accused him of lobbying for the regime.) Quincy’s resident muckraker (who once, ironically, reported for progressive websites on the Koch brothers’ involvement in politics) has shined a harsher light on Taiwan’s involvement in funding Washington think tanks than on China’s considerably more extensive and malign influence operations.

Unlike some of his colleagues, though, Stephen Wertheim, the group’s deputy research director and a Columbia University historian, offers a serious perspective with which to grapple. Relying on a wealth of archival evidence, Tomorrow, the World asks Americans to reexamine the way the United States emerged from World War II atop the international pecking order.

Wertheim explains that everything we take for granted about Washington’s post-war engagement with the world rests upon a foundation more deliberately constructed than most people realize. They don’t know that at the outset of World War II, an extensive, nongovernmental post-war planning network centered at the Council on Foreign Relations and likeminded institutions concluded that the United States would need to assume global dominance. Wertheim draws a line connecting the underappreciated efforts of those experts with today’s so-called forever wars and the hundreds of U.S. military bases that dot the globe.

He contends that their case for U.S. armed supremacy was made possible by the invention of the concept of isolationism as the foil to the new U.S. role that the planners envisioned. Throughout the inter-war period, two internationalist factions fiercely debated what it would take to prevent another catastrophic conflict. One faction favored the use of armed sanctions to enforce collective security, and the other saw such arrangements as bound to lead to conflict. But as the country barreled toward war with the Axis powers, internationalists who were inclined to support a collective-security architecture backed by military force started calling their opponents “isolationist.” “In the mid-1930s,” writes Wertheim, “such advocates invented this category as an antonym for internationalism, using it to characterize their opponents as wholly antithetical to intercourse among nations.”

Wertheim wants to challenge the prevailing narrative about America’s reluctant ascension to the role of global hegemon, and to counter what he views as the unfair tarring of Quincy Institute types as isolationists. “So long as the phantom of isolationism is held to be the most grievous sin,” Wertheim intones at the conclusion of the book, “all is permitted.” But his broader project is not just to correct the record; it’s to turn the tables on the foreign-policy establishment under which he and likeminded restrainers chafe.

Perhaps even more than a revisionist argument that explains America’s role in the world, Tomorrow, the World is a book about the words that we use when we talk about foreign policy. Wertheim’s book is an attempt, that is, to ground the preferred terminology of the foreign-policy-restraint crowd in a coherent, myth-shattering historical narrative.

He doesn’t take for granted “American leadership” and the language of the Pax Americana. Wertheim reduces “internationalism” in its current incarnation to “primacy,” “armed supremacy,” and “dominance,” effectively rendering thinkers and strategists who describe themselves as defenders of a rules-based order as militaristic proponents of American imperialism.

Wertheim knows better, though, than to beat the heavily battered drum of condemnation of American imperialism. In fact, at a couple of points in the book, he effectively refutes some of the lazier arguments from the anti-imperialist Left that sees the persistence of the global U.S.-led order as the work of parochial business interests or as arising from the machinations of American capitalism. Wertheim writes that although “one might be tempted to join some analysts in arguing that the perceived imperatives of capitalism propelled America’s assumption of global political-military responsibilities and its recasting of international institutions,” this misses what the planners were actually preoccupied with: defending an entire system of liberal international trade from disruption by a foreign, totalitarian threat.

From there, the planners’ efforts took on a life of their own — the American strategists who advocated global dominance ultimately pursued a self-interested project, Wertheim later concludes: “America’s foreign policy class, built up over two decades between the wars in Europe, was not about to see U.S. political, economic, and cultural influence reduced to a hemispheric husk. . . . American elites expected, and felt entitled, to traverse the globe and exchange ideas, goods, and money widely.” He never contends that U.S. hegemony, and the dominant internationalist position, was born of mere greed; he argues, rather, that it’s a form of entitlement to imperial grandeur that Americans have for decades taken for granted.

All of this makes for a mixed bag. Wertheim’s historical sourcing is impressive, and his major contribution is to revive obscure academics and strategists of whom few were previously aware as the architects of America’s modern-day leadership role. Of the figures that he presents, the most important might be the most significantly overlooked of the lot. Toward the end of Tomorrow, the World, John Bassett Moore, an international legal expert and State Department adviser, makes his only cameo, to explain that America’s absence from the League of Nations did not cause the organization’s downfall. Those who believed that America could have been a force for peace within it overlooked the country’s own penchant for wars of aggression abroad and its civil war at home.

Wertheim invokes Moore to cast the creation of the United Nations in a new light: “He thought the U.N. gave the United States the new power to cast its rivals as enemies of the world — against whom all is permitted — and enlarge local disputes into global wars.” The U.N., the Quincy scholar seems to conclude, is the linchpin of America’s “instrumental internationalism,” which sees multilateral buy-in for the use of force as a path to legitimize naked exercises of power.

If only. That would be the Goldilocks case for multilateralism: the idea that international institutions are valuable instruments through which Washington can project power. Instead, America’s dominant political factions see fit to either yield to the diktats of organizations increasingly steered by authoritarian powers or abandon them entirely. The instrumental internationalism Wertheim describes is worth reviving and fighting for, if it is used to advance peace, security, and human rights globally — and, by extension, U.S. interests.

In this way, the example of Moore serves as a bridge between Wertheim’s impressive archival research and a more polemical argument that rests on shakier ground. Tomorrow, the World’s point is to warn that the choice to turn America into a global superpower — and the corresponding effort to discredit the critics of that decision as isolationists — ratified an era of unreflective dominance for its own sake that has persisted up to the present. “In the early twenty-first century, largely free from conquering rivals, global supremacy has left the United States with awesome destructive power and little prospect of peace,” he writes.

Wertheim has taken the reader for a fascinating ride, but the wealth of knowledge that he presents does not necessarily lead to this frankly awkward conclusion. In the 21st century, an authoritarian rival need not pose an immediate threat of invading the continental United States or its allies to justify significant alarm and merit the full response that can be mustered by the U.S.-led global order. By suggesting that only the threat of 20th-century-style armed conquest can justify American primacy, Wertheim downplays what the post-war planners grasped early on — that the consequences of yielding influence over swaths of the world to a hostile rival will ultimately come home to roost.

In any case, armed conquest remains a real possibility. Claiming that the U.S. lacks “conquering rivals” allows Wertheim to wave away concerns about the Chinese Communist Party’s increasingly assertive global ambitions — as he did in a November New York Times op-ed promoting Tomorrow, the World. Though China “threatens Taiwan,” he wrote in the piece, “no one thinks it is about to invade U.S. allies like South Korea or Japan.” But the very existence of that threat to Taiwan exposes the specious reasoning behind his point.

Those who, unlike Wertheim and his Quincy Institute colleagues, do not underestimate the fundamental threat to global democracy and peace posed by the totalitarian-aspiring Chinese regime ought to read Wertheim’s book. He reminds us that global dominance was a choice — but one taken of necessity in a dangerous world. As the U.S. and its allies face a threat that increasingly resembles the last century’s totalitarian regimes, American strategists can take Wertheim’s research as a road map of sorts to revivify the global project that began so many decades ago. Tomorrow, the World’s ultimate point, like the Quincy Institute’s efforts, falls flat because Wertheim and his colleagues are willfully blind to a new authoritarian challenge that doesn’t fit their forever-wars-era narrative of America as global transgressor.