Maintaining American Primacy: After Bush

With the United States presidential election less than a year away, America’s world role already occupies a prominent place in the candidates’ campaigns for the Democratic and Republican Party nominations. Former United States President Bill Clinton observed that, when evaluating prospective presidents on national security, Americans invariably prefer the candidate who is ‘strong but wrong’ over one ‘timid but right’. If a closely-divided country is to elect a successor to George Bush both ‘strong and right’, the most salient issue promises to be not whether to preserve American primacy, but how best to do so.