Description
How do we characterize the United States’ role in the international system since 1990? The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, and the Taliban’s subsequent takeover, prompt us to reflect on America’s role in the world between 1991 and 2021. Broadly, historians and IR scholars take two positions on how they view America, that of an empire, or a hegemon. In this article, I contest both propositions as having limited scope, and not necessarily capturing the essence of the American interventionist mindset rooted in democratic promotion. This paper proposes America as a “messiah state”. A messiah state is a state that seeks to save other societies from a perceived threat. To conceptualise messiah states, I draw on—and distinguish from—terminologies of “empire” and “hegemony”. This paper makes three critical arguments: First, the existing conceptions about America and its role are insufficient to explain the years from 1991 through 2020. Second, the period between 1991 and 2020 must be characterized as an era in which America assumed the role of a messiah state. I examine the National Security Strategy documents from the early 1990s to demonstrate how America established itself as a messiah state. In this time frame, between 1991 and 2020, it is possible to demonstrate that a messiah state emerged between 1991 and 2001, persisted between 2001 and 2015, and has been in decline since 2016. Third, I show that the U.S. as a messiah state has failed in most societies it has intervened in.
