This book provides a truly timely and richly documented study of the problems associated with the idea of hegemony in international politics. Simon Reich and Richard Ned Lebow convincingly interrogate the multiple ways this idea is conceptually impoverished and demonstrate how it skews the lenses through which international relations scholars and political actors view America’s role in in the world. At the same time, they maintain, the very assertion of hegemony is descriptively false. America has not actually been a hegemon since shortly after World War II and, even then, for only a brief window of time. However, despite its lack of utility and its failure to conform to reality, IR scholars (realists and liberals alike) and the foreign policy establishment cling to the necessity of America’s global leadership, resulting in a foreign policy that is largely ineffectual and actively alienates much of the world. Reich and Lebow find this unacceptable and throw down the gauntlet at the feet of academics and policy makers, insisting upon a different kind of foreign policy for an increasingly multipolar international environment.

One of the great strengths of the book is the elegant way it moves back and forth between an empirical and theoretical critique of hegemony, often within the same chapter, even within the same paragraph. In Chapter 2, for instance, the authors first ably demonstrate that neither realists’ emphasis on military and economic power alone nor liberals’ understanding of hegemony as a “mix of power and norms” accurately describes the status and role of America in the world (p.18). The United States may account for over 40% of the world’s military spending and a quarter of its economic activity, but this does not translate into a consistent ability to enforce its will upon the states and peoples it deems out of order. Moreover, to believe (as does G. John Ikenberry) that American hegemony not only exists but that it is necessary and beneficent is, the authors assert, not only woefully out of touch with reality but also grounded in a nostalgic misreading of history that ignores those moments of bullying, assassination, and occupation—in the Axis powers after the war, in Latin America, Asia, and Africa—that have led critics around the world to refer to America as an imperial power. The authors then pivot to a conceptual critique of hegemony that takes this very disconnect—between the IR literature that assumes America is a benevolent hegemon and the fact that it is neither hegemonic nor perceived as benevolent—and uses it to critically disentangle a variety of theoretical distinctions. Because they have a vested interest in this flawed notion of hegemony, Reich and Lebow argue, IR scholars conflate material advantage with power and power with influence. Conflating power with influence leads them to overlook other forms of influence and, in the process, to support a foreign policy that further alienates current and potential allies.

Chapters 3 and 4 shift gears, away from a critique of hegemony as a concept to an investigation of alternative approaches to foreign policy that challenge both hegemony’s normative and empirical claims. The authors find these approaches in instances of European agenda setting and contemporary China’s role as a global “economic custodian.” The investigation of China in Chapter Four is particularly compelling in its refutation of those contemporary American alarmists who issue dire warnings about Chinese regional and global ambitions and who propagate the notion that China is, in Niall Ferguson’s typically flip words, “tyrannous and toxic” (“China Marches Again, Tyrannous and Toxic,” The Telegraph, Sept. 8, 2007,http://www.niallferguson.com/journalism/politics/china-marches-again-tyrannous-and-toxic, accessed Aug. 21, 2015). Reich and Lebow carefully take on each of these fears and examine the ways in which China has demonstrated its lack of interest in the global overreach of which it stands accused. Rather, the authors argue, China seeks what they refer to as hegemonia, a Greek term about which Lebow has previously written in his brilliant and theoretically rich 2003 book The Tragic Vision of Politics and elsewhere. Hegemonia requires that other political communities who are ruled understand this rule as justified rather than simply tyrannous. Hegemonia therefore necessitates precisely the kinds of economic custodianship and the infusion of development aid that China has recently been spreading around the world.

Understanding hegemony simply as brute power (as do most realists), or approaching it with the fixed ideological certainty that everybody loves America because we stand for stability and democracy (as do liberals), blinds scholars and policymakers to what China is actually doing on the ground. Additionally, Reich and Lebow maintain that IR scholars committed to a factually erroneous and theoretically unhelpful notion of hegemony necessarily ignore history and culture in their analysis of China’s foreign policy objectives. Hegemony as a description, normative good, and analytical tool compels its adherents to assume what they have not proven—that American power is necessary and good and that the world would fall apart without it. In the face of such conceptual obduracy, all detail—Chinese historical experiences of empire and American power, cultural specificities, and context more broadly—fall away. In this light, the hysteria of American scholars and pundits over China’s “tyrannous and toxic” intentions begins to look a lot like what the authors describe elsewhere as Freudian projection: the mechanism by which people deny their own (secretly imperial?) desires and ascribe them to others.

Perhaps the simultaneously most fascinating and most frustrating chapter in the book is Chapter 5, in which the authors “offer conceptual tools for rethinking the U.S. role in the world” (p. 133). They do this by first introducing the notion of “sponsorship” and contrast it to a foreign policy grounded in the leadership assumed to flow from hegemony and linked to the parochialism of military deterrence and compellence. Such an approach does not require policymakers—who are “oblivious to the limitations of this view despite all evidence to the contrary”—to develop any special knowledge of regional history or of the domestic and international contexts that engender particular conflicts. (p. 139) Rather, all international issues are boiled down to technical problems requiring technical solutions. By way of contrast, Reich and Lebow offer us the “alternative framework” of what they term “sponsorship.” In its essence, sponsorship amounts to everything that hegemony is not: Where hegemony ignores context, sponsorship engages it. Where hegemony antagonizes by insisting that the American way is the only way, sponsorship takes the needs and desires of other peoples seriously and works with all stakeholders. Where hegemony assumes moral superiority without consensus, sponsorship understands that a Great Power that truly wants to be effective must be considered legitimate by the nations over whom it hopes to have influence. The authors demonstrate sponsorship in action by first contrasting Barack Obama’s approach to Libya with the war in Iraq and then by engaging in a novel, “counterfactual” reading of the U.S.–Mexican relationship since the inception of the drug war.

I am in agreement with much of Reich and Lebow’s analysis throughout this book, but found myself troubled by their turn to the counterfactual. To be clear, they use the counterfactual sparingly—it amounts to only a small part of one example in a single chapter—and they obviously do not use it in the same cynical fashion as do neoconservatives, who turn to “what if” scenarios to retroactively justify American military intervention or point to where its absence led to failure (See Ferguson’s frequent use of counterfactuals in Virtual History, 2000; Collossus: The Rise and Fall of American Empire, 2005; and Civilization: The West and the Rest, 2011). See also Robert Kagan, “Whether This War Was Worth It,” Washington Post, June 19, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/17/AR2005061701217.html, accessed Aug. 21, 2014). Lebow is also a careful and experienced advocate for the use of counterfactuals to explore international politics (see Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations, 2010), and his desire to expand their utility beyond what E. H. Carr referred to as “parlor-games” is another indication of his open and heterodox approach to IR (Carr, What Is History, 1967), p. 127).

Rather, my discomfort with the authors’ use of the counterfactual springs from the sympathetic but critical belief that it highlights a potential weakness in their vision of how we—as scholars, concerned citizens, and/or policymakers—ought to respond to the vision of America encapsulated in the idea of hegemony. Specifically, Reich and Lebow label their reimagining of Richard Nixon’s response to Mexico and the drug war in terms of sponsorship rather than hegemony a “miracle counterfactual” because it assumes that an administration as committed as Nixon’s to a criminal disregard for national and international law would be willing—in an alternative universe—to “work with the Mexican government rather than alienating it through unilateral initiatives” (p. 165). But, other than a miracle, what would it actually take to make American sponsorship a viable alternative to American hegemony?

Reich and Lebow rightly argue throughout the book that IR scholars, policymakers, and Americans more generally must learn to ground their responses to international politics in something other than blind faith in the necessity of American leadership. Such a shift, they argue, “would require reshaping the lessons Americans learned from their history and the deeper-rooted beliefs—exceptionalism, messianism, and indispensability—that we have described” (p. 165). But they do not tell us how that miraculous shift is supposed to occur in the context of a political culture so profoundly committed to understanding America as the world’s savior. Simply saying to IR scholars, the policy establishment, and the American people alike “this doesn’t work, let’s try something different” takes an ideologically and historically complex problem and decontextualizes it, something the authors argue vigorously against elsewhere in the book.

Ultimately, I argue, the kind of change Reich and Lebow call for requires a deeper and broad-ranging critique of America’s imperial history than they make here. To their great credit, the authors take very seriously the extent to which the United States has historically made foreign policy decisions that violate the principles upon which it was supposedly founded by allying itself with dictators, squashing emerging democracies, and contributing toward an increasingly unstable world economy. But, in the final analysis, Reich and Lebow consider such actions exceptional. Thus, they argue, liberals, realists, and foreign policy analysts ignore the ways America has routinely “violated the responsibilities and roles assigned to a hegemon.” By contrast, they insist, “We highlight these departures” (p. 23). The very word “departures” here implies that the authors consider such moments of American overreach to be anomalies rather than the norm, despite their persistence through time. “Postwar American hegemony,” they argue, “never took the form of an empire” (p. 135). But is this necessarily true in either a pre- or postwar context?

The United States was founded upon land already inhabited by autonomous peoples, and its expansion across the continent required an inordinately complicated language of manifest destiny to square forced land dispossession and genocide with America’s foundational language of freedom and democracy. The complexity of justification increased in intensity as the United States grew into a world power, annexing portions of Mexico, overthrowing the sovereign monarch of Hawaii, occupying Haiti for more than 15 years, and behaving in ways that, as Reich and Lebow correctly observe, the rest of the world understood to be implicitly imperial. Such misadventures continued after the World War II, and, if anything, the rationalizing language of “exceptionalism, messianism, and indispensability” only hardened in response to the Cold War and following the events of September 11, 2001. In other words, the foreign policy actions that the authors imagine as departures—along with the kinds of ideological justifications and forms of psychological “projection” necessary to sustain them—are actually fused into the very fabric of American self-understanding. This self-understanding is, they note, delusional. But it is also extraordinarily powerful, and unraveling it will take more than identifying it as a fiction.

That being said, the fact that Reich and Lebow do identify hegemony as a delusional fiction goes a long way toward beginning the process of reimagining American foreign policy in a multipolar world. I suggest that countering the idea of American exceptionalism ought to proceed on two fronts. The authors successfully articulate one of these fronts for us with their interrogation of hegemony and their clear-eyed call for sponsorship. The other front will entail beginning the difficult process of self-reflection that demands that Americans investigate how their exceptionalism has always been braided with imperial overreach. As Ta-Nehisi Coates notes in a recent article that makes the case for offering reparations to African Americans who have endured 300 years of systematic theft: “An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders” (“The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, May 21, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/, acessed Aug. 21, 2014). Similarly, Good-Bye Hegemony! constitutes, to my mind, a crucial initial moment in the maturation process whereby America takes responsibility for its imperial past and present and faces the world with the kind of realistic humility of which Thucydides—one of Lebow’s biggest heroes—would be proud.