From The Ripon Forum

June 2025

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** What America Means to the Free World
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** by Paul D. Miller
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In any high school in America, teenagers organize themselves into social groups: cheerleaders and jocks, nerds and goths, artists and preppies. No one tells them to do so. It is a natural human instinct. We form groups, and each group has a distinct culture around shared values.

And the school as a whole has a culture. If the most socially influential subgroup is also kind, generous, and full of integrity, that will influence the culture of the whole school. If the most socially influential group consists of bullies or cheaters, that will also affect the culture of the whole school.

If Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle were the most popular or influential students at Hogwarts, it would be a very different school than the one in which Harry, Hermione, and Ron raised an army against Voldemort and his Death Eaters.

What is true at a high school is true at any level of social organization, including world order. World order is a social system made up of the patterned interactions among the states, intergovernmental organizations, and multinational corporations of the world. World order has its own culture. Its culture takes shape from the norms, values, and behavior of its most powerful members.

For three centuries, the United Kingdom and the United States have been among the most powerful and influential nations in the world — sometimes the most powerful. Which means the culture of world order in large part reflects our values and our interests.

For three centuries, the United Kingdom and the United States have been among the most powerful and influential nations in the world — sometimes the most powerful. Which means the culture of world order in large part reflects our values and our interests.

We might have had fascist order if the Nazis got the bomb first. We might have had a communist world order if the Soviets had prevailed. We might have had an Islamist-jihadist world order if al-Qaida or ISIS got their way.

Instead, we have a world order characterized — imperfectly, and not universally — by American ideals: ordered liberty within and among nations. Scholars have a clunky name for it (the “liberal international order”) and its opponents smear it with another name (“globalism”).

I prefer a simpler title: the free world.

We have a free world because freedom-loving nations consistently defeated their opponents — Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler and Tojo, the Soviets, and more. Which means America helped build the free world. Sometimes consciously, as when we fought “to make the world safe for democracy,” as Woodrow Wilson said, or to defend the ideals of the Atlantic Charter, under which Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill fought the Second World War. We consciously built the free world when we championed free trade or forcibly democratized our former enemies after World War II.

Just as often, we built it through our example and through the pressure of outcompeting our opponents. Over the long run, America and our allies are vastly superior at producing wealth, peace, and human flourishing than the fascist, communist, Islamist, and authoritarian alternatives — and their people know it. If you want to compete with America, sooner or later you must adapt to our way of doing things or get left behind—and when our opponents adapt our ways, we win.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Iran’s proxy attack on Israel, and China’s maneuvering against Taiwan are not isolated developments. They are all attacks on the free world order.

The free world is good for America, and America is good for the free world. The free world is the outer perimeter of American security, an engine of American prosperity, and a tool of American influence. We are safer because half the world agrees with our ideals and sees the world the same way we do. We are richer because half the world trades with us on equal footing. We are stronger because we have friends and allies who work together with us on almost every imaginable issue of global concern. An unfree world is a world in which America is poorer, weaker, and more vulnerable on every front.

Today the free world has enemies abroad and doubts at home. China and Russia are mounting a full-spectrum assault on the free world; Iran and North Korea are smaller satellites to their efforts. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Iran’s proxy attack on Israel, and China’s maneuvering against Taiwan are not isolated developments. They are all attacks on the free world order.

The consequences of each conflict will not be limited to their regions but will ripple outward and affect the culture of world order. If they get away with aggression — if tyrants and terrorists attack, conquer, and kill with impunity — we live in a very different kind of world. It will no longer be a free world, but a world in which might makes right; a world in which “the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer as they must,” as Thucydides memorably put it. It will be a world in which Draco (Russia) takes the school and hands it to Voldemort (China).

We should face the threat the same way we always have. American grand strategy at its best always aims to preserve and expand American power by preserving and expanding American ideals. Power and justice go hand-in-hand. They are the twin pillars — better yet, the two fists — of an effective strategy. Power without justice is cynical and immoral; justice without power is weak and naïve. Together, they are tough-minded but morally aspirational, focused on American interests but mindful of our impact on the world at large.

That means, first, American power — and the power of our free world allies — must remain unmatched. The U.S. defense budget during the Cold War averaged close to 9 percent of GDP. Today, it is closer to 3 percent. That is inadequate to the task of defending the free world. The U.S. needs a large and sustained increase in spending for hard power: guns and bombs, a modern nuclear arsenal, shipyards and aircraft carriers, missile defenses, and spy satellites. We need to sustain a network of military bases and platforms of access in the key geopolitical theaters around the world.

American power — and the power of our free world allies — must remain unmatched. The U.S. defense budget during the Cold War averaged close to 9 percent of GDP. Today, it is closer to 3 percent. That is inadequate to the task of defending the free world.

Second, America must rearm with the weapons of soft power. During the Cold War, we gave hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid to allies and partners around the world through organizations like the U.S. Agency for International Development. We created media outlets to spread the American message, like Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. We invested in a cadre of diplomats who spoke foreign languages and traveled the world. These tools of soft power advertised American ideals and helped win the Cold War.

Unfortunately, we have comprehensively dismantled these tools and disarmed ourselves of our soft power. After the Cold War, we took a “peace dividend” and cut back on everything, leaving most international affairs bureaucracies limping along as shells of their former selves, demoralized, underfunded, and poorly staffed. When they unsurprisingly proved ineffective, the public turned against them, and President Donald Trump gave them the coup de grace this year.

The fight against Russian and Chinese authoritarianism is the fight of the 21^st century. America must fight and win the Second Cold War, which means we must advance American power and American ideals. We need guns and bombs, and we need dollars and diplomats.

Above all, we need leaders, statesmen and stateswomen, of character, integrity, and competence. We need a cadre of politicians, bureaucrats, diplomats, and soldiers who know how to pull the levers of the government’s complex machinery and make it work for the American people. (It would help if Congress would fix itself and its budget process and then free the executive to streamline the bureaucracy).

But more than how, we need statesmen and stateswomen who understand why to pull the levers. We need a renewed sense of civic pride and national purpose, rooted in an awareness of our history and our Creed of liberty and equality. American grand strategy aims at national greatness, yes, but that is not our ultimate purpose. Greatness for its own sake is just national ego. Pride makes poor strategy, neither effective nor just. True greatness is the side effect of victory in a just cause. With our Creed, we have justice on our side; whether we achieve victory is yet unknown. But those twin goals — victory and justice, power and ideals — those are the calling of our time.

Dr. Paul D. Miller is a Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He serves as co-chair of the Global Politics and Security concentration in the MSFS program.

The Ripon Forum is published six times a year by The Ripon Society, a public policy organization that was founded in 1962 and takes its name from the town where the Republican Party was born in 1854 –Ripon, Wisconsin. One of the main goals of The Ripon Society is to promote the ideas and principles that have made America great and contributed to the GOP’s success. These ideas include keeping our nation secure, keeping taxes low and having a federal government that is smaller, smarter and more accountable to the people.

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