Foreign Affairs
Saving the World is Not America’s Responsibility
President Trump should ignore the foreign policy “Blob” and act with restraint on the international stage.
The world can be an ugly place. Russia invaded Ukraine. Sudan is consumed by civil war. Haiti is overrun by violent gangs. Conflict has surged in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Somalia is ravaged by violence. Israel is waging war on Palestinians. In Burma the military regime is committing murder and mayhem.
The list goes on: Syria remains divided and at risk after years of conflict. Islamist violence is consuming Nigeria’s Christians and moderate Muslims. China is threatening to forcibly reclaim Taiwan. The Trump administration is killing Yemenis and threatening to bomb Iran. Europeans are pushing America toward a direct military confrontation with Moscow.
These and other conflicts and potential conflicts are terrible. Many people, especially in Washington, look to the U.S. for answers. In their view, if only Uncle Sam is willing to “lead,” the lion will be forced to lie down with the lamb. And all will be well.
Unfortunately, this strategy, as evidenced by the last three decades, has proved to be disastrous. Fixing the world proved to be well beyond Washington’s capability. Equally important, these battles aren’t Americans’ responsibility.
That’s a controversial belief in Washington, where commitment to the U.S. as the crusader state dies hard. Even the Trump administration, staffed with more neocon warriors than MAGA realists, seems determined on war somewhere. Indeed, the conviction that Washington should fix every problem and right every wrong is widely shared. I recently attended a conference on religious persecution around the world, an issue that I have covered for years. I was surprised when a long-time colleague vehemently criticized my long-held opposition to Washington’s continuing military presence in Syria.
Never mind that the American people have never thought of, let alone debated, protecting Syria’s Kurds. Or that the president has not negotiated and the Senate has not ratified a defense treaty. That Syria never has been a significant security interest for America. That Washington did much to harm Syrian civilians by fueling the civil war and applying brutal sanctions. That maintaining a garrison entangles the U.S. in the globe’s most volatile region. That protecting Syrian Kurds requires an ongoing, potentially permanent military presence. That American forces in Syria face multiple challengers, including Russia, Iran, ISIS, unaffiliated Islamist radicals, NATO ally Turkey, and the new Damascus regime, whose leaders once were affiliated with Al Qaeda. Or that such involvement is not in Americans’ interest.
Still, this person wanted the U.S. military to stick around. Not forever, they insisted. However, no one in the region, especially in the newly emerging Syrian government, which would like to reestablish control over all the land it now purports to rule, and Turkey, which has invaded Syria’s north and used proxy forces to rule over ethnic Kurdish borderlands, is prepared to abandon its claim. Which means any U.S. commitment must be open ended and any U.S. forces must remain perpetually ready for combat.
There is no duty for any government more fundamental than protecting its people. The Constitution speaks of the “common defense.” But that means of Americans, not the world. Most importantly, that also means defense. Not conducting grand crusades around the globe to bring paradise to earth.
Washington should be prepared to deter war against and defeat antagonists of Americans. Although the U.S. need not wait for the invaders to touch American soil, to act Washington should confront a genuine threat, not seek to create an idealized version of Pax Americana in the far reaches of the globe. Defending the U.S. has gotten more complicated in today’s world, where conflict can take various forms. Nevertheless, defense still means defense. Just as Supreme Court justices know pornography when they see it, Americans know cant about humanitarian war-making when they hear it. To constrain the Blob, as the foreign policy establishment has been called, it is vital to narrowly define both the foreign policy end and military means.
What makes international affairs so complicated is that it is prudential, requiring a judgment call in ever varying circumstances. For instance, Imperial Germany’s Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm and Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler warranted very different responses. Unnecessary intervention in World War I inadvertently led to World War II, which was far more difficult for Washington to avoid. In retrospect the Soviet Union’s ambitions look more limited than feared at the time. However, policymakers must deal with reality as it appears at the time. The results often are counterproductive, sometimes disastrously so.
Indeed, many of today’s hot spots, some literally on fire, are to varying degrees America’s or the broader West’s responsibility. Such is the Russia–Ukraine conflict, in which the U.S. and European allies have been fighting a proxy war-plus, very publicly helping Ukraine kill thousands of Russians. Moscow chose to initiate hostilities, an unjust and unjustified invasion. However, Washington and its NATO partners broke multiple promises not to expand the alliance to Russia’s borders, launched an aggressive war against Serbia, a long-time friend of Moscow, and promoted regime change in neighboring Georgia and Ukraine, where a democratically-elected president who leaned east was ousted. Had the Soviet Union conducted a similar campaign against Mexico, the U.S. and USSR would have been at the brink of war, like over Cuba during the Cold War. Catastrophe could result. Russia possesses nuclear weapons, which it uses to make up for conventional inferiority, and cares a lot more about Ukraine than America, which never challenged Moscow’s rule over that territory, even during the Cold War.
In the Middle East, the U.S. has proved to be a prodigious killer. Washington waged war on Iraq (twice), Libya, Syria, and Yemen, causing hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. The U.S. is threatening Iran, again. A war there could be worse than all the others combined.
Moreover, Washington has shaped its policy to protect the interests of Saudi Arabia and Israel rather than America. They long looked to war, and, more importantly, war by America, as the answer to their problems. For instance, the Guardian reported: “The Saudi king was recorded as having ‘frequently exhorted the U.S. to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons program,’ one cable stated. ‘He told you [Americans] to cut off the head of the snake,’ the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir said, according to a report on Abdullah’s meeting with the U.S. general David Petraeus in April 2008.”
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has long campaigned for the same result. For instance, noted the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi, “By ringing the alarm bells on Iran’s growing nuclear program, Netanyahu had hoped to eliminate Obama’s ‘kick the can down the road’ option and force Washington to strike Iran militarily.” Netanyahu similarly pushed Biden to act, but “almost all [of his plans] required significant U.S. support via direct military intervention or intelligence sharing. Israel has also requested that Washington help Israel defend itself should Iran retaliate.” The prime minister continues to push for war. According to the New York Times: “Israel had planned to strike Iranian nuclear sites as soon as next month but was waved off by President Trump in recent weeks in favor of negotiating a deal with Tehran.” Apparently, even Trump is wary of his nominal friend. During his first term, the president complained that Israel’s premier was “willing to fight Iran to the last American soldier.”
Unfortunately, Washington’s refusal to do its supposed clients’ bidding in this case was unusual. In Yemen the U.S. aided the Saudi royals, among the world’s worst human rights abusers, in killing tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians to reinstate a puppet regime. Hamas warrants obvious condemnation for its atrocities, but Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of civilians goes well beyond a legitimate response. Yet there appears to be no crime against Palestinians that the U.S. will not excuse.
Worst of all, the U.S. is thoughtlessly careening toward a potential war with China over Taiwan with little thought of the consequences. Only a very few voices have been raised in Washington against the idea of confronting Beijing militarily if it moves against Taiwan, a territory as close to the Chinese mainland as Cuba is to America. However, battling a major conventional power possessing nuclear weapons over an issue which it views as existential is a prescription for catastrophe. Even in the minority of cases when the U.S. wins war games it suffers major losses in manpower and materiel, and the exercises typically presume no use of nuclear weapons. America’s response to Soviet military activities in Cuba offer a scary foretaste of how Beijing might ultimately respond to increased U.S. military activity on and around Taiwan.
What may be most striking about these cases is that none of them have much to do with defending America. The purpose of allies should be to help protect the U.S., not to act as welfare queens dragging Americans into other people’s quarrels. In some cases, the battle is largely irrelevant to U.S. interests and occasionally entirely unjust, such as Riyadh’s years of brutal attacks on Yemen. On occasion the objective may be useful, but is in no way vital for America, such as preventing Iran’s possible acquisition of nuclear weapons. In other examples, the cause is just—such as supporting Ukraine and Taiwan against foreign aggression. However, even then the interest isn’t vital for America, and certainly not worth conflict with a nuclear power.
The Founders’ desire to prevent promiscuous military meddling abroad caused them to require congressional assent for war. George Mason insisted that the president “is not safely to be entrusted with” that authority, hence it was placed with Congress. Explained James Wilson, “It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve U.S. in such distress; for the important power of declaring war is in the legislature at large.” The inimitable Thomas Jefferson made the same argument in more colorful language: the Constitution provided an “effectual check to the dog of war by transferring the power of letting him loose.”
Their worries proved to be well-founded. In the modern era presidents misuse their role as military commander-in-chief to start endless conflicts. Unfortunately, Congresses fail to fulfill their responsibility and hold errant chief executives to account. Only rarely does either branch of government follow the Constitution.
“It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it,” opined Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as he viewed the human carnage of the Fredericksburg battlefield. Since the end of the Cold War the U.S. has been the most militaristic and aggressive of nations. The lust for power and war has energized the infamous foreign policy Blob centered in Washington. Alas, everyone else at home, and many abroad, have paid the price.
Contra the constant fearmongering used to justify the U.S. government’s frequent warmaking, America is the most secure great power ever. Military intervention has proved to be the cause of, not solution to, U.S. insecurity.
Trump should chart another course. He was the first modern president to publicly acknowledge that America had done wrong, announcing that “war and aggression will not be my first instinct.” During his first term he also was reluctant to retaliate against other nations and needlessly leave corpses in the U.S. military’s wake. Now the president is attempting to bring peace to Europe and disentangle America from that continent’s major conventional conflict. He should take the same approach to the Middle East, ending threats against Iran, attacks on Yemen, and backing for Israel’s depredations.
Doing so won’t end war and inaugurate eternal peace. However, it would better keep America safe and force other nations to address their own problems and grievances. It’s impossible to know Trump’s ultimate legacy. However, it would be hard to improve on reducing America’s involvement in dangerous and unnecessary wars.
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