Stale Foreign-Policy Ideas Imperil America
A failed strategy gave us a dangerous world and created a need for fresh thinking.
Aug. 19, 2024
As hungry revisionist powers challenge the existing world order in the Middle East, Ukraine and the South China Sea, American foreign policy looks increasingly lost. In World War II, we had a plan: beat Germany first, then Japan, and then try to build a robust enough peace to prevent World War III. During the Cold War, the plan was to contain the spread of communism without a nuclear war until the Soviet Union’s inner failings brought it down. After the Cold War, the plan was to use America’s moment of unipolar dominance to build a peaceful, rules-driven world order.
While America’s World War II and Cold War strategies worked out well, our post-Cold War strategy failed. The unipolar moment is over, but today’s world isn’t peaceful, orderly or rules-driven. Instead, we are looking at an era of geopolitical competition driving a wave of wars.
The world we inhabit is nastier and more dangerous than the posthistorical paradise we dreamed of at the end of the Cold War. American foreign-policy makers have to go back to the drawing board to figure out what comes next. Foreign policy is going to be riskier, and our choices will often be uglier than we hoped they’d be.
Driving that debate is the disillusionment of many younger Americans with the failures of 21st-century U.S. foreign policy. American military interventions led to “endless wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. American advocacy of free trade allowed a cheating China to emerge as a hostile superpower. American promotion of democracy abroad failed to halt a democratic recession that has sent freedom into retreat around the world. Given this record of failure, wouldn’t it be smarter and cheaper for America to attempt less? Maybe it’s time for some healthy restraint.
Most of the old foreign-policy establishment shudders in horror at the calls for restraint. When Sen. JD Vance criticizes the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, they think about how America’s refusal to back Britain and France in the 1930s aided Hitler in his expansion across Europe. When Sen. Josh Hawley calls for protectionist tariffs, they think of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, widely blamed for worsening the Great Depression. A globally engaged America, the Old Guard deeply believes, is absolutely necessary for the peace, freedom and even survival of the whole human race.
Both sides have scored points, but neither blind ideological commitment to global engagement nor knee-jerk calls for restraint amounts to a strategy. Strategy begins with the question of interests and moves on to priorities and costs. The strategists who helped us win World War II and the Cold War built on concepts of the national interest with deep roots in American history.
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Historically, we needed to prevent foreign countries from interfering in our domestic politics. We needed freedom of the seas. We needed to dissuade any hostile great power from challenging our security in the Western Hemisphere. We needed to deter a single great power from dominating either Europe or Asia. We needed to ensure the freedom of our citizens to travel, invest and do business overseas. We needed to prevent rivals from cutting us off from vital supplies. We needed to protect the security of our global communications as waves of new technologies and ultimately the internet and satellite networks made connectivity the key to economic and military power.
Those interests still matter today. They matter a lot. But the restrainers are right about cost. The end of the unipolar moment means we have to think much harder about what we do and how we do it. There are good things we want that we just can’t afford to pursue. From an American point of view, geopolitical security is a must-have; freedom of religion in Turkmenistan is a luxury.
Historically America has been good at getting its way on the cheap. During World War II, the U.S. relied on Stalin’s Red Army to bleed Nazi Germany. We won the Cold War in part because Richard Nixon pulled China away from the Soviet Union. Finding allies who share burdens rather than hoping to ride free on our might needs to become a priority.
Sustainable strategy requires painful reform. The cumbersome structure of our military forces, our disastrous procurement processes and the entrenched bureaucratic dysfunction of the Pentagon were burdens we could afford in a unipolar world. We can’t now.
American policies must change with the times. The Old Guard is right that our interests are global and that the ostrich approach to foreign policy won’t work. The restrainers are right that our current course is militarily unsound, politically unpopular and fiscally unsustainable.
What’s needed is fresh thinking about how to advance enduring interests in a changing world. Let’s hope it comes quickly. We don’t have much time.
Appeared in the August 20, 2024, print edition as 'Stale Foreign-Policy Ideas Imperil America'.