https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/foreign-policy-restraint-is-now-inevitable/amp/https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/foreign-policy-restraint-is-now-inevitable/amp/
Foreign-Policy Restraint Is Now Inevitable
We will be forced to pare down our global ambitions because we simply lack the resources to back all our commitments.
F or the past few years, foreign-policy debates have been framed as if there were a person, or a group of people, who faced a neat decision between maintaining American primacy on the world stage and some form of retrenchment and restraint.
I would know, because I’ve been on the “restraint” side of those debates. Should we enforce Obama’s red lines and change the regime in Syria? Or is that another costly nation-building exercise that will enflame extremism and worsen a refugee crisis for Europe? Should America tear up its agreements and stay in Afghanistan? Or should we honor them and end the longest war in American history? Should we aid Ukraine against Russia’s invasion as if it were a de facto member of NATO? Or should we acknowledge that Ukraine is of peripheral interest to us, and that Russia will make greater sacrifices and take bigger risks to effect its preferred outcomes there?
For a long time, I was convinced that if I was making any progress in the case for restraint, it was thanks to the extravagance of my antagonists’ claims and ambitions measured up against the paltry results. Our interventions in Iraq started a wave of extremism, not democracy. Our intervention in Libya convinced dictators never to trade their WMDs to us for peace, and then the resulting wave of human trafficking from there broke European politics in the bargain.
The premise behind all such debates is that the decisive factors are the will of our people to assume these responsibilities and risks, and the leadership of our politicians, who can stir us to this — admittedly awkward — historical role for a commercial republic.
But that may be a delusion coming to an end. We will be forced to pare down our global ambitions because we simply lack the resources to back all our commitments.
Military spending and investment are a bit like playing poker with your cards facing out. The other players in the game can see how many troops and ships and airplanes you have, how many shells you produce in a month, and what portion of your budget is dedicated to warfare.
And they can see that, on a GDP basis, we are spending less on our military than we did during the Cold War, and yet we have radically expanded our commitments since that time. A generation ago, we took on Poland and the Baltics. More recently, we’ve thrown North Macedonia, Sweden, and 900 more miles of Finland’s border into the pot.
We used to have a readiness goal of being prepared to fight two major wars at once. That has long since been abandoned, even as we’ve expanded the list of our serious global rivals. Instead of one — the Kremlin — we now have two and a half, now that Beijing and Tehran have been added to the list. While the playability of our hand has degraded, we’ve responded by radically increasing the size of the bluff. It’s the tell-tale sign of a player who is psychologically reconciling himself to going bust.
The fact is that our military and our diplomatic class live in a culture in which we make promises that we cannot keep. Our shipyards promise to deliver readymade ships on a certain date before they even have fully sketched out plans. The U.S. missile frigate Constellation is three years behind schedule. We promise Australia — after making them break off a deal with France — submarines that we cannot deliver. The only way we may make the deliveries even close to on schedule is by decommissioning another 17 support ships, owing to the lack of qualified mariners. Many of the so-called delays in shipping weapons to Ukraine are not failures of will, but failures of readiness.
Although it has exceeded its goal in 2024, the U.S. Army’s recruitment crisis meant shrinking the Army by roughly two divisions between 2021 and 2023. The Navy is still falling behind its recruitment, and it’s radically reducing its standards to try to fill the gaps. Only 23 percent of American youth meet the physical, mental, and moral requirements of service. Sixty percent of our youth choose college. And declining fertility means that our number of recruits is now about to dwindle, with no end in sight. Fertility went into steep decline in the past decade, but the worst trend started in the financial panic of 2008. That means that in 2026, the armed forces will be recruiting from a population of 18-year-olds that is literally decimated — cut by 10 percent from the previous year.
The war in Ukraine has taught us that any war short of nuclear conflict involves the expenditure of men and resources. The United States is running out. Our accumulated debt and our ever-ballooning commitment to expending the maximum amount of resources on the Baby Boomer generation (now on Medicare) have already caused Congress to try to freeze military spending even as we promise to do more in the world against stronger enemies. Those burdens will only grow as America becomes older, more senile, less assertive, more risk-averse, more obese, and less willing to sacrifice the dwindling number of youth.
In this case, foreign-policy restraint looks less like the prudence of the wise and more like the price paid by the aged fool who squandered what was given — and failed to invest for posterity.