Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy by Christopher A. Preble

Author:Christopher A. Preble [Preble, Christopher A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, History & Theory, United States, Political Science, History, Politics, General
ISBN: 9781948647168
Google: 93aRugEACAAJ
Goodreads: 41165050
Publisher: Cato Institute
Published: 2019-01-15T12:02:11+00:00

9

The Problem with American Primacy

A suicide bombing in Yemen kills scores of new military recruits. Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe is deposed in a palace coup. Nuclear-armed North Korea tests ballistic missiles. Venezuela is in a political and economic death spiral. Syria’s civil war drags on with no end in sight. In each case, a worried world asks: “What is the United States going to do?”1

U.S. policymakers have invited this response. For decades, Washington has pursued a quixotic goal of primacy, also known as “deep engagement” or “global hegemony.” It presumes that the United States is the world’s “indispensable nation.”2 That means that U.S. leadership is required in order to solve every problem, in any part of the world. All of these problems will grow worse if the United States fails to act, according to this logic. “We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright explained in 1998, “and we see the danger here to all of us.”3

This belief in Washington’s supposed twin powers of perfect prognostication and always-effective action persists despite the unpleasant reality that policymakers have often guessed wrong or have failed even when they correctly identified the problem. U.S. policymakers’ commitment to maintaining preponderant military power, not merely to defend the United States but also to defend a growing roster of security dependents, has likewise proved surprisingly resilient, even as the relative difficulty of maintaining this posture has grown. That is unfortunate for a number of reasons, including the high costs and dubious benefits, but mostly because the core assumptions underlying U.S. foreign policy are deeply flawed and deserve a full public airing.

That foreign policy status quo, primacy, hinges on the belief that overwhelming American power makes the world safer—and not merely our possession of great power, but our willingness to use it. The U.S. military exists to defend this country and its vital security interests, but—critically—it also defends others. Primacy holds that it would be too dangerous to allow other countries to defend themselves. Some will fail, necessitating U.S. interventions at a later date under less auspicious circumstances. Others will succeed too well, unleashing arms races that could roil regions or even the whole planet. Primacists are particularly concerned about self-help leading to nuclear proliferation. If countries were driven out from under the security umbrella provided by American nuclear weapons, the argument goes, then some—perhaps many—would seek a nuclear arsenal of their own.4

Thus, one could say that the greatest fear among U.S. leaders since the end of World War II has been other countries’ fears. U.S. foreign policy aims to reassure a nervous world. Primacy calls on the U.S. military to stop threats from materializing: threats anywhere, to almost anyone (or at least the United States’ 60-plus formal and de facto treaty allies). And when prevention fails and fires ignite, the United States is the first on the scene to stomp them out.

Writing in 1993, the dawn of the post–Cold War era, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington contended that “a world without U.

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