Summary: We’ve built an empire, but like its British predecessor, it provides little benefit to the people who pay for it with blood and money. Recent polls suggest that we might be catching on to the con, but it’s too soon to speculation about the effects of this change on US foreign policy.
… it is a fact that Kipling’s “message” was one that the big {British} public did not want, and indeed, has never accepted. The mass of the people, in the 1890’s as now, were anti-militarist, bored by the Empire, and only unconsciously patriotic. Kipling’s official admirers are and were the “service” middle class …”
— “Thoughts on Rudyard Kipling” by George Orwell, Horizon, February 1942
America burst upon the world in the Spanish-American War (1898), with succeeding waves carrying us into broader and deeper involvements around the world. With each wave our military grew larger. We have become the world’s hegemon, running a mad unprofitable empire.
The cost in money has been borne by American taxpayers. The cost in blood by America’s young men (and some women).
Each wave has fought and overcome a deeply-rooted isolationist sentiment. But a new generation has arrived, whose views might mirror the disinterest of the British mass public during the late Empire era. Decades of futile and failed wars might finally have had an effect. Especially on fresher minds, as shown in this interesting result from “Millennials in Adulthood“, Pew Research, 7 March 2014:
Polls show the effects of this evolution of pubic opinion, as in “America’s Place in the World 2013” by Pew Research, 3 December 2013:
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Our hawks screech, learning nothing by our expensive defeats since 9/11, but see that he public no longer follows. As in Condoleezza Rice’s (Secretary of State 2005-2009) op-ed in the Washington Post (7 March 2014): “Will America heed the wake-up call of Ukraine?” The always-insightful Ta-Nehisi Coates gives a rebuttal: “As Though Iraq Never Happened – The short memory of Condoleezza Rice“, The Atlantic, 11 March 2014:
Condoleezza Rice was an important member of an administration that launched a war on false pretense and willingly embraced torture. … It takes a particular historical blindness to claim that such actions should have no effect on all our crowing over “democracy and human rights.”
War-mongering is self-justifying. If you bungle a war in Iraq, it does not mean you need to sit back and reflect on the bungling. It means you should make more war, lest Iraq become a base for your enemies. If Vladimir Putin violates Ukrainian sovereignty, it is evidence for a more muscular approach. If he doesn’t, than it is evidence that he fears American power.
If there are no terrorist attacks on American soil, then drones must be right and our security state must be effective. If there are attacks, then our security state must increase its surveillance, and more bombs should be dropped.
Violence begets violence. Peace begets violence. The circle continues.
David Brooks gives a more sophisticated analysis than Rice’s straightforward war mongering in “The Leaderless Doctrine“, David Brooks, op-ed in the New York Times, 10 March 2014. Conor Friedersdorf gives a powerful rebuttal in “The Decline of the American War Hawk“, The Atlantic, 11 March 2014 — “There’s been a backlash in the United States against foreign interventionism — but David Brooks and others just don’t get it.” He explains what’s happening.
What Americans are actually sensing, especially after Iraq and Afghanistan reminded them about the limits of military force, is that the law of diminishing marginal returns holds, even if, left to its own devices, the Pentagon would spend without limit.
… Americans who want the U.S. less engaged in world affairs are saying no more than what Brooks, for reasons I can’t fathom, finds “amazing”: that there are limits to the changes that American politicians and soldiers can bring about, and that those limits ought to be obvious to anyone looking at Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Ukraine.
This point is being made with increasing insistence by the American public because they perceive, correctly, that there is a cadre of Washington, D.C. insiders — bureaucrats, military contractors, think-tank fellows, editors like Bill Kristol, writers like Max Boot — so oblivious to America’s limits that they can’t even see the last military intervention that they successfully advocated as a mistake, even though, in that case, the catastrophic results have already played out.
It might be a new day in America — if we put to work our new, more-sophisticated view of the world. The funds squandered on foreign adventures can help rebuild our rotting infrastructure and better prepare America to compete in the 21st century.
For More Information
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About our foreign policy:
- Mitt Romney and the Empire of Hubris. Setting America on a path to decline., 10 October 2011
- Advice from one of the British Empire’s greatest Foreign Ministers, 18 November 2011
- Continuity and dysfunctionality in US foreign policy (lessons for our conflict with Iran), 13 January 2012
- Look at America’s grand strategy. Why do we believe this nonsense?, 5 March 2013
