David Brooks makes an alarmist argument:

The weakness with any democratic foreign policy is the problem of motivation. How do you get the electorate to support the constant burden of defending the liberal system?

It was barely possible when we were facing an obviously menacing foe like the Soviet Union. But it’s harder when the system is being gouged by a hundred sub-threshold threats [bold mine-DL].

Brooks overstates the number and significance of threats to “the liberal system.” If there is a “constant burden” of defending this system, it cannot conceivably be the responsibility of the U.S. alone to do it, and the American electorate is justifiably tired of being told that the U.S. is required to shoulder so much of the burden. Not only is it not necessary for the U.S. to do so much of the work, but it is simply impractical to expect that the U.S. will continue to do this indefinitely. Furthermore, it is very difficult for the electorate to be rallied to the defense of a system that doesn’t seem to be in serious danger. Despite what many hawks say, civil war in Syria and the crisis in Ukraine do not amount to the breakdown of international order as we know it. They are unfortunate and serious problems, and neither of them is easily remedied by anything that the U.S. and its allies are able to do. Bombing Syria last year wouldn’t have stabilized Syria, protected diversity, or upheld international order, but would have done significant damage to all of them. Many of the loudest cheerleaders of international order today were more than eager to trash its most basic principles just a few months ago, so we should greet their latest warnings with great caution.

Brooks says that “it is harder to get people to die for a set of pluralistic procedures to protect faraway places,” and he seems to think that this is a bad thing. What sane person would be willing to die for a “set of pluralistic procedures”? Who really wants other people to be willing to die for this? It would be more accurate to say that it is harder to convince people here at home to support the killing of people in faraway places on the assumption that this has something to do with pluralism and international law, not least because such claims are frequently false and misleading. It should be difficult to persuade people to support unnecessary wars in countries that they are not obliged to defend. This is not a failure of the international system, such as it is, but proof that it is not yet defunct. The fact that it has been difficult “to get people to accept commercial pain and impose sanctions” is in many respects welcome news, because it tells us that there are large constituencies in many Western nations that have no interest in dead-end policies of confrontation and isolation. That isn’t a threat to international order, but it is dangerous for a particularly destructive approach to foreign policy.