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Mindless Interventionism Is Bad For America

Leon Wieseltier makes a very tired argument: It turns out that Obama’s Iraq-based view of America’s role in the world, according to which American preeminence is bad for the world and bad for America, is not shared by societies and movements in many regions. They need, and deserve, support in their struggles. That doesn’t describe […]

Leon Wieseltier makes a very tired argument:

It turns out that Obama’s Iraq-based view of America’s role in the world, according to which American preeminence is bad for the world and bad for America, is not shared by societies and movements in many regions. They need, and deserve, support in their struggles.

That doesn’t describe Obama’s view all that well, but then accuracy has never been all that important for Wieseltier. Whether it involves calling Obama “Henry Kissinger’s epigone” or attributing other views to him that he almost certainly doesn’t hold, this is just an exercise in setting Obama up as a caricature of what he thinks realists are. It’s true that there are “societies and movements” that would like the U.S. to provide them with support, and in some cases they might even want military assistance, but while they might need that support it is frequently not the case that the U.S. is obliged to provide it.

If an opposition group or government is calling on the U.S. to do something for them, Wieseltier and other interventionists like him assume that the U.S. should more or less unthinkingly do it. They can’t see any good reason not to, and they’ll dismiss any reason that others might give them. It doesn’t seem to matter whether doing these things serves any discernible U.S. interest, nor does it matter what the costs or possible negative consequences might be. According to this view, the U.S. should intervene again and again because it may advance someone else’s cause. This sets up the U.S. to be suckered into one conflict after another with no end in sight, since there will always be some groups and nations that will hope for and demand U.S. backing. Giving it to them may or may not prove to be good for their countries, but it will definitely be bad for America.

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