fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The U.S. and “Vital” Interests

I’m not trying to make fun of the Hudson Institute here, but the idea that we have “critical” interests in Kyrgystan just illustrates the poverty of American strategic thinking these days. Even now, in the wake of the various setbacks and mis-steps of the past decade, the central pathology of American strategic discourse is the […]

I’m not trying to make fun of the Hudson Institute here, but the idea that we have “critical” interests in Kyrgystan just illustrates the poverty of American strategic thinking these days. Even now, in the wake of the various setbacks and mis-steps of the past decade, the central pathology of American strategic discourse is the notion that the entire friggin’ world is a “vital” U.S. interest, and that we are therefore both required and entitled to interfere anywhere and anytime we want to. ~Stephen Walt

I don’t disagree with any of this. In fairness, most people would not be very interested in attending a panel on Kyrgyzstan’s politics if they didn’t think it had implications for the U.S., and event organizers have to find some way to generate interest in the topic. This is understandable up to a point, but it also helps get to the heart of why so many Americans involved in shaping foreign policy end up treating virtually everything as something “vital” or “critical” to the U.S.

This exaggeration of the importance of every other part of the world to the U.S. is necessary to get around the reality that the U.S. has very few truly “vital” interests and there are very few countries around the world that might reasonably be considered “critical” for U.S. security. It isn’t just that the U.S. is currently over-committed after the blunders of the last decade. The presumption that the U.S. must provide global “leadership” leads the U.S. to go far beyond protecting its “vital” interests so that it can no longer properly discern what is essential and what is extraneous. In the end, administrations apparently don’t need to invoke the need to protect “vital” interests. The U.S. will plunge into new wars even when it has nothing at stake.

The flip side of the bad habit of exaggeration is that Americans become accustomed to thinking of international events solely through the question, “What does it mean for us?” Again, that is understandable, but in most cases if we were honest in answering that question the correct answer would be, “Very little or nothing.” Global interdependence notwithstanding, things are not as interconnected as many internationalists would have us believe. Nonetheless, the public has been conditioned to believe that major events in most parts of the world affect or relate to the U.S. in some way. The tendency to treat everything in the world as our business keeps us from recognizing that the rest of the world doesn’t revolve around or need us as much as some interventionists would claim.

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here