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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Obstacles to Foreign Policy Restraint

It is because we are so secure that our government can "get away with" being heedless and irresponsible in its conduct of foreign policy.
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Emma Ashford reviews the recent Advancing American Security conference, and adds this:

Despite these attempts at engagement, realist and restraint-oriented perspectives, whether from inside or outside the Beltway, remain a relative rarity in Washington, where broadly interventionist ideas tend to dominate among both Democrats and Republicans. Indeed, last week also saw the release of a report by the Center for a New American Security, co-authored by former officials from both the Obama and Bush administrations, which argued for the extension and expansion of American power and presence around the globe. With the report’s 10 signatories dominated by liberal internationalist and neoconservative voices, it is no surprise that it calls for various expansive policies, including a no-fly zone in Syria, a focus on undermining Iran’s hegemonic ambitions, providing arms to Ukraine, and a call to “significantly increase U.S. national security and defense spending.”

Continuing bipartisan support for overseas meddling in the name of global “leadership” remains a major obstacle to a more restrained U.S. foreign policy, and so it is worth thinking a bit more about why that support persists in spite of numerous costly failures since the end of the Cold War.

One reason why restraint hasn’t gained more adherents in Washington is that it is always easier to accept the prevailing consensus than it is to dissent from it. Poor and distorted information about the state of the world probably also has something to do with it. Foreign conflicts in which the U.S. has little or nothing at stake seize media attention, and that prompts calls for “action” and reinforces the false impression that much of the world is in chaos. The reality that the world is overall more peaceful and secure than it has been in over a century receives virtually no coverage because there is nothing dramatic or attention-grabbing about the absence of conflict. Some of the relatively few pockets of instability around the world garner that much more attention because there are so few of them, and it is taken for granted out of habit that the U.S. has both the right and obligation to police these areas. The extent of U.S. power and the lack of any major threat to America itself makes our policymakers overconfident and reckless, and it causes them to look for new conflicts to join rather than find ways to steer clear of them.

One might think that the extraordinary security of the U.S. would make our foreign policy less activist and meddlesome because it is no way necessary to keep Americans secure, but it is because we are so secure that our government can “get away with” being heedless and irresponsible in its conduct of foreign policy. The U.S. can interfere in numerous countries, take sides in civil wars that have nothing to do with us, and even embark on disastrous wars of our own without really putting the U.S. in grave jeopardy, and that allows every administration regardless of party to intervene more freely and unnecessarily than a less secure government could. Bad policies are often cast aside only when their costs become intolerable for a large number of people at home, but the costs of U.S. foreign policy are usually borne by a relative few in the U.S. and are otherwise borne by the peoples of other countries.

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