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Priorities and Public Ignorance

Daniel Trombly objects to Stephen Walt’s dismissal of Kyrgyzstan: So while I am glad to see the motley crew of realists and non-interventionists of all stripes pushing for restraint, I wish there was a little more articulation of what areas did matter and an explanation of why we should care. It would make it a […]

Daniel Trombly objects to Stephen Walt’s dismissal of Kyrgyzstan:

So while I am glad to see the motley crew of realists and non-interventionists of all stripes pushing for restraint, I wish there was a little more articulation of what areas did matter and an explanation of why we should care. It would make it a lot harder to paint advocates of retrenchment and restraint as isolationists. Then cases for prioritization could rely less on unnecessarily dismissing countries and regions to cater to simplistic ideas of what makes the rest of the world “important,” which, when they are convincing, tend to just aggravate bad policy whenever the US inevitably does face a crisis in a given area. Coming up with an alternative grand strategy or two, and pushing them, is a lot more helpful than insisting that countries are just unimportant.

I should add that Trombly is mainly objecting to the reasons Walt gives for his dismissal, which were these:

Yes, I know that the air base at Manas is a critical transit point for logistics flowing into Afghanistan, but otherwise Kyrgyzstan is an impoverished country of about 5 million people without significant strategic resources, and I daresay few Americans could find it on a map (or have any reason to want to).

Granted, these are not good reasons for dismissing Kyrgyzstan as unimportant. Libya is potentially a very wealthy country with some significant resources, but that doesn’t make it all that strategically important. The more valid point that Walt made is that there is no attempt to set priorities or distinguish between places that really are critically or vitally important to the U.S. and those that aren’t, and I agree with that criticism. Trombly is also right that appealing to public ignorance is probably never something that one wants to do when arguing for a more restrained, sane foreign policy, since public ignorance is a real factor in our inability to hold the government accountable for its policy mistakes and an important reason why those policy mistakes can be made so easily and often.

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