Daniel Davis elaborates on why it is wrong to think of the U.S. as the world’s “policeman”:

The inhabitants of any civil entity want to be governed and secured by laws of their choosing, protected by people culturally and linguistically like themselves, and to have a judiciary to prevent abuse of power by the police force.

The world is given none of those things when the U.S. military is made to be its police force. If Americans would never, under any circumstances, submit to the laws and enforcers of another country on U.S. soil, why should we expect the citizens of other nations to submit to being made to obey our interpretation of laws by means of armed U.S. troops?

As I said before in my response to Rasmussen’s op-ed last month, most of the world doesn’t want or need the U.S. to fill the “policing” role that some people in the West want it to have. Even if the U.S. were a competent and consistent enforcer of “world order,” it would not be a legitimate or accepted one in most countries around the world, and we have seen enough in the last twenty-five years to know that the U.S. is frequently neither competent nor consistent in how it tries to enforce the “rules.” If the U.S. abuses its power in this self-appointed role, other nations have no legal recourse, and there is no mechanism or institution to hold the enforcer in check.

The core problem is that the U.S. has neither the right nor the authority to do the things that Rasmussen and others like him want it to do, and we know from experience that when it sets out to act as an enforcer it often leaves the affected countries far worse off than they were before the intervention. Davis sums up the record this way:

Our actual experience of performing the duty of the world’s policeman has universally failed. American national security has not been served and the plight of the helpless has markedly deteriorated.

The idea that the U.S. can or should act as the world’s “policeman” has been thoroughly discredited by events, and policymakers should dismiss it as the dangerous and hubristic nonsense that it is.