On the main blog, Dan has made an argument for non-interventionism as the best, indeed only, way to pursue a prudent foreign policy that will avoid such blunders as the war in Iraq or the deployment to Somalia.  While restating his confidence in the virtues of Pax Americana, Ross rejects “stringent non-interventionism” but essentially agrees with Dan’s following point:

If you want a prudent foreign policy that keeps America out of unwinnable wars in places like Iraq and Somalia, you should support noninterventionism. Neither neoconservatism nor liberal interventionism nor old-fashioned Cold War conservatism will ever be cautious enough to avoid such entanglements.

Ross makes it very clear that he doesn’t embrace a thoroughgoing non-interventionism, and he thinks that the costs from any of the blunders we might care to name are more than made up for by the (exaggerated) benefits of Pax Americana, but he allows that the blunders are simply part of upholding this order.  On this point, Ross says:

I think my disagreement with the non-interventionist point of view comes down to the question of whether the benefits that flow from the Pax Americana that’s been created by America’s quasi-imperial role in the world are worth the blunders that more-or-less inevitably accompany it.   

Given that these inevitable blunders will happen, there is the possibility of relatively greater prudence (e.g., Eisenhower’s administration), but he admits that future blunders will be part of any attempt to serve as the guarantor of world order (which is what admirers of Pax Americana think has been happening).  So Ross has ceded Dan’s main point quoted above, and it is therefore crucial to Ross’ position that the benefits of Pax Americana are as great for America and the world as he claims.  However, the incidence of cross-border warfare does not seem to have been less since 1991, especially considering that the U.S. and our allies have launched a number of invasions or attacks on sovereign states in the last 17 years.  Wars with massive casualties have been fewer, but it’s questionable how much of this can be attributed to our “quasi-imperial role.” 

Having armed and deputised the Ethiopians to invade Somalia, Washington can take credit for at least one other invasion in this decade besides Iraq.  While Colombia recently had reason to launch a cross-border raid into Ecuador and Washington supported the action, this act violated the OAS Charter (to which the U.S. is a signatory and which is supposedly part of the architecture of international order that we uphold).  The people of Lebanon two years ago seem to have missed out on the benefits of the peace, and Washington could not have been more supportive of the war against Lebanon.  More recently, as we all know, Turkey has launched attacks across the border into Iraqi Kurdistan with Washington’s grudging permission.  The assumption that you must make about Pax Americana to think that it is working to stop cross-border warfare is that in the absence of U.S. hegemony there would be many more instances of this and the wars would be longer and bloodier than they have been.  This is doubtful.     

Meanwhile, the most dangerous borders in the world between Pakistan and India are precisely those where the U.S. has been most ineffective in discouraging cross-border attacks by Pakistan-backed militants.  The Kargil war and the heightened tensions in earlier part of this decade following the attack on the Indian Parliament were kept from escalating largely thanks to India’s deterrent and cooler heads prevailing on both sides.  As it was, whatever beneficial influence Washington had in easing tensions during these episodes was minimal, and to the extent that Washington has favoured Pakistan for decades, armed its military and raised it to non-NATO ally status the guarantor of the peace has been facilitating the violation of the peace.  Obviously, the Congo wars that have killed millions and at one time involved as many as seven central and southern African nations are not even on the radar if we are going to pretend that there has been a significant decrease in major cross-border warfare.  Relative to what?    

The point in listing all of these interruptions of the peace is not say that Washington needs to do more and try harder to enforce the unenforceable peace, but that a hegemonic role can also fuel instability and even the hegemon has little to do with preventing India and Pakistan from going to war (and indeed, in the 1971 war, we modestly aided the Pakistanis).  Given the limited resources of any nation, there will not and cannot be a meaningful Pax Americana or its equivalent that extends to the whole world.  By and large, what people are referring to is the peaceful development of Europe and Japan while they have been under American protection.  This has been impressive, but if that is where most of the benefits are our presence is no longer required. 

Also, most of the postwar benefits that are attributed to Pax Americana were the product of the freezing of many conflicts by the Cold War.  (This general freeze did not, of course, stop multiple major international wars on the Subcontinent that killed and displaced millions, nor did it stop the Iraqi invasion of Iran or the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, to cite a few prominent examples.)  Once the USSR disappeared as a global player, the peace began unraveling in many parts of the world because the relative peace was not a product of our superpower position or our entanglements around the world, but to the extent that it existed was a product of the highly unusual superpower rivalry that ended almost two decades ago.  The benefits are considerably less obvious than they might have once seemed, and if we restricted our attention to the benefit to the United States it is even less clear that Americans benefit from a Pax Americana that inevitably (as Ross says) involves colossal blunders that require the deployment of a huge part of our land forces for many years, trillions of dollars spent and tens of thousands dead and wounded.      

Update: James joins the conversation and offers a conclusion that I find fairly acceptable:

To make this work, we badly need to restore Europe and Japan to security independence, and we need to continue to advance the interests of India, and we need maybe above all not to make enemies of the Russians. If Europe remains weak, if Japan remains toothless, if India falters, and if Russia is demonized, we lose — and we lose because our unnatural position of globally hegemonic intervention cannot, and should not, be maintained, much less intensified.

This is more or less what I and several others here and elsewhere have been urging for years.  Dr. Trifkovic in particular has been making the case for a “Northern Alliance” with the Russians and has correctly seen the current administration’s efforts to develop a better relationship with India as one of its few at least partial successes, and it has become a standard refrain among non-interventionists and sympathetic realists that Europe, Japan, South Korea (and, yes, even Taiwan) can provide for their own defense now and really should be providing for their own defense.