fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Washington’s Foreign Policy Illusions

The impulse to meddle in the affairs of other nations "for their own good" is not limited to just one party or foreign policy tradition.
Bill Kristol constitution

Robert Merry traces the many U.S. foreign policy failures since 2001 to Washington’s embrace of two different, related illusions:

So it isn’t just Bush and Obama, or their minions, who have perpetrated so much foreign-policy incompetence over nearly a decade and a half. A major contributor has been a flawed outlook made up of two hopeless illusions—the ameliorative impulse and national greatness conservatism [bold mine-DL]. So long as the American people permit their leaders to fashion the country’s foreign policy based on those two illusions, the incompetence will continue.

As Merry’s account makes clear, the impulse to meddle in the affairs of other nations “for their own good” is not limited to just one party or foreign policy tradition, and the preoccupation with national greatness isn’t just a neoconservative one. Interventionists from the two major parties routinely accept both illusions to some degree, and the main difference between them is how much emphasis they give to one or the other. Liberal hawks will normally be more inclined to express their support for an unnecessary war by talking about “values” and upholding “norms,” and hawks on the right prefer to frame their support in terms of celebrating American power and strength and inflicting damage on enemies real or imagined, but all of them are usually in favor of bombing other countries for the sake of “values” and “norms” and all of them approve of U.S. demonstrations of strength through military action. And all of them embrace a third hopeless illusion, namely the illusion that U.S. “credibility” is at stake in virtually every crisis and has to be maintained.

The two illusions Merry describes depend and feed off each other. “National greatness” hawks imagine that U.S. hegemony is benevolent and necessary to maintenance of “world order,” and foreign policy meliorists take for granted that U.S. preeminence gives Washington both the right and the responsibility to interfere overseas to “fix” various problems and crises. As we know, the two groups overlap and agree with each other with remarkable frequency. “National greatness” Republicans are usually supportive of “humanitarian” interventions and liberal hawks are typically on board with any projection of U.S. power or use of force overseas. One group may quibble with how the war is being handled by a president from the other party, but there is rarely any disagreement on the grounds that military action is the wrong thing to do. They all take for granted that the regular exercise of U.S. power and the application of hard power in foreign conflicts always do more good than harm, and their great fear is of an America that avoids entanglements and minds its own business.

Advertisement

Comments

Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here