A Foreign Policy Warped By Fear
Conflicts that have little or nothing to do with U.S. security are thus transformed into “vital” struggles for the future of the world.
Ben Friedman talked with John Glaser on the Cato Power Problems podcast, and at one point he discusses why the U.S. is so fearful when it is objectively so secure. Glaser asks, “Why are we so fearful despite our safe position?” Friedman answers (answer begins around 14:30):
I think that power generates insecurity. It’s ironic. It’s an irony of great power that you think it would make you more secure, and instead…I mean, it does in an absolute sense make you more secure, having more military power and more military capability and wealth, but it makes you think you’re insecure. So it creates paranoia, essentially. My argument is…as a result of the United States being so powerful for so long, we taught ourselves, because of the need to generate support for all of our far-flung policies in WWII and the Cold War, we taught ourselves an ideology that we can only be safe in the world if we’re in some sense dominating it.
We developed, for good reason, to manage our foreign policy all these big bureaucracies that are important to how we think about foreign policy and help kind of educate the American people into believing in this ideology. My view of it is you have a bunch of institutions…you can call it the military-industrial complex, or something like that, that are tied for rather material reasons to the continuation of these world-spanning policies, and they help create at least an elite in the United States that’s very tied to this ideology that says that we’re very unsafe, at least unless we are very active, we have a very active foreign policy. There’s a lot of effort that goes into teaching Americans that they’re fundamentally insecure, because insecurity is tied to the health and, I guess ironically, the security of the national security state.
The U.S. is extraordinarily secure from physical attack, so in order to keep the public fearful of foreign threats those threats are consistently exaggerated and U.S. interests are defined so broadly that virtually everything in the world can be said to threaten them. That necessarily involves distorting reality and in some cases it means inventing threats out of thin air. If the real world won’t provide a sufficiently formidable enemy to justify our constant meddling, it becomes necessary to imagine one. Conflicts that have little or nothing to do with U.S. security are thus transformed into “vital” struggles for the future of the world, and countries that never mattered to the U.S. before are reinvented as pillars of our security.