Haass and the 'Real Danger' to the Security of the World

Someone like Haass only sees danger when domestic problems threaten to disrupt the status quo that he wants to protect.

Spencer Ackerman responds to some recent comments by Richard Haass:

Leave it to the president of the Council on Foreign Relations to have never before entertained the idea that the premiere danger to the world is the United States of America. Leave it to him, as well, to avoid the sense in which that's actually true—that is, the bloody, exploitative and destabilizing manner in which America has exercised its economic and military power during its rise from continental conqueror to hemispheric overlord to Cold War team captain to global hegemon. Instead, Haass means that it's dangerous for the world if America, wracked by fissures at home, no longer exercises that power.

Haass likes to talk about America’s domestic problems mostly as obstacles to the maintenance of the foreign policy status quo. When he wrote a book about how “foreign policy begins at home” almost a decade ago, he was arguing that the U.S. needed to get its house in order as means of preserving its global “leadership.” This is how many people in the foreign policy establishment understand the relationship of domestic affairs and U.S. foreign policy: the former are supposed to serve and bolster the latter. Then they wonder how politicians gain traction by saying that domestic concerns should take priority.