Pursuing Dominance Is a Dead End

An overcommitted America is a much less secure and prosperous America.

Stephen Wertheim makes an excellent case for setting priorities in U.S. foreign policy and reducing commitments in those places where America has fewer interests:

Burden sharing is no substitute for burden shifting. If the United States truly wants to set priorities according to its interests—in other words, to act strategically—there is no viable alternative to pulling back from the places that matter less. Washington cannot reap the benefits of caring less without actually caring less and downsizing U.S. objectives, commitments, and positions accordingly. Rather than lump overseas areas together into a grand, U.S.-led battle space, Washington should differentiate among regions and establish clear divisions of labor between itself and its security partners.

The U.S. needs to do this because decades of accumulating too many commitments have exposed our country to significant risks that could have been avoided and because an overcommitted America is a much less secure and prosperous America. The U.S. ought to do this so that it does not keep falling into the ruts of enabling its clients’ atrocious wars, fighting other nations’ battles, and condemning itself to a bleak future of militarism and eventual bankruptcy. The pursuit of dominance is a vain and destructive path, and it will sooner or later lead to our ruin.

The U.S. keeps taking on additional liabilities without ever shedding any. Many people have been talking about the danger of a “bank run” when other states lose confidence in U.S. guarantees, so it is important to understand that the bank—that is, the U.S.—put itself in this position by overleveraging itself. The smart thing would have been to get out of unsound positions years ago, but thanks to hubris, stubbornness, ideology, and good old fashioned corruption the bank managers refused to get out even when it was clearly in their best interests. What this means in practice is that the U.S. doesn’t have the resources to honor all the commitments that it has made, and it tends to fritter away a significant part of its resources on the commitments it doesn’t need.

The U.S. is so overstretched today because its leaders make too many commitments and then they fail to distinguish between the commitments that matter most, those that are peripheral, and those that are wholly unnecessary. There is entrenched opposition to making these distinctions partly because the supporters of the peripheral and unnecessary commitments have a major stake in perpetuating them and so they are highly motivated to prevent any change. Then there is the cult of global “leadership” that rejects the idea that the U.S. can set meaningful priorities because U.S. commitments are supposedly so interdependent that retrenchment anywhere will lead to the collapse of everything. On top of all this, there is the renewed obsession with “great power competition” that encourages U.S. leaders to add countless more commitments in every region in the name of outpacing great power rivals. Overcoming this opposition won’t be quick or easy, but it is imperative.

Our government is a pack rat when it comes to overseas commitments: it is always finding new ones and it is almost never getting rid of any. As with most pack rats, the U.S. has accumulated a lot of junk over the decades that it would benefit from getting rid of. There are also some commitments that might have been valuable twenty or forty years ago in a very different world that are no longer worth keeping.

Like the pack rat, the U.S. refuses to distinguish between the keepsakes that will become more valuable over time (core alliances in regions where the U.S. has vital interests) and the worthless knick-knacks (relationships with reckless client states in the Middle East) that should have been tossed aside long ago. It is about time that the U.S. had a thorough spring cleaning to separate out all the outdated and unneeded commitments from the important ones.