Retrenchment and Being an 'Ordinary Country'
An ordinary country would not embark on the foreign crusades in the first place.
Jonathan Katz tears apart George Packer’s essay on a “new theory of American power”:
More importantly, who is “overdoing” what “retrenchment,” and where? The U.S. still operates at least 750 military bases in 81 countries and territories — on every continent except Antarctica — and those are just the ones we know about. At any given time, most of the U.S. Navy’s eleven active carrier strike groups are deployed without challenge across the Atlantic, Pacific, and often the Indian and Arctic Oceans, and the Mediterranean Sea. They patrol, largely at will, along with dozens of nuclear attack and other submarines, bombers, and drones, available for scattering at any given moment to almost any point of the globe.
If the U.S. retrenched half as much as defenders of the status quo have claimed it has over the last twenty years, our foreign policy might start to become somewhat sane. Instead, the U.S. repeatedly expands its commitments and involvement and then settles in for what becomes the new normal. That then becomes the new baseline for comparison, and anything less than that newly-expanded role is rejected as “turning inwards.”
Packer says in his essay that “[w]e overdo our foreign crusades, and then we overdo our retrenchments,” but as I noted in my own response a few weeks ago there has been virtually no retrenchment to speak of. If it means anything, retrenchment would require the U.S. to have fewer security commitments today than it did in the last few decades and it would require the U.S. to spend significantly less on its military than it has during that same period. The costs of U.S. foreign policy should be noticeably lower if there had been any retrenchment, but they are not.
As a matter of fact, the U.S. today has more commitments than it had ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, and its military spending is higher in real terms than at almost any point in U.S. history. We have not “overdone” any retrenchments in the twenty-first century, and I would argue that we have not seriously attempted to retrench at all. I sometimes wonder if we would even know how to do it if we finally decided to try. There have been enough generations of Americans that have grown up with the empire that we have all become used to it, whether we approve of it or not.
As Katz points out, the U.S. is anything but an “ordinary country.” It is an “ordinary empire” with all that this entails. An ordinary country would not embark on the foreign crusades in the first place. An ordinary country would have no desire to attack countries on the far side of the world, and it would not possess the means to project power all around the globe in any case. It would not possess an empire of bases, nor would it have dozens of security dependents scattered across multiple continents. It would have no need to retrench, because it would not have expanded its reach so far. There would be no need to restrain the ambitions of an ordinary country, because those ambitions would not be so excessive.
Packer doesn’t really want America to be an “ordinary country” as anyone else would understand it. He would like to redefine being an “ordinary country” to include all of the world-spanning responsibilities that the U.S. currently has. His “Goldilocks” solution is to have just the “right” amount of empire, and he attacks restrainers because they favor relatively less meddling than he would prefer. What he proposes is not really a “fine balance” at all, but only slightly less overreach. There is nothing new about that, and it sets the U.S. up for more of the same failures that have done so much harm.