The Hegemonists' Irrational Fear

The U.S. has nothing to lose but its excessive and unnecessary entanglements.

Bret Stephens reminds us that he has a warped and bizarre view of the world:

But the fallacy of abandoning Pax Americana is that we don’t have the option of transforming ourselves into a larger version of New Zealand: faraway and inoffensive. A world we seek to turn our back on is likelier to stab us in the back than it is to turn its back on us. That’s why we have to preserve, and police, a global order.

The U.S. isn’t in any danger of “turning its back” on the world, but it says a lot about the paranoid mentality of hawks like Stephens that he thinks that doing so would lead to the U.S. getting “stabbed in the back.” It’s a weird sort of Dolchstosslegende for hegemonists. According to this myth, the U.S. has to “police” (i.e., dominate) the world for its own safety. This is garbage, but it is worth spelling out why it is.

America is not doomed for all time to act as a vigilante enforcer of “order.” There is always an option to walk away from the overreaching and destructive role that the U.S. has had for decades. The U.S. has nothing to lose but its excessive and unnecessary entanglements. If the U.S. left other nations alone and stayed out of their business, it would find that it doesn’t have many enemies at all. The few enemies that it might still have (probably as a legacy of its earlier meddling) could be effectively deterred without a globe-spanning empire.

We know this because we can see how the U.S. engaged with the rest of the world before it became the hegemon. Before the U.S. set out to dominate the globe, America was often perceived as both a model and a trustworthy mediator. We don’t have to be a “larger version of New Zealand.” We could simply be the United States of America without pretensions to “leading” the world. The only people that find that frightening are those with vested interests in keeping the U.S. perpetually ensnared in foreign conflicts.

The truth is that the U.S. is extraordinarily secure now and would remain so if it abandoned the pursuit of dominance and policing the world. The rest of the world would not seek to do us any harm if our government stopped interfering all over the planet. Even if some states did wish us harm, it would be extremely difficult for them to act on those wishes in any case.

This brings us back to the role that irrational fear plays in justifying U.S. dominance. As the U.S. has become more powerful, it has become preoccupied with security despite being more secure than any other state in the world. Our leaders conjure up fantasies that they use to scare the public, and over time they begin to buy into their own threat inflating propaganda. That calls to mind Andrew Preston’s article, “The Fearful Giant” from Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations, and this quote from Preston: “Strength, indeed supreme strength, ironically made Americans feel more vulnerable because maintaining supremacy became an end in itself.”¹

The best thing that the U.S. could do is to shed the fear that has so warped its foreign policy for nearly eighty years. If we could do that as a country, perhaps our leaders would do a better job of running U.S. foreign policy. Americans should decide whether they want to have an ambitious and expansive foreign policy or a restrained one, but no one should ever fall for the self-serving hegemonist lie that there is no choice.

America doesn’t have to “police” or “lead” the world. Our nation can be a normal nation instead of an “indispensable” one. I am sure that the United States would be better off if we chose a different path from the one we are on, and I am fairly confident that the rest of the world would manage just fine without our “leadership.”

1. Preston, “The Fearful Giant,” Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: p. 176-177.