The Many Entanglements of the 'Indispensable Nation'

The “indispensable nation” conceit is the president’s standard justification for some of the terrible policy decisions he has made over the last three and a half years.

The New York Times published a report on Biden’s foreign policy record last week that annoyed a lot of analysts and other readers because of its original hyperbolic headline about the U.S. being “consumed by war” on Biden’s watch. As Joel Mathis noted, the headline was changed to make it the more defensible “entangled in war,” but by then there weren’t many people interested in what the article said. As often happens, the content of the article was more reasonable than the original headline. The thrust of the story was that Biden’s foreign policy has been defined by the foreign conflicts that he has supported, and no one can seriously argue that this isn’t what has happened.

Michael Crowley, the author of the article, opened by quoting from the president’s speech last month in which he falsely claimed that the U.S. was not at war anywhere in the world. Crowley continued, “But while America is no longer waging a large-scale ground war like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, for much of his tenure Mr. Biden has seemed like a wartime leader.” That seems hard to dispute since so much of Biden’s foreign policy agenda has been taken up (one might even say consumed) by the foreign wars that he has chosen to support.

As Crowley mentions, Biden and his campaign very much wanted the public to see him as a wartime leader when he was still a candidate. This may have initially benefited him, at least in Washington, but it has done the opposite over the last year as the wars have dragged on without the success that many supporters expected. Now Biden would like to be perceived as presiding over an America that isn’t at war at the same time that he fuels the war in Gaza with a steady supply of weapons.

Biden has tied himself and the reputation of the U.S. to the fortunes of wars that may be unwinnable (Ukraine) or are indefensible (Israel/Gaza). The president identified himself personally with Israel’s war effort more than any other American president before him. Since then, the war in Gaza has created a humanitarian catastrophe and brought the region closer to a major conflagration that the U.S. is making more likely with its unconditional support for Israel. The slaughter and man-made famine in Gaza have naturally caused most Americans to recoil in horror from the administration’s policy of support.

The president has tried selling U.S. support for the war in Gaza by arguing that things would be far worse if the U.S. “walked away,” but that is hard to take seriously when the U.S. is enabling mass starvation and genocide. U.S. troops may not be engaged in combat there, but the president has implicated the U.S. in some of the worst crimes of the century. Those crimes haven’t stopped, and the administration has done practically nothing to try to stop them. This entanglement through complicity in the slaughter and starvation of innocent people is even worse than commiting U.S. forces to an unnecessary war.

Biden has repeatedly celebrated these policies as proof of what he considers to be America’s “indispensable” role in the world. When the war in Gaza started, he went out of his way to link it to the war in Ukraine with which it had practically nothing in common. The claim of American “indispensability” has been closely linked with the use of force from the start, and Biden reinforced this link by tying U.S. backing for these wars to its “indispensable” leadership role. The “indispensable nation” conceit is the president’s standard justification for some of the terrible policy decisions he has made over the last three and a half years.

The article might have been a bit stronger if Crowley had acknowledged that the U.S. was under no obligation to support the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. No law or treaty required the U.S. to take sides in these conflicts, and certainly not to the extent that it has. These were choices that the president made. In fact, the president has not only gone far beyond what he was required to do, but in the war in Gaza he has flouted the requirements of U.S. law by continuing to provide military assistance to a government responsible for grave human rights abuses and restrictions on the delivery of humanitarian aid.

Crowley is right that “Mr. Biden has not actually kept America out of combat entirely since leaving Afghanistan.” He mentions the current war against the Houthis in Yemen, U.S. attacks on militias in Iraq and Syria, and the American fatalities suffered at a base in Jordan as a result of tit-for-tat exchanges with Iraqi militias. Ongoing direct U.S. involvement in the war in Somalia went unnoticed as usual. Some of these conflicts are remnants of the “war on terror” and the new Yemen war is a by-product of the war in Gaza, but all of them have U.S. forces fighting and killing foreign adversaries in wars that don’t really have anything to do with the security or vital interests of the United States.

These small conflicts in the Middle East and Africa are wars that the U.S. fights out of reflex (“we have to do something”) or because our leaders won’t think of any other policy response than to reach for the sword. The war against the Houthis is a good example of this. No one that knew much about Yemen thought it was a good idea. No one that had paid any attention to the Saudi coalition war on Yemen thought that the Houthis could be bombed into quiescence. No one thinks that the military campaign is working. No one really believes that it will succeed in deterring future Houthi attacks. Despite all that, it continues because our policymakers won’t consider the one option staring them in the face. So U.S. forces keep fighting against an enemy in pursuit of an unrealistic goal when the use of leverage with a client could potentially solve two problems at once.

The U.S. is so “entangled in war” because our leaders pursue an overly ambitious strategy and add new security commitments without seriously considering what the costs might be. When they are confronted with a new conflict, their first impulse is often to look for some way to take sides rather than steer clear. Because our country is so extraordinarily secure, our government has the luxury of throwing its support behind belligerents on the far side of the world even when the U.S. has little or nothing at stake. A much less ambitious strategy would allow the U.S. to disentangle itself from the conflicts that it has chosen to support and join, but unfortunately that option is not on the ballot this year.