The 'Necessary Myth' Is Bad for America and the World

Like every other self-flattering story that empires tell about themselves, this one is also a lie.

Tom McTague praises America’s “necessary myth”:

The dumb simplicity of America’s interventions is often infuriating and obtuse, or even disastrously naive and destructive. It exists in people like Neal and Holbrooke, Bush and Biden. And yet if America stops believing in its myth, if it scurries back into the safety of its continental bunker, having decided it is now just another normal nation, then a cold wind might start to blow in places that have become complacent in their security. When the dumb simplicity is removed, the complexities of the world start growing back.

This is what Ukraine fears and others in Europe expect. In the end, though, what really matters is which story America believes, and for how long.

The myth that McTague is referring to is essentially the belief that U.S. dominance is good for the world, and that the U.S. acts for the good of the world as it acts in its own interests. As he puts it, “America believes that it is a superpower, but an anti-imperial one, founded in opposition to arbitrary force, monarchy, foreign domination, and the like. Its supremacy, unlike other imperial powers, is good for everyone.” Like every other self-flattering story that empires tell about themselves, this one is also a lie. Whatever else one wants to say about U.S. foreign policy over the last seventy-seven years, one cannot call it anti-imperial. It has certainly not been good for everyone, and one can argue that the pursuit of what Stephen Wertheim calls “armed primacy” has frequently been very bad for the United States and the rest of the world.

The U.S. should absolutely reject the “idea that convinces U.S. leaders that they never oppress, only liberate, and that their interventions can never be a threat to nearby powers.” We should all reject it because that idea is false and dangerous, and ultimately nothing good can come from something so much at odds with reality. As McTague acknowledges, this bad idea “lies at the core of its most costly foreign-policy miscalculations” when the U.S. projects its own desires and interests onto other nations and then acts surprised when they have their own very different preferences and interests. It isn’t possible to conduct a competent and constructive foreign policy if our policymakers keep making these errors, and they make these errors at least in part because they believe in this false idea. The myth may keep the U.S. actively meddling in the world, but that isn’t doing our country or the world any favors.

If the U.S. keeps buying into the myth McTague describes, it will keep blundering at its own expense and the expense of the many other nations that receive its “help.” For every country that the U.S. effectively aids against an attacker, it strangles another three or four with economic warfare and impoverishes tens of millions of people. For every “good” intervention that ended relatively quickly without causing too much destruction, there are two or three prolonged disasters that cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands or even millions.

Whenever a state imagines itself to be “indispensable” to world order, it becomes extremely easy to justify almost any excess and abuse. When it deludes itself into believing that it is acting in the best interests of the whole world, it will abuse its power as a matter of course and tell the victims of that abuse that it is for their own good. When it becomes axiomatic that a state, any state, is a “force for good,” it does not take very long for that to translate into the practice of routinely using force against others and declaring that it is good regardless of the consequences.

That is how empires act towards weaker powers because they know they can get away with such abuses with impunity, and the myth of benevolent do-goodism serves to sanitize the image of the empire. As Daniel Bessner observes at the end of his recent essay for Harper’s, “It’s an open question whether U.S. foreign policy can transform in a way that fully reflects an understanding of the drawbacks of empire and the benefits of a less violent approach to the world,” but we must do what we can to transform it. The first step to doing that is to toss this myth in the garbage.