The Pursuit of Dominance Is a Disaster in the Making

The continued pursuit of dominance will cause hostile states to draw even closer together and it makes conflict with one or more of these states more likely.

Van Jackson puts the latest news of increasing Russian-North Korean military cooperation in its proper context:

The national security state has been spamming us with one poor judgment after another so it’s hard to keep up, but it should not be lost on anyone paying close attention that US foreign policy has brought America’s enemies together. Adversary balancing in response to US primacy is the only hypothesis that accounts for the full sweep of events. America’s rivals have no other basis for cohesion other than their shared opposition to US policy.

Defenders of the current U.S. strategy of primacy used to mock the idea that other states would begin banding together to balance against the U.S., but as it started to happen over the last fifteen to twenty years they pretended that this was driven solely by the other states’ “revisionist” ambitions. The first rule of defending primacy is that the U.S. is never responsible for the consequences of anything it does. Any undesirable developments in the world must be the result of the nefarious designs of enemies that want to tear down the world order. This is a convenient story for policymakers that don’t want to make any major changes to how the U.S. operates in the world, but it isn’t true and it leads to more and more costly policy errors.