What Are We So Afraid Of?

The more powerful the U.S. became, the more fearful Americans became as a result.

Andrew Preston has written an important article on the role of fear in the making of U.S. foreign policy, and it appears in the new volume, Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories. He explores why Americans have such “intense fears about the wider world” and why those fears are “an integral part of U.S. foreign policy.”

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To illustrate this idea, he begins with a discussion of the 2017 crisis with North Korea and how the U.S. was much more fearful of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal than its South Korean ally was. He writes:

What explains this paradox? Americans, who lived far from the danger and had the ability to respond overwhelmingly to any North Korean attack, seemed more fearful of the situation than South Koreans, who had already faced an existential threat from North Korea for decades….So why would a country as powerful as the United States—more powerful, in both absolute and relative terms, than virtually any other state in world history—be so concerned about a country as impoverished as North Korea?

The answer, I suggest, is an ordinate prevalence of fear that sits at the heart of the American worldview and provides the basis for thinking about U.S. foreign policy.

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As Preston goes on to explain, Americans have not always been so afraid of the wider world. It was only as the U.S. began to take on a leading international role after WWII that Americans began to feel insecure. Remarkably, “Americans almost never spoke of ‘security’ as an objective of foreign or military policy before the late 1930s,”

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and then with the Cold War security became the new obsession. The more powerful the U.S. became, the more fearful Americans became as a result. “Strength, indeed supreme strength, ironically made Americans feel more vulnerable because maintaining supremacy became an end in itself.”

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Having reached a dominant position in the world, Americans were then desperate to keep that position, and at least partly because of that our government has tended to see enemies around every corner ever since. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, and irrationally frightened is the nation that aspires to be the global hegemon.

Preston’s investigation into the role of fear in our policy decisions and debates was very helpful to me because I have often marveled at how the U.S. government and the American public have perceived foreign threats that weren’t there or grossly exaggerated the threats that did exist. The debate leading up to the invasion of Iraq was bizarre in many ways, but perhaps the strangest part was that a U.S. invasion would still have been completely unjustified even if everything the Bush administration claimed about Iraqi weapons programs had been true. The idea that the U.S. was acting to defend itself and the rest of the world from the Iraqi government was absurd on its face, but such was the fearful and violent mentality after 9/11 that most of our leaders and much of the public embraced that monstrous absurdity.

No doubt deliberate efforts at threat inflation exacerbate the problem, but for threat inflation to work the public has to be willing to believe that American security could somehow be imperiled by much smaller and weaker countries on the other side of the planet. As for policymakers and analysts, they often have strong incentives to stoke fear in order to get attention and resources. The overreaching, ambitious nature of post-WWII U.S. foreign policy encourages a constant state of anxiety and fear that something is always happening somewhere in the world that might be undermining very broadly defined interests. Once a state sets its sights on armed primacy, as Stephen Wertheim has called it, it begins to imagine dangers everywhere and sees in every distant crisis a possible threat to be countered. Preston makes a related observation about the Vietnam War:

Only under the influence of something like the domino theory could Americans see the Vietnamese communists—who lived more than eight thousand miles away, represented only one half of one of the world’s poorest countries, and lacked the ability to project power beyond Indochina—as any kind of threat to the United States.

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Our government’s extremely ambitious foreign policy creates excessive fear of foreign threats and then it thrives on the fear that it has created. If we would have a more normal and peaceful foreign policy, we have to overcome the deep-seated sense of insecurity that defines how so many Americans see the rest of the world. If we don’t succeed, we can expect that our foreign policy will only become more militarized and interventionist than it already is as the U.S. desperately tries to maintain its dominant position.

1. Preston, “The Fearful Giant: National Insecurity and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: p.172.

2. Preston, “The Fearful Giant,” p. 171-172.

3. Preston, “The Fearful Giant,” p. 173-174.

4. Preston, “The Fearful Giant,” p. 176-177.

5. Preston, “The Fearful Giant,” p.177.