Abstract
The debate over national-security strategy in Washington is seemingly bracketed by two similar choices: sustaining American primacy and expanding American primacy.
The debate over national-security strategy in Washington is seemingly bracketed by two similar choices: sustaining American primacy and expanding American primacy. This fixation is remarkably arrogant, unnecessarily ambitious and unsustainably expensive; it has done, and will do, little to improve the lives of the great majority of the country’s citizens.
America’s recent track record as the sole superpower is not particularly enviable. Two largely unsuccessful wars have left the greater Middle East more violent and less stable than it was beforehand. More than two decades of bipartisan efforts to shape Russia into a peaceful member of a ‘Europe whole and free’ have resulted in total and humiliating failure. A confused approach toward China, combined with Beijing’s own assertive behaviour, has created a dangerous and deepening security dilemma in the Western Pacific. None of these appears to have done anything to cool the enthusiasm of those who believe that American leadership is essential to sustaining whatever kind of global order they imagine they see. This is puzzling, and should be most worrisome.
What is needed is a national debate that challenges long-held but increasingly maladaptive assumptions about America’s role in the world and how it should identify and deal with challenges to its security. This essay offers a starting point for that debate. The evidence offered in support of its propositions is deliberately polemical, necessarily sketchy (given the breadth of the topic) and highly selective. The purpose is not to definitively establish each statement’s validity, but to provoke a discussion on whether or not it might be true – and, if so, what to do about it.
Read the article here