Discussion of American foreign policy is an endless string of talking heads and think tank hacks claiming that we “must” do this or that, for reasons such as global security, values, or credibility. With a little bit of knowledge, it is apparent that the foreign policy class is generally responding to problems they themselves caused (if the problems exist at all). Either way, their concerns are completely remote from what any normal person would understand to be U.S. national interests.
In concluding his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton stated frankly that this does not have to be the way we live, saying, “Donald Trump could get on a plane and go Tehran right now, he could go from there to Moscow, to Beijing, to Pyongyang, and come how being ‘Trump the Great.’” I myself told Horton something similar on an episode of his show earlier this year, discussing the failure of regime change in Georgia. He asked if we had reached the end of U.S. operations in Georgia, and I explained their ruling party is not anti-America; they just oppose the Western-funded swarm of NGO agents trying to overthrow their government. If you tell them that era is over, you could “reset” easily, to which Scott responded, “But that is the empire.” The reality is that our country faces no immediate or mortal threats, and if our rulers would just behave prudently and reasonably we could end this entire destructive farce that accomplishes nothing but to make us poorer and less safe.
This isn’t the place to re-litigate the entirety of American history, but in every instance of major (or even minor) conflict, there tend to be pretty strong arguments that either we were outright lied into war or better diplomacy and foreign policy could have avoided what real challenges existed. In the modern era they have ran out of good lies, particularly as the era of an ideological struggle with communism ended and Jihadi terrorists (when the CIA isn’t funding them) only have clear state allies in narrow circumstances. The reality is that currently all of America’s state “enemies” are more well disposed to us than we are to them. It is always the United States that is setting up sanctions programs and funding the opposition and everything else in countries such as Russia, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. These countries have persistently shown willingness to decrease conflict, and it is only the U.S. which uses the blunt instrument of a global sanctions regimes (once an exceedingly rare tool) against countries it dislikes.
None of this is to say our country should be naive and assume the goodwill of others. These countries are still pursuing their own interests and are in instances, such as China, legitimately economic and diplomatic rivals. But all of them would prefer making agreements with a country that is acting in its own straightforward interest instead of playing whatever bizarre ideological games the American foreign policy class prefers.
It was, for example, a mistake to let us become completely dependent on Taiwanese microchips; but besides that one thing, it doesn’t matter to America who rules Taiwan. Further, both the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China seem fairly comfortable with the absurd status quo. Russia has deep-seated interests in Ukraine, but they were peacefully satisfying those interests until the U.S. policy class expanded NATO into Eastern European statelets and went to great efforts to foment revolution in Ukraine and persistently provoke Russia. Similarly, domestic lobbyists notwithstanding, there is no “grand strategy” reason to keep supporting Israel in such a way that leads to constant acrimony with Iran, a country which has funded a network of proxies in its region but has shown no tendency towards large-scale engagements. No actual national security interests were involved in making the decisions that lead us into constant problems with these states, to say nothing of various insignificant states the United States has flooded with subversive NGO money for no good reason.
There are a variety of more reasonable tools than a vast military network, constant airstrikes, regime change operations, and coercive sanctions regimes that can be used to ensure states are peaceful towards us, and ideally to their neighbors as well. The first is, as Horton suggested, simply going around and talking to people and telling them we want to move to a new era. Plenty of our supposed enemy regimes would be happy to restore normal diplomatic relations.
Another important tool is our economy. While trying to force the whole world to take part in sanctions regimes is a destructive and generally counter-productive policy that generates global resentment, it isn’t unreasonable to make access to our own enormously valuable consumer market contingent on being passably well-disposed towards us. No matter how much we are meant to believe that various regimes hate us, the evidence that any significant state doesn’t want access to our consumer market is nearly non-existent. It was in this way we managed to develop warm relations with the same Vietnamese communist dictatorship we couldn’t defeat in a decade of war.
America is blessed with enormous oceans protecting us from what enemies we could have, while our only land neighbors are well disposed towards us as well as being much smaller and weaker. Securing the homeland in the general sense doesn’t require more than guarding the border, some submarines, and a missile defense system. However, in what is nearly a “post-ideology” world outside of the West, our self-interested rulers are bankrupting us, committing mass murder, and acting as the main obstacle to a peaceful era for no good reason (though several nefarious ones).
The evidence that any state wants to be our enemy doesn’t exist, while there is much evidence to the contrary. It is laughable to act as if maintaining peaceable relations with states like Venezuela or Cuba risks a global communist takeover. Having productive relations with Iran would primarily threaten Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career, but no actual American interest. Russia and China require a bit more wisdom to handle as they are major world powers, but both have shown a great tendency towards restraint and concern for internal development, so even there conflict beyond periodically arguing about trade matters or competing for contracts in third states is entirely unnecessary.
The ghouls in our military-industrial complex, think tank, and political classes will fight it tooth and nail, but the reality is that we don’t have to do any of this. America and the world would be much better off if we stopped.