"predatory empires who seek to expand their power"
Many on the Right see America's actions since the Cold War, especially since 2001, as exactly this though. We routinely use our empire (the "rules based international order" is just a fig leaf for "empire") for our own benefit.
"Going too far toward either Isolationism or aggressive promotion of values overseas"
I agree with this statement 100%, but I think we've gone vastly too far in the latter direction already. For example: flying the Pride flag from American embassies or tying foreign aid to a country altering its sex laws to our liking. Whether Ugandian women can get abortions or Hungarian men can marry each other doesn't matter a hill of beans to American economic progress. Yet these have been made the core of American foreign policy for almost 2 decades. George Bush's "democracy promotion" (at the point of a gun) failed utterly, but it didn't die. Instead it became "liberalism promotion" -- to hide this, proponents oxymoronically called it "liberal-democracy" -- and the tools became sanctions, foreign aid, and only occasionally guns. But how does promoting either make America more productive, prosperous, or politically powerful.
What I suspect Michael and many others see as "isolationism" is really only rebalancing back toward a foreign policy rooted in America's self-interest instead of the promotion of abstract ideals increasingly divorced from any connection to reality (Men can get pregnant? Really? That's the hill US foreign policy is prepared to die on?)
No, American foreign policy over the last 20 years is not a "predatory empires who seek to expand their power"
Too many people on both the Left and Right are too willing to throw around the term "Empire." They are deliberately distorting the actual definition of the word to avoid a real discussion. This is traditional trick of ideologues. They try to change the definition of words rather than reevaluate their prior assumptions.
The USA is not an empire, nor is it really what the article is about. Please keep the comments on topic.
Where do you believe that my proposed foreign policy is incorrect?
I don't think we're "predatory", but I do think we use the "rules based international order" that we run and finance -- but isn't an empire :-) -- mostly for our own benefit. Note, I don't have a problem with this. That's what powerful countries do. N.S. Lyons has a great piece out today about how devastating the loss of that order would be for the American standard of living. He's spot on. But you are too: the world benefits from our willingness to underwrite this order, which is why getting our own economic house in order is so important. That order will collapse if we're broke, and then we'll be a whole lot more broke.
Your list of threats is spot on, and "going too far toward either isolationism or aggressive promotion of values overseas" are both real risks. But I suspect you would place our current foreign policy (the Foggy Bottom consensus that has existed for at least 30 years) much closer to the center of that continuum than I would.
I think we've gone bananas with promotion of issues that have nothing to do with core American interests. And it weakens us. My Uganda example was real: Rod Dreher says he was told by Ugandan diplomats that they were turning to China because the Chinese conditioned aid on not getting in China's way, while the US conditioned it on altering their domestic laws to US abortion and LGBT standards, which wouldn't fly in their country. This makes us weaker. Are there limits to the moral turpitude we're willing to accept from our friends? Absolutely. But as you said, we cooperated with truly horrible regimes many times in the 20th century.
We're putting comparatively unimportant issues about sexual behavior and laws front and center, even funding attempts to "meddle" in other nations elections based on those issues (ask Victoria Nuland or Samantha Powers about Hungary.) So I welcome, as Trump said this morning, "every day my administration will put the interests of Americans first." To most Americans, that's exactly what American foreign policy should be about: making America protected and prosperous. If we can bring others along for the ride on a "rules based international order" (that isn't an empire) we certainly should. But our core interests come first. And the core interests of Western Europe come second. Everyone else is below those. In the Cold War we knew this; Fukuyama made us forget it. I want to rediscover it before the History that he was so convinced had ended bites us in the ass.
The ideological purity tests that started domestically and migrated to our foreign policy have been a net negative for American power. You dislike labels (and I mostly agree) but at the moment, I'm for less idealism and more pragmatic realism.
Do we really think we are going to out manufacture China in a conventional war? If we somehow did, what kind of a world would that be?
I’m a butter over guns guy. During the Cold War we maintained a reasonable conventional deterrent, but we didn’t try to match the Soviets in land forces in Central Europe. We built more nukes and said “we’ll try to stop them in the fulda gap and if we fail we’ll start using tactical nukes”. Many people hated the strategy and it had downsides, but having to maintain a large land army in west germany had downsides too.
Spending the saved money on the economy instead of artillery tubes allowed us to outgrow the Soviets and win the Cold War.
It’s very difficult for me to understand the desire to get in an arms race with China (a country that has never harmed us and has no history of aggression). A few nukes in the Taiwan straight will do as much damage as trillions spent on the navy and air force.
Interest on the national debt now exceeds our entire military budget, where do you plan to get the money from?
I agree that the best foreign policy must emphasize our own economic growth and prosperity to show more by example than proclamation that our system is the better one out there. That the decentralized competition (and innovation) that forms one of the major poles in your progress tent, coupled with the "pole" for development and use of applicable energy sources, provides the basis for the success of ourselves and our allies, and even our adversaries if/when they learn to modify their goals to align with ours. [Dream on?]
For us to continue to "police" the sea lanes to support global trade, we definitely need to bolster our allies' roles in sharing that endeavor, but I am still somewhat concerned about our ship building abilities/capabilities vs. China's. We may have some higher performing ships and better trained and experienced crews, but was it Stalin (?) who said quantity has a quality all its own? If they churn out a 1000 frigates or whatever, that might cause problems that even our 8 or 9 active (out of 12?) aircraft carrier groups cannot properly counter.
I can exercise a fantasy that if we "took out" either Iran or N. Korea it would serve as an example of "killing the chicken to convince the monkey". What is also interesting to me is to see articles claiming that either Russia or China are on their last legs (mostly economically but even questioning their real military might or capability [and even the reliability of their nuclear arsenal]), except they are also our greatest threats [mostly becasue of that arsenal].
The one area you did not address (although it is buried in your comments about the Middle East) is the GLOBAL role and impact of the ideology of Islam on both prospects for terrorist actions and in minimizing the attraction of economic benefits vs. achieving the goals of ideological purity [i.e., global conquest over the infidels]. Countering terrorist actions can be done via whack-a-mole tactics, but minimizing (removing?) the Islamic vs. Western cultural boundary is going to take a global focus, I believe. Almost no one in the West is talking or acting like this is necessary or possible. (Maybe they know something that I don't appreciate? :-) )
Wow! Fantastic as usual. This continues to be the best subscription on substack.
"predatory empires who seek to expand their power"
Many on the Right see America's actions since the Cold War, especially since 2001, as exactly this though. We routinely use our empire (the "rules based international order" is just a fig leaf for "empire") for our own benefit.
"Going too far toward either Isolationism or aggressive promotion of values overseas"
I agree with this statement 100%, but I think we've gone vastly too far in the latter direction already. For example: flying the Pride flag from American embassies or tying foreign aid to a country altering its sex laws to our liking. Whether Ugandian women can get abortions or Hungarian men can marry each other doesn't matter a hill of beans to American economic progress. Yet these have been made the core of American foreign policy for almost 2 decades. George Bush's "democracy promotion" (at the point of a gun) failed utterly, but it didn't die. Instead it became "liberalism promotion" -- to hide this, proponents oxymoronically called it "liberal-democracy" -- and the tools became sanctions, foreign aid, and only occasionally guns. But how does promoting either make America more productive, prosperous, or politically powerful.
What I suspect Michael and many others see as "isolationism" is really only rebalancing back toward a foreign policy rooted in America's self-interest instead of the promotion of abstract ideals increasingly divorced from any connection to reality (Men can get pregnant? Really? That's the hill US foreign policy is prepared to die on?)
No, American foreign policy over the last 20 years is not a "predatory empires who seek to expand their power"
Too many people on both the Left and Right are too willing to throw around the term "Empire." They are deliberately distorting the actual definition of the word to avoid a real discussion. This is traditional trick of ideologues. They try to change the definition of words rather than reevaluate their prior assumptions.
The USA is not an empire, nor is it really what the article is about. Please keep the comments on topic.
Where do you believe that my proposed foreign policy is incorrect?
I don't think we're "predatory", but I do think we use the "rules based international order" that we run and finance -- but isn't an empire :-) -- mostly for our own benefit. Note, I don't have a problem with this. That's what powerful countries do. N.S. Lyons has a great piece out today about how devastating the loss of that order would be for the American standard of living. He's spot on. But you are too: the world benefits from our willingness to underwrite this order, which is why getting our own economic house in order is so important. That order will collapse if we're broke, and then we'll be a whole lot more broke.
Your list of threats is spot on, and "going too far toward either isolationism or aggressive promotion of values overseas" are both real risks. But I suspect you would place our current foreign policy (the Foggy Bottom consensus that has existed for at least 30 years) much closer to the center of that continuum than I would.
I think we've gone bananas with promotion of issues that have nothing to do with core American interests. And it weakens us. My Uganda example was real: Rod Dreher says he was told by Ugandan diplomats that they were turning to China because the Chinese conditioned aid on not getting in China's way, while the US conditioned it on altering their domestic laws to US abortion and LGBT standards, which wouldn't fly in their country. This makes us weaker. Are there limits to the moral turpitude we're willing to accept from our friends? Absolutely. But as you said, we cooperated with truly horrible regimes many times in the 20th century.
We're putting comparatively unimportant issues about sexual behavior and laws front and center, even funding attempts to "meddle" in other nations elections based on those issues (ask Victoria Nuland or Samantha Powers about Hungary.) So I welcome, as Trump said this morning, "every day my administration will put the interests of Americans first." To most Americans, that's exactly what American foreign policy should be about: making America protected and prosperous. If we can bring others along for the ride on a "rules based international order" (that isn't an empire) we certainly should. But our core interests come first. And the core interests of Western Europe come second. Everyone else is below those. In the Cold War we knew this; Fukuyama made us forget it. I want to rediscover it before the History that he was so convinced had ended bites us in the ass.
The ideological purity tests that started domestically and migrated to our foreign policy have been a net negative for American power. You dislike labels (and I mostly agree) but at the moment, I'm for less idealism and more pragmatic realism.
Do we really think we are going to out manufacture China in a conventional war? If we somehow did, what kind of a world would that be?
I’m a butter over guns guy. During the Cold War we maintained a reasonable conventional deterrent, but we didn’t try to match the Soviets in land forces in Central Europe. We built more nukes and said “we’ll try to stop them in the fulda gap and if we fail we’ll start using tactical nukes”. Many people hated the strategy and it had downsides, but having to maintain a large land army in west germany had downsides too.
Spending the saved money on the economy instead of artillery tubes allowed us to outgrow the Soviets and win the Cold War.
It’s very difficult for me to understand the desire to get in an arms race with China (a country that has never harmed us and has no history of aggression). A few nukes in the Taiwan straight will do as much damage as trillions spent on the navy and air force.
Interest on the national debt now exceeds our entire military budget, where do you plan to get the money from?
I agree that the best foreign policy must emphasize our own economic growth and prosperity to show more by example than proclamation that our system is the better one out there. That the decentralized competition (and innovation) that forms one of the major poles in your progress tent, coupled with the "pole" for development and use of applicable energy sources, provides the basis for the success of ourselves and our allies, and even our adversaries if/when they learn to modify their goals to align with ours. [Dream on?]
For us to continue to "police" the sea lanes to support global trade, we definitely need to bolster our allies' roles in sharing that endeavor, but I am still somewhat concerned about our ship building abilities/capabilities vs. China's. We may have some higher performing ships and better trained and experienced crews, but was it Stalin (?) who said quantity has a quality all its own? If they churn out a 1000 frigates or whatever, that might cause problems that even our 8 or 9 active (out of 12?) aircraft carrier groups cannot properly counter.
I can exercise a fantasy that if we "took out" either Iran or N. Korea it would serve as an example of "killing the chicken to convince the monkey". What is also interesting to me is to see articles claiming that either Russia or China are on their last legs (mostly economically but even questioning their real military might or capability [and even the reliability of their nuclear arsenal]), except they are also our greatest threats [mostly becasue of that arsenal].
The one area you did not address (although it is buried in your comments about the Middle East) is the GLOBAL role and impact of the ideology of Islam on both prospects for terrorist actions and in minimizing the attraction of economic benefits vs. achieving the goals of ideological purity [i.e., global conquest over the infidels]. Countering terrorist actions can be done via whack-a-mole tactics, but minimizing (removing?) the Islamic vs. Western cultural boundary is going to take a global focus, I believe. Almost no one in the West is talking or acting like this is necessary or possible. (Maybe they know something that I don't appreciate? :-) )