David French:
What do Americans on both sides of the aisle mean when they call the U.S. the “indispensable nation”? It’s simply this: that without America maintaining its post–World War II role as the ultimate guarantor of the safety and security of the Free World, the world is more likely than not to revert to the historical mean of regional and perhaps even global conflict.
Acknowledging that the U.S. is “indispensable” does not mean that we’re the world’s hegemon, controlling all the Earth’s peoples from Washington, D.C. It does not mean that different administrations at different times haven’t chosen to retreat from this or that peripheral commitment. It does depend, however, on the understanding that American retreat necessarily means — in key strategic areas — the advance of powers hostile to American interests and hostile to international peace and security more broadly.
Writing in The New Republic, Jeet Heer thinks that Donald Trump is well on his way to destroying America’s status as the world’s indispensable nation — after just four months in office. And Heer is not alone. He cites multiple foreign-policy thinkers who are not only proclaiming America’s strategic demise; they’re already anointing international substitutes, such as China and Germany. Even worse, Heer is celebrating the new international landscape — believing it’s high time that the U.S. take a lesser role in world affairs. He thinks it’s time for other regional powers to fill the vacuum.
Heer’s analysis is fundamentally flawed on both counts. First, it’s simply wrong that Trump has fundamentally changed anything about America’s strategic approach abroad. For all Trump’s tweets and worrisome campaign rhetoric, since he’s been in office, his administration has reaffirmed its commitment to NATO, accelerated the fight against ISIS and other Islamic jihadists, enforced Obama’s “red line” against the use of chemical weapons in Syria, rushed missile-defense batteries to South Korea, and announced its intention to expand and modernize a military that was already the most powerful in the world. While all these decisions may dismay some of President Trump’s more isolationist supporters, in real-world terms, they mean exerting more American power abroad, not less.
Second, Heer glosses over the Obama administration’s beta test for American withdrawal. Remember “leading from behind”? Remember the Iraq retreat? In many ways, Barack Obama came into office with a worldview that echoed Heer’s. Obama believed that American power was in many ways responsible for the world’s ills, and that less American influence could well lead to less strife and conflict. Yet in every strategically important arena where America stepped back, our nation’s rivals stepped forward. From the genocidal nightmare in Syria and Iraq to China’s aggressive moves in Southeast Asia to Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine and Syria, American retreat or hesitation emboldened enemies, not friends.
By the end of his second term, Obama had become a miniature George W. Bush, launching combat operations in Libya, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He’d sent troops forward in Poland and Estonia. Obama had finally learned the enduring, eternal lesson of foreign affairs. The operative word in the phrase “great power” is “power,” and absent that power the greatness or morality of a nation is of little count in international affairs.
In reality, Heer and others are engaging little more than a fantasy-land intellectual exercise without bothering to realistically explore the alternatives to American engagement. What happens to international trade and stability if America yanked the U.S. Navy off the high seas — leaving Western democracies with minimal ability to respond to regional instability and ceding the balance of power to those countries with the largest land armies? No nation can project power like the United States, and even if Britain, France, and Japan decided to reassert their historic international roles, it would take well over a decade of emergency efforts to design, build, and deploy naval forces even a fraction of our size.
Let’s put this another way. The international order can stand even if any given friendly regional power fails. It cannot stand if the U.S. abdicates. Germany can fail to meet its defense obligations, yet NATO can still deter Russia. The South Korean military could melt away, yet the U.S. could defeat North Korea. But if the United States retreats from these key strategic regions, can any allied regional power (or coalition) truly step up and guarantee stability?
