Blood and Belonging: The Human Condition

Foreign policy is the tribal instinct writ large – the ancient division of the world into us and them, extended from clan to village to nation to civilization. When a president speaks of “vital national interests” or “threats to our way of life,” the emotional register is identical to the tribal chief warning of raiders on the horizon. The flags, the anthems, the uniforms, the rhetoric of sacrifice and honor – all of it taps into the deepest strata of human psychology, the in-group loyalty and out-group suspicion that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years of intergroup competition. This does not make nationalism irrational; it makes it deeply, powerfully human. Any foreign policy that ignores the emotional foundations of national identity is doomed, because it fights against the very wiring of the human brain.

The psychology of threat perception is particularly distorting. We evolved to be hypervigilant: in the ancestral environment, missing a real threat meant death, while reacting to a false one cost only wasted energy. This asymmetry means we systematically overestimate danger. In foreign policy, it manifests as the threat inflation that has characterized American security discourse for decades. Every adversary becomes existential. Every regional conflict becomes a domino. Every failure to act becomes another Munich. The result is permanent mobilization, permanent crisis, and a systematic bias toward action – because doing nothing in the face of perceived threat feels psychologically intolerable, even when doing nothing would be wisest. Iraq is the most catastrophic example, but far from the only one.

And yet – there is a genuine moral weight to these decisions that no strategic analysis can fully capture. When children are being gassed in Syria, when civilians are massacred in Rwanda, when cities are reduced to rubble in Ukraine, the question of whether to intervene is not merely strategic. It is moral, in the deepest and most personal sense. The images on the screen are not abstractions; they are human beings with lives and loves and fears as vivid as our own. The knowledge that you have the power to stop the killing – or at least to try – and the decision not to exercise that power: this carries a weight that is impossible to set aside, regardless of how sound the strategic arguments for inaction may be. This is why the debate between interventionism and restraint is never resolved. Both positions carry genuine moral costs, and the cost of the position you reject is always visible, always haunting.

On the other side stands a cost that is concentrated, personal, and devastating in ways that geopolitical abstractions cannot touch. A mother who receives notification that her child has been killed in action does not care about the balance of power in the Middle East. A father watching his daughter come home from Afghanistan with PTSD – unable to sleep, hold a job, sustain a relationship – does not care about NATO’s credibility. A spouse watching their partner drink themselves to death over a decade, haunted by what they saw and what they did, does not care about the liberal international order. These costs are real, immense, and borne almost entirely by a small fraction of the population – disproportionately rural, disproportionately working-class, disproportionately from communities already left behind. The disconnect between those who decide on war and those who fight it is one of the most corrosive features of American democracy. It explains much of the populist fury that Ruth channels, and it deserves to be understood rather than dismissed.

The moral injury of veterans deserves particular attention because it is among the least understood and most destructive consequences of war. Moral injury is not PTSD, though they often co-occur. PTSD is a response to life-threatening trauma. Moral injury is a response to having participated in events that violate one’s deepest convictions – killing civilians, following orders one believes are wrong, failing to protect those one was supposed to protect, discovering that the cause for which one fought was based on lies. A soldier who fought in Iraq and came home to learn there were no weapons of mass destruction – that friends died in service of a strategic blunder – carries a wound no therapy can fully heal. The betrayal is existential. It calls into question the meaning of the sacrifice, the integrity of the institutions that demanded it, the trustworthiness of the society on whose behalf it was made. The suicide rate among post-9/11 veterans is a national disgrace inseparable from these moral injuries.

There is also the intoxication of power – a phenomenon as old as recorded history. Thucydides saw it in Athens. Tacitus in Rome. It is the belief that because one has the power to act, one has the wisdom to act well. After the Cold War, the United States was drunk on its own power, convinced it had solved the riddle of history, that liberal democratic capitalism was humanity’s inevitable endpoint, and that military force could accelerate the process. The hubris was bipartisan: Clinton bombed Serbia and expanded NATO; Bush invaded Iraq; Obama intervened in Libya and escalated the drone war. Each action was taken with confidence that American power could produce American-desired outcomes. Each produced consequences unforeseen and often catastrophic. The nuclear arsenal, the carrier strike groups, the global surveillance apparatus, the special operations forces that can reach any point on the planet within hours – these capabilities create an illusion of omnipotence, and the illusion of omnipotence creates the temptation to act as if one were God. The bill for that temptation has been paid in blood – mostly the blood of people in other countries, but increasingly, the blood of Americans.

Why do both isolationism and interventionism pull at us so powerfully? Because each speaks to something genuine in the human heart. Isolationism – the desire to withdraw, to tend to home, to stop sacrificing for ungrateful strangers – is the instinct of the parent who says, “I cannot save the world, but I can take care of my family.” It is powerful because it is grounded in truth: those closest to us have the strongest claim on our care, and every dollar spent abroad is a dollar not spent at home. Interventionism – the desire to act, to protect, to extend the sphere of justice – is the instinct of the bystander who sees a stranger attacked and cannot walk away. It is powerful because it, too, is grounded in truth: the suffering of others makes a moral claim on us, and the capacity to reduce suffering creates an obligation to try.

The tragedy of foreign policy is that both instincts are genuine, both grounded in real moral commitments, and they stand in irreconcilable tension. Every dollar spent on defense is a dollar not spent on schools. Every soldier deployed is a parent absent from home. Every life saved by intervention is shadowed by lives lost in conducting it. There is no resolution – only the ongoing, agonizing attempt to balance competing goods and competing harms, knowing that any choice leaves genuine moral debts unpaid. This is not a problem to be solved. It is a condition to be endured, with as much wisdom and as little cruelty as we can manage.