What Happens When We Get It Wrong

Each of the five positions in this chapter, taken to its logical extreme, produces consequences its advocates would find unacceptable – and these consequences are precisely what fuel the perpetual debate.

Elena’s anti-imperialism, fully implemented, would leave vacuums across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. China would almost certainly move on Taiwan and the South China Sea, gaining dominance over shipping lanes carrying a third of global trade. Russia would have a free hand in Eastern Europe. Iran would pursue regional hegemony unchecked. Nations sheltering under the American security umbrella – Japan, South Korea, the Baltic states, Poland, the Philippines – would face stark choices: accommodate the nearest great power, develop nuclear weapons, or fight alone. The result would be proliferation, arms races, and a more dangerous world – precisely the opposite of what Elena intends. Moreover, the institutions she wants to strengthen depend, paradoxically, on American power. The UN Security Council without American engagement is a debating society. International law without enforcement is aspiration. The liberal order Elena envisions is, to a significant degree, underwritten by the military power she wants to dismantle.

Marcus’s progressive internationalism creates an almost unlimited set of potential interventions. There are always atrocities somewhere, always allies under threat, always democratic movements needing support. The logic of liberal internationalism tends toward expansion: each commitment creates new obligations, each intervention creates new responsibilities, producing the overextension that exhausts great powers. His position depends on effective international institutions, but their track record in preventing conflict is, charitably, mixed – failing in Rwanda, Bosnia, Syria. And the insistence on supporting democracy abroad creates familiar contradictions: we support democracy, except when elections produce outcomes we dislike, at which point we support coups.

Sarah’s pragmatic centrism may be the most vulnerable to real-world pressures. Her criteria for intervention are sensible in theory but nearly impossible to apply when information is never complete at the moment of decision. Was Vietnam a vital interest? Reasonable people disagreed. Were Iraq’s WMDs real? Intelligence said yes. Was there a realistic Afghan exit strategy? Several administrations thought so. Pragmatism as philosophy provides no framework for choosing between competing pragmatic assessments. It tells you to be wise without specifying what wisdom looks like in any particular case – leaving policy reactive, driven by events, vulnerable to the crisis of the moment.

James’s peace-through-strength conservatism creates a standing temptation to use the hammer it has built. A nation outspending the next ten combined will inevitably find reasons to swing – the institutional interests of the military-industrial complex, the career incentives of officers, and the political incentives of presidents all push toward action. Reagan resisted these pressures; his successors did not. Moreover, insistence on dominance rather than sufficiency drives an arms race dynamic. Adversaries pursue asymmetric strategies – cyber warfare, hypersonic missiles, nuclear proliferation – that negate conventional superiority at a fraction of the cost, producing an endless race that drains the domestic foundations of national strength while failing to achieve the absolute security it promises.

Ruth’s America First nationalism offers the most emotionally satisfying but potentially most dangerous consequences. The alliance system exists not from generosity but from the hard lesson of two world wars: it is cheaper to deter threats far from American shores than to fight them after they arrive. American withdrawal from Europe after World War I did not produce peace; it produced Hitler. Failure to deter in Asia did not prevent Pearl Harbor; it made it inevitable. Ruth assumes America can be safe behind its oceans, but the world has grown too interconnected. The economy depends on global supply chains and shipping routes that cannot be secured without forward deployment. A pandemic from China reaches American shores in weeks. A cyberattack from Russia shuts down infrastructure in seconds. A nuclear weapon in rogue hands threatens American cities regardless of troops at the southern border. The threats of this century do not respect borders, and a policy built entirely around border security is a 19th-century answer to a 21st-century problem.

The debate persists because each of these criticisms is valid and none dispositive. Elena is right that foreign policy has often served elites at the expense of ordinary Americans and of people where force is applied. Marcus is right that American leadership has produced extraordinary benefits and withdrawal extraordinary harms. Sarah is right that pragmatic judgment, however imperfect, beats ideological rigidity. James is right that strength deters and weakness invites. Ruth is right that the establishment has failed catastrophically and paid no price.

But the deeper reason is that foreign policy forces a confrontation with the most fundamental questions of political philosophy: What do we owe strangers? What are the limits of responsibility? Can power be exercised justly? Is security achievable, or is it an illusion driving endless expansion? These questions have no final answers because they involve incommensurable values – security and liberty, justice and order, the claims of our own community and the claims of common humanity. Every generation must confront them in the context of its own threats, and every generation will reach a different, provisional, unsatisfying answer.

What can be said with confidence is this: the worst outcomes in American foreign policy have resulted not from any particular ideology but from the combination of certainty, arrogance, and unaccountability. The architects of Vietnam were certain about domino theory. The architects of Iraq were certain democracy would bloom in the desert. The architects of withdrawal were certain the Afghan government could hold. In each case, certainty blinded, arrogance prevented correction, and the absence of accountability ensured the same mistakes would be repeated by the same people or their intellectual heirs. Whatever foreign policy the United States pursues, it must be pursued with humility about the limits of knowledge, honesty about costs, accountability for outcomes, and respect for the democratic process that alone confers legitimacy on decisions of war and peace. If this book has a single foreign policy recommendation, it is this: be less certain. The stakes are too high for anything else.