Foreign Affairs
Both Parties Got Us to Where We Are on Foreign Policy
Republicans and Democrats have coordinated to make the world more dangerous.
Credit: Lucky-photographer
The United States is the most secure great power ever. Yet Washington policymakers have made the world unnecessarily dangerous for America. They have created enemies of the U.S. around the globe.
Commonly cited as threats are Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, which are increasingly cooperating and targeting U.S. interests and forces. Scores of other governments see Washington as a bully and resist its dictates. Terrorists actively seek to capture and kill Americans. As a result, U.S. citizens are at global risk.
The former president Donald Trump recognized the problem when he recently complained that Democrats “allowed China and Russia to do the impossible: combine. They’re natural enemies. They always have been because China needs more land and Russia has it.” He went on to blame “Obama—it started with him and then Biden because he didn’t know what the hell he was doing—they’ve now become one force.”
Trump is right about Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Nevertheless, he also is at fault, perhaps even more than them. So is George W. Bush, the worst president in the last half century, who is responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq and elsewhere. That said, Bill Clinton began the process of turning Moscow hostile and encouraging it to ally with Beijing against America. At least Trump may have learned something, given his apparently newfound concern about turning the People’s Republic of China and Russian Federation into “one force.”
Absent Washington’s penchant for “running the world,” as Biden put it, most other countries and peoples would leave America alone. That doesn’t mean foreign events don’t have domestic impacts. Yet a superpower that dominates its hemisphere, is protected by two vast oceans, has only two weak land neighbors, and possesses the world’s largest economy is secure against all but the most grievous threats, in this case nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. This danger is best met by avoiding unnecessary conflicts, especially with powers armed with ICBMs and nuclear weapons.
Of course, members of the War Party routinely insist that, as the Daily Telegraph’s Jake Wallis Simons wrote, “if you shun conflict, it will come for you on the enemy’s terms.” This argument ignores how decades of maladroit, counterproductive, and deadly U.S. intervention turned countries and peoples against America and its allies. For instance, Simons seems disappointed that Washington didn’t attack Tehran years ago, but Iran is a good example of U.S. and allied blundering. Although Western officials claim to support democracy, in 1953 Washington jo …