I don't want to crap too much on the emerging neo-isolationist foreign policy consensus, because it's not obviously wrong. Matt Yglesias and some guys from the Cato Institute (!) lay out the case:
I wanted to take a moment to recommend a new book by Chris Preble, the top foreign policy guy at Cato, called The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free....to briefly sketch the thesis Preble argues that our over-large military establishment isn’t just a waste of money, but actually harmful to our security. The reason is that it spawns a self-justifying ideology about the appropriate American role in the world that leads us to repeated foreign policy blunders. If we had much less military capacity, we would have a much narrower definition of the strategic purpose of our military—to defend the country against threats—and would find that we were happy with that equilibrium. But the large military spawns a grandiose strategic concept that winds up writing checks that even a gigantic military can’t cash.
I think this analysis is dead on...
The video of a recent event that Preble did with my colleague Larry Corb and The American Conservative’s Scott McConnell is also worth watching. It shows that the coalition of people calling for a serious rethink of American strategy and defense spending priorities—a group in which I would include myself—is as ideologically diverse as we are ineffective in actually getting our way.
Ineffective today, maybe, but the chorus of voices is growing. I expect this "neo-isolationist" (I use the term in a non-perjorative sense) movement to continue to grow in influence, because maintaining a global hegemony has just gotten prohibitively expensive for our nation.
But I'm very reluctant to join this movement (not that anyone would notice if I did or didn't!). The reason is that it seems to suffer from a kind of hindsight bias. The failures of American hegenony (Vietnam, Iraq, Guatemala, Iran) are painfully apparent, but the successes - all the times when wars didn't happen because here was a big American military sitting there waiting to intervene - are by definition almost invisible.
I'm often talking about "public goods" in the context of national-level goods like roads and research. But in the international context, military security is a public good. Nearly every country benefited from the implicit guarantee of international stability that American military dominance provided in the 80s and 90s; but not every country paid for it. We paid, in fact; that's why we racked up $5 trillion of debt in the Reagan years.
Which is not to say Yglesias and the Cato guys don't have a point. American hegemony worked most spectacularly when it was used to smack down those who bucked the internationa system - North Korea, Iraq (1990), Serbia. But most of the little guys got the message; there have been extremely few international wars since WW2. And when there was a long lull, our military was sitting around with nothing to do, and rather than downsizing it we've gone looking for trouble. Kind of like a kid who learns taekwondo and goes around throwing kicks in everyone's face, just having our awesome military power was an irresistible invitation to use it. That almost never turned out well.
But the fact remains that during the end of the 20th Century, war and violence declined steadily. Some of that might have been due to technological change, but my bet is that a lot of it came from the post-WW2 international norm of static national borders. Anyone who "invaded" a neighboring country - stepped over the arbitrary line on the map - was subject to international action backed up by U.S. military power. Most small nations got the message. "Pax Americana" didn't become a household term for nothing.
Now, the end of unilateral American hegemony is a fait accompli. It wasn't neo-isolationists who ended it, either; the developing world has grown too much, and policing the world is no longer within our budget.
What will the world be like without a hegemon? Will countries go back to fighting over a few acres of border land? Will a new batch of "great powers" each enforce their own norms in their own backyards, and then clash with each other over "spheres of influence"? Will nuclear arms proliferate as each nation decides it's on its own?
The neo-isolationists are not, in my opinion, properly worried about these possibilities. They look at the shameful debacles of Iraq and Vietnam, and they don't see the big picture of stability and declining violence. If there is any chance to reestablish a global liberal hegemony by widening our circle of allies (to include, say, Brazil and India) and sharing the burden of hegemony, neo-isolationism will cause us to miss that chance.
And the consequences might be that we save a bunch of money and effort, or it might be the fall of civilization. Just sayin'.
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