By Angelo Codevilla
Thursday, March 31, 2016
As Americans have sacrificed blood and treasure to
safeguard ourselves against our enemies and defend our interests, we also have
protected any number of other nations and served their interests. Not unfairly,
we have looked upon these as “free riders” and thought of ourselves as
fostering in them a kind of international welfare dependency. From time to
time, Americans have called for these people to make greater efforts on behalf
of common goals and, if they do not, for us either to stop protecting them or
to “make them pay” for the protection we provide.
Donald Trump’s call to stop fighting ISIS unless the
governments it most directly threatens “substantially reimburse” the United
States for our services, and to withdraw our nuclear guarantees from Japan and
South Korea unless they also pay, is but the latest of these calls.
But whereas previous calls of this kind advocated ceasing
to do such things, Trump is perfectly willing for Americans to continue serving
other nations’ military needs so long as we get paid for it. The American
people have always thought that the U.S. government should not hazard American
lives for any but our own safety and interest, and hence that we should not
mind others’ business or be the world’s policemen.
Instead, for Trump, the distinction between our business
and that of others seems unimportant. He is perfectly willing to send Americans
to kill and be killed, and to make commitments in any given instance, without
ascertaining what is in it for us except for money. Americans as the world’s
cops is okay with him, so long as we are rent-a-cops.
Time for Some Real
Values Clarification
The “free rider” phenomenon is all too real. Any number
of governments, beginning with our oldest NATO allies, long ago became so
dependent on us for security that they have lost the capacity to help
themselves. They may get to being beyond anybody’s help.
Others (e.g., Saudi Arabia) have always been. Rightly do
we resent our bipartisan foreign policy establishment’s officials who imagine
themselves masters of the global chessboard, endowed with the capacity to
settle the world’s affairs, or who “go native” and hence confuse others’
business with our own.
Trump’s kind of thinking however, further fuzzes American
statesmanship’s proper focus by reducing America’s international affairs to
money. Above all, it treats the lives of Americans as commodities. By contrast,
a due regard for the value of our own lives requires us further to clarify the
distinction between America’s business, to be defended with all we’ve got, and
that of others more sharply than our government has in recent decades.
Once, We
Distinguished Our Own Foreign Interests
Failure to make and keep that vital distinction has been
a problem. Once upon a time, we were clear about that distinction. Presidents
Truman and Eisenhower kept U.S. troops in Europe after 1945 to prevent the
Soviet Union from expanding its capacity to make war on America—only
incidentally for Europe’s sake. Similarly, we guaranteed Japan’s security not
out of any warmth for the Japanese people, but rather to avoid a repeat of the
twentieth century’s deadly struggle for mastery of the Western Pacific between
Russia, China, and Japan.
But then the Cold War’s logic led our bipartisan foreign
policy establishment to conclude that keeping America safe required us to
improve mankind. The idea of American security morphed into an imperative for
global meliorism. Our establishment confused the good incidental results that
America’s struggle with the Soviet empire were producing for the rest of the
world with the very purpose of America itself. They came to believe that all
this authorized them to send American troops around the globe to kill and be
killed to satisfy allies as well as to improve hearts and minds.
The American people have never looked kindly on this sort
of thing.
Trump Repeats
George W. Bush’s Fatal Mistake
Most recently, after President George W. Bush had invaded
Iraq and overthrown a regime that had been fostering terrorism against us,
Saudi diplomacy convinced him to occupy that country to preserve in it a
favorite place for the Saudis’ favorite minority, while our foreign policy
establishment convinced him to occupy it to reform it. Thus eclipsing America’s
own interest produced any number of disasters. ISIS is one of them. Would the
occupation of Iraq have been more in America’s interest had Saudi Arabia paid
for it?
ISIS is many nations’ problem. But it is America’s by
virtue of the fact that it has beheaded Americans and that it continues to
inspire some Americans to kill other Americans. Therefore, regardless of what
problems ISIS poses to anyone else, we are obliged to deal with the fact that
ISIS not only kills us but that its continued survival kills respect for
Americans, which respect is our first line of defense. ISIS destroyed, by
whomever, would be good for America. But it would be best for America if
Americans destroyed ISIS for what it has done to Americans, and for the world
to take note of that.
Suggestions such as Trump’s, that we might leave the
fight against ISIS to others unless we are paid, proceed from failure properly
to identify for what we rightly hazard our lives. They reduce the American
military to mercenaries and American statesmen to their contractor.
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