America needs to prioritize, not panic.
America needs to prioritize, not panic.
T here is a debate among elected Republicans about whether to have a bill that sends more money to both Ukraine and Israel, or whether to have separate bills. This debate about how legislation will pass reflects the deeper debate on the right about America’s role in the world.
For the rising populist and nationalist Republicans, led by figures like J. D. Vance, each proposed American intervention must be judged by whether it really contributes to our national interest, and whether it merits priority over other foreign and domestic issues.
For Republican hawks and Democrats obsessed with the supposed decline of democracy worldwide, every political event on planet Earth — whether minor and relatively obscure like Robert Fico winning an election in Slovakia, or enormities informed by the most ancient of hatreds, like the October 7 pogrom of Hamas in southern Israel — is seen primarily as an immediate and existential threat to “the American-led world order” or “the 70-year post-War world order.” The stakes are always high and existential.
Matthew Continetti writes:
Already you see voices on the Progressive Left as well as on the nationalist Right separating the war in Ukraine from the war in the Middle East. For the Left, different power dynamics are at work. Progressives always must side with the “oppressed” against the “oppressor.” For the Right, Ukraine is somehow “woke” and thus bad, while Israel deserves support because it is nationalist and religious.
Enough with the obfuscation. The normal work of intellectuals is to make distinctions, to tease out the differences between phenomena. Not in this case. There is more than enough evidence of a vast international effort to overturn the American-led post-World War II international system. The rabid dogs tearing at the seams of world order are Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Holding the leash is Communist China, whose leader Xi Jinping welcomed Vladimir Putin to Beijing the day before Biden touched down in the Holy Land.
The primary evidence brought to bear for this “vast international effort” is that Iran sells weapons to Russia, and it has historically backed Hamas and other terrorist groups that threaten Israelis or Sunni regimes with which we have good relations, like our bone-saw-wielding Saudi friends. There is a gesture made toward Moscow reviving antisemitism. And blame is put on Joe Biden for our troubles, because of the mistake of America’s “harried and tragic retreat from Afghanistan.”
If not for intellectuals, I would at least like to speak up to defend intellection itself. If you subtracted American involvement entirely, Russia’s conflict with Ukraine and Hamas’s with Israel are perfectly explicable. Russia has opposed Ukrainian nationalism since before we entered World War II. Israel has fought with Palestinians and surrounding Arab states since long before the U.S. considered it a close ally.
In the present conflicts, the world is not neatly divided into a “status quo” bloc aligned with America, and a revisionist bloc aligned with China, Moscow, and Iran. Consider Turkey. Traditionally, Turkey has the largest military in NATO after the United States. It has a productive arms industry, and it is selling lots of drones and bombs to Ukraine, risking its somewhat warmer relations with Moscow in the process. But in the war between Hamas and Israel, it is outspokenly on the side of Hamas.
Consider Qatar, which has been sending more money to Hamas than Iran for years. Qatar is being used by the U.S. to pressure Iran. Qatar buys weapons from the U.S and recently signed a letter of bilateral cooperation with the State Department. In some ways, Qatar is elevating itself by being arsonist (funding and hosting Hamas) and fireman (negotiating hostage releases.)
A foreign-policy expert from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, perhaps seeking to save the neat, clear-cut “one-war” ideology from the messy reality, suggested that we should “kick Turkey out of NATO” and “strip Qatar of its major non-NATO ally status.”
For those who think geopolitics is a zero-sum contest of power blocs, it’s hard to think of a worse own goal for the liberal world order than throwing Turkey and its enormous military out of NATO. Where do you think it would align next?
Or one could look at the United States. Since the start of his war in Ukraine, Putin’s trade with China is “booming.” Exports to China from Russia rose over 63 percent to $71.8 billion and imports increased more modestly to $83.3 billon. Despite the CHIPS Act and the continuation of some Trump tariffs, the U.S. bought $562.9 billion from China in 2022. If anyone is powering the expansion of China’s military, it’s the American consumer. That is why historian Niall Ferguson is correct to see China and the U.S. as locked into a conflict of “mutually assured financial destruction.”
Conceiving all geopolitics through the lens of the “American-led liberal world order” will reduce the United States to the most inflexible, fragile, and paranoid world power that ever existed. It’s also a danger to our freedom. When liberals go in for this melodrama, they end up wishing to proscribe from politics all parties and players that are even marginally less committed to liberal-world maximalism than they are. Thus the electoral results in Poland and Hungary are overread as contests between authoritarianism and democracy. If parlaying with populist parties over rates of immigration or tariffs on trade, or security commitments at the far edge of Europe, is incompatible with the liberal world order, then that order’s promise of political freedom is itself empty.
For conservatives, the melodrama about the liberal world order leads to simple overcommitment and exhaustion, giving unearned opportunities for revisionist disruption. That disruption is likely to take advantage of our excesses of “will” if they lead to deficiencies of money, and materiel. That’s why Washington, D.C., policy-makers are suddenly freaking out. Israel and Ukraine are already in competition for stretched U.S. military supplies, even as we fall more behind on deliveries to Taiwan.
If we had listened to hawks, our will and resources would be even more depleted than they are now. Their policy influence means we have unnecessarily kept a small number of troops in Syria. They have a handful of missions, but mostly exist as a memorial to the hawks’ own regrets about America’s unwillingness to pursue a regime-change war in Damascus in the 2010s. Those troops were not on an essential mission and are now in danger of being engulfed in the flames fanned by Hamas. But if we had gone as far as the conservative hawks wanted, we would have sent 50,000 troops to save “the world order” in 2015. We would be there still today, trying to babysit a government that would be chasing hundreds of thousands of Alawites out of the cities, most of them likely to become refugees in Europe, further empowering populist upheaval. We’d be left pampering a regime made up of mostly radical Sunni groups, many of them openly aligned with al-Qaeda.
Similarly if we had followed the hawks’ advice to stay in Afghanistan past 2021, we would have had to cut a deal to stay as guests of and effectively partners with the Taliban — or we would have had to recognize that the Afghan National Army’s casualties and territorial losses had been unsustainable for more than half a decade, and recommitted to our own troop surge and partial occupation.
The post-war American-led order, such as it exists, is not and never has been so utterly dependent on its peripheries. It’s strong enough to absorb temporary setbacks like those in Hungary in 1956 and Prague in 1968. It’s strong enough to endure the overreach of its enemies. What it cannot endure is the endless paranoia and panic of its champions, who will exhaust its treasuries and armories chasing the perfect, and thereby destroying the good.