Is America Really ‘Indispensable’ Again?

The Democrats have stood much stronger in support of U.S. President Joe Biden’s ambitious—and somewhat scary—attempts to project military strength on three major international fronts: supplying, all at once, Ukraine’s stand against Russia, Israel’s war on Hamas, and Taiwan’s defense against China.

But even among Democrats, new doubts are surfacing about U.S. commitments abroad. This week, Democratic progressives in the Senate sent a letter to Majority Leader Chuck Schumer demanding that the new more than $100 billion emergency supplemental aid for Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific requested by Biden in his Oct. 19 Oval Office address be accompanied by additional money for domestic programs. “The supplemental cannot just be about responding to emergencies abroad,” says the letter, which was signed by Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, Mazie Hirono, and Peter Welch. Biden, meanwhile, has pledged to veto the House bill.

All these new battles on Capitol Hill have a very old ring to them. In times of stress, Americans always revert to their default mode going back to the Founding Fathers, which is to avoid too many foreign entanglements. And it’s probably healthy that these debates are happening now.  With Israel’s war against Hamas recently added to the mix, the United States is once again seriously entangled abroad. The problem is that the debates in Washington so far—if one can call them that—have been utterly incoherent.

Biden has also edged the United States into a new cold war with the world’s second-most-powerful nation, China—despite his demurrals that he is doing so, and in spite of recent efforts by others in his administration to reach out to Beijing. Though Biden plans to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping later this month at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco, he has all but embraced an incendiary pledge to defend Taiwan and has expanded NATO’s focus to East Asia in what is effectively a new containment policy toward China.

All of a sudden, the United States is again the “indispensable nation” and a “beacon to the world”—as Biden declared in his Oct. 19 Oval Office address—and the United States is once more thrusting itself forward as the arsenal of democracy to the world. And this at a time when its defense-industrial base is shrunken and ill-prepared, its economy is sluggish, and its politics at home are polarized and, far too often, paralyzed.

For Stephen Wertheim, a political scientist at the Carnegie Endowment and the author of the influential 2020 book, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, this incoherence and strategic drift in Washington is a vindication of what he’s been arguing for years.

Since World War II, the U.S. idea of internationalism has become fatally intertwined with the idea of maintaining the United States’ global military dominance, Wertheim argues. Consequently, we can find no way out of this global police officer role, even as it’s strained both our economy and our sense of national identity to the breaking point. This hubris helped lead to the debacle of the Iraq invasion 20 years ago—and today it could well lead to a new disaster of overextension in the Middle East, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific, Wertheim told me in an interview. And that is partly what is causing so much alarm on Capitol Hill.

Wertheim said that until now, Biden has been acting on what political scientists call “the deterrence model of conflict.” But the growing danger is that the United States will instead get sucked into the “spiral model” as things grow out of control. “I think something is changing, because the costs of maintaining what Biden called the ‘indispensable nation’ are rising very high now, and the risks are so much higher than they ever were in the 1990s,” Wertheim said.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin testify during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Oct. 31. Blinken and Austin both testified about budget requests, which include aid money for Israel and Ukraine. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

This is a supreme irony for Americans, Wertheim notes, because for most of its 247 years of existence, the United States saw itself as an exceptional nation in large part because it did not view itself as military hegemon. It is understandable why Washington got pulled in when and the way it did after World War II—there was no other country with the means and will to rebuild and maintain the international system after Germany and Japan destroyed it.

But in embracing its postwar role permanently, Americans did not fully realize that their country would get caught up “beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue”—as John Quincy Adams warned in his famous 1821 speech, when he also said that the U.S. should never “go in search of monsters to destroy”—and that, as Adams put it, “the fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.”

That’s pretty much what happened. Having obtained such power by force, it was difficult to give it up, especially with a giant defense-industrial complex vested in it. Thus, long after World War II and then the Cold War ended in U.S. triumph, almost nothing has changed. “The United States decided, when the costs and risks were low, to scatter its forces all across the world, naively thinking [that] it was the end of history and projecting American power wasn’t going to inspire violent reactions,” Wertheim said.

Post-Cold War U.S. hegemony wasn’t necessarily fated to inspire such reactions, but it certainly did after successive administrations, both Republican and Democratic, badly mishandled things. Feckless NATO expansion toward Russia’s borders and the unjustified Iraq invasion discredited U.S. power as a reliable peacekeeper, helping to provoke Russia and China to go their own ways.

Domestic anger at the way the United States’ internationalist elites bungled this role then opened the door to the nativist populism of Trump. In his crude way, Trump sought to redefine U.S. hegemonic power—for example, by demanding that the NATO allies pay up for the U.S. defense umbrella that had allowed them to spend instead on their welfare states. And he struck a chord by daring to ask why the United States was simply maintaining, apparently through inertia, a system that was created to oppose a set of threats that no longer existed: first fascism, and then communist totalitarianism. As vicious as Russian President Vladimir Putin is, he’s running a second-rate (if nuclear-armed) power that has nothing close to the former Soviet Union’s global reach does not pose the same threat.

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A bipartisan group of House members attends a vigil for Israel on the steps the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Oct. 12. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

In a column published Wednesday, the Washington Post’s George F. Will lamented that the “post-World War II U.S. consensus about this nation’s world role” was being undermined by isolationist sentiments similar to those which prevailed before Pearl Harbor. “The cold-eyed men in Moscow and Beijing must be as delighted as they are astounded by the spectacle of U.S. populists cultivating war weariness in a nation that is shedding no blood and is spending a pittance of its wealth,” Will wrote.

In truth, this “war-weary” impulse runs much deeper: The United States has been effectively an isolationist country since its founding, specifically to avoid getting pulled into foreign wars. Its postwar global leadership role—the one we’ve all grown up with for nearly eight decades—is in fact an aberration, not the norm, when measured against its whole history.

Trump’s critique of NATO actually sprang from a deep-seated U.S. desire “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world,” as George Washington put it in his iconic plea for insularity in his farewell address of 1796. Wertheim is correct to argue that “isolationism” was a pejorative invented by internationalists to shame the America Firsters into silence, and that the United States has always sought some engagement abroad, at least through trade. But that is really a distinction without much of a difference: Maintaining a “detached and distant situation,” in Washington’s words, has always been a part of the United States’ DNA, which is why it typically requires a terrible disaster to spring Americans out of it.

One such disaster was Nazi and Japanese aggression leading up to World War II. Another was 9/11. Today, without thinking too deeply about it, we may be inviting another such disaster, tempting fate in three major regions of the world.

And yet Americans have had no real strategic discussion about what Washington is doing or planning in the long run. When he delivered his speech on Oct. 19, Biden didn’t seem to know what Israel planned to do other than to “destroy” Hamas, but the military campaign has generated a widespread backlash at home and abroad, even in his own party. Nor has the Biden administration reckoned with anything like an endgame in Ukraine, even though Ukraine’s commanding general, Valery Zaluzhny, admitted to the Economist this week that the war was in a “stalemate” and “[t]here will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.”

Charles Kupchan, a political scientist at Georgetown University and a former senior National Security Council official, says that in one respect, there was no alternative to Biden’s initial approach to both Russia and China. “Europe alone would not be able to handle what’s going on in Ukraine, and the Indo-Pacific needs a strong American presence and a steady American hand,” he said in an interview. Moreover, he said, Biden has done a good job thus far in both regions, as well as the Middle East, by keeping U.S. troops mostly out of harm’s way and letting U.S. allies and partners do the fighting.

U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks about the Hamas attacks in Israel from the White House on Oct. 10 Drew Angerer/Getty Images

But the deeper worry, Kupchan says, is that in calling the United States the “indispensable nation”—former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s controversial phrase from the late 1990s—Biden is “still operating in the world that was, not the world that is becoming. In the 1990s, the United States was the unchallenged hegemon. That is not the world of 2023.” Today’s world is rather one in which “power is rapidly diffusing,” Kupchan added.

“But using a small share of our annual defense budget, we have helped Ukraine fundamentally degrade the Russian military. So far so good,” Kupchan said. “Where things start to get a little bumpy is what about now? I do think it’s time to pivot to an alternative strategy that is less focused on a Ukrainian victory and more focused on trying to de-escalate, stop the killing, and reduce the drain on resources that are running up against limits on our stockpiles. I don’t yet see the beginning of that Plan B.”

One will be needed soon, especially with Biden heading into an election year. A new Gallup Poll found that Americans have become more likely to say the U.S. is doing “too much” to help Ukraine—a percentage that has increased by double digits since June. Similar doubts are rising about unlimited aid to Israel. “I do think the Biden administration underestimated the continuing appeal of an America First narrative,” Kupchan said.

Most important of all, the U.S. president also seems to realize that the ever-escalating confrontation with China is getting too costly and dangerous to continue—and it is possible that China’s Xi, faced with serious economic stagnation at home, has come to realize the same thing.

“There is a mutual vulnerability that is staring both the U.S. and Chinese governments in the face,” added Kupchan. “That can fuel a security spiral, and it can also fuel a de-escalation. We don’t know which is going to prevail. But I’m mightily relieved that Washington seems to be trying.”