The West Wins, in Spite of Itself

A merciful confluence of events is softening the impact of the foreign-policy errors of the United States and its traditional allies. It must be allowed that U.S. foreign policy in this new century has been a bipartisan failure. There has not really been a policy that could be sustained, or that any sane foreign-policy architect would wish to sustain for more than a few years. Through much of the Obama administration and the preceding Bush era, almost the entire ground-forces combat potential of the United States was mired in the Middle East, while the Western alliance has steadily loosened, and the United States has withdrawn toward its own shores. As has been endlessly recounted, the country has become, in Peggy Noonan’s phrase, “war-wary” — as the Korean, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq Wars (though not the Gulf War of 1991) dragged on interminably and only the Korean and possibly Afghanistan Wars produced even a partially satisfactory outcome. Nowhere was the United States defeated militarily, but it suffered serious strategic setbacks in Vietnam and Iraq. The impulse to be less internationally adventurous is understandable, and the implosion of the Soviet Union drastically reduced the need for American-led resistance to anti-democratic forces in the world. From the end of the Cold War there was much talk of the “peace dividend,” and it was assumed that substantially less resources could be consecrated to national defense.