I hope to have a bit more to say on Robert Kagan's long piece in the Weekly Standard where he makes the case (again) for American global hegemony, but I wanted to highlight this short bit where he sketches out the historical grounds for America's expansive global posture:
Under Franklin Roosevelt, and then under the leadership of Harry Truman and Dean Acheson, American leaders determined that the safest course was to build â??situations of strengthâ? (Achesonâ??s phrase) in strategic locations around the world, to build a â??preponderance of power,â? and to create an international system with American power at its center. They left substantial numbers of troops in East Asia and in Europe and built a globe-girdling system of naval and air bases to enable the rapid projection of force to strategically important parts of the world. They did not do this on a lark or out of a yearning for global dominion. They simply rejected the offshore balancing strategy, and they did so because they believed it had led to great, destructive wars in the past and would likely do so again.
That's true, but this leaves out a fairly glaring fact: the Soviet Union. America's post World War II global strategy developed not simply with the war's lessons in mind, but with the specter of a globally powerful strategic competitor threatening the post-war balance. That's a fairly significant factor to simply skirt around in the retelling of American strategy following the second World War.
The U.S. faces new threats today and is justified in maintaining some military forces abroad as a forward line of defense and to protect some vital interests, but clearly the situation is a lot different, and a lot more favorable to American security, than it was in the 1950s.
