The Good Country President Obama’s foreign policy of disengagement has been shattered by the events of the past year. His conviction that a retrenched United States would be better for Americans at home and for people around the globe has only invited aggression, from the Middle East to Europe to the Pacific. The animating ideas behind Obama’s policies have been called into question: the beliefs that “military solutions” are always inferior, that American troop deployments are tantamount to occupations, that multilateral compromise is more moral than decisive unilateral action, and that America’s enforcement of world order does more harm than good. Obama is actively uncomfortable exercising American power abroad, but he is entirely comfortable exercising centralized power at home. He believes that a strong central government is a moral force inside the United States, but he does not believe that American power is a force for good outside our borders. He is especially certain that American “boots on the ground” don’t do anyone any good—not us and not the countries to which they are deployed. This is wrong. Indeed, it is tragically wrong. Having compared growth and development indicators across all countries of the world against a database of U.S. “boots on the ground” since 1950, I’ve discovered a stunning truth: In country after country, prosperity—in the form of economic growth and human development—has emerged where American boots have trod. Unique among dominant powers in world history, America intervenes in the world not merely to advance its own narrow interests but to forward a greater good. And that is due in large measure to the belief that the greater good is in America’s national interest—that a freer and more prosperous world is one in which the United States will flourish. After the Second World War, the United States established “what we might call a global economic and security commons,” in the words of former Secretary of State George Shultz. Billions of poor people experienced economic development thanks to their own efforts—and thanks to the Pax Americana that enabled them to do so. Without America, world economic output would not have grown from $5.1 trillion to $70.2 trillion in 70 years. World population would not have quintupled after 1950. And child mortality would not have been cut by two-thirds. Critics call it empire. Academics call it hegemony. Some of its champions have called it unipolarity. But the data show a distinguishing feature beyond those descriptions: The projection of universal liberty has been the beating heart of U.S. foreign policy. But not for this president. At West Point earlier this year, Obama declared: “To say that we have an interest in pursuing peace and freedom beyond our borders is not to say that every problem has a military solution…U.S. military action cannot be the only—or even primary—component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.” Our power is a “hammer”—in his view, a destructive tool. But is that really what a hammer is? Hammers are tools for construction, not destruction. In that sense, the metaphor works very well. Indeed, from 1950 to 2010, more than 30 million U.S. troops were deployed around the world, the vast majority to allied countries, stationed in permanent bases, and cooperating in peace. They were building, not destroying. Full Article from Commentary Magazine commentarymagazine/article/the-good-country/
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 05:15:17 +0000
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