PNN – Â Biden says that the United States has again become an “indispensable nation” for the world when the American defense-industrial base is weakened; Its economy is facing recession and its politics is polarized and paralyzed.
The Republican Party, which has been riding waves of isolationist sentiment for more than a century, is once again torn apart over US commitments abroad. Even before Hamas launched another war on October 7, Republicans backed out of the Ukraine war.
Now the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, is insisting on sending aid only to Israel for now — and making it conditional on domestic budget cuts — while Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell still wants to tie the bill to aid to Ukraine has opened a new gap, but even McConnell now wants to tie that money to new funding for homeland border security. Democrats are standing stronger in support of US President Joe Biden’s ambitious and somewhat frightening efforts to project military might on three major international fronts: Ukraine’s stand against Russia, Israel’s war against Hamas, and Taiwan’s defense against China. All of these new battles on Capitol Hill have a very old ring to them.
In times of stressful crises, they revert to their default mode and revert to the [US] founding principle of avoiding too much foreign conflict, and it’s probably natural that these debates are happening right now. With Israel’s war against Hamas recently added to the mix, the United States is once again seriously involved abroad.
The problem is that the current debates in Washington – if you can call them that – have been quite incoherent. Republicans can’t decide whether they want to be the old defense-minded Republican or the new isolationist Republican like former President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is having an identity crisis. Just in the past year, the government has left its approach of separating from the Middle East after leaving Afghanistan and transferring the security burden to Europe by sharing the costs of aid to Ukraine and pledging to fully support Israel; What is happening today in the Middle East can turn into a massive war.
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As Biden announced in his October 19 speech in the Oval Office of the White House, the United States has once again become an “indispensable nation” for the world, and America is once again advancing itself as the arsenal of democracy in the world. This comes at a time when America’s defense-industrial base is shrinking and unprepared, its economy is in recession, and its politics are polarized and paralyzed at home.
Stephen Wertheim, a political scientist at the Carnegie Endowment, argues that since World War II, the United States’ idea of ​​internationalism has become fatally intertwined with the idea of ​​maintaining US global military dominance. As a result, we cannot find a way to escape from the role of global policeman, even if this role severely strains our economy and national identity.
The same hubris that led to the failure of the US invasion of Iraq 20 years ago and today could lead to a new disaster on a larger scale in the Middle East, Europe and the Indo-Pacific is partly what is causing alarm on Capitol Hill. So far, Wertheim says, Biden has operated according to what political scientists call the “conflict deterrence model,” but there is a growing danger that the U.S. will instead be drawn into a “spiral model” as the situation spirals out of control.
Wertheim said: “I think something is changing because the costs of maintaining what Biden calls the “Indispensable Nation” are now much higher and the stakes are much higher than they were in the 1990s. This is an irony for Americans, notes Wertheim, because for most of its 247-year existence, the United States has largely seen itself as an exceptional country because it has not seen itself as a military hegemon.
It is understandable why no country had the means and will to rebuild and maintain the international system in the way that Washington was drawn to after World War II and after the destruction of Germany and Japan. It will be caught up “beyond the power of redemption, in all wars of interests and intrigues,” as John Quincy Adams (the sixth president of the United States in 1825-1829) warned in his famous speech in 1821; Where he said the United States should never be “looking for monsters to exterminate” and, as Adams predicted, “the basic principles of American politics will shift imperceptibly from freedom to coercion.”
Almost the same thing happened. Once such power was acquired by force, it was difficult to relinquish it, especially with a gigantic defense-industrial complex at the disposal of the United States. So long after World War II and then the Cold War, which ended with the victory of the United States, almost nothing has changed. “The United States decided to spread its forces around the world when the costs and risks were low, naively thinking it was the end of history and that American power would not provoke violent reactions,” Wertheim said. It was a projection of US power. US hegemony after the Cold War did not necessarily provoke such reactions, but it certainly did after successive administrations, both Republican and Democratic, handled matters badly. NATO’s reckless expansion into Russia’s borders and the unwarranted invasion of Iraq discredited the US’s power as a reliable peacekeeper, helping Russia and China to get their way.