I work in FP for a living, and this is the best thing I've read in weeks. Really patient, methodical, well-organized list of ways that "the blob" is consistently, predictably biased towards a romanticized vision of the U.S. military's role in the world, that just-so-happens to overlap with governments' innate temptation toward power aggrandizement.
I will add that I think both Cato and Chris Chivvis do good work that's aligned with the restraint movement today, however wrong Chris may have been about Libya a decade ago. Chivvis works in the same department of Carnegie that employs Stephen Wertheim, for example (whose book is another you should check out if you haven't already) and the two of them made similar points about the challenge of breaking from FP groupthink in a recent co-authored Foreign Affairs article. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/americas-foreign-policy-inertia
Thanks! I was planning on getting an IR PhD until about a year ago, so I’m a lot more tuned into the scholarly world than the think tanks. I probably should have looked more into Chivvis before levying such harsh criticism.
Out of curiosity: Applying the same logic, would you have argued that it would have been cheaper for the West to help Ukrainians by simply letting Russia take over all of Ukraine, or at least as much of Ukraine as it wanted to, and having open borders between Ukraine and the West?
Possibly, but considering how Russia has committed pretty grotesque war crimes as part of the occupation, there’s a very good chance that some level of intervention would have done more good than harm. I think it’s pretty clear the Biden admin should have pushed Ukraine harder on diplomacy — and the sheer level of aid delivered has made the war worse overall, not better — but that doesn’t mean the best option would have been doing nothing. Having a short war plus the easternmost ~20% of Ukraine under Russian control would probably be better than a shorter war but all of Ukraine under brutal permanent occupation.
And that’s not even mentioning indirect effects: you have to consider what doing nothing for Ukraine would mean for the fate of the post-1945 territorial integrity norm, for example.
You are correct: foreign interventions do not generally help foreigners, at least not directly. Also, police interventions do not help criminals. In fact, many police interventions, like no-knock raids, stop-and-frisk, issuing a warrant to the wrong address by accident, or simple good-old-fashioned police brutality all carry a moral cost.
Despite these costs, society as a whole is better off with having an aggressive police force rather than a passive and weak police force. This is because when you take a "hands off approach," people lose confidence in the state's ability to maintain its monopoly on violence, and this loss of confidence leads to the rise of gangs and mafias.
This argument applies to the international situation as well. So no, intervention in Libya did not help Libyans. But this does not mean that American military aggression cannot have a net positive effect, globally. The key here is to attempt to be more accurate about when we apply aggression. In Syria, I think aggressive force was warranted; in Iran, putting boots on the ground has a very different risk/reward ratio.
Credibility derives from the perceived interests and capabilities a state has in any particular conflict. If anything, generalized belligerence and interventionism undermines credibility by depleting a state’s resources.
From the summary: "Fear of diminished credibility motivated America's costly participation in the Korean and Vietnam wars." I disagree that this was the only motivation. American intervention in Korea was about controlling Chinese access to the sea and protecting Japan from an invasion point, and it was successful.
Here's one way to estimate the cost-benefit of the Korean War:
Let's say the war cost $1 trillion. I think the lowest reasonable estimate is $600 billion, including the cost of the American occupation through 2024.
Now, the GDP of North Korea is estimated at $23 billion. The GDP of South Korea is $1.7 trillion. In this sense, the war pays for itself every single year through economic benefits. But if you only care about the direct benefit to America, US-South Korean trade is over $220 billion. So the Korean war pays for itself every 3-5 years. Not a bad investment.
Vietnam was a failure. But we're talking about different kinds of conflicts: boots on the ground versus drone strikes.
My argument wasn't exactly that "if America doesn't conduct drone strikes, we will become less credible." My argument was that by neglecting to take out aggressively anti-American dictators like Gaddafi and Saddam, we are allowing these local mafias to grow in a cancerous way.
You can argue that "we shouldn't have killed Gaddafi, because it resulted in greater death than if he remained in power." Even if that were true, I still think there is a benefit to killing anti-American dictators.
My analogy to police is meant to demonstrate that minimizing conflict and casualties is not the primary motive behind policing. Sometimes policing results in more death than just ignoring the problem. But it can still be morally justified, because policing criminality reduces the risks of mafias developing.
It is impossible to eliminate mafias entirely, but they must be incrementally suppressed by the use of force, through intimidation. The reason why Assad fled in 2024 was because he did not want to become a Gaddafi or a Saddam. That is the result of the USA setting a terrifying precedent. I think that's better for America. I don't think the state, either with regard to the police or military, should hold as its highest moral principle "minimizing death count." That can be part of the calculus, but projecting power is crucial.
The study you bring up specifically deals with "backing down during a crisis." I think "backing down during a crisis" is sometimes wise, but this is a completely different matter from "drone striking autocrats." I understand you're attempting to discredit my argument regarding "loss of confidence," and I see how you would link the two concepts. I just don't think the specific point of the author is able to be generalized so broadly to discredit the point I am making.
For example: if the state uses force to capture a criminal, and then reaches a plea deal, does this "backing down during a crisis" invalidate the use of force? No: a state can use force, and then reach a plea deal or agreement, and both decisions made in succession can be optimal for a given situation. The plea deal does not invalidate the wisdom of the initial use of force.
Or take a recent example: the ceasefire in Gaza does not necessarily invalidate the initial use of force of Hamas or Israel. Maybe Hamas successfully achieved its objective, whatever that was (???). Maybe Israel obtained its key objectives, and pursuing the war further would have diminishing returns. But "de-escalating a conflict is sometimes good" has nothing to do with "drone strikes are always bad," and it certainly doesn't prove that "taking out Gaddafi was bad."
Morally speaking, measuring good and evil in terms of ONLY body count is one-dimensional. This leads you to the position that every state throughout history was evil, and America is evil, and everything is evil... This is libertarian thinking. It should be a consideration, but if it is the only consideration then this degrades the capacity of the state to take aggressive risks.
If America were to allow Gaddafi, Assad, and Saddam to stay in power, the risk of these dictators forming an "anti-American axis" would be fairly high. Maybe you believe that this would be better than risking a Libyan Civil War, because less people would die in the near term. However, I think the catastrophic risk of allowing Russia to become a dominant power in the Middle East and Mediterranean is high enough to warrant the violence of civil wars.
My goal is to avoid a direct conflict between major powers, and I believe the best way to accomplish that is to be aggressive in policing minor powers.
I also don't think that America's resources are depleted through use. Military resources age quickly, and if you don't use them, they become obsolete.
Regarding what DeepLeftAnalysis said about police (quoted below):
Funny thing is - i saw this "hands off" approach being intentionally done in municipal unions when I partook in a consultant midlife right of passage break and pivot.
The managers I was supposed to be "watching and learning from" used kid gloves only, gave them whatever they wanted, and the best way I can describe the structure of it is a "monarchial mafia with a contract", or a tamer version of Libya as described above. Their ideas were literally crazy all the time like Qaddafi (switzerland footnote!). But that is how the system works.
The "police badge gravitas" part of it only takes effect a couple years after when the union leaders that were total assholes to me realized they were in a long-term bait and switch - almost there, fucking quid pro quo litigation avoidance rules (2 years!).
"Despite these costs, society as a whole is better off with having an aggressive police force rather than a passive and weak police force. This is because when you take a "hands off approach," people lose confidence in the state's ability to maintain its monopoly on violence, and this loss of confidence leads to the rise of gangs and mafias. "
“The Pyramid of Power and the Coming Reckoning: A Psychological and Political Analysis of the Climate Crisis”
In the shadowed corridors of power, a quiet war rages—not one fought with armies, but with influence, obfuscation, and the controlled flow of capital. Oil and gas companies, and their bedfellows in finance—BlackRock, Vanguard, and their ilk—operate as the architects of inertia in the face of an accelerating climate crisis. Their strategy is as insidious as it is effective: buy the loyalty of political leaders, shape narratives through media control, and dismantle the democratic tools that might otherwise hold them accountable.
The Methodology of Control
From a psychological perspective, the mechanisms at play mirror a classic model of learned helplessness. By engineering systems of dependency—economic, political, and informational—these entities have conditioned the global population to accept a false binary: economic growth versus environmental sustainability. Politicians, rendered impotent or complicit by the lure of campaign funding and lucrative post-political appointments, become the unwitting (or willing) marionettes of a larger agenda.
BlackRock and Vanguard, with their unparalleled stakes in global industry, represent not just capital accumulation but the consolidation of power into a plutocratic elite. This elite, representing less than 1% of the population, wields its wealth not merely as a tool, but as a weapon. Climate change, for them, is not a crisis but an opportunity—a chance to privatize resources, displace populations, and profit from the chaos they have orchestrated.
Historical Parallels: Lessons from 1789
This dynamic, however, is not without precedent. History offers a chilling parallel in the French Revolution. When the masses—disenfranchised, impoverished, and ignored—reached a breaking point, their response was neither measured nor merciful. The guillotine became not only a tool of justice but a symbol of revolutionary fervor. Today, the psychological and economic pressures exerted by the 1% are creating a similarly volatile undercurrent.
The Anatomy of Revolt
The inevitable consequence of this systemic exploitation is revolt. As climate disasters grow more frequent and severe, the facade of control maintained by the elite will fracture. The masses, emboldened by a growing awareness of their exploitation, will target not only the institutions but the individuals responsible. CEOs and upper management of oil and gas companies, along with financiers who have profited from environmental degradation, will find themselves in the crosshairs.
This revolt will not be confined to symbolic protests or legal challenges. It will be visceral and direct, echoing the collective fury that toppled the ancien régime. The psychological tipping point—when hope is replaced by rage—will lead to an unprecedented challenge to the structures of power.
The Warning to the Elite
For the architects of this exploitation, there is still a path to redemption. Transparency, systemic reform, and the relinquishment of disproportionate power are not just moral imperatives but survival strategies. However, if these steps are not taken, the elites must prepare for a reckoning far beyond the reach of their gated communities and private security forces.
The psychology of revolution is clear: when the gap between the rulers and the ruled becomes insurmountable, the result is upheaval. The choice is theirs to make—but time is running out.
The people are awakening, and the guillotine of justice, whether literal or symbolic, waits in the wings.
This Movie will end in the usual historical fashion.
This is effective criticism of the Libyan intervention, but you don't offer an alternative to 'primacy' or explore how an alternative would have led to other choices. I was also wasn't convinced by your evidence of 'failing upwards'. The Libyan intervention was simply not very important in the careers of folks like Barak Obama, John McCain, or Marco Rubio.
I think generally, FP experts develop rational strategies that (in theory) produce better overall results for their nation, or the world in general, or both, often based on past successes of similar policies, game theory, ideology, and common sense. Unfortunately even the best theory is necessarily based on assumptions, and the underlying truth those assumptions approximate in FP change constantly.
Take Kissinger's theory of force-diplomacy and credibility, as it applied to Vietnam, where the goal was to force the North Vietnamese to negotiate. He thus needed to back up the negotiations through credible force, so the first step was to threaten mass bombings and offensives by the US. In theory, the bombings and offensives themselves are a net-loss for the US (inflicting huge pain against the Vietnamese, but little chance of lasting military victory for the US), but so long as the threat of these things was credible, it would force the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table, without the US actually having to follow through with its threat. Bluffs and intimidation are probably the highest ROI strategy you can come up with, but there are circumstances where the assumptions break down.
Taking N. Vietnam as an example, they were much less responsive to intimidation than was suspected by the US. They were willing to suffer years of bombing, terrible casualties, and way outsized bloodshed. Maybe this was their own negotiating strategy (make the threat of force less threatening by their willingness to accept the consequences), maybe it was ideological fervor that surpasses all logic, maybe there were a few key players in N. Vietnam who were willing to accept the suffering of their people without batting an eye, since they were secure in comfortable party headquarters hidden in the wilderness.
Either way, since they were unresponsive to threats of force, in order to maintain the "credible" part of a "credible threat" the US then had to follow through with negative ROI bombing and offensives that cost huge amounts of resources/lives, international goodwill, and domestic support. If they didn't the credibility of future and parallel threats would be down the toilet, so the Kissinger strategy of using credible threats of force to achieve outsized diplomatic results, paradoxically forced the US to take extremely costly diplomatic action.
The key assumptions that were wrong were assuming the other party was purely rational, assuming the other party's motivations were what the US thought they were, and underestimating how often foreign powers would call the US's credible threat/bluff.
This all is to say that while yes, foreign policy experts are better equipped to make suggestions than the average schmuck, they are basing their suggestions off theories where the truth of the underlying assumptions may or may not be correct. Combine this with imperfect information/serious biases/the interests of those operating by different or no strategies/potential changes in foreign policy every 4 years making long term FP strategies difficult, and foreign policy seems just as like to not achieve its aims as it is to achieve them.
You give them too much credit. The big US FP questions are a matter of habit: we did primacy in the past, so the institutions came to believe it's the "right" way to do things, so the people who adhere to primacism are the ones who get the most influential jobs. That less fundamental question like *how to* (as opposed to *whether to*) pursue the war in Vietnam were the subject of rational inquiry doesn't change this.
If grand strategy were rational and not habitual, why has it not changed in more than 80 years despite unprecedented changes in the int'l environment including the shift from multi to bi to unipolarity, the spread of democracy and development of int'l institutions, more advanced military technology (nukes!), etc?
If the FP scene is just a repetition of habit, what’s better than primacy that wouldn’t just involve ceding international influence to a country that practices primacy itself?
Besides the period from maybe 1991-2011 any pullback in pursuing US interests abroad would be matched by an opportunity for another global power to gain influence in that nation/region. That pretty much leaves us with few options for goals to pursue, which broadly align with: Pursuing US national interests while generally supporting a global order that reinforces those interests + globally peace and stability as an afterthought/ideological justification.
I’ve seen some arguments in favor of more isolationist FP. If the international games we play cause us to devote trillions, only to end up with a hostile regime still in power after intervention (Iraq), or the same hostile regime back in power (Afghanistan) choosing not to play is a viable option. I think that would be an overcorrection though, as other international powers that are willing to take a more subtle (or more overtly imperialist) stance would greatly benefit from a US withdrawal of interests, that in the long term could cost us significantly.
Edit: I reread the article and found some of what I was looking for. Any specific book recommendations for a non-primacists foreign policy?
That's a very simplistic view that I don't think is borne out by the evidence. The US didn't have to fight in Vietnam (for example) to contain Soviet influence, as even realists like Hans Morgenthau recognized. In fact, direct engagement was draining to the US economy and likely extended the length of the Cold War. So too with the pursuit of nuclear superiority and the maintenance of costly alliance guarantees to avoid proliferation to allies, which has arguably been the most consistent element of US grand strategy since nuclear weapons were invented.
Even putting that aside, the bigger issue is how revisionist we should expect other states to be. I'm not convinced that China and Russia being aggressive powers (insofar as that's true of China; all the examples people raise are really lame) actually shows that the US needs to be muscular and primacist. It could be a self-fulfilling prophecy: we think they're aggressive, so we behave aggressively toward them, so they act aggressively back. Or it could be that it's actually the US that's revisionist and encroaching on legitimate Chinese and Russian security interests through its expansion of alliances like NATO, deploying military assets, trying to change other countries' form of government, etc. (You can also explain a lot of the Cold War like this.) The realist model of states as power hungry security maximizers may have been accurate a long time ago, but with the development of nukes, new norms and institutions, and globalization it's not obvious that that's true anymore.
If you want an example of what an alternative FP would look like I suggest Restraint by Barry Posen (I would say Van Jackson's Grand Strategies of the Left, but neither of us is into that commie bullshit). I think the basic case for it is best made by John Mueller's Retreat from Doomsday (possibly his Stupidity of War, but I never read that) and if you want to read hundreds of pages of theory, Christopher Layne's The Peace of Illusions.
I think I would broadly agree with you here more than you expect from what I said above. I'll check out Restraint, as a quick browse of the synopsis seems interesting.
My main beef (not saying this is what you were doing in this post) is with the simplistic isolationist take that doesn't actually seek to understand any implications. It's mostly just a response like: "Look at those billions being spent on the military! That's coming out of my taxes. We should just worry about the US and not be subsidizing all these foreign nations." without actually trying to understand why military force is being used across the world, and what might happen if we stopped. This is (in my eyes) what motivates a lot of the anti-supremacist rhetoric in politics, but the discourse is certainly better in academia.
A policy of restraint, rather than one of isolation, seems more reasonable on branding alone.
I mean, maybe? It seems more likely to me that absent much foreign competition, China will quickly eat up the low hanging fruit that's currently not so low hanging due to the US.
Maybe China expands to where it meets its natural neighboring adversaries, but wherever that line is, it's certainly farther than where they are currently, and encompasses some current key US allies.
I can't imagine that the result would be anything but an expansionary effort where countries carve out their own spheres of influence where there was otherwise US presence. They of course won't stop there, as China is already investing heavily into central and South America, much closer to home under the current international order. I doubt that if America pulls back they will decrease their meddling, but only feel emboldened. If anything, we end up with a similar rivalry, except the centers of conflict are much closer to home.
As for why I believe it? Look at Russia. Their sphere of influence was aggressively (and non-consensually) sent back to where Russian is the majority. Their rival, NATO, expanded nation by nation until they were less than 400 miles from Moscow (Estonia). Previously any plausible incursion by NATO was over 1,000 miles away. So Russia still has the same rivals as they did in 1991, except now their rivals are a lot more relatively powerful, they are relatively weaker, and the closest American military base is a lot closer to home. Maybe this wouldn't have been so bad if there wasn't a severe economic collapse and a quick disintegration of their own international order, but I think they should serve as a warning for what even a few decades of isolationist policy can do if you have rivals salivating at the thought of expanding their influence.
It was a sort of forced isolationism by their inability to project power in the post-soviet collapse. But the point is, it's not so much about what they did, so much as how their rivals responded. A vacuum was left by their retreat
and quite quickly their rivals moved in to fill that vacuum with freedom and democracy^TM.
Their rivals case were helped by the ideological claim of freedom and democracy in the west, but I think the same case could be plausibly made today to the developing world by a Communism with Chinese Characteristics that promotes "equality" and rapid improvement in quality of life, along with the multiple recent failed interventions on the part of the US.
It seems almost a given that if you retreat from your sphere of influence, that a foreign power will fill the gaps (hell the US did so with China after the Sino-Soviet split). It's of course more complicated than that, as competing regional interests can make a foreign power unable to exert influence even over its neighbors. Nixon and Kissinger saw N. Vietnam as a tool of China, but six years after US withdrawal, Vietnam and China were literally at war with each other. Perhaps the lack of a mutual enemy allowed for their more direct and regional competing interests start to become prominent. Maybe this would happen across the world, so there's no reason to worry about a greatly expanded Chinese, Russian or [Insert Growing Power Here] sphere, but the US was able to play the international influence game pretty well so far, so I don't doubt it could be played even better in the future by someone else.
Thanks for this… I think I’m the reader you’re referring to in the beginning, and really appreciate the extensive discussion.
This is all pretty convincing, but I think I remain a little more trusting of the American-primacy strategy, given the historical grounding. You mention the primacist style sprung up post-WW2—I’d argue its most important accomplishment is still the Marshall Plan, which worked out very well and cost-effectively. (Especially re: culture-shifting and building lasting democracies, I mean, Japan! Japan!)
Agreed about the recent perversion of rewarding foreign policy elites, though, the evidence really is damning, and I think you’re right that that could erode trust, make us fuck ourselves over, etc.
(A final aside: I vaguely remember a recent Cato piece outlining an asymmetric defense doctrine for US aid to Taiwan. It criticized our practice of selling them very expensive missile-interception systems and various offensive weapons when there are significantly cheaper ways to defend against possible invasion. I wonder if that sort of egotistical inefficiency is at all downstream of the American-primacy culture, if it’s part of how this ends up screwing us…)
I'll offer a few points on your criticism of the blob.
First, I agree that the sanctimony of the United States when it conducts military interventions is oppressive and wrong. But one of the reasons that the United States overstates its moral worth and authority is that in so many cases this just obviously is so. With Gaddafi, ISIS, etc you can almost make the claim that our very flawed American leadership are empirically better people.
Second, on the claim that the blob overestimates the effectiveness of military intervention. The blob is well aware that military interventions are often unsuccessful at achieving their stated ends, and they produce quagmires with a fair frequency. But when the blob advocates for a particular military intervention they're doing so because they see a way for their political leadership, which is only in charge for x more years, to achieve something that could be called a victory. The blob is not dispassionate experts looking for long-term solutions that support US national security interests. The blob is a group of individuals that succeed or fail professionally depending on how well they advised the current administration on its short-term responses to events.
The last claim that the blob is too focused on bolstering allies and deterring bad actors seems relative and subjective. The cited Obama efforts do seem like failures, but Biden's efforts to convince allies that Russia was going to invade Ukraine and coordinate a response seems like a very good thing.
You need people with specialized knowledge on particular issues and regions that the general public doesn’t have. And you need people who can make decisions in crisis moments when deliberative processes wouldn’t work.
I work in FP for a living, and this is the best thing I've read in weeks. Really patient, methodical, well-organized list of ways that "the blob" is consistently, predictably biased towards a romanticized vision of the U.S. military's role in the world, that just-so-happens to overlap with governments' innate temptation toward power aggrandizement.
I will add that I think both Cato and Chris Chivvis do good work that's aligned with the restraint movement today, however wrong Chris may have been about Libya a decade ago. Chivvis works in the same department of Carnegie that employs Stephen Wertheim, for example (whose book is another you should check out if you haven't already) and the two of them made similar points about the challenge of breaking from FP groupthink in a recent co-authored Foreign Affairs article. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/americas-foreign-policy-inertia
Thanks! I was planning on getting an IR PhD until about a year ago, so I’m a lot more tuned into the scholarly world than the think tanks. I probably should have looked more into Chivvis before levying such harsh criticism.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cBY-0n4esNY
I don't know how many QALYs this video is worth, but it's probably enough to justify the strike.
Out of curiosity: Applying the same logic, would you have argued that it would have been cheaper for the West to help Ukrainians by simply letting Russia take over all of Ukraine, or at least as much of Ukraine as it wanted to, and having open borders between Ukraine and the West?
Possibly, but considering how Russia has committed pretty grotesque war crimes as part of the occupation, there’s a very good chance that some level of intervention would have done more good than harm. I think it’s pretty clear the Biden admin should have pushed Ukraine harder on diplomacy — and the sheer level of aid delivered has made the war worse overall, not better — but that doesn’t mean the best option would have been doing nothing. Having a short war plus the easternmost ~20% of Ukraine under Russian control would probably be better than a shorter war but all of Ukraine under brutal permanent occupation.
And that’s not even mentioning indirect effects: you have to consider what doing nothing for Ukraine would mean for the fate of the post-1945 territorial integrity norm, for example.
Great chin guard ending!
You are correct: foreign interventions do not generally help foreigners, at least not directly. Also, police interventions do not help criminals. In fact, many police interventions, like no-knock raids, stop-and-frisk, issuing a warrant to the wrong address by accident, or simple good-old-fashioned police brutality all carry a moral cost.
Despite these costs, society as a whole is better off with having an aggressive police force rather than a passive and weak police force. This is because when you take a "hands off approach," people lose confidence in the state's ability to maintain its monopoly on violence, and this loss of confidence leads to the rise of gangs and mafias.
This argument applies to the international situation as well. So no, intervention in Libya did not help Libyans. But this does not mean that American military aggression cannot have a net positive effect, globally. The key here is to attempt to be more accurate about when we apply aggression. In Syria, I think aggressive force was warranted; in Iran, putting boots on the ground has a very different risk/reward ratio.
When actual political scientists study whether states deter bad actors by developing a reputation for interventionism, they consistently find that it doesn’t matter. (For example: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801443435/calculating-credibility/)
Credibility derives from the perceived interests and capabilities a state has in any particular conflict. If anything, generalized belligerence and interventionism undermines credibility by depleting a state’s resources.
From the summary: "Fear of diminished credibility motivated America's costly participation in the Korean and Vietnam wars." I disagree that this was the only motivation. American intervention in Korea was about controlling Chinese access to the sea and protecting Japan from an invasion point, and it was successful.
Here's one way to estimate the cost-benefit of the Korean War:
Let's say the war cost $1 trillion. I think the lowest reasonable estimate is $600 billion, including the cost of the American occupation through 2024.
Now, the GDP of North Korea is estimated at $23 billion. The GDP of South Korea is $1.7 trillion. In this sense, the war pays for itself every single year through economic benefits. But if you only care about the direct benefit to America, US-South Korean trade is over $220 billion. So the Korean war pays for itself every 3-5 years. Not a bad investment.
Vietnam was a failure. But we're talking about different kinds of conflicts: boots on the ground versus drone strikes.
My argument wasn't exactly that "if America doesn't conduct drone strikes, we will become less credible." My argument was that by neglecting to take out aggressively anti-American dictators like Gaddafi and Saddam, we are allowing these local mafias to grow in a cancerous way.
You can argue that "we shouldn't have killed Gaddafi, because it resulted in greater death than if he remained in power." Even if that were true, I still think there is a benefit to killing anti-American dictators.
My analogy to police is meant to demonstrate that minimizing conflict and casualties is not the primary motive behind policing. Sometimes policing results in more death than just ignoring the problem. But it can still be morally justified, because policing criminality reduces the risks of mafias developing.
It is impossible to eliminate mafias entirely, but they must be incrementally suppressed by the use of force, through intimidation. The reason why Assad fled in 2024 was because he did not want to become a Gaddafi or a Saddam. That is the result of the USA setting a terrifying precedent. I think that's better for America. I don't think the state, either with regard to the police or military, should hold as its highest moral principle "minimizing death count." That can be part of the calculus, but projecting power is crucial.
The study you bring up specifically deals with "backing down during a crisis." I think "backing down during a crisis" is sometimes wise, but this is a completely different matter from "drone striking autocrats." I understand you're attempting to discredit my argument regarding "loss of confidence," and I see how you would link the two concepts. I just don't think the specific point of the author is able to be generalized so broadly to discredit the point I am making.
For example: if the state uses force to capture a criminal, and then reaches a plea deal, does this "backing down during a crisis" invalidate the use of force? No: a state can use force, and then reach a plea deal or agreement, and both decisions made in succession can be optimal for a given situation. The plea deal does not invalidate the wisdom of the initial use of force.
Or take a recent example: the ceasefire in Gaza does not necessarily invalidate the initial use of force of Hamas or Israel. Maybe Hamas successfully achieved its objective, whatever that was (???). Maybe Israel obtained its key objectives, and pursuing the war further would have diminishing returns. But "de-escalating a conflict is sometimes good" has nothing to do with "drone strikes are always bad," and it certainly doesn't prove that "taking out Gaddafi was bad."
Morally speaking, measuring good and evil in terms of ONLY body count is one-dimensional. This leads you to the position that every state throughout history was evil, and America is evil, and everything is evil... This is libertarian thinking. It should be a consideration, but if it is the only consideration then this degrades the capacity of the state to take aggressive risks.
If America were to allow Gaddafi, Assad, and Saddam to stay in power, the risk of these dictators forming an "anti-American axis" would be fairly high. Maybe you believe that this would be better than risking a Libyan Civil War, because less people would die in the near term. However, I think the catastrophic risk of allowing Russia to become a dominant power in the Middle East and Mediterranean is high enough to warrant the violence of civil wars.
My goal is to avoid a direct conflict between major powers, and I believe the best way to accomplish that is to be aggressive in policing minor powers.
I also don't think that America's resources are depleted through use. Military resources age quickly, and if you don't use them, they become obsolete.
Regarding what DeepLeftAnalysis said about police (quoted below):
Funny thing is - i saw this "hands off" approach being intentionally done in municipal unions when I partook in a consultant midlife right of passage break and pivot.
The managers I was supposed to be "watching and learning from" used kid gloves only, gave them whatever they wanted, and the best way I can describe the structure of it is a "monarchial mafia with a contract", or a tamer version of Libya as described above. Their ideas were literally crazy all the time like Qaddafi (switzerland footnote!). But that is how the system works.
The "police badge gravitas" part of it only takes effect a couple years after when the union leaders that were total assholes to me realized they were in a long-term bait and switch - almost there, fucking quid pro quo litigation avoidance rules (2 years!).
"Despite these costs, society as a whole is better off with having an aggressive police force rather than a passive and weak police force. This is because when you take a "hands off approach," people lose confidence in the state's ability to maintain its monopoly on violence, and this loss of confidence leads to the rise of gangs and mafias. "
“The Pyramid of Power and the Coming Reckoning: A Psychological and Political Analysis of the Climate Crisis”
In the shadowed corridors of power, a quiet war rages—not one fought with armies, but with influence, obfuscation, and the controlled flow of capital. Oil and gas companies, and their bedfellows in finance—BlackRock, Vanguard, and their ilk—operate as the architects of inertia in the face of an accelerating climate crisis. Their strategy is as insidious as it is effective: buy the loyalty of political leaders, shape narratives through media control, and dismantle the democratic tools that might otherwise hold them accountable.
The Methodology of Control
From a psychological perspective, the mechanisms at play mirror a classic model of learned helplessness. By engineering systems of dependency—economic, political, and informational—these entities have conditioned the global population to accept a false binary: economic growth versus environmental sustainability. Politicians, rendered impotent or complicit by the lure of campaign funding and lucrative post-political appointments, become the unwitting (or willing) marionettes of a larger agenda.
BlackRock and Vanguard, with their unparalleled stakes in global industry, represent not just capital accumulation but the consolidation of power into a plutocratic elite. This elite, representing less than 1% of the population, wields its wealth not merely as a tool, but as a weapon. Climate change, for them, is not a crisis but an opportunity—a chance to privatize resources, displace populations, and profit from the chaos they have orchestrated.
Historical Parallels: Lessons from 1789
This dynamic, however, is not without precedent. History offers a chilling parallel in the French Revolution. When the masses—disenfranchised, impoverished, and ignored—reached a breaking point, their response was neither measured nor merciful. The guillotine became not only a tool of justice but a symbol of revolutionary fervor. Today, the psychological and economic pressures exerted by the 1% are creating a similarly volatile undercurrent.
The Anatomy of Revolt
The inevitable consequence of this systemic exploitation is revolt. As climate disasters grow more frequent and severe, the facade of control maintained by the elite will fracture. The masses, emboldened by a growing awareness of their exploitation, will target not only the institutions but the individuals responsible. CEOs and upper management of oil and gas companies, along with financiers who have profited from environmental degradation, will find themselves in the crosshairs.
This revolt will not be confined to symbolic protests or legal challenges. It will be visceral and direct, echoing the collective fury that toppled the ancien régime. The psychological tipping point—when hope is replaced by rage—will lead to an unprecedented challenge to the structures of power.
The Warning to the Elite
For the architects of this exploitation, there is still a path to redemption. Transparency, systemic reform, and the relinquishment of disproportionate power are not just moral imperatives but survival strategies. However, if these steps are not taken, the elites must prepare for a reckoning far beyond the reach of their gated communities and private security forces.
The psychology of revolution is clear: when the gap between the rulers and the ruled becomes insurmountable, the result is upheaval. The choice is theirs to make—but time is running out.
The people are awakening, and the guillotine of justice, whether literal or symbolic, waits in the wings.
This Movie will end in the usual historical fashion.
Enjoy the Show
GQ
This is effective criticism of the Libyan intervention, but you don't offer an alternative to 'primacy' or explore how an alternative would have led to other choices. I was also wasn't convinced by your evidence of 'failing upwards'. The Libyan intervention was simply not very important in the careers of folks like Barak Obama, John McCain, or Marco Rubio.
I think generally, FP experts develop rational strategies that (in theory) produce better overall results for their nation, or the world in general, or both, often based on past successes of similar policies, game theory, ideology, and common sense. Unfortunately even the best theory is necessarily based on assumptions, and the underlying truth those assumptions approximate in FP change constantly.
Take Kissinger's theory of force-diplomacy and credibility, as it applied to Vietnam, where the goal was to force the North Vietnamese to negotiate. He thus needed to back up the negotiations through credible force, so the first step was to threaten mass bombings and offensives by the US. In theory, the bombings and offensives themselves are a net-loss for the US (inflicting huge pain against the Vietnamese, but little chance of lasting military victory for the US), but so long as the threat of these things was credible, it would force the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table, without the US actually having to follow through with its threat. Bluffs and intimidation are probably the highest ROI strategy you can come up with, but there are circumstances where the assumptions break down.
Taking N. Vietnam as an example, they were much less responsive to intimidation than was suspected by the US. They were willing to suffer years of bombing, terrible casualties, and way outsized bloodshed. Maybe this was their own negotiating strategy (make the threat of force less threatening by their willingness to accept the consequences), maybe it was ideological fervor that surpasses all logic, maybe there were a few key players in N. Vietnam who were willing to accept the suffering of their people without batting an eye, since they were secure in comfortable party headquarters hidden in the wilderness.
Either way, since they were unresponsive to threats of force, in order to maintain the "credible" part of a "credible threat" the US then had to follow through with negative ROI bombing and offensives that cost huge amounts of resources/lives, international goodwill, and domestic support. If they didn't the credibility of future and parallel threats would be down the toilet, so the Kissinger strategy of using credible threats of force to achieve outsized diplomatic results, paradoxically forced the US to take extremely costly diplomatic action.
The key assumptions that were wrong were assuming the other party was purely rational, assuming the other party's motivations were what the US thought they were, and underestimating how often foreign powers would call the US's credible threat/bluff.
This all is to say that while yes, foreign policy experts are better equipped to make suggestions than the average schmuck, they are basing their suggestions off theories where the truth of the underlying assumptions may or may not be correct. Combine this with imperfect information/serious biases/the interests of those operating by different or no strategies/potential changes in foreign policy every 4 years making long term FP strategies difficult, and foreign policy seems just as like to not achieve its aims as it is to achieve them.
You give them too much credit. The big US FP questions are a matter of habit: we did primacy in the past, so the institutions came to believe it's the "right" way to do things, so the people who adhere to primacism are the ones who get the most influential jobs. That less fundamental question like *how to* (as opposed to *whether to*) pursue the war in Vietnam were the subject of rational inquiry doesn't change this.
If grand strategy were rational and not habitual, why has it not changed in more than 80 years despite unprecedented changes in the int'l environment including the shift from multi to bi to unipolarity, the spread of democracy and development of int'l institutions, more advanced military technology (nukes!), etc?
If the FP scene is just a repetition of habit, what’s better than primacy that wouldn’t just involve ceding international influence to a country that practices primacy itself?
Besides the period from maybe 1991-2011 any pullback in pursuing US interests abroad would be matched by an opportunity for another global power to gain influence in that nation/region. That pretty much leaves us with few options for goals to pursue, which broadly align with: Pursuing US national interests while generally supporting a global order that reinforces those interests + globally peace and stability as an afterthought/ideological justification.
I’ve seen some arguments in favor of more isolationist FP. If the international games we play cause us to devote trillions, only to end up with a hostile regime still in power after intervention (Iraq), or the same hostile regime back in power (Afghanistan) choosing not to play is a viable option. I think that would be an overcorrection though, as other international powers that are willing to take a more subtle (or more overtly imperialist) stance would greatly benefit from a US withdrawal of interests, that in the long term could cost us significantly.
Edit: I reread the article and found some of what I was looking for. Any specific book recommendations for a non-primacists foreign policy?
That's a very simplistic view that I don't think is borne out by the evidence. The US didn't have to fight in Vietnam (for example) to contain Soviet influence, as even realists like Hans Morgenthau recognized. In fact, direct engagement was draining to the US economy and likely extended the length of the Cold War. So too with the pursuit of nuclear superiority and the maintenance of costly alliance guarantees to avoid proliferation to allies, which has arguably been the most consistent element of US grand strategy since nuclear weapons were invented.
Even putting that aside, the bigger issue is how revisionist we should expect other states to be. I'm not convinced that China and Russia being aggressive powers (insofar as that's true of China; all the examples people raise are really lame) actually shows that the US needs to be muscular and primacist. It could be a self-fulfilling prophecy: we think they're aggressive, so we behave aggressively toward them, so they act aggressively back. Or it could be that it's actually the US that's revisionist and encroaching on legitimate Chinese and Russian security interests through its expansion of alliances like NATO, deploying military assets, trying to change other countries' form of government, etc. (You can also explain a lot of the Cold War like this.) The realist model of states as power hungry security maximizers may have been accurate a long time ago, but with the development of nukes, new norms and institutions, and globalization it's not obvious that that's true anymore.
If you want an example of what an alternative FP would look like I suggest Restraint by Barry Posen (I would say Van Jackson's Grand Strategies of the Left, but neither of us is into that commie bullshit). I think the basic case for it is best made by John Mueller's Retreat from Doomsday (possibly his Stupidity of War, but I never read that) and if you want to read hundreds of pages of theory, Christopher Layne's The Peace of Illusions.
I think I would broadly agree with you here more than you expect from what I said above. I'll check out Restraint, as a quick browse of the synopsis seems interesting.
My main beef (not saying this is what you were doing in this post) is with the simplistic isolationist take that doesn't actually seek to understand any implications. It's mostly just a response like: "Look at those billions being spent on the military! That's coming out of my taxes. We should just worry about the US and not be subsidizing all these foreign nations." without actually trying to understand why military force is being used across the world, and what might happen if we stopped. This is (in my eyes) what motivates a lot of the anti-supremacist rhetoric in politics, but the discourse is certainly better in academia.
A policy of restraint, rather than one of isolation, seems more reasonable on branding alone.
I mean, maybe? It seems more likely to me that absent much foreign competition, China will quickly eat up the low hanging fruit that's currently not so low hanging due to the US.
Maybe China expands to where it meets its natural neighboring adversaries, but wherever that line is, it's certainly farther than where they are currently, and encompasses some current key US allies.
I can't imagine that the result would be anything but an expansionary effort where countries carve out their own spheres of influence where there was otherwise US presence. They of course won't stop there, as China is already investing heavily into central and South America, much closer to home under the current international order. I doubt that if America pulls back they will decrease their meddling, but only feel emboldened. If anything, we end up with a similar rivalry, except the centers of conflict are much closer to home.
As for why I believe it? Look at Russia. Their sphere of influence was aggressively (and non-consensually) sent back to where Russian is the majority. Their rival, NATO, expanded nation by nation until they were less than 400 miles from Moscow (Estonia). Previously any plausible incursion by NATO was over 1,000 miles away. So Russia still has the same rivals as they did in 1991, except now their rivals are a lot more relatively powerful, they are relatively weaker, and the closest American military base is a lot closer to home. Maybe this wouldn't have been so bad if there wasn't a severe economic collapse and a quick disintegration of their own international order, but I think they should serve as a warning for what even a few decades of isolationist policy can do if you have rivals salivating at the thought of expanding their influence.
It was a sort of forced isolationism by their inability to project power in the post-soviet collapse. But the point is, it's not so much about what they did, so much as how their rivals responded. A vacuum was left by their retreat
and quite quickly their rivals moved in to fill that vacuum with freedom and democracy^TM.
Their rivals case were helped by the ideological claim of freedom and democracy in the west, but I think the same case could be plausibly made today to the developing world by a Communism with Chinese Characteristics that promotes "equality" and rapid improvement in quality of life, along with the multiple recent failed interventions on the part of the US.
It seems almost a given that if you retreat from your sphere of influence, that a foreign power will fill the gaps (hell the US did so with China after the Sino-Soviet split). It's of course more complicated than that, as competing regional interests can make a foreign power unable to exert influence even over its neighbors. Nixon and Kissinger saw N. Vietnam as a tool of China, but six years after US withdrawal, Vietnam and China were literally at war with each other. Perhaps the lack of a mutual enemy allowed for their more direct and regional competing interests start to become prominent. Maybe this would happen across the world, so there's no reason to worry about a greatly expanded Chinese, Russian or [Insert Growing Power Here] sphere, but the US was able to play the international influence game pretty well so far, so I don't doubt it could be played even better in the future by someone else.
Fascinating
Thanks for this… I think I’m the reader you’re referring to in the beginning, and really appreciate the extensive discussion.
This is all pretty convincing, but I think I remain a little more trusting of the American-primacy strategy, given the historical grounding. You mention the primacist style sprung up post-WW2—I’d argue its most important accomplishment is still the Marshall Plan, which worked out very well and cost-effectively. (Especially re: culture-shifting and building lasting democracies, I mean, Japan! Japan!)
Agreed about the recent perversion of rewarding foreign policy elites, though, the evidence really is damning, and I think you’re right that that could erode trust, make us fuck ourselves over, etc.
(A final aside: I vaguely remember a recent Cato piece outlining an asymmetric defense doctrine for US aid to Taiwan. It criticized our practice of selling them very expensive missile-interception systems and various offensive weapons when there are significantly cheaper ways to defend against possible invasion. I wonder if that sort of egotistical inefficiency is at all downstream of the American-primacy culture, if it’s part of how this ends up screwing us…)
I'll offer a few points on your criticism of the blob.
First, I agree that the sanctimony of the United States when it conducts military interventions is oppressive and wrong. But one of the reasons that the United States overstates its moral worth and authority is that in so many cases this just obviously is so. With Gaddafi, ISIS, etc you can almost make the claim that our very flawed American leadership are empirically better people.
Second, on the claim that the blob overestimates the effectiveness of military intervention. The blob is well aware that military interventions are often unsuccessful at achieving their stated ends, and they produce quagmires with a fair frequency. But when the blob advocates for a particular military intervention they're doing so because they see a way for their political leadership, which is only in charge for x more years, to achieve something that could be called a victory. The blob is not dispassionate experts looking for long-term solutions that support US national security interests. The blob is a group of individuals that succeed or fail professionally depending on how well they advised the current administration on its short-term responses to events.
The last claim that the blob is too focused on bolstering allies and deterring bad actors seems relative and subjective. The cited Obama efforts do seem like failures, but Biden's efforts to convince allies that Russia was going to invade Ukraine and coordinate a response seems like a very good thing.
I don’t see how that would be possible.
You need people with specialized knowledge on particular issues and regions that the general public doesn’t have. And you need people who can make decisions in crisis moments when deliberative processes wouldn’t work.
Good elites > Bad elites > No elites
that is what is happening in a couple days right?