Americans have demonstrated a deep weariness with the burdens of “U.S. global leadership” that foreign policy professionals under governments from both parties have said America must bear. A reexamination of how American military power is used could help to lessen that burden.
Americans see the annual defense budget grow, seemingly without bounds, from approximately $650 billion in 2017 to just over $800 billion in 2021, to around $900 billion today. At the same time, Americans are told by distinguished and elite blue-ribbon panels like the 2024 report of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy that they are no safer, that the world has become more dangerous in spite of American efforts, and that still more investment and more sacrifice are needed at a time when average Americans are struggling to pay bills worth dozens or hundreds – not billions – of dollars.
Of the benefits that Americans are told they reap in return for investing vast sums in defense, many are diffuse or difficult to perceive, like maintaining the free flow of commerce and preserving the liberty of like-minded democracies. Meanwhile the costs in taxation, opportunities lost because money spent on defense is not invested elsewhere, and the lives of American service members that are lost are felt by the American people in a much more direct and immediate way.
All this has led to an understandable desire to lay down those burdens and retreat from global leadership. But the historical record, almost from the founding of the United States, suggests that this approach is not likely to succeed. The United States’ attempt to avoid the problem of Barbary piracy nonetheless ended in the creation of the U.S. Navy and its dispatch to the Mediterranean. Our attempt to remain neutral in the Napoleonic Wars pulled us into the War of 1812. We entered the First and Second World Wars years after they began, but only after deadly attacks on America and Americans. Out of those experiences of the 20th century flowed the Cold War consensus that produced over a half-century of American global leadership.
But in the aftermath of the Cold War, as existential threats seemed for the moment to recede, American leadership metastasized into something else: a blind inability to distinguish vital from non-vital interests or militarily soluble problems from problems that cannot be solved by military means – with disastrous consequences for both American domestic and foreign policy. But there is a silver lining: The nature of the problem suggests that there is a better solution than simply abandoning America’s global position and its very real global interests.
The answer is not, as some might argue, to keep doing everything and simply spend more on defense. The answer is to return to a cold, clear appraisal of what problems American military power should be applied to and can be applied to fruitfully.
This will not be easy. Vocal lobbies within the Washington foreign policy establishment are heavily invested, professionally and emotionally, in applying U.S. military power to problems that are not military in nature and cannot be solved by military means. There remains an undisciplined impulse to engage American forces in brushfire wars and civil conflicts that do not impact vital American interests, a fetish for U.S. presence as a response to non-military “gray zone” activities, and a penchant for open-ended commitments to stabilizing chaotic, impoverished and ungoverned spaces.
These problems cannot be solved by the U.S. military, and in fact have not been solved despite the application of American forces and American money in copious quantities over the last 25 years. They can and do suck up money, readiness, and service members’ lives. Furthermore, they sap Americans’ faith in their leaders, government institutions, internationalist foreign policy, the efficacy of military spending, and more.
It is well past time to stop. A better approach is available. The U.S. military must be directed to focus on problems that can be solved using military force, in the places where American vital interests are clearly engaged. Put plainly: the military is first and foremost an instrument of warfare, of killing and destruction, and it must be prepared, with great violence and prejudice, to kill the troops and destroy the armaments of countries that would pursue military aggression against America’s closest partners in the Western Pacific and in Eastern Europe – or, if a country were so foolish, against the United States itself.
While the military can – and is often directed to – perform other functions, such as collecting intelligence or training and exercising with foreign partners, most such missions carry very real costs in time, money, and opportunities foregone. And in very few such cases can the United States achieve the decisive outcomes that it seeks unless it is prepared – and seen by enemies to be prepared – to commit its own forces to fight for them and to seek victory in pursuit of clearly defined military goals.
At worst, committing the U.S. military to goals for which it is not clearly willing to fight risks tempting the adversary to test American forces, American will, and American limits. As Garrett Mattingly wrote in his 1959 history of the Spanish Armada of the French king’s unwillingness to use force against an armed insurrection in his capital, “One does not wave a pistol under the nose of an armed enemy and then let him know it won’t go off.” Or, as senior officials were frequently quoted as asserting during the Obama administration, “superpowers don’t bluff.”
If that promise is to be given substance, then there is indeed a strong argument for focusing America’s military commitments on the physical defense of the United States’ vital interests in Asia and Europe. And vital interests they are. For these regions are home not only to America’s largest trading partners outside the Western Hemisphere (Canada and Mexico together account for approximately 30% of U.S. trade; Asia excluding China for approximately 25%; and Europe excluding Russia for approximately 20%; by comparison, China accounts for a little over 10% of U.S. trade), but also, perhaps more importantly, to the vast majority of the world’s prosperous democracies which broadly share America’s principles and worldview.
As Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote in 1950 on the creation of the alliance structures that remain cornerstones of our foreign policy today, the United States’ abandonment of those regions to control by hostile powers would give our adversaries “such a dominating position over so vast an area, population, and military and economic resources as would make our problems unmanageable,” and “would so change the spacious freedom of American life as to undermine its cultural, moral, political, and constitutional bases.”
The defense against attacks on America’s vital interests and the pursuit of victory in warfare are things the military can do if directed to focus on them, almost certainly at a price equal to or lower than what the United States pays today for “defense” against an endless array of ill-defined threats. Aligning the military’s missions with actual military problems might even restore the American people’s common-sense belief that their hard-earned money is being spent in their interest, and to good effect.
That would be a policy worth – and worthy of – the tax dollars of the American people and the commitments and sacrifices of its servicemen and women.
Ann Dailey is a policy researcher at RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research institution.
