Generic commentary on U.S. grand strategy and ‘Don’t Come Home America’ essay

be willing to act.”© This is as true for nations as it is for each of us. We must be willing to act. It’s easy to be sympathetic to the desire for less action. Nothing we’ve done in recent years seems to be working. But, as we'll see, that’s because we've been using the wrong tools. Our enemies? They are developing the right ones. They are willing, and eager, to act. To travel the world now is to encounter in nearly every capital figures who have a different reading of history or the future of the global order. They see the world not as some ready-to-eat American political order but rather as a churning, uncertain, urgently worrying vortex. They wonder: What might we build? They look at America’s global leadership with the hungry eyes of an Internet startup eyeing an old, unconnected market. “Don’t do stupid things,” is an invitation for these forces to poke at the world, to take risks, and to remind us that so much of what later seems brilliant appears stupid or insane when it begins. In the years since “smart power” became fashionable, another proposition has emerged from a different group of elite thinkers. It is, in a sense, the flipside of that strategy-free posture of passivity. It was distilled by a well-regarded cluster of academic foreign policy specialists in 2012 as America began withdrawing from Iraq: “Don’t Come Home America!” they called their essay. As they explained, “The United States’ globe-girding grand strategy is the devil we know. A world with a disengaged United States is the devil we don’t know.”®? According to this logic, the country’s globe-striding posture, while expensive and exhausting and admittedly inefficient, is a crucial element of our rich national power. Yes, we spend 15% of our GDP on security activities, but we reap far more in return: Access to the best minds in the world, a secure life, a culture of open debate and personal liberty. The problem here is that “Don’t Go Home!” feels, for the most part, like a costly groping after something to hold onto. Articles and speeches and policy ideas that flow from this hopeful camp have a shimmering and expensive unreality, one that American domestic sentiment would be unlikely to support for long and that jostles against our experience of recent years. Are more aircraft carriers, overseas bases and jet fighters really the cure for the dangers we face? The ideas of this group have an appealing simplicity, or maybe I should say an appealing familiarity, because they echo instincts about power that were once true. The energetic engagement with the world they suggest is attractive, but America has work to do at home and - we can all see - the ambitious overseas tasks of recent decades have not, in any event, been really finished. Instead of a confident, conclusive, “Job well done!” comfort we still sweat with nervousness. What is coming next? After all the blood and treasure, after 850,000 soldiers in Afghanistan and $3 trillion dollars - we were left with expanded swamps. Like “Don't do stupid things”, “Don’t Go Home!” tells us little about the picture of world order that might emerge in the future. (It also tips us to this: Probably as a general rule no credible grand strategy starts with the word “Don’t”.) 62 Admiral Hyman Rickover: Rickover speech date TK 63 As they explained: Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, William C. Wohlforth, “Don’t Come Home America: The Case Against Retrenchment” International Security, Volume 37, Number 3, Winter 2012, pp. 7-51 49 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018281