Amid the incessant clashes of the campaign season, there is at least one thing that pretty much all of the presidential candidates can agree on.
Bernie Sanders: “Of course the United States must lead. But the United States is not the policeman of the world.” Jeb Bush: “We’re not going to be the world’s policeman, but [we’d] sure as heck better be the world’s leader.” Chris Christie: “We are not the world’s policeman, but we need to stand up and be ready.” Carly Fiorina: “We cannot be the world’s policeman, but we must be the world leader.” Donald Trump: “At some point, we are going to have to stop being the policemen of the world . . . whether we like it or don’t like it.” Marco Rubio: “I don’t think that’s necessarily the role that I would advocate.”
In this the candidates side with the incumbent, Barack Obama, who says, “We should not be the world’s policeman,” even as he employs military forces to kill terrorists in, inter alia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia. They agree, too, with Bill Clinton, who said, “We should not be the world’s policeman,” as he launched cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan, bombed Iraq, and dispatched troops to Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor. And with George H. W. Bush, who said, “We’re not the world’s policeman,” even as he sent U.S. troops to overthrow Manuel Noriega in Panama, to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait, to save Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s wrath, and to succor Somalis from the ravages of famine. And with Ronald Reagan, who agreed that “it is not the American role to play policeman around the world,” even as he bombed Libya, sent peacekeeping forces to Lebanon, invaded Grenada, and sent U.S. naval forces to fight Iranian attempts to close the Persian Gulf. And with Jimmy Carter, who said, “We have no desire to be the world’s policeman,” even as he promulgated the Carter Doctrine that pledged the United States to defend the free flow of oil in the Middle East and created what became Central Command to do so.
In short, American presidents for decades have been disclaiming any desire to be the “world’s policeman” even as they have been taking actions that are pretty much the definition of what a “world policeman” would do. It is the foreign policy that dare not speak its name, but it is one that the United States has been following in one form or another since the early years of the republic. Think, for example, of the Barbary Wars (1801-1805, 1815) waged to protect commercial shipping from pirates based in North Africa. That was America policing the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
The United States long saw itself as having a special duty to police its “backyard,” the Caribbean region. In 1904 President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine: “Chronic wrongdoing . . . may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation,” he announced, “and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.” This “international police power” justified dozens of American military interventions, including long-term occupations of Haiti (1915-1934) and the Dominican Republic (1916-1924) to stabilize those turbulent countries.
The U.S. policing role went global in 1941 when President Franklin Roosevelt joined Prime Minister Winston Churchill to issue the Atlantic Charter, pledging to fight for goals such as giving “all peoples” the right to “choose the form of government under which they will live,” to “see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them,” to create a peace “which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries,” to “enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance,” and to disarm aggressor nations.
While the language of the Atlantic Charter was high-minded, its issuance was rooted in stark considerations of national security. FDR realized that by abjuring its policing role in the 1930s, the United States had given free license to predatory states such as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. He vowed not to repeat that mistake in the future.
After World War II, the United States had fresh impetus to police the world, because it confronted the threat of Soviet expansionism. During the Cold War, hundreds of thousands of American troops were stationed in Europe and Asia, and the United States took responsibility for the security of nations such as Greece and Turkey, France and Germany, South Korea and Japan, South Vietnam and the Philippines. There were few corners of the world where the United States did not send its diplomats, spies, and soldiers to stymie the advance of communism, real or perceived.
One might have thought that the end of the Cold War would end the American global policing project—many did think that—but the disorder of the 1990s showed otherwise. That decade saw U.S. troops being sent from Kosovo to Somalia. Since 9/11, the U.S. impetus to police the world has only been enhanced for fear that if we leave a vacuum, it will be filled by terrorists—as has indeed happened in countries from Libya to Syria.
Few today imagine that we can simply abandon all or even most of our international obligations without compromising our own safety. U.S. military forces patrol all the world’s oceans, deter aggression on the part of states such as China and Russia, fight terrorists and pirates, combat nuclear proliferation and drug trafficking, and even deploy regularly to aid countries caught in natural disasters. You might say we are the world’s social worker in addition to being its policeman—and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Actually, it’s something that we need to do in our own self-interest, because if we don’t do it, who will? China? Russia? Iran? We can’t count on any of those countries to fill the vacuum and would not be happy if they did. But if nobody polices the world, the result is likely to be disorder that will threaten the security of the United States and our allies. Indeed, that’s already happened in Syria: Because of President Obama’s refusal to intervene in the Syrian civil war, millions of refugees are swamping nearby states and an Islamic State has been established that is inspiring terrorist attacks from Paris to San Bernardino. With defense spending consuming only 3.5 percent of U.S. GDP, it’s far cheaper to police the world ourselves than to suffer the consequences of chaos.
That is something presidents of both parties have long realized, even if they haven’t leveled with the American people about what they were doing. It would be nice if someone in high office, or seeking it, would explain why, yes, we need to be the world’s policeman. But, whether the mission is made explicit or not, it is one the United States will perform for as long as it remains a great power.
