Americans are weary and wary of war. Poll after poll shows it. The nation is loathe to commit ground troops to any conflict, and in general wants the United States to rein in its instinct to police the world.
But the past year has delivered hideous reminders that Atlas, having accepted the weight of the world on his shoulders, cannot simply set it down and walk away.
Throughout the summer of 2014, the ever-stronger army of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria destroyed the gains that American blood and treasure had purchased over a decade in Iraq. With President Obama’s military strategy floundering there and in Syria and terrorist fighters prospering, the consequences of this administration’s disengagement have become a serious problem and a stain on the country’s reputation.
The predations of the nascent caliphate was matched, in horror if not in scale, by the systematic massacre of children at a school in Peshawar, Pakistan, on Tuesday. This repugnant and cowardly act, which will live in infamy, was committed by the Taliban, an enemy America set out to remove from power in Afghanistan in 2001. Seven Taliban gunmen attacked the school, which is attended by the sons of military officers, and killed at least 145 people, most of them children. This atrocity, a Taliban spokesman said, was revenge for Pakistani and CIA attacks on Taliban strongholds in the province of North Waziristan.
It is a terrible possibility that the Taliban will seize control again in Afghanistan and return it to the barbarism of the years before President George W. Bush’s 2001 invasion. If this happens, their restored power will be greater than ever, backed by a hardened army and encouraged by a decade of fighting against the world’s increasingly chastened superpower. Then the benighted people of that country, and perhaps others, will live and die under a regime given to sadistic cruelty, mass executions and wanton destruction.
There are, more obviously now than in the past, limits to American power. Our enemies are in many cases no longer the uniformed armies of identifiable nation states that can be defeated. They are, rather, protean groups that dissolve, regroup and coalesce as their needs and circumstances require. The epoch of decisive warfare is over. America’s fights cannot be expected in many cases to reach clear conclusions.
In these grim and intensely difficult times, Americans must look at their options with a careful and sober eye. Perpetual war and occupations are neither feasible nor desirable. But neither is walking away from the world. If this great nation disengages, our enemies will, in any case, follow us home. They already have.
American elections are usually decided on economic conditions and issues. Voters tend to ignore foreign policy concerns, which played only a minor role in the 2014 election outcome. But the world is a messy place today for reasons both within and beyond American control. And foreign policy should and probably will loom large over the next election cycle.
