We are at war, under siege from a global alliance that runs from Pyongyang to Havana and Caracas. At the moment we are losing, having failed to bring down the leaders of our main adversaries: Kim Jong Un in North Korea, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, and Ali Khamenei in Tehran, despite monster demonstrations in the latter two countries. We have also failed to support the huge crowds clamoring for greater freedom in Hong Kong, although the regime in Beijing has canceled its law enabling it to transfer dissidents to the mainland.
We are losing because there is a growing sensibility on the conservative side of the political spectrum that the United States is simply too precious and good to sacrifice lives and coin to save failed (and continuously failing) cultures from themselves.
It is not in our national interest to be aggressively internationally engaged, they claim. This attitude is exacerbated by the sensibility on the extreme left-wing, which is increasingly defining the Democratic Party, that American ideals are a myth, its founding an act of injustice and original sin, and the projection of power on their basis an immoral fraud. Namely, it is not in the interests of the world for the U.S. to be aggressively engaged.
These two camps now converge on a common idea: The U.S.’s global presence and power is to be replaced by isolation — as seen by conservatives as an American fortress, as seen by the Left as a berated kid sent to stand isolated in the corner for misbehavior.
The dominance of the public debate by these two camps advocating a diminished international role for the U.S. is easily observed by our nemeses, who take great heart at the silence of some, departure from office of others, and tired repetitiveness of yet more of those who advocate a more muscular foreign policy. Absent the U.S., no great power stands in their way, and the regional allies which could have reinforced American power are left hunkering down in defensive postures.
There is much to commend the current administration for questioning basic assumptions and forcing a stress test on our policies. Indeed, the absence of discussion as to what our interests actually were had long given way to dogmatic assertions anchored to no more than inertia, and so too are the defense of the institutions and policies based on them.
But this process of house cleaning has also left a vacuum, which the conservative side has failed to fill with a reinvigorated and powerful argument for continued global engagement and presence. As a result, the legitimately felt exhaustion over such decades-long sacrifice without clearly defined enemies or victory and the facile arguments about retrenchment become irresistible.
The inevitable gap which thus emerges between unwillingness to maintain active and forward global engagement and the continued, and still valid, but unarticulated need for the maintenance of a world order which upholds our way life has seduced us into stopgap measures which create the illusion of an effective and strong policy, but in reality only tread water.
In various shades, therefore, the U.S. has retreated into two basic policies, both elements of which are presently pursued by the current administration: financial pressure (mostly sanctions) and a willingness to sit down and talk to our enemies. The last several administrations have engaged in both with different weighting, but this administration has added unprecedented and increasing levels of sanctions as leverage. The current president promised to end American foreign military involvement during the 2016 presidential campaign, and he intends to honor those promises, leaving the battlefield to the locals.
In short, American foreign policy rests on President Trump’s convictions, reinforced by a populist sentiment ineffectively answered by our foreign policy elites, that we need to disengage from action on the battlefields, and that our enemies will welcome this change and make deals with us. But is there hope the current administration’s recipe will produce the results the president hopes for?
It doesn’t look that way.
Our enemies are currently acting as if the U.S. has no will to resist their hostile efforts, and they will simply pursue us. The Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington taught us that the confidence and the immense power of our nation and geographical distance from our enemies would ensure the conflict would remain over the horizon proved an illusion. Our enemies came as far as they were indulged, even into our cities.
Sadly, the events since have shown us that managing and seeking to “incentivize” rather than defeat our enemies left us two decades later still facing them and their unabated enmity. They seek every opportunity to remind us of that.
The Taliban celebrated those Sept. 11 attacks last month with an explosion at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, shortly after an armed attack that killed an American soldier.
Will they negotiate with Trump? Of course they will, but they are not likely to make his kind of deal. Why should they? He does not threaten their regimes. He does not support those of their own citizens who want an end to the oppressive tyranny under which they suffer. He does not retaliate when they attack us or our allies. Instead, he or the secretary of state warn our enemies that the U.S. is preparing to take decisive action against them.
However, the decisive action does not come, even though it is constantly promised. The action required must threaten the leaders directly, just as it did the Soviet regime when Reagan was president of the United States.
The current situation in many enemy regimes is strikingly similar, and their needs are the same.
The “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, Venezuela, and China can succeed if our enemies cannot turn around their failed systems and embrace our successful experiment with freedom. Therefore, we need to endorse and support a revolutionary campaign against our enemies in the name of freedom.
Our campaign againstMikhail Gorbachev’s failed tyranny succeeded because the Russians had had enough of his muddled policies. The same strategy will work against our current enemies.
Michael Ledeen is freedom scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He has written 38 books. David Wurmser was senior adviser to the National Security Council.
