The Problem With Fortress America: The Enemy Gets a Vote

It is easy to argue for the Fortress America vision of foreign policy. It has the virtue of simplicity. 

But the world is not quite as simple as we would all hope. 

“Fortress America” is the argument that America’s conflicts with other countries are the result of America’s willingness to intervene in other countries. Hence, the path to peace is to arm up–peace through superior firepower–while restraining the use of American power. I don’t harm you, and you don’t harm me.

The principle of non-aggression in action. At least that is the simplified version. 

There is a surface plausibility to this argument. We have to admit that a substantial fraction of the hostility to America is not, as some argue, that our adversaries “hate our freedom.” That is a comforting argument because it implies that America is absolutely pure of heart and never intervenes in others’ affairs for less-than-noble reasons. 

The nonaggression principle is foundational to libertarianism, although the Kamala Harris Venn Diagram of people who hold it and libertarians does not completely overlap. That’s why you saw a substantial number of Trump supporters get deeply angry at Trump’s intervention in Iran. The America First advocates and the libertarians banded together to oppose what they saw as Trump’s aggression against Iran–far better to mind our own business. 

The problem with this argument is simple: no country is an autarky–relies solely on its own internal resources–and history shows that trouble abroad leads to trouble at home. There is a reason why there are no countries that are in practice libertarian in practice. Everybody gets a vote when it comes to causing trouble, and countries (or people) don’t only cause trouble when they are attacked. 

Sometimes, the interests of one are fundamentally at odds with the interests of others, and there are many ways that a person or a country can be harmed other than direct military action. A war abroad–at least when trading partners or trade routes are involved–can cause enormous harm to one’s own interests. 

Consider the cases of a nuclear-armed Iran or a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. In neither case would the United States be directly threatened–neither Iran nor China would risk directly attacking the United States militarily, as proven in Iran’s case by its backing down when Trump bombed its most prized possession–the nuclear program. 

Yet a nuclear Iran would still directly threaten the United States by putting world trade at risk, and much of our prosperity is based on our being a trading nation. A closure of the Strait of Hormuz, or God forbid, an all-out nuclear war in the Middle East, would harm the United States grievously. Even if our own oil supply were left untouched–it wouldn’t, by a long shot–sending our trading partners into a depression would leave us dramatically poorer. 

Taiwan’s fall could possibly be even worse for the United States. The vast majority of advanced microprocessors are dependent on the Taiwanese manufacturer TSMC, and, like it or not, the US has not “decoupled” from the Chinese economy, and won’t for years to come. Over 30% of global trade transits through Southeast Asia, with around 20% passing through the South China Sea. The US can’t afford a war in the region. 

Europe is hardly irrelevant to our economy either. Neither is Africa nor Latin America. Close to 30% of our economy is based on world trade. 

America pulling back from the world misunderstands how important US control of the seas ensures the free flow of goods, and how important the free flow of goods is to the United States. 

And if you look at the world today, and world history, it’s clear that war is nearly a constant. We may not want war, but war wants us in some form or another. 

You can easily make the argument that the United States has been way too active in intervening in other countries’ affairs. We overestimate our ability to reshape the global order to our liking. This is obviously true. Even assuming that Iraqis hungered for freedom and democracy, we ignored the fact that Iran didn’t hunger for a world where Iraqis could get them. We wound up fighting a proxy war with Iran as well as battling ISIS and other extremists in Iraq. Our intervention in Libya was a complete disaster. We could argue about Vietnam, but leaving 55,000 Americans dead and countless Vietnamese and Cambodians in graves didn’t obviously help our cause. 

On the other hand, winning the Cold War was an unalloyed good, and American dominance on the seas has made the US much wealthier, and maintaining the dollar as the world’s reserve currency has made us dramatically wealthier. 

Nonaggression sounds great, but it only works if others respect it. And the truth is that it rests on deterrence. Order depends on the threat of force, and the threat of force is only credible when you occasionally use it. 

It would be wonderful if we could achieve world peace without imposing it, but others have a say in whether that strategy works. Sometimes you just have to impose your will, or others will take the opportunity to do so.