America: Unsafe at Home

In the beginning the United States governed its place in the world by the perception of strategic vulnerability to hostile influences from nations in Europe. George Washington played for time for the nation, initially unsafe at home, to recruit its strength and resources to enable it to resist intrusions. In the interim he relied upon the dissipating effects of great distances and the two oceans to ward off threats. The goal was to attain sufficiently robust national stature to communicate a capacity for self defense that would deter hostile influences. That day eventually came, when the United States could meaningfully defy any nation to attempt without permission a drink from the Mississippi River.

Our place in this world is determined by far more that simple geography.

Today America’s place in the world must be governed by a different consideration. Not only has the technological shrinking of the safety of distance eroded nature’s defenses, but the extension of national interests through global engagement has also exposed the United States to potential security insults from foreign opportunists seeking marginal advantages at the expense of the United States. In other words, while there is no credible danger of an invasion of the United States, there are numerous threats to national security in forms that would constrain economic and financial interests and also in forms that would endanger regional peace in several theaters in such a manner as to engage United States participation at considerable cost and peril.

In this context it is well to take stock of the dangers the United States might face and how she might best handle them. Typically, analysts today cite China as the rising world power that will challenge the global dominance that inured to the United States after the fall of the Soviet empire. For the United States, however, the relevant question is not that of dominance (the outmoded thinking of much of the world) but rather that of resilience in the face of challenge. The goal of the United States is not the projection of power for the sake of power; it is the radiation of influence to secure safety at home. In the nature of things radiating influences penetrate an infinity of sectors, any one or several of which can at times become hot with obstacles that can potentially reverberate systemic disorders. The task of national security policy is to anticipate “hot sectors” and reduce their potential to become inflamed.

Nothing illustrates this so well as the problem of potential nuclear weapons in Iran. While the existential threat to Israel, which implicates the interests of the United States, is the most visible and dramatic danger of this Iranian threat, it is no less significant that it poses for the United States, wholly apart from Israel’s danger, the potential for a dominant power to rise in that region that can dictate the terms of United States engagement there and its ability to extract natural resources from the region. The United States must prevent that threat coming to maturity, since rectification after the fact would be no less damaging to the United States’ economy and would exaggerate claims from other state’s that could take advantage of the situation. Given that Iran in 1978 essentially placed itself in a state of war with the United States, which situation persists still, the danger is all the more grave.

This single example of a potential threat, however, is neither the only nor the most significant determinant of America’s place in the world. As the announcement of China’s stealth fighter program illustrates – in context of the United States’ abandoned stealth fighter program – the prospect of China’s defense posture succeeding in forcing the United States to stand off the East Asia theater means that the influence of the United States in the region would dissipate in proportion as its military projection was removed from the region. This result does not require an aggressive intent toward the United States by China; it flows rather from China’s determination to act with a free hand in the region, which means free from restraining United States’ influence. However, if a new “arms race” grows out of China’s military modernization program, it will derive from United States determination to defend free access to East Asia more than from fear of a new “Pearl Harbor.”

Indeed, it is perhaps helpful to reflect that America’s strategic posture need not for the foreseeable future focus unduly on any potential aggrandizing against the homeland itself. Unfortunately, however, that is not sufficient to assure safety at home. We live in an era in which new categories of states have emerged as the central focus of strategic thinking – not potential enemy states as classically conceived (russoviets notwithstanding), but rather states whose initiatives are geared to leveraging marginal advantages in the competition for global influence. Such states need not be superpowers. Thus, two of the most notable examples, Brazil and Turkey, stand out as particularly opportunistic in this regard. In fact, it seems to me that the place of the United States in the world ought now to be viewed from the perspective of its relations with states whose initiatives coordinate around the competition for marginal advantages against the United States, among whom we can name China, first, and Russia, Brazil, and Turkey.

Just as there are coordinated states, there are what I would call collateral states, whose position in the world is calculated in terms of relations to the United States but without deference to the United States. Such are the European Union states, Canada, Australia, Indonesia, Japan and Mexico. The collateral states also engage in marginal competition for global influence, but they do so with an acute sensitivity to align with the United States to the extent possible. Their interests would be too greatly exposed if they were to embrace frank and open competition targeting the United States, because they continue to expect mutual benefit from cooperation rather than gains from zero sum competition. Accordingly, in the looming reserve currency struggle, we may expect a vigorous case to be made for cutting free from the dollar, but only if in doing so there can somehow be preserved a United States obligation to sustain states that have become too accustomed to that backstop.

There are many other states in the world of importance in summing up the position of the United States – the Gulf states, a few African states, Indochina and, naturally, the states of Latin America. Many are allies (if only tacitly), while some are best understood as adventurers (Venezuela, Nicaragua). We may gauge the success or failure of United States policy by the extent to which it modulates the vast majority of these relationships more by its world profile (radiating influence) than by state-to-state dealings. It follows, therefore, that how the United States fares in the direct competition with the states that challenge it head on will most certainly determine whether it remains safe at home. It would be fair to say that current United States policy does not acknowledge direct competitions. That may result from a predisposition in the current Administration to deflect from world tensions with a somewhat Pollyanna-ish inclination to treat the goal of consensus as a concept rather than as a dynamic state in a project with a clear aim in view (means to an end). Or it may result from a failure to understand America’s place in the world.