Dr. John C. Hulsman is President and Managing Partner of John C. Hulsman Enterprises, a global political risk consulting firm. A life member of the US Council on Foreign Relations, his most recent book is “The Last Best Hope: A History of American Realism.”
You can read part one of John Hulsman’s short series here, part two can be found here , and part three can be found here.
The realist revival of the Republican Party would have stood no political chance of happening had the Wilsonian/neoconservative follies of the past 30 years not discredited the American foreign policy establishment far and wide.
However, following the botched Humanitarian Interventions in Somalia, Haiti, and Libya, the ruinous, seemingly endless nation-building wars fought over Iraq and Afghanistan, a vague, misdirected War on Terror (which ignored the rise of peer superpower competitor China), and the economic collapse brought on by the greed and incompetence of the financial crisis, historically it is hard to think of another governing class so in need of being shown the door.
By using American history as our guide an alternate, and far more successful, foreign policy can be constructed organically by looking at the lived experience of the republic’s citizens over these past 250 years. As we have seen in the first three parts of this series, realism has played a major role in the American foreign policy story since the dawn of the country.
The three great strategic innovations in American foreign policy thinking – Washington and Hamilton’s acceptance of the Jay Treaty (leading to US dominance of the North American continent), John Quincy Adams’s promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine (leading ultimately to American dominance of the Western Hemisphere), and FDR’s invention of the Roosevelt Rule, which to this day provides the vital yardstick for when interventions ought to take place (securing America’s global advantage) – are all realist in nature.
The Washington/Hamilton collaboration, unbettered in the whole history of the country, provides the first piece of the puzzle. In facing down vociferous opposition and signing the crucial Jay Treaty with Britain, America’s first administration set the course for nothing less than US domination of North America and permanent great power status. By making it clear that alliances should only be entered into when they advance specific and primary American interests, the founders laid down a realist yardstick that must be rediscovered today.
For instance, even established concords, such as the NATO alliance, should only be continued if they are shown to presently clearly be serving American interests. After 75 years of vainly waiting for Charlie Brown to kick Lucy’s football, it is well past time to ask free-riding European countries to care half as much about their security as Americans do. Instead, especially since the end of the Cold War, a shameful number of rich continental powers (Germany, Italy, and Spain) have chosen to cross-subsidize their ridiculously profligate social spending habits off the backs of the hard-pressed American taxpayer.
Bluntly, as America rightly pivots toward the Indo-Pacific—where much of the world’s future growth will come from as well as much of its future political risk—Europe must take charge of its backyard, in North Africa, the Balkans, and even over dealing with Russia, as America has other things to do in the world.
While the US will remain a strategic backstop, in line with its NATO obligations, on a day-to-day basis Europe must either put up or shut up. In any event, NATO only matters if European states stop behaving like lotus-eaters, giving Americans actual reciprocal value in terms of our common defense.
Second, John Quincy Adams, the greatest US Secretary of State in the nineteenth century, echoed the President in seeing that ‘No more stupid wars’ should be a cornerstone of American realist thinking. Just as Adams skillfully steered the US clear of conflict with Europe over Spain’s restive colonies in the New World, with the Monroe Doctrine securing US dominance over time in the Western Hemisphere, so should modern America live by this tried-and-true foreign policy adage.
The thing that both Wilsonian and neoconservative wars of choice over the past 30 years have in common – besides abject strategic failure and a tragic and colossal waste of America’s precious blood and treasure – is that the stakes were so low. Be it Humanitarian Interventions in Somalia and Libya, or nation-building exercises in Iraq and Afghanistan, in absolutely none of these cases were primary US interests in play, certainly once the Taliban had been initially routed and Al-Qaeda put to flight.
Instead, in the latter case, a highly successful initial strategic strike based on disrupting the murderers of 9/11 gave way to a failed, costly, unwinnable nation-building occupation, with the American-installed government risibly lasting mere days after $2 trillion and decades of military support. Frittering away such American patrimony for such negligible stakes must never be allowed to happen again, as the failed foreign policy establishment never met an intervention it didn’t like.
For, finally, it must be accepted that while fighting wars remains necessary in international relations, it should only be entered into as a last resort for America. More often than not – and despite the fever-dreaming of a boatload of tenured academics, safe from any real-world repercussions for their fashionable hawkishness – it is rarely the fateful year of 1938.
More often than not, America’s rivals are Slobodan Milosevic rather than Adolf Hitler – nasty, tinpot dictators rather than revolutionary powers determined and able to upend the global order in favor of creating a new one. US military action must be rare, only undertaken when the country faces a threat to the established, largely pro-American order. But given that the stakes would then be the highest, America must fight to win.
From early on, FDR sensed that Hitler (and to a lesser extent Imperial Japan) posed a threat to the relatively benign global order of his day and therefore had to be stopped. Over years, he expertly, step by step, moved the American people – then cosseted in ruinous isolationism – toward this dreadful, if accurate, strategic realization.
Roosevelt managed to politically change American public opinion in time to save the world from the dark night of Nazi barbarism, creating the Roosevelt rule, which to this day provides the essential realist yardstick for when the US ought to militarily intervene in military conflicts and when it should not.
Roosevelt’s great insight was to remember that geography largely determines geostrategy. The preeminent Eurasian landmass, with most of the world’s people and resources, stands to dominate the rest of the planet should either its European or Asian portion be controlled by any one great power. America, lurking in the peripheral Western Hemisphere off the coast of Eurasia, will continue to be the world-ordering power only as long as both Europe and Asia are fragmented between a series of competing great powers.
The Roosevelt rule has massive implications for setting the terms for when and where America must militarily intervene today in the world and when it should not, making it clear when the US faces a Milosevic and when it faces a Hitler.
For example, by FDR’s yardstick, the Ukraine war is a sideshow that ought to never involve American military intervention and should be of only limited importance to the country. Russian President Vladimir Putin, heading a great power in obvious decline, a corrupt gas station with an economy only the size of the state of Texas, cannot even manage to take over Ukraine, let alone credibly threaten a NATO country. While it was right that some aid be given to Kiev to stave off its annihilation in the initial stage of the war, the Roosevelt Rule makes it clear that everything done beyond this initial act has been a strategic overreaction.
On the other hand, China’s threat to invade Taiwan and dominate the rest of the Indo-Pacific does meet the test of the Roosevelt Rule. A China that takes over Taiwan and escapes from the pro-American first island chain strategically hemming it in (Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, down to India and the Strait of Malacca) can sail its fleet and commercial vessels unhindered out into the blue waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
Given its already dominant trading position in the region, this strategic shift in fortune would undoubtedly leave Beijing as the dominant power in first the Indo-Pacific, and over time the whole of Asia itself. Ultimately, we would come to live in a world dominated by China.
In America’s new cold war with Beijing, Taiwan is the new Berlin, the strategic canary in the coal mine that informs us as to who holds sway. A dramatic change in its political fortune means that a revolutionary change like the Indo-Pacific – and over time, the world – has come to pass. Using the Roosevelt Rule, it is here that America must focus the lion’s share of its energies.
By restoring such a realist foreign policy as the governing view of the Jacksonians and Jeffersonians who now dominate the Republican Party, we can, over time, remake America. And in doing so, we can remake the world.
