Foreign Policy is Not a Game of Risk

America must stop trying to play world affairs like a game of Risk.

Frank DeVito is an attorney currently serving as counsel at the Napa Legal Institute. His work has previously been published in several publications, including The American Conservative, The Federalist, The Claremont Review of Books, and First Things. He lives in eastern Pennsylvania with his wife and children. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily his employer.

While I certainly wasn’t reading The American Conservative as a teenager, I was a young, rebellious punk rocker. So I can claim the rare bona fides that, with TAC and Trump, I was against the Iraq War and 21st-century American imperialism from the beginning. When war is not absolutely necessary for the defense of a nation, it should not be fringe to oppose it. Why, then, from the end of World War II, through the Cold War, into the present day, do so many normal Americans not seem horrified by and opposed to the United States continuing to act like the superpower that must intervene in and rule the world? 

Perhaps it is just the fact that normal people numb themselves with technology: when so many people fill their leisure time with binge watching shows and scrolling social media feeds, it is no wonder they do not think too hard about the horrors of war and America’s continued imperial posture in the world. This has been a problem for decades, as I recall from lyrics by the Subhumans, still embedded in this former punk rocker’s memory after all these years:

There's a bomb going off in Belfast

There's a war in Vietnam!

There's a T.V. documentary

To help you understand

But the other channel is better!

Because it doesn't tax your mind

Relax in the ignorance of your home

As man destroys mankind!

Fortunately, it looks like opposition to forever wars and to American obsession with remaining the unipolar world power is expanding beyond the fringes of heterodox magazines and punk rock concerts. Look up from the screen, think for a moment, and “the American situation on the world stage is not sustainable” should be, not fringe, but common sense.

No, we cannot sustain the nation while running trillion-dollar budget deficits. We cannot sustain an economy, a social welfare system, or a coherent national culture while millions of illegal aliens flood across the southern border. We cannot sustain a first-world country when big city prosecutors spend resources engaged in lawfare against the former president of the United States while neglecting to prosecute, you know, crime.

America cannot sustain a healthy population when we are in drastic demographic decline and continue to promote abortion, late marriage, easy divorce, fewer children, and the indoctrination and gender confusion of the children we do have. And in the midst of this domestic instability, we certainly cannot sustain a foreign policy where America gets involved in every foreign conflict possible in the name of some nebulous crusade for freedom.

Each of these unsustainable situations is a separate political issue, but it is important to take a step back and see a looming, big-picture question that must be addressed in the coming years: Can (and should) America continue in its role as the sole power in a unipolar world order? And if not, what does America’s transition to and role in a new multipolar geopolitical reality look like?

The answer to these questions ought to shape one’s worldview not just on war, but on many of the seemingly unrelated political issues mentioned above. 

If America can maintain its role as the world’s financial power and the dollar remains the currency of international transactions, then how much do national debts and deficits really matter? Surely we will be able to continue to manipulate the currency in such a way that we can fix all this. There is no need to reshore manufacturing; we will always have the financial power to outsource such lowly economic activities to the third world.

But if America is simply one sovereign nation — a particularly rich and great and powerful one — among many in the world, surely it has to pay its debts, spend within its means, and discipline its use of military force just like everyone else. Surely this huge, fertile, resource-rich nation should produce a substantial amount of its own food, medicine, and weaponry on American soil, to protect against supply chain issues and make the country less vulnerable to scarcity caused by everything from foreign wars to foreign sanctions to foreign famines.

If America will continue to be the unipower, the financial and technological center of the world, then there is no need to fret too much about immigration and birth rates. America will experience a great flourishing of AI, machines will take the place of laborers in many industries, and we won’t need so many workers. And we are such a large, wealthy nation that we can continue to take the world’s tired, its poor, its huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

But if a world order is emerging where America will be a great power but not the great power, perhaps we have to think differently about sustainability. Perhaps we need a coherent national culture that sustains its own population, rather than one that hates itself, accepting the decreasing birth rate while allowing millions of foreigners to cross our borders unchecked. 

And if America will continue to be the mighty superpower, the invincible vanquisher of fascist and communist regimes, then of course the nation will continue to march through history as the world’s great defender of liberty. We are America, so of course we can do it all! But perhaps this is where the changing state of geopolitics is most obvious. We clearly do not have the military capacity to be the great intervenor in every regional conflict across the globe, even if it were theoretically a good thing to do. 

What is America’s future on the world stage? Until American conservatives answer this question honestly and come to grips with the implications of the answer, both domestic and foreign policy on the right will be a mess. A nation that controls the world economy through its own currency and has the capacity to protect demilitarized allies around the world can behave quite differently than other countries. But, a nation that follows George Washington’s recommendation “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world” must make quite different policy decisions. So who are we, and where are we going?

It is important for patriots to be realistic. The United States has been the most dominant world power of the modern world, at least since 1945 and probably since 1918 or even before. It is unlikely that this level of unipolar world dominance is sustainable for much longer. After World War II, Europe was in shambles, Japan was demilitarized, and (with the obvious exception of the Soviet Union) much of the world was (more or less reluctantly) accepting of American dominance.

Much of Europe, decimated by the war, had neither the male working population nor the infrastructure to rebuild itself. American industry, economy, and military power boomed. That superiority continued into the 1970s and the slow decline since then has been incremental enough that we have continued to maintain at least the appearance of the superpower in a unipolar world. Since most living Americans only remember America-as-superpower, it is hard to imagine the nation could ever be anything else. 

But no empire lasts forever. It is cliche to compare the United States to the late Roman Empire for a reason. Rome in the fourth and fifth century faced a rising rival empire in the east as well as barbarian invaders, a financial crisis due to overspending (especially due to constant foreign wars), a labor shortage and corresponding inability to produce its own goods, and various forms of political corruption and instability that made the government unable to restrain and reform itself. Sound familiar?

Rome fell hard: sacked by barbarians, replaced by Byzantium, a great power no more. But Rome fell not because that is the fate of an empire hitting its inevitable expiration date. The fall came because the empire overestimated its ability to rule the world, overextended both financially and militarily, and destabilized as a result. America is similarly overextended in its financial situation and its military commitments, surrounded by enemies willing to replace it on the world stage, and seemingly unaware of the precarious place in which it finds itself. 

It is no longer 1918 or 1945. America is no longer the manufacturing superpower that produces enough food, machinery, and weaponry to rule the world. Yes, America is still a power in the financial and tech sectors. But an industry based on financing debt and building apps is not a sustainable way to maintain an economy. Even technological dominance cannot sustain a world power that does not provide for its own material needs.

As China and the rest of the BRICS nations continue to maneuver towards a world that does not need to rely on America for global economic transactions, the foundations of a world run by the United States seem to be collapsing. Perhaps this is arguable, but the argument needs to be taken seriously that our time as ruler of the world may be up. 

If the world is realigning in such a way that many powerful nations will create a multipolar future far different from twentieth century geopolitics, the United States needs to adapt so it is not left behind. A path forward can be charted and the collapse avoided. But it requires the intentional choice of a path of restraint, a recognition of the limits of reality.  

It seems inevitable that the 21st century will not look like the 20th. Even if — God forbid — another world war is on the horizon, there is no reason to believe that America can maintain the superiority to emerge as the heroic world victor as it did in World War II. It is very unlikely that America will experience its 1945 dominance on the world stage ever again. And frankly, that may be a good thing for America anyway.

Perhaps we have gotten too fat, too conceited, in our success. Good times can breed soft men, who bring about bad times. Nations that need to continue to work for greatness, to build things and train soldiers and police domestic behavior, do not have the time for the decadent nonsense that is now occurring in the United States. Only a nation thoroughly convinced of its own invincibility could welcome the destruction of sex, gender, and family, the lawlessness of an open border, a culture that hates its own history and traditions.

So where do we go from here? The details will be worked out, hopefully, by our statesmen and policymakers in the years to come. But it must start with a clear vision of what the United States is and what it can and should be. If our leaders take sober stock of the world and realize that we have neither the resources nor the geopolitical position to dominate the world for another century, there is hope to rebuild. 

We face a world where China has indeed emerged as a superpower, where India and much of Africa are on the rise. We must adapt our policy accordingly. We can make strategic moves to keep a healthy geopolitical order and avoid realignments that truly damage American interests (nobody wants China in charge of the next world order!), but we must become realists and stop trying to play world affairs like a game of Risk. We must take steps to reshore critical manufacturing and stop relying on (potentially adversarial) nations to supply our population with food, medicine, and weapons. We must reassess policy decisions so that our involvement in foreign conflicts is actually based on American safety.

We don’t need to be punk rockers or weird fringe politicos to acknowledge that our role in the world, the world order itself, is inevitably changing. We can embrace common sense; we can adapt and thrive in the coming century. But if we fail to acknowledge reality, continuing to ride on the hubris of our defeat of the Nazis and the fall of the Soviet Union, we will likely go the way of ancient Rome, the way of all empires that have spread themselves too thin.

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