America’s Hollow Foreign-Policy Debate

America’s Hollow Foreign-Policy Debate

07/10/14

Tom Nichols

Grand Strategy, Foreign Policy, Politics, United States

"Our insular arm wrestling has made us helpless bystanders, watching a string of foreign-policy defeats, the likes of which we have not experienced since the 1970s."

The use of military force is among the most wrenching decisions a democracy ever faces. Placing America’s sons and daughters in harm’s way in the name of our national goals requires discussions of the utmost seriousness and solemnity. And that’s why it’s a shame—and a terrible danger—that our national debates on intervention and the use of force have become exercises in mendacity and partisanship, characterized at their core by a desolate moral hollowness.

The disingenuousness of all sides when it comes to the exercise of American power is disheartening, even shocking. People who once cheered the immense risks of marching on Baghdad now pretend to cold-eyed pragmatism and caution. People who once denounced American warmongering now gleefully revel in the killing of terrorists. People who once decried the expansion of presidential power (including then-Senator Barack Obama) now defend almost unlimited war-making prerogatives, while others who once would brook no boundaries on the discretion of the executive have now found a new fascination with the War Powers Resolution and the role of Congress. The words “national interest,” once a source of legitimate and intelligent debate, no longer have content and are now used to denote things of which the speaker does, or does not, happen to approve.

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