No More of the Same: The Problem with Primacy

Christopher Preble and William Ruger

August 31, 2016 | http://warontherocks.com/2016/08/no-more-of-the-same-the-problem-with-primacy/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTVRJelpUTXpPVEJrTUdGayIsInQiOiJuNWFSK2F0dWtZUVJ5Vk83Y0YzQ3YySU82MUY1SzV1dXc0Z3ZkOEI1M3RXZFVpN2NcL2FyQ1BlRDhPYnpMN3FqT1ozb2RMUHYxMm8wYzFxb2VxMXc1MThnaTRKcHdDM0VcL1wvSmh0QUlNa0lPSHVqK0FOeklGeEJydGdLN3hwUHlRWCJ9

A suicide bombing in Yemen kills scores of new military recruits. Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov has suffered a brain hemorrhage. Nuclear-armed North Korea tests ballistic missiles. Venezuela is in a political and economic death spiral. The civil war in Syria drags into its fifth year, and only seems to get worse. In each case, a worried world asks: “What is the United States going to do?”
U.S. policymakers have invited this response. For decades, U.S. foreign policy has followed a quixotic goal of primacy, or global hegemony. It presumes that the United States is the indispensable nation, and that every problem, in any part of the world, must be resolved by U.S. leadership or else will impact American safety. http://warontherocks.com/2016/08/no-more-of-the-same-the-problem-with-primacy/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTVRJelpUTXpPVEJrTUdGayIsInQiOiJuNWFSK2F0dWtZUVJ5Vk83Y0YzQ3YySU82MUY1SzV1dXc0Z3ZkOEI1M3RXZFVpN2NcL2FyQ1BlRDhPYnpMN3FqT1ozb2RMUHYxMm8wYzFxb2VxMXc1MThnaTRKcHdDM0VcL1wvSmh0QUlNa0lPSHVqK0FOeklGeEJydGdLN3hwUHlRWCJ9