Retrenchment and Being an ‘Ordinary Country’

Jonathan Katz tears apart George Packer’s essay on a “new theory of American power”:

More importantly, who is “overdoing” what “retrenchment,” and where? The U.S. still operates at least 750 military bases in 81 countries and territories – on every continent except Antarctica – and those are just the ones we know about. At any given time, most of the US Navy’s eleven active carrier strike groups are deployed without challenge across the Atlantic, Pacific, and often the Indian and Arctic Oceans, and the Mediterranean Sea. They patrol, largely at will, along with dozens of nuclear attack and other submarines, bombers, and drones, available for scattering at any given moment to almost any point of the globe.

If the US retrenched half as much as defenders of the status quo have claimed it has over the last twenty years, our foreign policy might start to become somewhat sane. Instead, the US repeatedly expands its commitments and involvement and then settles in for what becomes the new normal. That then becomes the new baseline for comparison, and anything less than that newly-expanded role is rejected as “turning inwards.”

Packer says in his essay that “[w]e overdo our foreign crusades, and then we overdo our retrenchments,” but as I noted in my own response a few weeks ago there has been virtually no retrenchment to speak of. If it means anything, retrenchment would require the US to have fewer security commitments today than it did in the last few decades and it would require the US to spend significantly less on its military than it has during that same period. The costs of US foreign policy should be noticeably lower if there had been any retrenchment, but they are not.

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.