The Veterans Day holiday this week, coming just a few months after the national humiliation that was President Joe Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal, ought to serve as a wake-up for Washington’s myopic foreign policy and national security establishment, as well as our decadent ruling class more broadly. The best way to honor our veterans in the aftermath of the Afghanistan boondoggle would be to finally end the delusional fantasy that America can, let alone should, attempt to cavalierly export its values unto foreign lands.
For decades, varying stripes of neoconservatives, neoliberals and humanitarian interventionists have dominated America’s sclerotic foreign policy establishment. Whatever minute or abstract philosophical details distinguish these schools of foreign policy thought, they have long been united by one overarching, guiding belief: American exceptionalism means the U.S. military should intervene to spread and promote our distinctly American conception of liberty and the good life, even if such interventions do not directly secure America’s national security interest or the American way of life.
The basic problem with this hubris is that it fundamentally misunderstands the U.S. military. As an institution, the military is less well-suited to constructing Madisonian democracies out of backwater hellholes halfway around the world than it is to hunting down and killing terrorists and enemy combatants in the most efficient way possible. This ought to be so obvious that it is somewhat embarrassing it even needs to be said. Nonetheless, whether it was leading Bush-era neoconservatives who sought to “spread democracy” across the sands of the Middle East or Samantha Power-style “responsibility to protect” liberal internationalists who aimlessly toppled Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, the men and women controlling the corridors of foreign policy power in Washington too often fail to intuit this basic reality.
The men and women who deploy and serve overseas, especially those in combat roles, are not pieces on an ivory tower chess board. They are not easily reducible to pawns in a graduate school game theory model. They are real human beings—patriotic Americans, disproportionately from the heartland, with parents, spouses and children. If respect for the sanctity of human life and an enduring belief in the Declaration’s right to life mean anything at all, they should militate strongly against a more casual willingness to deploy military force abroad. What’s more, the sheer decadence of our ruling class and generally sordid state of our domestic political morass really should make elites think twice next time before sending our uniformed men and women into harm’s way without a clearly delineated and demonstrably attainable military objective.
If our elites can actually learn this common-sense lesson, it would be the best Veterans Day lesson of all.