A great power cannot shed its mass simply because it has grown weary of the weight.
A great power cannot shed its mass simply because it has grown weary of the weight.
M ilan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being turned on a cruel paradox: A life unburdened by weight feels like freedom until the weightlessness itself becomes unbearable.
A similar temptation inspires “restraintism,” a school of foreign-policy thought that has gained traction among the populist right, including influential pockets of the Trump administration. Reports this month that the Pentagon is weighing cuts of between 25,000 and 40,000 troops in Europe — while Russia escalates its hybrid warfare on the Continent — mark the latest turn in a fierce behind-the-scenes debate.
The “restrainers” promise a lighter foreign policy: narrower interests, an end to wars of choice, and the use of force only as a last resort. After two decades of costly, inconclusive war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the appeal is easy to understand. However, a great power cannot shed its mass simply because it has grown weary of the weight.
The populist-right restrainers are not the Barry Posen realists who would prune “liberal hegemony” while keeping a balance-of-power watch on Eurasia. Nor are they progressive budget-cutters who recast strategy around “human security” and climate policy. Their political project is more radical.
Many of these restrainers would retrench to the Western Hemisphere; they regard NATO as a bad bargain and view Ukraine as a problem for Europe to solve. Some see value in Pacific alliances that constrain China, though they demand more quid pro quo from the Japanese, Koreans, and Australians; others argue for pulling back to the second island chain.
Restrainers are not two-dimensional isolationists. They support international trade, diplomacy, and a strong military with which to safeguard the homeland. What they reject is the post–Cold War claim that Americans’ security and prosperity are bound up with global stability, specifically the order made possible by Pax Americana.
The restrainers’ diagnosis contains kernels of truth. The United States arguably overreached after its triumph over the Soviet Union; nation-building projects proved unbearably costly; threat inflation became a Beltway habit; and allies underinvested because they could. But none of that makes the remedy of restraint sound.
While geography and a nuclear arsenal make America difficult to invade, they do not make us immune to coercion. A hostile power that dominates Asia or Europe need not land a soldier in California or Connecticut to coerce markets, choke energy routes, weaponize supply chains, and force American firms and U.S. partners to live on its terms. Homeland security is downstream of he who writes the rules beyond the water’s edge.
Slogans such as “strong defense” and “diplomacy first” are compatible with almost any worldview — the fight is about thresholds and presence. If restrainers would deter China while drawing down in Europe and the Gulf, they owe an account of why Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, and Canberra should treat American commitments as more credible after Washington has advertised its eagerness to leave. A smaller forward presence does not make diplomacy easier. It makes stalling, probing, and seizing cheaper for adversaries.
“Allies will do more if we do less” is a hope, not a plan. Free-riding is real, as are abandonment panic, nuclear hedging, and bandwagoning with the nearest bully. Spheres of influence, sold as sophisticated great-power politics, mean a Russian veto over Ukraine; a Chinese veto over Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea; and an Iranian veto over the Gulf and the Red Sea.
The record of restraint is not encouraging. On at least three occasions in the 20th century, Washington narrowed its commitments and advertised new lines in the sand — and then watched adversaries cross former redlines, leading to conflicts that were more costly than if the United States had stood its ground.
In 1919, after U.S. intervention proved decisive in ending the First World War, America’s political class chose to withdraw from European security, spurning President Woodrow Wilson’s vision of collective security and the League of Nations. Isolationism carried the day in the 1920s and 1930s, but it emboldened two revisionist powers: Japan to the east and Germany to the west. The Axis’s subsequent declaration of war on America in December 1941 brought Washington and the American people into a conflict far costlier than early engagement might have required.
Less than five years after World War II, American attempts to prioritize commitments in the Pacific backfired when Secretary of State Dean Acheson laid out an American defensive perimeter that ran through Japan and the Philippines but omitted the Korean Peninsula. Within months, Soviet-backed North Korea invaded South Korea. The United States then fought a three-year war costing 36,000 lives, essentially to restore a frontier that its leaders had implied was not worth defending.
In the 1970s, a war-weary America retrenched in the wake of the Vietnam denouement, counting on Cold War equilibrium to deliver stability. What followed, however, was a decade of Soviet and proxy advances, from Angola and Ethiopia to South Yemen and, in 1979, Afghanistan, capped by the humiliation in Tehran. Adversaries had read American fatigue as opportunity — and Jimmy Carter, a president who longed for a foreign policy of restraint based on “moral idealism,” was compelled to reassert American hard-power redlines in the Middle East via his Carter Doctrine.
The same dynamics are visible in Eastern Europe. Russia’s 2022 invasion followed 15 years of unanswered probing: Georgia in 2008, Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, then a full-scale war now in its fifth year. A settlement that ratifies conquest would not close the file. It would signal to Moscow — and to Beijing — that aggression and nuclear threats can move borders. That is why publicly floating a large-scale U.S. drawdown in Europe, while Russian drones and sabotage campaigns test NATO members, is not burden-shifting. It prices the next grab as a bargain.
The historical record is not an argument for reflexive primacy. Responsible American leadership means bearing the weight where American power is irreplaceable, coaxing rich allies to carry more of the load, and avoiding nation-building projects. The opposite of reckless hegemony is not frictionless withdrawal — it is a visible, potentially costly presence in the theaters that will decide whether the next decade is contested or conceded.
Restraint has its appeal, but it belies what follows when America does less: emboldened rivals, rattled allies, and rules written by states that do not share core American interests. Pulling forces back from Europe or the Pacific will not insulate Washington from great-power conflict; rather, it all but ensures a more costly reckoning down the road. Lightness feels elegant, right up until the floor gives way.