America is once again tempting fate. A broad coalition is coalescing to curtail America’s role and influence in the world. After ten years of two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the country is hightailing it home. The urge to pull back is irresistible but wrongheaded. The world does not go away when America retreats. Each time America has come home, after the First World War, the Second World War, Vietnam, and the Cold War, new conflicts yanked it back into world affairs, always under less favorable circumstances and with higher casualties than if it had acted earlier.
America needs a strategy whereby it stays engaged in the world and accepts smaller costs in the short run to avoid much greater costs in the long run. That strategy would address direct threats from any region of the world but prioritize the spread of freedom primarily on the borders of existing free countries, use less force early to avoid the use of greater force later, back force with diplomacy to give adversaries a peaceful way out, and compromise in timely fashion to sustain public support.
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