No hard power impact---not key to peace, we’re too far ahead for their internal link to matter, and any decline would be offset by allies filling in

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.

But primacy has proved both difficult and costly. It is also frequently disconnected from American security needs.

An alternative approach to global affairs would concentrate on vital U.S. national interests and maintain the tools necessary to defend them. It would also reject the need for global hegemony. The idea that we can only be safe once the world is remade in our image is riddled with logical fallacies. Moreover, an interests-driven foreign policy would take seriously the consequences of our actions abroad and here at home — on our soldiers, our fiscal health, and our principles.

Instead of asking, whenever a distant crisis breaks, “What is the United States going to do?” we should ask, first, “How does this affect vital U.S. national interests?” and, second, “In light of recent developments, what can the United States do, while remaining prosperous and relatively safe, and what must others do to protect themselves?”

This might seem like common sense, but it runs counter to the foreign policy thinking among American elites. They argue that America’s dominant position in the international system is good not only for America but also for the world. A large, expensive, and globally deployed military is designed to smother potential peer competitors and stop prospective threats before they materialize. Primacy also requires a globe-girdling array of allies and the active spread of liberal values. It even means “resisting, and where possible, undermining, rising dictators and hostile ideologies” through frequent military interventions, as primacists Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol have argued. They are comfortable going to war even “when we cannot prove that a narrowly construed ‘vital interest’ of the United States is at stake.”

Primacists hold that it would simply be too dangerous to allow allied countries to defend themselves or independently assert their interests; therefore, the United States must do it for them. Though such a strategy encourages free riding, primacists are more worried by the prospect that allies’ self-defense efforts might fail, necessitating more costly U.S. intervention later and under less favorable circumstances. U.S. security guarantees, the primacists say, tamp down the natural inclination of states to want to provide security for themselves, thus preventing allies from engaging in arms build-ups that might unsettle their neighbors, perhaps even unleashing regional arms races.

Unfortunately — but predictably given what theory and history teach us — primacy has been neither easy to implement nor cheap to sustain. When the U.S. military is called upon to fight wars across the globe, the human toll is considerable. Since 9/11 and through 2014, nearly 7,000 U.S. troops have been killed, 52,000 have been wounded in action, and close to a million veterans have registered disability claims.

The fiscal burdens of primacy are severe as well. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the United States trillions of dollars, some of which we will be paying for many decades in the form of additional debt servicing and veteran care. And primacy guarantees more fighting in the future — and the bills that come with it.

Of course, we ought to have a strong defense. But, under primacy, the U.S. military is expected both to stop threats from materializing and to stomp out any fires it fails to prevent. That expectation requires us to maintain the world’s largest and most active military. Notwithstanding the false claims that the Budget Control Act is responsible for “gutting national defense”, or the widespread belief that the U.S. military has been hollowed out and needs to be rebuilt, the U.S. military is the preeminent fighting force in the world. No state can match U.S. global power-projection capabilities. And U.S. military spending remains near historic highs. In inflation-adjusted dollars, military spending — both war and non-war — averaged $612 billion per year during President George W. Bush’s two terms in office. Under President Barack Obama, it has averaged $675 billion. The United States will have spent nearly $500 billion more on the military in the Obama years than during the Bush years.

The United States spends at least as much on its military as the next eight countries worldwide and nearly three times more than China and Russia combined. Although not all of that money is spent wisely, it still buys incomparable capabilities. No sensible American should wish to trade places with any other country on earth. The U.S. military is second to none, and our massive economy is a solid foundation for generating military power when it is needed..

In the current strategic environment, the United States could easily spend less and still safeguard America’s vital interests. It could do so through smarter spending, eliminating wasteful gold-plated programs such as the F-35, and demanding greater burden-sharing from allies. At present, U.S. security guarantees to wealthy allies cause them to underprovide for their own defense, meaning they have less capacity to help us deal with common security challenges.