Gene Lyons: U.S. can’t dominate world by force

Almost regardless of who wins the presidential nomination, there’s small likelihood of serious debate about the most crucial long-term foreign policy question facing the American people: Do we or do we not want to maintain a global empire by force of arms ? Or, to put it another way, what’s in it for us, as individual citizens, for the United States to maintain 800 military bases around the world ? Does the word “superpower” actually mean anything in today’s world ? Hardly anybody in the foreign policy establishment likes having it put that way. It strikes them as vulgar and reductive; hence, anybody who questions, for example, whether the United States really needs to spend almost twice as much on wars and weaponry as the rest of the world combined gets caricatured as a crackpot isolationist, the kind of person who, in the usual formulation, would have ignored Adolf Hitler’s military buildup in the 1930 s. Hence, too, a seemingly infinite procession of miniature “Hitlers” clanking along like targets in a carnival shooting gallery—Gadhafi, Noriega, Saddam, Ahmadinejad, etc. “Endless Enemies,” the late Jonathan Kwitny dubbed them in his 1984 book of that name. Subtitled “The Making of an Unfriendly World,” the onetime Wall Street Journal correspondent’s thesis was that the majority of America’s armed interventions in the Third World constituted a self-fulfilling prophecy guaranteeing more or less constant war.