The U.S. has a long history of abstaining from foreign conflicts. Many American politicians have recognized that there is more to lose than gain by engaging in wars overseas. As former Secretary of State John Quincy Adams asserted in his oft-quoted 1821 speech, America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
Although the U.S. broke this rule countless times, it historically avoided intervening in conflicts that did not reside on its border. For instance, the U.S. followed a policy of neutrality during the French Revolution due to economic concerns and fear of invasion. With this policy, the U.S. achieved high levels of economic growth without the excessive military spending we see today. As James Pethoukoukis, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, points out in a 2018 blog post, “Real GDP grew by nearly 4 percent annually from 1870 to 1913, while GDP per capita grew by nearly 2 percent annually. Both figures are roughly twice Great Britain’s performance over the period.” Military spending as a percentage of GDP was around one percent for most of the century, with the only exception being the years encompassed by the Civil War.
But it is a mistake to regard Adams’s speech as isolationist; on the contrary, he provides a definitive scope of action for the U.S. military, claiming that America should act as its own “champion and vindicator” of its “freedom and independence.” This principle of self-defense sometimes necessitates limited military action overseas in support of American interests. These interests can involve protecting large contingents of citizens abroad — which notably occurred in 1980, when Iranian students held staff of the U.S. embassy hostage — but will primarily involve commercial concerns. Protecting the U.S.’s right to trade freely sometimes requires military intervention. For instance, the U.S. military intervened in 1801 when the Pasha of Tripoli declared war and demanded that the U.S. pay tribute for trading in the Mediterranean.
Today’s quagmire in the Middle East involves the right and wrong kinds of American intervention simultaneously. The U.S. is right to maintain its freedom of navigation by defending commercial shipping against Houthi attacks. Even though the attacks have primarily targeted foreign shipping, allowing the Houthis to build up their offensive posture in the Beir-el-Mandeb strait deters U.S. shipping from entering. As Steven Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes for Foreign Policy, “The fact remains that, as difficult as the last three decades have been for Washington there, the United States still has interests in the region and freedom of navigation is one of them. To be self-deterred in this instance is to be self-defeating.”
However, it is wrong to put its troops at risk in Jordan, Iraq and Syria for the unstated goal of countering Iranian influence. This policy has deadly consequences for U.S. troops, as is evident from the recent deaths of three troops from a drone strike in Jordan. Pursuing the correct scope of action requires putting American interests at the forefront of foreign policy.
