US Interests and a Far-Off Use of Force

American Thinker 

At times like these, we are reminded of our Founding Fathers’ warnings — especially that of President Washington in his Farewell Address — to “avoid foreign entanglements.” 

Our Founding Fathers were students of history.  Much like history students today, an overwhelming amount of their studies had been focused on conflict between nations, and prisoners of war and battlefield deaths, and the costs of war to civilians and governments alike. 

Our Founding Fathers themselves had fought in the French and Indian War (our part of the larger conflict known as the Seven Years’ War).  And then of course we fought our own War of Independence — eight painful years from start to finish. 

So they were sensible to encourage their colleagues and successors to avoid the temptation of getting ensnared in foreign struggles unnecessarily.  The royal families of Europe — whether because of personality or revenge, or greed or religious disagreement — were seemingly always fighting, and with a fortunate ocean separating us from them, our Founding Fathers had reason to hope that we could resist those particular future wars. 

But they weren’t naïve; they had no expectation of being able to avoid all war, forever.  They knew that this New World would have plenty of its own challenges and would be likely to create its own conflicts, independent of the Old World ones. 

Our Founding Fathers knew there would be border challenges and assumed there would be outright invasions — with Mexico to the south and Canada to the north, with English and French and Spanish territories to the west, and with countless American Indian tribes (some friendly, many hostile) as far as the eye could see.  And then who knew what the future would hold as nation-states developed in South America and the Caribbean? 

When our Founders said to avoid foreign wars, they may have been exercising a euphemism: They really meant we shouldn’t go looking for trouble, because trouble would find us soon enough.  Our fledgling nation would need to keep our power dry, because if we overextended ourselves by joining the wars of Europe, we might be caught unprepared by Indians, Mexicans, islanders, or South Americans. 

And even if we conclude from this that we are right to avoid unnecessary entanglements, but we should be prepared for the ones that do indeed concern us, we have another question to face, one we are seeing play out at this very moment: How exactly to define which conflicts really do concern us? 

If we were right to avoid the battles between the English and the French or between the Catholic nations and the Protestant nations of that era, then surely the disagreements between the Shia and Sunni blocks of the Middle East are also too distant to warrant our involvement.  What concern of ours, we are asked, are the petty fights between Iran and the Emirates, or the Israeli unease at Teheran’s constant threats? 

For the answer to this one, we should look back at how quickly world commerce was transformed in the 18th century, and how our own third president handled that transformation at the beginning of the 19th. 

The American colonies had long had commercial vessels — privately owned merchant ships — sailing to customers in the Mediterranean.  The Barbary pirates of North Africa generally left them alone because American vessels were first protected by the English flag, then by the French flag.  But after the French Revolution, we lost any such protection, and the pirates stopped holding back and started seizing our ships and demanding bribe money with great frequency.

The Jefferson administration responded appropriately.  We sent a navy halfway ’round the world, defeated the pirates, and set a precedent that these United States would protect American interests — that means our people, our ships, our goods, our commerce — wherever in the world they were threatened.

In short, whatever today’s peacenik crowd may try to imply, America has always known that our interests don’t end at our land borders and seashores.

We may have international commitments by treaty, too, but first and foremost, American interests lie wherever there is American commerce.  The independent American ship owners and merchants who sailed the Mediterranean two centuries ago weren’t the exception; they were the rule.  If President Coolidge was right to say, “The business of America is business” — and he was — then by corollary, America’s military policy has always been to defend that business. 

So let’s take a moment to consider what that means today: Regarding the conflict with Iran, the evidence is simple.  Iran has been threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting American commerce with Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, and the eastern side of Saudi Arabia.  And Iranian puppets — the Houthis of Yemen, acting on Iran’s orders — have closed the Suez Canal and Red Sea for over two years now, disrupting ocean commerce with Egypt and the western shore of Saudi Arabia, but more importantly, costing the global economy billions of dollars per day (yes, billions per day for over two years now) by making half the world’s ocean shipping travel around Africa instead of using the Suez shortcut. 

The mullahs’ regime has rung up hundreds of other reasons that justify our action against Iran.  These two are just the most obvious ones from a commercial side. 

But looking beyond just Iran, how do we judge true American interests going forward?  What markers might indicate a reason for our naturally semi-isolationist posture to be set aside in order to take up arms? 

Education: At any given school year, there are at least 300,000 American students studying abroad, distributed across a host of countries, many in the foreign campuses of our own colleges.  That’s a clear U.S. interest.  (Remember the action in Grenada.) 

Tourism: Roughly a third of the American population travels internationally.  That means that at any moment, tens of millions of Americans may be visiting any of a hundred or more foreign countries.  While the majority are in Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean, just because of convenience, still there are countless millions on short- or long-term trips all over the world.  These millions of American travelers are a clear U.S. interest.  (Remember Ion Perdicaris.) 

Business: Countless thousands of American businesses either own foreign subsidiaries or operate other foreign operations and have long-term employees stationed abroad, either working for their own foreign plants, or working on loan for foreign vendors.  This arena covers millions of people; billions of dollars of real estate and equipment; and billions of dollars’ worth of raw materials, finished goods, and work in progress.  Then there are those employees’ families and property in those distant countries for years at a time, depending on the duration of the posting.  These are all legitimate U.S. interests. 

American Servicemen: We have long established airbases, naval bases, and army bases abroad, on every continent and in every ocean, to ensure that the American safety superstructure is complete.  This wasn’t a single, one-time choice that the American public voted on, but it has long been popularly accepted that as the leader of the free world, we need a presence everywhere.  And to protect ourselves, our allies, and the example subgroups above, this archipelago of bases and postings is a very necessary U.S. interest. 

This list doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive.  But hopefully it demonstrates the simple fact that the interests of the United States don’t end at our shores, and frankly, they never have. 

We are an international nation, the leading light of an international economy.  As long as our people, our students, our businesses, our commercial holdings are scattered all over the world, our national interest has a far-off presence as well. 

Militarily speaking, that doesn’t mean we should ever go out looking for trouble.  But it does mean that when trouble comes looking for us, we do indeed have a legitimate interest to defend, more often than not.