One of the most popular public global debate topics is: The U.S. is the World Policeman. American policymakers have been largely loathe to accept the title with an enduring conviction since Vietnam that the role is not sustainable. President Warren Harding’s memorial to the “unknown soldier” is a testament to the enduring isolationism of the American public and the keen aversion to risking the precious lives of young Americans abroad. John Quincy Adams’ proclamation to the Congress while serving as Secretary of State in 1821 remains a compelling admonition to present policy makers: “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
Despite these profound historical caveats, America does appear to be the indispensable power in global affairs and the current military engagement in Iran deepens that reality and urges growing acceptance that the United States is ‘the world’s policeman.’ The abrupt capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro eviscerated the global mood of bluffing or relying upon Trump’s promise to not increase U.S. commitments for military intervention. The ease of Trump’s military entries and exits from diverse locations defies one of the most important rhetorical premises rooting American isolationism: “quagmire.” The term remains the media’s ‘gotcha’ to presidential plans of “limited intervention.” The 21st century version of the quagmire problem is the Iraq war of 2003 fought by President Bush. Trump himself denounced the war as one of the nation’s greatest mistakes. Punditry successfully lodged the enduring false memory that Saddam Hussein ‘never had weapons of mass destruction,’ -- though the dead bodies of Kurdish children at Halabja bear the marks of a dictator who used chemical weapons as “human insecticide.”
From Vietnam to current conflicts, American public culture venerates an intense skepticism about American combat. The idea of being “anti-war” is generally well received by journalists and is cultivated as a mechanism for holding in check American military interventions. Organizations such as Code Pink and ANSWER rally public events to turn the American public against “war.” The chic anti-war sentiment has not ultimately aged well. The clean dichotomy of war and peace has dissolved in the 21st century as the ‘peace’ found in Afghanistan after the departure of U.S. troops in 2021 looks ugly and inhumane. Today’s skeptics like Representative Thomas Massie say that ‘bombing Iraq will not stop the Epstein files.’ But sex with children is an uncomfortable and common reality in the Afghanistan ‘liberated’ from U.S. troops and free from our ‘imperial colonialism.’ The larger rhetorical infrastructure of anti-war sensibility like that produced by Noam Chomsky do not effectively dissolve the imperialism and structural injustice of empires like the 47-year-old theocracy of Shia supremacism spreading from Persia to Christian Lebanon. Iranian activists seeking liberation from Shia supremacism complain that while Americans lament the deaths of government protesters Pretti and Goode, they appear ambivalent or disengaged from 35,000 citizens assassinated in the cities of Iran.
The United Nations is not rising to its original charge of being the kind of global custodian that the United States increasingly is called upon to fulfill. The U.N. and various internal committees of it seem cooperative and helpful to inhumanity, including holding Jewish hostages in the Gaza Strip in the role of paid educators from UNRWA. The failure of the United Nations to stop the slaughter at Srbrenica or Kigali in the 1990s is not resolving favorably in the 21st century. Nor does any multipolar alliance of China and Russia appear near or compelling. Russia’s two-week takeover of Ukraine is indeed a four-year quagmire recently hindered by the realization that Elon Musk’s Starlink system is no longer available for their drone warfare. The current conflict is revealing the deeper undercurrents of American technological supremacy as Musk’s specialized military satellite network -- Starshield -- provides far more advanced battlefield power than the civilian technology of Starlink used by Ukrainian military. Iran’s best battlefield technology was the Shaheed drone -- stolen from U.S. technology captured by the Iranians during the Obama administration. In this attack, the U.S. is using drone bombers exponentially cheaper than the Iranian Shaheeds sold to Russia. U.S. ingenuity stole the Iranian innovations back into the American arsenal. Our Israeli counterparts are demonstrating their own radical innovations with new laser missile interception systems that are also exponentially cheaper than the missile-based systems such as THAAD. European basing power is proving increasingly irrelevant with Britain, Spain, and Turkey all blocking U.S. access. Exceptional bomber technology allows the U.S. to fly 36-hour missions from the U.S. to any point in the world with precision, stealth, and devastating lethality.
Another important constraint on U.S. interventionism in the Middle East has long been the risk to global oil supplies. It is hard not to perceive a deliberate hegemonic move by the Trump administration to take Venezuela first followed by a second more comprehensive attack on Iran. With the U.S. now controlling the massive oil holdings of Venezuelan reserves alongside streamlined domestic extraction procedures, the U.S. is arguably the largest global supplier of the world’s most expensive commodity. Not only that, but one of America’s most significant geopolitical rivals -- China -- depends greatly upon oil imports from Venezuela and Iran. Higher oil prices do not affect the United States in the same manner they did when the problem was such a crux in the 1970s. The United States could profit handsomely from higher oil prices.
Rhetorically the Trump role as global cop faces severe scrutiny from the MAGA base that thought the President would reduce the resort to war. Trump does have a useful counter in the clarity that the Islamic government of Iran has been at war with the United States since its inception in 1979. With daily chants of “Death to America,” and deadly attacks on U.S. Marines from 1983 to 2005, Iran was continually at war with the United States. It is possible that if the regime could not recover, that the 47-year war fought by Iran against the U.S. would end.
All of this must be seen through the larger lens of human suffering. Humanity was four times as likely to die from genocide as combat in the 20th century. The non-response to the Rwandan genocide of 1994 was not encouraging for any semblance of a moral global order. In 100 days, more than a million Tutsis perished under the eyes of an indolent world. A world that is effectively alert and willing to interrupt a regime slaughtering tens of thousands on their streets is a better world. The American creativity of the Liberian intervention in 2003 allowed 6,000 Nigerian troops to end the deadly genocidal savagery of Charles Taylor and usher in the first female president on the continent of Africa. That better world can be composed of “coalitions of the willing” where those sympathetic with authentic human rights not screened through the ugly lens of anti-Semitism can triumph and provide meaningful relief. The role of the Unites States as the world policeman is a more just world.
