The Interventionist Crisis

Matthew R. Bishop — April 16th, 2021

The American Empire today is declining at a much faster pace and in much the same manner as one of its most storied predecessors, the Roman Empire, did almost two thousand years ago: Military overstretch, a commitment to unsustainable goals of global defense, and the consequent disconnect between those goals and the more depressing reality of collapsed economic, physical, and social infrastructures at home.

As it was true then, so it remains true today: The adversaries of the collapsing empire see opportunity in the same spaces where we see crisis. Conflict, tragedy, and war ensues. The world in this moment hangs in a very fragile balance.

If you’re not familiar with the global security concerns I’m referring to, here’s a brief recap:

Taiwan needs reinforcements — only a few days ago, China sent its largest air force yet into Taiwanese air space in a blatant territorial threat against the sovereign island nation, and continues to insist that there is no Taiwan. Taiwan does not exist. There is only one China. China will use this narrative to launch its invasion and conquest of Taiwan. Taiwan needs helps now, or else it cannot survive. America must respond to prevent Chinese territorial conquest of smaller Asian states.

But everyone else also needs help. And that’s the real problem.

Myanmar needs R2P — there, the situation is devolving so rapidly that the United Nations just this week deemed it “the next Syria”. Nearly 1,000 unarmed civilians have been murdered by the new military junta which seized power only six weeks ago, shortly after Trump’s failed autocoup in the United States. In response these massacres — and perfectly justifiably — Burmese civilians are beginning to take up arms against their new government in order to defend themselves. A civil war is unavoidable in only a matter of weeks if the international community fails to take decisive military action against Myanmar. America must respond to prevent the next Syria.

And that’s only half of the list.

There’s a whole new front to fight in mainland Europe again: 80,000 Russian infantry and armored tanks are set up right now on the border of Ukraine, in what appears to be the staging grounds for a full Russian invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation in mainland Europe reminiscent of the days leading up to World War II. Obviously, this demands a strong and immediate military response from the United States and the international community. America must respond to prevent the next world war in Europe.

But wait, there’s more!

Iran today announced that it has enriched uranium up to 60% — roughly fifteen times the amount they’re bound to by their existing treaty with the EU, and almost 20x more than what’s needed for domestic energy production. It is beyond any doubt that Iran is now actively producing a nuclear weapon, and will probably have such a weapon in just a few more months. Forceful military intervention is not only justified, it is immediately necessary. We know that Saudi Arabia will pursue nuclear weapons if Iran attains them, and more dominoes are likely to fall beyond just Saudi Arabia. America must respond to the Iranian nuclear weapons crisis right now — literally next week — in order to prevent a catastrophic nuclear weapons race among the nations of the Middle East in the short-term future.

The true crisis is that the United States is politically incapable of responding to all of these grave and dire threats at the same time. Attempting to do so will only hasten the decline and collapse of the United States. We cannot afford to let any of these issues slide by — and yet we also cannot afford to respond to all of them at the same time.

The United States today is incapable of meeting the security demands of a seven-continent (plus outer space!) global defense and intervention strategy. That strategy is not lacking in its ethical arguments, its logical reasoning, its funding pool, or anything else — it’s simply a political impossibility to respond to wars and conflicts actively unfolding across six different continents, for half a dozen different reasons, involving causes and actors that no ordinary U.S. citizen is even aware of in the first place, all at the same time, while the U.S. itself is in decline and Americans worry about paying the damn rent and putting food on the table. They have no time for foreign policy.

Whether or not the United States can rebound from its decline is another subject. Biden does seem to understand the stakes and the risks. He is a competent statesman and has worked in foreign policy himself. But he cannot do everything alone, and most Americans right now are dangerously inward-looking, afraid of and averse to any honest foreign policy discussion. These next few years will test just how much a U.S. President can accomplish in foreign affairs while the American people themselves are increasingly hostile to and fearful of playing an active role in the outside world.

But there is one all-powerful solution which addresses all of the above operational and political crises all at once: Allies.

Allies will be the key to American global power in the years ahead. Allies can help us solve and address all of these problems all at once. Americans, their indomitable arrogance aside, will need to accept that we literally cannot do this alone.

Americans will need to become global power brokers — not always projecting their own power, but negotiating a balance of powers and shared solutions on behalf of a larger international community. They will need to become more altruistic, but they will also need to demand more serious commitments from their allies, and there’s no side-stepping or candy-coating that fact. Allies will need to pull their own weight. The United States can formulate and reinforce these alliance structures, but the United States cannot respond to every crisis everywhere all at once. Instead, as we move into the next quarter of the 21st century, the United States should envision itself as an almost multilateral power, which exists to lead, reinforce, and defend allied commitments where they have been made — but never to risk making those commitments unilaterally.

If an allied commitment anywhere appears to be losing ground, that is where the United States should commit the weight of its power — not to all key objectives all at once, but to whichever key objective seems most imperiled.

The United States can and should engage its allies to respond to these crises — regionally where possible — in order to compensate for these risks and to execute successful missions without risking the kind of hyped-up military overexpansion that quickly collapsed previous hegemons like Rome and Great Britain.

If the United States fails to build effective alliance networks structurally empowered to respond to all of the above security risks all at once, then it is inevitable that U.S. power will decline on the global stage for years to come, and Americans will be forced to cede key security objectives.

If this happens, territorial conquest will become normalized once again as both Russia and China expand their global empires and invade weaker surrounding states. Europe and Asia will be in free-fall. A nuclear weapons race will destabilize an apocalyptic-looking Middle East, and a real-life hot nuclear war is possible in this situation. Finally, all the hard-won gains of international law and human rights since 1947 will be consigned to the history books. A century of world-historical progress will be lost.

In simpler terms, the consequences of failure will be severe, catastrophic and irreversible. A third world war becomes increasingly probable in this scenario.

Right now, we need to respond to all four of these disasters — and we need to do it all at once. The only way to do that, without losing, is to build a global coalition of willing allies and partners who share our objectives and our concerns for the future of our planet and the future of humanity. These allies must be willing to invest sustainably in their own security commitments. They should not expect the United States to take the lead role in every single conflict, everywhere, every time. But they should be able to count on the United States if any conflict begins taking a turn for the worse — we cannot give our allies any reason to doubt the seriousness of our own commitments to them, even as we demand greater commitments from them.

Hegemony is over. Americans now need to enter into multilateral power-sharing deals with their allies to address the immediate crises of now, and those crises will not wait even for a few more months. This needs to happen now.

Matthew R. Bishop is an author, journalist, and U.S. civilian crisis responder specializing in early-stage identification and prevention of armed conflict.