Doug Bandow reviews Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s The Will to Lead in the current issue of TAC:

As a result, he argues, “We need a policeman to restore order; we need a fireman to put out the fire; we need a mayor, smart and sensible, to lead the rebuilding.” Three guesses on who they should be! Not people in the countries themselves. Or regional powers. Or governments with the most at stake. Or international organizations. Or friendly coalitions. Or some combination of the foregoing. Rather, “We need America to play all these roles.” It doesn’t matter where, the nature of the conflict, or the degree of threat. Uncle Sam must simultaneously be firefighter, cop, and politician.

Rasmussen’s case for having the U.S. “police” the world is no more persuasive today than it was when he was making it last fall, and Bandow makes clear that a full book-length version of that argument doesn’t improve it. The U.S. government doesn’t know how to do what he wants it to do, but even if it did it would still be a mistake. The idea that the world’s most powerful state should be its “policeman” assumes that this state has some lawful authority to act as an enforcer throughout the world, but it has no such authority and it is hard to see how it could ever acquire it. It also ignores that all other states are sovereign and don’t fall under Washington’s “jurisdiction” in any case.

Many other nations around the world don’t even accept that U.S. “leadership” is desirable, and I doubt that any other nation truly consents to being “policed” by our government. Insofar as one can find supporters of this concept in other Western countries, they are in favor of it in large part because they assume that the violence and destruction that come with said “policing” will always be directed at countries other than theirs. The nations that have been on the receiving end of this “policing” over the decades, especially in the last sixteen years, understandably want no part of it. The people that have borne the brunt of our government’s frequent “policing” know very well that it doesn’t “restore order,” and in many cases destroys whatever order there already was.

Much of the “policing” that Rasmussen wants the U.S. to do is not only risky for the U.S., but it is almost always involves trampling on the very international law that one might think the world’s “policeman” would have to respect. According to Bandow, Rasmussen asserts that the invasion of Iraq was “legal and justified.” Neither of those things is true, but the bigger problem is that defenders of global “policing” don’t really care about the legality of our government’s actions. As we saw in the wake of Trump’s decision to order an attack on the Syrian government, fans of U.S. “leadership” don’t care about our government’s violations of international law and will proudly celebrate them so long as the U.S. is targeting the “right” people. The “policing” Rasmussen is calling for has nothing to do with any legitimate form of upholding law and order, but resembles heavy-handed, destructive vigilantism. That isn’t something Americans should want their government involved in, and no one should encourage any government to play such a dangerous role.