Policymakers and commentators mustered only a muted response when the Washington Post’s recent blockbuster investigation into the Afghanistan War exposed how officials across multiple administrations lied to the public about how the conflict was progressing. On some level, this response was unsurprising. After all, Americans long ago resigned themselves to the fact that the U.S. mission in Afghanistan had been a failure.

And yet, the Washington Post’s investigation did deal a devastating blow to a particularly cherished conceit shared by many advocates of democracy promotion and nation-building. Unlike U.S. missions in places such as Vietnam and even Iraq, this failure was not attributable to a lack of political will in Washington to see the thing through to the end. Just the opposite. Despite a steadfast bipartisan commitment to stabilize and democratize Afghanistan, the mission failed anyway.

These revelations should impose some contrition on American interventionists, though that is not an unfamiliar condition for them. Contrary to a shallow but popular consensus among their critics, advocates of an extroverted foreign policy are regularly made to account for their failures. No such introspection is demanded of advocates for nonintervention, however, even when the fruits of their labor manifest in regional instability, humanitarian disasters, and the loss of prestigious and strategic advantages abroad. Of this, the decadelong crisis in Syria is a prototypical example. When conservatives look at America’s role in the world and seek to shape a foreign policy doctrine for a new era, they shouldn’t look away from Afghanistan, but neither should they be able to ignore Syria.

When the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, it quickly became apparent that this was not just another Arab Spring uprising. Bashar Assad’s regime mowed down civilian demonstrators, and an armed insurgency took shape. This conflict became the epicenter of a proxy fight involving American adversaries such as Iran and Russia, but the United States did its best to avoid involvement. It should have been obvious at the outset that the American effort would fail here, too, but tens of thousands had to die before the U.S. would awaken to that fact.

Iranian regulars were already streaming into Syria in support of Assad when Barack Obama drew his “red line” in 2012. The president’s line in the sand was designed to deter Assad from using chemical weapons. Obama blinked, chemical weapons were used repeatedly by Assad, and, in the years that followed, both North Korea and Russia were implicated in the use of sophisticated nerve agents in terrorist events on foreign soils.

In 2013, Obama invited Russia to mediate the conflict and rid Assad of his chemical weapons stockpiles, but America’s adversary in Moscow used the opportunity only to provide political cover for its ally. Two years later, in 2015, Russia intervened militarily in Syria on behalf of its overstressed client. But Moscow did not target Islamist terrorist organizations, which served as a useful foil for the Assad regime. Instead, it took aim at U.S.-backed anti-Assad rebels and the CIA facilities that supplied and housed them. All the while, millions of Syrians ran from the crucible in all directions, precipitating the most politically destabilizing refugee crisis in modern history and shattering the political consensus in Europe that had for 70 years preserved the peace on that fractious continent.

Obama’s effort to keep the U.S. out of this conflict broke down entirely when it became clear that the Syrian power vacuum incubated a uniquely virulent transnational terrorist threat: the Islamic State. Yet by the time he reluctantly consented to establishing a toehold in Syria, virtually all of America’s strategic interests in the region had been substantially weakened.

This failure, too, has been bipartisan. “Let someone else fight over this long-bloodstained sand,” President Trump declared in the wake of his abrupt decision to announce a full troop withdrawal from Syria. But the president had not yet even ordered the withdrawal of the small deployment of U.S. forces working with local Kurdish fighters when Turkish forces and the ruthless militias in Ankara’s employ stormed over the Syrian border, slaughtering Kurds, displacing civilians, and “bracketing” U.S. personnel with dangerous artillery strikes. Trump only had to signal his intention to withdraw those troops to inaugurate a multidimensional military and humanitarian crisis.

AMERICAN GRAND STRATEGY

How do policymakers reconcile the costly mishandling of the Afghanistan conflict with the even costlier hands-off approach American elected officials took to Syria? As ever, the questions before U.S. policymakers are not the theoretical sort that preoccupy think tanks and editorial boards. Their job is to determine vital U.S. interests, define America’s objectives so they are narrow and accomplishable, identify the course of action that is most likely to achieve them, and weigh that course against its trade-offs and alternatives.

A cynical interpretation of American foreign policy is that it is congenitally aggressive. This misapprehension conflates full military conflicts with policing actions and advisory commitments. In fact, America’s civilian leaders are often slow to react to foreign threats, and they regularly campaign for office on the appealing promise of reducing commitments abroad.

Toward that end, the U.S. has several tools at its disposal beyond its ability to project power around the world, including alliances, institutions, and ideological convictions. How these instruments of state power are deployed and toward what objectives constitute grand strategy.

What precisely are the American strategic interests at stake not just in Afghanistan and Syria but all over the world? Broadly, the U.S. has four grand strategic goals. Foremost among them is to prevent major shooting wars, both against military powers and nonstate actors in failed or failing nations.

To achieve this, the most important tool in policymakers’ sheds is America’s preponderant military superiority. Though it is an expensive enterprise, U.S. investment in a qualitatively superior military meets a variety of targets at a comparatively lower cost than the alternatives, most of which consist of varying degrees of armed conflict. The essence of deterrence is to communicate in the clearest of terms to America’s potential adversaries that the cost of their actions against U.S. interests vastly outweighs the rewards. War is always costlier than peace, even if that peace is preserved at the price of the U.S. defense budget.

Supporters of a doctrine of nonengagement and retrenchment have a habit of defining American interests down. A conflict abroad in a strategically imperative part of the world may not be “our problem” at the outset, but such unchecked conflagrations rarely stay that way. Sustained engagement with allies and rivals in significant zones of conflict and trade is not “being the world’s policeman.” It’s protecting American interests, often long before an escalation would necessitate a very different kind of engagement.

U.S. military dominance facilitates America’s second chief strategic objective: the preservation of the U.S.-led global order that emerged out of World War II and triumphed at the end of the Cold War. When applied, the threat posed by American military might deters would-be challengers to the international order from aggressing against their neighbors or choking off navigation on the high seas. These structures protect international commerce and preserve global economic growth. What’s more, U.S. military dominance dissuades smaller powers from aligning with larger, more aggressive nations in their region out of fear. This forestalls the development of spheres of influence in which blocs of states effectively balance against the U.S. and close off access to their respective regions.

Third, it is in America’s national interest to integrate other states into U.S.-backed institutions and open markets. Be they diplomatic, financial, trade, or military in nature, these institutions establish the rules of the road. Those rules are, by and large, of our own making. Integration into the global liberal economic regime that emerged as the dominant system of societal organization after the Cold War functions in the same way. Market economics and monetarism encourage economic growth and transparency, both of which impede roguish regimes intent on inaugurating transnational conflict. A politically potent middle class quickly becomes a key constituency for any regime invested in its own preservation. This class represents a bulwark against unchecked autocratic governments, both at home and abroad.

For Americans who have become suspicious of the compelling power of liberalized markets, the obvious counterpoint is the People’s Republic of China. Deng Xiaoping began the process of liberalizing the Chinese economy in 1978. He broke up collective farms, sold off state-owned industry, tore down trade barriers, and decriminalized private industry. The result was an economic bonanza that has virtually eliminated the extreme poverty in which 88% of the nation languished at the time. But the theory advanced by Milton Friedman and others, which holds that liberalized markets beget liberalized politics, failed to materialize in China. Indeed, the nation has become more authoritarian and nationalistic, even as the country’s wealth grows and it develops a stable middle class. But these two conditions are not unrelated. The political instability in places such as Hong Kong is an outgrowth of the public’s desire to retain its peculiar autonomy, but that desire for political liberty is hard to envision in the absence of the economic freedoms bequeathed to them by the British. And the objective political potency of these and other critical Chinese constituencies serves to check Beijing’s ambitions abroad, forcing communist policymakers to contend with the prospect of a dangerous threat to regime stability in the event of a conflict that would risk its economic prosperity. Preserving that check is in America’s national interest.

Finally, the U.S. maintains a strategic investment in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, both horizontally (more nations) and vertically (more bombs). This one should be self-explanatory. Suffice it to say that a state’s possession of a functional nuclear arsenal substantially limits the options available to U.S. policymakers in the event of a conflict. Moreover, the proliferation of nuclear technology and fissile material makes them harder to police and increases the odds they will fall into the hands of nonstate actors. This principle applies to the spread and use of biological and chemical weapons, though their components are often dual-use and harder to monitor.

THE CONSERVATIVE ADVANTAGE

How are these core interests secured in practice, and what is the limiting principle that prevents the U.S. from expending unnecessary blood and treasure in pursuit of them? That is the question at the center of a vigorous national debate that has raged with varying degrees of intensity for decades. It is a debate that conservative thinkers are uniquely capable of navigating.

Possessed of an instinctual distaste for expanded governmental powers, American conservatives may be more inclined than their liberal counterparts to deter would-be adversaries and prevent major American wars. War is, after all, a powerful engine driving the growth of state power, justifying federal intervention into many once-private spheres of American life. America’s primary grand strategic objectives are therefore advanced by a philosophical apprehension toward the sacrifice of both national and personal sovereignty that significant global conflicts demand.

Conservatives are also more likely to embrace even peripheral aspects of statecraft, such as, for example, a national energy policy that reduces the dependence of the U.S. and its allies on bad actors abroad. In September 2019, an Iranian campaign of piracy, sabotage, and attacks on U.S. assets in the vital Strait of Hormuz culminated in a sophisticated assault on the world’s largest petroleum processing facility in Saudi Arabia. A decade ago, assaults on the global oil market could have yielded a multinational military response. They did not only because the U.S. has developed technologies such as hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling that today render America all but energy independent and the world’s stabilizing producer in the event of shocks. Even as activists wage an ideological war on fracking technology, it has allowed the U.S. remarkable flexibility and likely prevented Iran from starting a major war.

Conservatism’s inherent understanding of and appreciation for precedent, national sovereignty, and the imperfectability of human nature renders it better suited to see the world as it is, not as theorists and social engineers would like it to be. The conservative perspective places a premium on history as the most reliable indicator of future events. Conservatives are also more comfortable with contradictions than their liberal counterparts, who are prone to doctrinal thinking and universally applicable policy prescriptions. These are several critical components of an effective foreign policy.

In her foundational work, Dictatorships & Double Standards, Jeane Kirkpatrick stitched a philosophically inconsistent approach to foreign affairs into a coherent dogma by advocating for the cautious embrace of both savory and unsavory partners in service to the West’s chief strategic and ideological objective at the time: containing the Soviet Union. The USSR is long gone, but the ideational paradigm Kirkpatrick outlined endures. And it can serve as a lodestar for conservatives thinking seriously about how Republican presidents should conduct American foreign policy. Their doctrine should reject doctrines.

THE LIMITING PRINCIPLE

It was always in American interests to invest capital and manpower to contain the conflict in Syria, in part because of the strategic importance of that part of the world. It was not in America’s long-term strategic national interests to intervene in the conflict in Libya because coastal North Africa is of limited strategic utility to the U.S. (as opposed to America’s European allies, which are far more invested in the region).

The codification of humanitarian interventionism into doctrines such as “Responsibility to Protect” would commit American political and material resources to theaters in which no vital American national interests are at stake. Humanitarian relief efforts and, especially, military action on behalf of threatened populations must be balanced against America’s objectives and primarily undertaken when its grand strategic interests are advanced as a result.

It is in America’s national interest to partner with China where appropriate, economically and diplomatically, while containing it militarily via regional alliances and the forward deployment of naval assets. It is not in America’s interest to take the same approach with Russia. As a rising power, China has demonstrated its aversion toward excess risk, whereas Russia, a nation in decline, has a limited window to secure and preserve its position in the world. Moscow has shown a willingness to risk even conflict with the Western alliance in that pursuit.

Material power isn’t everything. “Soft power” is real, as is moral authority. The demonstrators in Hong Kong raging against Chinese autocracy aren’t waving American flags, singing the national anthem, and demanding the universal rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution only out of affection for American soybeans.

What about international institutions? Despite conservatives’ aversion to them, there is instrumental utility in, for example, the United Nations Security Council (as opposed to talk shops such as the U.N. General Assembly). Like the NATO alliance, the Security Council’s authority is predicated on raw, hard power. To the extent that it constrains great powers from actions that would destabilize the international environment, it does so by channeling the combined power of the five permanent members. As such, the Security Council has little power to constrain those permanent members, but it wields a demonstrated capacity to impose caution on smaller states. Likewise, the World Trade Organization, which chiefly benefits the U.S., is valuable. The International Criminal Court, with its supranational power to undermine U.S. sovereignty, is not.

The U.S. cannot devote itself to a purely ideological foreign policy, in which democracy promotion becomes an end in and of itself. Democracy promotion is, however, a critical tool to achieve a variety of its core strategic objectives. Critics of an ideological foreign policy fancy themselves “realists,” which sounds rational enough on its face. But a purely realist foreign policy would commit the U.S. to as many, if not more, open-ended and potentially major conflicts. If America’s foreign policy establishment comes to view hard power as the sole arbiter of contests between states over tangible assets, as pure realists would, the U.S. will find itself committing its military to ever more theaters in defense of its investment in foreign resources, populations, and strategic topography. Practitioners of international relations (as opposed to theorists) must quickly come to terms with contradiction and even hypocrisy if they hope to be effective.

This theoretical framework is unlikely to satisfy those within the Republican coalition who reject America’s extroverted role in the world. Those who object to “endless wars,” a contingent that includes the current Republican president, imagine themselves to be nonideological proponents of a smarter, smaller American footprint overseas. This is, in fact, a highly ideological approach to foreign affairs. It is one that advocates for retrenchment at the expense of the objectively advantageous conditions that result from America’s relatively low-cost forward position. Disengagement, even at the expense of vital interests, is not realism.

THE COUNTER-ARGUMENT

“We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich,” said James Dobbins, a special envoy to Afghanistan under Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, in one of the devastating Afghanistan documents uncovered by the Washington Post. “We don’t invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful, and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.”

But what are the alternatives to the U.S.’s long engagement in Afghanistan? Negotiating with the Taliban is the course both the Obama and Trump administrations have taken. But those negotiations could only be undertaken with American consent to allow this al Qaeda-supporting organization to reconstitute its pre-2001 leadership, and they have been routinely derailed by the group’s attacks on U.S. troops and assets. What’s more, the public would only stomach such a concession to the theocratic and abusive regime responsible for harboring the executors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks after the concerted effort to eradicate it failed.

The alternative to nation-building is simply to break a rogue state from the air and to care little for whatever springs up through the rubble after we’d left. But this, too, would prove unsatisfying. The humanitarian concerns and the prospect of a radicalized civilian population would quickly outweigh the benefits associated with a sanitized anti-terrorism campaign executed from 30,000 feet. These tactics, too, are a recipe for “endless war.” You need only look to Iraq for evidence of that.

Advocates of a more circumspect interventionism cite the 1991 campaign that ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait as a model. That international mission was tailored only to reverse Iraq’s invasion and annexation of a neighboring sovereignty and go no further. But that approach committed U.S. forces to perennial engagement in the region. After 1991, the U.S. struck Iraqi targets in 1993, 1996, and 1998. All the while, coalition forces maintained no-fly zones over the country’s north and south, which often meant getting shot at and shooting back (or accidentally shooting down U.S. forces, which left 15 Americans dead in 1994). Contrary to the Iraq War’s critics, it’s highly unlikely there would be peace in Iraq in the absence of the 2003 invasion because there was no peace before the 2003 invasion.

Retrenchment as a policy prescription is possible only when the conditions on the ground are secure enough to merit such a course of action. Such conditions are only achieved when a threat has been neutralized, either militarily or diplomatically. But they cannot be wished away. Declaring victory and retreating may satisfy America’s laudably peace-loving political constituencies, but it’s a prescription for long-term pain in exchange for short-term gain.

THE VIRTUOUS CONSENSUS

Critics of America’s extroverted role in the world do have a point. The U.S. currently deploys roughly 200,000 service personnel to countries all around the world. That’s an astonishing deployment for a nation at relative peace.

But where exactly are those deployments? Roughly 13,000 U.S. troops operate in an advisory capacity in Afghanistan, protecting American interests and civilian contractors from Taliban insurgents. Six thousand U.S. soldiers are stationed in Iraq, where they helped local forces successfully push ISIS back from cities it occupied only a few short years after U.S. troops abandoned the country entirely in 2011. Between 45,000 and 65,000 soldiers are stationed elsewhere in the Middle East in defense of U.S. allies against terrorist organizations and Iran, which is executing a dangerous campaign of terrorism and sabotage across the region.

Seventy-eight thousand U.S. soldiers are stationed in Japan and South Korea, where they help contain a nuclear-armed state supporter of terrorism (North Korea) and an increasingly aggressive near-peer competitor (China). There are 35,000 U.S. forces stationed in Europe, where Russia has become the first nation to invade and annex sovereign soil on the continent since 1945 and is currently prosecuting a shooting war against Ukraine (an action it took only months after America withdrew thousands of troops and the last of its armored divisions from the continent in 2013). Seven thousand American soldiers are stationed in Africa, helping to combat Islamist terrorist groups in places such as Chad, Somalia, Mali, and Niger. And, finally, about 2,000 advisors and Special Forces are training and supporting humanitarian and counterterrorism operations in Latin America and the Pacific.

There is a reason why the last three consecutive U.S. presidents campaigned on a platform that advocated a humbler foreign policy but abandoned that pledge when in office. The devil is in the details. Which of these deployments are ancillary? Which missions are expendable? In what regions are vital American interests not at stake? American commitments abroad are easier to demagogue in the aggregate than they are individually.

Of course, the U.S. can and has disengaged from theaters where it once had substantial military, financial, and diplomatic commitments, but those successful disengagements were predicated on dramatic changes in the security situation in those theaters. Such changes cannot be willed into existence on artificial political timetables set in Washington.

Aspirants to high office in the U.S. too often profess their distaste for American commitments abroad. But the task before every serious thinker on the issue is to posit a viable alternative to those commitments. And when those alternatives beget civil conflict, power vacuums, socially destabilizing refugee crises, the disruption of international commerce, or the prospect of great power conflict, sober minds should conclude that the cure is worse than the disease.

Noah Rothman is the associate editor of Commentary Magazine .