The Case for American Power

By now many of you have probably seen Campus Reform’s interviews with Harvard students. The question posed to students on the Science Center Plaza: “What is a greater threat to world peace, ISIS or America?” The results were predictable. College students predisposed to a pacifist viewpoint attempt to give a concise, nuanced answer to a silly question, and are made to sound like flag-burning radicals.

America and ISIS are impossible to compare. One has been the world’s greatest economic, military, and political superpower for seven decades, and the other is a band of jihadists that came into existence after most of us began college. When one examines the destabilizing effect that each has had on the world at large, the answer is clear. America has intervened in more countries, supported more resistance movements, and toppled more leaders than ISIS. If the interviewer had asked students which entity is pledged to a doctrine of violence, or which is the least morally admirable, I would assume that most would choose ISIS. Some would still douse Old Glory in kerosene, but most, I think, would recognize that the United States has been a greater force for good in the world than the Islamic State. After all, we are currently helping the Christians and Yazidis that ISIS would like to massacre. Religious liberty and the protection of minorities are worthwhile goals.

America is not wholly bad, or even mostly bad. In fact, we are quite good. One of the students interviewed explained her answer with reference to “American imperialism” and our attempts to secure oil supplies in the Middle East. I find that uncompelling. Americans are not imperialists. There was a time when that label would have applied, those days at the dawn of the twentieth century when we existed in the shadow of the British Empire and tried to compensate by seizing territories such as Puerto Rico or the Philippines for ourselves.

But in the years since Vietnam, that is less true. We tried to expiate some of our prior sins in Latin America by returning the Panama Canal to local control. When we intervened in the Persian Gulf in 1990, we did so only after Iraq invaded another sovereign country–and then refrained from toppling the regime in Baghdad. Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist, put it best when he said that, “It is absurd to apply the word to to a people whose first instinct upon arriving on anyone’s soil is to demand an exit strategy.”

In the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, many liberals claimed that our sole justification for invasion was our thirst for oil. But last year Iraq was sixth on the list of countries from which we import oil, constituting a mere 4.4 percent of total imports–and its share has dropped over the past decade as we have made efforts to diversify our energy sources. When we went to war, President Bush said we had three objectives: “[T]o disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” Those goals seem honorable enough, and the government of Iraq is better today than it was in 2003. In the midst of the violence in northern Iraq this summer, Americans might have missed something pretty astounding: Prime Minister Nour al-Maliki peacefully relinquished his office to Haider al-Abadi. In spite of its troubles, Iraq is one of the few functioning democracies in the Middle East, and it is doubtful that would be the case if not for our ill-informed (but not ill-intentioned) intervention.

Now, I do not believe that America should send in the troops anytime we dislike the leader of a particular country. President Obama has deemed this the “whack-a-mole” strategy of geopolitics, and he is right. Yet there is a time and a place for action. This past summer, I was handed a flier by a tearful woman in front of the White House who was begging for intervention on behalf of Syrian Christians. When a nation resolves to defend abroad the principles that it holds dear, it is bound to err. But that is no justification for husbanding our resources here at home and refusing to intervene on behalf of victimized peoples. A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

Andrew B. Pardue ’16 is a government concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.