Isolation and Hegemony: A New Approach for American Foreign Policy

April 23, 2012 by Alex Verschoor-Kirss

In modern foreign policy the United States faces a complicated irony: in a bid to ensure national security and maintain global primacy the U.S. spends a large quantity of blood and treasure on interventionist policies that may actually compromise national security and the future of American hegemony. The culmination of these exercises in grandiose foreign policy has been the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, at the combined cost of between three and four trillion dollars. While it is possible to argue that the invasions have been successful in preventing further terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland, such a counterfactual proposition is difficult to prove.

What is clear, however, is that such expenditures are unsustainable given a national debt of over $15 trillion. As the country debates the potential for military action in the Middle East in both Syria and Iran the necessity of a levelheaded understanding of the costs of such interventions, and their potentially fatal consequences for American standing in the world, cannot be overstated.

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