Richard Hanania is president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and a former Research Fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.
U.S. bases and troops abroad no longer translate into influence, making America’s far-flung garrison a “Phantom Empire.” The refusal of U.S. leaders to countenance drawdowns in most cases removes what leverage U.S. troops might provide over host nations. U.S. commitments in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia yield example after example of countries whose close defense relationship with the United States does not prevent them from going their own way geopolitically.
China is destined to be the leading power in East Asia. It will soon have an economy much larger than that of the U.S., and its advantages in East Asia compared with the U.S. are compounded by geographic proximity and hence deeper economic ties to the countries of the region compared to the U.S. At the same time, the U.S. need not be directly threatened by the rise of China—if it focuses on balancing in ways that bring prosperity and avoid catastrophic war.
The U.S. military presence in Iraq and Syria—unnecessary after the collapse of ISIS’s territorial caliphate—is today part of an unsuccessful compellence strategy against Iran. It is a potential “tripwire” that could cause an escalation toward a larger and needless conflict. A full U.S. military withdrawal would reduce the risks of war and aid President Biden’s efforts to pursue diplomacy with Iran and salvage the 2015 nuclear deal.
Today, “great power competition” is too often invoked by advocates of a more militarily assertive foreign policy. The phrase represents a view of the world that is to a great extent zero-sum, in which the U.S. must constantly confront China and Russia abroad. This view is dangerously outdated; changes in the international system such as nuclear weapons and the end of territorial expansion mean that the great powers should move toward more cooperative relations.
