If American foreign policy lacks anything, it is imagination. When 2016 presidential contenders speak about the rest of the world, their rhetoric is often superficial and predictable. It seems the country’s strategic thinking is succumbing to a creeping “Russification” — an obsession with neo-imperial greatness and jingoistic patriotism.

Irrespective of party label, America’s political elites and resident media experts have framed the country’s position in the world as a straightforward choice between strength and weakness: Unless America retains a permanent and dominating presence in every significant region of the world, a dystopian “war of all against all” will reign. Into this inevitable vacuum will leap “bad actors,” such as China, Iran and Russia. The delicate stability that supports the global economy will be upended and the American homeland will be under relentless threat. The assumption is that America’s role in the world is fateful and irreversible rather than a matter of choice or an accident of history — what America’s often globally unaware public thinks of this is beside the point.

America’s political values, and founding principles have become intertwined by consensus with its supposed role as the guardian of international peace and security. Those who pose the counterfactual, question the assumption of America’s inevitable internationalism or propose an alternative path for the nation’s foreign policy have been diagnosed as malicious, anti-American retrogrades whose weakness would see the country prostrate before vacuous evil forces that must be fought “there” to avoid having to confront them “here at home.”

In this way, American liberty has been exchanged for the authoritarian tribalism of, among others, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. (more…)