Balanced Internationalism: 5 Core Principles to Guide U.S. National Security Policy

Schuyler Foerster, Ray Raymond

Security, Americas

America’s legitimacy as a global leader will rest not only on our military and economic power, but also on our moral authority.

In his prophetic poem, “The Second Coming,” about the coming of fascism in Europe in the 1920s, Anglo-Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

The best lack all conviction,

While the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats’ words apply to today’s fierce debate over U.S. foreign policy as much as they did to the debate over Europe’s future after World War I. Today, the long-standing bipartisan consensus about America’s role in the world is being challenged as never before by passionate extremists of the populist left and right. At a time of unprecedented danger in the world, the center must hold, lest the liberal world order we created over seven decades ago falls apart.

To that end, we offer (1) a summary of the national security challenges that face us as a nation, (2) an analysis of the debate about how we should respond to these challenges, (3) a description of five, distinct, core principles that we believe should guide the next Administration’s thinking about U.S. national security strategy, and (4) an outline of how these principles would be applied to an especially critical question for national security policy—the relationship between diplomacy and military force and the limits of state power in the twenty-first century.

The challenges that face us

Fifteen years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States finds itself still embroiled in Afghanistan and Iraq, but not for the reasons it initially went to war there. Al Qaeda and its ilk have metastasized across the Middle East and North Africa, and the so-called Islamic State has sought to redraw by force the boundaries of the Levant, while demonstrating its ability to target cities in the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. Clearly, America’s strategy to pacify these regions and establish at least the foundations of sustainable pluralistic political systems has not fulfilled the aspirations of its proponents. Instead, we are confronted with hostile forces, based in failed states fueled by apocalyptic visions, filling political vacuums previously dominated by more traditional despots.

Meanwhile, more familiar geopolitical threats also claim our attention.

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