Is the World Really Getting More Dangerous for America?

Ted Ellis

Security, United States

The world may not be "literally about to blow up."

Senator Lindsey Graham famously announced that the world is “literally about to blow up.” Is this an accurate statement, or is the senator contributing to threat inflation? In partnership with The Center for the National Interest, the Charles Koch Institute gathered leading foreign policy experts to address the most important questions of the day, including: Is the world getting more dangerous for the United States?

The United States emerged from the Cold War as the world’s leading power. This “unipolar moment” afforded America an unprecedented amount of leverage with which to pursue its foreign policy objectives. As a consequence, the United States assumed the role of a global “firefighter,” using its unrivaled military might to attempt to extinguish foreign policy brushfires all around the world.

Examples of this firefighting include numerous interventions in Middle East, Africa, and South America. Interestingly, few of these can be directly tied to core U.S. interests like national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and continued prosperity. So, why does the U.S. military pursue ends so far removed from our vital national interests?

Several strategic advantages allow the United States to engage in this policy of global firefighting—a policy often defined as “liberal hegemony.” For one, America is flanked to its east and west by large oceans (“big moats,” as the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer dubs them). Additionally, the United States is favorably positioned between two friendly and comparatively weak allies. Furthermore, the Charles Koch Institute’s Will Ruger observes, the United States possesses the world’s largest economy and strong economies are the “foundation of military power.”

For these reasons and others, Stephen Walt of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government argues that the United States is “substantially safer now than it has been at most of its modern history as a great power.” Walt contends that our interventions abroad, in Iraq and elsewhere, “have done more harm to the United States than anything a foreign actor has done to us in decades.”