I was struck by a quotation from a retired Vietnamese general in this New York Times article about the rapid warming of relations between the U.S. and Vietnam. “Among all the choices, Vietnam chooses Pax Americana,” said Le Van Cuong, who had once fought American troops.
That’s a heartening and highly rational choice on the part of a country that fears its giant neighbor and onetime ally, China, and sees its former foe as a good-faith guarantor of its security. It is, in fact, a choice that countries and individuals have made in great numbers since World War II: South Korea, Japan, Germany, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, and many, many others have voluntarily chosen to embrace the Pax Americana. But for how much longer?
Nobody wants to join the losing side — everyone prefers, in Osama bin Laden’s phrase, “the strong horse.” For many decades, there was little doubt of America’s strength. And even today, the U.S. remains the sole superpower by virtue of its unrivaled economic and military might. The U.S. economy remains strong, at least stronger than those of our competitors among other industrialized nations, even if growth is hampered by an ever-expanding tax and regulatory burden.
But America is busy cutting its defense budget, with the army alone due to fire 40,000 soldiers over the next two years. While the U.S. retains formidable military and diplomatic muscle, it is not exerting itself as it once did. From Ukraine to the South China Sea, we can see the perilous consequences of American disengagement.
The situation is particularly worrisome in the Middle East. The Obama administration is making one concession after another to Iran in the hopes of achieving a deal that will allow the mullahs to keep a nuclear program while reaping untold billions in sanctions relief. At the same time, the U.S. is ignoring evidence that Bashar Assad, Iran’s ally, continues to use chemical weapons in spite of his promise to remove all of them. Assad is also dropping barrel-bombs with impunity on the civilian populace, with hardly a peep of protest from Washington. Seen from the vantage point of Tehran, America looks like a pushover; not a formidable adversary.
The same view no doubt holds in Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate. As Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has just revealed in Congressional testimony, the Department of Defense has trained only 60 Syrian rebels to take on ISIS’s 20,000+ fighters. Presumably the CIA has trained some more, but the forces they have produced are inconsequential, too. Meanwhile, the Washington Post notes, summing up Carter’s testimony, “the 3,500 U.S. personnel deployed in Iraq since last year had trained just 8,800 Iraqi army and Kurdish militia soldiers. Just 1,300 Sunni tribesmen have been recruited.” It is scant wonder, then, that ISIS has actually expanded its territory since the U.S. began bombing it last August.
Why aren’t more Syrians and Iraqis flocking to join the anti-ISIS cause? Because they are not going to risk their necks in a losing cause, and America at the moment does not look like the strong horse in the Middle East. Iran and ISIS both look stronger. That’s not because they are inherently more powerful than America; on any rational comparison of strength, both the Islamic State and Iran are inconsequential next to the American hyperpower. But they are punching above their weight, while we punch below ours.
If this situation continues unabated, we will find ever fewer countries making the choice that Vietnam is making. We will, in fact, find that that the Pax Americana, which generations of Americans stretching back to 1898 have been laboring to create, is no more. Not because we are unable to project power anymore but because we are choosing not to.
