How America Creates Its Own Enemies: ISIS, Terrorism, Insecurity | William Ruger | Big Think

U.S. foreign policy over the last 15 to 25 years hasn’t really been working on delivering the goods, on making sure that America is safe and secure, and at the same time being cognizant of the economic and human costs of our engagements.

If the United States had followed a more realist or restrained approach to the world then it’s not as if Libya or Iraq would be thriving liberal democracies. A foreign policy of restraint isn’t going to create heaven on Earth—but neither is a policy of primacy.

In fact, primacy has often led the United States to create situations where there’s greater instability, more problems, lots of unintended consequences that have spilled over to other places. And Iraq is a perfect example of that. ISIS would not exist in Iraq had it not been for the United States opening Pandora’s box by our regime-change efforts.

And that obviously spilled over to places like Syria. You’d also have some of these problems with our allies like Turkey related to some of the issues dealing with the Kurds. The problem is that these war games expanded well beyond what was possible, and again the U.S. really thought through what the ideal would be without thinking about the constraints that meant reality would look a lot different than that ideal.

It would be great if Afghanistan were a liberal democracy, thriving economically, and not a place where folks like Al-Qaeda could operate out of. The problem is that that wasn’t really in the cards. And so you had situations, for example, like in Helmand, where General McChrystal sent “government in a box.”

And what ended up happening, as General McChrystal later said, is that you got a bleeding ulcer in that country. So these efforts at trying to nation-build are often unnecessary for America’s core security interests and really impossible to realize in any kind of short run, and at a cost that we really think is appropriate given what we need to achieve as opposed to what might be ideal.

And so we’ve really opened up all kinds of challenges in this attempt to create an exemplar for the Middle East. We actually have created an exemplar: an exemplar of what could go wrong if you engage in the world without first thinking carefully about what is necessary for American safety and what those unintended consequences of our behavior could be—and how that spills back over into the United States in terms of the effects on Americans, the effects on our system of government, and our civil liberties, and really thinking about those human costs because oftentimes we forget that there is a real price to be paid.

So, for example, when the United States has intervened in places like Iraq and Libya there’s been a huge human cost with thousands of American lives lost, tens of thousands of Americans harmed by that conflict, and a real human cost at home on families and communities. Not to mention the cost to those who were ostensibly trying to help in places like Libya and Iraq.

And so there are lots of unintended consequences of not following a more prudential or realistic approach to the world. And what restraint tries to do, or realism, is to really be cautious about that. To think about second-order consequences.

To think about the human and financial costs, and to put that in the calculus before you reach for the sword or the bayonet to try to achieve American foreign policy goals. So Libya is a classic case of a well-intentioned policy gone awry.

So the argument was that the United States needed to get engaged as part of a responsibility to protect when conflict emerged in eastern Libya. Unfortunately for the United States, the consequences of this well-intentioned set of policies did not turn out the way we wanted it to.

And this is a common problem in foreign policy, and something that a more realistic approach would try to remedy. Namely in Libya we had a situation where we harmed those who were ostensibly trying to help—namely Libyan society. Libya is an unstable country with rival parties trying to control the government. There’s also been the proble...