The key to America’s security in the 21st Century does not lie in our trying to dominate the world, but in our learning to co-exist with it. Just as we have dangerously militarized our domestic police forces, we have dangerously militarized America’s foreign policy as well. Our delusional reliance on brute force to do what brute force cannot do has neither kept the peace nor created peace. It has exacerbated violence at home and around the world. We have built prisons and fought wars where we should have built schools and championed democracy.
And the madness needs to end.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s current unwillingness to support deescalation of the violence in Gaza displays a blindness to the realities of the world. In fact, it is both wrong-minded and dangerous. We are quite possibility marching into the jaws of hell, as the President’s policy seems not so much an effort to avoid WW3 as a likely preparation for it. We are seeking to lead as a unipolar power, when in fact it is now a multipolar world.
While the ways of the past are a catastrophic guide to the future, the current administration is not so much transitioning to something better as doubling down on what has not worked before. In the days ahead I will be outlining a very different kind of foreign policy perspective, in which America will pivot from paths of danger to paths of peace.
We need a new beginning and a season of repair. Let us choose a better way.
