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By Root 1219 0

who believe that America’s place in the world is wholly different from that of the British Empire, it is instructive to read the “Base Structure Report” for fiscal year 2006. In it, the Department of Defense boasted of being “one of the world’s largest ‘landlords’ with a physical plant consisting of more than 571,200 facilities (buildings, structure, and utilities) located on more than 3,700 sites, on nearly 30 million acres.” The report lists a sprawling network of 766 bases in forty foreign countries, from Antigua to the United Kingdom. These overseas bases were worth at least $127 billion in 2005, housed 197,000 uniform personnel and an equal number of dependents and civilian officials, and employed an additional 81,000 local foreign hires. They covered 687,000 acres (nearly 1,100 square miles) of foreign land and cost taxpayers $13 billion in maintenance alone.

America may be more powerful than Britain was, but it still cannot neglect the lesson that it must make choices. It cannot be involved in everything. Tensions in the Middle East are important, but they have sucked all the resources, energy, and attention out of every other issue in American foreign policy for the last seven years. Washington has to move out of the eighth century a.d., adjudicating claims between Sunnis and Shias in Baghdad, and move into the twenty-first century—to China, India, Brazil—where the future is being made. Every choice to engage in some cause, worthy as it is, is a distraction from the larger strategic issues that confront the United States. In focusing on the seemingly urgent, we will forget the truly important.

2. Build broad rules, not narrow interests. There is a fundamental tension in U.S. foreign policy. Does the country want to push its own particular interests abroad, or does it want to create a structure of rules, practices, and values by which the world will be bound? In an age of rising new powers, the United States’ overriding goal should be the latter—so that even as these countries get more powerful, they will continue to live within the framework of the current international system. This is the principal constraint we can construct to ensure that the rise of the rest does not turn into a downward competitive spiral, with great powers freelancing for their own interests and advantage in such a way as to destabilize the whole system. For such a system to work, we would have to adhere to these rules as well. If the United States freelances when it suits its purposes, why would China not do the same with regard to Taiwan? Or India with regard to Pakistan? If we are not bound by the rules, why should they be?

First, that means recommitting itself to the institutions and mechanisms for problem solving and adjudication that the United States (largely) created over the last five decades. But this is more than simply about attending more UN meetings and signing treaties. When the United States proclaims universal values, it must phrase its positions carefully. George Bush declared in his second inaugural that it “is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” And yet, when democrats in Taiwan and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were silenced, the United States kept quiet, arguing—perhaps persuasively—that these are special cases. Still, Washington pillories China and scolds India for not being tougher on North Korea and Burma. Diplomats in both countries will tell you that these are special cases for them. Instability in Burma is a remote problem for the United States. But that country shares long borders with China and India. Instability to them means millions of refugees. Washington should recognize that if it has its own exceptions, so do other countries. Or else it should drop its own exceptions. But to do neither, and preach one thing and practice another, is hypocrisy, which is both ineffective and undermining of American credibility.

When it comes to terrorism, the United States