It Was Always in the US’s Power to Force a Cease-Fire

Daniel Bessner

It’s a very old position, at least going back to the middle of the twentieth century, when the United States decided to become more involved in global affairs, particularly European affairs. It had been previously that you really need to focus on great power competition. This has been a drum that’s been beaten in both the Democratic and Republican parties, but particularly in the Republican Party.

This was basically Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon’s major conviction, which was that the war in Vietnam distracted from dealing with larger and more important powers like the Soviet Union and China. And also, one might add, it took Nixon and Kissinger a while to actually get out of Vietnam themselves. It’s easy to be drawn into these types of foreign situations.

So I think this is the inherent tension in imperial management: you could have a grand strategy that says you need to focus on China today, or, back in the 1970s under Kissinger and Nixon, on the Soviet Union. But when you’re a great empire, you have all of these involvements and commitments around the world, and you wind up getting bogged down in what international relations theorists would call “peripheral interests.” I think that’s precisely what you’re seeing in the Middle East. Famously, Jake Sullivan, right before the October 7 attacks, gave a speech in which he was trumpeting how the United States was less bogged down in the Middle East than ever before.

So the question for the Trump administration and for someone like Elbridge Colby is, is he going to be able to basically ignore things that are of immediate concern, for example what’s going on in Syria or what’s going on in Israel, and refocus the national security bureaucracy and establishment toward great power competition with China? Which is precisely what Colby wants — my understanding is that…