Mitch McConnell’s Weak Case for American Empire

If you’re taking flak, you’re over the target.

The old World War II idiom certainly appears to ring true regarding President Trump’s plan to begin the much needed process of refocusing America’s foreign engagements. The subsequent tranche of articles decrying the alleged return of “American isolationism” by defenders of the crumbling American-led liberal international order should therefore not come as a surprise.

They tell us that failing to maintain a sprawling military-industrial framework of permanent alliances, defense guarantees, and logistical entanglements is akin to weakness—appeasement even—that will undermine U.S. national security.

Senator Mitch McConnell makes this exact argument in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. The Republican senator’s lengthy article, “The Price of American Retreat,” is thorough and well-written. It articulates current challenges to U.S. hegemony on the world stage and identifies economic, political, and doctrinal elements of the U.S. force posture that are inadequate to the task of meeting those challenges.

But the clarity of McConnell’s thesis belies the problem with the premises of his argument: the very hegemony he is fighting to maintain has failed to secure peace and prosperity for the American people. The ability for a given policy to accomplish the latter is precisely what is supposed to constitute a national interest. Whether through willful ignorance or plain disconnect, McConnell and our political class have apparently forgotten this fact.

In order to delegitimize any move away from the status quo, McConnell’s argument subsequently employs a false dichotomy that frames the choice for our foreign policy. We are told that “neo-isolationists” stand for weakness and withdrawal while those like McConnell understand the need for “American hard power.” Replete with moralizing bromides against those who would seek to reorient our limited resources in a manner that prioritizes specific national security threats, the implicit conclusion is that America must not only maintain but even increase its overseas deployments and foreign engagements.

Moralizing All the Way Down

The issue of Ukraine is of course front and center. It is a black hole of American resources, with neither clearly identifiable U.S. vital interests nor clearly articulated (or feasible) strategic objectives. The U.S. has sent upwards of $80 billion in military and financial aid to the country, which is more than all European countries combined (the next largest supporter is all collective E.U. institutions at about $40 billion). U.S. military aid alone comes in at about $46 billion, with second place Germany contributing about $10 billion.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is now in a significantly worse position than at any time since the war broke out in 2022. Nothing outside of foreign troop deployments will change the deteriorating battlefield situation. Kiev has subsequently been incentivized to take provocatory actions aimed at inducing greater Western involvement. Yet any attempt to demand accountability for the massive amount of U.S. taxpayer money being sent abroad is met with derision, and even accusations of treason. Indeed, such accusations were launched against then-Senator J.D. Vance for daring to propose a bill to track some of that taxpayer-funded aid that is only prolonging a failing Ukrainian war effort.

In service of his argument, McConnell even claims that Trump “courted Putin” in his first term due to treating the Russian president as the leader of a major power worthy of diplomatic engagement. Regarding the war, Trump has consistently argued that Putin doesn’t need to be our friend, and we certainly don’t need to condone his invasion of Ukraine. President Trump seems to understand that if we want to create a lasting settlement that ensures peace while lowering the risk of escalation, we must engage in real diplomacy. And as far as “courting Putin” is concerned, adopting the same verbiage that dishonest partisan actors have used to smear the sitting U.S. president as an agent of the Kremlin is an insult to the American people. If we want to create a lasting settlement that ensures peace while lowering the risk of escalation, we must quit trading real diplomacy for empty moralizing.

In place of using diplomacy to manage our competition with rivals and potential enemies while also building mutual relationships with partners, the defenders of empire present a Manichean world. Above all, they think it is a moral imperative to increase our retrenchment on the European continent and deepen our involvement with NATO. To support the contention that Washington must remain the head of a freedom-loving coalition, McConnell writes that “U.S. allies on the continent now spend 18 percent more than they did a year ago, a far greater increase than the United States’.”

But as Mark Twain once said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics; McConnell does not specify if that 18% constitutes the average amount each country has increased its individual defense expenditures, or if it is the collective increase of all countries taken together. Regardless, the U.S. is predicted to have the third highest level of defense expenditure among NATO members as a share of its GDP. The U.S. contributes about $755 billion to NATO, as compared to the $430 billion contributed by the remaining 31 members. That means America is footing about 64% of the total bill. At the same time, NATO’s European allies have a collective population of 585 million (compared to 330 million for the U.S., and less than 150 million for Russia) and a collective GDP that dwarfs Russia’s.

What exactly does the United States get in return for this massive investment?

Military hawks would likely answer that we get a safer world in which America forms the lynchpin of a global security network that supposedly benefits all nations. But the hidden cost of this American-led “rules-based order” is the inevitable need to cede a significant portion of our national sovereignty. That the U.S. remains the implicit guarantor of the territorial integrity of a sprawling system of allied states forces it to fulfil the function of an international executive, ensuring that all parties follow the rules as well as punishing transgressors. Somewhat paradoxically, it is therefore America that is perhaps the most constrained actor in this system—which is why we are at constant risk of being pulled into war.

This creates a warped incentive structure for the small, insecure states whose security the U.S. guarantees. At best, peripheral states are encouraged to amplify threats from their more powerful neighbors to induce American entrenchment. At worst, this allows geopolitical lightweights to punch well above their weight class, incentivizing them to actively engage in provocatory behavior knowing that they have our military backing them up. This may be good for the territorial integrity of the peripheral states in question—but it is hardly to America’s advantage.

Transitioning from a sprawling supranational security architecture toward greater European defense independence and the U.S. forging more robust, bilateral relationships would help Washington leverage its strength to ensure responsible international behavior from all parties. Such a reorientation is a far-cry from “isolationism.” It is a strawman to say that those who wish to prioritize specific policy areas are enacting a retreat from global affairs in order to hide inside “Fortress America.” In reality, it is the only way the U.S. can properly allocate its limited resources to address the most pressing challenges to its vital interests.

Peace through strength above all means having the necessary capabilities to realistically address those challenges. Strategic overstretch is not a chimera used by modern-day peaceniks—it is a glaring danger to U.S. national security. Actively promoting the conditions for such a scenario to develop is a failure of statesmanship.

Stop Searching for Monsters to Destroy

In his Foreign Affairs article, McConnell rightly addresses the inadequacy of our defense stocks and the negative repercussions for U.S. military readiness. In order to rectify these shortcomings, he subsequently argues for various government subsidies to increase defense production, including using the Defense Production Act to “steer resources toward the production of goods for national defense.”

But this ignores the U.S.’s willful depletion of its own weapons stores, primarily through President Biden’s use of presidential drawdown authority to supply the militaries of other countries. This is particularly crucial for complex weapons systems such as Patriot aerial defense missiles and long-range ballistic ATACMS. Consider the fact that a single salvo of the former includes about 30 missiles, which is needed for Ukraine to intercept one single hypersonic Russian missile such as the air-launched Kinzhal. Ukraine reports that Russia has fired at least 110 Kinzhal’s since the start of the war. Now consider that the U.S. only produces about 550 Patriot missiles in a single year.

As the United States supplies such critical munitions to other important allies, it is easy to see how drawdown authority can put the U.S. at risk by stretching its own stocks thin. The same can be said of the ATACMS, with Biden providing up to 500 to Ukraine out of a stockpile that is thought to be between 1,500-2,000.

The supporters of our status quo often rebut this point by noting that the United States simply needs to harness its latent industrial potential. They argue that this is also good for our economy, as weapons contracts with foreign nations support domestic manufacturing while increasing the productive capacity of our own defense. While this is true to a degree, it also hides certain costs. For one, it ignores the fact that aid counted as new production has been paid for by U.S. emergency appropriations. And while the U.S. should be leveraging its dynamic private sector to support innovation and competition in defense production, the type of state-subsidized industrialization that is required to make America the munitions workshop of the world is hardly so cut and dry.

Large defense producers require the proper economic inputs to allocate capital to produce more of the critical weapons systems that the U.S. can then dole out to its allies. That means more factories, more production lines, and more limited resources being diverted from other sectors. For example, the U.S. set its intended 2024 production level for 155 mm artillery shells—a crucial munition given the type of attrition warfare taking place in the frozen fields of Ukraine—at 100,000 per month. That is a significantly higher production level than the beginning of the year, yet it is dwarfed by Russia’s current output of about 350,000 shells per month. In order for America to maintain its empire, economic intervention is needed in order to create the proper market indicators through government action.

However, devoting our economy to producing world war-level quantities of conventional munitions is hardly the most efficient use of our capital. Making America capable of defending itself by becoming the most dynamic and innovative military in the world on both land and sea is necessary to make America great again. Increasing our defense base and even our defense exports are certainly part of that. But most of that increased capacity should revolve around providing the economic incentives to focus on critical new industries such as drones, AI, and advanced ISR technologies. Depleting America’s stocks of more conventional types of munitions means that limited resources will be diverted from advanced industries to replace previously existing supplies.

Technological and industrial capacity, human and economic capital: all of the resources are there. There is no reason we can’t simultaneously embrace diplomacy and eschew needless foreign interventionism while also maintaining the best military in the world.

The end result of American Empire is a less sovereign nation, a more constrained economy, greater strategic overstretch that puts us at perpetual risk of conflict, lowered weapons stocks, and lagging force readiness in the short-term. That is not how to make America great. It is obvious that putting America First means that our policy must reflect the realities of a rapidly shifting international environment in a manner that prioritizes specific national interests.

What is more, imperial overreach necessarily goes hand in hand with a diminution of freedom at home. A Republican Empire is and always has been an oxymoron. In showing America’s slide from constitutional republic to empire, Pat Buchanan stated that “nowhere in the Constitution is Congress or the president authorized to conscript the wealth of the nation or the blood of its sons for crusades…. Conservatives who believe our Cold War triumph empowers us to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy should cease calling themselves conservatives.” As far as the Founders’ thinking on foreign policy is concerned, that is still exactly right.

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