Earlier this week, Max Boot had a column explaining why getting the U.S. out of endless wars involved a lot of risk. washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump… I sent a letter to the editor in response. The WaPo decided didn’t run it, so I’m posting it here for anyone who might be interested.
“In his latest column, Max Boot lectures his readers about the dangers & pitfalls of withdrawing U.S. troops from countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Yet nowhere in his piece does he spend a second acknowledging the dangers and pitfalls of staying in any of these areas.
The American people, however, have seen the pitfalls on a daily basis. They see it in news reports of casualties in Afghanistan, where 13,000 U.S. troops are still fighting and dying in a war that has been on an endless loop over the last 19 years. They see it in the trillions...
of taxpayer dollars spent & often wasted on excessive nation-building projects in countries that have no capacity to sustain them. And they see it in the completely misguided priorities, where policing a violence-plagued Middle East is treated with the same urgency as the far...
more important goal of managing relations with a near-peer China. One of the most consequential U.S. foreign policy mistakes of the last quarter-century is Washington’s inability to prioritize. The Beltway has an extremely unhealthy habit of believing every problem...
in the world is America’s responsibility to solve, no matter how small or tertiary to U.S. security and prosperity. The ugly and painful result of this myopia has been wasted resources, muddle, and strategic distraction.
What the United States needs is a grand reassessment of its grand strategy, not more of the same.
