Op-Ed: U.S. foreign policy took a narcissistic turn after the Cold War. Here’s how to set things right
LA TimesIn Iraq in 2003 and elsewhere we bought into the pipe dream that there could be an “easy” war. The flawed assumptions we made at the end of the Cold War stemmed from strategic narcissism: the tendency to define problems as we would like them to be rather than as they actually are. For example, the Trump administration portrayed recent decisions to withdraw the small contingents of U.S. forces enabling Afghan and Iraqi forces to fight against jihadists as protecting — rather than jeopardizing — hard-won military gains. Although the Trump administration was right to demand that NATO allies do more to share the burden of collective defense, reducing U.S. forces in Europe is unwise at a time when Vladimir Putin’s principal rival in Russia was recently poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent and the Kremlin threatens to quash calls for freedom in Belarus. Today, strategic narcissism has fostered a sentiment common in both political parties that, after long and costly wars, U.S. disengagement from overseas challenges would be an unmitigated good and that the United States is the principal cause of the world’s problems.
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