ABSTRACT
If restraint is such a good strategy, why does Washington ignore it and adopt primacy? Shouldn’t democracy dispose of bad ideas through debate and elections? This chapter explains why the United States has a grand strategy of primacy despite its failings and how this circumstance might change. Over time, U.S. power—wealth and military capability—concentrated the benefits of expansive military policies. Power meanwhile diffused the human and material costs of those policies. The beneficiaries, especially those in the federal bureaucracy, the private sector, and Congress, form a powerful support base for primacy. The diffusion of costs, meanwhile, diminishes opposition to primacy. Insulated from the consequences of security policy, the public remains largely indifferent to it. Special interests adverse to primacy wither or remain unformed. Ideological conflict over grand strategy quiets, protecting an elite consensus around primacy. As long as this imbalance holds, the U.S. political system will tend to support primacy, even though it costs the nation more than it is worth. Still, potential costs do constrain primacy’s support. Federal debt, diminished entitlement spending, and wars’ consequences limit what the United States is willing to pay, in a human and material sense, for primacy. The conclusion offers recommendations to concentrate primacy’s costs so as to better align U.S. security policy with the national interest.
