The myth of the national security sweater, or why Israel is not the string that will unravel US hegemony for good 

As the Israel-Hamas conflict moves into another week, politicians and national security experts of all stripes are trotting out a tired equation regarding American national security interests: that [fill in blank event: terrorism, civil uprising, minority oppression, cross-border incursion] in [fill in blank region: Middle East, Eastern Europe, East Asia, South America] is indicative of declining U.S. power, and the U.S. must reassert unipolar global hegemony or risk existential threats.  

We’ve seen the same narrative told over the past decade regarding Libya, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Ukraine and now Israel. Each issue or conflict is the proverbial string being pulled that will unwind the entire sweater, leaving the U.S. exposed to be picked apart by our enemies. 

This idea was on full display when President Biden addressed the nation following his visit to Israel and meeting with regional leaders. In a moment reminiscent of the George W. Bush administration 20 years ago, Biden looped Russia, China and Iran into the problem, before offering a $106 billion spending package as the solution. In a similar line of thinking, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) labelled these countries the new Axis of Evil and called for a more aggressive global posture to put them in their places. 

Of course, Iran is the only of those actors likely to have any connection to the Israel-Hamas conflict, given its adversarial history with Israel. Even so, the U.S. and Israel do not currently have any intelligence that Iran supported or was directly involved in the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. And while the destruction of Israel is still a central tenet of the Iranian regime, realistic military assessments indicate that a direct assault or obvious proxy attack would be catastrophic for the Iranian military — a fact that is likely understood by leaders in Tehran. 

But such realism has never troubled the supporters of a hegemonic American role in the world. Despite that the ancient religious and ethnic divisions at the heart of the Israel-Palestine conflict are older than the establishment of any English-speaking nation, American leaders cannot help blaming this recent flare-up on the perceived diminishment of our global influence. 

This not only ignores history, it also conflates our core national interests with an idealistic concept of global order while inflating the threats we are facing. Catastrophic results were forecasted if we did not unequivocally intervene in the civil war in Syria in the last decade; yet despite our more limited and ineffective intervention compared to Iraq and Afghanistan, the impact on the U.S. was far from apocalyptic. Similarly, the wave of Russian tank divisions projected to be crossing into NATO countries because of a weak response to the Ukrainian conflict has yet to materialize. 

That’s not to say U.S. policies haven’t contributed to any of the geopolitical crises today. But rather than seeing these events as the consequence of waning U.S. influence, they could be more accurately observed as the result of an exaggerated impression of our power since the end of the Cold War. 

Unipolarity is largely an anomaly throughout the history of the nation-state, especially at the global level. Even at the height of the British Empire, there were still sizable geopolitical rivals in Europe and across the colonial world that eventually overwhelmed and exhausted British military and economic strength. The years following the Cold War were quite unique in terms of global power balance, with the fall of the Soviet Union leaving the U.S. in an unusual position of unrivaled strength. With that triumph, we sought to capitalize with a new world order through the spread of democracy and capitalism undergirded by our military and economic strength. A new series of defense alliances from which the U.S. derived little actual security benefit but increased the risk to ourselves were launched and expanded, and our security burden stretched further and further. 

But the U.S. could never fill the vacuum completely — the world is simply too big and diverse — and nature abhors a vacuum. The rise of China, the reassertion of Russian power and the proliferation of political Islam are less an indictment of U.S. influence than they are a return to historical norms. 

There are many fathers of the Israel-Palestine conflict, just as there are in Ukraine and other volatile parts of the world. While the U.S. has an interest in preventing these conflicts from expanding and possesses the means that can help towards that end, we must also understand our limitations and not be trapped into thinking we have the responsibility, capability and need to solve them. Overextending ourselves and inevitably exhausting our resources on issues that are not relevant to our core national interests puts us at significantly more risk of pulling that string on our sweater and exposing ourselves to real threats.      

Robert Moore is a public policy adviser for Defense Priorities. He worked as a staff member on Capitol Hill for nearly a decade, most recently for Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) on the Senate Armed Services Committee.