The Real Point of Our Inextricable US Involvements

Wise men, we are told, have been engrossed in some rather strange hobbies over this past generation. Apparently, they like nothing better than to wrangle far into the night over the reasons for America's seemingly incurable habit of self-entrapment in foreign quagmires. 

The assumption seems to be that our foreign-policy elites, almost for no other motive than the goodness of their hearts and a love of global humanity, somehow enjoy rather an awful lot of dangerous risk-taking. (Or dangerous, at any rate, to other people's [enlisted] sons and daughters.) But in particular, they seem to enjoy the risk of wading ever deeper into the sort of overseas problems that not only admit of no clear solution, but offer no simple or easy exit. As if this, if you will, unintended instability - and sometimes even anarchy - that follows our projects in various (often strategic) parts of the world was all part of a sincere attempt, by our wise foreign-affairs experts, to promote the directly opposite result. Or, in the riveting words of Britain's good old reliable Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs), "to help governments and societies build a sustainably secure, prosperous and just world." (Bottom right-hand corner of page.)

And of course what they claim may be so. Though at first glance it does strike me as a pretty complicated explanation. I mean, why is it lately - as in the past 20-odd years - that almost nothing we do abroad turns out as purportedly intended? Are we really, for all our great wealth, power, influence and vaunted "efficiency," that consistently stupid and blundering? 

And what if, as is sometimes the case, the simplest, least convoluted explanation contains the deeper truth? What if the real point, by and large, of all our deepest, messiest, inextricablest US involvements all over the world is not to ensure ongoing stability at all? But rather the reverse? Suppose, in fact, that what all our best national (in)security experts have been trying to do, in all sorts of regions across the globe, is to ensure whatever degree of local/regional instability is optimal for "our" premium economic interests.

But maybe I can illustrate better by way of a direct contrast. So I ask you to imagine a very different, if not opposite kind of globe. Show me, then, a world in which most of its regions - but in particular those that are most resource-rich (oil, gas, minerals, etc) - in which these same regions are steadily becoming more DE-frontierized. Which is to say, steadily more and more unlike our Old American Wild West. Steadily more settled and stable, and law-abiding. And thus more and more capable of their own political and economic self-direction, autonomy, prosperity. You know, rather like the way Singagore, or Japan, or even Costa Rica, has functioned over the past 60 years. (As distinct from, say, Yemen over the past 5 years, or Libya or Syria for the past ten; or for that matter, Afghanistan over the past twenty.)

Show me a world that has more and more places like Singapore, etc, busting out all over. And I will suggest to you a globe that can never, of its own accord, EVER hope to meet our (to put it mildly) exacting 21st-century US standards of open commerce. I.e, it can never be sufficiently open to, and penetrable and manipulable by, our US commercial interests. To say nothing of those of our allies . . .  plus Saudi Arabia . . . plus (and despite our present seeming estrangement) mainland China . . .

My point is not that other countries of very different posture and alignment - like, yes, Russia - aren't also engaged in fomenting various kinds of instability in sensitive parts of the globe. And often for reasons similar (if not exactly identical) to ours. My question is why so many, not just of our US but Western and other global elites, insist on singling out Moscow: why they insist on behaving - or at least talking - as if Russia (along with possibly other vile ingrates like Iran and North Korea) was just about the only major power guilty of doing these awful things?