I had the pleasure last night of joining The Free Press for its debate series on the issue of “Should the U.S. Still Police the World?” Bret Stephens and Jamie Kirchick were pro-military intervention against Matt Taibbi and myself, arguing against it.
In short, Taibbi and I won by a hair. I will post the video when it is live. Below is my opening and closing statement.
Opening Statement
Thank you Bari, I really appreciate you having me. I want to also thank FIRE, the Free Press, all of the staff here at the theater, everyone who made this event possible.
My name is Lee Fang — I’m an independent investigative journalist. I write on Substack at leefang.com – and I’m a skeptic of American intervention and military escalation, which have produced one dismal failure after another for my entire adult life.
The question before us today is whether the United States should still “police” the world. We recently had a great debate about the role of policing in society, and so these concepts are still fresh in my mind. Let’s talk about this framing.
In our country and in most Western industrialized countries, despite what some activists say, police are generally highly trained and enforce democratically enacted public safety laws under constitutional restrictions and civilian oversight. When done correctly, policing serves as the foundation for a civilized society. When police overstep their bounds, there is usually accountability, as there should be.
But policing can also be very dangerous if practiced without safeguards. Look at how police operate in Saudi Arabia, China, or Russia. In authoritarian systems, police are completely unaccountable and used to force obedience, crush dissent, and terrorize the public.
All too often, American foreign policy takes the form of policing that is much more akin to the authoritarian model. We force our belief systems on others at the barrel of the gun. When we act unilaterally and attempt to use the awesome might of the American military and intelligence forces for regime change, we tend to have disastrous results.
There have, of course, been some cases where U.S. intervention has generated some benefits. But the unilateral policeman mindset has generally led to catastrophe.
Consider two of the recent examples of hawkish policing blowing up in our faces: Iraq and Libya.
In the run-up to the Iraq War, politicians and pundits sold us a bill of lies, phantom weapons of mass destruction and false ties to Al Qaeda. Our intervention in Iraq resulted in an insurgency and civil war that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. The ensuing instability fueled the rise of jihadist groups such as ISIS and gave Iran a new ally in the region.
Likewise, we were told that U.S.-led NATO bombings of Libya would bring, in the words of one aide to Hillary Clinton, “democracy and inclusivity.” That war instead resulted in an ongoing dystopia and rump state. Weapons from Libya -- either stolen from Qaddafi's government or taken from U.S. supplies to militias -- have reportedly ended up in Syria, Nigeria, Egypt, and Mali, fueling civil wars, violent uprisings and extremists. The ongoing chaos of the post-Qaddafi state has empowered criminal gangs that funnel migrants from Africa into Europe.
There are countless other examples, ones Matt will discuss and others I am sure we will dig into later in the debate.
Before we get bogged down by examples and counterexamples, I want to clearly state what I support.
I would like to see an America with greater engagement with our adversaries, more multilateralism, and a foreign policy grounded in respect for the legitimate concerns and viewpoints of all countries and all peoples. A textured foreign policy with the confidence to settle old grudges, to end cycles of distrust and violence, and to find common ground for a mutually beneficial future. These are the ingredients for a lasting peace and the conditions for American values to flourish.
And with that I want to close with another thought about how to think about this debate. Like many of you, four years ago, I experienced a painful whiplash. It almost cost me my job.
In 2020, woke journalists harassed newspaper editors and demanded so-called “moral clarity” in all of our reporting – in other words, in the name of social justice, there was an intolerance for any questioning of activist claims, a rejection of viewpoint diversity and a myopic obsession with partisan slogans around racial identity. You either supported the demands of the movement or you were a racist; you were either an ally or a white supremacist.
The pro-military interventionist crowd uses the very same tactics. Recall George W. Bush’s words, “You are either with us or with the terrorists.” There are many iterations of this form of persuasion. You either blindly agree with NATO expansion in Europe or you are a puppet of President Vladimir Putin. You either stand with the U.S. or you stand with Iran.
This black-and-white thinking – whether it is practiced by the extreme BLM left or by those in Congress who want to bomb America’s supposed adversaries – is simply crude propaganda.
The war hawks and the woke left both embrace a utopian vision, a moral fundamentalism, and a reckless hubris – they both believe they can remake the world through force. This worldview is reductive and counterproductive. With every bomb dropped, every civilian killed, every child left hungry from sanctions, every city looted by riots, every school locked down for no reason, we create vicious cycles of backlash and more conflict and suffering.
Let’s reject one-dimensional thinking in all of its forms. Thank you.
Closing Statement
Our position is backed by evidence, by consistency and by the reality of the consequences of war and aggression – but, perhaps, it is difficult to defend our position only because it is not easy to articulate in one or two minute soundbites.
To understand the context of each conflict, there is a deeper history and nuance that is all too often ignored in our national debates. Our entire media system is filled with war escalation rhetoric — fear sells newspapers, fear is an easy way to mobilize voters on both sides of the aisle, fear is often more compelling than intellectual scrutiny. If there’s one thing that Fox News and MSNBC have in common, it’s in their focus on the latest foreign boogeyman and smearing dissenters as foreign agents.