How Kyrgyzstan can save America at home…
Kyrgyzstan, a landlocked mountainous former Soviet state recently had a presidential election. Don’t stop reading!!! At this point you’re probably wondering, why the heck should I care? Well, here’s why:
Once the new president was elected, one of the first decisions he made was to announce that he would shut down the U.S. Manas Air Base once its lease expires in 2014. It's our only major base in Central Asia, and it's been a crucial conduit of arms and supplies to the war in Afghanistan. Kyrgyzstan is essentially telling Americans thanks for everything, but that it’s time for us to leave.
While this might initially sound like another blow to America (everything in the news seems to be about American decline), I disagree. Recently, President Obama announced that the Iraq War was “over”, announcing that all U.S. troops would be coming home by the first of the New Year. These two developments should help Americans see that America has been spread too thinly throughout the past decade. We’ve had too many commitments – both financial and with “boots on the ground” – with too many countries throughout the world.
A reality of the twenty-first century: The United States has to manage its foreign policy resources more carefully. That means we will likely do fewer massive military operations like Iraq. That's good though, isn’t it? Those kinds of operations have proven to be incredibly expensive and rarely produced the benefits that justified the costs.
This is not to say that America will become isolationist. We have, for example, achieved a good outcome in Libya with far fewer dollars and lives lost than we did in Iraq. We've shared the responsibility with other stakeholders, the Europeans.
Geo-politically, this is all fine and dandy, but what about at home? By spending trillions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we fell in areas at home like education, innovation and infrastructure. Pundits disagree about what the Obama Doctrine is, or if one even exists. For our country’s sake, let’s hope this doctrine begins and ends by first asking this question before invading any country or territory:
Could an intervention be successful while keeping costs under control - both human and financial?
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The Takeaway: We need to invest more at home and more shrewdly abroad.
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