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People in Washington love to debate threats. Which country or organization is the greatest danger to the United States? Is it Russia, with its massive nuclear arsenal and expansionist tendencies? Is it China, which seems poised to snuff out Taiwan’s noble experiment in democracy? What about Iran, our longtime Middle Eastern bête noire? If you’re in an early-2000s kind of mood, then maybe you’ll argue the real threat is Islamic extremism, as advanced by such venerable transnational baddies as al-Qaeda and ISIS. The reality is that each of those seemingly perennial security challenges pales in comparison with the greatest threat to American security and prosperity: U.S. policymakers.

Let’s engage in a thought experiment. Imagine for a moment if, after the Cold War, the United States had brought its troops home? What if we had returned to our pre-WWII foreign policy roots and worked very hard at minding our own business?

Imagine if President George H.W. Bush, rather than quickly picking up the cause of crusading for a “new world order,” had shrugged his shoulders when one autocracy conquered another in the Middle East in August of 1990. Imagine if we had not deployed 500,000 American soldiers to Saudi Arabia to fight a former friendly country—i.e., Iraq—and then compounded that error by keeping our forces there after defeating our new “enemy.”

Would 9/11 have happened? We can’t know for certain, of course, but what we do know is that our campaign to “liberate” Kuwait, and the long-term military deployment to Saudi Arabia that followed, did nothing to protect Americans, who were more exposed than ever to the lunacy that radiates from the heart of the Islamic world. Whether we’re talking about the attack on the Khobar Towers, the bombing of the USS Cole, or the deadliest attack on America of all time, 9/11, our commitments in the Middle East were themselves a source of danger for Americans both overseas and at home.

From the “good Gulf War,” we can draw an unbroken line to George W. Bush’s disastrous bid in 2003 to finally render the world “safe for democracy” through an ill-conceived bid to force regime change in Iraq. That a decade of debilitating sanctions had left Iraq spiritually and financially broken, with a per capita income lower than Angola’s, was immaterial. It wasn’t Iraqi strength that made it an ideal target for the high priests of post–Cold War liberalism in D.C.; rather it was Iraq’s weakness. It is no happenstance that Saddam Hussein—head of a feeble pariah state—was targeted for overthrow, even as Kim Jong Il was courted for negotiation through multilateral engagement.

Gulf War part 2—i.e., the “bad Gulf War”—wrought tremendous chaos. If the consequences of Bush the Elder’s foreign policy had been subtly corrosive, the failures of Bush the Younger and his coterie were quickly obvious to all but the most committed neoconservatives. Apart from the catastrophically costly insurgency and civil war that claimed the lives of 200,000 natives and 4,431 Americans, there were costly second-order effects, almost none of which can be viewed as contributing to U.S. interests.

Setting aside the most obvious outgrowths of America’s misadventure in Iraq, including the founding of ISIS and the ascendance of Iran as a regional power, even the most positive of the downstream effects, Arab Spring, did little to benefit the Arab world and nothing to make Americans safer or more prosperous. Only in Tunisia did democracy take root, but even there the legacy is a mixed one. In Libya, Syria, and Yemen, life is worse now—in some cases much worse—thanks to Arab Spring and the political changes American leaders insisted would benefit everyone. In other cases, such as Egypt, disorder and regime change led not to a new liberal order, but to a brief flirtation with illiberal democracy, followed by a return of authoritarian rule, albeit under new management.

You might be thinking that it is unfair for me to focus on the obvious failures associated with America’s Middle East policy. So, let’s zoom out and assess the legacy of that other great American foreign policy project of the 21st century—the engineering of a liberal democratic, multiethnic state in Afghanistan. After spending $2.313 trillion over the course of two decades and sacrificing 2,354 American lives, the U.S. government and its NATO allies fled Afghanistan in 2021, paving the way for a return to power of the Taliban…you know, the very regime we invaded to depose in the first place. Adding to our humiliation, the U.S. government left behind around $7 billion in arms that were eagerly snatched up by our enemies.

Again, you may be thinking my analysis is unfair, and that we shouldn’t focus too much on what amounts to good-faith errors on the part of our foreign policy establishment—no matter how much blood and treasure was expended along the way. To this, I would say that the wreckage left in the wake of our foreign policy elite extends beyond Southwest Asia and North Africa.

Do you remember that time we bombed Serbia into submission so that a restive minority group could secede and take with them the spiritual heartland of the Serbian people? What about the time we decided we would save Somalia, so we intervened in a complex multiparty civil war—got a bunch of people killed—and then ran for the door when we realized our mistake? And don’t forget the first time we bombed the Serbs. That also involved intervening in a complex multiparty civil war that few Americans understood. But we knew one thing—that democracy and human rights are worth dying for, provided the people doing the dying are white, working-class Americans and foreigners.

Some will say that all the above interventions were justifiable on humanitarian grounds. Slaughters like the Srebrenica massacre should never be tolerated, particularly on NATO’s doorstep. Fair enough, I don’t like it when innocents are abused and slaughtered either, but I would ask the reader to keep two things in mind:

(1) Very seldom do international conflicts have good guys and bad guys. To be sure, one group might be more objectionable than another, but very seldom are international disputes true Manichean struggles. In the case of the war in Bosnia, while the Serbs were responsible for a greater number of atrocities, the Croats and Bosniaks were themselves guilty of heinous war crimes. In the case of the Bosniaks, jihadists flocked to the Balkans to fight on their behalf. Osama bin Laden may have personally visited the region and met with Bosniak leader Alija Izetbegovic.

(2) There was no critical American interest at stake in any of the conflicts mentioned above. As tragic as the Balkan calamity was, the fate of Bosnia never should have been an American concern. This is not because American policymakers should go about their work as unfeeling robots, but because the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The seemingly compelling logic of intervention in places like Bosnia and Somalia (i.e., that civilized people do what they can to stop barbarism and help those in need) draws policymakers away from their true responsibility, which should always be the furtherance of the real-world interests of the American people. It is this sort of guiding logic that leads our ruling elites to place the interests of foreigners in exotic places over Americans. It makes perfect sense, then, that even as uncounted Americans were suffering and dying in Appalachia in the wake of Hurricane Helene, the first question asked in the vice presidential debate was about Israel. Consider also that we may lack the on-hand power grid resources needed to quickly repair parts of the power grid affected by Helene because we have—as noted by other observers—been gifting them to Ukraine.

And now, after having amassed a body count approaching one million over the past few decades, and with less than nothing to show for their labors, American policymakers are champing at the bit to fight new wars in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. The arguments they make are familiar. The “enemy” is cast as an inhuman monster (e.g., the “Putler” phenomenon); we’re told that we have obligations to “allies”; and that our prosperity depends on our willingness to do battle against aggressive, illiberal forces. The problem is that it’s all a lie.

Russia, which showed itself incapable of conquering a third-rate military power right on its doorstep in 2022, is supposed to somehow be a threat to the United States and our Western European allies—just as Saddam Hussein’s hollowed-out Iraq was a “grave threat to peace.” Israel is a “key ally” that must be defended, although Israel has never committed troops to fight in any of America’s forever wars. And we must be prepared to fight a war against a nuclear-armed China for the sake of semiconductor plants on Taiwan and of course because we just love democracy. This despite the fact that it was the shortsighted, ideologically driven economic policies of American elites that hollowed out our manufacturing in the first place—creating the very dependency on Taiwan they now claim makes the fate of the island a vital concern.

Thankfully, more and more Americans no longer buy the lies. In part, this is probably because they are just transparently false. Fewer people are prepared to accept the story that we live in an ever more dangerous international system, and instead embrace the reality that America is geographically blessed, and while Russian intentions may weigh heavily on the minds of Latvians, they need not trouble the average person who, rightly, is more concerned about things that actually matter, like the price of groceries. It is these folks who have woken up to the reality that the greatest threat to our people doesn’t come from foreign powers; it comes from our own leaders.