America Second

The view that the primary aim of U.S. foreign policy ought to be advancing U.S. interests is wrong

Watching the Republican debates recently, I was struck by what was a consistent view among the candidates, that despite being seemingly universally adhered to was just downright psychopathic. That view is the idea that the aim of U.S. foreign policy should be solely to advance U.S. interests. Vivek Ramaswamy and Desantis opposed arming Ukraine on the grounds that Ukraine fails to serve American interests.

I do not plan to address the question of whether arming Ukraine is legitimate. My gripe is instead with the moral notion underlying this opposition—that the U.S. ought only serve itself. This is frequently repeated in U.S. politics—I remember hearing Buttigieg say it a few years back, and even the most sensible political commentators like Daniel Larrison sometimes say it (I can’t find an exact quote of Larrison saying it, but I distinctly remember him saying it—if I made that up then sorry!).

This is a very common talking point, often asserted without argument (as is true of nearly all talking points). But I think it’s totally indefensible. Where a person lives is totally irrelevant to our moral obligations to them. The life of a Cuban or Ugandan or Mexican or Russian is just as valuable as the life of an American. If we can save two people from Sierra Leone or one person from the U.S., assuming the people are relevantly alike, it seems intuitively like we should save the two people from Sierra Leone. It’s better to do more good rather than less.

There are lots of decent practical objections to arming Ukraine. But the moral one seems to be dangerously deluded. If we can prevent hundreds of thousands or millions of people from being massacred, at the cost of a tiny fraction of the federal budget, we should do so. Our invasion in World War 2 was good, and it would have been even if it hadn’t served U.S. interests, simply because it prevented the spread of brutal fascism and shortened the holocaust. Any view of foreign policy that says that actions like that aren’t worth taking unless they serve U.S. interests is bankrupt.

I’ve elsewhere argued against all kinds of special obligations. Each of the arguments given in that piece is applicable here. In particular, the America first view of foreign policy violates the Pareto principle which says that if something is good for some people and bad for no one it is good overall.

Suppose that allowing a person to immigrate to the U.S. would give that person a benefit of one unit. Suppose that once they’re here, we can endure a cost of 4 units to benefit them by 3 units. Assume we have an obligation to do that for our citizens but not foreigners. Suppose that we are not obligated to endure 4 units of cost to give foreigners 4 units of benefit. This would imply that it would be wrong to allow them to immigrate here, even if it benefits them and harms no one, because this would then cause us to incur new obligations which we’d follow and would culminate in us enduring 4 units of cost to give them 4 units of benefit.

The America first idea makes a good slogan, especially when applied to foreign policy. It gets applause easily—the victims of it can’t vote, after all. If you proposed benefitting current kids at the expense of adults, you’d get loud applause in an elementary school, and similarly, if you propose putting America first, it’s not surprising that Americans like that idea. But despite its allure, it implies very implausible moral claims, especially when, at its most strident, it claims that we have no non-self-interested obligations to the rest of the world.