Opinion | The World That Awaits the Next President

Some questions for the next American president:

If necessary, are you willing to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons or China from subjugating Taiwan — two events that may well take place on your watch? Will you use the threat of an arms embargo to compel Israel or Ukraine to agree to cease-fire deals they do not want? Are you prepared to increase military spending to Cold War levels to contend with great-power competitors and new asymmetric threats, such as from the Houthis?

Above all, do you believe that maintaining our global primacy is worth the price in effort, treasure and sometimes blood?

If the answer to that last question is “no” — an answer that has the virtues of honesty, modesty and frugality — then you can mostly ignore the previous questions. You can also comfort yourself with the fantasy that the world will leave us alone in exchange for us leaving it alone.

The world doesn’t work that way. Unlike, say, New Zealand, we are not a pleasant and remote country under the implicit protection of a benign ally: Nobody will protect us if we do not protect ourselves. We have globe-spanning territorial, maritime and commercial interests that require us to police the global commons against bad actors, from China in the South China Sea to Iran in the Strait of Hormuz to Russia in the cyber domain. We stand for a set of ideas, centered on human rights and personal liberties, that invariably attract the violent attention of despots and fanatics.

We’ve also tried isolationism before, in the 1920s and 1930s. It ended badly.

All these points used to be no-brainers. Not anymore. When JD Vance said in 2022 that “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” he was implicitly suggesting that he was — or was at least close to — rejecting the costs of global primacy. When Kamala Harris said in 2020 that “I unequivocally agree with the goal of reducing the defense budget and redirecting funding to communities in need,” she was, too.

Both these statements were foolish when they were made. Now they’re dangerous. Russia, Iran, North Korea and China have joined hands in a vast Axis of Aggression that finds victims from Kharkiv to Tel Aviv to the Spratly Islands off the Philippines. Beijing has doubled its nuclear arsenal in recent years and may double it again by the end of the decade. Tehran’s nuclear breakout time — the time needed to produce a bomb’s worth of weapons-grade uranium, though not a bomb itself — is “now probably one or two weeks,” according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Moscow seems to have pressed pause on its plans to arm the Houthis with missiles, but the threat of it gives the Kremlin leverage elsewhere in the world.