Military force abroad can only secure what a domestic and international political environment can tolerate. The United States is reviled today around the world because it started a war of choice (not demonstrably related to the terror threat to its own homeland) that was a total fiasco for several years, opening the door to chaos and killing over a hundred thousand Iraqis in the process -- and, not so incidentally, costing the American people a trillion dollars by some estimates.
If we believe that represents a viable way to produce rights and democracy, notwithstanding the world's rejection of the method, then we are out of step with what George Washington called on Americans to have: "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." Americans do not have their freedom solely because they have military power, as if they lived in a fortress. We have our freedom primarily because our values, our diplomacy, our commerce, and our culture have largely created the kind of global society --developing now for a generation -- in which we can and must necessarily live, at peace, in the future. If we use our military power in a way that makes the rest of the world disregard all those other things that we offer to the world, and distrust us because we shoot first and ask questions later, we will indeed be in constant peril.
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