What level of global engagement best serves America’s core interests and global security? Is the United States too willing to engage in “interventionism” abroad? John Quincy Adams famously advised against going “abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” a charge that influential figures on both the Left and Right regularly make against American foreign policy. And as the war with Iran continues, it’s certainly a valid question to raise.
On Wednesday, I had the privilege of participating in a rousing debate on this very subject, hosted by the Munk Debate program in Toronto, where I went up against liberal neorealist academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. In line with their academic work, the professors trotted out a series of arguments against American interventionism that veered from outrageous moral relativism to their ultimate core conviction: That it is America (and Israel) that are responsible for the world’s ills.
As a practitioner, I can say confidently: America does not go looking for or create monsters to destroy, nor should it. During my time as Secretary of State, we didn’t start a single war and instead deterred many through American strength. Sometimes when we fight monsters, we do so ineffectively, or half-heartedly, or do not use the correct strategy or tools necessary to defeat them. But the nature of the world and our place in it has made our willingness to fight monsters when they rear their ugly heads an essential guarantor of our security and freedom.
Monsters are real, and history shows us that we’ll have to fight them one way or another. The question is, do we let the monsters set the terms of that fight? We let the Ayatollahs do just that for nearly 50 years. We did not want to be at war with Iran, so we pretended that the Islamic Republic was not at war with us. But in fact, that evil regime has been engaged in a war against the United States since 1979, when revolutionaries took American diplomats hostage, and then spent the next 47 years dedicating themselves to undermining America wherever possible, funding and directing terrorist attacks against Americans, and killing American servicemen across the Middle East. America did not go “searching” for a monster to slay in Iran; we’re finally fighting back after years of tolerating an intolerable status quo.
America was bitterly split over whether to support the democratic nations being swallowed up by the Axis powers, until Pearl Harbor made our entry into the war unavoidable. Isolationists told themselves that America could insulate itself from the consequences of the imperial powers set upon conquering the world. How many lives might have been saved if we had gotten serious about fighting those monsters earlier?
I served in the U.S. Army in a tank crew on the front lines of the Cold War; I’ve run the CIA and served as the Secretary of State. I know the costs imposed by war, and I know what it means to travel to Dover, Delaware, and look a relative of a fallen warrior in the eye and to say that their family member made the ultimate sacrifice. But those experiences have also taught me that monsters are real.
I wish monsters didn’t exist. But they do: And they grow when we ignore them. They win when we surrender to them. Monsters can’t be explained away. They don’t comply with international relations theory. Monsters hide in the shadows, but when they emerge into the light, their signature is unmistakable. Monsters killed millions at Auschwitz and Treblinka, starved millions more in the Holodomor and the Great Leap Forward.
Monsters are very much with us today: Their deeds are written in blood and rubble in Bucha and the Donbas; in the music silenced and young lives snuffed out on October 7; in the thousands of Iranians murdered in the streets for the crime of demanding the same rights we take for granted; and in the modern-day concentration camps of Xinjiang.
Judeo-Christian Western civilization – and basic decency – depends on a United States that fulfills its historic obligation as leader of the free world. That includes ensuring that the monsters who seek our destruction, and who make the world a more dangerous place, never prevail.
