It would be no exaggeration to say that Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class made possible for the first time the scientific study of culture. The ideologies that arise from time to time to justify the peculiar, useless or destructive tastes of a particular class—from barbarian warriors (Song of Roland) and effete gentlemen (Newman’s Idea of the University) to moralistic meritocrats (Stuff White People Like)—all these Veblen exposed as nonsense. It is not the mysterious movements of the human soul that produces culture but rather the need to signal one’s dominance over others.
Reading Matthew Yglesias’s new book, Heads in the Sands: How Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws up Democrats, I wonder if Veblen’s theories can also help us to understand American foreign policy. The traditional international relations theories that Yglesias discusses (realism, institutionalism, liberal internationalism and so forth) all seem outdated. Each purports to explain how nations go about ensuring their security. These days, however, for reasons having little to do with the structure of the international system, nations can increasingly take their security for granted.
For one thing, human beings aren’t producing enough young men to make aggressive war worthwhile. Families in the developed world today are lucky to have one son at all. With so few young men to spare, nations have become unwilling to suffer the casualties that aggressive war entails.
Second, the heroic nationalism that once inspired young men to die in foreign wars is decaying. American soldiers, upon command, may still go off to die in places that they know or care little about, but not many Europeans (for example) will do that sort of thing anymore. Warfare seems to be returning to its more natural, intimate state, where the victims of war (such as in Iraq) tend to know their killers personally.
Finally, the costs of aggressive war have become too high and the benefits (if any) too insignificant to justify. Occupying powers (even, on many occasions, the United States) tend to just get tired and leave, as the French left Algeria and the Israelis left Lebanon. Unlike in the past, most nations today can be reasonably confident that their neighbors are not seriously interested in invading them.
For these reasons, most nations’ security risks are trivial at best. Yet the United States still devotes a significant portion of its wealth to military spending and picks a new place in which to intervene about three or four times a decade. If these policies do nothing to improve American security, what inspires them?
Perhaps, to take a cue from Veblen, it’s nothing more than the status-mongering of American elites. American policymakers like to say, in effect: “We are so rich and powerful that we can meddle anywhere we like, waste trillions of dollars doing it and get thousands of our soldiers killed. The terrorism our civilians suffer in consequence is no more than a nuisance that doesn’t bother us much at all. That is just how rich and powerful we are.”
O, reason not the need for America’s foreign policies? In the end, they may amount to no more than conspicuous consumption.
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