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America Can’t Intervene Everywhere. Where Should It? Isaac Grafstein
This time last year, Russia-Ukraine was the hot war du jour, and officials were hectoring the Israelis for the crime of not shipping weapons to Kyiv.
Congressman Michael Turner, of the House Intelligence and House Armed Services committees, lectured: “This is the time for all democracies and all individual countries that have a moral compass to stand together against this type of brutality.”
And Ukraine’s embassy in Israel blasted Jerusalem in a statement this summer: “We urge Israel government to change its position and to support Ukraine with defensive means, to support freedom and democratic world order. We expect Israel to be on the right side of history!”
Now that Hamas has brutally attacked Israel, murdering, raping, and taking hostage thousands of innocent civilians—and as Hezbollah launches missiles into Northern Israel from Lebanon and Syria fires rockets into the Golan Heights—it is abundantly clear that the Jewish state is in for a long and difficult war. What’s even clearer: Israel’s decision to save its arms has proven prescient.
This strategic foresight stands in stark contrast to the United States, which severely depleted its munitions stores that were stationed in Israel earlier this year. These weapons could have been used to advance American interests in the Middle East, but were instead diverted to Ukraine.
These two approaches—one of pragmatic restraint and the other of reflexive power projection—bring into stark relief a long-standing battle of ideas about the right way to design a national security strategy. Today, as the U.S. promises to support both Israel and Ukraine in hot wars, that debate is not theoretical, but practical and urgent.
The conventional wisdom in Washington—embraced by policymakers across the political spectrum—was well-summarized by Joe Biden late last week in an address to the nation pleading for $100 billion in additional military aid to go to both Ukraine and Israel.
“We know that our allies, and maybe most importantly our adversaries and competitors, are watching,” he said. “If we walk away and let Putin erase Ukraine’s independence, would-be aggressors around the world would be emboldened to try the same. The risk of conflict and chaos could spread in other parts of the world, in the Indo-Pacific and especially the Middle East.”
This view of deterrence—that any sign of weakness in one region signals a broader weakness to our adversaries around the world—is shared by many prominent Republicans. Days before Hamas launched its barbaric attack, onstage at the second GOP primary debate Nikki Haley chastised her primary opponent Vivek Ramaswamy for advocating for a diplomatic resolution to the war in Ukraine. “A win for Russia is a win for China,” she said. Mike Pence chimed in too: “Vivek, if you let Putin have Ukraine, that’s a green light to China to take Taiwan! Peace comes through strength!”
In the days after the attack, they doubled down. Haley wrote in the New York Post: “Biden’s weakness on Moscow and Tehran has strengthened Beijing—which is hosting Putin as I write—and endangered America. America is strong enough to hold China, Russia, and Iran accountable at the same time.”
This view—that the United States is strong and capable enough to do everything, everywhere, all at once—has been the consensus in Washington since 9/11. With rare exception, that view goes like this: the United States must be the world’s policeman. We can—and must—fight on multiple fronts in order to keep the global balance of power from tilting to our adversaries. And, most significantly, there are seemingly no limitations on our ability to do so. (Israel, which is surrounded by adversaries and under constant threat, has a profound awareness of limitations when it comes to defense.)
But the dam in Washington is beginning to break.
A growing number of policymakers and analysts believe that, despite the muscular rhetoric from the White House, the reality is far graver. With a gutted industrial base, a weak president, and a rival in China unlike any we have seen since World War II, America’s power is scarce. Conserving our physical, material capabilities, they argue, is what matters for deterrence. Not some abstract idea of credibility.
For evidence of this shift, look no further than a bill introduced to the Senate on Thursday by Senator Roger Marshall, co-sponsored by Senators J.D. Vance, Mike Lee, and Ted Cruz. The bill comes after a memo circulated in the Senate earlier this week by Vance, called “Differentiating Ukraine and Israel.” In it, he objects to the Biden administration’s effort to connect funding for both countries, arguing that their respective war efforts are fundamentally different. Helping to secure the Gaza Strip, Vance writes, is more achievable and more important for American interests than helping to recover Ukrainian territory, which would require decades of sustained conflict at the current pace.
The bill, whose arguments have been echoed by Senators Josh Hawley, Rick Scott, and others in recent days, reflects the fundamental divide between the old, abundance-driven mindset and the emerging call for strategic prioritization.
“I think that a lot of them grew up in an era when America was the dominant power. They’re thinking about the world in 1990s or 2000s terms, where it’s America, nobody else, and we’re the global hegemon. And I think for a lot of them, it is psychologically hard to wake up in a world that actually exists in 2023, where our constraints are very real,” Vance told me.
Partly those constraints are the result of decisions that they made over the past decades, Vance argued. “It requires them to look in the mirror and acknowledge that they allowed the world superpower to become an economy that can’t even manufacture enough artillery shells. That’s very hard to recognize. It’s very hard to look in the mirror and say America is constrained in part because I made mistakes. It’s much easier to pretend that those constraints don’t exist and hope that reality never hits you in the face.”
So what are those constraints?
The main one is the deterioration of our defense industrial base, which Deputy Defense Secretary William Perry first warned about in 1993 when he informed the defense establishment at a Pentagon dinner that they were facing an era of massive consolidation. Since then, reduced manufacturing capabilities and supply chain issues have diminished our ability to build key weapons systems. The number of suppliers of solid rocket motors, for example, has plummeted in the last few decades.
According to Raytheon, it will take several years to resupply the Stingers, Javelins, and other precision missiles that have been sent to Ukraine in the last year. Right now, Taiwan has about $19 billion in equipment orders that will likely remain backlogged for years. Already, the United States is rapidly diverting 155-millimeter artillery shells that were originally intended for Ukraine to Israel due to the drawdown on U.S stockpiles.
Vance emphasized to me that it’s not billions of dollars that Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan need—it’s weapons. And you can throw money at the problem, but unless you actually rebuild the capacity to supply multiple countries, you’re not going to be able to do much with that money.
“Even if you pressed a button tomorrow, making Congress functional, making Joe Biden effective, and increasing our defense industrial capacity, it would still take years to get to a point where we can effectively supply both Taiwan and Ukraine,” he said.
Why can’t we rapidly ramp up production? “We are literally talking about rocket science,” a national security expert on Capitol Hill told me. “These are exquisite, precision-engineered systems produced by highly skilled technicians. You can’t just repurpose a pencil factory.”
The decrease in our stock of munitions is alarming because it compromises America’s ability to protect our core interests. For years, protecting Taiwan from a Chinese invasion has been of paramount concern. The island nation is of devastating importance to the United States as a critical supplier of the microchips we depend on and as a bulwark against our main economic rival’s hegemony in Asia. Imagine a scenario in which China invades Taiwan and we have completely used up Patriot missiles, HIMARS, and artillery shells, leaving us unable to help defend the island. Say goodbye to American economic growth—to everything from modern home appliances to smartphones—to say nothing of national security.
Figures like Biden, Haley, and Pence insist that supporting Ukraine is critical to deter the Chinese from invading Taiwan. But the U.S. has provided $113 billion in military aid to Ukraine since the war broke out in February 2022, and there is no indication that Xi Jinping’s plans for Taiwan have shifted—that “peace through strength” has worked.
Instead, the People’s Liberation Army is continuing its aggressive activities in the Taiwan Strait. Ely Ratner, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, acknowledged this recently. One Republican senator’s national security adviser told me: “The PRC is developing a network of bases, which they had never done before, overseas in the Middle East and the Atlantic coast of Africa. They’re practicing amphibious invasions. They’re practicing airborne assaults. They are rapidly developing a nuclear arsenal to rival our own. These are very clear indications of China’s intentions.”
Some point out that all of these fights are interconnected, noting that China and Iran, for example, have been critical sources of support to Russia throughout its campaign in Ukraine. And in Israel, Hamas fighters were trained by Iran and reportedly used North Korean weaponry.
All true. Of course our enemies forge alliances with one another—they all want to displace America as the world superpower. In order not to let them do so, it is crucial that we allocate resources, public support, and focus where they matter most. Getting embroiled in too many conflicts that do not directly impact our interests only helps this alliance of enemies. Not all regions hold the same strategic importance for the United States.
While the slogan “our adversaries are watching” is certainly accurate, some in Washington contend that our enemies are not watching to gauge some abstract idea of American resolve. Elbridge Colby, a deputy assistant secretary of defense under Trump, told me that in reality, when planning an invasion of Taiwan, China is looking at the military balance in the region. And when it comes to actual ships and forces around Taiwan, the PRC greatly outnumbers the USA. This is a dangerous state of affairs.
In the wake of Hamas’s attack, the hawks are finding their voices once again. They believe America can show no weakness. But exhibiting restraint does not necessarily signal weakness. It can also signal strategy.
In this precarious moment, let us learn from Israel, take stock of our limitations, remember that decisions about our defense capabilities are zero-sum, and remain clear-eyed about our core interests.
Isaac Grafstein is a writer and chief of staff at The Free Press.
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At the end of August, we ran a special series on What School Didn’t Teach Us, in which Joe Nocera described his path into journalism and Julia the Intern explained why she wanted to try farming before taking up her place at Stanford. (You can catch up with it.)
In response to the series, we got a letter from K.L. Evans, who homeschooled her daughter Ruby LaRocca—otherwise known as the winner of our first-ever High School Essay Contest. Last year, Ruby wrote us a gorgeous Constitution for Teenage Happiness. Reading her mother’s letter—about what you can learn in school, if you have the right teacher—we now get how Ruby ended up so wise beyond her years.
The best students are the bad ones. That was my great discovery in school. I was not belligerent or idle, just a little deviant. Dreamy. I would dodge what I was supposed to be doing and work industriously on projects that were not asked for and would never have been assigned. (Bold, unwieldy affairs that required enormous effort and patience and drew tiny audiences.) I tortured and enjoyed myself. Pondered long and earnestly on how I should make use of my life. I met with many successes but of a kind so marginal they scanned as failures. People found me charming and ridiculous.
My favorite teachers were the same: unpredictable, untidy, gifted in a way that only a handful of people appreciated. They tended to be honest, and so uncertain about their own effectiveness. Both exacting and affable. Bound absurdly to the twin demands of scholarship and art. Never friendless, but often lonely. (I know because eventually I became one of them.) I found my teachers in old books, in novels and plays and films, and occasionally in real life. Some who I knew in person were just assigned to me, and I had the good sense to cling to them like a barnacle. Some wrote books that taught me how to think, and once in a while I would be brave enough to send a letter to one of these hardworking scholars, and the most generous of them would write back. Corresponding with lively intellectuals far beyond my limited circle of acquaintance was almost as exciting as coming to understand with profit those playful, dynamic, radical works of education sometimes called “classics.”
A classic is one of those rare, synoptic books around which a whole life can evolve, or which becomes deeper as one becomes deeper. That’s why classics have what Ezra Pound calls “a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.” They do not reinforce but challenge our habitual, settled ways of thinking—which is perhaps why so many people assiduously avoid reading them. As the playwright Alan Bennett jokes, “A classic is a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have read themselves.” Of course, school is not the only place one could find readers of such books, but in my experience, school was where you found them. (Even if on the perimeter, without a formal position.)
My point is that the experience of formal education missing from the Editors’ recent investigation into “What School Didn’t Teach You” is the one clung to by the most serious teachers and students: Those eccentrics and oddballs who associate school with the charged, productive space one person opens up for another. The philosopher Stanley Cavell said a teacher is any person who “shows one a way to do relevantly and fruitfully the thing one had almost given up hope of doing.” According to this view, “school” is where students find (only by looking) teachers (not all, not most, but a small, animated faction) game to ward off the stultifying atmosphere in which educators take up a mode of explanation premised on students’ inability—in which teaching assumes the form, “I must explain this to you, since you cannot understand it yourself.” Most people feel fondly about school in proportion to how much they practiced thinking, unraveling difficulties, for themselves.
Schooling as I experienced it and tried to re-create for my students felt less conventional, more bohemian than the kind of pre-professional training the contributors to your series rightly fled—for the farm, the newsroom, or the workshop. A very clever friend of mine (one of those brilliant, legendary, unemployed intellectuals happily occupying what John Ashbery calls the “category of oblivion which increasingly threatens any artist who dares to take his own way”) says that human genius is like grass breaking through concrete; it persists even in situations of institutional hostility. School is and ought to be the straining, daring green and the crushing pavement—minus which the grass ain’t so beautiful.
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When I joined The Free Press—then called Common Sense—as an intern in 2021, it was run out of a family group chat. Literally.
Texts about what story from the news should we commission mingled with what we should order for dinner, and who was picking up the baby. There was no office, no HR department, and inevitably we went with Thai.
I scored the job the way most Free Pressers do: a cold email. In mine, I wrote about losing friends, grades, and party invites because I was too stubborn—or perhaps too foolish—to censor myself on campus. I told Bari I’d be willing to sweep the floors.
Instead, in my first week on the job, I sat in on an interview with Kim Kardashian from my dorm room. It was the most fun I had in my four years at college in the Covid era. And not just because my personal hero was on the other side of the camera—Kim, not Bari—but because it was the first time in a long time I hadn’t felt alone.
Overnight, I was working with people who left their jobs at places like The New York Times and NPR and Vanity Fair because, like me, they no longer belonged in the places that they worked so hard to get to. They became the most valuable mentors any young person could imagine.
That summer I flew to California and became the first Free Press intern. It was. . . informal. My official interview was with Suzy on FaceTime. Early on I had to Uber a microphone from Andrew Sullivan’s house to Larry Summers’ for a podcast recording. I’ve taken out the trash and furnished an entire newsroom from Facebook Marketplace. I’ve traveled to Israel to cover the war in Gaza and to Palo Alto for an interview with Javier Milei.
We’ve buttoned things up a bit since I started. And we’ve grown. A lot.
I have watched that little family group chat—and an office that was Bari and Nellie’s kitchen table—grow into a full-fledged newsroom. We still think of ourselves as an island of misfit toys, but when I really look, I see a hotbed of journalistic talent, doing agenda-setting reporting. I see an 800,000-person strong community of engaged, freethinking subscribers from all over the world. And we’ve found young journalists who embody our values: honesty, curiosity, respect, hard work, independence, excellence, common sense, and a belief in the American project.
So today, we are thrilled to announce a new initiative: The Free Press Fellowship. It’s a two-year program for reporters and writers eager to pursue the kind of journalism that makes The Free Press live up to its name.
The 2024–2025 Free Press Fellows are:
Julia Steinberg (known far and wide as Julia the Intern) has been with The Free Press since her sophomore year of college. In those two years, she has answered all of your “Where I TGs,” testified before Congress, and reported on the ground at the DNC. As a rising senior at Stanford, she will serve as the editor of The Stanford Review.
Here’s Julia on her time at The Free Press: “This was my second summer at The Free Press. I chose to come back—and work part-time during the craziest school year I could imagine—because I was not treated with kid gloves. Interns are trusted to to pitch, report, and write stories, script podcasts, take on business projects, create videos, and so much more. (And yes, sometimes we make coffee.)”
Evan Gardner, a rising senior at Brown, has also been at The Free Press for two years. In that time, he spearheaded our Olympics coverage, traveled to Nashville to cover country music concerts, and installed Ethernet in our new New York offices. (Thank you, Evan!)
Here’s Evan: “I’ve learned how to follow an exciting idea from the chaos of my Notes app all the way to something worthy of the pages of The Free Press. My writing and my thinking have become more expansive, yet precise. Around the clock, there is never a dull moment with this lean but strong team, and there’s no place I’d rather be as we continue to bring you the history—and the madness—unfolding before us. I’ve never consumed this much Diet Coke in my life. I couldn’t be happier doing it.”
Elias Wachtel came to us this summer after finishing his junior year at Columbia, where he studies ancient Greek and classical political philosophy. He wrote about his time on the Appalachian trail and called for Gen Z to turn to national service. He commissioned freelance pieces, worked with editors, and contributed reporting to stories on West Virginia’s opioid settlement distribution and the psychological strain on elite gymnasts.
Here’s Elias: “The most remarkable thing about interning with The Free Press is that they really care about hearing from us. I was shocked when I first learned I’d be allowed to write and publish this summer—in what other internship is that even possible? Before I started working here, I had been a longtime reader of The Free Press. At first, I was almost scared to see what it was like behind the scenes, lest I uncover some hidden angle, some well-kept secret that would shatter my faith in the project. But the wonderful thing about The Free Press is that it’s just what it promises to be: a small team of fiercely independent, curious thinkers who want to bring you the truth, each and every day.”
Jonas Du became a Free Press intern through a Twitter DM he sent to Bari while reporting the Columbia campus protests back in May.
In his time at The Free Press, Jonas has responded to an Atlantic article that argued conservatives benefit from the hostile environment of liberal college campuses, written about why the “authentic” social media app BeReal faltered, and appeared on NewsNation to talk about what young voters want from Harris and Trump.
“When you’re part of a company that’s truly new and disruptive, you can feel it every day. That’s why working at The Free Press this summer has been the best internship experience I could have wished for. After only a few months at The Free Press, it’s hard to imagine working for the legacy media. Every day, I see the real-world impact that reporters, editors, and producers sitting in the same room as me have on the national conversation. To be a part of that team, especially as a 21-year-old, is an opportunity I am incredibly grateful for.”
Last but not least, we are thrilled to welcome Danielle Shapiro.
Danielle is currently a senior at Princeton University, where she studies political theory and history. She is the president emeritus of the Princeton Open Campus Coalition, which is committed to truth-seeking and academic freedom. Shapiro’s summer internships, at both Tablet magazine and The Wall Street Journal opinion page, have cemented her desire to pursue a career in journalism. “As someone who has been following The Free Press since its inception, I am so excited to join a growing team of motivated and thoughtful writers,” she said.
You’ll notice that the Free Press Fellows this year are all college seniors. You need not be a college student—or have ever gone to college—to apply to the next cohort. Indeed, we are especially keen to consider college-aged applicants from nontraditional or unconventional backgrounds.
If that sounds like you, please apply here to be considered for The Free Press Fellowship program for 2025–2026.
If you’d like to support our Fellowship program, and the next generation of free-thinking journalists, become a Free Press subscriber today:
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