For the whole of my adult working life, the discussions among the American foreign policy elite have had a cartoonish quality, amounting to highly stylized posturing, not remotely approximating the reality of the country’s actual place in the world. This intellectual flabbiness was mitigated by the fact that, because the U.S. was then far and away the dominant force on the planet, it could survive a great deal of analytical error.

Get the Somalia intervention wrong? It didn’t matter, because the U.S. was the only true superpower in the world. Utterly cock up the Haiti intervention? Again, strategically unimportant because there was no peer superpower competitor nipping at America’s heels. But the days of wine and roses are well and truly over for a U.S. moving into an age characterized by great power competition. The time when it was all right to be entirely wrong about the country’s foreign policy is over, just as the strategic “give” that America enjoyed is over with China’s rise to superpower status.

The two cartoons that have bedeviled U.S. foreign policy would be laughable if they were not so prevalent among the American establishment. On the one hand, you have the Wilsonian hawks on the left and neo-conservatives on the right, who never met a foreign policy intervention they didn’t like; they consider every foreign problem somehow to be a vital American interest. But to care about everything means that, in practice, you end up valuing nothing, making no strategic distinctions at all, never having to make hard, real-world choices. In saying that all foreign policy problems are vital, the “always-interventionists” have doomed America to one foreign policy failure after another, be it Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya.

This tribe has never heard of imperial overstretch, utterly ignores the country’s unimaginable $32 trillion deficit ($98,000 per person in the U.S.), the opioid crisis that has killed more Americans than died in World War II, the country’s crumbling roads, laughably substandard schools, and rusting infrastructure. They seem to care far more about peripheral foreign concerns than the welfare of the hard-pressed American people at home. But history makes it clear, from the Roman Empire onto the present day, that an overly-promiscuous foreign policy inevitably leads to domestic decay and national decline.

Despite all obvious facts to the contrary, Wilsonian hawks and neocons have urged the United States to “do whatever it takes” to support Ukraine, a country that until they discovered it had no real history of importance to America whatsoever.

Yet, despite sending $114 billion of American taxpayers’ money to Ukraine, the best that the dominant interventionist cabal has managed is to buy itself a stalemate in the war there. Unencumbered by any form of self-reflection at being analytically wrong over the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, the always-interventionists are gearing up to make Ukraine the next American trillion-dollar expenditure for negligible strategic gains. Chinese Communist Party leaders must be laughing themselves silly.

On the other hand, and equally wrongheaded, is the view that the U.S. need never intervene in the world at all, sitting comfortably behind the strategic moats that are the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The only reason the isolationist grouping is less heinous than the always-interventionists is that this is very much the minority view among the Washington foreign policy elite. Nevertheless, largely due to the obvious follies of the neocons and their ilk, isolationism may be making a comeback.

Such a view is just as cartoonish and  poisonous for the U.S. Like it or not — and history always works like this — we are where we are: The United States is presently the preeminent power in the world. However, with the rise of China to a peer superpower competitor, there are only three choices for how the new era will evolve at the grand strategic level. Either we will live in a largely American-ordered world, a Chinese-ordered world, or we will live in chaos. Anyone not preferring the first has been sitting in the safety of a French café for far too long.

To take our ball and go home, to decree in practice — and neither side will ever admit they are absolutists about American intervention, though many are in both camps — that the U.S. simply has no interest in defending the global order it has constructed over eight decades, is to consign the world to China’s domination. As the Uyghurs, Tibetans and students in Hong Kong will tell you, that is not a reality in which anyone wants to live.

So, how to thread the needle between these two dangerous cartoons of perpetual intervention and perpetual non-intervention? Fortunately, as is so often the case if one bothers to look, American history provides the answer in the “Roosevelt Rule” for how to run a grown-up foreign policy fit for purpose in our new era.

As the clouds of global war gathered ominously in the late 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt, that idiosyncratic genius, felt his way toward a geostrategic rule that still ought to guide American foreign policy in this new era. This is because America’s basic position in the world has not varied, despite all the tumult, since those fateful days.

FDR saw that the great Eurasian landmass has the most people, resources and economic wherewithal in the world, and because of the unchanging nature of geography, it always will. As such, American foreign policy at the grand strategic level is simple: However dominant the U.S. is in the Western Hemisphere, it is a lesser landmass, being merely a strategic periphery off the main Eurasian world-island. To maintain U.S. preeminence in the world, neither portion of Eurasia (Europe or Asia) can be dominated by any other single great power.

The Roosevelt Rule explains why U.S. intervention in WWII made sense strategically, as Nazi Germany — and to a lesser extent, Imperial Japan — endeavored to dominate a portion of the all-important Eurasian landmass. America was right to geostrategically intervene in both cases.

The Roosevelt Rule still works in today’s world. Russia is no threat to dominate Europe — it cannot even subdue Kyiv, let alone threaten Berlin, Rome or Paris — so U.S. involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict should be limited. On the other hand, a China in possession of Taiwan would come to dominate first the Indo-Pacific, the region from which much of the world’s future growth will emanate, and then the whole of the Asian continent. This would be nothing less than a geostrategic disaster for America.

Based on the Roosevelt Rule, it is Taiwan — not Ukraine — where American strategic thinking must focus. We live in a world where we must acknowledge limits, make strategic choices, and set priorities. The Roosevelt Rule is a grown-up response to the challenges of this era, moving us away from the cartoonish thinking that has plagued U.S. foreign policy analysis for as long as I can remember.   

John C. Hulsman, Ph.D., is founder and managing partner of John C. Hulsman Enterprises, a global political risk firm. His latest book, “The Last Best Hope: A History of American Realism,” will be released in January 2024. His other work can be found at: johnhulsman.substack.com.

This piece was originally published in The Messenger.