US officials are keeping very busy in the world. Yet very few of Washington’s actions have much to do with protecting America. Instead, the foreign policy establishment believes that its primary role is to run the world.

The Department of Defense was originally known as the Department of War, a far more accurate name. If DOD defends anything today, it is client states overseas. Called ‘allies’, most are security liabilities, threatening to drag America into wars which they are unwilling to fight themselves.

Such is the case of Ukraine. Stuck in a bad neighbourhood, it faces a limited invasion by Russia. Such a conflict, though horrific, would have little direct impact on America. In fact, the US has long been thankfully aloof from terrible wars that ravaged other nations and regions.

For instance, from 1967 to 1970, Nigeria battled a secessionist movement which founded the Republic of Biafra. Tens of thousands died in battle. Up to two million civilians also died, mostly from starvation. Americans barely noticed. In 1971, India intervened in a genocidal Pakistani civil war, in which the military, controlled by a West Pakistani elite, murdered as many as three million Bengali Pakistanis. Later that decade came the mad Khmer Rouge, who slaughtered as many as two million out of a Cambodian population of barely eight million. In the 1980s, Iraq and Iran battled old-style, with trenches and human wave tactics. Total deaths ran around a half million. The 1990s featured horrific conflicts in the Balkans, Liberia, Rwanda and Sudan. Up into the 2000s, the Democratic Republic of Congo was the epicentre of a multi-sided international war that killed as many as six million people, the most since World War II. The 2010s featured the Syrian civil war, in which hundreds of thousands died.

All of these were terrible, costly, criminal, tragic conflicts. None much affected America. That reflected the reality which the foreign policy establishment continues to do its best to hide, that the US is extraordinarily safe, probably the most secure great power ever. The US enjoys vast oceans east and west, and weak Pacific neighbours north and south. America dominates the Western Hemisphere, which made it so difficult for the Soviet Union to turn communist revolutions, like the one in Cuba, into military gains during the Cold War.

This safety at home allowed the US to be a minor military power until World War II. The nation’s founders feared a standing army. When danger loomed, the new country relied on sometimes barely functional militias and an expanded regular army. That system proved sufficient to defeat the British invasion in the War of 1812, but not to seize Canada; steadily but not easily drive Indian tribes off their ancestral lands and grab half of Mexico. During the Civil War, the US briefly became a great power with a large army and navy, but rapidly demobilised afterwards.

The Spanish-American War solidified US domination of the Western Hemisphere and launched the once small republic on the eastern seaboard as a Pacific power. However, Washington emphasised naval power, which reinforced the American mainland’s security and thus security from Europe’s large land powers. The US briefly mobilised for World War I, but afterwards returned to North America. Not until 1940 did Washington begin a global advance that essentially never stopped.