A generation ago, it was common to joke about beauty pageant contestants aspiring to “world peace.” The phrase became shorthand for naïveté—a goal so unattainable that even invoking it invited mild ridicule. Yet beneath the joke was an important assumption: peace remained the aspiration. However imperfectly, it was understood as the condition toward which serious nations ought to aim.
No one believed human nature had changed. Conflict, rivalry, and violence were constants of history. But there remained a broad belief—particularly among Western democracies—that strength existed, at least in part, to preserve stability rather than normalize permanent confrontation.
That sensibility now feels weaker.
Increasingly, the language of American power is not defensive but martial. We speak less of deterrence than dominance, less of diplomacy than warfighting. Even the vocabulary has shifted. Terms such as “warfighter” increasingly replace the older civic language of “soldier.” The Department of Defense now often carries the posture, if not the formal title, of a Department of War. The United States appears not merely prepared to project force, but psychologically oriented toward it.
One sees this in the growing casualness with which expansionary ideas are discussed. Greenland becomes a strategic acquisition, Canada a joking extension of American sovereignty, Venezuela an arena for revived hemispheric doctrines. The proposals themselves matter less than the underlying assumption: that American power confers a broad right to decide.
The war with Iran reflects a similar tendency. Although the administration has offered varying justifications for the conflict, one recurring rationale has been straightforward: Iran is a bad regime, and bad regimes should not possess nuclear weapons. There may be logic to the position. Iran’s government is authoritarian, arguably regionally destabilizing, and hostile to both American and Israeli interests.
But method matters.
The United States did not primarily turn to sustained multinational pressure, regional diplomacy, or collective institutions before resorting to force. Military action accelerated even as negotiations remained underway. Peace increasingly appears less a solution to be exhausted than an interval through which one maneuvers.
The deeper danger extends beyond the immediate conflict itself.
A nation that claims broad authority to act because it is stronger implicitly advances a principle others may someday invoke. Power rarely remains fixed. If strength alone becomes the organizing logic of international conduct, rising powers will eventually inherit the same rationale. Even weaker actors may adopt asymmetric versions of it through terrorism, cyberwarfare, proxy conflict, or economic disruption.
In that sense, the abandonment of restraint is not merely moral diminishment. It is strategic self-erosion.
George Kennan understood this after the Second World War. Containment, as he envisioned it, was not simply military pressure but disciplined restraint—the belief that powerful nations preserved legitimacy partly by limiting their own impulses. Postwar European leaders reached similar conclusions. International institutions were valued not as sentimental idealism, but as mechanisms through which strong nations restrained themselves before events forced restraint upon them. Even imperfect rules create expectations. Expectations create predictability. Predictability, over time, creates stability.
History offers examples of restraint working. The Cold War—despite its crises—remained largely cold because both superpowers recognized that unbounded force risked mutual destruction. Nuclear nonproliferation norms, however strained, have held for decades because nations accepted limits on what power alone might justify.
None of this requires pacifism. Nations have enemies. Some conflicts are unavoidable. Military strength remains necessary, particularly in a world where authoritarian powers are themselves increasingly assertive.
But there is a difference between possessing strength and glorifying its use.
The strongest nations are often those most capable of restraint precisely because they possess alternatives. A superpower that begins treating force as the first language of policy may eventually discover that others have learned the dialect as well.
Great powers rarely notice the habits that weaken them until those habits have already hardened into doctrine.
And once every nation claims the unilateral right to decide what security requires, the argument no longer belongs uniquely to the United States.
It becomes the language through which every nation justifies itself.