America's foreign policy illusion

For decades after the Cold War, the United States operated as though military supremacy alone could sustain global leadership. From Iraq to the Balkans, Washington projected overwhelming force and assumed geopolitical outcomes would eventually bend in its favor. Yet the recent confrontation with Iran has exposed a harder truth: Military dominance no longer guarantees political success. America remains extraordinarily powerful, but the structure of global power has changed faster than Washington’s tactics. The erosion of U.S. leverage has not come primarily from external enemies. Much of it has been self-inflicted through repeated overreach. Britain learned the same lesson after the Suez Crisis; the Soviet Union learned it in Afghanistan. Great powers decline not because they suddenly become weak, but because they confuse military capability with strategic wisdom. The Iran crisis revealed this paradox clearly. Washington inflicted enormous damage, yet struggled to produce decisive political outcomes. Superior firepower did not translate into lasting geopolitical control. Decades of sa

Original source: Korea Times