Is it crazy to think that “the situation in Kyrgyzstan has a critical bearing on US national security?” Steve Walt thinks so:

The first sentence of the announcement informed me that “the situation in Kyrgyzstan has a critical bearing on American national security.” As my teen-aged daughter would say: “OMG!” Did you know that your safety and security depends on the political situation in…. Kyrgyztan?” Yes, I know that the air base at Manas is a critical transit point for logistics flowing into Afghanistan, but otherwise Kyrgyzstan is an impoverished country of about 5 million people without significant strategic resources, and I daresay few Americans could find it on a map (or have any reason to want to). It is only important if you think Afghanistan’s fate is important, and readers here know that I think we’ve greatly exaggerated the real stakes there. (And if we’re heading for the exits there, as President Obama has said, then Kyrgyzstan’s strategic value is a stock you ought to short.)

I’m not trying to make fun of the Hudson Institute here, but the idea that we have “critical” interests in Kyrgystan just illustrates the poverty of American strategic thinking these days. Even now, in the wake of the various setbacks and mis-steps of the past decade, the central pathology of American strategic discourse is the notion that the entire friggin’ world is a “vital” U.S. interest, and that we are therefore both required and entitled to interfere anywhere and anytime we want to. And Beltway briefings like this one just reinforce this mind-set, by constantly hammering home the idea that we are terribly vulnerable to events in a far-flung countries a world away. I’m not saying that events in Kyrgyzstan might not affect the safety and prosperity of American a tiny little bit, but the essence of strategy is setting priorities and distinguishing trivial stakes from the truly important. And somehow I just don’t think Kyrgyzstan’s fate merits words like “vital” or “critical.”

I don’t have a problem with Walt arguing that we shouldn’t be in Afghanistan. Or, for that matter, that massive strategic retrenchment is in America’s interests. Those are rather crucial issues issue over which reasonable people disagree. But the United States is, in fact, currently fighting a war in Afghanistan. As long as we are, the “essence of strategy” is precisely to identify assets that are vital to that effort — such as one of the very few major logistical routes into the theater of war — and then treat them as important.

Beyond that it is simply irrelevant if country of interest is impoverished, if the average American can’t find it on the map, or it doesn’t contain strategic resources other than its geographical position. Imperial Britain didn’t prioritize the disposition of South Africa because of its diamonds, Egypt because of its cotton, or Gibraltar because of its sunny Mediterranean coast. They mattered because of their location.

Image source: The Map as History