by Eric Martin
Daniel Larison neatly summarizes the overriding goals of U.S. foreign policy – or at least, the permissible range of motion afforded the pursuit of those goals – over the past half century or so. Simply put, policymakers want their cake, and the ability to eat it too. Or, put differently, an interventionist foreign policy, without the political headaches that arise when the American people are confronted with the actual implications and costs associated therewith.
America begins the new year embroiled in two of the longest wars in our history. But so far, the public has not directly borne their costs, which have been deferred to the future or limited to the members of the all-volunteer military. The illusion that our wars are cost-free has reduced the political risks of engaging in military action overseas. But as Princeton professor Julian Zelizer argues in his new history of national security politics, Arsenal of Democracy, it has also made the maintenance of U.S. primacy unsustainable.
The last 60 years of national security policy have been subject to fierce competition between (and within) the parties, as well as between Congress and the executive, as partisan advantage on national security has been gained, lost, and then contested anew. As Zelizer demonstrates, domestic political battles have never been separate from national security debates, and U.S. political history since the end of WW II has been shaped to an extraordinary degree by the national security state—the "arsenal"—that grew up during and after the Cold War.
Today, we are at the end of an era defined by conservative internationalism, a creed both exceedingly ambitious in its goals and extremely parsimonious in the resources provided to reach them. For the past 30 years, conservative internationalists have largely dominated national security debates; even internationalist Democrats have been influenced by them or been forced to mimic their arguments. During and after Vietnam, conservative internationalists wished to preserve an active, "forward" foreign policy while avoiding the political costs such a policy entails. Consequently, they turned to air power, missile defenses, covert operations, and short wars to minimize both American casualties and public backlash. In short, conservative internationalists found a way to insulate an activist national security state from the people it was supposed to serve.
The debacle of Iraq finally exposed the central flaw of conservative internationalism, which was essentially that its reach exceeded its grasp.
Alas, that is why, while flashy and novel, America's love affair with counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) will never make it past the honeymoon. Or, as Mark Safranski puts it in a thought-provoking piece:
COIN is an excellent operational tool, brought back by John Nagl & co. from the dark oblivion that Big Army partisans consigned it to cover up their own strategic failures in Vietnam. As good as COIN is though, it is not something akin to magic with which to work policy miracles or to substitute for America not having a cohesive and realistic grand strategy. Remaking Afghanistan into France or Japan on the Hindu Kush is beyond the scope of what COIN can accomplish. Or any policy. Or any president. Never mind Obama, Superman, Winston Churchill and Abe Lincoln rolled into one could not make that happen.
Association with grandiosely maximalist goals would only serve to politically discredit COIN when the benchmarks to paradise ultimately proved unreachable. Austerity will scale them back to the bounds of reality and perhaps a more modest, decentralized, emphasis.
While true, the essential lesson from recent foreign policy failures, the realization that COIN is not a panacea (and an expensive tool to wield regardless) and the underwhelming results from the serial mismatch of ambitious goals with limited means under the doctrine of conservative internationalism (and its liberal cousins) is that foreign policy adventurism is too expensive. Attempts to conceal its costs have failed, and purported fixes are themselves enormous commitments that likely outpace the strategic necessity. This is especially true at a time when the United States has limited resources that are declining relative to the rest of the world, with mounting domestic needs.
Rather than persist in undertaking interventionist policies that are doomed – if not to failure, at least to underachievement – from the onset due to a lack of necessary resources, and rather than dedicating a fortune and a half chasing COIN phantoms of limited relative value and dubious prospects for success, the United States would be far better served to limit its military interventions to only those that are truly vital and necessary. In contemporary terms, that means, at the least, no military confrontation with Iran, and extreme caution and circumspection with respect to any proposed increased involvement in places like Yemen.
Just in case you hadn't noticed, starting conflicts has proven far easier than extricating ourselves from them. And, no, abstaining from interfering does not necessarily equal "neglect and disengagement."
By limiting our foreign policy interventions to only those instances of vital necessity and last resort, we can better assure that the domestic political will would exist to apply the resources necessary to succeed, we wouldn't have to try to pull off the remarkable on the cheap, and we wouldn't need to dedicate trillions of COIN dollars in the aftermath in order to fix the original bargain basement boondoggle. While that sounds like a vague standard – it is – try this rule of thumb: the overwhelming presumption should be against committing U.S. military resources in an offensive capacity, especially if there are any alternatives that are even arguably viable. Work back from there.
(Larison link via the Jolly Green Satan)
Well, as you can probably tell from my comment on the other thread, I think the idea that the Iraq War will continue to be seen as a dire disaster a decade or more from now is far from certain. (That is not to argue that it was not a dire disaster given the alternatives – just that history tends to give short shrift to counterfactuals.)
If you look at past US military policy, the only ones that have been widely accepted as mistakes or failures are those in which the US ignominiously bugged out – Vietnam, Somalia, Beirut.
And Iraq doesn’t look like it’s going to end with a bug-out. Afghanistan, harder to say, but nobody wants to be the one ordering the last helicopter out of the country; if there is any way to string it out a little longer rather than fail altogether, they’re going to do it. As I said in the other thread, it is reasonably likely that the outcome in Iraq will be a radical increase in oil production capacity, the breaking of OPEC, and much lower oil prices. So the historical record is likely to say “Iraq was an expensive strategic success for the US, cause hey, $1/gallon gas, right?”
This is obviously not a mainstream view right now, to say the least. But being an avid reader of military/political history, the one thing that is very apparent to me is that the popular view of past events tends to be based on final outcomes, and all of the detail that was present contemporaneously about costs, alternatives, and morality disappears. If the bottom line looks okay, all is forgiven. Reagan won the Cold War (never mind that the Soviet Union was collapsing on its own and the US could have invested money spent on armaments on something more useful), Kennedy confronted the Soviets over missiles in Cuba (never mind the Bay of Pigs, never mind US missiles in Turkey), Truman dropped the bomb and defeated the Japanese (never mind whether it could have been demonstrated without killing 150,000 civilians), Clinton wimped out of Somalia (never mind whether we had any compelling reason to be there in the first place), the Democrats forced the US out of Vietnam (never mind whether we had any chance of winning), etc etc.
Popular history doesn’t do nuance. Pain, dissent, and the original cause of debt fade away. (The actual debt doesn’t, but nobody but dirty hippies remembers that we’re still paying for Reagan’s military buildup.) I think it’s way too optimistic to declare that the kind of interventionist policy we saw under Bush is now dead. More likely will be – a couple of years after we get out of Iraq and get most troops out of Afghanistan, under the next Republican President – more of the same.
Hoping that costs or dead soldiers or international norms or learning even one damn thing from the past will keep us from doing it seems analogous to the way the peak oilers keep hoping that the end of cheap oil will imminently end consumer society as we know it. Wishful thinking. The US still has massive financial and industrial resources, even a Democratic President dare not freeze military spending, and the public, well, they were pretty gung-ho for Iraq to begin with, and given a few years to forget about it, they’ll be pretty gung-ho for the next one too.
I sure hope I’m wrong.
As I said in the other thread, it is reasonably likely that the outcome in Iraq will be a radical increase in oil production capacity, the breaking of OPEC, and much lower oil prices. So the historical record is likely to say “Iraq was an expensive strategic success for the US, cause hey, $1/gallon gas, right?”
Color me extremely skeptical.
Hoping that costs or dead soldiers or international norms or learning even one damn thing from the past will keep us from doing it seems analogous to the way the peak oilers keep hoping that the end of cheap oil will imminently end consumer society as we know it. Wishful thinking.
Perhaps, but consider this: after Vietnam, major changes were implemented precisely BECUASE the US government could not do the same thing again.
They dropped the draft, and began singling out smaller targets capable of hitting on the cheap, with minimal troop involvement (Beirut, Somalia, Grenada, Afghanistan I, Panama, Balkans/Kosovo, Iraq War I, etc).
That’s the whole thesis of the book reviewed by Larison.
Vietnam forced us to pick a different strategy…and it doesn’t work if carried too far. Either we can’t achieve the goals because of the limited resources, or we get sucked into to spending the enormour, politically impossible amount.
I’m not sanguine, but also not convinced that these incidents are incapable of altering future behavior.
JD – Isn’t Iraq a member of OPEC? And, if not, what keeps them from joining?
Color me extremely skeptical.
Which is entirely fair, given security conditions there and historical production figures. But I think it’s a contingency worth looking out for. Oil production projections are already being trumpeted by neocons – you can bet that if reality matches up, you’re going to be hearing that a lot more.
Some DOE data.
“Iraq’s 10-year strategic plan for 2008-2017 set a goal of increasing crude oil production capacity by 1.5 million bbl/d within 3-4 years, and by an additional 2 million bbl/d to a total of 6 million bbl/d within 10 years.”
But when the latest contracts were bid out, they gave a goal of 10 million barrels a day within 6-7 years. And they gave them out to established Western oil companies who – security conditions permitting – undoubtedly know how to build production facilities at this scale.
Understandably some people in the know are pretty skeptical of the forecasts, but not all of them, from what I’ve read. The oilfields themselves are clearly large enough to support that level of production – overall they’re nearly half the size of Saudi Arabia. Now, given that total world oil consumption is going to be about 100 million barrels a day by then, what difference does 10 million more make? Russia isn’t in OPEC and produces 10 million barrels a day already. But from what I can tell, adding 10% overcapacity would be a major change – the quota changes that OPEC uses to control prices are much smaller than that.
And of course, Iraq is in OPEC right now – but given that they’re openly talking about increasing production to 10 million barrels a day, I’m not seeing much of a future for production quotas there. And one has to ask whether 10 million barrels a day would be the peak output anyway, and what the effect on Saudi production would be of a major drop in the price of oil – historically they have been the producer with the ability to reduce output to prop up prices, but if prices stay below a certain level for long enough, internal budgetary pressures to increase production will be very strong. Overcapacity has on several occasions in the past produced radical drops in the price of oil that were sustained for long periods. I’m just saying I wouldn’t count it out, and you can bet that if it happens – hell, even if oil prices drop by a lot for reasons totally unrelated to Iraq – Republicans are not going to be shy about taking credit for it, and the popular history of this period may not look much like “another Vietnam”.
Either we can’t achieve the goals because of the limited resources, or we get sucked into to spending the enormous, politically impossible amount.
Well, two problems: one, we are going to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan having claimed to achieve the goals – the goals having shifted to match what we have actually accomplished. We already forgot why we went into both those countries – we’re in Iraq for democracy and freedom (WMDs? Huh?) and in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban (who, as everyone knows, attacked us on 9/11). So when we leave we’re going to declare victory – and by the shifted goals, it will be victory. Those of us muttering about “Where’s the WMDs?” and “Where’s bin Laden?” will be a bunch of sore losers and haters who can’t acknowledge our glorious victory.
Two, the enormous expenditures are clearly not politically impossible. Yeah, okay, Obama won and the Democrats took power, but that had very little to do with the level of spending on the wars, and there appears to be virtually no political pressure to reduce that spending. On the contrary, the war funding is about the least controversial spending that we’ve had under Obama, certainly compared to spending on those “mounting domestic needs” like healthcare.
I think we’re going to continue to have to make the case that the wars were a disaster for the foreseeable future, and I think there’s a pretty good chance that we’re going to fail, and that the popular history will look nothing like Vietnam.
You’re right that inside institutions, Vietnam made a big difference in the kinds of action they expected to be able to take in future. But that’s precisely because Vietnam really did end with unbearable political, economic, and popular pressures, and in miserable failure. Vietnam had nearly 60,000 US soldiers KIA – getting up there with WWII with 400,000 US soldiers KIA. Iraq and Afghanistan combined have less than 6,000 KIA, and from a US population 50% larger than in 1970. I don’t think the pressures are nearly the same.
Isn’t Iraq a member of OPEC?
Yep. See above comment about planned increases in production though. They’ve publicly stated that they’d like to match Saudi output, and that would not be OPEC-as-we-know-it.
JD – thanks, that makes more sense to me now.
Well, two problems: one, we are going to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan having claimed to achieve the goals – the goals having shifted to match what we have actually accomplished.
But JD, they tried this with Vietnam too. It just didn’t work. I see the same problem here.
Two, the enormous expenditures are clearly not politically impossible. Yeah, okay, Obama won and the Democrats took power, but that had very little to do with the level of spending on the wars, and there appears to be virtually no political pressure to reduce that spending. On the contrary, the war funding is about the least controversial spending that we’ve had under Obama, certainly compared to spending on those “mounting domestic needs” like healthcare.
I don’t necessarily agree that these wars are so uncontroversial. Many a poll indicate that people think the spending is a waste. Mustering support for similar expenditures in the future will not be as easy.
Iraq and Afghanistan combined have less than 6,000 KIA, and from a US population 50% larger than in 1970. I don’t think the pressures are nearly the same.
No, but we’re not necessarily looking for as drastic a shift either. And while body counts aren’t even comparable, financial expenditures are entering that realm.
They might have tried it with Vietnam, but it’s hard to spin the complete Communist takeover of the country you just spent a decade and 60,000 lives defending from Communism as anything but a miserable failure. I don’t think Iraq right now looks anything like that kind of total failure, and I think it’s near-certain that it will look better and better over the next decade. (Largely because it would be hard to look worse than it did under the sanctions regime or in the first few years after the invasion – merely returning to what is normal for a regional oil producer is going to look like a huge success.)
On polls:
NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll Dec 11-14 2009:
“Do you think the war in Iraq has been very successful, somewhat successful, somewhat unsuccessful, or very unsuccessful?”
57% say successful; 40% say unsuccessful.
I’m definitely on the “unsuccessful” side here myself. Our stated goals were nonsense, and what we’ve achieved wasn’t worth the effort (plus, it was totally immoral).
Then again, there’s this poll:
CBS News/New York Times Poll. Sept. 19-23, 2009:
“Do you think the result of the war with Iraq was worth the loss of American life and other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?”
24% say worth it; 67% say not worth it.
But I’m not sure that today’s polls tell us too much about how it will be viewed 5-10-20 years down the road, when it’s no longer a gaping hole in the budget and people don’t have family members still deployed there. My (amateur) read of history says that the majority view of past actions tends to grow until it dominates the popular history; and more importantly (looking at those two polls, for instance), the contemporary concerns about costs & alternatives are forgotten, and only the overall perception of success or failure is remembered. Crucially that means even if people contemporaneously thought that it wasn’t worth doing – a view quite popular prior to US involvement in WWII, for instance – the later perception will be that the course of action chosen was a wise one.
Sure. We’re just speculatin.
But I would add this: Iraq and Afghanistan have already altered our behavior. See, ie, the Bush admin’s unwillingness to attack Iran. Direct result.
But I would add this: Iraq and Afghanistan have already altered our behavior. See, ie, the Bush admin’s
unwillingnesslack of soldiers to attack Iran. Direct result.the Bush admin’s unwillingness to attack Iran. Direct result.
Yeah, that’s a good point. Certainly the original views, justifications, estimated costs, and potential rewards of the Iraq war were totally busted by the actual costs, and so the casual plans to “roll up” Iran, and maybe Syria, North Korea, etc, were thrown out the window.
So I don’t think anyone’s going to buy, next time, that it’s going to be a 6-month occupation costing $100 billion. You’re certainly right about that. Thankfully.
I just think that the perverse effect of moderate success (AKA “not totally failing”) in Iraq may be to make such medium-scale interventions seem politically palatable.
I sure hope you’re more right than I am. We are just speculating, after all. I’m just not convinced that the popular history of this period will be nearly as anti-war as the popular mood might look right now. Unfortunately.
I think that a lot of the squishy support for COIN amongst the hawks in the general public would melt away as soon as they began to understand that COIN looks nothing like Steven Seagal taking over a train and, in fact, involves relatively little boot-to-ass relative to ass-on-line.
My brother is getting married in New Orleans in April (where his fiancee is from). They’re trying to get Seagal to show up, just for the pure absurdity of it all.
But on a more serious note nous, you already see the odd combination of reverence for Petraeus and the magic of COIN, side by side with constant complaining that we’re hurting our chances for victory because we have timid rules of engagement, and are overly politically correct.
No sense of irony.
Would they settle for one of his stunt doubles?
Would they settle for one of his stunt doubles?
Hells no!
I don’t think that COIN will ever get the support it needs within the military and especially within congress for the simple reason that it’s not about buying expensive things from well connected contractors. COIN is about human skills much more than it is about hardware, and changes in training or creation of specialized units just doesn’t pump enough money into the political donor class to gain a competitive advantage in the struggle for decision maker attention against approaches to warfare that rely on big ticket hardware.
togolosh — agreed.
Also, for the last few decades the US mil has been dealing with the problem of dispersion by trying to maximize technologically enhanced firepower through a network paradigm that beefs up the individual element and connects it to a ‘brain’ at a safe remove. We see this in the widespread use of drones and robots. The idea is to maximize firepower and information flow while minimizing risk to human resources.
COIN (as the manual describes it) tends to work by exposing human resources to more risk and stripping away a lot of the firepower in favor of local connections. It’s more like a cop walking a beat with a sidearm than a fully armored patrol in a Stryker. The idea is to maximize the humanity of your systems.
One of the problems with COIN at the brass level is that it means more military casualties and that goes against post-Vietnam doctrine because bodies are bad PR. COIN is also very contingent and hard to formalize in a top-down command architecture.
And all this completely ignores the competing moral paradigms underlying the split.