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)
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