Author Archive
Should We Simultaneously Make China More Powerful and Try to Contain It?
Robert Kagan and AEI’s Daniel Blumenthal have an op-ed in today’s Post criticizing President Obama’s policy on China. It contains the odd dualism in neoconservatism whereby neocons endorse contradictory assumptions about international politics, putting a logical inconsistency at the center of their argument.
First, Kagan and Blumenthal write that “China is behaving exactly as one would expect a great power to behave. As it has grown richer, China has used its wealth to build a stronger and more capable military. As its military power has grown, so have its ambitions.”
Then, however, Kagan and Blumenthal seem to endorse U.S. China policy over the past 30 years:
For decades, U.S. strategy toward China has had two complementary elements. The first was to bring China into the “family of nations” through engagement. The second was to make sure China did not become too dominant, through balancing…The strategy has been to give China a greater stake in peace, while maintaining a balance of power in the region favorable to democratic allies and American interests.
Except these two elements aren’t complementary at all. If the authors think that a wealthier China is naturally going to get more ambitious and more capable, and that these developments are contrary to U.S. interests, why would the authors endorse engagement, which has helped make China more wealthy? (Their language is imprecise, so it’s possible they do not.)
John Mearsheimer recognized this logical implication, and therefore in drawing up his theory of offensive realism wrote that “the United States has a profound interest in seeing Chinese economic growth slow considerably in the years ahead.” (This constitutes an example why Mearsheimer refers to the “tragedy of great power politics.”) There are not a lot of people making this argument openly, and there are a lot of people who’ve offered criticisms of it, but if you want to contain China, you really have to make it unless you resort to some very cute argumentation.
Instead of facing up to the contradiction, Washington has opted for cute argumentation, conceptualizing its China policy as “congagement,” that is, part containment and part engagement. This strategy involves making China richer and militarily more powerful, while hoping that the Seymour Martin Lipset story about economic growth facilitating the development of democracy comes true in China, and then the democratic peace is supposed to kick in, ensuring that we won’t go to war with China. To my mind, this is a very tenuous set of arguments: ultimately, I don’t think there’s much evidence we’re willing to grant China something like its own version of the Monroe Doctrine in East Asia, but at the same time we’re helping it get to a point where it’s more likely–and more capable–of pursuing this kind of influence.
I criticized this argument back in 2006 [.pdf] in The American Conservative, if anyone has interest. It would be good to hear more China hawks spell out their logic on this stuff, because the longer it goes unscrutinized, the more worrisome the implications of flouting the contradiction become.
Deep Thoughts from the Weekly Standard
Republican Party platform, 2012?
Sad to say, neoconservatism is clearly the dominant foreign-policy ideology of the Republican Party. George H. Nash apparently has written that “We are all neoconservatives now.” And after the strategic and political masterstroke the neocons produced in Iraq, who could blame the Republicans for doubling down with them?
So sometimes it’s good to stroll by the Weekly Standard blog, just to see what those folks are thinking about.
Today, for example, it’s war with Russia. (Now there’s a “stimulus!”)
If the Republicans were smart, they’d get rid of these guys before it’s too late.
Department of Bad Analogies
US Ambassador's residence, Paris
In the course of wondering whether it may not be so important that so few US government personnel speak Pashto, Spencer Ackerman writes:
You don’t have to speak French to craft a good U.S. France policy.
That’s a fair point, although many, many more U.S. diplomats dealing with France speak French than do the folks dealing with Afghanistan speak Pashto (or Dari, or…). But the problem is that we don’t have a normal diplomatic relationship with Afghanistan — we’re trying to transform the entire society. Counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen tells us Afghanistan is all part of a “global counterinsurgency.” [.pdf] This, of course, is a somewhat more ambitious job than blowing through the cocktail circuit in Paris.
Just to press the point, as only one of eight “best practices” for counterinsurgents, Kilcullen lists “cueing and synchronization of development, governance, and security efforts, building them in a simultaneous, coordinated way that supports the political strategy.” Another COIN guru, John Nagl writes [.pdf] that “The soldiers who will win these wars require an ability not just to dominate land operations, but to change whole societies…”
In short, we probably ought to distinguish between France and Afghanistan.
The New Republic and Guilt by Association
I watched with interest the J Street debate between Matt Yglesias and The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait over the question “what it means to be pro-Israel.” Matt’s a very efficient thinker, and Chait’s a particularly sharp debater. I witnessed him slug it out at length in a debate with David Boaz a while back, not something I’d like to do.
Chait made a straightforward argument: to be pro-Israel, someone has to accept two premises. First, one has to believe that historically, Israel is the more sympathetic party in the Middle East. Second, one has to believe that the U.S. should not be even-handed in the Middle East, but rather should be on Israel’s side.
But what was most interesting about his argument was his accusation of guilt by association against J Street. It was a problem, Chait argued, that J Street had been embraced by people who did not meet his definition of pro-Israel. Chait rang the alarum that “The American Conservative magazine, which was founded by Pat Buchanan, …has been saying nice things about J Street.” In addition, “the famous Walt and Mearsheimer have been saying extremely nice things about J Street — embracing J Street.”
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics; Political Philosophy
Cause for Alarm in Iraq, or Just a Ripple?
Najim Abed al-Jabouri, former mayor of Tal Afar, has a piece in the Times that seems like cause for alarm:
Both the military and the police remain heavily politicized. The police and border officials, for example, are largely answerable to the Interior Ministry, which has been seen (often correctly) as a pawn of Shiite political movements. Members of the security forces are often loyal not to the state but to the person or political party that gave them their jobs.
The same is true of many parts of the Iraqi Army. For example, the Fifth Iraqi Army Division, in Diyala Province northeast of Baghdad, has been under the sway of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the Shiite party that has the largest bloc in Parliament; the Eighth Division, in Diwaniya and Kut to the southeast of the capital, has answered largely to Dawa, the Shiite party of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki; the Fourth Division, in Salahuddin Province in northern Iraq, has been allied with one of the two major Kurdish parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
More recently, the Iraqi Awakening Conference, a tribal-centric political party based in Anbar Province (where Sunni tribesmen, the so-called Sons of Iraq, turned against the insurgency during the surge) has gained influence over the Seventh Iraq Army Division, which was heavily involved in recruiting Sunnis to maintain security in 2006.
Hadi Mizban/Associated Press
Now, via Spencer Ackerman, we find out that there may be support for al-Jabouri’s fear that “these political schisms are partly responsible for coordinated terrorist attacks like those on Sunday or the so-called Bloody Wednesday bombings of Aug. 19, which killed more than 100.” 61 Iraqi army and police officers were just arrested in connection with Sunday’s blasts, part of the effects of which you see over there on the side of the post.
Neoconservatism and Militarism
Matt Yglesias identifies a puzzle, comparing Cold War/Irving Kristol neoconservatism to today’s Weekly Standard Wilsonianism:
[E]ven though the high-level theoretical content of the realpolitiker 70s version of neoconservatism and the Wilsonian 2000s version of neoconservatism seem very different, the operational content is extremely similar. You have support for higher defense budgets, a tendency toward threat-inflation and hysteria, a belief in an aggressive military posture and extensive saber-rattling, hostility to negotiations, and hostility to international law both in theory and in practice. This was initially presented to the world as a “realistic” alternative to lefty critiques of US support for anti-communist dictators and more recently appeared as an “idealistic” critique of lefty reluctance to launch wars, but the continuity between the views is enormous.
What Matt doesn’t say is why the policy outcomes stayed largely the same despite shifting theoretical sands. I think this piece by Brian Schmidt and Michael Williams can help shed some light on the problem.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics
Why the Obama Administration Is All Over the Map on Afghanistan
Hey Rajiv Chandrasekaran, what the heck happened back in March when Obama decided to send 17,000 more troops into Afghanistan and started telling everyone we needed a more expansive approach there?
Everyone, save Vice President Biden’s national security adviser, agreed that the United States needed to mount a comprehensive counterinsurgency mission to defeat the Taliban…
[...]
To senior military commanders, the [implications were] unambiguous: U.S. and NATO forces would have to change the way they operated in Afghanistan. Instead of focusing on hunting and killing insurgents, the troops would have to concentrate on protecting the good Afghans from the bad ones.
And to carry out such a counterinsurgency effort the way its doctrine prescribes, the military would almost certainly need more boots on the ground.
To some civilians who participated in the strategic review, that conclusion was much less clear. Some took it as inevitable that more troops would be needed, but others thought the thrust of the new approach was to send over scores more diplomats and reconstruction experts. They figured a counterinsurgency mission could be accomplished with the forces already in the country, plus the 17,000 new troops Obama had authorized in February.
“It was easy to say, ‘Hey, I support COIN,’ because nobody had done the assessment of what it would really take, and nobody had thought through whether we want to do what it takes,” said one senior civilian administration official who participated in the review, using the shorthand for counterinsurgency. (emphasis mine)
This sort of thing is almost enough to make you feel for the COIN clique. Barack Obama fancies himself a foreign-policy thinker, and his national-security staff no doubt think highly of their strategic vision and would like to advance the idea that Democratic administrations make better foreign-policy decisions than Republican administrations. But when Obama and his administration come out in March and say “yes, we’d like a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan,” and then send McChrystal over to do an assessment of what a COIN mission would need in terms of resources, it’s just absurd for them flutter six months later that “well, we didn’t know what we were getting into! They didn’t tell us it was going to be long and hard and costly!”
We’ve been having a discussion on counterinsurgency — indeed we’ve been doing counterinsurgency — for the last few years. There are lots of us who think that COIN in Afghanistan is a fool’s errand. My view is that COIN more generally is an intellectually insular doctrine purveyed by a cadre of scholar-practitioners who’ve either situated the doctrine in an absurd strategic context [.pdf] or else failed even to attempt to situate the approach inside any larger strategy.
But to be fair to them, they’ve been pretty candid about how hard counterinsurgency is. It’s just ridiculous for the administration to protest that they didn’t know it was going to be so expensive. The policy outcome the Obama administration produced was simply to throw more resources at the problem without bothering to think carefully about the connections between strategy, doctrine, and resources. Not encouraging.
Are We Sticking Around in Afghanistan to Deny al Qaeda a Talking Point?
Defense Secretary Robert Gates offered some interesting thoughts on the war in Afghanistan last night in a talk at DC’s George Washington University. As Adam Rawnsley notes, Gates says we need to stay in Afghanistan because al Qaeda will get a propaganda win if we leave:
The Afghanistan-Pakistan border area, Gates said, represents the “modern epicenter of jihad.” A place “where the Mujahedeen defeated the other superpower,” and in his estimation of the Taliban’s thinking, “they now have the opportunity to defeat a second superpower.”
Defining al-Qaeda as both an ideology and an organization, Gates said their ability to successfully “challenge not only the United States, but NATO — 42 nations and so on” on such a symbolically important battlefield would represent “a hugely empowering message” for an organization whose narrative has suffered much in the eight years since 9/11.
This is tantamount to saying we have to stay in Afghanistan because we’re in Afghanistan. The recent evidence on this sort of thing is not encouraging. Recall, for example, that Israel spent almost 40 years in possession of the Gaza Strip. Ariel Sharon decided to pull Israelis out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, unilaterally. When that happened, Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas, was all smiles.
Despite the time that had passed, despite the wreckage in Gaza, Meshaal sneered that the pullout constituted “the beginning of the end for the Zionist program in the region.” He went on to say “it is unthinkable that our people will renounce the resistance, which made the enemy retreat. This is our only guarantee to force the enemy to withdraw from the other territories.”
Now that’s a “hugely empowering message,” to use Gates’ term. But what it shows is that it is virtually impossible to do enough damage to a group like al Qaeda — or Hamas — that prevents it from claiming a propaganda victory once you leave somewhere. Issuing press releases and crowing isn’t very hard.
Propaganda aside, though, the underlying material reality is unchanged. The withdrawal from Gaza did not, of course, signal anything like “the beginning of the end for the Zionist program in the region.” Hamas may try to use terrorism to “force the enemy to withdraw from the other territories,” but it’s far from clear that’s actually going to work.
That is to say, Gates is being a bit too postmodern for my tastes here. We have interests. We should make clear that we will defend them. Then, we should defend them. But to say that we’re so concerned about lending al Qaeda a propaganda victory that we can’t leave Afghanistan is a bridge too far. There will always be somebody to declare victory for al Qaeda, whether we leave Afghanistan next year or 20 years from now. Staying until you feel comfortable no one can claim a moral victory as we depart is a recipe for staying forever.
Could the U.S. Stop Israel from Bombing Iran?
Last night, Chris Matthews presided over an odd, staccato interview with AEI’s Michael Rubin and Time magazine’s Bob Baer that was enough to make one feel sorry for the interviewees. Matthews was wildly whipping questions at Rubin and Baer, but they both did an admirable job returning Matthews’ volleys.
One interesting topic that came up was whether the Obama administration should discourage Israel from attacking Iran. Rubin and Baer agreed that at this point an Israeli attack would be unhelpful and should be discouraged, but Baer noted that our ability to prevent such an attack is “zero.” They agreed that the likelihood of an Israeli strike in the next year was “greater than 50-50″ and Rubin suggested that the Israeli timeline for an attack was “months if not weeks.”
On What Larger Theory Is Neoconservatism Based?
There have been some interesting writings coming out of AEI’s new Center for Defense Studies recently. On Friday, Daniel Blumenthal offered some thoughts on China. In the course of making the case that Chinese leaders should realize that we are not trying to contain China, he wrote the following:
If countries acted in accordance with rational actor theories of political science, the Chinese would be pretty well assured that we are not going to contain it. We have made clear across administrations that we welcome China’s rise as a great power and urge it to act as a responsible one.
But countries do not act in accordance with political science theories.
Later in the piece, he wrote the following:
China is not the only country that is rising. So is India. But we do not worry about India’s rise. That is because India is a democracy. Almost everything it does is transparent to us. We share liberal values with India, including the desire to strengthen the post-World War II liberal international order of open trade and investment and the general desire among democracies to settle internal and external disputes peacefully and democratically. The fact that China is not a democracy matters greatly as it rises. It makes its rise more disruptive as countries have to divine its intentions and observe the gap between its rhetorical policy of a “Peaceful Rise” and some of its actions that are inconsistent with a peaceful rise.
He closed thusly:
Wouldn’t it be nice if China got on board with all the post-modern, feel-good notions about international politics put forth by the Obama Administration? In the 21st century, says the Obama team, all countries have common interests in confronting transnational issues like climate change and proliferation. Sorry guys, those who lead China think 21st century international politics will look more or less like it did in the past. They favor good old fashioned power politics. Unfortunately for Obama, that forces us to do the same.
There’s an awful lot of interesting stuff going on here. First, Blumenthal’s claim that “countries do not act in accordance with political science theories” is strangely incoherent. As his second and third quotes above make clear, Blumenthal has a political science theory–two actually.
David Brooks Is Confused about Counterinsurgency
Would you buy a state-building mission from this man?
Today David Brooks (in the role of Teddy Roosevelt) debates George Will (as Edmund Burke) on the subject of Afghanistan without citing him. This debate marks a high point of conservative politics where neoconservative ideology appears in concrete clarity.
First, Brooks makes clear that he is not interested in merely managing the problem of terrorism, but rather in “prevailing” in the war in Afghanistan. He argues that “only the full counterinsurgency doctrine offers a chance of success,” but then proceeds to absurdly define population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine as one in which “small groups of American men and women are outside the wire in dangerous places in remote valleys, providing security, gathering intelligence, helping to establish courts and building schools and roads.”
Either Brooks is being cute here or demonstrating his ignorance. With one word — “small” — Brooks has utterly mischaracterized what counterinsurgency is all about.
Population-centric counterinsurgency is all about large numbers of American men and women, not small numbers. The promoters of COIN in Afghanistan have recently taken to including the Afghan National Army in the count of counterinsurgents, but the textbook — and as a result, obviously oversimplified — number of counterinsurgents you’d want in a place with a population, dysfunctional national government, and geography like Afghanistan pushes well up to around half a million. It is an extraordinarily resource- and labor-intensive endeavor. If you don’t believe me, perhaps you’ll take David Petraeus or David Kilcullen as authorities on the matter.
Brooks pushes his argument further, declaring that we possess only two choices in Afghanistan: “surrender the place to the Taliban or do armed nation-building.” One paragraph later, Brooks writes of the fight against terrorism that “we shouldn’t pretend we understand how this conflict will evolve.” That Brooks does not recognize the conflict between these views is telling. See Rory Stewart for more on the swashbuckling certainty like what Brooks is displaying.
The International Relations Academy and the Beltway “Foreign Policy Community”–Why the Disconnect?
Glenn Greenwald uncovers a very interesting sentence in Les Gelb’s Democracy essay [.pdf] on the Iraq war and the media:
Les Gelb on Charlie Rose
My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.
I had to read that two or three times to unpack all that’s going on in there. The question obviously being begged is where does the disposition, and where do the incentives “to support wars to retain political and professional credibility” come from?
Consider: There are two groups of people, the Foreign Policy Community (FPC) in Washington and New York, centered around the national-security bureaucracy and think tanks that produce orthodox foreign policy hands like Brookings, AEI, and CFR. There is a second group of people, international relations academics. The two groups have, in most cases, similar training (PhDs from top schools) and in the course of obtaining such training have been exposed to many of the same theories and topics.
Yet the two groups have been wildly at variance in terms of their views on important public policy issues. Take the Iraq war, for example. As anyone who was in Washington at the time knows, the FPC was extremely fond of the idea of invading Iraq. To oppose it was to marginalize oneself for years. Indeed, those who promoted the disastrous adventure have prospered, while those who (bravely or stupidly, depending on your point of view) opposed it remain huddled in the chilly, dusty alcoves of popular debate.
In the academy, meanwhile, there was hardly any debate over Iraq–almost 80 percent of IR academics opposed the war. [.pdf] To the extent academics did enter the public debate on the issue, it was to pay for an advertisement in the New York Times warning against the war. [.pdf] The only academics who spoke out in favor of the war (to my knowledge, anyway) were IR liberals like Anne-Marie Slaughter, who sought policy positions in Washington. (Slaughter, of course, was rewarded with a spot as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, while to my knowledge none of the academic opponents of the war have gained Washington policy jobs.)
So what is going on here? Why is there such a profound disconnect between the two groups that look so similar on paper? The first, most obvious answer is that the academy tends to be more liberal (in the domestic political sense), so academics tend to have more peacenik-y views. The problem with that argument is that the domestic-political liberals in the FPC supported the war just as strongly as their conservative brethren, which means that domestic political views don’t work as a determinant of support for war.
My sense is that the giant national-security bureaucracy in Washington that has emerged over the last 65 years has shaped incentives in a manner such that it is next-to-impossible to “get ahead” by advocating for restraint. Put differently, restraint isn’t in anybody’s interest except the country’s, and there’s nobody in Washington representing broad national interests as opposed to their own parochial ones. Every neoconservative or liberal imperialist in DC has someone’s interests behind them. The Don Quixotes like myself and my colleagues here, by contrast, want to cut the defense budget, slow the opportunities for rent-seeking among contractors, etc, etc, etc. As Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot once derisively referred to us, we’re just “four or five people in a phone booth.” But we were right about Iraq, which is more than Gigot can say for himself.
For the legions of IR journal editors who are reading this post, I am completing an article draft examining this idea in more detail. But for now you can cast an eye on a Steve Walt blog post that makes an argument very similar to my own:
…America’s role in the world today is shaped by two imbalances of power, not just one. The first is the gap between U.S. capabilities and everyone else’s, a situation that has some desirable features (especially for us) but one that also encourages the United States to do too much and allows others to do either too little or too many of the wrong things. The second imbalance is between organized interests whose core mission is constantly pushing the U.S. government to do more and in more places, and the far-weaker groups who think we might be better off showing a bit more restraint.
I’m open to different theories on this matter, but I think we should agree that at the very least, it’s an interesting puzzle.
Another Day, Another Tranche of Afghanistan Reading Material
Item: The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, a group of concerned scholars and authors who work on international security and U.S. foreign policy, have issued an open letter to President Obama warning him not to expand U.S. involvement in that country. (Full disclosure: I was a signatory.) The list of signatories includes many of the scholars who urged President Bush not to invade Iraq. Politico was the first to run the story: see here.
Item: Via Michael Cohen, former CIA counterterrorism honcho Paul Pillar takes to the pages of the Washington Post to think through the concept of “safe havens” in Afghanistan. His conclusion?
Among the many parallels being offered between Afghanistan and the Vietnam War, one of the most disturbing concerns inadequate examination of core assumptions. The Johnson administration was just as meticulous as the Obama administration is being in examining counterinsurgent strategies and the forces required to execute them. But most American discourse about Vietnam in the early and mid-1960s took for granted the key — and flawed — assumptions underlying the whole effort: that a loss of Vietnam would mean that other Asian countries would fall like dominoes to communism, and that a retreat from the commitment to Vietnam would gravely harm U.S. credibility.
The Obama administration and other participants in the debate about expanding the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan can still avoid comparable error. But this would require not merely invoking Sept. 11 and taking for granted that a haven in Afghanistan would mean the difference between repeating and not repeating that horror. It would instead mean presenting a convincing case about how such a haven would significantly increase the terrorist danger to the United States. That case has not yet been made.
Item: Michael Crowley offers a piece in the New Republic that strongly implies but doesn’t quite come out and say that President Obama should ignore the skeptics and the political risks and wade deeper into Afghanistan. The piece swallows whole the conventional wisdom narrative on Iraq–that the Surge amounted not to a combination of defining down “victory” and appeasement of Sunni tribes but rather a borderline miracle whereby Gen. Petraeus loosed his wonder-working COIN doctrine on the maelstrom of violence in that country and produced a strategic victory. Crowley then uses this narrative to frame the decision before President Obama. Still, he writes
[I]f the definition of success isn’t clear to the Obama team, the definition of defeat may be. Bush argued unabashedly that Iraq had become “the central front in the war on terror” and that withdrawing before the country had stabilized would hand Al Qaeda not only a strategic but a moral victory. Current administration officials don’t publicly articulate the same rationale when discussing Afghanistan. But former CIA official Bruce Riedel, a regional expert who led the White House’s Afghanistan-Pakistan review earlier this year, cited it at the Brookings panel held in August. “The triumph of jihadism or the jihadism of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in driving NATO out of Afghanistan would resonate throughout the Islamic World. This would be a victory on par with the destruction of the Soviet Union in the 1990s,” Riedel said. “[T]he stakes are enormous.”
Obama may have one last thing in common with Bush: personal pride. Bush was determined to prevail in Iraq because he had invaded it. And, while Obama, of course, had nothing to do with the invasion of Afghanistan, he has long supported the campaign there–including during the presidential campaign as a foil for his opposition to the Iraq war. Speaking before a group of veterans last month, Obama called Afghanistan a “war of necessity”–a phrase which politically invests him deeper in the fight. “The president has boxed himself in,” says one person who has advised the administration on military strategy. “The worst possible place to be is that our justification for being in a war is that we’re in a war.”
Lots to chew on.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General
Jervis on Afghanistan
Columbia University IR guru Robert Jervis has a smart post at Foreign Policy’s “Af-Pak” blog. For those who couldn’t get enough at yesterday’s Cato forum on Afghanistan, Jervis’ post is well worth a look:
Prof. Robert Jervis
Most discussion about Afghanistan has concentrated on whether and how we can defeat the Taliban. Less attention has been paid to the probable consequences of a withdrawal without winning, an option toward which I incline. What is most striking is not that what I take to be the majority view is wrong, but that it has not been adequately defended. This is especially important because the U.S. has embarked on a war that will require great effort with prospects that are uncertain at best. Furthermore, it appears that Obama’s commitment to Afghanistan was less the product of careful analysis than of the political need to find a “tough” pair to his attacks on the war in Iraq during the presidential campaign. It similarly appears that in the months since his election he has devoted much more attention to how to wage the war than to whether we need to wage it.
Afghanistan Debate Starting
Gen. Charles C. Krulak
George Will’s excellent op-ed piece on Afghanistan may be forcing a debate over the role of counterinsurgency/armed nation-building as a component of American grand strategy.
Yesterday afternoon, the Small Wars Journal, a counterinsurgency blog, posted an email sent to Will by Gen. Charles Krulak, the 31st Commandant of the Marine Corps (.pdf). Krulak wrote that he was “in total agreement” with Will’s views, and wrote that “no desired end-state has ever been clearly articulated and no strategy formulated that would lead us to achieve even an ill defined end state.” Krulak concluded by urging that Will not to “be dismayed by the people who disagree with you. There are many retired and active-duty military who feel you hit the bull’s eye.”
Well.
Now LTC Paul Yingling has responded to Krulak, accusing him of advancing “incomprehensible” views and claiming that Krulak’s proposed “light footprint tactic has failed for the last eight years.” To which I would respond: “failed to do what?” Failed to create a functioning modern state in Afghanistan? Well, fair enough. But it’s by no means clear that our foreign policy must be targeted at creating such a state. In fact, if the ends of our foreign policy are to ensure the safety and security of the American people and the defense of the Constitution of the United States, it’s far from clear that we have “failed” in Afghanistan.
There is now a reasonably heated debate raging in the comments section to Yingling’s response, with Col. Gian Gentile and others advancing the argument that Yingling and others are mired in “the tactics, methods, principles, and catechisms of population centric counterinsurgency” while ignoring the much-more-important subject of strategy.
To the extent that Krulak’s email can bring into the debate those retired (or even active-duty) military officers who believe we’ve run off the rails, it may be a very important contribution. At this point, those who support the current approach have felt it right to participate in this debate, adding their voices to those of the civilians who are promoting the strategy. (Occasionally these people claim they are merely promoting the “doctrine,” and that their views do not bear on the debate over strategy. This is not persuasive.)
If Krulak is right in claiming that “there are many retired and active-duty military” who agree with George Will, it would be good to start hearing more from them.
The Surreality of Washington
Further to David Rittger’s post below, here is a sublime commentary on Washington politics, the media, and some other odd phenomena:
Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
David Frum Analyzes Why ‘The Crazies’ Are Running the GOP
In a discussion on Bloggingheads, David Frum offers his thoughts on the sad state of the GOP these days:
He blames the predicament, in part, on the “conservative entertainment-industrial complex,” a term coined by Andrew Sullivan. In Frum’s telling, this complex has “distorted conservative dialogue to suit the wishes of the Fox audience.” He says that drawing on such a group, “you can get seriously rich out of that, but you can’t govern a country with that kind of voter base, it’s a tiny minority-within-a-minority.”
This is an interesting thesis. Frum was the coauthor of a seemingly successful, widely discussed foreign-policy book titled An End to Evil, which posited that terrorism posed a “threat to the survival of our nation,” and in foreign policy, “there is no middle way for Americans. It is victory or Holocaust.” Are these the sorts of carefully considered judgments on which the GOP is going to ride back into office?
It’s probably true that pushing the American nationalist button over and over from 2002 forward contributed to getting Bush reelected in 2004, but the results after then have been rather less encouraging. John Boehner colorfully remarked recently that the GOP “took it in the shorts with Bush-Cheney, the Iraq War, and by sacrificing fiscal responsibility to hold power.” I’m not sure that my preferred foreign policy is the key to political success, but I’m pretty sure that the zany world view that Frum has traded on isn’t the way forward either.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics
Bringing the States Back In
It’s an annoying, hackneyed trope of foreign policy types to say “if you want to understand X, you have to understand Y.” That said, let me engage in a little bit of it.
What’s going on in Afghanistan, we’re supposed to believe, is about terrorism, failed states, economic development, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, human rights, and some other stuff. And to an extent, it is about each of those things. But to my mind, if you want to get a handle on what’s driving events over there, and on its historical status as a plaything of regional and extraregional powers, you ought to read this article in today’s Wall Street Journal.
The themes that permeate the article are familiar: States as the primary actors in international politics, their uncertainty about other states’ intentions, the fundamental zero-sumness of security competition…somebody should cook up a theory or two on this stuff.
Eventually–although in fairness, God only knows when–we’re going to leave Afghanistan. When that happens, India and Pakistan are still going to live in the neighborhood. They’d each prefer to have lots of influence in Afghanistan, and to preclude the other from having too much. Accordingly, they’re both trying to set up structures and relationships that would, in the ideal scenario, let them control Afghanistan. In a less-than-ideal scenario, they’d like enough influence to undermine the other’s control of the country. Until you grasp that nettle, you’re really just fumbling around in the dark.
Find a solution for that in your COIN manual.
Stephen Brooks’ Response to Me, and Mine to Him
Guest-blogging for Stephen Walt last week, I offered some criticism of Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth’s book, World Out of Balance. Brooks has emailed to offer his response, which I post below with my reply.
Brooks writes:
First, the concluding chapter of our book distinguishes between two forms of systemic activism that a leading state can pursue — the first one relies on the use of the military and the second (identified by Robert Gilpin) involves changing the structure of the global economy, international institutions, and standards of legitimacy. We favor a focus on the second approach to systemic activism (that is what our Foreign Affairs article is all about) and taking this route does not involve the deployment or use of military force. It is hard for me to see how undertaking this second form of systemic activism can contribute to imperial overstretch.
Second, our main point about the financial crisis does not concern the US policy response. Rather, the essential point is that the crisis does not change the fact that America’s lead over its competitors is very, very large and that relative power shifts slowly. Knowing that the US is so far ahead is sufficient for us to reach the conclusion that the US will long remain the sole superpower.
My response is as follows:
Let me start by making clear that I think Brooks and Wohlforth have the better of the “is unipolarity ending?” argument. I also think they have the better of the argument about the likely implications of the financial crisis on the balance of power. Due to interdependence and a number of other factors, the United States will almost certainly emerge from the wreckage with its unipolar status intact.
Rather, the point of my highlighting their argument that the long-term fiscal problems in the United States “can be fixed” was to observe that they seem quick to dismiss problems that may pose serious danger to America’s standing over the medium term. To my mind, the fiscal imbalances are significant, and don’t appear likely to be fixed any time soon.
Is America About to Be Overrun by the Chinese/Russians/Anybody?
One of the frequent tropes of recent years is the notion that the United States is in decline, and America is plunging from being the only great power in the system to a status merely as first among equals. A veritable slew of books have come out in recent years making this argument. You also get this rhetoric when folks are arguing that we need more F-22s than we actually do, or for various other military-industrial-congressional boondoggles that the MIC complex and its supporters don’t want to give up.
One rhetorical tactic these folks have used is the “defense spending as a share of GDP” approach, which implicitly argues that defense needs should not be based on threat assessment, but rather on economic growth. The more economic growth, the more defense needs we have. (By this ramshackle logic, an uncharitable critic like me could note, economic growth is deleterious to national security. By contrast, if we went into a serious and enduring economic downturn, we’d get much more secure.)
A couple of useful data points have recently emerged that could help lower our pulse a little. The folks over at the U.S. Naval Institute blog point to the sixth failure of the latest Russian SLBM technology, snarkily observing that “generally speaking, the preferred direction for a ballistic missile, especially a sub-launched one is UP.”
In addition, Tom Donnelly offers a sensible take on the “Russia is going to reassemble the USSR” argument, noting
Moscow’s ability to enforce its writ in the hinterlands has fallen far down. And even Putin isn’t spending the rubles required to rebuild the Red Army. Second, the collapse of the Soviet Union cost the Russian empire about 400 years worth of conquests. Retaking Abkhazia [sic] might seem like a first step, but the road to great power status — as measured by something more than nuclear weapons and commodity prices — is very long.
Still, recognizing that Russia is not capable of reassembling the Soviet empire does not mean that we ought to be sending Joe “Ukrainian Chicks Are Hot” Biden over to Georgia and Ukraine to plump for NATO expansion and dance on the Soviet grave.
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