What is power? A simple and evocative word, but a complicated concept that we Americans seem naive about. We have the most nuclear bombs of anyone on the planet. But would we ever use them? Obviously not. So they do not really increase our power in many, most, and possibly any practical ways. The only setting where nuclear bombs are useful is the precise opposite of the one we occupy- a case like North Korea, which with only a handful deliverable bombs, and the madness to use one, can effectively deter us from ever attempting to overthrow their system. It represents power in only the most existential extremity, and none at all in the usual hurly burly of diplomacy, conflict, terrorism, and small wars.
Similar considerations apply to other levels of military power. We can precision-bomb anyone, anywhere, but does that make us powerful? Not if power really means getting other people to do what you want. Over the last couple of decades, terrorists have shown that they have the power to make us to what they want- start wars, drop bombs all over the place, aggravate a lot of friends, create ungoverned spaces, and make air travel miserable for millions. But have we had the power to make them do what we want? Precious little, other than the extremely blunt method of killing them piecemeal in a game of whackamole which is reaching a dispiriting state of functional surrender in Afghanistan, and stalemate elsewhere.
For people will do what they want, and military methods are never a good or efficient way to make them do otherwise. Rome ran a very militaristic and terroristic system, which is the way things have to be if others are going to bent to one's will by military means. This is the problem of international relations, and particularly our problem having taken on the role of the world's policeman, and gotten embroiled in numerous conflicts ranging from bitterly disappointing (Vietnam, Syria, Afghanistan) to catastrophic (Iraq).
Preble is writing out of the Cato Institute, (and in the realist tradition I have reviewed recently), and adopts a nuanced libertarian stance- that we should not do so much, should allow others to do more, that standing down a little bit would benefit everyone, especially ourselves. The record of the last few decades speaks for itself- that we have made several very bad blunders, mostly by rushing to the "military option" with too little thought. Preble puts a lot of focus on the military- how expensive it is, how intrusive into the rest of society, how wasteful, and how its very size and capability encourage policy makers to use it, like the proverbial hammer. He is an exponent of the Powell doctrine, which sought to hedge our enthusiasm by asking some critical questions, principally whether a particular military action really addresses a national security interest of the United States. Preble is of the opinion that our true interests are quite narrow- simply defense of the continental territory, and that everything else about our world-wide hegemony is not a core interest and could be de-emphasized, if not jettisoned.
Exhibit A is our Middle East policy. The word "inane" comes up in Preble's discussion, and it is hard to disagree. Despite our alarm over the Arab oil embargos of the 1970s, oil has generally found a way to market whatever we do. When we have tried to block exports from countries such as Iraq and Iran, their oil has found markets anyhow, if in reduced amounts, for the simple reason that they have little else to live from. Not even the richest petrostates can refrain from exports for very long. So our decades of support for some of the most retrograde governments imaginable, including garrisons in Saudi Arabia (now shuttered), Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and elsewhere in the Gulf, to "keep the shipping lanes open" and "maintain the flow of oil" have been mostly a waste of time and resources- a deep strategic error. Our only policy should be to deny broad control over the oil centers to strategic enemies such as Russia, or now China. But ISIS? How are they so different from the Saudis? Each sells oil as enthusiastically as it can.
This points to the real problem of US power, which is not so much the seductions of military Rambo activities, but the plain stupidity that they enable and amplify. We have a foreign policy run by amateurs, by definition. The president is rarely elected for foreign policy credentials, and then builds a team (see Hillary Clinton) hardly any more knowledgeable or judicious. Our ambassadorial ranks are filled with political donors and flaks. The congress has given up any hope of retrieving its war powers. And our professionals, in the State Department and wider intelligence community, have numerous problems as well. How can we make this system work better?
I don't think that trimming our ambitions and letting the world go to the dogs, which is to say, to whichever other powers such as China and Russia have the ambition to take our place, is the only solution. We have good intentions (at least outside of the current administration) and have been generally justfied in our post-World War 2 Pax Americana, despite numerous costly blunders. We have also been served by those good intentions, which generate acquiescence, if not enthusiasm, on the part of our many allies and friends towards our dominant role, which in turn brings us benefits in economic and strategic terms. Not enough to offset the cost, perhaps, but having a stable world is difficult to value, really. Having and keeping many friends is the surest way to proceed to a peaceful world, which is our ultimate goal. In this sense, our competition with China should be on the basis of who can be friendlier and more supportive of an orderly state of affairs among the many other countries of the world.
The question is how to continue our relatively benevolent services without winding up in grievous error because we want to "fix" some problems a bit too enthusiastically. Preble raises the question of alliances, pointing out their inherent danger. If we promise mutual protection with a vast number of frontier countries, from South Korea to Ukraine, we should not be surprised to be drawn into conflicts not of our choosing, which may be unwise. Allied countries naturally feel a bit more free to provoke their neighbors given such protection, and we only need to think of World War 1 to understand the danger of such interlocking, tripwire alliances. So one approach is to make our relations with other countries more contingent, dependent on continuing good relations rather than legalistic (which is ultimately fictitious anyhow) in character. We should have friendship treaties with many, but alliances with few. But that is a minor point, since most of our rushes into action have been justified in other ways.
The deeper problem is not in having a military that is too strong, or alliances that are too promiscuous, but in having a policy-making apparatus that lacks intelligence. For all our NSA, CIA, and other capabilities, we blundered into Iraq for reasons that involved personal psychology (Bush, Cheney), intelligence failures (CIA), failures of integrity (Rumsfeld, the military, CIA), failures of institutional balance (State vs military and CIA), and further failures of intelligence- in lacking knowledge not only of the state of Saddam's power structure and capabilities, but of the culture we would be faced with were we to succeed in removing him. It was portrayed as the liberation of Paris all over again, plus lots of oil. The absurdity of this vision comes down to the insularity of everyone in power and the weakness of countervailing institutions (i.e. the State Department) that might have had a better grasp of the matter.
So while Preble is dubious about expanding the State Department, "its aim is to relate to foreign nations, not to run them", that is exactly where we need to go to gain a more intelligent foreign policy. But in a very specific way. We need more knowledge of local cultures that is useful to us. Right now, the customary tour is for a two or three years. This is enough time to get a feel for local conditions and make lots of high-level contacts. But it is no way to gather deep knowledge of the wellsprings of local sentiment, and the wheels that make everything work in that culture. It is that knowledge that we were missing in Iraq, and in Vietnam, and in the Balkans, and many of our other misadventures. We should keep the short tour officers- they are less likely to be captured by the local culture, and keep their service-to-America discipline. But we should add a cadre of officers that are a sort of cross between Peace Corps and Foreign Service, who specialize in learning about one other place for the long haul, and are not under threat or obligation to move elsewhere, unless they wish to do so. A sort of Lawrence of Arabia model, who might make themselves useful by writing books about the local culture, reports for the local embassy, etc. They would necessarily be more loosely tied to the US government bureaucracy, and their knowledge would come with some caveats. We probably cultivate a variety of locals currently who provide such key knowledge, but it seems that it does not always make a sufficient impression to affect our policy, due to failures in translation.
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| Knowledge is power. Some white privilege and great cinematography doesn't hurt either. |
The next question is how to slow the rush to war, and weigh expertise more heavily in our foreign policy councils, such that all this deep knowledge and intelligence from the field gets used to actually make decisions, rather than brushed aside by an incurious or incautious executive. The current structures of departments and the interdepartmental process through the NSC, are effective in shaping rational policy. But again, there are a lot of amateurs at this table. Every one at the top level is a political appointee, other than the President herself. While the Secretary of State should be speaking for the arm of the government that is deeply knowledgeable in foreign affairs, and for its expert employees, that is hardly a given. The NSC needs at least one representative from the professional ranks of the State Department, and also needs at least one representative from Congress, to exercise its oversight and constitutionally balancing role. In compensation, the council could probably do without the drug policy advisor, Energy Secretary, and White House Chief of Staff. This would make our core foreign policy-making institution more professional, accountable, and responsive to knowledge from the field. It needs also to take its long-term policy role more seriously, and spend less energy on micromanagement.
Turning back to our over-militarized stance in the world, using force less requires not so much that our military be made smaller. We have prowling through all the oceans shockingly powerful submarines to which no one pays much attention or wishes to use. No, the problem is one of strategic conception- that we fail to realize how limited the effective role of military action is, compared with the vast scope for friendly and constructive engagement with other nations.
Military power is simply the power to kill people, not to make them do or think what you want. As we learn in the old Westerns, coercion is the least effective, least humane, and least durable way to run a society. The model of global policing (if that is what we are doing) needs to be one of community policing, not of SWAT teams dropped from Apache helicopters. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we routinely killed the wrong people because we did not know true local conditions and got our "intelligence" from bad sources. That is what you get with the SWAT team model. Our own civil war can serve as another touchstone here. What if some other country had barged in and told us what was right, and had started an occupation? That would not have gone over well. The opportunities for insurgency and simmering ongoing warfare would have been quite a bit higher, though there was plenty of that in the postwar South as it was. The point is that our blithe talk about "the military option" routinely fails the most elementary test of foresight- to put ourselves in the other party's shoes.
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- Yes, it looks very bad.
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- In Australia, a war on cats.
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