Bad for everyone

In last month’s issue of Foreign Affairs, Barry Posen writes an article “Pull Back“, arguing for a less “interventionist” United States.

He opens the piece “Despite a decade of costly and indecisive warfare and mounting fiscal pressures, the long-standing consensus among American policymakers about U.S. grand strategy has remained remarkably intact. As the presidential campaign made clear, Republicans and Democrats may quibble over foreign policy at the margins, but they agree on the big picture: that the United States should dominate the world militarily, economically, and politically, as it has since the final years of the Cold War, a strategy of liberal hegemony”.

The war on terror may have been costly, but to say it was “indecisive” is risible. Terrorist networks are no longer as powerful as they were in 2001 and this is thanks to both President Bush and President Obama. What Posen does correctly point out is that there is little difference between Democrats and the GOP in this area.

Posen goes on to write “the U.S. government has expanded its sprawling Cold War-era network of security commitments and military bases. It has reinforced its existing alliances, adding new members to NATO and enhancing its security agreement with Japan. In the Persian Gulf, it has sought to protect the flow of oil with a full panoply of air, sea, and land forces, a goal that consumes at least 15 percent of the U.S. defense budget. Washington has put China on a watch list, ringing it in with a network of alliances, less formal relationships, and military bases. The United States’ activism has entailed a long list of ambitious foreign policy projects. Washington has tried to rescue failing states, intervening militarily in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya, variously attempting to defend human rights, suppress undesirable nationalist movements, and install democratic regimes. It has also tried to contain so-called rogue states that oppose the United States, such as Iran, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, North Korea, and, to a lesser degree, Syria. After 9/11, the struggle against al Qaeda and its allies dominated the agenda, but the George W. Bush administration defined this enterprise broadly and led the country into the painful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although the United States has long sought to discourage the spread of nuclear weapons, the prospect of nuclear-armed terrorists has added urgency to this objective, leading to constant tension with Iran and North Korea”.

What Posen and others like him do not answer sufficiently well, if at all, is who would take over this role if America were to disengage with the world? Posen continues, “This undisciplined, expensive, and bloody strategy has done untold harm to U.S. national security. It makes enemies almost as fast as it slays them, discourages allies from paying for their own defense, and convinces powerful states to band together and oppose Washington’s plans, further raising the costs of carrying out its foreign policy. During the 1990s, these consequences were manageable because the United States enjoyed such a favorable power position and chose its wars carefully. Over the last decade, however, the country’s relative power has deteriorated, and policymakers have made dreadful choices concerning which wars to fight and how to fight them”.

What Posen and others like him fail to see, and ackownledge is that US national security and US grand strategy are one and the same. America does what is does, firstly because it can, secondly becuase it wants to and thirdly because it is in its interests. Posen is not the first to make what is an unnatural differentation between the two strands that come together and benefit both the world as well as America itself. As to the unverified claim that America “makes enemies almost as fast as it slays them” this makes little real sense and to this day America’s only real enemies, i.e. those who wish it genuine harm, are numbered in the single digits. The rest of the world either knows and accepts that America is here to stay, in more or less its current form. However, Posen’s point about the problem of freeriders is undeniably true and gives little incentive for others to pay for their own security. Yet, is this the best he can come up with? This problem while a nusiance of the current international order is hardly its ultimate flaw. Lastly, the notion that America “chose its wars carefully” seems to say the least, bizarre. President Clinton had numerous warnings about terrorist extremism and did nothing. At the same time as making this point he seems, in the previous paragraph, to accept that Clinton’s other wars were largely beneficial, “defend human rights, suppress undesirable nationalist movements, and install democratic regimes”.

Amidst all the inaccuacies and falsehoods Posen rightly states “the Pentagon has come to depend on continuous infusions of cash simply to retain its current force structure — levels of spending that the Great Recession and the United States’ ballooning debt have rendered unsustainable”. This poses an extremely serious risk to America, and by extentsion, the world if it a long term solution is not found.  He goes on to note that America is rich, safe and well armed yet far more controversially he says “instead of relying on these inherent advantages for its security, the United States has acted with a profound sense of insecurity, adopting an unnecessarily militarized and forward-leaning foreign policy”.

Again the stark differences are revealed. America takes an expansionist view of the world, that all events are interlinked in this increasingly globalised world. This is in the world that America operates in, the only realistic attitude to take. Anything else would be naive and foolish. He cites “examples” of how this expansionist reading of realist doctrine has been recieved. He notes that “China and Russia regularly use the rules of liberal international institutions to delegitimize the United States’ actions. In the UN Security Council, they wielded their veto power to deny the West resolutions supporting the bombing campaign in Kosovo in 1999 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and more recently, they have slowed the effort to isolate Syria”. Yet if this is the best the Posen can come up with getting US actions delegitimised than so be it. Again Posen seems to be of two minds, “a country as large and as active as the United States intensifies these responses”. If America only “intensifies” these reponses then surely it would be better for America to act rather than stop something that, according to Posen would only be less “intense”.

Posen ends the piece arguing “Washington should not retreat into isolationism but refocus its efforts on its three biggest security challenges: preventing a powerful rival from upending the global balance of power, fighting terrorists, and limiting nuclear proliferation. These challenges are not new, but the United States must develop more carefully calculated and discriminating policies to address them”. He goes on to argue that Asian countries should balance against China, despite the fact that China has acted aggressively towards them and without America they are fractious and weak.

On the second point regarding terrorism he argues “it was partly the U.S. military’s presence in Saudi Arabia that radicalized Osama bin Laden and his followers in the first place”. This is true but wrong. US bases were in Saudi Arabia but now they are gone and America is still fighting the same terrorists. Posen is attempting to paint al-Qaeda as a group that can be negotiated with, when it fact it has no such desire. Only the destruction of America, to pretent otherwise is nothing short of dangerous. Posen does however make the valid point that “trying to reform other societies by force is too costly, the United States must fight terrorism with carefully applied force, rather than through wholesale nation-building efforts such as that in Afghanistan”.

Besides from the already stated problems with free-riding Posen’s argument is really isolationism in disguise. It would be bad for America, and bad for the world. In short, bad for everyone.