By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, March
08, 2022
For a long while — perhaps since the
failure to find the expected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003? —
when Americans pay attention to foreign policy, it has been almost de
rigueur to scoff at “hawks” — or those who prefer larger defense
budgets, a larger military, and a more assertive or even aggressive response to
potential threats overseas.
This is well-trod, even exhausted
territory that has been debated most of my adult life: “Neocons.”
“Warmongers.” “Fighting for oil companies.” “The military industrial complex.”
“Nation-building.” “Forever wars.”
Anger over the loss of blood and treasure in
Iraq and Afghanistan is easily justified, as is fury over U.S. inability to
guide either country to a smooth and stable future. No serious observer of
American foreign policy can deny that over the past 20 to 30 years, the U.S.
has made extraordinarily consequential mistakes. The U.S. government has
demonstrated an ability to win wars in the form of destroying enemy forces, but
not an ability to turn a defeated territory into a stable country, run by a
competent and decent government. (The Iraq of 2022 is a big step up from the
regime of Saddam Hussein, but still has
a long way to go.)
But the world beyond our borders will not
just go away, and it is deadly naïvete to think that the world’s motley crew of
thugs, brutes, and other menaces — from powerful autocrats such as Putin and Xi
Jinping; to rogue states such as North Korea and Iran; to terror groups such as
al-Qaeda and ISIS; to transnational criminal groups such as drug cartels,
organized crime, or private-mercenary groups — will ever just go away and not
be a threat to Americans at home or abroad. The world is full of bullies who can
only be deterred by a metaphorical punch in the face, or by the fear of a
literal punch in the face.
No, not every problem in the larger world
ends up coming over here. But not every problem stays out there, either. Recent
history is full of bloody examples of what happens when the U.S. either decides
to stay out of a consequential conflict entirely or foolishly believes that it
can trust a hostile force:
·
The U.S largely stayed out of the civil
war in Syria for years, even after dictator Bashir al-Assad used chemical
weapons against civilians. (Remember when then-secretary of state John Kerry
boasted that in Syria, “We got 100
percent of the chemical weapons out” — and then Assad gassed
more civilians a few years later?) The war did not “solve itself”; the death toll in that war grew so
high, no one is sure how high it is — more than 606,000 is the estimate from June of
last year. The waves of refugees had a serious
impact on European politics.
·
Three successive American administrations
attempted to negotiate a settlement with the Taliban — and we saw how
their return to power turned out. As of January, at least 80 American
citizens were still in Afghanistan and could not leave; as of a week
ago, “More than 60,000 Afghan Special
Immigration Visa applicants remain at risk in Afghanistan.”
·
The U.S. and its European allies gave
diplomacy between Russia and Ukraine every chance to work in the past six
months. Putin invaded anyway. You may have noticed the consequences the last
time you filled up your gas tank.
The world has no shortage of evil people —
rulers who see weakness in neighboring states and seek to conquer them, raping
and pillaging, building or rebuilding empires atop the backs of subjugated
neighbors. The world has simmering ethnic hatreds and madmen who dream of
genocide, and angry young men (and sometimes women!) who find meaning by
joining up with extremist movements and lashing out violently against innocent
people.
The presence in the world of rulers,
regimes, factions, and movements that we would define as evil is a cold, hard
fact, and one that I suspect many people instinctively turn away from,
preferring to believe we’ve left that kind of wanton malevolence behind in the
darker chapters of our history books. The idea that someone powerful would
deliberately hurt others, just because they can, is frightening; it’s better to
conclude that everyone is always acting out of rational self-interest, and that
if we just approach them with the right combination of carrots and sticks, they
will calm down and be reasonable. (Senator
William Borah reportedly said, upon learning that Germany had invaded Poland in September 1939, “If
only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided.”)
You can find foreign-policy thinkers who
will turn themselves inside out to argue that every attack on Americans or
American interests traces back to some sort of U.S. “provocation.”
At the end of last month, after Russia
invaded, political
scientist John Mearsheimer declared that, “My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is
principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and
hardly anywhere [sic] in the American foreign-policy establishment, is
going to want to acknowledge that line of argument, and they will say that the
Russians are responsible.”
Russian forces
are shelling and killing innocent civilians on evacuation routes, but the real problem, Mearsheimer explains, is the April 2008 NATO
summit in Bucharest, Romania.
Putin’s Russia, the Taliban, Saddam
Hussein’s regime in Iraq — you can always find some sort of allegedly “realist”
foreign-policy thinker who insists that those countries were just standing
there, minding their own business, when the big bad Americans came along and
picked a fight.
It’s always our fault; as Jeanne
Kirkpatrick accurately noted, “They always
blame America first.”
You know what’s great about hawks? We
never blame America first. (Admittedly, it’s rare that we ever get around to
blaming America for anything at all.) Hawks rarely get blindsided. Hawks will
almost never look at a simmering potential crisis overseas and conclude, “Eh,
it’s not that bad.” We don’t count on luck or on problems to solve themselves.
Maybe we do come across as paranoid, but it’s partially because we have long
memories.
We generally believe that deterrence is
the best policy; if you have sufficient military assets in a geopolitical
neighborhood, and everyone believes you’re willing to use those military assets
in that geopolitical neighborhood, very few people want to start a fight with
you or your allies. You don’t see many thieves robbing the doughnut shop across
the street from a police station.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, Kerry, now
the president’s special envoy on climate change, declared that, “I’m very concerned about, I’m concerned about Ukraine
because of the people of Ukraine and because of the principles that are at
risk, in terms of international law and trying to change boundaries of
international law by force. I thought we lived in a world that had said no to
that kind of activity.”
Remember, Russia seized Crimea on
Kerry’s watch. And yet Kerry now has the gall to exclaim that he “thought we
lived in a world that had said no to that kind of activity.”
Many countries say “no to that kind of
activity” — 141 of the 193 member states of the United Nations, to be precise.
But 35 abstained on the resolution denouncing the invasion of Ukraine and
demanding a withdrawal of its forces, and Russia, Belarus, North Korea,
Eritrea, and Syria opposed it. A world that is 73 percent opposed to
territorial conquest is a world that is still going to have attempts at
territorial conquest.
It is good that world opinion
overwhelmingly denounces Russia. But world opinion doesn’t stop tanks and
planes and ships. It is not enough for the world to say “no to that kind of
activity”; the consequential question is what the world is willing to do in the
face of that kind of activity.
Hawks also rarely underestimate foes. In
December 2016, outgoing President Obama was asked about Russian attempts to
influence the previous presidential election, and
characterized Russia as a flailing, spent force: “The Russians can’t change us or significantly weaken us. They are a
smaller country. They are a weaker country. Their economy doesn’t produce
anything that anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms. They don’t
innovate.” As Benjamin Haddad and Alina Polyakova summarized in 2018, “Though
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was the final nail in the coffin of the ‘Reset,’ President Obama remained reluctant to view Moscow
as anything more than a local spoiler, and thought the whole mess was best
handled by Europeans.”
And in a 2016 interview, Obama insisted
that Russia’s use of military force was a sign of weakness, not strength:
The notion
that somehow Russia is in a stronger position now, in Syria or in Ukraine, than
they were before they invaded Ukraine or before he had to deploy military
forces to Syria is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of power in
foreign affairs or in the world generally. Real power means you can get what
you want without having to exert violence. Russia was much more powerful when
Ukraine looked like an independent country but was a kleptocracy that he could
pull the strings on.
In retrospect, Obama’s worldview was
infuriatingly naïve, a denial of difficult facts, and a more eloquent version
of Kerry’s insistence that we live in “a world that had said no to that kind of
activity.”
“If you want peace, prepare for war” — it
is so simple and yet so counterintuitive, at least to significant swaths of
Americans.
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