By Brian Stewart
Thursday, August 07, 2025
I.
Proof that power and diplomacy go together arrived
earlier this summer in the Middle East. As Israel was pulverising Iranian
regime targets in June and fears loomed of a wider conflagration, President
Donald Trump brought the Twelve Day War to an end with a hammer blow to the
Iranian nuclear program followed by the immediate imposition of diplomatic
pressure. But the apparent success of this limited but consequential military
operation felt anomalous. Ever since the Iraq War was declared more than two decades
ago, American foreign-policy discussions have been preoccupied with fears of
quagmire and failure. This inclination to fight the last war would be
understandable had the right lessons been learned from it. Unfortunately, they
have not.
Two popular strands of thought now disfigure the US
foreign-policy debate, both of which converge on an ambivalence about the use
of hard power as an instrument of policy. But neither understands the
wellsprings of global order and international legitimacy, the importance of
using (or credibly threatening to use) military might to suppress anarchy in
the global commons, or the ideological character of liberal civilisation’s
enemies. As a result, since the end of the Cold War, these discrete ideological
tendencies have tended to act as mutually reinforcing barriers to the
application of American power.
The first tendency is conservative “realism,” the
adherents of which have a reflexive suspicion of ideals and abstract principles
in statecraft. Instead, they are chiefly committed to maintaining a balance of
power in the interests of stability. Realists’ fixation on narrow national
interests prejudices them against grand crusades, especially in a country as
distant and complex as Iraq. The brand of realism in vogue today holds that
Saddam Hussein’s cruelty and expansionism never posed much of a threat to the
United States, and that American power should therefore never have been used to
topple his regime or establish consensual rule in its place. This counsel of
restraint arises from a concern with the external conduct of regimes and
indifference to their internal characteristics. This creates unhelpful
illusions about ideological foes and unconventional dangers that make this
ostensibly bullet-biting doctrine unfit for purpose in the real world.
The second common argument against the Iraq War usually
comes from the more progressive quarters of liberal internationalism. It rests
on a belief in collective security and looks to the world community and its
institutions as the ultimate source of legitimacy. Whereas adherents of
realpolitik define vital interests in terms of oil wells, strategic
chokepoints, and regional stability, liberal internationalists place a premium
on a global system in which raisons d’état are subject to international
law. In this view, the Iraq War wrecked America’s position as the chief
upholder of a rules-based order and corrupted the ideal of a law-bound world.
If realism takes a crabbed view of national interest, the debilitating flaw of
liberal internationalism is the reverse: it finds power politics so
disagreeable that it recoils from promoting a national interest. This
post-national set of beliefs emphasises the limits of power and—if only
implicitly—global responsibility. It conceives of collective security as a
principally pacific task save in those vanishingly rare instances when
international institutions approve the use of force to keep peace. This
preference for quixotic and legalistic idealism in foreign policy is a poor
alternative to a tradition that blends raw power and high principle.
The misconceptions about national purpose and policy
shared by these approaches betrays confusion about the way the modern world
works. The consequences of this confusion—an aversion to the serious and
sustained assertion of American power—are particularly ominous in a world of
gathering geostrategic peril. Coming to grips with the actual legacy of the
Iraq War is therefore a prerequisite for fending off a reticent or merely
cynical foreign policy, and for evolving a muscular internationalism that offers
the best means of defending a fragile and embattled liberal order.
II.
As President Trump deliberated about bombing Iran’s
nuclear facilities, the interventionist-turned-restrainer Sohrab Ahmari invoked
the spectre of Iraq to caution against military action. In a June
essay for UnHerd titled “The Regime Change Maniacs Are Back,” Ahmari
reminded his readers that the Iraq War began “with scant resistance from the
mainstream media or wider establishment.” The decision to remove Saddam Hussein
from power was indeed the collective decision of a governing class convinced
that his regime was a menace to US national security and regional order. The
war was waged with congressional authorisation, and every subsequent Democratic
and Republican presidential nominee who was a member of Congress at the time of
the 2003 invasion blessed it with their vote. It was also a popular cause with
the American public—a CNN/USA
Today/Gallup poll conducted on the eve of the invasion found that 72
percent of respondents approved.
But the bitter experience in Iraq, Ahmari argued, exposed
the folly of using American power against Iran and he invoked the cautionary
wisdom of a handful of Iraq dissenters who he said had been vindicated by that
war’s outcome—“above all Brent Scowcroft.” Back in 2003, it was Scowcroft, the two-time
former national-security adviser (under Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush), who
had urged America “to consider the law of unintended consequences—and to open
its imagination to nightmare scenarios.” For conservatives in Ahmari’s mould,
this unheeded “realism”
requires little elaboration, since it is self-evident in the tragedy that
subsequently befell America in Iraq. “Drawing on his experience as the elder
Bush’s adviser during the Gulf War,” Ahmari relates, “[Scowcroft] warned that
regime change would mean ‘occupation of an Arab land, hostile Arab land.’ Not
for months, but for years. In short, Scowcroft predicted
everything that went wrong with Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
Within a year or two of the fall of Baghdad, US public
support for the invasion had suffered a decline from which it has never
recovered. But it should be noted that not every problem Scowcroft and other
foreign-policy realists forecast came to pass. In an article
for the Wall Street Journal in August 2002, Scowcroft predicted that
Israel would be the first casualty of any military action against Saddam
Hussein—just as it had been after Iraqi forces were expelled from Kuwait. The
Jewish state would be provoked to join the fray, he went on, and perhaps even
use its own (secret) nuclear arsenal. But Israel was not pulled into the
conflict, and Armageddon did not result. Scowcroft also predicted that the war
would result in a “serious degradation in international cooperation against
terrorism” as friendly Arab regimes were destabilised. He was wrong about that,
too.
The realists were correct, however, on one important
point. The liberation of Baghdad was followed by a large-scale, long-term
military occupation. Once the Bush administration decided that a hostile tyrant
would not be replaced by a compliant one, a prolonged American commitment
became inescapable. But the baleful effects of Saddam Hussein’s divide-and-rule
policies on Iraqi society—once memorably
described as a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave beneath
it—ensured that a wrecked and traumatised country lay in wait. Under such
circumstances, it should have been obvious that anarchy followed by a reversion
to dictatorship was a distinct possibility, and that any durable order
following the end of Iraqi Ba’athism would impose onerous burdens and require
patient sacrifice.
In his gripping 2005 history of the war, The
Assassins’ Gate, American journalist George Packer details the Bush
administration’s breathtakingly naïve assumptions about postbellum Iraq and its
fatal hope that imperial domination could be achieved on the cheap. Just weeks
before the war, for example, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld selected Jay
Garner, a retired lieutenant general, to lead the Office of Reconstruction and
Humanitarian Assistance that would administer Iraq for an indeterminate period
after the fall of the regime. In a prewar meeting at ORHC headquarters in
Kuwait City, Garner outlined a sparse plan to put Iraq back on its feet that
included a timetable for reconstructing utilities, standing up ministries,
ratifying a constitution, and holding elections. Garner told the meeting that
“by August, Iraq would have a sovereign, functioning government in place.”
(This was in keeping with Pentagon plans to reduce US troop levels from more
than 160,000 in April to 25,000 in September.) “There was a stunned silence,”
Packer reports. “Someone at the table said, ‘Which August?’”
Packer writes with quiet indignation about the Bush
administration’s oddly cavalier approach to postwar planning in Iraq, and his
prose is all the more damning for its understatement. Its hit-and-run war plan
and economical timetable only made sense, Packer observes, “if one thought of
postwar Iraq as a limited humanitarian operation as opposed to an open-ended
political-military undertaking more vast and complex than anything the United
States government had attempted since the end of World War II.” This ambitious
mission—to uproot a heinous tyranny, rebuild a broken state, repair a ravaged
society, and secure a strategic foothold in a benighted region—required a
program of imperial tutelage backed by garrisons of troops and civilian
administrators looping around the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys. Instead,
the Iraq War was prosecuted “with
the army we have” on the presumption that the enemy was a bystander and
that the boys would be home by Labour Day. This was, Packer writes, war without
politics—the opposite of Clausewitz’s famous dictum.
America’s quasi-imperial commitment to Iraq was
unforeseen by the war’s architects, an indictment of the Bush administration’s
complacency about the difficulties of raising a democracy in the Middle East.
But that is not enough to discredit Operation Iraqi Freedom wholesale. The
costs of the war were hefty, but they were hardly exorbitant (the price tag was
lower than that of Obama’s ill-fated 2009 stimulus plan), and a full
account of the war must also consider its necessity, along with the strategic
advantages it conferred and the calamities it prevented. In 2003, the antiwar
faction insisted that deterring and containing Saddam Hussein (the main
alternative to war) was feasible, but this would also have required gunboats
and barracks and outposts. Realists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt even
argued that the US could contain a nuclear Iraq.
As the philosopher Michael Walzer put it in an essay for
Brookings’ Liberty
and Power symposium:
The campaign against the war
should never have been only an antiwar campaign. It should have been a campaign
for a strong international system, designed and organised to defeat aggression,
control weapons of mass destruction, stop massacres and ethnic cleansing, and
assist in the politics of transition after brutal regimes are overthrown. But
an international system of this sort has to be the work of many different
states, not of one state.
The risks and expense of such an indefinite mission would
have been enormous: a continuous mass military deployment on the borders of
Iraq in addition to maintaining the no-fly zones established after the first
Gulf War, to say nothing of tightening economic sanctions and an inspections
regime robust enough to withstand Ba’athist intimidation and fraud. Even if
other world powers had resolved to go along with this kind of operation (and
there is no evidence they were prepared to do so), there was no way of ensuring
an avoidance of conflict in the long run. Saddam Hussein’s record of inveterate
antagonism and near-suicidal aggression virtually guaranteed a showdown with
the world’s liberal superpower (or Walzer’s “strong international system”).
Realists claimed that Saddam Hussein was deterrable because he was chiefly
concerned with his own survival, but his actual record indicated the psychology
of a pathological gambler. It was therefore prudent to conclude that
coexistence with Saddam Hussein in the post-9/11 world was neither possible nor
desirable.
The determination to misread the Iraq War has had
deranging effects on commentary. In an essay co-written with one of Bernie
Sanders’s former foreign-policy advisers and published in the Washington
Post on the day of America’s strikes against Iran’s nuclear
facilities, Sohrab
Ahmari predicted that even a limited use of force would spiral out of
control. “A U.S.-Iran war would be anything but quick,” he warned.
Even if the Trump administration
could satisfy itself that a “one-and-done” operation had achieved all that was
necessary, as the saying goes, the enemy gets a vote. A cornered, vengeful
Iranian leadership enjoying a rally-around-the-flag effect may feel the need to
escalate. Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent
of the world’s oil supply traverses, and target vulnerable U.S. bases across
the Middle East with an arsenal of sophisticated short- and medium-range
missiles that have yet to be impacted by Israeli airstrikes.
Attacks on U.S. bases would
require the United States to respond in kind. And there we’d have it: another
big Mideast war, unfolding amid the American public’s exhaustion with wars in
the region.
But instead of all this lurid carnage, the clerical
regime in Tehran forewarned the US of its perfunctory retaliatory strike and
then immediately sued for peace. Years spent accommodating the mullahs had
allowed the expansion of their Islamist imperium and produced bloody mayhem
throughout the region. Conversely, a vigorous application of American (and
Israeli) airpower has now checked Iran’s malign influence, actual and
potential. Although Iran remains a threat, the regime has sustained massive
damage. Too many Western analysts, commentators, and policymakers lost
confidence in American power after Iraq, and in the fear it could elicit in bad
actors. After years of bad behaviour was allowed to pass unchecked by a
diffident United States, the Trump administration has at last provided the
autocratic axis with a potent display of American deterrence.
III.
Today, the Iraq War is widely considered the greatest
strategic blunder in modern US history. That judgment isn’t simply based on the
assorted errors of execution (of which this war had as many as any other); it
is an attack on the conception of the war itself. In the popular narrative,
marching to Baghdad was an unnecessary venture founded on deceit or delusion—“a
war of choice,” as it is frequently described. But this objection does not
explain why the war initially attracted such broad liberal support, and it
betrays a misapprehension about the nature of global order.
Any conflict except one involving a truly existential
threat to one’s country can presumably be described as a war of choice. And in
the annals of elective warfare, the Iraq war qualifies as a particularly noble
and far-sighted endeavour. In the aftermath of 11 September—which had placed
America in the crossfire of a civil war raging within the Arab world—the
prevailing order in the Middle East was a font of internal repression and
external violence that did no favours to American interests at all (to say nothing
of American principles). In a region of paranoid and sadistic autocrats, Saddam
Hussein was in a class by himself, posing not so much an imminent threat to the
outside world as a permanent and inevitable one.
Under such circumstances, was the desire to make American
power more credible and effective really so unimportant? Was it a matter of
indifference to the civilised world that Iraq—or the Muslim Middle East more
broadly—was being indefinitely denied self-rule? The nontrivial prospect of
regime collapse in Baghdad without intervention also raised the prospect
of a Hobbesian hellscape in post-Saddam Iraq that was almost too ghastly to
contemplate. The realists who proposed abdication never took the measure of
jihad and nursed their own illusions about the rationality of the strongmen
they favoured to produce regional stability. Even after Saddam Hussein was
overthrown, their call to abandon Iraq to a Baathist-Bin Ladenist alliance
ignored the fact that America’s military presence was the vital buffer between
relative order and total chaos.
Scowcroft and the realists believed the undemocratic
status quo in the Middle East was conducive to US interests and therefore
preferable to any likely alternative. In reality, one-party and one-leader
states are inherently dangerous and unstable, and Saddam Hussein’s regime was
an unusually menacing example. The Iraqi Ba’ath Party had revealed itself as
such during the 1980–88 war with Iran and the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. It was
not just bellicose, it was also irrational in its ceaseless anti-Americanism and
antisemitism, which included assassination plots against ex-US presidents and
lavish support for Palestinian rejectionists and suicide terrorists. Saddam
Hussein’s persistent recalcitrance over weapons of mass destruction violated
the terms of the Gulf War armistice, which required compliance with UN weapons
inspections. And he hosted a bevy of international gangsters and jihadist
organisations in his capital. All of which made the Iraqi regime an
omnidirectional threat.
When the smoke cleared after al-Qaeda’s attack on
America—which Iraq was the sole government in the world to praise—the nexus of
Arab autocracy and Islamist terror became hard to miss. On 7 October 1998,
regime change in Baghdad had become official US policy when the Iraq Liberation
Act passed through the Senate without a single dissenting vote. Saddam Hussein
was not implicated in 9/11, but he shared the perpetrators’ resentment of
American power and contempt for democracy, and the attacks had now changed the
threat assessments being made within the US governmental and security
apparatus. Regime change in Iraq would finally enforce more than a dozen UN
Security Council resolutions, but it would also punish the leader of Arab
rejectionism and restore American deterrence in a region highly sensitive to
configurations of power.
Getting rid of Saddam Hussein, Washington dared to hope,
might even reorder the regional balance of power, undermining brutal
police-states and autocracies while bolstering more liberal forces. As Fouad
Ajami pointed out, the 9/11 terrorists had been forged “in the crucible of
Arab society, in the dictators’ prisons and torture chambers. Arab financiers
and preachers gave them the means and the warrant for their horrific deeds.”
Saddam Hussein was as poisonous an influence as could be found in the Middle
East’s sprawling and dysfunctional political culture. Consecrated to sadistic
nihilism at home and ferocious belligerence abroad, he nursed the pathologies
of the whole region—paranoia, religious fanaticism, lawlessness, and terror.
Scowcroft’s scepticism about upending Saddam Hussein’s
rule—and instituting a new regional order midwifed by American power—was
motivated by a reactionary impulse to minimise the disruption to the Middle
East after 11 September, as if America’s top regional priority was shielding
the very Saudi monarchy that had helped stoke the furies of holy war. Fearing
instability more than tyranny, realist statecraft has long betrayed a
preference for “modernising” authoritarian order over the upheavals of participatory
politics.
But for Americans living nervously in the shadow of 9/11,
these doctrines had lost their appeal. The corrupt kings and
presidents-for-life in the Middle East were incubating religious absolutism and
violent fanaticism with their misrule. In these despotisms, dissent was largely
confined to the mosque, where the popular Salafist orientation swelled the
ranks of global jihad. But even after the pursuit of “stability” in the Middle
East had brought slaughter to New York and Washington, Scowcroft ardently
defended a policy that he claimed had produced “fifty years of peace.” Was
it any surprise that an apologist for the old order urged the United States not
to topple Saddam Hussein, and likewise deplored the ambition to create a
representative regime in his place? This was surely a sincere view, but it
lacked any sense of the threat’s gravity.
Once the Iraq War ran into severe difficulty, the realist
faction redoubled its efforts to end American involvement that it maintained
should never have occurred in the first place. But another faction, that of the
liberals, joined the stampede for the exits and disavowed a war it had once
endorsed and championed. A common refrain from these disaffected liberals went
like this: notwithstanding its good intentions, the Bush administration
exploited the 11 September 2001 attacks to lash out against a convenient enemy
rather than staying focused on the present danger. In so doing, it
overreacted to al-Qaeda’s onslaught, which ought to have been countered by
means of law-enforcement and intelligence work rather than the 101st Airborne.
Worse, the administration undermined liberal principles by taking up the role
of global sheriff for which it did not possess legitimacy. In choosing war, it
was not constrained by international opinion, but guided by its own morality
and sense of justice. Hubris was then duly followed by nemesis.
IV.
In a searching two-part
analysis
of US foreign policy for Quillette, Matt Johnson provides a version of
this narrative. On the whole, Johnson offers a stimulating review of
international politics in the post-Cold War era, but his analysis falters when
he addresses the use of US military force and discounts the decisive role of
power in creating and sustaining the international order since the end of World
War Two. As so often, it is a tendentious reading of the Iraq War that leads
him astray.
Johnson is a liberal, so it is striking that, like
Ahmari, he makes favourable references to Brent Scowcroft’s realist arguments
on the Iraq War. He praises Scowcroft (and his boss, George H.W. Bush) for not
invading Iraq in 1991 after Saddam Hussein’s seizure of Kuwait was undone, and
upbraids the architects of regime change in Baghdad a dozen years later for
disregarding their forebears’ prudence in a frenzy of post-9/11 martial zeal.
No mention is made of the Iraqi Kurds and Shi’ites who, encouraged by the
American president, revolted against Saddam Hussein’s government, or of the
massacre those communities then suffered at the hands of the Republican Guard
divisions retreating from Kuwait. It may be that Johnson shares Scowcroft’s
wish that the popular revolt simply hadn’t happened.
Johnson argues that pressing on to Baghdad in 1991 would
have compromised the liberal-internationalist ideal, since it would have
fractured the coalition against Saddam Hussein’s bid to conquer Kuwait. In this
respect, he echoes the view of Bush and Scowcroft that regime change would have
“destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped
to establish.” But this was an excessively optimistic reading of human nature
and events, albeit a fairly conventional one. In a September
1990 address, Bush declared that the world had been given a “rare
opportunity to move toward a historic period of cooperation,” and he called for
a “new world order” in which the “rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle”
and the “strong respect the rights of the weak.”
This tantalising vision of a new age captivated realists
and liberal internationalists but it was a false dawn. Fashionable notions
about material progress and moral improvement in a new world order were no
match for the dark forces that drive the warp and woof of
history—hypernationalism, despotism, economic protectionism, genocide, and
imperial conquest. Since time immemorial, peoples and states have reliably
pursued their self-interest, and they generally lack the sort of anxious
foresight or enlightened thinking required to collaborate in upholding
international peace and harmony. So, the likelihood of a binding commitment to
collective security was always remote. No precedent lasts in this fallen world.
As Edmund Burke observed, “Experience is the school of mankind, and they will
learn from none other.”
In any case, merely responding to aggression is an
inadequate basis for international order. Policing actions that repulse
interstate assaults (Kuwait in 1991 or Ukraine since 2022) do not prevent them,
and they seldom punish the predatory regimes responsible. The invasions and
attempted annexations of Kuwait and Ukraine were destructive campaigns that
could easily have been worse. The world was fortunate that Iraq did not possess
nuclear weapons that would almost certainly have deterred any attempt to come
to Kuwait’s rescue. But leaving Saddam Hussein in power allowed a vicious
aggressor to molest Iraq and the region for years to come.
Meanwhile, it was only the valour of Volodymyr Zelensky
in the winter of 2022 that rallied the Ukrainian nation to resist the Russian
juggernaut and kept it outside the gates of Kyiv. Had Russia’s initial
blitzkrieg been successful, it would have expanded the Kremlin’s writ across
the Black Sea, and the world might well have accepted the outcome—just as it
accepted Russia’s land grab in Crimea eight years previously. Here, though,
Russia’s nuclear arsenal, and Putin’s corresponding brinksmanship, has sharply
limited the scope of military assistance that the United States has been
willing to provide to Ukraine. Despite the stalemate that overtook the war long
ago, it has been a human and strategic catastrophe that may yet leave Ukraine
dismembered and Putin emboldened.
Johnson grieves for what has been lost—or at least for
what he perceives has been lost. “After the Cold War,” he writes, “the United
States and other Western powers were attempting to pursue a historically
unprecedented geopolitical project—the creation of a law-bound international
community.” In Johnson’s telling, this project began to fade with the failure
of George W. Bush to follow his father’s temperate example. Reiterating
Bush and Scowcroft’s cautious approach to American power in A World
Transformed, he laments that the younger Bush didn’t “read his father’s
book more carefully” and struck into Iraq without the one great asset of the
Gulf War: international legitimacy. After the botched intelligence about
weapons of mass destruction was exposed, Johnson avers that America’s mission
in Iraq “torpedoed” the gathering global shift toward liberal internationalism,
ending dreams of establishing a “new world order.”
Of course, when military action becomes necessary, it’s
preferable to act in concert with other states. But must multilateral approval
be secured before the United States contemplates any use of force? Is
unilateral military action inherently illegitimate? Was President Clinton
wrong, for instance, to launch Operation Desert Fox in 1998 over the objections
of France and Russia in response to Iraq’s obstruction of weapons inspections?
The following year, was Clinton wrong to order airstrikes to halt Serb ethnic
cleansing in Kosovo after the UN Security Council declined to support a
resolution calling for action? Was President Obama wrong to order the covert
raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad? Did these military operations
lack legitimacy because they were largely unilateral assertions of American
power?
It is hard to agree that legitimacy in the global commons
is simply a matter of adhering to international law. Since international
institutions have a dismal record of keeping the peace and defending human
rights, it would be truer to say that respect for principles of international
law can just as easily thwart the pursuit of justice. Not so long ago,
this was recognised by the good and the great across Europe. In 2002, British
diplomat Robert Cooper issued a warning. “The challenge to the postmodern
world,” he argued, was for Europeans to remember that hard power still mattered
outside their own peaceful continent’s borders. “Among ourselves,” he wrote,
“we keep the law, but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the
laws of the jungle.”
Cooper’s plea was made after Slobodan Milosevic’s
ruthless campaign in Bosnia, which the Clinton administration and its European
counterparts deplored but did almost nothing to stop for almost three years. In
the end, Europe decided to act with the United States in Bosnia and later in
Kosovo, bypassing the Security Council. In that case, two of the loudest voices
raised on behalf of armed intervention belonged to then-British prime minister
Tony Blair and then-German foreign minister Joschka Fischer—both of whom
Johnson salutes in his essay. According to these men, traditional principles of
sovereignty and nonintervention had to yield in the face of mass murder. So,
did military action to punish gross and systematic violations of human rights
in the Balkans, carried out without the Security Council’s legitimising
sanction, prevent “the creation of a law-bound international community”?
Johnson doesn’t appear to think so, but he doesn’t explain why not.
In Kosovo and Iraq, Blair was consistent in his adherence
to the defence of liberalism over the sovereign equality of all nations, while
Fischer supported liberal intervention in the former and opposed it in latter.
But Fischer’s emphasis on multilateral legitimacy grants too much sway to
autocratic powers with no concern for human rights. As Charles Krauthammer
pointed out, effective action on behalf of liberal principles or international
security is seldom possible if American power is hostage to global consensus.
“Multilateralism,” he observed, “is the isolationism of the internationalist.”
And yet, the illusion persists that the United Nations is the world’s highest
moral authority (or at least, “the best we have”) and the repository of
mankind’s most high-minded instincts and ideals.
But do international law and institutions really deserve
credit for upholding global order all these years? Multilateralists would say
so. But the UN is just a collection of sovereign states—and one that makes no
distinction between tyrannies and democracies, both of which enjoy equal clout.
How could such a body possibly keep peace on terms about which there is fierce
disagreement? The world order we have known for more than three-quarters of a
century has little to do with growing fidelity to the rule of international law
or obeisance to the UN charter from the world’s great powers. It is the product
of one nation’s power and purpose—specifically, that of the United States,
which took special responsibility for providing security and preserving
liberalism after World War Two.
In this period of American primacy, Washington did not
look to the United Nations for permission to use force, nor did it usually
consult allies. In defence of the liberal order the United States policed,
American leaders defended their country’s interests but they also frequently
sought to advance the welfare of others. And in the unipolar moment that
followed the collapse of the Soviet empire, America did not exploit its
newfound dominance or treat its allies as tributary powers. Instead, it sought
to prevent a reversion to the historical norm that defined the world before
1945. It was precisely the lack of a decent and hospitable international order
that initially summoned Americans to global leadership.
With fascism and totalitarianism on the march, American
leaders concluded that only the United States had the strength and capacity to
repulse them and build a durable liberal order. Over subsequent decades, it shouldered
burdens that benefited the entire civilised world. It has resisted and, where
possible, undermined predatory dictators and hostile ideologies, while
leveraging its influence—inconsistently—to spread liberal-democratic
principles. It has also provided security to frontline democracies menaced by
illiberal neighbours and offered solace and assistance to democrats struggling
for liberty within dictatorial states.
As China, Russia, and Iran have formed a revisionist
alliance to resist this liberal order, America’s governing class remains
unconvinced that other states or international arrangements can be trusted to
address the problems that threaten to plunge the world into chaos and disorder
as America retreats. Whatever the flaws of the current order, it still requires
American strength and leadership and would perish without it.
V.
If liberal internationalism was indeed a casualty of the
Iraq War, it’s worth pondering the value of something so brittle. If this
system could not withstand a jihadist insurgency in the alleyways of Baghdad
and Fallujah, it may not have been able to survive any adverse conditions at
all. If not in Iraq in 2003, would it have survived a Western intervention to
arrest mass murder and chemical warfare in Syria in the 2010s? Or a committed
effort to fashion Ukraine into a garrison state in the teeth of Russian
aggression during the same period? In the absence of prudent statecraft, of
course, neither of these interventions occurred, and the world began to sink into
its present disorder.
The experience of what happened—and what didn’t happen—in
history displays the foreign-policy conundrum faced by a superpower: action and
inaction can both have terrible consequences. This dynamic explains why
American foreign policy has oscillated between feckless crusades and dangerous
isolation, an erratic pattern that has prevented sustained disengagement from
world affairs, or even an overly selfish pursuit of material self-interest. As
the historian Stephen Sestanovich writes in Maximalist,
after periods of retrenchment, Americans tend to become persuaded that their
way of life is not disconnected from the fate of liberty elsewhere in the
world. What Sestanovich calls maximalism—the instinct in a foreign crisis to
muster the nation’s strength and turn back the threat at hand—has occasionally
led to overcommitment. But if this global activism brought about conspicuous
failures abroad, it has also been an essential ingredient in America’s greatest
successes.
At one point, Johnson remarks that “the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq made much of America’s public and political class
reflexively hostile to the whole idea of military intervention abroad,
particularly in the Middle East.” But were Americans ever receptive to toppling
dictatorships and uprooting terrorism in the Middle East, except in the
aftermath of a devastating attack on the American homeland? As memories of the
11 September attacks faded, Americans naturally began to chafe against a costly
and protracted undertaking in a forbidding setting. It was predictable that the
United States would succumb to what Niall Ferguson termed a bout of “attention
deficit disorder” in his 2004 book Colossus.
Another mass-casualty assault on the homeland, however, would likely cause
American war-weariness to dissipate overnight.
It has become commonplace to attribute all manner of ills
to the Iraq War, and Johnson is not immune to this bad habit. “Liberal
internationalism,” he laments, “has become a political cudgel for populist
authoritarians around the world, who present it as a paradigmatic example of
elite arrogance, ineptitude, and failure. Never again, they vow, should the
political class be allowed to drag Western nations into forever wars with
fantasies of regime change, democracy promotion, and nation-building.” But what
exactly was the fantasy? The Ba’athist regime in Baghdad was changed,
and democracy was successfully promoted on its ruins. If the existence
of American forward operating bases in the Iraqi or Syrian deserts constitute a
forever war, then Donald Trump—the populist authoritarian par excellence—has
continued to prosecute it with gusto.
The blunders of the Iraqi occupation did not preclude a
benign outcome. By any measure, the US troop surge in 2007, and the Awakening
of Sunni tribes in al-Anbar province that followed, inflicted a battlefield
defeat on al-Qaeda in Iraq and salvaged Iraqi democracy. By 2011, this
achievement was even acknowledged by President Obama as he announced the
withdrawal of US forces from Iraq: the country, he reassured the world, was now
“sovereign, stable, and self-reliant.” That last item was erroneous, as Obama’s
conservative critics insisted at the time, and as the rise of the Islamic State
soon demonstrated.
But in his determination to attribute the ills of world
order to the Iraq war, Johnson lapses into historical determinism. He treats
the project’s grim denouement as inevitable, as if history were written in
advance. He therefore finds himself in the position of tacitly fixing the blame
for today’s precarious world order on a military intervention that occurred in
2003. But the collapse of the Iraqi army in Mosul and the bulldozing of the
Iraqi–Syrian border by a force of 15,000 jihadists were not predetermined. It’s
exceedingly strange to depict George W. Bush as the author of that particular
calamity when Obama’s hasty removal of America’s military presence in Iraq
created a vacuum that was filled by the rival brigades of Sunni and Shi’ite
terror. Obama deserves credit for belatedly ordering US airpower to halt ISIS’s
march across the Levant, but this successful intervention was only necessary
because of his previous abdication.
Johnson lets liberal internationalism off much too easily.
He views Obama’s policy in the Middle East as an overreaction to his
predecessor’s “recklessness.” But this misstates the case: the recklessness was
Obama’s. Johnson rightly criticises Obama’s weakness before Russia’s unprovoked
war in Ukraine since the Obama-imposed “limits of American support ...
wasn’t a deterrent—it was an invitation.” But he doesn’t grapple with how
Obama’s recurring capitulation in the Middle East—first in Iraq and then in
Syria—allowed Sunni jihadism to flourish and also empowered the rise of Iran
and its proxies, which ultimately led to the aggressions and atrocities of 7
October. Multipolar harmony was always an illusion; historically, multipolar
systems have not been particularly peaceful.
What lies behind this ungenerous appraisal of the Iraq
War—and its exculpation of Obama’s
carelessness with some of its most important gains—is a deeper opposition
to a martial superpower that has claimed for itself the prerogative to use its
power as it sees fit. The conviction that American hegemony is illegitimate,
and that hard power has to give way to “soft power” and international
cooperation is a major obstacle to shoring up a vulnerable world order. For
Americans, in particular, a wider disengagement looms as large segments of both
parties seek a reprieve from the burdens of global leadership. In his 2003 book
Of
Paradise and Power, Robert Kagan argued that “Martian” Americans
understood the dangerous and anarchic nature of the world better than
Europeans, with their “Venusian” nostrums of perpetual peace and universal
goodwill. It would be tragic if at a time of general European rearmament, the
custodians of American power, still reeling from the disappointments of Iraq,
managed to forget this.
Paralysing delusion may yet exact a catastrophic cost if
the People’s Republic of China decides to challenge the Pax Americana in the
East—the geographic core of the world economy and the home of American treaty
allies. US military commanders and officials have already warned that if
Beijing decides to invade Taiwan, China would pressure its tacit allies in
Russia, Iran, and North Korea to launch a multi-front war across Eurasia to
overwhelm the resources of allied democracies. In such a crisis, any discomfort
about the use of American power will only assist the rise of Chinese hegemony
in the Pacific Rim.
Liberals have an obligation to acknowledge that the
international order we inhabit is not a natural condition. It is a product of
economic heft and military might more than a triumph of values. Contrary to the
assurances of those with a reflexive distrust of the United States, there is no
reason to think this order will survive the eclipse of American power. If other
nations supplant American dominance, the global order will begin to conform to
their interests and values and the world will almost certainly become a lot
more dangerous.
For that reason, conservatives have an obligation to
grasp the value of the liberal order and what must be done to maintain it. For
too long, the United States has spent too little on its military capabilities,
and a dangerous gap now exists between its strategic goals and the means
available to accomplish them. The White House is now touting a US$1 trillion
defence budget for 2026, but this is deceptive. The Trump administration counts
in that total about US$113 billion for defence in a one-time budget reconciliation
bill. This is a palliative measure, not a cure, for lingering shortfalls in
American rearmament. At a time when the United States faces a colonial Russia
making new gains in Ukraine, and a peer competitor in China building up its
military, the 2026 request asks for a mere three US Navy ships, though the
fleet is sixty short of its goal to deter China—which already boasts the
world’s largest navy. Absent more annual GOP bills, defence spending could fall
to about 2.65 percent of the economy by 2029.
Americans need to confront the fact that there is no
respite from the burden of power. Despite their cosmetic differences, Ahmari’s
realism and Johnson’s liberal internationalism resemble each other in striking
ways, and offer similarly inapt guides to the challenges facing American
generals and statesmen. If the stewards of American power wish to act
effectively and preserve the liberal order in this dangerous new era, they will
have to act with the self-confidence of the just
man armed.
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