By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Deterrence makes someone not do something. A parent
promotes good teen behavior not just by providing cars and smartphones, but
also by the explicit specter of graduated punishments that an adolescent does
not wish to repeat, and thus chooses instead to abide by the house rules.
In terms of world affairs, a clear display of
overwhelming military strength, and the real probability of being willing to
use it, remind would-be aggressors not to start stupid conflicts — given that
the possibility of winning something through war is overshadowed by the risk of
losing far more. A world where everyone knows the unspoken rules as well as the
moral and material relative strength and weakness of the various nations is a
safer place for all involved.
Or put another way, deterrence, in the famous formulation
of the 17th-century British statesman George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax,
means that “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be
stolen.” Translated, that means that nations do not go to war just over
Czechoslovakia, but that other nations are not swallowed up like
Czechoslovakia.
When German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann, in a
notorious 1917 telegram, offered the government of Mexico all sorts of rewards
for attacking the southwestern United States and thereby sidetracking American
support for the allies on the Western Front, Mexico balked. But its reason for
backing off was not that it liked Americans or thought a preemptive attack
would be unfair. Rather, President Carranza worried that Mexico lacked the military
clout to take American territory. And even if it could have grabbed, say,
Texas, Mexico did not have the power to control it — given a rowdy and armed
English-speaking state population, one that Carranza worried was “better
supplied with arms than most populations.” In other words, the Second Amendment
and a frontier attitude helped to deter Mexico from taking up Zimmermann’s
offer.
Deterrence hinges on accurate perceptions not just of
relative strength, but also of the likelihood of a nation’s using its power. By
any military benchmark — economic resources, size of armed forces, quality and
quantity of armor, ships, and aircraft — Hitler’s Third Reich in the mid-1930s
was far weaker than the combined power of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France,
Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Poland, well aside from the isolationist
United States and enigmatic Soviet Union.
Yet Hitler was still not deterred, but systematically
continued his aggrandizement. He gambled that his more powerful enemies were
not really more powerful because they wanted calm far more than did he — and
were not willing to make short-term sacrifices in order to avert long-term
catastrophes. Hitler dismissed his well-meaning appeasers as “little worms,”
believing that their efforts should earn them contempt rather than gratitude.
In contrast, Hitler saw his own reckless desire to risk
war as a force-multiplier of his otherwise puny tank, the Panzerkampfwagen Mark
I, his pathetic surface fleet, and his nonexistent heavy bombers. He was right
in all his conjectures until 1941, when, intoxicated by a series of cheap
border victories, he in delusional fashion attacked or declared war on both the
supposedly unprepared Soviet Union and the apparently pacifist United States.
The earlier Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact complicity of the Russians and the
isolationism of the Americans had masked the reality that both countries were
far more powerful than Hitler’s Axis coalition. The Red Army and the United
States military would be able to demonstrate that fact in fairly rapid and
overwhelmingly destructive fashion — but at the cost of a global war that would
take 60 million lives.
In 1979–80, at the height of the Cold War, the United
States was clearly the most powerful nation in the world. Yet, over a few
months, the Iranians stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran with impunity and took
American hostages; the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and began drawing up
plans to deploy dangerous new weapons; Communist insurrections spread
throughout Central America; China invaded Vietnam; and North Korea began
saber-rattling. The postwar order created by the United States seemed in danger
of unraveling.
All the aggressors assumed that President Carter’s past
humanitarian professions, his condemnation of the Shah, and his conciliatory
policies toward the Soviets had ensured that for a rare moment they might just
have more to win than to lose by otherwise risky aggressions — as the United
States’ considerable power was judged to have been rendered negligible by its
lack of leadership. President Reagan’s efforts from 1981 to 1984 to restore
lost deterrence were caricatured as brinkmanship, given that deterrence is
easily thrown away but often difficult and potentially risky to restore.
As we approach 2016, the U.S. economy and military still,
by any token, give us unquestioned world power and influence, fueled by
constitutional stability, rock-bottom energy prices brought about by brilliant
private-enterprise fracking, a dynamic popular culture, top-flight science
departments in our universities, and technological innovation. That said, since
2009, in both symbolic and material fashion, the U.S. has shed its classic
deterrence. And the world is now a far more dangerous place because of this.
President Obama lost the power of deterrence through a
variety of unfortunate pronouncements and policies. False deadlines to Iran,
false red lines to Syria, and false step-over lines to Russia have all rendered
the currency of U.S. admonitions worthless. If Obama were now to lay down a red
line for ISIS should it come close to entering Baghdad, would anyone take that
threat seriously?
Deterrence also hinges on emotions. Teddy Roosevelt’s
legendary advice to speak softly and carry a big stick named both halves of a
successful deterrent posture: not to unduly excite thugs with cheap language,
and always to be demonstrably better armed than your enemies just in case.
The inverse — speak loudly and cheaply while carrying a
visibly tiny stick — is dangerous. When Obama talks trash about Putin behaving
like a class cut-up or being hung up on macho shtick, or when he uses his
accustomed sports metaphors to write off the threat of ISIS, or brags that he
“does not bluff,” the world at first anticipates that such tough-guy bluster is
backed by American muscularity.
But when the rhetoric increases, even as the likelihood
of consequent action lessens, deterrence is lost. Ridicule ensues. “Lead from
behind” in Libya, coupled with the disaster at Benghazi and its cover-up, only
added to the impression abroad that something was now quite different in
Washington, and thus in the world’s balance of power as well.
The world is full of thugs and creeps who are kept from
spreading their thuggishness and creepiness by their fears of confronting
overwhelming power. Vast cuts in our military spending – even as Obama added
$10 trillion to the national debt – encouraged a global caricature of the U.S.
as a soft, entitlement-addicted society in which increased subsidies for the
electorate were deemed more important than an overwhelmingly powerful fleet of
planes, ships, and ground assets. When Obama promised to end “two wars,” few
here or abroad assumed that he meant to lose both, although accepting defeat is
always the quickest way to cease fighting.
Such dangerous perceptions abroad mask the reality that
the residuals of American military power still dwarf the power of all rivals.
General Matthew Ridgway, who turned the Korean War around when he took command
in December 1950, supported strong defense not just for the security it
ensured, but also for the deterrent message it sent: that a society willingly
sacrifices some of its affluence in exchange for the preservation of its
values, and its citizenry is all the more ethical and healthy for it.
Symbolism is integral to deterrence. Obama perhaps meant
well in his Cairo speech, his Al Arabiya interview, his apology tour, his
circumvention of the Constitution to close a treaty deal with the Iranian
theocracy, his media-hyped hosting of the deserter Bowe Bergdahl, his
administration’s lies about Benghazi, his euphemism campaign of renaming acts
of Islamic terror, his monotonous promises to close Guantanamo, his inability
to control U.S. borders, and his pop admonitions to Christians to get off their
high horse, to capitalists to remember they had not built their own businesses,
to investors to quit profiting, and to the police to remember that they were
stereotypers and profilers.
But perplexed autocrats abroad only pondered such
behavior and asked themselves, “Has any leader of any nation, past or present,
so habitually deprecated his own people and country? So why, then, does Obama
do that — if not to show sympathy to our similar grievances against America?”
Certainly, Obama’s most venomous vocabulary has been
reserved for House Republicans, legal gun-owners, the successful upper-middle
class, and those who are not convinced that man-caused global warming is soon
to doom the planet. He speaks much less harshly of the autocratic Castro
brothers, the murderous Iranians, or the ISIS beheaders.
To restore the Western-inspired postwar order and hold
chaos at bay, the next president will have to restore deterrence, both
materially and psychologically. And that will be one difficult and dangerous
endeavor — made worse by shrill attacks coming from those who have done so much
to lose it.
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