By Victor Davis Hanson
Monday, April 17, 2017
The Tomahawk volley attack, for all its ostentatious
symbolism, served larger strategic purposes. It reminded a world without
morality that there is still a shred of a rule or two: Do not use nerve gas on
the battlefield or against civilians. The past faux redline from Obama, the
systematic use of chlorine gas by Syria, and its contextualization by the Obama
administration had insidiously eroded that old battlefield prohibition. Trump
was right to seek to revive it.
The subsequent MOAB bomb strike in Afghanistan is useful
against ISIS’s subterranean nests, and in signaling the Taliban and ISIS that
the U.S. too can be unpredictable and has not quite written off its 16-year
commitment. But as in the case of the Tomahawk strikes against Syria, it also
fulfilled the larger purpose of reminding enemies, such as Islamic terrorists,
North Korea, and Iran (which all stash weapons of destruction in caves and the
like) that the U.S. is capable of anything.
In other words, apparently anywhere Trump thinks that he
can make a point about deterrence, with good odds of not getting Americans
killed or starting a war (he used Tomahawks not pilots where Russian planes
were in the vicinity), he will probably drop a bomb or shoot off a missile or
send in an iconic carrier fleet.
The message reminds the world that the Obama
administration’s “lead from behind,” “don’t do stupid sh**,” plastic red-button
reset, Cairo Speech foreign policy followed no historical arc that bent
anywhere. And the U.S. was previously on the wrong, not the right, side of both
history and the traditions of U.S. bipartisan foreign policy — an aberration
from the past, not a blueprint of the future.
Like Ronald Reagan, who, after Jimmy Carter’s managed
declinism, shelled Lebanon, bombed Gaddafi, and invaded Grenada, Trump is
trying to thread the needle between becoming bogged down somewhere and doing
nothing.
No president in recent memory also has outsourced such
responsibility to his military advisers, whom Trump refers to as “our” or “my”
“generals.” He can afford to for now, because he has made excellent
appointments at Defense, State, National Security, and Homeland Security. These
are men who justifiably have won broad bipartisan support and who believe in
the ancient ways of military and spiritual deterrence, balance of power, and
alliances rather than the U.N., presidential sonorousness, or soft power to
keep the peace.
These opportunistic deterrent expressions are likewise
intended to remind several parties in particular that the Obama hiatus is over.
Apparently, Trump will not necessarily reset the Obama
reset of the Bush reset with Russia. Instead, he probably believes that Putin
will soon agree that the 2009–16 era was an abnormal condition in which a far
weaker Russia bullied friends and connived against almost everything the U.S.
was for. And such asymmetry could not be expected to go on. A return to normal
relations is not brinkmanship; it should settle down to tense competition, some
cooperation, and grudging respect among two powerful rivals. Who knows, Putin
may come to respect (and even prefer) an American leader who is unpredictable
and unapologetically tough without being sanctimonious, sermonizing — and weak.
The old canard is largely true: Russia has no natural
interests in seeing a radical Islamic and nuclear Iran on its border, other
than the fact that this change would irritate and aggravate the U.S., which
might satisfy Putin. But if Russia no longer felt a need to automatically
oppose everything America sought (or if it feared to do so), then many of its
unsavory alliances might no longer may seem all that useful.
Trump’s strikes and displays of naval power, and the
reactions to them, also remind North Korea that it has no friends and could
prove a liability to China (as Syria could to Russia) rather than a useful
rabid animal to be occasionally unleashed so that it might bark and nip at
Westernized Asia and the U.S. If North Korea’s antics imperil China’s
commercial buccaneering or lead to a nuclear Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan on
China’s borders, or to U.S. commercial restrictionism, then China could see
North Korea’s insanity as not worth the cost. Additionally, if tensions rise,
North Korea’s own military elite could remove the unhinged Kim Jong-un after
concluding that he’s expendable. Or regional powers, despite differences, might
collectively conclude that they can’t live with daily threats of nuclear
launchings.
Again, Trump is trying to act unpredictably and
forcefully against Pyongyang, the world’s most detested government — on the
logic that without war, he can prompt greater containment before the
unsustainable status quo leads to a conflagration. This is a sort of post–Cold
War brinkmanship.
By now, Iran knows that it cannot send another missile
toward an American carrier, hijack an American boat, or cheat flagrantly on the
Iran Deal without earning some response from a man who dislikes both the
revolutionary government and what Iran has done to the U.S. over the past eight
years.
The general aims of these iconic acts are to remind the
world of U.S. strength and that the new president has the willingness to use it
to prevent some weaker entity from doing something stupid on the
misapprehension that the U.S. is in decline rather than reemerging from a
temporarily and self-imposed recessional. Once deterrence is reestablished (and
only once it is achieved), then the U.S. will be able to appeal to Russia and
China to find areas of mutual concern (radical Islam, nuclear proliferation in
Asia, rogue nations that threaten the international order, etc.).
Are there risks in seeking to reestablish U.S.
deterrence?
Of course.
1) Even dropping a huge bomb or sending in a flock of
missiles or deploying the fleet near hostile shores at some point can lose its
luster and lead to escalation to ensure that enemies remain impressed. In a
cycle of escalation, then, America could leapfrog into an unintended war. It is
vital to play out each demonstration of strength to the subsequent third and
fourth degree, to guarantee that shows of deterrent force do not lead to
unintended involvement or become habitual and thus banal.
2) Trump ran as a Jacksonian — not as a neoconservative
or an isolationist. His electoral base must see his use of force as a) long
overdue, b) at some point soon, no longer required, c) not leading to but
rather preventing a major intervention, and d) undertaken for American not global
interests. Otherwise, Trump will stumble into what he ran against.
3) When Trump righteously hits back at nerve-gassing
dictators or head-chopping radical Islamists, his polls climb, his press
improves, and more Americans think him a sober and judicious centrist — a fine
and useful thing. But such political concerns can take on a logic of their own,
in that the more Trump is praised by the Council of Foreign Relations or the
Brookings Institution, the more likely he might be to fall into a pattern prescribed
by an entrenched establishment. For a populist, doing necessary things that
political opponents like is a paradox whose political consequences are still
not quite fully appreciated.
4) Soon the low-hanging fruit of sending carriers around
the globe and bombing Assad or ISIS will be picked, and Trump may find himself
in an “incident” with a nuclear-armed Russia or China. Both adversaries have
their own deterrent considerations and will bristle that they really do have to
back down from what has been (since 2009) a rare period of opportunism at U.S.
expense. The best solution, obviously, is to persuade Russia and China to curb
their clients so that they will receive credit for their belated maturity.
Losing deterrence and seeking to recapture it are among
the most dangerous moments for a great power, and we will be reminded of just
that peril over the next year. There’s only one thing more dangerous in the
short term than allowing North Korea to advance to launching intercontinental
nuclear missiles, or letting China build an artificial island base in
international waters of the South China Sea, or permitting the Iranians to haze
U.S. ships in the Gulf of Hormuz, or backing down from Assad as he gasses civilians:
trying to put an end to such things, and reminding the world that what was once
normal was always in the long term a sure way to war.
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