What’s Wrong Today:
On May 28th, President Obama delivered a speech stating his strategic doctrine on the occasion of the graduation of cadets at West Point. It was remarkable in a variety of ways:
He is restating the Bush Doctrine of intervention and executive authority. Who voted for that?
The speech emphasized Mr. Obama’s continuing support for the policies that have kept us involved in large parts of the Middle East, Africa, and Eurasia. Claiming exceptionalism requires that the country also has the will to use exceptional means. Mr. Obama knows that, so he said:
This is unlikely to work, since a key factor is how many soldiers we would be willing to lose on the battlefield. Since Vietnam, it is unclear that the US will ever be willing to lose more than a thousand soldiers per month, unless we are directly attacked.
This means it is useless to claim we will ever use force on a large scale. Certainly we could never use it against the Chinese or the Russians under any circumstances. Mr. Obama acknowledges this by saying:
Unfortunately, the bind in the Obama doctrine, (using military force only as very last resort) is that the President remains committed to a large counterterrorism posture: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)
Mr. Obama’s comment implies that we have learned from our past mistakes. That we have fine-tuned the art of counterterrorism so it will not involve squandering of our valuable human and financial resources. Does that strike anyone else as absurd? To continue the War on Terror, President Obama announced the creation of a “counterterrorism partnerships fund,” of up to $5 billion. It aims to train security forces in allied states to fight their own battles with terrorists.
Why is that idea believable? It hasn’t worked since the start of the Cold War.
Walter Russell Mead wrote in Foreign Affairs that Mr. Obama came into office planning to cut military spending and reduce the importance of foreign policy in American politics. But, now he finds himself bogged down in exactly the kinds of geopolitical rivalries he had hoped to transcend. The real and implies threats in our relationships with the Chinese, Iran and Russia have changed what was an uncontested status quo at the break-up of the USSR into a contested one today.
US presidents must again be concerned with shoring up America’s geopolitical foundations.
Mr. Obama built his foreign policy on the conviction that the “war on terror” was overblown. He articulated an ambitious agenda: blocking Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons, solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, negotiating a global climate change treaty, striking Pacific and Atlantic trade deals, signing arms control treaties with Russia, repairing US relations with the Muslim world, restoring trust with European allies, and ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But, his view has changed. We are back to All Terrorism, All The Time. The kernel of truth is that although Washington claims to have eliminated much of the leadership of Al Qaeda, it now faces a serious problem of many affiliated AL-Qaeda groups on the march throughout Africa and the Middle East.
And geopolitics have evolved. The 21st century world is too interconnected to again fully break into blocs. A small country that plugs into cyberspace can deliver as much or more prosperity to its people (think Singapore) than a giant with standing armies.
Unfortunately, Russia didn’t read the memo on 21st century geopolitics. Neither has China’s president, Xi Jinping, who is engaging in gunboat diplomacy against Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. Syria’s Assad is waging a 20th
century war against his own people, dropping exploding barrels of screws, nails and other shrapnel onto apartment buildings. These countries have not been deterred by the disapproval of their peers, the weight of world opinion, or by Wall Street dumping their bonds.
Even without using military power, there are plenty of ways for the US to cripple an adversary. We can use economic sanctions; financial warfare through the international banking, economic, and trade system; we can use subversion, through the Internet, through support of dissident parties and insurrectionists; there are always proxy wars and drones.
It would be good for the future of the world if the US could find a path back to a realistic foreign policy that refrains from constant threats of the use of force. But if Mr. Obama continues to hold up exceptionalism as doctrine, the inherent contradictions between our claims of exceptionalism and our unwillingness to use exceptional means will rip Obama’s West Point doctrine apart.
A step towards realism requires that America shun both. Good luck with that.
The Obama administration wants to begin its “pivot to Asia”, its plan to counter China’s rise, by projecting, but not using military force. It is difficult to see how that is going to work. Our local allies, who Mr. Obama wants to use as proxies, fear that without a believable threat by the US to cover their asses, there will be no restriction of what China can and will do around its block.
On the other hand, there is little need for the US to try to “contain” China in its local business, unless China’s demands grow to nutty levels. As a practical matter, it is doubtful even in that case that the Obama Doctrine would fly as a matter of realist geopolitics.
We should face a final hard truth. US military force is a blunt instrument. It cannot be used to win what Washington wants it to win (see: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria); and it hasn’t been tested in battle against a peer-level foe in a very long time (WWII).
Theoretically, use of overwhelming power sounds very nice, but it was unusable against the Russians in the Black Sea when they took Crimea.
And it might not do so well in the South China Sea.
2 comments. The first is that politically, no president can tell the American people that we can’t simply fight every fight. the real lesson of WW2 is that it took all of our money, and the UK and USSR to defeat the axis powers. the second is that i a bi-polar world (US-USSR) it was far easier to recruit viable allies, with no bi-polar split, everyone stays on the sidelines unless the treat affects them. thus, when we went to Vietnam, we had at least the tacit support of many. With our current policy, we are often alone.