American foreign policy and chronic Democratic defensiveness on national security

Joan Walsh brings up an important historical point about the effects of the post-Second World War Red Scare and the heavy role of Cold War polemics in creating the Democrats' more-than-annoying and often debilitating habit of apologizing for being Democrats, especially on foreign policy (Are liberals national security hypocrites? Salon 06/21/2012):

Liberals had to declare they weren’t Communists or Soviet-loving pacifists in the 1940s and '50s, until John F. Kennedy saved them by out-hawking Richard Nixon about a fantasy "missile gap." Then they went from having to separate themselves from New Left antiwar revolutionaries in the '60s and '70s, to fending off Reagan's claim that they'd appeased the Soviet Union by refusing to build his beloved Star Wars boondoggle. Bill Clinton's tough strikes against the former Yugoslavia and Iraq shook that image a little bit (in fact, Republicans became the anti-interventionists). But after 9/11, Republicans were back to charging that Democrats appeased the enemy, and Democrats were back to groveling to prove that wasn't true. A stunning 29 Senate Democrats voted to authorize the Iraq war, including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. Now I know it wasn't just about Vietnam, but about China. Liberals have spent the last 60-plus years pleading with the nation to understand they’re not un- or anti-American.

She's referring in particular to the analysis of Eric Alterman and Kevin Mattson in their book, The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism From Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama (2012).

Swords to plowshares: a favorite symbol of the democratic opposition  in East Germany 

I won't try to rehash the Cold War in this post. While Joan's sketch in that paragraph just quoted is true as far as it goes, there is another side to the Democrats' defensiveness and the Republicans' verbal belligerence. Both the Korean War, prosecuted first by the Truman Administration, and the Vietnam War, prosecuted first by the Kennedy and Johnson Administration - following a policy background laid by the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations.

There is a lingering nostalgia for Dwight Eisenhower's Presidency among some left-leaning political analysts. Truthdig's Robert Scheer periodically writes nostalgically about Ike's skepticism of militarist assumptions. However, the Eisenhower Administration's nuclear posture of "tripwire/massive retaliation" actually was a high-risk strategy. Reducing the likelihood of nuclear war under the operative assumptions of the Cold War meant pursuing a policy of diversifying military options away from the Eisenhower level of reliance on nuclear weapons. And most Democrats in 1960 actually did believe that there was a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union, though the belief was incorrect.

It's true that the Cold War political history left the Democrats too defensive on foreign policy for their own good and the country's. But the more proximate cause is the bipartisan acceptance of the post-Cold War foreign policy of global dominance, or global hegemony, as analyzed by Realist foreign policy theorist like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. (See Dan Drezner, You can't generalize from George W. Bush 12/28/2010; Mearsheimer, Imperial by Design The National Interest Jan/Feb 2011Walt, More to read from Mearsheimer Foreign Policy 12/20/2012) American dominance pre-dated the fall of the Berlin Wall, of course. Gareth Porter's Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (2005) shows how that fact seduced the US into disaster in Vietnam.

As Mearsheiner puts it in the article just cited:

The root cause of America’s troubles is that it adopted a flawed grand strategy after the Cold War. From the Clinton administration on, the United States rejected all these other avenues, instead pursuing global dominance, or what might alternatively be called global hegemony, which was not just doomed to fail, but likely to backfire in dangerous ways if it relied too heavily on military force to achieve its ambitious agenda.

Global dominance has two broad objectives: maintaining American primacy, which means making sure that the United States remains the most powerful state in the international system; and spreading democracy across the globe, in effect, making the world over in America’s image. The underlying belief is that new liberal democracies will be peacefully inclined and pro-American, so the more the better. Of course, this means that Washington must care a lot about every country’s politics. With global dominance, no serious attempt is made to prioritize U.S. interests, because they are virtually limitless.

This grand strategy is "imperial" at its core; its proponents believe that the United States has the right as well as the responsibility to interfere in the politics of other countries. One would think that such arrogance might alienate other states, but most American policy makers of the early nineties and beyond were confident that would not happen, instead believing that other countries — save for so-called rogue states like Iran and North Korea — would see the United States as a benign hegemon serving their own interests. [my emphasis in bold]

The bipartisan consensus around a global-dominance/global-hegemon foreign policy includes a lot of self-deluding overconfidence, aka, arrogance from politicians of both parties. As Walt observes in The Myth of American Exceptionalism Foreign Policy Nov 2011:

Finally, any honest accounting of the past half-century must acknowledge the downside of American primacy. The United States has been the major producer of greenhouse gases for most of the last hundred years and thus a principal cause of the adverse changes that are altering the global environment. The United States stood on the wrong side of the long struggle against apartheid in South Africa and backed plenty of unsavory dictatorships -- including Saddam Hussein's -- when short-term strategic interests dictated. Americans may be justly proud of their role in creating and defending Israel and in combating global anti-Semitism, but its one-sided policies have also prolonged Palestinian statelessness and sustained Israel's brutal occupation.

Bottom line: Americans take too much credit for global progress and accept too little blame for areas where U.S. policy has in fact been counterproductive. Americans are blind to their weak spots, and in ways that have real-world consequences. Remember when Pentagon planners thought U.S. troops would be greeted in Baghdad with flowers and parades? They mostly got RPGs and IEDs instead.

Tags: john mearsheimer, stephen walt, us foreign policy

More on Obama and war with Iran

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt weigh in on the current US-Israel dispute over starting a war with Iran in Mr Obama must take a stand against Israel over Iran Financial Times 03/04/2012. (Be careful clicking around on the Financial Times site; they have a low limit on the number of free articles you can see per month.) Walt supplements it with The real disagreement between Obama and Netanyahu Foreign Policy 03/05/2012.

Walt summarizes the contrasting positions this way:

My basic take is that Netanyahu's view and Obama's view are essentially mirror-images of each other. Netanyahu says Iran is an "existential" threat to Israel, while he sees the Palestinians as just a problem to be managed. So he wants Iran's nuclear program ended, and by force if necessary, while the peace process drags on interminably. By contrast, Obama sees Iran as a problem to be managed through patient diplomacy, but he thinks the Palestinian issue is the real existential threat to Israel's future (and a continued liability for U.S. strategic interests). He'd like to put that one to rest ASAP, except that he's been forced to back down every time he's tried and he knows he can't say much about it between now and November.

Mearsheimer and Walt write of the Palestinian issue:

The gulf between Washington and Jerusalem is just as wide on the Palestinian issue. Mr Netanyahu opposed the 1993 Oslo accords, which sought to resolve the conflict and establish Palestinian self-rule. The only "state" he would countenance today is a set of disconnected and disarmed enclaves under de facto Israeli control. He was elected in 2009 on a platform rejecting Palestinian statehood, and his cabinet is populated with politicians who want to control the West Bank forever. His government continues to expel Palestinians from their homes in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and to expand Israeli settlements there.

By contrast, Mr Obama is committed to helping create a viable Palestinian state living alongside Israel in peace. As he said in Cairo in June 2009, a two-state solution is “in Israel’s interest, Palestine’s interest, America’s interest, and the world’s interest”. He knows the combination of US support for Israel and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians fuels anti-Americanism throughout the Arab and Islamic world, and contributes to the global terrorism problem.

In fact, the Palestinian issue is the real existential threat to Israel. More than 500,000 Israeli Jews now live in the occupied territories, and continued settlement building will lead to a single state between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea. Given demographic trends, this “Greater Israel” could not be both a Jewish state and a full democracy. Instead, it would be an apartheid state, threatening Israel’s legitimacy and long-term survival. As Ehud Olmert, former prime minister, said in 2007, if the two-state solution fails, Israel "will face a South African-like struggle for equal voting rights". And if that happens, he warned, "the state of Israel is finished". [my emphasis]

More accurately, the state of Israel as a Jewish state will be finished. It can still be a democratic state with freedom of religion, depending on how the transition occurs.

Surprises can certainly happen, but it seems to me that the possibility for a two-state solution has approached the vanishing point.

Glenn Greenwald in Obama, Iran and preventive war Salon 03/05/2012 agrees that in his speech to AIPAC on Sunday, "part of what Obama was doing was denying Netanyahu’s demands that the American 'red line' be moved to where the Israeli 'red line' is." But he also notes that Obama was definitely threatening preventive war, which is illegal in international law, and illegal for very good reasons. Speaking of Obama's threats against Iran in his AIPAC speech, he writes:

Is that not the classic case of a "preventive" war (as opposed to a "preemptive" war), once unanimously scorned by progressives as "radical" and immoral when the Bush administration and its leading supporters formally adopted it as official national security doctrine in 2002? Back in 2010, Newsweek‘s Michael Hirsh documented the stark, fundamental similarities between the war theories formally adopted by both administrations in their national security strategies, but here we have the Bush administration’s most controversial war theory explicitly embraced: that the U.S. has the right not only to attack another country in order to preempt an imminent attack (pre-emptive war), but even to prevent some future, speculative threat (preventive war). Indeed, this was precisely the formulation George Bush invoked for years when asked about Iran. This theory of preventive war continues to be viewed around the world as patently illegal — Brazil’s Foreign Affairs Minister last week said of the "all-options-on-the-table" formulation for Iran: some of those options "are contrary to international law" — and before 2009, the notion of "preventive war" was universally scorned by progressives.

Again, one can find justifications, even rational ones, for President Obama’s inflexible commitment of a military attack on Iran: particularly, that this vow is necessary to stop the Israelis from attacking now (though it certainly seems that the U.S. would have ample leverage to prevent an Israeli attack if it really wanted to without commiting [sic] itself to a future attack on Iran). And I've noted many times that I believe that the Obama administration — whether for political and/or strategic reasons — does seem genuinely to want to avoid a war with Iran, at least for now. [my emphasis]

Tags: barack obama, iran war, third subject, israel, john mearsheimer, preventive war, stephen walt

Varieties of global dominance strategy: "the results somehow always turn out to be war""

John Mearsheimer's article Imperial by Design The National Interest 12/16/2010 (Jan-Feb 2011 issue) was written before the outbreak of the Arab democratic revolution and before the start of the Libya War. But the Libya War has given in a new and more immediate relevance in understanding the similarities and differences between the Cheney-Bush and Obama foreign policies. The basic strategy common to Democratic and Republican administrations since the collapse of the Soviet Union 20 years ago has been one that Mearsheimer calls "global dominance":

The root cause of America's troubles is that it adopted a flawed grand strategy after the Cold War. From the Clinton administration on, the United States rejected all these other avenues, instead pursuing global dominance, or what might alternatively be called global hegemony, which was not just doomed to fail, but likely to backfire in dangerous ways if it relied too heavily on military force to achieve its ambitious agenda.

Global dominance has two broad objectives: maintaining American primacy, which means making sure that the United States remains the most powerful state in the international system; and spreading democracy across the globe, in effect, making the world over in America's image. The underlying belief is that new liberal democracies will be peacefully inclined and pro-American, so the more the better. Of course, this means that Washington must care a lot about every country's politics. With global dominance, no serious attempt is made to prioritize U.S. interests, because they are virtually limitless. [my emphasis in bold]

Note that Mearsheimer's criticism falls outside what our punditocracy and the leaders of both parties currently consider mainstream opinion, because it argues that that our foreign policy suffers from fundamental flaws that both Democrats and Republicans perpetuate.

This does not mean there are no distinctions to be made between the parties on foreign policy or no ways to make judgments about events taking place within that strategic framework. On the contrary, Mearsheimer distinguish between partisan variations on the global dominance strategy, the Democrats preferring a liberal imperialist version and the Republicans a neoconservative version (though I would characterize the Republicans' approach more as neocon-militarist to account for the fact that Dick Cheney's particular variance is more unilateralist militarism without the democratic garnish the neocons prefer). Mearsheimer writes:

On one side are the neoconservatives, who believe that the United States can rely heavily on armed force to dominate and transform the globe, and that it can usually act unilaterally because American power is so great. Indeed, they tend to be openly contemptuous of Washington’s traditional allies as well as international institutions, which they view as forums where the Lilliputians tie down Gulliver. Neoconservatives see spreading democracy as a relatively easy task. For them, the key to success is removing the reigning tyrant; once that is done, there is little need to engage in protracted nation building.

On the other side are the liberal imperialists, who are certainly willing to use the American military to do social engineering. But they are less confident than the neoconservatives about what can be achieved with force alone. Therefore, liberal imperialists believe that running the world requires the United States to work closely with allies and international institutions. Although they think that democracy has widespread appeal, liberal imperialists are usually less sanguine than the neoconservatives about the ease of exporting it to other states. As we set off to remake the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall, these principles of global dominance set the agenda. [my emphasis]

David Rieff in Just Like Bush: What's the difference between Obama's Libyan war and neoconservatism? The New Republic 04/01/2011 describes the fundamental agreement between the neocon/Cheneyists and the liberal imperialist strategists this way: "Both sides think it is America's duty to reshape the world into a more democratic place. And no matter which side's narrative is in the ascendant, the results somehow always turn out to be war."

In a sense, what some are hailing as the Obama Doctrine on so-called humanitarian intervention seems like nothing so much as fusion of the liberal interventionism of the 1990s, during the period that stretched from Bosnia through Kosovo to Sierra Leone, and the neoconservative interventionism of the Bush era. Indeed, despite what liberal interventionist supporters of President Obama and of the Libyan war have claimed, there was little in the president's speech that, stripped of some of its religious cloaking, could not have come out of the mouth of George W. Bush, above all the Bush of the "democracy exporting/wars fought in the name of values" Second Inaugural in 2005. Liberal interventionists indignantly deny this of course, claiming that they believe in multilateralism whereas neoconservatives do not, and that they believe in soft power, or, in Secretary of State Clinton's formulation, smart power, whereas neoconservatives are fixated on hard power.

The problem with this is that the liberal interventionists' idea of multilateralism is one in which other nations join America's efforts. "The world works best when America leads" is the way the late Richard Holbrooke liked to put it, which neatly encapsulates the liberal hawks' view that they can have U.S. hegemony and multilateralism, which a more skeptical observer might be tempted to call hegemony without tears. But most of this is institutional sleight of hand. These interventions happen if the United States will provide the muscle and don't if it will not. That is how defenders of the Libyan war — up to an[d] including the president — can pretend that the fact that formally there is indeed a coalition, and that the United States has technically ceded the lead role in the operation to NATO (again, as if NATO was not a U.S.-dominated institution), makes such an intervention a horse of an entirely different color from those initiated by the horrid neocons, and never mind that, on this logic, in strictly institutional terms, the Soviets could have called the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 a Warsaw Pact operation. [my emphasis]

Aaron David Miller also looks at policy continuities between the neocon/unilateralist Cheney-Bush Administration and Obama's liberal interventionist one in Is Obama Really George W. Bush? Huffington Post 04/04/2011. Here's how he frames his perspective:

There are fundamental differences to be sure: the president's tendencies to engage; to work multilaterally; to be contrite about American power; to see the world not as black or white, but in gray, the color of diplomacy. But on key issues--Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Arab-Israeli peacemaking--there's also great continuity. And in one of the greatest potential ironies of all, Obama could be heading for Bush 43 redux on getting rid of Gaddafi.

Miller looks at some of the problems confronting the US in the Libya War in Obama's 21st-Century War Foreign Policy 04/05/2011. In either variety of global strategy, there are limits to American power that make the global dominance strategy, in Mearsheimer's words, "doomed to fail" in the longer run (after often in the shorter-run). Miller writes:

Welcome to Libya, Mr. President. You've got your very own 21st-century war, where the goals are as diffuse as the means at your disposal to accomplish them. Having chosen to double down in Afghanistan, you now own two of them -- Afghanistan and Libya. To get out of the former, your military advisors [sic] argued, you first had to get in deeper. And you chose to do so.

In Libya, another war of choice, you are now confronted with many of the same contradictions, impossible choices, and hard decisions that these other conflicts pose. Yes, Libya isn't Iraq or Afghanistan; it may well be a good war fought for sound moral and humanitarian purposes -- but it's also a complicated war. To put it mildly, like the other two conflicts, getting in may be a lot easier than getting out, despite all rhetoric to the contrary. [my emphasis]

That's a basic rule of war that our political culture has, in practice, largely lost side of: it's a hell of a lot easier to get into a war than to get out of one.

Tags: aaron david miller, barack obama, david rieff, john mearsheimer, libya war

Debating a war against Libya

Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley tweets today, "In 1949 we askd [sic] 'Who lost China?' In a few weeks we will ask 'Who lost Lybia?'"

And today we're asking "who wants war?" Chuck Grassley, apparently. And Bill Kristol. (Ben Armbruster, Kristol Wants 'More Than A No-Fly Zone' In Libya, Says U.S. Should Attack Qaddafi's War Ships And Tanks Think Progress 03/13/2011) Two of the usual suspects. After Bill Kristol's smug, dishonest warmongering on Iraq and his being wrong about pretty much everything about that war, airing his views as though they were anything but mindless, reckless war propaganda is just, well, war propaganda. So of course that's just what FOX News does:



Wesley Clark, who was as right on the Iraq invasion as Bill Kristol was wrong, makes the case against attacking Libya in Gen. Wesley Clark says Libya doesn't meet the test for U.S. military action Washington Post 03/11/2011. Caution and a realistic view of actual experience are alien concepts to the Bill Kristols of the world:

The past 37 years have been replete with U.S. interventions. Some have succeeded, such as our actions in Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), the Persian Gulf War (1991) and the Balkans (1995-2000). Some were awful blunders, such as the attempted hostage rescue in Iran (1980), landing the Marines in Lebanon (1982) or the Somalia intervention (1992-94).

Some worked in the short run, but not the longer term - such as the occupation of Haiti in 1994. Others still hang in the balance, such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, consuming hundreds of billions of dollars and wrecking thousands of American lives. Along the way, we've bombed a few tyrants such as Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi himself, operated through proxies in Central America, and stood ready with fly-overs, deployments, mobility exercises and sail-bys across the globe.

He offers his own revision of the Weinberger/Powell doctrine (his wording):

• Understand the national interests at stake, and decide if the result is worth the cost.

• Know your purpose and how the proposed military action will achieve it.

• Determine the political endgame before intervening.

• Get U.S. public support, obtain diplomatic and legal authority, and get allies engaged.

• Avoid U.S. and civilian casualties.

• Once you decide to do it, get it over with.

With neocons like Kristol and militaristic nationalists like Rummy or Dick Cheney, they don't care about such principles. If some set of principles like that has some general acceptance, they will just declare them fulfilled, regardless of reality.

But Clark here uses them for some reality-based analysis. For instance, he makes a point that, sadly, even the Obama Administration would at this point consider quaint, even though it's both true and highly relevant: "Offensive war is, in general, illegal." In the structure of international law which the United States had a huge role in constructing, you can't just invade a country because old Republican white guys like Chuck Grassley and Bill Kristol get off on the idea. And, as Clark observes, "In Libya, Gaddafi has used and supported terrorism, murdered Americans and repressed his people for 40 years. The American public may want to see him go. But his current actions aren't an attack on the United States or any other country." (my emphasis) He also makes these observations:

Protecting access to oil supplies has become a vital interest, but Libya doesn't sell much oil to the United States, and what has been cut off is apparently being replaced by Saudi production. Other national interests are more complex. Of course, we want to support democratic movements in the region, but we have two such operations already underway - in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then there are the humanitarian concerns. It is hard to stand by as innocent people are caught up in violence, but that's what we did when civil wars in Africa killed several million and when fighting in Darfur killed hundreds of thousands. So far, the violence in Libya is not significant in comparison. Maybe we could earn a cheap "victory," but, on whatever basis we intervene, it would become the United States vs. Gaddafi, and we would be committed to fight to his finish. That could entail a substantial ground operation, some casualties and an extended post-conflict peacekeeping presence. [my emphasis]

... if we want to get rid of Gaddafi, a no-fly zone is unlikely to be sufficient - it is a slick way to slide down the slope to deeper intervention.

In Libya, we don't know who the rebels really are or how a legitimate government would be formed if Gaddafi were pushed out. Perhaps we will have a better sense when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton meets with rebel leaders, as she is scheduled to do this coming week. In a best-case scenario, there would be a constitutional convention, voter lists, political parties and internationally supervised free and fair elections. But there could also be a violent scramble for authority in which the most organized, secretive and vicious elements take over. We are not well-equipped to handle that kind of struggle. And once we intervene, Libya's problems would become our responsibility. [my emphasis]

Given these rules, what is the wisest course of action in Libya? To me, it seems we have no clear basis for action. Whatever resources we dedicate for a no-fly zone would probably be too little, too late. We would once again be committing our military to force regime change in a Muslim land, even though we can't quite bring ourselves to say it. So let's recognize that the basic requirements for successful intervention simply don't exist, at least not yet: We don't have a clearly stated objective, legal authority, committed international support or adequate on-the-scene military capabilities, and Libya's politics hardly foreshadow a clear outcome.

It's worth noting that Clark's guidelines for evaluating military intervention are exactly that. He's providing a framework for evaluating individual cases of possible military action.

He's not attempting in that piece to address the larger strategy within which those decisions are made. As John Mearsheimer explains in his important article, Imperial by Design The National Interest 12/16/2010 (Jan-Feb 2011 issue), since the end of the Cold War, the United States has pursued a stategy of global dominance, with the Republican Administrations taking a more neoconservative approach and Democratic Administration and liberal internationalist approach (Mearsheimer calls it a liberal imperialist approach). Decisions about intervention within that framework are different that such decisions would be within a less expansive foreign policy strategy. On this larger strategy issue, see also Stephen Walt at his Foreign Policy blog, Imbalance of power 05/12/2009 and Grading U.S. grand strategy 12/28/2010, and Jake Whitney's interview with Andrew Bacevich, Blood Without Guts Guernica Oct 2010.

Tags: john mearsheimer, libya, wesley clark

The Vietnam War in perpetuity

From around 1970 until 2001, Americans generally considered the Vietnam War a mistake that should be avoided in the future. Now, in 2010, the Vietnam War was become a normal way of conducting US foreign policy, this time in the form of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the expanding war in Pakistan and various rocket strikes, assassinations and black ops in other countries. The latter being of unknown number, even to Congress, maybe to the Pentagon and the White House, as well.

The notion that the Vietnam War has become what these days is described by the somewhat painful phrase "the new normal" occurred to me after reading the "liberal hawk" Peter Bergen's article, The Generals' Victory New Republic 12/16/2010. It's a propaganda puff piece providing Pollyanna projections (sorry, I couldn't resist) based on the Pentagon's latest official strategy, which of course will lead to glorious victory someday somehow, although if it doesn't it's the wimpy politicians' fault and not that of our infallible generals. It displays the same mentality, the same disdain of reality, the same groundless confidence in American ability to achieve unrealistic ends at a manageable cost, as similar puff pieces on the Vietnam War after Tet 1968.

Yet here we are. We're carrying on the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan and though Vietnam War never happened. Or, rather, like the Vietnam War happened and we won it.

Which, sadly, is the lesson much of the officer corps and many Republican politicians and once-Democratic neoconservatives took from that war. Our military succeeded brilliantly, the revisionist case goes, but the gutless Democratic politicians in Congress spoiled the whole thing. I've discussed this revisionist theory, elaborate in books like On Strategy (1981) by Col Harry Summers, a number of times here.

The big question is how our political system failed to the point where the political and media elite largely accept something like a perpetual Vietnam War as normal policy now. Despite all the post-9/11 fearmongering and post-Cold War American triumphalism, clear majorities turned against both the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. There was an unprecedented level of active popular opposition - also reflecting majority opinion in the polls - to the invasion of Iraq in the lead-up to that war in 2002-3. And the main propaganda rollout of that war began just a year after the 9/11 attacks.

John Mearsheimer, one of the leading figures of the Realist school in foreign policy, writes in Imperial by Design The National Interest 12/16/2010:

The United States has been at war for a startling two out of every three years since 1989, and there is no end in sight. As anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of world events knows, countries that continuously fight wars invariably build powerful national-security bureaucracies that undermine civil liberties and make it difficult to hold leaders accountable for their behavior; and they invariably end up adopting ruthless policies normally associated with brutal dictators. The Founding Fathers understood this problem, as is clear from James Madison’s observation that “no nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Washington’s pursuit of policies like assassination, rendition and torture over the past decade, not to mention the weakening of the rule of law at home, shows that their fears were justified.

To make matters worse, the United States is now engaged in protracted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have so far cost well over a trillion dollars and resulted in around forty-seven thousand American casualties. The pain and suffering inflicted on Iraq has been enormous. Since the war began in March 2003, more than one hundred thousand Iraqi civilians have been killed, roughly 2 million Iraqis have left the country and 1.7 million more have been internally displaced. Moreover, the American military is not going to win either one of these conflicts, despite all the phony talk about how the “surge” has worked in Iraq and how a similar strategy can produce another miracle in Afghanistan. We may well be stuck in both quagmires for years to come, in fruitless pursuit of victory. [my emphasis]

Mearsheimer's list of the four major post-Cold War foreign policy strategies available to the US is inadequate. I don't know what the short label would be for a foreign policy of restrained democratic internationalism combined with a crash domestic project to develop clean energy and dramatically reduce US dependence on oil. But I don't see Mearsheimer really describing that alternative in this article.

But he's right about US foreign policy now being dominated by the strategy of global dominance. And he provides a good description of why it's an extremely problematic one. His article is also a good example of how someone can criticize real practical problems in both Democratic and Republican approaches without pretending that they are the same thing. Clinton's foreign policy, he says, was to have the US act as a "reluctant sheriff" in the world. And the Clinton Administration " at least managed to avoid any major foreign-policy disasters."

Dick Cheney's Administration, on the other hand, was not so lucky. Its approach to a global dominance policy "meant relying primarily on the unilateral use of American military force" and on "threat inflation of the highest order".

From the early days of Afghanistan onward, America was to enter the age of the “Bush Doctrine,” which was all about using the U.S. military to bring about regime change across the Muslim and Arab world. It is easy to forget now, but Iraq was supposed to be a step in the remarkably far-reaching plan to sow democracy in an area of the world where it was largely absent, thereby creating peace. President Bush put the point succinctly in early 2003 when he said, “By the resolve and purpose of America, and of our friends and allies, we will make this an age of progress and liberty. Free people will set the course of history, and free people will keep the peace of the world.”

By pursuing this extraordinary scheme to transform an entire region at the point of a gun, President Bush adopted a radical grand strategy that has no parallel in American history. It was also a dismal failure.

The Bush administration’s quest for global dominance was based on a profound misunderstanding of the threat environment facing the United States after 9/11. And the president and his advisers overestimated what military force could achieve in the modern world, in turn greatly underestimating how difficult it would be to spread democracy in the Middle East. This triumvirate of errors doomed Washington’s effort to dominate the globe, undermined American values and institutions on the home front, and threatened its position in the world. [my emphasis]

No kidding!

One problem with Mearsheim's analysis is that his Realist viewpoint leads him to automatically view the rising influence of China in the world as inherently a threat to American interests. Even in this essay in which he severely criticizes the neoconservatives, he explicitly praises the Cheney-Bush administration and their neoconservative cheerleaders for assuming that "the most serious challenge that the United States is likely to face in the decades ahead is dealing with a rising China."

Practical problems with China are one thing. Using China instead of The Terrorists to justify the massive military and national-security establishment we have, and using fear of China instead of fear of Islamists to justify the corrosion of democracy and human rights under the national security state, are not acceptable options.

Tags: afghanistan war, iraq war, john mearsheimer, us foreign policy