The Hell of Good Intentions

by Stephen M. Walt

  Chapter 5 considers why liberal hegemony remained the default strategy despite its obvious shortcomings. A key reason, I suggest, is the foreign policy establishment’s ability to avoid full accountability. Key ideas are rarely questioned, lessons learned are soon forgotten, and members of the foreign policy elite are rarely, if ever, penalized for their mistakes. Instead, it is the dissidents and critics who end up marginalized or penalized, even when they are proved right. When the same people keep getting reappointed and the same tired rationales are rarely challenged, there is no reason to expect the guiding principles of U.S. foreign policy to change or the results to improve.

  Until Trump. His election in 2016 showed that although the American people would tolerate a long series of foreign policy failures, these shortcomings could not be concealed forever. The final question, therefore, is whether Trump would manage to steer the ship of state in a new direction, and whether his efforts to do so would leave the country better off. Sadly, the evidence to date suggests that this will not be the case. Instead, chapter 6 argues that Trump’s handling of the presidency provides a textbook illustration of how not to fix U.S. foreign policy. In particular, it shows how the foreign policy community forced Trump back toward the same familiar paths—aided in no small part by Trump’s ignorance, deficiencies of character, and poor policy choices. Instead of implementing a systematic and well-thought-out readjustment to liberal hegemony and playing different groups in Washington off against one another, Trump soon united key elements of the foreign policy community against him and lost political support. He also turned out to be a chaotic manager whose White House was a snake pit where top aides came and went with alarming frequency and whose inexperienced staff made repeated and sometimes embarrassing mistakes. Add to that toxic mix Trump’s own errors of judgment, rash statements, and decidedly unpresidential behavior, and you have a recipe for disaster.

  Thus, the battle between the Donald and the foreign policy “Blob”—to use former deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes’s dismissive term for the Beltway establishment—was a protracted one and continues today. But the United States has already paid a substantial price, with the costs still mounting. Trump’s stewardship of U.S. foreign policy has had serious negative consequences and has squandered the hard-won positions of influence the United States had established since the Second World War. The United States is still fighting wars in distant lands and bearing a disproportionate share of global security burdens, but it is now led by an impulsive and frequently angry narcissist whose erratic behavior has alarmed U.S. allies but done little to contain or co-opt America’s adversaries. Instead of bringing America’s commitments and capabilities into better balance, Trump has undermined the latter without decreasing the former, and has given other states ample reason to question Washington’s judgment and competence.

  Chapter 7 explains how this situation might be corrected. After briefly considering possible objections to my argument, I lay out an alternative grand strategy based on the geopolitical concept of “offshore balancing.” This approach eschews trying to remake the world in America’s image and would focus U.S. foreign policy on upholding the balance of power in three key regions: Europe, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf. Offshore balancing rejects isolationism and calls for the United States to remain diplomatically and economically engaged with other nations, but it would rely primarily on regional actors to uphold local balances of power and commit the United States to intervene with its own forces only when one or more of these balances was in danger of breaking down.

  Absent a crushing international setback, however, the foreign policy establishment will not embrace a strategy that would diminish its own power, status, and sense of self-worth. If outsiders such as Obama or Trump could not pull off a more fundamental change, who could? I argue that meaningful and positive change will occur only if a well-organized and politically potent reform movement emerges, one that can puncture the elite consensus behind liberal hegemony and generate a more open and sustained debate on these issues. A single leader cannot do it alone, especially someone as unqualified and unfit as the current president. It is the foreign policy establishment that has to change for a new strategy to emerge, and that means building new institutions and sources of political power inside the “Blob.” If such a movement does not arise or proves too weak to generate meaningful change, U.S. foreign policy will not improve. The United States will undoubtedly survive, but its citizens will live less secure and bountiful lives.

  It did not have to be this way. The United States is an exceptionally lucky country, one that is wealthy and vastly powerful, and it has no serious enemies nearby. That remarkable good fortune gives its leaders enormous latitude in the handling of foreign affairs. But as I show in the next two chapters, the men and women responsible for U.S. foreign policy over the past twenty-five years have repeatedly made bad choices and squandered many of these enduring advantages. They may have acted with the best of intentions, but their recurring failures are part of the reason Donald Trump became president.

  1.  A DISMAL RECORD

  WHEN THE SOVIET UNION collapsed, in 1991, Americans could have taken a well-earned victory lap and reconsidered the expansive grand strategy they had pursued for the previous four decades. They could have asked themselves whether the level of global engagement mandated by the Cold War strategy of containment still made sense in these radically new circumstances. In the absence of a peer competitor or a strong ideological rival, was it still necessary or wise for the United States to maintain an extensive array of global security commitments and to work overtime to shape events around the world? The sudden disappearance of America’s only serious rival might have encouraged U.S. leaders to question the wisdom of trying to guide political, economic, and military relations on every continent, and led them to retrench slightly and focus more attention on domestic needs.

  Yet this possibility did not get much of a hearing in the early 1990s.1 A handful of academics and policy analysts called for a significant reduction in America’s global commitments, but their views attracted scant attention in official circles and had zero impact on U.S. foreign and defense policy.2 Allies in Europe and Asia worried that the United States might cash in its “peace dividend” and reduce its global presence substantially, but the foreign policy establishment never considered this possibility for more than a moment. The world had changed, but a serious reassessment of U.S. grand strategy never took place.

  Even before the U.S.S.R. imploded, top officials in the Bush administration believed that the United States should preserve or expand its existing commitments and maintain overwhelming military superiority in order to deter the emergence of new “peer competitors.”3 But their ambitions did not stop there. As President George H. W. Bush and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft later recalled, they found themselves “standing alone at the height of power” with “the rarest opportunity to shape the world and the deepest responsibility to do so wisely for the benefit of not just the United States but all nations.”4

  As Richard Haass, former director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and later the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, described it, the central objective of U.S. foreign policy became one of integrating other countries “into arrangements that will sustain a world consistent with U.S. interests and values, and thereby promote peace, prosperity, and justice.”5 The process of “integration” was not passive: on the contrary, the United States actively pressured other states to adopt more representative political systems, open themselves to trade and investment, and accept a set of global institutions that were to a large extent made-in-America. States that welcomed U.S. primacy were supported and defended; those that resisted it were isolated, contained, coerced, or overthrown. Terrorist and insurgent groups that opposed U.S. dominance would be tracked, targeted, and, if possible, destroyed. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all shared these broad objectives and actively pursued
them, albeit in somewhat different ways.

  The United States, in short, was not a “status quo” power. Having won the Cold War, helped liberate Eastern Europe, and freed Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s clutches, U.S. leaders now set out to create a liberal world order through the active use of U.S. power. Instead of defending its own shores, maximizing prosperity and well-being at home, and promoting its ideals by force of example, Washington sought to remake other countries in its own image and incorporate them into institutions and arrangements of its own design.

  Victorious nations often succumb to hubris, and the heady sense of possibility that followed America’s Cold War triumph was to be expected. Nor did these hopes appear unwarranted. The smashing U.S. victory in the 1991 Gulf War had exorcized the ghosts of Vietnam and the 1979 Iranian hostage debacle, and U.S. military supremacy was now apparent to all. The U.S. economy grew impressively for most of the 1990s, new democracies were springing up in Latin America and the former Soviet empire, and there were even hopes for lasting peace in the broader Middle East.

  Small wonder, then, that prominent intellectuals believed that the era of great power competition and grand ideological rivalries was finally behind us and humankind could concentrate on amassing wealth in a benevolent “new world order.” American power would be marshaled for (nearly) everyone’s benefit, and other states were expected to welcome Washington’s leadership, accept its well-intentioned guidance, imitate the American model of democratic capitalism, and be grateful for the benefits U.S. primacy would provide.

  Unfortunately, the results of this ambitious attempt to remake the world have been dismal. Pursuing liberal hegemony did not make the United States safer, stronger, more prosperous, or more popular. Nor did it make the rest of the world more tranquil and secure. On the contrary, America’s ambitious attempt to reorder world politics undermined its own position, sowed chaos in several regions, and caused considerable misery in a number of other countries.

  To see this clearly, we need only compare the world the United States faced in the early 1990s with the world it confronts today. It is not a pretty picture.

  THE UNIPOLAR MOMENT AND THE END OF HISTORY

  A BENEVOLENT STRATEGIC ENVIRONMENT

  When the Cold War ended, the United States found itself in a position of global primacy unseen since the Roman Empire. It had the world’s largest and most advanced economy—with a gross domestic product roughly 60 percent larger than its nearest competitor—and in 1992 it produced roughly 25 percent of the world’s goods and services.6 It continued to set the pace in scientific research and technological innovation, its universities and research labs were the best in the world, and the U.S. dollar remained the world’s reserve currency, a luxury that allowed Washington to run larger trade deficits and to offset costs onto other countries in other ways.

  The United States was also the only country in the world with a global military presence. Not only did it have “command of the commons” (the oceans and much of the world’s airspace), it had the capacity to take decisive military action almost anywhere.7 In the 1990s, in fact, U.S. military spending exceeded the defense expenditures of the next twenty or thirty largest countries combined. Many of these states were close U.S. allies, so America’s practical lead over its remaining rivals was in fact even larger. Its armed forces also enjoyed impressive qualitative advantages, with U.S. spending on military R & D alone exceeding the entire defense budgets of Germany, Great Britain, France, Russia, Japan, or China.8 Even the deaths of nineteen U.S. Rangers in a bungled raid in Somalia in 1993 did not undermine the widespread sense of U.S. military omnipotence.

  Moreover, the United States was on good terms with all the other major powers. The major European states were bound to the United States through NATO, and Washington also had formal alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines as well as close strategic partnerships with Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan (among others). Relations with Russia were surprisingly cordial as the unipolar era began, as Moscow wanted Western help to transition to a market economy and was eager to forge cooperative security arrangements as well. China’s rising power was of some concern to U.S. leaders, but Beijing was still committed to Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “peaceful rise.” Accordingly, the United States opted to integrate China into existing institutions such as the new World Trade Organization in the hope that extending a friendly hand would convince Beijing to be a partner rather than a rival.

  Given America’s abundant advantages, many experts believed that the “unipolar moment” might last for years—and possibly decades. Writing in Foreign Affairs in 1990, the columnist Charles Krauthammer of The Washington Post suggested that preserving U.S. dominance was readily affordable and that the only thing that might topple the United States from its lofty perch was a prolonged economic downturn caused by wasteful entitlement spending at home.9 The political scientists William Wohlforth and Stephen Brooks of Dartmouth College agreed, arguing that U.S. primacy might last even longer than the forty-plus years of bipolarity that preceded it.10 These and other apostles of U.S. dominance repeatedly emphasized that the costs of U.S. primacy were modest and would be easy for the world’s largest economy to bear.11

  The strategic situation was not entirely rosy, of course, but the dangers that troubled U.S. leaders after the Cold War were far less ominous than the threats the United States had faced in the recent past. Instead of competing with a continent-size superpower driven by a revolutionary ideology that had won millions of sympathizers around the world, America’s main adversaries were now an array of weak “rogue states” such as Iraq, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan (under the Taliban), and Serbia. These regimes were all unsavory dictatorships, some of them sought to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and each was a troublesome influence within its own region. But they were all third- to fifth-rate powers when compared with the mighty United States, and none of them posed an existential threat to the United States or to any of its vital interests.12 As General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wryly noted in 1991, “I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of enemies. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.”13

  Moreover, the first Gulf War and the subsequent containment of Iraq suggested that the United States and its allies could take care of any of these states rather easily if it became absolutely necessary. From a broad historical perspective, the United States could hardly have asked for a more benign security environment.

  A FAVORABLE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC TIDE?

  In 1993 the tides of history appeared to be flowing America’s way. Victory in the Cold War seemed to be a striking vindication of America’s core ideals of individual liberty, free elections, and open markets. The so-called velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe and a “third wave” of democratic transitions in Latin America and elsewhere convinced many observers that liberal democracy was the only logical end point for modern or even postmodern societies. The expansion and deepening of the European Union (EU) in 1992—culminating in its decision to adopt a common currency, the euro—fit this upbeat narrative as well. Indeed, as a self-proclaimed “civilian power,” the EU seemed to offer further evidence that democracy, the rule of law, and the progressive expansion of international institutions could create durable “zones of peace” among countries that had fought repeatedly in the past.

  The spread of liberal norms and institutions—democracy, free speech, rule of law, market economies, etc.—was closely linked to hopes for significant progress in human rights. With Soviet-style authoritarianism discredited and more states becoming democratic, it seemed inevitable that government abuses would decline and humans would live increasingly free and secure lives. America’s dominant position put it in an ideal place to press other states to protect basic human rights and to help states making the transition to democracy build the requisite legal institutions and other supporting elements of civil society.

  The political scienti
st Francis Fukuyama captured the zeitgeist perfectly in a famous 1989 essay (and subsequent 1993 book), arguing that the grand ideological struggles of the past were now behind us and that mankind had reached “the end of history.”14 In the future, he suggested, there would be “no struggle or conflict over ‘large’ issues and consequently no need for generals or statesmen; what remains is primarily economic activity.” The chief danger we faced, warned Fukuyama, might be boredom. Another well-known scholar, John Mueller, offered the rosy view that great power war had become unfashionable and obsolescent, and the Harvard professor Stanley Hoffmann told The New York Times that foreign policy realism—which emphasizes the perennial and often tragic struggle for power between states—was “utter nonsense today.”15 These (and other) optimistic views reflected the widespread sense that the world had left great power politics behind and was moving steadily toward a peaceful liberal order.

  Reinforcing the sense of optimism about democracy and human rights was the belief that economic globalization was opening the door to a new era of peace and prosperity. The Communist world had embraced the market; new technologies of transportation, communication, and digitalization were shrinking distance and lowering transaction costs; ambitious new global agreements were removing political barriers to trade and investment; and global manufacturing now depended on complex but highly efficient supply chains that made goods cheaper and war even less feasible. International institutions such as the new World Trade Organization (WTO) would manage these new arrangements and enable all states to benefit from increased economic cooperation, assuming that they met the relevant requirements for membership and agreed to abide by the rules that these various organizations had laid down.16

  Needless to say, these same pundits saw the United States as the linchpin of this benevolent new economic order. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas L. Friedman’s bestselling anthem to globalization, the New York Times columnist argued that countries hoping to succeed in a globalized world had to don the “Golden Straitjacket”—open markets, democratic institutions, the rule of law, etc.—and described the United States as the state that had gone furthest toward perfecting what he called “DOSCapital 6.0.” And Friedman seemed to be onto something, because the U.S. economy performed well during the 1990s. Time magazine dubbed the U.S. Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers and the Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan “the Committee to Save the World,” and the idea that U.S. officials and Wall Street financial institutions were better at running a modern economy than anyone else reinforced the so-called Washington Consensus. If poorer states wanted to succeed in an increasingly integrated and competitive world economy, they would have to become more like the United States.