The Hell of Good Intentions

by Stephen M. Walt

  Of course, it didn’t help that many of these interventions were taking place in the Middle East, a region where the United States was especially unpopular. The use of military force and economic pressure to topple regimes or spread democracy inevitably reinforced well-established opposition to Western interference in the Arab/Muslim world and thereby discredited the new elites the United States sought to support. Comments made by the Syria expert Joshua Landis about America’s failed effort to support moderate groups in the Syrian civil war apply with equal force elsewhere: “America failed not because it didn’t try, but because its moderates were incompetent and unpopular. As soon as they began taking money and orders from America, they were tarred by radicals as CIA agents who were corrupt and traitors to the revolution. America was toxic, and everything it touched turned to sand in its hands.”69

  These recurring failures are neither surprising nor atypical; on the contrary, rigorous scholarly studies of earlier efforts at “foreign-imposed regime change” by the United States, Great Britain, and other democracies have shown that toppling a foreign government rarely produces a successful democracy, enhances the rule of law, or leads to significant progress on human rights.70 What is surprising is how long it took for these lessons to sink in.

  THE IMPACT OF DISTANCE

  A final justification for liberal hegemony was the idea that the world was shrinking, that grave dangers could emerge from virtually anywhere, and that it was therefore necessary for the United States to try to monitor and guide events almost everywhere. If we were all citizens in a shrinking “global village,” then keeping order all over the world was essential to protecting Americans back home.

  But as Patrick Porter argues convincingly, the popular image of a “global village” was mostly a myth.71 Advances in military technology did not give hostile states a usable capacity to threaten the U.S. homeland in strategically consequential ways, because hostile foreign powers could be reliably deterred by America’s vastly greater retaliatory capabilities. Globalization might increase the risks from terrorism, cyberwarfare, and infectious diseases somewhat, but these dangers remained modest when compared with other threats. In any case, projecting U.S. power into more places was not an effective way to deal with them.

  Nor did these various technological developments make it easier for the United States to govern distant lands. Satellite reconnaissance, sophisticated targeting systems, long-range aircraft, and unmanned drones allowed Washington to bring force to bear in many places, but establishing political control still required “boots on the ground,” with all the attendant costs and risks. Supporting expeditionary forces far from home was still expensive—especially in a remote and landlocked country like Afghanistan—and poorly armed local insurgents turned out to be surprisingly effective when fighting on their home turf. Trying to make America safer by intervening in many different places just made the problem of violent extremism worse, and public support for costly overseas crusades soon waned.

  NEGLECTING THE HOME FRONT

  Liberal hegemony had one final shortcoming, although it did not become fully evident until the 2016 election. Trying to reshape politics all over the world and carrying the other burdens of global leadership was costly and time-consuming, and it took time, attention, and resources away from pressing domestic concerns. Every hour a president spent fretting about Iraq or Afghanistan or Somalia or Colombia was an hour he could not devote to domestic concerns, and every dollar spent on foreign military bases and overseas interventions was a dollar that could not be devoted to improving the lives of Americans at home or left in taxpayers’ pockets. As we shall see in chapter 3, the American people were never all that enthusiastic about liberal hegemony, and with good reason.

  These opportunity costs were especially important because the combination of globalization and rapid technological change was having a profound impact on the American workforce. Globalization may have been good for highly educated elites and especially Wall Street, but middle-class incomes were stagnating, blue-collar manufacturing jobs were disappearing, and the reeducation and retraining programs that Washington was providing were far from adequate. The country’s crumbling infrastructure was badly in need of repair—a 2017 report by the World Bank found that the United States had an infrastructure investment gap of almost $4 trillion, the largest of any country in the world—but infrastructure spending had to compete with existing entitlement programs and costly overseas interventions.72 Not only had liberal hegemony failed to achieve its explicit international goals, it contributed to the domestic discontent that fueled Donald Trump’s surprising electoral triumph.

  SUCCESS STORIES

  Liberal hegemony’s shortcomings become even clearer when one examines those rare episodes when U.S. foreign policy worked well. As discussed in chapter 1, U.S. diplomacy helped end the Bosnian War and helped broker the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, and the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program improved nuclear security in Russia and other former Soviet territories until it fell victim to the crisis over Ukraine. The creation of the World Trade Organization, the PEPFAR program in Africa, the Proliferation Security Initiative, the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the 2015 Paris Agreement, and the restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba were all legitimate achievements, as was the successful multilateral effort that convinced Libya to dismantle its WMD programs.

  What do these success stories have in common? In each case the United States did not try to impose solutions on others solely by issuing ultimatums and ratcheting up more and more pressure, or by trying to topple hostile governments with which it disagreed. On the contrary, in these cases it recognized that there were limits to U.S. leverage, and it adjusted its goals to win greater international support and to reach a mutually acceptable agreement with the other parties. When Washington sought cooperation from others and took others’ interests into account, its efforts were generally successful.

  As previously discussed, the poster child in this category is the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which blocked Iran’s ability to acquire nuclear weapons. As long as the United States insisted that Iran give up its entire enrichment capacity, it made no headway whatsoever, and the Islamic Republic just kept expanding its centrifuge capacity and stockpiling more and more enriched uranium. Once Washington began negotiating in earnest, however, it was able to assemble a broad international coalition and impose more effective economic sanctions. Equally important, U.S. negotiators abandoned the futile hope that pressure alone would convince Tehran to give up its entire enrichment capacity. That concession to reality opened the door to a compromise that avoided war, blocked Iran’s path to a bomb, and allowed Tehran to save face. The election of the moderate Iranian president Hassan Rouhani in 2013 surely facilitated the agreement, but it took flexibility on America’s part to seize the opportunity.

  The disarming of Libya in 2003 offers a similar lesson. There is no doubt that coercive pressure—including tough multilateral economic sanctions—helped persuade Muammar Gaddafi to give up his relatively primitive WMD programs in exchange for restored economic and diplomatic ties. Fear of regime change in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq may also have played some role in his decision, but the other key ingredients were Gaddafi’s own fears of Al Qaeda and the Bush administration’s pledge to leave him in power if he allowed U.S. officials to cart away his WMD equipment. The Obama administration’s decision to renege on this pledge in 2011 does not negate the broader lesson: diplomacy worked in 2003 because the United States offered carrots as well as sticks.73

  Furthermore, in many of these cases, the United States was willing to negotiate in earnest with regimes whose values and governing principles were very different from its own. Washington didn’t demand that other states become democratic before joining the Proliferation Security Initiative or receiving Nunn-Lugar Threat Reduction funds, for example, and it did not insist that Vietnam and Brunei become democracies before joining the Trans-Pacific Part
nership negotiations.

  These same features can also be seen in the U.S. approach to China. U.S. leaders understood that China was too big to push around, so they generally refrained from issuing ultimatums or relying solely on threats or sanctions. They were sometimes critical of China’s authoritarian system and human rights record, but Clinton, Bush, and Obama quickly learned that hectoring Beijing on these issues accomplished little. U.S. leaders recognized that Sino-American relations were likely to be increasingly conflictive, and they took a number of steps designed to constrain Chinese influence, but they also understood that cooperation was still necessary on climate change, global health, North Korea, and international economic issues. In short, when dealing with Beijing, U.S. officials forgot about regime change and the other revisionist elements of liberal hegemony, concentrated on managing relations with the world’s number two power, and did about as well as could be expected.

  The lesson is clear: when the United States abandoned liberal hegemony and adopted a more realistic and flexible approach, its ability to achieve specific foreign policy goals increased significantly.

  CONCLUSION

  After more than two decades, the failures of liberal hegemony were impossible to hide. Yet until the inauguration of Donald Trump, its central principles remained hardwired into American foreign policy discourse and went mostly unchallenged in the corridors of power. Barack Obama may have been elected in good part to correct his predecessors’ excesses, but even he sought to expand the sphere of democratic rule and oust a few dictators, and he was willing to take on new security obligations, just as Bill Clinton and George Bush had done. Obama tried to use more limited means and to get others to bear a bit more of the burden, but the foreign policy establishment remained committed to maintaining U.S. dominance, spreading liberal values, and expanding U.S. commitments. Liberal hegemony remained the guiding star of U.S. strategy even though Washington still had no idea how to make it work.

  The election of Donald Trump exposed a final flaw in the strategy of liberal hegemony: it had created a world order that was overly reliant on the United States and thus potentially vulnerable to the vagaries of U.S. domestic politics. By viewing their country as the “indispensable power” and making it the linchpin of security arrangements around the world, U.S. officials had unwittingly created a security architecture that depended on America’s being engaged, powerful, resolute, and effective nearly everywhere. Instead of encouraging regional powers to resolve their differences and develop security arrangements that didn’t require a lot of active American guidance, U.S. leaders had created a world order that would disintegrate rapidly if the United States stopped bearing the global burdens it had once eagerly embraced. No wonder U.S. foreign policy elites viewed Trump’s arrival with alarm; the liberal world order to which they were deeply committed was more delicate than it appeared, and they knew it.74

  With the benefit of hindsight, the decision to embrace a grand strategy of liberal hegemony and to pursue it despite repeated failures seems baffling. It was the height of hubris for Americans—who are, after all, only 5 percent of the world’s population—to believe they had discovered the only workable model for a modern society and the only possible blueprint for a durable and peaceful world order. It was naïve for them to think they could create stable and successful democracies in deeply divided societies that had never been democratic before. It was positively delusional to assume that this objective could be achieved rapidly and at low cost. It was unrealistic to believe that other states would not be alarmed by America’s efforts to reshape world politics and to assume further that opponents would not devise effective ways to thwart U.S. designs. And it was stubborn to the point of insanity to keep chasing the same elusive objective after so many repeated setbacks.

  So why did liberal hegemony remain the default condition of U.S. grand strategy? Part of the answer—but only part—is the vast power the United States possessed and the favorable geopolitical position it enjoyed after the Soviet Union collapsed. To borrow Bill Clinton’s explanation for his embarrassing affair with a White House intern, the United States opted for liberal hegemony and kept trying to make it work “because it could.”

  The end of the Cold War had left the United States in a position of preponderance unseen since the Roman Empire. This good fortune could not protect the country from every conceivable danger, but it was still the most secure great power in modern history.75 The combination of vast power—along with what the historian C. Vann Woodward called the “free security” resulting from America’s providential location—was the permissive condition that allowed the United States to intervene with near impunity all over the world without having to worry too much about the short-term consequences back home.76

  Because the United States was so rich, powerful, and secure, it could afford to follow a misguided grand strategy for a long time without bankrupting itself completely or leaving itself vulnerable to foreign invasion. Had it faced a serious peer competitor after 1993 or some number of powerful and hostile neighbors, it would have been forced to devote more attention to protecting the U.S. homeland and it would have been less willing to take on costly new commitments or to try to shape political conditions in distant lands. Since World War II, however, and especially since 1993, the United States has had the luxury of being able to intervene wherever it chooses and then withdraw if things go badly—as it did in Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, and Libya—leaving the local populations to their fates.

  At the same time, these advantages also left the country with relatively little to gain from its ambitious campaign to remake the world. The benefits of an ambitious and successful foreign policy are not zero, of course, but in 1993 the United States was already rich and secure, already led stable alliances with a number of other powerful states, was on fairly good terms with many other countries, and was positioned to do well in a globalizing world economy. Even if liberal hegemony had worked much better than it did—for example, by successfully turning Iraq and Afghanistan into thriving democracies—it would not have improved America’s overall position all that much.

  Indeed, because the United States was already wealthy, strong, and secure, it could have just as easily chosen to draw down its overseas commitments somewhat, passed the burdens for regional security in some areas onto other states, and devoted more time, money, and attention to improving the lives of citizens back home. This approach might even have enhanced U.S. leverage over its remaining allies, who might have worked harder to preserve U.S. backing and been more sensitive to Washington’s wishes.77

  We are left with a puzzling paradox. Primacy made pursuing liberal hegemony possible, but it also made it less necessary. Understanding why that fateful choice was made, and why three very different presidents clung to it despite its failings, requires a closer look at the institutions and organizations that shape how Americans think about these decisions and how elected officials ultimately choose to act. That task begins in chapter 3.

  3.  DEFINING THE “BLOB”: WHAT IS THE “FOREIGN POLICY COMMUNITY”?

  DURING THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, Donald Trump showed scant regard for the individuals who had been in charge of U.S. foreign policy. Saying “we have to look for new people,” Trump stated that he wasn’t going to be “surrounding myself with those who have perfect resumes but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies.” When prominent Republican foreign policy VIPs published an open letter questioning his qualifications and character, Trump retorted, “The names on this letter are the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess, and we thank them for coming forward so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place.”1

  Were Trump’s criticisms justified? The answer—unfortunately—is yes, because most of the problems afflicting U.S. foreign policy are the result of conscious choices rather than unpredictable acts of fate. Primacy and “free securit
y” made it possible for the United States to meddle in distant regions, and it insulated Americans from some of the consequences, but the specific commitments and initiatives that U.S. leaders undertake are still matters of political choice. As Thomas Oatley notes, “the United States has never been forced by foreign invasion to fight a war at home. Instead, American policymakers have been able to choose when, where, and if to participate in wars … in every instance … [they] could have chosen not to use force without placing the territorial integrity or national sovereignty of the United States at risk.”2 Yet in recent years the threat or use of force has often been the default option despite its disappointing results.

  Let us therefore look more closely at the people and institutions that make or influence these decisions, and explore what is guiding their choices.

  FOREIGN POLICY AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICS

  In a democracy, foreign policy is not simply the product of a president’s vision. It is also shaped by competing forces in civil society and by what might be termed the “foreign policy community.” The impact of civil society will be especially large in a liberal democracy such as the United States, with its tradition of divided government, constitutional guarantees of free speech and association, and ambivalent attitude toward centralized power. These forces will be even more powerful when there is no compelling danger to focus the national mind and when policymakers are freer to act as they see fit or as domestic pressures dictate.