To make that sale, its advocates have to convince the public that liberal hegemony is necessary, affordable, and morally desirable. Proponents need not convince everyone to embrace these policies, however; a core of elite support is sufficient provided the rest of the population goes along. If the costs are not too great and advocates can point to some degree of success, the forces favoring liberal hegemony will face little opposition.
But “the more demanding the policy is, in terms of its call on American resources or lives,” warns the historian John A. Thompson, “the broader and deeper such support must be.”4 Accordingly, the foreign policy community uses a number of arguments to convince the public to support (or at least tolerate) its efforts to shape world politics in accordance with U.S. designs.
First, advocates of activism inflate threats to convince Americans that the world is a dangerous place and that their security depends on active U.S. engagement. Second, supporters exaggerate the benefits of liberal hegemony, arguing that it is the best way to defuse potential dangers, enhance prosperity, and spread cherished political values. Lastly, government officials try to conceal the costs of their ambitious foreign policy in order to persuade Americans that it is a bargain even when successes are few and far between.
RIGGING THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS
In fact, selling liberal hegemony is easier than one might think, as debates on foreign and national security policy are not a fair fight among the competing alternatives.
As discussed in chapter 3, access to information and open debate (i.e., the “marketplace of ideas”) are supposed to help democracies avoid major policy blunders and minimize the consequences when they do occur.5 When the subject is foreign policy, however, these mechanisms often break down. Vested interests within the government and the broader foreign policy establishment have significant advantages in shaping what the public knows about international politics and foreign policy, and these advantages tilt the competition among policy alternatives in their favor. In other words, the marketplace of ideas is rigged.
MANIPULATING INFORMATION
For starters, citizens lack direct access to reliable information about most foreign policy issues. If the economy is in free fall and millions of people are losing their jobs, if roads and bridges are crumbling, or if government agencies bungle a disaster relief effort, ordinary citizens can see this for themselves. But few Americans have independent information about Al Qaeda’s inner workings, the details of U.S. trade agreements, the history of Iran’s nuclear research program, the scope and impact of U.S. drone operations, or whether Russia did in fact hack the Democratic National Committee’s computers in 2016. For these and countless other international topics, citizens have to rely on what the government officials or well-connected experts tell them, and the media that reports on these issues depends on these same sources for information as well. As a result, people inside the foreign policy community have considerable latitude to shape what the public thinks about key issues.
Governments can also influence what the public knows by classifying information, so as to keep citizens in the dark about the actions top government officials undertake.6 To take an obvious example, an extensive and costly Senate investigation into the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of torture has yet to be released to the public—even in a highly redacted form—although U.S. taxpayers funded the crimes the committee was investigating and paid millions of dollars for the report.7
Top officials can also leak classified information in order to make the case for the policies they prefer. To persuade Americans to back the invasion of Iraq, for example, the Bush administration used a well-orchestrated campaign of leaks and false statements to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling biological and chemical weapons, actively seeking a nuclear bomb, and in cahoots with Osama bin Laden.8 Vice President Dick Cheney told CNN in March 2002 that Saddam was “actively pursuing nuclear weapons,” and in August he announced, “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” In September 2002 President Bush told reporters, “You can’t distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror,” and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told an interviewer that the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were “accurate and not debatable.” National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told a CNN interviewer, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” implying that Iraq might already have nuclear weapons, and President Bush repeated the same warning in October.9 As John Schuessler observes, “The democratic process may act as a constraint on leaders’ ability to go to war, but deception provides a way around that constraint.”10
Officials with access to classified information can also tie a president’s hands by leaking it. As the newly elected president Barack Obama pondered military requests to increase troop levels in Afghanistan during the spring and summer of 2009, military leaders leaked a report by the U.S. commander Stanley McChrystal warning that the war “would likely result in failure” if the request were not approved. This transparent gambit to box in the new president worked, and Obama ordered a “surge” of additional troops later that year.11
The desire to control what the public knows also encourages government officials to go after independent whistle-blowers and journalists who publish leaked information. Indeed, government efforts to prosecute leaks increased sharply after 2008, President Obama’s pledge to conduct the most “open” government in American history notwithstanding.12
The combination of leaking and selective prosecution empowers those with control over information and makes it harder for critics to evaluate the merits of the government’s case.13 According to Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton, this asymmetry helps explain why government officials are often able to ignore public opinion about foreign policy. In their words, “The executive branch can use its information control to conceal or misrepresent what it is doing abroad. This diminishes the ability of voters to hold officials accountable.”14
FOCUSED INTERESTS VERSUS THE NATIONAL INTEREST
The marketplace of ideas is distorted further because the focused interests that benefit from liberal hegemony have more influence over public debate than the public does. This phenomenon is well known to students of democracy: if there are key groups with a focused interest in a particular policy while the majority of citizens are either indifferent or distracted, the more focused groups will exert a disproportionate impact on policy, even if they do not get their way every time.15
The think tanks and lobbies described in chapter 3 are a perfect illustration of this tendency. These groups work overtime to publicize their work and get their experts onto talk shows, op-ed pages, or other visible venues, and they take up a disproportionate share of the bandwidth in debates on foreign policy. Because the vast majority of foreign policy think tanks and lobbying organizations support liberal hegemony and U.S. “global leadership” (even if they sometimes disagree about the best way to advance that goal), what the public hears about these issues is biased toward an interventionist approach.
To be sure, when competing interest groups are equally powerful, their respective efforts to sway elite and mass opinion can produce the rich and lively debate the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor depicts. The vigorous debate over the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran is an apt example: both supporters and opponents were well-organized and had similar opportunities to make their respective cases.16 But balanced debate does not occur in many areas of U.S. foreign policy—especially not over the wisdom of liberal hegemony itself.
Proponents of liberal hegemony also benefit from the enduring power of nationalism, including the reverence accorded the military as the embodiment of patriotic service. In a country where sports events typically begin with the national anthem and feature color guards, tributes to veterans, or awe-inducing flybys by B-2 bombers, advocates of military dominance and global leadership enjoy powerful rhetorical advantages while advocates of restraint risk being se
en as favoring a weaker America. No wonder the Defense Department paid at least fifty professional sports teams a total of $10 million to conduct patriotic ceremonies at games as part of a broader campaign to reinforce public support and enhance recruiting. In effect, U.S. taxpayers were paying for a public relations program designed in part to convince them to pay even more.17
The implication is clear: debates over foreign policy and grand strategy are not a fair fight, let alone a genuine “marketplace” where the best ideas invariably win out.
TABOOS, DOGMAS, AND THE “CONVENTIONAL WISDOM”
The benefits of open debate diminish further when topics become taboo and questioning them can be harmful to one’s career. To say a particular topic is taboo is not to say that no one ever raises the issue or challenges the reigning orthodoxy, only that it is understood to be politically risky for anyone seeking a prominent role in government or the foreign policy establishment. What John Kenneth Galbraith dubbed the “conventional wisdom” goes unchallenged, and errors are more likely to be repeated than corrected. Or as Walter Lippmann once warned, “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”18
As the task forces described in the previous chapter illustrate, the elite consensus in favor of liberal hegemony is wholly bipartisan. It is also deeply ingrained in the foreign policy establishment. Ambitious foreign policy wannabes rarely question the desirability of U.S. primacy, the need for nuclear superiority, the necessity of NATO, the desirability of the “special relationship” with Israel, the need to protect access to Middle East oil and defend an array of Asian allies, and the inevitability of conflict with “rogue states” such as North Korea and Iran.19 The origins of these unquestioned dogmas vary, but each one adds to the global tasks the United States is supposed to perform. Until very recently, anyone who questioned these basic principles or proposed a more restrained foreign policy risked being labeled an “isolationist,” a loaded term that seeks to marginalize alternative views by tying them to the now-discredited individuals who opposed U.S. entry into World War II.20
A similar bias distorts discussions about the use of military force. Foreign policy mavens do debate the pros and cons of specific military actions—such as the merits of intervention in Syria’s civil war—but not the basic right of the United States to use force wherever and whenever it wishes. A corollary to this principle is the reluctance of Washington insiders to endorse peace as a central goal of U.S. foreign policy—even though it is very much in the U.S. interest—for fear of being seen as “soft.”21 As Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a quintessential foreign policy insider, admitted in 2009, his initial support for the Iraq War “was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.”22
At worst, taboos such as these force politicians and their advisors to refrain from expressing their true beliefs so that they can stay within the boundaries of “acceptable” opinion. Such informal prohibitions also discourage members of the foreign policy community from asking tough questions about well-established policies even when those policies are visibly failing. Questionable but politically safe ideas pollute the public sphere, few will say the emperor has no clothes, and those who do so openly will not be taken seriously.
CONSTRAINTS ON THE MEDIA
Nor can the media be relied upon to challenge the dominant narratives that underpin liberal hegemony, at least not on a consistent basis. To take an obvious example, the most popular Sunday TV talk shows rarely present views from outside the Beltway mainstream and instead show a marked bias for hawkish positions. This is partly a question of design, as the main purpose of such programs as NBC’s Meet the Press and ABC’s This Week is to spotlight senior officials or other prominent politicians rather than to deepen public awareness or foster wide-ranging debate. Proponents of aggressive U.S. policies appear on these programs far more often than advocates of restraint, with three hard-line members of Congress—John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsay Graham (R-SC), and Mike Rogers (R-MI)—being especially prominent in recent years.23 Even if one omits consistently hawkish outlets like Fox News, the deck is stacked.
Furthermore, as we saw in chapter 3, many prominent media figures genuinely believe that the United States should be committed all over the world and are therefore quick to defend the expansive role that liberal hegemony prescribes.24 During the 1990s, for example, mainstream media coverage in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times was strongly biased in favor of increased defense spending, with hawks and Defense Department officials quoted three times more frequently than advocates of spending cuts.25 As Michael Glennon points out, many of the reporters and columnists working on foreign policy and national security are part of the same inside-the-Beltway culture and subject to the usual pressures to conform. Moving outside the consensus behind liberal hegemony could also jeopardize access to top officials—the lifeblood for any ambitious journalist—and put existing friendships and future professional opportunities at risk.26
Of course, government officials understand that favorable media coverage is essential to sustaining public support for an ambitious foreign policy, so they work hard to obtain it. In 2008, for example, the New York Times reporter David Barstow revealed that the Pentagon had recruited a network of retired military officers who were given VIP briefings and access to classified information. Media outlets looking for expert “military analysts” to appear on air were then given these names. As an internal Pentagon memorandum put it, the retired officers would be “message force multipliers” and “surrogates” who would appear as authoritative, independent voices supporting the Bush administration’s policies. Participants were told not to reveal their relationship with the Pentagon and were expected to stay “on message.” If you weren’t on board, one participant told Barstow, “you’ll lose all access,” and another former officer was dismissed from the program after telling Fox News that the United States was “not on a good glide path” in Iraq.27
Subsequent investigations by the Pentagon’s inspector general and the General Accounting Office found that this program did not violate any federal laws, but the real issue is that the American people were being fed biased but seemingly “authoritative” accounts of how the military campaign was proceeding. This covert public relations campaign didn’t help the United States win in Iraq or Afghanistan, but it did help mislead the American people about how well these wars were going.
The modern practice of “embedding” reporters with combat units may have similar effects. Allowing reporters to accompany combat units can make for vivid coverage and in theory should produce more informed stories, but it also makes journalists even more dependent on the Pentagon for access to stories “from the front” and encourages them to portray the soldiers that are protecting them in favorable terms.28
Finally, media scrutiny of key foreign and national security policy issues is also affected by the media’s willingness to respect government secrecy. Especially after 9/11, media managers have been understandably reluctant to publish stories that might aid America’s enemies, and government officials have been quick to use this concern to influence how controversial topics are covered.
In 2004, for example, The New York Times bowed to government pressure—including a direct request from President Bush himself—and delayed for nearly a year the publication of a story exposing the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program. The reason? Administration officials told the Times that the story “could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny.”29
As discussed in the previous chapter, a number of journalists, academics, and media figures do important critical work on key elements of recent U.S. foreign policy and provide a useful counterpoint to conventional narratives about America’s global activities.30 The diversity of discourse on foreign policy in
the United States is higher than in authoritarian countries, where censorship and official government media make it much harder for alternative voices to be heard. Indeed, the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and Donald Trump in 2016 could be seen as confirmation that many Americans understood that U.S. foreign policy had veered off-course. It would be wrong, therefore, to conclude that the “marketplace of ideas” does not operate at all, or to view media coverage of foreign affairs as nothing but “fake news” designed to keep U.S. citizens in the dark.
Nonetheless, the clash of ideas and policy proposals is not a fair fight on a level field. Individuals and groups with money and status enjoy powerful advantages, and special interests with strong preferences on particular issues normally wield disproportionate influence over what gets written, printed, or broadcast. As shown in the previous chapter, most of these groups strongly favor some version of liberal hegemony. In the competition for the public mind, therefore, it remains easier for advocates of liberal hegemony to make their case, even in the wake of repeated policy failures.
But exactly how does this work? What are the main arguments the foreign policy establishment employs to justify global engagement in general and the goal of liberal hegemony in particular?
STEP 1: THREAT INFLATION
A time-honored method for selling an ambitious foreign policy is to exaggerate foreign dangers. If the public believes that the country faces imminent threats from abroad, it is more likely to support energetic efforts to contain, compel, isolate, degrade, or eliminate them.
The Hell of Good Intentions Page 16
