The Hell of Good Intentions

by Stephen M. Walt

  As the post-9/11 “war on terror” proceeded, other hawks began to refer to a growing threat from “Islamofascism,” thereby suggesting that a diverse set of Islamic terrorists had a common agenda and a unified strategy. Like the term “Axis,” such phrases imply a high degree of coordination among these diverse groups and connect them rhetorically to Nazi Germany—as clear a case of evil as one could imagine—thereby suggesting that Islamic radicals and/or rogue states are equal to the dangers the world faced back in the 1930s. Such terms also subtly invoke the triumphal U.S. narrative of World War II—the “Good War,” where virtuous Americans came together to save the world from a set of aggressive dictatorships. Small wonder that hard-liners quickly labeled the war on terror “World War IV,” thereby implying that the United States was confronted by the same sort of threat it had faced in 1941 and needed to make an equivalent effort to defeat it.56

  Unfortunately, sloppy historical analogies such as these make it harder to devise effective strategies for isolating, dividing, and ultimately defeating these various foes. Treating every group that employs terrorist methods as part of a common movement also gives some of them greater incentive to join forces, which is the last thing the United States wants.

  “OUR ALLIES ARE WEAK AND UNRELIABLE (YET WE MUST STILL PROTECT THEM)”

  The flip side to exaggerating one’s opponents’ unity is overstating the fragility or fecklessness of America’s many allies. Compared with potential adversaries such as ISIS, China, or Iran, the United States is blessed with a number of wealthy and capable partners. Of the ten countries with the largest defense budgets, for example, six are formal allies of the United States. China and Russia are the only countries in the top ten who are at odds with the United States, and neither of these states has other allies with substantial global influence.

  Indeed, when one takes contemporary alliances into account, America’s strategic situation is in some ways better than it was at the height of the Cold War. In the 1980s the United States and its allies together outspent all potential threatening states (e.g., the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria, and Vietnam) by a margin of more than two to one. That margin increased to more than five to one when the Soviet Union collapsed, even though U.S. defense spending also declined during this period.57

  Given these favorable realities, what is a dedicated threat inflator to do? One response is to assume that U.S. allies are unreliable and to warn that they will abandon the United States and bandwagon with America’s rivals if the United States does not protect them against every conceivable danger. Accordingly, hawks warn that U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf would quickly abandon the United States and appease Iran were it to acquire nuclear weapons.58

  A second response is to denigrate allied capabilities and suggest that having lots of allies makes it harder—not easier—to protect key U.S. interests.59 There is some truth in this assertion, insofar as some of the states the United States has promised to protect—such as Estonia, Latvia, or Montenegro—have little military potential, and other U.S. allies—such as Germany—have become overly reliant on American protection and let their own military capabilities atrophy. Indeed, some of America’s current alliances are better seen as one-sided “protectorates” that add to U.S. defense burdens but do not contribute new capabilities with which to meet them.60

  But if some allies increase U.S. defense burdens without enhancing U.S. security, the proper response is to be more selective when extending guarantees and to insist that these allies bear a greater share of collective burdens. Such sensible steps won’t happen, however, if U.S. leaders continue to believe it is a major strategic achievement whenever they take on costly security obligations for others.

  EXPLOITING UNCERTAINTY

  Threat inflation thrives when dangers are difficult to measure. Tanks, planes, ships, and defense budgets are easy to count and compare, but gauging other dangers can be more difficult. Anyone with a decent imagination can dream up an infinite number of frightening scenarios, and it is sometimes hard to prove that some hypothetical danger is overblown.

  One sees this problem today in the tendency to hype threats from terrorism and, to a somewhat lesser extent, from cyberwarfare. Because terrorist organizations plot in secret (at the same time issuing lurid threats), we can never be 100 percent certain that a devastating attack is not in the works. Even if most of the post-9/11 plots against the United States were either FBI “sting” operations or involved incompetent bunglers, and even if the actual danger America faced from Al Qaeda or its various offshoots—including the “Islamic State”—was vastly overstated, there is no way to be completely sure that the next terrorist plot will fail.61

  Similarly, because cyber threats are always evolving, and because one needs sophisticated technical knowledge to assess the danger accurately, it is easy for threat inflators (or Hollywood scriptwriters) to concoct alarming scenarios in which hackers, terrorists, foreign governments, or clever teenagers blind our armed forces, crash the air traffic control system, shut down power grids, crater the world economy, or launch whatever other nightmare scenario they can imagine.62 The ability to dream up new dangers is nicely illustrated by Benjamin Wittes of Brookings and Gabriella Blum of Harvard Law School, who write, “In our new world, you can pose a threat to the security of every state and person on the planet—and each can also threaten you … Today, each person needs to fear an exponentially higher number of people and entities than only a decade ago. The threats to your personal security now include not merely governments and corporations but also other individuals around the world: stalkers, identity thieves, scammers, spammers, frauds, competitors, and rivals—everyone and everything from the government of China to the NSA … You can be attacked from anywhere—and by nearly everyone.”63 Shorter version: be afraid. Be very afraid.

  This is not to say that such dangers are imaginary. Indeed, Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election and the use of damaging viruses, ransomware, and denial-of-service attacks by Iran, North Korea, Russia, the United States, and some private entities demonstrates that the threat is far from ephemeral.64 The broader point, however, is that the uncertainties surrounding this pervasive and rapidly evolving technology make it more likely that we will overstate or misjudge the actual danger we face.

  It is revealing, for example, that the chorus of experts warning about sophisticated forms of cyberwar, cyber espionage, cybercrime, and cyberterrorism failed to anticipate what is arguably the most politically significant use of digital technology to date. I refer, of course, to Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. election by flooding Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms with counterfeit accounts disseminating phony stories and messages intended to deepen divisions within the United States and weaken the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Russia didn’t hack voting machines or bring down the power grid on Election Day, but its low-tech effort to plant false stories reportedly reached some 126 million Americans through Facebook alone.65 A number of prescient Internet scholars had previously warned that social media platforms might have powerful but largely unseen effects on election outcomes, but no one seems to have anticipated that a foreign power might use these same platforms to advance its own political agenda here in the United States.66

  What this incident also revealed was the fragile and polarized condition of American democracy, which gave Russia’s interference more impact than it deserved. As Paul Pillar put it in January 2017, “Sure, what the Russians did is worthy of condemnation, but Americans ought to be most disturbed by the fact that there already were enough reasons to shake such faith [in the existing democratic order] that the Russians would have known they had a vulnerable target.”67 In any case, the central point remains valid: when threats are inherently hard to measure, threat inflation is more likely to thrive.

  If an imagined attack of any kind would be extremely damaging, taking extreme measures to p
revent it may well be justified. This is the reasoning behind Vice President Dick Cheney’s infamous “one percent doctrine”: if there was only a 1 percent chance of something terrible happening (such as a Pakistani plot to give Al Qaeda a nuclear weapon), Cheney told aides to act as if it were a certainty.68 Because dreaming up scary scenarios is child’s play (especially when compared with the effort needed to make a rigorous threat assessment), the “one percent” doctrine guarantees that threats will be exaggerated. Nor does this approach tell us which of the infinite number of Very Bad Things That One Cannot Completely Rule Out deserve the most attention or the greatest claim on government resources. It does make liberal hegemony look more attractive, however: if there’s a 1 percent chance that something really bad might emerge from almost anywhere, then the United States had better do more to root out potential dangers wherever they might arise.

  WHY DOES THREAT INFLATION WORK SO WELL?

  External dangers do exist, and the United States does not always exaggerate them. Threat inflation is still a serious problem, however, because it diverts resources from other priorities and can lead to policies that make existing dangers worse. Scaring the hell out of the American people may win popular support for an ambitious foreign policy, but it can also lead to costly missteps. Unfortunately, both politicians and pundits have learned all too well that a poorly informed public is quick to lap up such phrases as “a new Munich” or “another Hitler” and all too willing to succumb to worst-case fears about terrorist masterminds, wily dictators, and vast conspiracies.

  Part of the problem lies in the incentives political leaders face when dealing with uncertain dangers. As Jack Goldsmith has argued, U.S. leaders overreact to terrorism because they receive daily reports about possible attacks and they fear the political consequences of appearing insufficiently vigilant. In his words, “It is hard to overstate the impact that the incessant waves of threat reports have on the judgment of people inside the executive branch who are responsible for protecting American lives.”69 Excessive vigilance is wasteful, but it shields officials from accusations of not having done enough to protect the nation.

  Threat inflation also prevails because individuals and groups with an interest in exaggerating threats are more numerous and better funded than those who seek to debunk them, and they often enjoy greater political prestige. The entire military-industrial complex has obvious incentives to overstate foreign dangers in order to persuade the body politic to give it additional resources. Hawkish think tanks get generous support from defense contractors and individuals; by comparison, groups offering less frightening appraisals are generally less well-funded and less influential.

  The unusual case of Micah Zenko, formerly the Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is instructive in this regard. Zenko has done important work on a variety of national security topics, but what made him noteworthy was his willingness to challenge the alarmist views that predominate in the national security establishment. Even more remarkably, he did so from a position at the Council on Foreign Relations, the beating heart of the mainstream foreign policy world. Zenko’s iconoclasm was sufficiently unusual to earn him a featured profile in The American Conservative under the headline “The Anti-Warrior.” The article described Zenko’s work as “a constant effort to take the threat landscape out of the funhouse mirror and restore some perspective: the gentle blasphemy of threat deflation.”70 Zenko is not the only threat-deflating voice in contemporary policy debates, but he was one of the few with a prominent position at a mainstream foreign policy think tank.

  Foreign governments that depend on U.S. protection will also do what they can to keep the American people scared, thus ensuring that the United States will continue to protect them. When the Obama administration decided not to intervene in the Syrian civil war, for example, Arab officials—such as former Saudi Arabian intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal—bemoaned the loss of U.S. “credibility” and warned that U.S. passivity would embolden Iran.71 The crisis in Ukraine elicited a chorus of similar complaints from NATO’s East European members, further underscoring their dependence on U.S. protection. Not to be outdone, U.S. allies in Asia routinely question U.S. credibility in the face of a rising China while refusing to increase their own defense spending significantly.72

  Hawks back home are quick to trumpet these warnings, of course, which they cite as “independent” evidence to support their own alarmist views. Thus former vice president Cheney, whose recommendations after 9/11 did so much to destabilize the Middle East, warned in 2013, “our friends no longer count on us, no longer trust us, and our adversaries don’t fear us.”73 Needless to say, this symbiotic relationship between liberal hegemony’s proponents in the United States and the foreign powers that benefit from U.S. protection reinforces the perceived need to respond to even minor events in every corner of the world.

  To repeat: my argument is not that the United States faces no foreign dangers or that its vital interests are reliably secure against any and all challenges. Nor am I suggesting that threat inflation leads directly and unavoidably to a strategy of liberal hegemony. When U.S. leaders are sufficiently alarmed, in fact, liberal values will get short shrift, and leaders will readily join forces with friendly dictators, provided the latter are useful for dealing with the problem at hand.

  On balance, however, threat inflation encourages ambitious, revisionist strategies like liberal hegemony. After all, if the world is indeed filled with dangers and Americans do not want them to grow, Washington must use its power to shape events in many different places.

  STEP 2: EXAGGERATE THE BENEFITS

  Having labored to convince Americans that the world is overflowing with dangers, step two in the defense of liberal hegemony is to persuade the public that U.S. dominance and “global leadership” offer the best strategy for dealing with these risks. In particular, defenders maintain that liberal hegemony—including, when necessary, regime change in other countries—will enhance U.S. security, increase American prosperity, and spread basic liberal values. As discussed in chapter 1, these claims formed the central justification for the U.S. grand strategy throughout the Cold War, and they underpin America’s expansive global role today.

  SECURITY

  With regard to the first goal—security—proponents of liberal hegemony claim that any reduction in America’s global military position will invite chaos around the world and eventually place Americans at risk. Absent U.S. dominance and “deep engagement,” great power competition will reemerge in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and states that now enjoy U.S. protection will rearm and possibly acquire nuclear weapons. Thus, the Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass claims that “for the past 75 years, the visible hand of the U.S., more than any other factor, has created and maintained conditions of stability.” He goes on to warn, darkly, that “the consequences of a lasting American retreat from the world would be dire.”74 U.S. military power and intelligence assets are also said to be essential for addressing threats from terrorism, drug lords, refugees, and other nontraditional security threats.75 In short, liberal hegemony supposedly makes Americans safer by keeping a diverse set of dangers at bay.

  Unfortunately, these familiar rationales overstate the security benefits that liberal hegemony supposedly provides. Many of America’s numerous global commitments and far-flung activities are not intended to keep the United States from being conquered or coerced; at most, the United States engages in distant areas in order to ward off future developments that might—repeat, might—one day impinge on U.S. security in some unspecified fashion. The alleged benefits are a hedge against uncertain dangers that might never come to pass, no matter what Washington does.

  Second, it is not obvious that U.S. military forces must be committed all over the world in order to keep regional competition from reemerging, or that these commitments will work as promised. In claiming that the United States has long “created and maintained U.S. stability,” for exam
ple, Haass ignores the many places (Indochina, the Middle East, Central America, etc.) where U.S. intervention did exactly the opposite. Deep U.S. engagement did help dampen security competition in Europe during the Cold War, for example, but a return to pre-1945 levels of rivalry today is unlikely no matter what the United States does in the foreseeable future. Alarmists now worry about a resurgent Russia, but the EU has more than three times Russia’s population and each year spends four times more on defense than Russia does. Far from being an ascending, would-be hegemon, Russia is in fact a kleptocracy in decline, a state whose population is aging and shrinking and whose economy rests on energy exports whose value is likely to decline over time. Russian president Vladimir Putin has played a weak hand well—aided in no small part by American blunders—but Russia is too weak to challenge the United States directly or to threaten other major powers in Europe or Asia.

  Third, although U.S. security guarantees have discouraged some states from seeking nuclear weapons, they are not the only reason potential nuclear states decide to forgo them. Britain, France, and Israel all developed nuclear weapons despite close security ties with the United States, and India is expanding its arsenal even as its ties to the United States grow. Thus U.S. primacy and its nuclear umbrella are neither necessary nor sufficient to keep some states from pursuing nuclear weapons. Moreover, a perceived threat from the United States is the main reason why North Korea, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Iran were interested in acquiring a nuclear deterrent, though only North Korea succeeded. In terms of discouraging proliferation, therefore, the benefits of liberal hegemony are exaggerated.