The Hell of Good Intentions

by Stephen M. Walt

  Nor is liberal hegemony the best response to terrorism. U.S. intelligence agencies and military forces have been on the front lines of the counterterror campaign for at least two decades, yet the number of violent extremists and the number of places where they are active is greater now than they were when Al Qaeda first emerged in the early 1990s. This disappointing result should not surprise us, as opposition to America’s expansive global role—especially its repeated interference in the Middle East—has been a key motivating element for Al Qaeda, ISIS, and other violent extremists for a long time now.

  Instead of making Americans safer, liberal hegemony has been making them less secure than they would otherwise be. At best, the security benefits of military dominance and global activism are smaller than is usually claimed.

  PROSPERITY

  Liberal hegemony’s defenders also exaggerate the economic benefits that military dominance and “deep engagement” allegedly provide. In theory, primacy could enhance U.S. prosperity by (1) making the United States a more attractive destination for foreign investment and helping solidify the dollar’s role as a reserve currency, (2) allowing Washington to extract rents and other payments from states that depend on U.S. protection, or (3) helping sustain a globalized world economy from which Americans (and others) gain. But as Daniel Drezner convincingly argues, in each case “the economic benefits from military predominance alone seem, at a minimum, to have been exaggerated in policy and scholarly circles.”76 To take but two examples, U.S. primacy after the Cold War did not discourage key allies from rapidly expanding their economic ties with China and did not enable Washington to strike more favorable trade deals than other large and advanced economies (as such the EU) did.77

  In fact, defenders of liberal hegemony rarely invoke the first or second arguments.78 Instead, they see U.S. primacy and its global military role as central to the preservation of an open world economy. In this view, extensive global economic cooperation requires geopolitical stability, freedom of navigation, strong institutions such as the World Bank or WTO, and a host of other public goods.79 The United States has been the most important provider of such goods since 1945, and simple self-interest dictates that it continue to perform this role. Were America’s military role to diminish, they suggest, freedom of navigation would be imperiled, access to energy and other vital resources might be curtailed, protectionism would reemerge, and the benefits of globalization would be lost, leaving many Americans worse off.

  There may be some truth to this argument, insofar as all economic orders rest to some degree on an underlying structure of political and military power.80 Moreover, the global institutions favored by many proponents of liberal hegemony do help facilitate cooperation on economic issues. And were the United States to revert to full-blown protectionism and ignite a global trade war—as the Trump administration may now be doing—the results for America and the world could be disastrous.

  But on the whole, the purely economic benefits of liberal hegemony and global military dominance are less than their proponents claim. U.S. citizens benefit from global trade and investment, but U.S. military dominance is not necessary for maintaining an open trading order or the multilateral institutions that make it possible.81 Given that almost all states benefit to varying degrees from today’s globalized economy, it is not clear why any of them would retreat from it were America’s global military role to decline. If the United States withdrew most of its forces from the Middle East and reduced its military role in Europe, for example, why would Japan, China, the EU, or any other members of the G20 decide to raise new protectionist barriers, dismantle the WTO, or take other steps that would only make them poorer?

  Furthermore, the scary economic scenarios used to justify liberal hegemony may not be anywhere near as bad as fearmongers suggest. Preserving access to Persian Gulf energy supplies has long been seen as a vital U.S. interest, as a significant reduction in Persian Gulf oil production would drive energy prices up, reducing global economic growth and hurting U.S. consumers directly. For this reason, the United States is committed to keeping oil and gas flowing from the Gulf to world markets, and it maintains a costly rapid deployment force for precisely this purpose.

  Fortunately, the risk that oil and gas will be cut off is low. Oil prices have fluctuated significantly over the past four decades, and spikes have sometimes caused economic problems, but the world economy never came close to collapsing. The 1973 Arab oil boycott did have significant negative effects on many countries (including the United States), but neither the Iranian revolution of 1979 nor the long Iran-Iraq War had major effects on the world or the American economy. More recent events—including the 2003 Iraq War or the various conflicts arising from the “Arab Spring”—had even less impact.82 If serious conflicts in the oil-rich Persian Gulf have only minor effects on global prosperity, then the benefits of protecting it militarily are small.83

  This is not to say that there is no connection between U.S. security commitments and U.S. prosperity. Were the United States to disengage from all its overseas commitments, and were this decision to lead eventually to major conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, or Asia, and thus to a precipitous drop in world trade, the U.S. economy would clearly suffer. But if relations between other states became only slightly more contentious, the United States could continue to trade with all of them. Once again, proponents of liberal hegemony have exaggerated its benefits, including its contribution to American prosperity.

  PROMOTING AMERICAN VALUES

  Finally, most members of the foreign policy establishment believe that U.S. leadership and global dominance help preserve and advance America’s most cherished political values. Woodrow Wilson promised that World War I would make the world “safe for democracy”; Franklin Roosevelt invoked “Four Freedoms” to prepare Americans for World War II; and Harry Truman justified U.S. aid to Greece and Turkey by saying it was necessary to defend a “way of life … distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, and guarantees of individual liberty.” Such declarations help rally public support for ambitious and difficult international challenges and may help deflect criticism when conditions at home fall short of professed U.S. ideals or when the United States finds itself bombing civilians, torturing captives, or violating international law. While obviously at odds with professed U.S. values, such acts can be defended as necessary evils in the struggle to end tyranny and (eventually) create a more benign world.84

  As described in previous chapters, the absence of a peer competitor after the demise of the Soviet Union allowed this evangelical impulse to burst forth with new vigor. A commitment to spreading liberal values was the foundation of Bill Clinton’s strategy of “engagement and enlargement,” George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda,” and Barack Obama’s vocal embrace of the Arab Spring. It is also the moral principle behind NATO expansion and the main reason so-called liberal hawks backed the war in Iraq.

  The claim that liberal hegemony promotes the moral values for which America stands is thus a recurring thread in the complex tapestry of recent U.S. foreign policy and a reflexive justification for much of what the United States does on the world stage. Although this impulse has been present from the founding of the Republic, it has become increasingly pronounced as U.S. power has grown.

  But as we have seen, efforts to spread U.S. values have not been nearly as effective as its proponents maintain. If anything, overzealous efforts to export America’s ideals have unwittingly subverted them at home and abroad, and the exuberant faith in the superiority of American political institutions that prevailed at the end of the Cold War had given way to dark doubts about these same institutions by 2016.85

  STEP 3: CONCEAL THE COSTS

  Threat inflation makes liberal hegemony seem necessary; overstating its benefits makes it seem desirable. For its advocates, the last line of defense is to claim that the strategy is cheap. In a ringing defense of “deep engagement,” for example, Stephen Brooks, John Ikenberry, and
William Wohlforth point out that U.S. defense spending consumes a significantly lower percentage of GNP than it did during the 1950s or 1960s and assert that modestly higher defense spending does not hinder economic growth. In their view, pursuing liberal hegemony is just not that expensive. Or as the journalist Steve Coll (former president of the New America Foundation and now head of Columbia School of Journalism) put it, “As an investment in shared prosperity (or, if you prefer, global hegemony), the running cost of American military power may be one of history’s better bargains.”86

  It would be nice if this were true, but there are good reasons to doubt it. The U.S. may spend a smaller percentage of GNP on national security than it once did, but the proper question to ask is whether it is spending more than it should. Modestly higher levels of defense spending may not affect overall economic growth very much, but every dollar spent on the military is still a dollar that cannot be left in the hands of American taxpayers or spent on other public goods, including long-term investments in future prosperity.

  Moreover, the economic impact of America’s global role may be more deleterious than defenders of liberal hegemony maintain. At moments of perceived emergency such as the Korea and Vietnam Wars or the 9/11 terror attacks, national security spending surges. The United States typically finances these expenditures not by raising taxes—which would make the cost of the war obvious and immediate—but by borrowing the money abroad. As Sarah Kreps has shown, this approach helps sustain popular support by hiding the immediate cost of these wars and shifting the burden onto future generations (who will end up paying off the loans).87 Unfortunately, relying on borrowed money also creates asset bubbles at home and makes financial crises like the 2008 Wall Street crash more likely.88 In this way, the global role mandated by liberal hegemony and the desire to conceal costs from the U.S. taxpayer foster greater financial instability.

  Convincing Americans that liberal hegemony is affordable is easier to do if the costs really are low, which is why both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were leery of sending large numbers of U.S. ground troops into harm’s way. Clinton authorized “no-fly zones” over Iraq for eight years and ordered occasional air strikes against that unhappy country, but he rejected calls to topple Saddam Hussein with military force. Clinton also stayed out of Rwanda, sent peacekeeping forces into Bosnia reluctantly in 1996, and chose to wage the 1999 Kosovo War solely from the air, resisting military requests to send ground troops as well. Fareed Zakaria aptly dubbed Clinton’s gingerly approach to global leadership “hollow hegemony,” one that reflected Clinton’s awareness that the American appetite for costly overseas engagements was limited.89

  Barack Obama did much the same for similar reasons. Although he agreed to send additional ground troops into Afghanistan early in his presidency, he set a time limit for the deployment and tried hard to stick to it. He withdrew most U.S. ground forces from Iraq and sent small contingents of Special Forces and intelligence personnel to the conflict zones in Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Nigeria. He was equally wary of openly sending arms or advisors to Syria for fear that doing so would fuel the conflict and place the United States on a slippery slope to deeper involvement. Obama understood that the stakes in these conflicts did not justify large and expensive deployments, and the American people agreed with that assessment. Accordingly, his administration relied on drone strikes, training missions, and cyberattacks, which kept the costs of continued U.S. global leadership relatively low for the United States. Even so, such exercises in restraint—especially Obama’s decision not to intervene in Syria—typically faced strong criticism from the foreign policy establishment, whose “playbook” favors what Obama later called “militarized responses.”90

  Yet Obama’s more discreet approach was neither a repudiation of liberal hegemony nor an embrace of a less ambitious grand strategy. Obama did not reduce any of America’s security commitments; in fact, they increased on his watch. He did not end any of the wars he inherited, did not resist the temptation to back regime change on more than one occasion, and did not reduce the use of drones, targeted killings, or special operations forces (indeed, they also increased during his presidency). Obama sought to keep the costs of the strategy low, but he never questioned the strategy itself.

  George Bush’s post-9/11 decision to transform the Middle East, beginning with the invasion of Iraq, is only a partial exception to this pattern. It was an enormous roll of the dice, but administration officials convinced themselves that the war would be swift and cheap. When one of Bush’s top economic advisors, Larry Lindsey, estimated that the war might cost $200 billion, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dismissed his estimate as “baloney” and Lindsey lost his job a few months later. Similarly, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told a congressional committee that Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki’s estimate that the occupation would require several hundred thousand troops was “wildly off the mark” and said that Iraqi oil revenues would pay the costs of the postwar occupation. His goal, of course, was to convince skeptics that the war would cost very little—and maybe even turn a profit.91

  Once Iraq and Afghanistan became quagmires, the Bush administration did its best to conceal the true cost of each one. Instead of funding them through the normal Defense Department budget, it asked Congress to approve “supplemental” budget authority for each campaign. But as the Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have documented, these supplemental budgets—totaling some $800 billion—covered only a fraction of the $4 to $6 trillion the two wars will eventually cost the American taxpayer.92

  Defenders of liberal hegemony also tend to ignore its opportunity costs. More than a half century ago President Dwight D. Eisenhower tried to focus the nation’s attention on the sacrifices excessive military spending imposed, telling a group of newspaper editors, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”93 As a five-star general and victorious World War II commander, Eisenhower hardly needed to be convinced about the importance of national security. But he was reminding his fellow citizens that they would face a bleaker future if they ignored the opportunity costs that overly ambitious foreign policy goals entailed.

  Eisenhower’s prudence now seems quaint, even radical. To be sure, the three task forces discussed in the previous chapter—the Princeton Project on National Security, the Project for a United and Strong America, and the CNAS report Extending American Power—as well as such books as Richard Haass’s Foreign Policy Begins at Home all acknowledge the need for fiscal responsibility. But they favor fiscal prudence not so that Americans can enjoy more prosperous lives, but to ensure that the U.S. government has the resources it needs to remain “indispensable” in world affairs. “For the United States to continue to act successfully abroad,” writes Haass, “it must restore the domestic foundations of its power.” Improving the lives of ordinary Americans is of secondary importance; what matters to the foreign policy elite is preserving America’s capacity to shape events around the globe.94

  CONTAINING CASUALTIES: THE ALL-VOLUNTEER FORCE

  Originally implemented near the end of the Vietnam War, the all-volunteer force (AVF) disguises the costs of an expansive grand strategy in two ways. First, although recruits have to be paid higher wages than draftees, the overall cost to society declines because productive workers are not diverted into military jobs. From a purely economic point of view, forcing a talented software designer, biochemist, or engineer to train for and perform purely military tasks is not the most efficient allocation of their talents.95

  Second, because members of the armed services have joined voluntarily, they cannot easily complain about being sent in harm’s way and are less likely to question the merits of using U.S. power abroad. Surveys of recent military personnel bear this out, as most veterans remain highly patriotic, proud of their service, and more supportive of recent U.S. mi
litary operations than the general public.96

  The AVF also insulates the political establishment from the direct consequences of relentless global activism. Because only a small proportion of American society is directly affected when these wars go badly, and because the men and women paying the blood price tend to be less well-educated or politically mobilized than the rest of the citizenry, politicians need not fear a sharp political backlash. Recent academic studies suggest that conscription decreases public support for war in general, which suggests that resuming a draft would make politicians far more cautious about sending U.S. forces into combat.97 Imagine how U.S. college students might have reacted if the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere had been waged by young people forced to serve solely because they received a low lottery number.

  A desire to keep the visible costs of liberal hegemony down may also explain the enormous effort now devoted to protecting U.S. personnel from harm—a practice critics deride as “force protection fetishism.”98 To some degree, this concern stems from the belief that public support for overseas military operations would decline rapidly if U.S. casualties were high, especially when vital interests are not at stake. Similar concerns also explain why the Pentagon barred photographers from filming returning U.S. war dead from 1991 to 2009: it is easier for the American people to overlook the human costs of U.S. interventions if they see fewer pictures of flag-draped coffins.99

  The American people may not be as sensitive to casualties as current doctrine implies.100 What matters, however, is that U.S. political and military leaders apparently believe they are. According to the U.S. Army Field Manual 100-5: “The American people expect decisive victory and abhor unnecessary casualties. They prefer quick resolution to conflicts and reserve the right to reconsider their support should any of these conditions not be met.”101

  Protecting men and women in combat is a laudable goal, but it can be counterproductive if carried too far. Body armor, medical and evacuation teams, and other protective measures all cost money, and key military objectives may be jeopardized if commanders are overly reluctant to put troops at risk.102 The desire to protect U.S. troops also encourages overreliance on airpower, leading to greater civilian casualties and undermining efforts to “win hearts and minds.” The result is another paradox: the Pentagon has to keep U.S. casualties low in order to preserve public support back home, but doing so makes it harder to win these wars, and public support for them eventually evaporates anyway.