These points do not mandate a return to conscription or imply that the United States should not try to protect its soldiers. Rather, they reveal the elite’s recognition that the American people would reject liberal hegemony if the number of U.S. lives lost was too high. This constraint arises not because Americans are unusually sensitive to casualties (though there is surely nothing wrong with caring about the lives of soldiers, sailors, and aircrews), but because the public understands that most of the combat missions undertaken over the past two decades have not been necessary and thus not worth a lot of blood or treasure.
BLOWBACK
Supporters of liberal hegemony also obscure its geopolitical costs, usually by denying that U.S. policy sometimes can provoke greater resistance by others. One technique is to deny that foreign hostility has anything to do with U.S. policy and interpret it simply as an expression of envy, resentment, or deep-seated rejection of U.S. values. This reaction was especially widespread after 9/11, when assorted foreign policy experts flocked to the airwaves and op-ed pages to deny that Al Qaeda’s attack had anything to do with U.S. support for Israel, its close ties and military presence in Saudi Arabia, or any other tangible element of U.S. Middle East policy.103 Even the blue-ribbon 9/11 Commission Report tiptoed around this issue, confining most of its discussion of the role of U.S. policy in motivating the 9/11 plot to appendices that few people read.104
Yet there is overwhelming evidence that anti-American terrorism is often inspired by what the United States has done around the world. That fact does not justify terrorism, of course, or imply that U.S. policy was necessarily wrong, but it does mean that a heightened risk from terrorism should be counted among the costs of what the United States is doing. Moreover, a 2012 study by the FBI’s counterterrorism division found that “anger over U.S. military operations abroad was the most commonly cited motivation for individuals involved in cases of ‘homegrown’ terrorism.”105 If that is indeed the case, then the costs of liberal hegemony are larger than we often think.
Second, Americans will underestimate the costs of U.S. foreign policy when they are unaware of what the government is doing. If Americans do not know the full extent of U.S. drone strikes and Special Forces operations, for example, they will not understand why some victims of these attacks are angry and eager to retaliate. The late Chalmers Johnson called this phenomenon “blowback,” which he defined as “the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people.”106 Some members of the public may be aware of dubious things the government has done—such as drone strikes or waterboarding—but they may miss the connection between actions taken at one time and place and the negative reactions occurring years later or in some other region. In this way, the full costs of liberal hegemony are further obscured.
The emergence of the so-called Islamic State (or ISIS) illustrates this dynamic perfectly. ISIS arose from the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant, which formed in response to the U.S. occupation of Iraq in 2003. Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was a cleric who was imprisoned by the U.S. occupation forces and radicalized further by the experience.107 When Barack Obama sent U.S. troops back to Iraq to “degrade and destroy” ISIS in 2014, he was trying to solve a problem America had created.
Most societies have trouble recognizing that their own actions might be the cause of some other group’s hostility. The United States is hardly the worst offender in this regard, and it has sometimes shown an admirable willingness to confront past wrongs. But given its power, its ambitions, and its global reach, concealing the role U.S. policy plays in provoking foreign opposition encourages Americans to understate the full cost of liberal hegemony.
IGNORING THE DEATHS OF OTHERS
Defenders of liberal hegemony insist that other states benefit from America’s expansive global role. This claim is undoubtedly true for many states that enjoy U.S. protection, which makes them more secure and allows them to devote more resources to other national goals. It is clearly not true in many other cases, yet Americans are to a large extent unaware of that fact. Like most people, Americans care less about the deaths of the citizens of other states than they do about losses suffered by their own countrymen and -women. Even so, greater awareness of the harm done to others would undoubtedly lead more people to question Washington’s actions.108 In 2016, for example, reliable reports about civilian casualties from Saudi air strikes in Yemen generated widespread media and congressional criticism and eventually led the United States to restrict the sale of some military items to the kingdom and to revise its training procedures for Saudi forces.109
To limit public opposition to its own military operations, therefore, the U.S. government provides as little information as possible about the victims of U.S. foreign policy, military and civilian alike. “We don’t do body counts,” said commanding general Tommy Franks during the initial invasion of Afghanistan, a view echoed by former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld.110 Nonetheless, Bush administration officials repeatedly claimed that independent estimates of Iraqi and Afghan casualties after the U.S. invasion were too high, and President Bush told reporters that estimates of several hundred thousand Iraqi “excess deaths” following the U.S. invasion were “just not credible.”111 Yet classified reports released by WikiLeaks show that the U.S. government’s own estimate of Iraqi casualties were on a par with the figures of the Iraq Body Count and other independent groups.112 Other estimates, including a careful survey of excess deaths that was published in the British medical journal The Lancet, were significantly higher.113
The U.S. government has also done its best to conceal the full extent of its use of armed drones and targeted killings, making it difficult to determine the number of civilians who died as a result of these activities. Independent research groups have estimated that U.S. drone strikes and targeted assassinations killed roughly 3,700 people (and roughly 500 civilians) between 2002 and 2014, but the U.S. government did not provide its own tally until 2016, and the low totals it eventually reported were widely disputed.
This same pattern continued into 2017. According to a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, the U.S. air campaign against ISIS was “one of the most precise air campaigns in military history.” The Pentagon reported that 466 Iraqi civilians had died as a result of coalition air strikes and said that only one out of roughly 1,500 U.S. air strikes led to any civilian deaths. Yet a detailed and rigorous investigation by The New York Times—based on hundreds of on-the-ground interviews—concluded that roughly one of every five U.S. air strikes produced at least one civilian death, a percentage thirty-one times higher than the Pentagon’s estimates.114
Taken together, the desire to keep the costs to the United States low and the willingness to ignore the costs to others makes it easier to keep today’s wars going and makes tomorrow’s wars more likely. As Rob Malley and Stephen Pomper of the International Crisis Group observed in response to the New York Times report just cited, “It’s a treacherous trifecta: the promise of greater precision and certainty of fewer U.S. casualties; which leads to more frequent use of military force in more diverse theatres without a substantial U.S. ground presence; which entails diminished ability both to gather information about who is being targeted before a strike and assess what happened afterward. With the human costs of wars substantially shifted to the other side, it has become easier to initiate, perpetuate, and forget them.”115
As discussed at greater length in the next chapter, the U.S. government is equally reluctant to acknowledge excesses or atrocities by U.S. personnel. The Bush administration tried to minimize opposition to the most controversial aspects of the war on terror—the use of torture, extraordinary rendition, and aggressive surveillance—by keeping these programs secret. When U.S. Marines massacred twenty-four Iraqi civilians in Haditha in 2005, for example, the Pentagon at first blamed the deaths on an insurgent bomb attack and did not acknowledge U.S. responsibility until journalists at the scene presented compelling evidence refuting
the official account.116 And when the U.S. Air Force bombed a hospital run by the international aid group Médecins sans Frontières in 2015, U.S. officials initially claimed that the hospital was “collateral damage” and only subsequently admitted that U.S. forces had failed to observe proper rules of engagement and had mistakenly targeted the facility itself.117 The Defense Department’s internal investigation concluded that the attack was “unintentional,” and sixteen U.S. personnel were disciplined, but no criminal charges were filed.118
In a democracy with a free press and norms guaranteeing free speech it is impossible to run a costly and unsuccessful foreign policy without people eventually becoming aware of it. As the evidence and anecdotes recounted above reveal, eventually the truth will out and a degree of public reckoning can begin. But the longer proponents of liberal hegemony can hide what is going on and delay the moment of revelation, the easier it will be to conduct business as usual. By the time the evidence is in and failure is apparent, the United States will have moved on to some new problem and repeated the same failed formula.
CONCLUSION
The arguments used to sell liberal hegemony form a seamless web. If Americans are convinced that they face a diverse array of powerful enemies who can be neither accommodated nor deterred, they will support active efforts to eliminate them and will not worry that using force might make the problem worse. If they believe that deep engagement will enhance U.S. prosperity and promote key U.S. values, they will be more likely to support an expanded U.S. role around the world. If the costs to the United States seem low and Americans are unaware of the costs borne by others, they will be even less likely to question what the government is doing.
The arguments used to sell liberal hegemony may be mutually reinforcing, but the campaign to sell it to the American people is not an elaborate conspiracy orchestrated by an unscrupulous, shadowy elite meeting in secret at Aspen, Davos, Bilderberg, or under the auspices of the Trilateral Commission. On the contrary, the foreign policy community in the United States conducts most of its work in full view: writing books, articles, blogs, and task force reports; posting media events on the Internet; appearing on TV and radio; testifying on Capitol Hill; consulting with government agencies; and serving in government themselves. There is no secret cabal running U.S. foreign policy; it is hiding in plain sight.
Yet most of the groups and individuals who favor an activist foreign policy also stand to benefit from it in large and small ways. The main government agencies responsible for conducting U.S. foreign policy have an obvious interest in an ambitious global agenda because it justifies their claim to a sizable share of the federal budget. Arms manufacturers, civil servants, ethnic lobbies, human rights activists, and other special interests have obvious reasons to favor liberal hegemony, especially if they can convince the public to back the particular projects that they favor. The more U.S. foreign policy tries to accomplish, the greater the need for foreign policy expertise and the more opportunities for ambitious foreign policy mandarins to rise to prominence. Whatever their private beliefs may be, most members of today’s foreign policy community know that challenging the central premises of liberal hegemony is not a smart career move.
It is easy to understand, therefore, why the foreign policy establishment clings to this strategy, and why most of its members were and remain hostile to Donald Trump. Liberal hegemony enhances the foreign policy community’s power and status and makes U.S. global leadership seem necessary, feasible, and morally desirable. But given the considerable costs and dubious benefits it has produced in recent years, how are we to explain its persistence? Why did the rest of the country tolerate failure for so long instead of demanding something better? It is time to consider this question in detail.
5. IS ANYONE ACCOUNTABLE?
WHEN A BIPARTISAN CHORUS of foreign policy professionals denounced Donald Trump’s candidacy during the 2016 campaign, Trump fired back promptly, calling them “nothing more than the failed Washington elite looking to hold onto their power, and it’s time they were held accountable for their actions.”1 Their concerns about Trump may have been valid, but so was his depiction of an out-of-touch community of foreign policy VIPs whose unthinking pursuit of liberal hegemony had produced few successes and many costly failures.
In a perfect world, the institutions responsible for conducting or shaping U.S. foreign policy would learn from experience and improve over time. Policies that worked poorly would be abandoned or revised, and approaches that proved successful would be continued. Individuals whose ideas had helped the United States become stronger, safer, or more prosperous would be recognized and rewarded, while officials whose actions had repeatedly backfired would not be given new opportunities to fail. Advisors whose counsel proved sound would rise to greater prominence; those whose recommendations were lacking—or, worse yet, disastrous—would be marginalized and ignored.
This notion may sound idealistic, but it is hardly far-fetched. Any organization striving to succeed must hold its members—especially its leaders—accountable for results. No corporation seeking to stay in business would stick with a management team that never met a quarterly target, and no baseball team would keep the same manager and lineup after finishing dead last five years running. In a competitive world, holding people accountable is just common sense.
But it doesn’t work this way in American politics, and especially not in foreign policy. Instead, failed policies often persist and discredited ideas frequently get revived, while error-prone experts “fail upward” and become more influential over time. U.S. leaders sometimes turn to the same people over and over, even when they have repeatedly failed to accomplish the tasks they were previously given. The reverse is sometimes true as well: people who do get things right can go unrecognized and unrewarded, and they may even pay a considerable price for bringing unpleasant truths to light.
In short, when it comes to foreign policy, F. Scott Fitzgerald had it exactly backward. Far from having “no second chances in American life,” foreign policy practitioners appear to possess an inexhaustible supply of them. This worrisome tendency applies to both ideas and policies and to the people who conceive and implement them.
WHY BAD IDEAS SURVIVE
We would like to think that the government was getting wiser and that past blunders would not be repeated. And in some areas—such as public health, environmental protection, or transportation safety—there has been considerable progress. But the foreign policy learning curve is shallow, and bad ideas are remarkably resilient. Like crabgrass or kudzu, misguided notions are hard to eradicate, no matter how much trouble they cause or how much evidence is arrayed against them.
Consider, for example, the infamous “domino theory,” which has been kicking around since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. During the Vietnam War, U.S. officials and influential pundits repeatedly claimed that withdrawal would undermine American credibility and produce a wave of realignments that would enhance Soviet power and, in the worst case, leave the United States isolated and under siege. The metaphor was evocative—assuming that states actually did behave like dominoes—and it played on fears that other states would flock to whichever superpower seemed most likely to triumph.2 Yet no significant dominoes fell after the United States withdrew from Vietnam in 1975; instead, it was the Soviet Union that collapsed some fourteen years later. Scholarly investigations of the concept found little evidence for its central claims, and the above two events should have dealt this idea a fatal blow.3 Yet it reemerged, phoenixlike, in recent debates over Afghanistan, Syria, and the nuclear agreement with Iran. Americans were once again told that withdrawing from Afghanistan would call U.S. credibility into question, embolden U.S. opponents, and dishearten key U.S. allies.4 In the same way, President Obama’s reluctance to intervene in Syria and his decision to pursue a nuclear deal with Iran is supposedly what led Russian president Vladimir Putin to act more aggressively in Ukraine.5 Despite a dearth of supporting evidence, it seems nearly impossib
le to quash the fear of falling dominoes.
Similarly, the French and American experience in Vietnam might have taught us that occupying powers cannot do effective “nation-building” in poor and/or deeply divided societies, and that lesson might have made future presidents wary of attempting regime change in the developing world. The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the turmoil the United States confronted in Somalia after 1992 should have driven the lesson home even more powerfully. Yet the United States has now spent more than a decade and a half trying unsuccessfully to do regime change and nation-building in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and several other places—at considerable cost but with scant success. The futility of this task could not have been more obvious when Barack Obama took office in 2009, but he still chose to escalate the war in Afghanistan, acquiesced in the ill-advised campaign to topple Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and continued to interfere throughout the Arab and Islamic world despite abundant evidence that such actions strengthened anti-American extremism.
Why is it so hard for states to learn from mistakes? And on the rare occasions when they do learn, why are the key lessons so easily forgotten?
THE LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE
Foreign policy is a complicated business, and observers invariably offer competing explanations for policy failures and draw different lessons from them. Did the United States lose in Vietnam because it employed the wrong military strategy, because its South Vietnamese clients were irredeemably corrupt and incompetent, or because media coverage undermined support back home? Did violence in Iraq decline in 2007 because “the surge worked,” because Al Qaeda overplayed its hand, or because prior ethnic cleansing had separated Sunnis from Shia and thus made it harder for either to target the other? Because policy implications depend on how the past is interpreted and explained, consensus on the proper “lessons” of a given policy initiative is often elusive.
The Hell of Good Intentions Page 20
