The Hell of Good Intentions

by Stephen M. Walt

  12. See, for example, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century (Washington, DC: Project for a New American Century, 2000); G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, eds., Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Project on National Security, 2006); America’s National Interests (Washington, DC: Commission on America’s National Interests, 2000); Setting Priorities for American Leadership: A New National Security Strategy for the United States (Washington, DC: Project for a United and Strong America, 2013); and CSIS Commission on Smart Power: A Smarter, More Secure America (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2008).

  13. That Obama held this view is hardly surprising. In 2008, a group of prominent Democratic Party officials released a report detailing how the United States could “reclaim the mantle of global leadership.” See Anne-Marie Slaughter, Bruce Jentleson, Ivo Daalder, et al., Strategic Leadership: A New Framework for National Security Strategy (Washington, DC: Center for New American Security, 2008). The report’s authors all received prominent appointments in the Obama administration.

  14. “President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address,” at www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4460172.

  15. The phrase “focused enmity” is that of William Wohlforth, whose 1999 essay on unipolarity argued that it was uniquely stable provided the unipolar power (i.e., the United States) did not disengage from Europe or Asia. See his “The Stability of a Unipolar World,” International Security 24, no. 1 (Summer 1999), and also Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

  16. This was a central theme of Samantha Power’s Pulitzer prizewinning book “A Problem from Hell”: America in the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

  17. America’s National Interests (Washington, DC: Commission on America’s National Interests, 2000). The commission’s cochairs were Robert Ellsworth, Andrew Goodpaster, and Rita Hauser; its executive directors were Graham Allison of Harvard, Dmitri Simes of the Nixon Center, and James Thomson of the RAND Corporation.

  18. Quoted in Patrick Porter, The Global Village Myth (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015), p. 19.

  19. Leading Through Civilian Power: The First Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 2010), p. xii.

  20. Ibid., p. iii.

  21. See Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955).

  22. On the tendency for liberal states to engage in idealistic crusades, see Mearsheimer, Great Delusion. Also relevant are Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); and A Pact with the Devil: Washington’s Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise (New York: Rutledge, 2007).

  23. This recommendation was contained in a draft of “Defense Guidance” that was leaked to The New York Times in early 1992. It prompted a heated response from key U.S. allies and was subsequently rewritten, but its core goals were never abandoned. See Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop,” The New York Times, March 8, 1992; and James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), pp. 208–15.

  24. See Strobe Talbott, “War in Iraq, Revolution in America,” John Whitehead Lecture, Royal Institute of International Affairs, October 9, 2009; at www.brookings.edu/articles/war-in-iraq-revolution-in-america/.

  25. Barack Obama, National Security Strategy (Washington, DC: The White House, May 2010), p. 14.

  26. The United States spent a higher percentage of its GDP on defense than China did every year, and a larger percentage than Russia between 2004 and 2013. Calculated from “Military Expenditures” (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2015), at http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS.

  27. See “Total Military Personnel and Dependent End Strength by Service, Regional Area, and Country,” Defense Manpower Data Center, July 31, 2015, at www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2015/drs_54601_309_report_p1506.xlsx.

  28. For a map of the regional combatant commands, see www.defense.gov/About/Military_Departments/Unified-Combatant_Commands/.

  29. See Michael McFaul, “The Liberty Doctrine,” Policy Review 112 (April–May 2002).

  30. See Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol, The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), p. 112.

  31. The invasion of Afghanistan could be seen as a direct defense of American soil insofar as the Taliban government in Kabul had refused to turn Osama bin Laden and his associates over to the United States after the 9/11 attacks. Yet the United States did not limit its goals solely to catching bin Laden and has been trying for seventeen years to create a stable and effective democracy there at a cost of more than $1 trillion and more than two thousand U.S. soldiers’ lives.

  32. See Micah Zenko and Jennifer Wilson, “How Many Bombs Did the United States Drop in 2016?” January 5, 2017, at www.cfr.org/blog/how-many-bombs-did-united-states-drop-2016.

  33. The first wave of NATO enlargement occurred in 1999 and brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined in 2004, and Albania and Croatia followed in 2009. This policy reached its apotheosis (or perhaps its nadir) in 2016, when mighty Montenegro joined the alliance.

  34. See John L. Harper, “American Visions of Europe After 1989,” in Christina V. Balls and Simon Serfaty, eds., Visions of America and Europe: September 11, Iraq, and Transatlantic Relations (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2004), chap. 2.

  35. Dual containment was the brainchild of Martin Indyk, who first articulated it while working at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and implemented it as Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs. According to Kenneth Pollack, who worked with Indyk at the Brookings Institution, dual containment was undertaken to reassure Israel and make it more pliable in the Oslo peace process. See Kenneth Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America (New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 261–65.

  36. On the goal of regional transformation, see John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), pp. 255–57.

  37. See Nick Turse, “U.S. Special Operations Numbers Surge in Africa’s Shadow Wars,” The Intercept, December 31, 2016.

  38. The United States is now committed to defend sixty-nine countries, which together produce about 75 percent of global economic output and contain nearly two billion people. See Michael Beckley, “The Myth of Entangling Alliances,” International Security 39, no. 4 (Spring 2015). Beckley argues that these commitments do not increase the risk that the United States will get dragged into unnecessary wars, but they do shape U.S. defense requirements, and some of America’s recent conflicts—including the Kosovo War and the two wars against Iraq—were partly inspired by a desire to protect nearby allies.

  39. During the uprising, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland handed out pastries to antigovernment demonstrators in Maidan Square and was secretly recorded telling U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt that opposition leader Vitali Klitschko should be kept out of the government and Arseniy Yatsenyuk should become acting prime minister instead. See “Ukraine Crisis: Transcript of Leaked Nuland-Pyatt Call,” BBC News Online, at www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957.

  40. For Obama’s speech, see “Remarks by the President on the Middle East and North Africa,” May 19, 2011, at www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/05/19/remarks-president-middle-east-and-north-africa.

  41. The Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency provided arms and training for various anti-Assad forces and c
ooperated with other foreign efforts to bolster opposition groups. See Christopher Phillips, The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 141–43; David Ignatius, “What the Demise of the CIA’s anti-Assad Program Means,” The Washington Post, July 20, 2017; and Austin Carson and Michael Poznansky, “The Logic for (Shoddy) U.S. Covert Action in Syria,” War on the Rocks, July 21, 2016, at https://warontherocks.com/2016/07/the-logic-for-shoddy-u-s-covert-action-in-syria/.

  42. “Senator Kerry Statement at Hearing on Sudan,” March 15, 2012, at www.foreign.senate.gov/press/chair/release/chairman-kerry-statement-at-hearing-on-sudan-.

  43. According to Denise Froning of the Heritage Foundation, “Free trade helps to spread the value of freedom, reinforce the rule of law, and foster economic development in poor countries. The national debate over trade-related issues too often ignores these important benefits.” See her “The Benefits of Free Trade: A Guide for Policymakers” (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, August 25, 2000), at www.heritage.org/trade/report/the-benefits-free-trade-guide-policymakers. See also Jeffrey Kucik, “The TPP’s Real Value—It’s Not Just About Trade,” The Hill, December 7, 2016, at http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/foreign-policy/309088-the-tpps-real-value-its-not-just-about-trade.

  44. See in particular Edward Mansfield and Jack L. Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

  45. Germany and Great Britain were each other’s largest trading partners in 1914, and Japan went to war in 1941 to try to free itself from economic dependence on the United States and others. On the latter case, see Michael Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security 1919–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). A comprehensive recent study of this subject finds that interdependence reduces incentives for war when states expect close ties to continue, but not when they fear these connections could be cut off. See Dale C. Copeland, Economic Interdependence and War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

  46. See especially John J. Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions,” International Security 19, no. 3 (Winter 1994/95).

  47. This argument is convincingly made in Lloyd Gruber, Ruling the World: Power Politics and the Rise of Supranational Institutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

  48. See Stephen M. Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), chaps. 2–3.

  49. Quoted in Craig Whitney, “NATO at 50: With Nations at Odds, Is It a Misalliance?” The New York Times, February 15, 1999.

  50. Timothy Garton Ash, “The Peril of Too Much Power,” The New York Times, April 9, 2002.

  51. In November 2009, for example, Major Nidal Hasan, an army psychiatrist, murdered thirteen people and injured more than thirty others at Fort Hood. Hasan had been in email contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, an influential Al Qaeda cleric, and had increasingly come to see the United States as a threat to Islam. In 2014, while awaiting execution for his crimes, Hasan wrote a letter expressing his desire to become a citizen of the “Islamic State” (i.e., ISIS).

  52. See Murtaza Hussain and Cora Currier, “U.S. Military Operations Are Biggest Motivation for Homegrown Terrorists, FBI Study Finds,” The Intercept, October 11, 2016.

  53. Serbia, Libya, and Iran all made concessions in the face of U.S. and/or multilateral pressure, but they also held firm on key principles, bargained hard, and eventually extracted their own concessions in exchange.

  54. Quoted in Mark Landler, “The Afghan War and the Evolution of Obama,” The New York Times, January 1, 2016.

  55. Chas W. Freeman, “Militarism and the Crisis of American Diplomacy,” Epistulae, no. 20, National Humanities Institute, July 7, 2015.

  56. See “President Delivers State of the Union Speech,” January 29, 2002, at http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html; “Text: Bush Remarks at Prayer Service,” The Washington Post, September 14, 2001, at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushtext_091401.html. See also Richard Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counter-Terrorism (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 67.

  57. Critical assessments of U.S. diplomacy in the Kosovo War include Michael Mandelbaum, “A Perfect Failure: NATO’s War against Yugoslavia,” Foreign Affairs 78 (September–October 1999); Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwarz, “Kosovo: For the Record,” National Interest 57 (Fall 1999); and Alan Kuperman, “Botched Diplomacy Led to War,” The Wall Street Journal, June 17, 1999. On the concessions Milosevic gained by resisting, see Stephen Hosmer, The Conflict Over Kosovo: Why Milosevic Decided to Settle When He Did (Washington, DC: RAND Corporation, 2001), pp. 116–17. Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon defend the Clinton administration’s handling of the negotiations preceding the war, but they concede that the United States and its allies greatly exaggerated the ease with which Serbia could be compelled to accept NATO’s demands. See their Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution), pp. 89–90.

  58. In negotiations with several European states in 2005, Iran offered to confine enrichment to LEU levels, limit its enrichment capacity to the amount needed to fuel its nuclear reactors, ratify and implement the Additional Protocol of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and accept enhanced IAEA monitoring of its nuclear facilities. Iran had fewer than three thousand centrifuges installed at that time, and the British foreign minister Jack Straw later maintained that “had it not been for major problems within the US administration under President Bush, we could have actually settled the whole Iran nuclear dossier back in 2005.” The Bush administration pressed the Europeans to reject the proposal, and serious talks did not resume until 2009, by which time Iran had more than seven thousand centrifuges available. See David Morrison and Peter Oborne, “U.S. Scuppered Deal with Iran in 2005, says then British Foreign Minister,” OpenDemocracy.net, September 23, 2013, at www.opendemocracy.net/david-morrison-peter-oborne/us-scuppered-deal-with-iran-in-2005-says-then-british-foreign-minister. See also Seyed Hossein Mousavian, The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: A Memoir (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2012); Gareth Porter, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare (Charlottesville, VA: Just World Books, 2014), pp. 153–59; Ali M. Ansari, Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Conflict in the Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2006), pp. 221–25; and “Communication Dated 1 August 2005 Received from the Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the Agency,” INFCIRC/648 (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 2005).

  59. In 2010 Brazilian and Turkish mediation (the so-called Tehran Declaration) produced an agreement that would have swapped 1,200 kilograms of Iran’s low-enriched uranium in exchange for 120 kilograms of fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor. The Obama administration had initially encouraged Brazil and Turkey’s efforts, but it backed away when the declaration threatened to derail the fragile consensus in favor of new United Nations sanctions. See Trita Parsi, A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), especially chap. 10.

  60. In June 2012 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejected Iran’s participation in the Geneva I talks, saying, “It is hard, for the United States certainly, to imagine that a country putting so much effort into keeping Assad in power … would be a constructive actor. And we think this would not be an appropriate participant at this point to include.” The point, however, was that any effort to end the conflict had to include all the stakeholders, and especially those in a position to derail an agreement. See U.S. Department of State, “Remarks with Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu After Their Meeting,” June 2012, at www.state.gov.secretary/20092013 clinton/rm/2012/06/19138.htm.

  61. See Christopher D. Kolenda, Rachel Reid, Chris Rogers, and Marte Retzius, The Strategic Costs of
Civilian Harm: Applying the Lessons from Afghanistan to Current and Future Conflicts (New York: Open Society Foundation, June 2016), p. 9.

  62. See Elisabeth Bumiller, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint,” The New York Times, April 26, 2010.

  63. Among a large literature, see especially Peter W. Galbraith, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007); Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012); Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); Emma Sky, The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (New York: Public Affairs, 2015); Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014); Carter Malkasian, War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier (New York: Oxford, 2013); and Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014).