The Hell of Good Intentions

by Stephen M. Walt

  138. See Osnos, “Making China Great Again.”

  139. On Clinton’s hawkish tendencies and habitual deference to the military, see Mark Landler, “How Hillary Became a Hawk,” The New York Times Magazine, April 21, 2016.

  140. Clinton’s presidential campaigns were not well-managed affairs, but they still fell well short of the feuds and backstabbing that have been commonplace between Trump and his present and former aides.

  141. See Tom Nichols, “Trump’s First Year: A Damage Assessment,” The Washington Post, January 19, 2018, at www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trumps-first-year-a-damage-assessment/2018/01/19/0b410f3c-fa66-11e7-a46b-a3614530bd87_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-d%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.ade2121af895.

  7: A BETTER WAY

  1. In particular, Russian intervention in Georgia and Ukraine has put an effective end to NATO expansion.

  2. Peter Schuck explains why government performs well in some areas but poorly in others in his Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

  3. Thus Stephen Brooks, John Ikenberry, and William Wohlforth argue that the Iraq War was an outlier that is unlikely to be repeated. See their “Don’t Come Home, America: The Case Against Retrenchment,” International Security 37, no. 3 (Winter 2012/13), pp. 31–33.

  4. See especially John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).

  5. In April 2016 a survey by the Pew Research Center found that 57 percent of Americans believe that the United States should “deal with its own problems and let others deal with theirs the best they can.” Forty-one percent thought their country did “too much” in world affairs, and only 27 percent felt the United States did “too little.” Pew Research Center, “Public Uncertain, Divided Over America’s Place in the World,” May 5, 2016, at www.people-press.org/2016/05/05/public-uncertain-divided-over-americas-place-in-the-world/.

  6. See Michael C. Desch, “How Popular Is Peace?” American Conservative, November/December 2015.

  7. The same survey showed equal support for legislation giving Congress “oversight and accountability regarding where troops are stationed around the world” and requiring recipients of U.S. military aid to adhere to the Geneva Convention. See “Press Release,” Committee for Responsible Foreign Policy, January 2, 2018, at http://responsibleforeignpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Press-Release-One_Final.pdf; and James Carden, “A New Poll Shows the Public Is Overwhelmingly Opposed to Endless US Military Interventions,” The Nation, January 9, 2018.

  8. See A. Trevor Thrall and Erik Goepner, “Millennials and U.S. Foreign Policy: The Next Generation’s Attitudes Toward Foreign Policy and War (and Why They Matter),” Washington, DC: CATO Institute, June 16, 2015, at http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/20150616_thrallgoepner_millennialswp.pdf.

  9. On Clinton’s establishment-heavy team of advisors, see Stephen M. Walt, “The Donald vs. the Blob,” Foreign Policy, May 16, 2016, at http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/16/the-donald-vs-the-blob-hillary-clinton-election/. On her interventionist proclivities, see Mark Landler, “How Hillary Became a Hawk,” The New York Times Magazine, April 21, 2016.

  10. Great Britain faced the prospect of a cross-Channel invasion on several occasions, but the United States has not faced a similar danger for more than two centuries.

  11. U.S. leaders did not intend to keep several hundred thousand troops in Europe during the Cold War, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower tried to find a reliable way to reduce U.S. force levels during the 1950s. But in the end, U.S. leaders concluded that America’s NATO partners could not balance the U.S.S.R. on their own. See Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

  12. For GDP and defense spending figures, see The Military Balance, 2015–2016 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2016).

  13. Barry R. Posen, “Pull Back: The Case for a Less Activist Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs (January/February 2013).

  14. It is worth remembering that both Osama bin Laden and the Taliban were motivated in good part by opposition to a foreign military presence in their respective homelands.

  15. Unlike Korea, which occupied a critical location in close proximity to the Soviet Union and Japan, Indochina was neither a center of industrial might nor near to Soviet territory.

  16. Iranian presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami made repeated efforts at détente in the 1990s. The Clinton administration responded with some modest positive gestures, but Iran’s initiative was thwarted when Clinton backed the AIPAC-inspired Iran and Libya Sanctions Act in 1996. A new Iranian initiative in 2003 was spurned by the Bush administration, and Iranians subsequently elected Mahmoud Ahmedinejad president in 2005. Ahmedinejad’s offensive beliefs made a rapprochement infeasible, and genuine dialogue did not occur until Obama was elected in 2008 and Hassan Rouhani became president of Iran in 2013. See Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); and John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2007), pp. 286–91.

  17. See Kurt H. Campbell, The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia (New York: Twelve, 2016).

  18. In a harbinger of things to come, Chinese president Xi Jinping visited Iran in 2016 and signed seventeen separate agreements with the Islamic Republic. See also James Dorsey, “China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom,” Working Paper No. 296, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, March 2016.

  19. Some observers maintain that Tehran already “dominates” the region, but this view greatly exaggerates Iran’s present capabilities or its capacity to dictate events there. For useful correctives see Justin Logan, “How Washington Has Inflated the Iran Threat,” Washington Examiner, August 4, 2015; John Bradshaw and J. Dana Stuster, “Iran Is Hardly on the March,” Defense One, July 15, 2015, at www.defenseone.com/ideas/2015/07/iran-hardly-march/117835/; and Thomas Juneau, “Iran’s Failed Foreign Policy: Dealing from a Position of Weakness,” Policy Paper, Middle East Institute, May 2015, at www.mei.edu/content/article/iran’s-failed-foreign-policy-dealing-position-weakness.

  20. If the United States spent 2.5 percent of GDP on defense, for example, the Pentagon’s budget would be approximately $425 billion, an amount more than twice the amount spent by China, the world’s number two military power.

  21. On the militarization of U.S. foreign policy, see Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016); Gordon Adams and Shoon Murray, eds., Mission Creep: The Militarization of U.S. Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014); and Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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

  23. On these points, see Stephen M. Walt, “The Power of a Strong State Department,” The New York Times, May 12, 2017.

  24. This sentiment is attributed to Lord Palmerston, who told the House of Commons in 1848, “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”

  25. During his February 2014 confirmation hearings to serve as ambassador to Norway, for example, the Obama campaign bundler and hotel executive George Tsunis admitted that he had never been to Norway and erroneously referred to Norway’s Progress Party as a “fringe” movement (it was then part of the ruling government coalition). See Juliet Eilperin, “Obama Ambassador Nominees Prompt an Uproar with Bungled Answers, Lack of Ties,” The Washington Post, February 14, 2014.

  26. See James Bruno, “Russian Diploma
ts Are Eating America’s Lunch,” Politico, April 16, 2014, at www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/04/russias-diplomats-are-better-than-ours-105773.

  27. Charles Ray, “America Needs a Professional Foreign Service,” Foreign Service Journal, July/August 2015. See also “American Diplomacy at Risk,” American Academy of Diplomacy (Washington, DC: April 2015), at www.academyofdiplomacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/ADAR_Full_Report_4.1.15.pdf.

  28. Secretary of State John Kerry, “Remarks to the Press,” U.S. Department of State, Office of the Spokesperson, January 7, 2016.

  29. Quoted in Barton Gellman, Contending with Kennan: Toward a Philosophy of American Power (New York: Praeger, 1984), pp. 126–27.

  30. Nicole Gaouette, “Retired Generals: Don’t Cut State Department,” CNN, February 27, 2017, at www.cnn.com/2017/02/27/politics/generals-letter-state-department-budget-cuts/index.html. For a list of additional ways to rebuild the State Department, see Stephen M. Walt, “The State Department Needs Rehab,” Foreign Policy, March 5, 2018, at http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/05/the-state-department-needs-rehab/.

  31. See William J. Lynn, “The End of the Military-Industrial Complex,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2014.

  32. See Barry Buzan, “Economic Structure and International Security: The Limits of the Liberal Case,” International Organization 38 (Autumn 1984).

  33. See Mary Sarrotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Postwar Europe, updated ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

  34. See Michael Glennon, National Security and Double Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  35. See Richard Haass, “The Isolationist Temptation,” The Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2016; Brooks, Ikenberry, and Wohlforth, “Don’t Come Home, America”; Robert Kagan, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” The New Republic, May 26, 2014; Richard Fontaine and Michèle Flournoy, “Beware the Siren Song of Disengagement,” The National Interest, August 14, 2014; Extending American Power: Strategies to Expand U.S. Engagement in a Competitive World Order (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security, 2016); Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Toward a Global Realignment,” The American Interest, April 17, 2016; Kenneth M. Pollack, “Security and Public Order: A Working Group Report of the Middle East Strategy Task Force” (Washington, DC: The Atlantic Council, 2016); and “Strengthening the Liberal World Order,” White Paper, Global Agenda Council on the United States, World Economic Forum, April 2016.

  36. See, for example, David Frum, “The Death Knell for America’s Global Leadership,” The Atlantic, May 31, 2017, at https://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2017/05/mcmaster-cohn-trump/528609/; G. John Ikenberry, “The Plot Against American Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 96, no. 3 (May/June 2017); and Robin Wright, “Why Is Donald Trump Still So Horribly Witless About the World?” The New Yorker, August 4, 2017.

  37. Extending American Power, p. 14.

  38. The case for selective engagement is made in Robert J. Art, A Grand Strategy for America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

  39. On this point, see Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

  40. Glennon, National Security and Double Government, p. 118.

  41. Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (New York: Viking 2016), pp. 269–77.

  42. See Patrick Porter, “Why U.S. Grand Strategy Has Not Changed: Power, Habit, and the Foreign Policy Establishment,” International Security 42, no. 4 (Spring 2018).

  43. See in particular John. J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), chap. 9.

  44. Whatever one thinks of David and Charles Koch’s broader political agenda, the support the Charles Koch Institute has given to proponents of offshore balancing or “restraint” is an encouraging development. See the program summary of “Advancing American Security: the Future of U.S. Foreign Policy,” at www.charleskochinstitute.org/advancing-american-security-future-u-s-foreign-policy/. Even so, the resources devoted to groups espousing liberal hegemony or its cousins are still vastly greater than the money supporting advocates of greater restraint.

  45. See Matthew A. Baum and Philip B. K. Potter, War and Democratic Constraint: How the Public Influences Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 4.

  46. As of 2017, the only editorial columnists at major U.S. newspapers who espouse a noninterventionist view of U.S. foreign policy are Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune and Stephen Kinzer of The Boston Globe. See Stephen M. Walt, “America Needs Realists, Not William Kristol,” Salon.com, January 16, 2008; and “What Would a Realist World Have Looked Like?” Foreign Policy, January 8, 2016.

  47. See Michael C. Desch, “It’s Kind to Be Cruel: The Humanity of American Realism,” Review of International Studies 29 (2003); and idem, “America’s Illiberal Liberalism: The Ideological Origins of Overreaction in U.S. Foreign Policy,” International Security 32, no. 3 (Winter 2007/08).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I HAVE INCURRED MANY DEBTS in writing this book, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge them here. Ironically, one of my debts is to the foreign policy establishment itself. I have been part of that community for much of my professional life, as a young researcher at the Center for Naval Analyses; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; a guest scholar at think tanks like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Brookings Institution; a faculty member at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, the University of Chicago, and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; and a participant in numerous other “establishment” activities. I am surely something of an outlier within this world, but I have learned a great deal from the friends, colleagues, and former students I have met along the way. I have benefited greatly from the opportunities that my role within this world has provided, and remain deeply grateful to all who have helped me.

  I wish to thank the following individuals for their comments and suggestions on the manuscript: Andrew Bacevich, Ian Bremmer, Ilene Cohen, Michael Desch, Michael Glennon, Stephen Kinzer, Fredrik Logevall, Ramzy Mardini, Tarek Masoud, Steven E. Miller, Moisés Naím, Barry Posen, and Richard Sokolsky. My father, Martin Walt IV, read an early draft with particular care and made many useful suggestions, and John Mearsheimer deserves special thanks for his comments and advice through the entire process. I am also grateful to Steve Clemons, Chas W. Freeman, Carla Robbins, Jeremy Shapiro, and Tara McKelvey for useful conversations about different aspects of U.S. foreign policy–making. Orga Cadet, Gabriel Costa, Kyle Herman, Enea Gjoza, and Jason Kwon provided able research assistance, and Leah Knowles kept the rest of my professional life in order.

  Over the past two years, students in my course on U.S. foreign policy took up the challenge of reading draft chapters and did not hesitate to tell me where my arguments were either confusing or just plain wrong. My editor at FSG, Eric Chinski, performed his usual wise, masterful (and when necessary, ruthless) job of improving the manuscript, and my agent, Bill Clegg, was supportive from start to finish. And it is a pleasure to offer a special shout-out to the chefs and staff at Cutty’s sandwich shop in Brookline, Massachusetts, whose addictive creations fueled countless afternoons of research and writing.

  Some portions of the book appeared in slightly different form as “The Case for Offshore Balancing: A Superior U.S. Grand Strategy” (coauthored with John Mearsheimer), in Foreign Affairs 95, no. 4 (July/August 2016); and “The Donald vs. the Blob,” in Robert Jervis, Francis Gavin, Joshua Rovner, and Diane Labrosse, eds., Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). I thank the Council on Foreign Relations and Columbia University Press for permission to use these materials here.

  Finally, my greatest thanks and admiration go to my wife, Rebecca Stone, for acting locally while I was thinking globally. Together with my now-adult children, Gabriel
and Katherine, her example is a constant reminder of the good that people can do if they don’t worry about who gets credit.

  Stephen Walt

  Brookline, Massachusetts

  INDEX

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  Abe, Shinzo

  Abrams, Elliott

  Abu Ghraib prison

  academia

  accountability; dissenters and whistle-blowers; failing upward; intelligence agencies; in the media; Middle East peace process and; military; neoconservatism and; survival of bad ideas; too big to fail

  Acheson, Dean

  Adams, John Quincy

  Adelson, Sheldon

  Afghanistan; election fraud; 1980s Soviet defeat in; Taliban