Third, war is uncertain. War is uncertain because it is political and human and because it is interactive. Neither the future course of events nor our enemies will conform to announcements of our linear plans, such as declaring a time line for withdrawal of forces years in advance. As Professor Hew Strachan observed, “One sort of war can turn into another.”8 As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq evolved across nearly two decades, the United States was slow to adapt, in part due to a fundamental misunderstanding of war—a failure to grasp that the future course of events depends not only on what one decides to do next, but also on enemy reactions and initiatives that are difficult to predict. The North Vietnamese did not impose limits on themselves and conform to the strategy of graduated pressure, but instead intensified the war effort and exploited American restrictions.9 Under the concept of graduated pressure, the United States selected military actions based on its readily available military capabilities rather than on the effects the application of military force might achieve. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the “light footprint” approach to those wars allowed determined enemies to regain strength and wage sophisticated insurgencies. The lesson is that in war and in competitions short of war, America does not control the future course of events, and strategies must not only be sustained over time, but also adapt continuously to retain the initiative.
Fourth, war is a contest of wills. As Gen. George Marshall observed in his address to the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1939, “In our democracy where the government is truly an agent of the popular will,” foreign policy and military policy are “dependent on public opinion,” and our policies and strategies “will be as good or bad as the public is well informed or poorly informed regarding the factors that bear on the subject.”10 With Vietnam, as Americans watched their first televised war, they realized not only that they had been misled, but that their government had not developed a strategy to achieve a desired outcome at an acceptable cost. With Afghanistan and Iraq, the determination to avoid another Vietnam encouraged not only the light footprint approach, but also a short-term mentality and early declarations of “mission accomplished” in both wars. The unexpected length and difficulty of those wars sapped American will, as did inconsistent strategies based on flawed assumptions that ran counter to war’s political, human, and interactive nature. Moreover, U.S. leaders did not devote sufficient effort to explaining what was at stake in those wars, or how the sacrifices of Americans’ fellow citizens were contributing to a worthy outcome. The lack of wartime leadership encouraged narcissism among the public, who understood neither their enemies nor the experiences of their sons and daughters engaged with those enemies. War reporting focused on casualties or troop levels while portraying soldiers as victims who had no authorship over their fate. It is thus that the post-9/11 “endless wars” became conflated with the trauma of Vietnam and began to drain America’s will.
WHAT SOME have called the “Vietnam syndrome” (a belief that the United States should simply avoid military intervention abroad) was the most prominent and immediate manifestation of the widely held interpretation that that war was unjustified and unwinnable. The mantra of “no more Vietnams” often muted discussion of what might be learned from that experience. The analogy to Vietnam was applied indiscriminately as well as superficially. Across the three decades following the 1973 Paris Peace Accords that ended American involvement in the war, assertions that any use of force abroad would lead to “another Vietnam” appeared in connection with military operations in Latin America, the Horn of Africa, the Balkans, Southwest Asia, and Central Asia. President George H. W. Bush declared after the First Gulf War that America had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”11 But under the guise of ending endless wars, the Vietnam analogy became conflated with Afghanistan and Iraq analogies to produce something like the Vietnam syndrome on steroids.
Simplistic interpretations of the American experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq obscure the differences in the character of those conflicts. Some interpretations point to American pursuit of “armed domination” or an effort to remake the world in America’s image. These interpretations overlook the fact that the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan after the most devastating terrorist attack in history. And while the majority of Americans might now argue that the invasion of Iraq was unwise—or, that at least it was unwise to think regime change in Baghdad would be easy—the arguments for retrenchment do not acknowledge the consequences of America’s precipitate disengagement from Iraq in 2011 as giving rise to ISIS, or the U.S. halting withdrawal from Syria in 2019 as setting conditions for an intensification of that multiparty conflict and complicating efforts to bring about ISIS’s enduring defeat. We should be aware that simplistic interpretations of the American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq cloud understanding and can be used to justify flawed policies and bad decisions. Just as the memory of America’s divisive military intervention in Vietnam, and the strong emotions that tainted many early interpretations of that war, clouded understanding and left plenty of room for manipulating the historical record, America’s understanding of more recent experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq has become more symbolic than historical; as with the Vietnam syndrome, the wars of 9/11 are used to evoke emotion rather than promote understanding.
Many who are deeply skeptical of U.S. military engagement abroad self-identify as part of a realist school of international relations. But realist is the wrong word. They get the world wrong because they start from an ideologically driven approach to U.S. engagement with the world. They are against any form of military intervention abroad and for the withdrawal of U.S. forces not only from the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, but also from the preponderance of other military commitments overseas. Rather than viewing the Vietnam syndrome and the overconfidence in American military technology of the 1990s as setting the United States up for the difficulties experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq, many who adhere to this school of thought argue that America’s conceit is to pursue “liberal hegemony,” an effort to turn as many countries as possible into liberal democracies. One of the school’s proponents, Professor John Mearsheimer, alleges that America’s “crusader mentality” drives a misguided, costly, and self-defeating foreign policy designed to “remake the world in its own image.”12 The realist school has found common cause with those who adhere to the New Left interpretation of history, which became more influential in academia during and after the Vietnam War. The realists and the New Left have been bolstered by a large influx of cash from billionaires George Soros and Charles Koch, who share little common ground politically except their advocacy for American retrenchment. The two pumped millions of dollars into new think tanks such as the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and funded programs within existing think tanks such as the Atlantic Council and RAND.13 The cash and appeal to emotion gained traction despite what Professor Paul Miller described as an effort to set up and then knock down a straw man of liberal hegemony with “historically myopic, morally stunted, and strategically incoherent” arguments.14
Because adherents to realism and the New Left both believe that the United States is the principal cause of the world’s problems, they argue that if the United States withdrew from competitions overseas, we would be safer. Their bywords are restraint and offshore balancing, which are meant to communicate a reduced emphasis on U.S. alliances and a diminished military posture overseas. But their views make them paragons of strategic narcissism due to their tendency to disregard the agency that the “other” has over the future course of events. In their view, the United States causes others to act; our presence abroad creates enemies; our absence abroad would restore harmony. Other states, according to this orthodoxy, only react to the United States and have no aspirations or objectives of their own. The United States, therefore, is to blame for antagonizing Russia and China, the former through the expansion of NATO and the latter through an excessive U.S. military presence in the Indo-Pacific. Ameri
ca, they believe, is to blame for jihadist terrorism because the offense of Americans’ presence in Muslim holy lands generated a natural backlash against us infidels. The United States is the cause of nuclear proliferation, they feel, because states like Iran and North Korea need those weapons to defend against an overly aggressive United States; a U.S. policy of conciliation with both countries would transform those states into responsible actors and even convince their leaders that they no longer need to brutally repress their own people.15
These twenty-first-century realists and fellow travelers of the New Left believe that American retrenchment would not only make the world safer, but also save money that could be applied to domestic needs. But as the history of the challenges in this book makes clear, American behavior did not cause Russian and Chinese aggression, jihadist terrorism, or the hostility of Iran and North Korea. Nor would disengagement make any of those challenges easier to overcome. America would have paid a much cheaper price for maintaining a military presence on the Korean Peninsula in 1950 than the cost of the Korean War, just as sustained engagement in Iraq beyond 2011 would have cost far less than the post-2014 campaign to liberate Iraqi and Syrian territory from ISIS. It is also much cheaper to deter Russia in Europe through U.S. presence today than to restore security after aggression tomorrow. And it is easier to ensure freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea and elsewhere now than to fight to restore them later.
The “realist” argument for retrenchment appeals to those deeply skeptical about efforts to promote democracy—skepticism due in part to excessive hope. The promise of the 1990s was that the world was progressing inexorably toward liberal-democratic governments and a globally harmonious system of states. Globalization would lead to the convergence of states as democratization advanced. That optimistic worldview was unsustainable. When it failed, it gave way to retrenchment and resignation. Much of the unrealistic optimism about the arc of history stemmed from the assumptions some made after the collapse of Communist authoritarian governments in 1989 that the regime changes in eastern Europe were replicable in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Yet, this thinking did not give due consideration to local context or, in particular, to political, social, cultural, and religious dynamics that complicate majority rule, the protection of minority rights, and the rule of law. It is clear that the United States can influence, but cannot determine, the evolution of the world order in favor of free and open societies. As nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill observed, “[T]he virtues needed for maintaining freedom must be cultivated by the people themselves.”16 It is also true, however—as protests in 2019 and 2020 in Hong Kong, Moscow, Tehran, Baghdad, Khartoum, Caracas, and Beirut attest—that people want a say in how they are governed.
The existence of free and open societies abroad benefits security because such societies are natural defenses against hostile, aggressive, authoritarian powers. As argued in this book, support for democracy and the rule of law is the best means of promoting peace and competing with those who promote authoritarian, closed systems. The United States and other nations should also continue to promote basic and unalienable rights as captured in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights approved by the UN General Assembly in Paris on December 10, 1948, while recognizing that America and its allies cannot be the guarantor of those rights. And those who self-identify as realists are right to be skeptical about the ability of international organizations to promote peace, justice, and prosperity across the globe. Because authoritarian and hostile regimes do their best to co-opt organizations like the United Nations, strong nations governed under the principle of popular sovereignty are the best advocates for the oppressed. As stated in the 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States, it is possible to recognize that a “world that supports American interests and reflects our values makes America more secure and prosperous” and to affirm “America’s commitment to liberty, democracy, and the rule of law” while also acknowledging “that the American way of life cannot be imposed upon others, nor is it the inevitable culmination of progress.”17
IT IS my hope that this book contributes to improving U.S. strategic competence through enabling a better understanding both of the history of how crucial challenges to national security developed and of the ideology, emotions, and aspirations that drive the other. But to preserve our competitive advantages, Americans need to focus inwardly as well as outwardly. For example, the best means to counter Putin’s playbook is to strengthen our democratic institutions and processes and restore faith in our democratic principles and free-market economies. To improve our strategic competence, we need to develop leaders who can think in time and who understand what it takes to implement ideas and strategies on the ground. It is vitally important to understand the local realities and know the actual people. Competitions are ultimately about human behavior. And although countering the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign of co-option, coercion, and concealment is important, an exclusively defensive stance would not only consign America to second place in critical competitions, but also play into the CCP’s narrative that the United States is trying to keep China down. Although investments in research and development, military capabilities, and infrastructure are vital, improvement in education may be the most important initiative to ensuring that future generations are able to innovate and create opportunities for their children and grandchildren.
Prevailing on today’s battlegrounds requires an unprecedented degree of cooperation among government, academia, and the private sector. To attempt to direct that cooperation would cut against America’s democratic and decentralized nature. Understanding today’s competitions, however, and especially what is at stake in them, can serve as a basis for joint action to counter hostile behavior such as cyber-enabled information warfare and to work together to maintain competitive advantages in technology and in the emerging data-driven economy. Encouraging public service and creating easier ways to move into and out of public service should be a top priority. Because new arenas of competition transcend the limits of geography and reach into society and industry, it is important for every citizen to understand the nature of those competitions. Cooperative efforts are essential both to defend freedom and to work on interconnected problem sets, such as those associated with climate, the environment, energy, and food and water security. The threats from Russia’s cyber-enabled information warfare, China’s industrial espionage and influence campaigns, jihadist terrorist efforts to direct or inspire attacks on our homeland, Iran’s offensive cyber capability, and North Korea’s missiles reach across borders and attempt to exploit vulnerabilities across all segments of society. That is why government-only efforts to defend the free world are passé.
To compete more effectively in war and in competitions short of war, the United States and other free nations should invest in strategic competence. Educating the public about the battlegrounds of today and tomorrow is an especially important task. A reinvigoration of history in higher-level education is particularly important, as many courses in diplomatic and military history have been displaced by theory-based international relations courses, which tend to mask the complex causality of events and obscure the cultural, psychological, social, and economic elements that distinguish cases from one another. Some theories risk sapping students of strategic empathy and encouraging them to reduce complex problem sets into frameworks that create only the illusion of understanding. A growing interest in applied history in some universities is a promising development.
But many universities do not teach military and diplomatic history, or they teach it only in relation to social history. After the Vietnam War, many gave in to the antiwar movement’s tendency to confuse the study of war with militarism. Thinking clearly about problems of diplomacy, national security, and defense, however, is both a necessity and the best way to prevent war. The analogy drawn by the late historian Dennis Showalter is apt: no one would ever accuse an oncologist of being an advocate for the disease he or
she studies.
The Foreign Policy Research Institute defines geopolitics as “an approach to contemporary international affairs that is anchored in the study of history, geography and culture.” With the new arenas of competition discussed in chapter 13, technology might be added to that definition—to educate future leaders about how to maximize the potential and minimize the danger of emerging technologies, in the context of geopolitical competitors.18
Contemporary challenges to security demand a concerted effort to deter conflict. There are two fundamental ways to deter conflict. First, by the threat of punitive action that would inflict pain that exceeds the attacker’s anticipated gains. This form of deterrence requires leaders to convince the potential enemy that the target of his contemplated aggression possesses both the will and the capability to retaliate. It also requires the ability to hold at risk something of value to the potential aggressor. Iran was able to escalate its forty-year proxy war with the United States on its own terms because its leaders were conditioned to assume that Washington would not retaliate directly against Iran in response to proxy attacks on U.S. people and facilities in the Middle East. That is why both the strike that killed Qasem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and the economic sanctions imposed in response to continued Iranian aggression were aimed, in part, at restoring deterrence of Iran. But deterrence by the threat of punitive action later is often unsuccessful.
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