The Hell of Good Intentions

by Stephen M. Walt

  In Afghanistan, the toppling of the Taliban in 2001 seemed like a miraculous demonstration of U.S. military prowess, belying preinvasion fears that the United States would end up in the same sort of quagmire that had ultimately defeated the Soviet Union. Some seventeen years later, however, it is clear that those fears were well-founded. None of the long line of U.S. commanders managed to find the magic formula to defeat the Taliban and achieve victory, and the Afghan government remained corrupt, internally divided, and incapable of securing its own territory without extensive U.S. military backing and lavish economic support. The much-publicized 2009 “surge” of additional U.S. troops failed to turn the tide, and by 2016 the United States seemed trapped in a war it could neither win nor leave.33

  The Bush administration’s ill-fated decision to invade Iraq in 2003 offers a similarly tragic lesson. The invading force had little difficulty defeating Iraq’s third-rate army, but U.S. civilian and military leaders had failed to plan for the occupation and were repeatedly surprised by the challenges it posed. A potent insurgency soon emerged, sectarian violence exploded, and the occupying troops responded in ways that made these problems worse. The subsequent “surge” in 2007 was a tactical success but a strategic failure, as it did not produce the necessary political reconciliation between Iraq’s Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish populations. Iraq’s new Shia-dominated government eventually insisted that the United States leave, and the Bush administration negotiated a schedule for withdrawal in 2008. Barack Obama eventually implemented this agreement (albeit more slowly than intended), only to be surprised when the new insurgent group ISIS emerged in 2014, inflicted a series of defeats on the Iraqi government forces that the United States had spent billions of dollars training and equipping, and proceeded to seize control of a significant slice of Iraqi and Syrian territory and proclaim the formation of a new “caliphate.” Viewed as a whole, the Iraq War was an eloquent reminder of the limits of military power: having broken Iraq and ignited a bitter sectarian struggle, Washington had no idea how to fix it.34

  U.S. military interventions elsewhere were no more successful. Relying primarily on covert action teams, Special Forces, and armed drones, the United States had interfered in Somalia and Yemen on several occasions from the early 1990s onward, and in each case the political situation got worse and anti-American extremists grew stronger.35 Even the twin interventions in the Balkans—the 1996 Dayton Agreement and the 1999 Kosovo War—produced at best mixed results, as the new states that emerged from these conflicts remain fragile and the ethnic tensions that produced these conflicts continue to fester. As Admiral Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted when asked about U.S. efforts at regime change in 2016, “We’re 0 for a lot.”36

  By 2016, what had once appeared to be an irresistible tool of American influence had been humbled, and the mismatch between U.S. commitments and aspirations and its military capabilities was increasingly apparent. The 2008 financial crisis, ballooning federal deficit, and subsequent budget sequester eventually forced across-the-board cuts in defense spending, yet the United States was still fighting in Afghanistan, still waging war against ISIS in Iraq, still reinforcing vulnerable NATO allies in Eastern Europe, still attempting to “rebalance” toward Asia, and still conducting an unknown number of counterterrorist operations in dozens of other countries.

  When Donald Trump took the oath of office, the United States was committed to defending more countries than at any time in its history. It had formal defense commitments with at least sixty-six countries, including the twenty-eight other members of NATO, the twenty signatories of the Rio Treaty in the Western Hemisphere, and such Asian allies as Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines. Afghanistan, Argentina, Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, New Zealand, and Pakistan had all been designated “major non-NATO allies,” and the United States was tied to dozens of other countries through a bewildering array of security arrangements and defense cooperation agreements.37 In 2014 a RAND Corporation study of U.S. security partnerships noted that “the most striking observation is the sharp increase in 1992, after the end of the Cold War, in both bilateral and multilateral agreements.”38 The available resources had shrunk, the number of opponents had grown, and still America’s global agenda kept expanding.

  By almost any measure, the strategic environment the United States faces today is worse than it was in 1993, and America’s overall position within that environment has eroded. In 2014, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, judged the world to be “more dangerous than it ever has been.” In 2016, Richard Haass gloomily noted that “the question is not whether the world will continue to unravel, but how fast and how far.” Or as Henry Kissinger observed darkly, “The United States has not faced a more diverse and complex array of crises since the end of the Second World War.”39 Even if one allows for the hyperbole that pervades much contemporary commentary on U.S. foreign policy, this is hardly the world that U.S. foreign-policy makers anticipated when the Cold War ended. To the contrary, the broad downward trend is a telling indictment of America’s post–Cold War grand strategy.

  LIBERALISM IN RETREAT

  When the Cold War ended, U.S. leaders expected that a rising liberal tide would accelerate the spread of democracy, human rights, and open markets and would usher in an unprecedented era of peace and global prosperity, all under Uncle Sam’s benevolent but watchful eye. By 2016 these confident expectations of an ever-rising liberal tide had dissipated, and liberalism was in retreat both at home and abroad.

  1. Democracy Demotion

  The Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations all made democracy promotion a central goal of U.S. foreign policy and were confident that U.S. power could reinforce a powerful secular trend. The Clinton administration’s national security strategy of “engagement and enlargement” put this objective at the heart of U.S. foreign policy, and George W. Bush said that his own national security strategy was based on a “great and guiding goal: to turn this time of American influence into generations of democratic peace.”40 Barack Obama was less outspoken on the topic than his predecessors, perhaps, but many of his senior aides were deeply committed to promoting liberal values, and Obama himself repeatedly called for foreign governments to be more open, transparent, and accountable.41 As he told the UN General Assembly in 2010, “There is no right more fundamental than the ability to choose your leaders and determine your destiny.”42 Or, as the State Department’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review declared in 2015, “Democracy, accountable government, and respect for human rights are essential for a secure, prosperous and just world.”43 This commitment to promoting certain human rights extended to religious freedom, which successive U.S. officials declared to be a cherished constitutional value, a strategic interest, and a foreign policy priority.44

  Nor were such statements merely empty rhetoric. In addition to using military power to topple such dictators as Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi, the United States used an array of softer policy instruments to promote or solidify democratic change in other countries. The U.S. Agency for International Development allocates more than $1 billion annually to strengthening political parties and democratic institutions, with the U.S. State Department spending roughly half that much on similar programs. The federal government also subsidizes the nonprofit National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, organizations run by the two main U.S. political parties whose mission is aiding their counterparts overseas. The U.S. taxpayer also supports the National Endowment for Democracy, a bipartisan, nongovernmental organization created by Congress that is “dedicated to fostering the growth of a wide range of democratic institutions abroad.”45 According to former assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland, a leading proponent of U.S.-sponsored regime change, the U.S. government invested more than $5 billion to strengthen democracy in Ukraine alone.46

  Yet despite the rhetorical priority given to this goal and the repeate
d use of U.S. wealth and power to advance it, efforts to promote democracy and human rights have gone into reverse. In 2012 the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Democracy Index reported that “between 2006 and 2008 there was stagnation of democracy; between 2008 and 2010 there was regression across the world.” The 2015 edition was even gloomier, noting “a decline in some aspects of governance, political participation and media freedoms, and a clear deterioration in attitudes associated with, or that are conducive to, democracy.”47 More shocking still, in 2016, declining trust in government led the Democracy Index to downgrade the United States from a “full” to a “flawed” democracy.48

  Similarly, the 2018 edition of Freedom House’s annual report on Freedom in the World warned that democracy “faced its most serious crisis in decades” and found that “Seventy-one countries suffered net declines in political rights and civil liberties, with only 35 registering gains. This marked the 12th consecutive year of decline in global freedom.” Over that twelve-year period, in fact, “113 countries have seen a net decline, and only 62 have experienced a net improvement.”49

  These trends are apparent nearly everywhere: liberal institutions are eroding in Poland and Hungary, Turkey’s ruling AKP Party has sharply curtailed press freedoms and imprisoned thousands of suspected opponents, and right-wing populist parties are increasingly active across Europe. The Obama administration persuaded the Egyptian military dictator Hosni Mubarak to step down in February 2011, but a military coup crushed Egypt’s brief experiment with electoral democracy two years later. Elections in Afghanistan are rife with fraud, and the government in Kabul remains divided, corrupt, and ineffective to this day. U.S.-backed reform efforts in Myanmar convinced the military to give up power and hold free elections, but the new, mostly civilian-led government subsequently launched a brutal campaign of violence against the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group. After a period of decline, mass killings peaked again in 2013, with massacres or civil wars occurring in Egypt, the Central African Republic, Nigeria, and several other countries.50 By 2016, what began as a peaceful protest movement for modest reforms in Syria had become a brutal civil war between the Assad regime and its equally despicable and dangerous opponents. Meanwhile, the youngest beneficiary of U.S. efforts at democracy promotion—the fledgling Republic of South Sudan—had fallen back into civil war before its third anniversary.51

  “Between 2000 and 2015,” observed democracy expert Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution in 2016, “democracy broke down in 27 countries … Meanwhile, many existing authoritarian regimes have become even less open, transparent, and responsive to their citizens … [And] democracy itself seems to have lost its appeal. Many emerging democracies have failed to meet their citizens’ hopes for freedom … just as the world’s established democracies, including the United States, have grown increasingly dysfunctional.”52

  As Diamond suggests, part of the problem was the various ills afflicting Western-style liberal democracy itself, including the paralysis that repeatedly hobbled the U.S. political system, the pervasive and corrupting role that money plays in U.S. elections, and the regulatory failures exposed by the 2008 financial crisis. The inability of European leaders to devise prompt and effective responses to the eurozone crisis sapped popular confidence as well, and public opinion polls across the Western world revealed declining support for democracy itself. For example, a 2014 study based on Eurobarometer surveys found that “satisfaction with democracy [in the EU] receded by seven percentage points between autumn 2007 and 2011, while trust in national parliaments decreased by eight percentage points.”53 As Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment rightly noted, “Democracy’s travails in both the United States and Europe have greatly damaged the standing of democracy in the eyes of many people around the world.”54

  Compounding these problems was the failure of countries like the United States to uphold the ideals they eagerly preached to others. The discovery that U.S. officials had authorized torture, extraordinary rendition, and targeted assassinations, and the revelations about prisoner abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the U.S. prison at Guantanamo made U.S. complaints about other states’ human rights conduct seem gratuitous at best and hypocritical at worst.55 Similarly, revelations that the National Security Agency was illegally compiling a vast trove of electronic data on U.S. and foreign citizens—and that top officials had lied about these activities—cast doubt on America’s professed commitment to civil liberties and the rule of law, straining relations with key allies. U.S. support for authoritarian governments such as Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and Singapore; its ready acceptance of the coup that toppled the democratically elected government of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt; and its refusal to sanction the questionable human rights behavior of such allies as Israel and Turkey helped tarnish America’s democratic brand as well.56

  At the same time, authoritarian regimes proved to be more resilient than U.S. leaders had anticipated. China’s one-party state weathered the 2008 financial crisis well and continued to enjoy impressive levels of economic growth, Russia regained its status as a great power and began defending its interests more successfully, and quasi-democratic leaders such as Recep Erdogan in Turkey and Viktor Orbán in Hungary remained popular despite their increasingly authoritarian conduct.

  The antidemocratic backlash also hit the philanthropic foundations and nongovernmental organizations that were working to strengthen democracy and promote human rights around the world. Between 2012 and 2015, for example, “more than 60 countries have passed or drafted laws that curtail the activity of non-governmental and civil society organizations. Ninety-six countries have taken steps to inhibit NGOs from operating at full capacity, in what the Carnegie Endowment calls a ‘viral-like spread of new laws’” designed to limit what these organizations can do or in some cases shut them down altogether.57

  To sum up: both Democratic and Republican administrations wanted to make the world more democratic, foster greater freedom, and improve human rights, and they believed that powerful secular forces around the world would make this goal easy to achieve and lead to a more peaceful and prosperous world. Not only were their hopes not borne out, U.S. actions at home and abroad have undermined these idealistic objectives and helped ignite the populist backlash that ushered Donald Trump into the White House.

  2. Globalization and Its Discontents

  The backlash against liberal democracy gained additional momentum when globalization failed to deliver as promised. Lowering political barriers to global trade and investment did boost world trade, helped countries like China and India lift millions of people out of deep poverty, reduced the costs of goods for U.S. consumers, and increased overall living standards in many places. But in the developed world—and especially the United States—the benefits of rapid globalization went mostly to the wealthy and well-educated: Wall Street won big, but Main Street did not. As Branko Milanovic has shown, incomes of the Asian middle class and the “global 1%” increased by roughly 60 percent between 1988 and 2008, while income gains for the lower and middle classes in the West over the same period were less than 10 percent.58 According to Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, between 1980 and 2016 the top 1 percent in North America received as much of the aggregate increase in real incomes as the bottom 88 percent did.59 Over time, the combination of rapid technological change and increasingly mobile global capital disrupted formerly dominant industries and eliminated thousands of middle- and lower-class jobs.60 The benefits for the country as a whole might be undeniable, but globalization had harmed key sectors and regions, and government institutions failed to create adequate compensatory or adjustment mechanisms. By 2016, a growing sense of vulnerability in the face of powerful but anonymous market forces had produced a strong domestic backlash in the United States, Great Britain, and a number of other countries, paving the way for such populist politicians as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and helping inspire the “Brexit” campaign in the United Kingdom.61

  Globalizatio
n also made the international economic order more vulnerable to financial crises, beginning with the 1997 Asian financial panic and later the 2008 Wall Street crisis and subsequent global recession. The follies and corruption within key financial institutions were eventually exposed, and Wall Street no longer seemed populated by brilliant and farsighted “Masters of the Universe.” The financial crisis raised serious doubt about the competence of the U.S. economic leadership and accelerated the search for new institutional models. The subsequent problems of the eurozone—a direct result of the Wall Street collapse—put the European Union under unprecedented strains as well and dampened earlier expectations of an “ever-deeper Union.”

  Proponents of globalization also believed that an array of existing international institutions would facilitate cooperation between states, dampen conflicts between them, and help overcome familiar dilemmas of collective action. Instead of growing more capable and legitimate, however, the U.S-led institutions that seemed invincible in the early 1990s—NATO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization—“are now in rapid and unmistakable decline.”62 Even more charitable appraisals acknowledge that existing institutions are not working well and are badly in need of reform, yet the measures needed to update and improve them have been almost impossible to implement.63

  A final consequence was the growing backlash against immigration. Globalization facilitated the movement of large numbers of people, including economic migrants seeking better employment and refugees fleeing conflict zones in the Balkans, Afghanistan, sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle East. Although immigrants and refugee populations comprised relatively small minorities in their host countries, the inevitable cultural frictions, fears of job displacement, and concerns about crime and/or terrorism fueled opposition to immigration and aided the rise of right-wing nationalist movements across the industrialized world. Nationalism turned out to be alive and well, and when tensions arose between the desire for national sovereignty and an increasingly globalized world economy, it was the latter that lost out.64