Opponents balanced U.S. power in other ways. Some adversaries sought to deter U.S. pressure by pursuing weapons of mass destruction, while others moved closer to each other in order to thwart U.S. aims. Cooperation increased between Russia and China as NATO moved east and Washington pivoted toward Asia; and Russia eventually fought a short war with Georgia, seized Crimea from Ukraine, and used cyberattacks and “hybrid warfare” to stop NATO from moving farther east and to undermine the liberal order in Europe. Similarly, Syria and Iran worked together to defeat U.S. efforts in Iraq and ensure that the United States was not free to go after either of them. None of these efforts sufficed to alter the global balance of power, but they made it more difficult for the United States to achieve its ambitious aims and insulated these states from U.S. pressure.
Finally, the United States also faced growing opposition from various Islamic extremists whose hostility was driven by U.S. support for Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia and by the expanded U.S. military presence throughout the Muslim world. Over time, U.S. efforts to counter Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, ISIS, Boko Haram, and other extremist groups produced an ever-expanding, open-ended set of conflicts in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and several other countries.
Moreover, the growing perception that the United States was fundamentally hostile to Islam began to inspire terrorist attacks in a number of countries, including the United States itself. In November 2009, for example, Major Nidal Hasan, an army psychiatrist, murdered thirteen people and injured more than thirty others at the Fort Hood army base in an attack motivated by his belief that the United States had declared war on Islam.51 And in 2012 a report by the FBI’s counterterrorism unit found that “anger over U.S. military operations abroad was the most commonly cited motivation for individuals involved in cases of ‘homegrown’ terrorism.” In response to the report, the terrorism expert Marc Sageman predicted that “continued US military action will inevitably drive terrorist activities in this country, because some local people here will identify themselves with the victims of those actions abroad.”52
Instead of a peaceful world order and near-universal acceptance of benevolent U.S. leadership, therefore, the post–Cold War world continued to operate according to the more traditional dictates of realpolitik. Other states remained acutely sensitive to the balance of power, declined to cooperate with Washington unless doing so was in their interest, and played hardball when necessary to safeguard key strategic priorities. Opponents of U.S.-led liberal hegemony sometimes resorted to violence—as Russia did when it seized Crimea or as Islamic extremists have done through the use of terror—even at considerable cost and risk to themselves. Such behavior was only to be expected; what was surprising was America’s failure to anticipate it.
EXAGGERATING THE UTILITY OF FORCE
Liberal hegemony also failed because U.S. leaders exaggerated what American power—especially its military power—could accomplish. America’s potent military arsenal freed Americans from the fear of being conquered or coerced, but it did not allow Washington to dictate to others or give U.S. leaders reliable control over domestic political developments in other countries.
In part, superior power did not translate into reliable control because the targets of U.S. pressure cared more about the issues at stake and were willing to pay a high price to defend their independence or other vital interests. States such as Serbia, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and North Korea were vastly weaker than the United States, but none of them capitulated at the first hint of U.S. pressure. Indeed, most U.S. opponents were willing to absorb considerable punishment without saying “uncle,” thus limiting Washington’s ability to impose its will upon them.
It is true, for example, that President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia eventually cut a deal on Bosnia in 1996 and was forced to give up control of Kosovo in 1999. Serbia was a very weak state, however, and it still took a seventy-eight-day air campaign to force Milosevic to concede. Moreover, neither Bashar al-Assad, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong-un, Muammar Gaddafi, nor any of Iran’s leaders ever capitulated outright to U.S. demands; indeed, some U.S. foes remained defiant right up to the moment they were overthrown.53 The Afghan Taliban are still fighting after more than seventeen years of war, and the lengthy U.S. occupation of Iraq never gave Washington the ability to tell the country’s post-Saddam leaders what to do.
And remember: each of these states was far weaker than the United States. If Washington could not intimidate, browbeat, or compel these minor powers to do its bidding, what did that reveal about the actual leverage the “unipolar power” enjoyed and its ability to use military force and other forms of pressure to expand a liberal order?
Proponents of liberal hegemony—whether in the more restrained Democratic version or the more muscular GOP approach—also forgot that military power is a crude instrument. It is useful for certain purposes, but not for others, and it always produces unintended consequences. Vast wealth, sophisticated weaponry, and innovative doctrines made it possible for the United States to project power to distant regions and defeat any number of weaker military opponents on the battlefield, which is why the United States could topple the Taliban, remove Saddam Hussein, and defeat Muammar Gaddafi rapidly and with little loss of American life. But the ability to destroy third-rate armies and oust foreign leaders did not enable the United States to create new and effective political institutions to replace defeated regimes. Fighting and governing are very different activities, and being able to blow things up with great precision does not confer a similar capacity to administer conquered territory effectively. As the deputy national secretary advisor Ben Rhodes admitted at the end of Obama’s presidency, “the [U.S.] military can do enormous things. It can win wars and stabilize conflicts. But a military can’t create a political culture or build a society.”54
Nor is military power a particularly flexible instrument, the growing reliance on more precise tools (such as remotely piloted drones or elite special operations units) notwithstanding. Using military force is ultimately a political act with its own logic and momentum, and it cannot be turned on and off like a light switch or simply dialed up or down as circumstances require. Committing forces to battle engages U.S. prestige, and allies and enemies will soon weigh in, soldiers will be killed and wounded, and the public will expect benefits commensurate with the costs. If success is not immediately forthcoming, neither civilian officials nor senior military commanders are likely to admit that they miscalculated. Nor will they be inclined to stop before victory is achieved. Setbacks will create pressures to escalate, and wars begun in response to false fears or false hopes can easily turn into open-ended campaigns.
Proponents of liberal hegemony were convinced that they could use military power selectively and cheaply in the service of an ambitious global agenda; they found themselves trapped in unwinnable quagmires instead. The Iraq War is the most obvious example of this problem, but every major case of U.S. military intervention after 1992—in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen—took significantly longer and cost substantially more than U.S. leaders expected, while achieving much less than they promised. Every single one.
DIPLOMATIC RIGIDITY
Excessive faith in U.S. power also encouraged U.S. officials to eschew genuine diplomacy—that is, the adjustment of competing interests for mutual benefit—and to rely excessively on ultimatums and coercive pressure. As Chas W. Freeman, a former assistant secretary of defense and longtime U.S. diplomat, has noted, “for most in our political elite, the overwhelming military and economic leverage of the United States justifies abandoning the effort to persuade rather than muscle recalcitrant foreigners into line.”55
Compounding this problem was the widespread tendency to see world politics as a Manichaean struggle between virtuous liberal states and malevolent, rights-abusing tyrants. Instead of attributing conflicts between states to differing perceptions, competing historical narratives, or straightfo
rward clashes of national interest, U.S. officials and influential pundits routinely portrayed them as confrontations between good and evil. Whether in the form of the “rogue states” targeted by the Clinton administration or the dictators lumped into the Bush administration’s “Axis of Evil,” U.S. adversaries were routinely demonized as immoral and illegitimate governments whose very existence violated America’s deepest political convictions.56 Barack Obama was less inclined to use such moralistic language than his predecessors, but he reminded the audience at his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “Make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.”
Because they saw opponents as evil and believed they held the high cards, U.S. officials tended to view concessions made to secure a deal as a form of surrender, even if the resulting agreement gave them most of what they wanted. In short, instead of genuine bargaining, Washington tended to simply tell others what it wanted them to do. If they refused to comply, U.S. leaders tightened the screws or reached for the sword.
In the negotiations preceding the 1999 Kosovo War, for example, U.S. officials blamed Serbia for the entire conflict, made little effort to construct an agreement that would preserve Belgrade’s minimum interests, and assumed that Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic would capitulate as soon as NATO showed it was willing to use force. Instead, it took a lengthy air campaign to get the Serbs to concede—an effort that accelerated Serbian ethnic cleansing, caused hundreds of civilian casualties, and destroyed billions of dollars’ worth of property—and Belgrade did so only after securing a deal that was more favorable than the original U.S. ultimatum. Had the United States been more empathetic and flexible from the start, the entire war might have been avoided.57
The same uncompromising approach allowed Iran to go from zero nuclear centrifuges in 2000 to more than nineteen thousand by early 2015. More interested in regime change than in halting Iran’s progress toward a latent nuclear capability, for years the United States demanded that Iran halt all nuclear enrichment, refusing to consider any arrangement that might leave Tehran with control over the full nuclear fuel cycle. U.S. officials refused to meet directly with their Iranian counterparts and rejected or derailed several Iranian proposals that would have frozen its enrichment capacity at much lower levels.58 Even after serious talks began in 2009, the Obama administration walked away from a “confidence-building” agreement that would have substantially reduced Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium.59 Instead of negotiating in earnest Washington kept imposing stiffer economic sanctions and issuing veiled threats to use force (“all options are on the table”) if Iran did not comply. This pressure probably played a role in Tehran’s eventual willingness to cut a deal, but the 2015 nuclear agreement also required flexibility on America’s part, including dropping the demand that Iran give up its entire enrichment capability. More than a decade of U.S. intransigence left Iran considerably closer to a nuclear bomb than it would have been had Washington engaged in genuine diplomacy sooner.
A similar rigidity hamstrung the U.S. response to the crises in Syria and Ukraine. In the former case, U.S. insistence that “Assad must go,” combined with its initial refusal to allow Iran to participate in peace discussions, crippled early efforts to stop the fighting, facilitated the growth of radical Islamic groups, and helped prolong an admittedly challenging conflict.60 In Ukraine, the United States called for Moscow to cease all of its activities in Ukraine, withdraw from Crimea, and let Ukraine join the EU and/or NATO if it eventually met the membership criteria for these organizations. Instead of pursuing a compromise that would satisfy each side’s core objectives, the United States was in effect demanding that Moscow abandon all of its interests in Ukraine, full stop. Such an outcome might be highly desirable in the abstract or from a purely American perspective, but it blithely ignored Russia’s history, its proximity to Ukraine, and its own security concerns. It is hard to imagine any Russian leader capitulating to these demands absent a long and costly struggle that would have done enormous damage to Ukraine itself.
Finally, diplomacy based on threats, ultimatums, and a refusal to compromise rarely produces durable outcomes. Weaker parties usually retain some bargaining power—especially where their core interests are concerned—making it difficult for even the most powerful states to get absolutely everything they might want from the other side. Equally important, if the weaker side is forced to capitulate under duress and in ways it regards as unfair, it will resent the result and seek to reopen the issue when conditions are more favorable. For diplomacy to work, both parties have to get some of what they want, or those making the largest concessions will have little incentive to abide by the deal over the longer term.
By exaggerating their ability to bend other states to America’s will, U.S. leaders undermined their own diplomatic efforts and missed important opportunities to resolve conflicts without having to use force.
THE LIMITS OF SOCIAL ENGINEERING
By definition, liberal hegemony committed the United States to remaking other societies. A liberal world order requires other states to embrace liberal principles, and the United States tried to give them a healthy shove in that direction. This effort failed, however, because it exaggerated America’s ability to conduct large-scale social engineering in societies whose history, internal characteristics, and social institutions were radically different from the U.S. experience. America’s accomplishments fooled both Democrats and Republicans into thinking that liberal democracy was the magic formula for economic growth and political tranquillity and convinced them that a universal desire for wealth and liberty would trump “old-fashioned” national, ethnic, or religious identities and obviate concerns about the relative power of competing groups in other countries. If history was moving in a progressive direction and other societies couldn’t wait to become like us, they would be quick to abandon old ways of thinking, embrace democracy, resolve internal conflicts peacefully, and eagerly join the liberal world order that Uncle Sam was creating. If this rosy vision were accurate, hardly anyone would even think of resisting America’s well-intentioned effort to usher other countries into the twenty-first century.
Alas, this view was at best naïve and at worst wildly off-base. The “velvet revolutions” in Eastern Europe and a “democratic wave” in Latin America were encouraging signs as the 1990s began, but secular trends in favor of liberal democracy were far from universal and authoritarian regimes proved surprisingly resilient in Russia, China, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. It had taken centuries for fairly stable democratic institutions to emerge in Western Europe and North America, and that lengthy process had been contentious and often violent. To believe that the United States could create liberal orders in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere in the Middle East in a few years was fanciful if not downright delusional. By 2017, in fact, it was not even clear if liberal democracy would survive in parts of Europe.
Trying to spread democracy via regime change was doomed to fail for another reason. Changing an entire system of government inevitably creates winners and losers, and the latter will often take up arms to oppose the new order. At the same time, regime change creates power vacuums that facilitate these acts of resistance. Local sources of identity, allegiance, and obligation—whether national, ethnic, tribal, sectarian, or whatever—do not suddenly disappear when a tyrant is toppled, and some of the people the United States was trying to help resented America’s heavy-handed interference and were willing to fight and die to resist it. As a research team led by the former senior advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Office of the Secretary of Defense wrote in 2016, “civilian harm by U.S., international, and Afghan forces contributed significantly to the growth of the Taliban … and undermined the war effort by straining U.S.-Afghan relations and weakening the legitimacy of the U.S. mission and the Afghan government.” The same team observed similar effects in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan.61 The more the United States tried to spread its liberal principles, the more opposition it created.
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br /> Furthermore, U.S. officials in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya lacked the detailed local knowledge necessary to guide successful state-building. As an infamous PowerPoint slide from the Afghan War made clear, state-building in the context of a counterinsurgency campaign was an absurdly complex process that could barely be comprehended, let alone implemented successfully (see Figure 1).62 Personal accounts from participants in these efforts make it abundantly clear that the people responsible for these efforts did not know which local leaders to trust or support, did not understand the complex and subtle networks of allegiance and authority in which they were trying to work, and inevitably trampled on local customs and sensitivities.63
Over time, some U.S. commanders and diplomats eventually acquired some of the knowledge that might have helped them be more successful. But then their tour of duty would end, and their replacements would have to learn the same lessons over again. As one former U.S. Army commander ruefully recalled, “we haven’t fought the wars overseas for the past fifteen years. We’ve fought them one year at a time for the past fifteen years.”64 This problem explains why, in 2016, a U.S. Army commander had to apologize for distributing anti-Taliban leaflets that juxtaposed Koranic verses with images of dogs, a combination deeply offensive to Afghan Muslims.65 The United States had been fighting in Afghanistan for a decade and a half, yet top commanders still did not understand key elements of the culture in which they were operating.
FIGURE 1: Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics
Moreover, even well-intentioned efforts to aid local populations repeatedly foundered in a sea of corruption and administrative incompetence.66 Pouring development and reconstruction aid into societies in the absence of effective institutions guaranteed that much of the aid would be squandered or, even worse, would end up in the hands of America’s enemies. In Afghanistan, for example, “the U.S. military was paying vast sums to Afghan security firms to guard supply convoys while much of the money was being passed on to the Taliban to guarantee safe passage.”67 Even worse, the central government in Kabul had little incentive to implement the reforms that might help the United States defeat the Taliban, as the billions of dollars of U.S. economic aid on which leaders in Kabul depended (and routinely diverted for their own gains) would evaporate if the war were ever won.68 And because U.S. officials kept insisting that defeat or withdrawal was not an option, they could not pressure America’s local clients to undertake meaningful reforms by threatening to leave them to their fates.
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