Threat inflation has a long history in U.S. foreign policy, especially since the United States took on the mantle of global leadership after World War II.31 At the beginning of the Cold War, for example, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg, advised President Harry Truman that the best way to win passage of a controversial aid program for Greece and Turkey was to give a speech that would “scare the hell out of the American people.” Truman did just that, and Americans were soon convinced that they faced a vast and looming threat from “monolithic Communism.” Hard-line advocacy groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger hyped these fears, as did official documents such as NSC-68 (1950), a National Security Council policy paper that offered an alarming portrait of Soviet capabilities and intentions and argued that Moscow’s recent acquisition of atomic weapons threatened the entire free world and necessitated a major U.S. defense buildup.32
By the early 1950s Americans believed that international Communism was on the march, and many accepted Senator Joseph McCarthy’s claims that numerous Communist agents had penetrated the Department of State and other key U.S. institutions. Over the next two decades, U.S. leaders fretted about bomber gaps, missile gaps, and “windows of vulnerability,” even though the United States had clear nuclear superiority until the late 1960s. During the Indochina War, U.S. leaders repeatedly argued that defeat or withdrawal would cause other dominoes to fall and U.S. allies to lose confidence, thereby undermining America’s entire global posture and turning the country into a “pitiful, helpless giant.”33 Yet fourteen years after Saigon fell, it was the Soviet Union that ended up on the ash heap of history.
In short, U.S. policy throughout the Cold War was frequently driven by worst-case assumptions about the dangers facing the United States. Nonetheless, the Soviet Union was a great power with an industrialized economy, and its large conventional forces and nuclear weapons arsenal did threaten U.S. allies in Europe and Asia. Soviet leaders never formally abandoned Bolshevism’s revolutionary aims, and millions of sympathizers around the world genuinely embraced the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. U.S. leaders may have exaggerated these and other dangers, but the threat was hardly a phantom.
Indeed, threat inflation may be a more significant problem today because the foreign dangers the United States faces are less daunting than in earlier eras. It is one thing to build in a margin for error when dealing with a serious threat, but quite another to convince the country that a minor problem is really a grave and imminent danger. If Americans become convinced that minor problems are really existential hazards, they will squander vast sums chasing monsters of their own imagining. Even worse, policymakers may take preventive actions that are in fact counterproductive, thereby turning minor problems into larger ones. What are the main rhetorical ploys that threat inflators use to justify greater exertion abroad?
“DELAY MEANS DEFEAT; ACTING NOW WILL GUARANTEE VICTORY”
Threat inflators see a world chock-full of dangers, where failing to respond quickly will have ominous consequences. Yet they also portray these same threats as easily overcome if their recommendations are undertaken promptly. In other words, threat inflators typically portray a world that is highly elastic: our entire way of life is in peril if we do not act quickly, but a vigorous and immediate response will rout our adversaries and usher in decades of durable peace.
Such claims often rest on peculiar beliefs about the basic nature of world politics. Threat inflators typically reject balance-of-power logic—which argues that powerful or aggressive states usually face ever-increasing resistance—and instead maintain that states are more likely to “bandwagon” with threatening states. If the United States does not maintain decisive military superiority or fails to respond in some far-flung corner of the earth, so the argument runs, its allies will lose confidence and quickly realign with America’s enemies. As Paul Nitze, the author of NSC-68, put it in that famous document, “In the absence of affirmative action on our part [i.e., a major military buildup] … our friends will become more than a liability to us, they will become a positive increment to Soviet power.”34 If this tendency were widespread, even minor shifts in the balance of power could have ominous consequences.
Relatedly, threat inflators believe that U.S. credibility is extremely important and inherently fragile. As Max Fisher notes, this idea “is pervasive, almost to the point of consensus, in much of Washington’s foreign policy community.”35 Any time the United States chooses not to respond to some external event, threat inflators warn that this decision will destroy U.S. credibility, undermine allies’ resolve, and embolden America’s opponents. Thus, hawks claimed that the U.S. failure to attack the Assad regime after it used chemical weapons in 2013 (thereby crossing a “red line” President Obama had implicitly drawn) had a “catastrophic” effect on U.S. credibility.36 When the United States does respond, however, the effects are fleeting, and Washington has to demonstrate its will and prowess again the next time a potential challenge arises.
Repeated scholarly studies on reputation and credibility show that the world does not work this way: states judge how others will respond primarily based on the interests at stake and not on how the country acted in a radically different context.37 To take an obvious illustration, how the United States responds to a crisis in a minor power far away says little or nothing about how it would respond to a direct attack on the U.S. homeland or against an important U.S. ally. Yet threat inflators argue the opposite, implying that the United States must respond in places that don’t matter in order to convince adversaries it will act in places that do.
Finally, given that the United States is wealthy, militarily capable, and has no powerful enemies near its own territory, threat inflators have to construct elaborate and improbable sequences of events in order to convince Americans that faraway events might eventually cause them significant harm.38 For example, the claim that any failed state could become a safe haven for anti-American terrorists transforms weak and strategically insignificant areas such as Afghanistan or Yemen into vital battlegrounds, thereby justifying open-ended counterterrorism and state-building efforts. Yet this argument requires all of the following statements to be true: (1) distant terrorist cells set a high priority on attacking the United States, (2) they can evade all the post-9/11 measures taken to enhance the security of the U.S. homeland, (3) an attack, if it does occur, will inflict enormous costs, and (4) the area in which they are currently operating is vital to their success, and alternative “safe havens” do not exist. Apart from the exceedingly remote possibility of a terrorist attack with a powerful weapon of mass destruction, no conceivable foreign-based terror attack could ever cause that much damage. Moreover, trying to eradicate all the groups that might aspire to attack the United States, while simultaneously eliminating every conceivable safe haven, would cost far more than the harm such groups might inflict.
OVERSTATING ENEMY CAPABILITIES
During the Cold War, threat inflators routinely portrayed the Soviet Union as a military colossus, even though the United States and its allies routinely outspent the Warsaw Pact on defense by as much as 25 percent each year.39 But Soviet power was not a chimera, even if it was often overstated. Once the U.S.S.R. collapsed, however, the tendency to exaggerate enemy capabilities became more pervasive and consequential.
Beginning in the early 1990s, for example, U.S. officials and establishment pundits have treated such third-rate military powers as Iraq and Iran as if they were major conventional threats, even though neither had any ability to attack the United States directly and scant ability to threaten other U.S. interests. The United States and its allies had defeated Iraq’s overmatched armed forces easily in the 1991 Gulf War, and a decade of punishing sanctions meant that Saddam Hussein’s forces were even weaker in 2003. Yet both the Clinton and Bush administrations continued to portray Iraq as a powerful and dangerous adversary.
Exaggerating Iraq’s capabilities was also a key ingredient in the Bush admini
stration’s recipe for preventive war. U.S. officials accused Iraq of seeking nuclear weapons and claimed that it had a large and sophisticated arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. For example, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s infamous briefing to the UN Security Council painted an alarming portrait of Iraq’s alleged WMD programs, claims that turned out to be completely false.
Similarly, hard-liners have long depicted Iran as a major military power that is about to dominate the Persian Gulf, even though Iran has little conventional power projection capabilities and its defense budget in 2016 was a mere $12.3 billion (compared with $63.7 billion for Saudi Arabia, $17.8 billion for Israel, and more than $600 billion for the United States).40 To make the case for economic sanctions and possibly a future preventive strike, hard-line anti-Iranian groups repeatedly accused Tehran of actively seeking nuclear weapons (just as they once accused Saddam Hussein) even though National Intelligence Estimates have repeatedly concluded that Iran has no active nuclear weapons program. Moreover, Iran’s nuclear potential was capped by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015.41 Or they insist that Iran’s local proxies (e.g., Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Assad regime in Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen) make up the sinews of an emerging “Persian Empire,” a view that overstates the influence of these various groups and Iran’s ability to direct them.42
Threat inflation has consistently shaped the American response to international terrorism. The danger is not zero, of course, but the actual threat that Al Qaeda, ISIS, or other terrorist organizations pose does not merit the obsessive attention it has received. Even if the toll from the 9/11 attacks were included, the risk that an American will be killed or injured in a terrorist incident is vanishingly small—perhaps 1 chance in 4 million each year—yet U.S. officials continue to describe foreign terrorists in ominous terms.43 In 2014, for example, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel described the Islamic State (or ISIS) as a threat “beyond anything we’ve ever seen,” and in 2015 FBI director James Comey said it was “the danger we’re worrying about in the homeland most of all.”44 Testifying about ISIS in June 2016, then–CIA director John Brennan told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “I have never seen a time when our country faced such a variety of threats to our national security.”45 Organizations such as ISIS posed a considerable danger to the people they ruled and caused some degree of harm elsewhere, but they remain weak and under-resourced actors and are nowhere close to being an existential threat.46
According to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, for example, there were forty-seven Islamic terrorist attacks in Western countries between 2012 and 2016. These attacks killed 269 people, more than half of them in a single attack in a Paris nightclub in November 2015.47 By comparison, roughly fifteen thousand Americans are murdered each year by guns, yet the federal government does little to address the problem, even in the wake of such mass shootings as the Sandy Hook massacre in December 2012 or the slaughter of fifty-eight concertgoers in Las Vegas in October 2017. Lightning strikes and bathroom accidents take more American lives than terrorism, yet no politician is declaring a War on Thunderstorms or announcing a National Campaign against Slippery Tile.
To say that government officials, think tank experts, and assorted interest groups inflate threats is not to say that the United States faces no dangers or to imply that hostile powers cannot affect U.S. interests. However, overstating the dangers they pose is still costly when it distracts U.S. leaders from other problems or leads them to act in ways that make the problem worse.
“OUR ENEMIES ARE HOSTILE, IRRATIONAL, AND IMPOSSIBLE TO DETER”
In addition to exaggerating enemy capabilities, threat inflators typically describe potential enemies as irrevocably hostile, irrational, and impossible to deter, which in turn implies that they must be removed. In the run-up to the Iraq War, for example, the Brookings Institution senior fellow Kenneth Pollack’s influential book The Threatening Storm portrayed Saddam Hussein as an inveterate risk-taker who could not be contained—an alarmist portrait that helped convince skeptical liberals that it would be too dangerous to leave Saddam in place.48
In much the same way, those who called for tougher sanctions and/or preventive war against Iran routinely portrayed its leaders as fanatical religious extremists who would welcome martyrdom and would therefore be quick to use nuclear weapons. Former CIA director R. James Woolsey described Iran’s leaders as “theocratic, totalitarian, and genocidal maniacs”; the columnist Bret Stephens (formerly of The Wall Street Journal and now at The New York Times) justified preventive war by describing Iran as a “martyrdom-obsessed, non-Western culture with global ambitions”; and Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute suggested that “it is plausible [Iran’s leaders] might believe Islamic interests make Iran’s weathering a retaliatory nuclear strike worthwhile.”49 Such portraits occasionally reached absurd lengths, as when the neoconservative historian Bernard Lewis warned in a 2006 Wall Street Journal op-ed that Iran might be planning a nuclear attack on Israel and went so far as to identify the date: August 22.50 That particular date was significant, Lewis argued, because it “is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to ‘the farthest mosque,’ usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back (c.f., Koran XVII.1). This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world.” In Lewis’s portrayal, Iran’s leaders were suicidal religious fanatics awaiting a symbolic date on which to launch a mass slaughter in which they would also perish. August 22 came and went with no attack, of course, and Iran has no active nuclear weapons program today. Remarkably, this bizarre and baseless alarm appeared not on some obscure far-right website, but on the op-ed page of one of the country’s most influential newspapers.
A variation on this same theme is to claim that animosity toward the United States does not arise from straightforward conflicts of interest or opposition to specific U.S. policies, but rather from a deep-seated antipathy to what America stands for. As George W. Bush famously explained after the September 11 attacks, the terrorists “hate our freedoms.” Or as he subsequently told a prime-time news conference, he was “amazed that people would hate us … because I know how good we are.” In fact, numerous independent surveys have shown that anti-Americanism around the world is largely a response to U.S. policy—not a rejection of “American values.”51
Nonetheless, threat inflators still depict foreign opposition as the result of deep antipathy to America itself. This argument reinforces a key article of faith for proponents of liberal hegemony—the idea that the United States is an exceptional country that is always a force for good in the world—and implies that only misguided or evil people could possibly oppose whatever the United States does around the world. As such, insisting that opponents “hate our freedoms” conveniently absolves Washington of any responsibility for foreign hostility and implies that nothing can be done to reduce it. If America’s enemies are implacably hostile no matter what we do, the only option is to eliminate them. Or as Vice President Dick Cheney put it in 2003, “We don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it.”52
“AXES OF EVIL”
Another obvious way to magnify threats is to assume that adversaries form a unified coalition seeking to inflict maximum damage on U.S. interests. During the Cold War, for example, hawks repeatedly warned of a “Communist monolith” and were slow to recognize the deep schisms that divided the international Communist movement. Even after the Sino-Soviet split was apparent, top officials still saw left-wing governments as reliable Soviet allies, despite the abundant evidence that Moscow had difficult relations with most of its Third World client states.
Yet U.S. officials and foreign policy analysts continue to invoke similar arguments today, repeatedly lumping states and groups together though they have little in common. During the 1990s, for example, top U.S. officials and foreign policy professionals repeatedly warned of th
e threat from a motley collection of “rogue states” whose ranks included Iraq, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Serbia, Libya, and Syria.53 None of these recalcitrant regimes was especially powerful, and there was little cooperation among them; indeed, some of them—such as Iran and Iraq—were bitter enemies.
Yet in 1992 the U.S. House of Representatives Task Force on Terrorism released a staff report entitled “Tehran, Baghdad & Damascus: The New Axis Pact,” which warned of a “Tehran-controlled strategic axis stretching from the Mediterranean to Iran … an integral part of a much larger ‘Islamic Bloc’ that is being consolidated by Tehran and that also includes Sudan and the Muslim countries of central and south Asia.” At about the same time, Clinton’s first national security advisor, Anthony Lake, warned of a growing threat from what he termed “backlash states” and called for vigorous U.S. action to contain them.54 The states on Lake’s list—Cuba, Iraq, Libya, Iran, and North Korea—were all at odds with the United States for different reasons, but none posed a grave threat to U.S. security and there was hardly any coordination between them. Taken together (with Serbia and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan thrown in), these states had a combined GDP of $165 billion in 1998. That amount was about one-third smaller than America’s defense budget in the same year and equal to a mere 2 percent of the U.S. economy. Yet lumping these diverse and largely isolated states under the general heading of “rogue state” made them sound like a unified gang of dangerous international troublemakers.
George W. Bush did the same thing in his 2002 State of the Union speech, famously placing Iran, Iraq, and North Korea into the “Axis of Evil.” According to former White House speechwriter David Frum, this misleading phrase was chosen deliberately to hype the threat and help justify military action against Iraq.55 The Bush administration also went to great lengths to link Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in order to make Iraq seem hostile, dangerous, and deserving of a U.S. attack. The disinformation campaign worked so well that a majority of Americans erroneously believed that Iraq had been directly involved in the 9/11 attacks.
The Hell of Good Intentions Page 17