Topic: Grand Strategy for a Divided America

[Thucydides]

America (and by extension we) need to consider competing "Grand Strategies" and how they affect us:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/12/03/the-rise-of-the-fifth-reich/

The Rise of the Fifth Reich?

Over at the always interesting Small Wars Journal, Tony Corn has a stimulating piece on the implications of the European crisis for world politics.  He sees a clueless German policy establishment recklessly moving toward an unsustainable quest for power reminiscent in too many ways of problems Germany has had in its past.

Germany, warns Corn, is planning to use its financial domination of Europe to remake the EU into an extension of German power — more or less the way that Prussia used the Zollverein to bring northern Germany under its control and then dominated the Bismarckian Reich through a rigged constitutional system.  Once that is in place, he writes, the Germans will continue their policy of deepening relations with Russia at the expense of NATO and transatlantic ties, and end Europe’s embargo on arms sales to China.

As an analyst, Corn sometimes goes to what we more placid types at VM consider overexcited conclusions about Eurasian power realignments.  Safely ensconced among the storied oaks and elms, gazebos, pergolas, ha-has, follies and deer parks surrounding the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens, we tend to take a wait-and-see attitude toward organizations like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization which Russia and China have sometimes posited as a kind of embryonic counter-NATO.  Corn, in our perhaps excessively complacent view, can be too quick to take vague Eurasian fantasies and aspirations about diplomatic revolutions as accomplished facts; it is easier to dream about firm Russian and Chinese anti-US cooperation than for those two countries to make it work.  But that said, there is no doubt that Corn’s industry, historical grounding and sensitive, even over-sensitive nerve endings give him the ability to produce original and striking ideas.

It would be truly foolish to ignore the reality that in many world capitals there are intelligent people who are not in love with the American world system that now exists, and who spend a great deal of time and energy thinking about how to cripple it.  Russia’s shrewd decision to invade Georgia in 2008 is an example of how, taking advantage of American preoccupation and Georgian overreach, a swift and limited Russian move was able to shift the regional power balance in its favor and catch the US off-guard.

Corn’s sensitivity to the possibility that actions Americans do not anticipate based on the very different priorities of policy makers in other parts of the world could radically reshape the global picture animates his article on Germany.  He begins provocatively:

    “If Clausewitz is right that “war is the continuation of policy by other means”, then Germany is again at war with Europe, at least in the sense that German policy is trying to achieve in Europe the characteristic objectives of war: the redrawing of international boundaries and the subjugation of foreign peoples….

Germany’s goal?

    A constitutionalization of the EU treaties, which would irreversibly institutionalize the current “correlation of forces,” and allow German hegemony in the 27-member European Union to approximate Prussian hegemony in the 27-member Bismarckian Reich.

This is much more exciting than the usual bland pap about European politics one reads in the US, and Corn’s analysis is deeply grounded in what serious people are thinking and writing in Paris, London and Berlin.

Corn goes on to analyze what this German Europe would mean for Russia and NATO:

    In a not-too-subtle way, German pundits are today hinting that Germany would be better disposed economically toward Europe if Europe, in turn, was better disposed politically toward Germany’s Russia policy – more specifically toward the Meseberg process initiated (without prior consultation with the EU or NATO) by Angela Merkel in May 2010.  The problem is, once you read the fine print, you discover that the Meseberg Memorandum calls for an EU-Russia Committee which would have greater powers than the NATO-Russia Council, would give Russia access to the EU decision-making process and, ultimately, would make NATO altogether irrelevant.

And on China?

    Or take EU-China relations. Since Germany is responsible for 47 percent of EU exports to China, German pundits are now arguing, the rest of Europe should give Germany the lead in the formulation of the EU’s China policy. The problem is, for all the rhetoric about Berlin having long forsaken military power and become a “civilian power” (Zivilmacht), Germany in the past decade has overtaken Britain and France as Europe’s main arms exporter. Since the Berlin Republic now defines itself almost exclusively as a “geo-economic power,” there is no doubt that the first priority of a German-dominated EU China policy would be to lift the arms embargo in place since 1989.  American taxpayers would thus continue to provide for the defense of the “civilianized” Germans (who spend only 1.3 percent of their GDP on defense) while Germany would be making money selling advanced military technology to America’s peer competitor.

So: is Germany planning to take over Europe, stab the US in the back and enter an entente with China and Russia?

Via Meadia thinks not, or at least not yet, though we don’t rule out some thoughts by some serious people in this general direction.  Certainly former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder occasionally seems to have let his mind drift towards vague and ambitious eastern visions even before Gazprom bought him.

In any case it is clear that too many American policy makers and opinion makers live in a bubble of conventional wisdom, comfortable assumptions and complacent ignorance.  Articles like this one are a useful corrective to that complacency, and even readers who end up thinking Corn goes a little over the top will appreciate the guided tour of European strategic analysis he provides.

The article also serves as a timely reminder that even in the Age of Asia, Europe still counts.  The euro crisis is a foreign policy crisis and not just a financial headache.  The future of the European Union matters deeply to the United States, and the level of US discussion about the implications of this crisis for the future evolution of the European project is depressingly low.

[tomahawk6]

The EU was an interesting experiment,but I think deserves failed state status.The economic policies of its members I think doom the EU to collapse.

[recceguy]

I think it failed the second that France and Germany decided that they would be the only two top dogs in the kennel and everyone else would follow their direction.

In other words, it was doomed to failure from the start.

[Thucydides]

American exceptionalism. The tools are there, but is the will?

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/102106

'Exceptional' America
by Victor Davis Hanson (Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow)
Is the United States simply one nation among many—or is it the leader of the world?

Accepting inevitable national decline is the new pastime of both the media and government elite. Some of the pessimism revolves around current federal financial insolvency. In response to the Bush administration’s borrowing of $4 trillion in eight years, Barack Obama, as a presidential candidate, called such profligacy “irresponsible” and even “unpatriotic”—only as president to trump Bush’s debt in three years.

Democrats now talk grandly of going back to the Clinton-era income tax schedules to balance budgets as was done between 1998 and 2000. Republicans counter that, since 2001, spending has soared to such levels that even a return to the old income tax rates would not come close to ending the serial annual deficits of $1.5  trillion without massive budget cuts—deemed intolerable by Democrats. The worried public senses that sometime very soon there are going to be either massive new taxes or historic cutbacks in federal spending, and most likely both.

Most sharp recessions lead to robust recoveries. But unemployment continues to be above 9 percent. GDP growth remains anemic. The old “misery index” is at an all-time high—as if this chronic downturn was somehow different from past post-war recessions. Near zero interest rates, unchecked borrowing, and record numbers on food stamps and unemployment insurance—all that “stimulus” has not jumpstarted a stalled economy.

Then there are the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are still fighting the Taliban, a decade after the September 11 attacks. The United States went into the heart of the ancient caliphate, removed Saddam Hussein, and established a consensual government, which survives to this day. And yet, Iraq is still considered an American tragedy given that a brilliant three-week removal of a dictator was followed by five years of insurgent violence that cost nearly 4,500 American lives. The acceptance that Americans have a massive military and yet cannot win wars quickly and permanently against outmatched enemies contributes to the growing sense of American paralysis.

The fiscal meltdown of September 2008 shattered American confidence in Wall Street. The sense of despair was heightened as conservatives blamed the disaster on profligate and politicized government mortgage agencies like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; liberals countered that the real culprit was the incomprehensible greed of speculators and grandees at firms like Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs. The public agreed with both analyses—and grew further disheartened as their 401k retirement accounts continued to shrink. That the panic occurred amid the unraveling of the European Union only intensified the sense of Western despair.

Despair, anxiety, and paralysis define the current public mood.

Amid such a depressing landscape, there are also the usual warnings of long-term pathologies. American K-12 students score far behind their counterparts in most industrial nations on math and science tests. Asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan have both longer work and school weeks, and greater labor productivity. Americans spend far more per capita on healthcare than other Westernized nations and yet do not enjoy greater longevity. The China chimera is raised constantly—as if its more impressive rate of economic growth will soon doom America to permanent second-tier status.

In reaction to this assorted bad news, President Obama sought to condition Americans to their newly perceived reduced role. In the trivial sense, Obama bowed to foreign monarchs, apologized for the supposed sins of America’s past, and once quipped, in relativist fashion, that America was now only exceptional to the degree that all peoples—such as the Greeks and the British—share such self-perceptions. More fundamentally, abroad a new “reset” foreign policy seeks to “lead from behind”—outsourcing military and diplomatic leadership to allies, while predicating U.S. intervention in Libya not on authorization from the U.S. Congress, but on a vote from the United Nations. Old enemies now seem to be neutrals—and so do our old allies as well. Sloganeering from the Obama administration—“multilateralism,” “reset,” and the “international community” —often seems aimed at conditioning now “soft” and “lazy” Americans who have lost “their competitive edge” to a new subservient role overseas.

Yet throughout history, national decline is rarely a result of uncontrollable external factors. It is usually a choice, not a fate. But if America’s future is well within our hands, should we be optimistic that we can still shape our own destiny to ensure continual American preeminence?

The building blocks of any civilization—demography, political cohesion and transparency, natural resources, social stability, military power, technological innovation, and scientific advancement—still weigh heavily in America’s favor. America is the third most populous country in the world; its fertility rate, with immigration, is about 2.1 children per woman far ahead of Russia (1.5), China (1.4), and the aggregate European Union (1.6). America is aging like all post-industrial nations, but at a far slower rate than its competitors.

The old misery index is at an all-time high.

Throughout 2008–2011, the world was plagued by costly riots, demonstrations, and strikes, from the so-called Arab Spring revolutions in North Africa, to the furor in Southern Europe over austerity measures, to little reported disturbances in China over everything from censorship and government confiscation of property to shoddy construction and government indifference to natural catastrophe. In contrast, the Occupy Wall Street protests were minuscule in numbers and, in many instances, peaceful. The Tea Party protests were likewise orderly and almost immediately led to peaceful political change in the 2010 midterm election.

In truth, the unique American Constitution and the two-party system grant America a degree of political stability simply unknown abroad. We lack the chaos of dozens of small parties and shaky political coalitions found in Europe, the brutality of Middle East dictatorship, and the authoritarianism of Russia and China. A multi-racial, multi-ethnic America suffers little of the religious strife found from the Middle East to the Balkans. There is little of the ethnic factionalism in America that is so common in Arab and African countries. And the aristocratic and class impediments to upward mobility that plague India and still bother the European Union are largely absent in the United States. American stability reminds investors that their money is safer in the United States, and translates into fewer economic losses due to social unrest.

The United States still possesses vast timber, agriculture, and mineral resources. In the last five years, its known fossil fuel reserves—petroleum, natural gas, coal, tar sands, and shale—and the ability to exploit them seem to have expanded twofold. Some forecasts suggest that should the United States develop all of its new known sources of energy in the American West, Alaska, the Dakotas, and offshore, it might have the ability to produce two-thirds of its daily carbon-based requirements within five years—a stunning and largely unforeseen development that will create millions of new jobs and cut drastically the current half-trillion-dollar cost of importing petroleum.

The recent nine-month-long Libyan War illustrated that NATO’s two most significant military powers—France and Great Britain—remain light-years behind the United States armed forces. True, China is developing an aircraft carrier, but it lacks the expertise and wartime experience of American carrier forces. We currently deploy 11 carrier battle groups, each one far more powerful than all the commensurate carrier groups of all the nations in the world put together.

It was common to suggest that the American military was “broken” in Iraq; in fact, enlistments are currently at record numbers, as all four branches of the military in 2010 met or exceeded their recruitment goals. The American military has trained an entire generation of officers in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose knowledge of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism is unmatched elsewhere in the world. In every category of military technology—armor, artillery, aircraft, ships, missiles, drones, robotics, small arms, and space—America remains far ahead of both its allies and rivals.

National decline is rarely the result of uncontrollable factors.

Recent surveys of higher education place American universities overwhelmingly in the top twenty internationally. In many surveys, California alone—Cal Tech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCLA—has more of the twenty top-ranked universities than any other nation in the world. Even during the supposed American downturn, most of the world’s largest corporations—Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobile, Chevron—remain American. It is unlikely that an Amazon, Apple, Facebook, or Google could have originated in Germany, Russia, China, or Japan, given their more highly regulated economies, less vibrant popular cultures, and less impressive universities.

All of this good news is not to deny that America does not have serious problems of an aging population, unsustainable entitlements, a clumsy tax system, growing regulations and impediments to business, disturbing ethnic and racial tribalism, and uncompetitive K-12 public schools. But we must interpret our current crises in two contexts: the manner in which the American political and social system can identify and address such challenges and the degree to which these same problems challenge our competitors.

By those standards, our recent history suggests that Americans can react quickly to serious threats. Bipartisan efforts piled up three consecutive budget surpluses from 1998 to 2000. Federal protocols prevented another massive terrorist attack in the decade following 9/11. High-tech corridors and idiosyncratic entrepreneurs have provided the world with innovative products like the iPhone, Google searches,  and discount shopping, whether of the Wal-Mart, EBay, or Amazon sort. Surging in 2008 saved a lost war in Iraq. America’s new drone forces can kill terrorists almost anywhere in the world. American engineering developed petroleum fracking that can vastly expand recoverable oil and gas. And the U.S. government helped save the financial system after the 2008 meltdown in a way that the European Union seems still incapable of doing.

This characteristic ability of the United States to respond to challenges, reinvent itself, and rebound is not to suggest that American preeminence is guaranteed in the coming decades. Rather, it means only that our destiny is in our own hands, should we have leadership that is intent on ensuring American predominance. The current rise of world hegemons like India and China recall similar warnings of a Nazi Germany in the 1930s, a postwar Soviet colossus of the 1950s and 1960s, a supposedly dominant Japan, Inc. during the 1970s, and a purportedly more moral and vibrant E.U. of the 1990s and 2000s. In every instance, the new ascendant rival eventually proved wanting in comparison to the United States. In other words, it is our decision whether China becomes our master or recedes, as did former twentieth-century competitors to the United States such as Germany, Russia, Japan, and the European Union.

In 2012, the public should ask the presidential candidates whether they believe America should accept a new role as merely one of many, or will they take the necessary steps to ensure our country’s traditional preeminence—as our perennially rebounding nation has done so often in the last seventy years.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a classicist and an expert on the history of war. A regular contributor to National Review Online and many other national and international publications, he has written or edited twenty books, including the New York Times best seller Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. His book The End of Sparta will appear in 2011. He was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Bush in 2007 and the Bradley Prize in 2008.

[E.R. Campbell]

Everything Victor Davis Hanson says, in the article posted just above by Thucydides, is true but I suggest that America is in in need of a broad "grand strategy" to define its aims for the next half century - something akin to what Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower enunciated in the 1940s and 50s. I see nothing of the kind from any of the major political parties, the emerging movements nor the commentariat.

A "grand strategy" is variously described as:

1. The purposeful employment of all instruments of power available to a security community (Colin Gray); or, better

2. The co-ordination and direction of all the resources of a nation, or band of nations, towards the attainment of the political object of the war – the goal defined by fundamental policy (B.H. Liddell Hart); or, better still

3. Using the collection of plans and policies that comprise the state's deliberate effort to harness political, military, diplomatic, and economic tools together to advance that state's national interest. Grand strategy is the art of reconciling ends and means. It involves purposive action -- what leaders think and want. (Peter Feaver)

Feaver goes on to say, correctly, that Grand Strategy is "constrained by factors leaders explicitly recognize (for instance, budget constraints and the limitations inherent in the tools of statecraft) and by those they might only implicitly feel (cultural or cognitive screens that shape worldviews)" and "Grand strategy blends the disciplines of history (what happened and why?), political science (what underlying patterns and causal mechanisms are at work?), public policy (how well did it work and how could it be done better?), and economics (how are national resources produced and protected?)."

In my view, Grand Strategy is, roughly as Feaver describes it, a a clear statement of a nation's aims presented within a sensible framework composed of that nations history, geography, culture and geo-political/economic situation in the world. America's geo-political and economic situations have changed, are, indeed, constantly changing; it is constrained by its history and culture but emboldened by geography. It is time for an American leader to enunciate the "vision" that lies at the core of Grand Strategy by telling America where she or he wants to lead it and, by implication, the West, including Canada.

[E.R. Campbell]

On the surface and given its headline, this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail, belongs in the Canadian Politics area but after reading it over a few times I decided that there is, really, little about the Liberal Party of Canada and lots about Grand Strategy and, in the final paragraph a sensible prescription for America, divided or not:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/second-reading/andrew-steele/are-liberals-up-to-challenge-of-total-strategic-overhaul/article2277475/singlepage/#articlecontent

Are Liberals up to challenge of total strategic overhaul?

ANDREW STEELE

Globe and Mail Update
Posted on Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Strategy is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and defined too little. Often, it is confused with the challenges of problem solving, optimizing efficiency or issue management.

The word comes from the Greek, meaning the commanding role of a general in a war. The conduct of individual engagements is tactics; the marshalling of the individual engagements into a co-ordinated, war-winning effort is strategy.

Texts from The Art of War to Clausewitz, added to the general understanding of military strategic thinking with concepts like positioning and the culminating point. Military strategy emphasizes work beyond simple planning to the adaptations that take place in response to enemy movements and changing conditions.

However, the military applications of strategy themselves define war as a subset of Grand Strategy or the organizing principals of nations, reducing even their own work to a tactic in the overall national strategy. Examples of Grand Strategy are the “Germany First” decision the Allies made in 1942, or the concept of containment during the Cold War.

While Grand Strategy is a fascinating topic, the academic work around it is not generally applicable. Study of grand strategy often focuses on the historical choices or current options facing international relations, rather than how to theoretically optimize strategy at its highest level.

One of the best definitions of strategy comes from business theory, and Harvard Professor Michael Porter. He argued that the essence of strategy was “choosing to perform activities differently than rivals do. Otherwise, a strategy is nothing more than a marketing slogan that will not withstand competition.”

The argument he makes is that strategy is about building a sustainable competitive advantage, ideally one that is virtuous and builds on itself constantly.

It must be something that competitors cannot mimic easily, otherwise it is not sustainable. It must be something that provides a real edge in differentiating your offering from others, or it is not a sufficient advantage to matter.

Perhaps most importantly, a good strategy is about trade-offs, and picking what you will and will not do. There will be excellent tactics offered up that could bring temporary gains, even great ones, but if they do not reinforce your sustainable competitive advantage, they may not be the right tactics.

A great example is Wal-Mart. Their low prices lead to market share, which gives them the ability to squeeze suppliers, which leads to lower prices, and so on. Each move Wal-Mart makes a decision increases its virtuous circle, whether it is a new IT system to link suppliers directly to their inventory system or an advertising campaign. The clarity of their strategic vision makes decision making more simple at a tactical level, and it makes it very difficult for rivals to catch up to their low price-market share-squeezed suppliers advantage.

Strategy as sustainable competitive advantage is a definition that can be translated to different settings. Just as there is no one “perfect” strategy for a nation state, the realities of a political campaign or business must be grounded in the resources available, the position of the organization on the competitive terrain, and the actions of the competitors themselves, finding a niche that builds and sustains a competitive advantage.

Applying this definition to politics, you can see that federal Liberals received a catastrophic thumping in this year’s election due to the loss of any sustainable competitive advantage.

Liberals are foremost the “party of power,” an organization whose ability to broker consensus among competing interests keeps them in office for long periods of time. However, the advantages of ideological flexibility, incrementalism and moderation become disadvantages in opposition, where clarity, boldness of vision and consistency are typical virtues.

As such, the Liberal positioning in opposition is a non-ideological “natural alternative government.” The Grits will wait, generally aligned with government orthodoxy but opposing the Conservatives on some symbolic issues, and then wait for the Tories to implode and the country to come back to them. They hold their position of alternative government by virtue of history, shouting down other challengers with claims of inevitability and strategic voting, and resting on a base of past clients of their brokerage politics.

However, this last election saw the Liberals eclipsed not just by the governing Tories but the traditional third party, erasing not just their government advantage but their opposition differentiation as well. At the same time, the Conservatives may have developed the skills and patience to recreate the strategic advantage over the past few years, adopting a more flexible and incremental approach compared to the Mulroney, Diefenbaker or Bennett eras.

As such, the Liberals will be hard pressed to use their past strategies to regain power, and will have to rebuild an entirely new strategy different from their typical “wait for the Tories to blow up” approach.

Canada as a nation has a strategy as well. I wrote a long piece for The Globe last summer on Canada's  Grand Strategy, which I won’t repeat here.

The Journal of Military and Strategic Studies includes some of the most interesting relevant work on Canada’s strategy. Jack Granatstein argues that Canada cannot actually have a grand strategy akin to great powers, because we lack the resources to sustain them.

What is intriguing about strategy in the national sense is the difficulty in identifying all but the most obvious examples. China, for instance, clearly has a strategy, but defining it is a difficult effort, far more complex than the classic “Germany First” strategy of the Allies.

But what is certain is that the United States has failed to develop a coherent national strategy since the end of the Cold War, and that absence can be directly attributed to the scattered and incoherent responses to international challenges like 9/11 and the Arab Spring, but also domestic failures in political consensus building.

Like the Liberals, the current struggles of the United States are strategic, and require the hard work and decisiveness to decide what they will do differently from competitors and – perhaps most importantly – to make the trade-offs of what they will no longer do.

The "trade-offs," what America will decide not to do, will have a real impact in the world. There are few nations able, much less willing to pick up all the pieces. China, for example, recognizes its dependence upon maritime trade and has begun, partially to combat piracy - even as it conveniently ignores the problem of Chinese pirates based in Fujian province and operating in the South China Seas, but it is not interested in becoming a global policeman. If, actually when America decides to make essential trade-offs who will pick up the tasks it "trades" away?

[Kirkhill]

There is something to be said for Principle #1:

To wit - Selection and Maintenance of the Aim.

Harper’s flat-tire federalism

Missing Bush

[E.R. Campbell]

There is something to be said for Principle #1:

To wit - Selection and Maintenance of the Aim.

Harper’s flat-tire federalism

Missing Bush

Paul Wells (Haper's flat-tire federalism) might be taken more seriously if he wasn't innumerate - like 90% of his journalistic colleagues.

The Canada First Defence Strategy does indeed promise to raise defence spending from $18 Billion to $30+ Billion BUT it also promises to cut defence spending as a percentage of GDP (a much, much more meaningful measure of the government's policy) - assuming any sort of reasonable GDP growth above, about, 1.5% per year. When, not if, the Great Recession ends (in, say, 2015/16) there is still 12 or 13 years during which the economy will likely grow by 2+ then 3+ and even 4+% per year making a sustained average growth rate of 2.5% per year from 2008 to 2018 a likely model and making the Canada First Defence Strategy a recipe for disarmament.

[Thucydides]

VDH discusses the idea that there is no "Grand Strategy" being followed by the United States:

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/winning-battles-losing-wars/?print=1

Winning Battles, Losing Wars

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On May 20, 2012 @ 1:43 pm In Uncategorized | 29 Comments

Can We Still Win Wars?

Given that the United States fields the costliest, most sophisticated, and most lethal military in the history of civilization, that should be a silly question. We have enough conventional and nuclear power to crush any of our enemies many times over. Why then did we seem to bog down in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? The question is important since recently we do not seem able to translate tactical victories into long-term strategic resolutions. Why is that? What follows are some possible answers.

No—We Really Do Win Wars

Perhaps this is a poorly framed question: the United States does win its wars—if the public understands our implicit, limited strategic goals. In 1950 we wanted to push the North Koreans back across the 38th parallel and succeeded; problems arose when Gen. MacArthur and others redefined the mission as on to the Yalu in order to unite the entire Korean peninsula, a sort of Roman effort to go beyond the Rhine or Danube. Once we redefined our mission in 1951 as one more limited, we clearly won in Korea by preserving the South.

In Vietnam, the goal of establishing a viable South was achieved by 1974. Congress, not the president or the military, felt the subsequent peace-keeping commitments and air support were too costly. They allowed a renewed Northern invasion that led to a second and lost war, and then were surprised that the North Vietnamese proved to be not campus radicals but hardcore Stalinists.

Panama, Grenada, and Serbia were successful small enterprises. In the first Gulf War, the strategic aim was to oust Saddam from Kuwait—or so we said. That succeeded, though it did not solve the problem of what Saddam would in the future do with his vast oil revenues. In the second war, the mission was to remove him, birth a democracy, and then leave Iraq better than before. That more ambitious aim too succeeded—not, however, without enormous costs.

Our strategic objective in Afghanistan was to oust the Taliban and ensure that it did not return to host terrorists on Afghan soil. The former mission was done over a decade ago, the latter hinges on the Afghans themselves after we leave. We vowed to rid Libya of Gaddafi and we did—and did not exactly promise that what followed would be immediately better than what we removed. In such special pleading, the U.S. has won its wars as it has defined them. Note the great success of the Cold War that ended with the destruction of the Soviet Empire.

Not So Fast

But wait—North Korea was on the ropes and now over a half-century later still threatens our interests, and with nukes no less. Should not the destruction of that system have been the real aim of the Korean War? North Vietnam united the country under a communist government, whatever way you cut it. Iraq was a mess, and its democracy may in time prove no more than an Iran-backed Shiite autocracy. In Afghanistan, does anyone think our Afghan partners will keep out the Taliban after our departure? Are the Libyan riffraff that took over all that better than Gaddafi as they kill tribal rivals, hunt down blacks, and desecrate military cemeteries? What exactly were we doing in Lebanon and what did we do after terrorists killed 241 of our people?

Strategy, What Strategy?

Why, then, does the use of American military forces not guarantee sure victory? The most obvious answer ib why we argue over the results of our interventions is an inability to articulate our strategic objectives—what exactly do wish to see follow from our use of force and for how long and at what cost? Do we wish to rid the world of Bashar al-Assad? We could do that quite easily and probably without ground troops. But would the region be more or less stable? Would Iran suffer a blow or find ways to fund more terrorists? Would the collateral damage from funding insurgents or bombing be worse or not as bad as the current Assad toll? Would the insurgents prove reasonable, or more like those in Egypt and Libya—or even worse? Many of our problems seem to hinge on explaining to the public what we wish to do, why so, how, at what cost it is to be accomplished, and what we want things to look like when we’re through.

Off the Table

Then there is the question of restraint—the inability to use our full forces to their full effect, in the manner that we did in World War I or World War II. From 1945 to 1989 the Cold War defined and limited the rules of engagement, given the nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union and its various trouble-causing clients who hid behind it. In Vietnam and North Korea there were certain options that were off the table because of fear the Soviets or Chinese might strike elsewhere or the fighting could descend into a nuclear exchange. “Limited” wars are now the new normal when so many countries can claim a nuclear patron.

Law, not War

But in the last twenty years there is an even greater restraint to operations—a moral, if not smug, self-restraint that has turned fighting from a quest for victory into a matter of jurisprudence in which how we fight a war is more important than what we actually achieve. The old Neanderthal formula — we will level your cities, defeat and humiliate your military, impose our system of government upon you, and then give you our aid and friendship as you reinvent yourself as a free-market capitalist democracy — certainly worked with Germany, Japan, and Italy.

But does anyone believe that we could have bombed Saddam as we did those in Hamburg? The country that tore itself apart over waterboarding three confessed terrorists who had an indirect hand in the murder of 3,000 Americans seems ill-equipped to inflict the sort of damage on enemies that in the past made them accept both defeat and redemption. War is now a matter of legality, or nation-building before, not after, the enemy is fully defeated, and that means, given the unchanging nature of man, that it is very difficult to win a war as in the past. Note, in this context, Obama’s drone campaign, which he expanded seven- or eight-fold upon inheriting it from Bush. Is it not the perfect liberal way of war? There is no media hand-wringing over collateral damage; no burned faces, charred limbs, headless torsos on the evening news; no U.S. losses; no prisoners at Guantanamo. There is only a postmodern murderous video game and a brief administration chest-thump that “we’ve take out 20 of the top 30 al-Qaeda operatives.”

Wars of Choice

We are forgetting yet another wild card: since World War II, all our serial fighting in Asia, Central America, the Pacific, and Africa has involved optional wars—fighting that did not question the very existence of the U.S. Other than a few stand-offs with the Cold War Soviets at places like Berlin or Cuba, the United States had not faced an existential threat since the end of World War II. September 11 might have posted such a challenge, since had bin Laden or his epigones been able to repeat the initial attacks, then air travel as we know it would have ceased, along with the idea of an open, modern commercial economy.

But other than the efforts to go after al-Qaeda, most of our fighting has been optional—whether in Somalia or Libya—and that makes it hard to galvanize the American public. (Which also explains why administrations try to hype WMD, or Saddam, or al-Qaeda, or Gaddafi, or the monstrous Assad in order to turn these peripheral threats into existential enemies.) In optional wars, the public can disconnect, as fighting can be conducted without disruption of the civilian economy. Victory or defeat does not immediately either please or endanger the public at home. And the result is that our leaders do not necessarily wage these wars all out, with the prime directive of winning them. (Note how the monster-in-rehab Gaddafi, whose children were buying off Western academics and putting on art shows in London, by 2011 was back in our imaginations to the 1986 troll, and how the Assads of Vogue magazine are once again venomous killers.)

Too Rich to Fight?

Then there are classical symptoms of Catullan otium: societies that become leisured like ours grow complacent (otium et reges prius et beatas perdidit urbes). They see military activity of all sorts coming at the expense of social redistributive programs: each dollar in aid campaigning abroad comes at the loss of one less new expansion in Medicare or Medicaid. Why then spend money overseas, when we could redistribute it for bread and circuses at home? A cruise missile is not seen as a wise investment in deterrence, but as a boondoggle that means one less Head Start center.

In postmodern America, we are all removed from mayhem, the killing of game for dinner, the sight of blood altogether. War is something “they” do, not our far more sophisticated selves, who have far greater claims on the federal treasury. Given that the therapeutic society of iPhones and Facebook believes that human nature has transcended violence, and no longer is prone to Thucydidean irrationality like fear, honor, or perceived self-interest, we believe that Libyan rebels are sort of like errant protestors of Occupy Wall Street, or the sometimes corrupt Chinese communist apparat that can be persuaded to be nice to Tibetans. That means war no longer involves good and evil, much less the elemental dirty means of using the former to destroy the latter.

Or Too Poor to Fight?

But wait, we are $16 trillion in debt, with serial $1 trillion budget deficits. Indeed, we are $9 trillion more in debt than when we went into Afghanistan. Any intervention now requires us to borrow the money from someone else. The truth is that for years we have been like Rome around AD 300 or Britain circa 1950—lots of supposed responsibilities, not enough money budgeted to fulfill them. The idea of a nation gearing up to smash an enemy when it has borrowed over $16 trillion on mostly social entitlements and pay-outs makes war a bad, if not absurd, investment.

On to Syria—or not?

With all this in mind, consider Bashar al-Assad. There is a growing movement in the press and Congress to go into Syria—either by arming the rebels, training them, or providing them air cover. But while we know that we have the power to do so (or rather can borrow the money from the Chinese to do so), do we have a strategic aim? What should Syria look like after the war (a constitutional state that would not support Iran, fund Hezbollah, undermine Lebanon, start a war with Israel, or build another reactor)?

Are U.S. arms and influence without ground troops able to see those laudable aims realized, or would a post-Assad Syria end up like Libya or Egypt—and would that still be better or worse than the present-day Syria, for us, for Christians and other minorities, for Israel, etc.? It is not enough to state the obvious: Assad is a U.S. enemy and a monster who is killing his own; we have the ability to take him out; ergo, we should.

Yet the same calculus applies to dozens of renegade states. If some advisor, pundit, general, or senator wants to go into Syria, then he must explain why Syria is more important than, say, the Congo or Somalia or the Sudan (or that we are following strategic self-interest in the Middle East, not humanitarianism)—and why we can leave the nation a far better place than under Assad, and how that is possible, given the nature of the dissidents and the fact it is the Middle East.

Remember, there is also an ironclad law about the Middle East, one we keep forgetting: Arab intellectuals (many of them educated or residing in Western universities) hate the U.S. for backing dictators; they hate the U.S. for intervening to remove them; they hate the U.S. for trying to impose postbellum democracy upon them; and they hate the U.S. for staying clear and letting Arabs be Arabs on their own.

Take out Saddam—”you created him in the first place”; stay to rebuild the country—”a neo-imperial enterprise to impose your values on a traditional society”; stay away and let him kill his own, or allow his successors to kill each other—”a callous disregard for the suffering of innocent others.”

Remember the critiques of Gulf War I and Gulf War II:

    Gulf War I: a needlessly large coalition that curbed our options, a hyped-up war that did not warrant the huge forces we deployed, a shake-down of our allies to turn war into a money-making enterprise, a cynical disregard for the Shia and Kurds who yearned for democracy, a video-game war in which we slaughtered the inept without incurring much risk or danger;

    Gulf War II: a too-small coalition that did not win international respect, too few forces deployed for the mission, a wasteful enterprise that did not demand monetary contributions from our allies, a naïve romance that Arabs could craft their own democracy, a dirty war in which we needlessly exposed our troops to mayhem and death.

Common denominator: whatever a Bush was for, critics were against.

We should posit one simple rule about intervening in the Middle East from now on. Please some honesty: we intervene for strategic advantage (no apologies for that), not humanitarianism. If those who advocate taking out Assad claim that it is to stop the bloodshed, then they must explain why there—and not where far more are slaughtered in Africa.

Again, state the proposed mission, debate the need and envisioned cost, articulate the strategic outcome, and then obtain it with overwhelming force—or otherwise forget it.

Article printed from Works and Days: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/winning-battles-losing-wars/

[Thucydides]

Without articulating the "Grand Strategy", everything could be lost due to indifference and domestic politics:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/05/22/shock-poll-51-of-voters-want-us-troops-out-of-europe/

Shock Poll: 51% of Voters Want US Troops Out of Europe

The Rasmussen polling organization is out with a shock poll that the entire Washington establishment needs to study: 51 percent of voters surveyed said they wanted all US troops out of Europe, now. Only 29 percent favored keeping the troops where they are.

US troops have been in Europe since World War Two. In the Cold War, they not only kept the Russians out; they gave the rest of the Old World the confidence that Germany would not come storming back for a rematch. The presence of US troops helped give western Europe its longest era of peace since Roman times.

Since the end of the Cold War the US presence in Europe has made much less sense to the average American, but foreign policy junkies like yours truly think that it still serves a purpose. Not only do those troops provide security in new NATO countries like Poland and the Baltic republics; US bases in Europe are important in dealing with terror and other problems in the Middle East and without the US presence in Europe it is unlikely that NATO in its present form can survive.

The Rasmussen poll notes that 29 percent of the public still supports the US presence in Europe and that 20 percent is undecided. My guess is that with strong presidential leadership those numbers would change. The arguments for the US presence in Europe are credible, clear and compelling.

Unfortunately the current White House doesn’t like to talk about the pointy end of American foreign policy. It uses troops and sends them into battle around the world, but the President doesn’t often use the bully pulpit to explain why we must fight, why we need a strong military, why we need to deploy, and why sometimes it is cheaper and safer to have our first line of defense thousands of miles from our shores.

My guess is that if President Obama went to leading Democratic and Republican officials, they would join him in an effort to explain the importance of the NATO alliance and our European bases — and that this effort would turn those numbers around.

But foreign policy in a democracy isn’t a chess game for elites. If you don’t build support for your policies and your commitments, the support ebbs away. It is very natural for Americans to wonder why we still have troops in Europe almost seventy years after World War Two and a generation after the end of the Cold War. And it’s reasonable for people to ask why we should spend so much of our money to provide a security shield for countries who refuse to carry their fair share of the common burden.

These are reasonable questions — and they have reasonable answers. But this administration hasn’t done nearly enough to lay out the facts and the ideas behind America’s grand strategy in Europe to the public. (To be fair, the same criticism could be made of its predecessor.) Our national leadership is taking the national commitment to Europe and to NATO for granted, and this is a major mistake.

Americans over a certain age don’t really need to be told why we built NATO and why we are so determined to keep it strong, but every new generation needs to reach its own understanding of the pillars of our foreign policy. Given that many colleges fail to teach much about American foreign policy (beyond, perhaps, some references to the horrors of Vietnam and the dangers of Islamophobia), and that the national leadership is largely silent on the subject of America’s strategy, it’s not surprising that support for our European deployments is weak.

My guess is that while Governor Romney and President Obama differ on some details about our NATO policy, they are in fundamental agreement on the main lines of our European strategy.  It would be nice to hear some of that during this campaign, but whether or not that happens, the Washington establishment needs to stop taking the public for granted. There is a certain arrogance at work here — a belief that public opinion can be ignored for decades and that the peasants will pay taxes and do what they are told without asking questions.

That isn’t how it works anymore, and unless the establishment figures this out, much more than the NATO alliance could be at risk.