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Posts tagged “realism”

Is ‘Restraint’ a Realistic Grand Strategy?

Posted on October 21, 2014

In his 2014 commencement address at West Point, President Obama was explicit in contrasting the wisdom of foreign policy “restraint” with the recklessness of certain unnamed past U.S. interventions abroad. “Since World War II,” Obama declared, “some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences, without building international support and legitimacy for our action, without leveling with the American people about the sacrifices required. Tough talk often draws headlines, but war rarely conforms to slogans.”

Barry Posen

American politicians from Rand Paul to President Obama now regularly deploy the rhetoric of restraint in their U.S. foreign policy speeches, and therefore MIT Professor Barry Posen’s “Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy,” is a timely articulation of how these broad sentiments might be translated into specific policies. Yet for a book length treatment of grand strategy, Posen’s conceptualization of national security is a surprisingly traditional one, centered around “sovereignty, territorial integrity, power position [i.e., a state’s total capability to defends itself relative to other states], and safety.” There are strengths to this approach, particularly in its ability to articulate precise recommendations on global U.S. military deployments. But in the topical context of ISIS and Ebola, it is ultimately an unsatisfying one that offers few conceptual tools to grapple with what confronts U.S. policymakers and military officers today: diffuse, highly complex, transnational security problems that also encompass vexing humanitarian and diplomatic challenges.

 

A World of Free Riders

The central problem with current U.S. strategy, according to Posen, is that the U.S. is expending massive economic resources to uphold a global order that benefits its allies far more than itself. For too long there has been an unquestioning national security consensus around what Posen terms “Liberal Hegemony.” This worldview insists that the U.S. maintains its power advantage relative to other potential competitors (e.g., China) by “a sustained investment in military power whose aim is to so overwhelm potential challengers that they will not even try to compete, much less fight.” Moreover, this power should be deployed on occasion “to defend and promote a range of values associated with Western society in general and U.S. society in particular.” With such expansive objectives, it is no surprise that Liberal Hegemony has not come cheap; Posen notes that “including expenditures on the [Iraq and Afghanistan] wars, the United States was spending 4.8 percent of GDP on defense in 2011, while… [U.S.] allies were averaging 2.25 percent.” Even if long-term spending at these levels is somehow financially sustainable, they add up to hundreds of billions of dollars that could otherwise have been invested into the U.S. domestic economy.

There are strengths to Posen’s policy of restraint. But in the topical context of ISIS and Ebola, it is ultimately an unsatisfying one that offers few conceptual tools to grapple with what confronts U.S. policymakers and military officers today: diffuse, highly complex, transnational security problems that also encompass vexing humanitarian and diplomatic challenges.

Posen effectively questions whether this level of military spending is really necessary across the globe when the U.S. enjoys a number of key allies that are mature, wealthy democracies. The U.S. covers such a disproportionate share of the military burden in these relationships that Posen argues they are in practice not alliances but rather U.S. security guarantees that have enabled an unhealthy and costly dependency among partners in Europe and East Asia. Japan is a good example of this “cheap riding” behavior, as it “does not spend more than 1 percent of GDP directly on its military.” It is in the context of Europe that Posen’s radical policy solution to U.S. allies’ free riding habits appear most sensible. The European Union represents the largest economy in the world and has been extraordinarily successful in its ability to end the potential for armed conflict between its member states for the foreseeable future. Yet European states generally, and in particular the three largest members of Germany, France, and the UK, have allowed the U.S. to cover much of the cost for their own security, and Posen advocates drastic reduction in the U.S. force structure to compel a change in this dynamic. Specifically, Posen argues that the “United States should withdraw its operational forces from Europe over a ten-year period, starting with ground forces,” with an eventual transition of NATO institutions to full European control or the transformation of these institutions into an entirely new security structure. Even in light of Putin’s actions to reclaim traditional spheres of influence through limited military intervention in countries like Ukraine, European Union member states are armed with an array of powerful diplomatic, economic, and (potentially) military tools to combat this threat without the presence of U.S. military bases.

 

A Clash of Nationalisms?

Posen rightly emphasizes the potency of nationalism since World War II and the fundamental role it has played in effectively mobilizing local populations against foreign forces to extract high costs. The Iraq War demonstrates that this is true even when sub-national forces (e.g., the Iraqi Sunni minority) reject the occupying powers, as in a globalized world these groups can also better exploit transnational networks to augment their manpower and resources. In the case of East Asia, however, the dynamics of regional nationalisms function differently, with the U.S. arguably acting as a stabilizing force between an ascendant China and its concerned neighbors, including, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and India. Will these powerful regional nationalisms clash to deleterious effect if the U.S. implements Posen’s call for a “withdrawal of a significant number of U.S. troops” from Japan and South Korea? Could this threaten to disrupt regional economic relationships that the U.S. economy relies so heavily on? Posen never fully examines these risks in detail. But the active U.S. encouragement for countries such as Japan—with troubled histories of militarism—to bolster their military capabilities would likely engender similar military build-ups from regional neighbors, especially if Japan decided to develop a nuclear deterrent. Since Posen argues this is a distinct possibility and a logical response in the wake of a U.S. military withdrawal, it would have been useful for these concerns to be addressed in greater detail.

Finally, an initial consideration of a U.S. policy of “restraint” in the Middle East in recent years has been profoundly destabilizing to the regional system. In many ways, the Obama Administration’s Syria policy has followed the two key principles of restraint as conceived by Posen: The reduction of a U.S. leadership role, particularly in committing military forces in any way to resolve regional conflicts, and instead encouraging regional allies to take the lead in solving these local problems. Yet Syria is situated in a largely non-democratic, regional system characterized by unresolved ethno-sectarian cleavages and bitter competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran. In this context, the absence of robust U.S. leadership has only spurred these regional adversaries, along with their allies, to support a bitter proxy war in Syria that has resulted in the deaths of nearly 200,000 people and displaced millions of refugees into neighboring countries. Far from shielding the U.S. and its allies from major costs, “restraint” has allowed a localized problem to metastasize into a regional catastrophe costing billions of dollars just to meet the basic humanitarian needs of Syrian refugees. Moreover, unlike previous regional conflicts like the Lebanese civil war, the instability has profoundly shaken neighboring states such as Iraq, leading to a situation where ISIS now controls territory and military resources far exceeding any previous jihadi militant organization. In light of these circumstances, the idea that the U.S. can smoothly reduce its military forces abroad and extract itself from a leadership role in addressing regional conflicts like Syria appears unlikely. In contrast to Posen’s central argument, the structure of the global political order might impose costs for a massive U.S. military withdrawal that actually outweighs its purported benefits.

 

[Photo source: Truthout.org via Flickr Commons]

 

Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy
by Barry Posen
Cornell University Press, 256 pages, $24.95

 

Michael Page Cicero Magazine

 

Michael Page is currently a graduate student at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has been a project manager with the research and stabilization consultancy ARK and has spent significant time working in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Turkey, and other countries in the Middle East.

Sorry Realists. ‘Containment’ Won’t Work Against ISIS

Posted on September 3, 2014

The rhetorical war over expanding direct U.S. military intervention into Syria—this time against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—has once again reached a boiling point. And in the long shadow of the Iraq War and its associated catastrophes, it is no surprise that the language of Realism is being deployed by those seeking to influence the debate against further involvement. With its vocabulary of prudent restraint, realist perspectives appear to resonate not only with a war-weary U.S. public but President Obama himself. Their argument boils down to this: While it is a brutal terrorist organization, ISIS fighters are not, as Harvard’s Stephen Walt put it, “the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” that U.S. officials and a hyperbolic cable media culture have portrayed them to be. Despite the group’s savage self-depiction and gruesome murders of civilians, according to realists like Paul Pillar, Washington needs to maintain a capacity for “cool-headed deliberation” to contains this threat rather than exacerbate a conflict situation in where we have little control and limited strategic interests.

Yet, for realist arguments that focus so heavily on the potential risks of intervention against ISIS, they conveniently elide or downplay the damaging consequences from maintaining the status quo. The conflict trajectories in Syria and Iraq are remorselessly marching towards one of two possibilities if the U.S. continues its policy of “strategic restraint”: The first is that local actors, primarily the Syrian and Iraqi governments, Kurdish politico-military groups, and the Iranian regime, summon the will and capacity to defeat ISIS. While a low-cost solution (for the U.S.) to neutralize the ISIS threat, the reality on the ground suggests this to be highly improbable. The more likely outcome is that ISIS will continue to consolidate and govern its expanding “caliphate,” which realists believe is both containable and susceptible to collapse. Unfortunately, this assessment fundamentally misreads ISIS’s growing capacity on the ground and existing intent, which together pose a real national security threat to U.S. interests that requires intervention now before it is too late.

 

Can Local Actors Actually Defeat ISIS?

In a January 2014 interview, President Obama inauspiciously analogized ISIS to “the JV team” when he compared the militant organization to Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda. Yet just four months later in late April, the “JV team” routed Al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra (JAN) in the province of Dayr Al-Zawr. This was a major strategic loss for JAN, as Syria’s eastern oil fields in the area were a major source of independent revenue. This pattern of local armed actors losing, often badly, to ISIS forces in areas of strategic importance extends to the Syrian and Iraqi militaries. It is true that the ISIS takeover of Mosul was enabled in part by local Sunni discontent against the Shia-dominated Iraqi security forces and the participation of other Iraqi Sunni insurgent groups such as JTRN (one of the Iraqi insurgent groups drawing from the discontent of Sunni ex-Bathists).

But it was ISIS alone that took over a series of Syrian-regime military bases in northeastern Syria late this summer, including the 17th Brigade base outside Al-Raqqa city on July 25, the 121 Regiment (i.e., Malbiya Regiment) in Al-Hasake governorate in late July, and the Tabqa Airbase in Al-Raqqa governorate on August 24. This quick series of victories stand in marked contrast to non-ISIS rebel achievements against the Syrian regime; despite controlling Al-Raqqa city and much of the province since February 2013, they were either unwilling or unable to overtake any of these Syrian regime positions.

Syrians I interviewed in Turkey, who despised ISIS as an organization, reluctantly admitted that the group’s governance structures were more than simply a component of a savvy media campaign.

This partial review of the conflict map highlights unwelcome realities for those hoping for a local response to deal with ISIS. The deterioration of state military forces, especially the Syrian army, has been severe. The Syrian regime’s operational dependence on Hezbollah and Iraqi Shia militias, the substantial defections of mainly Sunni soldiers to the armed opposition, and the cumulative attrition from battling rebel groups across the country for several years all put into question the idea that the Syrian regime would be an effective partner in battling ISIS and retaking lost territory (Of course, the reputational costs of a U.S. partnership with the Syrian regime—a policy some former US diplomats have proposed—that is actively committed to an ongoing mass murder and displacement of civilians, would be severe). Even the highly respected Kurdish peshmerga forces in Iraq lost territory to ISIS until they were 20 miles outside of Erbil, which then triggered limited U.S. airstrikes.

It has also been clear for some time that the Syrian regime and the Kurds are unwilling to commit serious resources against ISIS outside their base of support, which relegates much of eastern Syria and western Iraq to minimally contested ISIS control. In light of this fact, other commentators, including Paul Darling in this magazine, have proposed encouraging Iran to step into the breach and fight it out with ISIS. But this most realpolitik of arguments does not factor in the unintended consequences of further exacerbating the Sunni-Shia conflict. A sustained, direct Iranian role in fighting ISIS will inevitably tempt the Arab Gulf States to do even less to restrict jihadi financial networks in their countries from transferring funds into ISIS coffers in order to bleed a strategic adversary. Moreover, a frontline Iranian role will only solidify Iraqi Sunni support for the group, which has been instrumental in ISIS’s success in Iraq and the continued breakdown of the Iraqi state.

 

Let ‘the Caliphate’ Fail On its Own

If local actors seem both unwilling and unable to face down the ISIS threat, then the remaining alternative is to let ISIS try to manage its newly established “caliphate.” Former CIA official Paul Pillar has recently summarized this position:

Traditionally an asset that non-state terrorist groups are considered to have, and a reason they are considered (albeit wrongly) to be undeterrable is that they lack a “return address”. To the extent ISIS maintains a mini-state in the Middle East, it loses that advantage. Any such mini-state would be more of a burden to the group than an asset… The place would be a miserable, ostracized blotch on the map with no ability to project power at a distance.

At the core of salafi-jihadi movements’ success is the transformative role that violence plays in mobilizing individuals and communities around what were once unacceptable (and unimaginable) social norms. Without being propelled forward by violent territorial expansion, an isolated ISIS mini-state could quickly unravel. Unlike Al-Qaeda, however, ISIS has invested heavily in establishing rudimentary governance mechanisms. Syrians I interviewed this past summer in Turkey, all of whom despised ISIS as an organization, reluctantly admitted that the group’s governance structures were more than simply a component of a savvy media campaign; ISIS regularly collected taxes, adjudicated local disputes, attempted to improve essential services, and worked to convince experienced local civil administrators to stay in their positions through continued payment of salaries. Through these activities ISIS developed diversified sources of revenue, including indirectly from the international community. Syrians involved in transporting humanitarian aid into northern Syria noted that ISIS was the least corrupt actor in terms of allowing international aid to be distributed to local communities under its control (rather than appropriated by armed men staffing checkpoints as is often the case in non-ISIS areas), which generates a degree of popular support from a Syrian population at odds with their ideological extremism.

 

Why ‘Containment’ Won’t Work

Some commentators have hoped that this extremism will spark a popular backlash. But in other civil wars where insurgent groups were committed to ideologies far more radical than the local community, it has been the society rather than the organization that has adjusted their beliefs and behavior (The Shia community in southern Lebanon is a good example of this phenomenon, which had strong leftist and Communist affiliations immediately preceding the rise of Hezbollah in the early 1980s). The threat of this “mainstreaming” of extremist views in the center of the Arab world is not factored into Pillar’s analysis, nor are other costs ISIS rule will entail. The consolidation of an ISIS territory is the guaranteed elimination of large swaths of cultural history and the cleansing of all minorities unfortunate enough to fall within the caliphate’s contours. While not a narrowly defined American interest, political pressure will continue to build for U.S. intervention as the international community watches a deliberate process of cultural destruction and ethnic cleansing in real-time through the lens of ISIS’s slick media production.

Realist arguments also underestimate the threat posed by ISIS to recruit and deploy hundreds of committed militants if the organization is allowed to maintain control of substantial territory. ISIS’s ideology is fueled by the lived reality and production of violence, and a decision to eventually target the West is part and parcel of its fundamental principles. Additionally, the organization’s location in Syria and Iraq provides a much more convenient staging ground for attacks against the West than Marib in Yemen or Mali. It is why ISIS has been able to recruit so many fighters from Western countries. Just as the barriers for would-be jihadis to enter Syria are too low, the barriers to prevent them from returning undetected to execute attacks are not nearly high enough, and this risk is compounded by the increasing number of foreign fighters that have arrived over time.

Ultimately, ISIS is a national security threat to the West because its end goal is not the overthrow of a particular Arab regime or control of a specific country, but a violent reckoning with the global political order. Mobilized by a nihilistic creed and empowered by an operational capacity that is overwhelming exhausted Syrian and Iraqi military forces, ISIS is not “containable” without U.S. military intervention. The concept of “strategic restraint” may be popular in the current U.S. political climate, but it will only end up increasing the potential for successful ISIS actions against American targets and interests in the future.

 

Michael PageMichael Page is currently a graduate student at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has been a project manager with the research and stabilization consultancy ARK and has spent significant time working in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Turkey, and other countries in the Middle East.

 

[photo: Flickr CC: Matt Morgan]

The Myth of Obama’s Realism

Posted on June 24, 2014

Never before in the history of the United States has there been such a yawning gap between the rhetoric of American power and its application abroad. Let us recap: President Obama warned that if Bashir al-Assad used chemical weapons against his people in Syria, “that would change my calculus. That would change my equation.” That to liberal hawks and neoconservatives presumed military intervention. Yet, after Assad took a gallant leap over Obama’s “red line” last August and gassed hundreds of civilians, the United States did nothing militarily. Likewise, President Obama warned the Russians there would be “consequences for their actions” if they swallowed up Crimea by force. Yet, after Putin did just that, the United States merely slapped sanctions on a few Russian insiders, who mocked America’s flaccid response. As Les Gelb, author of Power Rules, writes, “Threats unfulfilled diminish power.”

Which is unfortunate because American threats used to matter. We didn’t even have to wield our military power, just arch our eyebrow, as it were, and countries would cower just on the presumption of avoiding our ire. Alan Henrikson, writing in 1981, called this the “aura of power.” Once one has to actually deploy its military, it has failed at deterrence. During the 1970 Jordan hijacking crisis, for example, the United States did not deploy troops, but quietly ordered an aircraft carrier to the coast of Lebanon and readied some C-130s at Incirlik airbase in Turkey. As Henry Kissinger would recall later, “Our silence would give them an ominous quality.” During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Moscow mobilized its forces in the southern part of the Soviet Union, Nixon raised the nuclear alert level and the Soviets backed down.

No such shows of force, however, are effective when the credibility of the leader of the free world is called into question. Never before have our alliances or commitments to our allies appeared on shakier ground. As Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, was caught telling a colleague, “the Polish-American alliance is worthless, even harmful, as it gives Poland a false sense of security. It’s bullshit.” Or consider Japanese concerns over whether the United States will honor its treaty commitments to protecting its territorial integrity. As one Japanese expert told the New York Times, “The Crimea makes us feel uneasy about whether the United States has not only the resolve but the strength to stop China. Between the Pentagon budget cuts, and the need to put more forces in Europe, can the United States still offer a credible deterrence?”

These are valid concerns, what with China declaring an “air defense identification zone” near disputed islands which would provide it justification to use force against enemy aircraft. Another concern is North Korea, which has threatened additional nuclear and missile tests. There is a widespread perception that Obama is all too willing to throw his allies under the bus, and does not back up his rhetoric with actions. Yes, the United States just dispatched two ballistic missile destroyers to Japan as a symbolic deterrent to North Korea. But nobody believes the United States will credibly use force if push were to come to shove.

The foundation of deterrence is both capability and credibility. Nobody doubts that the United States possesses sufficient military potential to deter any aggressor anywhere on the planet. Our military spending dwarfs that of the next ten countries’ defense budgets combined. But all the weapons in the world cannot restore the credibility of our commitments. We have a president whose naive devotion to changing the culture of Washington has crept into how he relates to the rest of the world – that the US is really powerless to make a difference and that our adversaries can be moved by persuasion and not power alone. He has ignored real crises in Syria and simply said effectively, well, we looked into that and decided our going in would make the situation worse. But in fact, his most senior advisers actually argued just the opposite, that arming the rebels back when they had momentum and comprised moderate secularists may have shifted the war’s balance of power.

Obama is so scared of a similar predicament – a kind of Bay of Pigs-style fiasco – that he has punted on nearly every major foreign policy crisis. This presidency possesses neither the shadow of power nor the substance.

No wonder that 58 percent of Americans disapprove of this administration’s foreign policy, according to the New York Times, the highest it’s been since Obama took office in 2009. Even one-third of Democrats think his foreign policy is a shambles. Obama’s backers describe his worldview as one of “restraint,” that he is acting strategically to avoid getting us into more foreign entanglements. Obama is said to be a big fan of the biography of McGeorge Bundy, Lessons in Disaster. But he is learning the wrong lessons from Camelot. As JFK asked Arthur Schlesinger after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, “What is prestige? Is it the shadow of power or the substance of power? We are going to work on the substance of power.” Obama is so scared of a similar predicament – a kind of Bay of Pigs-style fiasco – that he has punted on nearly every major foreign policy crisis. This presidency possesses neither the shadow of power nor the substance.

Nor does Obama’s policy of so-called “restraint” square with his penchant for making bold threats to our adversaries. If he truly wants the United States to retrench or be more selective with its commitments, then Obama should stop threatening the Assads and Putins of the world that they will incur the wrath of the United States when no such reckoning is in the cards. My beef with Obama is that his words (Nobody pushes us or our allies around!) does not match his rhetoric (Let’s boot Russia out of the G8!).

It would be easy to dismiss this as an unqualified former community organizer and cerebral law professor who found himself as the most powerful man in the world, and just isn’t comfortable wielding power on a global scale. He has preferred light footprints or no footprints at all to taking bold military actions, which explains his addiction to drones, and our “leading from behind” policy in Libya. Gone are the days when America could arch its eyebrow, as it were, and get its way. What Henrikson described as the “emanation of [American] power” is now a distant memory.

The trouble is not that the administration is trying to put out too many fires or lacks the bandwidth, as Stephen Walt and others have charged. It is that it has zero confidence in its ability to do anything at all, an incredibility of how power works sprinkled with a dangerous mix of naiveté from the Middle East to East Asia. This is not realism, as many of Obama’s liberal critics claim, it’s neo-isolationism dressed up as prudent restraint. It’s a blind faith that ignoring regional issues like Iraq will make them go away. It’s reacting to crises overseas, not preempting them proactively. So long as Obama believes that persuasion trumps power, he will have zero accomplishments on his foreign policy docket besides taking out Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, the Syrian war is entering its fourth year, the former Soviet Union is being redrawn by the Kremlin’s hawks, and the Middle East is coming unglued.

Joseph Nye of Harvard has written that incrementalist leaders (Dwight Eisenhower) tend to be more effective and leave a more indelible ink on the world than transformational ones (Woodrow Wilson). The trouble with Obama is that he is neither. He does not believe in the ability of American power to achieve its aims abroad. His speeches are inspirational, but his actions abroad are anything but. That is not a shrewd policy of restraint or realism – that’s just cluelessness on how the world works.