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August 11 - August 27, 2020
How did our country go so quickly from unique global power to a country that is widely perceived as no longer willing to bear the costs or accept the responsibility of global leadership—or even capable of governing itself effectively?
The answer is, essentially, the failure of too many of our recent political leaders to understand the complexity of American power, both in its expansiveness and in its limitations.
Eisenhower was the only post–World War II president who was a career military officer, a five-star general who became commander in chief. He brought to the presidency great personal strengths, strategic insight, and leadership skills. He understood the uncertainties and risks always attendant to military operations. He knew the limits of military power in the nuclear age. He had the experience and confidence—and rank—to tell his generals no. Above all, he grasped the importance of diplomacy, economics, communication, and the many other tools of influence. He understood and wielded power in all
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Eisenhower, Reagan, and Bush, three presidents with very different backgrounds, wielded all the instruments of American power with extraordinary skill. This book assesses their post–Cold War successors’ decisions in fifteen critical places, the effectiveness of their use of the instruments of American power, and the lessons we must learn for the future.
We must use the American symphony of power to ensure that authoritarianism, twice defeated in the twentieth century, does not prevail in the twenty-first.
President Harry Truman had cut the defense budget from $91 billion to around $10 billion and wanted to reduce it further, to between $6 billion and $7 billion. Truman turned to nonmilitary forms of power to thwart further communist expansionism.
Relying initially on our nuclear monopoly and subsequently on our nuclear deterrent, during the first dozen or so years of the Cold War Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy approved assistance to Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO and other alliances, and a strategy of containing the USSR. They also promoted the establishment of international financial institutions at Bretton Woods, the formation of the United States Information Agency and the United States Agency for International Development, and the use of CIA covert actions around the world—all nonmilitary
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In both conflicts, the United States ignored Machiavelli’s warning that wise leaders should be content with victory.
All things considered, it is not surprising that allies and friends have begun to look elsewhere for collaboration and protection.
Presidents need to assign missions to the military that it can actually accomplish. An always, “can-do” military leadership must be willing to tell the commander in chief that a given mission cannot be accomplished with the resources and/or timetable the civilian leadership is prepared to provide.
Based on the history of the last five decades, presidents need to be mindful that every war is predicted to be short, and that prediction is almost always wrong.
While we worry about nuclear proliferation, in truth, cyber weapons are more likely to be used than nuclear weapons because they are potentially more damaging, much less risky for the attacker, and tougher to trace to the aggressor.
Often overlooked in the United States is that while we have many allies, Russia and China have none, only clients, giving the United States a unique advantage.
Communism as an ideology is dead, but authoritarianism has deep roots in human history and is alive and well. Indeed, it is thriving. Ideology is a source of national power; we forget the ancient appeal of authoritarianism, and the significance of our own concepts of liberty and human rights, at our peril.
A distinctively American instrument of power is the broad range of nongovernmental institutions that are great assets in our interactions with the rest of the world.
When most American businesses build manufacturing facilities or stores, or develop natural resources such as oil and gas abroad, they tend to hire local inhabitants, pump money into the local economy, and pay attention to local environmental and social issues. To build and sustain relationships with local and national leaders, they often will fund improvements such as construction of schools, roads, wells, and the like. They do these things not out of altruism (although there is some of that) but simply because it is good business.
American universities are another instrument of power through the foreign students they educate here and through the hundreds of thousands of U.S. students who go abroad to study. Beyond this, thousands of faculty specializing in agriculture, human and veterinary medicine, the environment, hydrology, education, and countless other fields work in developing countries not just doing research but helping to improve lives. I will refer repeatedly to the extraordinary contribution such civilian expertise could make by augmenting and improving government development assistance programs.
Private U.S. foundations and charitable and religious organizations make a difference in the lives of millions of people in developing countries.
Our preoccupation with Nazism and communism in the West for the last eight decades led us, I believe, to forget the power of religion in shaping history, including long and bloody wars over religion as well as the role of religion in empowering and legitimizing secular authority.
Nationalism is a remarkably strong and enduring instrument of power.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia has exploited the power of nationalism with particular effectiveness. I think the West never fully appreciated the magnitude of Russians’ humiliation over the collapse of the Soviet Union, perhaps because many foreigners didn’t grasp that it also represented the end of the nearly four-century-old Russian Empire. The domain ruled from Moscow shrank to the size of Russia prior to the reign of Empress Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century, and its population fell from nearly 300 million to 140 million. The 1990s were a period of great economic distress
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He’ll sit right here and he’ll say do this, do that! And nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating. —HARRY TRUMAN ON THE ELECTION OF DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
The United States would, in fact, get little credit among Muslims for its humanitarian effort in Somalia (and in Bosnia) in no small part because of a failure to harness the power of strategic communications—the absence of any concerted program to publicize our actions in the Muslim world.
The disaster in Mogadishu is an enduring example of the failure to properly exercise both military and nonmilitary power.
As would be the case too often in the years to come, reasonably free and fair elections were seen in Washington as synonymous with democratization, with little attention given to the need for long-term institution-building, rule of law, accountability, and the other pillars of a truly free society.
The enthusiastic support for regime change in Iraq in late 1998 among both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and by a Democratic president and his senior advisers quickly faded from memory after President George W. Bush (Bush 43) invaded Iraq in March 2003. Regime change was a great idea when all it involved was rhetorical chest-thumping; over time, as the reality—and costs—of making it happen sank in, too many sunshine soldiers on Capitol Hill and from the Clinton administration fled the political battlefield. —
we simply had no idea how broken Iraq was before the 2003 war—economically, socially, culturally, politically, and in its infrastructure and education system. Moreover, “decades of rule by Saddam, who didn’t give a damn about the Iraqi people; the eight-year-long war with Iran; the destruction we wreaked during the Gulf War; twelve years of harsh sanctions—all these meant we had virtually no foundation to build upon in trying to restart the economy, much less create a democratic Iraqi government responsive to the needs of its people,” I wrote.
Authoritarianism came naturally to Putin, who didn’t have it in him to become a democratic politician. Suppression of his enemies and critics began early but accelerated after the color revolutions. By his third election as president in 2012, he had eliminated the autonomy of the regions, subordinated the judiciary, exerted control of the mass media, and shown he would eliminate any stubborn adversary—literally.
Clinton had told an international conference in Lithuania after the Russian election that “the Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted, and that means they deserve fair, free, transparent elections and leaders who are accountable to them.” Her remarks infuriated Putin, who never forgot Clinton’s “interference” in Russia’s elections. One indication of just how hostile Putin had become to the United States was his turndown of Obama’s invitation to the May 18–19, 2012, G8 meeting at Camp David.
On the crown prince’s third visit to Moscow, just weeks after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, he received a warm public handshake from Putin.
In Africa, the Russians have become the largest source of weapons and are seeking to expand their political and economic influence.
Beginning with the color revolutions in 2003 through 2005, I believe Putin has been convinced the United States seeks to foment regime change not just on Russia’s periphery but in Russia itself. American support for human rights, democracy, and reform, he believes, is a facade behind which the United States seeks to bring to power friendly governments responsive to its interests.
The 2014 “coup” in Kyiv was the last straw and set Putin on a course to do everything in his power to create turmoil, division, and chaos in the West, weakening governments and multilateral institutions such as NATO and the EU. The more problems he could create in the West, the more the governments would be forced to turn inward and be less inclined to counter Russia’s authoritarianism at home and its militant posture on the periphery.
The United States wasn’t Putin’s only target. The Russians worked to help the election campaign of French right-wing nationalist Marine Le Pen through hacking and spies, and even loaned her millions of euros during the election. They engaged in aggressive cyber espionage of German politicians, meddled in the December 2016 referendum on the fate of the Italian government, and even tried to influence the 2016 Brexit vote in the United Kingdom. Putin has shown a willingness to do anything to weaken the EU, European cooperation, and multinational democratic institutions.
The United States arrived late to the use of this new instrument of power for political or economic purposes against other nation-states.
In retrospect, failure to expand NATO would have left us without an important political and military instrument of power for deterring and containing a resurgent, revanchist Russia.
In Iraq, the U.S. intervened and occupied, and the result was a costly disaster. In Libya, the U.S. intervened and did not occupy, and the result was a costly disaster. In Syria, the U.S. neither intervened nor occupied, and the result was a costly disaster. —PHILIP GORDON, SPECIAL ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT AND WHITE HOUSE COORDINATOR FOR THE MIDDLE EAST, NORTH AFRICA, AND THE GULF REGION, 2013–15
Once Obama decided to intervene in Libya, I believe two strategic mistakes were made. The first was agreeing to expand the original NATO humanitarian mission from protecting the people of eastern Libya against Qaddafi’s forces to regime change.
Qaddafi had given up his nuclear program and posed no threat to U.S. interests. There is no question he was a loathsome and vicious dictator, but the total collapse of his government opened the way for more than 20,000 shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles and countless other weapons from his arsenals to find their way across both Africa and the Middle East, sparked a civil war, opened the door to the rise of ISIL in Libya, and created the opportunity for Russia to claim a role in determining Libya’s future. The country remains a dangerous shambles. As in Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, and
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economics would dominate the U.S.-Chinese relationship—and almost entirely on Chinese terms. It was an instrument of power China wielded with great effectiveness under successive leaders.
I cannot emphasize enough that the objective of military intervention must be clear, and the strategy and resources committed must be adequate to achieving the objective. Too often presidents, sensitive to domestic politics, are tempted to use just enough military force to avoid failure but not enough to achieve success. Such an approach is not only strategically unwise and imprudent, it is also immoral. The lives of American men and women in uniform must not simply be thrown at a problem and squandered in halfhearted or impulsive efforts. In the use of military force, the Yoda rule from Star
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Presidents and commanders alike should be mindful of the perils of overreach, that is, achieving the original objectives but, with success, feeling emboldened to pursue more-ambitious goals (arguably, Bush in both Iraq and Afghanistan; Clinton in Haiti and Somalia). Know when to stop.
Presidents should scrupulously avoid red lines and ultimatums unless they are fully committed to enforcing them militarily. Once a president cocks the pistol, he or she must be ready to fire it. Obama’s failure to enforce his own red line with respect to Assad’s use of chemical weapons against the Syrian opposition echoed around the world—but especially in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang. Trump’s repeated threats of massive military attacks on North Korea and Iran by the end of 2019 increasingly were viewed by adversaries as hollow bluffs.
I am convinced most of the public wants the United States to be seen by others as the world’s strongest advocate for liberty and democracy—a beacon of reassurance to the oppressed.
