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September 11 - October 12, 2020
Still, most histories report that there were probably fewer than fifty and no more than one hundred U.S. military casualties due to direct Soviet action between 1947 and 1991.
Since we rarely know where and when we will next use military force, our military forces must be trained and equipped to have the greatest possible versatility across the broadest possible spectrum of conflict.
At least 250 diplomats have died in the line of duty. It is not a role for the faint of heart.
In fact, the United States ranks twenty-first in the world in development assistance spending as a percentage of GDP, with countries such as New Zealand, Portugal, and Greece ranking ahead of us.
The importance of communicating America’s message as a critical element of foreign policy became all too clear after al-Qaeda’s attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq. Incredibly, by 2005–6, the terrorists seemed to have a better and more effective communications strategy than we did.
Interfering in other nations’ elections is not new, but the tools available today are qualitatively an order of magnitude more pervasive and effective.
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.
Because members, both Republicans and Democrats, cannot abide the thought of a single Defense program in their state or district being cut by a dollar, the department is also stuck with paying for a significant number of bases and facilities—probably 25 percent of the total—it neither wants nor needs.
How ironic that so many members of Congress who decry the use of our military to deal with problems abroad have contributed to dismantling, starving, or restricting the nonmilitary instruments of power.
Nearly everyone in the administration knew the United States could not, on its own, bring regime change to Iran. Such change could only come from within.
The clerics control the levers of power and the guns, but so did the shah. Even though the ayatollah and his minions are far more ruthless than the shah had been, the country they rule is changing. Forty percent of the population is under twenty-five. In 1980, 37 percent of the people were literate; today 81 percent are. There are more women in Iranian universities than men. In the first Iranian parliament forty years ago, 61 percent of the members were clerics; today they make up only 6 percent.
The larger question for the United States is how to provide humanitarian assistance to a dysfunctional country without getting drawn into its internal conflicts and politics, as happened in Haiti even as the Somali disaster was playing out.
The world knows nearly instantly of our military actions abroad, but we seem to think the selfless actions we take aren’t worth publicizing effectively. That is not how a country best builds or exercises power.
power misused is power lost.
The lesson: a tough, courageous national leader willing to use force against the bad guys yet also work with all elements of society is a precondition for American success in stabilizing a country long racked by violence, and a leader committed to democratic principles and strengthening (or creating) a country’s rule of law and institutions is a huge bonus.
Bearing in mind these lessons from success in Colombia, the next time an American president is urged to intervene in a Third World country’s internal conflict, stabilize the situation, or improve governance, he or she should ask these questions: Do we have a strong, competent, reasonably honest local leader committed to democracy and the rule of law with whom to partner? Are there existing indigenous institutions and capabilities on which to build? With our help, can the country’s military and police be strengthened sufficiently to carry the burden of the fight? Is the effort likely to be
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What began as one of the smallest, least expensive, shortest, most successful military campaigns in American history morphed into a generation-long conflict, the longest war in our history. Things went so wrong for the same reasons other post–Cold War imbroglios did: hubris in believing we had the power to transform a country and its culture, strategic mistakes, and the weakness of our nonmilitary instruments of power that are so essential to any chance of success. There was a terrible mismatch between our aspirations to change Afghanistan and our ability to do so.
It tempted Clinton, Bush, and even Obama to think we could change other countries, despite history and culture, and make them more like us. Contrary to Machiavelli’s warning, they misjudged our power and our resources.
Corruption was part of the warp and woof of Afghan culture. And once we arrived, with tens of billions of dollars—much of it in cash—for contracts, construction, and services and to underwrite Afghan salaries, there was a frenzied rush to the trough.
We stayed in Afghanistan after 2002 to bring democracy and improve the quality of life there, and yet during that period only a little over 5 percent of the money spent was allocated to the nonmilitary instruments for achieving those goals.
One of the enduring lessons of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union is that lasting change in a country will come only from within, though it can be encouraged and hastened through the use over time of nonmilitary instruments of power.
We debated whether to seek regime change in Baghdad, but Bush and all his advisers agreed that objective was beyond the scope of the authorizing UN resolutions and the expectations of our coalition partners. We also were convinced that trying to effect regime change would likely require us to occupy much of Iraq without any assurance we could capture Saddam, who, we thought, likely would lead an insurgent resistance. There would be no mission creep, no nation-building under Bush 41. We would accomplish our specific objectives and then come home.
The challenge Clinton faced from Saddam, though, was real, and one can only wonder if the president might have acted more forcefully had he not been in serious political trouble. It’s tough for a president to exercise power internationally when his power at home is weak.
The quick passage of PEPFAR was a reminder that a bold, well-conceived nonmilitary exercise of national power was possible.
When there was an outbreak of Ebola in West Africa in 2014, PEPFAR-recipient countries, including Nigeria, Uganda, and Congo, were able to contain the crisis because their PEPFAR-funded labs quickly identified the disease and trained and provided health-care workers with the capacity to intervene. Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and other countries that had not been part of PEPFAR because of their low rates of HIV/AIDS infection lacked the labs and health systems necessary to detect the Ebola outbreak and thus initially were unable to contain it.
I did not know that.
Although the Trump administration wanted to cut PEPFAR funding substantially in 2017, bipartisan support in Congress for the program prevailed. Thus, since 2008 funding has been sustained each year between $6.6 billion and $6.8 billion.
Indeed, a 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Project report found that of the eleven countries with the most positive views of the United States, nine were in sub-Saharan Africa and six of those were PEPFAR countries.
The program was tailored to each recipient country and, through data-driven processes, adapted at the local level to local conditions. The government of each country had to take responsibility (and this, in turn, had the unexpected benefit of strengthening the role of U.S. embassies and ambassadors). Sustaining PEPFAR over such a prolonged period was critical to its success and allowed countries to build stronger institutions and capacity. Finally, strong accountability and transparency won support for the program.
PEPFAR also succeeded because Bush consolidated authority and budget for the program under one entity, the AIDS coordinator; therefore, different bureaucracies within the government would not be allowed to compete for dollars or authority, nor to step all over each other.
While President Trump tried to cut the MCC budget in 2017 and 2018—Congress restored the funding to earlier levels—the administration continued to support the organization’s mission. On April 23, 2018, Trump signed the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act and MCC Modernization Act, after it passed Congress with bipartisan support.
A 2008 report by the Brookings Institution described MCC as “one of the outstanding innovations” of the Bush presidency and noted that “no other aid agency—foreign or domestic—can match its purposeful mandate, its operational flexibility and its potential muscle.”
“MCC has the potential to become the world’s leading ‘venture capitalist’ focused on promoting growth in low-income countries.”
The satisfaction of quietly doing good works may be sufficient for religious orders; it is not for governments engaged in the exercise of power.
Even as Putin develops an ever more sophisticated Russian military, he has relied primarily on nonmilitary methods to achieve his goals.
Russia had the opportunity to take a different path that would have been far better for its people and the world, but Vladimir Putin chose otherwise.
The NATO-Arab coalition bombed the hell out of the place and then just went home, leaving Libyans to fight over the remains, creating another source of instability in the region and a new base for terrorists.
Through the inadequacy and ineptitude of American strategic communications, the magnitude of this assistance has been unknown to virtually the entire world.
One lesson from Syria is that American presidents should not call for another leader, however odious, to relinquish power without a plan for, or some prospect of, making that happen. It severely limits political and diplomatic options.
Had I been secretary of defense, I would have opposed outright military intervention in Syria, as I did with respect to Libya. In this, I believe Obama’s wariness was justified. There were just too many potential unintended consequences. But I would have counseled against a presidential “red line” and against telling Assad he had to leave when the declaration was purely for effect.
At some point, we must come face-to-face with reality. The only way to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear program is militarily—at the cost of a major war (potentially including China) with casualties at least in the hundreds of thousands on both sides of the DMZ and with the significant likelihood we will be unable to find and target all the hidden underground storage and deployment sites. With the instruments of power available, if neither force nor nonmilitary instruments will work, what option is left?
Perhaps, then, we should change the goal, lower our sights, and seek an agreement that limits the North’s nuclear weapons arsenal to a very small number of weapons; dismantles their capability to make more such weapons through either reprocessing or enrichment; bans all future testing of both nuclear devices and ballistic missiles; and establishes verification arrangements that provide reasonable assurance that these serial cheaters and liars do not cheat again—or, at the least, provide us with the capability to catch them before their cheating becomes strategically meaningful.
Failure of such an approach—and based on the record, I acknowledge it would be a long shot—would leave us no worse off than we are now. I can hear hard-liners gasping in horror, but what alternative do they have to offer apart from a growing North Korean threat (the status quo) or a major war?
Moreover, continuing attempts by the Trump administration to slash the USAID budget sent a strong, wrong signal to many countries that the U.S. government is abandoning the development assistance arena, thus offering China open-field running in the competition for markets and influence.
In January 2017, a new law came into effect requiring NGOs in China to register with the Ministry of Public Security, obtain permission for their activities, and refrain from fund-raising in China. When the new law was enacted, there were some 7,000 foreign NGOs in China. By 2019, there were just 400.
What China seeks from these institutions and from others it creates, such as the AIIB and the Commercial Courts, is the ability to shape the international system in ways that elevate its status, increase its influence, and facilitate the achievement of its strategic objectives.
The Chinese also clearly intend to fill the void created by America’s withdrawal from agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its diminishing participation in others.
It is clear, in fact, that China’s leaders are scared to death of their own people. As noted earlier, at the very beginning of the economic reforms forty years ago, Deng declared there would be no political reform, no lessening of controls over the people. Tiananmen Square was a fire bell in the night. The massive and prolonged protests in Hong Kong in 2019 served as a new, vivid reminder that the greatest danger to communist rule in China is not from abroad but from within—the Chinese people.
China’s rise does not require America’s decline. Whether the United States descends depends far less on what happens in Beijing than on what happens in Washington.
The Chinese accuse the United States of trying to contain or stop China’s rise. It is therefore a supreme irony that over the last forty years we have done so much to facilitate that rise. We have opened our economy to China; encouraged American companies to invest there; supported China’s inclusion—on advantageous terms—in international bodies such as the WTO; soft-pedaled criticism of its dishonest and one-sided economic policies as well as its suppression of human rights; invited Chinese students into our best universities (with access to the most advanced scientific and technological
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