The past week has been an immensely clarifying — and
profoundly demoralizing — one in American politics. It has demonstrated beyond
a shadow of a doubt that the country's foreign policy establishment, along with its leading
center-right and center-left politicians and pundits, are hopelessly, perhaps irredeemably,
deluded about the role of the United States in the world.
From the start of the 2016 Republican primaries on
down through Donald Trump's surprise electoral college victory, the transition,
and the opening months of his administration, members of this foreign policy
establishment and these leading politicians and pundits have been united in
expressing dismay and alarm about Trump's lack of temperamental and
intellectual fitness to serve as commander-in-chief. Yet the moment Trump gave
the order to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airbase used in a chemical
weapons attack a few days earlier, all was forgotten and forgiven. Finally
Trump became president! Finally he put Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad in his place! Finally the U.S. showed it had
moved beyond former President Barack Obama's reluctance to use military force!
It's hard to know where to begin in formulating a
response to this outpouring of delight at the thought of Trump giving the order
to launch a barrage of deadly weapons at a sovereign nation over 5,000 miles
from American shores. But let's start with absolute basics: Launching even one
missile at another country is not, as we euphemistically like to presume, a
"military action," a "military operation," or even a
"humanitarian intervention." It is an act of war. Full stop. That
many countries in the world, including Syria, are far too weak to consider
launching a retaliatory counter-attack against the United States for such a bombardment
is utterly irrelevant. How would a more powerful country — China, for example —
respond if we fired even one cruise missile at its territory? How, for that
matter, would we respond if China fired just one at us?
The answer is patently obvious: We would respond
furiously, and with complete justification, because it would be an act of war.
How people who spend their lives thinking about international affairs can write
about America's actions in the world without placing this fact at the center of
their analysis is nothing short of astonishing — and a confession that their
thinking is really a form of ideological propaganda that places the United
States in a different category from every other country in the world. (American
exceptionalism might be a relatively salutary civic myth, but it is a myth all
the same. It has no business playing a role in the policy recommendations of
informed analysts.)
Unconvinced? Then consider another basic fact: The
aforementioned foreign policy and centrist establishments were united in
considering Obama averse to using American military might. Yet during the eight
years of his presidency, Obama bombed at least nine countries: Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, the Central African Republic, and
the Philippines.
If that's what "reluctance" to use force looks like, I
wonder what it would take for these critics to call someone a warmonger.
What these critics really mean is that Obama didn't
embrace a policy of overthrowing governments around the world ("regime
change"), and that he didn't think it was a good idea (either for the U.S.
domestically or for our relations with the rest of the world) to brag in
moralistic terms about our motives in seeking to advance our interests
militarily (which Obama mainly did with targeted drone strikes and the
selective deployment of special operations forces).
The exception, of course, was in Libya, where three
senior members of the foreign policy establishment and the Obama administration
(Hillary Clinton, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Susan Rice) persuaded the president
to help rebels topple the government of Moammar Gadhafi. When events ended up
unfolding like a rerun of the Iraq War's disastrous aftermath in miniature
(with its own unique horrors), Obama's
instinctual aversion to regime change and moral grandstanding reasserted
itself, leading him to resist repeated calls to cripple or overthrow Assad's
government in Syria. The president would bomb areas of the country that were
controlled by ISIS, but he would not act to remove Assad for fear that the
result would lead to even worse consequences than the Syrian civil war itself.
The establishment's reaction has been uniformly
negative about that decision, which is a major reason why there was such an
outpouring of joy and relief when President Trump reversed course and did what
Obama had steadfastly refused to do for over five years: target assets of the
Assad government. If there was a criticism to be heard, it was that Trump's
missile strike was too limited in scope. Never mind that neither the Trump
administration nor any prominent analyst presented a convincing strategy for
using American bombs to bring the civil war to a sustainably peaceful
conclusion. All that mattered was that the U.S. finally did something,
and that this something would continue and expand. "More, please!" —
that's what most of the commentary has amounted to.
I'm sorry, but this is madness.
To see why, imagine an alternative history of the
American Civil War. In 1861 the southern part of the United States launches an
insurrection against the central government and declares its independence. The
leader of the central government decides to put it down. The result is several
years of bloody conflict that eventually leaves approximately 600,000 people,
or 2 percent of the total population, dead (that's about six million people in
contemporary terms).
Now imagine there was a country on the other side
of the globe in the 1860s that took a keen interest in the conflict and was
powerful enough to intervene in the war. The citizens in this country half a
world away debate furiously whether to try and "stop the killing" by
joining the battle. They have no plan to resolve the underlying issues feeding
the violence, but some think it would be desirable to punish the evil deeds committed by one side or
the other, or perhaps to punish those who use one kind of weapon or another in prosecuting
the war. Some even insist that the case for intervention in the distant
conflict is so obvious that the burden of proof should fall on those who
oppose it.
In the end, this super-powerful country decides
that it makes most sense to pursue "regime change." So it launches an
attack that adds to the death toll and eventually leads to the overthrow of the
central government, allowing the southern region to prevail.
The point isn't to equate Assad to Abraham Lincoln.
Go ahead and imagine the opposite scenario if you wish: Perhaps the moral
busybodies on the other side of the planet are less moved by the claim to
self-determination asserted by the American South than they are by Lincoln's
noble speech at Gettysburg, so instead of pummeling Washington they bombard
Richmond and contribute to an easy victory for the North.
The point is that regardless of which side the
outside power favors, it has anointed itself the moral arbiter of the world, a
position that grants it the authority to mete out justice and punishment to
individuals and nations as it sees fit — and this despite the fact that no one
elected this power to that ruling position, or even asked the world if it
wished to offer its consent.
Every country in the world thinks well of itself.
But we're the only country in the world that expects every other country to
defer to our self-evident wonderfulness — apparently even when Trump is
launching the missiles.
Not every problem in the world has a solution, just
as not every injustice in the world is our problem. This has always been the
case. But with a reckless, incompetent president prosecuting a foreign policy of "impulse and whim," it has perhaps never
been more important to remind ourselves of these truths, and of the pressing
need to tame our boundless national self-regard.
More than eight years after Obama's first inaugural address, we still
haven't set aside our childish things.
