US Foreign Policy and Global Standing in the 21st Century

Realities and Perceptions

Efraim Inbar, Jonathan Rynhold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138096554
• eBook ISBN: 9781317382690
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines US foreign policy and global standing in the 21st Century.

The United States is the most powerful actor in world politics today. Against this backdrop, the present volume examines how the foreign policies pursued by Presidents' George W. Bush and Barack Obama have affected elite and public perceptions of the United States. By examining America's standing from the perspective of different actors from across various regions, including China, Russia, Latin America and the Middle East, while also assessing how these perceptions interact with America's own policies, this books presents a fresh interpretation of America's global standing. In doing so, the volume evaluates how these perceptions affect the realities of US power, and what impact this has on moulding US foreign policy and the policies of other global powers. A number of books address the question of which grand strategy the United States should adopt and the issue of whether or not America is in relative decline as a world power. However, the debate on these issues has largely been set against the policies of the Bush administration. By contrast, this volume argues that while Obama has raised the popularity of America since the low reached by Bush, America's credibility and overall standing have actually been damaged further under President Obama.

This book will be of much interest to students of US foreign policy, US national security, strategic studies, Middle Eastern politics, international relations and security studies generally.

Part I
The United States today

1
Lessons from 15 years of war

Eliot Cohen

The importance of the last 15 years

The debate over the United States’ use of force in the world will be shaped for the next several decades by the experience of three wars: the war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates; the Afghan war; and, most controversially, the Iraq war. All three were, or swiftly became, wars without discernible fronts, in which progress was obscure; all three involved tremendous domestic and international controversy; all three were waged by two presidents whose outlooks were in many respects very different, yet who did many of the same things.

The partisan temper that surrounds these conflicts makes it both difficult and important to gain some distance on these events, and insofar as is possible, to consider them with a dispassionate eye. One way of doing this is to imagine ourselves looking back on these wars from a much longer period ahead than we normally do, and to ask the kinds of questions that future historians are likely to pose about them.

Where did the wars begin?

In one way the answer to this question is simple: with the events of September 11, 2001. But of course future historians will question that easy assignment of a date, noting the ways in which US support for the mujahedeen in the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s paved the way for the Afghan war; the roots of the conflict with Iraq stretching back at least to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990; and the contest with radical Islam as far back as Sayyid Qutb’s unfortunate visit to Colorado in the late 1940s. Nonetheless, it is the shock of 9/11, and the ensuing change in the US temperament and attitude toward the use of force in South Asia and the Middle East, that deserves attention.

It is absurd to claim that there was some ending of innocence here. The territory of the United States, and certainly US citizens abroad, had been attacked before. But the 9/11 attacks were very much a bolt out of the blue, conducted on a scale and with an effectiveness that few could have imagined within the scope of a non-state actor, and directed against symbolic targets of tremendous significance. Secretary of State Rice used to say that for those who were in the White House on that day, as she was, every day thereafter passed in high government service was September 12 – accompanied by a deep fear that it was really September 10.

These three wars were distinct, yet united by that central fact. The 9/11 attacks contributed to a mood of emergency and deeply felt threat to the homeland, and in some measure to the global order that the United States had maintained since 1945.¹ They were united as well by larger developments extrinsic to the United States, chiefly a crisis in the Arab world, which, in the years since it won independence from European colonial rules had charged down a number of dead ends (pan-Arabism, revolutionary socialism, strong man leadership), and whose order had been upended by lopsided wealth produced exclusively by oil, a demographic explosion, and repeated humiliation, as it saw it, at the hands of the West, to include Israel.² Beyond this lay a larger crisis in the much wider Muslim world, which can be most broadly understood as a crisis of modernity. This too fed off the crisis in the Arab world, particularly through the oil-rich states (and their citizens) who funded radicalizing madrassahs and movements.

The wars were linked in other ways as well: US decision makers, not altogether implausibly, saw a connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime – a connection not nearly as deep, we now think, as they imagined. But in the atmosphere of 9/11, and on the basis of the scraps of intelligence available to decision makers, it was not an unreasonable hypothesis to investigate. The wars against al-Qaeda and the Taliban were, obviously, wars of immediate reaction to 9/11; the Iraq war was too, to some extent, but had also to do with the brewing crisis that had resulted from the incomplete ending of the 1991 war.³ The elaborate regime of sanctions and inspections directed against Saddam that had been constructed after the rescue of Kuwait was crumbling; it had been bolstered by repeated attacks on the Iraqi regime (e.g., Operation Desert Fox in 1998), but one way or another the Iraqi conundrum would need to be faced.

The question of the origins of these wars is important because of its relevance to strategic choices. By 1940 or 1942, the question of what had allowed Hitler to gain power– the terms of the Versailles treaty, the Allies’ failure to end World War I with a march on Berlin, the brilliance of a particularly dangerous demagogue, or a development in strains of German culture going back to Martin Luther – made little difference. This question was important to historians and political thinkers, but from the point of view of strategists, it was peripheral. The business at hand was the shattering of German military power and the drive on Berlin. In the United States’ recent wars, however, the question of the origins of the wars has been highly relevant to the strategic choices US leaders have confronted. And in the failure to think deeply about the origins of these wars lie some of the mistakes and errors committed in all three.

What went right?

At a time of disillusionment with these wars it is particularly important to begin with the large number of things that went well from a strategic point of view. In the case of al-Qaeda, the first attack on the homeland was the only successful one; the central al-Qaeda organization was put under a great deal of pressure, and its leader was eventually killed by a US raid into Pakistan. This war in the shadows was conducted successfully (from a tactical point of view, at least) across two administrations.

The Afghan war saw the swift overthrow of the Taliban, construction of a reasonably stable, reasonably open government through the first decade of the twenty-first century, and steady support by the Afghan population for a large foreign presence. This situation should be compared with those in countries like South Korea in the early 1950s, and South Vietnam in the early 1960s, by which standards the Kabul regime does not look quite as bad as some think. In the case of Iraq, the regime was swiftly dispatched, and after a period of tremendous turbulence several insurgencies (former regime elements, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the Sadrists, among others) were crushed. A central government was constructed, and infrastructure restored enough to permit growing oil exports. By 2008 it was the judgment of most outside observers that Iraq was on a fragile trajectory to success – depending, crucially, on US support, mentoring, and pressure.

In all three cases, the United States did not spend unsustainable amounts of money to achieve these ends. From 2001 to 2014, the United States spent something like $3.4 trillion on the Afghan and Iraq wars, using a very broad definition of directly war-related expenses; by some accounts, it has accrued another $1 trillion in war-related obligations to future veterans. These are huge numbers, no doubt – until one realizes that US defense spending never cracked 6 percent of GDP during these years. By contrast, it had been in the range of 10 percent and above in the 1960s, and around 8 percent in the 1980s.⁴

The United States did not need to reintroduce conscription to fight these wars, and although the quality of volunteers dipped to some extent, in most respects the quality of the armed forces remained extraordinarily high, particularly in the officer and NCO corps. Grievous though the losses were, they were an order of magnitude lower than in previous conflicts. About 4,400 Americans died in Iraq, and another 2,200 in Afghanistan, for about 6,600 overall – about a sixth as many as died in Korea and an eighth as many as died in Vietnam. Because of advances in military medicine, wounded rates were conversely much higher in these more recent wars.

The innovations

It is worth remembering the point of departure of US ground forces. The United States’ last large war had been in 1991, with Iraq; it was a war fought the way the US army liked it: mainly in the desert, against a generally static enemy. The conflicts of the post-9/11 period were, with the exception of the brief opening phase of the Iraq war, nothing like that. When the wars began it was a commonplace – one with plenty of precedents in military history – that counterinsurgency operations were low-technology, and in some ways unsophisticated, operations. As US leaders soon learned, this was no longer true.

The biggest operational – and with it, tactical – innovation, of course, was, in fact, the return to counterinsurgency: a set of military operations neglected in US military thought since Vietnam. Indeed, when I conducted a survey for the Defense Policy Board in 2004 on US counterinsurgency doctrine I discovered, to my surprise, that the extant manuals were still those written for Vietnam. The newer manuals were about different forms of peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention. The new doctrinal manual issued in 2006, FM 3–24, was a step, but only a step, in recovering some of that knowledge.

The greatest tactical innovations were as follows:

• First and foremost, the development of the most extraordinary manhunting operations ever seen, first in Iraq and later in Afghanistan, in which black special operations units were repeatedly able to find, capture, or kill senior enemy operatives – and to do so at a high rate. Although Israel, in particular, has had similar success in its theater of operations, as had the British in Northern Ireland, the US operations were performed on a scale and over an extent of territory unprecedented in military history.⁵
• Second, the deployment of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) on a theater-wide scale for the first time in military history, and for many purposes, to include for targeted killing of enemy leaders. To be sure, Israel had used UAVs over Gaza and in southern Lebanon for tactical purposes, and indeed the United States had made extensive use of drones during the Vietnam War. Still, the Predator and Global Hawk programs now allowed the United States to conduct sustained surveillance of targets hundreds of miles from US forces, and to deliver precision fire power against them on a routine basis. As the old Soviet saying went, quantity has a quality all its own, and in the course of these wars the United States deployed several hundred large-scale UAVs, and many times that number of smaller platforms.⁶
• Third, dramatic breakthroughs in tactical signals intelligence. One area in which FM 3–24 had it wrong, in retrospect, was in its emphasis on HUMINT at the expense of SIGINT and other forms of technical intelligence gathering. While much of this subject remains classified, it is publicly known that the United States developed the ability to monitor cellphones and similar electromagnetic devices. In the connected world of the 2000s, cellphones were widespread, and that proved a vulnerability to many terrorist groups.
• For the rest, a lot of what was done – to include, for example, walling off neighborhoods in Baghdad or deploying small units in neighborhoods – was not particularly new, but effective nonetheless.⁷

The question of institutional adaptation to the challenge of the new conflicts was much more problematic.

As is well known, the United States military simply did not do much to prepare itself for the foreseeable tasks of military governance that it would confront, particularly in Iraq. Until quite late in the Iraq war, and to some extent to the present day, the United States military never mastered the art of detainee operations, for both intelligence gathering and subverting the insurgents. Eventually, pretty good training and mentoring programs for the Afghan and Iraqi militaries were created – but they were rushed, and under-resourced for a very long time, particularly in terms of assigning quality US personnel to these missions. More to the point, they were not sustained over the long haul, being understood in terms of decades rather than years.

These were not new problems, and indeed, all of them could have been found in the challenges the United States faced in Korea and Vietnam, and indeed elsewhere throughout the Cold War.⁸ They may be lumped together in Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that “in the absence of a true theory of war, routine methods take over, even at the highest level” (Howard et al. 1984, II: 4). Indeed, in that sentence lies the explanation for many US mistakes in these wars.

A more open question is the creation of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs, an innovation begun in Afghanistan that then was applied on a larger scale in Iraq, and curiously, reintroduced to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The United States today
• Part II Regional perceptions
• Part III The Middle East
• Index