American Security and the Global War on Terror

Edwin Jacob

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000062687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book delivers an interpretive framework for making sense of today's geopolitical landscape and casts new light on the impact ideology and technology have had on American foreign policy and contemporary security practices.

Edwin Daniel Jacob argues that America's security practices in the Global War on Terror have been guided by an anachronistic Cold War logic that has subordinated strategy to tactics. Jacob shows that deep-rooted prejudices and presuppositions regarding American exceptionalism have had a disastrous impact on the policies of the United States, not only in dealing with terrorism, but also in seeking to impose American hegemony in the Middle East. Ineffectual security practices of dubious moral character, from rendition and torture to preemptive strikes and nation building to drones and assassinations, privilege exigency over ethics. Yet the result of this "post-strategic" approach to security, where interchangeable tactics, like these, masquerade as strategy, only increases insecurity. Jacob offers a fresh perspective on American foreign policy that links national security with human security in regional terms. This approach highlights the need for order, predictability, and stability—the cornerstone of political realism.

Making use of insights derived from Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx, Weber, Schmitt, and Morgenthau, this interdisciplinary work provides an overview of American foreign policy in the twenty-first century and speaks to crucial themes in the fields of history, political science, and sociology.

1

Meditations on the abyss

America’s imperial illusions

DOI: 10.4324/9781003006084-1

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche¹

Security has been a perennial feature of the political since its inception, but its character has changed with time. American security has lacked a coherent geostrategic framework since the Cold War ended as exhibited by the distinctive security measures undertaken by the five administrations that have shepherded American foreign policy through a post-bipolar world. While each sought geopolitical advantage in its own unique fashion, as has been the sovereign’s prerogative since the establishment of the modern nation state, strategic aims have become increasingly subordinate to contingent tactics. This has been particularly evident in the Global War on Terror, wherein isolated tactics and symbolic gestures have frustrated the formation of strategic goals while also inhibiting the general discourse surrounding security. Varying security approaches employed from the H. W. Bush administration to Trump’s thus speak less to America’s refinement of security—in terms of facing new threats and taking structural arrangements of geopolitical power into question—than it does to an inability to define and pursue America’s national interests.

Incongruity has been the only seeming constant in America’s approach to international affairs from the end of the Cold War to the ongoing Global War on Terror. But general confusion over America’s strategic interests are not limited to the foreign policy establishment. Traditional scholars of international relations have exhibited similar disorientation in dealing with American security. Recent academic treatments have sought to overcome challenges facing American security from a qualitative standpoint—as opposed to the more fashionable instrumental approaches whose relevance is confined to those doing similar analyses—that speaks to the interplay between theory and practice. But these efforts have, in my view, failed to fully capture the practical impact ideology has had on American security. They also evince an arbitrary quality by discounting the price paid by the “other” in the name of US security.

American Security and the Global War on Terror contests reductionist approaches to foreign affairs in favor of what can best be understood as an interpretative framework for making sense of modern insecurity. This approach lends itself to broader considerations of ethics—an element sorely lacking where security matters are involved—and the role it should play from the standpoint of utility in security models. Its normative character thus aims to overcome the chasm between theory and practice, exigency and ethical commitments, and national interests and universal principles. This study is a sobering and constructive contribution to the discipline, the policy-making world, and even extends itself to a general audience interested in the effects of security in general and American foreign policy in particular.

American determinations in the Global War on Terror have engendered increased geopolitical insecurity, warranted scrutiny, and geostrategic risk. Informed by an ethical commitment with a cosmopolitan purpose, this study provides an overview of American foreign policy from the beginning of the twenty-first century to the present. It argues that America’s security practices in the Global War on Terror have been guided by an anachronistic Cold War logic that has resulted in the degeneration of strategy into tactics in a misguided attempt to fight a transnational terrorist threat to security in state-centric terms. To test these claims, it assesses the two most predominant foreign policy models in historically contingent practices: neo-conservatism as it pertains to the Iraq War and liberal interventionism as it relates to the Arab Spring. The ends sought by these opposing camps are similar; decisive is rather the divergent means that they employ: unilateralism and multilateralism. Issues concerning sovereignty, along with the Responsibility to Protect, are also analyzed in the context of globalization and transnational movements and institutions. The interplay here is particularly significant, not merely with respect to terrorism, but also on the burgeoning refugee issue and how proxy wars undermine the ability of states to provide the most basic of services to its citizens. Lastly, constructing a generalizable theory of terrorism provides a groundwork for a new model of American security, culminating in a fresh interpretation of human security that focuses on regional security. Fusing this paradigm with an institutional referent affords a refined US foreign policy that seeks greater security, predictability, and stability —the cornerstone of political realism.

History, it would seem, is getting away from us. But now is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that great power politics appeared as entering a new phase. Such was also the case when the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving America, its bipolar foil during their nearly 50-year Cold War, the world’s lone superpower.² Could history get past cold warrior ideologues whose raison d’être was shattered as the Iron Curtain was finally lifted across Europe decades after its descent? Would a new enemy, or host of enemies, be able to fill the (in)security void left by the Soviets? Should the US—and its regional, international, and global security partners—modify its worldview of security to meet the new situation?

How scholars of international relations see their roles also proves equally problematic. Bracketing (personal) ideology to generate value-free geopolitical analysis has resulted in scholarship that compromises politics in favor of discursive exercises in solipsism and groupthink. This positivist approach to the social “sciences” obliterates the formation of critical judgments insofar as such analyses fail to interrogate factors beyond empirical measure: structural analyses are thus discarded in favor of apolitical quantitative studies that are, above all, objectifiable. Relying on instrumental rationality of this sort has exacerbated the jumbled correlation between scholastic approaches to security and real-world political approaches to security matters.

There are, however, numerous scholars who have bucked this fashionable trend by attempting to at least provide policy prescriptions in their studies on America’s international conduct. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, for their part, have suggested the US should revamp old Cold War geostrategic models, like containment, in regional terms.³ Their conception of “offshore balancing” would maintain American supremacy by solely focusing US foreign policy commitments to Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Persian Gulf.

If there is no potential hegemon in sight in Europe, Northeast Asia, or the Gulf, then there is no reason to deploy ground or air forces there and little need for a large military establishment at home. And because it takes many years for any country to acquire the capacity to dominate its region, Washington would see it coming and have time to respond. In that event, the United States should turn to regional forces as the first line of defense, letting them uphold the balance of power in their own neighborhood. Although Washington could provide assistance to allies and pledge to support them if they were in danger of being conquered, it should refrain from deploying large numbers of U.S. forces abroad. It may occasionally make sense to keep certain assets overseas, such as small military contingents, intelligence-gathering facilities, or prepositioned equipment, but in general, Washington should pass the buck to regional powers, as they have a far greater interest in preventing any state from dominating them. If those powers cannot contain a potential hegemon on their own, however, the United States must help get the job done, deploying enough firepower to the region to shift the balance in its favor.⁴

Sober-minded realist understandings of contemporary American security, like these, privilege the nation state as their unit of analysis for good reason. The world is populated by an assortment of sovereign states whose relative power animates the given structural imbalances of regional and global power alike. Far less appreciation, however, is given to sub-state actors and movements who have proven their ability to influence international security. This is to say nothing, of course, of the route by which American academicians interpret security: from the vantage point of the US at the perpetual expense of the “other” who suffers the most from American security failures. Such interpretations of American security also confirm my understanding of “post-strategic warfare,” whereby (replaceable) tactics are favored at the expense of established strategic frameworks.

More impactful beyond the realm of academic quarters, though, were the post-Cold War geopolitical forecasts provided by Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington. Fukuyama and Huntington delivered their respective “end of history” and “clash of civilizations” theses in the lead-up to and in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Their predictions garnered instant, if not over-exaggerated, attention and remain two of the most widely cited political science articles of the past 30 years. At issue was not only how the collapse of bipolarity would come to shape global security under a newly accelerated process of globalization but also how the so-called “first” and “third worlds” would interact with one another in the new millennium. Would they come together (for the most part) on political and ideological grounds? Or, would culture replace ideology as the foundation for strife in the new millennium?

Choosing between history’s end and the looming clash of civilizations proved to be a Hobson’s choice. Although Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s theses are seen as antithetical to one another, they can be seen as flip sides of the same coin. Fukuyama’s convergence theorem,⁵ which conflated capitalism with the modern (liberal) state,⁶ spoke to liberal interventionism as surely as Huntington’s divergence argument (wrongly understood!⁷) grounded neo-conservative thought on exporting democracy—American style, of course—to intransient “third-world” lands.

Thinking of this sort was put into practice in numerous military adventures and alliances of convenience in the Global South generally and the Middle East particularly under the five successive administrations that carried through on what Charles Krauthammer called the “unipolar moment”⁸ that accompanied the rearrangement of the well-ensconced bipolar world order. This was evidenced in George H. W. Bush’s solidification with Saudi Arabia as a regional partner in the Middle East following Saddam’s US-led removal from his neighboring Kuwait; Clinton’s meandering about in the Balkans and Kosovo; George W. Bush’s debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq; Obama’s divergent reactions to the Arab Spring in Libya and Syria; and Trump’s penchant for discarding traditional alliances and multilateral agreements and associations in favor of embracing fellow “strongman” sovereigns, from Putin to Erdogan, in transactional terms that reflect the whims of a shady businessman intent on becoming the “great(est) man” of history.

Crosscutting all these approaches, whether taken upon using unilateral, multilateral, or transactional means, is not only an increasingly post-strategic character of contemporary American warfare, but also the development of what I consider the “moral cognition of modern war.” This outlook may have been born out of an inflated post-Cold War hubris, but it gained increasing traction in the Global War on Terror, where the line between “friend and enemy” is distinguishable to the extent that it serves whatever expedient ends are deemed sellable at a particular moment.⁹ An invigorated imperial policy and regional hegemony in the Middle East was the strategic vision of the US after winning the Cold War. But exerting military might has steadily become less of a means towards that end than an end in and of itself. This has especially been the case since these misguided policies failed to pan out in practice. Arbitrary determinations are thus taken up in pursuit of upholding what serves the “national interest.” Worse yet, various security policies acted upon under this veneer have yielded further insecurity, which then leads to further securitization, culminating in what I identify as the “in/security matrix.”

Al-Qaeda’s attack on 9/11 not only coalesced a nation but also the Western world. Le Monde declared its solidarity when it proclaimed “Nous sommes tous Américains [We are all Americans]” on its front page the day following the attacks.¹⁰ Bush’s ensuing crusade against terrorism, however, did much to sully world opinion against the tremendous sympathetic political capital America received on that summer morning. Taking out Iraq to (finally) capitalize on America’s supposed “unipolar moment” speaks all too well to the increasingly familiar rationale of justifying horrors against horrors. Preemptively attacking a supposedly al-Qaeda-friendly Iraq after 9/11 only makes sense when thought of in terms of the broader agenda it sought to serve: taking out the weakest state in an already fragile region to use it as a base of operations for a broader reordering of the Middle East as a new sphere of American influence.

In the three administrations that have prosecuted the Global War on Terror thus far, direct forms of homeland security and foreign policy measures of Bush’s reign gave way to more discreet, albeit equally lethal, practices under Obama and Trump alike in the form of the protracted use of drone warfare in the former and the litany of one-off surgical strikes as regards to the latter. Yet America remains stuck in a seemingly unwinnable position against the concrete threat of global terrorism. This situation did not arise from the way in which American security is practiced from a liberal or conservative standpoint. Rather, it is the foundational elements American security thought rests upon that undermine its modern security practices. Ideology, in the main, accounts for America’s contemporary security disasters.

More than a quarter of a century passed between the fall of the Soviet Un...