Fowl and Foreign Policy in the United States
Introduction
Over the last several months I have been rather tied up in a
personal life transition, but this does not mean, for one moment, that I have
been absent in my observation or thinking in regards to another corner of the
globe and a former romping ground of mine in Iraq. As I articulated in a past post (http://backusec.blogspot.com/2014/06/losing-iraq.html)
there was much yet to be seen in the saga that was the emergence of ISIS (of
media parlance, or ISIL, of official parlance, or “The Islamic State”, of whom
they wish to be called). I too have been
attuned to our response, lack there-of or limited as it is, and that of the
voices both here in CONUS as well as overseas and among our allies, fren-emies,
and enemies. And what has finally gotten
me to the point of scripting a post, was the Facebook yelling I saw between a
friend of mine and that of another associate of a common acquaintance he had on
this very topic; which devolved to bird calling. Birds?
What does that have to do with ISIS and Iraq, and Syria, and foreign
affairs? I’ll get to that. Let me first posit that the last century has
changed the way we look at foreign affairs irrevocably.
A Brief Review of US Foreign Policy History
I listened, in early February, to Bruce Carlson’s superb
podcast on Washington and his birthday (https://myhistorycanbeatupyourpolitics.wordpress.com/2015/02/12/why-washington-deserves-his-own-day-2013/[i]). In that broadcast he hints at the impact of
the Farewell Address that Washington gave[ii] as
he left the presidency (he didn’t leave the white house mind you) lasting for
over a century. His assertion of
American neutrality and that we avoid “entanglements” with the European powers
of the day. He asks “Why forego the
advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign
ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe,
entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship,
interest, humor or caprice?[iii]” And in so doing he steers our first 100 years
of being towards a clear policy that we would “[take] care always to keep
ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may
safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.[iv]” But today, the US is not merely entangled, it
is often the entangler of others, into longstanding alliances, treaties, and
obligations, not the least of which is NATO, the UN, and the Geneva and Hague
Conventions/Law of the Sea. If anything,
we have turned Washington’s policy, and that of the predominance of the 19th
century, on its head in the 20th century. One cannot point to a flip-of-the-switch
moment, but there is a clear inflection point that happened in the late 1800s
that is historical and pertinent today.
Our emerging nation spent the first 100 years establishing itself
amongst world powers, and in the second 100, became one of, if not “the”, world
power. The US spent the first century
constantly afraid that a colonial power would try to re-engulf the fledgling
country into its sphere of influence, if not its empire outright. While in the second case, the US emerged as
an imperial stakeholder acquiring its own overseas possessions and often has to
now fend off accusations of its own desire to “take over” other nation
states. No longer were we ostriches
sticking our heads in the sand defended behind the distance of seas and
communication gaps, but instead eagles flying high over nearly every
international engagement the world round and invasively infusing our culture
through our globalized network of connectedness.
To say the US is not, by the late-middle of the 20th
century in a very different place than Washington’s vision is fantastically
ignorant. But, likewise, it is even more
ignorant to not understand why the policy ended up that way. America has not, even from Washington’s day,
been without the need for allies and alliances, and, as with all things in
history, they add up. Initially we
relied on the French as a counterweight to the British, and then we fended off
the British, French, and Spanish along with the Barbary States through
diplomatic and naval gamesmanship, until such time as our trade became thwarted
and we succumbed to a check action during the Napoleonic period. And even in the aftermath of the War of 1812[v],
we worked more to play the European powers off against themselves than we tried
to avoid them. We saw to it in the
Monroe Doctrine that we would “close” the hemisphere “to European colonization”
and further enforced that doctrine through a number of actions (including the
Mexican-American War) to hedge against a land-based invasion among other
priorities. And as the American Civil War
heated up, it was critical to the US government that Great Britain, among
others, remain on the sideline and not become a treaty party with the Confederate
States or other elements on our doorstep.
All of these necessitated treaties, and alliances, and commitments, that
simply continued to add, along with trade pacts, to the growth of the need for
America to eventually take a differing stand in its international relationships
from that which Washington envisioned.
And all the while, something else was happening, technology
and progress in industry was making the ocean barrier more and more
narrow. All history buffs of the 1812
conflict know that the Battle of New Orleans (the US’s most significant land
based battle win) was fought after the Treaty of Ghent was signed in 1815[vi]. The reason for this is that in the late 18th
and early 19th centuries the flow of communication depended highly
upon wind-born sailing ships on the seas and drawn or flotsam craft by
river. Thus weeks could pass between the
sending of a message and the reply. By
the break-out of the Civil War, with the invention and widespread use of the
telegraph and locomotive on land and steamships on the rivers, this had been
halved if not further shortened to mere days.
And by the end of the 19th century, the Great Columbian
exhibition in Chicago was demonstrating such wonders as the wireless radio,
electric lighting, and refrigeration and tales of the battleships that were now
roaming the seas and there was a village of these new peoples, conquered by the
recent war with Spain called “Filipinos”.
Simply put the oceans were becoming less a barrier and more an
all-important byway for the US, its citizens, and its interests.
So when we fast forward to the sequence that led to our
involvement in the Great War (aka WW I) and then WW II, both our string of
localized treaties and alliances coupled with technology and industry hit an
abrupt about face. The US didn’t go
quietly into this new position, mind you, as Wilson had to promise never to
allow us to get entangled in the then multiyear European based worldwide
conflict, in order to get re-elected and he could never get that League of
Nations through the Senate. While true,
this didn’t change the fact that the “facts on the ground” had changed from “Our
detached and distant situation …[vii]”
that Washington bespoke of in his farewell.
And it became clear, as we first succumb to a worldwide economic
depression, and then worldwide total war, that our policy could no longer be in
the guise of isolationist ostriches, but had to be a new bird altogether.
The Post WWII Foreign Policy Consensus
Having been draw into two devastating world conflicts, the
US defense and foreign affairs community quickly gravitated around the optimism
that America was and would remain a force for securing international peace for
years to come. Helped by the emerging
ideological and cultural conflicts with the communist world, core principles of
what America saw as its mantle of leadership, emerged and remained essentially unmovable
up through the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
These principles, I believe were:
- Our best defense is to
fight and defeat the enemy “over there” and thereby avoid the utter
destruction of total war to the homeland[viii]
- Appeasement of “evil”
forces does not work, rather it encourages them; showing strength is the
best way to ensure peace in the face of such forces in the world (the
lesson of Munich[ix])
- Building and integrating
allies into commercial and cultural exchanges and ensuring the freedom of
the seas is paramount to the power of the economic and political future of
the United States[x]
- Maintaining a strong
military and having its posture such that it can strike and mitigate
threats before they are able to sufficiently challenge our position,
secures both the homeland and our interests in the world[xi]
- The US can employ
diplomacy, information, military and economic forces (DIME theory[xii])
to bend the will of other powers and contain those hostile to our
interests
- Democracy, rule of law,
and capitalism are unstoppable forces that uplift human kind and the
American model of liberal constitutionalism ought to be spread throughout
the world as an innate good; to this end we will engage the world to
uplift “them” using our might for the betterment of ourselves and all
others.
These principles of our foreign policy still resonate to
this day. Echoes of it, for instance,
are almost quoted verbatim in the discussions of the ongoing crisis with ISIS
in the Middle East. For instance in
January, Fareed Zakaria, wrote a bit about this in an opinion piece[xiii],
and questioned Senator John McCain’s call for intervention in the conflict this
way, “This theory was sometimes described during the Iraq war as ‘we fight them
there so we don’t have to fight them here.’ It was wrong then, and it’s wrong
now.”[xiv] I normally am one that is highly
complementary of Mr. Zakaria and his analysis. In this particular article, however, I find
myself in some level of disagreement because he is partially right when he
offers that “[t]o argue that the only way to stop terrorism at home is for the
United States to intervene militarily and stabilize the many parts of the
Middle East that are in conflict is to commit Washington to a fool’s errand for
decades.”[xv] But then, Senator McCain is partially right especially
when he observes “…now we see Libya descending into chaos because once they [the
Obama administration] got rid of Gadhafi we washed our hands of it. The moral of the story is leading from behind
doesn't work.”[xvi] Even so, both seem to have flown the coop in
regards to the bigger picture of how we ought to conduct foreign policy.
Back to the Bird Calling Discussion
So let’s return to the nest in this discussion and the
throwing of fowl words in a Facebook exchange.
What got my friend and his associate into the bird calling game was that
we have several dynamics and attitudes that have emerged in the last decade as
it relates to the use of force in the pursuit of US foreign policy. There is a challenge now to clearly place
policies in our political discourse into clearly pacifist or clearly
pro-martial buckets. During McCain’s
service days it was easy, those that were for involvement in the War in
Vietnam, for instance were “hawks”[xvii]
while those that were against were “doves”[xviii] Now it’s a bit more nuanced. Senator McCain, for instance is widely known
for his desire to use military force early and often, but is also widely known
for his unequivocal position that torture should never be allowed. And there are also now other fowl that are in
the picture that include ostriches[xix],
chicken-hawks[xx], turkeys[xxi],
and owls[xxii]. In the discussion that I observed, the two
favorite bird calls were to rail against the “ostriches” and the “chicken-hawks”
(ostriches, stereotypically “with their head in the sand” often symbolize
isolationist policies, and chicken-hawks often symbolize those with hawkish
policy approaches that either lack the personal experience in war to speak as
such, or are those that are unwilling to accept and support paying for the
fullness of the consequences of military action). What was missed was that we lack a unifying
policy at all, lending it to having way too many birds in the aviary to enable
a best way forward. What we need is an “eagle”,
we can all follow and be assured of success with.
The “Eagle” Policy and the post WWII Consensus
I offer, in a separate post (http://backusec.blogspot.com/2015/05/we-together-theory-strategy-and.html),
a fairly comprehensive vision of such a possible strategy; one that I think is
that eagle. What I think I need to do is
help compare that with our core post-WWII tenants and the various other birds
we could consider adopting as a strategy.
On the whole, the proposed strategy holds to most of the core principles
cited above as the post-WWII/Cold War consensus policy, with a few
exceptions. First, it does not presume
that we know and can impose our form of democracy and rule of law in other
cultural contexts or nations. It,
further, does not support an absolute recognition and defense of existing nation-state
boundaries or constructs. Thus if you
look at that bulleted list above, my proposed “eagle” approach to foreign
policy is not going to engage military force as a medium to “make nations” so
much as to “enable nation making” of their own variations and volitions amongst
native peoples. Secondly, this proposed
policy, does not presume that the US has to or should “go it alone” in regards
to how it engages in military action.
While the policy does bespeak a strong military component, it does so in
the guise of collective action first and foremost, and full ownership, for a
long term engagement (that allows the indigenous growth needed to gain
stability) if we do opt to take on the burden ourselves. What this policy suggests is that we have
George HW Bush’s “Gulf War Coalition”[xxiii]
over and against a George W Bush type “Coalition of the Willing”. By doing so, we can bring to bear long term
success and mitigate against loosing international credence in our objectives. The last difference, is in our
selectiveness. In the post-WWII world
the Truman Doctrine[xxiv]
pushed us to an “all-in” approach to fighting for and defending all around the
world all the time[xxv]. As articulated in my post, we have to acknowledge
that our use of military power, amongst the various expressions of national
power, has to be “on-par” with the other elements. The Cold War construct, for good reasons,
weighted the military option much more heavily than the other three
components. Going forward, there needs
to be a much more strident attempt to balance those aspects, so that none
become too skewed across the world of engagements the US must be a part of (that
said what is proposed is not the Nixon doctrine entirely, as we may engage with
non-allies in our efforts). Save these
exceptions, then, we still fit more into the tenants of a globalized US
engagement construct, using this policy theory, than Washington’s
dis-engagement policy of the 19th Century.
And How About the Other Birds?
But how about the other birds? Well, notably, what I believe necessary, is
in direct contradiction with the ostriches.
The libertarian neo-isolationist view would very much harken back to Washington’s
farewell, but it would essentially equate to a handing over the world and
suffer the consequences approach.
Looking to that counter-factual future, I am unsure we want to cede to
the BRICS[xxvi] control of the economic
and political world we will have to live in.
While I do posit we need to find out own version of the “special
relationship” like the one the UK established with us as it began its decline
from Empire, putting our heads in the sand precipitously is rife for creating a
world that we will regret acceding to.
Likewise, however, this is a direct affront to the “chicken-hawks”. The proposed plan is not a “strike fast,
strike hard”, and “evacuate as soon as possible”, strategy. Unlike neo-conservative interventionism, it
isn’t exclusively or even near-exclusively military enabled. Rather it accepts and requires a whole of
government approach and one that acknowledges that killing ISIS may have much
more to do with killing its funding stream than its people. The other thing this strategy does is embrace
rather than flee from nation-building, even if it re-envisions our involvement there-in
(e.g. less us building and more them building for themselves). Thus, this strategy is anything but a chicken
in hawk attire; it has much more depth and staying power than that. This strategy also comes into conflict with
the turkeys, as it recognizes there are limits to US power and we ought not to
show where our proverbial wall is lightly manned. There is a realization that we also cannot
solve every conflict between various peoples and places; the Arab-Israeli
conflict is probably a case in point. To
that end this isn’t a policy that will aimlessly try to “do-it-all” and thus
end up being a thanksgiving meal rather than working theory of foreign relations. Similarly, this isn’t an owlish policy
either. Unlike the realpolitik of the Nixon
administration, or even Bismarck’s, this isn’t a purely Machiavellian mechanism
absent a level of ethical and moral direction.
Rather it has a clear aim to aid people in the world to bridge where
they are to where the globalized world is at today or in the future. Certainly the proposed “eagle” policy does
put more pragmatic terms on our attempts to shape events and places, but we are
doing so with a clear long term goals of removing oppression and helping people
to a path of liberty. Thus we will not
stand on the shoulder, turning our head from side to side, of an authoritarian dictator
for long, especially if they are not working to liberate and develop a place
that uplifts its people.
The Eagle Policy and ISIS
So, with all this, is this a hawkish or a dovish policy? I think the answer is both/and. The goal is to enable a policy that meets our
long term aims of a stable, globalized, and liberalized (in the sense of
liberated) world order that enables the US to compete, and compete well,
economically, socially, and politically.
An eagle policy should do that, and must do that. The other birds simply cannot meet the needs
of the day or of the US long-term. We
don’t live in the age of Washington or even of Eisenhower; we have to
understand that we live in an age that neither could have imagined. So to take on the likes of the continuing
problem of ISIS we have to shift and understand the newness and with it the
policy that can support our efforts into the future.
An application of my proposed policy would be a more robust
engagement in the wider Middle East to create the bulwark needed to engage in
both the present day Syria and Iraq. Long
term, all of the states created in the post WWI Sykes-Picot world will need to
be decidedly balkanized and reformulated.
Great concerns exist of the rise of a new “Persia” on the part of the Hejaz/Bedouin
Saudi Arabia, but likewise, we need to recognize that the current Iraqi and
Syrian states cannot provide a stable situation long term. Our best bet is to engage closely with the Hashemite
Kingdom (aka Jordan), Turkey, and the Gulf Principalities to develop a strong engagement
strategy that reformulates Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, into component parts and
states that can stand on their own.
Working with the Saudis and the Iranians, an encirclement and prevention
of inbound support to ISIS, Bahir al-Assad’s regime, and other emerging threats
is a must. We must understand that while
the power sharing opportunity we gave Iraq didn’t occur, we didn’t fail. The Government of Iraq is functioning at a
low level, but can still stand as a representative body for the Shia dominated
south, and the Baghdadi urban core.
Likewise the autonomy given to the Kurds has enabled stability and a
security in that region and not as a destabilizing element in
Turkey/Anatolia. While in hindsight
perhaps sagely, a “soft partition” as proposed by Joe Biden in the mid-2000s
may need to take place, but larger than that, may have to occur in Syria as
well, in order to properly develop the political stability required[xxvii]. The likelihood is that a series of
deployments around the “ISIS zone” will need to take place, involving US ground
troops for sure, but more importantly and numerously Saudi, Jordanian, Turkish,
as well as Kurdish and Shia Arab Iraqi.
Rather than a pure assault oriented approach against ISIS, the goal
should be to control and contain ISIS and Assad’s forces, which will be in a pitch,
for some time, against each other. This
containment would need to also be financial and diplomatic which will necessitate
Russian support as well. This will
require an approach that will likely include concessions about the orientation
of the gradual break-up of the present Syrian state, especially as it relates
to the Mediterranean coast. That said,
once the encirclement is in place and the two (or more) parties within it are
weakened, the approach can be much like a noose tightening, with the relinquished
areas, not re-integrated into Iraq or a Syrian state, so much as into a loose
confederation of Arab republics/states that eventually form into several
countries based along ethnic, geographic, and cultural boundaries rather than
present borders. The Saudi’s and the Iranians,
with the US as a third partner, would need to broker a needed overall security
balance, so as to ensure that none of the developed states would become proxies
for either Shia Iran or Sunni Saudi Arabia for a continuance of the conflict. The counter to these will need to be an
encouraged Turkish state with allies in Jordan and the remaining Gulf States[xxviii],
which would be called upon to aid in the garrison of security forces once the constituencies
are established. Over time, the security
forces can retrograde as local policing in possible, and eventually a confederation
army is stood up that provides defense against existential threats.
Conclusion
This hopefully puts into some context the way forward, at
least within the working theory I have put forward for an US foreign policy. There are still some finer points to be
worked out, but this hopefully can help create the vision of how we proceed,
and not be out of our nest or flying away from the coop. So, to conclude, the next time you see
bird-calling in a series of posts about foreign policy, remember that unless
they are arguing as an eagle, they are simply being a dodo.[xxix]
[i] By the way, I cannot
recommend this more-or-less weekly podcast enough; fantastic work on relating
current events and American history
[ii] A copy of which can be
found, publically, at http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=15&page=transcript
[iii] Washington, George,
Farewell Address, http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=15&page=transcript
[iv] Ibid.
[v] or the Second
Revolutionary War, or the Anglo-American Theatre within the sphere of the
overall Napoleonic Wars, which ever parlance you might choose.
[vi] Signed on 24 December
1814, the Battle of New Orleans occurred 24 December 1814 to 8 January 1815.
[vii] Washington, George,
Farewell Address, http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=15&page=transcript
[viii] In this we were greatly
affected by the stories, images and devastation that was wrought upon Europe
(especially) and Japan/China by the conflict in WWII. The idea that main street America could end
up looking like the smoked out hole that was made of the Avenue des
Champs-Élysées in Paris or the Unter den Linden in Berlin.
[ix] Summary narrative here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement,
but also check the source reference material for more information.
[x] e.g. the UN Charter, the
NATO alliance, and so forth.
[xi] It is noted that the
draft continued well into the 1970s, even though the US never was in a declared
state of war since the end of WWII.
[xii] DIME: Diplomatic, Information/Intelligence,
Military, and Economic; more at http://defensestatecraft.blogspot.com/2010/04/dime.html
[xv] Ibid.
[xvi] Interview on CNN on
January 13, 2015, retrieved from: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1501/13/nday.05.html
[xvii] The hawk being a high
flying bird of prey that seeks to attack, disable, and ravage its victim;
symbolizing the pro-war stance and/or a desire for an active foreign policy
that uses the military extensively.
[xviii] The dove, often seen
as carrying an olive branch, the traditional symbol of peace, is famously
remembered as the chosen bird to go out by Noah and see if the devastating
flood in the biblical story had receded to the point that it was safe to
re-enter the world. Typically this symbolizes
in such discussions a stance of an anti-war stance and/or a foreign policy mark
by diplomacy and other means without engaging in military action.
[xix] libertarian neo-isolationists;
some leading voices include Rand Paul and Ron Paul
[xx] neo-conservative interventionists;
some leading voices include Bill Kristol, Richard Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz
[xxi] liberal interventionist;
some leading voices include Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright
[xxii] Realpolitik; some
leading voices include Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice
[xxiii] All major world powers
contributed to the ejection of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1990/1991, with a
coalition of 34 countries inclusive of numerous Arab states and several
financial backers (including Japan and China).
By contrast, France, Germany, Turkey, and several major powers were left
off the list of 48 partners in the supporting cast for the invasion of Iraq in
2003. Simply looking at the lists
together shows, instead of having established partners, the 2003 coalition was
one more of upstarts and “wanna-bes” (excepting some key players common to both
actions).
[xxiv] “It must be the policy
of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted
subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” March 12, 1947, Speech to a Joint Session of
Congress, Harry S. Truman.
[xxv] Famously articulated by
Kennedy in his inaugural address “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us
well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship,
support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of
liberty.”
[xxvi] BRICS (Brazil, Russia,
India, China, South Africa) is a common expression for the largest and most significant
world powers that are emerging in the post-Cold War/ post US-hegemonic period.
[xxvii] I would posit here that
one needs to look at the historic boundaries that existed within and before the
Ottoman Empire as well as the geographic and cultural features of today. For instance, looking at Syria, it is really
composed of: A region centered on and
surrounding Damascus; a region centered on and surrounding Aleppo; a coastal
region nominally with capitols at Latakia (Alawite) and Tartus which has more
relation with Tripoli in Lebanon; an interior region streaming from Palmyra south
of the Euphrates and a region that centers on Al Hasakah and more properly should
be a part of a greater Kurdistan. Similarly
in Iraq, during the latter Ottoman period it ws diviede into three vilayets of
Mosul (Kurdish), Baghdad (Sunni Arab), and Basrah (Shia Arab). Interspersed was a vilayet of Zor Sanjak that
bridged Anbar, and southern Syria as we have it today. The precise boundaries of the new states that
would emerge, is hard to reckon at this juncture, but these geographic and cultural
notes are perhaps good guides as we look forward.
[xxviii] It is acknowledged
that save some air assets, there is likely to be limited military support from
the independent Gulf States. However,
this effort will require significant financial heft, and in the case of the
UAE, there is aide that can be provided in developing a governing structure
amongst and between rival factions so as to create a stable nation.
[xxix] Dodo, a now extinct
species of bird.
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