[NYTr] America as a Prisoner to Primacy

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Consortium News - Dec 10, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/121007a.html

[Editor’s Note: One of the riskiest features of George W. Bush’s foreign
policy has been its embrace of permanent U.S. military dominance
throughout the world. It is a concept so brazen in its ambition and so
extravagant in its cost that it could well invite the opposite
consequence, a precipitous and disastrous American decline.

But questioning Bush’s dangerous vision of endless American primacy is
almost a taboo topic for political debate, as Carl Conetta of the
Project on Defense Alternatives notes in this guest essay.]


America as a Prisoner to Primacy

By Carl Conetta

As foreign policy disasters go, the American adventure in Iraq is a
splendid one - "splendid" in the sense of being both grand and
manifest.

We might call it "exceptional" as well, except that the troubles which
beset U.S. policy do not end at Iraq's borders. The policy wreck is a
more general one. The U.S. mission in Afghanistan has run aground, too.

Rather than spreading democracy, recent U.S. military activism has
helped spread chaos in several regions. It has tattered both our
reputation and our armed forces. It has helped push Muslim populations
toward Islamist politics, unsettled America's alliances, and prompted
"balancing behavior" on the part of potential big power competitors:
China and Russia.

As for its impact on terrorism: terrorist activity and violence has
grown worse, not better since 11 September 2001. Average levels of
terrorist violence that would have been considered extreme in the
period prior to 9/11 have become the norm in the years since. And there
is no sign that this trend is abating.

The present course is not only counter-productive, but also fabulously
expensive. Indeed, it seems to be delivering less and less security at
ever increasing cost.

Annual defense expenditures have risen by 50 percent in real terms
since 2001 (and 78 percent since 1998). By the end of FY 2008, defense
authorization will exceed $700 billion - significantly more than was
authorized in any year since 1946.

Expenditures of this magnitude are not easily reconciled with bringing
national debt under control, while also meeting pending demands on
Social Security and Medicare. These circumstances may soon force an
economic reckoning for which the nation is ill-prepared.

New Direction?

With American security policy listing on the shoals, we might
reasonably expect congressional leaders and presidential candidates to
be vowing incisive action - a fundamental re-think, a new direction,
something!

But no such awakening is evident. Perhaps Democrats are not eager to
interrupt the self-immolation of the Bush administration. It is easy
enough to ascribe the lapse in thought to the vaudeville of American
electoral politics. But, again, the problem is a more general one.

Lehigh University professor Chaim Kaufmann had it right when he wrote
in the summer 2004 issue of International Security that America's slide
into the Iraq war evinced a broad failure in our vaunted "marketplace
of ideas" - and not simply the perfidy of the current administration.

Today, the market failure continues. Again and again, we are tempted to
rash action by falsehood. Our policy discourse - in the media, academe,
the halls of government, and the think tank world - seems perpetually
locked and loaded. And the "military option" is always on the table,
darkening the agenda.

And the future?

What presently passes for the "cutting edge" in new thinking is a
search for an imagined "middle ground" - a political safe harbor -
located somewhere between the errors of the present administration and
those of the previous one.

Emblematic of this is the view that sees America's troubles in
Afghanistan and Iraq as largely a matter of execution and insufficient
troop strength, that foresees our military occupation of those nations
continuing for decades, and that pins its hopes for success on the
enlargement of U.S. ground forces and the renovation of
counter-insurgency doctrine.

Most prescriptions for policy change still operate within the framework
of a "war on terrorism" - a piece of strategic nonsense if ever there
was one.

Even worse is the slippery, indistinct notion of a "long war" against
Islamic radicalism (or "jihadism" or "Islamo-fascism"), which seems
tailor-made to tempt war with the Muslim world. Neither framework
accurately models the current security environment and neither
illuminates a productive, sustainable path to greater security.

Finally, and worst, are the ruminations about setting America on the
path of "liberal empire" with U.S. ground troops serving as the
constabulary of troubled regions.

Imperial Option

The fact that the imperial option - which has advocates left, right,
and center - should gain a respectful hearing despite the experience of
Iraq indicates that the American policy community has worked itself
into a dead end, a cul de sac. We cannot think outside the military
option, the "big stick."

The problematic turn in U.S. policy did not begin on 11 Sept 2001, or
even on 7 November 2000. Recognizing this is the minimum requirement
for exiting our current predicament.

By the late-1990s, U.S. security policy was already on a path that was
counter-productive and unsustainable - not a wreck, but one waiting to
happen. Defense budgets were already rising, but with little relation
to actual threats.

And America's world reputation was already eroding. Key precursors to
current policy - unilateralism, offensive counter-proliferation, the
"rogue state doctrine", and regime change - were already evident in
U.S. policy toward Iraq and elsewhere.

The 9/11 attacks may have stupefied the U.S. policy debate, rendering
it narrow, reactive, and timid - but there is a more fundamental and
longer-standing problem.

Since the end of the Cold War, much of the U.S. policy community has
been mesmerized by the advent of U.S. military primacy and the
advantages it supposedly conveys. This circumstance seemed to provide
the leverage with which the United States might further enhance its
security, extend its position of world leadership, and advance an
American vision of world order - a "new rule set".

The 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review and U.S. National Security Strategy
went a step further, construing military primacy as essential to U.S.
global leadership and security - not just a fortuitous thing, but a
necessary one. Thus, primacy became a security end in its own right and
the cornerstone of our global policy.

Trouble is: primacy is not sustainable. Indeed, the more it is
exercised, the more it invites balancing behavior on the part of
others. Moreover, experience suggests that we have dangerously
overestimated both the extent and utility of our military primacy.
Nonetheless, our policy discourse remains entranced by it.

Militarized Policy

Hoping to realize the promise of military primacy, three successive
U.S. administrations have retreated from the idea that force should be
an instrument of last and infrequent resort. Thus:

--The threshold for using force has steadily come down,

--The ways we imagine using force and our armed forces have multiplied,

--And our military objectives have grown steadily more ambitious - now
including the aim of fighting multiple, overlapping wars to fast
decisive conclusions, including regime change.

Beyond the traditional objectives of deterring and defending against
aggression, there has been an increasing emphasis on trying to use
force and forceful pressure to actually "prevent the emergence" of
threats and, more generally, to "shape the strategic environment" (as
the 1997 U.S. Defense Review put it.)

In the past, threat prevention and "environment shaping" were largely
in the purview of the State Department. But a feature of our post-Cold
War practice has been the increasing intrusion of the Pentagon on the
provinces of State.

Parallel to this, diplomatic functions have been increasingly
militarized. Thus, today coercive diplomacy plays a bigger role
relative to traditional "quid pro quo" diplomacy. Similarly, "offensive
counter-proliferation" has grown in importance relative to
non-proliferation efforts. And even our programs in support of
democratization and development have gained a khaki tinge.

Prevention or Provocation?

Using military power to prevent the emergence of threats often implies
treating actors who are not preparing or conducting an act of
aggression as though they were.

Preventative military operations target not aggression but, instead,
the capability to aggress - be it existing, emergent, or suspected.
Prevention can also target actors who we believe are disposed, due to
the nature of their governments or belief systems, to do us some type
of harm at some point in the future - that is, adversary regimes or
movements, rogues and radicals. …

Beginning in 1997, U.S. strategy has seen the success of dissuasion as
depending in large part on maintaining America's considerable margin of
global military superiority. In accord with this, a key objective of
dissuasion has been to discourage other countries from initiating arms
competitions with the United States. How? By continuously widening
America's lead with the aim of making competition seem hopeless. …

A key enabler for the broader and more frequent use of force is the
notion that the United States has developed ways to fight fast,
low-risk, low-impact wars. This is the "new warfare" hypothesis and it
did not originate with the Bush administration. In one form or another,
it has helped shape U.S. thinking about the utility of force since the
1990-1991 Gulf War.

However, what we have seen in Iraq and elsewhere is that military power
is less discrete, manageable, and predictable in its effects than
recent policy assumes. And its negative repercussions are more
far-reaching and complex than imagined. Indeed, we have been treated to
an exceptional lesson in how "precision warfare" can spawn chaos.

Putting "boots on the ground" in Iraq was supposed to rectify the
shortcomings of wars fought at a distance with stand-off weapons - wars
like the 1999 Kosovo conflict. But instead of giving us greater
control, military occupation has prompted nationalistic responses and
inflamed ethnic tensions.

Clearly, we have not understood the power and dynamics of "identity
politics". This failure points to a more fundamental one: Seized by a
sense of military primacy, we have failed to appreciate the difference
between achieving military effects and achieving political-strategic
ones.

Military Primacy?

Any true reassessment of the utility of force and its limits must lead
to a re-evaluation of our present condition of "military primacy". What
does it mean and what is it worth?

Our distinct military superiority exists only in the conventional
realm. Facing an unconventional foe in a complex contingency is another
matter. And even in the conventional realm: potential adversaries do
not have to match our levels of investment in order to boost the price
of victory to unacceptable heights and, thus, effectively sap our
superiority.

It is worth remembering that the present global disparities in military
power and investment do not reflect the global distribution of human
and material resources. Many nations have considerable latent capacity
to narrow the military gap between themselves and the United States --
if they are so motivated.

At any rate, when evaluating primacy, the most important comparison is
not between us and other international actors, but between means and
ends - that is, between our power and what we propose to do with it.

The options range from simple defense and deterrence at one end to
schemes of coercive national transformation on the other.

If our Iraq experience teaches anything, it is that humility is in
order. But this lesson is not likely to register in our policy
discourse - not so long as it remains a prisoner to primacy.

[Carl Conetta is co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives.
See: http://www.comw.org/pda/ ]