Quitting Our Addiction To Small Power Conflicts
Washington needs to stop
picking fights with adversaries that pose no threat to America.
AUGUST 21, 2020
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The U.S. has a poor track record in its conflicts and standoffs with smaller
regional powers. Especially when it has pursued maximalist goals that threaten
the security or the very existence of other governments, the U.S. has
predictably encountered stiff resistance. Wars of regime change have likewise
yielded tremendous costs with virtually no benefits to be seen. Even when the U.S. successfully eliminates a small power adversary, it is usually not worth
the effort and the human cost is always far too high. Despite the recurring
failures of U.S. policies, Washington remains addicted to picking fights with
relatively weak, medium-sized states that pose little or no threat to America.
This has the obvious
disadvantage of wasting resources and attention on unnecessary conflicts, and
it also tends to distract the U.S. from more pressing issues. Above all, it
keeps U.S. foreign policy in a dangerously aggressive, imperial mode in which
our leaders believe they have the right to dictate terms to other countries and
inflict severe punishments on them when they refuse to comply. This is how the U.S. overextends and exhausts itself in the fruitless confrontation while other
major powers husband their resources and make significant domestic investments.
America’s
preoccupation with attacking and coercing small adversaries is a bad habit that
our policymakers and pundits just can’t quit. Even when they recognize the
costs and pitfalls of the addiction, many of them refuse to give up on it. It
has become so familiar and comfortable for the U.S. to obsess over the
activities of a handful of so-called “rogue” states rather than deal with
issues of genuinely global concern. Weak states offer a tempting target for
would-be global policemen that want to make an example of one country pour
encourager Les Autres, and it is politically safe for politicians
to pursue hard-line policies against these countries because they have so
little clout.
Michael Singh’s recent call for “strategic discipline” in Foreign
Affairs is an interesting example of what I am describing.
Singh recognizes the folly of repeated small power conflict. He admits that the U.S. has been unsuccessful in its efforts to remake or coerce these states. But
he still doesn’t think that the U.S. can do entirely without these conflicts: “The United States neither can nor should eschew conflict with small states
altogether. The threats such states pose are often genuine, and addressing them
can complement a strategy focused on great-power competition.” In one breath,
he extols the virtues of discipline and avoiding unnecessary entanglements, and
in the next, he accepts that small power conflicts are bound to happen.
Singh grants that the U.S. has a serious problem with these small power conflicts, but he doesn’t
want the addict to go into rehab just yet. Instead of getting clean and
quitting the habit for good, maybe the occasional fix now and then would be all
right. The trouble with addiction is that it isn’t possible to indulge it just
a little and then stop. Once you start feeding the habit, it takes control and
there is no telling where it will lead you. America’s habit of small power
conflicts is like that. Our policymakers never know when to stop or when it is
enough. They keep listening to the siren song that tells them that these small powers
are major threats, and they guide the ship into the rocks every time.
He urges the U.S. to
be more careful and discerning in the future: “Still, conflicts with minor foes
can tie down resources and consume attention, and such conflicts have proliferated
in the twenty-first century despite U.S. policymakers’ avowed aim to shift
focus away from them. Washington needs to exercise discipline and set a high
bar if it is to avoid the next quagmire.” That sounds like good advice, but it
can’t be followed without combating the threat inflation that drives these
conflicts.
The “strategic
discipline” that Singh recommends isn’t possible as long as the U.S. defines
its interests so broadly that it sees minor regional powers as potential
threats. It also can’t work if minor and manageable threats from these states
are being blown out of proportion every day by legions of analysts and
politicians. The constant drumbeat about some of these smaller states in the
media warps the public perception of the countries that pose the greatest threat to
the U.S. In early 2020, a survey conducted by the Chicago Council on Global
Affairs found that 34% of Americans saw Iran as the
greatest threat to the United States. Even granting that the U.S. and Iran had
recently gone to the brink of war, this was a ludicrous perception that has no
connection to reality. This distorted view is something that politicians and pundits
help to create, and then they exploit it to promote more aggressive policies.
Iran
is widely regarded as a significant threat to the United States, but believing
this requires greatly exaggerating Iranian power and overstating U.S. interests
in the Middle East. Put simply, Iran isn’t capable of posing nearly as much of
a threat to the surrounding region as Iran hawks claim, and the things it can
threaten are not vital interests of the United States in any case. Conflict and
tension with Iran are not inevitable, but rather they are something that the U.S. chooses because of the way it expansively defines its interests and
inflates the danger from Iran. A crucial part of practicing “strategic
discipline” is correctly assessing what our vital interests truly are and how
best to secure them. If our policymakers did this, we would find far fewer
occasions for small power conflicts because they would understand that these
small powers don’t endanger what matters most to us.
Because in the U.S.
insists on treating these smaller powers as major, intolerable threats, the U.S. and its smaller adversaries fall into patterns of hostility and mistrust
that become self-justifying. The U.S. perceives a smaller power as a serious
threat and then begins coordinating with other states to oppose it. Those
relationships in turn become the cause for new and deeper entanglements in the
conflicts of the region. How did the U.S. become involved in the destruction
and starving of Yemen? Because the Obama administration wanted to “reassure”
regional clients that they still had American backing, and because they
indulged those same clients in their fantasy that attacking Yemen had something
to do with opposing Iran. One faulty commitment leads to even worse errors and
crimes. If the U.S. had not been so concerned to keep regional clients happy,
it would not have made one of the most catastrophic decisions of this century
by backing the war on Yemen.
Singh’s case for “strategic discipline” has something to recommend it, but it remains
quite vague about what it would and wouldn’t permit. For example, he writes,
“To that end, the United States should set a high bar for becoming involved in
struggles with small states, and it should engage in them fully cognizant of
their difficulty and of the need for a clear and realistic path to success.”
That all sounds sensible enough, but what exactly would this high bar exclude?
In other words, just how disciplined should the U.S. be? There are
unfortunately not many specifics included in the article. Why is the U.S getting involved in “struggles” with these states in the first place? Is it
really because they threaten us, or has the U.S. adopted someone else’s enemy
as our own? If so, is the “struggle” really worth engaging in? However high
Singh would set the bar for getting involved in “struggles” with smaller
powers, it needs to be set even higher.
It is all very well
to say that the U.S. should make sure to have a “clear and realistic path to
success” when it tries to bully another country into submission, but when the U.S.
coercion campaigns almost always target the core security interests of other
states it is not clear how there can ever be realistic paths to success. The
targeted state will resist because they believe survival is at stake and the
U.S. record gives them every reason to hold fast to that belief. There may be
paths to escalation and eventual regime change, but as the record shows this
just leads to another kind of failure. That should tell us that these campaigns
of coercion are a dead-end that we should abandon as soon as possible.
