The 1944 Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago from July 19-21. Our landing at Normandy began on June 6th. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a little too busy to attend the convention that year, but he did manage to address the convention from a naval base in the Pacific Ocean. You might want to read his remarks because they are quite interesting. Unlike Mitt Romney, FDR did not fail to mention that we were in the middle of a war. In fact, he didn’t even run a traditional campaign.
“I shall not campaign, in the usual sense, for the office. In these days of tragic sorrow, I do not consider it fitting. And besides, in these days of global warfare, I shall not be able to find the time. I shall, however, feel free to report to the people the facts about matters of concern to them and especially to correct any misrepresentations.”
He then went on to explain that quite a lot of planning went into building our armed forces since 1932 and that even more planning went into building a strategy for winning the war. But what he really wanted to talk about was the planning they were doing for the post-war environment.
Some day soon we shall all be able to fly to any other part of the world within twenty-four hours. Oceans will no longer figure as greatly in our physical defense as they have in the past. For our own safety and for our own economic good, therefore -if for no other reason- we must take a leading part in the maintenance of peace and in the increase of trade among all the Nations of the world.
And that is why your Government for many, many months has been laying plans, and studying the problems of the near future—preparing itself to act so that the people of the United States may not suffer hardships after the war, may continue constantly to improve their standards, and may join with other Nations in doing the same. There are even now working toward that end, the best staff in all our history- men and women of all parties and from every part of the Nation. I realize that planning is a word which in some places brings forth sneers. But, for example, before our entry into the war it was planning. which made possible the magnificent organization and equipment of the Army and Navy of the United States which are fighting for us and for our civilization today.
Improvement through planning is the order of the day. Even m military affairs, things do not stand still. An army or a navy trained and equipped and fighting according to a 1932 model would not have been a safe reliance in 1944. And if we are to progress in our civilization, improvement is necessary in other fields—in the physical things that are a part of our daily lives, and also in the concepts of social justice at home and abroad.
Personally, I believe that vision right there is exactly what progressivism looked like when it was ascendant and unashamed of itself. FDR laid out the basic idea behind collective security and universal human rights. He explained why America had to take a lead role in building and pursuing a system that could prevent and resolve conflicts, and protect human life.
We have talked about American Exceptionalism a few times over the years, and I’ve taken a lot of heat from latter-day progressives who think America has been an imperialist bully rather than the true leader of the free world. It’s a complicated topic, but I have always agreed with the basic project. I think we got distracted by a panic about communism that led us to make big mistakes. I think we lost our moral compass a bit under the leadership of John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen. We let a narrow corporate interest trump a more overarching interest in promoting self-determination and representative government. But, overall, I think the best evidence that we were right to pursue the project is that the rest of the world has now matured to the point that the vast majority of it is at peace, trading relatively freely, and more committed to representative government, international institutions and international law than we are.
We built that.
But now people are looking at us with our troops deployed in dozens of countries around the globe and our drone strikes and our presidential candidates who carry on their campaigns as if we are not even at war, and many of them are thinking that we’re out of control. I think Obama got the peace prize because the world wants him to dial it back, and he is doing it slowly. We need to continue dialing it back, and we certainly do not want to return to the Bush/Cheney way of doing things. But we also need other nations to step up and do more to secure the peace. They are politically mature enough to handle it.
Just because America should do less on the international stage doesn’t mean that there isn’t legitimate work to do. Who is going to liberate a Kuwait or defend a Benghazi if America won’t do it?
I’m with Clint Eastwood. We should leave Afghanistan tomorrow. But is the rest of the world going to stand around after we do that and passively watch while Pakistan uses Afghanistan as a launching pad to strike India, and maybe even America, again?
Finally, if the world community can’t do it together, it will either be America or another hegemonic state like China and Russia. Do you think they’ve done the best job of internalizing FDR’s post-war vision?
I don’t. I wouldn’t trust them to maintain a just peace or do a better job of arbitrating disputes. We’re not perfect, but I don’t see anyone else better who is willing and capable to do the job.
That’s part of the reason I was so offended by the Bush administration. They not only ran things poorly, but they surrendered the moral high ground needed to earn people’s respect and trust.
As a country, we only get so many mulligans. And, remember, it was U.S. foreign policy under Bill Clinton that inspired bin-Laden to attack us in Africa, in Yemen, and eventually right here in the United States. That doesn’t mean those attacks were in any way justified, but you ought to know when your actions are putting our citizens’ lives at risk. You ought to minimize that kind of blowback. Don’t do things that antagonize people unless you absolutely have to.
I think we need to wind this empire down, not because it was a bad idea, but because the idea wasn’t to be an empire. The idea was to build a world where countries can agree not to fight each other and we have the tools to resolve conflict without war. That’s something the neo-conservatives not only do not understand but with which they totally disagree. They think the point is to maintain “the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.”
If we have fallen short, it’s because too often we have allowed our foreign policy to be perverted away from FDR’s vision to a vision in which U.S. corporate interests come first.
It’s funny that you and Greer seem to post on the same topic in your own ways at the same time more and more these days (as I think I commented on a couple of months back on the topic of ordinary Americans being involved in politics).
Today’s is another instance, as I enjoyed both your post and the two latest ones from Greer (this and this).
In 1946, the Republicans took Congress on a combination of economic scare and Red scare tactics. In 1946, Democrat and head of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan got a visit from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Reagan’s cooperation with Hoover’s Red Scare campaigns of the 1940s earned him a permanent job flacking for General Electric and doing Red Scare dramas on General Electric Theater. The rest, they say, is history.
Harry Truman either did not share FDR’s vision or was easily intimidated by the Republican victory in 1946. In 1947-1949 he ushered through the major restructuring of the national security apparatus that burdens us today–to fight the Cold War. W put that apparatus on steroids to fight the Global War on Terror. Obama has significantly destabilized the global situation with the introduction of assassination, drones, and cyberwarfare–again stampeded by Republican intransigence and electoral victory.
This is not the way to fulfilling FDR’s vision.
FDR really did believe that the UN, the version of the League of Nations that Wilson failed to get popular support for, would prevent wars and foster peace. Unfortunately we’re in a situation today where the UN is the vehicle for further wars and military intervention.
I think Obama does deserve blame for escalating use of drones and cyberwarfare but I don’t think either has destabilized the global situation to a great extent. I don’t agree with emphasis we’ve placed on using drones but I think it’s preferable to boots on the ground. Secondly, from the administration’s perspective I think they like it because there is less risk to American lives.
There really is no good option.. either way will lead to loss of civilian lives. We just need to end these wars as soon as possible.
Widespread sales of drones overseas by US arms manufacturers and widespread reverse engineering (such as Iran is currently doing with a hacked US drone) lower the cost (human and financial) of attacks. And put the price point for such weapons within the capability of a number of non-state actors (including transnational corporations). They are GPS-guided; commercial GPS would work as well as any secret military guidance satellites and would be harder for a country like the US to shut down without disrupting commerce. That makes it inherently unstable.
The same is true of cyberwarfare. The techniques of cyberwarfare are already available to non-state groups. Fortunately, so far the most publicly visible ones have used it to undermine calls for war and to help popular revolutions in the Arab Spring. But here too, there is a growing informal economy of shady actors in addition to a burgeoning US effort. If the StuxNet virus was indeed inflicted on Iran by Israeli and/or US cyberwarriors, it shows that even infrastructure can be affected through the remote progamming of control devices. That is not only destabilizing, it also like various intellectual property enforcement schemes threatens the independence and security of the internet as a neutral public carrier. Security mechanisms will slow it down to the speed of a TSA screening line at airports and destroy its utility.
I understand the attractiveness of these weapons; they forestall the inevitable decision to negotiate politically and end the war.
Unfortunately we’re in a situation today where the UN is the vehicle for further wars and military intervention.
Yes, it’s terribly unfortunate that Gadhaffi didn’t win, and Libya became a democracy.
Also, what do you mean “today?” One of the earliest notable actions the UN took was to authorize an international force to stop the conquest of South Korea. Stopping international aggression and the commission of widespread crimes against humanity, by being the sole legitimate authorizer of force, is the purpose of the UN (and the League of Nations). You talk about the League failing, but it failed precisely because it refused to authorize force in the cases of Japan’s invasion of China and Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia.
Harry Truman either did not share FDR’s vision or was easily intimidated by the Republican victory in 1946.
You don’t suppose the actions of the Soviet Union in eastern Europe had anything to do with Truman’s stance, do you?
Obama has significantly destabilized the global situation with the introduction of assassination, drones, and cyberwarfare
Obama didn’t introduce any of those. Each of them were used by the Bush administration as well (even leaving aside the misuse of the term “assassination.”)
And the evidence of this destabilization is…what? Arab Spring?
Read James Carroll’s House of War. Historians have now had a look at the documents and debates that went on during the 1940s on both the US and Soviet side and have discovered the folks like Paul Nitze were itching for conflict more than the Soviets were. The Soviets knew their weakness and played bluster as a deterrent weapon.
Singling out an individual to kill when that individual is not on a battlefield constitutes assassination, no matter how much you want to pretty it up.
Bush used drones, torture, assassination, and cyberwarfare withoout institutional authority. Obama has gotten that institutional authority, whether sought or unsought. The authorization for assassination of US citizens anywhere without checks and balances or judicial review is institutionalized. That is dangerous domestically because it depends on trusting one person in the government, the President. The use of drones for assassination and having a “kill list” concentrates power in the hands of the President, like nuclear weapons do, without checks and balances — the emergency is “time-sensitive”, thus the need for single command. That concentration of power has increased since 1945. The President now has the power, without checks and balances, to declare someone an enemy of the state.
But the destabilization occurs in the lowering of the cost of conducting warfare to the point that non-state actors can accumulate substantial power easily, enough to bring any large state to heel through asymmetric warfare and attrition. It is a matter of time before some small state or non-state actor tries. And not necessarily in an attack against the US.
Yes, the Arab Spring is a result of the destabilization brought about by the spread of social media and citizen journalism. The actions against government websites by Anonymous and other hacktivists have been at this point more symbolic—DDoS attacks on pubic information web portals– than serious cyberwarfare.
But the potential for non-state-based cyberwarfare exists, is cheap to carry out and expensive to defend against–just like other asymmetric attacks. And the US is pioneering in expanding the offensive capabilities of cyberwarfare, some of which will leak out to other nations and non-state groups.
It is not a policy it is the unintended consequence of other seemingly sensible policies.
Historians have now had a look at the documents and debates that went on during the 1940s on both the US and Soviet side and have discovered the folks like Paul Nitze were itching for conflict more than the Soviets were. The Soviets knew their weakness and played bluster as a deterrent weapon.
The canceling of elections in Poland, and the rest of the fall of the Iron Curtain, was not bluster. It was real-world, significant foreign policy.
Also, whatever Paul Nitze might have wanted, you might notice that we did not, in fact, go to war with the Soviet Union. There were certainly people who wanted that, but that was not the policy we implemented. Instead, we adopted a containment policy.
Singling out an individual to kill when that individual is not on a battlefield constitutes assassination, no matter how much you want to pretty it up.
Not under any American or international legal doctrine. You’re just using a word, incorrectly, for emotional effect. The term “assassination” has actually been defined in American law, which forbids the assassination of foreign political leaders, and the targeting of people in the chain of command of a force with whom a country is at war has never been included. It would have been just as legal to shoot at Goering in Berlin, “far from any battlefield,” as it was to bomb airfields in Berlin, “far from any battlefield.” You seem to be using “assassination” to mean “being too precise in target acquisition.”
Bush used drones, torture, assassination, and cyberwarfare withoout institutional authority. Obama has gotten that institutional authority, whether sought or unsought.
Barack Obama has done precisely the opposite of getting institutional authority on torture. He has used institutional authority to ban it, after Bush had, in fact, gotten institutional authority (the Bybee memos, for instance) to implement it.
War powers are, indeed, dangerous. War powers do, indeed, concentrate power in the hands of the President. But this is nothing new, nothing unique to President Obama.
But the destabilization occurs… I see what you’re getting at here. It’s not exactly “destabilization” in the sense that the term is used in international affairs, so I wasn’t clear about what you meant.
And I certainly agree that Arab Spring has been destabilizing (which shows that it is not necessarily a bad thing), and that the dissemination of technology can also be destabilizing.
It is potential destabilization, in the sense used in international relations. Nuclear weapons, by contrast, by raising the cost of acquisition and by being too terrible to consider risking retaliation turned out to be stablizing if scary during the Cold War. I’m not sure that would have been the case if the Soviet Union had not developed nuclear weapons and ICBMs–not a judgement I would have made even a decade ago. The ideology of the American Century and the US as the sole nuclear power could have done as much damage as the ideology of “the New American Century” and the status of the US as the sole superpower did.
As for Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union did there what the US and allies did with liberated France and the Western part of Germany, and especially Japan – institutionalized its system. And the US totally misread the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions because it’s thinking was stuck in the ideology of “international communism”, a vision that the Soviet Union promoted but could not achieve. There were more political ways of dealing with the Soviet Union. But to Truman’s credit, he stemmed for a time the Republicans stampede into another war.
Banning torture by Executive Order is easily reversible. I will grant that Obama has taken torture out of that list. But the DOJ has failed to bring accountability to those who planned and carried out that policy–and the suspicion is that it is because the paper trail leads to Bush and Tenet and would provoke a Constitutional crisis that would be politicized by the Republicans. Sorta the same reason that Nixon was let off the hook.
On concentration of war powers in the hand of the President. Yes the institution of the Presidency never seems to give up power on its own. Part of the unfulfilled hopes for the Obama administration was that he would roll back the Presidential power that Bush had claimed in the Global War on Terror and would end the security theater silliness exactly as he dealt with the real threats. Yet today, for all the Homeland Security money that has been spent, grandma’s still are relieved of their hand lotion, airline passengers are body scanned, and no one can provide evidence of any plots that have been stopped. And the mindset has infected the police forces in the country, who have gotten gobs of new toys and the ability to suppress any dissent and surveil any citizen without probable cause.
The US military has a poor record of analyzing the toys that it wants for their potential to be destabilizing internationally or instruments of suppression of dissent domestically.
It is potential destabilization, in the sense used in international relations. Nuclear weapons, by contrast, by raising the cost of acquisition and by being too terrible to consider risking retaliation turned out to be stablizing if scary during the Cold War. I’m not sure that would have been the case if the Soviet Union had not developed nuclear weapons and ICBMs
So, wouldn’t the dissemination of this technology work the same way – allowing poorer countries to have deterrent capability?
As for Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union did there what the US and allies did with liberated France and the Western part of Germany, and especially Japan – institutionalized its system.
This is a rather stomach-churning way to describe the difference between allowing and supporting elections, and forbidding them after promising to respect them. No, I do not agree that the MacArthur constitution for Japan and the Soviet enslavement of Poland are the same thing.
Banning torture by Executive Order is easily reversible. I will grant that…
Your claim was that Obama institutionalized torture. He did not. He did precisely the opposite. What you’re now talking about is the degree to which he de-institutionalized it. Torture does not belong on your list.
Yes the institution of the Presidency never seems to give up power on its own. Part of the unfulfilled hopes for the Obama administration was that he would roll back the Presidential power that Bush had claimed in the Global War on Terror and would end the security theater silliness exactly as he dealt with the real threats.
And he did – for instance, closing the black sites and banning torture are two examples of presidential power claimed by Bush that Obama rolled back. Again, you’re talking about how much Obama rolled back Bush’s policies. Another important point is that Obama had renounced the Bush administration’s claims of inherent executive powers to fight a ‘War on Terror,’ and grounded his actions vs. al Qaeda in the powers granted (and therefore, available to be withdrawn) to the President by Congress. Locating these powers in the 2001 AUMF, instead of claiming they are inherent in the Presidency, is an important action from a legal and constitutional perspective.
I agree with you about the militarization of local police, but I think it’s a mistake to identify this problem too much with counter-terrorism. It goes back much father than that, to the drug war.
Second the recommendation of Carroll’s House of War. This blogging on the left would be less fractious and not as difficult if more participants read books such as Carroll’s. The easier to read and less narrowly focused Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer is another good one. Chalmers Johnson’s trilogy is probably the most currently relevant and scariest of these three.
That’s India’s concern. They are a nuclear Great Power. Why should we pull their chestnuts out of the fire? Why should we be the world’s policeman while they laugh and export into us and giggle at our inefficiency caused in large part by the crushing burden of Defense expenditures?
Voice…how do you feel?
Neo-isolationist. Lived 45 years with the Cold War. That’s Enough.
Well…do you believe in Good and Evil? Or is it all grey?
Believe it or not, this is a very important question.
That’s India’s concern…Why should we pull their chestnuts out of the fire?
How is this outlook any different than that of the Randian conservative who says the same thing about poverty?
How is this not merely a “screw you, I got mine” argument?
Another way to think about this question is, do we want relations between nations to be built around each one pursuing its self-interest while assuming a zero-sum world, or do we want cooperation and mutual protection and rules?
Right now, with the United States at the top of the heap, it might be attractive to think in terms of the former, but will we still want “You’re on your own” to be the guiding principle in 100 years?
The US depends on Pakistan as an (imperfect) ally.
Exactly how would the US pull India’s chestnuts out of the fire? My best guess at a first move would be to get a joint agreement from both of them to become parties to the nonproliferation treaty–and bring along Israel as well.
China, which has a outstanding border dispute with India, is also conflicted relative to brokering the reversal of hostilities between Pakistan and India.
Isolationism doesn’t work. Neither does extreme forward deployment. Regional mutual security agreements, such as NATO, SCO, Unasur, AU, are stable to the point that regional interests cause conflict. Given this, the likely forum for the negotiation between India and Pakistan would be the SCO, which has already had sessions among the frontline states to Afghanistan, sessions that included India, the US, and the EU as observers.
That’s all correct.
But without at least a credible stick behind the carrots, those discussions at regional security organizations are as meaningful as League of Nations debates.
My guess is that we would start cruising warships hoping to incite a Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Much different. The Randian is refusing help to a weaker member of his own society. I’m saying we not get involved in a Great Power’s war, and a potentially nuclear war at that. If India were to attack Bangladesh or Thailand, that would also be another situation. But both India and Pakistan chose to join the nuclear “club”. It would be as foolish to intervene as to intervene in a nuclear war between Russia and China.
The Randian is refusing help to a weaker member of his own society.
So, you’re writing Indians out of your “circle of humanity,” so that we have no responsibility for them. You are your brother’s keeper, but those people over there, they aren’t your brothers.
That is rather horrific moral reasoning.
And one reason to intervene is a war between Indian and Pakistan is to prevent it from going nuclear.
Didn’t say they weren’t human. Even the Nazis were (barely) human. But they are not our responsibility or allies. In fact, they are enemies, just not as bad enemies as Pakistan.
But they are not our responsibility or allies.
I think Ayn Rand made your point most effectively when she said, “No one has ever been able to explain why I should be my brother’s keeper.” Then again, Ebeneezer Scrooge was pretty pithy when he said, “They’re not my children.”
But, you see, I’m a liberal. I don’t agree with those things.
But even beyond the moral level, as a liberal, I recognize that the Randian vision of uber-individualism, of the pursuit of self-interest untouched by the concept of responsibility to others, just doesn’t work. It is a horror show for the weakest, but it is ultimately worse for the powerful, too, to be in a society like that than to be in one with a sense of mutual responsibility. We know this to be true in a community of individuals; why wouldn’t it be true among a community of nation-states?
In fact, they are enemies
Am I misunderstanding you, or are you claiming that India is a hostile nation?
Well, let’s see.
One is about foreign policy and the other domestic.
One is about refusing to meddle in affairs none of our business (good idea) and the other about starving my (or your) Grandma (bad idea).
One is about how the wealth we produce in our economy is distributed among us (definitely our business) and the other is about ineffectively playing global Lone Ranger out of national vanity (not so much).
Getting it?
I got it just fine: you think that survival-of-the-fittest, screw-you-I-got-mine is a perfectly legitimate moral stance to take towards people who aren’t Americans. Americans are “my grandma,” while those other people with the funny language are some kind of other, whose well-being is of no moral consequence to you. Nice.
Not only that, but you think that it is likely to result in a decent, humane outcome when it comes to affairs between nations, when you know quite well that it results in horrifying, inhumane outcomes when practices between individuals. Or, then again, maybe you don’t, but you just don’t care what sorts of consequences result for those “other” people.
You’re pretty much arguing the 40s-era America First line.
I “get” it all right; I just find it morally repugnant to dismiss the rest of the world like that.
Everyone has an in group and an out group. Even a lower animal like a dog understands “us” and “them”. To “us” untold loyalty and sacrifice is due. To “them” nothing more than a wary watchfulness. And if “they” do something to “us”, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”. You can see it here. What do gays feel for Santorum? What do Liberals feel for Conservatives? Democrats for Republicans? And vice versa. Why the glee at the assasination of bin Laden? Wasn’t he a human being? Of course, but he belonged to the out group, the enemy.
Some people have extremely narrow in groups. Mormons, KKK’ers, and the 1% come to mind. Others have extremely wide in groups. You and Mother Teresa have the widest in group encompassing all of humanity. I venture to say that one’s country as the limiting in group is pretty common, so common as to be the norm. My father felt the Family was the in group. That’s pretty common too.
Social animals all have some sort of pack, herd, or troop. Solitary animals are only loyal to their immediate offspring and often only while the offspring are immature. Is one good and the other evil? To your mind it appears so, but doesn’t that only prove that you are intolerant of other views?
To “us” untold loyalty and sacrifice is due. To “them” nothing more than a wary watchfulness.
What a horrible, barbaric way to live. I’m glad our society doesn’t operate along those lines, and I see no reason to think an international order that operates that way would be any more humane.
The glee at killing bin Laden was not about his status as a Muslim, Arab, or member of any other national out-group, but the threat he posed as an individual homicidal maniac. As has often been pointed out, we’ve blown up American al Qaeda terrorists, too.
You and Mother Teresa have the widest in group encompassing all of humanity.
You misunderstand me. It isn’t that I think of Indians or Kuwaitis as members of “my group” in the same way that I think about my fellow Americans. I don’t support providing Medicare benefits to Indians, for instance. I recognize that Indians are an out-group; I just don’t agree that we have no responsibilities to people in out-groups. We don’t have the same responsibilities that we have towards other Americans, but ferchrissakes we have some.
As for animals, they are not humans, and cannot be judged good or evil. I’m talking about us.
But it does,Joe. It may be horrible and barbaric but “Eppur si muove”.
Phooey.
All of this is just the usual bullying bullshit propaganda we get from interventionist thugs who either don’t know a thing about normative moral theory or choose to pretend not to.
And pretend to see no difference at all between those who preach utter selfishness and those who accept a realistic gradation of responsibilities, strongest toward those near (family, friends, neighbors, countrymen) and weakest toward those most remote.
After a century of horrific globalism, nobody goes in for that “American Century” eyewash anymore but ambitious politicians, greedy military contractors, moralistic humbugs, and bar-room patriots.
The same people who have been going in for it all along.
Wilson, FDR, and Lyndon Johnson all promised to keep us out of war while planning to push us in up to our asses.
Nobody lies like a liberal Democrat promising peace.
Enough, already!
My gosh.
Are you playing the race card?
What a joke!
Pretty much like your arrogant, moralistic humbug.
“I find it repugnant.”
Oh, do you?
Well, we’ll all rush right off to war, then!
We surely can’t do anything you find “morally repugnant”!
Boo…Impressive…wow…even the hint that America is different is impressive….
There is hope!
The part of American exceptionalism that is unconscionable and works counter to US stated aims is the persistent avoidance of international accountability.
The most egregious example was George W. Bush’s refusal to bring the Rome Treaty to be ratified.
Less egregious but no less serious examples are our continued use of the veto in the UN Security Council to avoid accountability. And our threats to bypass the Security Council if our initiatives are blocked by other countries’ vetoes.
Watching Arab Spring evolve, Libya and now Syria I wonder whether FDR’s philosophy may have been remembered by Obama’s team with the idea that it was time to nudge today’s world powers into stepping up to that vision.
I always feel like Obama is teaching them to join the command so that we aren’t always the world’s only policeman. Until you’ve had to be the tip of the spear you ain’t nothing but a backseat driver.
The sharing of command was a sign of a return of US policy to multilateralism.
It was necessary, in part, because it is a wise way of dealing with folks you call “allies”. And in part, because George W. Bush blew America’s deterrent standing as the world’s sole superpower by using that power unwisely and exposing the US as a paper tiger.
We are in a multipolar world with the world’s most expensive military, not the world’s most powerful military (although it might yet be). There is NATO, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization countries have be strengthening ties in response the US policies in Iran and Syria and the coming withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Unasur nations are standing behind Ecuador’s decision to grant Julian Assange political asylum. And the African Union has been instrumental in stabilizing Somalia to the point that it has (for now) an elected parliament.
What our expensive military can do is (1) provide relief logistics in natural disasters, (2) deter a nuclear or conventional attack on the US by nations, (3) act as a nuclear umbrella to prevent a NPT breakout in the North Pacific, (4) act as a partner for stability in Europe, (5) allow Israel to act with impunity in its handling of the Palestinians, (6) patrol the high seas and suppress piracy. Everything else it puts its resources to ends in failure, the most persistent being the pursuit of counterinsurgency in other countries.
I think you forgot something our military can do exceedingly well – win a conventional ground war against any imaginable opponent anywhere in the world.
When was the last time that happened?
Iraq 2003. In the conventional ground war phase of the operation, it was like one of those Mike Tyson fights from the late 80s.
And then instead of sending 3 million personnel to do a proper occupation, we sent Paul Bremer, who couldn’t get the electricity turned back on.
And there is not a lot of evidence that the Iraqi army put up more than a symbolic fight; Saddam Hussein no doubt was intending to jerk victory from his defeat by a protracted asymmetrical war. Had it not been for Sistani and Sadr, he might have succeeded.
So overall, how that turn out in attaining the American objectives going in?
And then instead of sending 3 million personnel to do a proper occupation, we sent Paul Bremer, who couldn’t get the electricity turned back on.
Indeed, the military does not do occupation nearly as well as it fights conventional ground wars.
And there is not a lot of evidence that the Iraqi army put up more than a symbolic fight;
This is nonsense. The Iraq Army was fully turned-out for the fight. They just lost, and badly, because they were so overmatched.
Certainly, Saddam saw the need to have a Plan B ready to go in case the Iraqi military lost the conventional war. Why do you think that was? Could it be that he understood that the United States military was surpassingly good at fighting such a war?
So overall, how that turn out in attaining the American objectives going in?
Since the American objectives going in required us to do things, like occupation and counter-insurgency, that the military is bad at, it turned out very poorly. What does that have to do with my observation about fighting conventional ground wars?
Military actions are as Clausewitz wrote “politics by other means”. That is not the way that the US has tended to approach military action. The US has mostly wanted to separate the international politics from the military action through seeking “victory” through whatever tactics were strongest in the toolkit.
If you can’t use conventional warfare well politically, either because you are so good and no one wants to fight or because the situation requires you to combine conventional warfare with stuff you don’t do well, you lose your political objective.
The US does not do non-existential wars very well; few nations do. And despite the hype, neither Korea, Vietnam, any of Reagan’s sorties, the two Gulf Wars, nor the war in Afghanistan was fundamentally an existential war. But World War II was an existential war in prospect and certainly in reality for the UK. And the Cold War was read (now we know incorrectly) as an existential war and despite appearances actually done on the cheap because it really never was, except in the minds of foreign policy wonks. Or maybe it appeared to be an existential external and internal war for a certain class of Americans. But even there it fails because privileged folks send their own kids to fight existential wars.
Conventional warfare is best suited to actually fighting existential wars. Nuclear weapons are best suited to deterrence and not use, but the idea of use has to be credible to be effective. Counterinsurgency works when the target government is popular and no foreign troops are involved; all other cases of success involved horrendous atrocities. Occupation requires roughly one soldier to each 8 people in the population (the ratio involved by all four allies in Germany) or the complicity of a puppet government (an unsure gamble).
In Korea, we stalemated a conventional war because we did not want to take on a China that was relatively weak because of the effects that would have on mobilizing Chinese society and the economy. Smart move. Had to cashier MacArthur to do it. In Vietnam, our puppet government turned out to be corrupt and unpopular and attempts to turn it into a conventional war failed. We failed at counterinsurgency for the same reason Great Britain did in 1781. The various Reagan sorties were wars of choice to try to remove the shame of failing in Vietnam. The First Gulf War was most likely a diplomatic screw-up that gave Saddam Hussein the impression that we recognized his sovereignty over his “19th province”. The Bosnian War was an existential war for a peaceful Europe, with the heavy shadow of 1914 Sarajevo hanging over it. The Kosovo War was an extension of the Bosnian War. Both Afghanistan and Iraq were wars of choice and likely chosen to gain George W. Bush additional presidential power and approval as a war president. In Libya, NATO played France in 1781.
So, once again, what does any of that have to do with your contention that the United States does not do conventional war well?
Talking about the limit of convention war is all well and good, but it isn’t relevant to the question. You cited Iraq post 2003 as evidence that we don’t fight conventional wars well, but what you’re saying now has to do with our inability to do other things well.
What we do well is fight high tech wars, Air and Naval. I’m not putting the Army down, they are highly professional, but in the air and on the sea there is no one who comes remotely close.
Interesting thought, but we weren’t exactly leading the charge in Libya – more like, we went along with our allies – and we’re sure not leading the charge in Syria.
I’m not complaining, mind you, just noting the facts.
IMO, the intervention in Libya was driven by France, with Sarkozy’s fear of a flood of muslim immigrants into France right before an election in which Maurine Le Pen was the leading opponent.
As it turned out, Sarkozy himself out-demagogued Le Pen and still lost.
Well, prior to Sarkozy, there was the Arab League pushing for intervention.
Libya really was a perfect storm, in terms of the international response. The sheer number of people Gadhaffi had managed to piss off by March 2011 is staggering.
Yep, Hugo Chavez was the last friend he had remaining. Even Castro (Raul) was circumspect. And Russia and China sat it out.
Well, there’s always Dennis Kucinich.
One part of his vision was that the Pentagon was to be demobilized at the conclusion of WWII. He understood that such a huge military complex would be too be a temptation of more war.
“We” didn’t panic over communism is was an orchestrated effort to keep us at war because WWII had made many careers and fortunes and those who benefited more from it wanted more of where that came from.
What’s pathetic is that sixty-seven years on nobody seems to have a clue as to how a US peacetime economy would operate. Primarily because the US bankbook only opens wide for the military. Otherwise it is deemed as wasteful spending.
Coloring the profile of the United States from a long-gone era. Your article is thoughtful and in the line of hope. Reality is much tougher, the United States has failed miserably in a vision and implementation of foreign policy since World War II. The UN Security Council should be revamped to reflect the major change of global power structure. Veto power of a single nation is irrational in world affairs.
American imperialist policy during the Cold War
veto power keeps the hegemonic powers from walking away from the UN entirely.
I applaud your realism on that score.
That’s a very silly article about American foreign policy since World War II.
The central plank of that policy was to implement containment of the Soviet Union, preventing it from expanding its reach. The ultimate goal was to keep the Soviets contained until they fell or reformed. After forty years of this policy, the Soviet Union reformed, and then fell.
There were certainly episodes of success and failure during Containment, and there are certainly criticisms to level in terms of how we pursued that policy, but it ultimately succeeded in its goals beyond the dreams of the people who first implemented it.
Yippee.
And this was good for ordinary Americans in some way?
I mean, other than making the world feel a lot safer for the terrified and angry capitalists of the West?
It was a hell of a lot better for the average American than the Soviets winning the Cold War.
Tell you what: ask anyone in Poland if they think Soviet domination was bad for their country.
Excellent point.
Ask anyone . . . in Poland.
making the world feel a lot safer for the terrified and angry capitalists of the West?
It is a testament to American privilege that it is possible for someone to believe that this is the only reason to consider Soviet expansionism to be a bad thing.
No, it was a bad thing.
But neither rollback nor containment were sensible American responses to it.
You remember containment?
The Korean War. The Vietnam War. Endless assassinations, dirty tricks, and dirty wars in Latin America.
Et cetera.
The rise and spread of Islamism are also bad things.
So far, like Communism, they have been bad things pretty much always for somebody on the other side of the world.
They have been bad things for us pretty much entirely because of the domination of American policy by globalist meddlers who cannot stay out of bar-fights that are none of their affair.
So far, the American response to Islamism has been absurd.
Further intervention will only bring further destruction, bloodshed, and useless expense.
We need to walk away from Afghanistan.
And Iraq.
And Israel.
And NATO.
And the Far East.
And Central Asia.
We need to walk all the way back to North America.
I don’t find the decontextualized contrast between FDR and Truman compelling. When FDR died, the Soviet Union had been our ally for years, had coordinated their policy with ours, and had made a whole raft of promises about continuing to do so in the post-war era, and had committed to respecting the democratic rights of the people in eastern Europe. Throughout this period, there was no daylight between Truman and FDR.
When Truman was governing in the late 1940s, he saw the Soviets break all of those promises, bringing the countries they’d “liberated” from the Germans under their boot.
If FDR had served out his final term into 1949, and had seen the Soviets’ post-war behavior, he almost certainly would have pursued a path identical to that of Truman.
“Who is going to liberate a Kuwait or defend a Benghazi if America won’t do it?”
Maybe nobody.
Is that a problem?
Why is it my granddaughters’ problem and not, say, that of some little girls in China, Russia, Germany, or Brazil?
Or maybe there just won’t be anyone stupid enough to step up and play global hegemon, if we climb down from this branch before somebody saws it off.
It’s a mug’s game, trying to be “the indispensable nation” that gets to tell everybody what to do.
And a moralistic, self-flattering smokescreen for the interests of the military-industrial complex, totally opposed to those of the ordinary people of America.
Go get your own granddaughters killed, if you must.
Leave mine alone.
Is that a problem?
It’s not a problem for you.
And I guess that’s all that matters.
“Screw you, I got mine.”
Or maybe there just won’t be anyone stupid enough….
Stupid indeed. Rescuing the people of Benghazi was as stupid as giving a homeless guy a dollar.
We gain nothing from it from a material point of view, but it costs us something.
How stupid it is to give a homeless guy a dollar. It’s a mug’s game. Next time, I won’t give him the dollar, but I’ll make some noises about wanting a Chinese guy, a Russian, a Brazilian, and a German to give him a dollar, so I can pretend I’m not being completely callous.
The homeless guy deserves much better of his country than a dollar, though he is in no degree my personal responsibility.
He is our countryman, a citizen of our very own sovereign political community, an integral member of the sovereign people who have every right to control the economic life of their – our – country for the – our – common good.
As for Benghazi, it is bad enough the Lobby insists we treat Israel as though it were a US state and defend it to the death of the last Chicagoan.
You want us to treat the whole world that way?
Phooey.
We’ve had enough of your moralistic delusions of grandeur.
America needs to quit trying to rule the world and do the work of straightening out its own house.