the u.s.-led international order is dead

B Y

Who Lost Iraq?That depends on whether you ever thought it could be won.

AAR O N D AVID M ILLE R

A mericans love keeping score. We love lists, ranking presidents, and Top 10s in

just about every category. And we particularly love trying to figure out who

won and lost things.

In foreign policy, this has devolved into by now the well-established "Who Lost

What" game. And we've played it now for over half a century. Take your pick: who

lost China, Vietnam, Egypt, Ukraine, Syria, the war on terror, and now Iraq. Part of

this process, of course, is that we love beating up whomever we peg responsible for

putting up an L rather than a W -- Democrats, Republicans, even ourselves.

Why ourselves? Because at the heart of the Who Lost What game is the elusive

notion that these prizes were ours to "win" in the first place. That's not to say what

America does (or doesn't do) is irrelevant to determining how we fare in the world,

or that we haven't made mistakes that have made matters worse.

But when it comes to influencing countries, small tribes or big powers, it's always a

matter of degree. And this is most certainly the case when we're trying to

reconstruct a country, build a nation, or assume responsibility for ending sectarian,

religious, and ethnic tensions in societies that lack enlightened leadership and

legitimate institutions -- especially when we don't have the power, capacity, and

partners to do it. And yet, faced with these challenges, we all too often assume a

power and capacity -- driven usually by arrogance and ignorance -- that somehow

we can bend the world or the forces of history to our will. This isn't a defense of the

Obama administration's risk-aversion as much as it is a defense of common sense

and reality.

That said, the who lost -- or perhaps more precisely the who's losing -- Iraq debate

is no academic matter.

The U.S.-Led International Order Is Dead http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/06/16/who_lost_iraq_oba...

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The president may be getting ready to blow a whole lot of stuff up on the ground in

that country. And he's being encouraged by a lot of people who are trying to guilt

him into doing so to compensate, presumably, for what we failed to do before. But

while Obama's besieged with calls for airstrikes and T-LAMs to break the back of

the ISIS siege, he should remind himself of two things. He didn't lose Iraq because

it has never been ours to win. And he can't win it now. Here's why.

Iraq Was Unwinnable

The Bush 43 vision for the country -- free, secure, violence-free, and stable with

Shiites, Kurds, and Sunnis all getting along in a contentious yet real democracy --

was always a fantasy. It denied what Iraq was and where it was. We can heap as

much blame on the Obama administration as we want. And they may well deserve

a fair share of it for not trying hard enough to secure an agreement that would have

allowed a residual U.S. presence and which might have helped stabilize things. But

it doesn't change the reality that demography and geography made almost

impossible the prospects of an Iraq made in America and fashioned with a

Hollywood happy ending.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a profound blunder that would set into motion a

series of events that contained much of the dysfunction that we see in Iraq today,

including the unintended rise of al Qaeda in Iraq. When you invade a country in

the heart of Arabdom with insufficient forces, unclear objectives, and a woeful

misunderstanding of that nation's politics, you aren't off to a good start.

The Iraq invasion destroyed the country's institutions; triggered a major shift in

the balance of power in favor of the Shiites; alienated the Sunnis and made them

vulnerable to jihadi persuasions (even with the success of the 2007 surge); and

enhanced Iran's role and influence. It also left a ton of unfinished business that the

United States tried its best to take care over the next eight years.

But so much of that -- creating a legitimate and sustainable contract between the


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governed and those who govern; countering Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's

sectarian agenda; finding an equitable share for the Sunnis; getting a newly

self-confident and liberated Kurdish community integrated in the new Iraq; and

checking Iran's influence -- was simply beyond America's capacity. We didn't sign

up for nation-building, kept denying that's what we

wanted to do, and in the end stopped trying. And it

was easy to see why.

We didn't sign upfor nation-building,kept denying that'swhat we wanted todo, and in the endstopped trying.

Iraq in 2003, 2011, and today is a bridge too far. It was

never going to be post-1945 Europe or Japan. It

wasn't even the Balkans. Consider the fact that we

occupied Japan between 1945 and 1952 -- a

militaristic nation, some of whose soldiers refused to surrender until the 1970s --

and not a single American was killed in a hostile action by Japanese during that

entire period. In Iraq, we had no entrance strategy and no exit strategy either. The

foundation was rotten before we arrived. And despite a good faith effort, the U.S.

reconstruction job left a foundation somewhat improved but still fundamentally

unsound.

Blame Maliki first

America's trillion-dollar social science experiment -- to build a new Iraqi state on

the ruins of the old one -- failed only partly because of what we did or didn't do.

The main problem was the playing field itself: Iraq. The most central actor in the

current mess isn't Barack Obama or even George W. Bush, but Nouri al-Maliki, a

diehard Shiite triumphalist whose vision of the new Iraq had little to do with a

more broadminded future and everything to do with taking care of business related

to the past -- settling scores and gaining power. And that meant pursuing a

sectarian agenda at the expense of what we might have considered a national one.

The United States may have helped moderate Maliki's worst impulses while troops

were there in force, but how long were we reasonably expected to stay in order to


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continue to baby sit him -- five, 10 years?

Leaders are driven by who they are and where they are. And Maliki is a Shiite

looking to right old wrongs. But now, extremist Sunni groups are determined to

right Maliki's new wrongs. Meanwhile, the Kurds understandably are determined

to ensure their interests are protected even at the expense of the Iraqi state. And

all of them operate in a neighborhood where Iran -- whose interests in Iraq are not

ours over the long-term -- plays a critical role. These forces of geography, history,

and sectarian identity were always going to be more powerful and enduring than

American civic lessons or financial and political support.

Syria: America's fault too?

If only Obama acted in 2011 to arm the moderate opposition and in 2012 to enforce

his redline on chemical weapons, everything would have been different. The

jihadists would have been contained, ISIS relegated to the margins, and maybe

even Assad would have been shot crawling out of a drainage pipe (or at minimum,

fled the country, or cried "uncle"). What's happening in Syria and now Iraq is a

direct result of President Obama's refusal and failure to act in a timely and effective

manner and his abdication of moral and humanitarian responsibility to boot.

If only Cleopatra's nose would have been shorter, Pascal famously argued in his

Pensées, the world would have been a different place. Maybe. I get the criticism.

But the upbeat notions of how the United States might have influenced the

situation in Syria sound pretty similar to those that still linger Iraq, don't they?

There are no rewind buttons on history, no way to disprove counterfactuals and

speculation about alternative realities. But it's a real stretch to imagine that

anything this risk-adverse administration would have been prepared to do in 2011

or 2012 would have fundamentally changed the arc of either conflict. Indeed, to do

that, the Obama administration would have had to become, well... the un-Obama

administration, committing to a serious military and political strategy that would


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have been sustained for months, even years, though probably not including boots

on the ground. I'm not sure any administration -- a Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton

presidency -- in the wake of years of effort in Afghanistan and Iraq would have

been willing to do that either. And let's not forget that this is something that

Congress would have been unwilling to endorse.

Of course, nature then took its course: first, the Syrian civil war became a natural

breeding ground for ISIS; second, Iraq was a ripe host for the spread of the

contagion across the border. Brookings's Bruce Riedel, no sentimentalist on these

matters, recently argued that the Bush surge could not have destroyed Abu Musab

al-Zarqawi's empire; nor would have a U.S. residual force. "Only sustained good and

smart governance could kill it, and that was something post-Saddam Hussein Iraq

could not produce, with or without the United States," writes Riedel.

Obama didn't create the environment for ISIS's recent rampages in Iraq, the Iraqis

did. That hundreds -- perhaps a few thousand armed men -- could subdue a city of

1.7 million people is a stunning testament to just how empty a shell the Iraqi state

really is, to how Maliki coup-proofed the army at the expense of its effectiveness,

and to the reality that Sunnis and Kurds weren't going to sacrifice much to keep

Maliki's Iraq afloat.

This administration owes the foreign policy piper plenty, for many things. And yes,

maybe Obama's rush for the exits in 2011 accelerated the downward arc of events.

But the primary responsibility for the current mess lies elsewhere: with a previous

administration that badly and tragically overreached in an effort to create a new

Iraq; an Iraqi government and sectarian political system far more committed to

getting even with other sectarian groups at the expense of the nation state; and

neighbors determined to ensure their own interests take precedence over Iraq's.

Do what you can, Mr. President, to break the momentum of the ISIS attacks; press

Maliki to be a more inclusive leader; and up the support for Syria's opposition -- as


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you promised to do. But don't let anyone guilt or shame you into thinking you can

save, win, or redeem these sad and forlorn Arab lands. Iraq was always a trap for

America. It remains so to this day.

STR/AFP/Getty Images

B Y

The U.S.-Led International OrderIs DeadLong live a new era of America's halting involvement in a world not of its own making.

E M ILE SIM PSO N

A s ISIS forces sweep through Sunni Iraq, whether or not the United States will

help Baghdad to bring back its provinces has overtaken "bring back our girls"

in Nigeria as the central public concern of U.S. foreign policy.

The contrast matters because it marks not the end, but potentially the start, of an

era of American exceptionalism.

The masterful performance through which Michelle Obama galvanized global

opinion on the Nigerian schoolgirls might have been seen at the time, only a

month ago, as an affirmation of a U.S. belief in its global destiny: That the

schoolgirls really were, for the first lady, and for that intangible sense of U.S.

mission and responsibility to the rest of the world, "ours."

From the end of World War II, the world's destiny has

been America's destiny. Although the U.S.

market-based economic model has been imitated

globally more than its democratic political

institutions, the basic structures of international

order have been underpinned by America's

economic, military, and cultural influence. From

1945, to subscribe to the idea of the West, or at least to the economic and cultural

From the end ofWorld War II, theworld's destiny hasbeen America'sdestiny.


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aspects of that contested concept, has been to subscribe to a U.S.-led international

order. That has been the case for better and for worse, as we are respectively

reminded, on the one hand, by the U.S. victory in the Cold War, and on the other by

the near collapse of the U.S.-centered international financial system in 2008.

The Western world order is no longer a post-1945 platitude, but a distinctly fragile

proposition, the reality of which people across the world need actively to be

persuaded of to believe in, as President Barack Obama attempted to do in his

recent foreign-policy speech at West Point.

Superficially, the president appeared to amplify the first lady's message of

America's global responsibilities: America was the "indispensable nation," so when

"schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria... it is America that the world looks to for

help."

But the underlying effect of the president's speech was to bookmark the end of an

era of American intervention; it closed the chapter starting from 2001, and perhaps

even the volume from 1945.

"Bring back our girls" may have inoculated the United States against claims that it

was not upholding the global rights of young women to an education, and

implicitly shifted the burden of proving whose world order gave the better deal to

young women across to Boko Haram -- which threatened to sell the girls into

slavery -- and Islamic jihadists worldwide. The Twitter campaign isolated a

clear-cut case of right and wrong, and was heard across the world, loud and clear.

But sometimes silence speaks louder than words. The world is virtually silent

about the genocide going on this very day in the Central African Republic (CAR).

There is no global Twitter campaign about schoolgirls there. They aren't ours.

As if to amplify the silent point in the West Point speech that an era of U.S.

intervention is effectively over, CAR even dropped out of the rhetorical


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"Today, according to self-described realists, conflicts in Syria or Ukraine or the

Central African Republic are not ours to solve. And not surprisingly, after costly

wars and continuing challenges here at home, that view is shared by many

Americans.

A different view from interventionists from the left and right says that we ignore

these conflicts at our own peril; that America's willingness to apply force around

the world is the ultimate safeguard against chaos, and America's failure to act in

the face of Syrian brutality or Russian provocations not only violates our

conscience, but invites escalating aggression in the future."

consciousness of the speech itself from one paragraph to the next:

If the responsibility to protect 276 abducted schoolgirls is alive and well, what's

clear from Syria to the CAR is that the "responsibility to protect" whole populations

as a doctrine of international policy is dead in the water; it's the language of the

last era, and to suggest otherwise in the face of one of the biggest humanitarian

catastrophes in history in Syria is surely untenable.

ISIS in Iraq is in a completely different league of complexity and geopolitical

significance than the Nigerian schoolgirls. Given that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri

al-Maliki is most to blame for the chaos, having systematically marginalized the

Sunni population since 2010, should Washington back Baghdad at all? Given the

risk of making an enemy of all of Iraq's Sunnis, whose reconciliation with U.S.

forces and Baghdad was the prime achievement of the 2008 surge, should the

United States strike ISIS? Given that Maliki has shown no competence to be able to

retake the Sunni provinces, militarily or politically, if the United States does

engage in limited strikes, given the risk of being drawn into an open-ended

commitment to back up Baghdad, where does that effort end? Should the United

States try to keep Iraq together at all, or is this the moment to cut losses and avoid

being drawn into a quagmire of sectarian violence, and see Iraq split up?


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And how should Washington understand ISIS: Should it accept Maliki's

self-interested argument that they are the same al Qaeda "terrorists" of 9/11, that

this is the same fight against common enemies? Or should the United States

refrain from grouping together all jihadists as "the terrorists," thus exploiting the

various groups' principal vulnerability -- that they fight endlessly with each other,

as ISIS's break with al Qaeda testifies? If it's the latter, then ISIS is not part of the

war the Obama administration refuses to call the war on terror -- despite still

relying on the 2001 post-9/11 Congressional Authorization to Use Military Force

(AUMF). And if the 2001 AUMF is not going to be used to fight ISIS, is the

administration going to rely on the 2003 Iraq War AUMF, and thus re-open the

war? Or will the White House stand back while ISIS takes control of the Sunni

provinces?

It is worth remembering in all this that, barely a month ago, resolving the kidnap

of the Nigerian schoolgirls was "one of the highest priorities of the U.S.

Government," according to the U.S. State Department.

In the context of far more serious and more morally complicated contemporary

security problems today, it still bears looking at the fixation on the Nigerian

schoolgirls last month. This was hardly an affirmation of international ambition so

much as an example of a relatively small and morally clear-cut case that marked

the limits of U.S. interventionism in a new era. The reticence to be drawn beyond

those limits is clear from the Obama administration's agony over whether or not to

intervene in Iraq.

The transition from one era to the next marked by the West Point speech could not

be better captured than by the now-anachronistic competition among

commentators to be the most outraged about why the United States had taken so

long to declare Boko Haram a terrorist group, or the delay to put pressure on the

Nigerian government to bring back our girls. If there is one lesson from the

post-2001 wars, it's that perhaps we should not rush in to complex conflicts that


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very quickly move away from being clear-cut cases of right and wrong, to

entanglement in intractable age-old tribal fights, with no clear boundary between

enemy and civilian.

The anachronism of the commentators' outrage at the delay in intervention in

Nigeria -- the knee-jerk desire to intervene everywhere and fight every jihadist

under the sun -- was nonetheless echoed in parts of the president's speech. The

speech worked where it looked forward, and set out the new and critical

distinction between the potentially unilateral use of force "when our core interests

demand it," but offered a higher bar for using force in relation to broader issues of

"global concern that do not pose a direct threat to the United States." The speech

failed where it blurred this new and important distinction by rehearsing the

language and motifs of the last era, motifs that now sounded tired, and out of tune

with U.S. public opinion.

We heard that "America's support for democracy and human rights goes beyond

idealism -- it is a matter of national security," because "democracies are our closest

friends and are far less likely to go to war," and that "respect for human rights is an

antidote to instability and the grievances that fuel violence and terror." That

doesn't fit with the small print: "In countries like Egypt, we acknowledge that our

relationship is anchored in security interests."

We heard that the test of any U.S. drone strike was whether "[we] create more

enemies than we take off the battlefield." But the idea of a global battlefield against

terrorist enemies is seriously out of date, at least since we worked out that the

original Taliban and Saddam Hussein actually had very little to do with al Qaeda.

Indeed, the irrational durability of the idea of the world as a battlefield is as

anachronistic as Guantanamo Bay.

Paradoxically, the speech itself acknowledged that al Qaeda was decentralized,

with many affiliates and extremists having "agendas focused in countries where


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they operate." But if that is true, why then are they the enemy of the United States?

Was the Nairobi Westgate Mall attack, mentioned as an example of a "less

defensible target," really an attack against the United States? Five U.S. citizens were

wounded, among hundreds of other nationalities. But if that is the threshold for

identifying a terrorist group as an enemy of the United States, then Obama's new

distinction is so porous as to be of little practical utility.

The vague and permissive concept of the terrorist enemy that punctuated certain

parts of the speech was contradicted by the main direction of the speech, which

was about limiting U.S. exposure to open-ended conflicts, not being drawn into

other people's fights and tribal-sectarian wars. Eras of U.S. intervention come and

go. Vietnam closed the last one, and Afghanistan will close this one. There will be

new eras of U.S. intervention in future, and the closing of the 2001 chapter is not

remarkable in the long view, as permanent war is plainly unsustainable. The

United States remains the global military superpower, and claims of the end of its

military dominance are exaggerated.

If that were the case, why would the speech potentially be closing not just a

chapter from 2001 but a volume from 1945?

Consider for a moment President Harry Truman's inaugural address on Jan. 20,

1949. As cultural historian Nick Cullather has written, by re-framing what would

previously have been perceived as colonial intrusion as "development," Truman, as

Fortune magazine put it at the time, "hit the jackpot of the world's political

emotions." Cullather notes how leaders of then newly independent states, such as

Zahir Shah of Afghanistan and Jawaharlal Nehru of India, accepted these terms,

merging their own governmental mandates into the stream of nations moving

toward modernity. Development was not only the best, but the only course. As

Nehru stated, "There is only one-way traffic in time."

President Obama mentioned the importance of development in the speech, and


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how American assistance aimed, for example, "to double access to electricity in

sub-Saharan Africa so people are connected to the promise of the global economy."

A noble thought perhaps, but this is a world away from Truman. The developing

states of 1949 are now powerful economies, and they hardly see themselves as

little Americas. Westernization in 1949 meant

Americanization; now it doesn't.

Westernization in1949 meantAmericanization;now it doesn't.

The very success of the United States in the Cold War

and in the brief period of post-1991 global hegemony

was to mold the world in its own image, with the

effect that Westernization -- at least its economic and cultural dimension -- is now

so universally accepted in varying forms that it changes the meaning of what being

Westernized is: Even ISIS probably uses iPhones.

In this new context, despite sympathy with the humanitarian ambition of bringing

electricity to sub-Saharan Africa, the very discourse of international development

as something Western states engage in seems at best dated: a vexed idea drifting

away from its post-colonial moorings towards the post-post-colonial waters in

which it has no clear anchor points.

President Obama said that America remains the "indispensable nation." He's right;

it is. But he was wrong to use the examples of "when a typhoon hits the

Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a

building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help." That is to attach

the meaning of America's role in this new era to being a first responder for a

fragmented set of events that don't fit into a clear narrative. Moreover, most of the

world does not want America as a bull in a china shop, rushing to create new

terrorist enemies or to chase Joseph Kony around jungles, changing foreign policy

in accordance with the latest YouTube or Twitter sensations.

America does not need to seek sensation, precisely because it remains the world's


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great democratic nation.

The rest of the liberal world's relationship with America is not one of love but one

of faith. America is the indispensable nation not just to its allies, but to individuals

and families around the world who rely on it to uphold some kind of liberal world

order: the educated Afghanis whose families will be killed if the Taliban take

control again; the Saudi woman who might hope to drive a car one day; the

students in Tehran arrested just for singing "Happy;" or any number of others,

from Kiev, through Cairo, to Baghdad.

This faith is not the demonstrative faith of the zealot, but the quiet contemplation

that, despite America's moral failures -- be it torture or mass surveillance --

recognizes that the United States remains the great liberal power. There are still a

huge number of people anxious not to see on their horizon a U.S. carrier group

replaced with a Chinese one.

Unlike the sensational reaction desired from rescuing schoolgirls, or capturing

Kony, the United States can't expect any thanks or applause for its routine foreign

policy from its faithful across the globe. To be effective, Washington needs to be

tough and sometimes make ugly compromises, like backing a corrupt regime in

Kabul to stop a worse fate for the Afghan people, or the equivalent in Iraq now. No

one is going to cheer that, even if they agree with it.

What is remarkable is not the enduring faith of those around the world in the

United States, but the enduring faith of the U.S. public in a U.S.-led international

order that is massively expensive and for which they receive little thanks.

The idea of a special global destiny is a fragile idea. Britain used to be the

indispensable nation; that ended a long time ago. When Britain announced its

famous decision to withdraw "East of Suez" in 1967, Dean Rusk, then U.S. secretary

of state, said to a colleague how he could not believe that the British viewed that

"free aspirin and false teeth were more important than Britain's role in the world."


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That shock would be banal today; the welfare state has permanently replaced the

warfare state. The idea of Britain's global destiny, within a generation, has become

ancient history.

But the United States still believes in its unique global destiny: "I believe in

American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being," the president said. The

truth, however, is that America has not been the exceptional nation since 1945

because of the extent to which the rest of the world has copied it.

America has lost control of what is means to be Western, as a result of its very

success in spreading the idea across the globe since 1945. Perhaps the new era that

we are entering will see America attempting to re-claim the legacy of the West as

its own, for example by working with, not against, the international institutions it

set up after World War II. On the other hand, we might see America assume a more

genuinely exceptional path, allowing itself to see a different destiny to that of the

West, or perhaps more accurately, Western-ism.

The president's speech undoubtedly marked the end of one era and the first steps

into another. Whether and how Baghdad gets its provinces back will be a more

accurate signpost of the direction of American exceptionalism in the twenty-first

century than the sorry fate of the Nigerian schoolgirls.

Andrew Burton/Getty Images

B Y

When All You've Got Is an F-16…Why is bombing the only option in Washington's policy toolkit?

M ICAH ZE N K O

J ust two days after the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) captured territory

and military installations in Iraq, Washington foreign policy commentators


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"I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a

small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs

pounding. It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates

problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which

he himself is especially skilled."

and policymakers are considering options for responding. And unsurprisingly, the

scope of the debate about what to do in Iraq has broken down into bombing, or not

bombing. Sen. Lindsey Graham declared on the Senate floor, "I think American

airpower is the only hope to change the battlefield equation in Iraq." President

Barack Obama later said "I don't rule out anything," to which White House Press

Secretary Jay Carney later explained, "We are not contemplating ground troops.

The president was answering a question specifically about air strikes." The debate

shrinks immediately around whether and how to use the tactic of force.

Though it is commonly referred to as Maslow's Hammer, the concept of privileging

the tool at hand, irrespective of its appropriate fit to solving a problem, originated

with the philosopher Abraham Kaplan. In his 1964 classic, The Conduct of Inquiry:

Methodology for Behavioral Science, Kaplan discussed the issue of the abstract

nature of techniques, particularly the scientific method, used by scientists,

whether conducting surveys, doing statistical analysis, or deciphering foreign

language inscriptions. He worried that, since "the pressures of fad and fashion are

as great in science, for all its logic, as in other areas of culture," certain preferred

techniques in which a scientist finds him or herself particularly skilled could

predominate over all others. As Kaplan described this phenomenon:

Kaplan's fuller context for the hammer attributed to Abraham Maslow -- who just

re-packaged the idea two years later -- was worth bearing in mind during President

Barack Obama's speech last week, which was primarily a defense for the contexts

in which he applies military force. As Obama noted, "Just because we have the best

hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail." Though Obama's speech


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provided no additional information about his thinking, it was useful because it

reinforced the singular conception of what foreign policy entails for many in

Washington: military force.

Somewhere along the line, in many influential schools of punditry and analysis,

the totality of U.S. foreign policy has been reduced to whether presidents bomb

some country or adversary, and the alleged impressions that this decision leaves

on other countries. The binary construction employed by these pundits and

analysts is that a president either demonstrates strength and engagement with air

strikes, or fecklessness and detachment in their absence.

Today, the U.S. military has over 400,000 troops stationed or deployed in 182

countries around the world -- primarily conducting force protection, training, or

security cooperation missions, but these troops do not factor into this equation.

The binary choice is either bombs, or isolationism. Of course, the activities of the

State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, Treasury

Department, or any other government agency and entity working abroad are

wholly disregarded or given short shrift at promoting and implementing foreign

policy objectives.

This vast overestimation of what military force can plausibly achieve runs totally

contrary to what the past dozen years have demonstrated, at tremendous cost and

sacrifice. The interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya show that the use of

force as the primary instrument did not sustainably secure U.S. interests in those

countries over time, nor assure U.S. allies of its mutual defense obligations, and

had no latent capacity to deter potential adversaries. Nobody on earth today is

scared of America because it put 170,000 troops in Iraq, 100,000 in Afghanistan,

and led a seven-month air campaign over Libya. If anything, the resulting

instability or outright chaos led most to reach the opposite conclusion. Yet,

somehow pundits continue to think and argue that sending troops or bombs into

another country today will achieve this in the future. Op-ed militarism never dies,


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even as its underlying logic repeatedly does.

While "the pressures of fad and fashion" apparently compel pundits and analysts

to demand the use of force to address unstable or threatening situations, it is rarely

accompanied with a definable or measurable military or political objective that it is

intended to achieve within the targeted country. You rarely hear such pundits state

explicitly what exactly military force is supposed to accomplish. Rather, it is a

mindless demand to apply some military tactic to elicit some feeling -- presumably

fear and awe -- among third-party witnesses. The most remarkable characteristic

of this school of thought is that those within it also claim to be transcontinental

mind-readers capable of knowing what specific U.S. instrument of power will

change the calculus of potential adversaries. Unsurprisingly, it is always military

force.

Though never referred to by proponents of militarism, there is an actual joint

planning process and universal task list that the military uses when planning and

conducting operations. These documents provide the common reference points

and actions that all affected service members are supposed to know. Nowhere in

U.S. military planning documents can you find missions like "demonstrating

resolve," "exhibiting strength," or "retaining superpower status." It is impossible to

make other countries think of you what you would like. Their impressions are

highly situationally dependent, and the result of the power and interests that

surround a discrete country or issue. Their opinions of the United States are not

merely based upon whether the president decided to bomb someone or not.

It is unfortunate that military force -- the most lethal, destructive, and

consequential foreign action that the United States can undertake -- suffers from

such a dismal and imprecise discourse. It contains meaningless and empty

metaphors characterized by crude gardening references, all options forever "on the

table," "setting the bar" higher, and Obama vowing to "take very tough actions."

Military force is about blowing things up and killing people. Trying to ascribe


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virtues to its nature, or magical powers to its effects, is misleading and imprudent.

Much of Washington does not see force as the solution to the world's problems

because the U.S. military has the best hammer, but rather because of the influence

and supremacy that it falsely ascribes to it.

MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images


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the u.s.-led international order is dead

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