Heg fails

Unfortunately, this frenetic pace of military activity has seldom produced positive outcomes. As measured against their stated aims, the “long wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq have clearly failed, as have the lesser campaigns intended to impart some approximation of peace and stability to Libya, Somalia, and Syria. An equally unfavorable judgment applies to the nebulous enterprise once grandly referred to as the “global war on terrorism,” which continues with no end in sight.

And yet there seems to be little curiosity in U.S. politics today about why recent military exertions, undertaken at great cost in blood and treasure, have yielded so little in the way of durable success. It is widely conceded that “mistakes were made”—preeminent among them the Iraq war initiated in 2003. Yet within establishment circles, the larger implications of such catastrophic missteps remain unexplored. Indeed, the country’s interventionist foreign policy is largely taken for granted and the public pays scant attention. The police killing of Black people provokes outrage—and rightly so. Unsuccessful wars induce only shrugs.

THE CHIMERA OF “AMERICAN LEADERSHIP”

With something approaching unanimity, Americans “support the troops.” Yet they refrain from inquiring too deeply into what putting the troops in harm’s way has achieved in recent decades. Deference to the military has become a rote piety of American life. In accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency, for example, Joe Biden closed his remarks with an appeal to the Divine on behalf of the nation’s soldiers: “And may God protect our troops.” Yet nowhere in his 24-minute address did Biden make any reference to what U.S. troops were currently doing or why in particular they needed God’s protection. Nor did he offer any thoughts on how a Biden administration might do things differently.

Americans don’t particularly want to hear about war or the possibility of war in the present season of overlapping and mutually reinforcing crises. And Biden obliged them in the most important speech of his career. The famously garrulous politician mentioned recent U.S. wars only in passing, briefly referring to his late son, who served in Iraq, and excoriating U.S. President Donald Trump for not responding more aggressively to revelations that Russia put bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

This aversion to taking stock of recent U.S. wars is by no means unique to Biden or confined to the Democratic Party. It is a bipartisan tendency. It also inhibits a long overdue reexamination of basic national security policy.

Between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 2016 presidential election, leaders of both political parties collaborated in trying to demonstrate the efficacy and necessity of what they habitually referred to as “American global leadership.” Embedded in that seemingly benign phrase was a grand strategy of militarized primacy. Unfortunately, the results achieved by this assertion of global leadership proved to be anything but benign, as turmoil in Afghanistan and Iraq attest. Although the defense industry and its allies have profited from American wars, the American people have done less well. Protracted wars are not making Americans freer or more prosperous. They have instead saddled the nation with enormous debt and diverted attention and resources from neglected domestic priorities.

In 2020, further occasions for bristling, militarized U.S. leadership beckon. China offers the most obvious example for hawks, with demands that the United States confront the People’s Republic growing more insistent by the day. Many in Washington appear to welcome the prospect of a Sino-American cold war. Other prospective venues for demonstrating assertive U.S. leadership include in operations against Iran, Russia, and even poor benighted Venezuela, with prominent figures in the Beltway eager to have a go at regime change in Caracas.

To cling to this paradigm of U.S. global leadership is to perpetuate the assumptions and habits defining post–Cold War U.S. national security policy—and above all the emphasis on amassing and employing military might. The United States grants itself prerogatives allowed to no other country to remain, in its own estimation, history’s “indispensable nation.” To judge by the results achieved in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other recent theaters of war, this imperative will only continue to wreak havoc in the name of freedom, democracy, and humane values.