September 11, 2016
Editor’s Note: An abridged version of the following article appeared in the September-October 2016 print edition and can be found here.
How will the next president of the United States secure and promote greater security, greater prosperity and greater freedom for the United States, and for our friends and allies around the world? How will he or she use American power and influence to shape the global system, strengthen international institutions and affect state behavior? How will the next president choose to lead? These questions lie at the core of America’s foreign policy and its purpose.
Looking to 2017, the next administration will confront the paradox of American power: unparalleled strength, but a deep disinclination to exercise leadership. It remains true that the next president will benefit from certain enduring advantages. No competing world power threatens our security. The United States remains the undisputed global leader in military, economic and diplomatic terms, and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future. Our influence is enhanced by a set of international institutions, largely of our own creation, that favor the rule of law, the free market and representative democracy, and a network of formal and informal alliances with many of the world’s most powerful countries. Unlike the period of the Cold War, we face no global ideological rival that offers a more appealing alternative to a social contract based on individual freedom, economic opportunity and human dignity.
At the same time, the world today and our place in it are less certain than before. The inward focus of our European allies has weakened our most important alliance. The eruptions throughout the Middle East in the aftermath of the Arab Spring have brought new misery across the region. A post–World War II record of 65 million people are refugees or internally displaced persons, with half being children. Three powers, China, Russia and Iran, are trying to revise the order in their regions by subversion and even military force, intimidating our friends and allies and undermining U.S. credibility. A fourth, North Korea, continues to improve its nuclear weapons and ballistic-missile capabilities unabated. The proliferation of terrorists, insurgents and other nonstate actors, some with global reach, has undermined the traditional state monopoly on the use of force. For the past decade or more, there has also been a menu of “new” security issues, led by cyberwarfare, but including climate change, infectious diseases, narcotics and human trafficking, and, increasingly, natural resources, especially water.
Any choice on how best to promote security, prosperity and liberty is complicated by U.S. domestic opinion. Twenty-five years ago, America’s “unipolar moment” metastasized into a “unilateral movement,” while in response our oldest allies invoked a cult of multipolarity, as if the world only encompassed the transatlantic relationship. While the unilateral-multipolar debate has long ebbed, it has been replaced by a loss of confidence in Washington’s ability to lead, reinforced by public skepticism about an activist American role in the world and an increasingly polarized political process in Washington. Casting an especially long shadow are our expensive and highly unsatisfying wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The sequester that constrains our defense budget (supported by Republicans as well as Democrats) is a result of this domestic reality and perpetuates its continuation. If the hallmark of a successful foreign policy is its ability to win domestic support, the application of sustained U.S. military force abroad (i.e., significant numbers of “boots on the ground”) seems to have priced itself out of the market.
In this threat environment, with these inherent strengths and stubborn constraints, what national-security strategy would best advance U.S. interests?
The answer is far from obvious. For example, it seems unlikely that we can sustain our current hegemonic edge indefinitely. While our preponderance of economic, diplomatic and especially military strength may not automatically cause our adversaries to balance against us, it has disincentivized our friends and allies from making more significant contributions to regional and global security. While we proudly believe that human rights and democracy are universal values, we have seen that “proselytizing by force” has severe limitations. And a true hegemonic strategy would require that we increase our military spending to levels that would break the budget, fuel inflation and be unsustainable domestically. There has to be a better match between our ambitions and our resources, which, although generous, are still limited.
Cooperative security also has its shortcomings. In a world where our security is indivisible from the security of other states, there are incentives for us to act more cooperatively with friends and allies, and in accordance with international organizations, laws and norms. Yet international institutions and alliances are means, not ends. Alone, they are insufficient to address today’s challenges. They lack authority to address threats to regional and global peace, especially military threats; they lack governance structures to allow them to respond quickly to tackle inchoate threats before they bloom into crises; and they often lack coercive military power.
Selective engagement, which requires a more discriminating approach to the world, has enjoyed some success in the past, primarily as an antidote to American overcommitments, such as the Vietnam War. The United States has engaged primarily in those parts of the world that contain great powers with significant military and economic strength; it is in America’s interest to either prevent them from becoming peer competitors or to enlist them as friends and allies.
Traditionally, this has meant that the United States has devoted its attention to Europe (including Russia), the Middle East (because of oil) and Asia (the fastest-growing economic region in the world). Yet it has been difficult to agree upon hard and fast rules for where and when the United States should engage overseas: Why the Balkans and not Rwanda? Why Libya and not the Congo? This has led to interventions and ensuing commitments that seem ad hoc and erratic, and which have erased any predictive value for either our allies or adversaries. This inconsistency has eroded domestic support for defending our vital interests as well. Paradoxically, it may be imprudent to draw red lines in an increasingly interconnected world; no region can be automatically written off as being unrelated to U.S. security and prosperity.
Isolationism has been a traditional temptation for America—and sometimes much more than that, as during the 1930s. Why not retreat from the world and concentrate on rebuilding our “city upon a hill” so that we can better serve as a model for others to emulate? Since there is clearly much work to be done at home, why not privilege butter over guns? Our relative strength and geographic position ensure that we face no existential threats to our national security; our nuclear arsenal deters other nuclear adversaries. International trade and financial issues could be left to the marketplace, which is more efficient than the government in promoting economic growth. And yet an isolated United States would still remain at risk; peer competitors could arise across Eurasia that could eventually threaten the United States. The international order that the United States has crafted after the Second World War could wither away without strong and sustained American leadership, thereby damaging our security, prosperity and way of life.
Given the complexity, persistence and variety of the challenges currently facing the United States, it is doubtful that any single approach is wise, or even possible, today. It is doubtful that the United States can adopt a “unified field theory” that applies U.S. power, in all of its forms, in the same way to each and every challenge we face across the world.
However, a blended approach could preserve American strength, promote American interests and win sustained domestic support. It would draw on elements of these different strategies and consolidate them in a manner that might be termed “pragmatic primacy.” Such a strategy would resist the temptation to overreach based on our current strengths, but would also not shy away from asserting our national interests and championing our values. We would prioritize our ambitions, and ensure that our rhetoric and resources are in balance with each other and are aligned with our objectives. We would discriminate between making significant commitments to defend our vital interests and using our influence to promote our preferences, and we would have the wisdom to tell the difference.
Pragmatic primacy would be based on the following principles:
• America would not enter into new international commitments, but would honor existing ones, investing more time and resources into reinvigorating our alliances and supporting our friends around the world.
• Short of a direct attack on the United States, we would not be the lead actor in any military conflict, but would deploy and sustain military force in supporting roles, working patiently with like-minded allies to counter insurgencies and preserve hard-won gains.
• We would not impose our values on others by force of arms, but would vigorously champion respect for human rights, individual dignity and the rule of law.
• We would appreciate that while the concept of humanitarian intervention may often appeal to our compassion, it is unlikely to be grounded in our national interests or command the resources and time demanded to restore order and rebuild civil society.
• We would continue to defend the global commons, especially freedom of navigation on the high seas, overflight rights, access to the Arctic and the demilitarization of outer space.
• We would ramp up our efforts to eliminate terrorist groups, while understanding that counterterrorism success will require patience and persistence for many years to come.
• We would privilege our economic, military and diplomatic presence in the Asia-Pacific region, where the character of China’s rise remains one of the greatest unanswered questions for the twenty-first century.
With these principles to guide us, how would pragmatic primacy work in practice in some of the key regions of the world?
Europe
Thirty years ago, a State Department official quipped, “Why is it that we define the globe as either ‘Europe’ or ‘out of area’?” Our response to this question has traditionally been neither semantic nor generational as much as it has been based on common interests and common values.
Today, it appears there is less commonality than ever. America’s allies in Europe have been undergoing wrenching changes. For some time now, Europe has been getting older, with ever fewer workers having to support an increasing number of retirees. It has been economically, politically, and socially impossible for Europe to maintain its status quo mixture of low birthrates, longer life spans, early retirement ages and generous entitlements. Old-age dependency spending has already started to overwhelm every other area of Europe’s public expenditures, including defense spending. This has led to a Europe that believed it faced no serious external threats after the Cold War and to “cheap ride” on the back of the United States, which now provides three-fourths of all NATO funding.
The eurozone crisis has exacerbated these trends. At heart, Europe is experiencing an economic trial that masks a deeper political crisis. This crisis has not simply highlighted the structural disconnect between the European Union’s monetary and fiscal policies, but it has also raised fundamental questions over a shared European identity and common values that threaten the decades-long experiment in continent-wide integration. Brexit is but the latest example of this broader reassessment.
As Europe has wrestled with ways to address these intertwined structural, political and economic trials, a process that will take years to fully unfold, it has been hit by waves of refugees and immigrants escaping the violence and lack of opportunity in North African and Middle Eastern societies. This humanitarian crisis exposed the clumsiness of the EU’s consensus-driven decisionmaking and the inability to craft a common, EU-wide policy. At the same time, this influx has fueled a revival of xenophobia and right-wing nationalism, especially in those European states hardest hit by austerity measures. The United States has largely stood apart while these serial crises have unfolded.
A policy of pragmatic primacy would start by recognizing that NATO remains one of the most important military alliances in the world, that the French, British and Germans have significant military assets, and that the alliance needs America’s energy, ideas and leadership. But alliances change, and it is timely for Washington to raise the core questions that undergird all alliances: What is our common purpose? What special obligations do members owe each other?
As a practical matter, the members’ different threat perceptions make it unlikely to arrive at a consensus on a common purpose anytime soon. It is unrealistic for the United States to expect that Europe will reverse its decades-long decline in defense spending; they have surveyed the neighborhood and will not substitute our threat assessment for their own. Washington can push harder to encourage greater coordination, rationalization and interoperability among European defense establishments, shortcomings exposed during the 2011 Libya operations, but our expectations should be tempered here, also. Hectoring them to ratchet up defense spending will only distract us from important tasks where we can collaborate.
A more promising area of collaboration is reinforcing deterrence on NATO’s eastern flank where, in Russia, Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine requires a more resolute response to reassure the Baltics, and especially those countries in central Europe and in Russia’s “near abroad.” It does not herald a return to the days of the Cold War to acknowledge that the Obama administration’s trumpeted “reset” with Russia has failed. Meanwhile in Russia, the quality of civic life has deteriorated dramatically over the past few years, highlighted by a rigged presidential election that was characterized by overt anti-Americanism. (We should expect more of the same in the run-up to the September 2016 Duma election.) “Putinism” today stands for a kleptocratic bureaucracy that aggrandizes power and wealth while denying its citizens basic human rights and dignity. While the United States should always explore its diplomatic options, it is unlikely that we can forge a working relationship with Russia as long as Putin is in charge.
Does this mean that Russia presents an existential threat along the same lines as the Soviet Union? Hardly. To start, Putin does not have the capacity to invade western Europe. Internally, Russia’s GDP has fallen 5 percent in the last few years, taxes have been increased to compensate for lower rents from oil and natural gas exports, inflation is approaching double digits, the business climate has eroded, and capital flight has accelerated. Overall, Russia’s population continues to shrink; it now has fewer people than Bangladesh.
Ukraine continues to be a flash point in East-West relations, and we should not be shy about asserting our preferences. As a first step, the United States should insist that NATO’s declaratory policy with respect to Ukraine should be a return to the status quo ante—i.e., the removal of all Russian forces and proxies from the Donbass region, in accordance with the Minsk Protocol, and also from Crimea. (To those who argue that Russia cares more about Crimea than the West, the same argument could have been made for the Baltics, yet that did not deter us from adopting a principled position that was ultimately vindicated.) While Putin has appeared to reap short-term tactical successes, he can ill afford Ukraine’s enduring enmity. For now, he is betting on the West—and a still-determined Angela Merkel—tiring of sanctions. The next president must ensure that this is a bad bet.
Beyond Russia, Europe’s most pressing need is counterterrorism assistance. European counterterrorism efforts need to be much better funded and more centralized, and the parties need to share more information and do so in real time. The greater sharing of financial intelligence to root out the funding of terrorist groups also needs to be a priority. Expanded police powers, with appropriate judicial and legislative oversight, are warranted.
In the past, many European states have balked at taking, or even debating, these steps; some may continue to do so even after the recent Brussels and Paris attacks. The time is now ripe for revisiting the rules of intelligence collection and sharing in a post-Snowden environment (and there are indications that the Germans, among others, are willing to do so). This is a debate that Europeans need to have, but U.S. interests are also at stake, because of American citizens and businesses in Europe who are at risk and because of the threat that Islamic State and other terrorists pose to our allies. We have significant contributions to make, not least our unmatched intelligence assets, which our European partners deeply appreciate. We also have sophisticated border-security procedures and technologies, and the ability to convene the parties, set the agenda and help shape the terms of the public debate. The next American president has an opportunity to strengthen our ties to Europe in ways that would be most meaningful to our partners and enhance America’s security at the same time.
The Middle East
The Arab Spring represented the most significant upheaval in the Middle East since the 1952 colonel’s coup overthrew King Farouk, installed a charismatic Gamal Abdel Nasser and ushered in an era of militant Arab nationalism. Yet its initial promise has all but evaporated. The region is now home to more misery than at any time in living memory; the instability across North Africa and the greater Middle East has led to millions of internally displaced persons and refugees. Traditionally, refugees returned home, relocated to a third country or were absorbed into the host state; none of that is happening today.
The consequences of instability in the Middle East are enormous, as the region contains over 410 million people, with almost half under the age of twenty-five, at least 30 percent of whom are unemployed, and which is the source of most of the world’s violent religious extremism. Not surprisingly, terrorism has metastasized in the Arab Spring’s aftermath. Islamic State volunteers in Iraq and Syria increased 300 percent in 2015 over the year before. U.S. intelligence agencies estimate that almost forty thousand foreign fighters have flocked to the region, representing at least 120 different countries. Each day the probability increases that they will return home, armed with new skills and presenting a far more sophisticated danger.
The past few years of American diplomacy across the Middle East are littered with opportunities missed, roads not taken, and errors in both judgment and execution. Pleasing no one, the Obama administration aligned the United States with neither the idealistic young people demonstrating in Egypt’s Tahrir Square and across the region, nor with the antidemocratic leaders in charge of autocratic, if stable, regimes. Our intervention in Libya was launched with no larger plan for “the day after,” namely, how to secure the country’s lethal arsenal of advanced weapons or halt the country’s descent into tribal warfare. The result has been ongoing instability inside Libya, and the proliferation of violence around the region, extending as far as Boko Haram and its affiliates in sub-Saharan Africa.
After decades of authoritarian rule, it is unrealistic to expect Egyptians, Libyans and other Arabs to transform their societies overnight into Western-style democracies. Much hard work, over many years, is required to build institutions and adopt procedures that can fulfill the people’s democratic aspirations. They will need external encouragement and assistance. The next president should restore previous funding levels for America’s democracy-promotion and good-governance programs, as well as support quasi-governmental organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy. We can also do a better job of coordinating such efforts with the Europeans, who devote significant resources to these same goals.
Consistent with our values and traditions, we should encourage and incentivize the private sector to play a stronger role in promoting self-reliance, entrepreneurship and religious freedom. For example, we can leverage the tax code to provide incentives to companies, colleges and universities, nonprofit groups, and others to encourage socially responsible investing (akin to the Sullivan principles in South Africa) that promote democracy and individual rights.
Social media is a realm where the United States has been particularly inept. Every U.S. embassy in the Middle East needs to have a dedicated team on social media; they should be coordinated by the State Department, but have the flexibility to respond to local conditions. These rapid response units should state the facts about U.S. policy, aggressively rebut lies and half-truths, and stay connected to the generation that will one day inherit power in these countries. Specifically, they should highlight the grisly toll in Muslim and Arab lives taken by Islamic State and other terror groups, and have the ability to directly confront the hateful propaganda and murderous imagery perpetrated by extremists.
Syria is a great example of policy adrift, of credibility squandered, of roads not taken. There has been a serious disconnect between our declaratory policy and our actions; our commitments have not matched our rhetoric. The Obama administration called upon Assad to cease the violence, yet failed to mobilize adequate pressure on Damascus. Many of the options the U.S. had during the Damascus Spring were eliminated after the growth of ISIS and the intervention of Russia, Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah; an estimated three hundred thousand Syrians have died so far in the conflict. (One unanticipated consequence of U.S. policy has Russia reasserting itself as a major actor in the Middle East, a role it has not played since Sadat kicked it out of Egypt in 1973.) It is no longer a question of what the U.S. wants (“Assad must go”). Rather, the issue is: how best can the U.S. promote its core goals within existing constraints?
Today Syria is a conflation of four distinct, but interrelated, challenges: (1) the brutal regime headed by Bashar al-Assad, and supported by Moscow and Tehran; (2) ISIS, which has seized and held territory, terrorized the local population and seduced tens of thousands of Sunni Muslims to its side; (3) a humanitarian crisis (with an estimated eleven million refugees or internally displaced persons) that has overwhelmed Syria’s neighbors and is now disrupting Europe; and (4) a diplomatic challenge for the United States in managing its relations with friends and allies in the region, especially the “front-line” states of Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey.
A policy of pragmatic primacy would seek to save Syrian lives, defeat ISIS and remove Assad, in that order. ISIS poses the greater danger to the Syrian people, to neighboring states and to Europe; according to Director of National Intelligence, General James Clapper, ISIS is today “the preeminent global terrorist threat.” It cannot be deterred; it must be defeated. This means committing more U.S. forces to the fight in a supporting role (perhaps as few as two U.S. brigades), but only if we can leverage our Arab friends and partners to send their soldiers to fight as well. Specifically, the objective is not for the U.S. to defeat ISIS, but for the U.S. to help the Sunni states defeat ISIS.
This approach means leaving Assad in power, perhaps for some time to come. This is not an ideal outcome, but the hard truth is that the United States cannot will the ends (Assad’s removal) if it is unwilling to provide the means (deployment of forces sufficient to remove him). It is unrealistic for any administration to commit U.S. forces in the numbers needed to defeat ISIS and topple the Assad regime. This is the culmination of policy choices made, or discarded, years ago, and of the new realities that Iranian and especially Russian arms and advisors have made on the ground.
Until ISIS is defeated, Syrians will remain at risk, even if they are housed in refugee camps inside Syria. The next president should instead persuade Turkey to establish refugee camps along its common border with Syria. The EU and the United States should help underwrite these costs. This would provide greater safety and security for civilians, would be easier to administer and supply than camps inside Syria, would be more firmly rooted in law, and would be better able to halt unplanned migrant flows into Europe.
Finally, Jordan is home to 1.3 million Syrian refugees, or one out of every five people living in the country. (The equivalent would be sixty-five million refugees in the United States.) The Hashemite Kingdom has been a longtime friend and ally of the United States, and is helping in the fight against ISIS. Last year the Obama administration increased assistance to Amman to $1 billion; this account needs to be carefully reviewed and updated to ensure that these funds continue to help stabilize Jordan.
The crisis in Syria has had one salutary effect: it has refuted the conventional wisdom that a settlement of the Palestinian question is the key to unlocking peace across the greater Middle East. Even so, the Obama administration badly misplayed its hand with respect to the peace process. It failed to appreciate the political constraints under which Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, operated, and it erred by publicly criticizing Netanyahu for the subsequent policy failure.
Even without the turmoil on Israel’s borders, current trends do not favor an Israeli-Palestinian peace anytime soon. The Palestinian Authority is paralyzed, caught in a transition from an exhausted older leadership to a younger generation that has not yet assumed power. Hamas shows no signs of relinquishing its stranglehold in the Gaza Strip. While the pace of Israeli settlements continues to slow in the West Bank, it has hardly ended; the same is true with the settler community’s political influence. Efforts in Europe and the United States to boycott, divest and sanction Israel have not yet matured, but remain worrisome, as do similar efforts in the United Nations to endow international legitimacy on the Palestinian Authority.
Israel can withstand all of these pressures, but for how long? Next year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Israel’s occupying the West Bank. Although there is a debate over when Jews will no longer be a majority in the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, there is little argument that this inflection point is fast approaching. What, then, is the future of Israel as a democratic and Jewish society?
These questions Israelis must ask, and answer, for themselves. And the United States should encourage them to do so. But the past provides a guide to the further role the United States should play. The lesson of the Oslo peace process was that the two parties are capable of hammering out agreements among themselves; the United States needs to encourage them to do so. The lesson of Camp David is that Israel has the courage to take risks for peace, but only if it has confidence that the United States is a firm ally. Here is where the next administration has much work to do—restoring greater trust and confidence between Washington and Jerusalem. This means continuing the exemplary military cooperation and intelligence-sharing of the Obama administration, but it also means not criticizing Israeli leaders in public, better appreciating some of the domestic constraints on Israeli leaders, making distinctions between settlement blocs and acknowledging that some settlements on the West Bank contiguous to the 1967 border will become part of Israel in any final agreement.
Promoting peace between Israel and its neighbors has been a long-standing U.S. foreign policy goal in the Middle East, along with ensuring the free flow of oil to global markets and preventing any single power from dominating the region. The present leadership in Iran places all three American objectives at risk. It continues to oppose the Middle East peace process, and has periodically unleashed its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, to strike at Israel. It has threatened its neighbors in the Persian Gulf, claiming islands that belong to the UAE, intervened in Syria, interfered in Iraq’s domestic affairs, armed the Houthis in Yemen and warned that it will close the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has consistently attempted to revise the region by force, rather than accommodate itself to the status quo.
The Obama administration was slow to understand the nature of the Iranian threat, despite the fact that the State Department has long labeled Iran the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. The president reached out to the mullahs during his first year “without preconditions.” He shamefully remained silent as the regime crushed the Green Movement in June 2009. The administration barely reacted after an Iranian plot was uncovered to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in a Washington, DC restaurant that would have killed and injured dozens of Americans; media reports have also stated that Iran tried to assassinate U.S. diplomats overseas. The Obama administration’s response? Iran’s actions were treated less like acts of war than as a minor diplomatic misunderstanding.
It is against this diplomatic context that the nuclear deal with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was negotiated. Serious questions remain about compliance, verification, and the ability of the United States and the international community to reimpose sanctions should Iran be caught cheating.
Implementing the terms of the JCPOA would be daunting enough if the only challenge was eliciting transparency from a regime that is a master of deception. However, the deal also frees up billions in frozen assets that Iran can readily use for masking its nuclear activities, advancing its ballistic-missile programs, repressing domestic critics and sponsoring foreign terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah.
The nuclear deal’s promise is to constrain Iran’s nuclear weapons activities for the next decade in the hope that relaxing sanctions will expose the Iranian people to the outside world and transform the regime into a more liberal, representative government that respects human rights and lives in peace with its neighbors. In short, the goal is an Iran that is willing to peacefully negotiate adjustments to the regional order, not subvert or overturn it by force. At heart, the deal makes a bet that the Iranian regime will have fundamentally changed its nature when the agreement’s limits on nuclear development will be lifted in ten to fifteen years.
Yet there is no strategy for how the United States might “shape the battlefield,” either inside Iran or in the region, to move, coerce or incentivize Iran to liberalize its government and fulfill this hopeful vision. There are no plans for ramping up Radio Farda so that more outside news is beamed into Iran. There is no Internet strategy that capitalizes on social media to appeal to the 60 percent of the Iranian population that is under the age of thirty. There is no support for dissident voices and human rights advocates. Further, while the United States and our European partners have recently stepped up interdictions on the high seas to intercept Iranian arms shipments to Yemen, Tehran continues to foment trouble in the Gulf States, to support Assad and to exercise undue influence inside Iraq. There is more that can be done to sanction individuals and organizations that support Iran’s proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. In short, the next president needs to develop a comprehensive strategy that will reassure our friends and allies around the Gulf and promote regime change inside Iran. Ultimately, the nature of the Iranian regime is the best guarantor of peace and security in the region.
This inability to appreciate the linkages across the broader Middle East and Persian Gulf regions reveals the Obama administration’s proclivity to view each foreign policy issue in isolation—in transactional, not strategic, terms. It explains why it was so eager to exit Iraq and squander the hard-won advantages it inherited in January 2009. A potential partnership with Baghdad was the strategic prize, leading to a stable and broadly representative Iraq that would serve as a bulwark against Iranian influence in the Gulf.
Yet the president’s overriding goal was hastening our departure, not working to ensure greater stability and security as the Iraqi people and their government struggle to transition to a multiethnic, multi-confessional society. The president badly misjudged the results of his own policy, which have resulted in grossly diminished American influence in Baghdad. The administration radically reduced our military and diplomatic footprint inside the country, lessening our “situational awareness” and ability to shape events, only to reverse course in 2015, reinsert American military advisors and special forces, try to regain territory from ISIS, shore up Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and reduce the influence of Tehran.
A pragmatic primacy approach cautions against redeploying U.S. forces in large numbers to Iraq or believing that we can dictate the country’s future. We can offer essential military support and influence a more inclusive political process, but only if we stay engaged. Whatever errors have been committed in the past, there is still a chance for the United States to help Iraqis reach a relatively peaceful and stable outcome over the next decade.
This means that we should support, but not take the lead, in the fight against IS. We do not need to send another fifty thousand troops, but we do need a sizeable element with the right authorities to develop the targeting matrix and to take direct action. Further, our preference should be to provide Iraq with the necessary military assistance and ensure that appropriate levels of weapons are then routed to the Kurds and select Sunni tribes in Anbar province. But we should make it clear to Baghdad that we are willing to do so directly it if is not. Strongly supporting Abadi in the cauldron of Iraqi politics is not without its risks, but he is the best Iraqi leader we have at this time and he broadly supports the same goals we do. Job number one remains eliminating ISIS. It will not be easy, but it will be easier, to reduce Iran’s influence inside Iraq after ISIS is degraded and destroyed.
As in Iraq, the Obama administration appears to have lost the strategic purpose for our fighting in Afghanistan. Our objectives are to ensure that the country can never again be used as a safe haven by Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups with global reach, to prevent violent disorder in Afghanistan from spilling over the border and further destabilizing Pakistan, and to preserve America’s reputation for reliability in the region and beyond.
Instead, the White House failed to address the tension between its two stated policy preferences: ending our military presence in Afghanistan and pursuing counterterrorism. In mid-2014, Obama announced in the Rose Garden that he would draw down U.S. forces in Afghanistan to one thousand troops by the end of 2016 and return to a “normal embassy presence.” The following day, however, he spoke at West Point about the U.S. establishing a series of counterterrorism nodes around the globe to combat transnational threats; Afghanistan was not mentioned as one of these nodes.
Shortly after Gen. John Campbell became the ISAF commander in August 2014, he lobbied the White House to ramp up the number of troops to 9,800 and have them stay in Afghanistan for as long as possible. This presence would have two primary missions: to train, advise and assist the Afghan security forces, and to target Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
In October 2015, Obama announced that he would keep the 9,800 soldiers through the end of 2016, but then reduce our presence to 5,500 by January 1, 2017. Once at this lower number, our primary mission would be counterterrorism aimed at Al Qaeda. This was consistent with previous policy statements, since the president had earlier declared the end of “combat operations” in Afghanistan and unilaterally stated we were no longer at war with the Taliban. Significantly, the president withdrew all authorities from our military to target the Taliban.
In June 2016, the White House announced a split-the-difference compromise of 8,400 troops, and allowed greater leeway for U.S. forces to support Afghan troops in targeting the Taliban. Yet the overall signal remains that America is leaving and that the president’s political timetable, not the facts on the ground, is driving policy.
The Taliban has not gone away, having retaken territory despite going through a contentious leadership succession following the announced death of Mullah Omar in mid-2015. The Afghans are in a very serious fight, and taking significant casualties. Complicating matters further has been the rise of is in Afghanistan. On the plus side of the ledger, we now have a partner in the newly elected Ashraf Ghani, who wants to work with us and who allows us to carry out counterterrorism operations in a very difficult part of the world.
What would a policy of pragmatic primacy look like for Afghanistan? The next president should maintain the larger number of US forces at 9,800 through at least 2017 and grant our military leaders the authorities they need to target the Taliban. At that time, he can better assess where Afghanistan stands in terms of security force performance, ISIS presence, regional dynamics, political relations and the reemergence of Al Qaeda, and then determine what policy he wishes to pursue.
Looking longer term, we need to put a stop to the year-by-year mentality with which we’ve been fighting this war and look at a multiyear strategy. This would allow for better planning and resourcing, particularly with other NATO nations. It would also help the Afghans gain a greater sense of confidence. Since 2009, the constant drumbeat has been that we are leaving, and this messaging has negatively impacted the way the Afghans go about fighting and managing the war.
It is important to understand that this part of the world has been a source of violent extremism and terrorism for decades—and likely will be for decades to come. This region will continue to pose a threat to the homeland. Afghanistan will never be ideal, but in this part of the world where we have few willing allies, we need to make the most of what we have. A relatively small investment of U.S. soldiers, supporting a willing Afghan government, will be worth the risks involved.
As the Obama administration has meandered strategically in Afghanistan, it has not demonstrated any sensitivity to controlling the larger narrative of our actions. Afghanistan is only one front in what Islamic extremists view as a global war. They achieved a huge propaganda victory when the mujahideen drove the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in defeat and disgrace, precipitating, they believed, the subsequent demise of the Soviet empire. Should our exit from Afghanistan be viewed as a hasty, dishonorable retreat, few blows would be more harmful to American prestige and reliability, and more advantageous to Al Qaeda’s cause.
Finally, we will struggle to realize even limited goals in Afghanistan without widening the aperture of our policy to include a diplomatic process with all the neighbors that have a stake in stability in Afghanistan. In this context, Pakistan represents a special challenge, combining the “perfect storm” of failing institutions, nuclear weapons and terrorist groups. The Obama administration has mismanaged this delicate, complex and important relationship, being unable to either find common ground or coerce Islamabad into good behavior.
The core dilemma is that Pakistan has selectively targeted terrorist groups (what has been termed “managed jihadism”), cracking down on Al Qaeda and domestic terror groups that threaten the state, but supporting those groups aligned with the Army and the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate that bleed India in Kashmir. Further, Pakistan has made a strategic decision to leave undisturbed the Afghan Taliban, many of whom have found sanctuary along the border areas between the two countries. This support for the Afghan Taliban, who comprise the greatest threat to U.S. troops and the Kabul government, has moved beyond originally being a hedge against the failure of the Karzai regime to becoming a device for ensuring that Afghanistan remains perpetually deferential and subordinate to Pakistan.
The Obama administration’s attempts alternatively to befriend Pakistan’s military leadership by generous aid packages, to publicly rebuke it for its selective counterterrorism efforts, or to ignore it altogether in carrying out drone strikes over Pakistani territory have not had much impact in forcing Islamabad to reassess its approach to the Afghan Taliban or its collaboration with Washington.
The United States needs to shed any illusions of what we can expect Pakistan to deliver for us in the war on terror and in stabilizing an independent, representative Afghanistan. A genuine strategic partnership between the U.S. and Pakistan will remain beyond reach for some time to come. However, it is possible for the two countries to craft a more limited relationship where our ambitions are more modest and our goals more realistic.
A less romantic, more clear-eyed pragmatic primacy approach would include terminating all conventional arms transfers and assistance to Pakistan that are unrelated to specifically targeted counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations. (The Pentagon’s recent decision to withhold $300 million in military assistance because of Islamabad’s unwillingness to take sufficient action against the Haqqani terrorist network is a step in the right direction.) It would include supporting civilian institutions and good governance initiatives through tailored assistance to specific NGOs rather than through Islamabad. And it would tie civilian assistance to Pakistan’s internal economic reforms, support for opening up its markets, and promoting economic integration with its neighbors in the region.
Nothing in Southwest Asia will come quickly or easily. But the challenges transcend any single country and can best be addressed in a regional format with key stakeholders. Establishing a diplomatic framework with these countries offers the greatest chance of stabilizing the region, eliminating terror groups and promoting economic development.
In contrast to much of his foreign policy, Obama’s counterterrorism policy has enjoyed success. Much of this success has rested on the legal and regulatory foundation the Bush administration constructed for the war on terror. And it has been achieved despite the president’s initial opposition to many of the counterterrorism programs that have kept America safe since 9/11: the long-term detention of suspected terrorists, trial by military tribunal, the Patriot Act, the executive authority to kill American citizens overseas engaged in terrorism, drone strikes and the detention center at Guantánamo Bay. As important as our tactical victories have been in the war on terror, however, they do not constitute an organizing principle for the conduct of our foreign policy or operational concept for U.S. leadership in the world.
Dangers still abound and are growing, ranging from the jungles of the Philippines to the deserts of North Africa. History suggests that religious-based terror groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are far more enduring and less prone to compromise than more secular groups, which means that they will present an ongoing threat to the United States, and our friends and allies, for some time to come. We should take some comfort from the fact that the ideology of many of these groups is rooted in a nihilistic death cult that over time is unlikely to rally many people to the cause (and there is already some data to suggest that fewer young people are attracted than in the recent past). We need to continue to employ a layered strategy based on defense of the homeland and first-rate intelligence work. But as good as our capabilities are, we cannot be as good as local actors working with local knowledge. This means that the next president needs to ramp up our cooperation and training with foreign intelligence and counterterrorism units around the world.
Asia
Over the past few decades, the United States has admired much of China’s rise, as more than five hundred million people have been lifted out of poverty. China is now a major actor on the world stage, a leading consumer of raw materials, and a leading provider of foreign investment in Asia, Africa and Latin America. There is much good that the United States and China can do together to promote global economic growth and deal with security challenges like nuclear proliferation and failed states.
But many of our allies and friends in Asia fear that Beijing is on course to undermining its own security, thanks both to its still strongly state-managed economy and, more importantly, to its growing military capabilities. One of the most important unanswered questions in international relations in the coming decades is whether a rising China can be successfully integrated into a liberal international order or whether it will work to subvert that order.
A rising China is not new. It has been predicted, and feared, at least since the times of Napoleon. In the United States, China has long been a repository of hope for those who thought that America could shape China to meet our preferences. During the twentieth century, these hopes found expression in three separate areas. China was viewed as a lucrative market for American goods, a source of pagans waiting to be converted to Christianity and a potentially thriving democracy.
As we know, none of these three hopes fully came to pass, at least according to the American plan or timetable. A fourth hope was recently added to this record of wishful thinking: that China will become a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system, a term first coined in September 2005 by then deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick. He predicted that China would continue to rise, with ever-greater power and influence in the world. The pertinent question was how China would use its new power and influence as it grew. The hope was that China would work constructively and cooperatively with the United States and others, not only to advance its own interests, but also to strengthen the system that sustains its prosperity and security.
Will this fourth hope come to pass? Will the Chinese become responsible stakeholders, creating public goods and placing their power in service to the global community? Or will China remain an outlier or even work to undermine the existing structures of global governance and reshape them to better suit its needs and wants? Will this fourth American hope lead to disappointment and bitterness as before? Or will it lead to something far worse: armed confrontation and conflict?
The truth is that the United States simply doesn’t know today which path China will choose. But we do know that the answer will be revealed in the coming years as we watch carefully the decisions the Chinese take on supporting the international financial system, preventing nuclear proliferation and pandemics, and resolving disputes peacefully.
China’s remarkable economic growth over the past three decades has led this region-wide phenomenon. China’s rise has also underwritten its growing military capabilities and greater assertiveness, which in turn has created anxiety among its neighbors who fear for their security and autonomy. Specifically, Beijing’s artificial “creation” of reefs and its unilateral assertion of a “nine-dash line” have no basis in international law and impinge on the territorial claims of its neighbors (as recently confirmed by the Permanent Court of Arbitration). Further, as China’s economy slows, with increasing capital flight, with almost half of all new loans being used to pay off the interest on existing loans, and with cash reserves being exhausted to prop up its currency, President Xi Jinping may be tempted to distract domestic unrest by stoking nationalism and xenophobia against foreign enemies.
In response to China’s rise, the Obama administration’s much-heralded “pivot to Asia” has been more rhetorical than real. It has not been informed by any rigorous assessment of the security environment, the risks we face, how we can share the burden with allies and how we might be able to mitigate the risks through diplomacy and other means. It has been a strategy drafted by accountants and designed for savings, not driven by success.
The result is an unstable balance of power in Asia marked by the presence of two rising giants, China and India, two critical allies—Japan and South Korea—trapped between rising Chinese strength and an erratic North Korea, as well as several smaller Southeast Asian states who look more intently than ever to the United States because of their fear of Chinese belligerence. These problems of regional order are exacerbated because there is no well-established arrangement for promoting collective security among strategic competitors.
The United States cannot bend China’s choices to fit our hopes, but we are not helpless. Our immediate task is to articulate clearly our policy preferences as to the type of responsible behavior we wish to see. Going forward, we want China to promote an international trading system based on open markets, to respect intellectual property, and to support a currency that is not kept artificially low to stimulate exports. We want China to encourage sustainable economic development and good governance in Third World countries. We want China to join with us to promote clean energy policies. We want the peaceful resolution of boundary and maritime disputes, especially in the South China Sea, and greater transparency in PLA modernization plans and doctrine, including meaningful discussions with senior members of our armed services. We want China to respect the rights and dignity of its own people to speak as they wish and worship as they please.
Much is riding on China’s evolution. It is no exaggeration to say that the regional and perhaps even the international order for the coming decades, and perhaps longer, will depend on which pathway it selects.
However, a policy of pragmatic primacy has to acknowledge the possibility that China will not do as we prefer, but will choose another path. So we must continue to support those policies that have maintained the peace in East Asia for decades. These include a robust defense of freedom of navigation and overflight rights. They also require funding a military—and a larger Navy—that can maintain a balance of power that reassures our friends and allies in the region, with a forward-deployed presence in the Pacific, and consistent support for Taiwan. We need to use all elements of our power to promote human rights, democracy and the rule of law. These venerable strategies must be supplemented by new components appropriate to our times: building new partnerships with friendly states, such as India, Indonesia and Vietnam, which are not formal allies but which share our aims with respect to peace and security in the Indo-Pacific region.
China’s bullying behavior has created a backlash among the East and Southeast Asian states and given the next president the diplomatic space to enhance America’s role in the region. But we need to understand that their wariness of China will not automatically translate into support for the United States. Many of these states would prefer not to be forced to choose sides; they look to the United States to manage its competition with China to avoid a crisis, and certainly a conflict. This will require a nuanced diplomatic strategy for the region. But deepening relations with these states—as a complement to our existing alliances—will over time create structural constraints that can discourage Beijing from abusing its growing power and help maintain the necessary cushion that prevents China from exploiting its economic gains to increase the geopolitical risks to the larger region.
One area where China and the United States can make common cause is in preventing North Korea, the only country in the twenty-first century to test nuclear weapons, from continuing to refine its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities and threaten regional security. After North Korea’s repeated diplomatic snubs, ballistic missile launches, and its fourth nuclear test this past January, it appears that Pyongyang has exhausted China’s patience, but not its patronage. The North remains heavily dependent on China for food and energy—as much as 80 percent, according to some reports—and it is doubtful that the Kim Jong-un regime could last very long without it.
Although Beijing appears more willing to show its displeasure towards Pyongyang, it remains reluctant to squeeze North Korea much harder because of the fear of collapse and the uncertainty of “the day after,” which could result in millions of refugees flooding into northern China, in U.S. forces moving above the thirty-eighth parallel, and in bringing about a unified Korea allied to the United States.
South Korea has exhibited no such reluctance to take strong action. In the wake of the North’s January 2016 nuclear test, it shut down the Kaesong Industrial Complex, a joint North-South project that employed fifty-five thousand workers and provided the North with hard currency equivalent to one-tenth of its annual budget. Seoul subsequently decided to accept the longstanding U.S. offer of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile system, despite Chinese objections.
While our overall goal is to change North Korea’s strategic calculus so that it negotiates the surrender of its nuclear weapons, pragmatic primacy would acknowledge that all previous attempts have failed, by both Democratic and Republican administrations. Verification and compliance issues are technically complex and politically insurmountable. The modicum of trust needed for any agreement does not exist, on either side. At the same time, the United States needs to maintain the diplomatic fiction of a North Korea without nuclear weapons because it would otherwise suggest that the United States has accepted North Korea as a nuclear power, which may trigger proliferation across the region.
Under these constraints, Washington needs to focus on its highest priorities: alliance management and nonproliferation. First, we must reassure South Korea and Japan that we will continue to deter and defend our allies. This means implementing the THAAD system in South Korea and linking it with existing missile defenses in Japan to provide a regional canopy. The United States should also conduct force demonstrations in and around the Korean Peninsula (along the lines of the Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises in March 2016), should undertake warhead modernization to hit underground bunkers, and should encourage more trilateral intelligence sharing and military integration with Seoul and Tokyo. (With the December 2015 agreement between Seoul and Tokyo settling the sensitive “comfort women” issue, the timing is propitious for greater security cooperation.)
Second, we need to ramp up efforts to prevent Pyongyang from selling its nuclear materials and know-how abroad. As dangerous as a nuclear-armed North Korea is, it is far more dangerous if it shares its expertise with like-minded rogue states. There is precedent here; in 2007, we learned that the North had secretly provided Syria with a plutonium production reactor. There is no reason to believe that the North has not searched for, or found, other buyers.
This means that we need to revisit the past successes of the Proliferation Security Initiative and the Illicit Activities Initiative as part of a larger interdiction and sanctions regime aimed at containing the North’s WMD activities. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of our long-standing, serial sanctioning of the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile testing (and its human rights abuses) is that we still have sanctions left to apply. The Obama administration has belatedly cited North Korea as a country of prime money-laundering concern; we should also increase sanctions against Pyongyang for its human-rights violations, along the same lines as we do for Zimbabwe and the Congo.
It also means that we need to enlist Chinese cooperation to impose tangible costs on North Korea through the strict implementation of sanctions. Unfortunately, past practice by Beijing is not encouraging, despite China’s leverage over the North with its fuel and food supplies. So the United States needs to explain and demonstrate to China that it will pay a price for the North’s bad behavior. China’s action, or nonaction, will influence Washington’s decision to accelerate an integrated THAAD missile defense system with our two allies and our determination to sanction mainland Chinese banks that continue to enable North Korea to export ballistic missiles, narcotics and counterfeit money.
Conclusion
The American people are now hearing from the presidential candidates on how we can solve our foreign-policy challenges, with Donald Trump proclaiming a “philosophy” of authoritarian nationalism (“Make America Great Again”), while Hillary Clinton appears armed with itemized lists of malleable talking points, but little vision. Neither offers a realistic and sustainable strategy for the United States in the twenty-first century.
Promoting and sustaining American greatness rests on understanding that our challenge is akin to a marathon, not a sprint, that our resources are not endless, and that the American people will not underwrite foreign conflicts unless our vital interests are at stake. It rests on exercising restraint, on choosing our commitments carefully, on appreciating that not all humanitarian crises implicate U.S. national security, and that not all conflicts have military solutions. It rests on understanding that we cannot be all things to all people.
For the past seven-and-a-half years, we have had a president skeptical of American exceptionalism, doubtful of America’s ability to act as a force for good in the world, and uncertain that our values are shared and envied by millions of people around the world.
The good news is that American leadership is still prized by many of our friends and allies around the world; the better news is that they want more, not less, of it. Pragmatic primacy is not a miracle cure, but provides the best chance to reestablish America’s purpose in a complex world.
This is the fourteenth in a series of essays on the future of American primacy. You can read the previous essay, “Will the Next President Restore U.S. Primacy?” by David Rieff, here.
Barry F. Lowenkron is the former assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the State Department, 2005–07. Mitchell B. Reiss is the former director of Policy Planning at the State Department, 2003–05.
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