J.B. Books
The United States needs a national security strategy reset. WWII ended 79 years ago, and the U.S. has engaged in some form of conflict for roughly 61 of those 79 years. The post-WWII era has been one of almost continual conflict and to what end? Republican and Democrat Administrations alike have made a practice of rushing into conflict absent decisive strategy and without achieving decisive outcomes.
The post-WWII rules-based order (RBO), centered around the United Nations and other international institutions, is often credited with having provided greater stability and peace in the world since WWII. But this is not true. It is an illusion. The world avoided large scale violent global conflict, but small-scale conflicts in the form of civil wars, border conflicts, regional wars, and terrorism have raged since 1945.
False hopes regarding the rules-based order and its effectiveness have warped the West’s view of war and its understanding of why the Allies were able to achieve a durable victory in WWII.
The Allies won WWII because they broke the will of the Axis powers through the sheer magnitude of death and destruction dealt to their civilian populations, not just to their armies. But ever since then, the United States has so feared conflicts escalating into vicious interstate wars that—perversely—it has tried over and over to fight limited wars for limited objectives, believing that such wars can either achieve our objectives or bring diplomacy into focus.
Counterintuitively, however, limited wars fail to result in long-lasting diplomatic solutions because they are limited. The U.S. fails to make war costly enough to collapse the will of our enemies and, because the U.S. is unwilling to wage war that is sufficiently violent and destructive, war doesn’t deliver decisive outcomes.
It is time for the United States to try a different tack and, by doing so, to also put itself in the position of having to use military power less frequently. With an actual framework to help guide the application of force, the U.S. would also be able to bring greater coherence to how and when it wages war and supports allies and partners.
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