Micah Zenko properly ridicules the habitual saber-rattling of certain editorial boards and op-ed writers:
I suspect that the desire to resolve an enduring problem in the near term explains many of these tough-guy (or girl) proposals. Given that it costs nothing to propose sending someone else to bomb or occupy another country, it’s the least tough and most thoughtless thing for someone to write. Why should we take these proposals seriously?
Zenko is right to reject the advice of the op-ed militarists. Unfortunately, as Zenko understands, these proposals are taken seriously more often than not, and they usually define and drive the debate on the appropriate policy response to a given conflict or crisis. These militarists create perverse incentives for every administration to respond more aggressively and to do more to militarize the conduct of foreign policy than it otherwise might, which in turn eventually pulls all policy debates in the direction of military action.
As long as the U.S. seeks to exercise global “leadership” and possesses a military much larger than it needs to provide for national defense, it is practically inevitable that there will be a dedicated number of journalists and writers ready to endorse military action of one sort or another in response to events overseas. Op-ed militarism contributes to the larger phenomenon of threat inflation, but the former wouldn’t be able to survive for very long if there weren’t numerous politicians and analysts ready and willing to engage in the latter. The constant agitation for “greater U.S.-led intervention” in foreign conflicts both fuels and thrives on the public’s exaggerated fears of threats to the United States.
When it isn’t possible for an op-ed militarist to identify a threat to the U.S., he can always fall back on referring to much more vague threats to “allies” (a term that is itself used so broadly by these writers that it can refer to almost any country), regional stability (even though the militarists’ proposals are typically far more destabilizing than anything that is already happening), “our values” (which are often irrelevant or not at risk), and, last but not least, everyone’s favorite, “credibility.” Once almost every foreign dispute can be treated as a test of U.S. “credibility” (not to mention our “resolve”), there is virtually nothing that the op-ed militarist thinks can’t be solved or improved by a greater exercise of American “strength.”
Excerpt from the Foreign Affairs: he delivered a speech to the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
This is the elephant, and the white one at that, in the room–FOREIGN wars. Should those have been non-foreign ones the set of attitudes towards war would have been quite different. That is why this is very true: In his 1977 study on military and civilian influence on U.S. uses of force, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crisis, political scientist Richard Betts examined Cold War military intervention and escalation decisions. Comparing the opinions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with those of civilian leaders, Betts found, “The stereotype of a belligerent chorus of generals and admirals intimidating a pacific civilian establishment is not supported by the evidence.”
Shared national military (war) historical experience DOES matter, the quantity of historical military (and civilian) casualties, the scale of national war wounds–this all does matter. All this constitutes a major CULTURAL, first and foremost, factor which influences overall attitude of the nation and its elites towards the war. Colin Powell’s “I thought I would have an aneurysm. American GIs were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global game board.” (c) sums up beautifully the professional attitudes towards war, the way they should be. Now comes the question, cases of organic military “militarism” aside–it happens in any military, what kind of the expertise, let alone restraint, in all things war upper-middle class, Ivy-league Liberal Arts graduates (nothing against them per se) working for the editorial boards, mentioned in the Zenko’s piece, can bring to the table? The answer is very simple–next to zero. Yet, they do have a power to form public opinion. Rephrasing of famous truism that the emotions in academic debate run so high because the stakes are so low thus becomes warranted and irresistible–the militarism of this kind of journalists runs so high because the stakes (for them) are so low. And all this is just scratching the surface of the problem.