Daniel Strand thinks that critics of America’s endless wars don’t understand the need for hard power:

Please hear me: I do think our foreign policy and recent wars should and must be criticized. We should always remain self-critical and weary of our own complacency. When we make mistakes, we should expose them to the light of day and learn from them. But being self-critical and learning from mistakes is quite different than adopting a view of politics that rules the use of force out or treats it like a secondary issue.

Strand mentions Sanders, Warren, and the Quincy Institute by name, so it is probably worth pointing out that none of his targets “rules the use of force out or treats it like a secondary issue.” Both senators and the co-founders of the QI accept that there may be occasions when the use of force is necessary, but I think they are all in agreement that U.S. foreign policy is overly militarized, our government resorts to force much too quickly and too often, and that our military interventions over at least the last 18 years have been unsuccessful and have generally created more problems and insecurity. If Strand thinks “our foreign policy and recent wars should and must be criticized,” perhaps he should do that instead of making inaccurate complaints about the people that have been consistently doing the work of criticizing these things for years.

Strand continues:

Sanders and Warren are right that diplomacy is important to any effective foreign policy. But they imagine it is sufficient unto itself.

I am familiar with the senators’ foreign policy statements and articles, and I am confident when I say that this is a misrepresentation of their respective positions. In fact, I can’t think of anyone that argues that diplomacy “is sufficient unto itself.” What they do argue is that the U.S. needs to devote considerably greater resources to the practice of diplomacy, and our foreign policy should make much greater use of that tool than our government has done in recent decades. We have had a foreign policy heavily skewed in favor of military action and threats of using force for at least half my lifetime, and restoring some balance and sanity will necessarily involve deemphasizing what has been used so excessively for all that time. Sanders, Warren, and the Quincy Institute are all proposing a necessary, overdue correction to the outrageous and destructive imbalance in our foreign policy. Strand is knocking down an argument no one is making and rejecting a view no one holds, and he is doing it in service of the bad cause of bashing advocates of restraint and opponents of unnecessary war.

When Strand turns to specific cases, that’s when things really go off the rails:

We have attempted for decades to work with Iran diplomatically, and it has failed. So what are we to do? What truly keeps Iran at bay at the end of the day are economic sanctions, which is a form of coercion, and those aircraft carriers and warships parked in the Persian Gulf. The open hand of diplomacy works because, not in spite of, the fact we have means at our disposal to cause Iranians pain, including physical pain.

I don’t know what he means when he says we “have attempted for decades to work with Iran diplomatically.” If he’s referring to the U.S. government, that is simply not true. The U.S. has sporadically and inconsistently engaged with Iran only to reverse course a few years later. Most of this has not been an attempt to “work with Iran,” but rather an attempt to dictate to Iran what it is allowed to do. When the U.S. and Iran finally did have a significant diplomatic breakthrough and negotiated a successful nonproliferation agreement along with the rest of the P5+1, the next U.S. administration turned around and almost immediately violated the agreement and launched an economic war that created the crisis that we see today. The one time when diplomacy with Iran was successful was when the U.S. shelved talk of military action, showed a willingness to lift sanctions in exchange for cooperation, and made necessary compromises to secure an agreement. When the U.S. has privileged ultimatums and threats, as Strand seems to suggest we should, the result has been heightened tensions, increased risk of war, and greater regional instability. The recent events in the Strait of Hormuz are a good example of what happens when the U.S. trashes a successful diplomatic agreement, wages economic war for no good reason, and takes provocative actions against another government. Strand is citing an example that torpedoes his own argument.

Strand goes on:

Many of our politicians have over-learned the lessons of recent American overreach. Just because America has sometimes blundered does not mean the problem is the use of power but the fact that we have not used it well.

The U.S. has been at war in one or more countries for the last 18 years, and it is likely to remain at war in one or more for the foreseeable future. I submit that our political leaders have not really begun to learn the lessons of our overreaching. Whenever an instrument of power is used excessively and almost to the exclusion of all others, we are not talking about the use of power but rather its constant abuse. The U.S. a very long way from overcorrecting for its post-9/11 blunders. There isn’t that much evidence that we have made a correction. The fact that the U.S. has come so dangerously close to a new war with Iran as a result of a crisis our government created shows that our political leaders haven’t learned much of anything. The U.S. may blunder into war with Iran yet, so until we actually avoid making an even bigger blunder than Iraq let’s not assume that anyone has “over-learned” its lessons.

Strand seems to think that the U.S. is in danger of becoming too averse to the use of force. I don’t know why he thinks that, but it is not the case. What Sanders, Warren, and the Quincy Institute are proposing is that the U.S. refrain from using force unless it is absolutely necessary to secure our vital interests and to defend ourselves. They do want the U.S. to stop fighting open-ended, aimless, and unwinnable wars for decades on end. That doesn’t mean they don’t understand the role of power in politics or the importance of using force when truly necessary. It means that they reject treating military options as the default first resort and the knee-jerk response to crises and conflicts overseas. After almost two decades of futility and failure, it is refreshing to hear more people making the case for engagement and restraint. It is telling that their critics have to distort their position when they attack it.