When is the WPR triggered? That is the source of the current interbranch debate. Obama continues to assert that operations against Libya do not qualify as hostilities because they are limited and do not involve the commitment of ground forces. This reveals the trigger for WPR applicability: hostilities. Is the president correct? It is true that the WPR does not define “hostilities.” However, the legislative history of the WPR indicates that it was partially motivated by the Cambodian air war, initiated by Nixon without congressional authorization. That campaign, like Libya, was limited to air assets with very little risk of combat losses. Nonetheless, Congress sought to address not only the initiation of large-scale combat operations, but also small-scale engagements that create the risk of conflagration and quagmire and put the Congress in the almost impossible position of forcing an end to a conflict after the U.S. has already committed itself to achieving some strategic objective [bold mine-DL]. Against this background, Libya seems to be exactly the type of situation the law was intended to avert.

All of this indicates that Obama has in fact violated the terms of the WPR — not only by continuing operations beyond 60 days, but by initiating the operation without first securing express congressional authorization. ~Geoffrey Corn

The amazing thing about the administration’s position is that it has actually wrapped itself in the War Powers Resolution that it is egregiously violating as a way of deflecting criticism. It was quite a display last week during the Foreign Relations Committee hearing when Kerry was gushing about how significant it was that Obama and his advisors accepted the constitutionality of the WPR. To hear Kerry tell it, Obama was setting a new standard for the scrupulous adherence to the law instead of hollowing out the last vestiges of the check on executive war-making. This is what makes the dishonest defense of the Libyan war that the U.S. is not involved in hostilities particularly galling. The administration theoretically accepts the limits the WPR imposes on the executive, but then weasels its way out of those limits despite the fact that they were intended to prevent exactly this kind of military action.

As the Afghanistan end-game begins and as we prepare for the debate on who, if anyone, will help stabilize a post-Gaddafi Libya, a stray thought on the never-ending intervention debate: there’s often the conceit from those skeptical of intervention that beleagured or conflict-ridden countries need to solve their own problems (not always of course–plenty of those arguing against intervention do so on purely national interest or prudential lines). This allows the anti-interventionist to safeguard national blood and treasure while also appearing to have in mind the long-term best interests of the society in question. It seems to me that there’s a basic fallacy here. There will almost always be intervention of some sort. Pakistan will meddle in Afghanistan; Chad will stoke the fires in Sudan; Ethiopia will take sides in Somalia [bold mine-DL]. The alternatives to Western or international intervention is therefore almost never a society left to sort out its own troubles. It’s really not a question of whether there will be intervention, only one of who will do the intervening. ~David Bosco

It may be the case that non-intervention by the U.S. and European allies serves the long-term best interests of a given country. On the whole, most of the countries that have “benefited” from such interventions in the last twenty years would probably have been better off had these never happened. For the most part, regional actors either could not or would not have intervened militarily where the U.S. and our allies have, partly because regional actors have to live with the consequences of such actions and the intervening governments are shielded from these by distance. Regional actors have more of a stake in the outcome of these conflicts, and they have at least some better understanding of the nature of such conflicts. Western intervening governments often have no reason to be involved, they are usually poorly-informed about the country in which they are intervening, and because they have so little at stake they have little patience to remain engaged in the country once the initial crisis has passed.

The Ethiopian example is not the best one Bosco could choose, since Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia was clearly supported and encouraged by the U.S. It is possible that Ethiopia would have invaded Somalia anyway, but U.S. policy at the time made it much more likely that Ethiopia would take such action. Regardless, what Bosco is describing is a lack of respect for other states’ sovereignty. We can take for granted that neighboring states are going to attempt to wield influence against one another, but what had usually limited this to support for proxy rebel groups was a basic acceptance that international borders were things that had to be respected. Over the last twenty years, the U.S. and allied governments have routinely ignored and undermined that principle.

Somalia is a difficult case. The formal borders of the country have long since ceased to represent political reality, Somaliland and Puntland have effectively broken off, and the officially recognized government of Somalia barely controls any of the country. Because it is such a fragmented country, it invites the sort of meddling Bosco describes. One would think that we should aspire to have fewer Somalias rather than doing things that are likely to create more of them. It also goes without saying that Western or international intervention hardly precludes other states from meddling in a country’s affairs, and it may be that the attention that Western governments and international institutions give to a particular country creates incentives for outside meddling where they would not be as great otherwise. The kind of intervention Bosco refers to in many of these cases is the wielding of influence or the use of proxies, which is something significantly different from direct invasions and occupations of other countries. If we must choose between the two, it’s hard to see why the latter is preferable. Presumably, the right way to cope with the problem of too little respect for state sovereignty and other states’ territorial integrity is not to find new and creative ways to undermine state sovereignty.

Whenever America has eschewed commitments abroad and turned inward, the results have been disastrous. The most isolationist decade in the country’s history — the 1930s — was followed by World War II. The “Come Home, America” isolationism of the 1970s was followed by the fall of South Vietnam, the genocide in Cambodia, the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the 1990s, the post-Cold War desire to spend the “peace dividend” led the U.S. to turn a blind eye to the rising threat from Al Qaeda. ~Max Boot

For all of these, Boot has relied heavily on the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The so-called “most isolationist decade” was followed by WWII, but American policies during that decade did not cause WWII, and it was obviously in spite of the general “isolationist” mood that FDR managed to get the U.S. pulled into the ongoing war. Withdrawing from Vietnam and refusing to be drawn back into the conflict did mean that South Vietnam could not successfully resist on its own, which was the disastrous conclusion to over a decade of fruitless, wasteful military intervention. Neither the Nixon administration nor later antiwar members of Congress were responsible for the Cambodian genocide, but it was Nixon’s decision to expand the war into Cambodia that created the conditions out of which the Khmer Rouge emerged. The Cambodian genocide ought to be a warning about the truly horrific consequences that can result from prolonged and unnecessary wars.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was partly a result of the U.S. response to the hostage crisis, but neither of these had anything to do with the withdrawal from Vietnam. Boot is just offering a series of statements that bad things happened after policy decisions with which he disagrees, but he makes no effort to link them together because they cannot be credibly linked together. He absurdly wants to link the post-Cold War reduction in military spending with the growth of a terrorist threat that emerged because of a greatly increased U.S. military presence in the Gulf after 1990-91. It is possible that there would have been a growing terrorist threat in the absence of a huge U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, but it is very unlikely.

Boot reviews the foolish intervention in Somalia, and then says:

It never seemed to register with the public that subsequent forays into nation-building, in Bosnia and Kosovo, were more successful.

Yes, they were more successful than Somalia, but that doesn’t mean they have really been successful. One reason that this hasn’t registered with the public is that neither of these missions has ended, and the U.S. and European governments involved in Bosnia aren’t very keen on drawing public attention to the state of affairs in Bosnia today. David Bosco reported last week from a gathering of experts in the Balkans:

It was all but taken for granted that the expensive and prolonged international involvement in the region had failed. The continuing dysfunctionality of the Bosnian state and the deep corruption in Kosovo were exhibits A and B. Participants also worried about stagnant economic growth and chronically high unemployment across the region.

While it is true that parties to the Bosnian War are no longer fighting one another, even this may not hold without continued outside involvement. The specific mission of nation-building has created corrupt international dependencies in which criminality flourishes. The examples of Bosnia and Kosovo are not at all encouraging if one is trying to persuade a skeptical public that nation-building is effective or necessary.

Of course, Kosovo would probably never have become an independent state had it not been for NATO intervention, so it is an example of a “nation-building” mission that the West foolishly took upon itself. U.S. security interests were never at stake. There was no question of Kosovo being left ungoverned. The U.S. and NATO forcibly ripped it away from the state that was governing it.

One lesson we ought to have learned from the last twenty years of experience is that the U.S. is not particularly good at “nation-building,” and Americans understandably fail to see the point in such open-ended, quasi-imperial missions. That doesn’t mean that we should heed Boot’s advice that the U.S. needs to become better at doing it. A more important lesson is that several of the places where the U.S. has pursued this policy either didn’t need “nation-building” until after unnecessary military intervention destroyed existing institutions (e.g., Kosovo, Iraq) or the “nation-building” in which we have engaged has had little or nothing to do with national security interests. Nation-building may be the unavoidable baggage that comes with military intervention, but that is just one more reason not to indulge the interventionists the next time they urge the U.S. to “do something” by attacking another state.

Actually, Pawlenty is continuing his “speaking truths in unfriendly venues” tour, which took him to Iowa to denounce ethanol subsidies, Florida to call for Medicare reform, Washington to blast current entitlement policy, and Wall Street to call for financial reform. His speech to CFR was not intended to cater to the elite, but to achieve note from the Republican base by disagreeing with the establishments’ views [sic] in its own house. But of course, Traub cannot be expected to pay attention to this. ~Ben Domenech

Domenech’s faith in Pawlenty’s bold truth-telling is touching. It would be more persuasive if Domenech could cite a single thing Pawlenty said that represented a meaningful disagreement with establishment views on foreign policy. He doesn’t do this. Perhaps this is because there isn’t very much in Pawlenty’s speech that qualifies. Instead, Domenech huffs and puffs about the evil elitists who are not showing the ignorant Tim Pawlenty the proper respect. It is hardly a daring move to go to a CFR event to denounce so-called “isolationism,” to express enthusiasm for American hegemony, and to declare hostility towards Iran. Pawlenty hardly encountered criticism or serious resistance from his audience, and he delivered this speech where he did to claim that he is the “serious” foreign policy candidate that his admirers pretend him to be.

When Traub says that Romney, Pawlenty, and Huntsman “all offer some variant of conservative internationalism,” he is basically correct. That doesn’t mean that their positions are identical. That is why he uses the word variant. Their internationalist positions vary, but they are all broadly similar. Domenech is apparently too busy berating Traub to notice the obvious.

Later, Republicans resisted Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to gird the nation for war, passing legislation that limited rearmament and support for European allies. ~David Greenberg

Actually, FDR’s efforts to pull the U.S. into war were resisted because most Americans saw no need to involve the U.S. in it. To state the obvious, the U.S. did not have any European allies to support before the end of 1941, and we were certainly under no obligation to provide any support. Before entry into the war, the U.S. provided some support to countries at war with the Axis in spite of this.

I suppose it is true that isolationism, if it ever really existed, would “reject America’s leadership role in the world,” but it doesn’t follow that preferring that U.S. “leadership” be reduced or wound down is an isolationist position. One can favor quite extensive economic, cultural, and diplomatic engagement with the rest of the world without wishing to exercise “leadership” of the sort the U.S. has exercised since 1945, and one could even support a more modest form of that “leadership” without wishing “to actively manage world affairs.”

Before he demonstrated his poor understanding of the history of the 19th century, Marion Smith defined isolationism as “a coherent grand strategy composed of economic protectionism, military non-involvement, and cultural detachment.” This is a passable definition. Using this definition, we see that there is virtually no one on the left or right today who endorses such a strategy. This definition makes isolationism into something not very different from the pursuit of autarky. Obviously, neutrality is something very different, and it involves not becoming embroiled in foreign conflicts in which the U.S. has little or no stake.

Greenberg claims that “isolationism” is on the rise again “at a moment when the world needs America to play a stabilizing role.” It’s not at clear that the world needs this. What we do see is that many American hawks want America to play this role. At a time when this stabilizing role is probably less necessary than it has been in over half a century, we are being told that the U.S. cannot reduce its presence anywhere around the world.

I’m not trying to make fun of the Hudson Institute here, but the idea that we have “critical” interests in Kyrgystan just illustrates the poverty of American strategic thinking these days. Even now, in the wake of the various setbacks and mis-steps of the past decade, the central pathology of American strategic discourse is the notion that the entire friggin’ world is a “vital” U.S. interest, and that we are therefore both required and entitled to interfere anywhere and anytime we want to. ~Stephen Walt

I don’t disagree with any of this. In fairness, most people would not be very interested in attending a panel on Kyrgyzstan’s politics if they didn’t think it had implications for the U.S., and event organizers have to find some way to generate interest in the topic. This is understandable up to a point, but it also helps get to the heart of why so many Americans involved in shaping foreign policy end up treating virtually everything as something “vital” or “critical” to the U.S.

This exaggeration of the importance of every other part of the world to the U.S. is necessary to get around the reality that the U.S. has very few truly “vital” interests and there are very few countries around the world that might reasonably be considered “critical” for U.S. security. It isn’t just that the U.S. is currently over-committed after the blunders of the last decade. The presumption that the U.S. must provide global “leadership” leads the U.S. to go far beyond protecting its “vital” interests so that it can no longer properly discern what is essential and what is extraneous. In the end, administrations apparently don’t need to invoke the need to protect “vital” interests. The U.S. will plunge into new wars even when it has nothing at stake.

The flip side of the bad habit of exaggeration is that Americans become accustomed to thinking of international events solely through the question, “What does it mean for us?” Again, that is understandable, but in most cases if we were honest in answering that question the correct answer would be, “Very little or nothing.” Global interdependence notwithstanding, things are not as interconnected as many internationalists would have us believe. Nonetheless, the public has been conditioned to believe that major events in most parts of the world affect or relate to the U.S. in some way. The tendency to treat everything in the world as our business keeps us from recognizing that the rest of the world doesn’t revolve around or need us as much as some interventionists would claim.

Despite the fact that the threat of Russia to British interests was minimal, and trade and diplomatic relations between the two countries were not bad at all in the years leading up to the Crimean War, Russophobia (even more than Francophobia) was arguably the most important element in Britain’s outlook on the world abroad. Throughout Europe, attitudes to Russia were mostly formed by fears and fantasies, and Britain in this sense was no exception to the rule….In the early nineteenth century there was a frenzy of European publications–pamphlets, travelogues and political treatises–on ‘the Russian menace’ to the Continent. They had as much to do with the imagination of an Asiatic ‘other’ threatening the liberties and civilization of Europe as with any perceived or real threat [bold mine-DL]. The stereotype of Russia that emerged from these fanciful writings was that of a savage power, aggressive and expansionist by nature, yet also sufficiently cunning to plot with ‘unseen forces’ against the West and infilitrate societies. ~Orlando Figes, The Crimean War (p. 70)

Figes notes that the 19th-century stereotype of Russia shaped the way Westerners later viewed the USSR during the Cold War, and there are some obvious similarities with the way that many Westerners still view Russia today, but what I find interesting about this description is that it is the way that hard-liners and hawks always perceive other nations that they view as competitors or threats. It does not seem to matter that they are almost always wrong in their estimations of the threat from the other nation. It is certainly not unique to American hawks or Americans in general, but Americans do seem to prefer treating potential and real enemies as if they were incredibly powerful and inherently aggressive and irrational. Logevall and Osgood quoted George Kennan’s observation on this habit:

We Americans like our adversaries wholly inhuman; all powerful, omniscient, monstrously efficient, unhampered by any serious problems of their own, and bent only on schemes for our destruction. Whatever their real nature, we always persist in seeing them this way. It is the reflection of a philosophic weakness—of an inability to recognize any relativity in matters of friendship and enmity.

One might think that this would lessen as we move away from the major, total wars of the last century that reinforced the habit, but this is not what has happened. If anything the vast disparity of power between the U.S. and our actual enemies not only encourages hawks to exaggerate threats, but it also pushes them to seek confrontation with other major powers by finding reasons for hostility. If a major power is seeking normal influence in its own region, it has to be treated as an aggressor and a “revisionist” power bent on expansion. If its external behavior doesn’t directly threaten our country, it is then necessary to align ourselves with those in the region hostile to that power for the sake of our “values.” If that fails to wreck relations, it becomes useful to find fault with the major power’s internal regime on the grounds that its political constitution proves that it will eventually become aggressive and dangerous.

Serving in the Aberdeen government, Palmerston’s agitation for war with Russia exhibited elements of all three of these. Figes describes Palmerston’s foreign policy:

Palmerston was the first really modern politician in this sense. He understood the need to cultivate the press and appeal in simple terms in order to create a mass-based political constituency. The issue that allowed him to achieve this was the war against Russia. His foreign policy captured the imagination of the British public as the embodiment of their own national character and popular ideals: it was Protestant and freedom-loving, energetic and adventurous, confident and bold, belligerent in its defence of the little man, proudly British, and contemptuous of foreigners, particularly those of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox religion, whom Palmerston associated with the worst vices and excesses of the Continent. The public loved his verbal commitment to liberal interventionism abroad: it reinforced their John Bull view that Britain was the greatest country in the world and that the task of government should be to export its way of life to those less fortunate who lived beyond its shores. (p.148-149)

Change out some of the religious categories and replace them with political ones, and the description is a very familiar one of modern American interventionist attitudes. The British public’s enthusiasm for Palmerston’s confrontational policy with Russia relied on the belief that “the struggle against Russia involved ‘British principles’–the defence of liberty, civilization and free trade.” (p. 149) According to Figes, just as the Russians were vilified, so the Ottomans were transformed into virtuous victims in the public imagination, and it would be the British government riding this wave of popular sentiment that would be the one to push hardest for war with Russia. Lost in all of this was the reality that there was no reason for Britain and Russia to fight one another at all. Consequently, as Figes explains, “the allied expedition to the East began with no one really knowing what it was about.” (p. 158) Then again, it is extremely difficult to understand the purpose of a war when the government enters into it for emotional and ideological reasons alone.

During the rest of the decade, while Russia rejected American efforts to promote democracy in Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Washington grew alarmed at the increasing authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin. ~Ariel Cohen and Donald Jensen

Via Scoblete

When reviewing U.S. policy towards Russia, it helps to describe things accurately. What Russia rejected in Georgia and Ukraine was U.S. support for anti-Russian nationalists who were intent on bringing their countries into NATO after more pro-Russian leaders were ousted in the respective “color” revolutions of 2003 and 2004. Of course, Russia opposed the invasion of Iraq for a number of reasons, but thwarting the promotion of democracy was pretty far down the list of reasons if it was on it at all. As for Afghanistan, the Russians presumably couldn’t care less about democracy promotion efforts there. It was, in fact, Russian support for the initial phase of the war in Afghanistan that helped facilitated the swift response after 9/11. Since the much-derided “reset,” U.S.-Russian cooperation on supplying the war effort in Afghanistan has been a clear, tangible gain for the U.S. Nikolas Gvosdev explains:

Over the past two years, Russia has emerged as an alternative to Pakistan as the conduit of choice for supplies to support the U.S. and NATO mission in Afghanistan. The so-called Northern Distribution Network (NDN) is a logistical corridor (.pdf) “connecting Baltic and Black Sea ports with Afghanistan via Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus.” Initially conceived as an alternative transit route for nonlethal supplies, the NDN has grown in importance over the past two years and now accounts for more than half of all U.S. military transit to Afghanistan. That is in part due to the unreliability of supply routes from the Pakistani port of Karachi, which are plagued by security concerns as well as temporary closures by the government in Islamabad. But it is also due to the Russian government’s decision to allow the transfer of military equipment as well as food and fuel across its territory. For the past year, Moscow has permitted U.S. planes to transit Russian airspace carrying troops and weaponry, with up to 4,500 flights authorized annually.

The NDN gives the United States a reliable transit route that reduces the opportunity for insurgents to strangle the Western effort in Afghanistan by blocking the supply routes across Pakistan. The NDN has also been a boon for Russian and other Eurasian companies involved in rail and air cargo transport. Some estimates suggest that NDN generates more than $1 billion in revenue for Russian firms, including state companies like Russian Railways, through what would otherwise be unused capacity. This collaboration creates a set of mutually reinforcing incentives for both Moscow and Washington. Over the past two years, the U.S. side has become much more comfortable in taking advantage of the NDN, while the tangible rewards for Russia include not just amorphous “good will,” but cold, hard cash that Moscow can bank.

Skeptics and opponents of the war in Afghanistan will probably say that finding a more reliable way of keeping the war effort supplied is not very good news, but that hardly applies to critics of the “reset” policy. Whether or not they support the policies in question, Cohen and Jensen do a poor job of acknowledging the gains that supporters of “reset” policy claim for it. At a minimum, these include reduced tensions between Russia and its neighbors in eastern Europe, Russian support for another round of U.N. sanctions against Iran, cooperation in supporting the new government of Kyrgyzstan following the overthrow of Bakiyev, final negotiation and ratification of a new arms reduction treaty, the establishment of a civilian nuclear cooperation deal (i.e., the so-called 123 Agreement), and paving the way for Russian accession to the WTO. On the whole, almost all of the gains claimed since the start of the new policy are on the American side. If anyone has reason to complain about the lopsided nature of the “reset,” it would have to be the Russians.

Cohen and Jensen call for the sort of hectoring of Russia over its internal flaws that spectacularly failed under the previous administration. It might be time to acknowledge that the U.S. cannot constructively shape Russian political developments. Cohen and Jensen claim in conclusion:

If Washington persists and stays strong, the Kremlin is likely to relent and eventually acquiesce. Russia’s current rulers recognize and respect power and policies based on strength, not weakness.

Russian leaders may recognize and respect power, but what we have learned over the last decade is that they don’t take well to being ordered around, provoked, and (as they see it) encircled by an antagonistic coalition of governments. Russian nationalists are no less likely to believe in the importance of uncompromising shows of “strength.” If the U.S. insists on criticizing their judicial system or their government’s authoritarianism, this will not cause the Kremlin to relent, but simply to dig in its heels as it did all during the Bush administration. Political and legal reforms may not come to Russia, but one way to guarantee that they will not is to associate these ideas with American demands.

Having prematurely declared neoconservatism as good as dead among the 2012 candidates, James Traub notices that Pawlenty’s neoconservative foreign policy speech was an uninspired collection of talking points:

“Moral clarity,” then, is the alternative both to the heartless realism of engagement and to the short-sightedness and penny-pinching of isolationism. But Pawlenty’s moral clarity didn’t feel as clear as Reagan’s or Sen. John McCain’s. Theirs’ was rooted in life experience and was consistent with a broader worldview, just as “engagement” is rooted in Obama’s own experience and his intuitions about the world. Pawlenty’s views sounded as borrowed as T-Paw, his NBA-style nickname. It felt like he had rummaged in the closet of Republican policy options and come out with whatever seemed to fit. (Of course Mitt Romney seems to do this with almost everything.) And the hat turns out to be a little too big for his head.

It was interesting that Pawlenty didn’t try to con his CFR audience with claims that overseas trade missions as governor count as foreign policy experience. To date, that has been his standard answer. It’s not just that Pawlenty, unlike Marco Rubio, can’t provide a biographical anecdote to illustrate why he believes in these bad ideas, but that these ideas are clearly so far removed from American interests that it is virtually impossible to relate them to Americans’ experiences.