Noah Millman continues the discussion on credibility and foreign policy:

This is all correct, but the funny thing to me is that credibility arguments should be the almost exclusive preserve of advocates of restraint. Why? Because if credibility is an important asset that allows America to achieve some objectives without deploying resources (by simply making a commitment to respond if some other actor takes some other action), then we shouldn’t squander that asset by making commitments we don’t intend – or cannot – make good on.

Millman makes a number of good points. I would add something else here, which is that hawks and advocates of restraint often mean very different things when they talk about U.S. commitments. Advocates of restraint take formal U.S. security commitments seriously, but they don’t pretend that every off-the-cuff presidential statement or every non-binding agreement commits the U.S. to do anything at all. There are real, binding treaty commitments that the U.S. is obliged to honor. But we shouldn’t honor them because we’re worried that a particular region or the rest of the world will fall apart if we don’t. We should honor them when we have good reason to believe those commitments are necessary for our security. (Since there are very few commitments that actually are necessary for our security, that is why we should ultimately have far fewer commitments than we do today, but that is another debate.) We’re also not worried about “preserving” something as intangible and useless as “credibility” at the expense of real resources and lives.

Just as hawks grossly exaggerate threats and perceive “vital” interests where none exists, they also tend to inflate meaningless and boilerplate rhetoric into binding statements of future policy. The assumption behind this seems to be that “if the president says X, that requires the U.S. to achieve X no matter what.” Thus the U.S. had to back up the vague “red line” in Syria, and if it did not terrible things would follow directly from that all over the world. In fact, Obama’s “red line” statements didn’t require the U.S. to do anything. It was a bit of careless presidential rhetoric that could have been disavowed without serious consequences for the U.S. and its allies, but instead it was treated by many people, including the president and his top officials, as something that demanded military action.

So hawks pretend that the U.S. has many more commitments than it really has. That allows them to turn every minor utterance by a president into a solemn obligation to intervene in this or that country. Since presidents are frequently tempted and encouraged to “speak out” about developments all over the world, creating the impression that presidential utterances are binding commitments is a useful way to trap administrations into pursuing more aggressive policies in all sorts of places.

We know the routine well by now. The hawks first insist that the president condemn a regime’s behavior, and then they will demand that he back up that condemnation with “action.” If the president is foolish enough to comply, perhaps also suggesting along the way that the regime’s leader “must go,” he is then chided for moving too slowly or doing too little to make that happen. Regardless of what he does, he is inevitably urged to “do more.” Each step along the way will also be found wanting by interventionists that will keep urging escalation. Once he has supposedly “committed” the U.S. to regime change by using some empty rhetoric, hawks start insisting that he should be even more aggressive in trying to topple the regime. This is what Yglesias dubbed the “regime change ratchet.” In other cases, hawks will try to elevate non-binding political agreements into the equivalent of a formal security guarantee, which is why so many interventionists were suddenly alarmed last year by the U.S. “failure” to “honor” its “commitment” in the Budapest memorandum, which had never been ratified and required almost nothing from the U.S. in any case. By pretending that the U.S. has many, many more major commitments around the world than it really has, hawkish interventionists try to trick their audience into thinking that their demands for new and unnecessary aggressive policies are just pleas to fulfill existing obligations.

Advocates of restraint are very wary of making any new formal commitments (e.g., bringing new countries into NATO) because they fear that the U.S. will be compelled to honor those commitments at great cost in the future. However, advocates of restraint also usually suspect that the U.S. is being committed to defend countries that it will not actually fight to defend in a conflict because those countries are indefensible or not important enough to the U.S. to merit the risk in the first place. The danger in the latter case is that this false promise of U.S. support will encourage leaders in these countries to behave recklessly on the mistaken assumption that the U.S. will bail them out. That is more or less the argument that I and other opponents of past and future NATO expansion have made over the years, and I still think it makes sense. But we don’t care about “credibility” because we assume it doesn’t matter very much in the way that its boosters claim, and we don’t want to rely on an intangible and much-abused concept. In any case, advocates of restraint have seen how often bogus “credibility” talk has lured the U.S. into fighting unnecessary wars, and we assume that this kind of argument is so misleading and inaccurate in the way it describes the perceptions and behavior of other governments that it would be bound to take the U.S. into a ditch.