A Crisis of Competence

Last month we marked the third anniversary of the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan—a poorly planned and executed retreat that capped a two decade-long policy that cost some two and a half thousand American lives, over twenty thousand American servicemen and women wounded, and an estimated $1 to $2 trillion—or between $150 million to $300 million a day for the duration of the conflict.[i]  Yet Afghanistan is but one example of the profligate expenditure of American blood and treasure post-Cold War—the wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria all failed to achieve their stated strategic objectives and cost the nation dearly.  The total price tag for the Global War on Terror post 9/11 is estimated to stand at up to $8 trillion.[ii]  The accuracy of such estimates is subject to debate, but in hindsight none of the overall goals that had been originally declared to justify the effort were achieved, nor did much of the bespoke “nation-building” or “democracy-building” we were promised come to pass.   And so, during the current election season, when debates about different strategies going forward oscillate between the “China first” and “pivot to Asia” on the one hand, and business as usual of American primacy—AKA hegemony—compete for the public’s ear, it is time we took stock of what happened during those three decades, and ensure we chart a different course going forward, one that no longer allows for the unsustainable profligacy in expending American blood and treasure.

The three post-Cold War decades were defined by a fundamental misreading of what the implosion of the Soviet empire meant, what caused it, and how long this strategic pause would endure. The Washington consensus was wrong that there was anything final or decisive about the decomposition of the Warsaw Pact, that Russia would somehow recognize that its path to empire had run its course, and that it would “accept its seat at the table” that we generously – so we thought – offered.  In reality, the end of the Cold War was more an end in the battle fought for the domination of the Eurasian landmass after 1945, but it was no more a period of peace than the breather between the First and the Second World Wars was anything but an armistice. American foreign policy elites celebrated the win as an existential victory, imbued with ideological meaning and “end-of-history” triumphalism when they should have understood that if anything, geopolitics were to be brought front-and-center, and that Russia’s weakness was likely to beget revanchism of the sort that seized Germany during the Weimar Republic.  In contrast to the strategists of the “Greatest Generation” who understood that caesuras in history happen only with tectonic shifts engendered by total defeats and victories, the post-Cold War leaders seemed to believe that our former adversaries would want to be “like us,” paying little attention to the extent of humiliation and anomie that defeat always brings forth.  It was this lack of strategic foresight that imbued American post-Cold War triumphalism with the crippling certitude that we could shape the world to our liking. Future historians will marvel that the United States frittered away so much power in just one generation, pursuing the chimera of “primacy” and the “unipolar moment,” instead of husbanding and preserving for as long as possible the unique power position it found itself occupying in 1991.

In fairness, dramatic events also shaped our elite perceptions. The terror attacks on 9/11 were a true game-changer, as they wrecked America’s sense that it was entitled to live in a secure homeland—separated from the world by two oceans and neighboring on Canada and Mexico, two friendly countries that pose no threat.  The trauma of 9/11, and especially the failure of the George W. Bush administration at that point of dread to ask something of the nation beyond money and security measures at our airports, laid the foundation for the most breathtaking hubris in American history:  the belief that properly crafted institutions would in short order remake non-Western cultures, and that we would not be safe until we had transformed entire regions of the globe in our image.  This folly was not so much a quest for empire as its critics posited; it was a borderline elite fixation enabled by the nation’s trauma wrought by a group of criminals who on that fateful day murdered several thousand American citizens. And so instead of capturing or killing Bin Laden and his co-conspirators to show to all that Americans may be gullible and sloppy at times, but that if you try to hurt them you will die, Washington launched on a breathtaking “transformative project” that cost trillions, exhausted the nation’s will, and in strategic terms achieved precious little.   The Kantian dream of “democratic peace,” whereby if all nations were democracies, the problem of war would be eliminated, in Washington’s rendition – Democrat and Republican – became a self-induced defeat. We have yet to fully appreciate how much damage GWOT and the attendant theories have done to American credibility, its good name, and the erstwhile belief that this country was being led by competent people who understood the harsh realities of state power and its limits in global politics.

The United States needs to rebuild its reputation as competent great power and its national credibility in a way that demonstrates to the American citizenry and to the world that we are still capable of thinking in pragmatic terms, and that the ideological normative flourishes of the GWOT and globalization eras that sapped the nation’s strength are a thing of the past.  Today Washington urgently needs to revisit the fundamentals of what constitutes a viable national strategy, one that can clearly articulate the irreducible national interests and objectives to be achieved, identifies the requisite resources to achieve them, and most importantly provides a trajectory going forward that will ensure the sustained support of Congress and the American people.  Most of all, our foreign policy establishment must demonstrate that it still has the competence to implement such a strategy, including real expertise when it comes to understanding different theaters, cultures, and polities.

If it cannot, we need to bring fresh blood into the policymaking and implementation process to ensure we never again fall prey to our ideological wishful thinking about how the world should be.  We must face head-on the realities of power and economics as they have always been and will remain going forward: a strong industrial base as the foundation of our defense industry and our military, and an economic policy that preserves and expands the opportunity and prosperity of the American nation. Then can we speak about rebuilding American credibility worldwide, restoring deterrence, and ensuring that the United States is not pulled unprepared into a wider war against our determined adversaries. Effective deterrence rests on capabilities and, most of all, on the genuine competence and will to deploy those capabilities in a way that communicates unequivocally that the nation will not go looking for the proverbial monsters to slay, but that it nonetheless remains resilient and determined to defeat decisively anyone intent on threating its security.  The clock is ticking, and to get there we need to relearn the fundamentals of great power politics that we seem to have forgotten since the end of the Cold War.

Andrew A. Michta is Senior Fellow and Director of the Scowcroft Strategy Initiative at the Atlantic Council of the United States. Views expressed here are his own.

[i] Remarks by President Biden on the End of the War in Afghanistan | The White House

[ii] Costs of War (brown.edu)