Index:

1.  On Containment and Islamism: Moderate Realism for a Fractious Age
2. A Region of Long Memory: The (Next) “Big One”?
3. The Persian Elephant in the Room: Revitalizing U.S.-Iran Relations After the Iran Nuclear Deal
4. Crisis in Ukraine: When Proxies are Primary
5. Ending the Korean War
6. Realism, Grand Strategy, and Landpower in the Near East: An Alternative Outline

 

 

1)  On Containment and Islamism: Moderate Realism for a Fractious Age

Michael F. Duggan
July 15, 2013

 

 

 

 

After more than a decade of costly wars, occupations, and humanitarian interventions in distant lands, the United States should critically reassess the basic premises of its foreign policy, especially as regards its ongoing conflict with radical Islamist movements, their origins, and the potential for a satisfactory resolution. The United States needs a more practical and integrated approach to policy, a basis for grand strategy I call “Neo-Hadrianism” after the consolidation practices of the second-century Roman emperor who pulled back from certain far-flung reaches of the Empire for the sake of preserving Roman strength and stability.[1] This model of moderate realism could strike an optimal balance between serving practical U.S. interests as a global maritime superpower and recognizing the limits imposed on U.S. goals as it encounters other nations and cultures with their own regional claims, security concerns, and fundamental interests. Neo-Hadrianism could serve as a middle way that averts both hegemonic overreach on the one hand and a return to isolationism and “Fortress America” autarchy on the other.

Michael F. Duggan teaches American History as an adjunct professor in the Department of Graduate Liberal Studies at Georgetown University. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown, with emphases in American and Modern European history, and his research interests range from 20th century U.S. foreign policy and the American presidency to critical rationalism and the history of ideas. His published works span topics in history and philosophy while also reflecting his passion for poetry and creative writing. At Georgetown, Dr. Duggan co-founded the Liberal Studies Philosophy Roundtable, an ethics discussion group.

Islamic extremism, with its terrorist networks and regional appeal, presents a formidable threat to U.S. influence and values, especially in the Near East. U.S. engagement with this dangerous enemy has been excessively confrontational and destabilizing to the already-troubled Near East and beyond. A deliberate but watchful disengagement by the United States from much of this region would serve the country better than its recent policies of counterinsurgency and nation building, as well as its shadowy, open-ended quasi-war of drone strikes.[2]

The U.S. Cold War strategy of containment hastened the collapse of Marxist-Leninism under the weight of its own inefficiencies, contradictions, and unsustainable historicist ideology. Similarly, a U.S. policy of gradual disengagement today from the Near East would lead to the eventual self-destruction and implosion of jihadi Islamism. A program of watchful non-interference in this region would furthermore reduce considerable unnecessary U.S. public waste and sacrifice in ventures that have done little more than exacerbate conflict with rival regional powers, especially China and Russia.[3]

Cold War Parallels to Today

A sensible reading of history, long-term national interests, and sustainability should form the basis for U.S. foreign policy, as was the case in U.S. Cold War strategy. The collapse of the Soviet Union was in large measure the result of Ambassador George F. Kennan’s idea of a grand strategy of containment, a deep and intimate—as opposed to a formal and remote—understanding of Russian history and cultural psychology and its ideological overlay of Marxist-Leninism. The victory was in part due to the avoidance of rigid historical narratives or ideology such as those embraced by the Soviet Union, and to think otherwise is to dangerously misread the lessons of 1946-1991 and those of our own time.[4] Ambassador Kennan’s general outline for containment accurately diagnosed the situation, provided a durable and flexible model, and bought the necessary time that allowed for the internal collapse of the Soviet system, a collapse which seems inevitable in hindsight.[5]

Far from discrediting deterministic historical narratives such as Soviet Marxism, the end of the Cold War actually inspired and instilled the West with heady, pernicious myths of its own. If Soviet Marxism was not the correct historical model, it was reasoned, then the true model must be one embracing the opposite: the active spreading of democracy, rights-based liberalism, rule of law initiatives, free markets, and deregulation. Consequently, from the 1980s until the present, the U.S. policy outlook has been captivated by such ideologies as neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, notions of American exceptionalism, and the free market and deregulatory ideas subsumed under the catchall term of “globalization.”[6] These ideas and programs, if held in earnest, are every bit as much of a historical narrative as others such as Marxism, Puritanism, or Islamism.[7] When a nation holds to ideological or moral imperatives at the expense of national interests, it puts its long-term prospects in serious jeopardy. There are no silver bullets in the course of human events and, as with the narratives of the past and current U.S. foes, our own outlook “bears within it the seeds of its own decay.” While “the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced,”[8] the United States should alter its course in realization that any program or set of policies put in motion by human hands can be undone by human agency.[9]

The success of containment strongly suggests that a pragmatic reading of history is a more effective basis for policy than ideology or morality. History never repeats itself exactly, and the transferability of strategic concepts is a tricky business. Upon close examination, one can see that, in spite of their differences, Cold War Marxism and today’s Islamism share important macro-historical conceptual commonalities and grounding in historicist ideology, or a fatalist view of the end of history.

The British philosopher John Gray sees Islamism, like the Marxist ideology of the Soviet Union, as a revolutionary and utopian eschatology. It is utopian in its belief that human beings are perfectible under its prescriptive model, eschatological in its belief that world history is unfolding via a preordained narrative toward a post-historical endgame, and revolutionary in its willingness to advance its program dynamically and even violently.[10] Gray’s work highlights that all eschatological programs to date—including millennialism, Puritanism, and Marxism—have had two things in common: a historicist point of view and repeated failure of all their predictions to materialize. Given the impossibility of sustaining revolutionary fervor over an extended period, eschatological movements tend to burn themselves out within a few generations unless given fuel from external sources. In the case of Islamism, that fuel has been supplied in large measure in the form of external pressure and foreign interventions in Muslim parts of the world.

The Islamist movement itself was, at least to some extent, influenced by the West. Interestingly, Gray notes that, though Islam has long had violent aspects, the idea of perfecting human nature and bringing about the post-historical Islamic world through the use of terrorism is not a tenet of Islam but of modern secular ideology. In this sense, the violent eschatological element of modern jihadi owes more to Western millennialism and even Bolshevism than it does to traditional Muslim thought.[11]

With freedom of action, the aggressiveness of radical Islamists may be more like that of non-eschatological extremists who give themselves short-term deadlines to meet their immediate objectives based on their own mortality rather than open-ended inevitability.[12] As with the USSR and all historicist models, however, Islamism could plausibly be taking its time to implement its larger historical vision; if something is inevitable, then why rush? Though the Islamist and Soviet Marxist-Leninism narratives share the view of historical inevitability of their programs, the realism of the Soviet leaders restrained them from risking violent extinction, while followers of radical Islam are more aggressive in their actions with less fear of mutual or one-sided annihilation. The eschatology of Islamism, being theistic in nature, may lead to a welcoming of an apocalypse from whose ashes a new world may rise. However, while the long-term vision of Islamism is utopian, the short-term goal of Islamist organizations like al-Qaeda is geopolitical rather than eschatological. Unlike the Soviet Union, the immediate goal of the Islamist violence of recent years likely has less to do with the end of history than it does with the far more limited geopolitical or “tactical” objective of driving outsiders from Muslim regions of the world.

Neo-Hadrianism as the Way Forward

How is the United States to deal with Islamism—an opponent who believes that God is on its side, who is willing to die for its cause, with whom it is difficult or impossible to negotiate, and whose reach extends beyond national borders? The way to deal with such an adversary is to vigilantly ignore it. I do not propose full-scale containment, as the United States employed in the Cold War. Rather, I propose that the United States and its allies seek merely to isolate radical Islamist actors through non-interference and a gradual Hadrian-like disengagement from parts of the world where they flourish.

Islamist jihadi fighters use violence, but they are straightforward regarding their intents; they are righteous killers, true believers, and not sociopaths for the most part.[13] They oppose Western liberal values, but their stated purpose is to drive Western influences from Muslim lands. They attack the West more for what the West does and what it has done rather than for what the West is, and they will likely discontinue attacks on U.S. interests if the United States leaves the region. Islamist groups have not waged attacks, for the most part, on countries with no significant presence in the Near East and Muslim regions.

Complying with enemy desires, in this case the ridding of Islamic regions of “infidels,” is the exception to conventional strategy, not the rule, yet it serves U.S. interests to do so when such action would lead to the enemy’s self-destruction. As Napoleon put it, “When the enemy is making a false movement we must take care not to interrupt him.”[14] If the United States accommodates the radicals’ immediate goal of disengaging from the region, it will hasten the failure of their ultimate objective and bring the downfall of their more radical elements. One case in which this phenomenon is already at work is that of the growing dissatisfaction of Iran’s youth toward their militant theocratic rulers. In general, the United States should consider if its interests in the Near East are so important that it would not be better served filling them elsewhere, if possible.

Practical Implications on U.S. Policy

The United States should adopt a foreign policy based on a more limited, regionally-based balance of power-oriented, internationalist outlook, with parallel domestic and economic policies such as sensible re-regulation and trade bilateralism. Thus, it would be able to sustain much of the economic success and an even greater degree of security than it knew after World War II. Such a cohesive particularist position would do away with the ever-increasing disparities and quasi-imperialist power relationships created by the foreign policy outlook dominant over the past three decades.[15] The historical record also shows that this sort of realism would likely produce better “moral” results than policy specifically crafted toward moral or ideological ends.[16]

The downside of a Neo-Hadrian approach to foreign policy would involve the disposition of long-term friends and alliances—for example, Israel, Ethiopia, and the Kurds—as well as maintaining access to crucial material resources in the regions affected. Needless to say these things would have to be watched very carefully and managed with great sensitivity. The guiding principle of this outlook would be to identify nations and regions of fundamental interest to the United States and to fashion our international role accordingly. The United States is a large and powerful nation, and even within such parameters would still require a fairly robust presence and involvement in the world. U.S. national interests would include an immediate sphere of influence encompassing North and Central America and the Caribbean Basin. Our geopolitical interests would include Israel and parts of the Near East due to the stark reality of nuclear proliferation and the emerging potential for actual nuclear conflict. India and Pakistan would remain U.S. interests for the same reason. Areas of important economic interest would include the Atlantic and Pacific sea lanes as links to the Near East, the Pacific Rim, and East Asia. Except for those areas immediately adjacent to our borders, we should walk very softly in terms of our engagement—keeping an eye on potential dangers while toning down our righteousness, rhetoric, and sense of entitlement in terms of intervention. The United States should ignore as much as possible those countries that are affirmatively hostile to us and should avoid direct or covert military action to destabilize them. Our goal should be to remain economically and technologically strong—vigilant but not threatening or aggressive.

The idea would be to be involved in the world only insofar as necessary. The United States would reserve the right to act in a multilateral military capacity in the event of threats to international stability such as the violation of territorial sovereignty, as in Korea in 1950 and Kuwait in 1990-1991. The United States would also be involved with international law enforcement and environmental initiatives. We should adhere to Ambassador Kennan’s admonishment to treat foreign nations on a basis of equal respect regardless of their relative importance to us.[17]

This comprehensive basis for policy would embody both moderation and tactical flexibility toward a long-term national vision geared toward goals of fundamental interests, regional spheres of influence, a sustainable combination of free trade and protection, and a non-ideological approach to problem solving. Specifically, the United States would gradually disengage from areas of the world where its vital interests are not demonstrably at stake, where it is not needed or wanted by the local people, and where its mere presence has actually increased the threats to its national security. As long as the United States remains in Muslim regions of the world, Americans will be regarded as infidels, occupiers, and meddlesome outsiders, and there is nothing we can do to change these perceptions. The United States must begin to take a more conciliatory attitude toward the indigenous peoples of the Near East by stepping back.

Reservations on Containment of Islamism

In divining a strategy from history, the greatest challenge is determining when to apply which lessons of the past and knowing when those lessons no longer apply to the current situation. The historical record on containment is mixed, as is the opinion on whether it applies to current U.S. confrontation with radical Islam. While the containment of the postwar Soviet Union was a success, other historical attempts to contain emerging powers such as Germany during 1894-1914 and the infant USSR during 1918-1921 and to level economic sanctions against Japan in 1940-1941 were notable failures.[18] What this suggests is that although the containment of rising powers may force their radicalization and eventually a violent response, it may be productively used to allow historicist ideologies to burn themselves out.

In his 2005 article “After Containment,” Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis argues that Kennan’s strategy of containment would probably not be effective in addressing the threat of non-state entities of the Islamist cause.[19] Gaddis argues that, in order for containment to be effective, it must be oriented towards a state. Such a focus on the formalities and trappings of containment as a policy against a rival state limits Ambassador Kennan’s vision to a single structural doctrine—“principle” in Kennan’s words—rather than a broad and flexible general policy of history and interest-based realism with potential regional applications against even Islamism. Most significantly, by focusing on structures over ideological psychology as a basis for strategy, Gaddis misses the bigger point that, in spite of their differences, theoretical commonalities and historicist foundations shared between Marxism and Islamism provide key insights and opportunities for U.S. policy.

Conclusion

One of the primary functions of the study of history is to learn from past experience—to understand why some policies and strategies work while others do not, and to correct our mistaken beliefs in light of such understanding. History still provides the best means for area specialists and cultural and intellectual historians to understand the course of the Islamic Revolution and determine the best basis for policy to effectively address it.

This article has presented the case that a nuanced understanding of the historical record and of human nature suggests to us a policy path based on the gradual reduction and withdrawal of military and economic elements from regions of little importance but of high consequences in terms of the agitation of traditional peoples, and to do so as part of a comprehensive reevaluation of our interests abroad. While not technically identical to containment, this detachment and non-interference would have the same practical effect of letting radical eschatology burn itself out by depriving it of external fuel sources as it has at other times and places historically. Though multifaceted and decentralized, Islamism is unlikely to spread as a large-scale proselytizing movement beyond its current range. A non-interventionist policy would deprive it of moral authority and limit its presence to where it already exists and to “lone wolf” conversions.

Terrorism remains an immediate and persistent danger to the United States, even if it is not an existential threat. Thus, the United States would reserve the right to respond to any future attacks though the judicious use of precision drone strikes and special unit operations, with congressional and judicial oversight, while avoiding the pitfalls of maintaining a conventional heavy footprint, or “boots on the ground,” in radical Islamic hot-spot regions.

The more general elements of Ambassador Kennan’s Cold War-era outline for containment could be easily adapted to the challenges of current geopolitical and security horizons. These elements are an intimate cultural and historical knowledge of our opponents, the avoidance of engaging with actors espousing righteous ideologies, and the acceptance of an adaptive, long-term policy run by professionals where domestic political interference is minimized. Through such prudent application of historical lessons, the United States could better guarantee the long-term physical and economic security of its people.

Notes

[1] See Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, an Abridgement, D. M. Low, ed., (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1960 [1776]), 8-9. Regarding Hadrian and his successor, Antoninus Pius, see Michael Grant, The Roman Emperors (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1997 [1985]), 76-88.
[2] Rather than thinking in terms of what specific areas the United States should withdraw from, our policy should be guided by the converse: most of the Islamic world should be of little concern to us, except insofar as local or regional conflicts are likely to dangerously spill over into our domestic or regional sphere.
[3] Watson Institute at Brown University has produced a report titled “Costs of War” which gives the costs of the Iraq War as 189,000 deaths and upwards of $2 trillion dollars. Estimates for the total number of deaths in Iraq since 2003 range from around 110,000 to more than one million. Total U.S. casualties for the war in Afghanistan are currently 20,904 with 2,229 killed. Total U.S. casualties for the war in Iraq are 36,710 with 4,488 killed. For up-to-date costs and casualty rates, go to http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assetsbudget.pdf. Regarding the costs of the U.S. contribution to the 2011 NATO campaign in Libya, go to http://washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/libya-war-costs-for-us-896-million-so-far/2011/08/23/glQA5KplYJ_blog.html. See also http://www.forbes.com/sites/beltway/2011/03/28/the-real-cost-of-u-s-in-libya-two-billion-dollars-per-day/. Considering costs versus benefits of the deep U.S. involvement in the Near East and specifically its implications on economic and trade considerations, I believe that we should only be engaged insofar as is absolutely necessary. This would include, first, keeping the Suez Canal opened and maintained and, second, keeping open and accessible the sea lanes leading to and from the major oil producers, for example the Persian Gulf.
[4] Historical narratives proceed from the assumption that history has a specific plot or “narrative” that can be known and anticipated through a filtering of a particular ideology or world view (eschatology). See generally John Gray, Black Mass (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007). The related idea that history is guided by deterministic “laws” that can be known through a study of the past is sometimes called historicism. The philosopher Karl Popper discredits this idea in his book The Poverty of Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1957). In contrast are less ideological approaches to history that concede the fundamentally unpredictable nature of the course of human events, but maintain that we may glean some modest insights from the past as a basis for policy in addressing present-day situations.
[5] On the idea of containment, see George F. Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 25, no. 4 (July 1947): 556-582. Reprinted in American Diplomacy, Expanded Edition (University of Chicago Press, 1984 [1951]), 107-128. Regarding the development of containment as a basis for grand strategy, see generally John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (Oxford, 1982).
[6] On globalization see for instance Francis Fukuyama, The End of History (New York: Avon Books, Inc., 1992) and Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005). On the neo-conservative movement in foreign affairs, see generally James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans (New York: Penguin, 2004).
[7] See generally, John Gray, Black Mass (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007).
[8] Kennan, American Diplomacy, 125.
[9] Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penguin, 2010), 293.
[10] Gray, Black Mass.
[11] Ibid., 69-72.
[12] See John Lewis Gaddis, “After Containment,” The New Republic, 25 April 2005.
[13] There are certainly exceptions, like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
[14] Archibald Alison, History of Europe from the commencement of the French Revolution in 1789 to the restoration of the Bourbons in 1815 (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1852), 5: 476.
[15] On the foreign policy of the George H. W. Bush Administration, which was the exception to this majority foreign policy outlook, see George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1998).
[16] The position that moderate realism actually produces better moral results and is less problematic than righteous, ideologically-inspired policy more specifically calculated toward moral ends is well supported by the historical record. Likewise the worst acts of mankind are generally justified at the time in terms of righteous ideology or moral necessity, and in hindsight, if successful, as forwarding the cause of the good. American ventures in Vietnam, Lebanon in 1983, and Iraq were all justified in ideological or moral terms. By contrast the U.S. intervention in the Second World War, the Marshall Plan, the rebuilding of Japan, and the Persian Gulf War of 1991 were first and foremost realistic policy measures.
[17] Regarding the idea of a more modest basis for U.S. foreign policy, see George F. Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill (W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1993), 183-184. On the courteous and uniform treatment of smaller nations, see page 210.
[18] As Noah Feldman notes in his recent book Cool War, containment, although intended to avert war, equally signals hostile intent.
[19] Gaddis, “After Containment.” In this article, Gaddis outlined four criteria necessary for containment to be effective: 1. The foe “must share one’s own sense of risk”; 2. It is a state-oriented strategy; 3. The containing power must have more to offer than the power being contained; and 4. The strategy must be coherent in its policy and application.
Michael F. Duggan
Conflict & Security
Crisis in Ukraine: When Proxies are Primary
Michael F. Duggan
February 22, 2015
Conflict & Security
The Persian Elephant in the Room: Revitalizing U.S.-Iran Relations After the Iran Nuclear Deal
Michael F. Duggan
April 08, 2015

Here is a link to an article from Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 

 

2) A Region of Long Memory: The (Next) “Big One”?

Michael F. Duggan
July 19, 2015

With the possibility of redeploying United States troops in Iraq — this time to fight the Islamic State — it is time for a national discussion about policy, the failure of policy, and an emerging situation — a gathering storm — that could keep the Near East in flames for generations to come.

The surest sign of a failed policy is a situation where no good options remain. Such is the situation in what once was Iraq. A sure sign that a policy is in disarray is when a nation finds itself on both sides of a conflict, and when an enemy’s enemy is equally an enemy (and when applying this standard, keep in mind that the United States sided with Josef Stalin in WWII). Such is the situation we find ourselves in, with regard to Syria and the Islamic State. The surest sign that a long-term regional policy has been catastrophic is when current military actions are attempts to remedy circumstances and combat enemies that grew Hydra-like out of previous policies. Consider that the rise of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and now ISIS are all in part the results of failed U.S. and Western policies in the Near East, as is the descent of Iraq and Libya into failed and fractured states, the radicalization of Iran more than a generation ago, and now its rise as a regional (and soon-to-be nuclear hegemon.

Sensitive observers of the international scene have noticed a drift over the past few decades toward what is increasingly beginning to look like a kind of open-ended cultural world war between the globalized West and the Islamic Crescent (in fact, the “postindustrial” West does not take kindly to any state or region that does not fall in line with the neoliberal program, as our actions against Hussein’s Iraq, Gaddafi’s Libya, Iran, and even Russia suggest).1 Some of this is the inevitable blowback to what traditional peoples of the Near East see as a quasi-imperialist policy of economic exploitation and the foisting of modernity onto them.

Conversely, much of the ongoing human migration from North Africa and the Near East to Europe is the result of the population bomb and the poverty that attends it, and in a more immediate sense, the result of wars, political instability, and brain drain, the effects of neoliberal economic and cultural imperialism under the banner of globalization. Recent estimates put the number of refugees world wide to be around 60 million — or about one fifth of the entire population of the United States.2 The current refuge crisis in the Mediterranean finds its proximate cause in the chaos that followed in the wake of the “humanitarian intervention” of the NATO air campaign championed by then Special Assistant to the President, Samantha Power. Such “humanitarianism” is reminiscent of the bumper sticker asking “Who would Jesus bomb?”

But the escalating “West versus Islam” conflict is arguably not even the most significant consequence of the general post-World War II policy failure in the region; this distinction may belong to the emerging Pan-Islamic civil war of the Sunni against the Shiite. To be fair, this divide is a long standing feature of the Near East and not the result of any Western policy, but the ill-conceived — arguably insane — whipping up of such latent passions between them in recent years largely is. Let us not forget that the much vaunted Surge of 2007 in Iraq was a policy calculated to exploit this rift by pragmatically playing off enemy against enemy (in fact it disenfranchised many former Baathists, who now comprise a significant portion of ISIS). Increasingly we are reaping the fruit of that short-sighted strategy.

The corporate media will occasionally reference the Sunni-Shiite split as a bare fact of cultural and geopolitical life in the Near East. But the focus of coverage in recent months has tended to be nervous and foreboding appraisals of whether or not ISIS is winning in Iraq, if the Islamic State poses a threat to Americans in “the homeland,” and the occasional story about how another American or European — a “lone wolf” — has attempted to join the ranks of Islamic State fighters, and was subsequently killed in combat or has attacked other Westerners. In fact the Shiite-Sunni Split is more than a religious backdrop, historical flavor, or complicating factor. It is the real story — a fault line that now threatens a multi-generational and multi-regional conflict that will continue to destabilize the Near East and beyond for the indefinite future. It will also be a continuing threat to the security of the United States and Europe, another tributary of the “new normal.”

The immediate consequences of the Sunni-Shiite conflict are ironies, confusion, and contradictions that include our siding with brutal Iraqi Shiite militias (and even Iranian forces), while opposing the pro-Shiite Assad Regime. Similarly, in September 2014, Congress took the issue of war against Syria seriously enough to put it to a vote, and President Obama has announced that 450 U.S. troops will soon be on the ground to train Iraqi forces to fight Syria’s enemy, ISIS.

Perhaps the most unsettling revelation brought about by the rise of ISIS is the continuing fickleness of American foreign policy and the people who make it. Two years ago a majority of Americans polled were against putting ground troops back into Iraq. But after the horrific images of journalists and others being beheaded by masked ISIS terrorists, a majority of American public opinion pivoted 180 degrees on this question and along with it, the regional policy of the most powerful nation on earth.

The fact that Shiites and Sunnis are willing to blow up each other’s places of worship and kill civilians indiscriminately not only underscores the depth and breadth of this division, but also gives us pause as outsiders, occupiers, and “infidels” to realistically size up the prospects of our success in the region. If the odds of converting a Sunni to a Shiite perspective or vise-versa are one-in-a-thousand, then what are the odds of converting either of them to the perspective of an outsider? Certainly they will not forget our attempts to do so; whatever we may say about the Near East, it is a region with a long cultural memory and an appreciation for history. Some who live there are still angry about the Crusades.

In a broader sense, the implications of this conflict are ominous. Even as hints emerge that the United States is willing to deal with Iran in a more mature and evenhanded way — the nuclear deal, for example — some of our Sunni allies are getting nervous (as indicated by the snubbing of President Obama by Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz during his visit to the U.S. in May). Even with the nuclear agreement in place, Iran will probably have a nuclear bomb one day, and while it makes sense to ease relations with them on one level, such newfound closeness to the world’s dominant Shiite nation, regional hegemon, and possible nuclear power would not only alienate our Sunni allies, but also possibly set off a regional nuclear arms race. Although some pundits have expressed doubt over the possibility of a Sunni atomic bomb in the near future, it would seem that wagering against nuclear proliferation among nations with disposable wealth and a religious desire to acquire such weapons is a sucker’s bet.3

What would a pan-Islamic civil war look like? Every regional and historical situation is unique of course, but the closest precedent for the situation unfolding in the Near East might be the conflicts in the Balkans from the 1870s through the 1990s: people with historical grievances and seething hatreds that were being manipulated and exacerbated by competing world powers. The results for this precedent were disastrous and fed into trends that led to the World Wars and beyond, and were some of the most vicious ethnic wars in history. As with the Balkans, a Sunni-Shiite war in the heart of the Near East could easily spread via the remote and regional meddling of the United States, Russia, Iran, and Israel.

Civil wars, by their very nature, are often the most brutal kinds of peoples’ wars. We think of them as pertaining to domestic affairs, but they can also be between diverse sets of peoples within a single border (as with the Balkans Wars). They can occur between sects or divisions within a single political institution or belief system and may sweep an entire region, as was the case with the Thirty Years War between Catholic and Protestant powers and is now the case concerning the Sunni and Shiite. However, while the seemingly dominant paradigm of inter-sect conflict may apply to the case of the Sunni-Shiite split, ethnic tension dominates the clash between the Arabs and the Kurds. Thus it is difficult to say what course a Pan-Islamic civil war would take or what its nature would be — the chief characteristic of war beyond its brutality is its unpredictability. In terms of duration and zeal, it could easily become a latter-day Thirty Years War.

Largely unspoken in the American press is the fact that “our policies in Iraq and Afghanistan have destabilized an already combustible region and have done us great harm both internationally and domestically – trillions of dollars that could have been better spent or at least saved have been wasted. The continued arrogance and self-congratulatory attitude of those responsible for such thoroughly harmful policies is and should be infuriating to more people. I cannot help but wonder if such continued misjudgment isn’t evidence underlying irrationality: ‘He whom the gods wish to destroy they first render insane.’”4

It would seem that the insanity reference in this quote is neither incidental nor a hyperbole. With the dangerous escalation of tensions between Ukraine and Russia, including the positioning of U.S. heavy weapons in Eastern Europe, the ongoing “West versus Islam” conflict, and now the inflaming of the Sunni-Shiite divide, the only question is: which of these preventable situations will blow up first? All of these circumstances would seem to mark a failure of neo-liberal policy via neoconservative means.

Informal references to history’s great conflicts are often reductions to the haunting generalities of pronouns. To a generation, the First World War was simply the “Great War.” Likewise, people who lived through the American Civil War and World War II came to refer to these conflicts as simply, “The War”. To Archie Bunker, the Second World War was “The Big One”. It is difficult to know what future generations will call the emerging Pan-Islamic conflict, but as of now, it looks like it might be the Next Big One.

Notes

1) China is an obvious partial exception to this rule, and our economic codependence with them limits how we can respond to their defiance. Consequently, President Obama’s stated foreign policy “pivot” to the Pacific and Far East has, to date, been little more than bluster.
2)See Somini Sengupta, “60 Million People Fleeing Chaotic Lands, U.N. Says,” The New York Times, June 18, 2015.
3)Fareed Zakaria, “Saudi Arabia’s Bluff” The Washington Post, June 14, 2015, A23.
4)David Isenbergh
Michael F. Duggan

Michael F. Duggan
April 08, 2015

Here is a link to an article from the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

 

3)   The Persian Elephant in the Room: Revitalizing U.S.-Iran Relations After the Iran Nuclear Deal

Michael F. Duggan
April 08, 2015

 

 

 

 

 

“I found myself wondering why we cannot regard another country, in this case Iran, as…one more country which we would regard as neither friend or foe, with whom we are prepared to deal on a day-to-day basis, neither idealizing it nor running it down, keeping to ourselves…our views about domestic political institutions and practices, and interesting ourselves only in those aspects of its official behavior which touch our interests—maintaining, in other words, a relationship with it of mutual respect and courtesy, but distant.”

— George F. Kennan, March 8, 1998, The Kennan Diaries, Frank Costligiola (ed.), New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2014, page 662

Last week’s nuclear agreement between the United States and Iran is the most transformative development in relations between the two nations in decades. But the diplomatic road ahead for the two countries remains uncertain, fraught with difficulties and potential pitfalls. Even triumphant readings of the recent nuclear agreement between the P5+1 and Iran have ignored the elephant in the room. That elephant is the fact that, with or without the talks (and short of a catastrophic regional war or a highly unlikely diplomatic coming-together), Iran will eventually become a nuclear power—and that there is little the United States, Israel, or any other country on Earth can do about it. Instead of trying in vain to prevent a nuclear Iran, the United States and its allies must recognize that, in the case of Iran, national interest increasingly fails to justify further enmity—and that the costs of potential hostilities are simply too high. Sometimes the best way to deal with an enemy is to make a friend.

Deep down every specialist of the Middle East with a grounding in history knows that in dealing with Iran there are only a handful of options, and that all but one or two of them are likely to produce constructive results. The others are likely to produce little more than continued violence and instability in an already troubled region, and will do nothing to prevent Iran from achieving its nuclear goals. It is therefore mystifying as to why the United States and Israel have used rhetoric that will be impossible to back up without catastrophic consequences, and which will inflame an already difficult situation. In terms of the United States’s general treatment of Iran, it would seem that the options are fourfold. First, the United States could keep up its economic sanctions in an attempt to generate Iranian compliance under threat of further destabilizing the nation’s economy. The problem with this sort of approach—beyond the very real violence it does to civilians—is that it will do nothing to derail Iran’s nuclear program, and in fact signals the exact sort of hostility that continues to justify the desire for and pursuit of such weapons in Iranian eyes. Some Americans think that because sanctions worked in Libya (over a period of more than two decades and before a NATO air campaign), they will also work in Iran. But Gadaffi’s Libya and present-day Iran are two fundamentally different cases. Whereas Libya is a flat analog to Afghanistan, consisting of a number of mostly disunified tribes with a territorial boundary drawn around them, Iran—historical Persia—is a proud civilization with antecedents that date back to before the time of the Ancient Greeks and Israelites. Iran is more like pre-WWII Japan in the sense that its people are unlikely to knuckle under to the pressure of external sanctions and embargoes. Rather, it is quite possible that they will unify, radicalize, and eventually fight. At the very least, continued U.S. sanctions will push Iran closer to Russia. Iran’s relative social stability, its considerable natural resources, and its potential for strengthened economic ties with Russia and China will allow it to safely endure any sanctions imposed by the West.

A second option for the United States is to attack Iran outright. Over the past half-decade, some American and Israeli leaders have talked openly about pursuing this course of action. Doing so, however, would embroil the United States in a war with a nation with more than twice the population of Iraq, almost four times its land area, a far more varied and difficult terrain, and a much more capable military. Considering how its military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone to date, U.S. leadership should probably err on the side of nonmilitary options vis-à-vis Iran first. Attacking Iran directly would only destabilize the wider region in a way that could potentially spell the eventual end of Israel—and bankrupt the United States in the process.

The third option is for the United States to contrive some way to divide and/or isolate Iran, the world’s dominant Shiite Muslim nation, from the rest of the (mostly Sunni) Islamic world. However, such a divide and conquer component to a grand strategy primarily focused on economic sanctions would be completely obvious to the great majority of the world’s Muslims. Moreover, the very real and menacing conflict between Sunni and Shia in the greater Muslim world that threatens to escalate into a regional conflagration constitutes a further elephant in the room of U.S. strategic planning. Such a strategy would also run afoul of the inconvenient truth that Iranian-backed forces are currently shouldering a large portion of the ground war against ISIS in Western Iraq, and are proving to be valuable assets there. Divide and conquer strategies—using mutual hatreds to play enemies off each other—is a dirty and tricky game that can easily blow up in the faces of those who initiate them (see the civil war in Ukraine).

This leaves only the fourth and most realistically promising approach to the situation: the United States could try to find common ground with Iran and bury the hatchet. After all, it is in the national interest of the United States to be on good terms with regional powers and soon-to-be nuclear states, and there is a slight chance that positive relations may actually preclude the latter. Without overstating things, Iran is now thedominant regional power of Southwest Asia—and it was the United States’ removal of Iraq as a secular counterbalance that elevated Iran to this status, or at least helped cement its claim. Moreover, the nuclear genie was let out of the bottle when India, Israel, and Pakistan developed bombs of their own, and there is nothing the United States can do to reverse the process. Finally, in 2001, Iran allowed the United States passage through Iranian air space in order to launch the latter’s invasion of Afghanistan, and it is time we acknowledged this good faith accommodation with renewed talks about the general security of the region.

What, then, are the reasons for not relaxing tensions with Iran? Hysterical and propagandistic rhetoric about how Iran is simply waiting for an opportunity to attack Israel abounds, yet common sense dictates that an attack with nuclear weapons would be fatal to both nations. But in order to believe that a nuclear-armed Iran would even attempt to use an atomic bomb in a first strike against Israel, one has to assume that Iranian leadership is either stupid or suicidal—that an attack would bring no consequences or that a fatal retaliation would somehow be worth the cost.

To be sure, Iran is potentially dangerous, but its leadership isn’t stupid, insane, irrational, or suicidal. Quite the contrary: they are crafty and calculating masters in the arts of negotiation and deception. They regard nuclear weapons as an insurance policy against invasion, a lesson the United States’ overly interventionist policies taught them. The calculus is simple: if you possess or are close to possessing nuclear weapons, you get negotiations; if you don’t have them, you get invaded. The fact that diplomats from the United States are even talking to their Iranian counterparts underscores how close U.S. leadership believes Iran is to having a bomb and how little there is that can be done about it. From an Iranian perspective, the decision to develop a bomb is actually quite sensible—in the short term at least. It falls to U.S. diplomats, then, to convince them otherwise.

History should tell us that Iranian leadership is a master of the long-term regional chess game that requires thinking two, three, and even four moves ahead. At the same time, U.S. (and Israeli) leadership tends to overreact like amateurs to Iran’s individual moves and outward appearances that are designed to rattle us. Every time we overreact to provocative rhetoric, the domestic popularity of Iranian politicians goes up (for a while, even a tin-eared leader like Ahmadinejad was able to play the part of Iranian boogeyman to good political effect). It seems probable that every sane Iranian knows the Holocaust happened, and even more likely that they all know what would happen if Iran ever attacked Israel. And every Iranian leader certainly knows what would happen if they ever instigated an attack against Israel (Israel probably has upwards of 200 nuclear weapons, to say nothing of the United States’ own atomic arsenal).

If anything, the history of U.S. policy in the region since World War II strongly suggests that the more it has attempted to impose its will on the region, the worse the situation gets as its opponents become more radical and determined. The Islamic Revolution that began in Iran in 1979 was in part blowback from heavy-handed, short-sighted U.S. policies, as is the rise of the Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS, and now the revival of Iranian power. As with so many problems in the region, the best solution may actually be to pull back in an effort to ease tensions. Just as domestic discontent in the Eastern Bloc preceded the fall of the Soviet Union, change in Iran will have to come from the inside. The United States must be able to recognize it when it comes, however. Iranian President Rouhani may or may not be a Gorbachev-like conciliator, but we must take the chance that he is.

If justification for an Iranian bomb grows out of fear of invasion (and the strong yet vague element of national pride), then the solution may lie in the opposite direction. If the United States, Israel, and Pakistan have stronger leadership and clearer diplomatic vision, they should normalize relations with Iran and guarantee Iranian security, thereby alleviating the need for nuclear weapons.

Normalizing relations with Iran would allow for two possibilities. First, and at the very least, it would put the United States on better terms with a newly rising power in Southwest Asia, reducing the likelihood that hostilities will emerge due to misunderstandings even if Iran acquires nuclear weapons. Second, as a friend in good faith, the United States would be in a stronger position to persuade Iran not to develop the bomb in the first place. After all, friends acting as evenhanded brokers can talk friends out of a risky course of action more easily than enemies can. And in a relationship bounded by friendship, nuclear weapons would be unnecessary.To date, President Obama’s most notable foreign policy success has been the normalization of relations with Cuba. If we can bury the hatchet with the Castro brothers, we can certainly do so with Iran.

Of course even if Iran possessing nuclear weapons poses little danger to Israel (much less the United States), and even if relations with Iran were greatly improved, there would be a far greater danger that a nuclear Iran could trigger a regional atomic arms race. Simply put, if Iran gets the bomb, it is more likely that Sunni states like Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia will want bombs of their own. Although this could conceivably produce a more stable state of affairs—one could plausibly argue that the state of Mutual Assured Destruction during the Cold War helped to prevent a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union—such stability would be predicated on the assumption of cooler heads prevailing in the region, which hardly seems like a safe bet. The more fingers on the nuclear button, the greater the chance that someone will eventually push it.

In the 1980s, George F. Kennan came to regard nuclear weapons as a far greater enemy than any temporal human regime. That said, a weapon is oftentimes the most reliable insurance policy in a dangerous neighborhood. The way countries, regimes, and statesmen perceive nuclear weapons seems to depend on where they stand. It is encouraging to see an interim nuclear deal in place, President Obama reasserting national sovereignty in U.S. foreign policy despite the desires of the current Israeli administration, and a U.S. Senate majority that has demonstrated a desire to conduct a foreign policy of its own. But the nuclear genie isout of the bottle. Although this destructive technology can be managed through vigorous international efforts and—hopefully— controlled, it will never go away. Just as the use of Persian war elephants—a superweapon of their day—by Persian emperor Darius III against the armies of Alexander the Great at Gaugamela in 331 BCE, deep in Iran’s cultural past, changed the nature of war, the building of the atomic bomb cannot be undone. The challenge now becomes one of diplomacy, the difficulty figuring out how to live with each new nation that acquires nuclear weapons. If these obstacles are successfully negotiated, the current agreement will at the very least buy time to sustain the trajectory toward improving relations in a troubled region.

We can only hope our diplomatic wisdom is up to the challenge.
Michael F. Duggan

Here is a link to an article from the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

 

4) Crisis in Ukraine: When Proxies are Primary

February 22, 2015

Michael F. Duggan

 

 

 

 

 

Sofia-Monument-to-Soviet-Army–Glory-to-Ukraine-20140224-1International crises signify a failure of policy, and each one has both proximate causes—immediate factors and triggers—as well as a more longstanding historical context of foment and escalation. It appears that the Ukrainian chickens have come home to roost and that a vicious civil war will likely result. Although this crisis is fundamentally an internal event*, it was enabled by a larger sequence of historical and geopolitical currents. Even with a fragile ceasefire in place, it is possible that events have now reached a point where there is little that the United States or Russia can do to prevent a very dangerous conflict.

Although the eastward expansion of Western economic and security interests did not cause the internal dynamics that led to the Ukraine crisis (civil wars, after all, cannot be manufactured by outsiders), it did inflame the situation. Even allowing for a broader historical context, the emerging war in Ukraine is chiefly a civil conflict based on longstanding cultural and linguistic divisions. These fault lines go back to well before the Cold War, yet continuing mistrust and suspicion between the United States and Russia has only served to exacerbate them. Ukraine, as with Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, is no longer a single nation. Rather, it is now two nations contained within a single border, in effect the social equivalent of mutually repulsive magnetic poles. This condition is inherently unstable, and yet the alternatives to forcibly attempting to hold Ukraine together or dividing it in two would not be worth the costs—both in terms of human lives and the greater geopolitical danger they would pose.

A brief history of the present crisis proceeds as follows: An east-west split in voting patterns among the already-fractured Ukrainian population resulted in the election of the weak and extremely corrupt President Viktor Yanukovych in 2010. Owing to his tremendous unpopularity in Western Ukraine, popular demonstrations against the Yanukovych administration broke out in Kiev in early 2014, but were hijacked by an extreme right-wing minority. Not fully understanding the situation, but presumably seeing an opportunity to drive a wedge between Ukraine and Russia, U.S. officials like Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian AffairsVictoria Nuland and Arizona Senator John McCain openly supported a revolution that had in fact become a coup of the extreme right, which eventually overthrew the democratically elected government.

The revolution was followed by Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, which led American politicians and reporters to compare Putin in hyperbolic and unhistorical terms to a Hitler-like aggressor. The Obama administration responded with several rounds of economic sanctions as well as escalatory language. Most recently, this rhetorical condemnation has included threats to supply Western Ukrainian forcers with “defensive” weapons. Instead of trying to contain the very dangerous situation or tamp-down the internal and geopolitical tensions which sparked the violence in the first place, our leaders have done little but contribute to the tailspin of Ukrainian security conditions. To date, the American misunderstanding and overreaction to this crisis has been little short of breathtaking.

This American overreaction, with threats of arms sales still in the air, precluded any direct U.S. (or even British) participation at last week’s ceasefire talks in Minsk. However, Secretary of State John Kerry’s meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the Munich Security Conference on February 7 suggests that the administration—or at least the more moderate elements within it—have come to their senses and are attempting to de-escalate the situation. As such, it is possible that German President Angela Merkel—by far the most knowledgeable Western leader in this crisis—was in part an emissary of the more cautious contingent in the U.S. government. Merkel herself walks a tightrope between representing German interests, fears of a regional war, and a growing refugee crisis on the one hand and the EU and NATO’s provocative expansionistic goals on the other. She also realizes that Putin—far from being the Hitler that hysterical American politicians and pundits have made him out to be—is looking for a way out of this crisis as well.

The problem, however, is this: Merkel may well be the United States’ diplomatic proxy, but the elements driving this crisis do not originate with global or even regional powers. Rather, they are the forces on the ground who appear to be proxies: a right-wing minority in West Ukraine, and the separatists in the East who enjoy genuine popularity there. Complicating this issue further is the fact that the separatists are also popular among the Russian people themselves, and large numbers of Eastern Ukrainian refugees are now pouring into Russia proper. Putin, who has so far shown great restraint (probably out of fear of a major civil or regional war on his front doorstep), may eventually be forced by the weight of Russian public opinion to take a more forceful stand. As it is, he has signed on to the Minsk agreement to include provisions calling for a withdrawal of material support of the separatists and the participation of Russian volunteer fighters.

At this point, Kiev’s strategy (i.e., that of the West Ukrainian extreme right wing minority, given that President Petro Poroshenko has been all marginalized throughout the crisis) rests on two premises that are irreconcilable under the Minsk agreement. Having taken a beating on the battlefield—and knowing that they cannot win a civil war militarily—they seek, first, the withdrawal of Russian support for the separatists (which is a provision of the Minsk agreement), and, second, increased Western involvement to perhaps include the direct participation of NATO forces (precisely what the Minsk ceasefire is intended to prevent). Thus, it is likely that loyalist Ukrainians will stake their fate on the probability that the ceasefire will not hold, and will pursue the second possibility. They will wager that a shooting war will bring in the active support of the West, which, they hope, will counteract Russian aid to the separatists.

The actual combatants on both sides of this fight—the zealous and well-organized extreme right in Western Ukraine and the equally zealous separatists in the East—do not want peace short of achieving their respective goals. In other words, what so many experts see as mere geopolitical proxies are actually driving events on the ground. That alone should scare the hell out of Western leaders. Elements of Western Ukraine have stated their intention to disregard the ceasefire, and in some places the fighting has already resumed.

If the ceasefire collapses, a civil war will likely ensue that combines the worst elements of a people’s war (think of the last Balkan War on a three- or fourfold scale) with the intensity and arms capabilities of modern conventional warfare. It will be a war with no good guys and which will in no way serve the interests of the United States, NATO, the European Union, or Russia. Along with the tens or even of hundreds of thousands of casualties (current estimates put the number at well over 5,000 already), the currently underreported refugee crisis will become cataclysmic. Moreover, unlike the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, this conflict would be bipolar but with nuclear-powered backers. Most disturbingly, it could easily become the war that the United States and Russia’s previous incarnation, the Soviet Union, successfully avoided fighting between 1945 and 1991.

The immediate goal of the United States and the Minsk signatories should therefore be to make sure that any conflict that does come to Ukraine is contained within its borders and does not spill over into a broader regional conflict. Although it seems unlikely with Republican control of both houses of the American Congress and a lame duck Democratic president who has demonstrated little acumen for foreign affairs, the United States must also reduce its anti-Russian rhetoric. Time and time again, history has shown that bellicose discourse that is easily ratcheted-up may not be so easy to bring down again. At the very least, a regional war in Europe will likely divide the major powers and distract them from problems that threaten all of us, like the ongoing global environmental crisis. For all its horror, war is sometimes necessary. But should a broader conflict break out in Ukraine, it would be just the opposite.

If things do somehow simmer down in Ukraine, the United States, along with the delegates of Minsk, should also act as brokers toward the eventual goal of partitioning the nation. If the intensity of both sides in this conflict demonstrates anything, it is that Ukraine is in fact two distinct nations living within a border as a fictional whole. We have seen what happens when mutually hostile populations historically divided by culture and language are artificially held together. The historical example set not only by the Balkans and Rwanda but now by Iraq and Syria as well should give us pause. Although the non-acrimonious divorces of the Czech Republic and Slovakia as well as that between Norway and Sweden may seem too amicable to serve as models, the goal of separation should be pursued with focus and vigor. This is in no way an endorsement of ethnic nationalism, but rather a realistic concession that partition is preferable to the most dangerous sort of war. Partition would also allow Russia to maintain a buffer to the West, while allowing Western Ukraine to align itself with the EU if it so desires.

If war is somehow averted, the United States will need to understand the cold reality that so long as large nations exist they will have spheres of influence, and that even competitor nations have legitimate interests which, by geographical necessity, may trump our own. The United States must also understand—as it once did—that there is no shame in negotiating with those whose interests run counter to its own and that, in fact, such discourse is necessary if it is to prevent limited regional conflicts from becoming great power wars. Perhaps most importantly, the United States and other parties who wish to avert a broader Ukrainian conflict must not let geopolitical perceptions and generalities or the lingering distrust of a bygone era blind them to the complex and nuanced realities of actual crises—and, in doing so, make them even worse.

* The idea that the Ukrainian crisis is first and foremost an internal situation was suggested to me by my friend, David Isenbergh

Here is a link to an article from the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

 

5) Ending the Korean War

 

 

Dr. Michael F. Duggan has a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University. He has taught both at Georgetown University and at New York University’s DC program. In 2011-2012, he was the Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States.

With rhetoric ratcheting events toward a crisis between the United States and North Korea, it is instructive to take account of how the situation has evolved since the beginning of the Korean War in order to devise a workable solution.

History: Miscalculations

The Korea War began with a chain reaction of miscalculations and overreach by all sides.[1] The outbreak of any war denotes the failure of policy, and the best thing one can say about a war is that fighting it was necessary. The Korean War was an unnecessary conflict that ended indecisively after three years of misery and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.[2] To be accurate, it has never officially ended: the Korean Armistice Agreement that was signed at Panmunjom on July 27, 1953, only secured a ceasefire. Because it is not a peace treaty, the conflict remains a suppressed war where potential enemies watch each other warily across the last frontier of the Cold War.

Despite the tensions of the early Cold War, then-U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson felt comfortable announcing that South Korea lay outside of the U.S. defensive perimeter during a speech at the National Press Club on January 12, 1950. In fact, the speech was a public expression of the NSC48/2 document[3]. NSC 48-2 was a National Security Council policy report that spelled out US support (both military and economic) to nations resisting communist movements and what was perceived as world communism. South Korea was not mentioned in this document, so Acheson’s speech recognized that it lay outside of our defense perimeter.Thus, this announcement was misconstrued by the North Korean government as a green light to violently reunite the two Koreas—a plan Mao and Stalin approved without enthusiasm.

The ensuing invasion took the United States by surprise, knocking the American and South Korean forces on their heels and pushing them back to a perimeter around the port city of Pusan on the southeastern coast.

According to historian John Lewis Gaddis, if South Korea had been regarded as strategically marginal before the invasion, it quickly became an item of great psychological importance within the bipolar logic of the Cold War that to lose anywhere is to lose everywhere.[4] The United Nations regarded the invasion as a violation of territorial sovereignty and intervened under American leadership after a seven-to-one vote in the Security Council on June 27 (with the Soviet Union abstaining). Thus began the “Police Action”[5].

In one of the most brilliant and daring large-scale military operations in history, General Douglas MacArthur landed 70,000 U.S. soldiers and marines at Inchon—a port city on the West Coast of the Korean Peninsula a mere 20 miles from Seoul, the capital of South Korea. What makes the assault at Inchon more remarkable is that the thirty-two-foot tidal differential is among the most extreme in the world. A tidal differential is the difference (usually measured in vertical feet) between low tide and high tide. Each foot of vertical differential affects the horizontal differential to a far greater extent (i.e. on a flat beach, a sing vertical foot differential could result in a horizontal change of 50 feet). An area with a 31 or 32-foot tidal differential would be extremely difficult for beach landing: at high tide, the landing would occur far up on the beach or even a sea wall (as was the case which was the case at the Red Beach landing at Inchon); at low tide, heavily weighed-down troops would have to cross hundreds of yards of mudflats. If this is done under fire, the situation could result in the bogging-down and massacre of the invading troops. In spite of such hazards, American forces experienced very few casualties, effectively cutting off and destroying the North Korean invasion force in the South with a hammer-and-anvil strategy. Soon though, it would be the Americans’ turn to miscalculate.

With a pre-Cold War military mentality of total war and the view that “there is no substitute for victory”, MacArthur aggressively drove his forces north and continued their push beyond the thirty-eighth parallel. By this point, MacArthur was virtually a rogue sovereign entity pursing his own foreign policy. In a rare lapse of judgment that reflected the position of the Truman Administration, Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall informed MacArthur “to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the thirty-eighth parallel.”[6] After crossing the line, resistance dropped off and it appeared as if the war would be soon be over and that a single, pro-West Korea would be restored before Christmas.

However, at least one U.S. advisor, George F. Kennan, was nervous. As Kennan observed on August 8, 1950, “[w]hen we begin to have military successes, that will be the time to watch out. Anything may then happen—entry of Soviet forces, entry of Chinese Communist forces…” As was so often the case over the course of his long public career, his words would soon read like a prophecy.[7] To him the U.N. (read: the U.S.) mandate was the “restoration of the status quo ante”, and not to reunite the two Koreas[8]As with other subtle observers in Washington, Kennan feared that a wider war could touch off a third World War.

Not long after Kennan penned these words, approximately 300,000 Chinese troops poured across the Yalu River and pushed the American forces back on November 26, 1950. Although the Americans were ultimately successful in evading destruction at the hands of the Chinese, the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir was a significant reverse and remains one of the most haunting chapters in recent American military history.[9]

After the retreat, Truman and Marshall came to their senses; MacArthur was relieved of command for insubordination and was replaced by a superb combat commander, a paratrooper with a better understanding for the subtleties of limited war within the context of the Cold War, Matthew B. Ridgway. It was Ridgway whose inspired,yet sensible, leadership stabilized the front that would remain fairly stable for the next two-and-a-half years.

Korea’s mountains precluded a war of maneuver (tanks were sometimes relegated to the role of fixed-position artillery) and the realities of limited war ground the conflict down to a war of position. As Dean Acheson observed, “If the best minds in the world had set out to find the worst possible location to fight this damnable war politically and militarily, the unanimous choice would have been Korea[10].” After all, Korea is a land fluctuating between extremes of heat and cold.

In the decades that followed the war, little in the North has changed, as witnessed by the abrupt cutoff of South Korean light pollution as seen from space at the sharp edge of the DMZ.

By contrast, to say that South Korea has moved on since 1953 would be a gross understatement. An economic miracle, it has grown from a poor Far East backwater (and frequent victim of more powerful neighbors analogous to Germany in the seventeenth-century or Poland in the twentieth) to a regional economic powerhouse. Now South Korea is one of the “Asian Tigers” whose 1.5-trillion-dollar per year economy is the fourth largest in Asia and eleventh largest in the world. Seoul is now a world-class metropolis of nearly ten million people and the greater Seoul Metropolitan Area, with a population of about 25.5 million people, is considerably larger than Greater New York City. Seoul is not only home of Hyundai, Kia, and Samsung, but is also home to about half of all South Koreans and its distance from the DMZ is about the same as that of Washington, D.C. from Baltimore.

Analysis

Given this historical context and the subsequent 64 years, what are the likely sources of North Korea’s behavior? It seems that beyond its rigid and extreme ideology, there are three other potentially important influences.

The first is that the United States dropped an enormous amount of ordnance on North Korea during the war and that being on the receiving end of strategic bombing campaigns changes people. Even comparatively small attacks can change a nation’s outlook. For instance, the attack on Pearl Harbor pivoted the United States 180 degrees from a mostly isolationist nation into the “Arsenal of Democracy” bent on unconditional surrender in a matter of hours, and the attacks of September 11th, 2001 led directly to two wars that fester to this day after spending trillions of dollars and many thousands of lives lost. Between 1950 and 1953 the U.S. largely destroyed North Korea via airpower and turned an already dysfunctional totalitarian state into something truly monstrous.

A second possibility is that because the U.S. continued to treat North Korea as an enemy even after the cessation of hostilities, it has instilled in Pyongyang a combination of self-confirming delusions and cynicism. Indeed, every year or two, North Korea does something provocative, and the United States acquiesces. Both sides frequently stage large-scale military exercises, the US spies on North Korea–in 1968, the USS Pueblo, a spy ship, was captured and its crew was detained for 335 days. The North Koreans have on a number of occasions detained US citizens. The desire for North Korea to acquire nuclear weapons is sometimes seen as another provocation and the US has tried with both the carrot and the stick to dissuade them from pursuing the program. The problem is that the two sides that still regard each other as enemies and eventually, North Korea will do something that the U.S. cannot shrug off or accommodate.

A third factor, and the most likely the reason why North Korea is actively seeking nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, is rational deterrence. An overly interventionist American foreign policy in recent decades has proffered a clear lesson: if an inconvenient nation does not have nuclear weapons, it may be attacked, perhaps invaded, and perhaps occupied. If a nation has nuclear weapons, it gets negotiations. North Korea has learned this lesson well and desires a nuclear insurance policy in order to preclude the same fate as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. Nuclear weapons are also a quantum leap in technological achievement, and would be a boost to the pride of a nation who, outside of military power, is little more than pathetic.

Therefore, for nations like North Korea, the bomb is not only a status symbol but a Promethean goal that drives obsession. If a good man like Robert Oppenheimer could not turn away from the Manhattan Project as the goal came into sight, one can imagine the practical difficulties of trying to talk a dictatorship like North Korea out of such ambitions.

Of course in a more general sense, there was a solution to this crisis, but its time has long since passed. When the community of nuclear-armed states was a club of five, there was a potential for an active and mutually-enforceable League of Nuclear States. No new states would be allowed in, and any nation trying to develop weapons would be dealt with forthrightly. With the nuclear club now including India, Israel, and Pakistan, the nuclear genie is long out of the bottle.

It is difficult to find a historical analog of the current situation to serve as a template to help the parties work their way through it. There is the Cuban Missile Crisis, but beyond the obvious superficial trappings there is very little similarity (in that crisis, both parties wanted the problem to go away, and the U.S. had a moderate and cautious president who was steeped in historical understanding). The attack on Pearl Harbor is even farther afield from events in Korea in that it was the active initiation of hostilities by one side. Although very different in many respects, the present situation may generally resemble the Fort Sumter Crisis of 1861 in which neither side diverged from a course that was unacceptable to the other—the resupplying of U.S. forts in the South was done in defiance of Confederate demands that they be abandoned, and the subsequent firing on those forts by Southern forces.[11] What followed should serve as a cautionary example and give us pause.

Where Things Stand

At this point, the situation is as follows. There are two rivals with ICBMs ratcheting up tensions with increasingly threatening language, as the United States matches North Korean bellicosity with invective rhetoric of its own. This does not seem to be the way a great nation should respond to an emerging threat, and does not keep with the best traditions of American diplomacy. The logic of the American escalation of the war of words growing out of the question of whether the mere fact of a nuclear-armed North Korea is tolerable. If it is not, then it must something must be done before they have an operational weapon that could hit the U.S. (as opposed to not being able to respond at a time in the near future when they might have dozens of such weapons). It appears we are not yet at this point, and the crisis does not justify the level of rhetoric of both sides.

What must be factored into the calculation is the fact that even a conventional war on the Korean Peninsula—although possibly limited in terms of geographical scope—would likely be a conflict of an intensity that the world has not seen for decades. Even without the use of nuclear weapons, it is likely that hundreds of thousands of civilians—perhaps millions—would be killed. Seoul is within range of North Korean artillery and the coordinates of important targets in South Korea are well-known by the North Korean military. In addition to the human cost, a war would likely destroy the South Korean economy and this would likely set off a regional economic depression and even world depression

Solutions

So what is the answer? Given that a preemptive attack and subsequent war is too risky and premature at this point, and, like all wars, is likely to lead to unforeseen consequences, the best option would probably be to sequester North Korea with a goal of normalizing relations. As many people have noted, North Korea has the qualities of a person who believes that others are out to harm him while exhibiting no concern over the possibility harming other people. Confronting such a person merely confirms his delusions and locks in place an irrational determination that cannot easily be undone. The way you deal with this kind of dangerous person is to lock him up. Please do not confuse the idea of sequestering (economic and otherwise isolating) North Korea with appeasement; any policy that can be backed up with overwhelming force at a moment’s notice is not appeasement, but rather mature and rational self-restraint.

Second, the U.S. has a fair measure of good will on its side—since China, Japan, South Korea, and a host of other nations have agreed to place sanctions on North Korea—and it must not squander that advantage with overreaction. North Korea cannot yet hit the United States with nuclear weapons, and if that day does come, the United States could eliminate the problem in short notice with a combination of precision airstrikes and cyberattacks in a similar way as Israeli Operation Orchard against the Syrian reactor site on September 6, 2007, and against the Iraqi reactor in 1981 In fact, some of the mishaps that have occurred in the North Korean program may have been the result of US cyber interference[12].

In the meantime, we should let China help us. They are the closest thing to a North Korean ally, and as the local hegemon, they have a vested regional interest in not letting a nuclear North Korea be a distraction from projects like the New Silk Road and a greater Eurasian economic zone11. The last thing they want is for the United States to be involved in the most disruptive kind of conventional conflict on their front doorstep followed by a massive refugee crisis.

For the time being, the United States must tone-down its inflammatory and escalatory rhetoric—it must not engage the North aggressively. It must not exaggerate and inflame the situation and transform a dangerous state of affairs into a bona fide crisis. It should isolate them and then wait and watch. If the U.S. did this, and allowed China to exert its influence, perhaps it might be possible to use them as an intermediary in the not-too-distant future. This would not only open negotiations to deescalate tensions, but could possibly restore American diplomatic and trade relations with North Korea[13]. Given that the United States has normalized relations with China and Vietnam, and has begun the process with Cuba and possibly Iran, there is no reason why it cannot do the same with North Korea.

Finally it is important to have some “big picture” perspective. As of this writing, the Indian/Pakistani, and Israeli/Pakistani nuclear rivalries are a greater, but far less reported set of potential global crises than the situation with North Korea need be. Additionally, China’s rise as a regional hegemon and world power is a greater threat to the United States, as are the new and perplexing tensions with Russia. Yet another profound threat to the United States is the unfolding global environmental crisis. Perhaps most disconcerting has been the shift from the unsustainable neoliberal foreign policy of recent decades to one with with little coherence at all.

If the United States wants to roll back this crisis, it could begin by presenting Kim Jong-Un a no-strings-attached, good-faith, magnanimous proposal, such as an offer to officially end the Korean War once and for all.[14] That long-ago war was the result of missteps and error, let us hope that history does not repeat itself as an amalgam of farce and darkest sort of human tragedy. The United States should end its old war with North Korea and in so doing, prevent a new one from beginning.

Notes

[1] Regarding the mistakes of this period, see Robert Dalleck, The Lost Peace (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 302-332.

[2] Although casualty figures for the war vary, see Clay Blair, The Forgotten War, (New York: Random House, 1987), 975-976. He reports that the South Korean military suffered 103,284 total casualties with 54, 246 and the U.S. suffered 63,200 total casualties with a total for both sides of about 2.4 million military casualties and about 2 million civilian casualties.Robert Dalleck observes that the war killed an entire generation of Koreans, North and South, giving the figures of 3 million killed—or about 10% of the entire population—and another 5 million displaced. He places American casualties at 36,000 killed plus more than 90,000 wounded. He reports the number of Chinese killed at about 900,000. See Dalleck, The Lost Peace, 327.

[3] John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life, (New York: Penguin, 2011), 396. To be fair, in a letter to President Truman dated January 20, 1950, Acheson expresses “concern and dismay” at the rejection of the Korean Aid Bill of 1949 by the House of Representatives. See Dean Acheson, Strengthening the Forces of Freedom, Selected Speeches and Statements of Secretary of State Dean Acheson, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1950), 174-175.

[4] Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life, 397. The almost paranoid idea during the Cold War that to lose anywhere was to lose everywhere was fairly common and reflective of a bipolar world view. More recently this view has been challenged by a more nuanced World Systems Theory point of view stating that even at the height of the Cold War, there were numerous regions that did not fall clearly into one camp or another. See Tony Judt, “Still a Story to be Told,” The New York Review of Books, May 23, 2006, a review of Gaddis’s The Cold War: A New History.

[5] Dalleck, The Lost Peace, 314.

[6] Dalleck, The Lost Peace, 320.

[7] George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1950-1963, (New York: Random House, 1972), 24.

[8] Kennan, Memoirs 1950-1963, 23.

[9] See generally David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter, (New York: Hyperion, 2007).

[10] David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter (New York, Hyperon, 2007) 1A

[11] See David Herbert Donald, Lincoln, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 267-268, 285-292, 301-302.

[12] Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadow of the American Century, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017, p. 57. McCoy in turn references David E. Sanger an,d William A Broad, “Trump Inherits Secret Cyber War on North Korea,” New York Times, March 5, 2017. (From Chapter 1, footnote 108, of In the Shadow of the American Century).

[13] Pepe Escobar, “The New Silt Road will go Through Syria”, Asia Times July 13, 2017 http://www.atimes.com/article/new-silk-road-will-go-syria/

[14] This idea was suggested to me by my friend David Isenbergh.

 

Here is a link to the article from The SAIS Review of International Affairs

 

6)  Realism, Grand Strategy, and Landpower in the Near East: An Alternative Outline

Michael F. Duggan, Ph.D.

 

These enemies appeared to us in the aspect of monsters that had arisen from

nowhere, as if by some black magic. We deluded ourselves with the belief that if

they could be in some way exorcised, like evil spirits, through the process of

military defeat, then nothing would remain of them and our world would be

restored to us as though they had never existed. It was hard for us to see that

these enemies were the reflection of deeper causes which could be only partially

alleviated, and might in some cases be actually aggravated, by the miseries of

war…

-George F. Kennan¹

 

Assuming the undue dependence on the Arab and Iranian oil to have been                           removed, would the United States have any vital interest in the Near East?                                 (Please bear in mind that this question contains the word “vital,” which ought       not be used lightly).

-George F. Kennan²

 

1. Introduction: The Relationship of Landpower to Grand Strategy

 

Considerations of regional landpower strategy are necessarily ancillary to those of geopolitical grand strategy.³ In order to be effective, the former must be tailored not only to the character of one’s enemy and the demands and conditions of the combat region, but also to the specifics of geopolitical goals; a nation must know where it is going before considering the soundest means of getting there. If American policy in the Near East is to be effective, it must be matched to clear and definable goals of vital national interest and based on a deep and intimate historical understanding of the region and its peoples, rather than on ideology, moral perceptions, formal academic knowledge, and the situational dictates of the moment; in policy matters, insights count for more than theories. Once this is accomplished, we can define the role and the nature of landpower as a dynamic component of grand strategy. Questions on landpower and its application in the Near East prior to a specific, well-defined grand strategy are as such misconceived, or at least premature.

What the United States is fighting in the Near East and around the world is not terrorism—a kind of asymmetrical warfare—but rather a program, an ideology, a worldview that utilizes terrorist methods: Radical Islamism.⁴ Short of laying waste to an entire region—an unavailable option, given the oft-stated role of American forces as liberators—it is impossible to defeat an idea with conventional and even unconventional combat forces.⁵ Islamism is like Hydra of Greek mythology: every severed head of the enemy—every high-level leader killed in a drone strike or by special operations forces—will be replaced by any number of others, equally pernicious to U.S. interests. Such engagement as a part of a conspicuous operational footprint actually fuels the Islamic Revolution and related phenomena and increases the regional popularity of violent radicalism. Therefore we must reformulate the question as: what is a realistic grand strategy for the Near East, and in light of such an outline, what is the appropriate role of landpower?

Rather than review and analyze the flaws in American strategy over more-than a decade of intervention in the Near East—certainly others in this call for papers will focus on these—I will propose an alternative outline for grand strategy in the region, and then explain the role of landpower in supporting such a scheme. I will also address the very premise of whether attempts to control this fundamentally unstable region further American vital interests at all. The overarching idea here is that policy should pursue the optimal as an ideal rather than the maximal, and that historical understanding is a better basis for policy than ideology or theory.

When designing a strategy to deal with a foe or potential foe, there are three genera of policy to consider: there is engagement; there is appeasement; and there is containment. The prehistory and early stages of World War II stand as stark illustration that appeasement does not work against a zealous enemy. Likewise the policy of the United States in the Near East over the past three decades has favored active engagement—the aggressive inverse of the timidity of appeasement—and has been little short of catastrophic in terms of blood and treasure and has further destabilized a combustible region for the indefinite future.

If anything the history of United States policy in the Near East since the end of World War II strongly suggests that the more it has attempted to impose its will on the region, the worse the situation has become as its opponents become more radical and determined. Yet unlike appeasement, the failed policies of engagement still enjoy widespread popularity. The Islamic Revolution that began in Iran in the 1970s was in part blowback from heavy-handed, short-sighted U.S. policies, as was the rise of the Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIL, the collapse of Iraq, Libya, and Syria into failed and fractured states, and the reemergence of Iran as the dominant regional (and soon to be nuclear) power, and the best solution may actually be to pull back in an effort to ease tensions. This would appear to leave the singular intermediate option of containment a basis for grand strategy.

1. Grand Strategy: On Containment and Islamism

After more than a decade of costly wars, occupations, and humanitarian interventions in distant lands, the United States should critically reassess the basic premises of its foreign policy, especially as regards its ongoing conflict with radical Islamist movements, their origins, and the potential for a satisfactory resolution. The United States needs a more practical and integrated approach to policy, a basis for grand strategy I call “Neo-Hadrianism” after the consolidation practices of the second-century Roman emperor who pulled back from certain far-flung reaches of the Empire for the sake of preserving Roman strength and stability.⁶ This model of moderate realism could strike an optimal balance between serving practical American interests as a global maritime superpower and recognizing the limits imposed on U.S. goals as it encounters other nations and cultures with their own regional claims, security concerns, and fundamental interests. It would serve as a middle way that averts both hegemonic overreach on the one hand and a return to isolationism and “Fortress America” autarchy on the other.

Islamic extremism, with its terrorist networks and regional appeal, presents a formidable threat to U.S. influence and values, especially in the Near East. U.S. engagement with this dangerous enemy has been excessively confrontational and destabilizing to the already-troubled region and beyond. A deliberate but watchful disengagement by the United States from much of this part of the world would serve the country better than its recent policies of counterinsurgency, nation building, and humanitarian intervention, as well as its shadowy, open-ended quasi-war of drone strikes—policy choices which themselves chip away at the first principles of a great liberal republic; A nation that cannot lead by moral example has no business telling others how to manage their internal affairs.⁷

The U.S. Cold War strategy of containment hastened the collapse of Marxist­ Leninism under the weight of its own inefficiencies, contradictions, and unsustainable historicist ideology. Similarly, a policy of gradual disengagement from the Near East would lead to the eventual self-destruction and implosion of jihadi Islamism. A program of vigilant non-interference in this region would furthermore reduce considerable unnecessary public waste and sacrifice in ventures that have done little more than exacerbate conflict with rival regional powers, especially China and Russia.⁸

History and Historicism: Cold War Parallels to Today

A sensible reading of history, long-term national interests, and sustainability should form the basis for foreign policy, as was the case in U.S. Cold War strategy. The collapse of the Soviet Union was in large measure the result of George F. Kennan’s idea of grand strategy of containment, a deep and intimate—as opposed to a formal and remote—understanding of Russian history and cultural psychology and its ideological overlay of Marxist-Leninism. The victory was in part due to the avoidance of rigid historical narratives or ideology such as those embraced by the Soviet Union, and to think otherwise is to dangerously misread the lessons of 1946-1991 and those of our own time.⁹ Kennan’s general outline of containment accurately diagnosed the situation, provided a model that was durable and flexible enough to absorb significant modification, formulization, misconstruction, tampering, and outright vandalism, and bought the necessary time that allowed for the internal collapse of the Soviet system, a collapse which seems inevitable in hindsight.¹⁰

Far from discrediting deterministic historical narratives such as Soviet Marxism, the end of the Cold War actually inspired and instilled the West with heady, self-destructive myths of its own. If Soviet Marxism was not the correct historical model, it was reasoned, then the true model must be one embracing the opposite: the active spreading of democracy, rights-based liberalism, rule of law initiatives, free markets, and deregulation. Consequently, from the 1980s until the present, the U.S. policy outlook has been captivated by such ideologies as neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, notions of American exceptionalism, and the free market and deregulatory ideas subsumed under the catchall term of “globalization.”¹¹ These ideas and programs, if held in earnest, are every bit as much of a historical narrative as others such as Marxism, Puritanism, or Islamism.¹²

When a nation adheres to ideological or moral imperatives at the expense of national interests, it puts its long-term prospects in serious jeopardy. There are no silver bullets in the course of human events and, as with the narratives of the past and current U.S. foes, the American foreign policy outlook of recent decades “bears within it the seeds of its own decay.” While “the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced,”¹³ the United States should alter its course in realization that any program or set of policies put in motion by human hands can be undone by human agency.¹⁴

The success of containment strongly suggests that a pragmatic reading of history is a more effective basis for policy than ideology or morality. History never repeats itself exactly, and the transferability of strategic concepts is a tricky business. But upon close examination, one can see that, in spite of their differences, Cold War Marxism and today’s Islamism share important macro-historical conceptual commonalities and grounding in historicist ideology, or a fatalist view of the end of history.

Eschatology: Mather, Marx, and Mohammad

The British philosopher and historian John Gray sees Islamism, like the Marxist ideology of the Soviet Union, as a revolutionary and utopian eschatology. It is utopian in its belief that human beings are perfectible under its prescriptive model, eschatological in its belief that world history is unfolding via a preordained narrative toward a post­ historical endgame, and revolutionary in its willingness to advance its program dynamically and even violently.¹⁵ Gray’s work highlights the fact that all eschatological programs to date—including millennialism, Puritanism, and Marxism—have had two things in common: a historicist point of view and the repeated failure of all their predictions to materialize. Given the impossibility of sustaining revolutionary fervor over an extended period, eschatological movements tend to burn themselves out within a few generations unless given fuel from external sources. In the case of lslamism, that fuel has been supplied in large measure in the form of external pressure and foreign interventions in Muslim parts of the world.

The Islamist movement itself was, at least to some extent, influenced by the West. Interestingly, Gray notes that, though Islam has long had violent aspects, the idea of perfecting human nature and bringing about the post-historical Islamic world through the use of terrorism is not a tenet of Islam but of modem secular ideology. In this sense, he argues, the violent eschatological element of modem jihadi owes as much to Western millennialism and even Bolshevism than it does to traditional Muslim thought.¹⁶

With freedom of action, the aggressiveness of radical Islamists may be more like that of non-eschatological extremists who give themselves short-term deadlines to meet their immediate objectives based on their own mortality rather than open-ended inevitability.¹⁷ As with the USSR and all historicist models, however, Islamism could plausibly be taking its time to implement its larger historical vision; if something is inevitable, then why rush? Though the Islamist and Soviet Marxist-Leninism narratives share the view of historical inevitability of their programs, the realism of the Soviet leaders restrained them from risking violent extinction, while followers of radical Islam are more aggressive in their actions with less fear of mutual or one-sided annihilation. The eschatology of Islamism, being theistic in nature, may lead to a welcoming of an apocalypse from whose ashes a new world may rise. However, while the long-term vision of Islamism is utopian, the short-term goal of Islamist organizations like al-Qaeda is geopolitical rather than eschatological. Unlike the Soviet Union, the immediate goal of the Islamist violence of recent years likely has less to do with the end of history than it does with the far more limited geopolitical and immediate “tactical” objective of driving outsiders from Muslim regions of the world.

A Way Forward

How is the United States to deal with Islamism—an opponent who believes that God is on its side, who is willing to die for its cause, with whom it is difficult or impossible to negotiate, whose outlook is irreconcilable with those of the modern West, and whose reach extends beyond national borders? The way to deal with such an adversary is to vigilantly ignore it from a position of strength. I do not propose full-scale containment, as the United States employed in the Cold War. Rather, I propose that the United States and its allies seek merely to isolate radical Islamist actors through non-interference and a gradual Hadrian-like disengagement from parts of the world where they flourish.

Islamist jihadi fighters use violence, but they are straightforward regarding their intents; they are righteous killers, true believers, and not psychopaths for the most part.¹⁸ They oppose Western liberal values, but their stated purpose is to drive Western influences from Muslim lands. They attack the West more for what the West does and what it has done rather than for what the West is, and they will likely discontinue attacks on U.S. interests if the United States leaves the region. Islamist groups have not waged attacks, for the most part, on countries with no significant presence in the Near East and Muslim regions.

Complying with enemy desires, in this case the ridding of Islamic regions of “infidels” is the exception to conventional strategy, not the rule, yet it serves U.S. interests to do so when such action would lead to the enemy’s self-destruction. As Napoleon put it, “When the enemy is making a false movement we must take care not to interrupt him.”¹⁹ If the United States accommodates the radicals’ immediate goal of disengaging from the region, it will hasten the failure of their ultimate objective and bring the downfall of their more radical elements. One case in which this phenomenon is already at work is that of the growing dissatisfaction of Iran’s youth toward their militant theocratic rulers. In general, the United States should consider if its interests in the Near East are so important that it would not be better served filling them elsewhere, if possible.

Practical Implications on U S. Policy

The United States should adopt a foreign policy based on a more limited, regionally-based balance of power-oriented, internationalist outlook, with parallel domestic and economic policies such as sensible re-regulation and trade bilateralism. Thus, the U.S. would be able to sustain much of the economic success and an even greater degree of security than it knew after World War II. Such a cohesive particularist position would do away with the ever-increasing disparities and quasi-imperialist power relationships created by the foreign policy outlook dominant over the past three decades.²⁰ The historical record also shows that this sort of realism would likely produce better “moral” results than policy specifically crafted toward moral or ideological ends.²¹

The downside of a Neo-Hadrian approach to foreign policy would involve the disposition of long-term friends and alliances—for example, Israel, Ethiopia, the Kurds, and allied Sunni nations—as well as maintaining access to crucial material resources in the regions affected. Needless to say these things would have to be watched very carefully and managed with great sensitivity. The guiding principle of this outlook would be to identify nations and regions of fundamental interest to the United States and to fashion its international role accordingly. The United States is a large and powerful nation, and even within such parameters would still require a fairly robust presence and involvement in the world. U.S. national interests would include an immediate sphere of influence encompassing North and Central America and the Caribbean Basin.

With increases in domestic energy production over the past decade, U.S. geopolitical interests in the Near East are now fairly limited. These would include Israel and other parts of the region due to the stark reality of nuclear proliferation and the emerging potential for actual nuclear conflict (India and Pakistan would remain U.S. interests for the same reason). Its immediate priorities here would be to keep the Suez Canal and Mediterranean sea lanes open and functioning and to insure that allies and stable nations of the region like Israel and Turkey are not threatened by Islamist forces. Both of these nations are largely capable of taking care of themselves and meeting their own security needs (one being a member of NATO, the other a nuclear power with one of the most capable militaries in the world).

Areas of important economic interest elsewhere would include the Atlantic and Pacific sea lanes as links to the Near East, the Pacific Rim, and East Asia. But except for those areas immediately adjacent to its borders, the United States should walk very softly in terms of engagement—keeping an eye on potential dangers while toning-down its righteousness, rhetoric, and sense of entitlement in terms of intervention. The United States should ignore as much as possible those countries that are affirmatively hostile to us and should avoid direct or covert military action to destabilize them. The goal should be to remain economically and technologically strong—vigilant but not threatening or aggressive. A disengagement from the Near East would also allow the United States to deploy assets withdrawn from the region to areas where they are needed.

The idea would be to be involved in the world only insofar as necessary. The United States would reserve the right to act (and even be a leader) in a multilateral military capacity in the event of threats to international stability such as the violation of territorial sovereignty, as in Korea in 1950 and Kuwait in 1990-1991. The United States would also be involved with international law enforcement and environmental initiatives. American policy makers should adhere to Ambassador Kennan’s admonishment to treat foreign nations on a basis of equal respect regardless of their relative importance to us.²²

This comprehensive basis for policy would embody both moderation and flexibility toward a long-term national vision geared toward goals of fundamental interests, regional spheres of influence, a sustainable combination of free trade and protection, and a non-ideological approach to problem-solving. Specifically, the United States would gradually disengage from areas of the world where its vital interests are not demonstrably at stake, where it is not needed or wanted by the local people, and where its mere presence has actually increased the threats to its own national security. As long as the United States remains in Muslim regions of the world, Americans will be regarded as infidels, occupiers, and meddlesome outsiders, and there is no way to change these perceptions—insofar as it is possible, it is important to see oneself the way others do. The United States must begin to take a more conciliatory attitude toward the indigenous peoples of the Near East by stepping back.

Reservations on Containment of Islamism

In divining a strategy from history, the greatest challenge is determining when to apply which lessons of the past and knowing when those lessons no longer apply to the current or developing situation. The historical record on containment is mixed, as is the opinion on whether it applies to current U.S. confrontation with radical Islam. While the containment of the postwar Soviet Union was a success, other historical attempts to contain emerging powers such as Germany during 1894-1914 and the infant USSR during 1918-1921 and the leveling of economic sanctions against Japan in 1940-1941 were notable failures.²³ What this suggests is that although the containment of rising powers may force their radicalization and eventually a violent response, it may be productively used to allow historicist ideologies to burn themselves out.

In his 2005 article “After Containment,” Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis argues that Kennan’s strategy of containment would probably not be effective in addressing the threat of non-state entities of the Islamist cause.²⁴ Gaddis argues that, in order for containment to be effective, it must be oriented towards a state. Such a focus on the formalities and trappings of containment as a policy against a rival state limits Kennan’s vision to a single structural doctrine—“principle” in Kennan’s words—rather than a broad and flexible general policy of history and interest-based realism with potential regional applications against even Islamism. Most significantly, by focusing on structures over ideological psychology as a basis for strategy, Gaddis misses the bigger point that, in spite of their differences, theoretical commonalities and historicist foundations shared between Marxism and Islamism provide key insights and opportunities for U.S. policy.

1. Landpower in the Neo-Hadrian Context

Now that we have an outline for grand strategy framed with specific, definable goals, we can address the role and nature of the landpower component necessary to implement and protect this model in practice. The key defining concepts regarding land forces in support of this policy are deterrence, preemption, disruption of, and response to terrorist threats to containment and to the United States and its interests abroad during and following divestment from the region. The idea is to prevent—deter—subsequent attacks via the certainty of U.S. reprisal. Its primary signature would be a light footprint—light to the point of invisibility when not engaged.

So that there is no misunderstanding, appeasement is an outlook from a position of weakness, where containment is strategy of strength, but with a realization that war is not desirable, that aggression and occupation to date have not produced the desired results and are not worth the continuing cost. Lest containment devolve into appeasement, the containing power must be able to back up its geopolitical strategy with force. The overwhelming conventional and unconventional strength of the United States, and a willingness to use it, guarantees that containment and disengagement will not become appeasement. The specific type of response that would be employed should never be apparent beforehand, but its certainty should be. Therefore the kinds of forces necessary would be vigorous and multifarious in their capabilities. These units would be the rapidly-deployable constituent elements of a regional command mostly offshore and otherwise out­ of-sight in the region as well as in the United States. Such a force and mission are obviously well within the current capabilities of the U.S. military.

The key characteristics of such a force would be tactical and operational flexibility and geographical mobility—to go where the enemy is and to hit hard any time and with precision strikes­ to disrupt planning, and reprisals in the event of continuing terrorist attacks on U.S. interests. The primary role of such a force would be deterrence via the certainty of response. The actions of the United States, as the active element of policy, will inform them that if they attack U.S. interests and personnel, it will respond, but they will never know specifically when and where. In other words, the overarching strategic component of this outlook would be the disengagement from the Near East and the relative isolating and de facto containment of Islamism, while land power would be employed as the protective, deterrent, and enforcement elements that would allow its implementation and functioning.

Limited War: Other Lessons from Kennan

But how should the United States actually proceed? Although Islamist terrorism does not threaten the survival of the United States as the nuclear forces of the Soviet Union did during the Cold War, addressing its amorphous, non-state-based nature also requires a limited war strategy. Again policy makers may find guidance and insight from Ambassador Kennan.

After the Second World War, Kennan read the few books that existed on geopolitical grand strategy (notably Bernard Brodie’s The Ultimate Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order).²⁵ From these readings, he seems to have anticipated the concepts of Mutually Assured Destruction and Flexible Response. In spite of the fact that MAD seems to have succeeded in preventing the Cold War from becoming a nuclear war, Kennan considered the stark reality behind the deterrent power of nuclear weapons—i.e. that they are too terrible to use and are ultimately self-destructive—as proof of their absurdity as practical weapons. He came to believe that the weapons themselves posed a much greater threat and were a truer and more permanent enemy than any temporal regime.

Because of this, Kennan rejected the Clausewitzian idea of total warfare (and the related concept of unconditional surrender), regarding it to be obsolete in a post-Hiroshima context. He also believed that an announced goal of unconditional surrender made an enemy fight all the more desperately, and that the idea of denying a defeated people a role in their own postwar governance was illiberal and problematic. He writes with some prescience that if any of the warring parties in the First World War had accepted the maximum demands of the other side in 1916, all would have been better off than the victors of 1918 (i.e. that unconditional surrender is usually not worth the cost to anybody, even the victors). Kennan also notes that when engaged in a total war and fighting toward a goal of unconditional surrender, cynical allies may play for time and a more advantageous postwar geopolitical map, as with the Soviet Union during the final stages of WWII.²⁶

Perhaps most importantly, Kennan believed that the aim of war should not be mere destruction for its own sake, but rather a state of affairs where the enemy no longer wants to fight.²⁷ The goal of strategy therefore, should be to match means toward the desired end of achieving policy aims and preserving lives. This is squarely at odds of such total war with practitioners as William T. Sherman and Curtis LeMay, who sought to end their respective conflicts by using overwhelming force to make war too terrible for the enemy to continue by inflicting as much human misery both on and off the battlefield.²⁸

Kennan’s view thus harkens back to Jomini, rather than von Clausewitz, and an eighteenth-century mode of limited war. It a sense, it prescribes the achieving of Clausewitzian policy ends via Jominian military means. Of course it could be argued that this line of thinking leads directly to Flexible Response—“keeping the game alive” in the nuclear age—and although it lessens the possibility of nuclear war, war itself actually becomes more likely and arguably less decisive. This is illustrated by the proliferation of “brush fire” wars during the Cold War, including the war in Vietnam—a limited war in a geopolitical sense, but one of exceptional ferocity and with elements of asymmetry and a people’s war. In the absence of the Soviet Union as a counterforce, U.S. military interventions and adventures have proliferated to an even greater degree since the end of the Cold War.²⁹  With refinements in technology, Flexible Response therefore morphs seamlessly into a never-ending active state of “semi-war” about which Professor Andrew Bacevich writes.³⁰ The American use of drones around the world is the fighting-edge embodiment of semi-war.

Avoiding Semi-War

The danger of relying on drones, precision guided munitions, and special forces strikes, is that such dependence embodies a kind of high-tech actualization of the idea of “surgical strikes” envisioned by the Cold War advocates of Flexible Response. The secrecy, ease, accuracy, low cost, and the small number of personnel involved in this kind of conflict make the temptation of open-ended semi-war all but irresistible.³¹

But Kennan’s realization of the necessity of occasional limited wars and the possible—even likely—devolution of Flexible Response into a permanent state of undesirable semi-war does no necessarily make him wrong, especially given the absence of other viable options. Nor does it mean that limited war options could not be productively adapted to the needs of a containment strategy. It seems that if the U.S. could disengage from the Middle East, leaving a virtually non-existent footprint, but having the precision of special operations forces and drones to launch strikes to disrupt and preempt potential terrorists attacks (and as retribution for those that American intelligence misses and which its policy fails to deter), it could successfully withdraw from the region, and “contain” Islamism without the situation degenerating into a broader, open-ended state of semi-war. This would be done by limiting action to a kind of war stripped to its bare minimum—of targeting so specifically to individuals as well as command, control, and communication structures­ that it will not be in the interest of those who initiate terrorist actions to continue. The result would be a campaign that would be noticed by those who launch attacks and which, as much as possible, would not interfere with the daily lives of those in the region. As such it would be a policy that would also deprive the enemy of a propaganda tool. Of course war is by its very nature a messy and imprecise enterprise and such precision would likely be a mere ideal or illusive goal.

Another characteristic of this model would be the minimizing of “collateral damage”—a sanitized way of saying the killing of civilians, and is the high octane fuel of Islamist recruiting—as a first and absolute priority equal to or greater than the target itself. The logic here is one of diminishing and comparative returns: if you kill a terrorist leader along with a number of non-combatants, you may end up creating any number of enemy combatants including leaders—again, the paradox of the Hydra. Among the worst things an occupier can do is to kill noncombatants and then callously or righteously justify their deaths in terms of unasked­ for gains such as freedom, democracy, and women’s and other individual rights. The dead and maimed of war don’t care a damn for the high-sounding words and motives of outsiders, and moral justificationsim usually smacks of cynicism, hubris, entitlement, and moral expediency.³²

Given the general outline above, the role of land force power can equally be defined in terms of what it is not. The ideal employment of land forces in the Near East would have as small of a presence as possible—i.e. there would be no conventional “boots on the ground” and only special operations forces when absolutely necessary and only for as long as necessary. Large and noisy conventional campaigns toward an end of nation building, “regime change,” and the propping up of friendly but unstable regimes (that may result in long and counterproductive occupations), would be avoided at all costs. The U.S. would also abandon total war concepts and the showy conventional overkill of “shock and awe” while retaining the decisive “overwhelming force” aspects of Sherman, LeMay, and the Powell Doctrine without its mass, and honed to a pinpoint focus.

Far from being an asset, the attempt to control a fundamentally unstable region and its people is a severe liability, and the holding of territory and quixotic attempt to win “hearts and minds” would also be avoided.³³ Again, the primary concern would be optimal results rather than maximal appearances.

The mission of land forces then would consist primarily of special operations units and air support tailored toward missions of counter-terrorism (CT) rather than counterinsurgency (COIN).³⁴ It is conceivable that circumstances may arise requiring more robust, but equally mobile elite light infantry (Ranger) units and specially-tailored task forces. This model for land power in the region could be easily accommodated by the existing Special Operations Command with little modification.

The primary difference between this strategy and the current employment of special operations units in the Near East and Southwest Asia would be a matter of degree, focus, oversight, and discretion. In recent years there has been a superabundance of concentrations of special operations and drone strikes in the Near East. It is as if American planners feel compelled to overuse them and to employ them toward good, questionable, and problematic ends simply because they can. And yet their effectiveness has been compromised through this overuse. Their use—counter to the intention of their employment—has only fed the Hydra of terrorism.

What this paper is calling for is a more moderate, limited, and strategically sensible use of special operations to act in response to specific threats against the United States and its interests abroad. An example of the use of this kind of force would be the employment of drones or special operations to destroy terrorist training camps upon specific intelligence that an attack on the United Sates was to be immediately launched from that site.

The scaling-back of operations into a mission limited to deterrence, disruption/preemption, reprisal, and a more general posture of traditional preparedness rather than the actual land war-fighting of recent years, would allow the U.S. to avoid mission creep and outright escalation as well as a permanent state of semi-war.³⁵ Along with the larger strategy of containment, it would also be a departure from-or at least a fundamental reconfiguration of-the problematic “long war” outlook of the past 15 years.³⁶ If the larger strategy is successful and the Islamic Revolution eventually collapses under its own weight and the deprivation of ideological fuel and sustenance—as other eschatological movements have—the United States could then easily dismantle this model or adapt it to new or emerging threats. It would also allow the U.S. to redeploy vital military resources elsewhere.

The United States must fundamentally change its outlook in regard to the Near East. To persist in error is to guarantee failure. In terms of policy it means the throwing away of additional lives in a noble, but futile, attempt to justify past losses. A committed policy of “death before dishonor,” like that of the crazed followers of the Japanese Bushido Code in World War II, is a symptom of exceptionalism and is a sign of decadence or outright irrationality. It is true that failed policy, like an illness, must sometimes run its course. But to keep making the same mistakes without applying lessons learned from them would seem to be a pathology of its own, and is very nearly identical to Einstein’s definition of insanity as repeatedly doing something the same way but expecting a different result.

Conclusion

One of the primary functions of the study of history is to learn from past experience—to understand why some policies and strategies work while others do not, and to correct mistaken beliefs and to adopt and adapt policy in light of such increased and refined understanding. History still provides the best means for area specialists and cultural and intellectual historians to understand the course of the Islamic Revolution and determine the most promising basis for policy to effectively address it.

This paper has presented the case that a nuanced understanding of the historical record and of human nature suggests to us a policy path based on the gradual reduction and withdrawal of military and economic resources from regions of little importance but of high consequences in terms of the agitation of traditional peoples, and to do so as part of a comprehensive reevaluation of our interests abroad. While not technically identical to the containment of the Cold War era, this detachment and non-interference would have the same practical effect of letting radical eschatology burn itself out by depriving it of external fuel sources as it has at other times and places historically. Though multifaceted and decentralized, Islamism is unlikely to spread as a large-scale proselytizing movement beyond its current range. An enforceable non-interventionist policy would deprive it of moral authority and limit its presence to where it already exists and to “lone wolf” conversions.

Terrorism remains an immediate and persistent danger to the United States, even if it is not and has never been an existential threat. Thus, the United States would reserve the right to respond to any future attacks though the judicious use of drone strikes and special unit operations, with congressional and judicial oversight, while avoiding the pitfalls of maintaining a conventional heavy footprint, “boots on the ground,” in radical Islamic hot-spot regions.

It should be noted that the very definition of a failed policy is a situation where no good options remain, and there is no guarantee that this policy will succeed. The disruption that Near East has experienced over the past century may have resulted in rifts too deep to mend by any policy, no matter how promising it may otherwise seem. But the United States must try something and it must not persist in error.

The general elements of Kennan’s Cold War-era outline for containment and limited conflicts could be easily adapted to the challenges of current geopolitical and security horizons. These elements include an intimate cultural and historical knowledge of opponents and potential adversaries, the avoidance of engaging with actors espousing righteous ideologies, and the acceptance of an adaptive, long-term policy run by professionals where domestic political interference is minimized.³⁷  It would also probably require the United States to adopt a more sustainable status of hemispheric power rather than a mode of overextended global hegemon. Through such prudent application of historical lessons, the United States could better guarantee the long-term physical and economic security of its people.

Notes

1. George F. Kennan, Realities of American Foreign Policy, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1954, 1966), p. 23.
2. George F. Kennan, The Cloud of Danger, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977), p. 80.
3. Military strategy must be consistent with the larger aims of a nation at war. This is a major theme of T. Harry Williams’ classic book, Lincoln and His Generals.       Williams notes—quite correctly—that traditional Jominian combat officers, like George B. McClellan pursued strategy that was at odds with Lincoln’s political strategy that required decisive victory. From the summer of 1863 onward, Lincoln’s recognition of the Clauzwitizan outlook of generals like Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan allowed him to employ military strategies that would successfully secure his war aims. See T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1952). See also James M. McPherson, Tried by War, Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief, (New York: Penguin, 2008).
4. References to the ongoing conflict with radical Islamism as the “War on Terror” are the approximate grammatical equivalent of referring to the Second World War in Europe as the “War on Blitzkrieg.”
5. Conflicts that are likely to devolve into insurgencies should be avoided at all costs unless there is a vital national interest involved of such demonstrable importance as to warrant a full national effort. See note 34.
6. See Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, an Abridgement, D. M. Low, ed., (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1960[1776]), 8-9. Regarding Hadrian and his successor, Antoninus Pius. See Michael Grant, The Roman Emperors (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1997 [1985]), 76-88.
7. Rather than thinking in terms of what specific areas of the world the United States should withdraw from, our policy should be guided by the converse: identifying those parts of the world whose defense can be defined as securing vital national interests. Most of the Islamic world should be of little concern to us, except insofar as local or regional conflicts are likely to dangerously spill over into our domestic or regional sphere, or if the territorial sovereignty of a stable nation in the region has been violated.                                                Considering the costs versus benefits of the deep U.S. involvement in the Near East, and specifically its implications on trade and the economy generally, I believe that the United States should only be engaged insofar as is absolutely necessary.
8. Watson Institute at Brown University has produced a report titled “Costs of War” which, as of early 2015, gives the total civilian costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan War as approximately 210,000 deaths, and the cost of the wars to the U.S. taxpayer as about 4.4 trillion dollars. Total U.S. uniform services deaths for the war in Afghanistan are 2,168 killed with 1,338-2,867 contractor deaths. The total number of U.S. servicemen and women killed is in Iraq is 4,489, along with 1,595-3,481 contractors. The numbers of wounded are obviously much higher. For up-to-date costs and casualty rates, see: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assetsbudget.pdHYPERLINK “http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assetsbudget.pdf”f.   Regarding the costs of the U.S. contribution to the 2011 NATO campaign in Libya, see http://washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/libya­war-costs-for-us-896-million-so-far/2011/08/23 /glQA5KplYJ blog.html. See also http://www.forbes.com/sites/beltway/2011/03/28/the-real-cost-of-u-s-in-libya­

two-billion-dollars-per-day/. Given that much of the current refugee crisis in the Mediterranean is the result of this campaign, its human cost is ongoing and can only be guessed at.                                                                                       Considering costs versus benefits of the deep U.S. involvement in the Near East and specifically its implications on economic and trade considerations, I believe that the United States should only be engaged only insofar as is absolutely necessary.

9. Historical narratives proceed from the assumption that history events follow the course of a specific preexisting “plot” or “narrative” that can be known and anticipated through the filtering of a particular ideology or world view (eschatology). See generally John Gray, Black Mass (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007). The related idea that history is guided by deterministic “laws” that can be known through a study of the past, is sometimes called The philosopher Karl Popper dispatches this idea in his book The Poverty of Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1957).             By contrast, there are less ideological approaches to history that concede the fundamentally unpredictable nature of the course of human events, but maintain that we may glean some modest insights from the past as a basis for policy in addressing present-day situations.
10. On the idea of containment, see George Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign, Affairs 25, no. 4 (July 1947): 556-582. Reprinted in American Diplomacy, 1900-1950, expanded edition (University of Chicago Press, 1984 [1951]), 107-128. Regarding the development of containment as a basis for grand strategy, see generally John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (Oxford, 1982).
11. On globalization see for instance Francis Fukuyama, The End of History (New York: Avon Books, Inc., 1992) and Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005). On the emergence of neo-conservatism in foreign affairs, see generally James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans (New York: Penguin, 2004).

1. See generally, John Gray, Black Mass (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007).
2. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 125.
3. Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penguin, 2010), 293.
4. Gray, Black Mass.
5. Ibid., 69-72.
6. See John Lewis Gaddis, “After Containment,” The New Republic, 25 April 2005.
7. There are certainly exceptions, like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and the masked killers shown beheading captives in recent videos released by ISIS.
8. Archibald Alison, History of Europe from the commencement of the French Revolution in 1789 to the restoration of the Bourbons in 1815 (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1852), 5: 476.       Sun Tzu similarly notes “[t]he best strategy is to let your opponent defeat himself.” Quoted in America and the World, (New York: Basic Books, 2008) p. 103. Both Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft make a case for staying in the Near East at pages 99-100.                                                             I would argue that history suggests the opposite, that staying in the Near East is more dangerous than pulling out.       Certainly a range of social and economic conditions favorable to the spawn of terrorism will persist in many parts of the Near East, but there is little that the United States can do to remedy these factors by remaining in the region. By pulling out, the possibility remains that Radical Islamism will burn itself out.
9. On the foreign policy of the George H. W. Bush Administration, which was arguably an exception to this foreign policy outlook, see generally George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1998). See also, The Strategist, chapters 17-27, and Robert Dalleck, The Lost Peace, p. 369.
10. The position that moderate realism actually produces better moral results and is less problematic than righteous, ideologically-inspired policy that is more specifically calculated toward moral ends is well supported by the historical record. Likewise the worst acts of mankind are generally justified at the time in terms of righteous ideology or moral necessity, and in hindsight, if successful, as forwarding the cause of the good. American ventures in Vietnam, and our efforts at nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq were all justified in ideological or moral terms. By contrast the U.S. intervention in the Second World War, the Marshall Plan, the rebuilding of Japan, and the Persian Gulf War of 1991 were first and foremost realistic policy measures.

• Regarding the idea of a more modest basis for S. foreign policy, see George F. Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill (W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1993), 183-184. On the courteous and uniform treatment of smaller nations, see page 210.
• As Noah Feldman notes in his book Cool War, the Future of Global Competition, containment, although intended to avert war, equally signals hostile intent. On the economic containment of Germany prior to the First World War, see Paul Kennedy’s The Rise of Anglo­ German Antagonism, 1860-1914 (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: The Ashfield Press, 1980).

24. Gaddis, “After ” In this article, Gaddis outlined four criteria · necessary for containment to be effective: 1.) The foe “must share one’s own sense of risk”; 2.) It is a state-oriented strategy; 3.) The containing power must have more to offer than the power being contained; and 4.) The strategy must be coherent in its policy and application. 230-236.
25. John Lewis Gaddis, George Kennan, an American Life, (New York: Penguin, 2011),                                     British military historian, John Keegan, apparently agrees with Kennan’s appraisal of nuclear weapons as having no practical combat application in forwarding a Clauzwitzian pursuit of policy. See caption to photograph of the atomic test at Bikini atoll, July 25, 1946, prior to page 273 in John Keegan, A History of Warfare, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). He also underscores the problems inherent in the deterrence strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). See pages 48-49.

1. All of the points in this paragraph attributed to Kennan come from Around the Cragged Hill, 218-220.
2. Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill, 220-222.
3. For published primary sources on the development of modem total warfare, see generally, Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman, (New York: Viking, 1990 [1875]), The Personal Memoirs of P.H Sheridan (New York De Capo 1992 [1882]). On the history of the emergence of modem total warfare, see Stig Forster and Jorg Nagler, eds., On the Road to Total Warfare, the American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
4. General Anthony Zinni notes that from 1945 to 1973, “when the United States ended the draft and created the volunteer military,” there were a total of “nineteen military deployments of various kinds [by the United States] throughout the world, from combat to humanitarian aid. In the four decades after 1973, there have been 144 foreign military deployments.” It seems that one could reasonably argue that the United States is already pursuing a policy of semi-war. See Tony Zinni and Tony Koltz, Before the First Shot is Fired, New York, Palgave Macmillan, 2014, p. 36.

30. Bacevich attributes the idea of “semi-war” to James Forrestal. Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules, (New York: Heny Holt and Company, LLC, 2010). 27-28.
31. It should be noted that although the actual operational costs of a state of semi-war are small relative to those of traditional conventional and unconventional military campaigns, as a part of a larger militarized national economy and the local false economies related to it, may be ruinous.
32. John Gray, Black Mass, 190-192.
33. As Edward Gibbon notes, there is nothing “more adverse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations in opposition to their inclination and ” Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ill, 49. Quoted in Gaddis, George F. Kennan, and American Life, pp. 175-176. See also Frank Costigliola, The Kennan Diaries, p. 156, note 17, and p. 392, note 64.
34. The United States should never involve itself in a conflict that is likely to devolve into an insurrection unless doing so can be demonstrated to be a matter of vital national interest, and that the insurrection is unpopular among the local people. In spite of more-than a half century of fighting insurgents from Vietnam to Afghanistan, we have failed to learn the lesson that guerilla forces can only be defeated if they are opposed by the general population (as in Malaysia in the 1950s and Columbia in the 1960s). If the insurgents are popular with a large number of local people, then the only way to defeat them would be to kill everybody in that area. Given that the goals in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq were to save these nations, a military strategy to kill everyone in each would be squarely antithetical to the goals of the broader mission (to say nothing of how a great liberal republic should act in the world). As with any potential military involvement, there are two fundamental questions that policy planners must first answer: 1). Can military intervention by United States forces help the situation? 2). Should the United States do anything to help? If the answer to the first question is “no”, then one does not even get to the second. In the vast majority of instances, military intervention is unlikely to provide realistic solutions to complex, longstanding problems in far flung regions of the world.                                                                            To retain the belief that a condition of asymmetrical warfare can be predictable settled by military force is suggestive of a misunderstanding of the nature of this kind of warfare.                                                                                               The outlook of moderate realism, that policy must be tied to vital national interest, finds more recent expression in the Weinberger and Powell Doctrines and in the foreign policy outlook of the George Herbert Walker Bush administration. See Anthony Zinni and Anthony Koltz, Before the First Shots are Fired, pp. 63-64, and generally in Bartholomew Sparrow, The Strategist, chapters 17-27. See also George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed.                                                                                                                     For counterinsurgency tactics and operations generally, see General David H. Petraeus, Lt. General James F. Amos, and Lt. Colonel John Nagel, The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, (University of Chicago Press, 2007).
35. Bacevich makes the important distinction between the more traditional “supreme value” of preparedness, and the more recent outlook of actual “war fighting.” He notes that preparedness is a more effective deterrent against war than actual fighting. See Washington Rules, Bacevich also discusses such important ideas as the “Washington Consensus” and what others have called the “deep state.” Bacevich, along with others, to include Rand Paul, have also suggested the containment of Islamism.
36. It is a singular coincidence that the term “long war” should be so reminiscent of the “large policy” of American policy planners 100 years before and which embodied and outlook similar to European imperialists of the period. Evan Thomas discusses the later term in the Ken Burns documentary, The Roosevelts, an Intimate History. Also see generally Warren Zimmerman, The First Great Triumph (Farrar, Gauss and Girous: New York, 2002).
37. This is to say nothing about the badly needed reconfiguration of American diplomatic, military, national security, and intelligence infrastructure from the current model, which is still in essence the model devised at the start of the Cold For a discussion of this, see Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill, pp. 286-291, and Brzezinsky and Scowcroft, America and the World, pp. 253-258.