How to Play a Strong Hand Poorly

I don’t link to articles in The American Conservative very frequently, but this one by Andrew Bacevich is an exception. Most of it consists of a lengthy diatribe against Robert Kagan but this is the passage to which I wanted to draw attention:

According to Kagan, the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War occurred at least in part due to American passivity. Successive post-Cold War U.S. administrations fell down on the job. Put simply, they did not exert themselves to keep Russia in check. While it would be “obscene to blame the United States for Putin’s inhumane attack on Ukraine,” Kagan writes, to “insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading.” The United States had “played a strong hand poorly.” In doing so, it gave Vladimir Putin cause to think that he could get away with aggression. Thus did Washington—as if sitting on its hands during the first two decades of the present century—provoke Moscow.

By “wielding U.S. influence more consistently and effectively,” presidents beginning with the elder Bush could have prevented the devastation that Ukrainians have suffered. From Kagan’s point of view, the United States has been too passive. Today, he writes, “the question is whether the United States will continue to make its own mistakes”—mistakes of inaction, in his view—“or whether Americans will learn, once again, that it is better to contain aggressive autocracies early, before they have built up a head of steam.”

to which Dr. Bacevich responds:

The reference to containing aggressive autocracies early requires decoding. Kagan is dissimulating. What he is actually proposing is further experiments with preventive war, which in the wake of 9/11 became the centerpiece of U.S. national security policy. Kagan, of course, supported the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. He was all in on invading Iraq. Implemented in 2003 in the form of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Bush Doctrine produced disastrous results.

Now, even two decades later, Kagan cannot bring himself to acknowledge the grotesque immensity of that mistake, nor its side effects, to include the rise of Trumpism and all of its ancillary evils.

In addition today’s Russia is not that of 30 years ago when Russia was practically supine.

I don’t believe that the U. S. forced Russia to attack Ukraine but pretending that countries do not respond to actions they consider provocations on the part of another is equally obscene. We have been playing our formerly strong hand poorly in two ways. First, by weakening our own hand in multiple different ways including destroying our own industrial base and trying to use our military to achieve political objectives to which it was ill-suited, giving the impression of being weaker than we actually are.

But the second is important, too. How can we insist on a “rules-based order” while refusing to obey our own rules?