Walter Russell Mead expresses considerable nostalgia for American hegemony in his column in the Wall Street Journal:
The Middle East firestorm is merely one hot spot in a world spinning out of control. The success of Hamas sent waves of excitement through jihadist groups and terror cells in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and beyond. Riots in France, a shooting in Belgium, anti-Semitic marches in Berlin and other uprisings across Europe point to a resurgence of radicalism. Africa, where feeble governments have lost the ability to control jihadist groups across swaths of territory, and where Russia’s Wagner Group supports many corrupt and violent military regimes, is bracing for more terror in more parts of the continent. The war on terror is plotting its comeback even as the Cold War between the U.S. and the revisionist powers heats up.
As Hamas put a torch to the Middle East, Russia’s Legislature revoked its ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and ended limits on missile technology sales to Iran. Mysterious disruptions to a gas pipeline and telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea continue.
Flying to Beijing, President Vladimir Putin toasted the growing friendship between Russia and China and celebrated a historic high in their bilateral trade. Trade between the two countries has roughly doubled since Mr. Putin’s original 2014 invasion of Ukraine.
Trade between Russia and North Korea also has flourished. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said last week that North Korea has delivered more than 1,000 containers of military supplies and weapons to Russia. What does Pyongyang want in return? “Fighter aircraft, surface-to-air missiles, armored vehicles, ballistic-missile production equipment, or other materials and other advanced technologies,†Mr. Kirby said. With Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov currently visiting North Korea, he and his hosts will have plenty to talk about.
China is also getting frisky. In the past two years, there have been more than 180 documented cases of People’s Liberation Army planes harassing American aircraft, the Pentagon said this week. That exceeds the number of such incidents in the entire preceding decade. More ominously, China’s pressure on Taiwan continues to grow. The number of Chinese military aircraft flying sorties into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone rose from 380 in 2020 to more than 1,700 in 2022. China has also increased the number of fighter jets and bombers (including bombers capable of delivering nuclear weapons) venturing close to the island. On one day last month, more than 100 Chinese military aircraft flew missions near Taiwan, with 40 entering the air defense identification zone.
Why are so many actors challenging American power in so many parts of the world? Because the U.S. is losing its power to deter.
I think that Dr. Mead is confusing power to deter with overwhelming superiority AKA American hegemony. I think that the “American hegemony” ship has sailed and won’t return for a simple reason. We refuse to pay for it economically, socially, and politically. You can’t maintain even the illusion of hegemony with a de facto open southern border. You can’t maintain hegemony and be dependent for strategic materials on near peer competitors. You can’t maintain hegemony and be defeated again and again. You can’t maintain hegemony without being willing for the economy to grow more slowly than it otherwise might.
I’ve was actively involved in the ME since the early 1990’s through 2017 and in my opinion, not much has changed in terms of US “hegemony.”
My own view is that we should refrain from using force until we’re prepared to employ it decisively. For one thing you’re more likely to preserve whatever deterrent you wield that way.
IMO our problem is that our political leadership is reluctant to use force decisively. They like using force (too much IMO) but they’re obsessed with a phony sense of “proportionality”. Proportionality doesn’t mean proportional to the force used against you or that you are facing. It means proportional to what you are trying to accomplish.
If what you are trying to accomplish can be accomplished by firing a single shot, fire a single shot, don’t level the city.
We actually won the wars with the nation states of Iraq and Afghanistan (such as it was). We went right through the Iraqi military. What we failed at was occupation and nation building. We failed at building a new military and a new government in those places. 20 years of setting up a government in Afghanistan and they bailed before we could pull our troops out, taking the money to boot. There was no hesitation about the correct use of force. We had no problem killing ISIS when we found them we just weren’t that good at finding them. When they stood up and fought we killed them.
Part of this was our lack of appropriate language skills. I caught part of a McChrystal interview and he said if he had to do it over he would have delayed any military action for at least a year until we had crash caused a horde of people in the necessary languages. It has been noted elsewhere that due to our lack of language ability we gravitated towards putting Iraqis with English into power and they turned out to not be reliable.
Steve
Your answer illustrates why we lose wars. Victory is not measured by battles. It is measured by the accomplishing of objectives. When the objectives cannot be accomplished or cannot be accomplished in a timeframe and at a cost we are willing to pay, we lose.
That isn’t limited to Arabic. The reality of things is that learning other languages isn’t worthwhile when companies and the government use native speakers in preference to those who learned in school.
That’s a different discussion and one where I will mostly agree with you I think. We had poorly defined objectives in Afghanistan and changed them. However, the question was about using adequate military force. Our inability to turn Afghanistan into Sweden wasn’t due to lack of military force. The Russians were very free with force and it failed in Afghanistan.
Steve