The Unkindest Cut

Of all of the criticisms of President Obama’s 2015 National Security Strategy (and most reviews of it are negative, as I noted yesterday) perhaps the harshest comes from James Jeffrey in an op-ed in the Washington Post, not because of its invective (that prize would go to Larry Johnson which is why I included his remarks in my round-up) but because to my eye it is the most damaging.

There are two reasons for that. First, Mr. Jeffrey was an Obama appointee, the U. S. ambassador to Iraq from 2010 to 2012. And second because his op-ed argues that the intellectual underpinnings of the NSS are badly mistaken. He summarizes these as the president’s view that

1. “those who use military force are destined for the ash heap of history because force is inherently counterproductive”.
2. “if the United States acts militarily, it inevitably runs a serious risk of overcommitment and disaster”.
3. “there is “no military solution” to anything”.
4. “when required, and absent the most compelling security need, military action should be employed through coalitions and after applying diplomatic, economic and other tools, with legality and legitimacy as the guiding principles.”

Here are his retorts to these four “themes”:

The first theme violates a precept that all diplomats must learn: Don’t project your worldview onto others. Assumptions that military force is self-defeating have tragically been proved wrong time and again the world over.

Equally open to question are the linked themes of “no military solution” and “escalation into a morass.” The United States has used or threatened military force frequently since the 1940s. Only three times did we fail with significant costs: in North Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. Those conflicts demonstrated the folly of regime change and social engineering under fire but not the folly of military action per se. Most U.S. military operations during that time were successful, and completed at low cost, from Berlin to the Cuban embargo, the first Gulf War, Kosovo and Bosnia. Obama’s incessant warnings notwithstanding, the United States has generally been able to achieve its military aims without getting bogged down in costly conflicts.

Finally, “no military solution” is simply empty rhetoric. It’s true that any military action ultimately must adhere to political logic. But military action can reinforce political objectives in multiple ways. Its mere threat has political effects on friends and foes, and the impact of combat operations — inflicting pain, seizing territory, threatening to disarm an opponent — also generates political outcomes. This has been made clear recently with Iran on nuclear proliferation and with the Islamic State in Iraq, but the president glosses over the effective use of U.S. military strength even under his own leadership. In this world, the military does solve problems.

I’d like to suggest that the only really permanent solutions in this sad world are military ones. We haven’t heard much about Carthaginian pirates in the Mediterranean lately, have we? Additionally, the German Empire, the Third Reich, and Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere might be interested in discussing the effectiveness of military solutions.

The more relevant question is whether we can solve the problems we have today with the force we’re willing to apply and my assessment would be that we can’t. That’s different than force in the abstract.

Then there are the problems that are simply not solvable full stop. Those are the “wicked problems” I’ve written about in the past and most of the thorniest problems we face fall into that category.