McMaster’s Militarist Fantasy

H.R. McMaster and Gabriel Scheinmann try their hands at comedy:

Contrary to the narrative of US belligerence and imperialism that has been impressed on countless university students, the United States has, since the end of World War II, largely pursued a policy of restraint despite its considerable military power.

This line tells us just about everything we need to know about the authors’ worldview, and it shows them to be very dangerous hardliners willing to distort the record to suit their purposes. If the history of US military intervention since 1945 looks like “restraint” to them, I would hate to see what they think overly aggressive and meddlesome behavior looks like. I am reminded of some of the earnest defenses of the “Blob” from a couple of years ago when the interventionist authors listed all of the countries that the US could have attacked after 1991 but didn’t. What restraint!

It is a disservice to the current debate over US strategy to publish such a ridiculous argument. McMaster and Scheinmann pretend that up is down and that the militarized foreign policy of the last few decades was something radically different from what we know it to be. We know that McMaster loathes restrainers, and now he wants to try to blame restraint for the failings of the strategy of primacy that he has supported by relabeling the status quo as restraint.

Conveniently, the authors make no mention of the Iraq war, the Bush Doctrine, or the “freedom agenda,” any one of which would prove their claims about U.S. “restraint” during this period to be false. The ongoing “war on terror” that has the US fighting in multiple countries more than twenty years after 9/11 is likewise left out of the story. Afghanistan receives one passing mention by way of complaining about the decision to end US involvement there after a generation. The idea that the US has been “restrained” with respect to Russia and China is also hard to take seriously unless you think that the US should have been going to war with one or both of them before now.

When we look at all of the US interventions of the last seventy-five years, the one thing that almost all of them have in common is that they were wars that the US chose to fight despite having no vital interests at stake. The US has rarely, if ever, fought in self-defense since 1945. Sometimes our government has fought on behalf of other countries, and sometimes it has attacked other countries just because it could, but there are very few cases in which the US did not go out of its way to become party to a conflict. You can call that restraint if you want, but in doing so you show that your analysis should not be trusted.

McMaster and Scheinmann need to pretend that the US practiced “restraint” since the end of the Cold War so that they can blame “restraint” for whatever has gone wrong in the world in the last three decades. It takes real gall to claim that at the height of America’s “unipolar moment” when the US was waging a global “war on terror” that the US was exercising restraint, but that is what they do. The thrust of their disingenuous argument is that the US was so restrained that it somehow allowed Russia and China to run amok, which conveniently ignores US foreign policy hyperactivism, especially after 2001, and how that hyperactivity looked to Moscow and Beijing. McMaster likes to tout the importance of strategic empathy, but as usual he shows he has no clue what it is or how to practice it.

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

A ‘New Compact’ With Saudi Arabia Is a Terrible Idea

Steven Cook and Martin Indyk urge Biden to bind the US even more tightly to Saudi Arabia:

Biden should instead consider a more fundamental reconceptualization of the bilateral relationship. What both countries need is a new compact that focuses on countering a major strategic threat they both face: Iran’s nuclear program.

Cook and Indyk’s article is a fairly standard rehash of familiar pro-Saudi claims. While they propose a “new compact” between our governments, the ideas in their article are very old and largely outdated. They assert that the “benefits of reconciliation are self-evident,” but this hasn’t been true for years. If the benefits were so self-evident, they wouldn’t need to be justifying closer ties with Riyadh, and the truth is that the benefits to the United States are nowhere to be found.

Even if the Saudi government increased oil production, any increase it can deliver won’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, and the Saudi government makes its oil production decisions based on what it perceives to be in its own interests and not as a favor to America. Whatever benefits there are from the relationship, the Saudi government is the one receiving virtually all of them. It is not self-evident at all what the US gets for its trouble, and except for inertia and the pleading of certain interest groups it is hard to see why the US continues to align itself so closely with such an awful state. It would be one thing if someone could demonstrate what the US stands to gain by continuing it, to say nothing of deepening it, but the possible rewards are never specified.

The authors imagine what this “reconciliation” would do: “The pariah would be transformed into a partner.” One problem with this is that Saudi Arabia was never treated as a pariah (quite the opposite), and it has proven itself to be a mostly useless and increasingly pernicious “partner.” Esfandyar Batmanghelidj turns their statement around on them in his response:

Maybe Saudi Arabia shouldn’t be a partner and maybe Iran shouldn’t be a pariah and maybe the US shouldn’t be lording the nature of its relationships with regional powers in ways that create regional imbalances and instability.

This gets at the core problem with what Cook and Indyk are proposing: the closer relationship with Saudi Arabia that they want would be a destabilizing and destructive one. It would fuel regional rivalries and keep the US ensnared in conflicts that have nothing to do with American security. A “more stable Middle Eastern order” will not exist if the US does what the authors want, and by increasing the commitment to Saudi Arabia they guarantee that the US will end up fighting and supporting wars that it could otherwise easily avoid and oppose.

We have already seen in Yemen what indulging the Saudi government does to regional stability. The Saudi government has proven that selling them weapons for “self-defense” has just enabled them to wage an unnecessary and atrocious war against their neighbor. Our government should stop providing them with the means to engage in more aggression in the future, not least because their use of U.S.-made weapons in their war crimes implicates the US in those atrocities. The current truce in Yemen is holding, and that’s good news for the people of Yemen, but we should make sure that the US is never again in a position where it is expected to support another Saudi war, whether it is in Yemen or anywhere else.

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

The Insane ‘Option’ of Attacking Iran

Eric Brewer argues that Iran’s shorter “breakout” time to acquiring enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon requires the U.S. to be ready to attack much more quickly:

The most impactful step the United States could take, however, would be to shorten military response time. This step might also be the hardest. One option would be increasing readiness and ensuring that all capabilities required for a strike, such as refueling aircraft, would be available on short notice. Another would be positioning aircraft, missile defense systems, and other support assets in the region. US B-2 bombers, for instance, periodically deploy outside the United States but have no sustained overseas presence. Washington would need to examine the requirements, and risks, of more frequent deployments or permanent stationing abroad. Still, these steps would give the United States more flexibility should a crisis arise and would signal to partners in the region as well as to Iran that the United States is prepared to act if needed.

The US debate over Iran’s nuclear program has been going on for at least two decades, but in the end it always comes back to this fantasy of using force to “stop” Iran from building nuclear weapons. There are a few basic truths that we need to remember before we go down the rabbit hole that Brewer invites us to enter. First, the US has absolutely no right or authority to attack Iran over its nuclear program, and this is true even if Iran chose to violate its commitments under the NPT by building a bomb. There is no universe in which that attack constitutes self-defense. Any attack on Iran for the purpose of destroying nuclear facilities would be illegal aggression. It would not only make a mockery of everything US officials have said about the invasion of Ukraine, but it would also alienate many other countries around the world as they would once again see us as a lawless, rogue superpower. As Steven Metz said Thursday:

Bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would make the US president who ordered it a war criminal and be jaw-droppingly stupid from a strategic perspective.

Second, military action would not “stop” anything, but it would almost certainly accelerate Iran’s development of nuclear weapons by giving their government a major incentive to build a deterrent to prevent further attacks. Third, attacking Iran would very likely set off a larger regional conflict that would result in the deaths of many thousands and possibly tens of thousands of people, and under current circumstances that would further exacerbate our economic problems and send the globe into a bigger recession. Finally, the only practical way to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is to give their government strong incentives to continue abiding by their commitments not to build them. There is no alternative to striking a diplomatic bargain with them. If the Biden administration fails to reach a bargain, that does not justify the use of force. Talking about a military “option” here is absurd, since there is no scenario where using that option is legitimate and effective. Debating this is like debating the details of how to shoot yourself in the foot, except that the human cost of launching an attack on Iran would be much, much higher. If all of this seems familiar, that’s because people have been pushing the insane option of aggressive war against Iran for half of my lifetime.

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Venezuela and the ‘Politics of Pain’

William Neuman makes a compelling case for lifting broad sanctions on Venezuela:

The oil embargo and other general sanctions targeting the economy are deeply unpopular in Venezuela. Many opposition politicians have come out against them, although Guaidó and some others still call for continued or even stronger sanctions. But advocating more suffering is not a winning message to send to voters in Venezuela. “To make politics with people’s pain,” Torrealba told me, “is a mistake.”

So what should Biden do? First, he must acknowledge that US policy toward Venezuela is broken and the sanctions-heavy approach, carried out on the fly and distorted by political aims, has failed. Any change carries political risks so tweaking the margins doesn’t make much sense.

Neuman has written the book on Venezuela’s crisis, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse, and in it he documents how the Venezuelan government created terrible economic conditions that U.S. sanctions have severely worsened. It should be required reading in the Biden administration and Congress. He describes the policymaking process in the US this way:

It was like watching the Venezuelanization of US policy making. So much was improvised, done without thinking things through, without preparation, ignoring the facts, hoping that it would all work when your own experts said that there was little chance of success.

This description could be applied to many of the big US foreign policy blunders of the last twenty years, but it is certainly an accurate assessment of the slapdash way that Trump and his officials made Venezuela policy. Regime change policies seem to suffer from these flaws more than most, because they involve seeking a goal that is either unrealistic or unwise (or both) in a country that the regime changers don’t really understand. They either don’t know enough to realize regime change is folly or they are so bent on it that they ignore everyone that warns them against it. Instead of relying on regional or country experts, regime changers routinely listen only to the people that are telling them what they want to hear, and what they want to hear is that regime change will be quick, easy, and advantageous. The Trump administration imagined that they would be able to score a cheap foreign policy “victory,” and then when that didn’t happen they lost interest and left their destructive policy on autopilot. The sanctions that were supposed to deliver the coup de grace have instead become a permanent feature of the landscape. Once they are imposed, sanctions are rarely lifted.

Venezuela’s crisis is one of the clearest examples of how US economic warfare makes an awful situation even worse. The frustrating thing is that this was all obvious and it was all predicted beforehand, but the people that could foresee the disaster that would follow were not the ones deciding on the policy. The policy was set by hardliners in the Trump administration egged on by regime changers in Congress, and Trump endorsed it primarily to win votes in Florida. As Neuman notes, the policy was a total failure, but the political pandering was successful. Now Biden is reluctant to reverse the policy that he called a failure because he does not want to antagonize the voters that are already voting for the other party. Instead of making policy decisions in the best interests of the United States and the people of Venezuela, our government caters to the obsessions of unrepresentative hardliners and exiles. As Neuman writes, the 2020 election results in Florida “stunned” Democrats, and now the Biden administration sees Venezuela policy as a “third rail.”

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Venezuela and the ‘Politics of Pain’

William Neuman makes a compelling case for lifting broad sanctions on Venezuela:

The oil embargo and other general sanctions targeting the economy are deeply unpopular in Venezuela. Many opposition politicians have come out against them, although Guaidó and some others still call for continued or even stronger sanctions. But advocating more suffering is not a winning message to send to voters in Venezuela. “To make politics with people’s pain,” Torrealba told me, “is a mistake.”

So what should Biden do? First, he must acknowledge that US policy toward Venezuela is broken and the sanctions-heavy approach, carried out on the fly and distorted by political aims, has failed. Any change carries political risks so tweaking the margins doesn’t make much sense.

Neuman has written the book on Venezuela’s crisis, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse, and in it he documents how the Venezuelan government created terrible economic conditions that U.S. sanctions have severely worsened. It should be required reading in the Biden administration and Congress. He describes the policymaking process in the US this way:

It was like watching the Venezuelanization of US policy making. So much was improvised, done without thinking things through, without preparation, ignoring the facts, hoping that it would all work when your own experts said that there was little chance of success.

This description could be applied to many of the big US foreign policy blunders of the last twenty years, but it is certainly an accurate assessment of the slapdash way that Trump and his officials made Venezuela policy. Regime change policies seem to suffer from these flaws more than most, because they involve seeking a goal that is either unrealistic or unwise (or both) in a country that the regime changers don’t really understand. They either don’t know enough to realize regime change is folly or they are so bent on it that they ignore everyone that warns them against it. Instead of relying on regional or country experts, regime changers routinely listen only to the people that are telling them what they want to hear, and what they want to hear is that regime change will be quick, easy, and advantageous. The Trump administration imagined that they would be able to score a cheap foreign policy “victory,” and then when that didn’t happen they lost interest and left their destructive policy on autopilot. The sanctions that were supposed to deliver the coup de grace have instead become a permanent feature of the landscape. Once they are imposed, sanctions are rarely lifted.

Venezuela’s crisis is one of the clearest examples of how US economic warfare makes an awful situation even worse. The frustrating thing is that this was all obvious and it was all predicted beforehand, but the people that could foresee the disaster that would follow were not the ones deciding on the policy. The policy was set by hardliners in the Trump administration egged on by regime changers in Congress, and Trump endorsed it primarily to win votes in Florida. As Neuman notes, the policy was a total failure, but the political pandering was successful. Now Biden is reluctant to reverse the policy that he called a failure because he does not want to antagonize the voters that are already voting for the other party. Instead of making policy decisions in the best interests of the United States and the people of Venezuela, our government caters to the obsessions of unrepresentative hardliners and exiles. As Neuman writes, the 2020 election results in Florida “stunned” Democrats, and now the Biden administration sees Venezuela policy as a “third rail.”

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Our Irrational Iran Policy

Michael Hirsh frames the failure of U.S. Iran policy this way:

After more than two decades of failed policies – fluctuating wildly between confrontation and cooperation – Washington and the West still find themselves facing down a hostile Iran.

US policy has not been “fluctuating wildly between confrontation and cooperation” over the last twenty years. Since the turn of the century, there have been two brief periods of limited U.S.-Iranian cooperation: a very short time following the 9/11 attacks when Iran was willing to work the US in the early stages of the war in Afghanistan, and a slightly longer period between the conclusion of the interim nuclear agreement in 2013 and the end of Obama’s presidency in 2017. The US didn’t renege on the nuclear deal until 2018, but Trump’s election had already signaled the return of reflexive hostility. Even during the Obama years, cooperation was limited to the nuclear issue, and that happened in the context of overall hostility and arming Iran’s regional rivals to the teeth. Except for those small windows of engagement, US policy towards Iran has been defined entirely by hostility and punitive measures, and when there was some engagement it was always overwhelmed by reflexive antipathy.

The nuclear deal was a remarkable breakthrough in relations on one level, but on another it had no real effect on how our government perceived theirs or vice versa. The US has followed the hawkish playbook of condemnation, sanctions, and threats for twenty years, and it has served to ratchet up tensions and bring the US and Iran to the brink of war. The confrontational approach is clearly bankrupt, but there are too many people with vested interests in confrontation for it to change in the foreseeable future.

The attempts at cooperation were few, tentative, and narrowly focused on one issue at a time. There was never a time when the US was broadly pursuing cooperation with Iran. To the extent that the US tried cooperation, it ended up with something to show for its efforts, but hardliners on our side kept sabotaging engagement and destroyed whatever gains had been made. Limited policies of cooperation did not fail in achieving something useful for the US, but they were killed off anyway. Policies of confrontation have repeatedly led to worse results for the US, Iran, and the region, but they remain firmly in place to this day. Biden’s decision to continue Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions is the latest example of the latter.

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.