‘Reassuring’ Allies and Clients Breeds Dependency

There is a lot of chatter from the usual suspects about how Biden will need to “reassure” allies and clients following the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but that seems like a serious mistake. First, it’s not at all obvious that allies and clients genuinely need any reassuring, and when the US has made the mistake of catering to the complaints of allies and clients it has led to some of the more serious foreign policy errors of the last twenty years. It was the misguided effort to “reassure” Saudi Arabia and the UAE six years ago that resulted in the disastrous policy of US backing for the war on Yemen, and that policy has been maintained for all this time on the grounds that the US could not “afford” to alienate these governments. The US needs to offer fewer reassurances to its allies and clients, because their dependency is a liability for the US and it does them no favors, either.

US allies and clients are so accustomed to relying on the US that they neglect their own defenses and capabilities, and then when the US does something they disagree with they find that they are not able to act independently even if they want to try. Far from viewing the US as unreliable, they are all too comfortable with the US bearing most of the burden for their security and show no interest in assuming more responsibilities. Contrary to all the yowling we have heard over the last two weeks, the US is perceived as being so reliable that these other governments feel no urgency to improve their own defenses. An interesting example of this appears in a recent Financial Times report from Taiwan, where most of the population doesn’t anticipate a Chinese attack and the government has not made much of a concerted effort to bolster the island’s military capabilities:

“The government should be raising people’s awareness of the military threat. But instead of doing real things, they just talk, telling people to hate China and love the US and Japan,” she said.

As Taiwan’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign gained traction this summer following donations from the US and Japan, many Taiwanese posted pictures of their inoculation records on Facebook with the words, “Thank you, Daddy America!”

Critics said Tsai’s administration had fed complacency by highlighting Taiwan’s ever-stronger relations with Washington. “The public will think that we are so safe, America loves us and will come to our rescue when push comes to shove – it takes away the urge to be self-reliant,” said Liu.

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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 Forever War Goes to Congo

The forever war has now apparently expanded to the Congo:

US special operations forces have arrived in the east of the DR Congo to help in the fight against a feared jihadist militia enjoying “sanctuary” in the region’s nature parks, US and Congolese sources said Wednesday.

The fight is against an insurgent group called the Allied Democratic Forces. One of the group’s factions has supposedly aligned itself with the Islamic State, and it is on this extremely shaky basis that the US is sending troops to help fight them. Originally an Ugandan insurgent group committed to overthrowing the government in Kampala, it has carried out a number of deadly attacks in the DRC in the last decade. The group was added to the State Department’s foreign terrorist organization (FTO) list in March of this year under the designation of ISIS-DRC. As Jared Thompson noted in an analysis piece last month, “[State] did not provide extensive detail on the nature of the relationship between the ADF and the Islamic State.” There is no question that it is a brutal group that has killed many civilians, like many other armed groups that have operated in eastern Congo over the last twenty-plus years, but why are any US forces involved in fighting them?

There is no pretense that this has anything to do with US security. US troops are being sent on a mission that Congress never approved to fight in a country against a group that cannot possibly threaten the United States as a favor to a government that we are not obliged to defend. The nature of the connection between this group and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is unclear. Thompson writes:

A June 2021 report from the UN Group of Experts on the DRC, meanwhile, could not substantiate “direct support or command and control of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” with respect to the ADF.

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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.

Cultivating Dependent Clients Is a Recipe for Failure

Anatol Lieven explains how the failure to anticipate the collapse of Afghan government forces illustrates how little the US understands Afghanistan even after twenty years:

I remembered this episode three years later, when the Communist state eventually fell to the mujahedeen; six years later, as the Taliban swept across much of Afghanistan; and again this week, as the country collapses in the face of another Taliban assault. Such “arrangements” – in which opposing factions agree not to fight, or even to trade soldiers in exchange for safe passage – are critical to understanding why the Afghan army today has collapsed so quickly (and, for the most part, without violence). The same was true when the Communist state collapsed in 1992, and the practice persisted in many places as the Taliban advanced later in the 1990s.

The Biden administration has said that the collapse of Afghan government forces is proof that they were unwilling to fight for their country, but this misses the point. It is true that these forces were not willing to fight for their corrupt government, and they had no interest in dying in a failing cause, so it made more sense for them to cut deals. A weak and corrupt government kept afloat with foreign money and military power is not going to command the loyalty of many people, and no one is going to want to risk dying to defend it when there is another option available. The fact that our government apparently didn’t understand this in Afghanistan is just more proof that our leaders never knew what they were doing there and were never going to learn.

Furthermore, the Afghan military had been designed to rely on the US The UShaphazardly built up an Afghan military modeled on ours and trained to fight in the same way, but that model and training make no sense when US air support isn’t available. The US built up an Afghan military on the assumption that our forces would never fully leave. That was a very poor assumption.

The U.S.-backed government was also always at a political disadvantage in part because it was U.S.-backed. Carter Malkasian commented on this last month:

The Taliban had an advantage in inspiring Afghans to fight. Their call to fight foreign occupiers, steeped in references to Islamic teachings, resonated with Afghan identity. For Afghans, jihad – more accurately understood as “resistance” or “struggle” than the caricatured meaning it has acquired in the United States – has historically been a means of defense against oppression by outsiders, part of their endurance against invader after invader. Even though Islam preaches unity, justice and peace, the Taliban were able to tie themselves to religion and to Afghan identity in a way that a government allied with non-Muslim foreign occupiers could not match.

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.

Daniel Larison: Drawing Lessons From Afghanistan

Bret Stephens is in full fearmongering mode:

Now, in the aftermath of Saigon redux, every enemy will draw the lesson that the United States is a feckless power, with no lasting appetite for defending the Pax Americana that is still the basis for world order. And every ally – Taiwan, Ukraine, the Baltic States, Israel, Japan – will draw the lesson that it is on its own in the face of its enemies. The Biden Doctrine means the burial of the Truman Doctrine.

Since everyone wants to make the comparison with Saigon and the fall of South Vietnam, it is instructive to look at what did and didn’t happen after 1975. Every other U.S. ally did not draw the lesson that it is on its own. Formal US allies did not change their allegiances, nor did they assume that the US wouldn’t fulfill its commitments to them. Just a few years after the fall of Saigon, the US terminated its defense treaty with Taiwan, and once again nothing of the sort happened. It’s as if other governments don’t judge US reliability as the hawks claim they do. Hawks are unable to see the world as these other states do, and so they project their reactions onto these governments to lend their complaints more weight. The trouble is that the allies and clients mostly don’t see things the way they do, and don’t draw sweeping conclusions about US reliability everywhere from its decision to end involvement in one conflict. When you see hawks holding forth about the dangers of losing credibility, understand that they are promoting a propaganda message and not offering serious analysis.

Hawkish credibility claims are annoying because they are both sweeping and extremely vague. According to them, the entire alliance system is now in jeopardy because the US ended its part in an unwinnable war. But they never spell out what that means in practice. Stephens says that allies and clients will “draw the lesson” that they are on their own, but what is the practical significance of that? What are these states going to do in the future that they aren’t doing now? If the hawks are right about this (they’re not), how would they prove it? If the other states were losing confidence in US guarantees, we should expect to see fairly significant and sudden changes in the military spending and shifting alignments of many countries. If these states now fear that they are “on their own” (they don’t), they ought to be taking more responsibility for their own security. If past experience is any guide, that isn’t going to happen. Warning about lost credibility is a cheap and easy way to attack a president’s decision when you can’t really defend your own policy preferences.

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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.

Why Using the Right Names for Things Matters

Jonathan Katz spoke with Emma Green at The Atlantic about the resistance he encountered to using accurate language while writing a piece about Haiti and possible U.S. intervention there for an unnamed publication. Katz ended up taking the piece elsewhere, and Foreign Policy would later publish it. Here is the relevant exchange:

Green: You wrote recently about an incident where you got an assignment for a national outlet – you don’t name it. You were supposed to be writing about the recent assassination of the Haitian president, Jovenel Moïse. You used the word occupation to refer to the role that the US Marines played in Haiti from 1915 to 1934. And your editor questioned you on that word.

As a caveat, I should say: I think there are a lot of well-educated Americans who don’t know much about the history of the US presence in the Caribbean. And it’s an editor’s role to add nuance and push back and ask dumb questions.

Still, that story struck me because it seemed like you were encountering a reflexive resistance to telling the story straight. The assumption is that if you’re using this kind of loaded word, one that gets tossed around in academic circles, you’re not telling it straight. You’re bringing an accusatory, ideological lens to bear on history. Why do you think that reflexive desire to shy away from naming things exists at national outlets?

Katz: That period of time was officially called “the US occupation of Haiti.” There are letters from occupation officials referring to themselves and saying, “On behalf of the American occupation, thank you for the fruit basket.” Stuff like that. That back-and-forth with this editor reflects a tendency to try to downplay the most egregious parts of America’s past. To a certain extent, we’re seeing that in domestic conversations as well with the 1619 Project and America’s history of racism.

This is how an empire has to operate. If you keep in mind all of these individual moments and string them together into a narrative, the conclusions that one can draw aren’t very friendly to self-identity and national identity – to the imperial project.

As Katz pointed out in his follow-up article describing the pushback he received, the US referred to the occupation of Haiti as an occupation to defend itself against the accurate accusations of the crudest sort of colonial domination. A hundred years ago, it suited the government to call it an occupation because that word at the time made the policy seem less brutal and exploitative than it really was. It was, as Katz notes, a “euphemism.” If it happened today, it would probably be called a stabilization mission or a humanitarian intervention to avoid too much scrutiny.

That resistance to calling an occupation by the correct term is a familiar one. Even when it involves a policy from decades ago, there is a strong desire to deny that the US did things like that to other countries. Americans love to tell ourselves that this is something that other countries do, and that we are different. After all, we’re the benevolent hegemon, or so the hegemonists would have us believe. Marilyn Young described this mentality in one of the essays published in the new collection, Making the Forever War:

The United States has not been an aggressor, because, by definition, it does not commit aggression. The hostility of others to the United States cannot, again by definition, be a response to American actions, because the United States does not invite hostility but only reacts to it. What the United States claims it intends, rather than what it does, should persuade any fair-minded observer of the righteousness of its policies.

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 Bad Faith Hawkish Credibility Argument Just Won’t Die

If there’s one thing hawks enjoy, it is creating doubt about U.S. reliability:

Mr. Biden “knows from long experience that America’s actions abroad matter, but he is willingly ignoring the far-reaching consequences of America’s withdrawal in Afghanistan,” said Bradley Bowman, an Afghanistan veteran and senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Center on Military and Political Power, a hawkish think tank in Washington.

“We can expect Chinese and Russian diplomats to ramp up with new credibility a whisper campaign in capitals around the world that Washington is an unreliable partner who will abandon its friends sooner or later,” he said.

Maybe Chinese and Russian diplomats will make this claim, but why would anyone else take it seriously? The only people that seem to believe that US credibility everywhere else hinges on prolonging an unwinnable war in Central Asia are the hawkish dead-enders that never wanted our involvement in the war to end. The appeal to credibility here is disingenuous, and it is the last resort of war supporters that have no other arguments left. As Mike Black put it on Twitter yesterday:

These hawks warn that the US will lose credibility with all of its allies unless it does exactly what the hawks want in every crisis or conflict. They impute their own preferences to the allies to make them seem more important to US interests than they are. It is remarkable how all of our allies are supposed to have exactly the same view of every issue as the most aggressive American hawks. Hawks said that the UShad to bomb the Syrian government’s forces in 2013 to maintain credibility with allies the world over, and then when the US did not do that there were zero consequences for US credibility. They insisted that the US had to retaliate for the Abqaiq attack in 2019 or there would be dire consequences for US credibility in the eyes of its partners. The US did not retaliate, and US credibility was unaffected. Now they tell us that the US is proving itself an unreliable partner again by withdrawing from Afghanistan after almost twenty years. One wonders just how many decades the US has to prop up a client state in order to be considered reliable.

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.