Preserving American Power After Obama

How long can a country with less than 5 percent of the world’s population continue to be the dominant power in every region of the world?

Ever since the end of the Cold War, the overwhelming power of the U.S. military has been the central fact of international politics. However, in three crucial regions—Europe, the Middle East and East Asia—America’s rivals have begun to test its resolve to use this power. Faced with serious security challenges in all three regions, the United States has to consider when and whether to push back—while its allies watch nervously, largely from the sidelines.

These events are taking place in different parts of the world, but they are intimately connected. It is American military might that guarantees borders all over the world. In the Middle East, the United States has giant naval and air bases, which exist to reassure friends and to intimidate rivals. In East Asia, the U.S. Navy has become used to treating the Pacific as an “American lake”—guaranteeing freedom of navigation and providing reassurance to its allies. In Europe, it is NATO that guarantees the territorial integrity of its member states, and the United States now accounts for a staggering three-quarters of NATO’s military spending.

These security orders are now under challenge in all three regions. In Europe, Russian intervention in Ukraine has led directly to the movement of NATO troops into the Baltic states, overt nuclear threats from the Kremlin and talk of a new cold war. The Putin government’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 represented the first forcible annexation of territory on the European continent since the end of the Second World War. The subsequent Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine (denied in Moscow) created strong pressure on the Obama administration to supply weapons to the government of Ukraine. The White House’s refusal to take this step has been added to the charge sheet by those who accuse Obama of pusillanimity in the face of naked aggression. However, NATO has decided to move some troops into the Baltic states on a rotational basis—a response to the widespread fear in these states that they are vulnerable to Russian military moves. This in turn has prompted NATO members to reflect hard on their Article 5 commitment to defend Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania should they ever come under attack.

In the Middle East, Russian intervention in the Syrian civil war has underlined the extent to which the United States has lost control of the region following the upheavals of the Arab Spring and America’s withdrawal of troops from Iraq. With the United States visibly reluctant to put “boots on the ground” in the Middle East again, the Russians noted a power vacuum and moved quickly to fill it. By firing cruise missiles into Syria, the Russians even staged a mocking emulation of previous U.S. military interventions in the region. Russia’s actions in Syria also created the risk of a military collision with the United States, as both countries’ air forces carried out clashing missions in the same contested airspace. The clarity of Russia’s support for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad seems to mark a stark contrast with the confusion of U.S. policy in Syria, where America sometimes seems to be opposed to both sides in a civil war, calling for an end to the Assad regime and the defeat of the Islamic State forces that are fighting him. America’s traditional allies in the Middle East have rounded on the Obama administration, charging it with weakness. Meanwhile, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has accused the White House of concluding a disastrous nuclear deal in Iran that is tantamount to appeasement. The Saudis are also deeply unhappy with America’s rapprochement with Iran and have not forgiven the United States for (as they see it) betraying Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

In Asia, China’s island-building program in the South China Sea has taken shape over the last year, transforming Beijing’s theoretical claim to territorial waters hundreds of miles from its coast into something that is (literally) more concrete. America says that it takes no position on China’s territorial disputes with its neighbors—but that it is determined to protect freedom of navigation in the Pacific. Hence, the U.S. Navy’s decision to challenge the idea that China has established territorial waters around its new artificial islands, by sailing the USS Lassen within twelve miles of one of these new features. Even this action, however, has still led to charges of American weakness—by critics who argue that the Obama administration agonized too long and too openly before deciding to send the Lassen on its mission.

Nor is this likely to be the end of the matter. The U.S. Navy has made it clear that it plans regular patrols within the twelve-mile zones around the reefs claimed by Beijing. The Chinese government has vowed to react. If it decides to place military installations or troops on some of the reefs and islands that it claims, the region will once again look towards Washington for a reaction. The “American lake”—otherwise known as the Pacific—is now clearly contested water.

All three disputes are a reminder that, despite voguish talk of a “borderless world,” the control of territory is still fundamental to world politics. As Sir Robert Cooper, a former diplomat and accomplished theorist of international relations, puts it: “World orders are territorial orders. If you don’t know who owns territory, you don’t know anything about international order.” Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution makes a similar point, when he argues that international political stability is dependent on “healthy regional orders, especially in Europe and East Asia. If these regions fall apart, nothing will save the global order.”

More broadly, these three regional challenges pose a global question—how long can the United States, a country that represents less than 5 percent of the world’s population and 22 percent of the world economy, continue to be the dominant military and political power in every significant region of the world? That question, in turn, raises further issues. First, what is the role for American allies in supporting the regional orders in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia? Second, should America make any concession to the idea of regional spheres of influence, particularly for China and Russia? Finally, should the United States be more selective about where it chooses to exert its power—or does the vision of an apparently hesitant America in one region, inevitably erode U.S. “credibility” all over the world?

The Obama administration’s relationship with its regional allies is rather more complicated than might be assumed. The narrative of American timorousness might lead some to believe that all of America’s regional allies are clamoring for a more robust U.S. response to regional challenges. This picture is closest to the truth in the Middle East, where both Israel and Saudi Arabia have barely disguised their preference for U.S. military action against Iran—and the Saudis have also regularly lamented America’s failure to take a tougher stand against the Assad regime in Syria. However, the Obama administration has remained understandably skeptical about whether wars that are in the interests of its regional allies are necessarily in the interests of the United States itself, particularly when it is American troops that will be expected to do the fighting and American politicians that will be expected to take the blame when it all goes wrong.

In Europe, America’s NATO allies have been divided among themselves about how to react to Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Generally speaking, the further east you get, the greater the demand for a tough American response, with the Balts and Poles leading the hawks. The German government, however, was clearly opposed to supplying weapons to Ukraine, and industry recoiled at the imposition of sanctions upon Moscow. Beyond the elite level, opinion surveys suggest that the Europeans are less prepared to confront potential Russian aggression than Americans. A recent Pew survey asked respondents whether they supported using military force to defend a NATO ally, neighboring Russia, that “got into a serious military conflict” with Moscow. Some 56 percent of Americans agreed that “our country” should use military force in such a case. But the proposition did not get majority support in any European NATO member, including Poland—with support for a military response as low as 38 percent in Germany. If the question before World War II was “who will die for Danzig,” the question today is “who’s prepared to go under for Tallinn?” Not that many, apparently.

America’s Asian allies are similarly ambivalent about how confrontational the United States should be in responding to China. None of them look forward to the idea of living in a Chinese-dominated region. But countries such as Singapore and South Korea are already treading carefully in their relations with China—and all dread being forced to make an overt choice between Washington and Beijing. The Japanese government led by Shinzo Abe has been more obviously favorable to a robust U.S. response to Chinese assertiveness. But the prime minister’s efforts to reinterpret the Japanese constitution to allow Japanese troops to fight alongside Americans, although ultimately successful, were also deeply controversial at home. There remains a deep strain of pacifism in Japanese public life and the U.S. base in Okinawa—crucial to America’s military presence in the Pacific—continues to excite controversy.

Lying behind the Russian and Chinese challenges to U.S. power is a common dilemma. Should the United States accept that other major powers should have some kind of zone of influence in their neighborhoods? The idea of “spheres of influence” is currently so unfashionable in Washington that it has even led Secretary of State John Kerry to declare that the Monroe Doctrine no longer applies in the Americas. Not so. The diffusion of economic power around the world—combined with simple common sense—suggests a different verdict, which is that some accommodation of the idea of “spheres of influence” is necessary to lessen the risk of conflict. The United States has made concessions to this principle, in the past, by accepting Beijing’s objectionable “One China” rhetoric over Taiwan. Some of America’s allies now believe the United States should go further to accommodate Chinese power in Beijing’s backyard. (One British minister was thus recently overheard saying that it was inevitable that China would dominate the South China Sea, adding, “The clue is in the name.”)

The “spheres of influence” question raises a broader issue about the extent to which Americans should attempt to see the world through Chinese or Russian eyes, if only to better understand the likely direction of their foreign policies. Anybody who has spent time in Moscow or Beijing will encounter the firmly held view that it is the United States that is the real revisionist power in world politics. The Putin government has persistently argued that Washington, not Moscow, is undermining global order by sponsoring its own brand of regime change in countries such as Ukraine and Syria. The Chinese government shares the Russian suspicion of Western NGOs as the potential advance guard of U.S.-sponsored subversion—a view that was given a significant boost by prodemocracy demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2014.

There is obviously a strong element of propaganda in these claims from Moscow and Beijing. But both the Russian and the Chinese governments also seem genuinely to fear that, unless they push back against U.S. power, they too might ultimately fall victim to American-backed regime change. Understanding this fear need not involve conceding a “sphere of influence,” at least not overtly. But it could affect the kind of rhetoric—and even actions—that the United States chooses to deploy in future regional crises.

The vision of simultaneous challenges to U.S. power in three different crucial arenas has also fuelled one of the oldest debates in the framing of U.S. foreign policy, reviving the arguments about U.S. credibility that were a recurrent feature of the Cold War. President Obama’s critics both at home and abroad have argued that weakness in the White House has damaged American credibility and so helped to make the world a more dangerous place. At times it has indeed seemed as if President Obama has the mentality of a high-minded professor who has discovered that international politics unfortunately still resembles a school playground in a rough area.

It is certainly true that perceptions of strength and weakness matter in global politics. So any sense that U.S. power has been successfully challenged in one part of the world, probably does encourage challenges elsewhere. So, for example, Obama’s decision, if that is the proper word, not to follow through on his threat to bomb Syria after the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in 2013 was widely noted and discussed in capitals all over the world. Obama’s fumbling may well have encouraged both Russia and China to be more assertive in their own neighborhoods. The vision of a Middle East that is falling apart is further unsettling both Europe and Asia by raising questions about U.S. power and the durability of international borders. Even some American strategists who have long argued that the United States should “rebalance” its foreign policy towards Asia and do less in the Middle East are now having second thoughts, believing that a perception of U.S. retreat in the Middle East is undermining U.S. power in Asia.

However, while the credibility argument contains some truth, its implication that the United States must always respond firmly to challenges to American power is bogus. Those who worry that U.S. power rests on the nation’s willingness always to enforce its red lines are taking much too narrow a view of what “credibility” means for a great power. The willingness to honor security commitments is just one element. Not making terrible mistakes in foreign policy is another crucial part of credibility—as is the preservation of a strong economy and an attractive society. The biggest blows to U.S. global power and prestige since 2000 were self-inflicted ones—the Iraq war and the financial crisis of 2008. Neither had anything to do with an unwillingness to defend a red line or a reluctance to fire off cruise missiles.

Indeed, one key lesson of Iraq was that ill-conceived military intervention can be far more damaging to U.S. power than any hesitancy about the use of force. In fact, arguably the two biggest dents to American global standing in half a century both flowed from mistaken military interventions, with Iraq repeating some of the damage done by Vietnam. By contrast, the biggest triumph for U.S. foreign policy—the collapse of the Soviet empire—was achieved without a shot being fired. For neoconservatives, Ronald Reagan is the epitome of a strong president—just as Jimmy Carter, and now Obama, epitomize weakness. Yet while Reagan certainly increased defense spending, he was very wary of actually deploying troops. The boldest mission for the military under Reagan was the invasion of Grenada, population ninety thousand. When a 1983 bombing in Lebanon killed 241 U.S. servicemen, Reagan pulled American troops out. The aerial bombardment of Libya during the Reagan years was a short punitive strike, with no thought of regime change. In the end, the strength that mattered in the Reagan years was a domestic economic revival, which helped to restore U.S. confidence and prestige at a time when the Soviet economy was falling apart.

Obama has certainly grasped the point that U.S. global strength ultimately rests on the strength of its economy—witness his oft-repeated insistence that America needs to concentrate on “nation-building at home.” The rise and fall of other global hegemons in the past century reinforces the point. The decline in the power of Britain, France and the Soviet Union was caused by the fact that their economies were too weak to sustain their international commitments. In all three cases, the cost of fighting wars had sapped the nation. The USSR’s intervention in Afghanistan was one of the final nails in its coffin. Britain’s ability to sustain an empire was, in effect, ended by the costs of the Second World War. And the strength of postwar France was undermined by ill-fated wars in Algeria and Indochina. With China soon to surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy, America cannot assume that it is able to afford to make costly military mistakes long into the future.

The Syrian crisis is a classic hard case—with strong arguments on both sides of the debate about whether the United States should have intervened more robustly. But the recent history of American military interventions in the Middle East suggests that Obama’s instinctive caution is amply justified. A fourteen-year involvement in Afghanistan has failed to achieve a conclusive defeat of the Taliban. In Iraq, eight years and many thousands of Iraqi, American and allied deaths failed to establish a stable polity. The overthrow of the el-Qaddafi regime in Libya, after a NATO bombing campaign with America “leading from behind,” has left the country an anarchic wreck. This track record of sustained failure makes Obama’s distaste for yet another military engagement—this time in Syria—easy to comprehend.

Outside the Middle East, Obama’s caution about the risks of military conflict with China and Russia seems entirely appropriate given the stakes involved. On a host of global issues—from the management of international finance to nuclear proliferation and climate change—America has no option but to deal with China and Russia. Seeking to preserve a working relationship with Beijing, and even Moscow, is not weak. It is simply imperative. The credibility argument also fails to take into account the extent to which regional disputes, although part of a connected global picture, also have distinct local characteristics that may dictate very different responses, in different places. Dealing with the sensitivities of a declining power like Russia is likely to demand a different approach from handling the muscle flexing of a rising power, such as China. In the Russian case, time and economics are on the side of the West. That is much less clearly the case when it comes to China.

For all the accusations of weakness, it is also not true that America has been averse to using force under any circumstances in recent years. The expansion of drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere displayed a ruthlessness that should satisfy the most tough-minded of hawks. And although Obama steered a wobbly course in Syria and Iraq, he has in fact used military force in the bombing campaign against Islamic State. America remains the preeminent military power in the world, and its rivals remain well aware of its long history of armed interventions.

However, the combination of the presidential election campaign and the terrorist attacks in Paris is once again increasing the pressure on the United States to escalate its military involvement in the Middle East. Even after a long record of military failure in the region, the rhetoric of “toughness” is still hugely tempting for the leading presidential candidates—including Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio. But President Obama should not abandon his innate caution by plunging deeper into the Syrian morass. Over the long run, greater caution and deliberation before taking military action need not detract from American credibility. On the contrary, they may help to preserve it.

Gideon Rachman is the chief foreign-affairs columnist at the Financial Times.

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/preserving-american-power-after-obama-14651?page=4