Dear subscribers, as we watch the unfolding situation in Afghanistan, I thought it might be interesting to highlight some dimensions to US grand strategy as it was formulated in the early days of the Bush administration. And to do that, I want to center the perspective of Condoleezza Rice who served as national security advisor from 2001-2005 before serving as Secretary of State (2005-2009.)
While I am critical of many of the leading influences in the Bush administration, and am especially critical of the choice to invade Iraq, I think that Condi Rice was and is a great leader with insights that cut across the idealist/realist divides. Here is Rice speaking directly to that point:
There is an old argument between the so-called "realistic" school of foreign affairs and the "idealistic" school. To oversimplify, realists downplay the importance of values and the internal structures of states, emphasizing instead the balance of power as the key to stability and peace. Idealists emphasize the primacy of values, such as freedom and democracy and human rights in ensuring that just political order is obtained. As a professor, I recognize that this debate has won tenure for and sustained the careers of many generations of scholars. As a policymaker, I can tell you that these categories obscure reality. In real life, power and values are married completely.
I think that Rice’s formulation of grand strategy provides a great starting place for thinking through what we got right or wrong about our broad foreign policy approach in the last 20 years and across several administrations, leading up to this particular moment. And let me put my cards on the table. I think Iraq was a blunder. I think Afghanistan was necessary and largely successful. And I think that leaving Afghanistan is a colossal mistake - at least in the way that the Biden administration has gone about it.
Above all, I believe that we are living through a transitional period in US grand strategy where there is no longer a dominant Washington Consensus. Trump was the great disruptor (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst) and I see Biden as closer to Trump than to Obama. In a 2000 Foreign Affairs article (that I quote from later), Condi criticized the outgoing Clinton administration for lacking a clear and consistent foreign policy agenda, writing that, “every issue has been taken on its own terms—crisis by crisis, day by day.” I hope the same will not prove true of the Biden administration. And in any event, I think having a clear view of the previous consensus in order to sift through the ideas to see which have merit is a good foundation for creating the next such lasting bipartisan consensus.
Excerpts from Condi Rice
January/February 2000 - Foreign Affairs Article
I want to start with this Foreign Affairs article that Rice published while she was an advisor to Bush prior to his inauguration as president. The theme of the article is promoting the national interest, and Condi begins by noting that “The United States has found it exceedingly difficult to define its ‘national interest’ in the absence of Soviet power.”
Here’s the opening frame, complete with the invoking of the “right side of history”:
“The process of outlining a new foreign policy must begin by recognizing that the United States is in a remarkable position. Powerful secular trends are moving the world toward economic openness and—more unevenly—democracy and individual liberty. Some states have one foot on the train and the other off. Some states still hope to find a way to decouple democracy and economic progress. Some hold on to old hatreds as diversions from the modernizing task at hand. But the United States and its allies are on the right side of history.”
Rice links the Clinton administration to the Wilson administration, and critiques both as holding to the wrong belief that “the United States is exercising power legitimately only when it is doing so on behalf of someone or something else.” And she further argues that national interest should be paramount to universal humanitarian aims: “To be sure, there is nothing wrong with doing something that benefits all humanity, but that is, in a sense, a second-order effect.”
And here are the specific priorities that Rice - prior to 9/11 - outlines for the administration:
* to ensure that America's military can deter war, project power, and fight in defense of its interests if deterrence fails;
* to promote economic growth and political openness by extending free trade and a stable international monetary system to all committed to these principles, including in the western hemisphere, which has too often been neglected as a vital area of U.S. national interest;
* to renew strong and intimate relationships with allies who share American values and can thus share the burden of promoting peace, prosperity, and freedom;
* to focus U.S. energies on comprehensive relationships with the big powers, particularly Russia and China, that can and will mold the character of the international political system; and
* to deal decisively with the threat of rogue regimes and hostile powers, which is increasingly taking the forms of the potential for terrorism and the development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
None of that is particularly new to us. But one other theme I want to highlight is Rice’s early concern about “loss of focus on the mission of the armed forces.” She asks, “What does it mean to deter, fight, and win wars and defend the national interest?” That is a question well worth asking, and it is my personal belief that 9/11 fundamentally sidelined the effort to really sit with that question as a basis for grand strategy.
Because just consider these quotes:
“If the United States is not prepared to address the underlying political conflict and to know whose side it is on, the military may end up separating warring parties for an indefinite period. Sometimes one party (or both) can come to see the United States as the enemy. Because the military cannot, by definition, do anything decisive in these "humanitarian" crises, the chances of misreading the situation and ending up in very different circumstances are very high. This was essentially the problem of ‘mission creep’ in Somalia.”
“The president must remember that the military is a special instrument. It is lethal, and it is meant to be. It is not a civilian police force. It is not a political referee. And it is most certainly not designed to build a civilian society.”
“It is one thing to have a limited political goal and to fight decisively for it; it is quite another to apply military force incrementally, hoping to find a political solution somewhere along the way.”
“Using the American armed forces as the world's "911" will degrade capabilities, bog soldiers down in peacekeeping roles, and fuel concern among other great powers that the United States has decided to enforce notions of "limited sovereignty" worldwide in the name of humanitarianism.”
So how the hell do we get from explicitly worrying about mission creep and the conflation of national interest with open-ended conflict to…well, 20 years of mission creep and open-ended conflict?
Let’s skip to 2002: less than a year after the September 11 attacks, here’s what Condi Rice is saying about US grand strategy…
April 29, 2002 - Speech to John Hopkins University:
Several themes stand out to me from this speech. First, there is the fairly clear mission statement as to what our presence in Afghanistan was designed to accomplish. And note that even this early into the war, the framing was that we were already largely successful in accomplishing that goal (though granted, at this point, we still hadn’t killed that son of a bitch, bin Laden.)
“The results speak for themselves: al Qaeda has been deprived of its home base; its leadership is on the run; many of its operatives have been captured or killed; the Taliban regime has been routed; Afghanistan has been transformed from a terrorist-sponsored state into a country led by people who are trying to create a better future.”
“…There can be no distinction between terrorists and those who harbor them. So in addition to pursuing al Qaeda, we have also pursued the Taliban and the government of Afghanistan, as we knew that they had shared responsibilities for the terrorist attacks.”
But then later in the speech, we see the seeds of mission creep:
“We need to help Afghanistan build up its political institutions, its economic institutions and its civil society. Building a nation is not an American military task -- it is a joint project, a long-term project between the Afghan people and the international community.”
And that mission creep is based on historical analogy to the US during World War 2:
“This is, then, a period akin to 1945 to 1947, when American leadership expanded the number of free and democratic states -- Japan and Germany among the great powers -- to create a new balance of power that favored freedom.”
And then finally, we are left with an uncomfortable internal contradiction between not wanting to impose values, but also wanting to impose values:
“America cannot impose its vision on the world -- yet, we will use our influence to favor freedom. There are right and wrong choices and right and wrong acts. And governments are making them every day for their own people and for the people of the world. We can never let the intricacies of cloistered debate -- with its many hues of gray and nuance -- obscure the need to speak and act with moral clarity. We must recognize that some states or leaders will choose wrongly. We must recognize that truly evil regimes will never be reformed. And we must recognize that such regimes must be confronted, not coddled.”
“Nations must decide which side they are on in the fault line that divides civilization from terror. They must decide whether to embrace the paradigm of progress: democracy and freedom and human rights, and clean limited government. Together, with others, we can help people and nations make positive choices as they seek a better future, and we can deter those who want to take away a better future for others.”
So again, even prior to the invasion of Iraq (2003) and in the midst of what was then still a largely positive situation in Afghanistan, we can already start to see the vantage point shift toward unforced errors in judgment. That gets even more pronounced in a speech given later that year.
October 1, 2002: Discussion of National Security Strategy (NY)
The first thing I want to note about this speech is that inasmuch as there is attention to the theoretical, it is largely one that invokes the spirit of Fukyama’’s “end of history” theory which suggests that liberalism has been vindicated as the final form of politics. It’s interesting to ask how much Condi is in agreement or disagreement with Fukuyama when she seems to remain agnostic in statements like this:
“The fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center were the bookends of a long transition period. During that period those of us who think about foreign policy for a living searched for an overarching, explanatory theory or framework that would describe the new threats and the proper response to them. Some said that nations and their militaries were no longer relevant, only global markets knitted together by new technologies. Others foresaw a future dominated by ethnic conflict. And some even thought that in the future the primary energies of America's Armed Forces would be devoted to managing civil conflict and humanitarian assistance.
In this speech, Condi outlines US grand strategy along three main pillars:
“We will defend the peace by opposing and preventing violence by terrorists and outlaw regimes.”
“We will preserve the peace by fostering an era of good relations among the world's great powers.”
“And we will extend the peace by seeking to extend the benefits of freedom and prosperity across the globe.”
Notice how proactive this vision is, not simply “defending” and “preserving” but also “extending.” It is clear that embedded into this framework is the belief that the best defense is offense. Here’s what that means in the context of the War on Terror:
“We will break up terror networks, hold to account nations that harbor terrorists, and confront aggressive tyrants holding or seeking nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that might be passed to terrorist allies. These are different faces of the same evil. Terrorists need a place to plot, train, and organize. Tyrants allied with terrorists can greatly extend the reach of their deadly mischief. Terrorists allied with tyrants can acquire technologies allowing them to murder on an ever more massive scale. Each threat magnifies the danger of the other. And the only path to safety is to effectively confront both terrorists and tyrants.”
And naturally that leads directly to Iraq. Literally, her very next sentence: “For these reasons, President Bush is committed to confronting the Iraqi regime.” Big yikes.
One other thing I’ll note though is that even as early as 2002, though war on terror dominated the conceptual landscape, great power competition does make an appearance, though in a markedly different fashion than the emerging consensus on China and Russia:
“We have an historic opportunity to break the destructive pattern of great power rivalry that has bedeviled the world since rise of the nation state in the 17th century. Today, the world's great centers of power are united by common interests, common dangers, and -- increasingly -- common values. The United States will make this a key strategy for preserving the peace for many decades to come.”
As Russia and China both seek strategic position in the Middle East - militarily and through trade presence, it will be interesting to see how the US withdraw heightens the great power competition that Condi Rice was so optimistic that we could keep at bay.
Concluding Thoughts:
I’m pessimistic, angry, and sad about the state of affairs right now. And I’m also grimly certain that if the US continues to withdraw from the world stage, the powers that replace us will be increasingly hostile - not just to our values, but also to our interests, and to the values and interests of our allies. People scoff on Twitter at the idea that US weakness endangers Taiwan or the Baltic states, for example. But I don’t think these are fears that should be dismissed. And whatever you think about Biden’s decision on Afghanistan, I think it’s clear that the whole world, friends and foes alike, is watching to see what the new consensus will be.
But we have to learn from our recent past. We have to be crystal clear that what started as a sharply focused intervention in Afghanistan - set against the backdrop of an administration that was initially skeptical of nation-building in the name of universal values - quickly became a clusterfuck driven by special interest groups, mismanagement, and lack of continued unifying strategy. And we also have to be clear about how we let our fears and our desire for revenge (along with other unsavory motives) dictate a lot of our actions.
I don’t have a clear road map for what comes next. But I pray that whatever challenges face us tomorrow, we will be ready and willing to act with responsibility and prudence, with courage, and with a clear sense of our obligations as a superpower.
What I Am Reading Elsewhere:
In the New York Times, Malala Yousafzai, the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate, with an important op-ed: I Survived the Taliban. I Fear for My Afghan Sisters
In The Atlantic: The Bill That Could Truly, Actually Bring Back U.S. Manufacturing
We live in the golden age of Econ substacks. One a new entry - Fullstack Economics - here’s an argument for why demographics (aging population) explain the perpetually low interest rates we’ve seen.
Every once in a while, I read a piece of research that forces me to fundamentally readjust all my priors. This Brookings article on food insecurity and the limits of the concept of "food deserts" by Caroline George and Adie Tomer is one such piece.
CNN: Census release shows America is more diverse and more multiracial than ever