The Pentagon's big old budget

 Stephen Wertheim speaks the truth: 

This is true about domestic priorities as well. I think it's weird, for example, that there is so much talk about having the military distribute a coronavirus vaccine. A country as prosperous as the United States has been should have a robust enough public health system to do that job, shouldn't it?

Does Donald Trump discredit the doves?

 Jeet Heer with an excellent observation:

My worry is that: Because of his attempts to portray himself as something of a dove -- even though that's arguable at best -- Trump will make it more difficult in mainstream politics to challenge Washington's hawkish consensus. The president's foreign policy incompetence and general terribleness will mean that if there is another leader who legitimately shrinks from using the hammer of the U.S. military to treat all challenges as a nail, they'll be tarred by association with Trump's rhetoric.

Maybe that's too hopeful, actually. It's difficult to position yourself for president in this country without buying into that hawkish consensus. The peaceniks are forever at a disadvantage.

The moral burdens of leaving Syria. (And why we should leave anyway.)

 Daniel Larison:

Andrew Bacevich recently commented on our government’s senseless policy in Syria: “So instead of a realistic policy defined by clear national interests, the United States drifts toward a confrontation with Russia in a place that virtually no American believes is worth dying for.” This “drift” is what happens when U.S. foreign policy operates as if on autopilot. Instead of deploying troops somewhere to achieve a specific end to advance an American interest, our policymakers come to see the deployments as ends in themselves. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the deployment serves a clear purpose or whether it is a wise use of resources. It evidently doesn’t matter whether it’s legal. Once the U.S. sends troops somewhere, it usually takes extraordinary effort to extract them later, and that has no effect on subsequent decisions to deploy them in new countries.

Correct. I'd add that deploying to countries like Syria creates a moral element to this flytrap effect: Once our troops are in a country and affecting the political landscape, we become morally responsible both for what happens while we are there -- and what happens as a result of our leaving. I think we should get out of Afghanistan, but I am distressed by what might happen to women in that country as a result. I think the U.S. has no business being in Syria, but it's also true that getting out screws the Kurds over. Those are lives lost and destroyed because we walked away. (I lost a friend, in fact, because I thought it correct to leave Syria -- he felt that doing so was a moral abomination because of the Kurds.)

The answer, as Larison suggests, is not to go to war in countries where American interests aren't all that clear in the first place. And I still think we should get out of Syria and Afghanistan. The advocates of a more humble foreign policy often find themselves having to justify the moral burden of non-interventionism in a way that hawks don't. But drifting toward a confrontation with Russia for no good reason could end up creating a higher moral cost -- in terms of shattered lives -- than leaving. Sometimes, when there are no good answers, the best answer is restraint.

The problem of humanitarian interventions

Something I've been wrestling with since I posted my opposition to the Uganda intervention is whether I could ever support an American military intervention on purely humanitarian grounds. I came of political age around the time of the Rwandan genocide, and I can say that it truly troubled my conscience at the time—and angered me greatly that the West stood by and watched while an entire region descended into hell. If my framework for supporting a military intervention wouldn't allow the United States to get involved, then two possibilities exist: The United States should never intervene on humanitarian grounds, or the framework doesn't work.

Spencer Ackerman today gets at the trouble inherent with humanitarian interventions conducted under a doctrine known as "Responsibility To Protect" on his blog today:

The uncomfortable truth is that a belief in human rights is a disruptive force in global affairs. It scrambles ideological boundaries and takes people down intellectual roads they did not anticipate travelling. It's why the Responsibility To Protect is a force for -- let's strip it of euphemism -- war. Not because, say, Ken Roth or Samantha Power are warmongers; that's absurd. But because the world, and America, has yet to come to terms with the obligations that human rights place on nations, particularly hegemonic ones.

To support the R2P seems like a recipe for endless war; to oppose it, a recipe for endless injustice and impunity. The responsible work of intellectuals and policymakers is to bridle it, to make it commensurate with American capabilities and American interests; to shape a world in which America is not the only nation burdened with enforcing it; and not to avoid the circumstances in which it conflicts with American capabilities and American interests.

Which is to say, once again, that there's no perfect framework for deciding to support or oppose an American military intervention. My framework is very much biased against military adventures of most sorts, which makes it also biased against humanitarian interventions. My problem: I still think the United States and the world should've done something a generation ago in Rwanda. Picking and choosing which holocausts to send troops to halt is tricky business. But it's also necessary.* The difference between Rwanda and Uganda may be mostly that the Rwandan genocide burned hotter, faster, and with much greater immediate loss of life. Is that enough of a distinction? It feels like it to me, but your mileage may vary.

* Necessary, presuming the United States retains its ability to project power virtually anywhere in the world. That's not a given, and if America retreats closer to home, then a lot of this calculation makes no difference. You can't go where you can't go.

Does intervening in Uganda meet the Mathis Test?

Ooh. Self-referential headlines are ugly, aren't they? But back when President Obama announced the United States would intervene in Libya's civil war, I set out a list of questions to help guide me through decisions on supporting or not supporting America's military interventions abroad. Now that Qaddafi is dead, it's a good time to apply those questions to America's latest intervention—the sending of 100 troops to Central Africa to aid the fight against the brutal Lord's Resistance Army.

Here are the questions, slightly revised:

A: Does the party against whom the United States is considering military action threaten U.S. security? No. The Lord's Resistance Army isn't attacking the United States or United States' interests. Now that the U.S. is getting involved, though, maybe that changes.

B: Is the party against whom the United States is considering action committing genocidal-levels of violence, such that even by the standards of war or civil war the conscience is shocked? Yes. The numbers are staggering. LRA's campaign of terror in Uganda has displaced 2 million people; the forces are said to have raped, mutilated, or abducted another 66,000 residents; and Michael Gerson's account is especially striking: "But (LRA leader Joseph) Kony’s crimes are vivid at close hand. When I was there in 2006, I talked to a boy forced by LRA rebels to execute his neighbors in order to break his ties with the past and to deaden his sympathy. I met another who was forced to bow in Kony’s presence — the rebel leader claims divinity — but who dared to look up in curiosity. The LRA soldiers took out one of the boy’s eyes in punishment." The conscience is shocked, and this violence is taking place on a widespread level to destabilize and horrify an entire region. It's important to note that humanitarian reasons—while significant—aren't as important as national security when weighing these questions. Answering "yes" here doesn't necessarily mean we should send the troops.

C: If the answer to (A) or (B) is "yes," are there non-military means that could effectively mitigate the threat? No. The Lord's Resistance Army is a non-state actor; sanctions wouldn't work in this case.

D: If the answer to (C) is "yes," do that. If the answer to (C) is "no," then: What is the desired end state of U.S. military action? A return to a previous status quo? Regime change? What? I'd have to say the death or capture of Joseph Kony. He claims divinity for himself; he runs the LRA as a cult of personality. Cut off the personality, and the cult is likely to be greatly diminished.

E: What is the worst-case scenario that could develop from U.S. military intervention? Is the scenario more or less threatening to U.S. security than the current threat? That LRA, which has ignored the U.S., becomes motivated to attack America and its interests because of the 100 U.S. troops that are helping track him down. From a security standpoint, the potential costs of blowback are more than the costs of doing nothing. But how likely is that blowback? We probably wouldn't know until the attack occurred.

F: Does the United States have the military and financial resources to bear the burdens of that worst-case scenario? Yes. At 100 troops, our footprint is light and the cost—as these things go—is unlikely to break the federal bank.

This series of questions doesn't produce a neat, mathematical "yes" or "no" answer. On the "for intervention" side, you have the serious of Kony's acts, the inability to address them through non-military means, and the relative cheapness of the operation from a U.S. perspective. On the "against intervention" side, though, you have the fact that Kony doesn't now threaten U.S. security—but that intervening raises the likelihood he will.

And that's, ultimately, why I come down against the U.S. deployment to Central Africa—though it's a closer call, in my mind, than the Libya intervention. The U.S. troops are supposedly going there on a training mission, to "advise" the African troops on how best to combat the LRA and pursue Kony; they only shoot if shot at. Being there makes it quite likely they'll be shot at, and shoot. At that point, we're at war, even if minor. To what good end?

The interesting thing about the deployment is that it is, apparently, an effort to help the countries of Central Africa help themselves, by training troops from those countries on how to pursue Kony and battle the LRA. That's going in the right direction. If there's a way to do that without putting armed U.S. troops in the field against this villain, I might well support that.

Final thought: This set of questions almost certainly leads to a U.S. foreign policy that is a good deal more risk-averse and less adventurous than we've had in the post-Cold War era. I'm OK with us. I want our leaders to clear a high bar before taking us to war.

Bag O' Books: "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War" by Andrew Bacevich

I'm trying to imagine what the world would look like if Andrew Bacevich ran the United States.

Every couple of years, Bacevich -- a retired Army colonel who is now a history professor at Boston U -- releases a new book that goes something like this: America is overextended and entirely too militarized. We need to live within our means, bring the troops home and start practicing a citizenship where all of us (and not just the one-half of one percent of us) serve as citizen soldiers, devoted to the common defense of our nation instead of power projection around the world. "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War" is another one of these books; Bacevich is a bit of a one-note Johnny -- but it's an interesting, angry, erudite note, and so I keep returning to him.

Instead of rooting him on, though, it might be good to ponder how things change if anybody in power took Bacevich's views seriously.

So what does the world look like if America took Bacevich's advice? Different. There would've been no Iraq War, nor a Vietnam War, nor Korea. (Bacevich is a Vietnam veteran.) We wouldn't have troops in Europe or the Middle East or Asia. I'm guessing that Hawaii and Alaska might not even have statehood status. We wouldn't be importing oil -- our standard of living, as a result, would look quite a bit different -- and we might not be enmeshed in Afghanistan right now, in part, because America's meddling in the rest of the world wouldn't have invited the "blowback" of 9/11.

We'd look a lot more like Switzerland, in other words.

All well and good, I suppose. But there's more than that. In Bacevich's world, maybe the United States doesn't get involved in World War I. That doesn't seem like such a bad deal -- what did Americans get out of that war, exactly? -- but maybe we wouldn't have entered World War II either. Or if we had, we wouldn't have kept troops in Europe during the Cold War, and maybe we would've left Communism ascendant in places that were relatively free during the postwar period.

Much of this is conjecture on my part. But Bacevich's basic idea is that the United States shouldn't be trying to dominate and shape the rest of the world to its liking -- that we should be looking inward, trying to create and perfect our own democracy as an example to the world, rather than a model that we try to push. We should be trying to fix Cleveland and Detroit, he repeatedly says, instead of Baghdad or Kabul.

This sounds isolationist, though Bacevich swears it isn't. And though it's a challenge to the worldview put forward by the Bill Kristol wing of the GOP -- which, in foreign affairs, is actually the only wing that matters -- it also strikes me as profoundly conservative. (Bacevich, despite the Amy Goodman blurb on this book, seems to identify as a conservative of the Ron Paulish variety; he has written for National Review and remains a contributor to American Conservative magazine.)

Conservatives have one pretty nifty insight: That government can't control all the outcomes of its actions, and so the bigger it gets and the more it does, the more problems it is likely to make -- and the more likely it is to infringe on the liberty of people to make their own way in the world. I don't completely buy into the argument, which at its most extreme would eliminate a safety net for many Americans, but I can't disregard it. The problem is that -- for many conservatives -- that insight ends at the shoreline. Many of the folks who root on the Tea Party marchers would say it's not up to the federal government to fix Cleveland or Detroit; somehow, though, many of them are sold on the ability of that same government to fix -- or, at least, repair to a reasonable enough state -- Kabul or Baghdad. They would fly the Gadsden Flag at home, but the American flag over foreign capitals. It's not just inconsistent; it's incomprehensible. At least Americans understand the language and culture and religion and politics of Detroit. We've made a lot of mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan because we didn't know the landscape like we should.

So what does America look like if Bacevich runs it? We're a smaller, probably less-rich place. (America's economic might being both the result and the foundation of our power projection around the world.) We're still rife with conflict -- because, hey, that's what happens in democracies. But maybe we're more civic-minded, more bonded to our neighbors -- and, maybe, a bit less vulnerable to the horrors of the world beyond. (How often to terrorists try to attack Switzerland, after all?) There's something simple and pure, and thus seductive, about this vision. And maybe we'll find out what it looks like in reality sooner than later. We can't afford to be the world's policeman anymore. It would be nicer if we could choose, wisely, that sort of future for ourselves. It looks like we'll have to bankrupt ourselves to it, instead. The result is likely to be unpleasant and wrenching. The good old days are probably over.