Our foreign policy debates today exceed in intensity those of the past four generations. This is not to say our debates are nastier—they have always been impolite—but rather that they cut to the core of the purpose of American foreign policy in a way that more recent debates have not. At the most basic level, the issue under question is whether the US should have a leading role in the world or instead revert to a more “restrained” approach that would pursue a narrower set of interests, thereby reducing our military and diplomatic commitments abroad.
This latter broad approach has gained considerable traction in recent years. Its ascendancy is due in no small part to the dramatic failures of our foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, which its advocates submit as undeniable evidence of the need for substantial reform. These “forever wars” are seen as America’s Sicilian expedition—hubristic enterprises that betray a democracy and empire that has stretched itself too thin.
Memories of Iraq and Afghanistan are rightly seared into the minds of our policymakers as cautionary tales of imperial hubris. We ought to have learned that military prowess is no indication of political wisdom, that adversaries cannot always be eliminated, that societies are not easily remade. But it is a regrettable misapplication of these lessons and an abuse of history to suggest that America must give up its hegemonic status and moral leadership as a consequence of its failures in these two countries. Far from representing the crescendo of our foreign policy tradition, Iraq and Afghanistan stand out as anomalies. Our response should not be to turn away from our post-World War II legacy because of these overreaches, but to return to its true and more noble course.
The Restraint School
Advocates of restraint argue that Iraq and Afghanistan revealed a foreign policy elite that is infatuated with martial strength. The most cynical interpretation sees this unspecified elite as a corrupt cabal, whose members are beneficiaries of a closed-loop system in which national security and intelligence professionals cash in on high-paying lobbying jobs where they enjoy privileged access to Congress and the Pentagon. This “deep state” uses this access to secure high-dollar contracts to build shiny new weapons of questionable utility. As a result, they see war as a cash cow that’s good for business even if it endangers American interests and lives. A more generous interpretation posits this elite as perfectly patriotic and pure in intention, but as suffering from groupthink. Its members are nourished—or indoctrinated—by exaggerated narratives of American foreign policy grandeur that portray our military as a vanguard of liberty that has saved the world from the forces of evil at least twice. They are an unaccountable “clerisy” that worships the footsteps of men like George Kennan and George Marshall.
Nefarious or naïve, initiates of this elite (or, if you will, the military industrial complex) are cloistered in Washington, DC, far away from average American citizens. Their distance from the heartland obfuscates their interpretation of the national interest, compelling them to exaggerate the importance of goings-on in the far corners of the world, prioritizing these events above the concerns of Americans, from grocery prices to natural disasters. As Andrew Bacevich, a leading voice in this movement, puts it,“For the Pentagon, this means that freedom of navigation in the South China Sea takes precedence over wildfires, hurricanes, floods, pandemics, and porous borders here at home, not to mention quelling the occasional insurrection.” Rory Stewart—whose views are more nuanced than Bacevich’s—similarly invokes the plight of local communities, like my own home of Eastern Kentucky, which he claims are ignored at the expense of a more globally minded foreign policy.
To correct course, advocates of restraint target the United States’ massive military and our global presence. In particular, they call for dramatic cuts to our military spending, reductions or elimination of forward troop deployments in Europe, the Middle East (and even Asia), a commitment to hard limits on our nuclear arsenal, and a general preference for diplomatic engagement with and accommodation of perceived adversaries.
The restraint school is far from new. There has always been a strain in American political discourse that is skeptical of concentration of military power and outright hostile to projecting military force abroad. In his book Special Providence, Walter Russell Mead described this impulse as the Jeffersonian school, embodied by such men as Robert Taft and John Quincy Adams. Popular through much of American history, it was largely confined to the margins after President Eisenhower made internationalism backed up by military might a bipartisan consensus. It has gained renewed strength in recent years, however, in part because of the dramatic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The argument of the restraint movement would be more compelling if Iraq and Afghanistan represented the logical end point of America’s foreign policy trajectory. But they simply do not.
According to Bacevich, Iraq and Afghanistan should have been to America what the Suez Crisis was to the British Empire: a wake-up call that forced the latter to severely curtail its role in the world and the military that supported it. “But the US foreign policy establishment has refused to move on, clinging to the myth that what the world needs is more American military power.” Even President Biden, who ultimately withdrew troops from Afghanistan and refused to send them to Ukraine, did not forsake the “fundamental belief in the enduring efficacy of American military power.”
It should not be surprising that such dramatic failures have bred widespread skepticism of the value or necessity of the American military industrial complex. In hindsight, it is hard to believe that serious people ever thought that the United States had the power or will to transform these countries into thriving, yet alone liberal democratic, societies. After all, neither country had strong institutions to refurbish or political cultures with experience in democratic processes, nor was there reason to believe that indigenous populations would welcome American forces as liberators instead of invaders. More importantly, the wars were incredibly costly, both in terms of resources and in terms of American prestige. The Cost of War Project at Brown University estimates that the United States spent over $8 trillion in its post-9/11 wars.
Correcting the Narrative
But Bacevich’s argument, and the argument of the restraint movement in general, would be more compelling if Iraq and Afghanistan represented the logical end point of America’s foreign policy trajectory after World War II. But they simply do not. Far from being the “apex,” Iraq and Afghanistan stand out precisely because they were such unique cases and stark aberrations from previous strategy.
Our post-WWII foreign policy was bold, to be sure. It sought nothing less than the eventual defeat of the communist empire and the military and economic security of democratic countries. Its orientation, however, was defensive in nature. It did not seek to forcibly transform the world into a democratic order, but rather to sustain freedom where it was under threat and to promote it via soft power where it could. It did not seek out monsters to destroy, but defended against them where it could. To be sure, there were overextensions and moral failures (e.g., Vietnam and Chile). But on the whole, as President Reagan noted, “Historians looking back at our time will note the consistent restraint and peaceful intentions of the West.”
This general pattern continued into the 1990s. Immediately following the high of victory in the Cold War, our country was far more selective of the conflicts in which it inserted itself and limited in its objectives than the restraint narrative would suggest.
In the Gulf War, President George H. W. Bush exercised laudable discretion, pursuing a mission with a clearly defined objective of removing Iraqi forces from Kuwait while refusing to expand the mission after decisive victory. Somalia stands out as a military intervention into a conflict of minimal strategic importance, but even here, the intervention was limited to ensuring famine relief aid was not being stolen by warlords; it was not an attempt to build a country or forcibly spread liberalism. Our failure there also prompted immediate reconsideration of humanitarian interventions, expressed in the restrained stipulations of Presidential Decision Directive (PDD)-25. Following PDD-25, the United States did nothing to prevent the Rwandan Genocide in 1994 and only reluctantly took part in airstrikes to stop ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in 1995. Even Anthony Lake’s argument for “Democratic Enlargement” called for assisting democracy to grow where there was demand for it and where it was in our interests to do so. It was explicitly not a “democratic crusade.” These are hardly the actions of an unhinged ideological power forcing its vision of justice on the world.
The United States preserved the civilized world by countering aggression with aggression, by standing firmly by our allies, and threatening overwhelming force against our adversaries.
However, if Iraq and Afghanistan were not the logical conclusion of American foreign policy, what were they? There are two interrelated factors that help to explain America’s actions in the early 2000s. First, the US suffered the worst attack on the homeland in its history on 9/11, an attack perpetrated by an enemy the nature of which the country had limited experience combatting. It is difficult to overestimate the sense of fear and paranoia following the collapse of the Twin Towers—and this paranoia was not limited to small town biddies. This attack called for a response, the intensity of which was catalyzed by the second factor: the United States in 2001 was an uncontested global power. Twenty years ago, China was still far from approaching the status of peer competitor, with an economy more than ten times smaller than what it enjoys today. Russia, meanwhile, was still recovering from the fall of the USSR and was perceived by many to be progressing towards a cooperative partnership with the United States. In such a context, muscular reaction could be executed without serious consideration to international backlash. These two factors—9/11 and the unipolar moment—were more determinant of the American response than was its Cold War legacy of international leadership.
It is important that we understand the weight of these factors when assessing the legacy of America’s post-9/11 foreign policy precisely because they are no longer present today. We are now in a multipolar world where the risk of America engaging in militarized nation-building—a practice already at odds with the full legacy of American foreign policy—is even less likely to occur than it was in the years before 9/11. Reducing our military’s strategic edge on the basis of a questionable narrative of our unipolar excess is simply not appropriate in a more competitive world where our adversaries are actively expanding their arsenals.
There is a tendency among partisans of restraint to overestimate the peaceful nature of world affairs. They often argue that Putin was “provoked,” that Iran is not expansionist, that China aspires to regional, not global, leadership. Their naivete is, paradoxically, proof of America’s success in the Cold War. Our efforts during that generational struggle yielded some of the most laudable diplomatic achievements since the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century. Europe saw an eighty-year peace, democracies thrived, and commerce flowed. Historic aggressors became prosperous allies. Most important of all, an ideological contest between nuclear powers ended peacefully with chants of liberty. The legacy of that conflict is not one of a cavalier cowboy spreading democracy at gunpoint. Instead, the United States preserved the civilized world by countering aggression with aggression, by standing firmly by our allies, and by threatening overwhelming force against our adversaries.
Having kept the monsters at bay for so long, we seem to forget that they remain, lurking in the deep. I commend the restraint school’s desire to reach diplomatic understanding with adversaries. But should there be any hope for such engagement to be effective in prompting responsible action, they would do well to remember George Kennan’s advice: “You have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet armed force in the background.”
