Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of US Primacy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018)
The fall of the Berlin Wall was to have ushered in a rethinking of America’s role in world affairs. Having vanquished her greatest adversary without firing a shot, the United States could finally heed George Washington’s farewell advice and disengage from unnecessary overseas ventures. America’s isolationist yearning dates back to its founding and, as the world’s lone great power, American leaders finally had an opportunity to reverse the post–World War II trend toward global military expansion.
Instead, the number of American interventions and global commitments between 1992 and 2017 totaled four times as many as those from 1948 to 1991. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, successive American administrations sought to push democratic ideals, expand international treaties, and maintain enough forces and bases oversees to bolster a liberal, rule-based order.
The results of such grand ambition? Less than thirty years after the end of the Cold War, the United States no longer sits atop a unipolar world. The American military now maintains a presence in more than 140 countries. Despite $6 trillion spent on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, neither country is on a path to great success. Since 1992, America’s national-security leadership has switched hands multiple times, but the primary urge toward the global spread of liberalism has remained consistent.
Throughout this period, Stephen Walt, a renowned foreign-policy expert who teaches international relations at Harvard University, has served as a critical voice against the foreign-policy establishment. Walt has been a critic of conventional international-relations thinking since the release of his 1987 book The Origins of Alliances. That book challenges balance-of-power theory and makes the essential case for international-relations realism, arguing that states should aggregate power and develop short-term cooperation agreements against rising threats. Since then, he has published controversial books and articles arguing against what he views as America’s impulsive and wrongheaded support of Israel and proclivity for wasteful ventures in the Middle East.
Walt’s newest book, The Hell of Good Intentions, may be his best, most important work to date. In it, he recounts the aforementioned post–Cold War foreign-policy missteps of the United States. He holds the nation’s foreign policy establishment—which he defines as senior military leaders, defense officials, senior members of the CIA and Department of State, think tanks, and national security media—to account for perpetuating a series of failures.
The book is a courageous effort in which Walt names names, identifying the reporters, analysts, and administration officials who maintain a prominent perch in mainstream foreign policy despite histories of blunders. Not mentioned in Good Intentions is that the author has a better track record than the foreign policy “experts” he criticizes. In 2002 and early 2003, he argued against invading Iraq and remaining in Afghanistan, a position for which Walt was ridiculed at the time. Meanwhile, some of the advocates for those wars, such as Bill Kristol, Jane Harman, and Richard Haass, all of whom publicly predicted a short conflict in Iraq with a low-cost postwar reconstruction, now have more prominent roles as foreign-policy analysts on cable news.
Walt also argues that the US military no longer holds itself to account to the degree the country should demand. Here, Walt glosses over the complexities involved in assigning blame to military leadership for failing to reach policy objectives that may be infeasible. It is certainly true that our military leaders have little to show for the remarkable blood and treasure spent in the Middle East over the past eighteen years. Still, a more nuanced discussion of assignment of blame than the author provides is warranted.
In the penultimate chapter, titled “How Not to Fix US Foreign Policy,” Walt turns his criticism to the current administration. The author alleges that despite an unconventional public display and a series of promises to drain swamps, refocus on internal problems, and disentangle American forces and money from foreign wars, the Trump foreign-policy team has conformed to recent tradition. Here, he has a point: there have been no significant troop reductions in Iraq or Afghanistan. In fact, the administration has authorized a series of new deployments to Saudi Arabia. Despite the “America First” rhetoric, the current National Defense Strategy, released in January 2018, calls for the United States military to maintain global commitments and favorable balances of power everywhere.
In its final chapter, The Hell of Good Intentions offers a set of clear-eyed policy prescriptions the United States can take to recover from its post–Cold War missteps and allow for a more prosperous peace. Walt is not an isolationist. His is a neorealist constructionist view of international relations, and he advocates a policy in which military force is used only in response to direct threats to American interests. Short-duration, limited-focus troop deployments should replace nation-building and long-term commitments of US forces. This is a Nixonian view of American force, in which a great power uses favored regional forces to halt the ascendance of potentially hostile states. Once a rising threat is subdued, American troops return to the homeland, leaving regime change and long-term occupation to others.
While Walt has a clear agenda in the book, he is also fair. The foreign-policy establishment has had successes since the close of the Cold War (the Nunn-Lugar Program, establishment of the World Trade Organization, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, for example) and the author points those out.
Anyone with an interest in the development and implementation of foreign policy should read The Hell of Good Intentions. In this reviewer’s opinion, Stephen Walt has written one of the most important books on foreign policy under the current administration.
Lt. Col. Joe Buccino is an Army public affairs officer and a resident student at the US Army War College. He previously served as spokesman for the secretary of defense, communications director for the deputy secretary of defense, and communications director for the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Cpl. Benjamin Cossel, Ohio Army National Guard
From the third to last paragraph of our article above:
"Once a rising threat is subdued, American troops return to the homeland, leaving regime change and long-term occupation to others."
The potential problems that we face with this line of thinking, this would seem to be much the same as the potential problems that we faced in dealing with the recent two articles here on MWI discussing "punitive expeditions?"
These such potential problems possibly being addressed in the MWI article entitled: "HOW LT. GEN. H.R. MCMASTER, THE NEW NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR, THINKS ABOUT FUTURE WAR" by John Amble on February 22, 2017, and as per two of LTG McMaster's "Four Fallacies of Future War" found therein:
"2. The Zero Dark 30 Fallacy:
Like the vampire fallacy, the Zero Dark 30 fallacy 'elevates an important military capability . . . to the level of strategy'—in this case, military raids. While attractive to decision-makers for a variety of reasons, raids can both be immensely successful tactically and, unfortunately, look to be a viable substitute to the conventional joint capabilities that are integral to effective strategy.
'Because they are operations of short duration, limited purpose, and planned withdrawal,' McMaster writes, 'raids are often unable to affect the human and political drivers of armed conflict or make sufficient progress toward achieving sustainable outcomes consistent with vital interests.'
3. The Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom Fallacy:
This fallacy, which earns its name from the tendency of Marlin Perkins, host of the 1960s nature show Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, to rely on his assistant when an episode required close proximity to dangerous wildlife. Too often, McMaster argues, US forces operate as Perkins does, depending on proxy forces to do the dirty fighting on land.
Proxies are and will continue to be key to US military action in future wars, of course. 'There is no doubt that security force assistance, foreign internal defense, and combat advisory missions will increase in importance to national security,' McMaster acknowledges. 'It is difficult to imagine future operations that will not require Army forces to operate with multiple partners.' But relying on partners to play the central role in military operations is problematic for one very particular reason—'insufficient capabilities or lack of will based on incongruent interests'—a challenge that our recent history in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere shows is not easily overcome.
Possibly the manner in which we should consider such things as "how to waste a peace dividend;" maybe this should be viewed:
a. Less from the "threat"/"isolationist"/'retreat" perspective offered by our author above and
b. More from an "opportunity and responsibility to achieve a better peace" perspective?
In this regard, let us consider the United States' (and indeed the Soviet Union's) long-running "expansionist"/"transformative"/"converting" understanding of "a better peace," for example, as addressed by Hans Morgenthau in his 1967 "To Intervene or Not to Intervene:"
"The United States and the Soviet Union face each other not only as two great powers which in the traditional ways compete for advantage. They also face each other as the fountainheads of two hostile and incompatible ideologies, systems of government and ways of life, each trying to expand the reach of its respective political values and institutions and to prevent the expansion of the other. Thus the cold war has not only been a conflict between two world powers but also a contest between two secular religions. And like the religious wars of the seventeenth century, the war between communism and democracy does not respect national boundaries. It finds enemies and allies in all countries, opposing the one and supporting the other regardless of the niceties of international law. Here is the dynamic force which has led the two superpowers to intervene all over the globe, sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes openly, sometimes with the accepted methods of diplomatic pressure and propaganda, sometimes with the frowned-upon instruments of covert subversion and open force."
From this such "expansion of our way of life, our way of governance, etc., defines a better peace" perspective, thus,
a. To "waste a peace dividend," this:
b. Would be to fail to use the amazing opportunity presented by one's victory over one's ideological opponent — and the so-called "unipolar moment" that follows — to advance one's way of life, one's way of governance, one's values, etc., (a) throughout the world and (b) especially in those places where these such attributes were least present and, thus, most needed?
(Viewed from this such "waste" perspective, would not those who had fought and died during the Cold War have risen from their graves, and condemned us, if we [or the Soviets if they had won the Cold War] had not aggressively pursued such a "better peace" effort?)