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Texas National Security Review

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Volume 4 • Issue 2 • Spring 2021

Print: ISSN 2576-1021Online: ISSN 2576-1153

09 From Citizen Soldier to Secular Saint: The Societal Implications of Military Exceptionalism Susan Bryant, Brett Swaney, Heidi Urben25 The Gulf War’s Afterlife: Dilemmas, Missed Opportunities, and the Post-Cold War Order Undone Samuel Helfont49 The Future of Sino-U.S. Proxy War Dominic Tierney75 Keeping Norms Normal: Ancient Perspectives on Norms in Civil-Military Relations Jim Golby, Hugh Liebert

The Scholar

Publisher:Ryan Evans

Editor-in-Chief:William Inboden, PhD

Executive Editor:Doyle Hodges, PhD

Managing Editor:Megan G. Oprea, PhD

Associate Editors:Galen Jackson, PhD Van Jackson, PhDStephen Tankel, PhD

Staff:

Designed by Cast From Clay, printed by Linemark

Chair:Adm. William McRaven, Ret.

Hon. Brad CarsonHon. Derek CholletAmb. Ryan CrockerHon. Eric Edelman, PhD Hon. John Hamre, PhD

Paul Lettow, JD, PhDHon. Michael LumpkinHon. William J. Lynn, JDDan RundeDavid Shedd

Hon. Kristen Silverberg, JDMichael Singh, MBAAdm. James G. Stavridis, Ret., PhDHon. Christine E. Wormuth

Policy and Strategy Advisory Board:

Chair, Editorial Board:Francis J. Gavin, PhD

Editor-in-Chief:William Inboden, PhD

Richard Betts, PhDTami Davis Biddle, PhDPhilip Bobbitt, JD, PhDHal Brands, PhDMiguel Centeno, PhDRobert Chesney, JDAudrey Kurth Cronin, PhDAnnika Culver, PhDAshley Deeks, JDPeter D. Feaver, PhDRosemary Foot, PhD, FBASir Lawrence Freedman, PhDShannon French, PhD

Stacie E. Goddard, PhDJim Golby, PhDJames Goldgeier, PhDSheena Greitens, PhDBeatrice Heuser, PhDMichael C. Horowitz, PhDRobert Jervis, PhDNina Kollars, PhDSarah Kreps, PhDMelvyn P. Leffler, PhDAdrian Lewis, PhDMargaret MacMillan, CC, PhDRose McDermott, PhD

Vipin Narang, PhDLien-Hang T. Nguyen, PhDSuzanne Nielsen, PhDElizabeth N. Saunders, PhDKori Schake, PhDKiron Skinner, PhDSarah Snyder, PhDBartholomew Sparrow, PhDKristina Spohr, PhDKeren Yarhi-Milo, PhDAmy Zegart, PhD

Editorial Board:

99 America’s Alliances After Trump: Lessons from the Summer of ‘69 Lindsey Ford, Zack Cooper117 U.S. National Security Strategy: Lessons Learned Paul Lettow

The Strategist

03 Revise! Francis J. Gavin

The Foundation

MASTHEAD TABLE OF CONTENTS

157 Competitive, Competent, Conservative: Internationalism After Trump Michael Singh

The Roundtable Feature

The Foundation Revise!

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In his introductory essay for Volume 4, Issue 2, the chair of our editorial board, Frank Gavin, emphasizes the importance of taking a second look at history and challenging our assumptions about the past.

Scholarship is not only about discovery of the new. It is also about challenging the old, or rather, what we think we al-ready know. This can be difficult, even

controversial, and never more so than when the subject being reexamined and revised is our own history. It is easy to forget that history is not sim-ply a recounting of what has happened, but also the way we decide to remember, recount, and make sense of the past.

We often hold stylized narratives of the past in our heads that we believe to be unassailable. Ask an intelligent observer to outline the story of America’s engagement with the world after 1945, and he or she might offer a clear, bifurcated story: There was the Cold War and the post-Cold War era. The Cold War would likely be identified as an uninterrupted geopolitical and ideological conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States that began soon after World War II was over and ended with the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989. The analyst might suggest that the United States prevailed by relentlessly pursuing the dec-ades-long strategy of containment, articulated by George Kennan in his 1946 “Long Telegram.” With the collapse of the Berlin Wall and eventually the Soviet Union itself, the United States rapid-ly switched, like the film The Wizard of Oz, from black and white to color and to something com-pletely different: America’s hegemonic, unipolar moment and the rise of liberal internationalism.

Upon closer examination, this seamless portray-al obscures as much as it reveals. Kennan’s version of political and economic containment was aban-doned as a failure in the early 1950s, replaced by a more muscular military posture that he spent the rest of his career disparaging. Two especially intense periods of confrontation when global war was a distinct possibility — 1949 to 1953 and 1958 to 1962 — were interposed between longer periods of simmering competition and occasional détente and even cooperation. Even as ensuing adminis-trations worked to craft comprehensive and effec-tive national security strategies, as Paul Lettow’s article in this issue ably chronicles, America’s pol-icies shifted while defense budgets rose and fell and rose again, in a rhythm driven as much by the

vicissitudes of domestic politics as by any coher-ent long-term plan. As late as 1979, few would have assessed that the United States was ahead in the competition with the Soviet Union, to say nothing of being poised to ultimately prevail, and as late as 1986, fewer still would have predicted the great rivalry would soon be over forever. The United States did not appear to be especially hegemonic in the early years of the post-Cold War era: U.S. economic prospects seemed uncertain and Ameri-can grand strategy stumbled, appearing ineffectual against such noted great-power political foes as the Somali rebels, Rwandan Hutus, Haiti, and Serbia.

Historical revisionism — the kind that dares us to challenge and interrogate strongly held assump-tions about the past — helps push against our nat-ural, if somewhat unhelpful, tendency toward ret-rospective or outcome bias: Since we know how a story like the Cold War ended, we can’t help but construct a neat narrative of inevitability. Revision-ism also allows us to complicate our understand-ing of chronology and periodization. The conven-tional narrative of postwar international relations and U.S. grand strategy focuses on Europe and the U.S.-Soviet competition. The reality of world poli-tics after 1945 was far messier, and a variety of forc-es — such as decolonization and the emergence of new nations; regional rivalries and conflict; Euro-pean integration and eventual union; the rise of political Islam; and globalization and the financial, telecommunications, and rights revolutions — shaped global affairs as much, if not at times more, than the Cold War superpower rivalry.

The problem with a simplistic Cold War/post-Cold War narrative is exposed in Samuel Helfont’s fas-cinating reexamination of the 1991 Gulf War. The conventional wisdom sees the war as a military tri-umph for the United States that exorcised the de-mons of the Vietnam War and helped establish the practice of collective security while reinvigorating global institutions for an American-led liberal inter-national order. This picture, however, was clouded by a post-conflict sanctions regime that impover-ished the Iraqi people without unseating Saddam Hussein’s brutal Baathist regime, harming America’s global image while splintering the wartime coalition. The Gulf War was only the start of greater difficulties

FRANCIS J. GAVIN

REVISE!

The Foundation Revise!

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ding acknowledgement to seeing an old problem in a different way to a fierce desire to contact the authors and argue with them. That is the desired outcome for any good journal. Challenging and re-vising history — and the assumptions and myths behind that history — is rarely comfortable, espe-cially as the past provokes strong feelings for many people. I have long thought that an underappreci-ated but important measure of a nation’s under-lying social and civic health is its ability to toler-ate, and even encourage, historical revisionism. It is easy to forget how hard — and how rare — it is to create an intellectual, political, and socio-cul-tural environment that encourages a willingness to challenge any conviction, no matter how widely shared or deeply held. The results are often messy and contentious and unpopular. It is well worth the price, however. Historical revisionism — to ruth-lessly examine and wrestle with our most treas-ured beliefs and assumptions — is a critical path to humility, understanding, and wisdom.

Francis J. Gavin  is the chair of the editorial board of the  Texas National Security Review. He is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the inaugural director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at SAIS-Johns Hopkins University. His writings include Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Rela-tions, 1958-1971 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age (Cornell University Press, 2012) and Covid-19 and World Order (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) co-edited with Hal Brands. His latest book is Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy (Brookings Institution Press, 2020). 

in a region that has been the cause of much grief for the United States ever since.

Re-thinking the Gulf War also complicates the issue of periodization, or how we mark and define historical eras. For many, the Gulf War was the first major event of the post-Cold War world. Another way to look at the conflict, however, was as an out-growth and culmination of political dynamics that had been brewing in the region for years. The two key dates here are 1967 and 1979. Up through the mid-1960s, the Middle East was not a grand stra-tegic priority for the United States, trailing well behind Europe, East Asia, and even Latin America in importance. Britain was the major Western pres-ence in the region. The 1967 Six-Day War changed all of that. The Soviet Union appeared to seek great-er influence in the Middle East, providing weapons and egging on client states Egypt and Syria, while financial and monetary burdens forced Britain to drastically reduce its footprint. Stuck in an un-winnable war in Southeast Asia, the United States could do little on its own to counter the Soviet gambit. While Israel easily prevailed in the conflict, America’s concern for Soviet regional influence drove it to establish deeper strategic ties with Isra-el, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Within a decade, Ameri-ca’s efforts to reverse Soviet influence in the region had been largely successful but at a steep cost: The Middle East had been elevated as a grand strategic priority while the United States had tied itself clos-er to arguably problematic regimes and even more problematic, complex regional dynamics. This left America exposed during the 1979 Islamic Revolu-tion in Iran that not only transformed Iran but also the larger politics in the region. In this viewing, the Gulf War was not the clean, resounding start of a new era, but the messy interlude of a complex American commitment whose relation to the Cold War was uncertain.

Lindsey Ford and Zack Cooper similarly force us to re-think periodization and stylized histories in their excellent analysis of what 1969 can teach us today. The Nixon administration, which was reeling from the Vietnam War, facing powerful domestic calls for retrenchment, and hoping to reset Amer-ican grand strategy in a more sustainable fashion, declared that its allies in East Asia had to do more to provide for their own security. Ford and Cooper reveal the varying paths different countries in the region took in response to this mandate, ranging from moving closer to the United States to accom-modating threatening powers in the region.

Nixon’s Guam doctrine reflected Cold War and

1 Adam Tooze, “Whose Century?” London Review of Books 42, no. 15, July 30, 2020, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n15/adam-tooze/whose-century.

regional dynamics in East Asia that were much different than those in Europe. Korea was divided, Vietnam a disaster, integrative alliances like NATO and the European Union elusive, and China, after 1972, an ally of convenience. As Adam Tooze re-minds us, “The simple fact is that the US did not prevail in the Cold War in Asia.”1 As the Communist Party’s ruthless massacre of protestors in Tianan-men Square revealed, Beijing did not share Ameri-ca’s view of history and world order. The Commu-nist Party leadership was obsessed, then and now, with avoiding what it saw as the Soviet Union’s grave mistakes in the Cold War competition with the United States. Looking at today’s rivalry with China, Tooze suggests,

The mistake in thinking that we are in a ‘new Cold War’ is in thinking of it as new. In put-ting a full stop after 1989 we prematurely de-clare a Western victory. From Beijing’s point of view, there was no end of history, but a continuity — not unbroken, needless to say, and requiring constant reinterpretation, as any live political tradition does, but a conti-nuity nevertheless.

In other words, not only did the Cold War play out differently in East Asia than in Europe, the history, meaning, and lessons from the conflict are under-stood much differently in Beijing than they are in Washington D.C. China, no doubt, has the lessons from the history of the Soviet-U.S. Cold War rival-ry in mind as it reflects upon the utility of proxy wars as a tool of great-power political competition. Dominic Tierney’s analysis of the future of Sino-U.S. proxy war provides an excellent way to assess such conflicts, should they emerge as he expects.

Historical revisionism can be applied not only to events, but to institutions and practices. Since 9/11, as Susan Bryant, Brett Swaney, and Heidi Urben remind us, the military has been held in especially high esteem within American society. But as their fascinating survey reveals, such exceptionalism can come at a cost: The long-held and cherished notion of the non-ideological citizen-soldier gives way to a more politicized and perhaps isolated servicemem-ber. Jim Golby and Hugh Liebert suggest that les-sons from ancient history — particularly the classic works of Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius — may pro-vide a better understanding and guide to the impor-tant norms of civilian control of the military.

My guess is that, like me, you will come away from this issue with a mix of reactions, from nod-

The Scholar7 8

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The Scholar

This section is dedicated to publishing the work of scholars. Our aim is for articles published in this journal to end up on university syllabi and policy desks from Washington to Tokyo, and to be cited as the foundational research and analysis on world affairs.

The Scholar From Citizen Soldier to Secular Saint: The Societal Implications of Military Exceptionalism

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For nearly 40 years, the American public has placed extraordinary trust and confidence in the military, celebrating heroism and service in diverse venues ranging from religious services to theme parks to sporting events. Survey after survey has shown that Americans revere their military, at least superficially. How members of the military feel about their own service, sacrifices, and relationship to the rest of society has been an open question. To help explore these questions, we surveyed more than 1,200 midgrade to senior military officers and West Point cadets between 2017 and 2020 regarding their political views, their sacrifices, and their pride in service. In addition to confirming past research indicating that servicemembers are increasingly isolated and have a growing sense of exceptionalism, our results also indicate that the attitudes of military elites who are in the minority in terms of race, gender, and political views vary considerably at times from their majority peers, raising questions about the degree of inclusivity within the ranks today.

1 Megan Brennan, “Amid Pandemic, Confidence in Key U.S. Institutions Surges,” Gallup, Aug. 12, 2020, https://news.gallup.com/poll/317135/amid-pandemic-confidence-key-institutions-surges.aspx.

2 Brennan, “Amid Pandemic, Confidence in Key U.S. Institutions Surges.” See also, James Fallows, “The Tragedy of the American Military,” The Atlantic (January/February 2015), https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/.

3 “Demographics of the U.S. Military,” Council on Foreign Relations, July 13, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/article/demographics-us-military.

The 2020 Gallup Poll measuring the American public’s confidence in insti-tutions reported what many in the mil-itary already know — that Americans

have an enduring trust in the armed forces.1 In fact, 72 percent of those surveyed indicated they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military. This trend goes back decades: The mili-tary has either been the top-ranked institution or has tied for the top in every year of the poll since 1986 and is the only major institution that inspires higher levels of confidence today than it did in

1980.2 That is a rather remarkable run considering that, for nearly two decades, America has been in-volved in protracted wars where victory has been fleeting and difficult to define. Moreover, less than 0.5 percent of the U.S. population currently serves in the armed forces.3

Since the 9/11 attacks, there has been a profu-sion of literature exploring this extraordinary lev-el of support for the military, both in terms of its implications for U.S. governmental decision-making and how the “non-serving” public views and inter-acts with those who have chosen to join the armed

SUSAN BRYANT

BRETT SWANEY

HEIDI URBEN

FROM CITIZEN SOLDIER

TO SECULAR SAINT:

THE SOCIETAL IMPLICATIONS

OF MILITARY EXCEPTIONALISM

The Scholar From Citizen Soldier to Secular Saint: The Societal Implications of Military Exceptionalism

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preferring the current arrangement for different reasons. Even if this were not true, the practical impediments associated with going back to the cit-izen-soldier system appear insurmountable.11 The shift from a drafted armed forces to an all-volun-teer force has had a number of consequences, es-pecially in the 20 years of war that have followed the attack of September 11. Specifically, it has led to increased isolation for U.S. servicemembers, to military members shouldering the brunt of the bur-den of war, and to a feeling among society — and the military — that those who serve are somehow exceptional or set apart — that they are, in a sense, secular saints. Our survey was designed to explore these consequences of the All-Volunteer Force, which we discuss below.

Increased Isolation

One consequence of moving to an all-volunteer force is that those who serve in the military are increasingly segregated from the rest of society. Today, less than 0.5 percent of the population has served in the current wars. This lack of shared ex-perience between most Americans and those serv-ing has led to the increased isolation of America’s armed forces, a topic that continues to dominate discussions about the civil-military gap.12 Amy Schafer has pointed out that, for those under 30, there has been a sharp decline in familiarity with the military as measured by knowing someone in uniform.13 Kori Schake and Jim Mattis note the high number of individuals who responded “Don’t Know” or “No Opinion” in response to questions about the military in their 2013 YouGov survey for

11 Beyond the seeming impossibility of getting legislation to reinstitute a draft through Congress, a draft would also be impossible to operate without lowering the current enlistment standards. Today, more than two-thirds of service-age Americans (ages 17 to 24) are unfit for military ser-vice. Even more troubling, the underlying problems (education, criminality, and obesity) preventing military service in the majority are growing worse rather than getting better. A draft would mean that standards for enlistment would have to be lowered, with all of the concomitant implications for readiness and training. Thus, there is a logic and a preference for the professional military to continue as it is currently conceived, even though the implications have not been fully examined by the citizenry. Miriam Jordan, “Recruits’ Ineligibility Tests the Military,” Wall Street Journal, June 27, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/recruits-ineligibility-tests-the-military-1403909945.

12 Mark Thompson, “The Other 1%,” Time, Nov. 21, 2011, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2099152,00.html; and Hugh Liebert and Jim Golby, “Midlife Crisis? The All-Volunteer Force at 40,” Armed Forces and Society 43, no. 1 (January 2017): 115–38, https://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X16641430.

13 Schafer, Generations of War.

14 Kori Schake and Jim Mattis, eds., Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institute Press, 2016), 289–90.

15 Schafer, Generations of War. See also Schake and Mattis, Warriors & Citizens; Charlsy Panzino, “‘Warrior Caste’: Is a Public Disconnect Hurting Military Recruiting Efforts?” Military Times, Jan. 18, 2018, https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-army/2018/01/19/warrior-caste-is-a-public-discon-nect-hurting-military-recruiting-efforts/; and Susan Bryant and Brett Swaney, “Deconstructing the ‘Warrior Caste:’ The Beliefs and Backgrounds of Senior Military Elites,” Institute for National Strategic Studies, July 5, 2017, https://inss.ndu.edu/Media/News/Article/1428887/deconstructing-the-war-rior-caste-the-beliefs-and-backgrounds-of-senior-military/.

16 In 2018, South Carolina, Florida, Hawaii, Georgia, and Alabama were the top five recruiting states, after controlling for population size. See Council on Foreign Relations, “Demographics of the U.S. Military”; and Rosa Brooks, “Civil-Military Paradoxes,” in Warriors and Citizens, 33–39.

17 Liebert and Golby, “Midlife Crisis?”

18 Charles Moskos, “Feel that Draft?” Chicago Tribune, June 8, 2005, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2005-06-08-0506080018-story.html.

19 Matt Richtel, “Please Don’t Thank Me for My Service,” New York Times, Feb. 21, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/sunday-review/please-dont-thank-me-for-my-service.html.

their book, Warriors and Citizens. This hesitancy to answer questions on military matters is like-ly rooted in respondents’ unfamiliarity with the armed forces.14 Compounding this cloistering ef-fect, recent studies show that those who choose to join the military are more likely to come from fami-lies with a history of multi-generational service, an indication that we are seeing the emergence of an American “warrior caste.”15 Additionally, military recruiting is disproportionately reliant upon re-cruits from rural areas, the South, and areas that host large military installations, with the Northeast underrepresented, giving this caste phenomenon a rural and regional flavor.16 Taken together, these factors tend to both separate and isolate military communities from civilian ones, to the detriment of civil-military relations.17

Unequal Burden-Sharing

A second consequence of the All-Volunteer Force is that the burden of being at war for nearly 19 years has fallen disproportionately upon a small segment of the American population. Charles Moskos coined the term “patriotism lite” to explain the broader public’s response to this uneven burden-sharing.18 It involves giving vocal public support to the troops as a substitute for making broader sacrifice in a time of war. This is most commonly manifested in what some have branded as the “thank-you-for-your-service” phenomenon.19 What has emerged is a new bargain between servicemembers and ci-vilians, one in which military service is no longer a component of one’s civic responsibility. These observations are supported by a 2015 Harvard

forces.4 However, remarkably little scholarship has examined how military personnel perceive their own service as well as society at large and what the implications of these views are for civil-military re-lations, the country’s conception of citizenship and service, and the ideal of the citizen-soldier. Through surveying over 1,200 military elites at different stag-es in their careers, this article aims to do just that: to explore how military officers today view not only their own service and sacrifice but the American public who, by all accounts, trusts them unfailingly.5

As of this writing, the United States is 19 years into the current wars — wars that have been entirely fought by volunteers who represent less than 1 percent of the overall population. Al-though expensive, the All-Volunteer Force, which will turn 50 in 2023, remains preferable to those who serve as well as to those who don’t.6 This preference is a relatively recent development. The last time a Gallup poll found a majority of Americans in favor of a draft was 1981.7 For most of U.S. history, the idealized, and even mytholo-gized, model of military service has been the cit-izen-soldier. Whether embodied by the “minute-man” or the spirit of the “Greatest Generation,” the American preference has traditionally been for the ordinary citizen who takes up arms when called upon rather than the professional warri-or.8 After nearly two decades of persistent con-flict, that citizen-soldier ideal has become nos-talgic to the point of quaintness. In its place has

4 From October 1991 through June 2001, on average, 65 percent of Americans reported a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military. Since June 2002, the average confidence level in the military has been 75 percent. See Brennan, “Amid Pandemic, Confidence in Key U.S. Institutions Surges.” For other recent examinations of public confidence in the military, see Jim Golby and Peter Feaver, “Thank You For Your Lip Service? Social Pressure to Support the Troops,” War on the Rocks, Aug. 14, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/08/thank-you-for-your-lip-service-social-pressure-to-support-the-troops/; David T. Burbach, “Partisan Dimensions of Confidence in the U.S. Military, 1973–2016,” Armed Forces & Society 45, no. 2 (April 2019): 211–33, https://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X17747205; Jim Golby and Peter Feaver, “The Determinants of Public Confidence in the Military,” Paper Presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, Aug. 29, 2019; and Heidi Urben and Jim Golby, “A Matter of Trust: Five Pitfalls that Could Squander the American Public’s Confidence in the Military,” in Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations: The Military, Society, Politics, and Modern War, ed. Lionel Beehner, Risa Brooks, and Daniel Mauer (New York: Oxford Press, 2020), 135–46.

5 We follow the definition of military elites first used in Peter Feaver and Richard Kohn’s Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS) survey, also referred to as “up and coming military officers.” The TISS sample also included U.S. Military Academy cadets and war college students. See Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, eds., Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 6–7. Additional survey demographics from our survey can be found in Appendix A and the survey instrument is included in Appendix B. Both are available in the online version of this article at https://tnsr.org/2021/02/from-citizen-soldier-to-secular-saint-the-societal-implications-of-mili-tary-exceptionalism/.

6 Amy Schafer, “Generations of War: The Rise of the Warrior Caste and the All-Volunteer Force,” Center for a New American Security, May 8, 2017, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/generations-of-war; and Steven M. Kosiak, “Is the U.S. Military Getting Smaller and Older? And How Much Should We Care?” Center for a New American Security, March 14, 2017, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/is-the-u-s-military-getting-smaller-and-older.

7 Jeffrey M. Jones, “Vast Majority of Americans Opposed to Reinstituting Military Draft,” Gallup News Service, Sept. 7, 2007, https://news.gallup.com/poll/28642/vast-majority-americans-opposed-reinstituting-military-draft.aspx.

8 Ricardo A. Herrera, For Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldier, 1775–1861 (New York: New York University Press, 2017), viii–x; and Phil Klay, “The Citizen-Soldier: Moral Risk and the Modern Military,” The Brookings Institute, May 24, 2016, http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2016/the-citizen-soldier.html.

9 Eliot A. Cohen, “Twilight of the Citizen Soldier,” Parameters 31, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 23, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol31/iss2/5/.

10 This idea that one can be revered but that an individual life means less because the person volunteered came to a head in 2017 with President Donald Trump’s alleged remarks that a Green Beret who had died in Niger “knew what he had signed up for.” See Mark Landler and Yamiche Alcin-dor, “Trump’s Condolence Call to Widow Ignites an Imbroglio,” New York Times, Oct. 18, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/us/politics/trump-widow-johnson-call.html.

risen a professional “warrior caste” largely living separately from a society that does not share in the burden of military service.9 The result is that today’s servicemembers are less well known and their individual sacrifices seem to mean less to the public. And yet, they are more superficially revered than America’s citizen-soldiers were.10

But what have been the effects of this shift to a warrior caste model, both on the public and on the “warriors” themselves? This article, and our sur-vey, were undertaken to improve our understand-ing of how America’s servicemembers view their own service and sacrifice. Specifically, our study examines some of the consequences associated with the All-Volunteer Force after nearly 20 years of prolonged war, and our survey was designed to elicit military elite opinion on some aspects of each of these consequences. The section that follows is not intended to be an exhaustive review of these consequences but instead focuses on three themes related to shifting to the All-Volunteer Force: in-creased isolation, unequal burden-sharing, and sentiments of exceptionalism.

Isolation, Unequal Burden-Sharing, and the Specter of Exceptionalism

Fighting and winning the nation’s wars has become the purview of a small cadre of highly trained professionals, with both sides of the divide

The Scholar From Citizen Soldier to Secular Saint: The Societal Implications of Military Exceptionalism

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Institute of Politics poll that found that while many youths supported sending ground troops back into Iraq to fight the Islamic State, very few would con-sider serving in the military themselves.20

James Fallows, writing in the Atlantic in 2015, pointedly called out a public attitude of reverence toward, but disengagement from, the military and highlighted the unequal burden placed on so few. At the time, he wrote that America had been at war for over a decade but as a public it had not.21 It is not only about the unequal burden of service, how-ever, as Schake and Mattis rightly point out. It is also about the burden of grief. The public is largely unaffected by the casualties of war, and there are few public rituals that pull the military and society together in times of great pain.22 What historically was a common experience of loss and sacrifice is now an isolating, perhaps even alienating, experi-ence for military servicemembers. This may con-tribute to a feeling among servicemembers that efforts to demonstrate appreciation by the public are hollow tokenism and only further sequester the military from society.23

Sentiments of Exceptionalism

A third consequence of the All-Volunteer Force is a sense of superiority or exceptionalism with-in the ranks. In his acceptance speech after being awarded West Point’s Thayer Award in 2011, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates cautioned young cadets about the “growing disconnect between mil-itary and society, not by average Americans, but on the uniformed side of the equation.”24 In his speech, Gates recalled a hallway display in the Pentagon

20 “Survey of Young Americans’ Attitudes Toward Politics and Public Service, 28th Edition,” Harvard University Institute of Politics, Fall 2015, https://iop.harvard.edu/sites/default/files_new/pictures/151208_Harvard_IOP_Fall_2015_Topline.pdf.

21 Fallows, “The Tragedy of the American Military.” Rosa Brooks has also described this phenomenon as “enthusiasm and ignorance.” Brooks, “Civil-Military Paradoxes,” 22.

22 Kori Schake and Jim Mattis, “A Great Divergence?” in Warriors & Citizens, 9.

23 Schake and Mattis, “A Great Divergence?”

24 Robert M. Gates, “Thayer Award Remarks,” Speech at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, NY, Oct. 6, 2011, https://www.westpointaog.org/page.aspx?pid=4843.

25 Gates, “Thayer Award Remarks.”

26 Ronald R. Krebs, Robert Ralston, and Aaron Rapport, “Americans’ Blind Faith in the Military Is Dangerous,” Foreign Policy, Dec. 3, 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/03/americans-blind-faith-in-the-military-is-dangerous-civilian-oversight-deference-mcraven-trump/.

27 John Vandiver, “Half of Americans Surveyed Say All Servicemembers Are Heroes,” Stars and Stripes, Sept. 27, 2018, https://www.stripes.com/news/half-of-americans-surveyed-say-all-servicemembers-are-heroes-1.549349. Of note, when the same question was asked in Germany and the United Kingdom, only 15 percent of Germans and 32 percent of Britons responded that all those serving in their armed forces should be described as heroes. See also Matthew Smith, “Are the Troops Heroes? Americans, Britons and Germans Feel Very Differently,” YouGov, Sept. 26, 2018, https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2018/09/25/are-troops-heroes-americans-britons-and-germans-fe.

28 Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 23.

29 Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1957), 8.

30 Rosa Brooks has also noted the elevation of military service into the realm of the “sacred.” See Rosa Brooks, “Serving in the Military Doesn’t Make You Special,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 10, 2016, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-brooks-military-sacred-20160810-snap-story.html.

31 Peter Kreeft, “What Is a Saint?” Catholic Education Resource Center, accessed Jan. 12, 2021, https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/catholic-contributions/what-is-a-saint.html.

showcasing the Army’s values of loyalty, duty, re-spect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and per-sonal courage. He was struck by the fact that the display introduced the list by saying that these val-ues “distinguish American soldiers from American society.”25 It was peculiar, he thought, to suggest that these attributes were not valued by Ameri-cans in general, or that somehow these attributes were unique to the military. It has become normal for politicians and Americans to honor soldiers for their sacrifice, heroism, and patriotism and to imply that military members are more virtuous than other Americans.26 In a 2018 YouGov poll, for example, 50 percent of Americans stated that all members of the military are heroes, regardless of their experience.27

Trust and confidence in the military is expressed in a tendency to elevate the soldier to the status of a national icon or even a secular saint.28 Today’s volunteer servicemember occupies the peculiar position of a secular saint in contemporary socie-ty, fulfilling Samuel Huntington’s observation that the choice to join the military is in “pursuit of a higher calling in service to society.”29 The Catholic conception of sainthood is a seemingly strange, but ultimately appropriate, analogy for the position the military holds in contemporary American society.30 Rather than ordinary, saints are, by definition, ex-traordinary. Sainthood is also associated with the idea of submission to and, if necessary, martyrdom in the service of, God. The saint is in no way sin-less, but rather is set apart from society and is the “conqueror … who conquers him/herself.”31 Simi-larly, the servicemember-cum-secular saint is dif-ferent and apart from the average citizen. These soldier-saints have all sworn an oath to “support

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and found that only 27 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed. However, a majority of respondents agreed that the American public is generally grateful for these sacrifices (see Table 1). These findings reinforce what many observers, including Fallows and Rosa Brooks, have suggest-ed about how the American public views its armed forces after nearly 18 years of war — with rever-ence but disengagement.40 They also help con-

40 Fallows, “The Tragedy of the American Military”; and Brooks, “Civil-Military Paradoxes.”

firm that servicemembers are feeling increasingly isolated from society in that they feel that no-one can quite understand what members of the mil-itary have gone through during wartime except others who have worn the uniform.

Notably, mid-to-senior grade officers (71 per-cent) are more likely to think that the public is grateful for their service than West Point cadets (55 percent), while slightly more combat veterans

and defend” the U.S. Constitution, with their lives if necessary, and be obedient even if it conflicts with their personal judgment or physical safety.

With such high levels of trust — even deference — being given to a segment of society that is in-creasingly isolated, chronically unrepresentative, and shouldering the burdens of America’s protract-ed conflicts, many civil-military relations observers have warned about the implications for the mili-tary. Lt. Gen. (Ret.) David Barno suggests that iso-lation in the face of an adoring nation risks foster-ing a “closed culture of superiority and aloofness” within the military.32 There is a fine line between feeling a sense of isolation and a more pernicious strain of elitism. Scholars have pointed out that this isolation combined with military members’ frequently higher levels of education or technical training and physical fitness can contribute to the idea that the military is not only separate from so-ciety but is perhaps a superior class.33

This isn’t the first time that these dynamics have been the subject of concern. In their watershed sur-vey of military elites nearly two decades ago, Peter Feaver and Richard Kohn found that 77 percent of military leaders agreed with the notion that civilian society would be made better off by adopting more of the military’s values and customs.34 In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, a 2003 Military Times poll also revealed that two thirds of its active duty subscribers thought military members had high-er moral standards than the nation they served. More than 60 percent called the country’s moral standards only “fair” or “poor.”35 Immense public trust, even veneration, for the military feeds this sense of superiority. As Kohn observed, caution, skepticism, and even a bit of mistrust is healthy for the relationship between senior military and civil-ian elites. However, military officers who feel con-tempt for their elected or appointed leaders — or even the voters who put them there — are unlikely

32 Thomas E. Ricks, “Dave Barno’s Top 10 Tasks for General Dempsey, the New Army Chief of Staff,” Foreign Policy, Jan. 21, 2011, https://foreign-policy.com/2011/01/21/dave-barnos-top-10-tasks-for-general-dempsey-the-new-army-chief-of-staff/.

33 Schafer, Generations of War.

34 Feaver and Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians, 55.

35 Gordon Trowbridge, “2003 Military Times Poll — We Asked. You Answered,” Marine Corps Times, Dec. 29, 2003, http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20040111094402/http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-2513919.php.

36 Richard H. Kohn, “The Erosion of Civilian Control of the Military in the United States Today,” Naval War College Review 55, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 35, https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol55/iss3/2/.

37 Most military officers that we surveyed were senior officers (O5s and O6s) attending senior service college at the National War College and Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy in the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, DC, and the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. However, the sample from the National Defense University also included a small subsample of midgrade officers attending the Joint Forces Staff College, specifically the Joint and Combined Warfighting School. While the subsample within the National Defense University included officers from each of the military services, this survey’s sample is predominantly an Army sample. Cadets at the U.S. Military Academy who we surveyed were drawn from the core course on American politics — a class typically taken by sophomores.

38 Feaver and Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians, 6–7.

39 The survey instrument is included in Appendix B, which can be found in the online version of this article, https://tnsr.org/2021/02/from-citi-zen-soldier-to-secular-saint-the-societal-implications-of-military-exceptionalism/.

to advise senior civilian leaders wisely or readily subject themselves to civilian accountability.36

Methodology and Findings

Given the public’s high levels of trust and con-fidence in the military, the acute burden borne by an isolated segment of society during America’s recent wars, and concerns about a growing sense of exceptionalism within the ranks, we decided to explore these themes as part of a broader survey we conducted of military elites. We conducted a voluntary, online survey in seven waves from De-cember 2017 through March 2020. Our partici-pants were 1,218 military officers enrolled in the various colleges within the National Defense Uni-versity and the Army War College and cadets at the U.S. Military Academy.37 To gain insight into generational differences among the respondents, we surveyed those just beginning their careers as officers and those who are approaching the ranks of senior officers. The survey sample by no means reflects the military at large, let alone the entire of-ficer corps, nor is it meant to. Rather it is meant to be representative of military elites — those “up and comers” likely to be tapped for advancement through promotion and selection for exclusive mil-itary schooling.38 While we only focus on a handful of questions from the survey in this article, the full survey instrument can be found in Appendix B.39

We asked these officers and cadets a series of questions aimed at exploring how they view their service in the armed forces and how they feel the American public views that service, specifical-ly looking at the three themes discussed in the previous section. We asked participants the de-gree to which they agreed or disagreed with the statement that the American public understands the sacrifices that members of the military make,

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(69 percent) think the public is grateful compared to those who have not been in combat (57 percent).41 It is likely that military officers who have made the sacrifice inherent in deploying to combat zones tend to think the public does indeed ac-knowledge and appreciate such sacrifices, because they have experienced the public’s gratitude first hand. From the proliferation of care packages for deployed troops, to elaborate welcome home cer-

41 It should follow that the subsamples of West Point cadets and those who have not deployed in combat should generally mirror one another, just as mid-to-senior grade officers and combat deployment veterans are strongly correlated. Of the 597 West Point cadets who completed the survey, six were prior service veterans with combat deployment experience. Of the sample of 621 mid-to-senior grade officers, 545 were combat deployment veterans.

emonies at sporting events, servicemembers who fought the post-9/11 wars have been the benefi-ciaries of Americans’ gratitude.

We also wanted to examine to what extent mil-itary elites have not only begun to believe their own press and take the public’s praise for them for granted, but whether they think they are, in fact, superior to the society that they have pledged to defend. To probe for these sentiments of military

exceptionalism, we asked if respondents agreed with the notion that those who have not served in the military generally should not question or criticize the military. This question was prompt-ed, in part, by White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declaring to a reporter in Oc-tober 2017 that it would be “highly inappropriate” to question or debate a four-star general, referenc-ing then-White House Chief of Staff Gen. (Ret.) John Kelly.42 We wanted to know if military elites

42 Josh Wagner, “White House Press Secretary: It’s ‘Highly Inappropriate’ to Question a 4-Star Marine General,” Washington Post, Oct. 20, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/10/20/white-house-press-secretary-its-highly-inappropriate-to-question-a-4-star-marine-general/?utm_term=.1194fb976635.

harbored similar sentiments — that the only peo-ple who were fair game to question them were those who have served in uniform themselves.

Fewer than a quarter of respondents agreed with the statement that those who have not served in uniform should not question or criticize the mili-tary, although nearly three times more West Point cadets (30 percent) agreed than their more senior military officer counterparts (11 percent). Similar-ly, those who have not deployed were also more

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apt to agree than combat veterans. This point is instructive: Those with the least amount of time and experience in the profession are more apt to think that those serving should be immune from questioning and criticism from outsiders. This could suggest that the longer one is exposed to the professional norms associated with being a military officer, the more likely one is to support oversight or criticism of the institution. In many ways, this finding is encouraging. We should want military elites to reject the idea that they should be immune from outside questioning. To do oth-erwise would be counter to the very principle of

the military’s subordination to civilian authority. Of note, while a slightly larger percentage of con-

servatives and Republicans agreed that those who have not served should not criticize the military than liberals and Democrats, the differences were not statistically significant. One surprising finding in Table 2 is also worth noting. Approximately 32 percent of female respondents agreed with the statement that those who have not served in uni-form should not question members of the military, compared to just 18 percent of men. In our sample, 65 percent of female respondents were West Point cadets. The higher level of support among women

on this survey question largely correlates with the higher level of support among West Point cadets in general (30 percent) and male West Point cadets (28 percent). Approximately 23 percent of female mid-to-senior grade officers agreed with this state-ment, compared to just 10 percent of male mid-to-senior grade officers.

Another way to investigate whether military servicemembers see themselves as exceptional is to ask whether or not officers find the culture of the military to be superior to the rest of society. Roughly a quarter of those surveyed agreed with this sentiment, but with some striking differenc-es among subgroups. Senior officers were slightly more likely than West Point cadets to indicate that they thought military culture was superior, but the difference was small. There were, however, more notable differences in responses based on ideolo-gy, party identification, race, and gender. Conserv-atives and Republicans were nearly twice as likely to agree that the military is superior to civilian so-ciety as liberals and Democrats, and whites were twice as likely as African Americans to hold this view. Men were also slightly more likely than wom-en to agree that military culture was better than civilian society. Thus, it would appear that military elites’ political views and identity matter in how they conceptualize military service and society. It should not be surprising that the experiences of minority elites vary considerably from those who are in the majority, and that those different expe-riences might influence minority views of the mil-itary and society at large. Elites who self identify as liberals, Democrats, or African Americans — all of whom are minorities in the officer corps — may not find military culture to be as idyllic as con-servatives, Republicans, men, or whites do.43 It is unclear whether this is also true for women, given that they were more likely than men to agree that military members should not be questioned by ci-vilians, but less likely to agree that military culture is superior to civilian society.

When we asked respondents the normative ques-tion of whether or not the military should reflect society, we found higher support for this among mid-to-senior grade officers (71 percent) than among West Point cadets (63 percent). However,

43 In our survey, 20 percent of respondents identified as a Democrat and 18 percent identified as a liberal. Blacks or African Americans consti-tuted eight percent of our survey sample, and women made up 18 percent of our sample.

44 On June 18, 2020, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper announced the establishment of a new Defense Board on Diversity and Inclusion in the Military, aimed at eliminating racial bias and increasing diversity within the ranks, especially in the officer corps. Additionally, on June 26, 2020, the U.S. Army announced that it will no longer include official photographs or any information that identifies a soldier’s race, ethnicity, or gender in promotion selection boards. Both moves came in response to Black Lives Matter protests in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing and the concomitant reactions in the U.S. military about systemic bias and racism. Dan Lamothe, “Pentagon Chief Announces New Steps to Improve Fairness for Service Members of Color,” Wash-ington Post, June 18, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/06/18/pentagon-chief-announces-new-steps-improve-fairness-ser-vice-members-color/; and Nancy A. Youssef, “To Combat Racial Bias, Army Is Dropping Photos from Some Soldier Records,” Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-combat-racial-bias-army-is-dropping-photos-from-some-soldier-records-11593102600.

we found a divergence based on key identity varia-bles such as political ideology, party affiliation, and gender (see Table 3). For example, 82 percent of liberals felt that the military should reflect socie-ty, compared to just 61 percent of conservatives, with a similar split observed along party lines — 79 percent of Democrats compared to 64 percent of Republicans. Likewise, 78 percent of women think that the military should reflect society, compared to 65 percent of men.

These findings further indicate that identity is an important factor for military elites when they reflect upon their service. Servicemembers who are under-represented in the military think that the military should look more like society, whereas those who are in the majority in the military feel less strongly about achieving that goal. This is more than just a theoretical debate. The findings carry real implica-tions about elites’ support for various policies to-day, such as promotion board procedures, gender integration into combat roles, efforts to increase the number of African American officers in combat arms branches in the Army, or the debate on transgender individuals serving in the military.44

Lastly, we asked respondents about their pride in service and the likelihood that they would en-courage young people close to them to join the military today. At first blush, the findings appear encouraging, with a strong majority of respond-ents reporting both pride in service and a will-ingness to encourage others to join the military (see Table 4). When comparing responses among subgroups, however, differences begin to emerge. Almost all of the midgrade to senior officers sur-veyed (97 percent) reported higher levels of pride in service compared to cadets who were just start-ing their careers (85 percent). Combat veterans displayed higher levels of pride than those who have not deployed. Mid-to-senior grade officers and those who had deployed were also more like-ly to encourage others to join (80 percent) than those who have just joined themselves and those who have not deployed (67 percent). Responses did not vary by gender, with men and women re-porting similar levels of pride in service and will-ingness to encourage young people to join the mil-itary. However, when the results are broken down

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questions about the degree of inclusivity — or even outright discrimination or harassment — with-in the ranks. To be fair, it is unclear how widely such attitudes toward taking pride in service and being willing to recommend that others join are held across the military. Our survey sample only included officers and cadets, who account for only a narrow slice of the armed forces. We do not know if the more numerous enlisted ranks hold similar views and if their views vary by ideology, party, race, and gender. Future research involving a large-scale, random sample could shed more light on the extent to which a divide exists between majority and minority groups in the military. Such a study should be commissioned now.

Regardless, these findings should give senior military leaders and their civilian superiors pause. Part of the allure of the citizen-soldier of the past was that service seemed to trump politics. People from di-verse backgrounds found common ground through shared sacrifice, or what Cohen termed “the idea of mili-tary service as the great leveler.”47 To-day, however, both uniformed and non-uniformed leaders should come to terms with a worrisome side effect in the professionalized fighting force — that servicemembers’ ideology and politics may shape their conception of service.

This is not the first time that scholars have un-covered evidence of differing attitudes and expe-riences among political minorities in the military. Previous research has found that a higher percent-age of Army officers who described themselves as Democrats reported feeling uncomfortable ex-pressing their political views with their co-work-ers compared to officers who identified as Repub-licans. Likewise, a greater proportion of Democrats indicated that other officers had encouraged them to vote a particular way than Republican officers.48 What makes our findings in this study notable, however, is that these differences between major-ity and minority opinions on normative aspects related to the military profession stretch beyond party affiliation into ideology, race, and gender and may impact how elites conceptualize their service and view the rest of American society.

Given these findings, we offer two modest

47 Cohen, “Twilight of the Citizen Soldier.”

48 Heidi A. Urben, “Wearing Politics on Their Sleeves? Levels of Political Activism of Active Duty Army Officers,” Armed Forces and Society 40, no. 3 (July 2014): 580, https://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X12467774.

49 Inspired to Serve: The Final Report of the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, (March 2020), 33–40, https://www.inspire2serve.gov/sites/default/files/final-report/Final%20Report.pdf.

50 We are by no means the first to make such an argument. As an example, see Kathy Roth-Douquet, “America’s Elite Needs to Get Back in Uniform,” Foreign Policy, Sept. 25, 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/25/military-service-warrior-caste-united-states/.

recommendations. First, the services should aim to study not only who serves in the military and why, but who does not serve and why. The answer to this question should help focus recruitment ef-forts, as well as retention efforts, to ensure a mil-itary — especially an officer corps — that better reflects society. Such efforts would also comple-ment and enable the military to better act upon the findings of the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, which recommended strengthening and expanding education pathways for military service, expanding opportunities for

youth to explore service, and strengthening mili-tary recruiting and marketing.49

Military recruiting is a tough business. Given the already small slice of young Americans who meet the necessary standards for service, an obvious tendency can exist to “fish where the fish are.” And while military service as a family business rightly offers much to be proud of, it, too, adds to military elites’ sense of isolation from the society that they are sworn to defend. Making a serious effort to ex-pand recruitment, especially of elites, outside the military’s traditional bastions of support may help to increase the officer corps’ representativeness and reduce its isolation and the tendency of service-members to have a sense of exceptionalism.50 The military has a greater ability to affect retention than recruitment. Given the concerns raised here regard-ing minority groups, the services should pay greater care and attention to why such minorities choose to leave the military.

Second, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should lead the services in a major effort to bet-ter incorporate the study of civil-military relations and the norm of non-partisanship into professional

based on political views, partisanship, and race, the findings tell a different story.

Liberals and Democrats were slightly less likely to report pride in their service and a willingness to encourage others to serve compared to con-servatives and Republicans. More starkly, white servicemembers were significantly more likely to report pride in service and encourage others to join the military than African American ser-vicemembers. In fact, only 56 percent of African American respondents surveyed indicated they would recommend that a young person close to them join the military today. No other measured subgroup reported such a low likelihood to rec-ommend service. Even more noteworthy, only 38 percent of African American West Point cadets in-dicated they would encourage someone close to them to join the military, compared to 77 percent of African American midgrade and senior officers. More than half of African American cadets sur-veyed (52 percent) were neutral on the matter. Ten percent indicated they would not recommend that a young person join the military, compared to 5 percent of white cadets who would not.

While admittedly a small subsample, it is alarm-ing that so few African American cadets who are just beginning their military careers indicated that they would likely encourage other young people to join the military, especially since 62 percent of African American cadets reported that a member of their immediate family served in the military, indicating some degree of familiarity with military service. African American cadets are a minority at West Point and historically have been underrep-resented there, although recent years have noted higher minority enrollment levels.45 Regardless, their hesitancy to recommend that other young people join is striking, particularly given that more senior African American officers were more apt to encourage young people to join. Clearly, more re-search is required, as these findings raise questions about the degree of inclusivity within the ranks to-day and why minority elites tend to view their ex-perience in the military less positively than their majority elite peers seem to.46 Two recent reports that document the extent of racial discrimination within the ranks further underscore the need for more research and attention to the matter. A 2017

45 Of the 1,190 cadets who reported in to West Point’s class of 2023 in the summer of 2019, 180 (15 percent) were African American. Jenni Fink, “West Point’s Newest Class Has More Minority Cadets than Last Year,” Newsweek, July 1, 2019, https://www.newsweek.com/west-point-class-2023-minority-cadets-1446958.

46 David Barno and Nora Bensahel articulate the challenge facing the U.S. military well. David Barno and Nora Bensahel, “Reflections on the Curse of Racism in the U.S. Military,” War on the Rocks, June 30, 2020, https://warontherocks.com/2020/06/reflections-on-the-curse-of-racism-in-the-u-s-military/; Phil Stewart, “Exclusive: Long-Withheld Pentagon Survey Shows Widespread Racial Discrimination, Harassment,” Reuters, Jan. 14, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-military-civilrights-exclusive/exclusive-long-withheld-pentagon-survey-shows-widespread-ra-cial-discrimination-harassment-idUSKBN29J1N1; and Phil Stewart, M.B. Pell, and Joshua Schneyer, “U.S. Troops Battling Racism Report High Barrier to Justice,” Reuters, Sept. 15, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-military-civilrights/.

Department of Defense report found that a third of African American servicemembers indicated that they had experienced racial discrimination or harassment during a 12-month period. Similarly, a 2020 Reuters study found that uniformed members of the military rarely file formal Equal Opportuni-ty complaints for racial discrimination, suggesting they do not trust the system.

Conclusion

This study has highlighted some of the less vis-ible implications of the All-Volunteer Force. Our findings show that while most military elites in uniform today feel the American public appreci-ates their service, they also think that the public fails to understand the sacrifices members of the military make. Perhaps this is an understanda-ble byproduct of unequal burden-sharing during nearly two decades of war. Additionally, only 43 percent of military elites disagreed that military culture is generally superior to the rest of Amer-ican society, raising not only concerns of discon-nectedness among the officer corps but also a ten-dency toward feelings of exceptionalism.

Much of the civil-military relations scholarship over the past two decades has centered on the civil-military gap — the divide between those who serve and the rest of society. Our findings certainly reinforce the notion that such a gap continues to exist. However, our study also found evidence of a troubling new gap — one among military elites themselves. After nearly two decades of fighting wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, our survey data shows that military elites’ feelings of superi-ority over the rest of society are more prevalent among conservatives, Republicans, whites, and men (at least in certain measures) than among lib-erals, Democrats, women, and African Americans. And, while military elites in general tend to display high levels of pride in service, it is not uniformly so, with liberals, Democrats, and African Ameri-cans reporting lower levels of pride and being less inclined to encourage young people to join the mil-itary today. This may be due to the fact that the experiences of these minority military elites may vary considerably from their majority peers, raising

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military education, which is sorely needed. Leaders should also reinforce why selfless service is such a critical component of professionalism, especially within the officer corps. Each branch of the mili-tary has a rich tradition of inculcating the concept of servant leadership, but it is largely taught with an eye toward being a servant leader with regard to one’s own subordinates.51 Fostering a similar focus on the values of humility and selfless service to-ward the country and its citizens may help to com-bat the growing sense of superiority among those who serve today.

For many serving in the military, King Leonidas and the vastly outnumbered Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae, popularized in the film 300, offer an idealized vision of military service. Released just as the surge in Iraq was commencing in 2007, the film, as described in a Los Angeles Times review, “celebrate[s] a warrior cult that prizes physical fitness, discipline, and bravery. The numbers are small, but the hearts are stout. The cult is part of the society it protects but yet is separate, even alienated from it.”52 The story of the Spartans at Thermopylae is not only favored by the rank and file — both the former chief of staff of the Army and former commandant of the Marine Corps had Steven Pressfield’s novel on the same topic, Gates of Fire, on their official reading lists.53 While the story of bravery and unbreakable solidarity in the face of overwhelming odds is a natural choice to inspire young servicemembers, it also carries with it the undeniable theme of a warrior caste separate from, if not superior to, the rest of society.54

We suggest that another historical figure of my-thologized proportions, but one arguably more accessible to U.S. audiences, be given the same amount of attention and admiration from senior military leaders and the officer corps today — George Washington. The first commander in chief’s Newburgh Address to a group of several hundred Continental Army officers who were ready to mu-tiny over a lack of pay in 1783 not only thwarted a possible coup but encapsulates servant leadership

51 Tom Kolditz, “Why the Military Produces Great Leaders,” Harvard Business Review, Feb. 6, 2009, https://hbr.org/2009/02/why-the-mili-tary-produces-grea.

52 Tony Perry and Robert W. Welkos, “The Few, the Proud Among Fans of ‘300,’” Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2007, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-mar-14-et-spartans14-story.html.

53 “The U.S. Army Chief of Staff’s Professional Reading List,” U.S. Army Center of Military History, accessed Jan. 12, 2021, https://history.army.mil/html/books/105/105-1-1/index.html; and “Revision of the Commandant’s Professional Reading List,” U.S. Marine Corps, March 4, 2019, https://www.marines.mil/News/Messages/Messages-Display/Article/1773787/revision-of-the-commandants-professional-reading-list/.

54 Jim Gourley, “Welcome to Spartanburg!: The Dangers of this Growing American Military Obsession,” Foreign Policy, April 22, 2014, https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/22/welcome-to-spartanburg-the-dangers-of-this-growing-american-military-obsession/.

55 George Washington, “Newburgh Address: George Washington to Officers of the Army, March 15, 1783,” Mount Vernon (website), accessed Jan. 12, 2021, https://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-sources-2/article/newburgh-address-george-washington-to-officers-of-the-army-march-15-1783/.

56 Washington, “Newburgh Address.” See also Richard H. Kohn, “The Inside History of the Newburgh Conspiracy: America and the Coup d’Etat,” William and Mary Quarterly 27, no. 2 (April 1970): 187–220, https://doi.org/10.2307/1918650.

and subordination to civilian authority.55 While Washington’s nine-page speech was a measured, dispassionate response to a growing frenzy within the officer corps, it was his seemingly offhand com-ment that truly disarmed the crowd: “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for, I have grown not only gray, but almost blind in the service of my country.”56 In the ultimate gesture of humility, Washington reminded his fellow officers of the greater cause they served. After nearly two decades of war, and as the elite of the U.S. military find themselves more isolated, more burdened, less representative of society, but more revered than ever before, senior military leaders would be well advised to turn to the country’s original secu-lar saint for inspiration.

Dr. Susan Bryant is the executive director of Strategic Education International as well as a re-tired U.S. Army colonel, an adjunct associate pro-fessor at Georgetown University, a visiting lecturer at John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, and a visiting research fellow at National Defense University’s Institute for Na-tional Strategic Studies. 

Mr. Brett Swaney is an assistant research fel-low at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University. His research focus-es on civil-military relations and NATO/Europe. He holds an M.A. in global security studies from Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Heidi Urben is an adjunct associate profes-sor at Georgetown University, non-resident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and Inter-national Studies, adjunct scholar at West Point’s Modern War Institute, a visiting research fellow at National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies, and a retired U.S. Army colonel. She is currently writing a book on partisanship and political activity in the armed forces.

This article reflects the personal views of the au-thors. It does not represent the views of the U.S. Army, National Defense University, or Department of Defense.

Acknowledgements: The authors wish to thank Dr. Peter D. Feaver, the panelists at the 2019 In-ter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Socie-ty, and the anonymous Texas National Security Re-view reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. We also are grateful to the National Defense University, U.S. Military Acad-emy, and U.S. Army War College, especially Col. Su-zanne Nielsen and Lt. Col. Heidi Demarest, and Dr. Marybeth Ulrich for facilitating this survey research.

Image: Department of Defense, Patrick Kelley

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The Gulf War is often remembered as a “good war,” a high-tech conflict that quickly and cleanly achieved its objectives. Yet, new archival evidence sheds light on the extended fallout from the war and challenges this neat narrative. The Gulf War left policymakers with a dilemma that plagued successive U.S. administrations. The war helped create an acute humanitarian crisis in Iraq, and the United States struggled to find a way to contain a still recalcitrant Saddam Hussein while alleviating the suffering of innocent Iraqis. The failure of American leaders to resolve this dilemma, despite several chances to do so, allowed Saddam’s regime to drive a wedge into the heart of the American-led, post-Cold War order. While in the short term the war seemed like a triumph, over the years its afterlife caused irreparable harm to American interests.

1 Susan Baer, “Desert Storm Takes N.Y. 5 Million Attend Ticker-Tape Parade,” Baltimore Sun, June 11, 1991, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1991-06-11-1991162064-story.html.

2 Edward J. Marolda and Robert J. Schneller Jr., Shield and Sword: The United States Navy and the Persian Gulf War (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001), xiii.

3 E.J. Dionne Jr., “Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome,” Washington Post, March 4, 1991, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/poli-tics/1991/03/04/kicking-the-vietnam-syndrome/b6180288-4b9e-4d5f-b303-befa2275524d/.

4 Richard N. Haass, “The Gulf War: Its Place in History,” in Into the Desert: Reflections on the Gulf War, ed. Jeffrey A. Engel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 57–83; and Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (New York: Mariner Books, 2014).

5 Warren Christopher, In the Stream of History: Shaping Foreign Policy for a New Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 11; and Jeffery Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” The Atlantic, April 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doc-trine/471525/.

6 Kirk Spitzer, “25 Years Later, Desert Storm Remains the Last Good War,” USA Today, Feb. 27, 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opin-ion/2016/02/27/column-25-years-later-desert-storm-remains-last-good-war/81033112/.

7 Rebecca Friedman Lissner, “The Long Shadow of the Gulf War,” War on the Rocks, Feb. 24, 2016, https://warontherocks.com/2016/02/the-long-shadow-of-the-gulf-war/.

In June 1991, nearly 5 million onlookers en-thusiastically welcomed American troops returning home from the Gulf War as they marched in a ticker-tape parade through

New York City’s “Canyon of Heroes.”1 This image of the Gulf War as a triumph has proved endur-ing. As two historians of the war wrote a decade later, the Gulf War was “one of the most success-ful campaigns in American military history.”2 For many Americans, the war exorcised the demons of Vietnam.3 Others have contrasted the success of the 1991 Gulf War with the failure of the 2003 Iraq War.4 Such praise has transcended domestic

American politics. Both the Clinton and Obama ad-ministrations admired the way President George H. W. Bush handled the conflict.5 Despite some handwringing about Saddam Hussein remaining in power and the fact that there was no World War II-style surrender, the conflict is still remembered as a “good war” or, as one Marine Corps general described it, a “beautiful thing.”6 Unsurprisingly, it has had an outsize impact on the way Americans think war should be conducted.7

Yet, just a few miles north of the June 1991 tick-er-tape parade, the difficulties American diplomats were facing at the United Nations offered a quite

SAMUEL HELFONT

THE GULF WAR’S AFTERLIFE:

DILEMMAS, MISSED OPPORTUNITIES,

AND THE POST-COLD WAR

ORDER UNDONE

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sources almost immediately reveals a disparity be-tween the destruction they describe in Iraq during the 1990s and the American narratives of a clean and precise war in 1991.13 As the second half of this article demonstrates, this disparity facilitated Ira-qi attempts to drive a wedge between the United States and its international partners. Saddam’s regime spent considerable time and effort high-lighting, in cinematic detail, the suffering that the Iraqi people experienced because of the Gulf War and international sanctions, juxtaposing it against American narratives about the war and its after-math to devastating effect.

This article first describes the policy dilemma that the United States faced following the Gulf War. It then discusses the opportunities that the United States missed to deal with that dilemma. Finally, the article shows how these missed oppor-tunities weakened the post-Cold War international system and ultimately contributed to the American decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

America’s Post-Gulf War Dilemma

The months following the end of the Gulf War presented the international community with com-peting images of triumph and despair: triumph for the United States and the United Nations, despair for Iraq and its civilian population. This Janus-faced outcome created a dilemma. How could the international community preserve the gains it had made during the Gulf War in solidifying a post-Cold War system based on the rule of law, while also addressing the acute humanitarian crisis that had engulfed millions of Iraqi civilians?

Triumph

The triumphal feelings that emerged at the end of the conflict surpassed what one might expect from a limited regional war. As the British ambas-sador to the United Nations argued, the war was “of far greater and of far more positive significance

13 For an example of the narratives that emerge from Iraqi records, see Khoury, Iraq in Wartime, 35–47.

14 “Provisional Record of the 2981st Meeting, U.N. Security Council,” UNSC Records, S/PV. 2981, April 3, 1991, 111, https://undocs.org/en/S/PV.2981.

15 “Provisional Record of the 2981st Meeting, U.N. Security Council,” 112; and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, “Introduction,” in The United Nations and the Iraq-Kuwait Conflict 1990-1996, ed. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, The United Nations Blue Books Series, vol. IX, Department of Public Information, United Nations, New York, 1996, 33–34.

16 “Provisional Record of the 2981st Meeting, U.N. Security Council,” 82.

17 “Provisional Record of the 2981st Meeting, U.N. Security Council,” 99.

18 Jeffrey A. Engel, When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 396; and George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Vintage, 1999), 317–18.

19 George H. W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of Congress,” Speech, Washington, DC, Sept. 11, 1990, available at the Miller Center, University of Virginia, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/september-11-1990-address-joint-session-congress.

20 George H. W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of Congress.”

for all countries in the world, and for [the United Nations] as a whole, than the many regional con-flicts with which we have tried to grapple over re-cent decades.”14 The conflict, he argued, “marked a clear, firm and effective determination of the world community not to allow the law of the jungle to overcome the rule of law.”15 The American ambas-sador called the war’s ceasefire agreement “unique and historic,” claiming that “it fulfils the hope of mankind.”16 In a sign of the times, the Soviet Un-ion’s ambassador agreed, arguing that the conflict demonstrated “the soundness of the new thinking, the new system of international relations.”17

These sentiments stemmed from the way that the Bush administration sold the war. Shortly af-ter the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, Bush began promoting a war to liberate Kuwait by connecting it to visions of a liberal and more hu-mane post-Cold War order.18 On Sept. 11, 1990, he made his case for war in a widely publicized ad-dress to Congress. He linked the Gulf crisis with the end of the Cold War, explaining that the “crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic pe-riod of cooperation.”19 He stated explicitly that a “new world order” was one of the objectives of the coming Gulf conflict and he argued that the crisis would birth “a new era — freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace.” This was no ordi-nary foreign policy venture. As Bush explained, “A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor.” Yet, the conflict in the Persian Gulf would finally put within reach a “world in which nations recognize the shared re-sponsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.”20

This almost utopian rhetoric about a new world order tapped into the broader zeitgeist at the end of the Cold War. A year earlier, in 1989, the polit-ical scientist Francis Fukuyama famously declared the “end of history” on the pages of the Nation-al Interest. For Fukuyama, the coming victory of

different image of the war’s place in history. The Gulf War had caused much more damage to Iraqi infrastructure than American officials had antic-ipated or acknowledged. As a result, the conflict contributed to an acute humanitarian crisis that developed during and after the war. Moreover, the Iraqi regime was carrying out atrocities against its own people and failing to abide by the Gulf War’s ceasefire agreement that permitted U.N. inspectors full access to its weapons sites. In response, the United States insisted on keeping economic sanc-tions on Iraq in place to coerce the Iraqi regime into full compliance. However, these sanctions fur-ther deepened the emerging humanitarian crisis in Iraq, punishing civilians for the crimes of a regime that they had little ability to influence. Through-out the following decade, the inability of the United States to find a way out of this dilemma plagued American diplomacy and diminished the country’s international standing.

This outcome was not inevitable. Following the war, at least two opportunities arose for finding a formula to hold Baghdad accountable while also alleviating the humanitarian crisis in Iraq. As new archival material makes clear, the American fail-ure to seize either of these opportunities caused lasting, and probably irreparable, damage to U.S. interests and to the post-Cold War order that the United States wanted to build. The first opportu-nity emerged from a plan in the summer of 1991 to separate the humanitarian situation in Iraq from the United Nations’ attempt to eliminate illicit Iraqi weapons programs. The second opportunity arose following Bill Clinton’s election in 1992. Ira-qi records show that once Clinton replaced Bush, Baghdad was prepared to adjust its approach to the United States and the international community. As a result, the United States had a clear chance to

8 George H. W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of Congress,” Speech, Washington, DC, Sept. 11, 1990, available at the Miller Center, Uni-versity of Virginia, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/september-11-1990-address-joint-session-congress.

9 For example, see Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1995); Marvin Pokrant, Desert Storm at Sea: What the Navy Really Did (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999); Marolda and Schneller, Shield and Sword; James A. Winnefeld, Preston Niblack, and Dana J. Johnson, A League of Airmen: U.S. Air Power in the Gulf War (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corp., 1994); and Daryl G. Press, “The Myth of Air Power in the Persian Gulf War and the Future of Warfare,” International Security 26, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 5–44, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3092121.

10 Though he takes a different position than this article, Joshua Rovner provides a good overview of this debate in Joshua Rovner, “Delusion of De-feat: The United States and Iraq, 1990–1998,” Journal of Strategic Studies 37, no. 4 (2014): 482–507, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2014.891074.

11 In addition to some primary documents from the George H. W. Bush administration, archival records used in this article include the Ba‘th Regional Command Collection, housed at the Hoover Archives and Library, Stanford University (hereafter cited as BRCC); the Conflict Records Re-search Center, formerly housed at the National Defense University, Washington, DC (hereafter cited as CRRC); the Clinton Library Archives, housed at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, Little Rock, AR and online at the Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentialli-braries.us (hereafter cited as Clinton Library); and the National Security Archive at George Washington University, Washington, DC and online at https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/ (hereafter cited as the National Security Archive). The United Nations records can be found in the Dag Hammarskjöld Library, https://research.un.org/en/docs/sc/quick/meetings/2020 (hereafter cited as UNSC Records).

12 For example, see Dina Rizk Khoury, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kevin M. Woods, David D. Palkki, and Mark E. Stout, eds., The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime, 1978–2001 (New York: Cam-bridge University Press, 2011); Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba’th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Aaron Faust, The Ba’thification of Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s Totalitarianism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015); Samuel Helfont, Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam, and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Lisa Blaydes, State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

establish a more sustainable policy on Iraq. Both of these opportunities offered a way out of the dilem-ma that America faced in the wake of the Gulf War and seizing them would have led to more favorable outcomes for U.S. interests and for the post-Cold War system.

Bush had sold the Gulf War as a way to forge the post-Cold War international system into a “new world order” that would unite the globe in a liber-al, American-led system rooted in the rule of law.8 This was a laudable goal. Yet, the fallout from that war ultimately undermined any hopes for such a system. New archival material from the Iraqi Baath Party’s archives and the Clinton Library demon-strates how humanitarian issues in Iraq poisoned American foreign relations and became a weapon for Iraq and other states to undermine American leadership of the international system. The result-ing frustration and ill will propelled the United States into the 2003 Iraq War, which only further undermined its international standing.

Most critical analyses of the Gulf War fail to con-sider the aftermath of the war.9 When they do, they often debate whether the United States won the Gulf War but lost the peace.10 However, that debate artificially separates the war from its political fall-out, including the 2003 Iraq War. In fact, most de-bates about Iraq that occurred in 2003 — including debates about regime change — had their origins in the dilemma that the Gulf War created for U.S. policy. This article explicitly links these events, of-fering a corrective to historical narratives of the Iraq wars.

These insights stem from new research with Ira-qi, American, and U.N. records.11 The Iraqi archives are particularly interesting and have generated a wealth of new literature over the past decade.12 However, immersing oneself in Iraqi and Arabic

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the air campaign would have been equally success-ful in expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait had it re-stricted its targets to the Iraqi military and com-mand-and-control systems.31

The war damage was compounded by Saddam’s crackdown on mass uprisings across the country following Iraq’s defeat. The regime deployed its elite Republican Guard to Shia-dominated south-ern Iraq, where it laid waste to several towns and damaged important religious shrines. In some cit-

ies, bodies literally piled up in the streets.32 The regime’s counterattack in northern Iraq led over a million Kurds to flee their homes for makeshift camps along the Turkish and Iranian borders. The regime had used chemical weapons against the Kurds in a genocidal campaign known as al-Anfal in the late 1980s, and many Kurds feared Saddam was planning another round of atrocities.33 Thus, the war not only damaged Iraq directly with bombs but also led to several rounds of unrest and harsh repression from the Iraqi government that further worsened the humanitarian situation.

The extent of the damage that the war and its aftermath caused became clear when several in-dependent survey teams visited Iraq in the spring and summer of 1991. A U.N. team led by Under-Sec-retary-General Martti Ahtisaari claimed “nothing that we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has now

31 Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 211–53; Press, “The Myth of Air Power.”

32 For an overview of these events and the myths that surround them, see Fanar Haddad, Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity (London: Hurst & Company, 2011), 13, 65–84, 117–32; Khoury, Iraq in Wartime, 135–36; Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 264–71; and Helfont, Compulsion in Religion, 121–24.

33 Scott Peterson, “Kurds Say Iraq’s Attacks Serve as a Warning,” Christian Science Monitor, May 13, 2002, https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0513/p08s01-wome.html.

34 “Report to the Secretary-General on Humanitarian Needs in Kuwait and Iraq in the Immediate Post-Crisis Environment by a Mission to the Area Led by Mr. Martti Ahtisaari, Under-Secretary-General for Administration and Management,” in The United Nations and the Iraq-Kuwait Conflict 1990-1996, ed. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, March 20, 1991, 187.

35 “Harvard Study Team Report: Public Health in Iraq After the Gulf War,” Harvey Study Team, Harvard University, May 1991, BRCC, 2749_0000, 0311–88. Quote found on page 312.

36 Paul Lewis, “After the War; U.N. Survey Calls Iraq’s War Damage Near-Apocalyptic,” New York Times, March 22, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/22/world/after-the-war-un-survey-calls-iraq-s-war-damage-near-apocalyptic.html; and Barton Gellman, “Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq,” Washington Post, June 23, 1991, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/06/23/allied-air-war-struck-broadly-in-iraq/e469877b-b1c1-44a9-bfe7-084da4e38e41/.

37 Lewis, “After the War.”

befallen the country.”34 The team argued that the war “wrought near-apocalyptic results upon the economic infrastructure of what had been, until January 1991, a rather highly urbanized and mech-anized society.” In May, a team of medical and le-gal experts from Harvard University visited Iraq and completed a peer-reviewed study. They came to largely the same conclusions as the U.N. team, estimating that “at least 170,000 Iraqi children un-der five years of age are likely to die from epidemic

diseases unless the situation in Iraq changes dramatically for the better.”35 As these reports showed, 9,000 homes were destroyed and over 70,000 peo-ple were left homeless in the after-math of the war. Coalition bombing damaged or destroyed 17 of Iraq’s 20 power plants. Eleven of them were deemed unrepairable. These power plants were needed to maintain es-sential infrastructure like water treat-

ment facilities. Without them Iraqis struggled to find clean water. Overall, these and similar reports agreed with the findings of Ahtisaari’s team, that “most means of modern life support have been de-stroyed or rendered tenuous.”36

The destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure and the suffering of Iraqi civilians that resulted from the war and its aftermath contrasted with the idealis-tic narratives about a clean and precise war that American officials had presented during the con-flict. In April 1991, the New York Times reported that the reality on the ground in Iraq “seemed to be at odds with allied military officials’ insistence that the damage in Iraq was largely confined to military sites and transportation links.”37 In June 1991, the Washington Post reported, “The strategic bombing of Iraq, described in wartime briefings as a campaign against Baghdad’s offensive military ca-pabilities, now appears to have been broader in its

liberal democracy in the Cold War represented the end state in the long evolution of political ideology.21 Bush himself had made a similar, though less philo-sophical, argument about the triumph of liberal de-mocracy in his 1989 inaugural address.22 Such think-ing mixed and coalesced with other ideas about the evolution of international politics and warfare dur-ing the late 1980s and early 1990s. A string of prom-inent intellectuals claimed that liberal democracy had prevailed and that the connected phenomena of war and authoritarianism were becoming obsolete.23 These “millenarian expectations,” as one prominent historian has termed them, allowed Bush to argue that a new world order could replace the might-makes-right calculations of previous ages.24

The world order Bush promised was not exactly new. A liberal order rooted in collective security had existed in theory since the advent of the United Na-tions after the world wars. However, the Cold War had blocked its full implementation. The warming relations between Moscow and Washington in the late 1980s meant a new order could be based on co-operation rather than conflict at the United Nations, making a rules-based system possible. As Bush de-clared, it would create a world “where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle.”25

Bush is often described as a foreign policy real-ist rather than an idealist.26 It is difficult to know whether he was influenced by liberal ideas behind a new world order and, if so, to what extent, or whether he adopted such rhetoric simply to sell the war at home and abroad. Either way, his rhet-oric clearly raised expectations that American actions would emulate the ideals that Bush had expressed. The United States gained enthusiastic international support for the war, leading to an un-precedented string of binding United Nations Se-curity Council resolutions. Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the U.N. secretary-general at the time, argued that

21 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest, no. 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184.

22 George H. W. Bush, “Inaugural Address,” Speech, Washington, DC, Jan. 20, 1989, available at the Miller Center, University of Virginia, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/january-20-1989-inaugural-address; and Engel, When the World Seemed New, 73.

23 See, for example, John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989); John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Robert F. Knopf, 1993), 48–49; and John Lewis Gaddis, “Toward the Post-Cold War World,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 2 (Spring, 1991): 103–4, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1991-03-01/toward-post-cold-war-world. It should be noted that Gaddis’ analysis does not suppose that these ideas will succeed, or even that they should.

24 Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), xi.

25 Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of Congress.”

26 Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “George H. W. Bush: Conservative Realist as President,” Orbis 62, no. 1 (2018): 56–75, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2017.11.001.

27 “Security Council resolution calling for strict compliance with the sanctions against Iraq and confirming that these sanctions apply to all means of transport, including aircraft,” UNSC Records, S/RES/670, Sept. 25, 1990, https://undocs.org/en/S/RES/670%20(1990); and Boutros-Ghali, “Introduction,” 21-23.

28 For an operational history of the war, see Gordon and Trainor, The General’s War.

29 See “Security Council resolution calling for strict compliance with the sanctions against Iraq,” 174–75; and Boutros-Ghali, “Introduction,” 21–23.

30 Alexander S. Cochran et al., Gulf War Air Power Survey, Vol. 1: Planning (Washington, DC, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), 155.

enforcing these resolutions represented a new ap-proach to international relations. He insisted that “enforcement” of Security Council resolutions was “qualitatively different from the way of war” be-cause it emphasized “diplomatic efforts to arrive at a peaceful solution” and strove “to minimize unde-served suffering.”27 As such, while linking the Gulf crisis to idealist dreams of a new world order was useful in rallying support, it also set high and per-haps unrealistic expectations about the amount of damage and suffering the war would cause in Iraq.

On the tactical and operational level, the Gulf War achieved remarkable successes. The American-led coalition quickly expelled the Iraqi military from Kuwait in January and February of 1991. The world seemed to have come together to enforce a new global system and the conflict’s ceasefire sparked the triumphalist, internationalist rhetoric high-lighted above.28 Soon after the war ended, however, the sense of triumph was quickly overshadowed by the dilemmas that the war produced.

Despair

The pre-war promise “to minimize undeserved suffering” did not match the reality on the ground for Iraqis.29 The Gulf War was clearly less destruc-tive than other 20th-century conflicts, such as the world wars or the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Nev-ertheless, in addition to targeting the Iraqi military directly in and around Kuwait, the U.S. Air Force pushed a strategic bombing campaign that was de-signed to win the war by incapacitating the Iraqi state and its critical infrastructure.30 This strategic bombing deep inside Iraq contributed significantly to the humanitarian crisis after the war and com-plicated America’s post-war diplomacy. Academic assessments of the war have argued that strategic bombing in Iraq was largely ineffective and that

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Iraqi sovereignty pushed a majority at the Security Council — led by China, India, Yemen, and Cuba — to press for easing the sanctions.48 This divergence began a long process that eventually ended with the shattering of the Security Council’s post-Cold War unity.

Missed Opportunities

To avoid a standoff at the Security Council over Iraq in the summer of 1991, member states needed to find a formula that would address the humani-tarian situation in Iraq while preventing the regime from skirting binding resolutions and rearming. By mid-summer, the secretary-general presented the outlines of just such an approach to the Security Council. Unfortunately, the United States failed to seize the opportunity.

American Overreach

The United Nations secretary-general appointed the senior U.N. statesman, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, to be his executive delegate for the human-itarian crisis in Iraq. In July, Sadruddin returned from Iraq with a detailed report on the scale of the problem as well as recommendations for address-ing it within existing Security Council resolutions. The “impact of the sanctions,” he argued, “had been, and remains, very substantial on the econo-my and living conditions of [Iraq’s] civilian popula-tion.”49 At that time, Iraq was only able to generate 25 percent of the electrical power it had prior to the war.50 Iraqis lacked access to clean water, raw sewage was flowing in the streets of some cities, and outbreaks of typhoid and cholera had already occurred.51 Additionally, sanctions had led to food shortages and threatened to “cause massive star-vation throughout the country.”52

The biggest impediment to addressing the human-itarian crisis in Iraq was financial. The report sur-veyed critical sectors of Iraqi society (agriculture,

48 “Provisional Record of the 2995th Meeting, U.N. Security Council;” “Provisional Record of the 3004th Meeting, U.N. Security Council,” UNSC Records, S/PV 3004, Aug. 15, 1991, https://undocs.org/en/S/PV.3004; and Litvak, “Iraq (Al-Jumhuriyya al- ‘Iraqiyya),” 440–41.

49 “Report to the Secretary-General Dated 15 July 1991 on Humanitarian Needs in Iraq Prepared by Mission Led by Sadruddin Aga Khan, Execu-tive Delegate of the Secretary General,” United Nations, July 15, 1991, 11, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/162775?ln=en.

50 “Report to the Secretary-General Dated 15 July 1991,” 13.

51 “Report to the Secretary-General Dated 15 July 1991,” 12.

52 “Report to the Secretary-General Dated 15 July 1991,” 13.

53 “Report to the Secretary-General Dated 15 July 1991,” 15.

54 “Report to the Secretary-General Dated 15 July 1991,” 15.

55 “Report to the Secretary-General Dated 15 July 1991,” 16.

56 “Report to the Secretary-General Dated 15 July 1991,” 17.

57 “Report to the Secretary-General Dated 15 July 1991,” 16.

medicine, water, electricity, etc.) to estimate their needs. Even the most minimal, short-term effort to supply the necessary humanitarian aid required tens of billions of dollars. These “massive financial requirements” were “of a scale far beyond what is, or is likely to be, available under any United Na-tions-sponsored programme.”53 After all, the Unit-ed Nations’ appeal to donors for humanitarian as-sistance for Iraq, Kuwait, and the border areas with Iran and Turkey had only raised $210 million.54

The only state capable of financing Iraqi recon-struction was Iraq. Its oil resources had the po-tential to fund reconstruction, but U.N. sanctions prevented Baghdad from selling its oil or import-ing the materials it needed to rebuild the coun-try. Sadruddin’s report highlighted that existing resolutions permitted exceptions to prohibitions on Iraqi exports and imports to ensure the Iraqi government had “adequate financial resources” to procure “essential civilian needs.” The excep-tions could clearly include oil exports and the im-port of critical goods for reconstruction. However, such exceptions required approval by the Security Council’s Sanctions Committee.55

To guarantee that Baghdad used oil revenue to address the country’s humanitarian crisis rather than for other, illicit purposes like rearming, the report argued, existing monitoring mechanisms could easily be expanded “to provide adequate in-formation on the destination and use of the goods in question.” All money would flow through banks in the United States and, as the report detailed, “commercial transactions relating to the export of oil and the import of the above-mentioned goods and services” would be “sufficiently transparent at the international level to allow adequate con-trols with respect to their shipment and entry into Iraq.”56 Before leaving Iraq, Sadruddin received Ira-qi assurances that the country would acquiesce to this plan and its monitoring mechanisms.57

This proposal was designed to meet the needs of the Iraqi people while maintaining the securi-ty architecture to prevent Iraq from rearming in

purposes and selection of targets.”38 This situation was exacerbated by the fact that

American planners had allowed for some excessive damage to Iraqi infrastructure because they as-sumed that following Iraq’s capitulation or regime change, the United States would quickly move in to rebuild the country.39 However, because the war ended so quickly, a war termination strategy was never completed, let alone coordinated with plans and operations. Thus, the ceasefire did not set the conditions for rebuilding to occur.40

Dilemma: Balancing Enforcement and Humanitarianism

Addressing the humanitarian crisis in Iraq was complicated by the need to enforce Iraq’s compli-ance with the war’s ceasefire agreement. The Iraqi government agreed to give up its weapons of mass destruction and the programs it had used to pro-duce them. Yet, because coalition troops had left Iraq at the end of the war, economic sanctions were the United Nations’ only real means of leverage against the Iraqi regime. By mid-June, it became clear that Iraq was attempting to limit the actions and effectiveness of U.N. weapons inspectors. The Iraqi regime committed several clear violations of the ceasefire agreement, and the regime continued the brutal crackdown on its own population.41

Sanctions were a problematic tool for enforcing compliance because they hurt the Iraqi population at least as much as they hurt the regime. Once it became clear how much damage the war and its af-termath had caused, some states and U.N. officials began to call for easing sanctions on humanitari-an grounds even if Iraq did not fully comply with the U.N. dictates. The United Nations’ own survey team recommended an immediate end to the em-bargo on Iraq to prevent “imminent catastrophe.”42

38 Gellman, “Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq.”

39 Cochran et al., Gulf War Air Power Survey, Vol. 1, 94.

40 For a discussion of alternative plans, see Thomas G. Mahnken, “A Squandered Opportunity? The Decision to End the Gulf War,” in The Gulf War of 1991 Reconsidered, eds. Andrew J. Bacevich and Efraim Inbar (New York: Routledge, 2003), 121–48.

41 “Provisional Record of the 2995th Meeting, U.N. Security Council,” UNSC Records, S/PV.2995, June 26, 1991, https://undocs.org/en/S/PV.2995.

42 Lewis, “After the War.”

43 “Provisional Record of the 2981st Meeting, U.N. Security Council,” 93.

44 George H. W. Bush, National Security Directive 54, The White House, Jan. 15, 1991, George H. W Bush Presidential Library and Museum, https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/nsd/nsd54.pdf.

45 “Oral History: Richard Cheney,” PBS Frontline, January 1996, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/oral/cheney/1.html. For analysis, see Donald Stoker, Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 195–96.

46 James Gerstenzang, “Bush Airs Thoughts on End of Gulf War,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 15, 1996, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-01-15-mn-24868-story.html; and Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 487. For analysis of unclear objectives in the war, see Stoker, Why America Loses Wars, 195–96.

47 Meir Litvak, “Iraq (Al-Jumhuriyya al-‘Iraqiyya),” in Middle East Contemporary Survey XV: 1991, ed. Ami Ayalon (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1993), 440–41.

During the ceasefire discussions at the Security Council, the French representative cited the U.N. survey team’s report and argued, “The necessary goal of the restoration of lasting peace in the Gulf should not involve measures that are unnecessari-ly punitive or vindictive against the Iraqi people. It would be unjust if they were held responsible for the actions of their leader.”43

By June 1991, the Security Council was split. The United States and the United Kingdom demanded that Saddam be removed from power. While the official U.S. objectives in the Gulf War, as outlined in National Security Directive 54,44 did not include regime change, the war raised expectations that Saddam’s days as leader of Iraq were numbered. Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney later ad-mitted that the U.S. military had Saddam in its crosshairs from the first day of the conflict.45 Bush himself claimed to have “miscalculated” in his as-sumption “that Saddam could not survive a humil-iating defeat.” He lamented that Saddam remained in power following the war and later stated that the United States “could have done more” to weaken his regime.46 In retrospect, it seems clear that the Bush administration felt uneasy about using the American military to march on Baghdad and over-throw Saddam. However, Bush and his advisers wanted regime change and assumed it would take place through either a precision strike or internal Iraqi actions. These sentiments carried over to the post-war period, with Washington wanting to solve the compliance-versus-humanitarianism dilemma by removing Saddam from power.47

Other states at the Security Council were uncom-fortable with this approach. The United Nations had never approved regime change in Iraq and the U.S. government’s demand for it seemed like a heavy-handed shift toward unilateralism. Concerns over the humanitarian situation and violations of

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violation of Security Council resolutions. It also left weapons inspections and more targeted sanctions against the regime in place. In practice, the pro-posal separated humanitarian issues from inter-national security. The report received enthusiastic support from a majority of the Security Council members. In early August, India lauded its “useful suggestions,” claiming they made “evident that the humanitarian objectives we aim at can be achieved with simple and yet effective arrangements for observation and regular reporting.”58 China made clear that it strongly backed the report’s “sound recommendations.”59

The United States was less enthusiastic. Wash-ington was not happy that Saddam had survived the war, and it still viewed him as the primary impediment to a cooperative, post-Gulf War Iraq. While the Bush administration could not muster enough support at the United Nations to demand Saddam’s removal, it did not want to allow him to reconsolidate his power. By giving Baghdad the power to sell its oil and provide services for the Iraqi population, this report’s recommendations provided Saddam the means to resolidify his rule. Thus, Washington led a minority effort at the Se-curity Council to block the implementation of the report’s recommendations.60

The United States backed a separate plan in which the United Nations would manage the sale of Iraqi oil and use the proceeds to deliver food and essen-tial supplies to Iraqis. Like Sadruddin’s proposal, this “oil-for-food” arrangement provided human-itarian relief to the Iraqi population while limiting Saddam’s ability to divert money to illicit programs. However, it cut the regime in Baghdad out of the equation. States that had backed Sadruddin’s pro-posal also backed this plan, though several of them voiced reservations about American unilateralism in blocking what they perceived to be a better formula. China, India, and several smaller states worried that the American-backed program would not provide enough humanitarian aid and that it excessively en-croached on Iraqi sovereignty.61

The American-backed oil-for-food program easily passed a Security Council vote, but it immediately

58 “Provisional Record of the 3004th Meeting, U.N. Security Council,” 98.

59 “Provisional Record of the 3004th Meeting, U.N. Security Council,” 81.

60 See David M. Malone, The International Struggle Over Iraq: Politics in the UN Security Council, 1980–2005 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 114-6; Litvak, “Iraq (Al-Jumhuriyya al-‘Iraqiyya),” 440–41; and “Provisional Record of the 3004th Meeting, U.N. Security Council.”

61 “Provisional Record of the 3004th Meeting, U.N. Security Council,” 56, 81–82, 98, 101.

62 See for example, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, “Document 77. Letter to Jose Luis Jesus, President of the Security Council,” July 15, 1992, in The Papers of United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, vol. 1, ed. Charles Hill, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 173–76; and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, “Document 88. Letter to Tariq Aziz, Deputy Prime Minister, Republic of Iraq,” Aug. 4, 1992, in The Papers of United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, vol. 1, 193–94.

63 See Tim Dyson, “New Evidence on Child Mortality in Iraq,” Economic and Political Weekly 44, no. 2 (2009): 56–59, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40278386.

ran into a major problem. The resolution assumed that Saddam cared more about the Iraqi people than he did about his own power. That assumption proved incorrect and he rejected the program even in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe. Despite consid-erable efforts by senior U.N. officials, including Secre-tary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who took office at the end of 1991, Saddam continued to reject the resolution as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty.62

With Saddam’s refusal to cooperate, the Bush ad-ministration blamed him rather than the sanctions for the humanitarian situation. Technically, Bush was right. Saddam could have significantly alleviat-ed his people’s suffering by cooperating. Yet, riding high off what they perceived as the success of the Gulf War, American policymakers failed to compre-hend the political power of Iraqi suffering or the damage it could cause to U.S. interests down the road. By contrast, Saddam knew the suffering of the Iraqi people was an important political weapon for his regime. In many ways, he benefited from his people’s anguish and, as more recent research has demonstrated, his regime manipulated inter-national surveys to show that Iraqis were suffering even more than they were.63 In essence, the United States found itself playing a game of chicken with the fate of Iraq’s civilian population. A liberal coun-try like the United States could not win that type of struggle against a regime that cared little for its own people’s anguish.

In hindsight, Washington overreached in reject-ing Sadruddin’s proposal. The U.S. government ap-peared callous to the Iraqi people’s suffering and to be acting in an increasingly unilateral manner at the Security Council. The proposal was far from perfect and Saddam could have attempted to ma-nipulate it to skirt restrictions on his regime. Yet, a unified international community would have been well-equipped to deal with his intransigence. As this article demonstrates below, the unresolved humanitarian situation in Iraq helped break up the cooperative international order that the Gulf War had forged and made U.S. efforts to contain Iraq more difficult.

Iraqi Outreach

The failure of the oil-for-food program in 1991 and early 1992 left Iraq and the United States blam-ing each other for the plight of the Iraqi people. This standoff continued until November 1992, when Bush lost the presidential election to Bill Clinton. Saddam and other high-ranking Iraqis in-terpreted the American election as a referendum on Bush’s approach to Iraq.64 In closed-door meet-ings following Clinton’s election, Saddam and his senior advisers mused that the Clinton administra-tion offered new opportunities. In one discussion, Saddam stated, “I believe that during [Clinton’s] reign, a change will occur,” and internal Iraqi docu-ments reveal that Baghdad saw Clinton’s victory as a chance to “turn a new page.”65

The Iraqi regime briefly altered its tone and at-tempted to open a dialogue with Washington. As a regime report stated in November 1992, the Ira-qi press needed, “at least for the time being,” to “not write negative headlines” about the American president-elect.66 The regime sent cables to every Iraqi mission around the world instructing its rep-resentatives to take advantage of the changes in Washington. In addition to holding “solidarity ac-tivities with the people of Iraq,” they were to meet with American, British, and French ambassadors to convince them that sanctions on Iraq violated international law and human rights. They were to emphasize that these states could make 1993 a year of peace. To the extent possible, the missions were to send similar messages to Clinton, members of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. secretary of state, and other senior American officials.67

In another instance, Baghdad reached out to Clinton through the Council of Lebanese American Organizations, which the Iraqi regime believed had

64 Kevin M. Woods and Mark E. Stout, “Saddam’s Perceptions and Misperceptions: The Case of ‘Desert Storm,’” Journal of Strategic Studies, 33, no. 1 (2010): 25–26, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402391003603433.

65 “Saddam and Senior Advisers Discuss Clinton’s Desire for Talks with Iraq and Impediments to Improved Relations, January 13, 1993,” in The Saddam Tapes, 44–45; “برقية جفرية“ [Cable], Cable from the Secretary General of the Branch of the Bureau of Iraqis Outside the Region to the Region-al Command of Iraq/Office of the Secretariat of the Region, BRCC, 033-4-2, Nov. 23, 1992, 766.

66 For example, see “No Subject,” Memo from Member of the Branch of the Bureau of Iraqis Outside the Region to the Secretary General of the Branch Command, BRCC, 2721_0000, Nov. 25, 1992, 307. Tariq Aziz made a similar recommendation in a meeting with Saddam. See “Saddam and Top-Level Ba’ath Officials Discuss the Causes and Consequences of Clinton’s Election Victory and Potential for Improved Relations, circa November 4th, 1992,” in The Saddam Tapes, 41.

Cable from the Secretary General of the Branch of the Bureau of Iraqis Outside the Region to the Regional Command of ,[Cable] ”برقية جفرية“ 67Iraq/Office of the Secretariat of the Region, BRCC, 033-4-2, Dec. 19, 1992, 717.

Cable from the Secretary General of the Branch of the Bureau of Iraqis Outside the Region to the Regional Command of ,[Cable] ”برقية جفرية“ 68Iraq/Office of the Secretariat of the Region,” BRCC, 2721_0000, Nov. 25, 1992, 130.

69 “Q&A: Oil-for-Food Scandal,” BBC, Sept. 7, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4232629.stm.

70 “Saddam and His Advisers Discuss the Decline of the United States and the Possibility of Rapprochement with the Incoming Clinton Adminis-tration, circa January 14, 1993,” in The Saddam Tapes, 47–50.

Memo from the Secretary General of the Branch of the Bureau of Iraqis Outside the Region to the Regional ,[Recommendations] ”مقترحات“ 71Command of Iraq/Office of the Secretary General of the Region,” BRCC, 3187_0001, Feb. 10, 1993, 484–87.

72 Ofra Bengio, “Iraq (Jumhuriyyat al-‘Iraq),” Middle East Contemporary Survey XIX: 1995, ed. Bruce Maddy-Weitzman (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1997), 221–22.

direct contacts with Clinton and widespread po-litical influence in the United States.68 The Iraqis also tried to contact Clinton through Oscar Wyatt, who was the founder of the Houston-based petro-leum and energy firm, Coastal Corporation. Wyatt worked with the Iraqi-American, Samir Vincent, who was later arrested on charges of corruption related to the oil-for-food program and of operat-ing as an illegal agent of the Iraqi regime.69 Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz provided Wyatt and Vincent a letter to deliver to Clinton on behalf of the regime that, the Iraqis hoped, would help es-tablish a better relationship. As an Iraqi official told Saddam, “Samir and Oscar are very optimistic.”70

These outreach efforts were not simply an at-tempt to change American policy. The Iraqis un-derstood that they, too, needed to adopt a new approach and to carry out internal reforms. As stated in a report by the Baath Party’s bureau that was responsible for foreign relations, Iraq and the United States shared interests in “balancing Iran strategically” and in relation to oil. These interests could form the basis of a new relationship during the Clinton administration. However, it added, Iraq must “keep up with modern times.” The report discussed the need to address human rights vio-lations in the country and even to introduce some democratic reforms.71 This was not the first or last time that the Iraqi regime spoke about the need for democratization, and one should read such docu-ments with a healthy dose of skepticism.72 Saddam ruled a brutal, tyrannical regime. It was not on the cusp of becoming a liberal democracy. Indeed, the report’s authors clarified that they had “intense reservations” about most forms of democracy and that Western-style democracy was neither good nor viable for Iraq.

Nevertheless, the report stated, “it is not

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hidden from the [regime’s] leadership that the global orientation is marching toward the realiza-tion of democratic practices.” Thus, the report sug-gested the Iraqi parliament discuss the formation of committees representing all slices of society and then arrange “free elections” for these committees in which all Iraqis could participate. The report argued that, in the immediate wake of the Gulf War, the regime could not take these steps with-out giving the impression that it was succumbing to internal and international pressures. Such an impression would have empowered the regime’s adversaries. However, that time had passed. While the report recommended that the regime proceed with “extreme caution,” it made clear that calls for democratic reforms would “resonate globally.” In taking such actions, the regime could cooperate with “concerned global organizations” at the Unit-ed Nations and in the United States to improve Iraq’s international status.73

This report was not without critics in the regime, especially because it suggested that Baath Party members could lose some of their privileged sta-tus to non-Baathists.74 There were also limits to Saddam’s appeasement of Clinton. “Actually, it is Clinton,” he told his advisers, “who is supposed to be willing to carefully handle the relationship with us in a way where we don’t get upset with him.”75 The existence of this and similar reports on Iraqi reforms should not be taken as evidence that Iraq was on the brink of making an about-face. Yet, the report indicates a discussion that was occurring behind closed doors within the regime, and some of its suggestions were later implemented.76 In ret-rospect, the report made clear that powerful voic-es in Baghdad believed the Clinton administration presented new possibilities and that senior Iraqis were considering difficult measures to seize that opportunity. Had the Clinton administration ex-plored this opening, as difficult as that would have been, it would have had the opportunity to alter

.BRCC, 3187_0001, Feb. 10, 1993, 484–87 ,[Recommendations] ”مقترحات“ 73

Memo from the Director General of the Office of the Secretariat of the Region to the Branch Command of the ,[Recommendations] ”مقترحات“ 74Bureau of Iraqis Outside the Region, BRCC, 3187_0001, Feb. 18, 1993, 473.

75 “Saddam and Top-Level Ba’ath Officials Discuss the Causes and Consequences of Clinton’s Election Victory,” 44.

76 Bengio, “Iraq (Jumhuriyyat al-‘Iraq),” 221.

77 Christopher, In the Stream of History, 11, 28.

78 Kenneth M. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002), 56.

79 “Points to Be Made on Iraq,” Oct. 11, 1994, Clinton - Iraq/Haiti Insert 10/13/94 for National Association of Broadcasters, Clinton Library, 13, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/9074.

80 David Ignatius, “The CIA and the Coup that Wasn’t,” Washington Post, May 16, 2003, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opin-ions/2003/05/16/the-cia-and-the-coup-that-wasnt/0abfb8fa-61e9-4159-a885-89b8c476b188/.

81 Marc Trachtenberg, “History Teaches,” Yale Journal of International Affairs 7, no. 2 (September 2012): endnote 16,32, https://www.yalejournal.org/publications/history-teaches-by-marc-trachtenberg; and David M. Malone, The International Struggle Over Iraq: Politics in the UN Security Council, 1980–2005 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 121.

Iraqi behavior and, with it, American policy.The Clinton administration either missed the

signals that Iraq was sending, or it ignored them. From the very beginning, the new administration in Washington indicated that it intended to con-tinue its predecessor’s approach to foreign policy issues such as Iraq.77 Internally, the administration was divided about how much attention to give Iraq, but as a former National Security Council staffer claimed, “there was a consensus … that Saddam was evil.”78 Baghdad seemed to confirm that view when it provoked a military confrontation with the outgoing Bush administration in January 1993 and then attempted to assassinate the former presi-dent in April 1993. Unsurprisingly, Washington was not interested in the Iraqi regime’s outreach.

Baghdad’s interpretation of Clinton’s election was almost certainly flawed. The election was not a referendum on Bush’s policy toward Iraq. Never-theless, that misperception opened at least some opportunity for reform in Baghdad and for a reset in its relationship with Washington. Instead of ex-ploring this opportunity, the Clinton administra-tion adopted an unworkable policy that it inherited from its predecessor. Clinton’s National Security Council backed the oil-for-food resolution that the Bush administration had sponsored in August 1991 and argued that “Iraq refuses to comply with these resolutions … because the regime would prefer the Iraqi people to suffer.”79 Publicly, the Clinton ad-ministration introduced a policy of dual contain-ment aimed at both Iraq and Iran, but by 1994, the CIA began running an operation codenamed “DB Achilles,” which attempted to overthrow Saddam in a coup.80 In 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated, “We do not agree with the nations who argue that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanc-tions should be lifted.”81 In 1998, Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which had passed unanimous-ly in the Senate and that made regime change the

CLINTON’S APPROACH

KILLED ANY CHANCE

FOR REFORM IN BAGHDAD

OR FOR FINDING

A NEW ARRANGEMENT

THAT COULD ADDRESS

THE ONGOING

HUMANITARIAN CRISIS

IN IRAQ.

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narrative of a weak and helpless Iraq being bullied by a neo-imperialist superpower was much more effective than a narrative of a strong Iraq standing up to the United States.90

This realization formed the core of Iraq’s politi-cal strategy to break up the U.S.-led coalition that was enforcing sanctions and inspections following the war. After the ceasefire, Iraq began linking “the new world order and the disaster of the Iraqi chil-dren.” The Baath Party used the war to highlight the contradictions in the emerging international system. Because of the coalition’s “interest in hu-man rights,” a Baathist pamphlet argued, “thou-sands of Iraqi children face death, deformity and vagrancy.” It claimed that the “unjust sanctions imposed on Iraq resulted in the death of 14,232 Iraqi children during the first months [after the war], due to contamination, malnutrition and acute shortages of vaccines and medicines.”91 The Iraqi regime also made claims about the United States targeting hospitals and schools that were exagger-ated or simply untrue, but there was enough truth in its propaganda to be taken seriously by global audiences. Baghdad paid close attention to the studies conducted by the United Nations and Har-vard University that highlighted how the Gulf War and sanctions destroyed the Iraqi economy and the state’s essential functions. Iraqi Baathists then dis-tributed the results of these studies widely, includ-ing to key sectors in the international community. As internal Baath Party records show, they did so through both open channels as well as in covert operations, which were designed to disguise the re-gime’s role in spreading the information.92

At the end of 1991, Saddam convened a com-mittee consisting of senior regime officials from the Foreign Ministry, the Baath Party, the Iraqi Intelligence Service, the Health Ministry, and the Ministry of Culture and Information to execute a strategy designed to break the international alli-ance against Iraq. This was done primarily through influence operations, which they termed taharruk (movement). These operations emphasized moral and humanitarian arguments like those discussed above to create bottom-up political pressure in key

90 Author interview with Jon Alpert by phone, April 19, 2017.

.BRCC, 2749_0000, 1991, 656–67 ,[The New World Order and the Disaster of the Iraqi Children] ”النظام الدولي الجديد و كارثة اطفال العراق“ 91

92 See various files in, BRCC, 2749_0000, 1991.

-Memo from the Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, to the Regional Command/Office of the Secre ,[Associations and People] ”جمعيات وشخصيات“ 93tariat of the Region, BRCC, 3203_0003, Dec. 22, 1991, 355–56.

,BRCC, 033-4-2, Nov. 23, 1992, 766. For an overview of the Iraqi Baath Party’s structure outside Iraq, see Samuel Helfont ,[Cable] ”برقية جفرية“ 94“Authoritarianism Beyond Borders: The Iraqi Ba’th Party as a Transnational Actor,” Middle East Journal 72, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 229–45, https://doi-org/10.3751/72.2.13.

95 Kevin M. Woods et al., Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents Vol. 1, Iraqi Perspectives Project, Institute for Defense Analysis, 2007.

.BRCC, 026-5-5, Feb. 15, 1989, 207 ,[Proceedings of the Meeting of the General Secretariat Group] ”محضر اجتماع هيأع مكتب الامانة العامة“ 96

states, such as those that had seats in the United Nations Security Council or had important geostra-tegic positions in the Middle East. The operations then combined that political pressure with manip-ulation of more traditional economic and geopolit-ical interests.93

It is difficult, and maybe impossible, to disentan-gle the effects of Iraqi influence operations from other factors that drove international politics in the 1990s. Disapproval of American overreach and the natural attenuation of international political will to maintain sanctions would likely have oc-curred without any of Iraq’s actions. Moreover, the most successful Iraqi efforts reinforced these oth-er, independent forces. Thus, where the effects of one of these other forces ends and the effects on Iraqi influence operations begin is difficult to un-ravel. Nevertheless, the Iraqi archives reveal vast, previously unknown efforts to manipulate domes-tic politics in key states around the world. As inter-nal Iraqi documents show, Iraqi Baathists working in dozens of countries spied for Baghdad, ginned up favorable media coverage, and reached out both overtly and covertly to “all people, organizations, unions, associations, political parties and anyone else who has political, popular, union, and profes-sional influence.”94 They also tried to intimidate and silence anyone who stood in their way.95

Iraqi Baathists often worked internationally with people and groups that had little in common with the regime in Baghdad except for the fact that they opposed sanctions on Iraq. Therefore, Baathists regularly used proxy organizations and disassoci-ated with the Iraqi embassy “to provide cover for their [Baath] Party activities.”96 In doing so, they could avoid divisive political questions about the regime and instead argue that they were merely concerned about the well-being of their families and friends who were suffering in Iraq. Baathists courted people on both the left and the right: ac-ademics, student organizations, militant Islamists, pacifists, liberal activists, and conservative isola-tionists. They found allies in the media and even among some mainstream politicians. Then they attempted to bring these incongruent groups

official policy of the U.S. government.82 Clinton’s approach killed any chance for reform

in Baghdad or for finding a new arrangement that could address the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Iraq. As Saddam told his advisers on multiple oc-casions, “We can have sanctions with inspectors or sanctions without inspectors; which do you want?”83 Considering the Iraqi regime’s actions over the previous few years, resetting the relation-ship with Saddam would not have been easy and the outlines of the potential arrangement remain murky because the window of opportunity closed before it could be developed fully. Yet, in hindsight, Iraq’s outreach early in the Clinton administration offered a chance to avoid the damage to American foreign relations that ensued.

Effects of Iraq’s Unresolved Crisis on World Order

The Bush administration’s push for an ultimately unworkable policy in the face of viable alternatives and the Clinton administration’s decision to continue that policy left an acute humanitarian crisis simmer-ing in Iraq. This unresolved crisis provided Baghdad with a powerful political tool it could use against the United States. Over the course of the following dec-ade, the suffering of the Iraqi people helped push states such as France and Russia out of the Ameri-can-led system. America’s standing fell considerably, and the post-Cold War order began to fray.

In most ways, the aftermath of the Gulf War was disastrous for Iraq. The Iraqi military, economy, and society were almost completely incapacitated. Wide-spread uprisings threatened Saddam’s regime in the months after the war. Moreover, the Baathists began hemorrhaging senior officials. Iraq’s ambassador to the United States had defected to Canada during the war,84 and several other Iraqi ambassadors and even the head of Iraqi military intelligence followed suit in the years following the war.85

However, there were some silver linings for

82 Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998, Public Law 105–338, Oct. 31, 1998, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-105publ338/pdf/PLAW-105publ338.pdf.

83 Trachtenberg, “History Teaches,” endnote 16, 32; and Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD, September 2004, vol. 1, 61.

84 Muhammad al Mashat, كنت سفيرا للعراق في واشنطن: حكايتي مع صدام في غزو الكويت[I was Iraq’s Ambassador in Washington: My story with Saddam during the invasion of Kuwait] (Beirut: The Iraqi Institute for Research and Publishing, 2008).

85 For example, see, “هروب السفير من تونس الى لندن” [The Fleeing of the Ambassador from Tunis to London], Memo from the Secretary General of the Branch of the Bureau of Iraqis Outside the Region to the Regional Command/Office of the Secretariat of the Region, BRCC 039-4-1, Aug. 15, 1993, 318–19; and Wafiq al -Samarra’i, “طام البوابة الشرقية” [Wreckage of the Eastern Gate] (Kuwait: Al Qabas, 1997).

86 Nuha al Radi, Baghdad Diaries: A Woman’s Chronicle of War and Exile (New York: Vintage, 2003), 29.

87 al Radi, Baghdad Diaries, 31.

88 Gordan and Trainor, The General’s War, 326.

89 “Saddam Appraises American and International Reactions to the Invasion of Kuwait,” Aug. 7, 1990, in The Saddam Tapes, 176.

Saddam. Unlike most other Arab dictators, he did not rise through the ranks of the army or come to power in a military coup. His position stemmed from his involvement in a populist political party — the Baath — and he viewed his power through the prism of mass politics. The unresolved human-itarian crisis in Iraq and his obstinance in the face of overwhelming Western power provided him the opportunity to seize the mantle of leadership in a bottom-up, global opposition to American hegemo-ny in the post-Cold War era.

During the war, Iraqis and those sympathetic to their suffering began to point out the contrast be-tween the idealist rhetoric of the new world order and the reality that they confronted. As one Iraqi intellectual recorded in her diary after 20 days of bombing, “Bush says, we make war to have peace. Such nonsense. What a destructive peace this is. A new world order? I call it disorder.”86 Then, a few days later, she wrote simply, “Killing is the new world order.”87

Saddam first realized the political power of this rhetoric when the United States bombed the al-Amiriyah bunker during the height of the Gulf War’s strategic bombing campaign. The Ameri-can military mistakenly thought the location was a military command center. It was actually an air raid shelter, and the bombing killed hundreds of Iraqi civilians. As news of the bombing emerged, condemnation from around the globe forced the United States to end its strategic bombing in Bagh-dad.88 In that sense, al-Amiriyah did more to cur-tail coalition military operations than any Iraqi an-ti-aircraft system. This event, more than anything else, taught Saddam the power of weakness. Early in the crisis, Saddam told his advisers that Iraq needed to appear powerful to attract support.89 Consequently, as one American journalist working in Iraq at the time observed, the Iraqi regime ini-tially tried to hide civilian casualties in an attempt to project strength. By contrast, after the bombing of al-Amiriyah, the regime went to great pains to highlight Iraqi casualties. Saddam realized that the

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program that gave him more control and, as later investigations have shown, Baghdad manipulated this program to funnel money to international ac-tors with influence at the U.N. Security Council. French officials were a major target of that effort. Some of them accepted significant enticements de-signed to buy their influence or reward political po-sitions that were favorable to Iraq, which may have affected French policy.104

However, the unresolved humanitarian crisis in Iraq — amplified by Iraqi influence operations — provided Chirac with political options he otherwise would have lacked. Because the French govern-ment was much more sympathetic to Iraqi suffer-ing under the U.N. sanctions, it was more open to decoupling sanctions from weapons inspections. As the conflict continued through the 1990s, the United States began to signal that its ultimate goal was indeed to remove Saddam rather than force his compliance with U.N. resolutions. France did

104 Paul A. Volcker, Richard J. Goldstone, and Mark Pieth, Independent Inquiry into the United Nations Oil-For-Food Programme: Manipulation of the Oil-For-Food Programme by the Iraqi Regime, Oct. 27, 2005, 47–78.

105 Frédéric Bozo, “‘We Don’t Need You’: France, the United States, and Iraq, 1991–2003,” Diplomatic History 41, no. 1 (January 2017): 188, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhw011.

106 Paul K. White, “Crises After the Storm: An Appraisal of U.S. Air Operations in Iraq since the Persian Gulf War,” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Military Research Papers, no. 2 (1999): 41–47.

not see that as a viable option or one that was sup-ported by a U.N. resolution. Instead, it wanted to give Saddam a path out of international isolation and sanctions.105 In essence, Paris continued to fa-vor the policies that the United States had reject-ed in the summer of 1991. American inflexibility on this issue inflamed opposition in France to U.S. policy toward Iraq on humanitarian grounds and it made it politically possible for Paris to diverge from Washington.

In 1996, the French government began to pull out of the coalition enforcing the no-fly zones over Iraq.106 Over the next few years, it grew increasingly hostile to the U.S. strategy in Iraq and the sanc-tions regime itself. Although France continued to support arms control in Iraq and remained official-ly supportive of the United States at the United Na-tions, French foreign ministry officials told visiting Iraqis in closed-door meetings that, regardless of what happened at the Security Council, they were

together into a loosely organized, yet potent, polit-ical force designed to achieve Iraq’s strategic goals throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.97

The Baathists used these influence operations to push proponents of the post-Cold War order to reconsider their support for the American-led sys-tem. The fallout was most evident in France and Russia, both of which supported the United States in the Gulf War and its immediate aftermath, but then used their positions on the Security Council to resist American policies on Iraq later in the 1990s. The Arab states that supported the Gulf War went through a similar transition. As such, Iraqi influence operations drove a wedge into the international sys-tem to the detriment of American interests.

France

Senior Iraqi officials understood that different states required different approaches. In December 1991, Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister, argued in an internal memo that the political situation and pub-lic sentiment in the United States precluded any chance of successfully influencing the U.S. govern-ment. However, he mused, “perhaps the conditions for influencing [France] are more favorable.”98 These observations proved prescient. France was much more sympathetic to the suffering of the Ira-qi people. Also, while France supported the Gulf War and sanctions, it avoided presenting its Iraq policies as a harbinger of a new world order. In the United Nations Security Council discussions following the Gulf War, France’s representative fo-cused on instituting a ceasefire and “re-establishing regional security.”99 This focus on regional security differed significantly from the American attempt to link the conflict to grandiose ideas of world order and a new international system. Following the war, France’s approach toward Iraq remained much more flexible and Aziz saw that France provided real opportunities.

97 The Baath Party archives contain thousands of pages on the party’s influence operations in the 1990s and early 2000s. In addition to sources cited above and below, see the following for a small sampling: “مقترح” [Recommendation], Memo from the Director of the Office of the Secretariat of the Region to the Presidential Diwan, BRCC, 2837_0002, April 1992, 585; “برنامج عمل” [Work Plan], Memo from the Secretary General of the Central Office of Students and Youth to the Office of the Secretariat of the Region, BRCC, 2749_0000, Dec. 22, 1991, 567–73; and “نشاطات” [Activities], Memo from the Assistant to the Secretary General of the Founding Leader Branch Command to the Regional Command of Iraq/Office of the Secre-tariat of the Region, BRCC, 2099_0003, Feb. 24, 1999, 505.

.BRCC, 3203_0003, Dec. 22, 1991, 355–56 ,[Associations and People] ”جمعيات وشخصيات“ 98

99 “Provisional Record of the 2981st Meeting, U.N. Security Council,” 93; and Boutros-Ghali, “Introduction,” 33–34.

Memo from the General Secretary of the Branch of the Bureau ,[Answer from the American President and His Wife] ”اجابة الرئس الامريكي وزوجته“ 100of Iraqis Outside the Region to the Iraqi Regional Command/Office of the Secretariat of the Region, BRCC, 2847_0002, July 7, 1994, 589–91.

Memo from the General Manager of the Office of the Secretariat of the Region to the ,[Answer from the French President] ”اجابة الرئس الفرنسي“ 101Presidency of the Republic – the Secretary, BRCC, 2847_0002, Aug. 10, 1994, 573–79.

102 “Cable: Presidential Call to PM Balladur,” Cable from the American Embassy, Paris, to the Secretary of State, Washington, D.C., Declassified Documents Concerning Rwanda, Clinton Library, 62–63, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/47967.

103 “Telcon with President Chirac of France,” Memorandum of Telephone Conversation Between the President and French President Jacques Chirac, Nov. 4, 1998, Declassified Documents Concerning Iraq, Clinton Library, 17–18, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/16192.

The supposedly independent proxy groups through which the Baathists worked revealed how different governments viewed Iraq. In 1994, one Ira-qi proxy group, representing itself as a humanitari-an and cultural organization, presented Clinton with details on the humanitarian crisis in Iraq and asked him to lift sanctions. Clinton responded curtly. He argued that Saddam was being investigated for var-ious crimes against humanity, “including genocide,” and that sanctions on his regime needed to remain in place. The Clinton administration recognized that Iraqis were suffering, but it blamed Saddam for re-jecting the oil-for-food formula.100 When the same Iraqi proxy group reached out to French President François Mitterrand, he responded that the informa-tion it provided on the humanitarian crisis in Iraq had a great impact on him. While Mitterrand did not commit to a change of French policy, Iraqi officials in Baghdad took note of his “positive response,” which was generally indicative of the broader sym-pathy for Iraqis in France.101

By 1994, American diplomats stated clearly that the French were moving away from the United States on Iraq.102 French policy on Iraq then began to shift more dramatically with the election of President Jacques Chirac in 1995. Chirac felt the American ap-proach was not working. While the U.S. government wanted to compel Saddam through sanctions and air strikes, Chirac recognized that the American pol-icy was unworkable. He told Clinton, “I’m afraid we are working here with an unarmed gun.” By this, he meant that for Saddam, the “best way to regain con-trol of the people is to pretend to be a martyr.” Thus, the more Chirac and Clinton punished Saddam, the stronger he became.103

As a conservative and a Gaullist, Chirac wanted to protect France’s traditional diplomatic power against rising American hegemony. Therefore, he pushed back against U.S. policies almost by instinct. Moreover, in 1996, Saddam finally agreed to a mod-ified version of the United Nations’ oil-for-food

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political pressure from the nationalist and commu-nist opposition.114

Iraqi Baathists operated cells in Russia that con-tinued influence operations throughout the 1990s. As internal Baath Party records show, they regular-ly held meetings with the heads of Russian polit-ical parties. They also organized popular demon-strations, published articles supporting Iraq in the Russian press, and, by their own account, contrib-uted to the “erosion of the American-British posi-tion.”115 At minimum, these actions amplified politi-cal positions in Russia that made cooperation with the United States on Iraq difficult for Russian leaders.

The Russian divergence with Ameri-ca over Iraq created a real dilemma for Washington and had significant impli-cations for world order. The United States felt it was necessary to enforce U.N. resolutions militarily on sever-al occasions in the 1990s. This posed a problem for U.S.-Russian relations. As Clinton explained to British Prime Min-ister Tony Blair, if the Russian govern-ment knew about potential American operations in Iraq, it would likely inform the Iraqi regime and put American lives at risk. If the Unit-ed States did not tell Russia, the trust necessary to build a cooperative international system would break down.116 More often than not, the adminis-tration decided not to tell Russia about American operations in Iraq, thus driving the two sides apart.

The breakdown in the U.S.-Russian relationship over Iraq bled into other important issues as well. As early as 1993, CIA reports claimed that American actions in Iraq were affecting Russian perceptions of the conflict in the Balkans.117 Russian-U.S. ten-sions over Iraq escalated throughout the decade. Moscow eventually recalled its ambassador to the

114 See, for example, “Russia’s Yugoslav Policy Reaching Critical Juncture,” Intelligence Memorandum, Office of Slavic and Eurasian Analysis, Jan. 27, 1993, 1993-01-27B, Office of Slavic and Eurasian Analysis re Moscow’s Yugoslav Policy Reaching Critical Juncture, 4, Clinton Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/12302; “Memorandum of Telephone Conversation,” Conversation Between President Clinton and Presi-dent Jacques Chirac, Dec. 17, 1998, Declassified Documents Concerning Iraq, Clinton Library, 53–56, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/16192; and “Meeting with Prime Minister John Major of Great Britain,” Memorandum for the President from Clifton Wharton, Jr., Feb. 18, 1993, Declassified Documents Concerning John Major, Clinton Library, 43, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/36622.

Memo from the Assistant to the Secretary General of the Founding Leader Branch Command to the Regional Command ,[Activities] ”نشاطات“ 115of Iraq/Office of the Secretariat of the Region, BRCC, 2099_0003, Feb. 24, 1999, 505.

116 “Memorandum of Telephone Conversation,” Conversation Between the President and Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom, Dec. 18, 1998, Declassified Documents Concerning Iraq, Clinton Library, 57–59, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/16192.

117 “Serbia and the Russian Problem,” Memorandum for the Acting Director for Central Intelligence from Roger Z. George and George Kolt, Jan. 25, 1993, 1993-01-25, NIC Memo re Serbia and the Russian Problem, Clinton Library, 4, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/12300; and “Russia’s Yugoslav Policy Reaching Critical Juncture,” 2–4.

118 White, “Crises After the Storm,” 51–64.

119 Ian Jeffries, The New Russia: A Handbook of Economic and Political Developments (New York: Routledge, 2013), 587.

120 “Memorandum of Telephone Conversation,” Conversation Between President Clinton and President Boris Yeltsin, Dec. 30, 1998, Declassified Documents Concerning Iraq, Clinton Library, 72–76, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/16192.

121 Samuel Helfont, “Saddam and the Islamists: The Ba’thist Regime’s Instrumentalization of Religion in Foreign Affairs,” Middle East Journal 68, no. 3, (Summer 2014): 361–65, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43698590.

United States in response to American and British attacks on Iraq in 1998.118 This was the first time since World War II that the Russians had done this, and it occurred because of Iraq — not the Balkans or NATO expansion.119 In a phone call to Clinton, Yeltsin made clear that “what is at stake is not just the person of Saddam Hussein but our relations with the U.S.”120 The Russian-American relation-ship, which offered so much promise and hope at the beginning of the decade, never fully recovered.

The Middle East

The aftermath of the Gulf War also proved par-ticularly problematic for Middle East states. Sadd-am highlighted the suffering of the Iraqi people and his influence operations spread conspiratorial prop-aganda about nefarious American, imperialist, Jew-ish, and Zionist actors as well as their collaborators in Arab capitals. The Iraqis found particularly fer-tile ground for this messaging among Islamists and even some violent extremists from around the Arab world.121 One of the Iraqi regime’s favorite tactics was to provide scholarships for Islamist dissidents from abroad to study at the Saddam University

“working hard to lift the sanctions.”107 Further-more, as a historian of French foreign policy has noted, the Iraq issue began to define Franco-Amer-ican relations: “[T]he French were tempted to iden-tify the Iraq problem with what Paris, and indeed many capitals around the world, increasingly saw as a U.S. problem—Washington’s increasing unilat-eralist tendencies.”108 In that sense, issues resulting from the Gulf War significantly undermined Ameri-can leadership of the international system.

Russia

The fallout from the Gulf War led other countries to challenge an American-led order as well. The So-viet Union had been an ally of Iraq until the end of the Cold War. Then Moscow sided with Bush in the Gulf War and recognized the war’s role in birthing a new, post-Cold War system of international rela-tions. As Russia emerged from the Soviet Union, it initially embraced American attempts to use the Iraq issue to forge a new world order. For Iraq, the loss of its patron was a disaster. Iraqi diplomats claimed that Russia had fallen under the influ-ence of the United States and “the Jewish-Zionist Lobby in Russia.” Iraqi efforts to restore relations with Russian leaders in 1991 and early 1992 were met with repeated rebuffs. A string of invitations for leading Russian politicians to visit Iraq were ig-nored or deflected.109

Later in 1992, the Iraqi regime adopted a new, indirect approach. As the Iraqi ambassador in Moscow reported, “we were forced to extend an invitation to the opposition in parliament [to visit Iraq].” Unlike the leadership, the opposition “re-sponded with enthusiasm” and “when the delega-tion returned [to Russia,] it undertook numerous activities inside and outside of parliament.” The Russian opposition worked “to explain the truth of the situation in Iraq, it defended the Iraqi view, and it demanded that the Russian government change its position on Iraq and work towards lifting

,Memo from Secretary General of the Central Office of Students and Youth to the Office of the Secretariat of the Region ,[Report] ”تقرير“ 107BRCC, 2699_0000, July 3, 2001, 325–33.

108 Bozo, “‘We Don’t Need You,’” 192.

109 “1992 ” [The Annual Political Report for the Year 1992], Report from the Ambassador (to Russia) to the Foreign Ministry/Third Political Department, BRCC, 033-4-2, Jan. 1, 1993, 663–65. Quote on page 663.

.Jan. 1, 1993, 664 ,[The Annual Political Report for the Year 1992] ”التقرير السياسي السنوي لعام 1992“ 110

111 For example, see “Letter from the Representatives of Iraq and of the Russian Federation Transmitting the Text of a Joint Communique Con-taining Iraq’s Announcement that It Had Withdrawn Its Troops to Rearguard Positions on 12 October 1994. S/1994/1173, 15 October 1994,” in The United Nations and the Iraq-Kuwait Conflict 1990-1996, ed. Boutros-Ghali, 695.

112 Volcker, Goldstone, and Pieth, Independent Inquiry into the United Nations Oil-For-Food Programme, 22–46.

113 “Provisional Record of the 3519th Meeting, U.N. Security Council,” UNSC Records, S/PV.3519, April 14, 1995, 14, https://undocs.org/en/S/PV.3519.

the economic blockade.” The Iraqi ambassador explained that “wide circles of the Russian people are beginning to understand the just Iraqi position, and to feel that the Russian position toward Iraq is an error.” Russian policies toward Iraq, he argued, “especially intensify the nationalist opposition in its activities inside parliament and the people’s conferences, in the media, and in demonstra-tions.”110 The Iraqi Baathists in Russia continued to press these issues both among politicians and in the popular press. In doing so, they helped Rus-sian opposition parties turn the fact that Western powers had crushed and humiliated a traditional Russian ally into a wedge issue that inflamed na-tionalist passions in the country. These domestic pressures forced Russia’s government, led by Boris Yeltsin, to change course. It began defending Iraq and attempting to lift the sanctions.111

As with France, there were several causes for Moscow’s moving away from Washington in the 1990s. Russia strongly disagreed with U.S. policy in the Balkans and with NATO expansion into East-ern Europe. Some segments of Russian society also blamed the United States for their economic woes in the 1990s. Most of the literature on Russia’s di-vergence with America at the time focuses on these issues. However, Iraq played a critical and largely overlooked role in Russian-American relations.

The economic incentives that Iraq offered Russia and Russian officials almost certainly influenced Moscow’s policy.112 Just as important, however, was the lingering damage in Iraq caused by the war and sanctions. When Russia wanted to challenge the United States over its Iraq policy at the Security Council, the Russian representative often led with critiques about the humanitarian situation.113 This issue also made the Russian opposition’s argu-ments against American policy in Iraq much more potent than they otherwise would have been. As multiple reports from the period argue, one of the most important catalysts for Russian divergence with the United States at that time was domestic

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to political missteps and reinforced perceptions of American callousness. Perhaps most infamous-ly, in 1996, Albright was asked on the television show 60 Minutes whether “the price was worth it” when a “half million children have died” in Iraq because of U.S. policy. She responded, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”129 Albright later stated that she regretted the comment.130 Nevertheless, her words reflected a genuine sentiment that was increasingly isolating the United States from the rest of the international community.

Members of the Baath Party attempted to exploit America’s blind spot with regard to Iraqi suffering. As Aziz predicted, Iraqi Baathists were not suc-cessful in influencing the U.S. government directly. Although they targeted members of Congress and politicians such as the former Republican presi-dential candidate, Patrick Buchanan and the for-mer Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart, there is little evidence that those efforts were effec-tive.131 The Baathists had more success organizing an indirect campaign to influence the broader po-litical conversation in the country. They identified journalists who were sympathetic to Iraq’s plight and critical of American policy and who could reach large American audiences. Then, Baathists operating in America fed these journalists stories or brought them to Iraq, where they received privi-leged access to Iraqi officials and, in one case, even an opportunity to interview Saddam.132

Baathist cells in the United States also organized high-profile demonstrations against American pol-icy and worked with local activists from organiza-tions as disparate as the Green Party and the Young Women’s Christian Association and who shared the goal of ending sanctions against Iraq.133 Iraqi Baa-thists were able to work through these sympathetic

129 Madeleine Albright, “Punishing Saddam,” Interview with Lesley Stahl, 60 Minutes, CBS, May 12, 1996. A clip of the exchange can be seen on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbIX1CP9qr4.

130 Albright, Madam Secretary, 276.

Memo from the Official of the Branch of the Bureau of Iraqis Outside the Region to the Regional ,[Associations and People] ”جمعيات وشخصيات“ 131Command/ Office of the Secretariat of the Region, BRCC, 3203_0003, Dec. 16, 1991, 360–61.

132 “Untitled Letter,” Letter from Ramsey Clark, Jon Alpert, Maryanne De Leo, and Abdul Kadir Al Kaysi on behalf of HBO to Saddam Hussein, BRCC, 033-4-2, January 1993, 557.

133 For example, “Untitled Memo,” Memo from a Member of the Branch, Official of the Territory to an Official of the Branch (of the Bureau of Iraqis Outside the Region), BRCC, 3835_0000, March 7, 1992, 273.

Memo from Official of the Organization of Iraqis in America to the Regional ,[Committee to Save the Children of Iraq] ”لجنة انقاذ اطفال العراق“ 134Command of Iraq – Branch of the Bureau of Iraqis Outside the Region, BRCC, 2837_0002, April 22, 1992, 288–89.

135 Nadine Brozan, “Chronicle,” New York Times, Oct. 4, 1993, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/04/nyregion/chronicle-513793.html?au-th=link-dismiss-google1tap.

136 “Ministerial Order,” CRRC, SH-MISC-D-001-446, November 1994; “‘Islamic Popular Conference’ Issues Final Statement,” Iraqi News Agency, Sept. 16, 1999, Foreign Broadcast Information Service; and “Awqaf Minister Meets with Farrakhan,” Iraqi News Agency, Feb. 15, 1996, Foreign Broad-cast Information Service.

137 For a transcript, see Madeleine K. Albright, William S. Cohen, and Samuel R. Berger, “Remarks at Town Hall Meeting,” Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, Feb. 18, 1998, U.S. Department of State Archive, https://1997-2001.state.gov/www/statements/1998/980218.html.

organizations to reach wider audiences. For exam-ple, they coordinated with a organization based in Germany and the United States called the Commit-tee to Save the Children of Iraq, which published and distributed materials on the plight of Iraqi chil-dren.134 Through this organization, the Baathists drew in unsuspecting but influential voices that had little sympathy for Iraq’s regime but were appalled by the humanitarian situation there. In 1993, the boxer Muhammad Ali held a $50-a-plate fundraising dinner for 200 people, with all proceeds going to the Committee to Save the Children of Iraq.135 The Iraqi regime also succeeded in openly recruiting promi-nent activists. Louis Farrakhan, who headed the Na-tion of Islam and had considerable influence among some sectors of the African-American community, visited Iraq several times in the 1990s. In 1995, he was appointed as a member of the board of the Baghdad-based, regime-sponsored Popular Islamic Conference Organization and openly campaigned on behalf of the Iraqi regime.136

Baathist operations helped to shift political nar-ratives about Iraq in the United States. The chang-ing mood was perhaps most evident in 1998 when CNN hosted Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, Secretary of Defense William Cohen, and Albright at Ohio State University for a televised town hall on the administration’s Iraq policy. Much of the audience was openly hostile to U.S. policy, and the large, raucous crowd repeatedly interrupt-ed the speakers. Members of the crowd shouted down points they did not like and frustrated the administration officials by accusing Clinton of try-ing to “send a message” to Saddam “with the blood of Iraqi men, women and children.”137

Despite this political pushback, some schol-ars have argued that, in terms of material effects, the U.S. policy to contain Iraq in the 1990s was a

for Islamic Studies in Baghdad, where carefully se-lected faculty indoctrinated them. The Baathists recruited students from organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Once these students returned to their home countries, they would agitate, sometimes violently, on behalf of Iraq.122

In 1994, Saddam’s son Uday initiated one of Iraq’s most interesting influence operations when he es-tablished contact with Osama bin Laden in Sudan. After several discussions approved by Saddam himself, the Iraqi Intelligence Service agreed to bin Laden’s request to broadcast the Salafi-Islamist sermons of the Saudi dissident Salman al Awda into Saudi Arabia. After beginning the broadcasts, Iraqi intelligence officers and bin Laden also agreed to “perform joint operations against the foreign forc-es in the Hijaz,” though it is unclear if they actually did so.123 The relationship ended in 1996 when bin Laden moved to Afghanistan and the Iraqi Intelli-gence Service lost contact with him.

Arab regimes feared the fallout from Iraqi influ-ence operations and the political narratives the Baathists promoted. By the mid-1990s, local lead-ers throughout the Middle East began to distance themselves from the United States even as they privately told American officials that they agreed with, and wanted to support, American policies in

Iraq. It simply was not politically viable for them to do so.124 In 1996, the U.S. government wanted to launch strikes against the Iraqi military in response to its move north to intervene in a Kurdish conflict. As a U.S. Air Force officer later lamented, Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia denied the United States use of their bases to launch coalition strikes, “even

122 “Correspondence from the General Secretariat of the Popular Islamic Conference Organization Regarding Nominating Students for Higher Studies in the Baghdad Islamic Universities,” CRRC, SH-MISC-D-001-443, 2002.

123 “Iraqi Efforts to Cooperate with Saudi Opposition Groups and Individuals,” CRRC, SHMISC-D-000-503, 1997.

124 Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 280.

125 White, “Crises After the Storm,” 40.

126 Conduct of the Persian Gulf War: Final Report to Congress, Department of Defense, April 1992, 38, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a249270.pdf; and “Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm,” United States Central Command, The National Security Archive, July 11, 1991.

127 Williamson Murray et al., Gulf War Air Power Survey, Vol. 2: Operations and Effectiveness (Washington, DC, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), 304–8.

128 Gulf War Air Power Survey, Vol. 1, 94.

though the strikes were already planned and ready for execution.”125 From that point forward, Ameri-ca’s ability to operate from places like Saudi Arabia, which was an essential state in the original coali-tion against Iraq, was severely constrained. Again, the fallout from this breakdown in relations had global implications.

American Frustrations: Drawing a Line from the Gulf War to the Iraq War

The international fallout from the Gulf War also damaged American perceptions of the post-Cold War international system. The United States never fully came to terms with what had occurred in Iraq during the Gulf War. The U.S. Central Command’s after-action report for the conflict did not mention the damage the war inflicted on Iraqi society. Like-wise, the U.S. Department of Defense’s 500-page final report to Congress glossed over the destruc-tion the war left in its wake.126

The most influential report on the conflict was the Gulf War Air Power Survey, which brought to-gether leading experts in government, the military, and academia to produce a definitive five-volume study totaling over 3,000 pages. Despite its recog-nition of wide-scale damage to Iraq’s infrastructure

and the resulting suffering of the Iraqi population — including tens of thousands dead — the survey ul-timately concluded that the “strate-gic air campaign had not only been precise, efficient, and legal but had resulted in very few [direct] civil-ian casualties.”127 The Gulf War Air Power Survey had a tremendous effect on the way American leaders

understood the war. Yet, the notion that the war was fought, as the survey argued, with “a strategy designed to cripple Iraq’s military without laying waste to the country” did not reflect the sentiment on the ground in Iraq or in foreign capitals.128

One can easily see how official narratives that papered over the humanitarian crisis in Iraq led

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The 2003 diplomatic crisis over Iraq stemmed from a breakdown in the international system. In the early 1990s, George H. W. Bush’s new world order offered hope for compromise and cooperation. For example, while disagreements over Iraq’s humani-tarian situation at the Security Council were heat-ed in the summer of 1991, member states accepted one another’s good intentions and were willing to compromise. They continued to work together to solve international problems, including in Iraq.146 By the early 2000s, the Iraq issue had embittered these relationships to the point that each side assumed the other was working in bad faith. Washington felt that Russian and European leaders were undermin-ing world order in favor of their pocketbooks and a knee-jerk anti-Americanism. European governments felt the United States only paid lip service to U.N. resolutions and only when they aligned with Amer-ican objectives. They accused Washington of push-ing regime change in Baghdad, something the Unit-ed Nations had not authorized, and insisting that foreign leaders blindly follow American dictates. No compromise was possible. George W. Bush repeated many of the arguments his father had made about history and world order, but the younger Bush’s words fell on deaf ears.

Some liberal theorists of the post-Cold War in-ternational order overestimated the system’s ro-bustness and underestimated the George W. Bush administration’s ability to act outside of it in in-stances such as the Iraq War.147 The frailness of the system in 2003 can be explained, at least in part, by the fact that American disillusionment with the United Nations and the international system more generally had been growing steadily since — and to some extent, as a consequence of — the Gulf War. This disenchantment and cynicism propelled the George W. Bush administration’s war plan forward in the face of strong international opposition and without a U.N. resolution.

However, these frustrations were not new. Nor were they unique to the George W. Bush adminis-tration. As Bush’s national security adviser, Con-doleezza Rice, argued, “we invaded Iraq because we believed we had run out of other options. The sanctions were not working, the inspections were unsatisfactory, and we could not get Saddam to leave by other means.”148 These were all issues that

146 Litvak, “Iraq (Al-Jumhuriyya al-‘Iraqiyya),” 440–41.

147 This puzzle of the international order being less robust than predicted was laid out in the new, 2019 preface to G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), xvi–xix.

148 Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York: Crown Publishing, 2011), 187.

149 Sean D. Murphy, “Assessing the Legality of Invading Iraq,” George Washington University Law School Scholarly Commons (2004), 4–6, https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1898&context=faculty_publications.

150 On the rise and enduring legacy of insurgencies in Iraq, see Helfont, Compulsion in Religion, 205–33.

the United States faced in the early 1990s and had the opportunity to resolve at that time. Left un-addressed, they had plagued U.S. diplomacy ever since. The problematic American policies on Iraq clearly predated the George W. Bush administra-tion. In fact, the official, legal justification for the 2003 invasion rested on U.N. resolutions passed during the Gulf War. Thus, the Bush administra-tion made the case that it was simply carrying out the policies it had inherited.149

The unresolved dilemmas that the Gulf War cre-ated were mismanaged for a decade, eventually leading to a 2003 conflict that was waged on shaky legal grounds and with limited outside support. This war quickly descended into a quagmire that cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. As of this writing in 2021, American forces are still fighting insurgents who emerged in Iraq following the overthrow of Saddam’s regime in 2003.150

Conclusion

Predicting the second- and third-order effects of complex political endeavors such as war and di-plomacy is notoriously difficult. However, that is no excuse for ignoring the consequences 30 years later. In fact, such post-hoc critical analysis is vital for learning the right lessons from the Gulf War and its aftermath. The United States could have been more cautious during the war, more clear-eyed about the damage that it inflicted, and more committed to alleviating the resulting humani-tarian crisis. Most of all, to create a cooperative international system, America needed to be more willing to compromise with its allies. In doing so, it could have been better equipped diplomatically to build and solidify the new world order whose creation George H. W. Bush claimed was one of the Gulf War’s primary objectives.

Instead, the fallout from the Gulf War almost immediately divided the international community and challenged U.S. leadership. The United States failed more than once to seize opportunities to change course when they arose. It is impossible to know whether a post-Cold War international system based on collective security, liberalism, and the rule of law was even possible. Scholars

success.138 As evidence for their claims, proponents of such arguments highlight the fact that Iraq re-mained a poor country, with little economic or mil-itary means at its disposal. Moreover, although the United States did not know it at the time, Iraq did give up its weapons of mass destruction and closed the programs that produced them.139 However, such arguments focus on Iraqi material means and assume that they were necessary for Saddam to achieve his objectives. Yet, Saddam’s strategy was to end the sanctions regime and normalize Iraq’s diplomatic situation in order to rebuild more tradi-tional means of hard power. By the end of the dec-ade, he was clearly making progress toward those goals, despite his material constraints.

The system designed to restrain him was falling apart. In 1998, Saddam violated the Gulf War cease-fire agreement by ending U.N. weapons inspec-tions. The United States and the United Kingdom launched air strikes in response, but, by that point, the international community was too divided and lacked the power to force Iraq back into compliance. Saddam was growing richer from corruption in the modified version of the oil-for-food program that the Security Council had endorsed in 1995 and that, as previously mentioned, he finally accepted in 1996. He was gradually normalizing Iraq’s diplomatic and economic situation while unabashedly flouting U.N. resolutions. In July 2001, the British Joint Intelli-gence Council described Saddam as “defiant” and “secure.” It argued that “Saddam judges his position to be the strongest since the Gulf War.”140

As a result, American policymakers grew increas-ingly frustrated. In March 2000, U.S. Senate hear-ings on Iraqi sanctions showed clear bipartisan disillusionment with the United Nations as well as the trans-Atlantic alliance that was supposed to underpin the post-Cold War system. Then-Sen. Joseph Biden argued that “Saddam is the problem.” However, Biden elaborated, “it is clear,

138 Rovner, “Delusion of Defeat”; and George A. Lopez and David Cortright, “Containing Iraq: Sanctions Worked,”Foreign Affairs 83, no. 4 (July/August 2004): 90–103, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/iraq/2004-07-01/containing-iraq-sanctions-worked.

139 “Misreading Intentions: Iraq’s Reaction to Inspections Created Picture of Deception,” Central Intelligence Agency, Jan. 5, 2006, 16, accessed Jan. 28, 2021, at National Security Archive, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB418/; Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer, “Cheater’s Dilemma: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Path to War,” International Security 45, no. 1 (Summer 2020), 51–89, https://doi.org/10.1162/is-ec_a_00382; and Gregory D. Koblentz, “Saddam Versus the Inspectors: The Impact of Regime Security on the Verification of Iraq’s WMD Disarma-ment,” Journal of Strategic Studies 41, no. 3 (2018), 372–409, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2016.1224764.

140 “Iraq: Continuing Erosion of Sanctions,” JIC Assessment, July 25, 2001, National Archives of the United Kingdom, https://webarchive.nation-alarchives.gov.uk/20171123124012/http:/www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/203196/2001-07-25-jic-assessment-iraq-continuing-erosion-of-sanctions.pdf

141 “Saddam’s Iraq: Sanctions and U.S. Policy,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 106th Congress, 2nd Session, March 22, 2000, 5, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-106shrg67659/html/CHRG-106shrg67659.htm.

142 “Saddam’s Iraq: Sanctions and U.S. Policy,” 19.

143 Melvyn P. Leffler, “Foreign Policies of the George W. Bush Administration: Memoirs, History, Legacy,” Diplomatic History 37, no. 2. (April 2013): 190–216, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dht013.

144 Albright, Madam Secretary, 274–89.

145 Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of Congress.”

on the part of the French and others, they would rather essentially normalize the relationship.”141 Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Af-fairs Edward Walker clarified, noting that “the per-ception” that sanctions were “responsible for the problems that the Iraqi people face” eroded the ability to enforce them. Biden agreed, adding, “I guess maybe that is what is wrong with the U.N.”142 In the United States, as elsewhere, the unresolved situation in Iraq gnawed away not only at bilater-al relations between individual states but also at trust in the post-Cold War system as a whole. This became unmistakably clear following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, when the administration of President George W. Bush began pushing for a more aggres-sive strategy to implement regime change in Iraq. When Bush first came to office in January 2001, he adopted Clinton’s policy on Iraq: His adminis-tration was officially committed to regime change, but not inclined to carry it out militarily. The Sep-tember 11 attacks created new possibilities to ral-ly domestic support for more muscular strategies to pursue regime change.143 Although the resulting war later turned divisive, it initially enjoyed wide, bipartisan support among policymakers in Wash-ington. Hillary Clinton voted to authorize the war along with a majority of Democratic senators. Al-bright later wrote that she found herself nodding in agreement when Bush made the case for war.144

Such sentiments were not shared international-ly. The Gulf War was supposed to cement Ameri-ca’s role as the organizer of the international sys-tem. By the time of the Iraq War in 2003, the tables had turned. Instead of “Iraq against the world,” as George H. W. Bush had argued in 1990,145 it was the United States against the world. Even stalwart allies like Canada refused to participate. Those interna-tional leaders who joined Bush’s campaign in Iraq, among them Blair and Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, often paid a significant political price.

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cannot replay history to know how events may have unfolded if the war had been conducted dif-ferently or the United States had based its post-war strategies on a more realistic assessment of the possibilities in Iraq. Likewise, it is impossi-ble to know the extent to which disagreements over Iraq divided the international community or whether Iraq simply aggravated differences that would have arisen anyway. Nevertheless, in hind-sight, the war and its aftermath clearly damaged, rather than facilitated, the work of statesmen and diplomats in their attempts to build a liberal post-Cold War international system or even to pursue American interests more generally. In that sense, the war generated considerable political costs. It was far from the clean, decisive conflict that American narratives depict.

Samuel Helfont is an assistant professor of strat-egy and policy in the Naval War College’s Program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Cal-ifornia. He is the author of Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam, and the Roots of Insurgen-cy in Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2018). His cur-rent book project, Iraq Against the World, examines Iraq’s international strategies from 1990 to 2003 and the impact they had on the post-Cold War order. He holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University and is an Iraq War veteran.

The views expressed in this article are the au-thor’s own and do not represent the views of the De-partment of Defense, the U.S. Navy, the Naval War College, or the Naval Postgraduate School.  

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Ga-len Jackson, Doyle Hodges, Dom Tierney, Tim Hoyt, Scott Douglas, Don Stoker, Michael Brill, John Shee-han, Mike Jones, and Tally Helfont for their help with this article.

2003

1995

1999

1991

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Strategic thought in both the United States and China has focused on the potential for a Sino-U.S. interstate war and downplayed the odds of a clash in a foreign internal conflict. However, great-power military competition is likely to take the form of proxy war in which Washington and Beijing aid rival actors in an intrastate conflict. The battlefield of Sino-U.S. military competition is more likely to be Venezuela or Myanmar than the South China Sea. Proxy war could escalate in unexpected and costly ways as Washington and Beijing try to manipulate civil wars in far-flung lands they do not understand, ratchet up their commitment to avoid the defeat of a favored actor, and respond to local surrogates that pursue their own agendas.

In the 2017 movie Wolf Warrior II — the highest-grossing Chinese film of all time — the hero, a veteran of Chinese special operations forces, rescues civilians in Afri-

ca who are being held by rebels fighting in a civil war. The nefarious puppet masters, however, are the U.S. mercenaries who control the rebels. The movie ends with the hero defeating his American nemesis and the Chinese Navy obliterating the re-bel forces. The scenario may be outlandish, but the idea that foreign civil wars will become an arena for Sino-American competition is highly plausible.

Strategic doctrine in both the United States and China has downplayed the possibility of a clash in a foreign internal conflict and in the U.S. case in par-ticular, focused on the potential for a conventional interstate war. However, the odds that the United States and China will engage in an interstate war are extremely low due to a number of factors, in-cluding nuclear deterrence, regime type, trade rela-tions between the two countries, and international institutions. Military competition is much more likely to take the form of a proxy war in which Washington and Beijing aid different actors in an intrastate conflict because of a systemwide shift away from interstate war and toward civil war, continued American hyper-interventionism, and growing Chinese interventionism. In the coming years, internal conflicts in countries like Venezue-la, Pakistan, Myanmar, or North Korea could be-come battlegrounds for great-power rivalry. Such U.S.-Chinese proxy wars will likely be much subtler

than the heavy-handed proxy conflicts of the Cold War and involve diplomatic initiatives, economic aid, cyber war, propaganda, and competition with-in international institutions. Indeed, Washington and Beijing may compartmentalize a particular proxy campaign — sparring in one civil war while steering clear of each other or even cooperating in another internal conflict.

U.S. analysts often characterize the global sys-tem in terms of a shift from the counter-terror-ism paradigm of the post-9/11 era, which was fo-cused on insecure states and nonstate actors, to the great-power competition paradigm of today’s era, which prioritizes U.S. relations with China and Russia. However, these two paradigms are less dis-tinct than sometimes thought: Future great-power competition, like earlier counter-terrorism efforts, may occur within insecure states and feature alli-ances with nonstate actors.

The question remains whether a Sino-U.S. proxy war could spiral into an interstate war. The barri-ers to direct hostilities make this outcome unlikely, but proxy conflicts could still escalate in unexpect-ed and costly ways. The United States and China may try to manipulate civil wars in far-flung lands they do not understand. Washington has a history of wading into strife-torn countries, like Afghani-stan and Iraq, with alien cultures and languages, leading to strategic failure. Beijing is even less prepared to comprehend or shape the contours of foreign civil wars due to a lack of capabilities and experience. Because of the psychological dynamic

DOMINIC TIERNEY

THE FUTURE OF

SINO-U.S. PROXY WAR

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manipulate the course of a civil war. Direct inter-vention involves the deployment of armed forces and can take the form of counter-insurgency or counter-terrorism efforts (when the intervenor supports a state partner in suppressing a rebel-lion), a rebel alliance (when the intervenor part-ners with a politically motivated nonstate actor), or peacekeeping (when the intervenor remains impar-tial in a conflict). Direct intervention can run the gamut from a brief raid by special forces to a major operation like America’s involvement in Vietnam.

Indirect intervention is an attempt to manipulate the course of a civil war without the deployment of armed forces. This can be done by providing weap-onry, training, financial support, or other materi-al aid to local actors. Indirect intervention usually takes one of three forms: capacity building, proxy war, or peacemaking. Capacity building is when an external actor backs a regime.6 A formal alliance is not required in this scenario, although alliance commitments often spur capacity building.7 Proxy war takes place when a state provides material as-sistance to a politically motivated nonstate actor.8 Proxy war implies a hierarchical principal-agent relationship between a more powerful state “prin-cipal” and a less powerful nonstate “agent” that are both pursuing a common goal, although con-flict could still arise over other diverging interests. States can also intervene indirectly in a neutral manner by, for example, engaging in diplomacy or applying sanctions against all civil war participants to help end the conflict. This is called peacemaking (not to be confused with peacekeeping, which in-volves direct intervention).

Indirect intervention can range widely in terms

6 Eli Berman and David A. Lake, eds. Proxy Wars: Suppressing Violence through Local Agents (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).

7 Mumford, Proxy Warfare, chapter 1.

8 I draw on Groh’s definition of proxy war as “directing the use of force by a politically motivated, local actor to indirectly influence political affairs in the target state” as well as his emphasis on nonstate actors. However, Groh’s requirement for “directing” or explicitly controlling the use of force narrows the meaning of proxy war and excludes instances of aid without clear strings attached (for example, Groh codes U.S. backing for the mujahadeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s as donated assistance rather than proxy war). I define proxy war as an attempt to influence the course or strategic outcome of a civil war that does not require the patron to direct the recipient’s actions. My definition also differs somewhat from that of Hughes, who blurs the line between indirect and direct intervention by defining proxy war as “a supplementary means of waging war or as a substi-tute for the direct employment of their own armed forces.” I define proxy war solely as aid to nonstate actors, whereas Mumford defines the term more broadly to encompass aid to rebels and regimes alike: “indirect engagement in a conflict by third parties wishing to influence its strategic outcome.” Groh, Proxy War, 29; Hughes, My Enemy’s Enemy, 2; and Mumford, Proxy War, chapter 1. See also Michael A. Innes, ed., Making Sense of Proxy Wars: States, Surrogates, and the Use of Force (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2012), 11–16.

9 Groh, Proxy War.

10 If the patron combines both direct and indirect actions — for example, deploying regular troops and supplying weapons to local rebels — this is coded as direct intervention.

11 Daniel Byman, Deadly Connections: States that Sponsor Terrorism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Idean Salehyan, “The Dele-gation of War to Rebel Organizations,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 54, no. 3 (June 2010): 493–515, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002709357890.

12 Daniel Byman, et al., Trends in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001); Idean Salehyan, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, and David E. Cunningham, “Explaining External Support for Insurgent Groups,” International Organization 65, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 709–44, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23016231.

13 Byman, Deadly Connections, 36-40; and Paul Staniland, “Organizing Insurgency: Networks, Resources, and Rebellion in South Asia,” Interna-tional Security 37, no. 1 (Summer 2012): 142–77, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23280407.

14 Groh, Proxy War.

of the type and extent of aid being offered and the degree of control the intervenor seeks to have over local actors. At one end of the scale is donated assistance, whereby patrons hand over resources without any strings attached, hoping for positive results but effectively ceding control to the part-ner.9 A patron may also employ relatively mild diplomatic and economic tools to manipulate an outcome in favor of one side in the conflict. At the other end of the scale are large arms transfers and efforts to exert extensive control over the regime or nonstate actor.10

Indirect intervention can offer a tempting com-bination of high strategic impact, low cost, and po-tential deniability. If a country’s rival faces internal rebellion, providing aid to rebels can undermine the rival’s control of territory or resources, pro-voke it to repress its populace and thereby deepen domestic divisions, or punish the rival for its own patronage of insurgents.11 External aid for rebels is one of the strongest predictors of rebel success.12 Proxy war is not risk free, however. The interests of the principal and the agent likely diverge in some areas, and nonstate actors may be emboldened to act in undesired ways, potentially triggering un-wanted escalation.13 The principal may expend ad-ditional resources trying to keep the agent in line and ultimately be forced to abandon its patronage or intervene directly.14

As we just saw, a proxy war can refer to an in-dividual patron that aids a nonstate actor in a civ-il war. For example, the United States would be fighting a proxy war by backing rebels in Syria. A proxy war can also occur between external patrons if they aid opposing sides in a civil war (either the

of loss aversion, these two great powers may be willing to ratchet up their commitment in a given proxy war to avoid the defeat of a favored actor. In addition, local surrogates could act independently in ways that might escalate a conflict.

One of the major concerns is that proxy war can worsen foreign internal conflicts. Meddling by out-side actors tends to make civil wars deadlier, longer, and more likely to reoccur.1 If the rivalry between the United States and China shifts into foreign in-ternal conflicts, it could also impact global govern-ance and norms such as state sovereignty, human rights, democratization, and the “responsibility to protect.”2 And yet, there is surprisingly little schol-arship on the potential for Sino-U.S. competition in an intrastate conflict. As Andrew Mumford has noted, proxy wars in general are “historically ubiq-uitous yet chronically under-analyzed,”3 an inatten-tion that extends to Washington’s relations with Beijing. This paper seeks to offer a corrective to that neglect.

The article is divided into four sections. The first section defines the key terms. The second section explores how strategic thought in both the Unit-ed States and China deemphasizes intervention

1 Christopher Linebarger and Andrew Enterline, “Third Party Intervention and the Duration and Outcomes of Civil Wars,” in What Do We Know About Civil Wars, ed. T. David Mason and Sara McLaughlin Mitchell (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 93–108.

2 G. John Ikenberry, “The Three Faces of Liberal Internationalism,” in Rising States, Rising Institutions: Challenges for Global Governance, ed. Alan S. Alexandroff and Andrew F. Cooper (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010), 17–47; and Michael J. Mazarr, Timothy R. Heath, and Astrid Stuth Cevallos, China and the International Order (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018).

3 Andrew Mumford, Proxy Warfare (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), 1. An exception is Mark O. Yeisley, “Bipolarity, Proxy Wars, and the Rise of China,” Strategic Studies Quarterly 5, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 75–91, https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/SSQ/documents/Volume-05_Is-sue-4/Yeisley.pdf. See also, Thomas J. Wright, All Measures Short of War: The Contest for the 21st Century and the Future of American Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).

4 Meredith Reid Sarkees, “Inter-state Wars (Version 4.0): Definitions and Variables,” https://correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/COW-war/inter-state-wars-codebook.

5 Meredith Reid Sarkees, “Patterns of Civil Wars in the Twenty-First Century: The Decline of Civil War?” in Routledge Handbook of Civil Wars, ed. Edward Newman and Karl DeRouen, Jr. (London: Routledge, 2014), 242. In this paper, “civil war” is used synonymously with “intrastate war” and “internal conflict.” See also Mark Gersovitz and Norma Jean Kriger, “What Is a Civil War? A Critical Review of Its Definition and (Econometric) Consequences,” The World Bank Research Observer 28, no. 2 (August 2013): 159–190, https://doi.org/10.1093/wbro/lkt005; Patrick M. Regan, Civil Wars and Foreign Powers: Outside Intervention in Intrastate Conflict (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2000), 9; Karen A. Feste, Intervention: Shaping the Global Order (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Mumford, Proxy Warfare; Andreas Krieg and Jean-Marc Rickli, Surrogate Warfare: The Transformation of War in the Twenty-First Century (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2019); Tyrone L. Groh, Proxy War: The Least Bad Option (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019); and Geraint Hughes, My Enemy’s Enemy: Proxy Warfare in International Politics (Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2012).

in foreign civil wars. The third section discusses how changing global conflict dynamics diminished interstate war and spurred internationalized civil war, which has encouraged U.S. hyper-interven-tionism and increasing Chinese intervention in in-ternal conflicts. The fourth section contends that Chinese and U.S. intervention in foreign civil wars is likely to take the form of proxy conflicts rath-er than great-power partnership and describes the potential for proxy campaigns to escalate.

Definitions of Key Terms

We ought to begin by defining the key terms. First, it is necessary to define two major types of conflict: interstate war and civil war. An interstate war refers to sustained combat between the or-ganized armed forces of members of the interstate system resulting in at least 1,000 combat fatalities per year.4 A civil war refers to conflict that reaches the same threshold of violence but is “within the territorial boundaries of a state system member.”5

Table 1 offers a basic typology of interventions, or attempts by an outside actor, usually a state, to

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foreign policy and rejecting the U.S. military’s in-volvement in nation building.23 The 2017 National Security Strategy made virtually no reference to foreign insurgency or unconventional warfare. In-stead, it highlighted China’s aim to displace U.S. influence in East Asia and vowed to “restore the readiness of our forces for major war.”24 The fol-lowing year, in 2018, the National Defense Strategy emphasized China’s assertion of territorial sover-eignty in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and Taiwan; Beijing’s rapid military modernization; and the need for high-end U.S. technologies, such as fifth-generation aircraft.25 According to the Na-tional Defense Authorization Act, the United States should respond to the Chinese threat by “re-es-tablishing warfighting dominance” in conventional interstate war, requiring “investments in critical equipment, weapons, and missile defense plat-forms to improve munitions that enhance lethali-ty.”26 In 2019, Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper told an audience at the U.S. Naval War College: “Many of you spent most of your career fighting irregular warfare. But times have changed. We are now in an era of great-power competition. Our stra-tegic competitors are Russia and China.”27

In recent years, the U.S. military has downplayed planning for counter-insurgency in favor of boost-ing its readiness for interstate conflict. In 2009, the Defense Department described stability operations as “a core U.S. military mission that the Depart-ment of Defense shall be prepared to conduct with proficiency equivalent to combat operations,” but

23 “Full Text: Donald Trump’s Speech on Fighting Terrorism,” Politico, Aug. 15, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-ter-rorism-speech-227025.

24 National Security Strategy of the United States of America.

25 Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America, U.S. Department of Defense, https://www.hsdl.org/?ab-stract&did=807329; “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2020,” Office of the Secretary of Defense, https://media.defense.gov/2020/Sep/01/2002488689/-1/-1/1/2020-DOD-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT-FINAL.PDF.

26 “FY 2020 National Defense Authorization Act Executive Summary,” United States Senate Committee on Armed Services, May 2019, https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/FY%202020%20NDAA%20Executive%20Summary.pdf.

27 “Secretary of Defense Esper Tells U.S. Naval War College Students His Focus Is Great-Power Competition,” Military News, Sept. 3, 2019, https://www.militarynews.com/news/secretary-of-defense-esper-tells-u-s-naval-war-college-students-his-focus-is-great/article_ba046c84-ce78-11e9-93a9-2be2d0a609bc.html.

28 “Department of Defense Instruction, 3000.05,” Department of Defense, Sept. 16, 2009, https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/DD/issuances/dodi/300005p.pdf?ver=2019-01-28-141537-720; and “DoD Directive 3000.05,” Department of Defense, Dec. 13, 2018, https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/d3000_05.pdf.

29 “Defense Budget Overview: United States Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2020 Budget Request,” The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller)/Chief Financial Officer, March 2019, http://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/fy2020/fy2020_Bud-get_Request_Overview_Book.pdf.

30 “Field Manual 3-0, Operations,” U.S. Army, Oct. 10, 2017, https://www.army.mil/standto/2017-10-10.

31 “Air-Sea Battle: Service Collaboration to Address Anti-Access & Area Denial Challenges,” Air-Sea Battle Office, May 2013, https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/ASB-ConceptImplementation-Summary-May-2013.pdf.

32 Aaron Mehta, “The Pentagon Is Planning for War with China and Russia — Can It Handle Both?” Defense News, https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2018/01/30/the-pentagon-is-planning-for-war-with-china-and-russia-can-it-handle-both/.

33 David C. Gompert, Astrid Stuth Cevallos, and Cristina L. Garafola, War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2016), xi.

in a 2018 update, this language was excised.28 The Defense Department’s budget request for 2020 contended that the focus on “insurgent warfare and the threat posed by the rise of violent extrem-ist organizations … led the U.S. military to expe-rience damaging trends in readiness and compet-itiveness,” and that the military would henceforth “re-focus on high-intensity conflict to compete against Great Powers.”29 In 2017, the Army’s “Field Manual 3-0” prioritized large-scale mechanized fighting against a peer adversary such as Russia or China.30 The Department of Defense developed the Air-Sea Battle concept to combat Chinese cyber and anti-access capabilities in the context of inter-state naval and air operations, explicitly echoing the Cold War-era AirLand Battle concept for inter-state war with the Soviet Union.31 Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Paul Selva said, “Any fight with China, if it were to come to blows, would be a largely maritime and air fight.”32

Prominent analysts have also prioritized the dan-ger of a conventional war with China. In 2016, a RAND study concluded that a potential Sino-U.S. war “would be regional and conventional” and “waged mainly by ships on and beneath the sea” based on the assumption “that fighting would start and remain in East Asia, where potential Sino-U.S. flash points and nearly all Chinese forces are locat-ed.”33 Elbridge Colby, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force develop-ment, wrote that “the United States must prepare to fight and achieve its political aims in a war with

regime versus the rebels or competing rebel fac-tions). For example, the United States and China would be considered to be fighting a proxy war in Syria if Beijing were to back the regime and Wash-ington were to support the rebels. In this scenar-io, Washington is engaged in an individual proxy war whereas China is engaged in capacity building. We also refer to the competition between the great powers as proxy war.

U.S. and Chinese Strategic Doctrine: the Primacy of Non-Intervention

China’s recent dramatic economic growth has intensified strategic competition between Wash-ington and Beijing. From 2004 to 2018, China’s share of global gross domestic product more than tripled, from 4.5 percent to 16.1 percent, whereas America’s share fell from 27.9 percent to 23.3 per-cent.15 Current trends suggest that China’s defense spending could overtake that of the United States by the 2030s.16 Beijing’s newfound economic and military capabilities have translated into increasing Chinese assertiveness in foreign policy, heighten-ing American fears about the fragility of the U.S.-led international order. In 2017, General Secretary Xi Jinping stated that China had entered a “new era” and would move “closer to center stage” in world affairs.17 Meanwhile, the Trump administra-tion labeled China a “strategic competitor” and a

15 See, for example, Malcolm Scott and Cedric Sam, “Here’s How Fast China’s Economy is Catching Up to the U.S.,” Bloomberg, June 25, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-us-vs-china-economy/.

16 David C. Kang, China Rising: Peace, Power, and Order in East Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), 360–402; and Arvind Subramanian, “The Inevitable Superpower: Why China’s Dominance Is a Sure Thing,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 5 (September/October 2011): 66–78, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23041777.

17 Chris Buckley and Keith Bradsher, “Xi Jinping’s Marathon Speech: Five Takeaways,” New York Times, Oct. 18, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/world/asia/china-xi-jinping-party-congress.html.

18 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, The White House, December 2017, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf.

19 Mike Pence, “Remarks by Vice President Pence on the Administration’s Policy Toward China,” U.S. Embassy and Consulates in China, Oct. 4, 2018, https://china.usembassy-china.org.cn/remarks-by-vice-president-pence-on-the-administrations-policy-toward-china/. See also Aaron L. Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011); Gideon Rachman, Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline from Obama to Trump and Beyond (New York: Other Press, 2016); Robert S. Ross and Øystein Tunsjø, eds., Strategic Adjustment and the Rise of China: Power and Politics in East Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017); and G. John Ikenberry, “Between the Eagle and the Dragon: America, China, and Middle State Strategies in East Asia,” Political Science Quarterly 131, no. 1 (2016): 1–35, https://doi.org/10.1002/polq.12430.

20 Weijian Shan, “The Unwinnable Trade War,” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 6 (November/December 2019), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/2019-10-08/unwinnable-trade-war; Nicol Turner Lee, “Navigating the U.S.-China 5G Competition,” Brookings Institute, April 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/FP_20200427_5g_competition_turner_lee_v2.pdf; Paul M. Nakasone and Michael Sulmeyer, “How to Compete in Cyberspace,” Foreign Affairs, Aug. 25, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-08-25/cybersecurity; and Kristine Lee, “The United Nations: An Emerging Battleground for Influence,” Testimony Before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, June 24, 2020, https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/Lee_Testimony.pdf.

21 Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 36; Colin S. Gray, Irregular Enemies and the Essence of Strategy: Can the American Way of War Adapt, “Strategic Studies Institute,” U.S. Army War College, March 2006, https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/irregular-enemies-and-the-essence-of-strategy-can-the-american-way-of-war-adapt/; Nadia Schadlow, War and the Art of Governance: Consolidating Combat Success Into Political Victory (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017); Dominic Tierney, How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010); and David H. Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the U.S. Military for Modern Wars (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009).

22 Benjamin Buley, The New American Way of War: Military Culture and the Political Utility of Force (New York: Routledge, 2008), 74; and Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era.

“revisionist power” that is seeking to rewrite the rules of the global system.18 In 2018, Vice President Mike Pence described a seemingly irrepressible contest between the democratic United States and an authoritarian China.19 This heightened Sino-U.S. competition is evident in a variety of areas, from trade and emerging technologies like 5G wireless to the cyber domain and multilateral institutions.20 How will this rivalry play out in terms of military conflict? Strategic thought in both the United States and China tends to downplay all forms of intervention, including a Sino-U.S. proxy war, and focus instead on the potential for interstate war.

U.S. Strategic Thought

U.S. policymakers and analysts prioritize the threat of interstate war with China in both plan-ning and procurement. According to scholars, the traditional American way of war emphasizes inter-state war as the U.S. military’s true vocation and deemphasizes counter-insurgency, nation building, and other forms of intervention in foreign civil con-flicts as peripheral or regrettable activities.21 After the Vietnam War, for example, the U.S. Army delib-erately avoided thinking about guerrilla war and in-stead planned for an interstate showdown against the Soviet Union in Europe.22

The Trump administration underscored this tra-ditional preference by placing the conventional interstate threat from China at the center of U.S.

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dling in foreign civil wars by any outside power, especially to promote human rights and democra-cy, as liable to spur conflict.39 In 2016, the state-run China Daily described the “Pax Americana” as an era of continual “interference in the domestic affairs of countries,” which triggered a “period of incessant warfare.”40

Does China also espouse a positive preference for conventional interstate war? Beijing tends to be clearer on what it will not do through force of arms — i.e., intervene — rather than what it will do in order to protect an image of the country’s peace-ful rise. Therefore, China is not as explicit as the United States in prioritizing interstate war. Nev-ertheless, by downplaying intervention in foreign civil wars, interstate war becomes the main focus almost by default. Beijing does sometimes signal a prioritization of interstate war. A major Chinese strategic priority is fighting and winning a conven-tional and de facto interstate war with Taiwan.41 A 2015 Chinese defense white paper outlined an “ac-tive defense posture” that emphasized Beijing’s newfound maritime capabilities.42 And a 2019 de-fense white paper stated that China’s military de-velopment prioritized “phasing out the outdated, upgrading the old, and developing and procuring the new, such as aircraft carriers, fighters, missiles and main battle tanks, to steadily modernize weap-onry and equipment.”43 Moreover, Beijing often casts the military threat from the United States in terms of conventional interstate war. The 2013 ver-sion of the People’s Liberation Army’s The Science of Military Strategy described how “[t]he U.S. has organized and built a global strike command for unified command of strategic long-range warfare strength … and has planned to develop a new con-ventional ‘prompt global strike’ system in the next

39 In 2011, China abstained on U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, which authorized the use of force to protect civilians and civilian-populat-ed areas in Libya, but Beijing was later sharply critical of the expanded goals of the intervention, including regime change.

40 Mazarr, Heath, and Cevallos, China and the International Order, 98.

41 “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2020, 116, https://media.defense.gov/2020/Sep/01/2002488689/-1/-1/1/2020-DOD-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT-FINAL.PDF.

42 “China’s Military Strategy,” Xinua, May 26, 2015, http://english.chinamil.com.cn/news-channels/2015-05/26/content_6507716.htm.

43 “China’s National Defense in the New Era,” The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, July 24, 2019, accessed at Xinhua, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-07/24/c_138253389.htm.

44 The Science of Military Strategy, Academy of Military Sciences, 2013, accessed at Air University, https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/CASI/Dis-play/Article/2485204/plas-science-of-military-strategy-2013/.

45 Aaron Clauset and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, “Trends in Conflict: What Do We Know and What Can We Know?” in The Oxford Handbook of International Security, ed. Alexandra Gheciu and William C. Wohlforth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 228.

46 Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989).

47 John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

48 Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principle for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Allan Dafoe, John R. O’Neal, and Bruce Russett, “The Democratic Peace: Weighing the Evidence and Cautious Inference,” International Studies Quar-terly 57, no. 1 (March 2013): 201–214, https://doi.org/10.1111/isqu.12055.

49 Kenneth Waltz, “Why Nuclear Proliferation May Be Good,” in Conflict After the Cold War: Arguments on Causes of War and Peace, ed. Rich-ard K. Betts, 5th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2017), 418–30.

decade so as to have the capability to implement conventional strikes anywhere within one hour.”44

In summary, both U.S. and Chinese strategic thought downplays intervention in foreign civil wars and, in the U.S. case in particular, prioritiz-es conventional interstate war. Washington sees intervention as unwise and a deviation from the military’s core mission to fight and win interstate wars, whereas Beijing views intervention as dan-gerous and illegitimate. Despite seemingly strongly held strategic preferences in both governments, a systemwide shift from interstate war to civil war means that future military competition between China and the United States is likely to involve proxy wars. In the next section, I discuss how glob-al trends in conflict have changed in recent dec-ades and the impact of these trends on U.S.-Chi-nese competition going forward.

A World of Civil Wars

Following World War II, the incidence of inter-state war declined significantly, becoming “rela-tively rare,” according to one study.45 The last in-terstate war between great powers was the 1950–53 Korean War.46 John Gaddis referred to the absence of severe interstate war in this period as “the long peace.”47 Scholars have proposed a variety of fac-tors to explain this era of interstate peace. The democratic peace theory contends that elected re-gimes very rarely fight interstate wars against each other, and therefore the global spread of democra-cy over the past several decades has created a zone of interstate peace among representative regimes.48 Nuclear deterrence has also reduced the odds of di-rect conflict between states with nuclear arsenals,49 while multilateral institutions provide arenas for

a great power,” noting that “the last time it fought one was in the 1940s.”34 In 2018, a survey of U.S. government officials and foreign policy experts found “increasing apprehension over the growing geopolitical rivalry and potential for conflict be-tween the United States and China,” with the most likely scenario for war being “an armed confronta-tion in the South China Sea.”35

Chinese Strategic Thought

Chinese strategic thought also tends to downplay any involvement in foreign internal conflicts. One of the most fundamental and longstanding Chinese foreign policy principles is that of non-intervention — a promise to stay out of the domestic affairs of other states. The non-intervention doctrine is designed to ward off outside meddling in China’s

34 Elbridge Colby, “How to Win America’s Next War,” Foreign Policy, May 5, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/05/how-to-win-ameri-cas-next-war-china-russia-military-infrastructure/.

35 “Preventive Priorities Survey 2019,” Council on Foreign Relations, Dec. 17, 2018, https://www.cfr.org/report/preventive-priorities-survey-2019.

36 John Lee, “China’s Economic Slowdown: What Are the Strategic Implications?” Washington Quarterly 38, no. 3 (2015): 123–142, https://doi.org/10.1080/0163660X.2015.1099028.

37 Daniel Large, “China and the Contradictions of ‘Non-interference’ in Sudan,” Review of African Political Economy 35, no. 115 (2008), 94. “Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, 1982,” available at USC US-China Institute, accessed March 18, 2021, https://china.usc.edu/consti-tution-peoples-republic-china-1982.

38 “Full Text of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Speech at Opening Ceremony of 2018 FOCAC Beijing Summit,” China Daily, Sept. 3, 2018, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201809/04/WS5b8d5c25a310add14f389592.html.

affairs, a reaction to what Beijing calls an era of co-lonial “humiliation” before 1945; signal that China will act with restraint in order to limit balancing behavior by other states; prevent Beijing from get-ting mired in dangerous foreign crises; and allow the regime to focus on domestic challenges such as economic growth and an aging population.36

Beijing’s doctrine of non-intervention dates back to the Sino-Soviet alliance of 1950 and was enshrined as one of the Five Principles of Peace-ful Coexistence in 1954, reaffirmed at the Band-ung Conference in 1955, and formally written into the Chinese constitution in 1982.37 In 2018, Xi an-nounced the Five Nos policy: “no interference with development paths, no interference in internal af-fairs, no imposing one’s will on others, no attaching political conditions, and no political self-interest in investments and financing.”38 China portrays med-

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in civil war. Therefore, internal conflicts are now the primary arena in which states compete mili-tarily. These dynamics will channel Sino-U.S. mil-itary competition in four respects. First, they will diminish the odds of an interstate war between the two countries. Second, they will encourage contin-ued U.S. hyper-interventionism. Third, they will promote increasing Chinese interventionism. And fourth, they will enhance the odds of China and the United States engaging in a proxy war.

Low Odds of Interstate War

Global dynamics have sharply reduced the chances of a Sino-U.S. interstate war taking place, a trend that is likely to continue. In the last half-cen-tury, the United States and China have never even come close to war. In 1996, the Taiwan Strait crisis briefly raised tensions, but it was quickly resolved after presidential elections in Taipei. Crucially, the United States and China may have in place all the barriers to interstate war discussed above. Both countries maintain significant nuclear arsenals with second-strike capability,63 are highly interde-pendent economically,64 and are active members of international institutions.65 What about regime type? Of course, China is not democratic, which is one of the major impediments to interstate war. However, scholars have found that civilian “ma-chine” autocracies like China are less prone to interstate war than personalist or military dicta-torships and may engage in war at similar rates to democracies.66 During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union successfully avoided an interstate war. Today, the impediments to an in-terstate war between China and the United States are even stronger.

The absence of Sino-U.S. interstate war does not mean the absence of military competition. Instead, systemwide dynamics are likely to channel this competition away from interstate war into proxy war. Of course, this requires that Washington and Beijing intervene in the same foreign internal con-flict. The question is why the United States and

63 Thomas J. Christensen, “The Meaning of the Nuclear Evolution: China’s Strategic Modernization and US-China Security Relations,” Journal of Strategic Studies 35, no. 4 (2012): 447–87, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2012.714710.

64 In 2019, Sino-U.S. trade reached $634.8 billion, China owned over one trillion dollars of U.S. debt, and over 350,000 Chinese students stud-ied at U.S. universities. See, for example, “The People’s Republic of China: U.S.-China Trade Facts,” Office of the United States Trade Representative, accessed March 18, 2021, https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/china-mongolia-taiwan/peoples-republic-china.

65 Alastair Iain Johnston, Social States: China in International Institutions, 1980–2000 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); G. John Ikenberry, “The Rise of China: Power, Institutions and the Western Order,” in China’s Ascent: Power, Security and the Future of International Politics, ed. Robert S. Ross and Zhu Feng (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 89–114.

66 Jessica L. P. Weeks, Dictators at War and Peace (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).

67 Robert B. Scaife, “The Regularity of Irregular Warfare,” Small Wars Journal, Oct. 16, 2012, https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-regulari-ty-of-irregular-warfare.

68 “Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy,” The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, Jan. 20, 1961, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/kennedy.asp.

China would deviate from long-established strate-gic preferences: the American desire to focus on conventional interstate war over foreign interven-tion and the Chinese commitment to non-interven-tion in other countries’ internal affairs.

Continued U.S. Hyper-Interventionism

Since 1945, American foreign policy has been defined by hyper-interventionism in foreign civil wars — and this behavior is only likely to continue in the future. Despite America’s traditional prefer-ence in planning and procurement for convention-al interstate campaigns, for decades Washington has intervened in intrastate conflicts far more fre-quently than it has waged interstate war.67 Indeed, the United States is the most interventionist great power in modern history.

After World War II, a combination of American power and the changing dynamics of global con-flict spurred numerous U.S. attempts to manipu-late foreign civil wars. America’s emergence as an economic and military colossus broadened Wash-ington’s view of national interests, emboldened U.S. officials to confront the threat from interna-tional communism, and gave American leaders the tools to contemplate military operations across the world. Newfound power also unleashed an idealis-tic streak in U.S. society and a desire to reshape the world in America’s own image — or in John F. Ken-nedy’s words, “pay any price” in order “to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”68 After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, American strength reached its zenith and U.S. activism around the globe increased still further. Crucially, the global shift from interstate war to civil war guided Amer-ican activism into foreign internal conflicts, as Washington saw civil wars in distant lands as vital-ly important for U.S. security and values.

During and after the Cold War, the United States repeatedly intervened directly in foreign internal conflicts with troops and airpower. The Interven-tion Project dataset found that the United States engaged in 500 military missions after 1776, with

dispute resolution.50 In addition, economic interde-pendence raises the costs of engaging in interstate war.51 Moreover, memories of World War II and the spread of norms against territorial conquest have helped to delegitimize interstate war.52

Global conflict is now dominated by civil wars — what David Armitage called “the most widespread, the most destructive, and the most characteristic form of organized human violence.”53 The number of civil wars increased in the 1970s, peaked after the end of the Cold War, declined somewhat, and then ticked upward again after the 2011 Arab Spring.54 In the post-Cold War era, almost 90 percent of wars have been civil wars.55 In 2019, there were two in-terstate conflicts and 52 intrastate conflicts.56 The factors that inhibit interstate war — such as de-mocracy and nuclear weapons — do not reliably prevent internal violence. Meanwhile, the root causes of civil war — such as poverty, failing gov-ernance, and ethno-religious tensions — remain prevalent.57 Indeed, the decrease in interstate wars and the increase in civil wars may be related. The norm of territorial integrity, for example, may have diminished interstate war, but it also meant that newly decolonized states were unable to change their borders, fueling internal conflict.58

States also routinely intervene in foreign civ-il wars. According to one study, “foreign military

50 Megan Shannon, Daniel Morey, and Frederick J. Boehmke, “The Influence of International Organizations on Militarized Dispute Initiation and Duration,” International Studies Quarterly 54, no. 4 (December 2010): 1123–41, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40931157.

51 Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1986); Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997); and Dale C. Copeland, Economic Interdependence and War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

52 John Mueller, The Remnants of War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); and Clauset and Gleditsch, “Trends in Conflict.”

53 David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (New York: Vintage, 2018), 5.

54 Gary Goertz, Paul F. Diehl, and Alexandru Balas, The Puzzle of Peace: The Evolution of Peace in the International System (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

55 Peter Wallensteen, “Future Directions in the Scientific Study of Peace and War,” in What Do We Know About War? ed. John A. Vasquez (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 263; and Patrick T. Brandt, “When and How the Fighting Stops: Explaining the Duration and Outcome of Civil Wars,” Defence and Peace Economics 19, no. 6 (2008): 415–34, https://doi.org/10.1080/10242690701823267.

56 Therése Pettersson and Magnus Öberg, “Organized Violence, 1989–2019,” Journal of Peace Research 57, no. 4 (June 2020): 597–613, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343320934986.

57 Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, “On the Threshold: Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict,” International Security 16, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 76–116, https://doi.org/10.2307/2539061.

58 Hendrik Spruyt, “Civil Wars as Challenges to the Modern International System,” Daedalus 146, no. 4 (Fall 2017): 112–125, https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00463; and Boaz Atzili, “When Good Fences Make Bad Neighbors: Fixed Borders, State Weakness, and International Conflict,” International Security 31, no. 3 (Winter 2006/2007): 139–73, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4137510.

59 Jeffrey Pickering and Emizet F. Kisangani, “The International Military Intervention Dataset: An Updated Resource for Conflict Scholars,” Journal of Peace Research 46, no. 4 (July 2009): 592, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25654438. See also Krieg and Rickli, “Surrogate Warfare,” 127; Candace Rondeaux and David Sterman, “Twenty-First Century Proxy Warfare: Confronting Strategic Innovation in a Multipolar World Since the 2011 NATO Intervention,” New America, Feb. 20, 2019, 41, https://d1y8sb8igg2f8e.cloudfront.net/documents/Proxy_wars_one_pager-v2.pdf; and Kaldor, New and Old Wars.

60 Ryan Grauer and Dominic Tierney, “The Arsenal of Insurrection: Explaining Rising Support for Rebels,” Security Studies 27, no. 2 (May 2018): 263–95, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2017.1386936; and Cunningham, Gleditsch and Salehyan, “Non-State Actors in Civil Wars.”

61 Pettersson and Öberg, “Organized Violence, 1989-2019”; and Vladimir Rauta, “Proxy Warfare and the Future of Conflict: Take Two,” RUSI Jour-nal 165, no. 2 (2020): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1080/03071847.2020.1736437.

62 Grauer and Tierney, “The Arsenal of Insurrection”; David E. Cunningham, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, and Idean Salehyan, “Non-State Actors in Civil Wars: A New Dataset,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 30, no. 5 (November 2013): 516–531, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0738894213499673; and Berman and Lake, Proxy Wars.

intervention, not interstate military force, is the type of armed force that will be most common in the coming decades among both major powers and less powerful states.”59 Consider that during the last two centuries, the likelihood that a rebel group would receive outside assistance has grown from about one-in-five to around four-in-five.60 In 2019, 22 out of 52 intrastate wars were internationalized — the highest figure in the post-1946 era.61 The fac-tors that impede interstate war, such as nuclear weapons, do not effectively prevent external med-dling in intrastate conflict. In fact, other dynamics have actually made indirect intervention easier. Af-ter World War II, the norm of self-determination helped to legitimize support for rebel groups that were fighting against colonial rule. Meanwhile, glo-balization and technological change have made it practically easier for civil war participants to com-municate messages abroad and recruit supporters and for patrons to transfer weapons and other ma-terial aid across borders.62 Indeed, the diminishing appeal of interstate war incentivizes states to seek new and cheaper forms of influence. States that in the past might have attacked their rivals directly now pursue their strategic goals by intervening in foreign civil wars.

In summary, global dynamics have reduced in-terstate war but not civil war or outside meddling

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over half of these operations taking place after 1950 and over one-quarter occurring since the end of the Cold War.69 In 2008, Defense Secretary Robert Gates noted:

Think of where our forces have been sent and have been engaged over the last 40-plus years. Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa, and more. In fact, the first Gulf War stands alone in over two generations of constant military engagement as a more or less traditional conventional conflict from beginning to end.70

During the Trump administration, every major U.S. deployment of troops in a combat zone was in a foreign civil war, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Niger, and Somalia.71

After 1945, America engaged in indirect interven-tion with even greater frequency than direct inter-vention. During the Cold War, the United States launched six overt regime change attempts (defined as a publicly acknowledged use of force to over-throw a state). It also instigated 64 covert regime change attempts, including assassination, backing a coup, or meddling in an election — all of which often occurred in the context of internal conflict.72 Wash-ington undertook capacity building by providing ex-tensive military and economic aid to regimes facing perceived communist threats in Greece, South Viet-nam, El Salvador, and elsewhere and waged proxy

69 Monica D. Toft and Sidita Kushi, “Introducing MIP: A New Dataset on U.S. Interventions, 1776-2017,” presented at the 115th American Political Science Association Annual Meeting & Exhibition, Aug. 29–Sept. 1, 2019; and Paul B. Rich, “A Historical Overview of US Counter-insurgency,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 25, no. 1 (2014): 5–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2014.893955.

70 “Secretary of Defense Robert Gates Speech, September 29, 2008,” Speech Given at the National Defense University, Sept. 29, 2008, http://armchairgeneral.com/secretary-of-defense-robert-m-gates-speech-september-29-2008.htm/8; and Ann Scott Tyson, “New Pentagon Policy Says Irregular Warfare Will Get Same Attention as Traditional Combat,” Washington Post, Dec. 4, 2008, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con-tent/article/2008/12/03/AR2008120303495.html?nav=rss_nation/special.

71 See, for example, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt, “Despite Vow to End ‘Endless Wars,’ Here’s Where About 200,000 Troops Remain,” New York Times, Oct. 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/world/middleeast/us-troops-deployments.html.

72 Lindsey A. O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018); Odd A. Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 407; and Eric Rittinger, “Arming the Other: American Small Wars, Local Proxies, and the Social Construction of the Principal-Agent Problem,” International Studies Quarterly 61, no. 2 (June 2017), 396–409, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqx021. During the Cold War, the United States intervened in foreign elections over twice as frequently as the Soviet Union. Don H. Levin, “Partisan Electoral Interventions by the Great Powers: Introducing the PEIG Dataset,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 36, no. 1 (2016): 88–106, https://doi.org/10.1177/0738894216661190.

73 Mumford, Proxy Warfare, 100; Westad, The Global Cold War; and Stathis N. Kalyvas and Laia Balcells, “International System and Technologies of Rebellion: How the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal Conflict,” American Political Science Review 104, no. 3 (August 2010): 415–29, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40863761?seq=1.

74 Thomas Waldman, “Strategic Narratives and US Surrogate Warfare,” Survival 61, no. 1 (2019): 161–78, https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2019.1568049.

75 “Security Aid Dashboard,” Security Assistance Monitor, Center for International Policy, June 12, 2020, https://securityassistance.org/con-tent/security-aid-dashboard; and “Counterterrorism Spending: Protecting America while Promoting Efficiencies and Accountability,” Stimson Center, May 16, 2018, https://www.stimson.org/2018/counterterrorism-spending-protecting-america-while-promoting-efficiencies-and-accountability/.

76 Mumford, Proxy Warfare; Berman and Lake, Proxy Wars; and Krieg and Rickli, Surrogate Warfare.

77 Dominic Tierney, “In Search of the Biden Doctrine,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, Nov. 9, 2020, https://www.fpri.org/article/2020/11/in-search-of-the-biden-doctrine/.

war by aiding rebels in countries like Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola, and Afghanistan. In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said that proxy war was “the cheapest insurance in the world.”73

After the Cold War ended, the United States con-tinued to engage in indirect intervention. Capacity building was central to the “War on Terror,” and Washington funneled arms and provided training and intelligence to vulnerable regimes like Iraq and Afghanistan under the guise of “security partner-ships.”74 According to Security Assistance Monitor, in 2019, the United States spent $18.81 billion on international security aid and delivered $26.9 bil-lion worth of arms to friendly governments.75 In 2018, the first U.S. Army security force assistance brigade was established to train, advise, and assist allied actors. Washington also engaged in proxy wars by supporting nonstate actors, for example in Syria after 2012.

The era of American hyper-interventionism is set to continue. The high cost of direct U.S. inter-ventions in Iraq and Afghanistan has not ended U.S. manipulation of foreign civil wars, but instead has encouraged Washington to search for cheap-er forms of influence through airpower and giving aid to surrogate allies.76 In 2005, Sen. Joe Biden ex-pressed regret for his 2002 Senate vote that author-ized the Iraq War.77 Nevertheless, in February 2021, as president, Biden launched air strikes against Ira-nian-backed militias fighting in the Syrian civil war in response to rocket attacks on American forces in the region and reportedly considered delaying the

proposed May 1, 2021, deadline for U.S. withdrawal of troops from the Afghan civil war.78

The United States has a clear and well-docu-mented track record of intervening in foreign civil wars. However, for a Sino-U.S. proxy war to take place, China would also have to intervene. This raises a core question: Why would Beijing deviate from a seemingly firm commitment to the principal of non-intervention? To answer this question, we need to look more closely at the nature of Chinese intervention, including its motivations, its tools, and its scope.

Growing Chinese Interventionism

Given the systemwide conflict dynamics de-scribed above, China’s commitment to the doctrine of non-intervention has always been ambivalent, if not illusory. In recent decades, this doctrine has steadily eroded and will likely continue to weaken in the future. In a globalized world where civil war is the dominant type of conflict, even a great pow-er that genuinely seeks to avoid intrusion in other states’ internal wars will struggle to stay out of the fighting entirely. The concept of “non-intervention”

78 Eric Schmitt, “Biden Says Withdrawing U.S. Forces from Afghanistan by May Deadline Is ‘Tough,’” New York Times, March 17, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/us/politics/biden-us-forces-afghanistan-may.html.

79 George Lawson and Luca Tardelli, “The Past, Present, and Future of Intervention,” Review of International Studies 39, no. 5 (December 2013): 1233–53, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210513000247.

80 Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs About the Use of Force (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). Non-interventionism by one state can also be an effective form of intervention if other states do not abide by the principle. “The doctrine of non-intervention, to be a legitimate principle of morality, must be accepted by all governments,” wrote John Stuart Mill in 1859. “The despot must consent to be bound by it as well as the free States. Unless they do, the profession of it by free countries comes to this miserable issue, that the wrong side may help the wrong, but the right must not help the right.” John Stuart Mill, “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” Fraser’s Magazine, December 1859, https://www.jstor.org/sta-ble/40244870?seq=1. For example, the U.S., British, and French policies of “non-intervention” in the Spanish Civil War, or the refusal to sell weapons to all sides, effectively harmed the Spanish government because the rebels received assistance from Germany and Italy and Madrid was unable to purchase arms to defend itself.

81 Peter Van Ness, Revolution and Chinese Foreign Policy: Peking’s Support for Wars of National Liberation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973), 47.

82 David H. Shinn and Joshua Eisenman, China and Africa: A Century of Engagement (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

83 Jerome A. Cohen, “China and Intervention: Theory and Practice,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 121, no. 3 (January 1973): 471–505, https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/penn_law_review/vol121/iss3/9; John F. Copper, China’s Foreign Aid and Investment Diplomacy, Volume III: Strategy Beyond Asia and Challenges to the United States and the International Order (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 30–34; Benjamin Barton, “China’s Security Policy in Africa: A New or False Dawn for the Evolution of the Application of China’s Non-interference Principle?” South African Journal of International Affairs 25, no. 3 (2018): 413–34, https://doi.org/10.1080/10220461.2018.1526707.

implies that intervention is binary — that a state either is or isn’t intervening. But there are, in real-ity, degrees of meddling across multiple domains, making some form of interference almost inevita-ble.79 An external country’s decisions about trade, investment, and the training of local forces can all impact the course of a civil war. For instance, an external actor can influence a civil war by allowing arms sales to one faction but not others or by per-mitting (or denying) arms sales to all sides (there-by treating the government and rebel groups alike and legitimizing the insurgents).80

The critical problem for the Chinese doc-trine of non-intervention is that, oftentimes,

Beijing is not neutral when it comes to foreign civil wars. Like other major states, China has interests at stake in foreign conflicts and has sought to manipulate their outcome. From the

late 1950s through the 1970s, China pursued a militant anti-imperialist (and anti-Soviet) foreign policy and sponsored a variety of

rebel factions engaged in “wars of na-tional liberation.”81 Beijing sent tens of thousands of troops to North Vietnam; backed leftist political groups in Laos,

South Korea, Thailand, and Oman; and armed rebels in approximately 20 African countries, including Al-geria, Zimbabwe, Guinea-Bissau, Congo, Angola, and South Africa.82 Beijing tried to reconcile this overt interference with its non-intervention doctrine by claiming that imperialist states do not respect non-intervention and therefore socialist states were obliged to assist popular movements.83

In the Deng Xiaoping era of the late 1970s, China focused on economic growth, sought to keep a low profile internationally, and abandoned its patron-age of wars of national liberation. Nevertheless, it

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to boost state capacity and construct strategic in-frastructure or allow an embattled regime to use Chinese-owned facilities to crush a rebellion. Fur-thermore, China can utilize political tools in foreign countries, such as encouraging front organizations to propagate pro-Beijing propaganda, punishing scholars and journalists perceived to be unfriendly, or bribing politicians.92

Another instrument China can use to interfere is U.N. peacekeeping. Until the 1980s, China de-nounced peacekeeping as a form of intervention and typically abstained from voting on U.N. resolu-tions on peacekeeping missions. Following the end of the Cold War, however, Beijing began to perceive peacekeeping as a means of buttressing China’s im-age as a “responsible power” and gaining experi-ence of military deployments. In 2008, a Chinese white paper emphasized the importance of “mil-itary operations other than war,” such as peace-keeping, disaster relief, anti-piracy campaigns, and infrastructure development.93 Over time, Chinese peacekeeping operations became steadily more ambitious and muscular. Since 2010, over 15,000 Chinese personnel have been deployed in over a dozen different missions, and the makeup of these contingents evolved from non-combat troops, such as engineers, police, and medical personnel, to combat forces.94 By 2020, Beijing was the 10th big-gest contributor to peacekeeping missions.95

Motivations for Chinese Intervention

In 2013, Li Shaye, an official in the Chinese Min-istry of Foreign Affairs, said that China’s interests in Africa were growing larger “so political unrest in

92 Anne-Marie Brady, “Magic Weapons: China’s Political Influence Activities Under Xi Jinping,” Woodrow Wilson Center, Sept. 18, 2017, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/magic-weapons-chinas-political-influence-activities-under-xi-jinping. On Beijing’s use of corruption as a tool, see Philip Zelikow, et al., “The Rise of Strategic Corruption: How States Weaponize Graft,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 4 (July/August 2020): 107–20, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-06-09/rise-strategic-corruption.

93 “China: The White Paper and Military operations Abroad,” Stratfor, Jan. 23, 2009, https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/china-white-pa-per-and-military-operations-abroad. See also “Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2019,” Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2019, https://media.defense.gov/2019/May/02/2002127082/-1/-1/1/2019_CHINA_MILITARY_POWER_RE-PORT.pdf; Andrea Ghiselli, “Civil–Military Relations and Organisational Preferences Regarding the Use of the Military in Chinese Foreign Policy: Insights from the Debate on MOOTW,” Journal of Strategic Studies 43, no. 3 (2020): 421–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2018.1438892.

94 Barton, Political Trust and the Politics of Security Engagement, 40; Courtney J. Richardson, “A Responsible Power? China and the UN Peacekeeping Regime,” International Peacekeeping 18, no. 3 (2011): 286–97, https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2011.563082; Yin He, “China Rising and Its Changing Policy on UN Peacekeeping,” in United Nations Peace Operations in a Changing Global Order, ed. Cedric De Coning and Mateja Peter (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 261; and “Troop and Police Contributors,” United Nations Peacekeeping, https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/troop-and-police-contributors.

95 Lucy Best, “What Motivates Chinese Peacekeeping?” Council on Foreign Relations, Jan. 7, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/blog/what-moti-vates-chinese-peacekeeping.

96 “Lu Talks with Readers of China Daily Website,” China Daily, Feb. 27, 2013, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2013Diplomats/index.html.

97 Verhoeven, “Is Beijing’s Non-interference Policy History?” 56.

98 Michael Mandelbaum, The Fate of Nations: The Search for National Security in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 132; and Byman et al., Trends in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements.

99 Sulmaan Wasif Khan, Haunted by Chaos: China’s Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

100 Evan S. Medeiros, China’s International Behavior: Activism, Opportunism, and Diversification (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2009), 185; and Chi-ung-Chiu Huang and Chih-yu Shih, Harmonious Intervention: China’s Quest for Relational Security (New York: Routledge, 2016), 146.

Africa will be affecting China to a much bigger ex-tent.”96 One Chinese ambassador said, “Of course, we are increasingly involved in the politics of Afri-can countries, we are being pulled in, we have no choice.”97 As these comments indicate, in recent decades, China has become an increasingly active player in foreign civil wars. Historically, rising great powers have tended to meddle in internal conflicts abroad and China is no exception.98 So, what spe-cifically is driving Chinese intervention abroad?

First, Beijing manipulates foreign internal con-flicts to protect its core interests: maintaining po-litical control and territorial integrity within China and safeguarding the “one China” principle that states that Taiwan is part of China.99 Beijing insists that recipients of foreign aid renounce diplomatic ties with Taipei and also discourages criticism of China on other internal issues such as Tibet, the treatment of Muslim minorities, and Hong Kong. Crucially, Beijing is willing to shape the outcome of a foreign conflict to ensure that the winner plays ball. The Liberian civil war from 1989 to 2003 be-came an effective proxy war between China and Taiwan, waged through aid and diplomatic support. In 1997, Liberia shut down relations with China in exchange for tens of millions of dollars from Taipei. In 2003, Beijing obstructed a nascent peace plan in Liberia and the deployment of a U.N. force until it received assurances that the new regime would abandon Taiwan. China and Liberia subsequently reestablished diplomatic ties, and the United Na-tions authorized a peacekeeping force, including hundreds of Chinese peacekeepers.100

Second, China intervenes to protect its border security. For example, the United Wa State Army

continued to intervene in foreign civil wars. During the 1980s, for example, China fought a proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan (in coor-dination with the United States and Pakistan) by supplying the mujahedeen rebels with everything from AK-47s to donkeys.84 China also gave weapons and diplomatic backing to the South West Africa People’s Organization, a rebel group in Namibia that was fighting South African forces.85

It is true that in the post-Cold War period, China was generally less interventionist than other per-manent members of the U.N. Security Council. Bei-jing avoided large-scale humanitarian missions like the U.S. intervention in Somalia from 1992 to 1994, major nation-building operations like the U.S. cam-paign in Iraq (2003–2011), or sustained proxy wars like America’s backing of Kurdish fighters in Syria (after 2015). Beijing has opposed unilateral interven-tions and regime change and vetoed numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions that targeted authori-tarian regimes for human rights abuses.86 When for-eign countries experienced internal violence, Beijing often chose flight over fight by withdrawing its na-tionals — for example, evacuating over 35,000 Chi-nese people from Libya in 2011.

Nevertheless, during the post-Cold War era, Bei-jing’s doctrine of non-intervention steadily weak-ened and will probably continue to do so. Chinese analysts engaged in a vigorous debate about the merits of the non-intervention principle, but the debate centered not on whether to intervene more, but instead on how much additional intervention was appropriate.87 In the following sections, I out-line the toolbox of Chinese interventionism and the

84 John W. Garver, China’s Quest: The History of the Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 418–19; and Mark Urban, War in Afghanistan (London: Macmillan, 1988), 123.

85 Ian Taylor, China and Africa: Engagement and Compromise (New York: Routledge, 2006), 156–60.

86 Barton, “China’s Security Policy in Africa.”

87 Chen Zheng, “China Debates the Non-Interference Principle,” Chinese Journal of International Politics 9, no. 3 (Autumn 2016): 349–74, https://doi.org/10.1093/cjip/pow010; and Allen Carlson, “More than Just Saying No: China’s Evolving Approach to Sovereignty and Intervention Since Tiananmen,” in New Directions in the Study of China’s Foreign Policy, ed. Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert S. Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).

88 Gisela Grieger, “China’s Growing Role as a Security Actor in Africa,” European Parliamentary Research Service, October 2019, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2019/642232/EPRS_BRI(2019)642232_EN.pdf

89 “Global Arms Trade: USA Increases Dominance; Arms Flows to the Middle East Surge, says SIPRI,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, March 11, 2019, https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2019/global-arms-trade-usa-increases-dominance-arms-flows-middle-east-surge-says-sipri.

90 Pieter D. Wezeman, Siemon T. Wezeman, and Lucie Béraud-Sudreau, Arms Flows to Sub-Saharan Africa, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Policy Paper No. 30, December 2011, https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/files/PP/SIPRIPP30.pdf; Ian Taylor and Zhengyu Wu, “China’s Arms Transfers to Africa and Political Violence,” Terrorism and Political Violence 25, no. 3 (2013): 458, https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2012.664588; Benjamin Barton, Political Trust and the Politics of Security Engagement: China and the European Union in Africa (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018), 38; and Barton, “China’s Security Policy in Africa.”

91 David Shambaugh, China Goes Global: The Partial Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 10; Obert Hodzi, The End of China’s Non-Intervention Policy in Africa (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2019), 129. In 1995, shortly after the Rwandan genocide, Tanzania refused to let a Chinese ship unload 152 tons of weaponry and ammunition which were headed to the Tutsi-dominated army of Burundi. In 2008, a Chinese cargo ship was discovered with 70 tons of small arms destined for Robert Mugabe’s repressive regime in Zimbabwe, despite international sanctions on the government. (Following a boycott by South African dock workers, Beijing claimed the ship returned to China). Ian Taylor, China’s New Role in Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009), 125; Celia W. Dugger, “Zimbabwe Arms Shipped by China Spark an Uproar,” New York Times, April 19, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/world/africa/19zimbabwe.html; and Shambaugh, China Goes Global.

different motives that have drawn Beijing further into foreign internal conflicts — and, potentially, onto a collision course with the United States.

Tools of Chinese Intervention

Beijing has a diverse set of tools available for inter-vening both directly and indirectly. As a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, China has the ability to meddle in an internal conflict by support-ing (or declining to veto) a U.N. resolution author-izing intervention or by blocking such a resolution, thereby helping the intended target. In addition, Beijing can shape the course of a civil war through arms sales and capacity building. China provides sophisticated surveillance technology to partner states (including AI-powered facial recognition) and has deployed military trainers in many African countries.88 From 2014 to 2018, China was the fifth largest exporter of weapons globally (behind the United States, Russia, France, and Germany).89 Chi-nese weapons manufacturers tend to sell small arms and inexpensive light weaponry to countries in the developing world. By 2010, China was the number one supplier of arms to sub-Saharan Africa.90 Data on Beijing’s arms exports are considered a state se-cret, which facilitates the covert supply of weapon-ry to foreign conflict zones. Chinese light weapons ended up in numerous civil wars in sub-Saharan Af-rica, and Beijing reportedly tried to block the United Nations from investigating these arms transfers.91

China also has powerful economic and political tools available to shape the course of a foreign civil war. For example, Beijing can provide investment

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overseas investments.”110 The 2015 Chinese defense white paper, China’s Military Strategy, stated that defending overseas interests through “open seas protection” would henceforth share equal bill-ing with “offshore waters defense,” or protecting China’s immediate periphery.111 From 2012 to 2018, Beijing deployed peacekeepers in 13 countries, nine of which were locations of significant Chinese eco-nomic investment.112

Economic interests drew China deeper into Pa-kistani domestic politics. Pakistan is a keystone of the Belt and Road Initiative, with over $60 billion in projects slated for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, including a seaport in the Pakistani town of Gwadar and plans for housing half a million Chi-nese workers.113 Construction projects often occur in conflict-ridden regions of Pakistan, such as Bal-uchistan. In 2018, Baluch separatists carried out numerous strikes against Chinese interests, includ-ing an attack on the Chinese consulate in Karachi that left seven dead.114 From 2014 to 2018, Pakistan received 37 percent of all China’s arms exports.115 The two states carried out joint counter-terrorism exercises focused on contingencies in Xinjiang, and China pressured Pakistan to crack down on rebel Uighurs in North Waziristan.116

Economic interests also spurred China to engage in capacity building in Sudan.117 From 1983 to 2005, Khartoum fought a civil war in the south of the country against the Sudan People’s Liberation Army and, after 2003, engaged in another internal conflict in Darfur. China is Sudan’s biggest trading partner

110 Hu Weijia, “China Ready to Play a Greater Role in Resolving Conflicts in South & Southeast Asia,” Global Times, May 1, 2017, http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1044849.shtml.

111 China’s Military Strategy, The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, May 2015, http://eng.mod.gov.cn/Data-base/WhitePapers/index.htm. See also, Michael McDevitt, “China’s Far Seas Navy: The Implications of the ‘Open Seas Protection’ Mission,” April 2016, https://www.cna.org/cna_files/pdf/China-Far-Seas-Navy.pdf; M. Taylor Fravel, “China’s New Military Strategy: ‘Winning Informationized Local Wars,” China Brief 15, no. 13 (July 2, 2015), https://jamestown.org/program/chinas-new-military-strategy-winning-informationized-local-wars/; and M. Taylor Fravel, Active Defense: China’s Military Strategy since 1949 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

112 Best, “What Motivates Chinese Peacekeeping?”

113 Mathieu Duchâtel, “The Terrorist Risk and China’s Policy Toward Pakistan: Strategic Reassurance and the ‘United Front,’” Journal of Contem-porary China 20, no. 71 (2011): 543–561, https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2011.587158; and Andrew Small, The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015).

114 Maham Hameed, “The Politics of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor,” Palgrave Communications 4, no. 64 (2018): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0115-7.

115 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “Global Arms Trade.”

116 Andrew Small, “The Xinjiangistan Connection,” Foreign Policy, July 30, 2014, https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/07/30/the-xinjiangistan-connection/.

117 Huang and Shih, Harmonious Intervention, 146; and Irene Panozzo, “Asian Players in Sudan: Social and Economic Impacts of ‘New-Old’ Actors,” in Multidimensional Change in Sudan (1989–2011): Reshaping Livelihoods, Conflicts and Identities, ed. Barbara Casciarri, Munzoul Assal, and François Ireton (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 163–81.

118 Taylor and Wu, “China’s Arms Transfers to Africa and Political Violence,” 465.

119 Large, “China and the Contradictions of ‘Non-interference’ in Sudan”; International Crisis Group, “China’s Foreign Policy Experiment in South Sudan”; and Jian Junbo, “China in International Conflict Management: Darfur Issue as a Case,” in China and Africa: Building Peace and Security Cooperation on the Continent, ed. Chris Alden, et al. (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 147–61.

120 Hodzi, The End of China’s Non-Intervention Policy in Africa, 19.

121 International Crisis Group, “China’s Foreign Policy Experiment in South Sudan.”

122 “Security Council, Adopting Resolution 2155 (2014), Extends Mandate of Mission in South Sudan, Boltering Its Strength to Quell Surging Violence,” United Nations, May 27, 2014, https://www.un.org/press/en/2014/sc11414.doc.htm.

and has extensive energy and mineral investments in the country. Beijing backed the regime by con-structing oil infrastructure; developing Sudan’s arms manufacturing industry; selling weaponry, including helicopter gunships; allowing the Sudanese air force to use airstrips and repair facilities at Chinese oil installations; and shielding Khartoum in the U.N. Se-curity Council.118 In 2007, China sought to burnish its credentials as a peacemaker by helping to broker a deal for an expanded United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur and deploying 4,000 Chinese personnel to Sudan.119

China is also a significant actor in South Sudan, which declared independence from Sudan in 2011 and endured a civil war in 2013. Beijing has invest-ed billions of dollars in South Sudan and purchased almost $4 billion of oil from the country in 2014.120 China pursued a nuanced position in South Sudan, talking to all sides (including rebels) and public-ly pressuring the combatants to sign a ceasefire agreement.121 In 2015, China deployed 1,000 troops to South Sudan as part of the U.N. mission in the country — the first time a Chinese infantry battalion was sent abroad on an external peacekeeping oper-ation. Beijing deliberately shaped the scope of the U.N. mission in South Sudan to safeguard Chinese economic interests — especially oil interests — re-sulting in U.N. Security Council Resolution 2155 call-ing for protecting civilians “in areas at high risk of conflict including, as appropriate, schools, places of worship, hospitals and the oil installations.”122

In Mali, China intervened to aid the government

in neighboring Myanmar is an effective Chinese proxy. The Wa rebels speak Chinese and use Chi-nese currency, and Beijing reportedly supplies the group with financial support and heavy weaponry, including missiles and armored vehicles. Although there are a variety of motives for Chinese aid, in-cluding economic interests and a desire to main-tain influence in Myanmar, the primary aim of sup-porting the group is to prevent the conflict from spilling over into China.101

Third, China interferes in civil conflicts as part of its strategic rivalry with India. New Delhi has long claimed that China aids insurgents in northeast In-dia, an accusation Beijing denies.102 China reportedly gave sanctuary to rebel leaders and provided weap-ons to Indian insurgents, using rebels in Myanmar as intermediaries.103 In 2020, an article published in the Chinese state-run Global Times warned that Beijing could respond to Indian support for Taiwan by backing rebels inside India: “If India plays the Taiwan card,” it stated, “it should be aware that Chi-na can also play the Indian separatist card.”104 China also helped the Sri Lankan regime crush Tamil sepa-ratists in 2009, partly to tilt the balance of power in South Asia away from India. Beijing was Sri Lanka’s biggest donor; its chief supplier of weapons; and its guardian in the U.N. Security Council, where Beijing blocked the chamber from debating the Sri Lankan military strategy. In 2015, China reportedly chan-neled funds to favorable political candidates in the

101 Daniel Schearf, “With Burma in Mind, China Quietly Supports Wa Rebels,” Voice of America, Jan. 25, 2013, https://www.voanews.com/east-asia/burma-mind-china-quietly-supports-wa-rebels; Ming Wai Sit and Tin Yau Cheung, “China’s Enduring Influence Over Wa State in Myanmar,” Nov. 18, 2019, https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/chinas-enduring-influence-over-wa-state-in-myanmar/; and Hak Yin Li and Yongnian Zheng, “Re-in-terpreting China’s Non-Intervention Policy Towards Myanmar: Leverage, Interest and Intervention,” Journal of Contemporary China 18, no. 61 (2009): 617–37, https://doi.org/10.1080/10670560903033901.

102 Shishir Gupta, “Ulfa Chief Traced to China, but Beijing Denies His Presence,” Hindustan Times, Feb. 2, 2014, https://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi/ulfa-chief-traced-to-china-but-beijing-denies-his-presence/story-I92KRfWgvsqdl27sCfGxyJ.html. See also, Kunal Mukherjee, Conflict in India and China’s Contested Borderlands: A Comparative Study (New York: Routledge, 2019), chap. 5; and Bertil Lintner, Great Game East: India, China, and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).

103 Bibhu Prasad Routray and Mantraya, “China’s New Game in India Northeast,” Eurasia Review, Aug. 9, 2017, https://www.eurasiareview.com/09082017-chinas-new-game-in-indias-northeast-analysis/; Prabin Kalita. “UNLFW: The New Name for Terror in NE,” Times of India, June 5, 2015, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/UNLFW-The-new-name-for-terror-in-NE/articleshow/47547899.cms; and Avinash Paliwal, “Is China Behind a Recent Insurgent Attack in India’s Northeast?” The Diplomat, Sept. 1, 2020, https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/is-china-behind-a-re-cent-insurgent-attack-in-indias-northeast/.

104 Long Xingchun, “India to Invite Trouble Playing Taiwan Card,” Global Times, Oct. 18, 2020, https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1203786.shtml.

105 Maria Abi-Habib, “How China Got Sri Lanka to Cough Up a Port,” New York Times, June 25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/world/asia/china-sri-lanka-port.html; and Kadira Pethiyagoda, “China’s Legacy in Sri Lanka’s Civil War Gives It a Diplomatic Edge,” National Interest, Nov. 28, 2018, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/chinas-legacy-sri-lankas-civil-war-gives-it-diplomatic-edge-37447.

106 Hongying Wang and XueYing Hu (2017) “China’s ‘Going-Out’ Strategy and Corporate Social Responsibility: Preliminary Evidence of a ‘Boomer-ang Effect,’” Journal of Contemporary China, 25, no. 108 (2017): 820–33, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2017.1337301.

107 Ken Davies, “China Investment Policy: An Update,” OECD Working Papers on International Investment, no. 2013/01 (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/5k469l1hmvbt-en; and “Annual Outflow of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from China Between 2009 and 2019,” Statistica, accessed March 19, 2021, https://www.statista.com/statistics/858019/china-outward-foreign-direct-investment-flows/.

108 “China’s Foreign Policy Experiment in South Sudan,” International Crisis Group, Asia Report No. 288, July 10, 2017, 3, https://d2071andvip-0wj.cloudfront.net/288-china-s-foreign-policy-experiment-in-south-sudan.pdf; and Thomas P. Cavanna, “Unlocking the Gates of Eurasia: China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Its Implications for U.S. Grand Strategy,” Texas National Security Review 2, no. 3 (May 2019), 13, http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/2927.

109 Harry Verhoeven, “Is Beijing’s Non-Interference Policy History? How Africa Is Changing China,” Washington Quarterly 37, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 55–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/0163660X.2014.926209.

Sri Lankan elections.105

Fourth, economic interests have also driven Chi-nese involvement in foreign civil wars. At the turn of the century, Beijing encouraged Chinese com-panies to step up overseas investment, known as the “Going Out” policy.106 China’s direct overseas investment subsequently increased dramatically, from $2.7 billion in 2002 to $196 billion in 2016.107 The centerpiece of Chinese foreign investment is the Belt and Road Initiative, a trillion-dollar pro-gram that launched in 2013 and includes financing for bridges, railways, ports, and other infrastruc-ture in Asia, Africa, and Europe.108

These economic interests give China a direct stake in the outcome of foreign internal conflicts and encourage Beijing to put a thumb — or more than a thumb — on the scale in shaping the course of the fighting. Chinese investments are often in insecure regions, with one-third of China’s oil im-ports coming from Africa. Chinese energy, mining, and construction companies are also more will-ing to operate in unstable countries than West-ern corporations.109 Beijing has a strong incentive to protect regimes that sign economic deals with Chinese companies and stick to the terms. Ac-cording to China’s  Global Times, “China has al-ways adhered to the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, but that doesn’t mean Beijing can turn a deaf ear to the de-mands of Chinese enterprises in protecting their

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against rebel groups. Although Beijing does not have extensive investments in Mali, it is concerned about the supply of uranium from northern Mali as well as broader regional economic interests. In 2012, Mali experienced both a rebellion and a coup, and China supported several U.N. resolutions that authorized pro-government intervention, including a major French operation. China deployed a protection unit to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Mali, which is authorized to take all necessary steps “to prevent the return of armed elements” to northern Mali.123

China typically backs regimes in foreign civil wars but, in the case of Libya, Beijing reluctantly aided the rebels. The civil war that broke out in 2011 between Muammar Gaddafi’s government and the rebels in the National Transitional Council threatened over $20 billion of Chinese investment in Libya’s oil, con-struction, and telecommunications sectors.124 Bei-jing voted for U.N. Resolution 1970, which blamed Gaddafi’s forces for the escalating violence; asked the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes; and imposed an arms embargo, asset freeze, and travel ban on senior Libyan government officials (but not on rebel leaders).125 Beijing also recognized the Libyan opposition even while Gaddafi remained in power and abstained on (rather than vetoing) U.N. Resolution 1973, which declared a no-fly zone in Libya and further tilted the war in favor of the re-bels. And yet, in 2011, Chinese arms firms reportedly offered to sell $200 million of weaponry to Gaddafi’s faltering regime, although the extent of official in-volvement was unclear.126

Fifth, China pursues intervention as part of its counter-terrorism strategy. Beijing has become

123 Hodzi, The End of China’s Non-Intervention Policy in Africa; David Shinn, “China’s Response to the Islamist Threat in Mali,” China-US Focus, June 21, 2013, http://www.chinausfocus.com/peace-security/chinas-response-to-the-islamist-threat-in-mali/; and Frans Paul Van der Putten, “Chi-na’s Evolving Role in Peacekeeping and African Security: The Deployment of Chinese Troops for UN Force Protection in Mali,” Clingendael Report, September 2015, https://www.clingendael.org/publication/chinas-evolving-role-peacekeeping-and-african-security.

124 Hodzi, The End of China’s Non-Intervention Policy in Africa, 108–09; and Yun Sun, “Africa in China’s Foreign Policy,” Brookings Institute, April 2014, 1–45, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/africa-in-china-web_cmg7.pdf.

125 Hodzi, The End of China’s Non-Intervention Policy in Africa, 123; and Joel Wuthnow, Chinese Diplomacy and the UN Security Council: Beyond the Veto (London: Routledge, 2013).

126 “Did China Sell Arms to Libya?” The Diplomat, Sept. 6, 2011, https://thediplomat.com/2011/09/did-china-sell-arms-to-libya/.

127 Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Myunghee Lee, and Emir Yazici, “Counterterrorism and Preventive Repression: China’s Changing Strategy in Xinji-ang,” International Security 44, no. 3 (Winter 2019/2020): 9–47, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00368.

128 Office of the Secretary of Defense, “Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2019,” 16–17; Zhao Jun and Hu Yu, “On China’s New Era Anti-Terrorism Governance in the Middle East,” Yonsei Journal of International Studies 7, no. 2 (2015): 267–83, http://theyonseijournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Jun-Yu-Chinas-Anti-Terrorism-Governance-1.pdf; Daniel L. Byman and Israa Saber, “Is China Prepared for Global Terrorism? Xinjiang and Beyond,” September 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/research/is-china-pre-pared-for-global-terrorism/.

129 Liu Zhen, “Chinese Military to Provide ‘Aid and Training Assistance’ to Syrian Government,” South China Morning Post, August 16, 2016, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2004676/chinese-military-provide-aid-and-training-assistance. See also, Courtney J. Fung, “Separating Intervention from Regime Change: China’s Diplomatic Innovations at the UN Security Council Regarding the Syria Crisis,” The China Quarterly 235 (September 2018): 693–712, doi:10.1017/S0305741018000851.

130 Mathieu Duchâtel, “Terror Overseas: Understanding China’s Evolving Counter-Terror Strategy,” European Council on Foreign Relations, October 2016, https://ecfr.eu/wp-content/uploads/ECFR_193_-_TERROR_OVERSEAS_UNDERSTANDING_CHINAS_EVOLVING_COUNTER_TER-ROR_STRATEGY.pdf.

131 Adams Bodomo, “Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Inequalities and Well-being of Africans in China,” Asian Ethnicity 21, No. 4 (May 2020), 526-541, doi: 10.1080/14631369.2020.1761246.

concerned over Uighur militants — who are most-ly Muslim — operating at home and their links to transnational Islamic militants. Since 2017, China has engaged in systematic repression of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang province.127 China has also ini-tiated counter-terrorism exercises with numerous countries; helped found the Global Counterterror-ism Forum; and backed the Quadrilateral Cooper-ation and Coordination Mechanism, a counter-ter-rorism institution for China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan.128 China views the Syrian civil war in part through the lens of counter-terrorism. Beijing displayed growing concern over Uighur fighters in Syria, backing the Syrian government by cast-ing multiple vetoes in the U.N. Security Council to oppose foreign-imposed regime change in Da-mascus and providing limited aid and training to Syrian regime forces.129 In 2016, China introduced a counter-terrorism law that smoothed the path for the People’s Liberation Army to conduct missions overseas, which, according to one study, “has the potential to lead to a dramatic change in the use of Chinese military power abroad.”130

Finally, Chinese intervention is part of an effort to safeguard the growing Chinese diaspora. The exhortation for Chinese companies to go out into the world meant that large numbers of Chinese na-tionals began living and working in insecure states, including an estimated two million Chinese people who live in Africa.131 Islamic fundamentalists and other rebel groups target Chinese, as well as West-ern, nationals. In 2012, for example, Chinese pri-vate security contractors coordinated with the Su-danese military to rescue 29 Chinese nationals who

LOOKING AHEAD, CHINESE INTERVENTION IS SET TO INCREASE. CHINA’S INTERESTS WILL KEEP BROADENING, ITS APPETITE FOR ENERGY AND RAW MATERIALS WILL ENHANCE ITS PERCEIVED STAKE IN THE STABILITY OF OTHER COUNTRIES, AND ITS GROWING CAPABILITIES WILL BOOST THE TEMPTATION TO ACT. 

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Partnership

In the partnership model, China and the Unit-ed States would cooperate in managing foreign civil wars. Washington and Beijing could, theo-retically, form an effective team, either as neutral peacemakers or as confederates backing the same faction in a conflict. China and the United States share significant interests in insecure regions, such as countering terrorism, and bring different assets to the table. U.N. peacekeeping is an area of relatively open communication between the United States and China, and the two countries often consult on security issues in Africa. U.S. and Chinese goals are largely aligned, for instance, in South Sudan, where China worked closely with the troika of the United States, the United King-dom, and Norway.138 Some insecure countries co-operate with both the United States and China. For example, Ethiopia has received major Chinese investment in infrastructure while also hosting CIA facilities, and Kenya is a historic U.S. ally but trades more with Beijing.139

In the past, the United States has sometimes pressed China to take a greater role in foreign internal conflicts. In 2005, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick urged Beijing to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the internation-al system by intervening to resolve civil wars in countries such as Sudan.140 In the wake of costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a renewed motivation for the United States to share the bur-den of stabilizing war-torn countries. The Belt and Road Initiative, for example, could help to satisfy the vast need for global infrastructure, which, in the coming decade, will run into the tens of tril-lions of dollars.141 Meanwhile, China has an incen-tive to tolerate U.S. intervention because Beijing can free ride on security provided by the Ameri-can military and prefers U.S. occupation to chaos in countries like Iraq.142 Whereas, historically, Bei-jing often opposed U.S. and allied interventions as

138 International Crisis Group, “China’s Foreign Policy Experiment in South Sudan.”

139 Verhoeven, “Is Beijing’s Non-interference Policy History?”

140 Robert B. Zoellick, “Whither China: From Membership to Responsibility?” U.S. Department of State, Sept. 21, 2005, http://2001-2009.state.gov/s/d/former/zoellick/rem/53682.htm.

141 Cavanna, “Unlocking the Gates of Eurasia.”

142 Hiim and Stenslie, “China’s Realism in the Middle East.”

143 Hodzi, The End of China’s Non-Intervention Policy in Africa, 222.

144 Groh, Proxy War, 50.

145 Aaron Maasho, “Africa Should Avoid Forfeiting Sovereignty to China Over Loans: Tillerson,” Reuters, March 8, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-africa/africa-should-avoid-forfeiting-sovereignty-to-china-over-loans-tillerson-idUSKCN1GK114.

146 John Bolton, “Remarks by National Security Advisor Ambassador John R. Bolton on the Trump Administration’s New Africa Strategy,” Speech Delivered at the Heritage Foundation, Dec. 13, 2018, https://td.usembassy.gov/remarks-by-national-security-advisor-ambassador-john-r-bol-ton-on-the-trump-administrations-new-africa-strategy/.

“adventurism,” China acquiesced in recent West-ern-led missions in Mali and Libya.143

Proxy War

Another possibility is that the United States and China will oppose each other in a foreign civil war and provide support for different sides in the con-flict. Given the significant incentives for the two countries to cooperate in foreign civil wars, why would they choose instead to engage in a proxy war?

Strategic competition in an emerging bipolar system may encourage a zero-sum mindset where both sides seek advantage — where a gain for the United States or China is perceived as a loss for the other side.144 These great powers could manipulate internal conflicts to protect a sphere of influence, maintain access to strategic resources, or counter the perceived intervention of the rival. Indeed, the shift from counter-terrorism following the 9/11 at-tacks to an era of great-power rivalry today may fundamentally alter how Washington views foreign civil wars. In the counter-terrorism paradigm, in-stability abroad is an inherent problem because it spurs violent extremism. In this scenario, Beijing could be a useful ally in countering local militants. By contrast, in the great-power rivalry paradigm, instability abroad may be threatening or it could be potentially useful, depending on its impact on the global strategic balance. China’s efforts to stabilize foreign states under this paradigm are treated with suspicion. For example, Washington does not see the Belt and Road Initiative as a useful mechanism for aiding fragile states and countering terrorism. In 2018, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson crit-icized what he called Beijing’s “opaque contracts” and “predatory loan practices.”145 Former National Security Adviser John Bolton claimed that China seeks to “hold states in Africa captive to Beijing’s wishes and demands.”146 The 2018 Better Utiliza-tion of Investment Leading to Development Act was designed to compete with the Belt and Road

had been kidnapped by rebel forces.132 The end of the movie Wolf Warrior II shows the cover of a Chi-nese passport and declares: “Citizens of the PRC [People’s Republic of China]: When you encounter danger in a foreign land, do not give up! Please re-member, at your back stands a strong motherland.”

The Scope of Chinese Intervention

There is a growing gap between China’s doctrine of non-intervention and how it behaves in practice. Since the end of the Cold War, China has trended toward greater involvement in foreign civil wars, including a sea change in Beijing’s attitude toward peacekeeping; a broadened view of China’s over-seas interests; a loosening of China’s rules for de-ploying troops in counter-terrorism missions; and the opening, in 2017, of Beijing’s first foreign mili-tary base (in Djibouti, where a company of U.S. ma-rines is also deployed).133 Several drivers of Chinese intervention are longstanding, such as protecting core interests, border security, and competition with India. Other drivers have grown in importance in recent years, such as defending overseas eco-nomic interests, strengthening counter-terrorism, and assisting Chinese nationals.

Looking ahead, Chinese intervention is set to in-crease. China’s interests will keep broadening, its appetite for energy and raw materials will enhance its perceived stake in the stability of other countries, and its growing capabilities will boost the tempta-tion to act. According to the U.S. Department of De-fense, China’s Marine Corps is not yet ready to per-form “expeditionary missions” but ultimately “will be capable of operating from land, sea, and air as the [People’s Liberation Army’s] global military force.”134 Meanwhile, Chinese nationalism and domestic poli-tics may encourage a more muscular response when China’s interests are at stake, especially if Chinese nationals are threatened.

In the immediate term, Beijing will likely contin-ue to exercise caution and favor subtler forms of manipulation over heavy-handed coercion. Direct intervention may involve peacekeeping missions and raids by special forces, rather than major

132 International Crisis Group, “China’s Foreign Policy Experiment in South Sudan,” 4; Hodzi, The End of China’s Non-Intervention Policy in Africa, 4; Jonas Parello-Plesner and Mathieu Duchatel, China’s Strong Arm: Protecting Citizens and Assets Abroad (London: Routledge, 2015).

133 Barton, Political Trust and the Politics of Security Engagement, 38.

134 Office of the Secretary of Defense, “Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2019,” 60–61; and Martin Andrew, “The Influence of U.S. Counterinsurgency Operations in Afghanistan on the People’s Liberation Army,” in Chinese Lessons from Other Peoples’ Wars, ed. Andrew Scobell, David Lai, and Roy Kamphausen (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2011), 237–75.

135 Verhoeven, “Is Beijing’s Non-interference Policy History?”; and Henrik Stalhane Hiim and Stig Stenslie, “China’s Realism in the Middle East,” Survival 61, no. 6 (2019), 153–66, https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2019.1688578.

136 International Crisis Group, “China’s Foreign Policy Experiment in South Sudan.”

137 Zeng, “China Debates the Non-Interference Principle.”

deployments of ground troops. Indirect interven-tion will likely prioritize security cooperation, cy-ber warfare, and surveillance rather than large-scale weapons transfers and will primarily favor regimes rather than rebels. Beijing will select less contentious cases to test new forms of involve-ment, such as multilateral U.N. interventions at the invitation of the target regime or African conflicts that are less salient in Chinese domestic politics compared to crises in Asia.135 China’s lack of allies, aside from North Korea and Pakistan, will also act as a constraint on intervention. However, although tools like economic aid and diplomatic maneuvers in the U.N. Security Council may seem relatively mild compared to the use of direct force, they can still have a powerful — and even decisive — effect on the course of a civil war.

A challenge for Beijing is to reconcile this new-found activism with its doctrine of non-interven-tion. China cannot renounce the doctrine without seeming to embrace meddling. Instead, China may define “intervention” ever more narrowly, for ex-ample to exclude multilateral operations or mis-sions that occur with the consent of the target state. Beijing has also suggested that when civil conflicts threaten to spill across borders, they are “no longer internal political affairs but regional security affairs.”136 Meanwhile, Chinese analysts and officials have proposed a variety of euphe-misms for activist policies that supposedly respect non-intervention, such as “creative involvement,” “constructive involvement,” “proactive non-inter-ference,” “persuasive diplomacy,” and “influence without interference.”137

Sino-U.S. Intervention: Partnership or Proxy War?

What will happen when continued American interventionism meets growing Chinese interven-tionism? Two models for how China and the United States will interact in the context of foreign civil wars are partnership and proxy war.

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For both the United States and China, indirect intervention may be appealing because of the per-ceived costs of alternative options. Nuclear weap-ons and economic interdependence largely fore-close pursuing direct hostilities. Meanwhile, rising security competition and fundamental distrust mean that the partnership model may not be seen as an adequate safeguard of each country’s inter-ests. As alternative options are eliminated, backing local actors may be the only viable means of pro-tecting interests without provoking a backlash. Bei-jing, for example, may conclude that risking direct conflict with the U.S. military is reckless, whereas working indirectly through surrogates offers sig-nificant gain at reduced risk. As former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has remarked, “There are two ways to fight the United States mil-itary: asymmetrically and stupid[ly].”157

The notion of a Sino-U.S. proxy war may evoke images of an intense and high-stakes military ri-valry, in which local actors are mere puppets and the outcome of the civil war is primarily shaped by decisions made in Washington and Beijing. But in reality, a Sino-U.S. proxy war would likely be subtle and deniable and would blur into “normal” international politics. It would involve the use of diplomacy, propaganda, cyber operations, and “weaponized interdependence” or control of key hubs in economic networks.158 Surrogate actors may seek to influence the great powers, and local dynamics will usually be determinative in shaping the course of the conflict.

As an illustration, a Sino-U.S. proxy war could occur if Venezuela were to collapse into a civil war. In this case, the United States might aid re-bel groups and China might support the regime through economic and military aid or diplomacy (at the United Nations or by pressuring regional actors not to cooperate with Washington).159 Such

157 Peter Bergen, “Trump’s Brilliant Choice of McMaster,” CNN, Feb. 21, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/20/opinions/trumps-brilliant-choice-of-mcmaster-bergen/index.html.

158 Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman, “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion,” International Security 44, no. 1 (Summer 2019): 42–79, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00351. See also, Mumford, Proxy Warfare; Groh, Proxy War; and Hughes, My Enemy’s Enemy.

159 Adriana Erthal Abdenur and Robert Muggah, “How to Avoid a Venezuelan Civil War: Latin American Solutions for a Latin American Problem,” Foreign Affairs, Aug. 9, 2017, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/venezuela/2017-08-09/how-avoid-venezuelan-civil-war.

160 “China, Venezuela Lift Ties to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership,” Xinhua, July 21, 2014, http://www.china.org.cn/china/2014-07/21/content_33009951.htm.

161 Antulio Rosales, “Deepening Extractivism and Rentierism: China’s Role in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Developmental Model,” Canadian Journal of Development Studies 37, no. 4 (2016), 560–77, https://doi.org/10.1080/02255189.2016.1208605; and “China,” U.S. Energy Information Administra-tion, https://www.eia.gov/beta/international/analysis.php?iso=CHN.

162 Pence, “Remarks by Vice President Pence on the Administration’s Policy Toward China.”

163 “Nicolás Maduro Moros and 14 Current and Former Venezuelan Officials Charged with Narco-Terrorism, Corruption, Drug Trafficking and Oth-er Criminal Charges,” U.S. Department of Justice, March 26, 2020, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/nicol-s-maduro-moros-and-14-current-and-for-mer-venezuelan-officials-charged-narco-terrorism.

164 Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).

165 Thucydides, The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, trans. and ed. Jeremy Mynott (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 17.

a scenario is quite plausible. The two great powers currently recognize different regimes in Venezue-la. Beijing backs the Nicolás Maduro government, whereas Washington sees Juan Guaidó as the le-gitimate leader. In 2014, China elevated relations with Venezuela to a “comprehensive strategic partnership.”160 Beijing renegotiated loans to give Caracas some breathing room and sold significant amounts of military hardware and surveillance technology to Venezuela.161 In 2018, Pence said, “Within our own hemisphere, Beijing has extend-ed a lifeline to the corrupt and incompetent Ma-duro regime in Venezuela that’s been oppressing its own people.”162 And in 2020, the United States indicted Maduro for narco-terrorism.163

Could a Sino-U.S. Proxy War Escalate?

Scholars often compare the danger of interstate war between the United States and China today to the Peloponnesian War in ancient Greece. Just as the rise of Athens in the fifth century BCE pro-voked fear in Sparta, triggering the Peloponne-sian War, so too today, the economic and military growth of China could spark alarm in the United States and heighten the risk of conflict — what Graham Allison calls the “Thucydides Trap.”164 It’s notable that the Peloponnesian War began when outside powers meddled in a foreign civil war. In 435 BCE, according to Thucydides, the city-state of Epidamnus fell prey to “internal conflicts last-ing many years.”165 Competing factions appealed to outside actors for aid, which ultimately trans-formed a local civil war into a broader conflict be-tween Athens and Sparta. In turn, the campaign between democratic Athens and oligarchic Spar-ta deepened domestic schisms throughout the Greek world, sparking further brutal civil wars, the erosion of norms, and the desecration of

Initiative by creating a new U.S. agency to facilitate investment in developing countries.147

Resolving the civil war in Afghanistan might seem to be a natural joint project for Washington and Beijing, given that the United States is eager to wind down its war in the country and China’s Xinjiang province borders Afghanistan. Since 2016, U.N. Security Council resolutions authorizing the

United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan explicitly referred to China’s Belt and Road Ini-tiative in the context of encouraging trade in Af-ghanistan.148 In 2019, however, Washington wanted the language removed and in 2020, the relevant authorization referred only to “the efforts of all regional and international partners of Afghanistan to support peace, reconciliation, and development in Afghanistan.”149 Political scientist Barnett Rubin wrote that “the Trump administration continued to oppose even perfunctory expressions of support for Afghan-Chinese cooperation.”150

Divergent ideologies may also encourage proxy war. Chinese foreign policy is pragmatic rather than missionary, and Beijing does not seek to export its

147 “Better Utilization of Investments Leading to Development Act of 2018,” S. 2463, 115th Congress (2017–2018), https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/2463.

148 “UN Security Council Resolution 2274,” United Nations, March 15, 2016, https://www.un.org/press/en/2016/sc12283.doc.htm.

149 “UN Security Council Resolution 2513,” United Nations, March 10, 2020, https://unama.unmissions.org/sites/default/files/security_coun-cil_resolution_2513_2020.pdf.

150 Barnett R. Rubin, “There Is Only One Way Out of Afghanistan,” Foreign Affairs, Dec. 9, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/unit-ed-states/2020-12-09/there-only-one-way-out-afghanistan.

151 Hal Brands, “Democracy vs Authoritarianism: How Ideology Shapes Great-Power Conflict,” Survival 60, no. 5 (2018): 61–114, https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2018.1518371.

152 There are some exceptions: China supported sanctions against Iran and North Korea and pressured the Sudanese regime to negotiate with rebels. James Mann, The China Fantasy: Why Capitalism Will Not Bring Democracy to China (New York: Penguin Random House, 2008), 24; Brands, “Democracy vs Authoritarianism”; and Aaron L. Friedberg, “Competing with China,” Survival 60, no. 3 (2018): 7–64, https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2018.1470755.

153 Ariana Berengaut and Rob Berschinski, “Good Governance Papers No. 9: Building an Effective Human Rights-Based Foreign Policy,” Just Secu-rity, Oct. 26, 2020, https://www.justsecurity.org/73042/good-governance-papers-no-9-building-an-effective-human-rights-based-foreign-policy/.

154 Antony J. Blinken, “A Foreign Policy for the American People,” U.S. State Department, March 3, 2021, https://www.state.gov/a-foreign-poli-cy-for-the-american-people/.

155 Gregg A. Brazinsky, Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry During the Cold War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

156 Edward Wong, “Chinese Civilian Boats Roil Disputed Waters,” New York Times, Oct. 5, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/world/asia/06beijing.html.

model of state-directed capitalism. Nevertheless, Beijing resists Western democracy promotion, treating it as a form of contamination that could infect China itself.151 China has assisted non-dem-ocratic actors from Angola to Zimbabwe or shield-ed them from censure from the United Nations. “Pick a dictator anywhere on the globe,” wrote James Mann, “and you’ll likely find these days that

the Chinese regime is supporting him.”152 The Trump administration generally downplayed

human rights and democracy in for-eign policy, but the Biden administra-tion has reemphasized the “creed” of traditional American values.153 In 2021, the U.S. secretary of state said,

“We will stand firm behind our com-mitments to human rights, democ-racy, the rule of law.”154 The greater emphasis on idealism could introduce further tensions in relations with Chi-

na. In the future, Washington may embrace rebels fighting for democratic change or proclaim a re-sponsibility to protect civilians facing mass killing, whereas Beijing may back an authoritarian regime.

In fact, the United States and China have a long history of using different kinds of proxy actors against each other. During the Cold War, the United States and China engaged in proxy war in a number of African countries, including the Congo.155 The Vi-etnam War was, in part, a proxy conflict between South Vietnam (backed by the United States) and North Vietnam (aided by China) — although Beijing also viewed Hanoi as a rival and ultimately went to war against Vietnam in 1979. China has even used commercial fishing vessels as proxies to challenge U.S. and other states’ access to maritime regions.156 Taiwan can be considered a U.S. state proxy as well.

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religious sites.166 “Civil strife inflicted many a ter-rible blow on the cities,” wrote Thucydides, “as always does and always will happen while human nature remains what it is.”167

Could a Sino-U.S. proxy war intensify into a larger conflict — or even an interstate war like in ancient Greece?168 The barriers to interstate war between the United States and China will likely prevent a proxy conflict from escalating to a full-blown con-ventional showdown. For one thing, most foreign civil wars do not threaten the core interests of the great powers. In addition, indirect intervention is often deniable, such that one, or both, great pow-ers may prefer to ignore the other side’s interven-tion precisely to control the risk of a crisis spiraling into a broader, unwanted war.169

Nevertheless, low-level proxy war could poten-tially escalate in unexpected ways. Scholars have found that foreign backing for rebels is correlated with a heightened chance of militarized interstate disputes.170 Patrons often end up providing more aid in foreign civil wars than initially planned be-cause of overconfidence about the allied faction’s capabilities. What begins as a minor proxy war can evolve into a much more dangerous situation if one patron decides to step up its involvement and in-tervene directly with ground forces.

A powerful driver of escalation is simply an aversion to losing. Psychologists have found that “losing hurts twice as bad as winning feels good,” and in the face of potential loss, actors are willing to gamble with an increased commitment in the hope of getting back to even.171 The Vietnam War illustrates the potential for a small-scale proxy conflict to intensify when neither side is willing to accept defeat. Another example is Cuban in-volvement in Angola. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ha-vana began giving aid to the communist-aligned People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola

166 Jonathan J. Price, Thucydides and Internal War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

167 Thucydides, The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, 212.

168 For the wider issue of escalation in international relations, see Barry R. Posen, Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Caitlin Talmadge, “Would China Go Nuclear? Assessing the Risk of Chinese Nuclear Escalation in a Conventional War with the United States,” International Security 41, no. 4 (Spring 2017): 50–92, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00274.

169 Austin Carson, Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

170 Kenneth A. Schultz, “The Enforcement Problem in Coercive Bargaining: Interstate Conflict Over Rebel Support in Civil Wars,” Internation-al Organization 64, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 281–312, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40608016; Jason Lyall and Isaiah Wilson III, “Rage Against the Machines: Explaining Outcomes in Counterinsurgency Wars,” International Organization 63, no. 1 (January 2009): 67–106, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818309090031; and Seth G. Jones, Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2008).

171 Dominic D.P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney, “Bad World: The Negativity Bias in International Politics,” International Security 43, no. 3 (Winter 2018/2019): 96–140, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00336.

172 Groh, Proxy War.

173 Deborah Welch Larson and Alexei Shevchenko, Quest for Status: Chinese and Russian Foreign Policy (Hartford, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).

174 Andrew S. Weiss and Nicole Ng, “Collision Avoidance: Lessons from U.S. and Russian Operations in Syria,” Carnegie Endowment for Interna-tional Peace, 2019, https://carnegieendowment.org/files/Weiss_Ng_U.S.-Russia_Syria-final1.pdf

175 Byman, Deadly Connections; Ryan Clarke, Crime-Terror Nexus in South Asia: States, Security and Non-State Actors (New York: Routledge, 2012); and Mumford, Proxy Warfare.

(MPLA) in the form of a relatively small training mission. This escalated into a large-scale and di-rect intervention with tens of thousands of Cuban ground troops deployed to check South African intervention and ward off the potential defeat of the MPLA.172 In the context of a potential U.S.-Chi-nese proxy war, Washington and Beijing may orig-inally envision modestly backing a friendly regime or rebel group. However, if either country’s sur-rogate faces defeat, the patron may increase its support, including sending in ground or air forces to avoid a strategic, moral, or reputational loss.173

Ignorance could also spur unanticipated esca-lation. In recent decades, the United States has struggled to manipulate foreign civil wars in Af-ghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere due to a lack of knowledge about local cultures, ethnic tensions, and languages. China is even more likely to blun-der out of ignorance because Beijing’s diplomatic corps is not sufficiently trained for complex civil conflicts and China lacks a network of non-govern-mental organizations. China and the United States may end up stumbling in the fog of proxy war. In-tervention in civil conflicts is often complex and covert, making it difficult to accurately perceive a patron’s degree of involvement, resolve, or influ-ence over surrogates. This uncertainty can encour-age a rival patron to engage in worst-case-scenario thinking and misperceive — and perhaps overreact to — the adversary’s involvement. In 2017, a U.S. jet shot down a Syrian aircraft that attacked the rebel Syrian Democratic Forces. Russia responded by suspending deconfliction protocols designed to avoid escalation, illustrating how intervention can evolve in unexpected and dangerous ways.174

In addition, surrogate forces may pursue an agenda that deviates from the patron’s preferences and po-tentially escalates the conflict.175 The Obama admin-istration struggled to convince the Shia-dominated

Nouri al Maliki government in Iraq to reach out to Iraqi Sunnis, worsening the Iraqi civil war.176 In such a situation, the local regime’s dependence on the United States does not translate into U.S. control be-cause Washington cannot credibly threaten to end support: A collapse of the government would also be a loss for U.S. interests.177 Surrogates may also escalate a civil war by mistake, worsening an already tense situation or drawing global condemnation. In 2014, Ukrainian rebels shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, using a surface-to-air missile provided, and subsequently recovered, by Russia. Ukrainian rebels may have fired the missile in error, believing the tar-get to be a military aircraft.178 Similar events in a Si-no-U.S. proxy war could spur a retaliatory response, particularly given loss aversion, cultural ignorance, and the fog of proxy war.

A U.S.-Chinese proxy war could also deepen the intrastate conflict itself. Scholars have found that external support tends to exacerbate civil wars.179 Take, for example, recent proxy wars in Libya, Syr-ia, and Yemen, which have often spilled across bor-ders. In Yemen, direct Saudi intervention and indi-rect Iranian intervention empowered the Houthis, provided fertile terrain for extremists like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and triggered catastroph-ic humanitarian consequences.180

Conclusion

In 2007, Robert Gates said that unconvention-al wars were “the ones most likely to be fought in the years ahead.”181 This holds true for military competition between the United States and Chi-na. Strategic doctrine in both countries downplays intervention in foreign civil wars. And yet, any fu-ture military rivalry between China and America is likely to take the form of proxy war because of the systemwide dynamics that inhibit interstate war. The battlefield is more likely to be in Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, or Myanmar than in the South China Sea.

176 Marc Lynch, “How Can the U.S. Help Maliki When Maliki’s The Problem?” Washington Post, June 12, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/06/12/iraq-trapped-between-isis-and-maliki/.

177 Walter C. Ladwig III, The Forgotten Front: Patron-Client Relationships in Counterinsurgency (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

178 Somini Sengupta and Andrew E. Kramer, “Dutch Inquiry Links Russia to 298 Deaths in Explosion of Jetliner Over Ukraine,” New York Times, Sept. 28, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/world/asia/malaysia-air-flight-mh17-russia-ukraine-missile.html.

179 Linebarger and Enterline, “Third Party Intervention and the Duration and Outcome of Civil Wars.”

180 Robert Malley and Stephen Pomper, “Accomplice to Carnage: How America Enables War in Yemen,” Foreign Affairs 100, no. 2 (March/April 2021): 73–88, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-02-09/how-america-enables-war-yemen.

181 Robert Gates, “Speech to the Association of the United States Army,” Small Wars Journal, Oct. 10, 2007, https://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/secdef-robert-gates-10-oct-07-ausa-speech.

182 Tierney, How We Fight.

183 “Irregular Warfare Center to Close Oct. 1,” Army Times, Sept. 1, 2014, https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2014/09/01/irregu-lar-warfare-center-to-close-oct-1/.

A Sino-U.S. proxy war may be low-level, covert, and deniable. Moreover, even as the United States and China seek to manipulate a particular civil war in contrary directions, they may cooperate in other internal conflicts to achieve shared goals like com-batting terrorism. However, there is a significant danger that psychological dynamics, ignorance of local culture, and the independence of local actors could unintentionally deepen the civil war or cause a proxy war to spiral into a larger conflict.

For both the United States and China, formal opposition to intervening in foreign civil wars is a useful myth. America’s prioritization of conven-tional interstate war aligns strategic doctrine with the U.S. military’s comfort zone and also aids par-ticular organizational interests in the Army, Navy, and Air Force by facilitating spending on big-ticket hardware.182 Meanwhile, China’s doctrine of non-in-tervention serves to diminish fears in the inter-national community about Beijing’s rise. Despite these well-established principles, however, both states routinely engage in foreign intervention.

What are the policy recommendations for the United States? First, the U.S. military and broader national security community should expand their thinking about military competition with China, going beyond preparing for highly unlikely scenar-ios of interstate war to thinking through far more probable scenarios of proxy war. This means boosting resources for both direct and indirect interventions, including diplomacy, information operations, foreign aid, training and advisory mis-sions, special forces, and counter-insurgency. The military should institutionalize hard-won lessons learned from prior unconventional campaigns like Iraq. Professional education in the U.S. mil-itary should pay greater attention to proxy war specifically in order to better understand how in-terventions can evolve, sometimes in unexpected ways. The Army’s decision in 2014, for example, to close its Irregular Warfare Center is hard to justi-fy when irregular warfare is the dominant kind of global conflict.183

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One counter-argument might be that a Sino-U.S. interstate war is the most dangerous outcome and therefore deserves the greatest attention, where-as proxy wars are relatively low stakes and the American response to an internal conflict can be improvised, if necessary. However, proxy wars are far more likely to occur than an interstate war and may have significant consequences for U.S. inter-ests and values. Furthermore, the less that the United States prepares for proxy war, the more these campaigns are likely to happen, either be-cause Washington stumbles into a crisis it does not expect or because rational opponents choose to confront America in a scenario where they have the best odds of success. After the Vietnam War, for example, the U.S. military neglected counter-in-surgency and pivoted to readying for interstate war with the Soviet Union, leaving America unprepared for later interventions in foreign civil wars.

Second, having developed its toolbox for both direct and indirect interventions, Washington should employ these tools with much greater dis-cretion. The era of American hyper-intervention-ism has also been an era of military failure in Viet-nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. U.S. power can be a double-edged sword because it tempts Washington into unwise adventures. Competition with China makes picking and choosing foreign interventions even more important. Costly U.S. direct interventions like Iraq may only weaken America and strengthen China.

Third, the United States should recognize the dangers of perceiving global conflict through the lens of great-power competition and seeing the instability of foreign states as potentially bene-ficial because it hurts Beijing more than it hurts Washington. The consequences of instability are notoriously tough to predict. U.S. aid to rebels in Afghanistan in the 1980s, for example, helped force Moscow’s retreat from the country, but it may have also facilitated the rise of al-Qaeda.

Fourth, if the United States does intervene in foreign civil wars, emerging Sino-U.S. competition underscores the importance of setting limited and achievable goals. Washington has a track record of fighting for grandiose war aims, such as building a beacon of freedom in Iraq, in part because the U.S. creed of individual rights encourages Ameri-cans to see foreign conflicts in moralistic terms as a struggle between good and evil. As U.S. officials balance local dynamics with the consequences for great-power competition, Washington will usually be well served by aiming for ugly stability rather

184 David Shambaugh, “U.S.-China Rivalry in Southeast Asia: Power Shift or Competitive Coexistence?” International Security, 42, no. 4 (Spring 2018): 85–127, muse.jhu.edu/article/693696.

than true democracy and cutting pragmatic deals with opposing factions in internal conflicts.

Fifth, Washington should make an effort to channel Chinese interventionism toward areas of shared interests. Although a true global part-nership to tackle foreign civil wars is unlikely to emerge, there are cases where the great powers’ interests overlap and they can cooperate effec-tively, such as countering terrorism or piracy.

Sixth, if a Sino-U.S. proxy war occurs, it ought to be carefully managed. Decision-makers should recognize how ignorance of the local culture and ethnic dynamics, an aversion to loss, and inde-pendent action by surrogates can all spur un-planned or undesired escalation. The United States should develop deconfliction protocols like those used in Syria.184 Proxy wars are unlikely to involve existential threats to either Washington or Beijing, making it possible to negotiate politi-cally tolerable outcomes and avoid a foreign quag-mire from triggering the Thucydides Trap.

Dominic Tierney is a professor of political sci-ence at Swarthmore College and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His most re-cent book is The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts (Little, Brown, and Co. 2015).

Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank Sam Helfont, George Yin, Scott Moore, and the reviewers for helpful comments. The author is indebted to Kaia Kim, Bram Sturley, John Ashbrook, Chloe Sweeney, and Sky Park for research assistance.

Image: Mahmoudreza Shirinsokhan, CC BY-NC 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/)

2015

2017

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The norms that uphold democratic values are a vital part of a healthy system of civil-military relations, but they are not well understood in the United States today. Ancient political philosophers, however, developed rich analyses of what norms are and how they work. We argue Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius established useful ways of thinking about civilian control focused on the apportionment of public honor and shame. We apply their insights to an ancient case: the civil-military breakdown in the Roman republic during the time of Marius. We argue that ancient modes of civilian control — based on education, honor, shame, unwritten norms, and social pressure — have enduring value. An orientation toward non-material incentives can help us better understand why civil-military norms have been weakening in the United States over recent decades. Ancient modes of civilian control may also help us prevent the type of civil-military problems that hastened the fall of the Roman republic.

1 David Choi, “People Have a Lot to Say about Trump Signing MAGA Hats for US Troops in Iraq,” Business Insider, Dec. 27, 2018, www.businessin-sider.com/trump-maga-hats-signing-iraq-germany-us-troops-2018-12?r=US&IR=T.

2 Daniel Politi, “Did Trump Break Pentagon Rules by Signing MAGA Hats in Iraq?” Slate, Dec. 27, 2018, https://slate.com/news-and-poli-tics/2018/12/some-analysts-said-that-the-commander-in-chief-seemed-to-confuse-a-visit-to-a-combat-zone-with-a-campaign-rally.html.

3 Kyle Rempfer, “Can POTUS Sign Your MAGA Hat? Experts Weigh-in on Recent Campaign Season Controversies Involving Troops,” Military Times, Sept. 5, 2019, www.militarytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/09/05/can-potus-sign-your-maga-hat-experts-weigh-in-on-recent-campaign-season-controversies-involving-troops/.

4 Stephen Saideman, “Civil-Military Relations Are Broken,” Political Violence at a Glance, June 3, 2020, https://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2020/06/03/civil-military-relations-are-broken/; and Ronald R. Krebs and Robert Ralston, “Civilian Control of the Military Is a Partisan Issue,” Foreign Affairs, July 14, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-07-14/civilian-control-military-partisan-issue.

During his first overseas troop visit in late December 2018, President Donald Trump signed campaign memorabil-ia — including “Make America Great

Again” hats and campaign flags — for soldiers and airmen stationed in Iraq and Germany. When members of the media released pictures of the event, controversy ensued.1 Some critics claimed it was a clear violation of the military’s tradition of non-partisanship, with uniformed servicemem-bers showing partisan favoritism that extend-ed beyond normal respect and deference for the commander-in-chief. No servicemembers were formally sanctioned for their actions because they

had broken no laws. The items Trump signed were personal items and they had not been distributed by the White House.2 Nevertheless, several experts agreed that this behavior, while legal, had crossed the line and violated a norm prohibiting partisan behavior by those in uniform.3

The norms and informal institutions that many scholars and pundits believe play an important role in civil-military relations increasingly have made headlines over the last few decades. In large part, the storyline has been the same: Long-held norms of American civil-military relations may be break-ing down.4 As partisan polarization and confidence in the military have grown among the public writ

JIM GOLBY

HUGH LIEBERT

KEEPING NORMS NORMAL:

ANCIENT PERSPECTIVES

ON NORMS IN

CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS

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think critically about how non-material factors — such as bestowing public honor or shame — might constrain or shape behavior. Ancient philosophers were concerned not only to prescribe norms but to understand what norms were and how they shaped behavior. Finally, ancient political philosophers were quite attentive to how politically divided pub-lics might threaten civil-military norms.

This paper explores the role of norms in struc-turing civil-military relations by returning to the earliest foundations of the field: not Samuel Hun-tington’s The Soldier and the State, but Plato’s Re-public. We argue that Plato and his most thought-ful followers established a way of thinking about civilian control of the military that focused on the use of public honor and shame — rather than material incentives, such as coercion or financial penalties — to enforce the norms that constituted their society’s rules of the game. The norms that uphold democratic values are an extremely impor-tant part of a healthy system of civil-military re-lations. These norms can be collectively enforced through the apportionment of honor and shame in conjunction with — or even in the absence of — other formal institutional or material incentives.

We make this argument in three stages. We be-gin by looking at how present-day political scien-tists have approached norms, and we argue that understanding norms as “rules of the game” (a term we explain below) offers the most fruitful way to conceive of their influence on civil-military relations. In the second part of the paper, we ex-amine a similar approach to norms in the works of three foundational political philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius. We turn to these ancient theorists not so much to recommend or adapt the particular norms they prescribe, but for their rich analyses of what norms are and how they work. In the third section of this paper, we illustrate these ancient theories of norms in political practice by applying them to an ancient case: the breakdown of civil-military norms in the Roman republic dur-ing the time of Marius. Finally, we conclude by suggesting how a theory of norms might be ap-plied to examples drawn from American politics.

11 Huntington, The Soldier and the State, 2.

12 Peter Feaver, “Civil-Military Relations,” Annual Review of Political Science 2, no. 1 (1999), https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.2.1.211.

13 Janowitz, The Professional Soldier; Janine Davidson, “The Contemporary Presidency: Civil-Military Friction and Presidential Decision Making: Explaining the Broken Dialogue,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 43, no. 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12006; Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012); and Peter D. Feaver, Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

14 Feaver, Armed Servants; Feaver and Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians; and Dempsey, Our Army.

As scholars of American civil-military relations wrestle with the erosion of longstanding norms, our excavation of a rich tradition should help to illuminate the significance of norms in the con-temporary study of civil-military relations. Per-haps ancient insights will inspire strategies for defending against their erosion today.

Norms and Informal Institutions

In the literature on American civil-military re-lations, most discussions of norms begin with a response to those Huntington proposed as part of his model of objective civilian control. Hunting-ton’s model attempts to maximize military effec-tiveness by requiring a non-partisan, apolitical, and professional military and non-interfering ci-vilians who grant significant autonomy to military leaders.11 Importantly, these norms are prescrip-tive rather than descriptive. Huntington is advo-cating what should be instead of exploring what is. In this sense, his seminal work and many of the responses to it in the civil-military relations liter-ature are highly normative, as Peter Feaver has argued.12 But a normative theory is quite different than a theory of norms.

Numerous political scientists have challenged Huntington’s proposed norms on theoretical grounds, questioning whether adopting them would, in fact, increase military effectiveness or civilian control, as well as whether a military — or at least its officer corps — can be apolitical or non-partisan in practice.13 Other scholars have focused on empirical studies of attitudes and be-havior, often suggesting that certain norms do or do not exist because civilians or members of the military hold a certain attitude or because civilians or servicemembers exhibit a particular behavior or set of behaviors.14 There are no major studies in the American civil-military relations subfield, at least none of which we are aware, that attempt to develop a theory of civil-military norms that identi-fies why certain norms are adopted, when and why they change, and whether the existence of norms

large, so have the incentives for political leaders to portray the military as favoring their side in do-mestic political disputes and for military leaders — both active duty and retired — to use their public esteem for political, and sometimes partisan, pur-poses.5 Since the late 1970s, there is evidence that more active duty military officers are openly iden-tifying with a political party; more retired military officers are involving themselves in electoral cam-paigns and political debates; more civilian political leaders are openly soliciting support from veter-ans; and more civilians are interfering in military issues for domestic political gain.6

Despite the attention this trend has gained in popular commentary, however, scholars of civ-il-military relations have done relatively little to study precisely what norms currently exist and how they constrain or shape the behavior of mil-itary or civilian leaders.7 To the extent that norms are discussed in the subfield of civil-military re-lations, scholars tend to focus primarily on what norms should exist, such as norms against military leaders resigning in protest or expressing public dissent or norms against civilian political leaders invoking military support for electoral purposes.8 This emphasis is understandable: As demonstrated in the broader political science literature, studying norms presents significant observational and meth-

5 For historical trends on public confidence in the military, see “Confidence in Institutions, Gallup, accessed March 25, 2021, https://news.gal-lup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspxv. For a discussion of how these changes have incentivized leaders to politicize the military, see Jim Golby, “America’s Politicized Military is a Recipe for Disaster,” Foreign Policy, June 18, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/18/us-military-poli-tics-trump-election-campaign/.

6 For a discussion of increasing partisanship among officers, see Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); and Jason K. Dempsey, Our Army: Soldiers, Politics, and American Civil-Mili-tary Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). On retired officers in military campaigns and public discourse, see James Golby, Kyle Dropp, and Peter Feaver, “Military Campaigns: Veterans’ Endorsements and Presidential Elections,” Center for a New American Security, October 2012, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/military-campaigns-veterans-endorsements-and-presidential-elections; and American College of National Security Leaders, “Retired Generals and Admirals: We Call on Trump to Start Living Up to the Values of U.S. Armed Forces,” Newsweek, Oct. 23, 2019, www.newsweek.com/generals-admirals-trump-kurds-isis-values-1467283. For a discussion of political leaders soliciting veteran support, see Barbara Rodriguez, “Pete Buttigieg, One of Few Presidential Candidates with Military Experience, Is Reaching Out to Iowa Veterans,” Des Moines Register, Nov. 12, 2019, https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presidential/caucus/2019/11/12/iowa-caucus-es-democrat-mayor-pete-buttigieg-military-service-veteran-outreach-navy-reserve/2519696001/; and Jasper Craven, “Democrats Are Ignoring One Key Voting Group: Veterans,” New York Times Magazine, Oct. 10, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/magazine/veterans-democrats-midterm-elec-tions.html. And, on politicization, see Lolita C. Baldor, “Pentagon Tells White House to Stop Politicizing Military,” Military Times, June 2, 2019, www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/06/02/pentagon-tells-white-house-to-stop-politicizing-military/.

7 There is a broad range of civil-military scholarship that focuses on normative explanations of civil-military relations: Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957); Morris Janowitz, The Pro-fessional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (New York: Free Press, 2017); Timothy J. Colton, Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority: The Structure of Soviet Military Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds., Civil-Military Re-lations and Democracy (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Christopher P. Gibson and Don M. Snider, “Civil-Military Relations and the Potential to Influence: A Look at the National Security Decision-Making Process,” Armed Forces & Society 25, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 193–218, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0095327X9902500202; Jerome Slater, “Apolitical Warrior or Soldier-Statesman: The Military and the Foreign Policy Process in the Post-Vietnam Era,” Armed Forces & Society 4, no. 1 (November 1977): 101–18, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0095327X7700400107.

8 See, for example, Risa A. Brooks, “The Perils of Politics: Why Staying Apolitical Is Good for Both the U.S. Military & the Country,” Orbis 57, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 369–79, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2013.05.001; and Don M. Snider, “Dissent and Strategic Leadership of the Military Profes-sions,” Orbis 52, no. 2 (2008): 256–77, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2008.01.006.

9 Julia R. Azari and Jennifer K. Smith, “Unwritten Rules: Informal Institutions in Established Democracies,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 1 (March 2012): 40, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23327062.

10 The use of material sanctions to punish normative behavior among other organizations such as interest groups, political parties, and the media are more common. See, for example, Jill N. Klein, Craig Smith, and Andrew John, “Why We Boycott: Consumer Motivations for Boycott Par-ticipation,” Journal of Marketing 68, no. 3 (July 2004): 92–109, https://doi.org/10.1509%2Fjmkg.68.3.92.34770; Graham K. Wilson, Interest Groups (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); and Gideon Rahat and Reuven Y. Hazan, “Candidate Selection Methods: An Analytical Framework,” Party Politics 7, no. 3 (2001): 297–322, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1354068801007003003.

odological concerns.9 It is far easier for political scientists to study institutions or behaviors they can observe. When it comes to civil-military rela-tions, these limitations are even more pronounced. Outside of violations of the Uniformed Code of Mil-itary Justice or of election law, material sanctions for the violation of civil-military norms occur in-frequently.10 Despite the methodological challeng-es involved, understanding whether — and how — non-material sanctions might help enforce the unwritten rules of the game should be of particular interest to scholars of civil-military relations.

In this paper, we turn to an often overlooked source of insight on civil-military relations: ancient political philosophy. Although ancient political phi-losophers wrote in a significantly different context than we face today — in terms of the structure of formal political institutions, the pace of technolog-ical change, and the geopolitical threats in a state-based system — there are several reasons this ap-proach is of particular value. First, ancient political philosophers devoted a great deal of attention to the fundamental question of civil-military relations: how to structure a relationship between a society’s rulers and its military that maximizes both the po-litical control of the rulers and military effective-ness. Second, the very lack of formal political and bureaucratic institutions caused the ancients to

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as self-enforcing, in the sense that it is not ration-al for any one individual to break a norm because of the negative consequences that will follow the breach. This approach to the study of norms has some significant drawbacks for understanding so-cial interactions, however. As Julia Azari and Jen-nifer Smith note, a large crowd of individuals walk-ing down a city street on a rainy day may all use an umbrella, for example, not because of social pres-sure to do so, but simply because they do not want to get wet.22 Additionally, this approach assumes that norms exist to help achieve a goal or because they are socially useful. Norms are supposed to be society’s way of coping with market failures, a mechanism for internalizing externalities, or a wel-fare-maximizing device.23 As a result, this approach does not explain norms that are harmful (such as bullying), norms that do not create material bene-fits, and norms based on social inequalities. Finally, this way of studying norms attributes changes or evolutions in norms to outside shocks to the sys-tem, making it unable to account for norms that break down on their own.

Norms based on learned values are often referred to by sociologists as “moral norms.”24 Moral norms are often based on learned behaviors, but adher-ence to them is based on purely intrinsic calcula-tions, such as guilt or pride, rather than on social expectations. For example, a moral norm would be said to exist when an individual learns she should not litter, either through familial interactions and social instruction or by watching others not litter, and subsequently chooses not to litter even when no one else is watching.25 This approach to the study of norms may miss important social interac-tions that shape or reinforce expectations about ap-propriate behavior, however, since it focuses only on the establishment of norms with no account of their enforcement or evolution. This approach also excludes the importance of the communal and con-tested context in which many norms are developed and enforced. As Azari and Smith have argued,26 norms may be particularly prevalent and important

22 Azari and Smith, “Unwritten Rules,” 40.

23 Kenneth Arrow, “Political and Economic Evaluation of Social Effects and Externalities,” in Frontiers of Quantitative Economics, ed. M. Intriliga-tor (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1971); James S. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Robert Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

24 Elster, “Norms,” 196.

25 Elster, “Norms,” 196.

26 Azari and Smith, “Unwritten Rules,” 41.

27 Gretchen Helmke, and Steven Levitsky, “Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda,” Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 4 (December 2004): 725–40, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3688540.

28 Daniel Brinks, “The Rule of (Non)Law: Prosecuting Police Killings in Brazil and Argentina,” in Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America, ed. Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

29 Elster, “Norms” and “Political Norms,” does develop a theory of social norms in which contempt constitutes a form of punishment, but con-tempt works primarily as the impetus to a material sanction or through ostracism and rejection from the social group.

when it comes to issues that are difficult to legis-late. For example, there may be general agreement that a rule needs to exist for a specific situation, but disagreement on the particulars of that rule, or there may be recognition of the need for a general principle that could apply across multiple situa-tions, but disagreement about which situations the principle should cover.

The rules-of-the-game approach provides some-what more flexibility in accounting for the social and political dynamics inherent in civil-military norms and holds more promise as a starting point for exploring them. We adopt Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky’s definition of informal in-stitutions (or norms) as “socially shared rules, usually unwritten, that are created, communi-cated, and enforced outside officially sanctioned channels.”27 This definition has several attractive features. While it is broad enough to encompass the regularized patterns of behavior described by the equilibria approach, it also stipulates that the behavior must be rule-driven, based on shared expectations. Moreover, it can subsume moral norm explanations because it allows for the social creation, communication, and teaching of norms, while also incorporating the possibility of using both material or non-material sanctions and in-centives as enforcement mechanisms. Finally, the rules-of-the-game approach also works well with existing normative frameworks in the civil-mili-tary relations subfield because rules, unlike equi-libria, prescribe what individuals should do and “state a standard of conduct.”28

Relatively few studies in the modern political science or sociological literature have focused on two important questions that arise within the rules-of-the-game approach to norms: whether non-material sanctions can serve effectively as an enforcement mechanism, and how and why norms adapt or break down.29 Although modern scholars of civil-military relations have paid scant attention to these topics, another group has: an-cient political philosophers.

matters with respect to important dependent varia-bles such as civilian control or military effectiveness.15 However, some scholars, notably Marybeth Ulrich, have hinted at this deficiency in the literature, cit-ing scholars’ lack of understanding of the role that professional military education currently plays or could play in promulgating civil-military norms, in particular.16

Political scientists and sociologists outside of the civil-military relations subfield have invested substantially more effort in developing theories about the development, evolution, and impact of civil-military norms. The work done by interna-tional relations and comparative politics scholars is particularly impressive. Constructivists such as Alexander Wendt, Peter Katzenstein, and Jennifer Mitzen show how identities and norms influence the way political communities understand their interests and security.17 Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, as well as John Gerard Ruggie, ex-amine how norms develop and change both with-in nations and across the international system.18 Audie Klotz and Stacie Goddard, among others, demonstrate that norms and ideas can translate into real political power.19

Yet, even in this broader literature, scholars’ un-derstanding of norms is nascent and incomplete. The literature focuses on how norms develop and evolve in an international context as well as on whether and how norms shape the behavior of leaders and states as they relate with other states. The object of our inquiry is substantially differ-ent. We are focused on the internal dynamics

15 There has been more work on this issue by comparativist scholars. See, for example, Douglas L. Bland, “Patterns in Liberal Democratic Civ-il-Military Relations,” Armed Forces & Society 27, no. 4 (2001): 525–40, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0095327X0102700402; Anne Aldis and Margriet Drent, eds., “Common Norms and Good Practices of Civil-Military Relations in the EU,” Centre for European Security Studies, 2008, https://gsdrc.org/document-library/common-norms-and-good-practices-of-civil-military-relations-in-the-eu/; and Jan Angstrom, “The Changing Norms of Civil and Military and Civil-Military Relations Theory,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 24, no. 2 (2013): 224–36, https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2013.778014.

16 Marybeth P. Ulrich, “The General Stanley McChrystal Affair: A Case Study in Civil-Military Relations,” Parameters 41, no. 1 (Spring 2011), https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol41/iss1/14/.

17 Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 391–425, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2706858; Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); and Jennifer Mitzen, “Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma,” European Journal of International Relations 12 no. 3 (2006): 341–70, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1354066106067346.

18 Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change,” International Organization 52 no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 887–917, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2601361; and John Gerard Ruggie, “What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (Autumn1998): 855–85, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2601360.

19 Audie Klotz, Norms in International Relations: The Struggle Against Apartheid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Stacie E. Goddard, “When Right Makes Might: How Prussia Overturned the Balance of Power,” International Security 33, no. 3 (Winter 2008/2009): 110–42, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40207143; or, for a broader review of the literature on norms in international relations and comparative politics, see Vendulka Kubálková, “What Constructivism?” in Routledge Handbook of International Relations in the Middle East, ed. Shahram Akbarzadeh (New York: Routledge, 2019).

20 Jon Elster, “Norms,” in The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology, ed. Peter Hedström and Peter Bearman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Jon Elster, “Political Norms,” The Jerusalem Philosophy Quarterly, no. 63 (January 2014): 47–59, https://www.jstor.org/sta-ble/23685971. Additionally, the term “informal institution” is often used in the game theoretic literature focused on norms as equilibria, but recent scholarship has expanded the use of this term to include regularized patterns that are not necessarily equilibria. See, for example, Orfeo Fioretos, Tulia G. Falleti, and Adam Sheingate, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Azari and Smith, “Unwritten Rules”; and David W. Rohde, “Studying Congressional Norms: Concepts and Evidence,” Congress & the Presidency 15, no. 2 (1988): 139–45, https://doi.org/10.1080/07343468809507942.

21 Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

between actors within states. Military organiza-tions typically possess significant coercive ca-pacity compared to other civilian actors inside the state, but these types of intrastate power dy-namics are not fully explored in the international relations literature. Civil-military norms can po-tentially shape both internal interactions between military and civilian institutions as well as inter-national relations with other states.

There is also no standard definition of a norm among scholars. In fact, there is even some dispute over what term scholars should use. Most sociol-ogists and some political scientists use the term “norms” to refer to the same phenomena that other political scientists — particularly in the rationalist tradition — call “informal institutions.”20 For our purposes, we will use both terms interchangeably.

Existing Views of Norms

There are three dominant views of norms in the existing literature: 1) norms as equilibria, 2) norms as learned values, and 3) norms as “rules of the game.” While each of these approaches can help explain certain aspects of human and group behav-ior, we argue below that understanding norms as rules of the game offers the most productive way forward for scholars of civil-military relations.

The view that norms are equilibria is grounded primarily in game theoretic approaches to stud-ying human behavior. It is particularly useful in explaining regularized patterns in repeated inter-actions.21 These patterns are generally understood

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by virtue of their very nature. A guardian must be keen, quick, and strong. Above all, he or she must be spirited, assertive, and aggressive in defense of his or her own city.33 When Plato’s Socrates wonders whether a power strong enough to protect his ideal city (kallipolis) from its enemies might also endan-ger the city, he worries not only about civic institu-tions, but also about the trustworthiness of human

nature. It is this readiness to explore the psycho-logical foundations of the civil-military divide that most distinguishes Plato’s approach from that of his modern heirs. Plato’s Socrates places at the center of his reflections on civil-military relations not an economic or technological problem, but a philosophical question: Is it possible for spirited individuals to acquire expertise in coercive force without aspiring to tyranny?

Socrates ultimately answers in the affirmative but the conditions for his assent are perplexing. The argument begins innocuously enough. While it might seem paradoxical that the same warrior could be harsh toward foreign enemies and gentle toward fellow citizens, nature provides a paradigm of the paradox’s solution in the “noble puppy,” barking and snapping at strangers but never the hand that feeds him. Since the city itself supports

33 Plato, Republic, 375a-b. For a recent application of Plato’s notion of “spiritedness” to contemporary politics, see Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018); Fukuyama develops here his lucid discussion of spiritedness in The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), esp. 162–91. For helpful analyses of this concept from scholars of Plato, see especially Linda R. Rabieh, Plato and the Virtue of Courage (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 95–111; and Angela Hobbs, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness, and the Impersonal Good (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–75.

34 Plato, Republic, 396b. Socrates forbids the guardians from imitating “horses neighing, bulls lowing … and everything of the sort.” Compare Marybeth Ulrich’s discussion of professional military education in “The General Stanley McChrystal Affair,” 96–98.

35 Plato, Republic, 416b.

36 Plato, Republic, 462b-c. The city is best governed, Socrates continues, which is “most like a single being.” Kallipolis is thus a “community of pleasure and pain” in which “to the greatest extent possible all the citizens alike rejoice and are pained at the same developments.”

37 Plato, Republic, 469b. Note that Socrates extends this honor to “any one of those who have been judged exceptionally good in life when dying of old age or in some other way.” In introducing these reforms Socrates invokes Homer’s authority — suggesting that he appeals to Homer’s notion of the hero, and therefore to glory rather than virtue or philosophy as a motive for human action. Socrates thus violates the strict terms of the question Glaucon and Adeimantus had initially put to him.

the guardian, one need only nurture the guardian’s soul along the lines that nature provides and so or-der it that it responds to its master’s commands. A puppy’s trainer might employ physical pleas-ures and pains to this end, but in the training of kallipolis’s guardians Socrates appeals instead to education — which might described as the social creation, communication, and teaching of norms

in modern political science terminology — broadly construed to include the way we ought to speak about the gods, heroes, even animals.34 Educating guardians is no small task. Socrates understands it to require

something like a cultural revolution, because the better part of Homer’s poetry would need to be revised (and eventually removed from the city) to ensure the guardians will grow up

thinking the gods are benevo-lent, the just are happy, and the heroes are stoic and courageous. The guardians are provided with the “greatest safeguard” against

their turning into tyrants, Socrates says, “if they have been really finely educated.”35 But if a fine education is as demanding as Socrates suggests, one might rightly wonder whether any real-world regime can really guard itself against its guardians.

One might wonder all the more when one consid-ers that Socrates himself does not entrust education alone with the watch. In addition to their education, guardians are subjected to severe restrictions on owning private property and are given a range of positive incentives for virtuous action. It is neces-sary to prohibit private land, houses, and families among the guardians lest their loyalty to one part of the city overcome their loyalty to the city as a whole.36 The best soldier on each campaign, how-ever, is singled out from among his comrades to re-ceive a crown, kiss whomever he pleases, and then be worshiped whenever kallipolis “honors the good with hymns.”37 These forms of additional social in-struction — one blending the dog into the pack, the

As noted above, the political science literature provides a compelling, but potentially incomplete, explanation of how norms might operate in a civ-il-military context because it largely omits dis-cussion of the hierarchical and coercive nature of military institutions within the state. The existing literature also ignores some of the social and cul-tural factors that might make military organiza-tions different than other domestic institutions. It is within these gaps in the literature that ancient insights might have contemporary relevance. The apportionment of honor and shame are uniquely important to military institutions, in part because these institutions celebrate tradition and cere-mony. Few other modern institutions so self-con-sciously refer back to ancient virtues or make them so central to their own organizational identities, education systems, and incentive structures.

Plato and his immediate successors provide im-portant insights on these points and make for an unlikely intermediary between contemporary polit-ical science scholarship and civil-military tradition. Writing prior to the development of the modern state, with its financial and legal tools for restrain-ing the military, many ancient philosophers empha-sized the norms that govern civil-military relations and how and why they might change over time.

Civil-Military Relations in Ancient Political Thought

The long tradition of reflecting on civil-military relations, much like the European philosophical tradition, can be thought of as a series of footnotes to Plato.30 Admittedly, contemporary philosophers are more conscious of their debts than scholars of civil-military relations — and for good reason. It is not obvious that works written with hoplites and popularly elected strategoi in view could have any-thing to teach scholars and statesmen confronted with military-industrial complexes and profession-al officers.31 Nevertheless, the political philosoph-ical problem at the core of civil-military relations was stated with perhaps greater clarity and probity

30 For this famous saying, see Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Free Press, 1979 [1927–1928]), 39.

31 See, for instance, Huntington, Soldier and the State, 20: “The activities of the Praetorian Guard offer few useful lessons for civilian control: the problem in the modern state is not armed revolt but the relation of the expert to the politician. The cleavage between the military and civilian spheres and the resulting tension between the two are phenomena of distinctly recent origin.” Nevertheless, Huntington’s historicism does not prevent him from drawing on ancient philosophy. “In their criticism of American commercial democracy,” he writes later in the work, American military officers of the late 19th century “were treading on classical ground, unconsciously echoing Plato’s indictment of Athenian commercial democracy twenty-five hundred years previously.” See page 268. This passage, to say nothing of his peroration on Sparta and Babylon (see pages 465–66) and his subsequent adapta-tion of the Praetorian model, suggests that even Huntington acknowledges some permanence in the problem at the heart of civil-military relations. For his adaptation of the Praetorian model see Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968).

32 Plato, Republic, 374c-d. Unless otherwise noted we quote from The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991). We cite the Stephanus pages (e.g., 374c) as they appear in this edition. Leon Harold Craig notes the resemblance of Plato’s guardians to a “professional standing army” in The War Lover: A Study of Plato’s Republic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 7–8, 156.

when it was first articulated by Plato than it has ever been stated subsequently. And the series of responses it provoked among Plato’s immediate in-tellectual heirs — the first of many footnotes — are likewise of enduring relevance.

Seen from the vantage point of contemporary civil-military relations, Plato and his heirs make two important claims: First, control of the military is a profound problem because those bearing arms naturally seek to rule. Second, this problem can best be solved by using non-material incentives — praise and shame, primarily — rather than co-ercion or financial incentives to educate for virtue and establish unwritten rules of the game to govern behavior. Although these philosophers also recom-mended norms that should govern the military — some of them quite utopian, others more practical — understanding them is not our goal here. As in our discussion of present-day political scientists, we are interested not in normative theories, but in theories of norms. In that sense, these ancient thinkers offer a robust and compelling view of civ-il-military relations centered on norms as rules of the game rather than punishment.

Plato

Plato’s Republic attempts to answer the central question of civil-military relations: Who shall guard the guardians themselves? But just as significant as Plato’s peculiar and powerful answer to this ques-tion is the fact that his Socrates can put it in the first place — i.e., that he conceives of guardians as distinct from the normal run of men. This func-tional specialization is a philosophical innovation. Socrates’ guardian, like Huntington’s officer, is an expert in violence who must cultivate his exper-tise. “Will a man, if he picks up a shield or any oth-er weapon or tool of war,” Socrates asks, “on that very day be an adequate combatant in a battle of heavy-armed soldiers?”32 Immediate mastery is at-tainable in few human endeavors, and it certainly is not possible in war. Socrates sets the soldiers of his utopian “best regime” apart from the rest of the city not only because of their training, but also

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other calling him by name for a reward — might seem to work at cross-purposes, but they are more similar than they first appear. Socrates understands virtue to be most effectively incentivized not with money but with honor (i.e., receiving praise).38 Hon-or depends always on the audience that praises. Genuine public esteem cannot be compelled and it must constantly be renewed. One therefore does not own praise in the same way that one owns materi-al property, since praise always belongs to the per-son doing the praising, even after praise is “given.” Because Socrates develops his theory of norms in the context of a utopian best regime, it is tempting to see the theory itself as utopian. But it is actually broadly applicable. Socrates suggests that the rules that reflect what a group honors are necessarily “so-cially shared” (in the words of Helmke and Levit-sky) and they can be enforced without being written down or officially endorsed.39 In the best regime, the guardian never belongs to himself or herself, even in the moment of receiving personal praise. The guardian is both trained and incentivized to belong always to the city.40 Although other regimes may use different norms to govern their guardians, Socrates suggests that norms of some kind will always figure prominently in the relationship between rulers and their military.

Socrates does not ultimately entrust his best re-gime to the guardians, however, but to philosophers. Virtue that is nurtured by public admiration — the opinion of one’s worth based on honor bestowed by an audience — is less secure than virtue that is founded on knowledge. The philosopher who has, or at least is in pursuit of, such knowledge is thus the proper ruler of kallipolis. As in the soul, where the rational is separate from and superior to the hot-tempered or spirited, so in the city the “civilian” in its highest form (the philosopher-king) should be separate from and superior to the military. An essential part of the philosopher’s rule consists of overseeing the guardians’ training, both through education and exposure to honor and shame.

38 Note that Socrates also offers exemplary guardians food and sex, but these rewards fit with our analysis of honor, for both are enjoyed on the spot rather than possessed. Socrates claims that kallipolis should give good men and women “what is conducive to their training at the same time as honoring them.” See 468d.

39 Helmke and Levitsky, “Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics.”

40 In the end, the guardian becomes the city’s education: The guardian’s ultimate consummation is to enter into the hymns sung at the city’s sacrifices, and thus to shape the souls of his or her successors.

41 Aristotle, Politics, 2.3.4 (1261b32-34). We refer to book, chapter, section, and Bekker numbers of Aristotle’s text as they appear in Carnes Lord’s translations of Aristotle’s Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013 [1984]).

42 Even if one could eliminate possessiveness entirely, one would be wrong to make the attempt, because “it is a very pleasant thing to help or do favors for friends, guests, or club mates, and this requires that possessions be private.” In short, much of the pleasure of virtue would be omitted along with the elimination of the concepts “one’s own” and “common.” See Aristotle, Politics, 2.5.9 (1263b4-6).

43 Aristotle, Politics, 2.5.25 (1264b6-9), 7.7.6 (1328a6-7). Later Aristotle raises the same point: “it is impossible that those who are capable of using compulsion and preventing [its being used against them] will always put up with being ruled.” See 7.9.5 (1329a9-11).

44 This line of argument in some ways resembles Janowitz’s critique of Huntington’s theory of objective control. See Janowitz, The Professional Soldier. Janowitz emphasizes the impracticability of civil-military distinctions.

Ultimately, for Plato, it is up to the rulers to es-tablish — and enforce — the civil-military rules of the game.

Aristotle

Aristotle’s approach to civil-military relations has a paradoxical connection to Plato’s. With one hand Aristotle seems to strike at the heart of his onetime master’s teachings on this subject, while appropri-ating, albeit subtly and in a more moderate form, much of its original force.

First, the attack: Aristotle claims that Plato’s Socrates got the psychology of the guardian wrong. Socrates found the soul’s capacity for selfless sac-rifice to be rooted in spiritedness. Aristotle argues, to the contrary, that spiritedness generates sacri-fice only for what one considers to be one’s own, not what is commonly owned. It is for this reason that “what belongs in common to the most people is accorded the least care.”41 A certain amount of self-interest is essential to spiritedness — it is not something that can be eliminated through education or with incentives.42 The city must, in some sense, belong to the guardians for them to relish serving it. But a city belongs most of all to its rulers, and it is central to Socrates’ conception of the best re-gime that ruling requires a nature and education distinct from what is required for guarding the city militarily. Aristotle therefore attacks the very notion of the philosopher-king. Assigning permanent rule to one class of men “can become a cause of faction-al conflict even in the case of those possessing no particular claim to merit,” Aristotle writes, “not to speak of spirited and warlike men,” for “spirit is a thing expert at ruling and indomitable.”43 The spir-ited guardian may resemble a noble puppy when young, but he aspires someday to lead his own pack. Socrates’ attempt to divide military power from civil power is therefore impracticable.44 The same dispo-sition that leads a man to want to defend a city also leads him, of necessity, to want to rule it.

Aristotle marshals an army of historical data to prove the point that changes in a regime’s military lead to changes in the regime’s politcs. When great generals led their cities in war, the Greeks lived under heroic kings. When many men of sufficient means to keep horses arose in the cities, cavalry became the chief military branch and the Greek regimes became oligarchies.45 Once the “hoplite revolution” had demonstrated the military efficacy of heavily armed men locked in tight ranks, Greek regimes shifted from oligarchies toward what Ar-istotle calls politeiai — broad-based rule by a mul-titude of virtuous citizens.46 Then came a demo-cratic revolution, following close on the heels of a military revolution. Aristotle writes that “The sea-faring mass, through being the cause of the victory at Salamis and, as a result of this, of the leader-ship [the Athenians exercised] on account of their power at sea, made the democracy stronger.”47 The many learned to rule while rowing in unison as something akin to socially shared identities and norms developed. Everywhere and at every time, Aristotle suggests, rule and arms coincide.48

Thus, when Aristotle outlines his best regime, he does not separate civil and military authority as Plato’s Socrates did. Instead, military power and political rule “should be in a manner assigned to the same persons, and in a manner to different per-sons.”49 Artistotle argues that granting the military the promise of future power can keep its natural thirst for immediate rule in check:

Insofar as each of these tasks belongs to a different prime of life, the one requiring prudence, the other power, it should be to

45 On oligarchies and cavalry, see Aristotle, Politics, 4.3 (1289b36), 4.13. Compare Politics 5.6, where the oligarchs’ reliance on mercenaries causes trouble, and 6.7, where Aristotle suggests that oligarchs can master small arms to counter democrats. On heroic kingship, see 3.14.11-14 (1285b3-23) and 5.10 (1310b40-1311a5). Note that Aristotle’s discussion of the heroic kingship ends with the kings gradually relinquishing their civil and military powers to the many, such that “in most cities the kings were left only with the sacrifices.” But, Aristotle continues, “where there was a kingship worth speaking of, they only held the leadership in military matters beyond the borders.” This is how Aristotle describes the Spartan kingship: “it does not have authority over all matters, but when [the king goes outside their territory he has leadership in matters related to war.” See 3.14.3 (1285a3-6). The Spartan monarchy is thus presented as vestige of the heroic age.

46 See Aristotle, Politics, 1265b29, 3.7 (1279a35-b4), 4.13.

47 On the link between the navy and democratization, see Aristotle, Politics, 2.12.5 (1274a12-21), 5.4.8 (1304a22-25). Aristotle later suggests that it is possible for his best regime to maintain a navy without democratizing — if one fills the rowers’ ranks with mercenaries or slaves. See Politics, 7.6). See also Barry S. Strauss, “The Athenian Trireme, School of Democracy,” in Dêmokratia: A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern, ed. Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

48 Note that geography also figures prominently in Aristotle’s theory of civil-military correspondence. See Politics, 6.7.

49 Aristotle, Politics, 2.5.25 (1264b6-9), 7.7.6 (1328a6-7).

50 Aristotle, Politics, 7.9.5 (1329a6-12).

51 Aristotle, Politics, 7.14.5 (1332b36-40). “No one chafes at being ruled on the basis of age or considers himself superior, particularly when he is going to recover his contribution when he attains the age to come.” See also 7.9.6 (1329a13-16): “What remains is for this regime to assign both things to the same persons, though not at the same time, but as it is natural for power to be found among younger persons and prudence among older persons, it is advantageous and just to distribute them to both, for this division involves what accords with merit.”

52 See for instance Aristotle, Politics, 2.1, 2.6, 4.7, 8.1.4 (1337a30-2).

53 When Sparta was the only city to train its soldiers, its many successes on the battlefield seemed to prove the excellence of its laws, Aristo-tle says. But these victories were no more than the triumph of experts routing amateurs, not the defeat of the less virtuous by the more virtuous. When other cities began to train their troops, Sparta lost its supremacy.

different persons; but insofar as it is impos-sible that those who are capable of using compulsion and preventing [it from being used against them] will always put up with being ruled, to this extent they should be the same persons. For those who have au-thority over arms also have authority over whether the regime will last or not.50

It is against the nature of “those who have author-ity over arms” to relinquish rule entirely. However, it is not against their nature to accept rule by their elders because they are confident that they, too, will rule as elders.51 Aristotle therefore recommends politeia, in which citizens own heavy arms and all others are forbidden both to possess arms and to participate in ruling. Enslaved farmers and artisans afford each citizen the leisure to specialize in mil-itary affairs. Under this regime, civil and military spheres are indistinct, save for the fact that those who are actively serving are ruled by veterans.

Aristotle’s best regime — with its enslaved work-ers, its expert warriors, and its sovereign elders — bears a striking resemblance to Sparta. And indeed, Aristotle praises many elements of the Spartan re-gime.52 Yet his criticisms of Sparta are trenchant. To secure the happiness of their city, Aristotle argues that Spartans look only to war, while, to secure their own individual happiness, they look to a particularly savage species of courage.53 The problem with this conception of city and man became evident not on the plains of Leuctra, when Thebes crushed Sparta’s power once and for all, but in the sullen households and grieved wives that met the shattered soldiers when they returned home. The true catastrophe of

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Sparta’s “fall” was that the soldiers considered it catastrophic. For what, Aristotle asks, had the Spar-tans really lost? It is “ridiculous,” he writes, “that they should have lost [the chance for] living nobly even while abiding by [their legislator’s] laws, and in the absence of any impediment to putting the laws into practice.”54 Had the Spartans known how to live well in leisure and peace, they would have been in-finitely stronger than they proved themselves to be. Had they known some pleasure other than victory, they may well have stood a better chance at Leuctra, but they certainly would have stood a better chance of living well in its wake.55

Aristotle’s solution to the civil-military dilemma is to teach warriors that there is more to life than war. He does not follow Socrates in severing the link between civilian and military spheres, nor does he follow Lycurgus in casting the civil in a military mold. Instead, he educates warriors with a view to instilling virtues that, while not self-evidently military in nature, are not so elevated as to soften their soldierly spirit. The discussion of education with which Aristotle’s Politics concludes does not, therefore, touch on metaphysical questions of the sort Socrates entertained in the Republic (nor even the theological perplexities with which the Athenian Stranger wrestled in The Laws). Instead, Aristotle focuses on the use of instrumental music in the ed-ucation of his warriors, and he praises this music for its very lack of utility. Music is “liberal and no-ble.”56 It is not made for achieving success on the battlefield, but for finding rest and relaxation once the battle is done. The aim of education — even, or perhaps especially, a warrior’s education — is the proper use of leisure.57

Nevertheless, when Aristotle considers what sort of music the citizens of the best regime should lis-ten to and learn from, he proves a censor even more

54 Aristotle, Politics, 7.14.18 (1333b23-5).

55 Aristotle, Politics, 2.9.34 (1271b1-7). See also 7.14.22 (1334a6-10): “Most cities of this sort preserve themselves when at war, but once having acquired [imperial] rule they come to ruin; they lose their edge, like iron, when they remain at peace. The reason is that the legislator has not edu-cated them to be capable of being at leisure.” Leuctra reveals that Sparta is essentially a revisionary rather than a status quo power, for they “came to ruin when ruling [an empire] though not knowing how to be at leisure, and because there is no training among them that has more authority than the training for war.”

56 Aristotle, Politics, 8.3.10 (1338a30-4).

57 Aristotle, Politics, 8.3.8 (1338a21-4).

58 Aristotle, Politics, 8.5.22 (1340b1-5), 8.7.8-12 (1342a28-1342b17). Note that the question of what other modes might be included is left for “those participating in the pursuit of philosophy and in the education connected with music” to determine — there is a task connected to the best regime left for the philosophers. Compare the task implicitly left for the philosopher-kings of the best regime (figuring out the marriage number — a mathematical challenge connected to the irrationality of nature) and the tasks left for the nocturnal council of Magnesia in Plato’s Laws (a version of the one-many problem connected to virtue (how is virtue one and four?)). Also compare to these passages the defense of poetry left to the poets at the conclusion of the Republic and the many details of legislation left throughout Plato’s Republic and Laws, and Aristotle’s Politics for the Oracle at Delphi to determine.

59 On the Spartan love of the flute, see Aristotle, Politics, 1341a17-b7. On the Spartans’ military use of the flute, consider Plutarch, Lycurgus, in Lives I, trans. B. Perrin, Loeb Classical Library 46 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 270–77 (chaps. 21–22): “[the king] himself led off in a marching paean, and it was a sight equally grand and terrifying when they marched in step with the rhythm of the flute, without any gap in their line of battle, and with no confusion in their souls, but calmly and cheerfully moving with the strains of their hymn into the deadly fight. Neither fear nor excessive fury is likely to possess men so disposed, but rather a firm purpose full of hope and courage, believing as they do that Heaven is their ally.”

severe than Socrates. Whereas Socrates had permit-ted both the Phrygian and Dorian modes — a type of musical style corresponding to a particular scale — in kallipolis, Aristotle prohibits the Phrygian, since, like the flute, the Phrygian mode is “frenzied and passionate.” The Dorian mode, on the other hand, induces a “middling and settled state” and is thus “the most steadfast and has most of all a courageous character.”58 For Aristotle, the warrior must be capa-ble of loving leisured peace as well as war, but the sort of leisure a warrior can love is not meant to con-sist of philosophical flights or divinely inspired fren-zy. Rather, it is the sedate and moderate pleasure of the Dorians — the sort of pleasure the Spartans themselves might have enjoyed, had they remained true to the best of themselves rather than continual-ly marching to the music of the flute.59

Aristotle’s solution to the civil-military problem was less radical than Plato’s, even though it shared Plato’s orientation toward what we would call norms. Aristotle recognized the difficulty of subject-ing spirited soldiers to the rule of civilians like Pla-to’s philosopher-kings. Rule by moderate veterans, educated to enjoy culture at least (if not to philoso-phize), offered a more practicable alternative. Nev-ertheless, the success of Aristotle’s regime, like Pla-to’s, rested on education and the proper assignment of praise and blame, on the development of social expectations and social pressure. Neither formal in-stitutions nor a code of law backed by coercive pun-ishment offers the best way to keep “spirited and warlike men” from dominating the city, but norms.

Polybius

Neither Plato nor Aristotle considered imperial conquest evidence of a regime’s success in regulating

civil-military relations — quite the contrary, in fact.60 But when, in the second and first centuries BCE, Plato’s heirs confronted the rise of Rome, it was the Romans’ vast empire that piqued their in-terest. “Who is so worthless or indolent,” Polybius wondered, “as not to wish to know how and with what sort of regime the Romans in less than fif-ty-three years have succeeded in subjecting nearly the whole of the inhabited world to their sole gov-ernment — a thing unique in history?”61 Even in framing the question, Polybius suggests his answer: “The chief cause of success or failure in all affairs is the structure of the regime.”62 Rome enjoyed the “best of all regimes,” Polybius thought, and this, rather than military might alone, explained its me-teoric rise. The Roman regime struck a balance between civil and military responsibilities unlike anything anticipated by Plato or Aristotle. Indeed, Polybius suggests that it was ultimately Rome’s novel answer to Plato’s foundational question —

60 See Plato’s discussion of kallipolis at war in Republic Book 5, and Aristotle, Politics, 7.1-3.

61 Polybius, Histories, 1.1.5. Polybius repeats this fundamental, motivating question of his Histories at the beginning of Book 6, signaling its im-portance in the whole (6.2.3). We refer throughout to book, chapter, and section number as they appear in F. W. Walbank’s edition of the Histories in the Loeb Classical Library, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000 [1922-27]).

62 Polybius, Histories, 6.2.9-10.

63 We borrow the term “economy of esteem” from Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit’s The Economy of Esteem: An Essay on Civil and Political Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

who shall guard the guardians? — that enabled its awe-inspiring conquest. That answer, as we shall see, involved not only the apportionment of mil-itary honor to influence a citizen’s standing, but even more so the power of a new institution — the Roman Senate — to regulate the republic’s “econ-omy of esteem.”63

The Roman regime does not fall within the con-ventional taxonomy of regimes developed in Greek political philosophy. The most common theory, ac-cording to which there are three regime-types (king-ship, aristocracy, and democracy), cannot account for Rome, nor can extrapolations of this theory that double the number of regimes by allowing for good and bad versions of each. The Roman regime is rather a synthesis of all the regimes known to Greek political thought — a “mixed regime.” The mixed re-gime unites “all the good and distinctive features of the best governments” and thus mitigates the ten-dency of unmixed regimes to degenerate into their

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of the illustrious dead.75 The death masks of the deceased are displayed conspicuously, and during public sacrifices and funerals they enable a ritual reincarnation.76 The Romans put the masks “on men who seem to them closest in resemblance to the original in stature and carriage,” and these men then march with all of their ancestor’s magisterial regalia. For young men “in love with glory and the good it is not easy to behold a more noble sight,” writes Polybius. A lifetime of such scenes leaves them “inspired to endure every suffering for the public welfare in the hope of winning the glory that attends on brave men.”77 However, if this did not incentivize good behavior, there were always dis-incentives. Instead of the soldier’s fear of a grisly fustuarium in camp, the citizen feared divine pun-ishment. “The Romans’ religious convictions,” Po-lybius writes, “make them most distinctly superior to others,” because what is a matter of reproach for others is for them a source of the state’s cohe-sion — “superstition.”78 Polybius’ Romans are loyal to their oaths in part because “invisible terrors” supplement honor.79

Polybius suggests that these elements of Ro-man life — the rituals at camp and at home that inspire individual courage and fear — do more to explain Rome’s success than the mere ordering of its governing institutions. Rome shares its mixed regime with other city-states, after all, including Sparta and its great rival, Carthage.80 But while the Carthaginians employ expert mercenaries, the Roman citizens fight themselves. These citizen-sol-diers make up for their lack of expertise with the

75 Polybius, Histories, 6.39.

76 The illustrious man is an epiphanos anêr. The place of his death mask at home is the epiphanestatos topos.

77 Polybius, Histories, 6.53.10, 6.54.3.

78 Polybius, Histories, 6.56.6-7.

79 On oaths, see Polybius, Histories, 6.56.13-15 and consider the oath administered as soldiers enter the army (6. 21.1-3) and when they enter camp (6.33.1-2). For “invisible terrors” (adêloi phoboi), see 6.56.11.

80 See Polybius, Histories, 6.51.1-2 on the Carthaginian regime: “The constitution of Carthage seems to me to have been originally well contrived as regards its most distinctive points. For there were kings, and the house of Elders was an aristocratic force, and the people were supreme in matters proper to them, the entire frame of the state much resembling that of Rome and Sparta.”

81 Polybius suggests that the Romans’ superior courage figures even in naval war, where one might expect expertise to figure most prominently: “though the Romans are, as I said, much less skilled in naval matters, they are on the whole successful at sea owing to the gallantry of their men; for although skill in seamanship is of no small importance in naval battles, it is chiefly the courage of the marines that turns the scale in favor of victory.” See Histories, 6.52.8-9. Polybius describes the Romans’ initial efforts to provide and maintain a navy with great drama in the early books of his History.

82 Polybius, Histories, 6.51.6-8.

83 Polybius, Histories, 6.49.8-10.

84 Polybius, Histories, 6.49.9-10. On Spartan austerity, also consider Polybius contrasting the Spartan regime with the Cretan regime: “The pe-culiar features of the Spartan state are said to be first the land laws by which no citizen may own more than another, but all must possess an equal share of the public land; secondly their view of money-making; for, money being esteemed of no value at all among them, the jealous contention due to the possession of more or less is utterly done away with; and thirdly the fact that of the magistrates by whom or by whose co-operation the whole administration is conducted, the kings hold a hereditary office and the members of the Gerousia are elected for life. In all these respects the Cretan practice is exactly the opposite.” See 6.45.3-46.1. See also 6.46.7-8).

85 Polybius, Histories, 6.12.5. Polybius notes that the consuls “are authorized to spend any sum they decide upon from the public funds, being accompanied by a quaestor who faithfully executes their instructions.” See 6.12.8.

86 Polybius, Histories, 6.14.4.

87 Note that Polybius does not discuss the Senate’s auctoritas.

“fury” that arises when they fight for “fatherland and children” and for a state in which they share the responsibility to rule.81 And whereas the multi-tude has a say in the Carthaginians’ foreign policy deliberations, in Rome only the most eminent men share in the formulation of strategy.82 Rome’s su-periority to Sparta is of a different sort. Polybius suggests that the same austere laws that stimulat-ed Sparta’s spiritedness and secured its domestic concord ultimately undermined the city-state’s ambitions abroad, for such “enterprises demand a currency in universal circulation and supplies drawn from abroad.”83 Sparta’s abolition of mon-ey was the paradoxical source of both Sparta’s strength and its impotence, leaving the city eager to dominate but unable “to aspire to any position of influence in Greece, much less to supremacy.”84 Rome surpassed Carthage owing to superior cour-age and prudence. She surpassed Sparta owing to superior financial savvy.

In both cases, Rome’s superiority derives from its senate. When Polybius first presents the Ro-man mixed regime, the Senate’s authority appears confined to the city of Rome. After all, the con-suls have “virtually unlimited” power over prepa-rations for war and over the army once it is de-ployed.85 And even in Rome, the Senate’s authority seems limited by the people’s “right to confer honors and inflict punishment, the only bonds by which the kingdoms and states and in a word human society in general are held together.”86 The Senate’s power derives, in large part, from its control of the public treasury.87 As Polybius’

worst forms.64 Balanced and stable, Rome’s mixed regime appeared to be a novelty sufficiently pro-found to account for its unprecedented success.

Polybius’ account of the Roman regime includes a sizeable digression on the organization of the Roman military, including a peculiarly detailed ac-count of the Roman military camp, introduced in terms that point back to his work’s guiding ques-tion regarding Rome’s regime. “Who is so averse to all noble and excellent performances,” he asks, “as not to be inclined to take a little extra trou-ble to understand matters like this?”65 Polybius frequently compares the camp to a polis of perfect mathematical precision.66 From the moment an en-sign is planted to mark the consul’s tent, an area of exactly four plethra unfolds and streets exactly 50 feet wide emerge.67 The legion’s camp retains its dimensions no matter the terrain — unlike Greek armies, the Romans trust in their own plans and labor rather than “the defenses which nature it-self provides” — and no matter how many addi-tional legions join it on a campaign.68 It is versatile, scaleable, and modular — and it is not exclusively Roman.69 Soldiers from allied cities double each le-gion’s numbers, and no matter their land of origin they take their place alongside the Romans, all of them in the well-ordered rows under the military tribunes’ watch.70

The Romans and their allies alike are subject to punishments such as the fustuarium, where a sol-dier would be publicly beaten and stigmatized for breaches of security and comparable transgres-sions. They also qualify for honorary prizes granted for varied acts of valor. Both the punishments and rewards reach beyond the camp into civilian life. Those who survive the fustuarium are not allowed to return home, Polybius says, for “none of the fam-ily would dare to receive such a man in the house.”71 Those who receive military honors similarly find

64 Polybius, Histories, 6.10.6

65 Polybius, Histories, 6.26.11-12. Polybius goes on to describe the organization of the Roman military camps as “one of those things really worth studying and worth knowing.”

66 See, for instance, Polybius, Histories, 6.31.10, 6.41.10.

67 Polybius, Histories, 6.27.2.

68 Polybius, Histories, 6.42.2.

69 Polybius, Histories, 6.42.1-5. On adjustments to the Roman camp depending on the number of legions camping together, see Polybius, Histo-ries, 6.32.6-8.

70 Polybius, Histories, 6.26.5-10, 32.3-5.

71 Polybius, Histories, 6.37.4.

72 Polybius, Histories, 6.39.9-10.

73 All authority flows from the consul, a distant and shadowy figure in the life of the camp. His lieutenants, the six military tribunes assigned to each legion, are the visible rulers.

74 Polybius, Histories, 346-7 (Book 6, chap. 19.1-4). Lawrence Keppie argues that Polybius’ figures represent the maximum a citizen might serve rather than the norm. These periods of service are particularly significant in light of premodern life-expectancy. Lawrence Keppie, The Making of the Roman Army: From Republic to Empire (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), 33–34.

their status elevated both in camp and at home:

The recipients of such gifts, quite apart from becoming famous in the army and famous too for the time at their homes, are especial-ly distinguished in religious processions af-ter their return, as no one is allowed to wear decorations except those on whom these honors for bravery have been conferred by the consul; and in their houses they hand up the spoils they won in the most conspicuous places, looking upon them as tokens and ev-idences of their valor.72

The military camp is thus an integral part of Rome’s domestic regime. It plays a central role in creating and spreading shared norms surrounding laudatory and damnable behavior, and it estab-lishes clear expectations of the kind of praise and dishonor that should be given in response to that behavior. If the camp is like a microcosm of the Ro-man world, the camp’s regime epitomizes Rome’s rule. While the camp is, in theory, a monarchy (un-der the rule of the consul), it is in practice an ar-istocracy (under the rule of the tribunes). But it is by no measure a democracy.73 For Polybius, the success of Rome’s mixed regime depends on each Roman spending between 10 and 20 years in the unmixed regime of the military camp.74

Polybius’ discussion of the Roman camp in his History serves the same function as Socrates’ education of the guardians and Aristotle’s musi-cal training of soldier-statesmen in the founding works of political philosophy. For Polybius, edu-cation proceeds through incentives rather than speech or song, however. The allure of honor is paramount. Just like the military camp gathers regularly to bestow public recognition and hon-orary prizes, so Romans gather to hear eulogies

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analysis of the Roman regime progresses, this power proves increasingly important. Consuls cannot carry on their enterprises without sup-plies sent by the Senate, and their one-year terms prevent them from seeing extensive campaigns to completion unless the Senate appoints them as proconsul or proprietor.88 Furthermore, the Sen-ate adheres to tradition — what we would call a norm — limiting the number of consecutive terms to which military leaders are appointed. Similarly, the people have difficulty conferring honor with-out formal occasions for them to do so. Thus, the Senate’s control of funds for triumphs — public celebrations to honor a military commander who had led Roman soldiers to victory — gives it con-siderable control over the city’s “economy of es-teem.”89 The Senate’s control of public funding for making internal improvements throughout Italy is also a mode of rule, both over the Roman people and over those living on the Italian peninsula as a whole.90 The Senate, then, is the source of Roman money and honor. It controls Rome’s army and the army’s consular leaders by obscure financial means that shape not only material incentives but also set the rules of the civil-military game. It de-ploys incentives familiar to Spartans and Carthag-inians, but in ways that no mixed regime had de-ployed them before.

In the final analysis, however, Polybius did not believe his mixed regime could remain mixed. Sparta’s mixed regime declined into oligarchy with the introduction of foreign currency into the city, while the Carthaginian mixed regime became an oligarchy and later a democracy. Both behaved exactly as Greek political philosophy suggested they would, had they been aristocracies.91 And Polybius expects the Roman regime to follow the same path. Like Carthage and Sparta, he believed the Roman aristocracy would, under the weight of the prosperity brought on by its conquest, slip into oligarchy. Then it would “change its name to the finest sounding of all, freedom and democra-cy, but would change its true nature to the worst thing of all, mob-rule.”92 One need only refer to the hoary old Greek cycle of regimes to learn why this is so, and to see that on the heels of mob-rule will come a new monarchy.

However, so long as the Roman Senate takes money in hand without losing its virtue and main-

88 Polybius, Histories, 6.15.4-6.

89 Polybius, Histories, 6.15.8.

90 Polybius, Histories, 6.18.

91 Polybius, Histories, 6.49.8-10.

92 Polybius, Histories, 6.57.10.

tains its careful administration of the Roman es-teem economy, Rome will continue to thrive. Ma-terial factors do play a role in the Senate’s control of Rome’s military, but not a strictly instrumental one. For Polybius, as for Plato and Aristotle before him, the challenge of civil-military relations is to check the natural tendency for arms and rule to coincide. Prior to the rise of modern economies, there were a number of tools one might turn to the task: One could separate the two by educat-ing guardians for virtue and supplementing that education with honorific incentives, as Plato’s Socrates did. Alternatively, one could accept that guardians would inevitably rule and use consti-tutional mechanisms to ensure that older, more prudent guardians restrained their younger, more impetuous heirs, as Aristotle did. Or one could follow the Polybian path, which at times veered quite close to the world of modern civil-military relations. After all, Polybius linked the power of the Senate to its oversight of the Roman treas-ury. But even in this moment of close encounter, where Polybius’ voice seems to speak from his world into ours, the basic orientation of the an-cients — toward the use of non-material methods to shape civil-military — remains. For it is by pull-ing the financial strings of honor (allowing for tri-umphs, for instance) rather than by threatening to defund legions, that the Senate had its most profound influence.

These ancient modes of approaching the prob-lem of civil-military relations — through education, honor, and unwritten norms and social pressure — have the virtue of enduring applicability. By tying the political role of the military to the philosophical matter of man’s spiritedness and the ways in which it can be controlled, these ancient political thinkers can provide insight about how to address today’s civil-military challenges as well as their own. Many of the specific norms, educational processes, or en-forcement mechanisms they recommend may be difficult to transplant directly into modern politics without some modifications to account for our cur-rent cultural and political context. Their broader theory of norms, however, can help us better un-derstand breakdowns in both ancient and modern civil-military relations.

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provincial commands and the manning of legions only from propertied citizens — Marius sowed the seeds of a powerful standing army and popular-ly acclaimed military dictators.100 These changes also created new financial demands that helped begin to shift control of the esteem economy away from the Senate to Marius and eventually other military leaders as well.

The Alliance Between Marius and Saturninus

Marius further widened the cracks in Rome’s longstanding civil-military norms for the sake of military expediency by disregarding the custom-ary interval that prevented consuls from receiving consecutive commands, and he did so with the ac-quiescence of the Roman people. As Marius was claiming victory in North Africa, a more serious military challenge was emerging in the north from two Germanic tribes, the Cimbri and the Teutones. At Arausio (in the southeast of modern France), the consul Gnaeus Mallius Maximus suffered the worst Roman defeat in over 100 years.101 Although Marius had not yet returned from Africa, the Ro-man people elected him to a second consulship for the year 104 and gave him command in Gaul against the Cimbri and the Teutones. In doing so, the Roman people disregarded the traditional re-quirement of at least a 10-year interval between consulships for the same man, again violating an existing norm in the name of military expedien-cy.102 Marius was subsequently elected consul each year until his sixth term in 100, effectively creating new shared expectations surrounding the power of military leaders in Rome’s political life and weak-ening the power of the Senate to dictate the be-haviors deserving of honor and shame. Marius and the generals who would follow him began to rely less on the Senate for their position and power, preferring instead to cultivate their own popularity among their soldiers and the people.

Marius went on to break norms that limited the du-ration of consular power, restricted the consul’s ma-nipulation of domestic politics, and limited the time soldiers served in Rome’s legions. While raising and training his new army, Marius forged an important political partnership with Saturninus, a powerful

100 See Mary Beard’s succinct and perceptive account of Marius’ reform and its consequences in SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (London: Profile Books, 2015), 267–68; and Keppie, Making of the Roman Army, 57–63.

101 Scullard, From the Gracchi to Rome, 52.

102 Plutarch, Life of Marius, 493 (chap. 12).

103 Plutarch, Life of Marius, 499–501 (chap. 14).

104 Plutarch, Life of Marius, 55. See also Richard Evans, “Gaius Marius: A Political Biography,” Thesis, University of South Africa, 1995, 143–46, on the link between the landlessness of Marius’ soldiers and the agrarian bills Marius and Saturninus supported; and Ernst Badian, “The Death of Saturninus: Studies in Chronology and Prosopography,” Chiron 14 (1984): 101–47.

Roman senator and tribune. Saturninus helped to secure the Senate’s approval of Marius’ fourth con-sulship, and, in return, Saturninus was able to ben-efit from Marius’ popularity among the people and his armies.103 When Saturninus was not admonished for his role in facilitating the rise of Marius’ political power, individual senators likely realized they, too, might benefit from co-opting military prestige with-out fear of punishment. Thus, the norm curtailing the duration of military command disappeared. Mil-itary leaders observed these changing norms, too, and learned that the rules of the game that dictat-ed the assignment of honor and shame had funda-mentally changed. Marius continued his practice of recruiting soldiers from among those without land. He also disregarded the practice of conscripting cit-izens for short terms, instead enlisting volunteers for a 16-year obligation. In so doing, Marius further bound his soldiers directly to him and weakened the Senate’s control of the financial strings of honor and shame by serving as an intermediary between the Senate and his soldiers.

By 100 BCE, when Marius returned to stand for a sixth consulship, his armies had successfully de-feated the Germanic tribes. Marius owed a great deal of his success to his military reforms. He had effectively consolidated control over a standing military force with a cadre of experienced career soldiers. Increasingly, however, these landless vol-unteers began to look to Marius to provide spoils and help them when they returned from the cam-paign.104 Because the Roman republic had not de-veloped any scheme for taking care of veterans, Marius used his relationships with key senators, including Saturninus, to ensure the passage of an agrarian law to provide allotments of land for his men. This was an important change to statutory law and the financial incentives offered to soldiers, rather than the informal rules of the game we have been discussing so far. Nevertheless, Marius’ rise to a position of sufficient prominence to carry off such a reform had everything to do with his will-ingness to violate Rome’s norms. This reform, in turn, gave future consuls new powers that could be turned against previously untouched precedents and customs. By violating norms to remain in pow-er far beyond prior limitations, Marius also was

Civil-Military Norms and the Fall of the Roman Republic

The fall of the Roman republic can serve as a case study for the themes we have discussed so far.93 As one might expect, following Polybius’ depiction of a certain sort of civil-military relationship as crucial to Rome’s success, a disorder springing from the relationship between the soldier and Rome’s polit-ical authorities figured prominently in the repub-lic’s century-long decay. Gaius Marius is the hero and villain of this story. His reforms of the Roman military vastly expanded Rome’s power, but at the considerable expense of upsetting the civil-military relations Polybius describes. We shall see in this section that the creation of a powerful, consolidat-ed military combined with the relaxation of norms securing the Senate’s regulation of Rome’s econo-my of esteem to undermine the republic. By gaining acquiescence from the Roman people — and even-tually from the Senate — to violate existing norms so that he could remain consul in the interest of military expediency, Marius gradually usurped the Senate’s role as the locus of the esteem economy.

Marius’ Reforms

The armies of the Roman republic grew out of a group of citizen militias that dated back to nearly 700 BCE. Initially, there were only three of these militias and they were composed of 1,000 soldiers each.94 As the republic grew and external threats emerged, however, Rome put as many as several hundred thousand citizen-soldiers under arms.95 Rome maintained no standing or professional forc-es, but called up the soldiers required for each campaign season, disbanding them shortly thereaf-ter. Prior to 107 BCE, only landowners and citizens in one of the five highest wealth classes were offi-cially eligible for conscription. The army’s senior

93 We intend this section as a case study rather than an allegory of contemporary American politics. For more direct applications of the Roman to the American case, consider Andrew Sullivan, “Our Caesar: Can the Country Come Back from Trump? The Republic Already Looks Like Rome in Ruins,” New York Magazine, Aug. 7, 2019, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/is-there-hope-for-the-american-republic-after-trump.html, and the many responses it elicited; James Fallows, “The End of the Roman Empire Wasn’t That Bad: Maybe the End of the American One Won’t Be Either,” The Atlantic, October 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/in-the-fall-of-rome-good-news-for-america/596638/; and Jim Golby, “In the Wake of Chaos: Civil-Military Relations Under Secretary Jim Mattis,” War on the Rocks, Feb. 4, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/02/in-the-wake-of-chaos-civil-military-relations-under-secretary-jim-mattis/.

94 Graham Webster, The Roman Imperial Army of the First and Second Centuries A.D. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 1–2. We rely primarily on modern secondary sources for this broad case study, but the reader interested in ancient sources for the periods we discuss can consult Plutarch’s Lives of Marius and Sulla, as well as Sallust’s Jugurthine War.

95 Webster, The Roman Imperial Army, 1–2.

96 H. H. Scullard, From the Gracchi to Rome: A History of Rome from 133 BC to AD 68 (New York: Routledge, 1982 [1959]), 47–48.

97 Scullard, From the Gracchi to Rome, 49.

98 Scullard, From the Gracchi to Rome, 49. See also Sallust, War with Jugurtha, in Sallust, trans. J. C. Rolfe, Loeb Classical Library 116 (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921), 289–91 (chap. 73).

99 Sallust, War with Jugurtha, 323 (chap. 86); Plutarch, Life of Marius, in Lives IX, trans. B. Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 483 (chap. 9). Michael Crawford notes that the Roman proletarians had also been armed at state expense during the Pyrrhic War. See Mi-chael Crawford, The Roman Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 125–27. See also Keppie, The Making of the Roman Army, 61.

officers, including its commanders-in-chief, the Ro-man consuls, were all elected annually at the Peo-ple’s Assembly. Once it had defeated Hannibal and the Carthaginians, Rome faced no immediate exis-tential threat and turned its military toward a num-ber of lesser challenges on its expanding frontiers.

One such challenge arose not far from where Carthage had once stood. In 146 BCE, Rome cre-ated the province of Africa. Roman traders and businessmen on the Italian peninsula quickly de-veloped interests in the new province and in the neighboring client kingdom of Numidia.96 A suc-cession dispute between two potential claimants to the Numidian throne led the Roman Senate, in 116, to order the division of the land. Jugurtha, one of the claimants, refused to accept the settle-ment, and, as a result, the Roman army was drawn into a decade-long conflict to impose the Senate’s will. From 109 to 107, the Roman consul, Metellus, oversaw what appeared to be an effective strate-gy. His progress was halting, however, owing in part to a lack of troops.97

Gaius Marius, a staff officer under Metellus, re-turned to Rome to stand for the consulship and won. His victory led the Roman people to over-rule the Senate’s extension of Metellus’ African command and send Marius to replace him. This action broke from a norm that gave the Senate the right to allocate provincial commands.98 In short order, Marius himself broke with tradition by reforming the manner in which Rome raised its armies, compounding the deterioration of the rules of the game Polybius had described. Mari-us refused to draw his soldiers from only the five propertied classes and looked instead to men of lesser means.99 These semi-professional soldiers soon made up a spirited and sizeable force, and they succeeded marvelously in Africa. But their loyalty was more to Marius than to the Senate. By breaching two norms — the Senate’s control over

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him. Neither the Senate nor the people could coor-dinate effectively to oppose him.114 In the absence of both norms and formal laws to orient and re-strain behavior, Sulla’s ability to control greater force proved decisive.

Sulla established control over the city and within three years had ended the war with Mithridates. During the eastern campaign, Sulla would expand Marius’ military reforms.115 Sulla allowed his vet-erans to extort the wealth of local communities and granted them plots of land without waiting for the Senate’s approval, effectively undermining that body’s power. He also implemented a system of taxing and fining conquered provinces. These methods allowed him to expand the size of his army and sustain its operations without the sup-port of the Senate.

As Sulla began to plot his return from the east, his rivals organized to resist him.116 They feared that he would use his now-consolidated legions to usurp power, which is, in fact, exactly what he did, once he had won a climactic battle near Rome’s Colline gate. Sulla then took control of Rome and implemented constitutional reforms that allowed him to rule as dictator with no term limit.

Lessons Learned

Over the course of 30 years, Marius’ successive violations of Rome’s civil-military norms created the conditions for the republic’s first civil war and its eventual fall. The precedents set in this tumul-tuous period eroded the power of the Senate to be-stow honor and shame. Marius’ and Sulla’s reforms of the Roman military, meanwhile, allowed Rome to consolidate control over its legions for a time, but in doing so they effectively destroyed the re-public.117 When the Roman people awarded Marius the African command held by his one-time superi-or, Metellus, they violated the norm that granted the Senate its traditional prerogative over provin-cial commands. The people also repeatedly made Marius consul, in violation of the norm dictating a decade-long period between terms. In doing so, they presaged Pompey’s rise and then Caesar’s el-evation. And when the Senate awarded Sulla an in-definite dictatorship, in violation of the dictator’s traditional six-month term, they foreshadowed

114 Even if the Senate and people could have opposed Sulla, they lacked the means to cut off his funding since Sulla’s forces could subsist quite well in the provinces.

115 Keppie, Making the Roman Army, 70–71.

116 Scullard, From the Gracchi to Rome, 65–68

117 Harriet I. Flower, Roman Republics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 76–79, 154–59.

118 Flower, Roman Republics.

119 Thanks to Josiah Ober for this way of putting the point.

Caesar’s “dictatorship for life” and eventually Au-gustus’ life-long rule (albeit without the dictator’s title). All of these precedents acquired their sub-sequent force thanks to the military changes that Marius ushered in, which not only enhanced the prestige of military commanders but also stripped the Senate of much of its power over Roman mili-tary forces. By raising armies of men who required remuneration and ensuring that their wages and bonuses were understood to come from their com-mander rather than the Senate, Marius put a pro-fessionalized army at the service of its immediate leaders.118 Less conspicuously, these reforms also may have effectively removed the Senate’s power to dictate the terms of the civil-military relation-ship, by reducing its power to use financial means to bestow honor and shame on soldiers and even its control over who served in the Roman legions. Had the Senate regularized the soldiers’ payments and pensions through legislation — administered perhaps by a republican bureaucracy anticipating the imperial bureaucracy that would arise on the republic’s ashes — the soldiers’ allegiance to the republic may have proven stronger than their alle-giance to military leaders.119 But perhaps even more fundamental was the Senate’s acquiescence to a thoroughgoing revision of ancient norms, partly in response to military necessity, partly in response to novel political conditions at home, like the furor over Italian citizenship and the Gracchi’s proposals for redistribution of land and wealth. The combina-tion of a powerful consolidated military and the re-laxation of the republic’s unwritten rules prepared the way for the Roman Empire.

Conclusion

Although political scientists have recently fo-cused on rationalist and interest-based expla-nations of civil-military relations, Plato and his earliest respondents suggest not only that norms matter, but that they should be central to our understanding of civilian control. While inter-est-based explanations have certainly enhanced our knowledge and should not be scrapped, we ar-gue that modern political scientists should think more carefully about the role that norms still play.

able to develop political power that likely caused his soldiers to see him as the source of the reforms rather than the Senate.

In late 100 BCE, Saturninus again began to press for measures to give colonial lands to Marius’ vet-erans and to lower the price of state-distributed wheat.105 When opposition arose in response to one of the bill’s provisions, Saturninus called on a small contingent of Marius’ army to join him in the Forum. With the backing of these veterans, Saturninus rout-ed his opponents and imposed his measures by the threat of force.106 Riots and violence continued until the Senate turned to Marius himself to restore the safety of the state. Marius then betrayed both his erstwhile political ally and his veterans by cutting off their water supply and forcing the contingent to surrender.107 Disgusted with their rash actions, Mar-ius had relinquished the opportunity to seize pow-er and had instead sided with the Senate in putting down the revolt.108 Yet his prior, repeated violation of norms had laid the foundations for the very crisis he was forced to resolve.

Although some accounts emphasize Marius’ lack of political savvy or ambition in this situation, this explanation is rather implausible.109 Having served six straight terms as consul and having repeatedly broken with longstanding traditions to secure the state, Marius was clearly the most powerful man in Rome. He did not want for ambition or savvy. He was also, however, a man of some virtue. The sight of riots in the Roman Forum — the spectacle of the Rome he loved and served falling apart — simply appalled him.110 Seeing senators engulfed in chaos and powerless to act on their own was no less appalling, and so Marius responded to their call. It was his virtue and his professional identity as a servant of Rome, ultimately, that saved his city from even greater disorder.111 Although the time Marius spent in Polybian-style camps may have im-pressed upon his own conscience the importance of the norm that prohibits the use of military force

105 Erik Hildinger, Swords Against the Senate: The Rise of the Roman Army and the Fall of the Republic (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002), 43–45.

106 Hildinger, Swords Against the Senate, 43–45.

107 Scullard, From the Gracchi to Rome, 58–59. Plutarch credits Marius with cutting off the water supply. See Life of Marius, 549 (chap. 30). Appian says that “other persons” did it while Marius hesitated. See Roman History: The Civil Wars, trans. Horace White, Loeb Classical Library 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913), 65 (1.4.32).

108 Scullard, From the Gracchi to Rome, 58–59. See also Cicero, Pro Rabirio Perduellionis Reo, in Cicero Orations, trans. H. Grose Hodge, Loeb Classical Library 198 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 470–75 (sect. 20–21).

109 Hildinger, Swords Against the Senate, 47; and Ernst Badian, Foreign Clientelae, 264–70 B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 208–10.

110 Hildinger, Swords Against the Senate, 47.

111 Later in his life, however, Marius would be at the center of — and an active participant in — even greater disorders in Rome. Plutarch begins his narration of this episode in this way: “Marius found a most suitable instrument for the destruction of the commonwealth in the audacity of Sulpicius, who was in all things an admirer and imitator of Saturninus, except that he charged him with timidity and hesitation in his political mea-sures.” See Life of Marius, 557–61 (chap. 35). See also 585–91 (chaps. 43-44); and Life of Sulla, 348–59 (chaps. 8–10).

112 Hildinger, Swords Against the Senate, 57–61.

113 Plutarch, Life of Marius, 559 (chap. 35); and Life of Sulla, 348–51 (chap. 8).

inside the Forum to resolve domestic disputes, the rules of the game — and the expectations of re-wards and punishments undergirding them — had already collapsed.

The Rise of Sulla and the Fall of the Roman Republic

Rome’s most fundamental civil-military norms — the prohibition on settling political disputes through military force and the customary authority of the Senate — would continue to be violated as Rome de-scended into civil war. In 99 BCE, Marius departed Rome for exile in the east. The republic enjoyed six years of relative peace until news of the assassina-tion of Drusus, a tribune who had proposed extend-ing full citizenship to Rome’s Italian allies, caused many of the Italian states to revolt. The ensuing chaos called Marius once more to Rome. He shortly served alongside Sulla in an attempt to subdue the allies, only to withdraw on account of poor health. Sulla was left to suppress the revolts alone and to win the loyalty of Rome’s legions.112

The Social War in 91 BCE brought with it the complete breakdown of coordination between the Roman Senate and the People’s Assembly. After the war concluded in 88 BCE, the Senate made Sul-la consul and appointed him to campaign against King Mithridates, who had invaded Greece and was attempting to conquer Rome’s provinces in the east. The People’s Assembly broke with the Senate and granted Marius the same command. Sulla re-fused to accept the assembly’s decision.113 Joining his army at Nola , Sulla urged the legions to ignore the assembly’s declaration and accept him as their rightful leader. The army obeyed. Sulla then led them to Rome and launched the first of Rome’s civil wars. His six legions easily defeated the small band of gladiators Marius had managed to cobble together. Many Roman citizens were shocked and dismayed by Sulla’s actions, while others welcomed

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and a controversial “show of force” by a National Guard helicopter trying to get protestors to dis-perse.125 Milley, in particular, faced heavy criti-cism for his role in the events in and near La-fayette Square. While still somewhat speculative, initial evidence suggests that this broad public reprimand — through the attribution of shame — played a significant role in Milley’s decision to apologize and to reaffirm the importance of mili-tary adherence to the norm of non-partisanship.

The success of the modern republican ap-proach to civil-military relations should not blind us to the enduring relevance of the ancient ap-proach. Although Americans may be accustomed to speaking of military virtue with the more modest and egalitarian label of “professional-ism,” citizens rely all the same on the officer’s character, particularly in moments of crisis and temptation. And even if financial and coercive incentives sometimes complement norms based on honor and shame, American society still relies on fame (e.g., medals of honor and other awards) and infamy (dishonorable discharges) to shape the behavior of American soldiers. Even scholars of civil-military relations exert some power over norms when they praise or condemn violations of “unwritten rules” — like recent breaches in the prohibition of partisan behavior by the military. While debates about civil-military relations to-day often begin with the writings of Huntington or Janowitz, ancient approaches to civil-military relations — with their focus on norms and im-material incentives — remain relevant. Modern modes of control rest on a substantial normative foundation that can be easy to take for granted.

As scholars, policymakers, and military officers struggle to understand and respond to changes in civil-military relations today, ancient modes of civilian control may be an important source of in-sight. The less observable, but still powerful, ways of shaping and maintaining civil-military norms that Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius proposed — through education, honor, unwritten norms, and social pressure — have enduring value. Their ori-entation toward non-material incentives can help us better understand why civil-military norms have been weakening in the United States over recent decades, and their insights could poten-tially help America prevent the same type of civ-il-military breakdown that hastened the fall of the Roman republic.

125 Alex Horton, Andrew Ba Tran, Aaron Steckelberg and John Muyskens, “A Low-flying ‘Show of Force,’” Washington Post, June 23, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/investigations/helicopter-protests-washington-dc-national-guard/.

Jim Golby  is a senior fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin and co-host of the Center for Stra-tegic and International Studies “Thank You for Your Service” podcast.

Hugh Liebert  is an associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy. He is the author or editor of six books, including Plutarch’s Politics (2016).

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to Kori Schake and numerous others who offered helpful feedback on this essay during the 2019 biennial meet-ing of the Inter-University Seminar on the Armed Forces and Society, the cadets of West Point’s “So-cial Sciences 472: The Soldier and the State,” and the anonymous referees for helpful comments on drafts of this article. The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Military Academy, the United States Army, or the Department of Defense.

Image: Matt Neale, CC BY 2.0 (https://creative-commons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

The ancients submit that honor and shame — as distinct from material incentives like money or coercion — are important mechanisms that can shape behavior in the civil-military relationship. And yet, scholars pay little attention to these mechanisms today. There is significant room for further research on the role of norms in American civil-military relations, both among civilian elites and among the military.

While debates about what norms should gov-ern civil-military relations will continue, they need to be supplemented by additional empiri-cal work that examines which norms exist, when they matter, and how they change. Similarly, the field would benefit from developing a better un-derstanding of who controls the articulation of norms and how they are transmitted to both ci-vilians and the military. Although most attention in the literature focuses on norms among military servicemembers, recent events — and the exam-ple of Rome’s decline — suggest that civilian ad-herence to civil-military norms, or the lack there-of, may have an important impact on dynamics between political and military leaders.

Contemporary events in American civil-military relations indicate that control over honor and shame still plays a key role in shaping the rela-tionship between civilian society and the mili-tary today, and that the rules of the game may be changing. Trump is not alone in attempting to po-liticize the military, even if some of his attempts have been particularly egregious. Elected politi-cal leaders and aspiring office holders routinely use photo ops and social media to demonstrate their support for the troops, and they frequently recruit retired generals and admirals to support their campaigns or boost their credibility with the public.120 As in the case of Marius and Saturninus, these developments suggest that elected leaders are, at least to some degree, less concerned with how to reward or punish adherence to civil-mili-tary norms than they are with how to appropriate the military’s prestige for their own benefit. In-deed, political scientist Risa Brooks recently went so far as to question whether and how the military

120 James Golby, Heidi Urben, Kyle Dropp, and Peter D. Feaver, “Brass Politics,” Foreign Affairs, Nov. 5, 2012, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2012-11-05/brass-politics.

121 Risa Brooks, “What Can Military and Civilian Leaders Do to Prevent the Military’s Politicization?” War on the Rocks, April 27, 2020, https://warontherocks.com/2020/04/what-can-military-and-civilian-leaders-do-to-prevent-the-militarys-politicization/.

122 Andrew Dyer, “All the SEAL’s Men: The Fox News Campaign that Made Eddie Gallagher Untouchable,” San Diego Union-Tribune, Nov. 29, 2019, https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/military/story/2019-11-29/all-the-seals-men-the-fox-news-campaign-that-made-eddie-gallagh-er-untouchable.

123 “Statement from the Press Secretary,” The White House, Nov. 15, 2019, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/state-ment-press-secretary-97/.

124 Helene Cooper, “Milley Apologizes for Role in Trump Photo Op: ‘I Should Not Have Been There,’” New York Times, June 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/us/politics/trump-milley-military-protests-lafayette-square.html.

could continue to adhere to norms of non-parti-sanship when political leaders themselves so grossly violate them.121

Moreover, the potential use of honor and shame — and their importance in shaping civil-military outcomes — was also apparent in the cases of convicted war criminals Clint Lorance and Ed-die Gallagher as well as in the case of alleged war criminal Mathew Golsteyn. In all three instances, attempts to shape the narrative and mobilize pub-lic support to mitigate criticism of these men’s actions were extreme, with Gallagher appearing on Fox News to defend himself despite being on active duty and a contingent of their supporters vocally requesting pardons from Trump.122 The White House statement on the president’s deci-sion to grant executive clemency to Lorance and Golsteyn and to promote Gallagher referenced a petition signed by 124,000 Americans and more than 20 members of Congress.123 This decision sent a clear message about which behaviors are worthy of honor and which are not.

Perhaps an even clearer example of the impact of norms in contemporary civil-military relations is the apology of Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after an appearance in his combat uniform with Trump on June 1, 2020. In the midst of divisive domestic debates about police brutality and the use of the military on domestic soil, the chairman joined Trump for a domestic public relations event only months before a presidential election. Milley followed Trump across Lafayette Square, which minutes earlier had been cleared aggressively by police with the support of National Guard personnel, to Saint John’s Church for a controversial photo op. His decision to join the president “created a per-ception of the military involved in domestic pol-itics.”124 After the appearance, an unprecedented cohort of retired senior generals and admirals criticized the president and the administration’s response to the Black Lives Matters protests, targeting Trump’s use of divisive language, the deployment of the National Guard troops to sup-port the police who cleared Lafayette Square,

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Richard Nixon’s 1969 Guam doctrine led America’s allies in Asia to pursue a variety of strategies based on perceptions of America’s reliability. If the Biden administration wants to strengthen the country’s alliances moving forward, and avoid repeating Nixon’s alliance errors, its first priority should be to restore confidence in U.S. reliability.

1 David Biller and John Leicester, “Many World Leaders Express Hope, Relief After Biden Win,” AP News, Nov. 8, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-trump-elections-anne-hidalgo-a4f71db8bab46c4dbc00bf02fe5ef3c1.

2 “Trump Worries Nato with ‘Obsolete’ Comment,” BBC News, Jan. 16, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38635181.

3 Joseph R. Biden Jr., “Why America Must Lead Again: Rescuing U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 2 (March/April 2020), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-01-23/why-america-must-lead-again.

4 On assessments of individual leaders, see Michaela Mattes, “Reputation, Symmetry, and Alliance Design,” International Organization 66, no. 4 (October 2012): 153–72, https://doi.org/10.1017/S002081831200029X; and Keren Yarhi-Milo, Joshua D. Kertzer, and Jonathan Renshon, “Tying Hands, Sinking Costs, and Leader Attributes,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 62, no. 10 (2018): 2150–79, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0022002718785693.

5 Danielle L. Lupton, “Biden Has a Narrow Window to Restore U.S. Credibility,” Foreign Affairs, Feb. 8, 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-02-08/biden-has-narrow-window-restore-us-credibility.

6 Richard Nixon, “Informal Remarks in Guam with Newsmen,” July 25, 1969, The American Presidency Project, accessed Dec. 17, 2020, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/239667.

7 Johannes Kadura, The War After the War: The Struggle for Credibility During America’s Exit from Vietnam (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 2016).

8 Nixon, “Informal Remarks in Guam with Newsmen.”

Shortly after media reports declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 U.S. pres-idential election, the congratulations from U.S. allies began rolling in. Though

such notes are expected diplomatic niceties, some leaders made clear their desire to turn the page on four years of tempestuous alliance relations. The election, declared German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, provided an opportunity for “a new trans-At-lantic beginning, a New Deal.”1 Such reactions are hardly surprising. President Donald Trump repeat-edly depicted U.S. alliances as “unfair” and “obso-lete” arrangements.2 Biden, in contrast, promised that closer coordination with allies would be a hall-mark of his foreign policy.3 Yet, a major question remains: Will America’s alliances simply bounce back to the status quo ante after four years of U.S. ultimatums or has a more fundamental transfor-mation begun?

While it is too soon to offer definitive statements about Trump’s long-term impact on American alliances, the debate bears hallmarks of an earli-er attempt to recalibrate U.S. alliances: President Richard Nixon’s 1969 Guam doctrine. The allied responses to the Guam doctrine hold important lessons for the Biden administration as it works to strengthen America’s alliances. We argue that the same concerns about strategic overreach that have driven U.S. demands for greater “burden sharing” also tend to shake allied confidence in the United

States. Instead of anchoring to the United States, many regional states are therefore pursuing alter-natives — augmenting, autonomizing, and accom-modating — often adopting a combination of these four strategies. Allies choose which of these ap-proaches to pursue based both on their perception of American reliability and the level of adversary threat they face.4 Therefore, if the Biden adminis-tration wants America’s allies to do more within an alliance context, its first priority should be to re-store confidence in U.S. reliability.5

Echoes of Nixon’s Guam Doctrine

On July 25, 1969, Nixon gave informal remarks on “America’s role in Asia” while on a stopover in Guam.6 At the time, financial constraints and an-ti-war sentiment were triggering a reassessment of long and costly overseas commitments.7 As a re-sult, Nixon warned, “The United States is going to be facing, we hope before too long—no one can say how long, but before too long—a major decision: What will be its role in Asia?”8 Nixon then laid out what became the core of the Guam doctrine:

[T]he time has come when the United States, in our relations with all of our Asian friends, [must] be quite emphatic on two points: One, that we will keep our treaty

LINDSEY FORD

ZACK COOPER

AMERICA’S ALLIANCES

AFTER TRUMP:

LESSONS FROM

THE SUMMER OF ‘69

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• Anchoring: States can commit (or recommit) to a formal alliance, working more closely with that ally. States can signal closer align-ment to an ally through a variety of actions, including formal treaties, military basing, rotational troop deployments, access agree-ments, joint training and exercises, joint combat operations, arms sales, military aid, statements of support for an ally, or criti-cism of a shared rival.17 These efforts seek to tighten an alliance commitment and increase shared capabilities to better deter or defend against a shared threat.

• Augmenting: Rather than relying on a single formal alliance, states can deepen informal relationships to create a stronger regional security network. John Ikenberry and Jitsuo Tsuchiyama describe a “community-based security order” in which power is restrained “through the operation of co-operative insti-tutions and agreed-upon rules that limit how power and the use of violence can be em-ployed.”18 The objective of such a system is to better sustain the status quo by enmesh-ing great powers in security multilateralism in order to dilute their power.

• Autonomizing: Alternatively, states can in-vest more in defense and pursue independ-ent capabilities — such as nuclear weapons — to maintain freedom of action. James Morrow explains that “a rough trade-off be-tween autonomy and security exists in the logic of military alliances. … Purchasing arms raises a nation’s security at the cost of some wealth; forming alliances can raise a nation’s security at the cost of some autonomy.”19 As

17 Darren J. Lim and Zack Cooper, “Reassessing Hedging: The Logic of Alignment in East Asia,” Security Studies 24, no. 4 (2015): 704, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2015.1103130.

18 G. John Ikenberry and Jitsuo Tsuchiyama, “Between Balance of Power and Community: The Future of Multilateral Security Co-operation in the Asia-Pacific,” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 2, no. 1 (February 2002): 92–93, https://doi.org/10.1093/irap/2.1.69.

19 James D. Morrow, “Alliances and Asymmetry: An Alternative to the Capability Aggregation Model of Alliances,” American Journal of Political Science 35, no. 4 (1991): 911, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2111499.

20 Stephen M. Walt, “Alliance Formation and the Balance of World Power,” International Security 9, no. 4 (Spring 1985): 8, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538540.

21 On alliance and alignment choices, see Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Glenn H. Snyder, Alliance Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Patricia A. Weitsman, Dangerous Alliances: Proponents of Peace, Weapons of War (Red-wood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Stephen M. Walt, “Alliances in a Unipolar World,” World Politics 61, no. 1 (January 2009): 86–120, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887109000045; and Brett V. Benson, Constructing International Security: Alliances, Deterrence, and Moral Hazard (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

22 On perception and its impact on alignment choices, see Thomas J. Christensen and Jack Snyder, “Chain Gangs and Passed Bucks: Predicting Alliance Patterns in Multipolarity,” International Organization 44, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 137–68, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818300035232; Doug-las M. Gibler, “The Costs of Reneging: Reputation and Alliance Formation,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52, no. 3 (June 2008): 426–54, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0022002707310003; Mark J. C. Crescenzi et al., “Reliability, Reputation, and Alliance Formation,” International Studies Quarterly 56, no. 2 (June 2012): 259–74, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2011.00711.x; and Keren Yarhi-Milo, Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

23 Stephen M. Walt, “Alliance Formation and the Balance of World Power,” International Security 9, no. 4 (Spring 1985): 3–43, https://doi.org/10.2307/2538540.

24 Todd Hall and Keren Yarhi-Milo, “The Personal Touch: Leaders’ Impressions, Costly Signaling, and Assessments of Sincerity in International Affairs,” International Studies Quarterly 56, no. 3 (September 2012): 560–73, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2012.00731.x.

a result, pursuit of autonomy is effectively a choice of internal balancing through in-creased military spending over external bal-ancing through greater reliance on an ally.

• Accommodating: Finally, states can realign by embracing the threatening power, thereby avoiding dependence on either independent capabilities or external support. Accommo-dation is similar to what Stephen Walt calls bandwagoning, in which “the bandwagoner may hope to avoid an attack on himself by diverting it elsewhere.”20 This type of accom-modation is, in many ways, the inverse of an-choring, with states choosing to align with rather than against the source of the threat.

Most states adopt a combination of these four approaches, embracing multiple options simulta-neously. But how do states choose the right mix of anchoring, augmenting, autonomizing, and accommodating?21 We argue that two variables govern these alignment decisions: perception of adversary threat and perception of ally reliabili-ty.22 High threat perception leads to anchoring or autonomizing, because countries facing a high threat desire a robust deterrent, which can only be obtained from a formal treaty alliance or substan-tial independent capabilities.23 Low threat percep-tion incentivizes augmenting or accommodating, since those approaches are less costly financially and do not require devolving political control to an ally. Meanwhile, when a state views an ally as highly reliable, it typically adopts an anchoring or augmenting approach, while low ally reliability incentivizes autonomizing or accommodating.24 These choices are reflected in Table 1.

commitments … but, two, that as far as the problems of internal security are con-cerned … the United States is going to en-courage and has a right to expect that this problem will be increasingly handled by, and the responsibility for it taken by, the Asian nations themselves.9

In asking Asian allies to do more for their own defense, Nixon noted that “[a]ll of them now, or virtually all, are on their own feet, at least from an economic standpoint, and are very good customers of ours.”10 Months later, Nixon delivered a formal address to the American public in which he argued, “The defense of freedom is everybody’s business — not just America’s business. And it is particular-ly the responsibility of the people whose freedom is threatened.”11 These remarks echoed sentiments he had made in a 1967 Foreign Affairs article sug-gesting the United States could no longer afford to serve as the primary bulwark against Asian insta-bility. Instead, he argued that Asian counterparts ought to “attempt to contain aggression in their own areas” and “establish an indigenous Asian framework for their own future security.”12

At the heart of Nixon’s strategy was the belief that the United States had hit a point of over-reach in which its strategy was no longer guided by a realistic assessment of U.S. interests. Over-seas commitments had been allowed to drain valuable American resources. Nixon felt that the United States had developed a fixation on periph-eral issues, such as the war in Vietnam, that had crowded out more vital priorities. He argued that America’s preoccupation with Vietnam had “dis-torted our picture of Asia. A small country on the rim of the continent has filled the screen of our minds; but it does not fill the map.”13 Nixon was determined to rectify this distortion and reset the terms of American engagement.

Although Nixon promised the United States would remain a Pacific power and uphold its treaty commitments, it was clear that American engagement would change. Nixon’s Guam speech

9 Nixon, “Informal Remarks in Guam with Newsmen.”

10 Nixon, “Informal Remarks in Guam with Newsmen.”

11 Richard M. Nixon, “Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam,” Nov. 3, 1969, Richard Nixon Museum and Library, accessed Dec. 17, 2020, https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/index.php/media/33421.

12 Richard M. Nixon, “Asia After Viet Nam,” Foreign Affairs 46, no. 1 (October 1967), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1967-10-01/asia-after-viet-nam.

13 Richard M. Nixon, “Asia After Viet Nam.”

14 Michael J. Green, By More than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2017).

15 Osamu Miyoshi, “The Nixon Doctrine in Asia,” The Adelphi Papers 12, no. 91 (1972): 13–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/05679327208448263.

16 Nixon, “Asia After Viet Nam.”

sparked anxiety among Asian allies, but it was the execution of this strategy — in particular, the unexpected rapprochement with China and even-tual fall of Saigon — that accelerated rethinking among Asian leaders about relying on the Unit-ed States. Meanwhile, the administration pre-pared to draw down its presence in Asia, remov-ing 20,000 service members from South Korea, 17,000 from Japan, and 16,000 from Thailand.14 U.S. leaders also sought détente with Russia while scaling back their commitments to Taiwan and Southeast Asia. These decisions suggested to regional states that Washington would jettison commitments that U.S. leaders viewed as incon-sequential or obsolete.

The regional response to the Guam doctrine marked the beginning of a profound realignment. Asian allies and partners complained that Nix-on’s new approach reflected a “weakening of the American will to uphold the international order,” suggesting “the inevitable American movement to devolution.”15 Through the 1970s, Asia became more multipolar and regional alignments more amorphous. Smaller powers were forced to adapt to a more uncertain regional power balance in which the U.S. role as security guarantor was no longer assured. Although Nixon left office in 1974, his theory of “dynamic stability” shaped the re-gion for the next half century.16 Regional respons-es to the Guam doctrine therefore present useful historical analogies for today’s alliance debates.

The Logic of Alignment Decisions

Before examining specific responses to the Guam doctrine, it is necessary to describe the range of decisions open to states with existing asymmetric alliances. Such states have four ba-sic alignment options, each of which is outlined below. These four options are best thought of as ideal types that can be combined to fit a state’s unique security situation:

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Although Nixon’s announcement generated anxie-ty among Japanese leaders, close ties between the two governments helped them weather the tran-sition.31 Bilateral communications from this period emphasized Japan’s expectation of a continued American commitment.32 Indeed, a year after the Guam doctrine was announced, a U.S. official re-ported that “relations with Japan are in very good shape.”33 Despite Washington rethinking its region-al approach, Japanese leaders largely decided to anchor their policies to those of the United States. Tokyo did augment its regional relationships and seriously consider autonomous capabilities, but these hedges against U.S. abandonment ultimately proved unnecessary because of Washington’s con-tinued commitment to Japan.

In some ways, the Guam doctrine played into pre-existing Japanese preferences.34 When Nixon announced his intention to reduce American in-volvement in Asia, he was signaling a major shift not only across the region but with regard to the U.S.-Japanese relationship in particular. During discussions over a joint communique in 1969, Nix-on urged Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato to embrace more regional security responsibilities.35 This shift was welcomed by many in Japan who were eager to take on a greater security role and re-gain control of Okinawa. In the final communique, the Sato administration expressly acknowledged Japan’s interest in the security of both the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Strait. This would not only ease the burden on the United States but also help to normalize Japan’s postwar security posture.

Sato’s decision to anchor to the United States was

31 “Memorandum from John Holdridge of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissing-er),” Jan. 29, 1970, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XIX, Part 2, Japan, 1969–1972, (hereafter FRUS XIX, 2, Japan) Docu-ment 38, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p2/d38 - fn:1.5.4.2.14.11.16.8.

32 “The Nixon-Sato Communique,” New York Times, Nov. 22, 1969, https://www.nytimes.com/1969/11/22/archives/the-nixonsato-communique.html.

33 “Memorandum from Richard B. Finn, Director of Japanese Affairs, Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs to the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs (Green),” March 25, 1970, FRUS XIX, 2, Japan, Document 41, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p2/d41.

34 “Dr. Kissinger’s Discussion with Mr. Nakasone, Director of Japanese Defense Agency,” Memorandum of Conversation, Sept. 10, 1970, FRUS XIX, 2, Japan, Document 53, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p2/d53.

35 Yukinori Komine, “Whither a ‘Resurgent Japan’: The Nixon Doctrine and Japan’s Defense Build-up, 1969–1976,” Journal of Cold War Studies 16, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 96, https://doi.org/10.1162/JCWS_a_00447.

36 Eitan Oren and Matthew Brummer, “Reexamining Threat Perception in Early Cold War Japan,” Journal of Cold War Studies 22, no. 4 (Fall 2020): 91, https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_a_00948.

37 Matteo Dian, The Evolution of the US-Japan Alliance: The Eagle and the Chrysanthemum (Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2014), 79—80.

38 Jennifer M. Lind, “Pacifism or Passing the Buck? Testing Theories of Japanese Security Policy,” International Security 29, no. 1 (Summer 2004): 107, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4137548.

39 “Mr. Miki’s Remarks on East Asia Developments,” Memorandum of Conversation, June 23, 1970, FRUS XIX, 2, Japan, Document 45, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p2/d45.

40 “Meeting Between President Nixon and Former Prime Minister Kishi,” Memorandum of Conversation, June 23, 1970, FRUS XIX, 2, Japan, Docu-ment 56, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p2/d56.

41 “Dr. Kissinger’s Discussion with Mr. Nakasone,” FRUS XIX, 2, Japan, Document 53.

42 “Meeting Between President Nixon and Former Prime Minister Kishi,” FRUS XIX, 2, Japan, Document 56.

made possible by the allies’ largely shared concern about the Soviets. Most in Tokyo viewed the Sovi-ets as a direct threat, a view that would gain trac-tion through the 1970s.36 Japanese leaders had long “identified the Soviet Union as the fundamental threat to the country’s security,” notes Matteo Dian, but a “resurgence of the Soviet threat was caused by the collapse of détente and by renewed Soviet ac-tivism.”37 Japanese leaders worried that they lacked the capabilities to deter the Soviets on their own.38 National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger noted, “Because Japan was so important, we could not be indifferent to Japan’s role … We were delighted to have the [U.S.-Japan Security] Treaty and certain-ly would not abrogate it; on the contrary we would strengthen it.”39 The United States thus differentiat-ed its approach to Japan from its approach toward other alliances, making clear that Japan could de-pend on the United States.

Although Tokyo feared that a rapid U.S. with-drawal might destabilize the region, both govern-ments were committed to decreasing the U.S. mil-itary presence in Japan.40 U.S. officials concluded that Japanese leaders preferred “to see the U.S. bases reduced and amalgamated, or even for the Japanese self-defense forces to take over control or management.”41 This mutual desire for a reduction in U.S. forces stationed in Japan was formalized in the Okinawa Reversion Agreement of 1971, which returned the Ryukyu and Daito Islands to Japanese control and paved the way for a more self-suffi-cient Japanese defense force.42 It was also critical that Japan acceded to U.S. demands for increased burden-sharing by spending more on its defense

As Table 1 shows, anchoring typically occurs when a state faces a high threat and has a reliable ally.25 By doubling down on that alliance, the state can quickly bolster the regional balance of power. This external balancing, however, is not without cost. The weaker ally then becomes more depend-ent on its stronger ally to uphold its security com-mitment. In exchange for this commitment, the weaker ally must often allow the stronger ally more say over its foreign and defense policies.26 None-theless, if facing a highly threatening adversary, anchoring may be worth the sacrifices.

What if the adversary is highly threatening but there is no strong and reliable ally available? In this case, a state might pursue autonomy by investing in its own military capabilities. Internal balanc-ing efforts of this sort are attractive because they avoid reliance on an external power. Nonetheless, there are serious risks, particularly for weak states that might not be able to match the capabilities of a threatening neighbor. As a result, efforts to pursue autonomy carry high risks and resource costs, par-ticularly for smaller states.27

What if the threat from an adversary appears rela-tively low? In this case, an attractive alternative is to augment a state’s position by aligning with a broad-er coalition of like-minded states. The upside of this type of coalition building is that states need not cede political leverage to each other. The risk, however, is that a loosely aligned group of states might suf-fer from coordination problems that undercut their

25 James D. Morrow, “Alliances and Asymmetry: An Alternative to the Capability Aggregation Model of Alliances,” American Journal of Political Science 35, no. 4 (November 1991): 904–33, https://doi.org/10.2307/2111499.

26 Victor D. Cha, “Powerplay: Origins of the U.S. Alliance System in Asia,” International Security 34, no. 3 (Winter 2009/2010): 158–96, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40389236.

27 On the limits of autonomy and entrapment concerns within alliances, see Jeremy Pressman, Warring Friends: Alliance Restraint in Interna-tional Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Tongfi Kim, “Why Alliances Entangle but Seldom Entrap States,” Security Studies 20, no. 3 (July 2011): 350–77, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2011.599201; and Michael Beckley, “The Myth of Entangling Alliances: Reassessing the Security Risks of U.S. Defense Pacts,” International Security 39, no. 4. (Spring 2015): 7–48, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00197.

28 Songying Fang, Jesse C. Johnson, and Brett Ashley Leeds, “To Concede or to Resist? The Restraining Effect of Military Alliances,” Internation-al Organization 68, no. 4 (September 2014): 775–809, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818314000137; and Timothy W. Crawford, Pivotal Deterrence: Third-Party Statecraft and the Pursuit of Peace (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

29 Walt, “Alliance Formation and the Balance of World Power,” 16.

30 For a deeper discussion about alliance choices in the region during and after Vietnam, see Andrew J. Rotter, The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).

ability to deter a determined adversary.28 Therefore, efforts to augment a state’s position are more attrac-tive when it faces a less threatening adversary.

Finally, if a state does not face a threatening ad-versary or have a reliable ally, it is often tempting to accommodate. Aligning with a challenger is often unpopular, and scholars have found a “strong ten-dency for states to balance when making alliance choices.”29 Yet, some states still consider it, particu-larly if they are politically or economically depend-ent on that foreign power. Nevertheless, accom-modation comes with serious risks, including that bandwagoning might fail to appease an adversary.

Asian Responses to the Guam Doctrine

Based on this construct, we argue that countries in Asia had four basic options for responding to Nix-on’s Guam doctrine, which were driven primarily by their perceptions of threats and allies.30 To deter-mine whether this framework applies to how region-al states reacted to the Guam doctrine, we examine the actions of four of the most important U.S. allies during this period: Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Thailand.

Japan: An Anchoring Ally

Japan’s response to the Guam doctrine was the most favorable from an American perspective.

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to be destroyed in a nuclear war. This was not an act of charity; we did it for ourselves.”52 In this sense, it was the close alignment of American and Japanese security interests that caused Japan to anchor, even as some in Tokyo began to consider the benefits of increased autonomy.

South Korea: An Autonomizing Ally

Rather than anchoring to the United States, South Korea sought substantially greater autono-my in response to the Guam doctrine. Seoul threat-ened to pursue independent military capabilities in large part because South Korean leaders were more skeptical about America’s commitment than were their Japanese counterparts. As Adm. John S. McCain Jr. warned after meeting South Korean officials in Hawaii in 1970, “The posture of the Ko-rean delegation today had a strong flavor of an ag-grieved party who was being deprived of his rights by a faithless friend.”53

America’s alliance with South Korea was born out of a shared fear about the spread of communism. This concern motivated U.S. involvement in the Korean War and led to the postwar stationing of U.S. forces on the Korean Peninsula, as well as the formalization of the two countries’ security rela-tionship.54 During the Vietnam War, South Korea returned the favor by supplying the second-largest number of foreign military forces.55 It hoped this effort would result in economic benefits and closer military ties with the United States. Seoul’s partic-ipation in Vietnam was thus a strategic calculation intended to secure American support in a future contingency on the Korean Peninsula.56

Against this backdrop, the Guam doctrine dealt

52 “Mr. Miki’s Remarks on East Asia Developments,” FRUS XIX, 2, Japan, Document 45. 53 “Telegram from the Commander in Chief, Pacific (McCain) to the Department of State,” July 23, 1970, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XIX, Part 1, Korea, 1969–1972 (hereafter FRUS XIX, 1, Korea), Document 67, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p1/d67.

54 Jimmy H. Koo, “The Uncomfortable SOFA: Anti-American Sentiments in South Korea and The U.S.-South Korea Status of Forces Agreement,” American University National Security Law Brief 1, no. 1 (2011), https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/nslb/vol1/iss1/5.

55 Glenn Baek, “A Perspective on Korea’s Participation in the Vietnam War,” The Asian Institute for Policy Studies, April 9, 2013, http://en.asa-ninst.org/contents/issue-brief-no-53-a-perspective-on-koreas-participation-in-the-vietnam-war/.

56 Leon Whyte, “Evolution of the US-ROK Alliance: Abandonment Fears,” The Diplomat, June 22, 2015, https://thediplomat.com/2015/06/evo-lution-of-the-u-s-rok-alliance-abandonment-fears/.

57 “Telegram from the Embassy in Korea to the Department of State,” May 29, 1970, FRUS XIX, 1, Korea, Document 59, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p1/d59.

58 “Talks Between President Nixon and President Pak,” Memorandum of Conversation, Aug. 21, 1969, FRUS XIX, 1, Korea, Document 35, Depart-ment of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p1/d35.

59 “Telegram from the Department of State to the Embassy in Korea,” Aug. 23, 1970, FRUS XIX, 1, Korea, Document 57, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p1/d57.

60 “ROK Force Capabilities,” Memorandum from Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), Feb. 26, 1970, FRUS XIX, 1, Korea, Document 53, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p1/d53.

61 “NSSM–27, US Policy for Korea,” Memorandum from the Joint Chiefs of Staff Representative to the National Security Council Review Group (Unger) to the Chairman of the Review Group (Kissinger), Feb. 17, 1970, FRUS XIX, 1, Korea, Document 52, Department of State, Office of the Histori-an, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p1/d52.

a double blow to South Korea. Nixon’s largely uni-lateral decisions to transfer more responsibility to Asian allies, reach out to China, and withdraw from Vietnam called into question both South Ko-rea’s sacrifices abroad and its prospects closer to home.57 Nixon initially told South Korean President Park Chung-hee, “I can assure you that we will not retreat from the Pacific area and we will not reduce our commitments, but I think we need intelligent policy, by giving aid to the countries who attempt to help themselves.”58 Yet, Park disregarded the possibility that the United States would use the Guam doctrine as cover to withdraw forces from the Korean Peninsula. A U.S. State Department ca-ble in 1970 noted, “Park had chosen to ignore these reports and … had been confident that there would be no such approach at this time.”59

It soon became clear, however, that Nixon was determined to realign U.S. forces in the region. Many in Washington believed that American forces in South Korea had more symbolic than military value. U.S. assessments concluded that South Ko-rea could handle an attack from North Korea. In 1970, the National Security Council asserted that “there is little or no military need for U.S. ground forces in Korea, with even the current unimproved ROK [Republic of Korea] force structure.”60 Some in Washington also thought force reductions in South Korea were necessary to avoid American overextension. Neither argument was particularly persuasive in Seoul, where American troops were still “a symbol of the US commitments to the de-fense of the Republic of Korea, and in fact to all of Northeast Asia.”61 As a U.S. intelligence document noted, “A critical element in both North and South Korean thinking during any crisis would be the US

forces.43 Thus, throughout the 1970s, the United States and Japan embraced expanded alliance re-sponsibilities and a larger regional role for Tokyo, including in both the renewal of the security treaty in 1970 as well as the Guidelines for Defense Co-operation in 1978.44 By framing the Nixon doctrine as an opportunity for Japan, U.S. officials avoided some of the tensions that would damage relation-ships with other allies.45

Yet, the Guam doctrine did increase alliance ten-sions between Washington and Tokyo while also decreasing U.S. leverage with Japan. American in-telligence assessed that “Japanese governments will be increasingly eager to demonstrate — to oth-er Asians and to their own electorate — that their policies are independent of Washington’s.”46 U.S. leaders worried about “indications of increasing strains in the relationship as the Japanese move to-ward greater independence.”47 Meanwhile, the tran-sition to a reduced U.S. military presence lessened American influence over Japan’s decision-making. In particular, Washington became more worried about an independent Japanese military buildup and the two allies pursuing diverging approaches to China. That these tensions proved manageable was due, in part, to the fact that Japanese leaders continued to view the United States as relatively committed to the alliance.

Officials in Tokyo could not easily contemplate going it alone against the Soviet Union. Although worried about the risk of a nuclear attack, Japan remained adamantly opposed to developing nucle-ar weapons of its own.48 This combined with the country’s limited military spending levels to prevent leaders in Tokyo from seriously considering the possibility of becoming autonomous from the Unit-ed States. Yet, the government still knew that there

43 “Mr. Miki’s Remarks on East Asia Developments,” FRUS XIX, 2, Japan, Document 45.

44 “The Guidelines for Japan-U.S. Defense Cooperation,” Japanese Ministry of Defense, Nov. 27, 1978, https://www.mod.go.jp/e/d_act/us/anpo/19781127.html.

45 “Memorandum from Richard B. Finn, to the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs (Green),” FRUS XIX, 2, Japan, Document 41.

46 “Japan in the Seventies: The Problem of National Power,” National Intelligence Estimate, June 25, 1970, FRUS XIX, 2, Japan, Document 46, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p2/d46.

47 “Proposal for NSC Review of U.S. Policy Toward Japan,” Memorandum from the Director of the U.S. Information Agency (Shakespeare) to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), Feb. 16, 1971, FRUS XIX, 2, Japan, Document 67, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://1991.history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p2/d67.

48 “Mr. Miki’s Remarks on East Asia Developments,” FRUS XIX, 2, Japan, Document 45.

49 “Proposal for NSC Review of U.S. Policy Toward Japan,” Memorandum from the Director of the U.S. Information Agency (Shakespeare) to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), Feb. 16, 1971, FRUS XIX, 2, Japan, Document 67, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p2/d67; Chalmers Johnson, “The Patterns of Japanese Relations with China, 1952-1982,” Pacific Affairs 59, no. 3 (Autumn 1986): 402–28, https://doi.org/10.2307/2758327; and Gerald L. Cutis, “US Policy Toward Japan from Nixon to Clinton: An Assessment,” in New Perspectives on U.S.-Japan Relations, ed. Gerald L. Curtis (Tokyo: Japan Center for International Exchange, 2000), 1–38, https://www.jcie.org/researchpdfs/NewPerspectives/new_curtis.pdf.

50 “East Asian Chiefs of Mission Conference, July 9–11, 1970,” Memorandum from Secretary of State Rogers to President Nixon, July 20, 1970, FRUS XIX, 2, Japan, Document 49, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p2/d49.

51 Komine, “Whither a ‘Resurgent Japan’”; and Michael J. Green, “The U.S.-Japan Alliance: A Brief Strategic History,” Education About Asia 12, no. 3 (Winter 2007), https://www.asianstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/the-us-japan-alliance-a-brief-strategic-history.pdf.

was some increased chance that it might be aban-doned by Washington. As a result, Japan’s leaders sought more autonomous capabilities to mitigate against the risk of abandonment and perhaps to also increase leverage over the United States.49 The U.S. secretary of state recognized this risk, writing that Japan’s security contribution would likely come “in less helpful forms than we would like.”50

In the wake of the Guam doctrine, defense of-ficials within the Japan Defense Agency began to suggest the need for a more independent approach for defending Japan. This led Japan to publish its first postwar defense white paper in 1970. The new-ly appointed director of the Japan Defense Agency, Yasuhiro Nakasone, led the charge to craft this new strategy, arguing that Japan should focus first and foremost on independent self-defense and should double the Japanese defense budget to support this goal.51 While Nakasone’s proposals ultimately fell prey to domestic constraints, they nonetheless marked the start of a gradual move toward greater Japanese autonomy. Managing this shift became a major fixation for the Nixon administration, which worked to reconcile its desire for greater Japanese burden-sharing with concerns about a stronger, more autonomous Japan.

Thus, Japan continued to anchor its security strat-egy in the United States, despite questions about America’s commitment in the wake of the Guam doctrine. One critical difference between Japan and other U.S. allies in Asia was that Washington saw Tokyo as a critical bulwark against the Soviet Union. The relatively high perceived threat to Japan helped convince leaders in Tokyo that the United States had no option but to maintain its commitment. Indeed, in 1970, Kissinger reassured Japanese leaders that “Japan was so important that we couldn’t permit it

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posture, or what they believe it to be.”62

Washington was thus aware that “significant or rapid reduction in the US presence could cause anx-iety to the Koreans and be regarded (by both allies and enemies) as evidence that the United States had lost interest in meeting its defense commit-ments in Korea.”63 But Nixon went ahead anyway and removed the 7th Infantry Division in 1971. This came as a “profound shock” to Park, who immedi-ately threatened to resign, stating, “If GIs go, I go.”64 But Park stayed and instead sought to consolidate his hold on power, undermining democratic institu-tions through the Yushin Constitution. The result-ing criticism from Washington accelerated alliance tensions. During this period, South Korean leaders reached out directly to North Korea, culminating in

62 “Confrontation in Korea,” Special National Intelligence Estimate, Jan. 30, 1969, FRUS XIX, 1, Korea, Document 1, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p1/d1.

63 “NSSM–27, US Policy for Korea,” FRUS XIX, 1, Korea, Document 52.

64 Doug Bandow, Tripwire: Korean and U.S. Foreign Policy in a Changed World (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1996), 24.

65 Sung Chul Yang, “The Politics of the North-South Dialogue in Korea,” World Affairs 137, no. 1 (Summer 1974): 55, http://www.jstor.org/sta-ble/20671543.

66 Kyung Ae Park and Sung-Chull Lee, “Changes and Prospects in Inter-Korean Relations,” Asian Survey 32, no. 5 (May 1992): 432, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2644975.

67 “Telegram from the Commander in Chief, Pacific (McCain) to the Department of State,” FRUS XIX, 1, Korea, Document 67.

68 “Military Assistance for Korea,” Memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon, Aug. 22, 1970, FRUS XIX, 1, Korea, Document 70, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p1/d70.

the North-South Joint Communiqué signed on July 4, 1972. Seoul tried to shift from a “strategy of mutu-al hostility” to a “strategy of hope” with Pyongyang, aiming to offset “heavy reliance on the big powers in solving basically their internal affairs.”65 This ac-commodation effort failed, however, as repeated negotiations proved unable to overcome different visions for a reunified Korea.66 Meanwhile, South Korean leaders requested military equipment and substantial assistance from America to help estab-lish domestic military industries.67 Although the United States eventually provided support for a $1.5 billion military modernization scheme, South Korea was not sufficiently reassured.68

Washington’s failure to reassure Seoul prompt-ed the government in Seoul to pursue independent

military capabilities. Park did not share America’s conviction that South Korea held a military edge over North Korea. Indeed, in 1974, Park’s wife was murdered by a pro-North Korea assassin. Park also knew there were those in Washington who favored removing even more troops from South Korea, among them Jimmy Carter, who later ordered the removal of the 2nd Infantry Division from South Korea. Against this backdrop, Park set South Korea on a path to build nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. When the United States objected, Park informed American leaders that the price of nonproliferation was a commitment to retain U.S. troops on the peninsula.69

By 1974, South Korea already had a robust nu-clear power program and was acquiring a repro-cessing plant that would allow for production of enough plutonium for roughly one nuclear weap-on per year. In 1975, a full-fledged nuclear weap-ons program — Project 890 — was initiated. This program included teams working on missile de-signs and nuclear warheads as well as chemical warheads. American leaders grew increasingly concerned about these efforts and worked hard to retard their progress. American pressure was eventually successful, with U.S. intelligence as-sessments concluding that Park’s “willingness to suspend 890 was strongly conditioned by the poor performance [of the Agency for Defense Develop-ment] … and by the lack of any immediate need for nuclear weapons development.”70 That need dissipated after U.S. officials provided clearer se-curity guarantees and demonstrated tougher re-sponses to North Korean provocations than Park and other South Korean leaders had expected. Yet, the United States and South Korea would struggle to manage these intra-alliance dynamics for years, and Seoul would consistently use threats of greater autonomy to shape U.S. policies.

Why did South Korea embrace autonomy after the Guam doctrine? The evidence provided above suggests that leaders in Seoul saw the United States as unreliable in the face of a serious threat from North Korea. Whereas American policymak-ers had demonstrated a high degree of concern

69 William Caplan and Kenneth B. Turner, “Reconsidering the Reversal: South Korea’s Nuclear Choices,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Feb. 21, 2017, https://thebulletin.org/2017/02/reconsidering-the-reversal-south-koreas-nuclear-choices/.

70 Chung-in Moon, Peter Hayes, and Scott Bruce, “Park Chung Hee, the US-ROK Strategic Relationship, and the Bomb,” Asia-Pacific Journal 9, no. 44, Oct. 31, 2011, https://apjjf.org/2011/9/44/Peter-Hayes/3630/article.html.

71 Daniel J. Lawler and Erin R. Mahan, eds. “Preface,” FRUS XIX, 1, Korea, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p1/preface.

72 This phrase was first used by Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies to describe Australia’s relationships with the United Kingdom and the United States. See Coral Bell, “Strategic Thought and Security Preoccupations in Australia,” in A National Asset: Essays Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC), ed. Meredith Thatcher and Desmond Ball (Canberra: Australian National University, 2006), 1–14.

73 P. H. Bailey, “Memo by First Assistant Secretary P.H. Bailey to the Secretary of the Department of the Cabinet Office,” Jan. 12, 1970, no. 178, in “The Guam Doctrine,” July 1969–Sept. 1970, National Archives of Australia, https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=3165068.

about the Soviet threat to Japan, they exhibited much less concern about the North Korean threat to South Korea. The United States and South Ko-rea continued to differ in their views of that threat for years, with Washington judging the likelihood of a major attack as unlikely. This disconnect ex-acerbated South Korean concerns about America’s commitment and led Seoul to consider multiple ways to decrease reliance on the United States. Al-though accommodation was pursued early in the 1970s, South Korea eventually opted to develop its own independent capabilities as a hedge against decreasing American commitment.71

Australia: An Augmenting Ally

Australia’s response to Nixon’s Guam doctrine was quite different from that of either Japan or South Korea, in large part because Australia did not face the same kind of proximate threat. Aus-tralia has long relied on its alliances with “great and powerful friends” to defend against instability else-where in Asia.72 Nixon’s declaration called this strategy into question. Australian officials offered public support for Nixon’s approach but privately worried about its implications  in Southeast Asia, calling the Guam doctrine “potentially self-contra-dictory” and noting that treaty commitments  to the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEA-TO)  “seem to have been unofficially shelved.”73 The result was a significant evolution in Australi-an strategy over the course of the 1970s. While re-maining committed to the U.S. alliance, Australian policymakers moved to augment Canberra’s ties to other regional powers. Nixon’s Guam doctrine also prompted secondary shifts in Australian strategic thinking, generating both closer ties to China as well as a new debate about the value of self-reli-ance that continues to reverberate even today.

Japan’s World War II military campaign  had served as a powerful reminder  to Australians of their vulnerability  to external threats. Faced with the prospect of communist insurgencies  across Southeast Asia, Australian policymakers em-braced  collective defense arrangements such as

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the Australia, New Zealand, United States Secu-rity  Treaty and SEATO. Australia’s strategic con-cepts and force design were expressly premised on the idea of operating alongside American forces in a forward defense strategy designed to keep Asian threats from reaching Australia’s shores. Australi-an leaders hoped this strategy would keep Amer-ica committed both to the alliance and to region-al stability. Yet, as the United States began to tire of bearing the primary responsibility for beating back communism in Southeast Asia, it increasing-ly demanded more burden-sharing from Australia, and the Liberal government responded positive-ly.  By  1970, over one-third of Australia’s combat forces were fighting alongside the United States in Vietnam.74 As one Australian journalist wrote at the outset of Australia’s involvement in Vietnam:

Why is Australia getting involved in the Vi-etnam War? Partly because we think a Com-munist victory there would threaten the rest of South-East Asia and jeopardize our security and partly because of the need to convince the Americans that we are more than paper allies. … It’s a sort of life insur-ance cover we’re taking out.75

Australia’s early engagement with the Nix-on administration following the Guam speech was reassuring. During  a 1969 visit to the White House, Australian  Foreign Minister John Gorton secured assurances  that America was still com-mitted to both the Australia, New Zealand, Unit-ed States Security  Treaty and SEATO.  Gorton,  in turn, promised, “wherever the United States is re-sisting aggression, … we will go Waltzing Matilda with you.”76 Two surprising developments shifted Australia’s strategy. First, Nixon shocked U.S. allies with an abrupt reversal on China and a chaotic re-treat from Vietnam. Second, the Australian Labor Party won Australia’s 1972 election, returning to power for the first time in 22 years. 

The lingering doubts Australian officials had ex-pressed about American reliability were heightened

74 Malcolm Fraser and Cain Roberts, Dangerous Allies (Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 2014), 142.

75 Jeff Doyle, Jeffrey Grey, and Peter Pierce, Australia’s Vietnam War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002), 46.

76 Peter Edwards, Australia and the Vietnam War (Sydney NSW: University of New South Wales Press, 2014), 198.

77 William McMahon, “Outward Cablegram, Prime Minister William McMahon to U.S. President Richard Nixon,” July 18, 1971, no. 94, in “China – President Nixon’s Initiative (Including World Reaction),” 1971, National Archives of Australia, https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=3054113.

78 William McMahon, “Outward Cablegram, Prime Minister William McMahon to Japan Prime Minister Sato Eisaku,” July 18, 1971, no. 83, in “China – President Nixon’s initiative (including world reaction),” National Archives of Australia, https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=3054113.

79 Edwards, Australia and the Vietnam War, 255.

80 Shannon Tow, Independent Ally: Australia in an Age of Power Transition, Kindle Edition (Carlton, Australia: Melbourne University Publishing, 2017), chap. 6, footnote 20.

in 1971 with Nixon’s surprise plans to visit Bei-jing.  Nixon’s move humiliated the administration of Prime Minister William McMahon, which  was under pressure from the Labor Party  to take a more flexible stance toward China. McMahon pub-licly offered support for the move, but in private cables to Washington complained, “we were placed in a quandary by our lack of any foreknowledge … the more so because we have attempted under all circumstances to coordinate our policies and sup-port you.”77 Beyond the domestic political mess Nixon’s diplomatic engagement created for Can-berra, the move further amplified concerns about the credibility of U.S. treaty commitments. A  ca-ble from McMahon to Japanese Prime Minister Sato opined, “In these circumstances, the seating of [China] and the expulsion of Taiwan [from the United Nations] seem unavoidable. Without being alarmist, I am obliged to question whether this is not in fact what the Americans intend.”78

Australia therefore faced two conflicting stra-tegic trends in the early 1970s. On the one hand, Australian leaders believed they faced a relatively benign security  environment. Indeed, Prime Min-ister  Gough  Whitlam’s government thought  the country faced “no direct military threat(s) for the next 15 years.”79 On the other, Australia was keenly aware that its longstanding patron  was likely to play a diminished role in the future.  Although the Australia, New Zealand, United States Securi-ty  Treaty remained intact and Australian leaders assessed that “the  United States would remain the world’s most powerful nation in economic and military terms for years to come,” they were also increasingly conscious that  “U.S. power was not absolute or unconditional.”80

The Whitlam government therefore began to pursue a new strategy: augmenting ties to leading Asian nations, which Whitlam had long believed would  hold increasing sway over Australia’s fu-ture. In a 1973 speech, Whitlam argued that Asian regionalism would be “one of the keystones of Australia’s foreign policy for the 70s,” marking a shift away from the country’s reliance on a single

powerful ally.81 An early sign of the new direction Australia was taking was Whitlam’s decision to re-verse nearly two decades of relative estrangement between Australia and India. His 1973 visit to In-dia was the first by an Australian prime minister in over a decade. This was accompanied by oth-er surprising policy moves, such as reversing  the controversial “White Australia” immigration poli-cies and taking a more neutral line toward India’s relationship with the Soviet Union.

Whitlam also made similar moves  to engage more closely with Japan and the newly established Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Whitlam  overruled his own bureaucracy to en-dorse the Japanese government’s proposal for a new, wide-ranging bilateral treaty. Arguing that “it would be appropriate for Japan and Australia, in a formal context, to acknowledge the very great interdependence they have on each other,” Whit-lam pushed his government to begin drafting what eventually became the 1976 Basic Treaty of Friend-ship and Co-operation.82 Meanwhile, the Whitlam government  reached out  to  ASEAN, establishing itself as the association’s first state-level “dialogue partner” and advocating for a new pan-Asian re-gional organization that would help integrate Southeast Asia and its neighbors.83  

Augmenting ties to other regional players was Australia’s primary response to the Guam doctrine, but not its only one. Whitlam was also an early ad-vocate of taking a more accommodating approach to China. The mainland government, Whitlam in-sisted, was “Chinese first, Maoist second, and Communist third.”84  Australia quickly normalized its relationship with China. This reconciliation helped to alleviate Australia’s fears about Chi-nese-backed insurgencies in Southeast Asia. Over time, Australia, like many other Asian allies, en-countered a growing tension between its security alliance with the United States and an increasingly

81 Gough Whitlam, “Opening Address by the Prime Minister,” Speech at the Australian Institute of Political Science Summer School, Canberra, Australia, Jan. 27, 1973, https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-2803.

82 Moreen Dee, “Friendship and Co-Operation: The 1976 Basic Treaty Between Australia and Japan,” Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australia in the World, The Foreign Affairs and Trade Files, no. 3, https://www.dfat.gov.au/sites/default/files/basic-treaty-between-aus-tralia-and-japan.pdf.

83 Graeme Dobell, “Australia in Asia: Echoes of Whitlam,” The Interpreter, Jan. 6, 2011, https://archive.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/austra-lia-asia-echoes-whitlam.

84 Quoted in Tow, Independent Ally, chap. 6, footnote 71. 

85 Edwards, Australia and the Vietnam War, 263. 

86 “The Strategic Basis of Australian Defence Policy,” Australian Defence Committee, March 1971, accessed at “Australia and the United King-dom, 1960–1975, Vol. 27,” Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, accessed Feb. 16, 2021, https://www.dfat.gov.au/about-us/publica-tions/historical-documents/volume-27/Pages/107-report-by-defence-committee.

87 Australian Defence Committee, “The Strategic Basis of Australian Defence Policy.”

88 “Australian Defence Review” Australian Department of Defence, March 1972, https://defence.gov.au/SPI/publications/defreview/1972/Aus-tralian-Defence-Review-1972.pdf.

89 “Australian Defence,” Australian Department of Defence, November 1976, 10, https://www.defence.gov.au/Publications/wpaper1976.pdf.

close economic partnership with China. The years following the Guam doctrine also gave

birth to new debates about Australia’s defense strategy, with Australian strategists toying for the first time with the idea of self-reliance. As one of-ficial would later argue, “seventy years of tradition in defence thinking seemed to have been trashed by the outcome of the Vietnam War.”85 The Austral-ian Defense Committee’s 1971 paper, “Strategic Ba-sis of Australian Defence Policy,” laid the ground-work for Australia to explore greater autonomy. Forward defense, the paper argued, had become an outdated concept, as it relied on a U.S. “presence, policy and commitment to South East Asia” that was no longer guaranteed.86 While  acknowledg-ing that Australia faced no immediate threats, the paper argued that the country needed new strate-gic concepts that could address “significant chang-es … which will have the potentiality of develop-ing, in a later decade, into a more active threat to Australia’s security.”87 The idea of autonomy thus became a more explicit part of Australia’s strate-gy in the 1970s, as codified in its 1972 defense re-view.88 When the government published its first public defense white paper in 1976, it outlined the rationale behind the concept more explicitly: “[E]ven though our security may be ultimately depend-ent upon US support, we owe it to ourselves to be able to mount a national defence effort that would maximise the risks and costs of any aggression.”89 

The Guam doctrine thus caused a strategic re-consideration in Australia. Leaders in Canberra believed Australia enjoyed  a relatively secure ex-ternal environment and maintained confidence that the United States would protect it against di-rect threats, but they did not rest on their laurels. Instead, the Whitlam government moved quickly to augment Australia’s relationships, building ties with Japan, India, Indonesia, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and even, to a degree,

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is a hangover from bygone days.”98 Thailand’s leader-ship, which saw the plan as a key symbol of alliance credibility, made clear it viewed these statements “not only as a disavowal of a joint contingency plan, but a reneging on a commitment.”99 

In the face of a U.S. Congress and body politic that were hostile to committing forces overseas and unwilling to provide military aid and support for allies, the Thai government became deeply po-larized. Division arose between military leaders, who remained committed to the United States and an anti-communist mission, and civilian lead-ers, who increasingly doubted American credibili-ty. The problem, as the Thai foreign minister ex-plained in a meeting with U.S. officials, was that “despite [the] expressed intention of President Nixon and his administration,” the Thai govern-ment could not be certain “whether American people were really behind the Nixon Doctrine.”100 By the end of 1969, it was clear the Thai government was considering an “agonizing reapprais-al” of its foreign policy and the U.S. alliance.101  Although the government continued to offer private support for U.S. efforts in Vietnam, it became less vocal in its support for the United States.  

The most notable shift in Thai foreign poli-cy was its rapprochement with China. Bangkok’s move toward accommodating Beijing was striking for a government that had been one of the most rabidly anti-communist regimes in Southeast Asia. Throughout the 1970s, the Thai government began to gradually rehabilitate China’s image with the Thai public, and over the course of the next dec-ade, this early accommodation grew into a more substantial strategic partnership.102 Chinese lead-ers quietly agreed to steps such as shutting down support for the Communist Party of Thailand, while the Thais, in turn, agreed to give the Khmer Rouge access to Thai territory and stayed neutral following China’s attack on Vietnam.103 

98 “U.S.-Thai Relations,” Memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon, Aug. 25, 1969, FRUS XX, Southeast Asia, Document 20, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d20.

99 “U.S.-Thai Relations,” FRUS XX, Southeast Asia, Document 20.

100 “Secretary’s Meeting with Thai Leaders,” FRUS XX, Southeast Asia, Document 104.

101 “Telegram from the Embassy in Thailand to the Department of State,” Nov. 1, 1969, FRUS XX, Southeast Asia, Document 33, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d33.

102 Pattajit Tangsinmunkong, “Thai Perceptions of China: the 1960s to the 2010s,” Presentation at Beijing University, May 31, 2019, http://wase-da-china.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/学生发表合集（文章PPT）.pdf.

103 Tangsinmunkong, “Thai Perceptions of China.”

104 “Memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to Vice President Agnew,” Dec. 17, 1969, FRUS XX, Southeast Asia, Document 39, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d39.

105 Tangsinmunkong, “Thai Perceptions of China.”

106 Tangsinmunkong, “Thai Perceptions of China.”

Thailand’s striking about-face was, in large part, a function of necessity. Further U.S.  military and economic disengagement  left Thai leaders feeling they had little choice but to seek a powerful new partner. On the economic front, Thailand was deal-ing with a weakening economy, made worse by the loss of U.S. financial support as the Vietnam War wound down. Bilateral disagreements with the Nixon administration over U.S. rice sales, which undercut the competitiveness of Thailand’s most valuable export, created the impression that Amer-ica had become not only an undependable military ally, but also an unreliable economic partner as well.104 When the 1973 oil embargo further damaged Thailand’s weak economy, Chinese leaders took ad-vantage of the opportunity, offering diesel fuel at a “‘friendship’ price” to ameliorate negative public

perceptions of China among the Thai public.105 The abrupt fall of Phnom Penh and Saigon in 1975 led Thai leaders to reevaluate their security relation-ships as well. They ultimately determined that a closer partnership with China might provide a but-tress against potential Vietnamese aggression. By the early 1980s, the security relationship between the two countries had blossomed to such a de-gree that the head of the People’s Liberation Army General Staff pointedly said, “If Vietnam dared to make an armed incursion into Thailand, the Chi-nese army will not stand idle. We will give support to the Thai people to defend their country.”106 

Accommodation was the most significant shift in Thai foreign policy in the early 1970s, but it was not the only one. Thai leaders also sought to augment

with China. These efforts sought to link Australia more closely to its immediate region, enhancing its relationship with like-minded partners and finding some amount of accommodation with China in a bid to hedge against future changes in U.S. strate-gy. This regionalism became a hallmark of Austral-ian strategy that has endured to the present day.90

Thailand: An Accommodating Ally

Perhaps the most  concerning type of response to the announcement of the Guam doctrine was the decision to accommodate communist pow-ers. Thailand provides the most striking exam-ple of this response. The steady retreat of U.S. forces from Southeast Asia and the slow erosion of SEATO, both of which had provided a bul-wark against communist insurgencies, sparked instability in Thailand.91  These realities and the realization that the United States was unlikely to provide adequate military or economic support led Thai leaders to shift their strategy. Foreign Minister  Thanat  Khoman  would later summarize the lessons of this period in blunt terms: “For Thailand, … its disappointing experience with SE-ATO taught it the lesson that it was useless and even dangerous to hitch its destiny to distant pow-ers who may cut loose at any moment.”92 

Thailand had been one of America’s staunchest allies throughout the early Cold War, enthusiastical-ly joining the fight against communism and signing a U.S.-Thai logistics agreement that facilitated the construction of multiple U.S. air bases throughout the country.  Thailand’s centrality to America’s re-gional military presence, however, revealed the rel-ative weakness of America’s security guarantees in Southeast Asia — a point of longstanding concern for Thai leaders.  As Nixon entered office, a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok warned of “re-

90 Shannon Tow makes the argument that Australia has repeatedly sought greater independence from the United States but has consistently done so from within the confines of the alliance. See Tow, Independent Ally, Introduction, 2–5.

91 Ang Cheng Guan and Joseph Chinyong Liow, “The Fall of Saigon: Southeast Asian Perspectives,” Brookings Institution, April 21, 2015, https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-fall-of-saigon-southeast-asian-perspectives/.

92 Thanat Khoman “ASEAN Conception and Evolution,” The ASEAN Reader, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1992, https://asean.org/?stat-ic_post=asean-conception-and-evolution-by-thanat-khoman.

93 “Congratulatory Message to Thai Prime Minister,” Memorandum from Secretary of State Rogers to President Nixon, March 17, 1969, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XX, Southeast Asia, 1969–1972 (hereafter FRUS XX, Southeast Asia), Document 6, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d6.

94 See American Foreign Policy, Current Documents, 1962 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State Historical Division, 1962), 1091–1093; and “Secretary Rogers, Prime Minister Thanom Bilateral,” Telegram from the Embassy in Thailand to the Department of State,” May 23, 1969, FRUS XX, Southeast Asia, Document 11, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d11.

95 “Secretary’s Meeting with Thai Leaders,” Telegram from the Embassy in Thailand to the Department of State, Jan. 11, 1971, FRUS XX, South-east Asia, Document 104, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d104.

96 “Symington Subcommittee,” Telegram from the Embassy in Thailand to the Department of State, Nov. 20, 1969, FRUS XX, Southeast Asia, Document 38, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d38.

97 “Secretary’s Meeting with Thai Leaders,” FRUS XX, Southeast Asia, Document 104.

liable intelligence that the Thai leaders are current-ly in a mood of questioning and doubt with regard to the firmness of the U.S. intentions in Southeast Asia.”93 Yet, it is possible that the Nixon administra-tion could have weathered these problems. It moved early to address Thailand’s abandonment concerns by providing high-level assurances  of America’s commitment, not just to SEATO, but also to the 1962  Thanat-Rusk communique.94 Although Thai leaders expressed some uncertainty about the po-tential implications of Nixon’s new plan, they were also open to the proposal, expressing the country’s willingness “to take care of its own defenses.”95

The executive branch in Washington, however, was not the only actor shaping Thai perceptions of Amer-ican credibility. Over the summer and fall of 1969, the U.S. Senate embarked on a series of hearings that were deeply critical of America’s involvement in Vi-etnam and that singled out the U.S. commitment to Thailand. The hearings damaged the alliance on two fronts. First, they provided a public and highly critical accounting of financial support the United States had provided to Thai forces, a revelation that suggested to Thai leaders the alliance was viewed as little more than a mercenary racket.96 This narrative also under-mined the Nixon administration’s ability to provide the Thai government with enhanced military aid, sup-port the Thai government had made clear was essen-tial to its self-defense.97  

Second, and perhaps most damaging, was the public fight between the Nixon administration and Sen. J. William Fulbright over a classified U.S.-Thai contingency plan that had been developed under the Johnson administration. In seeking to assuage congressional outrage over this new, supposedly se-cret military commitment to the Thai government, both the secretary of state and secretary of defense publicly disavowed the plan. Secretary of State William Rogers referred to it as “an appendage that

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lessons from the Guam doctrine that apply today.

Lesson 1: Threatening Disengagement Accel-erates Hedging

In 1969, Nixon’s statements and actions made crystal clear that the United States would decrease its military presence in some parts of Asia and that America’s regional allies would increasingly have to handle their own affairs. Nixon’s “Asianization” strategy was, in many ways, the Guam doctrine’s greatest success as well as its most glaring weak-ness. On the one hand, the United States got exactly what it was seeking: Asian states began to explore new options to build autonomous capabilities. Some also sought to strengthen the regional order through strengthening intra-regional ties between the spokes in the “hub and spokes” system. The Guam doctrine thereby accelerated Asian regionalism in a way that ultimately proved more enduring than collective se-curity models centered on the United States, such as the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.

On the other hand, a major shortcoming of Nix-on’s approach was that it accelerated an “Asia for Asians” narrative that implicitly defined the United States as an outsider. By fueling the belief that America’s exit from Vietnam was simply the precursor to a larger retreat from the region, U.S. leaders reduced their leverage to shape allied de-cision-making. Allies such as South Korea sought independent capabilities that could have further destabilized the region, while Australia, Thailand, and others built regional ties that distanced them from the United States. Thus, the devolution of re-gional responsibilities had both positive and neg-ative effects. It tied regional states more closely together, but in doing so it also undermined Amer-ica’s leverage in the years ahead.

This lesson should provide a warning for leaders in Washington. When faced with uncertainty about America’s commitment, most regional states are unlikely to double down on their alignment with Washington. As Kori Schake has noted, “when the United States steps back, its allies step back even further.”114 From the push by allies like South Ko-rea to expand their domestic defense industries to the adoption of two new regional trade pacts, the past few years have seen U.S. allies in Asia once again openly advocate strategic autonomy as well

114 Kori Schake, “Back to Basics: How to Make Right What Trump Gets Wrong,” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 3 (May/June 2019), https://www.foreig-naffairs.com/articles/2019-04-16/back-basics.

115 Evelyn Goh, “ASEAN-Led Multilateralism and Regional Order: The Great Power Bargain Deficit,” International Relations and Asia’s Southern Tier, ed. Gilbert Rozman and Joseph Chinyong Liow (Singapore: Springer, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3171-7_4.

116 Tae Yang Kwak, “The Nixon Doctrine and the Yusin Reforms: American Foreign Policy, the Vietnam War, and the Rise of Authoritarianism in Korea, 1968–1973,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 12 no. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 2003): 41, https://doi.org/10.1163/187656103793645315.

as stronger Asian regionalism.115 Washington will have to be careful to encourage allies to become more capable but without leaving the United States on the sidelines in a region that is trending more intra-Asian and less trans-Pacific.

Lesson 2: Transactional Policies Undermine Alliances

It was not only the waning American military presence in the Pacific that sparked anxiety among U.S. allies in the 1970s. It was also the more trans-actional economic approach that Nixon embraced when he jettisoned the Bretton Woods system. The postwar alliance relationships the United States established in Asia were rooted in far more than defense guarantees. American trade and invest-ment helped propel the region’s dramatic postwar growth, especially in allied nations like Japan and South Korea. The Vietnam War offered further economic benefits, fueling commercial exports and trade with allies and generating substantial U.S. economic assistance in return for allied con-tributions to the war effort.116 The United States upended these economic ties when it hit allies with a 10 percent tariff on imports and unraveled the Bretton Woods financial system while also winding down its wartime assistance.

Through these actions, the Nixon administration signaled that the United States was becoming less predictable and reliable — not only as a military ally, but as an economic partner as well. The end of dollar convertibility into gold, which became known as the “Nixon shock,” introduced new fric-tion into U.S. alliance relationships right at the mo-ment when U.S. allies were also beginning to ex-plore new trade relationships with China. Over the next three decades, Asian allies sought increasingly closer economic ties with Beijing, which repeatedly capitalized on the perceived economic absence of the United States during both the Asian financial crisis and the more recent pandemic-induced re-cession. In short, transactional American economic policies accelerated the adoption of transactional allied security policies.

Looking forward, if the United States hopes to incentivize its allies to anchor rather augment, au-tonomize, or accommodate, it will need to focus on the economic underpinnings of its alliance rela-

their regional ties through the newly established As-sociation of Southeast Asian Nations. Although the association’s establishment predated the Nixon ad-ministration, America’s perceived retreat from the region in the early 1970s played a significant part in encouraging Thai and other Southeast Asian lead-ers to envision a more meaningful role it. Reflect-ing Thailand’s growing disaffection with the United States, Khoman decided to “rely more on neighbor-ly mutual support than on stronger states.”107 Thai leaders  began to explore  a more explicitly Asian strategic orientation. They encouraged the idea of a  “Southeast Asian Community,” considered new border security arrangements with fellow ASEAN member states, and supported Malaysia’s push for a neutrality concept  aimed at preventing external powers from interfering in Southeast Asian affairs.108 Though Thailand  was not  enthusiastic about  the idea of ASEAN neutrality, its eventual acceptance of a Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality declaration in 1971 was another remarkable policy reversal for a nation with such a staunch anti-communist tra-dition. The Guam doctrine thus pushed Thailand to rethink how to manage relations with non-Asian powers, resulting in a willingness both to accom-modate communist neighbors as well as to insulate Southeast Asia from external influence.

Lessons from the Guam Doctrine

As the experiences of Japan, South Korea, Austral-ia, and Thailand demonstrate, the Guam doctrine af-fected U.S. allies in different ways. All four countries adopted elements of multiple strategies, but each ally adopted a different mix of approaches. Japan largely doubled down on its alliance with the Unit-ed States, while South Korea and Australia sought to increase their leverage and hedge against pos-sible U.S. disengagement by building independent military capabilities or investing in regional rela-

107 Thanat Khoman, “ASEAN Conception and Evolution.”

108 Kei Koga, “The Process of ASEAN’s Institutional Consolidation in 1968-1976: Theoretical Implications for Changes of Third-World Security Oriented Institution,” RSIS Working Paper, no. 234, Feb. 24, 2012, https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/138882/WP234.pdf.

109 One difficulty in assessing this period is that many U.S. allies had multiple reasons to increase their ties to communist countries, particularly China. Not only was the United States disengaging from Asia but by 1972, Washington was also engaging Beijing and signaling that it would switch recognition from the Republic of China to the People’s Republic of China. The fact that many Asian states followed suit is not necessarily indicative of a propensity toward accommodation. Instead, it could simply be seen as closer alignment with the policies of the United States.

110 Jacob Gardenswartz, “Transcript: President Donald Trump’s Rally in Melbourne, Florida,” Vox, Feb. 18, 2017, https://www.vox.com/2017/2/18/14659952/trump-transcript-rally-melbourne-florida.

111 Trump quoted in Nick Wadhams, “Trump’s ‘Unpredictable Starting Now’ Foreign Policy Is Here,” Bloomberg, Dec. 4, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-05/trump-s-unpredictable-starting-now-foreign-policy-already-here; and “madman theory” described in Barton Swaim, “Opinion: How Might Nixon’s ‘Madman Theory’ Apply to Trump?” Washington Post, Dec. 15, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/12/15/how-might-nixons-madman-theory-apply-to-trump/.

112 “Inaugural Address: Trump’s Full Speech,” CNN, Jan. 20, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/20/politics/trump-inaugural-address/index.html.

113 Leandro Dario, “Anne-Marie Slaughter: ‘Climate Is Clearly Biden’s Top Priority,’” Buenos Aires Times, Dec. 26, 2020, https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/world/anne-marie-slaughter-climate-is-clearly-bidens-top-priority.phtml.

tionships. Thailand, on the other hand, saw little option but to accommodate a country it had pre-viously seen as an adversary.109 Two key factors in determining which pathway a country took were perceptions of external threats and perceptions of alliance reliability. When the threat was seen as high and America viewed as reliable, leaders were more likely to anchor to the United States. When the threat was perceived as relatively low or Wash-ington was seen as unreliable, U.S. allies opted to autonomize, augment, or accommodate.

Flashing forward five decades, Trump’s “America First” approach to alliances reads less like a new script and more like a sequel. Shortly after his elec-tion victory, Trump insisted that U.S. allies had not been “paying their bills,” and questioned the value of keeping forward deployed forces in Japan and South Korea.110 He also stated that “we have to be unpredictable starting now,” invoking Nixon’s so-called “madman theory” — an effort to ensure that “you could never put your finger on what he might do next.”111 Trump also announced in his inaugural address that he would reconsider the country’s in-ternational role, commenting, “From this moment on, it’s going to be America First. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign af-fairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”112

Biden has been clear that he plans to take a different approach with U.S. allies than his pre-decessor’s. Indeed, one foreign policy expert has suggested that Biden will shift from an “America First” stance to an “Allies First” approach.113 Biden also portends a return to predictability that allies and partners will welcome. But just as the Guam doctrine’s impact continued after Nixon resigned, future U.S. policymakers will likely have to contend with the reverberations of America First long after the Trump presidency. As is often the case, histo-ry does not repeat itself but it does rhyme. Thus, the Biden administration should keep in mind four

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two different periods, some historical similarities are unmistakable. Of America’s allies in Asia, Japan was the most comfortable working with Trump, largely doubling down on the alliance just as it did under Nixon. South Korea struggled with the unpredict-ability of both American presidents, leading to its pursuit of more independent capabilities. Australia worked in both eras to maintain U.S. engagement while also deepening its ties with other regional security partners as a hedge against American dis-engagement. And Thailand sought greater outreach to China under both Nixon and Trump, while still maintaining military ties with the United States.

These similarities are not mere coincidences. Alignment decisions in Asia are driven by many of the same structural factors today as they were 50 years ago. The region’s geography has not changed: Japan and South Korea are stuck in Northeast Asia, near the most likely zones of regional con-flict, while Australia and Thailand are thousands of miles away. Meanwhile, Japan and Australia tend to expect the United States to be committed to their security because U.S. forces are reliant on their territory for basing access and on their forces for coalition operations. South Korean and Thai lead-ers have been more concerned about the prospects of abandonment by Washington in both periods, in part because they play less direct roles in bal-ancing against the chief great-power threats to the United States. In 1969 and 2016, American leaders sought to refocus on great-power competition by shifting more of the burden on allies and partners. Although Nixon’s and Trump’s policies differed in many ways, structural similarities drove U.S. allies to adopt similar alignment choices in both eras.

Conclusion

Polling indicates that many Asians perceived the United States under Trump as weak, unprincipled, disengaged, and unpredictable.124 In recent years, allies have indicated that they are considering op-tions beyond anchoring to the United States, in-cluding augmenting, autonomizing, and accom-modating. There is bipartisan support to reverse these trends, but America’s experience after Nix-on’s Guam doctrine suggests that it will take time. And Washington’s success will vary substantially depending on the circumstances of the ally or part-ner in question. Regardless, American leaders will have to convince their Asian counterparts that the

124 Sharon Seah, et al., The State of Southeast Asia: 2021 (Singapore: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2021), https://www.iseas.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/The-State-of-SEA-2021-v2.pdf.

125 Seah, et al., The State of Southeast Asia, 50–51.

United States remains powerful, principled, pres-ent, and predictable.

This is a tall task, but there is reason for opti-mism about the future of U.S. alliances in Asia. The United States still retains many of its longstanding advantages, especially when compared to China. First, Washington has dozens of treaty allies and a global network of partners. Second, America has a record of fighting on behalf of its friends around the world. Third, U.S. leaders have often champi-oned (albeit imperfectly) shared values and prin-ciples that appeal to many of its allies and part-ners. Finally, despite Trump’s embrace of America First rhetoric, foreign publics still trust the United States more than China. These substantial and en-during advantages are the reasons why most coun-tries in Asia would prefer more U.S. engagement, not less. However, if the United States does not de-liver on promises to sustain regional engagement, most Asian countries will avoid anchoring and turn toward alternative strategies.125

Few American allies in Asia look back at the sum-mer of ‘69 with any sense of nostalgia. But keeping in mind the lessons of the Guam doctrine can help the United States avoid repeating its alliance errors 50 years later. America’s experiences following the in-troduction of the Guam doctrine suggests that if the country can leverage its advantages, U.S. allies and partners will be more confident in continued U.S. en-gagement and will share more of the burden.

Lindsey Ford was formerly a David M Rubin-stein fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Insti-tution. She is currently serving as the deputy assis-tant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the Department of Defense.

Zack Cooper is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and conducted much of this re-search under a grant from the National Asia Research Program, supported by the National Bureau of Asian Research and Institute for National Strategic Studies.

Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank Emily Carr, Annie Kowalewski, Harry Lee, and Michael Tan for their excellent research support.

Image: U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (photo by Pfc. Karish Mattingly)

tionships. Transactional relationships based only in shared short-term interests are difficult to maintain. Economic power and influence have given Beijing not just clout, but substantial leverage over U.S. allies and partners. One need look no further than China’s use of economic statecraft against Japan in 2010, the Philippines in 2012, Vietnam in 2014, South Korea in 2017, or Australia in 2020 to see the effect Beijing’s economic power is having in the region.117 Equally important, regional assessments of Ameri-can decline are based largely on perceptions of wan-ing U.S. economic influence and its inward turn on trade.118 U.S. leaders will need to assure allies that Washington has a plan to restore its economic lead-ership in the Pacific in addition to restoring its mil-itary presence. Better aligning U.S. alliances around shared principles and institutions will therefore be key for the United States going forward.

Lesson 3: Enduring Policies Require Congres-sional Support

The disconnect between the Nixon administration and the legislative branch over the country’s over-seas commitments was a significant obstacle to im-plementing the Guam doctrine.119 Although the Nix-on administration provided repeated assurances to Asian allies about America’s enduring role as a Pacific power and its willingness to offer assistance, U.S. al-lies became increasingly skeptical that the executive branch could deliver on its promises.120 Allies such as South Korea and Thailand found themselves repeat-edly disappointed by promises of aid and support that failed to materialize, which contributed to their eventual decisions to seek greater autonomy and an accommodation with Beijing.

Today, the combination of perceived American un-reliability and Chinese aggressiveness is creating sim-ilar alliance management challenges. Foreign leaders are weighing the prospect that Trump’s transactional

117 For more on these cases, see Peter Harrell, Elizabeth Rosenberg, and Edoardo Saravalle, “China’s Use of Coercive Economic Mea-sures,” Center for a New American Security, June 2018, https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.cnas.org/documents/China_Use_FINAL-1.pdf?m-time=20180604161240; and Natasha Kassam, “Great Expectations: The Unraveling of the Australia-China Relationship,” Brookings Institution, July 20, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/great-expectations-the-unraveling-of-the-australia-china-relationship/.

118 Hugh White, “Without America: Australia in the New Asia,” Quarterly Essay, no. 68, (November 2017), https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/essay/2017/11/without-america.

119 Earl G. Ravenal, “The Nixon Doctrine and Our Asian Commitments,” Foreign Affairs 49, no. 2 (January 1971), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/1971-01-01/nixon-doctrine-and-our-asian-commitments.

120 Jeffrey Kimball, “The Nixon Doctrine: A Saga of Misunderstanding,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 36, no. 1 (March 2006): 59–74, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5705.2006.00287.x.

121 For example, see “The Security and Defense Agenda (As Delivered by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Brussels, Belgium, June 10, 2011),” Washington Post, June 10, 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the-security-and-defense-agenda-as-delivered-by-secretary-of-defense-robert-gates-brussels-belgium-june-10-2011/2011/06/10/AGqlZhOH_story.html.

122 Yoichi Funabashi, “Why a New Asia Policy Is Needed Under Biden,” Japan Times, Jan. 17, 2021, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opin-ion/2021/01/17/commentary/world-commentary/api-biden-asia/.

123 Lalit K. Jha, “US to Establish Pacific Deterrence Initiative to Counter China,” Outlook India, Dec. 7, 2020, https://www.outlookindia.com/newsscroll/us-to-establish-pacific-deterrence-initiative-to-counter-china/1989121.

approach and ambivalence toward overseas commit-ments may not have been an aberration but could represent a new turn in American foreign policy.121 A clear alignment between the White House and Cap-itol Hill will be necessary to convince Asian leaders and Asian publics that the United States will remain trustworthy in the years ahead, regardless of whom the American public elects as president.

U.S. allies need to be convinced that presiden-tial initiatives enjoy support from the legislative branch and that any U.S. commitments have sufficient bipartisan backing to ensure they will endure beyond a single administration. The Oba-ma and Trump administrations were both criti-cized by regional allies for failing to adequately implement their Asia strategies.122 As the Biden administration seeks to craft new Indo-Pacific in-itiatives, it will need to win legislative buy-in to see them through. Fortunately, Congress is plac-ing ever greater attention on the Indo-Pacific. Re-cent support for the Asia Reassurance Initiative and Pacific Deterrence Initiative has been noticed throughout the region.123 The executive and legis-lative branches should build on this momentum.

Lesson 4: Structural Factors Drive Alignment

At first glance, it might seem that the Nixon doc-trine has little to do with regional dynamics now, over half a century later. The Soviet Union has since dissolved, U.S. allies have flourished, China has ris-en, and many Asian states have democratized. Fur-thermore, it is hard to think of two more unique lead-ers or time periods in recent America history than Richard Nixon in the late 1960s or Donald Trump in the second decade of the 21st century. In short, why should observers believe that Asia in 1969 holds any lessons for approaches to the region in 2021?

Although it would indeed be unwise to draw a direct connection between ally decisions in these

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The Biden administration, as well as future administrations, should look to the national security strategy planning efforts of previous administrations for lessons on how to craft a strategy that establishes a competitive approach to America’s rivals that is both toughminded and sustainable in order to guide U.S. foreign, defense, and budget policies and decision-making. In this article, Paul Lettow gives a history of the processes and strategies of past administrations, beginning with the Eisenhower administration, and draws out the lessons to be learned from them.

1 Biden issued interim national security strategic guidance “even as we begin work on a National Security Strategy.” Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, The White House, March 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/NSC-1v2.pdf. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the interim guidance “gives initial direction to our national security agencies so that they can get to work right away while we keep developing a more in-depth national security strategy over the next few months.” See Antony J. Blinken, “A Foreign Policy for the American People,” March 3, 2021, https://www.state.gov/a-foreign-policy-for-the-american-people/.

2 Regarding China, Biden said: “[W]e need to not have a conflict. But there’s going to be extreme competition.” Joe Biden, interview by Norah O’Donnell, Face the Nation, Feb. 7, 2021, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-interview-iran-sanctions-nuclear-agreement/.

3 Burns, during his confirmation hearing, added that China is “the biggest geopolitical test that we face.” Martin Matishak, “Biden’s CIA pick vows to focus on a rising China,” Politico, Feb. 24, 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/24/cia-william-burns-china-471354.

In keeping with the practice of U.S. admin-istrations for the past several decades, the Biden administration is likely to produce a national security strategy within its first

year or two. Indeed, it has already signaled that it will begin work on one.1 It will do so while con-fronting an international environment character-ized by increasingly intense geopolitical challenges to the United States — most prominently and com-prehensively from China, but also from a Russia determined to play spoiler and destabilizer when and where it can, and from Iran, North Korea, and other powers and threats at a more regional level.

President Joe Biden has stated that the United States and China, in particular, are engaged in “ex-treme competition,”2 while CIA Director William Burns has said that China is the “most signifi-cant threat [and] challenge” to the United States throughout the foreseeable future and that “[o]ut-competing China will be key to our national security.”3 To increase the likelihood of long-term outcomes that favor the United States, the admin-istration should focus its national security strat-egy on establishing a competitive approach to America’s rivals — especially China — that is both toughminded and sustainable in order to guide U.S. foreign, defense, and budget policies and de-cision-making. The president and his team should look to the national security strategy planning

efforts of previous administrations for lessons on how to do just that. A number of those lessons are positive but are underappreciated today — and some are cautionary, pointing to flaws in outlook or process that the Biden administration and fu-ture administrations ought to avoid.

Most presidents since Harry Truman have pro-duced a written national security strategy, or some-thing akin to it. During the Cold War, national se-curity strategies often took the form of a classified written directive to executive branch departments and agencies as part of a systematic planning pro-cess involving senior White House national secu-rity officials and cabinet secretaries. These strate-gies focused, for the most part, on competing with the Soviet Union and its allies. Sometimes, those overarching strategy documents sparked an on-going planning process that generated classified strategies addressing specific regional or function-al subjects. Since the end of the Cold War, presi-dential administrations have issued national secu-rity strategies only in unclassified form for public consumption. Those public documents were often products of a far less rigorous and analytical pro-cess than those which had been pursued by Cold War presidents and more closely resembled an ex-tended speechwriting exercise, disconnected from any prior or ongoing systematic planning.

The Trump administration broke with that post-

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LESSONS LEARNED

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allows for input from the president’s cabinet, thus ensuring, as much as possible, a unified sense of direction to guide the administration’s efforts.

Why Develop a National Security Strategy?

Before examining the most useful aspects of na-tional security strategies — the what and how — it is helpful to understand why presidential admin-istrations pursue them. The Biden administration is likely to produce a written national security strategy in part because of custom and law. The pattern stretching back for decades of presidential administrations issuing a national security strategy document generates expectations that the Biden administration will follow suit. And a federal stat-ute, in place since the Goldwater-Nichols national security reforms of the mid-1980s, states that the president “shall transmit to Congress each year” a national security strategy.6 Over the last two dec-ades, that provision has been honored mainly in the breach: Beginning with the George W. Bush ad-ministration, presidents have, sensibly, produced one national security strategy for each four-year term, rather than annually, which would be unnec-essary and perhaps unhelpful. While the statutory provision has served the purpose of encouraging presidents to develop a national security strategy, it has also coincided with the post-Cold War era of national security strategies that were unclassified, designed primarily for public consumption, and mostly disconnected from rigorous planning pro-cesses — a cross between a speech and a check-the-box exercise. The congressional requirement has been, at best, a mixed blessing and ought to be reexamined.

In addition, the Biden administration, like every presidential administration, has its own reasons for producing a national security strategy. At their best, written national security strategies can serve multiple purposes.

First, a national security strategy can identify and prioritize the most important U.S. interests, the threats to those interests, and the objectives that America must pursue to secure those interests. A national security strategy should start with lay-

6 War and National Defense, U.S. Code 50 (2015), § 3043. On the legislative mandate, see Catherine Dale, National Security Strategy: Man-dates, Execution to Date, and Issues for Congress, Congressional Research Service, Aug. 6, 2013, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R43174.pdf; Nathan J. Lucas and Kathleen J. McInnis, The 2015 National Security Strategy: Authorities, Changes, Issues for Congress, Congressional Research Service, April 5, 2016, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R44023.pdf; and Kathleen J. McInnis, “The 2017 National Security Strategy: Issues for Con-gress,” Congressional Research Service, Dec. 19, 2017, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/IN10842.pdf

7 “Memorandum of Discussion at the 165th Meeting of the National Security Council, Wednesday, October 7, 1953,” Foreign Relations of the United States [hereafter FRUS], 1952–1954, National Security Affairs, Volume II, Part 1 [hereafter FRUS, 1952–1954, II, 1], Document 94, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v02p1/d94.

ing out the most critical national interests: the physical security of the nation and its people, the maintenance of the country’s constitutional sys-tem and values, and an international environment conducive to American prosperity. It should set out clear objectives as well as the means necessary to preserve U.S. interests over the long term, especial-ly in light of other international actors, including great-power rivals, that are pursuing interests and objectives often directly at odds with those of the United States. It should also account for and em-phasize what a president and his team believe they must achieve as well as what they will not accept and thus must prevent or counteract. A national security strategy affords an administration the op-portunity to consider those interests, threats, and objectives dispassionately, comprehensively, and systematically, rather than having to try to come up with various plans in reaction to disparate crises once they have been forced on the United States, when the willingness to consider overall enduring interests and priorities is at a minimum.

Second, a national security strategy can set a di-rection for an administration, shaping day-to-day policy and decision-making. It can provide coher-ence, allowing officials to place discrete issues and actions within the framework, terms, and priorities set out in the strategy. President Dwight Eisen-hower, leading a meeting of his National Security Council to consider a draft of a basic national se-curity policy, emphasized that principle. According to the meeting minutes, “he pointed out that even as you dealt with day-to-day problems you needed some kind of a philosophy as a general guide to action.”7 In setting out that directional guidance, a national security strategy can prioritize particular objectives and the means to achieve them, while al-lowing for flexibility and adaptability in execution. This, in turn, allows officials, from the president on down, to prioritize the allocation of resources — including of their individual and collective time and policy goals — rationally and intentionally, in line with the overall strategy. A national secu-rity strategy thereby helps avoid the “tyranny of the inbox” that can otherwise plague senior offi-cials and cause them to spend their time and effort on distracting, secondary issues without making meaningful progress on established U.S. priorities.

Cold War trend by taking a hybrid approach. It is-sued a public national security strategy document followed by classified internal directives on specific regions and functional topics. The administration’s national security strategy emphasized the geopolit-ical threats posed by great-power rivals, especially China, and the need for a competitive U.S. strate-gy in response.4 Those basic substantive premises have earned widespread acceptance, even as they marked a departure from post-Cold War national security strategies that had downplayed — or mis-apprehended — the threats posed by China, Rus-sia, and other state actors that have challenged the United States over the last several decades.

The United States is at a transitional and con-sequential moment. It is newly alert to an era of great-power competition. The Biden administra-tion seems to grasp that it should accept and build on the basic premises and many of the elements of its predecessor’s national security strategy, while pursuing more predictable policies and turn-ing away from the vagaries, moral relativism, and transactional nature of Trump, which, in ways big and small, often proved counterproductive to his own administration’s national security strategy.5

More broadly, the United States is out of prac-tice at developing and pursuing a strategy of high-stakes, long-term geopolitical competition. Such a strategy, adjusted and corrected over time, ought to garner enough bipartisan congressional and public support to endure, be firm in pressing Amer-ica’s formidable advantages in acute but peaceful competition, and be sufficiently far-sighted and disciplined to make investments in resources, at-tention, and time to best position the United States to succeed over the long run.

There is thus much to be gained by reassessing the advantages that accrue from a sound national security strategy, and the prerequisites and ele-ments of a successful strategy, as well as the pit-falls that should be avoided. There are important differences between America’s rivals today — their nature and the challenges they pose and the type of competition they require — and the rivals of the Cold War era. This article looks to post-World War II history not to encourage replicating it, but to understand the principles and practices that can help the country navigate through the storms that surely lie ahead.

4 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, The White House, December 2017, http://nssarchive.us/wp-content/up-loads/2020/04/2017.pdf.

5 See Kurt M. Campbell and Ely Ratner, “The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectations,” Foreign Affairs 97, no. 2 (March/April 2018), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2018-02-13/china-reckoning. Campbell is now coordinator for the Indo-Pacific on the White House National Security Council staff. Ratner is now special assistant to the secretary of defense and leads the Department of Defense’s China Task Force. In his confirmation hearing, Burns stated that “out-competing China” requires “a long-term clear-eyed bipartisan strategy.” Matishak, “Biden’s CIA Pick.”

This article draws on a review of available his-torical records of a number of previous national security strategies, as well as interviews with eight former national security advisers and many other senior officials involved in shaping previous nation-al security planning efforts. It gleans from those sources lessons and principles that apply both to the process of developing a national security strat-egy and to the substantive elements of the most successful examples. It attempts to shed light on how to increase the chances that a national secu-rity strategy will be effective — that is, to guide an administration’s national security policies, to achieve the objectives that strategy outlines by the means it proposes, and to set a foundation upon which future administrations can build.

This article first sets out why a president should develop a national security strategy. It then address-es the what and how of national security strategic planning by giving a brief history of how adminis-trations from the Cold War onward have, or have not, conducted strategic planning and by identifying some of the consequences of those decisions. The article concludes by distilling the lessons from those past efforts that may be of help as the Biden admin-istration and future administrations undertake na-tional security strategic planning in a difficult, com-petitive international environment.

In summary, the president ought to adapt to the present circumstances the best elements of the rig-orous, analytical planning processes that generated successful national security strategies during the Cold War. These include: a classified process that focuses on understanding the nature of America’s adversaries, what they are up to, and why; a net assessment to analyze America’s advantages and vulnerabilities relative to its rivals; incorporation of that comparative analysis in the ensuing strate-gy directive, such that the strategy aims to assert America’s relative advantages, shore up its vulner-abilities, and exploit adversaries’ weaknesses; an approach designed to meet challenges from China and other rivals on a sustainable basis, obviating the need for wild swings from periods of repose to frenetic reaction, building on the useful aspects of the Trump national security strategy, and increas-ing the likelihood for public and congressional sup-port over the long term; and a planning process that is driven by the White House but nevertheless

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Washington in February 1946 while he was serving as U.S. chargé d’affaires in Moscow.10 It was a re-sponse to earnest queries from a Washington mys-tified as to why the Soviet Union, America’s recent ally in the war, was not being more constructive in cooperating with U.S. plans for the post-war in-ternational system. Kennan, a specialist in Russia’s language, history, and culture, was serving his sec-ond tour in the Soviet Union and had observed in person Joseph Stalin’s show trials and the opacity and duplicity of the Soviet leadership. Brooding, sensitive, and possessed of a keen, cynical mind, Kennan had despaired that the U.S. government up to that point had understood neither the na-ture of Stalin’s Soviet Union nor its implications for the United States. In fielding the inquiries from Washington, he took the opportunity to help his government, as the telegram stated, “apprehend”

that problem and “recognize [it] for what it is.”11 The Long Telegram was clear-eyed and stark in

its description of the Soviet leadership, its mo-tives, and its modus operandi. Combining a tra-ditional insecurity and a desire to bring together unchallengeable authority and Marxist dogma, Soviet leaders “found justification for their in-stinctive fear of [the] outside world, for the dicta-torship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand.” Kennan warned that the Soviet regime continually sought to increase its strength and prestige internally and externally, and that it would aim to destabilize Western powers and divide them from each other while expanding its own geopolitical influence. He

10 “The Chargé in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State,” Feb. 22, 1946, FRUS, 1946, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Volume VI, Document 475, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1946v06 (also known as “The Long Telegram”). This section also draws from Paul Lettow, “Parallel Lives,” National Review 61, no. 19 (Oct. 19, 2009): 43–45; George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925-1950 (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown & Co. 1967); Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1969); and Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, reissue ed. (London: Picador, 2010; New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2009).

11 Kennan, “The Long Telegram.”

12 Kennan, “The Long Telegram.”

13 George F. Kennan (X), “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 25, no. 4, (July 1947), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/rus-sian-federation/1947-07-01/sources-soviet-conduct.

argued that the Soviets thus posed an enormous challenge to American interests, but that the Unit-ed States could best meet it not by belligerence or inaction, but through adopting a thoughtful, long-term strategy. Kennan also noted that the nature of the threat meant that the United States had impor-tant advantages. The Soviet Union did not take un-necessary risks when faced with strong opposition or likely defeat. It was, relatively, the less powerful force, and because it was overextended and purely dictatorial, it was deeply flawed.12

A year after sending the cable, Kennan anony-mously authored a Foreign Affairs article titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” in which he developed his thesis that the Soviet Union bore within it the seeds of its own decay, and that U.S. policies could “increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate” with the

aim, ultimately, of “promot[ing] tendencies which must eventual-ly find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellow-ing of Soviet power.” He wrote, fatefully, that U.S. policy “must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant contain-ment of Russian expansionist tendencies.”13

Kennan did not set out a grand unified theory for U.S. foreign

relations based on blue-sky thinking about Amer-ica’s preferences for what the world ought to look like. He was not given to wishcasting as a prem-ise for American policy. His contribution lay in understanding and explaining, compellingly and resonantly, what Soviet leaders were up to — their motives, interests, and aims, and how they pur-sued them — and what that meant for the United States. In illuminating the latter, Kennan was able to observe that through embracing a competitive but peaceful long-term strategy, the United States could help to foster the conditions that would pro-duce a solution to the challenge posed by the So-viets.

In a kind of “Big Bang” at the start of the Cold War in 1946 and 1947, Kennan thus identified the

Third, a national security strategy also helps en-sure that the different departments and agencies under the president operate in alignment with one another in terms of understanding and direc-tion. As will be seen, a process that allows sen-ior cabinet-level officials to give their input and requires them to sign off on the strategy, or at least requires them to understand and acquiesce to a clear presidential decision regarding strategy, tends to ensure that differences among senior offi-cials are comprehended, addressed, and resolved upfront. This helps avoid an administration being consumed by disagreements over basic premises and directions for years.

Fourth, in setting out national security priorities and the means necessary to achieve them, a na-tional security strategy allows a president and his team to take the initiative in order to create pos-itive outcomes and head off unacceptable ones, rather than being forced to take a reactive or de-fensive position in response to situations or cri-ses brought about by other actors. A proactive ap-proach, as Henry Kissinger noted while serving as national security adviser, helps ensure that policies “are not simply tactical responses to immediate situations.”8 It encourages and guides officials in shaping the decision-making environment in which competitor nations operate.

Fifth, when crises do arise, officials do not have to assess and deal with them starting from a blank slate. Instead, they can place the crisis within the overall strategic context, including the most im-portant and enduring U.S. interests and objectives that they have identified and prioritized in ad-vance. A strategy can help avoid over-reacting or under-reacting to crises, or becoming befuddled or overwhelmed by them. In short, it can help prevent stumbling into disasters by inaction or unwise ac-tion for want of a pre-existing framework in which issues and events can be properly prioritized and considered. Eisenhower was well aware of the ben-efit of advance planning during crisis management, and it furthered his determination to lead a sys-tematic national security planning process with his senior officials.9

Sixth, a properly designed, ongoing strategic planning process can also help the president and his National Security Council to make appropriate

8 “White House Background Press Briefing by the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger),” Feb. 16, 1970, FRUS, 1969–1976, Volume I, Foundations of Foreign Policy, 1969–1972 [hereafter FRUS, 1969–1976, I], Document 58, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v01/d58.

9 Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 89, 258–59.

course corrections over time if they periodically re-visit and revise as necessary the premises and ob-jectives of the strategy. As an administration pro-gresses, however, a national security strategy can also allow them to assess and reject ill-considered arguments or ideas that may be vocally advocat-ed for but would ultimately diverge from, or even work at cross-purposes with, the overall strategy.

Finally, a national security strategy can help keep a president and his team focused on how best to position the country over the long term, by clari-fying and prioritizing the investments that have to be made now to increase the chances of positive outcomes in the future. This includes everything from research and development efforts to overseas bases and deployments to maintaining access to global commons and influence over international standards-setting institutions. A national security strategy does not just match ends to means in the near-term. It can and should also underscore the need to husband and generate the resources that will be essential over the long run. Indeed, a prop-erly conceived national security strategy requires that an administration conceptualize, marshal, and invest in resources in the near term to enable success years later, as the best of those strategies have emphasized. That is especially so during an era of intensifying great-power competition, with China growing in power and employing that power to shape the international environment in its own favor for the future.

The “What” and “How” of National Security Strategic Planning: A Brief History

Kennan and the Birth of Cold War Strategy

Looming large over the problem of how to de-velop a sound national security strategy, and what elements it should include, is the legacy of George F. Kennan. But it is essential to understand what it was about Kennan’s contribution that was so consequential to the formation of U.S. strategy and what its relevance is today.

Kennan’s signal statement — the “Long Tele-gram” — came in the form of a cable he sent to

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In their first few months in office, Eisenhower and Cutler set up a new committee chaired by Cutler — the Policy Planning Board — that consisted of sen-ior planning officials selected from throughout the departments and agencies. The board’s mission was to provide discussion papers and drafts for consid-eration at the National Security Council meetings. Throughout his pre-presidential career, Eisenhower had been frustrated and dismayed by bureaucrat-ic wrangling and rivalries — not least the parochi-al fights among the military services when it came to the budget process, fights that Eisenhower saw as inimical to pursuing sensible strategy. The stra-tegic planning process that he and Cutler devised reflected his experience and personality.20 Eisen-hower underscored that while members of the Poli-cy Planning Board would represent their respective departments and agencies, they would also serve the president and the National Security Council overall and must pursue their work accordingly. Ei-senhower himself approved and appointed each of the board members, and he sent presidential letters to them charging them with their duties.21 The writ-ten summary of a National Security Council meeting from Eisenhower’s first year includes the following statement by Eisenhower, captured in the third per-son used by the notetaker:

Noted a statement by the President of his conception of the NSC as being a corporate body composed of individuals advising the President in their own right, rather than as representatives of their respective depart-ments and agencies. Their function should be to seek, with their background of experience, the most statesmanlike solution to the prob-lems of national security, rather than to reach solutions which represent merely a compro-mise of departmental positions. The same concept is equally applicable to advisory and subordinate groups, such as the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the NSC Planning Board.22

To drive the point home, the White House distrib-

20 Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace, 45, 83–93; “Memorandum for the President,” March 16, 1953, FRUS, II, 1; and “The President to the Special Assistant (Cutler),” March 17, 1953, FRUS, II, 1.

21 Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace, pp. 45, 83–93; “Memorandum for the President,” March 16, 1953, FRUS, II, 1; and “The President to the Special Assistant (Cutler),” March 17, 1953, FRUS, II, 1. At the start of the strategic planning process, in his March 17, 1953, memorandum to Cutler, Ei-senhower instructed Cutler to “call the special attention” of National Security Council members to the Policy Planning Board and said that he “place[d] great emphasis on the selection of men of high caliber for these positions, able to devote plenty of time to their Planning Board functions.”

22 “Memorandum of Discussion at the 166th Meeting of the National Security Council, Tuesday, October 13, 1953,” FRUS, 1952–1954, II, 1, Docu-ment 95, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v02p1/d95.

23 Note 2, NSC Action No. 928, in “Memorandum of Discussion,” Oct. 13, 1953, FRUS, II, 1.

24 See memorandums of discussions of weekly National Security Council meetings from Feb. 11 to April 29, 1953 and on June 9, 1953, associat-ed preparatory papers, and documents summarizing conclusions and adopting policy restatements in in “United States National Security Policy: U.S. Objectives and Programs for National Security; Estimates of Threats to the National Security; Military Posture and Foreign Policy; Organization for National Security,” FRUS, 1952–1954, II, 1, documents at 234–323, 370–86, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v02p1.

uted that paragraph from the meeting summary as a separate action memorandum to the National Se-curity Council members — who had already heard the president’s message in person — “for the infor-mation and guidance of the Council and its advisory and subordinate groups.”23

With the aid of the Policy Planning Board, Eisen-hower’s National Security Council systematically reviewed and assessed the Truman administra-tion’s Cold War strategy, including its principles, means, planning documents, and budgets, identify-ing elements that would be preserved and strength-ened, and those that would be jettisoned.24

Eisenhower and his National Security Council then set out and considered different strategic alternatives for a long-term approach to the Cold War, in an exercise known as Project Solarium. The president assembled three teams, each drawn from experts inside and outside of government, to study and present on a different basic approach. Alterna-tive A, which drew on and refined elements of the Truman strategy, would “maintain over a sustained period armed forces to provide for the security of the United States and to assist in the defense of vital areas of the free world,” “continue to assist in building up the economic and military strength of the free world,” and “exploit the vulnerabilities of the Soviets and their satellites by political, eco-nomic and psychological measures.” It would be “interpreted and administered” on the basis that “if we can build up and maintain the strength of the free world during a period of years, Soviet pow-er will deteriorate or relatively decline to a point which no longer constitutes a threat to the security of the United States and to world peace.” Kennan, who had been closely associated with the Truman administration, was brought in to lead Team A.

Alternative B would establish an explicit cordon around the areas then under Soviet and satellite control, beyond which the United States would permit them no advance without provoking war. Al-ternative C proposed to “increase efforts to disturb and weaken the Soviet bloc and to accelerate the consolidation and strengthening of the free world

threat posed by the Soviet Union and, in light of that threat, the basic premises that would ultimately guide American strategy for decades. It fell to others to craft the strategies for each ad-ministration, however, including for Truman. Paul Nitze, building on the premises and insights that Kennan had established, led the drafting of the classified NSC-68 in 1950, which wove together military, political, and ideological policies into an assertive and coherent whole. It focused in particu-lar on the hard power — especially military forces — perceived as necessary to operationalize con-tainment of the Soviet Union.14

Strategic Planning Under Eisenhower

Before taking office as president, Eisenhower had led the Allied invasions of North Africa and of West-ern Europe, commanded the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe to victory over the Axis powers, and served as Army chief of staff and as supreme allied commander of NATO. He knew the value of plan-ning. And he was determined to impose a rigorous strategic planning process in the White House. Ei-senhower shared Kennan’s basic assessment of the threat that the Soviets posed to America’s interests and of Soviet methods. He also agreed that, on bal-ance, the United States was the stronger power. He believed that the nature of the Soviet system and of Soviet geopolitical overreach itself made the Soviet Union vulnerable.15

Eisenhower was also exasperated by what he saw as the erratic nature of the Truman administration, especially its swing from making drastic cuts to the national security budget in the immediate post-war years — which Eisenhower knew was danger-ous and foolhardy in the dawning Cold War — to a surge in spending, in part to meet the demands of the Korean War.16 The war had originated in an invasion of South Korea by communist North Korea that had shocked the Truman administration.17 The

14 “A Report to the National Security Council by the Executive Secretary (Lay),” FRUS, 1950, National Security Affairs, Foreign Economic Policy, Volume I, Document 85, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950v01/d85. See also John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 81–116; Acheson, Present at the Creation, 347, 371–81, 420–21, 467, 735; and Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, 111–14, 118, 133. Truman formally approved NSC-68 after the outbreak of the Korean War. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 105, 107.

15 Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace, 43–54. This section draws on Paul Lettow, “Ike’s Triumphs,” National Review LXX, no. 10 (May 28, 2018): 37–38.

16 Lettow, “Ike’s Triumphs,” 37–38.

17 See Acheson, Present at the Creation, 355–58, 402–13.

18 Lettow, “Ike’s Triumphs,” 37–38; and Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace, 4, 75–80, 88–90. For concise and deeply informed analyses of Ei-senhower’s pre-presidential background as a strategist and its impact on his presidency, see Andrew P.N. Erdmann, “’War No Longer Has Any Logic Whatever’: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Thermonuclear Revolution,” in Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy Since 1945, edited by John Lewis Gaddis et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 87–119; and William I. Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 3–83.

19 “Memorandum for the President by the Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (Cutler),” March 16, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, II, 1, Document 50, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v02p1/d50; and “The President to the Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (Cutler),” March 17, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, II, 1, Document 51, https://history.state.gov/historicaldoc-uments/frus1952-54v02p1/d51. See also Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace, 45, 83–93.

war bedeviled the administration over the ensuing three years and had ground to a stalemate by the time Eisenhower took office.

Eisenhower was a habitual planner who sought to take the initiative rather than respond defensively to events. He was emphatic that America needed to pursue a Cold War strategy that was compre-hensive, consistent, and built for the long haul. He was attentive to the strengths and vulnerabilities of America and its allies relative to their adversaries and to the need to marshal and deploy resources in the short term to increase the likelihood of positive outcomes in the future. He sought to wage a vigor-ous, sustained competition with the Soviet Union, communist China, and communist satellites in the Cold War, and to do it on terms that favored the United States.18

Understanding the purposes and advantages of sound strategy better than perhaps any president before or since, Eisenhower prioritized the establish-ment of a rigorous planning process to develop a na-tional security strategy. His National Security Coun-cil — the president, vice president, secretaries of state, defense, and the treasury, and the senior-most military, budget, intelligence, and other relevant of-ficials — generally met once a week throughout Ei-senhower’s presidency, devoting much of their time during the first year to strategic planning through a rigorous process overseen by Eisenhower and his national security adviser, Robert Cutler.

At the beginning of that process, Cutler had not-ed to Eisenhower that the president, as chairman of the National Security Council, “should exercise that leadership by asking for views around the table so as to bring out conflicts and so as to create a sense of team participation among those present in mak-ing the policy which they must later carry out.” That suggestion corresponded with Eisenhower’s own views and inclinations.19 As will be seen, he would accomplish the twin purposes that Cutler had set out with extraordinary patience and skill.

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to enable it to assume the greater risks involved.”25 Eisenhower and his top aides listened to the pres-

entations in a special session and then considered and debated them during later meetings. They di-rected the Policy Planning Board to draw together the best elements of their review of the Truman administration’s policy and Project Solarium, revise them in light of those National Security Council de-bates and conclusions, and draft a unified strategy.26

The attention and time that Eisenhower and his National Security Council devoted to strategic planning was extraordinary. One National Security Council meeting, convened to consider a draft of what ultimately became NSC 162/2, “Basic National Security Policy,” resulted in an extended discussion within the group regarding the nature of the Sovi-et threat and how to pursue a sustainable U.S. re-sponse that balanced national security and econom-ic concerns. Cutler himself, Eisenhower’s right-hand man and fellow architect of the process, commented that the meeting resembled a “debating society.”27 But Eisenhower knew what he was doing. Through the process of examining the prior administration’s approach, stepping back to consider a wide range of alternatives, and hashing out their own differences in considering drafts of a national security strate-gy, he and his National Security Council continu-ally worked to identify and prioritize the soundest premises, objectives, and means of accomplishing those objectives as they built their strategy.

The president, aided by Cutler, deftly guided the

25 “Paper Prepared by the Directing Panel of Project Solarium,” FRUS, 1952–1954, II, 1, Document 69, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocu-ments/frus1952-54v02p1/d69.

26 The documentary record of the origins in May 1953 and ensuing work of the Project Solarium teams, their presentations to the National Security Council in July 1953, and the resultant council debates and follow-on taskings are set out in “National Security Policy,” FRUS, 1952–1954, II, 1, documents at 323–28, 349–54, 360–66, 387–93, 393–464, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v02p1. See also Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace, 123–38; and Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, 150–51.

27 Cutler’s quote is from “Memorandum of Discussion at the 165th Meeting of the National Security Council, Wednesday October 7, 1953,” Oct. 7, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, II, 1, Document 94, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v02p1/d94.

28 “Memorandum of Discussion at the 131st Meeting of the National Security Council, Wednesday, February 11, 1953,” FRUS, 1952–1954, II, 1, Document 46, 236–37, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v02p1/d46; and “Memorandum of Discussion at a Special Meeting of the National Security Council, Tuesday, March 31, 1953,” FRUS, 1952–1954, II, 1, Document 53, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v02p1/d53. See also National Security Council meetings from September to November 1953 that considered what ultimately became NSC 162/2, “Basic National Security Policy,” prepared by the Policy Planning Board, and associated drafts, reports, and memorandums, all available in “National Security Policy,” FRUS, 1952–1954, II, 1, various documents at 464–75, 489–609.

meetings, letting debates play out, nudging them in certain directions with questions and comments, and moving with ease and apparent purpose from examining the fundamental premises and principles of containment and deterrence to drilling down into concrete facts. Along the way, his National Security Council together weighed and discarded ideas that some of them had previously held firmly. For ex-ample, Treasury Secretary George Humphrey’s ini-

tial hardline views on restraining national security spending were worn down and eventually overcome by what the council collectively came to perceive as a need to keep that spending at a relatively high, but sustainable, level to invest in the military, science, technology, and other resources that they felt would be essential to play-ing the long game in the Cold War. The National Security Council also extensively considered and largely rejected, as being both risky and ultimately unnecessary, the use of direct military force or overt sub-

version to roll back communist control from satel-lite countries where it was already established. The council also sought to avoid missteps or misadven-tures that would dissipate America’s strength and work to America’s long-term disadvantage.28

The national security strategy document that they ultimately developed, the top secret NSC 162/2, amounted to the original peace through strength approach. NSC 162/2 emphasized both geopolitics and hard power as foundations for maintaining U.S. values and America’s way of life and for nurturing freedom abroad. It was wary and sophisticated in its analysis of the Soviet Union and of potential future outcomes. It noted, for example, that although the Sino-Soviet alliance was then “firmly established” and must be dealt with as such, “in the long run, basic differences may strain or break” it. The doc-ument was attuned to Soviet vulnerabilities and flaws and to the strengths of the United States and its allies. The strategy document focused on pur-suing a steady, sustainable build-up in hard power; strengthening alliances and the forward deployment

of U.S. forces; taking the ideological offensive; and proactively pressing American advantages, espe-cially technological, economic, and values-based advantages, to undermine Soviet power and influ-ence peacefully. Eisenhower formally approved NSC 162/2 in October 1953 and “direct[ed] its implemen-tation by all appropriate executive departments and agencies of the U.S. Government.”29

It is possible, perhaps even likely, that the plan-ning process that Eisenhower launched in his first year in office arrived at the strategy he had had in mind from the start. But the planning process he led allowed him, together with his senior-most officials who would be responsible for executing the strategy, to test their assumptions and precon-ceptions. It let them consider a range of potential strategic alternatives, and as a group find their way toward an approach that could guide day-to-day action and decision-making with the overall aim of building enduring strength and succeeding in long-term, peaceful competition. It thereby ena-bled them to act in line with the strategic premis-es and objectives that they had established and to do so with a relatively uniform understanding of those premises and objectives and the role of each in pursuing them. They applied those premises and objectives for example, in their budget planning.

Moreover, NSC 162/2 served as springboard, not an endpoint, for the Eisenhower administration’s strategic planning process. Over the course of his two terms, Eisenhower and his National Security Council systematically reevaluated their strategic objectives and the means to achieve them, seeking to make adjustments accordingly while sticking to the basic approach that they had established. They were especially attentive to areas that ultimate-ly required more rigorous analysis and definition

29 Memorandums of discussions at National Security Council meetings to consider what ultimately became NSC 162/2, “Basic National Security Policy,” prepared by the Policy Planning Board, and associated drafts, reports, and memorandums are available at “National Security Policy,” FRUS, 1952–1954, II, 1, including meeting of Feb. 11, 1953, 236–37; meeting of March 25, 1953, 258–63; meetings from September 1953 to November 1953, 464–75, 489–609. For the text of NSC 162/2, Oct. 30, 1953, see “National Security Policy,” FRUS, 1952–1954, II, 1, 577–97. See also Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace, 139–46, 257.

30 Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace, 147–257.

31 “Memorandum of Discussion at the 131st Meeting of the National Security Council, Wednesday, February 11, 1953,” Feb. 11, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, II, 1, Document 46, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v02p1/d46; “Memorandum of Discussion at a Special Meeting of the National Security Council, Tuesday, March 31, 1953,” March 31, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, II, 1, Document 53, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v02p1/d53; “National Security Policy,” FRUS, 1952–1954, II, 1, documents at 323–28, 349–54, 360–66, 387–93, 393–75, 489–609. Eisenhower’s “New Look” policy, with its emphasis on nuclear weapons, was designed in part to keep defense spending at sus-tainable levels. See Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 125–96. In the end, Eisenhower sought and obtained what were remarkably high peacetime defense budgets as measured by percentage of Gross Domestic Product and of federal spending. As a result of that sustained investment, his administration served as the bridge between the U.S. military of World War II and that of today. It was during the Eisenhower presidency that the United States developed intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, high-altitude spy planes, and spy satellites. Both before and after the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, Eisenhower championed government investment in science and technology, and encouraged scientific and technological education. Lettow, “Ike’s Triumphs,” 37. See also Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower. Eisenhower also focused on laying out for the public and Congress the threats identified and that the United States must set a course for long-term, but ultimately peaceful, compe-tition. As the Eisenhower administration constructed its own national security strategy, Eisenhower wrote to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles: “[P]rograms for informing the American public, as well as other populations, are indispensable if we are to do anything except to drift aimlessly, probably to our own eventual destruction.” “[W]e must begin now to educate our people in the fundamentals of these problems,” Eisenhower con-tinued: “We must have the enlightened support of Americans and the informed understanding of our friends in the world (emphasis in the original).” “Memorandum by the President to the Secretary of State,” Sept. 8, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, II, 1, Document 89, 461, https://history.state.gov/histor-icaldocuments/frus1952-54v02p1/d89.

than the administration had given them in its first year. They pursued their strategic planning as an ongoing process.30

Eisenhower is often quoted as saying “It’s not the plans, it’s the planning,” or variations on that theme. That statement is a little misleading, how-ever: He did, in fact, place considerable emphasis on the specific strategy documents that he and his National Security Council developed and that he approved, and rightly so. Yet, the statement does reflect an essential component of his approach to national security planning. Even if it had not re-sulted in any written strategy documents, the pro-cess that he led his security council through would still have been valuable, by winnowing out unwise or unworkable ideas, prioritizing issues and objec-tives, and establishing baseline approaches that could and did act as a guide to action for those who had to execute them.

Another essential aspect of Eisenhower’s ap-proach is that while he and his team adhered to Kennan’s basic analysis of the Soviet Union and the threat that it posed, they also paid close attention to an analysis of American capabilities and means. The records of the Eisenhower National Security Coun-cil meetings show a continual emphasis on ensur-ing that the administration’s strategy would wage the Cold War in a way that played to U.S. strengths and would prove sustainable over time.31 For exam-ple, Eisenhower and his National Security Council sought to find a level of national security spending that could endure, and to avoid dissipating Amer-ica’s strength through unsustainable commitments of resources or by getting lost or diverted in fights, literal or figurative, that were outside of the core in-terests and objectives that they had identified.

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The Kennedy and Johnson Administrations

Neither Presidents John F. Kennedy nor Lyndon B. Johnson oversaw a rigorous strategic planning process. They preferred informal and nimble de-cision-making, unencumbered by formal strategic planning. Partly that was a response to, and a way to differentiate themselves from, what they and their advisors and much of the media and aca-demia characterized as the stale, bureaucratic, old ways of the Eisenhower administration.32 One of the political themes of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations was dynamism and vigor, of a new generation, possessed of analytical prowess and intellectual self-confidence, taking the helm.33 The Kennedy administration was indeed young: When he took office, Kennedy was 43, his national securi-ty adviser, McGeorge Bundy, was 41, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was 44.

The Kennedy and especially Johnson adminis-trations were also less concerned about balancing an active national security approach with domestic

32 “The intent … of the steps below [including the abolition of the Policy Planning Board and giving its functions to national security adviser McGeorge Bundy] is to free up the time and attention of the President and his immediate advisors by relieving them of the burden of immediate super-vision of the machinery for continuous policy review and adjustment.” “Draft Paper by the Executive Assistant of the Operations Coordinating Board (Johnson),” undated [January or February 1961], FRUS, 1961–1963, Volume VIII, National Security Policy [hereafter FRUS, 1961–1963, VIII], Document 6, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d6. See also “Record of Actions Taken at the 475th Meeting of the National Security Council,” Feb. 1, 1961, FRUS, 1961–1963, VIII, Document 8, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d8 (including a report by Bundy that “in response to the President’s desires a different organization and procedures would henceforth be used in the work of the National Security Council, involving fewer and smaller staff groups” and policy recommendations would not be subject to as much formal development or interagency coordination); “Notes of Secretary of State Rusk’s Daily Staff Meeting,” Feb. 14, 1961, 34 (noting the disman-tling of Eisenhower’s White House-coordinated policy process and that the State Department should try to do strategic planning so that “foreign policy is not made on a fragmented basis by various agencies”); “Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy) to the President’s Press Secretary (Salinger),” March 13, 1961, FRUS, 1961–1963, VIII, Document 19, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d19 (evidently anticipating press inquiries, stating that Kennedy prefers informal discussions with smaller groups on each national security ques-tion rather than a more formal National Security Council process); and “Memorandum from the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy) to the President’s Special Counsel [Speechwriter] (Sorensen),” March 13, 1961, FRUS, 1961–1963, VIII, Document 21, 65, 68, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d21 (noting the importance of policymaking by what Kennedy says publicly); and “Memorandum for President Kennedy,” June 22, 1961, FRUS, 1961–1963, VIII, Document 31, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d31. The author of this latter memorandum, entitled “Current Organization of the White House and NSC for Dealing with International Matters,” is not identified, but appears to be inside or otherwise close to the administration. The memorandum notes the Eisenhower planning model and that Kennedy “has changed all that” and that Kennedy “works through many people and talks to still more,” but “retains an acute sense of ‘operational’ communication” and “counts on his people to keep in close touch with each other, and in general they do”; it praises Bundy and his staff as men of a “high level of ability” and “[in]compa-rable,” but also warns that “there should be a more clearly defined pattern of preparation for new policy papers, and reporting on existing crisis areas,” and that “much could be ordered that is now somewhat haphazard”; and it wryly notes for Kennedy that those suggested changes “would require a Presidential acceptance of routine that might be dull.”). See also Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6–9, 25–26, 34–41; Gordon M. Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2009), 35, 70–71; and Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 197–271.

33 Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, 6–9, 25–26, 34–41; Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, 35, 70–71; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 197–271.

34 Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, 27–33; Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, 16; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 197–271, especially 202-04, 259; David Milne, America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), 6–7, 13, 78–81, 84, 132, 151. See also memo-randum for the record of President Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey meeting with the White House National Security Council staff, noting Johnson’s points that “in our own interests we have to worry about the other fellow. More than that we can’t rest while other people are miserable in such numbers. … So a nation blessed with the riches ours has can not sit back while others like ourselves [i.e., humans] are in misery,” and also noting that Humphrey “spoke generally on the same theme of circulating the ideals of the Great Society into a worldwide effort against poverty, disease, and illiteracy.”) “Memorandum for the Record,” May 27, 1966, FRUS, 1964–1968, Volume X, National Security Policy, Document 129, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v10/d129.

35 Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, xi–xii, 6–9; Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, 157–221; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 197–271, especially 211-12, 232; Milne, America’s Rasputin, 76–84. See also Bundy’s White House notes from March 21, 1965, as the Johnson administration was steadily deepening U.S. military involvement in Vietnam: “[I]f we visibly do enough in the South [Vietnam] (whatever that may be), any failure will be, in that sense, beyond our control”; “Questions: in terms of U.S. politics which is better: to ‘lose’ now or to ‘lose’ after committing 100,000 men? Tentative answer: the latter.” Quoted in Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, 167.

36 Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, 9, 287; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 197–271, especially 213; Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, 220; and Milne, America’s Rasputin, 71, 76. On “flexible response” in the nuclear realm, see Elbridge A. Colby, “The United States and Discriminate Nuclear Options in the Cold War,” in On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, ed. by Jeffrey A. Larsen and Kerry M. Kartchner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 49–79.

economic needs and concerns than Eisenhower and his cohort had been. With a more optimistic and expansive view of economics and U.S. capabil-ities, they focused less on sustainability.34 Kennedy in particular was also prone to relying on powerful, bold oratory — eloquent, moving, and inspiring, in the case of his inaugural address, but also overly broad, almost boundless — as a guide for policy. Each administration also displayed a near-obses-sion with credibility and image, in terms of both domestic and international politics.35

More broadly, with an emphasis on a “flexible response” approach to crises around the world, the administrations focused less on systematically assessing the comparative strengths and vulnera-bilities of the United States and Soviet Union and their respective allies — and the need to press U.S. advantages, peacefully and over the long run, while avoiding reactive positions in crises forced by oth-ers — and more on being able to devise and shape a suitable response to developments as they arose.36

For all of those reasons, Kennedy and Bundy put

no emphasis on national security strategic plan-ning. Indeed, they appear to have been averse to it, as a matter of personality, principle, and politics.37

But that did not mean that no one else in the ad-ministration attempted it. In late 1961, Walt Rostow shifted from the White House, where he had been Bundy’s deputy, to the State Department, where he took over as director of policy planning. There he picked up and ran with the task his predecessor had started of preparing a draft “Basic National Security Policy” for consideration by the National Security Council. Rostow seems to have generated the massive document more or less on his own, without direction or oversight from the White House.38 He was an odd fit for the role. Kennedy had moved him out of the White House specifically because he was an unceasing advocate for maxi-malist economic aid policies and maximalist in-volvement in meeting communist challenges when and wherever they might arise, including in the Third World and including by use of U.S. military force.39 Those tendencies were also reflected else-where in the administration, including in the rhet-oric of the president himself — if not always in his actions, as will be seen — but Rostow represented their distilled essence, as did his draft of the Basic National Security Policy in the spring of 1962.40 A

37 As the historian Lawrence Freedman has noted, “Kennedy spoke about the need to give a visionary edge to foreign policy and be guided by core principles, yet advisers found him fixated by the short term.” Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, 6–7. See also Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, 40–41; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 197–271; Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, 35; and Milne, America’s Rasputin, 148.

38 Notes, excerpts, and documents reflecting the drafting of Rostow’s Basic National Security Policy, and the debate and reactions it generated, are available at FRUS, 1961–1963, VIII, Documents 70–85, 93–95.

39 Milne, America’s Rasputin, 9–10, 95, 98–104, 110–17, 125; Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, 28–33, 38–41; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 197–271; Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, 38.

40 The complete text of the draft of the Basic National Security Policy as of June 22, 1962, is in “Draft Paper, June 22,” June 22, 1962, FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. VII, VIII, IX Supplement, Document 271, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v07-09mSupp/d271. See also FRUS, 1961–1963, VIII, Documents 70–85, 93, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08.

41 “Memorandum from the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy) to the Chairman of the Policy Planning Council and Counselor of the Department of State (Rostow),” April 13, 1962, FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. VIII, National Security Policy, Document 77, 263, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d77.

42 McNamara, letter dated June 13, 1962, quoted in “Editorial Note,” FRUS, 1961-1963, VIII, Document 94, https://history.state.gov/historical-documents/frus1961-63v08/d94.

43 Letter from Kennan to Rostow, May 15, 1962, in “Letter from the Ambassador to Yugoslavia (Kennan) to the Chairman of the Policy Planning Council and Counselor of the Department of State,” May 15, 1962, FRUS, 1961-1963, VIII, Document 85, 285, 289, https://history.state.gov/histori-caldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d85.

44 Milne, America’s Rasputin, 117; Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, 6–7, 40–41; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 199; “Editorial Note,” FRUS, 1961-1963, VIII, Document 94, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d94 (noting numerous instances in 1962 when Kennedy and/or Bundy simply avoided taking any position on the Basic National Security Policy or whether it would be adopted as policy, leaving the rest of the executive branch, which had been responding to and commenting on various iterations of it, to speculate about its status); “Memorandum From the Chairman of the Policy Planning Council and Counselor of the Department of State (Rostow) to Secretary of State Rusk,” FRUS, 1961–1963, VIII, Document 136, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d136 (noting conversations that Rusk had had with Department of Defense officials about the Basic National Security Policy, that the policy now appeared to be dead as far as the Department of Defense was concerned, and adding, after reminding Rusk that the Truman and Eisenhower administrations had each produced fundamental national security policy documents: “Whatever the limitations inherent in any such document, I doubt that it will redound to the credit of our Administration that we failed to thrash out any successor document. A BNSP obviously cannot substitute for specific policy judgments; and it should not tie the President’s hands. But it can provide an occasion for debating and defining the bone structure of policy and communicating it to the troops who never see the four star generals. My first recommendation is, therefore, that you consider with the President whether or not you wish to consider the BNSP exer-cise as finished.”). Rostow, undaunted and still without any guidance or direction from the White House one way or the other, produced yet another attempt at a Basic National Security Policy in November 1963; he told Rusk “that promulgation of a BNSP would contribute in important ways to effective, coordinated execution of U.S. policy.” Rostow is quoted in “Editorial Note,” FRUS, 1961-1963, VIII, Document 146, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d146.

draft of the document sent out for written com-ment elicited a mixed reaction. Bundy expressed approval to Rostow of the military sections of the nearly 200-page draft. But characteristically, Bundy expressed skepticism on his own part and that of the president about the utility of strategy in gener-al. With respect to this effort in particular, Bundy also noted that “[t]he paper seems to me to imply a kind of equal and adequate effort everywhere, and I think both abroad and at home we have to have a clear sense of limits, and of priorities.”41 McNa-mara wrote that “the thrust of the proposed policy seems highly suitable.”42 In contrast, Kennan, then serving as ambassador to Yugoslavia, was unspar-ing in his criticism, not least because, as Kennan wrote to Rostow, “the paper is deeply imbued with a relatively optimistic view of the sources of hu-man nature.”43

Kennedy was wary of getting pinned down to any strategy, much less one produced by an official he had effectively banished from the White House. So, while the paper encapsulated many of the ba-sic inclinations of the administration’s flexible re-sponse approach, it was never formally adopted or approved by Kennedy.44 In the end, neither Ken-nedy nor Johnson evidently developed a national security strategy. They did not want to — Kennedy

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and the role of the strategic policy papers re-mains unsettled, although it seems they may be more important than Bundy now wishes.48

The historian Lawrence Freedman has noted that the refusal on principle of Kennedy and Bun-dy to engage in strategic planning “fitted in with the temper of the times,” with the “intelligentsia” from which Bundy came — he had been a Harvard dean — preferring and celebrating instead its own “capacity for analytical problem solving.”49 More broadly, Freedman has noted, Kennedy “wanted a national security staff to suit his temperament as Eisenhower’s staff had suited his. . . . He wanted a system that extended the range of his options and did not box him in when the moment came to choose… preferring small, intense groups.” Yet “there were costs” to that “informal structure,” Freedman writes. “This less orderly structure pro-duced few clear and properly considered recom-mendations,” with “nobody quite clear on whether the president knew all he needed to know or exact-ly what he had decided.”50

Many of those who were responsible for guiding U.S. national security policy before and after the Kennedy and Johnson administrations have as-sessed that, at least in part due to a lack of adequate strategic planning, Kennedy and Johnson too often reacted to international events and crises rather than first developing and then executing a proac-tive approach. That assessment has been bipartisan and not only retrospective.51 And indeed, the period witnessed rolling crises in Cuba, Berlin, Laos, Cuba again during the missile crisis, and Vietnam.

After the disastrous Bay of Pigs episode and the embarrassing Vienna summit with Nikita Krush-chev, during which Krushchev sought to test Ken-nedy with overly assertive bombast, Kennedy con-tinued to face a cascade of crises pressed upon him

48 “Memorandum for the Record,” Dec. 4, 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, VIII, Document 148, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d148.

49 Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, 7.

50 Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, 40–41.

51 Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson was scathing in his assessment of the Kennedy administration during its first year in letters to his for-mer boss, President Truman. He wrote of “weakness in decisions at the top,” and “a preoccupation here with our ‘image.’” Acheson said that the latter “is a terrible weakness. It makes one look at oneself instead of at the problem. How will I look fielding this hot line drive to short stop? This is a good way to miss the ball altogether.” Letter from Acheson to Truman, July 14, 1961, in Harry S. Truman and Dean Acheson, Affection and Trust: The Personal Correspondence of Harry S. Truman and Dean Acheson, 1953-1971 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 264–65. The next month, after having assisted Rusk — who had served Acheson at the State Department during the Truman years — with an issue, he wrote to Truman that “to work for this crowd is strangely depressing. … Rusk wants to approach everything piecemeal. But how you lead anyone unless you first know where you yourself want to go, I do not know.” Letter from Acheson to Truman, Aug. 4, 1961, in Truman and Acheson, Affection and Trust, 267. See also Henry Kissinger, White House Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 11, 41; and Winston Lord, interview with the author, July 6, 2012. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had served on the State Department Policy Planning Council during the Johnson administration, later stated that neither the Kennedy nor the Johnson White House had done much strategic planning nor pursued much structure regarding national security policy, that they had acted mainly on an “ad hoc” basis, and that they had been “overwhelmed by basic events and crises.” Brzezinski, interview with the author, July 7, 2012.

52 Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, especially xii, 4, 5, 9, 40–41, 54–57. See also Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, 41–47, 63.

53 “Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy) to President Kennedy,” Nov. 16, 1962, FRUS, 1961–1963, VIII, Document 108, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d108.

by adversaries. But he began to handle them with greater wariness and savviness. His crisis manage-ment modus operandi, as Freedman has noted, was to keep as many options open as possible, and to feel for a resolution while avoiding the introduc-tion of direct or significant U.S. military force. That approach allowed him to find his way through the various crises after his first half-year in office and to avert disaster along the way.52 But some of those crises were close-run things.

Some insecurity seemed to creep in amid the White House’s self-confidence in its ability to solve crises. Following the Cuban missile crisis, Eisen-hower apparently suggested the need for improve-ments in White House national security planning and process. In a memorandum to Kennedy in re-sponse, Bundy noted that they had dismantled Ei-senhower’s planning process and committees but placed responsibility for the cause of that disman-tling elsewhere, especially on Rusk and McNamara. He acknowledged that “it is probably also true that we did not promptly develop fully adequate new procedures of our own.” He then blamed the State Department for lack of executive management and inter-departmental coordination. He commented that “we have learned a lot in the last year and a half,” but maintained that “[w]hat we have said, and what I, at least, have deeply believed, is that differ-ent Presidents are bound to have different adminis-trative methods. General Eisenhower is a believer in a military concept of staff operations, and you gov-ern by direct personal involvement and decision.”53

Five months later, Bundy wrote another mem-orandum to Kennedy, this one stating: “As you know, there has been considerable discussion in recent months of the need for strengthening inter-departmental planning and coordination on ma-jor national security issues.” Bundy suggested the possibility of establishing an interagency commit-

in particular — and did not try to.45 Bundy not only did not lead or guide a national security planning process, but he resisted, in a passive-aggressive manner, attempts by others within the adminis-tration to conduct strategic planning throughout his tenure as national security adviser from 1961 to 1966.

In 1963, for example, the State Department, again spurred by Rostow, proposed “strategic studies of various countries as a basis for policy making and programming,” presumably in lieu of any overar-ching strategy.46 Bundy cast doubt on the idea at a White House meeting, expressing skepticism of the value of strategy papers, although “admitt[ing] that analyses of the type suggested would produce information which would be available in time of a crisis and might facilitate action then.” Character-istically, he cast aspersions on the idea of the stud-ies but did not take responsibility for the process, guide it, or turn it off, leading the State Department to gin up a process that again involved the other departments and agencies and again left everyone wondering where the president — first Kennedy, then Johnson — and Bundy would come out on

45 Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 197–271.

46 “Editorial Note,” FRUS, 1961-1963, VIII, Document 135, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d135.

47 “Editorial Note,” FRUS, 1961-1963, VIII.

it.47 A memorandum for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by a military staff officer summa-rized Bundy’s approach during interagency consid-eration of the papers:

Bundy himself, concerned essentially with operational matters, seems not to believe the papers will be of much value in determining policies because they may be out of date be-fore they are finished. His basic approach, as he admitted today, has been that since he could not stop the Rostow papers from being developed, he could, if necessary, ig-nore them … But [these matters] are seldom joined directly. Instead they flit by in short-hand remarks. … Bundy looked on the White House role as being the right to intervene without any obligation to do so. … [Bundy] said you could not make programming deci-sions in a policy document and, when asked where these would be made, did not answer directly, although he believed they would be made in the budget. … In summary, the dis-cussion reached no recognized conclusions,

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U.S. withdrawal from its most important overseas commitments or severe defense cuts, both of which he thought would jeopardize America’s long-term competition with the Soviet Union.61

Nixon and Kissinger led a process that was espe-cially White House-centric by design. They shared an instinct to consolidate policymaking in the White House on the most important issues, including on Vietnam and on relations with the Soviet Union and with China.62 Within days of taking office, Kissing-er flooded the executive branch departments and agencies with classified formal requests for studies on almost every conceivable foreign, defense, and intelligence issue, in each case sending out multiple pages of specific questions and often asking for the bases of various assumptions and alternative hy-potheses or courses of action.63 The reasons for this were partly Machiavellian: to gather information on how each department or agency thought about spe-cific issues and why for his own bureaucratic rea-sons. It was perhaps even an effort to keep them busy with responding while the White House, more or less fully staffed from the start, could get under way with its policy planning.64

Yet that is only part of the story. Kissinger and

61 In FRUS, 1969–1976, I, see Nixon’s comments in private to French President Charles DeGaulle on March 1, 1969, in which he foreshadowed a move to drive a wedge between China and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, the basic concept of which he had been contemplating for a few years, 63–64; speech by Nixon to the North Atlantic Council, April 10, 1969, 69–75; speech by Nixon at the U.S. Air Force Academy, June 4, 1969, 86–88 (“There is no advancement for Americans at home in a retreat from the problems of the world. … America has a vital national interest in world stability, and no other nation can uphold that interest for us.”); speech by Nixon to the United Nations General Assembly, Sept. 18, 1969, 107–08 (“our aim is to place America’s international commitments on a sustainable, long term basis”); and memorandum from Nixon to Kissinger regarding the draft of the first annual report on foreign policy (discussed below), February 10, 1970 (“get back to my theme that the Nixon doctrine rather than being a device to get rid of America’s world role is one which is devised to make it possible for us to play a role—and play it better, more effectively than if we continued the policy of the past in which we assume such a dominant position” and suggesting that Kissinger look at and draw from Nixon’s Air Force Academy speech, as “the tone and strength of that speech on this issue is very much needed”), 186–87. A comment made by Nixon in a meeting with French President Georges Pompidou in 1971 characterized Nixon’s approach. After Pompidou had given a tour d’horizon of trends in the Cold War, Nixon said, “in the broad landscape President Pompidou had painted we should now look at the pieces and see how those pieces could be moved to our advantage rather than [the Soviets’].” Kissinger was not present. See “Top Secret Memorandum of Conver-sation,” Dec. 13, 1971, in William Burr, ed., The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow (New York: The New Press, 1998), 35. See also Winston Lord, interview by Charles Stuart Kennedy and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, April 28, 1998, 54–55, https://memory.loc.gov/service/mss/mfdip/2004/2004lor02/2004lor02.pdf.

62 Lord, 2012 interview with the author; Kissinger, White House Years, 24–48; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 299–302. See also “Memo-randum From President Nixon to His Assistant (Haldeman), His Assistant for Domestic Affairs (Ehrlichman), and His Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger),” March 2, 1970, FRUS, 1969–1976, I, Document 61, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v01/d61.

63 Nearly 50 National Security Study Memorandums issued by the White House to the departments and agencies from Jan. 21, 1969, through the spring of 1969 requested formal studies. Among these are “National Security Study Memorandum 1, Situation in Vietnam,” The White House, Jan. 21, 1969, accessed at the Nixon Library, https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibrary/documents/nssm/nssm_001.pdf; “Na-tional Security Study Memorandum 2, Middle East Policy,” The White House, Jan. 21, 1969, accessed at the Nixon Library, https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibrary/documents/nssm/nssm_002.pdf; “National Security Study Memorandum 3, U.S. Military Posture And the Balance of Power,” The White House, Jan. 21, 1969, accessed at the Nixon Library, https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibrary/documents/nssm/nssm_003.pdf; “National Security Study Memorandum 9, Review of the International Situation,” The White House, Jan. 23, 1969, accessed at the Nixon Library, https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibrary/documents/nssm/nssm_009.pdf; “National Security Study Memorandum 10, East-West Relations,” The White House, Jan. 27, 1969, accessed at the Nixon Library, https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibrary/documents/nssm/nssm_010.pdf; and “National Security Study Memorandum 14, U.S. China Policy,” The White House, Feb. 5, 1969, accessed at the Nixon Library, https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibrary/documents/nssm/nssm_014.pdf.

64 Lord, 1998 interview with Kennedy and Bernkopf Tucker, 48–51; Lord, 2012 interview with the author; and Kissinger, White House Years, 47.

65 Lord, 1998 interview with Kennedy and Bernkopf Tucker, 48–51; Lord, 2012 interview with the author; and Senior Nixon administration national security official, discussion with the author, March 2012. One of the Department of Defense recipients of the many taskings from the White House was an Air Force officer named Brent Scowcroft, who was impressed that Nixon and Kissinger were reaching down into the departments and agencies for information, and who would later join Kissinger’s National Security Council staff and then serve as national security advisor to Presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. Brent Scowcroft, interview with the author, August 1, 2012.

66 Lord, 2012 interview with the author; and Senior Nixon administration national security official, discussion with the author, March 2012; and Kissinger, White House Years, 24–47.

his staff genuinely wanted to fill gaps in their own knowledge and understanding of various regions, functional issues, and developments. And they wanted to probe for alternative explanations or approaches outside the consensus views.65 In that first year, the White House convened a number of sessions of the National Security Council and sub-ordinate interagency committees to discuss the studies and basic policy options and directions.66 But it was largely Kissinger and his staff who under-took the work of shaping and drafting the admin-istration’s national security policies, in some cases through memorandums and directives sent to the departments and agencies, and in some cases sim-ply by formulating a policy and then implementing it, with or without the involvement of the depart-ments and agencies. As Winston Lord, who worked closely with Kissinger throughout the administra-tion as a strategic planner, and who subsequently served in senior roles in administrations of both parties, has noted, a strategic sensibility pervaded Nixon’s foreign policy. On the issues they prior-itized, Nixon and Kissinger insisted on thoughtful analysis, including by identifying, understanding, and navigating the interconnectedness of efforts in

tee that would include Averell Harriman from the State Department. Bundy recommended that Har-riman draw on plans from, of all people, Rostow.54

Following Kennedy’s assassination, the officials and ad hoc process that Kennedy had overseen lost the guardrails he had come to provide in the face of exigencies. For his part, Eisenhower tried to warn Johnson to be more systematic in nation-al security organization and planning. According to Bundy — who continued on as national securi-ty adviser, ultimately to be replaced after several years by Rostow — “Ike was trying to get the new President to abandon all the bad habits of his pre-decessor.” Somewhat flippantly, Bundy added in a memorandum for the record that Eisenhower “has a picture of chaos among the children, I guess.”55

Eisenhower had resolutely kept U.S. combat forces out of Vietnam, both because of the con-flict’s roots as a French colonial war and because of the risk of a quagmire that would dissipate U.S. strength. Kennedy, while steadily deepening U.S. involvement in South Vietnam, had held firm on that main principle.56 With his death, the re-straints fell away. Johnson and his administration stumbled into what became a disaster in Vietnam, where the connections between interests, prior-ities, objectives, and means were never properly comprehended, much less tailored in the execu-tion.57 Bundy seemed unable or unwilling to tee up those subjects for systematic and rigorous review, a crucial aspect of his job, and for his own part rec-ommended expanded U.S. military action in Viet-nam at critical turning points in 1964 and 1965.58 His eventual replacement, Rostow, was a vigorous advocate of the war. The scholar Gordon Goldstein worked with Bundy in the 1990s on a project to analyze retrospectively the U.S. presidency and the Vietnam War during the 1960s. (Bundy died before they could complete it.) In his own resultant book on Bundy, Goldstein noted that, 30 years after the events in question:

[T]he man I observed was still struggling to understand how Vietnam happened. … One of the questions that appeared to preoccupy

54 “Memorandum from the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy) to President Kennedy,” April 2, 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, VIII, Document 131.

55 Bundy as quoted in Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, 101.

56 Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, 50–56, 63–67, 95–96, 239–40.

57 Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, 98–140, 156–67, 168–249; and Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 235–71.

58 Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, 98–140, 156–67, 168–249. Goldstein characterized one Bundy memo to Johnson from April 1965: “Bundy sub-mitted another memorandum to President Johnson elaborating on the merits of an open-ended and unformulated U.S. military strategy in Vietnam. … Bundy again argued that America’s strategic objectives did not have to be precisely defined.” Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, 169.

59 Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, 70–71.

60 Robert S. McNamara with Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 101, xxi.

Bundy was how the process of managing presidential decisions for Vietnam could have become as disordered as it did for both Ken-nedy and Johnson. Bundy had come to the White House with a reputation for brilliance as a bureaucratic manager, the young aca-demic dean who had tamed the fierce politics and formidable egos of the Harvard faculty. The conventional wisdom was that Bundy was decisive, commanding, and terse.59

In his controversial 1995 memoir, McNamara, too, acknowledged in retrospect that the most ba-sic issues involved — such as whether South Viet-nam was worth the effort poured in, and whether that effort could have been successful in the first place — “were not presented clearly to” Johnson and “remained unanswered throughout his presi-dency.” He wrote:

One reason the Kennedy and Johnson admin-istrations failed to take an orderly, rational approach to the basic questions underlying Vietnam was the staggering variety and com-plexity of other issues we faced. Simply put, we faced a blizzard of problems, there were only twenty-four hours in a day, and we often did not have time to think straight.

“This predicament,” he added, “ought to be rec-ognized and planned for when organizing a gov-ernment.”60

Strategic Planning Under Nixon

On taking office in 1969, President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Kissinger, inherit-ed the Vietnam War, domestic turmoil, and tensions with U.S. allies. Nixon, who had been Eisenhower’s vice president, insisted that his administration’s strategy would aim to place the United States back on a sustainable course in the Cold War. That was the purpose of what would become his détente ap-proach. He wanted both to take advantage of geo-political opportunities in the Cold War and to avoid

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One of the effects of Nixon and Kissinger’s White House-centric planning model was to further mar-ginalize the cabinet departments and other agen-cies and their roles relative to that of the White House. Even Kissinger and his closest aides, in ret-rospect, realized that Kissinger’s personalization, even personification, of policy design and execu-tion caused needless friction within the govern-ment, thereby complicating efforts to pursue the strategy successfully.73

It also left the Nixon administration’s national security approach uniquely tied to the strengths and weaknesses of its two architects, especially Kissinger. Kissinger was largely of the view that America was in long-term relative decline and had to plan and act accordingly, for example, and that underlying premise colored his approach, including with regard to negotiations with the Soviets.74 That premise seems not to have been as clearly or fully shared by Nixon. And, for all of Kissinger’s formi-dable intellect, historical insight, and negotiating prowess, that premise was later disproven, or at least rendered premature, in light of America’s un-ipolar pre-eminence from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s. It is at least possible that a more systematic and comprehensive strategic planning process, in-cluding about basic premises and evaluations of rel-ative strengths and vulnerabilities in the Cold War competition along the lines that Eisenhower had led, would have resulted in greater testing and tem-pering of those premises. That was especially the case following Nixon’s resignation, which removed from the calculus his own geopolitical shrewdness

73 Kissinger, White House Years, 30. That view is implied in some of Lord’s insights and prescriptions in his interview with the author. Lord, 2012 interview with the author. See also Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 273, 332.

74 See Kissinger’s essay “Central Issues of American Foreign Policy,” in “Essay by Henry A. Kissinger,” 1969, FRUS, 1969-1976, I, Document 4 (first published in 1968), https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v01/d4; “Background Press Briefing by the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger),” Aug. 14, 1970, FRUS, 1969-1976, I, Document 69, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v01/d69; Kissinger, White House Years, 54–70; Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007), 161–62, 169, 180–81, 199, 225, 236.

75 Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Paperback ed. (New York: Random House Trade 2006), 26–32. In remarks made to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in 1976, Jimmy Carter said, “Our recent foreign policy … has been predicated on a belief that our national and international strength is inevitably deteriorating. I do not accept this premise.” He continued, saying, “détente is under attack today because of the way it has been exploited by the Soviet Union. … [Kissinger] is giving up too much and asking for too little. … To the Soviets, détente is an opportunity to continue the process of world revolution without running the threat of nuclear war.” “Remarks by Jimmy Carter,” March 15, 1976, FRUS, 1977-1980, Vol. I, Foundations of Foreign Policy [hereafter FRUS, 1977–1980, I], Document 4, https://history.state.gov/historicaldoc-uments/frus1977-80v01/d4. In the second presidential debate against Ford, on Oct. 6, 1977, Carter stated that “we’ve become fearful to compete with the Soviet Union on an equal basis. … The Soviet Union knows what they want in détente, and they’ve been getting it. We have not known what we’ve wanted, and we’ve been out-traded in almost every instance.” “Editorial Note,” FRUS, 1977-1980 I, Document 11, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v01/d11. See also Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 307, 319.

76 Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977-1981, rev. ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985), 48–50.

77 See Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington, Political Power: USA/USSR (New York: Viking Books/Compass Press 1965; originally pub-lished 1963/1964); and Justin Vaïsse, Zbigniew Brzezinski: America’s Grand Strategist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 72–73.

78 “Memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Brzezinski) to President Carter,” April 29, 1977, [hereafter “Memo from Brzezinski to Carter”], and excerpts of attached paper prepared by the National Security Council staff, “Paper Prepared by the National Se-curity Council Staff,” in FRUS, 1977-1980, I, Document 36, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v01/d36; Zbigniew Brzezinski, interview with the author, July 7, 2012; and Brzezinski, Power and Principle, 50–57. In his cover memo to Carter conveying the memorandum, Brzez-inski noted that “It is not meant to be a public statement—and its publication or revelation would be counterproductive.” “Memo from Brzezinski to Carter,” FRUS, 1977-1980, I.

and his attention to hard power and to détente as a tactic. By the mid-1970s, the premises underlying Kissinger’s foreign policy had become a political hin-drance for President Gerald Ford. Ronald Reagan, who challenged Ford in the Republican primaries in 1976, criticized Ford and Kissinger’s policy. So did Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter in the general election, with Carter battering Ford and Kissinger’s policy as declinist.75

Strategic Planning Under Carter

Carter entered office prioritizing human rights and arms control, but he had less-defined views regarding the nature of the Soviet threat and the proper balance between competition and coopera-tion in the Cold War.76 His administration did pro-duce a formal, classified national security strategy directive in its first year, and it provides valuable lessons for today.

Carter’s administration followed a two-track ap-proach to strategic planning. Carter’s national se-curity adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, brought on to his staff as his chief strategic planner the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, with whom Brzezinski had co-written a book comparing the United States and the Soviet Union.77 In the first few months of the administration, Brzezinski and his White House staff, including Huntington, pre-pared for the president a lengthy memorandum outlining specific national security policy objec-tives, with the proposed timing for each.78 Both Carter and Brzezinski considered it to be an im-

one area with effort in another, and by pursuing a proactive, not reactive, approach.67

And yet, the Nixon administration did not develop a comprehensive national security strategy docu-ment. At Nixon’s urging, toward the end of his first year in office, Kissinger’s staff sent him a summary of trends in the international environment, drawn from the interagency responses and discussions on the subject that had been one of Kissinger’s re-quested study topics early on.68 But Kissinger and his staff did not then use it as a basis for an overar-ching, classified, internal planning document.

Nixon and Kissinger had agreed even before tak-ing office, however, that they would issue unclassi-fied annual reports on U.S. foreign policy from the White House.69 Kissinger’s staff worked extensive-ly on the first report, which came out just over a year after Nixon took office, and on the ensuing annual iterations. They are thoughtful reviews of international trends and of U.S. policy and were sometimes predictive, dropping hints of policy changes to come. Nixon, Kissinger, and their im-mediate staff placed great importance and priority on the annual reports, and crafted them careful-ly.70 Characteristically, Nixon’s response to a draft

67 Lord, 2012 interview with the author; and Lord, 1998 interview with Kennedy and Bernkopf Tucker, 64–65.

68 “Memorandum From the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon, Analysis of changes in international politics since World War II and their implications for our basic assumptions about U.S. foreign policy” and attached paper, Oct. 20, 1969, FRUS, 1969–1976, I, Document 41, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v01/d41. The cover memo and the paper itself indicate that Nixon had requested such a document earlier that month. In the cover memo, Kissinger noted that “[o]ne of the first studies [his] Staff undertook was a comprehensive review of major trends in international politics” — see National Security Study Memorandum 9 —and that “[p]art of that rather long review was a summary of those trends in the context of the postwar evolution of American foreign policy and the current mood of reassessment,” and added that the attached study paper represented his staff’s interpretation and summary thereof.

69 Kissinger, White House Years, 158–59; “Report by President Nixon to the Congress,” Feb. 18, 1970, FRUS, 1969–1976, I, Document 60, 195, fn. 1; “National Security Study Memorandum 80, The President’s Annual Review of American Foreign Policy,” Oct. 27, 1969, https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibrary/documents/nssm/nssm_080.pdf.

70 “Report by President Nixon to Congress,” Feb. 18, 1970, FRUS, 1969–1976, I, Document 60, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v01/d60. The full text of the report is available at The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-report-the-congress-united-states-foreign-policy-for-the-1970s. Nixon described that first annual report to members of Congress as “the most important statement made by this Administration,” and said that “all our foreign and defense policies had been gathered together in one place.” “Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant (Buchanan) to President Nixon, Notes from Legislative Leadership Meeting,” Feb. 18, 1970, FRUS, 1969–1976, I, Document 59, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v01/d59. See also Lord, 2012 interview with the author; Kissinger, White House Years, 158–59; Lord, 1998 interview with Kennedy and Bernkopf Tucker 54–55, 63, 75; and Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 303.

71 See Nixon’s memo to Kissinger regarding the draft of the first annual report on foreign policy in “Memorandum from President Nixon to His Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger),” Feb. 10, 1970, FRUS, 1969-1976, I, Document 57, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v01/d57. (Nixon wrote, “get back to my theme that the Nixon doctrine rather than being a device to get rid of America’s world role is one which is devised to make it possible for us to play a role—and play it better, more effectively than if we continued the policy of the past in which we assume such a dominant position,” and suggested that Kissinger look at and draw from Nixon’s Air Force Academy speech, as “the tone and strength of that speech on this issue is very much needed.”) Nixon emphasized that basic theme repeatedly in comments after he released the first annual report in February 1970, as Buchanan noted in his memorandum on the legislative leadership meeting: “the President said unless the United States does play a role in the world, if, for example, the United States should return home, the rest of the world in his opinion would come under Communist domination. … The purpose of this foreign policy is to find a way to stay in the world, not a way to get out of the world.”). “Memorandum from the President’s Special Assistant,” Feb. 18, 1970, FRUS, 1969–1976, I. More generally, see comments from Nixon to Kissinger in a meeting on October 12, 1970: “The US—what it will be like for the next 25 years depends on whether we have the guts, the stamina, the wisdom to exert leadership … All right, we will get out of the world. Who is left? The two activists, Russia and Communist China. … We go to the sidelines and there are a couple of big boys out there ready to play—China and Russia.” “Transcript of a Telephone Conversation Between President Nixon and the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger),” Oct. 12, 1970, FRUS, 1969–1976, I, Document 2, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v13/d2.

72 “Memorandum from Under Secretary of State (Richardson) to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), Dec. 5, 1969, FRUS 1969-1976, I, Document 46, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v01/d46; “Memorandum From the Under Secretary of State (Richardson) to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger),” Jan. 22, 1969, FRUS 1969-1976, I, Document 53, https://his-tory.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v01/d53; “Memorandum From Secretary of State Rogers to Nixon,” Dec. 24, 1969, FRUS, 1969-1976, I, Document 48, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v01/d48; Kissinger, White House Years, 158–59; and “National Security Study Memorandum 80.”

of the first annual message was to emphasize that it should convey more forcefully that his policies were aimed at sustaining a strong, enduring Ameri-can presence and influence in the world and a last-ing ability to compete in the Cold War.71

The annual reports did involve some input from the departments and agencies.72 Yet, they did not have as a primary function, and did not achieve, the creation of an overarching strategy that estab-lished fundamental premises regarding the nature of the threat posed by America’s adversaries, the strengths and weaknesses of those adversaries rel-ative to the United States, or the priority objectives and methods by which America could exploit those elements to its advantage. Such honest assess-ments, analysis, and policy direction are essentially impossible in an unclassified document for public consumption. Nor did the annual reports require or involve substantial buy-in and sign-off from the various departments and agencies. That in turn meant that the process of developing the reports did not both empower and constrain the cabinet secretaries and agency heads to follow the direc-tions laid out in the documents with basic unity of effort, as they otherwise might have.

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single, consolidated net assessment report for con-sideration by the National Security Council.85

Huntington’s net assessment has not yet been fully declassified and released, but significant parts of it have been, in final or draft form. It appears to be an extraordinary work, in ambition, scope, and execution.86 It was occasionally given over to ac-ademic, political-science-influenced language and themes — on historical phases of the Cold War, for example — tendencies to which Brzezinski and Kissinger were also prone in their government roles, and that, viewed in retrospect, did not always prove perspicacious or particularly useful. But for the most part the document seems to have been in-sightful and illuminating, dispassionately analyzing relative U.S. and Soviet strengths and weaknesses across a wide range of categories and issues and across different regions of the world. The excerpts quoted here come from several declassified sec-tions of what appears to be a near-final draft that is undated but seems to be from May or June 1977.

Huntington underscored that recent years had seen deteriorating trends in relative U.S. military strength and posture and increased Soviet influ-ence and adventurism in regions around the world, especially in the Third World. In certain hard pow-er and geopolitical metrics, the Soviets had built up considerable momentum, trends that altered the overall Cold War competition in worrisome ways. “The most significant change that has oc-curred in the power relationships between the US and the SU during the past decade has been the growth in Soviet military power in relation to that of the United States,” Huntington wrote.87 He as-sessed that “[t]he probability that the Soviets will take one or more military initiatives during the next eight years is high,” for a number of reasons: The Soviets’ capability to take military initiatives in the Third World was “significantly greater” than it had been; they had “redefined the scope of their

85 Brzezinski, interview with the author, July 7, 2012; Brzezinski, Power and Principle, 75–76, 177; and “Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, with Madeleine K. Albright, Leslie G. Denend, and William Odom,” Feb. 18, 1982, Carter Presidency Project, University of Virginia Miller Center, 2003, 31–32, http://web1.millercenter.org/poh/transcripts/ohp_1982_0218_brzezinski.pdf. (Odom, who assisted Huntington during the process, summarized Brzezinski’s instructions to Huntington as “’Go out and tell us how we’re doing in the world vis-à-vis the Soviet Union,’” and stated that the objective was to construct a “comprehensive net assessment” that encompassed “all the major categories of power.”); and Brian J. Auten, Carter’s Conversion: The Hardening of American Defense Policy (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 156–58.

86 Extensive segments of Huntington’s net assessment report, which appear to be from a close-to-final version that is undated but seems to be from May or June 1977 [hereafter “Draft Net Assessment Report”], are available at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, in National Security Coun-cil Institutional Files, 1977-1981, Box 29, Presidential Review Memorandum/NSC-10, for example. The excerpts quoted here come from that version in that file location. Those segments have been declassified and released and were made available to the author by the Carter Library. The full text of the Huntington net assessment awaits declassification and release. See also Miller Center, “Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,” 31–35, 39–40; and Brzezinski, Power and Principle, 177, on the contents of the Huntington net assessment. In September 1980, Odom summarized the Huntington net assessment and used it to gauge how the administration had done over the intervening period in light of Huntington’s analysis and conclusions and to set out needed adjustments in strategy, in a memorandum to Brzezinski. “Memorandum from William Odom of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Brzezinski),” Sept. 3, 1980, FRUS, 1977-1980, I, Document 156, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v01/d156.

87 “Draft Net Assessment Report,” VI-1.

88 “Draft Net Assessment Report,” IV C-5-6.

89 “Draft Net Assessment Report,” IV A-9.

interests and commitments in Third World areas”; the U.S. military presence in Third World areas had been reduced; “the Soviets could well feel that” U.S. public opinion and legislative restraints inhib-ited any U.S. military response; and the “Soviets may feel it necessary for them ‘to win’ a crisis-con-frontation with the U.S. in order to establish their overall equality with the U.S. as a world power.”88

Huntington looked at the nature of the Soviet system, the motivations and interests of Soviet leaders, and the implications for U.S. strategy with clear eyes. “Soviet leaders do not easily compre-hend the idea of a pluralist world or a balance of power. Their domestic experience encourages them to see an international pecking order.” “The Soviet response to American dominance,” Hunting-ton wrote,

has been a political struggle to overthrow the pecking order and to establish a new subordination, not a new balance. ‘Parity’ is not, from this viewpoint, a cornerstone con-cept for capping the arms race. It is a tactical slogan for an assault on the post-1945 world strategic edifice.89

Huntington’s writing style was more genteel and restrained than that of Kennan, or certainly of Nitze, but his portrayal of what the Soviets were up to and why, and what the implications were for U.S. strategy, were essentially as stark:

If the Soviets choose to view the strategic relationship as a pecking order, American leaders are unwise not to take that into account. ... The Soviet leaders are likely to continue seeking to develop their strength, not only in arms, but across the board in political, economic, and military instrumen-talities. The task for American strategy is to

portant statement of the administration’s aims.79 It was, in essence, exclusively the product of Brzez-inski and his staff.80 Brzezinski later stated that Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Secretary of Defense Harold Brown had seen that memorandum but had not provided signifi-cant input into it or even evinced much interest in that kind of planning.81 In all events, Brzezinski may not have gone out of his way to include the depart-ments and agencies in the development of the docu-ment.82

Brzezinski and his staff also led a more traditional strategic planning process that did involve the departments and agen-cies. Their first step was to prepare a compre-hensive net assessment of the United States and the Soviet Union. In the secret Presidential Re-view Memorandum/NSC-10, “Comprehensive Net Assessment and Military Force Posture Review,” from February 1977, Carter directed that Brzezin-ski would chair an interagency process to develop a “dynamic net assessment” that “will consist of review and comparison of the overall trends in the political, diplomatic, economic, technological, and military capabilities of the United States, its allies, and potential adversaries,” and “will evaluate the

79 Brzezinski, interview with the author, July 7, 2012; and Jimmy Carter, White House Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 45 (quoting diary entry from April 29, 1977: “The National Security Council staff has prepared for me what we call our international goals. This is a good framework around which to build our day-to-day decisions. I think a growing consciousness of these tangible goals will be good to bind us all to-gether in a common effort.”) See also Brzezinski’s memo to Carter from April 1977 (“Memo from Brzezinski to Carter,” FRUS, 1977-1980, I, Document 36); a memo of a meeting with Carter, Vance, Brzezinski, and members of Congress, (“Memorandum for the Record,” Feb. 1, 1977, FRUS, 1977-1980, I, Document 19, 80 and fn. 4, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v01/d19); and Brzezinski, Power and Principle, 50–57.

80 Brzezinski, interview with the author, July 7, 2012. In his cover memo to Carter conveying the memorandum, Brzezinski stated, “The document is not an interagency consensus statement. It was prepared, on the basis of the conceptual framework which you and I have often discussed, by Sam Huntington and myself, with NSC staff inputs.” The cover memo noted that Huntington was also coordinating the PRM/NSC-10 net assessment project, discussed below. “Memo from Brzezinski to Carter,” FRUS, 1977-1980, I, 36. See also Brzezinski, Power and Principle, 50–57.

81 Brzezinski, interview with the author, July 7, 2012.

82 Brzezinski, interview with the author, July 7, 2012. “Let Cy [Vance] assess your more comprehensive goals,” Carter wrote to Brzezinski in July 1977 in response to a later paper from the State Department which set out four-year goals as the State Department saw it, and which Brzezinski had forwarded to Carter. “Memorandum From the Executive Secretary of the Department of State (Tarnoff) to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Brzezinski),” June 28, 1877, FRUS, 1977-1980, I, 199, fn. 1, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v01/d47.

83 “Presidential Review Memorandum/NSC-10, Comprehensive Net Assessment and Military Force Posture Review,” The White House, Feb. 18, 1977, [hereafter “PRM/NSC-10”], https://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/assets/documents/memorandums/prm10.pdf.

84 See “PRM/NSC-10 Comprehensive Net Assessment Organization,” undated, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP-83M00171R001200160001-7.pdf, listing the members of the Net Assessment Group and Net Assessment Working Group, and setting out the 11 interagency task forces and their chairs, available at the CIA Electronic Reading Room; Edward C. Keefer, Harold Brown: Offsetting the Soviet Military Challenge, 1977-1981, Secretaries of Defense Historical Series, Vol. IX (Washington, DC: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2017), 132–37; Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts, The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 130–36; and Andrew W. Marshall, oral history interview with Alfred Goldberg and Maurice Matloff, Office of the Secretary of Defense, June 29, 1992, 1–2, https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/oral_history/OH_Trans_MARSHALL Andrew 06-29-92.pdf?ver=2018-04-10-070002-393. (Marshall stating that “We … got involved in one part of the PRM-10 activity. There were two parts, one run by Huntington and Odom, out of the NSC staff, and my office was the principal contributor from Defense because they were trying to replicate at another level a broad assessment of the world situation and major trends.”).

objectives and national strategies that may be pur-sued by our principal potential adversaries and ex-amine the alternative national objectives and strat-egies appropriate to the United States.”83

Brzezinski and his staff established interagency task forces to oversee what ultimately became 11 preparatory studies on specific functional and re-gional areas to provide analysis and data for the net assessment. The head of the Defense Depart-ment’s Office of Net Assessment, Andrew W. Mar-shall, played an important role supporting the de-velopment of the net assessment, as did a number of intelligence officials.84 That interagency work ultimately produced a number of written reports covering specific issue areas. Drawing on all of that background and input, Huntington then drafted a

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…. All-in-all, American political institutions seem to be emerging from a time of troubles, while Soviet political institutions are possi-bly entering one.97

Sorting through the various critical regions of the world, Huntington zeroed in on Iran as a country of long-term importance and short-term vulnerability for American interests and the leading potential ge-ostrategic flash point in the coming years, and on the Middle East more broadly. In doing so, he fore-shadowed what would become the Carter Doctrine three years later.98

Huntington reached the following conclusion of his net assessment:

In sum, a rough overall equivalence exists in military capabilities. The US remains sig-nificantly ahead of the Soviet Union in most non-military aspects of national power, in-cluding economic resources and productive capability, technology, stability and respon-siveness of political institutions, diplomatic support and access in most regions of the world, and overall political action, informa-tion, and ideological warfare capabilities.

“The present US overall competitive advantage, however,” Huntington noted,

must also be assessed against the dynam-ics of present and foreseeable change. The trends have been favorable to the Soviet Union or against the US in a number of key areas: strategic forces, conventional forces in Europe, mobilization and force projection capabilities, short-run economic interaction payoffs, [redacted] and diplomatic relation-ships, especially in Africa and Latin America. In others, including intelligence capabilities

97 “Draft Net Assessment Report,” VI-4-5.

98 See also “Memorandum from William Odom of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Brzezinski),” Jan. 18, 1980, FRUS, 1977-1980, Volume XI, Part 1, Iran: Hostage Crisis, November 1979 – December 1980, Document 156, 412, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v11p1/d156 (noting the prescience of Huntington’s paper as the administration faced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the crises in Iran).

99 “Draft Net Assessment Report,” VI-6, 7.

100 “Draft Net Assessment Report,” IV A-13.

101 See Brzezinski, Power and Principle, 177; “Meeting of the Special Coordination Committee, July 7, 1977, Summary of Conclusions,” regarding PRM/NSC-10 Comprehensive Net Assessment, 1-3, in folder SCC 020 – US – USSR Strategic Capabilities and PRM-10, 7/7/77; and “Memorandum to the Special Coordinating Committee from Christine Dodson, NSC Staff Secretary, Aug. 2, 1977,” in advance of SCC Meeting on Aug. 4, 1977, regarding PRM/NSC-10, in folder SCC 024 – PRM 10, 8/4/77, both from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, National Security Council Institutional Files, 1977-1981, Box 87.

102 “I do not think the study provides the basis for a selection of an overall integrated military strategy at this time.” Memorandum from Brown to, inter alia, Brzezinski and Vance, June 6, 1977, “Subject: PRM – 10 Force Posture Study,” 1, with attached agenda for discussion, and attached “PRM/NSC-10 Military Strategy and Force Posture Review Final Report,” available from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, https://www.jimmy-carterlibrary.gov/assets/documents/memorandums/prm10.pdf. See also Keefer, Harold Brown, 120–33, 137; and Auten, Carter’s Conversion, 160.

103 “Memorandum: Presidential Directive/NSC-18, U.S. National Security Strategy,” Aug. 26, 1977, from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, https://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/assets/documents/directives/pd18.pdf.

and core alliance relationships, the trends have been mixed. Trends favorable to the United States occur principally in political capabilities (political institutions and capac-ities for PIA) and in economic productivity.99

The overall net assessment indicating the follow-ing, Huntington reasoned: cooperation will remain limited; misunderstandings will persist on many key issues; and competition will predominate.100

Huntington’s net assessment served as one of the bases for ensuing discussions within Carter’s National Security Council, from which emerged the administration’s classified written national security strategy.101 Another planned input in that process was a review of possible defense strategy alternatives led by the Defense Department. But mismanagement of the conceptualization and or-ganization of that study by civilian policy officials in the department resulted in a document that was essentially useless for that purpose, as even Brown conceded.102

The top-secret written national security strategy that ultimately emerged from the National Security Council discussions was extremely short, at only five pages.103 As a strategy, it was vague and sub-ject to a wide variance in interpretation. It mostly glossed over the sensitive and perceptive compar-ative analysis that Huntington had developed and provided little guidance as to U.S. objectives and the means to achieve them.

The document stated that “US-Soviet relations will continue to be characterized by both compe-tition and cooperation.” It did capture important themes from the net assessment in noting that in the competition, “military aspects aside, the Unit-ed States continues to enjoy a number of critical advantages: it has a more creative technological and economic system, its political structure can adapt more easily to popular demands and relies

cope with this competition in its full scope rather than to view it narrowly as a military and military-technical issue.90

Huntington sought to dispel what he saw as illu-sions in U.S. policy, and to grapple with the impli-cations for U.S. policy of the Soviets’ own approach to the Cold War. Regarding arms control, for exam-ple, Huntington wrote: “it looks doubtful in retro-spect that Western strategists have ‘raised the So-viet learning curve’ on matters of nuclear warfare in the sense they have sometimes believed. The Soviet side has never lost sight of the essentially political character of both military force posture and arms negotiations.”91 “American negotiation success,” he wrote, “will depend on being more adept at exploiting Soviet weaknesses, at putting the Soviets on the defensive diplomatically.”92

Huntington delved into an analysis of relative Soviet weaknesses, including economic and tech-nological vulnerabilities relative to the position of the United States:

The slowdown in the Soviet economy and its weakness in competing with the West is due in large part to the political choices made long ago by Soviet leaders and tena-ciously upheld today. The Soviet command economy may be inefficient, but it reserves the structural allocation decisions for the top leadership. The leadership’s continuing preference for heavy industry and military might has led to an enormous military bur-den, far greater than has normally been real-ized in the West.

“Unable or unwilling to cope with economic problems through domestic reform,” Huntington continued, “the Soviet leadership has turned to the alternative of importing more advanced technolo-gy. In other words, the present Soviet trade policy is aimed at avoiding systemic reform not at achiev-ing reform.”93

90 “Draft Net Assessment Report,” IV A-13-14.

91 “Draft Net Assessment Report,” IV A-13.

92 “Draft Net Assessment Report,” IV F-6.

93 “Draft Net Assessment Report,” IV E-11. See also IV E-1, where the report states, “The apparent goal of the Soviet economic strategy … is to open Western sources of technology and to draw on them in order to catch up with Western levels of … productivity and to perk up the nodding Soviet growth rate. On the economic front, accordingly, the Soviet Union has emphasized cooperation that facilitates East-West trade.”

94 “Draft Net Assessment Report,” IV E-7, 8. “In the short run, it is in the economic sphere that Soviet alliance calculations will become more complex and subject to risk. … [G]iven its goals in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union has few real alternatives. … A longer-range dilemma for the Soviet Union is how to allow national solutions without ultimately encouraging nationalist challenges to Soviet political and ideological control.” See pages IV D-15, 17, 19. Huntington described a number of negative trends, including that of “a ‘one-way-street’ in transfers of technology and capital to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,” and said, “The degree of risk involved in these trends must be estimated in terms of individual and culmulative [sic] impacts and the significance of each area in the implementation of a national strategy.” See page VI-7.

95 “Draft Net Assessment Report,” IV E-13.

96 “Draft Net Assessment Report,” IV E-13.

Huntington expressed skepticism and wariness of advocates for expanded U.S. (and Western) eco-nomic ties with the Soviet Union. “[T]he profit made by the firm which executed the sale of a tech-nology” had to be weighed against playing into the Soviets’ attempts to solve their manifest economic and technological weaknesses: their inherent in-efficiencies and flaws; the constraints on growth imposed by massive military spending; and the in-creasing drain on Soviet resources posed by Sovi-et client states, which itself posed significant risks and threats to the Soviets in coming years.94

More broadly, Huntington assessed, “[i]n the economic competition, most factors favor the US. The difficult choices face the Soviet Union,” such as “How to avoid giving up military programs? How to respond to the economic realities of East Eu-rope?”95 Huntington again pointed to the implica-tions for U.S. policy, emphasizing the benefits of a competition-based U.S. approach and the strategic error of an overly cooperative policy: “Astute Amer-ican appraisals of the level of Soviet discomfort can provide occasional opportunities for nudging the USSR into more cooperative behavior toward the West,” whereas “US neglect of its competitive opportunities may allow the Soviet leadership to postpone or escape growing constraints on its ca-pability to compete.”96

Moving to an analysis of relative political insti-tutions, Huntington underscored that U.S. political institutions “have successfully emerged from a try-ing decade which involved racial problems, student upheavals, an unwinnable war, and a constitution-al crisis.” He highlighted the U.S. political system’s “adaptability.” In contrast:

Soviet political institutions confront seri-ous problems caused by unfavorable de-mographic trends, economic slowdown, an inefficient agricultural sector, nationality aspirations, and intellectual dissidence. During the coming decade, the Soviet sys-tem will also confront a succession struggle

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on freely given popular support, and it is supported internationally by allies and friends who genuinely share similar aspirations.” In contrast, “though successfully acquiring military power matching that of the United States,” the Soviet Union “con-tinues to face major internal economic and nation-al difficulties, and externally it has few genuinely committed allies.” “In this situation,” the strategy continued, “I direct that US national strategy will be to take advantage of our relative advantages in economic strength, technological superiority, and popular political support.”

Yet, it then listed five short objec-tives that gave only the scantest di-rection and no prioritization: 1) “[c]ounterbalanc[ing]” Soviet power and influence “in key areas, particular-ly Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia”; 2) competing politically with the Soviet Union “by pursuing the ba-sic American commitment to human rights and national independence”; 3) seeking Soviet cooperation in re-solving regional conflicts and reduc-ing areas of tension; 4) pursuing arms control and disarmament negotiations; and 5) “seek[ing] to involve the Soviet Union constructively in global activities.” The United States would also “maintain an overall balance of military power … at least as favorable as that that now exists.”104

The vagueness and lack of prioritization or di-rection of the national security strategy may have resulted from a wide variance in the views among Carter’s principal advisers and a need to capture an approach that could garner agreement among them easily enough. Brzezinski and Huntington were more attentive to and concerned with the ad-versarial nature of the Cold War, the need for the United States to pursue a primarily competitive approach, and the importance of hard power than was Secretary of State Vance, who emphasized co-

104 “Presidential Directive/NSC-18, U.S. National Security Strategy,” 1–2. Nearly two pages from the ensuing military strategy part of the docu-ment are still redacted — they appear to address U.S. military strategy in Europe, among other issues.

105 Brzezinski noted in his memoirs that “[t]he interagency debate over the PD-18 draft revealed a sharp dispute within the Administration about the implications of PRM-10.” “One side,” Brzezinski stated, “preferred to limit our strategic forces to an assured destruction capability and to consider reducing our forces in Europe and Korea. The Indian Ocean-Persian Gulf region was to be addressed through arms control efforts with the Soviets.” Brzezinski continued that the “other side, on which I found myself, pointed to the momentum and character of Soviet military programs, the vulnerability of the oil-rich region around the Persian Gulf, and the growing Soviet projection of power” in regions around the world. Brzezinski noted that the resultant national security strategy reflected a series of compromises, although it also gave him “additional arguments” on various U.S.-Soviet issues. Brzezinski, Power and Principle, 177–78.

106 Keefer, Harold Brown, 135–37; and Auten, Carter’s Conversion, 162–68.

107 Brzezinski, Power and Principle, 13, 29–31, 42–48, 177–78. Indicative of the ongoing battles were: an extraordinary memorandum from Brzezinski to Carter on Feb. 9, 1978, in which Brzezinski warned of negative Cold War trends in Western Europe and in the Third World and stated that “[t]he cumulative effect of these trends could be very serious internationally and then domestically,” and that “[b]y the fall we could be under attack for having presided over a grave deterioration in the U.S. global position,” (“Memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Brzezinski to President Carter,” Feb. 9, 1978, FRUS, 1977-1980, I, Document 68, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v01/d68); and a letter from Vance to Carter on May 29, 1978, setting out his own views and expressing clear frustration with Brzezinski’s hardline public and internal positions and declarations (“Letter from Secretary of State Vance to President Carter,” May 29, 1978, FRUS, 1977-1980, I, Docu-ment 82, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v01/d82).

operation with the Soviet Union, as well as a focus on transnational issues.105 It also may have been due to the competing instincts of Carter himself, whose worldview encompassed elements of both outlooks and, early on at least, resolved clearly in favor of neither. Perhaps Brzezinski and his White House staff saw some advantage, tactical or other-wise, in keeping the document brief and general, or perhaps they simply preferred it that way. Yet the upshot was that while the document started from a premise of competition, its goals seemed just as weighted toward cooperation, and overall it avoid-

ed specificity, prioritization, or guidance, giving encouragement and justification to both factions.106

Over the next two years, the Carter administra-tion struggled to pursue a clear, proactive line of foreign and defense policy, with Vance and Cart-er himself often favoring a focus on negotiations and restraint and Brzezinski warning, with growing concern and intensity, that they were neglecting the competitive nature of the Cold War and los-ing public and international support along the way. Brown increasingly sided with Brzezinski.107 The period also saw the further deterioration in many of the trends that Huntington had already identi-fied in the net assessment — growing Soviet mili-tary buildup and geopolitical adventurism, embod-ied by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — and a crisis and subsequently a series of debacles in Iran.

The last two years of Carter’s term saw the United States swerve toward a more combative posture in the Cold War, featuring increased defense budgets, aid to the Afghan resistance, and the announcement of the Carter Doctrine aimed at heading off Soviet advances toward the Middle East.108 In the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter famously declared, “My opinion of the Russians has changed most [more] drastically in the last week than even the previous two and one-half years before that.”109

One of the tragedies of the Carter years was that an appropriately balanced, consistent, competi-tion-oriented approach toward the Cold War could have guided the administration from the start. That would have only required following through on an-alytical work — and the competitive implications that flowed from it — that had already been done, and prioritizing it in the written national security strategy document, even if that had meant appre-hending, forcing, and resolving some intra-admin-istration disputes at the front end.

Strategic Planning Under Reagan

Perhaps no administration’s national security strategic planning has been as underappreciated as that of the Reagan administration, although it got off to a late start. Ronald Reagan, wary of the ten-sions between the White House and the cabinet de-partments that had characterized U.S. foreign and defense policy under Nixon and Carter, had initial-ly downgraded the role of national security adviser. That experiment was short-lived and has not been repeated since. Secretary of State Alexander Haig clashed constantly with the White House and other cabinet secretaries and agency heads on both sub-stance and process. Reagan’s national security ad-

108 Odom, who served on Brzezinski’s staff as Carter’s military assistant and had worked closely with Huntington on the net assessment, later stated that in 1977 and in 1978 the State Department in particular, and sometimes the Defense Department, “launched vigorously off in other policy directions than PRM 10 seemed to justify,” and that were, in Odom’s eyes, “self-defeating” in light of the findings and implications of the net as-sessment. For the ensuing two years, “based on the kind of analyses we had done in PRM 10, we [Brzezinski and his White House staff] had to work slowly to try to bring the realities to the eyes of the President, the eyes of the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and make them realize that we had to tackle some of these policies from very fundamentally different directions.” “[T]here was a lot of tension,” Odom said. “We wouldn’t have had a case without the earlier analysis.” Miller Center, “Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,” 34–35, 39. Odom said that he had tried “to understand the differences of view that beset us in the Carter Administration,” and that it eventually seemed to him that “we split over whether or not the Soviet Union was a status quo power.” Brzezinski and he thought not, that “[t]he power balance had shifted; if anything, the competition was going to be tougher; the possibility of maintaining the post-World War II international order essentially unaltered was going to be a much larger, more challenging task,” whereas others “seemed to believe that the U.S.S.R. was becoming benign and status quo, and accepting the international order.” Miller Center, “Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,” 56. Auten, in Carter’s Conversion, and Keefer, in Harold Brown, discuss the administration’s policy shifts over the four years in detail, as does Brzezinski in his memoirs, Power and Principle.

109 See Carter’s interview with Frank Reynolds at ABC News, in “Editorial Note,” Dec. 31, 1979, FRUS, 1977-1980, I, Document 133, https://histo-ry.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v01/d133.

110 Lettow, Ronald Reagan, 42–47, 60–64.

111 Lettow, Ronald Reagan, 1–80. The Clark quote is from an interview with the author, Aug. 1, 2001.

112 “National Security Study Directive 1-82, U.S. National Security Strategy,” The White House, Feb. 5, 1982, from the Ronald Reagan Presiden-tial Library, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/public/archives/reference/scanned-nssds/nssd1-82.pdf.

113 Lettow, Ronald Reagan, 61–70.

viser was unable to coordinate the interagency pro-cess and establish guidance with any effectiveness. At the end of his first year, Reagan replaced his na-tional security adviser, restored the role to its cen-tral coordinating function, and within six months also replaced Haig with George Shultz.110

At Reagan’s direction, the new national security adviser, William Clark, and his deputy, Robert “Bud” McFarlane, immediately established a rigorous stra-tegic planning process. Reagan perceived not just that the Soviet Union was overstretched but also that its internal system was vulnerable economically and technologically. He emphasized that the United States could and should exploit those vulnerabilities and pursue a competitive strategy that took the in-itiative and played to U.S. strengths. Clark and Mc-Farlane intended that the strategic planning process should “reduc[e] to careful writing” the president’s views and set out a comprehensive strategic frame-work to guide the prioritization and execution of the administration’s approach.111

Reagan signed a directive instructing his ad-ministration to develop an overarching strategic framework. The first step was to produce an ex-tended study paper that identified fundamental U.S. national security objectives and set out a stra-tegic rationale and agenda to guide all aspects of U.S. national security policy. The second was to incorporate the findings of the study in a single na-tional security strategy directive.112 The extended study was conducted by an interagency group, but it was chaired and directed by Clark’s White House staff. Reagan played an active role in the process, reviewing and commenting on draft segments and sometimes, Clark later noted, sending them “back to the drawing board.”113

The review process resulted in a top secret, 87-

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page study paper, titled “U.S. National Security Strategy.”114 The study was divided into three parts. The first section provided an analysis of the nature of the U.S.-Soviet competition and the internation-al environment and a statement of U.S. objectives. The second section directed that those objectives had to be attained through an “interlocking” set of diplomatic, information, politico-economic, and military strategies. And the final section set out in detail a military strategy in pursuit of the adminis-tration’s objectives.115

The study paper focused on identifying the threats posed by the Soviet Union and the rela-tive U.S. and Soviet strengths and weaknesses. It was ruthless in specifying and prioritizing U.S. policy approaches that sought to exploit America’s strengths in peaceful competition over the long haul. For example, the military strategy compo-nent of the study noted that the Soviets “face se-vere economic problems” and “a bleak economic outlook” and that “[l]iving standards in the USSR will probably stagnate owing to the growing de-fense burden and inefficient investment practices. As Soviet citizens perceive a decline in the qual-ity of life, productivity growth will also decline,” forcing Moscow to “make difficult choices among priorities.” “[I]t will become increasingly difficult for the Soviets to sustain their military buildup as their economic growth slows.”116 Noting “contin-uing [Soviet] difficulties in introducing new tech-nology,” and also the need for a sustainable U.S. military force and budget, the paper emphasized exploiting “our national genius for technological innovation and industrial efficiency, and in our al-liances.”117 A principal theme of the study was that perceived advantages in various specific spheres of the Cold War — military, economic, technological, ideological — translated into expanded influence and freedom of action in the overall U.S.-Soviet competition. Thus, it underscored the need for America to seek and exploit opportunities to bol-ster its standing in those areas that most worked to its strengths, while shoring up relative weaknesses

114 “U.S. National Security Strategy,” Study Paper, April 1982, Records Declassified and Released by the National Security Council, Series III., Related Documents, Subseries B, System II, Box 4, 90283 (NSDD 32), Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

115 “U.S. National Security Strategy,” Study Paper.

116 “U.S. National Security Strategy,” Study Paper, 2, 9, 13.

117 “U.S. National Security Strategy,” Study Paper, 73.

118 “U.S. National Security Strategy,” Study Paper, 5.

119 Lettow, Ronald Reagan, 68. The Clark quote is from an interview with the author, Aug. 1, 2001.

120 “National Security Decision Directive 32, U.S. National Security Strategy,” The White House, May 20, 1982, from the Ronald Reagan Presiden-tial Library, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/public/archives/reference/scanned-nsdds/nsdd32.pdf.

121 “National Security Decision Directive 32,” 1.

122 “National Security Decision Directive 32,” 1–8.

123 “National Security Decision Directive 32.”

where it could.The underlying analysis in the study established

a foundation for the stated U.S. national security objectives. Those were forward-leaning and aimed at Soviet vulnerabilities. One of them was:

To foster, if possible in concert with our al-lies, restraint in Soviet military spending, discourage Soviet adventurism, and weak-en the Soviet alliance system by forcing the USSR to bear the brunt of its economic shortcomings, and to encourage long-term liberalizing and nationalist tendencies with-in the Soviet Union and allied countries.118

The National Security Council took up the study paper for consideration and discussion. Clark lat-er noted that the objective of pressuring the inter-nal Soviet system “didn’t have a lot of support” from State Department officials, including Haig — who was about to be supplanted by Shultz in any event — but the president and other senior officials strongly supported it. It stayed in the document amid the debates within the National Security Council.119

Reagan approved the study in full and formally adopted it as the foundation of foreign and defense policy in a top secret directive.120 That national se-curity strategy directive stated in the presidential first person that “I have carefully reviewed the NSSD 1-82 study in its component parts, consid-ered the final recommendations of the National Security Council, and direct that the study serve as guidance for U.S. National Security Strategy.”121 The document listed the “global objectives” out-lined in the study, summarized the rest of the study, and included the study in its entirety as an attachment.122 The national security strategy direc-tive itself made clear that it was the beginning, not the end, of the administration’s strategic planning. Additional classified strategies on specific issues and regions were to follow.123

Clark then delivered what was for him a rare

speech. He described in broad terms that the ad-ministration had undertaken a process to “review the results of [the] first year with decisions often being made at the departmental level, to see where we were, to make sure our various policies were consistent, and to set the course for the future” by a “well-thought through and integrated strategy.” Unsurprisingly, Clark did not spell out all of the specific objectives in the national security strategy. But he did note that the administration would be prepared “to respond vigorously to opportunities as they arise and to create opportunities where they have not existed before.” And, echoing the presi-dent’s rhetoric while capturing the direction of the strategy, Clark emphasized “our fondest hope that with an active yet prudent national security policy, we might one day convince the leadership of the Soviet Union to turn their attention inward, to seek the legitimacy that only comes from the consent of the governed, and thus to address the hopes and dreams of their own people.”124

The national security strategy codified a sin-gle, unifying framework. It established objectives that the United States would work peacefully to reverse the spread of Soviet influence and to pres-sure the Soviet system so as to leave internal re-form as the Soviet leaders’ best, or only, option. It also catalyzed a period of intensive strategic plan-ning within the Reagan administration across a range of issues: Over the ensuing year, the admin-istration issued 75 national security directives, many of them establishing follow-on regional and functional strategies.125

One of these strategies was specifically on Amer-ica’s policy toward the Soviet Union, building upon the premises and guidance set out in the national security strategy study and directive. The White House stated that the development of that strategy directive was to “proceed on the premise that So-viet international behavior is determined not only by the external environment but also by political, economic, and social and ideological features of the Soviet system itself.”126 The White House mandat-ed that the review process that would develop the

124 Clark, “National Security Strategy,” address before the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, May 21, 1982, in American Foreign Policy Current Documents, 1982 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 1985), 89–91, 93.

125 Lettow, Ronald Reagan, 70.

126 “National Security Study Directive 11-82, U.S. Policy Toward the Soviet Union,” The White House, Aug. 21, 1982, 1, from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/public/archives/reference/scanned-nssds/nssd11-82.pdf.

127 “National Security Study Directive 11-82, U.S. Policy Toward the Soviet Union,” 1–3.

128 Lettow, Ronald Reagan, 76-80.

129 “National Security Decision Directive 75, U.S. Relations with the USSR,” [hereafter NSDD 75] The White House, Jan. 7, 1983, 1, from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/public/archives/reference/scanned-nsdds/nsdd75.pdf.

130 “NSDD 75,” 1.

131 “NSDD 75,” 1.

directive should encompass, among other things, the likelihood of changes in the Soviet system, the sources of tensions and strains within that system, as well as the bases for continuity, and how “the Unit-ed States, its Allies and other mobilizable forces” could “influence the evolution of Soviet policies and the Soviet regime in directions favorable to our interests.”127

While the State Department chaired the intera-gency group that produced the resultant strategy directive, Clark directed the overall process. The strategy directive itself was largely drafted by Rich-ard Pipes, the Harvard historian of Russian and Soviet history, then serving Reagan and Clark as senior director for Soviet and European affairs.128

The strategy directive on U.S. relations with the Soviet Union flowed from the prior national secu-rity strategy. The directive stated that U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union would consist of three elements. The first was to “contain and over time reverse Soviet expansionism by competing effec-tively on a sustained basis with the Soviet Union in all international arenas—particularly in the overall military balance and in geographical re-gions of priority concern to the United States.”129 The second was:

To promote, within the narrow limits availa-ble to us, the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system in which the power of the privileged ruling elite is gradually reduced. The U.S. recognizes that Soviet aggressive-ness has deep roots in the internal system, and that relations with the USSR should therefore take into account whether or not they help to strengthen this system and its capacity to engage in aggression.130

The third was to “engage the Soviet Union in ne-gotiations to attempt to reach agreements which protect and enhance U.S. interests and which are consistent with the principle of strict reciprocity and mutual interest.”131

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The strategy directive emphasized that “[i]mple-mentation of U.S. policy must focus on shaping the environment in which Soviet decisions are made both in a wide variety of functional and geopolitical arenas and in the U.S.-Soviet bilateral relation-ship.”132 It laid out the means by which the Unit-ed States would seek to influence the factors that could impel Soviet policy toward directions more favorable to U.S. interests. It established objectives across U.S. military strategy, economic policy, po-litical action, geopolitical strategy, and bilateral re-lations.133 For example, it stipulated that the United States would pursue “a major ideological political offensive, which, together with other efforts, will be designed to bring about evolutionary change of the Soviet system.”134 The strategy directive estab-lished some specific steps to be taken toward each objective, but did not attempt to catalogue them.

The strategy directive, as assertive as it was, was intended to be sustainable. It stated that the “in-terrelated tasks of containing and reversing Sovi-et expansion and promoting evolutionary change within the Soviet Union itself cannot be accom-plished quickly,” and that the policy it set forth “is one for the long haul.”135

While Pipes was the primary drafter of the strat-egy toward the Soviet Union, the interagency nature of its development meant that the various depart-ments and agencies weighed in at the front end, and thus bought into and were constrained by the out-come. The State Department, for example, sought to mitigate the objective of putting pressure on the internal Soviet system, succeeding in inserting the phrase “within the narrow limits available to us” in the block quote above. But it did not attempt to turn away from that objective overall, which in any event had been set in the earlier national security strategy and was accepted — even underscored — by Reagan and the rest of the National Security Council. The final draft of the directive met with little objection when the council took up it up for consideration. Reagan approved it as a formal, secret directive to guide U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union.136

Through the formal strategic planning process that had produced the national security strategy

132 “NSDD 75,” 2.

133 “NSDD 75,” 2–9.

134 “NSDD 75,” 8.

135 “NSDD 75,” 6, 8.

136 Lettow, Ronald Reagan, 78–80.

137 Lettow, Ronald Reagan, 88–89, 126–29. The McFarlane quotes are from an interview with the author, Aug. 22, 2000.

138 “National Security Decision Directive 238, Basic National Security Strategy,” [hereafter NSDD 238] Sept. 2, 1986, from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/public/archives/reference/scanned-nsdds/nsdd238.pdf.

139 NSDD 238, 3.

140 NSDD 238, 5–6.

and the ensuing follow-on strategies, Reagan and his National Security Council had collectively al-lowed themselves flexibility in pursuing specific foreign and defense policies, but left little doubt about the premises and objectives that would guide those policies, which were both coherent and particularly assertive.

McFarlane, who had played an important role in coordinating the strategic planning process as Clark’s deputy and then succeeded him as Reagan’s national security adviser, later stated: “We had a policy, written down, that said, ‘I am the president and I want to challenge the Soviet Union political-ly, economically, and militarily.’ That does tend to have an effect on the Cabinet and on subordinates, as it should.” McFarlane added that “the devel-opment of programs from that leitmotif, included programs on arms control and human rights and regional disagreements … and bilateral issues.” All of those, McFarlane continued, “contained—well, ‘aggressive’ has a legal connotation to it I don’t in-tend, but an enthusiastic, energetic, competitive content. Not a placid, passive content, but compet-itive. For example, the economic policies were spe-cifically designed to weaken the Soviet economy and to do so in any way we could think of within le-gal and moral bounds.” McFarlane concluded: “We established a policy framework that directed us to explore ways to compete more energetically.”137

Like the Eisenhower administration, the Reagan administration also reassessed and refined its na-tional security strategy over time. In September 1986, for example, a year and a half after Gorbachev had taken power in the Soviet Union and nearly a year after Reagan and Gorbachev had met at the Geneva summit, the Reagan administration updat-ed its classified national security strategy.138 The updated strategy noted that the “Gorbachev lead-ership is more vigorous and dynamic than its pre-decessors” and that “the potential now exists for more creative and energized Soviet foreign policies inimical to U.S. interests.”139 It retained the same basic objectives as the earlier version.140 The strat-egy remained intensely assertive and consistent with the earlier version in its aims: “the greatest

threat to the Soviet system, in which the State con-trols the destiny of the individual, is the concept of freedom itself,” it stated, and “[w]hile we will seek and experience periods of cooperation with Soviet leadership, there will be no change in the funda-mentally competitive nature of our relationship un-less and until a change occurs in the nature of the Soviet system.”141 Again, the strategy focused on ex-ploiting comparative U.S. advantages in high tech-nology to press U.S. strengths, channel the military and economic competition into areas that favored the United States and could prove sustainable, and to undermine the Soviets at their weakest points and force them toward options — reducing Soviet defense spending and pursuing internal change — in line with U.S. interests. This time, the strategy was aided by the Reagan administration’s pursuit of the Strategic Defense Initiative missile defense research and development program, announced in 1983, which Reagan knew to be a source of enor-mous military, technological, and economic anxiety and concern for Gorbachev.142 The United States, the document noted, “must pursue strategies for competition which emphasize our comparative ad-vantages in these areas.”143

The updated Reagan strategy is also noteworthy for its concise statement of the imperative to avoid direct U.S. military engagements that could result in a quagmire and dissipate U.S. strength:

In a conflict not involving the Soviet Union, the United States will rely primarily on in-digenous forces to protect their own inter-ests. Commitment of U.S. combat forces will be made only when other means are not considered viable. Such commitment is appropriate only if political objectives are established, our political will is clear, and appropriate military capabilities are availa-ble. If U.S. combat forces are committed, the United States will seek to limit the scope of the conflict, avoid involvement of the Soviet

141 NSDD 238, 4, 5.

142 NSDD 238, 7; and Lettow, Ronald Reagan, 122–248.

143 NSDD 238, 7, 9.

144 NSDD 238, 16.

145 Brent Scowcroft, interview with the author, Aug. 1, 2012; and George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Vintage Books 1999), 37–41.

146 Scowcroft, interview with the author, Aug. 1, 2012; and Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 37–41.

147 See “National Security Review-3, Comprehensive Review of US-Soviet Relations,” [hereafter “NSR-3”] The White House, Feb. 15, 1989, from the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/nsr/nsr3.pdf; “National Security Review-4, Comprehensive Review of US-East European Relations,” The White House, Feb. 15, 1989, from the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/nsr/nsr4.pdf; “National Security Review-5, Comprehensive Review of US-West European Relations,” The White House, Feb. 15, 1989, from the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/nsr/nsr5.pdf; and “National Security Review-10, U.S. Policy Toward the Persian Gulf,” The White House, Feb. 22, 1989, from the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/nsr/nsr10.pdf.

148 NSR-3, 1. In the presidential first person, Bush continued: “My own sense is that the Soviet challenge may be even greater than before because it is more varied.”

Union, and ensure that U.S. objectives are met as quickly as possible.144

Strategic Planning Under George H. W. Bush

Brent Scowcroft, George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser, later expressed disappointment with the efforts at strategic planning that he had led in 1989, the administration’s first year.145 In some respects, his assessment was too modest, be-cause despite the results of the strategic planning process being underwhelming, the process itself did produce useful effects.

With Bush’s agreement, Scowcroft conducted an interagency review of policy that was intended to generate new strategies to underpin the adminis-tration’s foreign and defense policies. Scowcroft was motivated, in part, by a desire to ensure that the Bush team considered and shaped its own pol-icies, rather than simply continuing without reap-praisal the approaches of the Reagan administra-tion.146 The White House accordingly requested a series of formal interagency studies, including re-views of U.S. relations with the Soviet Union, East-ern Europe, and Western Europe, and America’s policy toward the Persian Gulf.147

The classified directives requesting the studies were themselves insightful and probing. The se-cret four-page document directing the review of U.S.-Soviet relations noted the potential for enor-mous positive alterations in the relationship, giv-en changes occurring within the Soviet Union and shifts in its control over Soviet satellites. But it also expressed wariness: “the USSR remains an adver-sary with awesome military power whose interests conflict in important ways with our own. The Soviet Union already presents a new and complicated po-litical challenge to us in Europe and elsewhere.”148 The directive sought a study of Soviet policy objec-tives, assessments of the Soviet internal situation and foreign and military policies, and a review of the sources of U.S. leverage over the Soviet Union

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and potential policy alternatives newly available to the United States.149

The administration had announced in broad terms that it was pursuing a policy review and analysis, creating public interest in the classified, internal process. That was especially so given the quickening pace of events unfolding in Eastern Europe and within the Soviet Union, including the loosening grip of communist control over Warsaw Pact countries, the potential perils of possible re-sponses from Moscow and the satellite govern-ments, and the enormous geopolitical ramifica-tions for the United States.150

The review process was hampered from the start by the fact that it occurred before the administra-tion was sufficiently staffed with its own new ap-pointees. The Defense Department, for example, did not have a confirmed secretary in place for two months, so the initial taskings for the reviews were handled without the attention and leadership from the top that they might otherwise have re-ceived. Nor did other departments evidently give the studies the priority that Scowcroft had intend-ed.151 In all events, Scowcroft later characterized the reviews that resulted from the interagency pro-cess as unimaginative, effectively reiterating past approaches, and he expressed some regret that he had not delved into and directed how and by whom they were prepared. Especially disappointed with the proposed strategy on U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union, Scowcroft called for a re-do, turning the assignment over to his White House staff ad-viser for Soviet affairs, Condoleezza Rice, who then drafted what became the administration’s strategy directive on Soviet policy.152

Despite these disappointments, the interagency review process did ultimately contribute to the ad-ministration’s national security successes. In con-

149 NSR-3, 2–4.

150 Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Ear: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983-1991, rev. ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hop-kins University Press, 1998), 332–34, 347, 349.

151 Senior Bush administration Defense Department official, interview with the author, Aug. 1, 2012; and Scowcroft, interview with the author, Aug. 1, 2012.

152 Scowcroft, interview with the author, Aug. 1, 2012; Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 40–43, 53; “Transcript, Interview with Brent Scowcroft,” Nov. 12–13, 1999, George H. W. Bush Oral History Project, University of Virginia Miller Center, 40, 51, http://web1.millercenter.org/poh/transcripts/ohp_1999_1112_scowcroft.pdf; James A. Baker, III, with Thomas M. DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989-1992 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), 68–70 (Baker noted that “much of the review was run by Reagan administration holdovers” and that “we asked the bureaucracy itself to produce the papers,” which “resulted in least-common-denominator thinking”; “what we received was mush.”). On what became the administration’s formal policy toward the Soviet Union, see “National Security Directive 23, United States Relations with the Soviet Union,” The White House, Sept. 22, 1989, from the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/nsd/nsd23.pdf. See also Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, orig. published 1995), 20–31.

153 Miller Center, “Transcript, Interview with Brent Scowcroft,” 31–33; Scowcroft, interview with the author, Aug. 1, 2012; and Bush and Scow-croft, A World Transformed, 40–56.

154 Bush quoted (including his quotation of Eisenhower) in Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (New York: Random House, 2015), 216–17. See also Paul Lettow and Kori Schake, “The Vision Thing: George H. W. Bush Saw How to Preserve American Strength at a Perilous Time,” National Review 70, no. 24 (December 31, 2018), 32–34.

155 Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 60–61.

sidering the studies, Bush and his National Security Council engaged in their own discussions of both strategic direction and specific policy courses, particularly on Eastern Europe and the future of Europe as a whole. That process was itself fruit-ful, resulting in specific ideas from Scowcroft and others that led to proposals and approaches that Bush launched that year. It demonstrated, for Bush and Scowcroft and their colleagues on the National Security Council, the importance of regularly dis-cussing the development of policy direction among themselves. It also helped establish the “Core Group” of principals whose work together, guided by the president and coordinated by Scowcroft, as they brought the Cold War to a successful and peaceful end has rightly earned them admiration and esteem.153

Both Bush and Scowcroft revered and conscious-ly emulated Eisenhower. In announcing his first bid for president, in 1979, Bush stated that he ad-hered to “the principles of Lincoln, Theodore Roo-sevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower,” and even quoted Eisenhower directly: “There is in world affairs a steady course to be followed between an assertion of strength that is truculent and a confession of helplessness that is cowardly.”154 Bush and Scow-croft’s national security planning was less rigorous and systematic than Eisenhower’s. Yet, like Eisen-hower, they possessed strategic vision and steadily implemented it. One of the ironies of Bush’s presi-dency was and remains the criticism that he lacked an overarching vision. To the contrary, he deserves to be remembered as one of the most effective strategists among presidents.

Bush’s worldview was based on the harsh les-sons of World War II, as he highlighted in his for-eign-policy memoirs.155 Having been shot down over the Pacific at age 20, and having lost his crew-

BUSH AND SCOWCROFT’S

NATIONAL SECURITY

PLANNING WAS LESS RIGOROUS

AND SYSTEMATIC THAN

EISENHOWER’S. YET,

LIKE EISENHOWER,

THEY POSSESSED STRATEGIC

VISION AND STEADILY

IMPLEMENTED IT.

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mates, he knew better than most that things can and do go dangerously wrong when America aban-dons a leadership role, or when its foreign policy is not guided by clear-eyed purpose — as with the disastrous American policies of the interwar years. Faced with convulsions in Eastern Europe and within the Soviet Union itself, and then in the Middle East with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Bush played the long game. Reminiscent of Eisenhower, he constantly, even ruthlessly, worked to preserve America’s geopolitical position and strength for the long haul, so that it could serve as a bulwark against the worst possibilities of a brutal and po-tentially chaotic world.156

Robert D. Kaplan has astutely summarized Bush’s worldview: “Tragedy is avoided by thinking tragi-cally.”157 For Bush, that meant, among other things, insisting on a unified Germany remaining in NATO, and the United States strengthening, not abandon-ing or curtailing, its position as the preeminent power in European affairs. Bush thereby hoped to reduce the possibility of future intra-European con-flict and to deter other powers from attempting to dominate or destabilize the continent.158 As he put it in a diary entry, the United States had “a dispropor-tionate role for stability,” and he had “to look after the U.S. interest in all of this without reverting to a kind of isolationistic or stupid peace-nik view on where we stand in the world.”159 In the Middle East, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 threatened the cardinal U.S. geopolitical principle of avoiding the destabilization or dominance by a hostile power of that region — as with East Asia and Europe — and so he led a coalition to combat and reverse it. That, in turn, served as precedent for what Bush and Scowcroft saw as a vision for the post-Cold War

156 Lettow and Schake, “The Vision Thing,” 32-34; Jeffrey A. Engel, When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2017), 5–10.

157 Robert D. Kaplan, “Obama Is No George H. W. Bush,” The National Interest, March 5, 2016, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/obama-no-george-h-w-bush-15406.

158 See Engel, When the World Seemed New; Lettow and Schake, “The Vision Thing,” 32–34; Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed; and Kaplan, “Obama Is No George H. W. Bush,” The National Interest.

159 Bush diary entry, Feb. 24, 1990, in George H. W. Bush, All the Best: My Life in Letters and Other Writings (New York: Scribner, 1999), 460–61.

160 Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 399–400. See also Engel, When the World Seemed New; Lettow and Schake, “The Vision Thing”; Kaplan, “Obama Is No George H. W. Bush.”

161 Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 399–400. For Bush’s speech, see “September 11, 1990: Address Before a Joint Session of Congress,” University of Virginia Miller Center, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/september-11-1990-address-joint-session-congress.

162 Miller Center, “Transcript, Interview with Brent Scowcroft,” 51–52 (“So as it became clear that there was a new world emerging, I was looking for a cute way to encapsulate and show that we were thinking ahead, that we were out in front. You know, this certainly was not the first time it

was used, to be sure, but no, I did not know that it had a Wilsonian connotation, or didn’t think of it at the time. … [I]t wasn’t a vision of a whole

world. We didn’t think it was going to be a peaceful world. We thought it was going to be a messy world.”). Scowcroft added that the concept had emerged from discussions he had with Bush “about what the future might look like, and how we ought to act to steer the future in directions that would be appropriate to the United States. It’s all fuzzy other than the New World Order, which I wish I had never thought of. … [B]ecause it’s been used for all kinds of pernicious things, mostly turning the United States over to the U.N..” “You know, if you come from Utah like I do,” Scowcroft noted wryly, “where every helicopter you hear overhead at night is the U.N., you sort of have second thoughts.” Miller Center, “Transcript, Interview with Brent Scowcroft,” 52. See also Engel, When the World Seemed New, 415–39, 480; Kaplan, “Obama Is No George H. W. Bush”; and Lettow and Schake, “The Vision Thing,” 32–34.

163 Scowcroft quoted in Engel, When the World Seemed New, 10, 480.

world in which the United States played the leading role, in which sovereign states adhered to basic rules, and in which structures of power favorable to America could encourage international cooperation to enforce those rules when necessary.160

That was their vision for the “new world order.” The inartful phrase was used by Bush in a speech in the lead-up to the Gulf War, and was maligned from the start.161 But as Scowcroft later noted, and the historian Jeffrey Engel and Kaplan have rightly emphasized, that slogan has come to mean near-ly the opposite of what Bush and Scowcroft had intended. Bush and Scowcroft were not Wilsoni-an, nor did they believe in multilateralism for its own sake. They knew that the world was a rough and unforgiving place, and that the United States needed to sustain its strength and leadership and geopolitical standing over the long haul.162 Engel quotes Scowcroft as saying: “The world could be a better place. But don’t get carried away.”163

As noted earlier, the current statutory require-ment for an unclassified annual strategy was enact-ed in 1986, as part of the broader Goldwater-Nich-ols package of legislative national security reforms. In addition to their classified, internal national se-curity strategy planning described above, the Rea-gan and Bush administrations also issued unclassi-fied national security strategies almost every year starting in 1987. The Bush administration’s three strategy documents were especially notable. They started to lay conceptual foundations for the post-Cold War world that were in line with Bush’s and Scowcroft’s views: optimistic but wary, and insist-ent upon maintaining strong alliances underpinned by American hard power over the long haul. Those iterations of the national security strategies were

relatively heavy on geopolitics — on ensuring an active, sustained, and global American presence, and on preventing domination or destabilization of regions critical to U.S. interests by current or po-tential future rivals.164

But Bush and Scowcroft never did set out their strategic principles in a comprehensive way or ful-ly and effectively explicate them publicly. In some ways, they were like Eisenhower, just without the paper. They were guided by basic principles and led a group of senior officials who hashed out their differences among themselves, sometimes vigor-ously but as a team, as they pursued those basic principles. Perhaps they would have been well served by getting that basic strategic direction on paper. It certainly would help us more clearly un-derstand and learn from their example today. For his part, Scowcroft — at least as of 2012, when this author interviewed him — enthusiastically sup-ported the mission of examining past strategic planning efforts, how we might learn from them, and the importance of developing sound and sus-tainable strategy.165

Strategic Planning in the Post-Cold War Era: Clinton, Bush, and Obama

The Bill Clinton administration continued to is-sue unclassified national security strategies most years, before the George W. Bush administration commenced the current tradition of issuing them once every four-year presidential term.166 Those ef-forts by the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama administrations had their purpose. They were extended public statements meant to empha-size critical themes and priorities of each adminis-tration for an audience that included Congress and the public, as well as friend and foe abroad.

In some respects, the Nixon administration’s an-nual foreign policy messages served as early forerun-ners for those documents, which were often written with care and even eloquence. Take, for example,

164 National Security Strategy of the United States, The White House, March 1990, https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss1990.pdf?ver=x5cwOOez0oak2BjhXekM-Q==; National Security Strategy of the United States, The White House, August 1991, https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss1991.pdf?ver=3sIpLiQwmknO-RplyPeAHw==; and National Security Strategy of the United States, The White House, January 1993, https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss1993.pdf?ver=Dulx2wRKDaQ-ZrswRPRX9g==.

165 Scowcroft, interview with the author, Aug. 1, 2012.

166 The Clinton administration’s annual national security strategies appear to be the only such documents that explicitly acknowledged that they were issued in compliance with the requirements of the statute.

167 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, The White House, March 2006, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/nss/2006/; National Security Strategy, The White House, May 2010, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/rss_view-er/national_security_strategy.pdf; and National Security Strategy, The White House, February 2015, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2015_national_security_strategy_2.pdf. Alan G. Stolberg, How Nation-States Craft National Security Strategy Documents, U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, October 2012, xi, 14, 70–98, 112, provides a history of the processes by which the 2002, 2006, and 2010 national security strategies were developed.

168 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, 14–15, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/nss/2002/. See Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York: Crown, 2011), 152–56, 166–72, 291; and Stolberg, “How Nation-States Craft National Security Strategy Documents,” 73–81.

the Bush administration’s focus on its freedom agenda in 2006 or the Obama administration’s un-derscoring of climate change and other transnation-al issues and threats.167 Like Nixon’s messages, they sometimes foreshadowed policy developments, as with the Bush administration’s 2002 national se-curity strategy, written in the wake of the al-Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and in advance of the war in Iraq. It declared that “[w]e must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends. … To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.”168

The post-Cold War U.S. national security strate-gies operated more as speeches than as strategies. But rhetoric is not strategy, and mistaking the for-mer for the latter is dangerous. Rhetoric is given to categorical statement and overreach that sweeps away analysis, prioritization, or context. It is best deployed as a tool in the implementation of a strat-egy. For the most part, the post-Cold War era na-tional security strategies were disconnected from the kind of rigorous, classified national security strategic planning often conducted by presidential administrations during the Cold War.

A prerequisite for the best of those Cold War planning efforts was a searching analysis to try to understand other international actors. U.S. strate-gists of earlier eras understood well that they were maneuvering on a playing field with other impor-tant actors — some friendly, some not — that were operating with motives, interests, and objectives of their own. Attempting to understand those mo-tives, interests, and objectives with dispassion and rigor was foundational for crafting U.S. strategies. Those strategies, in turn, aimed to shape the en-vironment in which those actors made decisions.

For much of the post-Cold War era, America’s ef-forts to bring about the country’s best wishes have seemed not to have had the desired effect. Until re-

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cently, national security strategies in this era have often been devoid of a clear-eyed analysis of the motives and capabilities of other important inter-national actors.169

One of the most fundamental lessons from Amer-ica’s Cold War-era national security strategy is one of the simplest, albeit the most underappreciated: America ought to examine — with as much insight and intellectual honesty as it can — what its prin-cipal geopolitical rivals are up to, why, what kind of challenges that poses to the United States, and what might be done about it, other than resorting to conflict or inaction.

That kind of clear-eyed foundational analysis of other actors is conspicuous by its absence from many of the national security strategies that have been produced over the last few decades. By way of illustration, the Clinton administration’s nation-al security strategy from 2000 emphasized that “[i]ntegrating the [People’s Republic of China] more fully into the global trading system is manifestly in our national interest.” It stated that the admin-istration’s trade and economic policies “will create jobs and opportunities for Americans through the opening of Chinese markets, promote economic re-form in China, and enhance the understanding of the Chinese people of the rule of law in the devel-opment of their domestic civil society in compli-ance with international obligations,” and that the United States was accordingly working “to com-plete the multilateral negotiation of China’s WTO accession,” which “offer[s] the best hope of inter-nal reform” within China.170

Yet, there is now a considerable debate on several points: whether the United States should have so purposely facilitated the drastic expansion of com-munist-led China’s comprehensive power through the World Trade Organization decision and other choices; the soundness of the premises and assump-tions that underlay that policy direction; and what

169 As Kissinger told the scholar-practitioners Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier regarding U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War: “Every new administration tries to develop a new strategy. The problem is that they never start with an analysis of what the world is, but what they think it should be.” Kissinger quoted in Chollet and Goldgeier, America Between the Wars: The Misunderstood Years Between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), 71.

170 A National Security Strategy for a Global Age, The White House, December 2000, https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss2000.pdf.

171 See Campbell and Ratner, “The China Reckoning.” They wrote that contrary to American policymakers’ assumptions and expectations, “China has instead pursued its own course, belying a range of American expectations in the process. That reality warrants a clear-eyed rethinking of the United States’ approach to China. … [B]uilding a stronger and more sustainable approach to, and relationship with, Beijing requires honesty about how many fundamental assumptions have turned out wrong.”

172 National Security Strategy, September 2002, Preface, ii, and 26.

173 National Security Strategy, September 2002, 27–28. The document stated that “[t]he events of September 11, 2001, fundamentally changed the context for relations between the United States and other main centers of global power, and opened vast, new opportunities.” See page 28.

174 National Security Strategy, September 2002, 26.

its likely or plausible implications and outcomes were for the United States and for the internation-al system it had done so much to build and lead.171 These fundamental issues could have been thought through at the time, before the United States pur-sued such a critical policy direction that persisted over decades. And they should have been — sys-tematically, in secret, with rigor, and with a dose of both hardheadedness and intellectual humility that characterized, say, the Eisenhower administration, which went out of its way to test its own assump-tions and consider alternative strategies.

The same applies to the Bush administration’s 2002 national security strategy, which sought to rally other major powers around a counterterror-ism focus and noted the need to hedge against po-tential threats if China and Russia turned in hostile directions, but it also noted that “the world’s great powers” are “increasingly united by common val-ues,” and that “recent developments have encour-aged our hope that a truly global consensus about basic principles is taking shape.”172 It focused on expanding trade and economic cooperation with China, which “will advance openness and rule of law in China,” and on deepening its global role, and noted that China “has begun to take the road to political openness.”173 The document also dis-cerned “a critical change in Russian thinking that promises to lead to productive, long-term relations with the Euro-Atlantic community and the United States.”174 The view may have looked different from Beijing or Moscow.

To his credit, the national security adviser in George W. Bush’s second term, Stephen Hadley, who had been deputy in the first term, recognized the importance of strategic planning. He took steps to rebuild both a culture of planning and a capacity for it, with the support of the president.

The initiation and early years of the war in Iraq had suffered from a lack of adequate strategic

planning.175 Hadley helped shepherd a thorough reassessment of strategy for the war in Iraq from the White House in 2006.176

Bush and Hadley also took some institutional steps to lay a foundation for future national securi-ty strategic planning. They reestablished a directo-rate within the National Security Council staff for strategic planning,177 of the kind that Brzezinski had created and Huntington had led. (Lord had earlier served essentially a similar role for Kissinger.) The initial leaders of that directorate, the scholar-prac-titioners Peter Feaver and William Inboden, played a significant role in the White House review that led to the Iraq “surge” and also spearheaded the drafting of the 2006 national security strategy.178

Administrations since have preserved that stra-tegic planning directorate on the White House staff, although its usage and effectiveness have varied. The Trump administration would elevate and expand it, as will be seen.

In 2008, Bush and Hadley, assisted by this au-thor, also formally established an interagency na-tional security policy planning committee, chaired by that White House strategic planning directorate and comprising all of the senior planning officials from throughout relevant departments and agen-cies. Those officials were specified in a presidential directive and charged in that directive with assist-ing the National Security Council and its princi-pals with coordinating the preparation of strategic planning documents, analyzing and recommending policy alternatives, and contingency planning.179 In essence, the Bush administration was rebuilding, or at least allowing for the future use of, something akin to Eisenhower’s Policy Planning Board.

Shortly after taking office, the Obama admin-istration engaged in a classified process aimed at identifying and prioritizing national security threats, challenges, and opportunities in what was called a national security priorities review. It was

175 For different perspectives on how and why this was so, see Rice, No Higher Honor, 161–215; Richard N. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 4–7, 168–293; and Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York: Sentinel, 2012, first published 2011), 316–30, 359–60, 413–541.

176 See Rice, No Higher Honor, 538–43, 544–46.

177 Stephen Hadley, interview with the author, 2012. Full disclosure: This author worked for Bush and Hadley in that strategic planning director-ate from 2007 to 2009.

178 See Rice, No Higher Honor, 538–43, 544–46; and Stolberg, “How Nation-States Craft National Security Strategy Documents,” 70–73, 81–91.

179 “National Security Presidential Directive 60, Establishing a National Security Policy Planning Committee,” The White House, Aug. 28, 2008, https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/nspd-60.pdf.

180 Barry Pavel, interview with the author, April 26, 2021. See also Stolberg, “How Nation-States Craft National Security Strategy Documents,” 92–93.

181 Barry Pavel, interview with the author, April 26, 2021. The strategic planning directorate established by Hadley played a significant role in the 2010 national security strategy. Rhodes evidently helped draft it and coordinated directly with the president to ensure that it captured his interests, priorities, and voice. See Stolberg, “How Nation-States Craft National Security Strategy Documents,” 92–97. On the Prague and Cairo speeches, and on Obama’s rhetoric generally, see Ben Rhodes, The World as It Is: Inside the Obama White House (London: Vintage, 2019, orig. pub. 2018), 41–42, 48–49, 51–61, 66–69.

182 Nadia Schadlow, interview with the author, Dec. 18, 2020.

conceived by Barry Pavel, the defense lead on the National Security Council staff who had started in the fall of 2008 under Bush and remained under Obama. An important drafter for the project was Ben Rhodes, then the chief National Security Coun-cil speechwriter and later the deputy national se-curity adviser, who captured Obama’s thinking and voice. Drafts of the document were discussed with representatives of departments and agencies and then provided to help guide them as they under-took their own strategic reviews in the adminis-tration’s first year, but the administration may not have had Obama formally sign off on it, at least at first, so that he would not be pinned down by it.180 That document, the various departmental strate-gic reviews, and the policy speeches by Obama in Prague and Cairo and elsewhere formed the basis for the administration’s unclassified 2010 national security strategy.181

Strategic Planning Under Trump

In 2017, Trump’s then-national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, wanted to make sure that the administration had a written national security strategy that provided coherent policy direction. He brought on Nadia Schadlow as deputy assis-tant to the president for national security strategy. Schadlow oversaw a handful of directors within an elevated and expanded strategy directorate. Their principal task was to spearhead the development of the written national security strategy. McMas-ter, Schadlow, and others on the National Secu-rity Council staff believed that the United States was overdue for a national security strategy that focused on the challenges that the United States faced from China especially, as well as from Russia and other, more regional rivals such as Iran and North Korea. That approach served as the basis for the development of the national security strategy.182

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As a foundation for understanding the nature of the threat posed by China and other great-pow-er rivals to the United States, the White House team drew on work from inside and outside the U.S. government on America’s great-power competitors and the nature of their challenge, in-cluding that of Princeton professor Aaron Fried-berg.183 McMaster and Schadlow met directly with relevant cabinet secretaries and agency officials at the front end of the process, and established interagency working groups to provide input and analysis on particular issues during the develop-ment of the document. Specific departments or agencies within those working groups were tasked with preparing and presenting study papers for discussion or for follow-up input and analysis. The National Security Council staff drafted the actual national security strategy document and then sent it out for interagency review.184 The ef-fort involved the president, who signed the docu-ment and launched it publicly.185

The document’s drafters intentionally sought to set out the challenge to U.S. interests posed by China and other rivals, and the essential elements and objectives of a competitive U.S. strategy that would be compelling and resonant on a bipartisan basis and would lay the foundation for a long-term approach.186 That sense was shared among strate-gic planners at the Defense Department, guided by Secretary James Mattis, who supported the devel-opment of the national security strategy along these lines, and who ensured that the Defense Depart-ment simultaneously prepared a classified nation-al defense strategy, which would complement the national security strategy. Mattis was adamant that the national defense strategy would follow not long after the national security strategy, which it did.187

The administration’s national security strategy and national defense strategy kicked off a series of stra-

183 See Aaron L. Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).

184 Schadlow, interview with the author, Dec. 18, 2020; and Elbridge Colby, interview with the author, Dec. 3, 2020.

185 Schadlow, interview with the author, December 18, 2020; Colby, interview with the author, Dec. 3, 2020; and National Security Strategy of the United States of America, The White House, December 2017, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Fi-nal-12-18-2017-0905.pdf.

186 Schadlow, interview with the author, December 18, 2020.

187 Colby, interview with the author, Dec. 3, 2020; Schadlow, interview with the author, December 18, 2020. The Defense Department released an unclassified summary of the national defense strategy. Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America, The Defense Department, January 2018, https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf.

188 Schadlow, interview with the author, December 18, 2020; Colby, interview with the author, Dec. 3, 2020.

189 “U.S. Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific,” The White House, February 2018, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/up-loads/2021/01/IPS-Final-Declass.pdf.

190 “Statement from National Security Adviser Robert C. O’Brien,” The White House, Jan. 12, 2021, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/brief-ings-statements/statement-national-security-advisor-robert-c-obrien-011221/. For the full statement, see “A Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” The White House, Jan. 5, 2021, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/OBrien-Expanded-Statement.pdf.

191 Senior Nixon administration national security official, discussion with the author, March 2012; Lord, interview with the author, 2012; Brzez-inski, interview with the author, July 7, 2012; and Scowcroft, interview with the author, Aug. 1, 2012. Also Nadia Schadlow, interview with author, December 2020.

tegic planning documents from other departments and agencies and within the White House, which led to the development of a number of classified strategies on specific issues and regions.188 Among them was the “U.S. Framework for the Indo-Pacific,” a classified planning document from February 2018, shortly after the national security strategy and na-tional defense strategy.189 The administration de-classified and released that framework document, with some redactions, days before Trump left office, noting that it “has served, for the last three years, as the Trump Administration’s overarching strategic guidance for implementing” the national security strategy within the Indo-Pacific, and that it was be-ing made public “to communicate to the American people and to our allies and partners America’s en-during commitment” to the region.190

Lessons Learned

Several lessons can be drawn from these exam-ples of national security strategic planning to help guide the Biden administration and future adminis-trations as they undertake their own planning pro-cesses. Chief among these lessons are:

Develop a comprehensive strategy

The Biden administration ought to develop a comprehensive national security strategy, for the reasons stated at the top of this article. Many of those responsible for national security strategic planning in administrations during the Cold War have agreed that it is just as essential now as it was then and that the government can and should discern and apply lessons from past efforts, even though the nature of the challenges and challeng-ers to U.S. interests are different.191

Make it classified

The strategic planning process that develops the overarching strategy should be rigorous and searching. By its nature, that involves information and analysis that is classified. The administration should aim to produce a classified national secu-rity strategy and then decide, with care and inten-tion, what aspects it will make public and in what form, whether through an unclassified summary or through speeches or other statements.192

The White House should lead

The process of developing the national security strategy has to be driven by the White House. The president has to give priority to it, and the national security adviser has to provide leadership, respon-sibility, and oversight. At the same time, the rele-vant departments and agencies ought to provide meaningful data, analysis, and input. That serves to inform the development of the overall strate-gy, to prevent or mitigate shortcomings in under-standing or assumptions within the White House, and ultimately to increase the likelihood of buy-in to the ultimate strategy from senior leaders from the departments and agencies. The most essential elements of the strategy should be considered and debated by the president and his or her National Security Council. As illustrated multiple times dur-ing the Cold War, that process itself can be useful. The most senior officials, who will have to oversee the execution of the strategy, can thereby air out and resolve any fundamental differences among themselves regarding the assumptions, alternative possibilities, and most essential objectives of the strategy. If the National Security Council together cannot find agreement, then the president can con-sider the differences and make a clear decision on them. Either way, that process increases the like-lihood of a common understanding, and unity of effort in execution, of the strategy.

Geopolitics matters, then, now, and always

The national security strategy should identify

192 Brzezinski recommended, in aid of building congressional support, that an administration convene informal sessions with a small number of

bipartisan congressional leaders to generate support for the premises and main objectives of its national security strategy. Brzezinski, interview

with the author, July 7, 2012. Brzezinski’s idea was endorsed, at the time, by Scowcroft, interview with the author, Aug. 1, 2012, although another, more recent former national security adviser, in an interview that summer, expressed some skepticism that it could significantly improve in-

ter-branch or bipartisan relations. In all events, it may be worthwhile to try.

193 See, for example, Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future (Boston: Little, Brown, 1897); Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Problem of Asia: Its Effect upon International Politics (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003; originally published 1900); Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 29–55 (on Roosevelt); Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin, 2014), 233–67 (on Roosevelt); and Nicholas J. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (London: Routledge, 2007; originally published 1942).

and set out America’s enduring interests, and the principal threats and challenges to them, includ-ing from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and other state and nonstate actors. In doing so, the administration should remember the importance of geopolitics. Preventing the destabilization or dom-ination of East Asia, Europe, or the Middle East by a power hostile to the United States is an endur-ing first principle of U.S. foreign policy. A related principle is that America should maintain access to lines of communication between and among those regions and more broadly to the sea, air, space, and cyber commons. Those principles have roots in the thinking of the best American strategists even be-fore the Cold War, including, among others, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, and Nicho-las Spykman.193 They served as a continual thread throughout U.S. Cold War strategy, beginning with Kennan and Truman through the strategies of each of the Cold War presidents, and in George H. W. Bush’s conceptualization of the post-Cold War world. We have learned through painful experi-ence in the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st the importance of those geopolitical prin-ciples, which go to the heart of Americans’ safety and their ability to thrive in the world.

There are, of course, other important interests that must be analyzed, many of them related to those cardinal geopolitical interests and some new and acute in today’s technological and globalized context. They include the importance of sustaining U.S. influence over critical intergovernmental or-ganizations and other international regulatory and standard-setting bodies. The current influence of China over the World Health Organization, and the ramifications of that in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, is one of many warning signs in that re-gard. Other essential interests include preventing or withstanding the increasing ability of rivals to weaken America and its allies at home through propaganda or misinformation; manipulation of infrastructure or markets; or theft, manipulation, and disruption of data. The beginning of a strategic planning process is the time to think through the most essential U.S. interests, old and new, and the source and nature of the threats to those interests.

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Rigorously analyze competitors

One of the most important inputs into the strategic planning process should be an analysis of the sources and nature of those threats to enduring U.S. interests. For rival great-power state actors in particular, the planning process should include analyzing their motives, interests, objectives, and methods. In essence, the administration should ask anew the questions that Kennan answered: What are America’s principal adversaries or com-petitors up to, why, and what does that mean for the United States? That analysis should, as Kennan did, take into account whether and how the mil-itary, economic, or technological challenges from a particular country are linked to the internal na-ture of its governing system and in what way, and what the consequences of that are for U.S. policy. And the analysis should include a searching as-sessment of both the strengths and vulnerabilities of America’s principal competitors. In the current environment, that kind of analysis will have to be done with respect to several different U.S. rivals. The results will help guide the development and prioritization of U.S. policy objectives and means.

Analyze the United States, too

The Biden administration should undertake some kind of net assessment examining the com-parative advantages and weaknesses of the United States and its principal competitors, especially Chi-na, which presents the most comprehensive chal-lenge to U.S. interests. Huntington’s study shows that such a net assessment can be done with use-ful results. In this era, it may be especially helpful in illuminating areas where the United States has traditionally held advantages, such as the ability to develop and deploy the most innovative technol-ogy for military or dual-use applications, but now require attention and forethought in order to main-tain or regain that historical edge.194 The process should identify the limits and capabilities of the United States, both relative and absolute, and take them into account.195

Focus on the decision-making environment

The administration should prioritize how to

194 See Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare (New York: Hachette, 2020).

195 The author is grateful to Andrew May for encouraging inclusion of this lesson.

196 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 481.

197 “To expect the Soviet leaders to restrain themselves from exploiting circumstances they conceive to be favorable is to misread history. To foreclose Soviet opportunities is thus the essence of the West’s responsibility. It is up to us to define the limits of Soviet aims.” Kissinger, White House Years, 119.

shape the environment in which other actors make decisions so as to increase the likelihood of those outcomes being more in line with U.S. interests. That was one of the recurring themes of America’s Cold War strategy, most explicitly in Ei-senhower’s and especially in Reagan’s strategies. In his magisterial history Diplomacy, Kissinger underscored that “the art of policy is to create a calculation of the risks and rewards that affect the adversary’s calculations.”196 It is the essence of a competitive strategy.197

Maintain continuity — and consider alternatives

The administration’s planning process should assess which elements and aspects of its predeces-sor’s approach ought to be maintained and built upon. And, as with the Eisenhower administra-tion’s Project Solarium, it should also step back to consider what plausible alternatives exist, even if it results in drawing elements together out of differ-ent possible approaches to form a cohesive whole.

Play the long game

The administration should focus now on identi-fying, investing in, and marshaling the resources that are necessary to increase the likelihood of good outcomes in the future, and doing so in a way that the American people and Congress are able and willing to sustain over many years. That means primarily, but not exclusively, the sinews of hard power — military, technological, and eco-nomic. The most rigorous and effective of the na-tional security strategies of the Cold War looked and planned ahead and aimed to make invest-ments and take steps that limited an adversary’s decisions and freedom of action over the long run. Those strategies aimed at what is now known as peace through strength: proactive, sustained, peaceful competition on terms that favored the United States and, critically, avoided causing the country reactively or precipitously to slide into disadvantageous positions, when the chance for an ill-considered response or even conflict is high-est. A peace through strength approach, one that avoids dissipating U.S. strength through ill-ad-vised U.S. military actions, itself helps to ensure that the strategy will endure. During Eisenhow-

er’s presidency, as during Reagan’s decades later, major combat actions fought by American forces were conspicuous by their absence.

Hard power underpins soft power, and enables it

A competitive strategy built for the long haul and underpinned by American and allied hard pow-er helps to resolve some of the tensions between hard power and soft power that have bedeviled U.S. policy since the end of the Cold War and even during it. Hard power is essential to the salience and attractiveness of American values. Invoking and championing fundamental values are most potent when America’s hard-power trajectory and geopolitical standing are moving upward. The Cart-er administration had an unquestionable and pro-found commitment to human rights, but its first years saw an erosion of its geopolitical standing that made its championing of human rights less at-tractive and less effective than it should and could have been. The Biden administration is looking to prioritize transnational issues such as climate change. It should carefully consider the factors and elements that influence the environment in which other powers make decisions in those areas and think through how best to influence outcomes conducive to U.S. interests. That may involve pos-itive, cooperative approaches. Yet, successfully achieving U.S. objectives in those areas may also involve — or, at the least, require building upon — a tougher-minded competitive approach over-all in which American hard power is understood to be on the upswing. A long-term competitive strategy focused on addressing geopolitical threats that is underpinned by hard power and reinforces traditional U.S. values may also be galvanizing for America’s allies and partners. Indeed, it may be the only strategy that can ensure the maintenance of those relationships, which are, in turn, essential comparative advantages for the United States in great-power competition.

Lead an ongoing process

The national security strategy should serve as the departure point, not the endpoint, of an ongo-ing strategic planning process that establishes spe-cific strategies for the most important functional and regional issues.

Remain optimistic

Finally, the Biden administration should un-dertake its strategic planning effort with a qui-et self-confidence in the United States. For any

number of fundamental reasons — among them free and fair elections, a free press, divided gov-ernment — America has historically proved able to self-correct and to remain resilient and adapt-able even in the face of significant and long-term challenges. That capacity was abundant during the Cold War, when successive administrations sought to navigate the circumstances of their times while building on the best and most constructive premis-es and approaches of their predecessors. We have done this before.

Conclusion

The United States faces considerable challeng-es ahead. The post-Cold War era — a time of en-thusiasm and ultimately of disappointments and struggles — has given way to a revitalization of great-power competition. In particular, the Biden administration confronts a unique and comprehen-sive challenge from China. And unlike during the Cold War, when Kennan captured the essence of the challenge and the basic premises of the com-petition more or less from the beginning, this time the United States has gotten off to a late start in grasping the nature of the challenge and in estab-lishing its response.

America is embarked on an era of difficulty and peril, but the Biden administration and future ad-ministrations also have before them an opportu-nity: to set the country on a strategic course that is toughminded, competitive, and proactive, but also peaceful, steady, and sustainable for the long haul. To succeed, they will need to understand and heed lessons — positive and negative — from administrations that grappled with national se-curity strategy throughout the Cold War. Under-standing how and why previous presidential ad-ministrations succeeded or failed at developing a competitive national security strategy is not merely of academic interest, but is a vital element of any effective effort.

Paul Lettow served as the senior director for strategic planning on the National Security Coun-cil staff in the White House from 2007 to 2009. He is the author of Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. The views expressed here are his alone.

The Roundtable Feature

Roundtables are where we get to hear from multiple experts on either a subject matter or a recently published book.

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In this issue’s featured roundtable, Michael Singh reviews H.R. McMaster’s book  Battlefield  and discusses where conservative foreign policy is headed and what challenges the United States faces.

1 Nadia Schadlow, “The End of American Illusion: Trump and the World as It Is,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 5 (September/October 2020), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/americas/2020-08-11/end-american-illusion

2 “Congressman Matt Gaetz Delivers Major Foreign Policy Speech,” Office of Matt Gaetz, Press Release, May 22, 2019, https://gaetz.house.gov/media/press-releases/congressman-matt-gaetz-delivers-major-foreign-policy-speech.

3 H.R. McMaster, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World (New York: HarperCollins, 2020).

4 Paul D. Miller, “Conservative Internationalism Out of Power,” Orbis 62, no. 1 (Winter 2018), 105–18, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2017.11.005.

As the Trump era comes to a close, the debate is just beginning over the admin-istration’s approach to the world and what it means for the future of conserv-

ative foreign policy in the United States. President Donald Trump himself was better known for his provocative and unpredictable pronouncements than statements of doctrine. Yet, once Trump as-sumed office it did not take U.S. partners and allies long to realize that they faced something altogeth-er new in Washington: that old assumptions about American policy had to be set aside, and any and all contingencies — the renegotiation or dissolution of agreements or American withdrawal from treaties or geographies — seriously considered.

It was left to Trump officials and allies to impute to him a foreign policy philosophy, which they did variously. Nadia Schadlow, who served as deputy national security adviser for strategy, argued that Trump, unencumbered by the assumptions and nostalgias of the foreign policy community, saw the new reality of a world defined by competition and enacted policies to meet that challenge. She contended that he focused on states rather than international organizations as key actors, demand-ing reciprocity from allies and adversaries alike and rebuilding U.S. military strength.1 Rep. Matt Gaetz of the Florida panhandle, on the other hand, propounded a “Trump Doctrine” that emphasized intervening in international affairs only under the gravest circumstances and otherwise leaving other states to their own business — the polar opposite of competition.2

In Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World, Lt. Gen. (Ret.) H.R. McMaster consciously adopts a different approach to taking stock of the Trump administration, one that reflects his long service as an apolitical officer in the U.S. Army.3 As the highly regarded retired general himself warns in the book’s introduction, those looking for a cri-tique, defense, or even explanation of Trumpism

will be disappointed. McMaster is determined to look forward, drawing upon his experience not just at the White House but in the military. He offers issue-by-issue criticisms of past U.S. for-eign policies and prescriptions for future policies, rather than any grand schema to tie the past and present together.

While no consensus doctrine emerges from these accounts, what comes across clearly is a sense of the conservative foreign policy pendulum in mo-tion, its final destination to be determined. Wheth-er it lands upon a wan realism of the Ford-Nixon era — when, in the estimation of scholar Paul Mill-er, “neither America’s material power nor its ideals were appreciably strengthened or expanded”4 — a strident and amoral nationalism, or, as McMaster implicitly but nonetheless clearly hopes, a more successful conservative internationalism depends on arriving at the correct evaluation of the foreign policy challenges facing the United States and the most effective ways to confront them.

Competition Rekindled

It has become widely accepted among conserva-tive commentators that the world the United States faces is more competitive than in the past, affording U.S. foreign policy less room for error and excess. Competition requires two things: that other states be capable of mounting a challenge and that they be willing to do so. An appraisal of the geopolitical landscape is bracing on both counts.

The gap in economic and material power between the United States and its rivals has inexorably shrunk since the end of the Cold War. It is not that U.S. power has declined. Indeed, America’s gross domestic product (GDP) has grown at a steady clip for decades, and the U.S. GDP remains the world’s highest in the nominal terms that matter geopoliti-cally, even if China’s economy is larger when meas-

MICHAEL SINGH

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COMPETENT, CONSERVATIVE:

INTERNATIONALISM

AFTER TRUMP

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of emotion and power.12 McMaster might have in-stead termed the problem “strategic solipsism” for, while Morgenthau was focused on what he considered the ills of self-actualization (criticizing, among other things, plastic surgery and jogging), McMaster is warning against the all-too-common predilection among U.S. analysts and officials to view world events as functions of American policy, insufficiently cognizant that “rivals and enemies will influence the future course of events” based in part on “their own interpretation of history.”13 At the same time, he tacitly acknowledges that Amer-ican assumptions sometimes require revision not because they were naively conceived but because circumstances have changed (for example, Xi Jin-ping’s ascendancy in China).14

Making matters worse, the guardians of the in-ternational order have arguably been complicit in its demise to the benefit of adversaries who are glad enough to see that order crumble. Democ-racy has faced challenges both at the free world’s periphery — where states such as Turkey and Hungary have seen the democratic gains of recent decades sharply reversed — and at its heart. In the United States and the United Kingdom, for example, only 39 and 31 percent of respondents, respectively, indicated to Pew Research in Febru-ary 2020 that they were satisfied with the state of their country’s democracy — in contrast to 70 percent of Indians and 55 percent of Israelis, de-spite the unending cascade of indeterminate elec-tions that the latter have endured.15

If conservative internationalists criticize their liberal counterparts for placing too much faith, and investing too much hope, in international institutions and not enough in American leader-ship, then they must acknowledge that Trump’s erratic fusillades against allies, his tendency to withdraw from international commitments and organizations without an alternative plan, and his unprecedented effort to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election have diminished Amer-ica’s standing and boosted that of its rivals, while hastening the decay of the U.S.-led international

12 Hans Morgenthau and Ethel Person, “The Roots of Narcissism,” Partisan Review 45, no. 3 (Summer 1978): 337-47, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, http://archives.bu.edu/collections/partisan-review/search/detail?id=331504. See also Hans J. Morgenthau, “Love and Power,” Commentary, March 1962, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/hans-morgenthau/love-and-power/.

13 McMaster, Battlegrounds, 19.

14 McMaster, Battlegrounds, 100.

15 Richard Wike and Shannon Schumacher, “Democratic Rights Popular Globally but Commitment to Them Not Always Strong,” Pew Research Center, Feb. 27, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/02/27/democratic-rights-popular-globally-but-commitment-to-them-not-al-ways-strong/.

16 McMaster, Battlegrounds, 50, 270.

17 These principles are drawn from those offered by Henry R. Nau in Conservative Internationalism: Armed Diplomacy Under Jefferson, Polk, Truman, and Reagan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) and summarized by Charlie Laderman, “Conservative Internationalism: An Overview,” Orbis 62, no. 1 (Winter 2018): 6–21, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2017.11.009.

order. McMaster, to his credit, explicitly recog-nizes problems such as these. He notes both how Trump’s groundless accusations of election fraud played into Russian disinformation efforts in 2016 and 2017, and the damaging effects of America’s declining reliability as an ally.16

Thriving in a Tougher World: Five Principles

The United States cannot turn back the clock. Just as the effects of past errors and excesses can-not be reversed, nor will the relative advantage in economic and military power America enjoyed at the end of the Cold War be regained. Striving for an idealized future heedless of the aims and plans of one’s rivals is a fool’s errand, but pining for the return of a mythologized past is just as fruitless. Yet, there is every reason to believe that the United States can continue to enjoy security, prosperity, and international preeminence with the adoption of a strategy that is informed by the lessons of the past several decades and tailored for today’s con-strained and competitive geopolitical environment. Such a strategy should be based on five principles.17

Support Diplomacy with Force, Force with Diplomacy

First, diplomacy is most effective when backed by force, and vice versa. The former is an article of faith among conservatives — economic and military force should not be considered a last-resort alternative to diplomacy but should be wielded in concert with diplomacy to achieve the best outcomes for Amer-ican interests. To ensure that U.S. threats of force are deemed credible, the country must build and preserve its military strength, allowing it neither to become outmoded by rivals’ technological advances nor exhausted by peripheral conflicts.

However, the converse is also true — coercion must be undertaken with realistic objectives in mind and with an understanding of the perspective

ured in terms of purchasing power parity.5 The U.S. military remains the world’s most formidable and battle-tested, and U.S. military spending is roughly three times that of China’s and indeed greater than the next 10 highest-spending countries combined.6

Yet, what was once a towering advantage in both economic and military terms is no longer, due both to the growth and diffusion of economic and mili-tary might around the world — enabled, ironically, by the very international order the United States has long upheld — as well as to stagnation on cer-tain key fronts in the United States. For example, U.S. productivity growth has slowed significantly since the mid-2000s, weighed down by flat or de-clining infrastructure and research and develop-ment spending, among other factors.7 Likewise, the U.S. military has fought to exhaustion in places like Iraq and Afghanistan while China has focused heavily on catching up to, and developing the ca-pabilities needed to confront, the United States — a strategy McMaster describes in detail over the course of two chapters on China. The result, ac-cording to the Department of Defense’s latest “Chi-na Power Report,” is that China has neared parity with, or even exceeded, the United States in certain areas such as shipbuilding and the deployment of intermediate-range missiles.8

While the notion of symmetric threats to U.S. power is alarming enough, McMaster astutely ob-serves that challenges to American power continue to come in asymmetric forms as well. He describes at length “Putin’s playbook” of disinformation, used to divisive effect in advance of and following the 2016 elections, as well as, in a telegraphic final chapter on cross-cutting threats, the risks the Unit-ed States faces in cyberspace, in outer space, and from new weapons and technologies. And unlike so many analysts who wish to brush aside the threat of terrorism after two decades of unsatisfying and

5 For a discussion of this distinction, see Jeffrey Frenkel, “Is China Overtaking the US as a Financial and Economic Power?” The Guardian, May 29, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/29/is-china-overtaking-the-us-as-a-financial-and-economic-power.

6 “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2019,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, April 2020, https://www.sipri.org/publica-tions/2020/sipri-fact-sheets/trends-world-military-expenditure-2019.

7 For further discussion, see, for example, Emily Moss, Ryan Nunn, and Jay Shambaugh, “The Slowdown in Productivity Growth and the Policies that Can Restore It,” The Brookings Institution, June 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Productivity_Framing_LO_6.16_FINAL.pdf.

8 Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2020, U.S. Department of Defense, 2020, https://media.defense.gov/2020/Sep/01/2002488689/-1/-1/1/2020-DOD-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT-FINAL.PDF.

9 “Chinese and American Warships Nearly Collide,” The Economist, Oct. 4, 2018, https://www.economist.com/asia/2018/10/04/chi-nese-and-american-warships-nearly-collide.

10 Jonathan E. Hillman, “A ‘China Model?’ Beijing’s Promotion of Alternative Global Norms and Standards,” Congressional Testimony Before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, March 13, 2020, https://www.csis.org/analysis/china-model-beijings-promotion-alterna-tive-global-norms-and-standards.

11 Kurt M. Campbell and Ely Ratner, “The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectations,” Foreign Affairs 97, no. 2 (March/April 2018), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2018-02-13/china-reckoning.

arduous focus on it, McMaster reminds readers that it remains a serious short-term threat, even if near-peer rivals loom larger in the long term.

Of course, if the United States were concerned by other states’ economic power and military poten-tial alone, it might regard the European Union and India as its foremost rivals rather than the partners they are. What makes states like Russia and China threatening is not simply their power — which, in Russia’s case, is in fact meager — but their mount-ing willingness to challenge the United States and the international order itself. These challenges have played out on a grand scale in places like Ukraine, Syria, and the South China Sea and on a smaller, but more frequent and no less dangerous, scale in the air and on the seas, where U.S., Russian, and Chinese vessels come into regular contact.9 They have also played out in diplomatic conference rooms, where U.S. rivals seek to gain the upper hand in setting international norms and standards and foster alternative multilateral institutions that exclude or marginalize the United States.10

Order Unravelled

Many commentators attribute this new competi-tive reality to a failure of the “liberal convergence” that many policymakers expected to materialize after the end of the Cold War. In their seminal ar-ticle recounting what went wrong in U.S. policy toward China in recent decades, Ely Ratner and Kurt Campbell, for example, assert that “the lib-eral international order has failed to lure or bind China as powerfully as expected.”11 McMaster ap-proaches the matter from a complementary angle, harshly criticizing what he describes as American “strategic narcissism,” a term inspired by Hans Morgenthau’s late-career work on the intersection

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Capitalize on Shared Values

Third, the United States should concern itself not only with power but with values. As American En-terprise Institute scholar Zack Cooper has noted, “the competitions with China and Russia are only partially about power … U.S. worries about China and Russia are founded as much in clashing values and visions as in clashing power.”23 While Ameri-ca’s competition with its present-day rivals centers far less on ideology than during the Cold War, the threat the United States and its partners perceive from Moscow and Beijing is heightened by the way both operate — through repression and control at home and coercion and subversion abroad.

Furthermore, U.S. values confer an important ad-vantage to Washington in its competition with its rivals that far outweighs whatever vulnerabilities these values give rise to. Free markets and a vi-brant democratic civil society help to foster growth and innovation, promote political resilience, and even speak to the aspirations of the citizens of U.S. rivals. While McMaster is rightly skeptical of the power of economic openness to liberalize au-thoritarian states like China — an assessment now widely accepted — he defends the promotion of democracy and economic liberalization as a means to counter and deter America’s rivals, even as he notes that the Trump administration unevenly ap-plied this logic.24

Shared values also underpin America’s strongest alliances, as does a shared concern over the threats posed by the values of U.S. rivals. Relationships such as that between the United States and Saudi Arabia are frequently offered as a counterpoint to this assertion. In fact, however, they demonstrate its validity. As Democrats’ calls for the incoming Biden administration to take a tougher line with Riyadh attest, relationships that are exclusively in-terest-based and not buttressed by shared values are those most vulnerable in political shifts — or shifts in how interests are perceived — on either side. This is why, when foreign leaders pen op-eds in American newspapers, they tend to appeal to shared values rather than simply to shared inter-

23 Zack Cooper, “Bad Idea: ‘Great Power Competition’ Terminology,” Defense360, Dec. 1, 2020, https://defense360.csis.org/bad-idea-great-pow-er-competition-terminology/.

24 McMaster, Battlegrounds, 140.

25 See, for example, Yousef al Otaiba, “The Moderate Middle East Must Act,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 9, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/yousef-al-otaiba-the-moderate-middle-east-must-act-1410304537.

26 See, for example, Campbell and Ratner, “The China Reckoning.”

27 Paul Miller, “Make the Free World Free Again,” The Dispatch, June 9, 2020, https://thedispatch.com/p/make-the-free-world-free-again.

28 Schake, Mattis, Ellis, and Felter, “Defense in Depth.”

29 For further discussion, see “Linking Values and Strategy: How Democracies Can Offset Autocratic Advances, A Task Force Report,” Alliance for Securing Democracy, October 2020, https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Linking-Values-and-Strategy.pdf.

ests.25 Doing so suggests a bond that goes deeper than a mere transaction.

During the Cold War, there was not one interna-tional order, but three: There were those that gov-erned relations between the United States and its allies, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union and their clients on the other. There was also the or-der that implicitly governed relations between the blocs. As many analysts have noted,26 the mistake Western policymakers made in their exuberance at the end of the Cold War was assuming that the liberal order led by the United States would subsume the other two. This proved only partial-ly true. While many ex-Eastern Bloc states gladly joined the U.S.-led international order, Russia and China proved more interested in contesting Amer-ican leadership.

The answer to this problem, however, is not to scrap the U.S.-led order as a relic of the past, but to reform it by building, as Miller has suggested, a “smaller, deeper liberal order” based on shared values and interests that can magnify U.S. efforts to counter its rivals.27 Miller proposes building a separate structure for engaging with those rivals through diplomacy, arms control agreements, and the like, and, yes, even cooperating with them where doing so is possible and advantageous. The point of building an order among U.S. allies would not be to cut them off from U.S. rivals — playing such a zero-sum game would be risky for the Unit-ed States, as Schake, Mattis, Ellis, and Felter note.28 Rather, it is to permit them to engage with those rivals collectively and with confidence. Both “or-ders” should leverage the advantages conferred on the United States by the democratic values it shares with its allies, as well as the weaknesses inherent in the authoritarian values held by Amer-ica’s rivals.29

Set Priorities, Match Ends and Means

Fourth, as important as they are, America’s democratic values should be advanced conserv-atively, keeping in mind the vital importance of maintaining domestic support for U.S. foreign pol-

of the target. This is where McMaster’s frequent exhortations to “strategic empathy” are valuable. Conflicts the United States, as a superpower, re-gards as limited tend to be considered nigh-exis-tential by smaller adversaries. This makes those ad-versaries unexpectedly defiant, even under severe coercive pressure, often leading either to stalemate or outright military conflict.18 Avoiding such out-comes requires, first and foremost, setting realistic objectives when first crafting a policy, which is less politically costly than scaling back one’s objectives once failure appears inevitable. McMaster applies this logic to Iran, decrying the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement as an exercise in diplomacy not backed by the credible threat of force, and the 2018 de-cision to withdraw from the deal as the resort to pressure without a clear diplomatic strategy.19

Respect the Role of States

Second, the United States should give proper due to strong states as key actors in international affairs. As much as analysts and policymakers tend to invoke the “international community” or call for the United Nations or another international body to act, the true burden of action lies with individual states and coalitions of states. International insti-tutions should not be dismissed lightly — they are important tools in international affairs, lending le-gitimacy, setting norms and imposing constraints, helping to allocate the costs of global public goods, and providing forums for the debate and resolution of problems. They are also arenas for competition, and American withdrawal from, or neglect of, those institutions benefits rivals, as McMaster notes.

However, success or failure in foreign policy nevertheless depends foremost on the will and capacity of states. Sanctions on Iran are a case in point. While the legitimacy of those sanctions in the eyes of much of the world flowed from the U.N. resolutions that endorsed them, their power de-rived from America’s preponderance in, and thus influence over, the international financial system. As the Trump administration’s “maximum pres-sure” campaign has demonstrated, the absence of significant international support has not reduced the power of U.S. sanctions. It has merely offset

18 For a fuller discussion of this topic, see Michael Singh, “Conflict with Small Powers Derails U.S. Foreign Policy: The Case for Strategic Discipline,” Foreign Affairs, Aug. 12, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/north-america/2020-08-12/conflict-small-powers-derails-us-foreign-policy.

19 McMaster, Battlegrounds, 297.

20 “Security Council Calls for End to Hostilities Between Hizbollah, Israel, Unanimously Adopting Resolution 1701 (2006),” United Nations, Aug. 11, 2006, https://www.un.org/press/en/2006/sc8808.doc.htm.

21 Kori Schake, Jim Mattis, Jim Ellis, and Joe Felter, “Defense in Depth: Why U.S. Security Depends on Alliances — Now More than Ever,” Foreign Affairs, Nov. 23, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-11-23/defense-depth.

22 McMaster, Battlegrounds, 442.

it modestly by offering Iran the meager consola-tion prize of international support for its position. When a U.N. imprimatur is present but no state is willing or able to act in support of that mandate — for example, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701’s call for the disarmament of Hizballah20 — the result is underwhelming.

With this in mind, the United States should de-vote considerable effort to increasing the capa-bilities and resilience of its partners, especially those that demonstrate the political will to act in furtherance of mutual interests. It should also or-ganize those partners into cooperative coalitions and networks so that they complement and am-plify one another’s capabilities. As Kori Schake, former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Jim Ellis, and Joe Felter have noted, allies help to constrain rivals and magnify, or substitute for, the exercise of American power. The neglect of alliances en-courages rival networks to flourish.21 Investing in alliances and enduring partnerships, as opposed to treating cooperation as purely transactional, also generates positive externalities, as existing allies are more likely to give new requests from Wash-ington a more sympathetic hearing in the future and may even search out new areas for cooperation themselves. But nurturing alliances need not mean fostering or encouraging dependency — indeed, as strength and dependency are at odds, Washington should not shy away from pushing its partners to shoulder ever greater shares of collective burdens as their capabilities grow.

In these respects, McMaster correctly notes that the Trump administration deserves credit for building and improving upon the work of previous administrations: It increased American defense in-vestments in Europe, even as it has pushed NATO partners to spend more on their own defense, and strengthened partnerships, such as the “Quad” in the Indo-Pacific and Israel’s nascent partnership with the United Arab Emirates and other coun-tries in the Middle East. Although he does also note that the administration deserves admonition for its “expressions of doubt about the value of allies when Russia and China are doing their best to break alliances apart.”22

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threats, and restore the health of its democratic institutions and ability to craft foreign policy on a bipartisan basis (seemingly the hardest of all given the country’s experience in 2020). McMaster’s suc-cessors in the West Wing will need to grapple with these problems that lie at the intersection of do-mestic and foreign policy, perhaps taking comfort that the United States has managed to do so in the past. In 1978, for example, Michael Mandelbaum and William Schneider lamented that the “Cold War consensus is gone,” and asserted that the in-coming Carter administration’s most pressing need was for “a domestic consensus for foreign policy.”36

Conclusion

In Battlegrounds, McMaster has offered a use-ful tour d’horizon of the threats facing the United States, as well as an entry into a pressing debate over the proper role of the United States in the world. For internationalists of all stripes, the stakes of that debate are high. Radicalism is resurgent in international relations. The notion that the interna-tional system the United States has defended and in which it has prospered for decades must not be preserved, but rather transformed, has gained traction not only in Moscow and Beijing but on the hustings throughout the Western world. The time to make the case for what focused, pragmatic, and competent American leadership and engage-ment looks like, and what it has to offer the United States and the world, is now or never.

Michael Singh is managing director and Lane-Swig Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He served at the State Department and National Security Council from 2000 to 2008.

Image: Department of Defense, SSGT Scott T. Sturkol, USAF

36 Michael Mandelbaum and William Schneider, “The New Internationalisms,” International Security 2, no. 3 (Winter 1978): 81–98, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/446200.

icy. McMaster is right to assert that “strengthen-ing democratic institutions and processes in tar-get nations may be the strongest remedy” to the aggression of America’s adversaries, and he advo-cates for doing so across the board — whether by supporting activists in Russia, China, and Iran, or by helping to promote democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq.30 Yet, he does not explicitly address the need to prioritize among these issues. Such prior-itization has taken on greater urgency given that American resources and power are increasingly at a premium in a more competitive world.

The Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy sets out its priorities with laudable clarity:

Long-term strategic competitions with China and Russia are the principal priorities for the Department, and require both increased and sustained investment, because of the magni-tude of the threats they pose to U.S. security and prosperity today, and the potential for those threats to increase in the future.31

Far less clear, however, are the policy implica-tions for this prioritization elsewhere, such as in the Middle East. As the defense strategy makes clear, it almost certainly means operating more through partners. But it should also mean recog-nizing that a dollar spent maintaining or expand-ing the strength, stability, and prosperity of a will-ing partner — those on the boundaries of the free world — will almost certainly yield more than that same dollar spent seeking to foster accountable governance or promote economic liberalization where they do not already exist.

The need to set priorities and follow them when allocating resources is reinforced by the need to maintain domestic support for foreign policy. Strategists should consider not just what ought to be done but what can be done given material, as well as political and social, constraints. The elec-tion of successive presidents who have decried American interventions in the Middle East and pledged to reduce U.S. commitments overseas should be evidence enough of the American peo-

30 McMaster, Battlegrounds, 140.

31 Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States, Department of Defense, 2018https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Docu-ments/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf.

32 Ruth Igielnik and Kim Parker, “Majorities of U.S. Veterans, Public Say the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Were Not Worth Fighting,” Pew Research Center, July 10, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/10/majorities-of-u-s-veterans-public-say-the-wars-in-iraq-and-afghanistan-were-not-worth-fighting/.

33 McMaster, Battlegrounds, 443.

34 McMaster, Battlegrounds, 411.

35 McMaster, Battlegrounds, 406.

ple’s conflict fatigue. While McMaster often at-tributes this phenomenon to a failure by consec-utive administrations to explain the importance of conflicts like those in Iraq and Afghanistan to the American populace, survey data does not bear this out. For example, Pew Research found in mid-2019 that veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — who are presumably well informed about those conflicts — overwhelmingly believe that the costs of those conflicts exceeded their benefits. These polls also show that veterans’ views close-ly track with those of the general public.32 Such evidence suggests that the problem is not one of communication but of failing to match realistic ends with available means — means that are in-creasingly needed elsewhere. If internationalists fail to learn from such feedback and from the re-sults of past policies, public skepticism of their proposals is likely to deepen and calls for more wholesale retrenchment and restraint will mount.

Husband America’s Strength

Finally, the United States needs to rejuvenate the wellsprings of its power and influence: its mil-itary and economic strength and its democratic health. While these topics are largely beyond Bat-tlegrounds’ remit, McMaster touches upon each briefly. He notes, for example, that “partisan vitri-ol” in the United States gives its rivals the impres-sion that it is incapable of competing effectively,33 or that “decisions involving technological and in-frastructure development must consider how the proposed technology and infrastructure would interact with geopolitical competitions,”34 or that competing in cyberspace requires cooperation be-tween the public and private sector.35

The upshot is that no clever strategy for deploy-ing American power will succeed in countering the threats it faces if that power itself is permitted to atrophy. To succeed in a more competitive world, the United States will need to move more quickly to modernize and make more resilient a military that is increasingly vulnerable to the capabilities of its adversaries, enact economic policies to boost productivity and protect against national security