U.S. foreign policy in recent years can look like a series of misadventures—failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bungled peace efforts in the Middle East, growing nuclear capabilities in some rival powers, and any number of other embarrassments. And the latest setback—the deaths of three U.S. soldiers in Jordan in a drone attack by a pro-Iranian militia—raises new questions about what U.S. forces are doing in these turbulent areas and whether it makes sense to keep them there.
U.S. foreign policy in recent years can look like a series of misadventures—failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bungled peace efforts in the Middle East, growing nuclear capabilities in some rival powers, and any number of other embarrassments. And the latest setback—the deaths of three U.S. soldiers in Jordan in a drone attack by a pro-Iranian militia—raises new questions about what U.S. forces are doing in these turbulent areas and whether it makes sense to keep them there.
It’s tempting to blame these recurring failures on inept U.S. leadership (in both political parties) or an ill-chosen grand strategy—I’ve written plenty of that sort of criticism myself—but U.S. efforts to shape world politics face a deeper structural problem that we sometimes overlook. U.S. initiatives sometimes fail not because U.S. strategy is necessarily bad or because public officials are less skilled than one might wish, but because adversaries have a greater stake in the outcome and are willing to make greater sacrifices than we are to get their way. In these situations, America’s superior power may be overcome by an opponent’s superior resolve.
This problem arises in good part because the United States is far and away the most secure great power in modern history. It has no serious rivals anywhere near its own territory; has a large, sophisticated, and diverse economy; possesses thousands of nuclear weapons; and enjoys a highly favorable geography. Its present level of security and prosperity may not last forever, but no other country (and certainly no major power) is in an equally fortunate position today.
The result is a paradox: The United States can roam the world and intervene in lots of distant problems because it doesn’t have to worry about defending its own soil against armed attack. But these favorable circumstances also mean that what happens in these far-flung regions is rarely critical for U.S. survival and may be only loosely related to its long-term prosperity. Among other things, this means that nearly every major foreign war fought by the United States is, to some degree, a war of choice. States facing a hostile invader or a rapidly deteriorating security situation may have no option but to fight to retain their independence, but the United States hasn’t faced these problems since the 19th century. Even U.S. entry into both world wars may not have been strictly necessary: Although I believe intervening in both of these conflicts was the right decision on strategic and moral grounds, U.S. involvement was hotly debated at the time—and for understandable reasons.
Since then, the United States has frequently found itself fighting adversaries far from its shores and either close to its opponents’ territory or on their home ground. A vastly weaker China intervened in the Korean War because U.S. forces were approaching the Chinese border, and Mao Zedong was willing to sacrifice more than a hundred thousand troops to keep the U.S. and its allies from controlling the entire Korean Peninsula. The United States cared enough about Vietnam to send more than 2 million troops there and lose more than 58,000 of them, but the North Vietnamese cared even more than we did, endured far more serious losses, and eventually prevailed. Americans were more than willing to go after al Qaeda in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, and they were even willing to stay on for years trying to keep the Taliban from regaining power. In the end, however, the latter cared more about the fate of that country than we did. Similar circumstances are also apparent in Ukraine: The United States and others have been willing to send money and arms and take other costly steps to help Kyiv, but Russia’s leaders are willing to send soldiers to fight and die there and Ukraine’s foreign backers are not. Not because Western leaders are pusillanimous, but because it’s a bigger issue for Moscow (and for Ukraine) than it is for the rest of the world. The same uncomfortable problem lurks in debates about Taiwan: No matter how often U.S. officials and defense experts stress that Taiwanese autonomy is a vital U.S. interest, it is hard to be confident that they care more about this issue than Beijing does.
Please note: The fact that adversaries may have more skin in the game and thus greater resolve does not mean that the United States should not take on global commitments or intervene in distant conflicts. One may not need equal resolve to deter an opponent from taking some risky action, for example, because they can’t be sure one won’t respond and impose costs they don’t want to bear. Nor does it mean that more resolved adversaries necessarily win, as the confrontations with Iraq in 1991, Serbia in 1999, and the Islamic State in Iraq demonstrate. But the fact that the United States is typically operating far from home and that its opponents will therefore tend to have greater resolve is a recurring feature of the broader strategic environment.
In practice, the United States has dealt with this problem in two ways. The first approach is to link America’s reputation for resolve and credibility to the outcome of a particular conflict. Even if the stakes are less than vital, officials will insist that they must prevail in order to deter future challenges somewhere else. In effect, this strategy attempts to convince opponents that the U.S. interest in a given issue is larger than it initially appears, because it is tied to every other commitment or interest that the United States might have made in the past.
As we saw in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, this approach can help sustain public support for wars that aren’t going well and where the benefits seem to outweigh the costs. But it may not convince opponents that Washington will stay the course forever, especially if they are highly resolved and if other U.S. allies start complaining that Washington is squandering resources that could be devoted to protecting them. Moreover, the more commitments a state takes on, the harder it is to defend all of them at once and the less credible each one becomes. Challengers will eventually figure this out and look for opportunities to take advantage. By itself, invoking variations on the domino theory is not going to be an effective strategy.
The second solution is to maintain a sufficient degree of military and economic superiority to allow the United States to defeat opponents at little or no cost to itself. An adversary might care more about the issues at stake, but it may not matter if they must pay a high price to achieve their objectives and we don’t. Saddam Hussein defied the United States in 1990 because he thought American society wouldn’t accept the loss of 10,000 men in a single battle, but U.S. leaders knew they weren’t going to lose anywhere near that many, and Desert Storm showed they were right. Indeed, one could argue that this principle underpins America’s entire approach to defense and foreign policy: It spends a lot of money to obtain capabilities that can defeat an enemy at relatively low cost; devotes lots of resources to various force-protection measures, uses its control over the key nodes of the global financial system to impose one-sided sanctions on others; and it relies on local ground troops (e.g., Iraqi special forces versus the Islamic State, Ukrainians versus Russia today) when it can.
The problem is that a margin of advantage of this magnitude is hard to maintain, especially now that the unipolar moment is over and major-power rivals are reemerging. Furthermore, our military advantages decline when facing insurgencies and other forms of local resistance. Technological developments (e.g., drones, enhanced surveillance, the spread of missile capabilities, etc.) are also giving relatively weak actors—such as the Houthis in Yemen—the ability to impose costs on opponents whose overall capabilities are vastly stronger. Weak but highly motivated local actors—such as the militia that conducted the drone attack in Jordan—may not be able to force the United States into doing what they want, but they can make it harder for the United States to act with the impunity it enjoyed a couple of decades ago.
If the world is entering a period of defense dominance, and if the resolve of most states is greatest in their immediate surroundings, then the ability of any country to wield vast and unchallenged global influence will decline. One could imagine an emerging multipolar order in which a half-dozen or more major powers exercise a degree of influence close to home, but whose sway declines rapidly the farther they get from their home territory. Influence will decline in part because the ability to project power declines with distance, but also because the balance of resolve shifts toward others the farther one ventures afield.
In such a world, the United States will have to pick its battles more carefully than it has in the past, because the costs of going everywhere and doing everything will rise, and distant opponents will be more willing to pay those costs in regions closer to them than to us. The good news is that this might also be a world where some of America’s current allies start doing more to protect themselves and their own surroundings because it is in their interest to do so. It will be a different world than the one we’ve inhabited for the past 75 years or so, but Americans needn’t be overly alarmed by it. As I’ve argued before, it might even be to their advantage.
America Is Suffering From a Resolve Gap
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30.01.2024
U.S. foreign policy in recent years can look like a series of misadventures—failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bungled peace efforts in the Middle East, growing nuclear capabilities in some rival powers, and any number of other embarrassments. And the latest setback—the deaths of three U.S. soldiers in Jordan in a drone attack by a pro-Iranian militia—raises new questions about what U.S. forces are doing in these turbulent areas and whether it makes sense to keep them there.
U.S. foreign policy in recent years can look like a series of misadventures—failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bungled peace efforts in the Middle East, growing nuclear capabilities in some rival powers, and any number of other embarrassments. And the latest setback—the deaths of three U.S. soldiers in Jordan in a drone attack by a pro-Iranian militia—raises new questions about what U.S. forces are doing in these turbulent areas and whether it makes sense to keep them there.
It’s tempting to blame these recurring failures on inept U.S. leadership (in both political parties) or an ill-chosen grand strategy—I’ve written plenty of that sort of criticism myself—but U.S. efforts to shape world politics face a deeper structural problem that we sometimes overlook. U.S. initiatives sometimes fail not because U.S. strategy is necessarily bad or because public officials are less skilled than one might wish, but because adversaries have a greater stake in the outcome and are willing to make greater sacrifices than we are to get their way. In these situations, America’s superior power may be overcome by an opponent’s superior resolve.
This problem arises in good part because the United States is far and away the most secure great power in modern history. It has no serious rivals anywhere near its own territory; has a large, sophisticated, and diverse economy; possesses thousands of nuclear weapons; and enjoys a highly favorable geography. Its present level of security and prosperity may not last forever, but no other country (and certainly no major power) is in an equally fortunate position today.
The result is a paradox: The United States can roam the world and intervene in lots of distant problems because it doesn’t have to worry about defending its own soil against armed attack. But these favorable circumstances also mean that what happens in these far-flung regions is rarely critical for U.S. survival and may be only loosely related to its long-term prosperity.........
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