A New Approach to US Foreign Policy

By Christopher Preble

On September 26, 2002, an eminent group of foreign policy scholars posted an advertisement in the New York Times declaring that a “war with Iraq is not in America’s national interest.” “Military force should be used only when it advances U.S. national interests,” the signatories averred, “War with Iraq does not meet this standard.”

Among the organizers of the Times statement, the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer and Harvard’s Stephen Walt emerged as two of the leading voices against war with Iraq in the autumn of 2002. Mearsheimer and Walt fixed on the Bush administration’s argument that Saddam could no longer be contained or deterred. This belief, they argued, “rests on distorted history and faulty logic.” Accordingly, “the campaign to wage war against Iraq rests on a flimsy foundation.”

Mearsheimer, Walt, and the 31 other signatories to the Times statement, struck a discordant note at a time when the president and his senior advisers were engaged in a daily effort to generate public support for a war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but they were hardly alone. In 2002 and early 2003, many libertarians also warned against a U.S.-initiated war with Iraq.

These warnings against military intervention were not grounded in a dispute over the motivations of the Bush administration, nor in any doubts about Saddam’s perfidy. They shared Mearsheimer and Walt’s confidence in the continued viability of containment and deterrence. But libertarian attitudes toward preventive war, forcible regime change, and coercive democratization, derive from an inherent skepticism about the utility and efficiency of state action, combined with fears that state power, mobilized for foreign policy aims, can just as easily be directed to stifling liberty at home.

Thomas Jefferson opined that the “natural progress of things is for government to gain ground and for liberty to yield.” James Madison added another crucial caveat: “Of all enemies of public liberty,” he wrote in 1795, “war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.” “No nation,” Madison continued, “could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

The historical evidence bears this out. The expansion of state power has occurred in almost every crisis, and at the expense of individual liberty. In short, war is a kind of petri dish for the germ of expanding state power. Although such considerations are not the only litmus test, libertarians take them into account when considering whether or not to support a particular military intervention. But they are hardly alone; most Americans treat war for what it is -- a necessary evil.

In practice, Americans have been particularly reluctant to engage in foreign military interventions not directly related to the defense of vital U.S. security interests. When our physical security is threatened, or when deterrence is likely to fail, we may reluctantly choose to initiate a war even before an attack. But we do so with a very clear sense of the high costs of such operations, and with a sober sense of the likelihood of success or failure.

How does President Bush’s decision to launch a preventive war against Iraq
measure up under this standard?

The president’s defenders can reasonably argue that he acted in accordance with his constitutional authority to defend this country, our people, and our way of life, from threats. The attack on Iraq was initially couched almost exclusively in these terms. The president defended his actions on the grounds that he had an obligation to defend the citizens of the United States, and, according to George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein posed a threat. The costs of inaction, he explained, were greater than the costs of action.

We can never know what the costs of inaction might have been, but the predicted costs of the Iraq operation have proved far higher than originally estimated. Meanwhile, the potential benefits still seem very uncertain. It is indeed possible that post-Saddam Iraq could become even more dangerous to U.S. security than what existed before.

But will the costs of preventive regime change be far higher than the benefits in other cases in the future? Does the experience in Iraq help to either confirm or refute the theory that preventive war is neither warranted nor wise? There are obvious problems with trying to draw generalizations from a single case. But some among the pro-war faction argued that the United States should do Iraq first because it would be easy, a “cakewalk.” A demonstration of American power would allegedly increase the likelihood that Kim Jong Il and the Mullahs in Iran would capitulate. But if they did not, an emboldened United States would be in an even stronger position to turn on them.

The war-hawks were probably correct in at least one respect: regime change was relatively easy in Iraq, easier certainly than many of the other countries on the list of failed or failing states, and easier than it would be in either North Korea or Iran, the other two countries named in the president’s Axis of Evil speech from January 2002.

So what does that say about future preventive wars, waged either to remove a not-yet-materialized threat or to remove an undemocratic government from power? Answer: To the extent that Iraq was to have been relatively easy, our continued difficulties there suggest that preventive regime change followed by long-term nation building will be even harder elsewhere.

Anticipating flagging public support, several Iraq war enthusiasts became Bush administration critics. The problem, they said, was not that the Bush administration deposed Saddam Hussein’s government, but rather that the Pentagon, chiefly, had made some critical errors at crucial times in the course of the post-war reconstruction, errors that could have the effect of snatching defeat from the jaws of a certain, unmitigated victory.

The arguments are, by now, quite familiar. The Bush administration didn’t use enough troops. They didn’t secure the borders. They disbanded the Iraqi army. They failed to provide water, power, and sanitation. They didn’t provide security. They didn’t hand out enough money. They didn’t hand out enough money quickly enough.

These criticisms are heard even among those who opposed intervention in the first place. Judging merely from the titles of some popular books, for example, Larry Diamond’s Squandered Victory and David Philips’ Losing Iraq, the implication is clear: success in future nation-building projects is not just possible, but likely, so long as the United States is prepared to devote the resources, and the political will, to make it happen.

But such arguments glide over the more difficult question: would Americans have embraced the president’s plans for Iraq if they believed at the outset that the project would tie up many tens of thousands of troops, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and require many, many years of effort? And will they be willing to sign onto similar missions in the future? There are ample grounds for skepticism.

The New York Times advertisement bought and paid for in September 2002 by some of this country’s foremost international relations experts failed to achieve its presumed ends. Within a few weeks, the U.S. Congress voted overwhelmingly to grant the president broad authority to wage war. By the time that the war began in March 2003, over 70 percent of Americans believed that an attack on Iraq was in the national interest.

Much has changed since then. Polls taken in recent months reveal that a majority of respondents now believe that the costs of the war have not been worth the expected benefits. Many Americans are now searching for a new approach to foreign policy, and this nascent coalition draws adherents from across the political spectrum.

The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, a group that I helped to organize in the summer of 2003, is motivated by a desire to prevent the supposed lessons from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein from being used as justification for a host of new military interventions elsewhere.

Unlike the ad hoc group assembled in September 2002, the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy was created as a long-term project, one dedicated to bridging the ideological divide. The organization aims to educate the public about the dangerous direction of our current policies. Given the emerging public frustration with the Iraq operation, it may be possible to fashion a new political consensus around a very different vision of foreign policy, one that returns the country to the high ground of leading by example, and leaves behind the excesses of overweening “indispensable nation” arrogance.

Christopher Preble is a founding member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.

This article appeared in the Fall 2006 print edition of the Free Liberal.