National Security in the 21st Century
Keith_Indy on Oct 18 2007 at 3:33 pm | Filed under: Developmental economics, Domestic Politics, Foreign affairs, Keith's Page, Military Matters
Megan McArdle asks the question, Should we cut our defense spending in half? And has a follow up post entitled “The best offense is a good defense?”
It is an interesting discussion in that our military has always been about projecting and protecting Americas national interests beyond our border. That is what the Navy has done for most of its history.
Including:
The Barbary Wars 1801-1815
Slave Trade Patrols 1820-1861
Anti-Piracy Patrols 1822-1830
Philippine Insurrection 1899-1902
China Relief-Boxer Rebellion 1900-1901
Latin American Campaigns 1906-1920
Yangtze Service 1926-1927, 1930-1932
China Service 1937-1939, 1945-1957
Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962
Dominican Republic Intervention, 1965
Grenada: Operation Urgent Fury, 1983
Korean Conflict 1950-1954
Vietnam Conflict 1962-1975
Kosovo Conflict, 1999
Well, national security always comes down to figuring out what the real threats are, where our national interests lie, and how best to handle them. Our strategy should be first to prevent wars and conflict, and when that fails, win them as quickly as possible, and be able to effectively deal with the aftermath. If you look at the world, and the way we’ve used the military over much of the 80’s, you see the types of missions our nation is going to be tasked with for the next 50 years.
Thomas Barnett has done this, and I personally think he has the right take on it. There is a place between war and peace which we are currently not handling very effectively. It is peace keeping, relief missions, stability projects (such as training other countries military,) it is aid projects to help build infrastructure.
All of this, the everything else between the Dept of Defense, and the Dept of State, is what needs to be increased and focused on. If you discount any “great war” happening within the next 50 years, say between Russia and US, or China and US, then what you have is what we’ve been doing since the early 80’s. Taking care of nations which can be described as dysfunctional.
Barnett gave a 25 minute presentation of his ideas at one of the TED conferences. It’s well worth watching, and explains his vision for what the make-up of forces should be.
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I’m not a big fan of Barnett. He sees dysfunctional countries and thinks we have a sacred duty to invade and occupy them to bring “stability,” on the assumption you can. In his books, I’ve noticed a shocking negligence of what sorts of diplomatic and financial outlays this grand strategy would require (in particular over Iraq, he said we should have just magically included NATO, Russia, and China, when they were opposed to the invasion in the first place). He also labors under the impression that the Balkans were a raving success to be replicated. In “A Blueprint for Action,” he even draws up multiple lists, trying to game out the proper sequence of sovereign nations to invade… on the idea that “chaos” is a vital national security interest (and it’s a much better book than his first).
In other words, it’s a great idea to want to fix broken countries, even if it’s not your place as a national government. How you go about doing it, however, is another matter entirely, and this is where Barnett (and a lot of interventionists) falls way flat. Militarizing the Peace Corps would not help things, aside from getting them kicked out of the remaining countries they’re allowed to operate in; similarly, salivating over the stability you can sow by bombing countries and hoping Europe is willing to pony up the occupation forces (he also points to Afghanistan as a roaring success of this model) isn’t really workable, or even, I would argue, very responsible. North Korea? Forget it—he thinks it’s totally awesome to have Japan and China team up to occupy and rebuild it.
Rather, looking at why countries like Zimbabwe fall off the deep end might help some—in that case, the enabling of fellow African nations. Why do they support him? The most reasoned arguments I’ve read tie it back to anti-colonialism, which is where and how Mugabe can say the right things at conferences to generate sympathy. The military, even the “pistol-packing peace corps,” isn’t the right solution to that.
Otherwise, it’s a really thin line between appropriate power projection and outright imperialism. The Philippine Insurgency was us brutally crushing a purchased colony, and a lot of those conflicts were of questionable value to our total national security.
So what IS the appropriate line? I honestly can’t say. I’m not an isolationist who thinks we have no legitimate actions outside our own borders unless specifically attacked. But I’m not comfortable with the idea of us toppling any government we don’t like, or refusing to engage with governments who oppose us simply because we have the capability to bomb them with impunity. Lining up in a Barnettian framework is not the way to achieve more global stability, it is how you achieve war without end.
I’ll admit I haven’t read the book. However, I have read a lot of Thomas Barnett and your description of him doesn’t square with what I read or hear from him. So, I guess I’ll have to read the book. I did just go over to his website and it sure doesn’t sound like the war crazed interventionist you just decribed. In fact, read this post and tell me you two are so at odds?
Or this post.
The post I linked above argues specifically against “refusing to engage with governments who oppose us simply because we have the capability to bomb them with impunity.”
Unless his book is 180 degrees from his work on the web and his essays I find your description hard to understand.
“I get accused of asserting too much with too little data, and I admit to the charge as a professional visionary.” Hehehe, that’s the sort of thing I was complaining about — both the annoying self-promotion, and the insouciance with which he simply asserts things.
On to what he’s writing, I can say those blog posts are almost the opposite of what he wrote in his books. I’ll confess to having been turned off by his books (read those reviews), and thus never bother to read his blog. If he’s changed his tune this much, I’d like to know why he’s dropped the rhetoric of invading and toppling “disconnected” regimes, or why he suddenly is redefining the idea not to include states like Iran, or why the need to forcibly reconnect them on our terms is a lesser concern.
Similarly, his stance about not worshipping “the soldier” is a new one to me too, as that is certainly not the feeling you get reading him crow about how much the military licks his boots after his powerpoints. If he’s changed, great, I’ll give the man a fresh consideration. If he (which, given he was still referencing “both books” in the second post) is simply writing about reality on his blog but ignoring that in his more formal writing… well, then I’d still have my doubts.
So to summarize: those two posts are almost completely the opposite of what his books say.
Once again, I’ll have to read the books, but this kind of stuff has been what he has discussed in essays and blog posts for years. Therefore I am perplexed without more data, which means I have to buy a new book.
I’ll say the self promotion aspect is part of his style (though it is his career) and certainly both criticisms are part and parcel of almost anyone who holds themselves out as expert. In fact, that is a criticism that could be made of a great many people;^)
Josh: I think you may have misinterpreted Barnett’s writings. I’ve only read Blueprint for Action (”BPFA”), and perhaps I’m the one who’s off, but I don’t recall him making any normative, neocon-like judgments as to whether we should go about toppling regimes that we don’t much care for. I understood him to take the assumption that, given the historical progression of our military conflicts and the growing globalization and interconnectedness of the world today, we will likely be drawn into these sorts of conflicts more often. Accordingly, the military needs to adapt from being a regime-toppling force only, into one that is also able to reconstruct and rebuild after the prior regime has been ousted.
Also, you seem to think that Barnett was pointing to Kosovo and Afghanistan as wholly successful ventures, whereas I read him as concentrating on particular aspects that were done well within those ventures. His point, as I recall, was to identify nation-building exercises that serve as examples of what could be done if those skills were enhanced and actively planned for pre-op.
In short, the point to BPFA was to advocate for an interventionist foreign policy, but instead to shape US military actions by employing the full set of our capabilities (i.e. military, diplomatic, economic, etc.) when we do get involved in foreign wars. He assumes, whether rightly or wrongly, that an interventionist foreign policy will be the norm in a single superpower world that is characterized by ever increasing economic globalization.
I could easily be misinterpreting his book — one of my other complaints about it was that his actual points were difficult to extract from the self-promotion and intimate details of his home life. But he does have an entire section devoted to mapping out different countries to invade and topple to “foster connectedness.” He doesn’t paint them as inevitable, he paints them as obviously within our self-interest.
I didn’t say Kosovo. I said the Balkans. Kosovo, whose drive for independence is about to launch it into another war with Serbia, is a part of that. Bosnia is another. Both are not successes, though they are also not failures. But we don’t like to think that there are still over 40,000 troops in Kosovo to “keep the peace,” and that if they leave, it descends into chaos and madness again as Albanians and Serbs go at each others’ throats.
The gist of it is that his ideas aren’t all that bad, and there are some really good nuggets – I particularly like his thoughts on force transformation. It is his world view, the way he interprets the core and gap, and the policy prescriptions that flow (and his total ignorance of the UNSC, pretending China, Russia, and the U.S. will ever see eye to eye on the majority of security issues), taken so seriously by senior policy-makers, that gives me deep pause.
With regard to the list, it’s been some time since I read it, but I didn’t view it as a to-do list, but rather a list of countries we might get involved with.
Given our interventionist history, isn’t it likely that we will continue to intervene when it suits us?
Given that, isn’t it prudent to have a force structure setup to do interventions correctly? Heavy on the peace-keeping, civil affairs, and rebuilding.
Also, if we had such a force, complete with a diplomatic, and economic component, wouldn’t it be easier to offer non-military help to struggling nations?
Yes, some of what Barnett proposes can be called wishful thinking. The same could be said about a lot of strategic thinking. I don’t think he turns a blind eye to the realities of today. He is looking for a way to get everyone involved with security matters which are truly global in nature.
Well, let me clarify, then. Barnett is trying to do a good thing, I just don’t think he’s doing a very good job. In his TED talk, I absolutely agree with his thoughts on force transformation, and the government’s intransigence in adapting to the clear reality of the present (and the need for a “department of everything else). Where I think Barnett falls down, hard, is his portrayal of the UNSC (and the international system in general), and his lack of good area knowledge, and even the effectiveness of some of his more specific policy measures.