The Real Reason For America's 'Weakness'
It's Not Biden or Trump, it's The Lingering Legacy Of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan
REMINDER: Part II of THE GREAT AMERICAN POLITICAL ROADTRIP, featuring in depth analysis of the politics and trends of ARIZONA and ARKANSAS is now out here.
Over the weekend when Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel in retaliation for an Israeli strike in Syria that killed several Iranian military leaders, a friend asked why we “couldn’t just overthrow the mullahs in Iran already?”
He’s not a conservative – far from it – but he admitted that he felt “embarrassed” that there was nothing the United States, the largest power on Earth, could do to stop Iran and “make everyone play nice.”
I rather bluntly responded, “What would you suggest, should we bomb and invade Iran and overthrow the mullahs if it came to it?”
“No,” he said. “No more wars.”
“But,” he added, “We look weak.”
This seemingly contradictory viewpoint is fairly common among people I’ve spoken to lately. No one wants another war, but they also don’t want to see America submissive to its adversaries or its allies. It’s left many of us questioning; What can we do to restore our place as the dominant power in the world without having to send Americans into another battle zone?
The United States, as a superpower, has two cards to play when pushing its weight around in international affairs – our military might and our economic strength. The most obvious example of playing the economic card is with China, where we’ve created a dynamic where trade and commerce is key to both of our economies. That makes war a unfavorable prospect for both. It’s the same relationship that has helped keep the peace between the US, Canada, and Mexico for nearly two centuries.
We also play this card in the form of sanctions. Often though, when one card doesn’t work, we have no other choice but the play the other. Sanctions did not work with Russia and Syrian dictator Bandar al-Assad. They don’t seem to be working with Iran.
In the past, the threat of war either made adversaries stand down, as was the case during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, or we followed through and went to war, as we did in Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait and Bosnia. Typically we won and the situation was resolved, but in recent decades that’s become less obvious of an outcome. In the 20th Century, Americans were generally supportive of military intervention, or at least the threat of it. The public only turned against Korea and Vietnam as the wars dragged on without any clear path to victory.
That all changed in the mid-2000s with the Iraq War. For President George W. Bush’s generation, the ghosts of Vietnam were still haunting our foreign policy. However, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Communism, and the successes in Panama, Kuwait, and Bosnia, Americans started looking at Vietnam as an aberration and grew less leery about using our military might again. The September 11th terrorist attacks changed the gambit entirely. A burst of national pride made us forget any misgivings and support for military action was nearly universal.
Bush’s decision to invade Iraq 18 months after 9/11 was a divisive one. Though public opinion was for it at first, the margins were not as high as they were for Afghanistan or the Gulf War, and there was a large, very verbal anti-war coalition. Had the Iraq War ended quickly and the occupation not become a quagmire, the opposition would have dried up, but the disastrous post-Saddam occupation of Iraq validated the anti-war movement’s worst fears and gave their dovish worldview credibility.
For the generation that remembered Vietnam, Iraq reopened those wounds. They witnessed the United States being humiliated militarily on the world stage for a second time. Our inability to manage peace and stability in Iraq took away our credibility as a military power and made the American people skittish about future military action. Ten years after we left Iraq, the Afghanistan War ended in another failure. That was three disastrous endings to wars in less than 50 years. Let’s face it, it shook our confidence.
Americans’ unwillingness to fight another war is why Syria was able to cross President Barack Obama’s “red line” in 2014 and use chemical weapons against factions opposed to Assad’s dictatorship. It’s also why Russia laughed off our warnings to not annex Crimea in 2014 and invade Ukraine in 2022, and it’s why Iran lobbed missiles at Israel this weekend. It’s also why there is growing fear that China might soon decide to enforce its claim on Taiwan and dabble in imperialism in the South China Sea. Further, it’s why our demands to our allies, like Israel and Mexico, get waved off The Iraq War made a mockery of Pax Americana1.
No president wants to be Lyndon Johnson or Bush and start a war that might end badly. Our adversaries know this. The fact that neither major presidential candidate is taking a clear hawkish tone on using the military, and the highest polling third-party candidate wants America to disengage from the world completely, reinforces this. Congress dragging its feet on aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel is more evidence of this.
Most Americans are probably facing an existential crisis surrounding our place in the world. We were all raised in the era of America being a global superpower and a positive force and our national pride is enveloped in that, and it is hard to adjust to the current dynamic where we are exhausted with the work that goes towards doing that. Going forward we will have to decide if it’s worth the sacrifices and hard work to remain a superpower, or if we just want to pass the torch to someone else.
Pax Americana is name given to the post-World War II era of relative peace which the United States, has the global superpower, used its might to enforce and sustain.
This is probably the most no-win construct in any public policy. When other nations are willing to use violence, there is generally no easy non-violent alternative. The US uses its tools, as you describe, but that only gets us so far. I can call myself a pacifist, but good luck with that approach if you are CIC of the US armed forces.