3 Wars the Next President Must Avoid

October 15, 2016 Topic: Politics Region: Americas Blog Brand: The Skeptics Tags: YemenSyriaUkraineForeign PolicyUnited States

3 Wars the Next President Must Avoid

These problems will go on past Election Day.

With all of the process stories, rumors of Republicans bolting from the Trump campaign and ongoing revelations of Donald Trump’s history with women, it’s more than easy for Americans to overlook the most important question when deciding on which candidate would be a better commander-in-chief: would you be comfortable or confident in allowing this person to decide single-handedly whether to send young Americans to war?

The Clinton campaign has tried to make the presidential campaign all about temperament and knowledge of foreign affairs in the hope that uncommitted voters will bolt away from even considering Donald Trump as forty-fifth president of the United States. The Trump campaign, in turn, is trying to turn the narrative around as an indictment on Hillary Clinton’s judgment over the past thirty years—his label of Clinton as the worst secretary of state in America’s history is all about convincing voters that she has made one bad decision after another, without accountability for the consequences those actions may have created.

But temperament and judgment aren’t only the characteristics in a president that Americans should weigh as they deliberate on who to support as President Obama’s successor. Patience, open-mindedness and a capacity to make big, potentially deadly decisions in short order is just as important. If we have learned anything from eight years of President George W. Bush and eight years of President Barack Obama, it's that a commander-in-chief needs to weigh all of the evidence before plunging into a situation that could impact U.S. national security interests in a negative way.

Whether Americans wake up on November 9 to a President-Elect Clinton or Trump, the forty-fifth president will inherit a world that is increasingly complex and unpredictable. There will be no shortage of advisers inside and outside the national security bureaucracy that will attempt to persuade the next commander-in-chief to get more involved in certain conflicts that President Obama failed to quell or have even evolved into a worst shape. Neoconservatives, hibernating in think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, will release policy papers listing which conflicts that Washington must begin to take more seriously and which countries require immediate attention.

These three conflicts will still be around on January 20, 2017. Whoever is elected to the top job, however, ought to think really hard before committing additional U.S. military resources. More isn’t necessarily better.

1. Syria:

Republicans and Democrats alike on Capitol Hill are disturbed about the Obama administration’s policy toward the conflict. This isn’t hyperbole, because there really isn’t any other term to describe the sheer anger from some quarters in Washington about how President Obama has opted to deal with the crisis in Syria. Republican senators like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton and Bob Corker have all implored the Obama administration to get off the sidelines and adopt a policy that is much more aggressive towards the Assad regime in order to hold the dictator accountable for crimes against his own people. Bob Corker summarized the resignation among many of his party colleagues during a Foreign Relations Committee hearing with Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was in the unfortunate situation of sitting in a room full of hostile senators trying to defend the administration’s approach. “I think it's going to be a fascinating walk-through what I believe to be a failed presidency as it relates to foreign policy,” Corker said. “[There is] an unwillingness to roll up sleeves and deal with the tough issues that we have to deal with.” Even Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who has historically been supportive of President Obama’s foreign policy throughout his presidency, has advocated for American leadership to stop an impending humanitarian slaughter of civilians in Aleppo.

No-fly zones, humanitarian corridors, safe-zones for refugees inside Syria and strikes on Assad’s military airfields to ground the Syrian air force have all been included as options that the administration can take to help the opposition regain ground and hold off being weakened militarily. Vice presidential nominees Tim Kaine and Mike Pence both mentioned their support for a humanitarian safe zone in Syria that would prevent Syrian and Russian jets from flying and bombing whatever civilian infrastructure there is left. And yet, all of these options could open up a pandora’s box of further violence, dysfunction, and great-power rivalry between Washington and Moscow the likes of which we haven’t seen.

Syria’s war is one of the most terrible humanitarian calamities in the world today. Bashar al-Assad is a war criminal that should be defending himself in The Hague, not sitting in a presidential palace in Damascus continuing to approve indiscriminate and unprecedented barrel bombings against civilians in cities across the country. And yet the United States needs to come to terms with the hard reality that a major power, the Russian Federation, is allowing Assad to fight the war the way he wants to fight it, and that Moscow has devoted so much to the regime’s survival that any U.S. military action against the Syrian government could provoke the Russians to such an extent that a new layer of war could erupt. As Dave Majumdar has written in these pages, “the United States cannot know for certain if Moscow will idly stand by while American forces attack Syrian forces.”

2. Ukraine:

By all objective standards, the Russians have treated Ukraine as a vassal state that deserves to be beaten down into submission rather than an independent nation whose sovereignty ought to be respected. The annexation of Crimea and Moscow's military support to the separatists in the Donbass is about as subtle as sneaking into a party by barreling through the front door. Legally speaking, Russia’s intervention—some would say covert invasion—of Ukraine is contrary to the very foundation of international law and state sovereignty that the United Nations system sought to cement after World War II. A government that cannot make decisions without having to worry about sparking more violence by separatists on its own territory is not exactly the definition of having free will.

And yet, international-law violations aside, the simple fact remains that the Russians have national interests in that part of the world that counter the spread of Western democratic ideals. The collapse of Viktor Yanukovych’s government and its replacement with one that is far more pro-Western and anti-Russian was simply too much for President Putin to handle. The last thing that Putin needed was another state on his borders that was itching to join NATO, so he took action to complicate that project from becoming a reality. We in the United States and Europe may not like it, but we ought to understand it.

A President Clinton or a President Trump will come into office with the same recommendations on Ukraine that have been sent to President Obama. James Stavridis, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer, have both pushed for Washington send defensive weapons systems to Kiev in order to make the costs of Russia’s policy harder for Putin to sustain. A large contingent of lawmakers agree; the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act includes a provision in the law that would provide the White House with the authority to send $50 million in assistance to the Ukrainian military on everything from counter-artillery radars and ammunition, to antiarmor weapons systems and crew-served weapons.

How the Russians would be bound to respond in the event that U.S.-supplied weapons killed Russian troops on the battlefield is left to the margins, as if Ukraine’s political direction is simply too much trouble to care about. Proposals to pour more weapons into the theater, particularly one where Moscow has much more of an interest than the United States, would likely antagonize the Russians and perhaps light a fuse on what is now a relatively low-grade conflict. Americans and Russians fighting against one another via proxy is so 1980’s, especially when the status of Ukraine is far more vital to Moscow’s strategic position than America’s.

3. Yemen:

The civil war in Yemen has claimed approximately ten thousand lives over eighteen months. At first glance, it would seem like the conflict in the Arab world’s poorest country is pretty straightforward and warrants sustained American support; Saudi Arabia, the nation leading the military coalition, is after all a strategic ally of the United States in the region. The Houthi militia is anything but—an illegal, armed group of fighters at least partly supported by Iran that overthrew a democratically and internationally recognized government by force of arms. Why wouldn’t the United States sell billions of dollars in weapons to the Saudis and fuel Saudi jets in mid-air as they attempt to reinstall the legitimate Yemeni government?

In addition to the civilian casualties, multiple documented case studies of war crimes being committed against civilians, and what seems like purposeful bombing of hospitals, medical clinics and ports to make life miserable in Houthi-controlled areas, the answer should lie in the results of the campaign thus far: U.S. intelligence and enabling support over the past eighteen months really haven’t made much of a difference in the war. The conflict is as intractable as it has ever been, the battle geometry has stabilized, and the pro-government forces on the ground have made so few gains that Yemen’s capital city is still effectively a rebel-controlled domain. And by selling more arms to the Saudis and ensuring that coalition jets in the air can perform their bombing missions without having to return to the kingdom to refuel, the United States is contributing to the bloodshed by giving Riyadh, and Yemen’s President Hadi, an incentive to keep fighting rather than negotiating. What reason does a state have to embrace conflict-ending diplomacy when they have an unlimited and dependable supply of U.S. weapons and intelligence support at their disposal?