A Grand Strategy of Restraint Needs a ‘Counter Elite’
The American foreign policy establishment prefers meddling around the globe because it can afford to without cost or political price. What is needed is a new foreign policy establishment elite based on the principles of realism and restraint.
MOST REALIST international relations theories (and even most liberal ones) follow some fundamental assumptions—that the world is anarchic without a global policeman and global hegemony is unsustainable. Nation-states, the primary units of international politics, seek to survive in that anarchy. Of them, great powers are the main actors. States seeking hegemony are often balanced, as balancing is the norm. The system is amoral and Darwinian, and most hegemons overstretch and collapse, though some smart powers successfully retrench, or even “buck-pass” to other states during times of stress. Different schools of realism can, of course, claim and predict different ways on whether and how states seek survival. Some would argue that states are power maximizers, while others would argue that states are overwhelmingly security maximizers. Different schools of realism also conclude different behavior even while analyzing from the same theoretical baseline. For example, all realists agree that China is the biggest potential threat to American interests. Some might argue that the United States needs to arm Taiwan and balance China actively by facilitating an alliance network in the Asia-Pacific. Others might prefer the United States to be “offshore balancers” and buck-pass the security burden to regional powers, drawing attention to the fact that China is practically alliance-less and is surrounded by powerful and rich states (most of them ideologically aligned with the United States or opposed to potential Chinese hegemony), one with nuclear power and all with large navies. The Asia-Pacific in 2021 is dissimilar to a broken Europe in 1949, susceptible to an expansionist Soviet Union.
Regardless, all realists agree that America is a very secure great power, with a geographical advantage and hemispheric hegemony, and overwhelming aggregate power compared to peer rivals. Most top universities are in the United States, as are most top defense industrial sectors, businesses, and companies. The United States still commands the global commons and is the primary destination of trade, and while there might be trade rivals such as the EU and China, it is unlikely that there will be a great power challenger that will topple America from its perch at least in the near foreseeable future. Commensurate with the logic of realism, there are two regions that are of primary interest for American strategic security: Western Europe and the Eastern Pacific. If dominated by a rival hegemon, these regions can make the American coastline vulnerable and can result in consolidated economic power in rival hands, overwhelming American trade. In other words, these are regions where the United States did and would again do anything to prevent an expansionist hegemony of a peer rival. That said, there are no threats of Russian armor sweeping through the Belgian meadows anytime soon, nor is there any likelihood of Chinese marines landing in Japan and Australia in a war of expansion. If China starts a war with India, Taiwan, or Vietnam, it would at worst be bogged down in a gruesome war of attrition comparable to World War I, and at best be mired in a bleeding long-term counterinsurgency far worse than Iraq and Afghanistan. Either of these scenarios would almost certainly end any potential Chinese expansionism.
One of the reasons China grew so powerful is because it hasn’t fought a war since 1979. Meanwhile, almost all problems that the United States currently faces are domestic, ideological, and interrelated. Primary among them are the declining education standards; activist teachers and culture war; the collapse of increasingly partisan institutions, with subsequent diminishing public trust in them; an increasingly cocooned elite out of touch with their own countrymen, leading to faulty analysis, policies, and conclusions; massive migration problems on the southern border; fraying social contract; and an ideologically neoliberal-neoconservative duopoly, most of whom are more determined to ensure women’s rights in a semi-feudal backwater than solve matters like the crippling addiction problem within their own country.
While realists historically focused on human interests, modern academic realism is more aligned to structural analysis, often at the cost of ignoring domestic unit-level variables. Kenneth Waltz, for example, argued that a theory of realism in international relations should only be focused on systemic behavior, and not on individual states and their foreign policy predictions—a claim he himself repeatedly undermined. Nevertheless, most academic realists, as a result, are obsessed with theoretical studies. Likewise, no policy realist will ever satisfy the academy, as policy invariably needs to take into consideration messy compromises. Daniel Drezner wrote a few years back, by the standards of ivory tower realists, “there will only be a realist president if that elected official got a Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Chicago and then hired the ghost of George Kennan to be secretary of state. It’s too restrictive.” Likewise, Justin Logan has asked,
The vast majority of realists opposed the war in Iraq, opposed the surge in Afghanistan, and support pressuring the Israelis to stop expanding settlements and cut a deal with the Palestinians. Given the alleged prominence of realists in Washington, how come they’re constantly losing arguments?
Drezner also demonstrated in his writings that the American tradition is of small-r republicanism, and the majority of the American people seemingly have realist sympathies. They have repeatedly voted for the presidential candidate who was more restrained than his counterpart. “The persistence of the anti-realist assumption might be due to an ironic fact: American elites are more predisposed towards liberal internationalism than the rest of the American public.” Nowhere was this disconnect more prominent than during the election of Donald Trump.
TRUMP, FOR the first time, started speaking in the crude language of amoral power, which should have given realists some satisfaction. The only academic realist to come out in support of candidate Trump was Randall Schweller in Foreign Affairs, and almost no policy realists other than Nadia Schadlow in the early days of his administration, and Douglas Macgregor and William Ruger in the final days, joined the Trump administration. In fact, Trump, for all his bluster, was constantly betrayed by his own administration, by the people he himself hired, including John Bolton, James Mattis, and H.R. McMaster, all of whom repeatedly opposed the president’s retrenchment instincts from the Middle East and Afghanistan.
This was the central paradox and puzzle of the Trump era: was he ill-served by the establishment, for lack of a “counter-elite” who could follow his campaign policies, or was he simply not smart enough to understand that he was being knee-capped? It now appears that the president was indeed frustrated. ABC News reported, “Picking Ruger was one of several personnel moves Trump made during his final months in office to put in place a team committed to one of his top policy goals: a complete U.S. military withdrawal.”
The total withdrawal was finally executed by President Joe Biden, who did what Trump couldn’t manage: go against his own military brass and argue in a language that was heavily criticized by the same foreign policy elite but which was completely in line with the public opinion. Blaming the Afghans for their own incompetence, dishonesty, corruption, and failure, Biden argued, sounding suspiciously like Trump to some observers, that “there’s nothing China or Russia would rather have, would want more in this competition than the United States to be bogged down another decade in Afghanistan.” He added that, from now on, the era of nation-building was over, and the United States will only embark on wars with clear, achievable goals and a fixed end date. His assessment of Afghans was shared by an unlikely source. The German defense minister also argued that it was the Afghans who “did not defend these achievements in the way we had hoped they would,” and that the Afghans who did not assume full responsibility for their security. It was a polite way of saying that the Afghan security forces, with a four-to-one advantage over the Taliban, surrendered and simply switched sides; At the end of the day, the Afghan men didn’t want to protect their women from Taliban rule and a massive number of draft-age men simply fled the country and did not fight.
Compare this Trump-Biden realism to the establishment reaction. One former NATO chief argued in Foreign Affairs that it was a mistake to leave Afghanistan because “…an entire generation has experienced an Afghanistan where girls were able to go to school and civil society flourished.” Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute was apoplectic in the pages of the New York Times as was Bill Kristol on Twitter. Mark Malloch-Brown, the president of the Open Society Foundation, contended that the crusade against a misogynistic Taliban should continue and
…donor governments and private funders must back the local Afghan groups and individuals who have been courageously speaking up for good governance, the rule of law and human rights. They include women’s groups, independent journalists, and voices representing religious and ethnic minorities whose views must be reflected in any negotiation between the government and the Taliban.
The list goes on. Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright tweeted about how America should continue to focus on saving Afghan women’s lives, a sentiment echoed by a hyper-emotive Mark Milley, David Petraeus, and H.R. McMaster, as well as prominent liberal think tanks.
One particularly curious assertion came from Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the living personification of the DC foreign policy establishment, who tweeted that the “alternative to withdrawal from Afghanistan was not ‘endless occupation’ but open-ended presence. Occupation is imposed, presence invited. Unless you think we are occupying Japan, Germany, & South Korea. And yes, withdrawal was the problem.” The flaw in the argument aside—it does not consider the difference in culture, history, or American interests in Germany and Afghanistan—open-ended presence is essentially akin to an imperial-lite foreign policy. Likewise, Paul Wolfowitz wrote
...those who complain of “forever wars” seem to ignore the reason we were in Afghanistan in the first place, or they misstate it, as Mr. Biden did in this instance. We were never in Afghanistan to participate in its civil war.
Ironically, the people who most agree with the American foreign policy establishment are Chinese and Russian officials worried about a power vacuum after the American withdrawal. In the Wall Street Journal, Ma Xiaolin, an international relations scholar from China said, “the chaotic and sudden withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan is not good news for China,” adding, “China is not ready to replace the U.S. in the region.” The sentiment was echoed by Russians suddenly worried about the prospect of spending blood and treasure to defend their Central Asian backyard. Biden, it appears, was correct in his assessment. Afghanistan is a local backwater, now left to local powers, none of whom are happy about it.
The “who’s who” of George W. Bush and Barack Obama era neoliberals and neoconservatives were all over television, lamenting the loss of “credibility” and the “progress of the last two decades.” A lot was made online about Biden’s falling approval rating, arguably due to the botched evacuation, even though in the greater scheme of things it might not matter, and it did not reflect the overwhelming view of the American people, as well as American veterans who are supportive of the withdrawal and are opposed to any further future misadventures. When asked if America should withdraw or send in more troops to Afghanistan, veterans supported the withdrawal by a margin of 63-24 percent, mirroring the average registered voters, who support withdrawal by a 65-22 percent margin, even after the decline in support. A jaded marine veteran writing in a small-town newspaper about the suicide attack in the Kabul airport argued that what “happened last week was inevitable, and anyone saying differently is still lying to you,” a sentiment otherwise unrepresented in the mainstream media narrative.
WHY IS that, and what is to be done to balance this ideological superstructure? The prevalent view is that unipolarity, a unique geopolitical aberration, and American geographic security made primacy the default cost-free option. Put simply, the American foreign policy establishment prefers meddling around the globe because they can afford to without cost or political price. “Beyond lobbies and interest groups, the national-security bureaucracy tends to support primacy because it benefits their organizational health,” Justin Logan wrote. “The scale of state power in the United States, including the size of its military and the government institutions dedicated to administering its foreign policy were in categories all by themselves.” This pessimism is shared by Patrick Porter, who argued that power and habit propel the imperial foreign policy. Elsewhere, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer have argued that foreign lobbies and ideological liberals with an urge to “do something” are behind this instinctive internationalism and primacy.
But there are a couple of more things that restrainers need to ponder about if they genuinely want to take advantage of the zeitgeist and shape the emerging contours of a realist American grand strategy. First, the school to military-NGO industrial pipeline that led to elite overproduction needs to be curtailed. Foreign policy realists and libertarians often do not care about what is being taught in schools and universities, but the imperial attitude of “we must do something about Afghan women” is an urge that did not develop organically. The War on Terror led to one of the largest ever explosions of grants, scholarships, schools, and departments, and saw the largest increase in America’s bureaucracy, in both the higher education sector and the national-security sector. This is not just a random correlation, there is a distinct pattern to it. Advocates of a restrained foreign policy will face an uphill struggle even if they manage to form some redoubts—they will constantly be undermined on all sides by an NGO-industrial complex that’s busy writing its brand of evangelism as constituent code into the whole liberal international order, and there are many more establishments churning out nodding-dogs for such than there are for realists. It’s not defeatism, but realism, to ponder such. The simple truth is that the over-democratization of higher education and the field of foreign policy has resulted in the explosion of a key demographic which is at ease with managerial internationalism, and which now forms the backbone of the neoliberal/neoconservative consensus. The reverse is happening with the growth of non-college-educated working-class conservatism, most of whom voted for Trump and are more nationalist and populist in temperament.
One way to look at this is that the American model of liberal democracy was an effect of the curious social conditions which reached their peak during the 1990s, and are now in decline all across the Atlantic with an older division of working-class conservatives and elite Whig-liberals coming back. The shifting social conditions are shaping newer electoral alignments, or, in fact (if you’re in Britain), moving back to a much older electoral alignment. On one hand, the former is more nationalistic and localist, and also believes in restraint, whether about domestic social engineering or in foreign policy. On the other hand, there is a more global and cosmopolitan middle class and liberal superstructure. Put another way, realism is fundamentally a narrow reactionary philosophical framework, which privileges the nation-state and national interest over any form of internationalism. Its increasing support pattern among the electorate reflects that.
The rhetoric of restraint needs to, therefore, reflect the target audience. The criticism of Biden’s rhetoric on Afghanistan was not just that he ended the war, but because it was also Trumpian. As Brookings Fellow Shadi Hamid tweeted, “It’s interesting to watch leftists and progressives hail a speech where the president doubled down on his cruel, Kissingerian disregard for non-Americans. Callous, stubborn, and completely lacking in self-criticism. ‘America First’ but this time under a Democrat,” adding, “Whatever Biden is on foreign policy, it’s definitely not ‘progressive.’ It’s nationalist and Trumpian.”
A significant section of academic realists who would have otherwise joined a presidential administration refused to join Trump’s brain’s trust, partially because Trump’s character and rhetoric were toxic and uncouth. Incidentally, it was also very popular and Palmerstonian, in the sense, it was more ruthlessly honest than most politicians in the last two decades. “I am sure every Englishman who has a heart in his breast and a feeling of justice in his mind sympathizes with those unfortunate Danes,” Lord Palmerston quipped as the Germans invaded Denmark. And yet, he ended the same speech saying
...we did not think that the Danish cause would be considered as sufficiently British, and as sufficiently bearing on the interests and the security and the honour of England, as to make it justifiable to ask the country to make those exertions which such a war would render necessary.
A straightforward assessment of national interest that, one might argue, both Trump and Biden mimicked. The sentiment was heavily criticized by the respective elites of their times, but one that proved to be narrow, nationalist, realist, and very popular overall.
Restrainers will need such ruthlessly honest and populist rhetoric to sell to those people who will form the backbone of this new movement, which will sometimes test the boundaries of electoral propriety. There will be a need for a vocal defense of nationalism, the national interest, and national borders. To argue that the time is fast approaching for Europeans to grow up, accept that the fate of far-Eastern Europe has no effect on the geostrategic security of the United States, and consider that the constant growth of the European Union and NATO has jeopardized the balance of power in Europe. Other matters must be considered. That offshore balancing dictates that Taiwan and other local powers will be the frontline cannon-fodder in case there is a potential war with China, and that that has been historically the American grand strategy—and that bogging down Beijing in a bleeding insurgency is quite frankly far more favorable than thousands of Americans dying in a great power war. That American grand strategy has diminishing interest in the Middle East, and autocrats are perfectly fine, as long as they can ensure order and smooth trade. That trying to spread human rights and liberal institutions, particularly in the aforementioned region, did more harm than good, including trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost and maimed. That counterinsurgency should be done in the old-fashioned way—not by winning hearts and minds and starting schools, but by decimating the fighting male population and installing warlords to ensure order. That American grand strategy has historically been restrained unless facing an existential threat from an expansionist great power peer rival about to overwhelm all other allied great powers. It is time to heed this traditional wisdom, from George Washington to George Kennan.
THE IDEAS of restraint and realism are increasingly popular among the average people, but also will increasingly be under fire by an ideological edifice whose worldview is opposed to any forms of narrow nationalism and populism. In light of that, the restrainers need a “counter-elite.” While public opinion is important, it is also by definition volatile, and easily swayed by smooth and emotive propaganda. Restrainers not only need academic theorists, but also intelligent and articulate people in both media and the bureaucracy, not just giving voice to the voiceless, who are opposed to an expansive, primacist foreign policy, but also converting more independents to the cause. Fewer articles in journals, more knowledge about what a “process foul” is, and how to write memos. It might not win one any accolades immediately, but it would win restrainers power, and in turn, agency to shape politics. As Hans Morgenthau once noted, “you may cover whole skins of parchment with limitations, but power alone can limit power.”
Sumantra Maitra is a national-security fellow at the Center for the National Interest and an elected, early career historian member at the Royal Historical Society. He can be reached on Twitter at @MrMaitra.
Image: Reuters.