America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder

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First published by Sentinel, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

Copyright © 2014 by Bret Stephens

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For Charles J. Stephens

1937–2011

In Cherished Memory

The price of greatness is responsibility. If the people of the United States had continued in a mediocre station, struggling with the wilderness, absorbed in their own affairs, and a factor of no consequence in the movement of the world, they might have remained forgotten and undisturbed beyond their protecting oceans: but one cannot rise to be in many ways the leading community in the civilized world without being involved in its problems, without being convulsed by its agonies and inspired by its causes.

Winston Churchill

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction: The World’s Policeman

May 2014: Last Convoy Out of Sangin

CHAPTER 1

Come Home, America

Winter 1947: The Birth of Pax Americana

CHAPTER 2

Pax Americana and Its Critics

Fall 2005: Pax Americana at the Edge

CHAPTER 3

The Overdose of Ideals

Fall 2009: Afghanistan Agonistes

CHAPTER 4

The Retreat Doctrine

Summer 2013: Let Allah Sort It Out

CHAPTER 5

Republicans in Retreat

Winter 2013: Eclipse in America

CHAPTER 6

Decline and Retreat

July 1911: A Distant Echo

CHAPTER 7

The Coming Global Disorder (Theory and History)

Summer 2013: President What, Me Worry?

CHAPTER 8

The Coming Global Disorder (Practice and Present)

July 2012: A Speck in the Water

CHAPTER 9

A Scenario for Global Disorder

November 2009: Peak Oil

CHAPTER 10

A Way Forward

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

The World’s Policeman

In the nearly nine years that I have been the foreign affairs columnist for The Wall Street Journal , I have received tens of thousands of letters from readers, many of them warm, a few of them rude, others critical or constructive. I publish my e-mail address, [email protected], at the foot of my column, read every note, and try to answer as many of my readers as I can. But there are times when a letter deserves a more extended reply than I have time for in the course of an ordinary workday. One reader, responding to a March 2014 column advocating a muscular U.S. stance against Russia’s seizure of the Crimean peninsula, wrote me just such a letter.

In response to your editorial today, please repeat after me: We should not be the world’s policeman. Repeat again. And again. Apparently, you just do not get it that an overwhelming majority of Americans would agree with this declaration. Unfortunately, you do not. So, given that, I encourage you to form your own volunteer army to police the hotspots around the globe. Please do not remit any bills to the U.S. government.

Barack Obama agrees with my reader. We should not be the world’s policeman, he told Americans in September 2013. So does Rand Paul: America’s mission should always be to keep the peace, not police the world, the Kentucky Republican told an audience of veterans earlier that year.

This book is my answer to that argument.

In formulating the answer, it’s important to acknowledge that the wish not to be the world’s policeman runs deep in the American psyche. For wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us, John Winthrop warned his fellow Massachusetts Bay colonists in 1630 as they were aboard the Arbella on their way to the New World,

soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a byword through the world, wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the wayes of god and all professours for Gods sake; wee shall shame the faces of many of gods worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into Cursses upon us till wee be consumed out of the good land whether wee are going. . . .

Though the phrase city upon a hill is taken from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid), Winthrop’s admonition is pure Old Testament. The Lord’s blessing depends not on our worldly striving but on our moral performance. The fate of the enterprise rests on the virtue of its people. A bad reputation in the opinion of mankind can be fatal. The great task for Americans is to be supremely mindful of our business, not of someone else’s. Our security as well as our salvation lie in the proper care of our souls, not the acquisition or exercise of power.

To study American history is to understand that Winthrop’s admonition has been honored mainly in the breach. The citizens of a city upon a hill may be in the eies of all people. But those citizens, in turn, will be able to see far over the surrounding lowlands. At a glance, they will see rich plains stretching in every direction. They will seek dominion over those plains and their scattered inhabitants, whether through purchase and treaties or confiscation and war. Beyond the plain they will find oceans to harvest and traverse. They will meet enemies on the seas, and to defeat those enemies they will build a navy. In faraway ports they will find wealth and wonders but also double-dealing and cruelty, arousing their appetite and greed—but also their conscience and charity.

And in mixing with the world they will become part of the world. Yet they shall still think of themselves as a city upon a hill.

So it is that America’s encounter with the world has always been stamped with ambivalence about the nature, and even the necessity, of that encounter. It is an ambivalence that has often been overcome—because the temptation was too great, as it was with the war with Mexico, or because the danger was too great, as it was during the Cold War. But the ambivalence has never been erased. Nearly 240 years after our birth, we Americans haven’t quite made up our minds about what we think of the rest of the world. Every now and then, we’re tempted to return to our imaginary city, raise the gate, and leave others to their devices.

It says something about the politics of our time that I have no idea whether the reader who wrote me that letter is a Republican or a Democrat, a Tea Party activist or a lifelong subscriber to Mother Jones. This is new. Until recently, the view that we should not be the world’s policeman was held mainly on the political left. Yes, the view also found a home on the fringes of the right, particularly among small-government libertarians and latter-day Father Coughlins such as Pat Buchanan. But it was typically the left that wanted America out: out of Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East, even Europe. And it was usually the left that made the case for a reduced role for the United States in global politics and for a radical rebalancing of spending priorities from guns to butter.

The case for America Out is still common on the left. But now it’s being made from within the mainstream of the conservative movement. Many things account for this change, including the deep mistrust, sometimes slipping to paranoia, of the Obama administration’s foreign policy aims. Many conservatives have also conceded the argument that the wars they once ardently supported in Iraq and Afghanistan were historic mistakes, and that imbroglios in Central Asia, Eastern Europe, or the South China Sea are other people’s problems, best kept at arm’s length.

The upshot is that there is a new foreign policy divide in the United States cutting across traditional partisan and ideological divides. It’s no longer a story of (mostly) Republican hawks versus (mostly) Democratic doves. Now it’s an argument between neoisolationists and internationalists: between those who think the United States is badly overextended in the world and needs to be doing a lot less of everything—both for its own and the rest of the world’s good—and those who believe in Pax Americana, a world in which the economic, diplomatic, and military might of the United States provides the global buffer between civilization and barbarism.

Some readers of this book will reject these categories. They will note that there are vast differences between liberal and conservative internationalists; between, say, Samantha Power, President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, and John Bolton, her predecessor in that job under George W. Bush. Or they will claim that the term neoisolationist is a slur on people who really should be thought of as noninterventionists or simply Realists. They will point out that labels often do more to cloud thinking than to clarify it. They’re right, up to a point. But labels also capture emotional reflexes, ideological leanings, and tendencies of thought that in turn help predict policy preferences and political behavior.

Where do you fall on the spectrum between internationalists and neoisolationists? Ask yourself the following questions:

Does the United States have a vital interest in the outcome of the civil war in Syria, or in Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians, or in Saudi Arabia’s contest with Iran?

Should Americans take sides between China and Japan over which of them exercises sovereignty over the uninhabited Senkaku Islands? Similarly, should we care whether Ukraine or Russia controls Crimea?

Is America more secure or less secure for deploying military forces in hot spots such as the Persian Gulf and the South China Sea?

How you answer any one of these questions will likely suggest how you answer most if not all of the others. And how you answer all of the questions will be an excellent indicator of how you are likely to think about other foreign policy crises, now or in the future.

This book takes a side in this debate. No great power can treat foreign policy as a spectator sport and hope to remain a great power. A world in which the leading liberal-democratic nation does not assume its role as world policeman will become a world in which dictatorships contend, or unite, to fill the breach. Americans seeking a return to an isolationist garden of Eden—alone and undisturbed in the world, knowing neither good nor evil—will soon find themselves living within shooting range of global pandemonium. It would be a world very much like the 1930s, another decade in which economic turmoil, war weariness, Western self-doubt, American self-involvement, and the rise of ambitious dictatorships combined to produce the catastrophe of World War II. When Franklin Roosevelt asked Winston Churchill what that war should be called, the prime minister replied the unnecessary war. Why? Because, Churchill said, never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle. That’s an error we should not wish to repeat.

A final preliminary: To say America needs to be the world’s policeman is not to say we need to be its priest, preaching the gospel of the American way. Priests are in the business of changing hearts and saving souls. Cops merely walk the beat, reassuring the good, deterring the tempted, punishing the wicked. Nor is it to say we should be the world’s martyr. Police work isn’t altruism. It is done from necessity and self-interest. It is done because it has to be and there’s no one else to do it, and because the benefits of doing it accrue not only to those we protect but also, indeed mainly, to ourselves.

Not everyone grows up wanting to be a cop. But who wants to live in a neighborhood, or a world, where there is no cop? Would you? Should the president?

MAY 2014:

LAST CONVOY OUT OF SANGIN

Sangin Valley, Afghanistan—The fighting season will begin in a few days, just as soon as the poppy harvest has been brought in. But the Marines are already gone. They left FOB Nolay, the last of what were once thirty forward operating bases in the valley, late at night on May 4. I watched them gather in the yard to stow away the trash, turn over the garbage bins, and have one final smoke before getting into their heavily armored mine rollers and MRAPs for the slow drive toward Camp Leatherneck, sixty miles away in the desert of Helmand province. They arrived seven hours later without casualty or serious incident.

Their war was over. The withdrawal—code-named Operation Palang-Lee—was described as a retrograde by the colonels and generals who orchestrated it. Why use the word retrograde, I asked one Marine major. I guess they didn’t want to call it a retreat, he answered.

I embedded with the Marines for their last days in Sangin. The generators at Nolay were gone by the time I arrived, and we had to make do with MREs for food and WAG bags for toilets. On all sides of the tiny base we were defended, and surrounded, by the Afghan National Army, which for the previous eleven months had been conducting combat operations in the valley on its own while Americans stayed behind in an advisory role. It was a source of pride to the Marines that the Afghans were taking the fight to the Taliban with native courage and increasing skill. But the Marines remained at risk. In November a gunnery sergeant at the perimeter of the camp was shot in the shoulder by a Taliban sniper. In April, an Afghan within the camp tried to kill Marine advisers at the camp’s shooting range; he was wrestled to the ground by his fellow Afghan soldiers before he could get off a shot. Early one morning I heard an IED explosion, followed by a burst of gunfire, a mile or two outside the base. It was a common enough occurrence as to barely elicit a comment from anyone at Nolay.

By the standards of the valley, this is peace. For years Sangin was a Taliban stronghold, the bloody crossroads where fanatical convictions, tribal identities, and heroin profits met. The British lost more than one hundred men in the early years of the war trying to bring the place they called Sangingrad under control. They failed, and in 2010 they handed the effort to the Marines as part of Obama’s surge. More than twenty thousand U.S. troops deployed in Helmand on more than two hundred bases. On a visit to the valley in March 2011, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called Sangin not just the most dangerous place in Afghanistan but maybe in the whole world.

The Marines who fought here suffered heavier losses trying to take the valley than any other unit in the war. Fifty were killed, though the number doesn’t capture the scale of sacrifice in terms of lost limbs, traumatic brain injuries, and third-degree burns. Patrolling the garbage-strewn lanes of the valley—a narrow green belt running alongside the Helmand River—the Marines were hit again and again by IEDs. As recently as February, the Afghan army found 178 of them along a two-mile stretch of road.

Still the Marines crushed the Taliban. They proved they had the will and the wherewithal to destroy the enemy. They were the strongest tribe. The people of Sangin gave them their trust and shared what they knew about the Taliban’s movements. The poppies are still harvested; eradication and crop-substitution efforts are mostly a sham. But government authority—and legitimacy—has been established. In national elections in 2009, just 179 people from the Sangin district turned out to vote. In April 2014, more than 5,000 did—58 percent of eligible voters. Two years ago the Marines began training the Afghans to take control of their own security, first on patrols with Americans in the lead, then with Afghans in the lead, then without any Americans at all.

It was as it should be, following the parable of teaching a man to fish so he can feed himself for a lifetime. Afghans knew how to fight—nobody had ever doubted it. What impressed their American trainers was that they knew how to be soldiers, too, disciplined, professional, resourceful. And committed: This was not an army of soldiers of fortune, or soldiers for hire, or soldiers of one ethnic group out to get the better of ancient rivals. It was an army of Afghans trying at last to take charge of their national destiny. At a time when nobody is talking about winning, said one Marine adviser at Nolay, they are talking about winning. Thousands of Afghan troops have died in the effort; in Sangin alone, one Afghan battalion alone lost more than six hundred men over the course of eight years.

But that’s where Afghanistan’s predicament lies. Just when Afghans are beginning to find faith in their cause, Americans have lost faith in theirs.

It’s a thought that weighs on Brig. Gen. Daniel Yoo, the Marine in charge of the Regional Command that oversees Helmand. On September 10, 2001, Yoo had just returned from a tour in the Mediterranean to be reunited with his wife and their one-year-old son. Within a day he knew he’d be going to war. He arrived in Afghanistan in mid-November, just as the Taliban were fleeing Kabul and being bombed out of Kandahar. He’s one of thousands of Marines for whom the war in Afghanistan has defined their professional, personal, and family lives.

I don’t want people to think it wasn’t worth it, he tells me the evening the Marines returned to Leatherneck. I’m an optimist. I have to be an optimist. I’ve seen too many Marines die here. I have to think it is worth it.

There’s no mistaking the conviction in Yoo’s voice. If the Taliban return to power after we leave, how can we be sure we won’t have to go in again? Is there no advantage to having U.S. forces stationed in a country that has Pakistan on one side and Iran on the other? Would Osama bin Laden and other senior Al Qaeda leaders be dead today had we not been able to go after them from bases in Afghanistan?

We’ve spent a lot of blood and treasure in this country, Yoo says. At the end of the day, whose credibility is at stake?¹

Yet as Yoo speaks, it occurs to me that he’s trying to make himself believe that he will be believed. Most Americans couldn’t care less whether or not the Marines have successfully pacified Sangin. They aren’t interested in learning that we’re winning, or that Afghans are making progress. They just want out. A CNN poll from December 2013 found that a mere 17 percent of the U.S. public supported the effort in Afghanistan, down from 52 percent in December 2008.

Americans didn’t turn against the war in Afghanistan in the same way they turned on the war in Iraq—as in a failing marriage, it was more a case of gradual disenchantment than of scandalous revelation. But turn they did.

There is no shortage of reasons for that. Thirteen years is a long time to be at war. There’s a depressing sameness to the conflict: the Taliban get pushed back; they creep forward; they get pushed back again. The Afghan government seems to repay generosity with corruption, honest dealing with shenanigans. Every instance of insider attacks—Afghan police or soldiers turning their guns on Westerners—tells Americans that no Afghan can ever fully be trusted.

None of this is untrue, but it’s also a caricature of reality. Aside from special operations, American soldiers no longer do much actual fighting in Afghanistan. What they provide is training, logistics—and confidence. The Taliban have been defeated in the most important battlefield of all: public opinion. The Afghan government is undoubtedly corrupt, like governments in all developing countries, but at least the country is developing. Afghanistan now has nearly eight million children in school, up tenfold since 2001. More than 80 percent of people have access to health care, up from 8 percent under the Taliban. Westerners and their families continue to make their homes in Kabul.

A president who believed in his own war might say such things to the public. But Obama almost never speaks of Afghanistan. Long before the Marines withdrew from the battle, he withdrew from the politics of the battle. Why should Americans be expected to support a struggle that the commander in chief is so plainly not committed to winning? Why not join him in beating the global retreat that is the motivating impulse of his presidency?

Much of my time in Sangin was spent in the company of Afghans. Their attitudes combined bravado with apprehension. Again and again they told me they were ready to fight for themselves—but they still were counting on U.S. help. Who was I to tell them that Americans had grown frustrated and bored with them; that we weren’t interested anymore in hearing about their progress or their sacrifice? A transition was taking place in Afghanistan, as well it should, but it was a transition being dictated by an overwhelming desire not to succeed but to depart.

We lifted off from FOB Nolay on a CH-53 Super Stallion at around 10:30 at night, maybe the last U.S. helicopter to leave the place. It was too dark to see anything; the roar of the rotors made it impossible to hear anything. I wondered what the Afghans were thinking, looking up at us for perhaps the last time. Mainly, though, I wondered: what are we thinking?

CHAPTER 1

Come Home, America

America is in retreat.

Let’s be clear about what retreat is not. Retreat is not decline—though it can be a symptom of decline, or a cause of it. Retreat is not surrender—though, as Napoleon is reputed to have said, "the logical outcome of retreat is surrender. Retreat is not cowardice; it can also be an act of prudence, even salvation, as Churchill knew from the deliverance at Dunkirk. Yet Churchill also knew, and warned, that wars are not won by evacuations."

Nevertheless, America’s retreat—or what the Obama administration prefers to call retrenchment¹—is the central fact of this decade, just as the war on terror was the central fact of the last decade. We got out of Iraq—at least until we had to go back in. We are getting out of Afghanistan. We want no part of what’s happening in Syria no matter how many civilians are brutalized or red lines crossed. We are dramatically curtailing our use of drones in Pakistan. We pretend to pivot to Asia, but so far the pivot has mostly been a feint. We are quietly backing away from our security guarantees to Taiwan. We denounce Russia’s seizure of Crimea, accusing Moscow of being hopelessly out of touch with the accepted norms of the twenty-first century. But we refuse requests by the Ukrainian government to provide their diminished military with arms. In November 2013 Secretary of State John Kerry went so far as to renounce the mainstay of U.S. foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere for 190 years. The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over, the secretary told the Organization of American States. That’s worth applauding, that’s not a bad thing.

We’re also in retreat at home. In the name of civil liberties we are taking apart the post-9/11 domestic security architecture—warrantless wiretaps, telephony metadata collection, police surveillance programs—brick by brick. In the name of budgetary savings the Army is returning to its June 1940 size, the month Nazi Germany conquered France. In 2013 the Navy put fewer ships to sea than at any time since 1916, before our entry into World War I,² and ship numbers keep falling. In the spring of 2014 the Pentagon announced it would cut U.S. nuclear forces, four years ahead of schedule, to comply with the terms of the 2010 New START treaty. Within days of the announcement Moscow test-fired its latest multiple-warhead ICBM. The size of Russia’s nuclear arsenal has grown since it signed New START.³ As for NATO, total military spending as a percentage of aggregate GDP is at the lowest point in the alliance’s sixty-five-year history.

Not long ago, these trends would have prompted anxious and extensive public debate. These days, not so much. A growing number of Americans no longer want the United States to shape the world according to its interests and values, or out of a sense of global stewardship, or even from a concept of enlightened self-interest. Nowadays, Americans mainly want to be left alone.

Sounding this American retreat is Barack Obama with his signature foreign policy theme: nation building at home. It’s a revealing phrase. Every president since World War II has worked to strengthen the economy, reduce unemployment, build or repair infrastructure, mend the frayed edges