“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Thucydides, “The History of the Peloponnesian War”
Stephen Walt has an interesting recent post up on the Foreign Policy Magazine blog. It’s called the “(In) Security Paradox.” His thesis:
“The main reason Americans are able to gallivant all over the world and expend lots of ink and bytes and pixels debating whether to get involved in Syria, Mali, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the South China Sea, etc., etc., is because the United States is actually very secure.”
Walt has a point. Terrorism, as the attacks of September 11, 2001, remind us, poses a severe threat to the United States. But it represents an altogether different kind of challenge than the one represented by the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War has given the United States unparalleled flexibility in the exercise of force. Not only have we been relieved in large part of the huge military burden of preparing against a Soviet invasion of Western Europe; we can also act without fear that a global adversary will provide decisive material support to those against whom we choose to act. During the Cold War, this was a real risk for the United States and Soviet Union alike. In Southeast Asia, for instance, Soviet assistance to North Vietnam contributed to a quagmire for the United States. We later returned the favor in Afghanistan, where our support for the mujahedeen exacted a terrible cost for the Soviet Union. Such experiences created a strong disincentive for either superpower to embark on major military adventures.
Such constraints, by and large, no longer exist. Countries like Russia and China can — and do — on occasion oppose our efforts to garner international legitimacy for the exercise of U.S. force. But they simply lack the military power to deter — directly or indirectly — U.S. action should we choose to undertake it. Today, our strategic flexibility allows us the freedom of making wars of choice unencumbered by concerns that consumed U.S. decision-makers during the Cold War. The invasion of Iraq is surely the most momentous case in point. We exerted substantial effort at the time to enlist allies and gain UN endorsement of our actions. But this was driven in large part by the need to bolster domestic support. Had we chosen, we could have acted alone.
Let me make two points:
First, we should indulge no nostalgia for the Cold War. It may have imposed a rough discipline on the superpowers (and, for that matter, their clients), but it did so at terrible human cost in lost lives, foregone freedom, and the ever-present possibility of thermonuclear war.
Second, strategic flexibility does not suggest infinite resources. Our invasion of Iraq, for instance, lowered the available forces we could dedicate to our intervention in Afghanistan. Would additional resources in Afghanistan have changed the outcome there? It is impossible to give a definitive answer. But it is surely a question we should bear in mind as American service people continue to die more than 11 years after we invaded Afghanistan.
Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.