A guerra que ninguém quer, mas alguns desejam: Israel-Hezbollah (Foreign Policy)

 How a War No One Wants Could Break Out

Foreign Policy, Jan 12, 2024

As Israel wages its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, there are prospects of a new war brewing on Israel’s northern border against the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group based in Lebanon. The United States and other Western powers are scrambling to try to prevent it, but diplomatic efforts to keep the war in Gaza from igniting conflicts in Lebanon and elsewhere in the region have already failed in some respects.

Militant groups that act as proxies for Iran—Israel and the United States’ arch regional rival—have ramped up attacks as Israel continues its military campaign in Gaza, from Houthi rebels in Yemen targeting commercial maritime traffic in the Red Sea to salvos of missiles targeting U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria.

A failure to contain Israel-Hezbollah tensions could be much deadlier, however.

The bigger war that everyone fears. Hezbollah, backed by Iran, is considered one of the most powerful and heavily armed nonstate groups in the world. All sides agree that an Israel-Hezbollah war would be devastating.

But history is rife with examples of wars breaking out even when no side wants one. Given how tensions in the region are already at a boiling point, all it would take is one ill-placed or ill-timed spark to alight a major new front.

“The longer this goes on, the greater the possibility of some mass casualty event which pushes both sides over the edge,” said Aaron David Miller, a former longtime U.S. diplomat and Middle East peace negotiator who now works at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank.

Upping the ante is the fact that U.S. officials now assess that the risk is rising that Hezbollah could begin targeting U.S. troops or diplomatic personnel in the Middle East, or even plan attacks in the U.S. homeland, according to Politico.

The deadliest “what if?” From the first days of the Israel-Hamas war, the Hezbollah question—whether the group would join Hamas’s war effort by launching a full-scale assault on Israel from Lebanon—has hung over the heads of U.S. and regional powers engaged in crisis response. Hezbollah’s military capabilities, with an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 missiles and rockets aimed at Israel and tens of thousands of fighters in its ranks, far outstrip those of Hamas. Experts warn that an Israel-Hezbollah war could be far deadlier and more drawn out than Israel’s operations against Hamas in Gaza, which have killed an estimated 22,000 Palestinians so far, according to health authorities in the Hamas-controlled territory.

Blinken’s warning. During his most recent trip to the Middle East this week—his fourth since the war began on Oct. 7, 2023—U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that the conflict could spill beyond its current contours. Behind the scenes, Blinken’s team has focused much of its efforts on both crafting a postwar plan for Gaza and heading off a major Israeli conflict with Hezbollah. “This is a moment of profound tension in the region. This is a conflict that could easily metastasize, causing even more insecurity and even more suffering,” Blinken said while visiting Qatar on Sunday.

Meanwhile, another top Biden administration envoy, Amos Hochstein, is in Lebanon this week following meetings in Israel to see if there’s room to negotiate on border disputes between the two countries in a bid to dial down the tensions. He has his work cut out for him, to say the least, as Robbie reports this week.

100,000 tons of diplomacy. The threat from Hezbollah is a key reason why the Biden administration deployed a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group and other warships to the Eastern Mediterranean in the months after the Israel-Hamas war started as a deterrent signal to head off any major Hezbollah offensive against Israel.

Ultimately, however, officials and experts widely agree that Iran has the deciding vote on whether Hezbollah should dive into the conflict. “Hezbollah does have a seat at the table, but the Iranians, at the end of the day … they make the decisions, and what they say goes,” said Phillip Smyth, an expert on Middle East terrorist groups.

Iran’s calculus. For now, Iran seems content with the status quo of dragging Israel through a grueling war in Gaza that has alienated much of its support on the world stage, as well as upending maritime trade routes through the strategic Red Sea chokepoint with Houthi attacks. In short, Tehran is already getting a lot for a relatively low cost—keeping thousands of Israeli soldiers occupied near Lebanon’s borders with the threat of a war there, while saving its biggest asset, Hezbollah, in reserve and skirting any direct role in the fight itself.

“Iranians are notorious for fighting to the last Lebanese, to the last Yemeni, to the last Syrian, to the Palestinian, to the last Iraqi, without implicating themselves, and this time is no different,” said Bilal Saab, a regional security expert at the Middle East Institute think tank.

Thus far, Hezbollah has limited its role in the war to cross-border fire targeting northern Israel, a clear sign in the eyes of U.S. officials and regional experts that Hezbollah’s patrons in Tehran don’t want a full-fledged war. Israel, meanwhile, has issued public warnings that it could launch a major military offensive against Hezbollah but has so far held off from doing so, as the bulk of its forces is bogged down in fighting in Gaza.

A powder keg waiting for a spark. The risk of miscalculation is high. On Tuesday, Hezbollah attacked an Israeli army base in Safed, located in northern Israel near the Lebanese border. This attack came just a day after a senior Hezbollah military commander, Wissam al-Tawil, was killed by an Israeli drone strike. A senior Hamas official, Saleh al-Arouri, was also killed in a strike in Beirut, though the Israeli government has not acknowledged its likely role in that killing.

Then there’s the political climate in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be bowing to the far-right members of his governing coalition in how he carries out the war as he scrambles to stop hemorrhaging political support.

Red lines. One major lingering problem is that both sides don’t have a clear idea of what the other’s red lines are. Israel may perceive the targeting of Hezbollah commanders as fair game in the so-far limited skirmishes along the Lebanese border, but Hezbollah may not. Similarly, Hezbollah could launch what it sees as skirmish attacks against Israeli bases, but Israel could perceive those as a major attack.

“There’s no mutually agreed-upon definition of what escalation is for both sides,” Saab said. “I’m not sure that intentions on their own to prevent a major war … [are] sufficient for actually preventing one.”

Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities (on nationalism) - David Polansky (Foreign Policy)

The Greatest Book on Nationalism Keeps Being Misread

“Imagined Communities” is far weirder than you remember.

 

By David Polansky, a political theorist and research fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy.

FOREIGN POLICY, JANUARY 7, 2024, 7:00 AM

 

There’s a scene in Sam Raimi’s classic horror-comedy Evil Dead II in which the protagonist saws off his own zombified hand and traps it under a copy of A Farewell to Arms. This is an intentional joke, but a similar titular misreading has haunted another 1980s classic: Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.

Due to a combination of the title’s pithiness and its well-established place on college syllabi, few works of social science have been so widely misunderstood. It is in that rarified genre of books more written about than read (officially known as the “Fukuyama Club”). For many readers appear to have taken the title literally, supposing that he treated nations as somehow fictional. His actual thesis, however, was more subtle. For Anderson, nationalism is imagined rather than imaginary — though too many readers only noted the first part.

He recognizes, in other words, that nations are historical creations rather than natural expressions of some authentic pre-political identity, but he does not assume this invalidates them. Thus (to take examples with particular contemporary relevance), Zionism is both a late 19th-century invention and a reality for Israeli citizens. Palestinian nationalism is both a derivation of a larger modern movement of Arab nationalism and the source of a recognizable collective identity. Nagorno-Karabakh acquired new (and mutually exclusive) significance for both Azerbaijanis and Armenians during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, without thereby being any less consequential. All of these and more are real and meaningful, even when their historical claims are convenient.

And yet, being widely misread is still a greater legacy than most scholars can boast. And, indeed, the work’s scholarly footprint is substantial; four decades out, it remains one of the most-cited works in all the social sciences, and more to the point it is “by far the most cited text in the study of nationalism.” This is probably less an indication of widespread commitment to Anderson’s specific theses regarding the role of print capitalism or the role of New World states in the development of nationalism and more a testament to the way his book, and its title, came to stand in for a larger intellectual shift in the study of nationalism.

In the wake of the nationalist furies unleashed by the end of the Cold War, we are perhaps more sharply aware now of the themes of Imagined Communities than its contemporary readers were. But why more than two centuries into the age of nationalism and decades after the first wave of decolonization, when the study of nationalism only saw an efflorescence in the late ’70s and early ’80s? Anderson himself notes in a much-cited remark that “unlike most other isms, nationalism [had] never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles, Marxes, or Webers.”

The book’s shaped the study of nationalism—but it did so in a way that was sui generis. This quintessential work of modern social science is in fact quite nonrepresentative of the discipline. It proceeds unsystematically, veering into highly poetic digressions throughout, from literary references to autobiographical details. In fact, Anderson’s influential account of nationalism is ultimately poetic both in the sense that he emphasizes the role of language and literature in the formation of nations and in the sense that his own arguments themselves take poetic forms. That makes it, unlike many of its peers, remarkably readable—and has no doubt contributed to its shelf life.

Its distinctiveness surely owes something to its author. In a fascinating posthumous essay, Anderson noted how his imagination was spurred one day at Cornell from overhearing Allan Bloom in full pomp remark how the ancient Greeks had no concept of “power” as we understand it, which subsequently set him off on his own study of that theme in Javanese culture.

Several of Anderson’s qualities are on display here, all of which shape the book. One is his ability to make unexpected intellectual connections across domains and cultures. Another is his strong historical sense—what the great classicist Peter Brown calls a historicized imagination. The last is his strong orientation toward Southeast Asia, a region to which he remained devoted for much of his life. In a nice bit of biographical caesura, though Anderson was barred for decades from visiting Indonesia owing to a critical analysis of Gen. Suharto’s coup, he spent much of his retirement there, ultimately dying in Java in 2015.

This last might not be remarkable for a historian or professor of “area studies,” but it was for a time unique among scholars of nationalism, who tended to focus on its development in early modern Europe, more or less in parallel with the literature on the rise of the modern state. Anderson’s approach thus stood out even during a time of broader revisionism when it came to the study of nationalism.

Even beyond his wider geographical ambit, his practical experience with how waning colonial systems gave way to elite-shaping national consciousnesses in places like Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines accorded his work a real sense of how nationalism actually emerged. Unlike more analytical works, Anderson’s work seemed to ask—to paraphrase a famous philosophy paper—what is it like to be a nationalist?

Some background is probably in order here. Part of what drove this movement to study nationalism anew was the apprehension that nations and nationalism were, in fact, modern creations, and that nationalism was something stranger and more complex than merely the political expression of a supposedly authentic pre-political nation. This view, labeled “modernist,” was set against the so-called perennialists, at least some of whom were themselves galvanized to develop their own theories in response to the modernist challenge (the usual caveats that this brief description greatly oversimplifies the scholarly debates apply).

Yet Anderson’s relationship to this group was always somewhat ambiguous. Anderson accepts the modernist view, he does not therefore assign it a pejorative slant or deny its validity—he explicitly distinguishes himself from his near-contemporary Ernest Gellner, whose own treatment emphasized the inherent falseness of nationalism.

Anderson’s highly memorable title led to his being casually associated with the normative positions of those he otherwise opposed. Much of this, I suspect, was due to larger prevailing intellectual trends—particularly the way that critical approaches had given license to debunk any phenomena that were held to be socially constructed. Work on the socially constructed nature of gender, for instance, tends to go hand in hand with a critique of gender norms. Thus, it was (and largely still is) tacitly assumed that acknowledging the socially constructed nature of nations must issue a similar critique.

As he himself noted: “I must be the only one writing about nationalism who doesn’t think it ugly. If you think about researchers such as Gellner and [Eric] Hobsbawm, they have quite a hostile attitude to nationalism. I actually think that nationalism can be an attractive ideology. I like its Utopian elements.”

Perhaps, for this reason, Anderson is able to address upfront (as not all his peers do) the implicit question a reader has when confronted with such a work: Why should we care about nationalism? His correct answer is that it has induced people to kill and, more importantly, to die on a scale not before seen in history.

What, however, is the basis for Anderson’s basically positive outlook on nationalism? His is not that of, say, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, in his famous Nobel lecture, endorses variety for its own sake. A multihued, patchwork world of different peoples and customs is to be devoutly preferred to the gray homogeneity of Marxism-Leninism (or democratic liberalism, for that matter).

His appreciation is, in fact, an interesting mix of traditional and modern. The traditionalist in him remarks:

In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.

Here he is probably closer to George Orwell, who sought to rescue the decent and even admirable elements of these particular patriotic loyalties. Anderson labored to rescue nationalism from associations with racism, arguing that nationalists are primarily concerned with history, whereas racists are primarily concerned with essences. Some readers may find that argument more plausible than others.

Anderson’s highly memorable title led to his being casually associated with the normative positions of those he otherwise opposed. Much of this, I suspect, was due to larger prevailing intellectual trends—particularly the way that critical approaches had given license to debunk any phenomena that were held to be socially constructed. Work on the socially constructed nature of gender, for instance, tends to go hand in hand with a critique of gender norms. Thus, it was (and largely still is) tacitly assumed that acknowledging the socially constructed nature of nations must issue a similar critique.

As he himself noted: “I must be the only one writing about nationalism who doesn’t think it ugly. If you think about researchers such as Gellner and [Eric] Hobsbawm, they have quite a hostile attitude to nationalism. I actually think that nationalism can be an attractive ideology. I like its Utopian elements.”

Perhaps, for this reason, Anderson is able to address upfront (as not all his peers do) the implicit question a reader has when confronted with such a work: Why should we care about nationalism? His correct answer is that it has induced people to kill and, more importantly, to die on a scale not before seen in history.

What, however, is the basis for Anderson’s basically positive outlook on nationalism? His is not that of, say, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, in his famous Nobel lecture, endorses variety for its own sake. A multihued, patchwork world of different peoples and customs is to be devoutly preferred to the gray homogeneity of Marxism-Leninism (or democratic liberalism, for that matter).

His appreciation is, in fact, an interesting mix of traditional and modern. The traditionalist in him remarks:

In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.

Here he is probably closer to George Orwell, who sought to rescue the decent and even admirable elements of these particular patriotic loyalties. Anderson labored to rescue nationalism from associations with racism, arguing that nationalists are primarily concerned with history, whereas racists are primarily concerned with essences. Some readers may find that argument more plausible than others.

 

But the modernist in him also celebrates nationalism for its instrumental role in the process of decolonization. Here, his particular engagement with Southeast Asia dovetailed with his left-wing political sympathies. This may in fact be the most striking thing for a reader encountering it today—even in the later revised editions: how much of Anderson’s considerations play out within the context of Marxism.

His thought was steeped in Marxism, though his treatment was never dogmatic. To begin with, honesty compelled him to take seriously the national conflicts that he saw erupting between Marxist nations.

In this he resembles his brother, the historian and social critic Perry Anderson, whose trenchant commentary still graces issues of the London Review of Books. It is difficult for us at the other end of history to recall (assuming we were there in the first place) the overwhelming presence of Marxist ideas at the time, but much of the show Anderson puts on makes more sense when viewed in light of his intended audience (though Marxist ideas are hardly absent from academia today, they no longer enjoy the hegemony they once held over entire areas of study). It may seem bizarre to us now, but Anderson was at the time fighting a bit of an uphill battle to demonstrate that national identities, however recent, were not less real or consequential than the movements of capital or material production that were and are the chief preoccupations of Marxists.

Anderson himself takes a largely benign view of such movements without sharing the internal perspective of those working from within them (that they are participating in the formal establishment of an authentic pre-existing social identity). How, then, does he expect us to judge their successes or failures? The implicit answer, I think—particularly given Anderson’s Marxist leanings—is to look to the material well-being of the real people that a given nation purports to represent. There, the record has been mixed, from the bloody methods of decolonization in places like Algeria and Vietnam to the fratricidal viciousness by which former neighbors decoupled themselves during the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. At the same time, the extraordinary economic achievement of pulling hundreds of millions out of poverty in China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and elsewhere cannot be decoupled from the social cohesion that nationalism provides. Anderson himself thus characterizes nationalism’s legacy as “Janus-headed.”

As I write this, the enduring conflict between two opposed nationalisms in the Levant has erupted again into terrible violence. Imagining a beneficent nationalism seems harder than ever. Perhaps for this reason, many outsiders have increasingly embraced a binational solution to the conflict—a kind of nationalism without nationalism—regardless of the actual preferences of the protagonists. And when confronted with such visible evidence of nationalism’s hard edge—the atrocities Hamas committed on Oct. 7, or the Israel Defense Force’s ongoing shelling of Gaza—it is understandable that many would blanch at what it really entails.

And it is similarly understandable that one may ask in the face of this and so many other conflicts—from Armenia and Azerbaijan to India and Pakistan to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s and beyond—just what people get from nationalism. Why do they imagine this and not some other form of community? One answer is that at the level of practical reality, the nation provides the form for the ordinary liberal goods we enjoy. In another classic of modern social science, Seeing Like a State, James Scott described the state as “the ground of both our freedoms and our unfreedoms.” Something like this is true of nationalism as well: that for all its capacity for violence, it also makes possible the bounded community within which we gain protections of individual rights and welfare benefits and security.

Anderson goes beyond this, however; his view of nations is not just instrumental. And perhaps for this reason the language we use to describe these conflicts today is very much his language. Hence the use of mythologized histories to legitimize territorial claims. And hence also the attempts to force the Israel-Palestine conflict into the framework of decolonization, in which a righteous emerging nationalism confronts a system of oppressive domination.

But what happens when two authentic nationalisms compete for the same territory? And while we may speak of the self-sacrificing love the nation inspires, what makes these sacrifices worthwhile in the end? The poetic resonances of Anderson’s treatment of nationalism have been widely recognized—but even poetry has its limits.

David Polansky is a political theorist who writes on geopolitics and the history of political thought. He is currently a research fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy.

READ MORE ON INDONESIA | ISRAEL | NATIONALISM

 

 

 

Was Henry Kissinger Really a Realist? - Stephen M. Walt (Foreign Policy)

Was Henry Kissinger Really a Realist?

America’s most famous 20th century statesman wasn’t exactly what he claimed to be.

Foreign Policy, December 5, 2023

By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University

 

Henry Kissinger’s death last week produced a predictable flood of commentary, ranging from steadfast admiration to passionate criticism. I published my own assessment of his career on the occasion of his 100th birthday a few months ago, and I stand by what I wrote back then. Here I address a narrower but still salient question: Was Kissinger really a realist?

The issue is not merely one of academic interest. If Kissinger’s world view, his actions in government, and his subsequent career as a pundit, sage, and well-paid consultant are regarded as synonymous with foreign policy realism, that judgment will influence how others regard the entire realist tradition. But if he was either not a true realist or a highly idiosyncratic one, then realism’s core insights can stand independent of however one might judge the man himself or the decades he spent in the public eye.

To be sure, it is not hard to see why the realist label seems to fit him well (and it was a characterization Kissinger did little to dispel). From the very start of his career, he was primarily concerned with relations among great powers and the challenge of constructing stable orders in the absence of a central authority and the inevitable clash of competing interests. He fully appreciated the tragic nature of politics and was wary of naïve idealism. As many critics have noted, he gave scant attention to humanitarian considerations and certainly did not think human rights, the need to preserve the lives of innocents, or the niceties of international or domestic law should stop a great power from pursuing its own selfish interests.

Kissinger was also a ruthless bureaucratic infighter and accomplished practitioner of the darker political arts. He had clearly read his Machiavelli, who taught that to preserve order a prince “must learn how not to be good.” Machiavelli also thought successful leaders “must have a mind disposed to adapt itself according to the wind,” and when necessary be “a great feigner and dissembler.” Such characteristics fit Kissinger to a T. It is easy to see, therefore, why so many people regarded him as the quintessential American embodiment of foreign policy realism.

Yet it is impossible to be sure if Kissinger was a true realist at his core. Although he wrote thousands of pages about international politics and foreign policy, none of his books present his own distinct theory of international politics in any detail. You can learn a lot about how states behave from Kissinger’s voluminous works, but you can’t find an explicit statement explaining why they compete for power, how much power they want, or which causal forces matter most in the calculations of political leaders.

Moreover, his views were often at odds with those of other most prominent realists. Most realists believed nuclear weapons were useful only for deterrence, for example, but Kissinger’s varied (and admittedly contradictory) writings on nuclear strategy sometimes portrayed them as usable tools for fighting a war. Prominent realists such as George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, and Walter Lippmann opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam—and did so well before public opinion had shifted against the war—but Kissinger supported it before entering government and prolonged it while in office, even though he also recognized that the war could not be won.

After the Cold War, realists were among the loudest critics of NATO enlargement, a policy Kissinger supported despite its predictably negative impact on relations with Russia. And most realists recognized that going to war with Iraq in 2003 was not in the U.S. national interest, but Kissinger backed the war before it began and for several years afterward. As Edward Luce astutely observes in his own thoughtful reflection on Kissinger’s career, “He was a realist when he needed to be, and a neoconservative when the winds changed.”

What explains Kissinger’s singular position within the broader realist community? One can think of many possible reasons, but I think two interrelated elements of his worldview were central to his departures from realist orthodoxy. (For an alternative take on this question, see Paul Poast’s thread here.)

First, whereas most realists (and especially structural realists) emphasize the material elements of power (i.e., population, economic strength, resources, military power, etc.), Kissinger believed ideas were potentially just as powerful and could be especially dangerous. His official (and highly sympathetic) biographer Niall Ferguson goes too far in trying to repackage him as a neo-Kantian idealist, but his account recognizes Kissinger’s enduring belief that dangerous ideas could wreak vast havoc if they gained a following, because the strongest army might not be enough to prevent them from spreading. How else can we understand Kissinger’s exaggerated fear of Eurocommunism or his overwrought reaction to the election of a moderate socialist president (Salvador Allende) in Chile? Kissinger’s concerns about the destabilizing impact of ideas made him hypersensitive to the smallest perturbations in strategically marginal countries and inclined him to overreact to them in ways that other realists opposed.

Second, where most realists believe that states (and especially the major powers) are inclined to balance against powerful or threatening rivals, Kissinger often seemed to believe the opposite was true. Although he frequently invoked balance-of-power logic (and the opening to China was a perfect illustration of such behavior), deep down Kissinger believed that other states would “bandwagon” with America’s rivals at the drop of a hat. As he famously wrote in “The Vietnam Peace Negotiations” (published on the eve of his becoming Richard Nixon’s national security advisor): “nations can gear their actions to ours only if they can count on our steadiness.” And he didn’t just mean the relatively weak states of Southeast Asia. He was worried that withdrawing from Vietnam would raise doubts about U.S. power and credibility and lead U.S. allies to opt for neutrality (or even worse, to align with the Soviet Union). This fear explains why he thought the United States had to keep fighting a war he knew it could not win. Kissinger was not alone in that belief—indeed, an obsession with credibility is hardwired into the U.S. national security establishment—but it is at odds with a core tenet of the realist tradition.

With hindsight, it is also clear that Kissinger was dead wrong, and the other realists were right. America’s European allies welcomed the disengagement from Vietnam, in part because the war had diverted U.S. attention and resources from European affairs. It is no accident that NATO’s strength and cohesion improved once the U.S. withdrew from Indochina, rebuilt its war-torn army, and focused once again on the central axis of Cold War competition. Realists like Kennan, Waltz, and Morgenthau were also correct in saying that nationalism was a far more powerful ideology than Soviet communism, and that the marriage of convenience between Beijing, Moscow and Hanoi would break down once the U.S. presence in Vietnam no longer gave these states a reason to collaborate. Instead of dominos falling and forming a unified communist sphere, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia ended up at odds once the U.S. withdrew. Similarly, realist opposition to the war in Iraq and to open-ended NATO enlargement looks wiser today than Kissinger’s endorsement of both these initiatives.

There is one sense, however, in which Kissinger can be regarded as the poster child for post-World War II realism. In Scientific Man Versus Power Politics, the classical realist Morgenthau located the taproot of international conflict in what he called the animus dominandi, or the desire to dominate that he believed was hardwired into human nature. My students are sometimes skeptical when they read this argument, perhaps because most of them don’t see themselves as driven to dominate others in the way Morgenthau describes. But if Morgenthau had been looking for an example to illustrate this concept, he could hardly have done better than Kissinger. As I argued in my earlier piece on him, no one in American history ever worked harder or longer at acquiring and retaining influence and power than Kissinger did, and few people were more successful at it. Morgenthau might also have warned that so long as people like Kissinger can rise to power in powerful countries—and not just in the United States—everyone must be on their guard. I can’t think of a more enduring realist insight than that.

Stephen M. Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University. Twitter: @stephenwalt

 

Why U.S. Presidents Really Go to War - Julian E. Zelizer: Andrew Payne, War on the Ballot (Foreign Policy)

Why U.S. Presidents Really Go to War

As a new book shows, it’s not always about strategy.

Foreign Policy, SEPTEMBER 10, 2023, 7:00 AM

By Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.

 

If there is one constant in U.S. political history, it is that presidents frequently make oversights, miscalculations, and even egregious mistakes in handling national security. Vietnam remains the ultimate case in point: a striking example of a talented and successful politician—in this case, President Lyndon B. Johnson—recklessly sending hundreds of thousands of service members into combat.

Historians and social scientists have spilled a great deal of ink trying to explain what has led U.S. presidents to misuse their power as commander in chief. For many generations of academics, the answer to the question of what went wrong in Vietnam and other failed wars lay in the ideological orthodoxies that blinded elected officials to the facts on the ground. In both Vietnam and Korea, historians argued, the “domino theory” was to blame, as it predicted that if one small country fell to communism, others would follow.

New Left historians in the 1960s and 1970s reached very different conclusions. In their work, ideology had little to do with it; rather than seeking to protect democracy abroad, administrations instead went to war to please interest groups, appease congressional committees, feed the budgets of defense contractors, or secure territorial control and valuable natural resources. As the scope of the executive branch grew, they argued, presidents and national security officials were granted too much unchecked power to do as they pleased, leading to poor wartime decision-making.

Over the past decade, however, academics have started to turn their attention away from ideology or material interests to examine the importance of another factor altogether: electoral politics. A new book by political scientist Andrew Payne, War on the Ballot: How the Election Cycle Shapes Presidential Decision-Making in War, is a welcome addition to the work of this small cohort of scholars—including Fredrik Logevall, Campbell Craig, Jeremi Suri, and me—who have attempted to develop a history of the U.S. presidency where commanders in chief constantly wrestle with the domestic political implications of their decisions overseas.

“It is an inconvenient truth,” Payne writes, “rarely admitted, that leaders habitually take electoral considerations into account when making decisions about military and diplomatic strategy in war.” For every military brass or State Department expert in the situation room advising the president on the best path forward for U.S. troops, another advisor is warning about the impact these policies might have on the next election.

As former President Richard Nixon candidly acknowledged, when it comes to determining the best course of action in wartime, “winning an election is terribly important.” In a democracy, it is virtually impossible for politics to stop at the water’s edge—and despite past blunders, that may not be such a bad thing.

In War on the Ballot, Payne provides a systematic assessment of the intertwined nature of elections and foreign-policy making over the course of a presidency. He outlines five ways that U.S. elections can affect presidential wartime decision-making: delay (postponing military action until an election takes place); dampening (watering down good strategic action until the vote); spur (accelerating military activity to appear tough on defense ahead of an election); hangover (being swayed to break or fulfill campaign pledges on war based on electoral results) and spoiler (when elections interfere with or disrupt bargaining strategies).

The first three, Payne writes, tend to occur between the midterms and reelection campaigns, and the latter two in the lame-duck period when presidents are more concerned about their legacies. Importantly, Payne argues that we have to consider the different kinds of election cycles—midterms versus presidential, election versus reelection, anticipatory versus post-mortem, and more.

Some readers will find these categories somewhat formulaic and jargony. Moreover, like any social scientific typology, Payne’s road map to presidential decision-making is too neat. Presidents can be contradictory. Often, they make decisions in an ad-hoc manner, motivated by shifting considerations amid the instability and unpredictability of war rather than a clear strategy. Some actions fit into multiple categories. Distinguishing between the national interest and political interest is not always easy. Payne’s book builds on the kind of rational actor model that animates political science but is often much cleaner than reality.

Nonetheless, Payne’s framework is useful in thinking about the ways that democratic politics shape different points in a presidency. And his work really shines in the detail. He provides three insightful case studies, using archival material, recently released documents, and interviews to show that presidents had their minds on the hustings as they determined whether and how to deploy troops in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. In each case, electoral self-interest triumphed over the national strategic interest.

We learn, for instance, how President Harry Truman allowed Washington’s hawks to accelerate the country’s involvement in Korea due to fears over appearing weak ahead of the 1950 midterms. The 1952 election also pushed Republican presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower toward an increasingly aggressive stance on Korea as he sought to placate the hard-line anti-communists in his party—though he intentionally remained vague enough to leave himself room to change course upon taking office. After winning the presidency, Eisenhower pursued an armistice despite his campaign rhetoric.

The chapter on Vietnam delves into how Johnson held back on acting on the domino theory and “Americanizing” the war with U.S. troops until after the 1964 election—with the notable exception of requesting the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964 after an alleged attack gave him cover to act tough. Then Johnson intensified U.S. involvement after he defeated Sen. Barry Goldwater in a landslide victory. Since he was freed from electoral concerns, Johnson could have decided to withdraw or pursue neutralization, as Vice President Hubert Humphrey urged him to do, but instead he concluded that escalation was essential to preserve his legislative coalition. His efforts to secure a peace during the lame-duck period after he decided not to run for reelection were subverted by the 1968 election cycle, especially the infamous efforts made by then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon’s campaign to subvert negotiations.

Several decades later, President George W. Bush resisted increasing the U.S. troop presence in Iraq until after the 2006 midterm election for fear that doing so might influence voters; in his memoir, he admitted that he waited so that his decision would not seem political. Nor would he fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld until after the midterms. Two years later, when Barack Obama ran for president, he promised to remove troops from Iraq, but he slowed down after winning the election and confronting his own fears about the midterms. Obama then accelerated the drawdown as his reelection campaign approached, understanding that many Democrats would evaluate whether he had gone through with his commitment.

There are missteps and missed opportunities in Payne’s book. For example, Payne defines political considerations as being primarily about elections, as opposed to passing legislation and preserving congressional coalitions that are essential to protecting domestic and national security policies. And although Payne demonstrates how policy ambitions influenced Johnson’s resistance to withdrawing troops in 1965, he doesn’t devote much attention to how such considerations affected Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Bush, or Obama.

Payne would also have done well to offer more analysis of the news media—a curious absence, given that it serves as a key intermediary between presidents and the electorate in the dissemination of information (and misinformation) about war and diplomacy in the lead-up to a vote. Polling matters, but so too do the reporters who translate and analyze the data. The kinds of rational calculations that Payne emphasizes are not always possible given that voters don’t always know what is happening overseas.

During much of the period examined in the book, notions of press objectivity offered presidents considerable room to maneuver in keeping information away from the public. Early in the Vietnam War, for example, reporters often failed to interrogate the official statements they received in military briefings and went on to share that information without critical analysis. Even today, many voters have little knowledge about Washington’s role in key parts of the globe, especially as news outlets move on from hotpots where conflict rages on to cover other issues such as the latest political scandal.

There Once Was a President Who Hated War

American elites used to see war as a tragic necessity. Now they’re completely addicted to it.

Biden Must Rethink the American Way of War

Fighting drags on because it places too little burden on the public and politicians. That has to change.

The Long, Destructive Shadow of Obama’s Russia Doctrine

A series of bad decisions during the Obama years prepared the ground for Vladimir Putin’s war.

Finally, Payne devotes too little attention to Congress. As political scientists have shown, Congress retains immense power to influence voter opinion and focus public attention on certain aspects of foreign policy through investigations and public statements, such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s aggressive push this summer to promote initiatives that counteract China’s growing economic power. Legislators also control the purse strings, which remain a powerful consideration for presidents as they contemplate wartime strategy.

Still, the question at the heart of Payne’s book is one we must all grapple with: Does democracy produce better or worse results when it comes to war overseas?

Although Payne does not have a clear-cut answer, his book points to a long history in which presidential concern about elections has resulted in “suboptimal” foreign-policy decisions—especially when it comes to asymmetric warfare. “[P]owerful democracies are peculiarly bad at fighting small wars,” he writes. “U.S. participation in these ‘limited’ conflicts [such as Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq] has been characterized by long, protracted struggles that sap morale and ultimately result in a draw at best, if not outright defeat.”

It’s a grim conclusion—made more dispiriting by the fact that Payne does not really offer any compelling solutions to the serious problems he identifies.

The problems created by democratic pressure won’t disappear. Yet this is a feature, not a bug, in the U.S. political system. We would not want to support a politics where presidents are freed from the electorate. This is part of what separates the United States from nondemocratic nations. It has also been one of the most powerful forces in pulling presidents away from their most disastrous decisions, such as the electoral and grassroots pressure in the late 1960s and early 1970s that was essential to bringing U.S. involvement in Vietnam to an end.

What the United States can do is work to bolster its democracy so that the president receives accurate signals of where the electorate stands, and the public can ensure accountability for any commander in chief who moves in harmful directions. That entails ensuring that voting rights are respected, that the Electoral College is not open to manipulation, and that congressional procedures don’t perpetually favor anti-majoritarian opinion and hyperpartisan calculations. In short, Washington must get its own house in order. It is one thing to have presidents constantly balancing expert-driven strategic advice and democratic pressures, but quite another when those democratic pressures are stunted and incomplete.

Democracy isn’t always pretty, but it’s the best system that exists. When the processes work, the nation’s most powerful official can’t afford to take their eye off what voters are thinking. In turn, members of the electorate have opportunities to register their opinions, replace leaders with ones they feel can do better, and have a stake in wartime decisions made at the highest levels of power.

The fact that presidents can’t escape the electoral cage, even when conducting wars overseas, is a good thing. It remains our best check against the imperial and autocratic tendencies latent in any position of power. While that check can lead to all sorts of bad decisions and skew deliberations away from strategic concerns, it keeps Washington’s leaders grounded on main street rather than in the Pentagon.

Over time, this still offers our best insurance against commanders in chief who will take troops unnecessarily in harm’s way and face no pushback for doing so.

Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.

Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 25 books, including Arsenal of Democracy, The Fierce Urgency of Now, Burning Down the House, and Myth America. Twitter: @julianzelizer

 

 

ASEAN Fights for Relevance - Foreign Policy

 

ASEAN Fights for Relevance 

Foreign Policy, Sept 6. 2023

Indonesia is hosting the three-day Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit this week. On Tuesday, leaders and officials from 10 countries convened in Jakarta to discuss regional security, territorial sovereignty, and growing animosity between the world’s two largest superpowers: the United States and China. ASEAN—whose members are Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—represents around 650 million people and more than $2.9 trillion in GDP.

Traditionally, the bloc had preached a policy of nonalignment due to strained loyalties between its biggest security partner, the United States, and its biggest economic partner, China. But recent foreign-policy challenges have tested that practice.

At the top of ASEAN’s agenda this week is the security crisis that has engulfed Myanmar since 2021, when its military overthrew the country’s quasi-democratic government and imprisoned many top leaders, including former leader Aung San Suu Kyi, as well as thousands of other critics. On Tuesday, reports emerged that the ruling junta had denied Aung San Suu Kyi’s request to see an outside physician for her ailing health. The military-led government was set to chair ASEAN in 2026, but the bloc announced on Tuesday that the Philippines would lead the grouping instead. Since the coup, ASEAN has pushed for a five-point peace plan that would end violence in Myanmar, catalyze peace talks between the junta and its opponents, and deliver humanitarian aid.

However, junta-attended dialogues hosted by Thailand and Cambodia have divided the bloc’s approach to the nation’s conflict. Specifically, Thailand and Cambodia, alongside China, have embraced the junta rather than calling for its ouster—while the rest of the bloc suspended Myanmar’s top generals from participating in this week’s ASEAN meetings.

Myanmar isn’t the only regional crisis limiting ASEAN’s effectiveness. Internal disagreements over China have curtailed the bloc’s ability to assert its power. Last week, Beijing released a new map that defined almost all of the South China Sea as under its sovereignty. Numerous ASEAN members—including Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam—denounced China’s actions. However, growing Chinese investment in the region, specifically through its Belt and Road Initiative, has hindered the bloc’s willingness to collectively counter rising Chinese aggression.

The bloc’s inability to agree on foreign-policy next steps has damaged its international reputation. Most significantly, major leaders such as U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping chose not to attend this year’s summit. Instead, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and Chinese Premier Li Qiang will take their places. “We can complain all we want about other countries not respecting us or not coming to our summits,” former Indonesian Foreign Affairs Minister Marty Natalegawa said. “But ultimately, it is actually a point of reflection.”

Biden’s decision to skip this week’s summit was particularly humiliating for ASEAN because the U.S. president will be in the region later this week. On Thursday, Biden heads to India for the G-20 summit; he will then visit rising economic power Vietnam on Sunday. Despite its seeming deprioritization of ASEAN, the White House has been quick to reaffirm Washington’s interests in Southeast Asia, pointing to Biden’s creation of the first U.S.-hosted summit with ASEAN leaders last year. “It’s just impossible to look at the record that this administration has put forward and say that we are somehow walking away” from the region, White House spokesperson John Kirby said.

 

 

Protecting the Amazon (Foreign Policy)

 Protecting the Amazon

Foreign Policy, August 8, 2023

A deforested and burnt area is seen on a stretch of the BR-230 highway in Humaitá, Brazil, on Sept. 16, 2022.Michael Dantas/AFP via Getty Images

On Tuesday, members of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), Latin America’s largest environmental bloc, met in Belém, Brazil, for a two-day summit to further regional cooperation, battle climate change and deforestation, and strengthen Indigenous protections. This is the first time the body, composed of eight Amazon rainforest nations—Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela—has convened in 14 years, and only the fourth time in its 45-year history. The last time the organization met, the only ACTO member with a president in attendance other than the summit’s host, Brazil, was Guyana.

“It has never been so urgent to resume and expand that cooperation,” said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “The challenge of our era and the opportunities that arise will demand joint action.”

Around 130 issues are on the bloc’s agenda, from economics to sustainability. But deforestation and oil drilling are at the top of the list. At last month’s pre-summit meeting in Colombia, Colombian President Gustavo Petro urged Lula to halt a new offshore drilling site near the mouth of the Amazon River. Brazil was the ninth-largest oil producer in the world in 2022, ahead of Kuwait and just behind Iran. “Are we going to let hydrocarbons be explored in the Amazon rainforest?” Petro asked. “Is there wealth there, or is there the death of humanity?”

Petro and other Latin American leaders hope to decrease oil drilling as a means of reducing deforestation. Last year alone, almost 10.2 million acres of primary rainforest was lost worldwide, according to the World Resources Institute—the equivalent of losing 11 soccer fields’ worth of trees every minute. Both Brazil and Colombia have pledged to stop deforestation by 2030, but other ACTO members have been slow to take up the pledge. And Lula is battling years of catastrophic environmental policies established under former President Jair Bolsonaro.

In a further blow to the summit’s effectiveness, not all eight members are in attendance. Both Ecuador and Suriname sent senior representatives instead of their nations’ leaders, and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro canceled at the last minute due to an ear infection. Still, Brazil is hoping to encourage the other ACTO nations in attendance to sign the Belém Declaration, a list of collaborative strategies for combatting carbon emissions. The document would also create an international police center in Manaus, the largest city in the Amazon, to promote interstate cooperation to combat organized crime in the region.

Prigozhin Should Study Europe’s Greatest Mercenary -Lucian Staiano-Daniels (Foreign Policy)

ARGUMENT

An expert's point of view on a current event.

Prigozhin Should Study Europe’s Greatest Mercenary

Albrecht von Wallenstein was the Holy Roman Empire’s power broker—until he clashed with his superior.

By Lucian Staiano-Daniels, a visiting assistant professor at Colgate University.

A colorized print depicts Bohemian military commander Albrecht von Wallenstein as a maverick prepared to ride any mount to get what he wants. HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Foreign policy,  JULY 2, 2023, 7:00 AM

Over a 24-hour period last weekend, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the commander of Russia’s Wagner Group, called for an uprising against Russia’s military leaders and advanced most of the way to Moscow at the head of his mercenary army before abruptly stopping. Prigozhin and Russian President Vladimir Putin looked each other in the eye, and both blinked.

Commenters have been likening this incident to a spat among gangsters, harking back to Prigozhin’s rise from a petty crook to, until recently, a close crony of Putin. This is more apposite than they might realize. The political theorist Charles Tilly famously compared state-making and war-making to organized crime. Both are human networks that extract resources, use these resources to promulgate violence, and attempt to monopolize violence in areas they control.

Putin and Prigozhin are fighting as a late medieval or early modern head of state and one of his mercenary generals might fight: Social networks of violent men tend to act in remarkably similar ways in many different contexts. One interpretation of Prigozhin’s actions suggests that they were intended more as an elaborate protest than as a serious threat; although this is by no means certain, this kind of mutiny is well attested in early modern Europe.

In 1973, the historian Geoffrey Parker analyzed the mutinies of the Spanish Army of Flanders, arguably the greatest infantry army of its age, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Their mutinies were forms of protest against harsh conditions or lack of pay, they followed a ritualized formula of work stoppage and presentation of demands, and the authorities often met them with negotiation rather than draconian punishment.

These protests were not bloodless: Antwerp has never fully recovered from its sack in 1576 during one of these events. But they and other large mutinies in the early modern Swedish or Parliamentarian armies demonstrate that the relationship between mercenary and master operated according to what the social historian E.P. Thompson called a moral economy, according to which proper behavior was expected on either side. This relationship could be extraordinarily vexed. The career of Europe’s last and greatest early modern mercenary general, a man whose eventual fall may offer insights into Russia’s future today, demonstrates this well.

Albrecht von Wallenstein was born in 1583 in Bohemia, then a kingdom of the Holy Roman Empire. When the Thirty Years’ War broke out with a rebellion in Bohemia, he was a minor Bohemian noble with military experience. He remained loyal to the Holy Roman Empire’s establishment and became a colonel in the Imperial Army of Emperor Ferdinand II. He also became extremely wealthy during the early years of the war by expropriating the confiscated properties of rebels who fled or were defeated. This is also how Prigozhin’s generation of Russian kleptocrats rose after the fall of the Soviet Union, which was followed by a massive sell-off of state-owned property.

Wallenstein used his financial base to make himself essential to Ferdinand by raising and financing armies on his own while also advancing immense loans to the crown. He was repeatedly ennobled and eventually given command of the Imperial Army. Centuries later, Prigozhin echoed him in his own fusion of public war-making and private finance but in a different form. Wagner was funded by the Russian defense ministry, but Prigozhin’s companies also made large sums of money through government contracts. In return, until Prigozhin’s rebellion, the Wagner Group not only acted as an extralegal army but also helped strengthen the Russian economy by extracting natural resources in Africa.

Military enterprise and state activity have been intertwined in many states, at many times. Early modern political entities relied on this public-private cooperation because they were not yet able to finance warfare on their own or handle other essential activities such as minting coinage, an ambiguously crooked enterprise in which Wallenstein also participated. The public, the private, and the potentially criminal were intertwined in Wallenstein’s career because the prince he served was not yet powerful enough to do what he relied on Wallenstein to do for him.

In contrast, they were and are intertwined in Russia because the Russian state in the Weberian sense is weakening. The Russian institutions of state are substantially interpenetrated with private and criminal interests, and functions such as universal suffrage and the rule of law are compromised. Most importantly for this essay, in both the early modern Holy Roman Empire and contemporary Russia, the central authority lacks the monopoly on legitimate lethal force.

This has become brutally clear in Russia over the past few days, as Prigozhin’s men seized Rostov-on-Don and shot down Russian army helicopters while other forces avoided engaging them. Their mutiny has damaged the image Putin cultivated of himself as the most powerful warlord, the man whose extra-state rule was acceptable because it was effective. But this rule laid the structural foundations that made the mutiny possible.

Like Prigozhin and Putin, Wallenstein and Ferdinand were tied inextricably to each other: Wallenstein was both the emperor’s creditor and his creature and owed his social position solely to the emperor’s promotion. The Imperialists may not have been able to win without him, just as the use of mercenaries such as Wagner is one way Russia is effacing the true costs of the war in Ukraine. 

Yet politically Wallenstein was troublingly independent. Like Prigozhin, Wallenstein clashed repeatedly with his government over strategies that he was responsible for implementing but on which he had little influence, and he attempted to broker peace on his own. He was dismissed twice and eventually accused of treason, lured into a meeting with the connivance of some of his officers, and assassinated in early 1634. Like Prigozhin, Wallenstein’s contacts with his government’s enemies were ambiguous; unlike him, he probably was not planning armed rebellion until he figured out that the emperor had put out a warrant on him.

Both Prigozhin and Wallenstein were powerful military leaders acting within a fusion of public and private. Such men were both subjects of their head of state and mercenary generals, neither purely dependent nor purely independent. This is one reason they chafed against their respective heads of state. But militarily, Wallenstein was the most powerful man in the empire, and the army he commanded was the largest in Europe since classical Rome. The Imperialists literally could not fight without him. Wagner is tiny: Prigozhin is not, in terms of military force, a serious rival to the Russian army.

But Wallenstein’s rise and fall illustrate not only Prigozhin’s weakness but also Putin’s. Although Wallenstein was probably not a traitor, once Ferdinand became convinced that he was, he acted decisively and authorized Wallenstein’s apprehension, dead or alive. In contrast, Putin has let Prigozhin live so far.

Wallenstein’s end suggests two possibilities. The first is that Ferdinand may have been a colder operator than Putin, despite the former’s lace collar and the latter’s tough-guy image. The second is that Putin is planning to kill Prigozhin—perhaps with the compliance of some of his own men, much like Wallenstein. Alive, especially in an independent base in Belarus, he will be a threat.

Lucian Staiano-Daniels is a visiting assistant professor at Colgate University.  His book on the historical social anthropology of early seventeenth century common soldiers is upcoming from Cambridge University Press.