Undeclared wars and drive-by bombing raids were hardly unknown before 9/11. But most of the military excursions of the post-Cold War era were geographically limited, temporary departures from a baseline of peace.
As a young state senator in 2002, Obama gave an antiwar rally speech railing against the “dumb,” “rash” rush to war in Iraq. As a presidential candidate five years later, he promised to “turn the page on the imperial presidency” and usher in “a new dawn of peace.” In a speech to US troops last month, he denounced the “false promise” that “we can eliminate terrorism by dropping more bombs,” and piously proclaimed that “democracies should not operate in a state of permanently authorized war.”
Where Bush secured congressional authorization for the two major wars he fought, Obama made perpetual warfare the new normal, and the president the ultimate “decider” in matters of war and peace.
Left-wing groups mounted a fairly serious effort to thwart Republican Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But when Democrat Obama escalated U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and led a NATO assault to remove Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi from power, the reaction was very different. Except for a few hard-left organizations, the sounds coming from the usual supposed anti-war liberal quarters were those of crickets. Likewise, there has been little push-back to Obama’s gradual return of the U.S. military presence in Iraq or the entanglement of the U.S. military in Syria.
With Trump’s inauguration near, Obama has described the transfer of presidential power as ”a relay race” where he’ll pass the baton to his successor. In private, he’s occasionally used a more ominous metaphor: leaving “a loaded weapon” behind for the next president.
“Americans rarely see the horror and savagery of the wars being fought in their name. The public—right or wrong—could care less about war; and our military and political elites have incentives for withholding the realities of war from the public.”
“Assessments of war should go beyond critiques of its political and geostrategic ramifications; they should also extend to the various ways that war affects our society and public more generally.”
“The FBI’s surveillance of antiwar activists dates back to at least World War I…No FBI agent or manager has ever been fired or prosecuted for violating the constitutional rights of those individuals or groups wrongly surveilled, harassed or charged.”
“On foreign policy, Trump’s statements throughout the campaign have been profoundly incoherent, ranging from more traditional hawkish Republican views on issues like the Iran deal, to more unorthodox, restrained views on Syria and other Middle Eastern conflicts, to his more conciliatory approach to Russia and truly bizarre fixation with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.So what comes next?”
“America’s foreign policy cannot simply rely on the business-as-usual policies that have sustained us in recent years. Instead, the country must look to alternative approaches to foreign policy, many of which are better suited to dealing with the complexities of the 21st century.”
It must be a semi-charmed kinda life… Despite his recent controversial remarks about libertarians, Third Eye Blind frontman Stephan Jenkins and Cato’s VP of Foreign Policy, Christopher Preble, actually share some common ground on foreign policy. You’re probably wondering:
The avowed liberal Jenkins recently shared his views on politics and public policy with Asawin Suebsaeng of The Daily Beast, including his nuanced perspective on foreign policy and his disagreements with the Obama Administration (which he otherwise supports).
“Jenkins’s foreign-policy prescriptions may be attractive to one group he recently irked: libertarians,” writes Suebsaeng, who then goes on to quote Preble’s analysis of Jenkin’s comments (Side note: Preble is actually a Third Eye Blind fan):
“I think he’s really expressing what is quite a widespread view among the general public,” says Preble. “There’s no way that if the public had been where it was after 9/11 and had not experienced Iraq—but also hadn’t had come to the realization that the Good War in Afghanistan turned out to be really hard and that we don’t have much to show for it—that we wouldn’t be more involved in Syria and Iraq than we are now…[Jenkins’s analysis] is a bit more sophisticated than the general public, and he clearly has given this more thought and more research than is typical. I disagree with him on the oil argument—but that is a widely held view, even among well-educated people.”
A new catoinstitute study finds that the end of the Cold War, 9/11, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have imprinted Millennials with a distinct pattern of foreign policy attitudes unique to the generation.
"In this 15th year of war in Afghanistan, as the United States is becoming further entangled in military conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, we need a serious debate about whether we want to be permanently at war."
Cato’s foreign and defense policies are guided by the view that the United States is relatively secure, and so should engage the world, trade freely, and work with other countries on common concerns, but avoid trying to dominate it militarily. We should be an example of democracy and human rights, not their armed vindicator abroad. Although that view is largely absent in Washington, D.C. today, it has a rich history, from George Washington to Cold War realists like George Kennan. Cato scholars aim to restore it. A principled and restrained foreign policy would keep the nation out of most foreign conflicts and be cheaper, more ethical, and less destructive of civil liberties.
“Ungoverned spaces”—areas of limited or anomalous government control inside otherwise functional states—are the latest international scare cited as threats to the United States and its global interests.
In 2003, then-CIA director George Tenet identified as a threat “ungoverned areas…where extremist movements find shelter and can win the breathing space to grow.” In 2007, then-senator Barack Obama warned of “weak and ungoverned states.” More recently, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have argued ungoverned spaces in Iraq and Syria provide extremists like ISIS with “safe havens.”
In a new analysis, former visiting research fellow Jennifer Keister explains why so-called “ungoverned spaces” are less menacing than many believe and why attempts to establish state control can backfire. According to Keister, “ungoverned spaces” are not ungoverned, but exist under authorities other than formal states. While policymakers and academics increasingly recognize this fact, the failure to integrate why and how these spaces are differently governed produces problematic policy approaches.
These areas exist outside state authority because the costs of incorporating them are too high and the benefits of integrating them are too low. Washington has ignored this insight in its costly efforts to encourage state integration in rural Afghanistan, Somalia, and the tribal regions of Pakistan.
Keister argues the threats from ungoverned spaces can be overstated and efforts to integrate them into state authority may actually exacerbate the threat of violent non-state actors. Such attempts disrupt local hierarchies that the population often sees as legitimate. They also typically involve violence, which engenders local animosities and can motivate people to commit terrorist acts.
Policymakers should consider putting less pressure on states to absorb ungoverned spaces. Unfortunately, the tendency to inflate the threat from ungoverned spaces makes such efforts more likely, even if these policies have substantial political and economic costs and indeterminate outcomes.
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s ongoing dust-up over the future of the GOP’s foreign policy has raised several important issues. Unfortunately, Perry has used the opportunity to raise the spectre of “isolationism” when discussing Paul’s policy outlook.
As we at Cato have discussed before, what interventionists like Perry call “isolationism” is really just a foreign policy of restraint.
Cato scholars Christopher A. Preble and Benjamin H. Friedmanwrite, “A security strategy of restraint would keep us out of avoidable trouble and husband our resources, ultimately making us safer and richer.”
President Obama has been deciding whether to use the U.S. military to help Iraq’s government repel Sunni Islamist rebels—the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—who recently took Mosul and swaths of other territory in northern and central Iraq.
Cato scholars have been opposed to military intervention in Iraq since at least 2001, and not without reason.
“Surge mythology notwithstanding, our efforts to reorder Iraq have always been misguided. The goal - a multiethnic, democratic, stable Iraq - was a nice idea but never vital to U.S. national security or worth thousands of U.S. lives and vast stores of our wealth,” writes Cato defense and homeland security studies research fellow Benjamin H. Friedman.
Those aren’t the only reasons not to go to war in Iraq.
Check out some of our best commentary on Iraq from the past week for just a few of the arguments why intervening in Iraq is a bad idea:
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