The Cato Institute

Weakening the Constitution to Go to War in Syria is a Terrible Idea

The Constitution is supposed to make it difficult for a President to take the U.S. to war. Why would Congress want to make it easier?

Despite President Trump’s calls during the campaign to pull back from the Middle East and more recent statements that he’s ready pack up and go home from Syria “very soon,” he nonetheless ordered missile strikes in Syria, ostensibly in response to reports that Assad killed civilians with chemical weapons.

President Trump’s announcement that the United States, France and Britain had launched airstrikes against Syria in response to a chemical weapons attack might have surprised the people who listened to him campaigning in 2016, when he repeatedly critiqued “stupid” Middle Eastern interventions.

Since entering office, President Trump has reversed course on foreign policy, and he evidently now shares the assumption that America must do something in response to atrocities in Syria — a wholehearted embrace of the Washington bias toward action.

In this, President Trump and his predecessor have something in common: Both he and President Obama came into office promising to change America’s foreign policy, but when faced with crises, both yielded to pressure to intervene. This bias toward action is one of the biggest problems in American foreign policy. It produces poorly thought-out interventions and, sometimes, disastrous long-term consequences.

President Trump’s previous strikes in Syria garnered bipartisan praise from the Washington establishment, praise that the president craves. Yet military action in Syria will not benefit national interests, and may draw the U.S. further into a quagmire there is no easy route out of.

Two days after President Trump declared “Mission Accomplished” on the latest round of missile strikes against Syria, a bipartisan group of senators unveiled legislation intended to reassert Congress’s relevance to the wars we fight. But the new Authorization for the Use of Military Force, introduced by Bob Corker, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, and the Democrat Tim Kaine, may end up doing the opposite.

Senator Kaine is right that, as he said in a speech about the bill, “for too long Congress has given presidents a blank check to wage war.” The 2001 authorization, passed three days after the Sept. 11 attacks and aimed at the perpetrators of those attacks, has done just that. Three presidents in a row have warped its limited authority into an enabling act for globe-spanning presidential war.

The Corker-Kaine resolution won’t bring an end to the Forever War; it will institutionalize it. Instead of ratifying war powers that three presidents in a row have seized illegally, Congress should repeal — and not replace — the 2001 legislation.

In authorizing the use of force against a list of terrorist organizations and their affiliates, the bill states that it “establishes rigorous congressional oversight,” “improves transparency” and ensures “regular congressional review and debate.” Such transparency requirements are an improvement over the status quo. But the bill also turns the constitutional warmaking process upside down.

Our Constitution was designed to make war difficult, requiring the assent of both houses and the president. The bill essentially changes that by merely requiring “regular congressional review” of presidential warmaking and requires reauthorization every four years; meanwhile, choosing new enemies, in new countries, is the president’s call, unless Congress can assemble a veto-proof majority to check him.

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Time to Rethink U.S. Arms Sales Across the Globe

Since 2002, the United States has sold more than $197 billion worth of major conventional weapons and related military support to 167 countries, often those engaged in deadly conflicts, with horrendous human rights records, under conditions in which it has been impossible to predict where the weapons would end up or how they would be used….

With the Trump administration poised to sell $110 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia — the largest such deal ever agreed to by the U.S. — and more than $84 billion to 42 other nations, it’s high time to reevaluate U.S. arms deals.

The research is clear: the geopolitical benefits of U.S. arms sales are overrated, while the benefits of discontinuing such sales are significant finding that arms sales do little to strengthen the U.S. economy or protect national security interests, even undermining the latter in some cases.

The U.S. does not discriminate between nations which may or may not pose future threats. There are a large number of risky customers in the world, and the United States sells weapons to most of them. Between 2002 and 2006, the U.S. clocked $197 billion in arms sales — and, the 28 countries currently involved in high-level conflicts bought an average of $2.94 billion worth of U.S. arms.

The U.S. has increasingly relied on arms sales since WWII, with the Nixon-era American Export Controls Act formalizing the executive branch’s ability to conduct such sales, requiring risk analyses (which are often nothing more than rubber stamps), and giving Congress the ability to block such sales within a 30-day window — a power Congress rarely exercises.

Although arms sales are an “extremely flexible” tool of statecraft allowing the U.S. to cheaply exert influence and gain favor, the benefits are illusory. Arms sales have shown little ability to prevent terrorism or conflict from taking root in a country, and arms sale-recipient countries have been significantly more likely to be attacked by their geopolitical rivals.

Most concerning is arms sales’ tendency to culminate in “blowback,” when a U.S. ally turns into an adversary. American troops and their allies have faced American-made weapons in almost every military engagement since the end of the Cold War. Moreover, weapons sales tend to have an entangling effect, leading the U.S. to take gradually more involvement in the areas it conducts such sales, most notably of late in the Syrian Civil War.

Despite this, there is limited manpower devoted to making sure weapons are not misused or end up in the wrong hands: the limited staff at the the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, which oversees U.S. arms licensing agreements, and the Blue Lantern program, which conducts end-use monitoring of weapons. The latter has a staff of twelve, responsible for tracking billions of dollars in weapons sales every year.

The United States does not need the limited economic benefits arms sales provide—and it certainly does not need the strategic headaches that come with them.

President Trump should enact a strict, conditional approach towards arms deals, with a default policy of “no sale,” and should be sure to embargo nations that are likely to misuse or lose weapons they buy from the U.S. End-use monitoring programs should be strengthened, while Congress should also legislate for itself a more active role in approving arms deals. 

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The Forgotten Anniversary: September 14th, 2001

After 16 years of war, it’s time to reckon with the less-appreciated anniversary of September 14, 2001, when Congress gave the President a relatively open-ended power to make war…

Over the last decade and a half, we’ve heard over and over again that “September 11th changed everything”—but maybe September 14 was the pivotal date. 

Sixteen years ago today, Congress passed the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). Aimed at the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and those who “harbored” or “aided” them, the AUMF has been transformed into an enabling act for globe-spanning presidential war.  

Two-thirds of the House members who voted for the 2001 AUMF and three quarters of the Senate are no longer in Congress today. But judging by what they said at the time, the legislators who passed it didn’t think they were committing the US to an open-ended, multigenerational war; they thought they were targeting Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

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.

Barack Obama left office as the first two-term president in American history to have been at war every single day of his presidency. In his last year alone, U.S. forces dropped over 26,000 bombs on seven different countries. Seven months into his presidency, Donald Trump has almost certainly passed Obama’s 2016 tally already — all under the auspices of the AUMF.

The AUMF Congress passed in 2001 still serves as legal cover for current wars we fight in seven countries. War is now America’s default setting; peace, the dwindling exception to the rule.

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Trouble in the South China Sea

Political leaders and experts are exaggerating the dangers of China’s South China Sea policy….

U.S. lawmakers and analysts see China’s efforts to control much of the South China Sea as a serious threat, endangering regional security, freedom of navigation, and the liberal world order. Is that really the case?

As the world’s largest trading nation, China has a deep vested interest in ensuring that trade routes in the South China Sea remain open, and Beijing has no interest in military conflict with regional powers.

Although China’s South China Sea policy is inconsistent with some of the norms and institutions of the rules-based liberal world order, Beijing does not seek to undermine this order as a whole and remains supportive of key elements of the international system.

Ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea will have little, if any, effect on the South China Sea dispute.

To avoid needlessly entangling itself in the South China Sea dispute, the United States should not support the territorial claims of any state and should make clear that the U.S.-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty does not apply to disputed territory and waters claimed by the Philippines. In addition, the United States should encourage claimant states to agree on de facto jurisdiction over disputed areas and to jointly exploit resources while more permanent resolutions are negotiated.

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Donald Trump & Our Nuclear Future

President-elect Donald Trump makes many statements via social media and off-mic about America’s plans for nuclear weapons, but it’s not clear what they mean…

With hasty tweets about nuclear weapons, cryptic support for arms racing, and overwrought spokesmen struggling to explain, president-elect Trump horrified the national security commentariat anew last week. Complaints centered on his willingness to embrace the expense and danger of heightened nuclear competition, abandon decades of bipartisan policy aimed at stopping the spread of nuclear weapons around the world, and jettison the commitment in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)  to “work toward the cessation of the nuclear arms race” and eventual “nuclear disarmament.”

It’s sensible to be concerned by a president rash enough to undertake nuclear diplomacy through tweets. But the furor is partly misdirected. However we interpret his incoherent statements, Trump is likely to preserve the current U.S. nuclear policy, which funds the modernization of nuclear triad at excessive expense.

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U.S. to Deploy Special Operations Forces in Syria

In Senate testimony on October 27th, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter indicated that the U.S. might be taking on a more direct combat role in Syria’s civil war. Later today, President Obama is expected to announce the deployment of U.S. troops to northern Syria. 

According to Cato Institute experts, this is a terrible idea.

“Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s statement…that the U.S. military ‘won’t hold back’ from engaging in ‘direct action on the ground’ in Syria is a troubling development,“ says Benjamin Friedman, Research Fellow in Defense and Homeland Security Studies at the Cato Institute. "It does not so much indicate mission creep as continuity of flawed policy. Competing objectives burden U.S. policy: helping weak rebels overthrow Assad, which prolongs the war and aids ISIS, and defeating ISIS, which aids Assad. Until we resolve that contradiction, the value of tactical gains against either foe will be limited. We should cease helping rebels and attack ISIS alone.”

Even without U.S. ground troops, the Obama administration’s policy of continuing to fund and arm Syrian rebel groups is problematic enough, especially now that Russia is more deeply involved in backing the Assad regime militarily. According to Visiting Research Fellow Brad Stapleton, this risks getting into a messy proxy war that won’t end well for Washington. “Unfortunately, there is probably little constructive the United States can do at this point to resolve the conflict in Syria and establish a stable new government,” Stapleton writes. “The Obama administration, therefore, should take care not to make a bad situation worse.”

Many commentators have proposed imposing no-fly zones or safe zones in Syria to ease the humanitarian crisis. But, as Emma Ashford, Visiting Research Fellow, explains, this is likely to backfire. “U.S. involvement in Syria displays no strategy, no boundaries and no clear goals,” Ashford writes. “The only viable long-term solution to Syria’s problems is diplomacy. But that has been pushed to the side in favor of airstrikes and limited, ad hoc rebel training programs.”

Christopher Preble, Cato’s Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies, argues that “It is time for the president to forcefully state what everyone knows to be true: the United States has no magic formula for solving the Syrian conflict…Outside involvement has fueled the multisided civil war, but failed to deliver a decisive victory for any one faction” and “emotional calls to ‘do something’ or vague invocations of the importance of American leadership” are not helpful.

Sending U.S. troops to intervene in Syria is a poorly thought out strategy that is likely to backfire. We hope President Obama takes into mind the serious concerns our scholars and others have expressed and decides against deploying Special Operations Forces.

The Fight with ISIS: One Year (and Counting) of Unauthorized War

Next week marks the one-year anniversary of the start of America’s War with ISIS. But after 12 months and more than 5,000 airstrikes—and with some 3,500 U.S. soldiers on the ground—Congress has yet to hold a vote on authorization for our latest Middle East war.

Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) calls this situation “inexcusable.” He has been a leader in the effort to get Congress to live up to the most solemn responsibility with which the Constitution entrusts it. “How much longer will we allow war to be waged without Congress even being willing to have a debate about the strategy and scope of the mission?” he asked from the Senate floor recently. “How much longer will we keep asking service members to risk their lives without Congress doing the basic job” of taking an up-or-down vote on the war?

On Thursday, August 6, Senator Kaine and Cato Vice President Gene Healy will discuss the dangerous growth of executive war powers and how Congress can reclaim its constitutional prerogatives over war and peace.

You can register to attend here. If you can’t make it to the event, you can watch it live online at www.cato.org/live and join the conversation on Twitter using #CatoEvents.