An American Empire—If You Can Keep It | GoodFellows: Conversations From The Hoover Institution

[Music] it's tuesday march the 9th and you're watching good fellows a hoover institution broadcast examining social economic political and geopolitical concerns in this time pandemic i'm bill whelan i'm a research fellow here at the hoover institution the virginia hobbs carpenter fellow in journalism i'll be the moderator of today's shows being the moderator means i get to introduce the stars of the show our hoover institution good fellows as we jokingly refer to them they're wise men wise guys but intellectually wise guys i might add uh but we are in store for the better part of the next hours the three of them offering their insights into these rather complicated times so let's meet the good fellows beginning with john cochran john's an economist and he is the hoover institutions rosemary and jack anderson senior fellow hey john hi great to see you guys again our second good fellows lieutenant general h.r mcmaster he is the hoover institutions for water michelle ajami senior fellow and he's the author of the best-selling book battlegrounds a fight to defend the free world hello hr hi bill great to be with you guys and our third good fellow yes he is back joining us again from his wilderness outpost is neil ferguson neil is the hoover institution's milbanks family senior fellow he is of course a renowned historian and author his next book doom the politics of catastrophe is coming out in early may you can pre-order it right now on amazon better yet you can order both neil's book and ion hersey ali's book pray immigration islam and the erosion of women's rights neil i say that because you two are a package but also we're still basking in the after glow of ion's appearance taking her place last week on good fellows be honest my friend did you miss us i did uh but of course it it hurts to be eclipsed and it's it's very difficult to come back she's she's a hard act to follow i'll do my best amen to that she was a joy to have on and please settle on our best to her deal uh a hat tip to john cochran for suggesting this week's topic which is endless wars forever wars the future of war uh which tells me two things number one john is in addition to being a very brilliant economist a big picture intellect who thinks about the world's conditions secondly it also tells me as an economist john is always looking to economize and he wants to get a free tutorial from two rather brilliant global thinkers so here we go uh hr i want you to get into the short-term outlook for afghanistan where the bi-administration might be headed with the may first deadline for troop withdrawal fast approaching with that uh america's role in uh projecting force around the world neil i want you to get into the bigger picture here which is the question of empire's great powers and the relationship of wars to their existence in this day and age can there be such a thing as a pox americana if america has a moral obligation to be in effect the world's policemen um h.r let's uh start off the conversation a week ago at this time you appeared before the senate armed services committee the topic of that conversation was global security challenges and strategy uh when it comes to questions of going to war hr a call to arms military intervention does america have a strategy in place if we have a strategy for going in hr do we have a strategy for coming out in other words what have we learned in the nearly 20 years since u.s forces first entered afghanistan well i mean it's a sad story on afghanistan bill of course what brought us into that war was the most devastating terrorist attack in history we have to remember you know sometimes wars choose you rather than the other way around or as whereas the great philosopher gk chesterton once said uh the award may not be the best way of settling differences but it might be the only way to ensure that they're not settled for you so of course that's what brought us into the war we waged in afghanistan a very effective initial military campaign mainly enabling afghan militias uh with air power intelligence uh and and and our tremendous special forces capabilities and units and soldiers uh but you know that swift light footprint victory uh didn't bridge into the consolidation of those military gains to get to a sustainable political outcome consistent with what brought us into that war to begin with which was to ensure that afghanistan never again became a safe haven and support base for terrorists who want to commit mass murder against us uh again on the scale of of 9 11. and and really inconsistent and unsound approaches to the problem set in afghanistan over the last 20 years lengthened that war made it much more costly than it would have been otherwise now it was never going to be easy in afghanistan and we should remember you know afghanistan again doesn't need to be denmark it just needs to be afghanistan but you know over over the years you our strategy was inconsistent and i would say self-delusional sadly that self-delusion is continuing today i don't know if you've seen uh secretary blinken's note to ashraf ghani in which he is essentially saying well we really need the afghan government to you know to conform to this peace agreement when of course it's the taliban that's violating the that very weak agreement an agreement that we entered into the taliban after making concession after concession and setting the afghan government up really for an impossible situation so you know i think what's sad about the war there uh is is that there's going to be a civil war and a humanitarian catastrophe unless there's a reversal of this policy and a recognition that the taliban is not going to adhere to a a a more humane uh philosophy uh they remained the brutal organization they are and they are utterly intertwined uh with jihadist terrorist organizations including al-qaeda now can i ask hr um we see so i asked this show because i don't know enough about this stuff and i get to ask you guys questions we seem to be amazingly good at winning wars uh iraq afghanistan just the u.s military hats off to you guys um but then we seem to be terrible at the subsequent peace uh afghanistan iraq um syria libya i find it hard vietnam i find it hard to think uh well we didn't we didn't even try that one um i find it hard to think of a model where this has ever worked so we could start small for for um for afghanistan but um is there a path to invading a country uh especially one as weak and chaotic as afghanistan and then leaving what what would that path be when when has it ever worked um help us out here on how america can win the peace well you know it really depends on what your objective is john you know so i i would just say that if you have a narrowly circumscribed objective like in the gulf war right hey give kuwait back to the kuwaitis and that's all you care about you know you you can do that quite rapidly although we should it's worth pointing out that we had a sustained effort in the gulf region after that to contain saddam in in in in the subsequent years uh and and and conducted some major airstrikes uh against uh iraqi facilities in the in the years after the gulf war as well but you know i i think that what's important to recognize is that unless it's a raid job like a raid is the military definition of a raid is an operation of of short duration limited purpose and planned withdrawal if it's not that and you want to achieve a political outcome the consolidation of gains is not like an optional phase right it's something you have to do and and when you prepare for it you can actually do it competently if you have the degree of agency you need you and like-minded indigenous partners typically you know we there there have been of course some significant studies about this one is uh nadia shadlow who's a visiting fellow here at uh at hoover uh her book called war and the art of governance shows from a historical perspective hey we've always had to do it and in the conclusion of her book she calls it american denial syndrome that we always think okay we're not going to have to do that next time well we've never been able to never do it again and and uh and even for you know when retrospect seemed like relatively easy military operations like the invasion of of panama for example i mean there was a there was a lot of work to do on the back end of that to consolidate those gains and and transition uh after the after uh to a post noriega government in in in panama so so uh know dominican republic in 1965 you can just every every example of an intervention required a consolidation of gains now the the point that you made john in one of our exchanges recently was that hey we still have 28 hundred troops in south korea yeah i mean that's they're consolidating you know to get the gains made there uh after the invasion in june 1950 uh and and um and so there really aren't short-term solutions to some of these longer term problems well not not not to mention germany and japan the united states of course has won uh the most important pieces uh even if it's lost some less important pieces but one must bear in mind uh that this uh this whole debate is is now such an old one that i i'm feeling almost geriatric listening to it i i first started to write about this stuff 20 years ago uh around about the time of of 9 11 i'd written about the problem of american foreign policy before it happened during the bill clinton presidency and i'm going to throw out my framework that i developed thinking about why it was all going to go wrong particularly in iraq i think afghanistan actually as hr says went well at first but when i came to put this into a book form in a book called colossus uh which had as a subtitle the rise and fall of america's empire the argument i made was that there were three deficits that ensured that it was very difficult for the united states to behave in the imperial way that say britain had behaved uh in the 18th and 19th uh centuries that even if there were some neoconservatives who wanted to talk uh in imperial terms it was all going to go wrong and it was partly because of a manpad deficit americans don't really want to go and spend long periods of time in in hot poor dangerous countries hence the sort of relatively short tours of duty that characterize american military uh interventions then your territory john that there was a fiscal deficit and that problem of a structural uh weakness in american public finances was obvious even in 2001 and it's only got more serious since then and then thirdly what i think is most important the attention deficit the american public does not really have and this has been true since korea a stomach for very long-term military conflicts it really quite likes these things to be over within an election cycle and those three deficits i think help to explain why things in iraq and afghanistan did not produce the kind of wonderful outcomes that some neoconservatives envisaged back in 2003 when i was writing the biography of henry kissinger i added a fourth deficit at the history deficit a great many american decision makers a sort of shockingly ignorant of of history and uh and tend not to think that there is anything to be learned from the history of particularly other countries i'll give you a little anecdote that hr will enjoy uh about 2004 i got a an out of the blue email from a junior group of junior officers in iraq and the email went roughly like this we hear there was an insurgency when you guys meaning the brits were here in in the 1920s do you know anything about that and uh it was clear that almost nobody uh in the sort of senior decision-making uh echelons had given any attention at all to the british experience in in iraq and the counter the insurgency and the counter insurgency that it necessitated actually bought quite striking resemblances to what happened in 1920 except that uh in 1920 it was much easier to run iraq because the population was much smaller relative to the british military presence and of course they were much better armed uh in 2004. so i i think the history deficit may be the most important of all the deficits last anecdote uh when i was writing volume one of kissinger i had to delve into vietnam and like hr thinking about the history of vietnam has has taken up a lot of uh of my time as a scholar in my case very recently he did it long ago uh and what really shocked me was that i got a letter from somebody who'd been in the bush administration in a senior position in george w bush's administration reflecting on the kissinger diaries that i that i included in my book describing kissinger's early visits to vietnam in the mid-1960s and kissinger analyzed at that point what was going wrong in america's intervention in vietnam uh and the person who wrote to me whose identity i won't reveal said as i was reading your quotations from kissinger's mid 60s letters from vietnam i had a terrible recognition that we had made exactly the state same mistakes in iraq uh and and the fact that that was a revelation to somebody who'd been in a position of real seniority in the bush administration i found that absolute vindication that the history deficit is a structural problem in the way america approaches its interventions i'm sorry i'm sorry john i'm going to ask questions so go ahead i was just i was just going to i was gonna expand on neil's comment about you know what i think was you know was uh was willful ignorance uh during the during the invasion of iraq uh by a number of people who deliberately neglected our history because they believed that war had changed fundamentally and and that the so-called revolution in military affairs of the you know the 1990s demonstrated during the gulf war and then expanded on with with new technologies emerging technologies associated with a short communication satellite imagery precision strike and so forth uh that had fundamentally changed the nature of war such the future could be waged quickly cheaply efficiently mainly at standoff range and what this neglected were continuities in the in the nature of war that were fundamentally political and therefore you have to achieve a sustainable political outcome war is fought people fight people employ use violence for the same reasons two cities identified 2500 years ago fear honor and interest and if you're not addressing what's driving that violence you're treating only the symptoms which we did in iraq as as an insurgency coalesced and gained strength over time and then war is uncertain you know the future course of events depends not just on what you decide to do you'll like leave iraq later in in december of 2011. uh your enemy actually has a say in in the future course of events and they just don't say well i guess the is over the americans left i mean actually they have ambitions of their own uh that that really can place at risk our our interests as we saw isis do in iraq and i think as we will see uh the taliban and jihadist terrorists do if we if we do just you know head for the exit in afghanistan and then finally as as uh as neil alluded to and you alluded to john wars a contest of wills right and and if american leaders if the president in particular is not explaining to the american people what they need to know hey first of all what is at stake well why why do we care about this and and second what is a strategy that will deliver a favorable outcome at an acceptable cost and i will tell you american leaders across multiple administrations haven't done that uh on afghanistan i mean we have a paltry number of troops employed overseas i mean it's 2500 troops right in in afghanistan now we're at a very low level of commitment as we support afghans who are bearing the brunt of that fight by the way i think most americans don't know there are more european troops in afghanistan now than there are american troops so i really think this this is really uh self-generated this clamoring for withdrawal and that we we can't sustain the effort because the effort is actually uh small uh from a relative perspective from a historical perspective uh and just in context of the history of those conflicts well let me push back on both of you uh guys because um yes it's small but it's taken a long time uh and i think hr there is a difference between war we're great at going in and unseating a power what we're not great at is then the counter insurgency then establishing something that lets us leave now you said something about raids early on there's a case for raids um there's a case for this regime has to go and we don't mind if we leave chaos in its wake we're going to take it out but it would be a lot easier for america to do that if we know how to leave and leave something in place now neil you mentioned germany japan and the north korea which are those are torqued sorry south korea south korea the next one to come but those those troops are there mostly to counter an extra external threat not to counter an internal threat and the usual story told at least to rubes like me is that um that worked because those places had institutions of civil society going that could be turned on uh to run again uh and the one you know the problem in iraq is that there were no institutions of civil society or to the extent that there were we went in as complete engineer thinking that we would just run an election and then somehow it would look like jeffersonian democracy when it came out forgetting that you need a court system you need police you need property rights you need a population used to discussing a political thing and not militarily um so that from my point i'll ask you guys if i'm if if that's wrong but and then world war ii after world war ii um we kind of uh blinked a little bit about um you know so so we we did have war crimes trials for the top end but the local mayor when it came time to we need to rebuild this place well okay it might have been a bit of a nazi in the past but we're going to leave that in place whereas we blew up what structures there were in uh in iraq and didn't allow them to build on that so how do you um not just view this as endless counter insurgency but how do you build institutions of civil society seems to be the question the precondition to letting you leave why don't i go first it strikes me that it's hard to make comparisons true uh west germany as it as it emerged and japan after 1945 were far more advanced economies and societies than uh say vietnam south vietnam or for that matter iraq on the other hand they were in utter ruins at the end of world war ii and it's easy to forget how totally the established institutions had been had been wrecked not just by uh air warfare but by the regimes the hitler regime and the nationalist regime in japan so i think it's worth bearing in mind that the task in the late 1940s in those countries was in many ways just as daunting as the task that the u.s confronted in iraq and afghanistan i'd also say that south korea bears a much closer resemblance one forgets because south korea has been such a success story how dirt poor it was uh when finally the war ended and korea was partitioned but south korea is in some ways the poster child uh of of a successful uh rising from the ashes and the u.s military guarantee was a vital part of that uh one must also remember that the south korean regime was an authoritarian regime for decades before democratization proved possible but when you look at the economics it's actually the miracle of miracles really and i think it illustrates a critical point that i used to spend a lot of time discussing with the late john mccain it needed the duration of of american commitment for the institutions to to bed down and and because we ceased to be able to make that kind of long-term commitment after vietnam well i should really say during vietnam because the decision to kind of not make that commitment was made in the late 60s and early 70s i think because we now more or less explicitly make our commitments uh time limited uh there's a kind of obvious advantage to the other side you can wait the us out and i remember you you may may recall this in 2008 john mccain on the campaign trail got into an argument as he was went to do with someone at a town hall and and said it was a rash thing to say that he didn't really mind if if if u.s troops were going to be uh in iraq for 100 years but it was kind of true that if you were serious about building institutions in countries like iraq and afghanistan it wasn't going to be doable in four year or five year time frames of course nobody wanted to hear that and i think it was it was a perfect illustration of how fundamentally hostile american political culture is to the idea now of any long-term commitment whether you call it empire or give it some other much more acceptable name americans don't want that kind of engagement and it's striking isn't it that we've had various flavors of disengagement offered to to voters barack obama's presidency was really all about extricating the united states from the role of global policemen he explicitly disavowed that role in a television address that i vividly remember at the time of the syrian crisis and and donald trump was a variation on the same theme his instinct was always to get out and hr will confirm that part of the challenge of working in that administration was to try to explain to president trump that you couldn't just leave it wasn't as simple as that i i just don't see how the united states will ever get over this fundamental public aversion to long-term engagements and as long as that's the case i think we have to think very carefully about the kind of raids you talk about think of libya you know it seemed very appealing to european leaders especially to off gaddafi and uh and that was duly done and the place has been in abject chaos ever since it barely exists as a country it's a sort of uh it's a zone of anarchy now and and that's a i think that's a warning to us not to think of raids short-term interventions as conducive to problem solving well i i often think of uh when our politicians announced i'm the troop withdrawal schedule which i remember from the vietnam era as well i think of uh um you know did eisenhower announce when he was going to take troops out of germany no he announced the goal and we're going to take troops out when the goal is done we don't seem to announce that goal but i want to push on this uh for both of you guys so south let's compare south korea and iraq um and throughout yes we don't insist on democracy we just want something there and we're willing to work with an authoritarian a strong man regime for a while and then as we did in korea i hope that hope and and and and push them to uh to liberalize uh but that's our go-to strategy is is work with the local government strongmen whatever and but they are most of our strong men aren't very strong and they they are they are not able to get the um cooperation of their own population uh which the south koreans seem to be able to do and so we're constantly propping up um people who are not just authoritarians but are also hated in their own country and ineffective and weak and and so there's a constant civil war going on and so that system doesn't necessarily seem to work yeah it doesn't work in every context clearly uh and i think that the issue that interests me is well you know where do we go from here my sense is that the united states certainly the american public has no appetite for new interventions but but what if but let me finish let me finish off let's just let's take a look look ahead and what if uh we hear tomorrow that china has in full imposed a blockade on taiwan uh what will happen then uh will the u.s public uh respond uh if the united states acts on uh its obligations that date back to 1979 to prevent a forcible solution of the taiwanese uh situation i genuinely don't know what will happen if there's a crisis over taiwan but one thing's for sure you you can talk about withdrawing or diminishing the us presence all you like there'll be a crisis at some point that necessitates some new intervention or if that doesn't happen an abandonment of american primacy and if the u.s simply stood back and watched taiwan uh be forced back into the control of the mainland that would be the end of american primacy in the indo-pacific region so it's not like this is an easy decision to make if if president biden is confronted with that crisis which i well i could well imagine that would be a very interesting test of this state of mind yeah i want to get hr back in because but we said that of vietnam too so i want to play liberal for a moment uh if we let vietnam go that's the end of america now maybe that was the end of america h.r well you know i would just say i'm just uh just to go back to a couple points that haven't been made about long-term commitments now first of all we are still in afghanistan 20 years later we are still in iraq in the middle east but what happens is we continuously declare our intention to leave almost immediately and thereby give up all of the psychological benefits uh associated with the long-term commitment and we also give up a longer-term competent approach uh to to to some of the the the problems that that uh impede our ability to to work with others to achieve enduring security and and stability in in these countries uh you know in in korea it was ugly right i mean it was ugly you know i just want to point out i mean neil alluded this already already but this was a country that was ravaged by decades of war and brutal occupation there wasn't a tree left standing in in south korea had no natural resources you had an illiterate population uh and and uh and you had a hostile neighbor right i mean what are the chances of success there everybody thought pretty low right and and uh it really wasn't until reforms in the 1970s uh that the korean economy took off and then later there were government governance reforms and so forth as well uh but it was it was it was a corrupt military dictatorship initially so you know i i think that we have to remember again there we need long-term approaches to to these problems but at a cost acceptable to the american people and that's what we're kind of debating john is like hey you know the the question on vietnam always is to get to your point here you know could we have won the war george herring the you know the the the probably the most accomplished historian of the war has said well that's the wrong question the question is was the war winnable you know however you define that right which would be maintaining or guaranteeing the freedom of independence of south vietnam at a cost acceptable to the american people and i would say that that that an incompetent strategy and fundamental dishonesty on the part of lyndon johnson sowed the seeds or the lack of of popular support in fact the opposition to the war uh as it reached its its uh you know the highest level at during the tet offensive in 1968. so no i think that we have to ask the right questions right we have to consider that it certainly is the point that neil's making is in a democracy you get the level of effort in war and the willingness to sacrifice consistent with what the public will bear and that's okay that's the way it should be in a democracy but i would say for leaders that that will is is not static right that will is it it can be influenced by a leader who explains what's at stake and i don't see people clamoring now for the withdrawal of 2500 troops from afghanistan how many americans really care about it even know what the heck those 2500 troops are doing i think this is largely and it's trying to self-inflicted back to catch you are those troops actually achieving a goal we've been at this 20 years and it's a slow retreat it strikes me that the issue is not so much the time uh commitment you're asking of americans but um that there has been no strategy there's been no articulated goal a a limited achievable goal we're in afghanistan to do x and we're going to do what it takes to get x and furthermore the goals that have been articulated at least to me a non-expert in foreign policy strike me as fables our goal is to get the taliban and the government to sit down and work out a power sharing agreement where everybody takes turns that's that's kind of like the international organization gobbledygook but that is not a a goal that you well it's that's it is goblet good and it is it is indicative of our strategic incompetence now i mean call me old-fashioned john but i think when you go to war you ought to try to defeat your enemy i mean you did you did travel all that way you know while you're there why don't you defeat your enemy and achieve you know a sustainable outcome that that that ends with some kind of a political agreement but you know the old you know it was only a matter of time when when the retired general would break out carl von clausewitz right the 19th century russian philosopher of war but hey klaus was right you know what he said winning in war means convincing your enemy that your enemy's been defeated well how well have we done with that on with the taliban when we kept saying hey we're leaving we're leaving and hey we'd like to enter into an agreement with you as we're leaving and by the way here's all the concessions we're going to make on our way out is that a way to fight it's not a way to fight so maybe it doesn't take much time it just takes announcing your goal and going for it and and and you know of course you know there are intractable problems in life right we're not going to solve afghanistan's problems we don't need to as i mentioned hey what if the taliban are are in control of strategically you know uh uh you know unimportant areas of of afghanistan uh and and uh and are operating in rural areas um that that uh you know that don't contain you know population centers uh unimpeded access to the to the to the heroin trade to the opium trade uh which is which is you know which is one of the great sources of revenue not just for the taliban for but for other jihadist terrorist organizations you know and and you know so i i just think that that we we uh we set up this false dilemma in afghanistan that you know again it's either going to be denmark or we failed i mean i you know i think we won the war in afghanistan with that but but sustaining uh the gains that we've made require sustained support for the afghan government afghan security forces not just the u.s but this coal this vast coalition with burden sharing we can do that at a cost that's acceptable to the american people i think if if if the president decides to lead on it a terrific book that was written about the war in afghanistan uh by my former student emil simpson was war from the ground up and it's relevant here because as you were talking hr about defeating the enemy i was remembering emile's argument that in afghanistan it was never entirely clear after a certain point who the enemy was uh emile's argument he served in the british army uh in afghanistan is that the problem with afghanistan was that we look we were looking for a close of itsian uh dichotomy between us and the enemy but many many times our actions created the enemy because in reality afghan society was an extraordinary kaleidoscopic complex of factions and and tribes and it wasn't always that easy to know who was on the side of the taliban because son one might be for the government and son two might be with the taliban and some three son three might be in the narcotics business and and i thought emil's book was brilliant because he said in truth our clause of itsean way of thinking about war didn't work that well in afghanistan because there wasn't always something as distinct as the enemy at least in many parts of the country it's a it's a brilliantly insightful book written from the vantage point of a junior junior officer trying to make sense of it uh on the ground and he also touched on i remember coming back from his first tour and describing the war to me uh in roughly the following words well uh in some ways he said it's it's easy we we fly in uh on helicopters and the enemy the taliban run away and then we shoot them and he said but then uh what happens next is the problem because then he said the americans turn up and destroy the the opium crop and the taliban come back in this was a caricature of the experience but i think it hit quite well the nail on the head that we we could sort of pick a fight and probably win that fire fight most of the time but it was it was the next phase that was was difficult the phase that would actually consolidate quote-unquote victory yeah you know i would say you know and i i know neil and i reviewed the book favorably as war from the ground up uh it's extremely insightful because what he what he shows is that that this conflict has local dynamics right and and you know the war in in helmand province is different from in kandahar province and and then in paktiya province and so forth uh but but what's important is to be able to get to that sustainable local outcome that is intolerant of the taliban and the talibans agenda uh of of of terror right of terrorizing their own population but then of course you know providing a safe haven support base for jihadist terrorists who already exist in that region right about 20 or so designated terrorist organizations and that doesn't mean we have to solve that problem right what that means is we have to be aware of the sources of strength and support for the taliban which which are are emotional and ideological uh but but also have to do with how certain tribes view their best bet right what is the best path to the to the future that they want and that's a political settlement right and and and that's a settlement that afghans have to come up with but they can't come up with it you know if the taliban is in charge from the military perspective so the military operation that he's describing you know you know an air assault against a taliban target or organization that's not going to solve the the political competition and and when we don't consider that this political competition is for power resources and survival and then help the afghans put into place some sort of a mediating mechanism a political process at the local level a jurga you know a tribal jurga that that allows them to realize well we can settle our differences through a political process rather than shooting at each other so that's what i mean by the consolidation of gains that applies to the local level as well as the national level and this doesn't mean that afghanistan again would be free of violence right it's a violent place now but it but this is not a lost war i i really believe that we are engaged in self-defeat at this stage in afghanistan it's worth remembering isn't it that there are also uh disastrous scenarios when the united states does not intervene and and we haven't touched on on that but syria uh has been not quite a forever war but an extraordinary protracted civil war uh and the united states basically took the decision not to intervene in that conflict that has not produced great outcomes i i think there's a very common pathology in discussions of foreign policy in the united states to say well all problems arise from american intervention and if only the united states wouldn't intervene it would all be so much better but we actually have a perfect illustration that that can't be right you have to keep asking the counterfactual question what if we hadn't intervened what if we just sort of taken legal action against the afghan government after 9 11 would be would we be in a better place well obviously no because if afghanistan had remained consistently under the control of the taliban we might well have had other 911s since that time uh the iraq case i think is more difficult because one could imagine a counterfactual of containment of saddam because that was what we were doing prior to 2003. i think on balance that would have been a smarter strategy to continue because in practice overthrowing saddam was just great for iran the principal beneficiary of our intervention in in iraq was ultimately the regime in tehran but one has to keep running these counterfactual questions and while i'm on the subject given that my role as a historian is to broaden out these discussions i want to plug a book i've been reading which is philip zeliko's marvellous new book the road less traveled describing a very different role that the united states has played in the relatively recent past just over a century ago the role of peace broker and zelika argues in this beautifully researched and written book that there was a near opportunity a very near miss to achieve peace in 1916 to cut the first war world war in half and that woodrow wilson could have done it if only he'd executed better on the opportunity that presented itself remember uh it had been teddy roosevelt who'd a broken peace between uh russia and japan uh only a decade before and i'm i'm fascinated by this reminder that the united states plays a different role historically or can play a different role historically from the intervener the the the kinetic actor that actually the united states as peace broker and peacemaker that that is a pretty important role that the united states can play and should continue to play think uh more recently of the role the u.s played in ending the war over what remained of yugoslavia richard holbrook's finest hour the dayton accords and i i keep asking myself as i listen to tony blinken the new secretary of state and indeed president biden as they set out their foreign policy stall if there's not a a more important role to be played by the united states in peace broking or peace making than in simply intervening in conflicts that we can't necessarily uh or don't necessarily have the staying power to win but it needs some hard-nosed realism i mean that's what they envisioned themselves they're doing now they are calling for talks and calling for power-sharing agreements we'll be the peace broker well it needs a little more hard nose well you know and just the the example of the of the balkans in the 90s 95 you know that was that was a large military operation to to impose uh to impose peace initially and remember the way that president clinton sold it to the american people was that's a one-year mission but we're still there we're still we're still in in the fall of that scenario so you know i i think it's it's important to recognize you know that that it doesn't have to be you know of course we think of 130 000 troops you know in iraq or in afghanistan i mean the the level now is quite low and and what are we getting out of it right well we're getting an insurance policy in afghanistan to prevent jihadist terrorists from again taking over a large portion of the country that they could then use to plan prepare raise funds for resource uh train and and then and execute uh more mass murder attacks now you think oh well would that really happen well look what happened when isis took over territory the size of britain after disengagement from iraq in december 2011 that's precisely what they were doing is using that control of territory to plan very sophisticated and devastating attacks that we we foiled many of them but remember they shot down a russian airliner uh and they were trying to go after other uh to uh mature other aviation threats they were trying to develop biological weapons uh i mean so it's it is important to remain engaged against these enemies because you want them worried about their safety instead of what they're going to do to you now that doesn't mean it's u.s soldiers doing every one of those raids and operations actually it's the afghans doing that now and so so it's the sustained effort against you know against jihadist terrorists in in iraq and syria is also important so the question is you know what are military forces doing in support of political objectives and outcomes now we're not going to solve the problem of you know security in iraq right iraq's about to go through it through another you know another election it's going to be messy it's it's iraq's in a very difficult situation uh but but our effort there is ensuring the defeat of the enduring defeat of isis and it's acting as a check on iranian influence in the region uh in iraq and and in syria i think it's worth it right it's it's a relatively small cost it's worth it but but how is the question right so let me um i want to get back to afghanistan and and ways in which this might be done better as an economist i always look for the money and as as as we look to these events external support is always a key part of our problems in vietnam there was external support to the north vietnamese and we we couldn't do what it took to stop the external support we couldn't even shoot we couldn't even bomb their mig site the the sam missile sites because we didn't want to make the russians mad in iraq we got iran who is the external uh supplier in uh so one question i'm curious what the external source of support is for the taliban what i've heard is saudi arabian money and uh our drug policy uh that basically it's a it's a it's both financed by the saudis and also um making money off the heroin trade are we doing the sort of sanctioning things that we could do to try to cut off their external support and then internally who in uh you know we tried vietnamization who in afghanistan likes the afghan government and and and trusts them and wants them to take over to what extent there is a structure there there's a social structure there's a civil society there's the tribes to what extent are they living in just a gang land world where you got to bet on the winner uh and is there a way for us to to have them think that perhaps what is the political structure that works in afghanistan without the taliban it's certainly not oh there's a central government that people seem to respect like it's washington d.c sorry i asked about three questions but uh no well no this is important to to the way to think about it right because if you want to get to sustainable outcomes consistent with your interests in these conflicts you need essentially you need an internal strategy and an external strategy but off the outside support and there's a viable internal strategy you're not just pretending right and so in afghanistan the number one problem is pakistan and the actions of the pakistani army as as executed through the inner services intelligence or isi and and what the what the what he uh pakistani army is doing is is supporting the taliban in an effort for them to be able to have the dominance say in in a post-war afghanistan the reason they want this is twofold one is that two-thirds of the pashtun population and the war there is primarily an intra push tuned civil war in afghanistan two-thirds of that population is in pakistan and should there be a a resurgence of push-to-nationalism that could be the first step in the dismemberment of pakistan the second reason is the pakistani army sees an indian behind every tree and and they and they they fear that that if there is a government friendly to india in afghanistan they will be surrounded right so this is the argument of strategic depth well you know we could do a lot more i think to convince the pakistanis the best way to accomplish their objectives in afghanistan is through diplomacy rather than perpetuating violence and continuing to allow this this terrorist ecosystem to exist along the afghanistan-pakistan border that is a threat to all humanity uh we have but we've been inconsistent with the pakistanis i mean this has been the most astounding case of serial gullibility i've ever seen in my life with the pakistanis because what the pakistanis do is they they give you the speech i i wrote about this in the book if everyone wants to read what every pakistani tells you leader tells you and i'll tell you so many americans fall for it because of ego they convinced themselves these are generals and admirals and ambassadors hey i'm going to be the person that really convinces pakistani leadership to fundamentally change their you know their behavior and and and the pakistanis encourage that uh that that conclusion so you know external support is is is extremely um important to address as part of getting to that sustainable outcome and then internally you know there are mediating mechanisms you know across afghanistan it's these these are the tribal lawyer jurgas and they work uh and there is there is a legislature in afghanistan that functions there is a government that is not universally loved but i'll tell you it's a heck of a lot better than the previous government and no matter it was an ugly election but it was an election those who now are saying hey let's come up with a different government you know that includes the taliban how about that well you know what kind of process is that based on it's not based on any any uh afghan process it's it's the united states advocating for the taliban against the afghan government and you know the and the taliban is not popular right people remember what it was like to live in that hell from from 1996 to 2001. so we we are you know we're we're actually acting as our own worst enemy in afghanistan when you look at really what has to happen internally and then what the drivers are externally i'd like to jump in and ask a question to h.r and neil um h.r what are we training for when it comes to war right now and i'm not talking about the navy and the air force the death from above guys i'm talking the army and the marines the boots on the ground guys what war are they preparing for and what if afghanistan and iraq taught us about fighting war and then neil i'm curious as to how the british empire approached this question and the law between the in the second half of the 19th century preparing for the first world war you've written about the pity of the war and part of the pity or the tragedy would have been that the british forces went into world war one using 19th century tactics so h.r neil jump in with that yeah and also the end of the british empire i think um bears on this question of how do you leave yes where do you go first well i'll happily go first it's uh i mean it seems to me that uh the key thing to to think about here is how far the united states is in fact in a similar situation uh to the british empire uh and let us say the 1940s uh and this is where i want to actually throw the ball back in in john's direction uh because uh the the debt levels that we now are contemplating uh i've now are close to if they haven't already exceeded the debt levels the end of world war ii so you're looking at a federal debt in public hands of around 100 of gdp and the congressional budget office latest figures indicate that that proportion could double uh in the next couple of decades on current policy trajectories and i guess the question that i'm always interested in is how far there's a rule that says when your interest payments on your debt exceed your defense expenditures it's game over for your uh empire or for your great power status now the us is not there yet not least because interest rates have been as astonishingly historically low level uh in in recent years but the cbo expects rates to go up and so it seems to investors so this is a chance for john to show us uh his metal how far is the united states entering a meaningful period of fiscal overstretch similar to that that britain found itself in in in the mid 20th century when when the point is reached that you actually have to unwind your overseas commitments because domestic priorities not least paying the interest on the debt simply crowd out your your global ambitions uh so yeah i think i think i have an economics question here for john before we get to hr's question about what kind of war we have to fight next if i'm right that we're in this kind of condition of fiscal overstretch we might not be in a position to fight a next war because we might be too fiscally constrained john well um i i doubt that in fact because defense is remarkably cheap what are we spending on defense now three percent of gdp uh our deputy at the high end is 3.4 i think right now we just borrowed 20 percent of gdp to send checks to voters uh you know our our fiscal problem is our domestic um our domestic entitlement state uh and our own willingness to charge middle-class taxes to pay for it and that defense would be is just a kind of a drop in the bucket now we have as you've seen when you're in a uh domestic entitlement's fiscal crisis everything gets cut they don't fix the potholes they don't do the defense uh but i it's certainly within the us's fiscal capacity to double or triple military expenditures you know the uk it ran into trouble because it couldn't finance world war one and world war ii uh but unless we're talking about world war three with china um uh that you know it's just not that expensive furthermore we're kind of edging towards um uh you know you know when the romans and and the british ran an empire they made money in their colonies and it you know if if the u.s was discussed in iraq if you know maybe we had a u.n protectorate or something of the sort uh one should be able to bring a tremendous prosperity to a country that the us basically runs you know imagine a free trade zone between iraq and the us there's immense amounts of prosperity on both ends uh so it the idea that it necessarily needs to be a money-losing project is an obvious so i don't think i don't think we are constrained by fiscal things i think our fiscal choices i think we will choose to to spend 20 of gdp on checks rather than one percent of gdp on defense and that may but that's a that's a failure of will rather than a failure of budgets just a tiny point of of detail that might be of interest to listeners uh the the cbo uh says indeed that that we're spending 3.4 percent of gdp on defense and a mere 1.6 last year on net interest but if the cbo is right that number on net interest will rise above 3.4 i.e above current defense spending in 2034 uh and the lesson of the history of past empires is that when you get to that crossover point that servicing your debt exceeds what you're spending on national security you'll probably have power heading heading for the the exit hr what what's the next war going to look like i don't want to i i we are headed for a fiscal calamity uh it's just the defense is a is this kind of defense a non-great power thing is is a small part of that fiscal calamity yeah hr well you know on the next word you you hope you don't have one right so i think what's mentally important is for us to continue to deter by denial essentially convince potential enemies that they can't accomplish their objective through the use of force and i think your comments earlier and you'll allude to the point that it's it's really your military capability and your capacity to size your force times your will your willingness to use it is what would deter something like a cross-strait invasion of taiwan by the people's liberation army for example that could be the beginning of a disastrous war uh and and one of the reasons why we you know we we have experienced surprise uh oftentimes and then had to respond uh with military forces having been surprised is that we we tended to not believe our enemies and what they said they would do for example you know uh osama bin laden declared war on the united states early 1990's really who's that guy well then he bombed the uh the world trade center with a truck bomb uh a few years later and and then bombed our embassies in 98 and continued to say he wanted to commit mass murder of americans we didn't take him at his word you know in in uh in 1950 the last u.s troops leave south korea under the theory that this is peripheral to our interests right and just a couple months later the north invades and and we're in in a war uh you know a three-year long war costly war on the korean uh peninsula so i think it's important for us to to maintain our deterrent capability but i think it's also really important when you're first of all you can't go wrong when you're thinking about future war to consider how sir michael howard uh uh the the late michael howard taught us how to think about war in width depth and context and probably i think the best essay ever written on military history the use and abuse of military history and in in that essay he also says hey you're never going to get it right you know you're not going to get your next war right you're not going to be able to fully anticipate the challenges of the war the key is to not be so far off the mark that you can't adjust once the realities of that conflict become inescapable and i think what was remarkable about and noteworthy about the wars in iraq and afghanistan is we were really way way off the mark with this orthodoxy of the revolution of military affairs right the next war hey it's going to be fundamentally different from wars that have gone before it you know and and and our technological military prowess would deliver you know uh quick cheap victories of course they should have read michael howard those who believe that because they would have studied war in width to see its continuities and its political continuities its human continuities its uncertainty and interactive nature and it's it's a contest of wills so i'm afraid we're gonna do the same thing neil i mean i and john and and bill i mean i i think that we are now resurrecting the orthodoxy of the revolution military affairs so we can get an easy and affordable answer to the problem of future war and this this is now a new range of cutting-edge technologies but again we we are not we're not doing what the destroying carl becker said we should do is is to consider both continuity and change he said that continuity and change should walk hand in hand in a happy way without one disputing privacy over over the claiming privacy over the other um and and i think we we always are biased in favor of change and uh and and i think we have to keep in mind what what the syrian conrad crane said i mean there are two ways to fight fundamentally right asymmetrically or stupidly and and you hope that your enemy picks stupidly but they're unlikely to do so so there are countermeasures to everything so bill said okay what are we training for we have to trade for a range of conflicts because you don't know what's going to happen you know we talk about great power competition and how important it is to get ready for the big one which it is is important to do to deter the big one with russia or china but also great power competitions play out in other arenas in ways that are much different from the big naval confrontation you might be envisioning in the south china sea for example so i think it's important to have a range of military capabilities ready forces who can fight because really what war is war is is the children's game of rock paper scissors and if you show up with only one of those three and can't use them in combination your enemies to have an advantage let me push hr on this um so there's the great power question in taiwan but what strikes me in this context of more worrisome is what do we do if iran flattens tel aviv um the only conceivable answer now you you've been downplaying the us military we beat saddam hussein amazingly fast so the only conceivable answer is the us mounts uh a kuwait iraq style conventional invasion takes out the regime because the alternative is uh either us us or the israelis are we really going to have a nuclear response and and murder tens of millions of iranians i don't think so um now the will to go in needs some kind of plan to go out and and it still strikes me that you're understanding that iran we went in beautifully and then just the management of when the war was over when the power the the regime iraq correct yeah yes in iraq then the running of the peace was an absolute catastrophic disaster and that the ability to run a piece is what allows you to credibly say we're going to deter that act of wary you know the chance that iran does something like flat in tel aviv is not uh insignificant and in the context of afghanistan and iraq that seems like the thing we should be thinking about not how do we rebuild china after we paid that one that's a long way away yeah and you know i think what's also i mean i think we just have to acknowledge that as as iran violates you know this the so-called nuclear agreement and and and restarts the nuclear program that it claims never existed then uh i i think that you're going to have uh you know an israeli government and defense force uh that will be leaning maybe more toward a a uh a preventive war and and um and this is not unprecedented of course right there there were idf strikes in in iraq uh in the uh in the 1980s uh there was the there was the uh 2007 strike in into uh into syria in the darshaur uh region uh to take out a nuclear facility that nobody knew existed until the idf bombed it you know the israeli defense was banned israel is not going to invade iran and unseat the regime directly and then try to know but but but they they are the begging the begging doctrine does still exist right which means that israel will not tolerate a hostile state having a you know having nuclear weapons uh so you know i i think that they're they're the possibility of war in the middle east but there's already wars going on at multiple wars in the middle east you know in yemen the syrian civil war uh you know a low-level you know a low-level uh war in in iraq as well but you know i i think it could get worse every time i think it couldn't get worse in the middle east it could get worse and and that's why it's it's very important for us to have very strong deterrent capabilities to for the turn i want to push it the deterrent capability we have we know how to go in uh we just don't know how to get out and and not knowing how to get out is going to stop us from going in when that is the least damaging option yeah well it depends obviously on what the context is right i mean with the right threat you can generate the will to do you know what you know what what's necessary i mean uh you know the the calculation that that imperial japan made in in 1941 was that the united states would not stomach the cost necessary to penetrate the inner island chain uh and threaten japan directly they're wrong about that uh the the the miscalculation uh that that uh that the kim dictatorship made in north korea what was that the americans won't stomach what it would take uh to defend south korea they're wrong about that right so so i i think what what the dilemma we often have is is that that we are you know unwilling to maybe anticipate dangers and take the appropriate actions to deter them or to prepare for for war uh and and then and then once we're surprised you know we have a hard time mobilizing what's necessary because we haven't prepared for it in advance so i i think you know you never get you never get to prove a negative right you can't say okay who knows what wars we've prevented right by by our you know prepared uh ready for position military forces uh but i think they're more important today really than than really at any time uh since the end of world war ii and it i can think i think you can make the argument it worked right i mean there hasn't been a great power war you know for over 75 years and and i i think that that that one of the reasons is or position capable us forces as part of strong alliances and and uh and i think it still works and and we should would abandon that deterrent posture i think at our own peril okay gentlemen uh wars may be endless but this broadcast is not so the witching hour approaches uh i'd like to uh end this with one last question to all three of you uh as we pride ourselves on being a forward-thinking broadcast and here's the question this month marks 18 years since the us entry into iraq this fall is 20 years since the u.s went into afghanistan if we look ahead 18 to 20 years from now gentlemen answer the following number one will we have relived the iraq afghanistan experience in another country number two fiscally can this country fight wars 20 18 to 20 years from now number three hr strategically will we have a strategy in place to fight wars and then finally given that political leadership with each passing generation becomes less and less directly involved in the military will we have political will public will to actually fight war so john why don't you kick it off and maybe go from the fiscal angle do you think 18 to 20 years now we can afford to prosecute wars um yes if we want to again you know we're not talking about 40 percent of gdp uh expenditures the question is will we want to and fundamentally does america have the will do we believe that we stand for something that's important in the world and i i see that in our current zeitgeist uh as as being the thing that falls apart and it's not the will to fight wars it's the will to defend democracy western civilization uh freedom uh as as something useful and wonderful in the world and uh who knows if we have that okay neil take us 18 to 20 years so now talk about war well if you believe the sort of mainstream prognosticators by that time the chinese economy will be larger than the us economy i i don't necessarily subscribe to that view because a lot can go wrong in china but that is certainly the that's the base case that you'll get from most people who project out gross domestic product data and i think in the big question really is is going to be what happens in that region uh not just taiwan but the south china sea as a richer more technologically advanced xi jinping because he'll still be in power assuming his health holds up decides to make uh the move that will be the big test because it will no longer be uh the wars of choice uh the this would be a war of necessity to maintain the position of the us not just with respect to taiwan but with respect to the indo-pacific region generally if we do not rise to the challenge the japanese will draw the conclusion that we are no longer the paramount uh strategic force uh in the region uh and so will other uh countries india will draw that conclusion so will australia so i think that's the big uh showdown the question is when it will happen uh and our colleague mitch oslan speculated that that such a showdown could happen in 2025 uh i think uh admiral jim stavridis has a novel coming out that in imagines conflict rather further off in i think 2034 but i think that's that's going to be the showdown and my fear and i'll end on this note is that the us is setting itself up fiscally to be unable to prevail and i'll i'll plug philip zelika's work again he just published an excellent essay with bob blackwell on the issue of our commitment to taiwan it is not encouraging recent war games have not been encouraging so that's what to watch for i think this could be the moment that uh that will be america's sewers if we blow it uh if we either intervene and fail or simply back down that will be the moment that britain experienced in the suez crisis that will be the end of empire moment for the us hr you get the last word okay i just want to first say that we're not an empire the united states is not empire yeah yeah yeah nobody in the rest of the world believes that only americans believe this if you're in afghanistan if you're in mesopotamia sorry hr you're an empire hey i would just say that that your your question on on will be strategically competent i don't think so and and one of the reasons is we don't study military history or diplomatic history in academia anymore and and i think that's because of the unfortunate uh mistaking of of the study of war for advocacy of it and and many people confuse you know military history the study of military and war with militarism i think it's quite odd you know i mean you would never you you would never accuse an oncologist of being an advocate for the disease he or she studies and and tries to treat and cure this is a metaphor that uh the late historian dennis showalter a great military historian used to use uh frequently so i i think that you know that you know again phil zelika we're gonna be plugging him this whole time he's written a great essay on strategic competence as well and i think it really begins you know that confidence begins with studying with studying history predictably i would say that as a historian but um i think that we are in this trap of believing that hey we're just never going to do this again right and as again conrad great has said we've never been able to never do it again and and uh and i think an example neil made earlier in in the discussion is libya in which the obama administration in in in trying to avoid what they perceived as the mistakes of the george w bush administration in iraq actually exceeded them by doing nothing to shape the political outcome on the back end of qaddafi's demise and and look at libya today now that's a forever war right there now we're not there but the war didn't end and we decided to disengage so i i mean i've really enjoyed the discussion everybody yeah and uh i i hope that that maybe you know all of us can advocate for the study of diplomatic and military history uh as a way to prevent war by understanding it better hey and i have a good idea for a future edition of goodfellas we should invite phil zeliko on he is after all a distinguished visiting fellow at the hoover institution that's not why we're plugging his work but i do think he illustrates the the extraordinary value of applying history to contemporary policy problems thanks guys that was a great conversation and neil's right we should return to this topic uh uh very soon so that's it for this episode of goodfellas we hope you enjoyed the conversation we'll be back a week from now the new topic and yes a new conversation on the behalf of hoover's good fellows neil ferguson h.r mcmaster john cochran all of us here at the hoover institution by all means stay safe stay healthy we'll do our best here at the hoover institution to help you stay informed we'll see you next week you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 54,977

Rating: 4.7867436 out of 5

Keywords: Hoover Institute, Hoover Institution, John Cochrane, Niall Ferguson, H.R. McMaster, Bill Whalen, public policy, GoodFellows, Goodfellows, Stanford University, Endless war, Afghanistan, Iraq, China, Taiwan, Korea, Israel, Iran, Taliban, Pashtun, empire, economics, Philip Zelikow

Id: vZ61X0JDtp4

Length: 70min 51sec (4251 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021