FA: America’s fatal attraction to war

Donald Trump campaigned for a second U.S. presidential term on a promise to end wars, not start them. And for the first year after his return, there were indications that he might make a real break with the status quo that has led Washington to overextend itself. He pushed the United States’ European allies to spend more on defense, promoted peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, and pursued a cautious détente with China that has dialed down tensions over Taiwan, Foreign Affairs writes.

Eighteen months later, however, the United States is bogged down in a new war in the Middle East. Although the U.S. military has enjoyed tactical successes, Washington has not achieved any kind of meaningful strategic victory; in certain respects, Iran exerts more power now than it did in February. Nonetheless, Trump has shied away from making diplomatic compromises. Just like his nemesis, U.S. President Barack Obama, Trump promised Americans that he would extract the country from pointless “forever wars” in the Middle East and then proved unable to do so. But the fact that the United States again became mired in a Middle East conflict is even more surprising today, because over the past two decades, the American public as well as many U.S. leaders have firmly concluded that such wars are mistakes.

At heart, structures and incentives pull Washington back, repeatedly, to avoidable quagmires. For starters, military action is easy for U.S. presidents to initiate. Since 1991, U.S. leaders have gotten in the habit of deploying force to secure even the most minor U.S. interests.

Washington is accustomed to setting maximalist goals for even marginal wars, and U.S. leaders balk at halting an intervention without meeting promised objectives. Particularly if the ongoing costs of a conflict are relatively diffuse, there are few incentives for presidents to face accusations of weakness.

Yet the costs of these interventions are not small. They are merely hidden. Repeated wars add to a growing national debt, overstretch the U.S. military, and generate opportunity costs, drawing spending away from needed military investments and domestic priorities. Simply desiring to change the United States’ habit of waging war has not been enough to change it. If U.S. foreign-policy makers want to break the cycle, they need to think of ways to make using force a harder and less attractive option.

Tip of the iceberg

The fact that U.S. wars’ costs remain hidden might lead some to conclude that even a war as ill conceived as Operation Epic Fury is not a big deal. After all, the economic and human toll, for ordinary Americans, of the previous 20 years of war in the Middle East were also relatively moderate. The numbers of Americans killed and wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq were far smaller than in earlier U.S. wars; in Vietnam, more than seven times as many people died than in both those conflicts combined. The economic costs were diffuse and passed off to future generations as additions to the national debt.

But this conclusion is a mistake. The United States’ wars in the Middle East — both past and present — carry long-term strategic costs that have already damaged the country’s position in the world and its ability to compete against other great powers. History is clear: great powers that overextend themselves in minor conflicts often end up unable to handle core strategic interests. Most visibly, the United States is running critically short on munitions. Despite discussion about dialing up production, the Pentagon cannot easily replace these systems soon, setting up a tradeoff: every interceptor used to defend a U.S. base or ally against Iranian rockets is one that cannot be used elsewhere. Effective deterrence requires both credibility and military capability. If U.S. troops in East Asia, the Baltics, or elsewhere do not have sufficient munitions, they cannot deter China, Russia, or anyone else.

The broader opportunity costs of the United States’ Middle Eastern follies are even more insidious. The troops deployed for Middle East campaigns cannot be sent to other regions, the money spent on these wars cannot be invested into new capabilities or cutting-edge technology, and the cost of rebuilding bases in the Gulf limits the United States’ ability to harden its basing infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific.

These opportunity costs cannot be solved simply by raising the defense budget. Even if the Trump administration’s proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget could be made politically palatable, that level of military spending — almost five percent of U.S. GDP, higher than it has been in decades — will draw investment away from other priorities and act as a long-term drag on U.S. innovation and economic growth.

The notion that the United States ever enforced a truly liberal rules-based order worldwide was always overblown. But it is true that the U.S. military has been a global guarantor of shipping and the free flow of energy for decades. The fact that the United States, in its recent conflict with Iran, directly destabilized international energy markets undermines the country’s claim to be a fair arbiter of the global commons. Polls now suggest that only about a third of people around the world view the United States as contributing significantly to global peace and stability. Meanwhile, the administration burned diplomatic capital on this conflict, reducing its influence and capacity to shape outcomes elsewhere, such as Ukraine, where the administration’s peace efforts have been largely abandoned since the start of the Iran war.

All these costs are diffuse and deferred. But in 20 years, as a result of its choice to pursue these wars, the United States may well have a less effective military force, less global influence, and even a weaker economy.

It will require radical change to break the incentive structure that leads the United States too easily into far-flung military conflicts, not just electing leaders who promise to end forever wars. Closing some forward bases, for example, would diminish the United States’ ability to conduct interventions. Congress should also reestablish more authority over the United States’ wars, first by exerting more power over military spending. The Pentagon is already struggling to cover the Iran war from its existing accounts; Congress could refuse to add contingency funding for this or future conflicts.

The American public long ago turned against military adventurism and regime-change wars, particularly in the Middle East. Yet a full 20 years after Obama was elected on a promise to break free of Bush’s legacy, policymakers keep getting sucked into the region by an incentive structure that makes the use of force attractive and minimizes its short-term costs. However harmless these forever wars might feel to average Americans, they are burning through the country’s military resources and thus eroding Washington’s might. Eventually, the United States will find itself constrained — no longer able to fight everything, everywhere, all at once. The question is whether it wants to proactively decide where it uses its resources, or whether it wants its hands tied by a parade of forever conflicts.

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