Hard Cases Make Bad Foreign Policy

     It’s commonplace to hear or read pronouncements – sometimes elaborate ones that amount to proposed replacements – on an administration’s “foreign policy,” especially by opinion-mongers who disapprove of what the administration did most recently. Time was, I held such discussions to be critically important. Indeed, I held them to be so important that I read rags such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy cover-to-cover, practically the instant they arrived in my mailbox. (At the time I was deep in my studies of strategic-weapons planning and defense postures. So sue me.)

     As my Gentle Readers have already divined from the previous paragraph, I no longer think so. Indeed, I think the notion that an administration can have a “foreign policy” is a bit naive. And of course, this being the loudest and most opinionated of all loudly opinionated blogs, I’m here to tell you why.

     Why now? Syria, of course. Specifically, the alleged use of chemical weapons at Douma a few days ago.

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     Like it or not, the determination of how the nation should act toward other nations is the president’s duty. Congress can constrain him to some degree, mainly by its exercise of the power of the purse, but when the U.S. confronts a decision about whether or not to use military force, the nation’s sword is in the president’s hand. He and he alone will wield it.

     Let’s look at a trying scenario or two. Here’s Scenario #1: Another continent is convulsed in a devastating war. It’s gone on for years and appears likely to go on for years more. The president’s sympathies lie strongly with one side, but the nation is firmly opposed to involving itself in the troubles of other lands, and he’s fully aware of it. Indeed, his re-election campaign made a big deal out of his unwillingness to stick America’s nose into that conflict.

     The president discovers that he can contrive an excuse for sending an expeditionary force to assist his preferred side. Moreover, he knows that should he do so, the country would rally behind its men at arms, as it nearly always has. He acts accordingly – and dooms the world to a still greater conflagration only a couple of decades down the river of Time.

     Now, Scenario #2: Another continent is convulsed in a devastating war. It’s gone on for years and appears likely to go on for years more. The president’s sympathies lie strongly with one side, but the nation is firmly opposed to involving itself in the troubles of other lands, and he’s fully aware of it. Indeed, his re-election campaign made a big deal out of his unwillingness to stick America’s nose into that conflict.

     The president discovers that he can contrive an excuse for sending an expeditionary force to assist his preferred side. Moreover, he knows that should he do so, the country would rally behind its men at arms, as it nearly always has. He acts accordingly – and is hailed as the savior of Mankind for having brought an end to an unspeakable horror and having contrived an enduring peace.

     What’s that you say? The two scenarios are the same, so how could the reactions of the electorate be so greatly at variance? Well, yes. That was the point. The reaction of the electorate to Woodrow Wilson’s insertion of the U.S. into European War I differed radically from its reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s insertion of the U.S. into European War II. The detail differences in setting that evoked the dramatic differences in reaction are what mattered.

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     Probably the determinative factor in whether a nation’s people will approve of its executive’s decision to make war is whether the contest can be given a moral cast. In European War I (a.k.a. World War I and The Great War), President Wilson (“He kept us out of war”) had no such hook on which to hang his decision. He had been inclined to involve the U.S. practically from the outset. His rationale for doing so was contrived from the sinking of the Lusitania and the famous Zimmerman telegram. While one could certainly argue that the implied threats to American lives and interests expressed by those two events constituted a casus belli, one could just as credibly argue that they constituted reasons for the U.S. to cease its shipments of war materiel to Britain. Had Wilson followed the latter course, European War I would probably have petered out after a negotiated settlement of claims between the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance. It’s possible that European War II (a.k.a. the European theater of World War II) would not have occurred, though given the vagaries of national sentiments that’s far from guaranteed.

     By contrast, in European War II President Roosevelt (“Your boys are not going to be sent to any foreign wars”) had excellent arguments, moral and practical, for involving the U.S. One was the German alliance with Japan, which had already committed an overt act of war against the U.S. by striking the naval base at Pearl Harbor. The second was Germany’s declaration of war against the U.S. on December 11, 1941, which was swiftly answered with an American declaration of war on Germany. The third was the mass of horrific reports about Germany’s genocidal pogrom against European Jewry, which we now call the Holocaust. Those events were sufficient to animate the American people in favor of war. Indeed, it’s possible that any one of them would have been sufficient even without the others. And despite the rise of the Soviet Union, the imposition of the Iron Curtain, and the immense costs European War II inflicted on the U.S. – far greater than the costs we suffered from European War I – both popular sentiment and the opinions of historians remain quite strongly in favor of our having taken a hand in it.

     In neither case could we say that a predetermined “foreign policy” had anything much to do with it.

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     And now to Syria and the use of chemical weapons at Douma. At this time it is unclear who deployed those weapons. It’s also unclear what interest whoever did so thought to advance by using them. The arguments are raging on all sides. Currently, President Trump appears inclined to believe that the regime of Bashar al Assad is to blame. Moreover, he seems inclined toward punishing that regime with an air strike. Here are my questions, none of which I can confidently answer from available reports:

1. Who decided to use war gases?
2. What did he hope to accomplish by using them?
3. Does the use of war gases justify American action against their employer?
4. Would American action, if taken, conduce to further American involvement in the Syrian conflict?

     ...but I contend that no matter what the answers might be, the president’s decision will have more to do with Americans’ sentiments concerning the proposed action than with his previously declared “foreign policy” of treating military action as a last resort. If the preponderance of popular opinion is that he should act against the putative miscreant, he probably will; otherwise, he probably won’t.

     The sword does rest in the president’s hand, but under current circumstances he cannot be confident that what his intelligence sources – domestic or foreign – tell him about the gas attack is true-to-fact – and he knows it. Indeed, it’s a large part of what got him elected. Therefore he must rely principally on popular opinion. It’s a more reliable gauge than any dictum that emanates from the State Department, the DIA, the CIA, or any foreign intelligence service. And it might well cause him to wield the sword in a conflict in which the U.S. has no obvious stake.

     Foreign policy decisions are like that.

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     The above flows from a cynical realization:

In every nation, the diplomatic, military, and intelligence communities are in business for themselves.

     The implication is plain. It always has been. The president cannot merely assume that what the State Department, the intelligence agencies, the military, and self-interested foreign actors are telling him is the truth. He knows, from both theory and practice, that those entities have agendas of their own. Sometimes those agendas will prove harmonious with the real national interest, but sometimes they won’t. In the usual case it will be impossible for him to tell.

     The notion that a predetermined foreign policy can remain “in force” is ludicrous. Every such decision will be represented to the president by at least some of the interested parties as a good reason to depart from his prior posture. Moreover, he would be well advised to listen attentively to everyone involved – but not because what they tell him is trustworthy.

     I could go on. I could discourse at length about the internal dynamics that give rise to contentions over foreign policy decisions, especially those about the use of military force. I could tease out why it’s wise for the president to listen closely to all the arguments, to compare them with what he knows of the institutional agendas of the proposers, and to contrast their emphases with one another. But this screed is already at a reasonable stopping point.

     More anon.