The Credibility Myth Revisited

I recently wrote about an article I published over at War on the Rocks explaining my research on the United States’ use of threats and how it demonstrates that a fixation on American “credibility” is unnecessary.  Alex Weisiger and Keren Yarhi-Milo wrote a response criticizing my argument and citing their own research on the role of reputation.  You can read why I think they are wrong here.  In a nutshell, their study does not actually measure what they claim to be (“reputation”) and thus their findings are invalid.

In my response, I also outline why it is so important for us to talk about the concept of “resolve” in a consistent manner.  Scholars, practitioners, generals, and pundits all use the word “resolve” in relation to the United States’ foreign policy, but they aren’t all talking about the same thing.  This matters.  When we don’t specify exactly what we mean when we talk about “the United States’ resolve,” it makes it impossible to evaluate claims about why and how credibility and reputation matter (or don’t) in international politics.  I know that we political scientists like to get all wrapped up in our definitions and concepts, but this is an area in which the failure to clarify what we mean has a major impact on the conclusions and arguments we can make about the United States’ role in the world and its ability to influence the behavior of other states.

The Utility of the First-Use Doctrine

One day after the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2016 in the House. The bill would “prohibit the President from launching a nuclear first strike without a declaration of war by Congress.” The press release announcing the bill cited concerns about Trump’s ability to be trusted with the dangerous weapons if he were elected president. Markey asserted that, “maintaining the option of using nuclear weapons first in a conflict…increases the risk of unintended nuclear escalation. The President should not use nuclear weapons except in response to a nuclear attack.” Controversy about first use surfaced over the summer, in response to an op-ed urging Obama to renounce the doctrine written by James E. Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former commander of U.S. Strategic Command. Despite the flurry of speculation that followed, it seems that Obama is unlikely to renounce first use during his remaining time in office.

The bill that Lieu and Markey introduced would effectively eliminate the strategic and other advantages that the United States derives from its current policy of ambiguity surrounding the first use of nuclear weapons. Most importantly, it would make the United States’ allies (South Korea and Estonia, for example) demand much larger commitments of U.S. conventional forces for their defense. Donald Trump has drawn a lot of fire for his views on various subjects, including his comments about nuclear weapons and his insistence that the United States’ allies take more responsibility for their own defense. The United States cannot have it both ways: it cannot maintain an elaborate and extensive array of commitments to defend allies around the world while at the same time minimizing its spending on defense and the current size of its military, unless it retains the possibility of nuclear first use. I recently published a piece with the National Interest about why retaining the first-use doctrine would be useful for the United States—even if we hope that the United States would never actually introduce nuclear weapons to a crisis. You can read the piece here.

 

 

 

The Credibility Myth

One of the most frequent critiques leveled at President Obama is that he has diminished the United States’ international “credibility.”  For example, former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has argued that Obama’s decision not to bomb Syria after the use of chemical weapons there in 2013 damaged U.S. credibility.  These critics argue that the United States must follow through on its commitments today so that its threats will be credible (and thus effective) tomorrow.

I have a new article published today at War on the Rocks explaining why these arguments about America’s credibility and reputation are misguided.  You can read the article here.

The No-Sacrifice Model of Warfare

If you have been following the blog for the past few months, you will know that I have been thinking a lot about accountability and sacrifice in the context of the United States’ current wars.  Donald Trump recently drew fire for (among other things) comparing the sacrifices that he has made in the last fifteen years to the loss of a young Army Captain killed in Iraq in 2004.  Trump’s comments may have been distasteful, but the truth is that the vast majority of Americans have not sacrificed anything in service of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, either.  I have a new article at the National Interest exploring the implications of this fact for America’s foreign policy and for American democracy available here.

Striking to Fail (Again) in Libya

In the midst of the furor about Donald Trump’s various remarks last week, you may have missed the fact that the United States launched air strikes against Libya starting on August 1. (One of the most unfortunate features of our presidential election cycle is the staggering amount of time and attention that it steals from governing, both in terms of actual policy making and media coverage of the governing that actually does take place in the midst of this electoral circus.) The air strikes will be part of a “sustained operation” to help forces loyal to the (current) Libyan government make a decisive advance on the coastal city of Sirte, which has been the site of fighting between IS and government forces for several weeks.

The United States has launched air strikes against Libya a few times since the 2011 intervention that eliminated Qaddafi and his regime. This is the first time, however, that the strikes are being touted as part of a “sustained operation” there. According to public reports, American special operations forces have been advising fighters on the ground in Libya since December. It is unclear whether they are still there and if so how many, but U.S. ground forces are not openly participating in the battle for Sirte. This also constitutes the first time that the United States has openly chosen to back a side (the Government of National Accord or GNA) in what is effectively a Libyan civil war. There are hundreds of rival militias currently fighting for control of Libya and for the opportunity to be the western-backed force that will defeat IS. Even if a temporary attack on IS in Sirte succeeds (a big “if”), it is not clear how this strategy will help to unify the rest of the country. If this operation succeeds, will the United States then help the GNA to wipe out the various factions that do not recognize its authority?

I have written about U.S. policy in Libya many times, both in my book and on this site. I wish I were surprised that the United States has chosen to go down this path again, given the fact that we created the chaos that we are now trying to contain. IS was able find refuge in Libya because the 2011 NATO intervention eliminated the government and showered munitions on the population without any plan for the aftermath. Obama has recently claimed that this failure to plan for the aftermath in Libya was the “worst mistake” of his presidency.[1] Despite this admission, Obama continues to conduct his foreign policy in a way that makes little strategic sense: he has consistently stated that he wants the United States to withdraw from the Middle East, but he has also launched limited strikes against various targets that can at best temporarily quash one problem while generating three more, with 2011 Libya as the classic example.

This unwillingness to plan for a longer occupation is actually part of the plan, because Obama explicitly wants to avoid committing American ground troops to another endless occupation in the Middle East. And therein lies the fundamental flaw with the so-called “Obama Doctrine”: using force in this relatively cheap, limited manner will not generate stable political outcomes. It can (and most likely will) make the situation worse in ways we cannot foresee right now, but it will not make things better over the long run and it will commit American forces to another conflict at a time when we are incapable of terminating any of our rapidly multiplying international commitments.

Someone who is notably not admitting that the Libya intervention was a colossal mistake is the American perhaps most responsible for orchestrating it: Hillary Clinton. Will the next President have a more sensible strategy for American involvement in the Middle East in general and Libya in particular? I am sorry to say that all the evidence currently points to “no.”

 

[1] I can’t say I disagree, although I would also rank the fruitless troop surge in Afghanistan among the worst of his major policy decisions, and the combination of the dozens of bad decisions embodied in the drone campaign should also rank alongside these major errors.

NATO Deterrence in the Baltics

Donald Trump made headlines earlier this week when he called into question the United States’ obligation to defend its NATO allies in the event of a Russian attack. Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty states that an attack on one member of the alliance would be considered an attack on all and requires the signatories to assist an ally that is the victim of such an attack. [1] Trump was asked about how the United States should respond if Russia attacks one of its Baltic neighbors, and he said that he would decide whether or not to assist the victim based on whether the state has “fulfilled their obligations to us.” Estonia’s president quickly took to Twitter to defend his country’s contributions, noting that Estonia is one of only five NATO countries that meets the goal of spending two percent of GDP on defense.

NATO recently announced its plan to station four battalions in the Baltics starting in early 2017 to deter Russian aggression, including an American battalion in Poland. I have a new piece over at the National Interest explaining why this will not work to deter a determined Russia from moving against one of its Baltic neighbors. You can read it here.

[1] No word on what happens if an ally and/or its population provokes a non-member into attacking it…hopefully we won’t have to see that played out in the near future.

Cheap Threats Has Arrived

cheap_threats_coverIt’s here! My first book, Cheap Threats: Why the United States Struggles to Coerce Weak States is now available for purchase through Georgetown University Press and Amazon. The book focuses on the following puzzle: The United States has the world’s most powerful military and has demonstrated a willingness to use its military power on many occasions (in fact, the book demonstrates that the United States always follows through on its compellent threats[1]). Why, then, would a small, weak state choose not to comply when the United States threatens it with military force to try to convince it to change its behavior? In other words, when the United States says to a weak state, “admit weapons inspectors to your nuclear facilities or we will bomb you,” why would this state choose to resist?

In Cheap Threats, I draw on game theoretic logic about costly signaling to argue that target states resist compellent threats issued by the United States when these threats are cheap to issue and to execute. I demonstrate that the United States has developed a method of war-fighting that limits the costs (human, financial, and political) of employing military force, and thus the threat to employ force is not a convincing signal that the United States is highly motivated to exact compliance from the targeted state. In other words, targets resist in the face of threats that are relatively cheap to execute because the cheapness of the force does not signal that the United States is highly motivated. A target expects that the United States will carry out the threatened action and then give up as the costs of continuing to coerce the target state become too high.

How can I argue that the use of force is cheap for the country with the world’s most expensive defense establishment?  Cheap Threats demonstrates that the United States now has a model of warfare that relies on an all-volunteer military (no politically costly conscripts to send overseas) supplemented by private contractors who rely on advanced technology to attack targets from a distance (precision air power and drones, for example), and that we pay for our wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) with deficit spending. We have effectively insulated the vast majority of the American public from the costs of employing force, and we even shield our own soldiers from many of these costs by opting for “standoff strike” operations like we saw with the 2011 Libya intervention, which was conducted entirely from the skies.[2]

To make the case for my theory, I evaluate an original dataset of compellent threats in all international crises in which the United States was involved from 1945-2007. I also examine in detail four prominent cases in which the United States employed threats to coerce an adversary: the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1991 Gulf War, the 2003 War against Iraq, and the 2011 Libya intervention. The Iraq chapters draw on new caches of documents and recordings seized after the 2003 invasion of Iraq to probe Saddam Hussein’s decision making (spoiler alert: he’s not as crazy as you might have thought!), and the Libya chapter traces the course of the U.S. decision to intervene and Qaddafi’s continued resistance. I also take a look at many competing arguments about threat effectiveness. I find, for example, no support for the argument that states determine whether to comply with threats based on the United States’ reputation for acting in past crises. In other words, the United States does not need to take action simply for the purpose of reinforcing a reputation for toughness.

Need more convincing? Read reviews of the book and see a list of contents here.

 

 

[1] A “compellent threat” involves the use of a threat of military force to convince a targeted state to change its current behavior. A “deterrent threat,” on the other hand, is a threat intended to prevent future behavior (nuclear deterrence would fall into this general category).   Cheap Threats focuses only on compellent threats.

[2] The book explains why the costs that the United States incurs when issuing and executing threats, not those incurred by the target, make a threat effective in changing a target’s behavior.

Evaluating Clinton’s Experience: The 2011 Libya Intervention

The front page of Sunday’s New York Times was dominated by a lengthy article (the first of two) about Hillary Clinton’s role in the 2011 decision to intervene in Libya. “As she once again seeks the White House, campaigning in part on her experience as the nation’s chief diplomat, an examination of the intervention she championed shows her at what was arguably her moment of greatest influence as secretary of state. It is a working portrait rich with evidence of what kind of president she might be.” Indeed, there is no case more important if we want to understand how Clinton would conduct her foreign policy if elected President, aside from her decision to vote in favor of the 2003 Iraq War.

If you haven’t read the piece, I encourage you to do so. It paints a fairly accurate picture of how the United States decided to intervene in Libya: very hastily, without a clear understanding of the conflict on the ground, at the urging of European allies, and with Clinton’s support playing a pivotal role in pushing for the intervention. Robert Gates (then Secretary of Defense) claimed that Clinton’s support tipped the vote “51-49” in favor of the intervention and was a key factor in overcoming President Obama’s hesitation about the operation.

It just so happens that I wrote an entire chapter on the Libya intervention in my new book, Cheap Threats. The Times’ description of the run-up to the intervention is fairly accurate, but it makes some glaring omissions: there was no convincing evidence that the impending massacre of civilians in rebel-held Benghazi, which was used as the pretext for the UN resolution and the launch of the no-fly zone, would have occurred. Political scientist Alan Kuperman wrote an extremely important and convincing article[1] for Foreign Affairs making exactly this argument.  Leaving that issue aside, the intervention was initially sold to the US public as necessary to protect Libyan civilians. But in the aftermath of Qaddafi’s overthrow, we did absolutely nothing to stop the rebel forces from liquidating entire villages of people that had been loyal to Qaddafi’s regime, or to stop the competing factions from seizing and destroying Libyan infrastructure.[2] (It’s not surprising that this gets little attention from the Times given that it and most American media outlets devoted very little coverage to the violence that unfolded on the ground in Libya after Qaddafi’s overthrow—one had to look to European and Middle Eastern news outlets for this information after America’s attention went elsewhere. I await the second installment in the series to see whether these omissions will be rectified.) Even more ridiculous in the context of this “we must save Libyans” crusade is the fact that, around this time in early 2011, Bahrain was actually mowing down protesters in the street, not simply threatening to do so, but we never debated intervening in Bahrain because we have important military bases there. The point is not that we should have sent more force to pacify Libya (or Bahrain)—the point is that we could have and should have foreseen that our interference would destabilize both the country and the surrounding region.

It is clear from the article and from Clinton’s insistence that she wants to put boots on the ground to expand the campaign against IS in Syria, however, that the lesson she took away from the 2011 Libya intervention is not that we should have stayed out of it, but that we should have done more. In the summer of 2011, when rebel forces were gaining the upper hand against Qaddafi, she praised the intervention as a model of “smart power”[3]: “This is exactly the kind of world that I want to see where it’s not just the United States and everybody is standing on the sidelines while we bear the cost, while we bear the sacrifice.”

Except that we didn’t really sacrifice anything to make that intervention happen (other than the stability of North Africa). This is exactly the point I make in my book: the 2011 Libya intervention is a prime example of how the United States has developed a model for the use of military force that relies on precise, standoff strike technologies to minimize the human and political costs of using force—with the result that we have actually undermined our ability to wield force effectively. The Libya intervention was conducted entirely from the air and involved the extensive use of drones. Furthermore, the Obama administration asserted that it did not need Congressional approval for the operation because it was so limited—the lack of boots on the ground meant that it did not “count” as a war and thus it did not need Congressional approval. This is very troubling: once the Executive has asserted a right to a particular power in foreign policy, it is unlikely to be taken away. The next President can point to the Obama administration’s assertions to justify all manner of international action without the need for Congressional oversight.

Reading between the lines of the article, Clinton comes across as anything but “experienced” in this case: she rushed to push intervention in the face of very limited and conflicting intelligence about the situation on the ground in Libya, she allowed herself to be swayed about the coherence of Libya’s opposition by a very small number of men claiming to represent this opposition (recalling how the George W. Bush administration allowed itself to be duped by a single human source who fabricated information about the Iraqi regime in the run-up to war in 2003), and she pushed (despite objections from military officials and members of the State Department) to funnel arms to the fractured Libyan opposition—arms that are now in the hands of al Qaeda and IS and helping to sustain insurgencies across North Africa. Make no mistake: this intervention was a disaster and one whose consequences we will continue to suffer in the coming years—if not the coming decades. It was a disaster not because we didn’t send enough forces to get the job done, but because we never should have gotten involved in the first place.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, then director of policy planning at the State Department, described exactly what type of president Clinton would be: “when the choice is between action and inaction, and you’ve got risks in either direction, which you often do, she’d rather be caught trying.”  How many Iraqs and Libyas are we going to “try” before we learn that regime change is a foolhardy endeavor that inflicts massive suffering on civilian populations (regardless of how precise our weapons are) and unleashes far-reaching consequences over which we have limited control?

 

 

[1] Alan J. Kuperman, “Obama’s Libya Debacle: How a Well-Meaning Intervention Ended in Failure,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2015).

[2] Anne-Marie Slaughter, who was a major proponent of intervention in 2011, admits that “We did not try to protect civilians on Qaddafi’s side,” but the article does not follow up on this reality.

[3] A term totally devoid of meaning, despite its buzzword status around the Beltway.

Special Operations and War on the Cheap

My book Cheap Threats:  Why the United States Struggles to Coerce Weak States is now available for pre-order from Georgetown University Press and Amazon.  In Cheap Threats, I argue that the United States struggles to use threats[1] effectively against weak states (like Iraq, Libya and Haiti) because it has adopted many strategies that render the use of military force relatively cheap.  Because force is cheap, the threat to use force does not convince weak targets of the United States’ compellent threats that the United States is highly motivated.  These targets will resist in the face of a cheap threat–even one issued by the state with the world’s most powerful military–because the cheapness of U.S. military action suggests that the United States lacks the motivation to pursue a long and costly victory against them.  In other words, by making the use of force cheap, we have made threats against weak states less effective.[2] This is a problem because the United States often chooses to launch costly military operations when the threat of force alone is insufficient to change the targeted state’s behavior.

How can I possibly argue that the use of force is cheap for the country that spends nearly as much as the rest of the world combined on defense each year? The first chapter of the book explains in detail the strategies that the United States has adopted to minimize the human, political, and financial costs of employing force—including the use of deficit spending to fund major military operations like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I won’t repeat these arguments here, except to highlight one of the major cost-minimizing strategies that I discuss in the book: the transformation of the American military since the 1970s.

Before 1973, the United States relied on some type of conscription, i.e., compulsory military service, to fight its wars. After the backlash against selective service in the Vietnam War, during which privileged young men were better able to escape the necessity of military service, the United States eliminated conscription and has since relied on an all-volunteer force (AVF). This has led to an increase in education, retention, and professionalization in the service, but the U.S. military is not a representative institution: new recruits are disproportionately drawn from the lower socio-economic classes; the southeastern states tend to be over-represented; minorities are over-represented in the enlisted ranks while whites dominate the officer corps, etc. As a result, the wealthy, educated individuals who are most likely to be members of the decision-making class (members of Congress, scholars at think tanks, i.e., those responsible for making decisions about when and where we fight wars) are insulated from the burdens of military service and increasingly unlikely to have any direct connection to the military themselves. In addition to opting for a volunteer force that shields the vast majority of the American public from the privations and sacrifice of military service, the United States has also relied increasingly on private military contractors to perform functions formerly reserved for the military. The casualties suffered by these individuals are not counted in official figures, which helps to further insulate the general public from the true human toll of America’s military conflicts.

Why does this matter? It matters because strategies that minimize the impact of the use of military force on the American population make it much, much easier for policy-makers to choose to use military force. (Can we imagine that the George W. Bush administration would have been able to sell the war in Iraq if conscription had been in place in 2003?) The AVF makes it much less politically costly to use force, and hence makes it more likely that force will be used. My book demonstrates, however, that such strategies that make the use of force cheaper also undermine our ability to successfully threaten weak states with the use of force.

An op-ed by former Army Captain Matt Gallagher in last Sunday’s New York Times highlights an important and related trend: the growing national obsession with special operations forces (Army Rangers, Delta Force operators, Navy SEALs, etc). “The mythos of Special Operations has seized our nation’s popular imagination, and has proved to be the one prism through which the public will engage with America’s wars…We like our heroes sanitized, perhaps especially in murky times like these.” In the midst of an overall downsizing of the U.S. military, the number of special operations forces continues to rise. Perhaps more importantly, these types of forces conduct their missions in the shadows, with limited Congressional and public oversight of where they are sent (139 countries in 2015, many of these for training missions). Out of sight, out of mind.

As the American public becomes increasingly enchanted with the myth of the commando running secret missions in bad neighborhoods while bathed in the green glow of night vision goggles, it is pushing the United States further down this path of seemingly cheap, low-commitment, sanitized military force. As Cheap Threats argues, however, this will continue to undermine our ability to wield threats of force effectively.

 

 

[1] For example, the United States might threaten a small state with air strikes if it does not admit weapons inspectors.

[2] The theory I advance in the book suggests that threats against more powerful states will be more effective because they are more costly to issue and to execute. See the book for a more thorough explanation.