American hegemony is on the decline and there is very little we can do to stem the historic flow of power from ourselves to a spectrum of old and emerging powers. The BRIC countries are aggressively promoting their agendas on economic, political and military levels. Despite the election of nominally pro-American leaders in Germany and France, Old Europe will not revert to the post-WWII years of acquiescence to our leadership. Finally, several mid-range Third World powers, notably Iran and Venezuela, are using their oil wealth to actively challenge the status quo both near and far from their shores. How we handle the coming decade will decide whether our decline is gradual and stable or tumultuous and ruinous. Regardless of how we choose to address challenges to our hegemony, military intervention, counter terrorism and peace keeping missions will continue to be active components of our foreign policy framework. Based on publically-available information of several recent interventions, TSF believes there is much we can take from these experiences as we craft ways of maintaining some semblance of order in the changing landscape.
First let us consider direct military intervention. Virtually everyone agrees that we are in a serious bind in Iraq. We’re losing a hundred men a month in a war of attrition with no sight of relief. We stumbled into a morass that was totally predicable (as was documented by CIA reports leading up to the war). Immediately after occupying the country, we fired the entire military and police infrastructure and made only rudimentary efforts to build out infrastructure during the critical first year. We so completely destroyed the former Sunni ruling class that our previous allies in the Gulf States and Egypt questioned their ties to us. Then we built up a powerful Shia civil servant class that ultimately answers to Iran just as we began to put pressure on that country to halt its uranium enrichment. Finally, we empowered a Kurdish mini-state that threatened our (former) strategic ally Turkey to the north. Now we are faced with the choice of abandoning Iraq and ceding the country to Iran, with a rudderless Kurdistan perhaps breaking away, or remaining as an occupying force for decades to come.
Despite the grave errors of our intervention in Iraq, we have recently undertaken a successful operation in Somalia that shows how things can be done right. Instead of employing an old-style occupation to uproot the radical Islamists in that country, we brought together the competent Ethiopian army, the nascent democratic government in Baidoa and the warlords. We supplied minimal intelligence, command and control, air cover and special operations support for the effort. Ultimately, the intervention was successful, with no known US casualties, and Somalia is now in the early stages of reintroducing the concept of nationhood to a part of the continent that deeply needed a helping hand. If we were smart, we would be undertaking a massive effort to build infrastructure and institutions in Somalia. We’ll see if it is possible to actually finish a job that started out so well.
Let us now examine our indirect interventions in the form of a complete failure and a possible success. In the months leading up to an attempted coup against Chavez in Venezuela, it was clear that we sought the overthrow of the left-leaning former commando. It does not take a very suspicious mind to assume that we were actively working with the opposition to support the coup. Perhaps we were not involved but the events leading up to the insurrection looked and smelled like the frequent CIA-initiated overthrows from Guatemala to Nicaragua during the Cold War period. When the coup appeared successful, our government ham-handedly gave a tearless farewell to Chavez. Unfortunately for President Bush and his foreign policy team, Chavez miraculously survived and seems to have been imbued with the same survival DNA as old nemesis Castro, who seems to have discovered a mojito-flavored Fountain of Youth in a sugar cane field somewhere on his island. Not surprisingly, a very alive and pissed off Chavez has been a thorn in our side ever since.
Where we failed in Venezuela, we seem to have succeeding in our indirect efforts in Lebanon. The country has been a political basket case since the brutal civil war that ended in 1990 but had done a splendid job of rebuilding its infrastructure and economy on the backs of Gulf State largesse and international debt instruments. Unfortunately, Syria and Iran prevented the country from developing a true nation state by propping up Hezbollah as well as housing thousands of Syrian soldiers and intelligence operatives throughout the country. In the south, Israel’s vacancy after operating it as a colony for years, left a power vacuum that Hezbollah dutifully filed. Following the assassination of Rafik Hariri, we put just enough pressure on the Syrians to pull out. The US-supported effort by the Israelis to crush Hezbollah failed but a reasonably strong international stabilization force now prevents Hezbollah from operating with impunity south of the Litani River. The IDF bombing of Lebanon destroyed much of the infrastructure so painstakingly constructed in the last 15 years. However, the democratic government in Beirut, with the support of the international community, has done a remarkable job of organizing a recovery and building institutions, including a credible military (witness the Lebanese liquidation of Fatah al-Islam in Tripoli). It is obviously too early to declare victory in Lebanon but the nation does appear to be moving in the right direction.
As we move into uncharted waters, we would do well to think through a strategy for our foreign policy. We have some successes and failures under our belts. The consequences of failure to plan a coherent strategy are too immense to ignore.