The Soviet Union and the risk of mutual civilizational destruction assured by the existence of tens of thousands of nuclear warheads made the Cold War more than the usual existential battle for survival; it was one that focused minds. For a country as physically large, economically diverse and ethnically varied as the United States, such a unifying and motivating factor played no small role in guiding and enforcing policy.
It’s an issue of time constraints. The United States has a presidential system in which all the cabinet secretaries serve at the president’s pleasure and can be dismissed at any time for any reason. In addition, while Congress can vet would-be cabinet secretaries, the only way it can dismiss them is via the impeachment-and-conviction process, which is so laborious that that particular power has never been used successfully. This effectively concentrates all power over strategic and foreign policies into the hands of a single person: the president. And the president has a lot of things on his plate at any given time.*
When the Cold War ended, the nuclear boulder hanging over the American foreign policy and security and intelligence institutions dissolved—and took with it that unifying focus. During the Cold War, American global primacy was a requirement to fight the Soviets. Without the Soviets, simply maintaining American global primacy has become the de facto goal of US strategic policy.
Having power for the sake of having power is sustainable neither strategically nor politically. At the point of the spear, it isn’t clear who the spear should be pointing at, so it tends to point itself at anything and everything that might theoretically become a problem. Issues as diverse as the Fulda Gap, the Taiwan Strait, al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, South African Apartheid, the Rwandan Genocide, the Mexican drug cartels, the Yemen War, the Haiti refugee crisis, the independence of Kosovo, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Central American migrants, and Venezuelan oil subsidies to London all end up in the same bucket. The American people understandably don’t understand why America’s national-security institutions want to hit everything with a hammer, nor is funding for that sort of scattershot strategic policy as easy a sell as preventing Soviet-initiated nuclear annihilation.
It isn’t that America’s military and intelligence professionals are obstinate or inflexible but that they’re bereft of leadership. Seven decades is a long time to do the same thing. Plenty of time to develop expectations that your current courses of action are the norm—the right, the good. Without a unifying strategic vision appropriate for the global environment, the entire American security bureaucracy relies upon firm guidance from the very busy man at the top, and if that is lacking, policy becomes driven by what the United States can do rather than what the United States needs to do. Worse, the actions required to counter many of the new threats inadvertently bolster others. Without a clear, defining goal, success in one part of American policy ensures that other aspects will fail.
At the other end of the spear, without a grand strategy things get . . . muddy. It’s easy to motivate both sides of the political aisle as well as the broader population when the issue is clear. “Contain and beat back the Soviets so we don’t all die in an atomic holocaust” is about as clear as it gets. But when that threat ended and no new vision replaced it, Americans bit by bit became less interested in an increasingly amorphous world. The recent political orphaning of America’s national-security conservatives removes the sliver of the population from the American political system that even thinks about these things.*
The disintegration of purpose isn’t something limited to America. It has percolated out to the Americans’ alliance structure as well. Everyone allied with the United States during the Cold War understood who the bad guy was and what was at stake, and if anyone wavered, the American president, ambassadorial core, and intelligence and military officials were not shy about reminding people.
After the Cold War, however, the allies are confused because Americans are confused. Is it American foreign policy to oppose terrorism or to oppose Iran? Because the countries that do the most to generate transnational Islamic terrorism are the countries that do the most to oppose Iran.* Is it America’s goal to pursue human rights or expand trade? Because many of the countries who most excel at dehumanizing humans are among the most lucrative trading partners.*
Without an overarching goal, America’s priorities change not year by year, but often hour by hour, with diplomatic, military, and intelligence efforts often working at cross-purposes. Even if allies tried to please the Americans in all things, in doing so they would automatically find themselves inadvertently opposing some aspect of American foreign policy because American foreign policy is now inconsistent.
However, the allies don’t always try to do what the Americans want:
Both within and beyond the United States, this policy schizophrenia is simultaneously maddening and entirely understandable.
Consider Russia:
During the Cold War, the Soviets’ fielding of new intermediate-range weapons would generate a direct and harsh American counteraction at the highest level, which would immediately trigger a direct and harsh counteraction that would make the Godfather blush. A command from the American president would quickly fan out through the American bureaucracy to slam American influence into points of contact throughout the world. The Soviets would quickly discover that their one violation would have consequences in Iceland, Britain, Denmark, Germany, Turkey, Pakistan, Japan, in grain markets, in oil markets, and so on.
Lately, however, the United States—under three different presidents—has done . . . nothing. Washington largely stood aside when the Germans went out of their way to establish new energy links to Russian natural gas fields—along routes specifically designed to cut out countries like Ukraine (whose independence is central to keeping the Russians unanchored) and Poland and Slovakia (which are NATO allies). France even (almost) sold the Russians amphibious assault ships that really could have had no use except against NATO allies in the Baltic Sea littoral. These are not the sort of actions allies take. They certainly are not the sort of actions allies put up with.
If the goal is to constrain Russia, the United States is left with the worst of all worlds. Halfhearted actions to counter Russia not only were insufficient, but their poor execution split what’s left of the alliance while also encouraging Russia to be more aggressive in dismantling the institutions that hold the West together and constrain Russian actions.
It isn’t so much that the Americans will get this all sorted out in time, but instead that sliding away from the Order means first and foremost the Americans’ sliding away from the burdens of European security. By commission or omission, that means the end of NATO as a functional alliance. The question becomes whether any of the Americans’ relationships with any of their Order-era allies in any region can segue into something that can outlive the Order:
In all three theaters, the seeds are being sown for much bigger competitions with much more formidable rivals two or more decades from now. In all three regions, American unconcern now leads to the broad-scale abandonment of the sorts of allies that could nip those competitions in the bud. America’s inability to voice what it wants from the world is condemning it to a series of future conflicts that are both eminently preventable and wouldn’t have to be fought alone.