Thread 5: Desperately Seeking Instability

The first four threads of US foreign policy are less notable for what they are than for what they are not. Getting past a strategic hangover or disengaging from an outdated commitment is a process, not a policy. Dollar diplomacy can exist only because there is a hole where policy normally would be.

The hole isn’t limited to American foreign policy. Since 1946 American foreign policy has determined the shape of the world. When the Americans stop holding up the roof, they will note that the resulting power vacuum is bad, exceedingly bad, for most of the world. But they will also notice that in many cases the chaos works for America.

It’s a shift in mind-set that ongoing structural evolutions will support.

America’s recent wars have shaped what Americans consider to be “normal” military activity. Of late very little of America’s war fighting has involved, well, fighting a war. Instead of clashes with other organized militaries, American forces have alternatively been doing a lot of patrolling and sweeping and hunting and drone warfare. When the goal is to pacify and stabilize large swathes of territory, large numbers of troops are required, and they are subject to high levels of irregular attacks. This is noisy and bloody; the American public notices it, and they don’t like it very much.

As the Iraq and Afghan wars ground on, however, it became obvious to the W and Obama administrations that these places could never be “fixed” as Americans defined the term. Goals narrowed from reconstructing Iraq and Afghanistan in America’s image to setting up local forces that could carry on the fight to setting up a government structure that could survive with minimal American support to simply ensuring that, when the bulk of American forces left the countries, some bases would remain in American hands to insert Special Operations forces and drones as needed.

It’s an issue of numbers and information. At their heights, the Iraq War had 148,000 American troops in theater and the Afghan War had 99,000 (not including contractors or allied forces), out of a total personnel roster (including reservists) of 2.3 million. Patrolling central Iraq requires a dozen major bases in central Iraq and tens of thousands of troops.

In contrast, drone and Special Operations require only a single small footprint that doesn’t even need to be in-country. America’s entire Special Operations forces—even with their tenfold increase in budget during the Global War on Terror—number fewer than seventy thousand. Add that Special Operations by their very nature are less public than conventional military operations, and that drones don’t have families back home, and most Americans are quite comfortable in (or at least resigned to) their ignorance about the way the US now fights.

What America finds ideal, however, the rest of the world finds problematic. The United States has become comfortable with a war-fighting method that exposes few Americans—civilian or military—to risk, but enables US power to reach anywhere in the world on short notice in an often deniable manner. Marry the new techniques to a broadscale and deepening American indifference to global stability, and the results are disruptive, bordering on explosive.

It does not take much of a leap in logic to see the next step here. The United States will begin to view disruption in and of itself as a tool, perhaps even a goal. It sounds dangerous (and there certainly is a risk), and it sounds irresponsible (and by some measures, it is) but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad strategy. Consider the following:

Marry an American strategic, willing disregard for global security to a public that has become more comfortable with low-level, disavowable military activity to a military with global reach to a more mercantile approach to the world, and it is Anakin-falling-to-the-Dark-Side eeeeasy to envision a United States that seeks disruption rather than stability as both a tool and a desired end of foreign policy.