Many of our contemporaries are extraordinarily reluctant to acknowledge the reality of past time and prior events, and stubbornly resistant to all arguments for the possibility or utility of historical knowledge.
—DAVID HACKETT FISCHER, HISTORIANS’ FALLACIES: TOWARD A LOGIC OF HISTORICAL THOUGHT (1970)
THE RAMP of the Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey aircraft dropped. I thanked the crew, yelling above the roar of the spinning tilt rotors, grabbed my two bags, and walked out to meet members of my new Secret Service detail, who, over the next thirteen months, would become like members of our family. The team took me directly to the White House to begin my first day as national security advisor. There had not been much time to prepare for the new job.
It had been a whirlwind twenty-four hours since President Trump announced my appointment in front of the press pool at Mar-a-Lago on President’s Day. Now, I had accompanied him, the First Lady, and the presidential entourage on Air Force One back to Andrews Air Force Base. There, Ospreys positioned on the tarmac flew me back to Fort Eustis, Virginia. Maj. Kevin Kilbride, my aide-de-camp, met me and gave me a ride home. He, my executive officer, Col. Neal Corson, and my enlisted aide, Sfc. Juan Sanchez would help manage my very sudden departure from my job as deputy commander, futures, at the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command. I would return to my home at Fort Eustis only once before I moved with Katie to Washington two months later.
At home, between a torrent of phone calls (mostly from people wishing me luck in the new job), I discussed with Katie and our daughter’s fiancé, Lt. Lee Robinson, the transition to what was certain to be an interesting and challenging tour of duty. Lee, who was serving in the U.S. Army’s Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment, had been driving through Virginia on his way back to Fort Benning, Georgia, and had stopped to spend the night. The next day, after we got back from an early morning workout, he asked me why I was spending more time packing books than clothes.
I explained to him that I intended to draw on history to help frame contemporary challenges to national security. An important first step in developing policy and strategy, I believed, was to understand how the past produced the present. I also believed that the history of how previous presidents, their cabinets, and the National Security Council staff made decisions, developed policies, and crafted strategies held lessons for how to deliver the best advice and sound options to the president. For me, history was an avocation. I spent my spare time writing articles, reviewing books, and serving as a contributing editor to Survival: Global Politics and Strategy. As a general officer, I found that examining the history of a new position helped me ask the right questions and understand better the possibilities and difficulties associated with current challenges. For example, as commander of Fort Benning, I had based our educational reform effort on the changes that then-Lt. Col. George Marshall implemented there after World War I. And the army study I commissioned in 2015 on Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine was modeled on the study that Gen. Donn Starry initiated on the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. For me, history came to life when it was applied to contemporary challenges and circumstances. As a regimental commander preparing our team for Iraq in 2004, I had consulted a wide range of literature on counterinsurgency to identify best practices. In the 1991 Gulf War, our cavalry troop used battle drills (rehearsed responses to a predictable set of circumstances in combat) based on my reading of U.S. major general Ernest Harmon’s and German field marshal Erwin Rommel’s accounts of armored warfare in North Africa in World War II. For military leaders, reading and thinking about history is an integral part of our sacred duty to our nation and our fellow soldiers. Because the stakes in war involve life and death, combat leaders who choose to learn exclusively from personal experience are irresponsible. So, it was not a stretch for me to regard military and diplomatic history as foundational to improving U.S. strategic competence—that is, our ability to integrate elements of national power and the efforts of like-minded partners to advance and protect America’s vital interests.
My soon-to-be son-in-law, Lee, got a longer answer than he had anticipated; it was the price he paid for asking a historian about the value of history. And readers who have stayed with me until this point know that the importance of history to understanding and coping with contemporary challenges is a major thrust of this book.
WALKING INTO the West Wing of the White House should be humbling for any person fortunate enough to serve there, but walking into the office occupied fifty-two years earlier by McGeorge Bundy, one of the principal characters in a book I had written twenty years earlier, was particularly so. In Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam, I seek to explain how and why Vietnam became an American war. As I wrote about the national security decision-making process, I had no idea that I would one day become responsible for that process. Before I walked into that office and met members of the NSC staff, I had in mind four resolutions to improve U.S. strategic competence. All four are based on pitfalls that, during the Johnson administration, contributed to unwise decisions, a fundamentally flawed strategy, and, ultimately, a lost war that took the lives of 58,000 Americans and well over a million Vietnamese, consumed billions of American dollars, and inflicted on the United States one of the greatest political traumas since the Civil War.1
First, our NSC process would deliver options to advance and protect the interests of the American people and overcome national security challenges. The story in Dereliction of Duty is, in large measure, one of abdication of responsibility. President Lyndon Johnson made wartime decisions based primarily on his domestic political agenda: getting elected in his own right in 1964 and passing the Great Society legislation in 1965. Because he viewed Vietnam principally as a danger to those goals, he chose a middle course that he hoped would allow him to avoid difficult decisions. Johnson’s path of least resistance proved unsustainable because it was built largely on lies aimed at the American people and their representatives in Congress. Once Americans realized that they had been misled about the scale and cost of the American military intervention in Southeast Asia, many lost faith in that effort. Now, in our work to develop integrated strategies for our most pressing national security challenges, we would provide the president with options differentiated by their level of risk to American interests and citizens, the resources required, and the prospect of their progressing toward national security and foreign policy goals and objectives. The president would then hear from his cabinet officials, who would recommend their favored course of action and their rationale for that recommendation. The NSC process would not consider the effect of policy decisions on partisan political concerns, the assumption being that successful policies serve all American people. Besides, the presentation of multiple options would give plenty of opportunity for political advisors to offer their assessments and recommendations.
Second, we would spend more time understanding and framing the nature of the problems and challenges we faced, viewing them through the lens of vital U.S. interests and crafting overarching goals and more specific objectives. During the period in which Vietnam became an American war, McGeorge Bundy argued that the objectives in Southeast Asia should be kept ambiguous, to give the president flexibility should the war effort fail.2 The lack of clearly understood objectives, combined with the primacy of domestic political considerations, resulted in a strategy for Vietnam based on what its Washington, DC, purveyors preferred rather than on what the situation in Vietnam demanded. The next steps up the “ladder” of graduated pressure (such as the initiation of covert operations against North Vietnam in early 1964, the beginning of the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign in February 1965, or the deployment of large U.S. combat units to South Vietnam that summer) had all been taken without meaningful discussion of how those decisions fit into an overall strategy designed to achieve a clear and agreed policy goal. To ensure that we did not repeat the Vietnam War mistake of confusing activity with progress, our staff would institute “framing sessions,” which I believed were necessary to foster understanding, before we developed options for the president. These sessions would result in succinct analyses of a particular challenge to national security; the “so what,” or a description of the effect of that challenge on American security, prosperity, and influence; and the recommended goal and objectives. Consistent with Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle’s observation that it is only worth discussing what is in our power, the framing would include an assumption of the degree of influence the United States and others had over that challenge. Only after key members of the president’s cabinet had discussed, modified, and approved the framing would they share ideas and give guidance concerning how to integrate all elements of national power, and the efforts of like-minded partners, toward the agreed objectives.
Third, we would insist on the presentation of multiple options to the president, as a means of providing best advice from across all departments and agencies of government. When it became clear that President Johnson wanted a strategy that allowed him to avoid difficult decisions on Vietnam, McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara delivered “graduated pressure” to placate both those who advocated for resolute military intervention in the war and those opposed to intervention, whom Johnson called “the sob sisters and peace societies.”3 Yet implicit and flawed assumptions that underpinned the strategy went unchallenged. It is important to provide any president with multiple options because, unlike members of the cabinet or NSC staff, the president is elected and should be the person to set the course for U.S. foreign policy and national security strategy. Presenting a single option designed either to tell a president what he or she wants to hear or to present the consensus position of the cabinet is doing him or her a disservice.
Fourth, we would not assume linear progress toward our objectives and would instead acknowledge the degree of agency that others (whether the authoritarian powers Russia and China, transnational threats such as jihadist terrorist organizations, hostile states such as Iran or North Korea, or multiple actors in emerging arenas of competition in cyberspace or space) had over the future course of events. Two war games in 1964 exposed as false the principal assumption underpinning graduated pressure: “By applying limited, graduated military actions, reinforced by political and economic pressures against a nation providing support for an insurgency, we could cause that nation to decide to reduce greatly, or eliminate altogether, its support for the insurgency. The objective of the attacks and pressures is not to destroy the nation’s ability to provide support but rather to affect its calculation of interests.”4 This vintage example of strategic narcissism is striking for its utter disconnection from the ideology and aspirations that drove the North Vietnamese and Vietnamese Communist leaders and for the implicit assumption that the principal cause of insecurity in South Vietnam was external support from the North. The last turn of the war game imagined the situation three years later, in 1968. The United States had more than five hundred thousand troops in Vietnam and no hope for success. Popular opposition to the war was growing. The war games and their eerily prophetic results, however, were ignored. Bundy thought the findings were too harsh. Therefore, to ensure that the president received the best assessments, we would include measures of effectiveness for every approved strategy. Assessments would go to the president periodically or when an event occurred that presented a new hazard or an opportunity. And we would scrutinize the assumptions on which the strategies were based and be prepared to reframe challenges if assumptions were invalidated.
PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE as well as the study of history shaped my approach to my new responsibilities. Experience in Afghanistan and Iraq convinced me that our inconsistent and flawed strategies in those wars did not satisfy the simple definition of strategy taught in the U.S. military’s professional education system: the intelligent identification, use, and coordination of resources (or ways and means) for the successful attainment of a specific objective, or end. But strategy in war extends beyond logic and reason because it has a moral component. I believed that the strategies in ongoing wars had become morally untenable because they did not explain to the American people how the exertions of their sons and daughters would achieve outcomes worthy of the cost in blood and treasure.5 As in Vietnam, the wars of 9/11 suffered initially from a form of strategic narcissism based on the conceit that American military technological prowess obviated the need to think deeply about the nature of the enemy or the political and human complexities of those wars. That conceit was made possible through the neglect of history and, in particular, of continuities in the very nature of war. It is easy to ignore continuities and assume that future wars or future competitions short of war will be fundamentally different from those of the past. I would therefore do my best to encourage the development of options for the wars in South Asia and the Middle East consistent with four fundamental continuities in the nature of war.
First, war is political. In Afghanistan and Iraq and, later, in Syria, war strategies violated the dictum articulated by eighteenth-century philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz that “war should never be thought of as something autonomous, but always as an instrument of policy.”6 Just as there was no simple or purely military solution to the problem of Vietnam, there was no military-only solution for the contemporary wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Instead of learning from the failure to put the strength and legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government and armed forces at the center of that effort, later American leaders viewed Vietnam as a mistake to be avoided.7 They assumed that the consolidation of military gains politically in Afghanistan and Iraq were not an integral part of war. Yet, successful military operations against ISIS in Syria and Iraq are not ends in and of themselves; they are the results of only one instrument of power that must be coordinated with others to achieve and sustain political goals. The lesson to learn from the American experience in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq is to be skeptical of concepts that divorce war or competitions short of war from their enduring political nature, particularly concepts that promise fast, cheap victory through technology.
Second, war is human. People fight today for the same fundamental reasons the Greek historian Thucydides identified nearly 2,500 years ago: fear, honor, and interest. In Vietnam, as predicted, covert raids and tit-for-tat bombing did not convince Ho Chi Minh and the leaders of North Vietnam to desist from supporting the Vietnamese Communist insurgency in the South. Vietnamese Communist leaders were committed to winning even at an extraordinarily high price; they had demonstrated that commitment not only in the Johnson administration’s war games, but also during the First Indochina War against the French. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and the broader war against jihadist terrorists, strategies that simply target enemy leaders or forces do not address the human as well as the political drivers of violence. That is why breaking the cycle of violence, restoring hope, reforming education, and isolating vulnerable populations from jihadist ideology are essential to defeating those who foment hatred to justify violence against innocents. It is also why strategic empathy and, in particular, the effort to understand how emotion and ideology drive and constrain the other is fundamental to improving strategic competence.
Third, war is uncertain. War is uncertain because it is political and human and because it is interactive. Neither the future course of events nor our enemies will conform to announcements of our linear plans, such as declaring a time line for withdrawal of forces years in advance. As Professor Hew Strachan observed, “One sort of war can turn into another.”8 As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq evolved across nearly two decades, the United States was slow to adapt, in part due to a fundamental misunderstanding of war—a failure to grasp that the future course of events depends not only on what one decides to do next, but also on enemy reactions and initiatives that are difficult to predict. The North Vietnamese did not impose limits on themselves and conform to the strategy of graduated pressure, but instead intensified the war effort and exploited American restrictions.9 Under the concept of graduated pressure, the United States selected military actions based on its readily available military capabilities rather than on the effects the application of military force might achieve. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the “light footprint” approach to those wars allowed determined enemies to regain strength and wage sophisticated insurgencies. The lesson is that in war and in competitions short of war, America does not control the future course of events, and strategies must not only be sustained over time, but also adapt continuously to retain the initiative.
Fourth, war is a contest of wills. As Gen. George Marshall observed in his address to the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1939, “In our democracy where the government is truly an agent of the popular will,” foreign policy and military policy are “dependent on public opinion,” and our policies and strategies “will be as good or bad as the public is well informed or poorly informed regarding the factors that bear on the subject.”10 With Vietnam, as Americans watched their first televised war, they realized not only that they had been misled, but that their government had not developed a strategy to achieve a desired outcome at an acceptable cost. With Afghanistan and Iraq, the determination to avoid another Vietnam encouraged not only the light footprint approach, but also a short-term mentality and early declarations of “mission accomplished” in both wars. The unexpected length and difficulty of those wars sapped American will, as did inconsistent strategies based on flawed assumptions that ran counter to war’s political, human, and interactive nature. Moreover, U.S. leaders did not devote sufficient effort to explaining what was at stake in those wars, or how the sacrifices of Americans’ fellow citizens were contributing to a worthy outcome. The lack of wartime leadership encouraged narcissism among the public, who understood neither their enemies nor the experiences of their sons and daughters engaged with those enemies. War reporting focused on casualties or troop levels while portraying soldiers as victims who had no authorship over their fate. It is thus that the post-9/11 “endless wars” became conflated with the trauma of Vietnam and began to drain America’s will.
WHAT SOME have called the “Vietnam syndrome” (a belief that the United States should simply avoid military intervention abroad) was the most prominent and immediate manifestation of the widely held interpretation that that war was unjustified and unwinnable. The mantra of “no more Vietnams” often muted discussion of what might be learned from that experience. The analogy to Vietnam was applied indiscriminately as well as superficially. Across the three decades following the 1973 Paris Peace Accords that ended American involvement in the war, assertions that any use of force abroad would lead to “another Vietnam” appeared in connection with military operations in Latin America, the Horn of Africa, the Balkans, Southwest Asia, and Central Asia. President George H. W. Bush declared after the First Gulf War that America had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”11 But under the guise of ending endless wars, the Vietnam analogy became conflated with Afghanistan and Iraq analogies to produce something like the Vietnam syndrome on steroids.
Simplistic interpretations of the American experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq obscure the differences in the character of those conflicts. Some interpretations point to American pursuit of “armed domination” or an effort to remake the world in America’s image. These interpretations overlook the fact that the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan after the most devastating terrorist attack in history. And while the majority of Americans might now argue that the invasion of Iraq was unwise—or, that at least it was unwise to think regime change in Baghdad would be easy—the arguments for retrenchment do not acknowledge the consequences of America’s precipitate disengagement from Iraq in 2011 as giving rise to ISIS, or the U.S. halting withdrawal from Syria in 2019 as setting conditions for an intensification of that multiparty conflict and complicating efforts to bring about ISIS’s enduring defeat. We should be aware that simplistic interpretations of the American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq cloud understanding and can be used to justify flawed policies and bad decisions. Just as the memory of America’s divisive military intervention in Vietnam, and the strong emotions that tainted many early interpretations of that war, clouded understanding and left plenty of room for manipulating the historical record, America’s understanding of more recent experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq has become more symbolic than historical; as with the Vietnam syndrome, the wars of 9/11 are used to evoke emotion rather than promote understanding.
Many who are deeply skeptical of U.S. military engagement abroad self-identify as part of a realist school of international relations. But realist is the wrong word. They get the world wrong because they start from an ideologically driven approach to U.S. engagement with the world. They are against any form of military intervention abroad and for the withdrawal of U.S. forces not only from the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, but also from the preponderance of other military commitments overseas. Rather than viewing the Vietnam syndrome and the overconfidence in American military technology of the 1990s as setting the United States up for the difficulties experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq, many who adhere to this school of thought argue that America’s conceit is to pursue “liberal hegemony,” an effort to turn as many countries as possible into liberal democracies. One of the school’s proponents, Professor John Mearsheimer, alleges that America’s “crusader mentality” drives a misguided, costly, and self-defeating foreign policy designed to “remake the world in its own image.”12 The realist school has found common cause with those who adhere to the New Left interpretation of history, which became more influential in academia during and after the Vietnam War. The realists and the New Left have been bolstered by a large influx of cash from billionaires George Soros and Charles Koch, who share little common ground politically except their advocacy for American retrenchment. The two pumped millions of dollars into new think tanks such as the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and funded programs within existing think tanks such as the Atlantic Council and RAND.13 The cash and appeal to emotion gained traction despite what Professor Paul Miller described as an effort to set up and then knock down a straw man of liberal hegemony with “historically myopic, morally stunted, and strategically incoherent” arguments.14
Because adherents to realism and the New Left both believe that the United States is the principal cause of the world’s problems, they argue that if the United States withdrew from competitions overseas, we would be safer. Their bywords are restraint and offshore balancing, which are meant to communicate a reduced emphasis on U.S. alliances and a diminished military posture overseas. But their views make them paragons of strategic narcissism due to their tendency to disregard the agency that the “other” has over the future course of events. In their view, the United States causes others to act; our presence abroad creates enemies; our absence abroad would restore harmony. Other states, according to this orthodoxy, only react to the United States and have no aspirations or objectives of their own. The United States, therefore, is to blame for antagonizing Russia and China, the former through the expansion of NATO and the latter through an excessive U.S. military presence in the Indo-Pacific. America, they believe, is to blame for jihadist terrorism because the offense of Americans’ presence in Muslim holy lands generated a natural backlash against us infidels. The United States is the cause of nuclear proliferation, they feel, because states like Iran and North Korea need those weapons to defend against an overly aggressive United States; a U.S. policy of conciliation with both countries would transform those states into responsible actors and even convince their leaders that they no longer need to brutally repress their own people.15
These twenty-first-century realists and fellow travelers of the New Left believe that American retrenchment would not only make the world safer, but also save money that could be applied to domestic needs. But as the history of the challenges in this book makes clear, American behavior did not cause Russian and Chinese aggression, jihadist terrorism, or the hostility of Iran and North Korea. Nor would disengagement make any of those challenges easier to overcome. America would have paid a much cheaper price for maintaining a military presence on the Korean Peninsula in 1950 than the cost of the Korean War, just as sustained engagement in Iraq beyond 2011 would have cost far less than the post-2014 campaign to liberate Iraqi and Syrian territory from ISIS. It is also much cheaper to deter Russia in Europe through U.S. presence today than to restore security after aggression tomorrow. And it is easier to ensure freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea and elsewhere now than to fight to restore them later.
The “realist” argument for retrenchment appeals to those deeply skeptical about efforts to promote democracy—skepticism due in part to excessive hope. The promise of the 1990s was that the world was progressing inexorably toward liberal-democratic governments and a globally harmonious system of states. Globalization would lead to the convergence of states as democratization advanced. That optimistic worldview was unsustainable. When it failed, it gave way to retrenchment and resignation. Much of the unrealistic optimism about the arc of history stemmed from the assumptions some made after the collapse of Communist authoritarian governments in 1989 that the regime changes in eastern Europe were replicable in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Yet, this thinking did not give due consideration to local context or, in particular, to political, social, cultural, and religious dynamics that complicate majority rule, the protection of minority rights, and the rule of law. It is clear that the United States can influence, but cannot determine, the evolution of the world order in favor of free and open societies. As nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill observed, “[T]he virtues needed for maintaining freedom must be cultivated by the people themselves.”16 It is also true, however—as protests in 2019 and 2020 in Hong Kong, Moscow, Tehran, Baghdad, Khartoum, Caracas, and Beirut attest—that people want a say in how they are governed.
The existence of free and open societies abroad benefits security because such societies are natural defenses against hostile, aggressive, authoritarian powers. As argued in this book, support for democracy and the rule of law is the best means of promoting peace and competing with those who promote authoritarian, closed systems. The United States and other nations should also continue to promote basic and unalienable rights as captured in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights approved by the UN General Assembly in Paris on December 10, 1948, while recognizing that America and its allies cannot be the guarantor of those rights. And those who self-identify as realists are right to be skeptical about the ability of international organizations to promote peace, justice, and prosperity across the globe. Because authoritarian and hostile regimes do their best to co-opt organizations like the United Nations, strong nations governed under the principle of popular sovereignty are the best advocates for the oppressed. As stated in the 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States, it is possible to recognize that a “world that supports American interests and reflects our values makes America more secure and prosperous” and to affirm “America’s commitment to liberty, democracy, and the rule of law” while also acknowledging “that the American way of life cannot be imposed upon others, nor is it the inevitable culmination of progress.”17
IT IS my hope that this book contributes to improving U.S. strategic competence through enabling a better understanding both of the history of how crucial challenges to national security developed and of the ideology, emotions, and aspirations that drive the other. But to preserve our competitive advantages, Americans need to focus inwardly as well as outwardly. For example, the best means to counter Putin’s playbook is to strengthen our democratic institutions and processes and restore faith in our democratic principles and free-market economies. To improve our strategic competence, we need to develop leaders who can think in time and who understand what it takes to implement ideas and strategies on the ground. It is vitally important to understand the local realities and know the actual people. Competitions are ultimately about human behavior. And although countering the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign of co-option, coercion, and concealment is important, an exclusively defensive stance would not only consign America to second place in critical competitions, but also play into the CCP’s narrative that the United States is trying to keep China down. Although investments in research and development, military capabilities, and infrastructure are vital, improvement in education may be the most important initiative to ensuring that future generations are able to innovate and create opportunities for their children and grandchildren.
Prevailing on today’s battlegrounds requires an unprecedented degree of cooperation among government, academia, and the private sector. To attempt to direct that cooperation would cut against America’s democratic and decentralized nature. Understanding today’s competitions, however, and especially what is at stake in them, can serve as a basis for joint action to counter hostile behavior such as cyber-enabled information warfare and to work together to maintain competitive advantages in technology and in the emerging data-driven economy. Encouraging public service and creating easier ways to move into and out of public service should be a top priority. Because new arenas of competition transcend the limits of geography and reach into society and industry, it is important for every citizen to understand the nature of those competitions. Cooperative efforts are essential both to defend freedom and to work on interconnected problem sets, such as those associated with climate, the environment, energy, and food and water security. The threats from Russia’s cyber-enabled information warfare, China’s industrial espionage and influence campaigns, jihadist terrorist efforts to direct or inspire attacks on our homeland, Iran’s offensive cyber capability, and North Korea’s missiles reach across borders and attempt to exploit vulnerabilities across all segments of society. That is why government-only efforts to defend the free world are passé.
To compete more effectively in war and in competitions short of war, the United States and other free nations should invest in strategic competence. Educating the public about the battlegrounds of today and tomorrow is an especially important task. A reinvigoration of history in higher-level education is particularly important, as many courses in diplomatic and military history have been displaced by theory-based international relations courses, which tend to mask the complex causality of events and obscure the cultural, psychological, social, and economic elements that distinguish cases from one another. Some theories risk sapping students of strategic empathy and encouraging them to reduce complex problem sets into frameworks that create only the illusion of understanding. A growing interest in applied history in some universities is a promising development.
But many universities do not teach military and diplomatic history, or they teach it only in relation to social history. After the Vietnam War, many gave in to the antiwar movement’s tendency to confuse the study of war with militarism. Thinking clearly about problems of diplomacy, national security, and defense, however, is both a necessity and the best way to prevent war. The analogy drawn by the late historian Dennis Showalter is apt: no one would ever accuse an oncologist of being an advocate for the disease he or she studies.
The Foreign Policy Research Institute defines geopolitics as “an approach to contemporary international affairs that is anchored in the study of history, geography and culture.” With the new arenas of competition discussed in chapter 13, technology might be added to that definition—to educate future leaders about how to maximize the potential and minimize the danger of emerging technologies, in the context of geopolitical competitors.18
Contemporary challenges to security demand a concerted effort to deter conflict. There are two fundamental ways to deter conflict. First, by the threat of punitive action that would inflict pain that exceeds the attacker’s anticipated gains. This form of deterrence requires leaders to convince the potential enemy that the target of his contemplated aggression possesses both the will and the capability to retaliate. It also requires the ability to hold at risk something of value to the potential aggressor. Iran was able to escalate its forty-year proxy war with the United States on its own terms because its leaders were conditioned to assume that Washington would not retaliate directly against Iran in response to proxy attacks on U.S. people and facilities in the Middle East. That is why both the strike that killed Qasem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and the economic sanctions imposed in response to continued Iranian aggression were aimed, in part, at restoring deterrence of Iran. But deterrence by the threat of punitive action later is often unsuccessful.
For ideological regimes or adversaries that do not possess valuable assets that the United States can hold at risk, a second form of deterrence is more appropriate. “Deterrence by denial” is based on the ability to convince adversaries that they cannot accomplish their objectives through the use of force or other forms of aggression. Applied to Putin’s playbook, deterrence by denial would entail closing fissures in our societies and restoring confidence in democratic principles, institutions, and processes. Deterrence by denial in cyberspace entails requiring resilient systems and an effective, layered, active defense of critical networks and infrastructure. Deterring potential military offensives, such as a Russian invasion of Baltic states or a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, requires convincing the would-be aggressors that defenses are strong enough to prevent their success.19
America’s allies on the Eurasian landmass and across the islands of the Indo-Pacific region are invaluable not only to deterring aggression, but also to engaging in critical competitions short of conflict.20 Strengthening ally defenses and augmenting them with American defense capabilities reduces burdens on the United States while bolstering allies’ security. But our allies provide us with competitive advantages that extend beyond deterring potential aggression. From a geopolitical perspective, allies on the “rimland” of the Eurasian landmass pose dilemmas for Russia and China and have the greatest potential to prevent what would be devastating wars. Alliances are also tools for accumulating greater moral as well as military capability than the United States has on its own. Allies magnify America’s voice and make it more difficult for countries to infringe on the sovereignty of their neighbors or their own citizens. And when facing forms of economic aggression, such as Russia’s use of energy for coercion or China’s effort to coopt nations and companies, allies can reach out to like-minded partners and help convince them not to compromise principles or their security for the lure of short-term profits or a great discount on 5G communications infrastructure. The Trump administration was right to demand a higher degree of burden sharing by allies and reform within NATO to cope with twenty-first-century threats, but expressions of doubt about the value of allies when Russia and China are doing their best to break alliances apart are counterproductive. Allies, along with knowledge of history and technology and collaboration across the military, government, industry, and academia, bolster our strategic competence.
STILL, THE ability to compete effectively requires confidence as well as competence. A general understanding of America’s role in the world is important because war and competitions short of war (such as defeating RNGW or the CCP’s sophisticated strategy of co-option, coercion, and concealment) are, fundamentally, contests of will. Over-optimism and retrenchment both stem from strategic narcissism and, in particular, the failure to acknowledge the degree of agency and control that the “other” has over the course of events. I had hoped, as we developed a National Security Strategy and integrated strategies for our most pressing challenges, to help the president develop a pragmatic approach based on neither over-optimism nor resignation. And because American influence depends, in large measure, on the confidence others have in our ability to execute an effective, long-term foreign policy, our team worked to develop options that were sound and sustainable such that they could garner support from the American people.
Partisan vitriol among America’s political leadership gives friends and foes alike the impression that the United States is incapable of competing effectively based on a bipartisan foreign policy. As the late professor and philosopher Richard Rorty observed, “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.” If we lack national pride, how can we possess the confidence necessary to fight effectively in war or implement a competitive foreign policy? In the United States, civics education might try to reverse the shift toward micro-identities and the focus on victimhood to foster what political scientist Francis Fukuyama describes as “broader and more integrative identities.”21 Every time Americans talk or tweet about issues that divide them, they might devote at least equal time to what unites them—especially our commitment to the fundamental individual liberties contained in our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights. The academy’s role in restoring our confidence and national pride may include a review of history, literature, and philosophy curricula to ensure that they contain not only self-criticism and a broad range of cultural perspectives, but also an acknowledgment of the nobility and accomplishments of our great unfinished American experiment in democracy and liberty. There is important work to do in primary and secondary education to rekindle in our youth an understanding of our history, including not only the contradictions and imperfections in our experiment, but also the virtues and great promise of America. Our teachers should not overlook blights on our history—the profound failures in the forcible subjugation of Native Americans, in slavery, in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, in institutionalized racism, in inequality for women, or in the mistreatment of other minorities—but they might place those stories in context. They might offer a progressive narrative that illuminates the advantages and resiliency of an American Constitution that placed sovereignty in the hands of the people and extended equal rights to previously excluded communities consistent with the nation’s founding principles.22 Besides education, public service is another means of strengthening strategic confidence and national pride. Working to eliminate opportunity inequality through educational and economic reforms is integral to the fight to defend the free world, as confidence in our democracies and free-market economies is essential to maintaining our will to compete.23
Immigrants have been and remain one of America’s greatest competitive advantages. Oppressed peoples who come to the United States, a self-selecting group, have the intrepidity to start a new life and are appreciative of the freedom and opportunity in America. A way to help overcome fractures in our society would be to talk less about who we do not want to come to America and more about whom America needs. Those who believe in our Constitution, the rule of law, and the opportunity to work hard to create a better life should be welcomed into our liberal-democratic culture.
An effort to restore confidence must extend to other free and open societies. Gains made in representative government and economic reform in the Western Hemisphere should not be taken for granted. And because Europe is particularly important to U.S. security, supporting its effort to overcome its struggle with identity politics and with Russia’s attempt to sow dissention within and among European nations should remain a top priority for U.S. diplomats.
I WROTE this book on the eleventh floor of the Hoover Tower at the center of the Stanford University campus. Herbert Hoover founded the institution that bears his name a century ago after witnessing the horrors of the Great War. Hoover, an orphan who graduated from Stanford University’s inaugural class and who would later become America’s thirty-first president, led a massive relief effort at the end of World War I in Belgium that was credited with saving more than ten million people from starvation.24 It was there that he bore witness to the horrors of war and resolved to do all he could to help prevent another one. The experience of World War I, a conflict that took the lives of more than sixteen million people, highlighted the need to understand the political and historical basis for violent conflict as critical to preserving peace and ending wars. Hoover founded the Hoover War Collection, later named the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, as a place where scholars might study past wars to prevent future conflicts. As we know, however, the “war that was to end all wars” was instead the first of two world wars that marked the bloodiest century in modern world history. The tower that contains the vast Hoover Library and Archives, a collection meant to provide scholars with materials that might help explain the origins of wars and uncover prospects for peace, was completed in 1941, the year the United States entered World War II. It is in the spirit of that archive that I wrote this book, in an effort to use the study of the past to illuminate the present as the best way of influencing the future.
As historian Zachary Shore observed, “the greatest source of national strength is an educated populace.”25 It is my hope that this book will make a small contribution to the strength of our nation and other nations of the free world. Writing it was a continuation of my own education. I will judge it to have been worthwhile if it inspires vibrant, thoughtful, and respectful discussion of how we can best defend the free world and preserve a future of peace and opportunity for generations to come.