A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
—SAUL BELLOW
ON FRIDAY, February 17, 2017, I was in my hometown of Philadelphia on the way to the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a think tank. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the findings of a study I had commissioned on Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine in 2014. As the lieutenant general director of the clunkily named Army Capabilities Integration Center, my job was to design the future army. To fulfill that responsibility, I sought to understand how Russia was combining conventional and unconventional military capabilities along with cyber attacks and information warfare—what we were calling Russia new-generation warfare (RNGW). The study recommended how to improve the future army’s ability to deter and, if necessary, defeat any forces that employed similar capabilities against the United States or our allies. We modeled the effort on General Donn Starry’s study of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Starry’s findings helped drive a renaissance in the post–Vietnam War army based on changes in fighting doctrine, training, and leader development. It was clear to me that Russia, China, and other nations had studied the U.S. Army after the lopsided U.S. victory over Saddam Hussein’s armed forces in the 1991 Gulf War and the initially successful U.S. military campaigns during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As a trained historian as well as a soldier, I believed that the old saying “The military is always prepared to fight the last war” was wrong. Militaries that encountered the greatest difficulties at the onset of war studied their recent past only superficially.1 Learning from history, I believed, was essential if the U.S. military were to maintain its competitive advantages over potential enemies.
I intended to begin the discussion at the institute with a description of how RNGW combined disinformation, denial, and disruptive technologies for psychological as well as physical effect. Russian president Vladimir Putin and his generals wanted to accomplish their objectives below the threshold of what might elicit a military response from the United States and countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). RNGW seemed to be working, and we were likely, I thought, to see more of it. The stakes were high. Russian aggression in the last decade had taken many forms, from cyber attacks to political subversion to assassination and the use of military power such as the invasion of Georgia in 2008. Russia had changed the borders of Europe by force for the first time since the end of World War II. It seemed likely that Putin, emboldened by perceived success, would become even more aggressive in the future.
It was warm for February. I was enjoying the walk down Walnut Street when my phone rang, displaying a partially blocked Washington, DC–based number. It was Katie Walsh, the White House deputy chief of staff. She asked if I could travel to Florida that weekend to interview with President Trump for the position of assistant to the president for national security affairs. I said yes and called my wife, also named Katie, as I walked the last block. Katie was used to phone calls that suddenly changed our lives. This was one of them.
I had scheduled a premeeting with the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Trudy Rubin. Trudy was always ahead of other analysts in her understanding of the complex problem set in the Middle East. I benefited from our conversations about the region. She predicted many of the difficulties that the United States encountered in the second Iraq War and characterized our unpreparedness for those challenges as “willful blindness.”2 We both agreed that while many often debated whether the United States should have invaded Iraq, the better question was who thought it would be easy and why. Trudy was about to return to Syria to report on the humanitarian catastrophe associated with the Syrian Civil War and the rise of the terrorist group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. The most difficult part of that campaign, we agreed, would be how to get to a sustainable political outcome in Syria and Iraq that led to the enduring defeat of ISIS and an end to the humanitarian catastrophe across the Middle East. I told her in confidence about the unexpected phone call I had just received. She replied that she hoped I would be selected. Trudy was not a supporter of President Donald Trump, but he was the elected president, and there was work to be done. She and I both felt that, in recent years, the balance of power and persuasion had shifted against the United States and other free and open societies. Much of that shift, we believed, had been self-inflicted due to failures to understand fully the emerging challenges to American security, prosperity, and influence.
Service in our army gave me the opportunity to work alongside dedicated and courageous men and women in our armed forces, intelligence agencies, and diplomatic corps to implement the policies and strategies that came from Washington, DC. I would soon enter my thirty-fourth year of service as an officer, and I was considering retirement. I felt privileged to have served, especially in command positions. I had spent nearly half my career overseas and over five years in combat. I would look back fondly on the tremendous, intangible rewards of service, especially being a part of endeavors much larger than myself and being a member of teams that took on the quality of a family, in which the man or woman next to you was willing to give everything, even their own life, for you. I was reluctant to retire because I felt a sense of duty to my fellow servicemen and women, many of whom were still serving in battlegrounds overseas.
Service in combat was rewarding, but the experience was also difficult and sometimes frustrating. It was difficult because one bears witness to the horror of war and the sacrifices of young men and women who fight courageously and selflessly for our nation and for one another. It was frustrating because of the wide gap between the assumptions on which some policies and strategies were based and the reality of situations on the ground in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Serving as national security advisor might give me an opportunity to help a new, clearly unconventional president challenge assumptions and close gaps between reality overseas and fantasy in Washington. Trudy knew that I was apolitical; in the tradition of Gen. George C. Marshall (the architect of victory in World War II), I had never even voted. If selected, I would do my duty under President Trump as I had under five other presidents.
I BELIEVED we were at the end of the beginning of a new era. At the end of the last era, the United States and other free and open societies had reason to be confident. The Cold War ended in victory over Communist totalitarianism. The Soviet Union collapsed. Then, during the 1991 Gulf War, America put together a broad international coalition and demonstrated tremendous military prowess to defeat Saddam Hussein’s army and free Kuwait. But after the end of the Cold War, America and other free and open societies forgot that they had to compete to keep their freedom, security, and prosperity. The United States and other free nations were confident—overconfident. Overconfidence led to complacency. I bore witness to that growing confidence.
In November 1989, our cavalry regiment was on patrol near Coburg, West Germany, the town where Martin Luther translated the Bible into German in the sixteenth century. As a captain in the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment, I saw the need to compete as obvious. Our regiment patrolled a stretch of the Iron Curtain that divided democracies and dictatorships in Europe.3 It was really an iron complex, one designed to keep the subjugated peoples in and freedom out. Fortifications began well east of the actual border between the two German states—with a ten-foot-tall, steel-reinforced fence covered in electric trip wires. Then there was a road. East German border guards drove their jeeps along that road, monitoring the soil next to it for footprints. A steep ditch prevented would-be escape vehicles from plowing through. Beyond the ditch stood two more fencerows, separated by a one-hundred-foot-wide minefield. Those who made it past the mines then had to cross a three-hundred-foot-wide no-man’s-land. Some of our sergeants had seen East German guards shoot unarmed civilians there. It was a formidable system. But it was artificial. And then, on November 9, 1989, it collapsed. A confused East German Politburo member announced that East Germans could use all border crossings to “permanently exit” the nation. With people gathering at the gates near Coburg, guards stepped aside and threw the gates open. Hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of East Germans flooded across. Scouts from Eagle Troop, on patrol that day, received countless hugs, bouquets of flowers, and bottles of wine. There were tears of joy. Meanwhile, Berliners were celebrating as they chiseled away at the wall that had divided them since 1961. The wall fell. The East German government withered away. The Soviet Union broke apart. We had won the Cold War.
But then came a hot war far away from the Iron Curtain. In 1989, Saddam Hussein’s first decade as Iraq’s dictator was coming to a close. He should have been fatigued. In 1980 he had started a disastrous eight-year war with Iran that killed more than 600,000 people. Since seizing power in 1979, he had employed a Stalinist model of repression, murdering more than another million of his own people in a country of 22 million, including an estimated 180,000 Kurds in a genocidal campaign in which he used poison gas to massacre entire villages of innocent men, women, and children. But in 1990, Saddam felt more underappreciated than fatigued. Had he not defended the Sunni Muslim and Arab world against the scourge of Iran’s Shia Islamist revolution? Did not Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states owe him a debt of gratitude—and cash to cover the cost of that war?
Saddam’s tanks rumbled toward Iraq’s southern border in July 1990, and on August 2, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq was in London when the first of more than three hundred thousand Iraqi troops poured into Kuwait to make that small but wealthy nation Saddam’s nineteenth province. President George H. W. Bush and his team got a coalition of thirty-five nations to agree that the annexation “would not stand.”
Those same troopers who were patrolling the East-West German border in November 1989 arrived in Saudi Arabia almost exactly one year after they watched the Iron Curtain part. Three months later, Eagle Troop was leading the so-called left hook, a massive envelopment attack, to crush Saddam’s Republican Guard and kick the door open to Kuwait with a blow from the western desert.
As our troop moved out on February 26, heavy morning fog dissipated. It was replaced by high winds and blowing sand. Visibility was limited. Our scout helicopters were grounded. It was just after 4 p.m. We moved in formation. One scout platoon, Lt. Mike Petschek’s First Platoon, led with six Bradley armored fighting vehicles, which carry a scout squad and were armed with a 25 mm chain gun and a TOW antitank missile launcher. The other scout platoon, Lt. Tim Gauthier’s Third Platoon, moved along our southern flank. Our tanks moved behind the lead scouts in a nine-tank wedge, with my tank in the center. Lt. Mike Hamilton’s Second Platoon was to my tank’s left and Lt. Jeff DeStefano’s Fourth Platoon was to my tank’s right. Our 132 troopers were well trained and confident, in their equipment and in one another—men bound together by mutual trust, respect, affection. As a twenty-eight-year-old captain, I was proud to command that extraordinary team.
The troop was not very high-tech by twenty-first-century standards. We had three of these new devices called Global Positioning Systems, or GPS. But given that they worked only sporadically, we navigated mainly by dead reckoning in the flat, featureless desert. Because the troop had no maps, leaders did not know that they were paralleling a road that ran through a small abandoned village and then into Kuwait. We also did not know that we were entering an old Iraqi training ground recently reoccupied by a Republican Guard brigade and an armored division. Their mission was to halt our advance.
The Iraqi brigade commander, Major Mohammed, knew the ground well. Mohammed had attended the Infantry Officer Advanced Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, in the 1980s, when the United States was cultivating an ill-conceived relationship with Iraq to balance against Iran. Mohammed’s defense was sound. He fortified the village with anti-aircraft guns and put his infantry in protected positions. He took advantage of an imperceptible rise in the terrain that ran perpendicular to the road running east to west through the village to organize a “reverse slope” defense. He built two engagement areas, or “kill sacks,” on the eastern side of the ridge, emplaced minefields, and dug in approximately forty tanks and sixteen BMPs, Russian-made infantry fighting vehicles, on the back side of the ridge. His plan was to destroy us piecemeal as we moved across the crest. Hundreds of Iraqi infantry occupied bunkers and trenches between the armored vehicles. He positioned his reserve of eighteen more T-72 tanks and his command post along another subtle ridgeline farther east.
At 4:07, Staff Sergeant John McReynolds’s Bradley drove on top of an Iraqi bunker positioned to provide early warning. Two enemy soldiers emerged and surrendered. McReynolds’s wingman, Sgt. Maurice Harris, was scanning into the village through the blowing sand when his Bradley came under fire. As Harris returned fire with his 25 mm cannon, Lieutenant Gauthier moved forward and fired a TOW antitank missile. Thus began twenty-three minutes of furious combat.
As our tanks fired nine high-explosive rounds simultaneously into the village, we received permission to advance to the 70 Easting, a north–south running grid line on a map. We switched to a tanks lead formation. I instructed Second and Fourth Platoons to “follow my move” and we passed through the scouts’ Bradleys. As our tank came over the crest of that imperceptible rise, our gunner, Sgt. Craig Koch, and I identified the enemy simultaneously: eight T-72 tanks in prepared positions faced us at close range. Koch announced, “Tanks direct front.” The crew acted as one. The gun recoiled, and the breech dropped. The enemy tank exploded in a huge fireball. Pfc. Jeffrey Taylor loaded a tank-defeating “sabot” round, which thrusts a fourteen-pound depleted uranium dart out of the gun tube at two kilometers a second. He armed the gun and yelled, “Up!” as he threw his body against the turret wall to get out of the gun’s recoil path. Our tank crew destroyed the first three tanks in about ten seconds. When our other eight tanks crested the rise, they joined in the assault. In about a minute, everything in the range of our guns was in flames. Our tank driver, Spec. Chris Hedenskog, informed me, “Sir, we just went through a minefield.” He knew that it would be dangerous to stop right in the middle of the enemy’s kill sack, the area in which all his tanks could concentrate their fire. We had a window of opportunity to shock the enemy and take advantage of the first blows we had delivered, to turn physical advantage into psychological advantage. So, our tanks drove around the antitank mines, with the Bradleys and other vehicles following in our tracks. We ran over antipersonnel mines, but they popped harmlessly. Our training was paying off. As McReynolds recalled, “We did not have to be told what to do; it just kinda came natural.”
Just as we cleared the western defensive positions, our executive officer, John Gifford, radioed, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but you’re at the limit of advance; you’re at the 70 Easting.” I responded, “Tell them we can’t stop. Tell them we have to continue this attack. Tell them I’m sorry.” Stopping would have allowed the enemy to recover. I felt that we had the advantage and had to finish the battle rapidly. The army’s cavalry culture encourages initiative, and the stakes were too high not to take advantage of the hard blow we had just delivered.
We crested a second rise and entered the reserve’s circular perimeter. Iraqi tank commanders were trying to deploy against us. They were too late. We destroyed all eighteen tanks at close range. Then we stopped. There was nothing left to shoot. Our fire support officer, Lt. Dan Davis, called in a massive artillery strike on fuel and ammo stocks farther east. There was some more fighting to do, but the main attack had lasted twenty-three minutes.
Eagle Troop destroyed a much larger enemy force that had all the advantages of the defense and took no casualties. Our fight was a lopsided victory in a larger battle and war that were lopsided victories. As confidence grew based on the military victory in the Gulf War, analysts undervalued the qualitative advantage of U.S. forces and the narrow political objective of simply returning Kuwait to the Kuwaitis. They assumed that future enemies would repeat Saddam’s mistake of trying to fight the U.S. and coalition military forces on our own terms rather than asymmetrically. And, as many reflected on the victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, they forgot how the United States and its allies and partners had competed based on a clear understanding of their adversary, what was at stake, and the long-term strategy designed to ensure their security, promote prosperity, and extend their influence.
IN RETROSPECT, what those cavalry troopers experienced in Coburg, Germany, and what would become known as the Battle of 73 Easting in the Iraqi desert, marked the end of an era.4 It was then, in the 1990s, that American leaders, flush with victories in the Cold War and the Gulf War, forgot that the United States had to compete in foreign affairs. Coburg was also the birthplace of Hans Morgenthau, who fled the Nazis in 1937 and became one of the fathers of the discipline of international relations. In 1978, in his last coauthored essay with Ethel Person, titled “The Roots of Narcissism,” Morgenthau lamented preoccupation with self in foreign policy because it led to alienation from other nations and aspirations that exceeded the limits of ability. It was there in Coburg, near Morgenthau’s birthplace, that American confidence grew as the Cold War ended and the world entered what the political analyst Charles Krauthammer called “the unipolar moment.” America’s stature as the only superpower encouraged narcissism, a preoccupation with self, and an associated neglect of the influence that others have over the future course of events. Americans began to define the world only in relation to their own aspirations and desires.5
Over-optimism and a preoccupation with self inspired three flawed assumptions about the new, post–Cold War era. First, many accepted the thesis that the West’s victory in the Cold War meant “the end of history,” what political philosopher Francis Fukuyama described as “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”6 Although Fukuyama warned that ideological consensus in favor of democracy was not a foregone conclusion, many assumed that an arc of history guaranteed the primacy of free and open societies over authoritarian and closed societies, and of free-market capitalism over authoritarian, closed economic systems. Ideological competition was finished.
Second, many assumed that old rules of international relations and competition were no longer relevant in what President George H. W. Bush hoped would be “a new world order—a world where the rule of law, not the rule of the jungle governs the conduct of nations.” The post–Cold War world was unipolar. Russia was in disarray after the collapse of the Soviet Union. China’s economic miracle was just beginning, and Chinese Communist Party leaders adhered to paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s directive to hide their capabilities and bide their time. An emerging condominium of nations would vitiate the need to compete; all would work together and through international organizations to solve the world’s most pressing problems.7 Great power competition was passé.
Third, many asserted that American military prowess demonstrated during the 1991 Persian Gulf war manifested a revolution in military affairs (dubbed RMA) that would allow the U.S. military to achieve “full-spectrum dominance” over any potential enemy. If any adversary had the temerity to challenge a technologically dominant U.S. military, the war would result in a rapid, decisive U.S. victory.8 Military competition was over.
Those three assumptions underpinning U.S. policies not only were over-optimistic, they also led to complacency and hubris. Hubris, an ancient Greek term defined as extreme pride leading to overconfidence, often results in misfortune. In Greek tragedies, the hero vainly attempts to transcend human limits and often ignores warnings that predict a disastrous fate. In the case of the new, post–Cold War era, warnings that might have drawn into question the three assumptions I’ve just outlined went unheeded by too many in the U.S. policy, political, and military establishments.
First, autocracy was making a comeback. By the end of the 1990s, market-oriented reforms failed in Russia, resulting in the election of Vladimir Putin, a little-known director of the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB (the successor organization to the KGB). Writing in the Hoover Digest in April 2000, David Winston, a strategic advisor to congressional leadership, warned that the newly elected Russian president “will be strongly tempted to revert to the traditional paths of autocracy and statism” and “may see both the fate of Russia and his rule through the traditional prism of military prowess and conquest.” But then, autocracy had never really gone away. Despite many predictions of its imminent collapse or implosion, the despotic regime in North Korea adapted to the loss of aid from the defunct Soviet Union, endured a devastating famine, extorted money and goods from the West and South Korea in exchange for a weak nuclear agreement, and transitioned the dictatorship from Kim Il-sung, known as the “Great Leader” since 1948, to his son Kim Jong-il, the “Dear Leader.” Meanwhile, a nascent reform movement in Iran was stifled as the Islamist revolutionaries tightened their grip on their theocratic dictatorship.
Second, a new great power competition was emerging. China had paid close attention to the 1991 Gulf War and was deeply embarrassed by the 1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis, during which the United States responded to Chinese missile threats meant to intimidate Taiwan with a massive show of force. The two U.S. aircraft carrier groups that converged on the strait exposed the inferiority of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy compared to the U.S. fleet. As China’s economy grew, so did the PLA. And as their military grew, China began to flex its muscles. On April 1, 2001, fighter pilot Wang Wei maneuvered his PLA Navy J-8 fighter aggressively over the South China Sea in an effort to intimidate the crew of a U.S. Navy EP-3 signals intelligence aircraft. After two passes at the U.S. aircraft, he misjudged his approach, colliding with its nose and propeller. The J-8 broke into pieces, and the U.S. aircraft made an emergency landing on Hainan Island. Wang Wei’s body was never recovered. The Chinese detained the twenty-four U.S. crew members for eleven days.9 The demonstration of U.S. military prowess in the Gulf War and the Taiwan Strait Crisis, as well as increasing tension in the South China Sea, spurred China to undertake the largest peacetime military buildup in history.
Third, as China began to challenge so-called American military dominance, increasingly potent jihadist and Iranian state-sponsored terrorist organizations attacked asymmetrically, avoiding military strength and exploiting weakness. The jihadist terrorist movement grew after the Afghan War of the 1980s and the Gulf War. Its leaders used a perverted interpretation of Sunni Islam to inspire recruits and rationalize violence against the “far enemies,” the United States and Europe, and the “near enemies,” Israel and Arab monarchies. Mass murder of the defenseless was the preferred tactic. On February 26, 1993, Ramzi Yousef, a Kuwaiti-born Pakistani terrorist who attended an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, drove with his Jordanian co-conspirator into the parking garage underneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. After building their weapon in a Jersey City apartment, they had packed the 1,200-pound bomb into a yellow Ryder van. Six people were killed and more than a thousand injured. Yousef had hoped that his explosion would topple Tower 1, which would then fall into Tower 2 and kill the occupants of both buildings, which he estimated to be about 250,000 people. Three years later, in 1996, Hezbollah terrorists (with Iranian backing and support) attacked U.S. military forces housed in the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans and wounding 372. In April 1998, Al-Qaeda issued a fatwa (a ruling on a point of Islamic law) from its safe haven in Afghanistan calling for the indiscriminate killing of Americans and Jews everywhere. Then, in August of that year, the terrorist organization turned words into action with simultaneous bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people and wounding more than 5,000. Twelve of those killed in Kenya were U.S. citizens. But Al-Qaeda was not finished. On October 12, 2000, the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole was docked in Aden, Yemen, for refueling. At around 11:18 a.m., a fiberglass boat laden with C4 explosives sped toward the port side and exploded on impact, blowing a forty-by-sixty-foot hole in the ship’s port side and killing seventeen sailors.10 By the turn of the century, the director of central intelligence, Adm. James Woolsey’s observation in 1993 that “Yes, we have slain a large dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes,”11 seemed particularly prescient. But in the new century, the free and open societies of the world would confront both.12
Those and other harbingers of an emerging geopolitical landscape much different from the idealized new world order might have inspired a fundamental reassessment of U.S. foreign policy and national security strategy and sparked a questioning of the assumptions underpinning the optimistic view of the post–Cold War world. They did not. Indeed, President Bill Clinton wrote the following in the preface to the December 2000 National Security Strategy report:
As we enter the new millennium, we are blessed to be citizens of a country enjoying record prosperity, with no deep divisions at home, no overriding external threats abroad, and history’s most powerful military. Americans of earlier eras may have hoped one day to live in a nation that could claim just one of these blessings. Probably few expected to experience them all; fewer still all at once.13
At the turn of the century, the United States was therefore set up for a rude awakening of tragic proportions. Like Icarus of the ancient Greek legend, U.S. leaders disregarded admonitions against over-optimism and complacency. Icarus’s father instructed him to fly neither too low, lest the sea’s dampness clog his wings, nor too high, lest the sun’s heat melt them. But Icarus flew too close to the sun, his wings melted, and he tumbled into the sea and drowned. Before the mass murder attacks of September 11, 2001, America was flying too high.
In the new century, three shocks and disappointments undermined American confidence. First, the September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda mass murder attacks in New York, Washington, and over a field in Pennsylvania hit like a sudden earthquake. The lives of nearly three thousand innocents were lost; many more suffered physical and psychological wounds. The attacks inflicted an estimated $36 billion in physical damages alone, with even higher costs accumulated when one considers the broader effect the attacks had on the American and global economies.14 Second, the unanticipated length and difficulty of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the cost of those wars in blood and treasure, came like slow, rolling aftershocks from 9/11. Third, the 2008 financial crisis had the effect of a tsunami earthquake. It began with subterranean rumblings caused by subprime mortgages and unregulated use of derivatives (contracts based on overvalued homes and bad loans). When the tidal wave hit, it created the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression of 1929. Housing prices fell 31 percent, more than during the Depression. The U.S. Treasury disbursed nearly $450 billion to banks to stimulate the economy, and approximately $360 billion to Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and AIG.15 The crisis passed, but two years later, unemployment was still above 9 percent and an unknown number of discouraged workers gave up looking for work.
OVER THE seven years following the 9/11 attacks, optimism and confidence eroded and, after 2008, began to give way to pessimism and resignation. In 2009, a new president implemented a foreign policy based mainly on his opposition to the Iraq War and animated by a worldview skeptical of American interventions and activist foreign policy abroad. In a June 2013 speech during which he announced the planned withdrawal of 33,000 troops from Afghanistan, President Barack Obama cited the cost of the war and the “rising debt and hard economic times” that followed the financial crisis. He stated that “the tide of war is receding” and that it was “time to focus on nation building here at home.”16 He saw the war in Iraq as part of a broader historical pattern of U.S. interventions. After a retrospective interview with President Obama in the waning days of his second term, Atlantic reporter Jeffrey Goldberg observed that President Obama “consistently invokes what he understands to be America’s past failures overseas as a means of checking American self-righteousness.” The president and many of those who served him were sympathetic to the New Left interpretation of foreign affairs, one that considers so-called Western capitalist imperialism as the primary cause of the world’s problems. “We have history,” President Obama said. “We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America. So we have to be mindful of our history when we start talking about intervening, and understand the source of other people’s suspicions.”17 An underlying premise of the New Left interpretation of history is that an overly powerful America is more often a source of, rather than part of the solution to, the world’s problems. To return to the Icarus analogy, under the Obama administration, we began to fly too low.
Across multiple administrations, U.S. foreign policy and national security strategy has suffered from what we might derive from Morgenthau’s essay “Strategic Narcissism”: the tendency to view the world only in relation to the United States and to assume that the future course of events depends primarily on U.S. decisions or plans. The two mind-sets that result from strategic narcissism, overconfidence and resignation, share the conceit of attributing outcomes almost exclusively to U.S. decisions and undervaluing the degree to which others influence the future. The over-optimism that energized U.S. foreign policy under the George W. Bush administration contributed to an underappreciation of the risks of action, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The pessimism about the efficacy of U.S. engagement abroad that influenced U.S. foreign policy under the Barack Obama administration led to an underappreciation of the risks of inaction, such as the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011 or the decision to forgo military reprisals for the Assad regime’s mass murder of Syrian civilians with chemical weapons in 2013. Both forms of strategic narcissism were based mainly on wishful thinking and the definition of problems as one might like them to be as a way to avoid harsher realities. I experienced the effect of strategic narcissism up close. I was often on the receiving end of ill-conceived plans disconnected from the problems they were ostensibly meant to address. That is because strategic narcissism leads to policies and strategies based on what the purveyor prefers, rather than on what the situation demands. The assumptions that underpin these policies and strategies often go unchallenged as they provide a deceptive rationale for folly.
As I got on the flight to Palm Beach, Florida, to be interviewed by a man I had never met, I thought that, if given the opportunity, I would try to help restore America’s strategic competence. And I thought that the first step might be to begin with historian Zachary Shore’s concept of strategic empathy, what Shore describes as “the skill of understanding what drives and constrains one’s adversary,”18 as a corrective to strategic narcissism. During the interview at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump seemed sympathetic to my observation that the United States had not competed effectively in recent years and that, as a result, determined adversaries had gained strength and our power and influence had diminished. As defense expert Nadia Schadlow observed in her 2013 essay “Competitive Engagement,” “being successful in a competition requires knowing and understanding both one’s competitors and oneself.”19 I began with those tasks when I assumed my duties as national security advisor just three days after the call I received in Philadelphia. I asked Schadlow to join me as senior director for national security strategy to develop options that would enhance America’s ability to compete more effectively and shift the balance back in favor of the United States and the free and open societies of the world.
There was a lot of work to do. Two days after I arrived in Washington, I held an “all hands” meeting in which I shared with the national security staff my view that our strategic competence had eroded based, in part, on our narcissistic approach to foreign policy and national security strategy. Our job was to provide the president with options and integrated strategies that combined elements of national power with efforts of like-minded partners to make progress toward clearly defined goals. The work, however, should begin with identifying challenges and understanding them on their own terms and from the perspective of “the other.” I asked our team not only to map the interests of rivals, adversaries, and enemies, but also to consider the emotions, aspirations, and ideologies that drive and constrain them. The options we developed, if approved, would become integrated strategies. I insisted that these strategies must identify not only goals, but also our assumptions—especially assumptions concerning the degree of agency and control that we and our partners could expect in order to make progress toward those goals. The strategies needed to be logical with regard to the means employed and the desired ends. We would also work hard to describe what was at stake and to explain why accomplishing those ends was worth the risks and potential cost in treasure and, especially, blood. I then laid out what I saw, from my more than three decades in the military and from studying national security as a historian, as the four categories of challenges to national and international security. These would be our priorities as we developed integrated strategies for the president.
First, great power competition was back with a vengeance, highlighted by Russia’s annexation of Crimea, invasion of Ukraine, intervention in Syria, and the sustained campaign of political subversion against the United States and the West. And it was clear that China under Chairman Xi Jinping was no longer hiding its capabilities and biding its time as the People’s Liberation Army accelerated island building in the South China Sea, tightened control of its population internally, and extended its diplomatic, economic, and military influence internationally.
Second, the threat from transnational terrorist organizations was greater than it was on September 10, 2001. Terrorist groups were increasing their technological sophistication and lethality. They were also growing in magnitude due to slick recruiting and the perpetuation of conflict in and around the two epicenters of the war in Afghanistan and the war in Syria.
Third, hostile states in Iran and North Korea were becoming more dangerous. The new dictator in Pyongyang aggressively pursued nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. An old dictator in Tehran expanded support for terrorists and militias across the Middle East and beyond in a way that prolonged destructive wars and increased the threat to Israel, Arab states, and U.S. interests in the Middle East.
Fourth, new challenges to security were emerging in complex arenas of competition from space to cyberspace to cyber-enabled information warfare to emerging disruptive technologies. Moreover, a range of interconnected long-range problems demanded an integrated effort now including the environment, climate change, energy, and food and water security.
As we began to frame those challenges as the first step toward developing integrated strategies, we paid particular attention to improving our competence. We emphasized the importance of history. Ignorance or misuse of history often led to the neglect of hard-won lessons or the use of simplistic analogies that masked flaws in policy or strategy. Understanding the history of how challenges developed would help us ask the right questions, avoid mistakes of the past, and anticipate how “the other” might respond.
Supposition about the future should begin with an understanding of how the past produces the present. Policies and strategies must be based on the recognition that rivals and enemies will influence the future course of events. How “the other” responds will depend, in part, on their own interpretation of history. As former secretary of state and national security advisor Henry Kissinger observed, all states “consider themselves as expressions of historical forces . . . what really happened is often less important than what is thought to have happened.”20 And more than 2,500 years ago, the Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu wrote, “If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.”21 So, in order to overcome strategic narcissism, we must strive to understand our competitors’ view of history as well as our own.
Still, it does no good to improve our strategic competence if the United States and our partners do not possess the confidence to overcome new and pernicious threats to our free and open societies. To rebuild and sustain that confidence requires communicating clearly what is at stake and describing how the proposed strategies are designed to achieve sustainable outcomes at acceptable costs. This is what British prime minister Winston Churchill described as “an all-embracing view which presents the beginning and the end, the whole and each part, as one instantaneous impression retentively and untiringly held in the mind.”22 None of the competitions discussed in this book will be resolved quickly; strategies, while remaining flexible and adaptable to changing conditions, must be sustained over time. Consistency and will are, therefore, important dimensions of strategic competence.
But our will is diminished. As our foreign policies swung from over-optimism to resignation, identity politics interacted with new forms of populism. That interaction divided us and diminished confidence in our democratic principles, institutions, and processes. We might apply empathy to ourselves as well as to the other and, as we discuss the challenges we face, seek common understanding, and work together to secure freedom and prosperity for future generations. It is my hope that this book might contribute to those discussions.