One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They’re happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there’s no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America.
Boot is a professional foreign policy expert, a job category that doesn’t exist outside of a select number of cities. Boot has degrees from Berkeley and Yale, and is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written a number of books and countless newspaper columns on foreign affairs and military history. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank, describes Boot as one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict.”
None of this, it turns out, means anything. The professional requirements for being one of the world’s Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict do not include relevant experience with armed conflict. Leading authorities on the subject don’t need a track record of wise assessments or accurate predictions. All that’s required are the circular recommendations of fellow credential holders. If other Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict induct you into their ranks, you’re in. That’s good news for Max Boot.
Boot first became famous in the weeks after 9/11 for outlining a response that the Bush administration seemed to read like a script, virtually word for word. While others were debating whether Kandahar or Kabul ought to get the first round of American bombs, Boot was thinking big. In October 2001, he published a piece in the Weekly Standard titled “The Case for American Empire.”
“The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition,” Boot wrote. “The solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation.” In order to prevent more terror attacks in American cities, Boot called for a series of U.S.-led revolutions around the world, beginning in Afghanistan and moving swiftly to Iraq.
“Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul,” Boot wrote. “To turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East: Now that would be a historic war aim. Is this an ambitious agenda? Without a doubt. Does America have the resources to carry it out? Also without a doubt.”
In retrospect, Boot’s words are painful to read, like love letters from a marriage that ended in divorce. Iraq remains a smoldering mess. The Afghan war is still in progress close to twenty years in. For perspective, Napoleon Bonaparte seized control of France, crowned himself emperor, defeated four European coalitions against him, invaded Russia, lost, was defeated and exiled, returned, and was defeated and exiled a second time, all in less time than the United States has spent trying to turn Afghanistan into a stable country.
Things haven’t gone as planned. What’s remarkable is that despite all the failure and waste and deflated expectations, defeats that have stirred self-doubt in the heartiest of men, Boot has remained utterly convinced of the virtue of his original predictions. Certainty is a prerequisite for Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict.
In the spring of 2003, with the war in Iraq under way, Boot began to consider new countries to invade. He quickly identified Syria and Iran as plausible targets, the latter because it was “less than two years” from building a nuclear bomb. North Korea made Boot’s list as well. Then Boot became more ambitious. Saudi Arabia could use a democracy, he decided.
“If the U.S. armed forces made such short work of a hardened goon like Saddam Hussein, imagine what they could do to the soft and sybaritic Saudi royal family,” Boot wrote.
The Bush administration apparently ignored this suggestion, but Boot was undeterred. Five years later, in a piece for the Wall Street Journal, he advocated for the military occupation of Pakistan and Somalia. The only potential problem, he predicted, was unreasonable public opposition to new wars.
“Ragtag guerrillas have proven dismayingly successful in driving out or neutering international peacekeeping forces,” he wrote. “Think of American and French troops blown up in Beirut in 1983, or the ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident in Somalia in 1993. Too often, when outside states do agree to send troops, they are so fearful of casualties that they impose rules of engagement that preclude meaningful action.”
In other words, the tragedy of foreign wars isn’t that Americans die, but that too few Americans are willing to die. To solve this problem, Boot recommended recruiting foreign mercenaries. “The military would do well today to open its ranks not only to legal immigrants but also to illegal ones,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times. When foreigners get killed fighting for America, he noted, there’s less political backlash at home.
American forces, documented or not, never occupied Pakistan, but by 2011 Boot had another war in mind. “Qaddafi Must Go,” Boot declared in the Weekly Standard. In Boot’s telling, the Libyan dictator had become a threat to the American homeland. “The only way this crisis will end—the only way we and our allies can achieve our objectives in Libya—is to remove Qaddafi from power. Containment won’t suffice.”
In the end, Gaddafi was removed from power, with ugly and long-lasting consequences. Boot was on to the next invasion. By late 2012, he was once again promoting attacks on Syria and Iran, as he had nine years before. In a piece for the New York Times, Boot laid out “Five Reasons to Intervene in Syria Now.” Not surprisingly, all of them were simple and compelling.
Overthrowing the Assad regime, Boot predicted, would “diminish Iran’s influence” in the region, influence that had grown dramatically since the Bush administration took Boot’s advice and overthrew Saddam Hussein, Iran’s most powerful counterbalance. To doubters concerned about a complex new war, Boot promised the Syria intervention could be conducted “with little risk.”
Days later, Boot wrote a separate piece for Commentary magazine calling for American bombing of Iran. It was a busy week, even by the standards of a Leading Authority on Armed Conflict. In the Commentary piece, Boot conceded that “it remains a matter of speculation what Iran would do in the wake of such strikes.” He didn’t seem worried.
Listed in one place, Boot’s many calls for U.S.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk. (“I’ll invade you!!!”) Republicans in Washington didn’t find any of it amusing. They were impressed. Boot became a top foreign policy advisor to John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008, to Mitt Romney in 2012, and to Marco Rubio in 2016. He continued to churn out well-received articles for Foreign Policy, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Washington Post.
Everything changed when Trump won the Republican nomination. Trump had never heard of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He had no idea Max Boot was a Leading Authority on Armed Conflict. Trump was running against more armed conflicts. He had no interest in invading Pakistan. Boot hated him.
As Trump found himself accused of improper ties to Vladimir Putin, Boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with Russia. Boot demanded larger weapons shipments to Ukraine. He called for effectively expelling Russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. The stakes were high, but with signature aplomb Boot assured readers it was “hard to imagine” the Russian government would react badly to the provocation. Those who disagreed Boot dismissed as “cheerleaders” for Putin and the mullahs in Iran.
As Boot’s posture on Russia became more reckless and bellicose, his stock in the Washington foreign policy establishment rose. In 2018, he was hired by the Washington Post as a columnist. The paper’s announcement cited Boot’s “expertise on armed conflict.”
A generation ago, it would have been hard to imagine a newspaper like the Washington Post celebrating Max Boot. Liberals were stridently antiwar. Opposing armed conflict was central to their identity. They hated violence; they visualized world peace. Liberals imagined a day when schools were fully funded but the Pentagon would be forced to hold bake sales, because war was not the answer and an eye for an eye made the whole world blind.
Those were actual slogans, and you heard them a lot. Liberals composed songs about peace, held festivals and symposia to celebrate it. Bumper stickers with antiwar slogans festooned the back of virtually every Volkswagen on every street in every college town in America. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King were revered on the left, not just because they were for civil rights and against colonialism, but because they were both outspoken pacifists, something that’s rarely noted today. To be liberal meant to oppose violence, especially violence committed by the U.S. military.
More than anything else, liberals were turned against war by the country’s experience in Vietnam. Unlike any American war before or since, Vietnam demonstrated the horror, futility, and ruin wrought by a conflict begun without domestic consensus or clear objectives. Americans were horrified by tens of thousands of military deaths and by the sight of young men drafted to go fight in a poor, distant country that posed no obvious threat to the United States. Though military leaders promised the final victory was imminent, the war dragged on for more than a decade.
Worst of all, it wasn’t always clear that America held the moral high ground. South Vietnam’s corrupt, autocratic government didn’t seem worth defending. Atrocities like the 1968 My Lai Massacre of 347 Vietnamese civilians shook the public’s faith in the project, while handing easy propaganda victories to America’s opponents. After several years Americans broadly turned against Vietnam, and liberals led the charge.
During the 1968 election, Senator Eugene McCarthy challenged Lyndon Johnson from a nearly pacifist position, arguing not that the war couldn’t be won, but that winning wasn’t worth it: “I am concerned that the administration seems to have set no limits to the price that it is willing to pay for a military victory.” McCarthy’s campaign was disorganized and underfunded, but the resonance of his message was enough to convince LBJ to drop out of the race.
Four years later, another antiwar Democrat managed to win the nomination. Senator George McGovern had flown thirty-five bombing missions against the Nazis in a B-24. He couldn’t be dismissed as a weakling afraid to draw blood. At the 1972 Democratic convention that summer, McGovern promised to withdraw the United States from Vietnam immediately: “[W]ithin ninety days of my inauguration, every American soldier and every American prisoner will be out of the jungle and out of their cells and then home in America where they belong.”
The message failed. The McGovern campaign lost all but a single state in the general election to Richard Nixon. McGovern didn’t reassess. If anything he hardened his position. Before leaving the race, McGovern made the case for what might now be described as an America First foreign policy: “This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation.” It would be forty-four years before another presidential candidate made that point as forcefully, and he was a Republican.
Four years later, Jimmy Carter became the only antiwar Democrat to win the presidency, riding a wave of anti-incumbent rage after Watergate. For all his failings, Carter made good on his promise to keep U.S. troops out of harm’s way. Depending on how you measure it, Carter may have been the only president in American history not to preside over a war. Only eight American servicemen died in action during his administration, killed accidentally during a failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran.
Politically, it didn’t matter. Carter lost after only a term, drowned in the Reagan tsunami he helped create. Personally, Carter was an unappealing figure, sanctimonious and nasty. As an executive, he conveyed indecision and incompetence. Even his strengths looked like weakness. When Carter bragged about keeping America out of war, it seemed his real motive was self-doubt. He was hesitant to use force because he didn’t trust American power.
Certainly many of his fellow liberals felt that way. Even at its peak, liberal antiwar rhetoric was never entirely coherent. Liberals didn’t hate all wars, just those in which the United States projected its will abroad. Nobody ever said that out loud, but it was evident. Liberals were horrified by Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia. They said nothing when the communist government of Vietnam invaded the same country a few years later. They complained about American military bases in Italy, but rarely mentioned the fact that Eastern Europe was occupied by Soviet troops. And of course, for pacifists, they seemed strangely attracted to Cuban leaders in military fatigues.
Liberals were never very consistent about where they stood on war, mostly because their positions were rooted in emotion rather than reason. But if their complaints about American imperialism were frequently childish, they nevertheless managed to make a couple of valid points.
The first is that war is destructive. It kills people. Wars flatten cities, hobble economies, topple civilizations, and upend ancient ways of doing things, often forever. In war, children always die.
None of this is hidden knowledge—nobody would deny that war destroys—but it’s easy to forget it anyway. Look up any speech by a political leader ushering his country into conflict and you’ll notice how nonspecific the descriptions are. It’s always a battle for something abstract, like freedom or sovereignty. If politicians acknowledge that soldiers will be killed at all, it’s only to extol their bravery and highlight the sheer glory of the endeavor. In speeches, war is never a bloody slog where eighteen-year-old boys get castrated by land mines, blasted apart by grenades, or pointlessly massacred in friendly-fire accidents, though that’s exactly what it is.
Liberals reminded America of that. Yes, they were hysterical, inconsistent, and simplistic, and often motivated by a dislike of their own country. But on a basic level, they were right: war is not the answer; it’s a means to an end, and a very costly one.
The second point that liberals made, often without knowing it, is that war is complicated. Once conflict starts, there’s no predicting what will happen, or for how long. Violence tends to create chain reactions that move in unpredictable directions.
On an unexceptional June morning in 1914, a second-string Austrian nobleman was murdered by a Serbian terrorist in Sarajevo. In response, Austria prepared to attack Serbia. Russia in turn decided to defend Serbia, Germany supported its ally Austria, France supported Russia, Great Britain somehow became involved, and soon a small war over a single nobleman’s death had sucked in every European great power.
Early on, commanders for both sides anticipated a short, triumphant conflict; the German kaiser told his men they would be home before the leaves fell from the trees. Instead, the continent was shredded by four years of mass killing. More than 16 million people died.
By the time World War I ended, four great empires with centuries-old monarchies had been destroyed. Wholly invented countries had risen in their place. Communism, previously a fringe ideology, held absolute control of Russia. Almost every significant conflict since, including World War II and the War on Terror, has its roots in what began that day in 1914. All the aftershocks of the death of a single minor nobleman, bleeding out in the streets of Sarajevo.
America has been granted no exception to the law of unintended consequences. In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Ronald Reagan came to power the next year pledging to do something about it, and soon did. By sending aid and weapons to the Afghan resistance, Reagan helped weaken the Russian position in Afghanistan, and ultimately the Soviet Union itself.
Democrats fought him on the policy from the beginning. Republicans accused liberals of being effectively pro-Soviet, and some of them were. Yet decades later you’ve got to wonder how wise it was to arm Muslim extremists waging a holy war in Southwest Asia. Both Osama bin Laden and Taliban founder Mohammed Omar got their first taste of warfare in the Afghan mujahideen.
Ironically, though, by the time it became clear that America had played a leading role in training its own enemies, liberals were in no position to complain. By that point, they were nearly as prowar as the Republicans.
The 1988 presidential campaign turned out to be the end of liberal pacifism. If you had to identify a moment of death, it would be the day the Dukakis campaign released video of its candidate riding in a tank with his helmet askew. An ad designed to show voters that Mike Dukakis wasn’t a dopey peacenik had instead revealed the opposite: he was precisely that, an effete college professor type who didn’t know which end of the gun the bullet came out of. Dukakis couldn’t keep you safe. He probably didn’t even want to. Within weeks, he blew a 17-point lead and lost to George H. W. Bush.
From the sidelines in Little Rock, Bill Clinton was watching carefully. Clinton was a lifelong peacenik himself, a Vietnam draft dodger who worked for the 1972 McGovern campaign, along with his wife, Hillary. But he wasn’t stupid. He understood that Democrats kept losing in part because voters perceived them as weak. He vowed not to repeat the mistake.
In the middle of the 1992 New Hampshire primary campaign, when candidates were working twenty-hour days and not a minute was unscheduled, Clinton took a break to fly back to Arkansas in order to preside over the lethal injection of a convicted murderer named Ricky Ray Rector. Rector was so profoundly brain damaged from a self-inflicted gunshot wound that it’s not clear he knew he was about to die. After finishing his final meal, Rector asked the guards if he could save his dessert for later. Rival campaigns denounced the execution as inhumane. Clinton ignored them, and in November he won the general election.
The lesson was clear, and Clinton as president soon applied it to foreign policy. When he took office, Clinton inherited a several-thousand-troop humanitarian mission in Somalia, first deployed by President Bush. Clinton didn’t simply continue the mission, he expanded it, deploying hundreds of U.S. Special Forces to battle Somali warlords. Clinton withdrew American forces only after nineteen U.S. troops were killed. Criticism came not from liberals in his own party, but from Republicans.
The experience was painful, but it did not halt future foreign interventions. In 1994, Clinton dispatched Marines to Haiti in order to topple the regime there. The following year, Clinton sent airpower to intervene in the Bosnian War. He later deployed more than sixteen thousand troops to the region. In 1999, the United States bombed Yugoslavia as part of the Kosovo War, and again, thousands of troops arrived as peacekeepers in the aftermath. Clinton sent cruise missiles into both Sudan and Afghanistan as well.
Clinton’s most militant posture was reserved for Iraq, which the U.S. military bombed numerous times throughout his presidency. By the end of Clinton’s second term, the United States was bombing Iraq an average of three times a week, at the cost of more than $1 billion a year.
After he left office, Clinton reflected that his main regret was that he hadn’t been interventionist enough. He’d wanted to send American troops to Rwanda.
Politically, the decision to become a prowar party paid huge dividends for Democrats. From 1968 through 1988, Democrats decisively lost five presidential elections and narrowly won another. Since Clinton took the party back in a hawkish direction, the Democrats have lost the popular vote only once, in 2004.
For the country, however, there was a downside. With both parties aligned on the wisdom of frequent military intervention abroad, no one was left to make the counter case. As a result, America has remained in a state of almost permanent war.
One week after the World Trade Center fell, Congress voted to give President George W. Bush the authority to use military force against “nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” The law was utterly open-ended. There was no expiration date. No country or terror organization was mentioned by name. The president had congressional approval to do essentially whatever he wanted. Only a single member of Congress in either chamber voted against it, and she was a flake from Berkeley, California, an old antiwar liberal. Even her fellow Democrats mocked her.
There was now a bipartisan consensus on war, and it extended into the next conflict, Iraq. Indeed the predicate for that war had been laid by the previous administration, which hyped the threats of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction program.
“No one has done what Saddam Hussein has done, or is thinking of doing,” Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright told the audience at a town hall meeting at Ohio State University in 1998. “He is producing weapons of mass destruction, and he is qualitatively and quantitatively different from other dictators.”
When some in the room expressed skepticism, Albright attacked their character. “I’m really surprised that people feel they need to defend the rights of Saddam Hussein,” she said.
At least one person in the crowd wasn’t intimidated. “You’re not answering my question, Madame Albright,” he yelled.
Albright’s response: “As a former university professor, I suggest, sir, that you study carefully what American foreign policy is. Every one of the violations has been pointed out on what is not right, and I would be happy to spend fifty minutes with you after the forum to explain it.”
She never did. Nor did Albright explain how exactly Saddam was “qualitatively and quantitatively” different from other strongmen around the world. She didn’t need to. Everyone back in Washington already agreed with her.
In the fall of 2002, a total of seventy-seven senators voted in favor of the Iraq War resolution. This included the majority of Democrats, and 100 percent of the party’s rising stars. Two future presidential candidates who voted for the war, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, also happened to be future secretaries of state. The future vice president, Joe Biden, voted for it, as did the party’s future vice presidential candidate, John Edwards. Future Senate leaders Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer supported the resolution, not to mention numerous future committee chairs like Dianne Feinstein. It was good politics for Democrats to support the war in Iraq, even within their own party.
Outside the Congress, relatively few mainstream liberals pushed back. Many aggressively supported the invasion. In 2002, the New York Times gave the case for war a sizable boost with a series of stories on Iraq’s supposedly vibrant chemical and biological weapons programs. The articles cited anonymous Bush administration sources, who later went on television and cited the Times as evidence that what they had already told the paper on background was true. It was an airtight loop.
Strikingly, two of the Times reporters responsible for those stories had previously written books attacking Saddam Hussein. It’s not a defense of the Iraqi regime to wonder how that might have affected their objectivity. Would the New York Times allow reporters who’d written books critical of abortion to cover the Supreme Court’s reevaluation of Roe v. Wade? Probably not, though the hypothetical is absurd, since almost nobody at the paper opposes abortion.
In the end, the Times admitted the desire for war with Iraq clouded judgment in the newsroom. “Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper,” read the paper’s postmortem. “Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted.”
It wasn’t just the Times. Other establishment outlets did the same, including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Stories that confirmed the existence of Iraq’s WMD program made the front page. Stories that raised doubts got buried. A postinvasion evaluation of coverage by the New York Review of Books concluded, “Despite abundant evidence of the administration’s brazen misuse of intelligence . . . the press repeatedly let officials get away with it. As journalists rush to chronicle the administration’s failings on Iraq, they should pay some attention to their own.”
They did pay attention, at least for a while. While the initial invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam Hussein from power almost effortlessly, the war quickly became an expensive, bloody quagmire with no clear end objective in sight. U.S. casualties, initially low, spiraled into the thousands. Even worse, Iraq’s WMD programs, the core justification for the war, proved to be illusory.
The many failures of the Iraq War triggered an Indian summer of antiwar sentiment on the left. In Connecticut, prowar senator Joe Lieberman lost his party’s nomination in the Democratic primary to antiwar Ned Lamont (Lieberman held the seat running as an independent with strong Republican support). Michael Moore won an Oscar and became one of the left’s intellectual leaders for his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which took a critical look not only at the Iraq War but the entire War on Terror. Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, became a household name when she camped outside President Bush’s Texas ranch demanding a personal meeting and an end to the war. Hundreds of thousands of people turned out for antiwar protests in Washington, D.C., and other major American cities.
But just as Indian summers eventually give way to winter, the revival of left-wing antiwar activism failed to reverse a long-term trend toward greater enthusiasm for war. When then-senator Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he positioned himself as the antiwar candidate. He attacked his top opponent, Hillary Clinton, for supporting the 2002 war resolution and pledged to get U.S. troops out of Iraq.
But even this antiwar attitude was a pale shadow of the antiwar positions the left once adopted. McGovern had pledged peace in Vietnam within ninety days. Obama merely vowed to have U.S. combat troops out within sixteen months, and he counterbalanced that pledge with a promise to increase troop levels in Afghanistan.
Less than a year into his first term, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, apparently for the transcendent achievement of not being George W. Bush. But the prize had no lasting effect on Obama. Under his stewardship the Democratic establishment once again became a party of war, differing from Republicans only on exactly how much war they wanted, and where.
In 2011, Hillary Clinton and other interventionists in the administration convinced Obama to support the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. It was never obvious why Gaddafi needed to be killed. While he’d once supported terrorist efforts against the West and established nuclear and chemical weapons programs, his behavior had dramatically improved following the invasion of Iraq. He shuttered his WMD programs in December 2003, was removed from America’s list of state terror sponsors, and even collaborated with the European Union to block illegal migration from Africa into Europe.
Gaddafi was an unsavory autocrat. But there were far more dangerous and more repressive regimes out there, and there was no clear replacement for him within Libya. If there’s a single lesson of the Iraq War, it’s that chaos is worse than dictatorship. Libya looked like a prime candidate for chaos. With Gaddafi gone, it was obvious that the place might devolve into a lawless mess and become a bug light for extremist groups.
Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power of the National Security Council didn’t agree. They viewed Gaddafi as a deeply immoral man. That’s all the justification they needed to take him out. So they did. With Gaddafi on the brink of victory in the Libyan civil war, the United States and its NATO allies intervened, taking over the country’s airspace, bombing Gaddafi’s forces, and turning the tide of the conflict. Seven months later, Gaddafi was toppled from power, captured, and unceremoniously killed.
The establishment applauded. Obama’s overthrow of the Gaddafi government, declared the New York Times, was “an historic victory for the people of Libya who, with NATO’s help, transformed their country from an international pariah into a nation with the potential to become a productive partner with the West.”
The triumphant tone evokes another famous Times dispatch, from Cambodia in April 1975. The headline: “Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life.” That story ran in the paper four days before the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh and began murdering more than a third of the country’s population.
The aftermath in Libya hasn’t been quite as bloody, but that’s small comfort. Instead of creating a democratic, Westernized Libya, Obama’s destruction of Gaddafi simply created a new failed state. Rather than marginalizing radical Islam, Gaddafi’s fall empowered it, and by 2014 the country was in another civil war that killed thousands. ISIS militants have found a haven in the lawless country. While Gaddafi had blocked illegal migration to Europe, the new Libya has been powerless to stop it, and hundreds of thousands of African migrants have made their way to Europe from Libyan ports.
Things got so bad in Libya after Gaddafi was deposed that even the Times had to acknowledge it might be some time before the country could become “a productive partner with the West.” Luckily, the Times had a solution: more American intervention in Libya.
Remarkably, an editorial in August 2016 cited the very same 2011 disaster the paper once endorsed as a justification for repeating the same mistake: “The United States demonstrated during its involvement in the 2011 civil war that led to the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi that American airstrikes can change battlefield fortunes.”
In Washington, military action is assumed to be preferable to inaction, regardless of outcome. Barack Obama—who campaigned for president on the promise to withdraw from Iraq—not only bombed the country, the fourth American president in a row to do so, but by the end of his term had recommitted troops on the ground. Republicans didn’t seem to find this odd. Their main complaint was that he sent too few.
Liberals, meanwhile, stood by (and in some cases cheered) as Obama expanded the War on Terror beyond the boundaries of the Bush years. After two terms, Obama had ordered the killing of nearly four thousand people by drone attacks, most of them in “non-battlefield” areas like Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. Some of the people killed were American citizens, struck down as “enemy combatants” despite being far away from U.S. troops, in countries the United States was not at war with.
By 2013, the lessons of Iraq and Libya still unlearned, Obama was preparing for another regime change, this time in Syria. The cycle was eerily similar. Syrian president Bashar Assad was undoubtedly a cruel, authoritarian figure, but he also was not a clear threat to the United States, and it was impossible to know who might replace him should he fall. Nevertheless, following a chemical attack on civilians during the country’s civil war, Secretary of State John Kerry gave an impassioned speech about Assad’s human rights abuses and argued that a military intervention was needed. A now-familiar cycle began again.
The New York Times was back with its full support. In an editorial, the paper noted that “it would be highly unlikely—if not irresponsible—for [President Obama] to authorize Mr. Kerry to speak in such sweeping terms and then do nothing.” The next day, the Times ran an opinion piece titled “Bomb Syria, Even if It’s Illegal.”
Strong popular opposition ultimately scuttled Obama’s plans to bomb Assad’s government, though seven out of the ten senators who voted for it were Democrats. But it was only a temporary reprieve. Removing Assad from power remained the official policy of the U.S. government. By the end of the Obama years, America was not only bombing Syria but had ground troops there, this time for the purposes of fighting the Islamic State.
And not just there, but a number of other places as well. On Election Day 2016, after eight years of rule by the nominally “antiwar” faction of U.S. politics, American troops were stationed on roughly eight hundred military bases in seventy nations. The Pentagon was dropping bombs on at least seven different countries. Barack Obama was the first president to serve two full terms, and preside over war for every single day of them.
Not all of that was Obama’s choosing. He didn’t start the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. But he didn’t pull back much, either. What’s particularly striking, however, is how little Democrats said about it. Apart from some rumblings from the far left, there were no protests in the streets. In 2008, three antiwar documentaries were nominated for Best Documentary at the Academy Awards, and Hollywood stars routinely bashed President Bush’s foreign policy. On January 21, that all evaporated. Popular culture seemed oblivious.
In 2016 there wasn’t a single antiwar song in the top 100 pop hits.
Liberals were no longer interested in giving peace a chance. If anything, by the 2016 presidential election, liberals seemed most agitated by the idea of not being in conflict with other countries. In one of those weird historical ironies that almost nobody seemed to appreciate at the time, the Republican in the race was running well to the left of his Democratic opponent on key foreign policy questions. Donald Trump gave speech after speech attacking the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the idea of nation building more broadly. Hillary Clinton was still defending the decision to kill Gaddafi.
Nowhere was the divide broader or more bewildering than on Russia. Trump argued it would be in America’s interest to make common cause with the Russian government when possible, especially in the fight against Islamic extremism. Liberals, who for decades defended Russia when it was run by the Soviets, dismissed the idea out of hand as irresponsible, possibly even unpatriotic.
Yet again, the New York Times led the way. Two days before the 2016 GOP convention in Cleveland, the Times announced that “decades after the end of the Cold War, Moscow, led now by the ambitious, aggressive and unpredictable Vladimir Putin, has returned as a major threat.”
The paper would spend the better part of the next year detailing that threat and implicitly suggesting that it deserved a military response. Less than a week after the election, the Times editorial board warned of “the dangers of going soft on Russia.” The paper repeatedly described the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s email servers as an “act of war” by Vladimir Putin. Democrats in Congress and on cable news repeated the charge.
Were they serious, or just baiting Trump? Both probably, but more the former than you might expect. At the end of March 2017, the administration indicated it would be ending the Obama-era policy of seeking regime change in Syria. “Our priority is no longer to sit and focus on getting Assad out,” explained U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.
The foreign policy establishment responded with outrage. Figures from both parties described the policy change as a concession to Russia, a major backer of the Assad regime, and therefore as a betrayal of the United States.
Five days later, U.S. intelligence agencies announced that the Assad government had dropped chemical weapons on civilians in northern Syria, killing at least twenty children. No one doubted Assad was capable of committing atrocities, but this one seemed counterproductive, to put it mildly. Indeed it was one of the few things Assad could have done to reverse U.S. policy on removing him from office. Essentially it was the most effective way to sabotage his all-but-assured victory in the Syrian civil war. According to American officials, he did it anyway.
It didn’t make sense. Why would a man as canny and resilient as Bashar Assad do something so pointless and self-destructive? Apparently, because he was so innately evil, he couldn’t help himself. That was the explanation from self-described Syria experts in Washington, few of whom could speak Arabic or had ever lived in Syria. Bad people do bad things. Assad is bad. He must go.
Within days, the Trump administration caved to the pressure and lobbed missiles into Syria. There were a lot of questions about the move, beginning with: What was the point? If we took out Assad, who would replace him? And by the way, how did we know for certain the Syrian government ordered the chemical attack? Didn’t the Syrian rebels have chemical weapons, too? Couldn’t the decision have been the work of underlings rather than top commanders?
For the most part, questions like these went unasked. Instead, for the first time since Trump received the GOP nomination, elites in both parties cheered. The media congratulated the new president for his courage and steadfast leadership. According to a Harvard study, the Syrian missile strike was the only decision Trump made in his first one hundred days that received positive press coverage.
Even Trump’s opponents in Congress loved it. Senator Chuck Schumer, leader of the Senate Democrats, described the attack as “the right thing to do.” The senior Democrat in the House, Nancy Pelosi, called it a “proportional response.” Senators Dick Durbin and Elizabeth Warren agreed. Former House majority leader Steny Hoyer said his only complaint was that Trump didn’t go far enough.
For the first time in memory, Democrats in Washington were every bit as hawkish as Republicans. The alignment was complete. How did that happen?
The first step for Democrats was embracing violence as a tool of positive social change. In 1965, liberals viewed the bombing of North Vietnam as a moral atrocity. Thirty years later, they applauded Bill Clinton’s bombing of Bosnia as a means of protecting the rights of a vulnerable minority group, the local Muslim population. Liberals discovered that war was an expedient form of social engineering, not to mention politically popular. Want to save children? Bomb their country. Head Start suddenly seemed like a tepid half measure compared to the swift compassion of air strikes.
How often do bombings actually improve people’s lives? Do children on the ground really like them? Who knows? Follow-up stories on the aftermath of cruise missile attacks are notably rare in American media.
The practical effects of the policies are less interesting to policy makers in Washington than the spirit in which they’re intended. When you’re pulling the trigger, the spirit is always pure. Liberals believed that Curtis LeMay dropped bombs because he was a crazed warmonger who took pleasure in hurting people. Liberals believe they bomb countries for the same reason they once opposed bombing countries, because they want to make the world a better place. Intent is what matters.
The second force driving the shift was a change in leadership in America’s biggest institutions. Liberal skepticism of the Vietnam War was inseparable from a generalized suspicion of the establishment. The left distrusted the government’s rhetoric and goals in the Vietnam War because the left distrusted the government itself. Liberals knew powerful people were happy to lie to them.
Liberals now control those elite institutions. They no longer distrust power; they wield it.
We were better off with Curtis LeMay. When moral certainty meets indifference to detail, anything can happen. You can overthrow a secular dictator, watch as he’s replaced by bloodthirsty religious nuts who make everything worse, and then attempt the very same thing somewhere else, expecting different results. And never feel bad about it.
It’s amusing to think that well-educated professionals once considered Lyndon Johnson the world’s greatest threat to peace. What they hated most about Johnson was his naked cynicism. That was appalling, but it was far from the worst thing.
The most dangerous force of all turns out to be an activist establishment that believes its heart is in the right place.
The signature characteristic of America’s foreign policy establishment, apart from their foolishness, is the resiliency of their self-esteem. No matter how often they’re wrong, no matter how many disasters they unintentionally create, they never seem to feel bad about it. They certainly never blame themselves. Part of the reason for this is that most of them live in Washington.
Washington isn’t like everywhere else. The city’s economy is tied directly to the size of the federal budget, which has grown virtually without pause since the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The District of Columbia and its surrounding suburbs are now the wealthiest metro region in the country.
Washington’s job market is effectively bulletproof. Political figures cycle in and out of government, from lobbying to finance to contracting and back, growing richer at every turn. In Washington, prosperity is all but guaranteed.
To the rest of the country, this looks like corruption, because, essentially, it is. But if you live there, it’s all upside.
The most interesting effect of uninterrupted economic growth is that the culture of the city remains unusually stable. Even as Washington’s population has grown exponentially over the years, many things about the city haven’t changed at all. Most of the affluent neighborhoods look the same demographically as they did in 1960. Mothers don’t work. Divorce is unusual. Housing prices almost never fall. It’s a cultural time capsule.
By voter registration, D.C. is the most Democratic city in America. Yet the instincts of the people who live there are deeply conservative. Washingtonians hate change.
More than anything, they hate to be told they’re wrong, or their ideas are stupid, especially when they are. This explains much of official Washington’s hostility to Donald Trump.
It is possible to isolate the precise moment that Trump permanently alienated the Republican establishment in Washington: February 13, 2016. There was a GOP primary debate that night in Greenville, South Carolina, so every Republican in Washington was watching. Seemingly out of nowhere, Trump articulated something that no party leader had ever said out loud. “We should never have been in Iraq,” Trump announced, his voice rising. “We have destabilized the Middle East.”
Many in the crowd booed, but Trump kept going: “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”
Pandemonium seemed to erupt in the hall, and on television. Shocked political analysts declared that the Trump presidential effort had just euthanized itself. Republican voters, they said with certainty, would never accept attacks on policies their party had espoused and carried out.
Back in Washington, rival GOP campaigns frantically searched for ways to discredit what Trump had said. They found what they considered a silver bullet in a recording of an episode of the Howard Stern radio show from 2002, in which Trump seemed to approve of the idea of overthrowing Saddam.
By Washington standards, this qualified as a kill shot. The candidate had once uttered complimentary words about a war that had not yet started. Therefore, he had no right to criticize the same war fourteen years later, after it had proved disastrous. Consultants for the Jeb! and Marco Rubio campaigns traded high fives.
Republican voters had a different reaction. They understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. They themselves had come to understand that the Iraq War was a mistake. They appreciated hearing something verboten but true.
Rival Republicans denounced Trump as an apostate. Voters considered him brave.
Trump won the South Carolina primary, and shortly after that, the Republican nomination.
Republicans in Washington never recovered. When Trump attacked the Iraq War and questioned the integrity of the people who planned and promoted it, he was attacking them. They hated him for that.
Some of them became so angry, it distorted their judgment and character.
Bill Kristol is probably the most influential Republican strategist of the post-Reagan era. Born in 1954, Kristol was the second child of the writer Irving Kristol, one of the founders of neoconservatism. Like most early neoconservatives, Irving Kristol was a former leftist, a childhood Trotskyite who became progressively disillusioned with failures of government social policy, and with the left’s infatuation with the Soviet Union.
The neoconservatism of Irving Kristol and his friends was jarring to the ossified liberal establishment of the time, but in retrospect it was basically a centrist philosophy: pragmatic, tolerant of a limited welfare state, not rigidly ideological. By the time Bill Kristol got done with it forty years later, neoconservatism was something else entirely.
Kristol came to Washington in the mid-1980s to work for the Reagan administration, after several years of teaching at Harvard. In 1995, he founded the Weekly Standard. I joined the Standard as a reporter that year, about a month before the magazine launched, and stayed until early 2001. Kristol was in his prime. The publication was explicitly conservative, but most of the time the writers could write what they wanted. I found Kristol a humane and decent boss, if a little cold. He was funny as hell in meetings.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that Kristol had an unstated agenda that informed much of what the Weekly Standard did. The writers in the office thought we were engaged in conservative journalism. Kristol was trying to remake the Republican Party.
Years later, writer Philip Weiss described a conversation he had with Kristol in which this became explicit. There are Republicans, Kristol told Weiss, “of whom I disapprove so much that I won’t appear with them. That I’ve encouraged that they be expelled or not welcomed into the Republican Party. I’d be happy if Ron Paul left and ran as a third party candidate. I was very happy when Pat Buchanan was allowed to go off and run as a third party candidate.”
Unbeknownst to his staff, Bill Kristol had no intention of being merely a magazine publisher, or a disseminator of conservative ideas. He saw himself as the ideological gatekeeper of the Republican Party.
I wish I’d known this when I worked there. Kristol was always encouraging me to write hit pieces on Pat Buchanan, and on a couple of occasions I did. At the time I had no idea this was part of a larger strategy, though it did strike me as a little odd. In one of those coincidences that happen regularly in a city as small as Washington, Pat Buchanan’s sister Kathleen was Kristol’s assistant at the Standard, and well liked by everyone. Buchanan himself was an appealing guy personally, beloved by the people around him. And his politics weren’t entirely crazy. A lot of what Buchanan predicted in the 1990s turned out to be true.
The animus wasn’t personal. Kristol got along with Buchanan when they saw each other. Kristol didn’t even disagree with most of Buchanan’s views on social questions. In private, Kristol was as witheringly antigay as Buchanan was in public. The disagreement was entirely over foreign policy.
At his core, that’s what Kristol cared about. That’s why he despised figures as seemingly disconnected as Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul. One of the few things Paul and Buchanan had in common was opposition to more war in the Middle East. Kristol believed the United States should be bombing and invading countries throughout the region.
Almost from the moment Operation Desert Storm concluded in 1991, Kristol began pushing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In 1997, the Standard ran a cover story titled “Saddam Must Go.” If the United States didn’t launch a ground invasion of Iraq, the lead editorial warned, the world should “get ready for the day when Saddam has biological and chemical weapons at the tips of missiles aimed at Israel and at American forces in the Gulf.”
In 1998, Kristol, along with Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Kagan, signed a letter to Clinton calling for “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.”
That same year, as the Clinton administration planned air raids on Iraq, Kristol and Kagan made their case for regime change. “Unless we act” in Iraq, they warned in a New York Times op-ed, “the Middle East will be destabilized . . . and American soldiers will have to pay a far heavier price when the international peace sustained by American leadership begins to collapse.”
Around this time, Bob Kagan became a fixture in the Weekly Standard offices. Kagan always struck me as very much like Kristol, in that both were products of academia and had similar views on the world. The main difference was that Kagan was dumber and less charming. Kristol came off as erudite and urbane. Those were his basic strengths. Kagan, who like Kristol had a graduate degree from Harvard, seemed like an aging linebacker with a history of concussions. Rather than make his case during conversations in the office, Kagan just increased his volume. When challenged, he yelled and stormed off. I always thought Kagan was an idiot. Not that it slowed him down as a foreign policy expert in Washington.
After the September 11 attacks, Kristol found a new opening to start a war with Iraq. He started pushing immediately. On September 12, 2001, as downtown New York smoldered, Kristol told NPR, “I think Iraq is, actually, the big unspoken elephant in the room today.” In another NPR appearance the next month, he said, “We know that over the last three or four weeks, [Saddam] has moved many of his chemical and biological weapons programs in preparation for possible U.S. attacks.”
In November 2001, Kristol and Kagan wrote a piece in the Weekly Standard alleging that Saddam Hussein hosted a training camp for Al Qaeda fighters where terrorists had trained to hijack planes. They suggested that Mohammad Atta, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was actively collaborating with Saddam’s intelligence services. On the basis of no evidence, they accused Iraq of fomenting the anthrax attacks on American politicians and news outlets.
“What will it take for the FBI and the CIA to start connecting the dots here?” Kristol and Kagan asked. “A signed confession from Saddam?” That confession never came. No evidence was ever found tying Iraq to the 9/11 attacks.
Many people believed Kristol’s claims. In the first couple of years after 9/11, it seemed like just about anything could be true. But even policy makers sympathetic to the idea of overthrowing the Iraqi government and occupying the country found themselves worrying about the aftermath. Saddam goes, but what then?
Kristol had no such concerns. He mocked those who did. “If we want to be popular in the Arab world, we should liberate the people of Iraq from Saddam,” he said during a Fox News appearance in April 2002. In November 2002, he predicted that removing Saddam would have a positive “chain reaction” effect across the Middle East. The following February, he declared that “if we free the people of Iraq, we will be respected in the Arab world . . . and I think we will be respected around the world.”
In March 2003, twelve years of advocacy paid off. America attacked Iraq. Kristol was quick to boast about his triumph. As U.S. troops entered the country, Kristol told C-SPAN, “This is going to be a two-month war, not an eight-year war.”
To those concerned about the possibility of ethnic conflict within Iraq, Kristol waved his hand. “There has been a certain amount of pop sociology,” he explained a month after the invasion, “that the Shi’a can’t get along with the Sunni. There’s almost no evidence of that at all.”
It’s a measure of how little experts in Washington actually know that Kristol kept getting invited to speak as an authority on the Middle East. No evidence the Shia and Sunnis might fight each other in Iraq? Your average Arab cabdriver would laugh at that claim. It’s ridiculous. The Iraqi regime was repressive largely because it’s so difficult to govern a country riven by religious factionalism, as modern Iraq has always been. Everyone who’s been to the region knows that. Apparently nobody told Bill Kristol.
Time has proved Kristol spectacularly wrong on Iraq, on the big questions as well as the specifics. He has never acknowledged that, much less apologized. He’s too implicated.
“I’m not apologizing for something that I think was not wrong,” Kristol said in 2014. “The war to remove Saddam was the right thing and necessary thing to do.”
Two years later, he seemed even more disconnected from reality. “The war in Iraq was right and necessary, and we won it,” Kristol said. At the time, Mosul, once Iraq’s second-largest city, was under the control of the Islamic State. Iraq was embroiled in a civil war that would kill at least ninety thousand people.
Because Kristol has refused to learn from the failures he helped create, his foreign policy positions have remained unchanged for more than twenty-five years, even as the world has changed completely. To almost every problem, Kristol’s solution remains the same: war, led by America.
In the summer of 2006, Kristol demanded regime change in both Syria and Iran, in response to fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. According to Kristol, taking out the leadership of both countries, while basically irrelevant to core U.S. interests, was somehow “our war.” Indeed, Kristol explained, Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel were America’s fault. “We have been too weak, and have allowed ourselves to be perceived as weak,” he said.
To atone for its weakness, Kristol argued, America should commence air strikes against the Iranian regime immediately. “It would be easier to act sooner rather than later,” he wrote, without explaining why it was necessary for America to act at all. “Yes, there would be repercussions—and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement.”
Kristol’s demands for war in the Middle East continued throughout the Obama administration. In 2011, he backed intervention in Libya, including with American ground troops. In 2013, he demanded intervention in Syria to topple Assad. In 2014, he called for a reinvasion of Iraq to defeat the Islamic State.
Under ordinary circumstances, Bill Kristol would be famous for being wrong. Kristol still goes on television regularly, but it’s not to apologize for the many demonstrably untrue things he’s said about the Middle East, or even to talk about foreign policy. Instead, Kristol goes on TV to attack Donald Trump. In a remarkable late-life conversion, Kristol has become one of the most passionate critics of the Trump administration.
Tellingly, it didn’t begin like this. Kristol once defended Trump. In June 2015, just weeks after Trump announced for president, Kristol urged the other candidates in the race to listen carefully to what Trump was saying. Some of his rhetoric, Kristol said, resonated with voters, and for good reason:
Trump understands that Americans like winning: “Our country is in serious trouble. We don’t have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don’t have them.” Trump is aware the public believes international politics is more zero-sum than globalist elites like to think. “Our enemies are getting stronger and stronger, by the way, and we as a country are getting weaker.” So Trump is pro-tough-trade-negotiations, he’s pro-China-bashing, and he’s promilitary. “I will find within our military, I will find the General Patton or I will find General MacArthur, I will find the right guy. I will find the guy that’s going to take that military and make it really work. Nobody, nobody will be pushing us around.” A bit simple-minded? Sure. Closer to the truth than the cocktail partiers at Davos? Probably. Closer in sentiment to the American people? Certainly.
The qualified praise continued for months. Kristol frequently had more good things than bad to say about Donald Trump. He criticized Trump’s opponents for not bothering to understand his appeal.
“I remain not pro-Trump, but I’m once again drifting into the anti-anti-Trump camp,” Kristol wrote in August 2015. “Much of the criticism of Trump has the feel of falling (fairly or unfairly) into the hobgoblin-of-small-minds category.”
Then came the South Carolina primary debate. Trump criticized the Iraq War and its promoters. Kristol erupted. He was as angry as he had ever been in public about anything. Kristol denounced not just Trump, but anyone who didn’t join him in denouncing Trump.
“Once upon a time we had leaders who would have expressed their outrage at such a slander,” he wrote in the Weekly Standard. “They would have explained to the American people how extraordinarily irresponsible his slander was, and would have done their best to discredit a man who could behave so irresponsibly. They would have pronounced him unfit to be president of the United States, and they would have mobilized their friends, supporters and admirers to ensure so appalling an eventuality didn’t come to pass.”
Suddenly Kristol found himself aligned with the cocktail partiers at Davos he once mocked. Global elites might oppose the interests of American voters, but at least they didn’t accuse Bill Kristol of lying about Iraq. Kristol lapsed into a kind of public nervous breakdown, once coming close to tears on television, as he tried to stop Trump.
He failed. Trump won the nomination, but Kristol barely took a breath. He began searching for a warm body willing to mount a third-party challenge that would guarantee Hillary Clinton’s victory in the general election.
Kristol had lunch with Mitt Romney in Washington to discuss a third-party run. He encouraged Senators Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio to jump into the race, as well as General James Mattis. When all of them declined, Kristol settled on a little-known writer for National Review named David French. French seemed nice enough but clearly didn’t fully understand what he was getting into.
Kristol tried to pressure French into running by preemptively announcing his candidacy. In May 2016, Kristol tweeted, “There will be an independent candidate—an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.”
Apparently this scared French. Within days he announced he wasn’t running. Few voters noticed.
Eventually, Kristol drafted a congressional staffer and former CIA employee named Evan McMullin. Like French, McMullin was new to public life, all but unknown outside his immediate circle of acquaintances. But McMullin had two qualities essential for the job Kristol had in mind: unusually high self-regard, and a willingness to defend the Iraq War. McMullin entered the race. He finished in November with less than 1 percent of the vote.
Trump’s election seemed to undo Bill Kristol entirely. He lost his job at the Weekly Standard after more than twenty years, forced out by owners who were panicked about declining readership. He seemed to spend most of his time on Twitter ranting about Trump.
Before long he was ranting about the people who elected Trump. At an American Enterprise Institute panel event in February 2017, Kristol made the case for why immigrants are more impressive than native-born Americans. “Basically if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two, three, four generations of hard work, everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled, whatever.” Most Americans, Kristol said, “grew up as spoiled kids and so forth.”
A year later, Kristol had moved even further. In February 2018, Kristol tweeted that he would “take in a heartbeat a group of newly naturalized American citizens over the spoiled native-born know-nothings” who supported Trump.
By the spring of 2018, Kristol was considering a run for president himself. He was still making the case for the invasion of Iraq, as well as pushing for a new war, this time in Syria, and maybe in Lebanon and Iran, too. Like most people in Washington, he’d learned nothing at all.