I'm no fan of President Trump, but it's irrational to automatically oppose everything he does. Many will disagree, but he recently did two things right by announcing a U.S. troop withdrawal from Syria and a tentative force reduction in Afghanistan. I can only hope the baneful influence of John Bolton and other traditional pro-intervention hawks doesn't change his mind.
Participation in other people's civil wars is nearly always counterproductive. We should have learned this during our Vietnam fiasco, but the "Vietnam syndrome" -- avoidance of further interventions -- lasted only a few decades. By intervening in Syria, Iraq, Iraq again, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, we have only added to the killing, infrastructure destruction and refugees.
The war in Syria has been a tragic mistake ever since its origin in 2011 during the Arab Spring when uprisings began against the ruthless dictator Bashar al-Assad. We immediately began aiding anti-Assad rebels, we began supplying weapons to rebel forces in 2013, we targeted Syrian Government forces since early 2017, and we called constantly for regime change.
This intervention in the civil war was coupled with action against Islamic State terrorists. The Islamic State battle can perhaps be justified by their threat to the wider world, but regime-change attacks and military support for the rebels was counterproductive. For just one of many things, Islamic State could have been sooner and more thoroughly defeated had we cooperated with Assad in fighting them.
Most Americans, including me, supported the U.S. war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan following the 2001 twin towers attack. But our gratuitous war in 2003 to change Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq took our eye off that ball. As a result, Iraq is now in worse shape than ever and essentially allied with Iran while al-Qaeda remains a terrorist threat and the Taliban are winning in Afghanistan.
Robert Kaplan, senior adviser to the Eurasia Group and brilliant foreign affairs writer, recently published a New York Times article titled "Time to get out of Afghanistan." According to Kaplan, "no other country in the world symbolizes the decline of the American empire as much as Afghanistan." He argues the war is helping our strategic rivals such as Russia and Iran while costing us $45 billion per year and $2 trillion total, that there's little chance of military victory over the Taliban or establishing sustainable democratic government, and that deep culture favors the heavily Pashtun Taliban to eventually win and govern. He compares our present dilemma in Afghanistan with our humiliation in Vietnam's civil war.
America has by far the world's strongest military. Our defense budget exceeds that of the next seven nations combined. The approved Department of Defense budget for 2019 is $674 billion plus $20 billion for nuclear weapons. According to a 2015 Politico Magazine report, America maintains nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories; for comparison, Britain, France and Russia combined have 30 foreign bases. The cost of foreign bases and troops in recent years has been about $180 billion per year. All this leads to a muscle-bound, overly-violent foreign policy. U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright named our military over-reach correctly in the title of his far-sighted 1967 book "The Arrogance of Power."
By contrast, U.S. foreign economic and development assistance funds currently total about $26 billion per year. With a military budget that's 25 times this amount, it's not surprising that our foreign policy often does more harm than good. As President Eisenhower, a former Army general, put it in 1953, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." For example, Syria needs $200 billion to reconstruct. We should provide much of this since our military support of the rebels led to much of the damage.
Sen. Fulbright noted that America was "at that historical point at which a great nation is in danger of losing its perspective on what exactly is within its realm of power." He wrote in 1967 as America was losing its perspective to a single-minded focus on military support for one side in a civil war that was none of our business. In the Middle East in recent decades we have gone down this counterproductive road over and over.
It's time to replace most of America's military force with a peace force focused on the kind of civilian assistance that can really help these countries.
Commentary on 01/15/2019