Is the Biden Administration Stumbling Into War?
Nothing is more dangerous than stronger powers, even inadvertently,
sending signals that are interpreted as weakness by weaker powers.
What causes wars?
Innately aggressive cultures and governments, megalomania, the
desire for power, resources, and empire prompt nations to bully or attack
others. Less rational Thucydidean motives such as fear and honor and
perceptions of self-interest are not to be discounted either.
But what allows these preemptive or aggressive agendas to reify,
to take shape, and to leave tens of thousands dead?
The less culpable target (and wars are rarely a
matter of 50/50 culpability) also has a say in what causes wars. The invaded
and assaulted sometimes overlooked or contextualized serial and mounting
aggression. They displayed real military weakness or simple political ineptness
that eroded deterrence. They failed to make defensive alliances with stronger
nations or slashed defense investments that made the use of deterrent force
impossible.
In sum, without deterrence and the clear potential in
extremis to do an aggressor damage, there can be no meaningful peace
negotiations, no “conflict resolution”—unless one believes a Hitler, Stalin,
Mao, or Kim Il-sung can become a reasonable interlocutor across the peace
table.
Weakness as
Strength, Strength as Weakness
But there are also other more subtle follies that can turn
tensions into outright fighting. And they are relevant in the current global
landscape as we go not just from one president to the next, but from a realist
and tragic view of foreign policy to an idealist and therapeutic one.
One catalyst for war is a lack of transparency about the relative
strengths and will of potential enemies.
If, even unwittingly, President Biden projects the image that the
Pentagon is more concerned about ferreting out wayward internal enemies than in
seeking unity by deterring aggressors, then belligerents such as China, North
Korea, and Iran and others will likely—even if falsely and unwisely—wager that
the United States will not or cannot react to provocations, as it has done in
the past. And accordingly, they will be emboldened to provoke their neighbors
with less worry about consequences.
Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 on the false assumption
that Stalin had been too busy purging his military elite, starving his own
people, or executing both rivals and friends. He certainly did all that and
more.
Yet despite Soviet cannibalism, nonetheless, Hitler was apparently
unaware that the chaotic Russians could still field an army twice the size of
his own. Stalin’s tanks and artillery were just as or more deadly than
Hitler’s—and soon far more numerous than the assets of Blitzkrieg. A spirited,
defiant and, yes, united populace was determined to protect Mother Russia from
the invader. The British Empire and America were far more potent allies than
Hitler’s Mussolini and Tojo.
So wars are deterred when all the potential players know the
relative strengths of each and the relative willingness to use such power in
defense of a nation’s interests. Lack of such knowledge leads to dangerous
misjudgments. And war then becomes a grotesque foreordained laboratory
experiment to confirm what should have been known in advance.
Wars begin when aggressive powers believe that their targets are
weaker, or give the false impression that they are weaker, or at least stay
inert in the face of provocation. What were Argentina’s generals or Saddam
Hussein thinking when they provoked the United Kingdom or the United States
during the Falkland War and First Gulf War? No doubt, they assumed that their
more powerful targets were too busy elsewhere, played out, or insufficiently
concerned to react. In aggregate, a lot of damage and death followed in those
two respective brief wars of 1982 and 1991—and all to prove what should have
been obvious.
Perhaps Buenos Aires had one too many times read of British
parliamentarians referencing the “Malvinas” rather than the Falkland Islands.
Or Saddam remembered too well the United States Ambassador to Iraq naïvely
voicing uninterest in 1990 “border” disputes between quarrelling Arab
neighbors—perhaps in the manner of Dean Acheson’s controversial speech in
January 1950 to the effect that South Korea was probably not inside the U.S.
defensive orbit abroad and thus made a previously hesitant Stalin, Mao, and Kim
Il-sung a little less hesitant.
Both Argentina and Iraq wrongly equated diplomatic naiveté and
laxity with military unreadiness and weakness and paid the price in inglorious
defeat.
The truth is that for the immediate future, the U.S. economy and
military remain the strongest in the world. Provoking America is an especially
unwise act, given the repercussions that could follow. What reassures our
allies is not talk of new bipartisanship, internationalism, and tolerance, but
quiet coupled with overwhelming power and a clear message to use it in defense
of our interests.
Some German and Japanese military grandees pointed out to the
Hitler and Tojo regimes that it was insanity to de facto prompt
a potential alliance between the British Empire, the United States, and the
USSR, given their enemies’ aggregate populations, collective GDP, global reach,
and military potential if mobilized.
But too many in the deluded Nazi and Japanese militaries instead
judged British appeasement in the mid-1930s, American isolationism during the
1930s, and Russian collaboration from 1939 to 1941 as proof of weakness and
timidity. Nothing is more dangerous than stronger powers, even inadvertently,
sending signals that are interpreted as weakness by weaker powers.
Biden should not assume that Trump’s gratuitous rough talk abroad
was as dangerous as loud laxity. His predecessor never committed the felony of
suggesting to a weaker Iran or China that their aggression would be
contextualized or ignored. And his unpredictability more likely bothered
Beijing than the predictable acquiescence and reassurance of the Obama years.
Peace For Our Time
It is also dangerous to raise unwarranted expectations that a new
round of negotiations, a new head of state, a new climate of reconciliation can
all per se reformulate animosities and lead to landmark
negotiations and peaceful resolutions to potential conflicts.
If proper attitudes, good will, and eagerness for negotiations on
the part of democracies could ensure peace, then the 20th century could have
skipped the over 150 million killed in conflicts, and the League of Nations and
United Nations would now be deified for eliminating deadly wars.
The story of intifadas and Middle East wars is often the aftermath
of unrealistic new peace efforts to bridge differences that could not be
bridged without the perceived humiliation of one or both parties. Thinking an
enemy will give concessions that it simply will not or cannot only inflames an
aggressor.
Neville Chamberlain’s felony was not just going to Munich with the
intention of rewarding German aggression, or believing he could trust a thug,
but also returning waving a piece of paper with grand boasts of “peace for our
time” that deluded his own countrymen. When the idiocy of Munich soon sorely
woke up the formerly ecstatic British public, and perhaps enraged the German
people who felt Hitler’s enemy already earlier acquiesced to German dreams,
both nations concluded that if a sure peace treaty had failed, then what was
left but war?
The so-called comprehensive Peace of Nicias (421 B.C.) was
supposed to ensure not just peace to end the first decade of the Peloponnesian
War, but a grand 50-year peace and de facto alliance of Sparta
and Athens to resume their partnered leadership of the Greek world.
But after the prior five invasions of Attica, the plague, the
chronic revolts of Athenian allies, the savagery at Plataea, Mytilene, and
Torone, a mere modest armistice would have been a greater achievement.
Instead, within months, both sides were scheming to use third
parties to harm their respective “ally.” And the massacre at Melos, the
disaster at Sicily, and a near decade of brutal naval war in the Aegean lay
ahead. Once grand, comprehensive, all-inclusive peace deals fail, both sides
can see no alternative but war.
“Comprehensive” peace talks often can be more dangerous than
modest agreements to channel hatred in some way other than shooting. Biden
should keep an eye on Iran and China, and avoid the fantasies of some
wide-ranging settlement that will be neither thorough nor a settlement.
We’re All Glad He’s
Gone
Just as hazardous is to attack gratuitously the statecraft of
one’s predecessor. Such internecine sniping sends the message abroad that
common ground will be found not among Americans but among America and its
enemies—a surreal idea that America’s enemies see as weakness to be
leveraged.
Barack Obama made a career about reassuring the world that George
W. Bush and his preemptive wars were reckless and not to be repeated. He earned
the murderous ISIS “Jayvee” caliphate as his reward along with misadventures
with Syria and in Libya. If we wondered why Putin turned so ambitiously
aggressive, it might have been that the foundations of Obama-Clinton reset were
based on a false conclusion that Bush’s modest pushback against Russian
aggression was too provocative and would be mitigated in a way that
green-lighted Putin.
When a government loudly and boastfully expresses a new reset, a
new paradigm, a new arrogance about solving problems, it risks blaming its own
country rather than the foreign belligerent, and thereby can only encourage
adventurism.
Joe Biden has billed his foreign policy team as a return of the
“bipartisan” and “internationalist” breakthrough pros—in rebuke of his
predecessor, in the manner that Trump himself sometimes publicly trashed
Obama’s foreign policy, rather than just silently resetting and changing it.
In all these cases, foreign powers, friendly and hostile, infer
not just that U.S. foreign policy is mercurial, but that they can calibrate and
massage it to find either assistance or exploit weakness, that otherwise would
be difficult or unwise.
After all, if Biden sounds like he hates Trump more than the
Iranians, why then would not the Iranians believe he is the enemy of their
enemy and now a friend to be used?
When a president tells the world that his predecessor did not
vaccinate one American, and then enters office weeks after he and 17 million
other Americans were already vaccinated, what is the world—and especially
American enemies— to think? That irrational hatred of Trump and his policies is
a way to win exemption for their own behavior?
If Biden promises to return to the Iran Deal to create peace in
the Middle East, to bring back the Palestinians to the center of negotiations
to “find a comprehensive peace” with Israel, he will not merely stumble, but
fail after claiming he did everything right in failing.
Despite the animus toward Trump, nothing is broken abroad. NATO is
better funded, better armed, and more fairly contributory to the shared cause.
In the Middle East, pro-Western Arab and Muslim nations are now aligned with
the United States to contain Iran and its appendages like the Assads in Syria,
Lebanese Hezbollah, and West Bank Hamas. Iran, the font of anti-Westernism and
anti-Americanism in the Middle East has not merely been sanctioned and
isolated, but broken and decimated by the pandemic and crashing oil
prices.
The reason that China despised the Trump Administration was not,
as it claimed, xenophobia, racism, or China bashing, but rather because Trump
called out and exposed its decades of aggression, subversion, and its planned
trajectory to global hegemony.
When the Biden team talks of reentering the Iran Deal without the
Trump baggage, or wants a new relationship with China, they may well instead be
interpreted by our enemies as rejecting deterrence, forgetting why the Trump
Administration held those two countries to account, and inviting them again to
take risks they otherwise might not be willing to take.
Our enemies may not see Biden just as elderly and frail, his
congressional majorities thin, his animus directed more at the Trump movement
than others abroad, but as unlikely to respond to their own aggression.
Biden would do better to apprise quietly his friends and enemies
of America’s force and determination. He should resist comprehensive deals with
China and Iran that have unrealistic chances of success given their agendas.
And he could claim Trump’s successes as his own and continue their current
trajectories, rather than court favor abroad by distancing himself from a
largely successful foreign policy guided by Secretary of State Pompeo.
Otherwise, the alternatives will become increasingly dangerous.
About Victor Davis
Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for
American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford
University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian,
columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has
been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded
the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is
also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and
a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author
most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was
Fought and Won and The Case for Trump.
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