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The New American Interventionism: Essays from Political Science Quarterly
Demetrios James Caraley (ed.)
1999
Foreword
The purpose of The New American Interventionism is to bring within one volume articles that talk to the general question of American military invervention since the end of the cold war. This collection does not purport to be a comprehensive overview of all the interventions that have taken place. Rather, the articles were written by individual authors who, on their own initiative or in response to my editorial suggestion, were moved to write about specific topics. I find it gratifying that the book as a whole has turned out to provide powerful lessons about the success or failure of the most important interventions and the general strategies and political processes that underlay them.
The scores of lessons in the book for policy makers and interested members of the public cannot be summarized in a foreword. But in rereading all the articles together in preparation for this book, I was struck by four patterns. First is the great complexity of the American government in reaching and implementing decisions to use military force, because proposals to use force generate conflict. The State Department, parts of the Defense Department, the CIA, and the national security adviser all have different perspectives and responsibilities and different relationships to the regime or the person to be influenced. In addition, foreign allies must be consulted to obtain their support or at least their acquiescence, as must organizations like the UN and NATO, under whose authority the military action may be taking place. The conflict and delay are simply in keeping with the United States’s pluralistic political system. But in military matters, the internal conflict sends contradictory signals to those whom the United States is trying to target. As a result, the targets it wants to influence choose the signal they prefer to believe, which often leads them to disbelieve U.S. resolve and makes them refuse to comply until the United States actually uses force.
Second, The New American Interventionism shows that influence against a determined foe cannot be exerted, even by the world’s sole remaining superpower, “on the cheap,” that is, with verbal threats or limited air attacks or cruise missiles that carry the risk of only minimal casualties. The success in removing Raul Cedras as the head of Haiti’s government and Manuel Noriega as the leader of Panama’s government and in imposing and implementing a cease-fire in Bosnia with the agreement of Slobodan Milosevic all required use of ground troops. In the case of Haiti, Cedras capitulated when he was persuaded that American airborne troops had already taken off to invade his country; as a result, the troops did not have to go in fighting. In the Gulf War, however, more than five weeks of the heaviest air attacks with nonnuclear bombs and missiles in the history of warfare did not coerce Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government to take troops out of Kuwait. Only a massive campaign by ground troops with the risk of substantial casualties—which in actuality did not occur—forced the Iraqis out.
Neither this foreword nor this book is a brief in favor of incurring large American casualties. But to be seen as unwilling to absorb any casualties severely limits the ability of the United States’s overwhelmingly superior weaponry and trained military personnel to coerce compliance even from a Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein, who are heads of third-rate powers. They have learned that because the United States is so reluctant to use military power, and especially ground troops, they can safely and repeatedly ignore deadlines and ultimatums and score tactical gains while receiving no or only acceptable damage in retaliation.
Third, the book shows how predominantly ad hoc the American use of military power has been against regimes it has been trying to influence since the end of the Soviet communist containment policy. Sometimes America intervenes to roll back an invasion, sometimes to try to stop massacres of civilians, sometimes to guarantee cease-fires in civil wars (while almost always tilting in favor of the underdog of the moment), sometimes to bring about democratization, sometimes to retaliate against terrorist attacks, and sometimes to displace foreign leaders it doesn’t like. But often America does not intervene in similar situations at all. Having a consistent grand strategy for all contingencies of intervention may be impossible in the complexities of the post-cold war era. But couldn’t the president and congressional leadership agree to articulate some general principles for classes of interventions, such as civil wars involving civilian ethnic cleansing and other atrocities? Such principles could speed up decisions on new interventions and deter massacres by convincing would-be aggressors that American military force will be used to stop and possibly capture, try, and punish them.
Fourth, the book strikingly reminds us that in military interventions, Congress has largely been bypassed concerning the use of military force and has allowed the presidency—however much weakened domestically—again to become an “imperial” one. Once the president decided to act, he normally did not ask Congress for authority or for specific appropriations. The president simply declared that his Article II designation as commander in chief gave him his own constitutional authority to use force and to finance it with money already granted to the military in lump-sum appropriations. The one exception was President George Bush, who asked for congressional authority to use American force in the Gulf War. But even that request came some five months after huge American military forces had already been deployed at positions from which they could strike immediately. And Bush’s request came after strong off-the-record statements that even if the resolution failed in Congress, he would go ahead and risk impeachment. President Bush explicitly admitted this in a January 1999 lecture to the Senate. Not only was Congress not asked for authority in most military attacks, but many were already in progress or finished before the president—Reagan, Bush, or Clinton—even made a case to Congress as a whole or to the public justifying the action.
This is not to say that Congress has clamored to get formally involved in deciding to use military force. For the most part, members have preferred to avoid such involvement because of the inherent complexities of intervention decisions and because if the venture fails, they can second-guess the president. Leaks to the media created stories about most of the actions being planned; but, except in the Gulf War, Congress showed little interest in doing anything about them. Indeed, the Senate showed only the slightest interest in the Clinton administration’s proposed treaty change to expand NATO to include former Soviet satellites, although this change will probably have much longer-term military policy consequences than any of the recent military interventions have had.
By bypassing Congress when initiating military attacks, the president implicitly asserts as irrelevant Congress’s Article I constitutional power to “declare war,” an untenable constitutional position. 1 But he also puts himself at an intellectual disadvantage. By not having to persuade independently elected majorities in Congress of the case’s merits, the president loses the opportunity of engaging in a give-and-take with equals through which he can gain fresh perspectives to balance those generated and debated in secrecy by his subordinates in the executive branch. It was this failure of the president to consult more broadly and to rely instead on executive branch groupthink that played a large part in the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco and in the disastrous decisions starting in 1964 to expand the war in Vietnam.
As of this writing at the end of the NATO air war against Serbia, U.S. post–cold war military interventions have not caused any major disasters—though the outcome of the war in Serbia is unclear and other interventions have produced some notable successes. But the seeds of disasters have already been planted in the Balkans, Middle East, the Korean peninsula, and the Taiwan strait. Furthermore, terrorists who can launch limited military attacks against the United States have no postal return address of their own.
An implicit national policy of allowing unilateral military intervention by the president on a largely ad hoc basis without official congressional support and without using ground troops does not constitute a viable long-term means of protecting our national security interests or role as a superpower. The president thus needs to articulate some coherent grounds on which America will use military force and try to persuade Congress and the attentive members of the public of the grounds’ validity. The president must also try to educate the public on the reality that substantial casualties must sometimes be risked to advance both American security and humanitarian interests.
Endnotes
Note 1: The claims of Congress for the control of warmaking rest on its Article I powers to “provide for the common defense,” to “declare war,” to “raise and support armies,” and “to provide and maintain a navy.” Back.
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