I've been reading Tanner Greer's blog, The Scholar's Stage, and his twitter feed for the past couple of years, initially because of his writing on China. He is always interesting. Greer's most recent piece is Pausing at the Precipice, regarding how to respond to Putin's invasion of Ukraine. My sympathies and emotions are with Ukraine, but the essay, quite properly, hits a cautionary note.
He writes about the Western response to date:
They are a natural, proportional, and even predictable response to Putin’s decision to settle the question of Ukrainian nationhood through the force of arms. Yet it is precisely the naturalness of our policy that we should be wary of. A righteous reaction may be a dangerous one. The imperatives of action disguise an ugly truth: in the field of power politics it is outcomes, not intentions, that matter most. Failure to slow down and examine the assumptions and motivations behind our choices may lead to decisions that feel right in the moment, but fail to safeguard our interests, secure our values, or reduce the human toll of war in the long run.
He then goes on to cite Michael Mazarr’s 2019 book, Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy (which I read last year and found to be the best thing I've read about America's decision to invade Iraq). Greer writes of that decision:
The administration did not intentionally mislead the nation into battle; motivated reasoning, not deceit, warped their understanding of events. Oil was never central to the campaign; when it appeared in war council discussions, it did so only under the rosy assumption that Iraq’s oil revenues would be sufficient to cover reconstruction costs. Contrary to the received wisdom in many quarters today, the invasion of Iraq was not about about spreading liberal democracy in the Middle East. That justification for the war came mostly in 2004 and the years that followed, when the WMD threat had been exposed as delusion. Liberalism did not lead us into Iraq so much as keep us there.
Perhaps the most astonishing fact about America’s invasion of Iraq is that the National Security Council never formally debated the decision to wage war. “One of the great mysteries to me,” wrote one NSC principal after leaving office, “is exactly when the war in Iraq became inevitable.” His confusion is understandable: there was no moment, no meeting, where the pros and the cons of invasion were laid out in full. No one ever asked “should we invade?” Instead they debated questions like “if we decide to invade, what must we do to prepare?” and “When we invade, what must our objectives be?” Mazarr explains this curious lack of first-order thought, the origin point of the motivated reasoning that produced both flawed intelligence assessments and unnecessarily hasty demands for action, as a byproduct of moral imperatives.
Catastrophic misjudgment rests on the convergence of two elements: an emergent sense that there is a moral imperative to act paired with a breakdown in the formal decision-making processes designed to force policy makers to carefully weigh the potential consequences of their decisions.
The entire essay is worth reading.
My additional thoughts:
As sympathetic as Ukraine's plight is, the interests of the West and of that country may diverge as the war continues. Now that the Russians have invaded, I think it harder for Ukrainians to accept any settlement that might lead to that country's neutrality or that in any way allows Russia to claim even the tiniest victory. But unless the West is banking on the overthrow of Putin and his replacement by someone more acceptable (a very risky bet under the circumstances) it is in our interests to seek a settlement, even as we strengthen the NATO alliance and impose sanctions. In order to get there, however, statesmen need to be thinking down the road and not just about short-term actions.
In the case of Mazarr's book it confirmed some things that became evident to me during the course of the Iraq War; for instance the complete lack of coordinated planning about what to do with Iraq once the initial invasion succeeded, but I was astonished to read about the complete lack of a comprehensive discussion about whether to go to war.
Leap of Faith also raises the question of who has the requisite wisdom to make long-term assessments. At the time I viewed Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell as seasoned and experienced and had confidence in their decision making abilities (I felt less sure about GW Bush). In reality, it turned out that Rumsfeld and Powell, while never fully on board with the decision, retreated to passive-aggressive behavior while Cheney, to my surprise, ran amuck while ignoring the domestic political lessons from every conflict the United States had engaged in during its existence. Even with that, the ultimate responsibility for failure resides in President Bush, who failed to engage in the details, and with National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice who failed to force a definitive and reasoned discussion about Iraq, and to resolve, or elevate to the President, the differing visions of Rumsfeld, Powell, and Cheney which became evident during the run up to the war.
There is one significant difference between Ukraine and Iraq. Iraq was an unforced error. The initiative was with the U.S. and we had time to consider it. Time pressures are much different with Ukraine. Decisions must be made. It does not make it any less dangerous - in fact, it may be more dangerous - but time means more pressure on everyone and even more need for resisting the momentum that occurs in these situations and careful consideration for second and third order impacts of decisions.
There are several posts I've written touching on the same concerns:
Japan's decision to attack the U.S. in 1941
The U.S. decision to enter combat operations in Vietnam (see Dereliction of Duty)
And, of course, Mastering The Tides of the World
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