The End of the Indispensable Nation

Transcript

Archive Recording, John Kerry: We are known as the indispensable nation for good reason.

Archive Recording, President Barack Obama: It has been true for the century past, and it will be true for the century to come.

Archive Recording, Hillary Clinton: And part of what makes America an exceptional nation is that we are also an indispensable nation.

Archive Recording: We understand that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. We don’t know anything more than that. We don’t know if it was a commercial aircraft.

Archive Recording: I looked up, and all of a sudden, it smashed right dead into the center of the World Trade Center.

Archive Recording: Two planes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on the country.

Archive Recording: And you can see the two towers, a huge explosion now raining debris on all of us.

Archive Recording, President George W. Bush: In a single instant, we realized that this will be a decisive decade in the history of liberty, that we’ve been called to a unique role in human events.

Terror unanswered can not only bring down buildings; it can threaten the stability of legitimate governments. And you know what? We’re not going to allow it.

SW: Hello. How are you?

SW: I’ll close some windows to my many tabs.

SW: Thanks for organizing this.

SW: As World War II began in Europe, Americans engaged in a very difficult debate over what role the United States should play in the war and the world. Now, prior to WWII, there had been a long-standing tradition that the United States should avoid entering into political and military entanglements, a term that was used by some of the founding generation like Thomas Jefferson. The idea was that the New World was the proper sphere in which the United States would exert its leadership. But the Old World back in Europe, and also covering Asia, that was a separate matter. That was a corrupt sphere where if the United States tried to use military power and enter into political commitments, it would only corrupt itself and do itself harm. And the United States essentially tried to work within that framework for what is still most of its history.

And so, in the 1930s, there was a movement to keep United States out of a looming war, first in Asia and then in Europe. And so, what happened over a, I think it was actually quite a short amount of time, from the fall of France to Nazi Germany – a stunning event in the middle of 1940 – through the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into the war, the United States recalculated its role in the world. And, fearing that totalitarian powers might for the first time come to become the dominant powers in Europe and Asia, and thus in most centers of global power, they decided the United States had to seek supremacy for itself. And so that initiated a new era for the United States and the world, in which the United States would pursue economic, political, and military dominance in principle on a global scale. That didn’t mean the United States would act wherever there was a conflict, but it did mean that the United States perceived a vital interest in matters that pertain to where the overall distribution of power lies. And that continued through the end of WWII and into the Cold War.

SW: So you might have thought that with the Soviet Union having completely collapsed in dramatic and unpredicted fashion, the United States would look around the world, proclaim victory, and send a lot of its troops home. And to some extent, that’s what the United States did. It did retract its military budgets over the course of the 1990s in the wake of the Soviet collapse, if you look at it as a percentage of GDP, and some military bases were closed.

But the bigger picture is quite different. Instead of retracting American power, US foreign policymakers across multiple political parties decided that the United States should seek and achieve a greater dominance than ever before. From that point of view, the collapse of the Soviet Union actually represented a great opportunity now to make US leadership extend across the entire world and not just the so-called “free world” during the Cold War. That is to say, the world, the part of the world that was not under a communist rule. And so, the United States ended up actually expanding its military commitments and deployments. It’s used force far more frequently since 1991, since the demise of the Soviet Union, than it did during the Cold War itself. And it’s entered into more security commitments through NATO and other military alliances – not fewer.

Archive Recording, President George W. Bush: I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, “We do it this way, so should you.” I think we can help, but…

Archive Recording, President George W. Bush: Tonight, we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.

Archive Recording, President George W. Bush: Now this war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion. It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago, where no ground troops were used, and not a single American was lost in combat. Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen.

SW: Well, from the very start after 9/11, Bush proclaimed a kind of war against evil. He announced, actually on that evening of September 11, that America was targeted for attack, because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. So, already, there was a kind of a narrative being formed that the United States did not face a particular distinct enemy, that the issue was more than providing security, answering an attack, preventing attack in the future. But rather, this was a struggle that would express who America was as a country on the world stage, that the United States, having been targeted for its beacon of freedom and opportunity, would almost inevitably be targeted by those who, to quote Bush again, “hate us for our freedoms.” And therefore, in this existential struggle, the United States would always have enemies, and the only sensible course was to kill as many of them as possible and try to prove to the rest that we are indeed the beacon of freedom, and they should join us and not the side of the terrorists and the other kinds of resistors.

So, I think what is so important to think about as we wrestle with the legacy of 9/11 is why it was that – it wasn’t just Bush by the way. Virtually no one said, “Well, look, let’s keep this targeted. Let’s focus on al-Qaeda, the organization responsible for this grievous attack on the Twin Towers and on the Pentagon. Let’s do everything in our power to decimate that group and hold responsible anyone who’s been aiding that group, but that’s it. And if we can do that, we will have solved our threat.”

That is very much not the position that George W. Bush took, but also not the position taken by mainstream figures in our politics or in intellectual circles. And I think one of reasons that that was, was that it would give the United States, in a terribly paradoxical sense, too little to do. It could be a short and rather mundane operation of choking off financial flows, going after what was, all things considered, a pretty small terrorist group: al-Qaeda. It might have been over rather quickly. But there was a thirst to do much more than that, to demonstrate that American power was as indispensable as your former boss, Madeleine Albright, claimed that it was several years before in 1998, when she was justifying bombing Iraq before the Iraq War of 2003.

SW: Well, the United States essentially went to war with a great portion of the world. Right now, just try looking up: how many countries is the United States at war with? It is not an easy question to answer. This is the fruit of what the United States embarked upon after the 9/11 attacks. Not just going to war against the entity that grievously attacked us, but declaring an open-ended war on terror or evil or something of that nature – a crusade for unclear purposes, but one that was supposed to demonstrate American power and transform an entire region of the world. And so, what that has done is given a license for successive presidents to undertake lethal operations in a very intense way in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in less obvious, but incredibly damaging ways through drone strikes or special-operations raids. And this is a war that’s still ongoing.

Archive Recording, protestors chanting: No justice, no peace. US out of the Middle East.

Archive Recording, protestors chanting: One, two, three, four, we don’t want your daddy’s war.

Archive Recording, President Barack Obama: As somebody who never supported this war, thought it was a bad idea, I don’t want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us in the war in the first place. That’s the kind of leadership I plan to provide.

Archive Recording: There’s no question we are at war once again. And this first phase is to take out [Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi’s] air defenses.

Archive Recording: Throughout the night, the US pounded Libya. The strikes began with more than 110 Tomahawk missiles launched mostly from US ships and submarines.

Archive Recording: President Barack Obama took to the airwaves to tell the American people why he ordered this.

Archive Recording, President Barack Obama: Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as president, I refuse to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.

SW: So, if you think about it on the whole, what Obama did was adopt friendlier language for the War on Terror. He made a show of being more multilateral about things. He surged in Afghanistan, but then drew down in Afghanistan and moved the US counterterrorism footing to a low- and no-footprint method of operation through special-forces raids and drone strikes.

But none of that really amounted to ending the war. And I think what he showed is that even though he could describe the war on terrorism no longer even in the terms of war, [but] as a kind of technocratic campaign to counter extremism, the public nevertheless came to worry that we had existential enemies. Why else were we killing people routinely? And [they] began to suspect, at least those on the right, that Obama was not focused on enough of our enemies and needed to take the gloves off. And that is, in part, what Donald Trump promised to do when he ran for president.

SW: When you go to war in an open-ended fashion for goals that are not achievable, a number of bad things happen, and they’ve happened now for two decades. In order to go to war, one creates a sense of existential fear to explain why we are putting our people, our service members, in harm’s way and asking them to make the ultimate sacrifice. So, first of all, an inflation of the threats that we face in an entire region – the greater Middle East – begins to occur. And then, because our goals are unwinnable, the public, which has been made to fear the enemy, starts to wonder, “Are we winning? And if we are winning, why aren’t we leaving?” And this fear festered.

I’m not sure that you could have a nativist movement in the country in the way that Donald Trump’s movement took form without, at that point, 15 years almost of fear whipped up by a sense that we had grave enemies across a huge arc of the Earth and had to essentially be there to kill them indefinitely or else they might come for us. He also did something innovative and connected our fears of foreigners distant from North America and invested those fears in immigrants, especially those coming in through the border in Mexico. And this is, I think, a strong part of the appeal of the distinctly Trumpian core of his support.

Archive Recording, President Donald Trump: Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo.

Archive Recording: The United States and the Taliban have signed an agreement aimed at ending nearly two decades of conflict in Afghanistan.

Archive Recording: The agreement establishes a timetable for the phased withdrawal of US troops, in exchange for guarantees from the Taliban, not to allow groups, including al-Qaeda, to operate in their territory.

Archive Recording, President Joe Biden: We cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan, hoping to create ideal conditions for the withdrawal, and expecting a different result.

Archive Recording: The Taliban is in control of Afghanistan, the country’s president has fled, and Western countries are scrambling to get people out.

Archive Recording: As the US scrambles to control the mayhem at the Kabul airport, the situation is growing increasingly dire for thousands of Afghans trying to flee the Taliban.

Archive Recording: Desperate crowds had been rushing the runway, trying to get on bull planes, even clinging to aircraft as they taxied for takeoff.

SW: Now, there are two questions here that are somewhat separate, though they’re also deeply connected. The first question is: Was Biden correct to decide to withdraw all US ground troops this year, more or less pursuant to the agreement that his predecessor had negotiated with the Taliban as part of the Doha agreement? That, I think, is the fundamental choice. To my mind, Joe Biden made the right decision. The war in Afghanistan, contrary to what some say, wasn’t sustainable, wasn’t low in cost, and there was no equilibrium. The Taliban were consistently making gains. Perhaps 10,000 Afghans were dying from the conflict every year, over a number of years. Americans were also fighting and dying, except in the period where the United States had reached an agreement with the Taliban, and either the United States was literally going to stay there forever, or it ought to leave and ought to leave immediately.

Then there’s the question of: How well did the Biden administration plan for and execute the withdrawal of US forces, which ultimately became a withdrawal of US personnel, including an evacuation of the US embassy in Kabul? Now, that is a difficult question to answer, I think, at this point in time. I know I’m giving you the historian’s answer, but – because we have to go back and understand exactly what did the administration and the various agencies understand and project and when. Because, as the administration has pointed out, mounting a quicker and fuller withdrawal of Americans and Afghans at a time when it was not clear that the Afghan government would completely lose the war might have become a self-fulfilling prophecy and caused the Afghan security forces to lose confidence in their own viability and create the very outcome that we had hoped to avoid, which was a complete Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. So, I think this is an issue that Congress should be investigating. I’m pretty sure Congress will investigate and ask difficult questions. And I’m all for doing that. But I think we should understand that there’s no good way to lose a war to the Taliban. That is not going to produce something rosy at the end of it.

SW: Well, I would like to see out of this terrible defeat a new kind of American engagement in the world. And that could start with Afghanistan, where I think it was absolutely correct and overdue to end the war. But now, I think it’s important to be welcoming of people that have fought alongside the United States, or whom the United States was protecting and are vulnerable now to the Taliban, to welcome them, whether it’s here into the United States or to other countries. And I think, not just in this case, but in general, if we have a kind of humanitarianism that isn’t defined any longer by dropping bombs to stop the “bad guys,” but rather is defined by helping people directly, that would do us a great deal of good. It would avoid unnecessary wars that are very costly to ourselves and that often do not actually help and achieve humanitarian outcomes. And we can actually do good in the world by engaging people directly in non-military fashions.

Archive Recording: China: 1.3 billion people, an economy projected to become larger than ours in just a few years, and a rapidly growing military. How much trouble are we in?

Archive Recording, President Joe Biden: China has an overall goal, and I don’t criticize them for the goal. They have an overall goal to become a leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world. That’s not going to happen on my watch.

Archive Recording, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: Let’s see the Chinese Communist Party also for what it is: the central threat of our times. Our vigorous deployments have helped lead an international awakening to the threat of the CCP.

SW: Well, there’s no question that China’s rise, its extraordinary rise, is something that the United States has to contend with over the long term. It’s one of the reasons, I think, you’re seeing both the Trump and the Biden administrations seeking to reduce the US level of commitment in the greater Middle East, because they realize correctly that there is a much bigger challenge out there.

At the same time, I am quite worried about the potential for us to inflate the China threat, much as we’ve inflated the threat of terrorism and threats from countries like Iraq in the greater Middle East over the past several decades. So, I think one of the main challenges that China poses is economic, and I think that’s what most Americans are responding to when they express concern about China. But the response to that challenge is going to be also economic. It’s going to be making investments in the United States.

But what I’m worried about is a kind of inflation of the various challenges China poses, such that it seems that China is a monolith and every challenge it poses in one domain reflects some kind of Chinese plot to achieve world domination in every domain.

China has actually not been militarily very aggressive over the past several decades. It’s doing things that are objectionable in the South China Sea, things that are closer to China, but it has not sought so far to project military power on hundreds of bases, like the United States has, all around the world. It has not concluded formal military alliances. It has mainly sought to spread its economic influence through the Belt and Road Initiative and pretty lavish financing, which is not entirely a bad thing, though it needs to be closely watched.

So, I think a lot of American leaders say that the challenge of China is not primarily a military challenge. And I think we should make sure to think through the implications of that sentiment. Because what would be truly damaging – and, frankly, it could be much more damaging to the United States than our wars in the greater Middle East have been over the last two decades, as damaging as that has been – [is] if we get into a great-power war over an issue like Taiwan. That would be a true disaster that could be extremely costly for us. We need to think very carefully about how to avoid that kind of challenge. And it’s one that the United States hasn’t had to think about really since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Most US foreign-policy challenges over this three-decade span have had to do with the United States confronting much weaker actors, whether they are states or terrorist groups. Now, we have a significant rival where we really can’t indulge in fantasies that we’re going to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party or anything like that.

SW: You know, I don’t think many people have a very good answer to that question. And I’ve always thought that if you don’t have a very good purpose for a great amount of power, maybe it’s the power that should go, rather than trying to invent some kind of purpose for it. So, I think the real question is: What do we want as a country? And I think we should probably listen to the American people who have been saying for more than a decade that it’s time to do less nation-building abroad and do more nation-building here at home. I think that’s the main place where we need to do a lot of work, not just to make people’s lives better across the country, but also to heal our domestic divisions that have been so egregious in recent years. That’s got to be priority number one.

And then if you think about our challenges internationally, rather than gravitate straight to China or some next big military competitor, let’s think about what are the actual threats that are most severe to the American people, where they live and work. Well, we’re speaking right now over Zoom because of a pandemic. I think the pandemic has greatly affected the security of Americans and the prosperity of Americans. So, pandemic disease has to be at the top of that list. And climate change, too, has to be at the top of that list. These are the two greatest threats that I see internationally.

China is a significant issue. I think some deterrence of China is warranted. But that’s a third issue, and it’s important to get our priorities straight. And by the way, we really can’t do things like solve the climate crisis without China being part of that. So, it’s important to get our priorities right. What I’m worried about is the continuation of a tendency that goes along with this idea that the United States is the indispensable nation, to define our problems in military terms and come up with military solutions to problems that really aren’t susceptible to that kind of treatment.

SW: Thank you. This was a pleasure.