[Peace-discuss] Ending the Endless War

[Szoke, Ron]

First, America has to give up its pursuit of global dominance.

By Stephen Wertheim
Dr. Wertheim is a historian who writes about American foreign policy. 
NYT  Sept. 14, 2019

“We have got to put an end to endless war,” declared Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., during the Democratic presidential primary debate on Thursday. It was a surefire applause line: Many people consider “endless war” to be the central problem for American foreign policy.
Even President Trump, the target of Mr. Buttigieg’s attack, seems to agree. “Great nations do not fight endless wars,” he announced in his latest State of the Union.
But vowing to end America’s interminable military adventures doesn’t make it so. Four years ago, President Barack Obama denounced “the idea of endless war” even as he announced that ground troops would remain in Afghanistan. In his last year in office, the United States dropped an estimated 26,172 bombs on seven countries.

President Trump, despite criticizing Middle East wars, has intensified existing interventions and threatened to start new ones. He has abetted the Saudi-led war in Yemen, in defiance of Congress. He has put America perpetually on the brink with Iran. And he has lavished billions extra on a Pentagon that already outspends the world’s seven next largest militaries combined.

WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO ACTUALLY BRING ENDLESS WAR TO A CLOSE?
LIKE THE DEMAND TO TAME THE 1 PERCENT, OR THE INSISTENCE THAT BLACK LIVES MATTER, ENDING ENDLESS WAR SOUNDS COMMONSENSICAL BUT ITS IMPLICATIONS ARE TRANSFORMATIONAL. IT REQUIRES MORE THAN BRINGING GROUND TROOPS HOME FROM AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ AND SYRIA. AMERICAN WAR-MAKING WILL PERSIST SO LONG AS THE UNITED STATES CONTINUES TO SEEK MILITARY DOMINANCE ACROSS THE GLOBE. DOMINANCE, ASSUMED TO ENSURE PEACE, IN FACT GUARANTEES WAR. TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT STOPPING
ENDLESS WAR, AMERICAN LEADERS MUST DO WHAT THEY MOST RESIST: END AMERICA’S COMMITMENT TO ARMED SUPREMACY AND EMBRACE A WORLD OF PLURALISM AND PEACE.

 IN THEORY, ARMED SUPREMACY COULD FOSTER PEACE. FACING OVERWHELMING FORCE, WHO WOULD DARE TO DEFY AMERICAN WISHES?
 IN MAY, VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE TOLD GRADUATING CADETS AT WEST POINT: “IT IS A VIRTUAL CERTAINTY THAT YOU WILL FIGHT ON A BATTLEFIELD FOR AMERICA AT SOME POINT IN YOUR LIFE. YOU WILL LEAD SOLDIERS IN COMBAT. IT WILL HAPPEN.” MR. PENCE ENUMERATED THE POTENTIAL FRONTS: THE GREATER MIDDLE EAST, THE INDO- PACIFIC, EUROPE, THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE. HE HAD A POINT. SO LONG AS THE UNITED STATES SEEKS MILITARY DOMINATION EVERYWHERE, IT WILL FIGHT SOMEWHERE.

IN THEORY, ARMED SUPREMACY COULD FOSTER PEACE. FACING OVERWHELMING FORCE, WHO WOULD DARE TO DEFY AMERICAN WISHES? THAT WAS THE HOPE OF PENTAGON PLANNERS IN 1992; THEY REACTED TO THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICA’S COLD WAR ADVERSARY NOT BY PULLING BACK BUT BY PURSUING EVEN GREATER MILITARY PRE- EMINENCE. BUT THE QUARTER-CENTURY THAT FOLLOWED SHOWED THE OPPOSITE TO PREVAIL IN PRACTICE. FREED FROM ONE BIG ENEMY, THE UNITED STATES FOUND MANY SMALLER ENEMIES: IT HAS LAUNCHED FAR MORE MILITARY INTERVENTIONS SINCE THE COLD WAR THAN DURING THE “TWILIGHT STRUGGLE” ITSELF. OF ALL ITS INTERVENTIONS SINCE 1946, ROUGHLY 80 PERCENT HAVE TAKEN PLACE AFTER 1991.

Why have interventions proliferated as challengers have shrunk? The basic cause is America’s infatuation with military force. Its political class imagines that force will advance any aim, limiting debate to what that aim should be. 

Continued gains by the Taliban, 18 years after the United States initially toppled it, suggest a different principle: The profligate deployment of force creates new and unnecessary objectives more than it realizes existing and worthy ones.
In the Middle East, endless war began when the United States first stationed troops permanently in the region after winning the Persian Gulf war in 1991. A circular logic took hold. The United States created its own dependence on allies that hosted and assisted American forces. It provoked states, terrorists and militias that opposed its presence. Among the results: The United States has bombed Iraq almost every year since 1991 and spent an estimated $6 trillion on post-9/11 wars.

An even deadlier phase may be dawning. Because the United States pursues armed dominance as a self-evident good, the establishment feels threatened by a rising China and an assertive Russia. “Some of you will join the fight on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific,” Mr. Pence told the cadets, noting that “an increasingly militarized China challenges our presence in the region.” But China’s rise invalidates primacy’s rationale of deterrence, and shows that other powers have ambitions of their own. Addressing the rise of China responsibly will require abandoning nostalgia for the pre-eminence that America enjoyed during the 1990s.
Despite Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about ending endless wars, the president insists that “our military dominance must be unquestioned” — even though no one believes he has a strategy to use power or a theory to bring peace. Armed domination has become an end in itself. Which means Americans face a choice: Either they should openly espouse endless war, or they should chart a new course.
As an American and an internationalist, I choose the latter. Rather than chase an illusory dominance, the United States should pursue the safety and welfare of its people while respecting the rights and dignity of all. In the 21st century, finally rid of colonial empires and Cold War antagonism, America has the opportunity to practice responsible statecraft, directed toward the promotion of peace. Responsible statecraft will oppose the war- making of others, but it will make sure, first and foremost, that America is not fueling violence.
 Shrinking the military’s footprint will deprive presidents of the temptation to answer every problem with a military solution.
 
  But it is for the people to decide who we are, guided by the best of what we have been. America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” Secretary of State John Quincy Adams said in 1821. “She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

Two centuries later, in the age of Trump, endless war has come home. Cease this folly, and America can begin to take responsibility in the world and reclaim its civic peace.

Stephen Wertheim (@stephenwertheim), a research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, is a co-founder and research director of the Quincy Institute.
  
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A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 14, 2019, Section SR, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: The Only Way to End ‘Endless War’