A major innovation of President Obama’s foreign policy is the so-called “low footprint” approach. Broadly, this means that heavy, conventional military interventions will be downgraded and in their place the U.S will rely increasingly on: first, special forces (e.g., the attack that killed Osama bin Laden), subversion (e.g., computer worm planted in Iranian computers to cause blow-ups of centrifuges enriching uranium dubbed “Olympic games”), and the use of drones to target leaders of terror groups to avert imminent attacks on the U.S. or U.S. forces in theater. The whole notion is also epitomized in the “leading from behind” strategy employed in Libya which has been proclaimed as a great success and a cogent demonstration of the new approach’s wisdom. At first glance the idea appears to be grounded in good sense. We are in a war fatigue mood, the nation wants out of expensive wars that have dragged on, and has no appetite for getting involved in new wars. A reassertion of diplomacy in the t5aditional sense in place of rushing into military interventions has much to commend it. Of course diplomacy is preferable to war, and there is no doubt an overdue shift toward stressing the arts of the diplomat in today’s world which seems to have no end of potential and actual crises that could easily lead to military commitments.
But if Libya is an
example of the new approach’s success (a proposition I dispute) the case of Syria
illustrates its shortcomings. Laying
back, allowing others to take the lead, waiting for an opportunity to target a
bad guy with a drone – in short, being generally passive and reactive but
highly aggressive in a narrow anti-terrorist arena – got us nowhere. Ore more precisely we are arguably worse off
than if we had been somewhat more active in the traditional arts of diplomacy,
trying to exert our influence openly, or
in supplying arms and assistance to rebel forces in the hope of bringing a
decisive end to the situation. Of course
we cannot be sure that the bigger footprint approach would have worked, but we
can be pretty sure that the light footprint approach would not work. Libya,
if it was a success, worked only because the geography facilitated the use of U.S. power to
destroy conventional troop build-ups in advance of a march on the anti-Gaddafi
forces. Even at that, the effort cost us
some $1-$2 billion, and it produced what?
A weak and practically non-existent state that controls only Tripoli and
shares power or co-exists with a miscellany of militias that trample on rights,
run things their own way in their territories, and generally prevent the
country from acting as a coherent state
or functioning economy. And the
rationale for the intervention (the “responsibility to protect” doctrine – in
this case protect Tripoli against a boastful
Gaddafi threat that was aimed at frightening people not to support rebel
forces) in retrospect is a mockery in light of the slaughter in Syria where we
have deemed it impossible go protect anybody or anything.
Let us look specifically at the components of the light footprint
strategy. The use of Special Forces may
be desirable and useful in the context of a broader engagement. But Special Forces cannot be used in all
sorts of situations where there is not a major U.S. national interest and the
logistical backup that would guarantee success and the safety of the
troops. As David Sanger points out in
his new book on Obama’s foreign policy, the President asked his advisers how
many troops would be needed to seize and hold Syria’s chemical weapons
facilities. He was told 75,000. This could not be an operation involving a
small number of Special Forces but nothing short of another conventional war
(which of course the President was not willing to consider for understandable
reasons).
Second, the use of the computer virus against Iran’s centrifuges was
astonishingly risky for a country whose economy is so dependent on the use of
the Internet in banking, transport, energy, etc. and which is at the same time
so vulnerable to disruption. Attacking
our information infrastructure would seem an ideal instrument of asymmetric
warfare for any country unable or unwilling to challenge us in conventional
military terms. Why should we be the
nation that takes the lead in state-sponsored computer subversion when we have
so much to lose? How can we take the
lead in trying to get an international convention to protect the Internet when
we have acknowledged our own not so clandestine subversion? I can see how the short-term advantage in
persuading the Israelis that Iran
can be stopped or slowed down by actions short of a military strike, but we are
paying a rather heavy price. Let the
Israelis engage in such subversion themselves or better yet call their bluff
and tell them we won’t support any military action while we are still
negotiating.
Third we come to the use of drones which
the Obama Administration, in an astonishing breach of security and good sense,
boasted about in the campaign. The
increasing use of drones is alien and odious to the American experience, and has
dramatically complicated and worsened relations with Pakistan and seems bound to the
same with other allies. Asserting that
there are careful review, including presidential approvals, does not help the
situation. It makes it worse. Hence I disagree with David Cole’s suggestion
in the current issue of The New York
Review of Books that the Administration and the Justice Department should
lay out a transparent set of criteria for the use of drone and targeted assassinations. This only furthers the impression that our
leaders actually spend their time plotting assassinations. To the world we are the Evil Empire raining
down technological death on third World peoples. What are we saying – that we have the right
to kill anybody, anywhere, anytime, apart from any theater of war? It does no good to claim that we now only
blow up the wife and children and maybe a few close neighbors because our
science and technology have made such progress.
There are other aspects of the whole problem that need to be addressed,
like the transformation of the CIA into a quasi-military agency rather than an
intelligence agency. But I will leave
those for a future blog. Certainly the
country needs more focus on diplomacy and fewer military interventions, but
let’s drop the nonsense that there is something magical, low cost, and
risk-free in pursing a light footprint in the world if we truly want to remain
relevant in the world.
-- Bruce L. R. Smith
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