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March 29, 2006
Assumptions and Actions
We all tend to think about foreign policy in terms of immediate events. We look at a threat from Iran, or a report about North Korea, or a statement from France or Britain, or an election in Belarus, and we ponder what that event means. The problem is that the events are almost meaningless in and of themselves, and so we are often deeply misled about our own and others' foreign policies. Events themselves only have two possible effects, over the long term, on changing policy: either they change our assumptions, or they spark action. Most events, though — the vast majority, in fact — have neither of those effects: they are simply historical footnotes, confirming our assumptions or leading to no firm decisions. The events that are not footnotes are called inflection points or turning points, depending on how severe is the change they create.
Those particular events that spark action — the Pearl Harbor attack, the 9/11 raids, the attack on Fort Sumter — do so because they crystallize a change in assumptions and make clear that our former ways of acting are no longer appropriate. The Japanese would not be deterred from conquest by economic sanctions and slowly increasing pressure; the jihadis would continue to attack the US in ever more outrageous ways; the South would not peacefully remain in the Union. In each case, the crystallizing event served to validate assumptions that had been undergoing change for some time, or to show the necessity for reexamining flawed assumptions. And of course there are positive changes as well, such as the fall of the Berlin wall, that change our assumptions as well.
Still, what is seldom remarked upon, except perhaps by historians seeking explanations when all the principals are long dead, is the framework within which we make foreign policy decisions. Even the spark events are less meaningful in the long-term than the underlying assumptions that frame our foreign policy. The 9/11 raids sparked a war, and arguably two wars. The increasing assumption that we cannot deal peacefully with Muslim countries and possibly not with Muslims at all may lead to a dozen or more wars; and in retrospect the 9/11 raids would simply be seen as a crystallization of the increasing feeling that the Muslim world was broken that started with the first Intifadeh and grew with various terror attacks during the 1990s. And I'm not sure that that characterization is entirely wrong, either: certainly, those who were paying attention were disconcerted by the terrorism increasingly directed at the US, and with increasingly vast effect; our assumptions were changing, but had not yet reached a tipping point.
Spark events determine when we act, but our assumptions determine how we act. And our assumptions have been undergoing radical changes since the end of the Cold War, and need to be reexamined in depth. In particular, there are a few assumptions that have changed, and a few that may soon change, that will determine much about the world in the next decades.
One little-examined change in assumptions actually began under President Clinton. The US has always reserved the right to act preemptively to secure our defense. But during the 1990s, President Clinton first enunciated a doctrine of preemption against situations that we were unhappy about morally, but which did not impact our security needs. The interventions in the Balkans and Haiti were of this type. President Bush's policy of preemptive war is actually more limited than President Clinton's, in that President Bush is signalling that the US will act against a threat earlier than before, rather than that we will act against non-threats. But the underlying assumptions are that anything that happens anywhere in the world is our business, and that we must act in the early stages of a crisis to prevent a full-blown crisis, and that (in the absence of any other superpowers) only the US can act globally. Taken together, these changed assumptions virtually compel the US to intervene in the affairs of any unstable or ungoverned areas, which means that we need to staff and train appropriately for that. And to think that these assumptions will change under a Democratic administration is fantasy: the very idea of interference in such places to bring about a better situation for the people living there came from the Democrats in the first place.
Many of our changes in assumptions recently have had to do with Muslims. The first changes were from Islamic terrorism as an Israeli problem to Islamic terrorism as our problem. This began in the mid-1990s under President Clinton, but the change did not crystallize until 9/11. This change in assumptions is fairly monumental in and of itself, and undergirds the Bush Doctrine in its entirety. But this is not the largest change, nor the most likely to lead to future wars (excepting Iran, which results largely from this change). The largest changes are those that deal with the character of Muslims and of Islam itself.
Already, there is a fairly large movement in public assumptions from "Islam is a religion of peace" to "the Muslim world has bloody borders and massive internal injustices because of Islam", and from "most Muslims are moderates, even when they don't speak out" to "most Muslims either support or refuse to condemn Muslim violence, including terrorism, against non-Muslims". These alone will change the way we fight: as the wars drag on, we will become increasingly brutal as we increasingly demonize the enemy. This is not unusual; read up on the Battle of the Bulge to see some of the war crimes committed by both sides.
But I can see us going further than that. I can see assumptions on the horizon that include "Muslims are not capable of being civilized", "all Muslims are potentially terrorists", "Islam is not a religion but a totalitarian movement" and others more extreme still. The Rahman case certainly does not help the Muslims, nor do the cartoon riots, to fight against these assumptions and stereotypes. And as long as such incidents continue, the US (and indeed the West in general) will move increasingly to the view that the only solution is to wipe out Islam, or to decimate Muslims everywhere, or to subjugate the Islamic world entirely. If that happens, there will be a full-blown civilizational war on the scale of the Crusades, the Arab conquest of the Middle East, or the Second World War.
And since that is, apparently, what the jihadis want to happen, the only way that it will be prevented is for Muslims to first reform internally. And that is not very likely; external pressure is almost certainly going to be required. In the end, the most likely course of events for the next decades is an increasingly frequent and increasingly brutal series of wars between the West (the US in particular) and the Islamic world. And it will not matter whether it is Democrats or Republicans in charge, other than to change the rate of reaction, because the assumptions of Americans as a whole will drive both parties to the same ends.
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» Behavioral Changes from Caerdroia
I've been so busy and distracted that I forgot to make a major point the other day with my post on how our assumptions underlie our foreign policy. Listening to Thomas Friedman on NPR this morning reminded me about it. The two assumptions governing our... [Read More]
Tracked on March 30, 2006 1:20 PM