Jeffrey Record , Weinberger-Powell Doctrine Doesn't Cut It ," US Naval Institute Proceedings, October 2000 mtholyoke.edu
[ Googling Record, I found this other paper of his from before 9/11 . A good preemptive defense against namby-pampy charges, I'd say. I tend to take what people wrote before 9/11 a little more seriously than what they wrote afterward in judging where they're coming from. The heat to light ratio got way pumped up that day, and I don't think we've yet recovered. ]
Lots of folks are talking about the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine again--but what does it offer the United States today? Among other things, the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine is simplistic and flawed, and its proponents' distinction between value-based and interest-based military intervention is largely false.
The Weinberger-Powell Doctrine's injunctions that vital interests must be at stake and that the United States should fight only wars it intends to win beg the question of criteria for "vital" and "winning." Beyond the defense of U.S. territory and citizens, there is no consensus on what constitutes vital interests. Making matters worse, since World War II, few areas of the world have escaped presidential declarations of vitality. For obvious reasons, presidents contemplating military intervention routinely have displayed a penchant for pronouncing the stakes at hand to be vital. So said Dwight Eisenhower of Quemoy and Matsu, Lyndon Johnson of Vietnam, and Ronald Reagan of Lebanon.
Even if agreement on the definition of vital interests could be forged, it would not exclude the use of force to protect interests that did not qualify. A distinguishing feature of great powers is that they are prepared to threaten and even go to war on behalf of nonvital interests for such purposes as demonstrating credibility and maintaining order. As Michael Kinsley observed, "If you wish to claim world leadership--which we do--you have to be willing to use your strength for something other than self-protection."1
"Winning" is even more elusive, except in the rare cases of total war. Most wars are limited in their political and military objectives, and it is difficult--the Vietnam War being an excellent case in point--to translate political goals into military ones. It also is quite possible to win militarily and lose, or at least not win, politically. What about those wars that reverse a specific aggression but leave the aggressor--e.g., Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic--in place to fight another day? Can we really call them victories? In addition, the course of war itself can alter dramatically war aims. As Colin Gray rightly pointed out, "the strategic fact of historical experience is that once the dice of war is rolled, policy achievement is largely hostage to military performance."2 In Korea, US war aims gyrated wildly as US military fortunes moved from near defeat to spectacular success to eventual stalemate.
The Weinberger-Powell Doctrine's insistence on reasonable assurance of public support also ignores the enormous influence of military performance on that support. It further ignores the role of presidential leadership, to say nothing of the irrelevance of public support to swift military action, such as the invasion of Grenada, and even to unpopular, more time-consuming interventions, such as the invasion and occupation of Haiti, as long as such interventions entail little or no blood cost. Military action need not be popular, as long as it is perceived to be necessary, and if not seen as necessary, action still can be sustained if domestic opposition to it remains tolerable to the White House.
The Weinberger-Powell Doctrine's implicit rejection of force as an instrument of diplomacy is perhaps its greatest flaw. Indeed, the doctrine stands Clausewitz on his head by holding force to be a substitute for rather than a companion to diplomacy.3 Threatened or actual use of force is the heart of coercive diplomacy, and force may have to be threatened or used early in a crisis to avoid a larger war later, thus violating another cherished Weinberger-Powell injunction--i.e., force as a last resort. Is not the great lesson of the democracies' appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s--and of the Clinton administration's gutless performance in the Balkans--the need for an early and politically decisive use of force against an aggressor?
As for overwhelming force, it usually is not available when and where it is needed, in part because astute enemies can be counted on to resist its creation. The United States amassed it in the Gulf in 1990, but only because Saddam Hussein was strategically incompetent and because the Cold War's fortuitous demise permitted massive force transfers from Europe. If George Washington had insisted on the certainty of swift victory via overwhelming force, the Union Jack might still be flying in the capitol city that today bears his name.
Washington certainly never had an exit strategy--at least until 1781, six years into the American Revolution--until the French came to his assistance. Indeed, all the chattering about exit strategies and departure deadlines ignores the political and military dynamics of intervention, including the presence of hostile force seeking to deny an easy exit. What was Harry Truman's exit strategy in Korea in 1950? Does the fact that US forces are still there mean it was a mistake to fight in Korea?
The pitfalls of the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine are evident when one applies its tenets to the retrospective case for resisting, by force if necessary, Hitler's demand at the 1938 Munich Conference for incorporation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland into the Third Reich. Weinberger-Powell would have endorsed the course of appeasement that the British and French followed there because armed resistance would have satisfied none of the Weinberger tests bearing on the decision to go to war. France and Britain did not regard the Sudetenland as vital to their security; there was strong public and parliamentary opposition to war in both countries; Paris and London viewed appeasement as a diplomatic alternative to a "last resort" to war; and overwhelming force was not available to either democracy.
Predictably, those who understand that war is a continuation of politics by other means and that the United States has exceptional global responsibilities have condemned the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine. In his critique of the doctrine, the late Richard Nixon declared that "the capability and will to use force as a first resort when our interests are threatened reduces the possibility of having to use force as a last resort, when the risk of casualties would be far greater." He also noted the obvious: "Every military operation cannot be a sure thing."4 George Shultz, Reagan's secretary of state, denounced the doctrine in his memoirs as "the Vietnam syndrome in spades, carried to an absurd level, and a complete abdication of the duties of [world] leadership."5 Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger also chimed in, opposing "the emerging belief that the United States must fight only popular, winnable wars. The role of the United States in the world is such that it must be prepared for, be prepared to threaten, and even be prepared to fight those intermediate conflicts that are likely to fare poorly on television."6
The insistence that force be employed only on behalf of concrete strategic interests--as opposed to mushy values--ignores both history and political imperatives. Most US military interventions have rested on a blend of interests and values. Americans believe their country is a morally exceptional one in a world of baser states, and they go to war for both moral and material reasons. Senator John McCain has observed "a puzzling tendency among many commentators to underestimate the importance of American values, both as a basis for unifying our country at home and for orienting our relations with the rest of the world." He pointed out that "America's Cold War policy was based first and foremost on its faith in the core values of liberal democracy. Our foreign policy was an outward projection of our belief in the American idea. Soviet communism was a threat not simply because of geopolitics and nuclear weapons, although these were certainly important. Soviet communism directly threatened our values."7 Even so committed a believer in and practitioner of realpolitik as Henry Kissinger has conceded that the "alleged dichotomy of pragmatism and morality seems to me a misleading choice. Pragmatism without a moral element leads to random activism, brutality, or stagnation. We must always be pragmatic about our national security. We cannot abandon national security in pursuit of virtue. But beyond this bedrock of all policy, our challenge is to advance our principles in a way that does not isolate us in the long run."8
Thus, US entry into World War II was both a strategic and a moral imperative. Even the US invasion of Haiti was driven by a combination of values (restoring democracy) and interests (stanching the flow of unwanted Haitian refugees into the United States). Even when interests are paramount, presidents have believed military action to be morally compulsive. They also have understood the connection between values and public opinion. Thus, President Woodrow Wilson's intervention to restore Europe's balance of power was also a crusade to make the world safe for democracy. Thus, President George Bush's war over oil was also a crusade for a new world order. These men believed the intervention values they professed.
The one recent intervention driven purely by values was the Bush administration's move into Somalia in 1992. Yet this intervention ultimately failed, not only because it was subsequently mishandled by the Clinton administration, but because Bush's decision to intervene rested on a false premise. It was naïve to believe that the United States could simply dart into the anarchy of Somalia, pass out some food, and then leave without at least attempting to deal with the primary source of starvation, which was political, not meteorological or logistical. As William Hyland, a Kissinger colleague and former editor of Foreign Affairs observed, "There was risk inherent in the American role, which was mistakenly conceived and portrayed as a limited military effort that could be divorced from political reality."9
Indeed, the Gulf War may be the last war of its kind, the last opportunity to successfully apply the Weinberger-Powell criteria for using force. Yet even in their successful application they produced a politically disappointing military victory.
This nation deserves a new doctrine for using force abroad that balances national interests and responsibility as the world's only superpower. Part of that doctrine must keep the nation's armed forces ready and modern to prevail in all missions assigned to them.
1. Michael Kinsley, "Is There a Doctrine In the House?" The Washington Post, 9 August 2000.
2. Colin S. Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 102.
3. In his memoirs, Weinberger declared "the admixture of diplomacy and the military" to be dangerous because it meant "that we should not hesitate to put a battalion or so of American forces in various places in the world where we desired . . . stability, or changes in government or support of governments or whatever else." Caspar W. Weinberger, Fighting for Peace, Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon (New York: Warner Books, 1990), p. 159.
4. Richard Nixon, No More Vietnams (New York: Avon Books, 1985), pp. 224, 221.
5. George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993), p. 646.
6. Quoted in Arnold R. Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows, The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 72-73.
7. John McCain, "Renewing American Foreign Policy: Values and Strategy," Brown Journal of World Affairs (Summer/Fall 1998), pp. 54, 55.
8. Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), p. 1072.
9. William G. Hyland, Clinton's World, Remaking American Foreign Policy (Westport, CT: Westview Press, 1999), p. 54.
Jeffrey Record is Professor of International Security Studies at the US Air Force's Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. He is a former staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and author of Hollow Victory, A Contrary View of the Gulf War (Brassey's, 1993) and The Wrong War, Why We Lost in Vietnam (Naval Institute Press, 1998). |
