Chaotic Neutral by Ed Burmila

Author:Ed Burmila [BURMILA, ED]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2022-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD

It would be glib and unsatisfying to whip through fifty years of American foreign policy in a few paragraphs. Instead, let’s consider one major paradigm shift that took place around 1990, with the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union. Both before and since, American foreign policy has been defined by elite consensus on goals but partisan disagreement on methods and intensity. During the Cold War, both parties’ foreign policy was anticommunist; the difference was of degrees, with Republicans tending toward the General Ripper from Dr. Strangelove variety while Democrats advocated a somewhat cooler-headed approach that remained tough on communism. The Democratic position is exemplified by the Kennedy White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when their posture was resolutely anti-Soviet and anticommunist but also adamantly opposed to demands from the Pentagon and the American right to resolve the conflict with an invasion of Cuba or even nuclear war with the USSR.2

The Clinton years marked a period of confusion in foreign policy, the era of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man in which liberal democracy and capitalism vanquished all alternative ideologies.ii In the 1990s, the foreign policy industry—including the military, defense contractors, NatSec (National Security) professionals—faced the dilemma of writing a Superman story without Lex Luthor to serve as the villain. It was challenged either to find a new permanent enemy or to wither away. With time, terrorism emerged as an alternative that justified the continuation of a permanently aggressive military posture. Rather than halving the Pentagon’s budget and refocusing spending elsewhere, the argument was to maintain but update the machinery of national defense to face new threats. The focus moved away from nation-states, armies, and formal warfare to nonstate actors and low-intensity, unconventional wars.

Suffice it to say that it happened, and there was no serious objection from within the Democratic Party to maintaining a hegemonic military, intelligence, and defense apparatus but redirecting it toward fanatics with suicide bombs instead of East German tank divisions poised to rampage through the Fulda Gap. What separates the parties on foreign policy continues to be their relative zeal for military adventurism and disagreement over best practices, over the proper management of war. The continued necessity to fight, to intervene abroad, and to spend lavishly has not been seriously challenged. The antiwar movement has been confined to the left, never seriously considered by establishment Democrats who see peaceniks as unsavory, vote-repelling reminders of McGovern-era protest politics.

As with crime and welfare, Clinton-era Democrats sought a position that undermined Republican accusations of weakness while maintaining some distinct identity. The solution as they saw it was to paint the GOP as hawkish and crazy while Democrats were hawkish and smart. So Clinton sent the American military into Somalia but in a “limited” fashion that avoided the optics of a big military invasion, with no armor or heavy air power for the TV cameras to capture. He intervened in the civil wars

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