Conventional wisdom holds that Donald Trump’s foreign policy has been an unmitigated catastrophe – a tragi-comic carnival of unrelieved bombast, crude machismo, and clumsy statecraft, all punctuated by empty photo opportunities substituting for genuine diplomatic engagement.
Certainly, the hungry detractor can choose from a veritable smorgasbord of strategic blunders made by the Trump Administration. But while I myself have been critical of the (former) president’s mercurial approach to matters of state, I don’t think the consensus is altogether just. Neither does Tim Lynch, professor of political science at Melbourne University. In a recent piece for the Fairfax press, Lynch argued – rightly, in my view – that ‘a new dark chapter of American foreign policy failure and crises…started much earlier’ than Trump’s confirmation almost four years ago. In his short essay, Lynch makes the case that dysfunction in American foreign and defence policy emerged shortly after the end of the Cold War. He highlights a series of critical decisions American leaders have made over the past three decades – most notably the country’s many wars of choice – and argues they reflect pathologies that became engrained in U.S. strategic thinking long before Trump’s advent. To the extent that the current occupant of the White House can be linked to crisis and chaos on the international stage, Lynch insists it is often by way of inheritance, not creation.
Going against the grain though it does, there is some merit to this line of reasoning: for all his impulsiveness and lack of personal restraint, Trump hasn’t commenced any new wars, and hasn’t presided over a foreign policy disaster like the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But whatever validity Lynch’s basic argument possesses, it is marred by more than one extraordinary – not to say, implausible – claim.
Two claims in particular stand out, both of which are critical of past presidential inaction: first, George H.W. Bush’s decision in 1991 not to topple Saddam Hussein after evicting the Iraqi military from Kuwait; and second, Barack Obama’s refusal to offer anything more than token support to so-called ‘moderate’ rebel forces during the Syrian Civil War (2011-). Let’s take these events in sequence.
Was Bush Senior wrong not to topple Saddam?
Lynch begins by castigating George Bush Senior for refusing to remove Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War in 1991 – going so far as to draw a controversial causal connection between that decision and the ‘penury’ ordinary Iraqis subsequently suffered. Many, of course, will remember Bush’s determination to oust Saddam’s armed forces from the tiny oil sheikdom of Kuwait in February of that year. But what people may not realize is that there was some debate within the American administration as to whether the U.S.-led coalition should extend operations to include regime change in Iraq proper.
Bush and his advisors ultimately decided to limit the campaign to its original mandate – and with very good reason. This is where Lynch’s objection strains credulity. For one thing, the coalition simply did not enjoy UN-sponsored consent to launch a full-scale invasion of Iraq in order to vanquish Saddam. While the United Nations Security Council had authorized members to enforce resolutions against Iraq militarily, it did not permit action beyond the liberation of Kuwait. As political scientist Stephen Zunes noted some years ago, had the U.S. invaded Iraq, it would have become the aggressor according to the norms of international law. Lynch doesn’t deal with this. Moreover, his criticism trades in unintentional irony; just a couple of paragraphs later, he condemns the Clinton Administration’s decision to bomb the former Yugoslavia because the president did so without the sanction of the UN Security Council. It’s far from clear why Clinton was wrong to attack Serbian forces under such circumstances, but Bush – had he chosen to invade Iraq – would not have been.
But it wasn’t just the absence of institutional authority that prevented the U.S. and its allies from extending the war to topple Saddam. The coalition that Bush and his administration had sedulously cobbled together remained a fragile creature. Other Western allies (including the U.K. and Australia) were adamantly opposed to the idea of an invasion. Egypt and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, were already nervous about the consequences of aiding a foreign power in a conflict with another Arab nation. Their disquiet was only deepened by the thousands of ‘unbelievers’ already stationed on soil Muslims regard as sacred. Both the Mubarak regime and the Saudi monarchy prudently surmised that popular discontent would have boiled over had the war been expanded. Again, Stephen Zunes is well-worth hearing on this point: having interviewed Arab state officials at the time, he concluded that there was absolutely ‘no support’ for the toppling of Saddam. Had the U.S. attempted to do so, the alliance – and the operation’s fig-leaf legitimacy – would have collapsed immediately.
Then there is the question of conducting such a war, even if it had been possible to win international and allied support. Although the U.S. and its partners won the Gulf War with embarrassing ease – taking just four days to rout the elements of the Iraqi military stationed in Kuwait and South-East Iraq – this was achieved on a conventional battlefield between clearly defined national forces. Geography and environment were crucial: because Saddam’s army was concentrated in flat, sparse, open desert, the American-led coalition could take full advantage of its superior firepower and technology, bringing them to bear on an opponent which, despite its size (Iraq had the fourth largest army in the world in 1991), was relatively feeble.
Contrast this with what a full invasion – and indeed, an occupation – of the country would have entailed. Instead of say, large-scale tank battles ranging across the spartan terrain of southern Mesopotamia, coalition soldiers would have been forced into ‘bitter, house-to-house’ fighting in Iraqi towns and metro areas, as they engaged in the far messier task of urban penetration. Combat in urban environments is notoriously tricky, given the layered, pulsating complexity of large (and even small) cities. As scholars of warfare have long noted, military interactions with and in those environments invariably trigger a series of rolling consequences, many of which are impossible to predict. Dense networks of buildings and infrastructure; the presence of large numbers of civilian residents; the use of unconventional guerrilla tactics by defenders; the fragmented, staccato nature of fighting forced upon attackers; and the often-blurred lines between combatant and non-combatant: all these features of urban conflict form additional burdens to the already-difficult phenomenon of war. This much would have been true had Bush attempted to dominate Iraq after removing Saddam. Even allowing for the presence of a substantial number of anti-Saddam partisans in the country, coalition forces would still have had to contend with both regular and irregular loyalists in a little understood setting.
Moreover, the logistical problems associated with occupying another state rarely subside. In the case of Iraq in 1991, the U.S. would have been confronted with two unappealing prospects: direct administration of the country, or the equally laborious project of creating a new government to midwife a measure of stability. With the prospect of mission creep lurking on the horizon, those options would have risked an unstable mix of bloody counterinsurgency operations and broader nation-building exercises. A critical danger at this point for any invading force is that whatever the local population’s initial estimation of their presence, a long, grueling occupation will inevitably arouse widespread nationalist hostility – undercutting the trust and legitimacy required to effectively change a regime. Bush and his team grasped the truth that a ‘quick and surgical’ strike against Saddam could easily have turned into a quagmire, similar to what previous administrations had encountered in a sliver of South-East Asian jungle 25 years earlier. Aware of the public’s distaste for a repeat, they wisely chose to draw combat operations to a close.
One doesn’t have to strain imagination to recognize just how difficult, exhausting, and protracted attempted regime changes are likely to be. After all, it was only 12 years later that Bush’s son, George W. Bush, led the United States into a catastrophic war against Iraq (much of which took place in urban centres like Baghdad and Fallujah) in order to overthrow Saddam. The ensuing decade saw the country plunged into a cauldron of fire and blood, as a welter of armed factions battled American forces and each other. As James A. Baker, Bush Senior’s former Chief of Staff, wryly said in 2006: “I am no longer asked why we did not remove Saddam in 1991”. Lynch rightly condemns the invasion of Iraq, but fails to connect the dots in criticising Bush Senior for refusing to do what his son did.
Should the U.S. do more to support moderates in Syria?
So much for Lynch’s analysis of the 41st President of the United States. What of his critique of the 44th Commander-in-chief – namely, Barack Obama’s decision to limit American support of the so-called ‘moderate’ Syrian opposition during that country’s civil war? While I’d argue the situation here is more ambiguous, Lynch’s implied objection overlooks a number of serious issues that would have complicated a policy of deeper intervention.
To begin with, the notion that there has existed a substantial ‘moderate’ opposition is, at the very least, contestable. ‘Moderate’ is an elastic term, used in a minimalist sense by, for example, British intelligence officials to designate any group in Syria that had formally renounced terrorism. What ought to be obvious is that this definition is broad enough to encompass any rebel faction animated by Islamic extremism, even if they don’t practice terrorism per se. While such groups might claim to abjure targeted attacks upon civilians, several of them have nonetheless employed a variety of unsavoury tactics. Many groups vehemently reject the fundamental principles of modern Western societies, and cannot be called ‘moderate’ in any meaningful sense. The relative absence of religious zealotry is also no guarantee of moral rectitude: diverse elements within the rebellion have been dogged by allegations of corruption, abuse, and warlordism. Indeed, local and rural Syrians have been ‘relieved’ when moderate factions were expelled from their communities by Islamist forces, such was the former group’s brutality. Anecdotal reports are complemented by survey data, which suggest that many refugees fleeing Syria were not simply escaping the Assad regime, but rebel groups — not all of have been driven by religious extremism — as well.
This isn’t to say that more temperate opposition forces are entirely absent in Syria. Nor would it be true to claim that every group arrayed against the Assad regime has been an Al Qaeda- or ISIS-like franchise. However, to the extent that they remain relevant on the battlefield, genuinely moderate factions are diminished, having long been marginalised by more radical elements in the country.
Alliance structures and group formation have exhibited a high degree of fluidity during the war, which means that international backing for one particular faction (or cluster of factions) has long been a risky prospect. The ephemeral nature of coalition-building is something that has afflicted so-called ‘moderate’ forces since the early days of the war. Far from being a unitary phenomenon, the opposition is deeply fragmented, riven by competing interests; even when groups are backed by states that are notionally allied with each other, the danger of bitter infighting is still quite real. While rebel groups have proliferated during the course of the war, some have rapidly collapsed into each other. This has led to significant – and often unwelcome – changes in the profile, aims, and tactics of the resulting progeny. The swift creation and disintegration of such factions suggests that today’s friends can quickly become tomorrow’s enemies.
Academic research substantiates this point: Fotini Christa, for example, has argued that the anarchical situation prevailing in civil conflicts leads to ‘inherent commitment problems within alliances’, for the simple reason that the parties to those alliances enjoy very little trust. ‘The result’, she says, ‘is a process of constant defection, alliance reconfiguration, and group factionalisation’, with some individuals and elements spinning off into ever-more radical spheres of belief and action. When such an unstable, Hobbesian environment prevails, it is difficult to see how an external actor such as the United States might build a credible, enduring opposition.
Many of these realities have occurred repeatedly throughout the Syrian war. Former Free Syrian Army soldiers have in the past thrown in their lot with militant jihadist groups, and evidence suggests that the FSA – itself a fairly ‘loose confederation’ with no central command structure – has at times coordinated with Al-Qaeda offshoots; as but one example, FSA soldiers joined elements of Al-Nusra Front in 2015 to capture the Southern city of Dara. Meanwhile, parties favoured by the U.S. have ended up aligning themselves with ISIS. American weapons supplied to other groups have ended up in the hands of violent extremists (whether willingly or not). In more recent years, the FSA has morphed into the Syrian National Army, and now seems to be leavened by a strong thread of jihadism. Some commentators have confidently touted the capacity of U.S. intelligence officials to properly vet potential beneficiaries of American military largesse. But this process – a highly specialised task at the best of times – remains only partially successful. It’s not just a case of imperfect knowledge about the identities of recruits (though this is highly significant); the war’s intrinsic dynamism means that one cannot be certain that even genuine moderates won’t eventually be drawn into the orbit of violent radicalism.
One shouldn’t be surprised by this devilish complexity, given the deep and ineradicable fissures that prevail in the Middle East. But the kaleidoscopic nature of the Syrian civil war is a function, not only of the country’s prevailing anarchy, but of the cross-cutting agendas that state and non-state actors have prosecuted. Even when external agents, like the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, are broadly aligned in their goal – i.e., the destruction of the Assad regime – those agendas persist. Countries in the region are also arming and training different rebel factions, and have been for some time. How does the United States control events on the ground when nominal allies may be advancing interests that cannot be easily merged with its own? How can a coherent opposition be forged – surely a condition for any reconstruction effort – when so many of its constituent parts are violently at odds with each other? Consider the Kurds of northern Syria. Both the U.S. and Turkey have been seeking the removal of Assad since 2011, and in that sense have been on the same side in the war. But Ankara also wishes to eliminate what it sees as an acute Kurdish security threat on its southern border. The problem is that the Kurds have long acted as reliable local partners of American forces in the region. Even if regional and international opponents of Assad were to successfully topple him, how would such irreconcilable differences be dealt with in a post-conflict Syria?
The sad reality is that intervention by external actors in a civil conflict often fails to end the fighting. Quite the contrary: the available evidence suggests that by doing so, other countries succeed only in making internecine war longer and bloodier. In the case of Syria, the financial and material support provided by regional powers – Iran, Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia chief among them – has fueled rivalry and competition between rebel factions within the country. As some observers contend, the entry of external forces has helped to sustain the war, with each party to the conflict bolstered by ongoing assistance from actors keen to ensure their proxies prevail. The result is a deadly stalemate, as the escalatory actions of one group trigger similar (albeit reactionary) behaviour in its opponent. As recent history demonstrates, the advances made by rebel groups in Syria eventually persuaded Russia and Iran to expand their support to Assad; such actions in turn led the Gulf states to increase their aid to opposition forces. And while some yearned for substantial American involvement earlier in the war, the truth is that military action likely would have drawn Assad’s allies into the maelstrom sooner. Naïve interventionists notwithstanding, the enduring character of Syria’s civil conflict – a crowded battlefield comprising multiple actors pursuing divergent goals – was always going to stymie the effectiveness of opposition support.
Taken together, the evidence on hand should give one pause before confidently advocating American intervention in Syria’s civil war – or, for that matter, criticising those who adopt a more restrained course. Unfortunately, Lynch fails to exhibit this virtue. He assumes without argument the efficacy of military involvement, and fails to reckon with the likelihood that such action would worsen an already savage conflict.
Mopping up
It’s time to conclude. While Lynch may rightly warn against sweeping denunciations of Trumpian foreign policy, his position ultimately fails to properly cohere: he praises Trump’s non-interventionist instincts, all while castigating previous presidents for obeying similar impulses. More importantly, his argument still bears traces of the kind of thinking that has frequently propelled the U.S. into destructive, self-defeating foreign engagements. This matters a great deal. For the past three decades, the country has prosecuted a litany of ruinous wars, encouraged by the misguided belief that it is destined, as if by Providence herself, to shape the world according to its own vision of reality. Nor has that vision been consigned to history: President-elect Joe Biden has promised to continue America’s calamitous legacy of military activism by vowing to apply greater pressure to the Assad regime upon taking office.
Lynch is surely correct when he condemns egregious examples of the mission the United States has assumed since the end of the Cold War – a mission that has all too often visited misery and chaos upon the objects of the country’s claimed benevolence. He is also right to highlight Trump’s departure from a conceit that has long commanded bi-partisan support* (even if that departure is often no more than rhetorical). One only wishes that the Melbourne University academic were more consistent in his criticisms, and did not offer residual comfort to the disciples of interventionism.
*The prominent IR theorist, John Mearsheimer, has said that on questions of foreign policy and military intervention, Democrats and Republicans are ‘Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum’. Indeed, one could easily argue that a Hillary Clinton is just as hawkish as a Dick Cheney.
A Bagful of insights 