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Foreign Policy Screw-ups: Let’s Talk Details
I’m almost reluctant to start this thread, because the discussion on this earlier one—about how we define and recognize competence—is really interesting. I’m worried that starting a related conversation may suck the life out of that one. But we can walk and chew gum, right? (Well, that’s an empirical question—soon we’ll have the answer.)
Again, an observation and a question. And this time two rules, too.
Word usage rule: On the thread I mentioned above, AIG rightly raised this question: What are we calling “competent?” An outcome? A policy? He felt that only outcomes could be described as competent. (By the way, forgive me, AIG, if you’re not a “he” but a “she.” Your handle and photo don’t make it entirely clear, so I’m using the more inclusive pronoun and guessing based on your prose style.)
I replied that it seemed to me the word should be applied to people and institutions. We didn’t settle that, but for now that’s how we’ll use it. If that still seems problematic, the “competence” thread remains open for business and I’m open to persuasion.
Observation: No one in his right mind believes the United States controls the world down to the last detail. (I am talking to you, Turkish friends.) Because of this, our policy could be as skilled, competent, precise, and coordinated as the Bolshoi Ballet, but things could still go horribly wrong. Failure, in other words, is not proof of the absence of competence.
Question: But let’s relax the rigor for now and come up with a list of foreign policy failures that seem to us, at least on the surface, to have devolved not from flawlessly-laid plans confronted with the worst species of unknowable unknowns, but from incompetence—from mistakes that reasonable people shouldn’t have made, from problems that any bright high school student would have seen coming miles away and solved.
The period in question: Here’s the rule: Let’s only talk about events before 2001. Why? Because when we talk about the Bush and Obama administrations, we’re immediately on such personal and partisan territory that the conversation loses focus. Let’s step back a bit, just for the sake of this exercise.
I’ll start with the first example.
Harry Truman (otherwise quite a competent president in the foreign policy arena) exhibited incompetence when he ordered Douglas MacArthur to push to the Yalu River. Why? Above all, because, having made the decision, he failed to order MacArthur first to destroy the bridges across the river—as MacArthur himself wanted to do.
It was thus predictable and likely, based on information available to Truman at the time, that the Chinese would immediately pour a vast amount of men and material into the Korean Peninsula. The US military knew there were Chinese troops across the river–four armies and three artillery divisions, to be precise. They had been warned repeatedly that the Chinese planned to cross and attack US forces.
Now, we can argue all day about whether the basic idea—pushing to the Yalu River—was a good one. That’s not the point. My assessment of his incompetence is a matter of this:
- If you’re going to do that, and;
- if you know that there are five divisions on the other side, and;
- If you know or strongly suspect that the Soviets have offered to provide the Chinese with military equipment and materiel, and;
- if you know that there was a hell of a lot of this left over from the Second World War, and
- if you know that the Chinese have 300,000 men in Manchuria, and;
- if, on October 25, 1950, eight miles east of Chosan, a South Korean battalion was wiped out by an enemy force, and;
- if, on that same day, US forces in the area came into contact with about 20,000 Chinese troops, and;
- if you know, by November 15, that Stalin is giving Chinese troops air cover (they had by then shot down 23 US aircraft; there was no way we didn’t know), and;
- if you know that you have 178,500 troops there but the Chinese have 300,000, and;
- if you’re willing publicly to state your willingness to use nuclear weapons to end the conflict,
…. then, for the love of God, why wouldn’t you blow up those bridges? What kind of appetite for punishment does that failure to pull the trigger exhibit?
Frankly, that is just incompetent.
Why did this happen? I don’t know, exactly, and would defer to Truman scholars. But how could Truman have thought that this could have any chance of success if those bridges were left intact? One needs no specialized knowledge beyond that needed to win a game of ultimate frisbee to figure out that if you’re going to do it, those bridges are going to have to disappear.
Any argument about that?
Your choices?
Published in General
That was my first thought when reading this article. Who really believed the German Army could sweep through Europe in a few weeks?
I do believe that the Great War was perhaps the most catastrophic event to happen to Western civilization since the sack of Rome. But I equally do not believe the it was the result of incompetence. The way in which it unrolled was due to the mobilization schedules, but I firmly believe that it would have happened in one way or another. My key source material for this belief is “World Power or Decline”, by Fritz Fischer, which details the thinking of the German government of the time.
There was a huge difference in the Cold War never going hot: the threat of nuclear weapons and immediately foreseeable civilizational destruction. The difference with the Great War is that the civilizational destruction was probably not foreseeable (was definitely not foreseen). If you believe that it was foreseeable without some sort of hyper-competence bordering on omniscience, then I will relent and agree that the disaster was due to incompetence.
One additional piece that perhaps I can offer to the discussion, and I think that it speaks to the fundamentally optimistic nature of Americans. There seems to be a presumption that if something fails, it must be due to incompetence of those conceiving or executing the plan. Americans have been so successful at war through their history that the concept that one can perform to the best of expectations and still fall short is almost counter to the philosophical grounding of the country. This is generally an endearing trait, and the source of much of your success in the world, but not helpful in these kinds of discussions.
One small but illustrative example was the escape by Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora (fails Claire’s recency criteria, but I bring it up because I know some of the planners involved in the Canadian portion of Op Anaconda, contemporaneous to that escape). I would argue that while not everything went successfully, it was not due to any kind of incompetence, but because we were fighting a capable enemy, on complex terrain with which that enemy was highly familiar. Yet, the presumption in the popular discussion was that due to the result, it must have been due to incompetence at some level.
If I look at history, especially military history, there are countless examples of efforts that ended in failure not due to competence, but in the meeting of two fairly matched rivals, one of whom by definition will lose. To take one obvious example, Napoleon and his highly experienced commanders did not suddenly become incompetent on their way to losing at Waterloo.
In short, disaster is possible without the presence of incompetence.
I would submit that WWI was not inevitable and was the result of incompetent foreign policy decisions. The Austro-Hungarians thought that they could punish Serbia in a quick war and that a) no one would intervene, or b) that if Russia intervened, Germany and AH could go to war with Serbia and Russia without everyone else becoming involved. When it became obvious this was not the case, they refused to change course.
One of AH’s incompetent foreign policy decisions was in waiting a month to attack Serbia. If they had attacked right after the assassination, the world would not have blamed them for this reaction, the world powers would not have had time to start choosing sides and mobilizing and a short sharp war may have occurred and been over before it had time to spread.
Now, for one foreign policy screw-up that genuinely might be the worst of the last 50 years, I would put forward the acquiescence of the Carter administration to the rise of the mullahs in Iran.
Result: replacement of a solid ally (if sometimes sordid) by the worst of bad actors. This really was the Shiite equivalent of allowing ISIS the keys to a nation state.
Downstream Impacts:
1. dismemberment of Lebanon as a functioning state by an Iranian proxy (Hezbollah)
2. Enabling of the wave of terrorism in the 1980s (albeit the only source- the KGB was arguably much worse as an enabler)
3. blurring of lines of American loyalties in the region through the Iran/Iraq war, arguably leading to the 1991 Gulf War
4. Enabling of a key antagonist in both Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000’s.
5. drive to Nuclear Weapons breakout in a not particularly stable corner of the world.
Argument for Incompetence: while the Carter folks could not reasonably have known all of the downstream impacts, there was a simple rule that could have been followed, which is that you support your allies where practicable. To use a parallel, despite plenty of reasons to be concerned with Syngman Rhee, there are millions of Koreans who owe their good fortune to the support given him.
The means could easily have been available, had the Carterites chosen to employ them. One possibility might even have been simply prevailing upon the French to not allow Khomeini to return to Iran.
Once it started to unroll, there was a clear casus belli in the occupation of the Embassy, and the Desert One debacle, even if successful would have been insufficient to the task of correcting that aggression.
The Germans did. They had very specific time tables.
I agree with you entirely. I know my opinions are scattered over three threads, but I’ve stressed this, and as you point out, it’s something that needs stressing. Neither disaster nor failure is proof of incompetence. What’s more, incompetence does not–necessarily–lead to either.
You mean like this?
Regards,
Jim
Yeah, it pretty much does always come back to Jaynes.
I sense that a big difficulty to overcome in making these kinds of arguments is going to be convincing people that in some cases (not all), there is enough experimental data and prior knowledge to deem a foreign policy decision wise or foolish. People fully understand that you can’t run multiple experiments on history and carefully manipulate independent variables while doing so–but the fact that people understand that also allows people to excuse bad decisions in a plausible-sounding way.
(I do hate to muddy things by introducing the words “wise” and “foolish” after we’ve been working to try to narrow this down to “competent” and “incompetent.” And I hate to talk about “decisions” after insisting that we should talk about “actors” and “institutions.” But let’s pretend that “competent” is a plausible translation here, and let’s avert our eyes to the second switcheroo–the underlying argument still applies.)
Claire,
Along mathematical lines we might say that wisdom is the ability to make decisions using inductive logic successfully. Foolishness is the inability to make decisions using inductive logic.
Everything in your original post suggested blowing up the bridges. We expected a wise decision maker, say one who had dropped the bomb to end WWII, to make the inductive leap and blow the bridges. Instead we got one of Tom Pendergast’s Thanksgiving Turkeys.
Perhaps the inscrutability of the Chinese Communists made it impossible for the Americans to induct their intentions properly at that moment. To us their intentions seem blatantly obvious but maybe they were a mystery wrapped in an enigma in 1950. We were blind sided because we were blind.
Regards,
Jim
A wonderful book along these lines – Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, From Troy to Viet Nam.