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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
Ultimately we’re talking strategic thinking. Strategic thinking is making decisions about what you’re going to do, based on what you can reasonably expect others to do.
That’s pretty much what game theory is all about. Game theory works from the premise that other people will act according to what they see as maximizing their interests (regardless of whether you agree with their assessments). That gives us two areas to analyze: whether you correctly grasp how your opponent calculates his own priorities; second, knowing what the other guy is likely to do, you can effectively maximize your own priorities in response.
One classic example is Saddam’s belief that he was safe in invading Kuwait, because he believed that the United States wouldn’t do anything about it. And yet, looking back on that, it’s hard to believe that the United States was going to allow Saddam to squat on Kuwait’s oil fields, controlling the worldwide price of oil, and do nothing about it.
That was an incompetent (if not foolish) misunderstanding of US priorities.
I guess the “Leave Truman along argument” would be that his worldview was all about Kennan’s Containment strategy, and he didn’t want forces to be that far North to begin with. Maybe he wanted to contain the Communists in the North and have the Chinese and Russians administer the state and support Kim. Or maybe, he thought more aggressive moves would have caused more involvement by the Chinese and the Soviets, which would have made things trickier.
Everyone knows politicians are way better at managing wars than generals. (sarc)
OK, it’s hard to defend this, and I can’t except with a bunch of hypotheticals. I guess Claire has a point on the scoreboard with this one.
Would (a) the decision to cede Eastern Europe to the Soviets; (b) the pressure to dismantle the colonial system post WW2; and (c) the decision to force France and Britain to give up the Suez Canal, be examples of incompetence? They seem to have at root an ideological view that ignored (foreseeable?) secondary effects.
I only read one book about the French Indochina war, but I wonder if Truman/Eisenhower took the wrong approach about supporting France’s desire to rebuild her empire. Perhaps the US should have pulled aid away from France and offered Ho Chi Minh financial support to pull Viet Nam away from China. If successful, we would have been saved a lot of heartache in the 60’s.
I’d like to humbly submit: World War, First
War of 1812.
The reason we only got our posteriors half-kicked was that the British were too busy fighting the inventor of the modern totalitarian state to give us a proper thrashing.
Other than that, though…
Was it incompetence or “misunderestimating” the intent of the enemy or are these the same thing? Did they (both Truman and MacArthur) think Chinese intervention unlikely and thus worth the risk of leaving the bridges intact avoiding a possible provocation? Even with the bridges intact, MacArthur thought the war was effectively over and dispersed his troops as they moved north leaving them out of position to effectively support each other in the event of an attack and failed to move to a defensive posture between the time of the initial Chinese encounters in late October and the launching of their full offensive later in November.
On a related point, the advance north of the 38th parallel may be an example of the dangers of changing and expanding goals on the fly. The original intent of the UN forces was to push the North Koreans back to the original dividing line between the Koreas. It was only when the North Koreans appeared to completely collapse after the Inchon landings and the breakout from the Pusan Perimeter that the goals changed.
Clinton’s bombing of Serbia in March-June 1999 was a very bad mistake. That angered the Russians and certainly played a role in Yeltsin passing the reins to Putin in the following months.
There is a precedent for this with Austria-Hungary annexing Bosnia in 1908 and upsetting a Russia weakened back then from its 1904-05 war with Japan. A few years later, Russia had revived and sided with Serbia when Serbia was threatened by Austria-Hungary in 1914 following the assassination of the Austrian archduke by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo.
Those who ignore the lessons of history…
Truman’s mistake regarding the bridges represents a common failing of politicians in refusing to match goals (the post-Inchon goal to liberate all of Korea) with providing the necessary means (blow up the bridges to make Chinese troop movements much more difficult).
The entire episode reflects poorly on both Truman and MacArthur. The latter went from one of his greatest and riskiest triumphs (the Inchon landings) to demonstrating overwhelming hubris in ignoring every sign of Chinese intervention so convinced was he that victory was his.
Claire,
This is a very interesting question because it so suggestive of the problems we face with the present occupant of the White House.
First, simply as a factual matter, accepting the normal presumed goals, Truman’s behavior is completely incompetent. The incompetence seems even greater when you realize that Truman was an artillery officer in WWI and really should have known better.
Now comes the interesting part. The incompetence level seems so great that we start to wonder about our assumption “accepting the normal presumed goals”. What if Truman allowed his political prejudices to color his judgement and undermine his responsibilities as Commander in Chief?
In short, what if he wanted MacArthur to fail and did it purposely because he feared him politically? What if he was so afraid of the political repercussions of taking the first shot against the Chinese he let the US Army walk into ambush?
Sound familiar. I got questions. I need answers.
Regards,
Jim
We’re getting close to one of “Claire’s Magic Shortcuts” here.
This shortcut, I will argue, has many applications.
Claire, it seems to me you want us to write that book for you ;)
Several things I would say here:
1) It wasn’t Truman who didn’t think the Chinese would “intervene”. It was MacArthur.
2) Intervene here is a key word: everyone knew the Chinese were sending soldiers and arms into Korea. The question was one of size. It was similar to the war in Ukraine today: everyone knows the Russians are the ones sending rebels/terrorists and tanks and artillery, and operating them in Ukraine. But everyone also knows that a real “intervention” would be something much bigger.
So MacArthur and Truman knew there were thousands of Chinese troops in Korea, way before November and before the Yalu was an issue. The question was whether China was going to commit in full force, or whether it would continue to only provide limited support.
3) The Yalu river bridges would have made no difference. China had already moved those 300,000 troops South of the river way before MacArthur or Truman even thought of destroying the bridges.
4) Destroying the bridges would also have made very little difference because the Chinese, and Soviets, had plenty of river-crossing ability without those bridges. Just as the US was barely slowed down in WW2 by the Germans destroying bridges, so there would have been very little impact of destroying the Yalu bridges.
5) The question wasn’t whether or not they knew the Soviets would get involved. They all knew the Soviets provided their best technologies to the Chinese, trained them, and even operated them. The question was…how to keep that as a limited intervention, and not a full scale invasion (e.g. Ukraine)
6) The “failure” here was simply one of…heuristics. Neither Truman’s nor MacArthurs actions should be characterized as “incompetent”, as they weren’t “incompetent” in their reasoning. I.e., we can image a far worst outcome of the war in Korea than the one that did happen…had we directly attacked China.
This was a case of determining the probability and level of commitment by China and USSR, and how to limit that commitment based on what we knew about China and USSR.
Those calculations turned out to be wrong. But that’s the nature of the game.
Losing a chess game isn’t a “screw up”. It’s a normal outcome.
Managing a war is, however, much easier than managing a general -let alone a dozen of them…
I have always thought the destruction of the eastern Roman empire which culminated in the fall of Constantinople in 1453 was a disaster for the Christian world. The fallout of which was still playing out in the Serbia/Kosovo conflict 540 years later.
It seems to me that there was a lot of room for improvement with respect to how Rome and the European states dealt with Byzantium during this period. So rather than the crusaders conquering Constantinople in 1204 which probably further weakened the Byzantines maybe another route. OR since Byzantine is a synonym for overly complicated administrative rule, I am guessing that maybe Byzantium would have better been served by the destruction of the Byzantine bureaucracy after 1204 and the introduction of better governance. So maybe the western Europeans just did not go far enough.
Further as a Catholic I was taught that the differences in theology were minor then and are non existent now, so it seems a shame that we could not have gotten better aligned when it would have helped.
I will add that the Crimean war strikes me as a particularly bad blunder for the British and the Russians. I suspect that the Russians would have defeated the Turks but a smaller war and a brokered peace would have been superior to the Crimean war that followed.
When we look at the Turks fighting against Britain in WWI and the shambles of the middle east today, it looks like this was a big fail.
I don’t know when the thought of blowing bridges occurred but according to Wikipedia MacArthur and Truman met on 15 Oct 1950 at Wake to discuss strategy and the Chinese secretly crossed the river on the 19th.
If we are not limited to US screw-ups, then I would also nominate WWI, particularly the behavior of the Austro-Hungarians. They thought they could have a quick little war and punish their upstart neighbor, when even a minor amount of thought would make apparent the chain of event that would follow. Also, since there is plenty of blame to go around for that little party, the Germans and Russians also screwed up in monumental fashion. Each held in their hand the final opportunity to prevent the war and yet neither would pause and take the step back necessary to avoid it. This is a special level of screw up on their parts because of the tragic consequences they both suffered as a result of the war.
Mario Cuomo, then the acknowledged leader of the Democrat Party, said we should give Saddam some islands and 40% of Kuwait’s oil fields because of past imperialism. I believe Al Gore was the only Democrat to vote for GHWBush’s war, even Sam Nunn and Fritz Hollings voted against it. It wasn’t that foolish a judgment on Saddam’s part.
All Interested Parties,
How do 300,000 Chinese Infantry secretly go anywhere? Inquiring minds want to know.
Regards,
Jim
I dug this out. There were actually ten Democratic senators who voted for the war.
Easy. They tiptoe very quietly.
I stand corrected. Saddam had been told the US had no opinion on his claims to or border dispute with Kuwait about a month before his invasion by our Ambassador, I believe her name was April Gillespie, [not sure of the name], So he could have plausibly taken that as a green light.
Gore later campaigned for President pointing out he was one of the few to vote “against his party” for the war, I thought I remembered him saying in those commercials he was the only member of his party to vote for it.
Well, Al Gore says a lot of things.
Austria-Hungary had to crush the Serbs. Any perceived weakness would encourage other separatist movements. There was some question of whether they could have done this with a more acceptable level of concessions by Serbia. But that was not clear.
Germany/Prussia wanted war with Russia for lebensraum in the East.
France wanted war to recapture Alsace-Lorraine before it became demographically impossible.
Russia, like Austria-Hungary, needed to maintain face. On the one hand, weakness might encourage separatism of non-Russophones. On the other hand, support of Serbia cemented Russian leadership of the Slavs.
Perhaps the biggest mistake was the US jumping in and not forcing a fair negotiated peace once Axis momentum had been blunted.
Considering the extensive rot that has existed (how long ?) in Foggy Bottom, one has to question who had more friends among the advisors who weighed in . Truman certainly lacked many friends when he assumed office , but how many did he curry in a few years ?
I imagine the same applies to MacArthur . I lack much knowledge of the state of the Pentagon at that point and wonder whether they were partially infiltrated as well.
Not playing a long game has resulted in much grief for our country. What is your opinion on national longevity and the ability to learn the long game ?
Actually, I’m fascinated by the idea of some kind of collaborative book writing by means of a discussion like this. I wonder how such a thing could be done, and if it would produce either a readable book or a better one than I could write on my own. Could an ordered, linear book emerge from a process like this? Or is this kind of discussion doomed to be, at best, a searchable online discussion?
I think I need to start a separate, dedicated thread to discuss this, because once we start (cf: linear argument problem) we’ll end up talking about this specific incident–which is obviously worth discussing, but I was hoping to collect a series of examples that seemed more-or-less like clear illustrations of the concept. I’ll start the Yalu Bridges thread on Sunday (it’s a good Sunday morning subject.) I’m definitely curious about your historical argument, which seems counterintuitive. But I’m open to persuasion; I’m not deeply attached to my interpretation of what happened.
So let’s leave that for Sunday, and for now approach the question I asked from a different angle, for the purposes of this thread. How about you choose an obvious example of incompetence, and let’s work with your example, not mine–as well as other examples suggested here. (If it turns out that you don’t believe there’s been any incompetence, ever, in US foreign policy, then I think we’ve discovered that you don’t think it’s possible by definition--and that, I think, is a discussion for the thread dedicated to defining “competence.”)
Sound reasonable?
Yeah, that’s the canonical one. I guess without making it clear I was confining my own thinking to postwar US foreign policy, but why not broaden it?
Actually, I think there might be a good reason not to broaden it–if we start thinking about all of foreign policy throughout all of history, we really run the risk of comparing things that might not be meaningful to compare. Or they might be, actually, but they’d take us pretty far from the original question, which is, “How would ordinary Americans recognize that the people and institutions executing their foreign policy are behaving incompetently, and put the brakes on them before this leads to disaster.”
If I start talking about the incompetence of Shu-Durul in the late Akkadian Empire,* I think, fairly or not, that most American readers will have trouble believing that this is really personally relevant to them. (I’d love to be wrong about that, of course.)
*In fairness to Shu-Durul, I guess I don’t really know how much of a role his incompetence played in the whole unfortunate business.
World War 1 was not the result of incompetence. Additionally, it was not something that all of these powers accidentally walked into. It was the result of an aggressive and confident Prussian mindset, coupled with industrial dominance within the continent. There was quite simply no way that the regime would not try to exercise that dominance to create empire in the way that all of its neighbours had in the few centuries before.
That it became as bloody and regime crushing as it did could perhaps be assigned to incompetence, but not of the kind that most people would immediately expect. From the beginning of the war until around 1917, neither side could figure out the fire-and-movement tactics needed to overcome the technological advantage that machine guns, reinforced trenchlines and wire gave to the defensive. The bloodiest offensives of the war (notably Verdun and the Somme) were essentially the result of this learning process. Would a more competent leadership have understood this before launching the continent into war? Perhaps, given the example of the Russo-Japanese war 10 years earlier.
I think that we need to avoid the perils of using things known to us, looking back 100 years after such an event to assess competence. Do we suggest that competence must be equated with the omniscience of future history? I don’t.
Maybe it’s just that I was staring at ridiculous WW1 casualty figures earlier this week, that’s why it’s on the brain. This was the seminal event of the 20th century, it sets up WW2 and the Russian Revolution. And it didn’t have to go down that way, the whole thing was an utterly pointless nightmare.
The problem is that the total [expletive] up that’s the start of WW1 is a book on its own, it’s ten books on its own.
Now, as to expanding it to all of human history, the problem is that the further back you go, the less reliable the source material is. It really depends where and when as to if there even is source material.
Yeah, that’s the “Prussian militarism” theory. It’s a nice idea and all. If you look at pre-war literature, you find people anticipating the Big War. The problem is that it’s wrong.
If the Cold War proved anything, it’s that the Big War, that everybody’s anticipating, that everybody knows is coming sooner or later, doesn’t have to happen. It requires a triggering effect and then it requires a string of errors among the people responsible for stopping it.
The beginning of World War 1 has everything to do with mobilization schedules. It could have been stopped. It should have been stopped. Things didn’t have to go down the way they did. History isn’t inevitable like that.