When the next president of the United States looks for nonmilitary means to achieve objectives abroad and to begin restoring America’s standing in the world, he would do well to read Robert M. Gates’s important new book, “Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World.”
Few Americans have the depth and breadth of hands-on national security experience that Gates has. Serving under eight presidents of both parties over four decades, he rose quickly to become director of the CIA and secretary of defense under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Gates’s chief premise here is that the use of military force should be a last resort — not the first. To make it more explicit, he implores future presidents and commanders, when considering the use of force, to ask these questions: Is the U.S. military the right or optimal solution to a problem? Are there nonmilitary means that can achieve partial success (e.g., the Iran nuclear agreement)? Does the use of the military entail collateral costs, and how well can the inevitable unintended consequences be anticipated? Does the situation justify putting the lives of young Americans at risk? The answers to these questions, Gates writes, “might have led to different decisions in Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans and Libya and in both Iraq and Afghanistan after the initial military objectives had been achieved.
Gates rightly focuses on the uses and misuses of American power in the seemingly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where, he argues, the United States failed to adhere to its originally stated military missions, allowing them to be morphed into nation building, a task for which, he emphasizes, the armed forces are neither trained nor suited. “There was a terrible mismatch between our ambitions to change Afghanistan and our ability to do so,” Gates says, “and in our ambition we lost sight of the very specific and limited reason we went [there] . . . after the attacks of September 11, 2001: to destroy those who attacked us, al-Qaeda, and to oust the Taliban. We assumed — because of our good intentions and our unparalleled power — that our experience in Afghanistan would turn out differently and better than that of all the foreign invaders over the centuries who preceded us.”
The story in Iraq, in Gates’s telling, is much the same: Bush chose to build a “better, democratic Iraq” after the initial fighting was over and Saddam Hussein was removed (largely as a cover, Gates concedes, for the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction), but without recognizing the difficulty of the task. The White House relied almost entirely on U.S. military forces to carry it out and then, seeing the mistake, compounded it by “the failure to recognize and then remedy the weaknesses of our nonmilitary instruments of power that were so essential to even attempting such an effort.”
It is these nonmilitary powers that constitute the essence of Gates’s work. He gives the reader a brief tutorial on exactly what the term includes: diplomacy, economic leverage, intelligence, alliances, cyber, development assistance, communications, science and technology, culture, ideology, religion, nationalism, the private sector, and “wise and courageous leadership.” It’s a cornucopia of alternative means that Gates successfully avoids calling soft power; he spends the balance of the book unpacking them in specific case studies where they sometimes worked and more frequently weren’t deployed. He argues persuasively that they were our most effective weapons during the Cold War, when military confrontation could have meant nuclear war and when the Soviet Union’s values contrasted sharply with our own, making these tools more effective in a binary contest.
Gates laments that the United States has allowed most of them to atrophy in a more complex post-Cold War world, where ironically our chief adversaries — Russia, China, Iran, North Korea — have successfully developed and refined them for use against us. He emphasizes: “Perhaps the most important nonmilitary instrument of power is a long-range strategy for waging this competition. The Chinese have one. The United States does not.”
Gates enjoys a reputation for fair-mindedness, which is apparent through most of the book; his treatment of Obama and his team, however, appears to be an exception. He cites Obama, along with President Trump, as “two successive presidents who have signaled an American withdrawal from global leadership.” This linking of Obama, who inherited two miserable wars and who struggled — sometimes, albeit tentatively — to avoid being dragged into others, with Trump, whose erratically impulsive decisions, alienation of allies and inexplicable deference to Vladimir Putin have caused U.S. credibility to evaporate, is just plain wrong. Putting Obama and Trump in the same (foreign policy) boat is gratuitous and unfair.
Gates skims over Obama’s success in securing a nuclear-arms deal with Iran, which Gates calls “time-limited [and] flawed.” It nonetheless allowed the world to breathe easier, until Trump tanked it. Ironically, Obama used the precise formula that Gates suggests by resisting those who urged airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear sites and instead employing alternative means — diplomacy, economic leverage, alliances and communications — in a strategic and successful venture.
In a serious omission, Gates ignores climate change in any discussion of strategic priorities. It’s worth noting that Obama played an indispensable role in building a global consensus of 195 signatories to the 2016 Paris climate agreement, perhaps the best indicator of worldwide support for addressing the issue that will determine the future of our planet and that belongs high on any list of national security priorities — but, sadly, not here.
Nonetheless, Gates’s policy and strategic advice to future decision-makers more than outweighs its blemishes and omissions. He skillfully blends the knowledge and discipline of a scholar with the hard-earned experience of a practitioner to produce a well-organized and superbly written book to lead America forward into a very different and challenging new world, and it is here that Gates’s admonitions are most compelling. He summarizes it this way:
“We must protect our interests. We must not be the world’s policeman, and we must be very cautious about deploying our military forces to resolve others’ internal problems. But we must also use every nonmilitary instrument of power we possess to promote freedom and encourage reform, with friends as well as rivals, because these objectives serve our national interest.” Gates reminds us frequently that any viable U.S. foreign policy must win strong support from the American people; this statement — and the book itself — provides an excellent starting point.
Gates and I both served in senior positions in the Carter White House, although I don’t recall that we ever met. I wish we had, because I’m sure I would have learned a lot; I certainly did here.
Exercise of Power
American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World
By Robert M. Gates
Knopf. 453 pp. $29.95
Richard Moe served as chief of staff to Vice President Walter Mondale and as an assistant to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981. He is the author, most recently, of “Roosevelt’s Second Act: The Election of 1940 and the Politics of War.”
Source: Washington Post