R2P's regime-change conundrum

If you haven't yet, I recommend you all read the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (pdf), the foundation of R2P doctrine. As far as reports go, this is a pretty good one: full of interesting thoughts and extremely readable. Please read all of it, but here we are going to focus on the sections related to military intervention and specifically chapter 4.

This report begins the discussion of deciding to intervene by establishing the starting point as the principle of non-intervention, comparing this principle to the Hippocratic principle - first do no harm (para 4.11, pg 31). States should respect other states' sovereignty as a starting point and should only violate their sovereignty when culprit states "shock the conscience of mankind" (more Americans should read and think hard about this principle - and not just within the context of Syria).

The report then goes on to establish six criteria for military intervention:

1. right authority
2. just cause
3. right intention
4. last resort
5. proportional means
6. reasonable prospects

The first two are discussed at length within the report.  But these are the go/no go criteria to determine if we should intervene. I think it would be difficult to for anyone supporting intervention in Syria to legitimately claim that criteria 1 and 6 have been met as of yet with some other criteria certainly disputable. Obtaining the right authority will be difficult and pro-interventionists have generally glossed over the Syrian military's ability to act against international intervention (admittedly, anti-interventionists have been particularly pessimistic on this criteria).  While the report's discussion of these criteria is interesting, it is not exactly earth-shattering stuff. 

Except for the section on right intention (para 4.33, pg 33):

The primary purpose of the intervention must be to halt or avert human suffering. Any use of military force that aims from the outset, for example, for the alteration of borders or the advancement of a particular combatant group's claim to self-determination, cannot be justified. Overthrow of regimes is not, as such, a legitimate objective, although disabling that regime's capacity to harm its own people may be essential to discharging the mandate of protection - and what is necessary to achieve that disabling will vary from case to case. 

Overthrow of regimes is not, as such, a legitimate objective. While this aligns with R2P's primary purpose to halt or avert human suffering, this presents a massive hurdle to the reasonable prospects criteria.  The "although" clause seems to suggest that rendering the regime ineffective may be legitimate in some cases, but regime change is not a legitimate objective. In a case like Syria where the regime abjures its responsibilities by committing acts violence against its own citizens, the problem is with the regime itself. How is military intervention supposed to succeed if the objective of that military action cannot remove the source of the human suffering? I see three potential consequences of this statement if the regime does not step aside on its own accord:

1. The intervening force overthrows the regime out of operational and/or strategic necessity. However, such a precedence calls into question the legitimacy of R2P as violating its own principles. 
2. The intervening force does not overthrow the regime, remaining compliant with R2P's principles, but renders the regime ineffective by destroying its ability to use force - which in cases like Syria effectively destroys the regime's ability to govern. The potential for greater instability is quite significant through a lack of governance or a more evenly-matched civil war. 
3. The intervening force only limits the regime's ability to project force into safe zones in order to prevent instability - through defensive or offensive methods. However, the regime maintains the ability to use force, which could be projected in the absence of a foreign military presence. If you like decades-long military operations with little hope of resolution, you pick this option (see: Kosovo, Sinai). Is this a reasonable prospect? 

Dr. Slaughter and others smart on R2P have been pushing for military action somewhere between consequences 2 and 3. If the removing the regime is not in play, success is logically unlikely if the regime is the primary cause of the human suffering in the first place. This may be where R2P has its greatest doctrinal weakness as it attempts to align multiple principles that are often at odds with each other. 

The other problem with these criteria are their lack of application to the internal strategic formulations of potential participating nations. As Dan Trombly deftly observes, every military action should be placed within and debated in terms of ends, ways, and means. Colin Gray makes the same point with regard to counterinsurgency, but his comments apply to R2P as well - it cannot be a theory unto itself. What are the United States' interests in intervening, especially if it is likely to result in an extended military campaign? The report discusses this in chapters 4 and 8 with regard to domestic political will, concluding that good international citizenship should be a national interest. How extensive are the means we are willing to commit for good international citizenship when those means may more directly benefit the American people through domestic spending or kept in reserve for actual security threats?  Halting human suffering in Syria is an excellent objective, but if the means of doing so will be tied up for 10 years or more (most likely scenario), is it still worth doing? While military force may sometimes be in a nation's interest, good international citizenship is not inherently a national interest in every case. Especially if the cost is too high or the prospects for success too low. America does its best to do right by the world, but there are limits to that magnanimity because of our own internal interests and needs. 

With the preclusion of removing the Syrian regime, interventionists must show reasonable prospects for success, keeping in mind the American people are probably not inclined to count another decade-long commitment of military force with an indeterminable outcome as a reasonable prospect for success.  I'm certainly not so inclined. 

Grand strategy: good but unlikely

I really enjoyed this post by the always excellent Daveed Gartenstein-Ross as a counter to anti-interventionists with regard to Syria. Daveed lays out arguments made by wunderkind Dan Trombly and his posts against intervening in Syria; mainly that acting in Syria does not further American interests, that non-interventionists need to prescribe alternative methods of dealing with the situation, and (getting to this post I wrote earlier) that a grand strategy would help the United States determine trades more effectively when deciding to intervene.

Frankly, I don't disagree with any of that and I'm not sure Daveed characterizes my post and position on grand strategy most accurately. Which is why I don't disagree with him. My writings on grand strategy have focused until recently upon the need for a grand enemy to formulate a strategy of equal magnitude. That is not the same as saying we only need grand strategies for grand enemies. Rather, the political entities that craft grand strategies tend to permit strategic drift in a state void of a grand enemy. Grand enemies serve as a beacon or focal point for strategy development. In the absence of such enemies, nations have difficultly determining their role in the world and focusing their resources and efforts because of such increased uncertainty. Therefore, grand strategy is not and should not be dependent upon a grand enemy, but grand strategy is less likely to exist without a grand enemy to drive its formulation.

That said, my post did not argue against a grand strategy for the United States or that it would not be a good thing, but rather that policy-makers have no interest in developing a grand strategy with the intricate and elegant statements of purpose we would expect from such a document. Such a document is what I considered a pipe dream. Elucidations of the nation's challenges, foreign and domestic, that require action by the Government could compel the Government to take action in situations where action may be unwarranted, immoral, or simply not in our interest regardless of what was written on a piece of paper. And no policy-maker wants to be compelled into a situation they think is unwise, even if the folly of the act only affects domestic political capital.

The Syria conundrum is indicative of this. One of the enduring American interests listed in the National Security Strategy (and the QDR and QDDR) is "respect for universal values at home and around the world."  For policy-makers, this is perfectly worded because it leaves them a maneuver axis 10 divisions wide. What are universal values? There's an entire focus of philosophy dedicated to studying and arguing for or against the existence of universal values. Are there values that the preponderance of the human race could probably agree are valid? Of course. But using a (non-) term such as universal values, as yet undefined, allows us to act to protect certain values when we can and want and not protect them when we can't or won't. The United States has intervened in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia (1990s), and Libya because of values and because we thought we might be successful. We didn't in Rwanda, Uganda, and as of yet Syria in spite of our values. One could argue that we had no strategic interest in the former group and yet intervened because of values and yet acted. We had equal strategic interest in the latter yet intervening would have been coherent with our values. Why the difference?

In a word: flexibility. The first group above were deemed more achievable than the latter group. While there is a significant strategic calculus to determine that the United States should only act when it thinks it can be successful (a moral imperative even), our description of interests is so broadly defined as to allow politicians to pick and choose what are vital American interests. Values are among the squishiest interests we have, enigmatic wisps of emotion couched in strategy. This is not to say that defense of values does not constitute a strategic interest, but it's impossible to define. Would Presidents Bush and Obama agree on what our values are? Or what values are worth defending? That Venn diagram probably has a lot of overlap, but it wouldn't be one circle.

Because of this, there is no constituency to create a grand strategy that may compel politicians to act when they don't want to - for whatever reason. An amorphous role in the world benefits the political class. Someone with moral certainty who can attain high levels of power, Anne-Marie Slaughter for example, could certainly add the protection of civilians against murderous regimes to the list of universal values for which the United States would go to war. Would a subsequent administration want to be held to that standard? How would they remove such an item from their list of values? What if that value is believed to be valid but compels the United States into a conflict it cannot win? How does a president explain that even though our values are worth defending, we just really, really can't in a specific case?

There is a lot of goodness to a grand strategy. It would help the United States understand the myriad challenges it faces and draw lines in the sand that would help it determine its role in the world more clearly for ourselves, our allies, neutral parties, and our adversaries. It would help us conduct the trade-off calculus to determine whether or not to intervene in most situation. I would love to see such a grand strategy. But I just don't see it happening. Daveed and I are both interested in avoiding foreign policy mistakes, but both paths (with and without grand strategy) are fraught with potential mistakes. In the current situation politicians have a freer hand to make those mistakes instead of possibly being forced into them. They have no impetus to change this condition.

Redefining victory doesn't mean not winning

It appears that I may have made a bit of a bloomer with my last post on how DoD's coming age of austerity will redefine how we think about "victory". The catalyst of that post was an article by Anne-Marie Slaughter from this fall - and this is where I went off the rails a bit - that I complimented. I was and am aware that her piece was actually an argument for more military interventions for R2P or other such operations and that warfare as we've known it is dead based on the lessons observed since 2001. I could not disagree more and we'll talk about that in a just a minute. I approved of the piece because of the idea that we'll be looking to influence others with our military force, not decisively defeat and occupy other nations - I thought the idea of influence vice victory interesting and that we should expect to use limited means towards limited ends in the near future, but not for her reasons and not the interventions she suggests. Anyone who has read my writing here for the past two plus years should know I never buy into the "War and warfare have fundamentally changed!" bunk. The reality is that Dr. Slaughter's piece suggests just that, so I admit I oversold it. There are some good ideas in it though, that I don't think Dr. Slaughter necessarily intended, that lay the foundation for what I see as a flawed thesis. But we shouldn't throw out the good ideas because of the rest.

So what did I mean in my post? Sometimes others say what you mean better than yourself, so please go read Adam Elkus on There is No Substitute for Victory and Part II to that post as well as Dan Trombly at Slouching Towards Columbia. These are excellent posts on what victory actually means and contribute significantly towards this conversation. When I talked about redefining victory, I didn't intend to suggest that we will no longer look to decisively win whatever engagements we embark upon. That would be stupid - as Adam asks correctly, why use force if you don't intend to win? I intended this redefinition, in the next 10 to 15 years marked by limited resources, to show that we will most likely strive towards more limited military goals than we have in the past 10 years. That we'll have to move away from "winning" as a goal in itself and instead need to define what winning means very specifically in each operation or campaign. The former use of the term, such as a candidate or politician saying "We should give the generals what they need to win in Afghanistan" having no idea what the generals' concept of winning in Afghanistan actually is, is vapid and useless and all too prevalent.

This is what needs to stop - winning is not a political or policy objective in itself nor is it a military objective. Winning is what happens when the military succeeds in its operational objectives such as: destroy or defeat this force, protect these people, defend this place, whatever. Winning or victory is simply the military achieving its ends and we need to stop using these terms in lieu of describing what the hell we actually mean - at both the political, policy, strategic and tactical levels. So yes, our military should look to win whenever it's put on the field, no doubts about that but we should instead say what winning means.

The other side to my post was that we need to examine limited objectives for the limited use of military force in the next decade and a half (or so) based on scarce resources. We'll need the type of constrained ends exhibited during the Gulf War, not the ones used during the Iraq War. Scarcity should always drive the focused application of resources. We'll have to narrow the scope of our national security interests. We should hedge our expectations on what we can and want to achieve with military force. Where we may have once put lots of troops on the ground to achieve rather nebulous objectives we should look more to strategic raids and precision strikes for very specific results. We shouldn't be looking to fight and win wars, we should be looking to influence our adversaries with more moderated means. That will mean we need to really specify what our objectives are - what it means to win. I should stress that I foresee this being for a limited time only. The three major reasons we'll return to less limited ends:

1. A better economy means we have more revenue to spend on defense resources;
2. We become engaged in an existential conflict or limited conflict with a near-peer competitor; or
3. Some other conflict pops up that we can't possibly fathom at the moment during which we can't achieve or don't want to use limited objectives and need to escalate.

While we should see a change in what winning means (limited objectives), that change will be short-lived in the grand scheme of history. This does not mean a fundamental change to war - this will be a temporary blip in how we do business. This is where Slaughter and I disagree. At some point in the future we'll engage in a large-scale ground war and probably with convoluted and poorly expressed objectives; to think otherwise is pure fantasy. Until then we should think of (decisively!) influencing those we need to and not defeating them in the sense we've been thinking of these past 10 years. If you're reading this and thinking to yourself "no shit we're going to have less resources and will rely on more limited objectives," I urge you to think about the implications of this as we look to extricate ourselves out of Afghanistan and what "winning" is going to look like there in the midst of a U.S. defense drawdown. Winning there in 2014 is going to require some hyper-contortionism to ISAF's mission statement between now and then. So yeah, we're going to have to redefine victory.

Trombly and Foust on R2P, sovereignty, Libya, and a rational basis for U.S. foreign policy

I haven't had time to write about this subject (though if you follow me on Twitter it should be plain that I have strong feelings about it), but Dan Trombly and Josh Foust are absolutely killing it on Libya and the so-called "responsibility to protect."

First, see Anne-Marie Slaughter at The Atlantic.

Now read Foust at PBS Need to Know.

And finally, check out Trombly's comprehensive take-down of R2P opportunism at Slouching Towards Columbia.

I like Anne-Marie Slaughter -- I think she's charismatic and engaging, and her enthusiasm to correspond with analysts and students on Twitter is an admirable example for other policy big-wigs to emulate. But Foust and Trombly are so effective in categorically dismantling the philosophical and logical foundations of her argument that the reasonably-minded can only lament their comparative distance from the levers of power.

(It seems like an appropriate time to offer this aside: Dan Trombly is a freaking superstar. I don't know the guy personally, but if this kid spends his 20s making copies for the Michael O'Hanlons of the world, it will be a damned tragedy. It's depressing to consider how completely the so-called "foreign policy establishment" is walled off to original thinking, but I hope he gets an opportunity to do meaningful work. Read his blog. Every day. (No, seriously.))

Don't expect much from me over the long weekend, as I'll be on a train to New York this afternoon. (Hopefully I can get through the last 300-ish pages of The Makers of Modern Strategy, but I'm not holding out a ton of hope.)