Coercion Is Not The Only (Or The Best) Way

George Kennan's "Long Telegram" of 1946 constituted a seminal moment in American foreign policy.  More, it served to define a strategic world view emphasizing the need to confront and contain threats.  While perhaps unintended by Kennan, there was a natural tendency on the part of American leaders both civilian and military to place an onus on coercion as the preferred instrument by which to confront and contain.

In his later years, the famed diplomat and historian bemoaned the "militarization" of his musings on containment as applied to one area--the Eurasian landmass--and one opponent--Russia under the Soviets.  He maintained that he had never implied containment to be a sovereign remedy of universal applicability or that coercive military threats should be the primary tool of diplomacy.

The Geek has always been of the view that Kennan's later appreciation of his thinking was honest and accurate.  Kennan had a profound mind capable of fine gradations of nuance.  Unfortunately the politicians and diplomats, the soldiers and operations analysts who were called upon to put containment into practice under the overall requirements of  the Long Telegram inspired NSC 68 were not so fine grained in their understandings of time and place, of world and politics, of threats and opportunities.  NSC-68 (signed by President Truman in 1950) has not only governed the warp and woof of American foreign and national security policies ever since but has served to make these policies increasingly irrelevant, increasingly unrelated to the contemporary realities of global politics and evermore counterproductive.

The reason for the persistence of the NSC-68 mode is simple.  It worked.  The doctrine of containment enforced primarily by coercive means headed by the US military did contribute significantly to the downfall of the Soviet Union.  While not the sole cause by any stretch, the American persistence in applying containment, in surrounding the Soviet sphere with a steel ring of bases and alliances, of being both willing and able to fight wars of dubious connection to the Kremlin, placed real and continued pressures on the inefficient Soviet regime with important consequences which served in aggregate to sap the political will of the Soviet elite to keep on keeping on.

Sanctified by apparent success, the draw-a-line-in-the-sand mentality of the Cold War soldiered on.  The natural inclination of people to divide groups into two categories--Us and Them--was reinforced by the intellectual legacy of containment.  The equally natural inclination of most people to rely on coercion first in the accomplishment of goals was likewise buttressed by the seeming success of militarily predicated coercion during the Cold War.

The short span of time which elapsed between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the onset of attacks by advocates of violent political Islam did not permit for any sort of measured appraisal of the containment-by-coercion mode of the Cold War.  As a result, the default response of the American government and We the People was rooted in the Cold War paradigm: divide US from Them, draw a line in the sand, employ military coercion to bend Them to Our will.

The focus on military based coercion was seen as early as the mid-Fifties to be having the expectable albeit unintended consequence of warping all aspects of American foreign policy, the national economy, and virtually all aspects of our domestic society and polity in ways that might not be at all beneficial over time.

In foreign relations the Are-you-with-us? test dominated all other considerations.  Foreign governments which failed the test were put beyond the pale as Nasser, among others, found out.

The economic effects of NSC-68 gave rise to what Ike notably called "the military-industrial complex" which extended far beyond cabals of generals and industrialists to include academia, the media, and even entertainment.  (Recall the "mine shaft gap" line in Dr Strangelove, the perfect risible parody of all the many "gaps" which punctuated political discourse for thirty and more years.)

Investment in both human and physical capital alike which were completely appropriate were justified politically as being required by "national security."  (Think of the Interstate highway system or even the name of the first federal student loan project, the "National Defense Student Loan" program.)

Even the first stumbling efforts of the national government in the field of civil rights were explained as being necessary not for reasons of inherent justice or domestic tranquility but rather to deny the "Communists" from reaping a propaganda harvest in the context of the decolonizing Third World.  And, it is worth remembering the assaults on free speech made by those seeking to present a unified American public resolute in its defense of all rights and freedoms against the "Communist" menace.

We are now a full twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the failed coup against the Yeltsin government in Russia.  We are now more than ten years into a seemingly endless confrontation with the forces of violent political Islam, seeking without measurable success to contain the new threat by coercion based primarily upon military means.

And, it might be asked fairly, "What have we learned?"

At the very least it might be asserted with accuracy that we have learned the limits or, to be more honest, the irrelevance of coercion based containment.  A sign, small but telling, that at least some of the American establishment has learned this highly valuable lesson.

Two serving officers, one Navy and the other a Marine, have delivered themselves of a very important "private" paper.  While "private," this product of two staffers on the Joint Chiefs of Staff would not have become public had it not been approved of by very senior members of the Defense Department.

Writing under the pen name of "Mr Y" in intentional imitation of Kennan who published an article in Foreign Affairs based on his Long Telegram under the pseudonym of "Mr X," the two officers, Captain Porter and Colonel Mykleby, have offered a viable alternative to the containment by coercion thesis of Kennan.  While not complete in itself, the paper points in a new direction, a direction which places far less reliance upon either coercion or the military and places far more emphasis on refocusing our efforts on traditional American values such as entrepreneurship and education and, in the foreign relations sphere, on engagement and influence rather than dominance.

At the center of the "Mr Y" paper is the contention that the world is not a venue composed of threats but rather a complex political ecology in which opportunities for engagement and influence far outnumber actual threats requiring deterrence or defeat by purely military means.  They argue forcefully against the contention that those who are not obviously "with us" must be resolutely "against us."  They also contend with vigor that the US has become destructively astigmatic in its focus on violent political Islam.

While there is room for debate regarding the second contention, the overall thrust against dividing the people of a complex and rapidly evolving global population into simple camps of threats and allies is well neigh onto impossible to defeat.  So also is a critical accompanying theme: The necessity of properly balancing the foundational reality of the nation-state with the need for and existence of supra-national entities.

This secondary theme deserves more consideration than the two officers give it.  For example, they overlook the critical reality that strong centrifugal forces are at work in a large number of "states."  The reality that some "states" are such in name only as well as the potent disintegrative pressures of language, culture, religion, and defining mythology are fracturing more than a few actual states, some of which have long historical existence.  The addition of sub-state entities to the mix gravely complicates the global political ecology.

With respect to the US the two authors are of the view that policy has gone very much astray.  They argue the self-evident but willfully ignored: the US has not invested well or enough in the development of its most important asset, its human capital.  In a way they are simply enlarging the perspective of that wise and insightful soldier, Dwight Eisenhower.  Ike held that the diversion of money into weapons and other military equipment came at the expense of human capital investment.  And that is a ground truth none can deny.

The same applies to the argument adduced by the captain and the colonel to the effect that the real strength, the fountainhead of all our instruments of national power, resides in the creativity, energy, and efforts of Americans in all fields of endeavor.  From those comes American prosperity, American self-confidence, the American optimism which has been such a notable feature of the American character for over two hundred years.  All aspects of national power, hard as well as soft, arise from the reality of prosperity, the actuality of confidence, the presence of optimism.

The authors contend for a diplomatic paradigm based on engagement and influence.  This approach, they imply but do not state, would allow for a level of American authority on the global stage which would equate to operational dominance without any of the obnoxious features of "with-us-or-against-us" which have so often blighted our relations with other states.  This assessment is so self-evident that the need to set it forth even by implication should not be necessary.  The fact that it was put forth serves to underscore just how drastically the Cold War model has skewed American diplomacy.

Mr Y has lit a candle against the current foreign and national security darkness.  One can hope it will ignite an intellectual firestorm, but as a historian, the Geek cannot be so optimistic.  As recent debates and votes on the budget demonstrate, the Congress is still stuck in the morass of coercion first and shows no sign of desiring otherwise. It is unfortunate, but it is quite unlikely that Mr Y's paper will have even a small fraction of the influence enjoyed by the Long Telegram.