John Bolton and Mike Pompeo made the rounds of every American president’s favorite region this past week, on behalf of their grizzly leader. The press story was that they were explaining the administration’s plan for withdrawal from Syria; really, this will be a much more gradual process than the president promised over the holidays to howls of protest from the national security talking heads. Of course, it’s a case of Trump doing a potentially positive thing in a really ham-handed fashion and for all the wrong reasons. So naturally he had to walk it back. Not the promise of “The Wall”, you understand … just the more recent promise of total withdrawal from Syria. And partial withdrawal Afghanistan.
I’ll believe it when I see it. The U.S. presidency has evolved to a point of foreign policy cravenness that pulling all troops out of any conflict, no matter how pointless or long-winded, is simply not an option. And before someone reminds me, yes, we do still have troops in Europe, Japan, and South Korea after more than 70 years. It’s basically the same dynamic. Pull the troops out and they’ll say you’re weak. No president, particularly not the current one, can willingly swallow that accusation. And so it continues – occupations stretching out to the vanishing point, burning up uncounted billions of defense dollars (and I really mean uncounted) and staking our young people out in hopeless situations that no application of military power can solve.
In essence, we are trapped in the box that was constructed in the wake of the Vietnam war. The so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” that George H.W. Bush declared cured in 1991 had two major components. One was a quite reasonable public distaste for foreign wars and military interventions, developed quite independently of articulate elite opinion, which almost universally supported the aims of our murderous adventure in Indochina. The second piece was a reluctance on the part of elected officials to institute conscription. Draft registration has been in effect since it was reestablished in 1980, but no draft has been declared since the end of the Vietnam War and none is likely to be. The reason is simple: politicians are unwilling to ask for that level of sacrifice from the American public. There’s no conscription because that would make presidents, senators, and congressmembers unpopular – period.
That’s what drives these endless wars. We are not compelled to fight, and our wars are financed on the U.S. Treasury’s credit card, so we don’t have to pay extra taxes, either. So if you’re wondering why we still have our all-volunteer army in Afghanistan, that’s basically why. Start drafting people (or even taxing people) and it would be over in six months, tops.
luv u,
jp
Bolton appears to have leveraged the fact that our credibility is shot in order to foment this crisis. The world doesn’t need reminding that in Libya, we talked Qaddafi out of his nuclear arsenal, then supported an uprising against him that ended with this murder. They don’t need reminding that both Iraq and Afghanistan, non nuclear states, were both invaded by us and are still under the partial control of our military. So, they know that we are liable to attack if you don’t have nuclear weapons … or if the U.S. manages to talk you into relinquishing your arsenal. What lessons would you draw from this kind of behavior?
It is often said that incumbency has its advantages, and it certainly does, but it has many drawbacks. One is that, as president, it’s harder to go around saying what you are going to do because the first thing people wonder is, well, why aren’t you doing it now? You are, in essence, applying for the job you already have. Your performance in that job is an actuality, not an abstraction. On the other hand, if you’re the challenger, you can promise anything, make any wild claim, run against mathematics itself, and act as though you have a big vat of miracle sauce locked up in your car elevator, and that once you take the oath of office, you’ll start ladling that stuff all over everything that’s bad and make it good.