This is the second in a four-part series on U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century, the focus of which will be to explain how America went from being the self-proclaimed “indispensable” leader of the free world in the 1990s to today’s more conflicted, hesitant and introspective great power.
In a National Security Council meeting on the afternoon of Sept. 12, 2001, as the nation was still in a collective agonized trauma over the 9/11 attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld first suggested to President George W. Bush that America should consider attacking Iraq, in addition to the al-Qaeda terrorist group that had perpetrated the carnage.
Less than two weeks later, during a speech to a joint session of Congress, the president laid out America’s plans in responding to the horrific ambush: “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
Thus began America’s war on terror which, for better or for worse, would dominate U.S. foreign policy for the following 15 years.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, then-candidate Bush, in a debate with Vice President Al Gore, offered a more-circumspect ambition for the use of the U.S. military abroad, criticizing the interventionist “nation-building” of the Clinton administration in Haiti and Somalia. The shock of the al-Qaeda assault on the homeland, however, unleashed in Bush and his administration a visceral, sometimes messianic, desire to rid the world of the scourge of terrorism. As a result, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington succumbed to the inexorable lure of nation-building, the very policy denounced by candidate Bush.
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 strikes, much of the world was fully supportive of the White House goal to take down al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for the first time in its history, invoked Article 5 of the group’s charter to provide military backing to the United States.
Washington even received substantive support from Moscow in the embryonic phases of the operation to overthrow the Taliban and track down Osama Bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership. The world’s initial succor to the American cause proved temporary, though, as the Bush administration, in search of real or imagined dragons to slay, made the fateful decision to invade Iraq in March of 2003, in the process squandering much of the global goodwill bestowed on Washington following 9/11.
While Saddam Hussein had been a thorn in the side of U.S. policy in the Middle East since the 1980s, he had been largely contained over the duration of the Clinton administration. By the fall of 2002, however, as Bin Laden had seemingly disappeared into the White Mountains along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Bush cabinet set its sights on taking the battle against Islamic extremism into the heart of the Middle East. Iraq was to be the first stop on a multi-country campaign to scrape clean the toxic social topsoil that bore the poison fruit of jihadi nihilism.
In fairness to the Bush White House, there was a general consensus amongst America’s political elite in late 2002 that Baghdad represented a legitimate target in the war on terror. In October of that year, Congress overwhelmingly ratified — 296-133 in the House, 77-23 in the Senate — the “Iraq Resolution” that authorized the use of military force against the Mesopotamian nation. While the subsequent U.S. military victory in the spring of 2003 over Saddam was achieved with alacrity, the wheels quickly came off of the “remake the world” bus as the occupying U.S. military became bogged down fighting insurgencies in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
One of the truisms of foreign policy theory is that a nation must balance its international policy aims with the resources available to pursue those objectives. The war on terror and its corresponding push to remake the world highlighted the cogency of this thesis. As the scope of the mission overwhelmed the human capital and technical gadgetry deployed for its prosecution, the effectiveness of the American foreign policy establishment — military, diplomatic and intelligence — began to weaken during Bush’s second term
Furthermore, experts within the U.S. government who had previously focused on the long-term threats posed by Moscow and Beijing were pulled into the vortex of the counterterrorism campaign, leaving Washington ill-prepared to predict, prevent and manage crises elsewhere. Consequently, while America was consumed with two “forever” wars and a seemingly unremitting terrorism battle, Vladimir Putin reasserted the Kremlin’s intention to reconstitute the historic Russian empire, attacking Georgia in a lightning strike on Aug. 8, 2008. In hindsight, the brief conflict in the Caucasus represented a harbinger of future Russian aggression, the repercussions of which have unsettled U.S. presidents to the present day.
As the sun set on Bush’s administration in January of 2009, the United States was perilously overstretched in the foreign policy realm, bleeding financial and personnel resources on an apparently unceasing melee against a political tactic favored by extremists the world over. The incoming president, Barack Obama, had campaigned on a platform to end the war in Iraq and refocus America’s foreign policy machinery on the country’s core national interests. Fulfilling those pledges as president would prove much more difficult than foretold by the candidate’s lofty campaign rhetoric.
Robert Beck of Peterborough is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. After serving for 30 years in U.S embassies in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, he now teaches foreign policy classes at lifelong learning programs at both Keene State College and Rivier University.