A Doctrine of Non-Aggression

It should be exceptionally easy to define a foreign policy doctrine that rules out wanton aggression against smaller states

Robert Kagan made a particularly ridiculous statement about foreign policy realism and critics of the Iraq war in a conversation with Bob Wright:

People want to build a doctrine around never doing Iraq again. If you mean we shouldn’t invade a country we’re not ready to based on false information, have a bad occupation, etc., I would agree with you. If you could a form a doctrine around that, I’m in favor of that doctrine. But if you want a doctrine that…unless you’re saying that we should never intervene anywhere under any circumstances, you’re always prone…you’re always putting yourself in a position where one of those interventions could go badly. You can’t have a doctrine that prevents you from having bad interventions.

The odd thing about this statement is that Kagan seems to think he is making a very trenchant criticism of Iraq war critics and advocates of restraint, but the statement shows exactly why his brand of reflexive interventionism is so bankrupt. On the one hand, he claims to be in favor of a doctrine that would avoid the pitfalls of an Iraq war, but then he insists on defining it in such extreme terms that almost no one could subscribe to it. It is actually quite easy to devise a rule that would exclude interventions like the Iraq war in the future: repudiate preventive warfare. That might not prevent all bad interventions, but it would make them much less likely.

The U.S. did not invade Iraq because it faced an imminent threat. What threat could a small country on the other side of the world actually pose in any case? The U.S. did not attack Iraq in retaliation for some wrong that their government had done to us. The Iraqi government at that time was a nasty government, but it had given us no legitimate cause to attack them. The U.S. attacked because of an irrational fear of some possible future threat that the Iraqi government might one day pose. As Bush said in his infamous West Point speech in 2002, “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.” Rather than wait for some legitimate casus belli, the Bush administration cooked up a bogus excuse to justify waging aggressive war against a small country whose government was incapable of doing any real harm to ours. It should be exceptionally easy to define a foreign policy doctrine that rules out wanton aggression against smaller states. It does not require rejecting all interventions under any circumstances, but it does require drawing a bright line against attacking other states on the basis of unhinged fears of what might happen sometime down the road. The fact that Kagan cannot or will not understand that tells us everything we need to know about his views.

He says at one point in the conversation that we can’t know in advance what will “succeed” and what won’t “succeed.” That is, of course, nonsense, since we have extensive experience to draw on and we have our informed assumptions about which policies work and which don’t, but the more important point is that there are some policies that should never be tried. An illegal war might very well “work” in destroying a government, but it should never be fought in the first place. Criminal aggression might “succeed” in seizing someone’s territory or compelling someone’s surrender, but it should not be done. The Spanish War “worked,” but the U.S. was wrong to fight it. The Philippine War “worked,” and we should be ashamed that it did. One does not have to reject all interventions everywhere for all time to recognize that there are some uses of force that are not just ill-advised, but genuinely unjust and wrong. Perhaps that makes me a “moralist,” as Kagan says, but I would rather be that than someone who keeps trying to justify unnecessary wars decades after they have been discredited by events.