McMaster's Militarist Fantasy

If the history of U.S. military intervention since 1945 looks like “restraint” to them, I would hate to see what they think overly aggressive and meddlesome behavior looks like.

H.R. McMaster and Gabriel Scheinmann try their hands at comedy:

Contrary to the narrative of U.S. belligerence and imperialism that has been impressed on countless university students, the United States has, since the end of World War II, largely pursued a policy of restraint despite its considerable military power.

This line tells us just about everything we need to know about the authors’ worldview, and it shows them to be very dangerous hardliners willing to distort the record to suit their purposes. If the history of U.S. military intervention since 1945 looks like “restraint” to them, I would hate to see what they think overly aggressive and meddlesome behavior looks like. I am reminded of some of the earnest defenses of the “Blob” from a couple of years ago when the interventionist authors listed all of the countries that the U.S. could have attacked after 1991 but didn’t. What restraint!

It is a disservice to the current debate over U.S. strategy to publish such a ridiculous argument. McMaster and Scheinmann pretend that up is down and that the militarized foreign policy of the last few decades was something radically different from what we know it to be. We know that McMaster loathes restrainers, and now he wants to try to blame restraint for the failings of the strategy of primacy that he has supported by relabeling the status quo as restraint.

Conveniently, the authors make no mention of the Iraq war, the Bush Doctrine, or the “freedom agenda,” any one of which would prove their claims about U.S. “restraint” during this period to be false. The ongoing “war on terror” that has the U.S. fighting in multiple countries more than twenty years after 9/11 is likewise left out of the story. Afghanistan receives one passing mention by way of complaining about the decision to end U.S. involvement there after a generation. The idea that the U.S. has been “restrained” with respect to Russia and China is also hard to take seriously unless you think that the U.S. should have been going to war with one or both of them before now.

When we look at all of the U.S. interventions of the last seventy-five years, the one thing that almost all of them have in common is that they were wars that the U.S. chose to fight despite having no vital interests at stake. The U.S. has rarely, if ever, fought in self-defense since 1945. Sometimes our government has fought on behalf of other countries, and sometimes it has attacked other countries just because it could, but there are very few cases in which the U.S. did not go out of its way to become party to a conflict. You can call that restraint if you want, but in doing so you show that your analysis should not be trusted.

McMaster and Scheinmann need to pretend that the U.S. practiced “restraint” since the end of the Cold War so that they can blame “restraint” for whatever has gone wrong in the world in the last three decades. It takes real gall to claim that at the height of America’s “unipolar moment” when the U.S. was waging a global “war on terror” that the U.S. was exercising restraint, but that is what they do. The thrust of their disingenuous argument is that the U.S. was so restrained that it somehow allowed Russia and China to run amok, which conveniently ignores U.S. foreign policy hyperactivism, especially after 2001, and how that hyperactivity looked to Moscow and Beijing. McMaster likes to tout the importance of strategic empathy, but as usual he shows he has no clue what it is or how to practice it.

They complain about “the greatest drawdown of military power since the collapse of the British empire” in the 1990s and they claim that “Russia and China were emboldened” by this drawdown. This implies that they think that the U.S. should have maintained the size of the military at Cold War-era levels even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is as revealing as it is deranged. Never mind that the Russian and Chinese behavior they’re complaining about took place decades after the end of the Cold War. In their narcissistic view, things that other governments chose to do decades later can be blamed in some way on U.S. military spending decisions taken in the early ‘90s. Of course, whatever those governments did in response to Western policies later on is treated as evidence of the other states’ innate aggressiveness.

McMaster and Scheinmann naturally say that the current level of military spending is too low. Guess what’s to blame for that? They tell us: “The policy of restraint continues to limit the U.S. defense budget.” It is commonplace for hawks to claim that the military budget is lower than it should be, but it is unusual for them to pretend that it is being limited by a policy of restraint. If only that were true. There is no restraint on military spending to be found anywhere. Congress is tacking on $45 billion extra for next year just for kicks. Of course, if the military budget were limited by a policy of restraint, I promise you that that the budget would not be closing in on $850 billion on its way to ever-higher levels.

The authors call for the U.S. to end its “unilateral restraint vis-à-vis Russia and China,” which amounts to demanding that the U.S. court conflict with both of these nuclear-armed states. Pretending that “democracy, prosperity, and peace are on the decline” because of this supposed U.S. “restraint,” they would have the U.S. plunge the world into catastrophic conflicts through more militarism and confrontation. If the U.S. has been too restrained for their tastes in recent decades, they must believe more aggression and conflict to be the right answers. This is pure militarism of the worst kind, and I hope it will be rejected as such.

The entire article is a lengthy exercise in spinning an era of record-high military spending and incessant interventionism as one of restraint. It’s deeply dishonest and obnoxious, it’s an insult to the intelligence of the reader, and it is exactly what we have come to expect from McMaster and his allies. If they think the last thirty years of U.S. foreign policy represent “restraint,” I shudder to think what they believe the U.S. should be doing that it isn’t.