Battlegrounds Read online

  Just as we cleared the western defensive positions, our executive officer, John Gifford, radioed, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but you’re at the limit of advance; you’re at the 70 Easting.” I responded, “Tell them we can’t stop. Tell them we have to continue this attack. Tell them I’m sorry.” Stopping would have allowed the enemy to recover. I felt that we had the advantage and had to finish the battle rapidly. The army’s cavalry culture encourages initiative, and the stakes were too high not to take advantage of the hard blow we had just delivered.

  We crested a second rise and entered the reserve’s circular perimeter. Iraqi tank commanders were trying to deploy against us. They were too late. We destroyed all eighteen tanks at close range. Then we stopped. There was nothing left to shoot. Our fire support officer, Lt. Dan Davis, called in a massive artillery strike on fuel and ammo stocks farther east. There was some more fighting to do, but the main attack had lasted twenty-three minutes.

  Eagle Troop destroyed a much larger enemy force that had all the advantages of the defense and took no casualties. Our fight was a lopsided victory in a larger battle and war that were lopsided victories. As confidence grew based on the military victory in the Gulf War, analysts undervalued the qualitative advantage of U.S. forces and the narrow political objective of simply returning Kuwait to the Kuwaitis. They assumed that future enemies would repeat Saddam’s mistake of trying to fight the U.S. and coalition military forces on our own terms rather than asymmetrically. And, as many reflected on the victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, they forgot how the United States and its allies and partners had competed based on a clear understanding of their adversary, what was at stake, and the long-term strategy designed to ensure their security, promote prosperity, and extend their influence.

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  IN RETROSPECT, what those cavalry troopers experienced in Coburg, Germany, and what would become known as the Battle of 73 Easting in the Iraqi desert, marked the end of an era.4 It was then, in the 1990s, that American leaders, flush with victories in the Cold War and the Gulf War, forgot that the United States had to compete in foreign affairs. Coburg was also the birthplace of Hans Morgenthau, who fled the Nazis in 1937 and became one of the fathers of the discipline of international relations. In 1978, in his last coauthored essay with Ethel Person, titled “The Roots of Narcissism,” Morgenthau lamented preoccupation with self in foreign policy because it led to alienation from other nations and aspirations that exceeded the limits of ability. It was there in Coburg, near Morgenthau’s birthplace, that American confidence grew as the Cold War ended and the world entered what the political analyst Charles Krauthammer called “the unipolar moment.” America’s stature as the only superpower encouraged narcissism, a preoccupation with self, and an associated neglect of the influence that others have over the future course of events. Americans began to define the world only in relation to their own aspirations and desires.5

  Over-optimism and a preoccupation with self inspired three flawed assumptions about the new, post–Cold War era. First, many accepted the thesis that the West’s victory in the Cold War meant “the end of history,” what political philosopher Francis Fukuyama described as “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”6 Although Fukuyama warned that ideological consensus in favor of democracy was not a foregone conclusion, many assumed that an arc of history guaranteed the primacy of free and open societies over authoritarian and closed societies, and of free-market capitalism over authoritarian, closed economic systems. Ideological competition was finished.

  Second, many assumed that old rules of international relations and competition were no longer relevant in what President George H. W. Bush hoped would be “a new world order—a world where the rule of law, not the rule of the jungle governs the conduct of nations.” The post–Cold War world was unipolar. Russia was in disarray after the collapse of the Soviet Union. China’s economic miracle was just beginning, and Chinese Communist Party leaders adhered to paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s directive to hide their capabilities and bide their time. An emerging condominium of nations would vitiate the need to compete; all would work together and through international organizations to solve the world’s most pressing problems.7 Great power competition was passé.

  Third, many asserted that American military prowess demonstrated during the 1991 Persian Gulf war manifested a revolution in military affairs (dubbed RMA) that would allow the U.S. military to achieve “full-spectrum dominance” over any potential enemy. If any adversary had the temerity to challenge a technologically dominant U.S. military, the war would result in a rapid, decisive U.S. victory.8 Military competition was over.

  Those three assumptions underpinning U.S. policies not only were over-optimistic, they also led to complacency and hubris. Hubris, an ancient Greek term defined as extreme pride leading to overconfidence, often results in misfortune. In Greek tragedies, the hero vainly attempts to transcend human limits and often ignores warnings that predict a disastrous fate. In the case of the new, post–Cold War era, warnings that might have drawn into question the three assumptions I’ve just outlined went unheeded by too many in the U.S. policy, political, and military establishments.

  First, autocracy was making a comeback. By the end of the 1990s, market-oriented reforms failed in Russia, resulting in the election of Vladimir Putin, a little-known director of the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB (the successor organization to the KGB). Writing in the Hoover Digest in April 2000, David Winston, a strategic advisor to congressional leadership, warned that the newly elected Russian president “will be strongly tempted to revert to the traditional paths of autocracy and statism” and “may see both the fate of Russia and his rule through the traditional prism of military prowess and conquest.” But then, autocracy had never really gone away. Despite many predictions of its imminent collapse or implosion, the despotic regime in North Korea adapted to the loss of aid from the defunct Soviet Union, endured a devastating famine, extorted money and goods from the West and South Korea in exchange for a weak nuclear agreement, and transitioned the dictatorship from Kim Il-sung, known as the “Great Leader” since 1948, to his son Kim Jong-il, the “Dear Leader.” Meanwhile, a nascent reform movement in Iran was stifled as the Islamist revolutionaries tightened their grip on their theocratic dictatorship.

  Second, a new great power competition was emerging. China had paid close attention to the 1991 Gulf War and was deeply embarrassed by the 1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis, during which the United States responded to Chinese missile threats meant to intimidate Taiwan with a massive show of force. The two U.S. aircraft carrier groups that converged on the strait exposed the inferiority of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy compared to the U.S. fleet. As China’s economy grew, so did the PLA. And as their military grew, China began to flex its muscles. On April 1, 2001, fighter pilot Wang Wei maneuvered his PLA Navy J-8 fighter aggressively over the South China Sea in an effort to intimidate the crew of a U.S. Navy EP-3 signals intelligence aircraft. After two passes at the U.S. aircraft, he misjudged his approach, colliding with its nose and propeller. The J-8 broke into pieces, and the U.S. aircraft made an emergency landing on Hainan Island. Wang Wei’s body was never recovered. The Chinese detained the twenty-four U.S. crew members for eleven days.9 The demonstration of U.S. military prowess in the Gulf War and the Taiwan Strait Crisis, as well as increasing tension in the South China Sea, spurred China to undertake the largest peacetime military buildup in history.

  Third, as China began to challenge so-called American military dominance, increasingly potent jihadist and Iranian state-sponsored terrorist organizations attacked asymmetrically, avoiding military strength and exploiting weakness. The jihadist terrorist movement grew after the Afghan War of the 1980s and the Gulf War. Its leaders used a perverted interpretation of Sunni Islam to inspire recruits and rationalize violence against the “far enemies,” the United States and Europe, and the “near ene
mies,” Israel and Arab monarchies. Mass murder of the defenseless was the preferred tactic. On February 26, 1993, Ramzi Yousef, a Kuwaiti-born Pakistani terrorist who attended an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, drove with his Jordanian co-conspirator into the parking garage underneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. After building their weapon in a Jersey City apartment, they had packed the 1,200-pound bomb into a yellow Ryder van. Six people were killed and more than a thousand injured. Yousef had hoped that his explosion would topple Tower 1, which would then fall into Tower 2 and kill the occupants of both buildings, which he estimated to be about 250,000 people. Three years later, in 1996, Hezbollah terrorists (with Iranian backing and support) attacked U.S. military forces housed in the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans and wounding 372. In April 1998, Al-Qaeda issued a fatwa (a ruling on a point of Islamic law) from its safe haven in Afghanistan calling for the indiscriminate killing of Americans and Jews everywhere. Then, in August of that year, the terrorist organization turned words into action with simultaneous bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people and wounding more than 5,000. Twelve of those killed in Kenya were U.S. citizens. But Al-Qaeda was not finished. On October 12, 2000, the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole was docked in Aden, Yemen, for refueling. At around 11:18 a.m., a fiberglass boat laden with C4 explosives sped toward the port side and exploded on impact, blowing a forty-by-sixty-foot hole in the ship’s port side and killing seventeen sailors.10 By the turn of the century, the director of central intelligence, Adm. James Woolsey’s observation in 1993 that “Yes, we have slain a large dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes,”11 seemed particularly prescient. But in the new century, the free and open societies of the world would confront both.12

  Those and other harbingers of an emerging geopolitical landscape much different from the idealized new world order might have inspired a fundamental reassessment of U.S. foreign policy and national security strategy and sparked a questioning of the assumptions underpinning the optimistic view of the post–Cold War world. They did not. Indeed, President Bill Clinton wrote the following in the preface to the December 2000 National Security Strategy report:

  As we enter the new millennium, we are blessed to be citizens of a country enjoying record prosperity, with no deep divisions at home, no overriding external threats abroad, and history’s most powerful military. Americans of earlier eras may have hoped one day to live in a nation that could claim just one of these blessings. Probably few expected to experience them all; fewer still all at once.13

  At the turn of the century, the United States was therefore set up for a rude awakening of tragic proportions. Like Icarus of the ancient Greek legend, U.S. leaders disregarded admonitions against over-optimism and complacency. Icarus’s father instructed him to fly neither too low, lest the sea’s dampness clog his wings, nor too high, lest the sun’s heat melt them. But Icarus flew too close to the sun, his wings melted, and he tumbled into the sea and drowned. Before the mass murder attacks of September 11, 2001, America was flying too high.

  In the new century, three shocks and disappointments undermined American confidence. First, the September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda mass murder attacks in New York, Washington, and over a field in Pennsylvania hit like a sudden earthquake. The lives of nearly three thousand innocents were lost; many more suffered physical and psychological wounds. The attacks inflicted an estimated $36 billion in physical damages alone, with even higher costs accumulated when one considers the broader effect the attacks had on the American and global economies.14 Second, the unanticipated length and difficulty of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the cost of those wars in blood and treasure, came like slow, rolling aftershocks from 9/11. Third, the 2008 financial crisis had the effect of a tsunami earthquake. It began with subterranean rumblings caused by subprime mortgages and unregulated use of derivatives (contracts based on overvalued homes and bad loans). When the tidal wave hit, it created the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression of 1929. Housing prices fell 31 percent, more than during the Depression. The U.S. Treasury disbursed nearly $450 billion to banks to stimulate the economy, and approximately $360 billion to Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and AIG.15 The crisis passed, but two years later, unemployment was still above 9 percent and an unknown number of discouraged workers gave up looking for work.

  * * *

  OVER THE seven years following the 9/11 attacks, optimism and confidence eroded and, after 2008, began to give way to pessimism and resignation. In 2009, a new president implemented a foreign policy based mainly on his opposition to the Iraq War and animated by a worldview skeptical of American interventions and activist foreign policy abroad. In a June 2013 speech during which he announced the planned withdrawal of 33,000 troops from Afghanistan, President Barack Obama cited the cost of the war and the “rising debt and hard economic times” that followed the financial crisis. He stated that “the tide of war is receding” and that it was “time to focus on nation building here at home.”16 He saw the war in Iraq as part of a broader historical pattern of U.S. interventions. After a retrospective interview with President Obama in the waning days of his second term, Atlantic reporter Jeffrey Goldberg observed that President Obama “consistently invokes what he understands to be America’s past failures overseas as a means of checking American self-righteousness.” The president and many of those who served him were sympathetic to the New Left interpretation of foreign affairs, one that considers so-called Western capitalist imperialism as the primary cause of the world’s problems. “We have history,” President Obama said. “We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America. So we have to be mindful of our history when we start talking about intervening, and understand the source of other people’s suspicions.”17 An underlying premise of the New Left interpretation of history is that an overly powerful America is more often a source of, rather than part of the solution to, the world’s problems. To return to the Icarus analogy, under the Obama administration, we began to fly too low.

  Across multiple administrations, U.S. foreign policy and national security strategy has suffered from what we might derive from Morgenthau’s essay “Strategic Narcissism”: the tendency to view the world only in relation to the United States and to assume that the future course of events depends primarily on U.S. decisions or plans. The two mind-sets that result from strategic narcissism, overconfidence and resignation, share the conceit of attributing outcomes almost exclusively to U.S. decisions and undervaluing the degree to which others influence the future. The over-optimism that energized U.S. foreign policy under the George W. Bush administration contributed to an underappreciation of the risks of action, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The pessimism about the efficacy of U.S. engagement abroad that influenced U.S. foreign policy under the Barack Obama administration led to an underappreciation of the risks of inaction, such as the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011 or the decision to forgo military reprisals for the Assad regime’s mass murder of Syrian civilians with chemical weapons in 2013. Both forms of strategic narcissism were based mainly on wishful thinking and the definition of problems as one might like them to be as a way to avoid harsher realities. I experienced the effect of strategic narcissism up close. I was often on the receiving end of ill-conceived plans disconnected from the problems they were ostensibly meant to address. That is because strategic narcissism leads to policies and strategies based on what the purveyor prefers, rather than on what the situation demands. The assumptions that underpin these policies and strategies often go unchallenged as they provide a deceptive rationale for folly.

  As I got on the flight to Palm Beach, Florida, to be interviewed by a man I had never met, I thought that, if given the opportunity, I would try to help restore America’s strategic competence. And I thought that the first step might be to begin with historian Zachary Shore’s concept of strate
gic empathy, what Shore describes as “the skill of understanding what drives and constrains one’s adversary,”18 as a corrective to strategic narcissism. During the interview at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump seemed sympathetic to my observation that the United States had not competed effectively in recent years and that, as a result, determined adversaries had gained strength and our power and influence had diminished. As defense expert Nadia Schadlow observed in her 2013 essay “Competitive Engagement,” “being successful in a competition requires knowing and understanding both one’s competitors and oneself.”19 I began with those tasks when I assumed my duties as national security advisor just three days after the call I received in Philadelphia. I asked Schadlow to join me as senior director for national security strategy to develop options that would enhance America’s ability to compete more effectively and shift the balance back in favor of the United States and the free and open societies of the world.

  There was a lot of work to do. Two days after I arrived in Washington, I held an “all hands” meeting in which I shared with the national security staff my view that our strategic competence had eroded based, in part, on our narcissistic approach to foreign policy and national security strategy. Our job was to provide the president with options and integrated strategies that combined elements of national power with efforts of like-minded partners to make progress toward clearly defined goals. The work, however, should begin with identifying challenges and understanding them on their own terms and from the perspective of “the other.” I asked our team not only to map the interests of rivals, adversaries, and enemies, but also to consider the emotions, aspirations, and ideologies that drive and constrain them. The options we developed, if approved, would become integrated strategies. I insisted that these strategies must identify not only goals, but also our assumptions—especially assumptions concerning the degree of agency and control that we and our partners could expect in order to make progress toward those goals. The strategies needed to be logical with regard to the means employed and the desired ends. We would also work hard to describe what was at stake and to explain why accomplishing those ends was worth the risks and potential cost in treasure and, especially, blood. I then laid out what I saw, from my more than three decades in the military and from studying national security as a historian, as the four categories of challenges to national and international security. These would be our priorities as we developed integrated strategies for the president.