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MISSION FAILURE
Q
 Also by€Michael Mandelbaum
The Road to Global Prosperity (2014)
That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It
Invented and How We Can Come Back (with Thomas
L. Friedman) (2011)
The Frugal Superpower: America’s Global Leadership in a Cash-╉
Strapped World (2010)
Democracy’s Good Name: The Rise and the Risks of the World’s Most
Popular Form of Government (2007)
The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s Government
in the Twenty-╉First Century (2006)
The Meaning of Sports: Why Americans Watch Baseball, Football, and
Basketball and What They See When They Do (2004)
The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free
Markets in the Twenty-╉First Century (2002)
The Dawn of Peace in Europe (1996)
The Global Rivals (with Seweryn Bialer) (1988)
The Fate of Nations: The Search for National Security in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1988)
Reagan and Gorbachev (with Strobe Talbott) (1987)
The Nuclear Future (1983)
The Nuclear Revolution: International Politics Before and After
Hiroshima (1981)
The Nuclear Question: The United States and Nuclear Weapons,
1946–╉1976 (1979)
 M ISSION
FAILURE

Q
AMERICA AND THE WORLD IN THE
POST-╉C OLD WAR ER A

M ICHAEL M ANDELBAUM

1
 1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by
publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in
the UK and in certain other countries

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or
under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries
concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights
Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978–0–190–46947–4

1╇3╇5╇7╇9╇8╇6╇4╇2
Printed by Sheridan, USA
 In memory of my brother,
Jonathan Edward Mandelbaum, MD,
1949–╉1976
. . . we do not think of ourselves as the potential masters, but as tutors of
mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection.
—╉REINHOLD NIEBUHR , The Irony of American History

Of course he remains essentially American in believing all questions

have answers, that there is an ideal life against which everyday life can be
measured . . .
—╉ANTHONY POWELL , Temporary Kings

You Americans are so naive.

—╉STEVE MARTIN, Saturday Night Live
 C on t e n ts

Acknowledgmentsâ•… ix

Introductionâ•… 1

1.â•… China, the Global Economy, and Russiaâ•… 14

A New Administration in a New Worldâ•… 14
China and Human Rightsâ•… 18
Economics as Foreign Policyâ•… 35
Russia: The Good Deedâ•… 52
Russia: The Bad Deedâ•… 65

2.â•… Humanitarian Interventionâ•… 75

The Innovationâ•… 75
Somalia, Haiti, Rwandaâ•… 86
Bosniaâ•… 94
Kosovoâ•… 111
Famous Victoriesâ•… 124

3.â•… The War on Terror and Afghanistanâ•… 133

To the World Trade Centerâ•… 133
The War on Terrorâ•… 144

vii
viii Contents

Afghanistan: Successâ•… 158

Afghanistan: Failureâ•… 165
Afghanistan: The Long Goodbyeâ•… 175

4.â•…Iraqâ•…185
From War to Warâ•… 185
From Success to Failureâ•… 203
The Wars After the Warâ•… 218
The Home Frontâ•… 227
Exit and Reentryâ•… 234

5.â•… The Middle Eastâ•… 245

The Center of the Worldâ•… 245
The Peace Processâ•… 250
Land for Warâ•… 272
The Democracy Agendaâ•… 287
The Arab Springâ•… 298

6.â•… The Restorationâ•… 311

The End of the Post-╉Cold War Order╅ 311
The Bubbles Burstâ•… 316
The Roguesâ•… 325
The Rise of Chinaâ•… 343
The Revenge of Russiaâ•… 353

Conclusionâ•… 367

Notesâ•… 383
Indexâ•… 459
 Ack now l e d g m e n ts

Conversations with two superb editors, Adam Garfinkle of The

American Interest and Gideon Rose of Foreign Affairs, planted the
seeds that grew into this book. I am grateful to them. I am grateful,
as well, for advice, assistance, and inspiration of various kinds to the
following: Anders Aslund, Steven A. Cook, Robert Danin, Thomas
L. Friedman, Leslie H. Gelb, Richard N. Haass, James Klurfeld, David
M. Lampton, Starr Lee, Robert J. Lieber, Charles H. Lipson, Robert
S. Litwak, Rajan Menon, John Mueller, Michael B. Oren, Daniel Pipes,
Robert Satloff, and Dan Schueftan. The usual caveat applies: I alone,
and not any of them, am responsible for what follows. Indeed, more
than the usual caveat applies: I am confident that most of those I have
mentioned will disagree, in some cases strongly, with at least some of
what I have written.
It is a pleasure to thank, for financial support in the writing of
Mission Failure, Daniel Pipes and the Education Fund of the Middle
East Forum and the Hertog Foundation. I have enjoyed working on its
production with David McBride of Oxford University Press.
My most profound gratitude, and that of longest standing, is to my
wife, Anne Mandelbaum, whose wisdom, editorial virtuosity, and love
continue to sustain me.

ix
MISSION FAILURE
Q
 Introduction

On March 3, 1991, a ceremony took place in southern Iraq that marked

the beginning of a new era in the history of American foreign policy. At
the Safwan airbase an American commander, Norman Schwarzkopf,
acting for the administration of President George H. W. Bush and
accompanied by British, French, and Saudi Arabian officers, agreed on
the terms of a ceasefire with an Iraqi general. The war that Iraq’s inva-
sion and occupation of tiny, neighboring, oil-╉rich Kuwait had begun in
August 1990 had ended in a decisive victory for the United States and
its allies.
The Gulf War, in turn, marked the end of a longer, larger, far more
important American conflict: the four-╉ decades-╉long political, eco-
nomic, and military struggle with the Soviet Union, its allies and cli-
ents, and its ideology, Marxism-╉Leninism. The end of that conflict, the
Cold War, had set the course of the Gulf War. For the first time since
1945, the Soviet Union did not oppose a major American international
initiative. The United States was therefore able to assemble a broad
international coalition to attack the army of the Iraqi dictator Saddam
Hussein and to evict Iraq from Kuwait without fear of interference
from Soviet-╉backed countries. The coalition defeated the Iraqi army
swiftly and at very low cost. Although Saddam’s Iraq had been a Soviet
client and although Soviet officials did attempt to mediate between the
Iraqi and American governments, in the end, for the first time since
World War II, Moscow sided with Washington.

1
2 Mission Failure

The opening of the Berlin Wall on November 11, 1989, fifteen

months before the Safwan ceremony, symbolized more vividly than
any other event the end of the Cold War. The dissolution of the Soviet
Union itself, nine months after that ceremony, in December 1991,
rendered its ending irreversible. It was, however, the ceremony in the
Iraqi desert that made clear the main consequence, for the United
States and the world, of the conclusion of what had been, with World
Wars I and II, one of the three great, all-​encompassing, era-​defining
global conflicts of the twentieth century. In its wake the United States
possessed enormous, perhaps historically unprecedented, and seem-
ingly unchallengeable power. The succeeding era in American foreign
policy would be defined by what the United States chose to do with
that power.
It could have chosen not to make any particular use of it at all. It
could have withdrawn from its far-​flung international presence, as it
had done after World War I and briefly after World War II. This did
not happen. Withdrawal had exposed the country to danger after the
two world wars, Americans had become accustomed to an expansive
global role, and the burden of that role was not prohibitively heavy. In
fact, in the wake of the Cold War the economic burden of America’s
international activities lightened. Its costliest feature, the military bud-
get, fell from more than seven percent of national output in 1988 to less
than four percent by 2000.
Inertia—​the tendency of the status quo to continue as long as it
is tolerable—​is a powerful force in human affairs, and it shaped the
American response to the end of the Cold War. The military deploy-
ments, the political commitments, the economic institutions that the
Cold War had involved had become, by the time Iraq surrendered,
familiar and routine. They imposed no particular hardship or even dis-
comfort on the American public, which therefore felt no pressing need
to end them. For one particular group of Americans, moreover—​the
government personnel, academics, journalists, and others profession-
ally concerned with the conduct of the nation’s foreign policy, as well
as the larger number of citizens for whom foreign policy had become
an abiding interest—​discontinuity in the American role in the world
would have caused disruption and imposed hardship. Unlike the rest of
the country, the informal, loosely connected American foreign policy
 Introduction 3

community cared deeply about relations with the rest of the world.
The members of that community, although divided on specific issues,
strongly favored sustaining an expansive international role.1
So the United States did not appreciably reduce its international
presence when the conflict with the Soviet Union ended, and in the
wake of that conflict American foreign policy exhibited considerable
continuity. Or rather, the forms of foreign policy—​the institutions
engaged in carrying it out—​continued. The content of that policy—​
the goals the United States pursued—​did change. Indeed, they broke
with the pattern of foreign policy of the preceding four decades and
of the entire history of the country before the Cold War. In fact, in
its main objectives, post-​Cold War American foreign policy differed
sharply from the foreign policies of most countries for most of recorded
history. The United States used the formidable power with which it
emerged from the conflict with the Soviet Union in a distinctive and
unprecedented way.
Q
The new era in American foreign policy began in the aftermath of
the meeting at the Safwan airbase that ended the Gulf war of 1991. The
Kurds of northern Iraq, ethnically separate from the Sunni Arabs who
dominated the country and from whose ranks Saddam Hussein had
come, rose up in rebellion against him and them. Although routed by
the American-​led coalition, the Sunni-​dominated Iraqi army retained
enough firepower to crush the Kurds. Thousands were killed and hun-
dreds of thousands put to flight. By the end of April two million of
them were crowded along the country’s borders with Iran and Turkey.
Moved by the Kurds’ suffering, feeling pressure from its ally Turkey
to shield it from a flood of Kurdish refugees, and equipped with United
Nations Security Resolution 688 that laid the basis for intervention
by designating the Kurds’ plight a threat to “the international peace
and security of the region,” the United States and its coalition partners
moved to protect them. Several thousand American, British, and other
troops established a safe haven in northern Iraq and provided food and
shelter to the beleaguered Kurds. Allied military aircraft patrolled the
skies above the region to prevent further attacks by the Iraqi armed
forces, establishing a “no-​fly zone” that was to endure for the next
twelve years.2
4 Mission Failure

Although it followed directly from the Gulf War, the establishment

of the Kurdish protective zone departed sharply from the principles for
which the winning coalition had fought that conflict, from American
policy during the Cold War, and indeed from the foreign policies of
almost every country throughout history. The war had been waged in
response to Iraq’s external behavior. Its aim was to reverse Iraqi aggres-
sion across an international border against another sovereign state.
Since the Kurdish region was located within what all countries rec-
ognized as Iraq’s legitimate borders, by setting up a safe haven there
the United States and its allies inserted themselves into Iraqi internal
politics.
Moreover, America had gone to war against Saddam’s army of occu-
pation in Kuwait on the assumption that if his aggression were allowed
to stand he would be able to intimidate neighboring Saudi Arabia and
exert control over the oil of the Persian Gulf, the unimpeded flow of
which to oil-​consuming countries was crucial for their economic wel-
fare. By contrast, the United States intervened in the wake of that war
to help an embattled people whose distress, while troubling, could have
no effect on the well-​being of American citizens.
The operation to rescue the Kurds thus represented a major
change: Saddam’s attack on Kuwait threatened American interests; his
assault on the Kurds affronted American values. The Gulf War was
an act of self-​defense. The intervention, tellingly named “Operation
Provide Comfort,” was a good deed. As such, it established the dom-
inant pattern of American foreign policy in the post-​Cold War era.
Without announcing it, without debating it, without even fully real-
izing it, the goals of American foreign policy changed fundamentally.
For two decades thereafter the principal international initiatives
of the United States concerned the internal politics and economics
rather than the external behavior of other countries. The main focus
of American foreign policy shifted from war to governance, from what
other governments did beyond their borders to what they did and how
they were organized within them. Invariably, the United States sought
to make the internal governance of the countries with which it became
entangled more like its own democratic, constitutional order and those
of its Western allies. In the Cold War the United States had aimed
at containment; in the post-​Cold War period the thrust of American
 Introduction 5

foreign policy was transformation. The Cold War involved the defense
of the West; post-​Cold War foreign policy aspired to the political and
ideological extension of the West.3
The United States had taken an interest in the internal affairs of
other countries before 1991. American military intervention in its
southern neighbor Mexico, and in the smaller, even weaker countries
of Central America to Mexico’s south, began in the nineteenth century
and continued well into the twentieth. During the Vietnam War the
United States tried, unsuccessfully, to reform the government of South
Vietnam so that it could win the contest with the communist North
for “the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people. But the American
government undertook those initiatives as part of broader policies that
had more traditional goals: it fought the war in Vietnam, for example,
as part of the policy of protecting the United States from global com-
munism. Only in the post-​Cold War period did the internal affairs of
other countries become the primary focus of American foreign policy.
That is what made this period distinctive. What had been a hobby
became a full-​time job.
Nor had countries other than the United States steered entirely clear
of the governance of foreign peoples. To the contrary, powerful states
that controlled empires, the dominant form of political organization
until the twentieth century, bore direct responsibility for governing
them. The United States itself, although the child of a revolt against
British imperial rule and generally opposed to empire throughout its
history, did govern the Philippines directly from 1898 to 1946.4 Most
imperial powers, however, had minimal concern for the way their
imperial possessions were organized politically, being interested simply
in maintaining control of them. They regarded their empires for the
most part as vehicles for expanding their own wealth and power, not
for improving the welfare of those they governed.5
Furthermore, by 1991 the age of empire had ended. Governing others
had acquired a moral taint and had, in any event, become too expen-
sive to be worthwhile. Whatever Americans thought was the purpose
of their post-​Cold War foreign policies, they certainly did not consider
themselves to be following in the footsteps of the British, the French,
the Habsburgs, or the Ottomans in acquiring and managing a grand
imperial domain.
6 Mission Failure

The emphasis on the domestic arrangements of other countries was

common to the foreign policies of the 42nd, 43rd, and 44th presidents:
Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. To be sure, they
and the foreign policy officials they employed did not think of them-
selves as pursuing the same foreign policy. To almost all observers of
American foreign policy, moreover, and to the American public as well,
the most important feature of the first two post-​Cold War decades
seemed to be the division of the period into two sharply different parts.
The terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC midway
through that period, on September 11, 2001, changed everything, or so
Americans believed.
The attacks did in fact change a great deal, profoundly affecting the
course of the nation’s foreign policy over the decade that followed. The
principal initiatives of the George W. Bush administration would not
have taken place but for the events of September 11. Yet those initia-
tives led to the same kind of effort to transform the domestic politi-
cal structures of other countries that the Clinton administration had
undertaken.
The Clinton and Bush foreign policies had another feature in com-
mon: neither administration deliberately set out on missions of trans-
formation. They embarked on these missions for different, and varying,
reasons. In its policies toward China and Russia, the Clinton admin-
istration was largely responding to domestic pressures in the United
States. In conducting military operations in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia,
and Kosovo, the Clinton officials sought to protect the people living
in those places from the depredations of the local authorities. The
administration of George W. Bush launched two substantial wars, in
Afghanistan and Iraq, for the most traditional of reasons: to defend
American security in response to a direct attack on the United States.
Those two administrations and the one that followed, that of Barack
Obama, all devoted time, money, and political capital to another famil-
iar international activity seemingly unrelated to the internal affairs of
the parties involved: mediation between Israelis and Arabs.
Yet all three administrations ended in the same place. All their ini-
tiatives led the United States—​despite the original aims and some-
times without the American government fully realizing what was
 Introduction 7

happening—​into efforts to transform the political institutions, the

political practices, and the political values of China, Russia, Somalia,
Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the wider Arab world.
Post-​Cold War American foreign policy produced a two-​decades-​long
series of unintended consequences. Why did this happen?
The fundamental reason that the United States concentrated on try-
ing to transform domestic political and economic practices in selected
places around the world was that it could. No other country or coalition of
countries was in a position to stop it. America’s enormous power, the vast
superiority in disposable resources over all other countries that the 1991
Gulf War demonstrated, is the pervasive underlying cause of the direc-
tion that post-​Cold War American foreign policy took.
Historically, most political communities have lacked the strength
even to aspire to remake the way others are governed. Those sover-
eign states that were not weak, the great powers, had to devote their
resources to protecting themselves against other great powers, as the
United States had to do against the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1991.
After the Cold War, by contrast, America had no major adversary
against which it had to defend itself. In 1796 the nation’s first president,
George Washington, foresaw a day when his infant country would
“possess the strength of a Giant and there will be none who can make
us afraid.”6 With the end of the Cold War, that day had come.
Power is to sovereign states in the international system what money
is to individuals: the more they have, the wider is the range of uses
to which they can put it. Most countries most of the time, like most
people most of the time, live in a world of scarcity. They must husband
their resources for the necessities: security in the case of nations, food
and shelter for individuals. Some people, however, are skillful enough
or fortunate enough (or both) to amass a great deal of money, which
they can spend in many other ways. The United States after the Cold
War found itself in an analogous position: it became the equivalent
of a very wealthy person, the multibillionaire among nations. It left
the realm of necessity that it had inhabited during the Cold War and
entered the world of choice.7 It chose to spend some of its vast reserves
of power on the geopolitical equivalent of luxury items: the remaking
of other countries. While its enormous post-​Cold War strength gave
8 Mission Failure

it the opportunity to choose, however, that strength did not, by itself,

determine the choice that America made. That choice had three addi-
tional causes.
First, restructuring the domestic affairs of the countries where the
United States attempted to do this seemed necessary to consolidate other
gains. China and Russia had become far less bellicose and much more
friendly to the United States at the outset of the 1990s than when both
were orthodox communist countries. Promoting respect for human
rights by the Chinese government and working free markets in Russia,
the Clinton administration calculated, would reinforce these positive
post-​Cold War trends. That administration sent American troops to
Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo to relieve hunger, combat oppres-
sion, and stop massacres, which led to efforts to construct stable, decent
governments in order to ensure that such outrages would not recur. The
George W. Bush administration, having removed regimes hostile to the
United States and dangerous to their own people in Afghanistan and
Iraq, found itself deeply engaged in the internal affairs of those two
countries in order to prevent similar (or even more dangerous) govern-
ments from gaining power.
Second, in the wake of the Cold War, building Western-​style politi-
cal and economic institutions seemed—​albeit erroneously—​eminently
feasible. The whole world appeared to be moving in that direction.
Democracy was on the march: between 1970 and 2010, by one count,
the number of democratic governments worldwide increased from 30
to 119.8 Free markets as the form of economic organization were more
popular still, embraced even by governments such as China’s that dis-
dained political democracy. In seeking to build these institutions where
they did not yet exist, the United States had cause to believe that it was
pushing on an already open door.
The third reason that successive post-​Cold War American adminis-
trations chose to concentrate on trying to encourage and even implant
Western institutions in a series of non-​Western countries is that this
came naturally to Americans. The impulse to do so is an old and deeply
rooted one in the United States. It is part of the country’s political and
cultural DNA. It goes all the way back to the first European settlers in
 Introduction 9

North America, who crossed the Atlantic not only to escape religious
persecution but also to found communities that would serve as mod-
els for others. They wanted these communities to become, to use the
Old Testament idiom in which they were steeped, “a light unto the
nations.” In 1630, while still on shipboard sailing to Massachusetts Bay,
the Puritan leader John Winthrop told his fellow passengers that their
new settlement would be “a city upon a hill,” to be observed, admired,
and emulated by the rest of the world. Three hundred fifty years later
the American president Ronald Reagan was fond of using those words
to describe the United States, a fondness that testifies to the enduring
resonance of the idea they expressed.
Americans, in short, have always believed that they have a voca-
tion to improve the world and have always wished to carry it out by
helping others become more like themselves. The enormous power
with which their country emerged from the Cold War gave them an
unprecedented opportunity to attempt to do just that. Post-​Cold War
American foreign policy consists of their government’s responses to
that opportunity.
The responses had a religious overtone, and not surprisingly: from the
moment that the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts
in 1620, religion has shaped America. Because it is a country, founded
by religious people for religious reasons, in which religious belief has
always been strong, religious ideas and practices have played a part
in America’s public life. The English writer G. K. Chesterton called
the United States “a country with the soul of a church.” Its post-​Cold
War foreign policy bears a resemblance to one particular feature of
America’s religious tradition: the dispatch of missionaries abroad to
convert nonbelievers. In the nineteenth century many of the Americans
who traveled and lived in other countries were Protestant missionar-
ies. In the twentieth century the American government established a
secular version of their missions, one designed to spread the values,
skills, and institutions that Americans considered crucial for success—​
above all economic success—​in the modern world. It was called the
Peace Corps. The main international initiatives of the United States
in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the
10 Mission Failure

twenty-​first had the same purpose, but on a far larger scale: they aimed
to convert not simply individuals but entire countries.
These missions had a common feature. They all failed.
Q
The United States did not succeed in getting China to protect
human rights, or in constructing smoothly functioning free markets or
genuinely representative political institutions in Russia. It did not suc-
ceed in installing well-​run, widely accepted governments in Somalia,
Haiti, Bosnia, or Kosovo. It did not transform Afghanistan or Iraq into
tolerant, effectively administered countries. It did not bring democracy
to the Middle East or harmony between Israelis and Arabs.
As is customary in American public life, the government’s policies
designed to do these things came in for vigorous criticism while they
were under way, and in every case the critics had a point: the policies
were not perfect. The undoubted flaws in the way the United States
carried out its post-​Cold War missions, however, do not bear the main
responsibility for their failures.
Nor were those failures due chiefly to the investment of insufficient
resources, although that shortcoming was present as well: in some cases
the United States could have done more than it did. Here, American for-
eign policy suffered from a contradiction. The enormous power of the
United States made it possible to undertake the tasks the United States
attempted in the Balkans, Africa, East Asia, the Middle East, and the
Western Hemisphere. On the other hand, Americans turn out to be
willing to underwrite long, painful, expensive projects abroad only for
the purpose of meeting what they deem major threats to their own well-​
being, which historically have come from powerful countries that oppose
the United States. So the feature of the post-​Cold War world that made
the American government’s principal international project possible—​the
absence of a serious challenge to American security—​also limited the
resources the American public was willing to authorize to carry it out.
The most important limits on what the United States was able to do when
it intervened after the Cold War came not from without but from within.
They came less from the resistance of other countries than from the reluc-
tance of Americans to support what their government was trying to do.
Still, the principal reason for the failure of American efforts to improve
other countries lay elsewhere—​specifically, in the nature of what the
 Introduction 11

United States was attempting. It did not achieve its goals because those
goals were not achievable with the available tools. The tools of foreign
policy are guns, money, and words implying that either or both will be
used. These can and do affect what other countries do outside their own
borders; they are far less effective in shaping what other countries are like
within those borders. In making the domestic transformation of other
countries the object of its foreign policy, the American government resem-
bled someone trying to open a can with a sponge. It unwittingly embarked
on variations on what was, to borrow a phrase, mission impossible.
What the United States was trying to do and failed to do was com-
monly labeled “nation-​building.” In fact, the failed American missions
involved two tasks. One was building nations, that is fostering a sense
of national community among people of different backgrounds. The
other is more appropriately termed “state-​building”: the creation of
working political institutions. America failed at both endeavors for the
simple reason that neither was within its power to accomplish.
After World War I the victors decided that the borders of states
should coincide with those of nations: groups with a common language,
or ethnicity, or history, or some combination thereof should have a
common government. The nation-​state became, and remains, the most
familiar and widely accepted large-​scale political unit. Sometimes,
however, the borders of states and the location of national groups do
not match: nations are dispersed among more than one state; two or
more national groups live in a single state. The desire of divided nations
to live in the same jurisdiction, and the determination of one nation
not to permit another to dominate the state in which they both dwell,
can lead to violence. That is what happened in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in
Afghanistan, and in Iraq.
The United States could and did compel Serbs to live with Muslims
in Bosnia and Sunni and Shia Muslim Arabs and Kurds to remain
within the framework of a single Iraq; but Washington could not and
therefore did not get them to do so voluntarily or peacefully in the
absence of a military presence from the outside. Enduring American
success required the creation of a widely shared Bosnian, or Kosovar, or
Afghan, or Iraqi identity to supplant the narrower allegiances that had
provoked conflict; but the United States, although the most powerful
country in the world, did not have the capacity to do this.
12 Mission Failure

As for state-​building, establishing the institutions of government—​

courts, legislatures, administrative agencies—​ as the United States
attempted to do, or to help to do, in Russia, in Haiti, in the Balkans,
and in Afghanistan and Iraq—​is inherently difficult. It involves changes
in the habits, the skills, and the beliefs of the many people who must
operate these institutions and the many, many more who must support
and accept them. This cannot be accomplished quickly. It is at least a
generation-​long project.
It is all the more difficult without a consensus on the location of bor-
ders. People will not cooperate in building and supporting the institu-
tions of a state if they do not want to live in that state or believe that the
institutions, once built, will be used to their detriment. State-​building
is even more difficult when the institutions being built are supposed to
be transparent, accountable, and respectful of individual liberty, which
was invariably the post-​Cold War American goal.
Yet another difficulty hindered American state-​building, the same
kind of difficulty that obstructed nation-​building: loyalties of narrower
scope than the project required. To function properly modern institu-
tions must command universal compliance with impersonal rules. This
is especially important for the rule of law. The natural allegiance of
human beings, by contrast, is neither universal nor impersonal: it is to
other people either with whom they have ties of blood or to whom they
are bound by a history of reciprocal assistance.9 The world has many
such societies, including in China, Russia, Somalia, Afghanistan,
and Iraq.
American foreign policy after the Cold War did not consist entirely
of failure. The United States achieved some successes as well. It did not
persuade the Chinese government to respect human rights, or make
Russia a stable democracy, but it did find, briefly, a workable post-​Cold
War relationship with China and see Russia establish rough-​and-​ready
free markets out of the ruins of the Soviet planned economy. It did
not bring peace to Israel and the Palestinians, but its efforts seemed
to make the Middle East, temporarily in the 1990s, a somewhat more
peaceful place. Moreover, American military operations succeeded
everywhere. The threat of force ended a military dictatorship in Haiti.
The American military twice defeated or helped to defeat Serb forces in
the Balkans and dislodged the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and that
 Introduction 13

of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. All these victories—​against, it is true, very

weak adversaries—​came at relatively low cost to America. The military
missions that the United States undertook succeeded. It was the political
missions that followed, the efforts to transform the politics of the places
where American arms had prevailed, that failed.
The successes as well as the failures of American policies toward
Russia and China in the 1990s are the subjects of Chapter 1. Chapter 2
deals with the military operations, and their aftermaths, in Somalia,
Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo—​the “humanitarian” interventions of the
Clinton years. The American experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq are
the subjects of Chapters 3 and 4, respectively, and Chapter 5 addresses
the American record in the Middle East beyond Iraq during the three
post-​Cold War presidential administrations.
In retrospect, the initiatives that seized the country’s attention and
claimed its resources did not concern the issues that mattered most for
the long-​term security and well-​being of the United States and the rest
of the world. What Americans considered urgent was not what was
important. What was important was the American role as the chief
custodian of the benign international order that had emerged from the
end of the Cold War. Making particular countries better by American
standards, which the main initiatives of American foreign policy aimed
to do, mattered less than keeping the world as a whole from getting
worse. Just how well the United States did on this score is the subject
of Chapter 6.
Together the chapters tell the story of good, sometimes noble, and
thoroughly American intentions coming up against the deeply embed-
ded, often harsh, and profoundly un-​A merican realities of places far
from the United States. In this encounter the realities prevailed.
 1
Q
China, the€Global Economy, and€Russia
[The Chinese government] is on the wrong side of history.
—╉BILL CLINTON TO CHINESE LEADER JIANG ZEMIN ON CHINA’S
HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY 1

. . . expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American foreign

policy in the entire post-╉Cold War era.
—╉GEORGE F. KENNAN2

A New Administration in€a New€World

In the 1992 campaign that made him the 42nd president of the United
States, Bill Clinton frequently invoked the memory of the nation’s 35th
chief executive, John F. Kennedy. The campaign showed a video of the
candidate as a 17-╉year-╉old high school student from Arkansas shak-
ing Kennedy’s hand at the White House in 1963. He visited Kennedy’s
gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River
from Washington, DC, during the week of his inauguration. In his
speech after taking the oath of office he sounded one of the themes of
Kennedy’s inaugural address 32 years earlier: generational change.3
Both new administrations marked a transition from one genera-
tion to the next. Kennedy’s assumption of office passed the presidency
from the supreme commander in Europe in World War II, Dwight
Eisenhower, to a man who had served as a junior naval officer in the
Pacific in that conflict and had been born in 1917, two years after
Eisenhower graduated from West Point. Similarly, Clinton had been
born in 1946, the year after World War II had ended, and was the same
age as the eldest son of his predecessor, George H. W. Bush. Like John

14
 China, the Global Economy, and Russia 15

Kennedy, the senior Bush had been a naval officer in the Pacific in that
war and turned out to be the last of the seven American presidents to
have served in it.
In another and more important way, however, the circumstances of
Clinton’s assumption of power could not have been more different than
those surrounding the beginning of the Kennedy presidency. The world
in Kennedy’s thousand days in office was the same as Eisenhower’s: both
were dominated by the Cold War. The world that Clinton inherited, by
contrast, differed dramatically from the one in which his predecessor
had taken power a mere four years earlier. In that period a revolution
in international affairs had taken place, brought about by the end of
the Cold War.
In this way the 1992 American presidential election resembled the
watershed 1945 general election in Great Britain, in which British vot-
ers replaced the government of Winston Churchill, the prime min-
ister who had led them, with eloquence and determination, through
World War II with one formed by the opposition Labour Party. The
British electorate decided that it could dispense with the services of the
man who came to be regarded as the greatest Englishman of his time,
and perhaps of any time, because the war over which he had presided
had ended in victory. The moment had come, the British concluded,
to concentrate on domestic matters, especially issues of social welfare.
For this, they believed, the Labourites were better suited. The 1992
American election turned on the same point: Bill Clinton was elected
because the Cold War had come to an end.
A telling sign of the impact of that conflict’s end on presidential
politics was the fact that Clinton, unlike all nine chief executives who
followed Franklin D. Roosevelt, had never served in the armed forces.4
Because each of the nine had presided over the global struggle with the
Soviet Union, all had been wartime presidents. The constitutionally
mandated presidential role as commander-​in-​chief had seemed espe-
cially important to American voters, who had regarded service in the
military as an important qualification for that role.
Indeed, Roosevelt’s term of office had given rise to the dual respon-
sibilities of the twentieth-​century presidency. For the first part of his
12 years in the White House he had functioned as “Dr. New Deal,”
implementing a variety of measures designed to pull the United States
16 Mission Failure

out of the worldwide economic slump known as the Great Depression.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor of December 7, 1941, he had
become “Dr. Win-​the-​War,” presiding over the conflict with Japan in
Asia and Nazi Germany in Europe. Each of his successors, through
George H. W. Bush, assumed responsibility for both the nation’s eco-
nomic well-​being at home and its security abroad. Clinton, by contrast,
was elected to deal only with the first.
He had emphasized economic concerns during his presidential cam-
paign. The electorate displayed little interest in foreign policy issues, to
the disadvantage of Clinton’s principal opponent, the incumbent presi-
dent, who had guided the country skillfully through the end of the Cold
War. In foreign policy George H. W. Bush was the most consequential
and most successful American president since Harry Truman. American
voters rewarded him for his achievement with the lowest percentage of
the popular vote any president had ever earned in seeking re-​election.
An unusual feature of that presidential year was the independent can-
didacy of the multimillionaire businessman H. Ross Perot, who won
almost 19 percent of the popular vote. Perot’s signature promise was to
reduce the fiscal deficit of the federal government, and deficit reduc-
tion is quintessentially a peacetime issue. During wartime, governments
spend whatever is necessary to win, or to avoid losing. Only when wars
end does fiscal responsibility rise to the top of the public agenda, as it
did in the United States in 1992. Despite its echoes of John F. Kennedy’s
theme of generational change, Bill Clinton’s first inaugural address
did not, like Kennedy’s, concentrate on foreign policy; it emphasized
instead the challenges America faced at home. Shortly after taking office
he promised to “focus like a laser” on the American economy.
Since the United States did not withdraw from the global positions
it had assumed and the international commitments it had made during
the Cold War, the Clinton administration could not ignore the world
entirely. It had to have a foreign policy, and here, as the first post-​Cold
War presidency,5 it faced a problem that had not affected its Cold-​War
predecessors. Their foreign policies had had a straightforward pur-
pose: the containment of communist power and influence around the
world. No comparably clear and compelling goal presented itself in
1993. The Clinton administration had to decide, as its predecessors had
not, what the United States should do in the world.
Another random document with
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evident that the strategic value of its position is very high. Such again
is, and to a greater degree was, the position of England. The trade of
Holland, Sweden, Russia, Denmark, and that which went up the
great rivers to the interior of Germany, had to pass through the
Channel close by her doors; for sailing-ships hugged the English
coast. This northern trade had, moreover, a peculiar bearing upon
sea power; for naval stores, as they are commonly called, were
mainly drawn from the Baltic countries.
But for the loss of Gibraltar, the position of Spain would have been
closely analogous to that of England. Looking at once upon the
Atlantic and the Mediterranean, with Cadiz on the one side and
Cartagena on the other, the trade to the Levant must have passed
under her hands, and that round the Cape of Good Hope not far from
her doors. But Gibraltar not only deprived her of the control of the
Straits, it also imposed an obstacle to the easy junction of the two
divisions of her fleet.
At the present day, looking only at the geographical position of
Italy, and not at the other conditions affecting her sea power, it
would seem that with her extensive sea-coast and good ports she is
very well placed for exerting a decisive influence on the trade route to
the Levant and by the Isthmus of Suez. This is true in a degree, and
would be much more so did Italy now hold all the islands naturally
Italian; but with Malta in the hands of England, and Corsica in those
of France, the advantages of her geographical position are largely
neutralized. From race affinities and situation those two islands are
as legitimately objects of desire to Italy as Gibraltar is to Spain. If the
Adriatic were a great highway of commerce, Italy’s position would be
still more influential. These defects in her geographical
completeness, combined with other causes injurious to a full and
secure development of sea power, make it more than doubtful
whether Italy can for some time be in the front rank among the sea
nations.
As the aim here is not an exhaustive discussion, but merely an
attempt to show, by illustration, how vitally the situation of a country
may affect its career upon the sea, this division of the subject may be
dismissed for the present; the more so as instances which will further
bring out its importance will continually recur in the historical
treatment. Two remarks, however, are here appropriate.
 Circumstances have caused the Mediterranean Sea to play a
greater part in the history of the world, both in a commercial and a
military point of view, than any other sheet of water of the same size.
Nation after nation has striven to control it, and the strife still goes
on. Therefore a study of the conditions upon which preponderance in
its waters has rested, and now rests, and of the relative military
values of different points upon its coasts, will be more instructive
than the same amount of effort expended in another field.
Furthermore, it has at the present time a very marked analogy in
many respects to the Caribbean Sea,—an analogy which will be still
closer if a Panama canal route ever be completed. A study of the
strategic conditions of the Mediterranean, which have received
ample illustration, will be an excellent prelude to a similar study of
the Caribbean, which has comparatively little history.
The second remark bears upon the geographical position of the
United States relatively to a Central-American canal. If one be made,
and fulfil the hopes of its builders, the Caribbean will be changed
from a terminus, and place of local traffic, or at best a broken and
imperfect line of travel, as it now is, into one of the great highways of
the world. Along this path a great commerce will travel, bringing the
interests of the other great nations, the European nations, close
along our shores, as they have never been before. With this it will not
be so easy as heretofore to stand aloof from international
complications. The position of the United States with reference to
this route will resemble that of England to the Channel, and of the
Mediterranean countries to the Suez route. As regards influence and
control over it, depending upon geographical position, it is of course
plain that the center of the national power, the permanent base,[19] is
much nearer than that of other great nations. The positions now or
hereafter occupied by them on island or mainland, however strong,
will be but outposts of their power; while in all the raw materials of
military strength no nation is superior to the United States. She is,
however, weak in a confessed unpreparedness for war; and her
geographical nearness to the point of contention loses some of its
value by the character of the Gulf coast, which is deficient in ports
combining security from an enemy with facility for repairing
warships of the first class, without which ships no country can
pretend to control any part of the sea. In case of a contest for
supremacy in the Caribbean, it seems evident from the depth of the
South Pass of the Mississippi, the nearness of New Orleans, and the
advantages of the Mississippi Valley for water transit, that the main
effort of the country must pour down that valley, and its permanent
base of operations be found there. The defense of the entrance to the
Mississippi, however, presents peculiar difficulties; while the only
two rival ports, Key West and Pensacola, have too little depth of
water, and are much less advantageously placed with reference to the
resources of the country. To get the full benefit of superior
geographical position, these defects must be overcome. Furthermore,
as her distance from the Isthmus, though relatively less, is still
considerable, the United States will have to obtain in the Caribbean
stations fit for contingent, or secondary, bases of operations; which
by their natural advantages, susceptibility of defense, and nearness
to the central strategic issue, will enable her fleets to remain as near
the scene as any opponent. With ingress and egress from the
Mississippi sufficiently protected, with such outposts in her hands,
and with the communications between them and the home base
secured, in short, with proper military preparation, for which she has
all necessary means, the preponderance of the United States on this
field follows, from her geographical position and her power, with
mathematical certainty.

II. Physical Conformation.—The peculiar features of the Gulf

coast, alluded to, come properly under the head of Physical
Conformation of a country, which is placed second for discussion
among the conditions which affect the development of sea power.
The seaboard of a country is one of its frontiers; and the easier the
access offered by the frontier to the region beyond, in this case the
sea, the greater will be the tendency of a people toward intercourse
with the rest of the world by it. If a country be imagined having a
long seaboard, but entirely without a harbor, such a country can have
no sea trade of its own, no shipping, no navy. This was practically the
case with Belgium when it was a Spanish and an Austrian province.
The Dutch, in 1648, as a condition of peace after a successful war,
exacted that the Scheldt should be closed to sea commerce. This
closed the harbor of Antwerp and transferred the sea trade of
Belgium to Holland. The Spanish Netherlands ceased to be a sea
power.
 Numerous and deep harbors are a source of strength and wealth,
and doubly so if they are the outlets of navigable streams, which
facilitate the concentration in them of a country’s internal trade; but
by their very accessibility they become a source of weakness in war, if
not properly defended. The Dutch in 1667 found little difficulty in
ascending the Thames and burning a large fraction of the English
navy within sight of London; whereas a few years later the combined
fleets of England and France, when attempting a landing in Holland,
were foiled by the difficulties of the coast as much as by the valor of
the Dutch fleet. In 1778 the harbor of New York, and with it
undisputed control of the Hudson River, would have been lost to the
English, who were caught at disadvantage, but for the hesitancy of
the French admiral. With that control, New England would have
been restored to close and safe communication with New York, New
Jersey, and Pennsylvania; and this blow, following so closely on
Burgoyne’s disaster of the year before, would probably have led the
English to make an earlier peace. The Mississippi is a mighty source
of wealth and strength to the United States; but the feeble defenses
of its mouth and the number of its subsidiary streams penetrating
the country made it a weakness and source of disaster to the
Southern Confederacy. And lastly, in 1814, the occupation of the
Chesapeake and the destruction of Washington gave a sharp lesson
of the dangers incurred through the noblest water-ways, if their
approaches be undefended; a lesson recent enough to be easily
recalled, but which, from the present appearance of the coast
defenses, seems to be yet more easily forgotten. Nor should it be
thought that conditions have changed; circumstances and details of
offense and defense have been modified, in these days as before, but
the great conditions remain the same.
Before and during the great Napoleonic wars, France had no port
for ships-of-the-line east of Brest. How great the advantage to
England, which in the same stretch has two great arsenals, at
Plymouth and at Portsmouth, besides other harbors of refuge and
supply. This defect of conformation has since been remedied by the
works at Cherbourg.
Besides the contour of the coast, involving easy access to the sea,
there are other physical conditions which lead people to the sea or
turn them from it. Although France was deficient in military ports on
the Channel, she had both there and on the ocean, as well as in the
Mediterranean, excellent harbors, favorably situated for trade
abroad, and at the outlet of large rivers, which would foster internal
traffic. But when Richelieu had put an end to civil war, Frenchmen
did not take to the sea with the eagerness and success of the English
and Dutch. A principal reason for this has been plausibly found in
the physical conditions which have made France a pleasant land,
with a delightful climate, producing within itself more than its people
needed. England, on the other hand, received from Nature but little,
and, until her manufactures were developed, had little to export.
Their many wants, combined with their restless activity and other
conditions that favored maritime enterprise, led her people abroad;
and they there found lands more pleasant and richer than their own.
Their needs and genius made them merchants and colonists, then
manufacturers and producers; and between products and colonies
shipping is the inevitable link. So their sea power grew. But if
England was drawn to the sea, Holland was driven to it; without the
sea England languished, but Holland died. In the height of her
greatness, when she was one of the chief factors in European politics,
a competent native authority estimated that the soil of Holland could
not support more than one eighth of her inhabitants. The
manufactures of the country were then numerous and important, but
they had been much later in their growth than the shipping interest.
The poverty of the soil and the exposed nature of the coast drove the
Dutch first to fishing. Then the discovery of the process of curing the
fish gave them material for export as well as home consumption, and
so laid the corner-stone of their wealth. Thus they had become
traders at the time that the Italian republics, under the pressure of
Turkish power and the discovery of the passage round the Cape of
Good Hope, were beginning to decline, and they fell heirs to the great
Italian trade of the Levant. Further favored by their geographical
position, intermediate between the Baltic, France, and the
Mediterranean, and at the mouth of the German rivers, they quickly
absorbed nearly all the carrying-trade of Europe. The wheat and
naval stores of the Baltic, the trade of Spain with her colonies in the
New World, the wines of France, and the French coasting-trade were,
little more than two hundred years ago, transported in Dutch
shipping. Much of the carrying-trade of England, even, was then
done in Dutch bottoms. It will not be pretended that all this
prosperity proceeded only from the poverty of Holland’s natural
resources. Something does not grow from nothing. What is true, is,
that by the necessitous condition of her people they were driven to
the sea, and were, from their mastery of the shipping business and
the size of their fleets, in a position to profit by the sudden expansion
of commerce and the spirit of exploration which followed on the
discovery of America and of the passage round the Cape. Other
causes concurred, but their whole prosperity stood on the sea power
to which their poverty gave birth. Their food, their clothing, the raw
material for their manufactures, the very timber and hemp with
which they built and rigged their ships (and they built nearly as
many as all Europe besides), were imported; and when a disastrous
war with England in 1653 and 1654 had lasted eighteen months, and
their shipping business was stopped, it is said “the sources of
revenue which had always maintained the riches of the State, such as
fisheries and commerce, were almost dry. Workshops were closed,
work was suspended. The Zuyder Zee became a forest of masts; the
country was full of beggars; grass grew in the streets, and in
Amsterdam fifteen hundred houses were untenanted.” A humiliating
peace alone saved them from ruin.
This sorrowful result shows the weakness of a country depending
wholly upon sources external to itself for the part it is playing in the
world. With large deductions, owing to differences of conditions
which need not here be spoken of, the case of Holland then has
strong points of resemblance to that of Great Britain now; and they
are true prophets, though they seem to be having small honor in
their own country, who warn her that the continuance of her
prosperity at home depends primarily upon maintaining her power
abroad. Men may be discontented at the lack of political privilege;
they will be yet more uneasy if they come to lack bread. It is of more
interest to Americans to note that the result to France, regarded as a
power of the sea, caused by the extent, delightfulness, and richness
of the land, has been reproduced in the United States. In the
beginning, their forefathers held a narrow strip of land upon the sea,
fertile in parts though little developed, abounding in harbors and
near rich fishing grounds. These physical conditions combined with
an inborn love of the sea, the pulse of that English blood which still
beat in their veins, to keep alive all those tendencies and pursuits
upon which a healthy sea power depends. Almost every one of the
original colonies was on the sea or on one of its great tributaries. All
export and import tended toward one coast. Interest in the sea and
an intelligent appreciation of the part it played in the public welfare
were easily and widely spread; and a motive more influential than
care for the public interest was also active, for the abundance of ship-
building materials and a relative fewness of other investments made
shipping a profitable private interest. How changed the present
condition is, all know. The center of power is no longer on the
seaboard. Books and newspapers vie with one another in describing
the wonderful growth, and the still undeveloped riches, of the
interior. Capital there finds its best investments, labor its largest
opportunities. The frontiers are neglected and politically weak; the
Gulf and Pacific coasts actually so, the Atlantic coast relatively to the
central Mississippi Valley. When the day comes that shipping again
pays, when the three sea frontiers find that they are not only
militarily weak, but poorer for lack of national shipping, their united
efforts may avail to lay again the foundations of our sea power. Till
then, those who follow the limitations which lack of sea power placed
upon the career of France may mourn that their own country is being
led, by a like redundancy of home wealth, into the same neglect of
that great instrument.
Among modifying physical conditions may be noted a form like
that of Italy,—a long peninsula, with a central range of mountains
dividing it into two narrow strips, along which the roads connecting
the different ports necessarily run. Only an absolute control of the
sea can wholly secure such communications, since it is impossible to
know at what point an enemy coming from beyond the visible
horizon may strike; but still, with an adequate naval force centrally
posted, there will be good hope of attacking his fleet, which is at once
his base and line of communications, before serious damage has
been done. The long, narrow peninsula of Florida, with Key West at
its extremity, though flat and thinly populated, presents at first sight
conditions like those of Italy. The resemblance may be only
superficial, but it seems probable that if the chief scene of a naval
war were the Gulf of Mexico, the communications by land to the end
of the peninsula might be a matter of consequence, and open to
attack.
 When the sea not only borders, or surrounds, but also separates a
country into two or more parts, the control of it becomes not only
desirable, but vitally necessary. Such a physical condition either gives
birth and strength to sea power, or makes the country powerless.
Such is the condition of the present kingdom of Italy, with its islands
of Sardinia and Sicily; and hence in its youth and still existing
financial weakness it is seen to put forth such vigorous and
intelligent efforts to create a military navy. It has even been argued
that, with a navy decidedly superior to her enemy’s, Italy could better
base her power upon her islands than upon her mainland; for the
insecurity of the lines of communication in the peninsula, already
pointed out, would most seriously embarrass an invading army
surrounded by a hostile people and threatened from the sea.
The Irish Sea, separating the British Islands, rather resembles an
estuary than an actual division; but history has shown the danger
from it to the United Kingdom. In the days of Louis XIV, when the
French navy nearly equalled the combined English and Dutch, the
gravest complications existed in Ireland, which passed almost wholly
under the control of the natives and the French. Nevertheless, the
Irish Sea was rather a danger to the English—a weak point in their
communications—than an advantage to the French. The latter did
not venture their ships-of-the-line in its narrow waters, and
expeditions intending to land were directed upon the ocean ports in
the south and west. At the supreme moment the great French fleet
was sent upon the south coast of England, where it decisively
defeated the allies, and at the same time twenty-five frigates were
sent to St. George’s Channel, against the English communications. In
the midst of a hostile people, the English army in Ireland was
seriously imperiled, but was saved by the battle of the Boyne and
flight of James II. This movement against the enemy’s
communications was strictly strategic, and would be as dangerous to
England now as in 1690.
Spain, in the same century, afforded an impressive lesson of the
weakness caused by such separation when the parts are not knit
together by a strong sea power. She then still retained, as remnants
of her past greatness, the Netherlands (now Belgium), Sicily, and
other Italian possessions, not to speak of her vast colonies in the New
World. Yet so low had the Spanish sea power fallen, that a well-
informed and sober-minded Hollander of the day could claim that
“in Spain all the coast is navigated by a few Dutch ships; and since
the peace of 1648 their ships and seamen are so few that they have
publicly begun to hire our ships to sail to the Indies, whereas they
were formerly careful to exclude all foreigners from there.... It is
manifest,” he goes on, “that the West Indies, being as the stomach to
Spain (for from it nearly all the revenue is drawn), must be joined to
the Spanish head by a sea force; and that Naples and the
Netherlands, being like two arms, they cannot lay out their strength
for Spain, nor receive anything thence but by shipping,—all which
may easily be done by our shipping in peace, and by it obstructed in
war.” Half a century before, Sully, the great minister of Henry IV,
had characterized Spain “as one of those States whose legs and arms
are strong and powerful, but the heart infinitely weak and feeble.”
Since his day the Spanish navy had suffered not only disaster, but
annihilation; not only humiliation, but degradation. The
consequences briefly were that shipping was destroyed;
manufactures perished with it. The government depended for its
support, not upon a widespread healthy commerce and industry that
could survive many a staggering blow, but upon a narrow stream of
silver trickling through a few treasure-ships from America, easily and
frequently intercepted by an enemy’s cruisers. The loss of half a
dozen galleons more than once paralyzed its movements for a year.
While the war in the Netherlands lasted, the Dutch control of the sea
forced Spain to send her troops by a long and costly journey overland
instead of by sea; and the same cause reduced her to such straits for
necessaries that, by a mutual arrangement which seems very odd to
modern ideas, her wants were supplied by Dutch ships, which thus
maintained the enemies of their country, but received in return
specie which was welcome in the Amsterdam exchange. In America,
the Spanish protected themselves as best they might behind
masonry, unaided from home; while in the Mediterranean they
escaped insult and injury mainly through the indifference of the
Dutch, for the French and English had not yet begun to contend for
mastery there. In the course of history the Netherlands, Naples,
Sicily, Minorca, Havana, Manila, and Jamaica were wrenched away,
at one time or another, from this empire without a shipping. In
short, while Spain’s maritime impotence may have been primarily a
symptom of her general decay, it became a marked factor in
precipitating her into the abyss from which she has not yet wholly
emerged.
Except Alaska, the United States has no outlying possession,—no
foot of ground inaccessible by land. Its contour is such as to present
few points specially weak from their saliency, and all important parts
of the frontiers can be readily attained,—cheaply by water, rapidly by
rail. The weakest frontier, the Pacific, is far removed from the most
dangerous of possible enemies. The internal resources are boundless
as compared with present needs; we can live off ourselves
indefinitely in “our little corner,” to use the expression of a French
officer to the author. Yet should that little corner be invaded by a
new commercial route through the Isthmus, the United States in her
turn may have the rude awakening of those who have abandoned
their share in the common birthright of all people, the sea.

III. Extent of Territory.—The last of the conditions affecting the

development of a nation as a sea power, and touching the country
itself as distinguished from the people who dwell there, is Extent of
Territory. This may be dismissed with comparatively few words.
As regards the development of sea power, it is not the total number
of square miles which a country contains, but the length of its coast-
line and the character of its harbors that are to be considered. As to
these it is to be said that, the geographical and physical conditions
being the same, extent of sea-coast is a source of strength or
weakness according as the population is large or small. A country is
in this like a fortress; the garrison must be proportioned to the
enceinte. A recent familiar instance is found in the American War of
Secession. Had the South had a people as numerous as it was
warlike, and a navy commensurate to its other resources as a sea
power, the great extent of its sea-coast and its numerous inlets would
have been elements of great strength. The people of the United States
and the Government of that day justly prided themselves on the
effectiveness of the blockade of the whole Southern coast. It was a
great feat, a very great feat; but it would have been an impossible feat
had the Southerners been more numerous, and a nation of seamen.
What was there shown was not, as has been said, how such a
blockade can be maintained, but that such a blockade is possible in
the face of a population not only unused to the sea, but also scanty in
numbers. Those who recall how the blockade was maintained, and
the class of ships that blockaded during great part of the war, know
that the plan, correct under the circumstances, could not have been
carried out in the face of a real navy. Scattered unsupported along
the coast, the United States ships kept their places, singly or in small
detachments, in face of an extensive network of inland water
communications which favored secret concentration of the enemy.
Behind the first line of water communications were long estuaries,
and here and there strong fortresses, upon either of which the
enemy’s ships could always fall back to elude pursuit or to receive
protection. Had there been a Southern navy to profit by such
advantages, or by the scattered condition of the United States ships,
the latter could not have been distributed as they were; and being
forced to concentrate for mutual support, many small but useful
approaches would have been left open to commerce. But as the
Southern coast, from its extent and many inlets, might have been a
source of strength, so, from those very characteristics, it became a
fruitful source of injury. The great story of the opening of the
Mississippi is but the most striking illustration of an action that was
going on incessantly all over the South. At every breach of the sea
frontier, warships were entering. The streams that had carried the
wealth and supported the trade of the seceding States turned against
them, and admitted their enemies to their hearts. Dismay, insecurity,
paralysis, prevailed in regions that might, under happier auspices,
have kept a nation alive through the most exhausting war. Never did
sea power play a greater or a more decisive part than in the contest
which determined that the course of the world’s history would be
modified by the existence of one great nation, instead of several rival
States, in the North American continent. But while just pride is felt
in the well-earned glory of those days, and the greatness of the
results due to naval preponderance is admitted, Americans who
understand the facts should never fail to remind the overconfidence
of their countrymen that the South not only had no navy, not only
was not a seafaring people, but that also its population was not
proportioned to the extent of the sea-coast which it had to defend.
IV. Number of Population.—After the consideration of the natural
conditions of a country should follow an examination of the
characteristics of its population as affecting the development of sea
power; and first among these will be taken, because of its relations to
the extent of the territory, which has just been discussed, the number
of the people who live in it. It has been said that in respect of
dimensions it is not merely the number of square miles, but the
extent and character of the sea-coast that is to be considered with
reference to sea power; and so, in point of population, it is not only
the grand total, but the number following the sea, or at least readily
available for employment on shipboard and for the creation of naval
material, that must be counted.
For example, formerly and up to the end of the great wars
following the French Revolution, the population of France was much
greater than that of England; but in respect of sea power in general,
peaceful commerce as well as military efficiency, France was much
inferior to England. In the matter of military efficiency this fact is the
more remarkable because at times, in point of military preparation at
the outbreak of war, France had the advantage; but she was not able
to keep it. Thus in 1778, when war broke out, France, through her
maritime inscription, was able to man at once fifty ships-of-the-line.
England, on the contrary, by reason of the dispersal over the globe of
that very shipping on which her naval strength so securely rested,
had much trouble in manning forty at home; but in 1782 she had one
hundred and twenty in commission or ready for commission, while
France had never been able to exceed seventy-one.
[The need is further shown, not only of a large seafaring
population, but of skilled mechanics and artisans to facilitate ship
construction and repair and supply capable recruits for the navy.—
Editor.]
... That our own country is open to the same reproach is patent to
all the world. The United States has not that shield of defensive
power behind which time can be gained to develop its reserve of
strength. As for a seafaring population adequate to her possible
needs, where is it? Such a resource, proportionate to her coast-line
and population, is to be found only in a national merchant shipping
and its related industries, which at present scarcely exist. It will
matter little whether the crews of such ships are native or foreign
born, provided they are attached to the flag, and her power at sea is
sufficient to enable the most of them to get back in case of war. When
foreigners by thousands are admitted to the ballot, it is of little
moment that they are given fighting-room on board ship.
 Though the treatment of the subject has been somewhat
discursive, it may be admitted that a great population following
callings related to the sea is, now as formerly, a great element of sea
power; that the United States is deficient in that element; and that its
foundations can be laid only in a large commerce under her own flag.
V. National Character.—The effect of national character and
aptitudes upon the development of sea power will next be
considered.
If sea power be really based upon a peaceful and extensive
commerce, aptitude for commercial pursuits must be a
distinguishing feature of the nations that have at one time or another
been great upon the sea. History almost without exception affirms
that this is true. Save the Romans, there is no marked instance to the
contrary.
[Here follows a survey, covering several pages, of the commercial
history and colonial policies of Spain, Holland, and Great Britain.—
Editor.]
... The fact of England’s unique and wonderful success as a great
colonizing nation is too evident to be dwelt upon; and the reason for
it appears to lie chiefly in two traits of the national character. The
English colonist naturally and readily settles down in his new
country, identifies his interest with it, and though keeping an
affectionate remembrance of the home from which he came, has no
restless eagerness to return. In the second place, the Englishman at
once and instinctively seeks to develop the resources of the new
country in the broadest sense. In the former particular he differs
from the French, who were ever longingly looking back to the
delights of their pleasant land; in the latter, from the Spaniards,
whose range of interest and ambition was too narrow for the full
evolution of the possibilities of a new country.
The character and the necessities of the Dutch led them naturally
to plant colonies; and by the year 1650 they had in the East Indies, in
Africa, and in America a large number, only to name which would be
tedious. They were then far ahead of England in this matter. But
though the origin of these colonies, purely commercial in its
character, was natural, there seems to have been lacking to them a
principle of growth. “In planting them they never sought an
extension of empire, but merely an acquisition of trade and
commerce. They attempted conquest only when forced by the
pressure of circumstances. Generally they were content to trade
under the protection of the sovereign of the country.” This placid
satisfaction with gain alone, unaccompanied by political ambition,
tended, like the despotism of France and Spain, to keep the colonies
mere commercial dependencies upon the mother-country, and so
killed the natural principle of growth.
Before quitting this head of the inquiry, it is well to ask how far the
national character of Americans is fitted to develop a great sea
power, should other circumstances become favorable.
It seems scarcely necessary, however, to do more than appeal to a
not very distant past to prove that, if legislative hindrances be
removed, and more remunerative fields of enterprise filled up, the
sea power will not long delay its appearance. The instinct for
commerce, bold enterprise in pursuit of gain, and a keen scent for
trails that lead to it, all exist; and if there be in the future any fields
calling for colonization, it cannot be doubted that Americans will
carry to them all their inherited aptitude for self-government and
independent growth.
VI. Character of the Government.—In discussing the effects upon
the development of a nation’s sea power exerted by its government
and institutions, it will be necessary to avoid a tendency to over-
philosophizing, to confine attention to obvious and immediate causes
and their plain results, without prying too far beneath the surface for
remote and ultimate influences.
Nevertheless, it must be noted that particular forms of government
with their accompanying institutions, and the character of rulers at
one time or another, have exercised a very marked influence upon
the development of sea power. The various traits of a country and its
people which have so far been considered constitute the natural
characteristics with which a nation, like a man, begins its career; the
conduct of the government in turn corresponds to the exercise of the
intelligent will-power, which, according as it is wise, energetic and
persevering, or the reverse, causes success or failure in a man’s life or
a nation’s history.
It would seem probable that a government in full accord with the
natural bias of its people would most successfully advance its growth
in every respect; and, in the matter of sea power, the most brilliant
successes have followed where there has been intelligent direction by
a government fully imbued with the spirit of the people and
conscious of its true general bent. Such a government is most
certainly secured when the will of the people, or of their best natural
exponents, has some large share in making it; but such free
governments have sometimes fallen short, while on the other hand
despotic power, wielded with judgment and consistency, has created
at times a great sea commerce and a brilliant navy with greater
directness than can be reached by the slower processes of a free
people. The difficulty in the latter case is to insure perseverance after
the death of a particular despot.
England having undoubtedly reached the greatest height of sea
power of any modern nation, the action of her government first
claims attention. In general direction this action has been consistent,
though often far from praiseworthy. It has aimed steadily at the
control of the sea.
[The remainder of the chapter, quoted in part on pp. 141–146,
outlines the extension of Great Britain’s trade and sea power during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.—Editor.]
 4. Definition of Terms[20]

Strategy, Tactics, Logistics

“Strategy,” says Jomini, speaking of the art of war on land, “is the art
of making war upon the map, and comprehends the whole theater of
warlike operations. Grand tactics is the art of posting troops upon
the battlefield, according to the accidents of the ground; of bringing
them into action; and the art of fighting upon the ground in
contradistinction to planning upon a map. Its operations may extend
over a field of ten or twelve miles in extent. Strategy decides where to
act. Grand tactics decides the manner of execution and the
employment of troops,” when, by the combinations of strategy, they
have been assembled at the point of action.
... Between Strategy and Grand Tactics comes logically Logistics.
Strategy decides where to act; Logistics is the act of moving armies; it
brings the troops to the point of action and controls questions of
supply; Grand Tactics decides the methods of giving battle.
 5. Fundamental Principles[21]

Central Position, Interior Lines, Communications

The situation here used in illustration is taken from the Thirty Years’
War, 1618–1648, in which the French House of Bourbon opposed the
House of Austria, the latter controlling Spain, Austria, and parts of
Germany. France lay between Spain and Austria; but if Spain
commanded the sea, her forces could reach the field of conflict in
central Europe either by way of Belgium or by way of the Duchy of
Milan in northern Italy, both of which were under her rule.
[The upper course of the Danube between Ulm and Ratisbon is
also employed to illustrate central position, dominating the great
European theater of war north of the Alps and east of the Rhine.—
Editor.]
The situation of France relatively to her two opponents of this
period—Spain and Austria—illustrates three elements of strategy, of
frequent mention, which it is well here to name and to define, as well
as to illustrate by the instance before you.
1. There is central position, illustrated by France; her national
power and control interposing by land between her enemies. Yet not
by land only, provided the coast supports an adequate navy; for, if
that be the case, the French fleet also interposes between Spanish
and Italian ports. The Danube is similarly an instance of central
position.
2. Interior lines. The characteristic of interior lines is that of the
central position prolonged in one or more directions, thus favoring
sustained interposition between separate bodies of an enemy; with
the consequent power to concentrate against either, while holding
the other in check with a force possibly distinctly inferior. An interior
line may be conceived as the extension of a central position, or as a
series of central positions connected with one another, as a
geometrical line is a continuous series of geometrical points. The
expression “Interior Lines” conveys the meaning that from a central
position one can assemble more rapidly on either of two opposite
fronts than the enemy can, and therefore can utilize force more
effectively. Particular examples of maritime interior lines are found
in the route by Suez as compared with that by the Cape of Good
Hope, and in Panama contrasted with Magellan. The Kiel Canal
similarly affords an interior line between the Baltic and North Sea, as
against the natural channels passing round Denmark, or between the
Danish Islands,—the Sound and the two Belts.[22] These instances of
“Interior” will recall one of your boyhood’s geometrical theorems,
demonstrating that, from a point interior to a triangle, lines drawn to
two angles are shorter than the corresponding sides of the triangle
itself. Briefly, interior lines are lines shorter in time than those the
enemy can use. France, for instance, in the case before us, could
march twenty thousand men to the Rhine, or to the Pyrenees, or
could send necessary supplies to either, sooner than Spain could
send the same number to the Rhine, or Austria to the Pyrenees,
granting even that the sea were open to their ships.
3. The position of France relatively to Germany and Spain
illustrates also the question of communications. “Communications”
is a general term, designating the lines of movement by which a
military body, army or fleet, is kept in living connection with the
national power. This being the leading characteristic of
communications, they may be considered essentially lines of
defensive action; while interior lines are rather offensive in
character, enabling the belligerent favored by them to attack in force
one part of the hostile line sooner than the enemy can reinforce it,
because the assailant is nearer than the friend. As a concrete
instance, the disastrous attempt already mentioned, of Spain in 1639
to send reinforcements by the Channel, followed the route from
Corunna to the Straits of Dover. It did so because at that particular
moment the successes of France had given her control of part of the
valley of the Rhine, closing it to the Spaniards from Milan; while the
more eastern route through Germany was barred by the Swedes, who
in the Thirty Years’ War were allies of France. The Channel therefore
at that moment remained the only road open from Spain to the
Netherlands, between which it became the line of communications.
Granting the attempt had been successful, the line followed is
exterior; for, assuming equal rapidity of movement, ten thousand
men starting from central France should reach the field sooner.
 The central position of France, therefore, gave both defensive and
offensive advantage. In consequence of the position she had interior
lines, shorter lines, by which to attack, and also her communications
to either front lay behind the front, were covered by the army at the
front; in other words, had good defense, besides being shorter than
those by which the enemy on one front could send help to the other
front. Further, by virtue of her position, the French ports on the
Atlantic and Channel flanked the Spanish sea communications.
At the present moment, Germany and Austria-Hungary, as
members of the Triple Alliance, have the same advantage of central
and concentrated position against the Triple Entente, Russia, France,
and Great Britain.

Transfer now your attention back to the Danube when the scene of
war is in that region; as it was in 1796, and also frequently was
during the period of which we are now speaking.... You have seen
before, that, if there be war between Austria and France, as there so
often was, the one who held the Danube had a central position in the
region. Holding means possession by military power, which power
can be used to the full against the North or against the South—
offensive power—far more easily than the South and North can
combine against him; because he is nearer to each than either is to
the other. (See map.) Should North wish to send a big reinforcement
to South, it cannot march across the part of the Danube held, but
must march around it above or below; exactly as, in 1640,
reinforcements from Spain to the Rhine had, so to say, to march
around France. In such a march, on land, the reinforcement making
it is necessarily in a long column, because roads do not allow a great
many men to walk abreast. The road followed designates in fact the
alignment of the reinforcement from day to day; and because its
advance continually turns the side to the enemy, around whom it is
moving, the enemy’s position is said to flank the movement,
constituting a recognized danger. It makes no difference whether the
line of march is straight or curved; it is extension upon it that
constitutes the danger, because the line itself, being thin, is
everywhere weak, liable to an attack in force upon a relatively small
part of its whole. Communications are exposed, and the enemy has
the interior line....
This is an illustration of the force of Napoleon’s saying, that “War
is a business of positions.” All this discussion turns on position; the
ordinary, semi-permanent, positions of Center, North, and South; or
the succession of positions occupied by the detachment on that line
of communications along which it moves. This illustrates the
importance of positions in a single instance, but is by no means
exhaustive of that importance. Fully to comprehend, it is necessary
to study military and naval history; bearing steadily in mind
Napoleon’s saying, and the definitions of central position, interior
lines, and communications.
Take, for example, an instance so recent as to have been
contemporary with men not yet old,—the Turkish position at Plevna
in 1877. This stopped the Russian advance on Constantinople for
almost five months. Why? Because, if they had gone on, Plevna
would have been close to their line of communications, and in a
central position relatively to their forces at the front and those in the
rear, or behind the Danube. It was also so near, that, if the enemy
advanced far, the garrison of Plevna could reach the only bridge
across the Danube, at Sistova, and might destroy it, before help could
come; that is, Plevna possessed an interior line towards a point of the
utmost importance. Under these circumstances, Plevna alone