Utility of force - from strategic objectives to political survival

For the last three decades, the US-led military campaigns had been directed to root out terrorism and to coerce rogue states into submission. The US and its allies pinned their hopes on democratic outcomes and improving the lives of those they would liberate. None of this happened. Instead, the use of force disrupted the very international system that the US spent so much effort in creating. The US created the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as a global commitment endorsed by the United Nations to stop genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. But what about the responsibility to act?

Congress was supposed to act as a serious check on the executive to prevent the breach of the executive's responsibility to act. The US Constitution empowered Congress to declare war. Arguably, the authors of the US Constitution also envisioned that the US President could act alone in emergencies to repel sudden attacks on the US. However, when it comes to authorising hostilities against foreign nations, the authors of the US Constitution envisioned Congress playing a major role. Congress did that when it debated and decided the US entry into WWI. Congress also passed neutrality legislation that prevented the US from becoming a member of the League of Nations. Congress even declared war against Japan, but only when the US was attacked at Pearl Harbor. But in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars, it yielded the decision to fight the war to the executive. Congress also looked the other way when the US launched covert operations in Laos, Cuba, Congo and Iran. President Bill Clinton sent US forces to Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo without Congress's approval. After 9/11, the role of Congress can be seen as more disappointing; it allowed President Bush the use of force in Iraq that it should not have, and it didn't either play its constitutional role of preventing the US interventions in both Syria and Libya.

The US Congress, which was supposed to be a check and balance on the executive, generally failed to implement its constitutionally declared role. When Leon Panetta, the US Defense Secretary in 2011, admitted, "Our goal in Libya was regime change, it was clear that, like Iraq, the US in Libya had achieved not what it could but what it should. Today, Congress has raised its constitutional voice against the Iran war, but it has not effectively exercised its constitutional power to restrain President Trump. The result is a widening gap between the formal principle of congressional control over war-making and the practical reality of the US President's growing autonomy over war-making. The Iran war once again raises the question whether Congress has adequately performed its constitutional role as the institutional check on an executive whose military objectives are not clear and remain in a state of evolution.

'Utility of force' is one of the core realist assumptions. Force is an indispensable instrument of statecraft, and in an anarchic international system, interests sometimes demand using force. The lesson from the past is that the US sometimes lacked clear direction in employing force to achieve its objectives. The military force used by the US created more political dilemmas than it resolved, as force was used as a political instrument and a preferred option before the diplomatic options were exhausted. Using force when it cannot deliver only raises dangers and risks, and forces the US supreme commander to revisit his war logic. The evolution of the Iran war explains this gradual shift from the earlier ends-and-means logic of war to the subsequent political-management logic. As the original military objectives became increasingly difficult to achieve, President Trump started making repeated claims of victory, sometimes daily. This indicates that the ends-and-means logic of this war is ceding space to the political-management logic of war. Today, public support for the war has fallen to 31%, and Trump's approval is around 33%, raising concern over public dissatisfaction and rising fuel prices, which indicate that managing domestic political perceptions has become almost as important as achieving the war's original strategic objectives.

In 1943, Joseph Stalin dissolved the Communist International, an organisation dedicated to spreading communism globally, to convince Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill that his priority was the defeat of Nazi Germany and not global revolution. President Putin hoped that the US and its allies would make a similar overture by not halting the promotion of democracy but at least not encouraging colour revolutions in its neighborhood and encouraging the former Soviet Republics to join NATO and the European Union. Decades of US-centred wars in the world have damaged the reputation of the US-led liberal international order. Great power competition today revolves around the central idea of the US wanting to promote and sustain the international order and China and Russia seeking to displace the US from the centre of the international system that this order has created. China and Russia seem convinced that the US played a major role in creating the geopolitical conditions and the civil unrest in various hotspots in the world today.

The world has largely democratised, but not everywhere has the idea of democracy inspired a political awakening, as demonstrated by the Arab Spring. The global political awakening cannot be attributed to the spread and promotion of democracy alone; it is also the result of political, cultural and technological changes – something that US National Security Advisor Brzezinski called 'global awakening'.

Despite the 'responsibility to act' and 'the responsibility to protect', the transatlantic alliance gives the impression that, in the coming days, rather than engaging with the outside world, it will be interested in insulating itself from it. This notwithstanding, the US wants to pivot to Asia. It even wants and expects Europe to carry out much more burden-sharing in the European theatre. Europeans, on the other hand, are weary of the migrants putting pressure on their borders and fear terrorist attacks that not very long ago targeted their capitals. They are more worried about insulating themselves from within, and that is resulting in the breakdown of liberal democracies as nationalism and authoritarianism rise in some of the European countries. After all the unnecessary wars that the US has fought and the chaos and anarchy that resulted from them, does the world still have the stomach for another great power competition? And live with its results?