And thank God that Dan does read the Post for me, because if I did have to read it myself I’d have the shakes even worse than I’ve got ‘em now. In his excellent substack site Eunomia, Dan alerted me to the Post's most recent eruption, taking them to task in his post China Hawks Hear What They Want to Hear, faulting them all too justly for going all apeshit on their unfortunate readers’ asses, as they are so often wont to do, belaboring their hapless intellects and blustering as follows on the occasion of a recent speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping: “Those who worry that hawks in Washington are drumming up an unnecessary and dangerous new cold war with China ought to take the time to read [President Xi Jinping’s] address,” a speech in which Xi, sounding just a bit like Donald Trump, promised that any country who tried to “bully, oppress, or subjugate” China would have its “head bashed bloody”.
Sorry, WP, you didn’t relieve my worries, you confirmed them, in spades. Among other things, the Post didn’t like Xi Jinping’s claim that soon China would have a “world class military”. Hey, Mr. Chinese guy! Only the U.S. is allowed to have a “world class military”. Not so we can “bully, oppress, or subjugate” other countries! So we can make them behave themselves, and make them free! Like we’ve been doing in the Middle East, by killing people in Syria and Iraq! So what if the Iraqi government called the attacks a “blatant” violation of Iraqi sovereignty? What do they know? We know what’s good for them even if they don’t!
The Post’s blind devotion to confrontation for confrontation’s sake, to America’s limitless duty to impose “freedom” everywhere in the world—everywhere except the parts that the Post isn’t particularly interested in, like Latin America and Africa and much of Asia—is, frankly, horrible to see. Every opportunity for compulsive, unthinking belligerence is seized upon with wild abandon. The fact that our massive interventions—aka “invasions”—beginning with first Iraqi invasion back in 1989, have been massive, overwhelming failures, doesn’t daunt them. Wait for the next one! It’s going to be great! Sure, our attempts to remold Iraq and Afghanistan (population, about 38 million each) were, well, they didn’t go so well, but, hey, China (population 1.2 billion), piece of cake! And throw in that Putin guy too! We’re tired of his guff!
As Dan says, "A good way to ensure that U.S.-Chinese rivalry turns into something like a new Cold War is to interpret every move that the other government makes and every word that the other leader says in the most alarmist way possible. If the Chinese government feels as though it is under siege, as Pang claims, it would be wiser not to feed that with increasingly confrontational rhetoric and policies of our own."
Wise words indeed. And words far too sensible, one suspects, to ever penetrate the Post's all too warped sensibility.
Over at Slate, Fred Kaplan has a related question, which I might slightly rephrase as follows: “Hey, guys! Have you noticed? ‘Deterrence’ doesn’t deter!”. Fred explains:
[D]eterrent messages often don’t get through. Or they get through, but the recipient isn’t deterred. Many countries, very much including the United States, frequently issue threats, mount attacks, or take other punitive measures as a way of pressuring another country (or militia or some other entity) to stop doing what it’s doing or not to do it in the first place.
Sometimes the pressure works; sometimes it doesn’t. However, people in power—here and elsewhere—don’t seem to be studying what works and what doesn’t, or why it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. If they were asking these questions in a serious way, they wouldn’t keep doing the same thing over and over, to little avail.
Small-scale attacks (whether from bombs, rockets, missiles, or drones) are classic examples. Israeli leaders would have stopped the rocket attacks from Gaza long ago, if their incessant shelling of Hamas and other terrorist groups had successfully communicated the “deterrent message.” But no, Hamas keeps firing back.
Sanctions are another tried-and-not-so-true method of deterring adversaries from continuing to do adversarial things. Sometimes the sanctions work—especially when the “stick” is coupled with a “carrot.” For instance, the talks that led to the Iran nuclear deal were brought about, in large part, by U.S. sanctions coupled with a proposal to lift those sanctions if Iran dismantled its nuclear facilities. Sometimes they don’t work. For instance, the threat to impose sanctions on Russia and China, in response to their cyberattacks, has had little if any effect.
Fred doesn’t quite go all the way, and note, as he should, that it’s, you know, possible that all this tough-guy swagger is, very largely, for domestic consumption, both to satisfy the public’s continuing appetite for low-cost “toughness” and to keep the military from thinking you’re a complete pussy. Every U.S. president since the end of the Cold War has committed at least a few politically convenient murders in foreign lands. Hey, if it can keep Congress and the Pentagon off my back, what’s not to like?1
A couple of paragraphs back, Fred expressed frustration with the fact that “people in power—here and elsewhere—don’t seem to be studying what works and what doesn’t, or why it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. If they were asking these questions in a serious way, they wouldn’t keep doing the same thing over and over, to little avail.”
First of all, since, in many cases, according to my “analysis”, the real target for these attacks isn’t their recipients, that’s a pretty decent explanation right there. But Fred goes on to examine the historical record, back to Vietnam.
Back in 1964, senior officials in Lyndon Johnson’s administration laid plans to step up military action in the Vietnam War. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s closest adviser on Vietnam, John McNaughton, was a close friend and former Harvard colleague of Schelling [Thomas Shelling, described by Kaplan as the “master deterrence strategist”], and he drew on Schelling’s work to devise a strategy that would affect the “will” of the North Vietnamese army, to “deter” it from further fighting. Nobody knew how to do this, so McNaughton consulted his old friend ….2
The two men spent more than an hour discussing what the U.S. could command the North Vietnamese to stop doing that they would obey as a result of our bombing.
In the end, Schelling—the master theorist of deterrence strategy and limited war—could not come up with a single plausible answer when faced with a real limited war.3
McNamara and Johnson began their bombing campaign anyway. Schelling did tell McNaughton that, whatever they decided to do, it would work within three weeks or not at all. On March 24, 1965, almost three weeks to the day after the bombing began, McNaughton wrote McNamara: “The situation in Vietnam is bad and deteriorating.” That fact never changed, but McNamara and his successors kept trying anyway.
Fred concludes: “The point is this: In wars, big or small, sometimes it’s not clear how to deter adversaries from doing or not doing what you want them to do or stop doing. Figure out that problem before you start dropping the bombs.”
At this point all I can do is throw my hands up in the air and exclaim “Great God! How naïve!” In the firstest4 first place (I guess), once a serious bombing campaign has begun, it’s not going to stop in three weeks just because it’s very unlikely to have a meaningful effect. “Mission creep” begins on day one, because, for any significant military action, “failure is not an option”—or, rather, admitting that events are beyond our control, as they always are, is not an option. To imagine that the U.S. would abandon a serious military action after a mere three weeks because it hadn’t succeeded yet is more than absurd. Human nature doesn’t work that way.
More importantly, of course, Lyndon Johnson felt he could not be seen to “lose” Vietnam. The fact that no one could give him a convincing strategy for victory was irrelevant. Fighting a pointless, bloody war for four years, costing thousands and thousands of lives, with no real goal other than to hand it off to his successor, was preferable to telling the American people something they didn’t want to hear and preferable to listening to Republicans denounce him for "losing" Vietnam. Johnson did this even though he knew that it was precisely U.S. intervention in Korea that cost the Democrats their once impregnable New Deal majorities in 1952. Naturally, Johnson quickly became emotionally involved in the war as well, as presidents always do, and quickly equated criticism as treason, as all presidents tend to do.
In the end, presidents don’t think about deterrence rationally because they don’t enter into it for rational reasons. When it comes to big nations they huff and puff, somehow blindly confident that their opposites won’t take them seriously. When it comes to small nations, well, they blow shit up, over and over again. Faint praise, but praise nonetheless, to Donald Trump that he largely preferred wild threats and brutal sanctions rather than outright murder (most of the time). Of course, sanctions kill too. Just not as dramatically. But just as uselessly.
1. Both Bushs, of course, were often “happy” murderers. Obama sort of wished he didn’t have to kill as many people as he did, but, well, you know, politics ain’t bean bag!
2. Kaplan bases this account on interviews he had with Schelling while Kaplan was writing his book The Wizards of Armageddon.
3. Earlier, Fred notes that, in his books, “Schelling wrote eloquently—at times, all too casually—about sending messages with force.” Apparently, talking big comes easier than acting big. Who knew?
4. Word recognizes “firstest” as a word. I did not see that coming.
