Common Conviction

Worry about war, a constant in these times, is growing of late.  Columnist Barton Swaim sees war coming, inevitably in a “fallen world” where too many nations are ruled by “criminals, ideologues, and irredentists.”  His interview subject, novelist Mark Helprin, sees America unprepared to fight.  A commentator in numerous LinkedIn posts maintains that “war” is already under way, and that the democracies are losing “on every front … to the autocracies … China Russia, Iran and Venezuela.  

The fears and warnings are not outliers.  But should we call current rivalries “war?”  If not, what other labels might apply to non-amicable international relations, and how should we approach them all?  Do we want combat against four autocracies?  Will we have to have it with all of them at some point?  Or, from another viewpoint, have we already engaged them in something that looks like “war?”  What should our stance be?

Strategist Andrew Krepinevich, writing about combat systems for kinetic warfare, notes how developing war-fighting capabilities calls first for choosing “what are we trying to do here.”  It just may be that to engage in whatever we call our current conflicts or potential conflicts, we need to start with that exercise.  Ali Wyne, of the Eurasia Group, has applied that question to the “great power competition” concern that a lot of Washington discourse has taken up in recent years.   What, in any given competition or conflict, are we out to accomplish?  Or avoid?  

Is “war,” in its various potential guises, strictly a matter of international relations?  Writing in 1910, William James sought ways to apply the collective purpose and fervor of war to the mastery of nature.  World War I soon rendered his language and imagery obsolete, but the fervor, belligerence and intransigence of our political camps today evokes trench warfare.  What are we trying to do?

Failure to know the answer, to see clearly, together, what we are trying to do, can be fatal.  And we know.  As Amb. Chas Freeman notes about Afghanistan, once we had accomplished our initial goals in 2001,

We began moving the goalposts this way and that.  There was no debate about why this was necessary or appropriate.  Soon, no one could offer a coherent explanation of why we were fighting in Afghanistan.  You can’t accomplish a mission when you don’t know what it is. 

Whatever codifications may arise, of “war,” “competition,” “cold war,” “counterinsurgency,” “peacekeeping,”“isolation” or “containment” via sanctions, “resistance,” or other descriptors of unfriendliness in international relations, America needs clarity on our bottom line.  

Realists will say that the world is always in a state of war, either active or waiting to happen.  Sovereign interests always collide, potentially at any time leading to mortal combat.  Economic and political actions for and against other nations always risk collisions and escalations, and protagonists’ always pursue their needs and interests.  

In today’s world as always, America needs to know our basic sovereign interest.  Just as any actor should.  

But what is ours?  Traditional nations rested on identities of soil, blood, race, church, tongue, or even dynasty.  Knowing those factors and knowing the desires of what was often a personal sovereign, interests could often be calculated relatively easily.  But America has none of those factors as defining characteristic.  This nation conceived itself on a “holding” of certain truths, in a creed of personal rights and that governments are created for the purpose of securing those rights.  This is unusual, and does not compute well with other actors, even in this age.

Projecting this kind of existential sovereign interest is difficult.  Our internal governance is easily dismissed, as inconsistent with the abstract words of our creed, or hypocritical in light of some of our actions abroad.  Indeed, if a poor nation only sees putting sanctions on its rulers, constraints on its actions, and imposing demands for human rights their people might find jarring, their regime, and perhaps their society, may call us “imperialists.” Dictators whose constituents acquiesce to their rule may claim to “resist” us, and some have joined, these days with Iran, to fashion themselves an “axis of resistance.”  If we bomb their missile sites and sanction their economies, they may see us warring against them, whether or not we do.  

So what are we trying to do here?  Russian dissident émigré Garry Kasparov, warning that we are already at war but still indulge an illusion that we are not, calls for goals, a strategy for victory, and bold leadership.  We need all of these whether we call our situation war or something else.  Above all, our goals need to reflect our ultimate ends.  Strategy will only be possible with that clarity.  Leadership will only be coherent with a good strategy.  War or not, we need to say just what we are trying to do.  Our founding creed offers a necessary starting point to describe what that should be. How to proceed will follow best when we can say what we seek.