New poll shows most Americans favor less interventionist foreign policy

(November 25, 2019)A new poll conducted by the Eurasia Group Foundation of 1,200 people across the US shows that belief in American exceptionalism is declining and Americans tend to support a less interventionist foreign policy

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The poll and summary can be found here.

Is America exceptional?

42.4 percent of the respondents believed that the US was exceptional for what it represents while another 18.2 percent thought it was exceptional for what it had done in the world. However, 39.5 percent thought there was nothing exceptional about the US and that it was just another country which acted in what it thought to be its own interests. This is up fully 6 percent from the previous year.

In the younger 18 to 29 age group only 45.1 thought the US exceptional, less than half. However, 75.2 percent of those over 60 thought America was exceptional.

How can peace best be achieved and sustained by the US?

The most popular choice was to keep a focus on domestic needs, chosen by 34.4 percent. 28.3 percent chose "establishing, encouraging,. and reinforcing, global economic integration". Only 19 percent chose "promoting and defending democracy". Last was the hawkish-sounding "maintaining overwhelming strength" with 18.3 per cent.

How should US respond to overseas humanitarian abuses?

The most popular answer was that the US should opt for restraint chosen by 47.1 percent, up two percent from the previous year. The second highest response favored a UN-led response at 33.5 percent. Only 19.4 percent favored US military action.

The US defense budget

Half of the respondents were in favor of leaving the defense budget as it was but twice as many of the rest preferred decreasing the budget rather than increasing it.

While the Pentagon has been focused on restraining Chinese influence in Asia, 57.6 percent of those polled said that the US should reduce its Asian presence while 42.4 percent favoredj sending more troops to allied Asian countries.

The Afghan war

There was considerable support for withdrawing immediately from Afghanistan 38.8 percent. Another 31.4 percent wanted to keep fighting until a peace deal was reached with the Taliban. However, 29.8 percent took a hawkish approach and wanted US troops to remain until "all enemies are defeated".

The Eurasia Group poll on Afghanistan fits with the views expressed in a Pew Research Poll that found a majority of both the public and veterans did not think that either the Afghan or Iraq war were worth fighting: ".. majorities of both veterans (58%) and the public (59%) say the war in Afghanistan was not worth fighting. About four-in-ten or fewer say it was worth fighting."

64 percent of veterans found the war in Iraq was not worth it and 55 percent thought the same about the war in Syria.

The Cost of War project

Tho Costs of War project based in Brown University this November that added up the costs so far of the War on Terror. Here is a summary of their findings: Over 801,000 people have died due to direct war violence, and several times as many indirectly.

Over 335,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting. 21 million — the number of war refugees and displaced persons. The US federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $6.4 trillion dollars. The US government is conducting counterterror activities in 80 countries. The wars have been accompanied by violations of human rights and civil liberties, in the US and abroad."

Given these costs it is hardly surprising that Americans favor a less interventionist approach in global affairs.

Previously published  in the Digital Journal

The New Welfare State: A Conservative View.

This is from a conservative US commentator in the Nationalinterest.
Although I come from a diametrically opposite political pole much of what Bandow says seems to show a great deal of common sense and immunity from the imperialistic virus that infects most US discourse on both the left and right.


The New Welfare State
by
Doug Bandow11.24.2008
The Republican Party is a wreck. The election was not quite as catastrophic as predicted—though if the Democrats take the two GOP Senate seats still at risk, things couldn’t have turned out much worse. Continuing on its present course obviously is no option.
Most of the arguments on the Right so far have been between social and economic conservatives, but the Republican Party also needs to reconsider its foreign policy stance. Neoconservatives had their opportunity and their policies were found wanting. With President Barack Obama and likely Secretary of State Hillary Clinton almost certain to follow the usual liberal interventionist course, the GOP should respond with a policy of strategic independence rather than even more promiscuous global meddling. In short, conservatives should insist on a “defense” policy that actually promotes America’s defense instead of promoting social engineering in other nations.
There’s much loose talk among conservatives about the need to increase military spending to maintain a strong defense. Even Barack Obama campaigned to expand the military’s size. But the image of the United States as a beleaguered innocent under siege by enemies around the world is embarrassing nonsense. America is the globe’s dominant military player, with most of its “defense” spending having nothing to do with defending the United States.
In 2009, Washington will spend roughly $700 billion on the military. Adjusted for inflation, even the $515 billion for normal (non-Afghan/Iraq) operations is more than America spent annually during the cold war, Korean War, or Vietnam War. Yet then the United States faced the Soviet Union and, in the latter two cases, was fighting a very hot war. Today America faces no threats of comparable magnitude.
Indeed, the United States bestrides the globe as a colossus. It accounts for roughly half of the world’s military spending. Washington is allied with every major industrialized state except China and Russia. As Colin Powell noted in 1991, after the Soviet Union’s collapse: “I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of enemies. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.” Nasty characters they were, but replacements for the “evil empire” they were not.
A revived Russia is dangerous only to its immediate neighbors. Its nuclear arsenal gives Moscow the power to deter Washington from attacking, but no more. Beijing spends more on its military—estimates of China’s annual outlays top out at $100 billion or so—but not enough to catch up or surpass America’s military capabilities. For instance, the United States has twelve aircraft carriers while China has none. And Asia is filled with countries with an interest in constraining Beijing: Russia, India, Japan and the ASEAN states.
Terrorism remains the most serious threat facing America, but it is not one amenable to solution via carrier groups, air wings and armored divisions. Indeed, using heavy conventional forces in an attempt to eliminate terrorism typically makes the problem worse—invading countries and killing civilians creates more grievances and more enemies. Better to target terrorist sponsors, use special forces in cooperation with indigenous allies, share intelligence among friendly states, dry up funding and break local organizations, and favor limited retaliation over nation-building where states have aided terrorists.
Not only is Washington spending too much money on the military, but the United States is deploying too many of its forces to defend other nations. For instance, troops in South Korea do nothing for American security. The Republic of Korea (ROK) has twice the population and around forty times the GDP of the North. For the ROK to ask for American military aid is a bit like Washington begging for defense alms from Europe to deter a Mexican attack.
Japan enjoys the world’s second-ranking economy and is fully capable of creating a world-class deterrent to any outside attack. Grant that some of its neighbors remain nervous about a more powerful Japan. That’s still no argument for stationing a Marine expeditionary force in Okinawa. The United States should not babysit countries unwilling to work through antagonisms rooted in a conflict that ended more than six decades ago. Many nations want American protection. But so what? That doesn’t mean Washington should waste money and risk lives to maintain a gaggle of international welfare queens.
U.S. forces in Europe, whether located in Britain, Germany, the Balkans or Donald Rumsfeld’s famous “new Europe” to the east, have equally little to do with American security. After all, the European Union collectively has a larger GDP and population than the United States. Why should American taxpayers subsidize the continent’s defense so Europeans can fund lavish welfare states? If the Europeans don’t believe they face a threat serious enough to warrant creating and maintaining modern and professional military forces, that’s their privilege. America shouldn’t bail them out by taking over their defense.
In any case, a Russian attack on the core Western European states for whose defense Washington created NATO is about as likely as an invasion from Mars. The former members of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact along Russia’s border understandably feel more vulnerable, but Moscow is acting more like a traditional great power interested in border security than an ideologically expansionist power planning a war of conquest. That means it desires influence rather than control.
The former still isn’t a pleasant prospect for newly independent states stuck in a bad geopolitical neighborhood, but easing their discomfort is no reason for America to risk war with nuclear-armed Russia. For instance, Americans have humanitarian reasons to sympathize with the Georgian people, not geopolitical reasons to defend the state of Georgia. The major powers in Europe have a much greater interest in backing up their central and eastern neighbors.
Indeed, NATO has become a defense black hole for the United States. By continually expanding the alliance, Washington has been adding small client states with nonexistent military capabilities but multiple political liabilities, ranging from social instability to ethnic discord to border conflict. For example, what conceivable benefit does America gain from bringing Albania or Croatia into NATO? Countries like Estonia proudly send a few dozen personnel to Iraq while expecting the United States to defend them from Russia in return. The alliance has become a form of international welfare, with Washington promiscuously distributing security guarantees hither and yon.
Even less relevant to American security are the potpourri of nation-building and humanitarian interventions Washington has busied itself in the post-cold war years. There’s Haiti (twice!), Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo, none of which had the slightest relevance to even the barest security interest. Whatever the justification for invading Iraq, sticking around as occupier to sort out conflicts amongst the Kurds, Shia and Sunni was never worth the cost. Intervening in Darfur or any number of other geopolitical horror shows creates many risks while straining a military whose principal duty should remain protecting America: its people, territory, and constitutional system and liberties.
If the United States was only concerned about its own defense, its military requirements would be modest. No country has the capability to assault American territory with ground forces. No potential adversary possesses an air force or navy which can match, let alone overcome, comparable American forces. The greatest military threat still comes from Moscow’s strategic nuclear forces, but Washington possesses by far the globe’s most sophisticated and deadly arsenal. All that is lacking is an effective missile defense, which justifies continued work in this area.
But the same tyranny of distance works against U.S. intervention overseas, making it so expensive. China is the latest conservative defense bugaboo. But Beijing has no practical capacity to attack America. To launch an attack on U.S. territory with something other than missiles would require a massive army, naval and air build-up. It would not be enough for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to match America; Beijing would have to assemble forces capable of overwhelming U.S. defenders. To do that would require massive expenditures and years of effort. Some day China’s moment might come, but not in the foreseeable future, especially at a time when the PRC remains notably poorer than America. Even when the Chinese economy overtakes that of the United States at some point in the coming years, China’s per capita GDP will remain well below that of America. Talk of a renewed “yellow peril” in the East is nonsense.
What Beijing’s increasing military outlays do is threaten Washington’s ability to intervene against the PRC. China is updating its strategic nuclear forces, expanding its blue water naval capabilities, modernizing its antiquated conventional forces and developing asymmetric war capacities, such as the ability to destroy U.S. satellites. None of these steps will enable it to attack America. All of them will make it more costly for Washington to attempt to coerce Beijing, particularly in the event of hostilities in the Taiwan Strait. That is, China is creating an effective deterrent force, capable of sinking U.S. carriers, blinding U.S. intelligence and forestalling U.S. nuclear threats. For Washington to construct a military capable of overwhelming China’s growing forces would force it to devote ever more resources to “defense.”
Washington has two basic choices. The first is to attempt to remain the dominant military power in every region on earth, capable of waging war against any adversary or likely hostile coalition on its own territory or in its own region. For instance, assume that the U.S. government wants to undertake three tasks in addition to protecting America: defend Georgia from Russia; shield Taiwan from the PRC; and fix failed states in Africa and the Middle East.
None of these objectives has much of anything to do with preserving American independence, liberties and prosperity. But pursuing these goals would cost as much if not more than defending the United States: maintaining strategic nuclear and conventional forces capable of defeating (not just deterring) a rebounding great power and an incipient great power, as well as large enough ground forces to garrison failed states (not just U.S. territories) for years. Every increase in Chinese and Russian military spending would require a much larger U.S. increase. Every additional failed state would force another expansion of American ground forces.
The cost would not just be financial. If pursuit of these objectives went awry—especially if deterrence against China or Russia failed—the consequence could be a devastated homeland as well as wasted money. Neither China nor Russia is the equivalent of Serbia or Iraq. War with the first two would be very different than war with the latter two.
The second choice is to put defense back into defense policy. The United States should maintain a military sufficient to deter or defeat attack on America by any enemy or likely coalition of enemies. Washington should possess the air and naval capacity necessary to keep hostile forces away from the American homeland. And the United States should have the ability to, if necessary, join with allied states to prevent an antagonistic hegemonic power from dominating Eurasia. In short, Washington should aim to keep America as the world’s strongest power, the first among equals, but not the arrogant unipower, determined to meddle in everyone else’s affairs and fight everyone else’s wars.
“War is the health of the state” Randolph Bourne famously declared. He was right. War is the ultimate big government program—a direct attack on individual liberty, fiscal responsibility, moral values and family stability. It always should be a last rather than first resort, never a matter of “choice” by ivory-tower warriors bent on remaking the world at everyone else’s expense.
The conservative movement isn’t dead, but its wounds are serious. To revive, the Right needs to offer a genuine alternative to the traditional liberalism likely to dominate policy in the Obama administration. No where is that more necessary than in foreign affairs. Let President Barack Obama propose sacrificing American lives and money to reform the world. Let conservatives insist that Washington defend America rather than populous and prosperous allies and favor the protection of American liberties over the dream of global social engineering. That is a political battle the Right would win.

Doug Bandow is the Robert A. Taft Fellow at the American Conservative Defense Alliance. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire (Xulon).
Copyright © 2006 The National Interest All rights reserved. Legal TermsP: (800) 893-8944, Outside the U.S.: (914) 962-6297 backissues@nationalinterest.orgP.O. Box 2671, Danbury, CT 06813-2671The National Interest is published by The Nixon CenterThe Nixon Center 1615 L Street, Suite 1250 Washington, DC 20036www.nixoncenter.org

Gabriel Kolko on US foreign policy

What Kolko claims to be failures are to some a success since if occupation and military actions continue and new military adventures launched the military industrial complex continues to profit as Kolko notes:
Weapons producers make money regardless of whether the Pentagon wins or loses its wars – and making money is their only objective. It is surely a key causal factor even if it is far from being the sole explanation of why the U.S. intervenes where it shouldn't.

The instability in the middle east also allows the US to ship billions in arms aid to Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States.

Eventually financial crisis and the gross underfunding of infrastructure in the US and also of social programs may finally force a change in policy but it may take a lot more pain in the US itself before this happens.


Mechanistic Destruction: American Foreign Policy at Point Zero

by Gabriel Kolko
The United States has rarely lost any conventional military battle since at least 1950. Nor has it, at the same time, ever won a war. It has successfully overthrown governments through interventions or subversion but the political results of all its efforts – as in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Iran in 1953 – have often made its subsequent geopolitical position far, far more tenuous. In a word, in international affairs it bumbles very badly and it has made an already highly unstable world far more precarious than it otherwise would be if only the U.S. had left the world alone. No less important, Americans would be far better off thereby. Because – to repeat a critical point – it has failed to attain victory in any of the real wars it has fought since Korea. Its adversaries learned as long ago as the Korean War that decentralization would stymie America's overwhelming firepower, which was designed for concentrated armies, and provided a successful antidote for massive, expensive technology.

All this is very well known. The real issue is why the U.S. makes the identical mistakes over and over again and never learns from its errors.

At the present time it is losing two wars and creating a vast arc of profound strategic and political instability from the Mediterranean Sea to South Asia, it has resumed the arms race in Europe, and it is making Russia an enemy when it could easily have been friendly. Economically, it has run up the biggest deficits in American history, brought on the decline of the dollar, and wherever one turns this administration has been at least as bad as any in two centuries of American history – perhaps even the worst. We now have an unprecedented disaster in the conduct of American power, both overseas and at home, in part because of the people who now rule – ambitious men and women who calculate only what is best for their careers – but also because the imperatives and inexorable logic of past policies and conventional wisdom have brought us to this critical juncture. All the old mistakes have been repeated; nothing had been learned from the past, and official myopia is timeless.

A large part of the United States' problem, whether Republicans or Democrats are in power, is that it believes it has the right and obligation to intervene everywhere, in whatever forms they choose, and that its interests are global. Interventionism – so the consensus among Republicans and Democrats goes – is the cost of its global interests and mission, because it has been convinced for almost a century that it was preordained to remedy the world's many wrongs – and to do so by whatever means it chooses. There is nothing whatever that is unique in this regard in the present Bush Administration. This pretension, which first began during the 19th century and which Woodrow Wilson articulated, is simply not functional and it has led it into countless morasses, bad for the U.S. and far worse for the countries it has interfered with. The fact is that no nation has ever been able to assume such an international role, and those that have attempted to do so came to no good end – they exhausted their resources and passions and follies.

Political conflicts are not solved by military interventions, and that they are often incapable of being resolved by political or peaceful means does not alter the fact that force is dysfunctional. This is truer today than ever with the spread of weapons technology. The U.S. is not exempt from the facts that have guided international affairs for centuries.

The U.S. has already lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the very same reasons it lost all of its earlier conflicts. It has the manpower and firepower advantage, as always, but these are ultimately irrelevant in the medium- and long-run. They were irrelevant in many contexts in which the U.S. was not involved, and they explain the outcome of many armed struggles over the past century regardless of who was in them, for they are usually decided by the socio-economic and political strength of the various sides – China after 1947 and Vietnam after 1972 are two examples but scarcely the only ones. It is a transcendent truism of global politics that wars are more determined by socio-economic and political factors than any other, and this was true long before the U.S. attempted to regulate the world's affairs.

But Why?

But all this still begs the issue of why the U.S. repeatedly makes the same drastic errors. Are there vested interests in preparing for war? Are illusions based on them, or ideologies – or both?

In part, expensive equipment and incredibly inflated military budget is premised on the traditional assumption that owning complex weapons gives America power, which is determined by arms in hand rather than what happens in a nation's politics and society. In fact, the reverse is often the case, especially when enemies find the weaknesses in this sort of technology and exploit it – as they increasingly have done over the past decades. Then the cost of fighting wars becomes a liability – and America's technological military an immense weakness when the government has huge deficits or lacks funds to repair its aging public infrastructure – a fact that was highlighted when the collapse of a bridge in Minneapolis earlier this month led to the striking revelation that 70,000 bridges in the U.S. are rated deficient. The Vietnam War should have resolved the issue of the relevance of technology to the America's military ambitions, but it did not. The real question is: why?

To a critical but scarcely exclusive sense, the Pentagon's penchant for military toys makes an ambitious, aggressive foreign policy essential. Without enemies and conflicts, real or potential, there is no reason to spend money, and this reality often colored its definition of Soviet goals after 1947 – despite the objections of senior CIA analysts. But the Defense Department, and national security establishments in general, are immense and all kinds of constituencies exist in them: there are procurement experts who draw up budgets and go after equipment mindlessly, people who have always dominated its actions, but thinkers too. Each does their own thing and they are often very different. It has always had these contradictions.

But that those who run military establishment have technological illusions, which many ordinary people share in this and other domains of human existence, keeps immense sums of money flowing to arms manufacturers and their minions. There is a very profound consensus between the two parties on arms spending, which began under the Democrats a half-century ago and it will not go away – no matter how neglected the bridges and infrastructure, health, or the like. Arms lobbies are not only very powerful in Washington but create crucial jobs in most states and military spending keeps the economy afloat. Weapons producers make money regardless of whether the Pentagon wins or loses its wars – and making money is their only objective. It is surely a key causal factor even if it is far from being the sole explanation of why the U.S. intervenes where it shouldn't.

It is close to impossible to assign some weight or priority to the arms industry but it must be taken into account that the arms manufacturers have power, strategic lobbies in Washington, contribute heavily to politicians who need campaign funding, and gain financially whether America wins or loses it wars. They are the "x-factor" in the equation but scarcely the sole one. But, at the least, they are very important even when not decisive.

Another explanation is ambitious politicians, who will say and do whatever is required to stay in power or gain it. This factor is so familiar that it scarcely requires repeating, but the cynical ways politicians treat polls and American public opinion is a crucial aspect of this question. There are indeed problems with the public but it invariably senses realities and its constraints well before the politicians – who use he public and then ignore it. The party out of office will cater to mass opinion but usually forgets it once it comes to power – as the recent Democratic Party trajectory shows. This is usually the rule but public opinion is an element that cannot be merely gainsaid, and the Korean and Vietnam wars proved, it could play a decisive role. An increasing majority of the people think the war in Iraq is not worth fighting, and the President is among the most unpopular in history. The public may be impotent or far too passive for its own good, and generally is, but it is far less brainwashed than the advocates of "manufactured consent" concede. How, when, or if its role becomes more crucial is a matter of conjecture. Its influence is usually negligible and takes far too much time to have an impact. Follies are committed long after the public condones them. But that it eventually becomes critical is a fact of life which one cannot make too much of, or too little.

Consensus on ideology and goals is crucial also but that policies fail to work and are increasingly dangerous as a guide to action has been true for a long time and is more obvious as years elapse. The Bush Administration encapsulates it but the basic problem has existed for many decades. What the Bush coterie has seen is the culmination of a logic that is much older. It presides over a catastrophe that began many years ago.

But all in all, these factors have delivered us to our present mess, which may very well exceed any in American history.

Some of the most acute criticisms made of the gross simplisms which have guided interventionist policies were produced within the military, especially after the Vietnam experience traumatized it. My history of the Vietnam War was purchased by many base libraries, and the military journals treated it in detail and very respectfully. The statement at the end of July by the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael G. Mullen, that "no amount of troops in no amount of time will make much of a difference" if Iraqi politics fails to change drastically reflects a current of realism that has existed among military thinkers for some decades (whether he acts on this assumption is another matter and depends greatly on considerations outside of his control). Like the CIA, the military has acute strategic thinkers, and the monographs of the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute – to name one of many – are often very insightful and critical. Academics tend to be irrelevant and dull by comparison.

The problem, of course, is that few (if any) at the decisive levels pays any attention to the critical ruminations that the military and CIA consistently produce. There is no shortage of insight among U.S. official analysts – the problem that policy is rarely formulated with objective knowledge is a constraint on it. Ambitious people, who exist in ample quantity, say what their superiors wish to hear and rarely, if ever, contradict them. Iraq is but an example, for the entire mess there was predicted. If reason and clarity prevailed, America's role in the world would be utterly different.

Those in power simply ignore the critical military's insights, and the vast bulk of officers obey orders. Many of them know better. They have learned the hard way – experience. Neocon intellectuals and scribblers utterly lack it.

We are at point zero in the application of American power in the world: the U.S. cannot win its extremely expensive adventures nor will it abstain from policies which increasingly lead to disasters for the nations in which it intervenes and for itself as well. All the factors I have mentioned – its myopia regarding technology, the policy consensus that binds ambitious politicians and often makes public opinion irrelevant, the arms makers and their local interests, or the limits of rational inputs – have all combined to deliver us to this impasse. It is difficult not to be pessimistic when – as it should be – realism rather than illusions guide our political assessments. But realism is the only way to avoid cynicism.