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- Walt
The United States is ignoring the most basic principle of international relations,
to its own detriment.
Yet despite its long and distinguished history, this simple idea is often forgotten
by America’s foreign-policy elites. Instead of asking why Russia and China are
collaborating, or pondering what has brought Iran together with its various
Middle East partners, they assume it is the result of shared authoritarianism,
reflexive anti-Americanism, or some other form of ideological solidarity. This act
of collective amnesia encourages U.S. leaders to act in ways that unwittingly
push foes closer together, and to miss promising opportunities to drive them
apart.
The basic logic behind balance of power theory (or, if you prefer, balance of
threat theory) is straightforward. Because there is no “world government” to
protect states from each other, each has to rely on its own resources and
strategies to avoid being conquered, coerced, or otherwise endangered. When
facing a powerful or threatening state, a worried country can mobilize more of
its own resources or seek an alliance with other states that face the same
danger, in order to shift the balance more in its favor.
Yet despite its long pedigree and enduring relevance, policymakers and pundits
often fail to recognize how balance of power logic drives the behavior of both
allies and adversaries. Part of the problem stems from the common U.S.
tendency to assume that a state’s foreign policy is mostly shaped by
its internal characteristics (i.e., its leaders’ personalities, its political and
economic system, or its ruling ideology, etc.) rather than by
its external circumstances (i.e., the array of threats it faces).
From this perspective, America’s “natural” allies are states that share our
values. When people speak of the United States as “leader of the free world,” or
when they describe NATO as a “transatlantic community” of liberal
democracies, they are suggesting that these countries are supporting each
other because they share a common vision for how the world should be
ordered.
Shared political values are not irrelevant, of course, and some empirical
studies suggesting democratic alliances are somewhat more stable than
alliances between autocracies or between democracies and nondemocracies.
Nonetheless, assuming that a state’s internal composition determines its
identification of friends and enemies can lead us astray in several ways.
First, if we believe shared values are a powerful unifying force, we are likely to
overstate the cohesion and durability of some of our existing alliances. NATO is
an obvious case in point: The breakup of the Soviet Union removed its principal
rationale, and herculean efforts to give the alliance a new set of missions have
not prevented repeated and growing signs of strain. Matters might be different if
NATO’s campaigns in Afghanistan or Libya had gone well — but they didn’t.
To be sure, the Ukraine crisis arrested NATO’s slow decline temporarily, but
this modest reversal merely underscores the central role external threats (i.e.,
fear of Russia) play in holding NATO together. “Shared values” are simply
insufficient to sustain a meaningful coalition of nearly 30 nations located on both
sides of the Atlantic, and all the more so as Turkey, Hungary, and Poland
abandon the liberal values on which NATO supposedly rests.
U.S. officials were equally surprised when Iran and Syria joined forces to help
the Iraqi insurgency following the U.S. invasion, even though it made perfect
sense for them to make sure the Bush administration’s effort at “regional
transformation” failed. Iran and Syria would have been next on Bush’s hit list if
the occupation had succeeded, and they were just acting as any threatened
state would (and as balance of power theory predicts). Americans have no
reason to welcome such behavior, of course, but they should not have been
surprised by it.
This misguided instinct lives on today, alas, in phrases like the “axis of evil”
(which implied Iran, Iraq, and North Korea were part of the same unified
movement), or in misleading terms like “Islamofascism.” Instead of seeing
extremist movements as competing organizations with a variety of worldviews
and objectives, U.S. officials and pundits routinely speak and act as if our foes
were all operating from an identical playbook. Far from being powerfully united
by a common doctrine, these groups often suffer from deep ideological schisms
and personal rivalries, and they join forces more from necessity than conviction.
They can still cause trouble, of course, but assuming all terrorists are loyal foot
soldiers in a single global movement makes them look scarier than they really
are.
Even worse, instead of looking for ways to encourage splits and schisms among
extremists, the United States often acts and speaks in ways that drive them
closer together. To take an obvious example, although there may be some
modest ideological common ground between Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis in
Yemen, the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, and the Sadr movement in Iraq,
each of these groups has its own interests and agendas, and their collaboration
is best understood as a strategic alliance rather than as a cohesive or unified
ideological front. Launching a full-court press against them — as Saudi Arabia
and Israel would like us to do — will merely give all of our adversaries even
more reason to help each other.
Unfortunately, the United States has done the exact opposite for the past few
decades, especially in the Middle East. Instead of exhibiting flexibility, we’ve
rigidly stuck to the same partners and worried more about reassuring them than
about getting them to act as we think best. We’ve deepened our “special
relationships” with Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia even as the justification for
such intimate support has grown weaker. And with occasional exceptions,
we’ve treated adversaries like Iran or North Korea as pariahs to threaten and
sanction but not to talk with. The results, alas, speak for themselves.
Notice to readers: I will be taking a short hiatus from my duties here at Foreign
Policy, in order to finish a book. I’ll resume my column in February 2018, unless
world events drag me back into the fray. Please do your best to keep things
quiet until then. Best wishes to all for a joyful holiday season and a peaceful and
prosperous 2018.