De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
America sets too little store by foreigners’ beliefs and values. It’s a costly mistake, each time.
Dit artikel komt uit The Economist
The American president’s tone was harsh, and the cause was not hard to identify. A war meant to last a few days had just passed the six-week mark. Addressing American troops, the president told them they were battling an „evil” foe whose „mad schemes” must be defeated. Though regime leaders are proving stubborn, „we are hitting them hard where it hurts,” he said. The president added a blast of cultural chauvinism. America’s armed forces can do things that „no one else can”, he told assembled soldiers. You are in action far from home, to help remake a region that has never been united in peace. As you fight, you should „thank God” that you come from a society whose unity makes it strong.
To reassure doubters back home, the Pentagon deployed stirring facts. In briefings, beribboned generals enumerated bombs dropped and targets destroyed. Bridges and oil refineries are legitimate targets, too, growled the generals as the war dragged on, for roads and fuel help hostile forces to remain on the move. Yet as days of war turned to weeks, blizzards of statistics could not obscure a stubborn reality: America had misjudged what it would take to break its adversary’s will.
De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
So far, so familiar, especially to critics of President Donald Trump’s bungled war in Iran. They see a distinctly Trumpian disaster unfolding in the Middle East, reflecting all the president’s worst traits. These include hubris, impatience, an over-reliance on threats to resolve complex problems, a tendency to respond with overwhelming force to signs of intransigence, and a damaging lack of curiosity about how foreigners really think.
In fact the war in those opening paragraphs took place in 1999. The president quoted is Bill Clinton. American military planners estimated that it might take three days for America and its NATO allies to break the will of Serbia’s leader, Slobodan Milosevic, using air power to pound his armed forces until he halted a murderous campaign of ethnic cleansing against Albanians in the former Yugoslav region of Kosovo. In the end, it took 79 days of escalating air strikes before Serbia’s nationalist regime capitulated, backed by credible threats of a land invasion by NATO forces.
The Kosovo conflict is worth recalling today. An honest assessment of Mr Trump’s war-making must reckon with a dispiriting truth. Some flaws are distinctively his, such as his love of making cruel threats, impetuosity and intolerance of being told unwelcome truths, so that with each passing month he acts less like a modern commander-in-chief, and more like an angry old king.
But Trump-level mistakes have been made by earlier, very different presidents. It is not just Mr Clinton. His fellow Democrats, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, thought that the Vietnamese would welcome America as an ally against communism. Instead, many saw Americans as just their latest colonial invaders.
The notion that America keeps making the same mistakes is not mere snark from a British columnist. Within the American intelligence community, a whole school of analysis has sprung up in the past decade or two, focused on the country’s cultural blind spots. The Kosovo war in 1999 is used as a case study. A much-cited paper on „Cultural Topography”, published in 2011 by two CIA veterans, Jeannie Johnson and Matthew Berrett, notes how American planners ignored underplayed differences in Serbia, a Balkan country whose national day celebrates not a victory in war, but a glorious defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1389. If analysts had put enough weight on Serbian views of honour, the paper concludes, they might have warned policymakers and generals to expect that: „Serbia would find victory by standing up to an overpowering military force when the world expected it to fold.”
Later, American impatience with cultural differences caused terrible harms in Afghanistan and Iraq. American commanders and leaders have a tendency to see foreign difficulties as problems to be solved or targets to be struck, „rather than terrain to be navigated”, as Professor Johnson puts it. With Mr Berrett she co-founded the Centre for Anticipatory Intelligence at Utah State University, training American spooks and other professionals to map cultural traits and use them to spot threats and openings.
Mr Berrett, a former CIA assistant director, would like policymakers to ask whether a desired foreign-policy outcome would require another country to alter something fundamental about its culture or worldview. If that is the case, he would have Americans ask a sobering question: „Over what period and with what resources is such cultural change achievable?” Alas, the question is too rarely posed. One reason is that America is so strong, militarily, that strategy can be an afterthought (indeed, when Britain was a great power, it could be just as clumsy). Americans are also too quick to recall turning Germany and Japan into democratic allies after 1945, and to assume the same can be done again, forgetting that it took total war and two atomic bombs.
Mr Trump scorns his predecessors for seeking to transform Middle Eastern countries into liberal democracies. He claims, falsely, to have already pulled off regime change in Iran, by joining Israel in the killing of many top leaders there and encouraging „reasonable” leaders to step forward. But his administration is seeking cultural change in Iran, to be sure. His vice-president, J.D. Vance, says that Mr Trump wants Iran to behave „like a normal country”. That means a place which puts economic and commercial interests ahead of ideology: a big shift from Islamist nationalism.
Put pessimistically, the Trump way of war involves making all America’s old cultural mistakes, with the sole exception of excessive idealism. Not so long ago, foreign governments grumbled about American presidents with good intentions. Mr Trump has solved that problem for them, but possibly only that one.
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