A Lexicon Deconstructed: N-S

N is for Nation-Building

America has been in the nation-building business from conception. We began life as 13 colonies (essentially start-ups run by private proprietors and corporations granted that privilege by a royal sovereign), and we expanded to encompass a total of 50 states and numerous other holdings over the next two centuries. We have always been an invasive species, our difference with colonial empires being that we prefer free association to outright political domination. Economically and militarily, we roam the planet with a freedom of action that is unprecedented in human history. But politically, we retain direct control over a mere one-twentieth of the world's population.

When America has temporarily engaged in direct political control over others, typically following a military intervention, we have endeavored to engage in nation-building, or the creation of local capacity for self-governance. It is always a noble venture, but we have failed more often than not. Of the seven nation-building exercises we made prior to World War II (Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Cuba three times), all were unilateral efforts and none resulted in lasting democracies. Since WWII, we have participated in thirteen nation-building efforts, with Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq still ongoing. Of the previous ten, we created lasting democracies in half the cases (Japan, Germany, Grenada, Panama and Bosnia). Overall, that gives a batting average of about .250, which is fairly poor for such a draining exercise.

But here's the most important statistic to note regarding grand strategy: During the Cold War we engaged in nation-building about once every decade. Since the Cold War's end, it's been more like once every three years. And if it's fair to count Bosnia and Kosovo as separate efforts, then it's arguably reasonable to tally up three separate nation-building efforts in increasingly "soft-partitioned" Iraq (the Kurds, the Sunnis, the Shiia). Toss in the other states created from the former Republic of Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia), and you could say that the American military has played a hand in either rebuilding or birthing a total of thirteen different political entities in the past 18 years. Then consider a recent RAND projection that argues "US armed forces should be postured to become significantly involved in at least 30 actively unstable states, plus another 20 where latent instability is linked to militant Islamist causes, at any given time." Sound like enough of a reason to make nation-building a core capability for any American grand strategy that seeks to keep the world reasonably stable?

In short, if war is the market we want to continue dominating with our Leviathan, then nation-building (or "state-building" in well-established nations) is the aftermarket that America must master, lest we suffer one of two draining outcomes: 1) we're forced into a never-ending cycle of repeat interventions (the Powell Doctrine) or; 2) we're trapped in failed occupations.

O is for Open Door

I know you were expecting oil here, but let me make my case for this bigger picture.

Open door" refers to a longstanding American foreign policy principle that argues for equal and unfettered access to any nation's economic potential. In effect, it's a universal restatement of the Monroe Doctrine in that we're saying no external power should have the capacity to unfairly dominate any nation's economy or restrict its ability for free trade with the rest of the world. In a world increasingly dominated by free markets and free trade, this principle still rings more true than ever.

Secretary of State John Hay first articulated this American principle during the William McKinley administration (1897-1901). The foreign market in question belonged to China, the "sick man" of Asia then under the collective colonial assault of Japan, Russia and several European powers. While the policy failed to stop these colonial powers from aggressively divvying up China for further economic exploitation, the ideal of the "open door" remains to this day a cornerstone of America's grand strategy, seen most clearly in our continuing military presence in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. How else to explain such a significant expenditure of American treasure and blood over the past several decades? Consider what fraction of Persian Gulf oil, which accounts for between 40 to 45 percent of world exports, actually makes it into the US economy, the world's largest importer of oil. The answer? Only one-tenth of the Gulf's oil exports supply America. If, as critics allege, the US plays Leviathan in the Persian Gulf merely to protect its access to oil, then how come 90 percent of that region's flow goes to the rest of the world when the US accounts for roughly 25 percent of global consumption? The answer is that the open-door policy is a true pillar of American grand strategy.

P is for Patience

By definition, a grand strategy is all about patience. This is a simple point, but one worth emphasizing. Modern wars tend toward instant gratification - at least when you win. They also result in immediate pain for all involved. In contrast, preventing wars takes a lot of time, and the work never ends. Keeping a postwar peace often involves sitting on walls or manning demilitarized zones for decades on end. Successful nation-building or counter-insurgency campaigns? Again, you're typically into a decade's worth of strenuous effort. Trying to shortcut any of these efforts usually ends up in disaster. As the Bush administration proved in Iraq, when you want something bad (i.e., Saddam's fall), you usually get it bad (the tortuous occupation). As a rule, multilateralism is a slow game, but it's worth playing because it spreads both the cost and the pain. Plus, grand strategy is all about constructing sure things, leaving as little to chance as possible, and sure things take time. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither is a winning coalition.
Flipping that argument over to domestic politics, grand strategies necessarily span both administrations and generations, meaning the appeal must be mainstream, not partisan. You can whip up your jingoists for the right "splendid little war" (another John Hay term, referring to the Spanish-American War he helped successfully sell), but getting the American public to stick with you through year after year of a bloody, messy counter-insurgency campaign? That's a lot harder.

Are we capable of sticking to long-term projects? Or are we merely the ADHD superpower of "Black Hawk Down"? History says we're capable of both amazing feats of endurance and self-destructive fits of pique. The crucial difference tends to be public expectations and how they're managed, yet another reason why the careful formulation and effective articulation of grand strategy matter. Do it right, you deter others. Do it badly, and you deter yourself.

Q is for Quagmire

Quagmires, or military interventions that go disastrously awry, are the distant, swampy scenarios where grand strategies go to die. They produce friction that overwhelms both military discipline and public morale, calling into question, by their tendency to produce atrocities, the moral fitness of the occupying nation. Quagmires are the black holes of grand strategy in that they suck in all available public resources that aren't already secured while narrowing the strategic vision of decision-makers who often end up just as mentally anguished and emotionally scarred as local victims by the pervasive unrest. That's the "high principles" definition.

A more cynical definition is this: quagmires are where your force loses enough soldiers each year that your public takes notice and defines those losses as unacceptable given the seeming lack of progress on the ground and the never-ending nature of the obligation, something your press is more than happy to highlight. Get those numbers down while demonstrating just enough progress to get the story off the front pages of major newspapers, and you can stay as long as you like, assuming a low frequency of scandals. Americans feel bad about American deaths, but those of strangers are much easier to ignore. That's why America's interventions inside the Balkans across the 1990s were not considered quagmires.
Finally, get the win - however defined - and it's impossible to dub the intervention a quagmire. Americans like winning most of all.

R is for Rollback

Rollback is the great alternative to containment. Instead of boxing your opponent in and waiting for him to collapse from your steady pressure and his own "internal contradictions," you aggressively seek to knock him out of his most vulnerable holdings and essentially drive him back into his hole, presuming that his progressive retreat will lead to regime collapse. Conventional wars, by definition, constitute rollback strategies: Country A conquers Neighbors B, C, D, and E, so your rollback effort simply "walks that dog backwards" (another wonderfully strange military phrase), starting with E and ending with A's surrender and/or collapse. Rollback fits the American way of war, which favors annihilation and eschews limited warfare. Why containment won over rollback in our Cold War thinking is because the nuclear stalemate ruled out the possibility of successful rollback - directly waged. We might have talked tough about going all the way, like Secretary of State John Foster Dulles did with his threat of "massive retaliation" in the Eisenhower years, but when push really came to shove, like the 1956 crises in Hungary and the Suez Canal, such rhetoric simply made us look foolish. Thus, after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, both we and the Soviets dialed down the bilateral heat and resorted to a combination of internal balancing and proxy wars.
That notion held sway until Ronald Reagan became president in 1981. Arguing that détente had emboldened the Soviets to spread their influence more aggressively in the Third World, Reagan's namesake doctrine embodied a rollback philosophy, but carefully packaged it within the existing two strands of competition with the Soviets: His Star Wars effort at missile defense sought to rollback the perceived Soviet advantage in sheer numbers of strategic missiles (the internal balancing strand), and his direct support of anti-Soviet insurgencies throughout the Third World (the proxy war strand) created significant friction for Moscow's leadership, culminating in the humiliating withdraw of Soviet troops from the quagmire that was Afghanistan. Reagan, while rhetorically aggressive, nonetheless carefully adhered to the basic rule of the bipolar Cold War stand-off: no direct conflict between nuclear superpowers.

President George W Bush's decision to invade both Afghanistan and Iraq was couched in rollback terms, with Afghanistan justified as the home base of al Qaeda and Iraq more loosely indicted as a member of the "axis of evil."

S is for Seapower

In his 2007 book, God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World, Walter Russell Mead makes the compelling argument that the master narrative of grand strategy since the rise of modern nation-states in 17th century Europe has been seapower, or control of the high seas by the era's dominant naval power with an eye to maximizing seaborne commerce. He thereby tracks a trifecta of Poseidon-like Leviathans from the "United Provinces of the Netherlands to the United Kingdom and finally to the United States," summarizing the "story of world power" as moving from the "UP to UK to US." The Dutch "version 1.0" came to preeminence in the 17th century, only to begin ceding control to the Royal Navy's 2.0 across the 18th century. America's 3.0 emerged in World War II and has retained its primacy since. As Mead puts it, "In Anglo-American strategic thought, there is one world comprised of many theaters. The theaters are all linked by the sea, and whoever controls the sea can choose the architecture that shapes the world."

American grand strategy really begins in the later decades of the 19th century, in clear conjunction with the rise of our nation's industrial power. Much like China of our day, American leaders became aware that our country's economic and network connectivity with the outside world had vastly outpaced our government's political and military capacity to protect and advance it. The gap, it was inevitably argued, was our primary security deficit, so, like rising global powers throughout history, we developed, primarily through the writings of Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, a grand strategic rationale built around seapower. That rationale, and the accompanying build-up of our blue-water naval assets (industrial base, ships, ports, overseas bases) was later leveraged by an Assistant-Secretary-of-the-Navy-turned-President, Theodore Roosevelt, to catapult the US from the rank of second-tier power to global power broker

Today, we see the US Navy moving away from the traditional definition of sea control (i.e., dissuading the rise of a competitive blue-water navy) toward encouraging the rise of a network-centric multinational Leviathan in the form of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen's "1000-ship navy." This strategy envisions making the world's oceans completely transparent to real-time sensor-based monitoring and accessible to near-real-time naval policing through the coordination of naval fleets the world over. While not quite a transfer from the U.S. to the U.N., it suggests an intelligent seapower vision committed to maintaining a realistically sustainable response to the rising complexity of globalization's vast seaborne traffic flow.