Democracy assistance practitioners frequently bemoan the ill-informed conflation of their work with militarized forms of regime change. They may at least be comforted by the latest unconventional thinking from the Pentagon.
“The United States is unlikely to repeat another Iraq or Afghanistan — that is, forced regime change followed by nation building under fire — anytime soon,” U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates writes in the January/February 2009 edition of Foreign Affairs.
He suggests that there is no military solution to terrorism and that the global war on terror is “in grim reality, a prolonged, worldwide irregular campaign — a struggle between the forces of violent extremism and those of moderation.” Military force will inevitably play a role but, over the long term:
“…kinetic operations should be subordinated to measures aimed at promoting better governance, economic programs that spur development, and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented, from whom the terrorists recruit. It will take the patient accumulation of quiet successes over a long time to discredit and defeat extremist movements and their ideologies.”
Gates recognizes that new security threats increasingly emerge from non-state actors and forces, often incubated within failed states, requiring preventive and partnership-based approaches. “U.S. strategy is to employ indirect approaches — primarily through building the capacity of partner governments and their security forces,” he writes, “to prevent festering problems from turning into crises that require costly and controversial direct military intervention.”
It has often been observed that the U.S. is, by virtue of geography and cultural predisposition, instinctively an insular nation. But it also one which has been dragged on to the world stage by history’s real drivers, what former British premier Harold Macmillan referred to as “events, dear boy, events.”
Gates provides a pithy demolition of the isolationalist mentality that occasionally manifests itself in reaction to the setbacks and challenges of recent years:
Repeatedly over the last century, Americans averted their eyes in the belief that events in remote places around the world need not engage the United States. How could the assassination of an Austrian archduke in the unknown Bosnia and Herzegovina affect Americans, or the annexation of a little patch of ground called Sudetenland, or a French defeat in a place called Dien Bien Phu, or the return of an obscure cleric to Tehran, or the radicalization of a Saudi construction tycoon’s son?
Recent Comments