Captain Obvious

 Someone (Anne Laurie?) called Matt Yglesias "Captain Obvious" and I can't get that out of my head. His latest piece on American foreign and military policy falls neatly into "Captain Obvious" territory.

I read a book over 15 years ago by Dana Priest called The Mission: Waging War And Keeping Peace With America's Military. Central to Priest's thesis was the idea that the State Department was being hollowed out and foreign policy was increasingly centered and defined by the Defense Department. This obviously exploded under Bush 43 and after 9/11, as it was part of Cheney's reimagining of America's role in the world.

As Captain Obvious notes, using the military to do all of our heavy lifting is incredibly expensive and not always terribly effective. The old adage of "If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" is perhaps unfair to the military, but not out of bounds. What we saw over two decades in Afghanistan was the problems of the military can-do, problem solving mindset in circumstances that simply denied solution. Diplomats are perhaps more comfortable with the ambiguity that the world often throws at us.

It's not a question of intelligence or capability, so much as it a philosophical way of engaging with the complexities of a world that spins beyond the ability of any organization to control it.

I had a mildly interesting Twitter interaction over the Trolley Problem as it relates to global humanitarian crises. The Trolley Problem (if you haven't watched The Good Place, and why haven't you) is basically this dilemma. You are standing next to a switch; a runaway trolley is coming down the track; if you do nothing it will crush five people; if you flip the switch, it will kill one person, but you will have actively killed them. What is the moral culpability of someone witnessing something tragic? 

The argument the Twitter poster was making was that America is standing by the switch while death and suffering occurred and that was not OK. I wondered why it was America who was standing next to the switch. Are we morally culpable in Chinese oppression of the Uighurs? I can't see it. 

The "liberal interventionist" perspective is that we - America - are alone next to the switch. Yglesias mentions Libya as a bad example of America sticking our nose into an impossible situation. But America didn't take the lead there. Britain, France and Italy did, because they not only saw a humanitarian crisis, but a subsequent refugee crisis that would swamp the nascent democratic movements in Tunisia and Egypt and eventually wash on to the shores of Italy and Europe. Or in other words, exactly what happened in Syria.

Neither Syria nor Libya are "good" outcomes. They are plausibly categorized as "bad" outcomes, especially if your yardstick is measuring against an abstract positive outcome where Libya becomes, well, Tunisia. But, of course, Libya is NOT Tunisia and the outcomes would never be the same. Did that make intervention wrong? Impossible to say. Did intervention save Tunisian proto-democracy? No way of knowing.

To me, the great missed "liberal intervention" was Rwanda. It came hard on the heels of the Battle of Mogadishu, and Clinton didn't want to see any more Americans dying in poorly defined African conflicts. Fair enough. But the problem in Somalia was that people were starving. We established enough order to feed them, but we could not create a stable state. Just like Afghanistan. If your goal was to stop wholesale death, then Somalia was a success. If your goal was to create a stable, self-sufficient state in Somalia, that was never going to happen. In Rwanda, you could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, but you could never have gotten the Hutu and Tutsi to have a loving relationship.

In other words, the military can established Max Weber's "monopoly of violence" long enough to stop on going atrocities. The military cannot establish a legitimate state as an external actor. This is somewhat hazily referred to as "nation building." Perfect. "Nations" are groups of people with a common identity who share a desire for self-rule. Yes, the American military cannot create that. Nations are perhaps not entirely organic, though they often line up with existing ethnicities, but they are explicitly indigenous. They cannot be grafted on from outside.

We have tasked the military to do something that cannot be done. The collapse of the Afghan Army is simply a byproduct of the real absence of an Afghan nation and especially an Afghan state and government. They didn't leave their posts because they were cowards, they left because there was no one to fight for. The famous question John Kerry asked of Vietnam "How do you ask a young man to be the last to die for a mistake?" applies to an Afghan solider, too.

I don't know if reinvigorating the State Department would help here. I do think that relying on the Pentagon to solve political problems with military tools does not seem to work.