A recurring defect in US foreign policy is a refusal by elites to concede when they made a serious policy mistake. This is not a new problem, but it has grown decidedly worse in the past few decades. It characterized the intervention in Vietnam years after it should have become evident that Washington’s approach was failing.
Even one of the few worthwhile lessons from the bruising Vietnam experience proved only to be temporary; The U.S. should not get involved in murky civil wars. A generation later, the United States had embarked on forceable nation building missions in both the Balkans and the Middle East. The subsequent interventions in Libya and Syria were even less defensible because Washington already had the Iraq fiasco as fresh evidence that the Vietnam failure was not unique.
One might have thought that the Vietnam experience would have inoculated US policymakers against a repetition in other parts of the world, however, even that benefit appeared to be temporary. Not even the sacrifice of 58,000 American lives and approximately 1,000,000 Vietnamese lives caused US leaders to reconsider a policy of global interventionism. Indeed, two decades later the United States was mired in another full-fledged civil war, this time in the Balkans. Another decade later, US leaders once again attempted to forcibly execute a strategy that created a client both democratic and compliant in Iraq. Such conduct strongly indicated that US officials might be incapable of learning appropriate foreign policy lessons. The latest adventure of the U.S. and its NATO allies in Ukraine appears to be less rewarding and even more dangerous than the previous examples.
A new generation of policy makers replicated many of the same mistakes a generation later in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Civilian and military officials in George W. Bush’s administration clung to failing policies even when it became obvious that the strategy being pursued was based on the illusion that Washington’s Iraq clients were winning the struggle.
And once again, the United States and its allies ignored multiple signs early on that the latest interventions would turn out badly. The portrayal of conditions in Afghanistan, for example, had almost no resemblance of actual battlefield conditions. Media accounts and congressional testimony bore little resemblance to the actual situation on the ground in that country. In the real world, Taliban forces made steady advances. Such spewing of fiction about an ultimate democratic victory continued during the Obama and Trump administrations. And when Joe Biden’s administration finally withdrew U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the withdrawal turned into a fiasco.
Worse, while Biden and his advisors at least belatedly realized that the Afghanistan mission was a failure, they continued indulging in wishful thinking about the prospects for pro-U.S. factions in Ukraine, a much more dangerous setting, risking a direct military conflict with Russia. Contrary to Washington’s mythology, the Kiev government was not democratic, peace loving, or winning the war. Weeks into the Ukraine-Russia war, prominent members of the foreign policy establishment insisted that it was just a matter of time until Ukrainian resistance fighters expelled Russian forces from their country. It took until the autumn of 2023 for major Western figures to admit that the battlefield situation was far less optimistic. Calls mounted for the Ukrainian government to negotiate the compromise solution to bring the fighting to an end. Even given the failure of the much-touted offensive in the summer of 2023, the Biden administration did not press Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government to commence serious peace negotiations.
Washington’s foreign policy initiatives in the post-cold war era have been characterized by a series of disappointments and outright failures. Those failures have had common characteristics. One is excessive optimism about the prospects for the success of the U.S. proxies, even when conditions on the ground do not warrant optimism. Officials overestimate pro-U.S. and pro-democracy sentiments; thus U.S. policy goals often are unrealistic. This lack of realism has led to disappointment after disappointment.
The United States is the most powerful country, militarily, in the world. But as the refusal of independent powers to heed Washington’s call to impose sanctions on Russia has shown, the United States is not nearly as powerful as it used to be. Except for long-standing clients, important powers in the world no longer automatically follow Washington’s policy lead.
Ted Galen Carpenter, Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, is the author of 13 books and more than 1,200 articles on international affairs. Dr. Carpenter held various senior policy positions during a 37-year career at the Cato institute. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).
