Disaster Isn’t Always Around the Corner for America

Why is the sky always falling in debates about U.S. intervention? Disaster-mongering has tended to pervade U.S. efforts to garner public support for policies since the creation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, sometimes justifiably. Catastrophism is so often the rationale for government foreign-policy actions that, twinned with American exceptionalism to make the world “be like us,” this mindset seems to have become embedded in U.S. pathology from the Truman era to the present.

When then-U.S. President Harry Truman asked then-Sen. Arthur Vandenberg how to persuade a war-weary public to back aid for Europe, Vandenberg told Truman that if he wanted congressional support to contain the Soviet Union, he had to “scare the hell out of the American people.”

The victory of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 etched this psychology deeper into the American psyche. The “who lost China” debate brought about the scourge of McCarthyism. Top China hands like former U.S. diplomats John Service and John Paton Davies Jr. were demonized and purged from the foreign service along with a generation of Asia hands. Among the consequences: Warnings by China specialists that Beijing would enter the Korean War if Gen. Douglas MacArthur crossed the Yalu River into North Korea went unheeded as were admonitions by Asia hands against entering the Vietnam War in support of an unviable South Vietnamese government after the French defeat in 1954.

Yet, the roots of the United States’ exceptionalist pathology run deeper and have a religious foundation in Puritanism. Since Massachusetts Bay Colony Gov. John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon advising to “be as a city upon a hill,” the notion of America’s unique moral virtue by Divine Providence to serve as a “beacon to the world” has suffused foreign-policy thinking. The flip side of this exceptionalism is catastrophism, stoking zero-sum fears of disaster that our world will crumble if bad guys prevail over virtue.

In the case of the Truman Doctrine, based on what we now know from Soviet archives about former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s intentions, the scare tactics were arguably mostly justified. But not so for the long string of subsequent invocations of catastrophism based on the same logic and assumptions—whether that’s the looming prospect of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or the domino theory of Vietnamese communism sparking a wave of Marxist triumph.

The policy inertia of decision-makers in the Vietnam War, driven by fear of imminent catastrophe, began a disastrous so-called March of Folly that has all-too-often served as the rationale for subsequent major foreign-policy interventions. The die was cast by then-U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower speaking at a 1954 press conference: “You have a row of dominoes set up; you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is a certainty that it will go over very quickly.”

As France abandoned its colonies and Vietnam became independent, partitioned between the communist North and the South, another characteristic of catastrophism—mission creep—occurred as the United States slowly, incrementally got involved, sending arms and training.

After then-U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. told then-U.S. President Lyndon Johnson that Vietnam “would go under any day if we don’t do something,” Johnson, shortly after being inaugurated, said on Nov. 24, 1963, that “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”

In the aftermath of the U.S. exit from Vietnam in 1975, there were fears and many predictions that the United States would be permanently out of Asia. But fast forward a few years, and the United States’ forward-deployed posture and influence in Asia appeared stronger than ever. Today, Vietnam is an important economic and strategic U.S. partner.

The first Gulf War in 1991 was a realist detour from this pattern of foreign policy. A combination of the Powell Doctrine—intervene with massive force when there is vital interest—public support, a clear military objective and exit strategy, and transactional diplomacy led by then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker not only rolled back then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait but mobilized not just the West but most of the Arab world as partners in the venture.

The limited goal of reversing Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait was key to garnering widespread support at the United Nations and from much of the world—including Moscow.

In sharp contrast, the sequel, former U.S. President George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11, with the utopian goal of “ending tyranny,” was the exact opposite. Amid the trauma of 9/11, the administration invoked the purportedly imminent danger of Iraqi nuclear weapons (which U.N. inspectors were searching for) as its rationale. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” warned then-U.S. National Security Council advisor Condoleezza Rice in full catastrophism.

The belief that the world’s fate must rest on the back of the United States is still a powerful one. I was struck by a recent comment from a senior U.S. official responsible for Middle East policy that the United States is “not going anywhere and we are not going to leave a vacuum in the Middle East for Russia or China or Iran to fill.”

This illuminates dubious U.S. assumptions, not least that the world order can only be binary and zero sum. In fact, as the region has perceived a reduced U.S. role there, the Saudis/Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Russia, and China as well as the United States are increasingly competing for influence in the Middle East. This is likely to result not in a vacuum and new hegemon but rather in a balance of competing forces. In part, the Sunni Arab states-Israel rapprochement as well as the Saudi/GCC-Iran steps toward detente reflect these emerging trends.

What of the two top current flash points: Ukraine and Taiwan? They both raise the specter of potential war between nuclear weapons states. Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine could be seen, like Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, as an unacceptable use of force to violate sovereignty, a core principle of the 1990 Paris Charter that Moscow signed.

As in Kuwait, the United States was not obliged by treaty to intervene, but the threat to European security made a compelling case for a needed U.S. and allied response: unprecedented sanctions and military aid. U.S. President Joe Biden framed it not as a singular response to a particular autocrat violating international law but as a part of the universal Manichean struggle of “democracy versus autocracy”—if Putin is not defeated, it’s the end of the rules-based order. Nonetheless, a Putin victory would be a serious blow to core principles of the international order. I suspect the precedent would have mixed consequences and be case-specific considering the sacrificing of Russia’s future for what would be a Pyrrhic victory.

Yet to his credit, Biden has tempered idealism with realism, making clear his intent not to directly fight Russia and risk World War III. As the quality and quantity of U.S. military aid to Ukraine steadily increases, the risk of unintended escalation remains. But clearly, Biden recognizes the limits of U.S. power in Ukraine.

This does not appear to be the case with Taiwan. Already, Ukraine’s impact on Chinese plans for Taiwan is being hotly debated. Misconceived frenetic panic over China’s allegedly imminent invasion of Taiwan leads some experts to posit that it would be the new Fulda Gap, the Cold War analogy through which World War III would begin by Soviet troops pouring into Europe and destroying the West. Under this analogy, China would then eject the United States from Asia and advance its goal of world domination.

CIA director William Burns recently said Chinese President Xi Jinping has instructed the People’s Liberation Army to be prepared for an invasion of Taiwan by 2027. Beijing may have non-kinetic means of coercion to force unification, but it lacks the amphibious landing capabilities for a feat akin to the allied D-Day landing at Normandy, France, in World War II. John Culver, a former senior CIA China analyst, has outlined the needed preparations for an invasion, most of which are not evident yet.

There seems an almost fatalistic assumption of the “Thucydides Trap,” inevitable conflict over Taiwan, as political scientist Graham Allison explains. Nuclear risks, given the existential nature of the issue to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), seem forgotten or cavalierly downplayed almost as if the Cold War never happened. In his much-discussed book, The Strategy of Denial, author Elbridge Colby argues that Taiwan is just the first step in a Pacman-type aggression to dominate Asia. Yet he matter-of-factly argues that nuclear escalation would be a manageable limited nuclear war, with the United States mixing “nuclear and conventional strikes to selectively and discriminately” impose costs on China “calibrated to avoid precipitating a massive response.” This is lunacy.

Taiwan has become the fulcrum of U.S. China policy, overshadowing the multitude of issues in a complex relationship that is defining the shape of world order. I don’t mean to suggest that some form of unification is not an existential imperative for the CCP nor that the United States shouldn’t help Taiwan build a porcupine defense. But the near-hysterical Washington political climate is more likely hastening a Chinese gambit than deterring it. A sober recognition of the risks would be helpful.

Taiwan, like North Korea, is a wicked problem over which compromise seems increasingly unlikely. In his classic 1952 work, theologian and social philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr counseled humility in disputing U.S. exceptionalism, warning of “the illusions about the possibility of managing historical destiny … always [involving] … miscalculations about the power and the wisdom of the managers,” and about the “manageability of the historical ‘stuff’ which is to be managed.” Still pretty good advice.