EXERCISE OF POWER
American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World
By Robert M. Gates
During the impeachment hearings, the world was introduced to members of a small, exotic tribe — American national security professionals. As the Vindmans, Yovanavitches and others emerged from the shadows and told their stories before the cameras, the public got a rare glimpse of members of the “deep state” in action. Some of those watching fantasized about how the world would look if the public servants ran the show rather than the political hacks. A new book by the former secretary of defense Robert M. Gates answers their call.
Gates was an unusual senior official. Like the rare foot soldier who rises to high command, he worked his way up from junior intelligence analyst to director of the C.I.A. under President George H. W. Bush, then went on to run the defense department under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “Exercise in Power” is written from a perspective somewhere in the middle — call it the view from the deputy’s chair, which Gates, at different points in his long career, occupied at both the C.I.A. and the National Security Council.
On the surface, the book is conventional. It starts with a list of all the tools national security policymakers can draw on, from military force and economic sanctions to diplomacy, foreign aid and beyond, and ends with wise advice. What makes it special is what comes between — a dozen case studies of how the last six administrations have used those tools in managing post-Cold War security challenges including China, Russia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea and the rest. The familiar stories gain new life and interest when told by somebody who’s been in the room where it happens. Gates says what he thinks and refuses to pull his punches and, as a result, the book offers in one volume the most accurate record available of recent American security policy, the most incisive critique of that policy and the most sensible guide to what should come next.
A picture of national security decision-making sets the scene. “Some observers talk about the president as being at the apex of a pyramid, sitting atop the world. I have a different perspective. I see the president sitting at the bottom of a funnel.” Each day, the top of the funnel is filled with a vast amount of information and analysis churned out by the entire government. “Every major problem — and a lot of minor ones, too — in the world pops out of the funnel onto” a table in the White House Situation Room, where about two handfuls of national security principals meet regularly to decide everything.
Gates examines how the people around the table have handled what has dropped into their laps over the past 30 years. He lays out the challenges policymakers had to confront, the menu of policy options they selected from, their reasons for choosing as they did and his retrospective assessment of those choices. His tone is judicious and nonpartisan, and he grades all the administrations fairly according to his standards of professional competence (although he clearly has a soft spot for Bushes and issues with Obama). He rebuts many familiar attacks by explaining how the players involved actually did the best they could with the resources they had available. More often, though, he makes sharp criticisms from inside the tent, backing them up by pointing out alternative courses of action that policymakers could have chosen — including many he recommended in real time. These counterfactuals are always interesting and often persuasive, with particularly bracing discussions of Iraq (mistakes on the way in and out) and Libya and Kosovo (avoidable mistakes).
No man is a hero to his valet, the saying goes, and Gates does not spare the rod. Trump “is unique in having the most disorderly decision-making process of any modern president, but not uncommon in following his gut and overruling advisers.” Good process improves the chances of good outcomes and reduces unforced errors — which are depressingly common at every level. Team competence and cohesion are important but rare. “It matters when the secretaries of state and defense can’t stand each other (more often than not during my career), or both mistrust the national security adviser (or think he or she is a dolt).”
He judges Washington’s overall track record as less than impressive. “There have been U.S. successes in the international arena during the past quarter century, but the overall trend for us in the global arena has been negative, despite our braggadocio.” Successive administrations have squandered American power, prestige and domestic political capital through various errors of commission and omission, creating opportunities for a rising China and other powers to gain increasing ground.
It didn’t have to be this way, he insists. And indeed, what gradually emerges from the book are the outlines of an alternative approach to foreign policy and national security — one Washington could have adopted before and one it should seriously consider adopting now. He doesn’t use the term, but Gates is the leading contemporary example of conservative internationalism, a venerable school of American foreign policy dating back more than a century. Like liberal internationalists, he favors strong American global leadership and close cooperation with allies and partners to protect and advance common interests. But he scoffs at the notion that Washington can transform other countries against their will or under less-than-ideal conditions, and he scorns those who assign the military grandiose tasks that can’t be accomplished. One imagines his situation room persona as a combination of Cassandra and Eeyore, warning endlessly about hubris, overreach and all the other things that could go wrong.
Few foreign policy theories would predict much change from simply swapping out one pair of old white male Republican national security grandees for another. Yet if George W. Bush’s first term had been led by Gates and his mentor Brent Scowcroft instead of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the history of the 21st century would look very different.
Rumsfeld is a recurrent figure in the book, usually brought in to make a hard-line case against liberal naïveté. The notable exception is the treatment of Iraq. Gates tersely notes how Rumsfeld demanded control over postwar planning, didn’t do any and then abdicated responsibility for the mess that followed. It’s a clear case study of what not to do. Some might consider Rumsfeld and Cheney and Gates and Scowcroft interchangeable. But Rumsfeld and Cheney were “careless people,” to use F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words — the type that smash up things and walk away, letting other people clean up after them. Gates and Scowcroft, in contrast, were responsible people. Gates was brought in to clean up the mess Rumsfeld and Cheney made in Iraq, just as he and Scowcroft (and their predecessors Frank Carlucci and Colin Powell) had been brought in to clean up the mess at the N.S.C. after the Iran-contra fiasco almost 20 years earlier.
His responsible conservative internationalism would use force sparingly but decisively, to protect major national interests under direct threat. The United States would try to be a good neighbor to the world, sending humanitarian aid and disaster relief, expressing support for democratic reformers and trying to shape its security environment however it could. (Strong chapters hold up Plan Colombia and AIDS relief as models of success.) But Washington would not intervene militarily to push history forward nor assume responsibility for other countries’ domestic political outcomes. Its military doctrine would be summed up by the adage “Never fight unless you have to, never fight alone and never fight for long.” A response to 9/11 informed by such thinking would have been less militarized, less reckless and less self-destructive, changing everything that came after.
Looking ahead, the approach Gates offers would be a plausible way to begin repairing the damage to America’s international position wreaked by the Trump administration. An executive branch that limited military interventions while expanding other forms of international engagement; husbanded its resources and deployed them effectively; used the correct tools appropriate to each situation — how much of a revolution would that be?
Throughout its sober gray pages, “Exercise in Power” gives the lie to the notion that the American foreign policy establishment is a mindlessly hawkish “blob” trapped in groupthink and incapable of creative reformation. Robert Gates is the epitome of the blob and he recommends a policy revolution at once radical and practical, a promising approach to strategy that any future administration could adopt. The only catch is that it relies on presidential self-discipline and “wise and courageous leadership,” qualities in scanter supply now than ever. The fault really is in ourselves — better decisions by the people around that table could have avoided many unnecessary failures.
When George C. Marshall was tapped to run the Army’s infantry school at Fort Benning in the late 1920s, he set out to teach future generations of military leaders the painful lessons his generation had learned during the Great War. The result was “Infantry in Battle,” a classic training manual, still worth reading, that combined descriptions of tactical episodes from the Western Front with succinct commentary on the lessons to be learned. Gates is cut from the same cloth as Marshall, and he too has written a lucid, constructive manual to pass on his hard-earned wisdom. Hopefully there are still some left to listen.
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