Today marks the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 and I feel the urge to say something to memorize the historical tragedy, even though I really did not find much time lately, as my rescheduled SIE exam is on September 17 and I am also reading and preparing myself for selling the Medicare insurance plans. It’s fortunate that the average contract with insurance carriers take at least two months to go through, otherwise I would have little time for anything else.
About a week ago I learned from Google News that the trial of Elizabeth Holmes was underway, starting from jury picking. The radio interview revealed an interesting but little known detail: Joe Biden, our sitting president, was a big fan of Holmes and her now defunct endeavor Theranos. This got me thinking what lessons we can pick from the trial that allow us to make better — smarter, efficient, realistic and ground fitting — foreign policies or international moves, considering the recent crisis in Afghanistan.
But first thing first, how are these things related? The Holmes trial could not have been more different than the crisis in Afghanistan. For one thing, the Holmes trial is a strictly domestic but fairly well-known public affair, while many Americans cannot even spell the name of Afghanistan right (or know where exactly it is located). Furthermore, while Biden faces no consequence whatsoever with the Holmes trial — no reason he should — he has the worst luck in Afghanistan for his presidency.
My point is we cannot randomly jump from one thing to another just because they occur in roughly the same time, even though they are thousands of miles away from each other (in San Jose, California and in Kabul, Afghanistan, respectively). There must be something logically linking them together.
Two Similarities Behind the Link
If one pays attention to Biden’s stated and revealed preferences, he has been a critic of the healthcare system. Biden being a nice guy, I am willing to look at his criticism as a sign of human decency. With a senator’s salary he himself can better afford the healthcare costs than most of us, yet he chose to look into healthcare affordability for ordinary folks.
Still, sometimes (oftentimes?) we humans make mistakes even with the best intentions. One reason is this: If we are unhappy about something, we likely will keep your eyes and ears open for presumably better options. Thus, Holmes appeared on Biden’s radar not by accident, because Biden has been on the lookout for entrepreneurs to come up with new ideas and products to change the system.
But that alone is not enough. Biden praised the wrong person (who may face 20 years in prison if convicted) for a simple reason that we all may be guilty of: listening to what others are saying (or watching what others are doing) before deciding our own moves. A quick reminder here: In her heyday and before the scandal was exposed by journalist, Holmes experienced no shortage of celebrity fans, including former Secretaries of State George Schultz and Henry Kissinger. Biden was just another politician on the bandwagon.
Humans being humans, following others is an easy, convenient and safe strategy, cognitively low cost and politically low risk — especially when you lack the required knowledge to make independent judgment of your own and /or especially when you want to move quickly on something. One evidence supporting my “safety” argument: No one, not even Trump, has ever attacked Biden for admiring Holmes.
A Recipe for International Disasters
I have been refraining myself from saying this but the ongoing and unfolding Afghanistan crisis pushes me to say what I have been meaning to say: The US has had the poorest records in foreign policies, all despite — or because of — the good intentions of self-assigned mission to change the world. I call this a global missionalism, defined in religion as “the worth of one’s life is determined by the achievement of a grand objective.” Such a global missionalism will become much risky and dangerously damaging if guided and reinforced by biased and oftentimes blinding domestic monologues — rather than by Intelligent international dialogues. The result is the following miserable formula:
Global Missionalism + Domestic Monologue = International Mishaps, Crises & Disasters.
Note we have seen how the two elements of “M&M” (Missionalism, Monologue) on the left hand side worked in Biden’s little known Holmes error, except this time in Afghanistan the consequences listed on the right hand side are much worse.
The brutal fact is that for numerous times in the past, and I fully expect numerous times in the future, the US resources have been used with evil outcomes, sometimes more damages to local people than the dictators, and often creating more problems than solving them. See later for real life examples.
Below I will discuss the ramifications of the missionalism & monologue and how the M&M recipe has led to disasters in the past and will do more in the future — unless the US truly learns something from the 911 and makes fundamental overhauls in its foreign policies.
The “Our Way or Highway” (OWOH) Mindset
If a nation has assigned itself the mission to change the world or to make the world a better place for all human beings, how would it move forward? Take some hints from the Holy Bible. In Genesis: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” This is the de facto path the US has taken with its global missionalism: Changing the world in the way to make it like the US.
This thinking has never been openly admitted and obviously not every American agrees with this doctrine. But lacking public discussion makes it more dangerous, because it is then subject to different interpretations, each of them believes it is representing all the people. I wish the 911 anniversary would trigger more soul-searching public debate on foreign policies, although I am not betting on such a discussion to occur.
This is a downside of democracy. For topics of consensus or of clear majority, individual abuse is harder to prevail, while the opposite is true for publicly overlooked topics.
Speaking of democratic weakness, China has been laughing at every chaotic political fight among fractions of the American society and takes it as sign that democracy does not work. Little do these people know that public debating serves an important function for raising the efficiency of democracy. This is how genuine and efficient democracy is supposed to work: The more citizens involved in debating, and the more topics they are talking about, the less likely something important will escape public attention and falls to the trap of abuses. Citizens’ involvement is where nominal and genuine democracies separate.
But even in the US, public attention is always a scarce resource, which means there will always be overlooked issues, especially when something is out of sight like things in foreign countries. We cannot rely on democracy itself to solve the problem. Instead, we must install thoughtful and preemptive rules to protect majority’s interests.
Unfortunately, when it comes to foreign relations, unlike the densely woven network of legal rules and regulations governing every important aspect of social lives, the US only has scanty rules and regulations and leaves most to the executive power to decide when and where the next foreign interference would be. Twenty years post 911 taught us to move toward more self-constraints and self-discipline in its foreign policies, and even more importantly, moves away from the mindset that our way is the only way, any or all deviations are bad and evil.
Changes are not that hard to come, we just need to take a page out of the domestic book, where the spirit is essentially “Our way or your way, let’s have both ways.” The US holds a high tolerance toward diverse preferences inside the country but much lower tolerance internationally, where the mindset is “Our way or highway” or “You are either with us or against us!”
A low tolerance of international differences is bad for spreading democracy to the world because tolerance of differences is a fundamental feature in democracy. The world is too big to have just one approach for everything. As the leader of the world, the US should allow different things to try out.
One reason for the OWOH mindset is to see everyone and everything through ideological lens. The world today runs by national competition more than by ideological competition. Xi Jinping of China has been claiming that Marxism works, which is a wrong attribution to the changes and progresses China has made. Nonetheless, he was careful enough not to claim that Marxism works for the US and the world.
This comes to the issue of how to define offenses, attacks or threats to the US democracy. Unlike many if not most American commentators and politicians who are paranoid, I would argue that Xi Jinping can say whatever he thinks is right for China, and the US does not need to take that as an offense or attack against our ideology and out values. If American democracy is so weak and so vulnerable that anyone saying anything different in his own country would constitute a threat to ours, our values are not a marvel to behold.
Similarly, the Taliban has openly claimed that the regime would be friendly to China. This is another example the US does not have to take it as a threat to its own national security. We should allow any country in the world to choose whom it wants to be friend with. Doing anything else is against global democracy.
Finally, regarding the approach fighting terrorism, the US has almost exclusively relied on overseas military operations. However, the experiences from Afghanistan show that organized violence alone, even with the latest military technologies that the US possess, can be too expensive, too inefficient, and too unsustainable. China’s approach in Xinjiang for vocational training of minority workers actually provides a viable and preemptive alternative — if one ignores the unsubstantiated forced labor allegation.
The Problem of Capacity Limits
As noble as it sounds, global missionalism faces inherent problems of the capacity limit. To make the point clear, let’s start by assuming that our global mission is nothing but indeed noble, pure and altruistic, just like our politicians have been saying all the time.
Now even if that were the case, we still face one inconvenience: The world is simply too big for even the historically strongest country in the human history to handle — alone by itself. It is literally the same situation as a single cop serving the entire world, even when the only cop has formidable and almighty muscles superior to anyone else, he still has a mission impossible.
It is an irony that the US has done an excellent job domestically in motivating, coordinating and regulating multiple resources, most importantly human resources, to make the country this strong; yet when it comes to global affairs, where multiple resources should have counted much more, the US has frequently been acting as a “Lone star.” Mishaps, crises, and disasters are bound to happen, if not in Europe then it will be in Asia, if not in the past then it will be today or tomorrow.
Unfortunately, many if not most Americans are unaware or unwilling to think of their own capacity limit. This article from Slate.com has this alarming title “Just Say it: The Health Care System Has Collapsed” based on the evidence that someone named Daniel Wilkinson, a 46-year-old veteran from Texas who served two terms in Afghanistan and diagnosed with gallstone pancreatitis, recently died after waiting too long to have that procedure done due to Covid-19. The first thought came to me after skimming the article was this: The US foreign policy has long been collapsed and yet nobody is saying anything about that.
Who says democracy works all the time? It depends on history, social psychology, quality of information and quality of citizens. Most of all, democracy is just a game of multi-parties, and the outcome is up for grabs by manipulators, who are just one group of game players.
Not recognizing capacity limits is unfortunate because declaring a crisis is the first step towards solving it. We have spent so much overseas and yet achieved so meagerly little. Since money does not grow on trees, every dollar we wasted overseas could have been used to solve domestic problems like filling up “donut holes” in Medicare and cutting down the waiting list on Medicaid, in universal long-term care and in Infrastructures.
The Conflict of Goals
Now let us abandon the unrealistic assumption and come back to the reality on earth. Although Biden and all other American politicians have kept saying the US competes with China or Russia wholeheartedly for democracy and human rights, the truth is that the US, just like any other countries in the world, has mixed intentions and multiple goals in global operations, not all of them are noble and pure, especially not all are altruistic. Worse still, these goals and interests are often not synchronized or coordinated. Instead, most of the time we witnessed and will continue to see conflict of goals from the historical track records of the US international moves.
Instead of democracy, the key words that account for the overseas moves are national interests. Expanding national interests is something far more useful and reliable for interpreting the US international moves than spreading democracy. We should thank Donald Trump, whose “America First” slogan openly admit this priority. This “best national interest” doctrine means under no circumstances would the US act against its own national interest, even if it means to work with, to support or to protect, or even to launch from scratch foreign dictators — the people the US clearly knows have no interest in democracy at all — as long as it is in the US interest to do so.
The name of the game is to pick up the lesser of two or multiple evils. The only problem is that only the US gets to decide who or what is the lesser evil.
The lesson is exactly the same as we are telling dictators of the world all along: Any mission, no matter how noble it may be, can and will lead to disasters if without constraints and balance of power. Anytime the US moves alone and bypasses the UN, it runs the danger of meddling and messing up the country it targets at.
The Biden doctrine that declared the end of “an era of major military operations to remake other countries” has moved us one step forward in the right direction. But depending on the administration’s self-constraint is risky and is not enough. What the US needs more is to install laws that place constraints on the administration’s power in international affairs. Congress hearings achieve little, because by the time the hearing is held, bad things already happened. We need preemptive steps that prevent the administration, its agencies and military forces, from abusing its so far unchecked foreign power. More specifically, Congress must establish a budget cap (like anything above $10 billion in overseas actions) that will automatically trigger congressional pre-approval. The idea is to make the administration to think twice before sending troops, tanks, drones, ships to other countries.
Do We All Want the Same Thing in the Long Run?
Conflict of goals is not the only sin we commit, not even the worst one. After all, one may argue that to the extent the US represents the best values of the people in the world, what is good for the US should be good for the world. Just like what is popular in the US is most likely also popular in the world (think of Hollywood movies, the US based name brands, firms and innovations.)
In other words, expanding the US national interest is ultimately in the best interest of the world. There is no conflict of goals in the long run.
Except nobody only lives in the long run. We all live in both the long and short runs, and there is no solid wall separating the two, because life is a continuously flowing river.
Plus, isn’t it a bit arrogant and naïve to assume in the long run all human beings on the face of the earth want or value the same thing? I would argue that most of us can agree with Maslow’s basic needs for food, water, warmth, rest, in addition to safety needs, but not so sure about self-actualization or self-fulfillment as our highest need. In Afghanistan, as this excellent article of the New Yorker told us, where “girls essentially disappear into their homes at puberty, emerging only as grandmothers, if ever,” perhaps the highest need for women there is to find a good husband and raise good children.
Conflict of Agents
Conflict of goals often is related to conflict of agencies. One thing unique to international operations is that there will be different governmental agencies involved, ranging from CIA, the militaries, the diplomats and numerous international organizations. Here is another place where the US has shown a drastically different system of coordination — or lack thereof — among its overseas agencies, resulting in chaos that is nothing resembling its domestic affairs.
The pattern and power distribution overseas are hard to predictable, as there is no written rule like those we commonly encounter inside the country. Sometimes when one particular agency was more powerful or influential, like the Pentagon was during the Iraqi war under the late Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who according to NYT was “a combative infighter who seemed to relish conflicts as he challenged cabinet rivals, members of Congress and military orthodoxies”, that agency will play a dominate role, even in fields that are clearly not within its expertise like post-war country building in Iraq. Other times we see different stories that are no less chaotic.
It helps to remember that the US has no shortage of “worriers” or fighters, meaning they are willing to compete with each other for resources, influences and strategic positions. This is a good thing for the most part, because competition helps determine the best allocation of resources.
But competition can be bad, depending on whether it is regulated. Inside this country, there are rules and regulations to restrict all agents from acting on their own free wills. Unfortunately, when it comes to international affairs, the US simply does not have nearly as many rules and regulations installed. This gives rooms for abuses.
A CIA field agent may prefer a foreign leader or entity who happened to say or do things to his or her personal liking, while a US military general will likely do the same for someone else. The funny thing about human nature is that different opinions of someone or something may trigger a boosted level of adrenaline to turn different preferences into personal fight. I have an old friend with a proven case in point: On her day of dissertation defense, two professors on the committee got into an argument and were too busy debating each other to ask her questions. Such is human nature!
It is naïve to assume that all US agencies abroad act in the best interest of democracy all the time, when there is little regulation and limited supervision. Biden argued the Chinese leaders had no democratic bones, implying the US leaders do. If nothing else, Donald Trump has proven to the world that the US has plenty of people with just as many dictator’s bones as one can find in China. Trump had turned the White House into something like his private corporate headquarters and asked all the cabinet members to show loyalty to him rather than to the constitution — exactly the thing a dictator would do.
It’s not that human nature (or body parts like bones or blood) does not matter but rules and regulations matter more.
For how brutal American soldiers can be and have been in Afghanistan, see this letter published in the Harpers. The same letter told us much more. “After a Green Beret team was accused of human-rights abuses in 2013, antipathy toward the Americans became so acute that then-president Hamid Karzai ordered all U.S. Special Forces out of the province.”
“At first, there was no support for the Taliban,” says Mullah Omari, a Taliban military commander who currently serves in Day Mirdad. “It was when the Americans started killing civilians that people started supporting us, giving us food, bullets, and offering men.”
“Nangial says the Taliban capitalized on the population’s resentment toward the government and its urban constituents, as well as on grievances over U.S. and Afghan military abuses. ‘It’s not a war of belief in Afghanistan,’ he says. ‘The people had expectations: better lifestyle, better living standards.’ The government squandered its opportunity. ‘Nobody wants a Taliban government there,’ but faced with a choice between neglect and contempt from the government in Kabul, and the nominal respect they’re shown by Taliban fighters who live ascetically among them, most will reluctantly accept the locals.
“Stories of brutal night raids, carried out mostly by a CIA-trained and funded unit known as 01, with the support of American Special Operations Forces, CIA paramilitary officers, and U.S. air power, had been spreading through the province since late 2018. The victims were rarely insurgents, but rather civilian families living in areas under Taliban control, or students of madrassas as young as eight. Wardak residents and government officials interviewed in 2019 described 01’s raids—arguably the most deliberately ruthless since the war began—as a campaign of terror that claimed dozens of civilian lives. Patricia Gossman, an associate director for the Asia division of Human Rights Watch who documented the raids in a 2019 report, says that the Taliban is known to recruit from madrassas, and so their students may have been targeted because they were seen as potential future enemies. According to Nangial, the same guilt by association can attract raids against residents who have complied with requests by Taliban fighters for food or lodging.”
In another real life story about an American soldier, Eddie Gallagher “murdered a teenage captive by plunging a knife into the helpless prisoner’s neck. He entertained himself by repeatedly firing his sniper rifle at people who clearly were civilians, such as old men, schoolgirls, and people doing their laundry in the Tigris River. He frequently disobeyed orders from his superiors and hid information about his unit’s whereabouts on the battlefield. He had a drug abuse problem.”
“The story gets worse. Gallagher’s immediate superior, a Navy SEAL lieutenant, was intimidated by him and went along with his misdeeds. The chain of command above that officer was aware of Gallagher’s behavior but did nothing to constrain him. Indeed, when the commander of SEAL Team 7, Robert Breisch, was told of possible war crimes violations by members of Gallagher’s team, instead of pursuing their allegations, as was his clear and legally required duty, he told them to report the violations themselves. But Gallagher’s immediate subordinate worried that if he vocally asked for an inquiry into the murder of the prisoner, Gallagher would find a way to kill him—which would be easy enough in a combat zone.”
“But Philipps’s book isn’t just about Gallagher. It’s about a system that enables evil because it doesn’t want to look bad. After the Mosul deployment, Gallagher was assigned to teach special operations urban warfare in the United States, and the compliant lieutenant was promoted to teach the art of command in such fights. Despite his justified fears of death, Gallagher’s concerned deputy went on to report the murder three times—only to have the Navy fail to act on each occasion. The institutional Navy’s response was to figure out a way to handle the situation quietly. When that failed and Gallagher’s story became major news, the Navy was still unable to discipline him, and the SEAL was embraced by high-level political figures, including then President Donald Trump.”
“Gallagher’s military and political trajectory is shocking, but it isn’t necessarily surprising. American leaders have a two-decade history of mishandling our wars in the Middle East, and officials have authorized needless violence against our enemies, real and perceived. Gallagher may or may not have been inspired by the dishonesty and brutality that underscored our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But his story is certainly a parable for what we did wrong.”
“In the spring of 2018, several members of Gallagher’s platoon lost patience with their leader’s misdeeds and essentially demanded an investigation. Gallagher responded by seeking to intimidate witnesses. Among other things, he gave the names of his accusers to an old SEAL buddy, who responded in a text message, “someday we will just kill them.” This book brims with such striking quotations, mainly because Philipps was able to read a trove of some 6,000 texts written by Gallagher and 2,300 others sent by members of his platoon.”
“When they finally decided to prosecute him for his other crimes, including killing the teenage prisoner, Gallagher found fast outside backing. The Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth conducted a campaign on the soldier’s behalf. He featured Andrea Gallagher, Eddie’s wife, in television interviews. She alleged that her husband was an innocent and noble victim of an ungrateful government. ‘These are atrocities being committed against our military service members, my family, my husband,’ she claimed. She asserted that people who had never been in the fight were judging her husband, when in fact his accusers were members of her husband’s own team, who believed he had recklessly endangered them while undercutting the war effort by alienating Iraqis. Benefiting from Fox’s backing, Andrea Gallagher was able to raise roughly $500,000 for her husband’s legal defense fund.”
Finally, agent conflicts are not limited to public sector, a big source comes from the private sector, where governmental contractors and suppliers have an interest not so much in democracy (they may pay lip service to that term) but in selling and proving weapons they make.
The challenge of leaders is to balance out all parties of interest and remain sober, not to be confused by what they say but leverage conflict of goals and agents to their advantage, not to be dragged down by them.
The Overseas Action-Consequence Disconnect
This is the first reason the US tends to have domestic monologues in foreign policies, because the consequences of our overseas actions are frequently and systematically missing in the conversations, preventing meaningful international dialogue from occurring and causing the popularity of domestic monolog. “Action” here refers to moves by the US, including military moves; “consequences” refers to those received by local people in a foreign country. Of course, the US faces consequences of its own, such as clashes with foreign cultures, not to mention the unbearably high budget and human costs. But unlike the domestic cases, where the same people witness actions and consequences, allowing easy connection between the two; in foreign countries the acting party and receiving party may be clearly separated.
The bad thing about the disconnect is that the acting party loses the opportunity to change the course of actions based on feedbacks from consequences. Not knowing local field consequences, at least not the full consequences, can be blinding to the action party (i.e., the US), which is literally like firing bullets without ever seeing the target.
We don’t have to use abstract metaphors to illustrate the point, because we have real life examples from the domestic case: The Biden administration is working to change the US drug payment system that will introduce efficacy into the pricing of drugs. Instead of paying whatever prices pharmaceutical firms have asked, federal programs like the Medicare will negotiate to pay more for drugs that actually worked for patients with high efficacy, but less for those not so. This is an excellent idea to bring efficacy consequences into the price conversations. We should seriously think how to do the same in foreign affairs.