The End of (Military) History? The US, Israel, and the Failure of the Western Way of War

"In watching the flow of events over the past decade or
so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has
happened in world history." This sentiment, introducing the essay that
made Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attention
today, albeit from a different perspective.

Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the Cold
War, had convinced Fukuyama that the "end of history" was at hand.
"The triumph of the West, of the Western idea," he wrote in 1989, "is evident... in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism."

Today the West no longer looks quite so triumphant. Yet events
during the first decade of the present century have delivered history to
another endpoint of sorts. Although Western liberalism may retain
considerable appeal, the Western way of war has run its course.

For
Fukuyama, history implied ideological competition, a contest pitting
democratic capitalism against fascism and communism. When he wrote his
famous essay, that contest was reaching an apparently definitive
conclusion.

Yet from start to finish, military might had determined that
competition's course as much as ideology. Throughout much of the
twentieth century, great powers had vied with one another to create new,
or more effective, instruments of coercion. Military innovation
assumed many forms. Most obviously, there were the
weapons: dreadnoughts and aircraft carriers, rockets and
missiles, poison gas, and atomic bombs -- the list is a long one. In
their effort to gain an edge, however, nations devoted equal attention
to other factors: doctrine and organization, training systems and
mobilization schemes, intelligence collection and war plans.

All of this furious activity, whether undertaken by France or Great
Britain, Russia or Germany, Japan or the United States, derived from a
common belief in the plausibility of victory. Expressed in simplest
terms, the Western military tradition could be reduced to this
proposition: war remains a viable instrument of statecraft, the
accoutrements of modernity serving, if anything, to enhance its utility.

Grand Illusions

That was theory. Reality, above all the two world wars of the last
century, told a decidedly different story. Armed conflict in the
industrial age reached new heights of lethality and destructiveness.
Once begun, wars devoured everything, inflicting staggering material,
psychological, and moral damage. Pain vastly exceeded gain. In that
regard, the war of 1914-1918 became emblematic: even the winners ended
up losers. When fighting eventually stopped, the victors were left not
to celebrate but to mourn. As a consequence, well before Fukuyama
penned his essay, faith in war's problem-solving capacity had begun to
erode. As early as 1945, among several great powers -- thanks to war,
now great in name only -- that faith disappeared altogether.

Among nations classified as liberal democracies, only two resisted
this trend. One was the United States, the sole major belligerent to
emerge from the Second World War stronger, richer, and more confident.
The second was Israel, created as a direct consequence of the horrors
unleashed by that cataclysm. By the 1950s, both countries subscribed to
this common conviction: national security (and, arguably, national
survival) demanded unambiguous military superiority. In the lexicon of
American and Israeli politics, "peace" was a codeword. The essential
prerequisite for peace was for any and all adversaries, real or
potential, to accept a condition of permanent inferiority. In this
regard, the two nations -- not yet intimate allies -- stood apart from
the rest of the Western world.

So even as they professed their devotion to peace, civilian and
military elites in the United States and Israel prepared obsessively for
war. They saw no contradiction between rhetoric and reality.

Yet belief in the efficacy of military power almost inevitably breeds
the temptation to put that power to work. "Peace through strength"
easily enough becomes "peace through war." Israel succumbed to this
temptation in 1967. For Israelis, the Six Day War proved a turning
point. Plucky David defeated, and then became, Goliath. Even as the
United States was flailing about in Vietnam, Israel had evidently
succeeded in definitively mastering war.

A quarter-century later, U.S. forces seemingly caught up. In 1991,
Operation Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush's war against Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein, showed that American troops like Israeli soldiers knew
how to win quickly, cheaply, and humanely. Generals like H. Norman
Schwarzkopf persuaded themselves that their brief desert campaign
against Iraq had replicated -- even eclipsed -- the battlefield exploits
of such famous Israeli warriors as Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin.
Vietnam faded into irrelevance.

For both Israel and the United States, however, appearances proved
deceptive. Apart from fostering grand illusions, the splendid wars of
1967 and 1991 decided little. In both cases, victory turned out to be
more apparent than real. Worse, triumphalism fostered massive future
miscalculation.

On the Golan Heights, in Gaza, and throughout the West Bank,
proponents of a Greater Israel -- disregarding Washington's objections
-- set out to assert permanent control over territory that Israel had
seized. Yet "facts on the ground" created by successive waves of Jewish
settlers did little to enhance Israeli security. They succeeded
chiefly in shackling Israel to a rapidly growing and resentful
Palestinian population that it could neither pacify nor assimilate.

In the Persian Gulf, the benefits reaped by the United States after
1991 likewise turned out to be ephemeral. Saddam Hussein survived and
became in the eyes of successive American administrations an imminent
threat to regional stability. This perception prompted (or provided a
pretext for) a radical reorientation of strategy in Washington. No
longer content to prevent an unfriendly outside power from controlling
the oil-rich Persian Gulf, Washington now sought to dominate the entire
Greater Middle East. Hegemony became the aim. Yet the United States
proved no more successful than Israel in imposing its writ.

During the 1990s, the Pentagon embarked willy-nilly upon what became
its own variant of a settlement policy. Yet U.S. bases dotting the
Islamic world and U.S. forces operating in the region proved hardly more
welcome than the Israeli settlements dotting the occupied territories
and the soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) assigned to protect
them. In both cases, presence provoked (or provided a pretext for)
resistance. Just as Palestinians vented their anger at the Zionists in
their midst, radical Islamists targeted Americans whom they regarded as
neo-colonial infidels.

Stuck

No one doubted that Israelis (regionally) and Americans (globally)
enjoyed unquestioned military dominance. Throughout Israel's near
abroad, its tanks, fighter-bombers, and warships operated at will. So,
too, did American tanks, fighter-bombers, and warships wherever they
were sent.

So what? Events made it increasingly evident that military dominance
did not translate into concrete political advantage. Rather than
enhancing the prospects for peace, coercion produced ever more
complications. No matter how badly battered and beaten, the
"terrorists" (a catch-all term applied to anyone resisting Israeli or
American authority) weren't intimidated, remained unrepentant, and kept
coming back for more.

Israel ran smack into this problem during Operation Peace for
Galilee, its 1982 intervention in Lebanon. U.S. forces encountered it a
decade later during Operation Restore Hope, the West's gloriously
titled foray into Somalia. Lebanon possessed a puny army; Somalia had
none at all. Rather than producing peace or restoring hope, however,
both operations ended in frustration, embarrassment, and failure.

And those operations proved but harbingers of worse to come. By the
1980s, the IDF's glory days were past. Rather than lightning strikes
deep into the enemy rear, the narrative of Israeli military history
became a cheerless recital of dirty wars -- unconventional conflicts
against irregular forces yielding problematic results. The First
Intifada (1987-1993), the Second Intifada (2000-2005), a second Lebanon
War (2006), and Operation Cast Lead, the notorious 2008-2009 incursion
into Gaza, all conformed to this pattern.

Meanwhile, the differential between Palestinian and Jewish Israeli
birth rates emerged as a looming threat -- a "demographic bomb,"
Benjamin Netanyahu called it. Here were new facts on the ground that
military forces, unless employed pursuant to a policy of ethnic
cleansing, could do little to redress. Even as the IDF tried repeatedly
and futilely to bludgeon Hamas and Hezbollah into submission,
demographic trends continued to suggest that within a generation a
majority of the population within Israel and the occupied territories
would be Arab.

Trailing a decade or so behind Israel, the United States military
nonetheless succeeded in duplicating the IDF's experience. Moments of
glory remained, but they would prove fleeting indeed. After 9/11,
Washington's efforts to transform (or "liberate") the Greater Middle
East kicked into high gear. In Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush's
Global War on Terror began impressively enough, as U.S. forces operated
with a speed and elan that had once been an Israeli trademark. Thanks
to "shock and awe," Kabul fell, followed less than a year and a half
later by Baghdad. As one senior Army general explained to Congress in
2004, the Pentagon had war all figured out:

"We are now able to
create decision superiority that is enabled by networked systems, new
sensors and command and control capabilities that are producing
unprecedented near real time situational awareness, increased
information availability, and an ability to deliver precision munitions
throughout the breadth and depth of the battlespace... Combined, these
capabilities of the future networked force will leverage information
dominance, speed and precision, and result in decision superiority."

The key phrase in this mass of techno-blather was the one that
occurred twice: "decision superiority." At that moment, the officer
corps, like the Bush administration, was still convinced that it knew
how to win.

Such claims of success, however, proved obscenely premature.
Campaigns advertised as being wrapped up in weeks dragged on for years,
while American troops struggled with their own intifadas. When it came to achieving decisions that actually stuck, the Pentagon (like the IDF) remained clueless.

Winless

If any overarching conclusion emerges from the Afghan and Iraq Wars
(and from their Israeli equivalents), it's this: victory is a chimera.
Counting on today's enemy to yield in the face of superior force makes
about as much sense as buying lottery tickets to pay the mortgage: you
better be really lucky.

Meanwhile, as the U.S. economy went into a tailspin, Americans
contemplated their equivalent of Israel's "demographic bomb" -- a
"fiscal bomb." Ingrained habits of profligacy, both individual and
collective, held out the prospect of long-term stagnation: no growth, no
jobs, no fun. Out-of-control spending on endless wars exacerbated that
threat.

By 2007, the American officer corps itself gave up on victory,
although without giving up on war. First in Iraq, then in Afghanistan,
priorities shifted. High-ranking generals shelved their expectations of
winning -- at least as a Rabin or Schwarzkopf would have understood
that term. They sought instead to not lose. In Washington as in U.S.
military command posts, the avoidance of outright defeat emerged as the
new gold standard of success.

As a consequence, U.S. troops today sally forth from their base camps
not to defeat the enemy, but to "protect the people," consistent with
the latest doctrinal fashion. Meanwhile, tea-sipping U.S. commanders
cut deals with warlords and tribal chieftains in hopes of persuading
guerrillas to lay down their arms.

A new conventional wisdom has taken hold, endorsed by everyone from
new Afghan War commander General David Petraeus, the most celebrated
soldier of this American age, to Barack Obama, commander-in-chief and
Nobel Peace Prize laureate. For the conflicts in which the United
States finds itself enmeshed, "military solutions" do not exist. As
Petraeus himself has emphasized, "we can't kill our way out of" the fix
we're in. In this way, he also pronounced a eulogy on the Western
conception of warfare of the last two centuries.

The Unasked Question

What then are the implications of arriving at the end of Western military history?

In his famous essay, Fukuyama cautioned against thinking that the end
of ideological history heralded the arrival of global peace and
harmony. Peoples and nations, he predicted, would still find plenty to
squabble about.

With the end of military history, a similar expectation applies.
Politically motivated violence will persist and may in specific
instances even retain marginal utility. Yet the prospect of Big Wars
solving Big Problems is probably gone for good. Certainly, no one in
their right mind, Israeli or American, can believe that a continued
resort to force will remedy whatever it is that fuels anti-Israeli or
anti-American antagonism throughout much of the Islamic world. To
expect persistence to produce something different or better is
moonshine.

It remains to be seen whether Israel and the United States can come
to terms with the end of military history. Other nations have long
since done so, accommodating themselves to the changing rhythms of
international politics. That they do so is evidence not of virtue, but
of shrewdness. China, for example, shows little eagerness to disarm.
Yet as Beijing expands its reach and influence, it emphasizes trade,
investment, and development assistance. Meanwhile, the People's
Liberation Army stays home. China has stolen a page from an old
American playbook, having become today the preeminent practitioner of
"dollar diplomacy."

The collapse of the Western military tradition confronts Israel with
limited choices, none of them attractive. Given the history of Judaism
and the history of Israel itself, a reluctance of Israeli Jews to
entrust their safety and security to the good will of their neighbors or
the warm regards of the international community is understandable. In a
mere six decades, the Zionist project has produced a vibrant,
flourishing state. Why put all that at risk? Although the demographic
bomb may be ticking, no one really knows how much time remains on the
clock. If Israelis are inclined to continue putting their trust in
(American-supplied) Israeli arms while hoping for the best, who can
blame them?

In theory, the United States, sharing none of Israel's demographic or
geographic constraints and, far more richly endowed, should enjoy far
greater freedom of action. Unfortunately, Washington has a vested
interest in preserving the status quo, no matter how much it costs or
where it leads. For the military-industrial complex, there are
contracts to win and buckets of money to be made. For those who dwell
in the bowels of the national security state, there are prerogatives to
protect. For elected officials, there are campaign contributors to
satisfy. For appointed officials, civilian and military, there are
ambitions to be pursued.

And always there is a chattering claque of militarists, calling for jihad
and insisting on ever greater exertions, while remaining alert to any
hint of backsliding. In Washington, members of this militarist camp, by
no means coincidentally including many of the voices that most
insistently defend Israeli bellicosity, tacitly collaborate in excluding
or marginalizing views that they deem heretical. As a consequence,
what passes for debate on matters relating to national security is a
sham. Thus are we invited to believe, for example, that General
Petraeus's appointment as the umpteenth U.S. commander in Afghanistan
constitutes a milestone on the way to ultimate success.

Nearly 20 years ago, a querulous Madeleine Albright demanded to know:
"What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking
about if we can't use it?" Today, an altogether different question
deserves our attention: What's the point of constantly using our superb
military if doing so doesn't actually work?

Washington's refusal to pose that question provides a measure of the corruption and dishonesty permeating our politics.