Can the US Give Up Primacy?

By JASON SIBERT

It’s been 20 years since the United States invaded Iraq. nnNaturally, it’s an episode that many Americans would like to forget. After invading the country, the US tried to put it together again, a task we couldn’t complete. There’s a big question to asked in this historic episode. Have we learned from our mistakes?

Writer Stephen Wertheim provides some valuable answers in his story at ForeignAffairs.com (March 17), “Iraq and the Pathologies of Primacy: The Flawed Logic that Produced the War is Alive and Well.” Our country invaded Iraq in the administration of George W Bush. His successor, Barack Obama, declared an end to the Iraq War in 2010 and said we should “turn the page.” Then President Obama increased the number of troops in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban and Islamic State. In addition, he also sent troops to Iraq and Syria in 2014 to fight ISIL.

By 2021, it was President Joe Biden’s turn to urge the country to move on from post-9/11 debacles. “​​I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years, with the United States not at war,” he declared in September. Biden had just withdrawn US forces from Afghanistan. The United States nevertheless continued to conduct counterterrorism operations in multiple countries, including Iraq, where 2,500 ground troops remained. “We’ve turned the page,” Biden said.

Wertheim doesn’t seem to think we’ve turned the page. He feels that American foreign policy hasn’t moved beyond Iraq because the US military is still fighting there and other places. Wertheim said the country “cannot turn the page without reckoning with the causes of war. It may be painful to revisit what drove American leaders, on a bipartisan basis, to want to invade a country that had not attacked the United States and had no plans to do so, facts widely appreciated at the time.”

There have been some lessons absorbed from the conflict. American politicians generally reject war to change the nature of regimes. So, there is some prudence being applied, as stated by Wertheim. However, not enough has been learned. Wertheim stated some original ideas on this thought: “they reduce the Iraq war to a policy error, which could be corrected while the United States goes on pursuing the hegemonic world role it assigned itself when the Cold War ended.” The decision to invade Iraq revolved around a policy goal of the US dominating the four corners of the globe.

On that note the goal of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War has been primacy. Primacy directs the United States to fund a massive military and scatter it across the globe for an essentially preventive purpose: to dissuade other countries from rising and challenging American dominance. Promising to keep costs low, primacy assumes that US hegemony will not engender resistance — and strikes hard to snuff out any that appears. It sees global dominance almost as an end in itself, disregarding the abundant strategic alternatives that wide oceans, friendly neighbors, and nuclear deterrents afford the United States. The invasion of Iraq emerged from this thinking.

The dimensions of power politics allowed this ideology to take place. The US didn’t have anyone to balance its power after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. However, when one state becomes too powerful in an international system, then another state or group of states will emerge to balance that state. China and post-Soviet Russia have done this. It must be added that Russia’s behavior toward Ukraine is belligerent and China is doing a belligerent act of its own. Also, China and Russia are allied in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The power balancing act in the world right now is something that the United Nations system was supposed to prevent.

Hopefully, and as stated by Wertheim, the US and China should, if either nation knows what’s good for itself, work to simmer the tensions in the current Cold War by establishing boundaries of coexistence. Wertheim also added: “better options are available: the United States should disentangle itself from the Middle East, shift defense burdens to European allies, and seek competitive coexistence with China. If it sometimes sounds as though policymakers are doing just that, the facts say otherwise. For all the talk of strategic discipline, about as many US troops are stationed in the Middle East today, around 50,000, as there were at the end of the Obama administration.” Can the power players of the international system learn to pave a way forward?

Jason Sibert of St. Louis is the Lead Writer for the Peace Economy Project (PeaceEconomyProject.dotorg). Email jasonsibert@hotmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2023

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