A recurring defect in US foreign policy is a refusal by elites to concede when they made a serious policy mistake. This is not a new problem, but it has grown decidedly worse in the past few decades. It characterized the intervention in Vietnam years after it should have become evident that Washington’s approach was failing.
Even one of the few worthwhile lessons from the bruising Vietnam experience proved only to be temporary; The U.S. should not get involved in murky civil wars. A generation later, the United States had embarked on forceable nation building missions in both the Balkans and the Middle East. The subsequent interventions in Libya and Syria were even less defensible because Washington already had the Iraq fiasco as fresh evidence that the Vietnam failure was not unique.
One might have thought that the Vietnam experience would have inoculated US policymakers against a repetition in other parts of the world, however, even that benefit appeared to be temporary. Not even the sacrifice of 58,000 American lives and approximately 1,000,000 Vietnamese lives caused US leaders to reconsider a policy of global interventionism. Indeed, two decades later the United States was mired in another full-fledged civil war, this time in the Balkans. Another decade later, US leaders once again attempted to forcibly execute a strategy that created a client both democratic and compliant in Iraq. Such conduct strongly indicated that US officials might be incapable of learning appropriate foreign policy lessons. The latest adventure of the U.S. and its NATO allies in Ukraine appears to be less rewarding and even more dangerous than the previous examples.
A new generation of policy makers replicated many of the same mistakes a generation later in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Civilian and military officials in George W. Bush’s administration clung to failing policies even when it became obvious that the strategy being pursued was based on the illusion that Washington’s Iraq clients were winning the struggle.
And once again, the United States and its allies ignored multiple signs early on that the latest interventions would turn out badly. The portrayal of conditions in Afghanistan, for example, had almost no resemblance of actual battlefield conditions. Media accounts and congressional testimony bore little resemblance to the actual situation on the ground in that country. In the real world, Taliban forces made steady advances. Such spewing of fiction about an ultimate democratic victory continued during the Obama and Trump administrations. And when Joe Biden’s administration finally withdrew U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the withdrawal turned into a fiasco.
Hellbound and Down 