NATO expansion and the Iraq War: two turning points for US foreign policy

Jeremi Suri has some observations about a couple of important turning points in Amrican foreign policy in recent decades in The Long Rise and Sudden Fall of American Diplomacy Foreign Policy 04/17/2019. Suri is commenting on a book by a former ambassdor to Jordan and foreign policy official, William Burns, currently president of the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Burns thought the Clinton Administration's decision to expand NATO was poorly conceived and inadequately thought out:

The militarization of U.S. diplomacy began, according to Burns’s account, when President Bill Clinton pushed for rapid NATO expansion into the former Soviet bloc, despite prior U.S. commitments to the contrary (as confirmed by Burns in his memoir) and strong Russian objections. Although Clinton offered strong personal support to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, he failed to address the growing sense of insecurity and grievance within Russia. It appeared that the United States was muscling into Russian geopolitical space, brandishing guns and dollars. Washington offered little to assure concerned Russians, other than continued aid to a drunk, pro-American figure in the Kremlin.

The former Soviet bloc states had good reason to seek NATO membership, but the United States needed to do more to accommodate Russian fears. Diplomacy of this kind received little attention among Clinton’s impatient advisors. Burns, then the U.S. minister-counselor for political affairs in Russia, recounts: “Sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-1990s, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst ... It was wishful thinking, however, to believe that we could open the door to NATO membership without incurring some lasting cost with a Russia coping with its own historic insecurities.”

It's too late to put that genie back in the bottle. But the post-1989 US foreign policy was strong on arrogance and short on realistic views of Russia.

And he cites Burns' view of the foreign policy disaster known as the Iraq War.

The United States isolated itself, antagonized allies and adversaries, and diverted its resources to a lengthy military occupation that further destabilized the region. The winner of the war was Iran, which saw a regional rival defeated and found new influence in Iraq. The United States was a clear loser, as the “war in Iraq sucked the oxygen out of the administration’s foreign policy agenda.” Mired in Iraq, facing opposition around the globe, Washington found its diplomatic leverage diminished in almost every region. Burns recounts how Russian President Vladimir Putin took advantage of this situation by throwing his weight around in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Southeastern Europe. The United States had cornered itself.   [my emphasis]

Sometimes commentators refer to the Iraq War as an unforced error. Unforeced disaster would be more appropriate.

Most damaging, the United States never recovered the diplomatic capital lost in Iraq. Burns recounts many skilled U.S. efforts to contain Russia and denuclearize Libya and Iran, but from military intervention to drone warfare Washington consistently “overrelied on American hard power to achieve policy aims and ambitions.” Even critics of the Iraq War presumed the United States had underused or misused military power; they did not address the diplomatic deficit. U.S. leaders failed to educate the public about the importance of forging compromise abroad, and they frequently encouraged more skepticism toward diplomacy. This was most evident during the Barack Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran, when members of Congress worked to undermine sensitive negotiations while they were still in process, calling recklessly for military intervention instead.  [my emphasis]

One of the poor assumptions behind the war on terror in the context of which the Cheney-Bush Administration justified the Iraq War was to conceive of terrorism as a problem of state-sponsored terrorism. Paul Pilar notes that this bad assumption has been unfortunately persistent (The Pensacola Shooting and the Misconceiving of Terrorism Responsible Statecraft 12/09/2019):

State sponsorship of terrorism has dropped significantly over the past three decades. At least that is true of governments either directly perpetrating or instigating terrorist operations. A persistent problem of states and terrorism involves the less direct malevolent effects of what certain states do, and Saudi Arabia is Exhibit A in that problem. It is no accident that fifteen of the nineteen men who carried out the mother of all of international terrorist attacks — 9/11 — were Saudis. ...

The Trump administration has put the latest attack, and terrorism in general, in the framework of its policy toward the Middle East, which rigidly takes sides in regional rivalries and is built around unrelenting hostility toward Iran. ...

The oft-repeated mantra about Iran being the “number one state sponsor of terrorism” is an anachronism. It was applicable in years past, when fifty U.S. diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran and in subsequent years when the Iranian regime conducted serial assassinations of exiled dissidents. That behavior stopped years ago. ... Iran has been heavily involved, especially in Iraq, in combating the most ominous terrorist movement of recent years - Islamic State - and has been the victim of major Islamic State attacks within Iran. [my emphasis]