Maslow’s ‘law of the instrument’ rules US response to global challenges

(Originally published Oct. 3 in “What in the World“) With pressure mounting from Russian forces, Ukraine’s military retreated from the strategic mining town of Vuhledar in eastern Donetsk province.

Critics of White House policy towards Ukraine blame Vuhledar’s surrender on U.S. President Joe Biden’s continued refusal to allow Kyiv to use long-range Western missiles against air bases deep inside Russia, which allows Russia to fire glide bombs from a safe distance and maintain its dominance of the skies over Ukraine. The Pentagon has countered, however, that Russia has already moved most of its vulnerable assets beyond the range of the Atacm and Storm Shadow missiles Kyiv hopes to use. What’s clear, however, is that even though the front lines remain largely static, the war in Ukraine has shifted from a trench war focused on artillery shelling to one of longer-range missiles and drones—possibly because global supplies of artillery shells have dwindled perilously low. The war is being fought at a distance.

Analysts say Iran and Israel appear more willing to fight each other directly, after years of doing so covertly or through proxies. Israeli airstrikes, meanwhile, hit Beirut and Gaza as its troops fought Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. In a piece for Foreign Affairs, UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations Senior Fellow Dalia Dassa Kaye argues that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political popularity is now linked to his continued pursuit of total victory.

Seth Jones, President of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, warns in the same publication that the U.S. defense industrial base is falling dangerously behind China’s increasing investment in its military’s ability to pursue its territorial ambitions against the U.S. and its allies. Never mind that the Pentagon’s $877 billion annual budget is more than those of China, Russia, France, Germany, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, the U.K., and Ukraine combined.

Jones’ appeal echoes a similar one in August from former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. They argued, however, that a virtual oligopoly of defense companies has encouraged the evolution of long-term purchase contracts that slow the switch to newer technologies, like drones, leaving the U.S. military dangerously outdated. Jones returns to an earlier argument—that contracts must be awarded more quickly and made longer-term to encourage investment in their long-term production.

Thomas Mahnken, who heads a non-profit think tank funded largely by the Defense Dept., the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and is a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, made a similar pitch in June. Dire shortages of ammunition in Ukraine, he said, highlighted the need for larger and steadier production by the U.S. defense industry so the Pentagon can stockpile weapons.

The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act enabled the Pentagon to make multi-year purchase orders and adjust spending for inflation. But Congress’ delay in passing the defense budget earlier this year highlighted how efforts by the U.S. and its allies to mount increasing opposition to China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia remain vulnerable to their own domestic politics. Those concerns have grown more acute as the Pentagon and Washington’s European allies contemplate the possible reelection of Donald J. Trump as President. Both the White House and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have thus been trying to bake in continued military aid to Ukraine to future-proof it against the possibility that a second-term Trump would try to cut it off.

While utterly different in context, all these conflicts—Ukraine, Israel, China—share one thing in common: the go-to response in Washington is to reach for the simplist policy choice, an escalation of military “deterrence.” (Though to be fair, diplomacy in the Middle East seems to have been abandoned not by Washington, but rather by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.) It recalls an observation by American psychologist Abraham Maslow (famous for his “Hierarchy of Needs”) that “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

To aid Washington’s binary view of foreign policy, it helps to conflate the issues in all three theaters into a single “axis” of authoritarianism. That explains Washington’s desire to cast Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea as a unified bloc of global evil. Naturally, casting these actors as pariahs has, by default, forced them to turn to each other in reality for collaboration. Iran and North Korea are indeed both supplying Russia with weapons for the war in Ukraine. And Russia has been forced by necessity to provide Pyongyang with key missile technology. How Russia and China will fulfill Washington’s prophecy by coming to Iran’s aid against Israel, however, remains to be seen.