Peace can only be won when we’ve blown ’em all to Kingdom Come

(Originally published Oct. 30 in “What in the World“) U.S. forces in the Middle East are starting to figure out one of the most glaringly obvious realities of warfare, one somehow continually lost on postwar American foreign policy makers: attacking your enemy only intensifies their determination to retaliate.

So the Pentagon and the White House are perplexed by why, after hitting them with air strikes in hopes of sending a subtle-but-sophisticated warning to Tehran, Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria have responded with more drone attacks.

Gee, go figure. American foreign policy has long been dedicated to “projecting power,” usually by meting out discrete batches of lethal punishment for perceived wrongdoing—as though what misbehaving foreigners really need is just a good old-fashioned spanking. Unfortunately, nations and peoples aren’t misbehaving toddlers. So, they never respond to these surgical strikes like a developing child. Given that corporal punishment is no longer an acceptable parenting tactic in America, one has to wonder why this paternalistic policy still has any currency in Washington.

Alas, the people around the world America aims to teach through violence its messages of democracy’s superiority don’t take away from these attacks the lessons Washington wants. On the contrary, American intervention merely reinforces their sense of injustice, proving to them that the U.S. is a bully bent on global dominion generally and their subjugation specifically. Maybe it’s partly due to the asymmetry of America’s bargain: leave us in peace, and we’ll leave you in poverty. The lessons of the Marshall Plan and “hearts and minds” have been erased from American policy. The Pentagon has instead replaced the State Dept. in directing foreign policy.

And with it, statecraft has been supplanted by a self-perpetuating cycle of military escalation, one calculated to serve the Pentagon’s interests and those of its suppliers. In the latest demonstration, the Pentagon has just announced plans to build a new, 360 kiloton B61-13 nuclear gravity bomb. This bomb is designed to replace older B61-7s from the 1980s and 1990s with a more accurate alternative, as well as the massive, civilization-ending, 1.2 megaton B83-1s. The Pentagon is already rolling out a smaller, 50 kiloton B61-12s, across its bases in Europe. Even those bombs have a destructive force triple that of the bomb America used to destroy Hiroshima in 1945. But Republican defense hawks in Congress aren’t happy about having smaller bombs. They like the threat of annihilation the B83-1—with the force of 80 Hiroshimas—poses to America’s enemies. And they’re probably right.

The mere fact that Washington is weighing how large a nuclear weapon is necessary to deter America’s enemies illustrates just how American leaders view the use of force in foreign policy: they still believe there you can use incremental levels of destruction to deter or defeat an enemy.

Once you engage someone in mortal combat, however, you can no longer expect them to respond with just behavioral adjustments to avoid more of the pain you’ve inflicted. On the contrary, a mortal threat is an existential one. Once you’ve posed it, your foe must plot your destruction to restore their own security. You create a permanent enemy bent not only on revenge, but on your death.

So, if you make the decision to attack a foe with lethal force, you must be committed to their complete annihilation. This isn’t such a great strategy if you’re not in the genocide business. It’s a recipe for the kind of unending wars the U.S. gets into over and over and over again.

History has shown us that, once you go to war, only total defeat will do. Once the U.S. manages to amass a sufficient consensus of enemies, it will be forced to go back into total war to defend its postwar empire. Is this something to worry about now? Absolutely. When Wall Street economists start parsing over the risks of World War III instead of the direction of interest rates, we could be closer than we think.