Preface. This is a book review of Toft & Kushi’s 2023 Dying by the Sword: The Militarization of US Policy. Oxford University Press.
They make the case that America is not the good guy anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time, having undertaken nearly 400 military interventions since 1776, half since WWII. The book is full of lists of battles and more that really bring home the extent of U.S. interventions and wars. Now we are a nation to be feared, like Russia or China, especially with our turn towards authoritarian leaders and new $1.5 trillion dollar nuclear weapon upgrade program. Rather than use diplomacy, we wage wars, and this has bloated the military budget beyond all reason and diverted resources away from health care, education, infrastructure, job creation, social welfare and more.
Toft & Kushi describe current US foreign policy as kinetic diplomacy, which supplanted the traditional statecraft trifecta of diplomacy, trade and aid, and war as a last resort. As traditional diplomacy withers away and political elites gut the US Department of State, military interventions—including shadowy special operation missions, drone strikes, and “gray zone warfare” efforts—grow at unsustainable rates; as do the quantity and quality of US adversaries.
Much of the book covers decades encompassing different strategies, such as slaughtering Native Americans and taking over their land for the first 100 years or so, and in later decades attacking and intervening in ever more distant nations to gain wealth for American businesses.
In summary the authors write:
“Leaving a bloody trail across the US continent, the US first vied for territorial and direct economic gains throughout the 1800s in North America, and in the early 1900s across the entire Western hemisphere. After the two world wars, it shifted to less tangible national objectives, such as “containment”; and after the Cold War, the US use of armed force to support the creation of favorable regimes or the removal of unfavorable ones escalated; and came to include overlapping objectives of “social protection,” and “protective” interventions on behalf of US business interests abroad. Finally, in the 1990s, we witnessed the new phenomenon of humanitarian military interventions, which were invariably well-intended, but often resulted in less-than-optimal outcomes. The United States relied on military intervention to pursue regime change and social protective operations more than other objectives after the end of the Cold War.
So many efforts at regime change lead the U.S. down the path of ill-defined “forever wars” with no endgame in sight and no clear national interests to pursue, as in Afghanistan and Iraq. And when the people being “liberated to death” object and resist Western efforts with violence, that also serves to justify greater and greater US military spending and expansion across the world through US bases, technological investment, drone programs, and the intrusion of US private military contractors into foreign wars. Violence, in the absence of great care in its use and its targets, begets violence.
Greater US military intervention can worsen the existing security dilemma between the United States and its aggressors, rivals, and enemies. By living by the sword, we increase our risk of dying by it.”
Below are some summarizing kindle notes.
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Toft MD, Kushi S (2023) Dying by the Sword: The Militarization of US Policy. Oxford University Press.
As our book will document, the United States’ overreliance on the use of force—living by the sword—has arguably made the United States, and indeed the world, less safe and less prosperous.
A critical aspect of our engagement overseas is through ambassadors, who are the president’s eyes and ears on the ground in both friendly and unfriendly places. US presidents traditionally reward some generous campaign donors with political ambassadorial appointments. The percentage of such political appointees hovered around 30 percent in the past, with 70% of the posts still reserved for career diplomats who possessed years of hard-earned on-the-ground cultural and practical experience.
Under the Donald J. Trump administration, that trend was nearly reversed. What’s more, the Department of State lost 12% of its employees in the foreign affairs division under Trump, and the diplomats that remained had to fight to remain part of the policymaking process. Increasingly, US foreign policy is now in the hands of inexperienced political appointees in the executive branch.
As of February 2022, Biden has appointed 87 ambassadors, and over half of them are political appointees; continuing the trends of the Trump administration; albeit to a lesser degree.
US diplomacy is experiencing a fundamental shift, one a long time in the making but escalating rapidly in our contemporary era. It is moving away from the era of hard-fought negotiations among career diplomats to an age of kinetic diplomacy—diplomacy by armed force.
It evolved from a relatively isolationist state to a hesitant intervenor to a global policeman and defender of the liberal world order. But in the past two decades, it has often and quickly escalated to the use of force abroad, with strong domestic and international backlash. In survey after survey, if you ask the global public, America is seen as a bigger threat to global peace and prosperity than China and Russia (prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (Poushter 2019 In 2022 the US being a threat was not covered).
Poushter (2019) Climate Change Still Seen as the Top Global Threat, but Cyberattacks a Rising Concern Worries about ISIS and North Korea persist, as fears about American power grow. Pew Research Center.
while a median of less than half across the nations in the survey say the influence of the U.S. is a major threat to their countries, more people now say it is a threat than in 2013 and 2017. Indeed, in 10 countries, roughly half or more now claim that American power is a major threat to their nation – including 64% who say this in Mexico, where ratings for the U.S. have turned sharply negative since the election of President Donald Trump. Percent of 22 nations that found U.S. power and influence as a threat in 2013: 25%, 2017: 38%, 2018: 45%. A lot of this has to do with a lack of confidence in Trump
Relying on military force is hardly a new means to project power abroad. The impulse to be more forceful always existed across every era of US foreign policymaking, but structural forces and historical events sometimes serve to mute or embolden this impulse.
For an entire decade after Vietnam, the US military’s reputation suffered, and few Americans trusted in the use of force abroad.
Samuel Moyn tells the story of how the United States has succeeded in reimagining armed combat as a consistent, first-line tool of foreign policy, instead of as an imperfect tool of last resort, or as a prelude to quagmire (think Afghanistan, 2001–2022). Examining over a century of history, he reflects on how the availability of precision weaponry and the path dependencies of safeguarding the US national image led us to the contemporary era of “forever wars,” perhaps minimizing some of the violence but perpetuating US dominion globally. Historically, attempts to decrease the friendly costs of war (i.e., our own casualties) only serves to make war a more palatable tool of foreign policy; as in the case of the United States’ post-9/11 drone warfare programs, which present a sanitized image of modern warfare and separate that image from the everyday lives of both American citizens and policymakers.
According to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that measures money flows within the Iron Triangle, between 1998 and 2021, the defense sector led by corporations such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing was one of top-ranked spenders on lobbying the US government.
Not only is the frequency of US military intervention increasing, but the level of US hostility is rising, the nature of US interventions is shifting, and its aims are escalating. In fact, our data reveal the United States hasn’t had a year without at least one newly started military intervention since 1974.
According to our research, the United States has undertaken almost 400 international military interventions since 1776, with more than half of them occurring after World War II. What’s more, the United States waged 29% of these interventions in the post–Cold War era and they were more intense. With recent interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, as well as weaponized drone campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and beyond, the widespread global concern about America’s role in the world we and others have highlighted should not be surprising.
We describe current US foreign policy as kinetic diplomacy, which supplanted the traditional statecraft trifecta of diplomacy, trade and aid, and war as a last resort. As traditional diplomacy withers away and political elites gut the US Department of State, military interventions—including shadowy special operation missions, drone strikes, and “gray zone warfare” efforts—grow at unsustainable rates; as do the quantity and quality of US adversaries.
We contend the United States has become addicted to military intervention. Each individual crisis appears to demand a military response, but a short-term respite then results in an even bigger problem later, which again seems to beg of an armed response, and so on and on: violence begets violence. Unlike the past, where force was a last resort, the United States now pursues a whack-a-mole security policy—much more reactionary than deliberate, lacking clear national strategic goals.
In the post-9/11 era, US strategic goals shifted to preventive war: a global war on terror, which propelled the country down the path toward kinetic diplomacy.
Money spent on foreign wars means money diverted away from economic development, health care, pandemic response, social welfare, education, infrastructure, job creation, and other critical domestic public goods. Beyond this, a more kinetic foreign policy prompts a higher risk of American casualties abroad, rising national deficits and debt, and deteriorating international perceptions of US behavior, which may demoralize long-time allies while increasing the quantity and quality of US adversaries.
Generally, the United States interacts with other states in the international system through the use of force, trade, and diplomacy, institutionalized via the departments of defense, commerce, and state, respectively.
As General James Mattis, commander of US Central Command in 2013 said in Congressional testimony, “if [Congress doesn’t] fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.” But what happens when diplomacy becomes a shell of its former self? What ensues when a grand strategy pillar the United States took for granted for centuries—diplomacy first and war as a last resort—collapses?
The dehumanization of the ‘other’ that ultimately led to a habit of leading with armed force. If its enemies were monsters that could not be reasoned with, then why bother even attempting to sway them from their path of destruction through bargaining and diplomacy? Better to beat them into submission.
The 9/11 attacks shattered any lingering nuance for good. The aftermath of the terrorist attacks—attacks organized and led by self-proclaimed religious actors undeterred even by the certainty of their own physical destruction—emboldened those political leaders who, in their bid to promote greater US military involvement, would depict enemies as irrational haters and their populations as bad people. Once this narrative takes hold, diplomacy is off the table as there is a refusal to negotiate with evil people, especially terrorists. Only brute force remains as an option. The George W. Bush administration took it a step further by identifying preventive wars as a tool of grand strategy. The logic is to kill evil, irrational enemies abroad before they have a chance to attack at home.
This is how kinetic diplomacy became enshrined in the US political psyche. Fueled by narratives of irrational, evil enemies, kinetic diplomacy grows in parallel with shrinking diplomatic capacity and bloated defense budgets, egged on by powerful interest groups within the Iron Triangle. The more force is resorted to, the more it has to be resorted to, and the United States ends up in a permanent state of war; a state of war which acts to abridge civil liberties and due process, stunts economic growth and starves infrastructure maintenance, and even suppresses gender equity (an environment of pervasive threat acts as a tax on women’s leadership and full participation in the nation’s economic, political, and social life).
Kinetic diplomacy is not the same as coercive diplomacy. In the case of coercive diplomacy, a state relies on a combination of diplomatic channels to threaten a costly escalation unless the target countries comply. In kinetic diplomacy, a state immediately turns to predominantly stealthy military resources, such as drone warfare, special operations, and covert missions, to violently coerce a rival in an attempt to prevent a costly escalation. In a word: it attempts to achieve its goals by killing.
Even the best trained special operations forces can only accomplish so much without the aid of traditional diplomatic support, economic levers, or better intelligence. And intelligence comes in two main types: short-term, battlefield and operational intelligence; and long-term, cultural, linguistic, and historical intelligence. Military might only goes so far without both types of intelligence, and without the other basic tools of modern statecraft.
Hampered by an over reliance on force, the United States is also struggling to craft a new grand strategy that will help guide its national security and foreign policies into the future. Grand strategy demands the prioritization of interests, consensus formation on threats and opportunities, and contingency plans for changing circumstances. Moreover, grand strategy must leverage and organize all instruments of statecraft, such as war, trade, aid, and diplomacy, toward the pursuit of national interest and power.
SUMMARY
Since its early years, the United States considered itself to be exceptional, both domestically and in foreign affairs. A force for good; an exemplar for the world. This American exceptionalism drove the young country to expand westward within the continent, spreading its ideology and economic system; then proclaiming itself the benign steward of the Western hemisphere and, after World War II, the globe. Thus, since its founding the United States has viewed itself as uniquely good: a nation of pious and prosperous peoples anxious that others emulate its great example.
Despite its growing expansionism overseas after the US Civil War, the United States refused to perceive itself as an imperialist power and largely ignored the harmful consequences of its military adventurism, even when its militarism starkly contradicted America’s self-image of restraint, democracy, and rule of law.
Most Americans remain unaware of just how often the United States has resorted to the use of force—just how often the United States has drawn its sword from its sheath—and unaware both that this use of violence as a first resort has been increasing over time, and that it has tarnished a once enviable global reputation.
In the name of “freedom” and democracy, the United States displaced and wiped out much of the indigenous American Indian nations in its Frontier Wars from the 1700s until the early 1900s. It occupied much of Latin America and overthrew left-leaning leaders using both military might and economic pressure throughout the 1900s, leaving a legacy of corruption, dependence, dictatorship—and unrecognized resentment by Latin America’s peoples—in its wake. During the Cold War, US foreign policy relied on covert operations and proxy wars to prevent what it believed to be communist expansion and the dictatorship that inevitably followed a communist takeover. But this militaristic impulse often accomplished the opposite by installing cruel and corrupt dictators.
Today US foreign policy remains militaristic, and the US continues to allow its once formidable diplomatic assets to wither away. Despite its overall power and potential, America appears lost. Its bloated defense budgets perpetuate blurry, broadened visions of national interests to pursue across all corners of the world, while special interest groups within the defense industry continue to push the Iron Triangle into greater military expansion and engagement abroad.
More disturbing still, US militarism has continued to prioritize technologies that can kill at ever greater distances with impunity, thus avoiding messy national debates about the appropriate or effective use of lethal armed force abroad in the service of US national interests.
We do not think US military preeminence is itself necessarily an obstacle to restoring the United States to its aspiration to lead. Clearly an effective military with global reach remains a critical asset for US national and security interests in rare circumstances. But an excessively aggressive America is a problem that everyone should care about. The United States’ long aspiration to be an exemplar for others can backfire too: US “force-first” foreign policy may make it easier for other state actors, especially eager revisionist powers such as Russia and China, to justify their growing militarism abroad; it prioritizes global militarism and defense spending over domestic programs and economic support; and it turns the United States into a feared and increasingly resented global actor, instead of the beacon of liberty, the rule of law, and democracy that the United States aspired to be since its founding.
The United States often justifies its militarism through defensive rhetoric—it must protect itself from belligerent international actors and anti-Americanism. In this interpretation, the world is out to get the United States, threatening its freedom and its way of life. But the countries that are often labeled as our enemies—such as China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran—are the same countries that have incurred the lion’s share of US military interventions across history; which ironically has likely contributed to their modern-day patterns of international aggression.
Greater US military intervention can worsen the existing security dilemma between the United States and its aggressors, rivals, and enemies. By living by the sword, we increase our risk of dying by it.
Leaving a bloody trail across the US continent, the United States first vied for territorial and direct economic gains throughout the 1800s in North America, and in the early 1900s across the entire Western hemisphere. After the two world wars, it shifted to less tangible national objectives, such as “containment”; and after the Cold War, the US use of armed force to support the creation of favorable regimes or the removal of unfavorable ones escalated; and came to include overlapping objectives of “social protection,” and “protective” interventions on behalf of US business interests abroad. Finally, in the 1990s, we witnessed the new phenomenon of humanitarian military interventions, which were invariably well-intended, but often resulted in less-than-optimal outcomes. The United States relied on military intervention to pursue regime change and social protective operations more than other objectives after the end of the Cold War.
So many efforts at regime change lead the U.S. down the path of ill-defined “forever wars” with no endgame in sight and no clear national interests to pursue, as in Afghanistan and Iraq. And when the people being “liberated to death” object and resist Western efforts with violence, that also serves to justify greater and greater US military spending and expansion across the world through US bases, technological investment, drone programs, and the intrusion of US private military contractors into foreign wars. Violence, in the absence of great care in its use and its targets, begets violence.
The Muslim Brotherhood metastasizes into Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda metastasizes into IS/IL; and on and on. Extending of the concept of national interest to include regime change by force and state building also means creating unsustainable and counterproductive demand for greater US military engagement worldwide. This risks perpetuating and prioritizing a military-industrial complex, and supports military adventurism at large.
The resources lost then starve America’s education infrastructure and democratic institutions, creating a feedback cycle of increasingly unrestrained militarism abroad. Today, it would be more accurate to return the Department of Defense to its former name, the War Department: US wars of “self-defense” have become US “forever wars,” and they’re moving further away from public and democratic scrutiny due to technological innovations, permissive legal authorizations, and increasingly lax Congressional oversight.
As the world became safer for the United States, the country grew more aggressive, not less; with higher rates of military intervention. This data should cause US foreign policy elites and citizens alike to shift their perspective. If the resort to arms is only justified when threatened with war, conquest, and occupation, then the increase in US military interventions in the absence of such a threat harms US legitimacy and damages its reputation abroad. Moreover, the reduction of resort to arms by US adversaries should not lead to the conclusion that hyper aggressive US military intervention has caused its adversaries to stand down.
The use of cyberattacks by, for example, the Russian Federation in 2016 were not only implicated in Britain’s exit from the European Union, but also a US presidential election whose Russia-supported winner was avowedly hostile to NATO. All this without firing a shot. Why waste resources trying when you can gravely damage your rivals by less costly, risky, and other-than-military means? And as US legitimacy has declined, the same diplomatic power that the United States once so powerfully deployed to isolate its totalitarian rivals during the Cold War, may be deployed by others to isolate the United States should it be perceived as a bully.
The post-9/11 era was marked by the lowest levels of national interest and higher rates of intervention across all of US history. At the same time of such military adventurism, US power capabilities relative to the international system stagnated. Waning power coupled with growing militarism disconnected to vital national interests is a recipe for imperial overstretch—the depletion of domestic resources and economic power, decline in international goodwill and soft power, multiple international conflicts raging with no clear end, and target countries like Afghanistan left on the brink of civil war after decades-long occupations.
While we used to think threats to the liberal world order would come from the outside (from revisionist states such as China or Russia), today it increasingly looks like the most serious threats—indeed, a repudiation of the rule of law, the principle of majority rule, and free trade—are coming from within the order itself.
Any change in American foreign policy trends will be difficult to achieve if history is any guide. Neither former presidents Barack Obama nor Donald Trump proved able to alter the course of the US security policy, even though both promised radical change. Both administrations ultimately caved to pressure to continue US primacy through militarism, albeit with different approaches and degrees of success.
Importantly, each new administration begins weighed down by the legacy not only of the administration preceding it, but decades of what we believe is US foreign policy malpractice. Moreover, shifts to the political right within the United States since 2000 have only further empowered the Iron Triangle Eisenhower warned about in the 1950s. A domestic arms industry is making weapons at an unprecedented pace (and profit),12 while the benefits of defense industrial output continue to shrink, producing fewer jobs per dollars spent relative to other sectors in the US economy.
While Americans refuse to perceive their country as a bully, given America’s continued aspiration to lead a democratic, liberal, and prosperous world, Americans will also believe that any harm they’ve caused along the way must be forgiven as “collateral. They seem to believe that America’s excessive resort to the use of force must be remembered as a force of good. As the late senator Barry Goldwater once put it when he accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for the presidency in 1964, “[E]xtremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
Despite the difficulty of changing well-cemented path dependencies, a restrainer camp believes the solution to America’s foreign policy woes and international backlash is for the United States to greatly reduce its global responsibilities and withdraw from most of its military commitments around the globe, even with its Western allies. They argue that the US military presence destabilizes regions like the Middle East and North Africa and undermines US security. Smaller powers strive to protect themselves from US aggression by attempting to secure nuclear weapons or by attacking US allies in the region. Thus, the restrainers propose a plan in which the United States prioritizes diplomatic and economic involvement over militaristic missions.
A restrained grand strategy would rely on the deterrent power of nuclear weapons—because nuclear-armed great powers are the greatest threat to US interests and security—rather than on efforts to halt nuclear proliferation; which have pitted the United States against countries like Iran. It would also seek to withdraw most US military presence from NATO, Europe, and the Gulf, while maintaining some presence in Asia to balance against China. For instance, a US policy toward the Middle East would be guided by two core interests: protecting the United States from attack and promoting the free flow of global commerce. The first step would be the drawdown of the US military in the region over the next five to ten years.
Restrainers are careful to say that the United States must still prevent the rise of hostile regional hegemons in the Persian Gulf, Northeast Asia, and Western Europe, but that doesn’t mean that the United States should play the role of the hegemon itself. For instance, instead of maintaining an artificial power balance in the Middle East by supporting states such as Saudi Arabia (and thus fueling proxy conflicts as in Yemen), the United States should allow the multipolarity in the region to serve its own vital interests, permitting regional actors such Iran and Saudi Arabia to balance against each other to preclude regional domination by any other state.
As Yeltsin’s successor, President Vladimir Putin pushed Russia to authoritarian kleptocracy. As a result, Russia’s reputation further declined and its repeated requests to be treated with the respect due a superpower were ignored. Even before Putin had taken full control of Russia’s government, this resentment came to a head in Kosovo in 1999, when Russia assumed NATO and the West would recognize Russia’s traditional interests in determining the political structures in the aftermath of the Kosovo Crisis. When a US-led NATO contributed to the end of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s rule and his ethnic cleansing policies in Kosovo, Russia took the Western humanitarian intervention as an insult and a precedent that Russia would later co-opt as justification for its war of conquest against Ukraine. While the NATO intervention in Kosovo has generally been hailed as a successful humanitarian one, in the post-9/11 era, the United States arrogated to itself the privilege of a great power to undertake more questionable military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. Each new US intervention altered international norms and made it easier for other countries to justify their own military interventions or militaristic aspirations. If the United States can do it, so can we; so must we.
A proper solution demands a decrease in US military engagements, with an attendant increase in diplomacy, intelligence sharing with allies, and deploying economic tools of statecraft. The United States should only intervene in regions that directly affect its security, leaving the United States to focus on its relationships with Europe, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf. Its main objectives would be to prevent war between great powers, prevent the rise of aggressive regional hegemons, and prevent nuclear proliferation.
US goals of free trade, democratization, and human rights promotion may still be pursued but only if they do not interfere with its primary strategic interests, and only if the United States itself abides by its own laws. The United States would maintain its existing alliance networks but withdraw its military forces from regions of the world with no capacity to hurt it militarily, ultimately reducing the US military footprint domestically (via lower defense spending) and internationally, while still promoting multilateral institutions and liberal ethos. In fact, the US withdrawal of forces from other regions of the world may be expected to significantly reduce anti-Americanism sentiments in the long-run.
The United States sees no double standard in asking Japan to apologize to Korea and China for genocide, or Germany to apologize to Poland for the same crime, but it has yet to make peace with its own genocides against indigenous North American tribes. It has yet to make peace with its own legacy of slavery and, after 1865, insufficient work toward eradicating race discrimination. But if the leadership and population of the United States won’t apologize for its moral failings or strategic blunders, how can it expect to learn from historical mistakes, bad intentions, and flawed policies? If there is nothing to apologize for, then there is nothing to change.