Focusing on What Matters

Yesterday I lamented that U.S. foreign policy lately seems to be unduly focused on backwaters rather than on the countries and regions that really matter. Kevin Drum’s response made me think I wasn’t being clear enough:

I don’t much like the idea of a fixation with either safe havens or COIN driving national security policy, but it’s hard to deny that safe havens really are a problem and that small conflicts against irregular troops really do seem likely to define our future more than big wars against other major powers. And if that’s the case, then we need to deal with it.

I think the sort of COIN vs Big Army debate is basically at right angles to what I’m trying to talk about.

Insofar as we’re just talking about “what should the joint chiefs of staff be thinking about” then it’s true that “fighting wars with major countries” is not the correct answer. But what I want to emphasize is that just because “prepare to fight wars with them” isn’t the thing we should be thinking about when we think about major countries doesn’t change the fact that the major countries are, well, the major ones. If our relationship with major countries is now less military-focused than it was in Cold War days (when preventing the USSR from threatening Europe and Japan was key) that shows that the military is less important than it used to be not that relationships with major countries are less important than they used to be.

Which is to say that even if it’s completely appropriate for planners at the Pentagon to be spending most of their time thinking about “small wars” and COIN, I want the president to be spending more time thinking about China, India, European integration, Japan, etc. than about governance in rural Afghanistan. Now as it happens, my colleague Nina Hachigian co-authored a great book on rising powers with Mona Sutphen who’s now Deputy Chief of Staff in the White House, so hopefully my fears aren’t coming true.