When Should the United States Use Military Force? (31:07)

00:00 Caleb O. Brown: If Americans can broadly agree on nothing else, we should be able to agree that much of the bitterness and political tribalism that drives our public discussions is unhealthy for our country. Our objective, the Cato Institute and the Brookings Institution, is to establish a gold standard for the public discussion of policy issues. In this episode, what principles should guide the decision to intervene militarily? What factors should weigh most heavily for politicians? In short, when should the U.S. use military force? Welcome to Sphere.

Our panelists today are Melanie Marlowe of Georgetown University, Tamara Wittes, senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, and Emma Ashford, a research fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. Welcome to Sphere. So, I would like to begin this discussion with, in very broad strokes — this is a very deep subject with a lot of ins and outs — begin with your broad vision of when the U.S. military should intervene.

01:47 Melanie Marlowe: The use of force is the most consequential power that a nation has. It can be used for great good. It can be used for bad efforts. The ability of the United States to use force is expansive and enormous, but it is not unlimited. We are sitting here in the shadow of the Iraq War, the intervention in Libya, both what most people consider to be grave and lasting errors, not only in terms of loss of people and treasure, but lost opportunities and perhaps taking us in directions where we did not want to go, including with the loss of legitimacy in the international order.

The use of force shouldn’t be the first option that a nation reaches for, but it should be one of many tools that it does. Diplomacy on a continuous basis, good trade deals, constant negotiations, sometimes sanctions, those are all things that should be used as part of grand strategy.

Grand strategy is the use of all available policy instruments. But force may be on the table. What is clear is that the United States has been doing too many things in too many places for the last 20 or 30 years, and it’s time to have a serious refocus of what our interests are and what our mission should be. In my view, we shouldn’t be fighting large-scale wars for anything but the most vital national security interests, interests of sovereignty, interest of territory, physical security. But there might be other things that are worth sending troops for.

In any case, we need to have a discussion about what those interests are, what the costs will be in terms of the things I just mentioned, what the consequences will be both long and short-term, and what will happen when we leave.

03:35 Tamara Wittes: So, I agree that the use of military force is only one tool in our foreign policy arsenal. And it’s understandable that at the end of 18 years of very intensive American military engagement, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we’re asking this question about military intervention. The fact is that the United States has been operating in a very permissive environment for the last 20, 25 years since the end of the Cold War era.

That doesn’t mean that the problem here is the use of military force. I think we do need to focus on strategy, on mission, on objectives, and then you have to fit the tools that you use to the strategy. When we start talking about it that way, you come to understand that military force can be used in very subtle ways. It can be used symbolically.

It can be used to deter violence rather than to carry out violence. It can be used to prevent conflict. Now, that’s extremely difficult, but it points to the fact that a simple debate about the use of force as to intervene or to not intervene doesn’t begin to cover the range of questions that we need to consider.

We need instead to talk about what we’re trying to accomplish, and whether the use of military force is the right tool to apply.

04:57 Emma Ashford: So, I think we agree on a couple of big things here. I think we agree that the use of military force is just one of the tools in America’s foreign policy toolkit and perhaps it’s a tool that’s been used a little too much in recent years at the expense of some of those other tools, things like diplomacy or economic statecraft.

Where I think we probably disagree is on the situations in which the U.S. should reach for that military toolkit. And in the last 25 years, since the end of the Cold War, in part, as Tamara notes, because we’ve been operating this very permissive security environment, we have seen the U.S. reach to use military force in cases where core national security interests are not at stake. We’ve seen the U.S. reach for force in cases where even the core national security interests of other states that are allies, even that is not at stake.

We’ve seen everything from the use of force for the purposes of nuclear nonproliferation, nominally that’s the reason we went into Iraq, all the way through humanitarian intervention, human rights, counterterrorism, all of these different issues, or even as George W. Bush put it during his term in office, the goal of our foreign policy is nothing less than ending tyranny around the world. And there was an element of that in the Bush administration’s use of military force.

And so what I think we need to have today is a much more focused conversation about why it is that we have come to use military force so much, the negative consequences that that has so often produced, and then we need to talk about, going forward, how do we avoid those mistakes? How do we use force when it is necessary, but without stepping into that realm of random, different reasons that we feel we always must do something around the world?

06:53 Caleb O. Brown: I hear a lot of agreement here, but in terms of helping the audience understand, what are some hard and fast rules that would either tell you yes, this circumstance exists and therefore we must intervene, or yes, this circumstance exists and we must not intervene?

07:12 Emma Ashford: I would say that U.S. national interests, U.S. territorial security, basically the safety of Americans and the American homeland is the primary reason we should consider using force abroad. I tend to think that humanitarian intervention, nuclear nonproliferation, those are not sufficient reasons to use force overseas unless there is some other pressing national interest.

And to that, I would also add that I think even in cases where perhaps it is a little more borderline whether we should use force or not on those questions, policymakers also really need to think both upfront about the costs that that intervention will produce, that’s something we’ve been very bad at thinking about in recent years. We’ve seen interventions that were intended to be very short and quick turn into decades-long quagmires in countries where thousands of American troops have ended up dying.

So, we need to think about the costs up front, but we also need to think about the chances for success. And there have been a number of U.S. interventions in recent years where, by not considering upfront whether we could actually do the thing that we were setting out to do, we may have actually made the situation worse.

08:22 Tamara Wittes: I think actually that point leads us to consider where the military tool fits into the toolbox in achieving our foreign policy objectives, because one clear lesson that has emerged from the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 18 years is the need to combine that military tool with diplomacy, with economic statecraft, with transitional justice, with a range of other interventions, if you will, in order for the military tool to be successful, it needs these other components of statecraft as well.

In other words, you can’t fight a counterinsurgency only with the U.S. military. And so, to me, it’s not a question of saying well, we used the military tool and it failed. To me, it’s a question of saying what were we trying to achieve? Did we apply our foreign policy tools in a strategic manner in a way that combined for effect? And I don’t therefore conclude well, that use of force was a failure, we shouldn’t have used force.

That doesn’t mean that we necessarily could have succeeded with an ideal combination of tools of statecraft. But I don’t think that we have demonstrable proof of the failure of the use of force or that the use of force was a bad idea. Yes, interventions can have horrible consequences, but in the case of humanitarian intervention, it is sometimes the case that non-intervention has horrible consequences.

And because we’re the biggest military power in the world, we have to accept responsibility both for acting and the choice not to act.

10:01 Melanie Marlowe: I agree with you that in some of these instances there’s going to be times when even a humanitarian mission could have down the road prosperity consequences for us, or even national security consequences for us.

But I rarely — I don’t know if I ever think that if that’s really the case then that isn’t also the case for other important strong governments that have strong militaries that should be contributing to the cause. I can hardly think of any humanitarian mission that is worth our time and effort that isn’t also worth the time and effort of many other countries.

And so, if we’re doing this, it should not be borne solely by the United States getting into the habit of going to countries where there are legitimate needs for help.

But when they are long-term, in some sense it can create a moral hazard, where there’s a lot of dependent states certain that we will come in. It can set up other conditions, political conditions in those countries. They become very complicated very quickly.

We talked about Libya and we talked about the humanitarian disaster that that could have been. And that if, you know, that there would be chaos because of the dire and terrible — and I don’t mean to make light of the horrible conditions that people live in in these countries. They are unfathomable to us.

But did we align our objectives with the means? Did we talk about the consequences and what was going to happen when we look at how much worse that country is off today? You might disagree. Go ahead.

11:28 Tamara Wittes: You know, I do disagree with you about this, and I’m glad that you raised Libya. To me, it seems clear — a couple of things seem quite clear. And partly this comes from the fact that I work on the Middle East.

11:39 Melanie Marlowe: I know.

11:41 Tamara Wittes: But Muammar Qaddafi was in power for 42 years as a repressive, brutal dictator who, during his reign, essentially destroyed Libyan institutions, Libyan civil society, Libyan social cohesion. When he left power, no matter how that happened, this country was going to face tremendous challenges, number one.

12:03 Melanie Marlowe: Sure, sure.

12:04 Tamara Wittes: So, I don’t know that it’s correct to say that the intervention triggered this domestic conflict.

12:09 Melanie Marlowe: Oh, no. I don’t think that it triggered any of that.

12:12 Tamara Wittes: The second thing is that without military intervention, I think we can say with very high confidence there would have been tremendous massacres.

Qaddafi was saying explicitly that was his intention. He was already preparing to carry those out. And so, yes, Libya has faced a horrific civil war that is still unresolved and has opened it to all kinds of other external interventions that are not helpful to stability in North Africa, they are not helpful to our counterterrorism interests, and so on. But I suspect that Libya was going to have a civil war when Qaddafi left no matter what.

And the one thing I can say with pretty good certainty today is that thousands and thousands of people are alive who otherwise would have been slaughtered. And I do think we have to put that on the table and say that was worth something.

13:05 Melanie Marlowe: And I don’t want to dismiss that, but we didn’t have a national discussion about Libya. You know, there was a lot of time. We could have. And we didn’t talk about what we were doing, and what we were prepared to do, and what the consequences were going to be, and maybe if we should have stayed longer, or if there if there was anything we can do.

And one thing that — I think that talking about Libya and Iraq is — history teaches us a lot about when it comes to war, in my view, the things that we shouldn’t do, but it doesn’t always tell us what we should do in the future, because circumstances do change. No war is — or no conflict is just like any other conflict in the future. And so, I’m not saying that we didn’t save lives, but I’m also not sure that we thought about it is as much as we could have, especially with the long-lasting consequences of what we did would be.

13:58 Emma Ashford: But I mean I do think the main problem with the Libya question, right, is it is all counterfactuals.

14:02 Melanie Marlowe: Right, we don’t know.

14:03 Emma Ashford: We don’t actually know what would have happened if we didn’t go into Libya, but what we can say is we can look at what happened and we can say that we saved so many lives in Benghazi, we saved this number of lives. If you look at the number of Libyans that have been killed since the civil war started, it is far more.

And while I think totting up human lives on either side of the equation is probably a pretty terrible way to do this, it’s indisputable that more Libyans have died in the civil war than we saved in that initial intervention.

If the intervention did indeed precipitate the civil war, then that is a consequence that we really need to think seriously about. And I also want to emphasize Melanie’s point about moral hazard. I think in the context of Libya it is very relevant. If you look at the Arab Spring movements across the Middle East, you do see some evidence that the Libya intervention helped to encourage people in other states to rise up and take up arms against their governments. You see in Syria groups talking about the U.S. will come and help us the way they did in Libya, and then we didn’t go and help them in Syria, and to some extent that strikes me as that’s almost a bigger sin.

We gave these people hope that we would go and help them if they rose up against their tyrannical rulers and then we didn’t. We created moral hazard, and then we weren’t willing to help them. Surely it would be better not to set up that situation in the first place.

15:23 T