Strength of diplomacy lost on war hawks

Sunday, Nov. 18, 2007 | 1:16 a.m.

As the presidential candidates debate national security strategy in the coming months, we can all listen closely for evidence of a basic flaw in thinking that has great influence over today's U.S. foreign policy: the "Hawk Consensus."

Statements and strategies built around belligerence, military power and posturing "toughness" are clear signs of this delusion at work. The Hawk Consensus is simply the notion that to be tough and to be effective in foreign policy you must also be belligerent, and prefer the military tool over all others.

This idea is dangerous, and a richer dialogue is necessary for a simple reason: The threats we face today are largely immune to brute toughness. Trends in the nature of conflict call for rebalancing our instruments of national power to deemphasize the military and kinetic in favor of the nonmilitary and developmental.

Yet a full discussion of such notions is being thwarted by the Hawk Consensus, which imprisons the politics of our foreign policy debate and brands anyone who questions its assumptions an appeaser and a weakling.

It is certainly true that those fully lost to the brutal fantasy of extremist violence - the core operatives of al-Qaida - can only be captured or killed, and it is important to stress the continuing role of intelligence and special forces operations in the effort to combat radicalism.

Even here, however, extremists have rejected the sense of proportion and desire for self-preservation that infuse military credibility with deterrent value. In other words, looking strong and tough doesn't buy you much with the al-Qaidas of the world.

More broadly, the Hawk Consensus is thoroughly out of step with the bigger truths about the geopolitical challenges we face today. Those challenges are driven by individual or social grievances; urges for national, ethnic or religious liberation; thwarted progress; the corruption and ineptness of governments; and a crushing sense of alienation or humiliation.

This package of psychosocial factors is what we confront in an insurgency, in a movement of national liberation, and in the broad package of sentiments that give rise to a phenomenon such as radical Islamism.

Toughness and belligerence are essentially useless against this new category of threat. When confronting radicals and terrorist networks made up of humiliated and angry young men, lashing out at them violently with the intention of humiliating them further promises only to worsen the problem - and for the past six years, it has done exactly that.

In regard to our key audience - the many millions in the Muslim world who sympathize with the grievances of the terrorists but oppose their tactics - a policy built around violent, belligerent threats will hardly gain us support for moderation. Strategies employing respectful dialogue, economic engagement and assistance, cultural interaction and many other hallmarks of a positive approach are more likely to be successful.

A perceptive observer of such conflicts has written that, in counterinsurgency contexts, combat operations "only led to one confirmable conclusion - you only pushed those on the fence into the insurgent category." The military tool, he worried, "would be our undoing" and, in the long run, a military emphasis "hinders true progress and, in reality, promotes the growth of insurgent forces." What wins are the nonmilitary instruments of statecraft - development, governance, information. The author of these rather unmilitaristic notions is Army Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who came to such views based on his experience trying to pacify Baghdad in 2004-05.

Given the relative amounts we spend on military as opposed to nonmilitary instruments of power, a fatal mismatch has emerged between our tools of statecraft and our challenges. Meanwhile, the hyperaggressive global posture we have adopted is already feeding the fire we are desperately attempting to extinguish.

We need a revised approach and a new tool set if we are to effectively meet many of the challenges of the new era of conflicts.

This is the debate we need to have as a nation, as a prelude to the steps we must take to redress the obvious flaws in our strategic posture. And this is the debate that our candidates are refusing to have, largely because the Hawk Consensus has manufactured an intense fear of what happens to any politician who discounts the value of belligerence or the role of the military instrument of power.

We need leaders who are willing to speak with the American people about these truths, not merely on the margins of their articles and speeches, but at their core. We need, in a word, leadership - candidates willing to take the risks necessary to lead the American people toward a new vision of national security, a vision based on pragmatism and effectiveness rather than posturing and politics.