The neocons have failed to understand the real danger of WMD because they have focused on state actors, including “secondary nuisances” like Iraq and Syria, when the true threat in the “war on terror” comes from freelancers. So argues Steven Van Evera in a chapter of a new book I’ve been reading (To Lead the World: American Strategy After the Bush Doctrine). Van Evera, a realist at MIT, says the only way to win against the terrorists is in a “concert” of major powers ala 19th century Europe.
In 1815 the victorious powers that had defeated Napoleon feared more mass revolutions like the French Revolution. They also feared conflict among themselves, partly because they worried that interstate warfare would weaken their regimes, bringing on the revolutions they feared. To address these problems they created a Concert of Europe. Under the Concert they agreed to cooperate to repress revolution across Europe while also agreeing on rules to resolve or contain their mutual conflicts.
Today the world again faces a threat from below, this time from WMD terrorists…
Neoconservatives… hold views that impede the development of an effective specific counterterror policy. They generally reject the view that WMD terror is the prime threat to U.S. security. Specifically, they underestimated the threat posed by nonstate actors both before and after 9/11, believing instead that state-sponsored terror or aggression poses the greater danger. This leads them to favor allocating too few resources to the WMD terror threat. They also believe that deterring or smashing states is an adequate answer to the terror danger. … Against al Qaeda, they have focused on the need to prepare to smash the armies of hostile states while neglecting the need to develop other tools of statecraft, including the capacity to wage a war of ideas, to dampen conflicts among others, to prevent or address state failure, or to lock down loose WMD materials abroad. Their counterterror strategy rests on the false premise that only terror groups with state sponsors can really harm the United States, so defeating terror requires only defeating or deterring these state sponsors.
Van Evera adds that there is little public push in the U.S. for concerted alliances because Americans have a grandiose view of America’s role in the world. Sadly, most Americans have little idea why World War I and II were fought and how they were won. And they were won by working together with other great powers.
[M]ost Americans are unaware that the United States rode to victory in both world wars and in the cold war on the backs of its allies. In fact, the United States achieved success largely through others’ sacrifices. Yet the American popular myth holds that those wars were won by American heroes and heroics..
What is the true picture? In World War I the United States suffered 126,000 military deaths, compared with 7,295,000 total military deaths among its thirteen allies. Thus U.S. military deaths constituted only 1.7 percent of the total among the Allied powers. In World War II the United States suffered 408,000 military deaths, compared with 10,780,000 military deaths among its eighteen allies.38 Thus U.S. military deaths made up only 3.6 percent of the Allied total in World War II.
One other point Van Evera makes is about my favorite issue. “The Middle East cannot be stable if Israel is not secure,” he says flatly. Yes; realists like Israel; and J Street and the other two-staters should be making its alliance with them. Though Van Evera emphasizes that a two-state solution will require “near-full” Israeli withdrawal to the ’67 borders, including “Arab East Jerusalem and the Muslim holy places.”
