Setting the Strategic Cat among the Policy Pigeons: The Problems and Paradoxes of Western Intervention Strategy

Abstract In theory, the idea of strategy is easy to comprehend but in practice it is a hard taskmaster because it often involves calculations of political values that are rarely amenable to the kind of rationalistic application of “expert” opinion to which Western nations invariably default when considering overseas interventions. Based on remarks to the Oxford Changing Character of War Centre, this research note argues that foreign policy experts frequently find themselves out of touch with the sentiments of their own populations, which in part is responsible for the poor strategic outcomes that Western foreign policies have incurred in recent years. A number of remedies are suggested, based principally on returning Western policy making to a tradition of prudential realism.

of intangible values. The most formidable intangible strategic question is almost always: What sacrifices are you prepared to endure to achieve your objectives? What costs -human, economic and social -are you prepared to pay to defend values or specific interests that are important to you?
Such questions are difficult to answer categorically because any discussions of values and the price you are willing to pay are fundamentally political questions -they are inherently contestable over which passionate opinions both for or against may rage. Unless the danger at hand is one that poses an imminent and direct threat to the national territory, considerations of whether to involve the state in challenges below that threshold are essentially matters of choice, requiring very careful strategic calculation and messaging.
And, as observers have witnessed on multiple occasions over the three decades since the end of the Cold War, when it comes to overseas interventions Western nations don't do strategy very well. They are often confused about their goals. They don't think through the long-term consequences. They get drawn into situations that they find it difficult to get out of. They create more damage than they seek to repair. Often they end up undermining their interests and reputations: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. We know the charge sheet.

War, Reason, and Passion
If I had to put my finger on why there has been a record of strategic failure in Western foreign policy, it is because liberal democracies have a tendency to try to extinguish the consideration of moral forces from complex political calculations. That is to say, liberal democracies seek to manage interventions in accord with a concept of pure reason. The application of reason is, of course, a profoundly liberal idea, embedded as it is in the Enlightenment tradition that has underpinned notions of democratic progress for well over two hundred years. The application of philosophical and scientific reasoning is seen as an essential moderating element, constraining reckless behavior, and reining in excess. It allows a knowledgeable elite to guide and manage foreign policy in accord with a cool, rationalistic, detachment.
The problem with this understanding is that it seeks to eliminate the role of passion and popular feeling from decisions about whether to intervene or not. Those of us who take inspiration from the writings of Carl von Clausewitz will know that one of his crucial insights is that war is essentially an outgrowth of hostile intent motivated by popular passions. Political leadership has the first responsibility to manage hostile feelings and, if so chosen, set goals accordingly, determining whether force is necessary to achieve them. The armed forces and their commanders are charged subsequently with giving hostile feeling direction, seeking to apply coercive means effectively in the face of friction. In other words, the political and military task is to steer passions toward something that has meaningful political effects. The politics of war is, therefore, to give hostile feelings -derived from the popular passions of the people -its ultimate purpose.
Over the recent past it has become increasingly clear that modern democratic states don't do the politics of war very well. War is seen as an abomination but at the same time something that democratic nations have to engage in from time to time to uphold liberal goals and values. This attitude has two notable negative effects so far as the construction of effective strategy is concerned.

The Problem of Reducing Interventions to Matters of Technique
The first negative effect is that policies of intervention are reduced to the technical application of force or abstract formulas and processes. Efforts in this respect are concentrated on issues such as the use of Special Forces, and other high-end war fighting capabilities (such as the use of precision guided weapons) or the employment of elaborate operational templates, such as counterinsurgency doctrines, that supposedly offer a universal recipe for combating external problems.
The second negative impact is that crucial decisions about intervention devolve to a self-anointed elite of experts who are invariably convinced of their erudition and moral rectitude. We have, I am sure, all come across these personality types: slick, assured, self-styled authorities on foreign policy. They may indeed be intelligent and well qualified educationally. But they are not necessarily in possession of any obviously superior insight, let alone practical on-the-ground experience of problems. Often their principal expertise seems to reside in an ability to network their way around the corridors of power.
To summarize, the consequence of the attempt to confine decision-making about interventions within the perceived realm of pure reason reduces Western strategic discourse to either over simplified technical responses, such as the notion that you can apply mechanistic techniques of counterinsurgency, or a questionable ethicism that seeks to "bomb the world to make it a better place. " Seeing solutions to complex issues as dwelling either in the application of discrete technical solutions, as identified by a self-selecting group of experts, disengages policymaking from any sense of popular endorsement: the people are relegated to mute onlookers in a game of spectator sport warfare.

The Problems of "Expert" Advice
There is, in other words, a tension at the heart of great deal of contemporary Western strategic thinking. On the one hand, having knowledgeable specialists and technical practitioners to guide political thinking about whether to intervene, and how to do so, is clearly desirable. Yet, limiting questions of whether to wage war solely within this technocratic paradigm of experts disconnects them from their own societies.
If you self-identify as a foreign policy expert you differentiate yourself from the mass of the population by claiming that you have superior knowledge and insights into the complexities of the world. However, by claiming this exclusive knowledge you not only elevate yourself above the views of normal people but gradually you cease to really understand the motivating feelings, passions and values of normal people. You end up misunderstanding your own nation. Instead, your justifications for action begin to lodge solely in your self-referential claim to special insight denied to the ignorant masses. You base your stances on your own moral convictions, not on what is prudentially realistic. You become convinced, for example, that Saddam Hussein's regime has a WMD capacity. You are certain that Iraq is intriguing with Al-Qaeda. You are sure that by invading Iraq it will spontaneously re-order itself along more democratic lines. You think the Pashtuns in Afghanistan just need a bit of economic development and Western modernization. You think that getting rid of Colonel Gaddafi will lead to a more stable Libya. You think that backing anti-Assad forces is the morally right course of action regardless of the actual impact such a policy is likely to have on the fabric of Syrian society.

The Ironies of Losing Touch and Being Outfoxed
The result of this tension leads to a number of ironies. The first irony is that far from constraining costly and damaging external adventures caused by populist excess, it is the foreign policy elite itself that is distinguished by a record of reckless advocacy and colossal analytical failure. That is the thing about claims to expertise: people expect you to be more right than wrong, and have the right to judge you when your predictions fail.
The second irony is that the policy elite is constantly surprised when the consequences of the failures they helped produce stimulates political backlashes that they find abhorrent: be it the 2016 vote by Britain to leave the European Union, the election of Donald Trump as President in the U.S., and the rise of so-called populist leaders elsewhere. If they wanted to know the reasons for these kinds of outcomes, they just really need to look in the mirror.
The ultimate irony, perhaps, is that the West finds itself consistently outfoxed on the international stage by more authoritarian states. In theory, one might think that liberal democracies would be more responsive to popular sensibilities in their own states. In fact it is the regimes of, say, Russia and China that are often more in tune with the elemental feelings of their own populations, be it a sense of Russian national pride and traditionalism, as understood by Putin's foreign policy advisors, or the intense nationalism, promoted by the Chinese Communist Party, which enables them to act more effectively -yes, sometimes more brutally -but often more astutely.
One of Clausewitz's observations was that for any military operation to succeed the "temper of the population" has to be behind the action. "If policy is directed only toward minor operations, " he said, "the emotions of the masses will have to be stirred. " What we can derive from this observation is that policymakers in Western democratic nations have to understand the "temper" of the people and their capacity to have their passions engaged by any particular political cause, especially foreign military adventures.
In summary, if a policymaking community cannot be bothered to understand the sentiments of their own populations, then they certainly cannot be trusted to deliver useful strategic advice: as the record clearly shows.

Conclusion: A Few Remedies -Returning to Prudential Realism
In conclusion, then, in terms of trying to avoid the policy mistakes of past interventions, let me throw out a few quick, if rather general, ideas by way of possible remedies: 1. Democratic rectification: this is the most obvious method by which a remedy can be sought, which is simply the election of parties and governments that are more representative of popular will and are prepared to take advice from sources that are more connected to the national temperament.
2. Within policy making circles there should be an end to "ethicist" based foreign policies based on cosmopolitan virtue that lure people into thinking that they are intervening to "make the world a better place." 3. Instead, Western nations should return to a tradition of prudential realism: states, in other words, should intervene because it is in their direct national interest -you might be able to dress it up in moral rhetoric -but the underlying motive is the protection or advancement of the state. 4. End the notion of unlimited commitment: nation building, "forever wars, " "capacity building, " and anything that smacks of neo-imperialist "progressivist" ambitions should be off the agenda. 5. Overt military interventions should be conceived only as short, sharp applications of military power. 6. Any longer term military commitment should be covert. This is a massive topic and I have only scratched the surface. I understand that some of what I have said may sound provocative. But in fact it is nothing that has not been stated, in so many words, in recent years by others far more experienced in the realms of policymaking than I am: people, such as Lord Powell, former foreign policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher, the late Lord Ashdown (former High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina), and General Sir David Richards (former Chief of the Defence Staff of the United Kingdom).
If I read these eminent figures correctly, their suggestions are that interventionist Western foreign policy strategies are only effective if they are proportionate to the outcome and are in tune with domestic popular sentiments, and that straying too far from these basic precepts results in hubris and policy failure: the solution to which is to recuperate a once venerable Western tradition of prudent, state-based, realism.