Gideon Rose's grand metaphor

Gideon Rose, the new editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and author of How Wars End (Simon & Schuster, 2010), deploys a stunningly ungainly but accurate metaphor of counterinsurgency warfare in his recent book to describe American grand strategy in its foreign entanglements of the past century.

Playing on the shorthand description of COIN theory, Rose rolls out the phrase "clear, hold, and build" to describe the strategic policy aims of United States in Europe (World Wars I and II, Bosnia and Kosovo), East Asia (Korea and Vietnam), and most recently, the Middle East (Iraq and Afghanistan). In counterinsurgency terms, he writes, the outcome of individual wars have varied wildly in the 'clearing', and 'holding' stages, with some positive, but more often checkered results in the third stage, 'building' stable nations in America's image.

For any real policymaker to spout such talk would be "ridiculous and unattractive", admits Rose. Yet his brief is unswervingly that "the United States has been engaged in nothing less than an ongoing campaign of global pacification -- clearing, holding, and building in region after region around the world", from well before Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama.

Without quite saying so, Rose's grand metaphor not-so-subtly fashions the United States as a deeply imperial power driven by its sense of its own exceptionalism, great wealth, and a strong instinct to use military power to deter 'insurgent' foreign threats. It's almost, but not quite, American history in the image of the Vietnam War. Rose's point, however, is less contentious: U.S. political leaders, too often adept at starting wars, are not very good at thinking through how those wars should end, or of imagining sustainable and desireable postwar political conditions, before conflicts begin.

He's no doubt right. However elusive such exquisite rational and clairvoyant planning may prove, Rose's quirky rendering of grand American strategy accurately describes a 20th century worldview shared by successive presidents that presupposes rising U.S. economic power, unchallenged American hegemony, and the backing of a far-flung, world-class professional military. No president thus far, including Obama, has shown any real inclination to back away from this script.

Rose's grand strategy metaphor thus places him in the company of military historians like Andrew Bacevich and other critics of Washington's imperial reach and militarization of U.S. foreign policy.

The metaphor itself, however, has limited staying power. Rose flicks at the existence of an alternative strategic outlook with "as distinguished a pedigree" -- "that it's somebody else's job to clear, and somebody else's job to hold, and somebody else's job to build" -- but fails to elaborate. A new approach would seem to embrace Washington's stepping back to leave Libya to the British and French, and leaving terrorist threats in Afghanistan to the Afghan army and national police, measures guaranteed to conjure images of American irresoluteness.

It also leaves the coining of a new grand strategy metaphor to a new generation of anti-isolationist foreign policy realists. I would nominate Harvard's Stephen Walt, who stakes out fundamental strategic assumptions that include 1.) compromised U.S. economic prospects; 2.) the rise of China as a superpower, 3.) withdrawal from Afghanistan-style overcommitment, and 4.) selective future military engagement based on regional balance-of-power politics.

Such a policy may well ring in "the end of the American Century", as one Washington pundit put it. But surely it describes what we are witnessing. That's not altogether a bad thing, and recognizing it is arguably long overdue. Rose's contribution is to encourage a sophisticated approach to the calibration of military and political restraint. He leaves it to others to suggest that dumping the global counterinsurgency strategy just might lead to new era of enhanced American power and influence, rather than the inevitable decline the Cassandras of the right and left so confidently predict.