On our minds: One of the most frequently cited rationales for war, and why it may turn out to be hollow. |
 | | An Afghan Air Force gunner over Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital of Helmand Province, in May.Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times |
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It's not hard to find downsides to the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Taliban's treatment of women, journalists and minorities. The danger to civilians who worked with the U.S.-backed government. The loss of American influence in a remote corner of the world. |
But there is another frequently invoked risk that may not be quite what it seems: damage to American credibility. |
The argument goes something like this: Withdrawing erodes America's reputation for standing by allies and standing down adversaries, a pillar of its power in the world. By undermining that reputation, President Biden encourages allies to back away and adversaries to rise up. |
The claim makes a certain intuitive sense, which may be why it has influenced, and at times determined, American foreign policy since the end of World War II. |
"Do leaders assume that other leaders who have been irresolute in the past will be irresolute in the future and that, therefore, their threats are not credible?" Jonathan Mercer, a professor at the University of Washington, wrote in 2013. |
"No; broad and deep evidence dispels that notion," he concluded. |
The idea first arrived in Washington in 1950, when the C.I.A. urged Harry S. Truman to intervene in the Korean War so as to uphold American credibility in Europe. |
Declining to fight a war in Korea would leave American promises to defend Europe "seriously discredited," the agency warned, "gravely handicapping U.S. efforts to maintain alliances and build political influence with the Western European powers." |
Dean Acheson, the secretary of state at the time, agreed, predicting that European leaders were desperate to see Washington prove its reliability by intervening in Korea and would deem Washington unreliable if it did not, risking the collapse of Europe's frail postwar order. |
But European leaders, archival research later found, privately considered faraway Korea to be a costly distraction. If anything, Washington's intervention damaged its reputation in Europe, whose leaders feared the Americans were pulling them into more conflicts. |
Credibility theory helped pull the U.S. into Vietnam, too. Washington policymakers believed that the Soviets would see inaction there as proof of American weakness everywhere and as an invitation to impose Communism throughout Asia. |
Even after the Pentagon assessed the war to be lost — and this part may sound familiar — the U.S. stayed, concluding that withdrawing would embolden Moscow, which was presumed to be watching Vietnam closely for hints to America's resolve. |
In reality, Soviet leaders, archival documents later revealed, were baffled by the effort in Vietnam, which they considered a sinkhole for American power. It was, once more, almost the exact opposite outcome as to what credibility proponents had predicted. |
In the 1990s and early 2000s, many in Washington warned that allowing Saddam Hussein, then president of Iraq, to thumb his nose at the U.S. would send a destabilizing message of American weakness. Only punishing Hussein would restore American credibility. The 2003 invasion, of course, had the opposite effect, infuriating American allies and creating years of distrust. |
The theory returned in 2013, when Barack Obama declined to use direct military force against Syria's government in retaliation for its use of chemical weapons. The decision was widely denounced as decimating American credibility. |
When Russia invaded and annexed Crimea the next year, it was taken as proof that Obama had signaled weakness and emboldened adversaries worldwide. |
But this, too, did not quite hold up to scrutiny. In 2016, the journalist Julia Ioffe surveyed Moscow foreign policy experts and former officials on whether the Syria decision had informed the Russian invasion of Crimea under Vladimir Putin. Though this is a crowd usually eager to criticize Washington and predict American decline, most said that the two events were unlinked, that Russia had invaded Ukraine for reasons specific to Russia and Ukraine. Some seemed to not even understand the question. |
Perhaps the best evidence for the existence of credibility is that American allies will sometimes raise it themselves. |
"I think I believe in American power more than Obama does," King Abdullah II of Jordan said of Obama's 2013 decision to not bomb Syria. He and other Arab leaders repeatedly warned that Obama was damaging American credibility in the region. |
But research by Jennifer Lind of Dartmouth College has found that allies invoke credibility opportunistically, when they want Washington to fight a war on their behalf. The same allies tend to change their tunes when Washington considers military action in some other part of the world or in a form that might not immediately serve their interests. They might speak in the language of credibility, but their behavior suggests that they do not really believe in it. |
The notion of global credibility is, whether its proponents ultimately consider it to be a political science theory. It implies a highly specific set of predictions about how countries behave and why. So it may be somewhat telling that political scientists often find it to be ridiculous. |
"The United States spent *twenty years* prosecuting a war in a strategically marginal country. I think that if I were in Tallinn or Taipei that would be very strong evidence that I could count on U.S. security guarantees," Dan Nexon of Georgetown University wrote on Twitter. |
Robert E. Kelly, a political scientist at Pusan National University in South Korea, concluded that Asian allies and adversaries appeared to be reaching much the same conclusion. |
"Just because the US withdrew from Afghanistan does not imply it will abandon Taiwan, South Korea, the Baltics, and so on," he wrote. "It was widely understood to be unwinnable, yet we fought for 20 years anyway. That signals a lot of resolve." |
Some are more incredulous. |
"How could Afghanistan have shattered U.S. credibility? I thought U.S. credibility had already been shattered by Iraq and Syria and Ukraine and Trump," Marc Lynch of George Washington University wrote. "It's almost like 'credibility' isn't even a real thing." |
So why is it so persistent? I have spent many years discussing this theory with both the policymakers who act on it and the political scientists who have sought to study it. |
I have found that the policymakers tend to invoke "credibility" when they have other reasons for wanting an intervention or invasion. |
Policymakers I met who wanted Washington to intervene in Syria, for instance, might first reach that conclusion out of a desire to help the millions of civilians imperiled by Syria's war. |
As fighting dragged on, they might seize on comments from Arab leaders, who had their own reasons to wanting American intervention, that a failure to act would undermine U.S. credibility. If some European officials who wanted Washington to handle Syria on Europe's behalf echoed these claims, all the better. When credibility concerns proved easier to sell publicly, they became invoked more frequently, too. |
"Credibility is an intuitive and hard to refute argument," Emma Ashford, a political scientist at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank, once told me. She called it "an easy way for elites to sell the foreign policy they're most interested in to the American people." |
The danger of this theory is not just that it may well be false. |
The logic of credibility can only ever lead to the same conclusion: toward the use or threat of American military force abroad, even in cases where the downsides would seem to outweigh the upsides, or where fighting a war might otherwise seem misguided. It is a compass that only points in one direction. And only takes you to one place. |
What We're Reading: Afghanistan Edition |
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