When people who occupy the United States federal government make foreign policy decisions, these decisions are based upon projected scenarios of consequences for given policy actions. Unfortunately, no matter how complex or sophisticated these models are, they will overlook critical aspects that can only be seen in hindsight.
The same reason that economic central planning fails will continue to doom foreign policy planners: the lack of omniscience.
Some foreign policy planners like to call themselves realists. Their ideology of realism is a theory of international relations that claims the world is at a state of anarchy and, within this system, states compete against another. They attempt to achieve security through power and control in the name of survival.
These are the people who are never elected but who have the ear of elected politicians and who stand over the most importance decisions this government makes.
These are the people who claim they have the solution to this or that region of the world, through a couple of military interventions here or there. These are the people who can be seen drawing up grand, and often contradictory plans to "stabilize" this or that region or this or that population.
Robert Higgs, a senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute, calls these planners "crackpot realists." Higgs borrows the term from sociologist C. Wright Mills, who illustrated the idea in his book The Causes of World War Three. Higgs writes that these people "continue to make the same sorts of disastrous decisions over and over, constantly squandering opportunities to maintain the peace, almost invariably painting themselves into corners of their own making, and all too often deciding that the only option that makes sense in their predicament is to bomb their way out."
American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Ledeen embodies this view quite nicely with his comment, "Every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
They are always willing to put the cost of lives into a long equation to attempt to maximize what they deem as the "good." In their rush to a quick fix, the worst atrocities result.
History is littered with the failures from these various decision-makers. The sanctions against Iraq in the ’90s are a case in point. Scholars thought comprehensive sanctions could be a powerful tool to challenge threats without unneeded suffering. The resulting extent of suffering and death has been described as worse than war.
These "intellectuals" advised to fund the resistance of the Soviets in Afghanistan only to end up training our next worst enemy. They advised to depose the prime minister of Iran in 1953 never realizing this would plant the seeds for the worst terrorist radicalization the world has ever seen. And now they advise and oversee the building of an embassy in Iraq larger than the Vatican.
A danger of these realist models is that they are willing to undertake 100 percent probable costs in exchange for less probable projected benefits, while never being able to project all of the potential disadvantages resulting from a given policy action.
A certain number of deaths of servicemen and women, and a certain level of innocent deaths, are all acceptable costs if we can only achieve stability in region X. But history has shown the benefits are fleeting while the costs are real.
Once one intervention is launched, another one is called to help where the first one screwed up, then another and then another. Interventionism snowballs. These advisers rarely suggest a plan that would have the U.S. back down its intervention. Why would they and risk losing their personal relevance?
Michael Rozeff, in his article "Getting to American Neutrality," explains the problem well: "One problem leads to another…. Our leaders place us on a merry-go-round of crises, each one connected to the last. Each problem crops up as a risk that must be dealt with or matters will deteriorate further. Yet each problem increases the chances of deeper conflicts. Our leaders act as if the merry-go-round is unstoppable.
They claim we can never get off, that we have to keep riding the whirlwind endlessly because we are the world’s leaders and this is our responsibility."
Don’t be fooled by the crackpots’ models and scenarios justifying ever-greater intervention. To stop the pain, we can just come home. We can get off the merry-go-round of endless interventionism and stop the spawning of unnecessary violence and war.
