Stephens:
Bush did too much and Obama too little—but
a ‘broken-windows’ model of U.S. foreign policy can be just right.
When it
comes to U.S. foreign policy, Americans must sometimes feel like Goldilocks in
the three bears’ house. The porridge that was President George W. Bush’s
“freedom agenda”—promising democracy for everyone from Karachi to
Casablanca—was too hot. The mush that has been President Barack Obama’’s foreign policy—heavy on
rhetoric about resets, pivots and engagement but weak in execution and deeply
ambivalent about the uses of U.S. power—is too cold.
What we
need instead, as the fairy tale has it, is a foreign policy that is just
right—neither too ambitious nor too quiescent, forceful when necessary but
mindful that we must not exhaust ourselves in utopian quests to heal crippled
societies.
The
U.S. finds itself today in a post-Cold War global order under immense strain,
even in partial collapse. Four Arab states have unraveled since 2011. The
European Union stumbles from recession to recession, with each downturn calling
into question the future of the common currency and even the union itself. In
Asia, China has proved to be, by turns, assertive, reckless and insecure.
Russia seeks to dominate its neighbors through local proxies, dirty tricks and
even outright conquest. North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and Iran’s effort to
develop one tempt their neighbors to start nuclear programs of their own. And
even as the core of al Qaeda fades in importance, its jihadist offshoots,
including Islamic State, are metastasizing elsewhere.
As for
the U.S., the sour experience of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has generated
a deep—and bipartisan—reluctance to interfere in foreign conflicts, on the view
that our interventions will exact a high price in blood and treasure for
uncertain strategic gains. One result is that aggressive regimes seem to think
that they can pursue their territorial or strategic ambitions without much fear
of a decisive U.S. response. Another is that many of our traditional allies,
from Israel to Saudi Arabia to Japan, are quietly beginning to explore other
options as the old guarantees of the postwar Pax Americana no longer seem as
secure as they once were.
How
should an American president navigate through this world of ambitious rogues
and nervous freelancers? How can the U.S. enforce some basic global norms,
deter enemies and reassure friends without losing sight of our global
priorities and national interests? How do we conduct a foreign policy that
keeps our nightmares at bay, even if we can’t always make our dreams come true?
When it
comes to restoring order in places widely assumed to be beyond the reach of
redemption, there is a proven model for us to consult. But it has nothing to do
with foreign policy; it has to do with policing our toughest inner cities. And
it has brought spectacular—and almost wholly unexpected—results.
The
year 1991 was a year of foreign policy triumphs for the U.S., from victory in
the Gulf War to the collapse of the Soviet Union. But it was the annus horribilis
for American crime, with nearly 1.1 million aggravated assaults, 106,590
forcible rapes and 24,700 murders. In every category, crime was up from the
year—and the decade—before. As late as 1995, some criminologists were
predicting that a new wave of “super-predators” would descend on American
neighborhoods. “If current trends continue, the number of arrests of juveniles
for violent crimes will double by the year 2010,” reported the New York Times,
citing a Justice Department report.
“Current
trends” did not continue.
In
1990, New York City registered a homicide rate of 30.7 murders for every
100,000 people. By 2012, it had fallen to a rate of 5. A similar, if slightly
less dramatic, story unfolded in every other major U.S. city. The social
deliverance happened despite the fact that many of the factors often cited to
explain crime—bad schools, broken homes, poverty, the prevalence of guns,
unemployment—remained largely the same from one decade to the next.
What
happened? The crack epidemic crested in the early 1990s. The police began
developing new techniques to track and control patterns of criminal activity.
Between 1992 and 2008, the number of law enforcement personnel rose by 141,000,
a 25% increase, and from 1990 to 2000, the adult incarceration rate nearly
doubled. More cops on the streets; more bad guys behind bars. It was bound to
have an effect.
Their
core insight turned on a social-science experiment conducted in 1969 by Philip
Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford. Dr. Zimbardo parked a car on a street in
the Bronx, with the hood up and without license plates. Within 10 minutes,
vandals begin to pick the car clean of its valuables: battery, radiator, tires.
By the next day, people began destroying the car, ripping up pieces of
upholstery and smashing windows.
Dr.
Zimbardo then conducted the same experiment in tony Palo Alto, Calif., near the
Stanford campus. This time, the car—also with the hood up and the license
plates removed—sat untouched for several days. So Dr. Zimbardo smashed a window
with a sledgehammer. “Soon, passersby were joining in,” wrote Drs. Kelling and
Wilson. “Within a few hours, the car had been turned upside down and utterly
destroyed.” What to conclude?
“Disorder
and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental
sequence,” Drs. Kelling and Wilson argued. It had long been known that if one
broken window wasn’t replaced, it wouldn’t be long before all the other windows
were broken too. Why? Because, they wrote, “one unrepaired broken window is a
signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.”
The idea
that the mere appearance of disorder encourages a deeper form of disorder cuts
against the conventional wisdom that crime is a function of “root causes.” Yet
municipalities that adopted policing techniques based on the broken-windows
theory—techniques that emphasized policing by foot patrols and the strict
enforcement of laws against petty crimes and “social incivilities”—tended to
register sharp drops in crime and improvements in the overall quality of life.
We are
disposed to think that, over time, order inevitably dissolves into disorder.
But the drop in crime rates reminds us that we can go the other way—and impose
order on disorder. Could it be that there’s a “broken windows” cure not just
for America’s mean streets but for our increasingly disorderly world?
President
Obama often talks about rules. After Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used sarin
gas to murder more than 1,000 people near Damascus in August 2013, Mr. Obama
warned that “if we fail to act, the Assad regime will see no reason to stop using
chemical weapons.” After Russia seized Crimea in 2014, he denounced the Kremlin
for “challenging truths that only a few weeks ago seemed self-evident, that in
the 21st century, the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force.”
The
language is elegant; the words are true. Yet the warnings rarely amount to
much. The U.S. succeeded in getting Mr. Assad to give up much of his chemical
arsenal, but the Syrian dictator goes on slaughtering his people, sometimes
using chlorine gas instead of sarin. The president’s immediate response to the
seizure of Crimea was to sanction a handful of Russians, send a few fighter
jets to Poland and Lithuania, and refuse Ukrainian requests for military
support.
This is
how we arrive at a broken-windows world: Rules are invoked but not enforced.
Principles are idealized but not defended. The moment the world begins to
notice that rules won’t be enforced, the rules will begin to be flouted. One
window breaks, then all the others.
The
most urgent goal of U.S. foreign policy over the next decade should be to
arrest the continued slide into a broken-windows world of international
disorder. The broken-windows theory emphasizes the need to put cops on the
street—creating a sense of presence, enforcing community norms, serving the
interests of responsible local stakeholders. It stresses the need to deter
crime, not react to it, to keep neighborhoods from becoming places that entice
criminal behavior.
A
broken-windows approach to foreign policy would require the U.S. to increase military
spending to upward of 5% of GDP. That is well above the 3.5% of GDP devoted to
defense in 2014, though still under its 45-year average of 5.5%. The larger
budget would allow the Navy to build a fleet that met its long-stated need for
313 ships (it is now below 290, half its Reagan-era size). It would enable the
Air Force to replace an aircraft fleet whose planes are 26 years old on
average, the oldest in its history. It would keep the U.S. Army from
returning—as it now plans to do, over the warnings of officers like Army Chief
of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno —to its pre-World War II size.
The key
to building a military ready to enforce a broken-windows policy is to focus on
numbers, not on prohibitively expensive wonder-weapons into which we pour billions
of research dollars—only to discover later that we can afford just a small
number of them.
Broken-windows
foreign policy would sharply punish violations of geopolitical norms, such as
the use of chemical weapons, by swiftly and precisely targeting the
perpetrators of the attacks (assuming those perpetrators can be found). But the
emphasis would be on short, mission-specific, punitive police actions, not on
open-ended occupations with the goal of redeeming broken societies.
The
central tragedy of the Iraq war is that it took nine months, at a cost of some
480 American lives, to remove Saddam Hussein from power and capture him in his
spider hole—which ought to have been the central goal of the war. Yet we spent
eight years, and lost an additional 4,000 Americans, in an attempt to turn Iraq
into a model of Arab democracy—a “root cause” exercise if ever there was one.
There’s a big difference between making an example of a regime like Saddam’s
Iraq and trying to turn Iraq into an exemplary state.
A
broken-windows foreign policy would be global in its approach: no more “pivots”
from this region to that, as if we can predict where the crises of the future
are likely to arise. (Did anyone see Russia’s invasion of Ukraine coming?) But
it would also know how to discriminate between core interests and allies and
peripheral ones.
As
Henry Nau of the George Washington University notes in a perceptive recent
essay in the American Interest, we should “focus on freedom where it counts the
most, namely on the borders of existing free societies.” Those are the borders
that divide the free countries of Asia from China and North Korea; the free
countries of central Europe from Russia; and allies such as Israel and Jordan
from many of their neighbors.
A
broken-windows foreign policy wouldn’t try to run every bad guy out of town.
Nor would it demand that the U.S. put out every geopolitical fire. American
statesmen will have to figure out which of those fires risks burning down the
entire neighborhood, as the war in Syria threatens to do, and which will
probably burn themselves out, as is likely the case in South Sudan.
Then
again, foreign crises rarely present a binary choice between doing nothing and
conducting a full-scale military intervention. A cruise-missile strike against
a single radio tower in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide could have helped to
prevent Hutus from broadcasting instructions for murdering Tutsis, potentially
saving thousands of innocent lives at minimal cost to the U.S. Bomb strikes by
NATO to lift the siege of Sarajevo helped to turn the tide of the war in the
former Yugoslavia against Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, also at no
serious cost to the U.S. Perhaps it is time for a strategy that enshrines the
principle that preventing tragedy should enjoy greater moral legitimacy than
reacting to it.
In his
famous 1993 essay, “Defining Deviancy Down,” the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan
observed how Americans had become inured to ever-higher rates of violent crime
by treating as “normal” criminal activity that would have scandalized past
generations of Americans. “We are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not
good for us,” the senator from New York wrote. Twenty years later, the opposite
has happened. We have defined deviancy up. But having done so, we have tended
to forget how much better things are now than they were before.
Americans
have lived in a relatively orderly world for so long that we have become
somewhat complacent about maintaining it. Perhaps that explains why, in recent
years, we have adopted a foreign policy that neglects to do the things that
have underpinned that orderly world: commitments to global security, military
forces adequate to those commitments, a willingness to intervene in regional
crises to secure allies and to confront or deter aggressive regimes.
In
recent months, however, and especially since the rise of Islamic State and the
beheading of American journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley, Americans
have begun to rediscover certain truths about Pax Americana: If our red lines
are exposed as mere bluffs, more of them will be crossed. If our commitments to
our allies aren’t serious, those allies might ignore or abandon us. If our
threats are empty, our enemies will be emboldened, and we will have more of
them.
In
other words, if the world’s leading liberal-democratic nation doesn’t assume
its role as world policeman, the world’s rogues will try to fill the breach,
often in league with one another. It could be a world very much like the 1930s,
a decade in which economic turmoil, war weariness, Western self-doubt, American
self-involvement and the rise of ambitious dictatorships combined to produce
catastrophe. When President Franklin Roosevelt asked Winston Churchill what
World War II should be called, the British prime minister replied, “the
unnecessary war”—because, Churchill said, “never was a war more easy to stop
than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous
struggle.” That is an error we should not repeat.
To say
that the U.S. needs to be the world’s policeman isn’t to say that we need to be
its preacher, spreading the gospel of the American way. Preachers are in the
business of changing hearts and saving souls. Cops merely walk the beat,
reassuring the good, deterring the tempted, punishing the wicked.
Not
everyone grows up wanting to be a cop. But who wants to live in a neighborhood,
or a world, where there is no cop? Would you? Should an American president?
