A Healthy Sense of Tragedy

On the winding down of the revolution in foreign affairs

Flag raising at the new U.S. ambassadors residence in Syria.

If you came of age politically over the last generation, you could be forgiven for assuming that the United States has always had an overwhelming ideological interest in the Middle East. The region and its conflicts took centre stage in the public consciousness of Americans for over thirty years, during which time local countries were subjected to a crusading political and military effort aimed at shaping their institutions and culture in a manner fitting with postwar American liberalism.

This focus on the Middle East was actually an extreme aberration in American history. The U.S. today presently has between 40,000 to 50,000 troops stationed at multiple bases spread throughout the region. But that heavy presence dates only from the period of the First Gulf War. Before that, the U.S. military barely had any physical footprint there at all. Meanwhile, conventional wisdom, particularly among conservatives, had held that the best policy was to simply stay out of the complex internal problems of a distant region, while saving scarce resources for a rainy day.

After three unhappy decades of bloodshed and waste, I believe that we are returning to that old equilibrium. Notwithstanding the horrific Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, of which the U.S. became a patron under the Biden administration, the government has begun shifting resources, personnel, and messaging towards confronting major powers outside the Middle East, particularly China, whom it expects to face as a serious rival in the decades to come.

I’ve written earlier about some lessons to take from this period. But there is another one that I think is important if we are to avoid such horrendous segues in the future. That is redeveloping a sense of tragedy about human nature. By tragedy what I mean is a sense of cautious pessimism about what is both possible and likely, which by nature disavows risky quests to remake the world for ideological reasons. Such an attitude steers people towards conservative actions and attitudes towards resources, their relations with others, and what they should prepare themselves for in the future.

The U.S. has been imagined as a radical, utopian, revolutionary regime, with a globe-spanning mission, although it did not self-consciously see itself that way. That revolution is gradually gradually burning out, at least for now, so we can take a look at what may come next.

The Revolution Devours

The irony of the last three unhappy decades of U.S. conflict in the Middle East was that it actually stemmed from a sense of radical optimism. Having prevailed in the Cold War, a popular idea began to take root in the West that we had entered a new era of human history where direct, large-scale conflicts between states, an unfortunate staple of human history, were now behind us. This was an era in which liberalism had defeated communism in a long ideological battle, and was expected to march triumphantly across the remaining corners of the planet.

Its not just that good days were ahead. People had come to naturally expect a utopian condition of peace, prosperity, and order, unlike anything previously existing in human history, to gradually spread throughout earth. We were going to slowly eliminate ignorance, injustice, and all manner of other misfortunes. War itself had been with us since the first glimmer of recorded history, during which it had been treated as a tragic inevitability on par with aging and bad weather. But that no longer needed to be the case. Economic interconnectivity, evolving moral norms, benign technological development, and nuclear deterrence would combine with adherence to a new set of laws and institutional practices to gradually banish this old demon once and for all.

In place of war, what U.S. elites felt that we needed to prepare for instead was something like imperial policing. (They would sometimes state this explicitly.) The role of the U.S. military and State Department would not be to fight major wars in the traditional sense as they did during World War I and II. Nor would they need to deter serious rivals such as the Soviet Union, as none would ever again emerge. Instead, they would deploy troops and diplomats to help tidy up the few bits of the planet that had not yet been graced by the enlightened touch of liberal democracy. Armed conflicts would be more like police actions than the trench warfare and mass aerial bombardments of the 20th century. Rather than merely representing their national interests, U.S. diplomats would work as missionaries spreading the good word of our correct ideology.

This is why when the September 11 attacks took place the response was so evidently irrational. A state with a sense of tragedy about human nature would have simply punished the perpetrators, improved security at home, and perhaps reevaluated whether a continued U.S. presence in the Middle East was a constructive use of resources. Instead, the attacks triggered an extreme ideological antibody response. The lesson America took was that it had to crusade harder for its revolutionary ideology, continuing a project of perfecting the human race in order to ensure that such things would not happen again.

There were a few cynics here and there. But sincere belief in global liberal revolution is ultimately how the U.S. military found itself gunning down Iraqi civilians at roadside checkpoints in Fallujah, and bombing Afghan wedding parties in a failed attempt to act as an ideological envoy for universal values. Unlimited amounts of time, money, lives, and resources had to be devoted to ensuring that rural Afghans were transformed into liberal democrats, feminists, and civil libertarians, which the public was assured that everyone on earth secretly was.

In retrospect, this was all obviously delusional. But it was the byproduct of an almost magically optimistic and self-assured ruling ideology, one no less idealistic and revolutionary than global communism. Given what it cost, its proponents are not going to look very good in retrospect.

A few years after the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian author Svetlana Alexievich went to collect oral histories of ordinary Soviet people for her book Secondhand Time. I recall the interview of one man who had worked in the Kremlin, and recalled the passing of his superior officer in a suicide after the regime finally collapsed:

“As for him…He was an idealist, a romantic communist. He believed in the ‘glittering peaks of communism.’ He took all that literally. He thought that communism was forever. It’s embarrassing to admit this now…It sounds dumb…”

An Orderly Retreat

People with a more tragic, or, one could say, realistic, conception of human nature would never have embarked on such wasteful crusades. They would not believe in a coming utopia that represents a clean break with all past history and culture, nor in the perfect standardization of human nature across the planet. They wouldn’t be overly concerned with what other people are doing anyways. Instead, they would be cautious, and marshal their resources carefully. They would expect the worst to arrive, as it periodically has throughout history, and do everything they can in the meantime to keep it at bay. Progress and improvement can still happen, but we shouldn’t force or even expect it.

I believe that after a long hiatus and several bruising encounters with reality, that sense of tragedy in human affairs is returning to the mainstream of American foreign policy. One thing that is often enlightening is reading Department of Defense-linked publications and analysts. Because of their line of work and historical conditioning, people with backgrounds in the military were always less likely to succumb to the self-destructive optimism about human nature that liberal internationalists had embraced. Like police officers, they regularly encounter the ugly sides of the human experience, which over time dims ones sense of idealism. They also never thought that major wars were going away for good, so they felt the most important thing to do would be to deter and defend ourselves for when the next one tries to emerge.

This attitude meant that the U.S. military establishment was among the first to calculate that the country needed to get out of its pointless and costly role as enforcer of a defunct and unpopular ideology in the Middle East. The United States had real problems and real threats, they believed, especially the threat of a major war coming again one day with China, Russia, or some combination thereof. As a result the revolution needed to end, now.

Read this passage from former senior John McCain advisor Christian Brose:

In recent decades, US leaders have given our military too many missions and have prioritized US military “presence” in too many places across the world that deliver too little benefit to our national defense. American leaders must tell our military what it no longer has to do. And they will certainly need to avoid saddling our military with costly and unnecessary new missions, such as a war with Iran, an intervention in Venezuela, or preemptive military action against North Korea.

The US military will have to do less. This will require hard choices with real consequences, but we must make them. Put simply, conserving US strategic resources—not just our military power but also our money, our leaders’ time, and our allies’ goodwill, among other things—must become a goal of US defense strategy. It will require US leaders to settle for less desirable, less optimal, and even riskier outcomes on other foreign policy goals so that we can prioritize the more important goal of balancing Chinese military power and harboring our own.

That was published in 2019. The sentiments have only gotten stronger as China continues a military buildout that alarms U.S. lawmakers. One can see the sense of the tragic shine right through Brose’s writing, in the calls of “settling” for things that are “less desirable.” These are heretical thoughts to any revolutionary regime. The goal of pivoting is not to fight a new war, but expecting that such things are always inevitable, and perhaps can be contained or deterred with a prudent mix of policies.

Americans, or at least some of them, are growing up again, and shedding the radical ideological extremism of the liberal era in favor of a more measured and restrained view of their role in the world. We should view the packing up of the soft power arms of the liberal empire like USAID and Radio Free Europe similarly. These were the wings of the revolution tasked with what communists would have called “ideological work,” and they have now been deemed unnecessary. We should count ourselves lucky that unlike the Soviet Union that our revolutionary ideology retreated in an orderly fashion instead of merely collapsing on top of us.

“We will not make it again”

This all brings me back to the Middle East, which was the arguably the most brutal workshop of the liberal revolutionary tradition. As painful as it is to witness, the current Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip should be seen as a byproduct of the unwinding of the U.S. imperial presence in the region, not its continuation. All pretense of ideological mission, critical to any imperial endeavor, has simply evaporated at this point. The Israelis are behaving as though they know this is true themselves, anxiously trying to draw down every last dollar in their account before they have to continue the Forever War without their senior partner sitting directly inside the ring with them.

I will not make the reverse error of suggesting that the return of a restrained United States will somehow generate idyllic conditions, or take away the many problems that the region faces. But I believe that a U.S. drawdown will allow a more acceptable status quo to gradually emerge for the peoples of the region. It will certainly be better for Americans, who will no longer have to suffer the loss of their resources, reputation, and the lives of their young men and women, in pointless utopian crusades far from home.

Tom Barrack, the new U.S. ambassador to Turkey and envoy to Syria, shared a remarkable statement recently intended to reflect a future vision for the U.S. in the region. Unlike past expressions of U.S. intent, nothing in his statement mentioned grand ideas like democracy, liberalism, or any of the other ideological imperatives for which an entire generation was told was important enough to kill and die.

His message was tragic, in the sense of abandoning grand revolutionary ideals, and leaving people to their own devices. But it was optimistic nonetheless:

“A century ago, the West imposed maps, mandates, penciled borders, and foreign rule. Sykes-Picot divided Syria and the broader region for imperial gain—not peace. That mistake cost generations. We will not make it again. The era of Western interference is over. The future belongs to regional solutions, partnerships, and a diplomacy grounded in respect.”

My own tragic sense says to expect bumps along the way in implementing such a plan, especially as the neoconservative true believers fight a rearguard action against it. But if it works, we can look back on the past thirty years as an unfortunate revolutionary detour that we have now left behind us.