https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/dont-drink-the-credibility-kool-aid?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozNDA2NjM5LCJwb3N0X2lkIjo0Nzk2MzIwMiwiXyI6IlYzVmVIIiwiaWF0IjoxNjQzNjIzNTc1LCJleHAiOjE2NDM2MjcxNzUsImlzcyI6InB1Yi03MzM3MCIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.nAiVVq6mo0Y0kMZ6a428atQpBt_DK219AdgF3DtgPasDon't Drink the Credibility Kool-AidIf you drank the hegemonist Kool-Aid, you would insist that the U.S. is never allowed to withdraw from any conflict and that it must take sides in every crisis that arises.Daniel Larison January 30, 2022
Stephen Walt considers why so many American policymakers and analysts are obsessed with credibility:
Here’s the real kicker: The United States has a credibility problem in part because its own geopolitical position is so favorable. There are relatively few interests that are truly vital to the United States’ independence or prosperity, yet it still maintains a far-flung global presence and has made a lot of promises to protect other countries.
Fears of losing reputation and credibility are most common in those states that preside over vast empires in which their commitments exceed their ability to fulfill them. It was this fear that kept Spain at war with the Dutch for decades even though it was obvious that continuing the war was ruinous for the monarchy’s finances. It is imperial and quasi-imperial states that are at greatest risk of overextending themselves because they tend to imagine distant threats that either don’t exist or exaggerate the ones that aren’t all that significant. Being always on the lookout for threats to their domains, they begin to chase after phantoms at great expense.
The American hawkish obsession with credibility seems to be driven by two things in addition to these fears. The first is the desire to sell the public and the president on the aggressive policies that they favor, and that usually requires exaggerating what is at stake in a given crisis or conflict. Syria hawks wanted U.S. intervention in that country’s civil war, and they tried to seize on every opportunity to get it. The ridiculous “red line” episode provided them with just such an opportunity, and then when Obama changed his mind and refrained from ordering the illegal attack they wanted they were predictably apoplectic.
The ensuing “debate” amounted to ever more hysterical warnings of the calamities that would befall the international order if Obama did not follow through on his threat to order unauthorized military action against a government that posed no threat to us. In the years that followed, hawks desperately tried to link every subsequent event to this episode in much the same way that that they are doing with the withdrawal from Afghanistan now. The decision not to bomb the Syrian government in 2013 had no discernible effect on the credibility of U.S. security commitments anywhere in the world, but that hasn’t stopped lots of people from insisting that it was a terrible disaster for the last eight and a half years. There is never any evidence provided that withdrawal from Afghanistan has had any effect, either, but hawks simply take it as a given that it must have.
Credibility serves as a catch-all justification that allows hawks to make their preferred policy seem essential to safeguarding the entire alliance system and world order. They told us that the U.S. must bomb Syria, or else all would be lost. The U.S. didn’t bomb, and it led to nothing. They said that the U.S. must never leave Afghanistan, or else all would be lost. It is still early, but so far this has proven to be a false alarm as well.
This is how they make countries where the U.S. has few or no important interests seem as if they are much more essential to U.S. security than they really are. Last decade, it was Syria, and today it is Ukraine. Ten years from now, it will be some other country that didn’t matter to the U.S. at all and then was transformed into a critical “ally.”
The other reason why many hawks fall back on the credibility argument is that they have bought into their own mythology about the U.S. as a stabilizing global “leader” that they imagine that the only thing standing between the status quo and global chaos is U.S. willingness to intervene practically everywhere. If you really believe that the U.S. is “indispensable” to world order, and if you have convinced yourself that the only thing keeping that order intact is frequent U.S. shows of force and “resolve” all over the world, you will probably see perils around every corner. If you drank the hegemonist Kool-Aid, you would insist that the U.S. is never allowed to withdraw from any conflict and that it must take sides in every crisis that arises. For some of these people, they really do think that the U.S. is Atlas holding up the world. What Walt calls a “rather self-centered view of world affairs” is born of self-importance, grows into hubris, and leads to ruin.