Why doesn't the USA use its power to influence its weakest and neediest allies?
The USA has a problem: various USA agencies engage in competition with each other, each pursuing a foreign policy that is often in conflict with every other agency. Our allies manipulate this.
The USA is crippled with a problem: the different branches of the government engage in competition with each other, each pursuing a foreign policy that is often at odds with the other branches of government. Among the many groups who undercut each other:
the military
the State Department
the Senate (specific Senators)
the CIA
private citizens representing government officials (Rudy Giuliani representing the interests of President Trump in Ukraine)
We already covered some of this in our essay “The CIA undermines the efforts of the USA military.” That offers a specific example of the way the USA intervention in Afghanistan 2002-2021 played out. The USA lost a huge treasure, lost some of our best people, gained nothing, and then walked away and allowed an evil dictatorship to regain power. No one benefits from the dysfunction of the USA government. For our sake, and for the sake of everyone who depends on us, we should want our government agencies to work in harmony with one another. A cynic might try to summarize this idea as “For as long as the USA has an empire, it should aim to have a well-run empire” but I think it might be more accurate to say that nation-building at home aids nation-building overseas. Building infrastructure, incorporating feedback from the public, arresting corrupt officials — everything we need to do to win over new allies are also things we should do for ourselves.
Nominally, the President of the USA plays the leading role in defining USA foreign policy. Of course, up to a point, some people in the government have the right to express opinions that differ from the opinions of the President. That’s especially true of Senators, as the Senate has the responsibility for ratifying or rejecting treaties, and therefore Senators must have an opinion on foreign policy. To take a specific example, in late 2013 it seemed that Russia was interfering in Ukraine, and Senator John McCain felt the USA needed to push back hard (I happen to agree with him). As a Senator, he had a right to that opinion. However, the Obama Administration decided to take a softer approach towards Russia, therefore employees of the State Department should have followed the guidance they were getting from the President. However, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs Victoria Nuland made several intemperate remarks, which have been used by Russian propaganda ever since. I’ll here quote Constantine Pleshakov, who (I warn) is often pro-Russian in his account of events:
The Crimean Nexus
Putin’s War and the Clash of Civilizations
Copyright © 2017 by Constantine Pleshakov
Page 52-54
Regime Change
If Yanukovych’s was a rogue state, U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine in 2013-2014 can only be described as rogue diplomacy. Most certainly without the imprimatur of President Obama, and perhaps even without a silent nod from Secretary of State John Kerry, a group of senior American diplomats allied with bipartisan interventionists in Congress started brokering regime change in Kiev.
The protagonists included Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs Victoria Nuland, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey R. Pyatt, and Senator John McCain.
~~
Assistant Secretary Of State Nuland, the one who had coined the “spinach treatment” adage, seems to have been the spearhead of the project. Not insignificantly, her husband was the leading neoconservative intellectual Robert Kagan. During the crisis, Nuland was a frequent visitor to Kiev. In turmoil like that it was not humanly possible not to make mistakes, and on December 13, 2013, speaking to the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation Conference in Washington, Nuland revealed that since 1991, the United States had “invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine” in building “democratic skills and institutions.” She later claimed she was “still jet lagged” from her “third trip in five weeks to Ukraine,” and maybe that’s why the wording was dangerously imprecise, the message conflicted, the delivery most certainly untimely. In a subsequent interview, Nuland reluctantly confirmed that the United States had spent $5 billion “on supporting the aspirations of the Ukrainian people to have a strong, democratic government that represents their interests. But,” she stressed, “we certainly didn’t spend any money supporting the Maidan; that was a spontaneous movement.” It had been spontaneous – in the beginning.
If John McCain found Putin the personification of evil, Nuland became that for the Russians. Later, the Russian foreign minister would say: “That woman has played a very nasty role at every stage of the crisis in Ukraine.”
In many of the wars that the USA has fought, the USA’s efforts have been undermined by the corruption of our nominal ally. This was especially clear with President Ngô Đình Diệm of South Vietnam — his corruption alienated the peasants of South Vietnam and made it impossible for the USA to run a campaign of “winning the hearts and minds” of South Vietnam.
In short, our efforts to save a nation are often sabotaged by our nominal ally who is running that nation, and that nominal ally is often empowered by at least one USA agency, which participates in the sabotage of other USA agencies. And we have repeatedly faced defeat because of this internal fighting among USA agencies. Therefore it is urgent to establish some harmony of purpose among these agencies. A minimal checklist would at least focus on these areas (demanding that all USA agencies agree on the answers):
is our ally taking steps to fight corruption?
is our ally listening to their nation’s public?
does the public have legal avenues for expressing their discontent?
is there a known penalty or punishment for our nominal ally if they try to play one USA agency against another USA agency?
is USA aid being audited and thus protected from participation in networks of corruption?
when the USA engages in social-engineering with the goal of establishing a vibrant democracy, what are the penalties and punishments if our ally blocks our efforts?
are all USA agencies in agreement regarding what circumstances we allow a change of leadership in an allied nation? For instance, is every USA agency willing to accept the outcome of a democratic election?
While the circumstances might be new, the subject is an ancient one. Even in the Islamic nations, there is a long history of careful study of the subject “How to achieve excellent government?” One of the great strengths of the research of Sarah Chayes is that she looks at 1,000 years of Islamic political teachings, to reveal how far back Islamic princes have been considering these issues. In her book Thieves Of State, she emphasizes that the quest for justice is an ancient one, and the need to fight corruption has been an urgent one for many centuries:
Thieves of State
Why Corruption Threatens Global Security
By Sarah Chayes, 2015
Page 11
When, around 1090, Sultan Malik Shah asked “his peers, elders, and men of science to reflect upon the constitution of his government,” the aging Nizam al–Mulk produced a manual that, while full of colorful anecdotes, is at least as practical as The Prince. It’s chapter headings catalog the administrative functions required in a sophisticated empire:
“Of financial inspectors and their means of subsistence.”
“Of envoys sent out from court for important matters.”
“The necessity of a racially integrated army.”
“Of civil servants.”
Alerted as I was, by then, by the frustrations of my Afghan neighbors, I found myself increasingly spell bound by the book’s admonitions against various forms of corruption:
“Only what is just should be exacted from God’s creatures, and it should be requested with gentleness and consideration….If an official assesses a farmer more than is due to the authorities, the sum he unjustly raised should be demanded of him and returned to the farmer, and if the official has any property, it should be confiscated as an example to other agents, so they refrain from tyrannical acts.”
––––––––
Page 12
Nothing preoccupied Nazim al–Mulk so much as justice. “The salaries and emoluments accorded to judges,” he wrote, “assure their independence and keep them from unfairness. This point is extremely important and extremely sensitive, for judges...dispose of the lives and fortunes of Muslims.” One king is described descending from his throne to kneel down in public audience if a subject has a complaint against him, and warning the judge of judges to rule without favoritism on pain of death.
By including such tales, in so many variations, Nizam al–Mulk was hammering home a point: that a government’s ability to administer justice – and especially to hold its highest officials to account – was indispensable to its very survival.
Sarah Chayes worked with the USA military in Afghanistan during the years 2008-2011. In her book Thieves Of State, she argues that government corruption is the central issue that causes citizens to turn away from the promise of democracy and instead become radicals who aim to overthrow the system. As such, Chayes feels that corruption is the central problem we face, and therefore we need to attack it directly. For awhile she worked on the ground in the province of Kandahar where she heard directly from Afghani’s how much they hated the corruption of the officials. Later, she transferred to DC and worked at the Pentagon in a group that reported up to Navy Admiral Michael Glenn Mullen. She describes in detail how the bureaucracy in DC was slowly absorbing the idea that corruption in Afghanistan was one of the main problems that they needed to confront. But as much as the military wanted to go after corruption directly, the CIA felt that corruption actually helped the CIA achieve its objectives — after all, corrupt officials were happy to accept a bribe, so from the point of view of the CIA, corrupt officials were much easier to manipulate and control.
Page 151-153
Communicating with colleagues at ISAF, I also started culling through names of the worst offenders, men whose activities had placed them at the top of one or more prioritization lists for “nonkinetic targeting,” according to the procedures currently being followed in different headquarters. My guidance was to come up with a top-twenty-list.
The objective of that maneuver, I gathered, was to use it to confront the CIA on its approach to Afghan officials. By now it was a matter of public record that Karzai’s land-grabbing, vote-stealing, drug-dealing younger brother, among others, was on the Agency payroll. President Barack Obama had reportedly not appreciated learning about that in the pages of the New York Times. The “top twenty” list was designed for Obama and the principals to compare with the CIA’s personnel records, to see how many of the most corrupt Afghan officials were also paid retainers of the U.S. government.
Mullen was simultaneously pushing the intelligence community to think through the interaction between corruption and violent insurgency more broadly — to see what evidence existed to support the equation that he was finding increasingly convincing; that outrage at a government’s corrupt practices often provided fuel for insurgencies.
By then, data was piling up — for the Afghanistan case, at least. Officers who interviewed Taliban detainees were corroborating what I had been hearing from my neighbors in Kandahar for years. At the top of the list of reasons cited by prisoners for joining the Taliban was not ethnic bias, or disrespect of Islam, or concern that U.S. forces might stay in their country forever, or even civilian casualties. At the top of the list was the perception that the Afghan government was “irrevocably” corrupt. Taliban detainees reportedly judged that the corruption had grown institutionalized and was therefore unchangeable. They were running out of nonviolent options for altering what they saw as a fundamental flaw in their government.
But fighting the corruption of an ally is difficult. Arresting a corrupt official, who is our ally, means that we lose whatever political network they were managing for us. And it is dangerous for anyone in the State Department to go after a corrupt official if it is known that the official is an ally of the CIA, because then the State Department knows they have to engage in a political struggle with the CIA. And the CIA fights dirty, it is notorious for leaking embarrassing stories to the USA press, in an effort to weaken those State Department officials who might challenge the CIA policies. Therefore, the leadership of the State Department often tries to sidestep whatever issues might lead them into conflict with the CIA.
Here Chayes describes Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issuing a statement regarding corruption, and the optimistic interpretation that Mullen had of that statement versus the negative reaction that the rest of Mullen’s staff had (and Sarah Chayes was among those who were disappointed by Hillary Clinton’s statement).
Page 145–146
Within days of taking up quarters in the Pentagon, and receiving my badges and the combination to the barrel lock on my office door, I was summoned to join a febrile conversation in Mullen’s light–filled office. The cabinet was at last taking up the issue of corruption in Afghanistan. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had submitted a memo at that day’s Principals’ Committee meeting. These periodic gatherings of the secretaries of defense and state, the national security adviser, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the head of the CIA, and a few other top officials were where all the final national security decisions were made. Briefing a half–dozen members of his personal staff on what had transpired, Mullen praised Clinton’s memo as the first time the U.S. government, at this level, had even attempted an analysis of the corruption problem.
As the conversation swirled around, my voice emerged as – unbelievably – one of the more moderate in the room. I had been struggling over the years to tone down my off–putting stridency. It was electrifying to hear raw common sense in such a high–level setting. One of Mullen’s eclectic and irreverent special assistants wondered whether success in Afghanistan was even possible so long as Hamid Karzai remained in office.
If this conversation was happening in this room, I thought, maybe there was still a chance to influence U.S. policy.
Like my colleagues, I disagreed with my boss as to the quality of the memo Clinton had presented to her peers. Where his innate optimism perceived a great first step, I saw an attempted end run around the whole issue.
The memo developed the argument I had first heard the previous year in those early anticorruption meetings at the U.S. embassy in Kabul. There were three different types of corruption, went the reasoning, of differing gravity. “Functional corruption,” or small–scale palm greasing, was of no great concern, since it did not jeopardize near–term efforts to fight the insurgency. High–level corruption was worrisome but largely because of its impact on U.S. – not Afghan – public opinion. Such criminality at the top of government was typical of that part of the world, the analysis judged, and could only be addressed carefully, by appealing to Karzai to take appropriate steps.
“We have come to conclude that unless Afghans take the lead in combating corruption, efforts are doomed,” State Department officials insisted. The memo, in fact, called for avoiding large–scale reforms. What really mattered, it opined, was what bothered ordinary Afghans the most: “predatory corruption” on the local level – in particular, shakedowns at the hands of the police.
I saw in this analysis an effort to define the matter down to relative inconsequence, to dodge the glaring reality that the Afghan government at its highest level was the source of the corruption that was plaguing the people and would never voluntarily reform. “A fish rots from the head,” my Afghan friends’ voices echoed in my ears. “A stream is muddied from the source.”
Most significantly, the memo entirely ignored the structured, vertically integrated nature of the corruption networks that had taken over the Afghan government. Predatory local officials enjoyed Kabul–based protection, I argued to Mullen, so efforts to address their behavior would inevitably lead to confrontations with Karzai. There was no way to isolate measures to confront “predatory corruption” from Kabul politics.
Any plan based on such faulty analysis would never work.
But it’s not just President Karzai of Afghanistan or President Ngô Đình Diệm of South Vietnam, but rather, it is a general problem that the USA seems to fall into, all over the world. Even when it is USA money that pays all of the bills, and even when it is USA troops who do most of the fighting, the USA is often bullied and out-maneuvered by so-called allies who are, in fact, weaker than us, and entirely dependent on us. Chayes puts this well in her book.
Page 147–148
What is it, I found myself wondering, that keeps a country as powerful as the United States from employing the vast and varied nonmilitary leverage at its disposal? Why is it so easily cowed by the tantrums of weaker and often dependent allies? Why won’t it ever posture effectively itself? Deny visas? Slow down deliveries of spare parts? Choose not to build a bridge or a hospital? Why is nuance so irretrievably beyond American officials’ grasp, leaving them a binary choice between all and nothing – between writing officials blank checks and breaking off relations?
If the obstacle preventing more meaningful action against abusive corruption wasn’t active U.S. complicity, it sure looked like it.
The U.S. approach to a complex world had been voluntarily constrained this way for decades. Robert W. Komer dissected it brilliantly in a 1972 analysis of U.S. failings in Vietnam, titled Bureaucracy Does Its Thing. The monograph spells out how the weak and discredited and not independently viable government of South Vietnam had deftly brought superior leverage to bear over its U.S. patron.
For many reasons, we did not use vigorously the leverage over the Vietnamese leaders that our contributions gave us. We became their prisoners rather than they ours; the GVN used its weakness far more effectively as leverage on us than we used our strength to lever it.
Substitute the Afghan government’s acronym, GIRoA, for GVN, and Komer could have been describing the relationship between Washington and Kabul.
This almost instinctive reluctance to apply U.S. government leverage may be due in part to a “realist” – or legitimist – reflex, or else to a reasonable concern about the United States acting with the arrogance of past colonizers, or appearing to give lessons in domains where its own behavior may be far from perfect.
But tactics aside, a deeper aversion seems to be conjured by the specific question of corruption. I long thought the topic just wasn’t sufficiently sexy to grasp people’s attention. Yet over the years that I have worked on the issue – in Afghanistan, where the equation seemed so obvious and the stakes so high, and as corruption–related revolts spread across the world – I have watched decision makers and implementers, expert analysts, and even newspaper or magazine editors recoil from the subject, often aggressively. They have been unwilling even to ask the questions that might reveal an important driver of conflict worldwide.
So powerful and so consistent has the hostility been that it has prompted me to reconsider. Perhaps corruption is not, in fact, a boring topic to think about, but rather a threatening one. Perhaps this issue, in some profound way, challenges people’s worldviews.
Turning the problem over in my mind, I have discerned the contours of a hypothesis.
In light of their view on the organization of society and political economy, Westerners, especially Americans, can be separated into two basic groups. One camp believes in the necessity, and the virtue, of government. People in this category tend to see governments, in whatever country, as essentially devoted to the common good — staffed by public servants, in the full sense of the term. Of course there are lapses; of course some officials are venal; but such cases are seen as exceptions. For this group of Westerners, the notion that an entire government might be transformed into what amounts to a criminal organization, that it might have entirely repurposed the mechanisms of state to serve its ends, is almost too conceptually challenging to contemplate.
The other camp is characterized by suspicion of government. For people in this category, many of society’s problems can be blamed on an excess of government interference and regulation. Lack of development overseas is the inevitable result of a collectivist approach, including planned economies and state–run enterprises. Privatization and deregulation, in the view of this group, are key elements of the cure. For if left alone, freedom and the market will function to the greater good of all. The overwhelming evidence that the market liberalization, privatization, and structural adjustment programs the West imposed on developing countries in the 1990s have often helped catalyze kleptocratic networks — and may have actually exacerbated corruption, not reduced it — conflicts with this group’s orthodoxy, and so is hard to process.
For most Westerners, in other words, seriously examining the nature and implications of acute corruption would imply a profound overhaul of their own founding mythologies.
Chayes analysis is excellent. Especially when dealing with Russia, it is clear that many in the USA government committed themselves to the idea that free markets and open trade would transform Russia into a happy and prosperous democracy with whom we could be friends, and few USA staff are willing to reconsider how the last 30 years have played out and how much the reality has differed from the theory. See what I wrote in Why does the USA defer to Russia? Much of the staff, at the different agencies in the government, seem to have a blind spot about the importance of corruption, and this blind spot at times seem to be deliberate, as if the subject threatens people’s world view. However, Chayes doesn’t offer a specific mechanism for this:
The GVN used its weakness far more effectively as leverage on us than we used our strength to lever it.
Several commentators said, during the Vietnam War, that the corruption in South Vietnam undermined the legitimacy of the struggle in the eyes of the peasants in South Vietnam. What I think we need to also consider is the specific mechanism that allows these weak allies to outmaneuver the whole USA government: the fact that the different parts of the USA government openly fight against each other. This includes the competition between the Democratic and Republican parties. The leadership of South Vietnam was keenly aware how damaging it was to accuse an American politician of being “soft on Communism” and so the South Vietnamese leadership could often threaten the Democratic administration with the danger of being attacked by Republicans.
In every war the problem manifests in a different way. In Afghanistan the military was on one side (anti-corruption) and the CIA was on the other side (pro-corruption). In Ukraine we had a representative of the State Department who went off-script, and then later we had a dangerous President (Trump) who was willing to sell our foreign policy for personal gain. In Vietnam the competition between the political parties (Democrats versus Republican) was a risk that we failed to manage. But the basic problem is always the same: the lack of unity on the American side.
One of Chayes recommendations is that, in the future, any one of our allies should have a single point of contact with the USA government, so that the USA government will seem to be speaking with one voice when dealing with that ally. (Needless to say, systems of accountability also need to be developed to make sure the single point of contact does not betray the interests of the USA.) As it was, President Karzai was able to play the CIA against the military and the State Department, because President Karzai had contacts with all 3 groups. If, instead, Karzai was only allowed one point of contact, then he would have lost his power to play the different American groups against each other.
In Nation building: the only way the USA will ever win another war we looked at the program of land reform that the USA executed in Japan after 1945, and we looked at the role that land reform played in transforming Japan into a democracy. It was a successful program that deserves to be imitated. In that case, the governance of Japan was put into the hands of General MacArthur. Perhaps one reason the program went so well is that it followed the rule that Chayes is suggesting: General MacArthur was the sole authority, so the Japanese government was not able to play different USA agencies against each other. The CIA had not yet been created, so it could not skulk around in the dark shadows and sabotage everything that General MacArthur was trying to do.
All of Chayes recommendations are good, and I hope that everyone involved in foreign policy reads her book, but we should also note, even if officials at the State Department and the military got much better at evaluating corruption, and seeing it as a core issue that needs to be addressed, our weak allies would still be able to out-maneuver the USA government so long as that ally is able to play the various USA agencies against each other. Therefore that is the most crucial problem we need to fix, when dealing with our allies, and therefore the “single point of contact” rule might be the most important of all of the ideas that she has suggested.