On Saturday, my wife and I along with thousands of others converged on Arlington National Cemetery to lay wreaths on the graves of those fallen in the nation’s wars. Wreaths across America, the organization responsible for this annual event, reports that they had received donations for over 219,500 wreaths, or nearly 87 percent of its goal. When we began, around 8 am, the familiar cemetery looked as it always does, row upon row of white stone markers. Within just a few hours, there were wreaths on nearly every one, for as far as the eye could see.

It was a decidedly bittersweet experience for me. Our group convened in Section 60, one of larger sections of the cemetery, and the resting place for many of those killed in the nation’s post‑9/​11 wars; in other words, the wars that I’ve been spending my 16+ years here at the Cato Institute mostly trying to stop. But it had far greater resonance to those around me who had family members and friends buried there. They knew the people behind the names on the stones.

So I kept quiet. This day was about those men and women who gave their lives in distant lands, not for criticizing those who sent them there. As we placed a wreath by every headstone, we read the names of those who died, and the dates of their passing. Some were killed in action, usually at a very young age; others served in the nation’s wars, but went on to enjoy a long life after. As mortal, finite beings, we die twice: on the day when we expend our last breath, the second time when our name is spoken aloud for the last time. By that standard, American servicemembers may live on in memory for a very long time. Though this was my first time placing wreaths, I can imagine it becoming an annual event for me—if not at Arlington, then perhaps at some military cemetery elsewhere.

But while Saturday was a day to honor the dead, it might also have been an occasion for the rest of us—those neither serving in the military, nor responsible for starting, expanding, or continuing the nation’s wars—to ponder why they died, and to wonder whether they needed to. Wreaths across America’s organizers explain that their mission is to “REMEMBER the fallen… HONOR those who serve… TEACH our children the value of freedom.” I might add that it is an opportunity for all of us, young and old, to think about this nation’s approach to national security, and to question whether that approach actually advances freedom, both for us, and those whom we claim to be liberating.

For example, I couldn’t help but wonder how many of the thousands of people around me were even aware of the Washington Post’s explosive series of articles revealing a pattern of deceit and misdirection that has sustained the nation’s longest war in Afghanistan. If those thousands of volunteers at Arlington, or even a fraction of them, had read the original story, or read or heard the many commentaries and podcasts since it was published (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, and here), would that make them less supportive, less willing to accept what they have been told, almost since the 9/11 attacks? Might they be more open to arguments for ending the endless wars? In other words, for trying to actually reduce the number of new graves that will be dug at Arlington in the coming year?

For now, that doesn’t seem to be happening. The arguments for continuing these wars prevail, mostly by inertia. In one of the only mentions of the Post series that I heard on the Sunday morning shows, on CBS’s “Face the Nation”, National Review’s David French dismissed the revelations as inconsequential. French essentially blamed the officials’ lies on the American people’s desire for irreconcilable things: both security and to bring the troops home. But French’s claim is merely emblematic of the sentiments that have sustained the GWOT since its beginning: the assertion without proof that thousands had to die, and trillions had to be spent, in order to prevent another 9/11. By now, we have many reasons for at least questioning whether the dangers are as grave, and therefore whether these wars are as essential to our safety, as French and others would have us believe.

Here’s hoping, therefore, that many more Americans remember those fighting and honor their service by actually scrutinizing their missions. If more people conclude that the endless wars are no longer serving the national interest, they might finally push to end them.

The conference version of the FY 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is a boon for the Trump administration’s questionable nuclear and missile defense initiatives. Once the bill is signed into law the Department of Defense will have the green light to continue its nuclear modernization plan and wholesale expansion of missile defense capabilities set forth in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and 2019 Missile Defense Review (MDR), respectively.

The administration claims that both new low-yield nuclear weapons and an expanded missile defense system are necessary to protect U.S. interests and strengthen deterrence in a new era of great power competition. However, these arguments rest on flawed assumptions and will likely make deterring nuclear conflict more difficult in the long run.

America’s nuclear deterrence strategy, like its approach to foreign policy in general, suffers from a lack of prioritization. The essential goal of nuclear deterrence is preventing nuclear attack against the United States and its allies, but Washington wants its nuclear forces to do more. The 2018 NPR sees a role for nuclear weapons in preventing “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks,” in addition to hedging against uncertainty, two goals that are both ambitious and amorphous. With so many self-imposed bases to cover, it’s no surprise that Washington thinks it needs to make good on the Obama administration’s nuclear modernization plan while also introducing the two new nuclear weapons outlined in the 2018 NPR.

A similar dynamic is affecting U.S. missile defense policy. The 2019 MDR calls for expanding existing missile defense capabilities and adding new systems that can improve defense against new offensive weapons. One of the most worrying new offensive capabilities is the hypersonic glide vehicle, which adversaries developed to counteract earlier U.S. missile defense expansions. The 2020 NDAA deserves some credit for zeroing out funding for a particle beam capability and space-based interceptors, but these are relatively minor and easy victories. The bill also authorizes $1.237 billion for the ground-based midcourse defense system, the least reliable and most destabilizing part of America’s missile defense architecture despite the program wasting roughly $700 million on a new kill vehicle that was cancelled earlier this year. 

One area where the FY 2020 NDAA deserves praise is its commissioning of multiple studies on pressing strategic questions. The topics for nuclear weapons and missile defense related studies include: the consequences of the United States adopting a no first use policy; cost savings of alternative nuclear force structures; and the impacts of missile defense deployment on nuclear stability. The nuclear and missile defense policy decisions made over the next few years will affect America’s nuclear deterrence and arms control strategies for decades to come. These questions deserve greater study and examination, and I hope that all the studies will be made public.

To learn more about the shortcomings of U.S. nuclear policies and the important choices policymakers will be making over the next few years, check out the Cato Institute’s latest nuclear-focused publication America’s Nuclear Crossroads: A Forward-Looking Anthology.

We finally have an NDAA! This is exciting news for many, mainly because operating under a Continuing Resolution is detrimental to national defense, since it funds past priorities without updating our outlays in light of evolving events and challenges.

The FY 2020 NDAA includes some provisions that might excite us, such federal parental leave, more support for child care within the military, and a pay increase for the military to retain the best and increase social services. Other contributions are less than enthralling (a paragraph on firefighting foam?!?). As Chris Preble notes, one of the main failings of the current NDAA is ripping out any provisions to revisit the AUMFs passed after 9/11 and the Iraq War. Yet there are many other critical issues left untouched.

The key challenge is the executive branch can still pilfer funds for its pet projects, such as the border wall, that Congress has allocated for other means. This infringement on legislative oversight is troubling, and it is a symptom of the wider confusion over just how the Overseas Contingency Operations fund should be used. Continuing to authorize $71.5 billion for what amounts to a slush fund will be a decision we will look back on for decades with amazement. This financial black hole is not the place to stuff priorities that should be decided through the normal legislative process.

Funding the Space Force is a reckless effort in expanding bureaucratic waste. Instead, the effort should continue to be housed completely in the Air Force, not as the “Sixth Armed Force.” While there is a need for a civilian agency to regulate space travel and satellites, especially from the cyber security perspective, this step is a few years away and should run by a civilian agency, not a new military branch.

The U.S. continues to fail to place any restrictions on funds allocated to Saudi Arabia, which is troubling considering the recent attack in Pensacola and their continuing involvement in the War in Yemen, not to mention the long forgotten Khashoggi murder. The ongoing proxy war with Iran only inflames tensions in the region and jeopardizes American security structures. Emboldening Saudi adventures harms our security and endangers regional security.

We can leave on some positive steps, such as steps to prohibit the recognition of Crimea as Russian territory, and an expansion and update of strategies to counter influence by Russia and China. Overall though, we must stop funding priorities agnostically. We fund the military during a time of peace as if it is on a war footing. Given recent revelations about our war in Afghanistan, it’s a concern that we have not sought to move past this disaster and turn the page towards the future.

There’s much to hate in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY2020, which passed out of conference committee late yesterday evening (story here, summary in .pdf here). I suspect my colleagues will unpack or attack some of the details, but I’m generally annoyed by the top line – $738 billion – at a time when the annual federal budget deficit surpasses $1 trillion. The utter failure of elected officials in both parties to come to grips with our fiscal catastrophe, and align our overly ambitious strategy with our obvious resource constraints is frustrating in the extreme. If this NDAA passes, which seems all but certain, it will be yet another sign of how U.S. foreign policy is writing checks that Americans dare not cash.

But another part of the NDAA is utterly infuriating – the decision by the conferees to strip out two provisions that would have compelled Congress to revisit the 18-year old Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed after 9/11, and the Iraq war AUMF of 2002, and a separate but related provision stipulating that that authority did not grant the White House carte blanche for initiating a war with Iran, something that senior Trump administration officials have suggested. Both measures were passed in the House version of the NDAA, and with bipartisan support. The Senate, however, especially Senate Republicans, refused to consider such measures.

The oath of office that every member of Congress takes is not so dissimilar to that taken by members of the military: most importantly, they pledge to “support and defend the Constitution.” And that Constitution clearly states that the nation’s war powers are vested in the Legislative branch, not the Executive. In short, members of Congress who have refused to revisit the AUMF are, in effect, engaged in a dereliction of duty. But those who have blocked any consideration of the question, as has just happened, are guilty of a far greater breach of trust: they are actively subverting the Constitution. Shame on them.

This brazen attempt to prevent public oversight of America’s longest war might again pass unnoticed, were it not for the shocking revelations contained in a blockbuster Washington Post report yesterday. The report reveals that U.S. officials have been engaged in a protracted campaign to mislead the American people. Under three successive presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump — who all promised to avoid getting sucked into an open-ended nation-building mission, civilian and military leaders, writes the Post’s Craig Whitlock “failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan…, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

Such revelations are not all that surprising, sadly. Drawing on an important Cato study that he co-wrote with John Mueller earlier this year, John Glaser explains how U.S. leaders, “have rather persistently depicted a rosier picture than the facts warranted,” and he concludes that “this dishonesty, in fact, is a big part of why the war persists.”

There may be a ray of hope on the horizon, however. While at least some of their fellow senators are actively engaged in a campaign to thwart meaningful oversight of this never-ending war, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal yesterday declared that the Post’s revelations compelled public hearings. They are correct. But, as minority members on the Armed Services Committee, they can’t force such an inquiry. Who among the many GOP senators who have, in the past, spoken eloquently about the need to claw back the war powers will take up the mantle? Who else in the Senate believes that the American people deserve to know the truth about the war in Afghanistan? Who is this generation’s J. William Fulbright?

The Washington Post has obtained a huge cache of internal government documents containing hundreds of interviews with U.S. officials on the war in Afghanistan. The documents reveal a broadly shared official view that America’s longest war has been a failure, essentially from the start. Over the years, official assessments of the war were consistently positive, optimistic, hopeful, and confident in the progress being made on the ground. But behind closed doors, official assessments were starkly different. Post reporter Craig Whitlock writes:

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

…[The] interviews contain numerous admissions that the government routinely touted statistics that officials knew were distorted, spurious or downright false.

A person identified only as a senior National Security Council official said there was constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary.

“It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory and none of it painted an accurate picture,” the senior NSC official told government interviewers in 2016. “The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war.”

I would like to say that I was surprised by such shameless and cynical manipulation, but I wasn’t. Earlier this year, I published a Cato Policy Analysis with my co-author John Mueller, entitled Overcoming Inertia: Why It’s Time to End the War in Afghanistan. National leaders, we wrote, “have rather persistently depicted a rosier picture than the facts warranted.” This dishonesty, in fact, is a big part of why the war persists “despite the telltale signs of mission failure.” Our paper also included criticisms of the very issues – aid distribution, corruption, the failure of the train and equip mission, confusion about objectives, etc. – at which these mostly anonymous officials took aim.

The Post story draws on interviews conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). John Sopko, the Special Inspector General, admitted to the Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.” When asked why he refused to include the damning interviews in SIGAR reports, Sopko explained, “My job and my people’s job was to try to get the information to try to come up with best practices.” In other words, he viewed his job as scrutinizing the war effort only in the service of informing policymakers on how to better carry it out, not whether it should be, or even could be, carried out.

A senior National Security Council official fleshes this out a bit: “Bad news was often stifled. There was more freedom to share bad news if it was small — we’re running over kids with our MRAPs [armored vehicles] — because those things could be changed with policy directives. But when we tried to air larger strategic concerns about the willingness, capacity or corruption of the Afghan government, it was clear it wasn’t welcome.”

Again, minor tactical criticisms were acceptable. Raising questions about “larger strategic concerns,” not so much.

Apparently, two considerations outweighed the public’s interest in knowing the truth about the war. According to the NSC official, lying about the progress of the war “went on and on for two reasons…to make everyone involved look good, and to make it look like the troops and resources were having the kind of effect where removing them would cause the country to deteriorate.”

To review: (1) narrow self-interest discourages anyone from blowing the whistle; (2) only operational criticism, not strategic criticism, is welcome; and (3) the U.S. government’s top priority is to uphold the erroneous idea that withdrawing from Afghanistan is not a viable option. Together, these imperatives made systematic lying about the war a virtual inevitability.

On Afghanistan policy, as on many issues in Washington, DC, people often talk past each other. On the one hand, the publicly available evidence has long convincingly demonstrated that the war cannot be won and is in many ways illegitimate. And yet, critics of the war tend to face an impenetrable wall of reality-denying officials and their non-governmental counterparts, most of whom toe the line about how we’re making progress. They are willing to continue to expend taxpayer dollars and human life for a lost cause. It doesn’t make for constructive policy debate.

CNN’s Jim Sciutto called this latest document reveal “a Pentagon Papers moment.” In a sense, he’s right. The Pentagon Papers revealed that government officials systematically lied to the American people about the Vietnam War and the prospects for victory. But as Micah Zenko put it in reaction to the Post story: “US civilian and military officials have misled the public for every war I’ve studied (Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, ‘non-battlefield’ drone wars).” Which is to say, the key lesson here is not just that officials consistently lied to the public in order to continue a war in Afghanistan that they privately acknowledged looked like a failure, but rather a broader point: credulously accepting official justifications for war goes against the advice of history.

Last year, the United States asked South Korea for a hefty, 50 percent increase in financial support to cover some of the costs of basing 28,000 troops on South Korean territory. American and Korean negotiators eventually settled on a $925 million, one-year deal that marked an 8.2 percent increase from the previous year. President Trump, evidently dissatisfied by this sum, upped the ante this year and is demanding $5 billion, a 500 percent increase, in the current round of cost-sharing talks.

What makes Trump’s $5 billion shakedown especially vexing is the fact that South Korea has been a very good ally when it comes to burden sharing. Trump’s insistence that U.S. allies ought to bear a greater burden for their defense, a sentiment expressed by many previous U.S. administrations, is reasonable, but some allies—South Korea in particular—do a good job of shouldering their fair share.

It’s unclear how Trump came up with the $5 billion figure, but this seems to be a first push at getting an ally to pay his “cost plus 50” formula—the full cost of deployed troops plus 50 percent extra. Currently, South Korean payments go toward the salaries of their citizens employed as workers on U.S. bases and military construction expenses, though Seoul has not covered either of these two categories in full. According to the Pentagon, the $925 million Seoul paid in 2019 represents about 41 percent of the “day-to-day nonpersonnel-stationing costs” for American forces in South Korea. This percentage implies that South Korea would pay roughly $2 billion if it covered these costs in full, which comes to less than half of Trump’s demand.

South Korea is understandably flabbergasted by Trump’s $5 billion figure. Criticism in the South Korean press that the United States would be little more than a glorified mercenary force should Seoul cave to Trump’s demand is fair given that getting to $5 billion would most likely require South Korea to pay U.S. troops’ salaries. American negotiators walked out of initial talks, throwing into doubt hopes that the U.S. would eventually step back from the figure and give Seoul some breathing room. Additional reactions in South Korea have emphasized the significant erosion in trust between the allies as a result of Trump’s demand. Song Min-soon, a prominent and mainstream former diplomat, even raised the possibility of South Korea developing nuclear weapons to be less dependent on the United States.

South Korea has consistently demonstrated a serious commitment to burden sharing and self-defense in recent years. In July 2017, President Moon Jae-in announced that he would increase military spending from 2.4 to 2.9 percent of GDP during his time in office; most NATO countries don’t spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense. About one-third of South Korea’s military budget is devoted to the acquisition of highly capable, modern weapons systems including missile defense interceptors and radars, destroyers equipped with the Aegis battle management system, submarines, and the U.S.-made F‑35 aircraft. Seoul also picked up 90 percent of the $10.8 billion tab for the construction of Camp Humphreys, America’s largest overseas military base.

Trump’s cost-sharing hardball with South Korea will have knock-on effects for alliance politics in 2020. Similar agreements with Japan and NATO are coming up for renewal and negotiations on new terms will begin next year. According to a report by Foreign Policy, the Trump administration plans on asking Japan to increase their contribution from $2 billion per year to $8 billion, an increase of 300 percent. On the Korean peninsula, a rift in the U.S.-South Korea alliance created by the $5 billion demand will almost certainly hinder cooperation on diplomacy with North Korea.

Alliances should not be sacrosanct. The United States should not be afraid to demand more financial, military, and political support from allies that have much more at stake in facing regional challenges than far-away Washington. However, requesting a 500 percent increase in host nation support from South Korea—an ally that has consistently demonstrated its willingness to grow its monetary and military contribution to its own defense—isn’t a smart strategic move; it’s thinly veiled extortion.

In our book, Fuel to the Fire, John Glaser, A. Trevor Thrall, and I lament how "the fear of a rising China" was fast becoming "the most popular candidate for a new guiding principle in U.S. foreign policy." Indeed, in an era of hyper partisanship, it is notable how the idea of a new Cold War draws so many advocates on both the left and right.

There are some notable exceptions, to be sure. In July, a distinguished group of China scholars and U.S. foreign policy experts penned an open letter explaining "China is not an enemy." And, earlier this week, the just-launched Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft released its very first policy brief. Written by the esteemed American diplomat Chas W. Freeman, Jr., it warns that the United States is making a mistake by embarking on "a new era of 'great power competition'" and advises instead that Washington and Beijing cooperate to tackle "planetwide problems."

In this same vein, among skeptics of the fearmongering surrounding China, Fareed Zakaria's essay in Foreign Affairs is likely to receive considerable attention. In it, Zakaria assails many of the leading arguments for why Americans (and the rest of the world) should be panicked by China's growing wealth and power.

Importantly, Zakaria echoes Patrick Porter's observations in a Cato paper (and forthcoming book) concerning the so-called liberal international order and China's supposedly unique threat to that order. Both writers are anxious to correct the myths and misconceptions surrounding international relations before China's emergence. "It is...worth remembering," Zakaria writes, "that the liberal international order was never as liberal, as international, or as orderly as it is now nostalgically described."

"A more realistic image," he goes on:

is that of a nascent liberal international order, marred from the start by exceptions, discord, and fragility. The United States, for its part, often operated outside the rules of this order, making frequent military interventions with or without UN approval; in the years between 1947 and 1989, when the United States was supposedly building up the liberal international order, it attempted regime change around the world 72 times. It reserved the same right in the economic realm, engaging in protectionism even as it railed against more modest measures adopted by other countries.

Nevertheless, on the whole, there is relative peace and stability in the world, and trade -- despite recent "backsliding on some measures of globalization" -- is still more free than it was a generation ago. In that context, Zakaria writes, "China hardly qualifies as a mortal danger to this imperfect order." It "has acted in ways that are interventionist, mercantilist, and unilateral—but often far less so than other great powers."

In sum, "The nature of the challenge from China is different from and far more complex than what the new alarmism portrays. On the single most important foreign policy issue of the next several decades, the United States is setting itself up for an expensive failure."

He's right. A course correction is needed. This essay could help. You can find it here.

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Fuel to the Fire provides an assessment of Trump's America First doctrine, its performance to date, and its implications for the future.

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