My foreign policy journey did not begin in the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but it accelerated and intensified there.
I was a Political Science/International Relations baccalaureate at New York’s Hunter College that day, thanks to GI Bill benefits I had earned as a Marine. In the service, I had already experienced American foreign policy in the real world. I was studying under committed realist professors when I responded to the attacks in Manhattan as a National Guard soldier.
What happened that day and in the next two decades shaped, and eventually changed, my understanding of what a realist foreign policy looks like for America.
Like all New Yorkers, I spent that day and those that followed dealing with rage, fear, and a desire for action. My ability to participate and support rescue and recovery operations was a mixed blessing. It gave me an immediate avenue to serve my community and the nation. But it came with a firsthand view of the devastation wrought by our attackers, which informed a desire for revenge and punishment.
Today, my view of realism doesn’t look like it did then, and it doesn’t look like how America’s foreign policy has generally been practiced since.
To be sure, America’s immediate military response to the attacks on September 11 were proper. But, once we had justly and swiftly defeated the bulk of Al Qaeda’s forces in Afghanistan and driven their Taliban hosts from power, our unrealistic overreach began.
First, we focused efforts on nation-building and democratization in Afghanistan. We invited our NATO allies to join us in this effort, far from the core of their own security. Then, quite separately and tragically, American leaders convinced themselves to overthrow the Iraq regime. As a New Yorker, a soldier, and a “conservative” Bush voter, I supported this. My shallow undergraduate understanding of realism had me seeing America’s actions as positive. After all, “the strong do what they will, the weak do what they must.”
I deployed to Iraq in 2004. There I witnessed corruption, the sectarian and tribal divides, and the culture of violence. Still, I celebrated the infamous “Purple Thumb Election,” Iraq’s first post-Saddam election, in 2005.
In 2008, I was in Afghanistan. Corruption, sectarian violence, and ethnic tribal divides pervade that nation as well. Despite knowing somewhere deep down that democracy was just as impossible there, I bought in as a soldier, saluting the flag and digging into nation building.
All through these events and well beyond them, I drafted my skewed version of realism into the service of my emotional approach to the world. I imagined that Ken Pollack and Fareed Zakaria could be taken for their word, as realists. I wanted what I learned from my realist-oriented professors to match the policies and outcomes I had been ordered to help enact.
After returning from Afghanistan, I resumed civilian life and began participating more directly in domestic politics. Barack Obama had been elected while I was deployed and was inaugurated soon after I returned. Like many Republicans, I reflexively opposed all things Obama, and thus opposed his drawing down the size of our deployment in Iraq, deeply distrusting his messaging that all “combat forces” were out of Iraq. (In fact, many combat units remained in the country.)
As the Obama presidency wore on, I remained steadfastly opposed to most of his policies and actions in global affairs. The notable exception was Neptune Spear, the operation to finally take Osama bin Laden off the board. But those experiences in the Mid-East continued to remind my subconscious of the ongoing failure of our policies there.
When Donald Trump first talked in 2015 of ending forever wars, I was still dubious. Part of me was still emotionally committed to winning those wars.
During his first term, my outlook began changing. Someone handed me a copy of Barry Posen’s Restraint. It led me to question most of my prior thinking (though it did not fully convince me). Posen’s book also caused me to go back and reread many of the realists I had studied in the years before Iraq, such as Robert Jervis, Kenneth Waltz, and Stephen Walt. I was reminded that realism did not automatically imply an aggressive approach.
Emotions also began to sway me in a new direction. My goddaughter, newly baptized just weeks before September 11, had just turned 18. The thought of her potentially serving in a military still at war after almost two decades brought me full circle.
As I engage in discussions on foreign policy today, whether personal or professional, I notice that, more often than not, those that disagree with realism make simplistic and emotional arguments. They derogate restraint as isolationism, and predict global catastrophe if America adopts restraint.
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This is not unexpected, nor, dare I say, unrealistic. We should anticipate that in matters of war, alliances, and “national honor,” even educated and rational persons can fall back on their emotions. It’s a hard journey out of groupthink.
My personal journey from a neoconservative approach to foreign policy to one of restraint took almost two decades after September 11, 2001. In that time, I lost many comrades in combat, and others to the suicide epidemic among Global War on Terror veterans. I’ve now attuned the emotions of those losses with the critical thinking skills I chose to ignore for too long.
We must recommit ourselves, as a nation, to making decisions of war and peace based on our best rational analyses, not on emotions or the ideas of self-appointed keepers of conventional wisdom. If we don’t, another generation may lose young men and women to the misguided decisions of those too proud to question their own assumptions.
