Another Unwinnable War

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos writes:

A firestorm over whether the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a second strike on survivors after their “drug boat” was bombed back in September has brought the legality of the entire campaign out of the so called “fog of war” and more widely into the public court of opinion. And that’s a good thing. 

“Hopefully, members of Congress will take this opportunity to reexamine the entire boat bombing scheme as a whole,” said Brian Finucane, a former counterterrorism legal advisor for the U.S. State Department. “The White House has been using military force at sea without congressional authorization and in defiance of the War Powers Resolution. More lawmakers should join the bipartisan pushback against this unauthorized killing spree as well as a potential unauthorized war with Venezuela.”

The episode involving the killing of survivors has also spurred investigations, led by top Republicans on each of the armed services committees—a rare breaking of ranks. They have been publicly questioning Hegseth’s behavior and culpability in what is widely considered by legal experts to be a violation of international human rights law—that is, if you believe that the U.S. is engaging in a legal armed conflict with drug cartels. If you do not believe the United States is in an armed conflict (Finucane’s position), killing the survivors would still be a violation of the U.S. Code of Military Justice—premeditated “murder on the high seas.”

“You don’t have to have served in the military to understand that that was a violation of ethical, moral and legal code,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), said this week. Admiral Frank Bradley, head of U.S. Special Operations Command, who was in charge of the September strike in question, briefed senators in a closed door meeting on Thursday. It is the second with senators since they have asked the administration to explain their strategy and authorities for the strikes overall. They left that one unimpressed, too, according to reports. In making the case, the administration has referred to a still-secret memo that assures that the U.S. is legally in a formal state of armed conflict with “narcoterrorist” drug cartels and their boats are carrying drugs to finance that conflict.

Several lawmakers who were in the closed door hearing shared that they were more concerned than ever after hearing what the admiral had to say. This wasn’t a wholly partisan response. According to Axios, senior member of the House Armed Services Committee Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) said that he was particularly “concerned” and wondered aloud why the survivors weren’t captured, tried, and convicted and instead “subject to capital punishment.”

Even the traditionally hawkish Wall Street Journal editorial board has weighed in on the matter with circumspection.

“The charge of deliberately killing the defenseless is serious enough to warrant a close look from Congress,” the editors wrote, continuing:

Our view is that the Commander in Chief deserves legal latitude as part of his constitutional war powers. But that doesn’t extend to shooting the wounded in violation of U.S. and international rules of war. The Pentagon’s own law of war manual prohibits “hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors.” Such excesses will also turn the public against allowing a President the power he may someday need to defend the country’s interests quickly.

Ahead of the closed-door meeting Thursday, defense officials said Bradley would be telling members of Congress that he had ordered a legitimate second strike because the survivors, accused drug smugglers, had called for help from another boat and looked to be securing the drugs on the ship (which had been earlier reported by Hegseth to be so consumed in flames that he could not see if anyone was alive).

In any case, it is a political and professional squeeze for Hegseth, who also faces scrutiny this week for his role in “Signalgate” earlier this year. According to reports, a Pentagon inspector general report has found that he violated security protocols and endangered U.S. troops and objectives by using the Signal messaging app to chat about the operational details of U.S. strikes on Yemen in March.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) played down the implications of the findings in an interview Wednesday night, but nonetheless acknowledged that “we have a duty both in Congress and the Executive to ensure … every time you send troops in harm’s way ... you want to keep [communications] as close to the vest as possible. I think overall I think the perception is it was a bit reckless…You don’t want to give the enemy advance notice of your intentions.” 

“All of this adds up to very, very poor judgment,” Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CBS Wednesday night. “As I said at his confirmation hearing, I did not believe he had the competence, the temperament, and experience to be secretary of defense, and he has proven that.”

In addition to legal experts like Finucane, military veterans and lawmakers, including Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Ro Khanna (D-CA), told The American Conservative Wednesday that the diminishing confidence in Hegseth’s helming of the Pentagon invites a much bigger reckoning of Trump’s campaign to bomb so-called narco boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, of which there have been more than 20 incidents and more than 80 people killed to date.

“I do think this is turning the debate,” Khanna said of the “double-strike” or “double-tap” imbroglio. “Listen, I don’t think the people want an American government killing on their behalf when there is no explanation of why or standards being set. People in this country are very proud of their national defense but they have a great sense of a moral compass and they don’t like that people are being killed that may or may not be guilty. There is a rule of law.”

The increasing scrutiny could breathe more oxygen into efforts on Capitol Hill to rein in what the president is doing. Massie joined Democratic House members to introduce a war powers bill this week to block the administration from engaging in strikes against Venezuela. It is one of several (so far failed) attempts in Congress this year to curb Trump’s powers to engage military force without congressional authorization, which both Massie and Khanna believe is unconstitutional.

“We can debate the finer points of whether they're allowed to do a second strike... but the reality is, the first strike was illegal, and all of the other strikes were illegal, and you're saying it's terrorism that authorizes them to do this, but that's quite a stretch,” Massie told TAC Wednesday. “There’s not even an AUMF [authorization for the use of military force] like when they typically talk about the Global War on Terror. Congress hasn’t even declared a Global War on Narco Terrorism, yet, right? That doesn’t exist.”

Critics who take this view are concerned the forest is being missed for the trees, that all the talk about the legality of killing survivors ignores the bigger picture.

“Those rushing to their partisan corners to condemn or defend Secretary Hegseth on the narrow grounds of this latest news cycle have lost sight of the fact that this whole campaign is an unlawful enterprise built on obfuscation, executive overreach, and a largely supine Congress,” said Brandan Buck, an Afghanistan War veteran who is now a foreign policy fellow at the Cato Institute.

“The scandal that has unfolded from the alleged ‘double tap’ incident elides the real scandal with ‘Operation Southern Spear,’ that the Trump administration is waging an air and naval war against noncombatants who don’t pose an immediate threat to Americans and is doing so without Congressional authorization,” he added.

Matthew Hoh, also an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, said he too, would like to see the lens of the debate around Hegseth widened out for a full airing of the Executive Branch’s unaccountable, illegal use of military force over the last 25 years.

“I am glad this conversation is coming up and I am pleased to see some of the critique coming from Republicans. Of course I would have preferred to see this conversation occur when the Obama administration was doing double tap strikes against first responders and hitting funerals,” not to mention U.S. culpability in Israel war crimes in the recent war in Gaza, he told TAC.

“To say that what the Trump administration is doing without acknowledging the precedent that has allowed it to conduct such actions means such actions are likely to occur again in the future, regardless of what action is taken against this administration,” Hoh added.

“I should add I think that ultimately any real action, in terms of proscriptions on drone warfare for example, is unlikely as I think this is more ultimately about the administration, than about the policies and infrastructure of American overseas warfare that have been in place for decades.”

A aforementioned Brandan Buck writes:

“We’ve been told for decades the US military must go everywhere and do the impossible all over the world. But the red line for permanent Washington is using the military to destroy narco-terrorists in our own hemisphere.” So declared Vice President JD Vance in response to mounting criticism of the Trump administration’s operations against alleged drug-traffickers in the waters off Venezuela.

Much of the criticism has centred on the role of Secretary of Defense — ahem, War — Pete Hegseth’s decision to “double tap” the alleged traffickers: hitting survivors a second time to ensure death — after they’ve already been incapacitated. Such conduct is indeed ethically troubling, however, the current controversy elides the larger issues.

I should know. After a stint in the army, I served as a targeting analyst attached to the Joint Special Operations Command from 2011 to 2013, helping to identify Taliban targets for elimination or capture. For all the flaws of what used to be called the Global War on Terror, my comrades and I acted according to tight restrictions, guided by the laws of war. Furthermore we conducted our operations against armed combatants and under the authority of an Authorization for Use of Military Force voted on by Congress.

The current controversy misses the bigger flaw in the administration’s hemispheric operations: contrary to Vance’s arguments, the extralegal operations against trafficking don’t repudiate “permanent Washington” — but offer it succour. The military-industrial complex and the hawkish security establishment want nothing more than to see the nation embroiled in yet another long and constitutionally dubious conflict with unclear goals and the potential to topple yet another government willy-nilly.

In the two decades after 9/11, the Bush and Obama administrations launched several wars of this kind, wasting thousands of American lives and trillions of taxpayer dollars — for what, exactly? In 2016, Trump clinched the GOP presidential nomination by condemning this enormous waste. Now, by embracing a state of never-ending war and state of emergency, a condition declared by an omnipotent executive branch, the second Trump administration has embraced essential elements of the deep state, the very machine the Trumpians were twice elected to dismantle.

Once upon a time, American conservatives were deeply committed to resisting the expansion of presidential war powers. Indeed, “Mr. Republican” himself, Sen. Robert A. Taft, commenting on the state of American pseudo-belligerency in the North Atlantic in 1941, argued that “if the President can declare or create an undeclared naval war beyond [Congress’s] power to act upon, the Constitution might just as well be abolished”.

Conservative Republicans similarly balked at President Truman’s unilateral use of military force in Korea and other trappings of the early Cold War state, arguing that the condition of permanent emergency empowered their liberal political enemies, “the war party” at the expense of constitutional norms and limited government.

They lost that political fight, and a new paradigm of an empowered presidency, tasked with securing an ever-expanding set of “national-security” interests, was born. Over the course of the Cold War and afterward, presidents from both parties upheld this new model, one that sanctioned a massive, permanent military bureaucracy. Americans became inured to a chief executive who could order US troops into combat with little to no congressional input, seeing the empowered presidency as an essential component of a modern state. The imperial presidency, as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called it, became the core political supposition of postwar America, one that survived the interregnum of Watergate and the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

Throughout the Global War on Terror, successive presidents from both parties leaned on this legacy to justify military action in Yemen, Somalia, and Syria — wars conducted without explicit congressional authorisation or clear, achievable political ends. Indeed, the open-endedness of these “forever wars” made possible by unbounded executive authority provided an essential plank for the MAGA platform, one that the Trump administration is now ripping up. The White House is instead doubling down on the original endless war, on the assumption that attempting the impossible in one’s neighbourhood — winning the war on drugs — is somehow more prudent than attempting “the impossible all over the world”.

Southern Spear, as with the War on Terror and the Cold War before it, conserves another component of permanent Washington: namely, a permanent emergency based on emotionalism and obfuscation. Under the imperial presidency, America’s wars have been sold via slippery language and amorphous geographical and conceptual boundaries. Washington inched its way into both world wars based, in part, on open-ended conceptions of neutrality and shifting boundaries of the Western Hemisphere. In both Korea and Vietnam, such quagmires were deepened through incremental escalation, crises that silenced debate and left tens of thousands of American dead.

More recently, the Global War on Terror, a quixotic war against a tactic — terrorism — yielded a 20-year morass without an achievable political objective, all the while furthering the growth of the security state at home. Throughout the War on Terror, the security state sold adventurism abroad by personalizing and inflating the threat of terrorism at home, making individual Americans unduly afraid that they could be the victims of terror. In all of these wars, the real winners were the Beltway bureaucrats — Vance’s permanent Washington — who administered them, often in careers that spanned eras, thereby preventing genuine national-security reform.

In Latin America, the Trump administration is conserving the core interests of permanent Washington. The White House has not only preserved the imperial presidency, but expanded its powers. While Trump’s recent predecessors pushed the boundaries of existing Authorizations for the Use of Military Force, the Trump administration, through a novel interpretation of the terrorism designation, has given itself the authority to commit acts of war. The administration’s obscurantism about the strikes and its guiding strategy for them are another inherited facet of permanent Washington’s predilection for secrecy in the service of unachievable goals.

The Trump administration is employing the same narrative games used by previous administrations. The primary rhetorical vehicle, the fluctuating label of “narcoterrorism”, once applied to acts of terror in service of the drug trade, has been applied to the trade itself. Similarly, the administration and its supporters have spuriously compared overdose deaths — tragic as they are — to American combat casualties. Associating an overdose of American at home to the death of an American draftee in the rice paddies of Vietnam is an absurd conflation that strips the drug epidemic of its context. This narrative slippage is but the latest example of Washington’s shameless shifting of symbols to prep the public for another unwinnable war like the ones that defined much of my career as a soldier and intelligence professional.

Someday in the near future, the Trump era will end. Betraying its campaign pledges, the Trump administration has not served as a disruptive force for permanent Washington, the deep state, or whatever euphemism one favours for the suite of institutions and assumptions that guide American geopolitics in the postwar era. By remilitarising the War on Drugs — to say nothing of a potential regime change in Venezuela — the White House is breathing new life into the political forces that it claimed to oppose.

Southern Spear is not a break with permanent Washington — it is its logical conclusion.

And the one and only Sohrab Ahmari writes:

Ever since the 2015 escalator ride that led Donald Trump to the presidency, conservative writers — including me — have tried and failed to offer a systematic account of his worldview. The newly-published White House National Security Strategy (NSS) document is, in some ways, the latest attempt at doing the same thing.

The document is an effective articulation of Trumpian foreign policy. It repeatedly emphasises hard national interest over airy liberal-interventionist ideology, and realism over adherence to the “rules-based order” for its own sake. Yet it’s also racked with internal contradictions and — more importantly — is likely to crash against the man’s own mercurial tendencies, which can never be stuffed into any neat mental scheme.

Most interesting is the NSS’s statement of principles and priorities which should guide American statecraft at home and abroad in the 21st century. Here, the document sounds many refreshing notes after the hubris of post-Cold War liberal interventionism of both the Left- and Right-wing varieties.

Out, says the NSS, is any notion of “traditional political ideology” and the baggy definitions of the national interest that led Washington to treat pretty much the whole world as part of its sphere of influence. In its place, the document insists on a clear and narrower definition of the American interest. It is one marked by a “predisposition to non-interventionism”, a “flexible realism” (read: willingness to work with friendly authoritarian regimes), a balance-of-power approach to checking global domination by other contenders (read: mostly China), and a focus on sovereignty and the wellbeing of US workers.

The document’s list of priorities fits with its statement of principles. These include ending mass immigration, the protection of America’s heritage rights and liberties, and greater burden-sharing within various US alliance systems (crank up your defence budgets, Eurocrats). On the political-economic front, the NSS counsels “balanced trade” — which is Trump-speak for closing massive trade deficits — and the renewal of America’s industrial base, including for the military.

These principles and priorities may not seem all that novel. Indeed, a Democrat like Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s former national security advisor, could easily sign up to many of them. He, too, emphasised hard-nosed realism about Chinese trade, a pro-worker global strategy, and industrial renewal.

But this only underscores the success of Trump and his supporters in shattering the post-Cold War “Washington Consensus” which promoted neoliberal globalisation and ever-deeper transnational integration. So disastrous was that consensus from a US domestic perspective, it’s hard to imagine any mainstream Democratic foreign-policy guru advising the restoration of the older free-trade regime or dismissing manufacturing as something Washington can safely leave to the Chinese.

Yet while the Trumpians deserve credit for injecting a new realism into Washington’s strategic bloodstream, they have plenty of ideological blind spots. References to industrial protectionism in the new document mark a welcome shift for the GOP, which was once the vehicle of choice for offshoring corporations chasing wage and regulatory arbitrage in the developing world. But as the writer Julius Krein points out, to make protectionism work, you first need to have industries to protect.

That requires, in addition to tariffs, a government willing to take an active role in directing investment and gearing the economy towards production rather than consumption. Industrial policy, in other words. Yet the phrase — and the concept — appear nowhere in the NSS because they remain taboo in a Republican Party still beholden to aspects of Reaganite ideology and a power base dominated by small business and regional capital. Instead, the NSS regurgitates the same old talking points about deregulation and tax cuts that you’d find on the free-market editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.

More importantly, the document’s rhetoric about a non-interventionist disposition and a non-ideological foreign policy is belied by the fact that the Trump administration appears poised to start a regime-change war with Venezuela, framed in part as a matter of promoting hemispheric democracy and defeating dictatorship.

If carried out, such a war would almost certainly draw Washington into yet another nation-building exercise and prompt an exodus of migrants bound for el norte. This outcome would transform the NSS into yet another feckless exercise by Right-wing intellectuals to define on paper a Trumpism that doesn’t exist in the real world.