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AFTER THE COLD WAR,
the United States became a “hyperpower,” with the world’s strongest military force and leadership of a mighty alliance. Several decades on, things have changed, and two former secretaries of defense warn that U.S. leaders have not tended to the country’s valuable soft power assets. From the June 23, 2020, online program “Former U.S. Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates and James Mattis.” ROBERT GATES, Former U.S. Secretary of Defense; Author, Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World In conversation with JAMES MATTIS, Ret. United States Marine General; Former U.S. Secretary of Defense
THE MILITARY CASE FOR USING NONMILITARY POWER
Robert M. Gates
JAMES MATTIS: Secretary Gates is my former boss, predecessor in office, and an inspiring role model. He was likened in one recent review as the rare foot soldier who rises to high command.
Secretary Gates, in reading your book, one that I would be reassured were required reading for presidents and cabinet officers when they come into office, I was struck by you attributing a large part of America’s 25-year decline in status and prestige to the failure of post-Cold War presidents and Congresses to recognize. resource and effectively used what you call our arsenal of nonmilitary instruments of power. Can you explain this fundamental failure and the significance of the title that you chose for your book?
ROBERT GATES: First of all, thanks Jim, for participating in this, and thanks to The Commonwealth Club for inviting me.
The germ of the book really began with the question in my mind of how the United States had gone from a position of supreme power in 1993, probably unrivaled since the Roman empire in every dimension of power, to a country today beset by challenges everywhere. How did we get here?
So I began looking at all of the major foreign policy challenges we’d had since 1993 and thinking about what we had done and what we had not done that contributed to decline in our role in the world and our power in the world. What I came up with was a set of nonmilitary instruments of power that had played such an important role
James Mattis
in our success in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and had largely been neglected and withered after the end of the Cold War. At a time when we continued to fund our military, we basically dismantled all of the nonmilitary instruments of power, from diplomacy to economic leverage to strategic communications and more
As I looked at the situations—at these challenges from Somalia and Haiti in 1993 and others right up to our relationship with Russia and China today, and North Korea— it occurred to me that we had failed in many respects to figure out how to compete with these powers outside of the military realm. The reality is, of the 15 challenges that I write about, for all practical purposes I considered 13 to be failures, and that’s why in the title, the word failures comes first. There are a couple of successes, and they’re important successes, and there are some lessons to be learned from those as well. We had a lot of problems during that 20-, 27-year period.
I would just conclude by saying, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan both began with very quick military victories. The problem that [I] identified, whether it was Iraq and Afghanistan or Somalia or Haiti or others, was that once we had achieved military victory, we then changed our mission. We then decided to move to trying to bring democracy and reform the governments of those countries. And that’s where we ran into failure. MATTIS: Secretary Gates, I’d like to go more deeply into what you just mentioned, this symphony of power. Could you give a brief overview of the type of instruments you’re referring to and where they might be more applicable, perhaps, or most likely than using the military form of power? And if they’re not played, why aren’t they played? But start, please, with what are the judgments? What do you look to bring on into the forefront here? GATES: So the two primarily coercive instruments of power are obviously the military, but I would say also cyber. In my opinion, cyber has actually become the most effective weapon that a nation can have, because it can accomplish military, political and economic harm to one’s adversary. It’s difficult to identify who perpetrated a cyber attack. It takes time to figure out attribution, and the more damage that was done the more important it is to identify exactly where the ones and zeros came from. So cyber is a huge player now in a way that it has never been before. It can dismantle or disarm weapons. It can redirect weapons. It can shut down infrastructure in countries. So it’s a very versatile weapon, and it doesn’t take the kind of enormous expenditure of money that a nuclear enterprise or even a chemical or biological threat would represent.
So I think cyber is a very important one. We’ve been pretty good about developing it for our military purposes, but I think we have not taken advantage of it in an offensive way,
with respect to either political or economic targets.
Another important instrument is clearly economic measures, and these can be both carrots and sticks. The truth is, we’ve developed the sticks part of the economic instrument pretty well. We levy sanctions on any country that looks at us cross-eyed, and it’s become actually very complicated for a lot of companies, because we’ve got so many sanctions against so many countries, figuring out how you can do business internationally and stay within U.S. law [has] become a fulltime enterprise for lawyers and accountants in these companies.
So we’ve got the sticks part of it down pretty well—embargoes, tariffs, sanctions and so on. Where we have fallen down and where we once had real capability is in how do we use economic assistance or [the] economy as an asset, as a carrot to encourage, to induce other countries to do what we would like for them to do, or to follow policies that we would like for them to follow, whether it’s loans at discounts, whether it’s economic concessions, trade concessions and so on.
We’re very good as I said at sanctions; we’re not so hot at figuring out how we might advantage someone in dealing with us. Now, President Clinton and President Bush both were pretty good with Africa when they arranged debt relief for a number of African countries back in the 1990s and the early 2000s. That really helped a lot of African countries, but that’s a rare example of us using economic measures as an instrument of power.
Strategic communications, or as we used to call it in the Cold War, propaganda— how do we get our message around the world? The Chinese have developed this to an extraordinary degree. Several years ago, [former Chinese President] Hu Jintao, allocated $7 billion for the Chinese to build a strategic communications network around the world. We, on the other hand, in 1998, dismantled the United States Information Agency and tucked what we call “public diplomacy” into a corner of the State Department. Various elements of our government do strategic communications, but there’s no coherent strategy. Each kind of goes its own way. We also lack the capabilities and reach that the Chinese have.
There are a variety of other instruments, Jim, that [I’ll] just briefly mention. Things like intelligence and how we use it with other countries, science and technology, our higher education, our culture, use of nationalism— as we watch Russia and China interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, we have failed to use their own nationalistic feelings to help build their resistance to what the Chinese and the Russians and others are doing. Religion is an important instrument. We haven’t thought about it in that way, but religion has played a big part in international affairs, particularly since the end of the Cold War. All you have to do is look at the role of religion in motivating terrorists to see that it has real power.
So there are a dozen or more of these instruments. The problem is we have neither resourced them, nor have we figured out a coherent strategy on how to bring them together, as I call it in the book, in a symphony where they play together and each strengthens the other and overall strengthens the hand of the United States in dealing with the rest of the world. MATTIS: Why haven’t we enlisted these other instruments in the symphony of power? If America has the power of intimidation, if we’re threatened, obviously in an imperfect world we need the military, we need the CIA, but why haven’t we summoned the instruments of inspiration that are so strong in America? What is the reluctance for us to use nonmilitary instruments? GATES: It’s a tough question to answer. I think part of it is that the Congress has been reluctant to fund these nonmilitary instruments, really going back to the end of the Cold War. It was Congress that disestablished USIA. It was Congress that wanted to disestablish the U.S. Agency for International Development. President Clinton stopped that, but still diminished USAID by bringing it under the State Department rather than as an independent agency.
The Congress has not funded the State Department properly. The State Department has been starved of resources, except for a couple of brief periods during the George W. Bush administration, when there was an increase in the number of foreign service officers. So there’s been a reluctance on the part of the Congress to fund these things. Congress hates development assistance. They’ve considered it a waste of time—if we’re going to spend money, why aren’t we spending it here at home rather than in other countries—and they don’t see how that can benefit the United States.
Finally, a big part of the reason is the reluctance of the Congress to fund it, and in all honesty, the reluctance for the most part on the part of all four administrations to push for such funding. The irony for me is that at a time when the Congress has become more and more resistant to the use of military force overseas in the aftermath or Iraq and Afghanistan, at the same time they’ve refused to fund or make more robust the nonmilitary instruments that could take the place of some of that military activity. MATTIS: In that regard, you brought up the war on Iraq. You mentioned earlier the change of mission, or what we call oftentimes in the Department of Defense mission creep. So we go into Iraq, and you write in the book that as happened so often after the Cold War, there was a lack of imagination in the White House and its State Department on how to access nongovernment civilian expertise in order to strengthen nonmilitary capabilities. They seemingly had no appreciation, you go on to say, of the importance of the private sector, apart from contractors, as an instrument of power. It just begs the question, How can we leverage the private sector? Obviously we keep the government
Left to right: Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talk during a visit to Mexico City on March 23, 2010. They attended the Merida Initiative Plenary, which focuses on helping the Mexican government fight drug-trafficking cartels and other security threats. (Photo by Master Sgt. Jerry Morrison, U.S. Air Force.)
out of some market things. We don’t want a government-run economy; but how do we enlist the private sector in enhancing our ability to basically exercise power, to again go to the nonmilitary aspects—how do we do that? GATES: The first thing is to recognize that it actually has something to contribute, and then you can figure out how to make it work. One of the things that frustrated all of us in the Department of Defense, I think through all of the Iraq and Afghan war experience, was the relatively few number of civilian experts. Here we were engaged in nationbuilding, and yet we had, relatively speaking, very few civilian experts who were in-country and helping make that happen. One of the instruments that had some effectiveness in both Iraq and Afghanistan was something called the provincial reconstruction teams— PRTs. At the peak of our presence in Iraq, we had 170,000 troops in the country, and we had 360 civilians in all of those PRTs in the entire country of Iraq.
So one of the things that I proposed as secretary of defense that got no traction— particularly, one of the things that we really could provide help with was helping both the Afghans and the Iraqis in terms of improving their farming techniques, improving how they took care of their herds, and that kind of thing. They’re both basically rural countries. So I suggested to the State Department, “Why don’t you go to our country’s land grant universities?”—I’d been the president of Texas A&M, so I knew what these universities were doing around the world in terms of their faculties working in very inhospitable and insecure situations—“Why don’t you go to these universities and ask them to partner with us and augment what we’re trying to do in these countries?”
Many of the faculty members were already in those countries, so how could we help them and how could we help provide some funding and so on? We also have the advantage that the head of the Association of [Public &] Land Grant Universities was a man named Peter McPherson, who’d been the president of Michigan State University, but also the head of USAID under President Reagan. So here was a guy who knew what we needed to do and who could have galvanized these universities to really be a powerful partner for us. Nothing ever happened.
Similarly, I think that where we can use the private sector or where we can partner with the private sector is in figuring out how we are going to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative, this trillion-dollar program of infrastructure, building ports and airports and highways and sports arenas, and so on, in most places around the world. You know, a lot of these things are white elephant projects. They involve a lot of debt for the receiving country. The Chinese make these countries sign contracts with Chinese construction companies to do these things. They don’t pay much attention to doing things honestly or in ways that actually benefit the people of the countries that are receiving these.
We can’t compete with that; the Chinese through their state-owned enterprises and banks and so on can find the cash to fund these projects. We can’t do that. Our economy and our government just [are] not structured that way.
But what we have is a private sector that invests all over the world. How can the United States partner with private companies in the United States and incentivize them to invest in some of these developing countries and bring jobs, bring environmental concern, bring sustainability in a way that doesn’t saddle these countries with projects that end up being useless, or saddle the countries with huge amounts of debt? We don’t really
do much in the way of trying to incentivize companies to move down that path, and it’s a resource that I think we could make better use of.
And then finally, I would say we have all these enormous numbers of churches and charities and others that do projects around the world, whether it’s in terms of health, and alleviating or getting rid of diseases, the work of the Gates Foundation and a number of others. They often don’t want much to do with the government, but is there a way we can augment their activities and we work in partnership with them? How can we work together? And frankly, there just isn’t much done to try and move down that road.
So these are just three examples of where I think we just haven’t been very imaginative in terms of how we can leverage our great strengths and translate that into efforts to shape the international environment in a way that serves our national interests. We don’t need to be altogether altruistic in these efforts; after all, it’s the responsibility of the president and the government to advance American interests and protect interests around the world. But that means you have to shape the international environment, and these are the tools that you can use to shape the international environment. MATTIS: We have tried, on many occasions, to shape the environment, as you point out, not very imaginatively and not, very frankly, successfully. We have tried to help multiple countries gain peace and stability. One of the successes, though, was the Columbia plan, and that one worked. Why did that one stand out? Why did that one work when it’s among such a number—over a dozen of what I think could objectively be called failures? GATES: Yeah, Columbia was a success, and it was a success under multiple presidents. So by the late 1990s, Columbia was on the verge of becoming a narco state, a criminal state. The leftist insurgency, the FARC, was on the verge of being able to take control of the country and the government. What made
Right: Colombian President Álvaro Uribe meets with U.S. President Barack Obama. (Photo by the White House.) Below, Former Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates (left) and James Mattis during their Commonwealth Club program.
our effort in working with the Colombians successful in controlling and then defeating the FARC was, first of all, we had a very strong partner in Columbia. The president of Columbia, President [Álvaro] Uribe, was a very strong person. He was an honest person, and he was determined to defeat the FARC.
So we started with a president who was committed to democratic principles and the rule of law and who was determined to lead this fight, at considerable risk to himself; he survived a number of assassination attempts.
The second thing that helped us was that there were already some basic institutions in Columbia—they were weak, but they had been established, and we could help strengthen those institutions inside Columbia. They helped carry the fight. That included both the police and the military, but also the judicial system. Over the course of the Colombian partnership, the planned Colombia effort, the Justice Department trained some 40,000 judges in Columbia.
A third reason for success, I actually give credit to the Congress. The Congress limited the number of Americans who could be in Columbia at any given time to help the Colombian government. So when the plan started, they limited us to 400 military people and 400 contractors. That eventually rose to 800 military and 800 contractors. But that was it. So that meant that the Colombians had to fight the fight themselves, and our role had be limited to supporting them, training them and helping them become better at carrying the fight to the FARC. We couldn’t take over this enterprise, because of the limits that the Congress put on us.
So we were there in support of the Colombian government. And I think that was another reason for success —that it was up to the Colombians to solve the problem. We could help them, but we weren’t going to run the show and do it for them.
I think another factor was that this plan really had bipartisan support in Congress and was funded over a period of about 10 years or more by three successive presidents. So we had the time to make things work, and had the bipartisan support to get the funding. So for about $10 billion, over a 10- to 12- year period, we helped the Colombians put down the FARC and regain control of their own country. MATTIS: We’ve got a question coming in [from the audience]. How should the U.S. reestablish itself, vis-a-vis our allies?
I always used to think that as much as
I would proud of my marines and sailors, soldiers, airman, coast guardsman, and I knew that we were a threat to authoritarians, any objective review would say the bigger threat was America’s network of allies. That scared [authoritarians] more than anything. That was votes in the United Nations, that was nations willing to put troops in the field alongside us. How do we reestablish with our allies a degree of reliability as someone they can count on? Because this, when you talk about things being tarnished, it’s pretty clear that right now, a lot of allies or traditional allies, partners, they don’t have that same degree of confidence. GATES: It’s kind of amusing, it seems like Winston Churchill has a quote for every single possible situation. But one of his lines was “The only thing worse than having allies is not having allies.”
This is one thing that disturbs me about our current foreign policy. Our allies are a unique American instrument of power, a unique American asset. Russia and China have no allies. They have clients, but they have no allies—people with shared values and people who have a history of working together. No one pushed our allies harder than I did to increase their defense spending. And we need to keep that pressure on. They aren’t doing as much as they should, but that doesn’t mean we walk away from them if they’re unsuccessful at doing that.
They are a critically important asset for the United States. Let me give you an example on the economic arena, just to take it out of the military. So we think that for the playing field to be leveled, the Chinese have to make some structural changes in the way they operate their economy, they work with foreign businesses and investors, and so on.
Just think how much more powerful our bargaining position would be if on our side of the table, right now, we had the Europeans and the Japanese and the Australians and the Indians, all of them saying together to the Chinese, “You must make these changes in the way you do business to level the playing field, or you will pay an economic price for it.”
The Chinese love dealing bilaterally with countries, because in most cases they can intimidate them. They hate a multilateral situation where they face 8 or 10 countries, all arguing with them about their policies. I attended a defense ministers meeting in Asia, and we had eight countries telling the Chinese minister of defense how offensive their aggressive actions in the South China Sea were. This is a big asset for the United States. And, and I don’t understand the unwillingness in Washington right now to understand that and make use of it.
How do we fix it? I think actually a change in rhetoric, being willing to reach out and consult with our allies before we make decisions and presenting a strategic case, listening to them, maybe adjusting our position somewhat to take into account their concerns.
Just to take one example, there’s nothing sacrosanct about 25,000 or 35,000 troops in Germany. And maybe there’s a reason to move some of those troops to Poland or someplace else. But that’s a discussion that ought to flow from a discussion with our allies and a discussion of the strategy and what’s behind it, and not leave the impression with them that we’ve made the decision to take 9,500 troops out of Germany because the president’s annoyed with Angela Merkel for not being willing to come to a G–7 meeting. MATTIS: I still recall one of your colleagues, Condoleezza Rice, telling a bunch of young generals and admirals as she waved her finger at us—I didn’t realize it was 18 inches long when she wanted to make a point—and she said, “Remember, gentlemen, we will do things with our allies, not to our allies.”
I’ve got to ask you one question that came in. Forgive my smile as I ask you, Secretary Gates; this person wants to thank you for your leadership, your service. I think both of us can respond to that part by telling everyone listening: We don’t care if you’re male or female, Republican or Democrat. We don’t care who you voted for. We’re not interested in who you went to bed with. You were worth every bit of the service that we gave. It was a privilege to serve.
But this person goes on to say, is there anything you missed about working in Washington, D.C.? GATES: The one thing that I miss is the opportunity to interact with the young people in uniform. I was joking with you before we went on the air that I was probably the only person in Washington that went to Iraq and Afghanistan for rest and recreation. Get out of the political battles of Washington and go out and on those frontlines, see those 20 and 21 year olds, 22 year olds, 25 year olds, men and women who are out there doing their part for the country with courage and honor. The desire to help them; it would reenergize me to go back and fight the political fights in Washington.
You know, I spent a long time in Washington and I kind of went through everything. I went through four confirmation processes. Not all of them were a lot of fun. There’s nothing like walking out to pick up The Washington Post on your driveway in the morning and wondering what disaster is going to face you that day.
But I miss the interaction with the troops, and I would say with the colleagues that I had at senior levels. They’re really amazing men and women, and dedicated. And I do miss that interaction.
But believe me, that’s the only thing I miss about Washington, D.C.
