McChrystal, Afghanistan, and the Era of Foreign Policy Austerity

For all the excessively glib parallels to Harry Truman's dramatic sacking of Douglas MacArthur, Stanley McChrystal's intemperate comments recorded by Rolling Stone do not rise to the level of a extra-constitutional challenge to civilian control of the military.

The imperious, impetuous, and imperial MacArthur wanted to command American foreign policy: The five-star general wrote a letter to the Republican leader of the House, urging unleashing Chiang Kai-shek on Formosa to attack mainland China. McChrystal, in contrast, as the smoking-gun Rolling Stone article demonstrates with bull's-eye detail, fostered a climate of mockery about bureaucratic rivals (including the vice president) without ever challenging the overall strategy of the Afghan war.

This is not designed to exonerate McChrystal, whom I hope is destined soon to join Sarah Palin on the out-of-power speaking circuit. (If the general has problems going to a NATO dinner in Paris, wait until he has to make head table small talk before, say, a $100,000 address to the mortuary management convention).

But the presumed departure of McChrystal (maybe standing in front of a banner proclaiming, "Mission Un-Accomplished") is a turning point that brings America closer to the inevitable disengagement from Afghanistan. Without a charismatic general personifying the possibilities of counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan, the nation will lack both the will and the wallet to long continue the longest war in American history. After all, Barack Obama, when he announced in December the Afghan troop buildup that McChrystal craved, warned about "goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost."

Tuesday was, in a sense, the day that America formally entered the Era of Foreign Policy Austerity.

Just as Washington was becoming fixated over the loose-lips-sink-careers McChrystal story Tuesday morning, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer was delivering a hard-hitting speech about the national debt. While Hoyer won headlines for questioning the fiscal merits of extending all the Bush-era middle class tax cuts, the second-ranking House Democrat was equally blunt about the nearly $700 billion Pentagon budget. "I fear if we can't decide what we can afford to do without today," Hoyer said, referring to expensive weapons systems, "we'll be forced to make more draconian cuts in the years ahead."

Moderate Democrats like Hoyer do not normally venture forth to cut the military budget with daisies in their hands and John Lennon on their iPods singing "Imagine." But rather than worrying about looking weak on national security (a conservative charge that dates all the way back to Harry Truman and the Communist takeover of China), Democrats are even more panicked about red-ink budgets. As pollster and foreign policy expert Jeremy Rosner, a veteran of the Clinton White House, puts it, "While any cuts in weapons systems are fraught, it's also fraught to not cut the deficit."

Rosner helped conduct a May national poll on Obama and national security sponsored by two Democratic groups, Democracy Corps and the Third Way. In this survey, Obama won 55 percent approval for his handling of national security, which is a slightly higher rating than other polls, though question wording varies. "These strong marks," Rosner argues, "come even though the Democrats have already made strong cuts in the military budget because of Robert Gates." While the president may not always boast political protection from a respected Republican Pentagon chief, it was telling that Obama did not face sustained GOP attack after capping production of the F-22 fighter last year.

All this brings us to the most prescient book of the summer, the soon-to-be-published "The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era" by Michael Mandelbaum. Anticipating Steny Hoyer's argument, Mandelbaum writes, "One of the best-known criminals of the past century, Willie Sutton, when he asked why he robbed banks, replied, 'Because that's where the money is.' For America's role beyond its borders, the money -- the serious money -- is to be found in the defense budget."

(Time for the obligatory disclosure -- and you can guess what is coming next: Mandelbaum, who is the professor of American foreign policy at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, is a good friend.)

Mandelbaum is not advocating an American foreign policy with the globe-girdling ambitions of Andorra.(To quote Pete Seeger: "I want to go to Andorra, it's a place that I adore/They spend four dollars and ninety cents/On armament and their defense/Did you ever hear of such confidence?"). Nor is Mandelbaum a declinist chortling that America soon will be like post-war Britain when it was forced to abandon all commitments east of Suez.

What "The Frugal Superpower" offers is a gimlet-eyed look at the foreign policy constraints that the nation will face over the next two decades. While America will, of course, respond if attacked and will only grudgingly shed its global policing role, the era of optional wars in places like Somalia, Kosovo, and Iraq is probably over for good. America is unlikely to again take on what Mandelbaum calls "the unexpected, unwanted, arduous and frustrating task...of creating working political institutions in the countries it has conquered."

Afghanistan is -- with or without Gen. Stanley McChrystal -- almost certainly the last protracted war of its kind. While McChrystal obviously felt no sense of limits about his own mock-around-the-clock tone or that of his subordinates, his departure inadvertently will bring the era of limits in American foreign policy that much closer.

Call it the Curious Case of the General Who Talked Too Much and the Nation That Spent Too Much.