Note: This segment is Part III of V in a outline prepared for a future long-form commentary
Another overstatement that underlies this work is the simple truth behind the change of state in modern times. Globalization was nary a theorem for Samuel Huntington when he drafted The Soldier, and while international affairs was certainly a complex arena post-World War II and Korea, the predominant construct would rightly be defined as the bipolarity of the Cold War. In that global power struggle, two constructs emerged: that of the open society, liberal and free market economy societies, and the collectivist, authoritarian and closed societies. On the one side, the United States nominally led a collaborative network of states whose basic premise was established as protection of individual rights, security as a shared, collective endeavor between cooperative and allegiance-based states, and whose state power rested on both hard power capability and interdependence of diplomatic, economic integration, shared values and mutual benefit paradigms. In opposition, rigid state control of social, economic and political structures was expressed by states through consolidated power under the collectivist model exhibited by the post-World War II Soviet Union and its proxy subordinate states.
We have the benefit today of reviewing that paradigm of Liberal versus Authoritarian systems under the banner called the Cold War. Historical review allows the contemporary scholar to observe the three fundamental components of international relations theory – realist, liberalist, and constructivist – and identify where and how states operated, explaining their motives, rationales, and mindsets across the timeline. At its core, the Cold War revealed that states employ hard power (professionalized violence being one such toll of hard power) to safeguard their interests regardless of other theories of relations. Conversely, other hard power tools such as trade and security agreements, economics, trade and financial systems were as critical as professionalized violence (the use of military force). Further, the ability to influence rather than force or coerce other states are within the spectrum of state capabilities that fall under soft power definition in international relations theory. On the U.S.-led side of the decades-long conflict, the proliferation of institutions, exporting liberal values like individualism, cooperation and collaboration to shared prosperity, and other tenets of liberalist philosophy were simply adaptations to a realist centrality that yet prioritized a professional force that was functionally purist in state adherence and use.
Today’s world is far more multi-polar in the aftermath of the Cold War’s symbolic end with the Berlin Wall’s demolition and the breakup of the Soviet Empire. For a breath, the United States enjoyed the unipolar moment at the end of the 20th century. The liberalist dream of rampant democracy with marketized economies, cooperative prosperity and the end of history were the predominant theories. The State itself became more of a component than the sole proprietary actor in international relations under the global structure shift. Briefly, by way of institutions and transnational agreements, an increasingly integrated global economy, and the digital space of the internet, multilateralism became the matter of course to fill the now half-empty global space that the end of the Soviet Union created. Hard power became yet another exercise in multilateralism, as states (slowly) collaborated against human rights crises to varying degrees of success (Somalia versus the former Yugoslavia).[i]
But the centurial turn had shown an emergent shift in the threats to both the liberal, rules-based order and the states themselves who existed within or peripheral to that order. Works such as David Kilcullen’s The Dragons and the Snakes[ii] identified where a recalcitrant Russia and patient China emerged to rival the United States as chief power brokers in a less-predictable multi-lateral world, these being the “Dragons” in Kilcullen’s assessment. The “Snakes,” then, were those sub-state and non-state entities such as transnational organized crime networks, cyber aggressors in the digital age, and most notably, non-state terror and extremist networks who posed a far different but credible threat to the briefly unipolar world. Shared by these dragons and snakes were a rigorous assessment of the limits of the unipolar American power model, with these old and novel actors adapting tactics, approaches, and exploiting blind spots in the international system to erode and degrade American influence.
The great shift in geopolitics came at the turn of the century, when an American state was dealt the crisis of one of those non-state actors shattering its idea of insulation from violence. The attacks on our homeland on September 11th, 2001, were more than just the first and spectacular use of political violence, they were the figurative blow to that sense of impregnability of the American monolith. If the previous security imperative summarized by Huntington had shifted from assumption to policy objective, it now became desperate reconstitution.
The state construct of the 21st century was based on an unprecedented sense of insecurity despite the unipolar preeminence of American power. Over five decades of American exceptionalism – having rebuilt the world after the Second Great War, contested with the global spread of communism, and the initial dominance of the information age – had been ruptured by an unanticipated attack by a small handful of radical extremists.
Rebuilding that sense of stability turned to a familiar hard power tool: the American military. With such attacks against the homeland being unprecedent, the delay in responding – by sending specialized troops into the remote hinterlands of Afghanistan, a place most Americans couldn’t place on a global map in late 2001 – there was a sense of helplessness and frustration felt by the American people. In retrospect, those American forces were in fact poorly prepared to enter such an isolated battlespace, having been slow to adapt from the Cold War, mass and maneuver force structure which drove military strategy and force projection with mild changes to account for the peacekeeping actions of the 1990s.
But the force itself, the servicemembers, adapted quickly to the demands of Afghanistan. Small teams of special forces soldiers, paramilitary specialists from the Central Intelligence Agency, and highly skilled aviators were able to infiltrate, embed with Afghan militias, and through the use of concentrated air power by close air support specialists, crippled the Taliban regime and Al Qaeda forces by the end of the year. That swift and decisive action by the professionals of violence who rapidly adapted systems, doctrines, and force structures, regained some of the credibility and confidence lost in the wake of September 11th. Unfortunately, those same adaptations would inform and shape much of the next twenty years of engagement in Afghanistan, setting up a military system to be failed by its polity.
[i] The new global system of multilateralism, however, would fail to redress such human rights atrocities as the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Columbia’s rising drug cartel violence and political repression in places like Sri Lanka. Part of this could be blamed as the timing of those humanitarian crises as the new global order adapted to change, but the policy failures of using multilateral military and security forces in such a matter should not be discounted in the greater discourse of eroding faith and trust in the violence professionals amidst such crises.
[ii] Kilcullen, D. (2020). The Dragons and the Snakes: How the rest learned to fight the West (1st ed.). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190265687.001.0001
