System Stability for Global Hegemons

By Fester:

Andrew Bacevich in the Los Angeles Times argues that great powers must remember their interests first and foremost before concentrating on the means to the desired ends.  The conflation of priorities towards means instead of ends is deadly to hegemonic powers that depend on managing a stable rule set. He uses Great Britain's lack of grand strategy in the First World War and the Edwardian Era as his example:

Back in December 1914, the Admiralty's impatient first lord was Winston Churchill, appalled by the slaughter on the Western Front. Intent on breaking the stalemate, Churchill became a font of ideas. Mired in Flanders? Then launch an amphibious assault against the Dardanelles, he urged. Were German machine guns cutting down British Tommies venturing into no man's land? Then support the infantry with tanks.

Yet Churchill's innovations failed to deliver a quick resolution. Instead, they prolonged the war and drove up its cost. When the guns finally fell silent in November 1918, "victory" left Britain economically and spiritually depleted. Revolution wracked much of Europe. And the seeds of totalitarianism had been planted, producing in their maturity an even more horrendous war. Some victory.

Churchill and his Cabinet colleagues had spent four years dodging fundamental questions. Fixated with tactical and operational concerns, they ignored matters of strategy and politics. Britain's true interest lay in ending the war, not in blindly seeing it through to the bitter end.

Great Britain's great interest was maintaining a balance of power in Europe and keeping the German Fleet from being too powerful.  Once the defensive goals of keeping France in the war was achieved, Britain had achieved its minimal strategic aims by Christmas, 1914.  After that the Allies and the Central Powers engaged in an attempt at system transformation war when it was in the best interests of Britain to maintain the system before the war.  Expansive goal sets led to intermediate term victory and a long term defeat of British power and strategic objectives.

Great Britain would not have been exhausted if there was a peace of
1915 with a settlement similar to almost all other settlements since
the Peace of Westphalia; mild adjustments to borders, trades of
colonies for concessions to be named later and perhaps an indeminity of
some small size as the war was already a stalemate.  A non-exhausted
Britain and more importantly a non-exhausted Europe would not have
needed their version of Chimerica to continously refinance hard
currency debts.  Without the massive war debts and reperations,
post-war Germany would not have suffered the hyper inflation that
delegitimatized liberal democracy and led to Hitler. And without the
opening for a hard right fascist party, World War II was far less
likely to have been a global war instead of another colonial African
war with Italy and a general Pacific War with Japan.  Either one of
those conflicts would have not bankrupted Britain like the global
nature of the Second World War. 

As I have argued before, the United States should adapt a policy of geo-strategic minimalism as grand goals are unattainable at any cost that is proportional to the non-priaptic benefits that expansive goals can achieve.

The US's best interests are served by seeing pockets of stability form and sustain themselves so that global interconnections can be made, and multi-issue linkages are possible. These pockets of stability may or may not be in the form of traditional states of the Westphalian model, but they are valuable none the less. These pockets are often a recognition of reality on the ground; local elites, networks and tribal connections as well as sometimes being the strongest group of thugs around who have fairly limited objectives can be sources of needed stability from which proto-states can emerge to better reflect ongoing realities....

working with the reality that there really is no such thing as a unified Somali state with an effective central government but there are regional pockets of stability that are effectively serving as limited proto-states will be far more successful in accomplishing the limited political/economic goals of the United States (smooth flow of global trade, sidelining of radical Islamists who have the capacity and intent for global strikes) then attempting to re-create a unified Somali state....

Not doing much on the ground is often the best policy option because there are no good policy options available; instead the options are expensive, intensive interventions with low probabilities of success and 'success' defined with severe limitations.

The United States is not a rising power any more.  Expansive goals of resource access and influence expansion can only be financed by external borrowing and the pay-offs are minimal if not negative.  Instead we have spent sixty odd years creating a system including both iterations of the Bretton Woods system that benefit our preferences.  It should be the basic goal of American foreign policy to either maintain the superstructure of a beneficial system arrangement or at least ease the transition to a new global rule set.  Frittering away power, influence, authority and capacity in the pursuit of low value but expansive goals is counterproductive to that basic goal.