Defining Ideas<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/p>\nPresident Obama, responding to widespread criticisms that his handling of the Syrian chemical weapons crisis was clumsy and ad hoc, said, \u201cI\u2019m less concerned about style points, I\u2019m much more concerned about getting the policy right.\u201d For the president and many politicians in both parties, problems, whether domestic or foreign, are about policy solutions; perceptions of the policy or its implementation, what Obama calls \u201cstyle,\u201d are irrelevant. As he said about Syria, \u201cThe chemical weapons issue is a problem. I want that problem dealt with.\u201d<\/p>\n
This idea that foreign policy crises are about finding and applying the right objective formula in order to solve problems, just as one does in engineering or mathematics, is a peculiarly modern prejudice. For most of history, those who thought about the rivalries and conflicts among great powers knew that the subjective perceptions that states and leaders develop about one another, and the prestige they granted or refused, rational or not, are critically important factors in the relations among states and must be taken into account during a crisis. And the most important perception that creates prestige is of a state\u2019s power and willingness to use it.<\/p>\n
The great Athenian historian of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, recognized this critical factor in state relations. In his history, he has an Athenian ambassador catalogue the causes of state behavior towards rivals and enemies: fear, honor, and interest. Fear we can understand, and \u201cinterest,\u201d in the sense of material or territorial gains, will not surprise us. \u201cHonor,\u201d however, we might dismiss as an archaic relic from our less enlightened past, when people lacked knowledge of the psychological, sociological, ideological, and environmental springs of behavior that we believe we possess.<\/p>\n
But honor is bound up with prestige, the reputation and influence a state possesses based on a public estimation of its achievements, status, or power. Notice that whether those bases of prestige are true or not at times can be irrelevant. As the Roman poet Virgil wrote, \u201cThey have power because they seem to have power.\u201d It\u2019s enough that people believe them to be true. This is the modus operandi of every schoolyard bully, who robs his schoolmates of their lunch money by projecting an image of fighting skills and ferocity. Often when those skills are challenged, the bully\u2019s prestige vanishes, and he is routed. We should remember that the origins of the word \u201cprestige\u201d lie in the Latin word\u00a0praestigiae<\/em>, which means \u201cjuggler\u2019s tricks.\u201d<\/p>\nOf course, in order to maintain prestige, a great power eventually must be able to back up the perception of its military power and its willingness to use it. But history documents many occasions when states have successfully run bluffs and achieved their aims. Adolf Hitler\u2019s early foreign policy successes were due in part to exploiting the over-estimation of Germany\u2019s military power by France and England, their bestowing upon the Reich a military prestige far beyond the reality at that point. In 1936, he remilitarized the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles Treaty with 36,000 policemen and green troops, while just across the Rhine nearly 100 divisions of French and Belgians merely watched.<\/p>\n
In 1938 when he invaded Austria, many of his tanks ran out of gas and scores of abandoned vehicles lined the road. France and England\u2019s passivity, and the willingness of most Austrians to be absorbed into Germany made the invasion a success. And the seizure of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia later that same year would have failed had England and France supported the Czechs, who had more than a million men under arms, the Skoda armaments works\u2014one of the most productive in Europe\u2014and state-of-the-art defensive fortifications in the mountainous Sudetenland.<\/p>\n
Hitler\u2019s generals trembled at all three moves, as they did not believe the Wehrmacht was ready to take on two powerful enemies like England and France as it would in 1939. But the British and the French had the\u00a0perception\u00a0<\/em>that Hitler\u2019s military was that strong, and that perception became a force multiplier. But perception is a two-edged sword. All France\u2019s and England\u2019s military might did not impress Hitler, because he did not believe that they had the will to use it. Here we see the truth of Napoleon\u2019s dictum that \u201cmorale is to the physical as three to one.\u201d No amount of material power can compensate for the accurate perception that a state has weak morale and is unwilling to fight. And even if false, that perception can invite aggression.<\/p>\nGreat powers, then, must nurture and periodically confirm their prestige, those global perceptions of their power, the belief of their allies and rivals that they will consistently help friends and punish enemies. Britain, at the height of its Empire, understood the need sometimes to take military action not to acquire territory or resources, but to demonstrate the wages of challenging their prestige. In 1868, they sent an expeditionary force to Ethiopia to rescue the British consul and several other Europeans being held hostage by the erratic and cruel King Theodore.<\/p>\n
The British had to construct a port, lay railroad tracks, build a road, and then march 400 miles to Theodore\u2019s stronghold. They destroyed his army and rescued the hostages, then left with only some artifacts looted by soldiers. But the message was clear: threaten British interests and citizens, and there will be a terrible price to pay.<\/p>\n
In our own history we see the wages of damaged prestige, and the value of its repair, by a vigorous response to an enemy\u2019s challenge. After the abandonment of South Vietnam in 1975 and the election of the internationalist idealist Jimmy Carter, the Soviet Union went on a geopolitical rampage, with its own forces and satellites fighting in Afghanistan, Africa, and Central America. The Soviets\u2019 calculation was not predicated on a material estimate of our military weakness, but on a disdain for American prestige, which had been tarnished in Saigon.<\/p>\n
The election of Ronald Reagan and his vigorous pushback against Soviet adventurism, as well as a military build-up, turned the Soviets back, and Reagan\u2019s active foreign policy eventually hastened the collapse of their empire, restoring American prestige to the point that 47 nations supported George H.W. Bush\u2019s war against Iraq in 1990, with 34 nations, including many Muslim countries, providing troops.<\/p>\n
Another blow to American prestige under Carter still challenges our foreign policy today. In 1979, a ragtag band of students and jihadists seized the American embassy in Tehran and held 52 hostages for 444 days. The prestige the Iranians acquired throughout the Muslim world, and the corresponding disdain for America, the \u201cGreat Satan,\u201d invigorated the various jihadists outfit that started a war we are still fighting today. Yet this failure to punish aggression against our forces was reprised by Ronald Reagan, when he failed to defend our prestige after the Iranian-backed terrorist murder of 241 of our military personnel in Beirut in 1983. And this same mistake was repeated yet again by Bill Clinton, who made only token military responses to al Qaeda\u2019s attacks against us in Mogadishu, East Africa, and Yemen.<\/p>\n
That lesson went unlearned under George W. Bush and remains so under Barack Obama. Iran\u2019s training and support of jihadists killing our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, its cultivation and financing of jihadists groups throughout the region, and its ongoing program to create nuclear weapons remained unpunished, strengthening the perception on the part of the Iranians that the U.S may bluster, negotiate, and sanction, but it will not take the military measures necessary to prevent a fanatical regime from acquiring nuclear armaments.<\/p>\n
That contempt for American power is unlikely to be mitigated by the recent events in Syria. Making several threats, failing to back them up, and then resorting to a diplomatic process that was initiated by Russia\u2013\u2013one of Bashar al Assad\u2019s most stalwart global supporters\u2013\u2013and that is unlikely in the end to remove Assad\u2019s chemical weapons, has confirmed the Iranian view of America, and angered our allies like Saudi Arabia, who understand that such perceptions are crucial for the Iranians\u2019 calculations of risk and reward.<\/p>\n
Worse yet, even if we manage to take Assad\u2019s chemical weapons from him, the damage will remain. Assad, already being rearmed by Russia and Iran with conventional weapons, will probably prevail against the rebels, or at the least survive in an Alawite enclave if the country fragments. Meanwhile, as Bernard-Henri Levy pointed out in theWall Street Journal<\/em>, he has been transformed from a war criminal into a legitimate negotiating partner.<\/p>\nSuch an outcome will be dangerous for U.S. national security and interests, as an emboldened Iran will remain active in the region, Hezbollah will gain prestige and invaluable fighting experience from battling alongside Assad and both will continue to be supplied with weapons from Iran. Other rogue regimes or jihadist organizations may make the same calculation as Iran and Syria, and attack our interests or those of our ally Israel. And Russia will exploit the perception that it, not the U.S., is now the dominant power in the region. Whether that perception is true or not won\u2019t matter. The states of the region will act as if it is true, and the result will be the same as if it were.<\/p>\n
This foreign policy debacle is the worst since the Iranian hostage crisis, and likely to have malign effects as long-lived as those following that blow to our prestige. The most obvious consequence will be Iran\u2019s acquisition of nuclear weapons, if it hasn\u2019t already occurred. These are the perils of forgetting the role that prestige plays in enabling a great power to defend and advance its interests.<\/p>\n
Bruce S. Thornton is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He received his BA in Latin in 1975 and his PhD in comparative literature\u2013Greek, Latin, and English\u2013in 1983, both from the University of California, Los Angeles. Thornton is currently a professor of classics and humanities at California State University in Fresno, California. He is the author of nine books and numerous essays and reviews on Greek culture and civilization and their influence on Western civilization. His latest book, published in March 2011, is titled ‘The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama’s America.’<\/em><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"History teaches us that nations must always respond vigorously to an enemy’s challenge, a lesson the U.S. should remember in Syria. by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0Defining Ideas President Obama, responding to widespread criticisms that his handling of the Syrian chemical weapons crisis was clumsy and ad hoc, said, \u201cI\u2019m less concerned about style points, I\u2019m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[127,22,196],"tags":[12,1055,1028,305,1041,76],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1Im","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7014,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-foreign-policy-enemy-action\/","url_meta":{"origin":6594,"position":0},"title":"Obama’s Foreign Policy: Enemy Action","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 18, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 It\u2019s often hard to determine whether a series of bad policies results from stupidity or malicious intent. Occam\u2019s razor suggests that the former is the more likely explanation, as conspiracies assume a high degree of intelligence, complex organization, and secrecy among a large number\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6473,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/fifteen-minutes-of-foreign-policy-malfeasance\/","url_meta":{"origin":6594,"position":1},"title":"Fifteen Minutes of Foreign Policy Malfeasance","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 12, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 On the eve of the 12thanniversary of the terrorist strikes on 9\/11, President Obama last night addressed the nation and reprised every delusional and bankrupt internationalist idea that contributed to that disaster. The current Syrian crisis\u2013\u2013merely the latest Middle Eastern example of Obama\u2019s incompetence\u2013\u2013exemplifies\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6419,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bad-reasons-for-bombing-syria\/","url_meta":{"origin":6594,"position":2},"title":"Bad Reasons for Bombing Syria","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 3, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine President Obama Saturday laid out the\u00a0case\u00a0for a military strike on Syria. He evoked the same rationales Secretary of State\u00a0Kerry\u00a0and others, including some conservatives, have been articulating for the last week. We\u2019ve heard of \u201cinternational norms,\u201d \u201ccommon understandings of decency,\u201d the \u201cinternational community\u201d that codified\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10151,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/angry-reader-12\/","url_meta":{"origin":6594,"position":3},"title":"Angry Reader","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 5, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"From an Angry Reader: Mr. Hanson, I don\u2019t know anything about Stanley Baldwin, but I\u2019ll assume your description of him is accurate. In that case, you have to stretch quite a bit to make Obama into Baldwin. For instance: You call Baldwin a pacifist. 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