[The decline of U.S influence should not feed the narrative that
anarchy has been loosed upon the world. The choice is not between a
U.S.-led world and a Joker-led world.]
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THE ENDURING LIMITS OF AMERICAN POWER  
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John Feffer
October 25, 2023
Foreign Policy in Focus
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_ The decline of U.S influence should not feed the narrative that
anarchy has been loosed upon the world. The choice is not between a
U.S.-led world and a Joker-led world. _

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The United States is the most powerful country on the earth. If you
add together its nuclear arsenal, its unmatched array of conventional
weaponry, and its global economic reach, America might be the
mightiest country in the history of the planet.

The United States has been responsible for destroying countries
(Germany, Japan) and raising them from the rubble (Germany, Japan). It
continues to hold sway in international financial institutions like
the IMF and World Bank. The dollar remains the global currency of
choice. Wall Street is the Mecca of capitalism; Hollywood is a creator
of global tastes; virtually everyone drinks Coca-Cola and eats Big
Macs or dreams of doing so.

And yet U.S. power has serious limits. The U.S. withdrawal from
Afghanistan in 2021 was a punishing reminder of just how little the
U.S. military and the provision of U.S. security and humanitarian
assistance can do to defeat a determined guerrilla force and
liberalize a brutalized society. The earlier defeat of U.S. forces in
Vietnam, the inability to prevent countries like North Korea from
going nuclear, the embarrassing failures of “drug wars” in various
countries: these are but some of the indicators that U.S. reach
exceeds its grasp.

The left, in particular, has often identified these very same limits
when pushing for a more modest U.S. presence around the world. This is
a reasonable demand. The limits of military force should indeed spur a
reduction of U.S. military bases abroad, the budget that sustains
them, and the arms exports that expand the capacities of U.S. allies.

Sometimes, however, these lessons learned about the limits of U.S.
power are forgotten or willfully ignored.

In both Ukraine and Israel, the United States currently wields a
measure of influence because of the military (and non-military)
assistance it provides. This assistance can occasionally fool the
Pentagon and the State Department into thinking that it can determine
outcomes on the ground in both regions. That’s not surprising, given
the arrogance of American power.

What is surprising, however, is that the left, which is so often
mindful of the limitations of U.S. power, sometimes makes the same
mistake.

END THE WAR IN UKRAINE?

I recently participated in a public forum
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pitted proponents of a “ceasefire now” against those of us who
support Ukraine and its efforts to resist occupation.

Like every Ukrainian—and Russian dissident who stands with them—I
desperately want peace in the region. Ukraine cannot afford this war.
And neither can the world at large.

But Ukraine did not ask for this war. It was invaded. And Russia
didn’t simply want to secure territorial gains in previously
occupied lands in the Donbas and Crimea. It aimed to seize the entire
country and extinguish Ukraine by absorbing it into a “Russian
world.” At the beginning of its intervention in 2022, it committed
horrifying war crimes. With its continued aerial assaults on Ukrainian
cities, Russia continues to kill civilians on a regular basis.
Ukrainians are very clear about the consequences of losing this war.
It’s not just a matter of territory or culture. It’s a matter of
life and death.

Those who call for a “ceasefire now” do so out of a willful
ignorance of the realities of the current war. Ukraine doesn’t
support a ceasefire now because it hopes to push out all Russian
occupiers. Russia doesn’t want a ceasefire now because it still
harbors hopes of seizing all of the Donbas, perhaps taking the entire
southern coast of Ukraine, maybe even reviving the original goal of
displacing the current government in Kiev.

Rather than bring their demand to Moscow, which could indeed end the
war tomorrow by withdrawing its troops from occupied territory,
proponents of the “ceasefire now” position are trying to persuade
the United States to use its influence over Ukraine to force a pause
in the hostilities. This campaign has involved lobbying U.S.
policymakers and even occupying the office
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the country’s most progressive senator, Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

“Use its influence” would, in realistic terms, mean cutting off
military assistance to Ukraine, negotiating over its head with the
Kremlin, and bullying Kyiv into accepting some kind of armistice
agreement. Ukraine might one day conclude
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can’t win on the ground against Russian forces, something that the
two Koreas ultimately realized in 1953. But at the moment, Ukraine
believes that it can expel Russian forces, with U.S. assistance, much
as the Croatian army did against Serbian forces in Operation Storm
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1995.

The ”use its influence” argument suffers from both pragmatic and
ethical shortcomings.

The pragmatic problem is that, although the United States provides the
lion’s share of military aid to Ukraine—a little over 50 percent
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July 2023—it doesn’t direct Ukrainian operations. Ukraine’s
military leadership doesn’t always inform
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States about the timing of its operations, often disregards the
strategic advice
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the Pentagon, and has conducted targeted attacks within Russia such as
assassinations that have “complicated its collaboration with the
CIA,” according to _The Washington Post_
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Even if Washington were to cut off assistance to Kyiv, Ukraine would
continue to fight with whatever resources it could muster because it
understands that the current Russian offensive—and any future
military intervention—poses a continued threat to the survival of
the country and its citizens. U.S. assistance is welcome, even
essential. But it is not a light switch that, if turned to the off
position, would shut down Ukrainian resistance.

The ethical problem runs deeper. Why on earth would a left that is
deeply skeptical of how the United States has played power politics
with smaller countries endorse a strategy of negotiating with a
right-wing authoritarian power to dictate policy options to a smaller,
struggling, occupied democracy? Why would a left committed to human
rights avert its eyes from the shocking (and ongoing) human rights
violations that Russia has committed? How can a left endorse peace
without any measure of justice?

I was not the first choice of the organizers of the aforementioned
public forum on Ukraine. The other proponents of my position were not
available. The organizers, who supported the “ceasefire now”
position, asked me for suggestions of another panelist of my
persuasion. I asked if they had reached out to any Ukrainians in the
area. They hadn’t. They didn’t have any contacts either.

A debate about Ukraine without any Ukrainians? That has been a
recurrent problem with the “ceasefire now” position. It
fundamentally doesn’t take into consideration
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Ukrainians—or the Russian left—has to say. It spreads
misinformation that denies Ukrainian agency, such as the myth of a
“U.S.-engineered coup”
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2014 and the myth of a “proxy war”
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by the United States today. And it proposes “solutions” that
involve the United States forcing “peace” down the throats of
Ukrainians as if they were infants incapable of making independent
decisions.

It seems that this segment of the left has forgotten the well-worn
recommendation of _nihil de nobis, sine nobis—_nothing about us
without us.

END THE WAR IN ISRAEL?

U.S. policy toward North Korea once suffered from a peculiar fallacy.
According to this fallacy, China could and should use its considerable
influence over the North Korean leadership to restrain the latter’s
nuclear ambitions and push it toward an incrementally more open
society. China and North Korea, after all, were allies dating back to
the Korean War. North Korea was heavily dependent on Chinese economic
assistance. The leadership of the two countries met on a semi-regular
basis. Surely this was evidence of potential Chinese leverage.

This superficial friendship fooled U.S. analysts into thinking that
China could, with a little pressure, make the North Koreans do their
bidding. If Beijing refused to apply such pressure, then it must in
fact support its neighbor’s nuclear program and erratic economic and
political policies.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. The North Korean
government seemed to take almost perverse pleasure in ignoring Chinese
advice and resisting Chinese pressure. All of that preferential
treatment bought Beijing precious little influence in return.

Israel similarly ignores U.S. advice and seemingly U.S. pressure as
well. In 2010, I described Israel as a “rogue ally”
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United States because it went behind the back of the Obama
administration in an attempt to buy out North Korea’s nuclear
program for a billion dollars. That was only one of many such examples
of Israel’s flouting of its ally’s preferences.

For instance, Israel built a nuclear weapons program in secret
and ignored pressure
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the Kennedy administration for inspections. It pushed forward with an
aggressive settlement policy in the West Bank despite concerns from
the Obama administration
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And it more recently ignored similar criticisms
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the Biden administration about the expansion of these settlements.

Israel has acted this way because it has calculated that it can do
pretty much anything without jeopardizing U.S. assistance. It has even
cultivated spies within the United States—Jonathan Pollard was only
the most prominent
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Washington has delivered several billion dollars a year.

The problem, then, lies not only with Israel. The United States has
not made serious efforts to back up its recommendations—and its
threats—with serious costs. As a result, prior to the latest
outbreak of violence in the region, some prominent mainstream figures
like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and _New York
Times_ columnist Nicholas Kristof began to talk of conditioning U.S.
aid
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even phasing it out.

But frankly, as Tariq Kenney-Shawa wrote
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Nation_ back in August, such U.S.-imposed conditions would not likely
have changed Israeli policy. “Because even if the US conditioned or
outright cut the funding it provides to Israel on account of its
treatment of Palestinians, it would likely not be enough to deter
Israel’s increasingly extremist leaders,” he wrote. “Only by
conditioning US aid alongside more assertive punitive measures such as
divestment and sanctions can the US effectively pressure Israel to
bring an end to occupation and apartheid.”

Certainly the U.S. government can do more to push Israel in the
direction of respecting basic human rights. But by itself, the United
States has limited influence over Israeli decision-making, whether
Likud or Labor is in charge. The bottom line is that Israel is a
wealthy country that doesn’t need U.S. largesse
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essence of Kristof’s argument—and so it can “go rogue” more
effectively than the comparatively impoverished North Korea.

By all means, let’s continue to press the Biden administration to
demand an immediate ceasefire, to pressure the Netanyahu government
not to invade Gaza, and to call for new negotiations between Israel
and the Palestinians. But let’s not be naïve about how much
influence the Biden administration could have even if it unambiguously
committed to those positions.

WHAT ROLE CAN AMERICA PLAY?

Sometimes, like the proverbial stopped clock, the United States does
the right thing with its foreign policy, like the current support for
Ukraine. More frequently, it makes terrible decisions, like providing
unconditional support for an increasingly right-wing and
human-rights-abusing Israel. The conventional progressive approach to
U.S. foreign policy is to campaign for Washington to abide by the
ideals it (often) professes about democracy, human rights, and the
rule of law.

But let’s face it: a United States that suddenly “sees the
light” will still not be able to determine outcomes on the ground.
That’s a reality of a post-Cold War era characterized by the “rise
of the rest” and the limits of military power.

At the same time, the decline of U.S influence should not feed the
narrative that anarchy has been loosed upon the world. The choice is
not between a U.S.-led world and a Joker-led world. The United States
should build up global institutions even as it relinquishes its
supremacy. It’s not America that ideally should be saving Ukraine
and constraining Israel. That should be task of international
institutions committed to human rights and the rule of law. The
decline of U.S. power isn’t a problem; it is a call to global
action.

_John Feffer [[link removed]] is the director
of Foreign Policy In Focus. His latest book is Right Across the
World: The Global Networking of the Far-Right and the Left Response
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_Foreign Policy in Focus [[link removed]] (FPIF) is a
“Think Tank Without Walls” connecting the research and action of
scholars, advocates, and activists seeking to make the United States a
more responsible global partner. It is a project of the Institute for
Policy Studies._

_FPIF provides timely analysis of U.S. foreign policy and
international affairs and recommends policy alternatives on a broad
range of global issues — from war and peace to trade and from
climate to public health. From its launch as a print journal in 1996
to its digital presence today, FPIF has served as a unique resource
for progressive foreign policy perspectives for decades._

_We believe U.S. security and world stability are best advanced
through a commitment to peace, justice, and environmental protection,
as well as economic, political, and social rights. We advocate that
diplomatic solutions, global cooperation, and grassroots participation
guide foreign policy._

_FPIF aims to amplify the voice of progressives and to build links
with social movements in the U.S. and around the world. Through these
connections, we advance and influence debate and discussion among
academics, activists, policy-makers, and the general public._

* U.S. foreign policy
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* U.S. foreign aid
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* Ukraine
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* Israel
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* Vietnam War
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