Almost all American public political discussion of military and foreign policy now takes place in the realm of cliches.
Take the distinction between “boots on the ground” versus the mere use of air power that replaced actual discussions of war and peace and grand strategy. It is a reversal of common sense: In journalism, “shoe-leather” reporting is an admiring phrase, and “parachute” journalism is an insult for diving in without knowing the context. The metaphors correctly imply that you tend to know more relevant, granular details if you are close to the situation than if you’re airborne. In Vietnam, the anti-war crowd took bombers to represent the very worst of the American war machine because of how removed they were from the action. And “boots on the ground” was initially used in a recommendation, part of British military officer Grainger Ker Thompson’s assessment for what would be necessary to respond to the insurgency of the Malayan National Liberation Army from the 1940s to the 1960s. Yet, in the exhaustion that followed the bungled war on terror, never “putting boots on the ground” became a sort of stock wisdom among people now ideologically committed to the idea that drones and diplomats can always replace the missions infantry are assigned to.
Isolationists imagined that a safe and just world could be achieved if only America took no substantial action beyond its borders (cf. “nation-building at home,” “America First”). This is how we got the unofficial Obama foreign policy doctrine of “don’t do stupid s***.” And it’s how we got the “red line” debacle in Syria, a threat to take military action if the regime in Damascus used chemical weapons that Obama didn’t follow through on after a massive gas attack. The Obama team added the absurdity of “leading from behind” to the bevy of cliches, as though its contradictory nature was poetic. And then, it was blindsided by the rise of the Islamic State and the public outcry over the beheading videos of Steven Sotloff and others in 2014, inevitably necessitating a surge of boots back onto Iraqi soil.
The bad news is the Biden team is continuing the tradition of slipping past strategic problems using stillborn cliches. Biden and his secretaries of defense and state have been insisting in speeches and testimony about Afghanistan that America can continue to do what it must, even without a physical presence, because of our terrific “over-the-horizon capabilities.” Like “leading from behind,” this is a phrase the public really ought to reject as absurd on its face. “Over the horizon,” a phrase taken from radar technology and used to rebrand what Clinton-era commentators recognized as “cruise missile diplomacy,” is a limited type of capability without human intelligence — just as air power can’t seem to succeed without those pesky boots below.
The Greek horizein, to divide on one side of a circle, has been used since ancient times to distinguish what we can see from the area beyond, eventually replacing “eaggemearc” (eye mark) in Old English and making its way to us as the word for the limit of view. It is surely technically impressive what America can see using satellites, radar, drones, and the like. And it is impressive how accurately Washington can drop a Paveway II laser-guided bomb from a Reaper drone through the driver-side window of a Toyota Hilux. But it will become increasingly unlikely it’s the right Hilux. The idea that most of the problems America faces in foreign policy are really of her own making is seductive for the same reason it is wrong like all simple ideological explanations are. These ideas tend to make for good aphorisms but bad thinking.
