Powell became a victim of expansionist policies, and his intuition told him that expansionist policies were wrong. But his cautious vision is making a comeback.
Colin Powell is a paradox: He is a key enabler of the overextension of U.S. foreign policy, perhaps the most tragic example of recent years. For most of his career, however, he struggled — and often in vain — against this excess.
Powell's career was brought to an end by two wars in Iraq, a similarity that was repeatedly highlighted in last week's obituary. The 1991 Gulf War is a classic example of his view that military power should be used cautiously and decisively in order to safeguard the national interest, while the 2003 Iraq War was the exact opposite: a war fought for vague reasons with no clear objectives. But what many obituary fails to note is that during this period, arguably at the height of Powell's influence, U.S. foreign policy dramatically deviated — even outright — from his theory of restraint in U.S. military power.
Powell, who died this week, will forever be associated with two things. The first, and perhaps more historic, is his claim to the War in Iraq before the United Nations Security Council, which is doomed to fail, paving the way for an invasion and occupation of Iraq and guiding the direction of U.S. foreign policy for 20 years. Yet for those interested in America's future role in the world, a second legacy may be just as important: a set of principles he advocated to limit the use of military force, later known as "Powellism," especially in the 1990s.
The mismatch between these two legacies is the greatest irony of Colin Powell's career. His compelling view of the limitations of U.S. military power during the Vietnam War is at odds with the post-Cold War zeal of the United States as an "indispensable nation." Powell failed to convince the foreign policy establishment that the military should be used sparingly and moderately. Worse still, after a decade of resisting U.S. missionary impulses in the Balkans and elsewhere, he himself fell prey to the zeitgeist, embraced the need for a more assertive foreign policy than his intuition suggested, and served as a credible supporter of the Bush administration's flawed war in Iraq. Still, Powell has the potential to have the last laugh: Now, at a time when the post-9/11 war evoked the same regrets that inspired the original dogma, the arc of U.S. foreign policy seems to be finally returning to the direction of his cautious guidance.
Powellism draws on principles first formulated by Reagan administration Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberg in the 1980s. In the run-up to the Gulf War, Powell adopted Weinberg's principles and put them into practice, arguing that wars should be rare and limited. In 1992, he further fleshed out these ideas in an article in Foreign Affairs in which he said, "We cannot ... Send troops into a crisis of unknown missions that they cannot accomplish. The principle's emphasis on clear political goals was largely a legacy of the Vietnam War: Powell, like many soldiers and policymakers who watched the conflict up close, came to believe that the United States had not fully considered the disastrous consequences of its involvement in the Vietnam War.
Therefore, powellism argues that the United States should not get involved in a conflict unless there are major national security interests at stake, there is a clear goal, risks and costs have been assessed, and there is a clear exit strategy. At the same time, if the United States really chooses war, it should not shrink back; Powell argues that any conflict important enough to fight is one important enough to take decisive military action, including putting U.S. forces at risk if necessary.
This fits well for the Gulf War. In this fairly clear conflict, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in violation of international law, threatened Saudi oil fields and, most importantly, threatened to disrupt the global oil market.
President Bush accepted the proposal of Powell, who was then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Powell suggested that once the United States drove Saddam's troops out of Kuwait, it should not pursue him to Baghdad and overthrow his regime. Saddam Hussein's invasion posed a clear threat to U.S. national interests, which the United States addressed through decisive and limited military intervention. In short, this is the action of Powellism.
America's unquestioned victory in the Gulf War only supported Powell's opponents, however, leaving Powell to try to explain why such a victory is unlikely to be replicated in a less explicit conflict. Within a few years, the doctrine was seen as increasingly ill-suited to the freewheeling, expansionary foreign policy that the United States was taking shape. After all, the early 1990s was a "unipolar moment", and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States became the only superpower, and Washington embraced the idea that American power could reshape the world. In an oft-mentioned incident, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who was said to have urged Powell to oppose the use of force for humanitarian purposes in the Balkans, asked, "If we can't use it, what's the point of having such a powerful army that you've been talking about?" Powell was shocked by this, pointing out: "American soldiers are not toy soldiers who can move freely on boards of games around the world."
In some battles that still violated Powellism, occasional successes also supported his critics. The intervention in Kosovo in 1998 eventually succeeded in forcing Slobodan Milosevic to negotiate with Albanian Kosovars, albeit longer and bloodier than initially anticipated. Obvious failures, such as the Clinton-era tragic intervention in Somalia – in which more than 20 American soldiers were killed in action, apparently did not meet the Powellist criteria for intervention – were largely minimized in foreign policy debates.
By the mid-1990s, Washington's philanthropic view was that Powell's guidance was well-intentioned, unrealistic and outdated, and only fit into the "best-case scenario" (former Secretary of the Navy Jim Weber said), or bygone eras, with clear conflicts such as the Gulf War. Some even explicitly argue that Powell's insistence on an exit strategy would make "the fruits of victory wither on the vines," a self-defeating tactic.
In the end, it was Powell himself who nailed the last nail in the coffin. After 9/11, he seemed to have accepted that his ideas no longer fit into the realities of the moment. As The Economist put it in January 2003, "There is some evidence that he has abandoned, or at least improved, his doctrine ... If there are any inconsistencies, they can be attributed to the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of unpredictable dictators or terrorists. "The 9/11 attacks changed the world, and even Colin Powell seemed to have lost faith in a clean, effective war centered on the national interest." Two weeks later, Powell traveled to the United Nations Security Council to advocate war on Iraq.
History has not proven him right. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have clearly failed to meet the standards Powell set out in the 1990s. In Iraq, even if some people accept false intelligence that Powell personally sells (and apparently believes), the United States has only a modest national security interest in overthrowing Saddam's regime. Policymakers have failed to adequately plan exit strategies and to consider the secondary impact of the invasion on regional security. The war in Afghanistan is clearly justified from a national security standpoint, but policymakers' failure to limit their goals to overthrowing the Taliban or killing Osama bin Laden has led to a quagmire of changing goals over two decades. The same is true of the Obama administration's 2011 intervention in Libya, which occurred after Powell left public life, but it is yet another indication that U.S. policymakers downplay the risks and potential costs of military intervention.
However, just as Vietnam forced Weinberg and Powell to call for limits on the use of U.S. military power, the United States' futile efforts to reshape the greater Middle East after 9/11 are now doing something similar. When President Joe Biden announced the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, he outlined some of the lessons learned from 20 years of war on terror: "First, we must set missions with clear, achievable goals, not goals that we can never achieve." Secondly, we must pay clear attention to the fundamental national security interests of the United States of America. ”
This apparent Powell-esque justification was even supported by Powell himself, who told The Washington Post in April that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was "late ... We've done everything we can." In fact, Powell supported the withdrawal as early as 2011 on the grounds of "Powellism" and its failure to set clear and achievable goals at the beginning of the conflict.
At the height of Colin Powell's career, Powellism was unable to persuade policymakers determined to use American power to reshape the world. Powell was a figure of his time: he was deeply affected by America's defeat in Vietnam, and he was determined to prevent future policymakers from making similar mistakes. However, this determination was not enough to overcome the tantalizing idea that the United States was an omnipotent and indispensable nation at a time when he was shaping U.S. foreign policy. This was not even enough to persuade him personally against the post-9/11 war.
However, as if Powell himself had died, we circled his thoughts again. The prudence behind Powellism is making a comeback. As the Biden administration issued an interim national security strategy guideline in March 2021, "The use of force should be a last resort, not a first resort... (And) it should only be used when the objectives and tasks are clear and achievable. Today's policymakers seem determined to learn from the post-9/11 war, just as Powell learned from the Vietnam War. Powell's life, however, provides a warning that if we forget the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan too quickly and deviate from these prudent principles, we may repeat his mistakes.