ALLIES Civil-Military Relations Conference: Intervention Panel
On November 10-11, the Center for Strategic Studies co-sponsored the fourth annual Civil-Military Relations Conference, organized by ALLIES (The Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services), a Tufts University undergraduate student organization. The student organizers of the conference provided the following summary of the conference’s panel on military intervention.
by Xiaohan (Shirley) Wang
“Military intervention comes at a great cost to the U.S.” argued panelist Paul Stares, a senior fellow for conflict prevention and director of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Since 2001, the United States has spent $5.6 trillion on military interventions and wars. This panel focused on issues such as the rationales behind military intervention, the consequences and ethics of diverse forms of interventions taking place around the world, and the future of military intervention. The panelists, in addition to Stares, also included Monica Duffy Toft, a professor of international politics at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and Deen K. Chatterjee, a senior advisor and professional fellow at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law.
“As military spending becomes more and more costly and sometimes antagonizes our domestic citizens, it becomes crucial for us to rethink our strategies,” Stares continued. In terms of strategy, “We have to acknowledge that we do need more military intelligence and soft power, and sometimes it is necessary to develop better diplomatic engagement and foreign assistance on a global level.” Stares also raised the question of which countries can provide reliable, alternative source of military power and assistance, at a time when the current U.S. administration is considering major changes in foreign and strategic policy.
Chatterjee, on the other hand, focused on the dilemmas stemming from foreign military intervention. “Instead of merely focusing on international dimensions on the military side, we also have to think about local politics and attempt to realize how they could affect our foreign military decisions.” Chatterjee believes we must do more to fully understand and appreciate the international, regional, and local environments when it comes to policymaking. In addition, given the current complexity of world politics, he argued that each external military power will need to recognize the splintering of local groups and their foreign alliances.
The conversation then moved to how the United States, or broadly, any other emerging global hegemon, such as China, should formulate and implement policies for foreign intervention. Toft started her argument by first contending that given the poor track record of past interventions, our foremost task is to recognize the full spectrum of tools necessary to execute a successful intervention and to plan for transitioning from tools of violence to tools of state development. Toft observed that though the underlying rationales and impulses behind military interventions vary from contingency to contingency, the most common ones include alliance concerns, security threats, and supporting governments threatened by internal insurgencies. She argued that in planning a successful intervention, there must exist a map that either looks ahead toward dealing with proximate violence, or is designed as a plan for transitioning from proximate issues to underlying issues of state reconstruction. Toft concluded by seconding Chatterjee’s point: “For a better and more organized politics, whichever route we choose, we must take into consideration both local and international impacts of any planned military intervention.”
The panel, lastly, moved on to a Q&A session in which several students and panelists collectively discussed how politicians can recognize the regional military impact of interventions and how the United States should think about future military interventions. The panelists all voiced a strong appreciation for the need to balance considerations of local, intra-state military power and the global impact of interventions. While there is still much more policy and research work to be done to reconcile the contradictions and address the problems of using military power, this panel discussion provided us with a nuanced and constructive perspective of the most important lessons learned from recent attempts at intervention.