Never before in the history of the United States has there been such a yawning gap between the rhetoric of American power and its application abroad. Let us recap: President Obama warned that if Bashir al-Assad used chemical weapons against his people in Syria, “that would change my calculus. That would change my equation.” That to liberal hawks and neoconservatives presumed military intervention. Yet, after Assad took a gallant leap over Obama’s “red line” last August and gassed hundreds of civilians, the United States did nothing militarily. Likewise, President Obama warned the Russians there would be “consequences for their actions” if they swallowed up Crimea by force. Yet, after Putin did just that, the United States merely slapped sanctions on a few Russian insiders, who mocked America’s flaccid response. As Les Gelb, author of Power Rules, writes, “Threats unfulfilled diminish power.”
Which is unfortunate because American threats used to matter. We didn’t even have to wield our military power, just arch our eyebrow, as it were, and countries would cower just on the presumption of avoiding our ire. Alan Henrikson, writing in 1981, called this the “aura of power.” Once one has to actually deploy its military, it has failed at deterrence. During the 1970 Jordan hijacking crisis, for example, the United States did not deploy troops, but quietly ordered an aircraft carrier to the coast of Lebanon and readied some C-130s at Incirlik airbase in Turkey. As Henry Kissinger would recall later, “Our silence would give them an ominous quality.” During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Moscow mobilized its forces in the southern part of the Soviet Union, Nixon raised the nuclear alert level and the Soviets backed down.
No such shows of force, however, are effective when the credibility of the leader of the free world is called into question. Never before have our alliances or commitments to our allies appeared on shakier ground. As Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, was caught telling a colleague, “the Polish-American alliance is worthless, even harmful, as it gives Poland a false sense of security. It’s bullshit.” Or consider Japanese concerns over whether the United States will honor its treaty commitments to protecting its territorial integrity. As one Japanese expert told the New York Times, “The Crimea makes us feel uneasy about whether the United States has not only the resolve but the strength to stop China. Between the Pentagon budget cuts, and the need to put more forces in Europe, can the United States still offer a credible deterrence?”
These are valid concerns, what with China declaring an “air defense identification zone” near disputed islands which would provide it justification to use force against enemy aircraft. Another concern is North Korea, which has threatened additional nuclear and missile tests. There is a widespread perception that Obama is all too willing to throw his allies under the bus, and does not back up his rhetoric with actions. Yes, the United States just dispatched two ballistic missile destroyers to Japan as a symbolic deterrent to North Korea. But nobody believes the United States will credibly use force if push were to come to shove.
The foundation of deterrence is both capability and credibility. Nobody doubts that the United States possesses sufficient military potential to deter any aggressor anywhere on the planet. Our military spe