Stephan Segraves

From Foreign Affairs —

A danger sign that a small war or military action might expand into a middle-sized war is when there is too much talk about geopolitics and not enough about local cultural and political conditions. The historian Barbara Tuchman has argued that the United States would have done much better in Vietnam if it had thought less geopolitically and more locally. The biggest U.S. foreign policy fiascos happened because policymakers were obsessed with regional and global consequences they often could not properly manage, and thus ignored critical conditions on the ground. In Vietnam, U.S. leaders overlooked the history and nature of Vietnamese nationalism; in Iraq, it was sectarianism.

During his time as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the early post–Cold War era, Colin Powell, who later served as U.S. Secretary of State, argued that the United States should not commit to a war unless it has overwhelming force, an exit strategy, a vital national interest, a clear objective, and broad support. This idea, which became known as the Powell Doctrine, has been sidelined in recent years. Yet it remains relevant. Perhaps the ultimate objective of the Powell Doctrine was not to avoid defeat, per se, but to avoid middle-sized wars. And for great powers such as the United States, avoiding middle-sized wars means being very careful about the small wars it gets involved in.

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