Impatient U.S. needs humility lesson

Eighty years ago, there was a notable U.S. intelligence failure: A Japanese fleet crossed the Pacific undetected until 6:10 a.m. Hawaii time, Dec. 7, 1941. Since then, there have been other intelligence failures: About the Bay of Pigs and the fragility of the Castro regime, about the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, about 9/11, about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

But, then, the 1957 Gaither Commission projected that the Soviet gross domestic product would surpass the U.S. GDP in 1993. (The sclerotic Soviet Union did not live that long.)

In the aftermath of the U.S. government’s misunderstanding of the Afghan regime’s durability and the Taliban’s capability, clearly in foreign policy as well as domestic policy the government needs a dose of epistemic humility. Epistemology is the field of philosophy concerned with the nature and limits of knowledge.

Domestically, the Biden administration speaks breezily about “transforming” the financial and energy components of the nation’s almost $23 trillion economy, oblivious about possible unintended consequences. In foreign policy, a chastened administration needs to tailor its objectives to fit its ability to know what it does not know.

In 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson called the United States “the locomotive at the head of mankind.” Forty years later, as the Berlin Wall was being chipped into souvenirs and the Soviet Union was a year from extinction, former U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick published an article whose title expressed her expectation and the nation’s yearning in 1990: During the Cold War, foreign policy had acquired “an unnatural importance,” but now the United States could again be “A Normal Country in a Normal Time.”

The U.S. holiday from history lasted 11 years. It ended with the thunderclap of 9/11, which shattered long-standing assumptions about technology and civilization advancing in tandem.

“The rapid increase of the means of communications throughout the globe,” said a U.S. secretary of state, “have brought into almost daily intercourse communities which hitherto have been aliens and strangers to each other, so that now no great social and moral wrong can be inflicted on any people without being felt throughout the civilized globe.” So spoke Hamilton Fish in 1873, 15 years after the first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid. Since, communications have been enriched by telephone, radio, cinema, television, satellites and the internet. Is it clear that this enrichment has made wrongs more intensely “felt” from afar?

Today, with the U.S. facing a near-peer adversary in muscle-flexing China, and with malign nonstate actors worldwide euphoric about the stumble out of Afghanistan, there will be domestic pressures for focusing on (in Barack Obama’s phrase) “nation-building here at home.” However, Robert Kagan, writing in Foreign Affairs, reminds us:

“In the 1950s, during the Eisenhower administration ... the United States had almost one million troops deployed overseas, out of a total American population of 170 million. Today, in an era when the United States is said to be dangerously overextended, there are roughly 200,000 U.S. troops deployed overseas, out of a population of 330 million.”

Americans are impatient, eager to stop thinking about their enemies, who are implacable. This is a dangerous asymmetry.