America Has an Unhealthy Obsession With Credibility

As many observers have commented, the most predictable feature of any debate about U.S. foreign policy is the ritual invoking of "credibility." Whether the issue is Ukraine, Iran, Russia, Taiwan, Afghanistan, the global war on terror, or even trade policy, sooner or later someone is going to argue that failing to implement their preferred policy will do grievous harm to the United States' reputation for resolve.

Why is the United States so obsessed with this aspect of foreign policy? Is it an artifact of its political culture, a result of how international relations is taught in universities, or an odd quirk of America's national history? Is it merely a handy refuge for hard-liners trying to justify actions that can't be defended on other grounds or just a persistent mind-worm that the foreign-policy elite can't get past? Or is it perhaps the direct consequence of U.S. grand strategy itself?

Whatever the reason, I can't think of another great power as concerned with preserving its own credibility as the United States has been for many years. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying the United States is the only country that worries about its reputation for resolve, nor am I suggesting that being perceived as credible isn't valuable when dealing with friends and foes alike. Since World War II, however, the idea that a failure to respond to and decisively defeat any challenge would have baleful consequences for the United States has been a central theme of U.S. foreign-policy discourse. It is the key ingredient in the infamous Munich analogy—surely the most moth-eaten trope in the foreign-policy elite’s toolkit—but also central to the so-called domino theory and recurring fear that any sign of weakness would lead allies to abandon the United States and bandwagon to its foes.

In 1968, for example, then-incoming U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger insisted that the United States had to fight on in Vietnam, even though he had apparently believed the United States could not hope to win the war. Why? Because he believed U.S. credibility was all-important: In his words, "nations can gear their actions to ours only if they can count on our steadiness."

Failing to respond when states act contrary to U.S. wishes supposedly invites further predations, which is why some observers of former U.S. President Barack Obama's decision not to retaliate after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons encouraged Russian President Vladimir Putin to seize Crimea in 2014, even though direct evidence of a link is lacking and Putin might well have acted no matter what Obama did. Today, former U.S. officials claim that failing to respond with force to a Russian attack on Ukraine will invite a Chinese attack on Taiwan and "set the global system back decades," said retired U.S. Navy Adm. James Stavridis to the New York Times....