The Exit Strategy Delusion

Gideon Rose

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1998

Summary:  Despite disagreements over troops in Bosnia, all sides want an exit strategy. That concept, however, dating back only to the ignominious U.S. withdrawal from Somalia, has nothing to do with military requirements and everything to do with post-Cold War politics. Exit strategies harm a mission's chances of success, and had they been required the United States would not have defended the armistice after the Korean War, kept the peace on the Sinai Peninsula after Camp David, or undertaken NATO. The real question is not when American troops will be out, but why they are going in.

Gideon Rose is Deputy Director of National Security Studies and Olin Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was Director of the Council's Henry A. Kissinger Study Group on Exit Strategies and American Foreign Policy.

STRATEGIC VOGUE

Come June, the American troops helping to maintain peace in Bosnia are scheduled to come home. Recently, however, some senior administration officials have begun murmuring about staying on longer. "A consensus is developing," says Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, "that there will be or should be some form of U.S. military presence" after the current force leaves. "If we pull out on an arbitrary deadline," says the architect of the 1995 Dayton Accord, Richard Holbrooke, "the situation in Bosnia will become chaotic, eroding the achievements so far." Such talk does not sit well with Congress, where many were hostile to the original mission and outraged at its first extension last year. The stage is set for a battle this spring over U.S. policy in Bosnia.

The administration and Congress do seem to agree on one important issue: any new Bosnia mission must have an "exit strategy." In her confirmation hearings, Albright assured Senate questioners that she "would never advise using American forces . . . where there is no exit strategy." In his confirmation hearings, Secretary of Defense William Cohen explained that before deploying troops he would ask questions such as, "Do we have a so-called exit strategy? We know how to get in. How do we get out?" In 1996 then-national security adviser Anthony Lake even crafted an explicit "exit strategy doctrine," which had as its centerpiece the principle, "Before we send our troops into a foreign country we should know how and when we're going to get them out." Congress has mandated an exit strategy for any new Bosnia deployment. The extent to which the concept has become conventional wisdom was underlined when Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) rebuked the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Henry Shelton, for what he saw as the Bosnia policy's missing ingredient: "Usually, we don't go into things without an exit strategy, as you know, General."

In fact, there is nothing usual about exit strategies; the concept's current vogue has little to do with time-honored verities of military intervention, and much to do with the politics of post-Cold War foreign policy. Borrowed from the business world, the term was not applied to foreign or military policy before 1993, and became part of the vernacular only during the withdrawal from Somalia later that year. Its current popularity epitomizes the new national quest for intervening on the cheap, with the troops home for Christmas-or better yet, Thanksgiving.

In the past, policymakers often gave little thought to the specific objectives and potential endings of their foreign adventures, with chaotic results. But the idea of a formal exit strategy, with its anti-interventionist bias and stress on rigid public planning, is misguided in theory and unhelpful in practice. Instead of obsessing about the exit, planners should concentrate on the strategy. The key question is not how we get out, but why we are getting in.

Opposing exit strategies does not necessarily mean favoring the waste of American blood and money in endless futile attempts to impose order or create harmony in Bosnia or anywhere else. The main reason to jettison the concept is because it lumps together several important issues that are best handled separately. The first question is when open-ended military commitments might actually make sense, and the answer is that it depends on the American interests at stake and the policy options available. The second question is how interventions can be closed out smoothly, and the answer is that they should leave some kind of stable order behind. The third question is how overcommitment can be avoided, and the answer is through selective intervention rather than the imposition of time limits. Finally, the fourth question is how unexpected developments should be handled, and the answer is according to well-developed contingency plans.

THINK STRATEGY, NOT EXIT

If you ask most politicians what an exit strategy is, they will look at you blankly, because they consider the answer obvious: a plan to bring American troops home from some mission abroad. The simplicity of this definition reveals the concept's political, as opposed to intellectual, origins: it is a response to perceived popular impatience with messy foreign entanglements. It follows that interventions should be designed to be painless and self-limiting. Assurances to that effect should be offered to Congress and the public as a precondition for authorization, and initial plans should be followed strictly as events unfold. "Mission creep" should not be allowed because it leads to "quagmires."

The insistence that troops should never be deployed unless an administration can tell Congress and the public in advance just how long the mission will last, how much it will cost, and precisely how it will end represents a Somalia corollary to the Vietnam syndrome in American foreign policy. This is why the call for exit strategies fits so neatly into updated versions of the Pentagon's restrictive post-Vietnam conditions for using force, articulated by Caspar Weinberger in 1984 and supplemented by Colin Powell a few years later. However, the concept has major drawbacks.

By definition, the term biases discussion in favor of foreign military commitments that can be terminated easily and against those that appear more open-ended. By making an exit strategy a prerequisite for the deployment of troops, neoisolationists preempt consideration of some worthwhile operations, allowing a general rule rather than specific arguments to do their work for them. Some of the missions that would have failed to meet such a standard include American participation in NATO, the post-armistice defense of South Korea, the post-Camp David peacekeeping in the Sinai, and the post-Gulf War containment of Iraq-not to mention the stated U.S. intention to maintain 100,000 troops in Asia. Indeed, an exit strategy in Asia would contradict the very purpose of the American presence there.