Closing the Overton Window on COIN

By Fester

The Overton window is closed in foreign policy. The range of acceptable opinions is from the Kagan clan of neo-cons to somewhat liberalish Center for New American Security on the sort of left. Brookings, CAP, Heritage, AEI all assume American hegemony is supreme and should be maintained in an unchallenged state through spending twice the global average on defense despite the fact that the current opponents that the US is engaged in combat with have budgets that are not even rounding errors in a single service's sub-budget. The major debate is on methods and tactics, not goals and strategies.

Matthew Yglesias has a good illustration of the narrow band of 'elite' discourse on a wide variety of subjects:

Things start out okay on the Middle East where they ask one person from CAP (left) one from AEI (right) and two from the Carnegie Endowment (center). But on energy, they ask one person from CAP (left) one from AEI (right) and one from Cato (also right). Then on economic history they go for Cato (right), Brookings (center), and Americans for Tax Reform (right). On American political history, it’s Cato (right), Brookings (center) and Heritage Foundation (right) and Foreign Policy Initiative (right).

Fabius Maximus looks at the experts who were part of the McChrystal strategy review team that is now proposing an expansive, and expensive counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan:

1. Stephen Biddle, Council on Foreign Relations (Author of the classic Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle)

2. Anthony Cordesman, Center for Strategic and International Studies

3. Catherine Dale, Congressional Research Service

4. Etienne de Durand, director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the Institut Francais des Relations Internationales (no bio found)

5. Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger, counterinsurgency expert, and blogger at the Center for a New American Security

6. Fred Kagan, American Enterprise Institute

7. Kimberly Kagan, Institute for the Study of War

8. Whitney Kassel, Office of the Secretary of Defense (no bio found, possible author of these and these articles)

9. Terry Kelly, senior researcher at the RAND Corporation

10. Luis Peral, European Union’s Institute for Strategic Studies

11. Lt. Col. Aaron Prupas, USAF officer at Centcom (USAF Academy, Class of 1987; no bio found)

12. Jeremy Shapiro, civil-military relations analyst at the Brookings Institution

Again, the Overton window of potentially plausible options under discussion is very narrow. And getting the argument that an open-ended system and society transforming effort that optimistically will take a decade or more and cost several trillion dollars may not be a good idea has been damn difficult because there is no "credentialled" and "legitimate" figure who will make that argument. So the peanut gallery of Cassandras snipe and hope that we are wrong.