Military Force and the Fallacy of the Middle Way

Paul R. Pillar

Military Force, United States

There is a time-honored technique, familiar to veterans of policymaking in the U.S. Government, for ostensibly giving the boss a choice of options but in effect pre-cooking the decision.  That is to present three options, which can be aligned along a continuum of cost or risk or whatever, and to list as the middle option the one that the option-preparers want to have chosen.  Often this option is indeed chosen; as presented, it appears to be the most balanced and reasonable one, avoiding excesses of the alternatives on either side.

But the appearance is an artifact of how the issue and the choices are framed.  The whole framework may be skewed.  The offered alternative on one side may be inherently more extreme than the one on the other side.  If a more complete list of options were presented, the additional alternatives may be mostly on one side, and the pre-cooked “middle” option would be revealed to be not in a moderate middle after all.

Similar dynamics apply not just to manipulation of options papers but also to public debate about foreign policy.  The nation’s recent history and the sheer volume of argumentation on one side of an issue or another create powerful framing effects.  A commonly felt sense of what is extreme and what is reasonable may derive mostly from the framing, detached from any more broadly based standard.

So it has been recently with discussion of how the next U.S. administration should use military force.  A common refrain has been that George W. Bush used too much, Barack Obama used too little, and the next U.S. president, like Goldilocks, should use some amount in between.  This theme appears, for example, in an article by Peter Baker in the New York Times about the next administration’s choices in the Middle East.  “If Mr. Bush was judged to be too assertive,” writes Baker, “many here consider Mr. Obama too restrained, and hope to see some middle ground.”  Baker quotes James Jeffrey of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy as articulating the same theme: “Bush’s excessive use of military force disillusioned the American political base for engagement.  Then Obama’s timid use of military force disillusioned the American regional diplomatic base in allied governments.”

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