A recent War on the Rocks article went a long way towards explaining how America’s hegemonic hubris leads to a prevailing, bipartisan leaning towards proactive responses to small threats worldwide. As recent experiences in Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria demonstrate, and with the institution of a Total Information Awareness-like NSA global surveillance to enable ongoing operations, the United States’ conceit in assuming the infallibility of its intelligence have led the nation into mishaps that ultimately degrade security rather than improve it. As an intel hand, I can confirm that a fetishization of “complete” intelligence exists: beyond my own anal tendencies and set of neuroses, this discomfort with uncertainty persists throughout the community. In a world of myriad threats, what you don’t know most certainly can hurt you; however, embracing uncertainty (and indeed doctrinally enshrining the concept of strategic uncertainty) rather than shying away from it, though frightening in the short run, will enhance national security.

Discarding the emotional component of an attack on the homeland, terrorism was (and arguably still remains) a minor fire to fight post-9/11; however, it was largely overblown by the trauma and inherent cognitive bias of past experience, as well as the demonization of uncertainty convincing analysts and policymakers that unless immediate action were taken, the United States would be attacked again. The response to terrorism continues to be grossly disproportionate, with U.S. expenditures on drone programs, SOF missions, materiel shipments to shore up autocratic allies, and the reality of continued presences in Iraq and Afghanistan running up a tab orders of magnitude higher than OMB’s cost-per-life-saved metric. In fact, all of these things engender a lot more hatred for America overseas, a critical loss of the information environment which I’ve harped on at length in my post about targeted killing. In the interest of not retreading old ground, I’ll just summarize that up as follows: the United States is a heck of a lot better at creating enemies than squashing them when it comes to small wars. And since it looks like we’re not going to war with a conventional power any time soon thankfully, small wars (proxy conflicts, countering insurgencies, covert action missions) are the name of the game.

Small wars all come with an inherent degree of uncertainty: they emerge from local grievances and draw upon local sympathies in a way that can’t be discerned from a 30,000 foot view. Even if you’re looking through the microscope at a certain population, such as the Pakistan/Afghanistan border tribal areas, you risk missing minor flare-ups elsewhere that can become a big deal in the long run. Libya stands as a great example of this: the international community’s naivete in assuming that the populace would take the tack of post-revolutionary Tunisia or Egypt after the NATO bombings of Gaddafi forces ignored crucial local and tribal differences. Now, Libya is split into three factions (arguably more, depending which way the wind blows for the Tebu that day) and harbors a resilient Islamic State presence that will continue to threaten as it radiates outwards throughout North Africa. This is a leitmotif within Western interventions: assumptions that things have worked that way in countries in the region in the past translate into disastrous assumptions regarding the future.

However, American politicians are pre-disposed towards action, lest they be slated by their political opponents by indecision, a sin conflated with “letting the terrorists win.” Instead, the U.S. needs to head off such incentives for reckless action by enshrining a policy of adopting strategic uncertainty: rather than throwing gasoline on a bunch of little fires that will lead us to be confronted with one frighteningly large one, we need to move towards a Containment 2.0. Wise uses that as a bogeyman in his War On the Rocks article, arguing that neo-conservative urges informed by arrogance and a lack of cultural context shaped a “bastardization” of Kennan’s Cold War-era strategy. But properly applied, it works. There’s a difference between regime change or directly attempting to mold the world in our image (which R.W. Komer rails against in his RAND study of the Vietnam War) and indirectly encouraging pro-U.S. views or leading foreign populations to their own conclusions of the American way being the best alternative. It’s the carrot or the stick: beat someone over the head until they sing the Star Spangled Banner (the Global War on Terror), or shower them with U.S. aid, governance building programs, and intelligence support to combat jihadism in a bid to push them towards Uncle Sam’s camp. In a casualty-averse and war-weary nation such as the United States, the political choice should be fairly simple.

So what would this look like? Jordan is a good example of 2/3 of this: the governance building piece is lacking, but with the deep state ingrained in the kingdom’s government, it’s unclear whether Abdullah’s reforms are realistically all he can accomplish or if it’s just what he wants to. Governance building to bolster the Hashemites’ legitimacy in the eyes of their increasingly diverse subjects is crucial given the influx of refugees from Palestine, Iraq, and Syria: Jordan is a buffer state, and if the United States wants to prevent the jihadist wildfire from spreading, it would be a good place to put up the first barriers. Lebanon is another good candidate, though tackling the power-sharing issues and confessional divisions could make things worse in the short term, making them a reach goal, per se. I’m going to go ahead and say that the intractable Saudi Arabia is a lost cause, and Washington won’t want to disturb that petro-enabled relationship. This leaves Egypt and Tunisia, which need help in all three areas, as crucial to preventing the spread of jihadism in North Africa.

All this builds off of the obvious admission that we can’t know what we don’t know. Human intelligence on the scale of the NSA’s signals intercepts, which is what we’d need to have total, accurate awareness of every local context, is impossible from a collection and analysis standpoint and will always be that way. So start acting like it: there is no way to know how exactly our interventions will destabilize a nation, and the way we carry them out, inevitably they will. By influencing the conditions that contribute to the proliferation of unsavory views in neighboring countries, these movements can be relatively contained and their spread largely restricted to within their existing borders. Then, more focused intelligence efforts and international initiatives can be taken to root out these ideologies, but surgically and with the framework in place to ensure that blowback in the region is limited.