Juan C. Zarate, Treasury’s War: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), 512 pp., $29.99.

AMERICA’S FOUNDING FATHERS believed little else would matter if the government they were forming did not reliably protect the new republic from foreign and domestic threats while also ensuring the liberty and growing prosperity of those it was to govern and defend. If that were not the Republic’s main and institutionalized organizing principle, the Founders believed, their effort to give it life would fail. The keys to success in ensuring national survival, liberty and prosperity were: stay out of debt; steer clear of foreign entanglements, alliances and wars that did not concern the United States; and avoid situations—whether products of ill-considered policies, fatuous and feckless idealism, or leaders’ inattention—that would lead to unnecessary wars and foreign military adventures, debt and eroded liberty. James Madison warned in the 1790s:

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debt and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended.

Elsewhere, he added, “War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.”

Juan C. Zarate’s new book, Treasury’s War: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare, shows how great a regression the Republic has undergone since the only-necessary-wars principle of the Founders’ era. Zarate, who served in the George W. Bush administration as assistant secretary of the treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes and is now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, offers a detailed study about what might be called “all war, all the time.” The author is described on the dust jacket of his book as “a chief architect of modern financial warfare,” and he unveils a catalogue of America’s financial-warfare adversaries, including Al Qaeda and other Islamist fighters; organized criminal groups, narcotics cartels and people smugglers; North Korea and Iran, with a short stopover in Libya; computer hackers; and obstructive, turf-conscious bureaucrats. What emerges is a stark reality: the Treasury Department is at war—and those involved in this financial warfare revel in it. Traveling the world to recover hoards of embezzled money, stop terrorist plots and confound North Korea’s money managers, these financial warriors thwart the bad guys through an array of tools ranging from old-fashioned publicity—to “name and shame” evildoers—to electronic whizbangs. And they do so in an amiable way, which is fitting for a group of men and women portrayed as if they are all “above average,” in the mold of the children of Lake Wobegon. Based on Zarate’s characterization, they are all brilliant, hard-driving, friendly, striking, optimistic, garrulous, savvy, confident, eloquent, masterful and so on.

It must be said that Zarate and others in Treasury’s war have accomplished some remarkable things for U.S. security—temporarily denying North Korea ready access to international financial markets; attacking the essential components of Iran’s economy such as banks and oil; dismantling parts of the financial networks of Al Qaeda and other Islamist insurgent groups; and recovering many billions of dollars stashed away by Saddam Hussein and Muammar el-Qaddafi for the debauched retirements they never reached. Perhaps most interesting, Zarate explains how successful he and others at Treasury were in forging ties to powerful private-sector U.S. and European interests—banks, financial managers and organizations providing security for international financial transactions—that allowed effective joint attacks on targets designated by the U.S. president. The reader will come away from Treasury’s War genuinely impressed by the tactical victories scored by those Zarate ably led and justly honors.

ZARATE HAS written a useful and alarming book. Useful, because he instructs his readers about the wide range of lethal enemies the U.S. government has acquired in recent decades and, at times, motivated. And alarming because, as Zarate implies, the U.S. government has no national-security strategy worth the name. Resting complacently on the illusion that the tactical victories Zarate details will adequately defend the United States, Washington, under either party, continues to pursue a relentlessly interventionist foreign policy that cultivates more enemies and complements the strategies that our myriad foes have designed to seek our defeat. Sadly, at book’s end Zarate turns out to be an advocate of intervention.

The rub in the book arises when it becomes apparent that there is no clear and attainable set of strategic objectives that provides a framework for the war waged by Zarate and his team—or their successors. There is nothing, that is, that even faintly resembles what the Founders saw as the sine qua non for the Republic’s survival—a government organized on the single principle of defending and furthering the security, liberty and prosperity of Americans. As smart as Zarate’s team and their allies may have been and as hard as they may have worked, their attacks are pinpricks—often quickly healed—that hit the financial interests of a wide array of America’s enemies. The clear inadequacy of this pinprick offensive is not their fault; they and all Americans are cosufferers of the national-security mess our bipartisan governing apparatus has cooked up since the Cold War’s end.

Throughout this nearly five-hundred-page book, the reader perceives no such thing as a “U.S. national-security strategy,” notwithstanding documents that are so entitled and published with some regularity and fanfare. What the reader sees is Washington—under both parties—running an uncoordinated, politically correct, ad hoc foreign and military policy that strikes out at numerous targets without sufficient power to destroy any of them. At this stage in its history, America’s security motto should be: “We take no enemy off the table.”

In the context of this amateurish foreign policy, successes like those scored by Zarate and Treasury’s warriors certainly are better than nothing, but they are not war winners. Like the U.S. use of drones, renditions, special forces and interrogations against Islamists, and the law-enforcement methods used against mafia groups and drug cartels, the operations heralded by Zarate reside on the periphery of the main components of genuine national power—namely, military force and a prosperous, low-debt economy. They are at best a complement to, and not a replacement for, these crucial ingredients of American strength. Indeed, notwithstanding the clear tactical successes scored through the methods Zarate describes, the United States today is losing to every entity Washington has designated an enemy.

Consider Zarate’s slate of enemies. Despite the successes against North Korea so well described in Treasury’s War, Pyongyang can still bring the world to a fretful standstill with its saber rattling, behind which it is gradually improving the quality of its nuclear weapons and their long-range delivery systems. It is true that Al Qaeda and other Islamist insurgents have suffered since 1996 from telling attacks at the hands of Treasury, the CIA and U.S. special forces. And yet, Islamist elements have defeated U.S.-led multinational armies in Afghanistan and Iraq and are quickly growing in manpower, geographic dispersion, and—thanks to the Arab Spring—access to veteran mujahideen and sophisticated weaponry. All of this means that Osama bin Laden’s strategy of bleeding the U.S. economy remains alive and viable. Meanwhile, Iran continues to build toward a nuclear capability, sucking up the pain and soldiering on despite the severe damage Western aggression has done to its economy via sanctions and cyberattacks. Tehran also maintains a capability to wreak terrorist havoc inside the United States—thanks to more than four decades of open U.S. borders—if we and/or the Israelis attack Iran.

And gangsters of all kinds, as Treasury’s War documents, continue to steal, hack, suborn, corrupt and kill. The Latin American drug cartels are expanding their manpower, monetary resources and firepower, challenging the state in Mexico, spreading into Central America, establishing smuggling networks in West Africa, corrupting banking systems throughout the Western Hemisphere, and, in alliance with Latino street gangs, showing signs of increasing influence and control in some towns and cities across the southwestern United States. Again, much of this is facilitated by the open U.S. southern border. Zarate’s book also explains the symbiotic relationship between organized criminal organizations (mafias, hackers-are-us groups, people smugglers, etc.) and globalism’s characteristic communication systems and portable high-tech gear. He makes the excellent point that even as the U.S. government has used cutting-edge electronic and computer equipment to hurt these organizations, they are growing increasingly capable themselves in this field. With seemingly unlimited cash, they can acquire state-of-the-art skills and equipment to defend and attack. Zarate wisely notes that these malefactors have an advantage over America because they do not care at all about collateral damage or breaking any laws. And he posits the troubling and probably accurate thought that it is only a matter of time before nonstate actors pose a potentially catastrophic threat to U.S. economic, financial and infrastructure interests that depend on the Internet and other electronic-communications systems.

HOW DO we fix this problem, which is really asking how we ensure the Republic’s survival? Well, most helpful would be to accept the fact that the Founders were not dead, white, misogynist slave drivers, but rather smart, often-ruthless and practical fellows who were completely devoted to an “America First” national-security policy. If we can embrace this historical reality, and if the NSA and Department of Education do not discover the heresy and lock us up, we can begin to see that today’s U.S. government and the bipartisan political establishment that runs it are contributing significantly and knowingly to America’s vulnerability. Then perhaps we can begin to formulate a commonsense national-security strategy, which would incorporate all of the enthusiasm described by Zarate and some of the methods.

To get on the same page as the Founders and then employ what might be called the “Founders’ Rules” in America’s defense, Washington must do five things, aiming to shape a world in which Treasury’s economic tools, special forces, military drones and CIA covert actions have a chance to control a suppressed and greatly damaged enemy. This would supplant the current, unachievable mission of defeating a rapidly growing enemy that is too often motivated by U.S. adventures overseas.

The five imperatives are: extinguish the national debt; attain energy security; win the very few wars America needs to fight; take risks to defend America and annihilate its enemies; and end an interventionist foreign policy meant to install secular democracy around the world.

Zarate’s book admirably underscores the dire national-security threat posed by the almost-unfathomable level of our national debt. With much of it held by adversaries and competitors in China and on the Arabian Peninsula, the debt cripples our ability to shift or even find resources to meet emergencies or reequip our badly worn military. It also prevents us from effectively challenging China’s obviously official and highly damaging hacking campaign against U.S. government agencies and corporations. Further, it forces us to acquiesce in the well-financed and unending campaign of Saudi Arabia (about which Zarate is far too positive) to spread its murderous form of Sunni Islam around the world, including in the United States.

No viable national-security policy is possible until the debt issue is resolved. Until then, our national security depends on the unlikely success of Ben Bernanke’s monthly flood of backed-by-nothing fool’s currency and the prattling of foreign-monster-seeking politicians such as John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham, bent on rattling sabers that have become dull blades following the U.S. debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In noting the importance of energy security, Zarate rightfully stresses the pleasing prospect of substantial near-term advances in that direction via shale oil and natural gas. Washington must realize these possibilities for both the energy security they will yield and the jobs they will produce. The United States already does more than any other great power to reduce environmental degradation, and for now it is time to put that issue on the back burner. President Obama’s politically motivated delay of the Keystone XL pipeline and his war on the coal industry cruelly cost jobs and degrade U.S. national security. It is time to ignore the ecozealots, the politicians who pander to them and their media supporters, while simultaneously squaring away our future energy security and ending our humiliating and war-causing dependence on effete but oil-rich Arab despots.

Although Zarate never says so explicitly, his book makes clear that human beings are, as ever, hardwired for war and lesser violent conflicts. Therefore, the wars that America must fight—and there are very few—must be decisively won. The widespread idea, embraced by Zarate, that the world has moved away from using military power to win wars and that America can now prevail by employing the pinprick tools described above is nothing less than lethal nonsense.

Since the mid-1990s, America definitively has proven that such tools can hurt its enemies but cannot win wars; indeed, in the long run they make matters worse by prolonging wars and ensuring our enemies survive, grow and—as Zarate accurately notes—learn how to turn our own pinprick tools against our very vulnerable economic and financial sectors. If we fix the debt and stop causing or intervening in unnecessary wars with countries that pose no threat to us (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, etc.), we can refit the U.S. military and await a chance to unleash our forces against our most lethal enemy, the Islamists, in a manner that focuses on destruction of their fighters, their infrastructure, and their supporters and abettors.

My own guess is that this necessary war will come in West Africa, where Al Qaeda and related Islamist groups are cooperating with Latin American drug cartels and organized criminal organizations to solidify their positions in and near areas that produce oil, strategic minerals and uranium, which are life-and-death national interests for the economies of America and several of its European allies. When this war occurs, it should be formally declared by Congress—a quaint but clear constitutional requirement—and then fought with as few allies as possible. It should be waged as the U.S. military sees fit under a presidential directive that simply orders it to annihilate the enemy as quickly and thoroughly as possible and then come home. Intense, indiscriminate and enemy-erasing lethality applied as fast as possible is, after all, the only mercy in war.

In Treasury’s War, Zarate also makes clear that U.S. politicians and senior civil servants have yet to realize that the Cold War is over, and that with it went the near “certainties” they once enjoyed about the intentions and capabilities of America’s major nation-state opponent, the Soviet Union. Once their leaders at last absorb this reality, America’s defenders can begin to take well-considered but dangerous risks on America’s behalf. As much as Washington’s bipartisan elite hates it, regular risk-taking is now the order of the day.

Zarate describes a policy advancement that occurred when Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill allowed him and his team to work on an 80 percent rule, meaning U.S. action could be undertaken against the enemy when there was an 80 percent confidence level in the intelligence being used. But this formula was soon replaced by a near 100 percent confidence requirement. In reality, such high confidence levels are rarely achievable in the post–Cold War world, and when they are it is almost always regarding nation-states, which operate from fixed addresses and use communications systems and other assets that can be monitored by a broad range of U.S. intelligence tools.

In assessing Soviet intentions and capabilities during the Cold War, we often had very high levels of confidence. But that world has changed, and Zarate demonstrates that senior political leaders and civil servants still don’t understand that. Nonstate actors—precisely those detailed by Zarate—are not vulnerable to many U.S. intelligence tools that are effective against nation-states because they have no fixed addresses, tank parks, airfields, fiber-optic cables, communications satellites, navies or electrical grids. Therefore, if America’s defenders secure a 25–30 percent confidence level that the United States is being threatened by a nonstate actor, close attention should be paid. If those men and women then become 35–40 percent certain that trouble is coming our way, U.S. political and bureaucratic leaders should destroy the threat, even if they have to risk being wrong, causing collateral damage, and then suffering condemnation by domestic political opportunists, the media, human-rights groups and foreigners—all of whom can stoop to criticize precisely because they are not responsible for America’s security.

It should be noted that today’s Islamist threat to the United States is so enormous because President Clinton’s administration wanted Cold War–level confidence—75–80 percent certainty or more—in the intelligence about bin Laden before it would act to protect Americans. Not surprisingly, that level never came, and Clinton took no chance on Americans’ behalf. The result was September 11. When U.S. Navy SEALs killed bin Laden in May 2011, U.S. government officials told the media that the chance bin Laden was in Abbottabad was at best 50 percent. Against Islamists, narcotraffickers, mafias and other nonstate actors, that is a truly excellent level of confidence. If we do not act when or before that level is reached, we will always be chasing but never defeating nonstate actors.

THE MOST essential reform needed to craft a viable national-security strategy is a decision by our bipartisan governing elite and senior civil servants to stop waging their war of cultural intervention—often backed by bayonets—against populations that don’t embrace Western norms and practices, and particularly against the Muslim world. The catalogue of meddling is extensive: intervening in Russian politics to criticize their gay- and human-rights policies; lecturing Latin American regimes on their democratic failings; hectoring societies whose level of women’s rights is not to our liking; and intervening militarily, diplomatically and economically in the Muslim world when we have no national interest at risk, such as in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt and the Arab-Israeli conflict. These U.S. actions do more than any other factor to motivate the most lethal of the enemies Zarate describes. Oblivious to their penchant for self-inflicted overseas disasters, U.S. foreign-policy officials are, in Alexander Hamilton’s words, “political doctors whose sagacity disdains the admonitions of experimental instruction.” If these U.S. interventionist actions against foreign cultures continue, Washington will help give birth to a worldwide collection of enemies requiring military countermeasures of such magnitude that they eventually will damage liberty, prosperity and democracy in the only place those things really matter—inside the United States.

Despite Zarate’s experience in fighting nonstate actors and seeing their continued growth into more numerous, skilled and ruthless foes, he still enthusiastically encourages U.S. political leaders to continue and strengthen the interventionist orientation of U.S. foreign policy that makes the job of all America’s defenders—intelligence and military—more difficult and perhaps impossible. He writes:

The goal of our national security should not be just the defense and promotion of our interests, but the creation of conditions globally that are commensurate with American interests and values. The rule of law, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the flow of information, respect for human rights, protection of minorities, the empowerment of women, free trade, systems that empower entrepreneurs and individual expression, the accountability of governments, and transparent civil institutions are all goals that the United States and American society should be promoting.

There is much in Zarate’s book that enlightens us, and he gets many things right and proposes some innovative ideas. But unfortunately he concludes by endorsing the same old Wilsonian recipe for endless overseas intervention that energizes many of the nonstate and state actors he correctly sees as American enemies that must be defeated. As the Founders explained, foreign policy is not about building an empire—an ambition, as John Dickinson noted, that is “fatal to republican forms of government”—but about defending America, protecting its material interests, and, at the margin, letting foreigners observe and perhaps choose to copy domestic behaviors that produce thrift, prosperity and liberty.

By endorsing an already-failed interventionist policy, Zarate urges the reinforcement of failure. It is “a mistaken opinion,” Benjamin Franklin once argued, “that the honor and dignity of a government is better supported by persisting in a wrong measure once entered into, than by rectifying an error as soon as it is discovered.” Interventionism-cum-empire building of the kind Zarate supports is a mistake that has severely undermined America’s “honor and dignity.”

More than two hundred years ago, George Washington said that U.S. foreign policy must focus on observing “good faith and justice towards all nations” and facilitate the cultivation of “peace and harmony with all.” The only path toward such a policy, Washington argued, was to abide by a hard-and-fast rule that “no nation has a right to intermeddle in the internal concerns of another; that everyone had a right to form and adopt whatever government they liked best to live under themselves.” Washington’s warning against U.S. intervention abroad remains today, as scholar Richard Norton Smith wrote two decades ago, “a brilliantly drawn road map to national survival and a fully realized independence.” This is particularly true given that the United States today faces the same condition that confronted it in Washington’s time: namely, as he put it, “a people . . . already deeply in debt, and in a convalescent state from the struggle we have been engaged in ourselves.”

At day’s end, America owes the world no more than the respect Washington pledged—and owes itself no less than the survival, liberty and prosperity his noninterventionism assured.

Michael Scheuer spent twenty-two years in the CIA and is the author, most recently, of Osama Bin Laden (Oxford University Press, 2011). He is working on a forthcoming book on the Founding Fathers’ prescription for a noninterventionist foreign policy.

Image: Flickr/Eli Christman. CC BY 2.0.

Pullquote: It is apparent that there is no clear and attainable set of strategic objectives that provides a framework for the war waged by Zarate and his team—or their successors.Image: Essay Types: Book Review