WASHINGTON — Most accounts of Ash Carter's education mention his doctoral degree in theoretical physics but often overlook his bachelor's degree in medieval history. Many reports also paint Carter as a trigger-happy, shoot-first, ask-questions-later type of military thinker because he once called for bombing North Korea.
But a broad look at Carter's media interviews and published work reveals a man who's as cautious about the use of American military power as President Barack Obama and not very different from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel — the man Carter may replace as the Pentagon chief.
Those in Congress who see Carter as a possible hawkish counterweight to Obama may be disappointed in the potential nominee's measured take on a wide range of foreign-policy issues that would confront him as the next defense secretary if he's nominated: terrorism, the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, ties with Asian allies, and Iran's nuclear ambitions. Some of Carter's past writings, meanwhile, could be grist for Republicans looking to slow his confirmation or to use the hearings as a chance to cudgel Obama.
Iran is likely to be a major flashpoint. During his disastrous January 2013 confirmation hearings, Hagel garbled the Obama administration's stated policy on Iran's nuclear program by saying the White House supports "containment." Hagel had to then quickly, and embarrassingly, reverse himself and say the administration's policy was actually predicated on preventing Tehran from ever acquiring a bomb in the first place.
If nominated, Carter would almost certainly face tough questions about whether he would be willing to accept the idea of containing a nuclear Iran, a toxic idea on Capitol Hill.
In an essay published in 2008 by the Center for a New American Security about U.S. options for dealing with Iran, Carter argues that military force alone wouldn't be enough to keep Iran from going nuclear and should instead be part of a "complete strategy integrating political, economic, and military elements." Airstrikes may not decisively stop Iran's nuclear ambitions and instead may spur the country to achieve its goals through subterfuge, making it more likely that the United States would have to be satisfied with containing a nuclear Iran, Carter wrote.
Writing like the diligent student of Yale and Oxford he once was, Carter noted, "My assigned topic is 'military options for dealing with Iran's nuclear program,' but I have re-titled this paper to reflect" that the use of armed force against Iran couldn't be divorced from a broader strategy to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions. Instead, Carter gave his paper a new heading: "Military Elements in a Strategy to Deal with Iran's Nuclear Program."
The reason for the new title, he wrote, "is that whenever military action is contemplated, one must ask the question, 'What happens next?'" The phrase echoes Obama's own ambivalence about the use of martial power to achieve national goals, particularly in a country as large, militarily powerful, and strategically important as Iran.
Carter described how American planners would have to analyze the effectiveness of potential U.S. airstrikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, drawing on Israel's experience in destroying Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 and the planned — but never carried out — U.S. strike against North Korea's Yongbyon complex in 1994.
"Unfortunately, a strike on Iran's nuclear complexes would not have as decisive a technical result" as the Iraqi or planned North Korean strikes, Carter wrote. The biggest impediment to shutting down Iran's program with such strikes would be if Iran had a "parallel, secret, and undiscovered enrichment program" that was somehow further along than its known facilities, Carter wrote.
"Airstrikes on the Iranian nuclear program or other targets could conceivably reset the diplomatic table in pursuit of a negotiated end to the nuclear program, but they could also easily overturn the diplomatic table," he wrote.
A large-scale military assault on Iran "would presumably be incompatible with a return to negotiations with the current Iranian government and must be seen as part of the major alternative to negotiating a curb in Iran's nuclear program: a strategy of containment of an Iran destined to go nuclear," Carter wrote.
After writing that paper Carter, went on to serve in the Obama administration, first as the Pentagon's top weapons buyer and later as the deputy secretary of defense.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has pursued some of the policy options Carter laid out in the 2008 essay: a combination of tough economic sanctions and vigorous diplomacy designed to stop Iran from enriching nuclear fuel that can be used to make bombs. Those efforts led to a November 2013 agreement under which the West loosened some of the sanctions on Iran in exchange for a temporary cessation of Iran's enrichment activities. A long-term deal to halt Tehran's production of bomb-grade nuclear fuel, however, has been elusive. Late last month, the United States and its partners reluctantly agreed to a seven-month extension after the latest Nov. 24 deadline for a deal failed to produce one.
Obama has been criticized for suggesting that American military power has its limits, drawing fire for remarks like a May 2014 speech arguing that "just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail." Carter has been similarly cautious about assuming that every problem has a military solution.
"We are necessary to the solution of many world problems. But we're not sufficient anymore," Carter said in a July 2014 interview with Charlie Rose on PBS, months after leaving his job as the deputy defense secretary. "That doesn't have to do with the diminution in our power relative to others, it has to do with the way the world works — how widespread technology is; how widespread social media are ... the ability of people everywhere to participate more."
That means that whether it was "Iraq today, Syria today, Afghanistan, and so forth, the way you approach them today as the United States is I think to recognize that we are a necessary but usually not sufficient force to affect the policy objective we're seeking," Carter said, using the type of language that led Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey to affectionately refer to him last year as an "uber-wonk."
Asked by Rose if the United States could have done anything to stop the emergence of the Islamic State — as many critics of the Obama administration allege — Carter blamed the group's ascendancy on the Syrian civil war careening out of control and sidestepped the issue of whether Washington should have gotten involved earlier in the conflict.
"I think if the Syrian war hadn't raged out of control for four or five years, clearly an environment in which a group like ISIS could arm itself and propel itself into western Iraq ... would not have, would not have occurred," Carter said. "It's a little trickier to know, to say — I'm just being honest with you — what leverage the United States or any of the other many participants in this might have had over that situation given the intransigence of Assad, the support for Russia for Assad and the crazy-quilt nature of the insurgency against him," he said, speaking about Syrian President Bashar Assad.
As to whether the continued presence of U.S. troops in Iraq could have prevented the rise of the Islamic State or if American intelligence could have spotted the group's rise sooner, Carter in his PBS interview backed the Obama administration's standard talking points: "I think it's undoubtedly true that ISIS surprised everyone with the rapidity with which they were made to cause the collapse of the Iraqi security forces to the west of Iraq."
Despite his careful phrasing and parsing of words on a range of topics, the one subject that anti-war and liberal lawmakers are likely to question Carter about are his blunt views on North Korea.
In a 2006 op-ed in the Washington Post, titled "If Necessary, Strike and Destroy," Carter and former Secretary of Defense William Perry wrote, "if North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched."
Back then North Korea was threatening to break out of a moratorium on launches of long-range ballistic missiles that the reclusive nation had observed since 1999. Pyongyang had boasted that it had obtained six to eight bombs' worth of plutonium between 2003 and 2006, and six-party talks aimed at curbing the country's nuclear ambitions had failed.
Still, the call by two Democrats for a preventive strike against North Korea was shocking, "especially after so many critics of the Iraq war had stripped the bark off Bush 43 for engaging in what now can only be considered a preventive war," as Tom Nichols, a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, wrote on his blog, referring to Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003 in search of weapons of mass destruction that were never found.
But, Nichols added, Carter's position may have been "part of trend of general exhaustion with rogue regimes and a complete evaporation of any tolerance for risk from crazies with nuclear programs" in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Carter's tough language on North Korea also may have been prompted by his dealings with the regime when he served in the Clinton administration as a nuclear nonproliferation specialist at the Pentagon, Nichols wrote.
In a 1994 interview with PBS, Carter recounted the experience he and Perry had in dealing with North Korea.
"Remember, the North Koreans have a very heated rhetoric, and a very heated way of talking to foreigners, including Americans," Carter told PBS. "They talk about how they're going to turn Seoul into a sea of fire. They're going to turn Tokyo into a sea of fire. They'll ask you, 'Where are you from?' And when you tell them where you're from, they'll say, 'Well, we're going to turn that into a sea of fire.'"
Carter went on to say that when Perry told the North Koreans he was from San Francisco, they said, "Well, we can turn San Francisco into a sea of fire."
Many aspects of Carter's background would distinguish him from his predecessors as secretaries of defense. Carter came of age after the Vietnam War, never served in uniform, and has a minor in a field — medieval history — that is probably irrelevant for an official charged with overseeing the world's biggest and most powerful military. But Carter believes a solid grounding in history is essential to effective policymaking.
While political and economic theories try to explain actions and courses pursued by nations and their leaders, history is a better guide, Carter told Rose in his July 2014 interview.
"I enjoyed and still enjoy history because it is the single discipline from the world of learning that most informs action in the world," Carter said. While physics explains how things work, history shows "why things are the way they are."
With a combination of how and why, "you're a little bit on the road to figuring out what to do next and how to make the world a better place," Carter said.
Gopal Ratnam is a staff writer at Foreign Policy.
