Rethinking America's Grand Strategy
Lieber, Robert J
Any serious analysis must take into account the nihilistic, diffuse nature of our enemies, the limits of international institutions, and other nations' dependence on American leadership.
With fits and starts, an intense debate about America's world role is under way. At stake is the country's overall strategy for protecting and promoting its security, values, and national interests. This dialogue about grand strategy has had a long gestation period, since the end of the cold war. For a half-century the United States had faced lethal threats to its security, first in World War II and then from the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors. In the wake of those threats, America sought a rationale for its international role. But for a dozen years, from 1989 to 2001, and despite numerous and largely unmemorable attempts at new blueprints, there seemed to be no single unambiguous peril that might serve as the focus for a new grand strategy.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, brought a violent end to that interlude. The vital national debate that it triggered, however, has been conducted in an acrimonious political environment. That atmosphere is a legacy of both the bitter partisan divide over President Bill Clinton's impeachment and the hotly contested outcome of the 2000 presidential election. It also reflects more-deep-seated cultural and attitudinal differences that characterize the populations of "red" and "blue" America. Scholars have by no means been immune from that climate, and not a few of the assessments of the Bush administration and its national-security strategy have been knee-jerk dismissals of the president as a trigger-happy Texan presiding over a radical and dangerous war on terror.
To be sure, many American and European analysts have issued serious, thoughtful critiques of recent U.S. grand strategy. Consider, for instance, America Unbound, The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, by Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, of the Brookings Institution (Brookings Institution Press, 2003); The End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-first Century (Knopf, 2002), by Charles A. Kupchan, of Georgetown University; and a recent article in the journal Survival, "The End of the Neo-Conservative Movement," by G. John Ikenberry, also of Georgetown. These critiques characterize Bush doctrines of primacy and pre-emption as ill advised and counterproductive, exacerbating the threats we face, alienating foreign leaders and publics, and isolating America from its erstwhile allies and others whose support we need to safeguard our security and tackle urgent global problems. The critics say the unilateralism evident in the war on terror and the administration's willingness to use force in Iraq without the agreement of the United Nations break with a half-century of multilateral cooperation and American commitment to institutions and alliances that we helped to create.
The critics condemn as simplistic the administration's labeling of countries or groups as "evil," and they consider the goal of fostering democracy throughout the Middle East as overreaching. They argue that recent U.S. policies not only exhibit hubris but also risk overextension and trigger opposition to American power, especially through "soft balancing" (i.e, collaboration among other countries to oppose the United States through means other than direct military confrontation). We cannot pursue our own security and global interests, the argument goes, unless we mend our ways, return to habits of multilateral cooperation, and reintegrate ourselves with the expanding array of international institutions and agreements that represent a nascent form of global governance.
Although widely shared, many such critiques stand on a shaky foundation. To begin with, they imply that the half-century preceding the current administration was a halcyon era of multilateral cooperation among allies. But the cold-war years were marked by a long series of often bitter disputes, which were kept within bounds largely by the shared sense of Soviet threat (see Anton W. DePorte's 1986 classic from Yale University Press, Europe Between the Superpowers: The Enduring Balance).
In turn, during the post-cold-war decade of the 1990s and Bill Clinton's presidency, a number of major divisions had already become apparent. They included, for example, bitter differences over NATO's response to ethnic conflict in Bosnia, and an inability to agree on a treaty to ban antipersonnel land mines, on terms for the International Criminal Court, and on the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Moreover, French opposition to American predominance was increasingly apparent. President Jacques Chirac proclaimed in 1996 that "the position of the leader of the free world is vacant," implying that he was prepared to take on the task. And Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine in 1999 uttered his widely repeated complaint about American "hyperpuissance."
Much of the current criticism dwells on the character and personalities of the Bush administration as the primary cause of European-American discord. While serious problems in the relationship have emerged, that emphasis undervalues the structural dimension of the problem. In contrast, Harvard's Stephen Walt, a leading neorealist author who is otherwise critical of the administration, dissents from a report of the quintessentially establishment Council on Foreign Relations, which emphasizes personality differences and philosophical disputes. He argues instead that "asymmetry of power -- not philosophy -- is the root cause of this dispute." Nor is the idea that we can rejuvenate the Atlantic partnership by conceding a European veto over American policy likely to be feasible or desirable. It is hard to imagine that even a Howard Dean presidency would have been willing to cede such control.
Policy critics also tend to adopt a reductio ad Iraqum. As important as the war in Iraq and the subsequent insurgency have become, they are not the sum total of foreign policy, and exclusive focus on them can distort perspective. Not only are there other issues and regions to be considered, but the standard critique of policy implies that, apart from Britain's Tony Blair, America has become almost totally isolated in its Iraq policy. In reality, more than half of the governments of Europe originally endorsed or supported the U.S. position in the months leading up to the Iraq war, and the differences within Europe are as important as those between Europe and the United States. Moreover, the much-maligned wider war on terror has seen close cooperation in intelligence and security (with exemplary U.S.-French collaboration) not only between European and American agencies, but in other regions as well.
What's more, balancing (soft or otherwise) against the United States is hardly apparent (see the essay in the November 3, 2003, Weekly Standard by Gerard Alexander, an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia). Beyond Europe, the United States and coalition countries gained considerable, often unpublicized, cooperation from many of Iraq's Arab neighbors, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and most of the Gulf states. Far from being isolated, the United States today finds its relations with many regional powers to be quite good. Russia under Putin has shown itself much more interested in a modus vivendi than in confrontation. Relations with India are in better shape than they have been for a half-century, and since 9/11 both China and Japan have conspicuously improved their ties with the United States.
Much of the conventional wisdom about foreign policy falls short because it fails to take sufficiently into account the profound implications of the post-9/11 world. A few authors (Jean Bethke Elshtain, Paul Berman, and Daalder and Lindsay) have assimilated those lessons, as do some new titles, but others -- perhaps because of the overheated political atmosphere -- have not. Three key elements must be taken into account.
First, there is the meaning of 9/11. The suicide terrorism of the 19 hijackers embodies what Michael Ignatieff, director of Harvard's Carr Center of Human Rights Policy, has termed "apocalyptic nihilism." It is not something that can be wished away or dealt with primarily by treating root causes. Instead, the combination of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction embodies a threat of a wholly new magnitude. Moreover, the key underlying assumption of deterrence -- that one's adversary is a value-maximizing rational actor who treasures his own survival -- is gravely undermined. The scale of risk in the coming years, up to and including that of a concealed nuclear weapon or dirty bomb being detonated in an American city, is likely to require a robust defense policy that includes pre-emption.
Second, as much as one might wish for more-effective means of global governance in addressing common problems, the reality of the United Nations and other international institutions is that on the most urgent and deadly problems, they are often incapable of acting or inadequate to the task. The U.N.'s decision-making structure, the makeup of the Security Council, institutional weaknesses, failures in Bosnia (1991-95) and Rwanda (1994), the corruption of the Oil-for-Food program in Iraq, and the ability of terrorists to drive the organization out of that country with one blow (Baghdad, August 2003) are cases in point. Nor do bodies including the European Union, the Arab League, and the African Union have much capacity to deal with the deadliest perils. The U.N. has a significant role to play, not least in burden sharing and in contributing to the perceived legitimacy of collective action, but its weaknesses remain a fundamental constraint. As Stanley Hoffmann, of Harvard's Center for European Studies, has observed, the U.N. and other international organizations "are increasingly important as sources of legitimacy and stabilizing forces, but often mismanaged and devoid of adequate means."
Finally, in a world with no true central authority and the United States as the preponderant power, other countries look to America for leadership. In this anarchic and unipolar system, if America does not provide leadership on the most urgent and deadly matters, no one else is likely to have the capacity or the will to do so. In view of American primacy, it is not surprising that the onus for action falls upon its shoulders, and that others may be tempted to act as free riders or buck passers in a situation where security is a collective good.
Several new books take a more thoughtful and rigorous approach to the new strategic environment. The best of these are original, stimulating and -- in contrast to much academic writing -- concise and lucid. Two of the books, the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis's Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, and Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk, by Walter Russell Mead, of the Council on Foreign Relations, stand out, both in bridging the scholar-public divide and in challenging conventional wisdom. Indeed, the Gaddis book is in a class by itself and, despite its brevity -- a mere 118 pages of text -- is likely to be of lasting value.
Gaddis deftly reaches back into American history to reject the commonly expressed idea that Bush's grand strategy, with its elements of pre-emption, unilateralism, and hegemony, is without precedent. The author draws upon the three crucial cases in which surprise attacks have caused the reshaping of America's stance: August 24, 1814, when the British marched into Washington and burned the White House and Capitol; December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor; and September 11, 2001. The 1814 attack led John Quincy Adams to articulate a strategy of achieving regional hegemony in North America through policies of unilateralism and even pre-emption. The strategy remained in place for more than a century, guiding the invasion of Spanish Florida in 1818, Andrew Jackson's brutal relocations of American Indians (which Adams came to regret), the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War, among other events. Gaddis identifies Adams -- son of the second president, he was the country's most experienced diplomat at the time (he would become secretary of state in 1817 and president in 1825) -- as "the most influential American grand strategist of the 19th century."
With the attack on Pearl Harbor, it became evident that continental hegemony was no longer sufficient to provide security, because attacks could come from well beyond North America. President Franklin D. Roosevelt thus devised a new grand strategy, de-emphasizing unilateralism and pre-emption, but embedding unilateral priorities within a cooperative multilateral frame-work as a means of achieving predominance. The Bretton Woods agreements (establishing the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), the U.N. Security Council veto, and later, under Truman, the Marshall Plan were meant to perpetuate American hegemony. During those years and throughout the subsequent cold war, American influence expanded with the consent of allies who had reason to fear "something worse," Gaddis writes, in the form of the Soviet Union.
With the end of the cold war, Gaddis cites the "widespread sense in the academic and policy communities that the international system had become so benign that the U.S. no longer faced security threats of any kind." He describes the Clinton administration as "closer to the examples of Harding and Coolidge than to those of Roosevelt and Truman," in allowing an illusion of safety to produce a laissez-faire foreign and national-security policy, and in failing to grasp the implications of the diminishing power of states within the international system and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In contrast, he cites the Bush administration's "radically different grand strategy," which rejects the Clinton assumption that the progress of democracy and capitalism had become irreversible, so that all the United States needed to do was to engage with the rest of the world to enlarge the process.
The attacks of 9/11 dramatically altered that sense of comfort. Citing historical antecedents, Gaddis writes: "So when President George W. Bush warned, at West Point in June 2002, that Americans must be ready for pre-emptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives, he was echoing an old tradition rather than establishing a new one. Adams, Jackson, Polk, McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson would all have understood it perfectly well." The 9/11 attacks and the threats from weapons of mass destruction, failed and rogue states, and suicide terrorism all provided a rationale for the Bush grand strategy, which Gaddis takes seriously, finding in it boldness, sweep, and vision.
However, he is by no means uncritical of the administration, noting that the grandness of a strategy does not guarantee its success. He is troubled by what he sees as the unnecessarily harsh rhetoric concerning the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the legal status of Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. He notes the wider fears of U.S. hegemony galvanized by the rush to war in Iraq, and he stresses the importance of diplomatic finesse. Gaddis approvingly cites Lincoln's characterization of America as the "last best hope of earth," but he warns that hegemony can't be sustained without the consent of others. He closes by quoting one of his Yale undergraduates in the days following 9/11, who asked, "Would it be OK now for us to be patriotic?" Gaddis responds unapologetically, "Yes, I think it would."
In turn, Mead's book is the work of an acute and original mind grappling with the problem of America's world role and not afraid to part company with conventional wisdom. Mead, like Gaddis, is frank in his dismissal of unrealistic thinking in the years after the end of the cold war, describing the period from 1989 to 2001 as an age of narcissism and hubris, with little sense of the urgent and gathering danger. As Mead puts it, "During those lost years a climate of opinion on the radical fringes of the Muslim world had coalesced into a mass movement, and acquired the ambition and the ability to make war on the United States and the American system." Mead does not mince words in describing this threat as "Arabian fascism." Like Gaddis, Mead finds the Bush administration right on its basic strategic direction while criticizing how it goes about getting things done, as, for example, in dealing with Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, Turkey, the U.N., our allies, and public diplomacy.
Mead is, however, unabashed in his appreciation of American purpose, noting that, "On the whole ... the aims and methods of American foreign policy, while sometimes mistaken and often questionable, are reasonably consistent with the happiness and advancement of humanity as a whole," and adding that he is even surer of another truth, that "the fall of American power would be a catastrophe not only for Americans but for millions and billions who live beyond our frontiers."
In setting out his arguments, Mead is often memorably provocative, for example in describing Chirac's France as "intoxicated with its greatest prominence in world affairs since it surrendered to Hitler," and in observing how multilateralists are seen by their fellow citizens: "For most Americans, multilateralism is a stick minorities use to attack majority policies they oppose in a high-minded and emotionally satisfying way."
The originality here stems from Mead's ambitious effort to identify a larger process of economic and social transformation within America and in the wider world, and to assess its impact. In doing so, he describes the transformation from what he terms the "Fordist" or "administered" capitalism of the first two-thirds of 20th-century society to "millennial capitalism," a volatile system of global competition, and he describes the wide-ranging and often unsettling consequences of that shift. Mead unleashes a flood of terminology, however, and the reader may struggle to retain the distinctions among different types of power ("soft," "sticky," "sharp," "sweet"), let alone the meanings of "pax Fordiana," "Monothelite," "harmonic convergence," the "party of heaven" and the "party of hell," and his invoking (and sometimes modifying) the four foreign-policy impulses (Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, Wilsonian) outlined in his 2001 book, Special Providence (Knopf).
Yet another major work on many of the same questions treated by Gaddis and Mead comes from Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, national-security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and now a professor of foreign policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, at the Johns Hopkins University. But whereas those authors are at pains to capture both the strengths and weaknesses of the Bush grand strategy, Brzezinski's agenda is readily apparent in the subtitle of his new book, The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership? That wording establishes a not-so-subtle dichotomy in which the "choice" is between the author's presumed wisdom in his own recommended course of action and the "global domination" that is ostensibly being sought by the Bush administration and which must, of course, fail.
The author harnesses his formidable rhetorical skills to an elegant but at times hyperbolic dismissal of Bush policy. In places his keen intelligence and impressive knowledge of world affairs are clearly evident, as in the description of why America is without a global peer and the ultimate guarantor of global stability.
But elsewhere Brzezinski's soaring rhetoric gets the best of him. For example, we are told that "global solidarity with America has increasingly been transmuted into American solitude," but that oversimplifies the current situation, in which Europeans are divided in their reactions, and America's relations with Asian powers are actually rather good. He calls for an "increasingly binding American-European global partnership" but doesn't get into the sticky problem of who speaks for Europe.
His overall prescription for "wise leadership" is something with which no administration would disagree, but it remains too unspecific to be useful, as are his exhortations to practice "consensual leadership" and "co-optive hegemony." And where he does elaborate, the policy implications may be opaque, as in his pronouncement about focusing on global turmoil: "To this end, the magnetic success of America's democracy and its outward projection through a humane definition of globalization would reinforce the effectiveness and legitimacy of America's power and enhance U.S. ability to overcome -- together with others -- both the consequences and the causes of global turmoil."
More important, despite the length of the work, the reader comes away with the sense that Brzezinski has not really grappled with the precepts of the Bush National Security Strategy. There is much to debate about Bush's grand strategy, in its concept, wisdom, and implementation, but that effort is not so effectively engaged here as it could have been.
A more nuanced critique comes from Joseph S. Nye, a professor of international relations at Harvard University and a former assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration. In Soft Power: The Means to Succeed in World Politics, following from his two previous books, Bound to Lead (Basic Books, 1990) and The Paradox of American Power (Oxford University Press, 2002), Nye enlarges upon his idea of "soft power" and explores its origins, uses, and limitations. He defines power as the ability to influence the behavior of others in order to get the outcomes we want. Soft power, "the ability to get what we want through attraction rather than coercion or payments," includes a country's culture, ideas, and policies, while hard power consists of military and economic might. Nye appreciates the need for both kinds but contends that seduction is more effective than coercion. In doing so, he argues for "smart power" through the combination of both hard and soft, and he faults the Bush administration for its overemphasis on military might. He concludes by invoking Mead's categories, arguing that we need more Jefferson (i.e., democratic ideals) and less Jackson (nationalist assertion) in our policies, together with a helping of Hamiltonian realism.
Few authors write more knowledgeably and thoughtfully than Nye, but he leaves unclear just how to apply soft power, especially because of the very broad nature of a term that encompasses culture, values, and civil society as whole. His criticism of the dangerous decline in American public diplomacy during the Clinton and Bush presidencies is very much on target. Indeed, an alarming sign is that especially in Europe the diatribes of Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky, or the rantings of conspiracy theorists, are commonly read and cited as explanations of U.S. policy.
Nye, on the other hand, may make too much of Donald Rumsfeld's dismissal of soft power ("I don't know what it means."). After all, as secretary of defense, Rumsfeld is the person with the formal responsibility for wielding hard power, and asking his views about soft power may be akin to querying the head of the Metropolitan Opera about the virtues of military force. And there remains the question of whether any mix of U.S. policies, let alone soft power, can significantly influence the wider struggle that is taking place within Arab and Muslim civilization, in circumstances where our values are abhorrent to the jihadists.
Two other new books range still further afield and, while reflective in their approaches, don't contribute much to the current debate. Gary Hart, former senator from Colorado, an attorney and a visiting lecturer at the University of Oxford, Yale University, and the University of California, has written an earnest sermon about the "power of America's principles." But large portions of the work seem to have been written well before 9/11, including an appendix reprinting his November 5, 1993, memo to President Clinton. The book's title, The Fourth Power, refers to our constitutional liberties as crucial to American strategy, but their practical application to foreign policy is less clear. Hart expresses frustration: "We do not possess a grand strategy"; war is not an instrument of policy, but "a failure of policy"; there is too much "careerism" in politics. That may well be because he sees himself as a prophet without honor. As a co-chairman of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, Hart saw his panel's public warning ignored despite its prophetic words, just six months before 9/11, that "the combination of unconventional weapons proliferation with the persistence of international terrorism will end the relative invulnerability of the U.S. homeland to catastrophic attack," and its prediction that "a direct attack against American citizens on American soil is likely over the next quarter century." As Gaddis observes, the commission was wrong only in that the event was just months, not years, away, and yet the surprise was total. However, although Senator Hart and his colleagues were prescient in warning of the dangers ahead, The Fourth Power is less effective as a guide to where we go from here.
Finally, there is the eloquent plea of Amitai Etzioni, a university professor at George Washington University, for an evolving global governance. In From Empire to Community, he asks what will make for a safer, healthier, freer, and more caring world. Etzioni argues that without some kind of developing global authority, transnational problems will overwhelm nation-states, but that the building blocks for this new order can already be found in such continuing efforts as antiproliferation agreements, the war on terror, humanitarian intervention, and new supranational institutions. Etzioni sees a global society evolving, global governance expanding, and a global community slowly beginning to form. But is it doing so rapidly enough to offer serious national-security solutions in the foreseeable future? Some readers will find inspiration in his transcendent communitarian outlook; others will see more wishful "ought" than helpful "is."
Those recent books, although sometimes confounded or confounding, prove at least that an essential and wide-ranging debate has begun. How else to sift and winnow competing ideas about our foreign policy after what looks, in retrospect, like the dozen years of somewhat deluded calm between the end of the cold war and the 9/11 storm? September 2001 signaled that America and the world really do face a common threat from what the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (a member of the Green Party and a staunch opponent of the war in Iraq) has referred to as "destructive jihadist terrorism with its totalitarian ideology."
The Bush foreign policies and the National Security Strategy document of September 2002, with its components of primacy, pre-emption, multilateralism, and democratization, reflect a coherent grand strategy with historical antecedents in prior responses to surprise attack. Yet those components and, even more, their implementation have become the subject of rightful and often constructive controversy.
From the six books discussed here, it seems the debate is becoming more nuanced. For example, the question of unilateralism versus multilateralism is not one of either/or, but of the appropriate mix of the two. And while pre-emptive action may sometimes be required, when and where is it feasible or desirable? Even the authors most receptive to this administration find that it has missed or mishandled vital opportunities for co-option and persuasion. And even the authors most critical of current policy acknowledge that America's preponderant power is likely to endure, that it is neither a boon nor a burden that could or should be wished away, and that we must learn to use it sagely. Perhaps the next wave of debate will focus on the fiscal foundation of that power, as Niall Ferguson has recently done in his book Colossus (Penguin Press, 2004), and how to sustain the public support essential to any consistent, long-term grand strategy.
Any serious analysis must take into account the nihilistic, diffuse nature of our enemies, the limits of international institutions, and other nations' dependence on American leadership.
With fits and starts, an intense debate about America's world role is under way. At stake is the country's overall strategy for protecting and promoting its security, values, and national interests. This dialogue about grand strategy has had a long gestation period, since the end of the cold war. For a half-century the United States had faced lethal threats to its security, first in World War II and then from the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors. In the wake of those threats, America sought a rationale for its international role. But for a dozen years, from 1989 to 2001, and despite numerous and largely unmemorable attempts at new blueprints, there seemed to be no single unambiguous peril that might serve as the focus for a new grand strategy.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, brought a violent end to that interlude. The vital national debate that it triggered, however, has been conducted in an acrimonious political environment. That atmosphere is a legacy of both the bitter partisan divide over President Bill Clinton's impeachment and the hotly contested outcome of the 2000 presidential election. It also reflects more-deep-seated cultural and attitudinal differences that characterize the populations of "red" and "blue" America. Scholars have by no means been immune from that climate, and not a few of the assessments of the Bush administration and its national-security strategy have been knee-jerk dismissals of the president as a trigger-happy Texan presiding over a radical and dangerous war on terror.
To be sure, many American and European analysts have issued serious, thoughtful critiques of recent U.S. grand strategy. Consider, for instance, America Unbound, The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, by Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, of the Brookings Institution (Brookings Institution Press, 2003); The End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-first Century (Knopf, 2002), by Charles A. Kupchan, of Georgetown University; and a recent article in the journal Survival, "The End of the Neo-Conservative Movement," by G. John Ikenberry, also of Georgetown. These critiques characterize Bush doctrines of primacy and pre-emption as ill advised and counterproductive, exacerbating the threats we face, alienating foreign leaders and publics, and isolating America from its erstwhile allies and others whose support we need to safeguard our security and tackle urgent global problems. The critics say the unilateralism evident in the war on terror and the administration's willingness to use force in Iraq without the agreement of the United Nations break with a half-century of multilateral cooperation and American commitment to institutions and alliances that we helped to create.
The critics condemn as simplistic the administration's labeling of countries or groups as "evil," and they consider the goal of fostering democracy throughout the Middle East as overreaching. They argue that recent U.S. policies not only exhibit hubris but also risk overextension and trigger opposition to American power, especially through "soft balancing" (i.e, collaboration among other countries to oppose the United States through means other than direct military confrontation). We cannot pursue our own security and global interests, the argument goes, unless we mend our ways, return to habits of multilateral cooperation, and reintegrate ourselves with the expanding array of international institutions and agreements that represent a nascent form of global governance.
Although widely shared, many such critiques stand on a shaky foundation. To begin with, they imply that the half-century preceding the current administration was a halcyon era of multilateral cooperation among allies. But the cold-war years were marked by a long series of often bitter disputes, which were kept within bounds largely by the shared sense of Soviet threat (see Anton W. DePorte's 1986 classic from Yale University Press, Europe Between the Superpowers: The Enduring Balance).
In turn, during the post-cold-war decade of the 1990s and Bill Clinton's presidency, a number of major divisions had already become apparent. They included, for example, bitter differences over NATO's response to ethnic conflict in Bosnia, and an inability to agree on a treaty to ban antipersonnel land mines, on terms for the International Criminal Court, and on the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Moreover, French opposition to American predominance was increasingly apparent. President Jacques Chirac proclaimed in 1996 that "the position of the leader of the free world is vacant," implying that he was prepared to take on the task. And Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine in 1999 uttered his widely repeated complaint about American "hyperpuissance."
Much of the current criticism dwells on the character and personalities of the Bush administration as the primary cause of European-American discord. While serious problems in the relationship have emerged, that emphasis undervalues the structural dimension of the problem. In contrast, Harvard's Stephen Walt, a leading neorealist author who is otherwise critical of the administration, dissents from a report of the quintessentially establishment Council on Foreign Relations, which emphasizes personality differences and philosophical disputes. He argues instead that "asymmetry of power -- not philosophy -- is the root cause of this dispute." Nor is the idea that we can rejuvenate the Atlantic partnership by conceding a European veto over American policy likely to be feasible or desirable. It is hard to imagine that even a Howard Dean presidency would have been willing to cede such control.
Policy critics also tend to adopt a reductio ad Iraqum. As important as the war in Iraq and the subsequent insurgency have become, they are not the sum total of foreign policy, and exclusive focus on them can distort perspective. Not only are there other issues and regions to be considered, but the standard critique of policy implies that, apart from Britain's Tony Blair, America has become almost totally isolated in its Iraq policy. In reality, more than half of the governments of Europe originally endorsed or supported the U.S. position in the months leading up to the Iraq war, and the differences within Europe are as important as those between Europe and the United States. Moreover, the much-maligned wider war on terror has seen close cooperation in intelligence and security (with exemplary U.S.-French collaboration) not only between European and American agencies, but in other regions as well.
What's more, balancing (soft or otherwise) against the United States is hardly apparent (see the essay in the November 3, 2003, Weekly Standard by Gerard Alexander, an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia). Beyond Europe, the United States and coalition countries gained considerable, often unpublicized, cooperation from many of Iraq's Arab neighbors, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and most of the Gulf states. Far from being isolated, the United States today finds its relations with many regional powers to be quite good. Russia under Putin has shown itself much more interested in a modus vivendi than in confrontation. Relations with India are in better shape than they have been for a half-century, and since 9/11 both China and Japan have conspicuously improved their ties with the United States.
Much of the conventional wisdom about foreign policy falls short because it fails to take sufficiently into account the profound implications of the post-9/11 world. A few authors (Jean Bethke Elshtain, Paul Berman, and Daalder and Lindsay) have assimilated those lessons, as do some new titles, but others -- perhaps because of the overheated political atmosphere -- have not. Three key elements must be taken into account.
First, there is the meaning of 9/11. The suicide terrorism of the 19 hijackers embodies what Michael Ignatieff, director of Harvard's Carr Center of Human Rights Policy, has termed "apocalyptic nihilism." It is not something that can be wished away or dealt with primarily by treating root causes. Instead, the combination of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction embodies a threat of a wholly new magnitude. Moreover, the key underlying assumption of deterrence -- that one's adversary is a value-maximizing rational actor who treasures his own survival -- is gravely undermined. The scale of risk in the coming years, up to and including that of a concealed nuclear weapon or dirty bomb being detonated in an American city, is likely to require a robust defense policy that includes pre-emption.
Second, as much as one might wish for more-effective means of global governance in addressing common problems, the reality of the United Nations and other international institutions is that on the most urgent and deadly problems, they are often incapable of acting or inadequate to the task. The U.N.'s decision-making structure, the makeup of the Security Council, institutional weaknesses, failures in Bosnia (1991-95) and Rwanda (1994), the corruption of the Oil-for-Food program in Iraq, and the ability of terrorists to drive the organization out of that country with one blow (Baghdad, August 2003) are cases in point. Nor do bodies including the European Union, the Arab League, and the African Union have much capacity to deal with the deadliest perils. The U.N. has a significant role to play, not least in burden sharing and in contributing to the perceived legitimacy of collective action, but its weaknesses remain a fundamental constraint. As Stanley Hoffmann, of Harvard's Center for European Studies, has observed, the U.N. and other international organizations "are increasingly important as sources of legitimacy and stabilizing forces, but often mismanaged and devoid of adequate means."
Finally, in a world with no true central authority and the United States as the preponderant power, other countries look to America for leadership. In this anarchic and unipolar system, if America does not provide leadership on the most urgent and deadly matters, no one else is likely to have the capacity or the will to do so. In view of American primacy, it is not surprising that the onus for action falls upon its shoulders, and that others may be tempted to act as free riders or buck passers in a situation where security is a collective good.
Several new books take a more thoughtful and rigorous approach to the new strategic environment. The best of these are original, stimulating and -- in contrast to much academic writing -- concise and lucid. Two of the books, the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis's Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, and Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk, by Walter Russell Mead, of the Council on Foreign Relations, stand out, both in bridging the scholar-public divide and in challenging conventional wisdom. Indeed, the Gaddis book is in a class by itself and, despite its brevity -- a mere 118 pages of text -- is likely to be of lasting value.
Gaddis deftly reaches back into American history to reject the commonly expressed idea that Bush's grand strategy, with its elements of pre-emption, unilateralism, and hegemony, is without precedent. The author draws upon the three crucial cases in which surprise attacks have caused the reshaping of America's stance: August 24, 1814, when the British marched into Washington and burned the White House and Capitol; December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor; and September 11, 2001. The 1814 attack led John Quincy Adams to articulate a strategy of achieving regional hegemony in North America through policies of unilateralism and even pre-emption. The strategy remained in place for more than a century, guiding the invasion of Spanish Florida in 1818, Andrew Jackson's brutal relocations of American Indians (which Adams came to regret), the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War, among other events. Gaddis identifies Adams -- son of the second president, he was the country's most experienced diplomat at the time (he would become secretary of state in 1817 and president in 1825) -- as "the most influential American grand strategist of the 19th century."
With the attack on Pearl Harbor, it became evident that continental hegemony was no longer sufficient to provide security, because attacks could come from well beyond North America. President Franklin D. Roosevelt thus devised a new grand strategy, de-emphasizing unilateralism and pre-emption, but embedding unilateral priorities within a cooperative multilateral frame-work as a means of achieving predominance. The Bretton Woods agreements (establishing the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), the U.N. Security Council veto, and later, under Truman, the Marshall Plan were meant to perpetuate American hegemony. During those years and throughout the subsequent cold war, American influence expanded with the consent of allies who had reason to fear "something worse," Gaddis writes, in the form of the Soviet Union.
With the end of the cold war, Gaddis cites the "widespread sense in the academic and policy communities that the international system had become so benign that the U.S. no longer faced security threats of any kind." He describes the Clinton administration as "closer to the examples of Harding and Coolidge than to those of Roosevelt and Truman," in allowing an illusion of safety to produce a laissez-faire foreign and national-security policy, and in failing to grasp the implications of the diminishing power of states within the international system and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In contrast, he cites the Bush administration's "radically different grand strategy," which rejects the Clinton assumption that the progress of democracy and capitalism had become irreversible, so that all the United States needed to do was to engage with the rest of the world to enlarge the process.
The attacks of 9/11 dramatically altered that sense of comfort. Citing historical antecedents, Gaddis writes: "So when President George W. Bush warned, at West Point in June 2002, that Americans must be ready for pre-emptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives, he was echoing an old tradition rather than establishing a new one. Adams, Jackson, Polk, McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson would all have understood it perfectly well." The 9/11 attacks and the threats from weapons of mass destruction, failed and rogue states, and suicide terrorism all provided a rationale for the Bush grand strategy, which Gaddis takes seriously, finding in it boldness, sweep, and vision.
However, he is by no means uncritical of the administration, noting that the grandness of a strategy does not guarantee its success. He is troubled by what he sees as the unnecessarily harsh rhetoric concerning the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the legal status of Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. He notes the wider fears of U.S. hegemony galvanized by the rush to war in Iraq, and he stresses the importance of diplomatic finesse. Gaddis approvingly cites Lincoln's characterization of America as the "last best hope of earth," but he warns that hegemony can't be sustained without the consent of others. He closes by quoting one of his Yale undergraduates in the days following 9/11, who asked, "Would it be OK now for us to be patriotic?" Gaddis responds unapologetically, "Yes, I think it would."
In turn, Mead's book is the work of an acute and original mind grappling with the problem of America's world role and not afraid to part company with conventional wisdom. Mead, like Gaddis, is frank in his dismissal of unrealistic thinking in the years after the end of the cold war, describing the period from 1989 to 2001 as an age of narcissism and hubris, with little sense of the urgent and gathering danger. As Mead puts it, "During those lost years a climate of opinion on the radical fringes of the Muslim world had coalesced into a mass movement, and acquired the ambition and the ability to make war on the United States and the American system." Mead does not mince words in describing this threat as "Arabian fascism." Like Gaddis, Mead finds the Bush administration right on its basic strategic direction while criticizing how it goes about getting things done, as, for example, in dealing with Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, Turkey, the U.N., our allies, and public diplomacy.
Mead is, however, unabashed in his appreciation of American purpose, noting that, "On the whole ... the aims and methods of American foreign policy, while sometimes mistaken and often questionable, are reasonably consistent with the happiness and advancement of humanity as a whole," and adding that he is even surer of another truth, that "the fall of American power would be a catastrophe not only for Americans but for millions and billions who live beyond our frontiers."
In setting out his arguments, Mead is often memorably provocative, for example in describing Chirac's France as "intoxicated with its greatest prominence in world affairs since it surrendered to Hitler," and in observing how multilateralists are seen by their fellow citizens: "For most Americans, multilateralism is a stick minorities use to attack majority policies they oppose in a high-minded and emotionally satisfying way."
The originality here stems from Mead's ambitious effort to identify a larger process of economic and social transformation within America and in the wider world, and to assess its impact. In doing so, he describes the transformation from what he terms the "Fordist" or "administered" capitalism of the first two-thirds of 20th-century society to "millennial capitalism," a volatile system of global competition, and he describes the wide-ranging and often unsettling consequences of that shift. Mead unleashes a flood of terminology, however, and the reader may struggle to retain the distinctions among different types of power ("soft," "sticky," "sharp," "sweet"), let alone the meanings of "pax Fordiana," "Monothelite," "harmonic convergence," the "party of heaven" and the "party of hell," and his invoking (and sometimes modifying) the four foreign-policy impulses (Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, Wilsonian) outlined in his 2001 book, Special Providence (Knopf).
Yet another major work on many of the same questions treated by Gaddis and Mead comes from Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, national-security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and now a professor of foreign policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, at the Johns Hopkins University. But whereas those authors are at pains to capture both the strengths and weaknesses of the Bush grand strategy, Brzezinski's agenda is readily apparent in the subtitle of his new book, The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership? That wording establishes a not-so-subtle dichotomy in which the "choice" is between the author's presumed wisdom in his own recommended course of action and the "global domination" that is ostensibly being sought by the Bush administration and which must, of course, fail.
The author harnesses his formidable rhetorical skills to an elegant but at times hyperbolic dismissal of Bush policy. In places his keen intelligence and impressive knowledge of world affairs are clearly evident, as in the description of why America is without a global peer and the ultimate guarantor of global stability.
But elsewhere Brzezinski's soaring rhetoric gets the best of him. For example, we are told that "global solidarity with America has increasingly been transmuted into American solitude," but that oversimplifies the current situation, in which Europeans are divided in their reactions, and America's relations with Asian powers are actually rather good. He calls for an "increasingly binding American-European global partnership" but doesn't get into the sticky problem of who speaks for Europe.
His overall prescription for "wise leadership" is something with which no administration would disagree, but it remains too unspecific to be useful, as are his exhortations to practice "consensual leadership" and "co-optive hegemony." And where he does elaborate, the policy implications may be opaque, as in his pronouncement about focusing on global turmoil: "To this end, the magnetic success of America's democracy and its outward projection through a humane definition of globalization would reinforce the effectiveness and legitimacy of America's power and enhance U.S. ability to overcome -- together with others -- both the consequences and the causes of global turmoil."
More important, despite the length of the work, the reader comes away with the sense that Brzezinski has not really grappled with the precepts of the Bush National Security Strategy. There is much to debate about Bush's grand strategy, in its concept, wisdom, and implementation, but that effort is not so effectively engaged here as it could have been.
A more nuanced critique comes from Joseph S. Nye, a professor of international relations at Harvard University and a former assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration. In Soft Power: The Means to Succeed in World Politics, following from his two previous books, Bound to Lead (Basic Books, 1990) and The Paradox of American Power (Oxford University Press, 2002), Nye enlarges upon his idea of "soft power" and explores its origins, uses, and limitations. He defines power as the ability to influence the behavior of others in order to get the outcomes we want. Soft power, "the ability to get what we want through attraction rather than coercion or payments," includes a country's culture, ideas, and policies, while hard power consists of military and economic might. Nye appreciates the need for both kinds but contends that seduction is more effective than coercion. In doing so, he argues for "smart power" through the combination of both hard and soft, and he faults the Bush administration for its overemphasis on military might. He concludes by invoking Mead's categories, arguing that we need more Jefferson (i.e., democratic ideals) and less Jackson (nationalist assertion) in our policies, together with a helping of Hamiltonian realism.
Few authors write more knowledgeably and thoughtfully than Nye, but he leaves unclear just how to apply soft power, especially because of the very broad nature of a term that encompasses culture, values, and civil society as whole. His criticism of the dangerous decline in American public diplomacy during the Clinton and Bush presidencies is very much on target. Indeed, an alarming sign is that especially in Europe the diatribes of Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky, or the rantings of conspiracy theorists, are commonly read and cited as explanations of U.S. policy.
Nye, on the other hand, may make too much of Donald Rumsfeld's dismissal of soft power ("I don't know what it means."). After all, as secretary of defense, Rumsfeld is the person with the formal responsibility for wielding hard power, and asking his views about soft power may be akin to querying the head of the Metropolitan Opera about the virtues of military force. And there remains the question of whether any mix of U.S. policies, let alone soft power, can significantly influence the wider struggle that is taking place within Arab and Muslim civilization, in circumstances where our values are abhorrent to the jihadists.
Two other new books range still further afield and, while reflective in their approaches, don't contribute much to the current debate. Gary Hart, former senator from Colorado, an attorney and a visiting lecturer at the University of Oxford, Yale University, and the University of California, has written an earnest sermon about the "power of America's principles." But large portions of the work seem to have been written well before 9/11, including an appendix reprinting his November 5, 1993, memo to President Clinton. The book's title, The Fourth Power, refers to our constitutional liberties as crucial to American strategy, but their practical application to foreign policy is less clear. Hart expresses frustration: "We do not possess a grand strategy"; war is not an instrument of policy, but "a failure of policy"; there is too much "careerism" in politics. That may well be because he sees himself as a prophet without honor. As a co-chairman of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, Hart saw his panel's public warning ignored despite its prophetic words, just six months before 9/11, that "the combination of unconventional weapons proliferation with the persistence of international terrorism will end the relative invulnerability of the U.S. homeland to catastrophic attack," and its prediction that "a direct attack against American citizens on American soil is likely over the next quarter century." As Gaddis observes, the commission was wrong only in that the event was just months, not years, away, and yet the surprise was total. However, although Senator Hart and his colleagues were prescient in warning of the dangers ahead, The Fourth Power is less effective as a guide to where we go from here.
Finally, there is the eloquent plea of Amitai Etzioni, a university professor at George Washington University, for an evolving global governance. In From Empire to Community, he asks what will make for a safer, healthier, freer, and more caring world. Etzioni argues that without some kind of developing global authority, transnational problems will overwhelm nation-states, but that the building blocks for this new order can already be found in such continuing efforts as antiproliferation agreements, the war on terror, humanitarian intervention, and new supranational institutions. Etzioni sees a global society evolving, global governance expanding, and a global community slowly beginning to form. But is it doing so rapidly enough to offer serious national-security solutions in the foreseeable future? Some readers will find inspiration in his transcendent communitarian outlook; others will see more wishful "ought" than helpful "is."
Those recent books, although sometimes confounded or confounding, prove at least that an essential and wide-ranging debate has begun. How else to sift and winnow competing ideas about our foreign policy after what looks, in retrospect, like the dozen years of somewhat deluded calm between the end of the cold war and the 9/11 storm? September 2001 signaled that America and the world really do face a common threat from what the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (a member of the Green Party and a staunch opponent of the war in Iraq) has referred to as "destructive jihadist terrorism with its totalitarian ideology."
The Bush foreign policies and the National Security Strategy document of September 2002, with its components of primacy, pre-emption, multilateralism, and democratization, reflect a coherent grand strategy with historical antecedents in prior responses to surprise attack. Yet those components and, even more, their implementation have become the subject of rightful and often constructive controversy.
From the six books discussed here, it seems the debate is becoming more nuanced. For example, the question of unilateralism versus multilateralism is not one of either/or, but of the appropriate mix of the two. And while pre-emptive action may sometimes be required, when and where is it feasible or desirable? Even the authors most receptive to this administration find that it has missed or mishandled vital opportunities for co-option and persuasion. And even the authors most critical of current policy acknowledge that America's preponderant power is likely to endure, that it is neither a boon nor a burden that could or should be wished away, and that we must learn to use it sagely. Perhaps the next wave of debate will focus on the fiscal foundation of that power, as Niall Ferguson has recently done in his book Colossus (Penguin Press, 2004), and how to sustain the public support essential to any consistent, long-term grand strategy.
The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership?, by Zbigniew K. Brzezinski (Basic Books, March 2004)
The Fourth Power: An Essay Concerning a Grand Strategy for the United States in the 21st Century, by Gary Hart (Oxford University Press, July 2004)
From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations, by Amitai Etzioni (Palgrave Macmillan, May 2004)
Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk, by Walter Russell Mead (Knopf, April 2004)
Soft Power: The Means to Succeed in World Politics, by Joseph S. Nye (PublicAffairs, March 2004)
Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, by John Lewis Gaddis (Harvard University Press, March 2004)
The Fourth Power: An Essay Concerning a Grand Strategy for the United States in the 21st Century, by Gary Hart (Oxford University Press, July 2004)
From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations, by Amitai Etzioni (Palgrave Macmillan, May 2004)
Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk, by Walter Russell Mead (Knopf, April 2004)
Soft Power: The Means to Succeed in World Politics, by Joseph S. Nye (PublicAffairs, March 2004)
Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, by John Lewis Gaddis (Harvard University Press, March 2004)
posted by EMREISERI @ 8:41 PM
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