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The Thirteenth Annual Seminar: June 24-27, 2004 The Lodge at Vail Vail, Colorado |
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OVERVIEWUnilateral Preemption: America's New Foreign Policy?The war in Iraq combines two different themes that have existed separately in American foreign policy since the early days of the Republic: the doctrine of preemption and the use of unilateral force. At the same time, the "Bush Doctrine" has rejected the principles of containment and deterrence that have driven American foreign policy since the end of World War II. How did this happen? Is the Bush Doctrine America's new foreign policy? Over the course of two centuries America has experimented with several very different views of how it should engage the outside world. In the beginning it was one of isolation and withdrawal. When England went to war with France in 1793 Washington insisted on neutrality, and in his Farewell Address he cautioned against entanglement with the affairs of Europe. His advice was enshrined in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which remained a cornerstone of American foreign policy until the end of the century. By then, however, much had changed. America had become a transcontinental power, full of confidence and eager to extend its hegemony to the South and West. Spain's desperate attempt to preserve its last vestiges of empire in the New World provided the excuse, and Theodore Roosevelt's "splendid little war" resulted not only in the emancipation of Cuba but the beginning of America?s long involvement with Central America, the Panama Canal and the Philippines. In the exuberance of the day the Monroe Doctrine was forgotten. This new expansionism found its voice in Woodrow Wilson. Whereas Monroe had counseled abstinence in order to preserve the spirit of American democracy from being corrupted by the Old World, Wilson saw it as America's duty to make the world safe for democracy by exporting its faith on the back of its newfound power. His chosen instrument, the League of Nations, was, however, rejected by his own country. This was partly because of a resurgence of the old isolationism, but perhaps more ominously because of a distrust of the new multilateralism on which the League was based. A second element had now been added to the mix. The end of World War II and the founding of the United Nations presented America with a second opportunity to be both international and multilateral. This time it took. The UN was not only embraced in principle, but ensconced in the heart of the nation's largest city on land donated by one of the leading Republican dynasties of the day. The structural solution was reinforced by a strategic one. In 1947 George Kennan articulated the theory of multilateral containment. This, combined with the threat of nuclear deterrence, was to be the cornerstone of our foreign policy for 60 years. These are the principles being challenged by the Bush Doctrine and the war in Iraq. Since there is now only one superpower, there is no one left to deter. And because it is not statist and knows no boundaries, terrorism cannot be contained in a traditional manner. The remedy is the assertion of power by the only nation still having it: the United States. And if the rest of the world shrinks from applying such force majeur, America has a moral obligation to do it on its own. The resulting pax Americana will lead to the end of tribalism, feudalism and despotism and the establishment of free and democratic societies throughout the world. Two old — and historically inconsistent — threads of American foreign policy have been knit together for the first time on an international level: interventionism and unilateralism. Do they fit? Is democracy really exportable? Where did the idea come from in the first place? Is it really all a part of a neo-conservative manifesto that was first floated during the Clinton administration but rejected, only to be rediscovered after the events of 9/11? Or is it a logical continuum of a Reaganite foreign policy that vanquished the first evil empire? Does it even matter where the idea came from? Or is it only important to understand where it's going? What will it mean for the United Nations and the principle of collective action? Should we care? Will we need allies down the road? If so, who will they be? Will we be the only superpower forever? If not will we need to reinvent containment and deterrence? Perhaps most important, can we win this new kind of war all by ourselves? Is power, even overwhelming power, enough? These questions and their related issues will be the focus of this Seminar, the thirteenth to be offered by the Vail Valley Institute. |
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James TraubKEYNOTEContributing Writer, New York Times Magazine, currently specializing in international affairs; Author, Can Any Democrat Win On National Security? (January 4, 2004), and Peace Keeping: Can It Ever Be Made To Work? (April 11, 2004). No marriage, and no friendship, can survive long if one party treats his own interests and preferences as supreme and self-evident, and the other’s as trivial and merely self-regarding. But this is just how the Bush Administration has conducted its diplomacy. Leave aside the merits of the Kyoto global-warming treaty and the International Criminal Court, for example, it seems never to have occurred to policy-makers in the Administration that they might gain some international goodwill by moderating their views, as we expect our allies to do all the time. Or, to take another instance, it almost certainly would have been more cumbersome to fight the war in Afghanistan under the banner of NATO, as our allies were very eager to have us do, but mightn’t it have been worth incurring that cost in order to fully engage the West in the war on terrorism? But that, too, was unthinkable. As Donald Rumsfeld told Wesley Clark, who had held NATO together through the protracted Kosovo air war, “No one is going to tell us where we can or can’t bomb.” The Administration’s policy was not so much unilateral preemption as preemptive unilateralism. As the foreign-policy analyst Fareed Zakaria wrote in “Newsweek” soon after UN negotiations collapsed, “with the exception of Britain and Israel, every country this administration has dealt with feels humiliated by it.” It is, of course, wondrous strange to see how the Bush Administration has returned to the UN as abashed as the prodigal son. Before the war, flush with the righteousness of the cause, Administration officials essentially demanded a Security Council resolution as their right; now, desperate to unload what has become a murderous tar baby, the Administration made whatever alternations the French, the Germans and the Russians required in order to secure the UN’s blessing on the June 30 transfer of authority. The Administration still believes that legitimacy proceeds from the self-evident rightness of American acts; but it has learned that the rest of the world refuses to accept this definition, and sometimes even acts on that refusal. But the lesson of Iraq cuts much deeper than that. As the tactical rationales for the war dropped away, they were replaced by the far more ambitious and idealistic vision of neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, who from the outset had seen Iraq as the beachhead of a war to remake the Middle East. In fact, while “unilateral preemption” serves as a useful shorthand for the means which the Bush Administration is willing to adopt in the war on terror, the goal it seeks is Woodrow Wilson’s goal -- making the world safe for democracy. Walter Russell Mead describes the neoconservatives as “Revival Wilsonians,” who have taken Woodrow Wilson’s ardent faith that American security requires the advancement of American values throughout the world, and put it, as Mead says, “on steriods.” But they are Wilsonians with a crucial difference: The idealists of the Right believe that Wilson’s mistake was trusting this project to international institutions; they assume, instead, that those institutions will resist the American “mission civilatrice” with all their might. Mead also shrewdly notes that the new Wilsonians are willing to use the most tough-minded means to achieve their visionary ends. He explains this apparent contradiction thusly: “The end is so noble -- the preservation and enhancement of the only power capable of leading the world in a positive direction -- the realist measures are fully justified.” If there is any irony in that observation, I missed it. Here, I think, we come to the contradiction at the heart of President Bush’s post-9/11 foreign policy. The core principle, as I said, is not unilaterialism or preemption, but rather the conviction that we must re-make the world in order to be safe in it. This is a view that is, as Mead says, deeply in the American grain. But in the conservative revival of the Wilsonian vision, certainty of the rightness of our own principles, and an equal certainty that few others share our willingness to confront evil, gives us leave to do that re-making by our own lights and by ourselves. In other words, we are trying to effect a transformation in values by means that are virtually guaranteed to spark resistance among those whose transformation we seek. As John Lewis Gaddis rather mildly puts it, “the means we choose in this post-September 11th environment could wind up undermining the ends we seek.” Gaddis goes on to say that the means may have to trump the ends if we are to secure our own safety; but the means we choose could in fact end up increasing the danger. The problem with the Revival Wilsonians may be that they have so much faith in us and so little in others. For all the idealism, there is a very deep strain of darkness that suffuses this Administration. We do, of course, live in dark times. Robert Kagan writes that Americans have accepted the Hobbesian nature of the post-9/11 world, while Europeans, ensconced in the Kantian garden, have not. And again, that may be so. But every time John Ashcroft announces the foiling of another terrorist plot bent on unspeakable mayhem that turns out, on closer inspection, to have been utterly half-baked, you can’t help feeling that the Administration isn’t just aware of, but enamored of, that Hobbesian darkness. Perhaps it proceeds from the embattled sense that few, either at home or abroad, truly accept the American creed. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: Because we suspect that the world wishes us ill, we behave in such a way as to ensure that it will, indeed, wish us ill. I’m not suggesting a policy suffused by Panglossian sunshine, but I do think we have to find a better solution than we have so far to Gaddis’ dilemma of means and ends. We have to recognize, that is, that while our Hobbesian orientation may enhance our power, and even our security, it will also diminish our standing. And that’s a very big price to pay, especially if you accept the premise that in the long run we must make the world safe for democracy. I think we should go to great lengths to avoid paying that price. I think we should accept that other countries — maybe even France — are willing to stand with us even when they think we’re wrong, and will do so if every once in awhile we stand with them when we think they’re wrong. I think we should treat multilateral institutions as if they can be made responsive to our interests. It seems to me, beyond all this, that the idea of America is being contested right now. Of course that idea is hateful to our enemies. And others will despise our pop culture — I kind of see their point — or our untrammeled form of capitalism. The very thought of our outsized power and global reach breeds resentment and fear. Well, since we don’t aspire to be Denmark, there’s not much help for any of that. But I cannot believe that it is inevitable that so many people should so deeply revile America. I don’t think we are helpless to shape our own meaning. We have become a different country after the terrorist attacks — far more suspicious, defensive, prepared for the worst. The Bush Administration has only channeled those feelings. And if there’s another major terrorist attack, our sense of the world will get darker still. But this would be a double catastrophe — because the America that others revered, and to which they flocked, was never a dark or a Hobbesian place. It was an open place — open-handed, open-minded, open-ended. I dearly hope that, despite everything that’s happened, we can somehow find our way back to that place. |
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Richard V. AllenInternational Business Consultant; Senior Fellow on War, Revolution and Peace, Hoover Institution at Stanford; former National Security Advisor, Reagan administration; Author of numerous books, articles and other policy writings in newspapers, journals and national magazines. What’s interesting for our discussion this morning, it seems to me, is our assessment of the relative worth of conventional means, ordinary and customary institutions of devices, methodologies and strategies, dialogue and diplomacy when dealing with modern forces of terror, whether rooted in nation-states or independent of them. In the 30 years since the Munich Olympics, we have become nearly numb by the steady growth of terrorist organizations and movements. Almost daily we read about at least some of the terrorist acts committed by organizations that actually take credit for their outrage. The great horror of our times was the attack on the United States on September 11th, when we were attacked in a way, with such brute force, that no one could have imagined possible. Response of the President and Congress was immediate and strong. President Bush denounced those who perpetrated the attack, and beyond that — and this is critically important — he promised the nation and the world to lead a long-term struggle to eliminate the threat of terrorism to the world. President Bush described his intention to pursue terrorists and to isolate states that harbor, finance or otherwise support terrorist groups, stating clearly that no one will be beyond the reach of the United States and its allies in this cause. He described the three nations that support terrorism and even practice domestic terrorism against their own populations, labeling Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an Axis of Evil. It was very destructive to hear the shrieks of horror of those who disagreed. According to those commentators America had become reckless and unilateralist, a war monger, a rogue power in itself. We heard glorious accusations that Georger Bush became a war criminal in the fashion of Adolf Hitler, ably assisted by his ally in London, Mussolini, otherwise known as Prime Minister Tony Blair. Then the United States announced a fundamental statement of its national security policy, the essence of which was that it would no longer wait to receive the first blow from a terrorist state or hostile nation; that it would be fully prepared to protect itself by taking preemptive actions against a known threat. In vain, the United States and its principal allies urged the United Nations to act together in unity with Iraq. But their attempts were not successful. Deeply divided were France, Germany, Russia, and China in steely opposition. The United States thus came to the determination to act, meaning to bring about regime change, the stated policy of the United States since 1998 and of the second Clinton Administration. It was more than passing strange then that everyone agreed that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was in gross violation of numerous resolutions of the United Nations, that everyone agreed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and actually used them on the Iraqi people. But a consensus could not be reached to act forcefully and directly to the threat. So it was left to the United States, Great Britain and Australia and a coalition of others to forge a workable coalition to deal with Saddam. Now some would argue that the United States is a new imperial power, that its power reach threatens regional and global stability. Others ask the provocative questions: Where will it happen? Who’s going to be next? The concern was the continuing threat posed by those rogue states that actively support terror, as well as those that manufacture weapons of mass destruction and export them, or export the underlying technologies that makes those weapons possible. The era which was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War had already been taking off in its own direction, charting it own course, while promoting policies of compromise and weakness that became a strategic drift away from the United States. What is at stake here is a Jihad against Western civilization. Here we come face-to-face with the phenomenon that’s beyond the capacity of many to grasp, or perhaps beyond their willingness to grasp. This hatred is something so deep, so ingrained, so ideological that it may be well beyond any repair. No traditional instruments of Western origin are capable of dealing with it, and certainly not the soft ways of diplomacy or the byways of the United Nations. These are not merely differences to be adjusted by compromise and mutual understanding, but the elements of a declaration of war upon Western civilization. We hear the argument that what is needed is to eliminate the conditions that breed terror, and those are conventionally identified as rooted in poverty and desperation. But while it is essentially true that much more needs to be done to eradicate poverty and disease and desperation, these Jihadists are not the slightest bit interested. Rather they focus on the literal elimination of the West and its way of life. And with those evils, there can be no compromise. Only if we begin to think in these terms, within the concept of irreconcilability, can we begin to grasp the dimensions of this larger conflict. Irreconcilability means simply: not capable of resolution. In the final analysis, we’ve come to the only length of recognition that the underlying ideals of Western civilization, our civilization, are now at risk and are in some ways under direct attack. For those who believe that by responding with the reach of national power and enhanced enforcement we are betraying the fundamental premises of our society and that we are subverting not only our ideals, but our ethics, I can say only that we are in major disagreement. We ask the question as to whether this new trend of America’s going alone, if it can’t bring along its allies, can be sustained for the long term. Posed that way, the answer is, probably not. But if the alternative means relenting and going the way of the Europeans, I’d say we have no other choice. In fact, in the long run, the Western world has no choice but to pursue policies of preempting imminent threats. If civilized democracies persist in believing that differences can be compromised with the Jihadists, and do not take action when threats are present, it will either fall victim to systematic blackmail or slowly fade into irrelevance. It’s ridiculous to think that the United States’ national security strategy threatens democracies. Our intention, our reach and our power, is targeted in the 21st Century at international rogues and law-breakers, and terrorists who can strike at any moment. There’s not much hope for détente, compromise and traditional negotiation with these folks. We need to try, of course. But we also need to be prepared to act. |
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Ivo H. DaalderSenior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies, Brookings Institution; Co-author (with James M. Lindsay), America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (2003); former Director for European Affairs, President Clinton’s National Security Council staff. First, in the Bush view, it is power — especially military power — that matters most in international politics. The country with the most power will matter more than anyone else. Because we, the United States, are the most powerful country in the world, we can do as we want, and as the Athenians told the Melians two-and-a-half millennia ago, others will do as they must. Indeed, by using our power and demonstrating our dominance we will give others no choice but to follow our way. It follows from the view of those in power, secondly, that international institutions and international laws are, in this Administration’s view, a significant restraint on our ability to do what is right and what needs to be done. The abandonment of the Geneva Convention post-9/11 is a perfect illustration of this. For those who have the courage to go through the legal documents, it was very clear that Geneva was regarded by this administration, by many key lawyers, as a constraint on our ability to do what we thought was necessary: To get information from terrorists, if we captured them, in a timely and proficient manner. It was a quaint and outdated international arrangement, in the words of the White House Counsel. Not much thought was given to the fact that the main reason why we adhere to something like Geneva is not to protect terrorists, but to protect our troops should they ever be captured. But this is not an argument that gains many adherents in this administration. To the contrary, Mr. Bush and his key advisors maintain that others champion international institutions and international laws precisely because they want to constrain American power. And it follows that adhering to these international institutions and international laws would weaken our power. Their view is that an unbound America is a more secure America. The third element of the worldview is that our power and our exceptionalism are deemed acceptable to everyone else in the world because surely our motives are pure. Not only are our motives pure, but importantly, others know that this is in fact the case. Those who would deny this essential truth, whether it may be French presidents or Jihadists in the Middle East, do so because they oppose what we to do; because they wish us ill; because they are not with us. Now there is much in this worldview that is comforting to Americans. Indeed there is much that is right about it. Power does matter in international politics. And surely it is better to be powerful, indeed, the most powerful, than it is to be not powerful at all. Others clearly support international institutions and multilateralism as such because they are weak and because they want to use these institutions to constrain and ensnare American power. And yes, I have no doubt that our intentions are just. There is no real debate about that. But what Bush and those who think like him don’t understand is that we no longer live in a world of competing nation-states in which power is the only coin of the realm. That was the age of Metternich; this is the age of the microchip. Power is not the only thing that matters in international politics. Globalization does as well. Globalization has created an unprecedented degree of international interdependence and has led to the shrinkage of time, space and distance, again, in unprecedented ways. The consequences of globalization are both good: Think of the increased trade and great prosperity that it has created, and of the far greater concern with human rights and democratization that has occurred in the last decades and more. But globalization also has exceedingly bad consequences: Think of terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the spreading of infectious diseases, global warming and all the other global challenges we now face. We know that our power, as important as it is, overwhelming as it is, cannot cope with the challenges that globalization poses on its own. We need to get the willing and active cooperation of other countries, to combat terrorist, to curtail proliferation, curb global warming and cure infectious diseases. We cannot do this on our own. International cooperation — not power alone — is how we get what we want. Yet, that cooperation is made more difficult by two fundamental realities. One is that the existing structures of international cooperation are weak and ill-suited for the task at hand. Take NATO, which can’t find a way to deploy a few dozen more troops or a handful of additional helicopters to do even the minimally necessary job in Afghanistan, let alone prepare for a serious stabilization operation inside Iraq. Or take the United Nations. Its Blue Helmets can help keep the peace when warring parties choose not to fight. But as we learned in the Balkans they cannot make peace where none exists. And as we saw in the 12 years preceding the Iraq war, the United Nations cannot enforce even its most important resolutions. Therefore, if we need international cooperation we will have to spend some time thinking about how to rebuild and adapt existing international institutions to deal with today’s existing realities and create new forms of cooperation where none now exist. The core, it seems to me, of an American foreign policy today must be to make a commitment to do today what America leaders did at the end of World War II: To lead the effort to create new forms of cooperation to deal with the real challenges we face. But here, to conclude, we come to the second reason why cooperation is so difficult: The international backlash stemming from Bush’s foreign policy and the growing anti-Americanism that has followed has undermined — perhaps fatally so — America’s ability, and America’s moral authority to lead in forging these new structures of cooperation. I submit that this is the true cost of America’s unilateralism for the past three years. We can’t get our NATO allies to join us in regard to Iraq. We cannot get the UN Security Council to vote on a resolution giving our soldiers immunity from prosecution by the international criminal court even though they have done so in the past. We can’t get our Asian friends to support our attempts to isolate North Korea during multilateral talks and in fact end up isolating ourselves. So here is our fundamental challenge: We must convince those whose cooperation we need that we are committed to cooperating with them. Whether after three years of ignoring their wishes and concerns George Bush can demonstrate that commitment remains to be seen. |
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Robert KaganSenior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Columnist, Washington Post; Author, Renewing U.S. Legitimacy (2004), and Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (2003); Co-author (with William Kristol), Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy (1996). The idea that we can simply go back to the Cold War structures and ways of behavior, it seems to me, answers itself. We are not in the Cold War situation any more and that needs to be thought of in very practical ways. Because a lot of what we look back on as the great multilateralist approach of the United States during the Cold War, first of all, had a lot of hypocrisy in that approach. But setting that aside for a second, that multilateralist approach was very much shared across both sides of the Atlantic under the special circumstances that existed in the Cold War. It was a fact that we faced common threats. More importantly the issue of the Cold War was Europe. Europe was the battleground of the Cold War. And American foreign policy during the Cold War — the idea that we would not consult with Europeans and not engage in multilateral action with Europeans — would have been an absurdity. The Cold War was about Europe and so of course we worked with the Europeans every day. Not always listening to them, by the way. Not always taking them seriously. But nevertheless making the attempt, because that was the Cold War to a very large extent. And also, and equally importantly, the Europeans depended on the United States for their security. They didn’t have any questions about their dependence on the United States. And so you know what that meant? They forgave a lot. They forgave the Vietnam War. Now, I am very confident Europeans did not oppose the Vietnam War less vehemently than they oppose the Iraq War. They opposed the Vietnam War on moral grounds, on the grounds that it was stupid, idiotic, a mistaken use of American power, that it was going to wind up weakening the United States. They had very good and millions of reasons why they opposed the war in Vietnam. But even the war in Vietnam did not undercut the broad mantel of legitimacy the Europeans granted the United States during the Cold War for its leadership in the world. One of the main reasons, if not the main reason, was that they depended on the United States. So to me there have been two turning points in the last decade or so. One is September 11th. The other, the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. When the Cold War ended, not only did Europeans’ sense of dependence on the United States end -- and Europeans do not feel dependent on the United States strategically any more -- but also the degree of legitimacy they afforded the United States just as a matter of de facto reality also eroded, if not began to disappear. And instead of viewing American power as a shelter, Europeans in the ’90s began to view American power as being excessive and perhaps too threatening and not under control. Because the other thing that happened at the end of the Cold War was that the only check on the United States -- the Soviet Union -- disappeared. And we were faced for the first time in modern history with what I call the “unipolar predicament.” It is a predicament, not a project of anybody’s policy; it’s a predicament that comes from having one nation with so much power and without anyone checking it. The Europeans, instead of depending on the United States for their security, began to worry about the United States being unchecked. And this was expressed by French foreign ministers in the mid-1990s when they referred to the United States as a “Hyper Power”. The French and Chinese and Russian foreign ministers were getting together in those days and talking about the need for a multipolar world because a unipolar world was unjust. Now did September 11 tremendously exacerbate these concerns in the aftermath? Has George Bush made an existing problem worse? Yes, he has. But now, as we all sit around here and say, “Fine, let’s elect John Kerry president,” how do we go about dealing with this new set of realities? May I say that just having a Democrat in the White House, even having a guy who says, “I like you, allies. Let’s like each other,” is not by itself going to overcome these fundamental structural changes that have occurred in the international system. And if the United States is going to win back the legitimacy it once enjoyed, it is not just going to be because we start thinking about microchips and all the other nice things that we should be thinking about. And I agree with you on all of that. But we are going to have to find some way to address this structural problem. Now I could propose ways that we might be getting to do that. But I’m not very optimistic that’s easy to do. So I will end by saying two things. First of all, this is not just a George Bush problem. This is all our problem. And it’s going to be a problem regardless of who’s president next year. And second of all, it is a problem that we do need to begin to address. But we should address it with the kind of sobriety and, dare I say, bipartisan approach, that some of our great policies in the past have employed. So I can’t wait for this election to be over, so we can actually get serious about addressing some of these problems. |
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