The Kalman Lassner Memorial Lecture
In Coordination
with
The Moshe Dayan
Center
For Middle
Eastern and African Studies
Lecture by
Professor Henry S. Bienen,
President,
Northwestern University
(Transcript)
THE MEANING OF AMERICAN PRIMACY:
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE MIDDLE EAST
22 March 2004
What I want to suggest is that a debate is going on in the United States now as we speak, it will be a debate which will be carried out in the American election, which is not the best time for intelligent debates of big public policy, not the best context perhaps, but it is the political context in which a very crucial discussion is going to take place, and it is really a debate which we have had off and on since the founding of the American Republic about America’s role in the world. But it’s a debate in a very different context, in a context which I will argue has changed fundamentally for the United States post-September 11, 2001, which is a great, which will go down as a great watershed period in American history I believe, and I want to argue that. This debate had really began in its current, most recent form with the end of the cold war, but it was brought to a head by the events of September 11, and then by America’s response, first in Afghanistan and more recently in Iraq. It’s been a debate also fueled by President Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy document which has been understood, maybe in a simple minded way to stress the following items, I don’t know, I’m sure my Israeli foreign policy colleagues have looked at that document, I don’t know whether other people have looked at it, it’s a very short document, it’s only 40 pages long, but it’s a very interesting document indeed, and it stresses a number of items:
1. That the United States must remain the unchallenged power in the world;
2. That the United States will be willing to act unilaterally, if need be, to protect its national security; and
3. That the United States will be willing to act preemptively if it needs to. Now the term “preemptive” and “preventive” are sometimes used interchangeably, I think they’re not interchangeable. Preemptive, which is the actual term used in the President’s National Security Strategy document means to act preemptively – first, but not necessarily when war is imminent. I think that’s the distinction. Preventive war would be a war really more like the war here, in the 60’s where war was going to come and you strike first when you know its about to happen. Preemptive means it might happen down the line, there’s a threat and you act before that threat and part of the debate in the United States today is over the, what’s called “A war of choice”, that Iraq was a war of choice for the United States or was it? Was it a war of choice or was it not. A preemptive war suggests, to some extent, a war of choice.
Now, the line of preemptive, about preemptive war in the President’s National Security document literally is two lines long, but, and the Administration more recently had said, well, why does everybody concentrate on 2 lines, but they were 2 very important lines indeed, and indeed, Secretary of State Powell, in an article in Foreign Affairs, in the Winter issue of Foreign Affairs, has argued that the President’s National Security Strategy document has been misconceived, that it’s critics have misunderstood it because they’ve emphasized the preemptive nature and the unilateral nature of America’s willingness to act, whereas the Administration says: we always want partners, we always want coalition, a term that the Administration uses the “coalition of the willing”, but the coalitions that the Administration has been talking about are rather ad hoc coalitions put together over specific issues rather than alliance systems like NATO, and its an important distinction which again we could come back to.
I actually don’t think that there’s been a misconstruction or a misconstruing of the break that the National Security Strategy document makes with the past, I actually think it is a break, the stated willingness to act unilaterally and to act preemptively, the emphasis on those things is a difference at least in degree than the past.
Now why there’s a lot of debate on these issues, they get even more fundamental ones that I want to talk about in a moment, but a lot of the debate comes around because of the messiness of the war in Iraq and to some extent in Afghanistan, that the reconstruction of both those countries is, and has been, extraordinarily messy and difficult, I don’t know why anyone would have thought it would be otherwise, but there were people who probably did think it would be otherwise, that the absence of key allies, traditional European allies, in Iraq has also sharpened the debate as has been the so called lack of legitimacy, given the absence of the United Nations support for the Iraq war. In any case, the Administration to some extent has shifted its ground, it now wants more allies for burden sharing in Iraq and it also wants some kind of United Nations imprimatur to legitimate the reconstruction of Iraq, if for no other reason for dealing with the contending factions inside Iraq, the role of the United Nations, I think, will be important for that as much as for getting other powers, particularly European ones but not exclusively so to come into Iraq to burden share with the United States. So around both the specific contexts of Iraq, and to a lesser extent Afghanistan, but set in a broader context of America’s role in the world and this break with that the National Security Strategy document represents, I want to focus what I, and others, have called the issues of American Primacy and bring it home to issues of conflict in the Middle East and just to give some example of how I think this debate is going on, both in the public realm and amongst elites, foreign policy elites in the United States, I’m involved in 2 task forces, one in the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations which focuses on, it’s actually called the American Primacy, and one, the New York Council on Foreign Relations, on reconstruction of post-conflict societies which takes off from Iraq but is not exclusive to the issue of Iraq. So foreign policy elites are very much worrying the issues that I just put on the table very broadly, but if you’ll bear with me, before coming back to those issues, I want to take you on a little bit of a world wind tour from the end of World War II until the 1980’s and then up to the current period, because I think, it is an important context for understanding where the United States is as it enters this new period and debates that America’s role of the world in terms of American Primacy.
What I would argue is that from the end of World War II until, certainly, the early 1980’s, the United States tended to see its foreign policy very much in terms of National Security rather narrowly construed. By National Security, I really mean it understood its foreign policy through the prism of Soviet-American competition, and largely saw that competition in military terms or potentially in military terms. If you look at the discussion of the National interests in the United States in post, from the post-World War II period up through the early 1980’s you’ll see that the national interest was redefined over and over again in terms of national security, which had to do with nuclear threats to the United States itself and military, Soviet military threats in Europe plus a concern more laterally with the growing Chinese power in East Asia.
Now, at, and again as I said, I’m going to go very quickly and I’m going to paint with a very wide brush and to some extent, I’m going to simplify what were much more complicated conversations.
But as the 1970’s progressed, the United States share of world product fell, and it fell from very high shares after, if you look at any chart after World War II, the United States had 40/45% of world product, very large shares of world trade because the European economies were on their back as was Japan and the Korean peninsula. So, you had an a historical phenomena that the United States simply had a very large share of world product, and if you look at the memoirs of Acheson, Truman, Marshall, those who constructed the Brenton Woods institutions after World War II, they were aware of how fleeting this American dominant share of world economy was going to be, and they deliberately constructed a set of institutions which would allow Europe and Japan to come back economically.
Now, the, as American product fell though, it really, share of world product fell, I think it fell much more precipitously than the post-World War II architects had envisioned, so by the time you get into the 1970’s and early 1980’s, particularly with the rise of Japan as a great economic power and the concern for the rusting out what came to be called the Rustbelt economy of the mid-West of industrial America, you got a concern that things were moving too far, too fast, and that the United States was losing out in world economic terms, that was to be a somewhat short lived concerned but it again, it recast the debate to some extent, away from national security to a concern with a national interest in much more traditional terms in a way that European powers had always thought about their national interest in terms of trade shares, in terms of economic competition, and interestingly as this period was progressing, the United States own economy, in some ways, was becoming more dependent on world trade, for employment, shares of trade in total American product were going up and people were concerned, as they are now concerned, in a somewhat different context, of how competitive the United States would be.
So trade and jobs were more tied to the world economy and the US, another part of this which is very interesting was that the US went from being a world creditor to a world debtor more rapidly than any country had ever gone from, any major economy had ever gone. Now that to some extent was a deliberate artifact of the Reagan, what I would call the Reagan-Volker policy of high interest rates, American interest rates zoomed up to deal with American deficits, American savings rates were low, America financed its growth by borrowing and it continues to finance its growth by borrowing, and we will look at those reserves in a moment.
So, this debate which I’m saying from World War II up until the late 70’s – early 80’s, that American nation interest was defined in security terms began to shift a little bit and more and more, as the 70’s and 80’s progressed, the United States was thinking about it’s worldwide foreign policy and its national interest somewhat more in political economy terms, somewhat more in terms of trade and economy, and then that movement became accelerated with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.
The Soviet Union weakened and finally collapsed and the threat perception became very different in the United States. There was, what I would call, an expansion of foreign policy, first order concerned, economic issues loomed very large and there were another set of issues that came to the fore – human rights issues, of the Clinton Administration worried a lot about human rights issues, people started worrying a lot of world environmental concerns, this whole shift away from national security was not only moving to the economic side but the kinds of issues that were getting debated in the United States broadened. There was a luxury, if you like, a broadening out into other concerns.
I’d mentioned just two, foreign, which had to do with the international environment and human rights issues. Now, when President Bush II, the younger, came into office, he came into office, again, in the context of the Clinton’s Administration’s shift which was away from defining the national interest in narrow security terms. And if you look at the start of the Bush Administration, pre-September 11, you see that while there was some growing concern with a rising China, regional instability, particularly here in the Middle East, and also in Northeast Asia and the Korean peninsula, Southwest Asia, India, Pakistan, and there were people that were certainly concerned about a growing strain of a viral Islam and that goes back into the Clinton Administration. By the way one of the issues which will come up in this election is the number of people formerly in the Clinton Administration are now arguing that they told the national security advisors of President Bush that the greatest worry was an al-Qaeda worry, that National Security Advisor Rice, had been briefed, so there’s an argument who said what to whom now during the transition period from Clinton to Bush, but if you look at the Bush statements as the Administration came into office, they were in some ways very traditional kinds of statements of concern with an added twist to them.
One, President Bush eschewed nation building, said that we don’t want to get into this, the Clinton Administration tried to get into this, it was a failure and were not going to do this, we’re not going to get deeply involved with the affairs of other countries, on the ground, the Bush Administration asserted a suspicion of international treaties, going back to an unwillingness to sign the international criminal court treaties, unwillingness to sign the Kyoto protocols on the environment, deep suspicion of the START negotiations, and unwillingness to finish the START talks in the START negotiations on nuclear weapons and a willingness to even expand the NATO alliance beyond the new states which had been brought in during the Clinton period, to not only those who had been in the old sphere of the Soviet Union, but who had been an integral part of the Soviet Union itself – the Baltic States, for starters, and to do that without much consultation.
So there was an expression of unilateralism at the start of the Bush Administration which certainly predates September 11 and at the same time a kind of suspicion of alliances but a kind of traditional American worry about getting deeply involved in the affairs of other countries and even in regional conflicts, and as you know, the Bush Administration was not eager to jump into Middle East negotiations, it let those sit.
Then came September 11th, and the nation was shot right back into narrower, more narrow definitions of security concerns, so if there had been this movement away from thinking about the national interests and foreign policy, very much in national security terms, September 11th changed everything. It not only brought back national security concerns, but it brought them back even in a new and heightened way because the security to be concerned about was not the security of the homeland, not the security of rising powers in Asia or in Europe but the threat to, the physical threat to the United States, and I just call to your historical memory that there had been simply no threat from an outside power on the continental United States since 1812, that was the last one. Of course there has been the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which was not the continental United States, there had been small submarines incursions of German U-boats on the coast during the war but this was the first real physical attack on the integrity of the homelands and it led to an amazing sense of vulnerability, and this time, the focus on homeland security was a focus through a concern with Islam, the Middle East and regional conflict.
Now, what I’ve tried to suggest in this little tour of the horizon was that the Bush Administration was not an Administration which came to power bent for great global changes, its not what was on its mind, or at least it wasn’t on President Bush’s mind or Secretary Powell’s mind, perhaps it was more on Secretary Rumsfeld’s mind or Vice-President Cheney or some of the people right below both of them, but if you recall, as I said a moment ago, the Bush Administration distanced itself from trying to broker an Arab-Israeli peace agreement, it seemed very uninterested in pursuing an accommodation with North Korea, although there were splits within the Administration on this issue. The Bush Administration was at first very critical of the Clinton Administration’s policy of trying to engage North Korea.
The first flap of the Bush Administration was with China, which it saw, as I said a moment ago, as a rising power and a competitor, but its attitude toward China was traditional in that it operated within a realist context, a worry about powerful nation states, it was not the issue of trying to do regime change.
September 11th changed a great deal.
The Bush Administration soon after September 11th, asserted its right to take unilateral and preventative, preemptive action against terrorists and the states which harbored them and it dusted off strategies and strategic documents that had been written in the time of the first Bush Administration, that is President Bush, the father, and were formulated in the office of Secretary of Defense Cheney, he was secretary of Defense under the first President Bush and which were associated with Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, “Scooter” Libby among others. In other words, in that first Bush Administration there had been people who had been already formulating the doctrines which emerged in the National Security Strategy document of 2002 but they had literally had been put in a drawer and they sat in a draw for a decade almost, or more.
Now, the documents stated a desire and a necessity for preemption in military dominance and these ideas were elaborated within the context of the Administrations’ unilateral bent. Again, that unilateral bent was again very striking, after September 11th there was initially no desire to embrace NATO’s military support in Afghanistan which was offered, there was also offered non-native support for protecting the United States homeland, again, the Administration didn’t embrace it, and clearly later on the Administration was willing, if not desirous to go it alone or relatively alone in Iraq.
Now, I don’t want to suggest that the Bush Administration has been unilateralist in all its policy areas, and one of the wonderful things about looking at policy areas is to see how opportunistic people always are with respect to their own doctrines, not only is the United States opportunistic but its critics are highly opportunistic, so if you go to look at Korea, the United States has insisted on multi-party negotiations with North Korea, bringing in the Japanese, the South Koreans, the Chinese and early on everybody else insisted that the Bush Administration which it criticized for being unilateralist vis-à-vis Iraq, go into unilateral or bilateral discussions, that is the US and the North Koreans, so there are some ironies here if you look case by case.
The Bush Administration has talked of “coalitions of the willing” a more fluid and ad hoc grouping of states and has been quite willing to strike deals when it needs to or wants to so its brought the French and the Canadians, most recently in Haiti, it succeeded, recently, to European allies stances, vis-à-vis Iran’s nuclear programs and it has clearly been looking for UN help in Iraq now and for other countries to foot more of the bill and to help provide security in Iraq as other countries have provided some security in Afghanistan. So I’m not suggesting that the Bush Administration can’t be opportunistic when it wants to be.
Now, I can’t know what fully has motivated the different actors in the Bush Administration though if people are interested you can look at 2 more or less recent books, “The Rise of the Vulcans: Bush’s War Cabinet” by James Mann and which deals with the motives of different actors, as does a recent book by James Lindsey and Ivo Daalder, titled “America Unbound” which looks at the different conflicts within the Administration. My own view is that right after September 11th there were some, in the Bush Administration, who saw a chance to build a political base for sweeping change, vis-à-vis enemies, the axis of evil states. There were some who simply think its better to fight terrorism abroad, to be pro-active and preemptive and preventative. Some saw a chance to get weapons of mass destruction which they probably thought existed in Iraq and to warn Iran, Libya and North Korea, maybe even Pakistan on this issue. I think some actually saw that there would be a greater possibility of an Arab-Israeli settlement by taking out Saddam, that was called the “Road to Jerusalem Runs Through Baghdad” echoing back from 19, from the early 1990’s when the same idea was floated in the first Gulf War and there were some, I think, sense to that argument that settlement might be easier here between Arabs and Israelis with a weakening of Iraqi military power with an opening up of a frozen Middle East and I think that did happen after the first Gulf War didn’t come to a conclusion, maybe there was less reason to think that it could happen in 2002/2003/2004 but there were probably some people who thought there was a chance, and I should put my own cards on the table, I was a supporter of the war in Iraq. I never thought the reasons for going into Iraq had to do with the weapons of mass destruction, I don’t know what the President thought, Secretary Rumsfeld has recently said that even if he knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq he still would have gone into Iraq, he’s been honest enough to say that. I would put myself in the same boat. I wouldn’t have dreamed, as a little aside, that they would have, as poorly planned, for the post-military phase of Iraq as they did and nobody can convince me that they had good plans for the post-military phase or the post-large scale military phase, it’s still a military phase. More American soldiers have been killed since large-scale hostilities ceased in Iraq than were killed during the 30 days or less in which American forces pushed up from the South. In any case, whatever the motives, and I suspect they were mixed motives, indeed, to me, I think, that there was one very major motive in the mind of the policy makers in this Administration and that was that the situation in the Middle East was intolerable, that it was dangerous, that there were corrupt and repressive states all over the place and that as long as they continued to exist that it would be an increasingly dangerous world for the United States and that by getting rid of Saddam there could be demonstration effects, the so-called spill over of democracy effects for that to happen of course, you have to have some kind of successful outcome in Iraq – I’ll come back to that in a moment – and I think that was a very major motive for going into Iraq.
Now, in other words, some saw a chance to shake up the Middle East, perhaps start change in Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and that argument was associated with Bernard Lewis, who I know has visited here a number of times as well as Fuad Ajami and others. But this was a revolutionary change argument in deed, this was not politics as usual, this marks a very large shift in American foreign policy postures, it marks the shift of trying to be an agent for very fundamental and revolutionary change in another part of the world, the Middle East, and presumably Southwest Asia as well. So this was not the traditional politics as usual and in that sense September 11th gave a potential for a very different shift in American foreign policy thinking. Now the National Security Strategy document coming back to that document, states some objectives that nobody could disagree with – defend the peace, preserve the peace, encourage democracy, it stresses the economic, military and political strain of the United States. But it also sees the United States as a benevolent primary power, benevolent hegemony, and while it sees the benefit from multi-lateral action, it stresses that US interest and responsibilities may require unilateral action including preventive action, usually through intelligence and homeland defense but also through preemptive military action abroad. It also states for the United States to maintain military primacy to deter foreign military threats. Now, the most aggressive proponents of what has come to be called the Bush Doctrine believe that you’re a super power and you use your power to intimidate and get compliance and expand what they call the American perimeter, but what does this mean? Does it mean, for example, that the United States should try to extend liberal democracy to Iran, Syria and where else, even if we see positive outcomes in Iraq? I think given the post-conflict, or post-large scale conflict situation in Iraq, my own reading of the tea leaves is that the American public and probably most, even, American policy makers have little appetite today for another major military intervention. Iraq would have to turn out very well, much better than it looks like it will turn out, though I grant it’s very early, you know when Joe and I were asked to what’s the impact of the French revolution on modern politics, he said too soon to say, so I think, its too soon to say what will happen in Iraq but if anybody will be optimistic about the outcomes of Iraq for stable democratic situation you can raise your hand and try to convince me, I think at best we’re going in for a position, a period of time of deep messiness and at worst, once can see large scale civil war and a dissolution of a scent, whatever’s left of a central state, the answer is not much. So, I don’t think, however one reads those tea leaves that policy makers have much of an appetite for another large scale intervention, certainly not if this means occupation and reconstruction in Syria, much less Iran, Saudi Arabia, I deliberately put Saudi Arabia there, or Pakistan. If the last two should turn out much worse for American interests than they are now and if I would worry about any place, I would lose sleep over Pakistan myself.
Americans are increasingly worried about limits, overstretch militarily and economically, and whether the United States has a culture of nation building, or even a highly developed civilian set of conjures for the job given the paucity of trained foreign service officers or US aid officers who speak good Arabic, Pushtun, Farsi, or a host of other languages.
Now I would finally like, if we could, Asher, at the graphs.
The first one, if you think, looking at American Primacy, now, unless you crane your neck to the side, you might have a hard time reading that, but what it shows, maybe put it the other way round if you could, just, no, move the graph from a vertical to a horizontal one, that’s backwards. So if you look at this, what you see is that the United States has a significant share of world output, and world trade but hardly what anybody, I don’t know if you can read it well, what anybody would call a primary share or a dominant share. The United States has 21% of world output and less than 15% of world trade, and if you look at reserves, it has rather small share of world hard currency reserves, that’s the small yellow bar, its under 3%. Who holds the large shares of hard currency reserves? They’re held in China, Japan, Taiwan, that is, those are people that are holding American dollars as they’ve been running very large trade surpluses with the United States. Now, do they have any great interest in calling in those chits, maybe yes, maybe no, but it doesn’t, to me, if you look at that bar chart, you don’t get the view of a dominant economic power. Now, if you go to the next one, if you would please, it just breaks it down in table form, and you can now see those numbers in more clearly and once again you’re not overwhelmed by American economic might though the United States remains a kind of engine of growth, it’s a great open market for people to export to, those are not the numbers of a dominant economic power and if we’d have done this circa in 1950 or 1960 you would have seen American shares much much higher of world output.
Now, if we go to the next one, if we look at the one on defense, we see something very different, and here, what you see, it’s not so easy to read that, hard to read that, that’s it, it’s right, if you, I’ll read them from here. If you look at defense expenditure – the United States has a defense, an actually interestingly enough, some of these figures were in the Jerusalem Post, which is not where I got them from this morning, but there was a small little article in the Jerusalem Post which gave a multiple of US defense expenditures vis-à-vis non-US NATO, which I think the US is something like, if we look at these numbers, here the US is 3 times, a little bit less than 3 times NATO Europe, so, OK, but the numbers actually understate American military dominance because NATO, because NATO expenditures are very often non-American NATO, Europe NATO or even Europe-Canada NATO. Defense expenditures are very often expenditures for soldiers who are often quite useless, that is to say they are padded payroll soldiers, they’re not necessarily high-level mobile defense forces, European logistic capabilities are very weak compared to the United States, NATO doesn’t spend enough outside of the United States on high-tech armed forces, so these military numbers actually understate American military dominance. If you look at US, which you can’t quite see, but US per capita defense spending, is again, about 3.5 times, almost 4 times NATO Europe and if you look at shares of gross domestic products, which is the last column, or numbers in the armed forces, again, they are not so huge, they don’t show any American dominance, it would really, you’d have to look much more at the quality of military capacity to see American dominance and then on the military side, I actually think, in one meaning of the word “primary”, what you don’t see economically, you do see militarily, but I want to insist its only one meaning of the word “primary”.
Now I’m done with this Asher, we’ve had a lot of turmoil over the technology, which gave birth to something nothing very exciting, but what I want to share with you a little bit is the meaning of primacy. The meaning of the American primacy, given these facts. Here I have a big problem with the unilateralists, I’ve already suggested that if you look at the economic data and you look at the reserves, you don’t see anything like the American primacy. Yes, you see American military primacy in conventional terms, that is in military conventional terms, with respect to conventional armies, the US has a very dominant military and that was shown in Iraq to some extent, you could say that the Iraqi army was a paper tiger, it hadn’t trained [?] a lot since the Gulf war, all that’s true but nonetheless, it was a fairly large scale army, it had a lot of armor, a lot of tanks and it couldn’t stand up to American airpower, the ability to have a very good command in control and to use airpower in support of conventional and very quick moving armor. But there, yes, if that’s what we mean by conventional military dominance, I think the United States has it, but I want to put some important caveats on that.
We’re not talking about military nuclear capacity here, and while the United States may have by far the greatest nuclear power, it’s much less useful kind of figure. The Soviet Union may have ended its conventional military strength, may have weakened vastly, it still is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and so are lots of other countries and with more to come, and I don’t know whether we will sleep better with that in mind, but the proliferation of nuclear weapons means that vast amounts of destructions can be made even against a country which has huge conventional military dominance, so in that sense of the word of military primacy, nobody has it, that is everybody is vulnerable. There’s another sense of vulnerability which is non-conventional, and so far non-nuclear whether it stays non-nuclear who knows, and that is of course the kind of terrorism that we’ve seen on September 11th and that you live with all the time that we saw in Madrid, that all modern societies are highly vulnerable to terrorists without an address. And that is Afghanistan won’t be replicated again, there was an address, there was somebody you could go and get because they had given a safe haven, safe harbor to Osamah, but it won’t be clear next time where the safe havens are, so in that sense, military dominance is much tougher to translate into political efficacy unless you are willing to, if you think it’s a deterrent, take out civilian targets yourself of lots of innocent people in the name of retaliation against terrorists, I could conjure up some nasty examples if I wanted to give them to you, we could all think of them, but whether the United States or anybody else would be willing to do it and under what circumstances, I don’t know and I’m not sure I want to go there in thinking about it, though I suspect we’ve all thought about it in some way. So, in that sense then, there are many more nuclear powers than there were 20 or 30 years ago. Already, one of them, North Korea, relatively new really constrains and constrains activities against it by the likelihood that it has nuclear weapons, it may not have them ready to go, it may, I don’t know, maybe our intelligence guys know that well, I suspect they could only know it probabilistically, and as I’ve said, even countries whose conventional forces have had a lot of attrition, like Russia, still could carry out vast destruction with nuclear weapons, so could China and so could, for that matter, India, Pakistan and some other countries we could name.
So, in this sense, since you can’t easily deter terrorists by conventional forces, the notion of military dominance or primacy is a limited notion at best, and as I’ve tried to suggest, Afghanistan is an aberration, not a vision of the future. Most states, including the one’s that support terrorism will not be so clear in the future about giving safe harbor to open terrorists, neither by aims or addresses are terrorists, militarily, deterable. They are deterable if at all by police action and decent intelligence, but not by the conventional forces that we used in Iraq. So President Bush talked about taking the fight to the terrorists but that can’t easily be done by military means. So, it raises the question which I started with, do you move on to other places that have to some extent harbored terrorists or supported them and where do you want to go and what are the costs that you’re willing to bear? And I’m going to try now and finish up with just a few more thoughts.
The, it doesn’t seem to me that even a successful post-war reconstruction of Iraq, if that can be brought about, and I don’t know how likely that seems, I would say modest likelihood at the present time, it’s not very likely to deter terrorists, whether you believe as the new, about to be, Spanish Prime Minister said, and others have echoed, that Iraq has given great impetus to terrorism, I don’t particularly believe that, I don’t think it matters very much, I don’t think that most of these folks have specific aims in mind, if Osamah says Andalusia was ours, I don’t think he cares very much whether Spain does have troops in Iraq frankly or doesn’t have troops in Iraq. He might care for awhile but not for very long. So, then, the question then is again, even if you are successful with this thrust toward democracy, what is its impact going to be? I’m not suggesting that one, having come this far, that the United States doesn’t have a very large stake in Iraq, I think it has a very large stake in Iraq indeed, but I don’t think even a successful reconstruction of Iraq puts and end or much of an end to any immediate run to issues of worldwide terrorism.
Now, if you look at American power and what its good for, which to me is the fundamental $64,000 question I’ve been trying to lead up to, you have a lot of power, what’s it really good for, what can you compel people to do? That’s the question of power, if you can’t persuade them, what can you compel them to do and I can think of lots of things, the United States has a very hard time in compelling other countries to do things about, we seem to not be able to compel China to change its currency policy or get Europe to change its agricultural subsidy policies. The term “empire” doesn’t apply very well to the United States, we don’t try to determine most countries domestic or foreign policies even if countries that need us badly and we have a lot of influence over, take Mexico, we have huge influence in many respects over that country, very often we can’t get it to do much about sending us immigrants, off and on we are able to give advice about trade and domestic economic policies and sometimes the Mexicans have completely ignored us, sometimes they haven’t. Even the Republic of Korea where we continue to station 40,000 + troops, we have very little, I think, influence over its domestic policies and not so much influence over its foreign policies anymore.
I can give lots of examples of this, so if one thinks about coalitions, allies and using multilateral institutions, I’m very pragmatic about, I don’t think the coalition should determine the mission, that I agree with the Bush Administration about – but the mission is influenced by the coalition, you need lots of coalition partners in this world, and here I think, what we see, is reality brining the Bush Administration back to more multilateralist positions, in part for burden sharing, in part because the tasks are very complicated tasks, whether they are the tasks of trying to have another round of the World Trade Organization, where again you need lots of people to cooperate with and do business with, or the tasks of reconstruction in Iraq or Afghanistan, they are messy, burdensome, costly, expensive and thus the United States will move back into a posture of compromising with a lot of its allies, whatever one thinks of multilateral institutions and I have no ideology about it, pragmatically speaking, one needs to use them, one needs to use these coalitions, one needs to use the international institutions, treaties, legal frameworks that do exist and if one cares about them or not, but other people care about the values that they represent and that becomes a fact on the ground as it were, and I think one trouble that I would very, really criticize the Bush Administration for is that, I think, both in Iraq and elsewhere it came to its policies thinking that there was a kind of sharing of values which was self-evident, but there isn’t a share of values which is self-evident in the world, its what’s striking about the world is how little values are self-evidently shared, even values that some people may hold very very strongly.
Now, I believe that at the end of the day, those people who can be called in the Bush Administration – Neo-Conservatives – will end up very much in the same place as pragmatic realists, I think that’s already happening in Iraq, they’re already finding that the under funding of the reconstruction of Iraq, Afghanistan and other things, you’re trying to do all this and cut American taxes at the same time, you’re not going to have the money to do it. So, some people say that this is the American moment of time, the American moment in history – yes, we may have a huge set of responsibilities like no other country, yes, in some sense to use Madeline Albright’s terms “the United States is an indispensable nation and an essential one for ourselves and for many other nations”, but the moment in history has to be a shared one, it can’t be a go-it-alone one. The biggest policy challenge for the United States seems to me is the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and there the proliferation both to other nations and then to non-nations, and whether the weapons of mass destruction in the hands of rogue states or to movements that states may sell to or to distribute weapons to, again, those are issues which can only be dealt with by many states working together, that doesn’t mean that the United States will never use preemptive action again. If we do, we will try, I’m sure, to get others to understand and support what we do, and if they don’t understand, we’ll act in our own security, but the paradox is, I think the real paradox is that the neo, what used to be called the “neo-Wilsonians” have become on the right in the United States, not the left. It used to be that the more liberal wing of American foreign policy that saw this self-evidence of values and now its people on the right that see it, they see, as I’ve said, that values or they perceive values as self-evident when they are not. They don’t have often the patience with persuasion and I think this can lead to very bad policy.
Now I’m not saying that the Bush Administration didn’t try to persuade on Iraq – it did, but to some extent it set itself up for failure by earlier unilateral actions and policies in a number of areas.
I want to now just make a few ad hoc points as I do finish up. In terms of what the United States can do in the world, yes we have a superb professional army, but we don’t have a superb professional overseas civil service and I think that also was self-evident in Iraq. Willy-nilly, when the United States does nation building, we farm it out very often to large contractors, beltway organizations and perish the thought, even to some universities, by default our military winds up doing civilian tasks in Iraq. If I blow into this too hard it makes a big noise. The United States hasn’t built up a language capacity and knowledge of culture and politics and economies essential for an in-house set of civil services, civilian administrators who can work overseas, particularly in the Middle East and Central Asia. So if this is an essential nation with worldwide responsibilities, it hasn’t invested very heavily in the civilian categories which ought to exist to better implement those responsibilities, and I include the clandestine services also. What implications do I draw for US policies in the Middle East? I’ve been talking about them in a kind of ad hoc way. The first that I draw is I see no inclination in the United States for further large-scale military intervention, at least with ground forces in the Middle East. The impedes to extend or to expand democracy, what the Bush Administration early on called “expanding the perimeter” is clearly going to be limited by the problems which have been evident in Iraq. Those problems were always there but they weren’t always perceived to be there. They are certainly perceived to be there now. So, the notion that one would undertake another large scale excursion, I think, is just simply not on the cards, or in the cards, and by the way, if one looks at the military stretch many of the units that have been rotated out of Iraq are going to be rotated back into Iraq very quickly. There are large national guard units that are sitting in Iraq, when people join the national guard in the United States, they didn’t bargain for 6 months or a year in Baghdad or in Mosul they thought they would make a little money, do their duty, I’ll do this, I’ll do that, but the families didn’t think that people were going to be sitting there for a year taking causalities, that’s a political issue as well as a military issue. Will the US army expand? Yes, I think we will see some expansion of ground forces in the United States, but that is going to be while you’re cutting taxes, the President is probably going to have to shift his economic policy somewhat, so the military is stretched somewhat thin as it tries to, again, if it tried to do yet another military intervention somewhere, it could do it militarily but whether it could sit and occupy for a reconstruction would be a very big question in deed. I could certainly envision the use of American military to destroy nuclear facilities if one knew where they were, or if they fell into the wrong hands, I could certainly envision the seizing of oil wells if that needed to be done, but I can’t envision, I’m trying to suggest a replay of Iraq and I think there would be very little support for it.
Another point I wanted to make in conclusion and again it comes to the issue of political power, the United States has a deep interest in a settlement here, between Israel and Arabs. US policy in Iraq and for that matter, the rest of the Islamic world will always be questioned without such a settlement and probably even with it, that Saddam or for that matter Osamah came left, Palestinian issues is not, it doesn’t negate what I said, the failure to have a settlement here, weakens the United States in the Middle East and I think one should really accept that. I would say the same thing for India/Pakistan with respect to Kashmir. The actors on the ground will remain the key actors, not maybe outsiders, but these intractable regional conflicts have consequences way beyond the regions themselves and they have consequences for the United States in its own homeland.
The United States is now a front line actor, nobody can say that its not, its highly at risk both at home and worldwide and it is in some ways hostage to the regional conflicts which exist, whether they are here or in Southwest Asia or whether they are in the Southern Philippines, or whether they are in the Balkans. Now the US, having said that, frequently doesn’t know how to compel a settlement or can’t use its power to try and compel a settlement of these regional issues, so to be a great powerful state doesn’t mean primacy is what I’m trying to suggest. It doesn’t allow one to delve into regional conflicts in any way to me at least, which is understandable, you can have purchase on those conflicts, you can give people side payments, you can provide them with economic wherewithal, with security wherewithal but you can’t compel the actors to act, so, I think with respect to American primacy, I’ve tried to throw some cold water on the term, I’ve tried to suggest that there’s underlying weaknesses to the idea, both economic and to some extent even military, less so on the military side. I’ve tried to suggest that the United States itself not well organized to carry out the reconstruction of not only Iraq, but conceivably other states and I’ve tried to finally suggest that it’s very difficult for the United States to get inside the regional conflicts which exist and which influence its own foreign policy stature and positions, and bring them to some kind of settlement that both the United States and above all the actors themselves can live with. So, all that said, I am very doubtful of the notion of American primacy.
Thank you.