The Present Danger - Robert Kagan, William Kristol
Robert Kagan, William Kristol
A LITTLE OVER twenty years ago, a group of concerned Americans formed the Committee on the Present Danger. The danger they feared, and sought to rally Americans to confront, was the Soviet Union.
It is easy to forget these days how controversial was the suggestion in the middle to late 1970s that the Soviet Union was really a danger, much less one that should be challenged by the United States. This was hardly the dominant view of the American foreign policy establishment. Quite the contrary: prevailing wisdom from the Nixon through the Carter administrations held that the United States should do its utmost to coexist peaceably with the USSR, and that the American people in any case were not capable of mounting a serious challenge to the Soviet system. To engage in an arms race would either bankrupt the United States or lead to Armageddon. To challenge communist ideology at its core, to declare it evil and illegitimate, would be at best quixotic and at worst perilous.
When the members of the Committee on the Present Danger challenged this comfortable consensus, when they criticized detente and arms control, and called for a military build-up and a broad ideological and strategic assault on Soviet communism, their recommendations were generally dismissed as either naive or reckless. It would take a revolution in American foreign policy, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the disintegration of the Soviet empire to prove just how right they were.
Does this Cold War tale have any relevance today as Americans grapple with the uncertainties of the post-Cold War era? The Soviet Union has long since crumbled. No global strategic challenger has emerged to take its place, none appears visible on the horizon, and the international scene at present seems fairly benign to most observers. Many of our strategists tell us that we will not face another major threat for twenty years or more, and that we may as a consequence enjoy a "strategic pause." According to opinion polls, the American public is today less interested in foreign policy than at any time since before World War II. Intermittent fears of terrorist attack, worries about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, concerns about the possible outbreak of war in the Taiwan Strait or in the Balkans--all attract attention, but only fleetingly. The United States, both at the level of elite opinion and popular sentiment, appears to have become the Alfred E. Newman of superpowers--its national motto, "What, me worry?"
But there is today a "present danger." It has no name. It is not to be found in any single strategic adversary. It does not fit neatly under the heading of "international terrorism" or "rogue states" or "ethnic hatred." In fact, the ubiquitous post-Cold War question--where is the threat?--is misconceived. Rather, the present danger is that the United States, the world's dominant power on whom the maintenance of international peace and the support of liberal democratic principles depend, will shrink its responsibilities and--in a fit of absentmindedness, or parsimony, or indifference--allow the international order that it created and sustains to collapse. Our present danger is one of declining strength, flagging will and confusion about our role in the world. It is a danger, to be sure, of our own devising. Yet, if neglected, it is likely to yield very real external dangers, nearly as threatening in their own way as the Soviet Union was a quarter century ago.
IN FACT, beneath the surface calm, there has already been an erosion of the mostly stable, peaceful and democratic international order that emerged at the end of the Cold War. Americans and their political leaders have spent the years since 1991 lavishing the gifts of an illusory "peace dividend" upon themselves, and frittering away the opportunity to strengthen and extend an international order uniquely favorable to the United States. The task for America at the start of the 1990s ought to have been obvious. It was to guard this extraordinary international system from any threats that might challenge it. It was to prolong the new period of relative stability and democratic progress as far into the future as possible. That meant, above all, preserving and reinforcing America 's benevolent global hegemony, which undergirded what President George Bush rightly called a "new world order." The goal of American foreign policy should have been to turn Charles Krauthammer's "unipolar moment" into a unipolar era.
Throughout the 1990s, the United States has tended toward a course of gradual moral and strategic disarmament. Challenged by anti-American dictatorships in Baghdad and Belgrade, the Clinton administration responded by combining empty threats and indecisive military operations with diplomatic accommodation. Rather than press for changes of regime in Pyongyang and Beijing, the White House sought to purchase better behavior through bribes and "engagement." Rather than face squarely our world responsibilities, American political leaders chose drift and evasion.
In the meantime, the United States allowed its military strength to deteriorate to the point where its ability to defend its interests and deter future challenges is now in doubt. From 1989 to 1999, the defense budget and the size of the armed forces were cut by a third; the share of America's GDP devoted to defense spending was halved, from nearly 6 to around 3 percent; and the amount of money spent on weapons procurement and research and development declined by about 50 percent. By the end of the decade, the U.S. military was inadequately equipped and stretched to the point of exhaustion. And while defense experts spent the 1990s debating whether it was more important to maintain current readiness or to sacrifice present capabilities in order to prepare for future challenges, under the strain of excessive budget cuts the United States did neither.
Yet ten years from now, and perhaps a good deal sooner, we likely will be living in a world in which Iraq, Iran, North Korea and China all possess the ability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons. Within the next decade we may have to decide whether to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack. We could face another attempt by Saddam Hussein to seize Kuwait's oil fields. An authoritarian regime in Russia could move to reclaim some of what it lost in 1991. While none of this is to argue that the world must become a vastly more dangerous place, the point is that the world can grow perilous with astonishing speed. Should it do so once more, it would be terrible to have to look back on the current era as a great though fleeting opportunity that was carelessly wasted. Everything depends on what we do now.
Cold War Distortions
CONTRARY to prevailing wisdom, the missed opportunities of the 1990s cannot be made up for merely by tinkering around the edges of America's current foreign and defense policies. The middle path many of our political leaders would prefer, with token increases in the defense budget and a "humble" view of America's role in the world, will not suffice. What is needed today is not better management of the status quo, but a fundamental change in the way our leaders and the public think about America's role in the world.
Serious thinking about that role should begin by recalling those tenets that guided American policy through the more successful phases of the Cold War. Many writers treat America's Cold War strategy as an aberration in the history of American foreign policy. Jeane Kirkpatrick expressed the common view of both liberal and conservative foreign policy thinkers when she wrote in these pages that, while the United States had "performed heroically in a time when heroism was required", the day had passed when Americans ought to bear such "unusual burdens." With a return to "normal" times, the United States could "again become a normal nation." In the absence of a rival on the scale of the Soviet Union, the United States should conduct itself like any other great power on the international scene, looking to secure only its immediate, tangible interests, and abjuring the broader responsibilities it had once assumed as leader of the Free World.
What is striking about this point of view is how at odds it is with the assumptions embraced by the leaders who established the guiding principles of American foreign policy at the end of World War II. We often forget that the plans for world order devised by American policymakers in the early 1940s were not aimed at containing the Soviet Union, which many of them still viewed as a potential partner. Rather, those policymakers were looking backward to the circumstances that had led to the catastrophe of global war. Their purpose was to construct a more stable international order than the one that had imploded in 1939: an economic system that furthered the aim of international stability by promoting growth and free trade; and a framework for international security that, although it placed some faith in the ability of the great powers to work together, rested ultimately on the fact that American power had become the keystone in the arch of world order.
American leaders in the early to mid-1940s rejected the notion that the United States could return to being a "normal" power after World War II. On the contrary, they believed that the "return to normalcy" that President Harding had endorsed in 1920 was the fatal error that led to the irresponsible isolationism of the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt said in 1941, "We will not accept a world, like the postwar world of the 1920s, in which the seeds of Hitlerism can again be planted and allowed to grow." Men like James Forrestal and Dean Acheson believed that the United States had supplanted Great Britain as the world's leader and that, as Forrestal put it in 1941, "America must be the dominant power of the twentieth century."
Henry Luce spoke for most influential Americans inside and outside the Roosevelt administration when he insisted that it had fallen to the United States not only to win the war against Germany and Japan, but to create both "a vital international economy" and "an international moral order" that would together spread American political and economic principles--and in the process avoid the catastrophe of a third world war. Such thinking was reflected in Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter and, more concretely, in the creation of the international financial system at Bretton Woods in 1944 and of the United Nations a year later.
Thus, before American leaders came to view the Soviet Union as the great challenge to American security and American principles, they had arrived at the conclusion that it would be necessary for the United States (together, they hoped, with the other great powers) to deter aggression globally, whoever the aggressor might be. In fact, during the war years they were at least as worried about the possible re-emergence of Germany and Japan as about the Soviets. John Lewis Gaddis has summarized American thinking in the years between 1941 and 1946:
The American President and his key advisers were determined to secure the United States against whatever dangers might confront it after victory, but they lacked a clear sense of what those might be or where they might arise. Their thinking about postwar security was, as a consequence, more general than specific.
Few influential government officials, moreover, were under the illusion that "collective security" and the United Nations could be counted on to keep the peace. In 1945 Harry Truman declared that the United States had become "one of the most powerful forces for good on earth", and the task now was to "keep it so" and to "lead the world to peace and prosperity." The United States had "achieved a world leadership which does not depend solely upon our military and naval might", Truman asserted. But it was his intention, despite demobilization to ensure that the United States would remain "the greatest naval power on earth" and would maintain "one of the most powerful air forces in the world." Americans, Truman declared, would use "our military strength solely to preserve the peace of the world. For we now know that this is the only sure way to make our own freedom secure."
The unwillingness to sustain the level of military spending and preparedness required to fulfill this expansive vision was a failure of American foreign policy in the immediate aftermath of the war. It took the Iron Curtain and the outbreak of war in Korea to fully awaken Americans to the need for an assertive and forward-leaning foreign policy. But while the United States promptly rose to meet those challenges, a certain intellectual clarity was lost in the transition from the immediate postwar years to the beginning of the Cold War era. The original postwar goal of promoting and defending a decent world order became conflated with the goal of meeting the challenge of Soviet power. The policies that the United States should have pursued even in the absence of a Soviet challenge--seeking a stable and prosperous international economic order; playing a large role in Europe, Asia and the Middle East; upholding rules of international behavior that benefited Americans; promoting democratic reform where possible a nd advancing American principles abroad--all these became associated with the strategy of containing the Soviet Union. In fact, America was pursuing two goals at once during the Cold War: first, the promotion of a world order conducive to American interests and principles; and second, a defense against the immediate obstacle to achieving that order. Nevertheless, when the Cold War ended, many Americans recalled only the latter purpose.
The Shaping Hand
BUT THE COLLAPSE of the Soviet empire has not altered the fundamental purposes of American foreign policy. Just as sensible Americans after World War II did not imagine that the United States should retreat from global involvement and await the rise of the next equivalent to Nazi Germany, so American statesmen today ought to recognize that their charge is not to await the arrival of the next great threat, but rather to shape the international environment to prevent such a threat from arising in the first place. To put it another way: the overarching goal of American foreign policy--to preserve and extend an international order that is in accord with both our material interests and our principles--endures.
Certainly, the dramatic shift in international strategic circumstances occasioned by the Soviet collapse requires a shift in the manner in which this goal is pursued. But it is not a shift to "normalcy." In the post-Cold War era, the maintenance of a decent and hospitable international order requires continued American leadership in resisting, and where possible undermining, rising dictators and hostile ideologies; in supporting American interests and liberal democratic principles; and in providing assistance to those struggling against the more extreme manifestations of human evil. Americans must shape this order, for if we refrain from doing so, we can be sure that others will shape it in ways that reflect neither our interests nor our values.
We can hardly expect it to be otherwise. Today's international system is built not around a balance of power but around American hegemony. The international financial institutions were fashioned by Americans and serve American interests. The international security structures are chiefly a collection of American-led alliances. What Americans like to call international "norms" are really reflections of American and West European principles. Since today's relatively benevolent international circumstances are the product of our hegemonic influence, any lessening of that influence will allow others to play a larger part in shaping the world to suit their needs. States such as China and Russia, if given the chance, would configure the international system quite differently. Their idea of international norms, needless to say, would also be quite different. American hegemony, then, must be actively maintained, just as it was actively obtained.
This does not mean that the United States must root out evil wherever and whenever it rears its head. Nor does it suggest that the United States must embark on a crusade against every dictatorship. No doctrine of foreign policy can do away with the need for judgment and prudence, for weighing competing moral considerations. No foreign policy doctrine can provide precise and unvarying answers to the question of where, when and how the United States ought to intervene abroad. It is a good deal easier to say that the United States must have criteria for choosing when to intervene than it is to formulate those criteria. Henry Kissinger writes in Diplomacy that what is most needed in American foreign policy are "criteria for selectivity." But he does not venture to suggest exactly what those criteria might be. If one admits that closely linked matters of prestige, principle and morality play a role in shaping foreign policy, then rigid criteria for intervention quickly prove illusory. As Kissinger well knows, the complicated workings of foreign policy and the exceptional position of the United States should guard us from believing that the national interest can be measured in a quasi-scientific fashion, or that areas of "vital" national interest can be located, and other areas excluded, by purely geopolitical calculations. Determining what is in America's national interest is an art, not a science. It requires not only the measurement of power but also an appreciation of beliefs and passions, which cannot be quantified. That is why we choose statesmen, not mathematicians, to conduct foreign policy. That is why we will occasionally have to intervene abroad even when we cannot prove that a narrowly construed "vital interest" of the United States is at stake.
It is worth pointing out, though, that a foreign policy premised on American hegemony, and on the blending of principle with material interest, may in fact mean fewer overseas interventions than under the "vital interest" standard, not more. Had the Bush administration, for example, realized early on that there was no clear distinction between American moral concerns in Bosnia and America's national interest there, the United States might have been able to nip the Balkan crisis in the bud. With the enormous credibility earned in the Gulf War, President Bush might have been able to put a stop to Milosevic's ambitions with a well-timed threat of punishing military action. But because the Bush team placed Bosnia outside the sphere of "vital" American interests, the resulting crisis eventually required the deployment of thousands of troops on the ground.
The same could be said of American interventions in Panama and the Gulf. A passive world-view encouraged American leaders to ignore troubling developments that eventually metastasized into full-blown threats to American security. Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein were given reason to believe that the United States did not consider its interests threatened by their behavior, only to discover that they had been misled. In each case, a broader and more forward-leaning conception of the national interest might have made the later interventions unnecessary.
The question, then, is not whether the United States should intervene everywhere or nowhere. The decision Americans need to make is whether the United States should generally lean forward, as it were, or whether it should adopt a posture of relative passivity. A strategy aimed at preserving American hegemony should embrace the former stance, being more rather than less inclined to weigh in when crises erupt, and preferably before they erupt. This is the standard of a global superpower that intends to shape the international environment to its own advantage. By contrast, the vital interest standard is that of a "normal" power that awaits a dramatic challenge before it rouses itself into action.
Arms and Alliances
IS THE TASK OF maintaining American primacy and making a consistent effort to shape the international environment beyond the capacity of Americans? Not if American leaders have the understanding and the political will to do what is necessary. Moreover, what is required is not particularly forbidding. For much of the task ahead consists of building on already existing strengths.
The United States, for example, already wields the strongest military force in the world. It has demonstrated its prowess in war on several occasions since the end of the Cold War--in Panama in 1989, in the Persian Gulf in 1991, and most recently in the air war over Kosovo. Those victories owed their success to a force built in the Reagan years. This is a legacy off which the United States has lived for over a decade, and it cannot last. Today the United States spends too little on its military capabilities, both in terms of present readiness and investing in future weapons technologies. The gap between America's strategic ends and the means available to accomplish those ends is growing, a fact that becomes more evident each time the United States deploys forces abroad.
To repair these deficiencies and to create a force that can shape the international environment today, tomorrow and twenty years from now will probably require spending some $60-100 billion per year above current defense budgets. This price tag may seem daunting, but in historical terms it will represent only a modest commitment of America's wealth to defense. And in a time of large budget surpluses, spending a tiny fraction on defense ought to be politically feasible. For the United States to have the military capability to shape the international environment now and for the foreseeable future, it would be necessary to spend about 3.5 percent of GDP on defense, still low by the standards of the past fifty years, and far lower than most great powers have spent on their militaries throughout history. Is the aim of maintaining American primacy not worth a hike in defense spending from 3 to 3.5 percent of GDP?
The United States also inherited from the Cold War a legacy of strong alliances in Europe and Asia, and with Israel in the Middle East. Those alliances are a bulwark of American power and, more important still, they constitute the heart of the liberal democratic civilization that the United States seeks to preserve and extend. Critics of a strategy of American pre-eminence sometimes claim that it is a call for unilateralism. It is not. The notion that the United States could somehow "go it alone" and maintain its pre-eminence without its allies is strategically misguided. It is also morally bankrupt. What would "American leadership" mean in the absence of its democratic allies? What kind of nation would the United States be if it allowed Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Israel, Poland and other democratic nations to fend for themselves against the myriad challenges they will face?
In fact, a strategy aimed at preserving American pre-eminence would require an even greater U.S. commitment to its allies. The United States would not be merely an "offshore balancer", a savior of last resort, as many recommend. It would not be a "reluctant sheriff", rousing itself to action only when the townsfolk turn to it in desperation. American pre-eminence cannot be maintained from a distance, by means of some post-Cold War version of the Nixon Doctrine, whereby the United States hangs back and keeps its powder dry. The United States would instead conceive of itself as at once a European power, an Asian power, a Middle Eastern power and, of course, a Western Hemispheric power. It would act as if threats to the interests of our allies constituted threats to us. It would act as if instability in important regions of the world, and the flouting of civilized rules of conduct in those regions, were threats that affected us with almost the same immediacy as if they were occurring on our doorstep. To act oth erwise would make the United States a most unreliable partner in world affairs, a perception that would erode both American pre-eminence and the international order. Eventually, the crises would appear at our doorstep.
This is what it means to be a global superpower with global responsibilities. The costs of assuming these responsibilities are more than made up by the benefits to American long-term interests. It is short-sighted to imagine that a policy of "keeping our powder dry" is either safer or less expensive than a policy that aims to preclude and deter the emergence of new threats, that has the United States arriving quickly at the scene of potential trouble, that addresses threats to the national interest before they have developed into full-blown crises. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison expressed a common view last year when she wrote that, "Superpowers preserve their superpower status by not engaging in regional conflicts." In fact, this is precisely the way for a superpower to cease being a superpower.
A strong America capable of projecting force quickly and with devastating effect to important regions of the world would make it less likely that challengers to regional stability will attempt to alter the status quo in their favor. It might even deter them from undertaking expensive efforts to arm themselves for such a challenge. An America whose willingness to project force is in doubt, on the other hand, can only encourage such challenges. In Europe, in Asia and in the Middle East, the message we should be sending to potential foes is: "Don't even think about it." That kind of deterrence offers the best recipe for lasting peace, and it is much cheaper than fighting the wars that would follow should we fail to build such a deterrent capacity.
This ability to project force overseas, however, will increasingly be jeopardized over the coming years as smaller powers acquire weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to launch them at American forces, at our allies and at the American homeland. The sine qua non for a strategy of American global pre-eminence, therefore, is a missile defense system that can protect all three of these. Only a well-protected America will be capable of deterring--and when necessary moving against--"rogue" regimes when they rise to challenge regional stability. Only a United States reasonably well shielded from the blackmail of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons will be able to shape the international environment to suit its interests and its principles.
With the necessary military strength, strong and well-led alliances, and adequate missile defense, the United States can set about making trouble for hostile and potentially hostile nations, rather than waiting for them to make trouble for us. Just as the most successful strategy in the Cold War combined containment of the Soviet Union with an effort to undermine the moral legitimacy of the regime in Moscow, so in the post-Cold War era a principal aim of American foreign policy should be to bring about a change of regime in hostile nations--in Baghdad and Belgrade, in Pyongyang and Beijing, and wherever tyrannical governments acquire the military power to threaten their neighbors, our allies and the United States itself.
Regime Change
THE IDEA, common to many foreign policy minimalists and commerce-oriented liberals alike, that the United States can "do business" with any regime, no matter how odious and hostile to our basic principles, is both strategically unsound and ahistorical. The United States has in the past worked with right-wing dictatorships as a bulwark against communist aggression or against radical Muslim fundamentalism. It has at times formed tactical alliances with the most brutal regimes--with Stalin's Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, and with Mao's China against the Soviet Union. But these should properly be viewed as tactical deviations from a broad strategy of promoting liberal democratic governance throughout the world, the result of circumstances in which our security was immediately threatened.
Relationships with tyrannical regimes, moreover, are inherently difficult to sustain. The problem is not merely that such relationships become distasteful to Americans. More important, in today's environment American interests and those of tyrannical regimes inevitably clash. For the force of American ideals and the influence of the international economic system, both of which are upheld by American power and influence, tend to corrode the pillars on which authoritarian and totalitarian regimes rest
To bolster their legitimacy, regimes such as those in Beijing and Baghdad therefore resort frequently to provocation, either with arms build-ups designed to intimidate both the United States and its allies, as in the cases of China and North Korea, or by regional conquest, as in the cases of Iraq and Serbia. With no means of acquiring legitimacy for their domestic policies, they, like the Soviet rulers described by George Kennan, seek the nationalist legitimacy that comes from standing up to an external enemy. Hence, the Chinese government knows there can be no real "strategic partnership" with the United States. The North Korean government knows there can be no true "normalization" with South Korea and the West. Saddam Hussein knows he cannot simply give up the struggle and try to live peaceably with his neighbors and with his own people. Slobodan Milosevic knows that he cannot truly integrate himself into the European community. The price of such accommodations would be most regimes' hold on power.
When it comes to dealing with such regimes, then, the United States will not succeed in persuading them to play by the existing, which is to say American, rules of the game. We cannot expect to limit their acquisition or sales of dangerous weapons by relying on their voluntary adherence to international non-proliferation agreements. We cannot hope to stem their aggression by appealing to their consciences and asking them to accept the "norms" of the civilized world. For those "norms" serve as obstacles to their ambitions and even threats to their existence. They have, and will continue to have, a clear and immutable interest in flouting them.
Here we would do well to cast another glance backward, for this is hardly the first time we have confronted the question of how to manage relations with dictatorial adversaries. During the 1970s, the view of U.S.-Soviet relations promulgated by much of the American foreign policy establishment was that the key to peace and stability lay in an effort to reach mutual understanding with Moscow. The way to deal with the threat of apocalypse posed by the Soviet and American nuclear arsenals was through mutual arms control. The way to cope with Soviet adventurism abroad was to bind Moscow's leaders into a "web of interdependence" and thereby compel them to recognize the advantages of responsible international behavior.
These measures proved futile, as Soviet leaders could not fulfill their side of the proposed bargain without undermining their rule at home. The source of confrontation between the two sides was not mutual misunderstanding, a lack of interdependence, or the military arsenals amassed by both sides. It was the nature of the Soviet regime. When that regime came to an end, so did the arms race, so did Russian aggression beyond its borders, and so did the Cold War. This lesson can be applied to the post-Cold War era. The most effective form of non-proliferation when it comes to regimes such as those in North Korea and Iraq is not continuing efforts to bribe them into adhering to international arms control agreements, but efforts aimed at the demise of the regimes themselves.
True, the United States cannot simply wish hostile regimes out of existence. An American strategy that included regime change as a central component would neither promise nor expect rapid transformations in every rogue state or threatening power. The United States would not dispatch troops to topple every regime we found odious. But such a strategy would depart from recent American policy in fundamental ways. Instead of ending the Gulf War in 1991 after the liberation of Kuwait, an American strategy built around the principle of regime change would have sent U.S. forces on to Baghdad to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and it would have kept U.S. troops in Iraq long enough to ensure that a friendlier regime took root. Such a strategy would not only have employed ground forces in Kosovo last year but would have sent sufficient NATO forces to Serbia to topple the Milosevic regime. Those who believe such efforts would have been impossible to implement, or who caution of the difficulties of occupying and reform ing such countries, or who insist that the removal of one man provides no solution to a problem, may wish to reflect on the American experiences in Germany and Japan--or even the Dominican Republic and Panama. In any case, if the United States is prepared to summon the forces necessary to carry out a Desert Storm, and to take the risks associated with expelling the world's fourth-largest army from Kuwait, it is absurd, and in the event self-defeating, not to complete the job.
Not all regime change can or need be accomplished by military intervention. Tactics for pursuing a strategy of regime change should vary according to circumstances. In some cases, the best policy might be support for rebel groups, along the lines of the Reagan Doctrine as it was applied in Nicaragua and elsewhere. In some cases, it might mean support for dissidents by either overt or covert means, and/or economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation. These tactics may or may not succeed immediately and would have to be adjusted as circumstances changed. But the purpose of American foreign policy ought to be clear. When it comes to dealing with tyrannical regimes, especially those with the power to do us or our allies harm, the United States should seek not coexistence but transformation.
To many, the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. In fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades. After we have already seen dictatorships toppled by democratic forces in such unlikely places as the Philippines, Indonesia, Chile, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Taiwan and South Korea, how utopian is it to imagine a change of regime in a place like Iraq? How utopian is it to work for the fall of the Communist Party oligarchy in China after a far more powerful and, arguably, more stable such oligarchy fell in the Soviet Union? With democratic change sweeping the world at an unprecedented rate over these past thirty years, is it "realistic" to insist that no further victories can be won?
If anything, we ought to be fairly optimistic that such change can be hastened by the right blend of American policies. The Chinese regime, for example, shows many signs of instability. The inherent contradiction between its dictatorial rule and its desire for economic growth so preoccupies the Beijing government that it feels compelled to crack down even on non-political sects like the Falun Gong. The United States and the West can either make it easier or more difficult for the PRC to resolve these contradictions. Our policy in this instance ought to be the latter, so that we can hasten the day when the conflicting currents of Chinese society prove beyond the capacity of its dictatorial government to manage.
But a strategy aimed at preserving American pre-eminence cannot and should not be based on any individual threat. We need not go searching for an enemy to justify the requirement for a strong military and a strong moral component in our foreign policy. Even if the threat from China were to disappear tomorrow, that would not relieve us of the need for a strong and active role in the world. Nor would it absolve us of the responsibilities that fate has placed on our shoulders. Given the dangers we know, and given the certainty that unknown perils await us over the horizon, there can be no respite from this burden.
IT IS FAIR to ask how the rest of the world will respond to a prolonged period of American hegemony. Those regimes that find an American-led world order inhospitable to their existence will seek to cut away at American power, will form tactical alliances with other dictatorships and rogue states for the common purpose of unsettling such an order, and will look for ways to divide the United States from its allies. China's proliferation of weapons and selling of weapons technologies to Iran, its provision of financial support to Milosevic, its attempt to find common ground with Russia against American "hegemonism"--all represent opportunistic attempts to undercut American dominance. Russia can similarly be expected to search for opportunities to weaken U.S. political, diplomatic and military preponderance in the world. Even an ally such as France may be prepared to lend itself to these efforts, viewing a unified Europe as a check on American power and using the UN Security Council as an arena for forging diplo matic roadblocks, along with China and Russia, against effective U.S.-led international action, whether in the Balkans or in the Persian Gulf.
All this is to be expected as part of the price for American global pre-eminence. It does not, however, add up to a convincing argument against preserving that pre-eminence. The main issue of contention between the United States and most of those who express opposition to its hegemony is not American "arrogance." It is the inescapable reality of American power in its many forms. Those who suggest that these international resentments could somehow be eliminated by a more restrained American foreign policy are engaging in pleasant delusions. Even a United States that never again intervened in a place like Kosovo or never expressed disapproval of China's human rights practices would still find itself the target of jealousy, resentment and in some cases even fear. A more polite but pre-eminently powerful United States would still stand in the way of Chinese ambitions in East Asia, would still exist as a daily reminder of Russia's vasdy diminished standing in the world, and would still grate on French insecuritie s. Unless the United States were prepared to shed its real power and influence, allowing other nations genuinely to achieve a position of relative parity on the world stage, would-be challengers of the international order--as well as those merely offended by the disparity of power--would still have much to resent.
But neither should Americans fear that any effective grouping of nations is likely to emerge to challenge American power. Much of the current international attack on American "hegemonism" is posturing. Allies such as the French may cavil about American "hyperpower", but they recognize their dependence on the United States as the guarantor of an international order that greatly benefits France. (Indeed, it is precisely this dependence that breeds French resentment.) As for Russia and China, the prospect of effective joint action between those two nations against the United States is slight. Their long history of mutual mistrust is compounded by the fact that they do not share common strategic goals--even with regard to the United States. While Chinese leaders consider the United States an enemy, a democratizing Russia has a more ambivalent view. Post-Soviet Russia seeks inclusion in an American-led West, both for economic and ideological reasons.
As a practical matter, as William Wohlforth has argued, it will be very difficult for other nations to gang up on the United States precisely because it is so powerful. But their unwillingness to do so also has something to do with the fact that the United States does not pursue a narrow, selfish definition of its national interest, but generally finds its interests in a benevolent international order. In other words, it is precisely because the United States infuses its foreign policy with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power.
Our Inheritance
AT THE beginning of this century, Theodore Roosevelt worried that Americans had become so "isolated from the struggles of the rest of the world, and so immersed in our material prosperity", that they were becoming "effete." Roosevelt implored Americans to look beyond the immediate needs of their daily lives and embrace as a nation a higher purpose in the world. He aspired to greatness for America, and he believed that a nation could only be great if it accepted its responsibilities to advance civilization and improve the world's condition. "A nation's first duty is within its borders", Roosevelt declared, "but it is not thereby absolved from facing its duties in the world as a whole; and if it refuses to do so, it merely forfeits its right to struggle for a place among the people that shape the destiny of mankind."
In appealing to Americans to support a robust brand of internationalism, Roosevelt possessed the insight to appeal to their sense of nationalism. It was a nationalism, however, of a uniquely American variety--not an insular, blood-and-soil nationalism, but one that derived its meaning and coherence from being rooted in universal principles, first enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. Roosevelt was no utopian; he had contempt for those who believed the international environment could be so transformed as to rid the world of war, put an end to international conflict, and, indeed, put an end to the nation itself. Roosevelt was an idealist of a different sort. He did not attempt to wish away the realities of power, but insisted that the defenders of civilization must exercise their power against civilization's opponents. "Warlike intervention by the civilized powers", he insisted, "would contribute directly to the peace of the world."
Americans should once again embrace a broad understanding of the "national interest", one in keeping with Roosevelt's vision. In recent years, many American foreign policy thinkers, and some politicians, have come to define the "national interest" as consisting of plots of ground, sea lanes, industrial centers, strategic chokepoints and the like. This was a definition of interests foisted upon our foreign policy establishment by "realists at the turn of the century. It is not a definition that would have been welcomed by previous generations of Americans. If someone had asked Alexander Hamilton what the "national interest was, he would have cited prosperity and security, but he would also have invoked the need to lift his young country into a place of honor among the world's great powers. Past American presidents and statesmen would never have imagined that the national interest, a term that can encompass a people's noblest aspirations, would come to possess a meaning as narrow and limited as many American t hinkers give it today.
Honor and greatness used to be understood as worthy goals of American foreign policy. In insisting that the national interest" extended beyond material security and prosperity, and in summoning Americans to seek honor as a nation, Roosevelt echoed the views of the American Founders. And almost fifty years after Roosevelt, Reinhold Niebuhr insisted that America's "sense of responsibility to a world community beyond our own borders is a virtue", and this virtue was in no way diminished by the fact that this sense of responsibility also "derived from the prudent understanding of our own interests." Common wisdom holds that Americans do not care about their nation's role in the world. But it has been a long time since any of their leaders asked them to care, or made an appeal to the elevated patriotism that joins interest and justice, and that has characterized the American republic from its beginning.
The American-led world that emerged after the Cold War is a more just world than any imaginable alternative. A multipolar world, in which power were shared more equally among great powers--including China and Russia--would be far more dangerous, and far less congenial to democracy and to individual liberties. Americans should understand that their support for American pre-eminence is as much a boost for international justice as any people is capable of giving. It is also a boon for American interests, and for what might be called the American spirit. George Kennan wrote more than fifty years ago that the American people should feel acertain gratitude to a Providence, which by providing [them] with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.
The "implacable challenge" facing Americans has, of course, changed. Our fundamental responsibilities have not.
Robert Kagan is senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
William Kristol is editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard. This article is excerpted from their forthcoming book, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (Encounter Books).
COPYRIGHT 2000 The National Affairs, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
A LITTLE OVER twenty years ago, a group of concerned Americans formed the Committee on the Present Danger. The danger they feared, and sought to rally Americans to confront, was the Soviet Union.
It is easy to forget these days how controversial was the suggestion in the middle to late 1970s that the Soviet Union was really a danger, much less one that should be challenged by the United States. This was hardly the dominant view of the American foreign policy establishment. Quite the contrary: prevailing wisdom from the Nixon through the Carter administrations held that the United States should do its utmost to coexist peaceably with the USSR, and that the American people in any case were not capable of mounting a serious challenge to the Soviet system. To engage in an arms race would either bankrupt the United States or lead to Armageddon. To challenge communist ideology at its core, to declare it evil and illegitimate, would be at best quixotic and at worst perilous.
When the members of the Committee on the Present Danger challenged this comfortable consensus, when they criticized detente and arms control, and called for a military build-up and a broad ideological and strategic assault on Soviet communism, their recommendations were generally dismissed as either naive or reckless. It would take a revolution in American foreign policy, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the disintegration of the Soviet empire to prove just how right they were.
Does this Cold War tale have any relevance today as Americans grapple with the uncertainties of the post-Cold War era? The Soviet Union has long since crumbled. No global strategic challenger has emerged to take its place, none appears visible on the horizon, and the international scene at present seems fairly benign to most observers. Many of our strategists tell us that we will not face another major threat for twenty years or more, and that we may as a consequence enjoy a "strategic pause." According to opinion polls, the American public is today less interested in foreign policy than at any time since before World War II. Intermittent fears of terrorist attack, worries about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, concerns about the possible outbreak of war in the Taiwan Strait or in the Balkans--all attract attention, but only fleetingly. The United States, both at the level of elite opinion and popular sentiment, appears to have become the Alfred E. Newman of superpowers--its national motto, "What, me worry?"
But there is today a "present danger." It has no name. It is not to be found in any single strategic adversary. It does not fit neatly under the heading of "international terrorism" or "rogue states" or "ethnic hatred." In fact, the ubiquitous post-Cold War question--where is the threat?--is misconceived. Rather, the present danger is that the United States, the world's dominant power on whom the maintenance of international peace and the support of liberal democratic principles depend, will shrink its responsibilities and--in a fit of absentmindedness, or parsimony, or indifference--allow the international order that it created and sustains to collapse. Our present danger is one of declining strength, flagging will and confusion about our role in the world. It is a danger, to be sure, of our own devising. Yet, if neglected, it is likely to yield very real external dangers, nearly as threatening in their own way as the Soviet Union was a quarter century ago.
IN FACT, beneath the surface calm, there has already been an erosion of the mostly stable, peaceful and democratic international order that emerged at the end of the Cold War. Americans and their political leaders have spent the years since 1991 lavishing the gifts of an illusory "peace dividend" upon themselves, and frittering away the opportunity to strengthen and extend an international order uniquely favorable to the United States. The task for America at the start of the 1990s ought to have been obvious. It was to guard this extraordinary international system from any threats that might challenge it. It was to prolong the new period of relative stability and democratic progress as far into the future as possible. That meant, above all, preserving and reinforcing America 's benevolent global hegemony, which undergirded what President George Bush rightly called a "new world order." The goal of American foreign policy should have been to turn Charles Krauthammer's "unipolar moment" into a unipolar era.
Throughout the 1990s, the United States has tended toward a course of gradual moral and strategic disarmament. Challenged by anti-American dictatorships in Baghdad and Belgrade, the Clinton administration responded by combining empty threats and indecisive military operations with diplomatic accommodation. Rather than press for changes of regime in Pyongyang and Beijing, the White House sought to purchase better behavior through bribes and "engagement." Rather than face squarely our world responsibilities, American political leaders chose drift and evasion.
In the meantime, the United States allowed its military strength to deteriorate to the point where its ability to defend its interests and deter future challenges is now in doubt. From 1989 to 1999, the defense budget and the size of the armed forces were cut by a third; the share of America's GDP devoted to defense spending was halved, from nearly 6 to around 3 percent; and the amount of money spent on weapons procurement and research and development declined by about 50 percent. By the end of the decade, the U.S. military was inadequately equipped and stretched to the point of exhaustion. And while defense experts spent the 1990s debating whether it was more important to maintain current readiness or to sacrifice present capabilities in order to prepare for future challenges, under the strain of excessive budget cuts the United States did neither.
Yet ten years from now, and perhaps a good deal sooner, we likely will be living in a world in which Iraq, Iran, North Korea and China all possess the ability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons. Within the next decade we may have to decide whether to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack. We could face another attempt by Saddam Hussein to seize Kuwait's oil fields. An authoritarian regime in Russia could move to reclaim some of what it lost in 1991. While none of this is to argue that the world must become a vastly more dangerous place, the point is that the world can grow perilous with astonishing speed. Should it do so once more, it would be terrible to have to look back on the current era as a great though fleeting opportunity that was carelessly wasted. Everything depends on what we do now.
Cold War Distortions
CONTRARY to prevailing wisdom, the missed opportunities of the 1990s cannot be made up for merely by tinkering around the edges of America's current foreign and defense policies. The middle path many of our political leaders would prefer, with token increases in the defense budget and a "humble" view of America's role in the world, will not suffice. What is needed today is not better management of the status quo, but a fundamental change in the way our leaders and the public think about America's role in the world.
Serious thinking about that role should begin by recalling those tenets that guided American policy through the more successful phases of the Cold War. Many writers treat America's Cold War strategy as an aberration in the history of American foreign policy. Jeane Kirkpatrick expressed the common view of both liberal and conservative foreign policy thinkers when she wrote in these pages that, while the United States had "performed heroically in a time when heroism was required", the day had passed when Americans ought to bear such "unusual burdens." With a return to "normal" times, the United States could "again become a normal nation." In the absence of a rival on the scale of the Soviet Union, the United States should conduct itself like any other great power on the international scene, looking to secure only its immediate, tangible interests, and abjuring the broader responsibilities it had once assumed as leader of the Free World.
What is striking about this point of view is how at odds it is with the assumptions embraced by the leaders who established the guiding principles of American foreign policy at the end of World War II. We often forget that the plans for world order devised by American policymakers in the early 1940s were not aimed at containing the Soviet Union, which many of them still viewed as a potential partner. Rather, those policymakers were looking backward to the circumstances that had led to the catastrophe of global war. Their purpose was to construct a more stable international order than the one that had imploded in 1939: an economic system that furthered the aim of international stability by promoting growth and free trade; and a framework for international security that, although it placed some faith in the ability of the great powers to work together, rested ultimately on the fact that American power had become the keystone in the arch of world order.
American leaders in the early to mid-1940s rejected the notion that the United States could return to being a "normal" power after World War II. On the contrary, they believed that the "return to normalcy" that President Harding had endorsed in 1920 was the fatal error that led to the irresponsible isolationism of the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt said in 1941, "We will not accept a world, like the postwar world of the 1920s, in which the seeds of Hitlerism can again be planted and allowed to grow." Men like James Forrestal and Dean Acheson believed that the United States had supplanted Great Britain as the world's leader and that, as Forrestal put it in 1941, "America must be the dominant power of the twentieth century."
Henry Luce spoke for most influential Americans inside and outside the Roosevelt administration when he insisted that it had fallen to the United States not only to win the war against Germany and Japan, but to create both "a vital international economy" and "an international moral order" that would together spread American political and economic principles--and in the process avoid the catastrophe of a third world war. Such thinking was reflected in Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter and, more concretely, in the creation of the international financial system at Bretton Woods in 1944 and of the United Nations a year later.
Thus, before American leaders came to view the Soviet Union as the great challenge to American security and American principles, they had arrived at the conclusion that it would be necessary for the United States (together, they hoped, with the other great powers) to deter aggression globally, whoever the aggressor might be. In fact, during the war years they were at least as worried about the possible re-emergence of Germany and Japan as about the Soviets. John Lewis Gaddis has summarized American thinking in the years between 1941 and 1946:
The American President and his key advisers were determined to secure the United States against whatever dangers might confront it after victory, but they lacked a clear sense of what those might be or where they might arise. Their thinking about postwar security was, as a consequence, more general than specific.
Few influential government officials, moreover, were under the illusion that "collective security" and the United Nations could be counted on to keep the peace. In 1945 Harry Truman declared that the United States had become "one of the most powerful forces for good on earth", and the task now was to "keep it so" and to "lead the world to peace and prosperity." The United States had "achieved a world leadership which does not depend solely upon our military and naval might", Truman asserted. But it was his intention, despite demobilization to ensure that the United States would remain "the greatest naval power on earth" and would maintain "one of the most powerful air forces in the world." Americans, Truman declared, would use "our military strength solely to preserve the peace of the world. For we now know that this is the only sure way to make our own freedom secure."
The unwillingness to sustain the level of military spending and preparedness required to fulfill this expansive vision was a failure of American foreign policy in the immediate aftermath of the war. It took the Iron Curtain and the outbreak of war in Korea to fully awaken Americans to the need for an assertive and forward-leaning foreign policy. But while the United States promptly rose to meet those challenges, a certain intellectual clarity was lost in the transition from the immediate postwar years to the beginning of the Cold War era. The original postwar goal of promoting and defending a decent world order became conflated with the goal of meeting the challenge of Soviet power. The policies that the United States should have pursued even in the absence of a Soviet challenge--seeking a stable and prosperous international economic order; playing a large role in Europe, Asia and the Middle East; upholding rules of international behavior that benefited Americans; promoting democratic reform where possible a nd advancing American principles abroad--all these became associated with the strategy of containing the Soviet Union. In fact, America was pursuing two goals at once during the Cold War: first, the promotion of a world order conducive to American interests and principles; and second, a defense against the immediate obstacle to achieving that order. Nevertheless, when the Cold War ended, many Americans recalled only the latter purpose.
The Shaping Hand
BUT THE COLLAPSE of the Soviet empire has not altered the fundamental purposes of American foreign policy. Just as sensible Americans after World War II did not imagine that the United States should retreat from global involvement and await the rise of the next equivalent to Nazi Germany, so American statesmen today ought to recognize that their charge is not to await the arrival of the next great threat, but rather to shape the international environment to prevent such a threat from arising in the first place. To put it another way: the overarching goal of American foreign policy--to preserve and extend an international order that is in accord with both our material interests and our principles--endures.
Certainly, the dramatic shift in international strategic circumstances occasioned by the Soviet collapse requires a shift in the manner in which this goal is pursued. But it is not a shift to "normalcy." In the post-Cold War era, the maintenance of a decent and hospitable international order requires continued American leadership in resisting, and where possible undermining, rising dictators and hostile ideologies; in supporting American interests and liberal democratic principles; and in providing assistance to those struggling against the more extreme manifestations of human evil. Americans must shape this order, for if we refrain from doing so, we can be sure that others will shape it in ways that reflect neither our interests nor our values.
We can hardly expect it to be otherwise. Today's international system is built not around a balance of power but around American hegemony. The international financial institutions were fashioned by Americans and serve American interests. The international security structures are chiefly a collection of American-led alliances. What Americans like to call international "norms" are really reflections of American and West European principles. Since today's relatively benevolent international circumstances are the product of our hegemonic influence, any lessening of that influence will allow others to play a larger part in shaping the world to suit their needs. States such as China and Russia, if given the chance, would configure the international system quite differently. Their idea of international norms, needless to say, would also be quite different. American hegemony, then, must be actively maintained, just as it was actively obtained.
This does not mean that the United States must root out evil wherever and whenever it rears its head. Nor does it suggest that the United States must embark on a crusade against every dictatorship. No doctrine of foreign policy can do away with the need for judgment and prudence, for weighing competing moral considerations. No foreign policy doctrine can provide precise and unvarying answers to the question of where, when and how the United States ought to intervene abroad. It is a good deal easier to say that the United States must have criteria for choosing when to intervene than it is to formulate those criteria. Henry Kissinger writes in Diplomacy that what is most needed in American foreign policy are "criteria for selectivity." But he does not venture to suggest exactly what those criteria might be. If one admits that closely linked matters of prestige, principle and morality play a role in shaping foreign policy, then rigid criteria for intervention quickly prove illusory. As Kissinger well knows, the complicated workings of foreign policy and the exceptional position of the United States should guard us from believing that the national interest can be measured in a quasi-scientific fashion, or that areas of "vital" national interest can be located, and other areas excluded, by purely geopolitical calculations. Determining what is in America's national interest is an art, not a science. It requires not only the measurement of power but also an appreciation of beliefs and passions, which cannot be quantified. That is why we choose statesmen, not mathematicians, to conduct foreign policy. That is why we will occasionally have to intervene abroad even when we cannot prove that a narrowly construed "vital interest" of the United States is at stake.
It is worth pointing out, though, that a foreign policy premised on American hegemony, and on the blending of principle with material interest, may in fact mean fewer overseas interventions than under the "vital interest" standard, not more. Had the Bush administration, for example, realized early on that there was no clear distinction between American moral concerns in Bosnia and America's national interest there, the United States might have been able to nip the Balkan crisis in the bud. With the enormous credibility earned in the Gulf War, President Bush might have been able to put a stop to Milosevic's ambitions with a well-timed threat of punishing military action. But because the Bush team placed Bosnia outside the sphere of "vital" American interests, the resulting crisis eventually required the deployment of thousands of troops on the ground.
The same could be said of American interventions in Panama and the Gulf. A passive world-view encouraged American leaders to ignore troubling developments that eventually metastasized into full-blown threats to American security. Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein were given reason to believe that the United States did not consider its interests threatened by their behavior, only to discover that they had been misled. In each case, a broader and more forward-leaning conception of the national interest might have made the later interventions unnecessary.
The question, then, is not whether the United States should intervene everywhere or nowhere. The decision Americans need to make is whether the United States should generally lean forward, as it were, or whether it should adopt a posture of relative passivity. A strategy aimed at preserving American hegemony should embrace the former stance, being more rather than less inclined to weigh in when crises erupt, and preferably before they erupt. This is the standard of a global superpower that intends to shape the international environment to its own advantage. By contrast, the vital interest standard is that of a "normal" power that awaits a dramatic challenge before it rouses itself into action.
Arms and Alliances
IS THE TASK OF maintaining American primacy and making a consistent effort to shape the international environment beyond the capacity of Americans? Not if American leaders have the understanding and the political will to do what is necessary. Moreover, what is required is not particularly forbidding. For much of the task ahead consists of building on already existing strengths.
The United States, for example, already wields the strongest military force in the world. It has demonstrated its prowess in war on several occasions since the end of the Cold War--in Panama in 1989, in the Persian Gulf in 1991, and most recently in the air war over Kosovo. Those victories owed their success to a force built in the Reagan years. This is a legacy off which the United States has lived for over a decade, and it cannot last. Today the United States spends too little on its military capabilities, both in terms of present readiness and investing in future weapons technologies. The gap between America's strategic ends and the means available to accomplish those ends is growing, a fact that becomes more evident each time the United States deploys forces abroad.
To repair these deficiencies and to create a force that can shape the international environment today, tomorrow and twenty years from now will probably require spending some $60-100 billion per year above current defense budgets. This price tag may seem daunting, but in historical terms it will represent only a modest commitment of America's wealth to defense. And in a time of large budget surpluses, spending a tiny fraction on defense ought to be politically feasible. For the United States to have the military capability to shape the international environment now and for the foreseeable future, it would be necessary to spend about 3.5 percent of GDP on defense, still low by the standards of the past fifty years, and far lower than most great powers have spent on their militaries throughout history. Is the aim of maintaining American primacy not worth a hike in defense spending from 3 to 3.5 percent of GDP?
The United States also inherited from the Cold War a legacy of strong alliances in Europe and Asia, and with Israel in the Middle East. Those alliances are a bulwark of American power and, more important still, they constitute the heart of the liberal democratic civilization that the United States seeks to preserve and extend. Critics of a strategy of American pre-eminence sometimes claim that it is a call for unilateralism. It is not. The notion that the United States could somehow "go it alone" and maintain its pre-eminence without its allies is strategically misguided. It is also morally bankrupt. What would "American leadership" mean in the absence of its democratic allies? What kind of nation would the United States be if it allowed Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Israel, Poland and other democratic nations to fend for themselves against the myriad challenges they will face?
In fact, a strategy aimed at preserving American pre-eminence would require an even greater U.S. commitment to its allies. The United States would not be merely an "offshore balancer", a savior of last resort, as many recommend. It would not be a "reluctant sheriff", rousing itself to action only when the townsfolk turn to it in desperation. American pre-eminence cannot be maintained from a distance, by means of some post-Cold War version of the Nixon Doctrine, whereby the United States hangs back and keeps its powder dry. The United States would instead conceive of itself as at once a European power, an Asian power, a Middle Eastern power and, of course, a Western Hemispheric power. It would act as if threats to the interests of our allies constituted threats to us. It would act as if instability in important regions of the world, and the flouting of civilized rules of conduct in those regions, were threats that affected us with almost the same immediacy as if they were occurring on our doorstep. To act oth erwise would make the United States a most unreliable partner in world affairs, a perception that would erode both American pre-eminence and the international order. Eventually, the crises would appear at our doorstep.
This is what it means to be a global superpower with global responsibilities. The costs of assuming these responsibilities are more than made up by the benefits to American long-term interests. It is short-sighted to imagine that a policy of "keeping our powder dry" is either safer or less expensive than a policy that aims to preclude and deter the emergence of new threats, that has the United States arriving quickly at the scene of potential trouble, that addresses threats to the national interest before they have developed into full-blown crises. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison expressed a common view last year when she wrote that, "Superpowers preserve their superpower status by not engaging in regional conflicts." In fact, this is precisely the way for a superpower to cease being a superpower.
A strong America capable of projecting force quickly and with devastating effect to important regions of the world would make it less likely that challengers to regional stability will attempt to alter the status quo in their favor. It might even deter them from undertaking expensive efforts to arm themselves for such a challenge. An America whose willingness to project force is in doubt, on the other hand, can only encourage such challenges. In Europe, in Asia and in the Middle East, the message we should be sending to potential foes is: "Don't even think about it." That kind of deterrence offers the best recipe for lasting peace, and it is much cheaper than fighting the wars that would follow should we fail to build such a deterrent capacity.
This ability to project force overseas, however, will increasingly be jeopardized over the coming years as smaller powers acquire weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to launch them at American forces, at our allies and at the American homeland. The sine qua non for a strategy of American global pre-eminence, therefore, is a missile defense system that can protect all three of these. Only a well-protected America will be capable of deterring--and when necessary moving against--"rogue" regimes when they rise to challenge regional stability. Only a United States reasonably well shielded from the blackmail of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons will be able to shape the international environment to suit its interests and its principles.
With the necessary military strength, strong and well-led alliances, and adequate missile defense, the United States can set about making trouble for hostile and potentially hostile nations, rather than waiting for them to make trouble for us. Just as the most successful strategy in the Cold War combined containment of the Soviet Union with an effort to undermine the moral legitimacy of the regime in Moscow, so in the post-Cold War era a principal aim of American foreign policy should be to bring about a change of regime in hostile nations--in Baghdad and Belgrade, in Pyongyang and Beijing, and wherever tyrannical governments acquire the military power to threaten their neighbors, our allies and the United States itself.
Regime Change
THE IDEA, common to many foreign policy minimalists and commerce-oriented liberals alike, that the United States can "do business" with any regime, no matter how odious and hostile to our basic principles, is both strategically unsound and ahistorical. The United States has in the past worked with right-wing dictatorships as a bulwark against communist aggression or against radical Muslim fundamentalism. It has at times formed tactical alliances with the most brutal regimes--with Stalin's Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, and with Mao's China against the Soviet Union. But these should properly be viewed as tactical deviations from a broad strategy of promoting liberal democratic governance throughout the world, the result of circumstances in which our security was immediately threatened.
Relationships with tyrannical regimes, moreover, are inherently difficult to sustain. The problem is not merely that such relationships become distasteful to Americans. More important, in today's environment American interests and those of tyrannical regimes inevitably clash. For the force of American ideals and the influence of the international economic system, both of which are upheld by American power and influence, tend to corrode the pillars on which authoritarian and totalitarian regimes rest
To bolster their legitimacy, regimes such as those in Beijing and Baghdad therefore resort frequently to provocation, either with arms build-ups designed to intimidate both the United States and its allies, as in the cases of China and North Korea, or by regional conquest, as in the cases of Iraq and Serbia. With no means of acquiring legitimacy for their domestic policies, they, like the Soviet rulers described by George Kennan, seek the nationalist legitimacy that comes from standing up to an external enemy. Hence, the Chinese government knows there can be no real "strategic partnership" with the United States. The North Korean government knows there can be no true "normalization" with South Korea and the West. Saddam Hussein knows he cannot simply give up the struggle and try to live peaceably with his neighbors and with his own people. Slobodan Milosevic knows that he cannot truly integrate himself into the European community. The price of such accommodations would be most regimes' hold on power.
When it comes to dealing with such regimes, then, the United States will not succeed in persuading them to play by the existing, which is to say American, rules of the game. We cannot expect to limit their acquisition or sales of dangerous weapons by relying on their voluntary adherence to international non-proliferation agreements. We cannot hope to stem their aggression by appealing to their consciences and asking them to accept the "norms" of the civilized world. For those "norms" serve as obstacles to their ambitions and even threats to their existence. They have, and will continue to have, a clear and immutable interest in flouting them.
Here we would do well to cast another glance backward, for this is hardly the first time we have confronted the question of how to manage relations with dictatorial adversaries. During the 1970s, the view of U.S.-Soviet relations promulgated by much of the American foreign policy establishment was that the key to peace and stability lay in an effort to reach mutual understanding with Moscow. The way to deal with the threat of apocalypse posed by the Soviet and American nuclear arsenals was through mutual arms control. The way to cope with Soviet adventurism abroad was to bind Moscow's leaders into a "web of interdependence" and thereby compel them to recognize the advantages of responsible international behavior.
These measures proved futile, as Soviet leaders could not fulfill their side of the proposed bargain without undermining their rule at home. The source of confrontation between the two sides was not mutual misunderstanding, a lack of interdependence, or the military arsenals amassed by both sides. It was the nature of the Soviet regime. When that regime came to an end, so did the arms race, so did Russian aggression beyond its borders, and so did the Cold War. This lesson can be applied to the post-Cold War era. The most effective form of non-proliferation when it comes to regimes such as those in North Korea and Iraq is not continuing efforts to bribe them into adhering to international arms control agreements, but efforts aimed at the demise of the regimes themselves.
True, the United States cannot simply wish hostile regimes out of existence. An American strategy that included regime change as a central component would neither promise nor expect rapid transformations in every rogue state or threatening power. The United States would not dispatch troops to topple every regime we found odious. But such a strategy would depart from recent American policy in fundamental ways. Instead of ending the Gulf War in 1991 after the liberation of Kuwait, an American strategy built around the principle of regime change would have sent U.S. forces on to Baghdad to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and it would have kept U.S. troops in Iraq long enough to ensure that a friendlier regime took root. Such a strategy would not only have employed ground forces in Kosovo last year but would have sent sufficient NATO forces to Serbia to topple the Milosevic regime. Those who believe such efforts would have been impossible to implement, or who caution of the difficulties of occupying and reform ing such countries, or who insist that the removal of one man provides no solution to a problem, may wish to reflect on the American experiences in Germany and Japan--or even the Dominican Republic and Panama. In any case, if the United States is prepared to summon the forces necessary to carry out a Desert Storm, and to take the risks associated with expelling the world's fourth-largest army from Kuwait, it is absurd, and in the event self-defeating, not to complete the job.
Not all regime change can or need be accomplished by military intervention. Tactics for pursuing a strategy of regime change should vary according to circumstances. In some cases, the best policy might be support for rebel groups, along the lines of the Reagan Doctrine as it was applied in Nicaragua and elsewhere. In some cases, it might mean support for dissidents by either overt or covert means, and/or economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation. These tactics may or may not succeed immediately and would have to be adjusted as circumstances changed. But the purpose of American foreign policy ought to be clear. When it comes to dealing with tyrannical regimes, especially those with the power to do us or our allies harm, the United States should seek not coexistence but transformation.
To many, the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. In fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades. After we have already seen dictatorships toppled by democratic forces in such unlikely places as the Philippines, Indonesia, Chile, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Taiwan and South Korea, how utopian is it to imagine a change of regime in a place like Iraq? How utopian is it to work for the fall of the Communist Party oligarchy in China after a far more powerful and, arguably, more stable such oligarchy fell in the Soviet Union? With democratic change sweeping the world at an unprecedented rate over these past thirty years, is it "realistic" to insist that no further victories can be won?
If anything, we ought to be fairly optimistic that such change can be hastened by the right blend of American policies. The Chinese regime, for example, shows many signs of instability. The inherent contradiction between its dictatorial rule and its desire for economic growth so preoccupies the Beijing government that it feels compelled to crack down even on non-political sects like the Falun Gong. The United States and the West can either make it easier or more difficult for the PRC to resolve these contradictions. Our policy in this instance ought to be the latter, so that we can hasten the day when the conflicting currents of Chinese society prove beyond the capacity of its dictatorial government to manage.
But a strategy aimed at preserving American pre-eminence cannot and should not be based on any individual threat. We need not go searching for an enemy to justify the requirement for a strong military and a strong moral component in our foreign policy. Even if the threat from China were to disappear tomorrow, that would not relieve us of the need for a strong and active role in the world. Nor would it absolve us of the responsibilities that fate has placed on our shoulders. Given the dangers we know, and given the certainty that unknown perils await us over the horizon, there can be no respite from this burden.
IT IS FAIR to ask how the rest of the world will respond to a prolonged period of American hegemony. Those regimes that find an American-led world order inhospitable to their existence will seek to cut away at American power, will form tactical alliances with other dictatorships and rogue states for the common purpose of unsettling such an order, and will look for ways to divide the United States from its allies. China's proliferation of weapons and selling of weapons technologies to Iran, its provision of financial support to Milosevic, its attempt to find common ground with Russia against American "hegemonism"--all represent opportunistic attempts to undercut American dominance. Russia can similarly be expected to search for opportunities to weaken U.S. political, diplomatic and military preponderance in the world. Even an ally such as France may be prepared to lend itself to these efforts, viewing a unified Europe as a check on American power and using the UN Security Council as an arena for forging diplo matic roadblocks, along with China and Russia, against effective U.S.-led international action, whether in the Balkans or in the Persian Gulf.
All this is to be expected as part of the price for American global pre-eminence. It does not, however, add up to a convincing argument against preserving that pre-eminence. The main issue of contention between the United States and most of those who express opposition to its hegemony is not American "arrogance." It is the inescapable reality of American power in its many forms. Those who suggest that these international resentments could somehow be eliminated by a more restrained American foreign policy are engaging in pleasant delusions. Even a United States that never again intervened in a place like Kosovo or never expressed disapproval of China's human rights practices would still find itself the target of jealousy, resentment and in some cases even fear. A more polite but pre-eminently powerful United States would still stand in the way of Chinese ambitions in East Asia, would still exist as a daily reminder of Russia's vasdy diminished standing in the world, and would still grate on French insecuritie s. Unless the United States were prepared to shed its real power and influence, allowing other nations genuinely to achieve a position of relative parity on the world stage, would-be challengers of the international order--as well as those merely offended by the disparity of power--would still have much to resent.
But neither should Americans fear that any effective grouping of nations is likely to emerge to challenge American power. Much of the current international attack on American "hegemonism" is posturing. Allies such as the French may cavil about American "hyperpower", but they recognize their dependence on the United States as the guarantor of an international order that greatly benefits France. (Indeed, it is precisely this dependence that breeds French resentment.) As for Russia and China, the prospect of effective joint action between those two nations against the United States is slight. Their long history of mutual mistrust is compounded by the fact that they do not share common strategic goals--even with regard to the United States. While Chinese leaders consider the United States an enemy, a democratizing Russia has a more ambivalent view. Post-Soviet Russia seeks inclusion in an American-led West, both for economic and ideological reasons.
As a practical matter, as William Wohlforth has argued, it will be very difficult for other nations to gang up on the United States precisely because it is so powerful. But their unwillingness to do so also has something to do with the fact that the United States does not pursue a narrow, selfish definition of its national interest, but generally finds its interests in a benevolent international order. In other words, it is precisely because the United States infuses its foreign policy with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power.
Our Inheritance
AT THE beginning of this century, Theodore Roosevelt worried that Americans had become so "isolated from the struggles of the rest of the world, and so immersed in our material prosperity", that they were becoming "effete." Roosevelt implored Americans to look beyond the immediate needs of their daily lives and embrace as a nation a higher purpose in the world. He aspired to greatness for America, and he believed that a nation could only be great if it accepted its responsibilities to advance civilization and improve the world's condition. "A nation's first duty is within its borders", Roosevelt declared, "but it is not thereby absolved from facing its duties in the world as a whole; and if it refuses to do so, it merely forfeits its right to struggle for a place among the people that shape the destiny of mankind."
In appealing to Americans to support a robust brand of internationalism, Roosevelt possessed the insight to appeal to their sense of nationalism. It was a nationalism, however, of a uniquely American variety--not an insular, blood-and-soil nationalism, but one that derived its meaning and coherence from being rooted in universal principles, first enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. Roosevelt was no utopian; he had contempt for those who believed the international environment could be so transformed as to rid the world of war, put an end to international conflict, and, indeed, put an end to the nation itself. Roosevelt was an idealist of a different sort. He did not attempt to wish away the realities of power, but insisted that the defenders of civilization must exercise their power against civilization's opponents. "Warlike intervention by the civilized powers", he insisted, "would contribute directly to the peace of the world."
Americans should once again embrace a broad understanding of the "national interest", one in keeping with Roosevelt's vision. In recent years, many American foreign policy thinkers, and some politicians, have come to define the "national interest" as consisting of plots of ground, sea lanes, industrial centers, strategic chokepoints and the like. This was a definition of interests foisted upon our foreign policy establishment by "realists at the turn of the century. It is not a definition that would have been welcomed by previous generations of Americans. If someone had asked Alexander Hamilton what the "national interest was, he would have cited prosperity and security, but he would also have invoked the need to lift his young country into a place of honor among the world's great powers. Past American presidents and statesmen would never have imagined that the national interest, a term that can encompass a people's noblest aspirations, would come to possess a meaning as narrow and limited as many American t hinkers give it today.
Honor and greatness used to be understood as worthy goals of American foreign policy. In insisting that the national interest" extended beyond material security and prosperity, and in summoning Americans to seek honor as a nation, Roosevelt echoed the views of the American Founders. And almost fifty years after Roosevelt, Reinhold Niebuhr insisted that America's "sense of responsibility to a world community beyond our own borders is a virtue", and this virtue was in no way diminished by the fact that this sense of responsibility also "derived from the prudent understanding of our own interests." Common wisdom holds that Americans do not care about their nation's role in the world. But it has been a long time since any of their leaders asked them to care, or made an appeal to the elevated patriotism that joins interest and justice, and that has characterized the American republic from its beginning.
The American-led world that emerged after the Cold War is a more just world than any imaginable alternative. A multipolar world, in which power were shared more equally among great powers--including China and Russia--would be far more dangerous, and far less congenial to democracy and to individual liberties. Americans should understand that their support for American pre-eminence is as much a boost for international justice as any people is capable of giving. It is also a boon for American interests, and for what might be called the American spirit. George Kennan wrote more than fifty years ago that the American people should feel acertain gratitude to a Providence, which by providing [them] with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.
The "implacable challenge" facing Americans has, of course, changed. Our fundamental responsibilities have not.
Robert Kagan is senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
William Kristol is editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard. This article is excerpted from their forthcoming book, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (Encounter Books).
COPYRIGHT 2000 The National Affairs, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
.jpg)
