When
the Bush administration issued its National Security Strategy
last September, it revealed a great deal about how the
world - and the administration - had changed over the
past year. George W. Bush entered office committed to
a realist foreign policy that would focus on great powers
like China and Russia, eschewing nation-building in failed
states of the less developed world. China was "a
strategic competitor", not the "strategic partner"
of Clinton's foreign policy, and the US would take a tougher
stance with Russia. During his first eight months, Bush
replaced Clinton's "assertive multilateralism"
with a unilateralism that worried friend and foe alike,
and which I criticised in my recent book.
Now
the new strategy declares that we are menaced less by
fleets and armies than by catastrophic technologies falling
into the hands of the embittered few. Instead of strategic
rivalry, "today, the world's great powers find ourselves
on the same side - united by common dangers of terrorist
violence and chaos". Not only was President Jiang
Zemin welcomed to Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, but
the strategy welcomes the emergence of a strong, peaceful,
and prosperous China. And the US will increase its development
assistance and its efforts to combat Aids because weak
states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to
our national interest as strong states. Moreover, these
policies will be "guided by the conviction that no
nation can build a safer, better world alone". How
the world turns in a year!
The
new threat
Of
course, much of the traditional agenda of world politics
carries on below the rhetorical surface of strategy documents.
And as I know from my experience in two prior administrations,
such documents are not always an accurate prediction of
policy. In addition, some of the rhetoric has attracted
widespread criticism. The document's trumpeting of American
primacy violated Teddy Roosevelt's advice about walking
softly when you carry a big stick. America will remain
number one, but there was no need to rub others' noses
in it. The neo-conservative promises to promote democracy
and freedom struck some realists as dangerously unbounded.
The statements about co-operation and coalitions were
not followed by equal discussion of institutions. And
the much criticised assertion of a right of pre-emption
could turn out to be routine self-defence or a dangerous
precedent depending on how it is implemented.
The
critics notwithstanding, the Bush administration is on
to something important. The distinguished historian John
Lewis Gaddis has compared the new strategy to the seminal
days that redefined American foreign policy in the 1940s.
While that comparison may be exaggerated, the new strategy
responds to deep trends in world politics that were illuminated
by the events of September 11, 2001. For example, globalisation
is more than just an economic phenomenon, and it had been
shrinking the natural buffers that distance and two oceans
provided to the United States. September 11 dramatised
how dreadful conditions in poor weak countries halfway
round the world can have terrible consequences for the
United States.
The
information revolution and technological change have elevated
the importance of transnational issues, and empowered
non-state actors to play a larger role in world politics.
A few decades ago, instantaneous global communications
were out of the financial reach of all but governments
or large organisations like transnational corporations
or the Catholic Church. At the same time, the US and the
USSR were secretly spending billions of dollars on overhead
space photography. Now commercial one-metre resolution
photos are cheaply available to anyone, and the internet
enabled 1500 NGOs to inexpensively co-ordinate the "battle
of Seattle" that disrupted the World Trade Organization.
Most
worrying are the effects of these deep trends on terrorism.
Many Europeans properly point out that terrorism is nothing
new, and they have successfully coped with it for decades
without significant disruption of their democracies. But
technology has been increasing the lethality and agility
of terrorists over the past decades, and the trend is
likely to continue. In the 20th century, a malevolent
individual like Hitler or Stalin needed the power of a
government to be able to kill millions of people. If 21st
century terrorists get hold of weapons of mass destruction,
that power of destruction will for the first time be available
to deviant groups and individuals. This "privatisation
of war" is not only a major change in world politics,
but the potential impact on our cities could drastically
alter the nature of our civilisation. The new terrorism
is not like the IRA or ETA. This is what the new Bush
strategy gets right.
Implementing
the new strategy
What
the administration has not yet sorted out is how to go
about implementing its new approach. It is deeply divided
between neo-conservative and assertively imperial unilateralists
on the one hand and more multilateral and cautious traditional
realists on the other. The tug of war between them is
visible both in the strategy document, and in the implementation
of policies on terrorism and the Middle East. The administration
has not fully realised that most transnational issues
are inherently multilateral, and that unilateral military
power is only part of the solution. Indeed, if used inappropriately,
it can cause larger problems.
North
Korea and Iraq - two-thirds of Bush's "axis of evil"
- are turning out to be the first big tests of the implementation
of the new strategy. This autumn, North Korea admitted
that it had violated the spirit of the 1994 Agreed Framework
that stopped its reprocessing of plutonium and was seeking
to build a nuclear weapon with enriched uranium. The Bush
administration responded cautiously and in close consultation
with our allies. Deterrence seemed to work, though in
this case it was the capacity of North Korea to deter
American military action through its conventional capacity
to wreak havoc on Seoul in the event of war. The dilemma
remains unresolved.
Iraq
also reveals the tug of war between different strands
of opinion in the administration. Last summer, Vice-President
Cheney and Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld made statements
disparaging the role of the United Nations and warning
that the return of UN inspectors to Iraq would give "false
comfort." Traditional realist Republicans like Brent
Scowcroft and James Baker weighed in publicly in support
of a multilateral approach, and Bush's September 12 speech
to the UN represented a victory for the coalition of Colin
Powell and Tony Blair.
Whether
the multilateral approach will hold if diplomacy bogs
down and hot weather approaches in the Gulf remains to
be seen. But the Iraq case is a dramatic instance of a
much deeper problem for the administration - and for the
United States' understanding of its role as the world's
only superpower.
The
mistake of the new unilateralists
In
his 2000 election campaign, George W. Bush said, "If
we are an arrogant nation, they'll view us that way, but
if we're a humble nation, they'll respect us." He
was right, but unfortunately many regarded the first eight
months of his administration as arrogantly concerned with
narrow American interests, focused on military power,
and turning its back on treaties, norms and international
negotiations.
September
11 initially led to a change of course toward more multilateral
approaches. Congress finally paid America's UN dues, and
the president turned his efforts to building a coalition
against terrorism. But the rapid progress of the military
campaign in Afghanistan led some in the administration
and some commentators to conclude that unilateralism works.
The columnist Charles Krauthammer, for example, argued
that the success against the Taliban government marked
a victory for what he called the "new unilateralism"
where the US refuses to play the role of "docile
international citizen" and unashamedly pursues its
own ends.
These
new unilateralists make a serious mistake in focusing
too heavily on military power alone. There the United
States is unequalled, with a military budget equivalent
to the next dozen or so countries combined. And it is
true that America's military power is essential to global
stability, and an essential part of the response to terrorism.
But the metaphor of war should not blind Americans to
the fact that suppressing terrorism will take years of
patient unspectacular civilian co-operation with other
countries in areas such as intelligence sharing, police
work, tracing financial flows, and co-operation among
customs officials. The military success in Afghanistan
dealt with the easiest part of the problem, the toppling
of the weak Taliban government in a poor country. But
all the precision bombing destroyed only a small fraction
of the al-Qaeda network which retains cells in some 60
countries. And bombing is no answer to the existence of
cells in Kuala Lumpur, Hamburg or Detroit. Rather than
proving the unilateralists' point, the partial nature
of the success in Afghanistan illustrates the continuing
need for co-operation. The best response to transnational
terrorist networks is networks of cooperating government
agencies.
The
paradox of American power
The
problem for Americans in the 21st century is that there
are more and more things outside the control of even the
most powerful state. Although the United States does well
on the traditional measures of power, there is increasingly
more going on in the world that those measures fail to
capture. The paradox of American power is that world politics
is changing in a way that means the strongest power since
Rome cannot achieve some of its most crucial international
goals acting alone. The US lacks both the international
and domestic prerequisites to resolve conflicts that are
internal to other societies, and to monitor and control
transnational transactions that threaten Americans at
home. On many of the key issues today, such as international
financial stability, drug smuggling, the spread of diseases
or global climate change, military power simply cannot
produce success, and its use can sometimes be counterproductive.
Instead, as the largest country, the United States must
mobilise international coalitions to address these shared
threats and challenges.
The
agenda of world politics has become like a three-dimensional
chess game in which one can win only by playing vertically
as well as horizontally. On the top board of classic interstate
military issues, the United States is likely to remain
the only superpower for years to come, and it makes sense
to speak in traditional terms of unipolarity or hegemony.
However, on the middle board of interstate economic issues,
the distribution of power is already multipolar. The United
States cannot obtain the outcomes it wants on trade, anti-trust
or financial regulation issues without the co-operation
of the European Union, Japan and others. It makes little
sense to call this American hegemony. And on the bottom
board of transnational issues, power is widely distributed
and chaotically organised among state and non-state actors.
It makes no sense at all to call this a unipolar world
or an American empire. And this is the set of issues that
is now intruding into the world of grand strategy as illustrated
by Bush's new doctrine. Yet the new unilateralist part
of his administration still focuses solely on the top
board of classic military solutions. Like children with
a hammer, all problems look like nails to them.
The
willingness of other countries to co-operate on the solution
of transnational issues depends in part on their own self
interest, but also on the attractiveness of American positions.
That power to attract and persuade is what I call soft
power. It means that others want what you want, and there
is less need to use carrots and sticks to make others
do what you want. Hard power grows out of a country's
military and economic might. Soft power arises from the
attractiveness of a country's culture, ideals, and policies.
Hard power will always remain important in a world of
nation states guarding their independence, but soft power
will become increasingly important in dealing with the
transnational issues that require multilateral cooperation
for their solution. Yet a recent Pew Charitable Trust
poll finds that American policies have led to lowered
favourability ratings for the US over the past two years
in 19 of 27 countries, including particularly the Islamic
countries so important to the war on terrorism. The new
unilateralist wing of the administration is urging policies
that squander our soft power.
No
large country can afford to be purely multilateralist,
and sometimes the United States must take the lead by
itself as it did in Afghanistan. And the credible threat
of a unilateral option was probably essential to get the
UN Security Council to pass resolution 1441 that brought
the inspectors back to Iraq. But the US should incline
toward multilateralism whenever possible as a way to legitimise
its power and to gain broad acceptance of its new strategy.
Pre-emption that is legitimised by multilateral sanction
is far less costly and a far less dangerous precedent
than when we assert that we alone can act as judge, jury
and excecutioner. Granted, multilateralism can be used
by smaller states to restrict American freedom of action,
but this does not mean that it is not generally in American
interests. Learning to listen to others and to define
the national interests broadly to include global interests
will be crucial to the success of the new strategy and
whether others see the American preponderance it proclaims
as benign or not.
The
challenge for the United States will be to learn how to
work with other countries to better control the non-state
actors that will increasingly share the stage with nation-states.
President Bush is correct that America will continue to
be the only military superpower, and its military strength
remains essential for global stability and as part of
the response to terrorism. But to successfully implement
his new strategy, he will need to pay more attention to
soft power and multilateral co-operation than was true
of the early stages of his administration.
