Practical Lessons From US Foreign Policy: The Itinerant Years 3030273113, 9783030273118, 9783030273125

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 8
Chronology......Page 11
Part I......Page 13
Chapter 1 How Did We Get Here?......Page 14
Chapter 2 Global Challenges......Page 35
1. We’re All Powerful and All Alone (1999)......Page 40
2. US Must Avoid Temptation to Shift Priorities Toward Asia (2001)......Page 41
3. Bush Should Seize His Chance to Recast US Ties with China (2001)......Page 44
4. US Needs Alliances, Not Short-Term Allies (2002)......Page 46
5. Thank the Friends: Doing America’s Work at the UN (2002)......Page 48
6. A Nuclear Arms Race (2003)......Page 49
7. Bush’s Corrosive Campaign of Fear (2003)......Page 51
8. The Nature of Freedom (2004)......Page 53
I......Page 55
II......Page 56
III......Page 59
10. US Must Take Offensive Against Nuclear Terrorism (2007)......Page 61
11. The False Promise of 1989 (2009)......Page 63
12. Diplomacy 2.0 (2010)......Page 64
13. US Diplomats: A Vanishing Species? (2010)......Page 67
14. End of a Nuclear Era (2013)......Page 70
Chapter 3 National Policies......Page 73
15. Back to Basics: US Foreign Policy for the Coming Decade (2000)......Page 81
16. Diplomatic Cathedral-Building (2002)......Page 87
17. Ike-Like Diplomacy Instead of War (2002)......Page 95
18. The Way to Rid the World of Nuclear Weapons (2003)......Page 97
19. American Diplomacy—What You See is What You Get (2007)......Page 99
20. Mugged by Reality? (2008)......Page 101
21. Obama’s World Tour: A Rising or a Setting Sun? (2010)......Page 102
22. The Strange Rebirth of American Leadership (2011)......Page 105
23. Pivots Forward, Backward, and Sideways (2012)......Page 107
24. Recipe for a Post-Hegemonic USA (2013)......Page 109
Part II......Page 116
Chapter 4 Regional Problems......Page 117
25. The Consequences of Russia’s Actions—Who Will Cast the First Stone? (1999)......Page 124
26. Don’t Rush to the Altar With India (2001)......Page 126
27. Afghanistan Stalemate Fosters Reevaluation of Stabilization Tactics (2001)......Page 128
28. Asia Needs a Common Defence (2001)......Page 130
29. The European Way: Asians Need a Regional Security Net (2002)......Page 132
30. East Asia: Connecting the Dots Isn’t Optional (2002)......Page 133
31. Juggling a Two-Front Crisis (2003)......Page 135
32. Time for Jaw-Jaw with North Korea (2003)......Page 137
33. NATO Can’t Be Globocop (2004)......Page 139
34. The US is Losing Ground on Korea Talks (2004)......Page 141
35. The Coming Showdown with Iran (2009)......Page 143
36. The Elusive Afghanistan Strategy (2009)......Page 145
37. Obama, “America’s First Pacific President”? (2009)......Page 147
38. The Putin Doctrine and Preventive Diplomacy (2014)......Page 148
Chapter 5 Regional Solutions......Page 163
39. Save the Caucasus from Balkan-like Crisis (2000)......Page 169
40. Defending Missile Defense (2001)......Page 171
41. NATO and the Future of War (2001)......Page 173
42. Afghanistan Interim Government “Solution” Could Leave Regional Problems Intact (2001)......Page 175
43. EU to Adopt Higher Profile in Recasting Europe (2002)......Page 177
44. European Defense: An Alliance with 2 Tiers (2003)......Page 179
45. Rescuing the UN Security Council: Should We? Can We? (2004)......Page 180
The NATO Problem......Page 181
The European Problem......Page 183
The Security Council’s Agenda......Page 184
Connecting the Dots......Page 185
46. Enlarge the North Korean Problem (2005)......Page 187
47. Democratic Lessons from Helsinki and Central Asia (2005)......Page 189
48. Chart New Course for Lasting Peace (2006)......Page 191
49. French Return to NATO Military Command Could Spur Greater Alliance Mission Clarity (2009)......Page 193
50. A Possible “Off-Ramp” in North Korea (2013)......Page 195
51. Redirecting US Diplomacy (2014)......Page 197
A European Example......Page 198
US Influence and Regional Affairs......Page 199
The Continuities of Policy......Page 201
52. A Middle East, Whole and Free (2015)......Page 204
Chapter 6 What Have We Learned?......Page 209
Further Reading......Page 214
Index......Page 224

Citation preview

Practical Lessons from US Foreign Policy The Itinerant Years James E. Goodby Kenneth Weisbrode

Practical Lessons from US Foreign Policy

“This interesting book touches on a variety of critical questions about America’s role in the world since the Cold War. Even though I do not fully agree with all of its arguments, I believe it will provoke productive—and badly needed— discussion about the road traveled and the road ahead.” —Hal Brands, author of American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump (2018) “There is one immutable fact about cooperative security—when practiced well, it works. Countries can solve together problems that none of them can solve alone. Ambassador Goodby and Professor Weisbrode are superb guides through the past two decades of American policy, pointing out how cooperative security could have helped us—and still could help us—to address global challenges like nuclear proliferation and climate change.” —Gloria Duffy, President, The Commonwealth Club, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense “The idea that America has lost its vision of global leadership has become a commonplace in the era of Trump. This thoughtful and wide-ranging compilation of op-eds reveals both the deeper history of these developments and the existence of longstanding efforts to counter them. For two decades, the esteemed diplomat-historian duo of Goodby and Weisbrode have delivered a series of prophetic warnings about the dangers and consequences of America’s failure to apply and adapt the principles of collective security—diplomacy, international institutions, and regional alliances—to a rapidly changing and globalizing world. Together with their reflections on these writings, this volume offers a nuanced assessment of the US international order that dominated the second half of the twentieth century, as well as a rebuke of the dark ‘America First’ nationalism that has reemerged in the Trump era. This sober yet ultimately hopeful book is vital reading for the current and future generation of America’s leaders and all who are dedicated to the prospect of a more peaceful, equitable, and sustainable world.” —Hannah Gurman, author of The Dissent Papers: The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond (2012)

“This engaging collaboration of a diplomatic practitioner and a political historian offers its analysis and critique of US foreign policy—the good, the bad, and the ugly—in the years 1998–2015. Arrogance and ignorance, we learn, have appeared in American leadership predating the Trump administration.” — Peter J. Katzenstein, Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies, Cornell University, USA

James E. Goodby · Kenneth Weisbrode

Practical Lessons from US Foreign Policy The Itinerant Years

James E. Goodby The Hoover Institution Stanford, CA, USA

Kenneth Weisbrode Bilkent University Ankara, Turkey

ISBN 978-3-030-27311-8 ISBN 978-3-030-27312-5  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27312-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Sebastián Crespo Photography/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To me, the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons is like the top of a very tall mountain. It is tempting and easy to say: “We can’t get there from here.” It is true that today in our troubled world we can’t see the top of the mountain. But we can see that we are heading down—not up. We can see that we must turn around, that we must take paths leading to higher ground and that we must get others to move with us. —Sam Nunn, 2007

To Priscilla Goodby (1932–2018)

Contents

Part I 1 How Did We Get Here? 3 2 Global Challenges 25 1. We’re All Powerful and All Alone (1999) 30 2. US Must Avoid Temptation to Shift Priorities Toward Asia (2001) 31 3. Bush Should Seize His Chance to Recast US Ties with China (2001) 34 4. US Needs Alliances, Not Short-Term Allies (2002) 36 5. Thank the Friends: Doing America’s Work at the UN (2002) 38 6. A Nuclear Arms Race (2003) 39 7. Bush’s Corrosive Campaign of Fear (2003) 41 8. The Nature of Freedom (2004) 43 9. America’s Strategic Surrender (2006) 45 10. US Must Take Offensive Against Nuclear Terrorism (2007) 51 11. The False Promise of 1989 (2009) 53 12. Diplomacy 2.0 (2010) 54 13. US Diplomats: A Vanishing Species? (2010) 57 14. End of a Nuclear Era (2013) 60 ix

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CONTENTS

3 National Policies 63 15. Back to Basics: US Foreign Policy for the Coming Decade (2000) 71 16. Diplomatic Cathedral-Building (2002) 77 17. Ike-Like Diplomacy Instead of War (2002) 85 18. The Way to Rid the World of Nuclear Weapons (2003) 87 19. American Diplomacy—What You See is What You Get (2007) 89 20. Mugged by Reality? (2008) 91 21. Obama’s World Tour: A Rising or a Setting Sun? (2010) 92 22. The Strange Rebirth of American Leadership (2011) 95 23. Pivots Forward, Backward, and Sideways (2012) 97 24. Recipe for a Post-Hegemonic USA (2013) 99 Part II 4 Regional Problems 109 25. The Consequences of Russia’s Actions—Who Will Cast the First Stone? (1999) 116 26. Don’t Rush to the Altar With India (2001) 118 27. Afghanistan Stalemate Fosters Reevaluation of Stabilization Tactics (2001) 120 28. Asia Needs a Common Defence (2001) 122 29. The European Way: Asians Need a Regional Security Net (2002) 124 30. East Asia: Connecting the Dots Isn’t Optional (2002) 125 31. Juggling a Two-Front Crisis (2003) 127 32. Time for Jaw-Jaw with North Korea (2003) 129 33. NATO Can’t Be Globocop (2004) 131 34. The US is Losing Ground on Korea Talks (2004) 133 35. The Coming Showdown with Iran (2009) 135 36. The Elusive Afghanistan Strategy (2009) 137 37. Obama, “America’s First Pacific President”? (2009) 139 38. The Putin Doctrine and Preventive Diplomacy (2014) 140

CONTENTS  

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5 Regional Solutions 155 39. Save the Caucasus from Balkan-like Crisis (2000) 161 40. Defending Missile Defense (2001) 163 41. NATO and the Future of War (2001) 165 42. Afghanistan Interim Government “Solution” Could Leave Regional Problems Intact (2001) 167 43. EU to Adopt Higher Profile in Recasting Europe (2002) 169 44. European Defense: An Alliance with 2 Tiers (2003) 171 45. Rescuing the UN Security Council: Should We? Can We? (2004) 172 46. Enlarge the North Korean Problem (2005) 179 47. Democratic Lessons from Helsinki and Central Asia (2005) 181 48. Chart New Course for Lasting Peace (2006) 183 49. French Return to NATO Military Command Could Spur Greater Alliance Mission Clarity (2009) 185 50. A Possible “Off-Ramp” in North Korea (2013) 187 51. Redirecting US Diplomacy (2014) 189 52. A Middle East, Whole and Free (2015) 196 6 What Have We Learned? 201 Further Reading 207 Attributions 215 Index 219

Chronology

1998 1999

Asian and developing country financial crisis continues. Kosovo War begins. India and Pakistan test nuclear weapons. US embassies attacked in Kenya and Tanzania. Bill Clinton impeached. Time magazine anoints Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers as the “Committee to Save the World.” 50th anniversary of NATO coincides with attack on Serbia. NATO accepts three new members. Istanbul summit of the OSCE highlights humanitarian intervention. 2000 “Dot-com” bubble bursts. Second Intifada begins. George W. Bush elected president of the US. 2001 Al Qaeda attacks the United States. 2002 The United States and coalition occupy Afghanistan, later transferred to NATO. The United States withdraws from Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. 2003 The United States and coalition invade and occupy Iraq. 2004 NATO accepts seven new members, including former Baltic republics of USSR. EU accepts ten new members. Bush reelected president of the US. 2005 China and Russia conduct joint military exercises. 2006 North Korea conducts nuclear test.

xiii

xiv  

CHRONOLOGY

2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

EU accepts two new members. Financial crisis begins. Treaty of Lisbon signed. Russia intervenes in Georgia. Barack Obama elected president of the US. NATO accepts two more members. North Korea conducts second nuclear test. Copenhagen climate change conference takes place. “Operation Iraqi Freedom” ends. “Arab Spring” takes place. US troops depart Iraq. Civil wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen begin. Obama reelected president. South China Sea dispute intensifies. North Korea conducts third nuclear test. EU accepts one more member. Russia intervenes in Ukraine. NATO troops begin to depart Afghanistan. Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed with Iran. Paris Climate Agreement negotiated.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

How Did We Get Here?

How will people remember and describe the first couple of decades of the twenty-first century in US foreign policy? To date, there is still no slogan or epithet for them. There is no single adjective, with the partial exceptions of “post-Cold War,” still somewhat in use, or “global,” which is inadequate because few people agree when “globalization” began. Slogan setting will track what happens in the years to come: This period is likely to rate as one of the richer ones for debating the complicated relations the American people and their government have with others around with the world, and with the many issues that they try, separately and in combination, to manage and solve. The following selection of essays is the work of two writers, Goodby, a diplomat, and Weisbrode, a historian. Our book is neither a monograph nor a social science primer on current events or on the sum of US relations (economic, cultural, scientific, etc.) with other countries. It is tailored narrowly to the topics and issues on which we specialize— diplomacy and political history—and is meant to illustrate the evolution of these aspects of foreign policy, not as substitutes for any others but as the focus of our professional analysis. Our reason for compiling it is to show how the administrations of three American presidents—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—disregarded or misapplied to differing degrees the main organizing principle of a peaceful and, on balance, stable world order that they inherited from the twentieth century: collective security. © The Author(s) 2020 J. E. Goodby and K. Weisbrode, Practical Lessons from US Foreign Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27312-5_1

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4  J. E. GOODBY AND K. WEISBRODE

What do we mean by collective security? That it must be defined at all speaks to the senility of our era, for not too long ago it was taken to be a mantra among most educated citizens. Since the 1990s, however, it has diminished to the status of a quaint relic if not otherwise taken for granted.1 It prescribed something more durable than a military or political alliance or, to use the more popular term today, “partnership.” Collective security meant that security is indivisible, both geographically and functionally, in all civilian and military fields of human action. It meant alliances that are underwritten not only by treaties and other agreements and understandings, but also by multilateral institutions and, as we discuss below, international regimes that transcend defense, economics, and politics. These regimes, along with treaties, agreements, understandings, and institutions are grounded, in turn, in the realities of power, not in principled opposition to them. And those realities of power correspond to geographic, economic, and cultural affinities and relationships that are, we believe, best constructed and nurtured in and among historic regions.2 The reasons for today’s widespread neglect of such realities are debatable and complex, but on balance they come, in our view, from a combination of ignorance and arrogance, both of which have been widely and persistently noted in the administration of Donald Trump. * * * In its foreign policy, the Trump administration follows a dark logic in its view of the world (“It’s a vicious place”—Trump). Its foreign policy could fairly be described as Realpolitik in its impulses but mixed in its execution of that policy. The administration’s relations with Russia and China are clearly not based on realism. Henry Kissinger and George Kennan were proponents of realism in American foreign policy, partly in reaction to what they saw as misguided policies espoused by Woodrow Wilson and excessive US devotion to unenforceable international law, especially between the two world wars. Both Kennan and Kissinger advocated policies rooted in power politics, but both recognized the limits of American power and sought to put in place policies of containment and détente in dealing with the Soviet Union.3 These policies relied on American military force for their ultimate effectiveness but depended in their day-to-day practice on American diplomacy. Kennan and Kissinger worried that Americans would not be able to pursue a consistent foreign policy over a long period of time, given the

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changing leadership and the need for public support in democratic governance. Yet from the end of the Second World War through the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a foreign policy consensus enjoyed the support of both major parties. It enabled American presidents and their cabinets and national security advisers to carry out a remarkably stable and consistent diplomacy (at least one that appears so in retrospect) in which negotiations with adversaries became an increasingly prominent component. This generation of realists has passed from the scene.4 In our essays commenting on issues of the post-Cold War period, we recorded how the single-minded focus on containment of Soviet power was gradually replaced by policies that were intended to respond to perceived new threats and opportunities. During that period, the immobility of the Cold War was superseded by a variety of threats from internal instability in strategically located nations, some of which had been subservient to the will of Moscow. International terrorism fostered by disputes in the Middle East became a major challenge to US security. Existential threats grew with the spread of nuclear weapons capabilities, climate change, and the ability of human beings to manipulate the genetic code. US foreign policy in the twenty-first century has been confronted with challenges that few states appear to have known before. Issues that statecraft was once called upon to manage required tools that have not been well developed in the foreign policy machinery of any government. Military force could deal with some of these issues, though not in traditional ways. Others require scientific and technological skills in short supply in most governments. The implications of social media and other developments made possible by the digital revolution, like cyber war, have only begun to be incorporated into the conceptual underpinnings of foreign policy. The management of global economic integration has not yet been mastered. No wonder that governance of foreign policy seems muddled and that critics of the United States and the conduct of its foreign policy have such a rich menu of complaints. Into this rapidly changing and not yet fully understood environment came the Trump administration, headed by a president with little experience in foreign affairs. That could have been an advantage. Fresh challenges require fresh eyes, and Trump, despite much criticism, had the political backing necessary to adopt a different set of foreign policy guidelines to respond to the complexities faced by the United States and other nations. But the principles of the administration’s foreign policies had to be derived from the president’s particular view of the world

6  J. E. GOODBY AND K. WEISBRODE

and his conviction that the way to create the conditions necessary to achieve American success in foreign affairs was to begin most relationships with threats in order to extract concessions. Trump revealed in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2017 that his attitude toward world order was probably rooted in the philosophy of the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes is best known for portraying human life as a “war of all against all.”5 In Hobbes’s major book, Leviathan, he argued that human beings are inherently selfish and that an absolute monarchy is the only form of government capable of dealing with this situation. One can argue about Trump’s philosophy of government, but that international life is a war of all against all in his psychology is clear. “America First” is his response to this perceived state of the world. “Protection” was Trump’s answer to predatory nations out to steal America’s jobs and its wealth. Tariffs and trade wars have been the natural result. The Trumpian outlook requires a world order in which international cooperation is a low priority and, in fact, something to be suspected. Peace is something abnormal and conflict the natural order of things. Threats are the most effective way to achieve results. International organizations are designed to restrain American freedom of action and deserve support only if America is paid for services rendered. Selfishness is the reigning human instinct and ignoring that reality can only lead to defeat in this world. It is not critical, really, how Trump came to hold these views or whether his views correspond closely with those of a seventeenth-century philosopher. The important point is that the world order Trump perceives and accepts as normal is one very similar to the dog-eat-dog world that others before him saw and that many citizens in many countries perceive today. And they are acting on that premise. Thus, one can observe a strong impulse in Europe, in the Western Hemisphere, in Russia, and in China, the latter of which not too long ago was called “the honor student in the school of globalization,” for a world order that is based on the ideas that conflict is normal and cooperation unnatural, and that self-interest narrowly conceived outweighs any appeal to generosity or even empathy.6 In a foreign policy resting on such a philosophy, demonstrated increasingly and vividly to friends and foes alike during Trump’s first term in office, there is very little room for ethical and moral principles in the creation of a foreign policy. That does not mean that principles were not being established. They boil down to

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“Never trust any other nation and do unto them before they do unto you.” This is not the type of realism that George Kennan and Henry Kissinger practiced. Both men recognized that to be successful and, above all, to be sustainable, US foreign policy had to be consistent with, or at least pay regular homage to, the American people’s self-identification as a moral nation. Have the American people always reacted to external events in ways that were ethical and based on religious or moral principles? No, of course not, although perhaps more self-consciously than many other nations. But their lapses from justice and ethical behavior were seen as lapses, especially in retrospect, rather than as proper behavior justified by American needs at the time. Cold War foreign policy was able to be as consistent, and in the end as successful, as it was because the American people thought of it as morally correct. American presidents spoke of it that way, too. Trump’s sense of ethics is summed up in his slogans: “Make America Great Again” and “America First.” He proclaimed himself a “nationalist.” Not for him what previous generations of American leaders thought of as “enlightened self-interest.” Their idea was that America could thrive best in a world where many nations and peoples shared the ideas upon which the United States was founded. American leaders sought to support democratic nations and movements, not just as a bulwark against adversaries in the Kremlin and elsewhere but most importantly because they were dedicated to building a world order based on democratic principles. Perhaps this was itself a form of imperialism, but if so, as was said of British colonialism, it was a self-liquidating form of imperialism.7 “Where there is no vision, the people perish” was one of John F. Kennedy’s favorite biblical quotations. The vision of most American presidents of the twentieth century was a world in which the United States would thrive and prosper among a universe of like-minded nations.8 Even adversaries, it was hoped, would someday become persuaded of the righteousness of that vision: “The end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama put it when it seemed to have turned out that way. The Trumpian vision has not embraced Fukuyama’s liberal democratic notion and, hence, the norms that go with it. Most previous administrations sought to put in place internationally accepted norms designed to build a global liberal democratic system, but Trump has set about to destroy those norms. What the consequences of this will be is a profound question with long-term implications for the United States and other nations.

8  J. E. GOODBY AND K. WEISBRODE

International regimes are what govern or at least influence the foreign policy behavior of most nations that are active participants in an international system of nations. An international regime is not a treaty but rather a set of norms that participants in an international system expect will predict the normal response of any one of them to an issue or decision point that arises within the system. An example of an international regime is that of nations engaged with each other under the terms of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and its supporting agreements and executive machinery. The NPT provides the basic framework, but periodic review conferences, a supplier group, and many aspects of the civil uses of nuclear energy are all part of the international regime that influences how nations will behave under certain circumstances. Regimes lend predictability and stability to international systems and hence are an important part of any world order.9 By challenging many of the international regimes that have governed the way nations behave, Trump has introduced major uncertainties into the international system with which the United States has been involved. The United Nations has long been a favored target for scapegoating; this now extends to other international organizations and bodies, including the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Such attempts at organizational delegitimation have affected international security and international trade and finance in ways that raise questions about the future viability of those international regimes. The question that only history will be able to answer is whether the national interests of the United States in the future have been well served by this attack on current international regimes and world order. The essays reproduced in this volume illustrate a set of assumptions and expectations about such regimes and international order. There was a consensus among policymakers in the United States, with very few exceptions, that international cooperation was essential to deal with the challenges and opportunities that technology had created. This consensus applied both to trade and finance and to security issues. The consensus accepted the need for institutions to support international cooperation. And it accepted the need for a leading role by the United States in creating an international environment, now known as the global commons, to update and expand the institutions created in the twentieth century, which were rooted in the West and which were seen as

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increasingly inadequate to meet global economic, security, and technological challenges.10 In the United States, Trump ran against that consensus—and won. The consensus evidently had feet of clay.11 It was not shared by the majority of his supporters, who carried the election in several states. Globalization was not providing economic benefits directly to some of these people. Instead, the income gap between the middle class and the managers and promoters of globalization was widening as wages for the middle class stagnated for several years and upward mobility stalled. It is now an open question whether the consensus that globalization is beneficial for all citizens, not just for the elite upper crust, may ever be reached. A global community cannot be restored since it never was accepted in the first place. Perhaps it can be created if globalization and its domestic component can create wealth that is shared more fully by the middle class, however many people globalization brings out of poverty.12 To accomplish that goal, a number of ideas and institutionalized habits that seem to have their roots in earlier beliefs that were widely shared by American citizens and which have been reinforced during the last few years will have to be renewed. One of these beliefs is popular consent. Technologies offer the means of expressing consent, but new methods of communications also have undermined representative democracy as it has been practiced in the United States and elsewhere. Social media have empowered individual citizens who can now share their opinions with millions of other citizens. Powerful officials, including the President of the United States, can now convey their views to millions of people around the world without the benefit of expert advice or the simultaneous filtering of the media. As predicted by James Madison in Federalist Number 10, this widespread practice of a form of direct democracy has led to factionalism on a vast scale. Moreover, technology is now introducing artificial intelligence and new means of producing goods and services into the economies of the United States and other technologically advanced nations. Revolutionary developments in communications and means of production could be supremely beneficial to humanity if their introduction into national and global societies were governed with wisdom and a respect for freedom, democracy, and other human values. At the moment, there is room for doubt that this will be the case. The

10  J. E. GOODBY AND K. WEISBRODE

empowerment of individuals offered by both of these technologies appears to be leading toward anarchy, nihilism, and the spread of dangerous weapons into the hands of individuals and small groups of ambitious people. There is incoherent public debate about these developments, although the use of social media platforms for spreading malicious lies which undermine democracies has become an issue in the public arena. Instead of encouraging social media to be an asset to the practice of democracy, the tendency is to see social media as the enemy and as the promoter of factionalism among citizens. Surely, there is a need to adapt democratic institutions to new means of direct communication. Representative government should be able to utilize these new channels to seek consensus on major issues and thus enhance, rather than undermine, democratic practices. It would mean more openness about decision making, but that should be a positive element. Similarly, the new technology of three-dimensional printing, which already is being used to produce many objects, could be further used to build localized, decentralized production centers. In some ways, this could encourage communities to remain as viable centers of economic life, like the cottage industries of the pre-industrial revolution era. There are plenty of old ideas around, too, which the new technologies are making more practical and realizable. The old ideas of a guaranteed annual income for all citizens, which has been regarded as too costly to be practical, now may become a necessity as artificial intelligence coupled with robotics shifts the balance of economic power further toward capital and away from labor. Fanciful? Perhaps, but there is a crying need to think more about how to channel technological change into forces to undergird democracy rather than undermine it. It usually is better to add before subtracting in social and political relationships. Yet, the use of the terms “globalism” and “globalist,” the latter a pejorative word in the Trump White House, implies that the process of global economic integration is one policy choice among many and that it can be discarded or ignored at will. That is not true. What is true is that nations can resist global economic integration or try to organize alternatives to it. But technology has created the means that make global economic integration possible, and the process of economic growth and integration has lifted people out of poverty in many parts of

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the world. Disrupting that process is possible for large economies like the United States but it comes at a cost, both to wealth creation and to international relations. What we discuss, then, is not just a policy choice but a condition of contemporary life. The choice is not simply between favoring or opposing international economic integration but between radically different forms of world order. A debate over world order is not the way the arguments about the current international disorder are being framed. The most common way to describe such disorder is as a rising tide of populism generated by economic pressures brought on by global economic growth and integration, and the dislocations being felt by waves of migrants. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel responded to migration within her understanding of a cooperative world order, she was denounced by those who saw a different world order. But they were called “populists,” which misses the point. The danger in missing the point is that the wrong responses will be advanced to deal with the truly grave international crisis our country is facing. The world structure that has been emerging in recent decades resembles what Hedley Bull described as a “new medievalism.”13 Technology has empowered private institutions (“Big Tech”) in a way that has created a power center like that of the great barons of European medieval times. International institutions created to enhance cooperation among nations have taken on a resemblance to the church in medieval Europe in that they exert moral and political influence on public policies and attitudes without having economic or military power. The third tier of the power structure of medieval Europe consisted of the sovereigns of each state. Yet each source of state power derived from the other centers, particularly when each depended upon technological progress. That, in turn, depended for its sustenance upon a degree of openness and collaboration. So, today, national governments exercise great power but, as in medieval times, are generally required to share power with other institutions if governance is to function most effectively. “Contemporary states,” therefore, “exist in a world order structured by norms of the international system, yet are correspondingly impacted by transnational pressures that override sovereign borders.”14 The more that states push against the trend of shared governance, the more governments come to realize that “it is precisely these market dynamics… that anchor state sovereignty

12  J. E. GOODBY AND K. WEISBRODE

but, paradoxically, also delimit the potential scope of state effectiveness.”15 There is a crisis of global governance which makes it more difficult for national governments to come to grips with the international crisis they all face—that of building a world order based on cooperation, not conflict. The two conditions—cooperation and conflict—are interrelated but also are essentially and functionally different in how they characterize an international system. Conflict, many scholars have argued, is the norm, cooperation the exception. We would not go this far but do draw a somewhat related distinction: Cooperation requires more creative effort than conflict—at least at the outset. In time, cooperation may become less exceptional and more normal. The modern world, it is said, has moved beyond the rivalrous nature of its medieval ancestor. Power can at once be tamed, mastered, and mobilized for the common good. Human progress can dictate its exercise more than the reverse. “[P]olitical equilibrium in international affairs is possible without a balance of power, and more easily attained without balance-of-power methods,” the historian Paul W. Schroeder has written, “and that international politics, even if they remain structurally anarchic… can none the less be restrained by consensus and bounded by law.”16 There is more to this point than what is, or used to be, commonly known as a harmony of interests. The intellectual and practical task of harmonizing interests is made more difficult by a misapprehension, held even among sophisticated observers, of what “world order” even means. Adam Tooze, another historian, has written, “What history actually suggests is that order tends to emerge not from cooperation and deliberation but from a cruder calculus of power and material constraints.”17 Power and principle do not always align well with technology, and the misalignments may be tragic, but that need not mean that each negates the inherent value of the other. Perhaps the Davos generation of financial, political, and social entrepreneurs of the 1990s—who once prided themselves on “disruption” and imparted to their successors a more anarchic world than the one they inherited—may someday be forgiven for overlooking this basic point of history.18 That diplomats and historians may similarly overlook this point is unforgivable. It is these twin crises, of order and governance, not populism, that represent the problem national leaders should be facing. National debates are needed about governance in today’s world and about what kind of world order will most benefit the nations. Other debates are about symptoms, not causes, although the symptoms are exacerbated

1  HOW DID WE GET HERE? 

13

by existential threats that cannot be effectively dealt with under the restraints imposed by inadequate governance. * * * What is the precise cause of today’s crisis of order and governance? One answer is rooted in the adversarial tradition on which American law and politics are built, and so too a long-standing tendency to regard foreign policy in principle as distinctly “foreign” and in practice as “domestic.” That is, to perpetuate a view of the world that sees it divided between us-and-them, while, at the same time, advancing or rejecting policies on the basis of how well or how poorly they play to domestic audiences. America is not unique in this respect. We do not limit this charge to parochial, opportunistic politicians. It is also prevalent among the self-appointed guardians of foreign policy— government officials, scholars, journalists, activists of various colors, and so on—who spent a good deal of their time talking to, past, and against one another, and have been accused, not without reason, of seeing the world like a giant laboratory in which to test, support, or oppose various nostrums.19 As of the time of writing, it is too soon to tell whether the rhetoric and policy of the Trump administration really do represent a significant break from the past, or whether they are merely a more extreme form of myopia. Historians someday may see it as a bit of both. Thus, we decided upon preparing this retrospective to pose a related question: How did we get here? Specifically, how did what appeared to many people a couple of decades ago to be a bright and promising future become so bleak and hostile? How did the exercise or non-exercise of US power contribute to that result? To restate some jargon of the post-Cold War years, one might ask, did unipolarity dictate the adoption of unilateralism? If so, when and how? By contrast, when and how did an American retreat, if it is accurate to call it that, begin, and why? It has become a commonplace to say that retreat began about a decade ago during the presidency of Barack Obama as an overreaction to the unilateralism of his predecessor, George W. Bush, and the mistakes of the Bush administration in its “war on terror.”20 It is even more of a commonplace to claim that each administration, rightly or wrongly, sets out to reverse, refute, or otherwise draw distinctions between itself and the one(s) that came before. This is because politicians generally like to make good on their campaign promises, and because most

14  J. E. GOODBY AND K. WEISBRODE

campaigns against incumbents are fought over those very distinctions. A new administration gets into trouble when it starts believing its own campaign rhetoric, and that almost always happens. Obama, for instance, drew an unfortunate distinction between “dumb wars” (which he called the one in Iraq) and necessary wars (which he called the one in Afghanistan). Once he became president, Obama appeared eager to put an end (albeit temporarily) to the US commitment to Iraq, but found himself trapped by the messy and complex problems of Afghanistan and the American troops still there. However different the two interventions were, Obama ended up in principle doing in Afghanistan more or less what Bush had done in Iraq in order to put a brave face, Vietnamstyle, on a deteriorating situation—even the rhetoric of “the surge” was similar—only to find that such escalation was a temporary palliative. In attempting to “create our own reality,” as Bush’s advisor, Karl Rove was reported to have said, successive administrations often limit their room for maneuver, not only by unrealistic expectations of the future but also by bias toward the past.21 Some historical blunders have a long fuse. Approximations of past, present, and future failures and achievements bring to mind another common theme in our writing here: decline— political, economic, military, and even moral, in nature. We neither ask nor bemoan so much whether American power is in decline as we question when it lost sight of the basis for the preeminence most people agree that it once enjoyed. Thus, to trace the evolution (or devolution) of US foreign policy after the Cold War, one must go back to the critical period from the late 1990s—a period that is depicted here not merely as a culmination but also as a turning point—and examine this process not as a series of calculations and miscalculations between so-called hard and soft power, between military intervention and withdrawal, between advance and retreat, or between the wisdom of “liberal internationalists” and “realist retrenchers,” but instead more contextually by way of the relative success or failure of US diplomacy to foster the types of regional security communities that experience tells us are the most durable and effective ways to promote and protect peace, security, and prosperity.22 It is important in posing these calculations, which in reality are a number of false dichotomies, to recall an actual distinction in policymaking: between means and ends. Few but the most ardent isolationists have expressed the wish for a total American divorce from the world; few

1  HOW DID WE GET HERE? 

15

but the most doctrinaire interventionists have stated the need to rule the globe in the name of American interests. There is instead a range of policy actions and choices that may be characterized by many people differently. Thus, to say that the Trump administration has discarded a mask of good manners from unilateralism is to repeat a charge that was levelled against all three of his post-Cold War predecessors.23 He may well be unmasking, and more; he may truly represent a real departure from existing norms. Or, his crassness may be another masking of a grand retreat begun decades earlier with the aim, as some of the essays in Part I describe, of seeing regional powers assume more of the responsibilities and burdens of keeping the peace in their own neighborhoods. As desirable as retreat may be, however, assertiveness, both real and imaginary, carries its own risks and dangers, starting with the “imperial overstretch” that historian Paul Kennedy famously warned against, which is as true for a retreating power as it is for an advancing one.24 Not all retreats are the result or the agents of “decline.” Cutting one’s losses is as American as apple pie. We are less interested in characterizing the means of foreign policy with particular theoretical or ideological labels than we are in understanding the basic aims of policies and determining whether and how they have or have not brought about their intended results. We do so on the premise that the post-Cold War era, which began more or less a decade before the period covered in this book, may be viewed as a postwar settlement.25 The jury is still out on whether the period after 1989 will be rated a failure, a success, or yet another imperfect, or perhaps even doomed, attempt with the “development—tentative, hesitating, contradictory and incomplete—of a new world order.”26 No new war among the major powers of the world occurred during the years covered by this book. Yet the world appears less peaceful and even more menacing than at any point since the early 1980s. We want, therefore, to take a step back and reexamine what we as observers were thinking and saying at the time; and to compare and contrast that with what happened then, and since, in the spirit of contemporary history as the British historian Geoffrey Barraclough defined it: a history that “begins when the problems which are actual in the world today first take visible shape… [and] the changes which enable, or rather which compel us to say that we have moved into a new era…”27 The people who now plan and execute US foreign policy grew to political maturity during the past twenty years, or otherwise lived

16  J. E. GOODBY AND K. WEISBRODE

through and observed the years as we did. They “think in time” ­consciously and, probably, subconsciously, by way of their personal disposition and professional experience, their tendency to consider both good and bad analogies, their related tendency to forecast results from particular conditions, and their drawing conclusions and “lessons” from recent and more remote examples with an eye not only to the past but also to the immediate and, in rarer cases, more distant future.28 Thus to understand how we got to where we now are in the world, we must first reexamine that history through a contemporary lens—one, we hope, will stand the test of time so that anyone in five, ten, or even twenty years looking back to interpret our own era will start with these observations as a first draft of contemporary history. These observations tell us that dramatic breaks in policy do happen, but rarely as bolts from the blue. In reviewing the essays for this volume, we have concluded that the apparent radicalism of the Trump administration has gestated during the past two decades in the combination and culmination of four principal failures: to secure the gains of the peaceful end of the Cold War in Europe and, to a greater extent, in Asia; to respond imaginatively to the hot-button issue of transnational violence; to allow a general unraveling of international order to fester; and, finally, to adjust national habits and structures of policymaking to the challenges of a globalizing world.29 The effects of the failures have been cumulative and exponential. For example, as the official inquiry on the September 11th attacks demonstrates, those attacks could happen because of successive bouts of incompetence and small-mindedness. The Clinton administration, although it had contemplated and discussed precisely this type of threat, failed to put into place the institutional and bureaucratic means to prevent it, while the Bush administration, although more institutionally effective and bureaucratically disciplined, failed to detect, comprehend or otherwise take seriously and defuse the threat right under its nose.30 A similar succession took place with the Bush’s heavy reaction—probably overreaction—to the 9/11 attacks domestically and internationally, followed by the Obama administration’s overreaction to Bush’s errors with an ostensible determination to underreact to the consequences of the instability, fear-mongering, and conflict attributed to its predecessor. These composite failures were as much the result of deficits in imagination as they were of ideology, politics, poor implementation, and bad timing. Successive administrations placed much emphasis on power

1  HOW DID WE GET HERE? 

17

politics when the United States had reached a point of global preeminence—its unipolar moment. Then later, from a weaker relative position, they shifted that emphasis to one of justice, equilibrium, and restraint; and from there, and from an even weaker position, began to act and speak as though it were living back in 1989 when the liberal, international order appeared beneficial, inevitable, and irrevocable. The cumulative effect was as distracting as it was dangerous. It should not be surprising then that the Trump administration has sought a return not so much to normalcy as to a bone-dry simplicity. * * * We have selected the term “itinerant” to describe the policies of this era, borrowing it from John Chipman, director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The term, as he used it, refers to means more than to ends, notwithstanding much of the era’s rhetoric.31 From our perspective, policymakers formulated policies less in response to actual shifting demands or challenges abroad than to shifting passions and fads at home. They did so arbitrarily, jumping from one moving target or “issue du jour” to another, instead of following the Cold War practice of formulating “new” policies as recalibrations or refinements of prevailing ones. This practice reflected a failure to build or even to imagine a consensus about where the country should go after decades of certainty about the goals of foreign policy. This book’s subtitle, and therefore its chronology, begins at the point of our initial collaboration and, tellingly, when a shift occurred away from the collective security tenets of the twentieth century.32 The difficult NATO-Russia collaboration that had been hammered out in the Balkans, namely over Bosnia, was succeeded by the unilateral military intervention by NATO in Kosovo, without a mandate from the UN Security Council. Al Qaeda launched its first major attacks against US interests, in Africa. The Taliban extended its control over much of Afghanistan. India and Pakistan became de jure nuclear powers, and the trend toward making nuclear weapons a global taboo was reversed. The end of the 1990s began to look less peaceful or optimistic than its beginning. The first third of the next decade saw the terrible attacks on American soil, followed by two major military interventions and occupations—in Afghanistan and Iraq—and several others elsewhere. Readers will detect an obvious emphasis in the essays. We focus almost entirely here on so-called high politics. There is very little written about economics, development, refugees, the natural environment, popular

18  J. E. GOODBY AND K. WEISBRODE

culture, and other frequent subjects of writings about globalization ­during the years under examination. Rather than apologize for or qualify a bias, we state unabashedly that high politics is the area where we have the most expertise and interest as well as one that has receded dramatically from the kind of careful, regular attention it received during the second half of the previous century. Alliances, rivalries, nuclear weapons and the other elements and expressions of “high politics” still matter and need a better understanding. With a few longer exceptions, our format was the newspaper op-ed: a particular type and style of writing that emphasizes one, or at most two, policy recommendations, and that appears to simplify and occasionally to exaggerate a question or issue with the aim of focusing attention on the most relevant, or the most potentially beneficial, steps to take. It is not a format that is known for deep introspection, and those who partake in it tend to be forgotten soon after the columns cease to appear.33 This is not to diminish the seriousness with which we intend (and intended) these essays to be read; in fact, what may appear to be an oversimplification or an exaggeration may (we hope) overlay a good deal of thoughtful synthesis. We aimed to redirect attention to less appreciated points—namely those dealing with collective security and its operational cousin, cooperative security—by the mass of professional pundits. Unlike them, we did not have a regular column or work for a single publication; we wrote only when we felt the need to share a point of view. The shelf-life of our writing was less important to us than the possibility that the essays would influence and improve thinking, and even action, at the time they were written. Yet, taken together, they offer a window on an important period in our country’s history when opportunities were squandered and misused, but also when the worst possible result—a war between any of the world’s major powers—did not come to pass. We offer the following collection as two individuals’ effort to understand and interpret the world they saw around them, and to have whatever influence they could upon decision makers. Our tone, while often critical and sometimes didactic, is, we hope, constructive, as the essays emphasize opportunities, both tangible and conceptual, rather than naysaying. We have divided the essays into four chapters designated as challenges, policies, problems, and solutions. The first two trace the global and the national dimensions of our thinking; the latter two emphasize regions. The division is not firm; we made it on the basis of intellectual consistency but some blurring of boundaries across the text

1  HOW DID WE GET HERE? 

19

is unavoidable; we hope it demonstrates the conceptual and practical interrelationship of global, national, and regional phenomena, and to that extent, the chapters may be compared and contrasted heuristically. Overall they underscore the axiom that appears throughout these pages: Policy, especially foreign policy, is almost always multidimensional, and the best policies are those that examine and anticipate potential effects upon proximate neighbors, that is to say, regions, or upon distant powers if they are in a position to exert regional influence. If any single bias may be stated, then, that is the one. Some of our observations and recommendations were overtaken by events while others may appear prophetic. We would like to think that some of our advice was heeded along the way, but the essays speak for themselves. If we could go back, we might have rewritten some lines, corrected one or two misstatements, and probably delved further into the domestic constraints and passions that have affected achievement of the changes we have sought.34 Those changes play a powerful role, and too often wise and conscientious policymakers find themselves moving quickly from the realm of “won’t” to “can’t.” It was a significant, but understandable, omission during what neither of us anticipated would be such an ideologically charged couple of decades.

Notes



1. Or, alternatively, as the bearer of a “stridently political” legacy still in one or two places (Thomas de Waal, “2016, the Year Europe Forgot World War II,” Carnegie Europe, December 16, 2016); cf. John Glaser, “The Amnesia of the US Foreign Policy Establishment,” New Republic, March 15, 2019. 2. Cf. Shiping Tang, “The Future of International Order(s),” Washington Quarterly 41, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 117–31. See Chapter 5 for more discussion of this point. 3. This is not to say that either man ought to be celebrated for his pragmatism, which is a different quality, albeit one that is often conflated with realism. 4. Carol Giacomo, “A Changing of the Guard,” New York Times, December 30, 2018. 5. See the introduction to Chapter 2. 6. Fyodor Lukyanov, “Rethinking Global Diplomacy,” Moscow Times, July 23, 2015. Cf. Paul H. Nitze, “America: An Honest Broker,” Foreign Affairs 69, no. 4 (Fall 1990): 1–14.

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7. Cf. John Bew, “World Order: Many-Headed Monster or Noble Pursuit?” Texas National Security Review 1, no. 1 (December 2017): 14–35. 8.  See, for example, David Mayers, America and the Postwar World: Remaking International Society, 1945–1956 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). 9.  E.g., James E. Goodby, “Nuclear Nonproliferation’s Missing Link,” PacNet, December 1, 2006; James E. Goodby and Steven Pifer, “Nuclear Non-proliferation: We Must Keep Working for a World Without Nuclear Weapons (Yes, It’s Possible),” Fox News, April 24, 2015. 10.  Jonathan Sperber, “The Failed Promises of 1989 and the Politics of 2016,” ISSF Policy Series, “America and the World—2017 and Beyond,” H-Diplo, March 7, 2017. 11. E.g., “The speed and spread of change has left commentators perplexed at how what, until very recently, appeared firm and unshakeable has proved brittle and shallow-rooted.” T. G. Otte, “The Waning of the Post-War Order,” in ibid., February 21, 2017. 12. Falling, by one estimate, from 42% of humanity in 1980 to 11% in 2013 (Martin Wolf, “The World’s Progress Brings New Challenges,” Financial Times, May 29, 2018). 13. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977). 14. Karl W. Schweizer, “The Postmodern State: Redefinition or Retreat?” The European Legacy 24, no. 1 (2019): 82–86, here 82, paraphrasing Paul James. 15. Ibid. 16. Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 803. See also, by the same author, the prescient essay, “The Risks of Victory: An Historian’s Provocation,” National Interest, December 1, 2001. 17. He has also claimed that the liberal international order recalled today really only came into existence in the 1990s and not, as other historians have argued, at the end of the Second World War, or after the First, in 1919 (Adam Tooze, “Everything You Know About Global Order Is Wrong,” Foreign Policy, January 30, 2019). A more careful statement of the point is found in Otte, op. cit.: The history of international relations is punctured by wars and subsequent post-conflict settlements. One of the chief characteristics of modern history, indeed, is the attempt to establish a lasting peace settlement after the last great war so that it really would end war. But whatever lofty ideals it expresses, the termination of any war, the manner of it and its substantive arrangements, reflects the power relationships of that moment. It crystallizes and preserves them.

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It reorders hierarchies and regulates, often in considerable detail, future relations between the victorious and the vanquished. The more far-sighted settlements were those that did not exclude the defeated powers, but offered them the prospect of eventual redemption and reintegration. And they tended to be the more durable ones. None of them, however, has proved permanent. At some point, all post-war periods have come to a close. No new order, whether regional or indeed global, has survived for longer than several decades. Power, after all, is the amorphous essence of politics, and conflict is inherent in history. Ultimately, its destructive potential overwhelms all efforts to tame or contain it through rules-based structures. The challenge is to prevent their complete destruction. Another appealing chronology is offered by the writer, Derek Leebaert: “…after World War II, the Americans struggled mightily to build upon remnants of liberal international arrangements that were a bequest of the latter nineteenth century…. The order that was achieved really didn’t arrive until the end of the 1950s” (Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945–1957 [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018], 510). 18. Or not. See Niall Ferguson, “Despite the Discord, the G20 Nations Are Still Dancing to America’s Tune,” Sunday Times, December 2, 2018, essays 9 and 25; and Kenneth Weisbrode, “Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Amazing and Grim Prophecy,” History News Network, October 4, 2016. 19. We make this observational point as two part-time pundits. There is an abundant social science literature on the interrelationship or “entanglement,” to use Robert Putnam’s familiar term, of domestic and foreign affairs, and its effects on international relations—which we do not mean to denigrate or dismiss (Robert D. Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games,” International Organization 42, no. 3 [Summer 1988]: 427–60). See also the introduction to Chapter 3. 20.  Cf. Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder (New York: Sentinel, 2014); Zbigniew Brzezinski, Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower (New York: Basic Books, 2007); and Kenneth Weisbrode, “‘Long War’ Label Sends Wrong Messages to the Enemy” (letter to the editor), Financial Times, February 17, 2006. 21. Kenneth Weisbrode, “Iraq, Mexico and the Whims of History,” Financial Times, August 23, 2007. 22. Some of these distinctions, including a useful restatement of the one between decline and retreat, may be found in Philip Zelikow’s review of Paul K. MacDonald and Joseph M. Parent, Twilight of the Titans: Great Power

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Decline and Retrenchment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018) in H-Diplo, Review Essay 47 (February 1, 2019). See also Chapter 3. 23.  We paraphrase the aphorism ascribed to Georg Schwarzenberger: “Hegemony is imperialism with good manners.” See also Andrew J. Bacevich, “Donald Trump’s Ugly, Myth-Busting Presidency,” Nation, April 8, 2019, and essay 24. 24. From his Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987). Cf. Christopher A. Preble, “Adapting to American Decline,” New York Times, April 21, 2018. 25. Carl Levy and Mark Roseman, eds., Three Postwar Eras in Comparison: Western Europe 1918–1945–1989 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002); Anatol Lieven, “Western Nations Are Repeating the Mistakes of 1914,” National Interest, December 22, 2018. 26. Jonathan Sperber, “The Failed Promises of 1989”; Kenneth Weisbrode, “Globalization, Terror: Get Away from a West Suffering Historical Amnesia,” US News and World Report, January 12, 2009. 27. Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967 [1964]), 20; Kenneth Weisbrode, “Punctuating History,” American Interest, March 1, 2009. 28. Ernest R. May, The “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York: The Free Press, 1986). 29.  A good statement on the need for such an adjustment is found in Obama’s final speech to the UN General Assembly, September 20, 2016. 30. See Ernest R. May, “When Government Writes History,” New Republic, May 23, 2005. 31. We do not discount the possibility that such itinerancy may be part of a clever strategy to limit or preempt “overextension” around the world and to put in place by default the kind of pro-regional policy we advocate, but we consider it very unlikely, as we show in Part II. 32. Our collaboration began with two conferences in 1998 and an edited report: James E. Goodby, Tomohisa Sakanaka, et al., Building an AsiaPacific Security Community: The Role of Nuclear Weapons (Washington, DC: Atlantic Council of the United States and the Research Institute for Peace and Security, 1999). 33.  Christopher Schaefer, “Civilizing Sentiments: The Unlikely Career of William Pfaff,” Commonweal, September 4, 2018. 34. Because of space constraints we have not reproduced a number of additional, related essays we wrote during these years, and cite them in the

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23

notes where relevant. We have also included single-authored essays in this collection for the insight they may give into our individual thinking as it evolved vis-à-vis the co-authored essays, and direct readers to the list of attributions at the end of this volume, which identify one or another of us as the author of essays appearing here that we did not write together.

CHAPTER 2

Global Challenges

Globalization, a term that entered into broad use in the 1990s to describe multiple phenomena affecting and interpenetrating various parts of the world with the perception that the world itself had become more uniform or “smaller,” was, at the same time, the source and the target of instability. The pace, scope, and complexity of globalization have offset the material prosperity it has brought to many people. Familiarity need not always breed contempt, but during the past twenty years, globalization and globality—a global consciousness—have appeared almost as a sword of Damocles over the ability of nations to govern themselves separately and in concert. Global governance is the main challenge of our era (essay 9). Demography suggests its magnitude. The world’s population, estimated to be around 10 billion by 2050, will grow the most in Africa and Asia: India’s will probably be the world’s largest, at about 1.7 billion, followed by China, whose fertility rate is estimated to decline, along with that of its East Asian neighbors: Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea. The countries with the highest fertility rates are all in Africa.1 These demographic trends do not necessarily correspond to a shift in political and economic power, although that also appears likely. They do suggest a mounting challenge to the legitimacy of a Western-led global order, from without as well as from within. The challenge relates to the ways and means of governance—its institutions, laws, and norms—and to the political understandings © The Author(s) 2020 J. E. Goodby and K. Weisbrode, Practical Lessons from US Foreign Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27312-5_2

25

26  J. E. GOODBY AND K. WEISBRODE

and relationships that accompany and underwrite them (essay 5). Statecraft over time has evolved methods to align the former with the latter. One method has been collective or common management, starting with security. The rule behind this method has been that aloofness or self-imposed isolation from the problems and challenges in other parts of the world is a tempting but usually ineffective response. This is not to say that any one set of nations carries the burden for governing the rest of the world, or that it is desirable for one power or group of powers to assume such a burden. Historians and other students of politics may debate whether such imperial habits are endemic to human civilization, but the principal lesson of the twentieth century—the central principle of its Western-led statecraft—was that governance must be both collective and reasonably democratic, that is to say, legitimate, in order to possess any real degree of success.2 That collective principle has gone out of fashion (essays 1 and 4). “Common management has so far been honoured as much in the breach as in the observance and, in consequence, has bred limited expectations,” François Duchêne wrote back in 1994. “Moreover, unilateral or oligarchic definitions of the general interest lack legitimacy…. Can one carry international cooperation very far without rules to ensure decisionmaking in the service of common goals? As the world shrinks relative to the growth of human power, the question of the ‘common management of common problems’ comes to roost ever nearer home.”3 Nearer home, the American reaction to most global challenges since the 1990s has been bifurcated: can-do rhetoric accompanied genuine, albeit difficult, commitment in action. From the management of climate change to population control to disease eradication to economic development to numerous other areas, Americans, both in and out of government, have made determined, important, and persistent contributions. But in the common management of global security, the American record of the past twenty years is imperfect and incomplete. The passing of the Cold War, as already stated, infected American statecraft with a curious political myopia, perhaps amnesia, which saw leaders confuse, conflate, or otherwise fail to distinguish between alliances and allies (as well as partners—essays 2 and 4); strategy, geopolitics, and ideology (essay 2); the means and ends of human freedom (essays 8 and 11); the quantity and the quality of power (essay 1); and the nature and nurture of fear and confidence (essay 7). Myopia is not always the easiest condition to diagnose and correct. Here it appears to have come from a rough combination of the extent of global change with a muddled and overly ideological conception of

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the “unipolar moment.” The verdict on all this as seen from 2019 is of a great opportunity squandered, and the reader will find here that this was our view to some extent all along (essays 1, 9, and 11). To this parade of disappointments one could add the diminishing investment in the primary human agents of American diplomacy and statecraft—its diplomats and other public servants (essay 13), whose own priorities and talents have often been squandered as much by neglect as by too much faith in particular tools and instruments (essay 12). Their condition, which some people might describe as akin to rot, had become so dire that numerous diplomats—who are meant to be the most discreet of public servants—began to speak out publicly against the “tragic saga of the Trump administration.”4 The Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, even issued a public plea for the American people to remain committed to global engagement and leadership, noting that “it’s possible to have [a] vacuum in nature but not in international relations.”5 Perhaps nowhere is that vacuum more palpable than in the once rarefied realm of nuclear arms control. Although we were hardly sanguine about the future of arms control, we never predicted that Mikhail Gorbachev and George Shultz, among others, would announce in 2018 the onset of a “new nuclear arms race.”6 With the suspension of adherence to the INF Treaty by both Russia and the United States in 2019 and the likely failure to renew the New START treaty in 2021, the world may face the first moment since the 1950s in which no strategic arms limitation agreement is in place at all between any of the world’s nuclear powers (essay 14). Europe may now rejoin the Middle East, Northeast Asia, and South Asia as regions where nuclear arms and ballistic m ­ issiles must be factored in to the planning and possible outbreak of conflict. This is a far cry from the moment in the mid-1990s when some 85 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenals were in the process of being destroyed and when it appeared possible that the world’s nuclear powers might join together to initiate a multilateral process leading to the total elimination of nuclear arsenals. In truth, the record is mixed. The Clinton administration brought about the ratification of a START II treaty that it inherited from its predecessor, but the treaty never entered into force, the victim of George W. Bush’s withdrawal, over Vladimir Putin’s strong objections, from the US-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which had helped stabilize the nuclear competition since 1972. The Bush administration

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negotiated an interim agreement called SORT, and the Obama administration negotiated and saw ratified a START successor treaty (“New START”) in place of START II, from which Russia had withdrawn. So, too, did the Obama administration expend great energies in a nuclear agreement with Iran—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—that promised to halt that nation’s attempts to become a nuclear weapon state. However, the JCPOA was abandoned, at least by the United States, soon after Donald Trump took office. The Clinton administration also failed to anticipate the testing of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan in 1998, and the Bush administration, following detection of a concealed North Korean uranium enrichment facility, walked away from its predecessor’s partial success in containing the North Korea nuclear program, which resumed and resulted in that country joining the eight other powers possessing nuclear weapons. In both Northeast Asia and the Middle East it may be only a matter of time before other powers follow a similar course of action, raising even further the possibility of a global proliferation of such weapons and associated technologies (essays 6 and 10).7 Has the world really reached the “end of a nuclear era” (essay 14)? It is not impossible to reverse course, even at this late stage.8 But the signs are that no matter what progress is made from now on, a return to the place the world was in during the mid-1990s will not happen any time soon. Nuclear weapons arsenals are being modernized and expanded; warfighting doctrines reportedly are being modified to contemplate the use of tactical nuclear weapons; missile and other delivery systems are also advancing apace. Uncontrolled by treaties and by all the verification and confidence-building measures that accompany them, nuclear modernization programs have clearly called into the question the principle proclaimed by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in 1985 that a nuclear war can never be won and therefore must never be fought. Whatever their declared purpose, the obvious, rational implication of any rapidly modernizing weapons program is that somebody somewhere probably intends to use such weapons with the aim of prevailing or at least avoiding defeat in a military conflict.9 Several of the essays that appear in later chapters discuss ways to resume a viable path of arms control, especially in Northeast Asia. For now it suffices to underscore the critical basis for such a path there and elsewhere: that arms control be considered not as an end in itself or as a substitute for political understandings, but as a means of contributing to the creation of an international order, and, in the apt description of

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Eugene Rumer, “as a tool for managing the arms race, as a platform for communications…, and as a barometer of not only… bilateral relations but also the overall global stability and security environment…”10 The failure since the 1990s to seize the opportunities for cooperation, including in nuclear disarmament, undermined the ability of states to generate support for practical steps in building a viable international order based on cooperation in confronting existential challenges facing humanity. This failure, combined with ineffective policies to adapt domestically to technological change, helped to discredit the idea of global economic integration as well. Although nations have taken steps independently of one another to deal with new challenges, for the most part in recent years they have failed to do so in unison as part of an effort to build a global commons. That failure was not inevitable but it has enabled two senior aides to Donald Trump to take pride in declaring that “the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” In fact, “rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs,” they “embrace it.”11 This chapter begins with an alternative, more commonly held view (essay 1), echoed by another columnist, Daniel W. Drezner: “The… problem is that the ‘embrace’ of a Hobbesian vision of the world by the most powerful country in the world pretty much guarantees Hobbesian reciprocity by everyone else…. policymakers must always be prepared to cope with rivals and adversaries who might exploit the absence of global governance to do what they want. But this is an insane way to approach countries that have been longstanding allies.”12 Hobbesian tendencies have been present in American foreign policy thinking for some time. How many of them were preexisting conditions of the body politic, and how many were stimulated (or resurrected) in response to the mounting and sometimes daunting challenges of globalization, is a question we are not now prepared to answer with certainty but we hope that future historians will attempt to do so. Future historians also might look to other moments when a once preeminent world power succumbed to its worst, most insular, instincts. “In 1900 the British Empire covered two-thirds of the planet, the City of London reigned supreme, and Britain both imported and exported more than any other country,” The Economist’s Bagehot columnist recalled. “Today Britain is a shadow of its former self: inward-looking and anxiety ridden, stagnant and expensive, split down the middle and fearful of the future…. Relative decline is threatening to turn into absolute decline…. Public debate is marinated in despair.”13 The essays in subsequent

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chapters, as well as essay 9 in this one, suggest that decline (and the obsession with it) is not, or need not be, synonymous with a retreat from global power and responsibility. However, retreat is examined here not as a policy response but instead as a symptom or condition of the breakdown of global order. The United States has scaled back its international commitments several times—the 1930s and the 1970s, for example—only to reverse course and march forward when the need arose. But as the world becomes more interconnected, and other powers assume greater roles in managing global affairs, such reversals are likely to be more difficult. The old adage, “if you’re not at the table, you’re on it,” comes to mind here as a counter-charge to the Hobbesian who, in our view, takes an approach to the complexities of our global era that is self-defeating and prophecy-fulfilling, hardly a vision where America’s can-do spirit would feel at home.

1. We’re All Powerful and All Alone (1999) However they turn out, the events in the Balkans of the past days signify more than the latest challenge for NATO or the American doctrine of intervention. They signify something much greater. For better or worse, they close the curtain on that brief period of optimism known as the post-Cold War. Accustomed since 1991 to saying that we were living through a period of historical limbo, we can now be fairly sure that the United States has entered a distinctly new phase in its global relations. We cannot be sure that it bodes well for us or for the rest of the world. All three world wars of the 20th century-including the Cold Warbrought political and economic benefits to the United States that were well worth the sacrifices made by its citizens during the time of conflict. American peace and prosperity were seen by a majority of leaders, both at home and abroad, as complementary to that of other nations whose citizens joined with ours in pursuit of common goals. That pattern of consensus now appears to be over for years to come. Nobody has defined tangible goals today beyond vague, moral judgments. The world as a result is now bifurcating along a dangerous and apparently irreversible line—with or against the United States. Important countries such as China and Russia, however harsh their rhetoric, may show restraint in their opposition to US objectives. But there will come a day when restraint no longer will coincide with

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self-interest. Smaller states, many that we now call our allies, will quickly reevaluate priorities depending on geopolitical proximity and exposure to regional threats. Without strategic statesmanship, the time is not too far off when the United States might face a hostile world, perhaps united against it at every corner. This outcome would be particularly ironic and sad if it resulted from frustration with and reaction to American means in spite of widespread agreement over ends. Is a fortress America that farfetched? Fifty years ago when the plans for an Atlantic alliance were brought to fruition, the architects of NATO thought according to national patterns. The French proposed satellite arrangements much like the Paris Metro or the French colonial system. The British preferred concentric circles, as their own colonial rule or careful urban planning would suggest. It was curious then that nobody really asked about the American geopolitical image. What did it look like? The answer is so obvious that it was taken for granted: the frontier. Americans draw a line—with us on one side and our adversaries on the other. Drawing lines or building fences can be a deadly mistake in a world without a common threat or purpose. Impressive military tactics and deft diplomacy can only postpone the inevitable consequences of conceptual inadequacy at the core. To preserve itself as the preeminent world power, the United States must hone subtle necessities to induce its friends and sophisticated means to isolate its enemies. We can only hope our friends and enemies—both present and future—allow us the time to do so.

2. US Must Avoid Temptation to Shift Priorities Toward Asia (2001) The trajectory of a new foreign policy never is easy to predict, but recent hints suggest the administration of US President George W. Bush may be embarking on a serious, and potentially dangerous, course—back to the traditional Asia-first foreign policy of the Republican Party. From the late 19th until the mid-20th century, Republicans were considered less Eurocentric than Democrats, despite their popular association with Wall Street and dollar diplomacy. On balance, this perception survived World War II, when some Republicans argued for prioritizing the struggle against Japan. It became more acute during the battle between Gen. Douglas MacArthur and President Harry Truman over war aims in Korea, when the State

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Department, under Dean Acheson, consistently subordinated US interests in Asia to those in Europe, and rejected (or at least limited) the popular, Republican belief that America’s natural destiny was across the Pacific. After the Korean War, Asia-first strategists remained strong in the Republican Party, but were more narrowly identified then as the China lobby, the highly influential backers of the Chiang Kai-shek regime in Taiwan. President Dwight Eisenhower, however, was no “Asia-firster.” He forged a bipartisan, Atlanticist policy that lasted through the end of the century. Since then the Asia-firsters on balance have been rather quiet. Though critics in both parties occasionally accused Washington of paying too little attention to Asia, few charged that there had been too much. This soon may change. In February, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered a major review, to include everything from the nature of future threats to the structure and composition of the US arsenal. In the middle of March he briefed Bush on its findings. Though the review has not been released to the public, the main arguments have circulated widely in the press. These reports cite a shift in US priorities toward Asia, fewer foreign bases, longer-range vehicles of power projection, which notably excludes the Air Force’s F-22, and fewer traditional weapon systems for the Army and Navy, namely heavy tanks and aircraft carriers. The new emphasis will be on smaller, more mobile forces that perform independently over greater distances. On the surface, this makes a great deal of sense. The US military needs to be able to fight and win the next war, wherever it takes place. Rumsfeld seems convinced that it will happen in Asia. Thus, much of the review’s rationale also is based on a future military threat from China. The first problem with this rationale is its tendency to provide fodder to political groups committed to hostile policies toward China, or to those enamored with overly symbolic and self-indulgent demonstrations of US strength. They may use the review to spearhead a diplomatic transformation far more consequential than its Pentagon authors probably intend. Combined with a more parsimonious attitude toward foreign commitments in general, and toward those in Europe in particular, this shift likely would diminish resources for NATO and, paradoxically, reduce ground troops in Asia as well.

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The impact on US alliances and US security as a whole would be considerable. The second, related problem comes from the risk the shift poses to US interests outside Asia. Barring a new war in Korea, the biggest headaches in the next 10 to 15 years will come from the Middle East, not East Asia. The usual threats—precarious oil supplies, missile proliferation and anti-Western militancy—will persist and probably worsen. At the same time, an important strategic realignment will demand a sophisticated US response: Iran will re-emerge as the major regional power, perhaps the first among several second-tier nuclear powers with their own longer-range capacities. The conventional forces that pose only a moderate threat to US interests in this region soon will be a thing of the past. A strong American presence in Europe is critical to adjust to this environment and protect the security of both Europeans and Americans. It is not clear how this can proceed if the United States dramatically shifts its focus to East Asia while closing bases, withdrawing troops and radically overhauling its military arsenal. Access arrangements, such as the one the United States has with Singapore, are no substitute for forward deployments. Rejecting the traditional ends and means of deployments in the name of technological change sets defense priorities against diplomatic ones. Until the United States can perfect the ability to defend itself anywhere, anytime, its security will depend on political alliances that require a strong forward presence. NATO will die a quick death if the US commitment recedes as the alliance takes on new members; US relations with Asian allies, namely Japan and [South] Korea, will be strained severely if injected with a more acute, anti-China vocation. There also is serious doubt about whether any of America’s current allies could adapt their own militaries in time to work effectively with the vastly more advanced US arsenal envisioned by Rumsfeld’s review. All of this, claim the Asia-firsters, is secondary to the coming conflict with China. But today’s China is not the old Soviet Union. A powerful China in Asia would not pose a direct threat to the United States, provided China respects the sovereignty of its larger neighbors. In order to ensure that it does, the United States should maintain its troop strength in Asia, either in Japan or in a reunified Korea (after leaving Japan fully capable of defending itself).

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Meanwhile, the US response to Chinese assertion should continue to be one of accommodation. The model should be British reconciliation with a rambunctious United States in the Western Hemisphere in the late 19th century, not the US-Japan falling out in the 1930s, or the British and French handling of Germany in the 1890s The famous Chinese militarist, Marshal Ye Jianying, once gave us some good advice for winning the Cold War: “Draw the Russians out on a limb, then stand back and watch it break.” The Bush administration should keep that in mind as it ponders military reform. There is more to this than being able to win the next war. Also at stake is the entire worldwide framework of US interests and alliances that keeps war from starting in the first place. These broader aspects may be overlooked amid the melee over procurement budgets, congressional prerogatives and interservice rivalries that will erupt once Rumsfeld translates the review into specific directives. Before that showdown begins, the Bush administration needs to present a clear picture of US interests worldwide, and dispel the idea that it favors Asia to Europe. A more balanced approach to US security should prevail over futuristic certainties. Atlanticism (with a strong Pacific component) has served this country well for more than 50 years. To replace it with an Asia-first policy (with a weak Atlantic component) would be premature. The Bush administration should resist that temptation, and let MacArthur rest in peace.

3. Bush Should Seize His Chance to Recast US Ties with China (2001) As President George W. Bush prepares for his first official trip to Asia next month he will have an opportunity to put relations between the United States and China on a new footing. The devastating attacks on New York and Washington have made this even more necessary by highlighting the two countries’ common interest in combating terrorism and the need for strong cooperation with the most populous, and potentially the most powerful, nation in Asia. In recasting US-China relations, Mr. Bush will have to correct the implications of what his administration has done to portray China as the successor to the Soviet Union as the chief global adversary of America. For too long we have been told that China is a strategic

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competitor determined to counter US interests in the Asia-Pacific in order to advance its own regional, or even global, ambitions. In light of more pressing threats to US security, this view appears exaggerated and unproductive. It is now clear that we need a China that opposes terrorism and supports stability both in Asia and elsewhere, not a China that sees itself as the target of a US technological and military build-up. This should be possible, but only if the Bush administration abandons its presumption of inevitable conflict with China. There are strong precedents among Mr. Bush’s Republican forebears for such a shift. The early hawkishness of the Eisenhower and Reagan administrations was eventually eclipsed in both cases by remarkably farsighted and conciliatory diplomacy. Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford also formulated creative policies that emphasized order over ideology and opportunity over rivalry. These were not wide-eyed idealists. Neither were the post-World War II architects of peace like Jean Monnet, Konrad Adenauer or Robert Schuman, who laid the basis for the European Union. They were thoughtful, far-seeing statesmen who knew from experience the value of leaving the door to cooperation wide open. Today’s leaders have a great deal more freedom to build the bases for a similar peace in Asia. But first Mr. Bush will need to set aside talk of power politics and propose a program of confidence-building measures to be pursued step by step with China. First among these should be joint action against terrorism, including more extensive intelligence sharing and field collaboration. This should be linked to broader efforts to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction which many fear will be the next generation in the terrorist arsenal as well as joint initiatives for stability in South Asia. In addition, the two nations should resume earlier cooperation on the Korean peninsula and explore a joint program for ballistic missile early warning akin to the one the United States has pursued with Russia. The United States and China should agree to prevent dangerous military activities and incidents at sea. If the United States could reach similar agreements with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, there is no reason why it should not be able to do so now with China. Finally, arms control talks to reduce the missile threat against Taiwan should begin in earnest. They should be coupled with understandings about ballistic missile defense which take into account China’s deep

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concerns over the likely US abrogation of its Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia. Progress in these areas will be very difficult because of Chinese suspicions of the United States and the influence of China’s own hard-liners, particularly their insistence that separatism in Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan is a form of terrorism. But serious engagement with China on security measures is well overdue, and need not be vitiated by more fundamental differences. Engagement does not mean asking Beijing for favors or appeasing Chinese aggression. It means developing a realistic relationship between China and the United States, and between China and its neighbors, so that an armed balance of power in Asia may some day no longer be necessary. A genuine security community based on pragmatic responses to the threats we share would better serve the interests of the United States and Asia.

4. US Needs Alliances, Not Short-Term Allies (2002) Concerns over American unilateralism have receded over the last few weeks as the Bush administration and the president himself have gradually begun to say positive things about the need for allies to accomplish US aims in the Middle East. Few proponents of war against Iraq or any other evil regime now assert in principle that the United States should act by itself or with just one or two coalition partners. Polls show that a wide majority of Americans also reject “going it alone.” The shift toward a greater concern for allies is a positive one; it has warmed the heart of the multilateralist backers of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in the administration and in the media. However, the shift has overlooked a critical distinction. Allies are not the same things as alliances. The latter subject has barely been mentioned in the administration’s public pronouncements. Aside from a bow to the importance of institutions such as NATO, there is no hint in the recently released National Security Strategy of the United States that alliances must play a central role in establishing a democratic peace or that the US is part of those alliance systems. It speaks of allies and alliances in a single, identical breath. Today’s situational, short-term thinking presumes an automatic link between friendly allies and stable regional environments. It is much more

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akin to the mind of Cardinal Richelieu or Otto von Bismarck than to the ways of the American and European democratic statesmen who created NATO and the European Community. International diplomacy has evolved considerably during the last half-century, mainly through the redefinition of an alliance as something more than a temporary meeting of the minds and a pledge to work together. The United States’ and the world’s most successful 20th century military alliances—NATO and the US-Japan and US-Korea alliances—were institutional as well as political. They were built on a sustained and deepening system of cooperation, across many levels and at high frequency, over many years. The result has been a far more stable international environment made possible by the inherent trust that has emerged from working together so often for so long. For some reason both the second Clinton and now the Bush administrations have come to discard this very American reconception of alliance organizations in favor of the traditional, Old World approach: temporary allies of convenience rather than institutionalized cooperation, or what many have come to call the promotion of nascent “security communities.” At the local level we might consider the distinction as one between well-armed and adaptable police states and inherently safe neighborhoods. The key task for the Bush administration is to convince current and potential allies that such organizations are made up of more than thin spokes emanating from an American hub with the sole aim of nipping hostile threats in the bud. The absence of strong alliance structures means that allies will require ever greater short-term incentives to support such aims and will be ever more likely to defect or to seek alternatives to complying with US demands. To their vast credit, the statesmen of the 20th century realized that the condition of “free security” for the United States had gone the way of the clipper ship. Like it or not, the world had grown interdependent; rather than fight that condition, these statesmen sought to make it work in favor of US (and, it may be argued, world) interests. President Bush’s oft-mentioned “balance of power that favors freedom” seems to support that mission in principle. Yet if the United States discards the form of interdependent, institutional alliances for something more ad hoc and temporary, the glue of international stability may soon dissolve.

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Increasingly, Bush’s vision will be viewed as a balance of power that favors US interests against all others. And in this condition no American will be free of foreign dangers, or fear. Let us not forget all that we have learned since 1945 about the value of alliances as well as allies. It is not too late to put things back on the right track.

5. Thank the Friends: Doing America’s Work at the UN (2002) American impatience with proceedings in the UN Security Council has been evident for weeks. As the debate over the US-British Iraq resolution entered its final stage, the French and the Russians continued to resist language authorizing an attack on Iraq before inspectors had a crack at helping to disarm Saddam Hussein without war. The French worried about a “hidden trigger” in the resolution, language that might allow Washington to claim that the Security Council had already given the green light for an invasion. A US spokesman at the United Nations said “the real hidden trigger is no resolution at all,” thus affirming that the United States would attack Iraq whether the UN authorized it or not. President George W. Bush said as much in Mexico this past Saturday. It has been the work of generations, punctuated by bloody wars, to create even a rudimentary system of international law and widely shared rules of behavior. The special American contribution to international life has been the belief that values and institutions are as important in the external realm as they are at home. Due process, human rights, the sanctity of contracts—all of these ideas and others have underpinned US foreign policy since the American Revolution. America has never been a country which relished the cynical manipulation of power for the purpose of national aggrandizement. That philosophy helped America shape a world in which American values and interests have prospered. The whole process of globalization would founder without a basis in those rules and values. Americans should be thanking friends abroad for resisting the international equivalent of mob rule and lynch law. That is what America has done through most of its history. Instead these friends are mocked by US media pundits and even by the president, who implies that they lack backbone, or have forgotten the dog-eat-dog world in which we live.

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But the friends are only too aware of the true nature of the violent world we all live in. They have lived in it, as nations, longer than America has. The goal of the UN Security Council should be to require the elimination of any and all weapons of mass destruction held by Saddam Hussein’s regime. That is the primary threat to international peace and security. France, Russia and other Security Council members agree on that point. The question is under what conditions would the use of force come into play in enforcing that outcome. There is room for more than one judgment on that, and time to debate it. As with domestic law, a failure to apply due process in international affairs, especially on matters of war or peace, can undermine the law itself. That is why the moral courage of America’s allies should not be scorned, but honored. What they are saying also has direct relevance to the war on terrorism. Terrorists are outlaws by definition and therefore not bound by rules. But the laws that they violate were created by governments. Upholding the rule of law among nations and within nations is fundamental to prosecuting the war against terrorism. Coalitions of governments, as broadly based as possible, are essential to winning this war. It is not just their military assets that count. What counts is that they are fighting, ultimately, for the rule of law. The advance of civilization and the essence of most religions challenge all of us to a fight to replace the law of the jungle with the rule of law. What a tragedy it would be if America did the right thing militarily in Iraq but set back the cause that Americans have fought for throughout their history. America would have won a battle but lost the war. Americans should take pride in what their friends have done in New York. The United States championed the founding of the United Nations in 1945. It fits with the American conception of world order and universal values. Patience is not much to ask to get the job done right.

6. A Nuclear Arms Race (2003) It is time to admit that Iran will follow North Korea’s example and become a de facto nuclear-weapon state in the absence of a US preventive military attack or a powerful international diplomatic offensive.

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Unilateral US military action against Iran is not in the cards anytime soon, for reasons that the situation in Iraq makes painfully clear. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has said “we never want to do another Iraq,” and that was last summer when the level of optimism over the Iraq occupation was much higher than it is now. Multilateral military action is also out of the question: quite simply, there are no volunteers for that job. Diplomacy is the only recourse, but it must rise to the occasion, and it has not, so far. Iran’s response to the demands of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for greater access to its nuclear facilities has already been more sophisticated than Saddam Hussein’s was to another sort of deadline. A full acceptance of the IAEA’s Oct. 31 deadline for meeting those demands would be a welcome first step. But it will not guarantee the necessary halt to the construction of Iran’s uranium enrichment complexes. Iranian authorities are very unlikely to do that without stronger incentives (or threats) than are now on the table. As for plutonium, Russia is requiring that Iran return the irradiated fuel rods from the reactor Moscow is helping it to build. That would prevent Iran from acquiring bomb-grade plutonium, the other fuel for a nuclear weapon. But a state determined to build a nuclear arsenal could be expected to find ways to circumvent these restrictions as well. The only solution to the problem of nuclear proliferation in Iran must address intentions as well as capabilities. The United States seems to be banking on its European friends to raise the potential costs to Iran of nuclear weaponization, much as it is now relying upon China to stop North Korea’s weapons program. This makes sense, but it is not a complete answer. Pursuit of nuclear weapons is the result of regional insecurity; other players—notably, those closer to home that concern Iran more directly—must be brought into the equation. If Iran joins Israel as a de facto nuclear weapon state, with three other nuclear weapon states—Russia, India and Pakistan—nearby, it is very unlikely that other nations in the vicinity will be able to resist launching or accelerating their own nuclear weapon programs. It is not at all inconceivable that a Middle East with four, five, or six nuclear weapon states—including Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—will be the reality of the early decades of the 21st century.

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Nobody should want that outcome—least of all those who put their trust in a resurrection of the Cold War model of stability. The US-Soviet nuclear standoff was stabilized by very different conditions. The United States and the Soviet Union had no territorial demands against each other and their military forces never engaged in large-scale direct combat with each other. That is not the case in the Middle East. Far from it. More to the point, a nuclear balance of terror in the Middle East is not inevitable. But American diplomacy is doing too little, too late to reverse course along an all-too-orthodox and pedestrian path. Its main flaw is that it is not truly regional in scope. It asks nothing of Israel, or of Pakistan or India. Vague threats are made against the Syrians, whose alleged nuclear aspirations are unlikely to be diminished by last week’s Israeli air attack. Egypt and Saudi Arabia seem not to be on the radar screen in the nuclear field at all. The United States must offer a broader vision of a nuclear-free region. The presence of American troops in the Middle East makes this the time for both creative thinking and decisive action. The moment will not last too long.

7. Bush’s Corrosive Campaign of Fear (2003) After the fall of the Berlin Wall, President George H. W. Bush remarked that American children would no longer have to worry every night about dying in a nuclear war. It was a great achievement: at long last the fourth of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four freedoms—freedom from fear—had been won. This was the result of four decades of commitment by the American people. It happened, of course, only because people in eastern Europe and Russia also decided that they did not want their children to live in constant fear. It is more than a little ironic, then, that fear has become the underlying theme of domestic and foreign policy in the administration of George H.W. Bush’s son. President George W. Bush’s own re-election campaign assumes that Americans are and should be fearful and that safety will be found only in voting Republican. The bottom line has been, and will remain: “You are scared—trust us.” Fear has been used as a basis for curtailing freedom of expression and for questioning legal rights long taken for granted. It has crept into

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political discourse and been used to discredit patriotic public servants. Ronald Reagan’s favourite image, borrowed from an earlier visionary, of America as “a shining city on a hill” has been unnecessarily dimmed by another image: a nation motivated by fear and ready to lash out at any country it defines as the source of a gathering threat. An unrelenting and unending campaign of fear based on the searing images of September 11 2001 will, at the very least, undermine the optimistic spirit that has sustained America’s progress during most of its history. “A long, hard slog” is one thing but, as Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, has pointed out, we have no way to determine whether we are winning or losing the struggle, not to mention to know when it is over. To subordinate every ambition of the American people to combating the disease of terrorism, with no end in sight, would be to hand Osama bin Laden a victory of the first magnitude. Bush himself put it well on November 6: “In the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.” And yet his policy and budget priorities come close to doing that. Fear was omnipresent during the early stages of the cold war. We all knew that the civilised world could be destroyed at any moment but there was always hope that peace would eventually be won. Even though most people assumed the Soviet Union would exist for a very long time, the perception, especially after the Cuban missile crisis, was that the adversarial relationship between the two superpowers was being managed by rational leaders. And that turned out to be true. Today, however, fear seems to be a permanent condition of life. Who can foresee an end to the “war on terrorism” when the administration itself does not hold out that prospect? Most Americans probably expect that, in some form, terrorist acts will remain an element of the human condition forever. Like the war on crime, the war on poverty and the war on disease, the war on terrorism will be with us for a long time to come. But we can reduce the frequency and scale of terrorism, and that is an achievable outcome that the administration rarely mentions. The president, of course, will continue to remind Americans of his finest hour, right after September 11, and do all he can to persuade them that only he will carry the war on terrorism to the enemy. But some opponents of this line of thinking have begun to speak of the corrosive effect a campaign of fear can have on American morale. They have begun to remind us of Roosevelt’s warning against “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat

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into advance.” And they have reminded us of Roosevelt’s four ­freedoms—freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and from fear—understood to be universal, both then and now. Americans still believe in these things. A positive message is what we all need to hear, rather than a message of doom. During the more than two years since September 11, most Americans have become realistic about the threats the country faces. But many have grown weary of the fear-mongering in which this administration indulges. Talk about Iraq as the “central front” of the war on terrorism is rubbish. The central front is here at home and the administration is not doing so well in that department. A commitment to a struggle over the long haul, as President Dwight Eisenhower often reminded us, does not require that the US become a garrison state. Mr. Bush and those seeking his job would all do well to remember it.

8. The Nature of Freedom (2004) Freedom has become the idealistic face of the Bush administration’s rationale for the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. President Bush began the discussion in 2003 when he proposed a corollary to the long-standing description of America as the land of the free. That is true, he said, but freedom is not confined to the American homeland. Indeed, “freedom is not America’s gift to the world. It is God’s gift to humanity.” What does the President’s statement mean for US foreign policy? Is it a call for an American-led crusade? This simple phrase continues to receive loud applause throughout the country. It resonates because Americans believe that all people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” in the words of our Declaration of Independence. But that fact alone means that the idea of freedom as a gift needs quite a bit of qualification. The Declaration of Independence was followed by years of warfare. The Constitution, a document of many articles, was designed to give the country a chance at keeping its freedoms for its citizens. The Founding Fathers believed in natural rights but when asked what the authors of the Constitution had produced, Benjamin Franklin replied, “a government, if you can keep it.”14

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Franklin Roosevelt later reminded us that “freedom cannot be bestowed, it must be achieved” while John F. Kennedy said, “here on earth, God’s work must be our own.” The president’s chief advisors also have spoken of freedom, reminding us that the idea is a many-splendored thing, rooted in the freedom to choose. Vice President Dick Cheney says that freedom means freedom for everybody, referring to rights for gays and lesbians. Condoleezza Rice says freedom must be chosen, referring to the administration’s grand design for the Middle East. And Donald Rumsfeld says freedom is messy, speaking of the wholesale looting that accompanied Iraqi liberation. As a party, the Republicans are advocating not one, but two amendments to the Constitution, one banning abortion, the other gay marriage. Instead of enlarging the freedoms of the American people, as previous amendments have done, the Republican Party wants to restrict them, in line with Bush’s conviction that “there ought to be limits to freedom.” Isaiah Berlin, long ago, saw that freedom meant freedom to and freedom from. There’s the rub, because the two freedoms are often in conflict and reconciling them involves a confrontation of values and priorities. Freedom, then, is an entitlement but one that requires a negotiation, and sometimes armed struggle, to reach fruition. What does the President’s idea of freedom as God’s gift to humanity mean for foreign policy? Should the liberation of Iraq be followed by the liberation of Iran and North Korea? If Bush means what he says, then the answer should be yes. But freedom is a political bargain that, in the end, each people decides for itself. The United States will not be able to impose that bargain on Iraq or on any other nation. The record shows that American attempts to impose democratic institutions to protect everyone’s right to freedom have rarely succeeded. And that leads to a conclusion not much different from what John Quincy Adams said about America’s role in the world: “She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” In today’s interdependent world, most Americans would amend that statement. America is the champion of those democratic nations with whom she is allied. And a “well-wisher” to freedom should make serious but non-military efforts to encourage democratic institutions and to discourage neo-imperialism. But most Americans would agree that it is not America’s divine right or duty to spread freedom at the point of a sword. Ultimately, freedom is a thing to be earned and defended, by each nation and by each citizen, in their own good time and in their own self-chosen way.

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9. America’s Strategic Surrender (2006) Former United States Secretary of State James Baker once reportedly said that the post-Cold War role of the US should be to ‘stack the deck’ during what he anticipated would be a prolonged period of retreat from global dominance. The idea stuck and deserves a closer look now that the second administration of George W. Bush has adopted a less militant tone—in other words, it appears to have rediscovered so-called ‘soft power.’ This may come as a surprise to many who have followed recent foreign policy debates in the US. Budgets, commitments and interventions have exceeded the most cynical expectations of those who questioned Bush’s rhetoric about a humble foreign policy. There is no doubt that the American stick has been big and loud; but so have the carrots. Bush’s 2002 Monterrey speech was the first major step away from post-Cold War parsimony in US aid and assistance to the developing world, pledging a fifty percent increase in development assistance. It reversed in a few minutes a downward trend that Jesse Helms, Newt Gingrich, and Bill Clinton’s White House took a decade to set in motion. Yet, both defenders and critics of the Bush administration’s ostensible return to interventionism, both hard and soft, miss its central point. The aim—to paraphrase a line used by Clinton—has never been to ‘enlarge and expand’ American power per se. Even the most doctrinaire ­neo-conservatives will admit that power wanes after it waxes. Thus America’s ‘grand strategy,’ if it has one, is consistent with Baker’s earlier sentiment: its underlying premise is not interventionist, or even internationalist, but isolationist. It would seek to rule the world in order to refashion regional balances of power temporarily in a manner that best protects US interests during a longer term retreat from globalism. It is, therefore, a fundamentally conservative strategy, not a liberal or reactionary one that embraces change. I The ideology of American isolationism was never pure. Very few Americans, even during the movement’s heyday of the 1930s, took seriously the possibility of separating from the rest of the world. The main thrust of so-called isolationism in reality has always been—in the words of the late Senator Arthur Vandenberg—’insulationist,’ not isolationist.

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The mission of American diplomacy was to insulate the American people and their way of life from foreign danger, not to remain aloof to world events and the facility to travel, trade and invest abroad. Most Americans to this day still want or expect to be shielded by American power but only very few who know about the wider world seek to escape it entirely. One must recall that the public debate in the run up to Pearl Harbor between interventionists and ‘isolationists’—one of the most bitter in American history—was never fully resolved. It was overtaken by events. The isolationists lost, of course, but the alternatives they advocated, namely the neutralist policies associated with the America-first movement, were never buried. Today almost nobody questions the wisdom of entering the ‘good war’ on the side of the Allies. Yet until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a majority of Americans did just that. Franklin Roosevelt probably would have succeeded in taking the nation into another war absent Pearl Harbor although it is difficult to imagine exactly how he would have done so, or what he would have done had Hitler not first declared war on the US. Neither Pearl Harbor nor the war in Europe settled the intellectual debate over the nature and scope of American power. They and the Cold War merely buried it under ‘insulationist’ premises. It is now common to hear that ‘9/11 changed everything,’ notably the sense of American invulnerability. This is a myth, just like invulnerability itself. As searing as the September 11th attack was on the liberal mindset of the 1990s, it did not bury the belief that the American way of life can and should be insulated against external threats. All subsequent foreign policy debates have been about how—never whether—to insulate. II It helps to recall that when Baker allegedly made his statement, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers had been a best seller. The country, or at least the foreign policy elite, seemed obsessed with what was then termed ‘declinism’; that the Soviet Union and not the US proved Kennedy’s point about the risks of imperial overextension was mitigated only partially by the short-lived triumph of 1989. One may assume that Kennedy’s book and its warnings of overextension had some impact on the administration of George W. Bush’s father. His far more cautious foreign policy paid homage to a liberal

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vision in the vague formulation of a New World Order but in reality followed a policy of limited liability in most parts of the world. Other Americans may have been more taken in by the New World rhetoric. The late George F. Kennan captured the spirit of the times when he said in a Congressional hearing that the age of Wilson was finally upon us. But like Woodrow Wilson’s before it, George H.W. Bush’s order was to arrive stillborn. Whether the world was then ready for it is a moot question. The first Bush administration spent most of its time tying ­ up loose ends of the Cold War while failing in large part to do what Baker urged. Its policies touted twentieth century institutions and concepts—the United Nations, Cold War alliances, collective security—but failed to grapple with the forces of twenty-first century global politics— ethnic chauvinism, anti-Western fanaticism, large scale tribal conflict, mass terrorism, Asian nationalism. There is no intrinsic reason why those institutions and concepts could not be renewed or reinvented to deal with the new challenges. But the process has been too slow and timid. The eight years of Bill Clinton, by contrast, saw a good deal of fresh thinking about the new global environment. But that was overtaken by a different kind of myopia, and events: the wars of Yugoslav succession; the integration of the former Warsaw Pact countries into European institutions; the vast growth of the global economy. Each of these challenges was perceived to have emerged sui generis. The Clinton administration failed to construct a coherent, disciplined and comprehensive response to the world. Many parts outside Europe were approached microscopically: the obsessive focus on the Israel-Palestine issue, for example. There was little sense of interconnection beyond the ‘enlarging and expanding’ concept, now joined to the old Gladstonian liberal (or what are generally termed ‘Wilsonian’) ideas of free markets and good governments. Clinton had, as one heard so often at the time, an itinerant foreign policy. In fairness, one could say that Clinton’s heart seemed to be in the right place but he consistently failed to muster the political determination and means to act. The American people sensed the ambivalence and some reacted fiercely to it. A neo-isolationist movement, then led from the Right, promoted the notion that the Clinton administration’s support of fuzzy multilateralism made America more vulnerable by imposing constraints without gaining benefits. Above all, it was open ended. It suffered from the classic shortcoming of liberalism: procedural rather than utopian, it failed to convey a compelling finale.

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This is why the foreign policy of George W. Bush’s first administration was so successful ideologically. It promises a better end—a world free of evil. It restored the basic faith in the protective (‘insulationist’) and enduring role of the federal government. And with its control of Congress, it has been able to provide many more material goods (that is, budgets) than the president’s father or Clinton ever could have done. However, its largesse is a deception. Its purported effort to extend a Pax Americana into the indefinite future is nothing short of fantasy, and its backers know it. In reality, their policy is a deliberate effort to provoke or manipulate other nations into devising ways to secure their regional or global interests that proscribe direct American intervention, either by disfavor or irrelevance. This, in turn, shall serve to reduce the burdens on the US by limiting the global extension (pace Paul Kennedy) of American power. One need only consider the following pairings of events since 2001: (1) derisive rhetoric directed at the leading powers of the European Union: the EU finally gets serious about paying for its own defense modernization, something the Clinton administration had been urging for a decade. (2) The long delay in engaging in serious nuclear talks with North Korea, or at least, promoting a false opposition between bilateral and multilateral arrangements: China emerges as the main partner of both South and North Korea and the most likely eventual sponsor of reunification. (3) A laissez-faire policy toward Israel and the Middle East generally, apart from Iraq (although that had been the aim there, too, following Saddam’s overthrow): animosity throughout the Arab world alongside the steady revival of Iran as the gendarme of the Gulf and Central Asia. Add to this the administration’s fiscal policy, which has raised the prospect—still slight but no longer theoretical—of the dollar someday forfeiting its key currency status. In the words of Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, “The world cannot run indefinitely on the engine of US demand and soaring US current account deficits. If these trends continue for another decade, as some believe possible, US net liabilities will be so large as to make management of the economy hard, at the least, if not close to impossible.” To this one surely must add American global leadership. The correlations of course are suggestive, not conclusive or irreversible. But they indicate the beginning of a process that may ultimately allow the United States to cede primary responsibility for international affairs to the largest regional actors themselves. On reflection, then, this would seem to be a brilliant achievement for an ‘insulationist’-minded administration.

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III The problem, of course, is that ‘grand strategy’ almost always resides in the imagination of the abstract-minded. The real world is far more complex and far more prone to variation than any strategist can outline on paper. That is not to say that daily headlines determine everything. This was the fallacy of the media obsessed Clinton administration. Mastery is usually better than drift. But no administration should seek to master a course of action with a grand deception, or, at the very least, with a blind faith in its ability to calculate outcomes in opposition to the ones it professes to seek. Not only does deception set forces (such as anti-Americanism) into motion beyond the control of even the most skilled Machiavellians, but it also fails to leave behind an institutional framework that can adapt to changing global conditions over time. The apparent logic of pre-emptive retreat is therefore both false and dangerous. Its diagnosis may be correct: that American interests are best served if the regions most critical to its peace and prosperity are peaceful and prosperous themselves, without an automatic reliance on American power. But the assumption that such a happy state of regional self-reliance can evolve through short-term buildups, provocations or neglect only encourages regional rivalries that vitiate the kind of stability America needs. Neither the strategy nor the tactics, in other words, fit the mission. The overriding goal of the post-Cold War world should be to foster in Northeast Asia and the Middle East the type of stable and secure community of nations that the US did so much to cultivate in Europe. These potential communities require cooperative institutions and new mentalities. They, in turn, shall pave the way for a more governable world. Here Baker was correct: American interests are indeed consistent with strong regional security communities which do not require constant American handholding. Someday those interests may be consistent with democratic communities as well. Collective security was once envisioned by Woodrow Wilson and others as a substitute for Machtpolitik. As it took hold, mainly in Europe and the Americas, collective security came to be seen as a more sophisticated way to govern relations among nations, complementing, rather than supplanting, the evolving balance of power. While collective security seeks to stabilize fractious regions with rules, laws and institutions, Machtpolitik places its faith entirely in the application of force. Collective security, of

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course, does not deny the necessity of hard power but it seeks to preserve peace by mobilizing what we now know as soft power. Machtpolitik relies on a far shakier, if more flexible, combination of carrots and sticks. One could argue that all soft power rests upon hard power; it would be hard to deny that. Yet hard power is far less conducive to consensus and, hence, to sustainable peace. Consensus, in turn, requires a great deal more than carrots: namely, trust and predictability, as well as a sense of mutual dependence. To substitute balance of power for community then takes us back to a pre-Wilsonian age in which temporary alliances relied on the periodic imposition of order by force or manipulation. By contrast, a community is meant to last by way of a transformation in the context of international relations so that hard power in its most blatant form becomes less necessary while the application of soft power is increasingly the norm. Today the believers in collective security seem to have withered into a silent minority. It is no surprise then that the current Bush administration has opted for the hard power approach in both Northeast Asia and the Middle East. This has involved a mix of resigned appeasement on the one hand and aggressive intervention on the other. Both seem to have been meant to shock the regional players into new arrangements that do not require the US to be at the center of their politics. That would be consistent with the traditional, self-denying form of American interventionism that aims, in the words of an early twentieth century US governor of the Philippines, to ‘rule this place only so it may be able to rule itself.’ Such logic may apply to the occasional foreign occupation, but hardly to international diplomacy writ large. America neither occupies the entire world nor is destined to rule it absentmindedly. It nevertheless exerts a great deal of influence upon the politics of many countries, both directly and indirectly. It cannot, no matter how hard it pretends, insulate itself or its way of life perfectly from them; and it retreats from its responsible place in the world at its own peril. That is a danger that the maneuverings of a present-day Bismarck can neither dispel nor conceal. A policy of stacking the deck, therefore, may stem from the most patriotic of motives. But it is too clever by half. Its underlying declinism is self-perpetuating and its reliance upon the tools of hard power self-defeating. There should be a balance of power in the world that is sustained by mutual consent or, to paraphrase President Bush, a balance of power that favors freedom and peace. For this the tools of soft power

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are probably far better suited. Otherwise there is nothing strategic about surrender. It is reckless, and will only continue to backfire as we move from the post-Cold War to a truly global era.

10. US Must Take Offensive Against Nuclear Terrorism (2007) It’s only a matter of time. That’s what the experts say when asked whether a terrorist organization might detonate an atom bomb in an American city. The Bush administration has taken several initiatives to defend the country against nuclear terrorism. These measures will help to prevent the theft of uranium and plutonium and to interdict any illicit shipments of nuclear materials or equipment. The recent capture in the Republic of Georgia of a smuggler carrying enriched uranium is a case where cooperative intelligence worked quite well. But we are still playing catch-up. Why? First, the task of preventing the spread of nuclear materials and technology too often is assigned a lower priority than other national goals. Second, we are not aggressively using the full array of diplomatic and security tools available to us in this fight. The consequences are clear to see. While the Bush administration debated whether to negotiate with or strangle North Korea’s government, that country built and tested a nuclear weapon. Pakistan, whose president has escaped two assassination attempts by Islamic extremists, is the home of Abdul Qadeer Khan, who set up an international black market in nuclear materials, equipment and even weapon designs, and used this to help Libya, Iran and North Korea. Pakistan has tested nuclear weapons. The Bush administration perceives that it needs Pakistan’s help in the war on terror. Consequently, nuclear nonproliferation issues must take a back seat in our dealings with that country. India refused to accept the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and tested nuclear weapons, causing Pakistan to do so shortly afterward. Despite the worries of a few “proliferation hawks” in Congress and elsewhere, President Bush negotiated a deal to assist India’s civil nuclear power program. Congress even endorsed a change in US anti-proliferation laws to accommodate India.

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In the case of Iran, the United States missed opportunities after 9/11 to engage with that country on security and other issues. Subsequently, we became bogged down in Iraq on the spurious grounds that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program. Now, according to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, the United States has little leverage to bring to bear in any discussions with Iran. And military options carry grave consequences. Meanwhile, Iran is putting in place the infrastructure needed to build atom bombs. Is all this relevant to preventing a nuclear bomb from being detonated in an American city? North Korea and Iran are not so bent on national suicide as to think of launching a nuclear attack on the United States. India and Pakistan are friends and are likely to remain so. So what’s the problem? In the nuclear field, America has no permanent friends, only permanent interests. We would do well to remember that America once supported Iraq in that country’s war with Iran. Before that, we supported Iran’s aspirations to become a dominant power in the Middle East. From the beginning of the nuclear age, America’s interest has been to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to any other nation, even our closest allies. That is still our interest. We cannot expect that the defensive measures we take to prevent terrorists from infiltrating a nuclear device into our country will succeed indefinitely in a world where more and more nations—some reliable, others less so—acquire the capabilities to build the bomb. Like the levees around New Orleans, sooner or later the rising tide of nuclear weaponry will break through those barriers. To the everlasting credit of all concerned, the Bush administration, and the Clinton administration before it, worked with Russia to improve the security of nuclear materials in Russia and elsewhere. Most, but not all, of these improvements relate to civilian research establishments. However, there are thousands of small, portable, “tactical” nuclear weapons in Russia—presumably in secure military installations scattered around the country—that terrorists would pay millions of dollars to get their hands on. None of these has been touched by any US-Russian agreement. We need an aggressive US policy aimed at denying terrorists the pool of nuclear weapons and related materials from which they can buy or steal the means to destroy an American city. A diplomatic offensive to block nuclear terrorism should not just fix the easier problems. It should

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dry up the most serious potential source of nuclear terror: the weapons that are stockpiled, the new weapons that are being built, and the infrastructure that supports these programs—and not just in Russia. No American anti-proliferation policy can be complete or successful if it does not address this side of the problem. Our offensive against nuclear terrorism should have the highest priority. It should be equipped with all the leverage we can provide it. That’s not the case today. And that’s why the experts can confidently say: It’s only a matter of time.

11. The False Promise of 1989 (2009) Twenty years is not a very long time in history but the fall of the Berlin Wall already seems like another era. The euphoria, confidence and excitement that accompanied that event were overtaken in short order by cynicism, fear and doubt resulting, according to some quarters at least, from American triumphalism. Despite the new leaf that Barack Obama’s election appears to have turned over, it will be a long time before the world hears the United States speaking of itself again as the “indispensable nation” or the American way of life as the harbinger of the end of history. This has also been called the beginning a “new” era of globalization. But 1989 was mainly about Europe. Nobody should forget the tanks and bullets that appeared in Beijing that very same year. In truth, 1989 represented a culmination more than a new departure. It marked the final end of a long European civil war, the third since 1914. To some it was the apotheosis of a very long campaign for continental unity, George H. W. Bush’s “Europe, whole and free.” To many Americans, Bush’s statement rang true. Not only because of their own history of e pluribus unum, but also because the European project—and America’s critical role in it—had much to do with Americans’ sense of themselves as transplanted Europeans, eager to prove to the so-called Old World that it could master its diplomatic ways. But in the end, both Americans and Europeans realized there was much they could teach one another. Nothing like this relationship exists elsewhere in the world, least of all in its most contentious regions. Like the once great powers of Europe, the United States has long played a powerful role in the Middle East and Northeast Asia, going back to the days of the Barbary Pirates

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and Commodore Perry’s Black Ships, but in an itinerant and episodic fashion. Asian civilization does not carry the same cultural significance for most Americans that European civilization once did. An “Asia whole and free” is not a phrase we expect to hear any time soon from an American president. This is a terrible pity because it seems the lessons of the 20th century learned in Europe are bound to be forgotten. Namely, that there is no such thing as a permanent rivalry among nations; that neighbors, whatever the obstacles, can be partners; that zero-sum relationships can be the exception, not the norm; that peace is forged both from the top down and from the bottom up; and that global issues—like the environment, crime, trade—are best handled in a regional framework with institutions that promote good neighborliness while at the same time setting higher standards for others to emulate. For Americans, in particular, a good deal of Europe’s success came down to trusting Europeans and letting them take much of the credit. It may have taken a half-century of immense destruction at the hands of Europeans to transform the above into axioms that few challenge today. But, again, this is mainly the case in Europe and America. The West, as it was once proudly called, has come to seem more and more like an island rather than a beacon. Along its peripheries, even just next door, are frightening echoes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The response of most Europeans and Americans to them has been, sadly, one of limited liability. Most spent the 1990s cultivating their own gardens; so far, much of the following decade has been spent building new walls or in being consumed by the passions of the moment. The world of 2009 is still much freer, more open and more peaceful than the one of a generation ago. But how much longer can this last? As the zeitgeist of 1989 recedes into distant memory, we should do all we can to keep alive the promise it once represented.

12. Diplomacy 2.0 (2010) There is much talk in the air—especially in Britain and the United States—about reinventing diplomacy for the 21st century. Both US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and the Conservative leader, David Cameron, have spoken recently of a new synthesis of defence, diplomacy

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and development, noting that recent American and British foreign policy has placed too much emphasis on the first element at the expense of the latter two. Meanwhile, the European Union has established a new foreign-policy apparatus called the European External Action Service (EEAS), which is meant to represent the common interests of all 27 of the EU’s member states. The lines of authority between the new Euro-diplomats and existing national foreign ministries are still unclear; but the EEAS is, nonetheless, a fact. Similar plans for Asia and elsewhere remain largely on the drawing board; but the members of such organisations as the ASEAN Regional Forum, the African Union and the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation at least are talking more and more seriously about harmonising policies on issues of common interest. Regionalism has moved to the foreground of global politics—except in the US, where the two are seen as antithetical. Clinton has described today’s major global challenge for her country as being the improvement of communication across borders and at all levels of society, evidently everywhere. To this end, her chief policy planner, the Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, has touted the US as the favoured hub of a global network of people, institutions and relationships. But, while America thinks in terms of networks, the rest of the world is busy connecting circuits. Will the twain ever meet? There is no reason why not. Both visions sound appealing and consistent with traditional tenets of international relations, particularly Thomas Jefferson’s desire for “peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations” to which Clinton might add “individuals and groups within and among nations”. Neither individuals nor nations have identical interests, however. Clinton’s global network is already meeting roadblocks, particularly with China. She is finding out that the old ways of doing business—treaties, ambassadors, démarches, alliances and the rest—may be useful after all. Ever since modern diplomacy was invented in Renaissance Italy, states have found it necessary to exchange envoys for the purpose of reaching (or breaking) agreements, whether on parchment or by video conference. This does not appear to have been overtaken by globalisation. Yet we should not deny that technology has had an important effect almost everywhere. Just as the telegraph made it possible to eliminate weeks from the time it took to exchange messages overseas, and the airplane and telephone allowed leaders to interact directly with far greater

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frequency than ever before, today’s technologies will surely continue to alter the basic means of exchange, whether among nations, regions, or supra-regional entities. We should take care, however, not to confuse the means and ends of policy. Better and faster communication is not a valuable end in itself, at least for diplomats. We need only recall the chaotic atmosphere ­during the recent United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen to fear the kind of disordered and disappointing result that can arise from the desire of everyone to be in the room and to be applauded everywhere at once—and to have every means of doing so. If such “global summits” are going to be the principal means of governing in the 21st century, we have real cause for concern. Fortunately, a counter-trend in Copenhagen is also worth noting. Like-minded states, often neighbours, grouped together to pool their leverage: this was notable among some of the smaller and poorer states with the most at stake in addressing climate change. With care, such groupings may become the building blocks, rather than the spoilers, of global consensus. The world has seen such a synthesis before. When, after the first world war, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the advent of the so-called New Diplomacy, whereby secrecy and the balance of power would be replaced by open covenants and collective security, many people regarded such things as the dreams of an idealist preacher. Machtpolitik is indeed alive and well in many parts of the world today. Yet nobody can deny that the ways of diplomacy in 2010 are vastly different from—and arguably superior to—those in 1910, with better results all around. This is not simply due to some iron law of progress. Many valuable elements of the so-called old diplomacy persisted: the alignment of foreign policies with national and regional interests, the preference for the possible over the merely desirable, and the cultivation of what are today called “confidence-building measures”—that is, methods for establishing trust among small groups of professional negotiators, and between them and the people they represent. Those who assume that the obsolescent diplomacy of the 20th ­century—as it is described by today’s global network enthusiasts—was conducted entirely behind closed doors by elites have got their history wrong. We need only read the contemporary press accounts of any major international conference during this period to realise how important various pressure groups—not only the press, but also peace activists,

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bankers, industrialists, labour unions, religious organisations and countless others—were in nearly all of these instances. Indeed, diplomats have long been some of the most proficient social networkers and connectors. And they have long confronted multiple agendas and constituencies, from those clamouring to influence the League of Nations disarmament conferences of the 1930s to those wielding the megaphones in Copenhagen in December. The challenge today is to channel such passions into results. This can be done only by the tried and tested ways of matching advocacy with professionalism, and by nourishing a new generation of international public servants called diplomats. The world needs them and their diplomatic baggage more than ever.

13. US Diplomats: A Vanishing Species? (2010) The news has recently focused on a rare sight: diplomats—in particular, those in the US Foreign Service. With the death of Richard Holbrooke and the continuing WikiLeaks affair, the American people have heard more about this discreet tribe than they have in many years. But do diplomats matter? The career of another recently deceased diplomat, arms control negotiator Maynard Glitman, suggests several reasons why they do. Glitman’s greatest achievement was negotiating the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which, along with the START negotiations developed from President Ronald Reagan’s dramatic summits with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985-86, were important milestones in the end of the Cold War. Moscow and Washington halted their military rivalry with the INF treaty. The two superpowers began the long process of withdrawing their nuclear weapons from the heart of Europe—the Cold War’s main prize. Without this treaty, the eastern bloc’s peaceful 1989 revolutions likely wouldn’t have happened as they did. And the lives of millions people around the world might not have changed so dramatically. Historians have puzzled over the reasons. Was the Soviet Union just bound to collapse, as another US diplomat, George Kennan, predicted a half-century earlier? Was it pushed by Reagan? Sacrificed by Gorbachev? Outspent by the West? Drained by its vassals? All the above? Lost in this story are people such as Glitman, relegated, if they are lucky, to brief footnotes. There were—and are—hundreds like him:

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well-trained, committed, professional masters of the brief and the language of compromise who are able to adapt to almost any setback save one: unwanted publicity. The cult of anonymity among diplomats is powerful. The exception— such as Holbrooke—is uncommon. But even Holbrooke was hardly a household name. Throughout American history, diplomats, when they haven’t been disparaged, have largely been ignored. The sharp contrast with the other principal figure of US foreign ­policy—the soldier—is noteworthy. Most Americans, even after Vietnam, rank the military high among professions. The State Department’s budget is a tiny fraction of the Pentagon’s. The use or threat of force is almost always in the forefront of policymaking in difficult situations. There are professional academies for each of the armed services, as well as advanced war colleges, but there is no official diplomatic academy apart from a career training center, the Foreign Service Institute. And preparation for a diplomatic career can differ from that in the military services. Nobody, for example, would propose naming a significant portion of four-star generals from the ranks of the president’s major campaign contributors. Yet, like most dichotomies of American life, the civil-military split over foreign policy is oversimplified. Soldiers and former soldiers have made some of the best, and worst, diplomats—dating back at least to the late 19th century, when President Ulysses S. Grant named several former generals to foreign posts. One newly minted diplomat seduced the queen of Spain, while another taught the British to play draw poker, thereby relieving them of considerable sums. In the United States, the professional diplomat is a relatively recent invention. The Foreign Service, as we know it, was established in 1924. Like its military counterparts, it received a considerable boost from World War II and the Cold War. For most of the 20th century, diplomats and warriors worked side by side—often interchangeably. But we recognize few diplomats. Frankly, that’s the way most of them prefer it. The stereotype of the diplomat as an Old World, effete appeaser remains lodged in the American cultural mindset. In the Foreign Service, few have fit that description—and some who did had a hard time of it. One infamous figure was Elim O’Shaughnessy, son of a diplomat, raised almost wholly abroad. He failed his department oral entrance

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examinations, reportedly because the examiners regarded him as too un-American in appearance and manners. Taking pity on him, the State Department said he could retake the exam—after a short domestic exile. Elim was ordered to change his ways by working as a manual laborer in the Midwest. He did so, returned and was admitted. Less fortunate were Elim’s fellow laborers who, according to State Department lore, spoke longingly of works by Puccini and Cezanne in between drags from long cigarette holders. The American diplomat, like American power, is a wellspring of paradox. The snooty stereotype is dismissed, but it is also a convenient cloak behind which diplomats hide ability and determination. The extent of political appointments is regretted, and no Foreign Service officer—apart from Dean Rusk, a transfer from the War Department, and Lawrence Eagleburger, a short-term replacement—has ever become secretary of state. Yet the regular influx of high-powered appointees offers the US Foreign Service opportunities few other bureaucracies possess. Clever, ambitious diplomats have not hesitated to make the most of the ­system—or, as Holbrooke did, to perpetuate it. Representatives of a democracy, drawn from nearly all social backgrounds, American diplomats nonetheless prize an elite hierarchy of talent that in the past century earned them status and distinction among Europeans, who had long dominated this profession. Inheritors of an individualist culture, Americans have emerged as among the most adept team players. In their own way, these practitioners of the most “un-American” of vocations have been among the truest believers in American exceptionalism, though few would ever use that term. Few nations in history have risen so far and so fast as the United States. Historians of the so-called American empire tell us that this is due to “splendid isolation,” great natural and human resources, a superior economic system, the folly of rivals, collective virtue and a tough-as-nails, can-do tradition. Each account, despite the country’s shortcomings—a few of them costly—contains elements of truth. But complementing them all have been diplomats—for the most part sensible and unobtrusive observers, repairmen, mouthpieces, peacekeepers and networkers par excellence. Long may they live and prosper. Discreetly.

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14. End of a Nuclear Era (2013) President Barack Obama’s cancellation of his planned meeting next month with President Vladimir Putin was followed by a statement at his Aug. 9 press conference regarding a “pause” to “reassess where it is that Russia is going.” The president had hoped that before his term ended US and Russian nuclear weapons could be limited to ceilings of about 1,000 warheads for each country. That was going to be hard to do even without a pause, given disputes over US ballistic-missile defense programs and Russian short-range nuclear weapons. Now the odds are against any US-Russian treaty calling for deeper reductions than those already achieved in the 2011 New Start treaty during the remaining years of the Obama administration. It is a lost opportunity, but does it matter? Mutual assured destruction, the essence of US deterrence policy during the Cold War, remains a condition of life in the 21st century. It will remain so for as long as thousands of nuclear weapons continue to exist. Ninety percent of those nuclear warheads are held by the United States and Russia. So, yes, that lost opportunity makes a difference. In his April 2009 speech in Prague, President Obama laid out an agenda that included the vision of a world without nuclear weapons, a dream of Ronald Reagan, who successfully made that goal one of his major policy interests. In recent years, that vision and the steps necessary to make it happen have had powerful advocates from both political parties. Today’s global stockpiles of nuclear weapons are less than one-third of what they were in 1986. But negotiations with Russia have stalled and now a “pause” is in effect. The fact is, the era of US-Soviet/Russian negotiations as the main driver of reducing nuclear threats is nearly at its end, in any case. For many years, the conventional wisdom has been that after the United States and Russia reduced their holdings to 1,000 warheads each, other nations that possessed nuclear weapons must join in nuclear restrictions. Political and security considerations alike suggest that US and Russian nuclear reductions will stop, somewhere between 1,000 to 1,500 warheads apiece, if other states possessing nuclear weapons are not involved in some way. It is comforting to think that US-Russian negotiations might have helped us “move beyond Cold War nuclear postures,” as the president said recently in Berlin, but creating a new global security commons that

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reflects current realities means that the concerns and outlooks of other nations will have to be an important part of the process. The pause in serious US-Russian negotiations can be put to good use. Creating a new nuclear security paradigm is not an easy task. Just as Obama called for a pivot to Asia in US defense thinking, so must nuclear diplomacy also shift to Asia. Threats of nuclear war all lie in an arc of Asia, running from Iran in the West to the Koreas in the East. For this reason among many, China is an indispensable strategic partner for the United States if Asia-based threats are to be successfully managed. Intensifying talks on nuclear issues with China and the other permanent members of the UN Security Council is in order. The aim should be to build a coalition that could work together to create the conditions for a world where means other than nuclear devastation provide security assurances. A joint enterprise like this is something the administration could begin to construct while relations with Russia are being mended. Such a coalition could devise and carry out a coordinated program of actions that would reinforce US-Russian bilateral efforts. It would have a better chance than current mechanisms of engaging the nations that have resisted nuclear constraints. A joint enterprise does not require turning away from US-Russia negotiations, and it certainly does not imply downgrading the ties that have bound together American and its allies. It does mean that a more proactive role must be played by Japan, South Korea, China, India, Pakistan and other Asian nations. It means a greater emphasis on multilateral negotiations that will bring all of the nuclear-armed states, and others, into a common agreement. The Obama administration, and particularly Secretary of State John Kerry, will have their hands full with this agenda, but this is the fate of presidents who intend to make a difference. In recent years, US arms control policies have been overly preoccupied with the tried and true process of negotiating with Russia. It is time to challenge that status quo and link arms control more closely with the national strategy it is supposed to support.

Notes

1. Lucy Westcott, “What the World’s Population Will Look Like in 2050: By the Numbers,” Newsweek, August 25, 2016.

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2. Branko Milanovic has noted that of the over two dozen successor states that emerged from the Warsaw Pact, including the Soviet Union, only three—Albania, Poland, and Estonia—may be regarded as true post-Cold War “successes,” that is, “on the road to becoming part of the rich and (relatively) stable capitalist world…. Many of the other countries are falling behind, and some are so far behind that they cannot aspire to go back to the point where they were when the Wall fell for several decades…” (“For Whom the Wall Fell? A Balance Sheet of the Transition to Capitalism,” Globalist, November 7, 2014). 3. Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence (New York: Norton, 1994), 389. 4. Nancy McEldowney, “How to Work for a President Who Loathes the Civil Service,” Washington Post, January 26, 2018. 5. Eric Schwartz, “An Extraordinary Plea for US Engagement from UN’s Chief,” Huffington Post, June 26, 2017. 6.  “A New Nuclear Arms Race Has Begun,” New York Times, October 25, 2018. See also Mikhail Gorbachev and George P. Shultz, “We Participated in INF Negotiations. Abandoning It Threatens Our Very Existence,” Washington Post, December 4, 2018. 7.  This problem has involved not only adversaries of the United States but also some of its traditional allies and friends. See James E. Goodby and Kenneth Weisbrode, “Brazil Gives the US a Nuclear Headache,” International Herald Tribune, December 31, 2003. 8. Cf. James E. Goodby, “The Test of Leadership,” Washington Times, July 9, 2008. 9. Theodore A. Postol, “US Nuclear Policy Is Undermining Our Safety and National Security,” Nation, December 10, 2014. 10. Eugene Rumer, “A Farewell to Arms… Control,” Carnegie Endowment, April 17, 2018. 11.  H. R. McMaster and Gary D. Cohn, “America First Doesn’t Mean America Alone,” Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2017. See also Michael R. Pompeo, “Restoring the Role of the Nation-State in the Liberal International Order,” German Marshall Fund, Brussels, December 4, 2018: https://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2018/12/287770. htm and essay 45. 12.  Daniel W. Drezner, “The Most Extraordinary Op-Ed of 2017,” Washington Post, June 1, 2017. 13. Bagehot, “Downhill All the Way,” The Economist, July 28, 2018. 14. Usually rendered as “a republic, if you can keep it.”

CHAPTER 3

National Policies

The essays in the previous chapter showed that the United States responded to global challenges during the past twenty years in a number of ways: with rhetoric and actions suggesting a retreat from international responsibilities, but also, and probably more often, with a strident, even arrogant, unilateralism. What policies did unilateralism lead to? How were they pursued? How well were they aligned with the challenges the country faced? How consistent were they? How successful? This chapter discusses a number of policies, starting with the first essay we authored together (essay 15). It proposed a three-part division of national interests: urgent (“vital”), important (“strategic”), and desirable (“lesser”).1 Deciding what challenges, and therefore what policies, fit is subjective, so we set out what we hoped were a few general standards to guide policymakers, first among which is an appreciation of regional realities, which will appear in more detail in Chapters 4 and 5. This chapter meanwhile picks up from Chapter 2, which illustrated how policymakers confused an appreciation for such realties with bias toward some regions over others (e.g., in essays 2 and 11), and with a conviction that events are following a certain path—as in one of Barack Obama’s favorite lines, to “be on the right side of history.” History may take sides, but not as a general rule fixed to a world map (essays 20, 21, and 23).2 We recall one of our own favorite lines, attributed to Lord Salisbury, that geopolitics and grand strategies are the fixations of armchair generals with maps of too small a scale, which is to say that for all their distinctions and © The Author(s) 2020 J. E. Goodby and K. Weisbrode, Practical Lessons from US Foreign Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27312-5_3

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particular cultures, histories, politics, and economies, no nation or region, can be disengaged from the rest. Thus the main task for US foreign policy has been, and to some extent remains, to help regional actors find ways to align their own policies with the realities of both regional and global interdependence. This point not merely restates a preference, but also the policy orientation most conducive to our own country’s national interests (essay 16). In our reading of recent debates over the current state of US foreign policy and its future, we have found very little of this kind of regional thinking. The debates still appear for the most part on a spectrum of preferences ranging from isolation to intervention—usually with a military component in the foreground—and nearly all rest on an image of the United States “and,” not “in,” the world (essay 24). They ask, using the imperial “we,” what must we do about x, or, sometimes more precisely, what do we want our country to do to the rest of the world and what do we want it to do, or not to do, for us. This mentality harks back to earlier periods in US history its depiction of the United States as a continental island with oceans on two sides, and with its depiction of “the world” as an experimental field or object of American theories, whims, desires, beliefs, and needs (essay 15). Three experiments dominate our era, which appear now as a theme— militarization—with variations. First came the militarization of the post-Cold War moment with the Gulf War, soon joined by the wars of Yugoslav succession; next came the militarization of the 9/11 moment with the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars; finally came the militarization of the moment of the Arab Spring with the Libya intervention and the Syrian non- (or quasi-) intervention. The final experiment marked an ironic refutation of previous American interventions elsewhere, as the interventions of other powers led to the Syrian Civil War, the bloodiest and potentially the most geopolitically consequential of all.3 In each instance, we (writers) did not oppose the decision to use force or, in the final one, not to use it, on principle, although we had serious reservations in practice. Rather, we pointed to the misalignment of force and diplomacy, and, more often, the absence of the latter in making the use of force (not only by the United States) less necessary or desirable beforehand, and in failing to “win the peace” in the aftermath.4 What do we mean here by militarization? Something besides the now-common gripe over bloated defense budgets, and hammers and nails in search of political problems to “solve.” We refer instead in many

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of the essays to the manner in which the decision to use military force as anything other than a last resort has altered the culture, ideology, and psychology of America’s role in the world. Military intervention has been made more acceptable, even preferable, to governments by conditioning public opinion to view difficult and complex international problems as being in need of dramatic, aggressive solutions.5 Joining the isolation-to-intervention spectrum, then, is another extending from neglect to impatience, and characterized by the willful ignorance of international realities where few problems are easily solved. The American people have become conditioned, in other words, to view history episodically, with such “moments” succeeded and interspersed with powerful responses, and with “transformation” cast as an immediate goal in itself. As discussed in the introduction, the most successful postwar moments in modern history have been characterized by having been followed by the establishment of viable, multilateral “orders” meant to preserve peace and promote prosperity over time. Mourning the disappearance of the liberal international order has become a cottage industry, yet in the United States there are still debates over exactly what international order means. A familiar definition is one that dates to the end of the Cold War: “essentially a foreign policy premised on US military superiority underwriting a series of global institutional, economic, and human rights commitments… By pursuing all of the above—it’s typically conceived of as a package deal—the United States is able to keep open a stable trading system, maintain balances of power in key regions of the world, and minimize the prospect of arms races and interstate wars.”6 Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has continued doing what some of its leaders say the country does best: to use force and the country’s wealth for the greater good; to keep the peace or to impose it, that is, to partake in “state-building under fire.”7 We could say this is a tragic definition. It certainly looks to have been one from the standpoint of 2019, for as Woodrow Wilson said in 1917 about his own calculus in taking the country to war, “To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, and the man on the street.” The jury is out on whether post-Cold War militarization has been an absolute success, a relative success, or a failure. In our writing, we did not claim that the use of force itself is the problem, or dispute that some wars may be necessary.

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We drew a firm distinction, however, between wars that are actually necessary and those that are perceived to be necessary, or sold as such, at the time. In our view, none of the conflicts in which American force was used since 1989—with the possible, normative exception of the first Gulf War—were, strictly speaking, necessary wars. Nearly all, however, proved almost impossible for politicians to prevent once the logic of militarization and public pressure for it set in. So, the historical question to ask is whether the benefits they claim to have won were worth the costs, not merely in human lives and material destruction, but also in their capacity, usually fulfilled, to reshape the axioms, assumptions, norms, standards, and logic of American power. The militarization of US foreign policy has distracted and even perverted diplomacy’s traditional aim in advancing the country’s interests. It has deepened the us-versus-them mentality with which this chapter began and which has now extended further into domestic discourse in the United States. It has magnified a short attention span, an oversimplification of international and regional problems, and a demand for crisis diplomacy. It has made the American people and their leaders more spendthrift, incurious, and, arguably, callous, by forcing the body politic to expect and even accept the occurrence of widespread death and destruction overseas as a central component of foreign policy. During the past two decades the American people have not been sold on the value of patient, quiet diplomacy, however much it has continued to take place, but instead on the opportunities and gains of “shock and awe.” That phrase, which came into use during the Iraq War of 2003, actually applies better to the outcome of the first Gulf War, in which the performance of the US-led coalition, including the diplomacy that assembled that coalition at the United Nations, impressed many people around the world. Yet it was the rapid and sophisticated military operation that impressed the most. That “victory” has not, in a word, done much for the advancement of creative, patient statecraft on which national security and the American people’s livelihoods depend (essays 16 and 18). We do not write here as pacifists, but as Americans who do not take our country’s formidable military strength for granted. We know the power it brings. But we also know that the responsibility brought in turn by such power has been wanting, with the predictable result being a marked loss in power and authority worldwide. About a decade ago

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it became fashionable to distinguish “types” of power using adjectives: hard, soft, smart, and so on (essay 19). We would prefer to emphasize the combination over the choices. Thus, if one believes the old axiom that diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments, one must also accept the corollary that arms without diplomacy is like instruments without a score to play from. A debate is underway about the future of US foreign policy.8 Unfortunately, this debate has been about how much or how little of contesting visions of “America and the world” one wants to promote in a certain way rather than how best to advance the country’s interests in a more peaceful, prosperous, integrated, and interdependent international environment. Some of the people bemoaning the demise of the liberal international order today are members of the successor generation of those who built and defended it, but some are the same people who, when in power, failed to nurture the collective security upon which such order was based. The international order that generation advertised was virtuous, objective, and fixed—not aspirational and subject to collaborative and combined improvement.9 The parameters of today’s debate—like others between isolationists and interventionists; between idealists and realists; and, more recently, between restraint and primacy—remain rather general and abstract, being mainly about how American opinion leaders would like to see themselves and not much about the rest of the world. For example, one authority has described a “New Convergence” as not between “progressives, libertarians, and academic realists” but between the left and the center… [with] an elevated concern for the distributional effects of international economic policy, a concentration on combating corruption and kleptocracy and neofascism, an emphasis on diplomacy over the use of military force, an enduring commitment to democratic allies… [and] a growing recognition and appreciation of the fact that many successes of the liberal project have been profound—such as the advances against global poverty and disease and the enduring peace between France and Germany…10

Critics of this line of argument have tended to cast such means and ends the other way around, and, sloganeering aside, see more divergence than convergence: “To put it bluntly,” another authority has written,

68  J. E. GOODBY AND K. WEISBRODE the democratic family is in an argument over the single most important question in politics: Who should rule? While conservatives embrace America’s democratic sovereignty and the US Constitution as the highest political authority for Americans—others, including allies such as Germany and many other nation-states in the European Union, as well as a considerable number of American progressives, tout the transnational institutions of global governance and the evolving concepts of international law as the final arbiters of legitimate authority above the sovereignty of any nation-state, including democracies like the United States and Germany.... One of the reasons the Trump doctrine works so well with foreign policy conservatism is that it is philosophically, psychologically, and politically “conservative” in the sense that it seeks to “conserve” something realistic—America’s military superiority and manufacturing base—and idealistic—America’s sovereignty and way of life. This is sharp contrast to President George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, which proclaimed in utopian Wilsonian rhetoric that the policy of the United States encompassed “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”11

There is little doubt that the world as a whole has grown healthier and more prosperous since 1989, in large part because of globalization, and that it remains remarkably peaceful, on the whole. But there are ominous signs that this has begun to change for the worse. It is now often said that the world’s major powers have entered into a new round of armed competition, even rivalry.12 The 2018 National Defense Strategy, which was one of three such reports issued (the other two being the National Security Strategy and the National Military Strategy), states baldly that “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security.”13 We note the prevalence of arms and force in all three. In its defense, however, the Trump administration, in the words of one ex-official, has claimed that “this is not a strategy of confrontation, but it is a strategy that recognizes the reality of competition and the importance of ‘good fences make good neighbors.’”14 Another ex-official, the principal author of the National Security Strategy, has added: “Critics disputed this assessment, with some calling it Hobbesian. Yet, events have borne out Trump’s view. Indeed, it is hard to conceive of a genuine community of common purposes with such states as China, Russia, and Iran.”15 Of these major powers, the first two now stand out as somehow having been “lost.” We shall have more to say about both in the next two chapters that deal with regional policies. Here it may suffice to say that our

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expectations for US relations with both powers were once much higher. So it is important to go back and ask what went wrong, how, and why. In both the Chinese and Russian cases there was a strong projection of American hopes and assumptions on to the image of the other country. China was seen (as it long has done in the American imagination) as a great market at the center of the region that the nineteenthcentury statesman, William Seward, called the “prize,” “the chief theater of events in the world’s great hereafter” (see also essays 2 and 37). This sort of thinking persists, as noted (essays 21 and 23), and was predicated on a liberalizing China that would become more familiar to Americans. Some people questioned that assumption, yet some of them also fell into another, old pattern of denouncing the Yellow Peril. “Like many either/ors, this one turned out to be a both/and,” a recent retrospective has concluded, and “debate divides those who think that it was naive to try engaging with China on the basis of such optimism and those who believe it was rational to make the attempt.” Meanwhile, “Western politicians have spent years rationalising their retreats in the face of Chinese pressure. The West has lost hope that it can make China embrace universal values. That would be a poor reason for the West to betray those values in response.”16 Following our own retrospective, we would agree. The projection of American hopes and assumptions with a logic of us-versus-them was even stronger in the case of Russia since the mid1990s. Relations between the United States and its former Cold War adversary have approached the pathological. Each has accused the other of breaking faith and promises that helped end the Cold War peacefully; of betraying trust; of interfering in each other’s internal affairs and spheres of influence; and of violating basic norms of international behavior.17 Each has blamed the other for missing or destroying a rare opportunity to move beyond the perils and limitations of geopolitical rivalry. As with the US-China relationship, either/or is probably both/ and. To that one could add an unfortunate holdover of Cold War-era mirror-imaging with and among adversaries, which was as inaccurate and counterproductive then as it is today.18 With both China and Russia, US policies have been beset by too much “mission-creep,” not in the usual sense of taking on too many associated burdens—as the term applies to armed interventions—but rather as a failure to keep America’s missionary and messianic tendencies at home. Those tendencies have been inflicted

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on other nations repeatedly, sometimes with good results, but more often not. One recent postmortem declared with regard to Russia: “The abiding mystery of American policy toward Russia over the past 25 years can be put this way: Each administration has come into office with a stated commitment to improving relations with its former Cold War adversary, and each has failed in remarkably similar ways.”19 It is not a mystery to the readers of this book. The US would have been better off by working with Russians to transform their own country, on their own terms, and by offering a viable, peaceful, and prosperous program for integration with the West and its institutions rather than into them, conditionally. Even so, the world might still be coping with an uncooperative, even hostile, Russia; the wounds of imperial humiliation take a long time to heal, if ever, and Russia is a large, proud, and difficult country. But Americans would not have had to bear so much of the blame for a lost opportunity, or so much of the burden of recovering it.20 In both the Chinese and Russian cases, the political, economic, and social changes have been so momentous during the past twenty years, that “presumptuous” is the first term that comes to mind when considering a US role in, let alone a US burden of, managing or guiding. It would also be presumptuous to claim that US policy toward each country could not have been better, more patient, and more based on a hope for positive transformation after some integration had been achieved following an improvement in relations.21 The deterioration in the tone and exercise of relations with both countries has made progress difficult even in areas of mutual interest, such as arms control. Here, too, formal treaties may be making way for more informal arrangements like the Iran nuclear deal.22 “Should we have had a higher, wiser concept of our real interests that would require us to hold back on what many people would say is our own current interest?”23 This question, posed by the former Clintonadministration official, Strobe Talbott, in examining the steps leading to NATO’s enlargement, puts the dilemma well regarding former and future adversaries. As the next chapter shows, the question also sums up the dilemmas faced by all three post-Cold War presidents in having to address and compensate for, politically as well as institutionally, difficulties in anticipating, planning, and preparing for dramatic changes in the world, such as popular uprisings against America’s loyal partners or former clients (e.g., Mobutu, Suharto, Mubarak).24

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Pundits have a term for the effects of poor planning, especially when it results in misguided interventions and the demonization of foreigners who find themselves on the other side of US demands: blowback. The “who lost x” question increasingly has been asked about the United States itself, or at least about the morale of the American people, only 18% of whom, according to one survey, will admit that “they trust the government in Washington ‘always’ or ‘most of the time….” This contrasts with 73% in 1958. Another survey found that 47% “say they’re ‘extremely proud’… of the United States, down from a peak of 70 percent in 2003.”25 “Just deserts,” America’s enemies might say. They ought to say, again, “too soon to tell.” No nation is bound to follow one or another path (essays 22 and 24). This is what was argued in our first essay about getting “back to basics.” The most basic national priority is to put our country’s own house in order, and that priority, in our view, has as much to do with how the United States acts at home as how it behaves abroad. This priority is a vital end in itself. It may enhance the projection of American power, but does not derive from it.26 To argue otherwise would be to take one back to the Cold War, and to the logic of containment as applied to the Soviet Union and its empire. Even at this late stage, it is uncomfortable to hear it refer to our own country.

15. Back to Basics: US Foreign Policy for the Coming Decade (2000) In the decade since the end of the Cold War, policymakers and pundits in the United States and, to some extent, in Europe have struggled with the problem of new organizing principles to replace older convictions and bring some logic to a complex world. Through fits and starts two normative beacons, globalization and democracy, have emerged as the talismans for US foreign policy. The Clinton Administration has sought to promote both objectives wherever it can, and take steps to forestall the failure of either whenever it must. Admirable though these universal goals certainly are, they are not an adequate basis for a foreign policy. Furthermore, their application by the current Administration has raised considerable doubts that already have come to the fore of public debate. Where should we draw the lines of importance to US national interests?

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The significance of the notion of containment during the Cold War was not its brilliance as a guide to action, but rather its utility as a readily comprehensible response to the geopolitical threat presented by the Soviet Union. Any attempt to establish a coherent foreign policy to support American strategic interests must be based on the ability of our leaders to apply broadly accepted basic principles to specific settings and outcomes in a way that matches our ends to our means. That is why it is particularly necessary to revisit the fundamentals of American interests in the world now that some time has passed since the foreign policy uproar that accompanied the NATO intervention in Kosovo. It is a sad thing to acknowledge that the public definition of these interests by the Administration has led only to more confusion. Worse still is the prospect that US diplomacy will not be able to overcome a setback that, seen in the context of a lost post-Cold War opportunity and future dangers, may be more momentous than we now perceive. There is a risk, of course, in stating what should be taken for granted, but sometimes it is necessary to refocus our minds on what is important for the public to understand. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., advised, “We need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.” For the first half of its history, the United States saw itself as a continental power. That is, the country’s foreign policy, to the extent it had one, was to protect its mercantile interests abroad and to avoid foreign entanglements. The purpose was to consolidate America’s geographic space for itself and to organize and integrate that space in pursuit of the national destiny. This ended with the Spanish-American War, and the new course later was made irreversible with the Second World War. America was no longer a mere continental power, but rather, an island: it looked outward east and west across the two seas. The oceans insulated the United States to an extent from the limitations of European and Asian states, but they also served as connecting links, a fact recognized as the United States became the world’s largest maritime power. The maritime view of the world fit well with the rise of the United States to the position of the preeminent world economy and with accelerating advances in communications. The American presence became essentially worldwide while Americans preserved their own sense of separateness, popularized by contemporaneous historians as “American exceptionalism.” The conjunction of late blooming US industrial might

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and a breakdown of the European political balance led to a new international role for the United States, promoted, each in its own way, by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The isolationists of the 1920s and 30s objected to both formulations, but their movement was short-lived. By 1945 the United States was irrevocably a central actor on the world stage. With the end of the Cold War, relatively few Americans think the United States still has the luxury of two oceans behind which to retreat to a highly selective involvement in foreign affairs. More are wedded to the maritime view of the world, but that overestimates, in today’s context, our ability to maneuver anywhere at will and to achieve success through military and technological prowess. The image which has not yet sunk in, but will eventually, is that of the United States once again as a continental power but with the “continent” now the world itself. America today bumps up against many other nations. It is perhaps the nation with the most borders of all in a figurative sense. Because of that, we must continually build coalitions and alliances to secure our most basic interests. Today the US world position demands what Sir Halford Mackinder called the “landsman” mentality, which emphasizes inseparability, interconnection, and equilibrium. This is not a mentality that is underpinned by separateness but by the fact of mutual dependence. Acceptance of this geopolitical reality and of the constraints that it implies is a fundamental first step toward designing a realistic foreign policy. How can we operationalize our response to this new reality? To begin, policymakers need to distinguish more carefully among levels of interest, a simple notion promoted by almost all advocacy groups interested in public policy in the United States. And yet the most common error of policymakers is to fail to distinguish among our levels of interest, leading to an overcommitment of resources to a third-tier interest and, inevitably, to an undercommitment to higher-level interests. In other words, strategic or second-tier interests, if mishandled, can threaten vital or firsttier interests. But strategic interests, if well understood and acted upon, can support vital interests as well as make more likely the achievement of third-tier or lesser interests. The three tiers of interests, as many analysts would see them, are: Tier one (vital): homeland defense, to include threats to the wellbeing and way of life of the American people. Tier two (strategic): peace and stability in Europe and Northeast Asia, open access to energy supplies in the Middle East.

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Tier three (lesser): stability in South Asia, Latin America, and Africa; the spread of open markets favorable to US prosperity. Admittedly, this is a geopolitical, not a universal approach. Foreign policy problems become important for us to the degree that they affect our most serious interests. This rule may diminish the gravity of foreign crises, but such events must not be allowed to put in jeopardy more important national priorities. A chief responsibility of American diplomacy should be to identify and exploit areas where US interests are shared by other countries while containing, if necessary by accommodation, those areas where they may be in conflict. No country, even one as strong as the United States, can accomplish its ends without the cooperation of others, and the Clinton Administration generally has recognized this. Frequent reference to the United States as the world’s only superpower is but a rhetorical exception. The primary strategic interest of the United States, in spite of a changed world, is fundamentally the same as it was when American power burst onto the world stage at the turn of the last century: the prevention of a threat from a rival Eurasian state committed to territorial expansion. A threat from Eurasia might result from either the dominion of a single power or an unrestrained competition for influence, resources, or territory among medium-sized powers—for example, India, Iran, or Turkey. Some have argued that the only source for stability in this complex environment should be a constantly shifting balance of power resembling the European state system of the 18th and 19th centuries. The United States, in this view, would serve as the balancing agent of last resort, much in the manner that Britain acted toward the European continent. However, it is improbable that the American people would support the obligations and costs required to sustain such a role. American leaders are far more beholden to the opinion of the people, and will be only more so in the years to come. What is needed instead is a meaningful Eurasian security community. What does this mean and how should it be brought forth? The geopolitical idea of Eurasia joins the two principal American strategic interests as outlined above. (The third, open access to Middle East energy supplies, probably will not survive as a second-tier interest to the middle of the next century, although a commitment to Israel almost certainly will.) Both the Second World War and the Cold War proved the stability of Europe and Northeast Asia are strongly linked, and that the United States is a key factor in each. This reality has not changed. What has

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changed so fundamentally is the political and military balance of power in Eurasia. No longer dominated by a single empire at the core, the states of Eurasia, including those of the Pacific rimland (namely Japan and Korea), exist in a precarious and insecure conglomeration of regional relationships. This equation cannot perpetuate itself indefinitely. As the world’s largest power and the only one that has the ability to affect outcomes throughout Eurasia without immediate impact on its own region, the United States should lead the way in building a new balance by way of a Eurasian security community. There are three essential pieces of this balance: Stability and cohesion in Europe and between the European Union and the United States. Mature and effective relations among China, Russia, and the West, to include, first among all others, a regular forum to oversee reduction of the risks of nuclear weapons. Systematic patterns of consultation and policy coordination of the states benefiting from the global economy, and positive relations between those states and the developing world. The policies that would further those aims are manifold, mainly diplomatic in character. George Kennan and George Shultz have used the metaphor of “gardening” to describe the process of keeping bilateral relations in good order. This is what is required of Washington with respect to the European Union, Russia, China, and Japan. Some specific mechanisms might be mentioned here: First, once the present-day domestic uncertainties have cleared, NATO and Russia should formalize their cooperation in a joint committee for strategic stability cochaired by minister-rank representatives. The agenda should include parallel measures to reduce the nuclear confrontation that still exists. And in light of President Yeltsin’s April 1999 announcement on reversing the Gorbachev–Bush agreement on tactical nuclear weapons, a control regime for non-strategic nuclear weapons should be given much higher priority. Second, a similar committee should form with specific responsibility for Northeast Asia. The committee would include the United States, China, Japan, Russia, and Korea. It would oversee cooperation in areas of mutual interest, such as consideration of a regional early warning system and a regional program of missile defense (that includes China and Russia), joint regional military exercises, technology transfer issues, and so forth.

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Finally, American support for the United Nations is essential. The main threat to American security is not intrastate conflict but the threat of powerful nations which see the United States as an enemy. The wisdom of post-World War II statesmen in creating the UN Security Council is still relevant today. As regards intrastate conflict, the biggest concern for the major powers, both individually and collectively, will continue to be how to deal with it in ways that are consistent with international norms while satisfying public concerns about the humanitarian aspects. It is clear that responses to such contingencies—and they will continue to arise—can succeed only if made through the cooperation of a quorum of major powers. If any one of the major powers opposes action, the action is far less likely to be successful, however strong the initial determination may be to make things right. This is why the function of the Security Council should not be written off as an unwieldy obstacle to getting things done. The United States should act against or in spite of it only in extreme cases. If the Security Council has not functioned optimally, then serious effort must go into improving its effectiveness. Diplomacy, especially multilateral diplomacy, is a hard, tedious task, but it is absolutely necessary to give international actions the legitimacy they need. Critics may characterize this view as overly legalistic, but no alternative to major power consensus, save a military imperium throughout the world, has presented itself with any convincing capacity for effectiveness. This essay presents only a brief sketch of what should be undertaken after a considerable period of forethought. But if these areas are handled well, problems in other areas of concern, namely the Near and Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and possibly other regions, can be approached with greater likelihood of success. A plea for a return to basics does not mean to suggest that the United States intentionally is neglecting its major-power relationships and allowing fads to overtake responsible policymaking. Most practitioners would say they are doing the best job they can under difficult circumstances, and most of us who continue to admire their integrity as public servants do not envy their workload. Yet the public perception and the private reality suggest worrisome disorganization and a certain degree of impatience with a foggy conceptual framework. It is time to return to the basic elements of the American role in the world and raise the level of public understanding of them.

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American strategic planners and policymakers cannot afford to be arbitrarily selective about where and when to engage US power. This would make our foreign policy aimless and lose the support of the American people for engagements overseas. A proper strategic picture should set out each of America’s interests and how they best may be achieved with the cooperation of other powers. However, this cannot take place until the executive and legislative branches of government resurrect the workable partnership in foreign affairs that once existed, but which exists no more. Checks, balances, and even inertia play an important role in domestic affairs where the purpose of government is to regulate interests but not intrude too deeply into the lives of citizens. But in the “vast, external realm,” these qualities are deadly to effective policymaking. There is no constitutional reason why an active role for the United States as the key player in a Eurasian security community cannot be consistent with both the values and the domestic priorities of the American people. That role requires a President with strong interest in foreign affairs and an ability to convince Congress of the soundness of his foreign policy. It also requires an effective bureaucracy to implement policy, namely a clear executive role for the Department of State in the exercise of diplomacy and a clear advisory role for the National Security Council in coordinating the roles of other departments and agencies to establish consistency of mission and objectives. In summary, the basic elements of American foreign policy should be, first, to get major-power relationships right; second, to be more attentive stewards of political cohesion among the major powers; and third, to cultivate more sophisticated diplomatic means to stave off or contain secondary conflicts. The average citizen is capable of understanding these goals if they are presented clearly and honestly; however, government must take the lead.

16. Diplomatic Cathedral-Building (2002) George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s second secretary of state, has described one aspect of diplomacy as gardening. “The way to keep the weeds from overwhelming you,” he wrote in his memoirs, “is to deal with them constantly and in their early stages.” We learned the hard way in Central Asia that when the weeds get the upper hand, we must sometimes turn to another type of statecraft—crisis management and the use of force.27

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But another aspect of diplomacy deserves its own metaphor, as well: “cathedral-building.” This approach aims to build a lasting order based on common values, as opposed to a transitory order based on balance of power or hegemony. It recognizes that American-imposed solution to international problems will provide only illusory benefits unless the nations affected come to share democratic visions and values. Otherwise these solutions are built on sand. Shakespeare, as usual, captured the idea memorably: “like the… fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples… shall dissolve and… leave not a rack behind.” To take the metaphor a step further, cathedral-building assumes that a structure erected on a foundation formed by similar modes of governance, a shared identity and common institutions will be more enduring than one imposed by hegemonic power alone. The results of this strategy are difficult to discern within the term of one president, yet a succession of American presidents in both parties, practical politicians all, have recognized that the spread of democratic values serves American interests— if for no other reason than because it reduces the risk of an attack against our country. As the first George Bush in his last foreign policy speech as president observed, “governments responsive to the will of the people are not likely to commit aggression. They are not likely to sponsor terrorism, or to threaten humanity with weapons of mass destruction.” For proof, we need look no further than Western Europe, where a democratic peace has emerged, ending centuries of fratricidal war. We are still part of that process, and our policy of extending that peaceful order in Europe as far to the east as possible has been remarkably successful. The world is safer because of it. Elsewhere on the Old Continent, we have been painfully reminded that the transition to democracy can be a time of demagoguery and intolerance and that constitutional liberalism—the governing mechanisms of a democracy—is an indispensable component of the democratic peace. Nowhere is that clearer than in today’s Russia, where democratic institutions are still in the process of development. But the trends there are encouraging and in that lies our best hope for a peaceful future in Europe. Standing Together Joining with other nations in pursuit of some common goal is perhaps the most familiar example of cathedral-building statecraft. The coalition

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we assembled last fall to conduct the war against the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan helped to consolidate a growing consensus that the behavior of governments—even within their own borders—can be a threat to international peace and security, justifying intervention by the world community. And as such, it is but the latest in a series of precedents confirming UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s judgment that a new principle of international law is taking shape. Yet despite its success in Afghanistan, the Bush administration has not made much use of this emerging rule of international behavior to support its policies elsewhere in the world, including the Middle East. Instead, it prefers to use the rhetoric of good and evil and the principle of the right of self-defense to justify military intervention. This reticence may spring from a concern that this principle could be misused, but a more likely reason is that the administration is allergic to the idea that international norms affect the behavior of nations. That skeptical view has a long and distinguished pedigree in the thinking of “realist” political philosophers. Yet the democratic principles that have bound the Western community of nations together for so many years seem to have a quality of permanence about them that makes one wonder whether the shifting sands of transitory coalitions can offer a better long-term approach to creating a peaceful order among nations. Coalitions are temporary, ad hoc affairs while common values, rules of behavior, and alliances that bind democracies one to the other are as enduring as anything can be international affairs. International solidarity was never more in evidence than in the reaction of ordinary people all over the world to the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. It was an unprecedented display of unity and sympathy. For the first time in its history, NATO invoked Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, declaring that the attacks on New York and Washington were an assault on all the members of the alliance. Yet less than a year later, the United States stood alone in the United Nations as the American ambassador vetoed the extension of a mandate for peacekeepers in Bosnia. Why? The United States, a non-party to the newly created International Criminal Court, had required an exemption from the court’s reach for any American citizen engaged in peacekeeping operations. And America’s oldest friends—Canada, Mexico and all the European members of NATO—saw in this request a US-imposed, self-serving amendment to the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court.

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Do Americans and Europeans really have such different opinions about the importance of such issues? It is true that the European Union having gained strength through pooling the sovereignties of its members is now more willing to challenge the United States. Yet polls taken after the Sept. 11 attacks showed that huge majorities of Americans also favored multilateral responses to terrorism. More Americans in the fall of 2001 thought that top priority should be given to strengthening the United Nations than thought so four years earlier. And a poll taken in the fall of 1999 showed that 66 percent agreed that the United States should support an international criminal court. I believe what we are seeing currently are policy differences driven by domestic politics, magnified by the writings of advocates of a frankly imperial role for the United States, rather than any fundamental change in attitude about the value of transatlantic solidarity. Striking the Balance Scholars have described the Jeffersonian legacy in American foreign policy as a tendency to oscillate between engaging in the world to make it more like us or withdrawing from it to tend to our own Garden of Eden. Now, it seems, isolationism is a thing of the past. Americans are too dependent on the rest of the world—and too aware that they are—ever again to withdraw into 1920s-style isolationism. We are all internationalists now. So the new struggle in US foreign policy seems to be between the poles of unilateralism (independence) and multilateralism (interdependence). Or to put it another way: do we have to accommodate ourselves to the conventions, rules, and norms of the international community, with all the constraints that entails, or can we act as though our interests and needs require freedom to accomplish our purposes—even if this results in declining support for the United States abroad? The “realists” would have us believe that it is an open-and-shut case. But as our friends abroad know, it is not. We need to reflect, now and then, on how much of our influence comes from our nearly $400 billion annual defense budget and how much from our aspiration to be “a shining city on a hill.” Only a judicious balance between the ideas represented by the two poles of independence and interdependence provides the basis for sound US policy. Indeed, the genius of American diplomacy in the period

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following World War II was that it struck this balance in a way that made people want to be on our side. Aiding that quest for balance is the fact that Americans tend to apply both moral standards and pragmatic thinking in foreign policy. “Grand designs” run against the grain but the rule of law resonates well, abroad as at home. Probably the closest President Clinton came to espousing a grand design was his genuine devotion to globalization, which he saw as the “central reality of our time.” His administration was committed to promoting the rule of law on a global scale, through the rules of the World Trade Organization, to cite but one example. Similarly, the success of the negotiating team I led in 1993 in paving the way for the elimination of nuclear weapons in Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakstan owes something to the fact that the “norm” of nuclear non-proliferation had already sunk in everywhere and was being quite logically and vigorously reinforced, first by President George H. W. Bush, then by Clinton. The Clinton administration was often criticized for using military force, either too readily or, as others saw it, too hesitantly. It was, in fact, only after much hesitation that President Clinton decided that certain principles of international behavior needed defending and that it was in the US national interest to do so. In such cases he used American strength, amounting to hegemonic power, to imprint acceptable rules of behavior on recalcitrant governments. The Balkans are the best example of this, but Haiti is another. The relative success or failure of these efforts does not contradict the fact that order-building diplomacy, aimed at strengthening democratic value systems, was what the Clinton team was practicing. In turning away from that approach from the beginning, with only a few exceptions (trade policy and relations with Latin America among them), the Bush administration’s diplomacy had a consistency that is the hallmark of a carefully thought-out philosophy. The Bush team apparently believed, at least initially, that a stronger defense of American interests would be possible if the United States could drop the constraints of certain international agreements or multilateral obligations. Many in Congress, of course, saw things the same way. But even as early as June 2001, when he made his first trip to Europe, Bush used rhetoric that any traditional Atlanticist would endorse. A note of appreciation for the idea of an international community seemed to have crept into his official pronouncements.

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We will never know whether it would have happened anyway, but after Sept. 11 there was a further course correction in the foreign policy of the administration. The president’s energies were directed toward the war on terrorism and he believed that, as a wartime president, his administration would be defined by that. Personally involved day after day in dealings with foreign leaders, President Bush seemed to develop a new appreciation for the needs and concerns of other governments. He forged new security relationships with Pakistan and with the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. China’s support for the war against terrorism was welcomed, and the administration’s view of Beijing as the main competitor of the United States in the 21st century was much muted. Some observers, myself included, quickly gave the president credit for this apparent realignment of his foreign policy. I thought that he had been convinced that international rules and norms are generally helpful to America’s global interests. That judgment may have been premature, but it is undeniable that Bush has modified some of his positions from time to time in a direction that is congenial to those of us who see an interdependent world. He now accepts the need for nation-building and he has increased the US budget for development aid very substantially. But he has gone the other way, too, on steel tariffs for example. So it is fair to say that his foreign policy is still a work in progress, as has often been the case with other administrations, even at this stage. Dreams of Empire The American democracy can only succeed in the international arena if it pursues a policy based on transparency, norms and rules, and steadiness in commitments. This is the American style, imposed on us by our history and culture. Any effort to act differently will not ring true, at home or abroad. To act differently we will have to turn into a different country. Nevertheless, a rising chorus of mostly conservative voices insists that the salvation of this country can only be found in an explicit American policy of global hegemony. What they expect to achieve from such a policy is not entirely clear, however. Some argue that preventing the rise of peer competitors is the primary task of US statecraft. Some, a little less ambitious, simply want to forestall hegemonic aspirations by rising powers. Others simply want to be rid of troublesome regimes or to settle old scores. Many of them agree that alliances are a good thing in principle because allies will refrain from building up competing military forces lest

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they lose their protector’s favor. And, to the extent that these thinkers agree that international collaboration is sometimes required, they tend to believe that the formation of limited, temporary coalitions is enough. Yet such calls to arms ignore the moral and philosophical question of whether conscious, though muted, imperialism befits the American republic. There is also the practical issue of whether that option is even available to the United States on a sustained basis, or whether it would require budgets and actions that no administration is likely to propose and the American people would not willingly support. Proponents of American hegemony also ignore the lessons of history. Henry Kissinger has written that “Bismarck was able in his lifetime to replace the philosophical constraints of the Metternich system with a policy of self-restraint. Because these nuances were not as self-evident to Bismarck’s successors and imitators, the literal application of Realpolitik led to their excessive dependence on military power, and from there to an armament race and two world wars.” The hazards of repudiating constraints developed by the international community over decades are as real today as they were in the 19th century. The character of the struggle in which we are now engaged requires modern military forces. Our allies in Europe and Northeast Asia are second only to the United States in fielding highly capable militaries. Not least because of this, this struggle also demands a type of diplomacy that is multilateral and rules-based. There really is no other way. Combating terrorism places a premium, after all, on asking other governments not only to observe but also to enforce norms of good behavior because it is in their—and our—national interest. The current struggle tends to pit all legitimate governments against shadowy non-state entities. In essence, the world community is facing a new medievalism, that is, the privatization of large-scale violence coupled with fealty to movements that transcend frontiers. This is a clash between organizing principles for human society, between states and transnational militancy. If the states fail to act together to uphold the constraints imposed by international law and custom, the terrorists will win. The Task Ahead Thus, the next few years will be critical ones for the republic as the Bush administration and Congress together define the strategic approach that this country will take as it enters a new era, one that can no longer

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simply be defined as the “post-Cold War.” Many of these issues we face as a nation involve the basic terms on which we choose to be involved in the world. Do we see ourselves as a part of a community of nations or as essentially alone—free of “foreign entanglements” and their obligations? The United States in the early 21st century has become so powerful that it is in a position to act with few constraints, except those imposed by the American people. And for this reason, foreign policy must and almost certainly will receive a higher priority among the concerns of our elected representatives at all levels as they grapple with the challenges already before us: • Can we fight transnational terrorism successfully as the leader of a league of democratic states without compromising our principles or theirs? • Can we achieve a stable peace in Europe by strengthening the transatlantic relationship and by promoting conditions that will permit Russia to become a “normal” European country? • Can we achieve a global equilibrium in which strategic restraint and shared interests as well as military power carry part of the load? • Can we proceed with globalization with the assurance that it will not widen the gap between the rich and the poor? • Can we strengthen our capacity to deal with intra-state conflicts, especially humanitarian catastrophes? • Can we minimize the threats that unbridled regional arms races involving weapons of mass destruction pose to international peace and security? Whether our nation will be successful in confronting these and many other global issues depends on whether the Bush administration’s practice of rule-based, order-building diplomacy becomes more the habit than the exception. We can be optimistic about that because the tradition of the rule of law runs very deep in American society. As a part of a balanced policy, American insistence on norms, rules, and institutions has achieved great results—great for us and great for the world. The post-World War II evolution of Europe and Northeast Asia and the creation of the United Nations and international financial institutions are examples of this enlightened self-interest. But there is much more to be done. We need to get on with cathedral-building.

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17. Ike-Like Diplomacy Instead of War (2002) A hostile government with evil designs and the means to attack America with weapons of mass destruction. Could a preventive war waged by the United States free the world of this danger? The Eisenhower administration, faced with this imminent threat, considered the idea of a preventive war, then dismissed it. That history has clear lessons for the Bush administration as it prepares to wage war against Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear bombs. When the Soviet Union, already armed with nuclear weapons, acquired a long-range ballistic missile capability in 1957, Dwight Eisenhower became the first president to face a new reality. The United States was vulnerable to a nuclear attack that could kill millions of Americans. It was a watershed in the history of a people who believed that two oceans guaranteed their security. That sense of vulnerability could have devastated public morale and led to cataclysmic war. It did not, and Eisenhower’s handling of that turning point in US history testifies to his great leadership. Unfortunately, he has not received the credit he deserves for this achievement. Eisenhower kept the lid on a volatile situation as only a president of his stature could, refusing to let America be turned into what he called a “garrison state.” It is certain that he would have pressed for an allied response to today’s military challenges. Hawks in his administration urged Eisenhower to adopt an aggressive “rollback” or “line in the sand” policy toward the Soviet Union. In the early 1950s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had expected a showdown with Moscow in 1959 or 1960, when the growing Soviet stockpile of nuclear weapons would neutralize the US advantage. They pressed Eisenhower to go on the geopolitical offensive against the threat. Adm. Arthur W. Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told Eisenhower that forestalling Soviet action was far preferable to reacting later. It is not surprising that, at such an unpredictable time, a preventive war seemed a reasonable option. But, pragmatic realist that he was, Eisenhower chose containment, a policy that required patience and did not promise immediate results. He opposed unilateral US action, believing that allies were essential to achieving US interests in the international arena. His administration created the military structure that undergirds nuclear deterrence. But to Eisenhower, war was the last resort.

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Eisenhower instead wanted to open direct communications with Moscow. In 1958, he proposed an international conference of experts to discuss measures that might prevent a surprise attack. I represented the US Atomic Energy Commission in that short-lived conference in Geneva. The Soviet delegation, led by a senior member of the Soviet government, pushed for comprehensive disarmament as the best solution. The US delegation tried to keep the focus on technical issues. George B. Kistiakowsky, a top member of the US delegation and also of the team that developed the US atomic bomb, spoke passionately about the crossroads of technology and a ruthless enemy: “The first act of a future war can be in itself a staggering human catastrophe…. [It] may blow whole cities sky-high and annihilate modern human society…. [An enemy would] try to choose as instruments of [its] surprise attack those weapons systems and aggressive forces [that would give no warning to] the prospective victim and whose capabilities for quick devastation are greatest.” These are conditions that cry out for preventive war. Eisenhower faced a dictator with more blood on his hands than today’s batch of despots. Josef Stalin had killed not just thousands but millions of his own people. His successor, Nikita S. Khrushchev, was more moderate at home, but he recklessly sought to use growing Soviet nuclear and missile capabilities to extract concessions from the West. Eisenhower stood firm against both the advocates of preventive war and the Soviets. He favored a strong defense, but he also believed in the power of negotiations to solve international problems. The 1958 conference on preventing surprise nuclear attacks did not produce direct results, but it encouraged high-level dialogue between the US and the USSR. Another Eisenhower-launched negotiation that year did lead to a concrete outcome that helped turn the US-Soviet rivalry away from war: the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which was signed in 1963 during the Kennedy administration. The struggle between the two powers lasted decades longer, but the likelihood of nuclear war receded.28 The lesson? An assumption of inevitability, as Eisenhower might say, is an abstraction that can get one down—and lead to a catastrophe. Worry that nuclear arms or other weapons of mass destruction could be acquired by rogue states also is not unprecedented in US experience. In the years after the communist revolution of 1949, China was regarded

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by many as a rogue state. In the 1960s, when it was on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons, there was some talk at high levels in both the US and Soviet governments of a “surgical strike,” a form of preventive war. Again, the hand of war was stayed, and China today is an ally in the global war against terrorism. The lesson? History seems to have a way of refuting those who say time is not on our side. Eisenhower’s emphasis on the long haul, his distaste for borrowing trouble from an uncertain future, his vision of what a democratic society should be, and his willingness to try diplomacy served us well when we faced the threat of imminent destruction in the 1950s. His style of statecraft could serve us well today.

18. The Way to Rid the World of Nuclear Weapons (2003) The war against Iraq was supposed to be a test case of the George W. Bush administration’s new anti-proliferation strategy combining prevention and defence. Preventive wars are necessary, the administration claims, because little else stops hostile regimes from going nuclear. Ballistic missile defences are necessary to dissuade states from building weapons with which to attack the US. There are several flaws in this analysis, quite apart from the failure to find a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq. The most fundamental error is the failure to recognise that the US anti-proliferation campaign has been eminently successful since its inception in 1945. Donald Rumsfeld, US secretary of defence, confirmed this indirectly at Garmisch, Germany last month: “It is possible that (10) years from now … we could be living in a world with as many as twice the number of nuclear powers.” Given the eight or nine states thought to possess nuclear weapons today, there could be as many as 16–18 by 2013. Compare that with President John F. Kennedy’s prediction that there could be 15-20 nuclear states by the early 1970s. It turns out that the worst-case predictions come with a rolling 10-year time horizon that has been stable for 40 years. And in the past two decades, more nations have opted out of nuclear weapons programmes than have opted for them. Not bad.

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The second fallacy comes from the belief that preventive war works. It is certainly one tool and ought to be used—on occasion. The problem, as Iran and North Korea have shown, is that the tool has limited use. As to missile defence, there is no evidence that the administration’s promise to build such defences, starting in 2004, is having the desired effect on either Iran or North Korea. The Bush administration faces difficult dilemmas. The president is right to stress the new danger of convergence between terrorism and radical states. Trade between these states also remains a serious problem. And the consequences of regional arms races continue to worsen. To meet these challenges the current system needs repairing but not wrecking. The Bush administration has come dangerously close to that by lumping nuclear weapons with all weapons of mass destruction. Four things are needed. First, the US must pursue deeper cuts with Russia and ultimately other nuclear states. The safest international environment is not, as some theorists have argued, one of multiple nuclear states balanced against one another but one with the fewest nuclear weapons in the fewest hands. The alternative is a bomb in an American city. Second, weapons of mass destruction should be categorised. All such weapons are a menace but nuclear weapons are in a special category. To threaten nuclear retaliation against chemical and biological capabilities simply encourages rogue states to raise the stakes. Third, members of the UN Security Council should strengthen the International Atomic Energy Agency and co-ordinate its work with other efforts such as the interdiction of nuclear materials on the high seas. The Additional Protocol, which the IAEA is trying to negotiate with Iran, provides for a more demanding monitoring system than now exists. Adherence to it should be required for co-operation with any non-nuclear weapon state. Finally, all must work to remove the initial incentives to develop nuclear weapons. This means looking at demand. Iran, for example, is developing nuclear weapons because its leaders, for good reason, feel vulnerable. Once Iran is fully nuclear, who is to say that Egypt and Saudi Arabia will not follow? The same dynamic is at play with North and South Korea and Japan. Many of these incentives can be curtailed with preventive diplomacy that addresses local security concerns. But we are getting perilously close to the point of no return.

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Condoleezza Rice, US national security adviser, recently stated: “We never want to do another Iraq again—we need a solution to proliferation.” If true, nuclear weapons need to be made obsolete—to borrow an idea from Ronald Reagan—in both word and deed.

19. American Diplomacy—What You See is What You Get (2007) If the recent Democratic and Republican presidential candidate debates are any indication, the sinking image of the United States abroad will feature heavily in the 2008 campaign. Poll after poll has recorded with impressively low numbers the all-time unpopularity of the United States in the world. American power is resented and occasionally feared; its culture insulted; its politics deplored. The image-building efforts of the US government—the hiring of Madison Avenue “wunderkind” Charlotte Beers to revamp the State Department’s public diplomacy; her replacement after little more than a year in the job, first by the mellifluous Margaret Tutweiler and then by President Bush’s chief image-maker, Karen Hughes—seem to have done little to stem the tide of anti-Americanism. Fortunately, we have been here before. In 1965, one of the greatest of American secretaries of state, Dean Acheson, wrote a fascinating essay about “world opinion” (New York Times, Feb. 28, 1965). He didn’t believe in it. He argued that “world opinion. . . is pure fancy” and that “the American image . . . will take care of itself if we get on with what we have to do . . . in the spot we’re in.” Most Americans in 1965 thought that their government almost always did “the right thing.” That was before the evacuation of Saigon and David Halberstam’s book, “The Best and the Brightest;” before Watergate and President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Before Abu Ghraib, before water-boarding, Guantanamo and the nuclear bombs that weren’t there. Acheson would be hard pressed to argue today that world opinion is pure fancy. World opinion, or at least a large portion of it, denies President Bush the moral high ground which he believes his policies in the Middle East should command. That, in turn, makes his diplomacy less effective. Compare Acheson’s experience in the Korean War with what we are seeing in Iraq: America’s allies in the Korean War—from 15 other nations—claimed that the American cause was just and backed

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it with nearly 50,000 troops and diplomatic support. America’s enemies were isolated. Acheson was correct, however, when he said that “the American image” will take care of itself. It always does, because the American image is created by what we do, more than by what we say. The Bush administration has worked from its first days in office to undermine the rule of law in international relations and to act out on the world stage its fantasies about American omnipotence. For such an administration, it should not matter that so many people in countries that are nominally America’s allies have mixed feelings, at best, about the president’s policies. Indeed, President Bush claims to have little interest in today’s public opinion. He projects fatalism about how history will come to view his stewardship of the republic. What should a new administration do about this situation? Changes in policies and attitudes toward the rest of the world are going to happen. Other nations will probably become more receptive to what they see and hear coming out of Washington. But there never will be a time when everything Washington does will be received with understanding and support. That is par for the course, and means we shouldn’t obsess over our “image,” if most policies are made in accordance with the nation’s great traditions. Chief among them has to be restoring the nation’s reputation for honest brokerage. The worst thing a new administration could do would be to use public diplomacy to paint a picture that differs from reality. Acheson’s thoughts about this topic are right on target: public diplomacy “conceived of as a ‘beautician’ is revolting,” he wrote. “Its purpose in an age of diplomacy among democracies is to get the truth to their sovereigns, as a basis of mutual confidence and trust.” The genius of American diplomacy in the years following World War II—the Acheson years—was that it struck a balance between the ideas of America as an independent actor and of America as part of a community of democracies. That policy brought support to our side of the global confrontation with the Soviet Union. It was consistent with the American creed. The most fundamental tasks of the new administration—Democratic or Republican—will be, first, to reconstitute the trust of the American people in its own government, and, second, to show by its actions that it takes seriously the interests of others around the world. Any effort to act differently will not ring true, at home or abroad. Return to our roots, then, and the image problem will take care of itself.

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20. Mugged by Reality? (2008) There was something incongruous about having a discussion of Sarah Palin and Barack Obama sitting next to some of the most luxurious gardens in Florence, at the Villa La Pietra, a stunning house made famous as the home base of the Anglo-American aesthete, Harold Acton, and now owned by New York University. But there we were, a small group of European and American students invited by New York University (NYU) to speak about the US presidential election. The discussion was revealing, and the Americans gave as good as they got. Nearly everyone present wanted Barack Obama to win, of course; even the few Europeans who described themselves as “proud adherents to the center-right” went for the Democrat. After all, they said, what counts as “left” in America doesn’t fall too far from the “right” in Europe. The American students in the audience seemed perplexed. Ideology aside, the Europeans’ interest in the election had everything to do with American foreign policy. All were terrified that John McCain would start a big war with Iran and never leave Iraq or Afghanistan, and that many more Europeans would be dragged into the mess. “We thought the worst would be over with Bush,” said one, “and now we are desperate to see the clear end of a bad cycle.” The passion for Mr. Obama, they contended, had little to do with the man himself and everything to do with his being a Democrat. The Americans countered that nobody in Europe seemed enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton, while Mr. Obama’s press over here has been, if anything, even more gushing than at home. It was simple, the Europeans responded: Mrs. Clinton did not represent change at all, and for most of them, a female head of state is nothing revolutionary. At the same time, all of the European speakers said it would be decades before any of their countries elected a “minority” to its top office; none could ever climb the ranks of the party machinery that is so much more powerful in Europe: “We don’t elect people out of the blue over here.” Finally, a German sitting in the back of the room lent a note of cynicism to the discussion. “I think we Europeans are going to be very disappointed by Obama,” he said. “American foreign policy will continue to alienate Europeans, no matter who is president.” Most of the Americans in the room concurred; Mr. Obama has sounded quite hawkish on using force in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The perception of change, at least in foreign policy, is probably superficial.

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The other Europeans in the room then nodded in agreement, more sympathetic perhaps with the cynical, sophisticated tone than with the substance of the German’s point, which essentially contradicted everything they had been saying. But no matter. If Mr. Obama were now the lesser of two evils, so be it. But then, in further contradiction, one of the Europeans mused, “if only we could return to the days of Clinton, when Europe mattered.” Yes, Europe did matter back then. NATO dropped bombs on European soil; the two most vocal members of Mr. Clinton’s foreign policy team—Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke—considered themselves great Europhiles: the former of long standing and the latter of more recent vintage. The NYU discussants seemed oblivious to the absence of anyone like this in either camp this time around. Mr. Obama’s exhibitionism in Berlin notwithstanding, the idea that Europe will figure prominently on the priority list of either potential president is difficult to imagine. The formative experiences of both men happened in Asia. Their mental maps of the world do not place Europe at the center, or even in the first tier of important regions to the United States. Europe may come to seem, as Henry Kissinger once famously said of South America, like a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica. That this notion, albeit somewhat exaggerated, did not occur to anyone in the gardens of La Pietra, is not really that surprising. The gravitational pull of the Old World can be strong, especially when one is surrounded by towering cypresses, olive and lemon trees and ilex, classical statuary and the domes of Florence visible in the distance. Whether that pull will extend as far as Washington, let alone to the battleground states in the South and Midwest, is another question.

21. Obama’s World Tour: A Rising or a Setting Sun? (2010) President Barack Obama’s itinerary this month—first to Asia, then to Europe—will follow a path that recalls the setting of the sun. For some people, that image is a metaphor for American power, itself seen as waning. The theme of American decline is a familiar one, of course. It resurfaces more or less with every election, and with every poll that asks whether the country is “headed in the right direction.” However, the evocation of direction suggests a more apt image for Obama’s journey: the two-headed eagle. It was once a common feature

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of imperial heraldry—for the Russians, Turks and Habsburgs, for example—that signified the dual power of church and state. But the image of the eagle with one head facing left, the other right, was also a symbol of geopolitics. It said, “Our power extends both to the East and to the West. We are of not one or the other, but of both.” Unfortunately, the two-headed eagle could also symbolize a certain amount of schizophrenia. The Russian empire, for example, was accused of facing in the wrong direction—paying too much attention to Asia and its rivalry with Japan at the turn of the last century, when it should have focused more constructively on its interests in Europe. The United States now demonstrates similar signs of strategic ambivalence. Obama has reaffirmed that America is committed to remaining “a European power,” while also stating that he is America’s first “Pacific president.” The former phrase was often heard in the 1990s, used, for example, to justify US support for NATO enlargement and military intervention in the Balkans. The latter expression has not yet gained an operational definition, and could apply to anything from Obama’s upbringing to his disposition. Both phrases underscore America’s bicoastal tendency to overlay foreign policy with geographical sentiment. But American power today faces a different sort of bifurcation. The school of declinism—which in other moments of American history was called declension—has modified its argument, noting that American and, by extension, Western, power is not declining so much as the power of others is rising; that is, decline is relative rather than objective. A West versus the Rest formulation, however, makes for tricky geography. It works for China and India, but what about for other growing economies like Brazil and South Africa? Are they part of the West? If they are not, should America treat them less familiarly than its fellow members in the club of decline, such as France or Japan? If they are, does not the idea of the West—with all that it entails in respect to shared history, values, norms and institutions—gradually dissolve in a vague globalism? No, the distinction worth making is historical and structural rather than purely geographical or civilizational. The “rising” nations of the 21st century are rising as nations, not as regions or cultures per se. They are accordingly more nationalistic than their richer but now-stagnant counterparts, especially those in the so-called West. Brazil, once dubbed the country of the permanent future, now has the resources to back up

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its claim to regional, even global, pre-eminence. China and India have overtaken regional rivals to become, according to their proponents, leading world powers, while their nascent competition has become a familiar topic in the media. Turkey is reportedly pursuing its most assertive diplomacy, in every imaginable direction, since the founding of the republic. Even Germany, notwithstanding its uneasy associations with nationalism, is asserting its prerogatives ever more effectively, both within the European Union and beyond. In much of Europe and America, nationalism remains a taboo subject. Elsewhere it does not. As a result, we have one world committed to erasing the legacy of nationalistic rivalry with institutional cooperation, and another that entertains such institutions only insofar as they advance national interests vis-à-vis rivals. Obama himself has fed such perceptions by repeatedly touting the national greatness of India, for example, and by promoting the expression of that greatness in the form of a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Thus, Obama’s tour of Asia was touted as a goodwill visit to rising world powers, while his trip to Europe is part of a renewed “triple crown” strategy to patch up relations with and among multilateral institutions—namely the EU, NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, all three of which are holding summits. That raises the important question: Which side is America on? Which direction does its eagle face? Across the Atlantic or the Pacific? Toward nationalism and power politics, or toward multilateralism and global governance? Obama would probably say there is no such choice to be made: America can, indeed it must face both ways. But America’s traditional foreign policy mantras—the good neighbor, the open door, the honest broker—will no longer suffice to integrate one set of priorities with the other. Washington needs a new organizing principle and a new set of approaches to help square this particular global circle whereby national, even nationalist, aims and orientations coexist peaceably with viable international institutions. The playing out of this adjustment on the ground will be messy, piecemeal and gradual, to be sure. It will require a constant effort to infuse old institutions with new ways of thinking about today’s demands and interests—some of which may come in the guise of yesterday’s passions. Above all, it will need a language of empathy regarding national and regional ambitions along with a commitment to staffing, educating

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and promoting the vital corps of international civil servants who will have the job of smoothing the many rough edges along the way. All of this demands, needless to say, a vivid diplomatic imagination. Let us hope that somewhere along his East-West journey, Obama will find one.

22. The Strange Rebirth of American Leadership (2011) At the recent annual meetings of the American Economic Association, there was widespread pessimism about the future of the United States. “The age of American predominance is over,” declared one economist. “The US should brace for social unrest amid blame over who was responsible for squandering global primacy,” said another. We have heard this story many times before, not only in the US, but in other places as well. George Dangerfield’s controversial history, The Strange Death of Liberal England, describes his country’s sudden decline at the peak of its power at the turn of the last century. The world everyone knew simply and inexplicably seemed to disappear. Many Americans—think of the Tea Party’s adherents, for example—fear that something similar is happening to their own country. Or that it has already happened. Dangerfield based his diagnosis on a cross-section of institutions, politics, and personalities, set against the bitter class warfare of the time. Americans, however, have generally been averse to class warfare. True, the US has been home to a rigid, albeit comparably fluid, class structure ever since its founding. But Americans just don’t like to talk about it, even when they are whining about the follies of the “elite.” Nearly all Americans, apart from the richest and poorest, define themselves as “middle class.” Such remains America’s democratic ethos. Still, it is right to ask if the American way of life will survive the twentyfirst century, and, if it does, whether it will survive in America or migrate elsewhere as the US economy and political system collapse under the accumulated weight of decades of myopic national leadership and squandered opportunities. Indeed, Chinese President Hu Jintao’s recent trip to Washington was seen by many—particularly many Chinese—as the passing of the torch.

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Pessimists have been saying this for a long time. Optimists, touting GDP and other indicators, will continue to insist that Americans have never had it so good. If there is any continuity worth underscoring, it is the regular cohabitation of boosterism with declinism: America’s glass is always simultaneously half full and half empty. It is no coincidence that during the Reagan/Bush years—the last time so assertive a foreign policy coincided with such large deficits—a book like Joseph Nye’s Bound to Lead (1990) could follow in the footsteps of Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (1987). The former made a strong case for the necessity of American global hegemony; the latter warned of “imperial overstretch.” Both authors based their arguments on an assessment of the underlying context—that is, the structure—of world power. America was overstretched because its global liabilities were increasingly out of balance with its national assets, and it was bound to lead because the world as we know it is arranged favorably for it to do so. Similar arguments have been raised again recently. Writers Parag Khanna and Fareed Zakaria have regurgitated those made by Kennedy, Nye, and forebears like Hedley Bull in asserting that the US must lead the world away from a “new medievalism” amid the “rise of the rest” and the relative stagnation of the “West.” But are such writers making a valid point? If we look at moments of so-called structural convergence—the 1880’s, 1920’s, 1950’s and 1960’s, and 1990’s, in particular—we see the sources of American prosperity and power emerged in a global context, only to recede again. Perhaps rise and fall is more of a cyclical than a linear phenomenon. Or maybe it’s neither. The missing variable in most of these arguments, even Nye’s, is leadership. Leaders are never bound to rise or fall by circumstances alone. Most historians place leadership in the foreground of human history, with structural variables having conditional, not causal, value. Beneath even the richest soil, Dangerfield wrote, may lie the most perilous residue of discord and destruction. Why have Americans been so good at leading? Are Americans specially blessed, or just lucky? Now that the US has at last begun to move, gradually and thoughtfully, away from the passions that characterized the country’s response to the 2001 terrorist attacks, it is worth asking if Bill Clinton was right to say that America’s virtues and assets always prevail against its vices and defects.

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The writers mentioned above are less interested in the essence of power than in its exercise. They would rather have the US become more sophisticated in the ways of the world. Khanna, for example—presumably drawing upon the recent writing of Edward Luttwak—urges Americans to learn from the Byzantine Empire in crafting complex and obscure alliances among large and small states and non-state entities, so that diplomacy comes to resemble something like the global derivatives market. Americans don’t do this particularly well, however Byzantine their country’s own politics and policymaking may seem. Which takes us back to structure. The US political system was never designed to rule the world. Its checks and balances were meant to frustrate any such mission at the hands of an all-powerful executive, and it is doubtful that Americans would support such activism in perpetuity. The secrets of American success are transparent yet difficult to quantify. Americans’ pragmatism, opportunism, fair-mindedness, inventiveness, adaptability, optimism, and, above all, their inherent competitiveness offset their tendencies toward violence, impatience, self-righteousness, and unpredictability, their fondness for novelty and celebrity for their own sake, and their self-assertion en masse—getting there, as they like to say, “fastest with the mostest.”29 Those who understand Americans’ deep-rooted passion for “making it” know why class or any other civil warfare has not succeeded in destroying America from within. The American character prefers displacement to destruction, the win-win to the zero-sum. That is still true, both at home and abroad.

23. Pivots Forward, Backward, and Sideways (2012) Once upon a time there was the barnstormer. Performances by these air acrobats were popular attractions in America early in the last century. The barnstormer would stand on the wings of the airplane, holding on with his feet while the airplane flipped and dove and rotated. The most impressive trick of all was the “leap” from one plane to another in midair. In truth the main thing was to keep one’s foot securely on the wing of one plane until the other foot was placed safely on the other. It is useful to think of the barnstormer with respect to the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia policy. Its presentation has been skillful,

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gradual and, so far, successful. It has not resulted in widespread cries of panic in Europe or in challenges from Asia, namely from China, despite some grumbling here and there. In the language of the president and the Secretary of State, it has sounded sensible, deliberate, prudent, thoughtful and, above, all, realistic. A few critics have suggested that the US may not be able to put its money where its mouth is, but this remains to be seen. As declaratory policy, at least, it appears to check all the right boxes: it tells America’s allies in that region that they are being heard; it extends America’s traditional Open Door policy to Asia as a whole, and invites China to take part in it while implying that the costs of opposing it would outweigh the benefits; and it offers to the Asia-Pacific region the vision of a stable, peaceful future along the lines of the Atlantic Community that succeeded in the second half of the twentieth century—with open markets, liberal politics and, someday, collective security. Finally, it does all this in the context of constrained budgets, which says to both domestic and foreign audiences: this is the best deal we can all get in the circumstances. So far so good. But the question remains, Has the policy been thought fully through? Or is the US jumping from one airplane to another with two loose feet? A quick survey of Europe and the Middle East fails to dispel the latter image. There is also unfortunate usage of the word “pivot.” Pivot is a nice verb but the noun’s connotations are all wrong because they recall the old “Pivot of History” dogma of Sir Halford Mackinder and like-minded imperialists who cast the world’s powers as perennial rivals. As was said at the time of NATO enlargement, going back to a pre-World War I model of international relations is the last thing the US and its closest allies ought to promote. Talk of chessboards and geopolitics and the Great Games was as unnecessary and unhelpful in the 1990s as it is now. Otherwise we all ought to jump on the new bandwagon. Except that the old bandwagon—or airplane, to continue the metaphor—called the Atlantic Alliance needs commitment, reaffirmation, and reassurance. They are not necessarily identical with self-help. The same is true in the Middle East and North Africa as several countries there undergo a period of great instability and change that could leave an important legacy for the next few generations. As in Europe next door, the people of these regions are looking to themselves to make their own future. But the twentieth century, especially its second half, shows that both anchors and beacons of peace and prosperity are desirable, even essential, to bolster

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the aspirations and determination of those who risk so much to achieve positive change. This was, after all, the whole premise of the promoters of NATO, as well as EU, enlargement little more than a decade ago. Yet few of them would say that this mission has been accomplished irreversibly in Europe today, let alone to its East or South. Like the barnstormer, the idea of collective security reached a peak of popularity in the early interwar years. Its main premise was that security is indivisible. This is no less true today; in fact, we could say that it is even more compelling so long as we take seriously the fact and implications of globalization. So, why is it necessary to popularize hierarchies, and the importance of some regions over others? Policy choices are always necessary and important. But what about the deeper choice between interrelationships—of nations, regions, challenges, and threats—and the subjective worldviews of leaders and governments? That is, the choice between the world we think we know, or seek, and the realization that not everyone, everywhere understands trends in precisely the same way. Few Americans were so presumptuous in 1912 to announce that the twentieth century would be an “Atlantic” one. Those who are so certain now about a Pacific Century may find that it does not play out as predictably as they expect—however dynamic Asia continues, and promises, to be. It may be wise, therefore, to ask that simple question—have we thought this fully through?—just a few more times. Before it is too late.

24. Recipe for a Post-Hegemonic USA (2013) Governance in the United States is at a standoff. The crisis over the federal budget has led many people around the world to wonder if Americans haven’t lost their minds. Ultimately, as Winston Churchill infamously observed, they may be counted on to do the right thing after exhausting all other options. But this hardly is sound policy with every new vote in Congress. Maybe the latest crisis is symptomatic of a deeper and even more serious problem. The future of the United States—and the American experiment— seems bleak. The optimism for which Americans are known comes less readily. While pessimism is nothing unique in American history—widespread since the time of the Puritans—its prevalence today is spread by the realization that the country’s position of global superpower may soon be lost.

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This realization, regarded as a “post-hegemonic” fact, is no longer controversial. All empires vanish eventually. Hegemony indeed may be a form of imperial rule—it’s been called an empire with good manners— but that’s beside the point. American hegemony may be giving way to some other post-hegemonic condition. It is hard to say where it will lead, or what it signifies. “After forty, all life is a matter of saving face,” Thomas Heise has written. “For those whose successes have run out early, the years are measured less by the decreasing increments of honors achieved, than by the humiliations staved off and the reversals slowed.” This diagnosis for America itself, increasingly difficult to refute, raises the simple question: Will life go on as before, only with less ostensible concern for the rest of the world, or more? Some may say this would make the US a more “normal” nation. Normality resides in the eye of the beholder. Each nation is as normal or as abnormal as its people and observers imagine it to be. Many Americans still regard superpower status as being normal, however unpopular the burdens of global leadership are at times. The power of the US dollar, visa-free travel throughout much of the world and the global prevalence of English are still widely taken for granted, despite the country’s difficulties. Yet this moment may represent a major psychological, even metaphysical, shift in the way that Americans relate to the rest of the world. To understand the change we must begin with perceptions. The sheer size of America’s military and economy, its commercial and technological success, and the global penetration of its culture have underwritten a high standard of living and influence over others. Earlier, its reputation as a dynamic, free, prosperous nation—in the words of William Penn, a “good poor man’s country”—allowed some people to champion a special destiny for the proverbial people of plenty. This was later matched by the growth of the nation’s physical power. Anyone who seeks to understand this history must start with the centrality of dichotomies in American life. It is still common to speak of “America and the world” as though the two exist separately in space and time. This can be traced back to the first such dichotomy: the New World and the Old. Related to it was one between civilization and barbarism. As Jay Sexton has shown in his recent history of the Monroe Doctrine, it did not take long for the two to merge into another defined more by latitude than by longitude, that is, a “North vs. South

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distinction of ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ peoples.” No longer was the United States merely a good poor man’s country, no longer just a refuge and a symbol of hope for those who endure oppression and poverty. It also had, collectively, a civilizing mission of its own. In fact this wasn’t too different from most contemporary imperial states. But many Americans insisted otherwise. Henry James, for example, supposedly said that empire civilized the British but barbarized Americans. An exceptional America, in other words, must be preserved against rather than with the rest of the world. So the United States became a much bigger global player but Americans have held on to a basic dichotomy which at once justifies their success and divides them from the less fortunate. They have also invoked their country’s exceptional nature, paradoxically, in claiming that the so-called win-win principle is unique to America. Meanwhile the loss of the nation’s hegemony has come to be seen by both Americans and non-Americans as leading away from gentility and progress. It is not merely a result of a smaller pie. Rather it’s due to the combination of socioeconomic and demographic disparities with rapid political and economic change at home and abroad. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has predicted that China and India alone will account for some 50 percent of world GDP in 2060, as opposed to about 25 percent today, and both countries’ economies are expected to be larger than America’s. Yet, the anticipated GDP per person in each country would still be a fraction of America’s: China’s about one-half, India’s about one-third. Critics in the circumstances may welcome the idea of the United States descending to a state of pre-modern—or post-modern, postindustrial—dystopia dominated by reactionaries. A glance at the front pages of many US newspapers suggests they have a point. By most measures, America is less violent and poverty stricken than at many other moments in its history. But that’s not the perception. One reason may be that there is less to offset it. The high-mindedness that the media once adopted as a matter of course has faded as broadcast and newspaper audiences have shrunk. More resemble tabloids in form and content. They also resemble, at least in their partisanship, the press of the 18th and 19th centuries. James was wrong: high-mindedness and hegemony go hand in hand, even in America. But can one survive without the other? And what shall follow?

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Political scientists G. John Ikenberry, Robert Keohane, Charles Kupchan, Fareed Zakaria and others have addressed the latter question at length in a contemporary context, for the most part structurally from the outside in. A few others, notably the British journalists Anatol Lieven and Edward Luce, have done so culturally from the inside out. The civilizing process is not always neatly cyclical. Many of the stereotypical adjectives associated with the American character—restless, competitive, acquisitive, mobile, free-spirited, informal, inventive, expansive—would appear to mar the evolution of a modest, quiet country at peace with itself in the world, content to cultivate its own garden. Somewhere there must be another frontier. In an ideal post-hegemonic world, a vibrant American economy and society would continue to combine cultural inclusion, diffusion and diversification with the kind of prosperity and competition that many Americans embrace. Doing so humbly, as George W. Bush suggested, is not ideal, however: Self-professed humility results too easily in charges of hypocrisy. The US is still a big country; it can afford a few mistakes; it needn’t magnify them by conflation with the national ego. A better policy would be to allow America’s creative talent, sense of fair play and pragmatism to continue to flourish, minus the dichotomies. It is mainly up to Americans to decide if this can work on a smaller global scale and to start planning ahead before their country turns upon itself, irreparably.

Notes



1.  Cf. Andrew J. Goodpaster, “Advice for the Next President,” Foreign Affairs 79, no. 5 (September/October 2000): 158–60. 2. See Kenneth Weisbrode, “Don’t Rush to Judgment on Clinton,” Foreign Policy, February 16, 2009. 3.  For a partial account, see, inter alia, Rory Stewart, “Afghanistan: A Shocking Indictment,” New York Review of Books, November 6, 2014; Gareth Porter, “Behind the Real US Strategic Blunder in Syria,” Middle East Eye, December 27, 2016; Alfred W. McCoy, “Into the Afghan Abyss (Again),” Lobelog, November 13, 2017; Danny Sjursen, “What If: An Alternative Strategy for 9/12/2001,” Lobelog, December 19, 2017; and books by Andrew Bacevich and Thomas Ricks listed in the section “further reading.” 4. See James E. Goodby and Kenneth Weisbrode, “The Path From Crises to Triumph,” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2003: “History is full of missed turning points… Unless [Bush] creates a foundation for order-building

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diplomacy, the last 30 months will go down as one of those failed opportunities to restructure global affairs…. Bush has favored the urgent (or what he said was urgent) over the important…. Bush and his advisors must dispel the widespread impression that they are deeply, almost pathologically, impatient with diplomacy.” See also James E. Goodby, “When War Won Out: Bosnian Peace Plans Before Dayton,” International Negotiation 1, no. 3 (January 1996): 501–23; James E. Goodby, ed., Regional Conflicts: The Challenge to US-Russian Co-operation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), esp. Chapter 10; Andrew J. Goodpaster, When Diplomacy Is Not Enough: Managing Multilateral Military Interventions (New York: Carnegie Corporation, 1996). 5. See Andrew P. N. Erdmann, “The US Presumption of Quick, Costless Wars,” Orbis 43, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 363–81. 6. Van Jackson in Van Jackson et al., “Policy Roundtable: The Future of Progressive Foreign Policy,” Texas National Security Review, December 4, 2018. 7. Rory Stewart uses the term in “Afghanistan: A Shocking Indictment.” 8. E.g., Colin Dueck et al., “Policy Roundtable: The Future of Conservative Foreign Policy,” Texas National Security Review, November 30, 2018; Jackson et al.; James Goldgeier, “Is There a New Foreign Policy Consensus Forming?” War on the Rocks, February 1, 2019. 9. For their part, some defenders of Donald Trump’s policies advertise what they assert to be a more modest, reasonable aim: “Those who view the president as an opponent of the so-called liberal international order are off point. He is not intent on tearing down this order, but rather is merely raising questions about whether institutions established over 60 years ago are up to the task of today’s challenges—and whether they are serving US interests” (Nadia Schadlow in Dueck et al.). 10. Jake Sullivan, “More, Less, or Different? Where US Foreign Policy Should— and Shouldn’t—Go From Here,” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 1 (January/ February 2019): 168–75; see also “Double Vision,” The Economist, September 8, 2018; Stephen Wertheim, “Will 2020 See a Monumental Clash Over America’s Place in the World?” New York Times, February 26, 2019. 11.  John Fonte in Dueck et al.; cf. Kenneth Weisbrode, “No Halo for Woodrow,” (letter to the editor) Wall Street Journal, July 9, 2002. 12. Competition need not be a bad thing, according to some people. It may be healthy or advantageous, as in a “responsible competition for the Free World” (Thomas Wright in Jackson et al.). Cf. C. Richard Nelson, ed., The Prospects for Security Cooperation Among the Major Powers (Washington, DC: Atlantic Council of the United States, 1995). 13. Quoted in Michael J. Mazarr et al., Understanding the Emerging Era of International Competition: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018).

104  J. E. GOODBY AND K. WEISBRODE 14.  Quoted in Aaron Mehta, “National Defense Strategy Released With Clear Priority: Stay Ahead of Russia and China,” Defense News, January 19, 2018; see also National Defense Strategy Commission, Providing for the Common Defense (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2018). 15. Nadia Schadlow in Dueck et al. 16. “Not the Partner You Were Looking For,” The Economist, March 3, 2018. 17. The record of what promises were made or not made by American officials to their Soviet counterparts at the end of the Cold War regarding the future of Germany and NATO, inter alia, has been the subject of much recent historical debate. A good summary along with several primary documents may be found in Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, “NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard,” National Security Archive Briefing Book No. 613, December 12, 2017 and, by the same authors, “NATO Expansion: What Yeltsin Heard,” Briefing Book No. 621, March 16, 2018, and in the chapters by Stephan Kieninger, Liviu Horovitz, and Stephen J. Flanagan in Daniel Hamilton and Kristina Spohr, eds., Open Door: NATO and Euro-Atlantic Security After the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2019), 57–114. 18. See, especially, Dov Zakheim in Dueck et al.: … the implicit bargain that the United States and its European allies had struck in the late 1940s still applied: Washington would commit forces to deter an attack on a NATO ally. Should deterrence fail, however, a war would be fought on European, not American, soil…. The deployment of American forces in Asia represents the same implicit bargain in terms of the value of American deterrence to Asian allies on the one hand, and allied acceptance of the reality that any conventional war would be fought in Asia and not on American territory on the other…. There is, however, a major difference between America’s posture in Asia and its posture in Europe. Although there are far fewer American forces on the East Asian landmass, America does have territory in, or near, East Asia… Over time, these territories have become increasingly vulnerable to a military threat from China, making it all the more important for American forces to deter any Chinese aggression as far from them as possible. 19. Keith Gessen, “The Quiet Americans Behind the US-Russia Imbroglio,” New York Times Magazine, May 18, 2018. 20. This verdict holds in spite of several mitigating efforts, such as the NATORussia Founding Act. See the chapters by John Kornblum, Robert Hunter, and Andrei Kozyrev in Hamilton and Spohr, eds., 277–95,

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297–337, 449–58. Cf. Fareed Zakaria, “US-Russia Relations Were Lost at the Start,” Washington Post, July 20, 2018 and essay 43. 21.  Kenneth Weisbrode, “Twilight of the Proconsuls,” Foreign Policy, February 10, 2014. 22.  E.g., Andrey Kortunov, “US Withdrawal from the INF Treaty and the End of the Bilateral Era,” Carnegie Moscow Center, October 25, 2018; Chimène Keitner, “What Are the Consequences of the Trump Administration’s Recent Treaty Withdrawals?” Just Security, October 17, 2018. See also Chapter 2. 23. Quoted in Gessen, “The Quiet Americans.” 24. See Kenneth Weisbrode, “The US and Egypt: The Limits of Hegemony,” World Politics Review, February 8, 2011 and “With Friends Like These: Influencing Allies and Clients,” ibid., November 8, 2011; Kenneth Weisbrode, “The Power of Planning,” New Atlanticist, February 7, 2001; James E. Goodby and Kenneth Weisbrode, “Limit the Pentagon’s Takeover of the CIA,” Defense News, June 5, 2006. 25. Yet another survey claimed that 36% of Americans surveyed said they are “not proud” of “the way democracy works in the United States;” in 2014 it was 18% and in 2002 it was 9%. (Emily Guskin, “It’s Independence Day, but Americans Aren’t Feeling So Proud,” Washington Post, July 4, 2018.) 26.  Cf. Heather Hurlburt in Jackson et al.: “Successful national strategies typically flow not from tactical choices—the how—but rather from fundamental goals—the what for… the belief in the unipolar moment in the 1990s… got the foreign policy establishment out of the habit of connecting the construction of global economic arrangements to the realities of how Americans lived their lives at home…” [author’s emphasis]. 27. “Central Asia” refers in this instance to Afghanistan and Pakistan. 28. See James E. Goodby, “The Limited Test Ban Negotiations, 1954–63: How a Negotiator Viewed the Proceedings,” International Negotiation 10, no. 3 (2005): 381–404; and by the same author, “The US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1961–63: A Study in Governance,” Hoover Institution, 2017. 29. From the line sometimes associated with Nathan Bedford Forrest: “git thar fustest [i.e., first] with the mostest.”

PART II

CHAPTER 4

Regional Problems

The next two chapters revisit several of the principal subjects addressed in the two previous chapters through a regional lens. In doing so we are aware that there are multiple regionalisms, multiple regions within regions, and multiple types of regionalization, just as there are multiple definitions of multilateralism, “strategic stability,” and so on. The same point may be made about nations and nationalisms, or any other geopolitical entity and ideology. But here again we are not out to highlight complexity, or to decry a pernicious abstraction, for its own sake. Instead we look at both intra-regional and extra- or trans-regional problems functionally: that is, how leaders can best devise policies that take into account regional realities—from the integration of markets and supply chains, to the movement of people, goods, diseases, commodities across borders, to the insecurity and idealization of those very borders and the variable qualities of cooperation and rivalry that regions evoke. The essays in this part are divided into “problems” and “solutions,” not because all problems can be solved (or even managed perfectly), but because these two categories offer a useful analytic counterpoint to the challenge/policy (or challenge/response, to repeat the old formula) framework within which to imagine the world during the past twenty years. The experience of the EU in particular has shown that regional problems are also created by national challenges from within a region. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the operational level—in contrast to the strategic and the tactical levels of military planners—whereby plans and the © The Author(s) 2020 J. E. Goodby and K. Weisbrode, Practical Lessons from US Foreign Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27312-5_4

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problems they address must emphasize interconnections, vulnerabilities, uncertainties, and composite advantages and gains during the mid-term future, so, about three to five years ahead. In principle, every regional problem derives from or otherwise relates to a global challenge, and every regional solution involves a national policy, at least until regional bodies like the EU fully supplant nation-states, which is unlikely to happen any time soon. The overarching solution to innumerable regional problems that is discussed in Chapter 5 is a regional order in the form of a well-integrated security community. The overarching problem, then, which is discussed in this chapter, is the absence of such a community in large parts of Asia, and even yet in Europe.1 We identify two broad macro-regions: Eurasia, or what some people prefer to call the Euro-Atlantic emphasizing its Western half, and Asia proper, or what some people now call the IndoPacific. The two are distinct but interconnected. Regarding the first, Eurasia, we demonstrate the internal effects within a region and the more general effects on norms and expectations of the US failure to build a post-Cold War order with Russia (essay 25), which was discussed in the previous chapter.2 The decision to enlarge NATO into the territory of the former Warsaw Pact, and later, to the former Soviet Union itself, was taken some time in the early 1990s and implemented finally on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty. The decision at the time was portrayed by the Clinton administration as a necessity in order to fill a strategic vacuum, to use the popular term.3 Historians of the future will probably uncover other rationales when more archival records are available. Domestic ethnic politics in the United States in the run-up to Clinton’s re-election campaign probably played a role, as did pleas from several former Warsaw Pact members who were uneasy with their status within NATO’s Partnership for Peace program, to which Russia also belonged, and were frustrated by the long process required to join the EU. The claim made by Clinton’s deputy at the time, Strobe Talbott, that “the EU would expand eastward only if—and after—NATO extended security guarantees to aspiring nations,” was an artful and powerful way of substituting a necessity for a choice, which NATO enlargement, and EU enlargement, for that matter, certainly were.4 The evidence for that theory is flimsy. Finland and Sweden, for example, found it much easier to join the EU and have not yet found it easy to join NATO. The necessity, by contrast, was (and still is) to

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make real the “Europe, Whole and Free” that George H. W. Bush had celebrated in 1989. Perhaps NATO’s new members feel more secure by the membership they achieved. But Talbott’s additional claim that “…at least a hundred million Europeans in the Baltic States, Central Europe, and the Balkans are shielded from Russian aggression thanks to NATO expansion” rests on the belief that Russian aggression was a fact, or that it would not be encouraged by the very actions meant to deter it.5 Chapter 5 will revisit the uses and misuses of deterrence in the postCold War world. This chapter contrasts different visions of European and Euro-Atlantic security, and asks how they resulted in a less secure regional environment. One answer, according to a Russian scholar, Svetlana Savranskaya, was that cooperation between Russia and the United States during these years boiled down, again quoting Talbott, to “‘what we deem to be [Russia’s] legitimate security concerns,’ not on what the Russians believed was important to them.”6 What was important to them? One priority was the survival of the Russian economy along with the authority and power of the Russian state. The American role in helping to secure a Europe whole and free came to be seen as being at the expense of all three in stereotypical Cold War, zero-sum fashion. Yet, “the United States did not ‘lose Russia’ in the 1990s,” Savranskaya adds. “What happened in Russia was the result of its internal political developments and choices. But US policies contributed to Russian disillusionment with democracy and free markets as well as with American plans to build a Europe whole and free, but without Russia.”7 The United States and European governments gave assistance to Russia during these years, amounting only to some $2.50 per Russian, according to one account.8 The level of this assistance, however, is secondary to the strategic premises on which it was based, which should not have been to reinvent Russian society but to secure Russian cooperation with other European powers and institutions over time.9 Assistance was said to be part of a good faith effort to help a former adversary back on its feet in the spirit of the reconstruction of post-WWII Germany and Japan. But there were few real parallels between those two cases and the former Soviet Union, which was not under military occupation and had joined with the West in calling an end to the Cold War in order, as Gorbachev put it, to enter and sustain a common European home. That aspiration contrasts with the statement attributed later to Barack Obama, that “the main challenge is to put [Vladimir Putin] in a box to stop making mischief.”10

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Still, Talbott is correct to note in retrospect that “a Russian veto of NATO expansion would have been a shameful injustice,” yet “Clinton and other Western leaders believed that NATO still had a post-Cold War role—in collaboration with post-Soviet Russia—to play in Europe and beyond.”11 This combined statement shows how ambiguous Russia’s status as a Euro-Atlantic power has been since the 1990s. That ambiguity has extended to NATO as well. NATO engaged in military action on the European continent for the first time in its 50-year history, against Serbian forces in Kosovo. Since then it invoked Article V for the first time (after September 11, 2001), and has been active “out of area,” notably in Afghanistan and Libya. We wrote against this likelihood (essay 33) and believe that NATO’s most important role remains underwriting Euro-Atlantic security, however unwilling and unlikely any such cooperation with Russia may now be, and however much Russia, for its part, claims to have taken advantage of NATO’s out-of-area interventions to upgrade its own military capacities in Europe.12 NATO has since begun to bolster those capacities and to pursue more extensive work with the EU, although cooperation has been piecemeal and limited. Its cooperation with Russia, by most appearances, is all but defunct. Russian leaders, following their country’s military actions against Georgia and Ukraine (which have included occupying portions of both former Soviet territories, and in the latter case, actually redrawing a border for Crimea) appear to have concluded that the nations of the former Warsaw Pact are bound to be drawn ever closer to the West.13 Should that development reflect a belief that both Russia and the United States, although not entirely European, are still historically, geographically, and culturally part of Europe, cooperation will probably continue to proceed more haltingly than it might have done. Should NATO and other Euro-Atlantic organizations continue to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy in lieu of participating constructively with others in coping with the challenges of globalization, the monsters will probably come closer to home.14 A relatively uniform set of norms and rules throughout a system of nations, such as the Euro-Atlantic community, is a necessary condition for a stable peace within the system. But patches of ethnic or communal strife will be difficult to erase from the map and small wars can destabilize relations among major nations. Different sets of norms and rules applied to small wars will inevitably cause disputes between the major nations and work against the achievement of a stable peace. Decisions about entering into small wars therefore should be made within a

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framework that includes the United States and its allies and Russia and its friends, acting within a common set of norms and rules if a stable peace within the Euro-Atlantic community is the objective. This was the fatal mistake made by the Clinton Administration when it undertook military operations in Kosovo without Russian or UN acquiescence. The legitimacy of the Kosovo outcome has been found wanting ever since.15 Moving further east, one may detect a similar condition of ambiguity over the formerly putative and now real “rise” of China. As noted in the previous chapter, American policymakers were of several minds on the subject of China: some saw China’s rise as a glass half-full/glass half-empty question; others preferred to plot it on a spectrum of risk to threat to the interests of the United States and its allies. Few people described the matter primarily as a problem of regional order, and as a reconfiguration of regional economies and security relationships involving all Asian and Pacific powers, including the United States. As China’s economy has grown, so too has its political and even its military assertiveness. But to claim that China’s neighbors as well as others around the world are being “pulled into China’s economic orbit” is in effect to conflate political and economic change.16 China’s Belt and Road Initiative aims in principle to link several regions to China’s growing economy with infrastructure and related investment. However it develops, the initiative is sure to carry benefits as well as costs, which, for the countries that are receiving Chinese investment, may come in the form of indebtedness and therefore dependence.17 Meanwhile, the United States has joined India, Australia, Japan and some others in calling for a “free and open Indo-Pacific” (FOIP). Here again, the principle looks simple; the reality is complex. The principle is not new: America’s “open door” policy originated with reference to the China market more than a century ago, and its guiding aim in defeating the Japanese Empire in WWII was to ensure that Asia not be autarkic or closed to outsiders, as Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” aimed to be. The difficulty with FOIP is that it doubles as an anti-China containment effort, which puts China’s neighbors, especially those that depend increasingly on peace and access to Chinese markets and capital, in a difficult and probably impossible position.18 Similar criticisms were made about Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” later renamed “rebalance,” strategy or policy (it was hard to say which it was, actually). Although it also claimed to square the circle between

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regional integration and global interdependence by co-sponsoring the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade liberalization agreement that was, at least in theory, someday allowing also for the inclusion of China (essay 37), squaring the circle has been tough, in part because American opinion-leaders, as already stated, have been divided over whether China represents a threat or an opportunity.19 “Equally frustrating,” for China, according to a long-time China-watcher, “is [its] inability to operate internationally, most particularly in its own backyard, without in some manner falling under the shadow of the United States.”20 Several of the essays in this chapter (26, 28, 29, and 30) suggest that the United States has put the cart before the horse with its regional diplomacy, or lack thereof. To predicate Sino-US relations on a semiindependent American-led effort to integrate China’s neighbors separately from China itself is to suggest that China needs checks and balances in its own region, in contrast to what the United States, nearly two centuries ago, decided it did not need, and would not countenance, in the Americas. Checks and balances are served better in collaboration with a presumed regional hegemon, not against or in spite of its ever growing capabilities. For its part, China’s diplomacy has been as much transregional and multiregional as hegemonic. For this reason the essays here have urged a basic understanding of, and commitment to, regional interdependence and multilateral cooperation extending across the Pacific, as a prerequisite for America’s China and broader Asia policies (essays 28 and 29).21 Such an understanding must start with resolving the still very dangerous security problem on the Korean peninsula, an issue which we devoted a significant portion of our attention over the years (essays 31, 32, and 34).22 As the United States learned painfully and repeatedly over more than two decades, North Korea cannot be disarmed by unilateral pressure or by relying solely upon Chinese power and influence to do the job. North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are certainly beholden to the insecurity it feels vis-àvis its neighbors and the United States in its region. Thus, as Chapter 5 shows, the only solution to this dangerous problem, if there is one, is a process that redefines and redesigns security in Northeast Asia with the cooperation of all the region’s powers. Barring that, the North Korean regime will only succeed in buying more time to arm itself, if it does not otherwise unexpectedly and independently disintegrate.23 The lesson was put forth over a century ago: the United States is both an Asian and a European power, and must assume certain responsibilities

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to act accordingly. Yet, with Korea as with most other regional conflicts, US policy has suffered from a mental deficiency in viewing such regions from the outside rather than from the inside, as it were, as an important regional actor in its own right. This deficiency in turn has resulted in more confusion of the means and ends of appropriate policies, and misplaced responses when they have failed. Even in Europe, where the United States crafted an empathetic and rather successful role for itself from the “inside” for nearly eight decades in the twentieth century, the problems and difficulties there in the past few years have become too much to bear for many American policymakers to pay important attention, seeking, perhaps, “a liberation, not from Europe, but from the torment of an eternally unresolved conflict between superiority and inferiority.”24 The result, according to one longtime diplomat and observer, has seen “transatlantic consensus… drift and decay not from opposition but from inanition…. a steady, unplanned, but nonetheless consequential ‘Amerexit…’”25 What many people perceive to be the radicalism of the Trump administration, turning away from duties and responsibilities in Europe and Asia, and from a fealty to America’s allies and alliances, has been happening for some time. Some of those allies—France, Germany, and Japan, for example—have begun to assume more responsibility for regional security, attempting to fill the gap being left by the United States.26 As discussed further in the next chapter, this effort, while significant, is not necessarily in the US interest—again, because the United States, whether it likes it or not, remains an important actor in both regions. Vacillation in recasting American regional roles during the past two decades suggests one final ambiguity over the role of a great power. Is it to “balance” the interests of small powers against those of a regional hegemon or bully? Or is it something else, perhaps: to work with all powers, large and small, to rewrite the logical foundation of power itself in a given region, by demonstrating and, where necessary, underwriting the mutual advantages from political community and interlinked economies so that the politics of inclusion, where possible, obviates a perpetuation of adversarial relations? Is the United States, in other words, mainly a guarantor, an agent, or a catalyst of regional security? Once again, the response to those questions depends on whether one views the United States as an outside power or as every bit as an Asian or European power as any other nation in those regions. We have argued that this dilemma extends to the region between the two and the one

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that is geographically farthest from the United States—Central Eurasia— where thousands of Americans have died since 2001 (essays 27, 35, and 36).27 US policies to date have not been very clear about where the US stands on that overall question. In the essays that follow, we have posed this question in a variety of ways. In Chapter 5 we attempt to answer it.

25. The Consequences of Russia’s Actions—Who Will Cast the First Stone? (1999) The European Security Charter issued by 54 leaders last week in Istanbul amounted to a remarkable break with the past. It was equally momentous for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the sponsor of the conference, whose role has greatly expanded in recent years. For the first time since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the states of Europe have openly challenged the primacy of territorial borders, suggesting a new right to intervene in one another’s internal affairs for humanitarian reasons.28 Even though application of this principle to ongoing territorial conflicts, namely the one in Chechnya, was diluted or postponed out of deference to Russian concerns, the principle itself warrants a second thought. It would seem at first blush that anyone who believes in all that is good should rejoice in this achievement. Bad regimes no longer will be able to hide behind a formal barricade of state sovereignty in committing atrocities. Virtuous men and women no longer will be forced to stand idle while barbaric demagogues run free to menace their own people. At last civilized Europe can nip such evil in the bud before it snowballs into a threat to European civilization itself, as it inevitably must do. But something is wrong here. Does anyone find it strange that the OSCE—an organization that owes its existence to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, which itself affirmed the territorial integrity of states and forbade the use of force between them—should now suggest an erosion of state sovereignty in Europe as we know it? And is it not additionally ironic that the nation which first proposed a European Conference on Security and Cooperation—the Soviet Union—should fall victim to the forces unleashed at Helsinki and then produce a poor stepchild, Russia, that should become the object of

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unanimous scolding by those very nations that profited most by her predecessor’s demise? Is the West not overdoing things just a bit? Historic ironies aside, it is hard to imagine that this step is as positive in reality as the script would suggest. Proclamations this general and ambitious, with moral rather than geopolitical foundations, augur suspicion and uncertainty. Who determines the standards of regime behavior? And who determines the penalties? To think that those on the losing side will ascribe such determinations to universal laws rather than to sheer power is not merely hubris—it is naive in the extreme. Potential double standards abound. Who could imagine that Turkey, the host of last weekend’s summit, would take this charter seriously were it to be applied to its dealings with the Kurds? What about the Spaniards and the Basques? The Czechs and the Gypsies? How would the United States react if an OSCE delegation condemned some future intervention in Central America or the Caribbean? The list could go on. We would do better to recall the wisdom of Bismarck, who put the case more simply: “A sentimental policy,” he said, “knows no reciprocity.” The European state system has survived 350 years for a reason. There is no world arbiter of right and wrong with the ability to enforce judgment. If individual states or groups of states take this role upon themselves, it will only come back to haunt in their own backyard. Diplomacy is about maximizing one’s own interests while smoothing over differences. It should not be about remaking the world in any one image, however righteous that image may seem to its promoters. When George Kennan made his last appearance before the US Congress in 1991,29 he announced that the era of Wilson had finally arrived, by which he probably meant self-determination on a global basis. But we should not forget that this same Mr. Kennan warned us sternly many years before about the “red skein of legalism-moralism” that Wilsonianism represents. Surely he meant this latest statement as an omen, not as a blessing. Before our leaders go any further with such overtly ideological policies we need to think a little more realistically about where they ultimately will take us. Surely we can find some other way to feel good about ourselves and express what indignation we must over the ill behavior of other states.

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26. Don’t Rush to the Altar With India (2001) The administration of US President George W. Bush may soon set aside three-year-old sanctions on India in favor of a dramatic improvement in military, political and economic ties. This caps a process begun during former President Bill Clinton’s April 1999 visit to New Delhi, when he cast India as America’s new first friend in Asia. India boosters trot out the usual justifications: The world’s “two largest democracies” have no reason to be anything but close allies; India is well on the road to overtaking China as the world’s most populous nation; its economy, having undergone impressive reforms in the early 1990s, continues to grow; its people, for the most part, are industrious, peace-loving and pro-Western; and its governments, though volatile, have fostered a mature and constructive attitude toward the US. India’s “regrettable” nuclear tests in 1998, which brought on the sanctions, are now made out to have been a foregone conclusion, or as Margaret Thatcher was reported to have said at the time, “They should have done it years ago.” For its part, the Indian government continues to pledge perfection of the still opaque measures for command and control over its new nuclear forces—with American assistance, of course. The Bush administration has eagerly picked up the baton from Mr. Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, appointing its own heavyweight, Robert Blackwill, as the new US ambassador to New Delhi. It has trumpeted recent lovefests between Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Hugh Shelton and their Indian counterparts. Indophilia in Washington is no longer a province of the Democratic Party; the logic of intense courtship has become sui generis, and nearly automatic. This should give the sober-minded cause for concern, particularly Americans. The Bush administration’s adamant denial that its overtures toward India have anything to do with China is believed by nobody in Asia, least of all the Indians. No amount of diplomatic pleasantries between the foreign ministries of India and China, or between those of India and Pakistan, can dismiss the presumption that the US and India are joining hands to “balance” Chinese power. But the only step that would align US rhetoric to such a reality would be a comparable deepening of military ties with both China and Pakistan, and that is nowhere in the cards. “Realists” will argue that geopolitics demand this course of action. Like it or not, they say, China is bent on becoming the next big US adversary. India is China’s “historic rival.” After all, it was the famous

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Indian strategist of the fourth-century B.C., Kautilya, who gave us the dictum “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” From the perspective of a rising India, then, the logic of an American alliance against a powerful Chinese neighbor makes eminent sense. But does it serve US interests? The answer to that question depends largely on India’s behavior. Those anxious to jump into bed with New Delhi should recall that India is the only country in Asia besides Japan that has invaded all of its neighbors. Against the Gandhian myth to which many Americans remain bizarrely attached, the people who rule India are no more peace-loving and democratic than people anywhere else, if one measures such sensibilities by the degree to which they allow their society to be open, free and—in contrast to China—mobile. As to being pro-US, India’s current government gets credit for saying all the right things about missile defense, naval cooperation in the Indian Ocean and Afghan-based terrorism, but this is very recent. No one should forget whose side India chose for most of the Cold War, a decision that fit well with the disposition of an elite known for combining the most insular tendencies of Fabian socialism, tiersmondisme and a British public school-bred snobbery into an especially intense variety of anti-Americanism—one that is slow to wane, not least because the composition of that elite has changed very little since Jawaharlal Nehru and his ilk left their indelible stamp on India’s self-image. India’s rulers, of course, have tried to distance themselves from this checkered past, advertising a thin stream of non-Brahmins in their midst, and telling outsiders that they are eager to diversify their country’s international relationships, notably in defense. For example, they point out how undesirable it is for more than 70% of India’s military hardware to be of Soviet or Russian origin, and have readily invited American, European and Israeli defense contracts. But this has not stopped them from continuing to seek new deals with Russia, particularly in fighter-aircraft, ballistic-missile and nuclear technology. In contrast to some of the more vocal armchair strategists who now extol India’s apparent change of heart, experienced India-hands generally take Indian oratory with a large grain of salt. Consider for instance the claim only three years ago of India’s then-defense minister, George Fernandes, that India’s nuclear capability was necessary to counter the country’s “encirclement” by the US, his evidence being the American troops based on the island of Diego Garcia. Which line is to be believed? The mantra that the US military presence must be expelled from Asia—still as prevalent within Indian officialdom as it is alleged to be

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in China—or the pledges of unconditional collaboration with the new American “strategic partner”? Of course, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a healthy US-Indian relationship. Sophisticated advocates also make the fair point that closer ties with the US might serve to restrain Indian hawks, or at least channel Indian nationalism away from religious chauvinism and/ or in a pro-Western, pro-US direction. This is important in light of the country’s largest-ever increase in defense expenditure in 1999 and notable expansion in recent years of forward deployments, including a new army corps in Ladakh, a new tri-service command post in the Andaman Islands and a sizeable upgrade of a base at Port Blair. A more robust Indian defense posture is here to stay. Better to work with it than against it. However, US leaders must make certain the alleged, existential benefits of deeper collaboration are matched by facts on the ground. India’s rulers will redefine and promote Indian nationalism in ways that most suit their immediate political interests, no matter what Washington does. Wishful thinking aside, US diplomacy could find itself drawn into messy regional conflicts—Kashmir being the most visible but not necessarily the most dangerous—on behalf of an unpopular bully determined to have its place in the sun. Ultimately, this would provide an excuse for Chinese skullduggery toward India’s weaker neighbors, namely Burma, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and even Thailand, which the pro-India tilt in policy seeks to deter. A tit-for-tat competition for spheres of influence in South and Southeast Asia is the last thing the US—or anyone in the region— should want to stimulate. Security requirements, and not prejudices for some Asians over others, should undergird US interests there. The value of closer US-Indian ties should not be measured on some abstract, geopolitical chessboard, but rather from the stability such ties could further in India’s backyard. The US government should proceed with caution in putting them to the test.

27. Afghanistan Stalemate Fosters Reevaluation of Stabilization Tactics (2001) The annual fighting season in Afghanistan is coming to a close with the opposing sides deadlocked. Their inability to achieve a breakthrough deepens existing dilemmas concerning the international community’s

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quest to foster stable government in Afghanistan. Specifically, the international community is reevaluating whether outside military assistance can promote stability, or prolong the conflict. The stalemate comes as a disappointment to both the Taliban, which has counted on significant action before the onset of winter, as well as Northern Alliance warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud, who has been desperate to retake territory, especially the strategic town of Taloqan. The most recent clashes along the border between the Ghor and Badghis provinces on September 2 resulted in only a few dozen casualties and no transfer of territory. Additional reports on September 4 of Taliban air attacks on opposition positions near Bagram and in Kapisa province were inconclusive. This is typical of the sporadic and generally unimpressive military action that has taken place throughout the summer. Fighting began in May, and a new round of massacres by the Taliban was reported in Yakawlang and northern Bamyan by June, along with the widespread destruction of dwellings and livestock. Skirmishes also took place in Herat, as well as near Taloqan and other parts of Takhar province. The pace picked up in mid-July and continued into August: on August 19, opposition forces allegedly launched a rocket attack during Independence Day celebrations in Kabul. The next day Taliban forces bombarded opposition areas in Kapisa and Parwan provinces, as well as the Alinegar district in Laghman province and Taywara in Ghor. During the next week intense battles took place near Bagram and in the Chal district of Takhar. According to most accounts, Taliban forces held the upper hand in the majority of incidents. Massoud’s forces still control about 10 percent of the country, mainly in the Panjshir Valley and remote Badakhshan, but they have not been able to hold onto gains elsewhere with the exception of a few pockets north of Kabul. Other commanders, notably Ismail Khan in the west, have made some attempt to organize and coordinate the opposition, but with little yet to show for it on the ground. Massoud has developed a reputation of invincibility, but, at best, he and his allies only succeed in keeping the Taliban on edge year after year. In mid-July, unconfirmed reports began circulating that the United States was becoming more active in anti-Taliban military efforts. One Iranian source even reported in August that US troops had arrived in Tajikistan in preparation for a cross-border punitive action against

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Taliban forces. Tajik officials in August denied that American soldiers had arrived to participate in military operations in Afghanistan. Until now, the United States has kept its distance from the ongoing turmoil in Afghanistan. The top priority for the US government has not changed since 1998—elimination of the threat posed by Afghan-based Saudi terrorist, Osama bin Laden. It seems, however, that US tactics for containing bin Laden are shifting. Washington now appears to realize that a good way to attack bin Laden is to disrupt his base of operations. The ouster of the Taliban could potentially accomplish this goal. But some experts question the practicality of tactical military assistance. The results of this summer’s fighting suggest that continuing attempts in the near-to-medium term to achieve a military breakthrough would not have high chances of success. A proxy war waged against only one element of instability—namely the Taliban—does not guarantee an end to all war in Afghanistan, or in the wider region. Meanwhile, it is far from certain that Massoud and his allies, if they could regain power in Kabul, would be able to restore order over the entire country. Just as the United States is reportedly stepping up military assistance operations, other members of the international community are exploring alternate stabilization ideas. On 22 August, for example, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called for a new, comprehensive approach to ending the Afghan war. It should then come as no surprise that the search for an alternative has begun. Coercion has only made the Taliban more hostile and/or extortionate—threatening to close Afghan airspace, expelling and/or arresting aid workers, and so forth.

28. Asia Needs a Common Defence (2001) The terrorist attacks on the United States have led several commentators to suggest that America’s bold proposals for missile defence have been overtaken by events. In fact, the United States is unlikely to abandon missile defence. The effort has become even more critical now with heightened fears that terrorists may some day get their hands on weapons of mass destruction with advanced delivery systems. But the effort has to be placed in the context of the coalition-building in which the US is now engaged. Something did change on September 11. The previous penchant for unilateral diplomacy, or what one administration official termed “a

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la carte multilateralism,” has been eclipsed dramatically by the need for international cooperation. If such cooperation is essential for the war against terrorism—and if the worst conceivable terrorists would be those having advanced technology like ballistic missiles—then it is self-evident that any effective missile-defence system must also be built upon a solid multilateral basis. The need for cooperation is especially strong in Asia. However, the US has put Europe first in its campaign to sell missile defence. It has held numerous talks with Russia to persuade it to “move beyond” the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, with little apparent progress. More positive talks have occurred with Nato allies, yet most still remain wary of US plans. Only fairly recently has the important need for similar discussions with China been acknowledged. For there to be any real diplomatic progress, these discussions must move beyond exchanges of generalities to specific proposals covering what each nation is prepared to bring to the table. First should be an acknowledgment that all states, not just America, are threatened by a hostile or accidental launch of a ballistic missile, and that all should be able to call upon one another for protection. The vision the US should project is not one of a go-it-alone, well-defended America advancing beyond the era of mutual-assured destruction, but of an interdependent community of states moving toward a new environment in which all would be protected by a network of interlocking defensive systems. In practice, a common defence requires shared costs and technology, including joint research and development and eventually deployment. One place to begin is in the area of early warning. The US and Russia have been trying to establish a joint ballistic-missile early-warning centre connected to the national command centres of both countries. Asian nations should also be invited to participate in such a centre, or to establish a separate regional centre if more feasible. This should begin right away. Other more complex issues relating to common missile defence will need more discussion and tough negotiation. Namely, linkage should be made between the number of China’s missiles targeted against Taiwan and measures that address China’s own concerns about missile defence. The global balance of offensive and defensive systems will also need to be handled within the concept of a shift from offence-based to defencebased deterrence. If Russia and America can agree to draw their arsenals down well below Start II levels, then additional agreements should be

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reached with other nuclear powers, notably China, over the pace and extent of their nuclear modernization. Finally, regional cooperation on missile defence should proceed alongside efforts to reduce tensions on the Korean peninsula, along with improved measures against the proliferation of missile technology. A joint stake in defending against missiles means a greater incentive to limit their numbers. For too long the US approach has presumed an “invisible hand” to guide the diplomacy of missile defence. In other words, so long as the US was clear about where it was heading, other governments would simply adapt. They could either acquiesce to US efforts or try to counter them—but the latter probably in vain. Now it makes more sense to work together from the outset to meet the threat. If the US is serious about leading the world into a new era where advanced defences complement rather than jeopardize the strategic stability of offensive deterrence, it must persuade its allies and friends with concrete measures of cooperation. Diplomacy needs to get out of the back seat and get its hands on the steering wheel. Washington should not wait until another disaster—surely far worse than the tragedy of September 11—forces the logic of common action upon all.

29. The European Way: Asians Need a Regional Security Net (2002) George W. Bush’s West Point speech on Saturday again invoked the vision of the world’s centers of power uniting against the common threat of transnational terrorism. This is a good message, but not everyone in the world can respond to it effectively. Bush proclaims yet another definitive end to the Cold War in Europe and announces that at long last Europe is united, whole and free. Such unity now includes a Russia committed to playing a constructive international role alongside its European neighbors. On the other hand, India and Pakistan threaten yet again to launch a war that could cost millions of lives and plunge Asia into turmoil. The Middle East continues to fester, with no foreseeable resolution. In East Asia, China, Japan and South Korea remain wary of one another. Bush’s pledge to unite the civilized states of the world in a campaign against international terrorists has much to be said for it. But Tip O’Neill’s old cliché about all politics being local never seems to go out of style. Global tensions notwithstanding, regional affairs remain supreme

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in the minds of most world leaders. For Asians in particular, the politics of the backyard do not look bright. While Europe has come together and set aside national grievances, at least in the military sphere, Asia remains locked in a late 19th century chessboard of insecure, competing powers. Any potential for an effective Asian version of NATO or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has been utopian for decades. How long can this discrepancy last between East and West? The Bush administration and its international partners, including Russia, have shown impressive vision toward tying up the loose ends of the Cold War and ensuring a more stable Europe for decades to come. But does there exist a similar vision for Asia? Where are the gentlemen’s agreements between China and the United States, Japan and China, Russia and Japan? Where is the consensus for moving ahead with peaceful reunification of Korea? Where is the pledge to seek lower levels of armaments, particularly weapons of mass destruction, in Asia? Asian leaders have begun to express greater concern about the lack of regional security. The Chinese government and military in particular convey an ever more acute sense of isolation as Russia and the United States agree to share missile defense technology and coordinate modernization of strategic forces. Meanwhile, China faces the possibility of a nuclear war to its southwest between its ally Pakistan and India, a nation that has identified itself as China’s chief rival in Asia. The region’s laissez-faire approach to security, in marked contrast to the way of Europe, has made all of China’s neighbors nervous. It has long been a mantra of diplomacy that the rest of the world cannot be secure so long as European rivalries threaten a world war. If such military rivalry among European states has indeed been put to rest, it represents an important achievement. But neither Europe nor the rest of the world can be safe so long as similar rivalries continue to fester in Asia. It is time to apply the same vision and courage there as well.

30. East Asia: Connecting the Dots Isn’t Optional (2002) Conditions in East Asia have begun to overtake the Bush administration and its piecemeal approach to critical security issues.

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President Jiang Zemin reportedly broached a deal with George W. Bush at their meeting in Crawford, Texas, in October that would have Beijing exercise restraint in its missile deployments opposite Taiwan in return for US restraint in arms sales to Taiwan. The administration does not seem to regard the proposal as serious. A yet graver problem in relations between China and the United States has been looming on the horizon for some time. China’s longrange nuclear-armed missile program will be influenced by America’s ballistic missile defense program. That equation will have consequences that apparently are not being discussed by either side, despite the Bush administration’s recent announcement that it will begin deployment of a ballistic missile defense system in two years. Such neglect could be costly. Bilateral US-Chinese strategic talks need to be brought closer to the type America has had with Russia for a long time. Other potential deals are hovering around Asia with little current hope of finding firm ground. They include Pyongyang’s appeal for a ­formal US agreement not to use force against North Korea, a nonstarter in the absence of a broader approach. Nor will Japan’s offer of generous economic help to North Korea in return for full accounting for, and repatriation of, kidnapped Japanese citizens be realized short of a wider peace settlement. The Japanese government has expressed interest in deploying a ballistic missile defense system to defend against North Korea’s conventionally armed shorter-range ballistic missiles. The trade-offs in this arena could benefit both countries, and the United States as well. Although such a trade-off technically does not involve nuclear weapons, a nuclear upgrade is clearly in the offing. In all these cases, a multilateral, comprehensive approach would be the most appropriate. East Asian security is too complex to be handled as a series of unilateral initiatives. To its credit, the Bush administration effectively mobilized Russia, China, Japan and South Korea in opposition to the North Korean nuclear programs. But the need for nuclear restraint has a broader dimension than just North Korea, as all of these interconnected nuclear-related issues demonstrate. A multilateral, bottom-up effort that includes both Koreas, China, Russia, Japan and the United States is badly needed. Each of these

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nations could make a solid contribution to heading off a nuclear arms race and possibly a devastating war. Nothing can happen in the absence of US dynamism, commitment and creativity. But Washington does not seem to be in a problem-solving mode in East Asia. Anonymous administration commentators have candidly said that it is difficult for top officials to deal with more than one crisis at a time. This can occur in any administration, and many problems are better tackled one step at a time. But East Asian security is not in that category. Officials facing daily diplomatic and military pressures may tire of the “connect the dots” urgings of outsiders. Too often these reflect impractical or abstract preoccupations with logical patterns. In this case, however, connecting the dots is not an academic obsession. It is a matter of national survival for the United States.

31. Juggling a Two-Front Crisis (2003) For much of the 1990s, American military planning centered on what the Pentagon termed a two-war contingency, which called for the United States to be prepared to fight two regional wars simultaneously. It was widely assumed these wars would take place in or near Iraq and Korea. Soon after taking office two years ago, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced the two-war contingency was no longer a satisfactory planning guide. He viewed it as a straitjacket preventing the US military from planning creatively for numerous international events. How ironic, then, that wars in Iraq and Korea now appear more likely than ever, forcing Rumsfeld to declare the US still capable of winning both simultaneously. The next few months will require the most delicate balancing act of President George W. Bush’s administration. The carefully staged brinksmanship with Saddam Hussein is nearing an endgame. Its more reactive, but no less careful, management of the Korea imbroglio is entering an equally critical period. While it is difficult to predict the outcome of either situation, it has become clear the two are connected, however much the administration insists they involve distinct sets of challenges. The connection initially was made apparent by the administration’s own national security strategy released last year. Its zero-sum calculus of American power allows less room for maneuver than in the past.

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Where current or potential adversaries seek to improve their capabilities for withstanding US pressure, either globally or regionally, the United States now has no choice but to humble them, or in the extreme case, to convert them into friends by force. That the United States seeks to pursue the latter course toward Iraq while adhering to a more tolerant policy for North Korea does not diminish the inherent connection between the two cases, or their similarity. Both present discrete challenges to US power and prestige. Both suggest a choice between war and state implosion. And both have made US friends and allies uncomfortable. Because most friends and allies, despite their discomfort, share an interest in seeing a soft landing in both places, the United States has had to appear alternately menacing and accommodating. A good-cop, bad-cop routine has served the United States well in the past when it faced a single adversary. In today’s environment of dual brinksmanship, however, the routine has grown too complex for comfort. Allies seek the good cop in public but demand the bad cop in private; adversaries seem to want the opposite. Accordingly, the Bush administration has done much to maintain its tough stance toward the axis of evil while seeking to further regional unity in East Asia and the Middle East. At times it also has opened a small window of opportunity for Kim Jong Il and Saddam Hussein in case either genuinely shares the desire for a soft-landing, or a graceful exit. The strain of split personalities has begun to show. Jiang Zemin, for example, has proposed a trade-off between missile deployment on the China coast opposite Taiwan for US restraint in arms sales to Taiwan. The Bush administration felt compelled to suggest it did not regard this as a serious proposal, insisting China continue to cooperate with the United States in making a final solution to the Korea issue a top priority. On top of this there is the absence of any progress toward an arms control regime or any serious nuclear arms control discussions in Asia, as well as the strange distancing of Japan from the front burner of US politics. This final case suggests the veneer of regional coordination and cooperation throughout Asia is growing thin and progressively more dependent upon crises du jour, which generally worsen from partial solutions. That is certainly axiomatic in the Middle East, where the United States has had to threaten war against Iraq repeatedly. These threats are

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made to preserve an equally thin veneer of regional support for what, despite all appearances, has been a delicately drawn-out solution to the problem of regional stability by way of Iraqi disarmament. Yet, the point at which the United States must toss aside its carefully calculated policy in favor of a desperate measure of force appears imminent given Saddam’s unwillingness to bend to our wind. In a classic bit of nuance appearing in his joint memoir with former President George H. W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser, described that administration’s approach toward the imploding Eastern Bloc: “It would be gratifying to say that our Eastern European policy— altered from support of those states most rebellious toward the Soviet Union to backing moves for greater freedom—had been among the catalysts of the changes. It was not. “But our policy did provide solid encouragement and allowed us to react properly to events. [Moreover] the President had to guard against crossing the line from championing the quest for freedom and self-determination to portraying the changes as victories in the Cold War struggle—thus provoking confrontation. For this reason, our policy evolved, perhaps even unconsciously, from quietly supporting the transformations to cultivating Soviet acquiescence, even collaboration, in them.” Contradictions notwithstanding, one can only hope this is what the second Bush administration is up to in Iraq and Korea.

32. Time for Jaw-Jaw with North Korea (2003) Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s leader, seems to have a sense of strategy, even though it may be driving his country to the brink of destruction. He will almost surely continue to take advantage of the heavy US commitment to overthrowing Saddam Hussein. If the US becomes engaged in a full-blown war in Iraq, Mr Kim is likely to escalate his nuclear challenge to dangerous levels, perhaps by detonating a nuclear test explosion. The Bush administration is right to insist on a regional solution to the crisis, but wrong to reject bilateral talks with Mr Kim. Direct talks should be aimed at setting an agenda for multilateral talks. And that agenda should be as broad as America’s negotiating partners can be persuaded to accept. “More for more” should be the objective.

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According to recent reports, President George W. Bush remains firmly against talks with the man he “loathes”, despite mounting North Korean provocations. But if direct negotiations are off the table, and if calculated deterrence fails, what is the alternative? Are we looking at another pre-emptive war? The issue is not regarded as a crisis by the US administration, at least in public, probably because it can handle only one crisis at a time. It may be able to handle only one war at a time, too. Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence, says America can fight and win two regional wars simultaneously, but the question involves more than coping with a North Korean infantry and artillery attack across the demilitarised zone just north of Seoul. A US attack on North Korea’s nuclear facilities could succeed in destroying them with few civilian casualties. The Clinton administration seriously considered such a limited, pre-emptive attack because it thought a North Korean nuclear weapons arsenal was unacceptable. Under the firm but creative guidance of William Perry, then secretary of defence, the Clinton team rejected that plan in favour of another course: it sought to defuse the crisis by measures designed to make the North Koreans active participants in their own transformation. The apparent failure of that approach in practice may or may not be temporary, but the theory behind it should not necessarily be abandoned. The Bush administration is doing its own contingency planning, to include, one hopes, a consideration of the aftermath of a preemptive strike. Deterring a North Korean attack on the south after a strike on Yongbyon probably cannot be left to the offensive threat posed by US and South Korean land forces in the peninsula. The US Navy will also be hard pressed. Just over half of its surface forces are currently on deployment, most in or near the Gulf, including six out of 12 carriers and about 20 out of 41 amphibious ships. The navy has already subcontracted critical tasks, such as keeping sea lanes open for continued deployments to Afghanistan, to the Indians, Japanese, Canadians and other Nato allies. Thus, any effort to deter North Korea after a “surgical strike” on Yongbyon coming in the midst of a Middle East crisis, will rely overwhelmingly on American strike forces. The Pentagon, in fact, may be forced to recommend the threat of nuclear retaliation for any North Korean attack on the south, or on Japan, following elimination of the most threatening part of North Korea’s nuclear potential. This, of course, would further alienate America’s South Korean ally and shatter

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any coalition assembled for action against Pyongyang, thereby reinforcing the bilateral nature of the crisis. But would it work to rein in Kim Jong Il? Probably not if he noticed the recent announcement that the Pentagon plans to accelerate the deployment of a missile defence system that even Mr Rumsfeld acknowledges is likely to be experimental at best. Not if he heard the most recent speech by Mr Bush, which pledged a heavy American involvement in the Middle East for decades—the functional equivalent of the cold war’s organising principle of containment, by which the US will bear any burden and pay any price to stabilise and democratise shaky regimes in the region. And not if he read the army chief of staff’s estimates that a few hundred thousand US troops will be needed to maintain order in post-Hussein Iraq. What does all this say to a desperate man like Mr Kim, who has little to lose by forcing America’s hand for as long as he can? It probably says that he can take all of north-east Asia to the brink of war, or, at a minimum, hint at a radically different set of strategic relationships, which neither the US nor any of its allies has contemplated fully. How would Asia look during a protracted nuclear arms race? Or after a nuclear exchange? What are the implications of both for the US role in the region? So long as there are no clear answers to those questions, President Bush should opt for direct talks with the North Korean leader, not to “reward bad behaviour” but to set up the multilateral forum necessary to settle the cold war’s last major confrontation once and for all. But that will take this administration’s equivalent of William Perry to do the heavy lifting, not to mention a more open mind at the top.

33. NATO Can’t Be Globocop (2004) In the final months before the US-led occupation hands over sovereignty to Iraqis, Europe has called on Washington to “internationalize” the security mission. With the November elections in mind, the Bush administration sounds receptive. So, with no stand-by UN force ready, the US and its allies hope that NATO will once more rally round the flag of Alliance unity. Proponents of NATO’s transformation into a global expeditionary force argue that the Alliance must undertake new missions virtually anywhere in the world if it is to survive as a viable and positive force for peace. Thus the Allies will likely extend the Afghan mission, and consider Iraq, at their June summit in Istanbul.

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We should proceed with caution down this particular road. A reinvention of NATO as globocop—particularly the NATO which took in seven new members this week, for a total of 26 members—would weaken NATO’s still significant role as a deterrent in Europe and elsewhere. The Alliance is a fragile institution. Last month’s Spanish elections and Prime Minister-designate Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s subsequent pledge to pull troops out of Iraq show just how fragile. Even before the squabbling over Iraq, as the Kosovo bombing in 1999 made clear, intervention in a relatively minor conflict creates terrible strains within the Alliance. Such missions should be undertaken only in the last resort. The concern about NATO unity is as valid in regard to post-­conflict interventions. Fortunately, NATO has avoided heavy casualties in Afghanistan or the Balkans. But the toll of lives would exact a price. At some point, NATO members won’t be able to stomach the cost of elective interventions merely for the sake of Alliance survival. More importantly, using NATO as a stand-in for the UN obscures the enduring importance of the Alliance in two critical areas—neither of which involves peacekeeping or peace-enforcement. First, NATO must continue efforts to integrate the former Soviet bloc into an emerging Euro-Atlantic security community. Second, it needs to remain a “force in being” as a powerful deterrent against an attack from any quarter on Europe or North America, or on their combined interests. This latter role is being overlooked. Article 5 of the NATO Treaty—stipulating that an attack on one is an attack on all—was invoked unanimously by NATO in response to the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. It attracted the support of the NATO countries to the war on terrorism, and it still does. In this vein the Alliance must now consider the threat posed to its members by the potential use of a nuclear weapon by any state against any other state, whether in the NATO area or elsewhere. If the members conclude that this would sooner or later involve them in an armed conflict, which would almost certainly be the case, then they must do all they can to ­discourage and deter such an event. This deterrence can’t be done with peacekeepers. Indeed, any ­deterrent would be fatally compromised if NATO peacekeepers are spread thinly on the ground in various parts of the globe. Rather, it should be done by a declaration that the use of a nuclear weapon by any Middle Eastern state would be the equivalent of an attack on the Alliance, thus justifying a NATO intervention as pledged in Article 5 of the Treaty.

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Whether such a guarantee would ultimately work cannot be known. But it may make the governments of Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia reassess the need for nuclear weapons by addressing a key source of their insecurity—an emerging nuclear arms race in their backyard. It may also help them to think more creatively about regional stability, so that someday a Middle Eastern community could begin to resemble the one NATO helped to build in Europe. At a minimum, it would put some backbone into President George W. Bush’s Greater Middle East Initiative, which currently is little more than a bevy of good intentions. In the real world deterrence and peacekeeping—taken in moderation— are not incompatible. Until the United States and others decide that a UN stand-by force is indispensable in today’s security environment, NATO should probably assume the burden for the time being in Iraq and Afghanistan. But absent a vision of NATO’s unique capacities and a determination to preserve them, the world will lose an irreplaceable asset.

34. The US is Losing Ground on Korea Talks (2004) In a striking understatement about North Korea’s nuclear w ­ eapons development programme, Dick Cheney, US vice-president, said in April that time was “not necessarily on our side”. Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, put it more bluntly—and accurately—this month, remarking: “Needless to say, time favours North Korea.” And that was before news of Pyongyang’s successful test of the main engine of its long-range ballistic missile. The Bush administration has responded in strangely inapposite ways to this gathering threat. It plans to withdraw a third of the US military forces based in South Korea; and it intends to deploy a ballistic missile defence in Alaska. There are reasons for this gap between awareness of the dangers and willingness to act on it. Mr Rumsfeld wants to ­reorganise US force deployments while he is still in office. The reorganisation is proceeding with Washington’s customary insensitivity to the opinions of old allies, in Europe as well as in Korea. The administration’s failure, meanwhile, to move aggressively to negotiate a settlement over North Korea can be attributed to a mix of divided counsel, ideology, the “anything but Clinton” syndrome and heavy US commitments to Iraq, all wrapped in the hope that North Korea can be kept on the back burner until after the US elections in November.

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Meanwhile, Congress is planning its own version of a Korea policy. Two bills, if passed, would maintain trade sanctions and block humanitarian and other aid to North Korea until Kim Jong Il, the country’s ruler, changes the way he treats his people. No one could disagree with the objective, but one bill, as drafted, would undercut chances for a negotiated settlement. The other would allow a presidential waiver, recognising that many US interests are in play. The people of North Korea, tragically, would be the victims of well-intended policies that merely reinforce the wall around them. With Washington increasingly out of step with its partners in northeast Asia, Mr Kim has been busy wooing public opinion on reunifying the nation. Many South Koreans and nearly every western visitor to the North have recently credited him with initiating economic reforms. Seoul’s engagement policy with Pyongyang, meanwhile, has resulted in expanded contacts and economic relations. But the South Korean government is also facing divisive questions about the future role of US forces in Korea, even while Washington is pressing it to deploy Korean troops to Iraq. Many South Koreans are beginning to look to China as a more reliable, long-term strategic partner. The stakes for the US are much higher in this region than they were in Iraq. But a sense of resignation appears to have set in, despite Mr Rumsfeld’s pointed remark. Quite apart from North Korea’s growing nuclear capability, two other ominous developments are under way. First, Pyongyang is improving its ability to sell nuclear technology and materials through clandestine networks. Second, the US is losing the wholehearted support of its other Asian partners in the six-party negotiations on denuclearising the Korean peninsula. Japan, while still loyally following the US lead in the negotiations, is moving toward economic relations with North Korea. Inevitably, US policies of economic sanctions and isolation of North Korea are becoming more difficult to adhere to. China’s diplomacy has kept the talks going. Beijing is reported to be willing to use its negotiating capital to do that much, but tougher measures are unlikely. Incredibly, North Korea, despite its weak hand and arrogant behaviour, has improved its position in north-east Asia while the US has lost ground. No single action by the Bush administration can reverse this trend. But it would help greatly if Washington could show it is serious about dealing with the gathering threat. At the forthcoming plenary meeting of six-party talks on North Korea, the US could strengthen its position by proposing

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specialised working groups to deal separately with issues such as a nuclear weapon-free Korean peninsula; forms of security assurances; and improving the economic welfare of both South and North Korean people. Opponents of a comprehensive approach to the North Korean issue say the urgency of the problem requires a narrow focus on nuclear issues. We have tried that before without success. Time, indeed, is not on the side of peace and stability in north-east Asia. We have a right to expect something better from the key parties in the negotiations.

35. The Coming Showdown with Iran (2009) US President Barack Obama’s administration has lost little time in announcing that it will seek direct talks with the Iranian government. This means, at the very least, a tough confrontation over Iran’s quest for a regional strategic advantage in the form of a nuclear weapon. There is more at stake here than coming up with the right set of incentives and threats to change the Iranians’ minds. Rather, the time has come to approach the nuclear question in its full regional context rather than piecemeal and operationally. The entire world knows the risk posed by a nuclear Iran: a drastically altered balance of power in the Middle East and Central Asia, with Iran able to exert far more regional leverage—both overt and implicit—than it now possesses in pursuit of its interests. Moreover, nearby states are likely to launch or further their own nuclear programs in response, leading to a protracted nuclear arms race in one of world’s most volatile regions. It is not in the interest of the US or Europe for any of the states at the head of the list—Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Algeria—to have its own nuclear weapons capability. While neither outcome is certain, each remains likely. There is considerable domestic pressure in each of these countries—as there has been in Israel and Pakistan, currently the region’s only nuclear states—to secure the presumed benefits in power and prestige of possessing nuclear weapons. Such pressure is magnified when rivals and neighbors are perceived to have any kind of strategic advantage. Yet each of the region’s states has important security concerns and vulnerabilities. Iran, a multiethnic state whose rulers have struggled to advance national cohesion, is no different.

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Shi’a nationalism has followed Persian chauvinism as a rallying point, but neither has succeeded fully in bolstering Iran’s political institutions and securing the allegiance of its young population, nearly two-thirds of which is under the age of 30. The nation’s unity is periodically threatened by its clerical rulers’ unpopularity among large sections of the population, as well as by regional and ethnic divisions, conflict and instability in its immediate neighborhood, and the hostility engendered by its regional clients and/ or proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. In theory, all of these factors are potential sources of leverage for outside powers like the US. But opposing Iran’s nuclear ambitions directly has had the opposite effect so far. Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons—with its boost to national pride and promise of regional preeminence—has played a critical unifying role, as well as a political and military one. The challenge is to craft a consistent policy that both contains and deters Iran’s ambitions without exacerbating its inherent sense of national vulnerability. The policy debate outside the region currently centers on whether to use force if talks fail. Iran, predictably, has refused to back down, which some observers have suggested reflects the failure of the world’s major powers to speak with a unified voice. This is true, but it is an insufficient explanation. Others have claimed that Iran’s leaders do not care one way or the other about world opinion. This, too, is an insufficient explanation, for no country, not even North Korea, lives in a vacuum. Formulating the right mix of carrots and sticks is extremely difficult, and the US is hardly seen in the region as an honest broker. Therefore, its focus should be less on calibrating tactics per se than on recasting the regional context in which Iran’s leaders will determine whether to ­proceed or desist. The starting point should be further enhancement of conventional military forces throughout the region, which means more than increasing weapons inventories. There should be more confidence-building measures, including joint training exercises and information exchanges, among all the region’s militaries. A major boost to confidence would be a clear-cut strategic commitment from the West in the form of an extension of NATO’s own deterrent to the Middle East. It need not single out Iran, and would be more effective than a unilateral US guarantee to Israel or any other single state.

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Instead, NATO members should pledge to defend any Middle Eastern state that is attacked with nuclear weapons. Under ideal diplomatic circumstances, Russia and China would be persuaded to join with NATO in a joint declaration. Such steps alone are unlikely to deter Iran or fully to reassure the region’s other states. But, along with continued international pressure from the United Nations Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency, they would send a clearer signal that the major powers of the world regard Middle Eastern peace and security as critical to their own. That would help to diminish the possibility of an unbridled regional arms race if talks fail and Iran someday tests a weapon.

36. The Elusive Afghanistan Strategy (2009) The ends and means of policy are difficult to disentangle in a place as complex and obscure to most Americans as Afghanistan. But clear thinking is essential—even more so than will, determination and boots on the ground, all of which are being alternately challenged and demanded by a growing cacophony of “AfPak” watchers. Following its predecessor, the Barack Obama administration so far has advanced two aims in Afghanistan, each derivative of the other: to ensure that al Qaeda or similar groups do not use the country as a “base” to harm the US, its allies, or the global interests of either; and to set the country on a path to being governed effectively and “democratically.” Behind both of these aims is the assumption—also voiced periodically by the administration—that continued instability in Afghanistan threatens the viability, not to mention the prestige, of the Pakistani state. To a lesser extent, the same concern has been applied to NATO, but this holds less traction in the US, which has commandeered the lion’s share of the Afghan counterinsurgency campaign. Meanwhile public opinion throughout Europe and the United States is skeptical. It is only a matter of time before greater casualties transform skepticism to hostility. To its credit, the Obama administration has put great energy into studying the problem. It has assigned some of the very best people to it. Yet in their public pronouncements, there is still some confusion and ambiguity about the overall mission. Just as there is no single “AfPak” insurgency to defeat, the aim of removing all potential terrorists from Afghan territory is fantastical.

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The same could be said for any number of other countries. The United States cannot create and sustain viable governments for all of them. Doing so for Afghanistan is a means, not an end in itself. The end is to reduce the incentives for outside powers, especially neighbors, to continue to feed regional, ethnic and other types of conflict and, in turn, enhance the potential for instability in Afghanistan to spread across borders. This has been a devil’s bargain, to be sure. But it is a fact worth underscoring. There would be no Taliban in Afghanistan or Pakistan if the Bhutto and Sharif governments had not once been so worried about Pushtun nationalism, just as there would be no need to placate Tajik and Uzbek parties in Afghanistan if the ethnic and ­political balance across Afghanistan’s northern borders were itself not so precarious. For the United States and its major allies, the stability of Afghanistan’s larger neighbors matters a good deal more strategically than the calculus of power within the country, however much the two are related. The potential for Afghanistan’s insurgencies to cause a wider regional war may seem remote, but they exist. On the other hand, then, we need to ask why it is so important to expand the scope of intervention internally. Couldn’t the US accomplish its overall mission without having to stabilize so much of the country directly? Those charged with operations and tactics no doubt have ready answers. Protecting Kabul means hitting important concentrations of Taliban wealth and power, which demands curtailing the opium trade, which means pacifying Helmand, and so forth. But this is precisely how policymakers begin to lose sight of the big picture. The temptation to act and react becomes harder to resist as immersion with local problems intensifies. By contrast, what the British once called “masterly inactivity” is seen as a sacrilege. Certainly it was in late 2001 when a few very unpopular souls tried to urge the United States to sit back and wait for the Taliban to self-destruct in Kabul and Kandahar—as some people suggested it was about to do, even after Ahmed Shah Massoud’s assassination—rather than intervene, however impressively. Now, it would be very difficult to convince the American people to sacrifice lives and treasure for the sake of a regional balance of power in Central Asia. There must be a determined enemy, a beleaguered ally, and a noble cause. So far, so good. But those in charge of executing the policy must be careful not to get too caught up in the rhetoric of

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commitment. Because friends and enemies can change—and they do with regularity in Afghanistan—while means can easily become their own ends. When they do, the campaign for prestige takes over, and a tough but manageable insurgency becomes a lost war.

37. Obama, “America’s First Pacific President”? (2009) For better or worse, President Barack Obama’s absence at the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and, days later, his departure for a tour of Asia is being seen as a sign that he is turning the US’s back on Europe. Does this mean Europe no longer matters so much for the United States? Is it an intentional slight? Is there a deeper significance? Similar questions were asked when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was in Berlin on 9 November in Obama’s stead, chose to make Asia the destination of the first foreign trip of her tenure some nine months ago. It is easy to read too much into these itineraries. They do not necessarily mean that the Asia matters more to the US than Europe does, or that there is some kind of existential competition between the two. Both matter to the United States, just as they do to nearly every other country. But the higher profile of Asia in US official rhetoric and possibly in the public consciousness is notable. And, unlike his past three predecessors and in contrast to his popularity among European publics, Obama seems visibly indifferent toward his European counterparts. Even George W. Bush, for all that he was reviled in Europe, appeared to enjoy the company of European leaders, especially the UK’s Tony Blair and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. Obama by contrast has shown a clear affinity toward only one leader so far—Australia’s Kevin Rudd. But how much does such chemistry matter? And does Obama’s own Pacific background contribute to it? Have Obama’s formative years in Hawaii and in Indonesia influenced his worldview—or, at least, do they increase his comfort level with the Pacific’s Asian leaders? His trip to Asia and to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum offers the first proper test for such questions. We should be careful not to read too much into Obama’s personal relationship with the Pacific, but nor should we read too little.

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Because if Obama’s commitment to the future of the Pacific region— including the United States—is deep and genuine, he would be wise not to fuel any deterministic distinctions between Asia and Europe, or about himself as passing the torch of world power from America and Europe to Asia. Doing so would only lend credence to the words of those in Asia or elsewhere who would charge him with being America’s Gorbachev—that is, as a leader who increasingly seems more popular abroad than at home and who presides, reforms in hand, over the demise of his country, to the benefit of its rivals. Rather, he should continue to emphasise the interconnection of all the world’s regions, economies and cultures, and to stress that reform is in everybody’s best interest. This does not mean we cannot all learn from one another’s example. Asia and Europe of course are very different places. Yet there is no fixed reason why the contending powers of Asia cannot bury the enmities of the past under layers of institutional co-operation, as did the nations of Europe in the latter half of the 20th century. Another world war is not necessary for this to happen. The reunification of Korea is just one potential spur for such co-operation, however difficult and remote it may seem at the present time. Other areas—from trade to disaster relief—call out for it and a degree of co-operation is developing. If the 20th century teaches us anything, it is that no country can be an island unto itself and that even bloodshed on the scale seen in Europe does not preclude the possibility of peace. Yet the world outside much of Europe and North America remains fragmented, nervous and unclear in its organisation and mindset. For Asia to become more like today’s Europe would not be such a bad thing. But this, or a similar programme of peaceful integration of markets, institutions and societies, must occur, first and foremost, by and for Asians. If America’s first Pacific president can serve as its catalyst, then all of the world should be in favour.

38. The Putin Doctrine and Preventive Diplomacy (2014) The changing climate and its effect on our environment, the civilization-destroying effects of nuclear war and the enhanced possibilities of global pandemics are only three examples of challenges that require an unprecedented degree of cooperation, and not just between national governments but among peoples.

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In this essay, Ambassador Goodby describes what he calls “the Putin Doctrine”: a coherent set of actions consistently applied over many years, designed with a specific, overriding goal in mind. That goal seems clear now, in light of the risks Russian President Vladimir Putin has been prepared to take to achieve it: to ensure Moscow’s dominance over as many of the former republics of the Soviet Union as is feasible given Russia’s resource limits, and to incorporate them, and those too strong to dominate, into a regional economic and political bloc led by Russia that is capable of exerting global influence. That strategic objective may not be achievable by Moscow for a host of reasons. But its pursuit can skew the way the international system shapes up in the future by holding out the model of a set of competing, relatively closed regional blocs, run by authoritarian systems of governance. Americans will have to rise to the occasion by building a consensus, hard as that may be, around our own goals in a world awash in change. Though I don’t sense that there is a consensus on that at the present time, I believe most Americans would agree that the United States must stand for open societies and for the rules embodied in the Charter of the United Nations and in regional compacts, such as the Helsinki Final Act. That is fundamental so long as nation-states remain central to the structure of the international system. But beyond that, we must be actively seeking to build institutions, whether global or regional, that can respond to challenges to humanity’s well-being and even its survival. The goal of that kind of policy and that kind of diplomacy, quite simply, is to position our nation to continue to thrive in the new world. —George P. Shultz, former Secretary of State, October 2014

Vladimir Putin announced his strategic doctrine regarding “postSoviet space,” as he calls the lands of the former Soviet Union, early in his first presidency and has stuck with it ever since. In a speech to the Russian Federal Assembly on May 16, 2003, he declared: “We see the [Commonwealth of Independent States] area as the sphere of our strategic interests.” In his April 2005 speech to the same body, Putin called for unanimity within the Commonwealth of Independent States, hailing the World War II victory that unity had made possible. Though he did pay lip service to the independence of the CIS nations and their “international authority,” he hinted that independence from Russia was not quite what he had in mind: “We would like to achieve synchronization of the pace and parameters of reform processes underway in Russia and the other members of

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the CIS.” In other words, Moscow wanted a say in, if not a veto over, how fast political change took place in neighboring states, and what form it would take. In the same speech, Putin made his famous comment: “The collapse of the Soviet Union was the major geopolitical disaster of the [20th] century,” adding that “the epidemic of disintegration [had now] infected Russia itself.” Putin’s domestic policies, his hard line in Chechnya and, later, in Georgia, and his regional diplomacy all testify to his belief that Russian pre-eminence in “post-Soviet space” is an indispensable element of the defense of the Russian Federation. Ukraine is only the latest and most dangerous manifestation of the Putin Doctrine. It will not be the last. Exercising Preventive Diplomacy? The clarity of the Putin Doctrine meant that the current crisis in Ukraine—or, more accurately, the crisis in US-Russian relations—was foreseeable. The 2008 war between Russia and Georgia added an unmistakable warning, but its significance quickly vanished among the “frozen conflicts” that littered so many territories of the former Soviet Union. Military force cannot be the first thing to come to the minds of policymakers for handling such challenges. Preventive diplomacy—which ­ the United Nations defines as “diplomatic action to prevent disputes from arising between parties, to prevent existing disputes from escalating into conflict and to limit the spread of conflicts when they occur”—should be the first resort, but it is exceptionally difficult to sustain. No government likes to borrow trouble from the future, and democracies, including the United States, are very poor at setting strategic priorities and sticking to them. The American stance under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama was that Moscow should have considerable say in its neighboring states, and Washington should not seek to supplant that influence. Georgian and Ukrainian membership in NATO, for example, should not have to damage their good relations with Russia. In the face of much evidence to the contrary, successive administrations thought that Moscow should understand that Russia would benefit from having prosperous, democratic nations in its neighborhood. The Kremlin interpreted NATO’s November 2002 decision to invite seven new members to join the alliance, including the three Baltic states, as taking advantage of Russia’s weakness. The later American decision to deploy ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic only heightened Russian insecurity. President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have contrasted their enlightened, 21st-century point of view with the zero-sum,

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19th-century thinking that has characterized Russian diplomacy. Putin was not persuaded by rhetoric, and the West failed to formulate a new strategic or institutional framework to match 21st-century challenges, although plenty of ideas were out there. For example, in 2002, the US Institute of Peace Press published a book titled A Strategy for Stable Peace: Toward a Euro-Atlantic Security Community. It was written by a Russian, Dmitri Trenin, a Dutchman, Petrus Buwalda and an American—myself. We wrote that “Ukraine must solve its internal problems through its own efforts” and “the stakes in the outcome of Ukraine’s struggles are high, not least the progress of Russia and the West toward a stable peace.” We called for “concerted national strategies on the part of the major nations within the extended European system.” In defining these strategies, we argued that a detailed master plan is not realistic, and that “governments should work with building blocks already available to them, having their objective clearly in mind.” The long-term objective, we thought, should be the inclusion of Russia as one of three pillars, with North America and the European Union, of a Euro-Atlantic security community, sharing similar democratic values. In 2012, a study of mutual security in the Euro-Atlantic region was conducted, led by four distinguished statesmen: former German Ambassador to the United States Wolfgang Ischinger, former U.K. Defense Minister Desmond Browne, former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and former Chairman of the US Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn. Their advice, in a spring 2013 report, “Building Mutual Security in the Euro-Atlantic Region,” included the establishment of a new, high-level “Euro-Atlantic Security Forum” to promote core security interests throughout the region. Common to this report and the 2002 book on the same subject is the notion that this ­geographical construct should be thought of as a single security space in the long term. The Permanent Revolution Back in February 2005, alluding to recent unrest in Georgia and Ukraine, Putin speculated that some nations “are doomed to permanent revolution.… Why should we introduce this in the post-Soviet space?” The answer, of course, is that those governments refused to meet pent-up demand for changes, leading to a series of political explosions—which Putin accused Russia’s old antagonist, the United States, of fomenting.

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Putin’s belief in American complicity in the “permanent revolution” had first surfaced during a Nov. 26, 2004, press conference in The Hague. Discussing the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, he remarked: “We have no moral right to incite mass disturbances in a major European state. We must not make solving disputes of this nature through street disturbances part of international practice.” Such warnings about permanent revolution stemmed from his perception of Russia’s weakness and its possible fragmentation. On Sept. 7, 2004, after terrorists killed nearly 400 people, many of them schoolchildren, in Beslan, North Ossetia, he said: “Some would like to tear from us a ‘juicy piece of pie.’ Others help them. They help, reasoning that Russia still remains one of the world’s major nuclear powers, and as such still represents a threat to them.” Later in the same speech, Putin remarked: “We are living through a time when internal conflicts and inter-ethnic divisions that were once firmly suppressed by the ruling ideology have now flared up.” Russia had not reacted adequately to these new dangers, he lamented; instead, “we showed ourselves to be weak. And the weak get beaten.” In other words, Moscow must show itself to be tough, even at the expense of its own best interests. Any step back from dominance over the new nations of “post-Soviet space” would be tantamount to encouraging the disintegration of the Russian Federation itself. Similarly, ­compromises with Russia’s enemies are a slippery slope that can only lead to a serious weakening of its international and domestic position. A New Iron Curtain? The last straw for Putin was probably his conclusion that the West was determined to prevent him from realizing his vision of a Eurasian economic bloc, dominated by Russia, that would include at least Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. When Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, seemed ready last fall to sign an association agreement with the European Union, Moscow pressured him to reverse the decision. Putin saw an American hand behind the resulting popular uprising that ousted Yanukovych. A desire to have friendly neighbors on one’s borders is not unique to Russia, of course. Nor is it unusual for a powerful state to expect that its opinions and interests will exert considerable influence on the policies of neighboring states. But there is a line beyond which a special relationship becomes domination. If things remain as they are in Putin’s Russia,

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the reality of a continent divided will congeal, leaving most of the newly independent republics trapped on the other side of the fence from a democratic Europe. This appears to be exactly what the Putin Doctrine is intended to achieve. Writing in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Lukin, vice president of the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, noted that some in Moscow are searching for an ideological foundation for a Eurasian union. Lukin wrote that the distinctive value system of Eurasian people had helped Putin “succeed in establishing an independent power center in Eurasia.” Putin and the “siloviki”—his former colleagues in the KGB who now occupy key positions in the Russian government—are disposed to confront Washington if American activities seem to be encouraging too much independence within “post-Soviet space.” Putin’s rollback of the democratic institutions in Russia that his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had encouraged underscores the fact that joining a Western-oriented community is not one of Putin’s strategic objectives. He is positioning his nation so that it cannot truly be part of Europe in the sense of shared values and shared self-identification. Challenge to the Post-Cold War Order The question for the West is how to conduct order-building diplomacy in the midst of a major crisis stemming from Putin’s increasingly evident intent to separate eastern Ukraine from the rest of the nation. His “New Russia” rhetoric has a serious meaning to it. The order that is being challenged is enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, which amounted to a surrogate peace treaty to end World War II. That document was strengthened by a series of agreements over the years negotiated within the framework of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (later the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe). Other agreements that shaped post-Cold War Europe dealt with the emergence of new sovereign nations after the breakup of the Soviet Union. One of the most important of these agreements figured in a CSCE summit meeting held in Budapest in 1994. It was the Lisbon Protocol to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and it changed the adherents to that agreement from just the Soviet Union and the United States to Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Russia and the United States. At Budapest, the three new signatory states formally agreed to become non-nuclear weapon states and to join the nuclear nonproliferation treaty

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in that status. A statement of assurance regarding its territorial integrity within existing frontiers was presented to Ukraine by the presidents of Russia and the United States and the prime minister of the United Kingdom, and also subscribed to separately by China and France. The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council thus became parties to these assurances of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. The provisions of the Helsinki Final Act that upheld territorial ­integrity and forbade changes in frontiers except by peaceful means also applied to the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. The Final Act begins with 10 principles, of which the first two deal with ­sovereign equality and refraining from the threat or use of force. The text of the second principle states: “No consideration may be invoked to serve to warrant resort to the threat or use of force in contravention of this principle.” This is the order that President Putin has challenged. There are really only two choices before the members of the Helsinki accords: accept that an all-European order with common understandings no longer exists and act accordingly; or try to reverse what Putin has done and work to restore the Helsinki consensus. The former course means a division of the Euro-Atlantic region into Eastern and Western societies and is the course less likely to lead to conflict in the near term. This appears to be Putin’s strategic aim. The latter is the policy that the Western nations say they are pursuing. But to succeed, the West must be willing to impose stronger sanctions and provide military assistance to Ukraine and possibly other neighbors of Russia if it is to succeed. Clearly, this policy has its risks; but in an age of globalization, sustaining the order laid down in the Helsinki Final Act is fundamental to order-building diplomacy. If carefully calibrated as to the tools employed and seen as a long-term strategy, it has a very good chance of success. The division of Europe into opposing camps would have consequences for relations between the West and Russia long after Putin leaves the scene. Re-creating the polarized structure of the Cold War runs against the grain of history, in my view. Framing the Issues Correctly The first step in devising guidelines for future US strategy is to frame the issues correctly. For example, it would be wrong to think that Russia is the origin of all the problems in the enormously complex mix of ethnic

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groups that inhabit the regions around its borders and also within the sprawling country. True, Moscow is an enabler of separatist movements in eastern Ukraine, and elsewhere, and seems to find that divide-andconquer policies suit its needs. But it would be simplistic to think that if Moscow suddenly became cooperative, all would be well. Because of the emotions and the long histories involved in all these disputes, it will take time before trust takes root between central governments and those ethnic groups inclined toward independence. The diplomacy of “gardening”—patient and prolonged engagement—is the only way to deal with these situations. Framing the issues correctly also means an accurate assessment of where Putin may be heading and where Russia might be able and willing to follow. Putin’s actions in Ukraine and his domestic crackdown on dissent are certainly reminiscent of the Cold War, or worse. Some have even compared this period to pre-World War II. But Putin’s Russia is not Stalin’s Russia, and the world of 2014 is notable for the many ways in which the international system itself is changing under the impact of globalization and the rise of social media. Seen in the light of megatrends dominating the global landscape today, Putin’s efforts to turn back the clock are unlikely to succeed, no matter how fervently he evokes nostalgia for Russia’s historical borders. Autarky simply is not a viable economic policy for Russia in the age of globalization. The people-to-people links between Russia and the West will not easily be severed, especially with information and global communication so easily available to ordinary citizens. A reasonable interpretation of events is that Russia is undergoing the trauma of a lost empire, not dissimilar to the withdrawal pangs of other former imperialist powers. Like other post-imperial powers, Russia is having trouble adjusting to its changed status. It still believes that it should not only have a privileged position in the nations that once were part of the czarist, and then Soviet, empires, but also that it can exclude political or other changes of which it disapproves. But no more than other European nations could re-establish their “blue water” empires will Moscow be able to re-create the Soviet Union or the Russian empire on the land mass of Eurasia. So what we are seeing is most likely part of the long recessional march from empire, made more complex by the reactionary romantic in the Kremlin. Accuracy in framing the issues also requires an understanding that American diplomacy in Russia’s neighborhood is only part of the total

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picture. On the positive side, the attraction of the European Union for all of Russia’s neighbors is hard to overstate. Political and economic reforms are the price for an association with it—something most of Russia’s neighbors accept, albeit with reluctance in some cases. On the negative side, the vulnerability of European countries to the threat of a cutoff of Russian oil and gas renders them less capable of assisting nations adjacent to Russia. China also will exert some influence, and so will the situations in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Beyond framing the issues correctly, American policymakers need to balance the twin American interests in good working relations with Russia and encouraging democracy and freedom throughout Eurasia. In principle, such policies should be compatible, especially within a policy framework designed to promote a Euro-Atlantic security community, including Russia, based on common values and a broad sense of a common identity. This is a multigenerational strategy, as containment was during the Cold War; but it is a positive, inclusionary vision, worthy of the West. If this strategy is pursued, the political changes that already have appeared in “post-Soviet space” and those yet to come will eventually succeed in transforming the frozen political landscape where heated emotions lie not far beneath the surface. The interrupted march toward a Europe that is peaceful, undivided and democratic will be resumed, and Russia ultimately will join it. But this is not Putin’s vision of the future, and probably never has been. He has left no doubt about this. Preventive Diplomacy: Another Chance? The optimism of the first years following the end of the Cold War has given way to skepticism, even cynicism, about Russia’s place in Europe. Disillusionment with the “reset” policy has added to the sense of helplessness. To renew the interrupted march toward a Euro-Atlantic ­ community of democracies will require a major act of Western and, yes, Russian statecraft. But failure to rise to the occasion will mean that the turning point in history that began with the Cold War’s end will become only another sad story of frustrated hopes leading ultimately to catastrophe. An American strategic approach that correctly frames the issues, and wields the tools best suited to strategic priorities, will be essential to the successful exercise of preventive diplomacy. Realism requires an understanding that internal conditions in Russia, and Moscow’s policies toward its former dominions, are likely to stand in the way of its full inclusion in a Euro-Atlantic community for a long time

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to come. Events in Ukraine and Putin’s crackdown on Russian dissent have underlined this. So why pursue a vision that the present Russian government almost certainly does not share? Because it provides a magnetic north for a policy compass that easily could become confused and directionless in the face of conflicting interests. In addition, failure to seek Russia’s ultimate inclusion in a Euro-Atlantic security community would slow down political change across the region, erect new walls and weaken the international response to global threats to humanity. Preventive diplomacy, crisis management and order-building diplomacy all need to be merged to meet the current challenges represented by Ukraine. Resorting to the mechanisms established to support the undertakings of the Helsinki Final Act will help. Reasserting the validity of the vision of Euro-Atlantic relations held forth by the Final Act is an absolutely bedrock policy for the United States, no matter what strategy Washington chooses to pursue. In current circumstances, managing the crisis over Ukraine requires the West to rally around this vision and encourage Russia to honor it, as well. The agreement that created the organizational machinery of the OSCE provided for ministerial meetings on a regular basis and also for summit meetings, to be held on an as-needed basis. Pres. Obama would do well to invite the OSCE heads of states or governments to convene early in 2015 to discuss the situation in Ukraine and, more fundamentally, to reaffirm that all members of the OSCE intend to abide by its principles of behavior as laid down in the Final Act. Possibly a new high-level Euro-Atlantic security forum of the type recommended by Ischinger, Browne, Ivanov and Nunn in their 2012 report could also be discussed in an OSCE summit meeting. That forum could be a useful adjunct to the OSCE in a way analogous to the UN Security Council and the General Assembly. The Challenge of Governance As chief negotiator for the Nunn-Lugar program of cooperative threat reduction, I had a direct hand in negotiating US-Ukrainian agreements that led to Kyiv’s decision to surrender the nuclear weapons left on its territory after the breakup of the Soviet Union. My counterpart was a highly competent Ukrainian general-lieutenant. Before we appended our initials to each page of the agreement that promised US assistance in expediting the destruction of nuclear delivery vehicles, my colleague

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spoke very earnestly to me: “I lay awake last night wondering whether I could trust you. I finally concluded that I could.” His comment brought home to me the stakes for Ukraine in initialing that agreement. I have thought of that moment frequently in recent months, wondering whether we lived up to the general’s trust. What I see is an American foreign policy establishment that lacks the capacity for consistent strategic analysis and policymaking. Decisions at the White House have tended to be ad hoc and personalized. During my time in the US government, it was this way more often than not. The Eisenhower administration was an exception. Ike used to say: “Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” The Nixon and Ford administrations believed firmly in top-down policymaking, and Henry Kissinger used the National Security Council apparatus to good analytical effect. These administrations were the butt of jokes for their perceived overuse of the analytic process, but that process was useful as an educational tool, both up and down the ladder of authority and responsibility. Strong and visionary Secretaries of State, like Dean Acheson and George Shultz, who enjoyed the confidence of the presidents they served, have devised and executed highly successful strategies. President Harry Truman and Acheson, for example, worked closely to create the institutions that dominated trans-Atlantic and even global relations throughout the Cold War. Three decades later, President Ronald Reagan and Shultz laid the basis for the end of the Cold War through an approach based on realism: strength, not only in military and economic capabilities but also in resolve; and a firm and consistent agenda with which they continued to engage with the Soviet Union through good times and bad. They believed that the Soviet Union would change, a belief that needs to be the bedrock assumption of American policy in the era of Putin. Preventive diplomacy is the functional equivalent of deterrence, and it is more necessary than ever in an era when nuclear deterrence is less relevant to today’s threats than it was at the height of the Cold War. I think that the best way to make preventive diplomacy work and to justify my Ukrainian colleague’s trust in the seriousness and constancy of US policy would be to build an improved institutional capacity in the foreign policy machinery for serious analysis and for the setting of strategic priorities. It must operate at the highest levels of government. If the United States followed the advice offered by former Secretary Shultz to make greater use of clusters of Cabinet secretaries with similar

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functional responsibilities to consider policy issues, and less use of White House “czars,” that would help enormously. But the culture of Washington may have to change, too—a difficult proposition. Preventive diplomacy cannot work in the absence of agreed, long-term strategic objectives. It would be like deterrence without a target.

Notes





1. As to other large parts of the world, namely the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, most observers would concede the longstanding existence of such a community in the Western Hemisphere, imperfect and asymmetrical as it may be; whereas in Africa there is no such community, despite some attempts, but these may expand for that enormous continent, given its size, demographic growth, and rising global stature. 2. See also James E. Goodby and Kenneth Weisbrode, “As NATO Grows, Unity’s Benefits Are Clearer,” Stars and Stripes, May 23, 2002: “The alliance’s full potential can only be realized in its unity and in its success as a community of democracies in creating lasting conditions for peace and prosperity worldwide…. The alternative is multiple mobilizations for complicated, risky and expensive military responses, which will divide the alliance and ultimately undermine public support. More to the point, they are far less likely to succeed.” 3. Tony Wood, “NATO and the Myth of the Liberal International Order,” New York Review of Books, August 21, 2018: The goal, as [Jimmy] Carter’s former security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski put it in 1994, was to fill “the potentially destabilizing geopolitical no man’s land between Russia and the European Union.…” But it is important to register that this threat was of little account in the original decision to expand NATO in the early 1990s. On the contrary, the absence of a serious challenge to the West from a greatly weakened Russia was a crucial enabling condition for it…. the expansion would help to legitimize a return to a more confrontational stance on Russia’s part…. That decision, made in the glow of an unprecedented American dominance of the global stage, was founded not on a collective assessment of Europe’s likely security needs during the post-cold war peace, but on Washington’s unchallenged sense of its own priorities.



4. Strobe Talbott, “Clinton and Yeltsin,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and William I. Hitchcock, eds., “One Hundred Years of Russian-American Relations,” Diplomatic History 41, no. 4 (September 2018): 568–71, here 569–70. He adds, “There was also a forward-looking argument for opening

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NATO’s door. If the former Warsaw Pact nations were refused membership and marooned in a gray area between West and East, they would rush to arm themselves against their neighbors, hobbling their economies and destabilizing the region.” Here too the claim was logical, but speculative. 5. Ibid., 571. 6. Svetlana Savranskaya, “Yeltsin and Clinton,” in Leffler and Hitchcock, eds., 564–67, here 564. She identifies the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program as one of the only examples of “genuine cooperation” (565). 7. Ibid., 567. 8. Rajan Menon, “How the Tumultuous ’90s Paved the Way for Putin’s Russia,” New York Times, April 10, 2017. 9. Cf. Celeste Wallander, “Reflections,” in Leffler and Hitchcock, eds., 586– 89; and Thomas Pickering, oral history, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, April 16, 2007, 390–96, 404–8, 412–14. 10. Quoted in Derek Chollet, “Obama and Putin,” in Leffler and Hitchcock, eds., 579. 11. Talbott, 570. 12. “Outgunned,” The Economist, March 10, 2018. See also essay 41. 13. Bruno Tertrais, “The Death of the INF Treaty or the End of the PostCold War Era,” Note No. 03/19, Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique, February 4, 2019. 14. See Jan Techau, “Four Predictions on the Future of Europe,” Carnegie Endowment, January 12, 2016. 15. See James E. Goodby, Petrus Buwalda, and Dmitri Trenin. A Strategy for Stable Peace: Toward a Euroatlantic Security Community (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 2002), 14ff., from which this paragraph was adapted. See also the introduction to Chapter 3. 16. Rana Foroohar, “The US-China Head Fake,” Financial Times, December 3, 2018. 17. “Monsoon Squalls,” The Economist, March 10, 2018. Cf. Chas W. Freeman, Jr., “The State of Sino-American Relations and their Global Context,” speech given at the Brown University China Summit, April 5, 2019: “‘Debt-trap diplomacy’ is an invention of American polemicists.” See also James E. Goodby and Markku Heiskanen, “Linking Europe and Northeast Asia,” NAPSNet Policy Forum, February 27, 2006. 18. Michael D. Swaine, “Creating an Unstable Asia: The US ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’ Strategy,” Carnegie Endowment, March 2, 2018. 19. Ibid. The Obama administration pursued a similar program with the EU called the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The Trump administration withdrew from the TPP; the TTIP, as of the beginning of 2019, is stalled. See also essays 21 and 23 in Chapter 3.

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20.  Priscilla Roberts, review of articles by David Shambaugh; Eric Heginbotham and Richard J. Samuels; and Jennifer Lind and Daryl G. Press, H-Diplo/ISSF Article Review 104, October 12, 2018; See also by the same author, Review of “Trump’s First Year in Asia,” special issue of Journal of American-East Asian Studies 25, no. 2 (Summer 2018), 105– 220 in H-Diplo, December 20, 2018. 21. See Wei Zongyou, “China-US Reconciliation and the East Asian Security Order,” Diplomat, July 18, 2014. 22. See also Chapter 5, essays 46 and 50, and the following essays, inter alia: John Endicott and James E. Goodby, “A Northeast Asia Security Conference,” International Herald Tribune, November 5, 2002; James E. Goodby, “Try to Engage with Pyongyang,” ibid., January 6, 2003; James E. Goodby, “Opportunity and Danger,” ibid., January 17, 2003; James E. Goodby, “North Korea: In 2003, Look Back to 1984,” ibid., January 29, 2003; James E. Goodby, “Playing the Long Game Is Risky,” ibid., February 20, 2003; James E. Goodby, “A Chance to Turn the Nuclear Tide,” ibid., August 5, 2003; James E. Goodby, “Negotiating With a Nation That’s Really Gone Nuclear,” Washington Post, February 15, 2004; James E. Goodby, “Nuclear Talks Will Test Six Nations in Beijing,” Financial Times, February 24, 2004; James E. Goodby and Donald Gross, “America and South Korea: An Alliance That Needs to Be Mended,” International Herald Tribune, August 6, 2004; James E. Goodby and Donald Gross, “The ‘Libya Model’ Could Help Disarm North Korea, ibid., September 3, 2004; James E. Goodby, “Creating a Peace Regime in Korea,” CSIS Pacific Forum, May 30, 2006. 23. Duyeon Kim, “The Inter-Korean Agreement and Pyongyang’s Offer to Trump,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 8, 2018. 24.  Fintan O’Toole quoted in Hari Kunzru, “Fool Britannia,” New York Review of Books, February 21, 2019. The line refers to the UK but could just as well apply to the United States. 25. John Kornblum, “The Amerexit,” American Interest, July 25, 2016. He continues: The United States cannot pivot away from Europe anymore than a tree can pivot away from the soil in which it is rooted…. and this remains the case regardless of diffusive demographic changes on both sides of the Atlantic, because institutions and attitudes are vastly more important than the details of ethnic origin. We are constituent parts of one another in ways that we are not with any other part of the world…. So unless the Atlantic world finds a new sense of common purpose as a “global Atlantic” to manage the challenges of globalization, we may not be able to ensure that Western values will continue to define the operating system of the digitalized world.

154  J. E. GOODBY AND K. WEISBRODE 26.  “Picking Up the Pieces,” The Economist, August 4, 2018; Shawn Donnan, “Globalisation Marches on Without Trump,” Financial Times, November 6, 2017. See also essays, 5, 9, and 24. 27.  See Chas W. Freeman, Jr. and Jack F. Matlock, Jr., “Central Asian Connection,” Christian Science Monitor, November 4, 1998; Kenneth Weisbrode, “The Eurasian Powers Have Good Reason to Stick Together,” International Herald Tribune, October 26, 2001; and, by the same author, “One Hand Clapping in the Caucasus,” YaleGlobal, January 26, 2004; and “Central Asia’s Perfect Storm,” Project Syndicate, September 3, 2010. 28. “Treaty” here refers to the Peace of Westphalia, comprising more than one treaty which allowed for intervention in some cases. 29. It was actually his penultimate appearance, in 1989.

CHAPTER 5

Regional Solutions

The essays in this chapter describe a number of possible alternative measures for aligning national policies, global challenges, and regional ­ realities. They include the essay (essay 51) that is the counterpoint to our first written together (essay 15), which appeared in Chapter 3, as well as additional essays that serve as counterpoints to those in previous chapters insofar as they offer solutions proposed by others and by ourselves. To reiterate a distinction that has already been made: regions are not discrete, closed geographic polities. Regional integration is valuable, but not for its own sake. Instead, such integration—starting with cross-­ border investment and expanding to trade and other types of peaceful interchange—is a natural and preferred way of mastering the interdependence that technology and economics make more or less necessary for survival. If there is a preferred model for regional order, it would be a flexible but durable security community of nation-states, and not necessarily a supranational union, although the latter need not be ruled out if it were to come about by a democratic choice. Whether community, commonwealth, federation, union, or some combination, our vision of successful regional governance makes little room for the abstraction of “balance of power.” That bias extends to such doctrines as “offshore balancing,” which has been gaining in popularity among commentators and academics.1 We cannot say how useful or practical such a doctrine would be, because it is not clear to us that either term—“offshore” or “balance”—applies to actual regional problems, or corresponds well to © The Author(s) 2020 J. E. Goodby and K. Weisbrode, Practical Lessons from US Foreign Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27312-5_5

155

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the technological reality of the world. The idea has a certain theoretical appeal, but what use does it serve without empirical criteria? Does the United States achieve this balance by intervening or not intervening? Where and how? And how is the need for balance detected? How is it satisfied? We do not doubt that theorists have devised elaborate answers to these questions. However, our approach in these essays is to offer policies for regions understood as complex and familiar environments, and as seen through the eyes of their inhabitants, and not on billiard tables or as some other mechanistic problem in need of just the right equation of power and influence as applied from the outside. We do not mean to impose a caricature of social science theories upon our readers; we merely disclose our own theoretical (or, better put, axiomatic) bias in this regard, which has come mainly from an observation of how regional powers relate to one another over time. We would extend such an ecological understanding to international institutions (if we may call it that, echoing the now-forgotten teaching of Harold and Margaret Sprout, along with the less-forgotten teachings of Hedley Bull and other members of the English School of international relations). International relationships and institutions also grow, adapt, decay, and die in relation to one another, to their component parts, and to the missions they undertake within and beyond their own regional boundaries (essays 41, 43, 44, 45, and 49). To be sustained, they require shared values. What else does a regional security community require? The following is the bare minimum for any such multilateral system. It must: • promote the peaceful resolution of disputes; • resolve misunderstandings and prevent miscalculations; • encourage transparency in the mutual relations of the member states; • enhance regional economic cooperation or inter-regional cooperation within the larger framework of the global economy; • raise the living standards of all the people living in the area to the levels of the most advanced nations; • promote the freer movement of people, information, and ideas among their nations; • foster an improved mutual understanding of each other’s histories and cultures.2

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Readers with a sense of contemporary history will recognize the basic provisions of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, which established the Conference on (later Organization for) Security and Cooperation in Europe. It was, and arguably remains the most important Euro-Atlantic regime of recent decades (essays 47, 49, and 52).3 That is because it harmonized, in the form of a multilateral agreement, the liberal aspirations of civil society with national sovereignty, the inviolability of national borders, and a doctrine of peaceful change. We see no theoretical or practical prohibition on it, or some version of it, being attempted elsewhere—certainly not in Northeast Asia and the Middle East (essays 46, 51, and 52). An overarching policy of fostering security communities, and not “enlargement and engagement,” “a balance of power that favors freedom,” or “don’t do stupid s***,” should have been the cornerstone of US diplomacy during the past twenty years in these regions, and therefore globally.4 In spite of the damage that has been done to the Helsinki model, which we described in the previous chapter, we believe it is still viable in Asia and Europe. There are two reasons for that. The first is that various nations in each region, and elsewhere, continue to pursue ever closer economic and political cooperation. Global supply chains are giving way, or at least are being supplemented heavily, by intra-regional ones. Asia’s intra-­regional trade and foreign direct investment have grown steadily during the past decade, now accounting for a majority of both trade and investment there.5 This was already the case in Europe for some time. The second reason is that intra- and inter-regional, as well as trans-regional, institutions continue to adapt to this reality. As noted in the previous chapter, the US-led transatlantic and transpacific trade agreements (TPP and TTIP) may have stalled or, in the case of the former, been abandoned by the United States; but the other nations are proceeding ahead with them. Similar groupings are being formed elsewhere. One in Asia called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) aims to become one of the world’s largest trading blocs.6 An African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) has appeared alongside three other regional economic commissions with a similar aim for that enormous continent.7 The list of regional acronyms continues to grow. Not all these organizations will live up to their promises, of course, and most will probably take a long time to bear fruit. There is also a wide difference between free trade regimes and investment accords, however advanced and productive they become, and regional security communities. Nevertheless, the

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proliferation of these groupings suggests that more may, and ought to, be in the offing; and that the United States, which is to date still the largest power with an important presence in every region, should encourage them strongly so long as they remain liberal and open to cooperation with other bodies that include the United States, and consistent with the aims of US bilateral and multilateral alliances. The regional ramifications of these developments are probably difficult to disentangle from the global ones. Chinese leaders, for example, have touted their regional leadership as in keeping with the liberal international order that some have claimed the United States and other Western powers have allowed to erode. This has included a Chinese defense of globalization itself.8 Where the West has become divided and no longer stalwart, other nations are rising to the challenge of defending the rules of the road as they view them, and if that cannot happen easily within existing institutions, China and others will proceed to found new ones.9 Some cynicism may be justified regarding the rhetoric accompanying these actions. China’s enthusiasm for infrastructural and other investment has not been matched by a detectable political commitment, not least in helping to resolve regional conflicts. Yet, at the same time, the proliferation of such groupings and institutions is a fact. What is left open to interpretation is whether they will accelerate and bolster the trend toward a Hobbesian world, or whether they will do the opposite and resume the contemporary project of building a liberal, free, and peaceful international order. If it is to be latter, leaders may come to recognize the existence, in the words of one Chinese scholar, Shiping Tang, of several “overlapping regional orders,” based on “regionalization, interregional bargaining and coordination” and that constitute, in effect, “international order(s), rather than a single international order.”10 This has been true for some time, as Tang acknowledges, only now the components of regional orders are bigger, stronger, more interconnected, and more hyperactive. So, as with globalization, the trend may work either way; neither one is a utopia. With our nation’s long history of promoting successful regional security communities in the Americas and the Euro-Atlantic, the difficulty with which US policymakers have in seeing the facts in front of their noses is strange but not surprising (essays 39 and 42).11 Regionalism can be a tough sell. During the Cold War, when it was said that the entire world was divided into two camps led by two superpowers, most informed people knew that the world and the Cold War were more complicated, and

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that regional realities and the policies crafted for them were at the center of world politics, not dotted along its periphery. Even nuclear deterrence—the hallowed ground of superpower bilateral relations—had as much to do with regional security—providing reassurance with NATO is a good example—as with the bilateral relationship with the Soviet Union. That continues to be the case, perhaps even more so, after the Cold War gave way to a contested global era.12 Yet, there continues to be a conceptual and actual muddle in the thinking of officials and opinion-leaders on this point. A recent fad for some of them is the network or “hub” of relationships that, with probable reference to the internet, is supposed to be the wave of the future.13 For example, Ash Carter, Secretary of Defense in the Obama administration has written that, in order to counter a “needless struggle for supremacy” by China, the United States and its East-Asian allies and partners should “invite” China into a “principled, inclusive network… an informal network—not an alliance, not a treaty, not a bloc [but] a multi-layered complex of relationships, some bilateral, some multilateral, that can accommodate a wide variety of interests within a shared regional understanding of fundamentals.”14 That happy outcome sounds fine, so long as one understands that it cannot happen on its own and is not the same thing, or even close to, a security community. Michael Pompeo, Secretary of State in the Trump administration, has taken the muddle to a perverse extreme by cloaking what observers have said is an American retreat from global governance, adherence to international norms, and contribution to international society in a desire to improve all three. “After the Cold War ended,” he has said, “we allowed this liberal order to begin to corrode. It failed us in some places, and sometimes it failed you and the rest of the world. Multilateralism has too often become viewed as an end unto itself. The more treaties we sign, the safer we supposedly are. The more bureaucrats we have, the better the job gets done.” Meanwhile, “bad actors have exploited our lack of leadership for their own gain. This is the poisoned fruit of American retreat. President Trump is determined to reverse that.”15 Maybe Pompeo has a point in his remark about lack of leadership. This was certainly the case with regard to the practice of regional diplomacy. In neglecting regional diplomacy during the past two decades, the United States has retreated from international leadership, however much it may have disguised retreat by reckless over-exuberance and overblown rhetoric about empires, networks, and so on. Who is meant to administer

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and defend such groupings is left unsaid, but this may be beside the point. That US policy took multilateralism and its trappings for granted during most of this period is not to say that collective security is flawed and needs to be replaced by something else, as Carter and Pompeo each suggest. We argue the opposite: that it needs to be renewed and bolstered from the bottom up in each region, where multilateral institutions should be adapted accordingly (essays 44, 45, and 49).16 To repeat, regionalism is not a happy middle ground between nationalism and globalism. They are not interchangeable alternatives. Rather, regions are essential components of international order, which includes nation-states as well as global regimes and institutions; which is to opt for, again, a logic of both/and, not either/or. Here, in fact, is a maximalist approach: the more open, regional institutions and policies there are, the better. In contrast to Pompeo and Carter, we view policies not as formalities but as the basis for nations acting in unison. Sometimes there will be duplicate roles and responsibilities, but redundancy in the spirit of integration is not necessarily a bad thing: it may check, balance, or otherwise compensate for deficiencies that are bound to persist in various regional bodies. Thus, the growing activity of the European Union in the defense realm need not, on principle, hinder or even counterbalance NATO (essays 41, 43, and 44).17 Deepening bilateral relationships need not come at the expense of other relationships. All are potential building blocks of regional communities, not suboptimal alternatives to a putatively obsolescent and decaying liberal international system (essay 50).18 Regional security communities are not the easiest things to foster, however. There are as many bad neighbors as good ones, and some are both at the same time. Proximity creates incentives to get along but the narcissism of small differences is endemic to human nature. And historical memories are long. Thus, if regional diplomacy is mishandled, a multi-regional power like the United States can set the process back, as its post-2001 wars, undertaken in the name of upholding both global norms and a regional balance of power, have done. Making up for the damage and other lost opportunities may require new thinking.19 Policymakers should also anticipate and allow for reaction and retrenchment. For all that some regional actors may want the United States (and others) to play the role of regional insiders, it does not take much for them to react to a perception of unwanted tutelage. For example, with regard to the Middle East: “President Obama suggested that Iran and Saudi Arabia share the region,” the Iranian diplomat, Hossein Mousavian has said. “I don’t believe this would be a good idea, because

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the region contains other countries as well. But the idea of sharing the region between regional countries is good.” His Saudi interlocutor, Prince Turki al Faisal, although asserting that their two countries have very different regional visions, agreed with him, to a point: It should be Yemenis who decide their future. Not Saudi Arabia and Iran. And definitely not the United States. And the same thing in Syria. It should be the Syrians who decide their future. Not the Iranians, the Saudis, the Russians… and so on. And that’s the difference in attitude and the difference in conception of what the roles are. But we objected to President Obama’s famous statement and his interview that Iran and Saudi Arabia should share the Middle East. Who are you President Obama to say who shares the Middle East? You don’t own it. You haven’t bought the Middle East in order to say Iran and Saudi Arabia should share it.20

One can find a number of similar views from many places, even during the height of the Cold War. As the essays in previous chapters showed, these views persist, notably in the former Soviet Union, and have begun to dovetail with post-imperial nostalgia and nationalist and other opposition to globalization.21 The antidote to those various geopolitical pathologies, starting with old-fashioned chauvinism, is a viable, open, regional community. Much was accomplished in that direction during the latter half of the twentieth century, however imperfect this solution has been to date. It is not too late in first half of the twenty-first century to resume the important task of perfecting it.

39. Save the Caucasus from Balkan-like Crisis (2000) President Süleyman Demirel of Turkey, the grand old man of goodwill and respectability in his part of the world, is on a new mission. He paid a visit to the Caucasus last week to promote an ambitious “stability pact” for the region, modeled on the effort to rebuild the Balkans after the Kosovo uproar last year. The reasons for it are easy to understand. Turkey is very concerned that its historic rival Russia is about to use whatever victory it claims in Chechnya to reassert dominance in the southern Caucasus. Already Russia has made forays into Georgia to restrict Chechen “sanctuaries.” When Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze cools toward Russian

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involvement on his territory, the Russians remind him he has little choice. The Abkhaz separatists, historically supported by Russia, have spread rumors they’ll begin to make trouble again for the beleaguered Georgian government. This could be just the beginning of a post-Chechnya round of regional/ethnic flare-ups, which according to some experts may spread beyond the Caucasus to Central Asia, and perhaps beyond. Turkey and its Western allies, namely the US, have invested nearly a decade in carving out what they see to be a new sphere of influence in this region and in trying to mediate peace on their terms. They’re worried it’s about to be lost. The time has come to cut a deal with the other major powers that have ambitions in what they all consider to be their backyard. The effort should be strongly encouraged. Ambitious as it sounds, a stability pact—in truth a basic security arrangement—is precisely what the Caucasus needs. The Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Georgian governments stand accused of promoting naked national interest—there is nothing wrong with that, and no real security framework can be based on anything less. Only now they are doing so within a broader concept of security—one that includes not only Armenia, but also Iran and Russia. The reaction by those governments has been lukewarm of course, but the offer strangely enough has come with a silver lining of good faith. For the first time, the key players in the Caucasus have openly declared that they will be unable to bring peace and prosperity to their region without the cooperation and gain of all the major powers across the borders. To impose stability on a fractious region before rather than after a conflict has torn it apart is a formidable challenge. President Demirel has set a tall order, and with so much else on his plate—Cyprus, the Kurdish problem—it may be difficult to pull off. The idea has to be taken more seriously, which means the West must offer something tangible to Russia and Iran. This most likely will be a relaxation of the even more ambitious effort to build an exclusive East-West energy corridor through the region that excludes Russians and Iranians. The Turks know how foolish this is and recently made progress in natural-gas pipeline projects with Russia and Iran. Azeri President Heydar Aliyev is on his way to Tehran for talks with the Iranian government about his own set of deals on energy and regional security. With close to 20 million Azeris living across the border in Iran (there are only a third as many in Azerbaijan), it is not surprising that Mr. Aliyev’s foreign

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minister declared Iranian involvement to be essential to any workable security arrangement for the Caucasus. The West—namely the US—should not lose this opportunity. With its stubborn promotion of pet pipelines and bizarre sanctions against Azerbaijan and Iran, US policy in the region since the Soviet breakup has been confused and contradictory, reminiscent of a statement attributed to former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser: “The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves that make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something we are missing.” It’s time to remove both complexity and genius from US policy and follow the sensible lead of the people there who are forced to live with one another.

40. Defending Missile Defense (2001) President Bush’s meetings this week in Europe mark an important shift toward pursuing ballistic missile defense in a way that can satisfy Russia and our NATO allies. Yesterday in Brussels, Bush told NATO leaders that Europe—including Russia—has a stake in working with the United States on missile defense. This caps a series of US moves away from a narrow commitment to national missile defense in favor of a broader program of cooperation with our allies and friends. The Bush administration has sought to convince NATO leaders and skeptics at home that building a defense against hostile or accidental launches of ballistic missiles makes sense for everyone. To strengthen the case, the United States should launch a regional, or theater missile defense program focused initially on the defense of Europe and of US forces based in Europe and the Middle East. The theater missile defense program would be a two-way street, meaning a joint NATO-Russia project of development, production, deployment and cost- sharing. A joint effort that would share technology—as President Ronald Reagan proposed—would cost far less than a national missile defense system, but the exact figures are still unknown. Such an initiative would advance four important strategic goals: – Strengthen the transatlantic relationship by giving NATO allies a stake in missile defense;

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– Draw Russia, which has only limited cooperation with NATO, more deeply into European security structures, thereby preventing a new arms race with Russia and new dividing lines in Europe; – Stress NATO’s defensive mission against external threats to any of its members; – Give Russia a greater incentive to clamp down on its sale of missile technology to countries in the Middle East and Asia, since Russia’s military would now be helping to defend Europe against threats from these regions. A joint NATO-Russia program need not supplant more ambitious plans for a national missile defense system, nor require immediate abrogation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which forbids the development of the larger scale defenses envisioned by most national missile defense proposals. A Europe-first missile defense policy, in fact, would be an essential building block for an effective national missile defense program. The technology for joint defense in Europe is available sooner and more reliably than the more experimental systems required for national missile defense. Early success here would pave the way for additional systems later on, and offer proof that ballistic missile defense can, indeed, be unifying, not divisive. Such experience would also demonstrate that there is more to EuroAtlantic cooperation than one side doing the other a favor. A European program should be the first step toward similar efforts in East and South Asia. The day for such cooperation in these regions may be further off, but it should still be a central goal of US policy. Indeed, cooperation in the early warning of missile attacks is something that can and should be done now in Asia, and not just in Europe. Otherwise, we may face the arms race that critics of missile defense now predict, and confirm the cynical view that limited cooperation with Russia or any other major power is intended at the expense of others such as China. The practical challenges are enormous, and require a great deal of negotiation. NATO has experience in this area, and there is no reason why NATO and Russia could not work out a broad program of cooperation in truly defensive systems.

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When Russian President Vladimir Putin made a proposal to do so last February, the US response was lukewarm because the idea was not fully developed. The plan we advocate could include Putin’s ideas, among others. Bush should therefore probe his NATO and Russian counterparts on what they would be prepared to contribute specifically to a joint theater missile defense system. Reactions to America’s missile defense proposals so far have left the impression that unilateral military needs are driving our diplomatic agenda. The Bush administration now intends to prove that US security initiatives are instruments for stability—not division. A NATO-Russia program on theater missile defense would be a good place to start.

41. NATO and the Future of War (2001) Why isn’t the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, despite its invocation of the collective defense provisions of Article V for the first time in its history, playing a larger role in the military intervention now taking place in Afghanistan? All the NATO allies joined our cause. Smaller countries like Iceland and Luxembourg, newly-minted members of NATO like the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, as well as historically great powers like France, Germany, Britain and Italy joined in saying “we will treat America’s tragedy as our own, America’s war will be our war.” The contrast with other post-Cold War wars is striking. NATO played a major logistical and operational role during the Gulf War. It took the lead, eventually, in ending the wars of Yugoslav succession. But Afghanistan is a different story. Part of the answer is that it hasn’t been asked to play a larger role. And that is because the United States military chafed under the restraints imposed by NATO allies in the Yugoslav campaigns, and probably is not eager for more. Another part of the answer is that NATO countries (except for Britain) are not well equipped to deal with crises that require long-distance force projection. They have been badgered for years by Washington to acquire these capabilities and improvements are being made, but very slowly. The money and will aren’t there. Still another part of the answer is that the US military has been fighting a limited intervention in Afghanistan. Access to that country is what the US military needs more than anything else at this point, not more

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air, ground or naval forces. If the war continues for many months or years that could change. On the positive side of the ledger, NATO is doing what the Bush administration thought it should do: attend to intra-state conflicts in the Balkans while the United States fights wars against major foes in other parts of the world with ad hoc assistance. The enemy that has appeared is not the one that the administration imagined but the principle still holds. Other NATO members are picking up the responsibility for Macedonia, Kosovo and Bosnia, a development the United States welcomes because it frees up US forces. Furthermore, NATO is replacing some US aircraft that have defended NATO and the United States. Burden-sharing is going well. The experience also shows that the European Union is right to create a rapid reaction force that can deal with low-level conflict in and around Europe. The United States will not always be available to do that. There is no conflict between the EU enterprise and NATO or US goals. The two are complementary. The goal is to put 60,000 troops into the field on sixty days’ notice. It is not intended to be a European army and will, instead draw on the national contingents of members of the European Union. The EU visualizes a force operating under EU leadership in crises where NATO as a whole is not engaged. Such a possibility was accepted by the United States in 1999 at the Washington NATO summit meeting celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Atlantic Alliance. Political will to support this force with adequate resources will be necessary if it is to work as planned. There should be no doubt in any European’s mind that the United States fully backs the effort. The Afghan intervention also underscores the reality that NATO is not an alliance outside NATO territory, but rather a temporary coalition like any other. The prospect of NATO being transformed into a 21st century grand expeditionary force to fight fires around the world is even less likely now than at any point during the Cold War. Manfred Woerner’s famous 1993 prediction that NATO should “go out of area or out of business” has been rejected with regard to conflicts beyond Europe. But will it have a major role in the war against global terrorism or will it be marginalized? Secretary Rumsfeld points out that coalitions are organized to fit the mission, not the other way around. In this case, the United States has identified the mission to be the apprehension of a single terrorist network, albeit one that extends across the globe.

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However long this takes, it is not the main international mission of the United States. That mission is to work with other countries to create lasting conditions for peace and prosperity worldwide, and the weapons are economic, political, and cultural as well as military. In fact, it requires a great deal more than reforming the US military. We are all facing a new medievalism, that is, the privatization of largescale violence coupled with fealty to movements across frontiers rather than to national governments. This is not a clash of civilizations. It is broader than that. It is a clash between organizing principles for human society, between states and transnational militancy. In the circumstances we now face, the mission is to show large parts of the Islamic world a brighter and more stable future so its disaffected no longer can find any shelter for their attacks on the West. An aggressive preventive diplomacy is far preferable to, and cheaper, than repeatedly organizing complicated, risky and expensive military responses. This is where NATO, as a political alliance, working closely with the European Union can lead the way The United States and its friends and allies around the world really have no choice but to unite in a more systematic manner around this wider mission. This war will require resources but it also will require new thinking about globalization. It requires a great deal more than fine tuning the US military or improving the European Union’s rapid reaction force, important though those things are. There is no way that globalization can proceed in a way that benefits one or two billion people while leaving the other four or five billion to dwell in poverty. Economic progress must advance everywhere or it will retreat everywhere. This will be the next war.

42. Afghanistan Interim Government “Solution” Could Leave Regional Problems Intact (2001) After a week of intense negotiations, Afghan parties near Bonn have neared a tentative agreement to establish a ‘broad-based’ government to succeed the deposed Taliban regime. Hamid Karzai, a former deputy foreign minister of a previous Afghan government, appeared set to become interim leader on December 4. The Northern Alliance presented a list of candidates for its share of a 29-member council the same day. While this

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may satisfy Western governments, its security provisions could encourage the country’s neighbors to continue meddling in its affairs. The deal boosts the antiterrorism coalition’s broadest mission in Afghanistan, by codifying ethnic diversity and drawing a head of state from the Pashtuns, the Taliban’s largest ethnic group and the group with strongest ties to Pakistan. Precise details on the composition and structure of the successor government are unclear, but a game plan is in place. Karzai would serve a six-month term before a loya jirga, or grand council, convenes to pave the way for another council. This second council would produce a constitution and oversee elections. The interim administration would include 29 members, with senior Tajik members of the Northern Alliance occupying the defense, foreign and interior ministries. (Representation for others, namely Uzbeks and Hazaras, is unclear.) One of Karzai’s five deputies would be a woman, evidently Sima Samar. The agreement also contains provisions for judicial power based on the country’s 1964 constitution along with human rights and civil service commissions. Though it may be impossible to enforce—not least because the Taliban continues to fight in pockets around Afghanistan, and still controls the Southern city of Kandahar—the United Nations and the signatories are treating the agreement as a breakthrough. They say it disproves the suspicion that Afghans are too partisan to rule themselves. Deriving the right balance of representation among the many factions and local authorities is a huge and difficult task, and recent indications of warlord activity will make the country harder to unify peacefully. The government, in its final form, will probably leave big parts of the country relatively autonomous. Abdullah Abdullah, the Northern Alliance’s foreign minister, claimed the new council would reflect the ethnic makeup of the country and would have a Pashtun plurality. Using Abdullah’s logic, Tajiks would be the second-largest group in the council, and Uzbeks would have a small role. This logical-sounding approach masks a weakness of the deal. While the agreement invokes international support, UN officials have been cryptic about how that support would work. The structure of Afghanistan’s security is particularly unclear. The agreement affirms the desirability of a “United Nations mandated force,” which would supplant local armies, but is vague about what this force would do or who would staff it. The security question demands a deep as well as a quick solution. The delegates at Bonn repeatedly acknowledged that no interim government

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can succeed amid a chaotic security environment. At present a jumble of local warlords provides that security, and their status is connected directly to the calculations of outside backers. Thus, the ‘bottom up’ arrangement for bringing stability to Afghanistan encourages the widespread conviction that foreign rivalries and interventions will indefinitely poison the country. The region’s complex ethnic and border relationships mean that urging neighboring countries to ‘keep out’ is as productive— but historically has not been as popular—as insisting that ‘ungovernable’ Afghans accept the imposition of authoritarian rule. These agreements do not give neighboring states an explicit incentive to promote stability in the region or a strategic reason not to meddle in the infant state’s affairs. For example, one could imagine an occupation-like partition under UN oversight; Russia and Uzbekistan could manage the north, Iran the west, Pakistan the east and south, and Americans the capital. This is a fractious and temporary solution, but no more so than the “broad-based” successor regime has been to date. The idea that foreign states can work in concert with the people’s wishes, though, does not hold much sway in Afghanistan. For this reason, the UN admits that it still has a great deal of work to do, not only inside the country but also beyond its borders. UN spokesman Ahmad Fawzi offered a warning on the negotiations that probably echoes in the minds of Central Asian governments and citizens. “Anything can go wrong,” he said.

43. EU to Adopt Higher Profile in Recasting Europe (2002) Two recent events show how far Europe has moved to put its bloody past behind it. One is the opening of the European Union’s (EU’s) constitutional convention. The other is NATO’s offer to Russia to establish a new political authority, tentatively called the NATO-Russia Council, or “NATO at 20.” The latter body signals a welcome recognition of Russia’s role in European security. Decision making will become more efficient and equitable among 20 equal partners. NATO has made it clear that the new arrangement would not mean a Russian veto over NATO’s own decisions. It would, nevertheless, align Russia with its European neighbors, and with the United States, to a degree unprecedented in modern world history.

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Ratification awaits Moscow’s approval, but is expected to see its true form by NATO foreign ministers at their May conference in Reykjavik. A decision about the next group of NATO invitees also is expected later in the year, and is likely to include some or all of the former Soviet republics on the Baltic, which Russia to date has strongly opposed. NATO and Russia thus may solve both the enlargement question and the issue of Russia’s relationship to NATO in time for NATO’s November summit in Prague. If so, we will hear a giant sigh of satisfaction from both sides of the Atlantic as the loose ends of the post-Cold War are tied up. Yet, another round of Western triumphalism would be both unwise and unrealistic. Despite the rupture brought about by Kosovo, and public spats over missile defense and enlargement, NATO and Russia have cooperated more often than not since the early 1990s—over other Balkan conflicts (namely Bosnia and Macedonia) as well as a range of European security issues, from conventional arms control to counter-proliferation. Streamlining the institutional side of this cooperation makes sense, but it is more an accommodation to reality than a dramatic departure from the recent past. Moreover, a workable partnership between NATO and Russia, while essential for European security, is not a sufficient guarantee. It just makes the playing field more level. The protagonist of the next chapter in the history of the EuroAtlantic community will not be NATO or Russia, but the EU. Now that the EU has launched an ambitious constitutional convention, the old cliches about Euro-navel gazing are again in vogue. Yet, EU diplomacy has grown steadily more assertive and wide-ranging, particularly in relations with Russia. At the same time, Washington saw fit to run the Afghan operation outside the NATO framework, in effect repudiating the “out of area or out of business” mantra of previous US administrations. Of course, it is too early to know where the complicated process of EU reform will lead, but it is difficult to foresee a stable and workable EuroAtlantic security community without a successful reform of the EU’s internal system of governance and the union’s enlargement to the east. The United States has a major stake in the outcome of the current EU debates. In fact, the two great Western institutions, NATO and the EU, should be harmonizing their basic reforms more vigorously than has been the case. NATO’s current initiative with Russia provides an important opportunity to get the process right. Any NATO-Russia plan for deeper

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integration must have an EU component, or ideally, would be an EU-NATO-Russia plan. EU high representative Javier Solana must sit at the same table as NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson and Russian President Vladimir Putin whenever security is at stake. Above all, the anticipated processes of EU and NATO enlargement must proceed in concert with each other, and with Russia. This cannot happen if the two processes continue to operate on an independent basis. NATO-Russia cooperation is as indispensable to the future of EU reform as EU reform is to the future of Euro-Atlantic security. Political realities in Europe have finally begun to catch up with the historic challenges presented by the end of the Cold War. The 1990s allowed for the necessary consolidation in the EU and Russia, and the crossing of several political hurdles in NATO. During such periods of consolidation, the engineers of change are wont to do battle with architects who seek to impose logical order upon disparate political forces. Happily, much of Europe has moved beyond rival abstractions, and disjointed discussions of architecture are for the most part behind us. But the job is not complete: For there to be a Europe whole and free that is also sustainable and coherent, a common logic now must be applied to the vital institutional glue that holds America, Russia and Europe together.

44. European Defense: An Alliance with 2 Tiers (2003) On Tuesday the leaders of France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg are scheduled to attend a meeting in Brussels to establish a new “European Defense Union.” What little notice the conference has received has been mainly dismissive. That is too bad, because after nearly 50 years of false starts, Europeans need an effective military authority besides an American-led NATO. Critics see the gathering as little more than a fit of post-Iraq pique from the vanguard of “old Europe.” Some Europeans, particularly the British, who care deeply about strengthening European defense, are deeply annoyed, labeling the meeting a poorly timed and unnecessary insult to the United States and the European supporters of the intervention in Iraq. Either way, virtually nobody expects the talks to produce anything serious.

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An anti-US (and therefore, anti-NATO) initiative in Belgium this week would seem very ill advised for the EU. It need not happen. A productive discussion about the Euro-Atlantic defense and security architecture is long overdue. Drift on these issues has produced ambiguity over the future of NATO and division in the EU, as well as frustration over American military preeminence. Past efforts to develop a quasi-independent European defense organization have nearly all fallen short of the mark. NATO has picked up most of the slack, but it cannot do so indefinitely. It is finally time to establish a clear division of labor in defense, and for both Americans and Europeans to put their money where their mouths are. The Bush administration should endorse such an effort, and so should Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. The division of labor would require a restructuring of the trans-Atlantic alliance into an inner and outer core. The outer core would consist of NATO and be geared to defending its members against external threats, particularly those involving weapons of mass destruction. Intra-European security would be left to the inner core, comprising a capable EU defense organization. EU members and aspiring members should belong to both the NATO core and the inner core. The United States would not accept a primary obligation to intervene in intra-European conflicts while every single NATO member would not be required to participate in extra-­ European conflicts involving the United States. Such a two-tiered alliance should be more flexible, yet carry greater multilateral authority, than current, ad hoc arrangements—particularly if Russia becomes a full member of NATO and Britain a full participant in the EU inner-core organization.

45. Rescuing the UN Security Council: Should We? Can We? (2004) United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan’s September declaration that the US-led invasion of Iraq was “illegal” has rekindled still-powerful, and unpleasant, memories of last year’s acrimonious Security Council debate. The conundrum the Council faced in early 2003 was that it was being pressured by President George W. Bush to enforce its own resolutions against a defiant Iraq—but through collective military action under American command, just as it did during the first Persian Gulf War. At

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the same time, the Council was being ordered by two key members of the Permanent Five—France and Russia—as well as its then-chair, Germany, to mobilize against armed intervention in Iraq until international inspectors had done more to clarify whether Baghdad possessed weapons of mass destruction. Adding to the dilemma, a majority of Security Council members supported the Europeans’ view. The Security Council thus found itself at an impasse. Nowhere in the UN Charter does there appear the right or duty of a single member or group of members to enforce Security Council resolutions against the collective will of the Council itself. And, as matters turned out, Iraq did not have a “reconstituted” nuclear weapons program and very few, if any, of the other programs listed on the indictment. As a practical matter, another US unilateral action of the magnitude of Iraq does not appear to be on the horizon. But it is likely that another test case will arise somewhere, sometime. If the catastrophe of 2003 were repeated, “Realpolitikers” would certainly have abundant proof that political globalization, unlike economic globalization, has no rules to guide it except the rule that might makes right. Unilateralists would be encouraged in their quest to change the world through US military power. This would be a deadly combination for the United States and for the Euroatlantic community. We remain firmly convinced that the problem of internal conflicts requires an organization like the United Nations, that current divisive tendencies within the Euroatlantic community are preventing a unified response to international security problems, and that a renewed spirit of Atlanticism would also help save the Security Council. With that in mind, we offer the following analysis and recommendations to enable the Council to regain its central place in the 21st-century international order. The NATO Problem There is a slogan often heard in Washington: “If America leads, others will follow.” Yes, they will—if leadership is understood to mean acting as part of a community. That element has been lacking in the Bush administration’s thinking, as becomes abundantly clear by examining the core international relationship of the contemporary world, the Atlantic Alliance. Defensive alliances end when the threat they were created to thwart no longer exists. This rule of international life would explain why the

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Atlantic Alliance is in danger of being transformed into little more than a pool from which coalitions of the willing may be assembled by the dominant member, the United States. No longer the tightly bound, “one for all, all for one” alliance of the Cold War years, NATO lacks a common purpose. It is gaining new members, but the enlarged alliance is not stronger because of it. It goes through the motions of security consultations and defense cooperation, but the reality is that NATO, as a unified community, has been hollowed out. Its political cohesion has vanished. Its military utility has been demonstrated in the Balkans and elsewhere, but in Washington that utility is seen in terms of a follow-up police force rather than as a full partner at the cutting edge of military actions. The disparity in defense spending is one reason for this, but not the only one. A preference for total control by the United States is another. Americans who favor an American-imposed international order have little use for transatlantic unity. Former government officials, now commentators, Richard Perle and David Frum, have criticized Secretary of State Colin Powell and the first President Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, for their “nostalgia for the alliances of the Cold War.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has talked about “the New Europe,” those nations of Eastern Europe who are more ready to accept an American-imposed international order than are the old allies of Western Europe. He has also said that “the mission defines the coalition,” thus turning his back on the solidarity that was NATO’s priceless contribution to world order for half a century. The paradox is that, while exalting the American commitment to spreading democratic values, these Americans scorn the rule of law— the bedrock of democracy—and ridicule the international organizations which enable nations to work together in the cause of peace and security. They disdain internationalists like Kofi Annan who remind us that “those who seek to bestow legitimacy must themselves embody it; and those who invoke international law must themselves submit to it.” Perle and Frum have referred to international law, the United Nations, and even the normal method of discourse among nations—diplomacy—as “exploded illusions about the way the world should work.” The transatlantic rift will never be closed if these views prevail in the United States. Fortunately, the American people have historically favored alliances and the rule of law as their preferred way of interacting with

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other states. They still do. This basic predisposition is strengthened by the cultural affinity between the democratic nations of the West. To be sure, there are differences, but the similarities are dominant. They reinforce the idea of community. The European Problem NATO’s confusion about its common goal is in danger of being replicated by the European Union. But the root cause there is different. The debate between widening and deepening the EU was resolved in favor of doing both—a balancing act that has proven much more difficult than expected. It is becoming clear that taking in more members requires a change in the governance of the organization—namely, more reliance on majority voting on certain types of issues. If the member-states cannot pass that test of their commitment to a united Europe, the outcome is likely to be a tightly integrated inner core surrounded by a larger group of members whose interests in the Union are primarily economic. That will not allow Europe to make its full weight felt on the world stage, and differences within the Euroatlantic community will be harder to resolve. Farther to the east, in Russia and the states that once were part of the Soviet empire, the revolution of the last years of the 20th century has not finished its work. It was never likely that Russia would become another “normal” European power. Russia has its own deep-seated cultural traditions which set it apart from Europe. Even before the tragic recent events in Beslan, there were ample grounds for fearing that Russia is turning back toward an authoritarianism that will deepen the divide within the Euroatlantic system of nations that many in Russia, and in the West, had hoped to erase. It would be an enormous defeat for the globe’s democratic forces were that to occur. The Euroatlantic world—North America, Europe and Russia—is clearly not a geopolitical system that has arrived at a calm and stable plateau, with all problems solved. Nor is it likely to arrive there for decades to come, at least. Despite all the crises that call out for attention in other parts of the globe, the building of a true Euroatlantic community, which is so essential to global peace, remains unfinished business of the highest importance. But, as often happens, the urgent is driving out the important.

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The Security Council’s Agenda The medievalism that al-Qaida represents haunts the world like a specter of the Dark Ages or a premonition of future chaos. Bin Ladenism will be a threat for a long time to come even if its leader is eliminated. The danger that members of a movement like this will acquire nuclear, biological or chemical weapons is very real. Neither NATO, nor the European Union, nor any other regional organization can tackle this threat by itself. A global organization is needed to integrate their efforts, if only loosely, and that organization is still the United Nations, led by the Security Council. Those who focus on the recent disarray and dissension within the Council forget that for most of the body’s history, consensus in even the smallest matter was nearly impossible. When the Cold War ended, the hope was that the Security Council, and the UN itself, would enjoy a long-overdue renaissance. Indeed, following the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, the UN seemed to have entered its Golden Age. Today, that optimism has vanished and the Security Council’s obituaries have already appeared. That is not because its members disagree over the desirability of peace, or even how peace should be maintained, but instead over the relative authority of certain powers—above all, the United States—in determining which international problems take priority and the preferred means to manage or solve them. The disagreements are political and case-specific; they have little to do with national-historical legacies, nor should they. The political pendulum in the United States has already swung back in the direction of a more traditional American regard for the opinions and interests of others, but the UN Security Council—and its servant, the Secretariat—have a long way to go in order to restore their ability to serve the cause of international peace and security. The striking fact about conflicts for the last quarter of a century, at least, is how many of them were internal affairs, rather than classic state-on-state aggression. The founders of the UN did not have that model in mind because, customarily, internal problems were not considered to be the business of the international community. That has changed, as Kofi Annan has consistently pointed out. The way a government treats its citizens has become a concern of other nations, possibly justifying intervention. Acquisition of weapons of mass destruction has become a threat to international peace and security, also justifying intervention in some cases. These new

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reasons for the imposition of peacekeeping or peace-enforcing forces have joined the more familiar causes resulting from the breakdown of order within a country. Who is to deal with these types of conflicts? The legitimacy provided by the formal approval of the international community, or some large and relevant portion of it, is one reason why the UN, or a surrogate, will have to take charge. Another reason is the need to use some neutral or impartial force in order to avoid exacerbating international rivalries. And a third reason is that the big powers may not wish to get involved directly, lest the conflict distract them from other perceived threats. Darfur is a recent case in point. The UN’s key role in internal conflicts is directly connected to a matter much discussed these days in relation to the reconstitution of the Iraqi state. This is the assistance that the UN can provide in building the infrastructure of civil society. And it concerns not only elections, but also, and equally importantly, the creation of democratic institutions, like an impartial judiciary system, a police force, and free and open media. Even the skeptical Bush administration has belatedly acknowledged that the UN has a special competence in these matters that needs to be brought into play. These types of intrastate conflicts and reconstruction efforts, therefore, will be a key preoccupation of the UN Security Council in the future. The UN may still be busy with monitoring cease-fires in conflicts between states, as in the past, but this may increasingly become the task of regional organizations, which also deserve a far more prominent role in the Security Council itself. It is easier to see NATO, for example, helping to maintain a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than the UN. A NATO or EU seat on the Security Council might someday help to preempt the horse-trading that will otherwise accompany an inevitable revision of the post-World War II composition of the Permanent Five. So, too, would the participation of other regional security organizations alongside their member governments. Connecting the Dots This is the context in which to consider the future of the Security Council and the rifts among its members. Have those rifts damaged beyond repair the strength of the Council? No, unity can be restored, but only upon a basis reflecting today’s realities. Was the immediate advantage gained in Iraq worth the price that was paid in Europe? Not

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unless Americans and Europeans can work out some modus vivendi that will permit them to cooperate throughout the Middle East. In short, while Iraq was the proximate cause of transatlantic disarray, it can now be the common cause that knits the alliance together again while restoring legitimacy to the United Nations. What about terrorism? Europeans have suffered from terrorism for many years. But they have not endured the terrible catastrophe of having nearly 3,000 of their citizens killed at one blow in one of their largest cities in peacetime. America, so seemingly invulnerable, suffered a sudden shock that exceeded by far any one attack that a single European state suffered in the past generation. That is understood intellectually by Europeans but it has not been absorbed by them. It is only slowly becoming a basic factor in their understanding of what motivates Americans these days. What about America’s special vocation for spreading freedom and democracy around the world, a God-given mission proclaimed repeatedly by President Bush? Does it really divide Europeans from Americans? The Kantian idea of creating peace through spreading democratic values is what Europeans are accused of following, in contrast to the Americans’ supposed deeper understanding that Hobbes was right when he wrote of “a war of all against all.” Of course Europeans know that the anarchy of the nation-state system ends in a war of all against all; the reason that the Europeans created the Common Market, which evolved into the European Union we see today, is that they understood from bitter experience that wars result from unfettered national rivalry. They tried to overcome that systemic fault, and have succeeded to a considerable degree. What the Bush administration claims to seek in the Middle East, through its “road map” and the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative, sounds very much like the democratic peace that Europeans have created in the western part of their continent. It is a worthy aspiration, and the president could not have said it better: “our security is not merely found in spheres of influence, or some balance of power. The security of our world is found in the advancing rights of mankind.” The real issue lies in the gap between the goal and the resources to achieve it. Only a renewal of transatlantic unity can fill that gap. And only the help of the “defunct” United Nations will allow the pursuit of democracy to be seen as anything other than an American crusade to impose subject governments worldwide.

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The Atlantic Partnership Turning the tide at the United Nations must begin with rejuvenating the Euroatlantic partnership. Yet the value of such solidarity seems to be forgotten in some quarters today, leaving national security to be understood only in the narrowest of terms. Perhaps this is willful amnesia, or just a perverse reaction to the age of high globalization, in which nations are more interdependent than ever. Either way, it must give way to common sense. “Imperial overstretch” was a premature diagnosis—at least with regard to the United States—when historian Paul Kennedy popularized the phrase in the late 1980s. Now it has to be taken seriously. No state, not even the most powerful, can survive and prosper outside a framework of international cooperation. The 20th century proved that national sovereignty must coexist with international organizations, like the UN, which institutionalize cooperative behavior across borders. That is the essence of what was once known as Atlanticism, a movement that emerged in the fight against fascism and survived to unite the West against the Soviet threat while sowing the seeds of peaceful global integration. Tyrannies were defeated but Atlanticism survives tenuously as an ideology in search of a role. That is a pity—and potentially a tragedy—yet one that can still be avoided if the leaders of the Security Council rediscover the utility of collective security in the 21st century. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a peaceful world in which its two most advanced and compatible regions, Europe and America, work at cross-purposes both internally and externally, and against the very institutions they designed 60 years ago to further their mutual interests. While national ambitions will always collide, the notion of “multipolarity” for its own sake is just as dangerous as doctrinaire “unilateralism.” Both should be set aside in favor of the Atlanticism that served the world so well since the end of World War II. That spirit embodied the spirit of community or commonwealth. It is very different from ad hoc coalitions. And it must be made to work today—for there is no rational alternative.

46. Enlarge the North Korean Problem (2005) Some of South Korea’s most influential policy advisers met for five hours last Friday with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il. The Bush administration’s initial reaction was dismissive. Tone deafness is not unusual in this administration but, in this case, the problem with Washington’s approach is more fundamental. What

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began as an exercise in arms control has been superseded by a much bigger issue: the future security structure of Northeast Asia. The administration seems to be unaware of this. South Korea is not. There is much talk in Seoul of a Northeast Asian community. Washington’s friends are on to something: The nuclear issue can only be resolved within a framework that is as large as the strategic issue of which it is a part. Some years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld published “Rumsfeld’s Rules,” one of which declares that “if you can’t solve a problem, enlarge it.”22 This happens to be very good advice in this particular case. Quite apart from the nuclear issue, it should be a US policy imperative to head off conflicts within the system of nations whose interests intersect and sometimes collide in Northeast Asia. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has used the term zero-sum thinking to describe a struggle for advantage in which one nation’s gain is seen as another’s loss. Such thinking is on the rise in Northeast Asia. Absent some mechanism to moderate the trends now gathering force, the long-term outlook for peace is bleak. Can we forget that three major 20th century wars involving the United States began in Asia? The six nations that have participated in talks on North Korea need to enlarge the scope of their discussions. They need not change the general purpose of the original six-party talks nor should they wait any longer for those talks to be successful. In parallel with those talks, or independently if the talks are not resumed, they should work out a mandate for a permanent mechanism to promote security and cooperation in Northeast Asia. This region is one of the few that does not have the organizational infrastructure to encourage multilateral cooperation. Interest in a security community is growing. If Washington drops the ball, some other nation is likely to pick it up and shape the outcome to its liking. The mandate for a security community should be as broad as that of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. It should include a joint commitment not to use or threaten force in the mutual relations of the participants; regulation of conventional armaments and transparency in military operations; cooperative programs to develop the energy and transport infrastructure of Northeast Asia; programs to deal with improvements in the welfare of individual citizens; and cultural exchanges. Regular consultations among governmental leaders should be mandated. The fundamental purpose of a permanent security mechanism would be to prevent virulent competition and military confrontation between

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nations. And it is precisely within such a framework that the problem of devising a sustainable agreement to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program also can be found. It is argued that this approach would delay the efforts of the original six-party talks. But, in fact, parallel talks on a broader agenda would more likely expedite a positive outcome of the nuclear talks. The original six-party talks should, if possible, continue to discuss the technical aspects of nuclear roll-back, including the ideas about phasing, dismantlement procedures and verification that the United States proposed in June 2004, the last time the six-party talks met. The “Libya model”—parallel and reciprocal actions taken without benefit of a treaty after long behind-the-scenes negotiations—should also be pursued. There is no way to predict whether North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il, would agree to embed the six-party talks in a larger exercise in institution-building, but his government should be invited to do so. This proposal is not a device for isolating North Korea but rather for including that country in a Northeast Asian security community where gradual reform of the North’s authoritarian system would be encouraged. The door should always be open to North Korea if its government is willing to make a commitment to peace, including nuclear disarmament. But if Kim Jong Il refuses to join in this effort the other five should proceed without him. They need this multilateral mechanism for their own reasons, not all of which are connected to North Korea. They would be unwise to allow progress toward a Northeast Asia security community to be held hostage to the outcome of the current six-party talks.

47. Democratic Lessons from Helsinki and Central Asia (2005) Thirty years ago today, the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe was signed in Helsinki by all the leaders of Europe and North America. Gerald Ford, the US president, signed with misgivings amid severe domestic criticism. Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet general secretary, signed with relief, glad that it ratified the division of Europe. Some states represented in Helsinki that day, including the Soviet Union, no longer exist. For that document, despite its bland bureaucratic title, began a revolution which that shook up the European order. The Final Act contained a time-bomb: each signatory government became accountable to all the others for the way it treated its own citizens.

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Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, how a government acted internally was strictly its own business, as reiterated in the United Nations Charter. But armed with the Final Act, citizens could call their governments to account for violating their international human rights obligations, and they did so even at the expense of their personal liberties. The rest is history. The Soviet republics that had gained independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union became participants in the Helsinki process. Other agreements were added to the original obligations, including a sweeping commitment to human rights adopted at Copenhagen in 1990. The conference was renamed the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) but has remained dedicated to the idea of a Europe whole and free. Fast forward to central Asia in April 2005: the president of Kyrgyzstan flees amid demonstrations against fraudulent elections. Peaceful elections are held in July. In May 2005, Uzbekistan’s ruler responds to a popular protest by killing several hundred unarmed citizens in Andijan. He is still in power today, rejects an independent inquiry into the massacre and enjoys the support of a multinational organisation—not the OSCE, but the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, dominated by Russia and China. Most of the Uzbeks who fled the May massacre for temporary refuge in Kyrgyzstan have been airlifted to safety by the UN. The US urged Kyrgyzstan to let this happen, even though such humanitarian actions could jeopardize the continued presence of US bases in central Asia. Indeed, Washington was given notice last Friday to vacate an airbase in Uzbekistan. Since George W. Bush’s second inaugural speech, with its dramatic commitment to ending tyranny around the world, the US seems less inclined to sacrifice human rights to preserve military bases. And where is the OSCE in this snapshot of history? The organisation has been under sustained attack by the Kremlin in the past year for focusing too heavily on election monitoring and the growth of civil society. Moscow has systematically questioned even the organisation’s very existence. At a meeting set for December, the OSCE foreign ministers will consider the organisation’s future. That meeting is too important to be left to routine procedures. It should be prepared by personal representatives of the foreign ministers, beginning now. The future of the Euroatlantic community depends on their getting this right.

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In late June, an OSCE-appointed panel of “eminent persons” recommended ways to resolve the problems besetting the organisation in recent years. Their report provides an excellent basis for a high-level review but there are two essential requirements for the western democracies: first, nothing should be done that would curtail the independence of OSCE field operations, especially those vital election monitoring missions to participating states; second, assistance in building civil societies in central Asia and elsewhere must be strengthened. The founding documents of the OSCE are nothing less than the charter for a Euroatlantic community of democracies. Should they become less than that, the outlook for Europe whole and free would be truly bleak.

48. Chart New Course for Lasting Peace (2006) The Bush administration’s rhetoric about bringing freedom to the people of North Korea and the Middle East is intended to sow the seeds for a future democratic peace in both regions. But the soil remains infertile. As we have seen recently in Palestine, Iran and Iraq, free elections do not automatically lead to democracy. A new tone—and strategy—are needed. This starts with a more realistic appreciation of the forces that drive regional powers to arm and threaten their neighbors—namely, strident nationalism, racial ideology and volatile borders. The issue is not whether the leaders of these countries are wicked or misguided, whether democracy is a superior form of government or whether America should champion freedom around the world. Rather, the central problem for today’s diplomacy is the very practical one of finding a way to prevent armed conflict while eliminating over time the political, social and economic sources of internal unrest. The two aims always have been closely connected, but their interplay is more consequential than ever in today’s globalizing world. Fortunately, we have been here before. The great achievement of the late 20th century was an interdependent, democratic and prosperous Europe, at peace with itself and the rest of the world. The long, difficult process of building a stable 20th-century peace after 1945 witnessed a good deal of rhetoric about liberating the world from godless communism, to be sure. But that was accompanied by several measures that transformed a tenuous balance of rival powers into

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a genuine security community. In Western Europe, NATO and the European Union created the conditions for a stable peace. It was only natural that this system grew to embrace nearly all of Europe. One of the most significant contributions to a Europe whole and free was made by the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, which established the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Now known as the OSCE (the “conference” became an “organization” in 1995), this mechanism has served both America and Europe very well over the decades. Beginning as a charter reaffirming the sanctity of borders and human rights, the OSCE today continues to provide a stable context in which to settle disputes, air differences and make tradeoffs on a regional basis. Northeast Asia and the Middle East desperately need a similar arrangement. Of course, both are very different from Europe, and the OSCE cannot, and should not, be replicated there. But the principle behind it is relevant to both these other regions. Each lacks anything like a permanent security mechanism required to forestall national rivalry. The pattern of relationships there is not too different from the one that characterized Europe at the turn of the 20th century. We all know where that led. There are several proposals on the table in both regions that would include designated nuclear-free zones in Korea and in the Persian Gulf area, including Iran. The South Koreans and Saudis, in particular, have each recently offered innovative ideas for comprehensive regional security communities. The United States should be giving its enthusiastic endorsement to these ideas. If it did, much could be accomplished by transformative diplomacy. But this is badly lacking. Rather, we have ceded diplomatic momentum—not to mention popular legitimacy—to reactionary movements such as Hamas, the multiple parties opposing our mission in Iraq and China’s backers of the status quo. Charters for security cooperation in these regions should include provisions for military transparency, elimination of weapons of mass destruction, the free movement of people and ideas, and energy-sector cooperation. Beyond that, the substance of the charters should be determined by the realities on the ground. And here we must remember that the process may be just as important as the outcome. The more regional powers begin to work with one another instead of relying upon the intervention or the jawboning of outsiders, the safer they—and we—will be.

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49. French Return to NATO Military Command Could Spur Greater Alliance Mission Clarity (2009) Among the many legends that endure from the 20th century is French obduracy with regard to its international—and particularly trans-Atlantic—relationships. Perhaps fickleness is a better word for it, because as President Nicolas Sarkozy finally confirmed recently, France is set to “rejoin” NATO’s military command during the alliance’s 60th anniversary next month. Of course France never left the alliance itself in 1966. It merely formalized—by withdrawing from the integrated military organization and expelling NATO headquarters from the country—its longstanding ambivalence about collective defense and, more precisely, the United States. The move in 1966 was aimed, in the words of Charles de Gaulle, who announced it, to reclaim French sovereignty over its national territory. Whatever he meant by that, or by his ostensibly independent entreaties with the Soviets, it wasn’t neutrality. Nobody took seriously the possibility of France’s abandoning the alliance. In any case, few people were surprised by what he did—least of all the Americans, who had long had a difficult relationship with de Gaulle and, in allowing or encouraging a series of mutual snubs since 1958, had helped to make estrangement a self-fulfilling prophecy. Despite the great inconvenience de Gaulle’s decision caused for some, it did no serious harm to NATO or to France’s most important relationships with the allies. US President Lyndon Johnson resisted making it into a big public issue. France went on to develop her own nuclear strike force. Yet a covert program of Franco-American nuclear cooperation began soon thereafter, while France’s military ties with other NATO members remained close. Its permanent delegate to the North Atlantic Council rarely was treated any differently from his counterparts—and certainly not like an outcast. In fact, French diplomats at NATO played a leading role with their American colleagues in laying the groundwork for the Helsinki Final Act, notably the humanitarian components of Basket III. Evidence is only beginning to emerge from the archives that the Americans and the French engaged in an essential pas de deux on this and other initiatives with both their Western European allies and the Soviets. So there is much more to the story than meets the eye.

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Some recognition of the complexity in the relationship matters today insofar as France’s coming back into the military fold ought not to be blown out of proportion. It certainly doesn’t mean any automatic boost for NATO’s effectiveness. It will probably be followed by business as usual. There is an opportunity, however, for NATO to use France’s action to help set a more unified tone and prompt a much overdue clarity of thinking about its current and future mission. In particular, an end to the distinction between France’s membership in the alliance and its military organization could facilitate the harmonization of several roles that appear to contradict one another. It is remarkable but also not surprising that, nearly two decades since the demise of the Warsaw Pact, NATO is confused over its raison d’être. On the one hand, it provides its Central and Eastern European members with an insurance policy against a revanchist or revisionist Russia. On the other hand, it promotes itself as the guarantor of Euro-Atlantic stability, and seeks in principle to cultivate a partnership with Russia in underwriting it. It also serves as the world’s peacekeeper or peacemaker of last resort, first in the Balkans, now in Afghanistan and possibly elsewhere in the future. Few experts claim that NATO can survive in its present form as a political and military alliance with so much simultaneously on its plate. It need not cut back radically, however. Rather, it must put forth an overarching strategy—as opposed to a mere set of policies—that gives logic, credibility and life to its necessary operational commitments. This is where France can help. Long ago the French perfected the notion of diplomacy and defense a tous azimuts, that is to say, in all directions. This could make sense for NATO. Rather than alternating between being an existential safeguard and a global expeditionary force, NATO must reassert its primary role as defender of the North Atlantic area, broadly defined. This would make both of the former missions more credible and effective. De Gaulle contended in 1966 that France could not possess an effective deterrent so long as its troops were under the nominal command of other nations or while the troops of other nations were based on its soil. In other words, boots on the ground and the strategic deterrent were seen as losing parts of a zero-sum calculation. A similar case could be made today with regard to NATO’s forward deployments outside the NATO area. It is not clear how they contribute

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to the defense of the alliance or deter future attacks upon it, particularly if some members oppose them. No matter how important they may seem to others, they will not work unless they have strong public support and are defensible, as an author of the North Atlantic Treaty, Jack Hickerson, once put it, with a logic that “an Omaha milkman” could understand. NATO must therefore accommodate its primary mission of defense and deterrence with the more diffuse, collective security identity that it continues to advertise by converting its flexibility from a zero-sum liability into an asset. Ending the theoretical distinction between membership in the alliance and in its military organization is an important step forward. It might have even made General de Gaulle proud.

50. A Possible “Off-Ramp” in North Korea (2013) At the Brookings panel discussion on North Korea on April 15, “North Korea and Policy Priorities for the United States,” several important points were made that suggest a connecting of the dots would be useful. First, the consensus appeared to be that Kim Jong-un is calling the shots. Second, there is a high risk of catastrophic miscalculation in the present situation. Third, we should pay attention to what the North Koreans are telling us, “in their own words.” Fourth, Kim Jong-un would like to open a discussion with the United States but he has left himself no exit from the current confrontation. It can be argued that Kim Jong-un has in fact left himself an exit in a variety of ways, of which the most commonly mentioned is that the ending of the current United States-Republic of Korea joint military exercise will permit him to ratchet down the rhetoric. There is one other “off ramp” strategy that is never mentioned at all, which is surprising, considering that it was presented in Kim’s own words in a highly public manner. It can be found in Kim Jong-un’s New Year’s Day speech this year, an address that Kim must have seen as a major statement of his intentions but which has been almost totally ignored. This is what he said: “All the compatriots in the north, south and abroad should launch a dynamic struggle to carry out to the letter the June 15 Joint Declaration and the October 4 Declaration, great unification programs common to the nation in the new century and milestones for peace and prosperity.”

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The June 15, 2000 Joint Declaration was signed by then-ROK President Kim Dae-jung and former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il at a summit meeting held in Pyongyang. It included some features from the 1992 Basic Agreement, including family reunification, but was much less sweeping in its reach than the 1992 agreement. Its emphasis was on an independent effort by North and South Korea to achieve reunification. The October 4, 2007 agreement was signed by then-ROK President Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang and was much more programmatic and substantive in content than the June 15, 2000 Declaration. Like the earlier summit declaration, the 2007 agreement stressed what it called “by-the-Korean-people-themselves.” In the present crisis-filled atmosphere, paragraph 4 of that document can be read as either an anachronism or as a beacon of hope. This is what it said: The South and the North both recognize the need to end the current armistice regime and build a permanent peace regime. The South and the North have agreed to work together to advance the matter of having the leaders of the three or four parties directly concerned to convene on the Peninsula and declare an end to the war. With regard to the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula, the South and the North have agreed to work together to implement smoothly the September 19, 2005 Joint Statement and the February 13, 2007 Agreement achieved at the Six-Party Talks.

Of course, both the Declaration in 2000 and the Agreement in 2007 were negotiated by leaders of a party that is now out of power in South Korea, and the North Korean leader has been succeeded by his son. Both documents have been gathering dust in the archives for years. But Kim Jong-un’s reference to them gave them new relevance. This is the powerful leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea saying that he and all Koreans should live up to the letter of these documents and he was saying that on January 1, 2013. As an off-ramp strategy, one can find flaws in it, especially in the possibility that it was intended by Kim Jong-un as an attempt to drive a wedge between new ROK President Park Geun-hye and the leaders of South Korea’s allies. It also opens the door to economic cooperation and possibly renewed assistance, difficult to contemplate under today’s circumstances, which include the shut-down of the Kaesong Industrial Complex. But skillful diplomacy should certainly be able to exploit for the good whatever good there is in it.

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51. Redirecting US Diplomacy (2014) Not so long ago, “international relations” meant “inter-state relations.” Issues of war and peace belonged exclusively to the governments of states. They ruled the world. This was commonly called “the Westphalian system,” after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which dictated the principle of independent national sovereignty and laid the geopolitical foundation for the next several centuries. It replaced a more decentralized system that was much like the system now emerging in this age of transition. The Westphalian system has given way to one in which the dominance of nation-states is challenged by global and regional entities, as well as subnational ones.23 National governments no longer have a monopoly over the use of force on a large scale and, hence, over decisions concerning war or peace. Their power is seeping away. Fragmentation, or disintegration, appears to be the inevitable “other side of the coin” from the integration inherent in the process of globalization. The reasons for this are not altogether clear. Perhaps the disintegration has occurred because power has been reallocated within the international system. Perhaps global institutions seem too remote. Certainly, the export of jobs and competition with workers in distant countries breed reactions leading to barriers between nations. Probably a mix of all these factors has contributed to this reaction, and we might reasonably invoke the philosophy of Hegel to suggest that a new system of governance will be a synthesis of globalization and localization. In any case, arguably, all of the conflict and turmoil that has affected the Euro-Atlantic region since the end of the Cold War, perhaps even the end of the Cold War itself, has resulted from the ambitions of actors operating below the level of states. Ethnic cleansing, the rise of political Islam, the dissolution of multinational states, over-reaching by financial organizations—all these are evidences of fragmentation. The correlation with the successes of globalization during this same period is too strong to ignore. National governments are fighting to retain their authority but it appears to be a losing battle. The technologies and tools they deploy to preserve their share of power also undermine it, as individuals and networks have become empowered by information technology. Barriers to trade only serve to weaken that power further. The process of creating

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new forms of governance continues unabated, but in a more or less haphazard fashion. This development does not mean that nation-states are going away or that their powers are permanently lost. In fact, one of the striking things about the history of nation-states is not merely how enduring they have been, but also how successful most have been in adapting to new geopolitical and economic conditions. A European Example The archetype of cooperation is still the “European project,” despite its many internal tensions. In Europe, a true security community has been constructed, where its members never entertain the thought of war among themselves. But even in Europe, nation-states survive and in a few cases appear to thrive. The half-century of European integration has served them well. To use the language of one of contemporary Europe’s best known historians, the late Alan Milward, supranationalism has served to rescue the nation-state.24 This verdict is not universally held but nation-states do coexist with other structures designed both to limit and to extend their power. Nation-states today matter more for what they do than what they represent. We need to focus less on whether or not they may cease to represent large communities and more on how they behave toward one another, and toward their own citizens. So long as nation-states exist, so will nationalism. The transition of a system based on one form of national behavior into another is bound to generate conflict, particularly of the old-fashioned nationalist variety. How best can national governments mitigate it? For Americans in particular, the rule of law, backed by global institutions like the United Nations, was the stock answer. For many nations, it still is the correct answer. And yet global institutions have had limited success in dealing with regional conflicts. For those conflicts, which are the main threats to global peace today, a region-based approach is essential. Indeed, regionalism has emerged as the preferred way in which the middle powers of the world have elected to pool their sovereignty. This approach sustains the viability of the nation-state and reduces the appeal of nationalism. It grants those activities with the most disruptive potential, like economic competition, a stake in a positive process of change.

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Cooperation at the global level remains difficult to achieve. Many believe that this transition has gone into reverse. The Wikileaks and National Security Agency revelations suggest that national governments are busy retaking control of the global environment with the tools previously used to diffuse power away from them. There are rumblings throughout the world of a new round of protectionism, trade barriers and the like. The Economist recently proclaimed the emergence of a “gated globalization.”25 Technology is continuing to change our world, particularly the relationship between government and its people. Private organizations are the main generators of this change, not governments, and governments are dependent on them, just as monarchs were dependent on the grand seigneurs in pre-Westphalian times. Surprisingly, the emerging order begins to resemble the tiered system of medieval Europe, with an overarching layer of global institutions exercising some normative influences and a number of local power centers, including nation-states, highly dependent on their ability to mobilize private, very powerful economic organizations. It is a structure in which loyalties easily become divided and diffused. The most effective structural change that could be injected by nationstates into the new forms of governance would be a renewed emphasis on regionalism. Europe may not be the model that nations elsewhere will want to follow, but other, simpler, models already have emerged-North America, Southeast Asia, and perhaps Africa and Latin America, among them. Policies that encourage the further evolution of these models would be on the right side of history. Good governance will demand that regional communities not act as blocs, shutting out one another’s members or allowing others to fall through the cracks. Regional communities will only work over the long term if they consistently promote both intra- and inter-regional cohesion. Their paths to regionalism must be their own, but for outsiders it means placing an explicitly higher priority on regional policies—and regional sensibilities—over clearly global ones. US Influence and Regional Affairs American interests and policies loom large in every regional setting. This is true closest to home. It is seldom mentioned how potentially powerful North America has become. In an article that appeared in The Wall Street

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Journal last summer, former Secretary of State George Shultz remarked on the integration of the economies of the United States, Canada, and Mexico: The three countries constitute around one-fourth of global GDP, and they have become each other’s largest trading partners. A 2010 NBER study shows that 24.7% of imports from Canada were US value-added, and 39.8% of US imports from Mexico were US value-added. (By contrast, the US. value-added in imports from China was only 4.2%.) This phenomenon of tight integration of trade stands apart from other major trading blocks including the European Union or East Asian economies.26

A cohesive North America thus can exert a strong influence on global trade and the strengthening of liberal institutions. “North America, with the US in the lead, is the world’s center of creativity and innovation,” Shultz continues, “Any measure will do: new companies formed, Nobel Prizes received, R&D spending, attractiveness to high talent from anywhere, patents issued, and numbers of great universities.”27 This all may result someday in the beacon of a world’s most successful regional community, where armed frontiers are transformed into prosperous borderlands, and where economic power and political influence go hand in hand. This moment is still a long way off. But contrast it to where North America was just a couple of decades ago before the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). A logic of regional peace has appeared in other regions meanwhile. Whether by design or by default, diplomacy, specifically American diplomacy, has begun to resemble the kind of cautious, step-by-step path of constructing better neighborhoods without the obvious need for bigger fences. Some developments elsewhere include: * The Middle East. The Obama administration reportedly is trying to be less hamstrung in the unending struggles there but it is unlikely to succeed, if only because it already is engaged in reinvigorating talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians; has worked with Russia to find a way to contain and eventually to reverse the course of the Syrian civil war; and has been blamed—rightly or wrongly—for exacerbating recent turmoil in Egypt and elsewhere in the region.28 Meanwhile it has forged ahead in helping to reverse the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions by exploring ways to reassure both Iran and its neighbors that a Middle Eastern nuclear arms race is neither desirable nor inevitable.

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* Central and South Asia. The administration has sought to reestablish a more normal relationship with Pakistan as North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops withdraw from Afghanistan, although this is proving very difficult.29 Economic ties between India and Pakistan, which the United States supports, are the best hope for ending the risk of war between these two key nations. Regional cooperation that includes Afghanistan may also become a possibility, particularly now that Afghanistan’s northern neighbors, the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, are desperate for investment and access to markets following the removal of NATO largesse from their backyard. * East Asia. The administration has worked with China to stop the cycle of crises coming from North Korea and is seeking multilateral solutions to territorial disputes nearby. A regional organization for security and cooperation in Northeast Asia may become part of a political settlement there. * The World Trade Organization. As the WTO is stymied in further trade liberalization, the administration has launched the two largest trade negotiations since the collapse of the Doha Round: a transpacific and a transatlantic free trade area. Some have called this a new backdoor method to global trade, but it promises to be much more than that if negotiations, admittedly very difficult, someday succeed.30

Most of these policies are in harmony with the systemic transition underway which is dispersing power to global, regional, and local groups, and empowering them with access to information that was never shared with them in the past. But what this diplomacy also shows is that preventing conflict is more the task of regional interaction rather than of globalization per se. It has taken too long for it to sink in that while globalization by definition has spread around the world, it affects different places very differently and, in some, strengthens rather than diminishes the draw of nationalism. For the United States, still the world’s most powerful nation-state, this reality calls out for recognition and action. The Continuities of Policy In the spring of 2000, we wrote an article called “Back to Basics: US Foreign Policy for the Coming Decade,” in which we sought to define US strategic interests, beginning with the proposition that the nation’s main foreign policy goals were the success of globalization and of democracy, but that its means for achieving these goals were

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unfocused.31 We spoke of methods for managing regional interests as an important way to bring better focus to them. US policy still is unfocused. President Obama has not embedded his regional initiatives in an explicit long-term strategy that is in tune with historical change. Currently, they are seen simply as a set of disjointed actions that respond haphazardly to local problems, offering headlines for “trend lines,” as President Clinton liked to say. Obama’s response lacks any connective tissue and so it looks pretty meager, especially in regional forums. The president has attended few European Union summits and has never gone to an African Union summit. The only region where some sort of long-term strategy can be discerned in the administration’s rhetoric is in the repositioning to Asia, but this has mainly been part of an ill-disguised effort to balance China’s rise, rather than the recognition of the benefits that concerts of nations can bring to a world in transition. Aside from embedding US regional diplomacy in a unified coherent strategy for peace, a better approach calls for finding and exploiting nearterm regional opportunities. In the two trade negotiations, for example, large global powers like the United States may need to adjust more than they otherwise would to the necessities of smaller, regional states with incomparably more at stake. Or, in the Middle East and Northeast Asia, it could involve devising a common security language and a code of regional conduct while encouraging people in these places to apply them to their own affairs as they see fit, especially as the US military presence around the world continues to ebb. This approach would fit well an old American diplomatic tradition but one that has gone relatively unrecognized. The genius of the Marshall Plan, for example, was not so much its generosity toward starving Europeans in 1947 or its self-interest in building prosperous new markets for American goods and investment. It was both these things. But most of all, it was a grand political gesture which said to Europeans, if you agree to work together from now on, we are prepared to help you, but we shall not dictate the precise terms of your cooperation beyond insisting that you do, somehow, cooperate in our mutual benefit. Cooperate is in fact what the Western Europeans subsequently did. They took some advice from the Marshall Planners but not all of it. They pursued their own path toward a regional community, through many fits and starts and reversals, on their own terms but also in consultation and collaboration (and occasional contestation) with outside backers, namely the United

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States. Regional autonomy is not the same thing as autarky, just as regionalism, internationalism, and globalism need not necessarily be mutually exclusive orientations or recipes for economic and political change. Proposals to replicate the Marshall Plan model elsewhere have long been abundant; however, few have emphasized its basic principle of regional self-help. This principle has the potential to construct more peaceful and prosperous neighborhoods; however, its main effect is representational: that is, to show that even long-established rivals sitting side by side can transform their enmities into patterns of cooperation whose value is much greater than the sum of their parts. This realization need not mean sacrificing every national source of power and influence in the process, but does require a demonstrable sharing of power among nations and regions. The process has no hidden hand or honest broker, however much the United States has cast itself in that role in the past. It takes continuous and difficult negotiation, and, most of all, public understanding and support. Obama’s first major achievement has been to convince a good number of his fellow Americans that the United States is a part of the world and has an obligation to listen more often. His next achievement, if the various negotiations succeed, would be to help set in motion workable processes of regional peace so that the United States itself can be at peace and prosper, both at home and abroad. It would mark an important step forward in the remaking of a weary superpower into a credible great power. Power itself has changed. So have the means for wielding it. Today we repeat this almost as a mantra. But the changes have been more gradual and cumulative than most analysts suggest. They do not necessarily represent a clear-cut shift on the commanding heights, or as others would have it, a new permutation of the balance of power among merchants, soldiers, and sages. Something different appears to be taking place. The currency of power has shifted, namely in the ways in which nations collaborate or compete with neighboring nations, and groups within these nations, to maximize their advantages vis-à-vis more distant neighbors. The major challenge facing our leaders is to fashion a stable but liberal system for accommodating the many interests and passions of this new era while using the leverage they still have, which is considerable. It would be easy to give in to the lowest common denominator and just muddle through. In that direction lies chaos.

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Of course, global institutions are essential in terms of pointing the way to a universal system of norms and obligations to support peace with justice. But for the rest of this century, an active regional diplomacy, not disengagement, will be the best way to manage the fundamental transformation in the global system now underway. The international system of nation-states is evolving into something more complex and indeterminate. One important development has been the creation of regional communities. If these are to thrive in their own distinctive way, national governments, including the United States, will need to support creative policies that harmonize interests, not only within such communities but also among them. Policy planners, therefore, must think globally and act regionally.

52. A Middle East, Whole and Free (2015) What passes for a status quo in the Middle East cannot survive much longer. The question is whether it will change by means of a violent cataclysm or through a peaceful, though chaotic, series of adjustments in national attitudes and policies. Several nations are major actors in this drama and Iran is only one of them, albeit an important one. The debate over the Iran nuclear agreement therefore was about much more than nuclear weapons. It was, and is, about the political redefinition of the Middle East. There is a reason for this. The rules of behavior that Iran has agreed to live by in the “Deal” have already incited internal change in that country—notably more freedom of expression, more interest in relations with other nations and much greater expectations of economic progress. They will go on to influence the norms that people live by in a direction that will breed defiance of conformity. The Revolutionary Guards will either live with a more transparent and less shackled society or they will revolt against the established authorities. Either way, the result will be transformative and will reverberate throughout the world. There will be an effect on Israel, Turkey, and the Arab states beyond any question. It can be a temporary effect that does not last beyond the Deal’s currently defined limits. Or it can be an effect that leads to a constructive engagement among most of the nations of the region, with more focus on trade and economic enterprises and an amelioration of bilateral tensions over the medium and long term. This latter vision is the one that the United States and other outsiders should project and work to make happen.

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For some reason, the US government seems unaware of or else does not wish to acknowledge the enormous political developments that will be instigated by an engagement of the intensity inherent in the Deal. A major impetus for peaceful change was presented as a technical agreement with narrow objectives. Yet, lack of agreement, we have been told, will bring economic uncertainties and probable descent into armed conflict, not to mention a nuclear arms race. Most of us instinctively know that the Deal cannot be sustained if the environment in which it is implemented does not change. The history of nuclear agreements supports that assessment. For example, warhead levels in the world peaked in 1986 and declined thereafter to less than a third of what they were in that year, in good part because of a fundamental change in relations between the US and the Soviet Union. Yet the Obama administration has held out no prospect of the kind of Middle East it would like to see and what actions should be considered to make that vision a reality, building on the Deal. Whatever its reasons for this may be, its silence has allowed for opposition to grow, based on the proposition that the Deal has no merit if Iranian behavior remains unchanged. “One thing at a time,” the administration might think, but that approach deprives us of any ideas of what might be done to move the Middle East in a positive direction. It is a posture that gave an open field to the opponents of the agreement to paint a quite plausible picture of a catastrophe in the making. That picture needs to be flipped on its head. What can be done in practical terms? First, the diplomatic bridge that has been built between Iran and the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, UK and US) should be made permanent. This group should continue not only to oversee Iran’s compliance with the Deal, but also to consult with Israel, Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and any other viable Arab governments on related issues as they arise and where a more cooperative spirit would not generate antagonisms. This could include anything from managing water resources to transport and communication links to refugee flows to regional trade and investment. Beyond this, the P5+1 should initiate, in collaboration with regional partners, a formal discussion about the basis for a regional security community. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. For years—centuries, in fact—it was axiomatic that the nations of Europe would never come together in the name of peace. But it has happened—for instance, with the Congress of Vienna two centuries ago—and again at Helsinki, where the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe was signed in August 1975.

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The Helsinki Final Act did several things: it formalized the post-World War II borders in Europe and reaffirmed that borders, if they change, must do so peacefully; it advocated greater economic links between the East and the West; it held all signatories to uphold basic human rights within and across their borders; and it initiated a process of increasing transparency among adversaries concerning military activities. Today, the Final Act binds together the coalition of nations opposed to Russia’s violation of its terms. An arrangement like this could bring real dividends in the Middle East. Neighbors may begin to promote their interests collectively. Individuals may connect in support of shared goals, and support the institutional means—Helsinki Watch Groups—to monitor compliance by their governments. Criticized at the time bitterly from several quarters, the Helsinki Final Act today is celebrated. The “Europe, Whole and Free” that George H. W. Bush touted in 1989 probably never would have come without it. A Middle East, Whole and Free may appear a fantasy to most of us. It needn’t be. During one of the darkest periods of the Cold War, a multilateral agreement paved the way for a regional consensus, starting with modest confidence building measures. Over time such things enhance mutual knowledge and, ideally, trust between hostile neighbors. Over time they may also build peace. Political campaigns and centrifuge counts notwithstanding, this is the kind of thinking and action that should guide the next chapter of public debate about the Middle East.

Notes



1. E.g., John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “The Case for Offshore Balancing: A Superior US Grand Strategy,” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 4 (July/August 2016): 70–83. Cf. James E. Goodby, The Six-Party Talks: Opportunity or Obstacle? (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, 2005) and essays 4, 10, 15, 16, 23, and 26. 2. Goodby, The Six-Party Talks, viz.: The statecraft of this generation will be judged by whether this moment in time is used to create the basis for an enduring peace in Northeast Asia. The United States, in particular, is in a position to take the lead in this enterprise. Its patterns of relations with all the countries of the region have not been irrevocably shaped by the experience of centuries of history. Its diplomacy works

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best through steadiness and long-term commitments. And the United States has much to gain from consolidating its presence in Northeast Asia. But this must be a shared effort and much of the energy must come from within the region itself.







3. See also essays 25 and 38, and James E. Goodby, “The Origins of the Human Rights Provisions in the Helsinki Final Act,” Unpublished paper presented to the 85th annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, April 1992. 4. The slogans employed by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, respectively. 5. Joergen Oerstroem Moeller, “From Globalization to Regionalization,” YaleGlobal, October 30, 2018. 6. Peter A. Petri and Michael Plummer, “The Case for RCEP as Asia’s Next Trade Agreement,” Brookings Institution, November 6, 2018. 7. George F. Ward, “Intra-African Trade—A Step in the Right Direction,” IDA Africa Watch, May 24, 2018. 8. Jamil Anderlini, Wang Feng, and Tom Mitchell, “Xi Jinping Delivers Robust Defence of Globalisation at Davos,” Financial Times, January 17, 2017. 9. Gary Sands, “New Bank for One Belt, One Road,” Lobelog, May 16, 2017. 10. Tang, “The Future of International Order(s),” 118–23. 11.  See also Kenneth Weisbrode, “Obama’s Afghanistan Blind Spot,” World Politics Review, September 16, 2009; John Kornblum, “The United States and Europe: Toward a Global Atlantic,” Foreign Service Journal 94, no. 3 (April 2017): 35–38. 12. Cf. Andrew Krepinevich, Jr., The Decline of Deterrence (Washington, DC: Hudson Institute, 2019); Kenneth Weisbrode, “Preventing War in the Middle East: A Role for NATO?” Joint Force Quarterly 61, no. 2 (April 2011): 108–10; and the discussion of the INF Treaty in the introduction to Chapter 2. 13. See essay 12. 14. Ash Carter, “Reflections on American Grand Strategy in Asia,” Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, October 2018. 15.  Pompeo, “Restoring the Role of the Nation-State in the Liberal International Order.” 16. See also James E. Goodby and Kenneth Weisbrode, “Security Council Seat for EU, ASEAN?” Christian Science Monitor, January 12, 2005. 17. Andrea Shalal and Robin Emmott, “EU to Sign Joint Defense Pact in Show of Post-Brexit Unity,” Reuters, November 8, 2017; “EU-20 Sign Collective Defense Treaty on Nov. 13,” New Europe, November 9, 2017; Beata Stur, “The Making of a European Defence Union,” ibid., December 12, 2017; Stéphanie Hofmann and Kenneth Weisbrode,

200  J. E. GOODBY AND K. WEISBRODE “EU and NATO: Interlocking or Interblocking?” World Politics Review, May 1, 2009; and by the same authors, “Europe’s Love Affair with Bureaucracy,” Foreign Policy, December 28, 2009. 18.  E.g., James E. Goodby, “A Reward Approach to North Korea,” Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2002. 19. E.g., Jon B. Alterman and Kathleen H. Hicks, Federated Defense in the Middle East (Washington, DC: CSIS, 2015), Chapters 3 and 4; Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, “An Open, Civilized World,” American Interest 4, no. 1 (September/October 2008): 16–31. 20. Prince Turki al Faisal and Ambassador Hossein Mousavian, “A SaudiIranian Dialogue on Regional Security,” Lobelog, April 23, 2018. 21.  E.g., Dmitri Trenin, “Russia’s Post-Soviet Journey,” Carnegie Endowment, December 25, 2016: Russia, which is one of the few states in the world with a truly global reach, sought to rebalance its Western-oriented policies with a broader strategic vision. Moscow turned south to the Middle East and North Africa, intervening in Syria and deepening its ties with Egypt. It looked east, upgrading its energy and military partnerships with China. And to the north, in the Arctic, it began to expand the Northern Sea Route, claim vast areas of the region’s continental shelf, and rebuild some Soviet-era military installations. Europe, having ceased to be a mentor and a model, is now just another neighbor, part of a Greater Eurasia stretching from Ireland to Japan. 22. The line has also been attributed to Dwight Eisenhower. 23. Rodrigo Tavares, “Foreign Policy Goes Local,” Foreign Affairs, October 9, 2013. 24.  Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State (London: Routledge, 1992). 25. Greg Ip, “The Gated Globe,” The Economist, October 12, 2013. 26. George P. Shultz, “The North American Global Powerhouse,” Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2013. 27. Ibid. 28. Edmond Sanders, “Anti-Americanism Flares in Egypt as Protests Rage over Morsi’s Ouster,” Los Angeles Times, July 6, 2013. 29. Shuja Nawaz, “A New Honeymoon for the United States and Pakistan?” New Atlanticist, November 1, 2013. 30.  Ana Palacio, “The Regional Route to Global Free Trade,” Project Syndicate, August 1, 2013. 31. James E. Goodby and Kenneth Weisbrode, “Back to Basics: US Foreign Policy for the Coming Decade,” Parameters 30, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 51–56.

CHAPTER 6

What Have We Learned?

Our tendency throughout this volume in both the introductory remarks and the essays subsequently collected has been to remind readers and ourselves of lessons that have been, or ought to have been, learned many times already rather than to break new conceptual ground. We are mindful of the significant technological, cultural, and socioeconomic changes that have taken place throughout the world during the past couple of decades, but we have opted to highlight a few important continuities and to ask how policies ought to adapt rather than to overturn those that came before. We do not apologize for the occasional or even frequent bouts of repetition, even here, as we have written, in the plea of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. for education in the obvious over investigation of the obscure. Why this necessity presents itself so many times and so frequently in American history is an old question. We shall refrain from trying to give a clever answer to it, and instead confine our conclusion to a summary of the main normative lessons we have learned from the past two decades, followed by a final thought experiment. Our lessons are based on three broad principles, or arguments, interwoven throughout this book. First, despite all the claims that multilateral institutions are a deadend in today’s world and that Donald Trump’s vision of the world means there is no going back to the era of these essays, international organizations and international regimes are the only viable way that nations can manage the challenges humanity faces. Readers may automatically © The Author(s) 2020 J. E. Goodby and K. Weisbrode, Practical Lessons from US Foreign Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27312-5_6

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assume that we were denizens of that bygone time and are still in thrall to it, but American leadership in creating and adapting institutions to meet new challenges is still crucial in shaping a global environment that reflects and nurtures worthy values and aspirations. Second, leaders need to concentrate most of their attention on regional security communities for this is where real issues that affect people’s lives are apt to be found and dealt with. Third, US policy has become too militarized and has become seriously counterproductive. From these three arguments, we derive six principal lessons. The first lesson relates to the principle of collective security. Neither it nor its value should be diminished, neglected, or forgotten, especially at moments when it appears less necessary than merely advantageous, or convenient. It is during such moments of peace, prosperity, and national self-confidence that leaders and citizens must have the discipline and foresight to think ahead, plan, and prepare for the preservation and cultivation of a viable international order. The second lesson deals with the essence and the exercise of collective security. It must be flexible and open, designed around alliances that bring peace and stability where they would not otherwise exist. It must augment treaties with institutions and other regimes—making use of shared norms, confidence-building measures and the like—that deepen habits of cooperation and peaceful interaction. That is, collective security must not be an end in itself but rather the primary means toward the establishment and furtherance of a particular kind of international order that rests on open and adaptive communities. The third lesson is that such communities, if they are to work, ought to have as their basis, in part, a regional—that is to say, a concrete and familiar geographic—dimension and scope. They should further good neighborliness, and the four freedoms which the European Union guarantees and other less-developed regional communities desire: freedom of movement for goods, capital, services, and labor. To this, one should add the major provisions of the Helsinki Final Act with respect to peaceful change, political relationships, and human rights. These are a prerequisite for the success of any regional security community. They should be accepted globally. The fourth lesson is that the United States, when it has tried to “balance” regional powers by favoring or “tilting” toward one against another, or when it has intervened directly with force in a region in the name of restoring balance, may do more harm than good if the policy

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is not accompanied, or preceded, by the steps noted in lessons two and three. That is to say, a regional security community cannot be created, imposed, or sustained for very long by an outside actor or set of actors, even with overwhelming force. The fifth lesson is that regional security communities, by contrast, are difficult for regional actors to make by themselves. Local and regional rivalries are long-lasting, and local and national interests often weigh against cooperation. Here then, in contrast to the role of an outside or “offshore balancer,” is how and where the United States could and probably should make its influence felt, that is to say, as a pragmatic combination of umpire, arbiter, and honest broker; and this, too, requires a proactive, not reactive, foreign policy, particularly if it remains in the American interest to see regions and their institutions remain or become open economically, politically, and culturally. The most successful of the twentieth-century regional security communities—in Europe—was designed and built primarily by Europeans. Many of them also would admit that that could not have happened without the assistance and goodwill of the United States and the menace, at least at the outset, of the Soviet Union. There may be times when honest brokerage does require at least the implicit threat of force, but these should be the rare exceptions. The sixth, and final, lesson is that American influence in the world is both durable and fragile. It is surprising to see how many additional chances the United States has been given to restore its reputation for fairness, decency, and pragmatism in its dealings with people in other nations, particularly allies. At the same time, it is not surprising to see how quickly the same people have been disappointed and at times angered by the words and deeds of some of our fellow Americans. The lesson, then, is not to take either fragility or durability for granted, and to stick instead to time-honored policies that have brought respect and appreciation in the past, or at the very least, to try one’s best to pay “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” * * * We return now to the principal failures identified in our introductory essay: the failure to secure the gains of the peaceful end of the Cold War in Europe and, to a greater extent, in Asia; the failure to respond imaginatively to the hot-button issue of transnational violence; the allowing of that trend to fester as other nations moved to challenge post-Cold War norms; and, finally, the failure to adjust national habits and structures of policymaking to the challenges of globalization.

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How might these failures have been avoided? The answers are by nature speculative but they may assist us in our revisiting of the recent past with an eye to doing better in the future. For example, what series of events or choices made it seem so necessary or so likely to change the hopeful tone of the post-Cold War so quickly to one of hostile confrontation and rearmament? It is tempting, though still somewhat iconoclastic, to say it began with a Pyrrhic victory in the first Gulf War, which prompted as much dread and resentment as admiration for American power, and a determination by some to catch up. Or one could date it, somewhat less iconoclastically, to the series of steps taken by the Clinton administration—notably NATO enlargement and its simultaneous armed attacks in the Balkans—that frustrated and possibly forestalled a viable post-Cold War partnership with Russia. Or one could join the mainstream line of liberal criticism that dates it to the neoconservative ascendancy during the George W. Bush administration and the militant rhetoric and action that accompanied and succeeded the attacks of September 11, 2001, culminating in a disastrous new war in Iraq. Or, to be bipartisan, one could trace it to the moment the Obama administration decided to turn its back on that legacy by failing to deal successfully and multilaterally with the political upheavals throughout the Middle East, after one last “humanitarian” intervention in Libya. Or, finally, one could review any number of other moments—from the various missteps in accommodating or challenging China’s economic and military growth, to the surprised public reaction and disjointed response to India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear tests, to a succession of failed efforts to expand and strengthen the global nonproliferation regime—and ask, what if    ? The value of counterfactual questions is found as much in the asking as in the answering. They force us not to refine an imaginary or virtual history but instead to underscore the reasons why some things did happen by challenging the assumptions and thinking behind them, especially when, in retrospect, one may claim that policymakers had more or better choices than they felt they had at the time. Students of the recent past ought to do so in order to learn from the apparent failure to build a viable post-Cold War order and, therefore, to imagine what role collective security must play in today’s world. Such questions also remind one of the power of contingency. Historians of the future may sort through more detailed, alternative scenarios for each of these and many other instances of decision-making. For our part, revisiting views and impressions at the time has served to cast the neglect of collective security as a

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leitmotif in American official thought and action. People need more time to understand why that happened when it did. But to us, there is little doubt that it did, in fact, happen. Most people knew that the unipolar moment, such that it was, could not be extended indefinitely. Someday it would end. So, why did our country not do more to prepare for the next phase, to devise international ways and means that would continue to serve US interests and those of like-minded countries once the unipolar moment had passed? Why was it so hard to understand that transforming other countries in a positive and pro-US direction first required a pattern of constructive relations with them as they underwent change? Why, in other words, did it become so easy to confuse the means and ends of foreign policy at the precise moment when history suggested that such confusion had abated and its damage repaired following so many costly blunders? Hubris is too easy and too convenient an answer. We prefer to emphasize a combination of laziness, hyperactivity, and luck. Lazy in thought, hyperactive in practice, and lucky in spirit. Yet, as we stated at the outset, it is probably not an accident that no major international war on the scale of those during the first half of the twentieth century occurred during the period described in this book, along with a good deal of peaceful progress. For all that we remain very grateful. And for that reason, we have redoubled our modest effort to interpret this itinerant era.

Further Reading

Acharya, Amitav. The End of American World Order. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. Adler, Emanuel, and Michael Barnett, eds. Security Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Anderson, Terry H. Bush’s Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Art, Robert J. A Grand Strategy for America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Bacevich, Andrew. Twilight of the American Century. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. Börzel, Tanja A., and Thomas Risse, eds. Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Bracken, Paul. The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics. New York: Times Books, 2012. Brands, Hal. Making the Unipolar Moment: US Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post-Cold War Order. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. Brands, Hal, and Charles Edel. The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. Brands, Hal, and Jeremi Suri, eds. The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2016. Breslin, Shaun, Christopher W. Hughes, Nicola Phillips, and Ben Rosamond. New Regionalism in the Global Political Economy: Theories and Cases. London: Routledge, 2002. Brooks, Stephen G., and William C. Wohlforth. America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. E. Goodby and K. Weisbrode, Practical Lessons from US Foreign Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27312-5

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208  Further Reading Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Bull, Hedley. The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. London: Macmillan, 1977. Burns, William J. The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal. New York: Random House, 2019. Buzan, Barry, and George Lawson. The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Buzan, Barry, and Ole Wæver. Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Campbell, Kurt. The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia. New York: Twelve, 2016. Carr, E. H. The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations. London: Macmillan, 1939. Chollet, Derek. The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America’s Role in the World. New York: PublicAffairs, 2016. Chollet, Derek, and James Goldgeier. America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11. New York: PublicAffairs, 2008. Cobbs Hoffman, Elizabeth. American Umpire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Cohen, Eliot A. The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force. New York: Basic Books, 2016. Cohrs, Patrick O. The Unfinished Peace After World War I: America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919–1932. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Conradi, Peter. Who Lost Russia? How the World Entered a New Cold War. London: Oneworld, 2017. Craig, Gordon A., and Alexander L. George. Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Problems of Our Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Deutsch, Karl W., et al. Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International Organization in the Light of Historical Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. Divine, Robert A. Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America During World War II. New York: Atheneum, 1967. Drell, Sidney D., and James E. Goodby. The Gravest Danger: Nuclear Weapons. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 2003. Drell, Sidney D., and James E. Goodby. A World Without Nuclear Weapons: EndState Issues. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 2009. Duchêne, François. Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994 [1939].

Further Reading

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Farrell, Mary, Björn Hettne, and Luk van Langebove, eds. Global Politics of Regionalism: Theory and Practice. London: Pluto Press, 2005. Fawcett, Louise, and Andrew Hurrell, eds. Regionalism in World Politics: Regional Organization and International Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Ferguson, Niall, ed. Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. London: Picador, 1997. Gamble, Andrew, and Anthony Payne, eds. Regionalism and World Order. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996. George, Alexander L. Forceful Persuasion: Coercive Diplomacy as an Alternative to War. Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 1991. Goldgeier, James. Not Whether but When: The US Decision to Enlarge NATO. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1999. Goodby, James E. Approaching the Nuclear Tipping Point: Cooperative Security in an Era of Global Change. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Goodby, James E. Europe Undivided: The New Logic of Peace in US-Russian Relations. Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 1998. Goodby, James E., Petrus Buwalda, and Dmitri Trenin. A Strategy for Stable Peace: Toward a Euroatlantic Security Community. Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 2002. Haass, Richard N. War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009. Hamilton, Daniel, and Kristina Spohr, eds. Open Door: NATO and Euro-Atlantic Security After the Cold War. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2019. Hendrickson, David. Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Henrikson, Alan K., ed. Negotiating World Order: the Artisanship and Architecture of Global Diplomacy. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1986. Herring, George C. The American Century and Beyond: US Foreign Relations, 1893–2014. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Hinsley, F. H. Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations Between States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963. Howard, Michael. The Lessons of History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Hunt, Michael H. Ideology and US Foreign Policy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987. Hurrell, Andrew. On Global Order: Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Hutchings, Robert, and Jeremi Suri, eds. Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Ikenberry, G. John. After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

210  Further Reading Ikenberry, G. John. Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Iriye, Akira. Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Iriye, Akira, ed. Global Interdependence: The World After 1945. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014. Janis, Irving L. Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. Johnson, Robert David, ed. Asia Pacific in the Age of Globalization. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015. Kagan, Robert. The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. Kahler, Miles, and Andrew MacIntyre, eds. Integrating Regions: Asia in Comparative Context. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Katzenstein, Peter J. A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Kennan, George F. American Diplomacy, 1900–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951. Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House, 1987. Keohane, Robert O. After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Khong, Yuen Foong. Analogies at War Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Kissinger, Henry. World Order. New York: Penguin, 2014. Krasner, Stephen D., ed. International Regimes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. Kugler, Richard L. Toward a Dangerous World: US National Security Strategy for the Coming Turbulence. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1995. Kupchan, Charles A. The End of the American Era: US Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Lafore, Laurence. The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War I. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1965. Lake, David A., and Patrick M. Morgan, eds. Regional Orders: Building Security in a New World. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. Leffler, Melvyn P. Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism: US Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920–2015. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Leffler, Melvyn P., and Jeffrey W. Legro, eds. In Uncertain Times: American Foreign Policy After the Berlin Wall and 9/11. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011.

Further Reading

  211

Levy, Carl, and Mark Roseman, eds. Three Postwar Eras in Comparison: Western Europe 1918–1945–1989. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Lieber, Robert J. Retreat and Its Consequences: American Foreign Policy and the Problem of World Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Lieven, Anatol. America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Lipset, Seymour Martin. American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. Luce, Edward. The Retreat of Western Liberalism. London: Little, Brown, 2017. Lundestad, Geir. “Empire” by Integration: The United States and European Integration, 1945–1997. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Lundestad, Geir, ed. The Fall of Great Powers: Peace, Stability, and Legitimacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Mansfield, Edward D., and Helen V. Milner eds. The Political Economy of Regionalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. May, Ernest R. “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. May, Ernest R., Richard Rosecrance, and Zara Steiner, eds. History and Neorealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Mayers, David. America and the Postwar World: Remaking International Society, 1945–1956. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. Mazarr, Michael J. Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019. Mazlish, Bruce, Nayan Chanda, and Kenneth Weisbrode, eds. The Paradox of a Global USA. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Mazower, Mark. Governing the World: The History of an Idea. New York: Penguin, 2012. McDougall, Walter A. The Tragedy of US Foreign Policy: How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. McFaul, Michael. From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. Mearsheimer, John J. The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Menon, Rajan. The End of Alliances. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Milton, Patrick, Michael Axworthy, and Brendan Simms. Towards a Westphalia for the Middle East. London: Hurst, 2018. Morgan, Michael Cotey. The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

212  Further Reading Narang, Viping. Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Nasr, Vali. The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat. New York: Doubleday, 2013. Nelson, C. Richard, and Kenneth Weisbrode, eds. Reversing Relations with Former Adversaries: US Foreign Policy After the Cold War. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Neumann, Iver B. Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations. London: Routledge, 1996. Neustadt, Richard E., and Ernest R. May. Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers. New York: Free Press, 1986. Ninkovich, Frank. The Wilsonian Century: US Foreign Policy Since 1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Nye, Joseph S., Jr. The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Ohmae, Kenichi. The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies. New York: Free Press, 1995. Packer, George. Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. Perry, William J. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Pfaff, William. The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy. New York: Walker, 2010. Phillips, David L. Liberating Kosovo: Coercive Diplomacy and US Intervention. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Posen, Barry. Restraint: A New Foundation for US Grand Strategy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Pouliot, Vincent. International Pecking Orders: The Politics and Practice of Multilateral Diplomacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Preble, Christopher A. The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Rhodes, Ben. The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House. New York: Random House, 2018. Ricks, Thomas E. Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. New York: Penguin, 2006. Rubin, Lawrence, and Adam N. Stulberg, eds. The End of Strategic Stability? Nuclear Weapons and the Challenge of Regional Rivalries. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018. Sestanovich, Stephen. Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

Further Reading

  213

Shultz, George P. Issues on My Mind: Strategies for the Future. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 2013. Shultz, George P., and James E. Goodby, eds. The War That Must Never Be Fought: Dilemmas of Nuclear Deterrence. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 2015. Shultz, George P., Sidney D. Drell, and James E. Goodby, eds. Deterrence: Its Past and Future. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 2010. Shultz, George P., Sidney D. Drell, and James E. Goodby, eds. Reykjavik Revisited: Steps Toward a World Free of Nuclear Weapons. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 2008. Smith, Patrick. Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Smith, Tony. America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Solingen, Etel. Comparative Regionalism: Economics and Security. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. Sprout, Harold, and Margaret Sprout. Foundations of International Politics. Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1962. Steiner, Zara. The Lights That Failed: European International History 1919–1933. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Steiner, Zara. The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933– 1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Stent, Angela E. The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the TwentyFirst Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Stephens, Bret. America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder. New York: Sentinel, 2014. Sweig, Julia E. Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the AntiAmerican Century. New York: PublicAffairs, 2006. Talbott, Strobe. The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy. New York: Random House, 2002. Thies, Wallace J. Why NATO Endures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Thomas, Daniel. The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Walt, Stephen M. The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of US Primacy. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018. Wampler, Robert A., ed. Trilateralism and Beyond: Great Power Politics and the Korean Security Dilemma During and After the Cold War. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2012. Zakaria, Fareed. The Post-American World. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. Zeiler, Thomas W., David K. Ekbladh, and Benjamin C. Montoya, eds. Beyond 1917: The United States and the Global Legacies of the Great War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Attributions

Chapter 2 ǂ“We’re All Powerful and All Alone,” Los Angeles Times, April 1, 1999. ǂ“US Must Avoid Temptation to Shift Priorities Toward Asia,” Defense News, April 30, 2001. *“Bush Should Seize His Chance to Recast US Ties with China,” International Herald Tribune, September 21, 2001. *“US Needs Alliances, Not Short-Term Allies,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 2002. +“Thank the Friends: Doing America’s Work at the UN,” International Herald Tribune, October 30, 2002. *“A Nuclear Arms Race,” Washington Times, October 19, 2003. *“Bush’s Corrosive Campaign of Fear,” Financial Times, November 19, 2003. *“The Nature of Freedom,”La Vanguardia, October 13, 2004. ǂ“America’s Strategic Surrender,” Internationale Politik, Summer 2006. +“US Must Take Offensive Against Nuclear Terrorism,” Baltimore Sun, February 4, 2007. ǂ“The False Promise of 1989,” International Herald Tribune, November 6, 2009. ǂ“Diplomacy 2.0,” Project Syndicate, March 24, 2010. ǂ“US Diplomats: A Vanishing Species?” Politico, December 22, 2010. +“End of a Nuclear Era,” New York Times, August 14, 2013. Chapter 3 *“Back to Basics: US Foreign Policy for the Coming Decade,” Parameters, Spring 2000. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. E. Goodby and K. Weisbrode, Practical Lessons from US Foreign Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27312-5

215

216  Attributions +“Diplomatic Cathedral-Building,” Foreign Service Journal, September 2002. +“Ike-Like Diplomacy Instead of War,” Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2002. *“The Way to Rid the World of Nuclear Weapons,” Financial Times, July 22, 2003. *“American Diplomacy—What You See Is What You Get,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 24, 2007. ǂ“Mugged by Reality?” Washington Times, October 6, 2008. ǂ“Obama’s World Tour: A Rising or a Setting Sun?” World Politics Review, November 17, 2010. ǂ“The Strange Rebirth of American Leadership,” Project Syndicate, January 21, 2011. ǂ“Pivots Forward, Backward, and Sideways,” Diplomatic Courier, January 12, 2012. ǂ“Recipe for a Post-Hegemonic USA,” YaleGlobal, January 2, 2013. Chapter 4 ǂ“The Consequences of Russia’s Actions—Who Will Cast the First Stone?” Wall Street Journal Europe, November 23, 1999. ǂ“Don’t Rush to the Altar with India,” Asian Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2001. ǂ“Afghanistan Stalemate Fosters Reevaluation of Stabilization Tactics,” Eurasianet, September 4, 2001. *“Asia Needs a Common Defence,” Far Eastern Economic Review, October 11, 2001. *“The European Way: Asians Need a Regional Security Net,” International Herald Tribune, June 5, 2002. *“East Asia: Connecting the Dots Isn’t Optional,” International Herald Tribune, December 26, 2002. *“Juggling a Two-Front Crisis,” Defense News, January 20, 2003. *“Time for Jaw-Jaw with North Korea,” Financial Times, March 6, 2003. *“NATO Can’t Be Globocop,” Wall Street Journal Europe, April 1, 2004. +“The US Is Losing Ground on Korea Talks,” Financial Times, June 11, 2004. ǂ“The Coming Showdown with Iran,” Project Syndicate, February 4, 2009. ǂ“The Elusive Afghanistan Strategy,” RealClearWorld, August 19, 2009. ǂ“Obama, ‘America’s First Pacific President’?” European Voice, November 16, 2009. +“The Putin Doctrine and Preventive Diplomacy,” Foreign Service Journal, November 2014. Chapter 5 ǂ“Save the Caucasus from Balkan-Like Crisis,” Christian Science Monitor, January 24, 2000.

Attributions

  217

*“Defending Missile Defense,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 14, 2001. *“NATO and the Future of War,” La Vanguardia, November 19, 2001. ǂ“Afghanistan Interim Government ‘Solution’ Could Leave Regional Problems Intact,” Eurasianet, December 4, 2001. *“EU to Adopt Higher Profile in Recasting Europe,” Defense News, March 18, 2002. *“European Defense: An Alliance with 2 Tiers,” International Herald Tribune, April 29, 2003. *“Rescuing the UN Security Council: Should We? Can We?” Foreign Service Journal, November 2004. +“Enlarge the North Korean Problem,” International Herald Tribune, June 21, 2005. +“Democratic Lessons from Helsinki and Central Asia,” Financial Times, July 31, 2005. *“Chart New Course for Lasting Peace,” Baltimore Sun, February 27, 2006. ǂ“French Return to NATO Military Command Could Spur Greater Alliance Mission Clarity,” US News and World Report, March 17, 2009. +“A Possible ‘Off-Ramp’ in North Korea,” Brookings Institution, April 16, 2013. *“Redirecting US Diplomacy,” Parameters, Winter 2013–2014. *“A Middle East, Whole and Free,” US News and World Report, September 3, 2015. Authored by: * J. E. G. & K. W. + J. E. G. ǂ K. W. We gratefully acknowledge the original publishers of the essays for granting permission, where necessary, to reprint them. We have retained their original style and punctuation. These reprints do not constitute or imply any endorsement or sponsorship of any product, service, company, or organization.

Index

A Abdullah Abdullah, 168 Abkhazia, 162 Abu Ghraib (prison), 89 Acheson, Dean, 32, 89, 90, 150 Acton, Harold, 91 Adams, John Quincy, 44 Adenauer, Konrad, 35 Afghanistan, xiii, xiv, 14, 17, 64, 79, 91, 112, 119, 120–122, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136–139, 148, 165, 166, 167–169, 170, 186, 193 “AfPak,” 137 Africa, 17, 25, 55, 74, 98, 157, 178, 191, 194 African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), 157 African Union, 55, 194 Alaska, 133 Albright, Madeleine, 92 Algeria, 135 Alinegar, 121 Aliyev, Heydar, 162

Al Qaeda (al-Qaida), xiii, 3, 17, 79, 137, 176 “Amerexit,” 115 America. See United States Americas. See Western Hemisphere “America First,” 6, 7, 46 American Economic Association, 95 “American exceptionalism,” 59, 72 American Revolution, 38 Andaman Islands, 120 Andijan, 182 Annan, Kofi, 79, 122, 172, 174, 176 Antarctica, 92 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), xiii, 27, 36, 123, 164 “Arab Spring,” xiv, 64 Armenia, 162 arms control, 27, 28, 35, 57, 61, 70, 128, 170, 180. See also nuclear weapons Article V, 79, 112, 132, 165. See also North Atlantic Treaty ASEAN Regional Forum, 55

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. E. Goodby and K. Weisbrode, Practical Lessons from US Foreign Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27312-5

219

220  Index Asia, xiii, 16, 25, 27, 31–36, 47, 54, 55, 61, 72, 92–94, 97, 98, 99, 110, 113–115, 118, 119, 120, 122–127, 128, 131, 134, 139–140, 157, 164, 180–181, 194, 203. See also Central Asia; East Asia; Northeast Asia; South Asia; Southeast Asia “Asia-first,” 31, 32, 33, 34 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), 139 Atlantic Alliance, 31, 98, 166, 172, 173, 174. See also North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Atlantic Community, 98, 112, 113, 148, 170, 173, 175, 182, 183 Atlantic Ocean, 94 Atlanticism, 32, 34, 81, 173, 179 Atomic Energy Commission, US, 86 Australia, 113, 139 Azerbaijan, 162, 163 B Badakhshan, 121 Badghis, 121 Bagram, 121 Baker, James, 45–47, 49 balance of power, 12, 36–38, 45, 49, 50, 56, 65, 73, 74, 75, 78, 114, 115, 118, 135, 138, 155, 156, 157, 160, 178, 183, 194, 195, 202 Balkans, 17, 30, 81, 93, 111, 132, 161, 166, 170, 174, 186, 204 Baltic States, xiii, 111, 142, 170 Bamyan, 121 Bangladesh, 120 Barbary Pirates, 53 barnstormer, 97, 99 Barraclough, Geoffrey, 15 Basic Agreement, 1992 (Korea), 188

Basques, 117 Beers, Charlotte, 89 Belarus, 81, 144, 145 Belgium, 171, 172 Belt and Road Initiative (China), 113 Berlin, Isaiah, 44 Berlin Wall, 41, 53, 139 Berlusconi, Silvio, 139 Beslan, 144, 175 Best and the Brightest (Halberstam), 89 Bhutto, Benazir, 138 “Big Tech,” 11 bin Laden, Osama, 42, 122, 176 Bismarck, Otto von, 37, 50, 83, 117 Blackwill, Robert, 118 Blair, Tony, 139, 172 “blowback,” 71 Bonn, 167, 168 Bosnia, 17, 79, 166, 170 Bound to Lead (Nye), 96 Brazil, 93 Brezhnev, Leonid, 181 Britain. See United Kingdom (UK) British Empire, 7, 29, 31, 101 Browne, Desmond, 143, 149 Budapest, 145 Bull, Hedley, 11, 96, 156 Burma, 120 Bush, George H.W., 41, 47, 53, 75, 78, 81, 96, 111, 129, 174, 198 Bush, George W., xiii, 3, 13, 14, 16, 27–28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 42, 43–45, 46, 48, 50, 51, 52, 68, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 102, 118, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129–131, 133, 134, 139, 142, 163, 165, 166, 172, 173, 177, 178, 179, 182, 183, 204 Buwalda, Petrus, 143 Byzantine Empire, 97

Index

C Cameron, David, 54 Canada, 79, 130, 192 Caribbean, 117 Carter, Ash, 159, 160 Caucasus, 161–163 Central America, 117 Central Asia, 48, 77, 82, 135, 138, 162, 169, 181, 182, 183, 193 Central Eurasia, 116 Central Europe, 111 Cezanne, Paul, 59 Chal, 121 Chechnya, 116, 142, 161, 162 Cheney, Dick, 44, 133 Chiang Kai-shek, 32 China, xiii, 4, 6, 25, 30, 32–36, 40, 48, 55, 61, 68, 69, 70, 75, 82, 86, 87, 93, 94, 95, 98, 101, 113, 114, 118–120, 123–126, 128, 134, 137, 146, 148, 158, 159, 164, 182, 184, 192–194, 197, 204 China lobby (US), 32 Chipman, John, 17 Churchill, Winston, 99 climate change, 5, 26, 56, 140 Clinton, Bill, xiii, 3, 16, 27, 28, 37, 45, 47, 48, 52, 70, 71, 74, 81, 89, 92, 96, 110, 112, 113, 118, 130, 133, 142, 194, 204 Clinton, Hillary, 54, 55, 91, 139 Cold War, 5, 7, 14, 16, 17, 26, 30, 34, 35, 41, 42, 46, 47, 57, 58, 60, 65, 69–74, 111, 119, 124, 125, 129, 131, 146–148, 150, 158, 159, 161, 166, 171, 174, 176, 189, 198, 203. See also post-Cold War collective security, 3, 4, 17, 18, 26, 47, 49, 50, 56, 67, 76, 98, 99, 160, 165, 172, 179, 185, 187, 198, 202, 204–205

  221

Common Market, 178 Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), 141–142 Conference on Preventing Surprise Nuclear Attacks, 86 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), 116, 145, 157, 181, 184, 197. See also Helsinki Final Act; OSCE confidence-building measures, 28, 35, 56, 136, 198, 202 Congress, US, 34, 47, 48, 51, 65, 77, 81, 83, 99, 117, 134, 143 Congress of Vienna, 197 containment, 4, 5, 28, 71, 72, 74, 77, 85, 113, 122, 131, 136, 148, 192. See also Cold War cooperative security, 18, 149 Copenhagen, 56, 57, 182 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, xiv, 56 Crawford (Texas), 126 Crimea, 112 Cuban missile crisis, 42 cyber war, 5 Cyprus, 162 Czech Republic, 117, 142, 165 D Dangerfield, George, 95, 96 Darfur, 177 Dark Ages, 176 Davos, 12 declinism, 46, 50, 93, 96 Defense Department. See Pentagon de Gaulle, Charles, 185–187 Demirel, Süleyman, 161, 162 Democratic Party, US, 118 détente, 4. See also Cold War Diego Garcia, 119 diplomacy, preventive, 88, 142, 148–151, 167

222  Index Drezner, Daniel W., 29 Duchêne, François, 26 E Eagleburger, Lawrence, 59 East Asia, 25, 33, 113, 125–127, 128, 159, 192, 193 Eastern Europe, 41, 129, 174, 186. See also Central Europe Economist, The, 29, 191 Egypt, 40, 41, 88, 133, 135, 163, 192, 197 Eisenhower, Dwight, 32, 35, 43, 85–87, 150 English School (international relations), 156 Eurasia, 74–77, 110, 116, 144, 145, 147, 148. See also Central Eurasia Euro-Atlantic Community. See Atlantic Community Europe, 6, 11, 16, 27, 32–34, 40, 46, 47, 49, 53–55, 57, 59, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 91–94, 98, 99, 110–112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 123, 124–125, 131–133, 135, 137, 139, 140, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 157, 163, 164, 166, 169–172, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 190, 191, 194, 197, 198, 203. See also Central Europe; Eastern Europe; Western Europe “Europe, whole and free,” 53, 111, 124, 171, 182, 183, 184, 198 European Community, 37, 178. See also Common Market European Defense Union, 171 European External Action Service (EEAS), 55 European Security Charter, 116 European Union (EU), xiii, xiv, 8, 35, 48, 55, 68, 75, 80, 94, 99, 109,

110, 112, 143, 144, 148, 160, 166, 167, 169–171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 184, 192, 194, 202. See also European Community F Fabian socialism, 119 Fawzi, Ahmad, 169 Federal Assembly (Russia), 141 Federalist Papers, 9 Fernandes, George, 119 First World War. See World War I Florence (Italy), 91, 92 Ford, Gerald, 35, 150, 181 Foreign Affairs, 145 Foreign Service, US, 57–59. See also State Department Foreign Service Institute, US, 58 Founding Fathers, US, 43 “four freedoms,” 41, 43, 202 France, 31, 34, 38, 39, 67, 93, 115, 146, 165, 171, 173, 185–186, 197 Franklin, Benjamin, 43 “free and open Indo-Pacific” (FOIP), 113 Frum, David, 174 Fukuyama, Francis, 7 G Gandhi, Mahatma, 119 gardening, foreign policy as, 75, 77, 147 Garmisch, 87 “garrison state,” 43, 85 Gates, Robert M., 52 Geneva, 86 Georgia (Republic), xiv, 51, 112, 142, 143, 161, 163 Germany, 34, 67, 68, 87, 94, 111, 115, 165, 171, 173, 197 Ghor, 121

Index

Gingrich, Newt, 45 Gladstone, William Ewart (Gladstonian), 47 Glitman, Maynard, 57 “globalism,” 10, 45, 93, 160, 195 globality, 25 globalization, 3, 6, 9, 18, 25, 29, 38, 53, 55, 68, 71, 81, 84, 99, 112, 146, 147, 158, 161, 167, 173, 179, 189, 191, 193, 203 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 27, 28, 57, 75, 111, 140 governance, 5, 11–13, 25, 26, 29, 68, 78, 94, 99, 141, 149–151, 155, 159, 170, 175, 189–191 “Grand designs,” 44, 81 grand strategy, 45, 49, 63 Grant, Ulysses S., 58 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, 113 Greater Middle East Initiative, 133 Greenspan, Alan, xiii Guantánamo (prison), 89 Gulf (Arabian/Persian), 48, 130, 184 Gulf States, 197 Gulf War, 64, 66, 165, 172, 176, 204 Guterres, António, 27 Gypsies, 117 H Habsburg Empire, 93 Hague, The, 144 Haiti, 81 Halberstam, David, 89 Hamas, 184 Hawaii, 139 Hazaras, 168 Hegel, G.W.F., 189 hegemony, 78, 81, 82, 83, 96, 99–102, 114, 115 Heise, Thomas, 100

  223

Helmand, 138 Helms, Jesse, 45 Helsinki Final Act, 116, 141, 145, 146, 149, 157, 181, 184, 185, 197–198, 202. See also CSCE Helsinki Watch Groups, 198 Herat, 121 Hickerson, Jack, 187 Hobbes, Thomas (Hobbesian), 6, 29, 30, 68, 158, 178 Holbrooke, Richard, 57–59, 92 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 72, 201 homeland defense, 73 Hughes, Karen, 89 Hu Jintao, 95 human rights, 38, 65, 168, 182, 184, 198, 202 Hungary, 165 Hussein, Saddam, 38–40, 48, 52, 85, 127–129, 131 I Iceland, 165 Ikenberry, G. John, 102 “imperial overstretch,” 15, 96, 179 India, xiii, 17, 25, 28, 40, 41, 51, 52, 61, 74, 93, 94, 101, 113, 118– 120, 124, 125, 130, 193, 204 Indonesia, 139 integration, global, 5, 10–11, 29 integration, regional, 47, 70, 109, 114, 140, 155, 160, 170–171, 190, 192. See also regionalization; regionalism; security communities interdependence, 37, 44, 64, 67, 80, 82, 114, 123, 155, 179, 183 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, 27, 57 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 40, 88, 137 International Criminal Court, 79

224  Index International Institute for Strategic Studies, 17 internationalism, liberal, 7, 14, 17, 47, 65, 67, 158, 159, 160, 195. See also governance; world order interventionism (military), xiii, 15, 17, 30, 45, 46, 48, 50, 64, 65, 67, 69, 71, 79, 112, 132, 138, 169, 171, 176–177, 184 Iran, xiv, 28, 33, 39, 40, 44, 48, 51, 52, 61, 68, 70, 74, 88, 91, 121, 133, 135–137, 160–163, 169, 183, 184, 192, 196, 197 “Iran Deal.” See Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Iraq, xiii, xiv, 14, 17, 36, 38–40, 43–44, 48, 52, 85, 87, 89, 91, 127–129, 131–134, 136, 171–173, 177, 178, 183, 184 Iraq War, 43–44, 64, 66, 85, 87, 89, 127–129, 131–134, 171–173, 177, 178, 204 Ischinger, Wolfgang, 143, 149 Islam, 51, 167, 189 isolationism, 14, 36, 45, 47, 59, 64, 65, 67, 73, 80 Israel, 40, 41, 47, 48, 74, 119, 135, 136, 177, 192, 196, 197 Istanbul, xiii, 116, 131 Italy, 55, 139, 165 Ivanov, Igor, 143, 149 J James, Henry, 101 Japan, 31, 33, 34, 37, 46, 61, 75, 88, 93, 111, 113, 115, 119, 124– 126, 128, 130, 134 Jefferson, Thomas, 55, 80 Jiang Zemin, 126, 128 Johnson, Lyndon, 185 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), xiv, 28. See also Iran

K Kabul, 121, 122, 138 Kaesong Industrial Complex, 188 Kandahar, 138, 168 Kant, Immanuel (Kantian), 178 Kapisa, 121 Karzai, Hamid, 167, 168 Kashmir, 120 Kautilya, 119 Kazakstan (Kazakhstan), 81, 144, 145 Kennan, George F., 4, 7, 47, 57, 75, 117 Kennedy, John F., 7, 44, 86, 87 Kennedy, Paul, 15, 46, 48, 96, 179 Kenya, xiii Keohane, Robert, 102 Kerry, John, 61, 142 KGB, 145 Khan, Abdul Qadeer, 51 Khan, Ismail, 121 Khanna, Parag, 96, 97 Khrushchev, Nikita, 86 Kim Dae-jung, 188 Kim Jong-il, 128, 129, 131, 134, 179, 181, 188 Kim Jong-un, 187, 188 Kissinger, Henry, 4, 7, 83, 92, 150 Kistiakowsky, George B., 86 Korea. See North Korea; South Korea Korean War, 31, 32, 89 Kosovo, xiii, 17, 72, 112, 113, 132, 161, 166, 170 Kremlin, 7, 142, 147, 182 Kupchan, Charles, 102 Kurds, 117, 162 Kyrgyzstan, 182 L Ladakh, 120 Laghman, 121 Latin America, 74, 81, 92, 191 law, international, 4, 12, 25, 38, 39, 49, 68, 79, 81, 83, 90, 174, 190

Index

League of Nations, 57 Lebanon, 136 Leviathan (Hobbes), 6 “liberal international order.” See world order Libya, xiv, 51, 64, 112, 204 “Libya model,” 181 Lieven, Anatol, 102 Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 86 Lisbon Protocol (START), 145 Lisbon Treaty, xiv London, 29 Luce, Edward, 102 Lukin, Alexander, 145 Luttwak, Edward, 97 Luxembourg, 165, 171 M MacArthur, Douglas, 31, 34 Macedonia, 166, 170 Machtpolitik, 49, 50, 56 Mackinder, Halford, 73, 98 Madison, James, 9 Marshall Plan, 194, 195 Massoud, Ahmad Shah, 121–122, 138 “masterly inactivity,” 138 McCain, John, 91 Merkel, Angela, 11 Metternich, Klemens von, 83 Mexico, 38, 79, 192 Middle East, 5, 27, 28, 33, 36, 40, 41, 44, 48–50, 52, 53, 73, 74, 76, 79, 89, 98, 124, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 148, 157, 160, 161, 163, 164, 178, 183, 184, 192, 194, 196–198, 204 Milward, Alan, 190 missile defense, 35, 36, 75, 119, 125, 126, 142, 163–165, 170. See also ABM Treaty “mission-creep,” 69

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Mobutu Sese Seko, 70 Monnet, Jean, 35 Monroe Doctrine, 100 Mousavian, Hossein, 160–161 Mubarak, Hosni, 70 multilateralism, 36, 47, 76, 80, 83, 94, 109, 123, 159, 160 “multipolarity,” 179 N Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 163 nation-building, 82 nation-state, 68, 110, 141, 155, 160, 178, 189–191, 193, 196 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 192 National Defense Strategy, US, 68 National Military Strategy, US, 68 National Security Agency, US, 191 National Security Council, US, 77, 150 National Security Strategy, US, 36, 68, 127 nationalism, 47, 94, 109, 120, 136, 138, 160, 183, 190, 193 NATO expansion, 112 NATO-Russia Council, 169–170 Navy, US, 32, 130 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 119 Nepal, 120 New Delhi, 118, 119 New Diplomacy, 56. See also Old Diplomacy “new medievalism,” 11, 83, 96, 167, 176 New Orleans, 52 New York (City), 34, 39, 79, 132 New York University (NYU), 91, 92 Nixon, Richard, 35, 150 Nobel Prize, 192 Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), 8, 51, 145

226  Index North America, 132, 140, 143, 175, 181, 191, 192 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 192 North Atlantic Treaty, 79, 110, 187 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), xiii, xiv, 8, 17, 30–33, 36, 37, 70, 72, 75, 79, 92–94, 98, 99, 110–112, 125, 130, 131–133, 136, 137, 142, 159, 160, 163–167, 169–172, 174–177, 184–187, 193, 204. See also Atlantic Alliance enlargement of, xiii, xiv, 70, 93, 98, 99, 110, 112, 170, 171, 204. See also NATO expansion North Korea, xiii, xiv, 28, 31, 33, 35, 39, 40, 44, 48, 51, 52, 61, 75, 88, 114, 115, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128–130, 131, 133–135, 136, 140, 179–181, 183, 187–188, 193 North Ossetia, 144 Northeast Asia, 27, 28, 49, 50, 53, 73–75, 83, 84, 114, 134, 157, 180, 181, 184, 193, 194 Northern Alliance (Afghanistan), 121, 167, 168 nuclear energy, 8, 51 nuclear-free zones, 184 nuclear weapons, xiii, 5, 17, 18, 28, 39, 40, 51, 52, 57, 60, 75, 81, 85, 87– 89, 126, 130, 132, 133, 135–137, 145, 149, 173, 181, 196 Nunn, Sam, 143, 149 Nye, Joseph, 96 O Obama, Barack, xiv, 3, 13, 14, 16, 28, 53, 60, 61, 63, 91–95, 97, 111, 113, 135, 137, 139–140, 142, 149, 159–161, 192, 194, 195, 197, 204

“offshore balancing,” 155, 203 Old Diplomacy, 56. See also New Diplomacy O’Neill, Tip, 124 Open Door (policy), 94, 98, 113 Operation Iraqi Freedom. See Iraq War opinion, public, 9, 65, 67, 74, 80, 89–90, 114, 134, 136, 137, 139, 203 Orange Revolution (Ukraine), 144 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 101 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), xiii, 94, 116, 117, 125, 145, 149, 157, 180, 182–184 organizations, international, 6, 8, 37, 55, 57, 112, 157, 174, 177, 179, 201 O’Shaughnessy, Elim, 58 “out of area or out of business” (NATO), 166, 170 P Pacific Century, 99 Pacific Ocean, 32, 34, 75, 93, 94, 114, 139–140 Pakistan, xiii, 17, 28, 40, 41, 51, 52, 61, 82, 118, 120, 124, 125, 135, 137, 138, 168, 169, 193, 204 Palestine (Palestinians), 47, 177, 183, 192 Palin, Sarah, 91 Panjshir, 121 Paris, 31 Paris Climate Agreement, xiv Park Geun-hye, 188 Partnership for Peace (NATO), 110 Parwan, 121 Pashtuns (Pushtuns), 138, 168 peacekeeping, 79, 132, 133, 177

Index

Pearl Harbor, attack on, 46 Penn, William, 100 Pentagon (US Department of Defense), 32, 58, 127, 130, 131. See also War Department Perle, Richard, 174 Permanent Five (UN Security Council, P-5), 173, 177, 197 Perry, Matthew (Commodore), 54 Perry, William, 130, 131 Philippines, 50 “pivot to Asia,” 61, 97–99, 113 plutonium, 40, 51 Poland, 142, 165 Pompeo, Michael, 159, 160 populism, 11, 12 Port Blair, 120 post-Cold War, 3, 5, 13, 15, 30, 45, 49, 51, 64, 65, 70, 72, 84, 110– 112, 145, 165, 170, 203, 204 post-Soviet space, 141–145, 148. See also CIS Powell, Colin, 36, 174 Prague, 60, 170 proliferation, nuclear, 28, 40, 51, 53, 81, 87–89, 124, 170, 204. See also nuclear weapons; Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Puccini, Giacomo, 59 Puritans, 99 “Putin Doctrine,” 140–151 Putin, Vladimir, 27, 60, 111, 140– 151, 165, 171 R Radford, Arthur W., 85 Reagan, Ronald, 28, 35, 42, 57, 60, 77, 89, 96, 150, 163 realism (international relations), 4, 7, 83, 148, 150, 173 Realpolitik. See realism

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refugees, 17, 197 regimes, international, 4, 8, 75, 128, 157, 160, 188, 201, 202, 204 Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), 157 regionalism, 55, 109, 158, 160, 190, 191, 195 regionalization, 109, 158 Republican Party, US, 31, 32, 35, 41, 44, 89, 90 Revolutionary Guards (Iran), 196 Reykjavik, 170 Rice, Condoleezza, 40, 44, 89, 180 Richelieu, Cardinal, 37 Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Kennedy), 46, 96 Robertson, Lord, 171 Rodriguez Zapatero, Jose Luis, 132 Roh Moo-hyun, 188 “rollback,” 85 Roosevelt, Franklin, 41–44, 46 Roosevelt, Theodore, 73 Rove, Karl, 14 Rubin, Robert, xiii Rudd, Kevin, 139 Rumsfeld, Donald, 32–34, 42, 44, 87, 118, 127, 130, 131, 133, 134, 166, 174, 180 “Rumsfeld’s Rules,” 180 Rusk, Dean, 59 Russia, xiii, xiv, 4, 6, 17, 27, 28, 30, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39–41, 52, 53, 60, 61, 68–70, 75, 78, 84, 88, 93, 110–112, 113, 116, 119, 123–126, 137, 141–149, 161– 165, 169–171, 172, 173, 175, 182, 186, 192, 197, 198, 204 S Salisbury, Lord, 63 Samar, Sima, 168

228  Index Saudi Arabia, 40, 41, 88, 133, 135, 160, 161, 184, 197 Savranskaya, Svetlana, 111 Schroeder, Paul W., 12 Schuman, Robert, 35 Scowcroft, Brent, 129, 174 Second World War. See World War II security communities, 14, 36, 37, 49, 74, 75, 77, 110, 132, 143, 148, 149, 155–160, 170, 180, 181, 184, 190, 197, 202, 203 September 11th, terrorist attacks of, xiii, 16, 17, 34, 42, 43, 46, 52, 64, 79, 80, 82, 96, 112, 122, 124, 172, 204 Serbia, xiii Seward, William, 69 Sexton, Jay, 100 Shanghai Co-operation Organization (SCO), 55, 182 Sharif, Nawaz, 138 Shelton, Hugh, 118 Shevardnadze, Eduard, 161 Shi’a, 136. See also Islam “shock and awe,” 66 Shultz, George, 27, 75, 77, 141, 150, 192 siloviki, 145 Singapore, 25, 33 six-party talks (Korea), 134, 180, 181, 188 Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 55 social media, 5, 9, 10, 147 Solana, Javier, 171 South Africa, 93 South Asia, 27, 35, 74, 164, 193 South China Sea, xiv South Korea, 25, 31, 33, 35, 37, 61, 75, 88, 114, 124, 125, 126, 130, 133, 134, 140, 179, 180, 184, 187, 188 Southeast Asia, 76, 120, 191 Soviet Union, xiii, 4, 5, 33–35, 41, 42, 46, 57, 71, 72, 85, 86, 90,

110, 111, 116, 129, 141, 142, 145–147, 149, 150, 161, 181, 182, 197, 203 Spain, 58, 132 Spanish-American War, 72 “splendid isolation,” 59. See also isolationism Sprout, Harold, 156 Sprout, Margaret, 156 Sri Lanka, 120 Stalin, Joseph, 86, 147 State Department, US, 31–32, 58, 59, 77, 89 Strange Death of Liberal England (Dangerfield), 95 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START I, II, and New START), 27, 28, 57, 60, 145 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), 28 Strategy for Stable Peace: Toward a Euro-Atlantic Security Community (Buwalda, Goodby, Trenin), 143 Suharto, 70 Summers, Larry, xiii supranationalism, 190 “surge, the” (Iraq), 14 Syria, xiv, 40, 41, 64, 135, 161, 192 T Taiwan, 25, 32, 35, 36, 123, 126, 128 Tajikistan, 121 Takhar, 121 Talbott, Strobe, 70, 110–112, 118 Taliban, 17, 79, 121, 122, 138, 167, 168 Taloqan, 121 Tang, Shiping, 158 Tanzania, xiii Taywara, 121 Tea Party, US, 95

Index

Tehran, 162 terrorism, 5, 13, 34–36, 39, 42, 43, 47, 51–53, 68, 78, 80, 82–84, 87, 88, 96, 119, 122, 123, 124, 132, 144, 166, 178 Thailand, 120 Thatcher, Margaret, 118 Tibet, 36 tiersmondisme, 119 Time, xiii Tooze, Adam, 12 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), 157, 193 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 114, 157, 193 Trenin, Dmitri, 143 “triple crown” (strategy), 94 Truman, Harry, 31, 150 Trump, Donald, 4–9, 10, 13, 15, 16, 17, 27, 28, 29, 68, 115, 159, 201 Turkey, 40, 74, 94, 117, 135, 161, 162, 196 Turki al Faisal, Prince, 161 Tutweiler, Margaret, 89 U Ukraine, xiv, 81, 112, 142–147, 149, 150 unilateralism, 13, 15, 26, 36, 63, 80, 122, 173, 179 unipolar moment, 13, 17, 27, 205 United Kingdom (UK), 29, 54, 74, 139, 146, 165, 172, 197 United Nations (UN), 8, 17, 38, 39, 47, 56, 61, 66, 76, 79, 80, 84, 88, 94, 113, 122, 131, 132, 133, 141, 142, 149, 168, 169, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 182, 190 United States (US) alliances of, 26, 29, 31, 33, 36–39, 46, 52, 54, 61, 67, 68, 82, 83,

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85, 89, 90, 98, 113, 115, 118, 123, 124, 128, 130, 131, 133, 137, 138, 158, 159, 167, 174, 184, 185, 188, 203 Constitution of, 68 Declaration of Independence of, 43 diplomacy of, xiii, 4, 5, 14, 23, 27, 31, 34, 35, 40, 41, 46, 53–54, 62, 66, 67, 72, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85–87, 88, 89–92, 97, 114–115, 120, 122, 124, 126, 141, 142–145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 157, 159, 160, 167, 183, 189–196 ethnic groups in, 110, 146 foreign policy of, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 14, 15, 27, 35, 38, 41, 43, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 58, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71–77, 80, 81, 90, 93, 94, 98, 110, 111, 115, 116, 122, 123–124, 125–127, 128, 129, 134, 138, 139, 140, 146, 149, 150, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164, 167, 169, 172, 180, 183, 192, 193–194, 195, 196, 202, 203 government of, 3, 26, 43, 48, 71, 77, 78, 87, 89, 90, 111, 120, 122, 150, 170, 196, 197 history of, 7, 31, 57–59, 64, 85, 93, 95, 99–102 politics of, xiii, xiv, 9, 13, 16, 17, 59, 66, 68, 72, 80, 89, 91, 95, 97, 110, 128, 133, 136, 140 power of, xiii, xiv, 3, 4, 5, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 38, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 53, 59, 60, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 82, 84, 89, 92, 93, 96, 99, 100, 115, 127, 128, 136, 158, 173, 179, 192, 193, 194, 204

230  Index presidents of, xiii, xiv, 3, 5, 7, 9, 14, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 48, 50, 51, 54, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 68, 70, 77, 78, 81, 82, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 98, 118, 127, 129, 130, 131, 133, 135, 139, 140, 142, 146, 150, 159, 160, 161, 163, 172, 174, 178, 181, 185, 194 prestige of, 32, 48, 52, 95, 100, 128, 137, 139 reputation of, 30–31, 33, 42, 43, 44, 46, 53, 64, 65, 71, 73, 80, 90, 100, 101, 102, 118, 127, 134, 136, 137, 173, 203, 205 security of, 5, 33–35, 36, 37, 43, 47, 52, 60–61, 65, 66, 68, 76, 81, 85, 87–88, 96, 119, 123, 127, 133, 163, 164, 165, 166, 178, 179, 181, 187, 197 wars of, xiii, xiv, 4, 5, 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 26, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 46, 47, 51, 56, 57, 58, 60, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85–87, 89, 90, 111, 119, 121, 123, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 139, 141, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 158, 159, 160, 161, 165–167, 171, 172, 173, 174, 180, 189, 198, 203, 204 uranium, 28, 40, 51 USSR. See Soviet Union Uzbekistan, 169, 182 V Vandenberg, Arthur, 45 Vietnam (War), 14, 58 Villa La Pietra, 91

W Wall Street Journal, 191 War Department, US, 59 “war on terror,” 13, 39, 42, 43, 51, 82, 132 Warsaw Pact, 47, 110, 112, 186 Washington, DC, 32, 34, 38, 57, 71, 75, 79, 90, 92, 94, 95, 118, 120, 122, 124, 127, 131–134, 142, 145, 149, 151, 165, 166, 170, 173, 174, 179, 180, 182. See also United States, government of West, the, 8, 25, 26, 33, 47, 54, 57, 61, 69, 70, 75, 86, 93, 95, 96, 111, 112, 117, 118, 120, 125, 134, 136, 143–149, 158, 162, 163, 167, 168, 170, 175, 179, 198 West Point, US Military Academy at, 124 Western Europe, 78, 174, 178, 184, 194 Western Hemisphere, 6, 34, 49, 114, 158 Westphalia, Peace of, 116, 182, 189, 191 WikiLeaks, 57, 191 Wilson, Woodrow (Wilsonian; Wilsonianism), 4, 47, 49, 50, 56, 65, 68, 73, 117 Woerner, Manfred, 166 Wolf, Martin, 48 world order, 3, 6–8, 11, 12, 15, 16–17, 28–29, 39, 47, 65, 67, 158, 160, 173, 174, 202 World Trade Organization (WTO), 81, 193 World War I, 56, 98 World War II, 5, 31, 35, 58, 72, 74, 76, 81, 84, 90, 141, 145, 147, 177, 179, 198

Index

X Xinjiang, 36 Y Yakawlang, 121 Yanukovych, Viktor, 144 Ye Jianying, 34 Yellow Peril, 69

Yeltsin, Boris, 75, 145 Yemen, xiv, 161 Yongbyon, 130 Yugoslavia, 47, 64, 165 Z Zakaria, Fareed, 96, 102

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