The United States in the New
World Disorder
Remarks to the Watson Institute for International and
Public Affairs. Brown University
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public
Affairs
11 February 2016, Providence, Rhode Island
[This is the second of three lectures on the
United States’ global role in the 21st century. The first deals with the causes and
consequences of the crumbling of the Pax American. The third addresses the need for renewed
agility in American diplomacy.]
I want to speak
with you about the consequences for our country of changes in the world
order. The United States now has several
great power rivals, not one, and it has worse
relations with all of them than they
have with each other. This is not a
situation with which Americans should be comfortable. It is the opposite of world leadership. It reflects America's internal disabilities
as well as the disorder that has succeeded both US-Soviet rivalry and the
American global hegemony that briefly succeeded it. And
it raises serious questions about how well Americans understand the
international environment our country’s foreign policies must now navigate.
The Cold War is
long over. The winds now blow not from
one but from many directions. But the
United States has not changed course.
Nor have Americans adjusted the alliances or reset the
military-dominated approach to foreign policy we developed to cope with Soviet
communism. The results of this lapse make
it obvious that a rethink is overdue.
From time to
time, the world reorders itself. This is
such a time. So was the moment in which
the United States was born, 240 years ago.
Tradition has it that a British army band played “The World Turned
Upside Down” as General Cornwallis surrendered to a combined American and
French force at Yorktown in 1781.
The French army
and navy played a decisive role in that surrender, which would not have
occurred without them. And it was in
Paris, two years later, that the British grudgingly accepted the independence
of the United States. Our country’s
independence was in many ways a byproduct of the global wars that accompanied
the first bipolar international order.
From the
outbreak of the Seven Years War in 1754 until the final defeat of Napoleon in
1815, Britain and France contested world dominance – not just who would rule
Europe but also North and South America, the Middle East, Africa, and
Asia. Had these great powers not
balanced each other, either could have snuffed out our republic in its
infancy. Had they not been at war, the diplomacy
that produced the vast expansion of the Louisiana Purchase could not have taken
place. American history began with an
illustration that the nature of the world order both creates the context for
national security and determines what policies can be successfully pursued
within it.
Consider the
impact on the United States of the French defeat at Waterloo in 1815. This again upended world affairs. It ushered in a century of British
manipulation of the European balance of power and British management of the
affairs of much of the rest of the world.
The United Kingdom was the world’s first global military and industrial
superpower. Despite misgivings, Britain first
accommodated, then facilitated America’s rise.
The Pax Britannica provided a peaceful international environment in
which the United States rose to wealth and power without effective foreign
opposition and without the need for much of a foreign policy. Americans may have chafed at British
supremacy but we accepted the benefits of the mostly peaceful world order
sustained by British imperialism and the Royal Navy.
Free of
entangling alliances and shielded by the Atlantic and Pacific from great power
intervention or the need for our own military engagement in Europe or Asia,
Americans practiced diplomatic minimalism.
We kept our army and navy small and our defense budgets frugal. We invested in our industry, infrastructure,
and workforce rather than a military capable of extra-hemispheric adventures.
This focus on domestic development enabled us to expand and prosper. By 1875 or so, the American economy was the
world’s largest.
World War I
ended the century-long Pax Britannica even though the British and other empires
remained intact. The American economy
emerged from the war larger than those of its six next-biggest
competitors. But Americans saw no reason
that our greater financial clout should make us any more responsible for the
maintenance of peace, stability, or prosperity in foreign parts than we had
been. We resumed our traditionally aloof
stance toward the other side of the Atlantic.
Still, some of the ideas we had put forward in our brief wartime
appearance on the world stage marched on.
Woodrow
Wilson’s idealistic advocacy of self-determination fragmented Europe, producing
weak new states that had little prospect of sustaining themselves against
larger neighbors. Germany was humiliated
by defeat and impoverished by reparations.
Russia was reduced to surly diplomatic isolation. After World War I, neither of these great
European powers had any role at all in European governance. Their ostracism left Europe inherently
unstable. Europeans lacked both a
consensus and a diplomatic structure that could contain national rivalries,
revanchism, or the rise of totalitarian ideologies and apparatuses. The United States chose to ignore the dangers
of this situation and did nothing to prevent nature from taking its course.
Despite
America’s efforts to keep our distance from the world beyond our oceans, the
size of the U.S. economy and the vigor of American society gave us immense
financial and cultural influence abroad.
We did not use this power intelligently.
Our unbending efforts to collect war debt from Europeans ruined by the
fighting made their recovery more difficult.
When Wall Street crashed in 1929, the United States responded with a
series of protectionist measures. Copied
by others, these beggar-thy-neighbor policies compounded the global financial
and economic damage, threw the world into ever deeper depression, and helped
catalyze eruptions of militarism in both Europe and Japan.
Americans
reacted to the return of war to East Asia and Europe with a timidly feckless
mixture of denial, righteous indignation, denunciation, and sanctions. Such feel-good diplomacy was largely
toothless, but America’s size and potential caused it to be seen as
life-threatening in Tokyo and menacing in Berlin. The Japanese and Germans acted accordingly. The regional conflicts they had initiated soon
expanded to include the United States.
Tokyo’s
surprise attack on Pearl Harbor aimed to deprive America of the capacity to
interfere with its empire-building in China or its takeover of European colonies
in Southeast Asia. But, instead of
sidelining the United States, Japan’s sinking of much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet
and seizure of the Philippines galvanized an American drive to destroy Japanese
power. The Second World War ended by
replacing European and Japanese hegemony in the Pacific with that of the United
States, dividing Europe into U.S. and Soviet-dominated zones, and placing China
under strong central government aligned with the USSR. The British, French and other European
empires in Asia and Africa began to disintegrate.
As European
colonists came home, natives of their colonies followed them. The colonizers began themselves to be
colonized. The tension inherent in the
struggle of colonial peoples to achieve self-determination took root in former
imperial powers (where it has now flowered into terrorism)..
War had once
again rearranged the global geopolitical geometry. This time the United States could not ignore
the challenges the new world order posed.
It rose to meet them.
World War II
devastated Japan, Europe, the Soviet Union, and China, but it left the American
homeland unscathed and lifted the United States out of economic
depression. The United States alone
possessed (and had used) nuclear weapons.
American international supremacy – not just military, economic, and
financial, but political, cultural, and moral – was undeniable. The more than six thousand ships in the U.S.
Navy gave America an effective global monopoly on naval power. By the time the war ended, the American
economy accounted for half or more of global output. Americans seemed to have all the money and
most of the answers. The United States
enshrined the dollar at the center of a new global monetary system that
exempted America from most of the financial discipline to which other countries
were subject. The United Nations
embodied American ideas for great-power collaboration that could manage world
affairs.
The almost
immediate emergence of a U.S.-Soviet contest for supremacy in Europe erased any
hope that the vanquishers of fascism and militarism could jointly manage world
affairs through the UN. The Cold War
divided the planet and established a bipolar world order, the likes of which
had not been seen since the Anglo-French contest for global dominance in which
our nation was born. As had been the case in the Napoleonic wars, America’s
rivalry with the USSR mixed ideology and geopolitics, pitting capitalism and
constitutional democracy against economic statism and totalitarian
dictatorship. The United States
responded to the new world order by transforming itself, its approach to
foreign policy, and the way its government was organized..
Americans
abandoned our 160-year-old aversion to entangling alliances. The United States extended formal defense
commitments to over two dozen countries on three continents. It adopted a grand strategy of “containment”
of the “communist bloc.” The purpose of
containment was to wall off the Soviet system and give it time to die of its
own deformities.
The first
alliances in American history established the perimeters of a new U.S. sphere
of influence from which we sought to exclude the USSR and its subordinate states,
denying them access to trade and investment as well as human and natural
resources. U.S. allies furnished bases
and served as military auxiliaries at the margins of this American-defended
sphere (which we called “the free world”).
To secure it against Soviet inroads, the United States jump-started
European recovery, helped reindustrialize Japan, and launched the visionary
reform and opening of world trade and investment that culminated decades later
in globalization.
Washington
needed a new national security structure to coordinate the policies and
programs of this unprecedented American activism in foreign affairs. The United States created an all-service
Department of Defense as well as foreign intelligence, propaganda, and aid
agencies. As the Cold War proceeded and
Americans became accustomed to life under threat and a permanently declared
state of emergency, the role of the military and intelligence services in
American foreign policy steadily expanded.
The size and political influence of what President Eisenhower named “the
military-industrial- congressional complex” grew apace.
The United
States abandoned the concept of a citizen army and built an impressively
professional military establishment. It
nurtured the growth of huge corporations dependent on federal outlays for their
research, development, and production of armaments. It funded the development of new foreign
policy-related academic disciplines, and established university departments and
think tanks to research how to apply them.
U.S. defense budgets and the American military-industrial complex came
to dwarf military spending and armaments production by all of America’s allies
and enemies combined. The budgets of
U.S. intelligence agencies grew to many times that of the Department of
State. Diplomats gave way to employees
of other agencies as the largest component of America’s civilian presence
overseas.
And then,
twenty-five years ago, the USSR first gave up its drive for global dominance
and then abolished itself. The threat environment that America’s
policy-making apparatus, military force structure, weaponry, alliances, spies,
and diplomatic representation abroad had all been designed to address suddenly
disappeared. No great enemy or
ideological challenge appeared to replace Soviet communism as an existential
threat to the United States.
This was a
fundamental change in the world order, comparable to that which had galvanized
America's self-transformation as the Cold War began. But the Soviet threat had gone away and there
wasn’t an obvious new one. Under these
circumstances, few Americans thought there was a compelling need to retool to
address the more complex realities of a world in which we had no ideological or
geopolitical rival. We felt no urgent
need to change course. So we didn’t.
Instead,
Americans sought to cure our enemy deprivation syndrome through a leisurely
search for a credible adversary to replace the USSR. We failed to find one. Still, the United States did not trim its
alliance structure to reflect the absence of a direct – still less an
existential – threat to either our global ascendancy or our homeland. Quite the contrary.
Because there
was nothing to stop us from doing so, we expanded our alliances to fill the
politico-military space the Soviet default on the Cold War had made
available. Over the past quarter
century, in the absence of any identifiable military threat to Europe, NATO has
grown from sixteen to twenty-eight (soon to be twenty-nine) members. And the United States has now extended
America’s defense responsibilities right up to the borders of both Russia and
China, while claiming the unilateral right to keep order in all the territories
and seas beyond these borders.
In the process,
the United States has aligned itself with every country that has a border
dispute with either Russia or China.
Americans are now the self-proclaimed protectors of Georgia and Ukraine
from their Russian neighbor. We are in
the process of developing a commitment to protect Vietnam from China – this
time all of it, not just its southern half.
Despite the fact that the United States has not won a war so far this
century, Americans seem willing to bet our future on the proposition that no
bluff we make will ever be called. Or
perhaps we really are prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed adversaries over
constitutional arrangements in culturally schizophrenic Ukraine or who can
perch where on the uninhabitable rocks and reefs of the East and South China
Seas.
The expanded
defense commitments we have undertaken do not reflect considered national
judgments on the part of the American people.
They are not anchored in our constitution. They are the product of ingrained habit,
institutional inertia, hubris, and blindness within the Beltway to the
realities of a changed world order. The
extent to which the American people will back these commitments is uncertain. The foreign pushback to them is not.
The
international environment the United States must cope with is no longer defined
by a life-and-death struggle between would-be global hegemons but by tugs of
war between shifting combinations of great powers and regional actors. But we Americans invested a lot in Cold War
bureaucracies, systems, intellectual superstructures, and alliances designed to
manage bipolarity. These institutions
have no interest in going out of business.
They have become what our military colleagues call “self-licking ice
cream cones.” This makes it unthinkable
to ask what their purpose now is. And we
have a military industrial base to sustain and jobs in the defense sector to protect.
The political
path of least resistance has clearly been to keep doing what worked during the
Cold War. So that’s what we’ve
done. But this is a little like
continuing to play checkers when the game has changed to chess. The old rules – those we went by in the Cold
War – no longer apply and the old moves no longer work. Our failure to recognize this is having
increasingly serious consequences.
The Soviet
stand-down from the contest to dominate the world left the United States as the
sole superpower. The clash between
constitutional democracy and messianic totalitarianism ended; so did the
contest between free-market capitalism and statism . The world became safe for political and
ideological diversity. Apprehensions
about nuclear war virtually disappeared.
Superpower proxy wars in the Third World ceased. But, at the same time, the Cold War’s
restraints on less powerful nations and peoples also disappeared. The world changed, and its rules of
engagement changed with it.
No longer
constrained by its Soviet patron, Iraq inaugurated the post-Cold War era by
invading and annexing Kuwait. In
reprisal for Western and Western-backed Israeli intrusions in the Arab world,
Islamist extremists – accountable to no power but themselves – bombed New York
and the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. On September 11, 2001, they began a series of
spectacular terrorist assaults in New York, Washington, and other Western
capitals. They assisted secessionist
movements in similar massacres in Russia and China. They made it clear that they considered these
attacks to be retaliation for past wars against Muslims and the ongoing
persecution of Muslim minorities in Palestine, Europe, Russia, and
elsewhere.
During the Cold
War, the possibility of nuclear Armageddon gave the United States and the
Soviet Union a common interest in restraining our respective allies or client
states. Neither of us wanted a state
within our sphere to provoke the other by attacking its homeland. When wars occurred, we sought to keep them
limited so as to avoid their widening or escalating into direct combat between the
U.S. and Soviet armed forces.
Intervention in the nations of the Third World therefore entailed little
apparent risk to either the American or Soviet homeland.
In the bipolar
order of the past, neither the Soviet Union nor China would allow north Korea
or Vietnam to retaliate against the United States by attacking targets in
America. The United States might fight
thinly disguised Chinese forces in Korea and Vietnam but the Chinese could be
confident that America would not take its war to the Chinese mainland. The U.S. knew China would not attack
America. The Soviets could be sure that
the Afghan mujahedeen's CIA and Chinese handlers would discourage them from
going after targets in the USSR. The
United States could bomb Tripoli while relying on the Soviets to deter Libyan
reprisal against the American homeland.
And so forth. All this has
changed.
Now, when a
great power bombs a foreign people, there is no other great power to deter that
people from finding a way to bomb back. Hence
9/11. In the globalized world in which
we now live, Americans must expect military interventions in other lands to
generate opposite, if not immediate or symmetrical reactions against us. We are both more powerful and more vulnerable
to reprisal – if only pinprick – than at any previous period in our
history. We need to take this into
account when we use force overseas.
In the new
circumstances, the argument that Americans must fight “terrorists” “over there”
to avoid having to fight them “here” is dangerously wrong. We are learning the
hard way that the more we poke hornets’ nests abroad, the more likely hornets
are to sting us here in our homeland.
Drone warfare is proving counterproductive. Killing Muslims overseas while projecting an
image of an America that hates and represses Islam at home is just what is
required to inspire anti-American extremists with global reach and
self-starting American copycats.
The greater
likelihood of retaliation against us by non-state actors, including deranged
individuals with guns or improvised explosive devices, is, of course, far from
the only important change in the international environment to which the United
States has yet to craft an effective response. Global dynamics increasingly reflect the
emergence of non-western forms of modernity and the diffusion of power to the
world’s regions. Major realignments and
shifts in regional balances of power are also taking place. Americans are not coping at all well with a
world in which we no longer call the shots.
As the 21st
century began, misguided U.S. attempts at regime change in West Asia and North
Africa overthrew the state system imposed by European colonialism, destabilized
previously tranquil societies, and ignited sectarian conflict, ethnic
cleansing, and civil wars. The region is
now being reshaped by sectarianism, widening proxy wars between Iran, Saudi
Arabia, and the other Gulf Arabs, eruptions of Jewish and Muslim extremism, and
violent disagreements among Muslims about how to restore their civilization to
greatness. None of these countries or
causes can now be restrained by great powers outside the region. The United
States and other outside powers whose interventions helped kindle this strife have
been powerless to inhibit, let alone halt it.
U.S. relations
with all the major actors in the region – Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi
Arabia, Turkey – are ever more distrustful and strained. Rebuilding these relationships is the
prerequisite for implementing a strategy – if Americans can devise one – to
defend and advance U.S. interests in the region. But even then, progress will depend on the
region’s major powers agreeing a peace among themselves. The United States may or may not be part of such
a process.
The spreading
violence is an existential threat only to the states and peoples in the region
where it originates, but it is having painful worldwide spillover effects. Neither Russia nor Europe has been able to
insulate itself. The mayhem is now
touching the United States and countries in East and South Asia. There is no coherent international plan for
containing the threat of Islamist terrorism.
In many respects, American, Russian, European, and Chinese policies and
actions seem to be exacerbating it.
Instead of making common cause with mainstream Muslims to combat
Islamist extremists, the United States is alienating itself from the Islamic
world. Obvious opportunities for
diplomatic cooperation remain unexplored and unexploited.
Uncontrollable
flows of refugees escaping war and poverty in West Asia, North Africa, and the
Sahel now threaten the unity of the European Union (EU), which was already
under stress from economic stagnation and persistently high unemployment. The EU’s economic problems have exacerbated
racial and religious tensions between Europeans and immigrants from their
former colonies. The result is belated
blowback from imperialism in the form of Islamist extremism and terrorism. This has given some of the EU’s newer member
states excuses to pursue autocratic and nationalist agendas that further
threaten the continent’s hard-won political and cultural cohesion.
Divisions
between Europe’s prosperous north and its indebted south, its liberal west and
autocratic east, and its German-dominated euro land and areas with national
currencies are more acute than ever. The
EU has proved unable to coordinate the fiscal policies of its members. It has had to rely on monetary policy instead. But few now believe that monetary policy
alone can end economic malaise in Europe
– or, for that matter, in America.
Europeans are increasingly despondent.
Europe demands
attention from the United States. It is
not just that Europe and America are part of a single geostrategic zone and
previously dominant global civilization.
The European economy remains the world’s largest. Sustaining the worldwide influence of Western
values in the face of competition from non-Western traditions requires
preserving transatlantic consensus.
Americans share Europeans’ frustration with dysfunctional
government. We can and should learn from
each other as we work to mend our broken politics.
Europe’s
political, economic, and ideological fault lines were for long the major source
of global conflict. On at least four
occasions, these divisions have convulsed the world in planetwide warfare. This is an important reason that European
unity has long been as much an American as a European project. If Europe disintegrates, so will
transatlantic ties.
But European
enthusiasm for the EU has flagged. The
EU has been unable to develop coherent responses to any of the political and
economic crises it now faces. Popular
dissatisfaction with both the shortcomings of EU governance and its
bureaucratism has grown. As the British
referendum on whether to leave the EU illustrates, there is now a serious risk
that Europe will come apart.
Meanwhile, in a
classic instance of moral hazard, the willingness of the United States to
supply military muscle for Europe through NATO continues to relieve Europeans
of the need to pay and provide for their own defense. Europe’s failure to come together as an
effective political and military partner for the United States has in turn reduced
American interest in “the European project.”
At the same time, Europeans see the United States as too prone to pursue
military solutions to essentially political problems. Europeans and Americans are slowly falling
out on matters of great concern to both.
The Ukraine
imbroglio is a case in point. To be
stable, independent, and prosperous, Ukraine requires cooperative relations
with both the EU and Russia. Western
Europeans, led by Germany, seek to restore a relationship between the EU and
Russia within which Ukraine can find such balance while healing its internal
divisions and evolving a coherent national identity, much like the
neutralization of Austria at the height of the Cold War. Americans and some Eastern Europeans see
containing Russian influence in Ukraine and fortifying the EU’s borders with
Russia as the main tasks before us.
EU efforts to
renew diplomatic dialogue and rebuild trust with Russia contradict the U.S.
preference for military capacity-building in Ukraine and escalating pressure to
punish Russian adventurism. These
differing approaches test transatlantic unity.
They leave Ukraine’s identity crisis uncured and Russia’s long-term
relationship with Europe unaddressed.
The result is a protracted crisis that calls into question both
Ukraine’s viability as a nation and its potential as both a buffer state and
bridge between Russia and the rest of Europe.
In this
stalemate, all sides lose. The impasse
in Ukraine inhibits desirable cooperation between Europe, Russia, and the
United States on other issues. It contributes
to the current drift toward more distant US-European relations. Like Germany after World War I, Russia is
left with no stake in the European order.
And Americans and Russians are once again engaged in contingency
planning for a possible war between us.
U.S.-led
efforts to isolate Russia have also strengthened its impulse to make common
cause with China. Both Beijing and
Moscow seek to counter what they see as U.S. policies that disrespect their
interests or those of other independent states.
Ironically, in view of the historic disdain of both for the rule of law,
this has driven them to emphasize support for international law, the procedures
of the United Nations, and the principles of the Westphalian order. They base their opposition to U.S.-backed
military interventions like those in Libya, Syria, or Yemen on the principles
of the UN Charter. Meanwhile, Russia
cites NATO’s forceful separation of Kosovo from Serbia without UN authorization
as an exculpatory precedent for its own less violent but equally unauthorized
separation of Crimea from Ukraine.
Russia is a
great regional power that borders Europe, the Middle East, China, and Japan and
has intercontinental nuclear reach. It
plays a major role in global energy and arms markets. The U.S. attempt to punish Russian
adventurism in Ukraine by ostracizing Moscow has inadvertently revealed how
important the Russians are as players on issues of importance to the United
States. Without Russian cooperation or
acquiescence, it is hard to imagine any success in the management of affairs in
Europe, the Middle East, post-NATO Afghanistan, or the Arctic. Demonizing and dissing Russia’s leader is
puerile posturing, not a policy. In the
new world disorder, adversaries on some issues are indispensable allies on
others. The notion that “you are either
with us or against us” is an unsophisticated delusion of bush-league minds.
U.S.-Russian
interaction over Syria, where we are adversaries, has illustrated this on
several occasions. Russia’s
now-six-month-old military intervention in Syria has altered more than the
correlation of forces on the ground. It
has underscored the need for a peace process in Syria and begun to make one
possible. It has made Russia a
significant actor in the international campaign against Islamist terrorism and
an essential part of any effort to staunch the flows of refugees that now
threaten the EU. In response, without
announcing a policy change, Washington has reengaged with Moscow.
Wisdom is to be
welcomed, even when delayed. Dismissing
Russia as a has-been power has been a mistake. The question Americans must now
dare to address is how to secure Russian cooperation where we have common
interests, even as we oppose each other where our interests conflict.
U.S. policies are
currently pushing Russia toward China, whose rise was already rebalancing
relationships across the Eurasian landmass, on its periphery, and in the world
as a whole. China’s GDP has quintupled
since 1990. It's on course to surpass
that of the United States. China has
begun to play an active role in reshaping the postwar international economic
order, which it views as skewed in favor of American, European, and Japanese
interests. By 2020, the Chinese are
expected to have invested $20 trillion abroad.
As the inauguration of institutions like the Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank and the so-called “BRICS bank” illustrate, China is now a
significant force in global governance.
It has become a rule-maker, not just a rule-taker.
The economic
order in the Indo-Pacific is now Sino-centric.
This reality is not going to be changed by the bravado around which the
Obama administration has built its domestic political case for approval of the
“Trans-Pacific Partnership” (TPP). China
cannot be excluded from writing a major part of the rules in a region where it
is everybody’s largest trading partner and source of new investment. India and Japan, the Indo-Pacific’s other
great powers, will also have much to say, as will ASEAN. They are reacting to China’s growing military
power by beginning to cooperate to offset it.
This is causing them to strengthen their relations with the United
States and with each other. China is
their greatest security concern but China is and is likely also to remain their
largest economic partner.
In military
terms, China is not yet an irresistible force, but it has become an immovable
object. Enhanced access to Russian and
European science, technology, and armament is now accelerating its
modernization, including its military modernization. But this just adds to China’s increasingly
formidable capabilities for innovation.
By 2025, it is expected to have a larger scientific, technological,
engineering, and mathematical workforce than all member countries of the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) combined.
This
underscores the need to recognize and respond to China’s growing role not just
in East Asia but in a much wider arena.
China’s “one belt, one road” proposal is by far the largest integrated infrastructure project in human history. It aims to connect every part of the Eurasian
landmass to every other and to ensure that all roads, railroads, and other
links in this vast space lead to Beijing, placing China at its center. This is a plan to erase borders to every kind
of human interaction from Portugal to the Pacific. It is an effort to integrate the major part
of the planet by commercial confederation rather than military conquest. It requires a non-military response.
As the AIIB
debacle demonstrated, on many issues American allies, partners, and friends now
see their interests as dictating support for Chinese positions rather than
ours. This is a further illustration of
the absence of fixity in international relationships and the increasing
fluidity of the new world disorder. A
country with which we collaborate on one difference with a third country may
very well be our opponent on another issue involving that very same
country. Americans need to cultivate the
emotional detachment and master the diplomatic agility required to cope with
these complexities.
In the
protracted struggle between two sides that was the Cold War, the primary task
of both American diplomacy and military planning was the prevention of changes
in the bipolar status quo, not the resolution of its problems or the
achievement of favorable adjustments to it.
The United States specialized in the military deterrence of change, not
problem solving through diplomacy. U.S.
diplomacy came to resemble trench warfare.
Its purpose was to hold the line, while occasionally probing the other
side’s defenses – to recognize that breakthroughs by our side were impossible
and to ensure that they were equally impossible for the other side. We have left that world behind. The rigid system of alliances we built to
forestall change in the borders between now-vanished spheres of influence needs
zero-based reexamination.
Policies
directed at managing potential conflict through military deterrence rather than
attempting to eliminate the causes of such conflict through negotiations also
need reexamination. Deterrence does not
remove the risk that differences between nations will degenerate into armed
conflict so much as delay such conflict.
It contains but perpetuates the danger of war.
During the Cold
War, almost every issue was a zero-sum game in which one superpower’s advance
was seen as the other’s retreat. Given
the desire of both superpowers to prevent local disputes from spiraling into
combat and possible nuclear war between them, it made sense to respond to
almost all challenges by freezing them.
The most effective way to do that was by issuing threats that showed
willingness to risk escalation. But,
with the Cold War behind us, such military deterrence to block change rather
than diplomacy aimed at reducing or ending the danger of war is proving
counterproductive.
There is no
“free world” with borders whose ramparts we Americans must man. There is no longer a global zero-sum game
between competing ideological camps or spheres of influence. We can afford to try to solve problems rather
than storing up trouble by letting them fester.
We have no need to preserve our credibility as the defenders of the
status quo against a now non-existent adversary. In the new circumstances, adjustments in the
past state of affairs need not signal a loss of American control so much as a
demonstration of American power.
Instead of reflexively deterring such adjustments, we should be thinking
about how to turn them to global and regional advantage.
For example, it
would clearly serve U.S. interests to end the south-north confrontation on the
Korean Peninsula and, with it, the U.S. troop presence along the 38th
Parallel that serves as a tripwire against north Korean attack. What happens between south and north Korea is
no longer connected to any global contest.
And it does not make sense to preserve the status quo until -- perhaps a
decade or more from now -- a hostile north Korea acquires the ability to
conduct a nuclear strike against our homeland, which it will, unless things
change.
South Korea now
has an economy thirty-five times that of the north. A peace treaty between south and north,
joined by the United States and China, could end the danger of war in
Korea. So, of course, would an implosion
of the despicable north Korean regime.
Either outcome should be acceptable to Americans. But a negotiated end to the military standoff
on the Peninsula would surely be preferable to the violent uncertainties of
turmoil in the north. Americans and
south Koreans should focus on what sort of relationship the United States might
have with a Korea that is at peace with itself, how to achieve such a Korea,
and what kinds of relationships Korea should have with China and Japan.
Similarly, a
negotiated resolution of the question of Taiwan’s relationship to the rest of
China would remove a threat to the peace of the Western Pacific and a potential
casus belli between China and the United States. The status quo risks an eventual armed clash between competing nationalisms that
would devastate Taiwan and adjacent areas of the China mainland, while dragging
the United States into war with a nuclear-armed China. It impairs Taiwan’s prosperity by inhibiting
its participation in regional trade and investment regimes. The emotions it generates constrain
cooperation between China and the United States.
U.S. policies
posited on sustaining military balance in the Taiwan Strait are unrealistic,
infeasible, and counterproductive. Since
1950, the major objective of the United States in the Taiwan area has been to
preclude the use of force there. While
it's up to Taipei and Beijing to strike a deal both can live with, it's time
for the United States to adopt policies that have the effect of encouraging
rather than inhibiting or discouraging them from doing so.
For analogous
reasons, as I have argued elsewhere, rather than deploying the U.S. armed
forces to freeze the situation in the East and South China Seas through
military deterrence, the United States should be encouraging the parties to
settle their disputes through negotiations.
As a final
example, in the Middle East, Israel’s continued viability as an internationally
supported, democratic, Jewish homeland is in mounting jeopardy as Palestinians
are transformed into a desperate people without land. The consequences of the Israel-Palestine
conflict for both regional stability and U.S. interests have already been
enormous. The potential for catastrophe
is growing.
Enabling the
continuation of current trends will end in disaster for the United States as
well as Israel, the Palestinians, and the region. Americans must now use our leverage to impose
incentives for Israel to prefer peaceful coexistence with its Arab neighbors
and disincentives for it to continue oppressing and displacing
Palestinians. The alternative is
tragedy.
The Pax
Americana is no more. America’s
alliances have lost their original purposes as have most of its client-state
relationships. With few exceptions, U.S.
allies and protected states are no longer threatened by countries that are also
enemies of the United States. Their
issues are not those of Americans and American issues are not theirs.
The policies we
have inherited on issues like those I have just cited all lead at best to dead
ends and at worst to tragedy. All place
short-term considerations ahead of likely long-term consequences. None is clearly succeeding. Some are visibly failing. The issues they present are no longer
imbedded in zero-sum rivalry at the global level. Their peaceful resolution by the parties
would harm no one else and benefit many.
Despite the political difficulties of changing long-established
policies, all merit rethinking. It is
time to take the risk to consider how to discourage the parties to such
disputes from carrying on as they have and to incentivize them to take their
own actions to mitigate, settle, or shelve their differences.
To sum up: in
the new world disorder, America needs national security policies that begin and
end by asking what’s in these policies for Americans, not what foreign nations
long dependent on our protection might think about them. There is no reason for us to continue to
shoulder burdens others can now bear. We
should build our strength while holding it in reserve. We should act only when it's in our interest
to act. If the United States makes
itself and the world safer, Americans will be better off. Our credibility – with which we have become
so obsessed – will take care of itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment