Dick Cheney’s Song of America
Drafting a plan for global dominance
Discussed
in this essay:
Defense Planning Guidance
for the 1994–1999 Fiscal Years
(Draft), Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1992
Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994–1999
Fiscal Years (Revised Draft), Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1992
Defense Strategy far the 1990s, Office of the Secretary of Defense,
1993
Defense Planning
Guidance for the 2004–2009 Fiscal Years, Office of the Secretary of
Defense, 2002
Few
writers are more ambitious than the writers of government policy papers, and
few policy papers are more ambitious than Dick Cheney’s masterwork. It has
taken several forms over the last decade and is in fact the product of several
ghostwriters (notably Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell), but Cheney has been
consistent in his dedication to the ideas in the documents that bear his name,
and he has maintained a close association with the ideologues behind them. Let
us, therefore, call Cheney the author, and this series of documents the Plan.
The
Plan was published in unclassified form most recently under the title of Defense Strategy for the 1990s, as Cheney ended his term as
secretary of defense under the elder George Bush in early 1993, but it is, like
Leaves of Grass, a perpetually
evolving work. It was the controversial Defense
Planning Guidance draft of 1992 — from which Cheney, unconvincingly,
tried to distance himself — and it was the somewhat less aggressive
revised draft of that same year. This June it was a presidential lecture in the
form of a commencement address at West Point, and in July it was leaked to the
press as yet another Defense Planning
Guidance (this time under the pen name of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld).
It will take its ultimate form, though, as America’s new national security
strategy — and Cheney et al. will experience what few writers have even
dared dream: their words will become our reality.
The
Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is
unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the
United States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority and prevent
new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for
dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States
must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely
powerful.
The
Plan is disturbing in many ways, and ultimately unworkable. Yet it is being
sold now as an answer to the “new realities” of the post–September 11 world,
even as it was sold previously as the answer to the new realities of the
post–Cold War world. For Cheney, the Plan has always been the right answer, no
matter how different the questions.
Cheney’s
unwavering adherence to the Plan would be amusing, and maybe a little sad,
except that it is now our plan. In
its pages are the ideas that we now act upon every day with the full might of
the United States military. Strangely, few critics have noted that Cheney’s
work has a long history, or that it was once quite unpopular, or that it was
created in reaction to circumstances that are far removed from the ones we now
face. But Cheney is a well-known action man. One has to admire, in a way, the
Babe Ruth–like sureness of his political work. He pointed to center field ten
years ago, and now the ball is sailing over the fence.
( 2 of 9 )
Before
the Plan was about domination it was about money. It took shape in late 1989,
when the Soviet threat was clearly on the decline, and, with it, public support
for a large military establishment. Cheney seemed unable to come to terms with
either new reality. He remained deeply suspicious of the Soviets and strongly
resisted all efforts to reduce military spending. Democrats in Congress jeered
his lack of strategic vision, and a few within the Bush Administration were
whispering that Cheney had become an irrelevant factor in structuring a response
to the revolutionary changes taking place in the world.
More
adaptable was the up-and-coming General Colin Powell, the newly appointed
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Ronald Reagan’s national security
adviser, Powell had seen the changes taking place in the Soviet Union firsthand
and was convinced that the ongoing transformation was irreversible. Like
Cheney, he wanted to avoid military cuts, but he knew they were inevitable. The
best he could do was minimize them, and the best way to do that would be to
offer a new security structure that would preserve American military
capabilities despite reduced resources.
Powell
and his staff believed that a weakened Soviet Union would result in shifting
alliances and regional conflict. The United States was the only nation capable
of managing the forces at play in the world; it would have to remain the
preeminent military power in order to ensure the peace and shape the emerging
order in accordance with American interests. U.S. military strategy,
therefore, would have to shift from global containment to managing
less-well-defined regional struggles and unforeseen contingencies. To do this,
the United States would have to project a military “forward presence” around
the world; there would be fewer troops but in more places. This plan still
would not be cheap, but through careful restructuring and superior technology,
the job could be done with 25 percent fewer troops. Powell insisted that
maintaining superpower status must be the first priority of the U.S. military.
“We have to put a shingle outside our door saying, ‘Superpower Lives Here,’ no
matter what the Soviets do,” he said at the time. He also insisted that the
troop levels he proposed were the bare minimum necessary to do so. This concept
would come to be known as the “Base Force.”
Powell’s
work on the subject proved timely. The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989,
and five days later Powell had his new strategy ready to present to Cheney.
Even as decades of repression were ending in Eastern Europe, however, Cheney
still could not abide even the force and budget reductions Powell proposed.
Yet he knew that cuts were unavoidable. Having no alternative of his own to
offer, therefore, he reluctantly encouraged Powell to present his ideas to the
president. Powell did so the next day; Bush made no promises but encouraged
him to keep at it
( 3 of 9 )
Less
encouraging was the reaction of Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense
for policy. A lifelong proponent of the unilateralist, maximum-force approach,
he shared Cheney’s skepticism about the Eastern Bloc and so put his own staff
to work on a competing plan that would somehow accommodate the possibility of
Soviet backsliding.[1] As Powell and Wolfowitz worked out their
strategies, Congress was losing patience. New calls went up for large cuts in
defense spending in light of the new global environment. The harshest
critique of Pentagon planning came from a usually dependable ally of the
military establishment, Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate
Armed Services Committee. Nunn told fellow senators in March 1990 that there
was a “threat blank” in the administration’s proposed $295 billion defense
budget and that the Pentagon’s “basic assessment of the overall threat to our
national security” was “rooted in the past.” The world had changed and yet the
“development of a new military strategy that responds to the changes in the
threat has not yet occurred.” Without that response, no dollars would be
forthcoming.
[1]
During the elder Bush’s tenure as CIA director in the 1970s, Wolfowitz had
served on a panel of defense experts known as “Team B,” which concluded that
U.S. intelligence was vastly underestimating the scale of the Soviet
threat — an opinion he had yet to revise in 1990.
Nunn’s
message was clear. Powell and Wolfowitz began filling in the blanks. Powell
started promoting a Zen-like new rationale for his Base Force approach. With
the Soviets rapidly becoming irrelevant, Powell argued, the United States could
no longer assess its military needs on the basis of known threats. Instead, the
Pentagon should focus on maintaining the ability to address a wide variety of
new and unknown challenges. This shift from a “threat based” assessment of
military requirements to a “capability based” assessment would become a key theme
of the Plan. The United States would move from countering Soviet attempts at
dominance to ensuring its own dominance. Again, this project would not be
cheap.
Powell’s
argument, circular though it may have been, proved sufficient to hold off
Congress. Winning support among his own colleagues, however, proved more
difficult. Cheney remained deeply skeptical about the Soviets, and Wolfowitz
was only slowly coming around. To account for future uncertainties, Wolfowitz
recommended drawing down U.S. forces to roughly the levels proposed by Powell,
but doing so at a much slower pace: seven years as opposed to the four Powell
suggested. He also built in a “crisis response/reconstitution” clause that
would allow for reversing the process if events in the Soviet Union, or
elsewhere, turned ugly.
With
these new elements in place, Cheney saw something that might work. By combining
Powell’s concepts with those of Wolfowitz, he could counter congressional
criticism that his proposed defense budget was out of line with the new
strategic reality, while leaving the door open for future force increases. In
late June, Wolfowitz, Powell, and Cheney presented their plan to the president,
and within a few weeks Bush was unveiling the new strategy.
Bush
laid out the rationale for the Plan in a speech in Aspen, Colorado, on August
2, 1990. He explained that since the danger of global war had substantially
receded, the principal threats to American security would emerge in unexpected
quarters. To counter those threats, he said, the United States would
increasingly base the size and structure of its forces on the need to respond
to “regional contingencies” and maintain a peacetime military presence
overseas. Meeting that need would require maintaining the capability to quickly
deliver American forces to any “corner of the globe,” and that would mean
retaining many major weapons systems then under attack in Congress as overly
costly and unnecessary, including the “Star Wars” missile-defense program.
Despite those massive outlays, Bush insisted that the proposed restructuring
would allow the United States to draw down its active forces by 25 percent in
the years ahead, the same figure Powell had projected ten months earlier.
The
Plan’s debut was well timed. By a remarkable coincidence, Bush revealed it the
very day Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait.
( 4 of 9 )
The
Gulf War temporarily reduced the pressure to cut military spending. It also
diverted attention from some of the Plan’s less appealing aspects. In addition,
it inspired what would become one of the Plan’s key features: the use of “overwhelming
force” to quickly defeat enemies, a concept since dubbed the Powell Doctrine.
Once
the Iraqi threat was “contained,” Wolfowitz returned to his obsession with
the Soviets, planning various scenarios involving possible Soviet intervention
in regional conflicts. The failure of the hard-liner coup against Gorbachev in
August 1991, however, made it apparent that such planning might be unnecessary.
Then, in late December, just as the Pentagon was preparing to put the Plan in
place, the Soviet Union collapsed.
With
the Soviet Union gone, the United States had a choice. It could capitalize on
the euphoria of the moment by nurturing cooperative relations and developing
multilateral structures to help guide the global realignment then taking
place; or it could consolidate its power and pursue a strategy of unilateralism
and global dominance. It chose the latter course.
In
early 1992, as Powell and Cheney campaigned to win congressional support for
their augmented Base Force plan, a new logic entered into their appeals. The
United States, Powell told members of the House Armed Services Committee,
required “sufficient power” to “deter any challenger from ever dreaming of
challenging us on the world stage.” To emphasize the point, he cast the United
States in the role of street thug. “I want to be the bully on the block,” he
said, implanting in the mind of potential opponents that “there is no future
in trying to challenge the armed forces of the United States.”
As
Powell and Cheney were making this new argument in their congressional
rounds, Wolfowitz was busy expanding the concept and working to have it
incorporated into U.S. policy. During the early months of 1992, Wolfowitz
supervised the preparation of an internal Pentagon policy statement used to
guide military officials in the preparation of their forces, budgets, and
strategies. The classified document, known as the Defense Planning Guidance, depicted a world dominated by the United
States, which would maintain its superpower status through a combination of
positive guidance and overwhelming military might. The image was one of a
heavily armed City on a Hill.
The
DPG stated that the “first objective”
of U.S. defense strategy was “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival.”
Achieving this objective required that the United States “prevent any hostile
power from dominating a region” of strategic significance. America’s new
mission would be to convince allies and enemies alike “that they need not
aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their
legitimate interests.”
Another
new theme was the use of preemptive military force. The options, the DPG noted, ranged from taking preemptive
military action to head off a nuclear, chemical, or biological attack to
“punishing” or “threatening punishment of aggressors “through a variety of
means,” including strikes against weapons-manufacturing facilities.
The
DPG also envisioned maintaining a
substantial U.S. nuclear arsenal while discouraging the development of
nuclear programs in other countries. It depicted a “U.S.-led system of
collective security” that implicitly precluded the need for rearmament of any
kind by countries such as Germany and Japan. And it called for the “early
introduction” of a global missile-defense system that would presumably render
all missile-launched weapons, including those of the United States, obsolete.
(The United States would, of course, remain the world’s dominant military
power on the strength of its other weapons systems.)
The
story, in short, was dominance by way of unilateral action and military
superiority. While coalitions — such as the one formed during the Gulf
War — held “considerable promise for promoting collective action,” the
draft DPG stated, the United States
should expect future alliances to be “ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting
beyond the crisis being confronted, and in many cases carrying only general
agreement over the objectives to be accomplished.” It was essential to create
“the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.” and essential
that America position itself “to act independently when collective action
cannot be orchestrated” or in crisis situations requiring immediate action.
“While the U.S. cannot become the world’s ‘policeman,’ ” the document
said, “we will retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing selectively
those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or
friends.” Among the interests the draft indicated the United States would
defend in this manner were “access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian
Gulf oil, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles,
[and] threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism.”
5 of 9 )
The
DPG was leaked to the New York Times in March 1992. Critics on
both the left and the right attacked it immediately. Then-presidential candidate
Pat Buchanan portrayed it as giving a “blank check” to America’s allies by
suggesting the United States would “go to war to defend their interests.” Bill
Clinton’s deputy campaign manager, George Stephanopoulos, characterized it as
an attempt by Pentagon officials to “find an excuse for big defense budgets
instead of downsizing.” Delaware Senator Joseph Biden criticized the Plan’s
vision of a “Pax Americana, a global security system where threats to stability
are suppressed or destroyed by U.S. military power.” Even those who found the
document’s stated goals commendable feared that its chauvinistic tone could
alienate many allies. Cheney responded by attempting to distance himself from
the Plan. The Pentagon’s spokesman dismissed the leaked document as a
“low-level draft” and claimed that Cheney had not seen it. Yet a fifteen-page
section opened by proclaiming that it constituted “definitive guidance from
the Secretary of Defense.”
Powell
took a more forthright approach to dealing with the flap: he publicly embraced
the DPG’s core concept. In a TV
interview, he said he believed it was “just fine” that the United States reign
as the world’s dominant military power. “I don’t think we should apologize for
that,” he said. Despite bad reviews in the foreign press, Powell insisted that
America’s European allies were “not afraid” of U.S. military might because it
was “power that could be trusted” and “will not be misused.”
Mindful
that the draft DPG’s overt expression
of U.S. dominance might not fly, Powell in the same interview also trotted out
a new rationale for the original Base Force plan. He argued that in a
post-Soviet world, filled with new dangers, the United States needed the
ability to fight on more than one front at a time. “One of the most
destabilizing things we could do,” he said, “is to cut our forces so much that
if we’re tied up in one area of the world . . . and we are not
seen to have the ability to influence another area of the world, we might
invite just the sort of crisis we’re trying to deter.” This two-war strategy
provided a possible answer to Nunn’s “threat blank.” One unknown enemy wasn’t
enough to justify lavish defense budgets, but two unknown enemies might do the
trick.
Within
a few weeks the Pentagon had come up with a more comprehensive response to the
DPG furor. A revised version was
leaked to the press that was significantly less strident in tone, though only
slightly less strident in fact. While calling for the United States to prevent
“any hostile power from dominating a region critical to out interests,” the new
draft stressed that America would act in concert with its allies — when
possible. It also suggested the United Nations might take an expanded role in
future political, economic, and security matters, a concept conspicuously
absent from the original draft.
The
controversy died down, and, with a presidential campaign under way, the
Pentagon did nothing to stir it up again. Following Bush’s defeat, however, the
Plan reemerged. In January 1993, in his very last days in office, Cheney
released a final version. The newly titled Defense
Strategy for the 1990s retained
the soft touch of the revised draft DPG
as well as its darker themes. The goal remained to preclude “hostile
competitors from challenging our critical interests” and preventing the rise
of a new superpower. Although it expressed a “preference” for collective
responses in meeting such challenges, it made clear that the United States
would play the lead role in any alliance. Moreover, it noted that collective
action would “not always be timely.” Therefore, the United States needed to
retain the ability to “act independently, if necessary.” To do so would require
that the United States maintain its massive military superiority. Others were
not encouraged to follow suit. It was kinder, gentler dominance, but it was
dominance all the same. And it was this thesis that Cheney and company nailed
to the door on their way out.
( 6 of 9 )
The
new administration tacitly rejected the heavy-handed, unilateral approach to
U.S. primacy favored by Powell, Cheney, and Wolfowitz. Taking office in the
relative calm of the early post–Cold War era, Clinton sought to maximize
America’s existing position of strength and promote its interests through
economic diplomacy, multilateral institutions (dominated by the United States),
greater international free trade, and the development of allied coalitions,
including American-led collective military action. American policy, in short,
shifted from global dominance to globalism.
Clinton
also failed to prosecute military campaigns with sufficient vigor to satisfy
the defense strategists of the previous administration. Wolfowitz found
Clinton’s Iraq policy especially infuriating. During the Gulf War, Wolfowitz
harshly criticized the decision — endorsed by Powell and Cheney — to
end the war once the U.N. mandate of driving Saddam’s forces from Kuwait had
been fulfilled, leaving the Iraqi dictator in office. He called on the Clinton
Administration to finish the job by arming Iraqi opposition forces and sending
U.S. ground troops to defend a base of operation for them in the southern region
of the country. In a 1996 editorial, Wolfowitz raised the prospect of
launching a preemptive attack against Iraq. “Should we sit idly by,” he wrote,
“with our passive containment policy and our inept covert operations, and wait
until a tyrant possessing large quantities of weapons of mass destruction and
sophisticated delivery systems strikes out at us?” Wolfowitz suggested it was
“necessary” to “go beyond the containment strategy.”
Wolfowitz’s
objections to Clinton’s military tactics were not limited to Iraq. Wolfowitz
had endorsed President Bush’s decision in late 1992 to intervene in Somalia on
a limited humanitarian basis. Clinton later expanded the mission into a
broader peacekeeping effort, a move that ended in disaster. With perfect
twenty-twenty hindsight, Wolfowitz decried Clinton’s decision to send U.S.
troops into combat “where there is no significant U.S. national interest.” He
took a similar stance on Clinton’s ill-fated democracy-building effort in
Haiti, chastising the president for engaging “American military prestige” on an
issue “of little or no importance” to U.S. interests. Bosnia presented a more
complicated mix of posturing and ideologies. While running for president,
Clinton had scolded the Bush Administration for failing to take action to stem
the flow of blood in the Balkans. Once in office, however, and chastened by
their early misadventures in Somalia and Haiti, Clinton and his advisers
struggled to articulate a coherent Bosnia policy. Wolfowitz complained in
1994 of the administration’s failure to “develop an effective course of
action.” He personally advocated arming the Bosnian Muslims in their fight
against the Serbs. Powell, on the other hand, publicly cautioned against
intervention. In 1995 a U.S.-led NATO bombing campaign, combined with a
Croat-Muslim ground offensive, forced the Serbs into negotiations, leading to
the Dayton Peace Accords. In 1999, as Clinton rounded up support for joint
U.S.-NATO action in Kosovo, Wolfowitz hectored the president for failing to
act quickly enough.
7 of 9 )
After
eight years of what Cheney et al. regarded as wrong-headed military adventures
and pinprick retaliatory strikes, the Clinton Administration — mercifully,
in their view — came to an end. With the ascension of George W. Bush to
the presidency, the authors of the Plan returned to government, ready to pick
up where they had left off. Cheney, of course, became vice president, Powell
became secretary of state, and Wolfowitz moved into the number-two slot at the
Pentagon, as Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy. Other contributors also returned: Two
prominent members of the Wolfowitz team that crafted the original DPG took up posts on Cheney’s staff.
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who served as Wolfowitz’s deputy during
Bush I, became the vice president’s chief of staff and national security
adviser. And Eric Edelman, an assistant deputy undersecretary of defense in the
first Bush Administration, became a top foreign policy adviser to Cheney.[2]
[2]
Zalmay Khalilzad, who served as assistant deputy undersecretary of defense
during the first Bush Administration, wrote a book during the Clinton interval
expressing the core concepts of the original DPG. Khalilzad argued that the United States should “preclude the
rise of another global rival for the indefinite future,” and “be willing to use
force if necessary for the purpose.” Khalilzad joined the inner circle of the
current administration as a special assistant to the president and today serves
as a U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan.
Cheney
and company had not changed their minds during the Clinton interlude about the
correct course for U.S. policy, but they did not initially appear bent on resurrecting the Plan.
Rather than present a unified vision of foreign policy to the world, in the
early going the administration focused on promoting a series of seemingly
unrelated initiatives. Notable among these were missile defense and
space-based weaponry, long-standing conservative causes. In addition, a
distinct tone of unilateralism emerged as the new administration announced
its intent to abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia in order to
pursue missile defense; its opposition to U.S. ratification of an
international nuclear-test-ban pact; and its refusal to become a party to an
International Criminal Court. It also raised the prospect of ending the
self-imposed U.S. moratorium on nuclear testing initiated by the President’s
father during the 1992 presidential campaign. Moreover, the administration
adopted a much tougher diplomatic posture, as evidenced, most notably, by a
distinct hardening of relations with both China and North Korea. While none of
this was inconsistent with the concept of U.S. dominance, these early actions
did not, at the time, seem to add up to a coherent strategy.
It
was only after September 11 that the Plan emerged in full. Within days of the
attacks, Wolfowitz and Libby began calling for unilateral military action
against Iraq, on the shaky premise that Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network
could not have pulled off the assaults without Saddam Hussein’s assistance. At
the time, Bush rejected such appeals, but Wolfowitz kept pushing and the
President soon came around. In his State of the Union address in January, Bush
labeled Iraq, Iran, and North Korea an “axis of evil,” and warned that he would
“not wait on events” to prevent them from using weapons of mass destruction
against the United States. He reiterated his commitment to preemption in his
West Point speech in June. “If we wait for threats to fully materialize we will
have waited too long,” he said. “We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt
his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” Although it was
less noted, Bush in that same speech also reintroduced the Plan’s central
theme. He declared that the United States would prevent the emergence of a
rival power by maintaining “military strengths beyond challenge.” With that,
the President effectively adopted a strategy his father’s administration had
developed ten years earlier to ensure that the United States would remain the
world’s preeminent power. While the headlines screamed “preemption,” no one
noticed the declaration of the dominance strategy.
8 of 9 )
In
case there was any doubt about the administration’s intentions, the Pentagon’s
new DPG lays them out. Signed by
Wolfowitz’s new boss, Donald Rumsfeld, in May and leaked to the Los Angeles Times in July, it contains
all the key elements of the original Plan and adds several complementary
features. The preemptive strikes envisioned in the original draft DPG are now “unwarned attacks.” The old
Powell-Cheney notion of military “forward presence” is now “forward deterrence.”
The use of overwhelming force to defeat an enemy called for in the Powell
Doctrine is now labeled an “effects based” approach.
Some
of the names have stayed the same. Missile defense is back, stronger than ever,
and the call goes up again for a shift from a “threat based” structure to a
“capabilities based” approach. The new DPG
also emphasizes the need to replace the so-called Cold War strategy of
preparing to fight two major conflicts simultaneously with what the Los
Angeles Times refers to as “a more complex approach aimed at dominating air
and space on several fronts.” This, despite the fact that Powell had originally
conceived — and the first Bush Administration had adopted — the
two-war strategy as a means of filling the “threat blank” left by the end of the Cold War.
Rumsfeld’s
version adds a few new ideas, most impressively the concept of preemptive
strikes with nuclear weapons. These would be earth-penetrating nuclear weapons
used for attacking “hardened and deeply buried targets,” such as
command-and-control bunkers, missile silos, and heavily fortified underground
facilities used to build and store weapons of mass destruction. The concept
emerged earlier this year when the administration’s Nuclear Posture Review leaked out. At the time, arms-control
experts warned that adopting the NPR’s recommendations would undercut existing
arms-control treaties, do serious harm to nonproliferation efforts, set off new
rounds of testing, and dramatically increase the prospects of nuclear weapons
being used in combat. Despite these concerns, the administration appears
intent on developing the weapons. In a final flourish, the DPG also directs the military to develop cyber?, laser?, and
electronic-warfare capabilities to ensure U.S. dominion over the heavens.
Rumsfeld
spelled out these strategies in Foreign
Affairs earlier this year, and it is there that he articulated the
remaining elements of the Plan: unilateralism and global dominance. Like the
revised DPG of 1992, Rumsfeld feigns
interest in collective action but ultimately rejects it as impractical. “Wars
can benefit from coalitions,” he writes, “but they should not be fought by
committee.” And coalitions, he adds, “must not determine the mission.” The
implication is the United States will determine the missions and lead the
fights. Finally, Rumsfeld expresses the key concept of the Plan: preventing the
emergence of rival powers. Like the original draft DPG of 1992, he states that America’s goal is to develop and
maintain the military strength necessary to “dissuade” rivals or adversaries from
“competing.” With no challengers, and a proposed defense budget of $379 billion
for next year, the United States would reign over all it surveys.
( 9 of 9 )
Reaction
to the latest edition of the Plan has, thus far, focused on preemption.
Commentators parrot the administration’s line, portraying the concept of
preemptory strikes as a “new” strategy aimed at combating terrorism. In an
op-ed piece for the Washington Post
following Bush’s West Point address, former Clinton adviser William Galston described
preemption as part of a “brand-new security doctrine,” and warned of possible
negative diplomatic consequences. Others found the concept more appealing.
Loren Thompson of the conservative Lexington Institute hailed the “Bush
Doctrine” as “a necessary response to the new dangers that America faces” and
declared it “the biggest shift in strategic thinking in two generations.” Wall Street
Journal editor Robert Bartley echoed that sentiment, writing that “no talk
of this ilk has been heard from American leaders since John Foster Dulles
talked of rolling back the Iron Curtain.”
Preemption,
of course, is just part of the Plan, and the Plan is hardly new. It is a
warmed-over version of the strategy Cheney and his coauthors rolled out in
1992 as the answer to the end of the Cold War. Then the goal was global dominance,
and it met with bad reviews. Now it is the answer to terrorism. The emphasis is
on preemption, and the reviews are generally enthusiastic. Through all of
this, the dominance motif remains, though largely undetected.
This
country once rejected “unwarned” attacks such as Pearl Harbor as barbarous and
unworthy of a civilized nation. Today many cheer the prospect of conducting
sneak attacks — potentially with nuclear weapons — on piddling
powers run by tin-pot despots.
We
also once denounced those who tried to rule the world. Our primary objection
(at least officially) to the Soviet Union was its quest for global domination.
Through the successful employment of the tools of containment, deterrence,
collective security, and diplomacy — the very methods we now reject —
we rid ourselves and the world of the Evil Empire. Having done so, we now
pursue the very thing for which we opposed it. And now that the Soviet Union is
gone, there appears to be no one left to stop us.
Perhaps,
however, there is. The Bush Administration and its loyal opposition seem not to
grasp that the quests for dominance generate backlash. Those threatened with
preemption may themselves launch preemptory strikes. And even those who are
successfully “preempted” or dominated may object and find means to strike back.
Pursuing such strategies may, paradoxically, result in greater factionalism and
rivalry, precisely the things we seek to end.
Not
all Americans share Colin Powell’s desire to be “the bully on the block.” In
fact, some believe that by following a different path the United States has an
opportunity to establish a more lasting security environment. As Dartmouth
professors Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, “Unipolarity makes it
possible to be the global bully — but it also offers the United States the
luxury of being able to look beyond its immediate needs to its own, and the
world’s, long-term interests. . . . Magnanimity and restraint
in the face of temptation are tenets of successful state craft that have
proved their worth.” Perhaps, in short, we can achieve our desired ends by
means other than global domination.
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