December 12, 2002
This week, FPA speaks with Dr. Andrew J. Bacevich, Director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University. He is also the author of the recently published book American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy.
TRANSCRIPT:
The name of your book is American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy. In it, you point out the strategic consistencies in the administration of the first President Bush and the two terms of Bill Clinton. In what ways were these administration's foreign policies alike, and has the current administration in any way diverged from this congruity?
The book tries show that we have had a coherent foreign policy since the end of the cold war. That idea, of course, is an exception to the conventional wisdom that we haven't. It also argues that this coherence has been shared across party lines and that it represents an extension of U.S. grand strategy over decades. In other words, the end of the cold war, the fall of the Berlin wall, the demise of the Soviet Empire, in a sense, really was not the dividing line that we tend to view it as. Much of what was U.S. foreign policy during the cold war continues to exist today. So the argument for coherence and for consistency goes further back than these first administrations of the post-cold war.
In terms of what's coming, what I try to argue is that we should think about U.S. foreign policy as arriving, in a very fundamental sense, not from our perceptions of the world, but from our own assessment of our domestic requirements -- that U.S. foreign policy is an extension of domestic policy, and when we think about our country and what we value, it seems to me that which we value above all other things is freedom. Freedom is the big cliché that politicians are always salting their speeches with, but the reason they do that is because people like you and me genuinely believe that freedom is important and we genuinely believe that that's what this constitutional order, this way of life, provides.
And so, what politicians want to do -- Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals -- is preserve that way of life and preserve that freedom. In order to sustain that American way of life, the sine qua non is prosperity and the expectation of continuous economic expansion. We think that freedom requires abundance. There is plenty of evidence, and I try to provide some of it, indicating that the two are linked in the minds of American politics. So, how to provide for continuous prosperity? Well, conservatives and Democrats have long since concluded that we cannot do that relying on the domestic market alone, that the only way to guarantee economic expansion is by increasing our access to trade and investment opportunities abroad. Thus, the true thrust of American foreign policy during the cold war and after has been the aim of removing barriers or obstacles to American enterprise -- an aim of trying to create an open world.
I want to continue on that, especially what you said about transferring the domestic ideals onto a larger scale, which is where I think that a number of the problems arrive. Earlier this year, Richard Haass gave a speech at the FPA…
The integration speech. I saw that on the web and when I read that I said, “Ah ha, this organization is on the same wavelength.”
And in your book, you refer to this as a “strategy of openness.”
Yes, I indicate that it is about openness and integration. It's about removing those barriers, but it is also about drawing the world together through the process of globalization. Our expectation is that this strategy of openness will provides for prosperity for others as well as ourselves, but above all for ourselves. However, we also think that in the long term, this open order will secure the spread of American values, meaning that the world is going to be organized to our liking, but it will be organized in a way in which our current primacy will become permanent.
How far do you see the administration as having come in terms of actually putting that policy into practice?
I try to argue in the book that it is evident in the emphasis that the elder Bush and Clinton both placed on trade policy. Clinton was especially emphatic on this with the passage of NAFTA, which was not a Clinton idea, but a Bush proposal that was implemented under Clinton. The creation of the World Trade Organization, and the three hundred trade agreements that were negotiated during his eight years as president are also examples of this.
It seems to me that it's not simply a lot of talk about openness, but a concerted effort to promote openness. Having said that, what Clinton discovered was that this push towards openness really means more than just the removal of barriers to trade and investment, but also encouraging nations to accept American values. There are a lot of American values that are very good and there are a lot that people abroad find offensive. This openness produces a backlash and it produces disorder, it produces opposition to the norms that we think ought to govern the world, and therefore, it produces a greater and greater reliance on the part of the United States on its military power.
So the 90s -- even though it's the first decade when there is no great power adversary to challenge us under a liberal president whose own record in a military sense was highly dubious -- end up being a period of extraordinary military activism. My interpretation of that activism is that in Bosnia and Kosovo, we saw interventions undertaken in order to support this larger strategy. The Clinton Administration claimed it was being motivated by humanitarian considerations in undertaking such interventions. My own assessment is that they actually reflect a strategy, strategic priorities, and not humanitarian concerns.
Let's take the example of Kosovo in 1999, which the Clinton Administration insisted was an action mandated by this great humanitarian crisis -- and there was a humanitarian crisis. But it seems to me that if you look at it through a strategic lens, that what you see in Kosovo is the following:
No continent on Earth has advanced in the direction of this model of an open and integrated world as much as Europe has in the aftermath of World War II. It is the greatest success story of American strategy. We have to acknowledge that the Europeans had a hand in making it happen, but it's the greatest success story of American strategy. Well, what is the basis of our claim to being the leading European power? It seems to me the basis of that claim is NATO and U.S. leadership in NATO. NATO has created the conditions whereby European integration and European recovery can occur. When the cold war ended, there was great concern in Washington over the relevance of NATO, and has been much said recently on the need to reinvent the alliance. In my judgment, what was spurring that discussion was the recognition that if you didn't reinvent NATO, then the American claim of being the leading power of Europe would be undermined.
The real danger was that if the U.S. and NATO did nothing with regard to Kosovo, the question certainly would be asked: What does NATO exist to do? And by extension, the question would be asked: Why should we defer to the United States as the leader of Europe any longer? Therefore, what made sense strategically was for the United States to lead NATO on this intervention in Kosovo, and in doing so, to establish a new rationale for maintaining NATO, even in the absence of a threat coming from the East.
To my mind, the purpose of the intervention had to do with strategic considerations rather than humanitarian ones. If you were genuinely concerned about the fate of the Kosovo Albanians, presumably upon intervention you'd do something to help them. But we go in foreswearing the use of ground troops, fighting the war using air power alone, and not even willing to put our pilots at risk. I'm not necessarily criticizing this in the sense that I'm eager to have our people be killed, but the predictable outcome is that our forces can't do anything to help the Kosovo Albanians, who continue to be ethnically cleansed even after the war begins. We find ourselves in order to win the war doing what? Bombing Belgrade, which does have the effect of winning the war, does have the effect of establishing a new role for NATO, and therefore affirms America's claim to be the leading power in this increasingly integrated continent -- but it certainly doesn't do much for the poor Kosovo Albanians. And that's how the use of military power connects to the grand strategy, at least as how I see it.
And the numerous conflicts that we've chosen to abstain from helps support the claim as well.
Now, your other question was, how much of that applies to the second and current Bush Administration. Maybe I'm just looking for evidence to suit my preconceived notions, but it seems to me that by and large, this administration is also committed to this strategy. Certainly it's easy to find references in the Bush National Security Document that was published in September about the importance of an open world, and America being an open society. One can certainly find the same sort of rhetoric we heard from the Clintonites coming from President Bush -- coming from Powell, coming from Robert Zoellick, the U.S. Trade Representative -- about the importance of removing barriers to trade and investment and how they will lead to democratization, and how they will lead to a peaceful world. So the rhetoric is certainly all there.
With regard to actions, the central event of this administration's time in office is the September 11th Attacks. First of all, I don't buy the notion that this is a war on terror, since terror is simply a tactic. This is simply a war against violent, anti-American Islamic radicalism, as one would emphasize. It's not Islam as a whole, but it's certain elements in the world of Islam who hate us. Those are the people who attacked us and those are the people we're at war against. The attack of 9/11 was an attack, when you think about it, on the very concept of openness. What the attackers did was to skillfully exploit the fact that we are an open society, that we are open to the movement of goods and people and ideas. And when you think about it as an attack on our openness, or exploiting our openness, then you say to yourself, we want to make sure this never happens again, a government has two basic options in that regard. One option is to erect barriers, and I mean more than physical barriers, to close ourselves off. We could guarantee that there will never be another 9/11 if we imposed severe restrictions on people entering this country, on trade coming into this country. We could protect ourselves. But you know and I know that there was never half a thought given to that approach.
The other approach is to go change the world so that we will no longer breed -- so that the world will no longer breed -- the sort of people who hate us and who are willing to attack us as they did on September 11th. And that's the war that the administration commenced and which we are engaged in, albeit still an early stage. The purpose of the war is to open up and transform those parts of the world from which the attackers come. That's what the war on Iraq is about in a small way.
It seems to me that this administration is still acting in the same paradigm as pre-September 11th where they're simply operating out of strategic interest. It doesn't seem that what you just mentioned is actually what is happening.
Yes, it is a continuation. When you carefully examine the rhetoric of people like Clinton and Albright, which was suffused with reference to the information revolution and to globalization, the Clinton Administration depicted those two phenomena as the big ideas that were sort of sweeping the world and changing it, and they continually talked about globalization as such a powerful force that nothing could stand in its way. And globalization, again, was leading towards openness and integration. Clinton resisted, I think, acknowledging the fact that there was nothing inevitable about the change, meaning he didn't want to confront and examine the disorder in the world: when people are blowing up our embassies, when they are attacking the USS Cole, when there's ethnic conflict, when there's genocide. Clinton didn't want to acknowledge that those realities contradicted his expectations, that globalization was leading us to the end of history.
Whatever Bush might have thought in that regard before 9/11, 9/11 emphatically showed Bush that there is nothing automatic about this creation of an open world and it also convinced him that America's trump card that is going to enable us to prevail ultimately is military force. So he's much more willing to use force in a very bold way. Hence the language of the National Security Strategy, the discussion of pre-emptive war, and the clear determination that we will remain the world's sole military power from now until the end of time. That we intend to spend so much money on defense, that no other nation in the world will even think it makes sense to compete.
I'd like to continue on with that a little bit. We've heard the importance of foresight in the debate surrounding the so-called “American Empire”. It's one of the dominant themes in Charles Kupchen's latest book, The End of the American Era, and numerous policy papers, and I believe you bring that up in your book as well. How would you compare the previous two administrations in terms of strategic foresight to this one, and what suggestions would you offer?
If you remember the campaign of 2000, you will recall that foreign policy was marginal and did not take any part in the outcome of the campaign. First we have to remember that Bush said U.S. foreign policy needed to be humble, and that was kind of a criticism of the Clinton Administration's tendency to talk in grand terms about being on the right side of history, and of America as the indispensable nation, and Bush didn't like the big talk. Since then, Bush has very much embraced the grandest formulation of our role. In the year 2000, he said he wasn't going to do that. In my recollection, the other big idea of the campaign, with regard to foreign policy, and you sort of put “big” in quotes because it really didn't capture much attention, was Bush criticizing Clinton on China.
Clinton had called China a strategic partner and Bush said that that's not true and that it's a strategic competitor. The Republicans -- and this gets to your point about strategic foresight -- suggest that where the Democrats had failed was in not understanding that the 21st century was going to be the century of Asia and that the central problem of this new Asian century was going to be the rise of China. That was their result of gazing into the crystal ball. It seems that they got that totally wrong.
The 21st century, to the extent that we can see it, will be the century of violent anti-American radical Islam. This is an enormous problem that is going to take a long time and they missed that. I missed it too. I think that in terms of strategic acuity, the Bush Administration, despite priding itself on having some serious strategists in its ranks has really done no better than the Clinton administration before it.
Paul Kennedy observed in a recent interview with FPA that throughout history “Time and time again, you find Roman Senators or Greek intellectuals or advisors to kings cautioning against too much hubris, lest it lead you to more responsibilities and more overstretch.” Is this statement applicable to the U.S. today? Are we in danger of exerting too much hubris -- of being caught up in a kind of colonial overstretch?
Absolutely. The war on Iraq really is not about Saddam Hussein entirely. More broadly, the war on Iraq is to be understood as the next step in this effort to transform the world of Islam and to open it up, to bring it to modernity. Meaning, we don't stop with Baghdad. I think the aim of certain elements of the Administration is the expectation, the hope, is that once we overthrow Saddam, we will convert Iraq into the first functioning, liberal democratic American state, and that will become the symbol, example, jumping off point whereby will begin to transform Iraq's neighbors to include those states that we have heretofore considered our friends and allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Saudi Arabia happening to be, of course, the place from which 15 of the 19 hijackers came.
Now, to my mind, this expectation that we can transform that region of the world and make it into a flourishing garden of liberal democracy invites overstretch, invites a backlash, and invites all kinds of problems that I think Americans are not willing to foot the bill for. Maybe it will all work out very well, but that's the sort of danger that lurks when we think about managing the American Empire, and its something we should be acutely conscious of.
Professor Bacevich, thank you so much for your time and insights.
Thank you.