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James Galbraith:
Our hope in inviting a participant this evening to give opening remarks was to find someone who was truly an original. And to give you an idea of how original Mike Lind is, I could just say that at the time when just about every loathsome individual one can imagine was seeing the opportunities in making an ostentatious migration from the left to the right, Mike decided to make a migration in the other direction. And he got at least as far as the radical center.
I first got to know him, actually, when he reviewed one of my books, and said two things memorable: one at the beginning, which was that it was brilliant and iconoclastic--I like that very much--and then at the end [about] which he said his reaction was, You and whose army?
But it wasn’t until one looks a little bit at what this fellow has been up to that you realize what a powerhouse and a polymath he actually is. He has edited or written for, and extensively, just about every worthwhile publication journal in America and a few that would not reap that--a few worthless ones. But in addition to that, he has a book of poetry entitled The Alamo, he has a children’s book entitled Blue Bonnet Girl, and he is a comprehensive and incisive commentator on every dimension of American political economy and foreign policy. So he is in many ways the ideal person to start us off this evening. And I will just note the most recent three of this books, which give you some of the range. One of them is called The Radical Center. It describes a political position. One of them is called Made in Texas. I was not made in Texas, but I’ve spent a couple of decades there, so I have some sense of what a truly strange place it is. And Mike’s book, which is about George W. Bush naturally, gives you an understanding of how such a--what’s the right word; now I don’t think I want to use the right word--how such a person could emerge from such a sociological environment riven between some of the most retrograde economic sectoral interests, oil and agriculture on the one hand, and a small but valiant group of modernizing influences. And then he has most recently--is it most recently?--ventured into exercise in what I’d call the historical philosophy as a discussion of what Lincoln believed, and that’s his most recent book.
So there was no question in my mind who I wanted to have speak for opening our conference, and so I’m very happy to give you Michael Lind of the New America Foundation. Michael.
Michael Lind:
Well thank you. I’m more intimidated than ever after those introductory remarks. I was intimidated coming in because I’ve admired the work of many of the people here for many years. I may have more to learn from them over the next few days than many of you have to learn from me. I was intimidated in addition by the fact that I would be competing for your attention with dessert.
And then as Jamie was speaking my heart sank as the door was opened over here onto this wonderful bucolic prospect and the marvelous evening. And so I thought, well, maybe this is a sign, sort of in the spirit of 18th century allegory in this 18th century building that I’ll be discussing in fairly somber tones a fairly somber subject. So naturally I would be in the dark part of the picture. So I’m security. Or insecurity perhaps today. And this is peace. There’s hope. There’s at least an opening to peace after the gloomy tenebrific shade in which I’ll deliver my remarks.
In his classic study, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic,written at the height of World War II, in 1943, the American journalist Walter Lipmann wrote, “Foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power.” When commitments exceed resources, the result is what Samuel P. Huntington has described as a Lipmann gap.
The strategy of American global hegemony today, I argue, suffers from a serious and growing Lipmann gap. Even apart from the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the scale of America’s commitments greatly exceeds the budget and manpower that America’s leaders have allocated or are willing or likely to allocate for the defense of those commitments.
Some have called the contemporary U.S. an empire. That is a half-truth at best. We have imperial commitments, but inspite of defense spending increases in recent years, we don’t have an imperial budget. In the next generation we are going to have to choose either to scale back some of our commitments or to ramp up our spending even further on the military. Either way, the Lipmann gap that exists in American strategy at some point will have to be closed.
Now the origin of the present Lipmann gap in American foreign policy can be found, in my opinion, in the early 1990s. The defeat and disintegration of the Soviet Union made it possible for the U.S. to reduce both its commitments and its military spending. Instead the United States, under the first President Bush, and then under President Clinton, expanded its geopolitical commitments even while reducing defense spending as a share of GDP. It got down to slightly less than 3 percent in the late Clinton years. The U.S. sought to maintain its existing Cold War protectorates over its East Asian allies, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, as well as non-unified Germany, indefinitely. In addition, during the Clinton years, the U.S. expanded its military influence into regions that had previously been contested or under Soviet domination, the Middle East, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe, where NATO was expanded to the very borders of Russia. Instead of viewing the end of the Cold War as a chance to enjoy the fruits of great power peace, the U.S. under Republicans and, I’m afraid, many Democrats alike sought to convert America’s temporary Cold War alliance leadership into indefinite global hegemony.
Now the most articulate proponents of the U.S. hegemony strategy, as everyone knows, were the neo-conservatives. In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz, then the third highest ranking civilian in the Defense Department headed by Dick Cheney, took the lead role, as is now well known, in drafting a defense planning guidance, which laid out a strategy for turning America’s temporary Cold War dominance into indefinite U.S. military hegemony. To prevent hostile powers from dominating Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia, the U.S. itself would be the dominant power in Eastern Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia, for decades or centuries to come.
When leaded to the press, this draft Pentagon document caused an international uproar with its call for permanently subordinating both what are called potential competitors, like China, as well as, “the advanced industrial nations” to the United States. Although the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush publicly distanced itself from the defense guidelines, in practice the leaders of both major parties agreed on the idea that the U.S. should attempt to use its position as the sole surviving super-power to convert its temporary hegemony over the anti-Soviet alliance into the basis indefinite U.S. global primacy.
But hegemony in a very hard-edged form became U.S. strategy officially when the Wolfowitz-Cheney joined the administrations of George W. Bush. In a 2002 commencement address at West Point, this President Bush, George W. Bush, reiterated the strategy in which the U.S. would remain at the top of the great power pecking order. He said, “Competition between great nations is inevitable, but armed conflict in our world is not. America has and intends to keep military strengths beyond challenge, making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless in limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.”
The Clinton administration had preferred the rhetoric of geo-economics to geo-politics, and was far more supportive of international institutions than its successor. But these differences in style disguise the fundamental consensus. The bi-partisan foreign policy elite following the Gulf War agreed that a unipolar world was in America’s interest, and that the U.S. should therefore try to convert its Third-World alliances in Eruope, Asia, and the Middle East into a permanent superstructure.
In 2000, Paul Wolfowitz himself observed with satisfaction, “In 1992, a draft memo prepared by my office at the Pentagon which proposed a post-Cold War defense strategy leaked to the press and caused a major controversy. Just seven years later, many of these same critics seem quite comfortable with the idea of a pax Americana.
This bi-partisan plan for perpetual U.S. military domination of every region with power resources outside of North America represented a radical departure from America’s previous policy of seeking to preserve rather than prevent a diversity of power in the world and to share the burdens of preserving the peace with other rich and militarily powerful states. This strategy is often justified by its proponents on the basis of a very pessimistic and somewhat theoretical version of the real politik, which leads to extreme gloom about the prospects for great power peace. The key concept—I’m sorry to be academic, but it’s necessary in discussing these ideas—is the security dilemma. The idea is very simple: All sovereign states are naturally suspicious of each other. If any country builds up its military forces for defense, other countries will assume that it will use those forces for aggression and feel compelled to build up their own militaries in response. The result inevitably will be a cycle of arms races that spin out of control into all-out war.
Now according to the theory of the security dilemma, the only possible way to prevent the security dilemma from producing arms races and wars is for one state to more or less monopolize military force and provide free security to others. In effect, the hegemonic power—hegemon comes from the Greek word for general, or military leader—acts as a de facto government for a regional or global system of sovereign states. In civilized countries, individuals do not feel the need to amass weapons in their homes out of fear of their neighbors because they trust the government to protect them from crime. In the same way, according to the theory, states that trust a benevolent hegemon to protect their existence and interests can relax, reduce their armaments to a minimum, and focus on civilian pursuits like trade, as President Bush suggested in his 2002 remarks.
But political scientist, Michael Mandelbaum, in his recent book, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s Government in the 21st Century—a significant title in itself—invokes American hegemony as the solution to the security dilemma in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. He writes, “Reassurance insures against what might happen, and the need for it arises from the structure of the system of sovereign states. Because no superior power controls relations among them, an attack by one against another is always possible. But military preparations that one country undertakes for purely defensive reasons can appear threathening to others, which may then take military measures of their own, and so set in motion of spiral of mistrust and military buildups.” You may get the sense that the spiral is the favorite geometric figure of proponents of this school of thought, the out-of-control spiral in particular.
Now fortunately, according to Mandelbaum, U.S. hegemony eliminates this dilemma. He writes: “The American military presence in Europe acts as a barrier against such an undesirable chain of events. It reassures the Western Europeans that they do not have to increase their own forces to protect themselves against the possibility of a resurgent Russia. At the same time, the American presence reassures Russia that its great adversary of the first half of the 20th century German, will not adopt policies of the kind that led to two destructive German invasions in 1914 and 1941.” So Mandelbaum concludes that the alternative to U.S. hegemony would be a far more dangerous world. At best, an American withdrawal would bring with it some of the political anxiety typical during the Cold War and a measure of the economic uncertainty that characterized the years before World War II. This reference to the Better Thy Neighbor trade policies of the 1930s is a recurrent theme of this literature. At worst, the retreat of American power could lead to a repetition of the great global economic failure and the bloody international conflicts the world experienced in the 1930s and 1940s.
The neo-conservative journalists William Crystal and Robert Kagen made the same argument for permanent U.S. global hegemony. “The more Washington is able to make clear that it is futile to compete with American power, the less chance there is that countries like China or Iran will entertain ambitions of upsetting the present world order. And that means the United States will be able to save money in the long run; for it’s much cheaper to deter a war than to fight one.”
On June 26, 2003, in remarks before the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Dr. Condoleeza Rice, the National Security Advisor, officially endorsed the security dilemma theory. She spoke of "a historic opporunity to break the destructive pattern of great power rivalry that has bedeviled the world since the rise of the nation-state in the 17th century. This is in fact more than opportunity, it is is an obligation. Instead of repeating the historic pattern in which great power rivalry exacerbates local conflicts, great power cooperation can now solve conflicts. In recent months, some have questioned whether this is possible or even desirable. Some argue that Europe and America are more divided by different world views than we are united by common values. More troubling, some have spoken admiringly, almost nostalgically, of multi-polarity as though it were a good thing to be desired for its own sake. The realityis that multi-polarity was never a unifying idea or a vision. It was a necessary evil that sustained the absence of war but did not promote the triumph of peace. Multi-polarity is a theory of rivalry, of competing interests, and, at its worst, of competing values. We have tried this before,” Dr. Rice said. "It led to the Great War, which cascaded into the Good War, which gave way to the Cold War. Today this theory of rivalry threatens to divert us from meeting the great task before us."
Now here we have all of the themes of security dilemma theory laid out by the National Security Advisor of the United States. The mere existence of independent great powers tends to lead to world wars in the absence of unanimity among them, enforced, although Dr. Rice does not say so, by a benevolent hegemon, namely us. Multi-polarity leads to war; unipolarity needs peace. This is a very Hobbesian view of international relations in which there can be no peace without a Hobbesian Leviathan to impose it.
Now the theory that the world’s great powers will plunge into rounds of rivalry and even more war in the absence of American hegemony repeatedly has been invoked to justify that hegemony. Is the theory valid?
The only way to test theories about international politics is to interpret history, and history does not support the idea of an inevitable security dilemma that forces neighboring state into ever-worsening spirals of destructive competition that lead to war. The idea that the global conflicts of the 20th century were produced by a security dilemma in Europe, in my opinion, is simply wrong. The world wars and the cold wars were not accidental results of destabilizing arms races. They arouse not from the dynamics of a system of multiple great powers, but from the ambition of particular aggressive regimes in Berlin and Moscow. To paraphrase a slogan of opponents of gun control: Arms races don’t cause world wars; great powers do.
In neither 1914 nor 1939 was Germany in any peril of unprovoked attack by France, Britain, or the Soviet Union, much less the United States. Motivated by ambition rather than by insecurity, the rulers of Germany of both world wars wanted their nation to be an awe-inspiring global super-power rather than a medium-sized regional European power, and this required the conquest of Europe and Western Eurasia and its transformation into a German sphere of influence. If Germany’s leaders had been content, as Bismarck had been, with Germany’s status as first among equals in Europe, there might have been arms races among Germany and its neighbors, perhaps even small wars in the Balkans; but there probably would have been no world wars, no matter how many archedukes were assasinated.
Nor was the Cold War the accidental result of the collision of defensive secruity strategies adopted by the Soviet Union and the U.S. After World War II ended, the U.S. withdrew most of its troops from Europe and Asia and demobilized them, even though the Red Army remained in Eastern Europe. And Stalin knew from American and British spies there would be years before American air power credibly could threaten his domain with atomic destruction. And since abandoning communism, post-Soviet Russia has been content with its status as a regional great power. It’s no longer a revolutionary revisionist power.
The security dilemma theory that justifies U.S. hegemony strategy assumes that the nature of a country’s government is irrelevant to its foreign policies. It is not necessary to endorse the theory that democracies will never go to war with each other in order to reject the idea that Britain, France, Germany, and Russia, in the absence of U.S. hegemony in Europe, would inevitably have arms races with each other and become enemies and cross each other’s borders […?]. Germany is not ruled by [?] or Nazis claiming leibestraum in the east; Russia is not ruled by communists trying to overthrow capitalism; and British policies towards Europe are no longer driven by fears of a continental threat to British colonies overseas.
Well, why is this important? It’s important because if the theory of an inevitable security dilemma is mistaken, then the major theoretical argument for U.S. hegemony in terms of American national security collapses. This is because the cost benefit analysis of U.S. hegemony depends on whether the security dilemma exists or not. If the alternative to perpetual U.S. military hegemony in Europe or East Asia is a local arms raise that might spiral out of control into World War III, then the cost of U.S. hegemony in those regions, including the cost of occasional small wars by the U.S. as local policement, are relatively minor by comparison to the benefits; and I for one would be willing to pay the cost. But if the alternative to perpetual U.S. hegemony in Europe and Asia is likely to be peace among the local great powers, if only in some cases a tense and armed peace, rather than new realms of Sino-Japanese or Russo-German war, then the U.S. hegemony strategy is very very costly indeed.
I'll conclude my remarks by discussing some of the economic costs, and then turning to the manpower costs.
If this policy of permanent U.S. global hegemony over all of the regions with military-industrial power outside of North America were seriously pursued, it would be far more costly than it actually is, because we’ve allocated commitments far in advance of the actual resources devoted to securing them. Consider a policy that the neo-conservatives have favored: the idea of outspending all of the militaries in the U.S. on the theory that this will intimidate other countries into abandoning arms races with us, indeed abandoning arms races with each other, and concentrating on the pursuits of peace and trade, to use the president’s language. This will harm the U.S. economy over time if it has not done so already, in terms of opportunity costs, not necessarily mobilization of those resources.
In 2004-2005, the U.S. accounted for 45 percent of global spending on the military. But there’s less to this than meets the eye, as Tallulah Bankhead on leaving the modernist play. This was largely the result of decision by other great powers to spend less on defense after the disappearance of the Soviet threat. The U.S. is able to spend almost twice as much on defense as its NATO allies combined only because the latter have chosen to slash their defense spending. Following the Cold War, if our NATO allies had continued to spend as much on defense as they had in 1985, U.S. spending would exceed theirs today only by 10 percent. So it’s sort of relative. It doesn’t prove that we’re the new Rome; it just proves that the British, and the French, and the Germans quite appropriately are spending much less in the absence of an imminent threat.
The neo-conservative journalists William Crystal and Robert Kagen have written, “Americans should be glad that their defense capabilities are as great as the next six powers combined. Indeed, they may even want to enshrine this disparity in U.S. defense strategy. Great Britain in the late 19th century maintained a two-power standard, insisting that at all times the British Navy should be as large as the next two naval powers combined, whoever they might be. Perhaps the United States,” say Crystal and Kagen, “should innaugurate a two- or three- or four-power standard of its own, which would preserve its military supremacy regardless of the near-term global threats.” Crystal and Kagen argue that the U.S. should perpetually spend as much on defense as-- Former Reagan economic advisor Martin Feldstein, in the last month or so he published a thing saying we’re now spending about 4 percent—more than that unofficially—but we should raise it to about 6 percent, which was the Cold War average, if I’m not mistaken.
The problem is the U.S. economy is not a limitless cornucopia which sustain a level of permanent military spending comparable to that of the Cold War without harm. The long-term growth of the U.S. economy, according to many economists, depends on public investments in scientific research, infrastructure, and education. Such public investments have diminished as a percentage of the U.S. federal budget since the end of the Cold War. The main threat to the U.S. budget is escalating health care costs, followed by entitlements for the elderly--although Social Security isn’t that much of a problem--, and Pentagon spending.
If the percentage of the U.S. economy devoted to health care and pensions rises as the U.S. population ages, spending more of the budget on the military may lead to less long-term public investment in laboratories, schools, and infrastructure, if you assume that the AARP will see to it that Social Security and Medicare are funded.
Some Pentagon spending produces useful spinoffs for the civilian economy, like the Internet; but for the most part, money spent on weapons and soldiers is money that cannot be used for public and private investments, which increase long-term yields productivity growth. The waste involved is illustrated by the example of the Iraq War.
Before the war, the Bush administration argued that it would cost no more than $60 billion. When White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey said that the price tag might be as much as $200 billion, he was pressured into resigning. The ultimate cost of this war of choice to the American taxpayer may be $1-2 trillion, according to Linda Bilmes, a former Secretary of Commerce, and Joseph Stiglitz, the former head of the World Bank and the winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. They conclude that if the money had been invested in the United States instead of Iraq, “avoiding war would arguably have saved the nation at least one trillion dollars, enough money to fix Social Security for the next 75 years twice over.”
Even in the absence of conflict with other great powers and small but expensive wars against minor countries like Iraq, the attempt of the U.S. to maintain its position at the top of the hierarchy by surpassing most or all other great powers combined in military spending is likely to grow ever more expensive. If China and other rising powers spend more on their military as their economy grows—they almost certainly will—the U.S. will be forced to spend ever more to keep its solitary military lead as long as it is unwilling to pool the costs of its defense with allied great powers. It’s all but certain that the U.S. public, confronted with a choice between slashing middle class entitlements, dramatically raising taxes, and limiting military expenditures, will force their elected leaders at some point to limit military expenditures, thereby deeming the displasion of ever-great powers as a crucial element of the hegemony strategy.
The price of American hegemony is too high as well in terms of manpower. While no Americans died as a result of combat in Kosovo, in the Iraq War more Americans have been killed than died in every U.S. military conflict between the end of the Viet Nam War and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The total number of dead, to be sure, is a fraction of the losses suffered by the U.S. in Viet Nam and Korea; but the stakes for the U.S. during the Cold War conflicts in Asia were far higher than the stakes in Kosovo or Iraq. In any event, public opinion turned against the Iraq War once the American death toll neared 1,000.
An Iraq syndrome, a generational reluctance to commit U.S. troops to combat, may very well follow the war in the same way that the Viet Nam syndrome followed that much costlier war. In itself, this might doom the U.S. hegemony strategy. In order to be the hegemon of Asia, Europe, and the Middle East and to reassure other great powers, the U.S. must be willing to threaten war and occasionally to wage war completely on its own if necessary against states that threaten not the United States, but allies and protectorates of the United States. Already the U.S. military is showing the strain placed on it by two simultaneous relatively small wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Recruitment and reenlistment rates in America’s long-term military have plummeted. In the last couple of months I saw the statistics. Now I think 20 percent of new recruits are high school dropouts, it has become so unattractive. The U.S. has tried to fill the manpower gap by enlisting forces from allied countries; but with the exception of Britain, no allied countries sent more than token forces to assist the U.S. In desperation, the U.S. government has relied on private contractors, or mercenaries, whose ambiguous legal and political status raises serious questions of ethics and oversight for U.S. policy.
Ironically, leading neo-conservative supporters of the U.S. hegemony strategy implicitly concede the existence of a Lipmann gap, at least where manpower is concerned. Some have called for the U.S. to spend vastly more on the military, and also to reinstate the draft. The clear implication is that absent this higher defense spending and a permanent draft, the U.S. will not be able to function as the global hegemon in a uni-polar world. In this they are almost certainly right.
To my mind, the most disturbing thing about the hegemony strategy of this administration in particular is that it’s the first grand strategy in American history that cannot be explained to the American public for fear they would reject it. Some champions of the strategy are candid enough to admit this. In his book, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s Government in the 21st Century, which I cited by Michael Mandelbaum, a very distinguished political scientist, Mandelbaum concedes that the case for U.S. global hegemony might not “persuade the American public, which might well reject the proposition that it should pay for providing the world with government services. American citizens—[end Side A] --providing them and other countries as little as was the case in the first decade of the 21st century.” Speaking perhaps for many supporters of this strategy, Mandelbaum concludes that it may be necessary to keep the American public in the dark because—and I’m quoting his words now—“the American role in the world may depend in part on Americans not scrutinizing it too closely.”
In the same spirit, neo-conservative defense analyst Eliot Cohen writes, “The United States needs an imperial strategy. Defense planners could never admit it openly, of course.”
Yet another neo-conservative, Thomas Donnelly, writes of a global strategy aligning the U.S. with Britain, Japan, and India against the other great powers as “de facto plan of the Bush administration, though officials dare not speak its name.”
Nothing could be more repugnant to America’s traditions as a democratic republic than a grand strategy which can be sustained only if the very existence of the strategy is kept secret from the American people by their elected and appointed leaders.
Since the hegemony strategy was adopted by elites of both parties in the aftermath of the Gulf War, the Clinton and Bush administrations, in varying ways, have tried to have world domination on the cheap. The Clinton administration expanded America’s commitments to new allies in Eastern Europe, even though cutting U.S. military spending to a post-Cold War low. Sensitive to public opinion, the Clinton administration shrewdly waged the Kosovo war in a way that would insure there would be no American combat fatalities; but there were other fatalities on the American side and NATO side.
George W. Bush, like Bill Clinton, has sought hegemony on the cheap. The Bush administration claimed, and no doubt believed, that the Iraq War would be brief and inexpensive, and that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the costs of reconstruction. Sooner or later, however, there was bound to be a war in the service of hegemony which, unlike the Gulf War, and unlike the Kosovo war, and like the Iraq War, proved to be truly costly in American blood and treasure.
If the United States is unwilling to pay the price in casualties and money for a medium-sized war like Iraq periodically, then it is not capable of policing the expanded American protectorate system that America’s leaders, in my view, recklessly created in the 1990s. As there is no political will to further increase the military’s share of American GDP, the only alternative that remains is to reduce America’s commitments. This does not mean a retreat into isolationism. It could mean more burden sharing with traditional allies and rising regional powers.
One thing is clear: It is time for Americans to embrace rather than reject a multi-polar world—not the rivalrous multi-polarity of the past, of the kind Condoleeza Rice spoke of, but the kind of cooperative multi-polarity that Woodrow Wilson meant when he spoke of a community of power. The choice between American hegemony and a return to world wars has always been a false dilemma. The sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can return to the earlier American tradition of collaborating with other non-aggressive great powers in building a peaceful and prosperous global society of states. Thank you.
Q:
[…?]
ML:
Certainly.
Q:
The announcement of this hegemony was made. It was in the newspapers.
ML:
Do you mean under the Bush administration?
Q:
Yeah. I think it’s […?]. The most remarkable thing is that it almost immediately disappeared. I mean, I read The Times and The Washington Post every day, and very little was said about it. There was no objection, and I find that to be the most amazing thing that has happened. I took that to mean that the American public was willing to go along with it. So it’s not a secret, and I think that—
ML:
You’re correct that it’s not a secret; but on the other hand, you sort of have to be a political scientist to read between the lines what the president is saying: destabilizing rivalries of the past, and things like that. You’re quite right, the press didn’t translate this into plan language to say, What they mean is, American taxpayer, the Pentagon is not protecting American interests. It is protecting the interests of other countries that are American protectorates, many of them allies throughout the Cold War, like Japan and our NATO allies, but also new allies in the Middle East [?] we’ve only been the dominant power really since the end of the Cold War, and also in the Balkans and in Eastern Europe. And you can make a case for that, and I’ve tried to give the case, based on the security dilemma, for this policy.
But instead, you’re quite right, when this has actually been said by President Bush himself, by Condoleeza Rice, by Paul Wolfowitz, others have explained this as a grand strategy, it’s a serious strategy, then three weeks later it’s all about specific isolated conflicts, okay. So Noth Korea might get an atomic bond that could hit Alaska, right? Or Iran could get an atomic bomb that could hit Israel, or could give it to terrorists to blow up New York, or whatever. So the public’s attention is constantly on all of these little discrete threats from world states, right, which in many cases are genuine threats. I mean these are genuinely scary regimes, and then they’re real problems. But what is missing from the journalistic analysis is the fact that the U.S. could respond to these real problems in two or three different ways, two or three different global strategies. That’s what fascinates me.
For example, our Middle Eastern strategy: I’m party to some discussions with military defense planning circles now and then where it’s taken for granted that we’re not protecting U.S. oil in the Persian oil, but we’re protecting and/or threatening Chinese and Japanese oil; because the U.S. gets only 15 percent of our oil from the Persian Gulf, 15-17 percent, something like that. Most of the oil from the Persian Gulf goes to East Asia, originally Japan, but increasingly China and India. And so in foreign policy establishment circles people behind closed doors talk about, well, this gives us great leverage over the Chinese. We can cut off their oil supply.
If you’ve ever read Mario Puzo’s of The Godfather—this wasn’t in the movie version—at one point you have the five Mafia families decide to go into the heroin trade, and Don Corleone is against drugs, so he says, We’re not going to sell any drugs ourselves. We’ll simply provide the protection for the other four families, so we will protect the transit of all of the drugs. But we’re doing this as a public service. There is a strategic logic behind that.
But you’re quite right, this is never discussed. It’s discussed in academic seminars, it’s discussed in defense studies; but you can’t get this, even on shows like MacNeil-Leher or NPR or something. It’s always this kind of kabuki theater about were the neo-cons wrong to think that they could democratize the Middle East?
I don’t believe for a moment that that was more than a pretext, as opposed to solidifying America’s military hegemony, which from their perspective actually is less costly in the long run. I’m not attributing motives to them. I think that they’re very cynical about the public presentation of this strategy; but I think that was true, frankly, of the Clinton administration and the war in Kosovo. Now I supported NATO intervention in Kosovo. It could have been done better, I thought, but I thought that was a just cause. But remember how President Clinton sold this to the public. He said that World War I began in the Balkans, and if we don’t intervene, this will spiral out of control into World War III—which is total nonsense, total nonsense. I mean there was no way that the Balkan conflict was going to spiral out of control so the Germans and French would be shooting at each other. But what he could not say—and this is why I concluded that this is the strategy that dare not speak its name—he could not say what a lot of people in Washington actually were saying, which is the credibility of NATO and a view of us as the leader of NATO will disintegrate if you allow this Serbian regime just to thumb its noses at the entire European and international community. So it was a war for the credibility of the U.S. as the dominant power protecting European security. But you can’t say this. President Bush, President Clinton, they got elected. They know the voters. The people around them know the voters. I think they have a good sense of their public. And I think they think the American public will not—and maybe the public is wrong. But things are always portrayed as direct, discrete threats to the American homeland itself, whether it was Saddam Hussein, or now it’s the Iranians, or the North Koreans, or the Chinese, or whatever, instead of what’s really going on, which is these regional and local powers and these rising great powers like China threaten America’s status in their own regions. But look at what Giuliani did to poor Ron Paul in the Republican debate. If you try to explain this, then suddenly you’re an appeaser—as I stand exposed as one now, I suppose.
Q:
Well, I appreciate the subversiveness of using […?]. And you started to answer my question in your remarks when you were talking about cutting Chinese off from oil. So I guess my question is about what is to really be gained by this hegemony, because you’re talking about the U.S. providing public goods, which [you can’t get the profits back from providing public good?]. And then I would agree with you that the real policy is kind of on shaky ground in terms of actually providing peace. So what do you think is to be gained from maintaining this military hegemony?
ML:
It would take too much of our time to go into my proposed alternative, which I outline in what is actually my most recent book, it just came out from Oxford University Press, The American Way of Strategy, where I try to revive a Franklin Roosevelt idea of the concert of power, which is a realist conception, but it’s an alternative to sole American hegemony. And I consider myself a liberal internationalist. I want the U.S. to have a role in the security politics of Europe, and of Asia, and of the Middle East; but you can do that by sharing the burden with the regional powers and regional allies, instead of it being unilateral.
But so your question is what is gained by this? I’ve discussed this with a number of—in an earlier career I worked with some of these individuals. I discussed the whole subject with Paul Wolfowitz. I was a guest of his in 1995. He laid out the whole reassurance doctrine. And if I’m a judge of human character, and I may not be, I think they’re basically sincere. I think that there was a generation of foreign policy thinkers and their disciplies in some cases, a younger generation, for whom the defining moment of history was the experience of the 1930s. And it’s not so much the actual history of the 1930s, but it’s the way this is kind of, what I call op ed wisdom.
So for example, whenever Congress wants to slow down a fast-track agreement with Guatemala or something like that, then all of the op eds say, This could be the beginning of Snoot-Hawley, which led to beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism, and before long we’ll have rival economic blocks, and that will lead to World War III, just like in 1929. So there are all of these just like in 1929, just like the 1930s, and I actually think they’re false memories, but I think these interpretations of history—and they’re almost so deep, they’re subconscious; they’re just unquestioned—they actually explain a lot more than trying to make a profit for Halliburton or protecting Israel, or this, that, and the other. That is, there really is this idea that if the U.S.—not withdraws. I mean even if the U.S. is just one of a number of great powers, that the inevitable result—I mean you saw this in Condoleeza Rice’s remarks that I quoted to you. I think she believes it.
They cannot imagine a peaceful multi-polar world. And to a certain extent, the logic is on the side of supporters of this theory because one did not exist. The last experience we had of a multi-polar before the bi-polar period of the Cold War and then the uni-polar period of the ‘90s, was the European power political system which collapsed twice into world war. Or the global system, if you count in Japan in the Second World War. So I think that’s behind a lot of this stuff.
And that’s one of the links, because there’s an economic dimension to this that I just touched on in passing—I’m not an economist, but maybe some economists could comment on this. There’s also this theory that the present liberal international trade regime is so fragile that at any moment it will collapse into imperial rivalry and mercantilism. And so that the U.S., one of the public goods that the U.S. provides, according to Michael Mandelbaum—I think he’s a very intelligent promoter of this theory—is the public good of promoting free trade and setting a good example. The idea is if the U.S. ceases to do this, then again it’s their favorite geometric figure: it’s the spiral. There will be a spiral of protectionism, and before long, we’re back in the 1930s.
So I think this image of the 1930s and these power-political rivalies leading to the breakup of the world economy, and then into the world wars, I think this is in people’s minds.
Mr. Mosler had question.
WM:
[…?] I think part of the problem is that the way people, voters will see the cost of the war […?] Carsdale, no shortage of anything anywhere, nobody’s giving anything up. The soldiers are all volunteers, so we don’t have any lawyers getting the kids drafted like we had in Viet Nam, that type of thing. When you look at spending […?] you show that we’re spending X amount, and Europe has cut down on their spending, but Europe’s got 8 percent unemployment, and we have 4. Nobody sees that.
We started the war with a tax cut, the biggest tax cut we’ve ever had. So what’s happened is the institutional structure has been used to show an economic benefit to everybody for having done this, and it’s turned into playing a supporting role. And the idea that you can point out these real costs […?] person who’s gone to work every day--
ML:
I think that’s absolutely right. That’s why I said that opportunity costs […?].
WM:
[…?] We’re not functioning to bring an end to this […?].
ML:
What is functioning is very interesting. Everyone is saying—You’re absolutely right. With a professional military, it’s largely working class, it’s not the children of the elite, I think frankly that some of the architects of this expansive policy thought that would prevent the public from coming against it. And I was agnostic about this. There was a debate about this in the late 1990s as to whether America’s toleration of casualties in wars would be higher now that it’s largely working class professional soldiers. And there were some people saying the Viet Nam’s syndrome over, Americans will tolerate 10, 20,000. There’s a paper about this in the late 1990s.
We now know—The public turned against this war around 1,000 deaths. And the fascinating thing to me—You’re quite right on the economics, but it’s pscyhologically—Americans, for whatever cultural-historical reason, treat professional soldiers as though they were draftees. They treat them as though they were draftees. I think it’s somewhat different in Britain and France. Maybe I’m mistaken, but it may be changing in Western Europe. Who knew this? Because once you abolished the conscript army, and you had a professional army, a lot of people thought, well, Americans won’t respond to the deaths, or the imprisonment, or the torture, because they’ll be seen like firemen or policemen; it’s part of their job. And you suffer with them, but you have a higher toleration of casualties of firemen or policemen in the line of duty. No! I mean with the yellow ribbons. Even in the Kosovo war, remember the one pilot who was shot down behind enemy lines. The country grinds to a halt. I for one think this is—I’m glad to be in a country like that, where we don’t treat our soldiers as just disposable mercenaries. But to me that’s a heartening thing. It’s not economic; it’s psychological.
WM:
[……?] The economics don’t work against it. […?] Democrats […?] they’ve been trying to do. […?] If they opt to roll back the tax cut, they could lose the election even though there’s this war going on.
ML:
It’s true, the economic argument didn’t do it, but I do think the casualties did it. The Republicans were thrown out of Congress by an anti-war vote, in many cases expressed by voting for fairly right-wing Democrats. But I do think the public, because of revulsion at—look, if you’re really fairly calculating about this, what is a fairly small number of fatalities and casualties compared to Korea or Viet Nam. So we may be talking past each other.
WM:
[…?] threats?
ML:
For the small stakes. The zero stakes.
WM:
The point is that the economics are not stacked to work against the U.S. going into the war or playing a small […?].
ML:
I don’t disagree with that.
Q:
Michael, the costs of this expansionist strategy are really to be reckoned in the future loss of American leadership and power. Certainly Russian is already making noises, and China and probably India, who will not ultimately tolerate the uni-polar view. So when we’re talking about the cost of this strategy, current costs are imperceptible in the larger scale of things, but if you discount the present value, the cost of loss of American not only political but moral and perhaps economic leadership 10 years hence, as the other powers grow and refuse to accept the uni-polar view, those costs can be very great, not to mention the cost of increasing terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. It becomes more likely, and becomes more likely to be supported by state actors that resent or are opposed to our hegemony. So the costs are mainly in the future.
Now, given your, I think, very clear identification of the imbalance between commitments and capabilities, in your view, which of the current—Well, before I ask you that, Tom Shelling at the AEA meeting, when we were talking about how to end the war, he made a very salient point that regimes, even if they’re not successful, can hardly ever end a war. That’s true in Viet Nam, that’s true now, and you have to change the regime in power. So he said that if you really want to end the Iraq War, what we should be talking about is who we want to be the next president.
Now, in that context, who do you think among both the Republican and Democratic candidates would be most likely to execute your preferred strategy of reducing commitments rather than increasing power and […?].
ML:
It’s a good question that I will skillfully evade, because going down […?] really of all 16 or 20, whatever—
Q:
[…?]
ML:
I’ll evade it by talking about the constraints, the political constraints, which I think are going to shape American foreign policy for at least a decade, maybe a generation.
The weirdest thing, I find, about the present system is that the number of real true die-hard hawks in the United States is fairly small. Maybe it’s 20, 30 percent of the population, largely in my native South, many of them in Texas. But it’s a minority of the population.
Nevertheless, because of the primary system, they control one of the two parties, the Republicans, so otherwise sensible moderate Republicans are forced to appeal to their Jacksonian militarism. But the capture by this minority of one of the two parties then makes it a vehicle for constantly attacking appeasement, retreat, weakness, cowardice, treason of the other party, the Democrats. And this is not entirely new. This was sort of a dynamic during Viet Nam in the ‘60s and’70s, where Nixon was afraid of his right, and then Johnson and the Democrats were afraid of Nixon, and you had this kind of perverse system. And I really fear that we’re going to get back into that kind of horrible black hole of politics, where the Democrats have to position themselves, in the words of a recent Democratic think tank which I won’t mention, as “tough and smart.” It’s all positioning; it’s not actually policy. It’s sort of positioning to protect yourself from being accused of being weaks. That’s why the Democrats—I’m sure this will come up in the next day or two—inside the Beltway Democrats are all trying to say, Well, Bush is too weak because the army is too small. We want to expand them—all of this stuff. Without ascribing motives to people, I think this is about positioning. It’s protecting yourself from the right.
I resist this conclusion, but maybe, just as it [took] Nixon to end the Viet Nam War or to go to China, sometimes I do wonder whether it will take a Republican who’s seen as a conservative to do a Nixon or a DeGaulle and just cut the Gordian knot; because the trap that a Democrat could find himself or herself in is the perceived need to show that you’re tough before you cut your losses. I think that might happen in either event. I’m very pessimistic. I think Bush is not going to pull most of the troops out. He may have them hunker down somewhere to reduce the casualties, but he will leave with most of the troops there.
The next president, Republican or Democratic, probably—again, for purely domestic reasons; this has nothing to do with rational military geopolitical strategy—probably has to have some show of force just to cover the planned pull-out later on. So this puts us into 2009, 2010, 2011. I think it’s going to be a long drawn-out process, and to depress you even more on this beautiful evening, there’s not going to be an end like the last helicopter from Saigon. In other words, it’s not that the U.S. is going to be in Iraq one day and just gone the next.
Because one of the things—you quoted Shelling about regimes—insurgencies almost always lose. Like the Sunni insurgency with 20 percent of the population, they’re not going to win. They can’t win. They might obtain indepdence […?], but they can’t win and overthrow the government and create a new regime. So even a weak, feeble, incompetent Shiia regime in Baghdad is going to survive. It [may not] extend down into the Green Zone, which may be under attack, but it’s not going to fall to the Sunnis, or to Al Qauida, the 2,000 foreign fighters from Jordan and Saudi Arabia. So I this, it’s going to be more like Lebanon, where the U.S. will pull out, but we’re going to continue to have advisors, we’re going to continue to have some forces. Other countries—the Saudies, the Iranians, maybe the Turks--are going to be intervening; so I think you’re going to have a failed state, which is a shatter belt where rival regional powers, as well as the U.S., have a role. And that essentially is the vision of the Baker Report, which is a fairly cold-blooded realist vision. It’s not that you just abandon having anything to do with Iraq; it’s just you change the nature to advisors instead of—you’re advising other governments insteaad of—It’s sort of Viet Namization; it’s Iraqification.
Q:
Two questions. One is that you are approaching this from a theory of hegemonic stability. I’m going to make a similar comment tomorrow in my presentation, not from the theory of hegemonic stability, but from the strategy document that came out of the White House. When Condi Rice was the National Security Advisior she prepared this National Security Strategy of the United States of America--certain other documents came out about that time, 2002—that represented a total change in the orientation of our established military […?], and we’ve never had any debate or discussion. It’s amazing.
ML:
Why do you think that is?
Q:
I don’t quite understand it. This is a total reversal of decades of strategy and agreement from the various presidents, and agreements with other countries, and so forth—
ML:
I’ve got a theory. My theory is if you mention the word hegemony on television, then the Nielson ratings just plummet and your channel goes out of business.
Q: My second point […?] hegemony, particularly Michael Mandelbaum’s analogy of the United States as the Goliath of the world. There’s going to be a David out there to challenge that Goliath. Whether that David is [?], or China, or somebody else, they’re going to use their slingshot and hit this Goliath. Mao Tse Tung talked about the paper tiger. Are we now a paper tiger? We seem to be in that mode now—
ML:
This is very interesting, because in reading all this and reflecting on it, it occurred to me that we actually understand our position in the world better in the ‘70s than we did in the ‘90s. Because, as you know, Nixon and Kissinger famously said on various occasions, We now have a multi-polar world. They’re going out saying this. They said in 1945 we had half of the world’s GDP, but it’s just because the other industrial countries were ruined. By the 1970s, Europe had recovered, Japan, Germany was back on its feet; so the U.S. shrank to about 25 percent, 30 percent. Which is where we’ve been really since 1900, it’s fairly stable, and where, according to Goldman Sachs and others, we’ll be for another 50 years, if you trust that.
So Nixon and Kissinger, we have a bi-polar world in the security arena, but we already have a pentagonal world—it was the U.S., Soviet Union, the European Union, Japan, and China. And increasingly I’m thinking, that actually got it right. Isn’t what really happened with the fall of the Soviet Union is we actually became a multi-polar world in every respect, including security, with one exception: The U.S. has the only global power projection forces. Nobody else. I mean we can send an army around the world logistically. The Chinese can’t do this, the Europeans, the Japanese. Actually they could if they wanted to, but they have no need to since they’re near the sources of conflict. We’re off in this other hemisphere, so we have to do it if we’re going to play a role.
And we use that unparalelled global power projection force against some of the most puny regimes in the world. I mean they were nasty regimes, but they were puny. Saddam’s Iraq had the GDP of Houston, Texas, before the Gulf War. Iran, last time I checked—I mean this was exchange rates and not purchasing power parity—spends one-one-hundredth on the military, compared to what we spend.
So essentially the U.S., after the end of the Cold War, was kind of like Britain in the 1920s, where Britain expanded, it painted the map red in the Middle East and it had vastly greater protectorates. Its geographic extent was unparalleled in the 1920s and ‘30s; but it was still basically an overseas super-power. And we are not a global hegemon with armed forces. If it came to a war with France, we would have to massively mobilize our economy and our industry and so on. This army that have that has toppled Afghanistan and Suddam—yeah, it cannot fight another great power; it’s not made for that.
Q:
[…?]
ML:
Yeah, exactly.
But to get back to the point that Clark made, in the long run, this multi-polar world would have emerged if it had not emerged already, and maybe it emerged economically by the ‘70s and ‘80s.
We’re not really in any danger of precipitous decline. If you look at shares of global GDP, it’s actually the European Union that will shrink. It’s not that they’ll get richer and richer; it’s just a matter of population, that’s all. And the U.S. will be a quarter, a third of world of GDP for generations to come. But what’s happening is China and India may catch up, along with some of these other developing countries like Brazil. Whether that will happen or not, we’ll see.
You are right that the Bush administration’s unilateralism and aggression, aggressive policy, I think has hastened the disintegration of the kind of global public services that Mandelbaum talks about. I’ll give you an example: GPS, right? We let the world use GPS because we didn’t want anyone else to have one, because basically it’s a military satellite system. But you’ve seen in the past couple of years is Galileo. The Europeans decided, no thanks, we want our own GPS system. They collaborated with China. I think Russia is coming up with its own—what’s it called? See, this is bad. I think this is a huge opportunity cost in diplomacy, because the president of the United States in the 1990s could have taken these things—like the Internet. That was just developed by the Pentagon, and it sort of became a global public infrastructure. We could have said, look, we developed this largely for military reasons. We’re now going to set up a consortium. But it makes sense—economies [of?] scale, and so on—just ot have one GPS system, just to have one Internet, but we’re going to have a commission of the great powers in the different regions. Everybody will be represented.
Instead—I do fault this president; I don’t fault Clinton on this respect—it’s going to be really hard for the U.S. in the future now to argue for a single international standard in some of these things, because we have so alienated even our allies.
Something else you see—Japan, for example, is building up its own rocket capability, its own satellite capability. According to the hegemony strategy, they weren’t supposed to do that. They were supposed to trust us. Clearly they don’t.
Q:
Could I as a European listening to this very American discussion ask ask a [minute?] question?
ML:
Please.
Q:
The gist of it is that this is a dangerous policy, and it’s stupid. The majority of Europeans are convinced that’s the case. So why can’t you convince the majority of the Americans?
ML:
Again, it gets into psychological public factors. I thought, after 9/11 happened—and it happened not far from where I used to live in New York, although I was in Washington by that time—I had taken for granted that this kind of thing could happen because, you know, in foreign policy circles, there were studies, there were commissions, hyper-terrorism. So in a sense it wasn’t a surprise. It was a horror, but it wasn’t a surprise. So I thought, you know, we Americans will get over this and adjust, the way the British did, to terrorism, the way the Germans did in the ‘70s, and the Red Brigades, and all of that.
It’s really shaken my confidence that I understand my own country, because it hasn’t happened. Now to a certain extent, it was because of the right wing was deliberately, constantly rubbing the wound and constantly reviving— President Bush can’t make a speech about foreign policy before it’s 9/11, the Towers, vengeance, and so on. What I don’t quite understand is why this works years later. And in terms of the scale of the trauma that we suffered, which was terrible—I was evacuated from Washington. I saw the smoke from the Pentagon from my office window. Half of our think tank at New America Foundation was holding a seminar in the Capitol on that day and would have been killed if the other plane had hit the U.S. Capitol. But the thing is, other countries have suffered shocks that, compared to their population and their economies, have been similar. And I know what it is really. Why does this still work? What is it in the American psyche?
I think one of the explanations is—The other thing I couldn’t figure out, and maybe somebody can help me with: We were in much greater existential danger in the Cold War from Soviet missiles. I live a few blocks from the White House. I sleep soundly every night having calculated the odds that the Iranian president will give Osama Bin Laden an atomic bomb to blow me up. They’re fairly small, according to the experts who study this. So why is it that Americans were freaking out, to use the old ‘60s phrase, about what actually was a not an existential danger in the sense that all-out nuclear war was?
We had a Senator Lugar, a respected analyst of nternational relations. He said the for the first time these people can destroy our country. Now I was shocked that anyone in any position of power would say such a thing. It’s not true. Maybe they could destroy part of a city, maybe a couple of cities. They can’t destroy our country. Even the Soviets at the height of the Cold War probably couldn’t have destroyed the United States. So to give these criminals, these maniacs, this kind of godlike power, I don’t know.
I’m trying to answer your question, but I don’t know the answer. There’s some element of the American character and American psyche that was so traumatized by us, in a way that I thonk other countries—
You look like you have answer.
Q:
I think people are rather afraid of terror and non-state actors, and I think your analysis needs to take into account the evidence that the action of the present government of the United States has exacerbated the risk of people—I mean, I was very happy when 9/11 happened that it wasn’t nuclear, because I have visualized other worse scenarios since I was 15 or so as possibilities, very unlikely, but possibilities. So I think you have to bring into account non-state entities, because you’re analysis is very much state-centered.
ML:
I think that’s right. I think one of the elements of this is it combines public fear of crime with public fear of a foreign threat in a way that Soviet nuclear weapons never did. And there have been studies in the U.S.—this may be true in other countries as well—people from watching television, the more you watch television, the more you think the world around you is much more dangerous than it actually is. So you’ll have people who watch these crime dramas every night about New York City, and they’re living in Topeka, Kansas, and they’re boarding up their windows. Actually, New York City is safer than you would think from watching the TV.
It’s going to be fascinating for cultural historians and psychologist, because this a period, it’s like the Red Scare, the Yellow Peril, things like that. In all of those there was a grain of threat of some sort in all of those things, but it just got transformed into this cultural pscyhodrama.
JG:
[…?] five more. […??
Q:
One thing that’s not clear in your assessment of the hegemony strategy is why would anybody refuse to give us the hegemony. Why would we get this type of response if in fact their argument was a totally convincing one. What is it that they suspect of us?
The second part is, recognizing that in fact people are suspicious, what would prevent them from, say, just deciding to hand the job of hegemony off to someone else? […?] Who else? We pay somebody else to do the job.
Now clearly the administration, and the previous administration, are not willing--in a sense they’ve made decisions […?]—to increase the power of some objective agency. They want to retain their hegemonic prerogative to themselves. So it’s just not a question that they recognize and assess […?]. They recognize and assess […?] being us.
ML:
That’s exactly right.
Q:
[…?] what is the connection there?
ML:
The fascinating thing is the two options that you describe, sort of turning down hegemony when it’s offered, or letting someone else exercise, were pursued by the United States in earlier generations. In 1865, the Grand Army of the Republic was the largest, most powerful military force on the planet. It had just crushed the South. It could have conquered Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean. It was bigger than the Czar’s army, bigger than the Prussian army. And the American people dissolved it, because they didn’t like standing armies.
By 1900, at least by World War I, the U.S. had the largest GDP of any country in the world. The U.S., if it had converted its GDP into military spending at the rates of the European powers, would have been the dominant great [?] hegemon, the dominant great military power of 1900, 1910, something like that. Chose not to because of Democratic, Republican, civilian, commercial traditions.
The option of handing it off to somebody else: The U.S. basically tolerated British naval hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, contrary to much left-wing propaganda, the British, not the Americans, dominated Latin America until the very late 19th century. And the U.S. tolerated it, sure. If the British want to police the Atlantic, protecting our merchants, that’s fine with us.
So if you read the neo-conservatives, many of whom are quite able scholars, very very first-rate public intellectuals, they’re always alluding to this earlier period, because they explain the world wars and so on in the failure of the United States to emerge as the hegemon after World War I in particular. They think this led to the rise of Hitler, this led to the world wars, and all that stuff; and if the United States in the 1920s and 1930s—this has been argued by Paul Wolfowitz in an essay in a book that William Crystal edited—if the U.S. had done basically what it did after World War II, then if you had figures like Hitler, they would have been overthrown by their generals or something, who would have said, there’s just no way we can compete. So this whole kind of fantasy that they would give up arms races and just focus on trade would have taken place earlier. I think it’s a fantasy, but they’re actually arguing that Americans made a terrible mistake, that these options were indeed pursued by the U.S., but it was a terrible mistake. And again, it led to this parade of horribles from the 1930s and ‘40s. That’s their view of history.
Q:
[……?] But I was wondering if there had been sort of a coherent response to the quagmire situation that we’re in now […?].
ML:
I would like to say that the Iraq War has discredited this strategy, but I actually can’t, because you can lose a war against an insurgency, and many great powers do, and yet continue to carry out your policy on other fronts uneffected. So that the fact that the U.S. is incapable of defeating Sunni insurgents at an acceptable cost—because I mean if we wanted just to decimate the country, we could do it. Other great powers, the Russians, the French in Algeria, and so on, they remained great powers. The U.S. remained a great power after losing in Viet Nam against a foreign-backed insurgency. So I would think it would be a terrible mistake that the hegemony strategy is dead. In fact I think on the contrary, because it has not been discussed in public, and also because most of the leading Democratic foreign policy thinkers supported the Iraq War, and even if they opposed the Iraq War, they do support in general the broad outlines of the hegemony strategy. That’s just the people who are most likely to serve in a Democratic administration.
Q:
[…?] threats that we would pose. […?].
ML:
You have to rebuild the army. But the navy, no. As a naval power, as an air power—And once you rebuild the army to do what it actually is configured to do, which is to defeat weak states, which it did in a couple of weeks very effectively, then that remains.
And so my concern is—I think we should have a debate about the larger strategy, not just about Iraq. But the people who supported the war and support the strategy in general are going to want the debate to go like this: There is nothing wrong with America leading the world after the end of the Cold War, being a polar super-power. There was nothing wrong even with defeating Saddam, which we did fairly quickly and efficiently. All of the mistakes were made by—And then you have your fall guy—Rumsfeld, Braemer, Garner, whatever. And if you read the neo-conservative publications, that’s their story. Everything was great up until about the summer of 2003, and then X screwed it up.
So don’t count these guys out. After the end of the Cold War, everybody thought the neo-conservatives were down and out and they’d be never be heard from again, and then boom, they’re running an administration all of a sudden, an administration, by the way, which everyone thought would be run by Colin Powell and realists like Brent Scowcroft. And they’re also very influential in the Democratic Party. I mean there is sort of a Joseph Lieberman wing of the Democrats.
I think that’s the great missing debate. It’s about our grander strategy, and the people who support the strategy are going to try not to have that debate. Anyone who questions the strategy, they’ll want to marginalize. And so the debate that will be permitted is about what particular technical errors in the post-war administration of Iraq beginning in the summer of 2003 and what can we learn from those technical—[end Tape I, Side B]—
ML:
Well obviously Europeans, the French in particular, have been quite critical. And I think the French—Now Sarcozy has tried to prove how pro-American he is, but it’s this false definition that being critical of Bush is being anti-American. So I think that’s sort of a false thing.
One of the things Dominique de Villepin and Chirac and others—they were pushing this idea of multi-polarity. I think that’s what the Europeans should do. Because the fact is the Chinese and the Russians are saying thing. The Indians are saying the same thing. Strategists are hoping to enlist the Indians as part of a balance-of-power strategy against China. I don’t think the Indians are going to fall into that trap. So essentially the Europeans—I include the Germans and the British under a new British regime—should say more. It’s a multi-polar world, and what’s more, promoting multi-polarity is not a European idea; it was an American idea before it was a European idea. This is why the crowds all streamed out to greet Woodrow Wilson after World War I. He was saying we’re going to get rid of empires, we’re going to have a community of power, we’re going to have a concert of great powers policing the world instead of spheres of influence, we’re going to have a integrated global economy, we’re going to have international human rights. So a lot of these things that are now thought of as the EU idea were really more American, Anglo-American liberal ideas in the 19th, early 20th centuries.
I get very angry. I was talking at a dinner with John Bellinger, who’s a legal advisor to Condoleeza Rice, and he was talking about the European position that prisoners of war have Geneva Convention rights. And I was somewhat rude and I said, That’s not the European position. That’s the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Like habeas corpus goes back to the English civil wars, it goes back before the founding of the United States. It’s central to the U.S. common law. Just as an American, the very idea that this going to be stigmatized as European, or even worse, as a French idea—it sounds kinda French, habeas corpus—Latin.
The door’s been closed, and so maybe the portal of hope isn’t still open, but things are going to get better once this regime is gone. The thing that could make things worse would be another major terrorist attack on U.S. soil. I think that would just make this country psychotic for a generation. We would get over it in the long run. But if we’re spared that, there is going to be a change of regime. Already in the second Bush administration there’s been some retreating from some of the aggression in the first, so I don’t want to be totally dispiriting about this.
But I do think that the time for a full, hearty debate about American strategy in the world as a whole unfortunately has not arrived. It will come at some point I hope, but my pessimistic conclusion that we’re going to have a debate about who lost the Iraq War; but we’re not going to have a debate, certainly not in the presidential election, about the basic premises of American grand strategy that I spoke about tonight. Thank you.
JG:
Michael, thank you for starting us off brilliantly and carrying this conversation forward this evening, but also for really letting us know what we have to do over the next two days. Because one place where some of the terms of the debate that you just said has not yet arrived can be forged is right here, over tomorrow and the next day, and we have to say a brilliant assembly of people to put our collective minds to just that task.
I want to ask Thea to give us some logistical advice, and then I have one final remark …
I do have a final word before you go, and it’s a personal note. Around 5:30 this afternoon, just as everybody was arriving, I learned that my mother, who is 94, who is up in Vermont getting her first swim of the season in, had run into a dog and discovered this morning that she had fractured a hip. So she is in a hospital in Cambridge, and facing some surgery tomorrow morning for the partial replacement of it. I just spoke to her on the phone. She seems to be in extremely good spirits, but the dinner party that she was supposed to hold at our house this evening was moved over and held in the Emergency Room. With the combination of whatever she ate and painkillers, she seemed to be in quite good shape.
My brother, Allen, who’s going up there first thing in the morning, has told me to stay put here, and so that is what I plan to do barring any change of situation. If you discover that I’ve disappeared, that’s the reason, in which case the conference will go forward under the leadership of Mike Intriligator and Richard Kaufman, and Thea, of course; but for the moment we’re hoping for the best, expecting the best, the doctors are optimistic, and so I expect to be here and listen and participate in this very fascinating discussion.
Once again, thanks all for coming, and see you in the morning.
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