Foreign Policy for America in the Twenty-first Century: Alternative Perspectives
152
Foreign Policy for America in the Twenty-first Century: Alternative Perspectives
152Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817927967 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hoover Institution Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 152 |
| File size: | 959 KB |
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Foreign Policy for America in the Twenty-First Century
Alternative Perspectives
By Thomas H. Henriksen
Hoover Institution Press
Copyright © 2001 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8179-2796-7
CHAPTER 1
John Lewis Gaddis
* * *
Grand Strategy in the Post-Cold War World
It is an interesting commentary on the world in which we live that, when I explain the grand strategy course I now co-teach at Yale, about half the people to whom I describe it think I am talking about "grant strategy": how do you go about getting the next federal or foundation grant? This could hardly have happened at any point during the half century that separated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, from the final collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Grand strategies then were a fact of life: you did not need to explain what they were or why they were needed. Today they are an endangered species.
Dr. Samuel Johnson provided a reason more than two hundred years ago: "Depend on it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." There was plenty to concentrate the American mind in 1940–41, with the result that we had a grand strategy for fighting World War II already in place before we even got into it. Minds concentrated quickly again when the Cold War broke out. By the end of 1947 we had a new grand strategy — containment — to which we adhered for the next four decades, despite confusions generated by our domestic politics, our relations with allies, and at least one grievous miscalculation of fundamental interests, which was the war in Vietnam. We maintained this sense of purpose and direction because we had to. We lived in a dangerous world.
It's not at all obvious, in the absence of the threats posed by Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union, that the United States would have taken on such global responsibilities. We've historically been an isolationist country. It took a lot to override that tradition. But on a single Sunday morning in 1941 it suddenly became clear to all Americans that the security we'd taken for granted throughout most of our history no longer came free. We would henceforth have to work for it, pay for it, and at times die for it. Our interests, therefore, shifted from the regional to the global, our capabilities grew to match them, and grand strategies emerged, out of necessity, for applying those capabilities in pursuit of those interests.
Today we still face dangers, but they are much less clear and certainly not as immediate as the ones we confronted between 1941 and 1991. We have, accordingly, contracted our capabilities, especially in the military sphere, although these still far surpass those of anybody else. But it's not at all apparent that we've contracted our interests: the Cold War habit of leadership is still very much with us. "The success or failure of the American people's foreign policy," Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has grandly proclaimed, "remains the single greatest factor in ... the future of the world."
Perhaps so, but what was the policy? On this point, she and her colleagues in the Clinton administration were less than explicit. There was little need to answer that question during World War II and the Cold War: we were defending democracy and capitalism against totalitarian challenges from both the right and the left. Today, though, democracy and capitalism are hardly at risk. Our culture, our economy, and our principles are more widely emulated now than at any other time in our history. We are more powerful now than we have ever been, but in contrast to what we did during the Cold War, we have yet to answer the question: how are we to use that power? That brings me back to the subject of grand strategy.
I define the term very simply: grand strategy is the calculated relationship of means to large ends. It is about how one uses whatever one has to get to wherever it is one wants to go. Our knowledge of it derives chiefly from the realm of war and statecraft, because the fighting of wars and the management of states have demanded this calculation more than any other documented arena of human activity. But grand strategy need not relate only to war and statecraft: it is potentially applicable to any field of human endeavor in which means are to be deployed in the pursuit of important ends.
Wanted: Generalists
It is striking that during the decade since the Cold War has ended, the term "grand strategy" has hardly been heard. The Bush administration spoke vaguely of a "new world order," but never got around to explaining what that meant. The Clinton administration experimented with terms like "enlargement" and "engagement," but never made it clear what was to be "enlarged" or "engaged." Congress has held no hearings on the need for a grand strategy; the media, apart from a few pundits, has mostly ignored it; and the public at large seems uninterested, not just in grand strategy, but in international affairs generally.
Nor have our allies done much better. NATO still looks to the United States to lead it, expressing only occasional alarm at Washington's own lack of clarity as to which direction NATO should now go. The European Union focuses its attention on economic and human rights issues, but hardly at all on how these might connect with international security. Our other allies elsewhere content themselves with regional perspectives, leaving it again to the Americans to determine how each of these might relate to the other, or fit within a global framework.
Indeed, the only places where I hear grand strategy talked about these days are places where things are not going so well: definitely Moscow, to some extent Beijing, and, most interesting, certain corporate boardrooms where the problems of trying to adapt old ways of thinking to new technology are all too real. Dr. Johnson, I think, would not have been surprised to hear that the comfortable and complacent are failing to think in grand strategic terms. For the flip side of his aphorism might well be framed as follows: Depend on it, sir, the prospect of not being hanged in a fortnight clouds the mind thoroughly.
As a consequence, the United States has become something rather remarkable: a nation that wields greater power than ever before in its own history, or for that matter in the history of the world, but without any particular purpose. So, should we conclude from this that the need for grand strategy has passed? That the problem of insecurity is no longer with us? That all that need concern us now is getting our grants? I don't think so, for several reasons.
First, even the most cursory familiarity with history would suggest that benign international environments like the present are rare, and that the persistence of unchallenged authority — like that currently enjoyed by the United States — is even rarer. Only the Roman empire functioned under comparable conditions; but given what happened to Rome anyway, that precedent holds little appeal. Sooner or later even the most powerful hegemon will encounter clear and present dangers. We just can't specify right now what ours will be.
Second, even in the absence of such dangers, a country without a strategy is like a missile without a guidance system. It's likely to dissipate resources ineffectually and spread potential damage far. It can pose as many risks to those who build and maintain it as it does to those at whom it's supposed to be aimed. When the country in question is as powerful as the United States, the problem is magnified. For even if you don't use your power, you run the risk of being regarded, by those who have so much less of it, as a very big giant with a very small brain.
Third, the intellectual discipline of thinking in grand strategic terms is a useful antidote to the specialization that necessarily comes with professional training. There have been instances lately of pilots literally flying their airplanes into the ground — the technical term is "controlled flight into terrain" — because they concentrated too narrowly on some particular cockpit task, while losing sight of their general responsibility to keep the machine in the air until the runway was safely under it. Statecraft, rather like aircraft, requires that those in charge think about a lot of things simultaneously. Grand strategy helps you to do that.
Fourth, organizations are delegating important responsibilities to younger, lower-ranking employees far sooner than once was the case. Business is learning that innovation flows from the bottom up as well as from the top down. International and nongovernmental organizations operate by balancing diverse coalitions just as much as by building firm consensus. These qualities require that subordinates within large organizations know their purposes and be able to decide for themselves how to fit their activities within them — in short, a grand strategic view.
Finally, there's a longer-term reason why grand strategies will be necessary in the decades to come. It is that the authority of government itself, as traditionally understood, is coming under siege from global forces. If democratic principles are to mean anything at all in this new age, there will need to be ways of monitoring these forces — and, if necessary, ways of regulating or even challenging these practices. Governments did just that in the wake of the first industrial revolution: they saved capitalism from its own excesses. They may have to do this again in the wake of the information revolution, and if so, that will really require thinking in grand strategic terms.
It's difficult to try to specify, in advance, what particular grand strategy will be appropriate for various situations. Too much depends on the context — and on the contingencies that are sure to come with it. At the same time, it's not enough simply to make up grand strategy as you go along. You wouldn't attempt basketball, ballet, or bridge without a certain amount of training. And yet, we as a nation invest far more time and effort preparing people for these and other recreations than we do in training grand strategists. The end of the Cold War has produced, not a "missile gap," as the Cold War once did, but a "strategy gap." How might we fill it?
We might start by reviving the respectability of generalists. Grand strategy requires people whose vision is broad enough to take in the entire picture, to break out of the boundaries that separate particular areas of specialization. George C. Marshall, arguably the greatest of American grand strategists, complained frequently about what he called "theateritis": the tendency of certain military commanders to look only at their own needs, and not at the requirements of fighting the war as a whole. A famous Herblock cartoon from the Korean War shows Douglas MacArthur — often a source of Marshall's concerns — planning military operations on a square globe, with only the Asian mainland visible at the top of it. Marshall is reminding him: "We've been using more of a roundish one."
Indeed Washington was, at the time, which has something to do with why the Korean War did not become the Third World War. But what about our universities, our professional schools, and our think tanks today: are they not geared toward the production of specialists — square-globe people whose limited views are ill-suited to panoramic visions.
There are, for example, the international relations theorists who refuse to look at new Soviet, East European, and Chinese documents on Cold War history because they might mess up the elegance and parsimony of their Cold War models. There are the economists who assure us confidently that an unregulated global marketplace is bound to bring peace, prosperity, and general contentment — even as, in Seattle, they dodged the demonstrators, and smarted from the tear gas. And then there is, most memorably, the NATO briefing team that came to Yale several years ago to make the case for admitting Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. "Might this not anger the Russians, and possibly push them into some form of cooperation with the Chinese?" one of my colleagues asked. "Good God!" the principal briefing officer exclaimed, in front of our entire audience. "We never thought of that!"
How, though, do we reverse this trend toward professionalized parochialism? What should we actually teach a new generation of generalists? I would begin by seeking a set of principles for thinking about grand strategy — principles sufficiently broad to be applicable in circumstances none of us can now foresee. What follows are a few suggestions for what some of them might be, framed with particular reference to the situation the United States faces as it balances the requirements of a new century and administration against the legacies of its Cold War victory.
First, Specify a Destination
If grand strategy involves getting from where you are to where you want to go, then it's obviously important to know where you want to go. Or, to put it another way, you have to define your interests, otherwise your strategy will make no sense. This is what Clausewitz really meant when he wrote the single most influential but also most confusing sentence in the history of grand strategy: that "war is merely the continuation of policy by other means." If I had been his editor, I would have asked him to put it this way: that war is always subordinate to policy, that force must always be used in such a way as to reflect political objectives, that means must be aligned with ends, not the other way around. Based on the rest of what Clausewitz says in his great classic, On War, I think he would have agreed.
So what are grand strategic "ends" in the first place? They are both easy and hard to specify, existing as they do in a kind of limbo between the extremes of platitude and profundity. Some are so obvious that it hardly seems necessary to state them: any state, or corporation, or individual seeks first survival, then security, then a reasonably benign environment within which to function. The difficulty comes — and it is here that profundity is required — in deciding what it will take to get these things: what conditions have to be met in order to secure these ends? Defining these is the first great task of any grand strategist, and there are several questions worth asking in going about this task.
First, is it necessary, in order to ensure survival, security, and a congenial environment, to alter the nature of the system within which you find yourself, or can you work within it? To put it another way, is your conception of interests unilateral or multilateral? Revolutionaries like Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao sought to reshape the international system in their own image. They regarded the existing order as illegitimate and set themselves about the task of changing it. Their approach was relentlessly unilateral: security for themselves, at the expense of all the rest. The more normal pattern for statecraft, fortunately, has been to construct, perpetuate, or seek to restore multilateral arrangements: security for several, if not for all. Metternich, Castlereagh, Salisbury, Churchill, and the two Roosevelts fall into this category: they were all, in their own way, conservative statesmen, content to work within the systems they had inherited.
A few individuals, like Bismarck, have challenged the status quo at one stage in their career, and defended it at another — but only, in Bismarck's case, after he had redesigned it to suit his specifications. Woodrow Wilson, conversely, sought multilateral objectives through unilateral methods: his vision of a world reformed so as to be safe for both democracy and capitalism was so far ahead of its time that it came across, even to allies and to his own countrymen, as revolutionary and therefore dangerous. As a consequence, Wilson's strategy failed within his lifetime — as Bismarck's did not — because he was never able to decide whether he was trying to work within the system or to overthrow it.
The United States today runs the risk of replicating Wilson's mistake. We have no reason to fear a multilateral world in which several centers of power exist and operate according to a set of common rules: the original objective of containment, after all, was to seek just such a system, and with the end of the Cold War we largely achieved it. Since that time, though, we seem to have switched to unilateral methods in our efforts to sustain it. There's no longer a common enemy to provide a common interest in holding the system together, so we seem to think we've got to do that ourselves by proclaiming our own importance — hardly a sign of self-confidence. We've lost the art of building strategy by consensus; today we do it by instruction, rather in the manner of Woodrow Wilson. And the pupils in the classroom are already getting restless.
That brings up a second issue about ends. Having determined whether you are seeking to preserve an old system or to create a new one, you must then choose between micro- and macromanagement: will you need to manage the entire system yourself, or can you set it up in such a way as to delegate much of that authority to the units that operate within it? Most states have no choice in the matter: they are one of several of roughly equal powers, none of whom has the opportunity to control the system as a whole. But empires, or superpowers (or, to use the currently fashionable word, hegemons), do have a choice: they can concentrate authority or they can delegate it; they can allow autonomy or they can seek to stifle it. It makes quite a difference which choice you make, because a self-regulating system is obviously easier to maintain than one that demands central direction.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Foreign Policy for America in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas H. Henriksen. Copyright © 2001 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Hoover Institution Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,Acknowledgments,
Contributors,
Introduction: From the Berlin Wall's Collapse to the New Century Thomas H. Henriksen,
1 Grand Strategy in the Post-Cold War World John Lewis Gaddis,
2 Meeting the Challenge of Multilateralism Richard A. Falk,
3 Building a World of Liberal Democracies Larry Diamond,
4 Globalization and U.S. International Economic Policy Sebastian Edwards,
5 National Interests and Measured Global Activism Thomas H. Henriksen,
6 Contra Globalization and U.S. Hegemony Walter A. McDougall,
Index,