Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  If grand strategy can be said to be a trinity of word, prophet, and deliverer, then we can delineate Roosevelt’s solution set like this: word (The Economic Consequences of the Peace), prophet (John Maynard Keynes), and deliverer (Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his “fireside chat” personages known as “Dr. New Deal” and “Dr. Win-the-War”). Keynes, arguably the one true grand strategist of the twentieth century (besides FDR himself), because he understood conflict within the context of the economic everything else (as I like to call it), forecast the entire post-WWII package from the perspective of 1919. Of course, he issued that list of remedies in the hope of preventing WWII and not merely improving it vis-à-vis the First World War. He also issued it within the implied context of sustaining Great Britain’s hold on its international empire, which, of course, in its ultimate logic it could not do. As such, Keynesianism needed an American deliverer, and Keynes himself basically anointed Roosevelt for that role as international exemplar and experimenter without peer. As stated above, this grand strategy was enormously successful and, in Marxian terms, provided the economic base upon which the additional grand strategy of containment could rest its superstructure of military strength, technological superiority, and sustained superpower rivalry. If the full fruits of this grand strategy were hidden from our full appreciation until the Soviet bloc’s collapse, then that only reminds us that good things come to those who wait—or better yet, persevere.

  Shifting from base to superstructure, here we find the quintessential model for articulating, selling, and implementing a grand strategy. Here word (“Long Telegram,” “X” article) and prophet (Kennan and Clark Clifford in the background, George Marshall and Dean Acheson in the foreground) find their moments primarily in the first Truman administration, with deliverers (Paul Nitze’s translation into NSC-68, Acheson’s implementation as secretary of state, General Douglas MacArthur’s scary turn in Korea and Truman’s ultimate decision to sack him) finding their moments more in Truman’s second administration. In short, necessary hearts were won in the first administration (e.g., the “sell” to Senate Republicans led by Arthur Vandenberg and Robert Taft), and great minds executed in the second. As Acheson himself put it in his memoirs, “In the first period, the main lines of policy were set and begun; in the second, they were put into full effect amid the smoke and confusion of battle.”

  Were there mistakes in translation? According to Kennan himself, there were plenty, but primarily in the overmilitarization of the containment strategy, which he viewed primarily in terms of political resistance to the spread of Soviet influence. Like Acheson, Kennan feared European weakness more than Soviet strength. Also, like any good grand strategist, Kennan was infinitely patient, preferring to “give the hand of time a chance to work.” For remember, Kennan’s primary observation was that the Soviet system was economically uncompetitive, meaning, given enough time, it would collapse under the weight of systemic, internal contradictions.

  Of course, the old saw about “mistakes were made” is easier to stomach with the distance of time. Having grown up during the Vietnam War, I remember the nation’s great sense of strategic unease back then—this sense that we no longer knew what we were doing but rather were doing what we’d always done simply because we could see no alternative. Here, the narrow orthodoxy of Nitze’s translation is somewhat to blame, but that translation unfolds in great deference to the exigencies of the time: the need to “scare the hell out of the country,” as Acheson famously put it to Truman; the subsequent “red scare”; deep social fears about the likelihood of global nuclear war; the perceived domino effect triggered by the “loss” of China to Communism; and so on. While the strategist in me deplores the myopia we developed as a result, the grand strategist in me discounts—quite cruelly—the associated cost. In large part, America was killing both people and time in Southeast Asia, waiting for the “rot” to set in on the Soviet system while innovation and self-improvement continued in the American System. To the extent our myopia encouraged a similar mindset among the Soviets, then we only sped up their economic demise.

  The net impact, though, on the global “correlation of forces” between socialism and capitalism was nil. On that basis alone Vietnam was a pointless exercise, because, as later events showed, the expansion of socialism into Southeast Asia hardly represented a victory for the “monolithic” Soviet bloc. If anything, it simply expanded the field of Sino-Soviet competition and antagonism, the end result being that Soviet satellites there effectively boxed in China, not that much containment was actually required. But again, this only points out how, in the long run, this effort was equally pointless for the Soviet side. No permanent advantage was granted to, or ceded by, either side in the superpower rivalry. Viewed from today’s perspective, in which a capitalist domino sequence seems to be unfolding (i.e., Southeast Asia marketizes so as not to fall too far behind dynamo and new regional economic hegemon China), the only clear winner in the process would seem to be the Chinese capitalist “running dog”—an unlimited irony indeed!

  13. IF YOU WANT TO MAKE IT STICK, THEN THE BOYS ARE NEVER COMING HOME.

  One of the main reasons Wilson couldn’t make his vision work in the aftermath of World War I was that America at the time had no stomach for keeping troops abroad for any length of time beyond what was absolutely necessary to win the war. The slogan of the Marine Corps of that age, “first to fight,” was quickly translated into first to leave once the shooting stopped, our exodus being so rapid that we had to prevail upon the British merchant fleet to make it happen. In that context, America’s demands for a new postwar international order lacked any long-term promise of commensurate enforcement, an effective strategic withdrawal made all too clear by our unwillingness to join the League of Nations.

  The same impulse to “bring the boys home” was seen after World War II, and it was indulged with near-equal fervor. U.S. troop strength stood at roughly 12 million at the end of the war, but by the middle of 1947, we had fewer than 2 million men in uniform, resulting in an American military largely unprepared for the ramping up of Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union, much less the rapid response to North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in 1950.

  What largely defined America’s status as a military superpower across the Cold War decades was our willingness, on average, to post about a quarter of our military manpower overseas on a rotational basis, including a steady core of about 300,000 troops in Europe at all times. The total worldwide number of troops varied over time, with two add-on bulges associated with the Korean (500,000) and Vietnam (700,000) conflicts. With the end of the Cold War, the drawdown of American troops in Europe was dramatic, declining to approximately 100,000, or roughly similar to what we’ve maintained in Asia before and since Vietnam. The highest concentration of American troops today is in the Middle East, where approximately 200,000 total troops are regularly rotated, a certain small percentage serving aboard ships. With the surging of U.S. troops to the region since 2003, the overall total of U.S. troops serving abroad returns to the Cold War levels of the post-Vietnam period (400,000), reversing the trend of the 1990s, when we averaged something closer to 200,000 (split roughly between Europe and Asia).

  My point is this: Once Truman committed us to the Cold War, America entered into an era in which the boys never really came home. Despite the illusion of the 1990s, demand around the world remains substantial for our Leviathan service, although in reality the vast majority of our operations—as during the Cold War—remain on the SysAdmin side of the ledger (e.g., crisis response, disaster relief, counterinsurgency, state-building, military-to-military training). Are we going to have troops in the Middle East for decades, just as we did in Europe and Asia? Yes. The real questions we face today involve the mix: How much Leviathan versus SysAdmin capabilities? What geographic spread? How much do we rely on other nations’ forces (as with the U.S. Navy’s notion of a “1,000-ship navy” that’s only one-fifth us and four-fifths the rest of the world)? These are serious
questions of grand strategy, reflecting our need to tie off the remnants of the Cold War as quickly as possible if we’re going to adjust ourselves to the challenges of today.

  Our military today is roughly one-third smaller in personnel than it was at Cold War’s end, so maintaining 400,000 troops abroad, operating at a fairly high tempo, is burning out the force. It’s simply unsustainable. What we could sustain is more like 250,000 to 300,000 abroad, or at least 100,000 less than today. There are two ways to achieve that: (1) draw down our troop levels in Asia and Europe (harder in the latter, because it’s the launching point for rotations in southwest Asia) or (2) get more friends. This is why I focus on the North Korean scenario: I want us to be able to reduce our troops in Asia once Korea is reunified and I want that process to unfold in such a way that China’s massive military (followed by India’s) is brought into my grand strategic fold. Think the origins of the Cold War don’t matter? They haunt us still.

  14. NUKES KILLED GREAT-POWER WAR.

  One last point reminds us how the first conflicts in a long war can set the tone for the rest that follow, something we see today in how Iraq and Afghanistan are triggering profound changes in our military.

  As WWII came to a close, Soviet troops ended up occupying the northern half of Korea as part of Stalin’s reward for joining American efforts against the Japanese in the Asian theater. The Soviets routed Japanese forces on Asia’s mainland (e.g., Manchuria), exploiting the opportunity to grab geographic buffers. As a result, Korea ended up being divided much as Germany had been in Europe: The Allies drew a line that later became a source of tension between the Americans and the Soviets, who set up mirror images of themselves in the two resulting governments. When North Korean troops poured over the border into South Korea in June 1950, it came as a stunning surprise to the Truman administration, which scrambled to respond militarily. Taking advantage of the Soviet Union’s decision to abstain from participating in the UN Security Council vote (Stalin had personally preapproved North Korea’s invasion but could have vetoed any UNSC decision to respond), Secretary of State Dean Acheson engineered the first-ever UN-sanctioned coalition war. As a result of this “police action,” Truman’s preferred euphemism, U.S. troops were sent overseas to a major war for the first time in our nation’s history without Congress making an official declaration of war.

  This was a huge turning point in U.S. history: From that day forward the United States would engage in overseas wars primarily to address the structure and stability of the global security order—a tremendous expansion of our definition of national interest. None of these conflicts has ever triggered a declaration of war by Congress, meaning we effectively altered our Constitution as part of a grand strategy we’ve since employed. By doing so, we shifted the function of war in U.S. grand strategy from survival to shaping; wars were no longer fought to ensure our immediate survival but to shape the global security environment, meaning since 1950 we’ve engaged solely in wars of discipline and not survival. Wars of survival are, by definition, unlimited or total wars—as in, you do anything to survive, including the use of nuclear weapons. Wars of discipline are limited, meaning you don’t go all the way with everything you’ve got.

  The Korean War was the great tipping point in this regard, and Truman’s decision not to go all the way with nukes when the tide turned against us was a seminal moment in U.S. grand strategy. You have to remember: This was the only man in human history ever to order the use of nuclear weapons. But he was also the American leader who first realized the limits of great-power war in the nuclear age, and in that moment, whether he realized it or not, Truman effectively killed great-power war. International-relations experts like to date the end of great-power war in 1945, a year marked by the cessation of WWII and the invention and first use of nuclear weapons. But in truth, great-power war died as a concept in April 1951, when Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur as the commander of U.S. forces in Korea. MacArthur, a living legend and five-star General of the Army, opposed Truman’s decision to wage a limited war in Korea, preferring to take the fight directly to North Korea’s main manpower patron, the People’s Republic of China. Had America done so, World War III could have easily resulted, as the Soviet Union would have been forced to come to China’s aid, possibly employing—eventually—its own recently developed nuclear weapons. All of this, of course, is historical conjecture.

  What is not historical conjecture is that Truman’s decision to fire the popular MacArthur was an act of great political courage. Gallup polls at the time indicated that roughly 70 percent of Americans sided with the legendary general, who many political experts expected would run for and win the presidency in 1952. Instead, another popular WWII five-star general won the presidency—Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike did take up MacArthur’s bold suggestion to threaten the use of nuclear weapons as a means to force a settlement in Korea. There is much historical debate as to how effective this threat was. Later historical evidence makes clear that the Soviets had no capacity for delivering nuclear weapons anywhere in East Asia, much less direct them toward the United States itself, whereas we did have the capacity to deliver them where we wanted. But for our purposes here, we can stipulate its effectiveness, because Ike’s threatened use of nukes did not supersede Truman’s concept of limited war but rather reinforced it. By threatening the use of nukes, Eisenhower signaled to the socialist-bloc powers America’s recognition of the upper reaches of “limited war,” a strategic concept that helped birth, after several other moments of mutual recognition (the most famous being the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962), the notion of mutually assured destruction as the cornerstone of strategic stability in the nuclear age.

  Truman, in historical terms, is really Theodore Roosevelt realized: a stick that was big enough so that America’s voice was heard the world over. Truman embodied everything that TR was reaching for in his original definitions of American power employed on the global stage: might that buttresses right but does not define it, and power whose main utility is the threat of use that effectively enforces global norms favoring the spread of American influence. That Truman both used and refused nuclear weapons as a tool of war only signals his tipping-point function in American history: our awesome, world-destroying power revealed, it was immediately shelved.

  This half-century journey from TR to Truman constitutes America’s realization as global Leviathan, a status that would remain subject to testing and ultimate transformation across the Cold War decades to follow. But it’s crucial to our understanding of American grand strategy today to realize that this power to shape the global environment—this awesome responsibility of deciding when and where war is allowed around the planet—is not something that dropped into our lap suddenly when the Berlin Wall collapsed or when the World Trade Center’s twin towers fell. Rather, it was something America’s leaders dreamed about from the very beginnings of this grand experiment in multinational union, and something our nation began actively pursuing more than a century ago.

  Simply put, America’s discipline has ensured the world’s survival—time and time again. This is why American grand strategy matters most.

  THE GLOBAL AMERICAN SYSTEM BECOMES GLOBALIZATION

  Histories of the Cold War invariably bury the lead by emphasizing nuclear brinksmanship and arms races and proxy wars in distant locales. While all such events captured headlines, the real story of the Cold War is that military strength, as always, bought time for economic superiority to wield its magic—the essence of the containment grand strategy. By salvaging and rehabbing what we could of Europe and helping Japan transform itself in a similar direction, America laid down its global system marker. The West then essentially dared the Soviets to do better in their own, mini-world economy.

  The outcome was never really in doubt. Central planning can drive an economy through its early, extensive period of growth, picking industries to expand and mandating infrastructure development, but once the challenge of intensive growth is engaged, meaning not
just adding in more inputs (labor, capital, resources) but using them more efficiently, central planning becomes more hindrance than help. The market’s “hidden hand” guides intensive growth so much more effectively, allowing the “wisdom of crowds” (e.g., consumers, shareholders, angel investors, venture capitalists, and leveraged-buyout firms) to pick winners and dismember losers on a continuing basis. The Soviets had a bunch of guys sitting around a table in Moscow trying to figure this all out. Guess which side processed the tough questions faster?

  History bears out this judgment: As soon as the Soviet economy moved past its extensive-phase recovery from WWII, the resulting, reasonably mature economy almost immediately began slowing down in growth, beginning in the early 1960s. Experiments were tried and “storming” efforts made toward certain technological advances (primarily in the military realm), but a growth gap inevitably opened up, then grew wider even across the West’s difficult economic period of the 1970s, and finally became indisputably evident within the Soviet system by the early 1980s, when the technocrats of Mikhail Gorbachev’s generation began showing up and quietly asking harder questions.

  In a strategic sense, the primary job of U.S. national security was to make sure the West stayed secure across this time frame, picking up no unbearable burdens while encouraging the Soviets to do just the opposite. Both tasks proved very difficult for America’s attention-deficit strategists, as evidenced by our going off the deep end on Vietnam and agonizing unduly each time the Soviets picked up another satellite (“Country X has been lost!”) that ultimately either drained their resources or sapped the bloc’s meager sense of ideological unity. Throughout the Cold War, we tended to discount our economic strength and vastly overestimate Soviet prowess in both economics and defense, our national security establishment tending to worst-case all possibilities and swallow Soviet propaganda far too uncritically. You could blame this on the incredibly high stakes involved (i.e., global nuclear war), but truth be told, it’s an endemic analytical problem that continues to this day, based in large part on the nature of people who select such career paths and the painfully isolated intellectual lives they lead (seriously, go talk among yourselves—for several decades!). We also allowed ourselves, as Kennan himself was to complain, to be abused financially by our own rather untrustworthy “allies” in many instances. As our standards for admittance were low (bare minimum: your leader can’t show up atop Lenin’s Mausoleum in Moscow for the May Day parade), it didn’t take much to qualify for Washington’s anti-Communist economic or military aid.