Now, as America wages war against disconnectedness, spending both blood and treasure, we are told by scholars of international relations that we do this reflexively, unwittingly, or merely to bolster our self-esteem and “power” (whatever that is). All attempts to explain ourselves in unselfish terms are immediately dismissed by the isolationist wings of both the left and the right as either sheer hypocrisy or a betrayal of our historical roots. If we seek to explain ourselves in strategic terms, we are accused by cynical commentators both here and abroad of fatal hubris because we prefer action over inaction, and because we exhibit no slavish deference to Europe’s “lessons learned” from corrupt colonial empires long since buried—and deservedly so.
We are also accused of racism by stone-throwing moralists for seeking to impose our value systems on other cultures, and we are told—as we have been told so many times in the past—that these people somehow lack a democracy gene, or a capitalism gene. Somehow, we are meant to understand this crude social Darwinism as a more sophisticated approach to viewing the world, thus allowing us to trade in our “misguided” revolutionary zeal for the familiar self-hatred that reflexively blames America first and foremost for 9/11.
America is likewise accused of all manner of perversity in disrespecting traditional societies, primarily because of the gender equality we demonstrate in our actions and encourage in our deeds. Our critics are completely correct on this score, for this is a war of perversity. Our enemies kill our countrymen in acts of mass murder, and we find it perverse. We topple the extremist regime in Afghanistan and then let girls return to school for the first time in years, and the Taliban finds it perverse.◈ This is a charge we must simply admit to, because the connectivity we spread cannot be denied to any gender, any faith, or any ethnic category whatsoever.
The only place where accusations of “empire” draw blood is on the subject of America adding new global responsibilities while not shedding old ones. But that is changing. It is absolutely true that our government has, with little to no public debate, lured America into a vast new array of long-term responsibilities for managing the Gap’s security. During the run-up to the war in Iraq, there was debate on the war itself, but none on the implied transformation of the Persian Gulf region. To many Americans, the global war on terrorism involves a few “bad” Muslim states, not shifting military bases from Europe to Central Asia or—God forbid!—sub-Saharan Africa itself.
Yet we will conduct such massive shifts in how we permanently position our military forces around the world, taking advantage of the Core’s relative tranquillity while addressing the Gap’s persistent instability. We will draw down our military presence in Western Europe and Northeast Asia, because it is becoming clear that neither Russia nor China is the compelling threat to globalization’s future. Instead, we will move bases into the Gap, where somewhere on the order of two dozen facilities have been added since the end of the Cold War to better access Central Asia and the Middle East. Within the Persian Gulf itself, the Pentagon has already made subtle, little-noticed shifts, effectively ending our significant military presence in Saudi Arabia, thus relieving that regime of the political complications of having nonbelievers in their sacred lands.
But clearly, the most radical change in our global force posture involves our progressive movement into Africa, although here we are likely to see a sort of “frontier fort” model, as Thomas Donnelly so aptly describes it.◈ These Spartan bases will never come close to the Mall of America gigantism of a Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, but that only speaks to the realities of the operational environment we face in this global war on terrorism; the more we hunt such terrorists, the more they will retreat to the deepest, most off-grid locations inside the Gap.
This radical repositioning of U.S. military bases around the world is the surest sign yet that the Pentagon is moving toward an appropriately deep embrace of the new strategic environment signaled by the Core-Gap divide.◈ The Cold War-era basing structure across the Core is now yielding to a new focus on the Gap, plain and simple. This fundamental shift reflects the inevitable reorientation of Pentagon strategic planning from great-power wars within the Core to small wars inside the Gap that target rogue regimes and terrorism networks. Having said that, I will tell you that one of the big manias right now within Navy threat planning circles remains Chinese submarines. Why? Because al Qaeda has no submarines. If they did, our submarine community would be as happy as clams.
A more suitable example of good Navy planning is the new concept of Flexible Fleet Response, which speaks to an inside-the-Gap, Sys Admin form of near-continuous ship presence that moves away from the strict rotation of surface combatants in key Cold War-defined “hubs.” The strategic environment America manages today does not have “hubs,” because the forces we seek to defeat are not concentrated in traditional battle formations. When disconnectedness defines danger, you tend to focus on the dark spots.
Concerns over American “empire” can be traced, in most instances, to fears concerning “imperial overstretch,” a notion voiced by Yale historian Paul Kennedy at the end of the Cold War.◈ The most salient definition of this fear was that America would not adjust well to the emerging strategic realities of the post-Cold War era, and would lose itself in managing a New World Order while emerging powerhouses such as Japan and a united Europe passed us by as new economic superpowers. While Kennedy’s suppositions regarding America’s waning years as a superpower were clearly overblown, more generalized concerns about America’s slowness in adjusting to the new strategic environment were right on. In my opinion, the Pentagon spent the nineties desperately clinging to the past while largely ignoring the emerging future, only to find itself in a brand-new strategic environment after 9/11.
Did that lapse in strategic vision cost America in terms of security lost? Not really. Traditionally, the military establishment in our country is easily overtaken by historical events for a lot of good reasons related to civilian control and our republic’s general desire not to let the generals get too uppity with their civilian masters. This setup is essential, as it has kept America a vigorous democracy that has never even come close to a military takeover. I do not want to live in an America where the generals are thinking ten steps ahead of the politicians. Having said that, I will say also that there are significant institutional prices to pay for the Pentagon’s tendency to stick with what it knows until history tells it otherwise.
But it is also clear that the Pentagon, and the Bush Administration in general, has not done a good job of explaining all these changes in strategic planning, and that is quite perplexing to me. Americans are smart enough to realize that it is a different world after 9/11, and that our military operations around the Gap reflect that new strategic environment. The shifts being pursued in our global basing posture alone tell me that this administration has moved smartly to deal with the potential dangers of “imperial overstretch” by trading past successes for future challenges. But the search for the happy ending has not found much expression in either the Pentagon or the Bush Administration.
The Bush Administration seems top-heavy in bold decision makers and short on visionaries, and while lacking the latter is not much of a hindrance to waging wars effectively (in fact, it probably helps), this is a troubling trend for an America that stands at a historical creation point between one era and the next. It may seem facile to say that this administration has made the right strategic moves only to tell its story poorly to the world, but perceptions matter plenty in this highly charged period of world history. If America offers a convincing case for its unique leadership role in global security management, we may not only secure the “unipolar moment” ad infinitum but also leverage Globalization III into a “Globalization IV” defined by the Gap’s elimination.◈ But if America’s words and deeds project too much the frightening Leviathan and not enough the calm System Administrator, then Globalization III remains at risk of suffering some version of Globalization I’s disastrous retre
at.
Only time will tell if George W. Bush is more Harry Truman than Woodrow Wilson. Truman started the ball rolling on a multi-decade grand strategic course that changed human history, whereas Wilson’s attempt at forging a new rule set—namely, the League of Nations—died a quick death, only to rise a quarter-century later from the ashes of World War II. Both Wilson and Truman were ahead of their time, but only one set in motion a future worth creating. Perhaps it is telling that history records no “wise men” in Wilson’s circle other than Wilson himself, whereas Truman, clearly the lesser of the two presidents in terms of intellect, proved a far shrewder judge of the talent that history was kind enough to provide.
The world needs a better effort from America in coming years, but just as important, it needs a better explanation of what that effort seeks to achieve. To that end, we need a better dialogue between the public and our nation’s leadership on the strategic choices that lie ahead. Too often that entire process gets short-circuited by a chattering class of op-ed columnists and network television experts who insist on issuing scorecards on a daily basis instead of exploring the long-term issues that both shape and are shaped by the national security strategies this nation pursues. The zero-sum nature of partisan politics in this country is, in many ways, the biggest handicap America suffers when it tries to forge a coherent long-term security strategy. Yes, this partisanship will sell newspapers and books, and draw viewers to the show, but it generates more apathy than understanding, and that apathy is what lulls far too many Americans into swallowing these misguided myths about our country’s role in international security.
Most Americans are constantly confronted with pointlessly hyperbolic media debates about tactics, but are exposed to almost no calm deliberations regarding strategy. Typically, if a high government official tries to engage the public or the media on that level, the immediate result is a flurry of speculation about “raging debates” within the administration (or, worse, that official’s “imminent departure”), rather than any serious exploration of the issues raised. I will confess, as someone who does this for a living, I simply cannot watch most of these shows for more than a minute or two without sensing that my strategic IQ is dropping with each idiotic sound bite offered (often hurriedly so, lest the buzzer on the countdown clock drown them out). Most of these discussions focus on generating more questions than answers, because questions are what keep you tuning in. But the cumulative result of this flood of unanswered questions is a public that often feels overwhelmed by current international events, when—simply put—we need not be.
Our world is not beyond describing, nor our future beyond imagining. But when every strategy we debate has to be shrunk to accommodate a three-minute TV segment or an 800-word op-ed, it often seems that way. When you see me trying to explain this entire book in two minutes on a TV news program, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
So people get overwhelmed by it all. They throw up their hands and say it’s all simply too “chaotic” to take in, and do you know what happens when they do that? Only two possible pathways seem reasonable: either we go all the way or we forget the whole damn thing. Either we kill all those bastards or we bring all the boys back home. Either we must wage perpetual war or we just give peace a chance.
Absolute times breed absolute measures, and absolute judgments to justify them. The myths we make fuel this dialogue of the deaf. Do yourself and the world a favor the next time you hear one: simply ask, “Oh, really, what exactly do you mean by that?” You will be surprised what a show-stopping question that can be. I know. I’ve built an entire career around it.
8 – Hope Without Guarantees
MY CAREER AS A political-military strategist has often felt like one long trek out of the darkness and into the light, mirroring the path I believe America has taken as it moved out from the shadow of the static Cold War into the harsh sunlight of this tumultuous Era of Globalization. That journey has been difficult for me personally, because as a natural top-down thinker, I spent much of the nineties deeply frustrated with my inability to get a firm grip on the “big picture” of how the world worked and how global change unfolded. So the first half of my career I played mostly the critic of other people’s visions, not someone who generated his own. Then my firstborn’s long struggle with cancer put my family on another trajectory, and as her match with a beast from hell segued into a life worth living, I felt compelled in my work to define a future worth creating. So the search began in earnest.
When I got myself out of the insular worldview of the Pentagon community, I began to understand, thanks to a trio of brilliant mentors (Hank Gaffney, Art Cebrowski, Bud Flanagan—all products of that insular world), the deep connections between security, the spread of information technology, and the financial underpinnings of globalization. At that point, I stopped quoting others and began to quote myself. I stopped criticizing other visions and began shaping my own. I stopped trying to fit the world into sterile academic models and began to see it for what it was. In my research of the late 1990s, this Core-Gap model slowly came into focus, only to be made imperative once the terrorist attacks of 9/11 made clear to me the strategic tasks that lie ahead. I end this phase of my career, then, with a tremendous sense of hope in the future, more than I have ever known across a life that began just before the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and has seen nothing but great progress in global peace since. I know not everyone sees the same wonderful arc of progress since 1962, and so in describing this future, I offer—to use J.R.R. Tolkien’s immortal phrase—“hope without guarantees.”◈
But it is beyond argument that I have seen far more “good” history than anyone in his early forties has a right to claim. When I think of my parents, born in the early 1920s, only to live through the Great Depression, World War II, the nuclear fears of the 1950s, and then Vietnam, their dark fatalism about the future seems more reasonable to me now than when I was young. But I have traversed a far different world-historical arc. I live in a world that walked away from global nuclear Armageddon, that left behind a Cold War rivalry both spanning the globe and filling it with wars, and that moved beyond an East-West divide into a global economy of great connectivity. I grew up fearing nuclear war and fear it no longer. I grew up watching wars unfold between states and see them no longer. I grew up witnessing terrorism by desperate individuals trying to draw attention to their causes and I ignore them no longer. You may see a world coming apart at the seams, a clash of civilizations, or the end of Western civilization, but I see something very different.
I see a world in which wars have become obsolete, where dictators fear for their lives more than democratically elected leaders, and where the world’s great armies no longer plan great wars but instead focus on stopping bad individuals from doing bad things. I see a world in which America’s definition of the big threat has downshifted progressively from an “evil empire” to “evil states” to “evil leaders.” I see a world clearly divided between the connected and the disconnected, and I see ways to fix that.
The Global Transaction Strategy that I propose is nothing more than a U.S. national security vision that recognizes the primacy of these four global flows: people, energy, investments, and security. That means America cannot pursue any national policy—such as the war on terrorism or the preemption strategy—in such a way as to weaken this fragile, interdependent balancing act across the globe as a whole. Instead, all security initiatives must be framed in such a way as to encourage and strengthen these system-level bonds. We will accomplish this best by being explicit with both friends and foes alike that U.S. national security policy will necessarily differentiate between the role we need to play within the Core’s ever-strengthening security community and the one we must assume whenever we enter the Gap.◈ In sum, the United States needs to play System Administrator to globalization’s continued functioning and advance, periodically waging war across the Gap as its de facto Leviathan.
If that is the overarching principle of the Globa
l Transaction Strategy, then its macro rule set on security can be summarized in three basic goals. First, we need to do everything feasible to nurture security relations across the Functioning Core by maintaining and expanding our historical alliances, and increasing the Core’s immune-system response capacity to deal with System Perturbations of the sort we suffered on 9/11. Second, working bilaterally with key Seam States and multilaterally with the Core as a whole, we need to discretely firewall off the Core from the Gap’s most destabilizing flows—namely, terrorism, drugs, and pandemic diseases—while working the immigration rule set to provide opportunities to all who can contribute. Third, America must commit itself to progressively shrinking the Gap by continuing to export security to its greatest trouble spots, while integrating any countries that are economic success stories as quickly as possible.
Is this a strategy for a second American Century? Yes, because it acknowledges that America is globalization’s source code—the world’s first great multinational state and economic union. And, yes, because it asserts that U.S. leadership is crucial to globalization’s advance. But, no, in that it reflects the basic principles of “collective goods” theory, meaning the United States should expect to put in the lion’s share of the security effort to support globalization’s advance because we enjoy its benefits disproportionately—hence we pursue this transaction out of rational self-interest.
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