In Defense of America

by Bronwen Maddox

  Isolation After the First World War, Engagement After the Second

  Having said that, America’s willingness to engage with problems outside its borders has ebbed and flowed, the two strongest tides being toward isolation after the First World War and toward deep and painstaking engagement after the Second. There has been much intricate debate about whether America’s isolation after the calamity of the Great War contributed to the Great Depression and permitted the rise of fascism. But at least part of the lesson the United States drew from the Second World War was that it would do what it could to prevent a repetition.

  That determination gave rise not just to the Marshall Plan, the laborious and expensive reconstruction of Europe, but to the great cornerstones of international institutions, aiming to bring order to international security as well as to the world economy. In those postwar years, America was the driving force behind the creation of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, all in 1945; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization four years later; and the Japanese-American Security Treaty soon after, which helped bring stability to East Asia. It helped draw up the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, perhaps the most important of the arms treaties. While the pact has not had complete success in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, it has been a central reason why the world has managed, for more than sixty years after the American strikes on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, to avoid another use of a nuclear weapon in conflict.

  Even though the usefulness of all these institutions is now under challenge by the United States as well as others, that does not negate their stabilizing influence in the aftermath of the Second World War and during the Cold War. True, the United States helped bring them into being in a form which gave it a leading role (and has objected when that role has been challenged, most directly in the United Nations), but it would be wrong to take the next step and call their creation entirely self-serving on America’s part and to deny the ideals the United States brought to their creation. The sense of their purpose may be fraying now, but that is not to dismiss their importance —and America’s role in bringing that about.

  After the Cold War

  The end of the Soviet Union freed America from the responsibility for defending European democracies, and with that, its instincts turned inward again. The two post–Cold War presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, are more similar than the towering drama of Iraq suggests, in their reluctance, in many areas, to get involved with foreign disputes. Both showed an increasing detachment from Europe, including sometimes sharp differences of opinion over defense policy and the Middle East. While the events of September 11, the Afghan and Iraq conflicts, and President Bush’s conception of a “War on Terror” exacerbated these differences, they were there since the end of the Cold War.

  In European eyes, President Clinton’s foreign policy is symbolized by Kosovo, the seventy-eight days of aerial bombing in 1999 to halt the “ethnic cleansing” of the Albanian majority of the Serbian province. The NATO assault depended crucially on American airpower, but President Clinton was still denounced by many in Europe for fighting a “cowardly war,” refusing to risk American servicemen’s lives. The question is why America became involved at all. In Pentagon presentations at the time, Kosovo, on the southern fringe of Europe, seemed a world away, with its ironwork balconies, people with wedge-shaped Slavic faces, and thousand-year-old rivalries.

  Part of the answer to why the United States became involved was President Clinton’s personal propensity to see in divided communities —Kosovo, Northern Ireland, the Middle East —a problem that he felt should be resolvable through better communication. He was prone to spot in these far-off conflicts a parallel with the American enterprise of uniting people who might otherwise have good reason not to get along. It was sometimes an inappropriate projection, and it arguably led him to embrace pet schemes to which the United States could devote attention —and many words —without the risk of military casualties. Those efforts also proved a distraction from the greater problem of helping Russia build a stable civic society, a task the United States would dearly have liked to off-load onto Europe but could not, and for which the opportunity is now past.

  The Clinton years offered a portrait of evasion, with carefully chosen exercises in foreign enthusiasm. The United States did insist on its own terms in its engagement, but if this was imperialism, it was of a reluctant kind. Europe, which did not distinguish itself over Kosovo other than by immobility, should count itself lucky that Bill Clinton chose to get involved at all.

  September 11 Reawakened America’s Sense of Mission

  In the eight months before the attacks, President Bush had shown little inclination to be active abroad and little familiarity with Europe or the Middle East. His gaffe-prone tour of Europe in June 2001 met with protests (over climate change and missile defense) and headlines mocking his apparent ignorance, such as “Bush Renames Spanish Prime Minister” (he called José María Aznar, “Anzar”) and “Bush Meets Royalty, Ignores Reality.”

  Three months later came the attacks that have been called the most traumatic event on American soil since Pearl Harbor. They provoked not just the invasion of Afghanistan but, as President Bush put it in his State of the Union speech of January 2002, the condemnation of an “axis of evil” of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. In that leap, the logic of which remains opaque, President Bush set America not just on the path to war with Saddam Hussein but on a mission to export democracy to the greater Middle East.

  I shall discuss in later chapters why America so badly misjudged those challenges, the practical problems it now faces as a result, and also its indefensible actions —those areas where it will have to work to regain a claim to morality. But the point I want to make here is that in his response to 9/11, President Bush was not acting at odds with the enduring spirit of American policy, even if it marked a change from President Clinton’s discursive style. September 11 reawakened America’s recurrent historic sense of mission about reforming the world in its image.

  As Thomas Donnelly, a resident fellow at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, puts it, there is a “set of predilections, tendencies, visions, myths, fallacies, traditions, and experiences that has led Americans to make choices in international politics that others might not and which, taken together, form a remarkably consistent approach to making policy and, especially, to using armed force.”5 That is not to justify President Bush’s decisions in Iraq, but it is to put them in a long tradition of similarly motivated impulses. Many of these impulses have driven the most beneficial actions in American foreign policy —and will very likely continue to do so.

  The Mistaken “War on Terror”

  The misconceived “War on Terror,” the first of President Bush’s two great themes in foreign policy, was not one of those admirable reflexes. You might ask what damage the mere choice of words can do; the answer is, a lot. By defining the pursuit of radical Islamists as a war, Bush made it impossible for America to identify its enemies. The language conflates all kinds of terrorist groups and causes —many of them stubbornly local and territorial in their obsessions: Kashmir, Chechnya, and Palestine, to name just three. Al Qaeda is the rarity in having an aspiration —the restoration of the old Islamic caliphate —that extends across continents. The notion that America was at war made it easy for Bush to make the unjustified leap from retaliation for 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq.

  The phrase “War on Terror” also leads to a disastrous strategy: you cannot define success, other than by the absence of attack, or know that the war has ended (one of the sources of the legal mess into which the United States has cast itself in Guantánamo Bay). And the metaphor of “war” threads every policy with belligerence, implying that force is the only appropriate tool (and it will be very hard for Bush’s successors to drop that language, for fear of being accused of going soft on terror). The phrase also alienates America from European countries with large Muslim populations wh
ich should be its allies.

  Promotion of Democracy

  But if the “War on Terror” is the worst of President Bush’s big themes, the promotion of democracy is among the better ones, although now derided. It has been a constant theme of modern American presidents, as well as those in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. John F. Kennedy, in his inaugural speech in January 1961, declared, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

  Less lyrically, George W. Bush, in the 2006 National Security Strategy, announced that “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” a phrase that reached so hard for resonance, it could have come from the script of Star Trek. More practically, he argued that “The goal of our statecraft is to help create a world of democratic, well-governed states that can meet the needs of their citizens and conduct themselves responsibly in the international system. This is the best way to provide enduring security for the American people.”6

  That last claim —about improving American security —is a bold one which can be judged only over decades. There are reasons to think it might hold good over generations, but it is hard to count on it producing American allies tomorrow. It relies on the principle that democracies are more loath than are other forms of government to go to war, and are more able to defuse grievances that would otherwise be expressed violently. But as the United States has found in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories, when people are newly free to choose their leaders, they may choose ones who particularly dislike the American giant. If people are very worried about security, they will choose authoritarian leaders (as Russians arguably did in repeatedly backing Vladimir Putin for president, although the minuscule choice of alternative candidates offered to voters hardly counts as democracy). If they are enraged by corruption and inequality, they may be lured by religious firebrands.

  But while it is not a law of nature, the incentive for people eventually to pick leaders who strengthen democracy and encourage capital markets is clear, in the improvement in their own lives which that promises. President Bush would have found it simpler to defend the pursuit of democracy by saying bluntly that it is the system which most accommodates people’s dignity, and that they want it, as Iraqis, Afghans, Kenyans, and people in western Pakistan showed in running huge risks to vote. He was at his rare best when he argued that point.

  The United States deserves part of the credit for what has now been three decades of democracy spreading around the world, including in Latin America (apart from Cuba). In the 1970s, Portugal, Greece, and Spain shook off authoritarian regimes; more recently, so did South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and much of Africa. The most dramatic changes have been in Central and Eastern Europe, where ten countries which had been part of the Soviet bloc joined the European Union in barely a decade and a half. True, the trend has not been one-way. The “color revolutions” —such as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia —are fading; the Central Asian “stans,” of which the United States had such high hopes, are a collection of autocracies; in Thailand, generals are in power more than a year after a coup against an elected leader. As Niall Ferguson, the historian, has argued, “Only slowly, by sometimes painful trial and error, do elites learn that it is in their own interests to exclude violence from politics, to take turns at governing, and above all to submit to the rule of law.” 7

  But that does not mean that nothing can be done to encourage efforts toward democracy. The United States has worked hard to support countries who make such moves, in offering to trade more openly with them, in extending membership of NATO to some, and in encouraging the European Union to take them in, too. Despite the hazards of trying to spread democracy, the list of horrors in American foreign policy is notable more for the times when the United States departed from the pursuit of democracy than for those where it pursued it to the point of disastrous success, as in Iraq. The long obsession with the defeat of Communism inspired the misjudgments of Vietnam. The horrors of the regimes which the United States backed in Central America, undermining popular leaders in favor of those it believed would resist Communism, have been well chronicled.8

  More recently, in Pakistan, the United States was mistaken in wholeheartedly backing the military regime of President Pervez Musharraf, believing he could best help in the pursuit of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It overlooked the extent to which the military was becoming the problem in Pakistan, not the solution, sucking up funds which would better have been spent on education —in a country where half the people can’t read —and building up resentment in the poorer provinces. The inevitable end to President Musharraf’s tenure as a military leader was the democratic elections of 2008, the only means of defusing the explosive anger against his rule. That is a lesson against too much realism —against the kind of pragmatism the Bush administration argued was justified by the “War on Terror.”

  Of course, the pursuit of democracy has to be tempered by other concerns, such as stability. The United States is understandably muted now in talking of democracy in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Central Asia, worried about energy supplies and combating terrorism. But as Pakistan has shown, backing military dictators is not a recipe for long-term peace; it may instead inflame the terrorism which the dictators have promised to quash.

  I have argued in this chapter that the United States has made an enormous contribution to world security and order, and to the spread of democracy. I shall argue in the next chapter that those who accuse it, after Iraq, of no longer upholding those principles are wrong.

  Chapter 6

  ARROGANT BUT NOT LAWLESS

  One of the most important accusations against the United States in the wake of Iraq is that it refuses to recognize international law if it does not suit its purposes. The charge is that America has violated its own principles, showing itself uninterested in upholding the international order it spent half a century working to construct. It needs to reclaim that moral authority to justify future international pressure, military or diplomatic. As one British minister put it, “There is a case for liberal intervention after the temple of Iraq came crashing down, but it has to be Iraq-with-rules.”1

  America has always had a different attitude toward international laws and institutions than smaller countries, which stems not just from its size but its Constitution and its belief that it is making its own laws, independent of other countries. But I argue that America’s dismissive attitude toward international law in the Iraq invasion does not mean that it has to surrender its overall claim that it works with other countries under the international laws and institutions it helped build. The list of ways in which the United States is seen to dismiss such laws and treaties is often hurled at it in one melded block, as if there is no distinction between the supposed offenses. The United States’ best defense is that it is picking and choosing among these institutions; that some of them are showing the strain of trying to fit a world radically changed in the half century since they came into being; and that, since Iraq, it is trying harder to work within these principles. It has a strong case, although one that, after Iraq and Guantánamo, it needs to strengthen further.

  Arrogance and the Bush Administration

  The accusation that America is now entirely indifferent to international laws and institutions is provoked largely by a series of decisions by the United States during the presidency of George W. Bush, of which the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is the most controversial. These include the decision to quit the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, a casual approach to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the continued refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the refusal to recognize the International Criminal Court, and a general contempt for the United Nations.


  In addition, although the United States has traditionally kept trade disputes separate from diplomacy, the Bush administration approved a farm bill of such extravagant subsidies to farmers that it jeopardized the Doha trade round, a hugely ambitious attempt to write a new global trade pact particularly aimed at helping some of the poorest countries. President Bush’s keenness to pass a new farm bill in the final months of his tenure also threatened Doha, as did his enthusiasm for one-on-one deals with other countries —seen by economists and trade negotiators as a threat to the ambitious but precarious structure of broader global trade deals.

  Other provocations included using the traditional American prerogative to name the head of the World Bank to put into that position Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy at the Pentagon during the Iraq invasion and one of the most vocal advocates of the war. A further sting was the appointment of John Bolton, again one of the most abrasive figures of the war, as the United States’ ambassador to the United Nations. He was never a conciliator; the Washington Post, in a rare sortie into wit, said he had failed even to “broker a compromise between his sand-colored mop [of hair] and his snow-colored mustache.” 2 Bolton’s skepticism toward the United Nations was summed up for many in his declaration in a 1994 speech that “there is no such thing as the United Nations. There is only the international community, which can only be led by the remaining superpower, which is the United States.” 3

  It was that arrogant tone, on top of actual decisions, which caused offense among the United States’ potential allies, never mind its enemies. There is no question that the Bush administration was egregiously dismissive in its comments about international cooperation, its officials taking apparent delight in offending any country or organization which might presume to count on American support or assume that the United States would work within the established rules. But even though the tone was high-handed, in many disputes, the United States had a fair point.