THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  But with the Long War won, why do we need a structuring paradigm at all? Why not simply make decisions on an ad hoc basis, recognizing that, in any case, these decisions will not be randomly made or irrational, but will be guided by our best judgments as to what appears to increase American power and freedom of action? The answer lies in the relationship of strategy to law. Legitimacy, not merely power, was what the Long War was fought over. Until that fundamental question could be settled, conquest and defeat alone could not end the war. Legitimacy is the ground of law; it arises from consistent practices and tacit acceptance and gives law its authority. A United States that cannot explain why it seeks the enlargement of democratic practices among all states—and yet supports the suppression of the Algerian elections that would have brought Islamic fundamentalists to power—will not be able to rally a worldwide consensus in favor of democratic enlargement. A United States that can offer no reason why Russia should be treated as a successor state for the purposes of the Soviet Union's Security Council seat but as a dissolved state for the purposes of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty* will perhaps have its way in such matters for a time, but only so long as our power can compel assent. It is better, even from the perspective of our power—in the long run—to write the rules, though they may sometimes be applied against our wishes, than to abandon rule following in favor of policies that have no more general appeal than that we want them followed, at least for the time being.

  We can extend our influence beyond our temporary hegemony if we take this moment to craft a system of rules with our allies that is compatible with our basic understanding of state responsibility. Yet without some general understanding of our strategy in the world, we cannot begin to even draft such rules.

  What are some of the candidates for this new paradigm? I will describe five general approaches and attempt to place various contributions from the recent literature on this subject within them. This is especially hard to do because these proposed paradigms are really nothing of the sort: rather, they are simply policies in service of the old paradigm that guided our behavior during the Long War. As a result, there is much overlapping among writers as they stray from a particular position that is comprehensive and internally consistent because they recognize that, as a practical matter, something more fundamental is pulling them away from a doctrinaire consistency. I put proposals in categories in order to ease the reader's understanding of what options are on the table for today's leadership, not because I am dealing with a series of clear-cut manifestos. On the other hand, it is also important to realize that the proposals that are proffered to become a new American paradigm for our behavior in the world are so far short of this advertising that no leader, no matter how nearsighted, is likely really to rely on them to master the challenges that have arisen in the backwash of the end of the Long War. This basic impracticality is sometimes hidden in the persuasive, reassuring prose of editorial writers and the aggressive debating of political candidates who do not have the responsibility of day-to-day decision making but are confident that things would run more smoothly if they did.

  One might label these five approaches as (1) the New Nationalism, (2) the New Internationalism, (3) the New Realism, (4) the New Evangelism, and (5) the New Leadership. Each of these general programs has a distinct paramount goal for U.S. policy; each proposes a particular strategy to achieve that goal; each reflects a perception of a crucial threat to U.S. interests to which the proposed paradigm is responsive.

  THE ANARCHIC SOCIETY AND THE NEW NATIONALISM

  In 1977 Hedley Bull's path-breaking book The Anarchical Society appeared.1 Almost at once it was recognized as describing something essential about the world of states, something that recalled and yet contrasted with Hobbes's description of anarchic mankind without a sovereign. Bull recognized that though there was no sovereign governing states, they constituted nevertheless a society that followed certain norms, whereas Hobbes had described a world of all against all and each one against every other one. The goal of each was to be fittest in a competition for survival; so it is with the proposed new paradigm that has recently found favor with a new generation of political leaders on the right.

  This strategy for the competitive survival of the United States focuses our resources on confronting only those threats that truly put the United States itself at risk. Alan Tonelson, in an influential article in Foreign Affairs, “Superpower without a Sword,” recommends that American forces limit their mission to deterring nuclear attacks on the American homeland, defending the American landmass from conventional incursions, and maintaining the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, “at least until a serious national energy plan is in place.” This is the core of his strategic plan, augmented by “token handholding” forces in Europe and East Asia, the maintenance of units capable of launching precision-strike weapons against rogue states to destroy weapons of mass destruction, and small special forces to handle evacuations, hostage rescues, and the like. It provides a well-thought-out example of an increasingly influential position in American affairs.2

  A similar proposal became part of the “Contract with America,” the legislative agenda offered by Republican candidates for the Congress in 1994. During a debate in the House in February 1995 one Republican representative was quoted as saying, “You call it isolationism. I say it's America first!,” apparently unconscious of the resonance such a phrase must have for many, because the America First Committee was the 1940 vehicle for isolationism before Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, the congressman was right, I think, in distinguishing this position from isolationism. A fuller canvass of this position will show that it does not in fact offer a new paradigm—and isolationism for the United States would certainly be that—so much as a policy variant on the interventionist role for America that we have pursued since entering World War I.

  The strategy urged by this approach would be more parsimonious in defining what constitute American “vital interests” because the new nationalist believes that most international conflicts and injustices do not concern our survival and therefore they can be safely, and should be prudently, ignored. The principal threat to the United States is thought to be economic, and, perhaps because they are asserting a strategic view, proponents of this position tend to adopt an essentially mercantilist view of international economic competition. That is, whereas strategic affairs are commonly zero-sum, with the measurement of the victor's spoils never exceeding those of the defeated's losses, economic perspectives are typically thought to enable the creation of wealth for all trading partners. When a strategic perspective on economic trading is introduced, however, gains and losses are necessarily relative to the positions of the various competing states. It matters not so much that both the United States and Japan are wealthier after a decade of record U.S. trade deficits; what matters is that the relative position of the United States vis-á-vis Japan has declined. Treaty arrangements like NAFTA and GATT are anathema to the New Nationalist because they sacrifice the pre-eminence of the American market in order to generate wealth, while many foreign markets remain to a large degree closed to U.S. products.

  There is a populist flavor to this position that disdains the establishment policies of intervention abroad and free markets at home. Thus Patrick Buchanan:

  Put bluntly, it is blue-collar Americans whose jobs are lost when trade barriers fall, working-class kids who bleed and die in Mogadishu and along the DMZ when the shooting starts. But the best and the brightest tend to escape the worst consequences of the policies they promote from military service to unemployment. This [and not better information or understanding] may explain why national surveys show repeatedly that the best-educated and wealthiest Americans are the staunchest internationalists on both security and economic issues.3

  Tonelson adds:

  On the merits, the essence of the America First approach [urges that] a focus on rebuilding and husbanding America's material wealth is our best foreign policy bet in the turbulent world we've entered,
and the establishment knows it. [It is] a full-blown alternative [that] would break decisively with internationalism by abandoning the quest for worldwide security, prosperity and democracy as the best guarantors of American well-being. Instead, it would conclude that in a world likely to remain highly unstable, America's future is best assured by restoring and consolidating its own military and economic strength…4

  Owing to this focus on domestic rebuilding, it is not surprising that it was the NAFTA debate, more than any traditional security crisis, that seems to have rallied the partisans of this approach. Precisely because NAFTA was advertised as a way of stemming illegal immigration from Mexico, it tended to invite nationalist reaction. The proponents of the treaty were put in the position of asserting a kind of blackmail: either we assist the Mexican economy or our own security would suffer. But this argument plays into the hands of the proponents of the set of policies I have been describing as New Nationalist because it implicitly accepts that the relative attractiveness of the United States must decline in order to keep Mexican immigrants at home.

  In any case, proponents of this view argue, the United States really has no alternative. We may claim, as did the first Bush administration, that we are forging a new world order, but the stark reality is that assets of the scope required by such an undertaking no longer exist. The Pentagon continues to maintain that the American military is capable of fighting a Gulf War–size regional conflict and at the same time coming to the aid of allies in a similar-size undertaking elsewhere (as in Korea) while being able to initiate small-scale intervention of the sort launched against Panama or in relief of the Kurdish forces in northern Iraq; this is the “two and one-half” war scenario. But, it is argued by New Nationalists, the facts are otherwise.

  In the last decade of the twentieth century, the U.S. military saw a 40 percent drop in active personnel. The Army's 10 combat divisions lack a full complement of officers, tankers, and gunners, and the Air Force as of 2001 was 700 pilots short.

  Planned force levels do not provide this “two and one-half war” capability. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, U.S. active forces contained 18 Army divisions, 9 Marine expeditionary brigades, 15 Navy aircraft carrier battle groups, and 22 Air Force tactical fighter wings. Of these, 8 Army divisions, 6 Marine brigades, 6 carrier groups, and 10 tactical wings were

  * * *

  COMPARISON OF ACTIVE FORCE LEVELS WITH “DESERT STORM” GULF WAR DEPLOYMENTS

  * * *

  MILITARY UNIT TYPES PLANNED LEVELS ACTIVE FORCE LEVELS IN 1990 ACTIVE FORCES IN “DESERT STORM” CLINTON 1999 ACTIVE

  * * *

  Army Divisions 18

  8

  10

  Army Independent Brigades/Regiments 7

  3

  4

  Marine Brigades 9

  6

  5

  Carrier Battle Groups 15

  6

  11

  Air Force Fighter/ Attack Wings 22

  10

  13

  Total Military Personnel 2,070,000 427,000 1,453,0005

  * * *

  sent to the Persian Gulf. The outgoing Clinton administration proposed a force structure composed of 10 Army divisions, 5 Marine brigades, 11 carrier groups, and 13 tactical wings in the total active force.

  To refight the Gulf War in 2001 would take 80 percent of all U.S. Army divisions, more than 75 percent of Air Force fighter attack wings and Marine air wings, and 50 percent of our aircraft carriers. If during such a conflict the North Koreans attacked across the 38th parallel, all of our reserves would have to be called up, and mobilization of the Selective Service pool would be required.

  Moreover, this gap between means and ends is growing larger, owing to the end of the Long War and an expansion of U.S. military missions. First, the collapse of the Soviet Union increased the number of independent actors on the world stage, some of whom had been restrained from fomenting conflict by Soviet local control. They, unlike the Soviet Union, have every incentive to believe that American resolve to intervene in their depredations is far more modest than our rhetoric, and thus the testing of U.S. commitments is, ironically, likely to increase rather than decrease after our victory in the Long War. “Since 1990 we deployed forces about 45 times,” according to former Secretary of State Alexander Haig. “During the entire 50 year span of the Cold War we had only 16 deployments.”6 Second, our national will to send troops abroad appears to be inversely correlated with the habit of our leaders to support humanitarian interventions. Polls routinely show large majorities opposed to intervention in Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda, and elsewhere. The American public not unreasonably appears to be more intent on revitalizing the social and economic framework at home, a focus of attention that is to some degree self-fulfilling, because as fewer and fewer resources are allocated abroad—resources that have to be voted by the representatives of the public—attention to other states' problems becomes more and more difficult.

  But perhaps the most salient argument for this proposed paradigm is rooted in constitutional law. By what right, Tonelson asks,

  can the President or the Congress make the decision to send our troops to alleviate suffering in dangerous situations in which they—the politicians—readily admit that there are no strategic stakes involved? As citizens of a republic, we authorize our elected leaders to take all sorts of actions… But we grant this authority because it is an American good that is advanced or defended—because the majority of members of the political community to which we belong will supposedly benefit.7

  This nation-state argument (one can scarcely imagine it from the lips of a Napoleon) exposes one of the deep, though subterranean, fault lines within post –World War II American national security policy: much of the American security structure is “extended” to protect other states. There are complicated reasons for doing so that, in fact, support the conclusion that such policies confer important benefits on the American people, but these have seldom been fully argued to the public. Instead, while foreign policy elites have used the forward presence of American forces to anchor powerful allies—Germany and Japan—whose ultimate intentions were a source of concern, these policies have been sold to the American public as based on resistance to the Soviet Union. Thus, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has opened a hitherto unexposed crevasse between our deployments and the ostensible reason for those deployments. Before the Soviet collapse, as Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwartz put it:

  In postwar Western Europe, American policy was spectacularly successful. Freed from looking nervously over their shoulders, the West Europeans were able to set aside their historical animosities and security fears and work together to achieve economic integration within Europe and economic interdependence between Europe and the United States. Because stability and reassurance were based on economic co-operation, it was at least as important for the United States to defend the Europeans from themselves as it was to protect them from the Soviet Union. Likewise, in East Asia, the U.S. reassurance against resurgent Japanese power enabled the region to concentrate on commerce rather than on power politics.

  Since the aims of the preponderance strategy transcended the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, it is not surprising that the foreign policy community now seeks to employ the same approach after the Cold War. Indeed, the Soviet Union's disappearance has seemingly removed the last barrier between Washington and the complete attainment of its world order aspirations. The USSR's demise has also forced the American policy elite to be more candid in articulating the assumptions that underpin its view of American strategy.

  The continuity in U.S. strategy was—and is—explained by the belief that preponderance prevents spiraling regional tensions by obviating the need for other powers to provide their own security. Removing the umbrella of U.S. protection would force other states to “renationalize” their foreign and security policies.8

  Now the public asks, however: why do we need to spend so much money and run such risks if the foe is
defeated?

  In place of a “global pacification strategy,” the anarchic paradigm of the New Nationalist accepts the condition of chaos as an irremediable feature of the state system. As de Gaulle remarked (and Palmerston before him), states have no permanent friends, they have only permanent interests. Rather than try to remake the nature of states, or human nature for that matter, proponents of the New Nationalism would operate within the natural, anarchic environment—preserving U.S. influence when a more ambitious agenda would dissipate it, strengthening our position by increasing our wealth rather than taking on ever-increasing expenses. Nor is this position confined to adherents from the Republican right wing. Paul Kennedy has eloquently presented a history of states whose power declined when strategic overreach impelled them to divert more and more of their resources into unproductive security investments as their global ambitions increased, and the need to protect peripheral assets became a policy imperative.9