Taken together, these trends heralded a bright future for the United States but also for much of the world. Liberal values were on the march, and powerful secular trends seemed to be pulling much of the world inexorably in the direction that U.S. leaders wanted it to go. A few recalcitrant “rogue states” might hold out for a while, but over time, more and more countries would become democratic, respect human rights, and enter an ever-expanding global economy. U.S.-led international institutions would facilitate cooperation and enhance transparency, reinforcing liberal norms and uniform legal standards even more. American power was the foundation on which globalization supposedly rested—or, as Friedman quipped, “Without America on duty, there will be no America Online.”17
SOLVING GLOBAL PROBLEMS
Primacy also seemed to put Washington in an ideal position to address an array of vexing global issues. Given the vast power at America’s disposal and the lack of serious rivals, the United States would be free to use its influence, wealth, prestige, and, if necessary, its superior military forces to address problems that had defied solution for decades.
1. The Arab-Israeli Conflict
In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference had made a promising start toward resolving the long and bitter Arab-Israeli conflict. Then, in 1993, the Oslo Accords brought new hope that the elusive final status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians might finally become a reality. The Palestinian Liberation Organization had accepted Israel’s existence, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was genuinely interested in a permanent peace, and the Clinton administration seemed to be in an ideal position to broker the deal. For the first time since Israel’s founding in 1948, a lasting peace in the Middle East appeared within reach.
2. Proliferation
Addressing the danger posed by nuclear weapons seemed increasingly feasible as well. The United States had long sought to discourage the spread of nuclear weapons (and other weapons of mass destruction) and had labored to create the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to persuade close U.S. allies to abandon their own nuclear ambitions. Although the problem had not disappeared in the early 1990s, the United States seemed to be in an excellent position to keep the lid on it. Iraq was now under strict UN sanctions, and inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) were dismantling its nuclear programs. Its neighbor, Iran, had sought nuclear weapons during the reign of Shah Reza Pahlavi, but the Islamic Republic had zero nuclear centrifuges operating when the Clinton administration took office in 1993 and still had none when George Bush became president eight years later. The United States joined with Russia and several European states to convince Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus to give up the nuclear weapons they had inherited when the U.S.S.R. broke up; Washington and Moscow subsequently negotiated new reductions in their own nuclear forces; and the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program was gradually placing Russia’s vast stockpile of nuclear materials under more reliable custody and reducing the danger of “loose nukes.”18 Washington was keeping a watchful eye on North Korea, and the Clinton administration eventually decided against preventive war and instead negotiated the so-called Agreed Framework in 1994, which sought to persuade Pyongyang to forgo a nuclear weapons capability in exchange for civilian nuclear power plants and other material benefits.19 Proliferation and other related issues remained a concern, but they appeared to be problems the United States could manage.
3. International Terrorism
International terrorism seemed to be a manageable problem as well. U.S. officials were aware that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups were hostile and dangerous, and attacks on the World Trade Center (1993), the Khobar Towers dormitory in Saudi Arabia (1996), the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya (1998), and the USS Cole in Yemen (2000) underscored the challenge. But top U.S. officials also believed that the threat could be contained and that significant adjustments in U.S. strategy—such as distancing itself from its various Middle East clients or reducing its military presence there—were not required. Instead, they believed that the long-term solution was the further spread of U.S. ideals: as two former Clinton administration counterterrorism officials later wrote, “Democratization, however hazardous and unpredictable the process may be, is the key to eliminating sacred terror over the long term.”20
As the post–Cold War era began, in short, the United States was in the catbird seat. Not only was it richer and stronger than any of the other major powers, it was allied with most of them and on good terms with the others, and it faced no peer competitors, regional rivals, or existential dangers. Key geopolitical trends seemed to be breaking America’s way, and the liberal prescription for perennial peace and expanding prosperity appeared to be fulfilling its promise. It was time to abandon ancient hatreds and local quarrels and get busy getting rich in a rapidly globalizing world, one whose defining features were made in America and underpinned by American power.
But even if the winds of progress were at America’s back, U.S. leaders still believed it would take an active effort to lead the world to this bright new future. As Secretary of State Warren Christopher told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1993, the United States was standing “on the brink of … a new world of extraordinary hope and possibility.” But, he also cautioned, “the new world we seek will not emerge on its own. We must shape the transformation that is underway.”21
Shaping that transformation is precisely what Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama all tried to do. Although their diplomatic styles differed and their specific policies and priorities varied in certain respects, liberal hegemony remained the default strategy for all three administrations. All three assumed that U.S. leadership was essential to global progress, and each sought to use American power to spread democracy, expand U.S. influence and security commitments, and reinforce a rules-based, liberal world order. How well did their efforts go?
GETTING USED TO DISAPPOINTMENT
By almost any measure, and in nearly every key area of foreign policy, the United States is in worse shape today than it was in 1992. The “unipolar moment” turned out to be surprisingly brief, the United States suffered repeated setbacks in several important areas, and the strategic environment has deteriorated sharply. Liberal democracy is in retreat in many places, and America’s image as a vanguard of stable and competent governance was eroding long before Donald Trump appeared on the scene. U.S. efforts to address important regional problems have repeatedly failed, existing global institutions are visibly fraying, and terrorism and nuclear weapons have spread despite extensive U.S. efforts to contain them. Some regions—most notably the Middle East—are now mired in conflicts that may take decades to resolve. Although there have been isolated foreign policy achievements over the past twenty-five years, the failures are far more numerous and consequential than the successes.
A DETERIORATING STRATEGIC ENVIRONMENT
1. Great Power Relations
When the “unipolar era” began, the United States was the sole great power. Russia and China were both relatively weak, U.S. relations with both countries were reasonably good, and Washington’s attention was focused primarily on a set of even weaker “rogue states,” on terrorism, and on WMD proliferation. Today, Russia and China are significantly stronger than they were, both are at odds with Washington, and Moscow and Beijing are collaborating more closely than at any time since the 1950s. Several of the rogue states that Washington targeted in the 1990s remain defiant, and the rest are now “failed states” that may pose even greater risks. America’s image of military dominance has been tarnished, the danger from terrorism has increased, and efforts to halt proliferation have been disappointing.
Relations with Russia deteriorated largely because the United States repeatedly ignored Russian warnings and threatened Moscow’s vital interests. The most important step was the decision to expand NATO eastward, beginning with the admission of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999; the subsequent entry of Bu
lgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004; and the U.S. proposal to invite Ukraine and Georgia to prepare “action plans” for NATO membership in 2008.
As Russia experts like the late George Kennan warned, expanding NATO to the east was a “tragic mistake” that made a future conflict with Russia far more likely.22 It also violated the assurances that Western officials (notably Secretary of State James Baker) had given to Soviet leaders prior to German reunification, including a pledge that NATO’s jurisdiction and military forces would not move “one inch to the east.”23 U.S. leaders felt they could act with near impunity, however, because the Russian economy was in free fall and there was little Moscow could do, even in areas adjacent to its territory. A similar disregard for Russian concerns led President George W. Bush to withdraw from the U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and announce plans to deploy ballistic missile defenses in Eastern Europe, triggering Russian fears of a possible U.S. first-strike capability.
By 2000, Russia’s official National Security Concept was warning of “attempts to create an international relations structure based on domination by developed Western countries … under U.S. leadership,” and some of these fears were well-founded.24 The United States bombed Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo War (without prior authorization by the UN Security Council), toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, backed the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004, and ousted the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. This last step was especially significant because Moscow had gone along with UN Security Council Resolution 1973—which authorized military action “to protect civilian life” but not to topple the Libyan government—only to see the United States and its allies use the resolution as an opportunity to remove a leader they had long despised.25 As former secretary of defense Robert Gates later acknowledged, “the Russians felt they had been played for suckers on Libya,” which helps explain why Russia later backed the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad so firmly and blocked UN action against him.26
Similarly, Obama’s early insistence that “Assad must go” in Syria threatened Moscow’s only remaining Middle East ally, and then, in 2013, U.S. officials openly sided with the pro-Western demonstrators who ousted Viktor Yanukovych, the democratically elected, pro-Russian leader of Ukraine. Moscow responded by seizing Crimea and backing breakaway militias in eastern Ukraine, thereby halting Ukraine’s drift into the Western orbit.27 The United States and its NATO allies responded with economic sanctions and the deployment of additional air and ground units in Eastern Europe, plunging relations with Moscow to the lowest level since the Cold War.
Russia is still significantly weaker than the United States but no longer a basket case. Although its economy remains dependent on energy exports and vulnerable to falling energy prices, its military power has been partly restored, and Moscow now has some capacity to defend its vital interests, especially in areas close to home. The seizure of Crimea, along with Moscow’s successful military intervention in support of the Assad regime in Syria, underscored Russia’s return to great power status and the waning of America’s unipolar moment.
U.S. relations with China have become increasingly fraught as well. In the 1990s, U.S. officials had hoped to integrate China into existing international institutions and make it a “responsible stakeholder” that would not challenge U.S. dominance. As late as 2002, in fact, the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy counseled China to forgo advanced military capabilities and focus on greater social and political freedom instead.28
China ignored this self-serving advice, however, and by 2016 had emerged as an increasingly confident and ambitious rival. It was using some of its rapidly growing wealth to modernize its military forces, with an eye toward contesting the dominant position in Asia that the United States had enjoyed since the end of World War II. As China grew stronger, its leaders abandoned Deng Xiaoping’s doctrine of a “peaceful rise” and began active efforts to shift the regional status quo in its favor. In a triumphal speech to the 19th Party Congress in October 2017, Chinese president Xi Jinping described global power trends as increasingly favorable, said that the Chinese nation “now stands tall and firm in the East,” and declared that China would be “a global leader in terms of comprehensive national power and international influence” by mid-century.29
Within Asia itself, China has begun to challenge U.S. military preeminence in the maritime areas close to China and to advance its own territorial claims in the South China and East China seas. This policy has led to repeated incidents with Vietnam, the Philippines, and Japan, largely over disputed territorial claims in the adjacent waters. Beijing also began a sustained effort to build up and garrison a number of partially submerged reefs and shoals in the South China Sea, rejecting a ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague that challenged its territorial claims there. A further sign of Beijing’s more confrontational posture was its seizure of an unmanned U.S. undersea drone in December 2016, even though the drone was operating outside the waters Beijing had previously claimed. And with the United States bogged down in the Middle East and elsewhere, in 2013 Beijing announced an ambitious “One Belt, One Road Initiative,” a multibillion-dollar infrastructure project to develop transportation networks in Central Asia and the Indian Ocean.30
The Bush administration sought to balance a rising China by forming a “strategic partnership” with India, and the Obama administration took the next step by announcing a “pivot” (or “rebalancing”) toward Asia in 2011. In addition to moving additional U.S. military forces to the region, the Obama team negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a controversial twelve-nation multilateral trade agreement that excluded China and was intended to reinforce U.S. economic and political influence in Asia.
Yet in a move clearly designed to provide an alternative to the U.S.-led liberal order, Beijing began to develop its own set of international institutions. Chief among them was a new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which had attracted fifty-seven “founding members” by 2016. The Obama administration refused to participate and tried to persuade other countries to follow its lead, but Washington could not even convince such close U.S. allies as Israel, Germany, or Great Britain to stay out of the new organization. And when President-elect Donald Trump announced that he would abandon the TPP as soon as he took office, Beijing immediately offered to organize regional trade under the auspices of a “Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership” that excluded the United States.31
By 2016, it was increasingly clear that the world’s two most powerful countries were headed for an intense security competition, one that was likely to shape great power politics for many decades to come.32 Not surprisingly, the deteriorating U.S. relationship with both Russia and China gave the two Asian giants ample incentive to cooperate with each other. In 1992 the two states announced that they were forming a “constructive partnership”; in 2001 they signed a formal treaty of friendship and cooperation. And when Chinese president Xi Jinping visited Moscow in 2015, Russian president Vladimir Putin spoke openly of a “special relationship” between the two states. Although they share a long border, have fought in the past, and are in many respects not natural allies, a shared desire to rein in American power has led Beijing and Moscow to share intelligence and military technology, conduct joint military exercises, sign a number of long-term oil and gas development deals, and coordinate diplomatic positions within the UN Security Council.
Instead of being on reasonably good terms with all the major powers and being decisively stronger than all of them, by 2016 the United States had an increasingly contentious relationship with two of the world’s great powers and U.S. policies had pushed them closer together.
2. From Rogue States to Failed States
American efforts to address the supposed threat from “rogue states” fared no better. The United States remains on bad terms with the rogue states that are still in power—North Korea, Iran, and the Assad regime in Syria—and all three gove
rnments continue to defy U.S. pressure. Syria has been wrecked by a brutal civil war, but Assad seems likely to remain in power, and Iran and North Korea are in stronger positions than they were twenty-five years ago.
With the partial (and minor) exception of Serbia, the rogue states the United States has successfully overthrown—Ba’athist Iraq, the Afghan Taliban, and Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya—ended up as failed states in the aftermath of U.S. intervention. Instead of becoming stable, pro-Western democracies, or even more moderate authoritarian regimes with a high degree of internal order, each became an active war zone, a breeding ground for violent extremism, and a further source of regional instability. Toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq also removed a key counterbalance to Iranian influence and greatly enhanced Iran’s position in the Persian Gulf region.
3. A Tarnished Military Reputation
By 2016 a series of internal scandals; the long, costly, and unsuccessful campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the ability of a number of weaker foes to defy sustained U.S. pressure had eroded the armed forces’ reputation for competence and military supremacy. The United States still possessed the world’s most capable military forces, but they no longer seemed unstoppable.
The Hell of Good Intentions Page 4
