Intellectual Roots of a New Foreign Policy
U.S. power can and should be a force for good.
URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/rbartley/?id=110002778
BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY
Monday, December 16, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST
President Bush has indisputably shaped and promulgated his own foreign policy, I wrote last week, but the new policy does have deep intellectual roots. And since some charge this means a "cabal" has hijacked foreign policy, I volunteered as a longtime member.
In 1976, for example, I attended Mao Tse-tung's funeral with the cabal's high priest, Richard Perle; the improbable delegation was led by James Schlesinger. In 1979, I sat on the banks of the Bosporus eating grilled fish with Paul Wolfowitz, the cabal's current point man, and legendary Pentagon visionary Andy Marshall. In 1984, I attended a conference on the Riviera's Cap Ferrat entitled "Fault Lines in the Soviet Empire," examining the chance that Communism would splinter on ethnic lines, as famously happened five years later.
The latter two events were among a succession of conferences organized by the late Albert Wohlstetter, Pentagon consultant and the pre-eminent military strategist of his generation. I like to say I and the rest of the cabal were educated in the Wohlstetter school of military strategy and culinary arts, since his conferences also focused on food.
I bring this up because I think I can speak authoritatively, though of course not every member of any "school" entirely agrees with all others, for the "new" thinking about foreign policy. For the Bush approach is indeed new, at least when contrasted with the two recently predominant schools of foreign policy. It has been a "third way," and I said last week it represented the "true idealism in foreign affairs."
Another school usually claims idealism; since at least 1968, Democratic Party thinking on foreign affairs has been dominated by wistful internationalism. Former President Jimmy Carter sounded these tones in his Nobel Lecture last week. Saddam Hussein must eliminate weapons of mass destruction because "The world insists that this be done." The Security Council was unanimous, and "imperfect as it may be," the United Nations is the path to peace, harmony and "international consensus."
Sometimes this is merely utopian, but often the sotto voce objective is to restrain the United States. During the Vietnam War these internationalists drew the lesson that the power of the U.S. is the main threat to world peace, and legions of boat people fleeing the victorious revolution did little to change their minds.
The Republican Party, by contrast, has been dominated by the philosophy of realpolitik. This is not isolationism, but it narrowly defines national interests. The GOP's instinct has been to do nothing unless obvious interests are involved--Middle Eastern oil fields, for example. And then to amass a huge force and destroy the threat, but go away and let the locals clean up their own mess. The Vietnam lesson here is about "slippery slopes" and "quagmires."
Realpolitik also stipulates that we do not care about the internal character of a regime, say Saudi Arabia, so long is it cooperates with us economically and militarily. The objective is to promote a "balance of power," on the idea that peace will be preserved so long as no state gets too uppity.
The Wohlstetter school, now the Bush school, is something different. For starters, it rejects starry-eyed arms control and similar internationalism. I first joined the cabal when it was sounding alarms over negotiations toward the ABM Treaty of 1972, which after 30 years President Bush has finally managed to shed. Whatever the imperatives of an era wracked by the Vietnam war, the "arms control process" became in the minds of the Soviets, and no few American advocates, a way to limit U.S. technology.
Closely associated with skepticism about arms control was a concern over civilians. The arms agreements incorporated the doctrine of "mutual assured destruction," deliberately targeting civilian masses so any nuclear exchange would destroy both societies. I and my friends regarded this as immoral. We supported, and advocates of MAD opposed, improvements in missile accuracy, designing weapons that would take out military targets with minimum collateral damage.
The precision bombs so impressive in Afghanistan are in no small part the legacy of Albert Wohlstetter's work on Pentagon panels. He was appalled at the destruction of Iraqi power grids during the Gulf War; military facilities had backup generators and civilians suffered needlessly. In Eastern Europe during the Cold War or Bosnia during the Milosevic era, he sought out those who wanted to throw off oppressive rulers, looking for allies who shared our values.
In this tradition Mr. Wolfowitz, as an assistant secretary of state, was point man in engineering the removal of Ferdinand Marcos and the restoration of Democracy in the Philippines. And today Mr. Perle is the principal advocate of Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. And clearly, an Iraqi military action would be followed by nation-building of one sort or another.
Wilsonianism this is not; that belongs to the wistful tradition. Nor is this the "national greatness" crusade of a couple of editors at the Weekly Standard. Rather, it is tempered by prudence; when key Vietnam decisions were made in 1962, the no-land-war arguments were offered by Albert Wohlstetter and Admiral Bud Zumwalt. And for all the skepticism about arms control, Richard Perle was author of the "zero option" removing intermediate-range missiles from Europe.
President Bush now says "international obligations are to be taken seriously. They are not to be undertaken symbolically to rally support for an ideal without furthering its attainment." And, "The aim of this strategy is to help make the world not just safer but better."
Yes, this is a new policy for a new century, but it is also the flowering of a third current of thought on foreign policy these last decades. A superpower can't opt out of the world, the newly ascendant school holds, and U.S. power can and should be a force for good.
Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com. |
