America's Democratic Imperialists
By Stephen Fidler and Gerard Baker
Financial Times; London (UK)
Mar 6, 2003
Subtitle: How the neo-conservatives rose from humility to empire in two years The rightwing officials and policy advisers are more diverse and hold less sway over the Bush administration than crude caricature suggests, write Stephen Fidler and Gerard Baker.
On October 2000, on a warm autumn evening at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, North Carolina, the second of the presidential election debates between Al Gore and George W. Bush featured a lively exchange on American foreign policy. Mr Bush insisted that America's standing in the rest of the world would depend on the way it behaved: "If we are an arrogant nation, they will resent us. If we are a humble nation, but strong, they will welcome us."
Looking back at the first two years of the Bush administration, those words could belong to a different era. And Governor Bush's pledge of humility that night was not a brief verbal aberration. His speeches in the 2000 campaign gave few clues to the direction he would take in office.
Though he was known to be more conservative than his father, even as he took office he was not expected to depart significantly from the canons of US foreign policy in the post-cold war era. The leading figures around him, such as Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, were viewed as conservatives but "realists", firmly within the cautious internationalist mainstream.
Now, to the discomfiture of many in the rest of the world, the US is on the brink of a war that Mr Bush has described as nothing less than an opportunity to remake the Middle East. This follows the publication last year of a national security doctrine that lauded the virtues of pre-emption as a military and political strategy to deal with emerging threats. Since Mr Bush took office, the US has walked away from the Kyoto climate-change protocol, withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia and killed negotiations aimed at strengthening the Biological Weapons Convention.
Somewhere during the last two years, humility has been dumped as the touchstone of Mr Bush's foreign policy to be replaced by an assertiveness that even close US allies view as bordering on arrogance. But what led Mr Bush on that journey, and who has guided him on the way?
To some, the explanation is simple: the reins of foreign policy have been seized by a cabal of hard-right conservatives who have for years pressed the US to take a more aggressive, unilateralist role in the world. The people usually cast as the central characters in this drama are the "neo-conservatives". These ideologues owe their prefix to the fact that their intellectual fore-fathers converted from leftwing politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Their world view resembles that of those 19th-century Britons who favoured an expansion of the British Empire to keep peace in the world and to civilise it. Far from preaching humility about American power, "neocons" celebrate it as a force for good.
The expansionist agenda, some observers say, is being driven at the highest levels by Vice-President Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, and by other senior officials such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon. Outside the administration, at least according to leftwing demonology, is the puppet master, Richard Perle, the former Reagan administration official who is now chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory group to the Pentagon.
But this is an over-simplified caricature of the evolution of Bush foreign policy. In fact, say US officials and outside observers, policy has evolved out of a complex confluence of events and individuals and is still, in many areas, contradictory and unresolved.
Neocons are undoubtedly influential, but they are not as numerous as often depicted and are often defeated by internal opponents. Moreover, these battles play out before a president who came to power with conservative instincts but few well-developed foreign policy ideas of his own.
There are at least three distinct intellectual approaches fighting for pre-eminence: realists, pragmatists such as Mr Powell and others at the State Department; conservatives of the old school; and the neocons. The distinction between the last two is particularly important since they favour fundamentally different strategies on America's global role.
The realists have suffered a number of reverses, but are not as peripheral as often described. Mr Powell persuaded Mr Bush to go much further down the multilateral route on Iraq than conservatives wanted. And though he clearly wanted to avoid war, his aides say he has been a key determinant of US policy even as diplomacy nears its end. And the realists have won other important victories under Mr Bush. Before September 11 2001, on matters such as the China spy plane incident, and perhaps most strikingly, again, on Iraq when the administration rejected the neocons' calls for aggressive action and opted instead for enhanced sanctions - Mr Powell's view prevailed.
But the other strands of opinion have grown in influence. Here the most important factor has probably been the role of Dick Cheney. Mr Bush chose Mr Cheney not because of his foreign policy ideas but because he needed his credentials and heft. It was widely assumed that the presence of Mr Cheney and other senior figures from the first Bush administration meant the son's approach to policy would follow his father's. But, in the view of some senior administration officials, Mr Bush did not actually realise how conservative Mr Cheney was.
Mr Cheney has wielded power in three ways, officials say. First, he has extraordinary influence over the president, meeting with him frequently and participating in all important policy-setting meetings. Second, Mr Cheney's staff - led by Lewis Libby, his neocon chief of staff - sit in on almost all other White House meetings. Rarely in history, possibly never, has the vice-presidential staff been so ubiquitous. Third, he has played a decisive role in appointments, spreading hawks across the administration.
Mr Cheney's influence was critical in bringing in Mr Rumsfeld and an important second tier of policymakers that include Mr Wolfowitz at the Pentagon, Stephen Hadley as Condoleezza Rice's deputy on the National Security Council and Richard Armitage at State.
Not all these officials are neoconservatives. Robert Kagan, one of the neocons' most prominent ideologues, complains that the term is often overused to describe all the administration's foreign policy hardliners. "Neocon has become a synonym for hawk," he says.
In fact neither Mr Rumsfeld nor Mr Cheney are neocons, say administration officials. Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century, an influential neocon think- tank, describes him as "an old-fashioned western conservative, culturally and politically".
Ivo Daalder, an official in the Clinton White House who is now with the Brookings Institution, says the more traditional conservatives such as Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld, along with other administration hawks such as John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, are better described as assertive nationalists.
By contrast, he calls the true neocons democratic imperialists. The differences between them often explain why some decisions take so long to emerge out of the administration - for example, over the need for the US to engage in "nation building" after an invasion of Iraq. Neocons such as Mr Wolfowitz are disposed to see the US playing such a role; his boss, Mr Rumsfeld, is deeply sceptical.
Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations says the two are interested in different concepts. "Rumsfeld is fundamentally concerned about what goes on within these borders and will do what's necessary to keep America safe. Wolfowitz also cares about the safety of US territory, but sees it as part of a more ambitious programme of change.
"Wolfowitz is the intellectual leader of a version of primacy that incorporates revolutionary aims in the sense of transforming the world in America's image. It's not just about American security and American pre-eminence; it's about using that pre-eminence to further a political programme."
At root, the division between the neo-conservatives and nationalists is fundamental. Both see the US as exceptional in history, but the nationalists come to their views through a deep pessimism about the rest of the world, while the neocons are permeated by optimism about the ability of America to transform it.
The first neoconservatives were intellectuals, often Jewish, who migrated from the political left during the 1950s and 1960s. They included Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, and Irving Kristol, editor of The Public Interest. It was Mr Kristol, whose son William edits the neoconservative Weekly Standard magazine, who described a neoconservative "as a liberal who has been mugged by reality".
Neoconservatives rejected both what they saw as the self- loathing of the left, which grew during the Vietnam war, and the cynical balance of power world view of the likes of Henry Kissinger. Instead, they celebrated American power as a force for moral good in the world. For them, the Soviet Union was indeed, in the phrase later used by Ronald Reagan, an evil empire. Containment of this evil was insufficient; detente the equivalent of appeasement.
The Reagan administration nurtured a new generation of neoconservatives, some who had not journeyed from the left. Some, such as Mr Perle and Elliot Abrams, Mr Podhoretz's son-in-law, and Frank Gaffney, founder of a hawkish think-tank called the Center for Security Policy, had worked for Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the hawkish Democratic senator for Washington state.
Most of the first generation of neocons were Jewish; just about all of the later neocons were. Israel looms large for many of them, such as Mr Feith, undersecretary of defence for policy, who are closely identified with hardline policies of the Likud party. But to others, Israel is one of a number of friendly democracies such as Britain whose continued wellbeing is in American interests.
The neocons, never numerous, have been shrewd communicators, amplifying their voice through Washingtonthink-tanks sometimes funded by the defence industry. Some of these groups are formed to tackle narrow issues: one recent example is the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
Policies that enhance the ability of the US to project its power abroad are articles of faith for all neocons. High defence spending is one; missile defence has become another. But these policies are not exclusively associated with the neocons: conservative nationalists favour both because they wish to see an America safe within its borders. In the Bush administration, there has been an alliance of convenience on many issues between these two groups.
The neocons and nationalists agree on other things, too: both are suspicious of multilateralism and international agreements that tie the hands of the US. Hence, they were both happy to dump the Kyoto climate-change protocol and to torpedo the talks to add verification procedures to the Biological Weapons Convention.
Some neocons have become associated with policies for which they have carried a candle for many years. Mr Wolfowitz has been closely linked with US policy in Iraq for almost 25 years, and was the first among senior officials, just five days after September 11, to suggest to Mr Bush that he should deal with the Iraq dictator.
While working in the defence department during the Carter administration, Mr Wolfowitz was the leader of a group that produced a ground-breaking study, still classified, that first identified Iraq as a potential threat to US interests, former colleagues say. It even warned of an Iraqi attack on Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. "He did some extremely important work. The focus of concern was a Soviet invasion of Iran . . . Paul was one of the people who said we needed to look at the bilateral issues, the non-Soviet cases," a former senior defence official says. "One of the things that came out of this was putting the Iraqi contingency on the list of things we had to worry about. That was very important in the Gulf War too." Based on this analysis, the US military created Central Command, which will run any invasion of Iraq, and its rapid deployment force.
Mr Wolfowitz was also the principal author of a 1992 Pentagon report in the first Bush administration that was considered too controversial; it was toned down before publication. Many of these ideas emerged a decade later in the second Bush administration's national security strategy document.
Yet, according to Mr Kagan, the movement nearly died after the Soviet Union's collapse. Many neocons allied themselves with traditional Republicans who often defined themselves in opposition to everything favoured by Bill Clinton.
And in the early days of the George W. Bush administration it was Mr Cheney's brand of hard-nosed conservatism that trumped the neocons. "We were really ticked off with the direction the administration was taking," says Mr Schmitt of the Project for the New American Century. "In fact early in 2001, Cheney dismissed neocons in a TV interview, saying: 'Oh, they have to sell magazines; we have to govern'."
What transformed the picture was September 11. Only after that, according to senior administration officials, did other members - including Mr Cheney - begin to move closer to a neocon world view. In the long term, the US would only find security in a world in which US values were widely held and spread. "After 9-11, you don't see a lot of daylight between the democratic imperialists and the assertive nationalists. Pre 9-11, you did," says Mr Kupchan.
But even then, the convergence between these two camps was slow. The initial phase of policy was aimed at dealing with the perpetrators of the terror attacks. There was little stomach for the broader neocon agenda. At a September 16 meeting at Camp David, Mr Wolfowitz pressed for an attack on Iraq and received some support from Mr Rumsfeld. But Mr Cheney and Mr Powell rejected the proposal, and ultimately Mr Bush decided against the neocon position. Somewhere between the end of the Afghan campaign and Mr Bush's state of the union address in January 2002, however, came the convergence of views that would produce the war against Iraq.
Administration officials and outsiders say there is still no agreement on how far to push the neocon world view. In a speech last month, Mr Rumsfeld said nation-building may be well motivated but "can create a dependency". Nonetheless it does look as though, as has happened in the past, a highly consequential shift in US foreign policy is taking place after a momentous event.
Robert Kagan argues that September 11 will pave the way for a neocon revolution in the way that the Soviet-backed North Korean invasion of the south galvanised Washington into adopting the Truman doctrine. While much of that policy stressed containment of the Soviet Union, it was also neo-conservative in leading the US to bring Japan and South Korea under its security umbrella and into the western ambit. In the same way, he says, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan set the stage for the Reagan Doctrine.
How much the neocons will shape the future, whether the policies promoting US expansion represent a trend or a blip on the graph is still uncertain. It will depend on the appetite of the American people for empire, or at least the post-modern 21st century version of it. To those who say that Americans have no stomach for modern imperialism, Mr Kagan argues that since its creation as a group of eastern seaboard communities, the US has been an expansive power.
Yet whatever the future holds, there is little doubt that Mr Bush has effected changes to US foreign policy that, for better or worse, many observers thought could only have taken place over a much longer period. Says Mr Kupchan: "I've been surprised by how quickly he has made these things happen. It's like history on fast forward." |
