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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (46372)	9/23/2002 11:34:59 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

the responsible party here: the airlines or the govt.? It is the Govt, and thugs like these need to be stomped on.

To: JohnM who wrote (46372)	9/23/2002 12:19:52 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Loud and clear Bush claims to enjoy reading about Theodore Roosevelt but he ignored Teddy’s famous foreign policy maxim: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’ By Jonathan Alter NewsWeek Columnist and MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR msnbc.com Sept. 20 — The “Bush Doctrine” unveiled this week will dominate discussion of U.S. foreign policy for years. My sense is that about half of it — the “We’re-Number-One-and-Don’t Forget It” stuff — will haunt this president and eventually cause heaps of trouble, particularly with China. The other half — the part that advocates “preemption” and explains the demise of such long-held concepts as “containment” and “deterrence” — will, after a period of uncomfortable adjustment, hold up under scrutiny and reorder the world for the new century. In other words, the Bush Doctrine manages to be both dangerous and visionary at the same time. FIRST, THE DANGERS. White House aides told The New York Times that President Bush edited the new “National Security Strategy of the United States” heavily “because he thought there were certain sections where we sounded overbearing and arrogant.” Can you imagine how it read before he edited it? Like something out of Dr. Strangelove? This is a blunt, straightforward document in the style favored by the president. Such clear language, free of nuance, can be refreshing, as it was at the United Nations on September 12. (And even in the West Point speech from which much of the new doctrine was taken). But diplomats have a reason, beyond fecklessness, to write gauzy prose that must be parsed and decoded: It helps their country’s diplomacy to write diplomatically. There’s a reason why, after hundreds of years, nations talk to one another with care: Too much clarity can be destabilizing. AT FACE VALUE ‘Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States.’ — LINE FROM BUSH'S NEW NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY DOCUMENT Bush and his CEO brethren — conditioned to believe in clear, corporate vision statements and contemptuous of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo — cut straight to the chase. “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States,” the document says. Now just because this is undoubtedly true doesn’t mean we should say it. In the past, the United States has always said we need the capacity to fight two big wars at once, deter aggression, stay strong, etc. But we’ve never quite rubbed the face of our competitors in their own inferiority before. If you sit on, say, the Chinese Central Committee and had been counseling better relations with the United States, would this help your cause? Or would it help the cause of hardliners who are determined to expand the Chinese military and catch up with us? That one’s a no-brainer. Bush claims to enjoy reading about Theodore Roosevelt but he ignored his most famous foreign policy maxim: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Our stick is so big — we dominate the world militarily by such orders of magnitude — that it is both ungracious and unwise to remind everyone of it all the time. Psychologically speaking, that all but assures a more rapid Chinese (and Russian) buildup. If Bush keeps it up, it may even goad Japan and the European Union into remilitarizing. LIMITS OF DETERRENCE The rest of the “doctrine” is not as bad as some are depicting it. The critics worry that “preemption” (which, by the way, is hardly new) will give India a green light to preempt Pakistan, or vice versa, and embolden other nations looking for an excuse to make war. This is a real danger, but the benefits of preemption outweigh the drawbacks. The big long-term benefit is deterrence: Allow inspectors into your country and keep no big secrets from the U.N. or risk ending up like Iraq. That’s not such a bad message to send to rogue states around the world. Syria, Iran and North Korea might get with the program. But the larger idea of deterrence as the centerpiece of American foreign policy is dying an overdue death. Suicidal terrorists cannot, by definition, be deterred. Nation states seeking what Bush calls a “shortcut” to bloodying the United States cannot be fully deterred from secretly slipping weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to terrorists and then claiming “Who, me?” afterward. And if these regimes are racing to build nuclear weapons, “containment” of them is not enough. That policy worked well against the Soviet Union for half a century but is of limited use now. TOWARD A ‘MORE HUMBLE’ POLICY That means the future of global security will move from deterrence and containment to transparency and disarmament. The Bush doctrine introduces a useful if clunky new word: “counter-proliferation.” It’s not enough to have a non-proliferation policy that aims to stop the spread of WMD; in some cases, like Iraq, those weapons must be identified and destroyed. So the White House seems to comprehend that deterrence is of declining use. Which makes the overall military posture — if-we-brag-about-our-strength-it-will-deter-the-bad-guys — more than a little contradictory. Clearly, deterrence still has a role to play in our relations with major nations like China, even as it no longer applies to rogue states or terrorists. But do we have to flaunt that distinction? If the world is going to call us cowboys, let it be for something that makes us stronger, not weaker. Bush said in the presidential debates with Al Gore that he wanted a “more humble” foreign policy. That noble goal didn’t have to die on September 11. We should be able to walk humbly and chew our enemies at the same time.