How Did We Lose Them?
Bush Wanted His Doctrine And the Allies, Too
By James Mann
The Washington Post
Sunday, March 16, 2003
We are witnessing a major intellectual failure by the Bush administration.
For more than two years, indeed even before President Bush took office, the members of his foreign policy team have repeatedly advanced a series of optimistic, self-justifying ideas about America's relationship with its friends and allies -- namely, that these nations' growing estrangement from U.S. foreign policy wasn't real, wasn't serious or wouldn't last. Now, the administration is belatedly discovering that both its beliefs and its underlying assumptions were wrong.
It is almost as if the administration has been running its foreign policy out of two different sides of its brain. On one side, it has been developing a whole new set of principles, centered on the doctrine of preventive war. On the other, the administration has clung to and operated with more traditional views about the continuing importance of our friends and allies, who do not accept the administration's new doctrines.
The result of the administration's disjointed approach has been plain to see. Over the past few months, Americans have been stunned to discover that some allied governments and large numbers of people overseas are focusing upon the power of the United States -- rather than upon Saddam Hussein's programs for weapons of mass destruction -- as the main international problem.
One reason, to be sure, is that perceptions about the extent of the Iraq threat are different overseas than in the United States after Sept. 11, 2001. But another major factor has been the mismanagement by the Bush administration, which has persisted in seeking approval abroad and has acted as though it expected to eventually get it, to the point where other governments were shouting "No!" ever louder.
How did the administration get into this mess? To understand that, one must trace the ideas about America's allies that have been advanced by the leading members of the Bush administration since the 1990s.
It might seem hard to believe now, but one of the central foreign policy themes in George W. Bush's presidential campaign was the importance of America's alliances. Indeed, candidate Bush criticized the Clinton administration for failing to work more closely with our allies. He regularly reminded listeners of his father's skill in putting together the international coalition that won the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
"All our goals in Eurasia will depend on America strengthening the alliances that sustain our influence," Bush said in a foreign policy speech at the start of his campaign. America's allies, Bush went on, are "partners, not satellites."
Condoleezza Rice, who served as Bush's foreign policy adviser during the campaign, went a step further in her thinking: She suggested that the United States was unlikely to exercise military power without the support and involvement of its allies. In one 1999 speech, when she still provost at Stanford University, Rice debunked the idea that "the world should worry about the United States becoming the world's policeman." That wasn't a problem, she said. "Americans, if anything, are ambivalent about the use of force and ambivalent about its [the United States's ] role in the world and using military force -- certainly without benefit of alliances and without benefit of friends."
In recent weeks, some commentators have advanced the argument that America's alliances aren't really so valuable or necessary. But that view is certainly not the one on which the Bush team campaigned or with which it took office. Even in last September's National Security Strategy statement, which laid out the doctrine of preemption, the administration asserted, "Today, the world's great powers find ourselves on the same side, united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos."
Yet while holding these beliefs, the members of the Bush administration faced a quandary: There was abundant and mounting evidence that many of America's allies profoundly disagreed with its approach -- both its broad doctrine of preemption and its specific policies, particularly on Iraq.
What to do? In theory, the administration could have altered its views about the value of allies and stopped asking them for approval. Or, alternatively, it could have adjusted its policies and new doctrines to take account of the allies' objections.
Instead, it did neither. Administration officials persuaded themselves that the allies and other major powers would ultimately support the United States. They did this by holding to two fallacious assumptions about the nature and behavior of America's friends and allies. We can call these the Strength Hypothesis and the Follower Hypothesis.
These assumptions about allies, too, date back several years. The best way to see how they evolved is to look at the intellectual history of Paul Wolfowitz, now the deputy secretary of defense. In the late 1990s, when Bill Clinton was in his second term and Saddam Hussein was becoming increasingly defiant of U.N. weapons inspectors, Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives came to the conclusion that a policy of containment in Iraq wouldn't work.
Wolfowitz, then dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, faced a conundrum. He had repeatedly emphasized the importance of the Gulf War coalition put together by the first Bush administration, in which he had served. However, some of the European and Middle Eastern governments that had been part of that coalition were, by the late 1990s, voicing increasing opposition to tough action by the United Nations against Iraq. How could one call for stronger action against Iraq and still adhere to the belief in a coalition, while the coalition seemed to be growing ever weaker? Wolfowitz put forward a cluster of ideas to explain why the opposition by other nations could be discounted.
One of these was the Strength Hypothesis: America's friends and allies were afraid to support the United States on Iraq because the Clinton administration's policy was too weak. They were said to be afraid we would wimp out. "[Other nations] do not wish to be associated with a U.S. military effort that is ineffective and that leaves them alone to face Iraq," wrote Wolfowitz in a 1997 commentary in the Wall Street Journal, headlined "Rebuilding the Anti-Saddam Coalition." The more strength the United States displayed, Wolfowitz suggested, the more support it would have from other governments.
The second, related idea was the Follower Hypothesis. In propounding it, Wolfowitz was echoing thoughts voiced by many others after the end of the Cold War, including Democratic Party leaders who spoke of America as the "indispensable nation." The theory was that if America led, its friends and allies would inevitably follow. "A willingness to act unilaterally can be the most effective way of securing effective collective action," concluded Wolfowitz in that 1997 article.
Others on Bush's team may not have put their names behind those exact words, but over the past two years the administration has operated on similar assumptions. It has pressed forward with its new doctrines, initiatives and policies, continuing to maintain that America's allies were important but expecting all the while that the allies' reservations would evaporate. The insidious nature of these expectations was that they caused the administration to fail to recognize what was happening overseas until too late.
And so we have heard, over the past six months, a succession of prophecies that turned out to be illusions: Sure, the Germans were opposed to war with Iraq, we were told, but they would be alone in their opposition, because the French would come around. Sure, the French were against U.S. policy, but their opposition wasn't significant because the administration would win over the Russians. Wrong and wrong -- and on and on, to the point where the United States has jeopardized the leader of the British government, its closest ally in the world. This, presumably, was not the regime change the administration had in mind.
It turns out that the underlying assumptions, coherent as they sounded, weren't valid. The Strength Hypothesis failed, because displays of power by the United States seemed to worry or even frighten America's friends and allies rather than winning them over. The Follower Hypothesis didn't work out because other nations were discomfited or downright insulted by being treated as though they were expected to simply get in line.
This does not mean that the recalcitrant allies are right or that the Bush administration is wrong about Iraq. It does mean, however, that the administration developed its policies about preemption and Iraq without readjusting its ideas about allies or coming up with a new strategy for dealing with them that was in line with these new doctrines.
What will happen now? Both American and European leaders are lining up to suggest that despite the struggles of the past few months, they will put the recent tensions behind them and everything will be fine. In one recent speech, former president George H.W. Bush noted that King Hussein of Jordan had opposed America in the Gulf War, but that the ties between the two countries were eventually restored.
Those are noble sentiments, but France and Germany aren't Jordan. The diplomatic battles over Iraq have created dynamics and crystallized perceptions that are likely to endure. Many Europeans have developed their own set of illusions about the United States. Some of them now seem to believe, erroneously, that American foreign policy is in the grip of a right-wing cabal, a misperception that fails to explain why many Democrats and liberals have supported (or are not opposing) war with Iraq.
To be sure, diplomacy is eventually likely to go forward as though little has changed. We may witness a series of summits and forced smiles later this year. In the realm of ideas, however, we can expect major adjustments soon from the Bush administration. It will have to revise either its emerging doctrine of preemptive military action or its stated belief, dating back to the earliest days of the Bush campaign, in the overriding importance of allies and friends.
The administration has tried to ignore the contradictory nature of its pursuit both of allies and of the preemptive war many of them oppose. Now its approach has reached the end of the line.
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James Mann, former diplomatic correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, is senior writer-in-residence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is writing a book about the Bush administration and its foreign policy.
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