Atlantic Unbound | June 18, 2003
Interviews
The Hard Edge of American Values
Robert D. Kaplan on how the United States projects power around the world?and why it must
In "Supremacy by Stealth," his cover story for the July/August Atlantic , Robert D. Kaplan states simply that we have gotten ourselves into the business of empire. (He leaves it to others to debate the necessity or morality of such a move.) Concentrating on empire's practical side, he asks, How do we manage this world?
In order to answer that question, Kaplan has spent much of his time over the past several years traveling with the U.S. military, observing the implementation of American power on a day to day basis by Special Forces troops who work on the ground in countries around the globe. Based partly on these extensive travels, Kaplan has come up with a list of "Rules for Managing the World":
1. Produce More Joppolos
2. Stay on the Move
3. Emulate Second-Century Rome
4. Use the Military to Promote Democracy
5. Be Light and Lethal
6. Bring Back the Old Rules
7. Remember the Philippines
8. The Mission is Everything
9. Fight on Every Front
10. Speak Victorian, Think Pagan
In essence, these rules are an articulation of power on a global scale. Have the best men possible on the ground; be everywhere; use American citizens?foreign and native born; use the military to further democracy; do a lot with a little; covert means and dabbling in moral ambiguity are sometimes necessary; a country united under one name may need more than one policy; the mission cannot be forgotten or compromised; sell the product; be idealistic, but know that realism wins the day.
For now, Kaplan argues that maintaining American pre-eminence is paramount?both for the sake of other countries and for our own. He cautions, however, that the American empire is not meant to last forever. We are here as a self-interested but liberal power, shepherding the world along only until a "kind of civil society for the world" exists.
Robert Kaplan is an Atlantic Monthly correspondent. He is the author of Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (2001), Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus (2000), The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite (1993), and other books.
We spoke recently by telephone.
?Elizabeth Shelburne
One of the first questions that emerges in your piece is "How should we operate on a tactical level to manage an unruly world?" Can you explain what you mean by "manage" in the context of the United States' global empire?
First of all, I find that so much of the analysis and commentary about America's place in the world is too abstract. What I'm attempting to do here is get down to the nuts and bolts. And one of the nuts and bolts that is never discussed is personnel. Who are the ambassadors? Who are the defense attachés? Who are these lieutenant colonels who are put in these positions in so many countries, where they are basically formulating micro-foreign policies on their own? I would much rather have an imperfect foreign policy executed and interpreted by the best kind of ground-level people than a brilliant foreign policy executed and interpreted by mediocrity. The real decisions on foreign policy are often made in the meetings of the State Department and the Defense Department, where the important questions are, Who's going to be the next ambassador to Turkey, who's going to be the next defense attaché to Uzbekistan? These are crucial, and this is what I get into in some of the first rules. Though I don't use the word personnel, that's what a large part of the piece is about. And you can only manage well through whom you appoint. A policy is only as good as the people who are executing it on the ground in the various countries.
So then your point here is to cut through the discussions of these high-minded, philosophical concepts and establish a real rule book for the people on the ground?
Right. It's not that these discussions are bad. Or that they don't help. It's that these discussions are often so similar that I feel unless you are going to write something different, it's better not to write anything at all. There have just been so many discussions?useful, not useful, whatever?on whether we want to enforce democracy, or whether we should or shouldn't nation-build. These are such broad categories that in so many countries they often have no application whatsoever. Often the last thing on an ambassador's mind is, Do we want to have more democracy or less? For example, there are elections in Yemen already; they're imperfect. They tend to lead to more radical politics, but not always. There already is some kind of a balanced system. These kinds of Washington and New York discussions simply don't help.
Should we be in the business of managing the affairs of other countries? Do we have a choice in the matter?
We don't have a choice. Very few empires set out to become empires. What tends to happen is that through economic and social dynamism, they become very strong economically and militarily as other places weaken, and they find themselves in a gradual position of dominance. As they increasingly see themselves threatened, they go out and do things not for the sake of conquest, but for the sake of their own security at home. Rome didn't go conquer Carthage because it sought to expand an empire in North Africa. It did it because it felt that Carthage was a threat to Sicily. And gradually Rome came to dominate North Africa through a process that originally started as a narrow security concern.
If you look at the history of the U.S., we were an empire long before we were a nation. I'm talking about the history of the American West. Up until the West became incorporated as states in the Union, it was essentially governed as an empire from Washington. And why did we expand to the west? Because we had the Spanish, the French, and the British at our west, our northwest, and our north. So we expanded into the continent originally for the sake of security and as a consequence we built an empire that we eventually incorporated into the country. We conquered the Philippines, a hundred years ago, as sort of an accidental consequence of the Spanish Civil War. Had it not been for Hitler and Tojo and the threats that Japanese and German militarism represented, America would not have become so dominant in Europe and Asia in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. So it was always a threat that led the U.S. deeper and deeper into the world. You can say the same thing about September 11. The United States is certainly stamping its foot around the world a lot more than it was before September 11. That increased involvement was, initially, at least, a consequence of a security threat.
You consider Colombia to be a very important example for the future of U.S. intervention in world affairs. Why should we be paying attention to that country?
I could have used the Philippines, I could have used Nepal. Colombia is important for two reasons here. First, we are deeply involved, yet no one is paying attention to it, which is an example of how we find ourselves in an imperial position in the world. There are many places where we are deeply involved that aren't even covered by the news media. The news media tends to interpret American imperialism solely through what's been in the headlines?Afghanistan first, now Iraq. Second and more specifically, the problems that Colombia presents are an exaggerated form of the kinds of problems that we are likely to face over the next ten or twenty years in managing our affairs around the world. North Korea and Iraq, the countries that have gotten the headlines recently, really have old-fashioned, Cold War, dinosaur-style regimes. So while these problems, North Korea and Iraq, will be with us for some years yet, they essentially already represent the past. Whereas Colombia is a sign of the future, in the sense that it has these guerilla organizations that are sort of centerless corporations split up into baronies and franchises, where it's hard to get your finger on the pulse. And it's very, very hard to defeat them, because you stamp out one element and there are all these other elements around the country. Colombia also represents how so much of terrorism around the world is interrelated with crime. The part of al Qaeda represented by Osama bin Laden is not an example of that. They are very utopian and ideological. But most of these groups that we're going to have to deal with have radical politics that are interrelated with crime.
Another reason why Colombia is so important, which I didn't have space to mention in the piece, is that we are constantly reading about these disputes between the State Department on the one hand and the Pentagon on the other. It's like they are these two poles of opposing bureaucracies. But when you get into the field, this totally dissolves, because any major U.S. program anywhere is an interrelationship between the State Department, the Pentagon, and other agencies. If the agencies don't work together seamlessly, the program itself doesn't work. Plan Colombia, which is the name of the whole gamut of foreign and military aid that we are providing to the Colombian government was, up until post-Saddam Iraq, the largest foreign interagency operation that the U.S. government had in the world. Plan Colombia represents billions of dollars of interagency cooperation. And interagency is really the only way we can ever operate into the future.
You describe FARC, the main guerilla group in Colombia, as being "Karl Marx at the top and Adam Smith all the way down the command chain." Can you tell us what you mean by that?
Karl Marx means that the front that the group presents to the world is ideological, in this case left-wing/communist/socialist. But beneath that front it's all based on profits and crime. The FARC has lost its ideological edge and has kind of devolved into profit-making enterprises, involving kidnappings, drugs, and siphoning off oil-pipeline revenues.
The Special Forces soldiers in Colombia complain about the limited rules of engagement in that country, since they are permitted "only to train, rather than fight alongside, their Colombian counterparts." Why aren't they allowed to fight? How does this edict manifest itself during their time in Colombia?
Rules of engagement are probably the key issue in determining what the morale is of our soldiers in the field. If the rules of engagement are appropriate, the morale tends to be very high. If they are inappropriate, you tend to get low morale. What rules of engagement really means, when you get down to it, is when you are allowed to fire and when you're not. Rules of engagement was a term that you didn't really hear much about until the 1990s, because during the Cold War, we were in a black-and-white situation. So it was either all-out war or nothing. We didn't have these kind of nuanced, quasi-battlefield, peacekeeping situations or training situations. All this emerged in the 1990s when we found ourselves in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia. We found ourselves with such questions as, If somebody wants to steal food from a relief convoy, is that worth shooting over?
The problem in parts of Colombia has been that Special Forces troops are allowed to train the elite units of the Colombian military and police but they often do this training in very hostile territories, which are surrounded by guerrillas. Many of the middle-level officers feel that the rules of engagement are not as expansive as they need to be in order for the soldiers to protect themselves while they are in these areas.
Also, rules of engagement come about through a negotiation between the United States and the host country. So we're limited to a degree by what the host country can politically accept. If U.S. soldiers find themselves shooting guerrillas in the Philippines or Columbia or Nepal, the question becomes, How does that affect the politics for the governments in these countries? Is it a plus? Is it a minus? So this is where politics intrudes in military operations.
What kind of things are these Colombian soldiers and others being taught? Why do they need this kind of training?
First of all, training sounds very passive. It sounds like the Special Forces soldiers are in a classroom teaching the Colombian soldiers how to clean a rifle. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about elite units of one military training the best of the best of the other military. And we're going even further. Because U.S. Special Forces soldiers don't just train elite units. They train the trainers of the elite units?whether it's knowing how to retreat, whether it's knowing how to throw a grenade, knowing how to occupy a building in urban combat, and once you occupy one building how to capture another building. It's practical and operational. The training really involves doing it as an example. Every morning U.S. Army Green Berets go out in full battle gear and they actually do these exercises. Very often a typical training day replicates actual combat conditions, in terms of physical exertion and tension. It includes parachute drops, it includes rappelling down from helicopters, it includes very fine things like teaching snipers how to measure the wind velocity and zero in through sights?all these little tricks. And if the Special Forces soldier can't get a perfect bulls eye with his assault rifle every day, the Colombians?or any other military?are not going to respect him. You only earn respect in this business by showing that you're the best.
Is the United States the only country that has this diffuse military presence, with thousands of operations a year in 170 countries?
Yes, we are. Some other countries?like Australia and Israel?are surprisingly diverse; they do things that would surprise people. Of course, you have the French throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, and they are very active in ways that also do not get that much news coverage. But these tend to be small, boutique operations. The United States is the only one that is doing it all.
Why do we consider this presence so important?
It is something that has emerged. I don't think it has ever been, "We need a military presence in a hundred countries in the world." What happened is that the Cold War went on for so long. It wasn't just a four-year war like World War II or World War I, where once the war was over the military budget could go down. The Cold War went on for so long that it bred a kind of worldwide military establishment. Even when budgets went down in the early and mid-nineties, it didn't really affect it. Also, in the post-Cold War world, with the Soviet Union gone, with problems in the Balkans that the Europeans couldn't solve on their own, and with all these Middle Eastern threats, the U.S. was always called upon to intervene, to train, to do this, to do that. So it was not part of a thought-out process.
The Army calls the Special Forces soldiers "quiet professionals." What is the definition of a quiet professional?
A quiet professional is somebody?and this is very generic?who may go into the country with civilian clothes. He'll have small arms waiting for him when he's there, he's diplomatic, he can put on a suit and tie, he'll know a foreign language. He may quietly liaison with elite units of a foreign Army giving them advice on how to deal with this terrorist or that drug lord. He may actually go out on missions with them. He flies in on a commercial airliner, traveling economy class like any civilian, and is met at the airport. With a small group of others, perhaps five or eight people, he will be in a forward position to help in a decisive moment. Probably the most popular known example of this is the Delta force that went down to help the Colombians eliminate Pablo Escobar.
You state that "a world dominated by the Chinese, by a Franco-German-dominated European Union aligned with Russia, or by the United Nations ? would be infinitely worse than the world we have now." Why is that the case? Can you give examples of why each of these would be worse?
END OF PART ONE |
