Part Two: The Hard Edge of American Values
Let's go down the list here. Let's use the Iraq crisis as an example. Or let's use the Balkans in the 1990s. In these cases, removing a terrible oppressive dictator was the primary aim?and remember, Saddam Hussein is responsible, directly or indirectly, for killing two to four times as many people as Slobodan Milosevic. The Europeans claimed that they could handle the whole problem in the Balkans at the end of the Cold War. They wound up calling upon us. It took the United States to get rid of Saddam Hussein. I think a world operated by the French, the Germans, and the Russians would have a kind of realpolitik that is more of the seventeenth century than the twentieth century. It would be so cold-blooded, and yet it would be dressed up with self-righteous moral statements, like the "world community" and "every country is sovereign." The result would be that some horrible dictators would flourish. And remember, Russia is not really a democracy. Germany has never really exhibited much wisdom in foreign affairs. If you look at how the French have operated in sub-Saharan Africa, how they operated supporting the Serbs in the Balkans, you will see that despite all the statements, their actual operations on the ground in many parts of the world have been, by any moral standards, worse than ours. And the problem I have with the United Nations is that it can only make decisions on broad consensus. And it's like any bureaucracy: the more people that are involved, the more mediocre and diluted the decisions are. Tough decisions tend to be made by small groups of people willing to take risks. The European Union and the UN Security Council certainly aren't designed that way. If you look back, the UN Security Council didn't give its stamp of approval for Bosnia, for Kosovo, for almost anything in the post-World War II world, except for the Korean War and the first Gulf War.
Some might consider the line "And so for the time being the highest morality must be the preservation?and, wherever prudent, the accretion?of American power" a rather terrifying one. How would you respond to people who have such qualms?
I would say that a liberal power like the United States cannot spread its liberalism without military power as well. That the reason the Balkans are democratizing is not because everyone woke up one morning and said, "Let's be democrats." It's because the United States proved dominant militarily in the Cold War and was willing to intervene. In the 1930s many of the intellectuals and university people in the Balkans were fascists, because the fascists were militarily and economically dominant at the time. It's not enough to have the right ideas. You also have to have military and economic power behind it, or else your ideas cannot spread. And again, we're not talking about the United States invading every country and holding a gun to their heads and saying, "Hold an election or we'll undermine you." We're talking about the United States serving as an organizing principle for the gradual expansion of civil society around the world. And making moral statements simply is not enough to spur that expansion. You also need military power, and you have to periodically show that you are willing to use it.
You mention that "while realists and idealists argue 'nation-building' and other general principles in Washington and New York seminars, young majors, lieutenant colonels, and other middle-ranking officers are regularly making decisions in the field." This effectively makes them the "keepers of our values and agents of our imperium." Does the American public realize that this is the case? If not, would this realization change the status of the military in this country?
First of all, I don't think the public realizes this. But, regardless, it is the case. If they thought about it for five minutes, however, they would realize that there is no other way to do this thing, because all decision-making has to be delegated. When you talk about aiding this country against that country or about fighting terrorism, when you actually take that decision and strip it down, it always comes down to one person in the field giving specialized training to somebody else in the field. It comes down to somebody working with the police in Cairo or the police in Tunis?teaching them techniques about how better to track suspicious characters in their country. The hard edge of American values has and always will be executed by people in the field.
One of the majors you spoke with told you that the model for a Special Forces soldier could be found in John Hersey's A Bell for Adano , in the character of Army Major Victor Joppolo. Can you talk about the important traits in his character for a Special Forces solider?
First of all, A Bell for Adano is just a simply great book that everyone should read. It's one of those sparely written, perfectly organized?almost in a mathematical way?kind of novels. Victor Joppolo represents the victory of common sense over mere abstract rules and regulations and precepts. What Hersey is showing is that no matter what rules you draw up, ultimately the man on the field is going to interpret them based on his instinct and common sense. Joppolo loves to talk to people, he speaks Italian, and he's not interested in being rewarded for his successes. He really doesn't care who takes the credit as long as something gets done. He also realizes that for each little problem there's a different solution. Because each problem he encounters in this town of Adano means a problem with a specific citizen in that town. They all have different personalities, so he has to approach each in a different way. There almost is no rule book. The rule book boils down to who you have in the field. It's a study in interpersonal relations.
You mention the friendships that have developed between U.S. military men and their foreign counterparts. These relationships appear to be extremely important to the Special Forces service. Can you talk about why these friendships mean so much? Also, why is it important for us to have a system for tracking these relationships outside of an anecdotal one?
What happens now is, there will be a crisis somewhere and an officer will say, "Oh, I know that army. A guy in that army was my student at Fort Leavenworth or Fort Benning and we were really good friends for a few years and then we lost contact. I'm sure he's in the middle of this crisis. I wonder what he's up to? I wonder what his e-mail address is?" If we could systematically keep track of these relationships and contacts, people would be able to access them in a crisis. We'd have better intelligence quickly and we'd be able to fix a problem too. When friendships are maintained, they are used. For instance, the Ghanaian Army may have a problem?it's got rebels in the north, it lacks equipment, or it can't keep up an airfield because the runway is damaged or there's not enough money to keep paving it. So then a colonel in Ghana, who is friends with a Marine lieutenant at Camp Pendleton in California, can just get in touch with his friend and say, "You know, this is going wrong and that's going wrong. Perhaps you could help us, perhaps you could send a training mission." And remember, some of these training missions can be one person. Or they can be ten or twenty. They can be planned nine months in advance, or they can happen on the spot. The more flexible this process is?the more seamless the relationships between American middle- and higher-level officers and officers in other countries?the better our relationships with these foreign militaries are going to be, and the better able we're going to be to deal with problems as they emerge in a world where every country is potentially strategic. If there's one thing we learn from the news, it's that the places that seem the most obscure today are the stuff of tomorrow's headlines.
Rule No. 3 is "Emulate Second-Century Rome." A main component of that emulation seems to be making use of "hyphenated Americans," similar to what the Romans did when they incorporated far-flung imperial subjects into the inner workings of the empire...
And made them citizens. Even emperors in some cases.
Right. Why haven't we done this thus far? Also, how has the U.S. military's relationship with "hyphenated Americans" been changing of late?
Well, we have been doing it, and there's been a lot of progress on this since I wrote the article. In fact, one of the stories that got some attention, but perhaps not as much as it should have, is the number of visits by high-level Pentagon officials to Dearborn, Michigan, which is kind of the center of the Iraqi-American community. People in the U.S. government have been increasingly reaching out to Iranian-Americans in Los Angeles, to Iraqi-Americans in Dearborn, hopefully to Palestinians in northern New Jersey. They recognize that we aren't tapping the "hyphenated Americans," and increasingly we're making progress. But just think about it. We have the most international country in the world. Large communities of Armenians, of Iranians, of Laotians, of Vietnamese, and of Arabs. Given this population base, there is no excuse for us not having a diplomatic and military corps that is the most erudite and linguistically sophisticated in the world. And we do, to an extent. But we have to get a lot better at it.
You argue that it isn't necessary for the area specialists whom we trust with delicate missions to agree with or like the orders they are given to carry out. Why is it a benefit for them to be emotionally involved with the host countries, which often causes the specialists to dislike policies from Washington? What guarantees do we have that this dislike won't prevent the policies from being carried out?
From the archives:
"Tales From the Bazaar" (August 1992)
As individuals, few American diplomats have been as anonymous as the members of the group known as Arabists. And yet as a group, no cadre of diplomats has aroused more suspicion than the Arab experts have. Arabists are frequently accused of romanticism, of having "gone native"?charges brought with a special vehemence as a result of the recent Gulf War and the events leading up to it. Who are the Arabists? Where did they come from? Do they deserve our confidence? By Robert D. Kaplan
This is actually a very controversial subject. It's not controversial in the big news sense, or on the op-ed pages. But it's very controversial in Washington, because the Near East Affairs division of the State Department, which basically deals with the Middle East?the Arabs, the Israelis, Iran?has traditionally been pro-Arab, anti-Israeli for bureaucratic, diplomatic reasons. You have large numbers of people who learn Arabic and then serve their whole careers in Arab countries. And yet there's only one country where they speak Hebrew, so career-wise, why would you want to specialize in that? I wrote a book on this subject called The Arabists. I found out that yes, there is a lot of sloppy thinking in the Near East Affairs division. That comes from "cultural clientitis." And there's very little solution to it. Once you teach someone a difficult-to-learn language, don't you want them to use it? Do you want them to study a language for three years, become fluent, and then only have them serve in one country for three years? No. You want to keep using them, because the public is invested in it. When people learn a language, when they live in a country, and in a second and a third country, they build up marriages, friendships, experiences?which is only human. And it's only human that they're going to develop some kind of an emotional sympathy. To a point there's not much you can do about this. The answer is not to destroy the Near East Affairs division, as some conservatives recommend. The answer is simply to police it. This is a management issue. You don't have to destroy a whole community of experts just because you have a problem with how they feel about something. And remember, we're talking about gradations of differences. Your troops in the field cannot always love the policy that they're carrying out. Sometimes, if they have certain differences with it, it may actually ease their own relationships with the locals. And as long as the policy is not undermined, I don't see the problem.
How does it ease their relationships with the locals?
Because the locals feel, This ambassador is really sympathetic with us, but he's got to carry out these orders from Washington. But he's really a good guy; we should try to help him. In other words the ambassador becomes a middle man?an interpreter of our policy to the local people. And if it's a policy that the local people don't like, but which still has to be carried out for the sake of our own self-interest, you're going to need a kind of medium. An ambassador can serve this purpose. What I'm talking about in this article is developing area and linguistic expertise, and that comes with a price. The price is sympathy?cultural sympathy for the area you become expert in. And that's going to lead you to have certain tensions with Washington's foreign policy. But I'm saying that that's normal, we can't just legislate that out of the picture. There is more benefit than drawback, and there are ways of managing this.
You describe a world in which the State Department seems increasingly irrelevant, at least in its current incarnation. Can you talk about this a little more? Is the military assuming the role of diplomacy?
First of all, the State Department is not irrelevant. It's going to be more and more relevant, because it's impossible to conduct a big program anywhere without both State and Defense. It's just that the State Department is not the subject of this article. Let me repeat this twice, it's so important. This article is not about foreign policy, it's about the security branch of foreign policy. I didn't write about globalization, I didn't write much about human rights, foreign aid?those are all legitimate subjects, but they're outside the scope of this piece. But yes, it is true that the military is broadening its scope of operations. They're doing more humanitarian relief work and more diplomatic work. But it is also true, as I mention here and there in the piece, that diplomats?foreign service officers from the State Department?are increasingly militarily sophisticated. They increasingly cannot operate without a greater and greater knowledge of military affairs. We're too locked up in roles, in specific definitions that are becoming more and more muddled as time goes on.
So it goes back to what you mentioned earlier about the importance of interagency cooperation?
Exactly, it goes back to that question. That we should stop this argument over who's more important, the State Department or the Pentagon. The better they can cooperate, the more effective our foreign policy is going to be.
The U.S. military's relationship with Latin America emerges as an example in your piece of the military's aggressive intelligence operations, Special Forces training of local units, and domineering diplomacy. You admit that "the results were not always pretty and frankly, not always moral." Is there a way to avoid these results in the future while still following the example?
Yes, absolutely. You cannot judge a foreign policy unless you accept the assumptions of the age in which that policy was executed. And the assumptions of the Cold War age were that the Soviet Union and China and Cuba together represented a massive, palpable security threat to the United States. That the people who lived under those regimes were essentially far less happy, far poorer, more miserable and more repressed than those who lived in the regimes of our allies. Having accepted those assumptions, we operated in a very rough and dirty way in Latin America during the Cold War decades. What I'm talking about here is using Cold War Latin America as an operational example, while at the same time being much more aware of moral concerns.
Rule No. 9 is "Fight On Every Front." The media appear to play an important role in implementing this rule. Can you talk about what kind of role you envision for the media?
I think the key thing that is so obvious that it's almost overlooked is that there is no longer an American media. There's a global media. Increasingly, American newspapers, magazines, etc., use reporters and writers from other countries, who come with a non-American perspective. Media organizations are global. They may be based in the U.S., but they're essentially global. So, while the U.S. government still has to operate in a world of nation-states, it's being judged by a media that already exists in a universal, post nation-state world. This increases the tension between government and media. Operating in such a world means you're judging the United States on a level of morality that any nation-state will find hard to live up to in every crisis. So there is no absolute answer to this, but there are two partial answers. One is, we can do information a lot better than we're doing it. As I put it, a nation that has businesses that can sell us things that none of us want or need can certainly come up with a better way of explaining our foreign policy. The other point, and I think this is crucial, is that we want to avoid future Iraqs. It never plays in our favor when there's one massive issue in front of the world's eyes. Because once an issue becomes so important?I'm talking about foreign-policy security issues?people start thinking about it emotionally and symbolically. Look at the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. It's gone on for so long and been on the front pages so long that there are many people on both sides who simply react to it emotionally. And because we are the world's preeminent military power, it's natural that when people focus on one issue that we're involved in, they're not going to take our side, they're going to be suspicious of us, they're going to be frightened and nervous?the way it's normal to be frightened, nervous, suspicious of anyone who wields all the power, or most of it. So we want to deal with issues around the world before they achieve mega-front-page status. In my opinion, that is ultimately the best information strategy.
You mention that U.S. dominance could end in a few decades. Why such a short amount of time? What sort of world do you see emerging after that?
Hopefully it will last only a few decades. If we have this much power in the world a hundred years from now, we would be far less benign and idealistic than we are now. I think it's a good thing that we should only be the preeminent power for a few decades. I can't in detail describe the world that's going to come next, simply because it hasn't happened yet. I foresee a global system in a few decades that will very roughly resemble the Han Empire that emerged in China in around the second or third century BC. The Han Empire, which governed much of today's China, was not a dictatorship ruled from a central capital. In the beginning, at least, it represented a grand harmony of diverse peoples and systems that despite all their power struggles found out that it was in their self interest to limit their own power for the sake of the greater whole. So while a single country didn't emerge, a loose web of agreements emerged that was a system, even though it wasn't a central government.
In other words, I'm not predicting a world government. What I am hoping for is a kind of world governance that's loose, informal, undeclared, and allows for a number of organizations?regional, global, and great powers?to work together toward the larger good. I don't think we're there yet. And because we're not there yet, I think it's very important that the preeminent military power in the world is also a liberal power, and that it serve as an organizing principle until this system of global governance emerges.
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