Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  China cannot be underestimated, and has the historic mentality and experience of a Great Power that has not faded in that immense and ancient people, as it has in Spain, where world power depended on distant colonial possessions. But, as with previous challengers to the U.S., there has been a tremendous gush of unthinking and premature acclaim; China has a completely corrupt political system with no worthwhile institutions, and a governing philosophy and national goals and political ethos that are made up ad hoc and very difficult to enforce over such a vast, sullen, skeptical population. Not one published financial or economic figure can be believed, it is still mainly a command economy, and although China has performed admirably as a developing country pulling hundreds of millions of people out of a primitive and desperately poor life into a burgeoning contemporary economy, there are still many hundreds of millions of people living as they did 3,000 years ago. The radical and often stylish evolution of Shanghai and Beijing in particular have impressed the world, as did China’s emergence from nowhere to win the 2010 Olympic Games (in Beijing and in monumental stadia designed by the world’s most illustrious architects).

  But there are almost no general social services, and terrible internal stresses. The reduction of its problem of overpopulation can only be accomplished by such restrictive birth control that there will be a prolonged problem of aging. China will face the same problem as Europe, Russia, and Japan—an aging, declining, more welfare-dependent population—though at least it is by choice and a smaller population is objectively desirable. Opposite a determined America, China will have a very long and difficult time achieving real geopolitical parity.

  As Europe wrestles with its financial woes, Germany is emerging as a semi-giant, at the head of a core of strong-currency nations, including Austria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Poland, the small Baltic countries, and Scandinavia, about 190 million people and about half of American GDP Such a bloc, astutely led, could establish some level of preeminence over most of Europe, including France (which has become very erratic) and Russia.

  2. GEORGE BUSH AND BILL CLINTON

  President Bush’s post—Gulf War popularity quickly eroded, as much of it was relief that there had not been heavy casualties or prolonged combat in the Gulf War; Iraq had everything that Vietnam had not—an unquestionable cause, a precise and achievable goal, overwhelming force, a complete constitutional and international mandate, a huge coalition, volunteer armed forces, and a simple exit strategy. But a moderate recession settled in and Republicans remembered Bush’s preelection pledge of “no new taxes” after he acquiesced in tax increases to reduce the deficit. He had called Reagan’s economic proposals “voodoo economics” in the 1980 primaries, and Republicans were now Reaganite. The president’s support in his own party was soft, and Ross Perot, an opinionated Texan billionaire, ran a largely self-financed populist campaign against Bush’s free-trade policies, including the Free Trade Agreement with Canada in 1989 and the much more controversial North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, including Mexico, which was only adopted just after the 1992 election. Bush recalled his able secretary of state, James A. Baker, to take charge of his reelection campaign and replaced him for the last few months of the term with career foreign policy specialist and former Kissinger protégé Lawrence Eagleburger.

  Bush’s answer to a worsening economy was a rather vacuous plea to a joint session of Congress and to the country to spend more. He paid a price for not ever having been an electoral politician. He had had a fairly tough race for his congressional district when he first ran, but after that, despite the important positions he held appointively and by clutching Reagan’s coattails, he never really clicked with the public.

  Perot was a populist who flowered suddenly after the main party nominations had been locked up by the president against populist dissident Pat Buchanan, and by five-time Arkansas governor Bill Clinton for the Democrats over a diverse field including a rather offbeat campaign by former California governor Jerry Brown. Perot’s campaign was launched with a tremendous television blitz as soon as the primaries were over, and he was fishing especially after the popularly disaffected of both parties with an eclectic platform of a balanced budget, free choice of abortion, tightened gun control, a stricter war on drugs, protectionism, greater emphasis of environmental protection, and electronic referenda to promote direct democracy. He had led some important task forces on education and drugs in Texas; had, unlike Clinton, opposed the Gulf War; and ran a campaign pitched to a disconnected group of constituencies of right and left.

  The country was uninspired by its president and unconvinced by his chief challenger, and Perot made greater inroads than any third-party candidate since the scarcely comparable Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Perot was running for a time ahead of both parties’ likely candidates but abruptly withdrew in July after Bill Clinton was nominated by the Democrats at their convention in New York. Clinton selected Senator Al Gore of Tennessee as his vice presidential candidate, and enjoyed a tremendous bounce from his convention, where he presented himself as a “New Democrat,” who had supported the Gulf War and criticized the budget deficit. He claimed that too many people had been disadvantaged by Reagan-Bush policies favorable to the prosperous but indifferent to those less well-off. Perot claimed that he did not wish to push the race into the House of Representatives. However, he was back two months later, claiming he had been forced out by Republicans who had threatened to disrupt his daughter’s wedding.

  The Republicans met in Houston and got only a modest lift from their convention. It was not clear when Perot reentered the race which of his opponents was the principal victim of his depredations. It was illustrative of the clumsiness of the Republican campaign (after the death in 1991, aged only 40, of hardball Bush strategist Lee Atwater) that it accepted a three-way debate, failed to take measures to arrest the economic slide, and largely focused on Clinton’s peccadilloes and draft avoidance. Bush (somewhat understandably) never knew what to make of Perot, whom Clinton sideswiped with his pitch to the people of modest incomes and insecure employment, “I feel your pain.” It was an appalling blunder for Bush to get so detached from the Reaganite foundations of the modern Republicans that he lost chunks of it not only to Clinton but even to an unstable political charlatan like Perot, who never provided a word of specificity for all the facile promises he made. On election day, Clinton won, 44.9 million votes (43.1 percent) and 370 electoral votes from 32 states and the District of Columbia to 39.1 million votes (37.5 percent) and 168 electoral votes from 18 states, and 19.7 million votes (18.9 percent) and no states for Perot.

  George Bush had been a competent and, in foreign policy terms, a good president, but a generally unexciting one. Though he did not know the people well, he was a respected and well-liked ex-president, who was soon seen clearly as a gentleman and patriot who had served the nation valorously in war and intermittently and with distinction through many important positions all the way to its highest office, for nearly 50 years.

  Bill Clinton was a very astute politician, and one of the new group of presidential politicians who had never had any real career except politics, nor any real ambition except to be president. Such men as Taft, Wilson, Hoover, Eisenhower, and Reagan were very famous because of completely separate careers they had had before seeking any public office. Truman, Carter, and Bush had had other careers, and Franklin Roosevelt had been sidelined for seven years mitigating a terrible affliction (polio). Harding, Coolidge, Johnson, and Ford went early into politics (after war service, in Ford’s case), but none of them was aiming for the White House; and Kennedy and Nixon, who were, at least won some battle stars, got round the world a bit, came from prominent centers (Boston and Los Angeles), and had been a long time in Washington. Bill Clinton ran unsuccessfully for congressman at age 28, was elected attorney general of Arkansas at 30, and governor at 32.

  As president, he raised taxes and balanced the budget, lost a battle for comprehensive medical insurance waged by his wife, los
t control of both houses of Congress in 1994, and didn’t have much legislative impact after that, though he did eventually sign a welfare reform measure that undid some of the excesses of Johnson’s Great Society programs, though it was chiefly sponsored by Republicans. The country’s numbers on economic growth, job creation, reduction of welfare rolls (largely because of the Republican-led reforms), unemployment and inflation (under 5 and 3 percent), and poverty (under 12 percent) were all good, but there is some dispute about how much of these gains came from a peace dividend on the end of the Cold War and a reduced defense requirement, and how much from the long buildup of Reagan’s tax reductions and productivity increases. Clinton did start the country down the road to chronic balance-of-payments deficits and to officially mandated and legislated noncommercial residential housing mortgages, which, with low interest rates, led to a terrible surplus of housing with no owners’ equity in it and an enormous quantity of worthless mortgages a decade later.

  He had no difficulty being reelected in 1996 over the Republican candidate, Senate leader and 1976 vice presidential candidate Robert Dole and his running mate, Jack Kemp, a former New York congressman and a leading advocate of tax cuts (also a former very talented professional football quarterback). Dole was witty but inconsistent, and an erratic campaigner, who wasn’t an agile debater and didn’t have much to shoot at, given the general prosperity and lack of foreign problems at the time of the election. His stock answer to many questions in the debates began with a reference to having “a modest foundation,” a fact that rarely turned out to be relevant to the subject he was supposedly addressing. Implausibly, Ross Perot ran again, for no explicable reason and against a more popular and politically connected president than George Bush had been. Clinton and Gore won with 47.4 million votes (49.2 percent) and 379 electoral votes from 31 states and the District of Columbia to 39.2 million votes (40.7 percent) and 159 electoral votes from 19 states for Dole and Kemp to 8.1 million votes (8.4 percent) and no electoral votes for Perot (who mercifully took the hint and retired from politics). Clinton chose Warren Christopher, a Los Angeles lawyer and Carter’s deputy secretary of state, for the State Department in his first term, and in his second term elevated the ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine K. Albright, the first woman to hold that office. She was a colorful personality and less conventional than Christopher, but there was less serious policy management for these holders of that office than any since Coolidge’s colleague, Frank Kellogg, who purported, with the French statesman Aristide Briand, to ban war as an instrument of national policy (Chapter 8).

  Clinton dabbled in the little that came by in foreign affairs, rather fecklessly. The new administration was handed, in effect, a grenade with the pin pulled by Bush in Somalia. Bush had responded to acute famine and food shortages in that country by landing Marines to distribute food. This depressed local agricultural prices and led to some sniping at the Americans at about the time of the Clinton inauguration. The new administration, without giving it adequate thought, plunged into nation-building in one of the most unpromising, dysfunctional, and violent countries in the world. A few crossfires with the faction heads and a downed helicopter, replete with the traditional public entertainment in the area of dragging the bodies of enemies through the street (American servicemen in this case), and Clinton reconsidered the plan and redeployed the nation-builders out of the nation.

  He was happy to take some credit for the Oslo Accords in 1993, which brought the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization together for the first time. Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres (then the Israeli foreign minister, but at different times prime minister, opposition leader, president, defense minister, and holder of many other posts throughout Israel’s history). But Arafat ignored the agreement and it was only the occasion for some unilateral concessions from Israel. Clinton tried again in 2000, when Ehud Barak was Israeli premier, but Arafat blew the talks up and demanded the right of millions of claimed Palestinians to pour into Israel and inundate the Jewish state. He left Camp David to unleash the Second Intifada, which Barak’s successor, General Ariel Sharon, put down very effectively.

  There was rather ineffectual and unfortunate meddling in Haiti in 1994, and the promotion of a government that proved to be corrupt even by Haitian standards, and that conferred questionable preferments in its international telephone revenues on friends of the Clinton administration. There was complete inactivity from the U.S. and all outside major powers, except to some degree France, in Rwanda in 1994, where the French-backed Hutus massacred 800,000 Tutsis, about a fifth of the population, a tragedy on the scale of the Cambodian atrocities 20 years before.

  The artificial federation of Yugoslavia, created at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, and held together by the Serbian Karagorgevich Dynasty between the wars and by the agile nationalist communist Josip Broz (Marshal) Tito for 35 years after the World War II, gradually unraveled in the late eighties as the Serbians resumed a rather aggressive treatment of Croatian and Muslim minorities, especially in Bosnia. The head of the European Commission, Jacques Poos of Luxembourg, triumphantly announced in 1991, after violence erupted in Slovenia, that “the hour of Europe has dawned,” and that there was no place for the Americans, a view in which the Bush administration happily concurred. But it was only a few months before the Europeans were beseeching American assistance.

  Ignoring Bismarck’s famous admonitions that “The Great Powers must not become involved in the quarrels of these sheep-stealers,” and that the Balkans “were not worth the bones of one Pomeranian grenadier,” the Americans, particularly former secretary of state Cyrus Vance, did assist the Europeans with sanctions and negotiators and eventually with forces. A fragile agreement for Bosnia was negotiated under American auspices at (of all unlikely places) Dayton, Ohio, in 1995. This did not constrain Serbia from attempting to suppress Montenegro and seize Kosovo from an Albanian majority, which led to a NATO air war against the Serbs that eventually drove out of power in Belgrade the authoritarian regime of Slobodan Milosevic. But it was a strange conflict, NATO’s first against Europeans, in which, to stay above antiaircraft missiles and try to avoid any casualties, NATO aircraft did not descend below 15,000 feet. Air-to-ground rocketry developed by the Americans was astonishingly accurate and was successful after a great deal of damage had been inflicted, but the concept of a war worth killing for but not dying for had worrisome implications, in what militarily sophisticated countries might do to more primitive countries. Russia and China condemned the operation and the United Nations never endorsed it, but it did achieve its objective.

  Clinton had terrible difficulty getting approval from the Republican Congress to pay American dues to the United Nations, because of the general leftist, anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-abortion stance of the organization, which was always too much for the Republican leadership. He finally had to agree to avoid any funding of abortion facilitation to get $800 million of the accumulated arrears paid and to save America’s vote in the General Assembly. (The world organization had evolved unpredictably from the device Roosevelt had intended to lure America out of isolation and front America’s preeminent influence in the world, mainly composed of the reliable votes of docile Latin American republics and cooperative British dominions. It had become a playpen for corrupt despotisms of the underdeveloped world to gambol about flaunting their often outrageous mockeries of human rights and puerile interstate behavior, thumbing their noses at the Great Powers.)

  Clinton’s most successful foreign policy initiative was essentially a flim-flam job called the “Partnership for Peace” that gave observer status at NATO to the former satellites and republics of the Soviet Union and had some of the superficial trappings of an extension of the alliance to all of them, including the Asian republics, but in fact provided full cover for an eastward expansion of NATO. Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary joined in 1999, followed in 2004 by Slovakia (which had
seceded from the now defunct Paris Peace Conference state of Czechoslovakia), Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Slovenia, all seeking an American military guarantee for their oft-violated and lengthily repressed independence. (In 2009, Albania and Croatia joined.)

  The chief strategic significance of this was that Poland, whose independence had also been restored at Paris in 1919, for which the British, French, Canadians, and Australians had gone to war in 1939, and whose independence Stalin had promised at Yalta, was now relatively secure and solidly in the West. More important, the long tussle over whether Germany, the most powerful nation in Europe when united, and the heart of the continent, was an eastern- or western-facing nation, was completely resolved in favor of the West. Stalin said in 1945 that the long battle between the Germans and the Slavs had been won by the Slavs, but the division was, because of the overwhelming and benign intervention of the United States, along different lines: the democracies and the communists. Ten million Germans had fled westward ahead of the Red Army in the terrible last months of World War II (Chapters 10 and 11). An honored member of the Western Alliance, West Germany extended the West with reunification in 1990, but now the eastern border of Germany was no longer the outer eastern edge of the Western world. Poland and Hungary, brutalized in 1956, and the Czechs, betrayed in 1938 at Munich and overlooked by everyone except Stalin in 1945, and suppressed again in 1968, were rightly the first wave of post—Cold War members. Germany was entirely enfolded in the comfortable and cordial embrace of the West. In no other respect was the strategic triumph of the United States more benignly manifested, and Bill Clinton, like the 10 preceding holders of his office, played a valuable role in it.