Of Paradise and Power

by Robert Kagan

  It is not that Americans never flirted with the kind of internationalist idealism that now permeates Europe. In the first half of the twentieth century, Americans fought Wilson’s “war to end all wars,” which was followed a decade later by an American secretary of state putting his signature to a treaty outlawing war. In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt put his faith in nonaggression pacts and asked merely that Hitler promise not to attack a list of countries Roosevelt presented to him. Even after the Yalta conference of 1945, a dying FDR could proclaim “the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power,” and to promise in their stead “a universal organization in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join . . . a permanent structure of peace.”[67] But Roosevelt no longer had full confidence in such a possibility. After Munich and Pearl Harbor, and then, after a fleeting moment of renewed idealism, the plunge into the Cold War, Kennan’s “logic of force” became the operating assumption of American strategy. Acheson spoke of building up “situations of strength” around the globe. The “lesson of Munich” came to dominate American strategic thought, and although it was supplanted for a brief time by the “lesson of Vietnam,” today it remains the dominant paradigm. While a small segment of the American elite still yearns for “global governance” and eschews military force, Americans from Madeleine Albright to Donald Rumsfeld, from Brent Scowcroft to Anthony Lake, still remember Munich, figuratively if not literally. And for younger generations of Americans who do not remember Munich or Pearl Harbor, there is now September 11. One of the things that most clearly divides Europeans and Americans today is a philosophical, even metaphysical disagreement over where exactly mankind stands on the continuum between the laws of the jungle and the laws of reason. Americans do not believe we are as close to the realization of the Kantian dream as do Europeans.

  So where do we go from here? Again, it is not hard to see where America is going. The September 11 attacks shifted and accelerated but did not fundamentally alter a course the United States was already on. They certainly did not alter but only reinforced American attitudes toward power. Recall that even before September 11, Acheson’s successors were still, if somewhat distractedly, building “situations of strength” around the world. Before September 11, and indeed, even before the election of George W. Bush, American strategic thinkers and Pentagon planners were looking ahead to the next strategic challenges that seemed likely to arise. One of those challenges was Iraq. During the Clinton years, Congress had passed by a nearly unanimous vote a bill authorizing military and financial support for Iraqi opposition forces, and the second Bush administration was considering plans to destabilize Iraq before the terrorists struck on September 11. The Clinton administration also laid the foundations for a new ballistic missile defense system to defend against rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Had Al Gore been elected, and had there been no terrorist attacks on September 11, these programs—aimed squarely at Bush’s “axis of evil”—would still be under way.

  Americans before September 11 were augmenting, not diminishing, their military power. In the 2000 election campaign, Bush and Gore both promised to increase defense spending, responding not to any particular threat but only to the general perception that the American defense budget—then running at close to $300 billion per year—was inadequate to meet the nation’s strategic requirements. American military and civilian leaders inside and outside the Pentagon were seized with the need to modernize American forces, to take advantage of what was and is regarded as a “revolution in military affairs” that could change the very nature of the way wars are fought. Behind this enthusiasm was a genuine concern that if the United States did not make the necessary investments in technological transformation, its forces, its security, and the world’s security would be at risk in the future.

  Before September 11, the American strategic community had begun to focus its attention on China. Few believed that a war with China was probable in the near future—unless as a result of some crisis over Taiwan—but many believed that some confrontation with China would become increasingly likely within the coming two decades, as China’s military capacity and geopolitical ambitions grew. This concern about China was one of the driving forces behind the demand for technological modernization of the American military; it was, quietly, one of the motives behind the push for a new missile defense program; and in a broad sense it had already become an organizing principle of American strategic planning. The view of China as the next big strategic challenge took hold in the Clinton Pentagon, and was given official sanction by President Bush when he declared pointedly before and after his election that China was not a strategic partner but a strategic competitor of the United States.

  When the Bush administration released its new National Security Strategy in September of last year, the ambitiousness of American strategy left many Europeans, and even some Americans, breathless. The new strategy was seen as a response to September 11, and perhaps in the minds of those who wrote it, it was. But the striking thing about that document is that aside from a few references to the idea of “pre-emption,” which itself was hardly a novel concept, the Bush administration’s “new” strategy was little more than a restatement of American policies, many going back a half century. The Bush strategy said nothing about the promotion of democracy abroad that had not been said with at least equal fervor by Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, or Ronald Reagan. The declaration of America’s intent to remain the world’s pre-eminent military power, and to remain strong enough to discourage any other power from challenging American pre-eminence, was merely the public expression of what had been an unspoken premise of American strategic planning—if not of actual defense spending and military capability—since the end of the Cold War.

  The policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations, well or ill designed, nevertheless rested on a common and distinctly American assumption—that is, the United States as the “indispensable nation.” Americans seek to defend and advance a liberal international order. But the only stable and successful international order Americans can imagine is one that has the United States at its center. Nor can Americans conceive of an international order that is not defended by power, and specifically by American power. If this is arrogance, at least it is not a new arrogance. Henry Kissinger once asked the aging Harry Truman what he wanted to be remembered for. Truman answered: “We completely defeated our enemies and made them surrender. And then we helped them to recover, to become democratic, and to rejoin the community of nations. Only America could have done that.”[68] Even the most hardheaded American realists have grown sentimental contemplating what Reinhold Niebuhr once called America’s “responsibility” for “solving . . . the world problem.” George Kennan, setting forth his doctrine of containment—which he foresaw would be a terribly difficult strategy for a democracy to sustain—nevertheless saw the challenge as “a test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations.” He even suggested that Americans should express their “gratitude to a Providence which, by providing [them] with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.”[69]

  Americans are idealists. In some matters, they may be more idealistic than Europeans. But they have no experience of promoting ideals successfully without power. Certainly, they have no experience of successful supranational governance; little to make them place all their faith in international law and international institutions, much as they might wish to; and even less to let them travel, with the Europeans, beyond power. Americans, as good children of the Enlightenment, still believe in the perfectibility of man, and they retain hope for the perfectibility of the world. But they remain realists in the limited sense that they still believe in the necessity of power in a world that remains far from perfection. Such law as
there may be to regulate international behavior, they believe, exists because a power like the United States defends it by force of arms. In other words, just as Europeans claim, Americans can still sometimes see themselves in heroic terms—as Gary Cooper at high noon. They will defend the townspeople, whether the townspeople want them to or not.

  Today, as a result of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States is embarked on yet another expansion of its strategic purview. Just as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which should not really have come as such a surprise, led to an enduring American role in East Asia and in Europe, so September 11, which future historians will no doubt depict as the inevitable consequence of American involvement in the Muslim world, will likely produce a lasting American military presence in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, and perhaps a long-term occupation of one of the Arab world’s largest countries. Americans may be surprised to find themselves in such a position, just as Americans of the 1930s would have been stunned to find themselves an occupying power in both Germany and Japan less than a decade later. But viewed from the perspective of the grand sweep of American history, a history marked by the nation’s steady expansion and a seemingly ineluctable rise from perilous weakness to the present global hegemony, this latest expansion of America’s strategic role may be less than shocking.

  What does all this mean for the transatlantic relationship? Can Europe possibly follow where America leads? And if it cannot, does that matter?

  One answer to these questions is that the crisis over Iraq has cast the transatlantic problem in the harshest possible light. When that crisis subsides, as in time it will, the questions of power that most divide Americans and Europeans may subside a bit as well; the common political culture and the economic ties that bind Americans and Europeans will then come to the fore—until the next international strategic crisis. But perhaps the next crisis will not bring out transatlantic disagreements as severely as the crisis over Iraq and the greater Middle East—a region where both American and European interests are great but where American and European differences have proved especially acute. The next international crisis could come in East Asia. Given its distance from Europe and the smaller European interest there, and the fact that Europeans could bring even less power to bear in East Asia than they can in the Middle East, thereby making them even less relevant to American strategic planning, it is possible that an Asian crisis would not lead to another transatlantic divide of the magnitude of that which we have been experiencing.

  In short, although it is difficult to foresee a closing of the gap between American and European perceptions of the world, that gap may be more manageable than it currently appears. There need be no “clash of civilizations” within what used to be called “the West.” The task, for both Europeans and Americans, is to readjust to the new reality of American hegemony. And perhaps, as the psychiatrists like to claim, the first step in managing this problem is to understand it and to acknowledge that it exists.

  Certainly Americans, when they think about Europe, should not lose sight of the main point: The new Europe is indeed a blessed miracle and a reason for enormous celebration—on both sides of the Atlantic. For Europeans, it is the realization of a long and improbable dream: a continent free from nationalist strife and blood feuds, from military competition and arms races. War between the major European powers is almost unimaginable. After centuries of misery, not only for Europeans but also for those pulled into their conflicts—as Americans were twice in the past century—the new Europe really has emerged as a paradise. It is something to be cherished and guarded, not least by Americans, who have shed blood on Europe’s soil and would shed more should the new Europe ever fail. This does not mean, however, that the United States can or should rely on Europe in the future as it has in the past. Americans should not let nostalgia for what may have been the unusual circumstances of the Cold War mislead them about the nature of their strategic relationship with the European powers in the post-Cold War era.

  Can the United States prepare for and respond to the strategic challenges around the world without much help from Europe? The simple answer is that it already does. The United States has maintained strategic stability in Asia with no help from Europe. In the various crises in the Middle East and Persian Gulf over the past decade, including the present one, European help, even when enthusiastically offered, has been token. Whatever Europe can or cannot offer in terms of moral and political support, it has had little to offer the United States in strategic military terms since the end of the Cold War—except, of course, that most valuable of strategic assets, a Europe at peace.

  Today the United States spends a little more than 3 percent of its GDP on defense. Were Americans to increase that to 4 percent—meaning a defense budget in excess of $500 billion per year—it would still represent a smaller percentage of national wealth than Americans spent on defense throughout most of the past half century. Even Paul Kennedy, who invented the term “imperial overstretch” in the late 1980s (when the United States was spending around 7 percent of its GDP on defense), believes the United States can sustain its current military spending levels and its current global dominance far into the future. The United States can manage, therefore, at least in material terms. Nor can one argue that the American people are unwilling to shoulder this global burden, since they have done so for a decade already, and after September 11 they seem willing to continue doing so for a long time to come. Americans apparently feel no resentment at not being able to enter Europe’s “postmodern” world. There is no evidence that most Americans desire to. Partly because they are so powerful, they take pride in their nation’s military power and their nation’s special role in the world.

  The dangers of the present transatlantic predicament, then, lie neither in American will nor capability, but in the inherent moral tension of the current international situation. As is so often the case in human affairs, the real question is one of intangibles—of fears, passions, and beliefs. The problem is that the United States must sometimes play by the rules of a Hobbesian world, even though in doing so it violates Europe’s postmodern norms. It must refuse to abide by certain international conventions that may constrain its ability to fight effectively in Robert Cooper’s jungle. It must support arms control, but not always for itself. It must live by a double standard. And it must sometimes act unilaterally, not out of a passion for unilateralism but only because, given a weak Europe that has moved beyond power, the United States has no choice but to act unilaterally.

  Few Europeans admit, as Cooper does implicitly, that such American behavior may redound to the greater benefit of the civilized world, that American power, even employed under a double standard, may be the best means of advancing human progress—and perhaps the only means. As Niebuhr wrote a half century ago, America’s “inordinate power,” for all its “perils,” provides “some real advantages for the world community.”[70] Instead, many Europeans today have come to consider the United States itself to be the outlaw, a rogue colossus. The danger—if it is a danger—is that the United States and Europe could become positively estranged. Europeans could become more and more shrill in their attacks on the United States. The United States could become less inclined to listen, or perhaps even to care. The day could come, if it has not already, when Americans might no more heed the pronouncements of the EU than they do the pronouncements of ASEAN or the Andean Pact.

  To those of us who came of age in the Cold War, the strategic decoupling of Europe and the United States seems frightening. De Gaulle, when confronted by FDR’s vision of a world where Europe was irrelevant, recoiled and suggested that this vision “risked endangering the Western world.” If Western Europe was to be considered a “secondary matter” by the United States, would not FDR only “weaken the very cause he meant to serve—that of civilization?” Western Europe, de Gaulle maintained, was “essential to the West. Nothing can replace the value, the power, the shining example of the ancient peoples.” Typically,
he insisted this was “true of France above all.”[71] But leaving aside French amour propre, did not de Gaulle have a point? If Americans were to decide that Europe was no more than an irritating irrelevancy, would American society gradually become unmoored from what we now call “the West”? It is not a risk to be taken lightly, on either side of the Atlantic.

  So what is to be done? The obvious answer is that Europe should follow the course that Cooper, Ash, Robertson, and others recommend and build up its military capabilities, even if only marginally. There is not much ground for hope that this will happen. But, then, who knows? Maybe concern about America’s overweening power really will create some energy in Europe. Perhaps the atavistic impulses that still swirl in the hearts of Germans, Britons, and Frenchmen—the memory of power, international influence, and national ambition—can still be played upon. Some Britons still remember empire; some Frenchmen still yearn for la gloire; some Germans still want their place in the sun. These urges are now mostly channeled into the grand European project, but they could find more traditional expression. Whether this is to be hoped for or feared is another question. It would be better still if Europeans could move beyond fear and anger at the rogue colossus and remember, again, the vital necessity of having a strong, even predominant America—for the world and especially for Europe. It would seem to be an acceptable price to pay for paradise.