Foundations of the American Century

by Inderjeet Parmar

  From May 2004, the project convened and published seven working groups’ findings on a range of national security challenges. The seven groups were grand strategy, state security and transnational threats, economics and national security, reconstruction and development, anti-Americanism, relative threat assessment, and foreign policy infrastructure and global institutions. Seventeen working papers were commissioned “on critical security topics.” A series of nine conferences followed in the United States and abroad—including at the Council on Foreign Relations, Oxford, the Brookings Institution, the universities of Texas and Tokyo, and the Truman National Security Project—to solicit input on numerous working papers and on the draft strategy. The project culminated in the production and dissemination of a ninety-page Final Report on national security, Forging a World of Liberty Under Law. Acknowledging that there were numerous other ongoing efforts to develop grand strategy for the United States, the project aimed comprehensively to link all efforts together and “to build on overlapping areas of consensus in charting America’s future course.”112 PPNS, therefore, saw itself as strategic in elite consensus building, hoping thereby to exercise wider influence.

  The PPNS claimed to be above party politics, as it was headed by George Shultz, a former secretary of state in the Reagan administration and close confidant of Condoleezza Rice, another former secretary of state, and Tony Lake, a former national security adviser to the Clinton administration. Its nonpolitical character is further suggested by its funding by David Rubinstein (a leading financier with the Carlyle Group), the Ford Foundation, the German Marshall Fund for the United States, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It was launched at an event on Capitol Hill sponsored by the New America Foundation, presided over by the Republican realist Senator Charles (Chuck) Hagel and the Democratic internationalist Senator Joe Biden.

  A detailed analysis of the links of the sixteen leaders of the PPNS—i.e., the executive director, the two co-chairs, and the thirteen members of the steering committee—shows their close links with the Ivy League universities, Council on Foreign Relations, and the foreign policy agencies of the American state (mainly pre–Bush II era).113 This evidence, while not unexpected, is important, because it boosts the Gramscian argument that PPNS represents a group of organic intellectuals who tend to see the problems of state and society from the perspectives of the dominant elites and institutions that sustain them. The above institutions are, as Robert Brym argues, vital agencies of socialization that nurture intellectuals, develop their modes of thought and, importantly, provide the bases of their successful integration into elite institutions. Intellectuals not so institutionally integrated, it is argued, are much more likely to exhibit radical and critical thought and action.114 Although casting themselves as “outsiders”—people whose voices are unheard in the White House—the evidence suggests that the PPNS’s leaders were completely immersed in policy organizations that reside very close to the centers of American elite power. As is argued below, PPNS cannot sustain a claim to be a genuine alternative—a counterhegemonic force—as its orientations and outlook were so close to those of private elite and statist forces and even shared the underlying view of the Bush administration that American values are universal and should be exported to the rest of the world.

  Some 398 individuals are listed in the PPNS’s final report as having participated in the project since May 2004. Alongside each name appears an affiliation—usually one but sometimes two—that represents that person’s qualification for participation. Before setting out the main results of that analysis, it is worth listing a few notable participants: Henry Kissinger (President Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state), Zbigniew Brzezinski (President Carter’s national security adviser), Stephen Krasner (then head of the State Department’s policy planning staff), Richard Haass (former head of the policy planning staff in the State Department in the Bush administration and currently president of the CFR), and Fareed Zakaria (the editor of Newsweek International). Prominent scholars include John Mearsheimer (Chicago), John Lewis Gaddis (Yale), Graham T. Allison (Harvard), Walter Dean Burnham (Texas), and Stephen Walt (Harvard). William Kristol (editor of the Weekly Standard), Charles Krauthammer (Washington Post), Robert Kagan (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), and Barry Rubin (Interdisciplinary Centre, Israel, and Middle East Review of International Affairs) represented their respective neoconservative viewpoints in the project’s various consultations and conferences. Contributors from the “left” of the academic-political spectrum included Bruce Cumings (Chicago), Emily Rosenberg (Macalaster), Tony Judt (NYU), and Ian Roxborough (SUNY).

  The project’s 398 participants operated, in effect, partly to reinforce the essential liberal-internationalist character of its leadership group and to open some space for critiques from out-and-out (conservative) realists such as Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer and neo-conservative “Wilsonian realists” such as Kristol, Krauthammer, and Kagan. PPNS was an Establishment project to “replace” the Bush agenda with something more palatable to leadership groups within both main parties. Its overall conservatism underlines the words of the leading neoconservative, William Kristol: the impact of the neoconservatives has been such that there is no going back to isolationism, no way to drift away from democracy promotion or Iraq.115 That is, even if the PPNS is evidence of a galvanization of centrist forces in the American foreign policy establishment, the right has shifted the center itself further rightward, one of the effects of the conservative ascendancy starting in the Reagan era. Indeed, it appears from the PPNS’s report that their principal claim is that they can do a lot better than Bush and the neoconservatives in securing America, fighting criminal terrorism, promoting democracy, and so on, despite retaining the underlying values and assumptions of the Bush administration.

  ANALYSIS OF FORGING A WORLD OF LIBERTY UNDER LAW: U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  Securing the homeland against hostile attacks or fatal epidemics, building a healthy global economy, and constructing “a benign international environment” grounded in security cooperation and the spread of liberal democracy should constitute Washington’s basic objectives, according to the PPNS’s Final Report. It was published in July 2006, in the very middle of Bush’s second term (2004–2008), when criticism of the U.S. war on Iraq was commonplace across the political spectrum. Disenchantment with the Bush strategy was reflected in the emphatic victory for the Democrats during the midterm elections of November 2006—in which they gained control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives—which many predicted signaled the death of the Bush Doctrine of unilateralism, preemption, preventive war, and militarism.

  The following sections consider the report’s uses of history, its attachment to democratic peace theory, its attitude to the United Nations, and the role of global networks in American power.

  The report’s view of “history” is instructive: Pearl Harbor taught Americans interdependence and that unchecked foreign aggressors would eventually threaten the United States: “Rather than recoiling in isolation from great power politics, we decided… to play an active and leading role in the world” (PPNS, 16). That is, an innocent America was rudely awakened by an unprovoked military attack on its territory by a power to which it had done nothing, a version of U.S.-Japanese relations that may be comforting though not entirely accurate.116

  The postwar “transformation of the Soviet Union from ally to adversary” and the threat of economic depression further strengthened American resolve behind “global involvement” (PPNS, 16). The uncritical assertion of the “Soviet threat” as a key cause of America’s very neutral-sounding “global involvement” is also worrying, given the weight of historical scholarship on the question.117 According to the report, it was NSC-68 that brought together all the strands of an enduring national security strategy and stressed the necessity of building a “healthy international community,” as the United States “needed then, as we need now,
a ‘world environment within which the American system can survive and flourish’” (PPNS, 16). That the drive to develop and sell to the American public the aggressive message of NSC-68 was led by the militaristic Committee on the Present Danger receives no acknowledgement in the Final Report.118

  Combined with such realizations and a response in terms of containment, the Truman administration inaugurated an era of international institution building to generate a “benign” international environment (PPNS, 15). The IMF, World Bank, United Nations, and NATO, as well as the Marshall Plan, which catalyzed European recovery and integration, helped to create and maintain a state of affairs that “served the interests of many other countries, making it easier to pursue our interests as well.” In those days, the “United States led but listened, gained by giving, and emerged stronger because its global role was accepted as legitimate” (PPNS, 16, 22).

  This is a version of history presented as uncontested, suggesting that American power is benign, largely reactive and defensive, and relatively enlightened rather than narrowly construed and self-serving. Taking from the past what is best for adaptation to the present appears to animate the Final Report. The Truman era is a “golden era” of relative prosperity, security, and order, which we need, in today’s conditions, to reinvent, as “the world seems a more menacing place than ever” (PPNS, 11): “it means safeguarding our alliances and promoting security cooperation among liberal democracies, ensuring the safety of Americans abroad as well as at home, avoiding the emergence of hostile great powers or balancing coalitions against the United States, and encouraging liberal democracy and responsible government worldwide” (PPNS, 16; emphasis added).

  The Princeton Project was persuaded of the efficacy of democratic peace theory: democracies do not fight each other, and thus the best hope for the world is democratization (PPNS, 25). Therefore, build alliances of liberal democracies, prevent other great powers or coalitions from threatening the United States, and promote democracy. Critiques of this view are left unaddressed.119

  This sounds similar to the “neoconservative” orientations of the Bush administration and, of course, to thinking within the Truman administration.120 This is understandable, according to Stephen Walt, as liberal internationalists and neoconservatives share a belief in the essential goodness of American power and the necessity of its use for global improvement.121 That is why many liberal internationalists—some of them involved in the Princeton Project—supported the Iraq war.122 Both groups also want only America and its allies to own and control weapons of mass destruction.123 They differ, however, on the role of international institutions, with neocons skeptical, given liberals’ stubborn desire for observing international law and, thereby, hindering the realization of American interests. It is clear, though, that the Princeton Project recognizes the limitations of the United Nations, for example, and calls, first, for “radical surgery”—abolition of the Security Council veto—to permit military interventions in sovereign states and, second, for a new organization of liberal democracies that would, in the failure of the United Nations to act, militarily enforce the United Nation’s “values.”124

  The overlaps between the Princeton Project’s Final Report and Bush’s 2002 national security strategy (and the core beliefs of Bush’s neocon allies) are many and interesting. Where that national security strategy and the neocons argued for spreading democracy, the Princeton Project argues for spreading “Liberty under Law.”125 Where the national security strategy wanted “a balance of power that favors human freedom,” PPNS promotes “maintaining a balance of power in favor of liberal democracies.” Both agree that defending and promoting freedom/liberal democracy requires “continued high level of U.S. defense spending” (PPNS, 30). Bush’s national security strategy emphasized preventive war, which PPNS endorses against “extreme states” after approval from the United Nations or “some broadly representative multilateral body.”126

  To the PPNS, the UN system is broken and needs reform. Barring reform, the United States should build a new “Concert of Democracies” to enforce international law and deter and intervene against aggressors, brutal states, terrorist havens, and so on. The concert of democracies would be an American-centered alliance that would feature military burden sharing. In practice, the concert of democracies is likely to be an alliance of the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and, possibly, India. It is similar to an alliance centered on the English-speaking countries—an Anglosphere127—the evolution of a hangover from late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Anglo-Saxonism.128 This reappeared as Federal Unionism in the late 1930s and early 1940s, specifically between the United States and Britain but including its white dominions and Scandinavia.129 Its racism was underlined by the machinations among its sponsors to gerrymander power away from populous India in a future federal assembly—including techniques borrowed from the U.S. deep South used to disenfranchise African Americans. The proposed concert of democracies may well represent an updated version of this tradition. That is, it appears to be part of an imperial project.

  Empire has become in many neocons’ and others’ eyes perfectly acceptable today. An empire of liberty is not really an empire at all. An empire that promotes and extends democracy is the very antithesis of the old colonial system. And democracies do not fight wars against other democracies. These ideas are endorsed by the PPNS’s Final Report. There is an expansive sense of “America” in the Final Report when it argues that “U.S. borders [should] be defined for some purposes as extending to the port of shipment rather than the port of entry…. [American officials should also]… strengthen the quality and capacity of a foreign government to control its territory and enforce its laws,” a necessary corollary to “defining our borders beyond those established by land and sea” (PPNS, 57). “The Princeton Project seeks to help America to grasp this opportunity to lay the foundations for advancing America’s interests on every front, rather than just vanquishing one enemy [global terrorism]… a long-term strategy should strive to shape the world as we want it to be” (PPNS, 58; emphasis added).

  One of the means by which American interests are to be realized is through the power of global networks “of national, regional, and local government officials and nongovernmental representatives to create numerous channels for [democratic] nations and others to work on common problems and to communicate and inculcate the values and practices that safeguard liberty under law” (PPNS, 7). The aim is to create intersections between “international institutions and domestic governments… institutions providing incentives and pressure to help conquer dysfunctional levels of corruption and bolster the rule of law” (PPNS, 23).

  Despite denials, therefore, of an imperial project, the levels of global leadership, global military engagement, degree of penetration of overseas nations—through border, port, and other security cooperation and supervision—interventions through public diplomacy and education—and political warfare—for nipping threats abroad in the bud all suggest that the PPNS effectively endorses an imperial approach to safeguarding American security. Kennan would, surely, have approved.130

  The Final Report of the Princeton Project received wide attention: it was launched on Capitol Hill by Republican Senator Charles Hagel and then-Senator (and now) Vice President Joseph Biden and presented at conferences across the United States normally co-sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and at private meetings between Ikenberry, Slaughter, and Senate staffers. Congressmen were lobbied to organize Princeton Project events in their home districts, visits were made to the United Nations to discuss the report, and events were held in China and Europe.131

  PPNS offered an “alternative” within a new consensus on U.S. engagement with the world and its remaking post-1989 and post-9/11; this is a reordering of the world more specifically under a U.S.-led global system and requires the redefinition of roles of global institutions, alliances, and so on. This process, triggered after 1989 and ongoing since the 199
0s and especially after 9/11 includes developments under Bush as well as Tony Blair’s thinking on “international community”: i.e., it stands rhetorically as “alternative” to Bush in theory but in practice able to go along; it is liberal imperial at its core.132

  The PPNS report’s recommendations were and are an integral part of the liberal-imperial project, not its rejection. It had to be this way, given the objectives of the project, its leadership, and participants as well as the scholar-activists’ desire to be taken seriously by policy makers; all of this affected the project’s design, leadership, membership, funding, and networks. It was oriented to the U.S. state and therefore had to enter its intellectual frameworks and underpinnings if it was to sound “realistic” as an “alternative” to the state or an opposition party in waiting.133 President Obama’s national security strategy (May 2010) bears more than a passing resemblance to the Princeton Project’s Final Report.134

  SURVEILLING ISLAMISM

  Understanding Islamic societies, movements, and ideas today are significant foundation concerns, especially after the decline of area studies in the wake of the end of the Cold War.135 This section examines some evidence of this recent development in foundations’ efforts simultaneously to support the war on Islamic terror and smooth the paths to complete globalization.