THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  Advocates of the new leadership are, however, less eager to intervene in Somalia or Haiti, where the outcomes do not appear to affect American leadership one way or the other. Where they perceive future threats—such as those arising from the possession of weapons of mass destruction by terrorist states, such as Iran, Iraq, or North Korea—these advocates favor decisive action untempered by the effort to achieve consensus with our allies. President Clinton's role in negotiating a peaceful solution with North Korea was attacked just as much by partisans of the New Leadership, who favored a more robust response, as it was by the New Nationalists, who really had little to offer as an alternative.

  As every leader instinctively knows, one's adversaries may present immediate problems, but preventing one's friends and colleagues from becoming successful rivals is the tricky part of the agenda of dominance. For this reason, New Leaders* and New Realists often appear to agree: both want to prevent the rise of a state, or collection of states, that would threaten the position of the United States. But whereas the realists wish to do so as a consequence of inevitable American relative decline, the leaders wish to preserve American hegemony at the top. Thus some New Realists would have demurred about intervention in the Gulf because Iraq is not a potential power of world-dominating ambitions, whereas for the New Leader, it was essential that the United States demonstrate it could act on behalf of the northern-tier states, from whose number a rival leader might emerge. While realists such as Jeane Kirkpatrick now suggest that “it is time to give up the dubious benefits of superpower status” so that we may aspire to be “a normal country in a normal time,” the New Leader recognizes that we are still far from normal times.30

  Above all, is not the New Leader the truly realistic one? For while others call for strengthening the democratic revolution, achieving a robust agenda of counterproliferation, and preventing hostile combinations from forming against us, only the New Leader actually plans to accomplish these goals by specific means within our control, as opposed to offering hortatory rhetoric and a sort of “you first” diplomacy. The probing question for the proponent of this paradigm: Can we afford it? Indeed there are some realists who claim that even attempting such an agenda is bound to weaken our geopolitical position, just as it did those of earlier superpowers who, having vanquished their opponents, found themselves increasingly unable to provide the economic infrastructure that would sustain their gains because they had diverted so great a portion of their resources to military budgets.

  To this the New Leader retorts that whether or not our economic health can be improved through American hegemony, it certainly can't prosper without it. Moreover, the decline in American competitiveness is not, he argues, due to overspending on defense, but rather to those national characteristics that are the negative consequence of qualities whose positive effects far better suit us for world political leadership than for cutthroat trade wars in the game of geo-economics, a game that our rivals would be only too anxious to tempt us to play in lieu of the geopolitics where our overwhelming assets lie. Let me take up both these points, one at a time.

  First, it is often assumed by many that the vast flow of international goods and information is a natural given and that any American resources spent to ensure international stability through defense expenditures are resources wasted because they are diverted from our economic well-being. How often are we treated to lectures by economists who claim that money spent on tanks is unproductive, while the same money spent on tractors contributes to our national wealth. In fact it took British expenditures well in excess of our own (as a percentage of GDP) to maintain the sea lanes on which British prosperity depended, and to prevent the competing hegemonies of those who would threaten her trade and later her industrial supremacy. It is open to question whether her relative decline began when the costs of empire overstretched her ability to maintain domestic investment, or when other states—Germany, for example, whose military expenditures were far greater than Great Britain's—overtook her and were manifestly willing to threaten the very international security on which complicated contemporary economic life depends. As Krauthammer puts it:

  It is a mistake to view America's exertions abroad as nothing but a drain on its economy. As can be seen in the Gulf, America's involvement abroad is in many ways an essential pillar of the American economy. The United States is, like Britain before it, a commercial, maritime, trading nation that needs an open, stable world environment in which to thrive. In a world of Saddams, if the U.S. were to shed its unique superpower role, its economy would be gravely wounded. Insecure sea lanes, impoverished trading partners, exorbitant oil prices… are only the more obvious risks of an American abdication… The cost of ensuring an open and safe world for American commerce—5.4% of GNP and falling—is hardly exorbitant.31

  But, it is said, this is far more than, for example, the Japanese spend on defense (about 1.5 percent of GNP) and is a competitive drag on the U.S. economy. Surely Japan is as much in need of secure trade lanes as the U.S. and far more sensitive to oil prices. Wouldn't the United States be better off ceding some share of its responsibilities for international security to those states who, when they took up this burden, would thereby acquire a drag on their ascent and thus relatively improve our own competitive position? This is the second question suggested above, and it draws a distinct line between the purported paradigm of leadership and all others. For here the partisan of this approach denies the assumption on which the argument depends: geopolitical leadership, he argues, is not the same as geo-economic competition. “The notion that economic power inevitably translates into geopolitical influence,” Krauthammer writes, “is a materialist illusion.” Economic power is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for great power status, which also comprehends not simply military power, but the will to use it and the legitimacy to do so (so as not to arouse countervailing coalitions). Here the United States, in part because of its benign history toward the defeated states of World War II, is in a unique position. The moment for its aria has arrived.

  It may appear that it is the imprimatur of the U.N. that conveys this legitimacy, but in fact this is only a reflection of the American desire not to appear hegemonical and thus to seek U.N. endorsements for its actions. A quick canvass of recent General Assembly resolutions would disabuse anyone who was tempted to think that the U.N. could, acting as an institution, convey legitimacy to any state act without the consent of the great powers.

  Indeed the constitutional framework of the United States and its multinational state uniquely suit it to pursue the goals of world power without threatening its peers. The Long War was fought over issues of legitimacy; the resolution of that war in favor of the democratic republics has given us a postwar order over whose protection the United States is well placed to preside. To abandon this role will not only threaten that victory, it will inevitably invite the chaos that is most costly to a status quo power such as the United States. We have the most to lose by our own passivity and no other way to lose it.

  PARADIGMS AND POLICIES

  We have seen five proposals for a new strategic paradigm for the United States—the New Nationalism, the New Internationalism, the New Evangelism, the New Realism, the New Leadership. None has yet captured a consensus. This failure has prompted some to suggest that the world is simply too complicated now for a single paradigm.* “No doctrine,” Richard Haass has written in a wittily titled article, “Paradigm Lost,” “can hope to provide a lens through which to view most events.”32

  The first thing to be said about these proffered “new paradigms,” however, is that they are not paradigms at all. In fact, the entire intellectual enterprise that has yielded these proposals has been triggered by a profound misunderstanding as to what has been lost and what can serve to replace it. The source of this misunderstanding may perhaps be traced, ironically, to the idea that the world inherited by U.S. administrations after the Long War is “a more complex place than what came before.” According to this
account presidents from Truman to Reagan had the comforting stability of the Cold War to provide a consistent and continuous context for foreign policy, but the aftermath of that war has not yet yielded a similar clarity. In the place of containment—the old “paradigm” through which all political events were mediated—there is only confusion, because the antinomies on which containment depended (the global competition of the West and the Soviet Union, the totalitarian ambition of communist ideology versus the pluralistic vision of the West) have also collapsed.33 Perhaps until new threats against which the United States must contend are themselves clarified, its political class will be unable to decide what paradigm is to replace containment—or perhaps the threats are so diffuse that, as Haass suggests, no single paradigm will do.

  What is wrong with this account? First, it confuses paradigms with policies. A paradigm is a worldview that members of a political community share; a policy is what some portion of them put into place in pursuit of the goals of that paradigm. Of course no single policy will do; indeed the history of the Cold War itself shows an enormous variation in policies, depending on the time, place, and manner of the campaign being waged. But without a shared paradigm, it's hard to know whether the proposed policy is effective when implemented. Without a shared paradigm, the United States is condemned to adopt that most seductive of strategies, the case-by-case approach. This approach is appealing to a powerful state because it obviates the need to make some crucial choices and comforts the decision maker that no precedent is created that will come back to embarrass him. The more powerful the state, the more appealing is this approach, because that state will always appear to prevail. It will always appear to get its way, if it is powerful enough to bring the other states into line. I say “appear to prevail” because it is not so clear what “way” the state, acting on a case-by-case basis, is actually getting when it gets its way. Any road seems like the right one if you don't know where you're going, because if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. So the United States may be said to have had its way when it persuaded the U.N. Security Council to adopt resolutions condemning the Serbs for war crimes, and when it led the Council in declining to prosecute those indicted, when it initially led humanitarian forces into Somalia and when it was the first to evacuate its own troops.

  Second, the history of the account given above is saturated with presentism, the view that things have never been quite so much the way they are as they are right now. I doubt the world is, as is so often said, “more complicated, more complex,” because the “world” in that sentence is not the teeming globe whose problems increase as our appreciation of them increases, but instead is the set of values that, problematically, collide in the attempt to allocate our power wisely. Such a world was hardly more complex for President George W. Bush, with vastly more resources, than it was for, say, John Quincy Adams, who was compelled to factor in the consequences of his foreign policy for the domestic crisis caused by slavery and also for our exceedingly precarious international position. President Bush's predecessor had to decide whether to intervene in Kosovo to halt a campaign of ethnic cleansing; Adams had to decide whether to give aid to the South American revolts against the Spanish empire. The decisions are no less complex in either case. Nor was the American position in the Cold War particularly simple either. As I wrote at the time:

  No effective American policy can be either pacifist or militaristic: for the U.S. must pursue an accommodation with the Russians in which we do not wholly believe, and at the same time, arm to prevent a conflict in which we do not truly wish to participate.34

  Moreover, it is not the end of the Cold War that has transformed the world and left the United States without an objective. Our objective never was simply to defeat the Soviet Union. Georgiy Arbatov's cynical remark, “We have done our worst to you: we have deprived you of an enemy,” is far more reflective of Soviet culture than American. Rather it is the end of the Long War, which was fought over the legitimacy of the democratic system itself and that of its competitors, that has quite appropriately left us with the slight puzzlement one feels after recovery from a long and life-threatening illness. What now?

  Finally, it is not “containment” that is the paradigm that has been lost. Containment, composed of that set of policies that sought by defensive alliances to prevent the aggrandizement of the Soviet empire and, where possible, the avoidance of armed conflict in order to enable the internal contradictions of the communist system to manifest themselves and to be contrasted with the marked success of the Western states, was not a paradigm at all. Containment did not provide us with a way of understanding the conflict, but rather with a guiding set of tactics for winning it.

  The paradigm by means of which Western statesmen and their publics have understood this century-long struggle is a picture of the State. That paradigm depicts the legitimate state as one that exists to better the welfare of its people. This paradigm distinguishes the nation-state from the state-nation that preceded it, the paradigm of which was a State that existed to mobilize the people for whom it was the sovereign; the state-nation was the state of empires. The nation-state is the state of nationalities.

  For most of the twentieth century the picture shared by the American political community has been that of a State created by the self-determination of peoples. This paradigm has not been lost; indeed it is flourishing in many parts of the globe. It fails to provide guidance for U.S. policy because the problems that the American state faces now are not problems of the Long War, whose inception marked the beginning of the widespread transition to the modern nation-state. That paradigm continues to provide the requisite ability to see resemblances, to enable analogies, to structure consensus—if it didn't, then the fruits of the Long War would be incomprehensible to us. But as a consequence of that war, the American state has changed and is changing to reflect those innovations that brought victory. Part of that change, which is already well underway in the United States, will be a paradigm shift in our expectations of the State.

  If the Wilsonian paradigm pictured a state that existed in order to better the welfare of its nation, the twenty-first century American state will exist to reflect, implement, inform, and diversify individual choice. It is tempting to say that this is a change from a democratic political matrix of ideas to a capitalist market matrix. But this would mistake the way we deal with problems for the problems themselves: there will always be a political and a market mechanism working in tandem because the kinds of problems states must solve cannot be wholly assimilated into one or the other approach.35 Briefly put, systems for allocation that use political means (like the Selective Service Act) call on a different view of egalitarianism (one man, one vote, for example) than do market systems (like the All-Volunteer Force) with their distinctive view of equal treatment (to each according to his means and ability). One can never be wholly sacrificed to the other in a civilized society. Indeed one might go so far as to say that it is a distinguishing mark of a civilized society that it struggles to maintain many-valued forms of life despite the human condition of scarcity that compels choice among these forms.

  What the proffered candidates for the new paradigm in fact offer are policies. Indeed they are the same policies we have more or less been recycling throughout the Cold War, and all sit quite comfortably within the Wilsonian paradigm for the nation-state. All five programs (the New Nationalism, the New Internationalism, etc.) have been, at various times, the implementing techniques for the Cold War policy of containment. Each has risen to temporary ascendancy at the time of a particular Cold War crisis the collapse of the Congo (internationalism), the Cuban Missile Crisis (nationalism), German unification (realism), the war in South Viet Nam (evangelism), the Arab-Israeli War in 1967 (leadership). The reason they are so very unhelpful—ask former President Clinton whether “the New Evangelism” actually helped him decide whether to use force to disarm North Korea's nuclear weapons capability or ask his successor, President Bush, whethe
r “the New Nationalism” has helped him persuade our allies to support missile defense—is precisely because they are representative of a debate whose reason for being has ceased. If we are truly to imagine what a new paradigm might look like, we have to look at the State and the strategic challenges it faces, and determine how it itself has changed. Each of the current elements in the policy portfolio was once a paradigm of statecraft. When the sort of state for which it was essential changed, the paradigm ceased to have the force of a consensus worldview. Paradigms decay into policies.

  The security paradigms—the worldviews of statecraft—of any particular era follow the constitutional makeup and outlook of the states of that era. As each form of the state underwent a transition from one constitutional order to another, it added an accompanying paradigmatic outlook. Thus we find in the political papers during the transition from the reign of feudal princes to that of the princely state, a refined and sophisticated development of the balance of power. Machiavelli speaks the idiom of realism. His city-state has his love, “more than his soul,” he once wrote, not his ethnic group, which he seems to pity and even disdain. There is little, if anything, of nationalism in his papers, though he calls upon a “redeemer” for Italy. And there is nothing of praise for internationalist institutions—the Church—nor, of course, for democratic enlargement. The transition to the kingly state retains the concept of the balance of power among its lexicon of policies, but its outlook is one that we would associate today with hegemony. One does not negotiate the compensating system of balances when one hopes to overpower all the competing states. The count-duke Olivares wrote Philip IV: