Ideas in the Post - Cold War World

Let's fast forward now to the end of the Cold War. Your article on NATO, which was prompted by the Clinton administration's proposal of enlargement (and we'll discuss that in a minute) is informed with history, which is the theme that we discussed in our last Conversation: always looking to history to help us understand what we should do now. It's the end of the Cold War now. A "new world order," or a new world disorder, depending on your view. How would you characterize the way our leaders are responding to a statement of goals to deal with today's world?

It's incontestable that the burden of replacing the ideology of the Cold War -- a rhetorical mission of explaining both to the American public and to policymakers themselves why the United States acts as it does in the world -- has been completely unfulfilled. Both President Bush and President Clinton have not been able to develop any successor to the containment Truman Doctrine policy. They failed at that. Many argue that the world being what it is, the Soviet Union having disappeared, such a doctrine is impossible to develop now. I'm not sure that that's true.

What is obviously necessary, and we can see it now with Kosovo, is a means by which our leaders can talk to the people. At the moment, the entire Kosovo policy, before that the entire Bosnia policy, before that the entire Somalia policy, before that the entire policy in the eighties, were all dominated by an almost phantasmagorical, nightmarish concern to avoid casualties. If one soldier is injured, the policy is ruined, which shows that each of those missions had no political support. Why did they have no political support? I think the leaders involved would probably say that the American people are not willing to support these actions. And indeed Clinton, according to George Stephenopolos's recent book, believes that the American people are inherently isolationist. Well, I don't accept that.

If you look at the example of Harry Truman, you see that a political leader must lead. What that means is, they have to put their political capital on the line. The political strength that they might have been planning to use to push forward health care policy, or some other domestic policy, they have to be willing to use to make a speech and build up support for whatever mission they feel is important, whether it's in Bosnia or Haiti or wherever.

The only example of that recently is George Bush during the months of 1990, between the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein's forces and the actual war, in which he spent months arguing and trying to build up political support. You haven't seen that in any of these other missions. And one of the reasons is that our leaders, including President Clinton, lack or have not developed any means by which to talk to the people to justify what they're doing.

Why indeed are we in Kosovo? Well, there's no real justification for it. It changed from a strategic mission -- "we can't have the Balkans breaking apart" -- to a humanitarian mission, to "stopping a dictator who's worse than Hitler." Back and forth, all these different reasons, without ever settling on one. And because [Clinton is] unable to build any support, the idea of losing a single pilot is absolutely an anathema to the administration. It has a direct effect on the policy: because they're so afraid of casualties, they've not been able to protect the people they're supposedly there to protect.

Help me understand why this is so. In talking about Truman, you mentioned the cohort of people around him who had been informed by the history that had preceded the Second World War, the history of the failure of the League [of Nations] and which led to the breakdown of Europe and the Second World War. Are our leaders still bearing the burden of the "Vietnam Syndrome"? Are they afraid because they think every situation is another Vietnam? Or are they afraid because they don't know what they want to do in the world, and therefore they have no way to justify it?

Both of those. That's not an either/or question. I believe that the answer to both questions is yes. Just the way the formative experience for Franklin Roosevelt (and Harry Truman, for that matter) was World War I, the formative experience for Bill Clinton was the Vietnam War. He didn't fight in it, but that was the period in which he grew up. The same thing with Colin Powell, who's been a dominant figure in this era. He's no longer in office, but his views about military force have been absolutely dominant. He developed those views as an officer -- Major, I think, was the highest rank he attained in Vietnam, in the Americal division. The "Powell Doctrine," which is sort of a corollary of what was called the "Weinberger Doctrine," is simply that you do not intervene militarily unless you have the powerful support of the people, unless you can use overwhelming force, unless you have a clear exit strategy. All that may sound absolutely reasonable, but, in fact, for a great power it's not reasonable. It limits a power to taking very specific actions: Bosnia, such as it was, the way it developed. The Bush administration stated at the beginning that we can't get involved because it would take at least 300,000 troops -- which is what General Powell constantly said.

Secretary Baker said "We have no dogs in that fight."

Well, that's another very good point as well, which bolsters your second question.

So let me put them both together. On the one hand, you had Powell saying at least 300,000, 400,000 troops, which was a way to say, We don't want to get involved here. He said, memorably: "When I hear the phrase 'surgical bombing,' I head for the bunker." He was the most politically involved military officer we've had since I can't think when. It was a way, certainly in that instance, to say, "We are not getting involved because we do not see the political side protecting us. It didn't protect us in Vietnam."

Now, your point about Baker is absolutely on the mark. The Bush administration made a judgment (why, I have no idea) that a war in Yugoslavia had no effect on U.S. interests. It's fascinating to speculate about why they made that judgment. They had, at the top, two men -- Larry Eagleberger and Brent Scocroft, as Secretary of State and National Security advisor-- who had actually served in Yugoslavia and knew it well. This might have meant that they made a lot of mistakes in dealing with it, in that they didn't take current material from the field too seriously. In any event, they judged that it was not important to U.S. interests. This seems to be, particularly in the present world that we see ourselves, a fantastically mistaken notion. And even now they're being interviewed in the press everyday, and on the television. People treat them as disinterested experts. Nobody thinks to say, "Well, why didn't you do something at a time when steps could have been taken with a minimum [of bloodshed], or even no bloodshed at all?"

So, that's a very good example of the confusion about U.S. national interests, particularly in an administration -- the Bush administration -- which in general was much more competent in foreign policy than the one we're living under now. And yet they were able to look at Yugoslavia and say, "Well, this doesn't involve us." I think that Mr. Eagleberger and Mr. Scocroft and others believed that "the road burned itself out": a lot of people would die, but it would not spill over the borders. And indeed they set forth what is known as the Christmas warning. It was one of the last things they did in office, when Bush was actually a lame duck in December, 1992, saying, "If this goes to Kosovo, we will oppose it with military force." And this is what we're seeing now, seven years later.

You mentioned that Vandenberg had told Truman and his advisors to scare the people. It is almost as if now we need someone to tell the president, "Don't let the people scare you." Because this absolute fear of losing one soldier's life prevents war from being an instrument of foreign policy.

Absolutely. Yes. Vandenberg said, "Scare the hell out of the American people, Mr. President." And, indeed, Truman tried to do that. Now, there's a certain feeling of hysteria in Washington about what's happening, and the possibility that they may lose control of it.

You know, Harry, in the end, these are matters that have become very complicated. But there's something morally corrupting about what is happening now with our foreign policy. We now are bombing every night, even as we speak. Tonight we'll be bombing once again, killing people in Serbia, destroying water mains and ministries and so on, and yet we're doing absolutely nothing to prevent what's going on in Kosovo. Now the reason for this is not that we couldn't. We have a large fleet of A-10, so-called Warthog planes that fly low and attack armor. We have helicopters that are now there and more to come. We have means by which, through air power, we could affect that battle. The United States will not do it because of the danger that a plane will be shot down. And you have to ask yourself, How many casualties in Kosovo, how many dead Kosovars are worth one dead American? It's [to be expected] that Americans care more about Americans. That's just a fact, and I don't flee from it. But the point is, when you guarantee people and take steps which involve their lives very seriously, you do incur an obligation to them. Now, our country goes on. Nothing's affected here. The reserves are being called up, some of them. But, besides that, nothing is affected here and yet an intensive bombing campaign is going on. An entire country has been sent into refugee camps. And I think there's something morally corrupting about the idea that we can have not one casualty, we can risk not one casualty. The result of that is, the burden of the battle is placed on the Kosovars, who are dying by the hundreds and, perhaps, by the thousands.

Before we talk more about Kosovo and the breakup of Yugoslavia and Bosnia, which you have skillfully analyzed in a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, I want to go back and talk a minute about your article on NATO that you published a couple years ago. Let's look at NATO enlargement as an example of the incapacity of our present leadership to formulate goals for our policy in the post - Cold War world. Talk a little about the absurdity, as you characterize it, of what the Clinton administration proposed and, in fact, did.

First of all, this was an enormously important step that was taken with very little publicity, no consultation with the American public, virtually under cover of darkness. The president made no important speech about it. The Senate considered it in a rather desultory manner. Yet it was enormously important. The United States has incurred the obligation to protect, by military and perhaps by nuclear means, if necessary, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. These are [countries] that have no historical resonance at all. Never in our history have we had this obligation, except for [Western] Europe. And those countries bear little relation to us strategically.

Now, my belief at the time was that there were two obvious objections to the policy, and then a broader view. The first objection was that the problem to which NATO enlargement was offered as a solution was a civil one, an economic one. To enlarge NATO is to bring these countries into the West. It's to make them solid democracies. It's to bolster their economies. Well, a military alliance is not the best-equipped organism to do that. The European Union would be perfect, economically, governmentally. It was perfectly set up to do that. People would argue and say that the European Union can't do that because you'd suddenly have Polish farmers competing with French farmers, and this would be impossible, politically impossible. And I would respond that that's a problem that has to be dealt with, because the European Union itself is a product of the Cold War. It was set up during the divided Europe, and you have to try to balance out those differences, and that will eventually happen.

The second obvious problem with this is that we made a choice. The United States made a choice. Either it can direct its foreign policy toward Russia, or it can direct it toward advancing Eastern Europe. It chose the latter course. And in so doing, it condemned relations with Russia, which have taken on the downward spiral that we see at present. If that enlargement hadn't happened, possibly Kosovo wouldn't be happening now, because we would be able to count on Russia's aid in dealing with Milosevic. Secondly, if [we hadn't made that choice,] SALT II, which is an enormously important treaty, which cuts the number of nuclear weapons, intercontinental missiles, by two-thirds on each side, would probably be halfway there by now. Instead, in languishes in the Duma. We forget, to some extent, that the Russians have politics now. By enlarging NATO, we've given a lot of strength to nationalist forces, anti-U.S. forces, within Russia. And to me, Russia is still the great problem to the United States, if only by virtue of their weapons.

Now, a broader point, or perhaps two. One of the arguments made for the enlargement of NATO (Henry Kissinger made this, in particular, and many others did as well) was that we have a vacuum in Central Europe. "A vacuum." He's talking about the Second World War, and how it happened: you have these weak states in Central Europe; they have to be held in an alliance. Well, to me, that's fighting the last war. It's a great example of fighting the last war. In fact, a number of military agreements were concluded between Gorbachev and Reagan, in particular the agreement to reduce conventional forces. During the late eighties we had an amazing number of agreements that changed the military balance. There was the agreement to reduce severely the conventional forces in Central Europe. The agreement to eliminate intermediate nuclear missiles. The agreement -- unwritten agreement -- to take [away] battlefield nuclear missiles, making it impossible to launch a surprise attack in the middle of Europe. That was the beginning of a kind of entente that would have eliminated that vacuum. So, I wasn't persuaded by that argument.

A final comment. There is a question, and it's a theme underlying our entire discussion so far about the creativity of U.S. foreign policy. What sort of force is this country going to be in the world? I'm forty years old, so I'm the next generation of people like Bundy, who are the second generation of the Wise Men. And when I look at the decisions that have been made by this government, by the Clinton administration and to some degree by the Bush administration, the lack of creativity, particularly when you compare it to the late forties, is striking. It's almost like a wheel, spinning, an inertial force that's living on the inertial force from the Cold War. Nobody's thinking. No new planning. It's one of the reasons I entitled the article that you've kindly referred to, "Marooned in the Cold War." The idea that, in the end, we're still stuck there. There isn't a new thought about what the U.S. position should be in the world. About, for example, how the Europeans should take on some of the burdens of their defense themselves. We're not heading in that direction at all. On the contrary, we're going the opposite way.

Next page: The Case of Kosovo