| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Robert Gallucci Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 3 of 5
In answering those questions, how big a turning point do you think the events of September 11th are?
I'm actually conflicted here. I'm tempted to say that the events of September 11th were a watershed and changed everything. And on the other hand, I sometimes think that actually they were an exclamation point, but haven't changed the flow of events very much.
On the one hand, I do think that America discovered a vulnerability it had heretofore never known. We went through the period in which oceans protected us. And then when that period ended, we went through a period in which our own capability to strike across oceans checked the ability of others to strike across oceans, and the word "deterrence" fit centrally in our concept of national defense for another fifty years. We just now came to understand how vulnerable we are, the most powerful nation on earth, the most vulnerable we are to a group of men who aren't even a nation, who are sub-national, and they can cause catastrophic damage to the nation's capital and our biggest city. So I think not to consider that recognition in the American psyche as important would be a mistake.
At the same time, it didn't change all international affairs. We have been moving in this direction for some period of time. These sub-national groups have been around and becoming more powerful and more important. In my view, we have not yet come to see the full measure of the catastrophe that they can cause modern civilization.
Our foreign policy making and our international relations are embedded in a political tradition, in a political culture that makes us, on the one hand, overreact at times, but not react in a timely manner at other times. Do you think that this event of 9/11 will bring a focus to our foreign policy that we've been lacking since the fall of the Soviet Union?
I think the events of September 11 have focused our mind, as Dr. Johnson once said about hanging. But it's not clear to me that it will necessarily be a constructive focus. We are all now very aware of how vulnerable we are, as I said. The question is, what do we do about it? Deciding to try to find who is responsible for those horrendous acts and capture and/or destroy them seems like a terribly good idea to me. And I have no difficulty thinking that the very first thing to do was to go off to Afghanistan and find al Qaeda and do what we could to destroy it. It sounds right.
But after that, it gets a lot more confusing. When you say, "Did this event bring focus?" -- it didn't bring all of American foreign policy into focus. It brought a certain particular set of steps that were pretty clear to be taken into focus, and I think the Bush administration has been proceeding prudently with that first step. It's the second step, and the path of those future steps, that I think is not yet in focus, to use your word.
One of the ways to conceptualize the choices before us is to solve some of these problems on our own or cooperate with others through multilateral institutions, to, if not achieve a final resolution, at least set up a process working toward a solution. In your work, you've been at the cutting edge of moving between national institutions, such as the State Department, but also being part of multilateral efforts to solve some of these problems. Let's draw on some of that experience. Is there a general statement you would make about the choice for unilateralism or the choice for multilateralism?
Yes. I think that the instinct of Americans is unilateral action when it comes to security matters -- not everything, but security matters. Americans have a mistrust for the United Nations, not when it's distributing food, but when it's trying to fight a war. Americans generally believe that America's military is more effective, more efficient, and it works best when it isn't constrained. America's military tends to think that way as well, not surprisingly. So I think the first thing to note here is that in the security world, unilateralism has a certain popular appeal.
The second thing to note, though, is that sometimes that may not fit best in terms of a foreign policy strategy, that "going it alone" can have some pretty high costs and can be a very difficult strategy, depending on exactly what is attempted. We can talk some specifics here, but let me start by saying that that appeal of unilateralism is very strong, and it's one thing that this administration has been appealing to. If you recall the catchy phrase of the current director of the policy planning staff of the Department of State, Richard Hass, he called it "à la carte multilateralism." Now, that sounds a lot like unilateralism to me. That means an administration that cooperates with others when it sees fit and when it's convenient. The thing about multilateralism is you perhaps end up truly compromising some of your objectives, compromising some of the means which you would use to achieve those objectives, in the interest of working with others. That's what it's all about, if you're doing that. And we are reluctant to do that, and, I think, more reluctant now than ever.
Is it something that we're going to have to do more of, that is, on the multilateral end, even though we are as powerful as we are?
I don't know. I do see different challenges ahead, and I think it's important that we distinguish, for example, between what we've been doing in Afghanistan and what we are contemplating doing in Iraq. I imagine that the effort, if there is one, to overthrow Saddam, and I will use the word "stabilize" that situation, with a regime that we believe is more humane to its own people and a better citizen in the international community -- that will require a lot of troops. I mean, we deployed half a million men and women in order to throw Saddam out of Kuwait in 1990 and 1991. So I think that would be a fairly large deployment, and it might be hard to do that without anybody on our side. There's too many people to put on an aircraft carrier. You're going to need a place to stand. So the question is, do you have friends in the region who will support staging areas for an operation to deal with Iraq? For Afghanistan, we needed staging areas, and, as you know, we found some new friends in the Caucasus, we improved the relationship with Pakistan, with Musharraf, and we even got our new friend, the Russian president, to support what we were doing. And in our deployment was not very large.
So in other words, to answer your question, which direction we go in the future, I think our inclination will be to do as much as we can alone, and not sacrifice those means and ends, or compromise them. But for some of the missions we may have in mind, we will not be able to get away with that.
Next page: Multilateralism in Practice
© Copyright 2002, Regents of the University of California