| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Michael Nacht Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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There are two ideas put on the table after these events. One is the Bush doctrine of preemption. As somebody who has spent a lot of time on weapons of mass destruction, help us understand what is new about that doctrine, and in what ways it does or doesn't make sense with regard to these new challenges.
We have a self-image not shared by a lot of the rest of the world, that we are the good guys, and part of our definition of being a good guy is we don't hit unless we get struck. We retaliate. We're not the kind of group that goes and clobbers somebody first.
Now, in fact, if you look at the details, there are a number of counter-examples to this, whether it was the U.S. invasion of Cuba or the Philippines, which was related, in part, to what William Randolph Hearst was trying to do for his own newspaper circulation; whether it was, later on, an attack on Libya. In many other cases, it's not so clear that the U.S. always retaliated, in a number of cases we did take preemptive action or prevention action.
By the way, there's an important distinction there, which is being blurred in this debate. I take preemptive action against you if I think you are about to attack me and I beat you to the punch before you kill me. Preventive action is [when] I think you're developing a plan and a set of capabilities to attack me, and I want to destroy that. It may well be that, in fact, the possible use of U.S. military force against Iraq is really preventive action, but it's being billed as preemptive action. Because at least as far as we know, or from the public domain, there doesn't appear to be a set of capabilities to attack the United States or its allies that's on the front burner there.
Now, what is different, and has been so much influenced by 9/11, and I think is the basis for the powerful language used by Bush -- some would say jingoistic, nationalistic, but it's very powerful, very clear language -- is the notion that there are people, and groups, and maybe even countries, maybe even governments that are willing to use weapons of mass destruction to kill thousands or more Americans, even if they, themselves, know they're going to be killed. Now, you may accept this, you may reject it. The Bush administration happens to believe that this is the reality. They say, "We have a choice. Our choice is to wait until we are attacked and then respond, or to try to find these --" as Bush says, "the worst people with the worst weapons, and deal with them before they attack." That is the basis for the preemptive strategy. I think it's very risky, it's potentially very dangerous, because it could provide a rationale for many other countries to do the same thing against their favorite enemy.
So, for example, India against Pakistan.
Exactly. And we don't want to see that happen. So I think Bush is actually going to be very cautious in the implementation of this.
By the way, going back to some of your earlier comments about what one learns from the government. What governments say and what governments do are not identical. And you know what? They've never been identical.
So we have this grand strategy, we have this preemptive strategy. Now we're faced with this terribly difficult problem of North Korea, a difficult and very dangerous problem. I've spent time in South Korea. I've been in the demilitarized zone. I've met with people who have been with the North Koreans. I can't tell you how dangerous this is. But three months after the announcement that they've resumed their nuclear program, Bush isn't bombing the heck out of North Korea. They're not doing it. Why? Because there are too many other mitigating factors, it's very dangerous. It can lead to the destruction of Seoul. It could lead to the destruction of the U.S. - Japan security relations. There could be all kinds of ramifications.
And also endanger American troops in Korea.
Of course. We have 37,000. So we have a strategy, and we use it, we implement it when we think we can, and when we can't, we don't talk about it. This is the way governments work. You need some organizing principles, but every case is a little bit different.
It's almost like a football team. I don't want to trivialize the point, but a football team has a game plan, they have a whole series of plays, everybody has their job, they know what to do. Then they get on the field, the first play, they look at the defense, no one thought that the defense would line up that way. "Time out. We've got to change this already." This is what any administration does. You come in with a game plan, and almost from the beginning, the game plan has to be altered.
In some sense, I think, the Bush administration didn't have a very clear game plan for the first eight or nine months, other than to rebuild the military even more -- although the military actually was in quite good shape, the military that was used in Afghanistan was the Clinton military -- and to talk tough, to get away from some of these nation-building ideas, and to focus on a few great countries, like Russia and China. That's what they said. And now look where we are. We're all over the place, and we're trying to get the Turks to agree on having U.S. bases there, and we're rebuilding in Afghanistan to certain degrees. We're quite a far cry from Bush's original proposal.
So it is important to look at the policy; I'm not trying to diminish its significance. But I wouldn't say it's a precise game plan of what we will actually do.
One other area that seems to be a major change, another area that you've worked in, is arms control. The Bush administration seems to have pronounced arms control dead on arrival, and is moving more aggressively toward a defense with regard to missiles that, although it doesn't necessarily seem that it will work, seems more compatible politically with the present environment. Talk a little about that demise and what we should watch for as that policy evolves.
Arms control, as it was originally envisaged and was implemented all the years of the Cold War, is something that this administration did not think ... first of all, they weren't fans of it during the Cold War, but they certainly don't think it's applicable in this new world. Now, we may actually come to terms with North Korea in some way. There may be some kind of quid pro quo here, some kind of deal may be struck. It may not be struck in a formal negotiation, it may be, you know, people walking in the forest late at night, or having tea in a café in Vienna or something. It won't be that kind of formal business. I'm hopeful -- because the alternative could be war -- I'm hopeful that a deal with be struck.
You know, that deal would probably lead to some kind of reduction on constraints on the nuclear weapons program of North Korea. What is that? That's arms control. It's just arms control in a very different wrapping with a different colored ribbon around it. But it's not the kind of thing that the administration has espoused as being useful.
Many of the folks in senior positions in this administration believe that arms control is kind of a misconceived notion, that those with whom you can reach agreement to constrain weapons are not threats, and those with whom you can't achieve agreement are threats. So why do you bother? In other words, we don't care whether the British deploy X or deploy Y, we don't need an agreement with them. They're very cynical and skeptical about the value of it. Of course, I've spent a fair amount of my time in this field, I think that that's short-sighted, but that's the past, that's the history of arms control in the nuclear age.
The question is, how can threat control, threat reduction, how can that be implemented today? If you don't like "arms control," I'm happy to put that term aside. "Threat reduction" is being used. We have a whole agency in the Defense Department called the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and they're looking for ways to reduce the threat. So I don't think the idea is dead, but it's being refurbished and polished and revised in certain ways.
So what comes to mind as you speak is the old adage of somebody in one of the previous administrations, who said, "Don't listen to what we say, but watch what we do."
Right. It's true that on a number of the key agreements, the administration has been very negative. And, after all, the president has exercised the United States's legal authority to withdraw legally from the ABM Treaty, and has chosen, of course, not to pursue any furtherance of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and in many other areas outside of arms control, like climate change and the Kyoto protocol, and the International Criminal Court, and I'm sure many of your viewers know the whole litany. They have not been fans of these treaties. But I bet you'll see, if the Bush administration carries on, at some point they will have to resort to some degree to international legal instruments. It's an element of diplomacy which is an element of foreign policy. They may not do it exactly in the way it's been done in the past, you may not like what they're doing. But I don't think it's going to be thrown out. Clearly, Secretary Powell was supportive of this, and he's an important voice in the administration.
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