Bush's Post-9/11 Grand Strategy

Now, 9/11 changed things drastically, in that it created a black and white world -- apparently -- and allowed President Bush and his National Security Advisor, Condi Rice, and Cheney and Rumsfeld to put on the table the American foreign policy agenda in an assertive statement of a grand strategy. You're critical of that grand strategy, and you propose an alternative one. Let's move the discussion to that. First, let's look at the Bush strategy. What is it telling us about the world, what we have to do in the world that exists after 9/11?

There are many aspects to the American political culture, and [in your class] you're using Walter Russell Mead's book that deals with these different political-culture schools in America. One school has a paranoid streak and a suspicion of the world that runs particularly deep: the Jacksonian school. What 9/11 did is merge idealistic triumphalism, "America is omnipotent, and America has answers for the rest of the world," with paranoia about our own safety and security. It created a very odd mixture of feelings of great power but great vulnerability. It led, therefore, to an opportunity for certain people with certain views to seize the agenda with the notion that the only way America could be safe was by remaking the world, and particularly remaking the Middle East: the only way to make us safe is to make those societies like us.

In the Clinton notion of grand strategy, the first principle was that we're likely to become more prosperous if we can make other economies open up and be more like us. That was a neoliberal version, to oversimplify. The neoconservative version that developed with Bush was the notion that in order to be secure we had to act in a preventive, preemptive manner, and bring democracy by force to those societies, particularly in areas, in countries, that were breeding-grounds for terrorists, and where they hated us. We couldn't be secure in living in purely a pluralistic world. You either had to be with us or you were against us. If you were against us, it means that you were harboring ill intentions. We had to make a priority of going after those people and getting them first before they got us. The core idea was driven by paranoia, absolute security.

In some ways, American policy has come to mirror that of Israel under Sharon, under Likud. The notion is that you have to have a very aggressive posture, that no American is safe from the possibility -- endless possibilities -- that terrorists might get any kind of weapons, and you have to act with ruthlessness and force to get them before they get you. It is built on these black and white notions.

Now, I happen to think the Bush grand strategy or doctrine has been very short-lived. We're already in the post-world. In fact, that's what I will be speaking about tonight, that in some ways the world has already moved, because the judgment has already been made out of the reality of what happened in the last two to three years that the Bush grand strategy or doctrine is going to be full of grief for America and the world.

It's important to note that even before 9/11, the Bush administration was making moves that, in essence, swept off the table a lot of the ideas for consultative, multilateral governance for the world, ideas that were in our interest and that were pushing our agenda forward and giving it a legitimacy in the broader world. In your article, you demonstrate quite effectively how the Bush strategy pulls the legs out from that whole system.

That system is based on a reality. What most Americans don't believe is that given even a more modest foreign policy agenda, we need the help and assistance of other countries, in many respects, more than they need us now. Whether it's in Europe or East Asia, there's not an overriding military threat. They still are dependent on the American market, but in many respects we're asking much more from them than they want from us at this point -- other than they don't want us to be the big bully in the world or misuse our power. They used to in the old days call this old-fashioned interdependence, but it's come back to us in a major way, and it's not fully appreciated [by the American public]. The advantage of that institutional framework is that it commits other countries to pooling their efforts and resources on goals that you widely share, and that sometimes you have to give up a little bit in order to get a lot more back.

In the Clinton administration, while some of them were sympathetic to that deal in terms of this whole litany of things that the Bush administration [has rejected], the Clinton administration actually wasn't willing or able to get there. All these things were on hold as far as American participation was concerned, whether it was Kyoto, or the International Criminal Court, or how constructive a member of the United Nations [we would be], whether we were fully going to repay our dues or not. The deal that Ambassador Holbrooke struck was a move forward, but there is still an open question about a lot of these. The future of even NATO was somewhat in questions because the Europeans were uncomfortable with this division of labor, where the U.S. did the military thing and then they were expected to pay for it and clean up the mess afterwards.

There was a lot of uneasiness about that even before Bush, but at least it was on hold; it wasn't totally rejected. What Bush did is he came in and in a most cavalier way, seemingly, to the rest of the world, he declared that those ideas, those institutions are an anathema to us. It wasn't just that we weren't going to participate; he was making a statement that these were almost un-American in their very character. It was taking the U.S. in a different direction.

So across the board -- arms control, Kyoto, and then after 9/11, the Iraq War -- the idea was there's an American way of doing this and only one American way --

There's a Texas way!

There's a Texas ... well, I defend my state! But we will say there is one way, and the world has to come onboard to what we have decided and perform a subsidiary role.

Next page: An Alternative Grand Strategy