Jonathan Clarke Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Our political system and its vigorous pluralism is in play here and should have been a check on some of the excesses of this policy, if that is what they were. Why did they not come into play? I'm talking about the opposition party and the Congress, or the media, or alternative research institutes in Washington. Why were they not able to come into play to at least call into question some of these policies?
The reason for that was that 9/11 created almost the perfect storm. There was a combination of fear and trepidation and at the same time there was a blueprint brought to the table to respond to this moment of trepidation. Once this ship was launched, once the idea that the response to terrorism was going to go after the states that harbored it and not just the al Qaeda franchise itself but after the state sponsors of terrorism, so-called, Iraq was practically doomed from that point. And at that point, a rather narrow decision making process took over.
Many of the opposition groups, the groups who might've been able to bring alternative thinking to bear, were intimidated by the circumstances. Clearly the country wanted a strong response to 9/11, the administration was extremely successful in setting up a sort-of discourse, a national discourse which suggested without actually necessarily saying so, expressed ad verbious, but suggested that Iraq was somehow behind much of the terrorist planning of the world. I think the establishment, political institutions particularly in Congress, failed to see what was going on.
The person who crystallized the opposition best of all was the governor of an obscure state who nobody had heard of before: Howard Dean. He was the person who brought the energy to the debate rather than the mainline Democratic opposition. The media was also partially responsible here, and they've conducted a certain amount of soul searching. The New York Times in the famous article confessed to not being sufficiently skeptical about the administration's claims on weapons of mass destruction; the Washington Times has done a sort of self-criticism; but I think the media was perhaps not as critical as it should have been. And then I guess we can't absolve the rest of us from complicity in this. If you don't follow international affairs closely enough to be able to bring popular opinion to bear, then the fault lies with the rest of us as well. So, this was, in a sense, a failure of the political system on a fairly broad scale.
Where do you see the balancing coming? We're in Iraq, and it seems that a new consensus is emerging, and a component of that is picking up the pieces. Where do you think a new consensus emerges to help us deal with the situation we've gotten in, and then in the longer term, where will the balancing come from? Will it be within our own political system or will it be from other major actors, like Europe and China, who would not be captured by a comparable narrow interest group and may have a diplomacy that draws more broadly on the kind of diplomacy you were talking about [from] earlier in your career?
What you're seeing today is, in a sense, almost a realization among the administration itself, that perhaps it went a little bit overboard on Iraq. The president himself has taken some constructive steps since his re-election. He's reached out to Europe, he's taken a more conciliatory tone towards Iran. There's a sense there that perhaps the allied component needs to be drawn in a little bit further, and that may have produced some beneficial results.
There is less neuralgia around today, the tone is a little bit better, the European allies themselves think that we have to put Iraq behind us, we have to get on with the process, so whatever you think about the war itself, we now have to get on with helping it rebuild. French and Germans are taking an active role on cancellation of debt, and so on. Inside the administration is already a little bit of balancing in the direction of a more traditional approach to American diplomacy.
Now, on the international side, where the balance is going to come from is an interesting question. The Europeans would certainly see themselves as supplying that balance. There's the famous phrase of a former prime minister of Britain, Harold MacMillan. He said that Britain wanted to play the part of the Greeks to America's Rome, i.e. "We're so smart; these guys have got all the muscle." I think that's the sort of European rather snobbish sense, that they've got the diplomatic brains and can guide. I doubt that's going to happen, really. I don't think the United States feels in any way under-equipped in terms of diplomatic intelligence today vis-à-vis Europe.
China's a much more interesting case to think about. China is obviously emerging on the world stage as a very dynamic power. Even in America's backyard now, it's now linking up with people like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Luiz da Silva in Brazil, making major purchases of Latin American goods from countries like Venezuela which are not in Washington's good books right now. China has just the mass, the size, the buying power, the population, to play this kind. It'll say to the United States that "Here is a power you've got to take very seriously, not just because we want to give you good advice but because we're actually a huge player on the international stage." So, I think the role of China as a balancer is going to be one of the key factors over this coming century, and if the United States can manage its relationship with China, then we're in for an era of considerable prosperity and peace. On the other hand, if that goes wrong, then who knows what may happen?
But to come back to the early part of your question, it does seem to me that it's at least arguable that there is a new consensus emerging in Washington today which combines both elite liberal thinkers -- people like Richard Holbrook, Madeline Albright from the left -- and the new Republicans that do see this union of American power with American values as, in a sense, providing the new shape, new paradigm for American policy. Not to be used in that rather cavalier, dramatic sense that it was used over Iraq, but nonetheless, that being the basic underlying concept under American foreign policy. This will bring about a very interesting challenge for the rest of the world, that whether they will see the United States as a status quo power interested in stability and maintaining global order, or whether they will come to see the United States as a revolutionary power, a sort of 1920s unleashing the bug of self-determination around the world, and who knows with what consequences. Those are two very different postures for the United States.
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