CHAPTER 8
ALL TWELVE POSTWAR presidents have passionately affirmed an exceptional role for America in the world. Each has treated it as axiomatic that the United States was embarked on an unselfish quest for the resolution of conflicts and the equality of all nations, in which the ultimate benchmark for success would be world peace and universal harmony.
All presidents from both political parties have proclaimed the applicability of American principles to the entire world, of which perhaps the most eloquent articulation (though in no sense unique) was President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address on January 20, 1961. Kennedy called on his country to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” He made no distinction between threats; he established no priorities for American engagement. He specifically rejected the shifting calculations of the traditional balance of power. What he called for was a “new endeavor”—“not a balance of power, but a new world of law.” It would be a “grand and global alliance” against the “common enemies of mankind.” What in other countries would have been treated as a rhetorical flourish has, in American discourse, been presented as a specific blueprint for global action. Speaking to the UN General Assembly one month after President Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson affirmed the same unconditional global commitment:
Any man and any nation that seeks peace, and hates war, and is willing to fight the good fight against hunger and disease and misery, will find the United States of America by their side, willing to walk with them, walk with them every step of the way.
That sense of responsibility for world order and of the indispensability of American power, buttressed by a consensus that based the moral universalism of the leaders on the American people’s dedication to freedom and democracy, led to the extraordinary achievements of the Cold War period and beyond. America helped rebuild the devastated European economies, created the Atlantic Alliance, and formed a global network of security and economic partnerships. It moved from the isolation of China to a policy of cooperation with it. It designed a system of open world trade that has fueled productivity and prosperity, and was (as it has been over the past century) at the cutting edge of almost all of the technological revolutions of the period. It supported participatory governance in both friendly and adversarial countries; it played a leading role in articulating new humanitarian principles, and since 1945 it has, in five wars and on several other occasions, spent American blood to redeem them in distant corners of the world. No other country would have had the idealism and the resources to take on such a range of challenges or the capacity to succeed in so many of them. American idealism and exceptionalism were the driving forces behind the building of a new international order.
For a few decades, there was an extraordinary correspondence between America’s traditional beliefs and historical experience and the world in which it found itself. For the generation of leaders who assumed the responsibility for constructing the postwar order, the two great experiences had been surmounting the recession of the 1930s and victory over aggression in the 1940s. Both tasks lent themselves to definite solutions: in the economic field, the restoration of growth and the inauguration of new social-welfare programs; in the war, unconditional surrender of the enemy.
At the end of the war, the United States, as the only major country to emerge essentially undamaged, produced about 60 percent of the world’s GNP. It was thereby able to define leadership as essentially practical progress along lines modeled on the American domestic experience; alliances as Wilsonian concepts of collective security; and governance as programs of economic recovery and democratic reform. America’s Cold War undertaking began as a defense of countries that shared the American view of world order. The adversary, the Soviet Union, was conceived as having strayed from the international community to which it would eventually return.
On the journey toward that vision, America began to encounter other historic views of world order. New nations with different histories and cultures appeared on the scene as colonialism ended. The nature of Communism became more complex and its impact more ambiguous. Governments and armed doctrines rejecting American concepts of domestic and international order mounted tenacious challenges. Limits to American capabilities, however vast, became apparent. Priorities needed to be set.
America’s encounters with these realities raised a new question that had not heretofore been put to the United States: Is American foreign policy a story with a beginning and an end, in which final victories are possible? Or is it a process of managing and tempering ever-recurring challenges? Does foreign policy have a destination, or is it a process of never-completed fulfillment?
In answering these questions, America put itself through anguishing debates and domestic divisions about the nature of its world role. They were the reverse side of its historic idealism. By framing the issue of America’s world role as a test of moral perfection, it castigated itself—sometimes to profound effect—for falling short. In expectation of a final culmination to its efforts—the peaceful, democratic, rules-based world that Wilson prophesied—it was often uncomfortable with the prospect of foreign policy as a permanent endeavor for contingent aims. With nearly every president insisting that America had universal principles while other countries merely had national interests, the United States has risked extremes of overextension and disillusioned withdrawal.
Since the end of World War II, in quest of its vision of world order, America has embarked on five wars on behalf of expansive goals initially embraced with near-universal public support, which then turned into public discord—often on the brink of violence. In three of these wars, the Establishment consensus shifted abruptly to embrace a program of effectively unconditional unilateral withdrawal. Three times in two generations, the United States abandoned wars midstream as inadequately transformative or as misconceived—in Vietnam as a result of congressional decisions, in Iraq and Afghanistan by choice of the President.
Victory in the Cold War has been accompanied by congenital ambivalence. America has been searching its soul about the moral worth of its efforts to a degree for which it is difficult to find historical parallels. Either American objectives had been unfulfillable, or America did not pursue a strategy compatible with reaching these objectives. Critics will ascribe these setbacks to the deficiencies, moral and intellectual, of America’s leaders. Historians will probably conclude that they derived from the inability to resolve an ambivalence about force and diplomacy, realism and idealism, power and legitimacy, cutting across the entire society.
THE BEGINNING OF THE COLD WAR
Nothing in Harry S. Truman’s career would have suggested that he would become President, even less that he would preside over the creation of a structure of international order that would last through the Cold War and help decide it. Yet this quintessentially American “common man” would emerge as one of the seminal American presidents.
No president has faced a more daunting task. The war had ended without any attempt by the powers to redefine international order as in the Westphalian settlement of 1648 and at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Therefore, Truman’s first task was to make concrete Roosevelt’s vision of a realistically conceived international organization, named the United Nations. Signed in San Francisco in 1945, its charter merged two forms of international decision making. The General Assembly would be universal in membership and based upon the doctrine of the equality of states—“one state, one vote.” At the same time, the United Nations would implement collective security via a global concert, the Security Council, designating five major powers (the United States, Britain, France, the U.S.S.R., and China) as “permanent members” wielding veto power. (Britain, France, and China were included as much in homage to their record of great achievements as in reflection of their current capacities.) Together with a rotating group of nine additional countries, the Security Council was vested with special responsibility “to maintain international peace and security.”
The United Nations could achieve its designated purpose only if the permanent members shared a conception of world order. On issues where they disagreed, the world organization might enshrine, rather than assuage, their differences. The last summit meeting of the wartime allies at Potsdam in July and August 1945 of Truman, Winston Churchill, and Stalin established the zones of occupation of Germany. (Churchill was replaced as the result of electoral defeat halfway through by Clement Attlee, his wartime deputy.) It also put Berlin under joint administration by the four victorious powers, with guaranteed access to the Western zones of occupation through Soviet-occupied territory. It turned out to be the last significant agreement between the wartime allies.
In the negotiations to implement the accords, the Western allies and the Soviet Union found themselves in mounting deadlock. The Soviet Union insisted on shaping a new international, social, and political structure of Eastern Europe on a principle laid down by Stalin in 1945: “Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.” Abandoning any notion of Westphalian principles in favor of “objective factors,” Stalin now imposed Moscow’s Marxist-Leninist system ruthlessly, though gradually, across Eastern Europe.
The first direct military confrontation between the wartime allies occurred over access routes to the capital of the erstwhile enemy, Berlin. In 1948, Stalin, in response to the merging of the three occupation zones of the Western allies, cut the access routes to Berlin, which until the end of the blockade was sustained by a largely American airlift.
How Stalin analyzed “objective” factors is illustrated by a conversation in 1989 I had with Andrei Gromyko, Soviet Foreign Minister for twenty-eight years until he was kicked upstairs by the newly installed Mikhail Gorbachev into the largely ceremonial office of President. He therefore had much time for discussions about what he had observed of Russian history and no future to protect by discretion. I raised a question of how, in light of the vast casualties and devastation it had suffered in the war, the Soviet Union could have dealt with an American military response to the Berlin blockade. Gromyko replied that Stalin had answered similar questions from subordinates to this effect: he doubted the United States would use nuclear weapons on so local an issue. If the Western allies undertook a conventional ground force probe along the access routes to Berlin, Soviet forces were ordered to resist without referring the decision to Stalin. If American forces were mobilizing along the entire front, Stalin said, “Come to me.” In other words, Stalin felt strong enough for a local war but would not risk general war with the United States.
Henceforth two power blocs were seeking to stare each other down, without resolving the causes of the underlying crisis. Europe, liberated from Nazism, stood in danger of falling under the sway of a new hegemonic power. The newly independent states in Asia, with fragile institutions and deep domestic and often ethnic divisions, might be delivered to self-government only to be confronted by a doctrine hostile to the West and inimical to pluralism domestically or internationally.
At this juncture, Truman made a strategic choice fundamental for American history and the evolution of the international order. He put an end to the historical temptation of “going it alone” by committing America to the permanent shaping of a new international order. He advanced a series of crucial initiatives. The Greek-Turkish aid program of 1947 replaced the subsidies with which Britain had sustained these pivotal Mediterranean countries and which Britain could no longer afford; the Marshall Plan in 1948 put forward a recovery plan that in time restored Europe’s economic health. In 1949, Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, presided over a ceremony marking the creation of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) as the capstone of the American-sponsored new international order.
NATO was a new departure in the establishment of European security. The international order no longer was characterized by the traditional European balance of power distilled from shifting coalitions of multiple states. Rather, whatever equilibrium prevailed had been reduced to that existing between the two nuclear superpowers. If either disappeared or failed to engage, the equilibrium would be lost, and its opponent would become dominant. The first was what happened in 1990 with the collapse of the Soviet Union; the second was the perennial fear of America’s allies during the Cold War that America might lose interest in the defense of Europe. The nations joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization provided some military forces but more in the nature of an admission ticket for a shelter under America’s nuclear umbrella than as an instrument of local defense. What America was constructing in the Truman era was a unilateral guarantee in the form of a traditional alliance.
With the structure in place, the historical debates about the ultimate purpose of American foreign policy reemerged. Were the goals of the new alliance moral or strategic? Coexistence or the adversary’s collapse? Did America seek conversion of the adversary or evolution? Conversion entails inducing an adversary to break with its past in one comprehensive act or gesture. Evolution involves a gradual process, a willingness to pursue ultimate foreign policy goals in imperfect stages and to deal with the adversary as a reality while this process is going on. What course would America choose? Exhibiting its historical ambivalence on the subject, America chose both.
STRATEGIES OF A COLD WAR ORDER
The most comprehensive American strategic design in the Cold War was put forward by a then-obscure Foreign Service officer, George Kennan, serving as head of the Political Section of the American Embassy in Moscow. No Foreign Service officer has ever shaped the U.S. debate over America’s world role to such an extent. While Washington was still basking in the wartime euphoria based on belief in Stalin’s goodwill, Kennan predicted a looming confrontation. The United States, he asserted in a personal letter to a colleague in 1945, needed to face the fact that its Soviet ally would, at the conclusion of the war, turn into an adversary:
A basic conflict is thus arising over Europe between the interests of Atlantic sea-power, which demand the preservation of vigorous and independent political life on the European peninsula, and the interests of the jealous Eurasian land power, which must always seek to extend itself to the west and will never find a place, short of the Atlantic Ocean, where it can from its own standpoint safely stop.
Kennan proposed an explicitly strategic response: to “gather together at once into our hands all the cards we hold and begin to play them for their full value.” Eastern Europe, Kennan concluded, would be dominated by Moscow: it stood closer to Russian centers of power than it did to Washington and, however regrettably, Soviet troops had reached it first. Hence the United States should consolidate a sphere in Western Europe under American protection—with the dividing line running through Germany—and endow its sphere with sufficient strength and cohesion to maintain the geopolitical balance.
This prescient prediction of the postwar outcome was rejected by Kennan’s colleague Charles “Chip” Bohlen on Wilsonian grounds that “foreign policy of that kind cannot be made in a democracy. Only totalitarian states can make and carry out such policies.” Washington might accept a balance of power as a fact; it could not adopt it as a policy.
In February 1946, the American Embassy in Moscow received a query from Washington as to whether a doctrinaire speech by Stalin inaugurated a change in the Soviet commitment to a harmonious international order. Kennan, at that time deputy chief of mission, was given an opportunity many Foreign Service officers dream of: to present their views directly to high levels without requiring ambassadorial approval. Kennan replied in a five-part telegram of nineteen single-spaced pages. The essence of the so-called Long Telegram was that the entire American debate over Soviet intentions needed to be reconceived. Soviet leaders saw East-West relations as a contest between antithetical concepts of world order. They had taken a “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity” and grafted onto it a revolutionary doctrine of global sweep. The Kremlin would interpret every aspect of international affairs in light of Soviet doctrine about a battle for advantage between what Stalin had called the “two centers of world significance,” capitalism and Communism, whose global contest was inevitable and could end with only one winner. They thought the battle was inevitable, and thus made it so.
The next year, Kennan, now head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department, went public in an article in Foreign Affairs published anonymously by “X.” On the surface, the article made the same point as the Long Telegram: Soviet pressure on the West was real and inherent, but it could be “contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.”
Theodore Roosevelt would have had no difficulty endorsing this analysis. But when outlining his idea of how the conflict might end, Kennan reentered Wilsonian territory. At some point in Moscow’s futile confrontations with the outside world, he predicted, some Soviet leader would feel the need to achieve additional support by reaching out beyond the Party apparatus to the general public, which was immature and inexperienced, having never been permitted to develop an independent political sense. But if “the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument” was ever so disrupted, “Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.” This prediction—essentially correct—was Wilsonian in the belief that at the end of the process democratic principles would prevail, that legitimacy would trump power.
This belief is what Dean Acheson, the model and seminal Secretary of State to many of his successors (including me), practiced. From 1949 to 1953 he concentrated on building what he called “situations of strength” via NATO; East-West diplomacy would more or less automatically reflect the balance of power. During the Eisenhower administration, his successor, John Foster Dulles, extended the alliance system through SEATO for Southeast Asia (1954) and the Baghdad Pact for the Middle East (1955). In effect, containment came to be equated with the construction of military alliances around the entire Soviet periphery over two continents. World order would consist of the confrontation of two incongruent superpowers—each of which organized an international order within its sphere.
Both secretaries of state viewed power and diplomacy as successive stages: America would first consolidate and demonstrate its power; then the Soviet Union would be obliged to cease its challenges and arrive at a reasonable accommodation with the non-Communist world. Yet if diplomacy was to be based on positions of military strength, why was it necessary to suspend it in the formative stages of the Atlantic relationship? And how was the strength of the free world to be conveyed to the other side? For in fact, America’s nuclear monopoly coupled with the war’s devastating impact on the Soviet Union ensured that the actual balance of power was uniquely favorable to the West at the beginning of the Cold War. A situation of strength did not need to be built; it already existed.
Winston Churchill recognized this in a speech in October 1948, when he argued that the West’s bargaining position would never be stronger than it was at that moment. Negotiations should be pressed, not suspended:
The question is asked: What will happen when they get the atomic bomb themselves and have accumulated a large store? You can judge yourselves what will happen then by what is happening now. If these things are done in the green wood, what will be done in the dry? … No one in his senses can believe that we have a limitless period of time before us. We ought to bring matters to a head and make a final settlement … The Western Nations will be far more likely to reach a lasting settlement, without bloodshed, if they formulate their just demands while they have the atomic power and before the Russian Communists have got it too.
Truman and Acheson undoubtedly considered the risk too great and resisted a grand negotiation for fear that it might undermine Allied cohesion. Above all, Churchill was leader of the opposition, not Prime Minister, when he urged an at least diplomatic showdown, and the incumbent Clement Attlee and his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, would surely have resisted a design invoking the threat of war.
In this context, the United States assumed leadership of the global effort to contain Soviet expansionism—but as a primarily moral, not geopolitical, endeavor. Valid interests existed in both spheres, yet the manner in which they were described tended to obscure attempts to define strategic priorities. Even NSC-68, which codified Truman’s national security policy as a classified document and was largely written by the hard-line Paul Nitze, avoided the concept of national interest and placed the conflict into traditional moral, almost lyrical, categories. The struggle was between the forces of “freedom under a government of laws” (which entailed “marvelous diversity, the deep tolerance, the lawfulness of the free society … in which every individual has the opportunity to realize his creative powers”) and forces of “slavery under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin.” By its own lights, America was joining the Cold War struggle not as a geopolitical contest over the limits of Russian power but as a moral crusade for the free world.
In such an endeavor, American policies were presented as a disinterested effort to advance the general interests of humanity. John Foster Dulles, a shrewd operator in crises and tough exponent of American power, nonetheless described American foreign policy as a kind of global volunteer effort guided by principles totally different from any other historic state’s approach. He observed that though it was “difficult for many to understand,” the United States was “really … motivated by considerations other than short-range expediency.” America’s influence would not restore the geopolitical balance, in this view, but transcend it: “It has been customary, for so many centuries, for nations to act merely to promote their own immediate self-interest, to hurt their rivals, that it is not readily accepted that there can be a new era when nations will be guided by principle.”
The implication that other nations had “selfish interests” while America had “principles” and “destiny” was as old as the Republic. What was new was that a global geopolitical contest in which the United States was the leader, not a bystander, was justified primarily on moral grounds, and the American national interest was disavowed. This call to universal responsibility underpinned the decisive American commitment to restoring a devastated postwar world holding the line against Soviet expansion. Yet when it came time to fighting “hot” wars on the periphery of the Communist world, it proved a less certain guide.
THE KOREAN WAR
The Korean War ended inconclusively. But the debates it generated foreshadowed issues that tore the country apart a decade later.
In 1945, Korea, until then a Japanese colony, had been liberated by the victorious Allies. The northern half of the Korean Peninsula was occupied by the Soviet Union, the southern half by the United States. Each established its form of government in its zone before it withdrew, in 1948 and 1949, respectively. In June 1950, the North Korean army invaded South Korea. The Truman administration considered it a classic case of Soviet-Chinese aggression on the model of the German and Japanese challenges preceding World War II. Although U.S. armed forces had been drastically reduced in the previous years, Truman took the courageous decision to resist, largely with American forces based in Japan.
Contemporary research has shown that the motivation on the Communist side was complex. When the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung asked Stalin’s approval for the invasion in April 1950, the Soviet dictator encouraged him. He had learned from the defection of Tito two years earlier that first-generation Communist leaders were especially difficult to fit into the Soviet satellite system that he thought imperative for Russia’s national interest. Starting with Mao’s visit to Moscow in late 1949—less than three months after the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed—Stalin had been uneasy about the looming potential of China led by a man of Mao’s dominating attributes. An invasion of South Korea might divert China into a crisis on its borders, deflect America’s attention from Europe to Asia, and, in any event, absorb some of America’s resources in that effort. If achieved with Soviet support, Pyongyang’s unification project might give the Soviet Union a dominant position in Korea and, in view of the historical suspicions of these countries for each other, create a kind of counterbalance to China in Asia. Mao followed Stalin’s lead—conveyed to him by Kim Il-sung in almost certainly exaggerated terms—for the converse reason; he feared encirclement by the Soviet Union, whose acquisitive interest in Korea had been demonstrated over the centuries and was even then displayed in the demands for ideological subservience Stalin was making as a price for the Sino-Soviet alliance.
On one occasion, an eminent Chinese told me that letting Stalin lead Mao into authorizing the Korean War was the only strategic mistake Mao ever made because, in the end, the Korean War delayed Chinese unification by a century in that it led to America’s commitment to Taiwan. Be that as it may, the origin of the Korean War was less a Sino-Soviet conspiracy against America than a three-cornered maneuver for dominance within the Communist international order, with Kim Il-sung driving up the bidding to gain support for a program of conquest whose global consequences in the end surprised all of the main participants.
The complex strategic considerations of the Communist world were not matched on the American side. In effect, the United States was fighting for a principle, defeating aggression, and a method of implementing it, via the United Nations. America could gain UN approval because the Soviet ambassador to the UN, in a continuing protest over the exclusion of Communist China from the UN, had absented himself from the crucial vote of the Security Council. There was less clarity about what was meant by the phrase “defeating aggression.” Was it total victory? If less, what was it? How, in short, was the war supposed to end?
As it happened, experience outran theory. General Douglas MacArthur’s surprise landing at Inchon in September 1950 trapped the North Korean army in the South and brought about its substantial defeat. Should the victorious army cross the previous dividing line along the 38th parallel into North Korea and achieve unification? If it did so, it would exceed the literal interpretation of collective security principles because the legal concept of defeating aggression had been achieved. But from a geopolitical point of view, what would have been the lesson? If an aggressor need fear no consequence other than a return to the status quo ante, would a recurrence somewhere else not be likely?
Several alternatives presented themselves—for example, holding the advance at the narrow neck of the peninsula on a line from the cities of Pyongyang to Wonsan, a line roughly 150 miles short of the Chinese frontier. This would have destroyed most of the North’s war-making capacity and brought nine-tenths of the North Korean population into a unified Korea while staying well clear of the Chinese border.
We now know that even before American planners had broached the topic of where to arrest their advance, China was preparing for a possible intervention. As early as July 1950, China had concentrated 250,000 troops on its border with Korea. By August, top Chinese planners were operating on the premise that their still-advancing North Korean ally would collapse once superior American forces were fully deployed to the theater (indeed, they accurately predicted MacArthur’s surprise landing at Inchon). On August 4—while the front was still deep in South Korea, along the so-called Pusan perimeter—Mao told the Politburo, “If the American imperialists are victorious, they will become dizzy with success, and then be in a position to threaten us. We have to help Korea; we have to assist them. This can be in the form of a volunteer force, and be at a time of our choosing, but we must start to prepare.” However, he had told Zhou Enlai that if the United States remained along the Pyongyang to Wonsan line, Chinese forces did not need to attack immediately and should pause for intensified training. What would have happened during or after such a pause must be left to speculation.
But the American forces did not pause; Washington ratified MacArthur’s crossing of the 38th parallel and set no limit to his advance other than the Chinese border.
For Mao, the American movement to the Chinese border involved more than Korean stakes. Truman had, on the outbreak of the Korean War, placed the Seventh Fleet between the combatants in the Taiwan Strait on the argument that protecting both sides of the Chinese civil war from each other demonstrated American commitment to peace in Asia. It was less than nine months since Mao had proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. If the final outcome of the Korean War was the presence of largely American military forces along the Chinese border, and an American fleet interposed between Taiwan and the mainland, approving the North Korean invasion of South Korea would have turned into a strategic disaster.
In an encounter between two different conceptions of world order, America sought to protect the status quo following Westphalian and international legal principles. Nothing ran more counter to Mao’s perceptions of his revolutionary mission than the protection of the status quo. Chinese history taught him the many times Korea had been used as an invasion route into China. His own revolutionary experience had been based on the proposition that civil wars ended with victory or defeat, not stalemate. And he convinced himself that America, once ensconced along the Yalu River separating China from Korea, would as a next step complete the encirclement of China by moving into Vietnam. (This was four years before America’s actual involvement in Indochina.) Zhou Enlai gave voice to this analysis, and demonstrated the outsized role Korea plays in Chinese strategic thinking, when he told an August 26, 1950, meeting of the Central Military Commission that Korea was “indeed the focus of the struggles in the world … After conquering Korea, the United States will certainly turn to Vietnam and other colonial countries. Therefore the Korean problem is at least the key to the East.”
Considerations such as these induced Mao to repeat the strategy pursued by Chinese leaders in 1593 against the Japanese invasion led by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Fighting a war with a superpower was a daunting proposition; at least two Chinese field marshals refused to command the units destined for battle with American forces. Mao insisted, and the Chinese surprise attack drove back the American deployments from the Yalu River.
But after the Chinese intervention, what was now the purpose of the war, and which strategy would implement it? These questions produced an intense American debate foreshadowing far more bitter controversies in later American wars. (The difference was that, in contrast to the opponents of the Vietnam War, the critics of the Korean War accused the Truman administration of using not enough force; they sought victory, not withdrawal.)
The public controversy took place between the theater commander Douglas MacArthur and the Truman administration backed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. MacArthur argued the traditional case that had been the basis of every previous American military involvement: the purpose of war was victory to be achieved by whatever means required, including aerial attacks on China itself; stalemate was a strategic setback; Communist aggression had to be defeated where it was occurring, which was in Asia; American military capacity needed to be used to the extent necessary, not conserved for hypothetical contingencies in distant geographic regions, meaning Western Europe.
The Truman administration responded in two ways: In a demonstration of civilian control over the American military, on April 11, 1951, President Truman relieved MacArthur of his military command for making statements contradicting the administration’s policy. On substance, Truman stressed the containment concept: the major threat was the Soviet Union, whose strategic goal was the domination of Europe. Hence fighting the Korean War to a military conclusion, even more extending it into China, was, in the words of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley, a combat leader in the war against Germany, “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”
After some months, the battlefront settled near the 38th parallel in June 1951, where the war had started—just as it had half a millennium earlier. At that point, the Chinese offered negotiations, which the United States accepted. A settlement was reached two years later that has, with some intense but short interruptions, lasted more than sixty years to this writing.
In the negotiations, as in the origins of the war, two different approaches to strategy confronted each other. The Truman administration expressed the American view about the relationship of power and legitimacy. According to it, war and peace were distinct phases of policy; when negotiations started, the application of force ceased, and diplomacy took over. Each activity was thought to operate by its own rules. Force was needed to produce the negotiation, then it had to stand aside; the outcome of the negotiation would depend on an atmosphere of goodwill, which would be destroyed by military pressure. In that spirit, American forces were ordered to confine themselves to essentially defensive measures during the talks and avoid initiating large-scale offensive measures.
The Chinese view was the exact opposite. War and peace were two sides of the same coin. Negotiations were an extension of the battlefield. In accordance with China’s ancient strategist Sun Tzu in his Art of War, the essential contest would be psychological—to affect the adversary’s calculations and degrade his confidence in success. De-escalation by the adversary was a sign of weakness to be exploited by pressing one’s own military advantage. The Communist side used the stalemate to enhance the discomfort of the American public with an inconclusive war. In fact, during the negotiations, America suffered as many casualties as it had during the offensive phase of the war.
In the end, each side achieved its objective: America had upheld the doctrine of containment and preserved the territorial integrity of an ally that has since evolved into one of the key countries of Asia; China vindicated its determination to defend the approaches to its borders, and demonstrated its disdain of international rules it had had no voice in creating. The outcome was a draw. But it revealed a potential vulnerability in America’s ability to relate strategy to diplomacy, power to legitimacy, and to define its essential aims. Korea, in the end, drew a line across the century. It was the first war in which America specifically renounced victory as an objective, and in that was an augur of things to come.
The biggest loser, as it turned out, was the Soviet Union. It had encouraged the original decision to invade and sustained its consequences by providing large stores of supplies to its allies. But it lost their trust. The seeds of the Sino-Soviet split were sown in the Korean War because the Soviets insisted on payment for their assistance and refused to give combat support. The war also triggered a rapid and vast American rearmament, which restored the imbalance in Western Europe in a big step toward the situation of strength that the American containment doctrine demanded.
Each side suffered setbacks. Some Chinese historians hold that China lost an opportunity to unify Taiwan with the mainland in order to sustain an unreliable ally; the United States lost its aura of invincibility that had attached to it since World War II and some of its sense of direction. Other Asian revolutionaries learned the lesson of drawing America into an inconclusive war that might outrun the American public’s willingness to support it. America was left with the gap in its thinking on strategy and international order that was to haunt it in the jungles of Vietnam.
VIETNAM AND THE BREAKDOWN OF THE NATIONAL CONSENSUS
Even amidst the hardships of the Korean War, a combination of Wilsonian principles and Rooseveltian geostrategy produced an extraordinary momentum behind the first decade and a half of Cold War policy. Despite the incipient domestic debate, it saw America through the 1948–49 American airlift to thwart Soviet ultimatums on access to Berlin, the Korean War, and the defeat of the Soviet effort to place intermediate-range nuclear ballistic missiles in Cuba in 1962. This was followed by the 1963 treaty with the Soviet Union renouncing nuclear testing in the atmosphere—a symbol of the need for the superpowers to discuss and limit their capability to destroy humanity. The containment policy was supported by an essentially bipartisan consensus in Congress. Relations between the policymaking and the intellectual communities were professional, assumed to be based on shared long-term goals.
But roughly coincident with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the national consensus began to break down. Part of the reason was the shock of the assassination of a young President who had called on America to fulfill its idealistic traditions. Though the assailant was a Communist who had sojourned in the Soviet Union, among many of the younger generation the loss raised questions about the moral validity of the American enterprise.
The Cold War had begun with a call to support democracy and liberty across the world, reinforced by Kennedy at his inauguration. Yet over a period of time, the military doctrines that sustained the strategy of containment began to have a blighting effect on public perceptions. The gap between the destructiveness of the weapons and the purposes for which they might be used proved unbridgeable. All theories for the limited use of military nuclear technology proved infeasible. The reigning strategy was based on the ability to inflict a level of civilian casualties judged unbearable but surely involving tens of millions on both sides in a matter of days. This calculus constrained the self-confidence of national leaders and the public’s faith in their leadership.
Besides this, as the containment policy migrated into the fringes of Asia, it encountered conditions quite opposite of those in Europe. The Marshall Plan and NATO succeeded because a political tradition of government remained in Europe, even if impaired. Economic recovery could restore political vitality. But in much of the underdeveloped world, the political framework was fragile or new, and economic aid led to corruption as frequently as to stability.
These dilemmas came to a head in the Vietnam War. Truman had sent civilian advisors to South Vietnam to resist a guerrilla war in 1951; Eisenhower had added military advisors in 1954; Kennedy authorized combat troops as auxiliaries in 1962; Johnson deployed an expeditionary force in 1965 that eventually rose to more than half a million. The Kennedy administration had gone to the edge of participating in the war, and the Johnson administration made it its own because it was convinced that the North Vietnamese assault into South Vietnam was the spearhead of a Sino-Soviet drive for global domination and that it needed to be resisted by American forces lest all of Southeast Asia fall under Communist control.
In defending Asia, America proposed to proceed as it had in Western Europe. In accord with President Eisenhower’s “domino theory,” in which the fall of one country to Communism would cause others to fall, it applied the doctrine of containment to thwart the aggressor (on the model of NATO) and economic and political rehabilitation (as in the Marshall Plan). At the same time, to avoid “widening the war,” the United States refrained from targeting sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos from which Hanoi’s forces launched attacks to inflict thousands of casualties and to which they withdrew to thwart pursuit.
None of these administrations had vouchsafed a plan for ending the war other than preserving the independence of South Vietnam, destroying the forces armed and deployed by Hanoi to subvert it, and bombing North Vietnam with sufficient force to cause Hanoi to reconsider its policy of conquest and begin negotiations. This had not been treated as a remarkable or controversial program until the middle of the Johnson administration. Then a wave of protests and media critiques—culminating after the 1968 Tet Offensive, in conventional military terms a devastating defeat for North Vietnam but treated in the Western press as a stunning victory and evidence of American failure—struck a chord with administration officials.
Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of the Singapore state and perhaps the wisest Asian leader of his period, was vocal in his firm belief, maintained to this writing, that American intervention was indispensable to preserve the possibility of an independent Southeast Asia. The analysis of the consequences for the region of a Communist victory in Vietnam was largely correct. But by the time of America’s full-scale participation in Vietnam, Sino-Soviet unity no longer existed, having been in perceptible crisis throughout the 1960s. China, wracked by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, increasingly regarded the Soviet Union as a dangerous and threatening adversary.
The containment principles employed in Europe proved much less applicable in Asia. European instability came about when the economic crisis caused by the war threatened to undermine traditional domestic political institutions. In Southeast Asia, after a century of colonization, these institutions had yet to be created—especially in South Vietnam, which had never existed as a state in history.
America attempted to close the gap through a campaign of political construction side by side with the military effort. While simultaneously fighting a conventional war against North Vietnamese divisions and a jungle war against Vietcong guerrillas, America threw itself into political engineering in a region that had not known self-government for centuries or democracy ever.
After a series of coups (the first of which, in November 1963, was actually encouraged by the American Embassy and acquiesced in by the White House in the expectation that military rule would produce more liberal institutions), General Nguyen Van Thieu emerged as the South Vietnamese President. At the outset of the Cold War, the non-Communist orientation of a government had been taken—perhaps overly expansively—as proof that it was worth preserving against Soviet designs. Now, in the emerging atmosphere of recrimination, the inability of South Vietnam to emerge as a fully operational democracy (amidst a bloody civil war) led to bitter denunciation. A war initially supported by a considerable majority and raised to its existing dimensions by a president citing universal principles of liberty and human rights was now decried as evidence of a unique American moral obtuseness. Charges of immorality and deception were used with abandon; “barbaric” was a favorite adjective. American military involvement was described as a form of “insanity” revealing profound flaws in the American way of life; accusations of wanton slaughter of civilians became routine.
The domestic debate over the Vietnam War proved to be one of the most scarring in American history. The administrations that had involved America in Indochina were staffed by individuals of substantial intelligence and probity who suddenly found themselves accused of near-criminal folly and deliberate deception. What had started as a reasonable debate about feasibility and strategy turned into street demonstrations, invective, and violence.
The critics were right in pointing out that American strategy, particularly in the opening phases of the war, was ill suited to the realities of asymmetric conflict. Bombing campaigns alternating with “pauses” to test Hanoi’s readiness for negotiation tended to produce stalemate—bringing to bear enough power to incur denunciation and resistance, but not enough to secure the adversary’s readiness for serious negotiations. The dilemmas of Vietnam were very much the consequence of academic theories regarding graduated escalation that had sustained the Cold War; while conceptually coherent in terms of a standoff between nuclear superpowers, they were less applicable to an asymmetric conflict fought against an adversary pursuing a guerrilla strategy. Some of the expectations for the relationship of economic reform to political evolution proved unfeasible in Asia. But these were subjects appropriate for serious debate, not vilification and, at the fringes of the protest movement, assaults on university and government buildings.
The collapse of high aspirations shattered the self-confidence without which establishments flounder. The leaders who had previously sustained American foreign policy were particularly anguished by the rage of the students. The insecurity of their elders turned the normal grievances of maturing youth into an institutionalized rage and a national trauma. Public demonstrations reached dimensions obliging President Johnson—who continued to describe the war in traditional terms of defending a free people against the advance of totalitarianism—to confine his public appearances in his last year in office largely to military bases.
In the months following the end of Johnson’s presidency in 1969, a number of the war’s key architects renounced their positions publicly and called for an end to military operations and an American withdrawal. These themes were elaborated until the Establishment view settled on a program to “end the war” by means of a unilateral American withdrawal in exchange only for the return of prisoners.
Richard Nixon became President at a time when 500,000 American troops were in combat—and the number was still increasing, on a schedule established by the Johnson administration—in Vietnam, as far from the U.S. borders as the globe allows. From the beginning, Nixon was committed to ending the war. But he also thought it his responsibility to do so in the context of America’s global commitments for sustaining the postwar international order. Nixon took office five months after the Soviet military occupation of Czechoslovakia, while the Soviet Union was building intercontinental missiles at a rate threatening—and, some argued, surpassing—America’s deterrent forces, and China remained adamantly and truculently hostile. America could not jettison its security commitments in one part of the world without provoking challenges to its resolve in others. The preservation of American credibility in defense of allies and the global system of order—a role the United States had performed for two decades— remained an integral part of Nixon’s calculations.
Nixon withdrew American forces at the rate of 150,000 per year and ended participation in ground combat in 1971. He authorized negotiations subject to one irreducible condition: he never accepted Hanoi’s demand that the peace process begin with the replacement of the government of South Vietnam—America’s ally—by a so-called coalition government in effect staffed by figures put forward by Hanoi. This was adamantly rejected for four years until after a failed North Vietnamese offensive (defeated without American ground forces) in 1972 finally induced Hanoi to agree to a cease-fire and political settlement it had consistently rejected over the years.
In the United States debate focused on a widespread desire to end the trauma wrought by the war on the populations of Indochina, as if America was the cause of their travail. Yet Hanoi had insisted on continued battle—not because it was unconvinced of the American commitment to peace, but because it counted on it to exhaust American willingness to sustain the sacrifices. Fighting a psychological war, it ruthlessly exploited America’s quest for compromise on behalf of a program of domination with which, it turned out, there was no splitting the difference.
The military actions that President Nixon ordered, and that as his National Security Advisor I supported, together with the policy of diplomatic flexibility, brought about a settlement in 1973. The Nixon administration was convinced that Saigon would be able to overcome ordinary violations of the agreement with its own forces; that the United States would assist with air and naval power against an all-out attack; and that over time the South Vietnamese government would be able, with American economic assistance, to build a functioning society and undergo an evolution toward more transparent institutions (as would in fact occur in South Korea).
Whether this process could have been accelerated and whether another definition could have been given to American credibility will remain the subject of heated debate. The chief obstacle was the difficulty Americans had understanding Hanoi’s way of thinking. The Johnson administration overestimated the impact of American military power. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Nixon administration overestimated the scope for negotiation. For the battle-hardened leadership in Hanoi, having spent their lives fighting for victory, compromise was the same as defeat, and a pluralistic society near inconceivable.
A resolution of this debate is beyond the scope of this volume; it was a painful process for all involved. Nixon managed a complete withdrawal and a settlement he was convinced gave the South Vietnamese a decent opportunity to shape their own fate. However, having traversed a decade of controversy and in the highly charged aftermath of the Watergate crisis, Congress severely restricted aid in 1973 and cut off all aid in 1975. North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam by sending almost its entire army across the international border. The international community remained silent, and Congress had proscribed American military intervention. The governments of Laos and Cambodia fell shortly after to Communist insurgencies, and in the latter the Khmer Rouge imposed a reckoning of almost unimaginable brutality.
America had lost its first war and also the thread to its concept of world order.
RICHARD NIXON AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER
After the carnage of the 1960s with its assassinations, civil riots, and inconclusive wars, Richard Nixon inherited in 1969 the task of restoring cohesion to the American body politic and coherence to American foreign policy. Highly intelligent, with a level of personal insecurity unexpected in such an experienced public figure, Nixon was not the ideal leader for the restoration of domestic peace. But it must also be remembered that the tactics of mass demonstrations, intimidation, and civil disobedience at the outer limit of peaceful protests had been well established by the time Nixon took his oath of office on January 20, 1969.
Nevertheless, for the task of redefining the substance of American foreign policy, Nixon was extraordinarily well prepared. As Senator from California, Vice President under Dwight D. Eisenhower, and perennial presidential candidate, he had traveled widely. The foreign leaders Nixon encountered would spare him the personal confrontations that made him uncomfortable and engage him in substantive dialogue at which he excelled. Because his solitary nature gave him more free time than ordinary political aspirants, he found extensive reading congenial. This combination made him the best prepared incoming president on foreign policy since Theodore Roosevelt.
No president since Theodore Roosevelt had addressed international order as a global concept in such a systematic and conceptual manner. In speaking with the editors of Time in 1971, Nixon articulated such a concept. In his vision, five major centers of political and economic power would operate on the basis of an informal commitment by each to pursue its interests with restraint. The outcome of their interlocking ambitions and inhibitions would be equilibrium:
We must remember the only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended period of peace is when there has been balance of power. It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitor that the danger of war arises. So I believe in a world in which the United States is powerful. I think it will be a safer world and a better world if we have a strong, healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance.
What was remarkable in this presentation was that two of the countries listed as part of a concert of powers were in fact adversaries: the U.S.S.R., with which America was engaged in a cold war, and China, with which it had just resumed diplomatic contact after a hiatus of over two decades and where the United States had no embassy or formal diplomatic relations. Theodore Roosevelt had articulated an idea of world order in which the United States was the guardian of the global equilibrium. Nixon went further in arguing that the United States should be an integral part of an ever-changing, fluid balance, not as the balancer, but as a component.
The passage also displayed Nixon’s tactical skill, as when he renounced any intention of playing off one of the components of the balance against another. A subtle way of warning a potential adversary is to renounce a capability he knows one possesses and that will not be altered by the renunciation. Nixon made these remarks as he was about to leave for Beijing, marking a dramatic improvement in relations and the first time a sitting American president had visited China. Balancing China against the Soviet Union from a position in which America was closer to each Communist giant than they were to each other was, of course, exactly the design of the evolving strategy. In February 1971, Nixon’s annual foreign policy report referred to China as the People’s Republic of China—the first time an official American document had accorded it that degree of recognition—and stated that the United States was “prepared to establish a dialogue with Peking” on the basis of national interest.
Nixon made a related point regarding Chinese domestic policies while I was on the way to China on the so-called secret trip in July 1971. Addressing an audience in Kansas City, Nixon argued that “Chinese domestic travail”—that is, the Cultural Revolution—should not confer
any sense of satisfaction that it will always be that way. Because when we see the Chinese as people—and I have seen them all over the world …—they are creative, they are productive, they are one of the most capable people in the world. And 800 million Chinese are going to be, inevitably, an enormous economic power, with all that that means in terms of what they could be in other areas if they move in that direction.
These phrases, commonplace today, were revolutionary at that time. Because they were delivered extemporaneously—and I was out of communication with Washington—it was Zhou Enlai who brought them to my attention as I started the first dialogue with Beijing in more than twenty years. Nixon, inveterate anti-Communist, had decided that the imperatives of geopolitical equilibrium overrode the demands of ideological purity—as, fortuitously, had his counterparts in China.
In the presidential election campaign of 1972, Nixon’s opponent, George McGovern, had taunted, “Come home, America!” Nixon replied in effect that if America shirked its international responsibility, it would surely fail at home. He declared that “only if we act greatly in meeting our responsibilities abroad will we remain a great nation, and only if we remain a great nation will we act greatly in meeting our challenges at home.” At the same time, he sought to temper “our instinct that we knew what was best for others,” which in turn brought on “their temptation to lean on our prescriptions.”
To this end, Nixon established a practice of annual reports on the state of the world. Like all presidential documents, these were drafted by White House associates, in this case the National Security Council staff under my direction. But Nixon set the general strategic tone of the documents and reviewed them as they were being completed. They were used as guidance to the governmental agencies dealing with foreign policy and, more important, as an indication to foreign countries of the direction of American strategy.
Nixon was enough of a realist to stress that the United States could not entrust its destiny entirely or even largely to the goodwill of others. As his 1970 report underscored, peace required a willingness to negotiate and seek new forms of partnership, but these alone would not suffice: “The second element of a durable peace must be America’s strength. Peace, we have learned, cannot be gained by goodwill alone.” Peace would be strengthened, not obstructed, he assessed, by continued demonstrations of American power and a proven willingness to act globally—which evoked shades of Theodore Roosevelt sending the Great White Fleet to circumnavigate the globe in 1907–9. Neither could the United States expect other countries to mortgage their future by basing their foreign policy primarily on the goodwill of others. The guiding principle was the effort to build an international order that related power to legitimacy—in the sense that all its key members considered the arrangement just:
All nations, adversaries and friends alike, must have a stake in preserving the international system. They must feel that their principles are being respected and their national interests secured … If the international environment meets their vital concerns, they will work to maintain it.
It was the vision of such an international order that provided the first impetus for the opening to China, which Nixon considered an indispensable component of it. One facet of the opening to China was the attempt to transcend the domestic strife of the past decade. Nixon became President of a nation shaken by a decade of domestic and international upheaval and an inconclusive war. It was important to convey to it a vision of peace and international comity to lift it toward visions worthy of its history and its values. Equally significant was a redefinition of America’s concept of world order. An improved relationship with China would gradually isolate the Soviet Union or impel it to seek better relations with the United States. As long as the United States took care to remain closer to each of the Communist superpowers than they were to each other, the specter of the Sino-Soviet cooperative quest for world hegemony that had haunted American foreign policy for two decades would be stifled. (In time, the Soviet Union found itself unable to sustain this insoluble, largely self-created dilemma of facing adversaries in both Europe and Asia, including within its own ostensible ideological camp.)
Nixon’s attempt to make American idealism practical and American pragmatism long-range was attacked by both sides, reflecting the American ambivalence between power and principle. Idealists criticized Nixon for conducting foreign policy by geopolitical principles. Conservatives challenged him on the ground that a relaxation of tensions with the Soviet Union was a form of abdication vis-à-vis the Communist challenge to Western civilization. Both types of critics overlooked that Nixon undertook a tenacious defense along the Soviet periphery, that he was the first American President to visit Eastern Europe (Yugoslavia, Poland, and Romania), symbolically challenging Soviet control, and that he saw the United States through several crises with the Soviet Union, during two of which (in October 1970 and October 1973) he did not flinch from putting American military forces on alert.
Nixon had shown unusual skill in the geopolitical aspect of building a world order. He patiently linked the various components of strategy to each other, and he showed extraordinary courage in withstanding crises and great persistence in pursuing long-range aims in foreign policy. One of his oft-repeated operating principles was as follows: “You pay the same price for doing something halfway as for doing it completely. So you might as well do it completely.” As a result, in one eighteen-month period, during 1972–73, he brought about the end of the Vietnam War, an opening to China, a summit with the Soviet Union even while escalating the military effort in response to a North Vietnamese offensive, the switch of Egypt from a Soviet ally to close cooperation with the United States, two disengagement agreements in the Middle East—one between Israel and Egypt, the other with Syria (lasting to this writing, even amidst a brutal civil war)—and the start of the European Security Conference, whose outcome over the long term severely weakened Soviet control of Eastern Europe.
But at the juncture when tactical achievement might have been translated into a permanent concept of world order linking inspirational vision to a workable equilibrium, tragedy supervened. The Vietnam War had exhausted energies on all sides. The Watergate debacle, foolishly self-inflicted and ruthlessly exploited by Nixon’s longtime critics, paralyzed executive authority. In a normal period, the various strands of Nixon’s policy would have been consolidated into a new long-term American strategy. Nixon had a glimpse of the promised land, where hope and reality conjoined—the end of the Cold War, a redefinition of the Atlantic Alliance, a genuine partnership with China, a major step toward Middle East peace, the beginning of Russia’s reintegration into an international order—but he did not have time to merge his geopolitical vision with the occasion. It was left to others to undertake that journey.
THE BEGINNING OF RENEWAL
After the anguish of the 1960s and the collapse of a presidency, America needed above all to restore its cohesion. It was fortunate that the man called to this unprecedented task was Gerald Ford.
Propelled into an office he had not sought, Ford had never been involved in the complex gyrations of presidential politics. For that reason, freed from obsession with focus groups and public relations, he could practice in the presidency the values of goodwill and faith in his country on which he had been brought up. His long service in the House, where he sat on key defense and intelligence subcommittees, gave him an overview of foreign policy challenges.
Ford’s historic service was to overcome America’s divisions. In his foreign policy, he strove—and largely succeeded—to relate power to principle. His administration witnessed the completion of the first agreement between Israel and an Arab state—in this case, Egypt—whose provisions were largely political. The second Sinai disengagement agreement marked Egypt’s irrevocable turning toward a peace agreement. Ford initiated an active diplomacy to bring about majority rule in southern Africa—the first American President to do so explicitly. In the face of strong domestic opposition, he supervised the conclusion of the European Security Conference. Among its many provisions were clauses that enshrined human rights as one of the European security principles. These terms were used by heroic individuals such as Lech Walesa in Poland and Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia to bring democracy to their countries and start the downfall of Communism.
I introduced my eulogy at President Ford’s funeral with the following sentences:
According to an ancient tradition, God preserves humanity despite its many transgressions because, at any one period, there exist ten just individuals who, without being aware of their role, redeem mankind. Gerald Ford was such a man.
Jimmy Carter became President when the impact of America’s defeat in Indochina began to be translated into challenges inconceivable while America still had the aura of invincibility. Iran, heretofore a pillar of the regional Middle East order, was taken over by a group of ayatollahs, who in effect declared political and ideological war on the United States, overturning the prevailing balance of power in the Middle East. A symbol of it was the incarceration of the American diplomatic mission in Tehran for more than four hundred days. Nearly concurrently, the Soviet Union felt itself in a position to invade and occupy Afghanistan.
Amidst all this turmoil, Carter had the fortitude to move the Middle East peace process toward a signing ceremony at the White House. The peace treaty between Israel and Egypt was a historic event. Though its origin lay in the elimination of Soviet influence and the start of a peace process by previous administrations, its conclusion under Carter was the culmination of persistent and determined diplomacy. Carter solidified the opening to China by establishing full diplomatic relations with it, cementing a bipartisan consensus behind the new direction. And he reacted strongly to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by supporting those who resisted the Soviet takeover. In an anguished period, Carter reaffirmed values of human dignity essential to America’s image of itself even while he hesitated before the new strategic challenges—to find the appropriate balance between power and legitimacy—toward the end of his term.
RONALD REAGAN AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR
Rarely has America produced a president so suited to his time and so attuned to it as Ronald Reagan. A decade earlier, Reagan had seemed too militant to be realistic; a decade later, his convictions might have appeared too one-dimensional. But faced with a Soviet Union whose economy was stagnating and whose gerontocratic leadership was quite literally perishing serially, and supported by an American public opinion eager to shed a period of disillusionments, Reagan combined America’s latent, sometimes seemingly discordant strengths: its idealism, its resilience, its creativity, and its economic vitality.
Sensing potential Soviet weakness and deeply confident in the superiority of the American system (he had read more deeply in American political philosophy than his domestic critics credited), Reagan blended the two elements—power and legitimacy—that had in the previous decade produced American ambivalence. He challenged the Soviet Union to a race in arms and technology that it could not win, based on programs long stymied in Congress. What came to be known as the Strategic Defense Initiative—a defensive shield against missile attack—was largely derided in Congress and the media when Reagan put it forward. Today it is widely credited with convincing the Soviet leadership of the futility of its arms race with the United States.
At the same time, Reagan generated psychological momentum with pronouncements at the outer edge of Wilsonian moralism. Perhaps the most poignant example is his farewell address as he left office in 1989, in which he described his vision of America as the shining city on a hill:
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind swept, God blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace—a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.
America as a shining city on a hill was not a metaphor for Reagan; it actually existed for him because he willed it to exist.
This was the important difference between Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, whose actual policies were quite parallel and not rarely identical. Nixon treated foreign policy as an endeavor with no end, as a set of rhythms to be managed. He dealt with its intricacies and contradictions like school assignments by an especially demanding teacher. He expected America to prevail but in a long, joyless enterprise, perhaps after he left office. Reagan, by contrast, summed up his Cold War strategy to an aide in 1977 in a characteristically optimistic epigram: “We win, they lose.” The Nixon style of policymaking was important to restore fluidity to the diplomacy of the Cold War; the Reagan style was indispensable for the diplomacy of ending it.
On one level, Reagan’s rhetoric—including his March 1983 speech referring to the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire—might have spelled the end of any prospect of East-West diplomacy. On a deeper level, it symbolized a period of transition, as the Soviet Union became aware of the futility of an arms race while its aging leadership was facing issues of succession. Hiding complexity behind a veneer of simplicity, Reagan also put forward a vision of reconciliation with the Soviet Union beyond what Nixon would ever have been willing to articulate.
Reagan was convinced that Communist intransigence was based more on ignorance than on ill will, more on misunderstanding than on hostility. Unlike Nixon, who thought that a calculation of self-interest could bring about accommodation between the United States and the Soviet Union, Reagan believed the conflict was likely to end with the realization by the adversary of the superiority of American principles. In 1984, on the appointment of the Communist Party veteran Konstantin Chernenko as top Soviet leader, Reagan confided to his diary, “I have a gut feeling I’d like to talk to him about our problems man to man and see if I could convince him there would be a material benefit to the Soviets if they’d join the family of nations, etc.”
When Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Chernenko one year later, Reagan’s optimism mounted. He told associates of his dream to escort the new Soviet leader on a tour of a working-class American neighborhood. As a biographer recounted, Reagan envisioned that “the helicopter would descend, and Reagan would invite Gorbachev to knock on doors and ask the residents ‘what they think of our system.’ The workers would tell him how wonderful it was to live in America.” All this would persuade the Soviet Union to join the global move toward democracy, and this in turn would produce peace—because “governments which rest upon the consent of the governed do not wage war on their neighbors”—a core principle of Wilson’s view of international order.
Applying his vision to the control of nuclear weapons, Reagan, at the Reykjavík summit with Gorbachev in 1986, proposed to eliminate all nuclear delivery systems while retaining and building up antimissile systems. Such an outcome would achieve one of Reagan’s oft-proclaimed goals to eliminate the prospect of nuclear war by doing away with the offensive capability for it and containing violators of the agreement by missile defense systems. The idea went beyond the scope of Gorbachev’s imagination, which is why he bargained strenuously over a niggling reservation about confining missile defense system tests “to the laboratory.” (The proposal to eliminate nuclear delivery systems was in any event beyond practicality in that it would have been bitterly opposed by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President François Mitterrand, who were convinced that Europe could not be defended without nuclear weapons and who treated their independent deterrents as an ultimate insurance policy.) Years later, I asked the Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin why the Soviets had not offered a compromise on the testing issue. He replied, “Because it never occurred to us that Reagan would simply walk out.”
Gorbachev sought to counter Reagan’s vision with a concept of Soviet reform. But by the 1980s, the “balance of forces,” which Soviet leaders had never tired of invoking over the decades of their rule, had turned against them. Four decades of imperial expansion in all directions could not be sustained on the basis of an unworkable economic model. The United States, despite its divisions and vacillations, had preserved the essential elements of a situation of strength; over two generations it had built an informal anti-Soviet coalition of every other major industrial center and most of the developing world. Gorbachev realized that the Soviet Union could not sustain its prevailing course, but he underestimated the fragility of the Soviet system. His calls for reform—glasnost (publicity) and perestroika (restructuring)—unleashed forces too disorganized for genuine reform and too demoralized to continue totalitarian leadership, much as Kennan had predicted half a century earlier.
Reagan’s idealistic commitment to democracy alone could not have produced such an outcome; strong defense and economic policies, a shrewd analysis of Soviet weaknesses, and an unusually favorable alignment of external circumstances all played a role in the success of his policies. Yet without Reagan’s idealism—bordering sometimes on a repudiation of history—the end of the Soviet challenge could not have occurred amidst such a global affirmation of a democratic future.
Forty years earlier and for the decades since, it was thought that the principal obstacle to a peaceful world order was the Soviet Union. The corollary was that the collapse of Communism—imagined, if at all, in some distant future—would bring with it an era of stability and goodwill. It soon became apparent that history generally operates in longer cycles. Before a new international order could be constructed, it was necessary to deal with the debris of the Cold War.
THIS TASK FELL TO GEORGE H. W. BUSH, who managed America’s predominance with moderation and wisdom. Patrician in upbringing in Connecticut, yet choosing to make his fortune in Texas, the more elemental, entrepreneurial part of the United States, and with wide experience in all levels of government, Bush dealt with great skill with a stunning succession of crises testing both the application of America’s values and the reach of its vast power. Within months of his taking office, the Tiananmen upheaval in China challenged America’s basic values but also the importance for the global equilibrium of preserving the U.S.-China relationship. Having been head of the American liaison office in Beijing (before the establishment of formal relations), Bush navigated in a manner that maintained America’s principles while retaining the prospect of ultimate cooperation. He managed the unification of Germany—heretofore considered a probable cause of war—by a skillful diplomacy facilitated by his decision not to exploit Soviet embarrassment at the collapse of its empire. In that spirit, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Bush rejected all proposals to fly to Berlin to celebrate this demonstration of the collapse of Soviet policy.
The adroit manner in which Bush brought the Cold War to a close obscured the domestic disputes through which the U.S. effort had been sustained and which would characterize the challenges of the next stage. As the Cold War receded, the American consensus held that the main work of conversion had been achieved. A peaceful world order would now unfold, so long as the democracies took care to assist in the final wave of democratic transformations in countries still under authoritarian rule. The ultimate Wilsonian vision would be fulfilled. Free political and economic institutions would spread and eventually submerge outdated antagonisms in a broader harmony.
In that spirit, Bush defeated Iraqi aggression in Kuwait during the first Gulf War by forging a coalition of the willing through the UN, the first joint action involving great powers since the Korean War; he stopped military operations when the limit that had been authorized by UN resolutions had been reached (perhaps, as former ambassador to the UN, he sought to apply the lesson of General MacArthur’s decision to cross the dividing line between the two Koreas after his victory at Inchon).
For a brief period, the global consensus behind the American-led defeat of Saddam Hussein’s military conquest of Kuwait in 1991 seemed to vindicate the perennial American hope for a rules-based international order. In Prague in November 1990, Bush invoked a “commonwealth of freedom,” which would be governed by the rule of law; it would be “a moral community united in its dedication to free ideals.” Membership in this commonwealth would be open to all; it might someday become universal. As such the “great and growing strength of the commonwealth of freedom” would “forge for all nations a new world order far more stable and secure than any we have known.” The United States and its allies would move “beyond containment and to a policy of active engagement.”
Bush’s term was cut short by electoral defeat in 1992, in some sense because he ran as a foreign policy president while his opponent, Bill Clinton, appealed to a war-weary public, promising to focus on America’s domestic agenda. Nonetheless, the newly elected President rapidly reasserted a foreign policy vocation comparable to that of Bush. Clinton expressed the confidence of the era when, in a 1993 address to the UN General Assembly, he described his foreign policy concept as not containment but “enlargement.” “Our overriding purpose,” he announced, “must be to expand and strengthen the world’s community of market-based democracies.” In this view, because the principles of political and economic liberty were universal “from Poland to Eritrea, from Guatemala to South Korea,” their spread would require no force. Describing an enterprise consisting of enabling an inevitable historical evolution, Clinton pledged that American policy would aspire to “a world of thriving democracies that cooperate with each other and live in peace.”
When Secretary of State Warren Christopher attempted to apply the enlargement theory to the People’s Republic of China by making economic ties conditional on modifications within the Chinese system, he encountered a sharp rebuff. The Chinese leaders insisted that relations with the United States could only be conducted on a geostrategic basis, not (as had been proposed) on the basis of China’s progress toward political liberalization. By the third year of his presidency, the Clinton approach to world order reverted to less insistent practice.
Meanwhile, the enlargement concept encountered a much more militant adversary. Jihadism sought to spread its message and assaulted Western values and institutions, particularly those of the United States, as the principal obstacle. A few months before Clinton’s General Assembly speech, an international group of extremists, including one American citizen, bombed the World Trade Center in New York City. Their secondary target, had the first been thwarted, was the United Nations Secretariat building. The Westphalian concept of the state and international law, because it was based on rules not explicitly prescribed in the Quran, was an abomination to this movement. Similarly objectionable was democracy for its capacity to legislate separately from sharia law. America, in the view of the jihadist forces, was an oppressor of Muslims seeking to implement their own universal mission. The challenge broke into the open with the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. In the Middle East, at least, the end of the Cold War ushered in not a hoped-for time of democratic consensus but a new age of ideological and military confrontation.
THE AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ WARS
After an anguishing discussion of the “lessons of Vietnam,” equally intense dilemmas recapitulated themselves three decades later with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both conflicts had their origins in a breakdown of international order. For America, both ended in withdrawal.
AFGHANISTAN
Al-Qaeda, having issued a fatwa in 1998 calling for the indiscriminate killing of Americans and Jews everywhere, enjoyed a sanctuary in Afghanistan, whose governing authorities, the Taliban, refused to expel the group’s leadership and fighters. An American response to the attack on American territory was inevitable and widely so understood around the world.
A new challenge opened up almost immediately: how to establish international order when the principal adversaries are non-state organizations that defend no specific territory and reject established principles of legitimacy.
The Afghan war began on a note of national unanimity and international consensus. Prospects for a rules-based international order seemed vindicated when NATO, for the first time in its history, applied Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty—stipulating that “an armed attack against one or more [NATO ally] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” Nine days after the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush dispatched an ultimatum to the Taliban authorities of Afghanistan, then harboring al-Qaeda: “Deliver to United States authorities all the leaders of al Qaeda who hide in your land … Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps, so we can make sure they are no longer operating.” When the Taliban failed to comply, the United States and its allies launched a war whose aims Bush described, on October 7, in similarly limited terms: “These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.”
Initial warnings about Afghanistan’s history as the “graveyard of empires” appeared unfounded. After a rapid effort led by American, British, and allied Afghan forces, the Taliban were deposed from power. In December 2001, an international conference in Bonn, Germany, proclaimed a provisional Afghan government with Hamid Karzai as its head and set up a process for convening a loya jirga (a traditional tribal council) to design and ratify postwar Afghan institutions. The allied war aims seemed achieved.
The participants in the Bonn negotiations optimistically asserted a vast vision: “the establishment of a broad-based, gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic and fully representative government.” In 2003, a UN Security Council resolution authorized the expansion of the NATO International Security Assistance Force
to support the Afghan Transitional Authority and its successors in the maintenance of security in areas of Afghanistan outside of Kabul and its environs, so that the Afghan Authorities as well as the personnel of the United Nations … can operate in a secure environment.
The central premise of the American and allied effort became “rebuilding Afghanistan” by means of a democratic, pluralistic, transparent Afghan government whose writ ran across the entire country and an Afghan national army capable of assuming responsibility for security on a national basis. With a striking idealism, these efforts were imagined to be comparable to the construction of democracy in Germany and Japan after World War II.
No institutions in the history of Afghanistan or of any part of it provided a precedent for such a broad-based effort. Traditionally, Afghanistan has been less a state in the conventional sense than a geographic expression for an area never brought under the consistent administration of any single authority. For most of recorded history, Afghan tribes and sects have been at war with each other, briefly uniting to resist invasion or to launch marauding raids against their neighbors. Elites in Kabul might undertake periodic experiments with parliamentary institutions, but outside the capital an ancient tribal code of honor predominated. Unification of Afghanistan has been achieved by foreigners only unintentionally, when the tribes and sects coalesce in opposition to an invader.
Thus what American and NATO forces met in the early twenty-first century was not radically different from the scene encountered by a young Winston Churchill in 1897:
Except at harvest-time, when self-preservation enjoins a temporary truce, the Pathan [Pashtun] tribes are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician, and a theologian. Every large house is a real feudal fortress … Every village has its defence. Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud. The numerous tribes and combinations of tribes all have their accounts to settle with one another. Nothing is ever forgotten, and very few debts are left unpaid.
In this context, the proclaimed coalition and UN goals of a transparent, democratic Afghan central government operating in a secure environment amounted to a radical reinvention of Afghan history. It effectively elevated one clan above all others—Hamid Karzai’s Pashtun Popalzai tribe—and required it to establish itself across the country either through force (its own or that of the international coalition) or through distribution of the spoils of foreign aid, or both. Inevitably, the efforts required to impose such institutions trampled on age-old prerogatives, reshuffling the kaleidoscope of tribal alliances in ways that were difficult for any outside force to understand or control.
The American election of 2008 compounded complexity with ambivalence. The new President, Barack Obama, had campaigned on the proposition that he would restore to the “necessary” war in Afghanistan the forces drained by the “dumb” war in Iraq, which he intended to end. But in office, he was determined to bring about a peacetime focus on transformational domestic priorities. The outcome was a reemergence of the ambivalence that has accompanied American military campaigns in the post–World War II period: the dispatch of thirty thousand additional troops for a “surge” in Afghanistan coupled, in the same announcement, with a public deadline of eighteen months for the beginning of their withdrawal. The purpose of the deadline, it was argued, was to provide an incentive to the Karzai government to accelerate its effort to build a modern central government and army to replace Americans. Yet, in essence, the objective of a guerrilla strategy like the Taliban’s is to outlast the defending forces. For the Kabul leadership, the announcement of a fixed date for losing its outside support set off a process of factional maneuvering, including with the Taliban.
The strides made by Afghanistan during this period have been significant and hard-won. The population has adopted electoral institutions with no little daring—because the Taliban continues to threaten death to those participating in democratic structures. The United States also succeeded in its objective of locating and eliminating Osama bin Laden, sending a powerful message about the country’s global reach and determination to avenge atrocities.
Nevertheless, the regional prospects remain challenging. In the period following the American withdrawal (imminent as of this writing), the writ of the Afghan government is likely to run in Kabul and its environs but not uniformly in the rest of the country. There a confederation of semiautonomous, feudal regions is likely to prevail on an ethnic basis, influenced substantially by competing foreign powers. The challenge will return to where it began—the compatibility of an independent Afghanistan with a regional political order.
Afghanistan’s neighbors should have at least as much of a national interest as the United States—and, in the long run, a far greater one—in defining and bringing about a coherent, non-jihadist outcome in Afghanistan. Each of Afghanistan’s neighbors would risk turmoil within its own borders if Afghanistan returns to its prewar status as a base for jihadist non-state organizations or as a state dedicated to jihadist policies: Pakistan above all in its entire domestic structure, Russia in its partly Muslim south and west, China with a significantly Muslim Xinjiang, and even Shiite Iran from fundamentalist Sunni trends. All of them, from a strategic point of view, are more threatened by an Afghanistan hospitable to terrorism than the United States is (except perhaps Iran, which may calculate, as it has in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, that a chaotic situation beyond its borders enables it to manipulate the contending factions).
The ultimate irony may be that Afghanistan, torn by war, may be a test case of whether a regional order can be distilled from divergent security interests and historical perspectives. Without a sustainable international program regarding Afghanistan’s security, each major neighbor will support rival factions across ancient ethnic and sectarian lines. The likely outcome would be a de facto partition, with Pakistan controlling the Pashtun south, and India, Russia, and perhaps China favoring the ethnically mixed north. To avoid a vacuum, a major diplomatic effort is needed to define a regional order to deal with the possible reemergence of Afghanistan as a jihadist center. In the nineteenth century, the major powers guaranteed Belgian neutrality, a guarantee that, in the event, lasted nearly one hundred years. Is an equivalent, with appropriate redefinitions, possible? If such a concept—or a comparable one—is evaded, Afghanistan is likely to drag the world back into its perennial warfare.
IRAQ
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush articulated a global strategy to counter jihadist extremism and to shore up the established international order by infusing it with a commitment to democratic transformation. The “great struggles of the twentieth century,” the White House’s National Security Strategy of 2002 argued, had demonstrated that there was “a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.”
The present moment, the National Security Strategy document stressed, saw a world shocked by an unprecedented terrorist atrocity and the great powers “on the same side—united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos.” The encouragement of free institutions and cooperative major-power relations offered “the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war.” The centerpiece of what came to be called the Freedom Agenda was to be a transformation of Iraq from among the Middle East’s most repressive states to a multiparty democracy, which would in turn inspire a regional democratic transformation: “Iraqi democracy will succeed—and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran—that freedom can be the future of every nation.”
The Freedom Agenda was not, as was later alleged, the arbitrary invention of a single president and his entourage. Its basic premise was an elaboration of quintessentially American themes. The 2002 National Security Strategy document—which first announced the policy—repeated the arguments of NSC-68 that, in 1950, had defined America’s mission in the Cold War, albeit with one decisive difference. The 1950 document had enlisted America’s values in defense of the free world. The 2002 document argued for the ending of tyranny everywhere on behalf of universal values of freedom.
UN Security Council Resolution 687 of 1991 had required Iraq to destroy all stockpiles of its weapons of mass destruction and commit never to develop such weapons again. Ten Security Council resolutions since then had held Iraq in substantial violation.
What was distinctive—and traditionally American—about the military effort in Iraq was the decision to cast this, in effect, enforcement action as an aspect of a project to spread freedom and democracy. America reacted to the mounting tide of radical Islamist universalism by reaffirming the universality of its own values and concept of world order.
The basic premise began with significant public support, especially extending to the removal of Saddam Hussein. In 1998, the U.S. Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act with overwhelming bipartisan support (360–38 in the House and unanimously in the Senate), declaring that “it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.” Signing the bill into law on October 31, the same day as its passage in the Senate, President Clinton expressed the consensus of both parties:
The United States wants Iraq to rejoin the family of nations as a freedom-loving and law-abiding member. This is in our interest and that of our allies within the region … The United States is providing support to opposition groups from all sectors of the Iraqi community that could lead to a popularly supported government.
Because no political parties were permitted in Iraq except the governing Baath Party, which Saddam Hussein ran with an iron fist, and therefore no formal opposition parties existed, the President’s phrase had to mean that the United States would generate a covert program to overthrow the Iraqi dictator.
After the military intervention in Iraq, Bush elaborated broader implications in a November 2003 speech marking the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy. Bush condemned past U.S. policies in the region for having sought stability at the price of liberty:
Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe—because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.
In the changed circumstances of the twenty-first century, traditional policy approaches posed unacceptable risks. The administration was therefore shifting from a policy of stability to “a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.” American experience in Europe and Asia demonstrated that “the advance of freedom leads to peace.”
I supported the decision to undertake regime change in Iraq. I had doubts, expressed in public and governmental forums, about expanding it to nation building and giving it such universal scope. But before recording my reservations, I want to express here my continuing respect and personal affection for President George W. Bush, who guided America with courage, dignity, and conviction in an unsteady time. His objectives and dedication honored his country even when in some cases they proved unattainable within the American political cycle. It is a symbol of his devotion to the Freedom Agenda that Bush is now pursuing it in his postpresidential life and made it the key theme of his presidential library in Dallas.
Having spent my childhood as a member of a discriminated minority in a totalitarian system and then as an immigrant to the United States, I have experienced the liberating aspects of American values. Spreading them by example and civil assistance as in the Marshall Plan and economic aid programs is an honored and important part of the American tradition. But to seek to achieve them by military occupation in a part of the world where they had no historical roots, and to expect fundamental change in a politically relevant period of time—the standard set by many supporters and critics of the Iraq effort alike—proved beyond what the American public would support and what Iraqi society could accommodate.
Given the ethnic divisions in Iraq and the millennial conflict between Sunni and Shia, the dividing line of which ran through the center of Baghdad, the attempt to reverse historical legacies under combat conditions, amidst divisive American domestic debates, imbued the American endeavor in Iraq with a Sisyphean quality. The determined opposition of neighboring regimes compounded the difficulties. It became an endless effort always just short of success.
Implementing a pluralist democracy in place of Saddam Hussein’s brutal rule proved infinitely more difficult than the overthrow of the dictator. The Shias, long disenfranchised and hardened by decades of oppression under Hussein, tended to equate democracy with a ratification of their numeric dominance. The Sunnis treated democracy as a foreign plot to repress them; on this basis, most Sunnis boycotted the 2004 elections, instrumental in defining the postwar constitutional order. The Kurds in the north, with memories of murderous onslaughts by Baghdad, enhanced their separate military capabilities and strove for control of oil fields to provide themselves with revenue not dependent on the national treasury. They defined autonomy in terms minutely different, if at all, from national independence.
Passions, already high in an atmosphere of revolution and foreign occupation, were ruthlessly inflamed and exploited after 2003 by outside forces: Iran, which backed Shia groups subverting the nascent government’s independence; Syria, which abetted the transfer of arms and jihadists through its territory (ultimately with devastating consequences for its own cohesion); and al-Qaeda, which began a campaign of systematic slaughter against the Shias. Each community increasingly treated the postwar order as a zero-sum battle for power, territory, and oil revenues.
In this atmosphere, Bush’s courageous January 2007 decision to deploy a “surge” of additional troops to quell violence was met with a nonbinding resolution of disapproval supported by 246 members of the House; though it failed on procedural grounds in the Senate, 56 Senators joined in opposition to the surge. The Senate majority leader soon declared that “this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything.” The same month, the House and the Senate passed bills, vetoed by the President, mandating that American withdrawal start within a year.
Bush, it has been reported, closed a 2007 planning session with the question “If we’re not there to win, why are we there?” The remark embodied the resoluteness of the President’s character as well as the tragedy of a country whose people have been prepared for more than half a century to send its sons and daughters to remote corners of the world in defense of freedom but whose political system has not been able to muster the same unified and persistent purpose. For while the surge, daringly ordered by Bush and brilliantly executed by General David Petraeus, succeeded in wresting an honorable outcome from looming collapse, the American mood had shifted by this point. Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination in part on the strength of his opposition to the Iraq War. On taking office, he continued his public critiques of his predecessor, and undertook an “exit strategy” with greater emphasis on exit than on strategy. As of this writing, Iraq functions as a central battlefield in an unfolding regional sectarian contest—its government leaning toward Iran, elements of its Sunni population in military opposition to the government, members of both sides of its sectarian divide supporting the contending jihadist efforts in Syria, and the terrorist group ISIL attempting to build a caliphate across half of its territory.
The issue transcends political debates about its antecedents. The consolidation of a jihadist entity at the heart of the Arab world, equipped with substantial captured weaponry and a transnational fighting force, engaged in religious war with radical Iranian and Iraqi Shia groups, calls for a concerted and forceful international response or it will metastasize. A sustained strategic effort by America, the other permanent members of the Security Council, and potentially its regional adversaries will be needed.
THE PURPOSE AND THE POSSIBLE
The nature of the international order was at issue when the Soviet Union emerged as a challenge to the Westphalian state system. With decades of hindsight, one can debate whether the balance sought by America was always the optimum. But it is hard to gainsay that the United States, in a world of weapons of mass destruction and political and social upheaval, preserved the peace, helped restore Europe’s vitality, and provided crucial economic aid to emerging countries.
It was in the conduct of its “hot” wars that America found it difficult to relate purpose to possibility. In only one of the five wars America fought after World War II (Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan), the first Gulf War under President George H. W. Bush, did America achieve the goals it had put forward for entering it without intense domestic division. When the outcomes of the other conflicts—ranging from stalemate to unilateral withdrawal—became foreordained is a subject for another debate. For present purposes, it is sufficient to state that a country that has to play an indispensable role in the search for world order needs to begin that task by coming to terms with that role and with itself.
The essence of historical events is rarely fully apparent to those living through them. The Iraq War may be seen as a catalyzing event in a larger transformation of the region—the fundamental character of which is as yet unknown and awaits the long-term outcome of the Arab Spring, the Iranian nuclear and geopolitical challenge, and the jihadist assault on Iraq and Syria. The advent of electoral politics in Iraq in 2004 almost certainly inspired demands for participatory institutions elsewhere in the region; what is yet to be seen is whether they can be combined with a spirit of tolerance and peaceful compromise.
As America examines the lessons of its twenty-first-century wars, it is important to remember that no other major power has brought to its strategic efforts such deeply felt aspirations for human betterment. There is a special character to a nation that proclaims as war aims not only to punish its enemies but to improve the lives of their people—that has sought victory not in domination but in sharing the fruits of liberty. America would not be true to itself if it abandoned this essential idealism. Nor would it reassure friends (or win over adversaries) by setting aside such a core aspect of its national experience. But to be effective, these aspirational aspects of policy must be paired with an unsentimental analysis of underlying factors, including the cultural and geopolitical configuration of other regions and the dedication and resourcefulness of adversaries opposing American interests and values. America’s moral aspirations need to be combined with an approach that takes into account the strategic element of policy in terms the American people can support and sustain through multiple political cycles.
Former Secretary of State George Shultz has articulated the American ambivalence wisely:
Americans, being a moral people, want their foreign policy to reflect the values we espouse as a nation. But Americans, being a practical people, also want their foreign policy to be effective.
The American domestic debate is frequently described as a contest between idealism and realism. It may turn out—for America and the rest of the world—that if America cannot act in both modes, it will not be able to fulfill either.