CHAPTER ELEVEN

Strategic Choices

One also expects “elegance” in its “architectural,” structural make-up. Ease in stating the problem, great difficulty in getting hold of it and in all attempts at approaching it, then again some very surprising twist by which the approach, or some part of the approach becomes easy, etc. Also, if the deductions are lengthy or complicated, there should be some simple general principle involved, which “explains” the complications and detours, reduces the apparent arbitrariness to a few simple guiding motivations, etc. These criteria are clearly those of any creative art and the existence of some underlying empirical, worldly motif in the background—overgrown by aestheticizing developments and followed to a multitude of labyrinthine variants—all this is much more akin to the atmosphere of art pure and simple than to that of the empirical sciences.

—Von Neumann on the qualities of a good mathematical proof*

THE END OF the Long War has also brought an end to the usefulness of the strategic paradigm that structured so much of American policy during the more than three score and ten years of U.S. involvement in the larger world, from the reversal of his own isolationist policies by President Woodrow Wilson in 1917, to the proclamation of a Wilsonian “New World Order” by President George Bush in 1990. That paradigm was formed by the cluster of understandings about the American purpose in the world, the threats the United States faced in that world, and the strategies to be employed to achieve those purposes and respond to those threats. These understandings continue today to provide the partly conscious model by which Americans grasp world events. This model has roots in American continental expansion westward, in the idealistic imperialism of Theodore Roosevelt, and the haunting cadences of Abraham Lincoln. It only came to life, however, once the United States was brought face-to-face with an attack by a great power whose involvement with the dynamic of state changes in Europe juxtaposed a competing paradigm that was threatening and invigorating. On March 12, 1917, Germany sank the U.S. merchantman Algonquin on the high seas; on March 18, she sank three more American merchant vessels; on April 1, the Aztec, another merchantman, went down. These attacks—and not the more famous sinking of the liner Lusitania two years earlier—propelled the United States into armed conflict, and the Americans have been endeavoring to “make the world safe for democracy” ever since.

A paradigm such as this does more than provide a model for describing events: it offers an explanatory worldview within which each new phenomenon can be fitted without altering the entire scheme. There will be zones of disagreement, of course, but the overall understanding is largely accepted by all parties to the debate. In the present chapter we shall study various new proposals for the American role in international affairs that describe themselves, or are described by others, as new “paradigms.” I think it can be shown that each of these is actually more of an implementing “policy”—like containment—than a new worldview, and also that each of the policies is really simply an application of the current paradigm, often even a repetition of a position within that paradigm that has appeared at an earlier period. Policies are distinguished by their pursuit of particular objectives, the identification of a particular threat, and their proposal of a particular strategy. For example, the purpose of containment was to defeat international communism. The perceived threat was communist aggression in Central Europe and in Asia on the one hand and threats of subversion in the formerly colonial states of the Third World on the other. The strategy employed was nuclear deterrence and conventional defense in the First World and military assistance augmented by covert aid to surrogates in the Third World. Alternative policies, like the liberation of communist clients and the rollback of the Soviet occupation of Central and Eastern Europe, or, at the other extreme, acquiescence and appeasement, were frequently proposed. These alternatives were not incompatible with the Wilsonian worldview, but after debates that look, in retrospect, less closely divided than they perhaps were, these alternative policies were decisively rejected by a series of administrations from both American political parties, Large elements of these parties actually preferred such alternatives but they were never able to fundamentally alter the policy of containment over a period of four decades and nine administrations. There were occasional departures from the rough guide I have just sketched, but even with these apparent departures U.S. policy was remarkably consistent over this long period.

But with the Long War won, why do we need a structuring paradigm at all? Why not simply make decisions on an ad hoc basis, recognizing that, in any case, these decisions will not be randomly made or irrational, but will be guided by our best judgments as to what appears to increase American power and freedom of action? The answer lies in the relationship of strategy to law. Legitimacy, not merely power, was what the Long War was fought over. Until that fundamental question could be settled, conquest and defeat alone could not end the war. Legitimacy is the ground of law; it arises from consistent practices and tacit acceptance and gives law its authority. A United States that cannot explain why it seeks the enlargement of democratic practices among all states—and yet supports the suppression of the Algerian elections that would have brought Islamic fundamentalists to power—will not be able to rally a worldwide consensus in favor of democratic enlargement. A United States that can offer no reason why Russia should be treated as a successor state for the purposes of the Soviet Union's Security Council seat but as a dissolved state for the purposes of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty* will perhaps have its way in such matters for a time, but only so long as our power can compel assent. It is better, even from the perspective of our power—in the long run—to write the rules, though they may sometimes be applied against our wishes, than to abandon rule following in favor of policies that have no more general appeal than that we want them followed, at least for the time being.

We can extend our influence beyond our temporary hegemony if we take this moment to craft a system of rules with our allies that is compatible with our basic understanding of state responsibility. Yet without some general understanding of our strategy in the world, we cannot begin to even draft such rules.

What are some of the candidates for this new paradigm? I will describe five general approaches and attempt to place various contributions from the recent literature on this subject within them. This is especially hard to do because these proposed paradigms are really nothing of the sort: rather, they are simply policies in service of the old paradigm that guided our behavior during the Long War. As a result, there is much overlapping among writers as they stray from a particular position that is comprehensive and internally consistent because they recognize that, as a practical matter, something more fundamental is pulling them away from a doctrinaire consistency. I put proposals in categories in order to ease the reader's understanding of what options are on the table for today's leadership, not because I am dealing with a series of clear-cut manifestos. On the other hand, it is also important to realize that the proposals that are proffered to become a new American paradigm for our behavior in the world are so far short of this advertising that no leader, no matter how nearsighted, is likely really to rely on them to master the challenges that have arisen in the backwash of the end of the Long War. This basic impracticality is sometimes hidden in the persuasive, reassuring prose of editorial writers and the aggressive debating of political candidates who do not have the responsibility of day-to-day decision making but are confident that things would run more smoothly if they did.

One might label these five approaches as (1) the New Nationalism, (2) the New Internationalism, (3) the New Realism, (4) the New Evangelism, and (5) the New Leadership. Each of these general programs has a distinct paramount goal for U.S. policy; each proposes a particular strategy to achieve that goal; each reflects a perception of a crucial threat to U.S. interests to which the proposed paradigm is responsive.

THE ANARCHIC SOCIETY AND THE NEW NATIONALISM

In 1977 Hedley Bull's path-breaking book The Anarchical Society appeared.¹ Almost at once it was recognized as describing something essential about the world of states, something that recalled and yet contrasted with Hobbes's description of anarchic mankind without a sovereign. Bull recognized that though there was no sovereign governing states, they constituted nevertheless a society that followed certain norms, whereas Hobbes had described a world of all against all and each one against every other one. The goal of each was to be fittest in a competition for survival; so it is with the proposed new paradigm that has recently found favor with a new generation of political leaders on the right.

This strategy for the competitive survival of the United States focuses our resources on confronting only those threats that truly put the United States itself at risk. Alan Tonelson, in an influential article in Foreign Affairs, “Superpower without a Sword,” recommends that American forces limit their mission to deterring nuclear attacks on the American homeland, defending the American landmass from conventional incursions, and maintaining the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, “at least until a serious national energy plan is in place.” This is the core of his strategic plan, augmented by “token handholding” forces in Europe and East Asia, the maintenance of units capable of launching precision-strike weapons against rogue states to destroy weapons of mass destruction, and small special forces to handle evacuations, hostage rescues, and the like. It provides a well-thought-out example of an increasingly influential position in American affairs.²

A similar proposal became part of the “Contract with America,” the legislative agenda offered by Republican candidates for the Congress in 1994. During a debate in the House in February 1995 one Republican representative was quoted as saying, “You call it isolationism. I say it's America first!,” apparently unconscious of the resonance such a phrase must have for many, because the America First Committee was the 1940 vehicle for isolationism before Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, the congressman was right, I think, in distinguishing this position from isolationism. A fuller canvass of this position will show that it does not in fact offer a new paradigm—and isolationism for the United States would certainly be that—so much as a policy variant on the interventionist role for America that we have pursued since entering World War I.

The strategy urged by this approach would be more parsimonious in defining what constitute American “vital interests” because the new nationalist believes that most international conflicts and injustices do not concern our survival and therefore they can be safely, and should be prudently, ignored. The principal threat to the United States is thought to be economic, and, perhaps because they are asserting a strategic view, proponents of this position tend to adopt an essentially mercantilist view of international economic competition. That is, whereas strategic affairs are commonly zero-sum, with the measurement of the victor's spoils never exceeding those of the defeated's losses, economic perspectives are typically thought to enable the creation of wealth for all trading partners. When a strategic perspective on economic trading is introduced, however, gains and losses are necessarily relative to the positions of the various competing states. It matters not so much that both the United States and Japan are wealthier after a decade of record U.S. trade deficits; what matters is that the relative position of the United States vis-á-vis Japan has declined. Treaty arrangements like NAFTA and GATT are anathema to the New Nationalist because they sacrifice the pre-eminence of the American market in order to generate wealth, while many foreign markets remain to a large degree closed to U.S. products.

There is a populist flavor to this position that disdains the establishment policies of intervention abroad and free markets at home. Thus Patrick Buchanan:

Put bluntly, it is blue-collar Americans whose jobs are lost when trade barriers fall, working-class kids who bleed and die in Mogadishu and along the DMZ when the shooting starts. But the best and the brightest tend to escape the worst consequences of the policies they promote from military service to unemployment. This [and not better information or understanding] may explain why national surveys show repeatedly that the best-educated and wealthiest Americans are the staunchest internationalists on both security and economic issues.³

Tonelson adds:

On the merits, the essence of the America First approach [urges that] a focus on rebuilding and husbanding America's material wealth is our best foreign policy bet in the turbulent world we've entered, and the establishment knows it. [It is] a full-blown alternative [that] would break decisively with internationalism by abandoning the quest for worldwide security, prosperity and democracy as the best guarantors of American well-being. Instead, it would conclude that in a world likely to remain highly unstable, America's future is best assured by restoring and consolidating its own military and economic strength…⁴

Owing to this focus on domestic rebuilding, it is not surprising that it was the NAFTA debate, more than any traditional security crisis, that seems to have rallied the partisans of this approach. Precisely because NAFTA was advertised as a way of stemming illegal immigration from Mexico, it tended to invite nationalist reaction. The proponents of the treaty were put in the position of asserting a kind of blackmail: either we assist the Mexican economy or our own security would suffer. But this argument plays into the hands of the proponents of the set of policies I have been describing as New Nationalist because it implicitly accepts that the relative attractiveness of the United States must decline in order to keep Mexican immigrants at home.

In any case, proponents of this view argue, the United States really has no alternative. We may claim, as did the first Bush administration, that we are forging a new world order, but the stark reality is that assets of the scope required by such an undertaking no longer exist. The Pentagon continues to maintain that the American military is capable of fighting a Gulf War–size regional conflict and at the same time coming to the aid of allies in a similar-size undertaking elsewhere (as in Korea) while being able to initiate small-scale intervention of the sort launched against Panama or in relief of the Kurdish forces in northern Iraq; this is the “two and one-half” war scenario. But, it is argued by New Nationalists, the facts are otherwise.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, the U.S. military saw a 40 percent drop in active personnel. The Army's 10 combat divisions lack a full complement of officers, tankers, and gunners, and the Air Force as of 2001 was 700 pilots short.

Planned force levels do not provide this “two and one-half war” capability. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, U.S. active forces contained 18 Army divisions, 9 Marine expeditionary brigades, 15 Navy aircraft carrier battle groups, and 22 Air Force tactical fighter wings. Of these, 8 Army divisions, 6 Marine brigades, 6 carrier groups, and 10 tactical wings were

COMPARISON OF ACTIVE FORCE LEVELS WITH “DESERT STORM” GULF WAR DEPLOYMENTS
MILITARY UNIT TYPES PLANNED LEVELS	ACTIVE FORCE LEVELS IN 1990	ACTIVE FORCES IN “DESERT STORM”	CLINTON 1999 ACTIVE
Army Divisions	18	8	10
Army Independent Brigades/Regiments	7	3	4
Marine Brigades	9	6	5
Carrier Battle Groups	15	6	11
Air Force Fighter/ Attack Wings	22	10	13
Total Military Personnel	2,070,000	427,000	1,453,0005

sent to the Persian Gulf. The outgoing Clinton administration proposed a force structure composed of 10 Army divisions, 5 Marine brigades, 11 carrier groups, and 13 tactical wings in the total active force.

To refight the Gulf War in 2001 would take 80 percent of all U.S. Army divisions, more than 75 percent of Air Force fighter attack wings and Marine air wings, and 50 percent of our aircraft carriers. If during such a conflict the North Koreans attacked across the 38th parallel, all of our reserves would have to be called up, and mobilization of the Selective Service pool would be required.

Moreover, this gap between means and ends is growing larger, owing to the end of the Long War and an expansion of U.S. military missions. First, the collapse of the Soviet Union increased the number of independent actors on the world stage, some of whom had been restrained from fomenting conflict by Soviet local control. They, unlike the Soviet Union, have every incentive to believe that American resolve to intervene in their depredations is far more modest than our rhetoric, and thus the testing of U.S. commitments is, ironically, likely to increase rather than decrease after our victory in the Long War. “Since 1990 we deployed forces about 45 times,” according to former Secretary of State Alexander Haig. “During the entire 50 year span of the Cold War we had only 16 deployments.”⁶ Second, our national will to send troops abroad appears to be inversely correlated with the habit of our leaders to support humanitarian interventions. Polls routinely show large majorities opposed to intervention in Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda, and elsewhere. The American public not unreasonably appears to be more intent on revitalizing the social and economic framework at home, a focus of attention that is to some degree self-fulfilling, because as fewer and fewer resources are allocated abroad—resources that have to be voted by the representatives of the public—attention to other states' problems becomes more and more difficult.

But perhaps the most salient argument for this proposed paradigm is rooted in constitutional law. By what right, Tonelson asks,

can the President or the Congress make the decision to send our troops to alleviate suffering in dangerous situations in which they—the politicians—readily admit that there are no strategic stakes involved? As citizens of a republic, we authorize our elected leaders to take all sorts of actions… But we grant this authority because it is an American good that is advanced or defended—because the majority of members of the political community to which we belong will supposedly benefit.⁷

This nation-state argument (one can scarcely imagine it from the lips of a Napoleon) exposes one of the deep, though subterranean, fault lines within post –World War II American national security policy: much of the American security structure is “extended” to protect other states. There are complicated reasons for doing so that, in fact, support the conclusion that such policies confer important benefits on the American people, but these have seldom been fully argued to the public. Instead, while foreign policy elites have used the forward presence of American forces to anchor powerful allies—Germany and Japan—whose ultimate intentions were a source of concern, these policies have been sold to the American public as based on resistance to the Soviet Union. Thus, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has opened a hitherto unexposed crevasse between our deployments and the ostensible reason for those deployments. Before the Soviet collapse, as Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwartz put it:

In postwar Western Europe, American policy was spectacularly successful. Freed from looking nervously over their shoulders, the West Europeans were able to set aside their historical animosities and security fears and work together to achieve economic integration within Europe and economic interdependence between Europe and the United States. Because stability and reassurance were based on economic co-operation, it was at least as important for the United States to defend the Europeans from themselves as it was to protect them from the Soviet Union. Likewise, in East Asia, the U.S. reassurance against resurgent Japanese power enabled the region to concentrate on commerce rather than on power politics.

Since the aims of the preponderance strategy transcended the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, it is not surprising that the foreign policy community now seeks to employ the same approach after the Cold War. Indeed, the Soviet Union's disappearance has seemingly removed the last barrier between Washington and the complete attainment of its world order aspirations. The USSR's demise has also forced the American policy elite to be more candid in articulating the assumptions that underpin its view of American strategy.

The continuity in U.S. strategy was—and is—explained by the belief that preponderance prevents spiraling regional tensions by obviating the need for other powers to provide their own security. Removing the umbrella of U.S. protection would force other states to “renationalize” their foreign and security policies.⁸

Now the public asks, however: why do we need to spend so much money and run such risks if the foe is defeated?

In place of a “global pacification strategy,” the anarchic paradigm of the New Nationalist accepts the condition of chaos as an irremediable feature of the state system. As de Gaulle remarked (and Palmerston before him), states have no permanent friends, they have only permanent interests. Rather than try to remake the nature of states, or human nature for that matter, proponents of the New Nationalism would operate within the natural, anarchic environment—preserving U.S. influence when a more ambitious agenda would dissipate it, strengthening our position by increasing our wealth rather than taking on ever-increasing expenses. Nor is this position confined to adherents from the Republican right wing. Paul Kennedy has eloquently presented a history of states whose power declined when strategic overreach impelled them to divert more and more of their resources into unproductive security investments as their global ambitions increased, and the need to protect peripheral assets became a policy imperative.⁹

The anarchic strategists go further and not only argue against strategic overcommitment but see opportunities in the very chaos of the international system that America's peculiar strengths would enable it to exploit. Unlike its potential competitors in Europe and Asia, the United States does not have powerful and threatening neighbors. That gives it less of a stake in the maintenance of a peaceful status quo, and allows for a comparative advantage should that system break down. Abandoning the task of underwriting a benign global political environment frees the United States to enjoy assets that are independent of that environment: the world's largest single market and the world's most secure geopolitical position. With such vast resources we can intervene when our own interests really are served, and pursue objectives that really are achievable. As Walter Lippmann wrote:

A mature great power will make measured and limited use of its power… will eschew the theory of global and universal duty which not only commits it to unending wars of intervention but intoxicates its thinking with the illusion that it is a crusader for righteousness…. I am in favor of learning to behave like a great power, of getting rid of the globalism which would not only entangle us everywhere but is based on the totally vain notion that if we do not set the world in order, no matter what the price, we cannot live in the world safely… We shall have to learn to live as a great power which defends itself and makes its way among the other great powers.¹⁰

In what does such a defense consist? There are three principal elements.

First, the defense of our economic strength and its growth. On this view, a national security establishment that, even in a period of record deficits and pronounced defense cutbacks, still takes about 29 percent of the national budget must rank as more of a threat to our long-term security than that posed by any particular state. Sizable and sustained tax cuts would be sought. Trade policies that are more geared to stabilizing the international trading system than winning advantages for U.S. companies and workers would be rejected. Military investment that is a drain on investment in infrastructure and innovation would be redirected.

Second, the avoidance of needlessly adding to the risks we would otherwise face. This means abstention from involvement in conflicts that would add to our burdens but do not actually threaten us. The state system will never be “in balance” because it is dynamic and historical. The relative positions of “one sub-Saharan state vis-à-vis another, or of Hungary vis-à-vis Romania, or of Serbia vis-á-vis Bosnia” pose no real threat to us. Indeed the many bitter conflicts in the world are largely focused on such dueling pairs, who would not turn their hostility against the United States unless we seek to insert ourselves, as the American involvement in the Middle East has shown.

Third, an assertive defense of our territory and freedom of action. This implies the abandonment of alliances, such as NATO, that have served their purposes but have no specifically American reason for being. This third element reinforces the demand for energy independence and a program of aggressive energy exploration and development. It implies a reconfiguration of the force structure: antimissile defenses ought to be developed that can shield the American homeland from the few, eccentric threats we might face as nuclear weapons proliferate to irresponsible but minor states like Iran or Libya. Without the obligation to defend Korea, Japan, or Western Europe, we would reshape our forces away from a large personnel base to fewer active-duty ground troops with greater readiness, fewer forward defense deployments, and greater sea- and airlift capability.

Such a proposed “paradigm” is far more tolerant of the proliferation of nuclear weapons to major states, because the latter (including the major state of Russia) do not pose geopolitical threats to the United States. At the same time, proponents of this view are more willing to hand over responsibility for regional security and regional trade to those states most closely affected. Far from feeling rebuffed by exclusion from a European Defense Community we should welcome it. If Ukraine had wished to retain nuclear weapons, we ought not to have ignored the advantages to the United States in having Russia checked by a regional nuclear power with its own considerable incentives to moderate Russian expansionism. In such a cacophony, the United States can prosper.

The New Nationalism represents a popular near-term option to remake American foreign policy. Some of its positions were adopted by Governor George W. Bush in his 2000 campaign for the U.S. presidency.* Such a program is the culmination of decades of change in which our attitudes have gone from “thinking like lawyers” —which gave us the collective security paradigm I will next discuss—to “thinking like economists.” It is present in many forms in contemporary Western life and shapes and reflects our values to some degree in all our public (and a good many of our private) endeavors.

THE MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY AND THE NEW INTERNATIONALISM

“Fundamental shifts in the definition of security begin at the conceptual level and, through a process of interaction with historical circumstances and emerging political perceptions, gradually prompt realignments of practical policy.” So wrote Janne Nolan and John Steinbrunner in Global Enlargement: Cooperation and Security for the Twenty-first Century, a report of the Brookings Institution and perhaps the most ambitious statement of the New Internationalism, the second proposed new national security paradigm of the United States. This proposal, in all its variants, relies on a structure of collective security. It is therefore a pole away from an autarkic, nationalist strategy. For our purposes it is important that the proponents of this view conceive it as a paradigm shift—whatever the philosophical merits of Nolan and Steinbrunner's (and Thomas Kuhn's) description of the process of shifts in paradigms.¹¹ The authors argue that “the major powers must completely reconcile their vaunted security strategies in this more multi-centric and unstable post-Cold War environment.” Whereas the survivalist agenda of the New Nationalism focuses on the U.S. position alone, the goal of the New Internationalism is world peace. One might characterize the nationalist agenda as leading to an international society where it is “every man for himself,” while the internationalist agenda is described as “all for one and one for all.” “In the former case,” a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report says, “the enemy is another nation-state; in the latter, the enemy is war itself.”

“Collective security” is an organizing strategic concept that seeks to marshal the resources of the group through institutionalized cooperation to achieve common goals. This perspective relies on the insight that the end of the Long War has globalized security needs in a way that only a global, collective response can cope with.

It is indisputable that the well-being of Americans is affected by the behavior of remote economic and political actors. How many American cities have substantial Vietnamese populations today, the internationalist asks, pointing to an obvious domestic consequence of foreign upheaval. Enthusiasts of collective security take this point to demonstrate that a nationalist agenda is therefore unrealistic and that the withdrawal of the United States from multilateral institutions is not really a viable alternative for policy. It, has been estimated that, in 2001, more than a twelfth of the population of El Salvador and one-sixth of the population of Haiti was living in the United States. How, the internationalists ask, can a serene neglect of the troubles of others really protect the United States? That unfairly caricatures the nationalist approach, I think: its proponents are perfectly aware that the perceptions and policies of other states, and indeed actors that are not states, must be taken into account by U.S. security policy and, moreover, that the security problems America faces are global in nature. Rather, the nationalist believes that the most successful manipulation of those perceptions and policies lies in the bilateral dialogue of the United States vis-à-vis other states and actors, and not through the multilateral institutions that, necessarily, curb our freedom of action and reflect interests that are not our own. In any case, the nationalist argues, we cannot resolve civil conflicts in Viet Nam, El Salvador, Haiti, or anywhere else. If we had been more self-restrained in our policies to Southeast Asia, perhaps the Vietnamese would never have left in the first place. If refugee flows are the problem, then perhaps a stricter border regime is the answer. At least this lies within our control.

To this the multilateralist asserts two propositions: (1) that American leadership of multilateral collective institutions can multiply the weight of our own policies, giving them a legitimation (and a cost sharing) far beyond what the United States standing alone could achieve; (2) that the well-being of others is and should be treated as a fundamental national goal for Americans. Of course this last point is the sort of pulpit rhetoric that drives the nationalist wild, but there is more to it than simply a vague egalitarian altruism. As James Rosenau has pointed out, modern media make Americans conscious of the identity and conditions of people around the world, and this awareness changes and enlarges the objectives we care about.¹²

Nor should this difference about goals be overstated: many of the objectives sought to be achieved by the New Internationalism are the same as those of the New Nationalism: to deter attack on the United States, its armed forces and citizens; to maintain U.S. prosperity; to reduce the vulnerability of the United States to nuclear attack. The means chosen to accomplish these objectives simply are different. The internationalist believes that U.S. prosperity is best ensured by a general lowering of barri-eers to trade and that this can be achieved only through multilateral institutions, preferably global ones, like the GATT and the WTO. Regions important to our prosperity—East Asia, Europe, the Persian Gulf—must be kept out of the hands of hostile powers and this can be done at an acceptable cost only by sharing the burden of forward defense (as in the case of the Gulf War, which was fought largely by the United States but financed largely by others). The internationalist believes in stopping weapons proliferation much for the reasons her liberal counterpart believes in gun control on the domestic scene, and also in the necessity of economic development for all states in order to ensure civil stability much as those who promote jobs for the poor at home do so as a prophylactic for crime. The nationalist is more dubious about these means, but in any case, does not concede that international organizations, like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) regime or the World Bank and the IMF, have been or could be successful at achieving the ends that would be required of them by both internationalists and nationalists.

Some objectives, however, belong to the multilateralist alone. Ensuring that the basic needs of all peoples are met (whether or not they could conceivably pose a security threat to the United States even by migration); strengthening U.S. control over multinational corporations; maintaining equal terms of trade for all states; protecting the global environment; developing agreed-upon norms of international behavior in the resolution of conflict and the settlement of disputes. These ambitious goals are achievable, if they are achievable at all, only through multilateral institutions.

What are these institutions and how would they change? For some internationalists, NATO would be expanded both as to its mission and its membership. What have thus far been regarded as “out-of-area problems” beyond the scope of the North Atlantic Treaty, which set up NATO and commits its members to a collective defense of the European frontier, would henceforth be included within NATO's responsibilities. NATO forces fought the Gulf War, though no one much said so at the time. Now NATO's mission would be expanded to include not only the protection of the Gulf states, but other responsibilities as well. Article 43 of the United Nations Charter might finally be activated in order to provide armed forces to the U.N. which would take up the role in the Korean peninsula, for example, now filled by U.S. forces. The permanent membership of the U.N. Security Council would be expanded to include Germany and Japan and the most influential states from the southern tier, such as India, Brazil, and others, such as Indonesia and Nigeria. While NATO would be devoted to peacemaking, the U.N., with its own Article 43 forces, would be an active peacekeeper and intervenor to provide humanitarian relief. Multilateral institutions such as the G-8,* which is now confined to coordinating macroeconomic policy, or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) would expand their missions to take on new roles including environmental protection, nonproliferation, counterterrorism, even the coordination of technology transfers. The IMF and the World Bank would be invested with greater funds to accomplish the mission of environmentally sustainable development in the Third World and in the former Second World of ex-communist states. GATT would be strengthened and extended to the equity and capital markets. Taken together, these institutions would act as a chorus, reminding the world of its possibilities and urging it on.

New Internationalists often hold, as James Chace does in his justly influential The Consequences of the Peace, ¹³ that economic stability is the precursor to international peace. Like the New Nationalists, Chace concedes that America's economic position does not enable it to either dominate the world economy or act as the world's policeman. But because international peace is the goal he wishes the United States to pursue, these concessions commit him not to a retrenched agenda of more or less autarkic objectives, but rather to reaching out to restructure international organizations to take up the role the United States is no longer able to play. Chace argues for a supranational central bank—Margaret Thatcher's worst nightmare—that could create and manage the money supply of a common global currency. He also envisions a parallel global organization vested with authority to manage international trade, pointing to the example of the E.U., which, unlike the GATT, has been able to abolish tariffs among the member states while maintaining their diverse tax and regulatory structures.

Like other New Internationalists, Chace supports an enlarged role for international security organizations, particularly the U.N. (although like Eugene Rostow, he points to Article 51 of the Charter as providing a reserve clause by which the United States can retain the power to act if the U.N. Security Council is stymied).

It is interesting to observe that multilateralists, like their nationalist counterparts, are inclined to believe that the superpower is over. The United States's role as a debtor nation; ¹⁴ its comparatively low savings rates that make it hostage to the indulgence of those very competitors; and its lack of self-control regarding imports and consumption generally: these facts reflect and re-enforce the prospect of a diminished future. They are salient characteristics of our current situation for both the internationalist and the nationalist.

Precisely because no nation is self-sufficient, as Richard Rosencrance has argued, ¹⁵ and every economy is intertwined with others, either the United States must exploit the institutions that arise from this necessary interdependence or exploit the comparative advantages that may be ours in the disarray that would follow the collapse of those institutions. Depending on which of these alternatives one chooses, one counts oneself as an internationalist or nationalist respectively. And that choice in turn seems to depend on whether global peace or comparative American success is the principal objective of the policy.

Or does it? The New Internationalist counters that a stable international environment that the United States has a leading role in shaping will be less expensive over the long term than a volatile system drifting out of control. Moreover, the United States cannot shape a stable environment unilaterally, but it can use multilateral institutions to work its will and project its interests. Indeed it is hard to see how the United States could broker a deal wherein it offers its unique military assets as its contribution to international security, partly funded by others whose contribution is material but not military, in the absence of multilateral institutions. Without such a deal, however, U.S. forces become too expensive to use, possibly even to preserve. How can it make sense to liquidate those assets in the name of promoting the national interest? And how can it make sense to liquidate also the political capital of the West—the shared goals, values, habits of cooperation, and institutions that have emerged from the struggle of the Long War? It is precisely because, as former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski suggests, America has neither the legitimacy to act as the world's policeman nor the liquidity to act as the world's banker that the northern-tier states must act together to preclude the re-emergence of the coercive, utopian-myth states that would arise in the vacuum created by our abdication of international leadership. Even the narrow goal of national survival is better served, he maintains, by collective security than by mercantile solitude.

Brzezinski argues that the American constitutional system has produced in the United States a policy of gridlock that prevents the institutions of government from dealing with our pervasive internal social problems. Moreover, our reliance on legal institutions has replaced the moral consensus of the community with the technical substitute of the law: not right and wrong but legal and illegal are the standards by which behavior is measured. As a result, the United States, despite its military, economic, political, and cultural power, cannot sustain a position as international role model (as required by the New Evangelism) nor as the apotheosis of the New Nationalism (since the ethos of consumerism, not dour mercantilism, has replaced self-restraint with the “permissive cornucopia” of modern life), nor as arbiter of the balance of power, as called for by the New Realism (because our security problems do not arise from a competition among the great powers, but rather out of the seething underclass, domestically and in the Third World, that has been seduced by the cult of consumption at a time when the future dictated by its demographics moves this class ever farther from realizing its fantasies). By contrast, our constitutional structure and the dynamics of our political process make us “organically congenial” to multilateral, collective institutions. America's openness to outside participation in its own affairs—through foreign-sponsored lobbies, growing foreign ownership of its assets, and even some foreign participation in the definition of its domestic agenda—makes America both the exemplar and the harbinger of an increasingly internationalist state.¹⁶

Brzezinski believes that international society will sort itself into six power centers: America, Europe, East Asia, South Asia, the Muslim crescent, and a Eurasian black hole created by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Conflicts among these clusters are likely to be economic in nature, with violent conflict occurring within* some of the unstable clusters. A trilateral alliance of Japan, Europe, and the United States is the collective security arrangement he prefers, operating within the larger framework of a strengthened U.N., with a somewhat larger Security Council.

INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY IN BALANCE:

THE NEW REALISM

The nationalist and internationalist models have ambitious goals for U.S. policy though they differ as to how these goals are to be accomplished. The New Nationalism seeks to improve the position of the United States vis-á-vis other states, by exploiting the natural advantages we enjoy in a chaotic environment; the New Internationalism seeks to improve the U.S. position absolutely (if not relatively), while improving the position of others also, so that U.S. dominance can be extended through multilateral institutions that provide security and prosperity to all.

Proponents of the compensating system, or balance of power, have no such illusions (as they regard them) about U.S. influence. The goal of these “New Realists” is less ambitious, or perhaps less starry-eyed. They aim merely to prevent the primacy of any other state. If the nationalist's fundamental objective is making the United States the fittest for survival, and the internationalist's the achievement of world peace, then the principal goal of the new realist is achieving world stability.

“Vital interests” are at the core of all these strategies, but what is really vital seems to vary with each perspective. The nationalist judges what is vital by its relationship to freedom of action, for only when the United States possesses such freedom can it use its power to protect itself from threats to its survival. The internationalist holds that the welfare of other states is vital, for only then will the world present a benign environment within which the United States can ultimately survive and prosper. Otherwise, the neglect of other states will turn the international environment into a cesspool of environmental and human rights degradation, out of which will emerge predators armed with weapons of mass destruction from whom there is, on our planet, no place to hide. New Realists—of whom former U.S. national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger is rightly the most celebrated—tend to define “vital interests” in terms of the stability of the state system. For the New Realist, our vital interests are only threatened when a state, or coalition of states, is powerful enough to successfully destabilize that system.

The differences among these varying definitions of the “vital,” however, are largely apparent only, and can be attributed to differing attitudes about means, not ends. The balance-of-power realist simply doesn't believe that calls for peace and justice can unite the world community, or deter a predator (who perhaps has unfurled the banner “No Justice, No Peace” and believes the status quo to be fundamentally inequitable). Nor does the balance-of-power proponent quite believe the machismo rhetoric of the nationalist: it strikes him as adolescent, unrealistic, exaggerated. To maintain that one state—the United States—will be able to coerce all the others into participating in a system that perpetually keeps them at a disadvantage is wishful thinking. The international system may be chaotic, or anarchic, but even criminals can conspire.

Rather, the proponents of compensating balances believe that technique, rather than natural advantage or procedural perfection, will best ensure vital U.S. interests. It is a philosophy for the Talleyrand in every statesman, and it requires an adroitness and coolness of calculation, to say nothing of a dispassion toward the problems of other states, that the American public has seldom exhibited. A history written by such a realist is a history of great men, just as a history written by the Hobbesian chaoticist is a history of impersonal forces, and a history by the internationalist the account of treaties and resolutions and minutes of the meetings of multilateral institutions.

What are the elements of the New Realism, a paradigm that is based on a balance of power? If we assume that the goal of ensuring world stability is sought in order to achieve the same objectives as the various other paradigms—protecting American territory, armed forces, and citizens from attack or coercion, and providing for the continued growth and prosperity of the American market economy—how does this archetypal approach plan to achieve these objectives?

The New Realist takes a severe view of those threats that actually strike at our vital interests but is disinclined to see every atrocity as a threat to our security. Accordingly, a state (or alliance of states) would have to do more than simply kidnap an American citizen or massacre an African village in order to pose a mortal threat to the American state. The New Realist assumes that America's current position is both too weak to impose world peace and too strong to have to content itself with passively waiting for hostile forces outside our control to coalesce against us. In order to prevent a state from becoming powerful enough to menace us, the New Realist takes as the first imperative the prevention of the emergence of any state (or alliance of states) that could dominate the Eurasian landmass. This principle plays itself out differently with respect to different potential adversaries.

With regard to China, the United States should seek to encourage it to develop as a trading state, because this development is both salutary—in that it will, over time, loosen the grip of the totalitarian party and armed forces that currently rule the country and have in the past been tempted to seek hegemony in the region—and possible, because the United States represents a rich market for Chinese goods, one capable of improving the standard of living for hundreds of millions of persons.

With respect to the states of the former Soviet Union, the United States ought to encourage devolution and democratization, not so much because these are good in themselves, but because they are the best hedge against the re-emergence of a state with ambitions of world dominion. A broken-up Soviet Union is less likely to be able to mount a challenge against the United States; a democratized Russian state is less likely to threaten the other former republics, and also less likely to be able to re-emerge as a militant superpower.

The states posing the greatest potential threat, however, are not the collapsing red dwarfs of communism, the supernovas that are already imploding, but rather Germany and Japan and the productive countries that surround them in some anxiety. Whereas the New Internationalist seeks to extend the U.N.'s mission and NATO's to accomplish the agenda of a world order based on collective security, the New Realist wants to strengthen NATO to keep Germany anchored to the United States. The differing approaches imply different policies for the widening of NATO membership and the deepening of its portfolio of missions. NATO enlargement, to include Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and perhaps the Baltic states, is the preferred realist proposal, not the expansion of NATO's missions out-of-area. While NATO remains the preferred institution for a German-American alliance, just as important is German membership in the E.U., which also ties German policy to its neighbors. Even a revived Western European Union (WEU) ¹⁷ would be preferable to a Germany looking eastward, with the potential to become a strategic superpower and the revived ambitions that would exploit that potential.

Japanese democracy is usually thought not to have achieved a very deep root structure, and thus to be even more at risk than the German democratic state. Moreover, Japan lies proximate to two potentially unstable, highly armed states—China and North Korea—and depends at present on U.S. forward forces and the U.S. nuclear deterrent for its safety. As I have written elsewhere, American policy to denuclearize North Korea or to induce respect for human rights in China must paramountly consider whether our steps are likely to bring the Japanese closer to nuclear and military self-reliance. It would be a tragedy for the world if, in order to extirpate a North Korean nuclear force with which Japan has learned to live, we plunged the Korean peninsula into a war that led to the mobilization of Japan's energy and wealth on behalf of its armed forces. Already the Japanese, with less than one and one-half percent of GNP, field the world's third largest defense establishment, and there is no NATO-like institution that links this establishment with the forces of surrounding states. It is probably far more important that the United States maintain forces in Korea than any other forward basing because Japan must be persuaded that the threats it faces—now that the Soviet Union is no longer among them—both require an alliance with the United States and yet will not lead to war owing to American unilateral action.

The New Nationalist strategy of closing American markets to East Asian competitors in a trade confrontation is precisely the sort of maladroit move that the New Realist seeks to avoid. Economic competition is doubtless the one area of interaction with the United States that could detonate Asian antagonism and anti-Western unity, particularly if it is sharpened by heightened trade exclusion on the part of the E.U. By treating each of the states of East Asia as a separate entrant into the U.S. market, the New Realist would balance one against another so that a coalition of East Asia states does not form, and no single state can dominate the others.

The same defensive posture dominates the New Realist calculus for American intervention: the United States should never intervene when its own vital interests are not at stake, and then only to prevent others from achieving a dominant position from which it can be threatened. Just as importantly, this principle should control our relationships with the internal forces at play within a foreign state. The Persian Gulf provides one example. The economic vitality of the G-7 states is linked to the flow of oil from the gulf; any state that controlled that flow would be in a dominant position vis-à-vis the United States, Japan, and Europe, who are all, to varying degrees, dependent on that oil. The states of this region to whom the United States gave security guarantees under the Carter Doctrine can be protected against local predators; the Gulf War and the earlier reflagging of Kuwaiti vessels showed as much. Accordingly the independence of the gulf states is of crucial importance and can and should be protected. It is far from clear, however, that these states are good bets for the long run. Modernization, democratization, and pan-Islamic movements stimulate internal threats that U.S. military intervention is powerless to deflect, and may even excite. Within such states the United States cannot afford to abandon the regimes on whose stability the economic life of the northern tier, postindustrial states of the world depends. But neither can the United States be so closely identified with those regimes that we, as well as they, become the target of revolution, as happened in Iran. This observation counsels that U.S. policy, perhaps through diplomatic or even clandestine contacts, must maintain a supple posture with respect to the internal dynamics at work in these states. Such a complex policy has strengths and weaknesses. It provides flexibility and avoids the rigid commitments of collective security that inevitably fail to reflect shifts in the politics and power relationships among and within states. It leverages American influence by linking it to coalitions of states that share America's interest in preventing a hegemonical threat from arising, rather than merely hoping to defeat such a threat once it becomes lethal. At the same time it is ineluctably linked to the status quo and thus makes the United States a locus of animosity among reformers whose values we may in fact share. Most important, it requires intimate knowledge of the political locale and a surefootedness in dealing with subtle and sometimes surprising shifts. It is one thing to muster the ruthlessness to abandon the Kurds in order to strengthen the shah of Iran for geopolitical reasons; it is quite another to predict the shah's replacement by the Ayatollah Khomeini, as so few analysts did. Yet without such accurate but difficult forecasting, the mere willingness to take cold-blooded decisions can amount to little more than a declarative pose.

Nationalists are inclined to downplay the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Most of these weapons, now that the Cold War has ended, are not trained on the United States—it is said—and, to the extent that they tie down our international competitors, relatively improve our position. So long as America is able to defend against the modest forces likely to be available to the current (and anticipated) generation of proliferatees, it is not crucial to us whether, for example, Iraq uses poison gas against Iran.¹⁸Internationalists, by contrast, seek a full court press against proliferation and even hope for cancellations of nuclear programs that have been pursued by states that are now willing to abandon them, for example, South Africa. With some exceptions, notably Kenneth Waltz, ¹⁹ internationalists tend to view any proliferation as inimical to world peace.

The realist view is more nuanced and more pessimistic. It seeks nonproliferation mainly of nuclear delivery systems, which are easier to detect and to destroy than fissile material. But the realist's position is essentially fatalistic and does not wish to waste diplomatic assets pursuing the fruitless goal of convincing Pakistan and India that nuclear weapons do not really enhance their security or that the threats each faces from the other are not mortal. Rather the realist accepts some proliferation as inevitable, and tries to mitigate its impact on the stability of the international system.

With respect to achieving American goals in the international economy, the balance-of-power approach shows the same watermark of maneuver and irony, and the same disdain for impractical programs (whether they spring from romantic idealism or sullen paranoia). This approach accepts that America's share of the world economic product has dramatically fallen since the end of the Second World War and is likely to fall still further as hitherto unproductive economies industrialize. Proponents of this view do not waste time lamenting this change or trying to recapture the past by withdrawing from these emerging states the markets they must have to thrive. But neither does the New Realism sacrifice American competitiveness simply to increase the world's wealth. Rather here, as with political competition, it seeks a certain relationship for the United States with other states that is relatively advantageous. Just as the New Realism seeks to prevent a situation whereby any state (or coalition) dominates the Eurasian landmass or crucial global sea lanes, so it seeks here to prevent the United States from slipping into an inferior position in the terms of trade with any state (or bloc of states) for much the same reason: in either case, the continued wealth and power of the United States become hostage to the policies of another state. For the New Internationalist, potato chip production is just as valuable as computer chip production: in a world market, the important thing is that every state produce what it has a comparative advantage in. This leads to the greatest efficiency and the maximization of international wealth. For the New Realist, however, this phenomenon is exactly what is to be deplored: the potato chip manufacturer, whose products have easy substitutes and for whom there is an infinite number of potential competitors because the human capital and the technology required for farm production are so modest and so widely distributed, will always be at the mercy of value-added products like the computer chip that enable so many other kinds of productivity, and can themselves only be made more efficient by the most sophisticated technology and the most competitive firms. Given a choice between a free market worldwide and a system that established favorable terms for trade for the United States, the New Realist would only smile: it is not a realistic choice. States will never permit a universal free market so long as they have the political power to engineer favorable terms for themselves through various anticompetitive tactics, including exploiting the free rider phenomenon, ²⁰and as long as domestic political groups can protect themselves from foreign competition at the expense of the larger society, as farmers have so successfully done in Japan, France, and elsewhere. Nor is any system that attempts to enshrine favorable terms of trade for the United States likely to endure for long, not least because the U.S. consumer would not tolerate the rise in prices such an imperial system would require. Competitiveness must be won. But through the adept use of retaliatory threats, state – private sector collaboration, and regional groupings like NAFTA that, for historic and cultural reasons, enshrine a favored U.S. position, it may be that the terms of trade can be successfully manipulated, at least to mitigate the effects of declining U.S competitiveness.

The New Realist is preoccupied with stability.* His forebears are those European intellectuals who attempted to tutor an unsophisticated and idealistic American policy elite in order to prevent a repetition of the catastrophe of Nazism that seemed to them as much a product of internationalist idealism and faith in the League of Nations as of the isolationism that characterized prewar U.S. policy. This group had little interest in the Third World; its successors do not either. There is nothing “vital” in American interests there, and the potential for costly diversion is limitless. Nor do the problems of transnationalism, the environment, refugee migration, epidemics, famine, and terrorism seem to concern the New Realist. He accepts the primacy of the nation-state, and at the same time realizes its existence cannot be successfully separated from that of the society of nation-states of which it is part, a member, so to speak, of an ensemble. Transnational problems, however, and the nongovernmental organizations that are increasingly the effective agents dealing with these problems, are difficult for the balance-of-power theorist to include within his frame of reference.

THE DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY:

THE NEW EVANGELISM

In September 1993 the Clinton administration announced its policy of “democratic enlargement,” a commitment to bring as many nations as possible into the fold of practicing free-market economies and limited-government democracies. This represented something of a change from the previous policy of “democratic engagement,” by which the United States sought a dialogue with other states at varying stages of democratization to encourage them along that path. That subtle change turns on a key notion of democratic enlargement: the link between a nation's internal political order and its external orientation.

Whether by force following aborted elections (as in Haiti or Panama), or with economic aid after democratic revolutions (as in the former Soviet empire) or economic sanctions against existing parliamentary states (as against South Africa), Americans have acted alone and in concert with NATO allies or pursuant to U.N. resolutions to encourage democratic regimes. Establishing democratic regimes, however, is a far more ambitious agenda than simply encouraging them. For one thing, the former goal requires rewriting existing international legal norms because the nature of a state's political structure has usually been held to be an “internal” matter, for that state's determination alone. Observing that the state system was “built around the idea of sovereign equality and noninterference by foreign powers into a nation's internal affairs,” the then director of policy planning for the State Department, James Steinberg, concluded, however, that “it seems clear that a rigid application of the concept of ‘noninterference in internal affairs' is not enough. Neither balance of power nor collective security arrangements will be adequate…”²¹

Steinberg, later a highly influential deputy national security advisor, further wrote that “the international community has begun to exercise the right, recognized in the U.N. Charter, to intervene in internal disputes when they pose a threat to international peace and security. And in practice, the international community is stretching the concept of a threat to internal peace and security to a broad range of cases where the internal conflict is serious, the humanitarian costs are large, but the external dimension is limited as in Somalia.”

Now suppose that, in addition to this appreciation of the changing transparency of sovereignty, we add the convictions that (1) democracies do not go to war against one another, and (2) a democracy crucially, if in part, consists in the security of basic human rights for its citizens, and (3) that free markets and democracy are mutually supportive and may even be indispensable to the longevity of either. We then have the “New Evangelist” position, which sees the U.S. role as one that, using international institutions wherever possible but acting alone if necessary, the United States should intervene to buttress, restore, or even establish democratic regimes where these are threatened or nonexistent, leading gradually to a world of like-minded communities sharing the universal values of liberty and freedom.

But are such values truly universal? George Kennan once wrote,

I know of no evidence that “democracy” or what we picture to ourselves under that word is the natural state of most of mankind. It seems rather to be a form of government (and a difficult one, with many drawbacks at that) which evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries in northwestern Europe… and which was then carried into other parts of the world, including North America, where peoples from that northwestern European area appeared as settlers… Democracy has, in other words, a relatively narrow base both in time and in space, and the evidence has yet to be produced that it is the natural form of rule for peoples outside those narrow perimeters.²²

Or, as Tony Smith put it in the Washington Quarterly:

[Some realists ask]: Given the desperate condition of many African countries, how can the U.S. propose with confidence that if they follow its example they will find salvation? Can Americans realistically suppose that good relations with the Muslim world necessarily presuppose the conversion of these countries to liberal democratic government?²³

The realist is content to offer limited help to struggling democracies, stressing that it is difficult to know what the right political system is for non-Western cultures and a mistake to identify too closely with every friendly regime. He doubts the premise that the security of human rights abroad is truly vital to American security. The nationalist, by contrast, is actually hostile to making the promotion of democracy a key American goal. He doubts the very underpinnings of the democratic evangelism, the belief that American security would be enhanced by a world of democracies because such states do not attack each other. France occupied the Ruhr in 1923 against the Weimar democracy; India attacked what was then East Pakistan when both states were thought to have generally democratic institutions; and Ecuador and Peru, Turkey and Greece have threatened recent hostilities. These and other examples may cast doubt on the theory, most eloquently argued in our day by the Princeton political scientist Michael Doyle, that democracies do not make war on one another. Moreover, the nationalist sees the New Evangelist as an impractical meddler, risking his own state's resources in a vain effort to reform everyone else. As Alexander Hamilton wrote:

There are still to be found visionary, or designing, men who stand ready to advocate the paradox of perpetual peace between states. The genius of [democracy], they say is pacific; the spirit of commerce has a tendency to soften the manners of men and to extinguish those inflammable humors which has so often kindled wars. [Democracies] will never be disposed to waste themselves in ruinous contentions with each other. They will be governed by mutual interest, and will cultivate a spirit of mutual amity and concord.

We may ask these projectors in politics, whether it is not the true interest of all nations to cultivate the same benevolent and philosophic spirit? If this be their true interest, have they in fact pursued it? Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found that momentary passions and immediate interests have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility and justice? Have democracies in fact been less addicted to war than monarchies? Are not the former administered by men as much as the latter? Are there not aversions, predilections, rivalships, and desires of unjust acquisition that affect nations as well as kings? Are not popular assemblies frequently subject to the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice and other irregular and violent propensities?²⁴

By contrast, the objection of the New Internationalist to the New Evangelist's proposed paradigm aims at a fundamentally different target: he questions the evangelist's emphasis on the importance of the internal. The internationalist strives for agreements to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, ecological devastation, and world recession from a macroeconomic perspective; he is less concerned with the internal drama of party politics and microeconomic practices. Both approaches stress the importance of international institutions, but on closer inspection, the preferred organizations of the new evangelist are choirs composed of the converted—the G-7, for example, or NATO, not the United Nations or the Organization of African Unity.

The New Evangelist rejects the classic formulation that states have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. For the evangelist, the community of the faithful is permanent. Because they are chosen by the people, democratic governments regard each other's regimes as legitimate and deserving of respect. Because, domestically, they use civilized nonviolent means to resolve disputes, democracies tend to prefer the same methods internationally. The evangelist also downplays the fear of a hegemonic power or group of powers. Indeed, the Clinton administration was more enthusiastic about European integration than many of the members of the E.U. So long as the power is exercised by a democratic state, even nuclear proliferation, for example, to Israel, is acceptable.

Like each of the other competing paradigms, this view is linked to a perception of a particular threat that it regards as uniquely salient. For the New Evangelist, this threat arises from the resurgence of nationalism and violence in the hands of authoritarian states. To combat this threat to the United States, the New Evangelist proposes a kind of inoculation far more imaginative than anything envisaged by his competitors. Realists, nationalists, and internationalists all treat the world as relatively static. The Cold War has ended, but their prescriptions generally forecast more of the same. The New Evangelist has more dynamic developments in mind, and these lend support to his position: history seems to be moving in his direction (the number of democracies is increasing), at least in the short term, and he can mobilize democratic popular support on behalf of American democratic values in a way that more cynical or more abstract theorists cannot. A global democratic revolution has been going on since Prague Spring in 1968, and with considerably more success each decade. In 1975 the Portuguese overthrew their communist government with the help of the European democracies. In the 1980s Latin American states began to replace military regimes to an unprecedented degree on that continent such that by 2001, there were elected civilian governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru, Panama, and Uruguay. In the 1990s, the transition from a racist, oligarchic state to a multiracial democracy in South Africa inspired the world community. In 2001, some 120 of the world's 192 states had democratic governments.

Unlike the other competing paradigms, the New Evangelism can call on these developments for inspiration and political support. Democratic ideology, it is said, ²⁵ not weaponry, won the Cold War. “Ideas matter.” We cannot ignore the role of values in shaping our security and our fate, nor should we. Being true to human rights, pluralism, freedom of conscience, and democratic governance is the only way we will be able to mobilize support at home for our policies and, if the New Evangelist is right, actually achieve a safer, more secure world. The end of the Cold War has freed us from having to support regimes that were hostile to our values. Now, as the sole remaining superpower, we can support those regimes with whom we have a true affinity.

It must be said that much of the enthusiasm behind this position does arise from our role as the sole superpower. The world is beset by enemies, many of them states that are the enemies of their own peoples. None really threaten us. If there was ever a time for the United States to assert its values, it must be now, for if not the United States, then who would do it, and if not now, when would we be in a better position to do so? And if no one asserts these values, isn't it just a matter of time before the fragile movement toward democracies is overtaken by the retrograde forces of jaded realists, reactionary nationalists, and relativist internationalists everywhere? In a period of relative American decline, doesn't our best insurance against the future lie in persuading other states to adopt a political system that is benign toward our state and congenial to our culture—a system, in other words, that is compatible with our strategic approach and our constitutional values?

Like all unipolar, or imperial, universal visions, however, the paradigm of the New Evangelist seems remarkably insensitive to the will of others. When a Clinton administration official proposed in an interview that “the U.S. must rebuild the Haitian economy and restructure its court system, its legislative system and its military system,” a columnist replied, “What colonialist, racist nonsense. Haiti belongs to the Haitians to run as they see fit.”²⁶ But isn't that the beauty of the democratic vision: that it alone of all the ideologies of modern government can lay a claim to truly recognizing the people's will in having a state of their own choosing? Only evangelism promises that, after conversion, one is empowered to do as one pleases.

The only major states in which democratic transplantation has been tried are Japan and Germany. These examples can be cited either way. Skeptics point out that the principal reason behind the alliance system was not to simply contain the USSR but to do so in a way that kept these new democracies from reverting to their old ways. This must reflect at least some nervousness about how entrenched the habits of democracy have become in those societies, even under the most propitious circumstances. Advocates point to the unblemished success of those two societies in peacefully transferring power (finally, in Japan) and in their nonthreatening international behavior. Perhaps the most salient point, however, is that it is no less important now to strengthen those democracies than it was before, and this, as before, is unlikely to happen in the absence of American commitment.

But what if a state is attacked that is not a fully functioning democracy, such as Kuwait? Or if a state threatens its neighbors even though it is a democracy, such as India? Or if the slow process of building democracies is too complicated and ponderous to treat emergencies such as occurred in Bosnia and Rwanda? In all these instances, democratic enlargement seems to have little of immediate relevance to say.

THE SOLE REMAINING SUPERPOWER:

THE NEW LEADERSHIP

Each of the preceding four proposed security paradigms shares an essential assumption about American power: that it is in relative decline and that the consequences of that decline will constrain the United States in its role as a world leader, a role to which it has become accustomed in the post –War II period. One proposed paradigm, however, denies this assumption. This is the program I will call the “New Leadership.” In the words of its most articulate spokesman, Charles Krauthammer,

the true geopolitical structure of the post – Cold War world [is that of] a single pole of world power that consists of the United States at the apex of the industrial west… American preeminence is based on the fact that it is the only country with the military, diplomatic, political and economic assets to be a decisive player in any conflict in whatever part of the world it chooses to involve itself…. One can debate whether America is in true economic decline. [One should note, however, that] its percentage of world GNP is roughly where it has been throughout the 20th century (between 22% and 26%) excepting the aberration of the immediate post – World War II era.²⁷

This point can be urged even more strongly: the United States, while in relative economic decline vis-à-vis the E.U. and Japan, whose percentages of world GNP were growing more rapidly (at least until the mid-1990s), has actually increased the measure of its geopolitical position by the defeat of its global adversary, the Soviet Union. As a result, as William Odom has written, “the configuration of power today is such that only the United States can launch the construction of a new system.”²⁸ What sort of national security paradigm would enable the United States to play such a role?

Advocates of the New Leadership have something in common with each of the other competing schools: like the nationalists, they advocate a focus on U.S. vital interests and disdain charitable missions abroad, although they draw the line around such national interests far more expansively than other nationalists because they believe American interests to be global in nature and emphasize that American prosperity depends upon a stable international market; like the internationalists, they wish to strengthen NATO and various collective security schemes (such as the OSCE), but they conceive of these groups differently, believing them to be little more than a psychological fig leaf for the robust American assertion of power (and thus reserve a special contempt for the U.N.). As Krauthammer has put it:

There is much pious talk about a new multilateral world and the promise of the U.N. as guarantor of a new post–Cold War order. But this is to mistake cause and effect, the U.S. and the U.S. The U.N. is guarantor of nothing…. Collective security? In the Gulf, without the U.S. leading and prodding, bribing and blackmailing, no one would have stirred. Nothing would have been done: no embargo, no Desert Shield, no threat of force. The world would have written off Kuwait the way the last body pledged to collective security, the League of Nations, wrote off Abyssinia.²⁹

Like the realists, advocates of American leadership place a strong emphasis on bilateral ties and on preventing new hegemonies from arising, but in contrast to the realists, leadership partisans focus more closely on internal issues within the great power states and less on a grand ensemble among them. Advocates of the New Leadership point out that balance of power approaches are tone deaf, for example, to the importance of American values in U.S. foreign policy. Moreover, balance of power techniques are considered outmoded from this point of view. As Odom puts it, “the American concept for NATO at its creation was prevention of a return to the old Realpolitik game in Western Europe, and although the alliance balanced Soviet power, it was created as much to solve Western Europe's problem with Germany as it was to prevent Soviet expansion.” Indeed Odom stresses that Europe's security problems are “primarily ones of internal instability and civil war, problems a balance of power approach [with its purely external focus] will not solve.”

One might say that, as opposed to the “democratic enlargement” of the Clinton administration, the advocate of American leadership proposes instead “selective engagement.” But whereas conservative groups, such as the Heritage Foundation, which coined this phrase, are strongly anti-interventionist, the New Leadership would deploy selective American engagement to achieve the global aims of American dominance. For example, this is the only paradigm that would, forthrightly, have counseled significant NATO force against Serbia in 1991, in part because the failure to do so amounted to an abdication of American leadership itself. If vic-tory in the Gulf War may be thought of as symbolizing what might have been the beginning of a new American century, then the collapse of Western will in Yugoslavia demonstrated what happens when the Americans defer to the Europeans on such matters. If the unification of Germany represented a triumph of clear-sighted American diplomatic leadership in the face of European confusion (and accordingly advanced American prestige) then the calamities in Bosnia give us some picture of what diplomacy becomes in the absence of such leadership: impotence draped in cynicism. In the end, the very Europeans who stalemated action in Yugoslavia will be the ones who point to Bosnia as evidence of the futility of American leadership (and our prestige will suffer accordingly).

Advocates of the new leadership are, however, less eager to intervene in Somalia or Haiti, where the outcomes do not appear to affect American leadership one way or the other. Where they perceive future threats—such as those arising from the possession of weapons of mass destruction by terrorist states, such as Iran, Iraq, or North Korea—these advocates favor decisive action untempered by the effort to achieve consensus with our allies. President Clinton's role in negotiating a peaceful solution with North Korea was attacked just as much by partisans of the New Leadership, who favored a more robust response, as it was by the New Nationalists, who really had little to offer as an alternative.

As every leader instinctively knows, one's adversaries may present immediate problems, but preventing one's friends and colleagues from becoming successful rivals is the tricky part of the agenda of dominance. For this reason, New Leaders* and New Realists often appear to agree: both want to prevent the rise of a state, or collection of states, that would threaten the position of the United States. But whereas the realists wish to do so as a consequence of inevitable American relative decline, the leaders wish to preserve American hegemony at the top. Thus some New Realists would have demurred about intervention in the Gulf because Iraq is not a potential power of world-dominating ambitions, whereas for the New Leader, it was essential that the United States demonstrate it could act on behalf of the northern-tier states, from whose number a rival leader might emerge. While realists such as Jeane Kirkpatrick now suggest that “it is time to give up the dubious benefits of superpower status” so that we may aspire to be “a normal country in a normal time,” the New Leader recognizes that we are still far from normal times.³⁰

Above all, is not the New Leader the truly realistic one? For while others call for strengthening the democratic revolution, achieving a robust agenda of counterproliferation, and preventing hostile combinations from forming against us, only the New Leader actually plans to accomplish these goals by specific means within our control, as opposed to offering hortatory rhetoric and a sort of “you first” diplomacy. The probing question for the proponent of this paradigm: Can we afford it? Indeed there are some realists who claim that even attempting such an agenda is bound to weaken our geopolitical position, just as it did those of earlier superpowers who, having vanquished their opponents, found themselves increasingly unable to provide the economic infrastructure that would sustain their gains because they had diverted so great a portion of their resources to military budgets.

To this the New Leader retorts that whether or not our economic health can be improved through American hegemony, it certainly can't prosper without it. Moreover, the decline in American competitiveness is not, he argues, due to overspending on defense, but rather to those national characteristics that are the negative consequence of qualities whose positive effects far better suit us for world political leadership than for cutthroat trade wars in the game of geo-economics, a game that our rivals would be only too anxious to tempt us to play in lieu of the geopolitics where our overwhelming assets lie. Let me take up both these points, one at a time.

First, it is often assumed by many that the vast flow of international goods and information is a natural given and that any American resources spent to ensure international stability through defense expenditures are resources wasted because they are diverted from our economic well-being. How often are we treated to lectures by economists who claim that money spent on tanks is unproductive, while the same money spent on tractors contributes to our national wealth. In fact it took British expenditures well in excess of our own (as a percentage of GDP) to maintain the sea lanes on which British prosperity depended, and to prevent the competing hegemonies of those who would threaten her trade and later her industrial supremacy. It is open to question whether her relative decline began when the costs of empire overstretched her ability to maintain domestic investment, or when other states—Germany, for example, whose military expenditures were far greater than Great Britain's—overtook her and were manifestly willing to threaten the very international security on which complicated contemporary economic life depends. As Krauthammer puts it:

It is a mistake to view America's exertions abroad as nothing but a drain on its economy. As can be seen in the Gulf, America's involvement abroad is in many ways an essential pillar of the American economy. The United States is, like Britain before it, a commercial, maritime, trading nation that needs an open, stable world environment in which to thrive. In a world of Saddams, if the U.S. were to shed its unique superpower role, its economy would be gravely wounded. Insecure sea lanes, impoverished trading partners, exorbitant oil prices… are only the more obvious risks of an American abdication… The cost of ensuring an open and safe world for American commerce—5.4% of GNP and falling—is hardly exorbitant.³¹

But, it is said, this is far more than, for example, the Japanese spend on defense (about 1.5 percent of GNP) and is a competitive drag on the U.S. economy. Surely Japan is as much in need of secure trade lanes as the U.S. and far more sensitive to oil prices. Wouldn't the United States be better off ceding some share of its responsibilities for international security to those states who, when they took up this burden, would thereby acquire a drag on their ascent and thus relatively improve our own competitive position? This is the second question suggested above, and it draws a distinct line between the purported paradigm of leadership and all others. For here the partisan of this approach denies the assumption on which the argument depends: geopolitical leadership, he argues, is not the same as geo-economic competition. “The notion that economic power inevitably translates into geopolitical influence,” Krauthammer writes, “is a materialist illusion.” Economic power is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for great power status, which also comprehends not simply military power, but the will to use it and the legitimacy to do so (so as not to arouse countervailing coalitions). Here the United States, in part because of its benign history toward the defeated states of World War II, is in a unique position. The moment for its aria has arrived.

It may appear that it is the imprimatur of the U.N. that conveys this legitimacy, but in fact this is only a reflection of the American desire not to appear hegemonical and thus to seek U.N. endorsements for its actions. A quick canvass of recent General Assembly resolutions would disabuse anyone who was tempted to think that the U.N. could, acting as an institution, convey legitimacy to any state act without the consent of the great powers.

Indeed the constitutional framework of the United States and its multinational state uniquely suit it to pursue the goals of world power without threatening its peers. The Long War was fought over issues of legitimacy; the resolution of that war in favor of the democratic republics has given us a postwar order over whose protection the United States is well placed to preside. To abandon this role will not only threaten that victory, it will inevitably invite the chaos that is most costly to a status quo power such as the United States. We have the most to lose by our own passivity and no other way to lose it.

PARADIGMS AND POLICIES

We have seen five proposals for a new strategic paradigm for the United States—the New Nationalism, the New Internationalism, the New Evangelism, the New Realism, the New Leadership. None has yet captured a consensus. This failure has prompted some to suggest that the world is simply too complicated now for a single paradigm.* “No doctrine,” Richard Haass has written in a wittily titled article, “Paradigm Lost,” “can hope to provide a lens through which to view most events.”³²

The first thing to be said about these proffered “new paradigms,” however, is that they are not paradigms at all. In fact, the entire intellectual enterprise that has yielded these proposals has been triggered by a profound misunderstanding as to what has been lost and what can serve to replace it. The source of this misunderstanding may perhaps be traced, ironically, to the idea that the world inherited by U.S. administrations after the Long War is “a more complex place than what came before.” According to this account presidents from Truman to Reagan had the comforting stability of the Cold War to provide a consistent and continuous context for foreign policy, but the aftermath of that war has not yet yielded a similar clarity. In the place of containment—the old “paradigm” through which all political events were mediated—there is only confusion, because the antinomies on which containment depended (the global competition of the West and the Soviet Union, the totalitarian ambition of communist ideology versus the pluralistic vision of the West) have also collapsed.33 Perhaps until new threats against which the United States must contend are themselves clarified, its political class will be unable to decide what paradigm is to replace containment—or perhaps the threats are so diffuse that, as Haass suggests, no single paradigm will do.

What is wrong with this account? First, it confuses paradigms with policies. A paradigm is a worldview that members of a political community share; a policy is what some portion of them put into place in pursuit of the goals of that paradigm. Of course no single policy will do; indeed the history of the Cold War itself shows an enormous variation in policies, depending on the time, place, and manner of the campaign being waged. But without a shared paradigm, it's hard to know whether the proposed policy is effective when implemented. Without a shared paradigm, the United States is condemned to adopt that most seductive of strategies, the case-by-case approach. This approach is appealing to a powerful state because it obviates the need to make some crucial choices and comforts the decision maker that no precedent is created that will come back to embarrass him. The more powerful the state, the more appealing is this approach, because that state will always appear to prevail. It will always appear to get its way, if it is powerful enough to bring the other states into line. I say “appear to prevail” because it is not so clear what “way” the state, acting on a case-by-case basis, is actually getting when it gets its way. Any road seems like the right one if you don't know where you're going, because if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. So the United States may be said to have had its way when it persuaded the U.N. Security Council to adopt resolutions condemning the Serbs for war crimes, and when it led the Council in declining to prosecute those indicted, when it initially led humanitarian forces into Somalia and when it was the first to evacuate its own troops.

Second, the history of the account given above is saturated with presentism, the view that things have never been quite so much the way they are as they are right now. I doubt the world is, as is so often said, “more complicated, more complex,” because the “world” in that sentence is not the teeming globe whose problems increase as our appreciation of them increases, but instead is the set of values that, problematically, collide in the attempt to allocate our power wisely. Such a world was hardly more complex for President George W. Bush, with vastly more resources, than it was for, say, John Quincy Adams, who was compelled to factor in the consequences of his foreign policy for the domestic crisis caused by slavery and also for our exceedingly precarious international position. President Bush's predecessor had to decide whether to intervene in Kosovo to halt a campaign of ethnic cleansing; Adams had to decide whether to give aid to the South American revolts against the Spanish empire. The decisions are no less complex in either case. Nor was the American position in the Cold War particularly simple either. As I wrote at the time:

No effective American policy can be either pacifist or militaristic: for the U.S. must pursue an accommodation with the Russians in which we do not wholly believe, and at the same time, arm to prevent a conflict in which we do not truly wish to participate.³⁴

Moreover, it is not the end of the Cold War that has transformed the world and left the United States without an objective. Our objective never was simply to defeat the Soviet Union. Georgiy Arbatov's cynical remark, “We have done our worst to you: we have deprived you of an enemy,” is far more reflective of Soviet culture than American. Rather it is the end of the Long War, which was fought over the legitimacy of the democratic system itself and that of its competitors, that has quite appropriately left us with the slight puzzlement one feels after recovery from a long and life-threatening illness. What now?

Finally, it is not “containment” that is the paradigm that has been lost. Containment, composed of that set of policies that sought by defensive alliances to prevent the aggrandizement of the Soviet empire and, where possible, the avoidance of armed conflict in order to enable the internal contradictions of the communist system to manifest themselves and to be contrasted with the marked success of the Western states, was not a paradigm at all. Containment did not provide us with a way of understanding the conflict, but rather with a guiding set of tactics for winning it.

The paradigm by means of which Western statesmen and their publics have understood this century-long struggle is a picture of the State. That paradigm depicts the legitimate state as one that exists to better the welfare of its people. This paradigm distinguishes the nation-state from the state-nation that preceded it, the paradigm of which was a State that existed to mobilize the people for whom it was the sovereign; the state-nation was the state of empires. The nation-state is the state of nationalities.

For most of the twentieth century the picture shared by the American political community has been that of a State created by the self-determination of peoples. This paradigm has not been lost; indeed it is flourishing in many parts of the globe. It fails to provide guidance for U.S. policy because the problems that the American state faces now are not problems of the Long War, whose inception marked the beginning of the widespread transition to the modern nation-state. That paradigm continues to provide the requisite ability to see resemblances, to enable analogies, to structure consensus—if it didn't, then the fruits of the Long War would be incomprehensible to us. But as a consequence of that war, the American state has changed and is changing to reflect those innovations that brought victory. Part of that change, which is already well underway in the United States, will be a paradigm shift in our expectations of the State.

If the Wilsonian paradigm pictured a state that existed in order to better the welfare of its nation, the twenty-first century American state will exist to reflect, implement, inform, and diversify individual choice. It is tempting to say that this is a change from a democratic political matrix of ideas to a capitalist market matrix. But this would mistake the way we deal with problems for the problems themselves: there will always be a political and a market mechanism working in tandem because the kinds of problems states must solve cannot be wholly assimilated into one or the other approach.³⁵ Briefly put, systems for allocation that use political means (like the Selective Service Act) call on a different view of egalitarianism (one man, one vote, for example) than do market systems (like the All-Volunteer Force) with their distinctive view of equal treatment (to each according to his means and ability). One can never be wholly sacrificed to the other in a civilized society. Indeed one might go so far as to say that it is a distinguishing mark of a civilized society that it struggles to maintain many-valued forms of life despite the human condition of scarcity that compels choice among these forms.

What the proffered candidates for the new paradigm in fact offer are policies. Indeed they are the same policies we have more or less been recycling throughout the Cold War, and all sit quite comfortably within the Wilsonian paradigm for the nation-state. All five programs (the New Nationalism, the New Internationalism, etc.) have been, at various times, the implementing techniques for the Cold War policy of containment. Each has risen to temporary ascendancy at the time of a particular Cold War crisis the collapse of the Congo (internationalism), the Cuban Missile Crisis (nationalism), German unification (realism), the war in South Viet Nam (evangelism), the Arab-Israeli War in 1967 (leadership). The reason they are so very unhelpful—ask former President Clinton whether “the New Evangelism” actually helped him decide whether to use force to disarm North Korea's nuclear weapons capability or ask his successor, President Bush, whether “the New Nationalism” has helped him persuade our allies to support missile defense—is precisely because they are representative of a debate whose reason for being has ceased. If we are truly to imagine what a new paradigm might look like, we have to look at the State and the strategic challenges it faces, and determine how it itself has changed. Each of the current elements in the policy portfolio was once a paradigm of statecraft. When the sort of state for which it was essential changed, the paradigm ceased to have the force of a consensus worldview. Paradigms decay into policies.

The security paradigms—the worldviews of statecraft—of any particular era follow the constitutional makeup and outlook of the states of that era. As each form of the state underwent a transition from one constitutional order to another, it added an accompanying paradigmatic outlook. Thus we find in the political papers during the transition from the reign of feudal princes to that of the princely state, a refined and sophisticated development of the balance of power. Machiavelli speaks the idiom of realism. His city-state has his love, “more than his soul,” he once wrote, not his ethnic group, which he seems to pity and even disdain. There is little, if anything, of nationalism in his papers, though he calls upon a “redeemer” for Italy. And there is nothing of praise for internationalist institutions—the Church—nor, of course, for democratic enlargement. The transition to the kingly state retains the concept of the balance of power among its lexicon of policies, but its outlook is one that we would associate today with hegemony. One does not negotiate the compensating system of balances when one hopes to overpower all the competing states. The count-duke Olivares wrote Philip IV:

You should not be content to be king of Portugal, of Aragon and of Valencia and Count of Barcelona, but you should direct all your work and thought… to reduce the realms to the same order and legal systems as Castile. If your majesty succeeds in this you will be the most powerful prince in the world.³⁶

Leadership and dominance are the language of Olivares and Richelieu, just as they are the animating ambitions of the Habsburg emperors, who shattered the princely states of Italy, and the French kings who, in turn, destroyed the hegemonical dreams of imperial Catholicism and whose model inspired Olivares. It would have been idle of Charles V or Maximilian to think in nationalist terms; what nation—Spanish, Austrian, Italian, Burgundian—would it have been? Nor did the great alliance structures of the period presage a system of collective security, precisely because these structures were not institutional in nature, and spawned no congresses or conventions that outlived the conflicts that gave them birth. Even shared religious allegiances could not create an alliance structure that outlasted a particular conflict and placed the security of the whole as its highest responsibility. In the Thirty Years' War, Catholic France proved Catholic Spain's decisive enemy.

It was the transition from kingly states to territorial states that introduced the paradigm of nationalism, as German princes became tied to particular peoples, in the slow working out of the consequences of the principle of cuius regio eius religio. Of course there persisted the continuing policies of the balance of power and of ideological hegemonism: the Treaty of Utrecht specifically cites the balance of power as its goal, and it was the thwarted ambitions of France to achieve hegemony that led to that treaty. But the “anarchic society” is a term one associates with Hobbes, not with his predecessors. It is he who insists that no individual is strong enough to guarantee his own security unaided, and that governments are required to do so in order to settle disputes that are not amenable to direct compromise or agreement among the parties. Conflict among states is the natural environment.

When Rousseau argues that moral rule, in order to be moral, must be self-imposed and thus that the State must originate in self-government, he writes words that to us suggest popular sovereignty, but to his contemporaries would have suggested the transition to the state-nation. For he also writes that the good of each citizen must be distinguished from his temporary desires. The permanent aim of the citizen—the product of his rational, true, higher self—s distinguished from his passing impulses. Thus obedience to the state is an act of allegiance to the true self-will; by this means, in Rousseau's word, “I am forced to be free.” Because this higher good is the same for all rational citizens, their permanent selves are identical and can thus have a single will that is manifested in the State. Although it may shock us to think so, the view that would organize the powers of Europe on precisely the same bases that individual governments are constituted leads directly to Hegel and the deified State. For if states, collectively, are the only means of assuring security and concert, then is not the State the only vehicle for a realization of the nation, its protection and order?

Because these transitions occur in the nature of the State itself, it is hardly surprising that the paradigms of statecraft to which they give birth should reflect ideas about the legitimate constitutional makeup of the State.

Finally we come to the transition from state-nation to nation-state, which gave us the paradigm within which we currently strive. This may be stated thus: The State is constituted to improve the material well-being of the nation. Thus the nation-state bears within its legitimacy the problem of nationalities. Who can claim a state? What is a national people? Suppose the nation is itself divided—what means are permissible to coerce and legitimate unification? This is the program of the evangelist of democracy, and it is rightly associated with Lincoln and Wilson, but also with Otto von Bismarck and Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin and Mikhail Gorbachev. Each of the three political philosophies that contested the Long War had a differ-ent answer to this issue, but for each it was the issue, whether it proposed submerging nationalism in the larger good owed to the international proletariat, or worshipping the nation as the authentic legatee of the volk, or placing at its disposal the procedures of legal process and representation. The United States has lived within a Wilsonian paradigm because that is the American understanding of the basis for the nation-state, but all the Great Powers lived within variations of the nation-state paradigm, whether Hitler's formulation or Stalin's. If, as I argued above, this paradigm has not withered away or been lost with the end of the Long War, why should we expect, much less search for, a new paradigm?

It could be that the vacillation of American foreign policy has no deeper cause than the poverty of its leadership; it may be that the prevailing paradigm is sturdy enough to provide a basis for choosing among competing policies in the various contexts that current affairs bring forth, if only leaders of a higher caliber were doing the choosing. I doubt this: the predecessor to the Clinton administration had no better answers to Haiti, North Korea, Somalia, Yugoslavia, or Ukraine, all of which it made modestly worse by not having a policy and bequeathing acute problems that became chronic to its successor. If, as I believe, President George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker will stand high in America's history for their contributions to unifying Germany and expelling Iraq from Kuwait, it can be seen already that the former was a problem in the endgame of the Long War, and that the latter did not even serve as a precedent for great power action a few months after Baghdad was surrounded when, for only the second time in the history of the U.N., a member state invaded another member state and annexed its territory. Virtually all of the Clinton administration's important achievements in foreign security policy—in China, Haiti, North Korea, Russia, Israel, Ireland, the former state of Yugoslavia—were at a tentative stage when the new Bush administration took office. The best that can be said of the Clinton initiatives is that they promised success even without a shared vision of the American role; the worst, that having lived by the expedient and the impromptu, we will find all these problems so much more troublesome when the arrangements that temporarily quieted them unravel.

I am inclined to believe, however, that it is not simply the absence of a structuring idea, a shared way of understanding the challenges we face, that pervades all the current proposals and disquieting performances, but rather the clinging to a paradigm that has lost its usefulness. The Wilsonian pledge—to make the world safe for democracy—and the Wilsonian understanding—that national democracies offered the best chance to benefit the people of the world—have not failed us; they have succeeded beyond what Wilson would have dared attempt in parts of the globe untouched by the Fourteen Points. They have succeeded in providing political principles that could guide our strategic policies during the Long War in which those principles were contested and sorely tried. Now, with the Long War over, we are so sunk in the habits of strategic thinking that we ceaselessly bat about alternative security policies at a time when we are unable to make the simplest decision when to use force. We have lived in a state of war for so long that, paradoxically, we are unable to make appropriate security plans for peace. The noteworthy feature of the policies that bid to succeed containment is that they, like that policy, assume a certain frame of reference for strategic conflict. Because the roles of history and law have been so well defined during the Long War— indeed they set its terms, because the establishment of legitimacy for state regimes after the collapse of the nineteenth century system was what the Long War sought, by strategic means, to determine—we have become accustomed to think within the context of that war.

In the next chapter I will offer some speculation as to what such a successor paradigm might look like, by examining current contexts analogous to those that provided paradigms to states in the past: the contexts of strategic innovation and constitutional change. Then it may be possible to answer the question posed in the Introduction: How ought the United States and its allies decide when to use force in the international arena?

Preliminarily, however, the first thing one ought to observe about a new archetype is that it will not be something wholly new in form. For the United States, for example, there will be no new constitution. Americans will still be called “Americans,” though what image that word conjures up in their minds may not be the same as came to my father and his contemporaries. Indeed, perhaps the most serious impediment to creative thinking in this area has been our automatic impulse to assume that the next paradigm will involve something like a new kind of state, that is, a reiteration of the European state on a different scale. Articles such as “After the Nation-State, What?” capture this reaction, for they invariably posit a “superstate” or no state at all.³⁷ Moreover, because so many of the challenges facing the nation-state are supranational in character—environmental threats, mass migration, capital speculation, terrorism, and cyber interference, to name just five—and because supranational solutions will be required, many assume that delegations of sovereignty must and will occur. This is a profound misreading of how such integration as has occurred in Europe came about. It is American involvement in Europe, through NATO and the Marshall Plan, that has, paradoxically, provided Western Europe with such capacity as it currently possesses to act as a unified political entity. It is difficult to imagine Britain ever delegating such a role to the bureaucratic machinery of Brussels or to the one state capable of dominating that machinery by virtue of its military and economic potential, Germany. The unification of the German state has, for the foreseeable future, put an end to the unification of Western Europe by creating a power that is actually capable of managing an integrated E.U.

What critics writing in the security area have not contemplated is a change in the constitutional structures of the European (and other) states that does not surrender sovereignty to yet another state, but returns it even more radically to the people themselves.