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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 02/02
Muddling Through? A Strategic Checklist for the United States in the Post-Cold War World
John Lewis Gaddis
Yale University
GCSP - ISS at Yale University Workshop Papers: "Old and New Security Issues: Research and Policy Ramifications"
August 1998
The single most striking feature of the post-Cold War environment is the diffusion, not the disappearance, of threats. The half-century extending from 1941 to 1991 was, for the United States, one in which threats were both focused and obvious. From the time of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor until the final collapse of the Soviet Union exactly fifty years later, we knew who our enemies were, or at least might be. As a consequence, we abandoned the isolationism that had characterized most of our history in favor of an unaccustomed but - as it turned out - highly effective internationalism.
Few people today would argue that as we return to an environment of diffused threats we can revert to isolationism. We are too bound up with the rest of the world, whether through our economic ties, our concerns about human rights, our fears that new technologies might take on potentially lethal forms, our awareness that we share a global ecology, and - perhaps most important - our memories of what happened after World War I, when we did indeed relinquish international responsibilities in the hope of returning to what we remembered, however imprecisely, as the innocent isolationist days of our national youth.
We have no experience, though, being actively involved in a world in which threats are dispersed, 1 but that is the situation which now confronts us. Old justifications for internationalism, based upon the existence of clear and present dangers, are no longer convincing; if persisted in they could even tempt us into constructing imaginary perils to justify our justifications. We need new strategies for a world in which threats are indistinct and potential - if no less real. None have yet emerged, hence the widely-shared perception, over the past several years, of strategic "drift." 2
In one sense, this is no bad thing. Our leaders at most points during the Cold War would have given their eye-teeth and a good deal more for the pre-eminence the United States now enjoys, whether in the military, economic, technological, cultural or moral dimensions of power. Whatever we imagined "victory" in the Cold War would look like while it was going on, the present compares favorably; so much so that future historians will probably recall ours as a golden age. The question arises, then: why, if things are going so well in the absence of a strategy, do we even need one? Why can't we just follow the old British example and simply "muddle through"?
There are two good answers to this question. The first is that British strategy was less muddled than the canny Brits liked to have it appear. Any island that managed to dominate several continents for several hundred years cannot have been making it all up as it went along. There was a strategy, even if it did involve improvisation, and it worked for quite a while. 3
The second and more substantive answer is that golden ages are like stock market bubbles: punctures, sooner or later, are bound to occur, and it would be a good idea to prepare now for the deflation that is sure to come. We have arrived at an unusually favorable position only in part through the wisdom and virtue of our policies. Our luck - for that has also brought us to where we are - can and eventually will change. When it does, when we again encounter adversity, we will again need to think in strategic terms. So maybe we should get a head start.
It might help to begin with the situation that confronts us. Presumably any strategy framed at the level of the nation-state seeks to do three things: to ensure first survival, and then security, and then a congenial international environment. Where do we stand with respect to each of these objectives as this century comes to an end?
Survival is hardly in question. Threats to our national existence have arisen in the past - the struggle for independence, the Civil War, the prospect of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War - but none loom large on today's horizon. We face no situation comparable to what confronted the victims of German and Japanese aggression in World War II, or the conditions that ruined the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia during the early 1990s, or even the peaceful processes that broke apart Czechoslovakia and may yet break apart Canada.
There is one remote but not negligible threat within this category, though, and we ought to give it more attention than we do because the consequences, if it materialized, would be so horrendous: I have in mind a deliberate or, more likely, an accidental nuclear exchange, brought about by the fact that several of the great powers still possess sufficient nuclear weapons to render each other's territory uninhabitable. 4 Just because the Cold War has ended doesn't mean that the danger of nuclear war has gone away — indeed as recent events on the Indian subcontinent suggest, it may actually have become more probable. The scale would not be what it could have been during the Cold War, with thousands of such weapons going off simultaneously. Cut that back by a factor of a hundred, though, and the results would still be bad enough to qualify — I think it's the only thing at the moment that qualifies — as something that could call survival into question.
Nor is our security at risk in the way that it was during the half-century that spanned 1941-91. Then the threats we faced originated with dangerous people like Hitler, Stalin, Khrushchev, Mao, and the systems that sustained them. We knew who and what they were, even as we debated the most appropriate methods of handling them. We worried that even though the nation might survive such confrontations, its character could change, whether as a result of being left without allies in a hostile world, or through internal subversion, or because of the exertions Americans might have to make - the vast military expenditures, the potential curtailment of liberties - to ward off those dangers. 5
Today threats tend to come in the form of dangerous processes that no one in particular has set in motion: the proliferation of lethal technologies, the emergence of violently-defined ethnic rivalries, the costs of environmental pollution, the risk of vaccine-resistant plagues, the vulnerabilities of interdependent information links, the pressures of population against resources, a gradual loss of control over the economic conditions that determine our standard of living. These phenomena lack, for the most part, definable agency. We can rarely hold any one person or country responsible for them. They are dangers that are present, but not clear. 6
That leaves, then, the international environment within which we function. With all our current problems we will probably remember the 1990s with a certain nostalgia, for the position of the United States may be as favorable now as we can ever expect it to be. Our task here, then, becomes one of preservation: we seek not to alter a menacing global system, as we did during World War II and the Cold War, but to hang onto as much as we can of the relatively benign system we already have. 7
This, though, is where things get murky, because when you consider the number of variables that make up today's international system, the complexity of their interactions, and hence the difficulty of determining where we must act and where we can let well enough alone - to say nothing of where we can act and expect our actions to have consequences — well, the Cold War, by comparison, seems easy. 8
We confront a situation, therefore, in which dangers have diminished but uncertainties have mounted, and that in itself carries certain risks. It's been said that the prospect of execution clears the mind. If that's true, then the perception of safety probably clouds it. Vital interests become less apparent than they might be, and the need to match them with capabilities seems less compelling than it should be. Planning requires hard work and careful thought - hence the temptation to give up on it altogether and simply take the crises as they come. "Muddling through" definitely has its appeal.
It's a little like flying an airplane. Pilots, whether operating in a hostile or a benign environment, value the freedom to improvise. Whether you're flying an F-15 for the United States Air Force or a 747 for United Airlines, you wouldn't want to lock yourself into some rigidly prescribed flight plan. You'd want the flexibility to shift your heading, your altitude, or your speed when you encounter the unexpected, whether it's a SAM missile or a big bad thunderstorm or wayward weekend Cessna. You can never be sure what you're going to run into along the way, and you need to be able to use your own judgment — not just that of your autopilot or your air traffic controller — in responding to it.
This is by no means the same thing, though, as operating without a strategy. For if the pilot hasn't learned ahead of time what to avoid in flying an plane - errors like forgetting to set the flaps correctly, or taking off without enough fuel or with too much weight, or neglecting to calibrate altimeters and navigation equipment accurately - then the effects even in a peaceful environment can be as devastating as encountering an enemy fighter ace in wartime. That's why all pilots, civilian or military, have checklists: they provide a way, not of predicting what is going to happen, but of preparing for whatever that might turn out to be.
In a world of indistinct and potential rather than clear and present dangers, perhaps we ought to think of strategy in the same way. We know more or less where we want to go - or at least what we want to hang onto — but unlike the situation throughout most of the Cold War, we have no clear sense of who or what will stand in our way. Maybe the best we can do, therefore, is to concentrate on avoiding predictable hazards, leaving room for improvisation to dodge the unpredictable ones as the need arises. We need not so much strategic forecasting as a strategic checklist - a reminder of known pitfalls for use in navigating around the unknown ones that are certain to lie ahead. What follows are a few suggestions for what ought to be on it.
Specify a destination. Sometimes it seems that if we don't have a word, we don't have a strategy. Recalling the elegance of the term "containment," we keep trying to find a post-Cold War equivalent, and so seize on words like "enlargement" and "engagement" - all it takes to make a strategy these days, it seems, is to turn a verb into a noun. 9 The principle of economy in prose is admirable, to be sure, but it's worth asking why we must impose such discipline on our strategies when we so rarely practice it elsewhere. We don't insist on verbal parsimony when we record messages for our answering machines, or compose e-mail, or edit famous authors. Why require it here?
Neither Metternich, nor Bismarck, nor Mahan ever sought to reduce their strategic thinking to a single word. Kennan got stuck with one, it is true; but that was not his choice and he has spent much of his life trying to clear up the resulting confusion. 10 Yet even the word "containment" made more sense in 1946-47 than the ones bandied about now: at least then there was an object to be contained. What is it though, in the 1990s, that is to be engaged or enlarged? The answers are rarely clear, which means that the words we ought to be using to describe our strategy instead become our strategy.
One result is that we tend to lose sight of where we want to end up. We confuse the method of transportation with the intended destination. It is as if instead of flying to Philadelphia we announce our objective as simply: flying. A strategy ought to announce as clearly as flight attendants do where it intends to go, even if it can't specify all the conditions to be encountered along the way. Kennan did this when he said that the objective of containment was to hold the line until the Soviet Union changed from within. Nixon and Kissinger did this when they talked about seeking a global equilibrium in which the five great Cold War powers would balance one another. Reagan did this when he said — even if few people believed him — that the purpose of building up military strength was to facilitate negotiations with the Soviet Union and ultimately to end the Cold War. 11
What is the intended destination, though, of a particularly visible airplane that has just taken off, which is NATO expansion? Is it only to bring in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, as many of the citizens of those countries would like to believe? Is it to bring in some additional Eastern European states but not others, as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright suggested when she raised the possibility of including the Baltic States? Is it to bring in all the Eastern Europeans and even other former Soviet republics, as Belorussian, Ukrainian, and Armenian lobbying groups in this country apparently hope? Is it eventually to include the Russians as well, an outcome that would horrify most of these other groups, as well as the current chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jesse Helms?
The Clinton administration has not said, and I fear it's because it has not itself decided. 12 Instead it has asked us to board an airplane for which the destination board reads simply: "expansion." It is not yet clear where it is going to come down, and so it's no wonder that so many people are nervous about making the trip.
Upgrade your instruments. NATO expansion is happening, I think, because of a second questionable notion: that whatever worked well in the past will do so in the future - even if the future is very different from the past. Adjusting to new eras is always difficult, as the British royal family has recently discovered; all the more so when the old era ends, as the Cold War did, abruptly and unexpectedly. Individuals and institutions get set in their ways, and although they are rarely so short-sighted as to believe they can prevent change altogether, they often try to adapt the familiar to it. There is a certain reassurance in such recycling, for it means that fresh thinking is not required.
This nostalgia for the past can take several forms. Certain academic experts, uneasy with the possibility that there may be no obvious adversary to contain, have preferred to find new ones rather than relinquish containment. They have produced murky definitions, speculative scenarios, and vaguely ominous warnings about clashing civilizations; but there is as yet no consensus as to precisely what it is, in the future, that will need containing. 13 Nor is there acknowledgement of the interesting possibility that one can have a strategy without having an obvious enemy — that you can fly an airplane without there being somebody out there trying to shoot you down.
Old instruments can also postpone — or provide the illusion of avoiding altogether — tough decisions. Any objective assessment of the situation in Europe today would conclude that it's economic disparities, not military capabilities or ideological differences, that divide the continent. Reintegration, hence, requires economic remedies, and the European Union would seem to be the obvious mechanism for providing them. That would demand that its members take the initiative, though, and for whatever reason they have been slow to do so. It has proven easier, therefore, to fall back on an old instrument — NATO — where there is a dominant power willing to lead — the United States — despite the fact that the task for which the alliance was invented is hardly the task at hand. We have reached for a monkey wrench, in effect, to fix a computer.
Nuclear weapons are, like NATO, artifacts of the Cold War, and despite substantial cuts we and the Russians still retain far more of these things than we could ever have feasibly used, even if World War III had at some point broken out. For reasons of familiarity, or perhaps just inertia, it did not occur to anyone in a position of official responsibility in Washington to explore the possibility, after 1991, of moving toward their total but verifiable abolition, an option several former commanders of our Cold War nuclear capabilities have since endorsed. 14 Our failure even to consider this has now placed us in a difficult spot in attempting to discourage nuclear proliferation. 15 We would have had far greater leverage over India and Pakistan this spring — and over whatever other states may now follow their example — if we had announced our intention, several years ago, to seek responsible ways of dispensing altogether with these dangerously antiquated relics, instead of mindlessly hanging onto them. The security we have gained by pursuing this latter course is hardly likely to balance the perils that will now probably emerge — but that might have been headed off.
There will always be a tendency, both in official and academic worlds, to cling to what seems familiar. That is only human nature. But when such reverence for the past becomes an end in itself — when we prefer old traditions and institutions in a world that has passed them by without regard to costs or consequences — when we try to make strategy, in short, in the way the Windsors handle public relations — then old ways of thinking can become an excuse for failing to comprehend, confront, and cope with the future. That surely qualifies it for our "what to avoid" checklist.
Avoid arrogance. Another bad habit pilots know to avoid is the tendency to equate power with wisdom. Anything that flies, regardless of its size and strength, is to some extent at the mercy of the medium through which it is flying. It's foolish to think that you can fly through whatever is out there: sometimes it's best to go around, or to divert to another destination, or to cancel the flight altogether. Humility is a quality worth cultivating, both in the air and with respect to the world at large.
Despite the pre-eminence the United States enjoyed during the Cold War, its leaders rarely behaved arrogantly when it counted. It is remarkable how frequently Washington not only consulted its allies but deferred to them in such matters as meeting their domestic political requirements, running military alliances, or encouraging economic reconstruction, even if this meant creating future competitors for the United States. When compared to the unilateralism with which the Soviet Union operated, the contrast is startling - and not what one might have expected, given the power disparities the Americans enjoyed. 16
Today, though, things are going so well for the United States that the temptation exists to bypass multilateral cooperation. If indeed our culture, our economy, our political tradition, are admired and even envied throughout the world - as they seem to be - why not just push things through, imposing our views on people who, at the moment, haven't either the means or the inclination to resist? 17
The answer, of course, is that such arrogance will, in time, generate its own resistance. 18 If Americans should ever interpret the absence of opposition as license to throw our weight around without regard to the wishes of those who wish us well - if, in short, we see in this world of diffused threats no further need to build a consensus behind our policies - then we could quickly go the way of our former adversaries. Hence the prudence of defining our interests in ways that others can wholeheartedly share them.
There are plenty of signs around that we are failing to do this: in our refusal to pay our United Nations dues; in our isolation on such issues as banning anti-personnel mines and establishing an international war crimes tribunal; in our inability to rally consensus behind military action to ensure Iraq's compliance with the international inspection regime; in the tepid response to our proposed sanctions against India and Pakistan for their recent nuclear tests; in our widely resented attempts to punish the Cuban people and anyone who would do business with them for the fact that Fidel Castro is apparently going to live forever.
None of these are disasters in and of themselves. Cumulatively, though, they suggest that we're losing a skill that served us well during the Cold War: the ability to combine power with persuasion, to build a consensus without giving the impression of imposing one. We need, in short, to adjust for the conditions through which we're flying, and to get away from the arrogant notion that we can simply define those conditions as we go along.
Resist specialization. There have been instances lately of pilots literally flying their airplanes into the ground — the technical term is "controlled flight into terrain" — because they concentrated too narrowly on some particular cockpit task while losing sight of their general responsibility to keep the machine in the air until the runway was safely under it. Statecraft, rather like aircraft, requires those in charge to think about a lot of things simultaneously. Trouble tends to arise when one or two are allowed to eclipse the others.
Take, for example, two general goals the Clinton administration has endorsed: encouraging the spread of democracy and promoting global economic integration. The premise behind these objectives is a simple one: it is that people who can choose their own forms of government and whose living standards are rising will have little or no reason to want to indulge in war, revolution, genocide, or other such horrors that disfigured so much of the 20th century. But is this right? Is focusing on just these two instruments going to get this airplane where we want it to go?
The current India-Pakistan crisis ought to raise concerns in our minds, for it's painfully clear that domestic democratic processes produced the decision, on each side, to test nuclear weapons — and that these have met, in each instance, with an overwhelmingly favorable popular response. 19 Democracies, we've been assured both by theorists of international relations and by Presidents Bush and Clinton, tend not to go to war with one another. 20 Can we be so certain of that now, in the light of these events? It's also worth noting that India and Pakistan made their decisions to test despite the likelihood that they would suffer economically if they did so. The assumption that economic internationalism will override religious and ethnic nationalism held up no better here than did our thinking about democracy. 21 Most disturbing of all is the fact that the Indians told us so clearly what they intended to do. "Oh, they can't be serious," we assured one another, keeping our eyes firmly fixed on our theoretical cockpit computer screens as the mountain we were about to fly into loomed larger and larger in the windshield.
What this sad story suggests is that we've been looking at the world as we would like it to be, not as it actually is. We've constructed a kind of virtual reality based on a couple of principles drawn from our own experience and that of our European allies; but we've neglected what our eyes could tell us if we only opened them. And how has this happened? Here I think it's not so much the government that's responsible as it is the institutions charged with training the people who enter it. For where, within the great universities and think tanks these days, is anyone bucking the trend toward ever-narrower specialization and hence conceptualization — trends that give rise to virtual rather than actual realities, which in turn make possible "controlled flights into terrain"?
Anybody who flies an airplane has got to think about how all of its systems function together. You can't just concentrate on the engines or the fuel tanks or the flaps and expect to get where you're going. You can't keep your eyes on the instruments all the time, and never look out the window. We need to recapture a sense of the whole and how the parts that so preoccupy us relate to it. 22 We need, in short, to reacquire, and then update, a Shakespearian insight: that there are more things in heaven and earth than tend to appear along our x vs. y axes, or our four-part matrices, or even on our cockpit computer displays.
Avoid temporal parochialism. By this, I mean the inability to place one's current concerns within a long-term historical context — and anyone who has read this far will be relieved to learn that I don't have an airplane metaphor to go along with this one. It is always hard for those who are living through a particular historical epoch to know how future historians will regard it. One way to get some sense of this, though, is to back off from our current preoccupations and think about those long-term historical trends that have brought us to where we are. Geologists can tell us the general vicinity within which earthquakes will occur and their approximate frequency - even if they can't specify precise places and dates. They assume, safely enough it would seem, that processes underway for vast stretches of time are not apt to reverse themselves overnight.
History doesn't function quite that neatly. Ancient patterns do at times abruptly disappear: slavery is one of them, war among great powers may be another, and autocracy could in time be a third. 23 This sort of thing is rare, though. Generally we can assume that if a particular trend has been underway for a hundred years or more, it will still be with us ten or twenty years into the future - which is about as far as anyone can do forecasting without having it become fiction.
We rarely attempt this kind of analysis, though - call it tectonic mapping - when we do strategic planning. We focus too much on what is likely to happen to a single trend next month, or next year; we fail to look at what has been happening to multiple trends on a long-term basis, and how their juxtapositions might affect our future.
Consider the Clinton administration's unconditional endorsement of democratic politics and market economics. Despite their deep roots in the British liberal tradition, despite Woodrow Wilson's success in placing these principles at the center of the American ideology in the 20th century, and despite the critical role they played in ending the Cold War — despite all of this, there is reason to think that their combined effects are producing results that few of their supporters would want to see. They are weakening the authority of states in general: self-determination by proliferating sovereignties to the point of self-indulgence; integration by neutralizing the state's ability to provide for its own citizens. 24
As a result, a trend we had taken for granted throughout much of the 20th century - the increasing power of the state, and the progressively greater intrusion of its authority over the lives of the people subject to it - is one we can no longer take for granted in the 21st. Liberating? Yes, in some ways. But if you look at the historical evidence of what life was like before states came on the scene - and they date back, after all, only about 500 years - the situation one finds is hardly an appealing one.
For one thing states did was to monopolize the means of violence. In doing so, they restrained the more aggressive tendencies in human nature - tendencies that, anthropologists and archeologists know, extend as far back in time as we can trace. 25 Could it be that many of the things we find upsetting about the post-Cold War world - national and ethnic rivalries, religious fundamentalism, the proliferation of cults, the distrust of authority, the tendency to take the provision of security into one's own hands - are in fact the normal condition of human existence, one we got beyond with the rise of the state, one we may return to if states decline?
If that's the case - and this is admittedly a speculative scenario - then the most fundamental threat this country may face is one that confronts all other states as well: the decline of their authority and a return to anarchy. 26 It is not at all clear that our strategic thinking has even begun to address this most fundamental of national interests - which is certainly an international one as well.
Strategic checklists carry one great risk, which is that those who compile them come across sounding a little like Polonius, Shakespeare's send-up of the well-intentioned but indecisive parent: "neither a borrower nor a lender be . . . ." I wonder, though, if in a different age the old boy might have made a good flight instructor: "Don't fly too high, or too low, or too fast, or too slow." Survival, in certain situations, depends upon knowing the extremes to avoid, even when there is a lot of room for improvisation - for muddling through? - in doing so. Given the difficulties we've already encountered in attempting to pilot the ship of state through an atmosphere of diffused rather than focused dangers, Polonius's counsel may be the best we are going to get.
What we sacrifice in clarity we compensate for with a wider margin of error than that allowed us during the Cold War years. Call it, therefore, a strategy that leaves something to common sense.
Endnotes
Note 1: Perhaps the closest precedent is American military planning during the 1920s and the early 1930s, before the Japanese and German threats became self-evident; but this was hardly a period of active political involvement with the rest of the world. For a brief discussion, see Eliot A. Cohen, "The Strategy of Innocence? The United States, 1920-1945," in Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein, eds., The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), especially pp. 440-41. Back.
Note 2: Barry R. Posen and Andrew L. Ross, "Competing Visions for U.S. Grand Strategy," International Security, 21(Winter, 1996/97), 5-53, provide a useful categorization of the approaches that have emerged so far: neo-isolationism, selective engagement, cooperative security, and primacy. But as they point out (pp. 44-50), the Clinton administration has attempted to pursue at least three of these simultaneously. Back.
Note 3: It is succintly described, and contrasted with Bismarck's strategy, in Josef Joffe, "'Bismarck' or 'Britain'? Toward an American Grand Strategy after Bipolarity," International Security, 19(Spring, 1995), 94-117. For case studies illustrating the frequently effective combination of improvisation and sophistication in British grand strategy, see also the essays by William S. Maltby, John Gooch, and Williamson Murray in Murray, Knox, and Bernstein, eds., The Making of Strategy, pp. 151-77, 278-306 and 393-427, as well as those by John B. Hattendorf, Michael Howard, and Eliot A. Cohen in Paul Kennedy, ed., Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 11-67. Back.
Note 4: See, on this point, Stansfield Turner, Caging the Nuclear Genie: An American Challenge for Global Security (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997); also Bruce G. Blair, Harold A. Feiveson and Frank von Hippel, "Taking Nuclear Weapons off Hair-Trigger Alert," Scientific American, 277(November, 1997). Back.
Note 5: I have tried to describe these anxieties in Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); and in The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), especially pp. 47-64. Back.
Note 6: The literature on them is voluminous. For some examples, see Robin Wright and Doyle McManus, Flashpoints: Promise and Peril in a New World (New York: Knopf, 1991); Paul Kennedy, Preparing for the 21st Century (New York: HarperCollins, 1993); Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century (New York: Random House, 1996); Eugene Linden, The Future in Plain Sight: Nine Clues to the Coming Instability (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998); and Richard K. Betts, "The New Threat of Mass Destruction," Foreign Affairs, 77 (January/February, 1998), 26-41. Back.
Note 7: For an earlier transition from a menacing to a benign international system, see Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Also relevant here, of course, is Henry Kissinger's classic, A World Restored: Europe After Napoleon (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). Back.
Note 8: The point is best made by Robert Jervis, "U.S. Grand Strategy: Mission Impossible," Naval War College Review, 51(Summer, 1998), 22-36. See also his Systems Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Back.
Note 9: To the extent that the Clinton administration has articulated a grand strategy, it has centered around these terms. See A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1994, 1996); also Anthony Lake, "From Containment to Enlargement," U.S. Department of State Dispatch, 4(September 27, 1993), 658-64. Back.
Note 10: The first sustained attempt was George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925-1950 (Boston: Atlantic, Little Brown, 1967), especially pp. 354-67, but there have been many others. Back.
Note 11: I have discussed the shifting objectives of containment in The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 18-46. My point is that, despite their differences, each of these Cold War strategists at least specified destinations. Back.
Note 12: For what the administration has said, together with the views of some of its critics, see U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, The Debate on NATO Enlargement (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1998). Back.
Note 13: The criticism has been directed most frequently toward the recent writings of Samuel P. Huntington, especially The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). See, for example, Stephen M. Walt, "Building Up New Bogeymen," Foreign Policy, #106(Spring, 1997), 177-89. But for other vague warnings, see Caspar Weinberger and Peter Schweizer, The Next War (Washington: Regnery, 1996), and Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Monroe, The Coming Conflict with China (New York: Knopf, 1997). Back.
Note 14: For a review of the nuclear abolitionist "upsurge," see International Institute of Strategic Studies, Strategic Survey, 1997/98 (London: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 45-54; but see also Jonathan Schell, The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now (New York: Henry Holt, 1998). Reagan and Gorbachev of course also discussed the possibility of abolition, briefly and inconclusively, at Reykjavik in 1986. Back.
Note 15: Not least because the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 obliged its nuclear-capable signatories to do precisely that. Back.
Note 16: I have discussed this pattern at greater length in We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 196-203. Back.
Note 17: The temptations are discussed in "America the Brazen," Time, 150(August 4, 1997), 22-31. Back.
Note 18: For an excellent case study, see John A. Lynn, "A Quest for Glory: The Formation of Strategy under Louis XIV, 1661-1715," in Murray, Knox, and Bernstein, eds., The Making of Strategy, pp. 178-204. Back.
Note 19: My Yale colleague Paul Bracken makes this point in "Democracy and Nuclear Weapons in India," (Seoul) Shinmun Daily News, May 20, 1998. Back.
Note 20: See, for example, Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), who in turn cites statements by Bush and Clinton on pp.10-11, 128-29. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder hedge the proposition significantly in "Democratization and the Danger of War," International Security, 20 (Summer, 1995), 5-38. Back.
Note 21: The argument has been made in Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New York: Basic Books, 1986); John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989), especially pp. 221-23; and Carl Kaysen, "Is War Obsolete?" International Security, 14(Spring, 1990), 42-64. Back.
Note 22: What's needed here closely resembles Paul Schroeder's conception of an ecological approach to international history: "It is to see and understand the forest of international politics as a professional forester would do, with knowledge of and respect for scientific forestry as an autonomous discipline, closely related to others and drawing on them, but also possessing its own rules and system. It means deliberately studying forests as forests, as entities important in their own right and not simply as the key to something else (climate, ecology, the economy of forest products, the social organization of forest animals and dwellers, or what have you). It requires posing as one's central questions the issues of what makes forests grow or die, what role chance and necessity, contingent events and deep organic developments, play in their growth or decline, what different forms and structures forests may take, how they gradually change over time, and what is required to keep forests from giving way to desert. In short, international history must be done systematically and ecologically, and must be done as international history, not primarily as a branch of or contribution to anything else." [The Transformation of European Politics, p. vii] Back.
Note 23: Mueller discusses the disappearance of slavery and the obsolescence of war in Retreat From Doomsday; see also his Quiet Cataclysm: Reflections on the Recent Transformation of World Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). For the triumph of democracy, see Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Back.
Note 24: For example, the New York Times for August 11, 1998, carried stories, respectively, on the movement within the Caribbean island of Nevis (population 10,000) to secede from St. Kitts (population 36,000), and on pressures international currency speculators are mounting against the Chinese yuan. The first reflects the push for political self-determination, the second the consequences of global economic integration — and yet both constitute challenges to state authority. For more general discussion, see Ian Clark, Globalization and Fragmentation: International Relations in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), especially p. 202. Back.
Note 25: See Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). Back.
Note 26: This would be, though, an anarchy rooted in human nature, not in the international system, as the neo-realist theorists of international relations would have it. Back.
