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POLICY ANALYSIS PAPERS

Grand Strategy in an Age of Terrorism:
John Lewis Gaddis, “Surprise, Security and the American Experience”
Gregory M. Williams, July 12, 2004

“We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

President Bush, Sept 11, 2001

“Deterrence … means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies… In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.”

President Bush, West Point, June 1, 2002

For over forty years, containment -- i.e., a strategy aimed at “the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power” -- was the central organizing principle of American foreign policy. With the Soviet Union’s dissolution on December 31, 1991, containment was no more. The United States, thrust into a new geopolitical period no longer defined by its competition with a rival superpower, has been struggling to construct a durable replacement strategy ever since. John Lewis Gaddis’s short new book, “Surprise, Security and the American Experience,” examines the current administration’s attempt to construct such a strategy, a set of policies already known as the Bush Doctrine.

Basking in the initial glow of victory over the Soviet Union, it appeared to many that a new grand strategy might not be necessary. The international system had been transformed. America had remade the world in its own image. In the words of international relations theorist Francis Fukuyama, the movement to democracy and capitalism was irreversible and as a result “history” was coming to an “end.” Even the realist President George H.W. Bush trumpeted a “New World Order,” in which “the principles of justice and fair play ... protect the weak against the strong” and “the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders.” Capitalizing on this apparently benign strategic environment, the Clinton Administration’s chief foreign policy goals were to advance U.S. economic interests abroad and “enlarge” the “world’s free community of market democracies.”

In short, America’s grand strategy in the 1990s, to the extent it had one, focused on exploiting opportunities rather than responding to challenges to its or its allies’ physical security. The reason was simple. Such challenges did not appear imminent. That changed on September 11, 2001.

Gaddis places in historical perspective what he identifies as the three core elements of the Bush response to the new security environment -- preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony. In contrast to the numerous critics who decry the Bush Doctrine as a dangerous and unprecedented departure from America’s most basic foreign policy practices, Gaddis argues that all three components of the Bush Doctrine enjoy substantial pedigree. Bush, whether consciously or not, has drawn on traditions that stem back to the aftermath of the first “surprise” attack the country suffered, the burning of Washington during the War of 1812.

Beginning with this barely remembered violation of homeland security, explains Gaddis, was born the American tradition that when attacked or confronted with a fundamental challenge to its security, the country will expand, rather than contract, its sphere of responsibilities. The task of devising the methods by which the fledgling republic would accomplish this expansion in the wake of the 1814 Washington attack fell to President Monroe’s Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams. The methods Adams selected were the very same preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony that mark the current administration’s policies.

For example, Adams approved Andrew Jackson’s invasion of Florida, then a Spanish possession, after a series of attacks across the border by Indians and escaped slaves on the theory that, if Spain could not prevent future incursions, America must do so preemptively. Adams, like Bush, recognized the danger that such a “failed state” -- a term not yet in vogue in Adams’s time -- posed to U.S. security.

Adams also drew on the already established American traditional of unilateralism. Reacting to the complications of the Franco-American alliance of 1778, George Washington famously warned in his 1796 Farewell Address that the United States should in the future steer clear of such permanent relationships. Jefferson similarly cautioned in his inaugural address against the dangers of “entangling alliances.” Adams had an opportunity to put this hoary principle to use when Spanish authority collapsed throughout most of Latin America. Alarmed by the prospect that the Holy Alliance states of France, Austria and Russia might aid Spain in restoring its power, or assume power themselves, the British suggested a joint Anglo-American statement ruling out future European colonization in the Western Hemisphere. The United States rejected Great Britain’s offer, instead issuing its own unilateral pronouncement authored by Adams, known as the Monroe Doctrine. It did so despite the fact that the U.S. had no way of enforcing the doctrine at that time. Adams calculated that Great Britain would use its navy to enforce the policy and preferred not to link formally U.S. and British policies for fear of being drawn into British quarrels with other great powers.

Finally, Adams rejected the concept of a balance of power on the North American continent. Although the U.S. was weak and most of the new world was at that time under control of the European powers, Adams judged that, due to the U.S. population growth and economic potential, time was on its side.

As Gaddis demonstrates, the preemption, unilateral and hegemony traditions influenced American foreign policy well beyond Adams’s time. In 1845, President Polk cited among his reasons for annexing Texas the concern that, if not incorporated in the U.S., the territory could fall prey to the British or the French. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson justified a succession of preventive interventions in Latin America on the grounds that instability might induce European great powers to intervene. The doctrine of preemption now justified the expansion of U.S. power at the expense of states (or territories) that might fail. Unilateralism -- often erroneously referred to as isolationism -- remained a persistent theme in American foreign policy as well. As but one example, when the United States intervened in World War I, it did so as an “associated” rather than a formally “allied” power. The goal of continental hegemony demanded such loyalty that, within months after the end of the Civil War, Americans on both sides of that conflict were united in the determination to oust Emperor Maximillian from Mexico, installed there by France’s Napoleon III while the United States was distracted with its internal dispute. Napoleon withdrew his troops from Mexico when the United States amassed its forces on the Rio Grande. Deprived of French protection, Maximillian was executed by a Mexican firing squad.

These traditions, however, are not unchallenged. In response to the more famous surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt, like Adams, chose to expand the United States’ sphere of responsibilities. FDR also fully embraced the concept of hegemony: this time on a global rather than continental scale. However, in doing so, he rejected the unilateralist and preemptive traditions. Rather than going it alone, the United States took the lead in creating a series of international institutions. FDR’s goal was not to mire the country in a web of multilateral restraints, but to ensure international support in achieving goals that the U.S. could not reach alone. Thus, “FDR quietly sought to ensure, in all these structures, predominance for the United States.”

Roosevelt similarly rejected the counsel of Winston Churchill and others to act preemptively, for example to rush American troops into Berlin before the Soviets arrived, despite its rival superpower’s clearly hostile intentions. He did so because he wanted America’s allies to have no doubt that there was something worse than U.S. leadership, Soviet subjugation. America had to maintain the moral high ground that it might lose by preemptively firing the “first shot.”

“American hegemony as FDR conceived it was now to be global, but in contrast to anything John Quincy Adams could have ever imagined, it was to arise by consent.” Roosevelt’s strategy guided the United States successfully through the Cold War and, arguably, helped prevent the emergence of any new challengers to US hegemony in the 1990s after the Soviet Union broke apart.

***

Bush’s strategy represents the third redefinition in American history of what it takes to protect the country from surprise attack. “That requirement has expanded now from John Quincy Adams’s vision of continental hegemony through Franklin D. Roosevelt’s conception of great power coalition aimed at containing, deterring and if necessary defeating aggressor states to what is already being called the Bush Doctrine: that the United States will identify and eliminate terrorists wherever they are, together with the regimes that sustain them.”

The administration laid out the tenets of this doctrine in the president’s report on The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS), dated September 17, 2002. The NSS expands on Bush’s June 1, 2002 West Point speech quoted at the top of this article as well as President Bush’s January 29, 2002 State of the Union address, in which he denounced an “axis of evil” comprised of Iraq, North Korea and Iran. The document defines three tasks for post-September 11 American grand strategy: (1) defending the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants, (2) preserving the peace by building good relations with the other great powers, and (3) extending the peace by encouraging free and open societies throughout the world.

What is striking about the first goal, according to Gaddis, is the elevation of the terrorist threat to the level of that posed by tyrants. The reason, as dramatically illustrated by September 11, is that in a world in which box cutters and civilian airliners can be transformed into weapons of mass destruction, the likelihood that the U.S. will suffer deadly attacks is dramatically increased. Moreover, the threat of retaliation is not nearly as effective against terrorist organizations with no territories to defend and ideologies that place high value on killing civilians and martyrdom. The reduced effectiveness of deterrence and containment lead naturally to the Bush Administration’s emphasis on the need for preemptive action. “Preemption, in turn, requires something else of which Adams would have approved, which is hegemony: the capacity to act wherever one needs to without significant resistance from rival states.”

This requirement leads to the Bush Administration’s second stated goal: cooperation with other great powers. The NSS posits that, despite America’s commitment to keep “strengths beyond challenge,” other nations will act in concert with the United States because (1) other nations actually prefer management of the international system by a single country as long as its management is relatively benign, and (2) American hegemony is acceptable because it is based on values that all states and cultures (excepting terrorists and tyrants) share. The theory is that because the U.S. acts based on such universal principles other nations will ultimately go along with American preemptive action, even if taken unilaterally.

The final element of the Bush approach addresses how to remove the causes of tyranny altogether. The Bush Administration’s prescription is to spread democracy throughout the world. This conclusion rests on the emerging consensus that poverty is not the cause of the Islamic terror movement, which consists to a large extent of middle-class and fairly educated Middle Easterners. Rather, terrorism results from frustration with the lack of representative institutions within their own societies, channeling dissent into the only available outlet, religious fanaticism.

This is, indeed, a grand strategy in every sense of the word and one with its roots firmly in the American diplomatic tradition. As Gaddis points out, “[t]he grandness of a strategy, however, by no means ensures its success.” The Bush Doctrine is being put to the test in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Although it is too early to judge definitively the effectiveness of the Bush approach, the primary flaw Gaddis detects “has to do with the relationship between preemption, hegemony and consent.” Namely, the Bush Administration’s perceived license to act preemptively whenever and wherever it desires at a time when the U.S. enjoys an unprecedented surfeit of power frightens not only tyrants and terrorists but even its closest allies.

What sustained the broad consent to U.S. leadership during the Cold War was American willingness to create economic and security structures that provided benefits to the U.S. and its allies alike and the prospect of something worse -- victory of the authoritarian alternative. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, sympathy and horror sustained support for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, together with the view that retaliation was deserved and proportionate. Today, however, “[t]he rush to war in Iraq in the absence of a ‘first shot’ or a ‘smoking gun’ left a different impression: a growing sense throughout much of the world that there could be nothing worse than an American hegemony if it was to be used in this way.” Rather than using its power to stabilize the system, as it did throughout the Cold War and the 1990s, the United States appeared to be one of the system’s chief destabilizers.

Gaddis briefly suggests a possible solution to this predicament. He advises that the United States project its domestic federal model approach abroad. That is, rather than embarking on a crusade to convert the world to democracy, the United States should seek to ensure that the world is safe for federalism or a collection of different politically organized countries. This is the approach that the United States employed first unsuccessfully in the form of the League of Nations, then more successfully in the form of the United Nations and finally most successfully through the consensual coalition the U.S. assembled to contain international communism. Such an approach, Gaddis asserts, is less likely to undermine the consensus required for U.S. action.

***

Gaddis’ prescription has merit, particularly in terms of relations with other great powers and those regions that are not breeding international terrorists. Yet, it is precisely the “federalist model” of foreign policy that led to the development of unrepresentative and failed regimes that spawned Al Qaida. Nevertheless, Gaddis has identified the central difficulty facing the United States today, whether it can sustain the legitimacy of its leadership while effectively combating the terrorist threat. The Bush Administration is clearly correct that traditional deterrence and containment policies, alone, are inadequate to confront that threat. America will have to act preemptively against terrorist groups and the tyrants who harbor them and may on occasion have to do so largely without help. We cannot wait for the terrorists to strike and then retaliate; neither can we permit the Security Council to veto action that is truly necessary for our nation’s defense. The cost would be too high. The question is how to preserve the necessary freedom of action without undermining consent to American leadership.

For even if the U.S. may have to act alone in certain instances, it will not be able to address unilaterally the terrorist threat broadly conceived. Today’s strategic environment is dramatically different than that the United States faced in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Then, the only potential challengers to U.S. security were European and the only means of projecting power great distances were sailing ships. The U.S.’s primary foreign policy aims were continental and commercial expansion and security in the Western Hemisphere, which it pursued under the protective cloak of Great Britain’s navy. (Thus, in a very real sense, U.S. policy was not fully unilateralist as it relied to a great extent on Britain’s tacit cooperation. The U.S. was, in other words, one of the “free riding” powers about which we now complain so vociferously.) But by World War II, there was no question that the Atlantic Ocean was no longer the strategic barrier it once was and that the U.K. was no longer up to the job of international leadership. These changes propelled the FDR and his successors to expand the country’s security horizons while simultaneously modifying the unilateralist tradition to accommodate global leadership through U.S. dominated international structures.

The need for international cooperation in waging the war on terrorism is no less acute than that during the Cold War. The U.S. will require help in the form of basing rights, such as those it obtained in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan (with Russia’s blessing) during the war on Afghanistan, intelligence cooperation from our friends, allies and not-so-friendly regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere, troop contributions at least for the post-war nation-building exercises, international debt relief for the rebuilding countries, etc. Moreover, as important as it is, the war on terrorism is not the United States’ only foreign policy goal. Perhaps most critically, the U.S. has a strong interest in ensuring that Russia and China join the liberal international order that the U.S. and its allies constructed after World War II. Both countries have one foot in that system at present, but their size and histories make them the most likely and potentially most important dissenters. The U.S. must find a way to combat the terrorist threat, without convincing the world that it has only its own narrowly-defined interests at heart.

The task is all the more difficult given the unprecedented nature of America’s predominance. Not since Roman times has one power so dominated the international system. To use just one measure, the United States’ yearly military spending approximates that of rest of the world combined and is much more efficiently and effectively employed. There is a natural tendency for other states to counterbalance against a country with such preponderant power. The problem facing the United States and the Bush Administration is thus, in large part, structural. American power engenders resentment and the terrorist threat by its nature will at times require a preemptive response that will only fan the flames of such resentment.

The Bush Administration, however, may have aggravated the situation with its diplomatic style and implementation of its strategy. Even before September 11, the Bush Administration has been unnecessarily brusque in its relations with even its closest allies. With little attempt to discuss alternatives, the administration dismissed a series of international agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol and Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that the rest of the world strongly supported. After 9/11, the administration refused much of the aid offered by its NATO allies in the Afghan war, and denied its closest allies even the right of consultation in the conduct of that war. Revealingly, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld when asked whether NATO might participate in the war on Iraq responded: “I can’t imagine it … it hasn’t crossed my mind.” The administration seems at pains to maintain short-term freedom of action with little regard for the damage it may do the United States’ ability to attract others to its cause long-term.

The administration’s approach in Afghanistan and Iraq contrasts sharply with that taken by Bush’s father in the run-up to first Persian Gulf War when Secretary of State James Baker and President Bush (41) himself exhaustively cultivated international support for action against Saddam. Even in Bosnia, when the U.S. was not able to obtain the Security Council’s blessing, the U.S. operated through NATO, giving the endeavor much less of a unilateralist hue. In neither case did the U.S. relinquish significant operational control.

Beyond mere diplomatic style, the Bush Administration may have undermined its grand strategy by the public justification of its policies. Most importantly, one wonders whether the administration would have had more success had it not attempted to characterize the war on Iraq as part and parcel of its war on terror despite no credible link between Al Qaida (or any other “terrorist group of global reach”) and the secular authoritarian regime of Saddam Hussein. There was a very credible argument for deposing Saddam Hussein that had nothing to do with terrorism. He had proven himself an inveterate aggressor in a region vital to U.S. and world security. He had consistently defied the sanction regime system put in place to contain him after the first Persian Gulf War, which was now badly fraying and imposing a terrible burden on Iraqi civilians. If that regime unraveled and Saddam obtained nuclear weapons, a mid-term rather than immediate threat, he almost certainly would have acted on his aggressive designs. He had severely miscalculated the likely success of his power grabs on several occasions in the past. The results could have been catastrophic.

Packaged as such, the Bush Administration might not felt it necessary to characterize Saddam as an imminent threat or strain to find ties between his regime and Al Qaida. By doing so, the Administration has cast doubt not only on its own credibility but on the broader effort. For if the United States can justify an invasion of Iraq as part of the war on terror, an explanation the vast majority of the world rejects, what restraints are there on U.S. power. Similarly, although the war in Iraq was in part “preemptive” in that it was directed at preventing future disruption by Saddam, it was distinct from the type of preemptive attack necessary to prevent terrorist attack. Saddam had a territory and concrete interests that we could strike. He was, in other words, at least theoretically deterrable. It was the combination of his long history of defying the international community, attempts to seek nuclear weapons and aggressive designs in a region of vital importance rather than any supposed imminent threat he posed that made him a candidate for removal.

In other words, the war against Saddam was in many ways the leftover business of the 20th century rather than an initial step in the 21st century war on terror. The wiser course might have been to acknowledge the distinction between the threats posed by the tyrant Saddam and the terrorists. Whether or not other nations agreed with the decision to oust Saddam, they would likely not have been as unsettled by the prospect of an unfettered U.S. employing its military muscle whenever and wherever it desired on the pretext that it was necessary to fight the war on terror. Luckily, the case of Iraq appears to be sui generis and therefore the peculiar set of difficulties it presented are unlikely to arise again soon.

The challenge for whomever is elected President in November will be to continue to pursue aggressively the war on terror and aid Iraq in its post-Saddam transition while re-building broad international support for the U.S. grand strategy. This is a task the Bush Administration may have begun with the recent unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution endorsing the U.S. transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government and authorizing foreign troops to provide security for at least a year with Iraqi consent.

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