The New American Interventionism: Chapter 8

The New American Interventionism: Essays from Political Science Quarterly

Demetrios James Caraley (ed.)

1999

Mission Impossible: Creating a Grand Strategy
Robert Jervis

On 1 May 1919, the acting secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, wrote the secretary of state:

It is a fundamental principle that the foreign policy of our government is in the hands of the State Department.... As it is upon our foreign policy that naval estimates must be based, it will be recognized that the Navy Department has a vital interest in this question. It is probable that certain policies are of such importance to our national interests that they must be defended at all costs. On the other hand certain policies are not, by the expense they would entail, justified if they lead to war. Hence... it is necessary for the Navy Department to know what policies it may be called upon to uphold by force, in order to formulate plans and building programs.

In May 1940, the United States chief of Operations wrote the commander of the Pacific Fleet:

Suppose the Japs do go into the East [without simultaneously attacking United States territory]? What are we going to do about it? My answer is, I don’t know and I think that there is nobody on God’s green earth that can tell you. ₁

Grand Strategy Without an Enemy?

Leaders of the armed forces always ask Roosevelt’s question, but as Roosevelt learned when he was president, if not before, it is rarely easy to answer. Under the current circumstances, it is impossible. To make the point more broadly, it is not possible for the United States to develop and follow a coherent grand strategy over the next decade or so. Fortunately, it is not necessary for the United States to have one, although its absence will annoy scholars, confuse other countries, and make military planning extremely difficult.

The reason that the United States will not develop a grand strategy is the same reason that one is not required: the current world, like the one before the invention of heavy bombers, presents no pressing threats. But it is unlike the earlier eras in that the United States now has less-than-vital interests throughout the world, sufficient power to act on more than a few of them, and an activist ideology—a conscience, as some would put it, or, as others would say, the belief that the United States has the right and indeed the obligation to try to improve the world.

This is then truly a new world, one that is unusual for leaders and scholars alike. For many of them, especially if they are Realists, ₂ the external world that states inhabit is a very dangerous one. States need to defend their security interests, and these are always potentially if not actually at risk—a situation that Arnold Wolfers analogizes to a house that is on fire. ₃ Under such circumstances, all states must obey the imperatives of the international system. This means that domestic politics is not considered, that all states will behave in the same way under the same circumstances regardless of their internal features (for example, democracies will react in the same way that dictatorships do), that democratic control of foreign policy has little meaning, and that morality can play no role because there is little room for choice. Whether or not this is ever an accurate description has been heatedly debated, but it is irrelevant here because no one would claim that this describes the world the United States now inhabits and shapes. The central implication here is that the United States now has unusual freedom of action, which is, of course, what statesmen often dream about. However, we should not forget the old saying “Be careful what you dream for, because you may get it.”

The most vital interest of any country is security from invasion or attack. The second most vital interest, often linked to the first, is the ability to protect the state’s closest allies, who either contribute to the state’s security or are valued in their own right. A third interest is economic prosperity, which both contributes to security and is valued as a goal in itself. Almost all analysts agree that these three core values are now available to the United States for free—that is, they do not require strenuous efforts to reach them, partly because of nuclear weapons. ₄ Indeed, not only are there no plausible direct threats to American security, but Western Europe similarly lacks such threats. Such countries constitute what Karl Deutsch called a “security community,” ₅ which means that they do not menace one another and there is little reason to fear extreme economic conflict between these countries and the United States. This now appears to be true for Japan as well, contrary to the alarmist claims that were common a few years ago. It is as certain as anything can be in international politics that the United States will not fight a war with the states of Western Europe or Japan. This is a truly revolutionary change in world politics, for there has never been an era in which the major powers have not periodically fought each other. We simply do not know what a world will be like in which this threat has been lifted. ₆

We can conjure up all sorts of threats, such as a resurgent Russia, a belligerent China that continues to grow at 10 percent a year, or terrorism. Because it would take an extremely lengthy analysis to rebut each of these claims, I will be content to assert that they largely represent the political and psychological need to find dangers ₇ and say that although one can argue that many goals are worthy of foreign policy effort, security threats are largely absent. ₈

Multiple, but Secondary, Goals

The fact that the United States has no pressing security threats does not mean that it has no foreign policy goals. Many secondary threats are worth worrying about and worth pursuing, and doing so is feasible because of America’s great power. But the very fact that many goals can be pursued while none are primary is what has generated the current debate. During the cold war, to be sure, arguments about strategy were fierce, but they largely involved perceptions of the Soviet Union. In contrast, some of today’s arguments turn partially on assessments of the international environment, but most relate to what the United States values, the prices and risks it should be willing to pay to reach alternative goals, and the priorities of domestic and international objectives. ₉ In this environment of greatly reduced threat, people focus on dangers that are less extreme or less plausible. By definition, policy makers and military planners concentrate on threats according to some combination of the likelihood that they will materialize and the menace that they will constitute if they do so. But it is harder than ever to see how one unlikely threat (rogue states) compares with another (China) on these dimensions. Indeed, perhaps threats of a very different kind deserve the greatest attention, as environmentalists, for example, claim. This plethora of remote but equally plausible menaces would not, of course, be a problem if the grand strategy designed to best deal with one of them suited the others as well. But only those who believe in a deity would expect such a happy coincidence.

Life is both more pleasant and more complicated without threats that are both dangerous and likely. I believe that this is clearly the case today. For example, look at what one typical commission has designated as American vital interests:

Vital national interests are conditions that are strictly necessary to safeguard and enhance the well-being of Americans in a free and secure nation:

Prevent, deter, and reduce the threat of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons attack on the United States.

Prevent the emergence of a hostile hegemon in Europe or Asia.

Prevent the emergence of a hostile major power on U.S. borders or in control of the seas.

Prevent the catastrophic collapse of major global systems: trade, financial markets, supplies of energy, and the environment.

Ensure the survival of U.S. allies. ₁₀

Not only are all these threats vague or unlikely to materialize, but it is hard to see how we would estimate, even roughly, how probable each is. Yet in order to know how many resources we should devote to preventing or coping with such threats, we would need to do this. Bernard Brodie, justifiably known as the dean of American strategists, noted: “All sorts of notions and propositions are churned out, and often presented for consideration with the prefatory words: `It is conceivable that...’ Such words establish their own truth, for the fact that someone has conceived of whatever proposition follows is enough to establish that it is conceivable. Whether it is worth a second thought, however, is another matter.” ₁₁

In previous eras, decision makers were often willing to say that certain eventualities that would be deeply disturbing if they arose were unlikely enough to be dismissed out of hand. Thus in 1924, Winston Churchill opposed the Admiralty’s argument that more ships had to be built to meet the menace from Japan by arguing: “A war with Japan! But why should there be a war with Japan? I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in our lifetime.” ₁₂ Of course, these judgments can be wrong, as was the case here. However, they are both necessary and difficult to make in an era when no threat is salient and pressing. We may be able to make rough judgments of dangers and events as being “very probable,” “probable,” or “improbable.” But it is extremely difficult to distinguish among threats that are “improbable,” those that are “very improbable,” and those that are “very, very improbable.”

It is at least as troublesome and difficult to develop intelligent policy prescriptions for distant and unlikely threats, because we are dealing with so many unknowns. Take the first vital interest on the list given above. How do we go about establishing a grand strategy for “preventing, deterring and reducing the threat of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons attacks on the United States” unless we know something about the countries that might menace us and the circumstances under which the danger might arise? In the past, while it was not easy to see how to diminish and protect against possible threats, as the debates before the two world wars and during the cold war remind us, at least there was a fairly small set of well-defined issues that needed to be analyzed in order to provide guidance. Difficult as it was to analyze Soviet intentions, this question is easy and well structured compared with estimating whether the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is likely to be a major threat ten or twenty years from now. Unless one believes in deterministic theories of history (for example, countries with rapidly increasing economies will expand until they meet a superior power; the Chinese, because of their history and culture, see themselves as the Middle Kingdom and so seek to dominate the barbarians; the center of world power has shifted from Europe to Asia), one needs to examine a large number of pathways by which China might become dangerous and, for each one, to estimate the likelihood that a proposed policy would be effective, ineffective, or misguided. Unfortunately, the world is sufficiently complex and perverse that a policy that would discourage and deter China under one set of circumstances could exacerbate the danger under another, thus ruling out any simple prescription.

This more relaxed environment creates greater room not only for differences of opinion about what policy to pursue but also for the splintering of opinion into unstable segments. In the absence of a clear danger, let alone a clear and present danger, our external environment does not require that we be guided by one set of values rather than another. There is always agreement that the protection of the country comes first, but after that, the consensus breaks down, which is hardly surprising. Individuals and groups vary widely in the priority they assign to self-interest, as opposed to altruism (or, to put it slightly differently, on how narrowly or broadly they construe self-interest), as well as on how they see their own interests and what values they seek for themselves and others. Thus some people give economic interests pride of place; others believe that the United States should give priority to enhancing human rights around the world; and still others believe that a crucial part of the national interest is aiding the countries to which they have ethnic or ideological ties. Still others focus on threats, but not on the same ones: some fear Russia; others worry about China; and still others believe that the most pressing danger is proliferation in general or of specific countries obtaining nuclear weapons. It is not news that the national interest is not entirely objective or that it can be composed of conflicting parts. But in the current era, the lack of a plausible candidate for a single unifying value or a motive that should animate American foreign policy greatly magnifies the difficulties of creating a coherent grand strategy.

Pluralism with a Vengeance

What we are likely to see is quite familiar to students of American domestic policy. Because neither any one interest nor the state itself is strong enough to impose coherent and consistent guidance, courses of action are shaped less by a grand design than by the pulling and hauling of varied interests, ideas, and political calculations. This is the model of pluralism, which although often criticized normatively or descriptively ₁₃ is believed by most scholars to capture a great deal of American politics. Furthermore, it is commonly argued that pluralism not only preserves individual liberties and ensures that each group gains at least some of the values about which it cares most, but it also is likely to produce a better overall policy than could be arrived at by a central authority seeking a synthesis of the public interest. ₁₄

Most scholars feel that this model is neither descriptive nor normative for American foreign policy, however. During the cold war, Realists argued that the national interest abroad—unlike the public interest at home—was not chimerical, because the external environment was sufficiently compelling to override many domestic differences and enable even a relatively weak state to follow a policy of some coherence. ₁₅ The argument that the United States can now adopt a grand strategy rests on the similar notion that it needs and has sufficient unity of interest, purpose, and government structures so that the national interest model still holds. Whatever the virtues of this in normative terms—and I might debate but certainly would not dismiss them—I see no reason to expect this to describe the future. Instead, I think the pluralist model offers much better predictions.

Henry Kissinger argues that “a conceptual framework... is an essential tool [of foreign policy. Its] absence... produces exactly the opposite of freedom of action; policy makers are forced to respond to parochial interests, buffeted by pressures without a fixed compass.” ₁₆ But for any individual to have such a framework is not sufficient to protect against the danger that Kissinger foresees; rather, there must be widespread agreement on it. Indeed, it was the inability of domestic leaders to maintain such an agreement in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate that Kissinger claims destroyed his policy. That the argument is self-serving does not mean it is entirely incorrect; in any event, the history of the 1970s does remind us of both the importance and the difficulty of gaining domestic support. ₁₇

“All politics is local,” former Speaker of the U.S. House Tip O’Neill famously remarked. Students of foreign policy are offended by this notion—the nation’s security and other vital interests are too important to be at the mercy of conflicting values, parochial interests, and partisan politics. When I wrote the first draft of this article, newspapers were reporting that the Senate had voted overwhelmingly to delay the next two rounds of military base closings until it received a study of the economic effects of past and future shut-downs. By voting as it did, the Senate ignored the wishes of President Clinton and military leaders who have argued that the closings of bases still to be determined were central to their efforts to pare the Defense Department budget and allow military officials to shift money from military operations to weapons systems. ₁₈ The location of military bases is the aspect of security policy that has always been most influenced by local and partisan politics for the obvious reason that the ratio between domestic impact and foreign policy importance is so skewed toward the former. Yet in the post-cold war world, this characterizes most foreign policy issues.

In April 1997, the New York Times carried a story that may have been equally revealing, if inadvertently so. Indeed, it was only a photograph of the new F-22 fighter plane being rolled out of the Lockheed-Martin plant in Marietta, Georgia. In addition to a stylized American flag, the airplane carried the painted slogan “Spirit of America.” ₁₉ Because the military rationale for the expensive advanced aircraft is unpersuasive, the “Spirit of America” is better translated not as the historic American commitment to defend itself, let alone to drop bombs on small countries, but by another slogan: “The business of America is business.” Military procurement policy has always been strongly affected by the domestic political economy, ₂₀ but with the declining persuasiveness of the foreign policy arguments for particular weapons, the influence of local economic pressures is certain to increase.

The broader argument for the rise of American economic diplomacy hardly needs to be repeated here. Although with Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s death American economic salesmanship abroad is not so flamboyant, the basic point remains that when the most important foreign policy objective of security has been reached or is indeterminate, economic goals will come to the fore. To take the most obvious example, it is not surprising that American policy toward the PRC, right or wrong, is driven much more by economic concerns than by the belief that imposing trade sanctions would encourage Chinese aggressiveness or increase human rights violations.

Even if economic objectives were both more important and dominant, it would not be easy to develop a coherent grand strategy, as economic interests would not be united. For example, the interests of importers often are different from those of exporters; the economic stakes of one state or congressional district conflict with those of others; and the interests of different sectors in the economy—and perhaps different classes—diverge. A strong executive branch ₂₁ or a corporatist political structure might be able to weld these interests together, but the United States lacks both. Similarly, a small country whose prosperity depends on trade may behave coherently, especially if it elects its officials by proportional representation. ₂₂ Again, the description does not fit the United States. Our system of a separation of powers, an unruly executive branch, and the dependence of political parties on corporate and union money means that private interests have extraordinary access. Furthermore, the fragmentation creates multiple arenas for political struggles, and so one group, interest, or ideology can prevail on one issue or in one instance but not in others. No more than it can adopt a coherent “industrial policy” is the United States likely to follow the sort of coherent economic foreign policy that could both support and require a grand strategy.

This is not to imply that economic considerations—conflicting or not—will or should dominate American foreign policy. Indeed, I think that conventional wisdom has tended to oversell the extent to which economics will dominate the post-cold war era. Although it is easy to cite some very large figures for the amount of trade, investment, or financial exchanges the United States engages in, it is far from clear how much these will be affected by foreign policy decisions. A major war involving one of our main trading partners would deeply affect the American economy, but many of the main international factors that structure our economic well-being seem to be firmly established. Our ability to lower trade barriers with specific countries, especially in Asia, can be affected by the policies we choose, and these can reciprocally affect whether these countries buy items such as airplanes and advanced telecommunications systems from us or the Europeans. But in the context of a multitrillion dollar economy, the impact of these cases is not great. Now that the vogue for strategic trade theory ₂₃ has passed, it is easier to see that the main determinants of the American economy’s health are internal. Nevertheless, the decline in military threats automatically elevates the relative standing of economic goals.

Although economic considerations play a large role, especially when the economic stakes are high, they do not have the field to themselves. To say that security interests are not pressing does not mean they are completely absent. Likewise, to argue, as I did earlier, that potential threats like proliferation do not readily lend themselves to a judgment of their magnitude or of the policies that would best combat them does not mean that people will not or should not argue for dealing with them. In addition, humanitarian or altruistic values are strongly held in American society. I doubt whether the policy of containment would have had as much public support as it did if people had believed that keeping other countries noncommunist not only increased American security but also was good for the world. Similarly, the current policy of supporting emerging democracies is fed by the argument that this will improve the lives of the people in those countries in addition to making others, including the United States, safer and more prosperous. In other cases, humanitarian motives are the main ones at work, as in Kosovo and what support there was for U.S. intervention in Somalia. Realists may decry such motives and argue that they will entangle the United States in unnecessary quarrels without always helping others, but it is hard to understand American foreign policy in the past or predict it in the future without taking account of them. What is crucial here, however, is not that these impulses cannot be ignored but that they are too weak and unfocused to direct policy over a significant period of time and over wide geographic areas. They will wax and wane according to circumstances and the public mood and will be intensified and brought to bear by particularly visible and outrageous atrocities. They are strong enough to contest with other values without being able to dominate them.

Finally, American foreign policy will be influenced by those who favor their coethnics abroad. Again, this is not a new phenomenon: the role of the Irish Americans and German Americans in earlier periods comes to mind. More recently, the American “tilt” toward Greece in its disputes with Turkey cannot be understood apart from the fact that Americans of Greek and Armenian descent vastly outnumber those who came from Turkey. Realists again are horrified by these influences; the textbooks are so embarrassed that they do not even acknowledge them. Nevertheless, I see no reason to reject these ties as a valid part of the national interest of a multi-ethnic country. Furthermore, while observers like Samuel Huntington see internal developments in the United States as dangerously approximating the external “clash of civilizations,” ₂₄ it may well be that only a multi-ethnic country can operate effectively in a diverse world. Various ethnic groups in the United States can form bridges to their coethnics abroad. ₂₅ The main point here is that legitimate or illegitimate, dangerous or helpful, ethnic considerations will play a role in American foreign policy.

Only the cold war held pluralism in check. A longer historical perspective reminds us of states’ difficulties in constructing a coherent and stable foreign policy when their interests have been powerful and conflicting. Now it is all the rage to argue that democracies not only do not fight one another but also are especially able to commit themselves to courses of action. ₂₆ In the nineteenth century, however, the conventional wisdom was the opposite, holding that because democracies were under the sway of unstable public opinion, they could not be counted on to carry out threats or promises. Before World War I, it was not entirely disingenuous of British statesmen to tell both France and Germany that they could not make firm commitments about the conditions under which their country would fight a war on the Continent, because the decision would have to be made through democratic processes, which, being responsive to public attitudes, would be influenced by the details of the situation that actually arose rather than being determined by more general and hypothetical questions. This kind of constraint was more the rule than the exception in earlier eras and, I believe, is likely to become familiar again.

In summary, the United States has a fragmented political system in an external environment in which no single interest, threat, or value predominates. This is a recipe for pluralism with a vengeance but not for a grand strategy, however intelligent it may look on paper. The United States will “muddle through,” to use Charles Lindblom’s term, ₂₇ rather than follow a coherent plan. A sidelight is that if this analysis is correct, decisions will be hard to explain after the fact, because so many relatively small factors either did or could have influenced them. We are accustomed to trying to account for big and important cases, in which we believe that with so much at stake, only major forces and considerations could have been responsible. Yet when we look at cases like the American intervention in Somalia or even the intervention in Bosnia, this assumption does not hold, because the costs and risks were much lower. For future decisions as well, many values and considerations could be at work because even relatively small perceived gains will be sufficient to set the policy in motion.

Military Planning in an Uncertain World

None of this means that American foreign policy will be entirely without patterns. I doubt that we will undertake serious economic sanctions to improve human rights in a major trading partner like the PRC. Neither are we likely to deploy massive force for humanitarian goals, to secure secondary economic interests, or to uphold abstract principles of world order. At the other end of the continuum, inertia if not enlightened self-interest will maintain our security commitments to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) allies, and we are unlikely to permit the military conquest of Taiwan. Furthermore, diplomatic instruments backed by demonstrations of force will be important in certain areas of the world, such as East Asia and East Central Europe, where American interests are important but not compelling. Support is likely to be provided for democracies, countries with large ethnic groups in the United States, and humanitarian values when the cost is predicted to be low. But these boundaries leave a great deal in between. Whether the United States intervenes in cases like Somalia and Kosovo, how it will act if the PRC puts military pressure on its neighbors, whether it would threaten to use force in a conflict between South American countries, whether it would provide guarantees or use force to inhibit proliferation will be determined less, I fear, by any grand strategy than by the balance of domestic interests and the play of domestic politics.

It has often been said that the current American enemy is uncertainty and instability. Whether or not this is true for the country at large, it is true for the American military. The domestic environment that will determine the missions it is asked or told to carry out is an uncertain and unstable one. Security policies will differ from one issue area to another and from one period of time to another as circumstances and domestic opinion vary. As the epigraph opening this essay indicates, leaders of military organizations often ask their political superiors for general foreign policy guidelines so that they can develop an efficient force. In a well-ordered polity, such a request is not only reasonable but mandatory. As Bernard Brodie constantly stressed, we must not lose sight of Carl von Clausewitz’s wisdom that politics must direct military policy. ₂₈ But the politics that will guide American foreign and security policy will be pluralism, and its results cannot be codified ahead of time.

Unless and until the United States faces a major and pressing threat, foreign policy will begin at home. No American policy can be sustained without adequate domestic support. One might think that this could be arranged with adequate public education: if the experts develop any sort of consensus about at least the outlines of a necessary grand strategy, the public can be brought around to support it. Indeed, for all the current partisan sniping and for all the annoying behavior of Senator Jesse Helms, the two political parties are not deeply divided on basic issues of foreign and security policy. But multiple fracture lines remain, and the best efforts of Madeleine Albright show that even a secretary of state who places a priority on building domestic support faces severe constraints on her ability to do so. ₂₉

In the late 1940s, when partisan divisions were greater, those who favored a policy of containment were able to work with opinion leaders throughout society to develop a strong foundation for the policy. I do not think this is possible now, however: our trust in government and many other organizations is very low, and we do not have the sort of civic leaders that were powerful earlier. Only the most extreme conspiracy theorists see the Council on Foreign Relations as anything but a social and status group. “Captains of industry” are gone, with the possible exception of a handful of leaders in the communications and information sectors who lack the breadth of experience that earlier elites had. Union leaders have disappeared even faster than unions. University presidents, who earlier were national figures, now are itinerant money-raisers. Those newspapers that have survived are much less relied on than was true earlier, and television anchors lack the expertise and reputation that would allow them to be influential, even if professioinal ethics and the large corporations that own the networks permitted them to try. Known to the public now are “celebrities,” largely from sports and the entertainment industry. I would not expect them to undertake the public educational campaigns we saw in the past.

What we are likely to see is that different groups, interests, and values will predominate in different areas and at different times. To take an extreme case, American policy toward Cuba has been “captured” by the émigrés in Florida in a way that is very familiar to students of American regulatory policy. When such a feat is impossible, we will see other patterns familiar in domestic policy making, such as shifting coalitions and logrolling. In return for reciprocation, one group will agree to support another’s foreign policy in an area of great concern to the latter but not the former. A recent newspaper carried a plea by the Coalition for International Justice calling for the United States to arrest war criminals in the former Yugoslavia. From one perspective, this diverse coalition is heartening: the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the YWCA, B’nai B’rith, the Arab American Institute, the Anti-Defamation League, the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and several labor unions, as well as individuals as different from one another as Patricia Derian (assistant secretary of state for human rights under Jimmy Carter), Bianca Jagger, and former “hard-liners” such as Max Kampelman, Paul Nitze, and Robert Dole. ₃₀ This is not the sort of coalition, however, that can support a general foreign policy, as it would not be activated by other issues. While it would be an exaggeration to say that every new issue will produce a different alignment, there is little reason to expect the coalitions that form on questions like the United States’s policy toward the Congo, maintaining Most Favored Nation status with China, enlarging NATO, or expanding NAFTA to bear much resemblance to one another.

Not only change but also instability over time is likely as the results of each major encounter influence later beliefs and preferences. This phenomenon was not absent in the past: the American experience in Vietnam shaped policy for the succeeding decade. But with less to anchor American policy, smaller events will exert greater influence. Thus I suspect that how the intervention in Kosovo ends will significantly influence the likelihood that the United States will undertake further missions of this kind, just as the deaths of a handful of soldiers in Somalia both forced the United States to withdraw and reduced the American appetite for similar tasks.

Military planning, let alone rational procurement, will be very difficult in such a world. It is easy for a civilian theorist to say that the military should simply plan on being flexible and must be prepared to deal with the unknown. But any military officer knows that the extent to which this is possible is severely limited. In reaction to such instruction and in order to rule out at least the wilder political vagaries, an obvious military strategy is to develop a force that can be used only in certain kinds of circumstances or only in certain ways.

But even with some degree of self-protection, the military is likely to be called on in unpredictable ways and places. The lack of major threats to vital American interests is an incredible boon to America and our allies, but it places unusual burdens on the military.

This environment will also be a difficult one for civil-military relations, already under significant strain. ₃₁ To employ military instruments for national goals that are secondary at best brings up a whole host of difficulties for the armed services, especially because many of the missions require frequent overseas deployments and retraining. Our military cannot be an overarmed police force that specializes in assisting local “civic action” programs, let alone ambitious nation-building. Yet these are almost certain to be prominent among the missions assigned to it. In this difficult and turbulent atmosphere, close working relations among civil and military officials at all levels are greatly to be desired. But this is extremely unlikely, as the two cultures have grown further apart over the past decade. Fewer civilians have served in the military or had extensive experience in military affairs, and fewer military leaders seem to have a deep understanding of proper civil-military relations.

The result is not so much that one or the other group has grown excessively strong but that both have mishandled their responsibilities and relations vis-à-vis the other. Civilians seem to have great difficulty understanding why many activities pose serious problems for the military and fail to consult adequately on issues with a strong military component, such as the expansion of NATO. Military officials too often use their expertise to inappropriately influence political decisions, if not to actually make them, as the American military commander in Bosnia apparently did when he made clear that NATO troops would not arrest indicted war criminals. Uncertainty about the United States’s grand strategy will only exacerbate these problems. Dealing with them calls for excellent working relations and understanding on both sides of the civilian-military divide, but this divide has become deeper. Few seem to be willing or able to begin the efforts necessary to bridge it.

Endnotes

Note 1: Quoted in Robert Butow, Tojo and the Coming of the War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 190. Back.

Note 2: For the purposes of this article, I will not distinguish between classical Realism (Thucydides, E. H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau) and Neorealism (Kenneth Waltz). Back.

Note 3: Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), 12-17. Back.

Note 4: The influence of nuclear weapons on world politics has been hotly debated; my own views can be found in The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). Back.

Note 5: Karl Deutsch et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), chap. 2. Back.

Note 6: I have discussed the causes and implications of this in “The Future of World Politics: Will It Resemble the Past?” International Security 16 (Winter 1991-92): 39-73; and “International Primacy: Is the Game Worth the Candle?” International Security 17 (Spring 1993): 52-67. Also see John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989); Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky, The Real World Order (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1993); Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Back.

Note 7: Frederick Hartmann, The Conservation of Enemies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982); John Mueller, “The Catastrophe Quota: Trouble After the Cold War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 38 (September 1994): 355-75. Back.

Note 8: For an excellent discussion, see Eric Nordlinger, Isolationism Reconfigured (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Back.

Note 9: The literature on alternative grand strategies is voluminous. An excellent comprehensive survey is that by Barry Posen and Andrew Ross, “Competing Visions for U.S. Grand Strategy,” International Security 21 (Winter 1996-97): 5-53. Back.

Note 10: The Commission on America’s National Interests, America’s National Interests (Cambridge, MA: Center for Science and International Affairs, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, July 1966), 5. Back.

Note 11: Bernard Brodie, “The Development of Nuclear Strategy,” International Security 2 (Spring 1978): 83. Back.

Note 12: Quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, 1922-1939 (London: Heinemann, 1978), vol. 5, 76. Back.

Note 13: For the former, see Theodore Lowi, The End of Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2d ed., 1979); for the latter, see, for example, C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); and Grant McConnell, The Decline of Agrarian Democracy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953). On pluralism in general, see Andrew McFarland, Power and Leadership in Pluralist Systems (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969). Back.

Note 14: The classic statement is that by Charles Edward Lindblom, The Intelligence of Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1965). Back.

Note 15: This claim was most commonly made by students of security but was affirmed by some of those analyzing foreign economic policy as well: see Stephen Krasner, Defending the National Interest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); and Robert Gilpin, “No One Loves a Political Realist,” Security Studies 5 (Spring 1996): 3-26. Back.

Note 16: Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 130. Back.

Note 17: This need is neglected in most scholarly analyses: even the brief mention of domestic support in Posen and Ross’s canvas of candidate grand strategies is more than most treatments offer. See their “Competing Visions,” 16, 22, 31. It is usually assumed that the intellectual job of determining the best policy is the hardest part of the task, if not the only part. Back.

Note 18: Jerry Gray, “Senate, in a Rebuff to Clinton, Votes to Delay Base Closings,” New York Times, 10 July 1997. Back.

Note 19: New York Times, 10 April 1997. Back.

Note 20: See, for example, James Kurth, “Why We Buy the Weapons We Do,” Foreign Policy 11 (Summer 1973): 33-56; and Nick Kotz, Wild Blue Yonder: Money, Politics, and the B-1 Bomber (New York: Pantheon, 1988). Back.

Note 21: In what other country could a trade crisis be sparked by the actions of an obscure federal agency, the Federal Maritime Commission, which took everyone else in the executive branch by surprise? See David Sanger, “U.S. Maritime Agency Moves to Bar Most Japanese Cargo Ships from American Ports,” New York Times, 17 October 1997; Steven Lee Myers, “Little Panel That Could, Did, Posing Threat of Trade War,” New York Times, 18 October 1997. Back.

Note 22: Peter Katzenstein, Small States in World Markets (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Ronald Rogowski, “Trade and the Variety of Democratic Institutions,” International Organization 41 (Spring 1987): 203-224. Back.

Note 23: See, for example, Paul Krugman, ed., Strategic Trade Policy and the New International Economics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); Paul Krugman, Rethinking International Trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Expectations (New York: Norton, 1994); Klaus Stegemann, “Policy Rivalry Among Industrial States: What Can We Learn from Models of Strategic Trade Policy?” International Organization 43 (Winter 1989): 73-100; Helen Milner and David Yoffie, “Between Free Trade and Protectionism: Strategic Trade Policy and the Theory of Corporate Trade Demand,” International Organization 43 (Spring 1989): 239-272; J. David Richardson, “`New’ Trade Theory and Policy a Decade Old: Assessment in a Pacific Context” in Richard Higgott, Richard Leaver, and John Ravenhill, eds., Pacific Economic Relations in the 1990s (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1993), 83-105; Marc Busch, Trade Warriors: States, Firms, and Strategic Policy in High Technology Competition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Back.

Note 24: Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, 304-308. Back.

Note 25: Yossi Shain, “Ethnic Diasporas and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Political Science Quarterly 109 (Winter 1994-1995): 811-841. Back.

Note 26: See, for example, James Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes,” American Political Science Review 88 (September 1994): 577-592; the discrepancy between current and past beliefs is commented on by Kurt Gaubatz, “Democratic States and Commitment in International Relations,” International Organization 50 (Winter 1996): 109-140. Back.

Note 27: Charles Edward Lindblom, “The Science of Muddling Through,” Public Administration Review 19 (Spring 1959): 74-88. Back.

Note 28: See especially Bernard Brodie, War and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1973), chap. 1. Back.

Note 29: Steven Lee Myers, “Secretary of State Sells Foreign Policy at Home,” New York Times, 8 February 1997. For a discussion of decision makers’ attitudes toward whether public support is desirable or necessary for an effective foreign policy, see Douglas Foyle, “Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: Elite Beliefs as a Mediating Variable,” International Studies Quarterly 41 (March 1997): 141-170. Back.

Note 30: “Mr. President: Order the Arrest of War Criminals in Bosnia Now!” New York Times, 15 July 1997. Back.

Note 31: See, for example, Richard Kohn, “Out of Control: The Crisis in Civil-Military Relations,” National Interest 35 (Spring 1995): 3-17; the symposium in the following issue; and A. J. Bacevich, “Tradition Abandoned: America’s Military in a New Era,” National Interest 48 (Summer 1997): 16-25. The difficulties are exacerbated but not caused by Bill Clinton’s unique characteristics. Back.