The National Interest: The Present Danger

The National Interest
Spring 2000 (No. 59)

The Present Danger (Extracts)

By Robert Kagan and William Kristol

. . . Throughout the 1990s, the United States has tended toward a course of gradual moral and strategic disarmament. Challenged by anti-American dictatorships in Baghdad and Belgrade, the Clinton administration responded by combining empty threats and indecisive military operations with diplomatic accommodation. Rather than press for changes of regime in Pyongyang and Beijing, the White House sought to purchase better behavior through bribes and "engagement." Rather than face squarely our world responsibilities, American political leaders chose drift and evasion.

In the meantime, the United States allowed its military strength to deteriorate to the point where its ability to defend its interests and deter future challenges is now in doubt. From 1989 to 1999, the defense budget and the size of the armed forces were cut by a third; the share of America's GDP devoted to defense spending was halved, from nearly 6 to around 3 percent; and the amount of money spent on weapons procurement and research and development declined by about 50 percent. By the end of the decade, the U.S. military was inadequately equipped and stretched to the point of exhaustion. And while defense experts spent the 1990s debating whether it was more important to maintain current readiness or to sacrifice present capabilities in order to prepare for future challenges, under the strain of excessive budget cuts the United States did neither.

Yet ten years from now, and perhaps a good deal sooner, we likely will be living in a world in which Iraq, Iran, North Korea and China all possess the ability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons. Within the next decade we may have to decide whether to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack. We could face another attempt by Saddam Hussein to seize Kuwait's oil fields. An authoritarian regime in Russia could move to reclaim some of what it lost in 1991.

While none of this is to argue that the world must become a vastly more dangerous place, the point is that the world can grow perilous with astonishing speed. Should it do so once more, it would be terrible to have to look back on the current era as a great though fleeting opportunity that was carelessly wasted. Everything depends on what we do now.

Cold War Distortions

Contrary to prevailing wisdom, the missed opportunities of the 1990s cannot be made up for merely by tinkering around the edges of America's current foreign and defense policies. The middle path many of our political leaders would prefer, with token increases in the defense budget and a "humble" view of America's role in the world, will not suffice. What is needed today is not better management of the status quo, but a fundamental change in the way our leaders and the public think about America's role in the world.

Serious thinking about that role should begin by recalling those tenets that guided American policy through the more successful phases of the Cold War. Many writers treat America's Cold War strategy as an aberration in the history of American foreign policy. Jeane Kirkpatrick expressed the common view of both liberal and conservative foreign policy thinkers when she wrote in these pages that, while the United States had "performed heroically in a time when heroism was required", the day had passed when Americans ought to bear such "unusual burdens." With a return to "normal" times, the United States could "again become a normal nation." In the absence of a rival on the scale of the Soviet Union, the United States should conduct itself like any other great power on the international scene, looking to secure only its immediate, tangible interests, and abjuring the broader responsibilities it had once assumed as leader of the Free World.

What is striking about this point of view is how at odds it is with the assumptions embraced by the leaders who established the guiding principles of American foreign policy at the end of World War II. We often forget that the plans for world order devised by American policymakers in the early 1940s were not aimed at containing the Soviet Union, which many of them still viewed as a potential partner. Rather, those policymakers were looking backward to the circumstances that had led to the catastrophe of global war. Their purpose was to construct a more stable international order than the one that had imploded in 1939: an economic system that furthered the aim of international stability by promoting growth and free trade; and a framework for international security that, although it placed some faith in the ability of the great powers to work together, rested ultimately on the fact that American power had become the keystone in the arch of world order.

American leaders in the early to mid-1940s rejected the notion that the United States could return to being a "normal" power after World War II. On the contrary, they believed that the "return to normalcy" that President Harding had endorsed in 1920 was the fatal error that led to the irresponsible isolationism of the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt said in 1941, "We will not accept a world, like the postwar world of the 1920s, in which the seeds of Hitlerism can again be planted and allowed to grow." Men like James Forrestal and Dean Acheson believed that the United States had supplanted Great Britain as the world’s leader and that, as Forrestal put it in 1941, "America must be the dominant power of the twentieth century."

Henry Luce spoke for most influential Americans inside and outside the Roosevelt administration when he insisted that it had fallen to the United States not only to win the war against Germany and Japan, but to create both "a vital international economy" and "an international moral order" that would together spread American political and economic principles--and in the process avoid the catastrophe of a third world war. Such thinking was reflected in Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter and, more concretely, in the creation of the international financial system at Bretton Woods in 1944 and of the United Nations a year later.

Thus, before American leaders came to view the Soviet Union as the great challenge to American security and American principles, they had arrived at the conclusion that it would be necessary for the United States (together, they hoped, with the other great powers) to deter aggression globally, whoever the aggressor might be. In fact, during the war years they were at least as worried about the possible re-emergence of Germany and Japan as about the Soviets. John Lewis Gaddis has summarized American thinking in the years between 1941 and 1946:

"The American President and his key advisers were determined to secure the United States against whatever dangers might confront it after victory, but they lacked a clear sense of what those might be or where they might arise. Their thinking about postwar security was, as a consequence, more general than specific."

Few influential government officials, moreover, were under the illusion that "collective security" and the United Nations could be counted on to keep the peace. In 1945 Harry Truman declared that the United States had become "one of the most powerful forces for good on earth", and the task now was to "keep it so" and to "lead the world to peace and prosperity." The United States had "achieved a world leadership which does not depend solely upon our military and naval might", Truman asserted. But it was his intention, despite demobilization, to ensure that the United States would remain "the greatest naval power on earth" and would maintain "one of the most powerful air forces in the world." Americans, Truman declared, would use "our military strength solely to preserve the peace of the world. For we now know that this is the only sure way to make our own freedom secure."

The unwillingness to sustain the level of military spending and preparedness required to fulfill this expansive vision was a failure of American foreign policy in the immediate aftermath of the war. It took the Iron Curtain and the outbreak of war in Korea to fully awaken Americans to the need for an assertive and forward-leaning foreign policy. But while the United States promptly rose to meet those challenges, a certain intellectual clarity was lost in the transition from the immediate postwar years to the beginning of the Cold War era. The original postwar goal of promoting and defending a decent world order became conflated with the goal of meeting the challenge of Soviet power. The policies that the United States should have pursued even in the absence of a Soviet challenge--seeking a stable and prosperous international economic order; playing a large role in Europe, Asia and the Middle East; upholding rules of international behavior that benefited Americans; promoting democratic reform where possible and advancing American principles abroad--all these became associated with the strategy of containing the Soviet Union. In fact, America was pursuing two goals at once during the Cold War: first, the promotion of a world order conducive to American interests and principles; and second, a defense against the immediate obstacle to achieving that order. Nevertheless, when the Cold War ended, many Americans recalled only the latter purpose. . . .