|
|
|
|
The National Interest
Letters
by Francis Fukuyama, Ian Rainey, Mike Roskin, Gary Schmitt, George Modelski, John M. Owen, IV, Eric Chenoweth, Kenneth Minogue and Max Singer
Fukuyama Responds
I HAD NOT intended to respond to Charles Krauthammer's "In Defense of Democratic Realism" (Fall 2004), since my aim was to stimulate a debate over the Bush Administration's foreign policy and not to spend time in an extended exegesis of Krauthammer's writings. I am compelled to respond, however, by one thing he wrote.
Krauthammer says I have a "novel way of Judaizing neoconservatism", and that my argument is a more "implicit and subtle" version of things said by Pat Buchanan and Mahathir Mohamad. Since he thinks the latter two are anti-Semites, he is clearly implying that I am one as well. If he really thinks this is so, he should say that openly.
What I said in my critique of his speech was, of course, quite different. I said that there was a very coherent set of strategic ideas that have come out of Israel's experience dealing with the Arabs and the world community, having to do with threat perception, pre-emption, the relative balance of carrots and sticks to be used in dealing with the Arabs, the United Nations, and the like. Anyone who has dealt with the Arab-Israeli conflict understands these ideas, and many people (myself included) believe that they were well suited to Israel's actual situation. You do not have to be Jewish to understand or adopt these ideas as your own, which is why people like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld share them. And it is not so hard to understand how one's experience of Arab-Israeli politics can come to color one's broader view of the world: The 1975 "Zionism is racism" resolution deeply discredited the UN, in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews alike, on issues having nothing to do with the Middle East. This is not about Judaism; it is about ideas. It would be quite disingenuous of Charles Krauthammer to assert that his view of how Israel needs to deal with the Arabs (that is, the testicular route to hearts and minds) has no impact on the way he thinks the United States should deal with them. And it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether this is the best way for the United States to proceed.
I understand perfectly well that Krauthammer has a narrower interpretation of American interests than William Kristol or Robert Kagan, and that he wants to use democracy promotion primarily as a tool to achieve realist ends. I would say that both of these positions are wrong: What we need is not democratic realism, but a realistic Wilsonianism that matches means to ends better than the Bush Administration has done. Krauthammer should consider that if democracy is merely a means and not an end of our policy, we would never support Israel as strongly as we do.
Now that the partisanship of the election is past, it is important for American policymakers to sit down quietly and reflect a bit on the past four years. A lot of mistakes and poor judgment calls were made; some were by individuals and others were failures of institutions. Charles Krauthammer joins the Bush Administration in doggedly defending everything that has been said and done in U.S. foreign policy over the past three years. Let's hope this doesn't remain the pattern as we move into the first year of the new administration.
Francis Fukuyama
Johns Hopkins University
Friends in Need?
I WOULD LIKE to offer a point of clarification regarding Nikolas K. Gvosdev's and Travis Tanner's "Wagging the Dog" (Fall 2004). The authors stated: "The United States has on many occasions demonstrated its resolve to Beijing through weapons sales, public statements and deployments of the Sixth Fleet." I suspect they actually meant the Seventh Fleet, which is responsible for the Taiwan Straits. The Sixth Fleet is based in Gaeta, Italy. Its area of responsibility is Europe, Africa and Israel.
Ian Rainey
Johns Hopkins University
HANS MORGENTHAU said it in 1948, and it bears repeating here: "Never allow a weak ally to make decisions for you." Those who do "lose their freedom of action by identifying their own national interest completely with those of the weak ally."
Mike Roskin
Chair, Political Science Dept.
Lycoming College
NIKOLAS GVOSDEV and Travis Tanner would have you believe that the tail is "Wagging the Dog"; that reckless leadership by allies in Taiwan and Georgia is putting at risk the larger national security interests of their key benefactor, the United States. However, the evidence they present for this conclusion is scant at best.
They over-dramatize the actions of tiny Taiwan with respect to its enormous neighbor. How irresponsible indeed of the Taiwanese to discuss defending themselves from some 600 PRC missiles pointed their way, and how worse it is to begin amending a constitution written nearly fifty years ago for a one-party dictatorship! These changes will not, as President Chen has promised, touch on any issue that might be construed as changing the status quo in cross-Strait relations. As for Beijing accepting the current situation-China spends enormous amounts on developing a military capability to coerce Taiwan; routinely practices invasion scenarios; publicly states that it reserves the right to settle the dispute militarily if Taiwan does not agree to talks leading to unification in the near future; and works assiduously at denying Taiwan any semblance of international legitimacy.
Nor should Beijing's cooperation with the United States on non-proliferation and the War on Terror be overstated. China's cooperation on these issues has been perfunctory: No serious pressure has been applied to North Korea, Chinese companies continue to assist states like Iran with their weapons program, and the only "terrorists" Beijing sees are those who are opposed to its dictatorial ways, such as the Uighur Muslims.
With regard to Georgia and Russia, it is Putin's increasingly open accretion of authoritarian power that is creating a new rift in U.S.-Russian relations. Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili may have taken steps with which the United States was not comfortable, but no ally should be expected to ignore its own pressing national interests-especially when they involve the neutralization of three large, Russian-supported, criminal pseudo-states within the country's borders. Gvosdev and Tanner cite the tension with Russia over Abkhazia but fail to mention that the Russian government played major role in the Abkhazia problem devolving into its current dangerous state. Ultimately, U.S. national security interests lie not with placating an increasingly anti-democratic and unreliable Russia, but rather with ensuring that a democratic Georgia succeeds in becoming a beacon of hope for the rest of the region. In turn, Russia should be working with the United States and Europe to stabilize Georgia and sustain its territorial integrity, especially after the tragedy in Beslan. Such cooperation will lead to the most realistic benefits in terms of advancing the fight against terror and preventing the deadly disintegration of states in the Caucasus along ethnic lines.
If managed with common sense and a long-term strategy in mind, the United States does not have to choose between having good relations with Russia and China and supporting allies like Taiwan and Georgia. In any case, China will cooperate with the United States when Beijing decides such cooperation is in its interest, even if it is not happy with the approach of the United States toward Taiwan at any given moment. The United States should certainly avoid unnecessary acrimony with Russia, but managing the partnership does not mean always having to yield to Russian demands, especially when they conflict with America's overriding security goal of creating a democratic, stable Eurasia.
America's conception of its own vital interest is shifting. The United States has now placed at the top of its foreign policy agenda the advance of democracy in the broader Middle East and neighboring regions as a bulwark against Islamist radicalism and extremism there. Democracy and realpolitik go hand in hand in the post-9/11 world. The new enemy is transnational and cannot be contained by exclusive reliance on large state actors, especially those that aggravate extremist tensions through repressive policies.
Gvosdev and Tanner end by citing Ronald Reagan, who stated, "I am hardline and will never appease [the Soviets]. But I do want to try to let them see there is a better world if they'll show by deed that they want to get along with the free world." This is indeed the right approach-in dealing with China and Russia.
Gary Schmitt
Executive Director
Project for the New American Century
GVOSDEV and TANNER RESPOND: We would like to thank Gary Schmitt for his thoughtful reply to our essay. For reasons of space, we cannot present a comprehensive response to his points. We would disagree, however, with his assertion that the United States "does not have to choose" between keeping good relations with Russia and China and supporting allies like Taiwan or Georgia. This, to us, seems like wishful thinking. Sometimes we have to choose. And as realists, we feel that our choices must be grounded in a clear assessment of America's foreign policy priorities.
In combatting the new threats of the 21st century-terrorism and WMD proliferation-the United States cannot do it alone, and it cannot do it via cosmetic coalitions where the United States bears almost all of the burden. We do not advocate "exclusive" reliance on large state actors, but their essential contributions cannot be minimized. Beijing, for example, encouraged Islamabad to cooperate with Washington in the run-up to the American offensive against the Taliban, cooperated with the Container Security Initiative (CSI) and allowed an fbi office in Beijing. Certainly, China or Russia can deliver more than they have. But the cooperation we are already receiving from both-including on Afghanistan and North Korea-is not inconsequential. And Schmitt doesn't explain how the United States can ignore vital Chinese or Russian concerns and yet expect a complete and full accommodation of American priorities.
The United States will never abandon its friends, but it should emphasize that it will never risk its relations with major powers by offering unconditional support for optional policies and maximalist agendas that complicate America's foreign policy efforts. The United States is not obligated to back any course of action simply because an ally chooses one preference over others. After all, the United States had little difficulty telling another island democracy facing both internal separatists and a hostile mainland neighbor not to move forward on steps we thought would needlessly inflame a volatile region. In 1998, Washington applied a great deal of pressure to dissuade the Cypriot government from installing the S-300 missile batteries, even though it had legitimate security concerns, on the grounds that this could escalate tensions throughout the eastern Mediterranean. To argue that Georgia should seek to reunify through peaceful means rather than a military campaign fraught with risks of further destabilizing an already explosive region, or that Taiwan should be satisfied with de facto rather than formal sovereignty does not qualify as appeasement of Moscow or Beijing, but as a level-headed approach to managing volatile situations.
Nor did we argue that it was unwise for Taiwan to be concerned about its security. But given that Taiwan's defense budget has declined annually over the past decade-which is certainly not the trend one expects to see from a territory under direct threat-one wonders whether Taipei genuinely feels that the PRC poses an imminent threat. This underscores Taipei's assumption of U.S. military intervention in the event of an unprovoked attack by the mainland. With regard to Abkhazia, we believe that Charles King's essay in this issue helps to illuminate what is a more complex situation than simply a Russian-backed plot to create a criminal pseudo-state on Georgian territory.
In a post-9/11 environment, we believe it is vital for the United States to have a consistent approach to foreign policy, one that is clear to friends and foes alike. Schmitt's logic is difficult to follow. Should democratic governments in Serbia and Cyprus, following his line on Georgia, feel they can take whatever means are necessary to reunify their countries? Or should ethnic separatists in Kosovo and Northern Cyprus take comfort, citing his position on Taiwan? Such conflicting signals give rise to charges about "double standards" in U.S. policy. They also give the appearance that U.S. foreign policy is based on special interests rather than national ones.
We don't harbor illusions about Russia or China (although both today are much more liberal and pluralist than they were twenty years ago). And we recognize the important contributions that smaller states can make in helping to spread zones of stability and prosperity around the world. But we remain committed to the principle that how other states aid American efforts to deal with the core threats that affect our survival should be the principal factor in shaping our foreign policy.
Working in Theory
AS A LIFE-LONG student of international relations with a penchant for theory, I feel challenged to comment on the theoretical portion of Clifford Kupchan's "Real Democratik" (Fall 2004)-in particular the prediction that "the contemporary international order", viewed as both "normatively good" and "empirically inevitable", will be marked for the next several decades by "unprecedented American unipolarity."
Like its cousins, bipolarity and multipolarity, unipolarity has been a key term of international relations. But the time has come to take another look at it. The conventional view equates polarity with raw power-a concentrated distribution of military and economic capacity. (I used this approach in my 1974 monograph, World Power Concentrations, one of the first, if not the first, attempts actually to measure unipolarity.) That is the metric (indexed by military expenses) basically used by Kupchan.
The main reason for taking another look at the "raw power" metric is the rising complexity of contemporary world politics. Most day-to-day international problems are increasingly processed in institutional and multilateral contexts, such as summit meetings, regional bodies, international financial institutions and the like. In this context, institutional power means decisional or voting power. Unipolarity here means control of a "one-party" system, and is measured by the ability to obtain favorable outcomes-and one of the relevant metrics is world public opinion.
I tend to agree with Kupchan that in today's international system, unipolarity probably prevails in terms of raw (military) power, but I do not think it obviously does so in relation to institutional power. In fact, some recent trends point toward the growth of a "bi- or multi-party" system in that area. Multipolarity is a fact in the world economy. Two or three decades ahead, unipolarity is still probable for forces of global reach (commanding sea, air and space) but not for all the aspects of military power.
If unipolarity claims to be the unique source of the public goods of world order, then its exercise labors under all the well-known burdens and criticisms of monopoly power: excessive costs combined with underperformance. Because it yields high profits but deteriorates into incompetence, a monopoly attracts competition and generates serious conflicts.
On such grounds, a monopoly is morally suspect, but there is an exception: when a monopoly naturally emerges from a process of innovation. In public life, the general interest in innovation is usually protected by patent law that grants the inventor a temporary privilege. Similarly, in world politics we might argue that world powers earn a temporary relief from the inevitable pressures and criticisms of monopoly in recognition of their inventive solutions of critical global problems. The early phases of the exercise of global leadership by the United States, Britain (twice), the Dutch republic and Portugal demonstrate that point. But does this hold for the current situation? Claims of benignity or benevolence are not enough.
All in all, Kupchan would be well advised not to use "inevitable" or "entrenched" unipolarity as the principal pillar of his analysis. As for the longevity of unipolarity, he might consider looking into the findings of the theory of long cycles.
George Modelski
Professor Emeritus
University of Washington
CLIFFORD KUPCHAN is to be congratulated for his thoughtful and timely call on his fellow Democrats to attend to the fact, and the desirability, of unipolarity-that is, that the United States has unprecedented international power and that it ought to seek to preserve that power. Indeed, as one of those rare academics who tend to vote Republican, I would like to see a corresponding Real Republikan approach that would recognize the common interest that the United States and its democratic allies have in preserving and extending the post-World War II international order. It would strive to keep the bargain on which that order is based, including the agreement to render U.S. actions predictable by binding America to some extent through international institutions. It would also insist that catastrophic terrorism is a grave threat to that order and the countries that subscribe to it.
Real Republikan would differ from Real Demokratik, however, by recognizing just how difficult unipolarity makes voluntary international cooperation. Unipolarity not only tempts America to act in ways and regions previously off limits, it also causes other countries to worry more about whatever the United States does. When America uses force in Afghanistan or Iraq, more people than ever around the world suspect that we are building a world empire. Most concerned countries have good reasons not to try to form a serious anti-U.S. alliance, but they use various low-cost tools, including diplomacy and passivity, to block perceived expansions in U.S. power. Iraq is where the costs of this resistance are felt most keenly today.
And of course Islamist terrorism is itself partly a product of unipolarity. Absent America's unchallenged military, economic and cultural presence in the Middle East, it is difficult to imagine 9/11. The Real in Real Republikan is an acknowledgment that in an anarchical international system the weak are bound to worry about the powerful. It thus implies that the recent surge in anti-Americanism is by no means entirely the fault of the Bush Administration.
In such a world, where even America's friends try to contain it and its enemies are capable of harming it grievously without defeating it militarily, America has less freedom of action than many understand-less, in fact, than it had during the Cold War. Its dilemma is to keep itself safe and prosperous while reassuring the world that it is not seeking global domination. America must find the correct tradeoff between, on the one hand, vigor in attacking terrorism and WMD proliferation, and on the other, rendering its own future actions predictable. Excessive unilateralism against terror will alienate countries otherwise inclined to help. But excessive self-binding will lead to excessive passivity against terrorism, for even many of its friends are bound to want America to under-invest in its own security.
The frontier along which the right amounts of vigor and self-binding are traded is hard to find. But Real Republikan would insist that the frontier exists, and that America's grand strategy after 9/11 must find it and stay on it.
John M. Owen, IV
Associate Professor
University of Virginia
That Magic Moment
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA'S critique of Charles Krauthammer's doctrine of a unipolar America ("The Neoconserv-ative Moment", Summer 2004), properly scolds Krauthammer for ignoring clearly unfortunate "facts on the ground." For Krauthammer does not just skip over inconvenient facts, he mistakes his judgement for fact-most importantly, the judgement that our transatlantic allies no longer count for much. But does the current "coalition of the willing" (wherein American forces take nearly all the burden) really equal a coherent NATO force willing to take action against radical Islamism? Might it not have been better to take Lord Robertson and nato up on their pledge after 9/11 to stand with the U.S. against terrorism? It was the imprudence of the current foreign policy, consonant with the democratic realism put forward by Krauthammer, that has placed America in the current position of temporal alliances having no common (or lasting) values, when a different diplomatic and ideological approach could have strengthened America's efforts.
The neoconservative argument that I knew during the Cold War was a moral one that reaffirmed the inherent rightness of upholding freedom against totalitarianism. Clearly, the neoconservative argument has gone way off course in trading sound policies of containment using democratic alliances for a doctrine of pre-emption that insisted on war in Iraq. But let this cold warrior state the case plainly: Pre-emption leads nations to unnecessary and therefore immoral wars and the harmful consequences such wars bring, including ruptured alliances and the consequent reduced influence of the United States in world affairs.
That there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq, that there are now a thousand American fatalities (and untold numbers of Iraqis), that traditional alliances with nations possessing real military strength have been broken, that there is a breakdown in civil order in Iraq-nothing can dissuade the purveyors of pre-emption that Iraq was a wrong course to take. Thus, Krauthammer's attempts to put limits on democratic idealism begs the question: Where does such reasoning end when it begins with an unnecessary war?
There is no doubt America is the sole superpower. But there is also no doubt that America will not be able to prosecute the War on Terror alone or with ad hoc alliances. Even our current "coalition of the willing" is a bow to this reality that the superpower cannot be the sole policeman. But if America's new foreign policy has alienated such sturdy democratic allies as France and Germany (because, as Fukuyama points out, we have simply lost the capacity to listen), one cannot hope that the perpetuation of that foreign policy will create sturdy (and equally powerful) new ones. Instead, America's allies will have the color of dictatorships like Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, and our antagonists that of a greater number of NATO members and democracies. This is neither prudent nor moral foreign policymaking.
Eric Chenoweth
Washington, DC
Nobody's Fault But Mine
NEIL MCINNES'S remarkable account of the rise and fall of "Australian genocide" ("Requiem for a Genocide", Summer 2004) is a case study in one of the more striking Western pathologies of recent times: that of the volunteer scapegoat. The common, in some ways rational, response when individuals or nations are reproached is to argue, "It's not my fault." In many cases, of course, this response is self-serving. The strange thing in these political cases is that the response of "it is our fault" often turns out to be no less irrational. Similarly, the rational response to being kidnapped or hijacked is resentment and an attempt to frustrate the crime. But the so-called "Stockholm syndrome" is a pathology in which the victims identify with their abductors. Some light is shed on these moral attitudes if we remember Orwell's view that many people (and especially intellectuals) find power hard to resist. They feel they must try to understand why Stalin, Hitler, Bin Laden and the like have the power and the passions they do. In the Australian case, most of the voluntary scapegoats belonged to the academic classes, and they went further. They not only embraced but virtually fabricated the case for national self-accusation. Many of them came to think that Australia must collectively and institutionally say "sorry" in order to sustain its place in the comity of morally acceptable states.
One can only speculate about the thoughts that went into this curious collective enthusiasm. These must include a Christian belief about repentance warranting forgiveness-the illusion that moral immaculacy is possible. Another line of thought was clearly an ill-informed induction from realism. Similar bad things have happened in other encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples: Who are we in Australia to think that we are better than others? We may also guess that the vanity of liberal elites disposes them easily to think of themselves as honest, frank and sensitive, by contrast with the self-serving civic partialities of what politicians these days call "ordinary people." No doubt many other impulses are at work, but among the lessons we may derive from these strange attitudes is that rationally benevolent dispositions can sometimes lead to a ruthless indulgence in untruth.
Kenneth Minogue
London, UK
Fueling Debate
THE ARTICLE "The New Geopolitics of Oil" (Special Energy Supplement, Winter 2003/04) by Joe Barnes, Amy Jaffe and Edward L. Morse, unfortunately contains a good deal of old, in-the-box thinking, as well as a strange fascination with what they call "neoconservative" policy.
They use the old chestnut that Saudi Arabia has a quarter of global petroleum reserves. This would be a reasonable estimate for "conventional" oil. But conventional oil is an outdated category from the time that unconventional oil, principally Canadian tar sands and Venezuelan heavy oil, could not be produced at competitive costs. Including "unconventional" oil, the Western Hemisphere has more reserves than the Persian Gulf region. While Persian Gulf oil mostly costs much less than $15 per barrel to produce, there is not enough very low cost oil on the market to keep the price below the current cost of unconventional oil.
They stress that the key element of Saudi oil power is the ability to expand production by 1.9 million barrels per day (BPD). But they ignore the fact that the OECD countries also have the possibility of putting an additional 1.9 million BPD into the market from their strategic stockpiles. This can dramatically affect the great fear that the Persian Gulf oil producers might someday shut their spigots and leave the West without the oil on which we have become dependent. OECD storage is enough to enable the world to do without Persian Gulf oil for about half a year. Can the Persian Gulf countries do without the dollars they get from selling oil for six months?
A real "New Geopolitics of Oil" would recognize that dependency in the relationship between buyers and sellers of oil runs in both directions and is much more complex than the old notion of consumers being at the mercy of the Persian Gulf producers.
Also, it is a little hard to understand why Barnes et al. think it is only "neoconservative ideology" that leads to the conclusion that the billions of dollars of Saudi oil money being spent annually to promote the Wahhabi brand of Islamism is playing a "pernicious" role in the world. Do liberals think the madrassas are helping the world?
Although they make a number of sound recommendations and provide some useful information, they seem to need windmills to tilt at, such as the idea that the Bush Administration decision to remove Saddam Hussein was partly motivated by the idea that a grateful Iraq would force oil prices to low levels. Producing a somewhat more pluralistic and free government in Iraq, in order to start the process of making the Middle East less of a source of danger to the world, would amply justify the U.S. removal of Saddam, and there is not and never was any reason to think that a free Iraq would want to pursue very low oil prices.
Max Singer
Hudson Institute