World Policy Journal
Volume XX, No 3, Fall 2003

Quixotic America
James Chace ^*

 

To conceive extravagant pretensions from success in war is to forget how hollow is the confidence by which you are elated. For if many ill-conceived plans have succeeded through the still greater fatuity of an opponent, many more, apparently well laid, have on the contrary ended in disgrace.

History of the Peloponnesian War
—Thucydides

The pretensions of the Bush administration go far beyond any efforts to transform Iraq into a liberal democracy. The ultimate goal of the administration is to do away with a multipolar world, leaving the United States as the predominant world power while other nations are to be content to play supporting roles. We don’t want allies. We want satraps. Countries that challenge our imperial role—notably France and Germany, Russia and China—are to be stripped of this ambition when they are confronted by American military and economic prowess.

Make no mistake about it: the Bush administration is not interested in internationalizing policy in the Middle East. But the other great and near-great powers want to be in a position to affect the political situation in Iraq, and indeed in the Middle East writ large. Contrary to American policy, the goal of these "lesser" powers is to create a multipolar world in which the United States does not predominate.

Bush’s national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, made this American aim clear at a speech she delivered in London this past June. Europe, she said, must repudiate the "multipolarity" that in the past "was a necessary evil that sustained the absence of war" but "did not promote the triumph of peace." "Multipolarity," she added "is a theory of rivalry, of competing interests—and at its worst—competing values. We have tried this before. It led to the Great War." ¹

Her message was clear: Give up the quest for a multipolar world. Embrace a unipolar world in which nations band together under American direction to "make common cause against freedom’s enemies." As it happens, Rice’s version of history is badly skewed. It was not multipolarity, which for most of the nineteenth century produced the semblance of a balance of power, that led to the First World War; conflict came about because Germany tried to over-turn the balance that existed at the turn of the century. In short, it was the breakdown, not the existence, of a balance of power that caused the Great War.

Rice’s speech was the natural extension of the administration’s National Security Strategy, issued in September 2002. The United States, that document promised, would maintain whatever military capability needed to defeat any attempt by any state to oppose the will of the United States and its allies, and to discourage or prevent any potential adversaries from building up their own forces to equal or surpass ours. This echoed the 1992 draft of a Pentagon planning document, drawn up under Dick Cheney when he was the elder Bush’s secretary of defense, that argued that the United States must "discourage the advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." ²

Speaking at the West Point commencement in June 2002, George W. Bush anticipated the thrust of the National Security Strategy. "America," he asserted, "has, and intends to keep, military strength beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace." This, as foreign policy analyst Fareed Zakaria has pointed out, was "a breathtaking statement, promising that American power will transform international politics itself, making the millennia-old struggle over national security obsolete." It was, Zakaria concluded, "the most Wilsonian statement any President has made since Wilson himself, echoing his pledge to create a ‘universal domination of right.’" ³

And what is American power supposed to achieve in the foreseeable future? Again according to Condoleezza Rice, it is to remake the Middle East, a region she rightly describes as suffering from a political and economic "freedom deficit." America’s aim will be to build a free, prosperous, democratic, and tolerant Middle East, just as America helped build a free, prosperous, democratic, and tolerant Western Europe after the Second World War. This will require "a commitment of many years," just as it did in Europe. In fact, it will mean "a generational commitment." ⁴

A generational commitment used to mean 30 years, based on the classic three-generation— grandparents, parents, child— cycle in a century. If rebuilding the Middle East and defeating radical Islam is what the present administration has in mind, this means spending Midas-like sums of money and maintaining at least a generation-long military presence, and all of this to remake a region that is far from resembling the advanced industrial society that Western Europe was in 1947. That was when the Marshall Plan went into effect to give a further boost to the reconstruction of the European economy, which, however, had already been started by the Europeans themselves.

A Combination of Power and Morality
The case of Condoleezza Rice, as she changed from being a Roosevelt-like (both TR and FDR) realist to becoming a neo-Wilsonian moralist, is an interesting and instructive one. At the University of Denver, where she received her B.A., Rice was a student of Josef Korbel, the Czech refugee scholar whose daughter, Madeleine Albright, was Bill Clinton’s second secretary of state. Korbel was an expert in international relations, and in one of his courses on Soviet politics, he discussed the swings in Stalinist policies, as the Soviet leader veered from right to left in the 1920s until he had no competitors left. It has always been that "combination of power and morality," Rice said, "that I’ve found interesting. ⁵

In her academic life, as a professor and later provost at Stanford University, and in her career in government when she was on the first President Bush’s National Security Council staff, Rice was also very much influenced by the writings of Hans Morgenthau, the great theorist of realism who saw power as the key determinant of the national interest. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Morgenthau was highly critical of the national interest being defined in highly moralistic terms. (In this respect, both Dean Acheson and George Kennan shared his views.)

In a penetrating profile of Rice in The New Yorker in October 2002, Nicholas Lemann showed how Rice’s views changed, seemingly overnight. Until the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, Rice appeared to embrace the overall approach of the realist school. Eleven months before George W. Bush was elected president, she published an article in the January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs titled "Promoting the National Interest." It consisted in the main of a virulent.attack on the Clinton administration’s foreign policy. Rice was especially hostile to morally motivated "nation building" in small, unimportant countries such as Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, and Bosnia, and proposed concentrating on dealing with the great powers, notably Russia and China, and the major countries of the European Union. As Lemann later pointed out, "This was not the position of the new Administration’s hawks [who] think of themselves as moralists and world-remakers."

But things are different now. Rice has joined the moralists—Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and, above all, the president. These days, according to Lemann, "she often says that great power rivalry—the basic theme of realist foreign policy and of her own writing—is a thing of the past, because all the great powers now share the same interests (which are America’s interests)." Rice no longer seems to believe that American efforts to spread democracy globally was a sentimental distraction from great power politics: "To be sure," she wrote in her Foreign Affairs piece, "there is nothing wrong with doing something that benefits all humanity, but that is, in a sense, a second-order effect." Post-9/11, however, she tells Lemann, "I don’t think you ever want to simply abandon the unhappy and unfortunate residents of a dictatorship to their fate." This leads, of course, to efforts by the United States to effect "regime change." In addition, the new Rice believes democracy is "the road to modernity...defined as adherence to certain key fundamental principles about the relationship between human beings and their government." Or (according to Rice) as George W. Bush would ask, "What is the principled thing to do or the right thing to do?" ⁶ This outlook is also reflected in the National Security Strategy, which asserts that there is "a single sustainable model for national [i.e., American] success" that is "right and true for every person, in every society." In the Bush administration’s thinking, the idea that the American model is the global model means that "multipolarity" is out of date.

Changing Views of America’s Role
The international system seen as one that should be cast in the American mold is radically different from the world system that earlier postwar American presidents envisaged. In particular, the world that Richard Nixon believed was emerging resembled the classical model of a balance of power. In 1972, Nixon articulated his vision of a global concert that was similar to the European system resulting from agreements among the great powers after the defeat of Napoleonic France in 1815. "We must remember," Nixon said, "the only time in history that we have had any extended periods of peace is when there has been a balance of power. It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competition that the danger of war arises." Looking to his preferred version of the future, he concluded: "I think it will be a safer world if we have a strong, healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance." ⁷

This was very much the system that might well have emerged after the Cold War, had the leaders of the United States shared Nixon’s view. To a certain degree, without following the explicit schema Nixon had suggested, George H. W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s policies did not impede, and in many ways, encouraged the evolution of such an international system. Washington sought closer ties with postcommunist Russia after the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact and urged Moscow to move more swiftly toward a decentralized economy and liberal democracy.

Even after the 1989 massacre in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square of students and workers demonstrating for greater freedom and accountability by their leaders, both Bush and Clinton continued to make serious efforts to bind China into international institutions (such as the World Trade Organization) and to play a larger diplomatic role in East Asia, policies that were designed to encourage China’s emergence as a great power, balancing and eventually cooperating more closely with Japan, the second-largest economy in the world after the United States. At the same time, the West European nations, led by France and Germany, were in the process of making an ever greater union out of the European states (now including countries that were formerly part of the Soviet bloc) by adopting a single currency and later preparing a new European constitution.

There was, of course, one enormous consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union that surprised the other powers. Soviet Russia was far weaker than Western intelligence agencies had generally admitted. Its military was underpaid and demoralized, the economy itself was one large Potemkin village, masking the reality of poverty and corruption that lay behind it, and the restive states that formed part of the Soviet Union—the Baltic states, Ukraine, Georgia, Byelorussia, and the Central Asian countries—were ready to demand their independence.

The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the last impediment to America’s emergence as the world’s sole superpower. This allowed Washington to pay a hegemonic role that could—and did under George W. Bush—become an imperial one. The American empire is, to be sure, an informal construct; but with an economy and a military that far exceeds any other nation’s, the United States is the locomotive of the global economy and the self-appointed global cop. Such power comes at a price. Other great powers may not be able to challenge the United States one-on-one, but they can—and will—band together to prevent America from carrying out policies they oppose.

There is, however, an alternate course for the United States to follow. America has the power to take the lead in creating a concert of powers, along the lines of, but not restricted to, Nixon’s pentagonal world. It could seek a moral consensus for moderation, as stability tends to be more likely if such a balance is underpinned by a moral and political consensus. Not only would there have to be a shared view that war between the great powers is impermissible, but also that there must be rules of conduct in trade and financial dealings that avoid beggar-thy-neighbor policies. Above all, a market-driven economy must be tempered by social justice. ⁸

Such a policy would hark back to Theodore Roosevelt’s view of America’s role in the world. Roosevelt was president at a time when America, its economic power rivaling that of Germany, Britain, and France, was already assuming a global role commensurate with its new economic strength, and he was eager to have America play its part in a global balance of power, linked to what he saw as righteous idealism. "Our chief usefulness to humanity," he wrote, "rests on our combining power with high purpose."

In typically Rooseveltian fashion, he distrusted "fantastic peace treaties" and an overemphasis on legalistic moralism. He compared international affairs with the Wild West before state and municipal law enforcement were in place, suggesting as a remedy "the action of a posse comitatus of powerful and civilized nations." Even when he urged the creation of an "international judiciary" within "a League of Peace," he believed that for it to be effective, it had to be backed by an "international police force." At bottom, as the historian John Morton Blum writes in The Republican Roosevelt, TR "sought security and peace in concerts of power in Europe and Asia and in power applied to discipline disorder." Far from rejecting multipolarity, Roosevelt would have campaigned for it.

A Nation to Serve Mankind
The Bush administration came into power with a very different mindset from the one it has since adopted. Bush and his closest advisers were deeply suspicious of multipolarity and disposed to pursue U.S. interests unilaterally. They were equally hostile to a Wilsonian approach that emphasized nation building and messianic efforts to imprint an American model of democracy on a global scale. Seeking an opportunity for the United States to extend its values to the Old World, Wilson declared: "We created this nation not to serve ourselves, but to serve mankind."

Yet, just as Condoleezza Rice has shifted her views away from the realist perspective that had been her intellectual grounding, so too the president himself has now embraced the role of leading America on a crusade to rid the world of terrorism and install democracy on the benighted masses of the Middle East. Like Wilson, George Bush appeals to the American people for public support in universalistic terms.

In the months following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the president and his advisers came to believe that a military campaign in Iraq would bring about a Wilsonian regime change in that country. Bush, and especially those in the Defense Department, concluded that if the United States could topple the autocratic, brutal regime of Saddam Hussein and replace it with a functioning democracy, this would have a positive demonstration effect on the other countries of the region. This, more than anything else, would help curb Islamist terrorism; it could lead to a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict; it could ensure the regular flow of oil at reasonable prices; and countries with democratic institutions would help to ensure economic stability and a better life for the Muslim peoples who inhabit the region.

Ironically, Secretary of State Colin Powell, in his first press conference with the president-elect, had scorned Saddam Hussein as a "weak dictator sitting on a failed regime that is not going to be around in a few years time." At that time, Iraq was not seen as a major threat to American interests: far more worrisome were a nuclear-armed Pakistan, the Arab-Israeli conflict, nonstate terrorist organizations, and the possible development of long-range missiles by "rogue states."

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, priorities had to change in order to combat the threat of the al-Qaeda terrorist network. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, America’s NATO allies supported the United States by voting to invoke Article V, which essentially states that an attack on one member is an attack on all. France’s Le Monde headlined its support by announcing, "Today we are all Americans." But in a signal that Washington alone would in the end decide the correct response and that the allies were expected to line up behind America’s strategies, President Bush declared: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

Washington’s decision to retaliate against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was widely supported. Victory there came easily, and the Taliban regime, which had permitted al-Qaeda to operate within Afghanistan’s borders, was quickly removed from power. In the war’s aftermath, U.S. forces remained to protect the new government headed by Hamid Karzai. But the efforts of the United States to rebuild Afghanistan, indeed to create a functioning Afghan state, have badly faltered.

Unwilling to send more forces to assure security in most of Afghanistan, the United States has to bear the responsibility for letting the country become once again a haven for potential terrorists, who may also be based in western Pakistan. In short, there is no real security outside the capital of Kabul. Instead, the warlords, who controlled much of Afghanistan after the Soviets pulled out in 1989, but fought a losing battle with the Taliban over the next decade, have returned.

A third of that country is now too dangerous to visit; there is still no constitution; women remain essentially powerless. It is true that the economy is growing, but as The Economist recently noted, "Any growth looks good when starting from zero; [Afghanistan’s economy] is still half the size it was in 1978" before the Russians invaded. Of the $4.5 billion promised for reconstruction at the Tokyo Conference last year, less than $1 billion has materialized. The bedrock issue is whether Afghanistan can be controlled by a national authority or whether the country simply disintegrates. ⁹ But rather than concentrating its military efforts to ensure security for the Karzai government and provide the economic where-withal to build up the country, the Bush administration began its crusade to topple the Iraqi regime.

"Imperialism Lite"
At the very moment Washington was deploying its armed forces to fight a preventive war in Iraq, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a study (in January 2003), stating that "Saddam is in an iron box." With tens of thousands of troops massed in the region, "an international coalition united in support of the [United Nations] inspection process, and now hundreds of inspectors in the country able to go anywhere at any time, Saddam is unable to engage in any large-scale development or production of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons." ¹⁰ Under the circumstances, Iraq could have been tied down indefinitely by a U.S. policy of aggressive containment.

But the Bush administration rejected the reasoning that if U.N. inspectors were allowed simply to continue their job military intervention could be avoided. Had this been the policy of the United States, there was a good chance of establishing a terrorist-free Afghanistan by focusing on the unfinished work there while waiting to see if the U.N. inspectors could finish their task in Iraq.

It is now clear that Dick Cheney in the White House and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in the Defense Department were above all determined to get rid of Saddam Hussein. By doing so, they would show neighboring countries that Washington was determined to remove regimes hostile to the United States and thus transform the region as a whole. Call it "imperialism lite." The Iraq war was intended to produce a domino effect. The thinking was that if America could turn one autocratic regime in the Middle East into a functioning democratic state, others would eventually fall in line.

To accomplish this, first the battle of Washington had to be won. What this meant was overcoming the doubts of Colin Powell, a convinced multilateralist, but also a skillful bureaucrat. John Newhouse, in his recent book, Imperial America, deftly describes the bureaucratic politics of this period. Powell, he writes, "deploys an exceptional knowledge of issues, a sharp intelligence, and much better than average judgment." Despite these gifts, "not since William Rogers, who served in the first Nixon administration, has a secretary of state been rolled over as often—or as routinely— as Powell." ¹¹

The secretary of state, whom Sen. John McCain had called "the most popular person in America," ought to have had unmatched power in the cabinet. But he seemed reluctant to use that power. Unwilling to threaten resignation, as Henry Kissinger routinely did in order to get his way when he was in government, Powell may be modeling himself after Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz. (Powell was assistant to the president for national security affairs at the end of the Reagan administration.) Shultz, a realist, became secretary of state only to find an administration dominated by ideologues who shared Reagan’s view of the Soviet Union as "the evil empire." He was, however, determined to overcome the ideologues’ reluctance to negotiate with Moscow, and in the end he won out. By the time the Reagan administration left office the main business of establishing a new relationship with Gorbachev’s Russia was thus well under way.

Powell’s patient multilateralism may yet vanquish Rumsfeld’s unilateralist approach to American foreign policy. But with only a year to go until the next presidential election, it may be too late to reverse policy direction. As John Newhouse points out, "on a given issue, Powell may seem to win the first round.... But far more often than not, his adversaries ask the White House for a review, and Powell almost invariably loses the second round. If he wins that round, the review process is likely to continue, and, chances are, he will lose the third or fourth round or however long it takes his adversaries to gain the decision they want." ¹² In any case, whatever Powell’s doubts about the war against Iraq, the president was determined to oust Saddam. In the absence of the discovery of weapons of mass destruction by the U.N. inspectors, Iraq’s alleged ties to al-Qaeda and the need to change the nature of a perennially hostile regime in the Middle East became the main rationale for going ahead. On May 1, after a quick and decisive war, President Bush declared victory. But Iraq was—and remains—in shambles.

Quixotic Notions
The likelihood of building a democracy in Iraq must be rated very low. A functioning democracy depends on domestic security, an economy that provides a decent standard of living for its citizens, some reasonable degree of social cohesion, and more than merely adequate political institutions. None of these conditions can be said to exist in Iraq. Commitments by "elites" are also vital, as they will fill the highest positions in running the state. Democracy requires free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, an impartial bureaucracy, and an honest police force. All these institutions that make a democracy a democracy are needed before guaranteed civil liberties and separation of powers among the branches of government can be put in place.

Pointing to the experience of postwar Germany and Japan as a model for success in Iraq, as some in the Bush administration have done, is delusional. Both countries had vibrant democratic institutions before the Second World War. As Eva Bellin, a faculty associate at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, points out, "Japan in the immediate aftermath of World War II...had an effective, rule-governed bureaucracy and a police force that could be marshaled to the cause of building a functioning, effective Quixotic America 13.democracy in that country. Iraq is not comparably equipped." ¹³ Rule-governed state institutions had persisted in Germany throughout the Nazi regime. In Iraq, by contrast, Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Party penetration of state institutions went far deeper, which means that Washington’s commitment to building a democratic society will require years, if not decades.

Can outsiders create a flourishing democracy where the conditions for democracy are all but nonexistent? As Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment argues, while outsiders can remove the financial and political support that sustain authoritarian regimes, it is quite another story for outsiders to install a democracy that will grow deep roots. Since so many Iraqis perceive the United States as yet another imperial power, they are unlikely to create institutions that they see as primarily serving American national interests.

If democracy is to take root in Iraq therefore, the role of building democratic state institutions must be given over to the United Nations. Iraq should become in fact if not in law a trusteeship of the United Nations. America’s role would then be to provide the bulk of security forces during a transitional period. NATO, however, should take over command of the military (as in Kosovo), and NATO troops should be augmented by soldiers from non-Western countries like Morocco and India.

As for economic aid for the rebuilding of Iraq, the United States is now providing 95 percent of the total, but it should seek to secure at least 40 percent of needed funds elsewhere, mainly from the European Union and Japan. This is especially urgent when the U.S. budget deficit is likely to exceed $500 billion, even before the costs of Iraqi operations are included. ¹⁴ Iraq’s oil facilities are far from being ready to resume full production; estimates of the cost of upgrading Iraqi infrastructure range from $16 billion to $30 billion. If others agree to share the cost of rebuilding the country, they will reasonably want a share of Iraqi business, but, as Fareed Zakaria has suggested, "that would also help get those countries invested in Iraq’s success." ¹⁵

The challenge to American predominance will only increase. The leaders of France, Germany, Russia, and China have spoken out in favor of a global system with multiple centers of power. As France’s Jacques Chirac, the most outspoken of these leaders, recently declared in addressing his diplomatic corps, Europe should forge alliances with "other major poles in the world," including China, India, Japan, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. ¹⁶

For the United States to oppose a multi-polar world is as quixotic as tilting at wind-mills. The real danger, however, is that multipolarity could easily turn into a contest for power, with the major nations unwilling to establish a salutary balance of power. In order to prevent such an outcome, the United States should adopt a foreign policy that promotes the common interests of the major powers. This can be done only if Washington abandons its unilateral approach and adopts an internationalism that embraces the International Criminal Court, global environmental protection, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, all of which the United States has so far rejected.

"To conceive extravagant pretensions from success in war," as Thucydides warns us, is indeed "to forget how hollow is the confidence by which you are elated." A multipolar world is in the offing. America’s task is to help shape it to ends that will benefit the national interest as well as the global commons.

Notes

1. Condoleezza Rice, "Remarks at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, United Kingdom," June 26, 2003. Office of the Press Secretary, The White House.

2. See Patrick E. Tyler, "U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop," New York Times, March 8, 1992.

.3. See Fareed Zakaria, "Our Way," The New Yorker, October 14–21, 2002.

4. See Condoleezza Rice, "Transforming Iraq," an address given at the Twenty-eighth Annual Convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, Dallas, Texas, August 8, 2003.

5. See Nicholas Lemann, "Without a Doubt: Has Condoleezza Rice Changed George W. Bush, or Has He Changed Her?" The New Yorker, October 14–21, 2002.

6. All quotes from Rice are taken from Lemann’s profile in The New Yorker.

7. Interview in Time magazine, January 3, 1972.

8. See James Chace and Nicholas X. Rizopoulos, "Toward a New Concert of Nations: An American Perspective," World Policy Journal, vol. 16 (fall 1999).

9. "Not a Dress Rehearsal," The Economist, August 16, 2003.

10. As quoted in John Newhouse, Imperial America: The Bush Assault on the World Order (New York: Knopf, 2003), p. 62.

11. Newhouse, Imperial America, pp. 23–24.

12. Ibid., pp. 25–26.

13. See Eva Bellin, "Bringing Iraq Back? Doubts about Democracy," Harvard Magazine, July-August 2003.

14. Steven R. Weisman, "Bush Foreign Policy and Harsh Reality," New York Times, September 5, 2003.

15.See Fareed Zakaria, "What We Should Do Now," Newsweek, September 1, 2003, pp. 24–25.

16. Elaine Sciolino, "Chirac Spares the U.S. in Defending His Stand on the Iraq War," New York Times, August 30, 2003.

* James Chace, editor of this magazine from 1993 to 2000, teaches international relations at Bard College. He is also the director of the Bard/NYC Program on Globalization and International Affairs. His new book , 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs: The Election That Changed the Country will be published in May 2004.