Great Powers Read online

  Say that fast five times in a row!

  My point is this: The continued de facto worldwide moratorium on preparation for straight-up, great-power-on-great-power war is a monumentally positive influence on human history. This is why it is so crucial that we shut down the remaining Sino-American scenarios for potentially direct confrontations (ditto for Russia), because as long as both sides allow their militaries to be shaped by such myopic scenarios, precious resources will be wasted that could be put to better use elsewhere in a complementary fashion.

  The Bush administration’s two terms overlapped extensively with the almost eight-year reign of Taipei’s provocatively nationalistic Democratic Progressive Party government of President Chen Shui-bian. To mince no words, the Bush-Cheney team handled the entire situation with great restraint and wisdom. The same can largely be said about handling China’s “rise” in general, including refusing to go off the deep end in response to various missteps and gaffes by Beijing (e.g., the satellite shoot-down test, the occasional spy scandal, refusing U.S. Navy ships safe harbor in a storm, the Tibet/Olympic torch protests). Instead, what we got from a Bush administration that came into power clearly itching for confrontation with China (remember the E-P3 plane incident in April 2001) was a calm, steady hand at the wheel of our bilateral relations, best exemplified by Henry Paulson’s stint as secretary of treasury, Robert Zoellick’s tenure as deputy secretary of state, the successive commands of admirals William Fallon and Timothy Keating at Pacific Command, and Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill’s supremely patient efforts at “cat herding” the six-party talks on North Korea.

  The lack of a serious U.S.-China confrontation in the years since 9/11 is the most important dog that did not bark during the Bush-Cheney administration. In the grand sweep of history, this is arguably George W. Bush’s greatest legacy: the encouragement of China to become a legitimate “stakeholder” in global security—Zoellick’s term. This sort of effort at grooming a great power for a greater role in international affairs is a careful balancing act, and the Bush team sounded most of the right notes, from reassuring nervous allies in Asia, to avoiding the temptation of trade retaliation while simultaneously pressuring Beijing for more economic liberalization, to drawing China into the dynamics of great-power negotiation over compelling regional issues like the nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran. We can always complain that Bush-Cheney didn’t do more to solidify what was the most important bilateral relationship of the twenty-first century, but we cannot fault them for any lasting mistakes, and that alone is quite impressive. Indeed, history will be likely to judge this success as greater than the Bush administration’s failures in Iraq.

  To a lesser degree, the same can be said of Bush-Cheney’s handling of Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power in Russia and that country’s re-emergence as a player to be reckoned with in international affairs. Yes, many lament Moscow’s slide toward authoritarianism, decrying the “loss” of democracy that never really existed in the first place, but the key thing to remember in the rise of the so-called “security guys” (siloviki) is that it has eliminated Western—and Eastern—fears of Russia’s imminent collapse and all the security burdens such an event could have foisted upon outside powers. Plus, any careful reading of Russian history will tell you that Moscow’s periodic depressive phases can—and should—last only so long, so a subsequent manic recovery was preordained. But just as important, it was both inevitable and good that Putin’s crowd arrested Russia’s long and pitiful downward spiral as a failed great power, because Moscow’s resurgence forces everybody to bring something closer to their “A” game when we butt heads over Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Real power vacuums are almost never adequately or intelligently filled, so better to let whatever power shifts must come do so at a gradual pace, allowing the targeted parties the time and confidence to play all ambitious external powers off one another. The strategic danger here arises when small states like Georgia (which started the conflict, mind you) are allowed to unilaterally declare war between Russia and the West, but here even we must acknowledge Bush-Cheney’s sensible restraint. Without it, we’d face a plethora of small-state nationalist leaders “auditioning” for the historic role of Archduke Ferdinand—unwitting trigger of World War I. That’s a casting call better skipped.

  While Bush-Cheney achieved only modest results in global trade policy, locking in several important bilateral free-trade agreements, they also steered the nation through plenty of rough waters without ever succumbing to congressional or popular pressures for trade protectionism. Moreover, the Bush White House made a good fight of trying to reduce America’s disastrously unfair agricultural subsidies as part of the World Trade Organization’s Doha Development Round negotiations, a stance that looks increasingly ridiculous—in addition to immoral—with global agricultural prices rising so high. If we factor in Bush’s dramatic increase of funding for global HIV prevention, as well as his creation of the innovative Millennium Challenge Corporation to encourage developing economies toward foreign direct investment-threshold status, then it’s fair to say that, outside of its failed reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, this administration has displayed real strategic imagination regarding development issues. In this regard, I would also consider Bush-Cheney’s long-standing opposition to the Kyoto Treaty on global warming to have had a beneficial effect. How so? It delayed its effective ratification until such time as the world came to realize the sheer folly of excluding rising China and India from its ranks of the constrained.

  Finally, I still admire George W. Bush’s display of audacity and hope in launching his Big Bang strategy upon the Persian Gulf. There’s no question in my mind that, no matter the weak rationales offered (or the slick sales job), Saddam Hussein was a horrific dictator whose time had come. That Bush-Cheney were able to pin that tail on the 9/11 donkey didn’t bother me in the least, for democracies such as our own always have to make it personal before we can launch a war of choice. That Iraq became a cause célèbre for the region’s radical jihadists likewise caused me no regret, because no matter what we did following 9/11, al Qaeda would have located some justifying cause somewhere in our actions. So if a center of gravity was to be had, better it be located over there than over here, and better that it involved our professional warriors instead of our untrained civilians. Most shocking perhaps, even the cynical realist in me has to admit that while an Iraq postwar done right would have had a revolutionary effect on the region, an Iraq postwar done wrong has had much the same effect—namely, making it impossible for the region to ever go back to what it once was. By locking America into real, long-term ownership of strategic security in the Gulf, Bush-Cheney transformed our dedication to maintaining an open door to that region’s energy into a commitment to bodyguard globalization’s ongoing transformation of those traditional societies.

  To some, that historical process will always smack of “globalization at the barrel of a gun,” but to me, the genuine realist recognizes the fact that whenever globalization creeps in, it is always the most ambitious and most talented that step forward to cut their own deals (like the Kurds in Iraq), triggering social tumult and ethnic divisions and even political fragmentation as a result. As I will argue later on, globalization will remap the Gap (my term for globalization’s poorly integrated regions), forcing new political configurations that repair the many wrong divisions left behind by Europe’s colonial cartographers. This wave of disintegrating integration is beyond anyone’s control at this point, for it is fueled by the demands for a better life of 3 billion-plus new capitalists around our planet—arguably the greatest collective power the world will endure across this century. Simply put, these once-and-future consumers will not be denied, only placated. So what George W. Bush’s Big Bang amounted to was an attempt, however unconscious, to step in front of that historical tsunami and ride it toward lasting political change for the better. In the end, I believe history will vindicate Bush’s
audacity in this regard, however poor his follow-up execution proved to be. As Fareed Zakaria notes in his book The Post-American World, what is stunning to anyone visiting the Middle East today is not how much Iraq has destabilized the region but how stable and thriving the region is despite Iraq’s violence.

  Bush-Cheney also deserve plenty of credit for leaving Iraq far more stable at the end of their second term compared with where it stood in 2005-6. The call on the surge wasn’t easy but needed to be made. Harder still was sticking with that tough choice during the initial ramp-up in U.S. casualties. While the surge was years late in coming and wasn’t accompanied by a similar diplomatic surge (as called for by the Iraq Study Group), it did finally reduce the overall violence, meaning Bush-Cheney’s strategic patience—always a question mark for U.S. administrations—clearly paid off.

  History will inevitably record that it was better for America to have made this strategic commitment than any other great power, and better for us to force this fight with the radical Salafi jihadists now before some eventual success on their part fostered a mad dash among economically vulnerable external great powers to salvage the situation. Needing to be “cruel to be kind, in the right measure” is an occupational hazard of owning the world’s largest gun. Bush-Cheney understood that, even if their many cardinal sins condemned their immediate efforts in this long war against violent extremists.

  NOW FOR THE SINS

  Lust, Leading to the Quest for Primacy

  The Bush administration’s allegedly secret plan for world domination was nothing more than a 1992 Pentagon policy white paper produced by then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz. In this document, known as the Defense Planning Guidance, or DPG, Wolfowitz and his aide, Lewis Libby, issued a rather full-throated policy version of the “reconstitution” pillar already in vogue in force-structure planning circles (“force structure” referring to the mix of troops and hardware in the force). The reconstitution argument stated that the U.S. military must retain sufficient industrial base capacity (e.g., infrastructure and factories capable of generating large, Cold War-style platforms such as long-range bombers, aircraft carriers, tanks), along with a reasonably—and gradually—downsized existing force (a process known informally as the “Powell downward glidepath,” for then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell), to hedge against the possible resurgence of a post-Soviet Russian threat. Wolfowitz’s articulated grand strategy, immediately dubbed the Wolfowitz Doctrine, argued for a long-term lock-in against any possible emergent superpower-like military threat, to include the use of preemptive war and unilateralism when required.

  At the time, I can tell you, few in the national security community took the secret planning guidance to be anything more than a Cold Warrior’s fantasy of making permanent what Charles Krauthammer had described as America’s “unipolar moment” of the early 1990s. If anything, the conventional wisdom stuck to the realists’ track of assuming a balancing function was inevitable, and since Japan’s “rising sun” served as that era’s favorite bogeyman inside the community (sad, I know), the DPG’s focus on military balancing struck many as painfully unimaginative in its assumption that the only counter to America’s dominance would be symmetrically mounted by future adversaries—in other words, they would build a military force like ours and confront us primarily on that basis. In truth, most farsighted defense analysts found the notion of maintaining America’s geopolitical primacy through military domination rather orthogonal to the real tasks at hand: managing a messy world, which at that time was experiencing a historic tide of civil strife and ethnic violence, stemming largely from the Soviet bloc’s collapse. In sum, Wolfowitz’s vision struck us as oddly detached from global affairs, even mildly isolationist.

  But the primacy argument did fit well with what became the Powell Doctrine of limiting America’s involvement in messy, long-term interventions. In effect, it offered the “then” corollary to the Powell Doctrine’s “if” assertion: If we avoided Vietnam-like quagmires, then we’d be better able to keep our powder dry and our technology high for the looming near-peer competitor to come. When Wolfowitz and Libby returned to power with the Bush-Cheney administration in 2001, the preferred near-peer target of the Wolfowitz Doctrine was clearly China. But after 9/11 forced a strategic redirect toward Southwest Asia, Wolfowitz’s previously voiced concerns (going back to his “Team B” days as a critic of détente in the mid-seventies) about a great power targeting the Persian Gulf for domination found fresh impetus in the administration’s declaration of a “global war on terror.” When Bush-Cheney proposed a policy of preemptive war as part of the mix, for all practical purposes declaring Iraq the next front in a sequential conflict, it appeared to many observers at the time—both inside (I was working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense) and outside of government—that the Wolfowitz Doctrine had met its historic moment.

  Once revealed in its apparent ambition in the 2002-3 run-up to the Iraq invasion, the Wolfowitz-cum-Bush Doctrine, when linked to the administration’s early tendency toward treaty breaking and go-it-alone-ism in international bodies, raised fears, both at home and abroad, that Bush-Cheney were exploiting the long war against violent extremism to further an agenda of America’s global military hegemony. The Bush White House did plenty to exacerbate that concern when, in late 2001, it announced that it would withdraw the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty concluded with the Soviet Union in 1972, the first time ever that America had disavowed a major arms agreement. While claiming this was necessary to deal with mounting missile threats from regional rogues like Iran and North Korea, many arms experts considered the need for ballistic missile defense against such powers to be a poor excuse for withdrawing from the treaty. Why? Deterring such attack from smaller powers is seen as a relatively straightforward affair, and if the fear is that such rogues will transfer nuclear technology to terrorist groups, then the notion of terrorists delivering such an attack using medium-range or long-range missiles seems far-fetched. A better route would be to smuggle such a device into the United States for later detonation—perhaps inside one of the many bales of marijuana that so regularly traverse our less-than-secure borders.

  The Bush administration’s 2006 decision to push for the construction of missile defense sites in Eastern Europe (a deal later secured immediately following Russia’s August 2008 invasion of Georgia), allegedly to protect the region from Iran’s missiles, only confirmed more suspicions among the missile defense program’s many vociferous critics that Bush-Cheney were indeed seeking a clear-cut strategic advantage not merely against regional rogues but against potential great-power competitors like Russia, which has consistently and vehemently contested missile defense, and China, which has long complained over a similar Bush-Cheney joint military program with Japan to protect that nation—allegedly—from North Korean missiles alone. In effect, both Moscow and Beijing suspect the Bush administration is trying to erect close-in strategic missile defense capabilities against their own nuclear arsenals, raising the unholy specter of America trying to eliminate its vulnerability not just to terrorist strikes but to the very logic of mutually assured destruction itself, thus calling into question the entire stability of nuclear deterrence as a strategic bulwark against great-power war. It is this kind of behavior that got us Russia threatening to target our missile defense sites and China staging a showy shoot-down of its own satellite—clear signaling that neither state will let America permanently tilt the correlation of strategic forces in its favor. Can we achieve such a permanent tilt in this manner? Not really. But quite frankly, that only makes our behavior seem all the more provocative—as in, What else do the Americans have up their sleeves?

  Here’s how we tie this sin back to failures in America’s grand strategy since 9/11: In its continued if fanciful lust for geopolitical primacy, Bush-Cheney had created an untenable long-term burden. Not merely content to add our new enemies in this long war against violent extremism, Bush-Chen
ey chose to keep our old Cold War targets (Russia, China) on our strategic radar screen, not only denying us effective partnership with these rising powers but also encouraging their strategies of obstructionism. Oddly enough, after all this strategic disingenuousness, the Bush administration was confounded by Russia’s and China’s reluctance to crack down hard on either Iran or North Korea regarding their nuclear programs!

  To remain “fit,” in the parlance of American strategist Colonel John Boyd, our nation’s grand strategy needs to attract more allies than it repulses. Bush-Cheney’s none-too-subtle lust for primacy effectively sabotaged that fundamental goal by stating to the world that America wants to have its cake (the long war) and eat it too (global primacy). That approach simply won’t fly in the age of globalization: America can’t take on both its friction (a terror-based global insurgency) and its force (rising great powers). For if we do, we’ll lose the one thing that truly allows us to play military Leviathan on behalf of globalization’s Functioning Core: the ability to access regional crises with our forces without having that act alone constitute an additional crisis. Think about that for a moment, because it’s an amazing writ that America should not trash in some quixotic bid to impede—or worse, repeat—history.

  Anger, Leading to the Demonization of Enemies

  America was naturally in an angry mood after 9/11, and the do-whatever-it-takes-to-protect-us atmosphere that prevailed during those days fed into the Bush administration’s own take-no-prisoners-and-offer-no-compromises style of ruling from the Republican base. This internalized anger (“They hate us, so why not hate them back?”) saps our virtue in ways almost too numerous to count.