WASHINGTON - After two years of
consultations with more than 400 members of the US
foreign-policy elite, a project headed by two
leading international-relations academics is
calling for the adoption of a new grand strategy
designed to address multiple threats and
strengthen Washington's commitment to a reformed
and reinvigorated multilateral order.
In a
wide-ranging report released in Washington on
Wednesday, the Princeton Project on National
Security suggested that the
policies pursued by President
George W Bush since September 11, 2001, had been
simplistic - even counter-productive - for the
challenges facing the United States in the 21st
century.
To be effective, according to the
report, US policy needed to rely less on military
power and more on other tools of diplomacy; less
on its own strength exercised unilaterally and
more on cooperation with other democratic states;
and less on rapid democratization based on popular
elections and more on building what it called
"popular, accountable, rights-regarding [PAR]
governments".
The report also calls for
performing "radical surgery" on the international
institutions created in the aftermath of World War
II, including significantly increasing membership
in the United Nations Security Council and
developing a "Concert of Democracies" that would
provide an alternative forum for collective
action, including the use of force.
On
more specific issues, it calls for Washington to
"take the lead in doing everything possible" to
achieve a comprehensive two-state solution to the
Israel-Palestine conflict; to offer Iran security
assurances in exchange for its agreement not to
develop a nuclear-weapons capacity; and to neither
"block or contain" China, but rather to "help it
achieve its legitimate ambitions within the
current international order".
The project
and its 90-page report, "Forging a World of
Liberty Under Law: US National Security in the
21st Century", was co-directed by the head of
Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of
Public and International Affairs, Anne-Marie
Slaughter, and John Ikenberry, a prominent
international-relations scholar at the school.
Of greater significance, however, is the
high-level and bipartisan cast of its
participants. Honorary co-chairs of the project
included George Shultz, who served as secretary of
state under the late president Ronald Reagan and
is considered particularly influential with the
current secretary, Condoleezza Rice, and Anthony
Lake, national security adviser under president
Bill Clinton.
The project's 13 steering
committee members and seven task forces that
addressed different aspects of national security
were also drawn from experts from or identified
with both major political parties, while
institutional co-sponsors included the major
centrist think-tanks, ranging from the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace and the
Brookings Institution on the left to the Hoover
Institution on the right.
In that respect,
the report appeared to be an effort to forge a
consensus framework for the mainly Republican
"realist" and mainly Democratic "liberal
internationalist" schools that dominated US
foreign-policy-making in the post-World War II era
until the September 11 attacks when nationalist
and neo-conservative hawks in the Bush
administration launched their "global war on
terror".
Thus, at the report's official
Capitol Hill launch, sponsored by the "radical
centrist" New America Foundation, the two keynote
speakers were high-level political symbols of both
schools - Republican realist Senator Chuck Hagel
and Democratic internationalist Senator Joseph
Biden - both sharp critics of the administration's
conduct of the "war on terror".
Indeed,
conspicuously missing among the institutional
sponsors of the project were two key think-tanks -
the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute
and the right-wing Heritage Foundation - that have
been most closely associated with the Bush
administration's more radical policies, including
its 2002 National Security Strategy, as well as
the invasion of Iraq.
A few prominent
neo-conservatives and aggressive nationalists,
such as Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer,
were among the individuals who participated in the
project's consultations.
While Slaughter
stressed that the final report and recommendations
did not represent a formal consensus of all
participants or even necessarily of the two
honorary co-chairs, she said, "There was agreement
across the political spectrum on a comprehensive
approach." Most participants, she said, would
agree with most of the analysis and
recommendations.
Three specific aims -
securing the homeland against hostile attacks or
fatal epidemics, building a healthy global
economy, and promoting a "benign international
environment, grounded in security cooperation
among nations and the spread of liberal democracy"
- should constitute Washington's basic objectives,
according to the report.
To achieve those
objectives, the report offers a number of general
and specific recommendations, many of which
contain implicit criticisms of the Bush
administration. It calls, for example, for "fusing
hard power - the power to coerce - and soft power
- the power to attract"; and for "building
frameworks of cooperation centered on common
interests with other nations rather than insisting
that they accept our prioritization of common
threats".
While it applauds Bush's
advocacy of democratization in principle, the
report calls for greater efforts to bring
non-democratic governments "up to PAR" - that is,
"a much more sophisticated strategy of creating
the deeper conditions for successful liberal
democracy - preconditions that extend far beyond
the simple holding of elections".
Similarly, with respect to military power
and the use of force, "Instead of insisting on a
doctrine of primacy, the United States should aim
to sustain the military predominance of liberal
democracies and encourage the development of
military capabilities of like-minded democracies
in a way that is consistent with their security
interests."
While endorsing Bush's
position that "preventive strikes represent a
necessary tool in fighting terror networks ...
they should be proportionate and based on
intelligence that adheres to strict standards".
Similarly, the preventive use of force against
states "should be very rare, employed only as a
last resort and authorized by a multilateral
institution - preferably a reformed Security
Council".
In addition to calling for
greater US effort and balance in promoting an
Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement and for
offering security guarantees to Iran, the report
urges Washington to reduce its ambitions in Iraq
from full democratization to PAR, to redeploy US
troops in ways that would encourage Iraqis to take
more responsibility, and, in the event of civil
war, to contain its regional impact. At the same
time, Washington should promote the construction
of regional institutions modeled on the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe.
The report also assails
administration efforts at "framing the struggle
against terrorism as a war similar to World War II
or the Cold War" because "it lends legitimacy and
respect to an enemy that deserves neither; the
result is to strengthen, not degrade our
adversary". Instead of a "global war on terror",
Washington should employ a "global
counterinsurgency" strategy that focuses on global
law enforcement, intelligence and special
operations.
To combat radicalization in
the Islamic world, Washington should also make
clear that it is willing to work with "Islamic
governments and Islamic/Islamist movements,
including fundamentalists, as long as they disavow
terrorism".
"It is time to unite our
country and our allies, while dividing our enemies
- rather than the other way around," said
Ikenberry.
On energy, the project called
for going much further than the administration has
proposed to reduce US reliance on Middle East oil
by adopting a tax on gasoline that would begin at
50 cents per gallon (about 13 cents a liter) and
increase by 20 cents per year for each of the next
years. It also called for stricter automobile
fuel-efficiency standards and for US leadership in
devising new ways to reduce emissions of
greenhouse gases.
