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COMMENTARY
US and the triumph of
unilateralism
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - When excerpts of the document first
appeared in the New York Times in the spring of 1992, it
created quite a stir. One senator described it as a
prescription for "literally a Pax Americana". Indeed,
the draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG), which set forth
the underlying assumptions for US grand strategy into
the next century, was pretty astonishing.
Written by two relatively obscure political
appointees in the Pentagon's policy office after the
Gulf War, it boldly called for permanent US military
pre-eminence over virtually all of Eurasia - to be
achieved by "deterring potential competitors from even
aspiring to a larger regional or global role" and by
pre-empting states believed to be developing weapons of
mass destruction.
It foretold a world in which
US military intervention would come to be seen "as a
constant fixture" of the geo-political landscape and
Washington would act as the ultimate guarantor of the
international order. Indeed, the draft failed to even
mention the United Nations.
"While the US cannot
become the world's 'policeman' by assuming
responsibility for righting every wrong, we will retain
the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing
selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our
interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which
could seriously unsettle international relations," the
draft said.
The paper was essentially a vision
of a world dominated by the unilateral use of US
military power to ensure international stability,
promote the US national interest, and prevent the rise
of any possible challenger for the foreseeable future.
The leak, apparently arranged by someone in the
military brass worried about the costs of enforcing such
an imperial vision, sparked major controversy. At the
insistence of then-National Security Adviser Brent
Scowcroft and Secretary of State James Baker, the final
DPG was toned down to the point of unrecognizability.
But the draft's strategy clearly retained a
central place in the hearts and minds of its two authors
and their boss, then-Pentagon chief Dick Cheney, until
new circumstances might offer a more auspicious moment.
That moment came on the morning of September 11 last
year.
At that moment, Cheney had already become
the most powerful vice president in US history, while
the draft's two authors, Paul Wolfowitz and I Lewis
Libby, had risen to the posts of deputy defense
secretary and Cheney's chief of staff, respectively.
In the year since then, these three men, along
with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded
officials elsewhere in the administration, have
engineered what former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke
recently described as a "radical break with 55 years of
bipartisan tradition" in US foreign policy making.
That tradition, as described in an article by
Georgetown University professor G John Ikenberry in the
current edition of Foreign Affairs, consisted of a
mixture of two grand strategies pursued after World War
II: a realist policy organized around containment,
deterrence and maintaining a global balance of power;
and a more liberal, internationalist policy based on
constructing a set of multilateral institutions and
alliances to promote free trade, open economies and
democratic values.
While various past US
administrations have emphasized one strategy over the
other, none since World War II has abandoned both at the
same time. "For the first time since the dawn of the
Cold War, a new grand strategy is taking shape in
Washington," says Ikenberry, who warns that viewing the
administration's policy after September 11 as directed
against terrorism is to miss its much broader purpose
and thrust.
"According to this new paradigm,
America is to be less bound to its partners and to
global rules and institutions while it steps forward to
play a more unilateral and anticipatory role in
attacking terrorist threats and confronting rogue states
seeking WMD [weapons of mass destruction]," Ikenberry
writes in the article titled "America's Imperial
Ambition". "The United States," he adds, "will use its
unrivalled military power to manage the global order."
In that respect, the war on terrorism must be
seen as a facade for a much more ambitious strategy of
projecting US military power around the world,
especially Eurasia, and cutting loose the multilateral
bonds that have constrained Washington's freedom of
action and power.
The attacks of September 11
(and the quick military success in Afghanistan that
followed) ended a stalemate within the administration
between more traditional foreign-policy practitioners,
led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, and those who
embraced the new paradigm, like Rumsfeld and Cheney. The
latter also gave the new strategy a momentum it could
never have achieved with its previous marginal political
support.
Behind this strategy, of course, lie
the 1992 draft DPG and a coalition of three major
political forces. These include: right-wing power
players, some of whom, like Rumsfeld and Cheney, played
key roles in the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford
administrations; mainly Jewish neo-conservatives closely
tied to the Likud Party in Israel; and leaders of the
Christian and Catholic right.
The events of
September 11 effectively empowered this coalition within
the administration at the expense of the more
traditional forces led by Powell, who, significantly,
has received strong support from veterans of the first
Bush administration, most prominently Scowcroft and
Baker.
Aside from a strong belief in US military
power and a worldview that assumes that the United
States is fundamentally good, the three components of
this coalition share several key perspectives that have
guided Bush's policy decisions over the past year. These
include strong backing for Israel Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon and efforts to sabotage several international
mechanisms, including the International Criminal Court
and arms-control accords.
They also share a
contempt for multilateralism, which necessarily denies
the "exceptional" nature of the United States, a similar
disdain and distrust for Europeans, and a conviction
that radical Islam poses a major threat to the United
States and the West and that Israel must be considered a
strategic ally of Washington in the Middle East.
The same coalition also considers China a
long-term strategic threat that should be confronted
sooner rather than later, although this view has been
muted over the past year due to the need to retain
Beijing's support, or at least acquiescence, for the
administration's more immediate goals in the Middle
East, the Gulf and Southwest Asia, including basing US
troops in Central Asia and elsewhere around China's
periphery.
All of these positions have been
addressed in letters and statements issued by the
coalition's most concrete institutional form outside the
administration, a group called the Project for a New
American Century. It was founded five years ago by two
dozen prominent right-wingers, many of whom, including
Cheney, Rumsfeld and the authors of the 1992 draft DPG,
Wolfowitz, and Libby, now occupy top positions in the
administration.
(Inter Press
Service)
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