American Strategy, Iraq, and the United Nations—Readers Respond

Second Quarter 2003

The lead article in the last issue of the Public Justice Report—Iraq, Terrorism, and the New American Security Strategy, by the editor James Skillen--drew a variety of responses from readers. Excerpts from four of them appear below, followed by Skillen's response. Two further responses, received later, appear at American Strategy, Iraq, and the United Nations—Readers Respond, Part 2.

Freedom, Control, and International Justice

By Bob Goudzwaard

The new National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States cannot be viewed as a good and responsible reaction to 9/11. Its idealism, which centers around the overarching concept of freedom is, as you show, highly problematic. Allow me to make three points.

First, the ideal of freedom in the modern era exists in close tension with the aim of control. In pursuit of freedom the drive for control quickly surfaces to achieve and guarantee freedom, but the more control takes over the more it limits and threatens freedom. Freedom and control both strive for complete realization and any attempt to keep a balance between them raises the question of how to find a criterion for the balance. Only if both give way to the norm of public justice can a real balance be found, but that means that freedom and control must both lose their absoluteness.

If, according to President Bush, freedom is the "birthright of every person," then that right relates to each person as a citizen. So the state in which I am a citizen must be respected in its freedom and not be ignored by the American quest "to further freedom's triumph over all its foes." There are limits, therefore, to an American (or any other nation's) quest for control in order to secure freedom, for as you point out, if the American quest is perceived as an attempt to exercise control over other states, then I and my state are threatened rather than being assured of freedom.

Second, there is a strong ideological component in the NSS, for if a goal [such as freedom] is absolutized, then a government may begin to justify any means to achieve it, including military means. Moreover, the question of whether the means are just can be pushed aside by insisting that the means are necessary. The ideology takes on a religious fervor and its advocates begin to talk of the "necessary sacrifices" that must be made to achieve the goal. If they ignore the standard of justice by which to measure the means as well as the end, then no room is left for the evaluation of their own political sin or misbehavior. They reach the point where they put their state outside the realm of any evaluative judgment of its own injustice. Only "others," who stand opposed to freedom, are the sinners. When, for example, the NSS speaks of the "clashing wills of powerful states," does it have the United States in view, or does it only consider other powerful states to be under the law of sin?

Third, the meaning of several other basic concepts comes in here. I have in mind political concepts such as security, safety, leadership, and the vital interests of the hegemon—the dominant country. All of these concepts need to be circumscribed by the norm of public justice if they are to be effective for good. US vital interests, for example, should not be identified with the aim of providing a military guarantee of the safety of all American investments in the world. That goal is beyond the reach of the norm of public justice. Vital interests are, in my view, those that uphold and sustain the "public household"—the common good—of a country. Any country's vital interests have to be seen in relation to the life-sustaining interests of the public households of other nations and cultures of this world.

Much the same can also be said about leadership. Political leadership is something that must be earned by the practice of justice. Leadership is not something that a big country may claim simply because it is the most powerful. I was shocked, for example, when I read the following stated goals in the Pentagon's Vision 2020 strategic document: "US Space command: dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investments. Integrating Space Forces into war-fighting capabilities across the full spectrum of conflict." In these goals no limitation appears to be recognized. Words like "dominating" and "full spectrum" convey a full-blown ideology at work. No wonder, then, that the Pentagon document also mentions globalization as a process that may lead to increased tension between the haves and have-nots in the world, followed by the assertion that the US has to have sufficient power to keep the have-nots in line. And this represents the advance of freedom?

There is one more thing I want to say about your argument that the international system is in crisis and that something better than the UN is needed in the future. I agree when you say that "as a matter of principle states ought to be acting as joint stewards of an international order of just governance that transcends but at the same time strengthens the limited authority of just states." But I feel considerable ambivalence about your previous statement: "The US should use its power and authority to help bring about a more just international order that elevates international and transnational governance above state authority as its first principle." For it all depends on what you mean by international and transnational governance. What I miss is a further specification of the fields of activity or concern in which such governance should have priority over state sovereignty. If you mean that transnational governance should set global environmental restraints for the world economy, or prevent and punish genocide and worldwide criminality, then I agree. But shouldn't there be elements of subsidiarity and federalism in the system? What happens when US power diminishes and, let's say, China becomes the world's dominant power, claiming authority to rule over national sovereignties for the sake of world order? Will the formulated safeguards of international justice be sufficient if the first principle of national sovereignty has been swept away?

I am not very comfortable, furthermore, with the assertion that the United States should "break through the contradictions of both the NSS and the UN system." For all its shortcomings, the UN system should not be put on the same level as the NSS document of the United States, a document that is very undemocratic and empire-oriented. Said otherwise, I fear that under the Bush administration it is more likely that there will be deterioration rather than improvement of international relations because of the administration's eagerness to dominate the world politically and economically. Therefore, I would much prefer to see you propose a step-by-step approach of reform within the present international system. Recommend courageous and firm practical steps to promote international justice for all governments rather than an approach that calls on the rich and powerful nations to bring about a grand, almost timeless solution.

Bob Goudzwaard is professor emeritus of economics at the Free University of Amsterdam and the author of Idols of Our Time and Capitalism and Progress: A Diagnosis of Western Society.

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Hegemony and the UN's Future

by David T. Koyzis

The final paragraph of your article leaves the reader wishing for something more concrete. I wonder whether you might not flesh out the following statement: "With the cooperation of other states that support such principle—including the rule of law, open societies, civil rights, religious freedom, and so forth—the U.S. should use its clout to draw in [to a new international order] states that shape themselves to these standards, somewhat like the European Union (EU) sets economic and political standards for entrance into the EU."

Some will argue that this sounds like just another form of American imperialism, in which the US imposes on other nations its own culturally specific norms. It may not be doing so through military means, but its activities might be seen as hegemonic all the same. It raises the issue of whose standards ought to undergird this new international order. Could not Islamic nations counter such efforts by charging that the standards held out by the US are nothing more than western standards and foreign to the Muslim worldview?

Turkey, for example, badly wants to join the EU, but that country is unique among Islamic countries because it underwent a deliberate westernizing process under Mustafa Kemal in the 1920s and '30s. Turkey is far more likely than, say, Iraq or Saudi Arabia, to clean up its act with respect to human rights. But even in Turkey the change is going very slowly, and that country may never become a full member of the EU. How much less likely is it that other Muslim countries will join this new US-led order, given all the domestic obstacles to their membership?

In short, are not such standards necessarily culturally specific? Are they not rooted in the peculiar experiences of particular civilizations? And if so, how easily can they be transferred to other nations outside of the postChristian West?

Second, what role do you envision for the UN? Are you really arguing for an alternative—a "third way"—between American hegemonic unilateralism and the UN? Is there not something to be said for working through existing institutions, even if they're not perfect? Your "third way" sounds like it could be a form of US hegemony that undercuts the UN.

I agree that the UN is not very effective, and it has sometimes become the voice of tinpot dictators and tyrants. But might it not be a good idea to work to strengthen the UN while at the same time trying to reform it in the direction you suggest? I wonder whether there is a parallel to be drawn between a reformed UN and the new shape of NATO. NATO was originally founded to contain communism. Now, after the end of communism NATO appears to be functioning primarily to keep its members from fighting each other, much as it has effectively kept Greece and Turkey out of war for half a century. Perhaps I'm too kind to NATO, but it seems to me that existing institutions, however imperfect, have a certain argument in their favor simply by their existence.

Dr. Koyzis teaches political science at Redeemer University College in Ancaster Ontario and is the author of the forthcoming book Political Visions and Illusions: A Survey and Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies (InterVarsity Press).

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Keeping America Number One?

by Harold Bratt

United States National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, recently expressed her view that the US is the number one military power in the world and that its hegemony is beneficent because it protects and spreads human freedom and democracy in the world. Therefore, the government's only defensible goal in the national security arena is to maintain America's unchallenged primacy for the indefinite future and, presumably, to block any development in the world power system that would allow any country or group of countries to successfully challenge America's military dominance.

A cynic might see Dr. Rice's comments as a mere gloss on what is really a policy of realpolitik. Looked at less cynically, such a policy may be understandable. Indeed, American interests and security are served by the spread of freedom and democracy. For example, the ability to trade, invest, and travel depends in large part on how broadly the writ of freedom runs in the world. The same is true of other nations, though some, like the US, are far better positioned to take advantage of this freedom than others.

However, while the protection of freedom and democracy would seem to be an appropriate military and foreign policy objective, the US government's actions are not always consistent with its vision. Throughout history inconsistencies and anomalies abound in American foreign and security policies if they are looked at through the eyes of, say, human rights or democracy rather than those of power politics. The long-term affects of the Bush administration's policies can only be guessed at. They certainly call for a very high level of military spending into the indefinite future. And they will likely require frequent military engagements in hot spots around the globe. Under such circumstances there is a real danger of overreach.

Mr. Bratt, now retired and living in Virginia, held posts in several departments of the federal government during a long public service career.

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Distribution or Balance of Power?

by Perry Recker

You say that there is a highly uneven "distribution of power and authority" in the world today. The older term I am more familiar with is "balance of power" which, like its close synonym, "equilibrium," implies a natural, more neutral cause. "Distribution" seems to me to imply more of a human agency (or agencies) of responsibility. Especially when one recognizes that power and authority have different layers of meaning ranging from trust and moral persuasion down to the physical control of weaponry and going to war, the role of human responsibility seems inescapable to me.

So we have this tremendous imbalance or disequilibrium, this unequal distribution, of power in the world today, with the preponderance of it on the US side. And the UN Security Council is woefully inadequate to exercise any control over these circumstances. But how does this bear on the entire UN system? Is the UN to blame for the mismatch of structure with reality? And doesn't UN irresponsibility implicate the US itself?

Mr. Recker is an academic librarian in Illinois and a long-time supporter of the Center for Public Justice.

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American Hegemony and International Order

by James W. Skillen

The responses above will, I hope, stir other readers to join in this discussion. Urgent and important questions about the way the United States plays its role in the world today call for an ongoing conversation and serious debate.

Gradual Reform and the UN System

I agree with Goudzwaard and Koyzis that a legitimate American approach to international security calls for incremental and historically careful steps, not for a grand, revolutionary scheme to implement a timeless solution. My comments may have sounded like a recommendation for the US to walk away from the UN and try to construct a new transnational governance system from scratch. That is not what I had in mind. The recommendation to reform the UN, however, raises the original question in a different way. Can the UN be adequately reformed and remain the UN? If the UN as a security organization is fundamentally flawed because it upholds state sovereignty as a fundamental principle, then reform in the direction of transcending the absoluteness of state sovereignty may mean that the UN can't be reformed without being turned into something different. The question remains: what should that "something different" be?

Goudzwaard is happy with the idea of a transnational authority that sets "global environmental restraints" and prevents and punishes "genocide and worldwide criminality." He also wants to see some kind of subsidiarity in the global governance structure, affirming my point that a transnational authority should "strengthen the limited authority of just states." I agree with this entirely. In fact, my idea of transnational governance is a highly federal one, something like what the European Union will look like once it achieves greater political integration. The very aim is to overcome both anarchy and overwhelming global hegemony, whether by the United States, China, or some other power. Consequently, transnational governance cannot be located in one state or regional power. It must be something federal in which a high degree of local, national, and regional authority is recognized and maintained. At the highest level, any transnational authority must be strictly delimited constitutionally and confined to responsibilities of security and probably commerce, human rights, and the environment.

An international system of this kind cannot be governed by "one nation, one vote." There will have to be some combination of national and regional representation as well as popular representation through several different levels of governance. But the important thing is that there must be the rule of law in accord with articulated principles of justice for all. I agree with Koyzis that much more needs to be said about this.

Worldwide Cultural Differences

Koyzis raises another important question about whether any kind of tighter global governance structure is possible given the cultural differences throughout the world. There can be no doubt about the difficulties that confront any attempt to achieve a measure of global agreement and cooperation on a system of transnational governance. The differences among western liberals, Marxist socialists, and Muslim extremists, to mention only three, for example, seem impossible to bridge. And if everything that transpires among peoples is controlled by these conflicting ideologies, then there is likely to be only perpetual conflict in the world interspersed, perhaps, by periods of order enforced by the overwhelming dominance of a single nation or region, as with the pax Romana or possibly with the pax Americana envisioned by the Bush administration. I did not intend to suggest a form of American or western imperialism, but the opposite of that.

At the same time, I confess that I do not believe ideologies and ideological or cultural differences have the final say or the highest authority in this world. At least Christians throughout the world should be making the case that God's creation-wide norms of justice and stewardship increasingly confront all people and countries in this shrinking world, calling us all to account. Those principles or norms do not belong to the West. In fact, it is in terms of those principles that we are now criticizing certain practices and ideological tendencies in the US. Consequently, there is an urgent need for the articulation of normative principles of international and transnational governance that can do justice to individuals, non-political institutions, states, regional organizations, and diverse civilizational cultures.

A principled order of this kind would be no more western or American than Christianity is Jewish. What I mean by that is that Christianity certainly has its roots in biblical Judaism, but it does not for that reason simply represent Judaistic imperialism. Analogically speaking, if a constitutionally limited, federally diversified, human-rights-protecting political order can do justice to people throughout this one world, the reason will be that it represents a wise human response to certain creation-wide principles and does not serve only the interests of the people in whose cultures these political patterns first developed. My argument is that Christians throughout the world ought to be working together to articulate and help shape such an order of international and transnational governance. Of course this can't be forced on everyone by a single hegemon without it being a form of imperialism. However, a variety of proposals for world governance are competing to control the world, including the present UN system (which I contend is in critical condition); the Bush administration's vision laid out in the NSS; Islam's vision of the dar al-islam; and the older Marxist vision of a communist world order. There will be others, and one of them ought to be something like the one I am hinting at in the brief remarks above. The competition of ideologies and the "clash of civilizations" may produce decades of conflict, terrorism, and warfare before one or another of these systems of global governance finally wins the day, if one of them ever does.

Responsibility and Vision

To Perry Recker I would say that the US certainly is implicated in the inadequacy of the UN system even as we are implicated in many of its positive achievements. Not only did we help to construct it, but we are the country most able now to use and misuse the UN for our own purposes and/or for the good of others. Whether one speaks of a "distribution" of power or a "balance" of power in the world, governments bear real responsibility for the order and disorder. There is no neutral cause in all of this. However, we can never place all the responsibility or blame on a single party, whether for approval or for disapproval. The hegemony that the US how holds in the world is not without some injustice, but it was not achieved by American empire building of the kind that built the Roman Empire or the British, French, Dutch, or Japanese empires. Nevertheless, the fact that the US now holds more political and economic power than any other single state in the world means, as I see it, that it bears a greater responsibility for the way power is distributed or balanced in the future.

Bratt is correct to suggest that not all American foreign policy decisions are made simply for self-aggrandizing purposes. In fact, much that the Bush administration aims to do is intended for the good of other countries and of the whole world. However, Bratt's suggestion that the main problem may be an inconsistency between American vision and actions implies that the vision is good. That is the assumption that I was calling into question in my criticism of the NSS, which presents an overly unilateral and aggressive aim, in my estimation.

President Bush's Immediate Predicament

Finally, look for a moment at the immediate predicament in which I think the Bush administration finds itself. Following its military response to the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan after 9/11, the president turned his attention both to homeland security and to a military build up for a "war on terrorism." This so-called war, which I contend should be called a cooperative international police and intelligence campaign, led the president rather quickly to focus on Saddam Hussein as the leading example of a rogue-state leader who might be an accomplice of anti-American terrorists. Just as the US had defeated the Taliban militarily, so the president believes that in self-defense we should remove Hussein from power, thereby showing every other potentially threatening state (like Syria, Iran, and North Korea) that they had better stop all support of terrorists.

This rather straightforward progression of judgments is fraught with problems, however. The military cannot by itself defeat global terrorism, and sufficient evidence has not yet been released to show that Saddam Hussein is in league with Al Qaeda (and similar terrorists groups) the way the Taliban were. Since Hussein is currently contained, it is not clear that a military attack on Iraq can be justified on just-war terms or that it will devastate terrorist groups the way the defeat of the Taliban disrupted Al Qaeda. In fact, an American attack on Iraq might spur on terrorists and other anti-American regimes throughout the world, requiring more and more US military incursions to try to change more regimes. On the face of it, then, an Americanled attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein faces a number of obstacles.

These are some of the reasons why, I believe, the administration decided last summer to try to gain UN Security Council support for its mission against Hussein. However, since the president had already declared that he would go after Hussein militarily regardless of whether the UN Security Council gave its support, his approach to the UN came too late in the game. Moreover, the decision to ask the Security Council to enforce its own resolutions meant presenting a different kind of case than the one the US was making for its own security. The appeal to the Security Council was that it should disarm Hussein because he had not complied with UN resolutions requiring his disarmament. This is quite different from the argument President Bush continues to make that American security is threatened by Hussein. If US security is genuinely threatened, the US has a right to defend itself militarily without UN support and regardless of whether Hussein has defied the UN.

This dual-track American approach has created a predicament for President Bush. The more the US urges the UN to act to enforce its own resolutions, the more the US diminishes its claim of justification for independent military action against Hussein. Why? Because if US security is truly and imminently threatened, then it has no need to seek UN approval for its own defense. After all this time, if President Bush chooses to act militarily against Hussein without official Security Council support, then the US may look like it is disregarding the UN just as Saddam Hussein is doing and further harm US relations with some of its allies.

Furthermore, the dispute over American aims and methods that arose in the UN, starting late last year, and in NATO earlier this year may weaken the international, cooperative police campaign against terrorism. This would be exactly counterproductive to US stated aims. Right now the US needs to be strengthening the confidence of other nations in its commitment to work cooperatively to defeat terrorism, but many believe the US is trying to reshape the world on its own, regardless of what the UN and certain important allies decide.

In the short term, then, whichever approach the Bush administration takes to try to disarm Saddam Hussein, it may be jeopardizing American security against terrorists if its larger NSS goals and methods antagonize too many of the allies the US needs to carry forward the international policing and intelligence fight against terrorists. Moreover, the Bush administration may also be undermining the UN Security Council's authority without working to replace it with something else that would represent international, cooperative authority.