Iraq, Terrorism, and the New American Security Strategy

First Quarter 2003

To begin to grasp the weight of what the United States and the world now face in relation to Iraq, terrorism, and security, we must go back to the European Peace of Westphalia (1648). With that treaty European rulers established their independence from both the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire and laid the foundations of an international system of independent sovereign states. Implicit in the new system, however, was a potential dilemma—a dilemma that became stark by the 20th century and is now codified in the Charter of the United Nations. On the one hand, the UN system represents international law and procedures mutually agreed to as binding on the separate states. On the other hand, the first principle of the UN system is that each state is sovereign and thus not beholden to any superior authority.

At the core of the United Nations is the Security Council, which is supposed to promote conflict management to keep small crises from growing into a third world war. The first principle undergirding the UN Security Council, however, is state sovereignty—the right of each of its five permanent members to veto any proposed resolution. (The permanent members are the United States, Great Britain, Russia, China, and France.) As a result, when the post-World War II division between the Soviet Union and the United States quickly developed into the Cold War, the Security Council was essentially put on ice. NATO and Warsaw Pact alliances were pitted against one another for more than 40 years, determining the fate of the world and marginalizing the UN as a factor in international dispute resolution and peacekeeping.

By the end of the Cold War, the relative power of all the permanent Security Council members except the United States had declined, while U.S. power had expanded exponentially. The United States through NATO is now the primary defense department of Europe. The United States through its treaties with Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asian states is the security umbrella for the Pacific and much of Asia. The U.S. is in many ways, de facto, the international security regime of the world. Furthermore, between the end of World War II and the end of the Cold War more than a hundred new states—many created out of the collapsing European empires—joined the UN. The UN today, in other words, looks very different than it did at birth. States like France, Great Britain, and Russia, still have the same Security Council authority that the United States has, despite their decline in relative power, while countries like Gabon, Qatar, Bhutan, and Togo have equal standing with every other state in the world in the United Nations General Assembly, despite their inconsequential power and authority in global affairs.

International System Crisis

The distribution of political power and authority today, I am suggesting, is in many ways incompatible with the structure and aims of the UN system, so much so that we are faced with a crisis of international law and order more profound in some respects than the crisis that emerged with World War II and the collapse of the European empires, and more profound than the crisis that gave birth to the Treaty of Westphalia. James Traub reminds us that back in 1948, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall predicted that "should there be 'a complete lack of power equilibrium in the world, the United Nations cannot function successfully." ("Who Needs the U.N. Security Council?" The New York Times Magazine, 11/17/02.) Not only is there no power equilibrium in the world today, the UN does not even represent a consensus about the kind of political and legal systems its member states should have.

Describing the circumstances in this way helps to shed light on the problem of rogue states and states with very weak or highly unjust governments—all members of the UN—where terrorists can hide and operate underground or where governments actually support them, as the Taliban supported Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. It is one thing for the relatively stable and democratic states of the U.S., France, and Japan to cooperate in trying to stop terrorists who might circulate within and across their borders, but how do these states work with Pakistan, Indonesia, Georgia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Iraq, and North Korea to fight terrorism? None of these states may be supporting Al Qaeda officially, but if their governments are either too weak to fight terrorists or stand in strong opposition to the West, then what is the U.S. or any other terrorist-threatened state to do? It may no longer make sense for the United States to uphold the principle of state sovereignty for Iraq, which appears to be one of the breeding grounds of trouble for others. In fact, why should the U.S. continue to uphold an unbalanced and relatively powerless UN system at all when the U.S., on its own, has the power to try to change the political disorder of Iraq and help make the world safe for democracy?

The New National Security Strategy

The Bush administration's recently released National Security Strategy (NSS) states boldly that the time has come for the U.S. to be forthright and intentional about acting unilaterally, if necessary, to promote security and freedom in the world, even if its actions no longer square with the modes of international cooperation to which other countries have grown accustomed over the past half century. Though it does not say so, the document seems to imply that since the Cold War put the UN Security Council on ice for four decades, perhaps the new crisis of terrorism and rogue states provides a reason for the U.S. to put that system on ice again.

What is especially striking about the NSS, however, is that it does not make a standard realist argument, namely, that American security interests require it to act in its own defense by using its power for that purpose. Rather, the NSS reads like an idealist tract, calling for the U.S. to lead in building a new world order of freedom. Freedom is the active subject in many of the document's sentences. Freedom is a transnational mission, a supranational standard, and a world-historical spirit, to which the U.S. and other countries simply must subordinate themselves. As President Bush puts it in the concluding paragraph of his opening introduction to the document:

Freedom is the non-negotiable demand of human dignity; the birthright of every person—in every civilization. Throughout history, freedom has been threatened by war and terror; it has been challenged by the clashing of wills of powerful states and the evil designs of tyrants; and it has been tested by widespread poverty and disease. Today, humanity holds in its hands the opportunity to further freedom's triumph over all these foes. The United States welcomes our responsibility to lead in this great mission.

This is freedom-idealism at its grandest. The U.S. is simply a servant of the universal cause that is now bringing about the final order of the ages. Everyone, including sovereign states, should submit to it.

But how is freedom working its will in history? Here is where the old dilemma of state sovereignty vs. transnational law and order intrudes. The NSS presents freedom as simultaneously both America's national interest and every person's and every state's birthright. The U.S. is the lead representative of freedom and therefore what America does in the world will advance the freedom of all. What is good for U.S. security is good for the world because the vanguard of freedom is leading the world to its true destiny, to its triumph over all its foes. Unlike the UN system, which allows tyrannical and unfree states to be members—all in deference to the first principle of state sovereignty—the new order must serve genuine freedom and that is what freedom's leader, the United States, intends to accomplish. Pictured this way, however, freedom's mission puts the U.S. in the lead as global policeman of last resort; as freedom's single-nation security council; as the vanguard of freedom's global hegemony that has not yet been fully realized.

Support and Criticism of the New Security Strategy

The Bush administration's new approach is exactly right, says Tod Lindberg, writing in the Hoover Institution's Hoover Digest (2002, No. 4, "The Bush Doctrine"). The White House, says Lindberg, is "firmly aligning itself with Francis Fukuyama's universalist 'end of history' vision of the spread of the recognition by human beings of each other as free and equal." President Bush's speech at West Point last June, a forerunner to the NSS, "is nothing less than the founding document of a new international order with American power at its center and the spread of freedom as its aim." Lindberg even goes so far as to say that what President Bush "is now promoting with this liberty doctrine is not [just] a model. It is the answer and it is final."

On the one hand, according to Bush at West Point, "America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish. We wish for others only what we wish for ourselves—safety from violence, the rewards of liberty, and the hope for a better life." On the other hand, as Lindberg happily explains, the president made this statement from a position of military strength and with "chilling implications": "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge—thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace."

In other words, the new world order of peace and freedom will be established and sustained by American preeminence. And this means, of course, that the way Lindberg, and perhaps the Bush administration, resolves the dilemma of state sovereignty within an international system is by establishing only one state—the United States—as the world's only true sovereign. Or to put it another way, President Bush's security strategy amounts, in some respects, to an attempt to reconstitute a pre-Westphalian international order, but in this case it will be the United States, not the Holy Roman Empire or the Roman Catholic Church, that will serve as the ultimate transnational security force and authority.

A recent Brookings Institution Policy Brief (#109) on the NSS (written by Ivo Daalder, James Lindsay, and James Steinberg) points to an inner contradiction in this vision of a new world order--a contradiction that can lead, and has already led, to charges of hypocrisy. "Which should take priority? Our [American] commitment to our ideals [like freedom]? Or a concern for our safety [national interests]? The Strategy [NSS] offers no advice on how to answer these questions, and it does not seem to recognize the possible contradiction." For the sake of our security and the fight against terrorism, for example, the U.S. cooperates with and supports states that are quite unfree and repressive of their own citizens. America is not, then, acting consistently to promote freedom but is, in some cases, "buttressing authoritarianism rather than opposing it."

John Lewis Gaddis approaches this dilemma by looking at the way the NSS conflates the fight against terrorism with the fight against a rogue state like Iraq ("A Grand Strategy of Transformation," Foreign Policy, Nov.-Dec. 2002). Since both terrorism and rogue states are the enemies of freedom, the administration aims to take on both of them with one strategy that includes preemptive military strikes if necessary. This is where Saddam Hussein fits in to the Grand Strategy, says Gaddis. "Iraq is the most feasible place where we [the U.S.] can strike the next blow. If we can topple this tyrant, . . . then we can accomplish a great deal. We can complete the task the Gulf War left unfinished. We can destroy whatever weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein may have accumulated since. We can end whatever support he's providing for terrorists elsewhere, notably those who act against Israel. We can liberate the Iraqi people. We can ensure an ample supply of inexpensive oil. We can set in motion a process that could undermine and ultimately remove reactionary regimes elsewhere in the Middle East, thereby eliminating the principal breeding ground for terrorism."

However, if the U.S. acts to destroy Saddam Hussein's regime with the aims Gaddis articulates, few countries are likely to accept such action as legitimate American self-defense. Instead they will see it as a self-aggrandizing act of U.S. aggression with the aim of staying in control of the world. For the U.S. to appeal to a transnational ideal of freedom to justify such an attack would appear to be nothing more than a hypocritical cover for self-interested action. Instead of other states wholeheartedly joining the U.S. in its mission to serve freedom, they will be forced to recalculate how to protect their own interests in face of what they may judge to be illegitimate intervention on the part of America into another sovereign state.

The American dilemma is that the UN's means of trying to disarm a dangerous Iraq and uphold international law did not work in the 1990s. In fact, one can argue that the new UN Security Council Resolution 1441 came about only because the U.S. used its immense power to force the Security Council to act. And that suggests that the UN remains so weak in the area of peacekeeping that it can serve as little more than a pawn in the hands of powerful states, whether Iraq or the U.S., whether France or Russia, whether Great Britain or China. What the Bush administration concludes, then, is that the U.S. had better remain the most powerful nation in the world in order to protect itself even from the UN.

By means of its new NSS, the Bush administration wants to do more than simply protect American borders. It wants to help bring about a new era of global peace and freedom. However, if the means the Bush administration uses to try to achieve this goal include unilateral, preemptive military action, then the U.S. may find that its efforts are counterproductive. The Brookings Brief quotes Henry Kissinger with approval when he says, "It cannot be in either the American national interest or the world's interest to develop principles that grant every nation an unfettered right of preemption against its own definition of threats to its security." (Perhaps the strongest case made to date for the legitimacy of a U.S. invasion of Iraq is made by Kenneth M. Pollack in The Threatening Storm, 2002.)

Hendrik Hertzberg illumines the dilemma of the Bush administration's new security strategy this way: "There's a contradiction at the heart of the Bush strategy. It implicitly recognizes that national sovereignty is in many ways an outdated and dangerous doctrine, one that must increasingly give way to other exigencies. Is the sovereignty of the Iraqi state to be valued more than the right of Iraq's neighbors and the rest of the world to be reasonably free of the fear of being vaporized or sickened unto death by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Of course not. So the Bush doctrine, in spite of itself, recognizes the logic of something like world government. But its idea of world government looks very much like a benevolent American dictatorship—a dictatorship of the entrepreneuriat, you might say" (The New Yorker, Oct. 14 & 21, 2002).

Building a New International System

Quite the opposite of using its position as world hegemon to try to reorder the world toward a "freedom" that only America can police, the U.S. should, I would argue, use its current power and authority to help bring about a stronger and more just international order that elevates international and transnational governance above state sovereignty as its first principle. As a matter of principle, in other words, 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 territorial authority of just states.

The present UN system does not represent this kind of order and that is why, on the one hand, American hawks decry the debilitated UN and the weakness of allies and enemies alike to shape a just world. They want action, and they want to begin by having the U.S. bring down Saddam Hussein, the most evident symbol of everything that stands against freedom, democracy, and U.S. interests. But hawks haven't counted the cost of going it alone because they cling by faith to the first principle of national sovereignty and to the conviction that America is freedom's world-historical leader. Critics of the new Bush doctrine, on the other hand, decry the administration's unilateralism and its apparent movement toward imperialism. But their blind spot is in assuming that the UN system and international law as now constituted are solid and can continue to serve as a sound basis for international politics in the future, if the U.S. will only become more modest and cooperative within that system.

Neither of these approaches faces up to the new global realities of international interdependence, rising terrorism, rogue states, U.S. military preeminence throughout the world, and the crisis of the UN system. The UN, with its present structure, has not kept, and cannot keep the peace or give order to the post-Cold-War and post-9/11 world. At the moment the U.S. obviously has the greatest potential to do that, on the basis of its own sovereign power, whether or not it chooses to use the UN Security Council for its purposes. However, the U.S. cannot reorder the world entirely on its own. As the preeminent realist, Henry Kissinger, argues, "The United States must resist basing foreign policy on hegemonic power. Many of the problems affecting world order are not susceptible to solution by military means. History shows that sooner or later every powerful country calls into being countervailing forces. And at that point—and I would insist even now—the United States will not be able to sort out every international problem alone without exhausting itself physically and psychologically" (Washington Post, 12/10/02).

This is not to say that the U.S. should retreat from global responsibilities or lay down its power. The U.S. should not turn over its defense department to Kofi Annan or to the European Community tomorrow. An international power vacuum will not remain unfilled. However, the kind of leadership the U.S. should give must break through the contradictions of both the new NSS and the UN system. The U.S. should, quite openly, begin to direct energy and money to strengthening the principles of constitutional, representative, accountable, federal government above states as well as within them. With the cooperation of other states that support such principles—including the rule of law, open societies, civil rights, religious freedom, and so forth—the U.S. should use its clout to draw in states that shape themselves to these standards, somewhat like the European Union sets economic and political standards for entrance into the EU. There can be little doubt that the United States will henceforth be engaged in the world thoroughly, intricately, and almost everywhere whether its citizens want this or not. The only question is whether the U.S. will try to dictate the terms of the new world order in the name of freedom and its own preeminence, or instead will work to help define the new order as one of accountable governance under law, which can eventually transcend even American sovereignty as well as the sovereignty of every other state.

Responses:

• American Strategy, Iraq, and the United Nations -- Readers Respond
• American Strategy, Iraq, and the United Nations -- Readers Respond, Part 2