National Security in a ‘New’ Strategic Era

GLOBALIZATION AND CONFLICT
National Security in a ‘New’ Strategic Era
Edited by Robert G. Patman
First published 2006
by Routledge


Uneasy co-existence: national security and the post-Cold
War security environment
In historical terms, the end of the Cold War offered an extraordinary opportunity
for a reappraisal and reformulation of the concept of national security. While
disagreement over the causes of the Cold War’s passing generated uncertainty
about the shape of the newly emerging international system, three distinctive
features of the post-Cold War world became immediately apparent.
First, there were no longer military confrontations of a system threatening
character. During the Cold War, a confl ict between the US and the Soviet Union
9
could have threatened the entire world with nuclear devastation. But after 1989, it
was diffi cult to conceive of likely confl icts of the same magnitude.
Second, the US emerged from the Cold War as the world’s only superpower
with no real geopolitical or ideological competitors in sight. The collapse of
the USSR produced a new Russian state, reduced eastward and northward by
nearly a third of its former territory and now surrounded by other former Soviet
republics, which had abruptly been transformed into fully independent states.
The new Russian government led by Boris Yeltsin was initially committed to an
‘Atlanticist’ foreign policy, based on a relationship with the states of the West
as partners and allies. This political upheaval resulted in a serious decline in
resources allocated to the Russian military. By 1993, the armed forces under the
control of the Russian Ministry of Defence had fallen to an estimated 1.8 million
personnel, a reduction of nearly 50 per cent from total Soviet military forces in
1991. Moreover, a severe reduction in the military budget had led to a reduction
in defence procurement orders for new weapons and spare parts by nearly 80 per
cent for 1992 and 1993.24
Meanwhile, the EU was preoccupied with German re-unifi cation and the
reconstruction of a post-Communist Eastern Europe; Japan stagnated under the
weight of its economic problems during the 1990s; and China had the world’s
fastest growing economy, but was involved in a potentially delicate economic
and political transition that limited its global aspirations. Thus, for the fi rst time
in the modern era, the US, the world’s most powerful state, could theoretically
operate on the global stage without the constraints of other great powers. In terms
of inter-state relations, the relative power of the US had sharply increased in the
post-Cold War era.
Third, the post-Cold War world was subject to deepening globalization.
Forces such as expanding trade, the growth of foreign direct investment and the
internationalization of the mass media were combining with the aftershocks of the
end of the Cold War. At the beginning of the 1990s, the impact of these changes
remained unclear, but the US and the West generally appeared optimistic about
constructing a new grand strategy in this changing global context. After all, the US
had been at the forefront of the process of globalization. The US economy was not
only the largest in the world, but was also the major engine of global growth and
technological change. For this reason, globalization seemed almost synonymous
with Americanization. The scene seemed set, according to Francis Fukuyama,
for a new world system based on Western values of liberal democracy, market
capitalism and international co-operation. In a memorable phrase, Fukuyama
argued that the end of the Cold War marked the ‘the end of history’.25
Indeed, for many observers, the crushing military victory of the US-led
coalition over Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91 seemed
to affi rm a ‘new world order’ based on US hegemony. While few of President
Bush’s statements actually defi ned this ‘new world order’, it was clear that the
administration expected a US leadership role in conjunction with the UN in
creating and sustaining international order. The model of the Persian Gulf War was
one of strong and effective leadership, albeit one based on coalition diplomacy
10
President Bush (Senior) was right to envisage a new world. But it did not turn
out to be the order he expected. In many ways, the controversial humanitarian
intervention in Somalia was a paradigm of the emerging security environment.26
In 1992, constant civil war and drought had combined to produce a catastrophic
famine killing an estimated 300,000 Somalis. An unprecedented United
Nations peace operation was the world’s response, with a US-led United Task
Force (UNITAF) set up for a lead role. It was the fi rst time in the post-1945
era that the US military intervened to protect the lives and welfare of foreign
citizens rather national strategic interests. The operation proved to be a profound
disappointment.
Nation-building was not written into UNITAF’s mandate and instead of striving
to stabilize Somalia through political reconstruction, UNITAF focused largely on
short-term humanitarian needs. When its successor mission, UNOSOM II, became
embroiled in hostilities with the Somali faction led by warlord General Mohamed
Farah Aideed, President Bill Clinton, under pressure from Congress over the US’s
growing casualty list, announced in October 1993 the withdrawal of all US troops
within six months.27 That decision effectively ended the US–UN experiment with
peace enforcement in Somalia and eventually led to the humiliating withdrawal of
all UN troops from the country in March 1995.
The Somali crisis served to illuminate some key features of the unfolding post-
Cold War security environment. First, it revealed that weak or failed states were
now the main source of threat and instability in the world. Somalia was an early
and spectacular example of state disintegration in post-Cold War world, but it
was by no means unique. The conditions that generated the Somali crisis – civil
war in a failed state – reappeared in a large number of other countries. In the
twelve-year period between 1989 and 2001, there were 57 different major armed
confl icts in 45 locations. All but three of these confl icts occurred within states.28
Intra-state war had displaced inter-state war as the dominant form of confl ict in
the international system.
Second, new civil confl icts like Somalia were typically characterized by the
absence or inadequacy of legitimate governance. This problem – the legitimate
governance defi cit – was not new, but many of its worst effects were masked by
superpower competition for control and infl uence during the Cold War.29 However,
as the Somali case demonstrated, once superpower patronage ceased, the effects
of the defi cit were not only more visible, but the defi cit itself grew.
Third, the clan-based fi ghting of Somalia showed that the mix of factors affecting
international security had changed. Many of these new wars are predominantly
driven by issues of identity and typically involve the mobilization of movements
along ethnic, racial and religious lines. Warring factions tend to sow ‘fear and
hatred’ in order to remove or marginalize elements of the population deemed to be
different. This new organized violence is associated with mass killings, forcible
resettlement, crime and, almost by defi nition, major human rights violations.30
Examples include Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, Liberia, Angola, Tajikistan, the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and East Timor, to
name but a few.
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Fourth, civil confl icts such as Somalia served to stimulate calls for higher
standards of governance by the international community in the post-Cold War
world. In part, this new trend was a product of a wave of democratization that
erupted in Eastern Europe in 1989, spread to the former Soviet Union and
extended to parts of Africa and Asia in the 1990s, and was supported by the Clinton
administration’s early focus on democratization. But it was also infl uenced by
the transmission of ideas that is inextricably intertwined with the globalization
process. Even authoritarian societies such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia have
found it increasingly diffi cult to seal off their own populations from ‘subversive’
democratic ideas channelled though the internet and satellite TV. Moreover, in
the 1990s the belief grew within Western scholarly and diplomatic circles that
democratic states simply do not go to war with each other. The logic of this
democratic peace debate was compelling. If democratic states do not go to war
with one another, a more peaceful world could be produced if democracy was
extended to non-democratic states.31
Fifth, the Somali crisis shook the conscience of the world largely because it
captured the attention of the major media networks that are part of the process of
globalization. In July 1992, the international media took up the story, beaming
horrifi c TV pictures of starving Somalis to many countries. These extremely
powerful and often haunting images deeply affected public opinion in the US, and
played a part in focusing President Bush’s attention on the crisis. The role of the
global media has also shaped the international response to other civil confl icts and
sometimes infl uenced the conduct of such wars.
Sixth, Somalia highlighted the blurring of the old distinction between domestic
and external policy in the fi elds of security and economics. In 1992, the civil war
in Somalia led to 400,000 Somalis seeking refuge in neighbouring Kenya while
another 300,000 Somalis fl ed over the border to Ethiopia. Such an exodus had
the potential to destabilize the Horn of Africa region as a whole and showed that
the effects of the new wars were not necessarily confi ned to the territory where
they are fought. Elsewhere in the 1990s, the UN supported a series of steps to
protect the rights of people through the use of humanitarian intervention in Iraq,
Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor. Such intervention could be seen as evidence of
a shift away from the sanctity of the state as the central focus in situations where
there are widespread violations of human rights and the potential for regional
spillover.
Seventh, the US-led humanitarian intervention in Somalia provided a vivid
example of the limitations of Russian diplomacy after the Cold War. The Russian
government backed the deployment of the US-dominated military force and helped
to draft the UN Security Council Resolution 794 in December 1992. Grigory
Karasin, then the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry Africa Administration,
explained that Moscow believed sending a sizable military contingent to Somalia
under the UN fl ag was an extraordinary measure, ‘but there was no other way
out’.32 The same offi cial, however, conceded that the US president did not consult
the Russian leadership in advance about the decision to launch a large-scale action
in Somalia. And apart from a conditional offer of medical assistance, Russian
12
involvement was minimal. Such marginalization was perhaps inevitable given the
scale of Russia’s domestic problems.
But if the Somali crisis epitomised the new security environment that took
shape, the US struggled to come to terms with it. In particular, Clinton’s handling
of the Somali crisis was singled out for criticism by Republicans and conservative
Democrats. There were those like John Bolton and Charles Krauthammer who
contended that the Clinton administration had abandoned the hard-headed
approach of former President Bush, and taken a multilateralist line that had
‘no conceivable connection to the US national interest’.33 In other words, these
observers simply did not believe that the typical failed or failing state was geostrategically
important to the US. Other critics were concerned that state failure
could only by fi xed by nation-building, and that was seen ‘as beyond the scope of
what US foreign policy could and should do’.
President Clinton sought to quell these domestic pressures. In May 1994, the
Clinton administration passed Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 25 of May
1994. This directive said the US would only participate in UN peacekeeping
operations if they were in the national interest.34 That did not mean a complete
return to Cold War thinking. But it did signal the resurgence of the realist view that
the essential characteristics of the Cold War world – a dangerous place fi lled with
potential intrigue, espionage and confl ict – were part of the natural international
order. PDD 25 marked a more unilateral approach to international security under
President Clinton.
In addition, embedded statism in the US limited the scope for new thinking in
security matters. Early efforts by the Clinton administration found that the prospect
for downsizing the Pentagon’s budget was limited by the resilience of the ‘iron
triangle’ linking defence contractors and interest groups, defence bureaucrats and
members of Congress.35 The Pentagon’s ‘bottom-up review’ of 1992–93 found
that US forces still needed to be equipped to fi ght two major regional confl icts
simultaneously against ‘rogue states’ like Iraq and North Korea. Clearly, managing
the power and actions of other states and their leaders, not focusing on states
without such power or on non-state actors, remained the main priority. According
to Michael Klare, General Colin Powell advocated the ‘two war strategy’ once it
became apparent that the US was ‘running out of enemies’ large enough to justify
spending hundreds of billions on the Pentagon every year.36
Although weapons procurement declined with the end of the Cold War, US
military spending during the 1990s amounted to more than $270 billion per year.37
That fi gure was close to the Cold War average during the period of intense US–
Soviet rivalry. Democrats, in general, and President Clinton, in particular, seemed
fearful of being accused of being ‘weak on defence’. Moreover, after the collapse
of the Soviet Union in 1991, the sales of US military equipment to other nations
increased dramatically with the US weapons industry controlling almost 50 per
cent of the world arms market. Most members of Congress, even liberal leaning
Democrats who previously opposed such arms transfers, now supported them, as
concern about jobs back home and related economic benefi ts took precedence.38
As an upshot, despite Secretary of Defense William Perry’s claim that the military
13
budget contained ‘no Cold War relics’,39 many long-standing and controversial
weapons systems remained.
Thus, in the wake of the unsuccessful US–UN operation in Somalia, there
was a determination in Washington not to cross ‘the Mogadishu line’ and engage
in peace operations that had the potential to expand into armed nation-building
actions containing the attendant risk of taking casualties. It was ‘the Mogadishu
line’ mentality that paralysed UN Security Council decision-making in the face of
two brutal genocides in the mid-1990s. Politically reluctant to risk US casualties,
the Clinton administration blocked an early deployment of UN peacekeepers in
Rwanda.40 At the same time, Washington declined to take an active leadership
role in Bosnia until Serbian forces overran one of the UN-designated ‘safe areas’
at Srebrenica in July 1995 and slaughtered 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men. As an
upshot, about 1,000,000 people were murdered in ‘ethnic cleansing’: 800,000 in
Rwanda and close to 200,000 in Bosnia.41
However, the Clinton administration moderated its post-Somalia national
interest stipulation for international engagement once it realized that the ‘new
wars’ of the 1990s were more than humanitarian tragedies; they could also be
major international security problems. The massacre at Srebrenica was a catalyst
in this regard. Fears of a widening war in the Balkans, along with the pressures
of an upcoming US presidential election, triggered a more assertive US policy
in Bosnia. In the fi rst serious use of Western military power in Bosnia, NATO
conducted two weeks of air-strikes on Serb targets in the fi rst half of September
1995.42 That military pressure brought Serb forces to the negotiating table. US
diplomats subsequently pushed through the Dayton Accords in December 1995,
which formally held Bosnia together as a single country. 60,000 heavily armed
troops, mostly from NATO (with 20,000 from the United States), went to Bosnia
and established a reasonably stable cease-fi re.
The Clinton administration also fi rmly supported the establishment of tribunals
charged with the indictment and prosecution of individuals accused of crimes against
humanity and genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In Haiti, President
Clinton successfully faced down domestic opposition from senior Republicans,
including former President Bush, to execute a US-led UN intervention in 1994 to
restore to power the elected president of that country. Then, in a visit to Rwanda in
August 1998, President Clinton publicly apologized for American inaction during
the 1994 massacres and implied that military power could be deployed to prevent
future genocides.43 The NATO humanitarian intervention in Kosovo in 1999 and
the Australian-led International Force East Timor (INTERFET) operation in the
same year seemed symptomatic of a broader approach towards international
security. It was during this period that US Commission on National Security in
the 21st Century identifi ed mass-casualty terrorism on the US homeland as an
increasingly likely threat.44
But new thinking on security under President Clinton was limited by the
domestic realities of Republican majorities in Congress following the elections
of 1994 and 1996. The Republican Party had been transformed during the decade
after the Cold War. A group known as the Project for the New American Century
14
(PNAC) became highly infl uential within Republican circles during the Clinton
years. Many of the key participants in this group went on to become leading
fi gures in the current Bush administration. These included Vice-President Dick
Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Under-Secretary of
Defense, Paul Wolfowitz.
The PNAC drew heavily on the ideas contained in a Defence Planning Guidance
(DPG) document which articulated America’s political and military mission in the
post-Cold War world. The document was leaked to the New York Times in early
March 1992. The DPG stated that the ‘fi rst objective’ of US defence strategy was
‘to prevent the re-emergence of a new [superpower] rival’. Achieving this objective
required that the US ‘prevent any hostile power from dominating a region’ of
strategic signifi cance.45 Another new theme was the use of pre-emptive military
force against possible adversaries. As a consequence, the PNAC advocated the
active pursuit of US global primacy, and condemned President Clinton’s policy of
containment towards ‘rogue states’ like Iraq.
From the mid-1990s, the Project called for the overthrow of Saddam’s regime.
In January 1998, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, along with others associated with the
PNAC, wrote the White House a letter saying that if Saddam acquired weapons
of mass destruction, he would pose a threat to American troops in the region, to
Israel, to the moderate Arab states, and to the supply of oil.46
Given this domestic context, the Clinton administration faced considerable
diffi culty in devising a new national security strategy for the post-Cold War era.
The Clinton administration found it politically expedient to publicly blame Yasser
Arafat, the PLO leader, rather than Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud Prime Minister
of Israel, for undermining the Oslo peace process in the late 1990s. It also had
few reservations about opposing or expressing caution about major human rights
initiatives such as the 1997 Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines and
the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998.47 Similarly,
the Clinton White House was reluctant to publicly press Congress into paying
America’s outstanding membership dues, totalling US$1.5 billion, to the United
Nations.
By the end of the 1990s, the US had adopted a middle road position in the
face of two broadly diverging security agendas. The fi rst, the hegemonic order
paradigm, was articulated by the PNAC group associated with George W. Bush’s
bid to win the 2000 presidential election for the Republican Party. This perspective
strongly rejected the notion of ‘nation-building’, embraced the traditional view
that security was fundamentally determined by the military means of sovereign
states, and advocated ‘a distinctly American internationalism’. Convinced that
President Reagan had successfully used power and ideas to win the Cold War in
the late 1980s, this school of thought argued that America had a unique historic
responsibility in the post-Cold War era to use its unrivalled power to spread
freedom and democracy.
The second approach was the human security paradigm. This concept was fi rst
advanced by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1994. It
contended that the concept of security needed to shift from stressing territorial
15
security to stressing people’s security, and from concentrating on achieving
security through weapons to focusing on achieving security through sustainable
human development.48 A core element here is the conviction the security of
states is only important in so far as it promotes the security of the individual.
This approach seeks to promote a more integrated, holistic view of security, one
that offers a framework for reconciling the demands of development and global
security.
Confronted with these very different security agendas, the Clinton
administration, in the words of two observers, opted for an ‘uneasy amalgam’ of
selective engagement, cooperative security, and primacy
16
Exceptionalism 2.0
President Bush came into offi ce determined to focus more on old-fashioned
geopolitics than globalization. In an agenda-setting Foreign Affairs article during
the 2000 campaign, his future National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice put
strengthening the military at the top of candidate Bush’s to-do list, as well as
focusing on relations with allies and “big powers” and “dealing decisively” with
“rogue regimes.”30 Bush’s realist agenda came through starkly in an exchange with
Vice President Gore during a debate on October 12, 2000. Asked by moderator
Jim Lehrer about their “guiding principles for exercising [the] enormous power”
of the United States, Bush replied: “The fi rst question is what’s in the best
interest of the United States … When it comes to foreign policy, that will be my
guiding question.” Vice President Gore, on the other hand, offered up a baldly
exceptionalist vision: “I see our greatest natural … national strength coming from
what we stand for in the world,” he responded. “I see it as a question of values. It
is a great tribute to our founders that 224 years later, this nation is now looked to
by the peoples on every other continent, and the peoples from every part of this
earth as a kind of model for what their future could be.”31
In that same debate, Bush made his now infamous comment that “If we’re an
arrogant nation, they’ll resent us; if we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll
welcome us.”32 But humility hardly characterized his fi rst eight months in offi ce,
when his administration began to shred global treaty commitments with much
the same enthusiasm that the new president brought to clearing brush on his
Texas ranch. From January until September, the United States reinstated the “gag
rule” prohibiting recipients of US international family planning assistance from
providing abortion services, counseling, or referrals (January), blocked progress
on a Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (March), renounced the Kyoto
Protocol on Climate Change (April), blocked or weakened the terms of a draft
agreement on small arms (July), and blocked a proposed monitoring system for
the Biological Weapons protocol (July). During this time frame, the United States
also signaled that it wouldn’t seek to reverse the Senate’s failure to ratify the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (and might even resume nuclear testing), might
delay or abandon an earlier commitment to sign the convention banning antipersonnel
landmines, “unsign” the treaty creating an International Criminal Court,
and withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.
Here was an exceptionalism of a different sort: not necessarily the
exceptionalism of the United States as unique or exemplary, but the exceptionalism
of the United States as entitled to an exception from international rules. Richard
Haass, then the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning, cheekily called
83
the administration’s selective acceptance of international agreements a form of
“à la carte multilateralism.”33 Other observers were less sanguine: As Jessica
Mathews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote
later that same year, “The … dichotomy between rhetoric and practice has often
made it seem that what makes the United States exceptional is not its uniquely
benefi cent role, but the expectation that it can pick and choose within the body of
international law those commitments it wishes to apply to itself.”34
Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11. It is important to recognize what
those attacks did and did not immediately change about the Bush administration’s
approach to foreign policy. True, gone were candidate Bush’s worries about “over
committing our military around the world” and being “judicious in its use,”35
much less any humility about the US’ role in the world. Speaking three days after
the attacks, President Bush declared that “our responsibility to history is already
clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”36 While the proximate
targets of US strategy were “every terrorist group of global reach,” declared Bush
in a speech on September 20 to Congress, these groups were in fact “the heirs of
all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century.” 37 Bush went on to say that “This
is not, however, just America’s fi ght … .This is the world’s fi ght … . This is the
fi ght of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.”
But this expansive rhetoric of America as a standard bearer for the world – the
language of exceptionalism deployed by many of his predecessors in times of
crisis – did not signal a change in attitude toward global institutions or multilateral
instruments. Instead, President Bush’s words had a sharper edge to them. As he put
in the same speech before Congress (to applause), “Every nation, in every region,
now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”38
Indeed, while some observers see the United States rejoining the world in the
period between the attacks of September 11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, it
might be more accurate to say that, for a time at least, the world rejoined the
United States. Thus, while the United States welcomed NATO’s unprecedented
decision to invoke Article V of its charter on joint defense, it had no desire to
make the invasion of Afghanistan a NATO operation. While the United States was
grateful for the Security Council’s willingness to pass resolutions on terrorism,
the Bush administration’s fundamentally dismissive attitude toward the United
Nations remained unchanged. Even the administration’s courting of allies and
partners for the invasion, whether China and Russia, or Pakistan and Uzbekistan,
must be seen for what it was: old-fashioned interest-based wheeling-and-dealing
and arm-twisting, often at the expense of international norms such as human
rights and transparency.
More damningly, even as the Bush administration garnered the support of groups
such as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops for its “just war” in
Afghanistan, it was laying the groundwork for a subsequent invasion of Iraq that it
recognized would not attract global support. On September 12, Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld raised the possibility of attacking Iraq as a principal target in
the war on terrorism.39 According to one best-selling contemporary account by the
investigative reporter Bob Woodward, the president postponed discussion of that
84
possibility. But while President Bush’s intentions at that moment remain known
perhaps only to him and his God, Woodward also reports that the president asked
Rumsfeld on November 21 to update the military’s war plans on Iraq.40
The March 2003 invasion of Iraq stands out as Exhibit A of the United States as
an exceptionalist rogue state. It was launched without the sanction of the United
Nations, on the basis of disputed evidence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of
mass destruction and connections to Al Qaeda, and in the face of widespread
international and domestic opposition. The strategy of pre-emption on which it
was based, laid out in a series of presidential speeches and documents culminating
in the National Security Strategy issued in September 2002, may have antecedents
in American foreign policy: John Lewis Gaddis, for example, traces its strands
back to presidents John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, and notes that while
pre-emption may not have been visible in US strategies during the Cold War,
“it was never absent.”41 But as the ethicist Peter Singer and others have pointed
out, the strategy’s execution depends on necessarily subjective evaluations that
the United States is no more entitled than many other states to make; if other
states were to adopt a similar strategy, the result would be Hobbesian confl ict and
chaos.42 Just imagine China applying the logic of pre-emption to Taiwan, or India
and Pakistan applying it to one another. As UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan
put it at the General Assembly in 2003, the logic of pre-emption “represents a
fundamental challenge to the principles on which, however imperfectly, world
peace and stability have rested for the last fi fty-eight years.”43
The conduct of the United States in its larger war on terror has mirrored its
exceptionalist, if not unilateralist, behavior in the war in Iraq. Over the last four
years, it has violated various international commitments by arbitrarily detaining
non-American citizens, secretly deporting suspected terrorists, rendering terrorist
suspects to other countries for interrogation and torture, suspending the Geneva
Conventions for detainees held by the United States in Cuba, and kidnapping
suspected terrorists from countries where they were being held in legal custody.
And the net effect of other security policies put in place by the administration has
been to reduce cultural and commercial contacts between the United States and
the outside world, whether by instituting onerous clearance procedures for travel
to and study in the United States or tightening security on the transport of goods.
Since 2003, the Bush administration’s rationale for invading Iraq has shifted
from the narrow goal of pre-empting a terrorist threat to bringing democracy to
the Middle East. Whether that shift in focus was premeditated on the president’s
part is an open question, but it clearly taps into a deeper exceptionalist current that
runs through US foreign policy. In language that Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy might have applauded, President Bush himself
addressed the tension between realist and exceptionalist thinking in his June 2004
speech to the Air Force Academy: “Some who call themselves ‘realists’ question
whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours.
But the realists in this case have lost touch with a fundamental reality. America has
always been less secure when freedom is in retreat. America is always more secure
when freedom is on the march.”44 Seven months later, at his second inaugural, the
85
president delivered an address that was even more rhetorically sweeping, ending
with the vow, “Renewed in our strength – tested, but not weary – we are ready for
the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.”45
Yet as 2005 wore on, the reality of conditions on the ground in Iraq, the ebbing
of American public support for remaining there, and shifts in the administration’s
own actions suggested that President Bush might be forced to retreat from the
heights of American exceptionalism. By September, the war in Iraq had already
cost the United States more than 2,000 dead and 14,500 wounded; some estimates
put its projected total cost to the United States at more than $1 trillion.46 Iraq
itself remained wracked by insurgency and mired in sectarian confl ict. While
American public attitudes on the war have remained fairly stable over time, by
September one reputable poll showed that a growing proportion of Americans
was worried that Iraq threatened to become another Vietnam (39 percent) and
supported the idea of setting a timetable for withdrawal of American troops (57
percent).47 Meanwhile, newly appointed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
has defi ned her own approach as “practical idealism.”48 Among the many more
multilateralist initiatives in the fi rst few months of her tenure have been reopening
talks with North Korea, endorsing negotiations between Iran and Britain, France,
and Germany, pushing a United Nations resolution to investigate war crimes in
Sudan, dropping a campaign to oust the leader of the International Atomic Energy
Agency, and embarking on a travel schedule that seems likely to make her the
country’s most traveled Secretary of State.49
86