Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2004/01/14/ideology_and_interest_in_a_unipolar_world_of_paradise_and_power.php
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, a somewhat less than diplomatically-exasperated Secretary of State Colin Powell complains, "it seems that an administration can develop a sound foreign policy strategy, but it can't get people to acknowledge or understand it."
Responding to charges at home and abroad of American unilateralism under the current Republican administration, Powell cites the recent decision of President Bush to seek a new resolution at the Security Council of the United Nations regarding the postwar reconstruction of Iraq. This latest diplomatic action, moreover, presents no departure from established protocol, he argues. It follows in the wake of the case, presented by the President of the United States to the General Assembly on September 12, 2002, for the enforcement, by force if necessary, of 16 of its own resolutions, flouted with impunity over the years by Saddam Hussein. The subsequent unanimous passage in November 2002 of Security Council Resolution 1441, warning the Baathist government to comply with its obligations to the international community, continued the commitment of administration to international institutions. The administration finally, Powell reminds, returned to the United Nations after the fall of Baghdad to secure the passage of Resolutions 1483, lifting international sanctions against the old regime in May, and 1500, recognizing the Iraqi Governing Council in August.
Powell, however, only obliquely mentions the unsuccessful effort to attain a resolution for the invasion of Iraq, framing the diplomatic failure in the more positive terms "that we tried for a further resolution to unite the international community in the months before Operation Iraqi Freedom began." Even if, moreover, as he argues, critics of American foreign policy too narrowly "think first and sometimes only about aspects of the war on terrorism," those with memories stretching farther than a year into the recent past have pointed to no shortage of decisions that, they say, exhibit the unilaterialist tendencies of the current administration in issues beyond the scope of global terror. A by no means exhaustive list includes American withdrawals from the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change in March 2001 and the International Criminal Court in May 2002, as well as the rejection of assistance from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.
At the most basic level, the contemporary debate over unipolarity and mulitpolarity, unilateralism and multilateralism, is over the nature and implications of American power. As Dartmouth professors Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth noted in the pages of Foreign Affairs in the summer of 2002, the United States was projected to spend more on defense in 2003 than the next 15 to 20 nations combined. On military research and development, moreover, the United States spends more "than Germany or the United Kingdom spends on defense in total." The result is a defense unprecedented in both quantity and quality. With an economy "twice as large as its closest rival, Japan," moreover, the United States throughout the 1990s and into the new century maintained its military superiority at the low and affordable price of only 3.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product.
Following the fall of communist governments in Eastern Europe, columnist Charles Krauthammer spoke in Foreign Affairs of the advent of a "unipolar moment," in which "The center of world power is the unchallenged superpower, the United States, attended by its Western allies." Nearly a decade and a half later, however, that moment has become fourteen years, as Krauthammer, this time in the latest issue of Newsweek, proclaims the continuing fact of "American dominance." This time, though, considering the obstructionism of France, Germany, and Russia during the buildup to the war in Iraq, our "western allies," through a sheer calculation of interests diverging with the strategic goals of the United States, are no longer allies. "It is sheer laziness now that counts France and Germany as old allies," he writes, "sheer naiveté that counts Russia as a new one." He bids, in the title of the article, "A Farewell to Allies," arguing that "Now they are neutrals. America can stand tall without them." Krauthammer, therefore, since the end of the Cold War, has proclaimed the fact of American unipolarity and advocated an American foreign policy of unabashed unilateralism.
In Of Paradise and Power, expanded from a 2002 essay in Policy Review, Robert Kagan makes a more nuanced argument. Echoing Krauthammer, he claims that transatlantic eruptions over international environmental policy, universal legal jurisdiction, and nonproliferation stem fundamentally from divergences of power and, as important, ideology between erstwhile allies. Unlike Krauthammer, however, who says in his editorial in Newsweek that in the 1990s "With the acquiescence of a Democratic Administration uncomfortable with American power, silk ropes were fashioned to tie down Gulliver: a myriad of treaties, protocols and prohibitions on everything from carbon emissions to land mines to nuclear testing. With the advent of the Bush Administration, contemptuous of these restraints, that would no longer work," Kagan draws no such stark contrast between the foreign policies of Democratic and Republican administrations. President Bill Clinton, for example, in taking steps to construct a new missile defense system in response to the threat posed by rogue states, such as North Korea, armed with nuclear weapons, "threatened to undo the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction that Europeans had long valued as central to their own strategic security," while Vice President Al Gore signed the Kyoto protocol, but the administration "deliberately did not submit it to the Senate, where it was certain to be defeated." President Clinton, finally, not President Bush, in response to concerns voiced by Secretary of Defense William Cohen and senior military officials at the Pentagon, "first demanded that American troops be immune from prosecution by the new International Criminal Court."
Unlike Krauthammer, moreover, Kagan provides a primarily descriptive, as opposed to prescriptive, analysis of international affairs. Whereas the former argued in a Washington Post editorial of early 2001, following the inauguration of President George W. Bush but before September 11, that "after a decade of Prometheus playing pygmy, the first task of the new administration is to reassert American freedom of action," the latter concludes that "Americans are powerful enough that they need not fear Europeans, even when bearing gifts. Rather than viewing the United States as a Gulliver tied down by Lilliputian threads, American leaders should realize that they are hardly constrained at all, that Europe is not really capable of constraining the United States," and that the United States "could pay its respects to multilateralism and the rule of law, and try to build some political capital for those moments when multilateralism is impossible and unilateral action unavoidable."
Kagan, therefore, describes what he considers the fact of American unipolarity, but does not make the cognitive leap from unipolarity to the necessity or desirability of American unilateralism in every case.The growing American tendency, in the words of political scientist Joseph Nye, to "go it alone" is, according to Kagan, an expression of American power relative to the rest of the world. That strength, combined especially with the weakness, as measured by military and demographic indicators, of Europe, has resulted in bipartisan strategic perceptions increasingly divergent with the views of our transatlantic allies. After five decades of life under the security umbrella of the United States, unburdened by the military exigencies of other states, the states of Europe have enjoyed the luxury of the ability to focus their attentions upon economic development, the perfection of social policies at home and multilateral institutions in their dealings with each other, and the arduous task of peaceful European consolidation. Europe lives, according to Kagan, in a world of perpetual peace, while the United States, as guarantor of global security, must of necessity operate in the anarchic realm of Machtpolitik.
These different international roles of the United States and the nations of Western Europe lead him to make one of the few prescriptive statements in Of Paradise and Power. The prescription is not his own, however, as he essentially endorses the argument of the British advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair Robert Cooper, whom he cites, that "The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards." With each other, the developed democracies can "operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security," but with the rest of the world of dictatorships, autocracies, and failed states, "we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era—force, preemptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary." Kagan points to Blair, our closest ally in the war in Iraq as well as a longtime proponent of British participation in European consolidation, as an example of such a policy based on double standards in action.
The example of Tony Blair, however, points to a weakness in the thesis of the essay. In drawing the distinction on which his analysis relies, between the "Hobbesian" United States and "Kantian" Europe, a cleavage most clearly evidenced, according to Kagan, during the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, Kagan fails to consider that Europe, if not its citizens than at least its governments, was anything but united in its opposition to the American policy. If anything, we drew both our most committed allies, such as Britain, Spain, Italy, and Portugal, and our most determined diplomatic opponents from those countries.
When Kagan speaks of Europe, he in fact means Germany and France. In the case of the latter country, moreover, he does not consider that France, notwithstanding his portrayal of a postmodern Europe uncomfortable with the use of force in international affairs, continues to think of itself, rightly or wrongly, as a great power willing to use unilateral military action to secure its national interests. French Foreign Minister Dominique De Villepin, rejecting at the United Nations "the logic of force" presented by the United States and Britain last year to deal with the threat posed by Hussein, pontificated that "war is an acknowledgement of failure." In events of a lower international profile, however, at the very same time as France continued to deploy troops to its former colony the Ivory Coast, ostensibly for peacekeeping purposes but actually to repress an internal political rebellion there threatening French economic interests. Nor does Kagan consider the role in determining the French position toward the war played by the substantial economic stake held by France in the continued rule of Saddam Hussein. The giant French corporation TotalFinaElf, by contract with the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein, held exclusive negotiating rights worth billions of dollars for the to develop two of the largest Iraqi oilfields following the projected repeal of international sanctions. The New York Times reports that France ranked first among European nations in 2001 in terms of business with Iraq at $1.5 billion in trade.
Despite these prominent divergences of French and American interests over Iraq, however, in emphasizing the importance of European ideology in foreign affairs Kagan overestimates the degree and nature of the split between the two nations. "Europe is turning away from power," Kagan writes in the introduction to his essay. "It is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation," while "the United States remains mired in history, exercising power in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable, and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might." Ideology is constant, however, whereas material interests vary from case to case. The recent French and Belgian effort to establish a European fighting force independent of NATO, for example, even if unlikely to materialize into meaningful action, hardly reflects the ideological commitment of those nations to transatlantic multilateralism. As shown by increased intelligence sharing since September 11 and the recent cancellation of six Air France flights from Paris to Los Angeles over Christmas, however, France will continue to cooperate with the United States in those international issues of confluent French and American interest. Without a threat to its security from the Soviet Union, France will not remain as deferent to the wishes of American policymakers as during the Cold War, but such is to be expected as geopolitical realities, and therefore national interests, change over time.