Drift & Mastery, Bush-Style
Mini Teaser: It is said that one cannot argue with success.
It is said that one cannot argue with success. On the contrary, one can and one should, for euphoria and complacency are the enemies of sound judgment. Before August 2, 1990, George Bush received high praise from the American foreign policy establishment for doing very little in relation to the collapse of communism. Since then he has received equally generous praise for being spectacularly activist in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. First masterly inactivity, then masterful engagement: How sound are these judgments?
For a recent example of an admiring account of George Bush's passive response to the end of the Cold War, consult Michael Mandelbaum's article in the current "America and the World" issue of Foreign Affairs. Professor Mandelbaum's conclusion that the president deserves high marks is based almost entirely on how well he believes George Bush played the role of the dog that didn't bark. The president "kept the United States in the background"; he "steered clear" of the pitfalls and blind alleys of interference; he "refrained from," "avoided," and "declined" to do this and that; he "correctly calculated" the wisdom of letting things "run their course," without either collaborating with or confronting Moscow.
Mandelbaum suggests that the president's performance in this respect has gone "underappreciated," but I don't think so. True, some conservatives have chided Bush for being insufficiently exultant in victory, and for inadequate zeal in pressing America's advantage over an adversary in crisis; and true, some liberals, gamely ready to embrace yet another hero on the Left even as the pillars of the temple are crumbling, have complained that not enough was being done to "help Gorby." But in the think tanks, editorial offices, and schools of international relations in which wisdom is made conventional, the bulk of opinion has approved the Bush administration's passivity. Professor Mandelbaum is expressing an orthodoxy, not a challenging reassessment.
On the whole, and with a qualification I shall come to, I agree with the orthodoxy. To adapt the old saw, if something you don't like is broke or breaking, don't feel obliged to fix it. And don't feel compelled to hasten a process that is proceeding nicely of its own accord; at best your efforts will be superfluous, at worst counterproductive.
More specifically, the case against Bush's conservative critics is that blatant attempts to exploit the crisis in the Soviet Union, either in propaganda terms or by attempting to influence events there, would in all likelihood weaken the reformers and strengthen the reactionary forces by allowing the latter to exploit Russian national pride. Expressions of conservative outrage at the use of Soviet force against the Baltic peoples and other nationalities, especially when accompanied by demands that the Bush administration must respond punitively, are not convincing. What we are witnessing in the Soviet Union is the collapse of the last great empire of the twentieth century. The earlier collapse of empires--including those of the democratic powers--was accompanied by much violence and bloodshed. The British departure from the Indian subcontinent, Kenya, and Malaya; the French from Vietnam and Algeria; the Dutch from Indonesia; the Belgians from the Congo; the Portuguese from Timor--millions of deaths accompanied these vast adjustments in the international system. So far, the collapse of the communist empire has been surprisingly parsimonious in blood, particularly given the regime's demonstrated taste for violence. Who would have predicted that fundamental challenges to the integrity of the Soviet Union would result in deaths measured only in dozens and scores? This may well change of course--indeed it will be surprising if it does not--but until it does, protestations of shock and horror ring rather hollow. Another observation suggested by earlier examples of imperial collapse is that whether or not the Soviet republics achieve independence will depend overwhelmingly on their own determination and staying power. Except as a side effect of a major war, there are few examples of outside intervention being decisive.
Liberal criticism of the Bush administration's passivity is also unpersuasive. That criticism has usually taken the form of complaints that the United States is being insufficiently supportive and generous with aid. But the gap between what would be required to make a significant difference to the Soviet economy and what the United States, even at its most generous, could conceivably give is very large. Further, there is no evidence that the Soviet system could make good use of any aid given to it. A country that wastes its own record harvest because of failure to gather, store, and distribute is hardly likely to use foreign aid effectively. The only exception to this inefficiency is the Soviet military-industrial complex, which almost certainly could make good use of Western material aid and technology. But aiding it would obstruct rather than facilitate reform. Indeed, arguably, any economic aid that was not entirely wasted would have that effect, in that it would lessen the incentive to change.
The liberal stress on the importance of material aid is quite mistaken. The most important thing the West, and particularly the United States, has to give--or to withhold from--the Soviet regime is legitimacy. This commodity is as scarce as soap and hypodermic needles in Moscow, and even more valuable. As a discredited ideology is no longer able to confer legitimacy, good relations with the world's major powers, particularly with the only authentic superpower, become increasingly important for the leaders in the Kremlin. So far, the Bush administration has been prepared to satisfy that need in a sober and moderate way, and in return for limited Soviet cooperation on matters of importance to Washington--particularly the Gulf Crisis.
It is true that Bush was given a good hand to play by the departing Reagan. It is also true that Bush would have been wiser to spread his bets, rather than to have put so much of his money on the personal future of Mikhail Gorbachev. On the whole, however, the praise given to Bush for his handling of relations with the Soviets in crisis has been well earned. But--and this is the qualification I signaled earlier--a policy that was appropriate when things were going very much as we wanted them to go, and when a good deal of cooperation on bilateral and international matters was forthcoming, may not continue to be appropriate if, as now seems evident, reactionary forces are gaining the upper hand in Moscow. While the United States will still have an interest in ensuring that events in the Soviet Union and Central Europe do not lead to a dangerous systemic instability, it should also be concerned to prevent the suppression of reform. But even then it should proceed with a clear sense of the limits of its likely influence, and of the dangers of unintended and counterproductive results.
President Bush's response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait has been enormously popular with both the foreign policy establishment and the American public. His unhesitating commitment; the unwavering demand for complete and unconditional withdrawal; the marshaling and holding together of a great international coalition; the use made of the United Nations; the smooth and rapid assembling of a huge military force in the Gulf and its subsequent successful deployment--all have been generally acclaimed for the decisiveness shown, the sense of control and authority conveyed, and the skill in implementation.
In the early stages of the crisis, I subscribed to this assessment. In a piece written for an Australian audience in early October, for example, I described the administration's handling of the crisis as "superb." Since then I have had second thoughts. While I certainly continue to support the opposition to the Iraqi aggression, and while much of the implementation of policy has been impressive, the policy itself now seems to me to be deeply flawed.
The first mistake made by President Bush, I believe, was the immediate, unqualified, and unilateral commitment of American power to achieving the complete, unconditional withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait. By this premature commitment, the president deprived the United States of the leverage necessary to get other countries to play their part, thus ensuring that the United States would play the leading role and bear most of the burden. If the president had really wanted to establish that the old way of doing things was yielding to a "new world order," as he insisted he did, he should have made it clear at the outset that the days of leaving it to the United States to bear the burden of responsibility and leadership--to "do the hard work of freedom"--were over.
This could have been done without jeopardizing the security of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states. The United States should have put enough air power in place, together with a small trip-wire force on the ground, to ensure that Iraq's aggression would not immediately extend beyond Kuwait--and then should have turned to the Europeans and the Japanese and said: "Given your greater dependence on its oil, you have much more at stake in the Gulf than we have, so you call the shots. The United States will support you, but the initiative must be yours." This would have established a new "ground rule" for the post-Cold War "order" with a vengeance. It would have been a true "defining moment," one that would have concentrated the minds of the Germans and Japanese wonderfully.
It would also have broken the unhealthy American habit, acquired during the Cold War years of absolute dominance, of assuming control without consulting anyone, and then complaining bitterly that others were not backing it up and sharing the burden. The time to get other countries to do some burden-sharing is before making commitments that lock one in, not afterwards. That President Bush chose to take virtually the whole burden on his country's shoulders, and that his choice was so popular with his fellow countrymen, may reveal one of the important secrets of contemporary America: Despite complaints and grumbles about burdens, and professions of relief that the tensions of the Cold War have now relaxed, the country has become much more attached to its role of superpower and leader of the free world than it cares to admit--and it would feel seriously deprived if it ever lost that role.*
More than inadequate burden sharing is involved in the feeble performance of Germany and Japan during this crisis. A year ago it was being predicted confidently--indeed, stated as an obvious fact--that these two countries were about to join the ranks of the truly global powers. The pronouncement was made simply on the basis of a crude economic determinism: these countries now have huge economies and are very rich; therefore they will inevitably be leading players in world politics. Americans who asserted and accepted this were forgetting their own history. The United States had the strongest economy in the world for about fifty years before it chose to become a fully active world power, and then it took Pearl Harbor to force the choice. Economics is not destiny. Wealth makes it possible to be a global power, it does not make it inevitable.
There are those, of course, who argue that it is better that Germany and Japan should remain politically quiescent, and that we should be prepared to put up with their freeloading as a necessary price for their remaining so. It is an understandable point of view, but it really will not do. Given our experience with both countries, there must be real concern that if they do not overcome the effects of their mid-century traumas and steadily acquire the habits of responsibility and participation in the company of others, their future history will consist of an unpredictable and dangerous lurching between extremes: timid and reticent one day, demanding and domineering the next.
Another, and more obvious, weakness of the Bush administration's handling of the crisis has been the opportunistic importance it has attached to the role of the United Nations as the authorizer of policy. While this has had obvious short-term advantages--mainly in disarming potential critics who still believe, or profess to believe, that the UN represents "morality"--it should be equally obvious that it stores up trouble for the future. In any dispute involving one or more of the veto-owning permanent members of the Security Council as the perpetrators of aggression--that is to say, in the most serious disputes--the moral patina of a UN resolution authorizing effective action will never be available. By pandering to and exploiting illusions about the UN, instead of exposing them and taking the trouble to make its own moral case for acting, the administration has encouraged the belief that UN approval is a necessary condition for the legitimate use of force. It is now commonplace for commentators on talk shows and op-ed pages to explain that certain courses of action or objectives (for instance, the removal of Saddam) exceed the limits of what is authorized by the UN, that they are not part of "the mandate"--as if that settled the matter. We shall live to regret this much-trumpeted "UN success."
The most serious fault in the Bush administration's Gulf policy is its disproportion. In terms of the original provocation and its perpetrator, there is something grotesquely inappropriate in the scale of response--as if, say, Muhammad Ali in his prime had been sent in against a promising lightweight. If anyone had predicted on August 2 that in six months' time there would be half a million American troops in the Gulf, as well as five American aircraft carriers, a huge air force, and sizable allied contingents; if anyone had predicted that in the first year of the new world order more bombs would be dropped on Iraq and Kuwait in three weeks than were dropped on Germany by the American and British air forces during the period of most intense bombing of World War II--surely he would have been thought very peculiar indeed. All other items on America's political agenda have been put on hold--or compromised--in order to concentrate on the problem of bringing a country of seventeen million people to heel. During a critical period in the evolution of the crisis in the Soviet Union, Washington's Soviet policy has been subordinated to the need to maintain Moscow's support for U.S. Gulf policy. (Indeed, a persuasive case can be made that the magnitude of the U.S. military response to Saddam Hussein has been a factor in hardening the Soviet military's outlook and making it more assertive and resistant to reform.)
All this has been justified by President Bush in terms of "a defining hour" and the importance of creating a decisive precedent for the new world order. In other words, the whole thing transcends Saddam Hussein and Kuwait. But the irony is that the very size of the reaction to the invasion of Kuwait ensures that it cannot be a convincing precedent. This kind of behavior is simply not replicable on a regular basis, and cannot therefore establish a rule. If there is another act of blatant aggression in Latin America or Southeast Asia in six months' time, it will be beyond the means and the will of the United States to respond in similar fashion.
Some would answer this by saying that if the action against Saddam is successful it will not be necessary to repeat it, that the terrible lesson taught him will be an effective deterrent to other potential aggressors, and that, in any case, they will not know that it cannot be repeated. Perhaps, but it is dangerous to base policy on the assumption that other people are dumber than oneself. The strong-arm men and bully boys of the world have many intellectual shortcomings, but one of the things they are normally fairly shrewd at--it is a necessary talent for success in their line of business--is the calculation of power realities. If we can see that the United States cannot sustain a series of Gulf-like operations to deal with regional aggression, it is safer to assume that they too will see it.
The other effect of the gigantic scale of the operation has been to flatter, and magnify the importance of, the object of its attention. Even as it destroys Saddam Hussein, that operation cannot help but build him up. If before the end he succeeds in inflicting serious casualties on American forces, it may yet confer on him an heroic stature in Arab eyes. (One says this with some trepidation. So many contradictory things have been asserted about "the Arab mind" in recent months that any claim concerning it is unlikely to be significantly more persuasive than its opposite.) To be defeated--even to be killed--by such a stupendous force will not in itself be a disgrace. It could well be taken to constitute proof of his seriousness as an adversary and to validate his pretensions; and revered dead men can be formidable enemies.
As conservatives should be the first to recognize, Walter Lippmann's famous warning about the importance of keeping ends and means in balance cuts both ways: while it is important to ensure that the means used are sufficient to secure the ends, it is also important that they should not be wildly excessive. For excessive means are the producers of collateral effects and unintended consequences, and these can be particularly unfortunate in a region like the Middle East.
By the time this is published, the United States may well have won a decisive and spectacular military victory at a very low cost in American lives. In that case President Bush will be triumphant and criticisms of his policy will probably fall on deaf ears. That will not in itself invalidate those criticisms, and it will not be the first example in history of military success serving to disguise political error--at least for awhile. And it may be worth pointing out that, from Napoleon to Anthony Eden, it is difficult to recall a modern Western statesman who, in the end, enhanced his reputation by taking initiatives in the Middle East. It will be a surprise--though a pleasant one--if George Bush turns out to be the exception.
Owen Harries is editor of The National Interest.
*On this point see Michael Vlahos in America's Purpose--Toward a New Vision of U.S. Foreign Policy, edited by Owen Harries (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1991), pp. 43-52.
Essay Types: Essay