Read THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Online
Authors: Philip Bobbitt
Many states will strive for primacy in their regions or in the world at large in the coming period. Some will do so pursuing the strategy of nation-states, like France, whose policies sometimes appear driven by a mixture of hauteur and reactionary anti-Americanism. Some will pursue the strategies of market-states, which can vary greatly. I believe the successful market-state strategy for the United States will be one that studiedly avoids both mercantile and managerial market approaches, which have the potential for alienating trading partners and heightening xenophobia, in favor of pursuing a goal of providing “collective goods” to the world. Joseph Joffe has prescribed this course with great insight:
The United States must produce three types of collective goods: First, act as regional protector by underwriting the security of those potential rivals—Japan, China, Western Europe—who would otherwise have to produce security on their own by converting their economic strength into military assets; [s]econd, act as a regional pacifier; [t]hird, universalize [security] architecture [by which the United States acts with various regional players in concert against regional threats].
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As long as the U.S. provides precious collective goods the Europeans or Asians cannot or will not produce for themselves—building coalitions and acting universally through regional cooperation, implementing anti-missile, anti-proliferation, and pro-environmental regimes, organizing humanitarian intervention—there will remain an important demand for U.S. leadership.
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Joffe contrasts this course favorably with a balance-of-power approach that I would be inclined to describe, in market terms, as a mixture of the managerial and the mercantile. These approaches are not well-suited to producing collective goods, such as mutual security, political unity within an alliance in the face of external threats, or stability in environmental and economic relations beyond the state or regional group. There is an intense debate within the United States, however, about whether the United States should become a more mercantile market-state and avoid some of the costs of producing collective goods. And there has always been a strong lobby in the United States for the beguiling prospects of burden sharing available to managerial market-states.
What would such a policy of producing collective goods look like? What programs serve that policy?
Consider the following seven possible programs to enhance the security of the United States in a world of market-states. These seven are analogous to the various programs that served the policy of containment (intervention in the Third World, nuclear deterrence at the central level, etc.) that applied the American paradigm in the context of the Soviet threat. They are examples of how, through the means of exercising leadership—for which the experience of the Long War has capitalized the United States with a reputation for relatively benign intent—the United States could be the principal provider of the most significant collective goods to the world community and in so doing, resolve its current intellectual stalemate over strategy.
(1)
The United States can take the lead in reforming NATO to give it a mission relevant to the twenty-first century. The North Atlantic Council, the decision-making body in NATO, would provide the framework within which intervention forces will be mustered. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry and Assistant Secretary Ashton Carter make this proposal:
NATO's principal strategic and military purpose in the post–cold war era is to provide a mechanism for the rapid formation of militarily potent “coalitions of the willing” able to project power beyond [Europe. These] “coalitions of the willing”… will include some—but not necessarily all—NATO members, and will generally include nonmembers drawn from the Partnership for Peace [former Warsaw Pact states].
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This is not to suggest that NATO fundamentally change its national command protocols, but it does imply that member states would be able to organize peacekeeping forces without a unanimous vote in the North Atlantic Council. Perhaps the most promising objective of such a NATO-plus coalition is a low-intensity, high-intelligence war against international terrorism.
The United States should also take the lead in organizing G-8 activities that go beyond the mere conferencing of its members (e.g., providing aid to stricken countries, mustering coalition-supported U.S. forces to resist aggression and to halt campaigns of ethnic cleansing). In organizing “coalitions of the willing,” the United States should place great emphasis on linking up with Russian forces. Joint professional activities with the Russian military should be given the highest priority. Russian units should be trained in NATO tactics, which include the use of nonlethal means for coping with contending local parties,
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how to secure a town with a minimum use of force, how to man a checkpoint as part of a multinational
force, even how to deal with the press.
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Russia has the potential to be a uniquely valuable security partner and, moreover, the experience of military-to-military cooperation in joint peacemaking enterprises could pay dividends in a more cooperative political relationship.
(2)
The United States could manage the world community's efforts to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of hostile powers—either by maintaining nonhostile relations with those powers (like China) that have nuclear weapons, or by preventing hostile states (like Iraq) from acquiring them, or by inducing friendly states (like Japan and Germany) to rely on the United States rather than set in motion regional competitions to acquire nuclear arms, or by bribing hostile states (like North Korea) that have nuclear weapons programs to give them up. This role implies that the United States should not constantly reassess its demands for internal liberalization in China, but at the same time should continue to protect Taiwan, which will otherwise go nuclear itself, setting off chain reactions in Australia and Indonesia; and that it should take especial care to maintain the security guarantees with Japan and South Korea—and not press its trade disputes with these states so aggressively as to arm anti-U.S. parties in those states; that it should use intensified covert means to sabotage the weapons programs of “rogue states” and insist on the continuing sanctions against Iraqi rearmament (even while setting up generous infrastructure funds from the controlled sale of Iraqi oil to pay off Russian and French creditors and revive the Iraqi middle class); that it should proceed with NATO expansion as a way of maintaining the importance of the security guarantee to Germany; and purchase outright intact nuclear weapons from Russia, a more effective market-state method than the legally negotiated, treaty-mandated handover of dangerous and negotiable fissile material favored by nation-states; and fully implement the North Korean reactor exchange (to take a few contemporary examples).
(3)
The United States could organize a North Asia Security Council, anchored in Tokyo and including Japan, Russia, China, and South Korea. This Council would provide a forum for regional discussions, joint military exercises, and information sharing. It would emphasize that the United States is a Pacific power and offer a framework for our nonproliferation efforts. No two states have as great an interest in preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as do Russia and China. If the Chechens, for
example, who have bloodied the Russian army with little more than small arms and antitank weapons, were to acquire such weapons, then surely the Tajiks and Azeris would not be far behind, with incalculable risks for the survival of the Russian state as it is now constituted. If Taiwan were to acquire nuclear weapons and thus force a stalemate, China would be hard pressed to maintain the threat that conventional force could mount a successful amphibious invasion. Yet without the incentive of this tacit threat, unification may be decades away. In these efforts the United States can find no more potentially helpful partner than China. China is a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (in 1992). It has signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (in 1996) and has affirmed (in 1992) and reaffirmed (in 1994) its commitment to abide by the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). Yet there is ample evidence that China sold Pakistan ring magnets for use in a gas centrifuge to enrich uranium (for a nuclear weapon), and, despite the MTCR, transferred M-11 short-range missiles to Pakistan. There is further evidence that China has passed materials and equipment for uranium enrichment to Iran, as well as cruise missiles, ballistic missile technology, and chemical weapons precursors.
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Why should we try to enlist such a partner?
China has more recently undertaken to halt this trade. More than any other state in the world, it has grounds for alarm at the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Only by enlisting U.S. cooperation in a nonproliferation regime can China ensure itself against this possibility. China is increasingly dependent on Middle East oil, and is at least partly responsible for provoking India's weaponizing its nuclear technology. Yet China ought to move to the forefront of enforcing a nonproliferation regime.
(4)
The United States might resist the regionalization of trade because it is a global power with global interests. No other power can speak for world trade cooperation with the legitimacy of the United States so long as the latter pursues free trade convincingly and exercises leadership in pursuit of international financial stability. This suggests that the United States should attempt to gain access to the markets of more than one regional trading pact; that it should resist efforts to have the euro replace or augment the dollar as the world's common currency; that it should tolerate wider swings in its currency than other states wish to permit; and, finally, that it should prefer virtual regional trading groups, which are united by cultural and business attitudes rather than by mere physical proximity. There is no reason why Sweden would not be a more appropriate partner in such a virtual union than, say, Guatemala. Proximity and contiguity should not be the decisive determinants of the perimeters of an economic union when the perimeters of economic life are unbounded on the World Wide Web. A
nonexclusive free-trade zone between the United States and the United Kingdom makes far better sense than an anti-competitive hemispheric fortress for either state.
(5)
The United States could provide warranties for the security of important regional states vis-à-vis each other by offering an open bargain to aid any state that is attacked—bearing in mind, of course, that American assistance can take the many forms discussed above that are appropriate to a market-state—and to mediate any significant dispute. Warranties could even be brokered or factored by various state guarantors. This implies that the ongoing and costly role of American diplomacy in brokering foreign disputes is a good investment of time and energy. (For such a course to succeed, Congress would have to resist adopting measures like the Pressler Amendment, which embargoed Pakistani arms purchases, and the Glenn Amendment, which requires economic sanctions against a nuclear India, with no provision for a national security waiver. Taken together such laws can paralyze U.S. action on the subcontinent, to take one example.)
(6)
The United States could develop an action program of lease-hire security insurance, licensing some forms of defense technology and emphasizing the U.S. role in providing information, missile defense, and even intervention for hire.
Consider, therefore, a vertical coalition in which the United States supplies intelligence and systems assistance to a beleaguered [state], which in turn, uses such help to organize its own sources of information, increase its battlespace illumination and support its own command-and-control, operational planning and rapid reaction… Vertical coalitions have several uses. In October 1994, Iraq massed its tanks looking southward to Kuwait, and the United States responded by shipping over 35,000 troops at a cost of nearly a billion dollars. What if Kuwait could have defended itself in the first crucial week with medium-range point-guided PGMs [precision-guided munitions] guided by the System (with in-place sensors) so that assault forces could be converted into real-time aimpoints? By revealing, for instance, precisely where opposing artillery is firing from, illumination could help one side (e.g., Bosnian Muslims) without risking American troops or impelling powerful countries to intervene on behalf of others (e.g., Bosnian Serbs). Border illumination could dissuade a U.S. ally from feeling the need to undertake problematic cross-border actions (e.g., Turkey's 1995 pursuit of Kurdish rebels into Iraq). Unlike a formal alliance, illumination could be offered
in finely graded doses depending on the degree of trust between the United States and others. Such applications could increase countries' confidence in their ability to see across their borders even without formal alliance commitments.
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Again, it must be emphasized that by sharing technology and information, the United States enhances its power; a failure to develop modalities of sharing will induce competitors to develop and provide similar services and products.
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(7)
Apart from these specific proposals, I will offer one suggestion that goes to the process of U.S. decision making. It is important that the United States, at the highest levels, create a strategic planning group analogous to the “vision teams” used by private industry. At this moment more than at any other time since Colonel E. M. House set up The Inquiry in 1918,
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the United States needs to find the resources and commitment to engage in a strategic planning process.
As Kees van der Heijden has recently observed,
[t]he need for efficient strategic thinking is most obvious in times of accelerated change when the reaction time of the organization becomes crucial to survival and growth…. The problem is that such periods of change alternate with periods of relative stability, when organizations often get stuck into established ways of doing things, making them ill-prepared for when the change comes.
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This is precisely the situation I have described with respect to the proposed “paradigms” for U.S. policy currently in play. But not just any process will do. One important element of such a process in an age of uncertainty is scenario planning.
The traditional approach [to planning] tries to eliminate uncertainty from the strategic equation, by the assumption of the existence of “experts” who have privileged knowledge about the “most likely future,” and who can assess the probabilities of specific outcomes. [By contrast] [s]cenario planning assumes that there is irreducible uncertainty and ambiguity in any situation faced by the strategist, and that successful strategy can only be developed in full view of this…. The most fundamental aspect of introducing uncertainty in the strategic equation is that
it turns planning for the future from a once-off episodic activity into an ongoing learning proposition.
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Appropriate scenario planning can create an institutionalized learning system. I will have more to say about the scenario process in Chapter 26. For the time being, let me simply urge that a true strategic planning group be created linking the National Security Council, the National Intelligence Council, and the Policy Planning Staff and that a true “vision team” be simultaneously convened, in secret, encompassing a broad range of opinions to aid that planning group. Such a team, in contrast to House's Inquiry—which was composed mainly of lawyers and academics—should include business executives, not necessarily only American, as well as scientists, technologists, and editors from the news media. In other words, this team ought to be different in composition from the think tanks that are a prominent source of ideas in Washington.
It would be absurd to make long-term forecasts about future security environments that would aim to offer guidance for force planning, force sizing, and force structure. No one scenario about the future is certain enough to justify this. Rather, what I am urging is more thought about how our present decisions are likely to play out in bringing about different worlds. As Paul Bracken has written:
It is not common to think about national security in such terms. Usually, policy goals are formulated and then force structure implications derived from them. History is not so clear in its causal relationships, however, and radically new improvements in military capacities can have their own impact on international relations.
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Let me be clear about the purpose of the seven proposals thus far canvassed. I am not proposing that the main force of the United States be converted from a large conventional army into a boutique force, capable only of high-tech special operations and humanitarian interventions. I strongly believe the greatest threats to American security in the early twenty-first century will come from powerful, technologically sophisticated states—not from “rogues,” whether they be small states or large groups of bandits. And I believe that large defense budgets will be required to deter or, if necessary, meet these threats without resort to nuclear weapons. I have stressed the innovations just discussed rather as a way of coping with the fact that the United States is often ill equipped to act within the confines of the market-state, with its aversion to casualties and its sensitivity to events in remote theaters that do not impinge upon U.S. vital interests. The current U.S. force posture tends to lock it into a two-major-war
contingency—the least likely of eventualities—and thus constrains the United States from using force appropriately in the battles it does fight.
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And the U.S. emphasis on large platforms tends to lock in American budget commitments for decades at a time, precisely when new technological developments demand nimble, flexible procurement policies.
There are other proposals that would doubtless also serve this model—a robust debate within the parameters of the market-state will surely ensue. These seven are offered as exemplary only. What is important is that the United States adapt its leadership to the new society of market-states, and that it gradually abandon those attitudes and proposals (for a “new” Bretton Woods, or for a rapid reaction force for the U.N., or for enlarging the responsibilities of the World Trade Organization [WTO], to take three popular proposals) that arise from a mentality geared to the society of nation-states that is already decaying.