World Order (44 page)

The issue transcends political debates about its antecedents. The consolidation of a jihadist entity at the heart of the Arab world, equipped with substantial captured weaponry and a transnational fighting force, engaged in religious war with radical Iranian and Iraqi Shia groups, calls for a concerted and forceful international response or it will metastasize. A sustained strategic effort by America, the other permanent members of the Security Council, and potentially its regional adversaries will be needed.

The nature of the international order was at issue when the Soviet Union emerged as a challenge to the Westphalian state system. With decades of hindsight, one can debate whether the balance sought by America was always the optimum. But it is hard to gainsay that the United States, in a world of weapons of mass destruction and political and social upheaval, preserved the peace, helped restore Europe’s vitality, and provided crucial economic aid to emerging countries.

It was in the conduct of its “hot” wars that America found it
difficult to relate purpose to possibility. In only one of the five wars America fought after World War II (Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan), the first Gulf War under President George H. W. Bush, did America achieve the goals it had put forward for entering it without intense domestic division. When the outcomes of the other conflicts—ranging from stalemate to unilateral withdrawal—became foreordained is a subject for another debate. For present purposes, it is sufficient to state that a country that has to play an indispensable role in the search for world order needs to begin that task by coming to terms with that role and with itself.

The essence of historical events is rarely fully apparent to those living through them. The Iraq War may be seen as a catalyzing event in a larger transformation of the region—the fundamental character of which is as yet unknown and awaits the long-term outcome of the Arab Spring, the Iranian nuclear and geopolitical challenge, and the jihadist assault on Iraq and Syria. The advent of electoral politics in Iraq in 2004 almost certainly inspired demands for participatory institutions elsewhere in the region; what is yet to be seen is whether they can be combined with a spirit of tolerance and peaceful compromise.

As America examines the lessons of its twenty-first-century wars, it is important to remember that no other major power has brought to its strategic efforts such deeply felt aspirations for human betterment. There is a special character to a nation that proclaims as war aims not only to punish its enemies but to improve the lives of their people—that has sought victory not in domination but in sharing the fruits of liberty. America would not be true to itself if it abandoned this essential idealism. Nor would it reassure friends (or win over adversaries) by setting aside such a core aspect of its national experience. But to be effective, these aspirational aspects of policy must be paired with an unsentimental analysis of underlying factors, including the cultural and geopolitical configuration of other regions and the dedication and resourcefulness of adversaries opposing American interests and values.
America’s moral aspirations need to be combined with an approach that takes into account the strategic element of policy in terms the American people can support and sustain through multiple political cycles.

Former Secretary of State George Shultz has articulated the American ambivalence wisely:

Americans, being a moral people
, want their foreign policy to reflect the values we espouse as a nation. But Americans, being a practical people, also want their foreign policy to be effective.

The American domestic debate is frequently described as a contest between idealism and realism. It may turn out—for America and the rest of the world—that if America cannot act in both modes, it will not be able to fulfill either.

E
VERY AGE HAS ITS LEITMOTIF,
a set of beliefs that explains the universe, that inspires or consoles the individual by providing an explanation for the multiplicity of events impinging on him. In the medieval period, it was religion; in the Enlightenment, it was Reason; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was nationalism combined with a view of history as a motivating force. Science and technology are the governing concepts of our age. They have brought about advances in human well-being unprecedented in history. Their evolution transcends traditional cultural constraints. Yet they have also produced weapons capable of destroying mankind. Technology has brought about a means of communication permitting instantaneous contact between individuals or institutions in every part of the globe as well as the storage and retrieval of vast quantities of information at the touch of a button. Yet by what purposes is this technology informed? What happens to international order if technology has become such a part of everyday life that it defines its own universe as the sole relevant one? Is the destructiveness of modern weapons technology so vast that a common fear may unite mankind in order to eliminate the scourge of war? Or will possession of these weapons create a permanent foreboding?
Will the rapidity and scope of communication break down barriers between societies and individuals and provide transparency of such magnitude that the age-old dreams of a human community will come into being? Or will the opposite happen: Will mankind, amidst weapons of mass destruction, networked transparency, and the absence of privacy, propel itself into a world without limits or order, careening through crises without comprehending them?

The author claims no competence in the more advanced forms of technology; his concern is with its implications.

Since history began to be recorded, political units—whether described as states or not—had at their disposal war as the ultimate recourse. Yet the technology that made war possible also limited its scope. The most powerful and well-equipped states could only project force over limited distances, in certain quantities, and against so many targets. Ambitious leaders were constrained, both by convention and by the state of communications technology. Radical courses of action were inhibited by the pace at which they unfolded. Diplomatic instructions were obliged to take into account contingencies that might occur in the time in which a message could make a round trip. This imposed a built-in pause for reflection and acknowledged a distinction between what leaders could and could not control.

Whether a balance of power between states operated as a formal principle or was simply practiced without theoretical elaboration, equilibrium of some kind was an essential component of any international order—either at the periphery, as with the Roman and Chinese empires, or as a core operating principle, as in Europe.

With the Industrial Revolution, the pace of change quickened, and the power projected by modern militaries grew more devastating. When the technological gap was great, even rudimentary technology—
by present standards—could be genocidal in effect. European technology and European diseases did much to wipe out existing civilizations in the Americas. With the promise of new efficiencies came new potentials for destruction, as the impact of mass conscription multiplied the compounding effect of technology.

The advent of nuclear weapons brought this process to a culmination. In World War II, scientists from the major powers labored to achieve mastery of the atom and with it the ability to release its energy. The American effort, known as the Manhattan Project and drawing on the best minds from the United States, Britain, and the European diaspora, prevailed. After the first successful atomic test in July 1945 in the deserts of New Mexico, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who headed the secret weapons-development effort, awed by his triumph, recalled a verse from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

In earlier periods, wars had an implicit calculus: the benefits of victory outweighed its cost, and the weaker fought to impose such costs on the stronger as to disturb this equation. Alliances were formed to augment power, to leave no doubt about the alignment of forces, to define the casus belli (insofar as the removal of doubt about ultimate intentions is possible in a society of sovereign states). The penalties of military conflict were considered less than the penalties of defeat. By contrast, the nuclear age based itself on a weapon whose use would impose costs out of proportion to any conceivable benefit.

The nuclear age posed the dilemma of how to bring the destructiveness of modern weapons into some moral or political relationship with the objectives that were being pursued. Prospects for any kind of international order—indeed, for human survival—now urgently required the amelioration, if not elimination, of major-power conflict. A theoretical limit was sought—short of the point of either superpower using the entirety of its military capabilities.

Strategic stability was defined
as a balance in which neither side
would use its weapons of mass destruction because the adversary was always able to inflict an unacceptable level of destruction in retaliation. In a series of seminars at Harvard, Caltech, MIT, and the Rand Corporation among others in the 1950s and 1960s, a doctrine of “limited use” explored confining nuclear weapons to the battlefield or to military targets. All such theoretical efforts failed; whatever limits were imagined, once the threshold to nuclear warfare was crossed, modern technology overrode observable limits and always enabled the adversary to escalate. Ultimately, strategists on both sides coalesced, at least tacitly, on the concept of a mutual assured destruction as the mechanism of nuclear peace. Based on the premise that both sides possessed a nuclear arsenal capable of surviving an initial assault, the objective was to counterbalance threats sufficiently terrifying that neither side would conceive of actually invoking them.

By the end of the 1960s, the prevailing strategic doctrine of each superpower relied on the ability to inflict an “unacceptable” level of damage on the presumed adversary. What the adversary would consider unacceptable was, of course, unknowable; nor was this judgment communicated.

A surreal quality haunted this calculus of deterrence, which relied on “logical” equations of scenarios positing a level of the casualties exceeding that suffered in four years of world wars and occurring in a matter of days or hours. Because there was no prior experience with the weapons underpinning these threats, deterrence depended in large part on the ability to affect the adversary psychologically.
When, in the 1950s, Mao spoke
of China’s willingness to accept sacrifices of hundreds of millions in a nuclear war, it was widely treated in the West as a symptom of emotional or ideological derangement. It was, in fact, probably the consequence of a sober calculation that to withstand military capacities beyond previous human experience, a country needed to demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice beyond human comprehension. In any case, the shock in Western and Warsaw Pact capitals at these
statements ignored that the superpowers’ own concepts of deterrence rested on apocalyptic risks. Even if more urbanely expressed, the doctrine of mutual assured destruction relied on the proposition that leaders were acting in the interest of peace by deliberately exposing their civilian populations to the threat of annihilation.

Many efforts were undertaken to avoid the dilemma of possessing a huge arsenal that could not be used and whose use could not even plausibly be threatened. Complicated war scenarios were devised.
But neither side
, to the best of my knowledge—and for some of this period I was in a position to know—ever approached the point of actually using nuclear weapons in a specific crisis between the two superpowers. Except for the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when a Soviet combat division was initially authorized to use its nuclear weapons to defend itself, neither side approached their use, either against each other or in wars against non-nuclear third countries.

In this manner, the most fearsome weapons, commanding large shares of each superpower’s defense budget, lost their relevance to the actual crises facing leaders. Mutual suicide became the mechanism of international order. When, during the Cold War, the two sides, Washington and Moscow, challenged each other, it was through proxy wars. At the pinnacle of the nuclear era, it was conventional forces that assumed pivotal importance. The military struggles of the time were taking place on the far-flung periphery—Inchon, the Mekong River delta, Luanda, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The measure of success was effectiveness in supporting local allies in the developing world. In short, the strategic arsenals of the major powers, incommensurable with conceivable political objectives, created an illusion of omnipotence belied by the actual evolution of events.