War In Iraq, Revolution In America

This is a revised text of the sixth John Whitehead Lecture delivered by Strobe Talbott at the RoyalInstitute of International Affairs, Chatham House on 9 October 2003. As always with writings and commentary ofBrookings scholars, the views expressed here are personal and do not reflect institutional positions orpolicy.

I am honoured to give a lecture established in honour of John Whitehead. He was a predecessor of mine atthe State Department and an active trustee and chairman of the board of Brookings. He remains a friend andmentor. Two weeks ago, I visited Chatham House in cyberspace in order to read the inaugural address of its newChairman DeAnne Julius. Like her, I feel I should address the war in Iraq, where 138,000 American and 11,000British troops are stationed and where my president and your prime minister have bet their political futures.Indeed, the stakes are even higher - I daresay much higher - than that. The war and its aftermath will havemuch to do with determining the direction of American and British foreign policy for decades to come. Beforeoffering my personal concerns and hopes about what may lie ahead, let me begin by offering a few reflectionson the past.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the international system was based largely on two epochal eventsin European history: the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15. My country missedout on both those grand and consequential assemblies -Westphalia for the simple reason that the US did notexist, and the Congress of Vienna because the US, then not even 40 years old, was not invited. PresidentMadison did not even have a representative at the Habsburg court to sit in as an observer. Besides, weAmericans had our hands full negotiating an end to the War of 1812 with George III’s envoys at Ghent-and, Imight add, cleaning up the mess the Redcoats made of my hometown when they sacked it and set fire to the WhiteHouse.

Westphalia and the Concert of Europe put in place an international status quo that prevailed until the USbecame strong enough to shake it up. Westphalia established the nation-state as the polity of choice for thenext three and a half centuries. A nation-state is a territory controlled by a single government and inhabitedby a distinct population with a common culture that commands the loyalty and shapes the identity of itscitizens: France for the French, Sweden for the Swedes, England for the English.

By that definition, America is not a nation-state in the Westphalian sense - it never has been, and neverwill be. It was conceived by its founders as a new kind of nation and, indeed, a new kind of state-one basednot on the combined accidents of demography and geography, but on the combined exertion of political will andchampionship of political ideas. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues summarized the main ideas in adocument that made them liable to be hanged if the opportunity had presented itself to the authorities of theBritish Crown.

Now, I hasten to add that these ideas, radical as they were, owed a lot to Europe-and to the Enlightenment.Moreover, they were developed and promulgated by transplanted Europeans-not just ones with English names (likeJefferson), but also with names like Van Steuben, Kos;ciusko, Lafayette, and Rochambeau. I pick those fourexamples because their statues have pride of place in the square just across from the White House. They standas a constant reminder of America’s debt to what might be called the original ‘old’ Europe. But asapplied to the American experiment in statehood, they were universal ideas-that is, they were believed to beapplicable to all humanity, the basis for what might be called (in a phrase used by a former president namedBush) a New World Order.

I stress this bit of American history because it helps to account for a strain in US foreign policy ofexemplary exceptionalism-that is, the notion that the US is exceptional in ways that should serve as anexample for others. The image of Uncle Sam as a wise, stern authority figure who believes he knows what’sbest for the whole family of humankind may be particularly evident today, but it is by no means new.

I now turn to that meeting in Vienna in 1814 at which the Viscount Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellingtonhelped redraw the map of the continent. The Congress of Vienna and the treaty that emerged from it sanctifiedbalance of power as the dynamic of choice for international relations. That was, and remains, a very Europeanidea.

But it is emphatically not an America idea. Balance of power was the nineteenth century version of whattoday is commonly -and, on this side of the Atlantic, approvingly -known as ‘multipolarity’.

A recurring and animating premise of US foreign policy has always been the righteous imbalance of power;that is, an imbalance in favour of the US, its friends, its allies, its protégés and, crucially, its fellowdemocracies. In that sense, the intellectual-I would even say ideological-justification for America as asuperpower predated both the phenomenon and the terminology.

A century ago Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson took the US onto the world stage. Those two presidentswere different in many ways, not just in their party affiliation. They also detested each other. But they bothsaw themselves, when they acted overseas, as motivated by something nobler than the cold-blooded calculus ofraison d’état or realpolitik-those specialities of European statecraft that Americans have never deignedeven to translate from French and German. Roosevelt and Wilson both believed that American foreign policy mustcombine power and principle, realism and idealism, national selfinterest and an altruistic internationalmission.

However, these two distinctly American themes of exemplary exceptionalism and the righteous imbalance ofpower did not automatically translate into what, in the parlance of today’s debate, we call unilateralism.Quite the contrary, it was yet another theme in US foreign policy during the twentieth century that preciselybecause American values were universal, they had a natural constituency in other countries. From thatconviction, it followed logically that American goals could be-and whenever possible should be-achieved inconcert with others; through international structures, international institutions, international compacts, andinternational rules that apply to everyone, including the rule maker-in-chief. Collaborative, consensualarrangements were seen as an appropriate and effective means of advancing American interests and values, andof leveraging American power.

The US’s two most ambitious diplomatic undertakings of the twentieth century were structural; they wereconstruction projects-and they were joint ventures, involving many partners, with the US in the self-assigned(and generally welcome) role of master architect and general contractor. The first of these projects, afterthe First World War was the League of Nations. It was Woodrow Wilson’s dream and his débâcle. The Leaguefailed largely because Wilson failed to build support at home for what he was trying to build abroad. Thespasm of isolationism and protectionism that ensued contributed to the rise of European fascism and theoutbreak of the Second World War.

When that war came to an end, there was another opportunity for institution building on a global scale.Once again - as at Westphalia, Vienna and Versailles - the victors gathered not just to divide the spoils ofwar but to build the structures of peace. This time, they got it right, largely because the US stayed involvedin the design and the management of the institutions that emerged. Bretton Woods led to the establishment ofthe World Bank and IMF, Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco to the creation of the United Nations, and theWashington Treaty to the founding of NATO. Under the protection of that US-conceived, US-led alliance, anothergreat project-European integration- came into being.

Much has changed, of course, in the nearly 60 years since those constructs were put in place. A cold warhas come and gone and is now itself a decade and a half in the past. A Russian diplomat sits as an equal withAmerican, British and other western colleagues around a large table in Brussels at something Winston Churchilland Harry Truman would have had difficulty imagining-a NATO- Russia Council. In a development that wouldsurely have astonished Jean Monnet (not to mention Joseph Stalin), the European Union will next year admitfour former Warsaw Pact allies and three former Soviet republics. During the 1990s, a number of new structuresand arrangements sprang up. Some, like the G8, are global. Others, like the ASEAN Regional Forum and APEC, areregional. Most have depended on the active involvement, if not the instigation, of the US.

Along with the expansion and adaptation of international institutions in the 1990s came the establishmentof a new principle. It was agreed that there are limits on the sovereignty of the nation-state: nationalgovernments are subject to international sanction if they violate certain basic norms within their ownborders. Our own governments along with others enforced that principle by stepping in and reversing a militarycoup and restoring a democratically elected president in Haiti in 1994; by ending genocide in Bosnia in 1995and in Kosovo in 1999; and by overseeing a peaceful transition from annexation to independence in East Timor.Taken together, those exertions of collective will on behalf of shared values and interests constituted alandmark accomplishment of the 1990s. The international community lived up to its name. It did so by relyingon international institutions and agreements.

With all that as background, let me turn to the foreign policy of the current President Bush. In onerespect, he is very much in an American tradition going back one hundred years. ‘Moral clarity’ is aphrase right out of the vocabulary of both Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. If you want to see a synthesisof the ‘Rough Rider’ spirit and Wilsonianism, read President Bush’s National Security Strategy releaseda year ago, with its vow to make the world, starting with the Greater Middle East, safe for democracy - and todo so with a very big stick. But in another respect Mr Bush, as the first president to take office in thetwenty-first century, has broken with his ten predecessors, Republican and Democrat, from the end of theSecond World War. By and large, those earlier occupants of the Oval Office - from Truman to Eisenhower toNixon to George Herbert Walker Bush to Clinton - believed in a foreign policy that combined Americanleadership with institutionalized, codified cooperation with other countries.

Mr Bush came into the presidency with reservations on this score and with an inclination to experiment witha new concept: that the sheer preeminence of American power could, in itself, be the ordering and tamingprinciple of a disorderly and dangerous world-and that the confident assertion of that power made it lessnecessary for the US to rely on structural arrangements, especially ones that limited America’s freedom ofaction. That was the subtext of the administration’s rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, theInternational Criminal Court, the Treaty on Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems, the land mine ban, and an array ofconventions designed to protect the rights of children, stop torture, curb discrimination by race and gender,end the production of biological weapons, prevent money laundering, and limit trafficking in small arms.

Earlier American administrations objected to some features of those accords, but in most cases they soughtto improve them rather than discard them. By contrast, intellectually formidable and politically powerfulfigures in the Bush administration seemed to be calling into question the very idea of binding agreements-andthe very idea of international structures.

That included, by the way, the structure that is taking form on this side of the Atlantic: the EuropeanUnion. For the first time in 50 years, starting in January 2001, there was, in official Washington, aqualitatively new scepticism about European integration. It wasn’t just scepticism about whether integrationwill succeed, but scepticism about whether Americans should want it to succeed- about whether progress towarda United Europe is in the interests of a United States.

In a development that was both telling and peculiar, the word ‘imperial’ came into fashion among somesurrogates, and even some spokesmen, for the Bush administration. Virtually all previous watersheds in theevolution of the international system had entailed the repudiation of specific empires. Cumulatively, theyamounted to a repudiation of imperialism in general. Westphalia marked the end of the Holy Roman Empire, theCongress of Vienna carved up the Napoleonic one; Versailles did the same to the Habsburgs’ and Ottomans’;the Romanovs’ was by then already on the ash heap of history. The allies in the Second World War defeatedthe Third Reich and the Empire of the Rising Sun, and the sun began to set on the British Empire not longafter. Throughout the twentieth century the US was an opponent of empire and a champion of decolonization. Thefading of the Cold War was made possible by the collapse of what was often called the world’s last empire,with Moscow as its metropole. Yet a decade later, in 2001, theoreticians for a new administration inWashington toyed with the idea of imperialism as a model for American foreign and defense policy.

Then came September 11. Around the world, the effect was to galvanize sympathy and support for theUS-including support for the remarkably swift and totally justified American military action against theTaleban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. As evidence of that solidarity, NATO, for the first time in its history,invoked Article V of its charter, proclaiming that the assaults against the World Trade Center and thePentagon constituted an attack on all member states. Yet in the way it waged the war in Afghanistan, theadministration sidelined the alliance. Only when the mission of regime-change was accomplished and the jobbecame one of nation-building did the US welcome international participation.

September 11 had another effect inside the US that must be understood outside the US. It made Americansmore supportive of the new, unilateralist premise of their government’s foreign policy. In the course ofthat single brilliant, blue-sky morning two years and one month ago, Americans suddenly saw the world as amore perilous place, inhabited by bad people who wanted to kill us indiscriminately and in large numbers onour own territory. That new fear made the body politic more receptive to the administration’s doctrine ofpreemption and prevention.

All that is backdrop to the war in Iraq. In the year and a half after 9/11, the Bush administration setabout persuading the American people that Operation Iraqi Freedom would be the next necessary battle in theongoing war against terrorism. To make that case, the administration-in a phrase that became common inWashington post 9/11-‘connected the dots’ between Saddam on the one hand and, on the other, the ultimateNGO, Al-Qaeda, and the ultimate instrument of terror, nuclear weaponry. Of course, as we now know, theadministration over-connected the dots: it exaggerated Saddam’s ties to Al- Qaeda and the extent of hisnuclear programmes. Nevertheless, the argument worked domestically.

It did not, however, work internationally. Hence the collapse, in February and March 2003, of theadministration’s effort to get the UN to accept the American timetable, the American rationale for the warand the American willingness to fight the war without the backing of the United Nations. Some in theadministration, particularly (though not exclusively) among high-level Pentagon civilians, were relieved whenthe Security Council went into deadlock. They had regarded the president’s decision to go to the UN in thefirst place, a year ago, as a mistake. He had, in their view, fallen into what they called ‘the UN trap’,from which the obstreperous French provided us with a welcome escape. For those with that view, the war wasnot just a successful military operation that liberated Iraq-it was a political breakthrough that liberatedAmerican foreign policy from the encumbrance of multilateralism. Much of the world, of course, was anxious andeven appalled. There was a lot of worry that Iraq, as a sequel to Afghanistan, had created a precedent forfurther sequels elsewhere. As the US Third Infantry Division rolled past Basra on its way to capture Baghdadin late March, many watching the spectacle in real time on television feared that those armoured columnswould, in effect, just keep rolling-all the way to Tehran and Pyongyang, taking care of the entire axis ofevil in one giant Operation Global Freedom.

On Wednesday 29 October, my colleague from Brookings, Ivo Daalder, will come to this podium to talk about anew book he has written with Jim Lindsay, America unbound: the Bush revolution in US foreign policy. I agreewith Ivo and Jim that the administration’s approach to the world has been sufficiently radical to qualify asrevolutionary. But in my view (which, like much of what I am saying, is vigorously debated within Brookings,not to mention elsewhere), it is at least possible that we are now seeing the Thermidor of the Bushrevolution-that is, a period comparable to the one in the French Revolution when radicalism began to ebb andmore moderate political figures came to dominate the First Republic. That may be happening within the Bushadministration itself. The radical preferences favoured by some in its ranks have, in the last several months,collided with reality. Actually, they have collided with several realities: on the ground in Iraq, in thecorridors and hearing rooms of Congress, in the public opinion polls and in the balance sheets of the federalbudget.