Dick Cheney Forgot Something; Can't Rule The World When The Almighty Dollar Is Worthless!

By David Armstrong

Harper's Magazine,
0017789X, Oct 2002, Vol. 305, Issue 1829

Few writers are more ambitious than the writers of government policy
papers, and few policy papers are more ambitious than Dick Cheney’s
masterwork. It has taken several forms over the last decade and is in
fact the product of several ghostwriters (notably Paul Wolfowitz and
Colin Powell), but Cheney has been consistent in his dedication to the
ideas in the documents that bear his name, and he has maintained a close
association with the ideologues behind them. Let us, therefore, call
Cheney the author, and this series of documents the Plan.

The Plan was published in unclassified form most recently under the
title of Defense
Strategy for the 1990s, (pdf) as Cheney ended his term as secretary
of defense under the elder George Bush in early 1993, but it is, like
“Leaves of Grass,” a perpetually evolving work. It was the
controversial Defense Planning Guidance draft of 1992 – from which
Cheney, unconvincingly, tried to distance himself – and it was the
somewhat less aggressive revised draft of that same year. This June it
was a presidential lecture in the form of a commencement address at West
Point, and in July it was leaked to the press as yet another Defense
Planning Guidance (this time under the pen name of Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld). It will take its ultimate form, though, as America’s
new national security strategy – and Cheney et al. will experience
what few writers have even dared dream: their words will become our
reality.

The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme
is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls
for the United States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority
and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world
stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not
that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that
it must be absolutely powerful.

The Plan is disturbing in many ways, and ultimately unworkable. Yet
it is being sold now as an answer to the “new realities” of the
post-September 11 world, even as it was sold previously as the answer to
the new realities of the post-Cold War world. For Cheney, the Plan has
always been the right answer, no matter how different the questions.

Cheney’s unwavering adherence to the Plan would be amusing, and
maybe a little sad, except that it is now our plan. In its pages are the
ideas that we now act upon every day with the full might of the United
States military. Strangely, few critics have noted that Cheney’s work
has a long history, or that it was once quite unpopular, or that it was
created in reaction to circumstances that are far removed from the ones
we now face. But Cheney is a well-known action man. One has to admire,
in a way, the Babe Ruth-like sureness of his political work. He pointed
to center field ten years ago, and now the ball is sailing over the
fence.

Before the Plan was about domination it was about money. It took
shape in late 1989, when the Soviet threat was clearly on the decline,
and, with it, public support for a large military establishment. Cheney
seemed unable to come to terms with either new reality. He remained
deeply suspicious of the Soviets and strongly resisted all efforts to
reduce military spending. Democrats in Congress jeered his lack of
strategic vision, and a few within the Bush Administration were
whispering that Cheney had become an irrelevant factor in structuring a
response to the revolutionary changes taking place in the world.

More adaptable was the up-and-coming General Colin Powell, the newly
appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Ronald Reagan’s
national security adviser, Powell had seen the changes taking place in
the Soviet Union firsthand and was convinced that the ongoing
transformation was irreversible. Like Cheney, he wanted to avoid
military cuts, but he knew they were inevitable. The best he could do
was minimize them, and the best way to do that would be to offer a new
security structure that would preserve American military capabilities
despite reduced resources.

Powell and his staff believed that a weakened Soviet Union would
result in shifting alliances and regional conflict. The United States
was the only nation capable of managing the forces at play in the world;
it would have to remain the preeminent military power in order to ensure
the peace and shape the emerging order in accordance with American
interests. U.S. military strategy, therefore, would have to shift from
global containment to managing less-well-defined regional struggles and
unforeseen contingencies. To do this, the United States would have to
project a military “forward presence” around the world; there would
be fewer troops but in more places. This plan still would not be cheap,
but through careful restructuring and superior technology, the job could
be done with 25 percent fewer troops. Powell insisted that maintaining
superpower status must be the first priority of the U.S. military. “We
have to put a shingle outside our door saying, ‘Superpower Lives
Here,’ no matter what the Soviets do,” he said at the time. He also
insisted that the troop levels be proposed were the bare minimum
necessary to do so. This concept would come to be known as the “Base
Force.”

Powell’s work on the subject proved timely. The Berlin Wall fell on
November 9, 1989, and five days later Powell had his new strategy ready
to present to Cheney. Even as decades of repression were ending in
Eastern Europe, however, Cheney still could not abide even the force and
budget reductions Powell proposed. Yet he knew that cuts were
unavoidable. Having no alternative of his own to offer, therefore, he
reluctantly encouraged Powell to present his ideas to the president.
Powell did so the next day; Bush made no promises but encouraged him to
keep at it.

Less encouraging was the reaction of Paul Wolfowitz, the
undersecretary of defense for policy. A lifelong proponent of the
unilateralist, maximum-force approach, he shared Cheney’s skepticism
about the Eastern Bloc and so put his own staff to work on a competing
plan that would somehow accommodate the possibility of Soviet
backsliding.

As Powell and Wolfowitz worked out their strategies, Congress was
losing patience. New calls went up for large cuts in defense spending in
light of the new global environment. The harshest critique of Pentagon
planning came from a usually dependable ally of the military
establishment, Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed
Services committee. Nunn told fellow senators in March 1990 that there
was a “threat blank” in the administration’s proposed $295 billion
defense budget and that the Pentagon’s “basic assessment of the
overall threat to our national security” was “rooted in the past.”
The world had changed and yet the “development of a new military
strategy that responds to the changes in the threat has not yet
occurred.” Without that response, no dollars would be forthcoming.

Nunn’s message was clear. Powell and Wolfowitz began filling in the
blanks. Powell started promoting a Zen-like new rationale for his Base
Force approach. With the Soviets rapidly becoming irrelevant, Powell
argued, the United States could no longer assess its military needs on
the basis of known threats. Instead, the Pentagon should focus on
maintaining the ability to address a wide variety of new and unknown
challenges. This shift from a “threat based” assessment of military
requirements to a “capability based” assessment would become a key
theme of the Plan. The United States would move from countering Soviet
attempts at dominance to ensuring its own dominance. Again, this project
would not be cheap.

Powell’s argument, circular though it may have been, proved
sufficient to hold off Congress. Winning support among his own
colleagues, however, proved more difficult. Cheney remained deeply
skeptical about the Soviets, and Wolfowitz was only slowly coming
around. To account for future uncertainties, Wolfowitz recommended
drawing down U.S. forces to roughly the levels proposed by Powell, but
doing so at a much slower pace; seven years as opposed to the four
Powell suggested. He also built in a “crisis
response/reconstitution” clause that would allow for reversing the
process if events in the Soviet Union, or elsewhere, turned ugly.

With these now elements in place, Cheney saw something that might
work. By combining Powell’s concepts with those of Wolfowitz, he could
counter congressional criticism that his proposed defense budget was out
of line with the new strategic reality, while leaving the door open for
future force increases. In late June, Wolfowitz, Powell, and Cheney
presented their plan to the president, and within as few weeks Bush was
unveiling the new strategy.

Bush laid out the rationale for the Plan in a speech in Aspen,
Colorado, on August 2, 1990. He explained that since the danger of
global war had substantially receded, the principal threats to American
security would emerge in unexpected quarters. To counter those threats,
he said, the United States would increasingly base the size and
structure of its forces on the need to respond to “regional
contingencies” and maintain a peacetime military presence overseas.
Meeting that need would require maintaining the capability to quickly
deliver American forces to any “corner of the globe,” and that would
mean retaining many major weapons systems then under attack in Congress
as overly costly and unnecessary, including the “Star Wars”
missile-defense program. Despite those massive outlays, Bush insisted
that the proposed restructuring would allow the United States to draw
down its active forces by 25 percent in the years ahead, the same figure
Powell had projected ten months earlier.

The Plan’s debut was well timed. By a remarkable coincidence, Bush
revealed it the very day Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait.

The Gulf War temporarily reduced the pressure to cut military
spending. It also diverted attention from some of the Plan’s less
appealing aspects. In addition, it inspired what would become one of the
Plan’s key features: the use of “overwhelming force” to quickly
defeat enemies, a concept since dubbed the Powell Doctrine.

Once the Iraqi threat was “contained,” Wolfowitz returned to his
obsession with the Soviets, planning various scenarios involved possible
Soviet intervention in regional conflicts. The failure of the hard-liner
coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, however, made it apparent that
such planning might be unnecessary. Then, in late December, just as the
Pentagon was preparing to put the Plan in place, the Soviet Union
collapsed.

With the Soviet Union gone, the United States had a choice. It could
capitalize on the euphoria of the moment by nurturing cooperative
relations and developing multilateral structures to help guide the
global realignment then taking place; or it could consolidate its power
and pursue a strategy of unilateralism and global dominance. It chose
the latter course.

In early 1992, as Powell and Cheney campaigned to win congressional
support for their augmented Base Force plan, a new logic entered into
their appeals. The United States, Powell told members of the House Armed
Services Committee, required “sufficient power” to “deter any
challenger from ever dreaming of challenging us on the world stage.”
To emphasize the point, he cast the United States in the role of street
thug. “I want to be the bully on the block,” he said, implanting in
the mind of potential opponents that “there is no future in trying to
challenge the armed forces of the United States.”

As Powell and Cheney were making this new argument in their
congressional rounds, Wolfowitz was busy expanding the concept and
working to have it incorporated into U.S. policy. During the early
months of 1992, Wolfowitz supervised the preparation of an internal
Pentagon policy statement used to guide military officials in the
preparation of their forces, budgets, and strategies. The classified
document, known as the Defense Planning Guidance, depicted a world
dominated by the United States, which would maintain its superpower
status through a combination of positive guidance and overwhelming
military might. the image was one of a heavily armed City on a Hill.

The DPG stated that the “first objective” of U.S. defense
strategy was “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival.” Achieving
this objective required that the United States “prevent any hostile
power from dominating a region” of strategic significance. America’s
new mission would be to convince allies and enemies alike “that they
need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to
protect their legitimate interests.”

Another new theme was the use of preemptive military force. The
options, the DPG noted, ranged from taking preemptive military action to
head off a nuclear, chemical, or biological attack to “punishing” or
“threatening punishment of” aggressors “through a variety of
means,” including strikes against weapons-manufacturing facilities.

The DPG also envisioned maintaining a substantial U.S. nuclear
arsenal while discouraging the development of nuclear programs in other
countries. It depicted a “U.S.-led system of collective security”
that implicitly precluded the need for rearmament of any king by
countries such as Germany and Japan. And it called for the “early
introduction” of a global missile-defense system that would presumably
render all missile-launched weapons, including those of the United
States, obsolete. (The United States would, of course, remain the
world’s dominant military power on the strength of its other weapons
systems.)

The story, in short, was dominance by way of unilateral action and
military superiority. While coalitions – such as the one formed during
the Gulf War – held “considerable promise for promoting collective
action,” the draft DPG stated, the United States should expect future
alliances to be “ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the
crisis being confronted, and in many cases carrying only general
agreement over the objectives to be accomplished.” It was essential to
create “the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the
U.S.” and essential that America position itself “to act
independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated” or in
crisis situation requiring immediate action. “While the U.S. cannot
become the world’s policeman,” the document said, “we will retain
the preeminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs
which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or
friends.” Among the interests the draft indicated the United States
would defend in this manner were “access to vital raw materials,
primarily Persian Gulf oil, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
and ballistic missiles, [and] threats to U.S. citizens from
terrorism.”

The DPC was leaked to the New York Times in March 1992. Critics on
both the left and the right attacked it immediately. Then-presidential
candidate Pat Buchanan portrayed candidate a “blank check” to
America’s allies by suggesting the United States would “go to war to
defend their interests.” Bill Clinton’s deputy campaign manager,
George Stephanopoulos, characterized it as an attempt by Pentagon
officials to “find an excuse for big defense budgets instead of
downsizing.” Delaware Senator Joseph Biden criticized the Plan’s
vision of a “Pax Americana, a global security system where threats to
stability are suppressed or destroyed by U.S. military power.” Even
those who found the document’s stated goals commendable feared that
its chauvinistic tone could alienate many allies. Cheney responded by
attempting to distance himself from the Plan. The Pentagon’s spokesman
dismissed the leaked document as a “low-level draft” and claimed
that Cheney had not seen it. Yet a fifteen-page section opened by
proclaiming that it constituted “definitive guidance from the
Secretary of Defense.”

Powell took a more forthright approach to dealing with the flap: he
publicly embraced the DPG’s core concept. In a TV interview, he said
he believed it was “just fine” that the United States reign as the
world’s dominant military power. “I don’t think we should
apologize for that,” he said. Despite bad reviews in the foreign
press, Powell insisted that America’s European allies were “not
afraid” of U.S. military might because it was “power that could be
trusted” and “will not be misused.”

Mindful that the draft DPG’s overt expression of U.S. dominance
might not fly, Powell in the same interview also trotted out a new
rationale for the original Base Force plan. He argued that in a
post-Soviet world, filled with new dangers, the United States needed the
ability to fight on more than one front at a time. “One of the most
destabilizing things we could do,” he said, “is to cut our forces so
much that if we’re tied up in one area of the world ..... and we are
not seen to have the ability to influence another area of the world, we
might invite just the sort of crisis we’re trying to deter.” This
two-war strategy provided a possible answer to Nunn’s “threat
blank.” One unknown enemy wasn’t enough to justify lavish defense
budgets, but two unknown enemies might do the trick.

Within a few weeks the Pentagon had come up with a more comprehensive
response to the DPG furor. A revised version was leaked to the press
that was significantly less strident in tone, though only slightly less
strident in fact. While calling for the United States to prevent “any
hostile power from dominating a region critical to our interests,” the
new draft stressed that America would act in concert with its allies –
when possible. It also suggested the United Nations might take an
expanded role in future political, economic, and security matters, a
concept conspicuously absent from the original draft.

The controversy died down, and, with a presidential campaign under
way, the Pentagon did nothing to stir it up again. Following Bush’s
defeat, however, the Plan reemerged. In January 1993, in his very last
days in office. Cheney released a final version. The newly titled
Defense Strategy for the 1990s retained the soft touch of the revised
draft DPG as well as its darker themes. The goal remained to preclude
“hostile competitors from challenging our critical interests” and
preventing the rise of a new super-power. Although it expressed a
“preference” for collective responses in meeting such challenges, it
made clear that the United States would play the lead role in any
alliance. Moreover, it noted that collective action would “not always
be timely.” Therefore, the United States needed to retain the ability
to “act independently, if necessary.” To do so would require that
the United States maintain its massive military superiority. Others were
not encouraged to follow suit. It was kinder, gentler dominance, but it
was dominance all the same. And it was this thesis that Cheney and
company nailed to the door on their way out.

The new administration tacitly rejected the heavy-handed, unilateral
approach to U.S. primacy favored by Powell, Cheney, and Wolfowitz.
Taking office in the relative calm of the early post – Cold War era,
Clinton sought to maximize America’s existing position of strength and
promote its interests through economic diplomacy, multilateral
institutions (dominated by the United States), greater international
free trade, and the development of allied coalitions, including
American-led collective military action. American policy, in short,
shifted from global dominance to globalism.

Clinton also failed to prosecute military campaigns with sufficient
vigor to satisfy the defense strategists of the previous administration.
Wolfowitz found Clinton’s Iraq policy especially infuriating. During
the Gulf War, Wolfowitz harshly criticized the decision – endorsed by
Powell and Cheney – to end the war once the U.N. mandate of driving
Saddam’s forces from Kuwait had been fulfilled, leaving the Iraqi
dictator in office. He called on the Clinton Administration to finish
the job by arming Iraqi opposition forces and sending U.S. ground troops
to defense a base of operation for them in the southern region of the
country. In a 1996 editorial, Wolfowitz raised the prospect of launching
a preemptive attack against Iraq. “Should we sit idly by,” he wrote,
“with our passive containment policy and our inept cover operations,
and wait until a tyrant possessing large quantities of weapons of mass
destruction and sophisticated delivery systems strikes out at us?”
Wolfowitz suggested it was “necessary” to “go beyond the
containment strategy.”

Wolfowitz’s objections to Clinton’s military tactics were not
limited to Iraq. Wolfowitz had endorsed President Bush’s decision in
late 1992 to intervene in Somalia on a limited humanitarian basis.
Clinton later expanded the mission into a broader peacekeeping effort, a
move that ended in disaster. With perfect twenty-twenty hindsight,
Wolfowitz decried Clinton’s decision to send U.S. troops into combat
“where there is no significant U.S. national interest.” He took a
similar stance on Clinton’s ill-fated democracy-building effort in
Haiti, chastising the president for engaging “American military
prestige” on an issue” of the little or no importance” to U.S.
interests. Bosnia presented a more complicated mix of posturing and
ideologics. While running for president, Clinton had scolded the Bush
Administration for failing to take action to stem the flow of blood in
the Balkans. Once in office, however, and chastened by their early
misadventures in Somalia and Haiti, Clinton and his advisers struggled
to articulate a coherent Bosnia policy. Wolfowitz complained in 1994 of
the administration’s failure to “develop an effective course of
action.' He personally advocated arming the Bosnian Muslims in their
fight against the Serbs. Powell, on the other hand, publicly cautioned
against intervention. In 1995 a U.S.-led NATO bombing campaign, combined
with a Croat-Muslim ground offensive, forced the Serbs into
negotiations, leading to the Dayton Peace Accords. In 1999, as Clinton
rounded up support for joint U.S.-NATO action in Kosovo, Wolfowitz
hectored the president for failing to act quickly enough.

After eight years of what Cheney et al. regarded as wrong-headed
military adventures and pinprick retaliatory strikes, the Clinton
Administration – mercifully, in their view – came to an end. With
the ascension of George W. Bush to the presidency, the authors of the
Plan returned to government, ready to pick up where they had left off.
Cheney of course, became vice president, Powell became secretary of
state, and Wolfowitz moved into the number two slot at the Pentagon, as
Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy. Other contributors also returned: Two
prominent members of the Wolfowitz team that crafted the original DPG
took up posts on Cheney’s staff. I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who
served as Wolfowitz’s deputy during Bush I, became the vice
president’s chief of staff and national security adviser. And Eric
Edelman, an assistant deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush
Administration, became a top foreign policy adviser to Cheney.

Cheney and company had not changed their minds during the Clinton
interlude about the correct course for U.S. policy, but they did not
initially appear bent on resurrecting the Plan. Rather than present a
unified vision of foreign policy to the world, in the early going the
administration focused on promoting a series of seemingly unrelated
initiatives. Notable among these were missile defense and space-based
weaponry, long-standing conservative causes. In addition, a distinct
tone of unilateralism emerged as the new administration announced its
intent to abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia in order
to pursue missile defense; its opposition to U.S. ratification of an
international nuclear-test-ban pact; and its refusal to become a party
to an International Criminal Court. It also raised the prospect of
ending the self-imposed U.S. moratorium on nuclear testing initiated by
the President’s father during the 1992 presidential campaign.
Moreover, the administration adopted a much tougher diplomatic posture,
as evidenced, most notably, by a distinct hardening of relations with
both China and North Korea. While none of this was inconsistent with the
concept of U.S. dominance, these early actions did not, at the time,
seem to add up to a coherent strategy.

It was only after September 11 that the Plan emerged in full. Within
days of the attacks, Wolfowitz and Libby began calling for unilateral
military action against Iraq, on the shaky premise that Osama bin
Laden’s Al Qaeda network could not have pulled off the assaults
without Saddam Hussein’s assistance. At the time, Bush rejected such
appeals, but Wolfowitz kept pushing and the President soon came around.
In his State of the Union address in January, Bush labeled Iraq, Iran,
and North Korea an “axis of evil,” and warned that he would “not
wait on events” to prevent them from using weapons of mass destruction
against the United States. He reiterated his commitment to preemption in
his West Point speech in June. “If we wait for threats to fully
materialize we will have waited too long,” he said. “We must take
the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst
threats before they emerge.” Although it was less noted, Bush in that
same speech also reintroduced the Plan’s central theme. He declared
that the United States would prevent the emergence of a rival power by
maintaining “military strengths beyond the challenge.” With that,
the President effectively adopted a strategy his father’s
administration had developed ten years earlier to ensure that the United
States would remain the world’s preeminent power. While the headlines
screamed “preemption,” no one noticed the declaration of the
dominance strategy.

In case there was any doubt about the administration’s intentions,
the Pentagon’s new DPG lays them out. Signed by Wolfowitz’s new
boss, Donald Rumsfeld, in May and leaked to the Los Angeles Times in
July, it contains all the key elements of the original Plan and adds
several complementary features. The preemptive strikes envisioned in the
original draft DPG are now “unwarned attacks.” The old Powell-Cheney
notion of military “forward presence” is now “forwarded
deterrence.” The use of overwhelming force to defeat an enemy called
for in the Powell Doctrine is now labeled an “effects based”
approach.

Some of the names have stayed the same. Missile defense is back,
stronger than ever, and the call goes up again for a shift from a
“threat based” structure to a “capabilities based” approach. The
new DPG also emphasizes the need to replace the so-called Cold War
strategy of preparing to fight two major conflicts simultaneously with
what the Los Angeles Times refers to as “a more complex approach aimed
at dominating air and space on several fronts.” This, despite the fact
that Powell had originally conceived – and the first Bush
Administration had adopted – the two-war strategy as a means of
filling the “threat blank” left by the end of the Cold War.

Rumsfeld’s version adds a few new ideas, most impressively the
concept of preemptive strikes with nuclear weapons. These would be
earth-penetrating nuclear weapons used for attacking “hardened and
deeply buried targets,” such as command-and-control bunkers, missile
silos, and heavily fortified underground facilities used to build and
store weapons of mass destruction. The concept emerged earlier this year
when the administration’s Nuclear Posture Review leaked out. At the
time, arms-control experts warned that adopting the NPR’s
recommendations would undercut existing arms-control treaties, do
serious harm to nonproliferation efforts, set off new rounds of testing,
and dramatically increase the prospectus of nuclear weapons being used
in combat. Despite these concerns, the administration appears intent on
developing the weapons. In a final flourish, the DPG also directs the
military to develop cyber-, laser-, and electronic-warfare capabilities
to ensure U.S. dominion over the heavens.

Rumsfeld spelled out these strategies in Foreign affairs earlier this
year, and it is there that he articulated the remaining elements of the
Plan; unilateralism and global dominance. Like the revised DPG of 1992,
Rumsfeld feigns interest in collective action but ultimately rejects it
as impractical. “Wars can benefit from coalitions,” he writes,
“but they should not be fought by committee.” And coalitions, he
adds, “must not determine the mission.” The implication is the
United States will determine the missions and lead the fights. Finally,
Rumsfeld expresses the key concept of the Plan: preventing the emergence
of rival powers. Like the original draft DPG of 1992, he states that
America’s goal is to develop and maintain the military strength
necessary to “dissuade” rivals or adversaries from “competing.”
with no challengers, and a proposed defense budget of $379 billion for
next year, the United States would reign over all its surveys.

Reaction to the latest edition of the Plan has, thus far, focused on
preemption. Commentators parrot the administration’s line, portraying
the concept of preemptory strikes as a “new” strategy aimed at
combating terrorism. In an op-ed piece for the Washington Post following
Bush’s West Point address, former Clinton adviser William Galston
described preemption as part of a “brand-new security doctrine,” and
warned of possible negative diplomatic consequences. Others found the
concept more appealing. Loren Thompson of the conservative Lexington
Institute hailed the “Bush Doctrine” as “a necessary response to
the new dangers that America faces” and declared it “the biggest
shift in strategic thinking in two generations.” Wall Street Journal
editor Robert Bartley echoed that sentiment, writing that “no talk of
this ilk has been heard from American leaders since John Foster Dulles
talked of rolling back the Iron Curtain.”

Preemption, of course, is just part of the Plan, and the Plan is
hardly new. It is a warmed-over version of the strategy Cheney and his
coauthors rolled out in 1992 as the answer to the end of the Cold War.
Then the goal was global dominance, and it met with bad reviews. Now it
is the answer to terrorism. The emphasis is on preemption, and the
reviews are generally enthusiastic. Through all of this, the dominance
motif remains, though largely undetected.

This country once rejected “unwarned” attacks such as Pearl
Harbor as barbarous and unworthy of a civilized nation. Today many cheer
the prospect of conducting sneak attacks – potentially with nuclear
weapons – on piddling powers run by tin-pot despots.

We also once denounced those who tried to rule the world. Our primary
objection (at least officially) to the Soviet Union as its quest for
global domination. Through the successful employment of the tools of
containment, deterrence, collective security, and diplomacy – the very
methods we now reject – we rid ourselves and the world of the Evil
Empire. Having done so, we now pursue the very thing for which we
opposed it. And now that the Soviet Union is gone, there appears to be
no one left to stop us.

Perhaps, however, there is. The Bush Administration and its loyal
opposition seem not to grasp that the quests for dominance generate
backlash. Those threatened with preemption may themselves launch
preemptory strikes. And even those who are successfully “preempted”
or dominated may object and find means to strike back. Pursuing such
strategies may, paradoxically, result in greater factionalism and
rivalry, precisely the things we seek to end.

Not all Americans share Colin Powell’s desire to be “the bully on
the block.” In fact, some believe that by following a different path
the United States has an opportunity to establish a more lasting
security environment. As Dartmouth professors Stephen Brooks and William
Woblforth wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, “Unipolarity makes it
possible to be the global bully – but it also offers the United States
the luxury of being able to look beyond its immediate needs to its own,
and the world’s, long-term interests. ..... Magnanimity and restraint
in the face of temptation are tenets of successful statecraft that have
proved their worth.” Perhaps, in short, we can achieve our desired
ends by means other than global domination.