We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act…America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge—thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.
George W. Bush, Graduation Speech at West Point, 1 June 2002
The Bush Doctrine
On 1 June 2002, Bush visited West Point to address the graduating class of the US Military Academy during its bicentennial year. Speaking to the young men from whom the future leaders of the US army are likely to be drawn, the president talked of the honour of serving one’s nation, and told jokes based on his own poor record at Yale, and on the traditional rivalry between the army and the navy. After the levity came the serious part. In four succinct paragraphs, he spelled out a new view of when it is justifiable to take military action—a view that has come to be known as the Bush Doctrine. Here it is:
The gravest danger to freedom lies at the perilous crossroads of radicalism and technology. When the spread of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, along with ballistic missile technology—when that occurs, even weak states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power to strike great nations. Our enemies have declared this very intention, and have been caught seeking these terrible weapons.
For much of the last century, America’s defence relied on the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment. In some cases, those strategies still apply. But new threats also require new thinking. Deterrence—the promise of massive retaliation against nations—means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.
We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systemically break them. If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.
Homeland defense and missile defense are part of stronger security, and they’re essential priorities for America. Yet the war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.
Perhaps this should have been tagged ‘Bush Doctrine II’, since the president’s declaration immediately after September 11 that the United States would make no distinction between terrorists and those who harbour them was also called the ‘Bush doctrine’. But it is the new doctrine that better deserves the name, for unlike its more specific predecessor, it points to a fundamentally new era in international relations.
Bush’s words at West Point were carefully chosen. They represent the considered conclusions, not only of the president, but of his entire national security team. That became evident with the release of The National Security Strategy of the United States of America in September 2002. Issued from the White House, this document reiterated that, to forestall hostile acts by adversaries, ‘the United States will, if necessary, act pre-emptively’. It argued that pre-emption is not a new idea, but an old one that needs to be revamped for new circumstances. In international law, the National Security Strategy acknowledged, the standard view is that a pre-emptive strike is legitimate only against an attack that is clearly imminent—for example, if the adversary can be seen to be mobilising its army and preparing to attack. But today it is possible to launch an attack without warning, and that attack may kill millions of people. This new situation, the National Security Strategy argues, forces us to modify our sense of what kind of threat can be a justifiable trigger for a pre-emptive attack.
Bush and his advisers are right to say that the world has changed since the Cold War. Then the balance of terror, of ‘mutually assured destruction’, kept the peace, at least between the two nuclear superpowers. Now we have to concern ourselves with a new possibility. The hijackers who flew the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were not deterred by a threat to their own lives, and they were not acting as the agents of any state that might fear retaliation. The prospect of nuclear weapons finding their way into the hands of such people is a nightmare that poses a real problem for prevailing ideas of legitimate self-defence. The difficulty is to find the best solution.
Under current international law, pre-emptive strikes are not permitted unless they are in defence against an imminent attack. It was the US Secretary of State Daniel Webster who, in response to an 1837 incident in which British troops attacked and sank an American ship carrying supplies to Canadian rebels, spelled out the conditions for justified ‘anticipatory self-defense’. He wrote that this could be justified only when the need for action is ‘instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation’.302 Contemporary textbooks on international law take essentially the same view, emphasising that the threatened attack must be immediate, and the need to respond urgent, with no possible alternative. Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter—a treaty to which the United States is a signatory—sets out the role of the Security Council in dealing with threats to the peace and acts of aggression, and then states that nothing in the charter impairs the inherent right of a nation to defend itself ‘if an armed attack occurs’—thereby suggesting that the provisions of the charter do ‘impair’ any possible ‘right of self-defense’ when no armed attack has occurred.303
In his preamble to the National Security Strategy, Bush takes a very different position from that taken by Daniel Webster and by the UN Charter. He says that ‘as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed’. One problem with this view lies in the risk of a government manufacturing a case for a pre-emptive war when it actually has other motives for going to war. A second problem is that a government may overestimate the danger that another nation poses due to flawed intelligence or exaggerated fears, suspicions or biases. The Bush administration’s war with Iraq illustrates both these problems, given that it was based on unsubstantiated assertions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and may well pass them on to Al Qaeda, and given that some influential members of the Bush administration had, as we shall see, reasons for overthrowing the government of Iraq that had nothing to do with terrorism or the need to pre-empt an attack. If a US administration can massage evidence to strengthen its case for war, other governments will be no less adept in doing the same.
There is also a more fundamental problem with Bush’s claim that a nation has a right to strike pre-emptively when an attack is not imminent. If he is proposing a new understanding of international law, then the most pressing question to ask is: When does a nation have this right? Moral rights do not adhere to particular nations. The United States does not, simply because it is the United States, have a special right to use force preemptively that other nations do not have. Admittedly, a right to use force pre-emptively might adhere to nations with particular characteristics, but if that is what Bush is claiming, we need to know what those characteristics are.
Let us start with the most obvious case in which another nation might believe that it is justified in striking pre-emptively. In January 2002 Bush named North Korea, along with Iraq and Iran, as part of the ‘axis of evil’. A year later, after North Korea admitted that it had a program to produce enriched uranium suitable for nuclear weapons, US military officials stated publicly that they were reviewing military options against that country. In March, B-52 and B-1 bombers were flown to the US base in Guam, within easy striking distance of targets in Korea. In April 2003 Bush said the successful war with Iraq ‘made it clear that people who harbour weapons of mass destruction will be dealt with’—a remark North Koreans could reasonably construe as threatening the same action against them that Bush had taken against Iraq, even though the president went on to say that ‘hopefully’ most of this task can be accomplished by diplomatic means.304 The United States, it is scarcely necessary to mention, ‘harbours’ weapons of mass destruction. Hence, if it is a sound moral principle that when a nation in possession of weapons of mass destruction threatens another nation, the threatened nation is justified in making a pre-emptive strike, North Korea would, after these developments, have been justified in making a pre-emptive strike against the United States.
What’s wrong with this argument? Of course, it would be pointless for North Korea to attack the United States, because it could not possibly hope to eliminate the capacity of the United States to strike back. In that sense, North Korea cannot pre-emptively strike against the US. But that still leaves open the ethical question: if North Korea did have the capacity to strike the US in a manner that would effectively pre-empt a US attack, would it be justified in doing so? Those who defend the right of the US to make pre-emptive strikes against nations it perceives to be a threat must either say yes, North Korea would be justified in making a pre-emptive attack on the US, or they must find a morally relevant ground for distinguishing the two cases. It is a safe bet that few will take the first option, so the question becomes one of finding relevant differences between the two nations.
One might say that, as Bush himself has often said, the United States is ‘a peace-loving nation’ and it is only peace-loving nations that can be justified in waging a pre-emptive war.305 That comes too close to satire to be put forward seriously, but it may not be far from thoughts that Bush and some of his advisers have of their country. Asked, after the Iraq war, what he thought of the French president Jacques Chirac, who had been the most forthright of the European leaders in opposing American efforts to gain UN endorsement for the war, Bush said that Chirac needed to be reminded that ‘America is a good nation, genuinely good’.306
Since Bush frequently portrays other nations as ‘evil’, and says the United States wants nothing but peace, freedom and prosperity for its own citizens and for those of every nation, perhaps the position he really has in mind is that good nations are justified in striking pre-emptively against evil ones, but not the other way round. But as a principle of international law, this criterion is hopeless. Granted, there are evil rulers, people who kill innocents without compunction to gain and hold on to power. But who is to decide what counts as an evil regime? No doubt there are a few regimes that almost everyone would agree are evil—those of Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, and a few others, perhaps. But we have no clear and agreed criteria for deciding which regimes are evil, or sufficiently evil for them to be subject to pre-emptive strikes. England’s appeasers of the 1930s considered Hitler’s nationalism a distasteful but understandable response to the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles. In Russia, there are still millions of older people who think back nostalgically to the communist regime as a time of economic stability, little crime, and very low unemployment. At various times, the United States itself seems to have had difficulty in recognising evil regimes for what they were. For a decade after Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge government was overthrown and replaced by the vastly better Vietnamese-backed Heng Samrin government, the US continued to recognise the murderous Khmer Rouge as the lawful rulers of Cambodia. After Saddam Hussein had abused human rights, used chemical weapons on his own people, aspired to obtain nuclear weapons, harboured terrorists, and started an aggressive war against Iran, the Reagan administration helped him to avoid defeat in that war. (As Reagan’s envoy, Donald Rumsfeld travelled to Baghdad to shake Saddam’s hand and assure him of US support.)307 If even the US government sometimes finds it difficult to recognise as evil regimes as bad as these ones, it is evident that the principle that good regimes may strike pre-emptively at evil ones lacks the clarity needed for a useful international standard of acceptable conduct.
One clear difference between the United States and North Korea is that the United States is a democracy while North Korea is a dictatorship. To make this fact relevant to the justifiability of pre-emptive attacks would require a revolution in international law, which has always recognised governments because they were able to rule over their territory, irrespective of how they managed to do so.308 That is the case, for example, with the recognition of governments as eligible to take their place at the United Nations, or the World Trade Organization. They do not have to justify their right to represent their nation by showing that they were democratically elected. It is arguable that the world would be a better place if this were changed—if these global bodies became ‘unions of democracies’ rather than open to any form of government. That proposal runs the risk of isolating some of the world’s most dangerous nations and excluding them from the world’s leading forum for resolving international disputes. If we were nevertheless to exclude undemocratic nations from global bodies, we would need some impartial body to judge which nations are democracies, and which are not. George W. Bush, after all, received fewer votes than Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. Critics of American democracy could also question the fact that the voters of Wyoming elect as many senators as the voters of California. Then there is the cloud cast over American elections by the fact that the candidate who raises the most money usually wins. Do the democratic deficits of the United States mean that the United States is not a democracy? Americans, used to thinking of their country not only as a democracy, but as the most democratic nation in the world, would consider that suggestion laughable, but to outsiders it is not so funny. In any case, the fact that the question can even be raised about the United States shows that borderline decisions about which nation is and which is not a democracy will not be easy to decide.
Democracies, it is often said, pose less of a security risk than dictatorships. No war, it is claimed, has ever occurred between two democratic states.309 Therefore, it might be argued, there is no justification for a pre-emptive strike against a democracy. The thesis that democracies are less likely to go to war with each other than non-democratic forms of government, however, is controversial. Much depends on the definitions of ‘war’ and of ‘democracy’. There are several borderline cases, including the American Civil War and World War I, and these, together with the small size of the sample—since widespread democracy is a recent phenomenon—make it hard to be confident of its truth.310
There can, furthermore, be no guarantee that a democratic nation will never elect leaders who decide to use nuclear weapons in an act of aggression, or to pass them on to others who will so use them. Especially in a nation in the grip of a militant religious ideology, this is always a possibility. When free elections were held in Algeria in December 1991 the first round of results suggested a decisive victory for the radical Islamic Salvation Front. Instead of allowing the second round of elections to proceed, the army intervened, established a regime more to its liking, and put thousands of its opponents in concentration camps in the Sahara Desert. The United States did nothing to oppose this suppression of democracy, and today Algeria is still not democratic.Yet its current rulers may well be less of a concern to international security than the leaders supported by the majority of voters would have been. Many non-democratic governments have not been internationally aggressive, regardless of their records at home. If the focus is on the right to use a pre-emptive strike against a perceived international threat, the issue is not whether the alleged threat comes from a government that is domestically good, bad, democratic or undemocratic—it is on how much of an aggressive international danger it poses.
Yet another difficulty in placing limits on pre-emptive strikes is that a nation may interpret ‘self-defence’ quite broadly. In its most recent Quadrennial Defense Review, the US Department of Defense states that the development of the nation’s defence posture should take into account the nation’s ‘enduring national interests’ and then gives a list of what these interests are. The list includes not only the obvious things, like ensuring US sovereignty and the protection of US citizens, but also a category of interests ‘contributing to economic well-being’ which includes ‘access to key markets and strategic resources’.311 Richard Betts, director of the Institute for War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, who has served on the staff of the National Security Council, has warned:‘When security is defined in terms broader than protecting the near-term integrity of national sovereignty and borders, the distinction between offense and defense blurs hopelessly…Security can be as insatiable an appetitive as acquisitiveness.’312 The combination of belief in the justifiability of pre-emptive strikes with the Defense Department’s view of the enduring interests that the US needs to defend does indeed blur hopelessly the line between offence and defence, and makes each of these views much more dangerous than either of them would be alone.
The problem of pre-emption lies in the logic of rational choice. It was powerfully laid out by the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his classic work The Leviathan, published in 1651. ‘In the nature of man,’ he wrote, ‘we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.’ By ‘diffidence’ Hobbes meant what we would call insecurity. This in turn is, for Hobbes, a natural outcome of the fact that since there is competition for scarce resources, we must always fear others who would take from us what we have. Given this situation, Hobbes argues,‘there is no way for any man to secure himself so reasonable as anticipation; that is, by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can so long till he see no other power great enough to endanger him: and this is no more than his own conservation requireth, and is generally allowed.’ But since this right to take pre-emptive action is universal, the outcome is Hobbes’ notorious war ‘of every man against every man’. If I expect my neighbour to be likely to take pre-emptive action against me, it is rational for me to strike at him first; but since he knows that this is what it is rational for me to do, he has equal reason to do it to me. As a result, as Hobbes puts it, we all live in a state of ‘continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.313
Hobbes’ analysis indicates the nature of the problem with accepting the legitimacy of pre-emptive strikes when there are no clear criteria setting out the conditions in which they are to be used. Acknowledging a general right of pre-emption creates a situation in which it will be rational for any country that might be the victim of pre-emptive action to make a pre-emptive strike against a possible foe before the foe takes pre-emptive action against it. Accordingly, the problem of establishing when a nation may or may not use pre-emption, or which nations are entitled to use it is insoluble within the framework of a world of fully sovereign, equally independent nations.
The way out of this dire situation, according to Hobbes, is for everyone to hand over his power to a sovereign, whether an individual or an assembly, and thereby to establish ‘that great LEVIATHAN’, the state, which has a monopoly on the use of force. Although Hobbes has individuals in mind he also points out that, since there is no global sovereign who rules over independent nations, the usual state of international relations is one of continual war, in which nations are either actually at war or have ‘their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms, and continual spies upon their neighbours, which is a posture of war’. Thus, for nations as for individuals, the knowledge that an enemy may attack is itself a reason for attacking first, and this spiral of hostile expectations is extremely dangerous. As already mentioned, during the Cold War the threat of massive retaliation between the two superpowers was enough to prevent an all-out attack. But the risk of a catastrophe was always present, and few will regret the passing of that tense era. In the absence of the ‘balance of terror’, however, we need some reasonable equivalent of the ‘great leviathan’ to keep the peace at the global level.
American pre-eminence
After the end of the Cold War, there were only two plausible candidates for the role of global peacekeeper in international affairs: the United Nations, or the sole remaining superpower, the United States. In his West Point speech, Bush never mentioned the United Nations. Instead he said:‘America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.’ He was, in effect, declaring that the United States would, now and for the foreseeable future, be the world’s chief of police.
Bush did not start out with that view. In the second presidential debate he contrasted the ‘humble’ foreign policy he planned to follow with the more interventionist one of the Clinton administration. He said that American intervention to restore democracy to Haiti was ‘nation-building’ and a mistake. He was, he said,‘worried about over-committing our military around the world’ and he wanted to to be ‘judicious’ in using it. Above all he was against arrogance. Asked how people around the world should view America, he said: ‘If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll—they’ll resent us. If we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us.’314 Even after being elected president, in May 2001, he pursued the idea of America as ‘strong and humble’, praising Colin Powell for doing such a good job of making the case for America in these terms.
While Bush was saying this, however, others who were close to him, or were to become members of his team, were developing very different views. In 1997, three years before his run for the presidency, a group of conservative thinkers centred on William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, founded the Project for a New American Century. They made no secret of their goal. In a ‘Statement of Principles’ they said:‘We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership.’ They called on the United States to use the fact that it was now the world’s pre-eminent power ‘to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests’. More specifically, the statement called for an increase in defence spending, a challenge to regimes hostile to American interests and values, and acceptance of ‘America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles’. The signatories to this statement included Bush’s brother Jeb, his future vice-president, Dick Cheney, Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby, and four others who would serve in the Bush administration.315
Although such naked assertion of American power was unfashionable and unfavoured during the Clinton administration, in January 1998 the Project organised a ‘Letter to President Clinton on Iraq’. The letter is remarkable because—years before the events of September 11, 2001—it sets out a course of action that was acted upon only after those events, and has been widely seen as a response to it. The letter opens by urging the president ‘to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the US and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.’ From that opening, the letter warns of the danger of Saddam acquiring weapons of mass destruction, and then adds: ‘It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard.’The signatories to this letter included, in addition to most of those who had signed the ‘Statement of Principles’ a year earlier: Donald Rumsfeld; the person who would later become his deputy in the Department of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz; Richard Armitage, subsequently deputy to Colin Powell at the State Department; John Bolton, later Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security; and Richard Perle, later chair of the Defense Policy Board.316
Two months before the election that brought Bush to power, the Project brought out a much more substantial statement of its views. Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century is a seventy-six-page report put together by a team that includes Wolfowitz and Libby as well as Stephen Cambone, who has since become Rumsfeld’s Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and Abram Schulsky, who as director of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans is credited with having produced the intelligence reviews that helped to shape American policy towards Iraq.317 In addition to reiterating the call for a substantial increase in defence spending ‘for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests’, the report explicitly acknowleges that the desirability of the United States having a permanent presence in the Persian Gulf goes beyond the danger posed by Saddam Hussein:‘The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.’
For the first eight months after he took office, Bush was not strongly focused on foreign affairs, but with Cheney as his Vice-President and Rumsfeld his Secretary of Defense, it was predictable that many of those involved with the Project should be appointed to influential positions in his administration. That the Bush administration would not be ‘humble’ in world affairs was certain once these appointees were known. Nevertheless, without the devastating shock that September 11 gave to the American psyche, they may not have been able to persuade the president to pursue their policy on Iraq—a policy that simultaneously achieved three of their major goals: removing Saddam Hussein from power, establishing a substantial American force in the Gulf, and asserting American pre-eminence over the United Nations and the rest of the world.
By taking the advice of those who wish to use America’s military supremacy ‘to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests’, and making the United States, rather than the United Nations, the ‘new leviathan’, is Bush following a course that can be defended as the right thing to do? The case for saying that he is, made very briefly by Bush himself in his West Point speech, is more fully developed by Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol in their book The War over Iraq—a book that makes the case for America attacking Iraq, and was published before the final decision to go to war was announced. Since Kristol has always been at the core of the Project for the New American Century, it is safe to assume that his views are widely shared by leading figures in the Bush administration, and, directly or indirectly, have an influence on Bush himself.
A key element in Kaplan and Kristol’s case for American preeminence can be summarised as: ‘Remember Munich, not Vietnam’. The overriding desire to avoid another catastrophe like the American military involvement in Vietnam has, they argue, made American foreign policy and defence strategy too timid. As a result, we have forgotten the lessons of the 1938 Munich Conference where Britain and France appeased Hitler instead of crushing him while he was still relatively weak. Rumsfeld is on record as saying the same thing—that Hitler could have been stopped at minimal cost if only action had been taken early enough.318 But the comparison between Hitler and Saddam Hussein in 2003 is misleading, in various ways. First, Hitler was the leader of a major world power: Saddam was not. (Iraq was much weaker in 2003 than it had been when it invaded Kuwait in 1991, for sanctions and forced disarmament had prevented it replacing much of the military equipment it lost during the Gulf War, or modernising its armed forces.) Second, Hitler was on an expansionist path: since 1991, Saddam had been contained to such an extent that he was unable to control even those areas of his own state in which Kurds had effectively established an autonomous region. Third, at Munich, Hitler made claims to part of the territory of an independent state, Czechoslovakia, which strenuously resisted those claims. Britain and France should have stood by Czechoslovakia, and, if Hitler had invaded it, declared war on Germany. That, obviously, would have been in full compliance with international law. The situation in 1991, when Saddam had invaded Kuwait, had certain parallels to Hitler’s claims on Czechoslovakia, but by 2003 there was no parallel at all.
Nevertheless, as Bush argued at West Point and as the National Security Strategy reiterates, given today’s weapons of mass destruction, isn’t it better to act early, rather than wait for an attack? If international law stands in the way of such action, doesn’t that merely show that international law needs to change? But that question leads us back to the issue of who is to decide when one nation is a danger to other nations. Kaplan and Kristol’s answer is clear:‘America must not only be the world’s policeman or its sheriff, it must be its beacon and guide.’The alternative, they say,‘is a chaotic, Hobbesian world where there is no authority to thwart aggression, ensure peace and security or enforce international norms’.319 This invites the obvious response: why isn’t strengthening the authority and power of the United Nations an alternative to this Hobbesian world?
The United Nations is the concrete realisation of an aspiration for a world body that was eloquently voiced by Woodrow Wilson, and later by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The United States played a key role in bringing it into existence, at a conference in San Francisco in 1945. After the delegates unanimously adopted the UN Charter, the new US President, Harry Truman told them:‘You have won a victory against war itself.’320 More than fifty years later, it is an institution to which virtually all the world’s nations belong, and the only institution in which many of them feel they have a voice, and in which they place their hopes for a peaceful world. On 12 September 2002, Bush went to the United Nations to make his case against Iraq—a move that was hailed, by the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin as showing that he had resisted ‘the temptation of unilateral action’. But the question that Bush put in his speech was:‘Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?’That question implied that unless the Security Council agreed to an attack on Iraq, it would be irrelevant. Six months later, as the crisis over Iraq was drawing to a close, he said much the same thing:‘The fundamental question facing the Security Council is, will its words mean anything? When the Security Council speaks, will the words have merit and weight?’321 But Bush’s claim that the United Nations would be irrelevant if it did not agree to the use of force against Iraq showed that he had already decided that it was irrelevant—that is, that if it did not go along with what he wanted, he would ignore its decision. Someone who really thought that the judgment of the Security Council carries weight would acknowledge a strong—if not necessarily always overriding— obligation to abide by its decisions, whether one agrees with them or not. (Similarly, there is a strong, though not necessarily always overriding, obligation to obey a law passed by Congress, whether or not one agrees with it.)
In the end, it was Bush who made the United Nations irrelevant in regard to Iraq. The United Nations Charter, to which the United States is a signatory, says in Article 2, Section 3, that ‘all members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means’. Section 4 of the same article reads:‘All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.’ Bush’s threats, and subsequent military attack, on Iraq were in clear violation of the UN Charter. The real irrelevance of the UN was shown by the fact that it could only stand on the sidelines while its most powerful member, with Britain and minor military support from Australia and Poland, attacked a virtually defenceless member state that was not itself, at the time, engaged in any aggressive activity beyond its borders. What adverse impact this action has had on the global peacekeeping role of the United Nations, it is still too soon to say.
In rejecting the authority of the United Nations, Bush may have been influenced by the views of Richard Perle, who has called the idea of achieving security through international institutions and international law a ‘liberal conceit’. Perle was, until a conflict of interest problem forced his resignation, chair of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, an advisory board that reports directly to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. (Even after the conflict of interest was exposed, Perle remained a member of the Board, though no longer its chair.) In an article published in the conservative British magazine the Spectator while the fighting in Iraq was going on, Perle expressed the hope that Saddam Hussein would, in falling from power,‘take the United Nations down with him’ and that ‘What will die in Iraq is the fantasy of the United Nations as the foundation of a new world order’. What seems to have particularly troubled Perle was the idea that the United Nations is the sole legitimising institution when it comes to the use of force.322 In a similar vein, in The War over Iraq, Kaplan and Kristol dismiss, in a single sentence, the idea that the United Nations should be the authority that keeps the peace: ‘The United Nations? Far from existing as an autonomous entity, the organisation is nothing more than a collection of states, many of them autocratic and few of them as public-spirited as America—which, in any case, provides the UN with most of its financial, political and military muscle.’ They then quote John Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute:‘A policeman gets his assignments from higher authority, but there is no authority higher than America.’ Some might think that is the ultimate expression of American arrogance, but Kaplan and Kristol comment that it is ‘not merely an assertion of national pride. It is a simple fact.’323 But it is not a fact at all. Questions of ultimate authority raise moral issues, and are not purely factual. Putting aside, for the moment, the question of the United Nations, what gives America greater authority than any other nation? Some would say that all sovereign nations have equal authority. We might think that democracies have greater moral authority than dictatorships, but granting this does not give the United States more authority than other nations that have equal or better claims to be democratically ruled. Switzerland has been a democracy for much longer than the United States, India is a much larger democracy, and many countries have much fairer voting systems than the United States. What distinguishes the United States from other democracies is that it has the strongest military. Are Muravchik, Kaplan and Kristol saying that might makes right?
Contrary to what Kaplan and Kristol say, the United Nations is no mere ‘collection of states’ but an organisation with decision-procedures to which the states can bring disputes, and through which these disputes can be resolved. It is true that many member states are dictatorships. That has not, in the past, been widely seen as diminishing the authority of the United Nations. Kaplan and Kristol suggest that few of the member states of the UN are as public-spirited as the United States, but that is debatable. As we have seen, in respect of foreign aid, global warming, and the International Criminal Court, the United States is the least public-spirited of all the major industrial nations. The assertion by Kaplan and Kristol that the United States contributes ‘most’ of the UN’s finances is false. It contributes 22 per cent— or would do so, if it paid its contributions on time, which it rarely does.324 America’s record in supporting UN peacekeeping is also weak. A study carried out by the magazine Foreign Policy, in conjunction with the Center for Global Development, scored developed nations on their contributions to peacekeeping during the year 2000–01, in proportion to the size of their domestic economy. The score was based on financial contributions to the UN peacekeeping program, as well as personnel contributions to UN and NATO operations (valued at $10,000 per person). On that basis, the United States ranked eighteenth out of twenty-one countries.325
Admittedly, the UN is an imperfect body. In the Security Council, where the real decisions are made, the victors of World War II—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States—are permanent members, with the right to veto any resolution. There is no sound reason why nations like the United Kingdom and France should have veto rights, while Brazil, India, Indonesia and Japan do not. Nor does it seem reasonable that four of the five permanent members should be nations that have a Christian cultural history, while no Islamic nation is represented. When, in the build-up to the 2003 war with Iraq, it became clear that France, Russia, and perhaps China would veto a Security Council resolution authorising the use of force against Iraq, the United States and the United Kingdom continued to lobby for votes, indicating that they would regard acceptance of a resolution by a majority of the Security Council as a moral victory, even if the resolution was vetoed. Prime Minister Blair spoke of being prepared to disregard an ‘unreasonable use of the veto’.326 (In the end, of course, they did not put the resolution to a vote, because they knew that they would not even get a majority.) That should indicate that the United States and the United Kingdom also do not think that their own ‘no’ vote should be enough to defeat a resolution that is favoured by a majority of Security Council members. More generally, it suggests a willingness to reconsider the veto system, perhaps replacing the veto by a requirement for resolutions to be passed by a qualified majority, perhaps three-quarters or two-thirds of the members. The permanent membership of the Council could then be increased and made more representative of the world’s population.
In view of the rejection of the United Nations organisation implied by the Bush administration’s attack on Iraq, there was considerable irony in Bush’s return to the UN General Assembly on 23 September 2003, six months after the war, to say that the United States is ‘committed’ to the United Nations, and to call for UN support for the costly occupation of Iraq.327 That was a little like a wife who has recently had an affair (and has not renounced the prospect of further affairs) turning to her husband, saying she was committed to the marriage, and asking him for money to pay for bringing up the child she has had by her lover. More significant than Bush’s speech on that day, however, was the one that preceded it. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the General Assembly that the arguments of those who assert a right to strike pre-emptively against other nations are contrary to the United Nations Charter and represent a fundamental challenge to the principles on which the United Nations has worked for the past fifty-eight years. Hence, he said, we are facing a moment in time ‘no less decisive than 1945 itself, when the United Nations was founded’. What was needed, he urged, was not simply a repudiation of unilateralism and the doctrine of pre-emption invoked by the United States in its attack on Iraq, but a reform of the United Nations that would make it more effective in responding to the threats that might lead some countries to act pre-emptively. Among the reforms he mentioned was a restructuring of the Security Council to make it more representative.328
These reforms would not be beyond the bounds of possibility if the United States were to push hard for them. Even more farreaching changes are possible. If governments were required to show, before being seated at the United Nations, that they have gained their authority from the consent of their people, perhaps the UN could be turned into an association of democracies. Once that were done, it would also be possible to weight the votes of member states in the General Assembly in order to reflect their populations, thus making the Assembly a kind of global parliament. But such changes—if they are deemed desirable—are for the more distant future. The reform of the Security Council would be easier to achieve and is more urgent. Whether it is worth the effort it would take depends on whether there is a better way of achieving a peaceful world. As we have already seen, the alternative favoured by influential figures in the Bush administration is ‘the American century’, the idea of a Pax Americana, a global peace enforced by the United States, or in two words, American dominance.
In his West Point speech, Bush claimed that ‘America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish. We wish for others only what we wish for ourselves—safety from violence, the rewards of liberty, and the hope for a better life.’ Kaplan and Kristol are more open in their support of American dominance. They ask: ‘Well, what is wrong with dominance, in the service of sound principles and high ideals?’329 But if America’s sound principles and high ideals mean anything, they mean democracy. Advocates of democracy should see something wrong with the idea of a nation of less than 300 million people dominating a planet with more than six billion inhabitants. That’s less than 5 per cent of the population ruling over the remainder—more than 95 per cent—without their consent. If America is dominant, then the United States Congress and the President of the United States dominate the world—but only American citizens get to vote for them. That isn’t ‘wish[ing] for others only what we wish for ourselves’.
After democracy, the other sound principle that America stands for is the idea, so important to its founding fathers, that checks and balances are needed to prevent any single branch of government becoming a form of tyranny. But if America is supreme, what is to stop it becoming tyrannical in the exercise of its power? There may be checks and balances within its own constitutional structure, but they are all internal—an American Congress acts as a check on the American president, and American courts are a check on both other branches of government. This is what made American government, in the words of Chief Justice John Marshall in his famous 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison, ‘a government of laws, and not of men’. There are no external checks on America’s power over the rest of the world, and Bush has undermined the only organisations which could offer such checks and strengthen the rule of international law, the United Nations and the International Criminal Court. America’s founding fathers would not have trusted Bush’s pledge that America has no empire to extend. They would have replied that power will always tend to become tyrannical, if there is no opposing power. Moreover, in his West Point speech, Bush also said:‘America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge.’That, obviously, contradicts his claim that ‘we wish for others only what we wish for ourselves’, since there cannot be more than one nation with military strengths beyond challenge.
The claim that America would only use its dominance ‘in the service of sound principles and high ideals’ is therefore a contradiction from the outset, since such principles and ideals are incompatible with the imposed, unelected global dominance of any single nation. We should also recall that the ‘Statement of Principles’ issued by the Project for a New American Century, and signed by Vice-President Cheney, as well as by Bush’s brother and several members of the present Bush administration, called on the United States ‘to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests’. That doesn’t sound like ruling the world impartially for the benefit of all. Nor could the citizens of other nations be encouraged by Bush’s statement on why he would not sign on to the Kyoto Protocol: ‘first things first are the people who live in America’.330 Even without this explicit statement, Bush’s refusal to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol looks to most of the world very much like national selfishness. It shows a preference for taking grave risks with the lives of people who are much worse off than most Americans, rather than imposing much more moderate sacrifices on Americans. Under Bush’s leadership, America’s record as a global citizen does not encourage the belief that it can be trusted to wield its global dominance in the interests of all the world’s people, rather than just Americans.
More fundamentally, for Bush and his supporters to proclaim America as the world’s policeman is effectively to reject the possibility that the world will be governed by just laws, rather than by power. As Jonathan Glover, director of the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics at King’s College, London, and author of Humanity:A Moral History of the 20th Century, has pointed out, the Pax Americana assumes a Hobbesian ruler who has power, but no moral authority, a world in which conflict is merely suppressed, not resolved.331 Glover prefers the vision of the world offered by the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his book Perpetual Peace. Kant advocated a system in which the states would give up, to a world federation, a monopoly on the use of force. The world federation would possess the moral authority of a body that was established by mutual agreement, and reached its decision in an impartial manner. In the modern world, that means a reformed United Nations, with adequate force at its command, and impartial procedures to decide when that force should be used.
Bush might respond by saying that since we are now standing at ‘the perilous crossroads of radicalism and technology’, we do not have the luxury of working, over decades, to improve the United Nations and ensure that it works properly to stop this peril. Is it so clear, though, that the route Bush is taking is more likely to make us safe? International terrorism recognises no borders, and to stop it will require international co-operation. The greatest danger is that weapons-grade uranium or plutonium will fall into the hand of terrorists. Russia has more than 1000 tonnes of such materials, and the United States more than 800 tonnes. Other nations, including Pakistan and India, also have some. (Iraq, at the time of the American attack on it, had none, and was not about to get any either.) According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, it takes just twenty-five kilograms of weapons-grade uranium, or eight kilograms of plutonium, to construct a rudimentary nuclear weapon. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, hundreds of attempts to smuggle radioactive materials have been detected, including eighteen involving weapons-grade uranium or plutonium.332 Probably the most effective action that can be taken to prevent terrorists getting hold of nuclear weapons is to ensure that all fissile material, whether from weapons programs like those in Russia or Pakistan, or from nuclear power programs, is rendered harmless, or safely stored and protected. That requires the co-operation of all countries that have or may produce such material. Similarly, we can only be secure against biological weapons if we have the co-operation of all countries that have the expertise to produce them. This seems more likely to be achieved by working together with other nations, through respected international institutions, than by attempting to dominate them.
After September 11, 2001, there was an unprecedented degree of international solidarity with the United States. Within twenty-four hours of the attacks NATO had, for the first time in its history, invoked Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, which states that an armed attack against one or more NATO member countries will be considered an attack against all. NATO also adopted a series of practical measures for fighting terrorism. All twenty-seven member nations accepted these measures, and Russia, which is not a NATO member, actively entered into cooperation with NATO on issues concerned with terrorism.333 The UN Security Council unanimously adopted a wide-ranging anti-terrorism resolution calling for international co-operation in suppressing terrorism and cutting off financial support for terrorists, and set up a committee to monitor its implementation.334 Instead of using this atmosphere of co-operation as a means of achieving security, the Bush administration has provoked anti-American sentiment. John Brady Kiesling, a career diplomat serving in Greece, felt so strongly that this course of action was wrong that he gave up his lifelong career. In his letter of resignation he told Colin Powell:‘We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.’335
Undoubtedly, Bush is right to say that the conjunction of radicalism and technology has made the world a more dangerous place—so dangerous, in fact, that it may undermine the Hobbesian idea that a sovereign with overwhelming military supremacy can ensure the security of his or her subjects. In a Hobbesian world in which a dominant nation is liable to attack and overthrow weak governments that are not to its liking, the most sensible response for a government that fears it may be attacked is to obtain nuclear weapons as rapidly as possible. Only then can it deter an attack by threatening to inflict intolerable losses on the dominant nation or its allies. Overwhelming military superiority is less significant when the militarily inferior nation possesses and is prepared to use nuclear weapons.
Whether the danger posed by the combination of new weapons technologies with radical religious and political ideas can be controlled at all is something that only time will tell. In the long run, however, we are more likely to succeed in meeting this threat by international co-operation than by one nation acting unilaterally and in defiance of international law. American pre-eminence may well prove to be, not only unjust, but a tragic mistake with catastrophic consequences.