In apparently diametric contrast has been the output of the most influential thinker commonly identified with neoconservatism, Robert Kagan. At Policy Planning and then the Inter-American Affairs desk in the State Department under Shultz and Baker, Kagan had a controlling part in the Contra campaign of the Reagan administration, of which he later wrote the authoritative history, A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977–1990. A vigorous champion of the strategy of the second Bush for recasting the world, he was foreign-policy adviser to McCain during his run for the presidency. But, like most in-and-outers, he has readily crossed party lines, supporting Clinton in 1992 and counselling his wife at the State Department during the first Obama administration. His fame dates from the book he published in 2003, Of Paradise and Power, during a season in Brussels as husband of the US deputy ambassador to NATO.1 Appearing at the height of transatlantic tensions over the impending invasion of Iraq, it proposed an explanation of them that made short work of liberal bewailing of the rift in the Atlantic community.
Europe and America were divided, not as conventionally held, by subjective contrasts in culture or politics (the ‘social model’ of the Old World), but by differing objective situations, determining opposite outlooks. If the EU stood for law, in a Kantian world of patience and peaceful persuasion, and the US for power, in a Hobbesian world of vigilance and force, that was a function of their respective military capacities: weakness and strength. When this distribution was reversed, so were concomitant stances: in the nineteenth century, Americans typically appealed to international law and the values of peaceful commerce, denouncing power politics as Europeans do today, while Europeans practised—and preached—the necessities of Realpolitik, and the inherently agonistic character of an inter-state system whose ultimate resort was violence. In the twentieth century, with the change in the correlation of forces, there was an inversion of attitudes.2
The inversion was not completely symmetrical, because above and beyond the objective ‘power gap’ of each epoch, there was the particularity of the history of each side. Traumatized by the internecine wars to which power politics in the Old World had led, Europe after 1945 accepted for fifty years complete strategic dependence on America in the battle against Communism. Then, once the Soviet Union had collapsed, Europe was effectively released from any such concerns. That did not mean, however, that it was capable of building a counterpower to the United States, or stepping again onto the world stage as a major actor. For European integration itself was such a complex, unprecedented process that it allowed for little consistent focus on anything external to it, while at the same time weakening—with enlargement of the EU—any capacity for unitary action. Contrary to the dreams of its enthusiasts, integration was the enemy of global power projection, not the condition of it. The result was very low military spending, no sign of any increase of it, and little strategic cooperation even within the EU itself.
The American experience was entirely different. Originally, the US too had been a ‘protected’ republic, guarded not only by two oceans but British naval power. But even when still a comparatively weak state by the standards of the time, it had always been expansionist—from Indian clearances to Mexican annexations, the seizure of Hawaii to the conquest of the Philippines—and no American statesman had ever doubted the future of the US as a great power and the superiority of American values to all others. Thereafter, the country knew no invasion or occupation, and only limited casualties in the two World Wars, emerging after 1945 as a global power in the Cold War. In turn, the end of the Cold War had led to no retraction of US might, or withdrawal to the homeland, but on the contrary to a further expansion of American power projection, first under Clinton and then under Bush, with a giant leap forward after the attacks of 9/11. For just as Pearl Harbour had led to the occupation of Japan and the transformation of the US into an East Asian power, so the Twin Towers was going to make the US a Middle Eastern power in situ.3 A new era of American hegemony was just beginning.
Under its protective mantle, Europe had entered a post-historical paradise, cultivating the arts of peace, prosperity and civilized living. Who could blame them? Americans, who stood guard against the threats in the Hobbesian world beyond this Kantian precinct, could not enter that Eden, and proud of their might, had no wish to do so. They had helped create the European Union and should cherish it, taking greater diplomatic care with its susceptibilities, just as Europeans should learn to value and adjust to the new level of American paramountcy, in a world where the triumph of capitalism made the cohesion of the West less pressing, and the remaining enemy of Muslim fundamentalism posed no serious ideological challenge to liberalism. In Washington multilateralism had always been instrumental, practised in the interests of the US, rather than as an ideal in itself. There was less need for that now, and if it had to act alone, no reason for America to be shackled by European inhibitions. The pleasures of Venus were to be respected; the obligations of Mars lay elsewhere.
Expanding the thumbnail sketch of the American past in Paradise and Power to a full-length survey with Dangerous Nation (2006), Kagan took direct aim at the self-image of the US as historically an inward-looking society, venturing only reluctantly and sporadically into the outside world. From the outset, it had on the contrary been an aggressive, expansionist force, founded on ethnic cleansing, land speculation and slave labour, unabashed heir to the ruthless legacy of British colonialism in the New World. In a detailed narrative demystifying one episode after another, from the Seven Years War to the Spanish–American War—with most of which, apart from the scant role accorded ideals of a Christian Commonwealth, William Appleman Williams would have found little to disagree—Kagan emphasized the central importance of the Civil War as the model, not only for the American use of unrestrained power with divine approval—as Lincoln put it, ‘the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether’—but as the template for future enterprises in ideological conquest and nation-building.4
Two years later, The Return of History and the End of Dreams made good a weak joint in the argument of Paradise and Power. If, after Communism, Muslim fundamentalism was left as the only ideological alternative to liberalism, yet was too archaic to pose any serious challenge to it, the conflict with it could only be a sideshow, with no resemblance to the Cold War. But in that case where were the menacing dangers from which Mars had to protect Venus? Correcting aim, Kagan now explained that the liberal international order extolled by Mandelbaum and Ikenberry had not, as they imagined, superseded great-power conflicts of old. These were re-emerging in the new century with the rise of China and recovery of Russia—vast autocracies antithetical by their nature to the democracies of the West, whose rulers were not mere kleptocrats lolling in wealth and power for their own sake, but leaders who believed that in bringing order and prosperity to their nations, and restoring their global influence and prestige, they were serving a higher cause. Well aware that the democracies would like to overthrow them, they were unlikely to be softened to the West, as often hoped, by mere commercial ties and economic interdependence. Historically, trade had rarely trumped the emotional forces of national pride and political competition.5 It was a delusion to believe that a peaceful, consensual ecumene was around the corner. The time for dreams was over. The great powers shared few common values; the autocracies were antagonists. A League of Democracies was needed to prevail over them.
The World America Made (2012) brought reassurance in this struggle. Threatening though China and Russia might be, the United States was more than capable of seeing them off. Like that of Rome in its day, or for millennia imperial China, the American order of the twentieth century had established norms of conduct, shaped ideas and beliefs, determined legitimacies of rule, around itself. Peace and democracy had spread under its carapace. But these were not the fruit of American culture, wisdom or ideals. They were effects of the attraction exercised by American power, without which they could not have arrived. That power—for all the excesses or failures of which, like any predecessor, it has never been exempt—remains, exceptionally, accepted and abetted by others. In a historically unique pattern, no coalition has attempted to balance against it.
That is not because American power has always been used sparingly, or in accordance with international law, or after consultation with allies, or simply because of the benefits its liberal order confers at large. Crucial is also the fact the United States alone is not contiguous with any other great power, as are Europe, Russia, China, India and Japan, all of whom have more reason to fear their immediate neighbours than distant America. On this stage there can be no ‘democratic peace’, because Russia and China are not democracies; and what peace there is remains too brief an experience—since 1945, only twenty years longer than 1870–1914—to rely on nuclear weapons to keep indefinitely. The only reliable guarantee of peace continues to be US predominance. Should that fade, the world would be at risk. But happily America is not in decline. Its world-historical position is like that of Britain in 1870, not later. Domestic economic problems there are, which need to be fixed. The country is not omnipotent. But it suffers no overstretch in troops or cash, military spending remaining a modest percentage of GDP. Its hegemony is essentially unimpaired, and will remain so, for as long as Americans harken to Theodore Roosevelt’s call: ‘Let us base a wise and practical internationalism on a sound and intense nationalism.’6
The authority of the first Roosevelt indicates the distance of this body of writing from the pedigree descending from Wilson, at its most pronounced in Paradise and Power and Dangerous Nation. But the adage itself speaks to the underlying invariant of the ideology of American foreign policy since the Second World War, which had its equivalent in imperial China: ru biao, fa li—decoratively Confucian, substantively Legalist.7 Liberal internationalism is the obligatory idiom of American imperial power. Realism, in risking a closer correspondence to its practice, remains facultative and subordinate. The first can declare itself as such, and regularly achieve virtually pure expression. The second must pay tribute to the first, and offer an articulation of the two. So it is with Kagan. In 2007, he joined forces with Ivo Daalder—a perennial Democratic stand-by, in charge of Bosnian affairs on Clinton’s National Security Council, later Obama’s ambassador to NATO—to advocate a League of Democracies virtually identical to the Concert of Democracies proposed a year earlier by Ikenberry and Slaughter as a way of firming up support for humanitarian interventions.8 Reaffirmed in The Return of History and adopted as a platform by McCain in 2008, with Kagan at his side, this conception was Wilsonism cubed, alarming even many a bona fide liberal. It was soon shot down as unwelcome to America’s allies in Europe and provocative to its adversaries in Russia and China, who were better coaxed tactfully into the ranks of free nations than stigmatized ab initio as strangers to them. The World America Made had better luck. Its case captivated Obama, who confided his enthusiasm for it on the eve of his State of the Union address in 2012, in which he proclaimed ‘America is back’.9 Kagan would return the compliment, crediting Obama not only with ‘a very smart policy in Asia’—the opening of a new base in Australia ‘a powerful symbol of America’s enduring strategic presence in the region’—but a welcome return to ‘a pro-democracy posture not only in the Middle East, but also in Russia and Asia’. If the record was marred by failure to secure agreement from Baghdad to continuing US troops in Iraq, it was star-spangled by the intervention in Libya. The terms of Kagan’s praise speak for themselves: ‘Obama placed himself in a great tradition of American presidents who have understood America’s special role in the world. He thoroughly rejected the so-called realist approach, extolled American exceptionalism, spoke of universal values and insisted that American power should be used, when appropriate, on behalf of those values.’10
II
Realism comes, without such disavowals, in a more unusual amalgam in the outlook of a thinker with Cold War credentials superior even to those of Kagan. Responsible, as Carter’s national security adviser, for the American operation arming and bankrolling the Islamist revolt against Afghan communism and subsequent war to drive the Red Army out of the country, Zbigniew Brzezinski is the highest former officeholder in the gallery of contemporary US strategists. From a Polish szlachta background, his European origins offer a misleading comparison with Kissinger.11 The contrast in formation and outlook is marked. Where Kissinger fancied himself as the heir to balance-of-power statesmen of the Old World, Brzezinski comes from the later, and quite distinct, line of geopolitics. This is a filiation more radically distant from the Wilsonian pieties to which Kissinger has always paid nominal tribute. But in this case the harder-edged realism to which it tends, free from liturgies of democracy and the market, comes combined with a Kulturkritik of classically minatory stamp, whose genesis lies in the rhetoric of malaise associated with Carter’s presidency. Brzezinki’s tenure in power, cut short when Reagan was elected in 1980, was only half Kissinger’s, leaving him with a greater drive to make his mark during subsequent administrations, with a succession of five books timed around electoral calendars: Out of Control (1993) as Clinton took office; The Grand Chessboard (1997) as he started his second term; The Choice (2004) as Kerry battled Bush for the White House; Second Chance (2007), as the prospect for Democratic recapture of it loomed; Strategic Vision (2012), as Obama approached a second term.12
Brzezinski laid out his general vision in the first of these works, which he dedicated to Carter. Far from victory in the Cold War ushering in a new world order of international tranquillity, security and common prosperity, the United States was faced with an era of global turmoil, of which the country was itself one of the chief causes. For while the Soviet Union might have gone, there were no grounds for domestic complacency. American society was not just pockmarked with high levels of indebtedness, trade deficits, low savings and investment, sluggish productivity growth, inadequate health care, inferior secondary education, deteriorating infrastructure, greedy rich and homeless poor, racism and crime, political gridlock—ills enumerated by Brzezinski long before they became a standard list in buck-up literature along Friedman–Mandelbaum lines. It was more deeply corroded by a culture of hedonistic self-indulgence and demoralized individualism. A ‘permissive cornucopia’ had bred massive drug use, sexual license, visual-media corruption, declining civic pride and spiritual emptiness. Yet at the same time, in the attractions of its material wealth and seductions of its popular culture, the US was a destabilizing force everywhere in the less advanced zones of the world, disrupting traditional ways of life and tempting unprepared populations into the same ‘dynamic escalation of desire’ that was undoing America.
Such effects were all the more incendiary in that across most of the—still poor and underdeveloped—earth, turmoil was in store as the youth bulge unleashed by population explosion interacted with the growth of literacy and electronic communications systems to detonate a ‘global political awakening’. As this got under way, newly activated masses were prone to primitive, escapist and manichean fantasies, of an ethnically narrow and often anti-Western bent, insensible of the needs for pluralism and compromise. The export of an American lack of self-restraint could only add fuel to the fire. Politically, the United States was the guardian of order in the world; culturally, it was a force sowing disorder. This was an extremely dangerous contradiction. To resolve it, America would have to put its own house in order. ‘Unless there is some deliberate effort to re-establish the centrality of some moral criteria for the exercise of self-control over gratification as an end in itself, the phase of American predominance may not last long’, Brzezinski warned: it was unlikely that a ‘global power that is not guided by a globally relevant set of values can for long exercise its predominance’.13 A new respect for nature must ultimately be part of this, even if rich and poor societies might not share the same ecological priorities. At home economic and social problems, however acute, were less intractable than metaphysical problems of common purpose and meaning. What America needed above all—Brzezinski disavowed any particular prescriptions for reform—was cultural revaluation and philosophical self-examination, not to be achieved overnight.
Meanwhile, the affairs of the world could not wait. American hegemony might be at risk from American dissolution, but the only alternative to it was global anarchy—regional wars, economic hostilities, social upheavals, ethnic conflicts. For all its faults, the United States continued to enjoy an absolute superiority in all four key dimensions of power—military, economic, technological, cultural; and it was a benign hegemon, whose dominance, though in some ways reminiscent of earlier empires, relied more than its predecessors on co-option of dependent elites rather than outright subjugation. Huntington was right that sustained American primacy was central to the future of freedom, security, open markets and peaceful relations worldwide. To preserve these, the US required ‘an integrated, comprehensive and long-term geopolitical strategy’ for the great central landmass of the earth, on whose fate the pattern of global power depended: ‘For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia.’14
From The Grand Chessboard (1997) onwards, this would be the object of Brzezinski’s work, with a more detailed set of prescriptions than any of his peers has offered. Since the end of the Cold War, his construction begins, a non-Eurasian power was for the first time in history preeminent in Eurasia. America’s global primacy depended on its ability to sustain that preponderance. How was it to do so? In the struggle against communism, the US had entrenched itself at the western and eastern peripheries of the mega-continent, in Europe and Japan, and along its southern rim, in the Gulf. Now, however, the Soviet Union had vanished and the Russia that succeeded it had become a huge black hole across the middle of Eurasia, of top strategic concern for the United States. It was illusory to think that democracy and a market economy could take root swiftly, let alone together, in this geopolitical void. Traditions for the former were lacking, and shock therapy to introduce the latter had been folly.
The Russian elites were resentful of the historic reduction of their territory, and potentially vengeful; there existed the makings of a Russian fascism. The biggest single blow for them was the independence of Ukraine, to which they were not resigned. To check any temptations of revanchism in Moscow, the US should build a barrier encompassing Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan to the south, and—crucially—extending NATO to the east. For Brzezinski, expansion of the Atlantic Alliance to the borders of Russia was the most important single priority of the post-Cold War era. Pushed through by his former pupil Albright at the State Department—a son was also closely involved at the National Security Council—its realization was a huge achievement. For with Europe serving as a springboard for the progressive expansion of democracy deeper into Eurasia, the arrival of NATO at their frontiers might in due course persuade Russians that it was to good relations with the EU that they should turn for their future, abandoning any nostalgia for an imperial past, even perhaps—why not?—breaking up into three more modest states, one west of the Urals, one in Siberia and a third in the Far East, or a loose confederation between them.
The EU, for its part, sharing a common civilizational heritage with the US, no doubt pointed the way to larger forms of post-national organization: ‘But first of all, Europe is America’s essential geopolitical bridgehead on the Eurasian continent.’ Regrettably, it was not itself in the pink of condition, suffering from a pervasive decline in internal vitality and loss of creative momentum, with symptoms of escapism and lack of nerves in the Balkans. Germany was helpful in the expansion of NATO, and France could balance it with Poland. Britain was an irrelevance. But as to their common status, Brzezinski did not mince words: ‘The brutal fact is that Western Europe, and increasingly Central Europe, remains largely an American protectorate, with its allied states reminiscent of ancient vassals and tributaries.’15 This was not a healthy situation. Nor, on the other hand, was the prospect of Europe becoming a great power capable of competing with the United States, in such regions of vital interest to it as the Middle East or Latin America, desirable. Any such rivalry would be destructive to both sides. Each had their own diplomatic traditions. But ‘an essentially multilateralist Europe and a somewhat unilateralist America make for a perfect marriage of convenience. Acting separately, America can be preponderant but not omnipotent; Europe can be rich but impotent. Acting together, America and Europe are in effect globally omnipotent.’16
This last was an uncharacteristic flourish. At the other end of Eurasia, Brzezinski was more prudent. There, for want of any collective security system, Japan could not play the same kind of role as Germany in Europe. It remained, however, an American bastion, which could be encouraged to play the role of an Asian Canada—wealthy, harmless, respected, philanthropic. But what of China? Proud of his role under Carter in negotiating diplomatic relations with Beijing as a counterweight to Moscow, Brzezinski—like Kissinger, for the same reasons—has consistently warned against any policies that could be construed as building a coalition against China, which was inevitably going to become the dominant regional—though not yet a global—power. The best course would clearly be ‘to co-opt a democratizing and free-marketing China into a larger Asian regional framework of cooperation’. Even short of such a happy outcome, however, ‘China should become America’s Far Eastern anchor in the more traditional domain of power politics’, serving as ‘a vitally important geostrategic asset—in that regard coequally important with Europe and more weighty than Japan—in assuring Eurasia’s stability’.17 Still, a thorny question remained: ‘To put it very directly, how large a Chinese sphere of influence, and where, should America be prepared to accept as part of a policy of successfully co-opting China into world affairs? What areas now outside of China’s political radius might have to be conceded to the realm of the reemerging Celestial Empire?’18 To resolve that ticklish issue, a strategic consensus between Washington and Beijing was required, but it did not have to be settled immediately. For the moment, it would be important to invite China to join the G7.
Western and eastern flanks of Eurasia secured, there remained the southern front. There, some thirty lesser states comprised an ‘oblong of violence’ stretching from Suez to Xinjiang that could best be described as a Global Balkans—a zone rife with ethnic and religious hatreds, weak governments, a menacing youth bulge, not to speak of dangers of nuclear proliferation, but rich in oil, gas and gold. The US was too distant from Central Asia to be able to dominate it, but could block Russian attempts to restore its hold on the area. In the Middle East, on the other hand, the US had since the Gulf War enjoyed an exclusive preponderance. But this was a brittle dominion, Brzezinski warned, lacking political or cultural roots in the region, too reliant on corrupt local elites to do its bidding. After the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, he was critical of the War on Terror as an overreaction that mistook a tactic—age-old among the weak—for an enemy, refusing to see the political problems in the Arab world that lay behind it, in which the US had played a part. Nor was it any good trying to foist democracy on the region as a solution. Patience was needed in the Middle East, where gradual social modernization was the best way forward, not artificial democratization. The US and EU should spell out the terms of a peace treaty between Israelis and Palestinians, on which there was an international consensus: mutual adjustment of the 1967 borders, merely symbolic return of refugees and demilitarization of any future Palestine.
In Brzezinski’s later works, many of these themes were radicalized. Second Chance (2007) offered a scathing retrospect of the foreign-policy performance of Bush I, Clinton and Bush II. The first, though handling the end of the Cold War skillfully enough (if unable to see the importance of backing Ukrainian independence and breaking up the Soviet Union), bungled the unsatisfactory outcome of the Gulf War, which might have been avoided by exchanging forcible exile for Saddam against preservation of the Iraqi Army, and missed the unique chance it gave the White House of imposing a peace settlement on Israel and the Palestinians in the wake of it. There was no real substance to his talk of a new world order, which in its absence could only look like a relapse to the ‘old imperial order’. Clinton had one great accomplishment to his credit, expansion of NATO; another of some moment, in the creation of the WTO; and had at least restored fiscal balance at home. But he too had failed to get a peace settlement in the Middle East, bringing Israelis and Palestinians together at Camp David too late, and then favouring the former too much. His faith in the vapid mantra of globalization had bred a complacent economic determinism, resulting in a casual and opportunist conduct of foreign affairs.
Worse still were the neoconservative doctrines that replaced it, which without 9/11 would have remained a fringe phenomenon. Under the second Bush, these had led to a war in Iraq whose costs far outweighed its benefits, not only diverting resources from the struggle in Afghanistan, but causing a grievous loss of American standing in the world. This dismal record was compounded by failure of the Doha Round, and an ill-starred nuclear deal with India, risking Chinese ire.19 Virtually everywhere, major geopolitical trends had moved against the United States. ‘Fifteen years after its coronation as global leader, America is becoming a fearful and lonely democracy in a politically antagonistic world’.20 Nor was the situation better at home. Of the fourteen out of twenty maladies of the country he had listed in 1993 that were measurable, nine had worsened since. The US was in bad need of a cultural revolution and regime change of its own.
Yet, Strategic Vision insists five years later, American decline would be a disaster for the world, which more than ever is in want of responsible American leadership. Though still skirting obsolescence at home and looking out of touch abroad, the US retained great strengths, along with its weaknesses. These it should put to work in a grand strategy for Eurasia that could now be updated. Its objectives ought to be two. The West should be enlarged by the integration of Turkey and Russia fully within its framework, extending its frontiers to Van and Vladivostok, and all but reaching Japan. European youth could re-populate and dynamize Siberia. In East Asia, the imperative was to create a balance between the different powers of the region. Without prejudice to that aim, China could be invited to form a G2 with the United States. But China should remember that, if it gave way to nationalist temptations, it could find itself rapidly isolated, for ‘unlike America’s favourable geographical location, China is potentially vulnerable to a strategic encirclement. Japan stands in the way of China’s access to the Pacific Ocean, Russia separates China from Europe, and India towers over an ocean named after itself that serves as China’s main access to the Middle East.’ A map repairs the tactful omission of the US from this ring of powers.21
Geopolitically then, ‘America must adopt a dual role. It must be the promoter and guarantor of greater and broader unity in the West, and it must be the balancer and conciliator between the major powers in the East’.22 But it should never forget that, as Raymond Aron once wrote, ‘the strength of a great power is diminished if it ceases to serve an idea’. The higher purpose of American hegemony, which would not last forever, was the creation of a stable framework to contain potential turmoil, based on a community of shared values that alone could overcome ‘the global crisis of the spirit’. Democracy, the demand for which had been overrated even in the fall of communism, in which many other longings were involved, was not the indicated answer.23 That lay in another ideal: ‘Only by identifying itself with the idea of universal human dignity—with its basic requirement of respect for culturally diverse political, social and religious emanations—can America overcome the risk that the global political awakening will turn against it.’24
In its peculiar register, Brzezinski’s overall construction—part geopolitical, part metacultural—does not escape, but replicates, the dualism of the American ideology for foreign service since 1945.25 In his formulation: ‘idealistic internationalism is the common-sense dictate of hard-nosed realism’. But in his latter-day version of the combinatory, both components have a markedly European inflection: a Realpolitik based on a geographical calculus descending from Mackinder, and a Kulturkritik of contemporary mores descending from Arnold or Nietzsche. As a tradition, Kulturkritik has always tended to a pessimism at radical variance with the optimism of the American Creed, as Myrdal classically depicted it. In Brzezinski’s case, the late absence of that national note has no doubt also been a function of his fortunes, the coolness of his view of post-Cold War euphoria due in part to displeasure that credit for the collapse of communism was so widely ascribed to the Reagan rather than Carter or earlier administrations, and the acerbity of his judgement of subsequent presidencies to his failure to return to high office—a sharpness of tongue at once cause and effect of lack of preferment. In his capacity to deliver blunt truths about his adopted country and its allies—the United States with its ‘hegemonic elite’ of ‘imperial bureaucrats’, a Europe of ‘protectorates’ and ‘vassals’ dependent on them—Brzezinski breaks ranks with his fellows. Emollience is not among his failings.
In its departures from the American norm, the substance, as well as style, of his output bears the marks of his European origins. Above all, in the relentless Russophobia, outlasting the fall of communism and the disappearance of the Soviet foe, that is a product of centuries of Polish history. For two decades his Eurasian strategies would revolve around the spectre of a possible restoration of Russian power. China, by contrast, he continued to view, not only out of personal investment in his past, but anachronistic fixation on the conjuncture of his achievement, as America’s ally against a common enemy in Moscow. When it finally dawned on him that China had become a much greater potential threat to the global hegemony of the United States, he simply switched pieces on the chessboard of his imaginary, now conceiving Russia as the geopolitical arm of an elongated West linking Europe to Japan, to encircle China, rather than China as the American anchor in the east against Russia. In their detachment from reality, these schemes—culminating at one point in a Trans-Eurasian Security system stretching from Tokyo to Dublin—belong with the American self-projections from which Brzezinski’s thinking otherwise departs: where tough-minded realism becomes rosy-eyed ideation.
III
Tighter and more dispassionate, the writing of Robert Art, occupying a position further away from the Wilsonian centre of the spectrum, offers a pointed contrast. Analytic precision, closely reasoned argument and lucid moderation of judgement are its hallmarks, producing a realism at higher resolution.26 The difference begins with Art’s definition of his object. ‘Grand strategy differs from foreign policy’. The latter covers all the ways the interests of a state may be conceived, and the instruments with which they may be pursued. The former refers more narrowly to the ways a state employs its military power to support its national interests: ‘Foreign policy deals with all the goals and all the instruments of statecraft; grand strategy deals with all the goals but only one instrument.’27 It is the role of armed force in America’s conduct in the world that is the unswerving focus of Art’s concern. Less visible to the public eye than others, with no bestseller to his name, from his chair at Brandeis he has served more discreetly as a consultant to the Pentagon—Long-Range Planning Staff under Weinberger—and the CIA.
Art’s starting point is the fungibility—not unlimited, but substantial—of military power: the different ways in which it can be cashed out politically or economically. Coercive diplomacy, using the threat of force to compel another state to do the bidding of a stronger one—tried by Washington, he notes, over a dozen times between 1990 and 2006—is rarely a conspicuous success: among its failures to date, attempts to oblige Iran or the DPRK to abandon their nuclear programmes. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, are more useful than is often supposed, not only as deterrence against potential attack, but for the wide margin of safety they afford for diplomatic manoeuvre; the advantages to be extracted from states to which their protection may extend; and the resources which the cost-efficiency of the security they provide releases for other purposes. More generally, so long as anarchy obtains between states, force not only remains the final arbiter of disputes among them, but affects the ways these may be settled short of force.
Of that there is no more positive example than the role of US military power in binding together the nations of the free world after 1945, by creating the political conditions for the evolutionary intertwining of their economies: ‘Force cannot be irrelevant as a tool of policy for America’s economic relations with her great power allies: America’s military preeminence politically pervades these relations. It is the cement of economic interdependence.’28 The Japanese and West Europeans could grow and prosper together under the safety of a US nuclear umbrella whose price was submission to American monetary and diplomatic arrangements. For ‘it would be odd indeed if this dependence were not exploited by the United States on political and economic matters of interest to it’. So it has been—Washington first obliging its ally Britain, even before the arrival of the A-bomb, to accept fixed exchange rates at Bretton Woods, and then cutting the link of the dollar to gold in 1971, not only without consulting its allies, but for twenty years thereafter confronting them with unpleasant choices between inflation and recession. Without its military preeminence, as well as its industrial strength, the US could never have acted as it did: ‘America used her military power politically to cope with her dollar devaluation problem.’ We are a long way from the placebo of the nation of nations.
Since the end of the Cold War, what are the purposes the armed forces of the US should serve? Atypically, Art ranks them in an explicit hierarchy, distinguishing between interests that are actually vital and those that are only desirable, in an updated geopolitics. Vital include, in order of importance: security of the homeland against weapons of mass destruction, prevention of great power conflicts in Eurasia, a steady flow of oil from Arabia. Desirable, in order of importance, are: preservation of an open international economic order, fostering of democracy and defence of human rights, protection of the global environment. The course Art recommends for pursuing these goals is ‘selective engagement’: a strategy that gives priority to America’s vital interests, but ‘holds out hope that the desirable interests can be partially realized’, striking a balance between trying to use force to do too much and to do too little.29 Operationally, selective engagement is a strategy of forward defence, allowing a reduction of overall American troop levels, but requiring the maintenance of US military bases overseas, where they serve not only as guardians of political stability, but also checks on economic nationalism.
In the same way, the expansion of the Atlantic Alliance to the east—a top-down project of the Clinton administration from the start—was designed not just to fill a security vacuum or give NATO a new lease of life, but to preserve American hegemony in Europe. In the Middle East, policy in the Gulf should be to ‘divide, not conquer’, pitting the various oil-rich rulers against each other without attempting closer management of them. In Afghanistan, the US had to stay the course. On the other hand, it would be folly to attack Iran. The security of Israel was an essential American interest. But a settlement of the Palestinian problem would be the most important single step in undercutting support for anti-American terrorism. The path to achieving it lay in a formal defence treaty with Israel, stationing US forces on its territory and obliging it to disgorge the occupied territories. In East Asia, the security of South Korea was also an essential American interest. But the goal of American policy should be the denuclearization and unification of the peninsula. Should China gain preponderant influence in Korea thereafter, that could be accepted. The US alliance with Korea was expendable, as the alliance with Japan—the bedrock of American presence, and condition of its maritime supremacy, in East Asia—was not.
Looming over the region was the rise of China. How should the United States respond to it? Not by treating the PRC as a potential danger comparable to the USSR of old. The Soviet Union had been a geopolitical menace to both Europe and the Gulf. China was neither. If it eventually came to dominate much of Southeast Asia, as it might Korea, so what? Provided the US held naval bases in Singapore, the Philippines or Indonesia, while Europe, the Gulf, India, Russia and Japan remained independent or tied to the US, Chinese hegemony on land in East and Southeast Asia would not tip the global balance of power. The PRC could never be the same kind of threat to American influence that the Soviet Union, straddling the vast expanse of Eurasia, had once represented. Friction over Taiwan aside—resolvable in due course either by reduction of the island to a dependency of the mainland through economic leverage, or political reunification with it if the mainland democratized—there was no basis for war between America and China. Beijing would build up a powerful navy, but it would not be one capable of challenging US command of the Pacific. In fact, China needed to acquire a sea-based nuclear deterrent if mutually assured destruction was to work, and the US should not oppose it doing so.
The role of force endured, as it must. American political and economic statecraft could not be successful without the projection of military power abroad to shape events, not just to react to them; to mould an environment, not merely to survive in one. That did not mean it should be employed recklessly or indiscriminately. Art, unlike so many who supported it at the time and dissociated themselves from it later, was a prominent opponent of the war on Iraq six months before it began,30 and once underway condemned it as a disaster. ‘Muscular Wilsonism’ had led to disgrace and loss of legitimacy. Even selective engagement was not immune from the inherent temptations of an imperial power—for such was the United States—to attempt too much, rather than too little. Its global primacy would last only a few more decades. Thereafter, the future probably lay in the transition to ‘an international system suspended for a long time between a US-dominated and a regionally based, decentralized one’.31 The country would do well to prepare for that time, and meanwhile put its economic house in order.
As a theorist of national security, Art remains within the bounds of the foreign-policy establishment, sharing its unquestioned assumption of the need for American primacy in the world, if disorder is not to supervene.32 But within its literature, the intellectual quality of his work stands out, not only for its lack of rhetorical pathos, but the calmness and respect with which other, less conventional, positions are considered, and certain orthodox taboos broken. Opposition from the outset to the war on Iraq, impatience with obduracy from Israel, acceptance of regional ascendancy for China, can be found in Brzezinski too. But not only utterly dissimilar styles separate them. Art is not obsessed with Russia—its absence is striking in his recent reflections—and his proposals for Tel Aviv and Beijing have more edge: forcing an unwelcome treaty on the one; conceding an extended hegemony on land, and a strike capacity at sea, to the other. In all this, the spirit of the neorealism, in its technical sense, to which Art belongs—whose foremost representative Kenneth Waltz could advocate proliferation of nuclear weapons as favourable to peace—is plain.
But neorealism as pure theory, a paradigm in the study of international relations, is one thing; the ideological discourse of American foreign policy, another. Through those portals, it cannot enter unaccompanied. Art does not escape this rule. Selective engagement, he explains, is a ‘Realpolitik plus’ strategy. What is the plus? The night in which all cows are black: ‘realism cum liberalism’. The first aims to ‘keep the United States secure and prosperous’; the second to ‘nudge the world towards the values the nation holds dear—democracy, free markets, human rights and international openness’.33 The distinction between them corresponds to the hierarchy of America’s interests: realism secures what is vital, liberalism pursues what is only desirable. The latter is an add-on: Art’s writing is overwhelmingly concerned with the former. But it is not mere adornment, without incidence on the structure of his conception as a whole. For the line between the vital and the desirable is inherently blurred, Art’s own listings of the two fluctuating over time. ‘International economic openness’, the classic Open Door, is—realistically, one might say—ranked second out of (then) five top American interests in ‘A Defensible Defense’ (1991), only to be downgraded to fourth out of six in ‘Geopolitics Updated’ (1998), on the grounds that 90 per cent of US GDP is produced at home. In A Grand Strategy for America (2003), there is only one vital interest: defence of the homeland, and two highly important ones—peace in Eurasia and Gulf oil.34 War should not be waged to further the promotion of democracy or protection of human rights (ranked without supporting reasons above global climate change)—but there will be exceptions, where military intervention to create democracy or restrain slaughter is required. Art admits, candidly enough, that selective engagement has its ‘pitfalls’, since unless care is taken, ‘commitments can become open-ended’, while himself falling in with the perfect example of just that—‘staying the course’ (to where?) in Afghanistan.35 What is selective about a requirement for ‘permanent forward operating bases’ in East and Southeast Asia, Europe, the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, eschewing ‘in general’ only South America and Africa?36 The telltale formula, repeated more than once in explaining the merits of this version of grand strategy, informs Americans that US power-projection can ‘shape events’ and ‘mould the environment’ to ‘make them more congenial to US interests’.37 In the vagueness and vastness of this ambition, open-ended with a vengeance, realism dissolves itself into a potentially all-purpose justification of any of the adventures conducted in the name of liberalism.
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1Victoria Nuland: successively chief of staff to Strobe Talbott in the Clinton administration; deputy foreign policy adviser to Cheney and later envoy to Brussels in the Bush administration; currently assistant secretary for European affairs in the Obama administration.
2Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, New York 2003, pp. 7–11.
3Kagan, Paradise and Power, pp. 95–6.
4Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America and the World 1600–1900, London 2006, pp. 269–70.
5Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams, New York 2008, pp. 78–80. This depiction of the great autocracies is just where Kupchan would later take issue with Kagan.
6Kagan, The World America Made, New York 2012, p. 98.
7Literally: ‘Confucianism on the outside, Legalism on the inside’—Legalism in Ancient China representing rule by force, Confucianism by sanctimony of benevolence.
8The first version of this notion was the ‘Community of Democracies’ launched by Albright in 2000—among invitees: Mubarak’s Egypt, Aliyev’s Azerbaijan and the Khalifa dynasty in Bahrain. The leading manifesto for a more muscular League of Democracies came from Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, ‘Democracies of the World, Unite’, The American Interest, Jan–Feb 2007 (elder statesmen on its proposed Advisory Board to include Fischer, Menem, Koizumi and Singh), followed by Daalder and Kagan, ‘The Next Intervention’, Washington Post, 6 August 2007, and Kagan, ‘The Case for a League of Democracies’, Financial Times, 13 May 2008.
9‘In an off-the-record meeting with leading news anchors’, Foreign Policy reported, ‘Obama drove home that argument using an article written in the New Republic by Kagan titled “The Myth of American Decline”. Obama liked Kagan’s article so much that he spent more than 10 minutes talking about it in the meeting, going over its arguments paragraph by paragraph, National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor confirmed.’ The article was a pre-publication excerpt from The World America Made.
10Weekly Standard, 28 March 2011.
11Brzezinski did not arrive in North America as a refugee in 1938, but as an offspring of the Polish Consul-General in Canada.
12As could be surmised from this scheduling, Brzezinski’s ties to the Democratic Party have been closer than Kissinger’s to the Republican, without being exclusive: see his amicable dialogue with Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to the elder Bush, in America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy, New York 2008. His comments on Obama have been generally laudatory—‘a genuine sense of strategic direction and a solid grasp of what today’s world is all about’—while urging the president to be more intrepid: ‘From Hope to Audacity: Appraising Obama’s Foreign Policy’, Foreign Affairs, Jan–Feb 2010.
13Brzezinski, Out of Control, New York 1993, p. xii.
14Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, New York 1997, p. 29.
15Ibid., p. 58.
16Brzezinski, The Choice, New York 2004, pp. 91, 96.
17Brzezinski, Grand Chessboard, pp. 54, 193, 207.
18Ibid., p. 54.
19Brzezinski would later criticize Obama’s sale of advanced weaponry to India too, and on the same grounds warn against advocates of a closer bond with Delhi. Prominent among the latter has been Fareed Zakaria, who enthuses that it is all but inevitable that the US will develop more than a merely strategic relationship with India. For not only are Indians perhaps the most pro-American nation on earth, but the two peoples are so alike—‘Indians understand America. It is a noisy, open society with a chaotic democratic system, like theirs. Its capitalism looks distinctly like America’s free-for-all’, just as ‘Americans understand India’, having had such ‘a positive experience with Indians in America’. The ties between the two countries, Zakaria predicts, will be like those of the US with Britain or Israel: ‘broad and deep, going well beyond government officials and diplomatic negotiations’: The Post-American World, New York 2008, pp. 150–2, a work of which Christopher Layne has remarked that it would more appropriately be entitled The Now and Forever American World. See Sean Clark and Sabrina Hoque, eds, Debating a Post-American World: What Lies Ahead?, New York 2012, p. 42.
20Brzezinski, Second Chance, New York 2007, p. 181.
21Brzezinski, Strategic Vision, New York 2012, pp. 85–6.
22Ibid., p. 185.
23Brzezinski, Out of Control, pp. 54, 60–1. In fact, democracy had become since the fall of communism a dubiously uniform ideology, ‘most governments and most political actors paying lip-service to the same verities and relying on the same clichés’.
24Brzezinski, Second Chance, p. 204.
25For ‘metaculture’ and Kulturkritik as a subspecies of it, see Francis Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture, London 2000, and ‘Beyond Metaculture’, New Left Review 16, July–Aug 2002.
26Art’s three role models, he explains, are Spykman, Lippman and Tucker, authors of ‘perhaps the best books written on American grand strategy in the last half century’, whose geopolitical tradition he has sought to follow: A Grand Strategy for America, New York 2003, p. xv.
27Art, America’s Grand Strategy and World Politics, New York 2008, p. 1.
28Ibid., p. 132.
29Ibid., p. 235.
30See ‘War with Iraq is Not in America’s National Interest’, New York Times, 26 September 2002, an advertisement signed by some thirty ‘scholars of international security affairs’: among others, Robert Jervis, John Mearsheimer, Robert Pape, Barry Posen, Richard Rosecrance, Thomas Schelling, Stephen Van Evera, Stephen Walt and Kenneth Waltz.
31Art, America’s Grand Strategy, p. 387.
32Art seeks to distinguish ‘dominion’ from ‘primacy’. The former would indeed ‘create a global American imperium’ allowing the US to ‘impose its dictates on others’ and, he concedes, while ‘the US has never pursued a full-fledged policy of dominion’, since 1945 ‘semblances of it have appeared four times’: at the outset of the Cold War (undeclared rollback); under Reagan; after the end of the Gulf War (the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992); and under the second Bush. ‘Dominion is a powerful temptation for a nation as strong as the United States.’ But it is impossible to achieve and any whiff of it is self-defeating. Primacy, on the other hand, is ‘superior influence’, not ‘absolute rule’. Nor is it a grand strategy, but simply that margin of extra military strength which makes the state that enjoys it the most influential actor at large: A Grand Strategy, pp. 87–92. But since, as Samuel Huntington once observed, there is by definition no such thing as absolute power in an inter-state system, the power of any state always being relative to that of others, the distinction between the two terms is inevitably porous.
33Art, America’s Grand Strategy, p. 235.
34Art, A Grand Strategy, p. 46; America’s Grand Strategy, pp. 190, 235, 237.
35Art, America’s Grand Strategy, pp. 254, 379.
36Ibid., p. 374.
37Ibid., pp. 373, 235.