We seem to have forgotten the essential elements of the Reagan Administration’s success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States’ global responsibilities. …
• we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
• we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
• we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
• we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.
—PROJECT FOR THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY
THE RETURN TO THE MORE modest definition of U.S. foreign interests that the Bush foreign policy team had called for in the 2000 elections—a “realist” lowering of expectations of what the United States could and should attempt to do abroad, foreswearing nation-building interventions—had a very short half-life.1 The September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the president’s perceived need to mobilize the nation in a this is war response, provided the opportunity for the coterie of so-called neoconservatives at sub-cabinet and assistant secretary levels to restore a Reaganesque content to U.S. foreign policy, the Reagan of 1980–1984, that is.
The shock of 9/11 provided just the opening the neoconservatives had been seeking—a responsiveness by the president and his professedly realist vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, and national security adviser to the assertive international agenda the neoconservatives had been urging on their bosses. Up to then, it had been only the unilateralist aspect of neoconservatism that was reflected in White House policy démarches: the “unsigning” of the statute of the new International Criminal Court; the renunciation of the Kyoto Protocol restricting greenhouse gas emissions; and the announced intent to slough off international arms control constraints—most notably, the antiballistic missile treaty—on U.S. weapons programs. But now, 43 (the shorthand policy makers and pundits used to distinguish President George W. Bush from the forty-first president) proved totally receptive to the compelling world-transforming ideology of the neoconservatives. And these intellectuals in the administration, with prodding from colleagues in conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, seized the day.
None of the cabinet-level officials reentering the government in January 2001 (Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld at Defense, Colin Powell at State, and Condoleezza Rice at the National Security Council) had been ideological neoconservatives before 9/11. Yet for them too, the demonstration of the country’s vulnerability to catastrophic terrorist attack was, as for the president, a moment of epiphany, leading to their embrace (with Powell the only real holdout) of much of the worldview of their neoconservative subordinates. The latter included, most prominently: at Defense, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretaries Douglas Feith (for policy) and Dov Zakheim (controller); at State, Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton; in the vice president’s office, chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, plus regional and national security experts, Eric Edleman, John Hannah, William Luti, and Nina Shokraii Rees; and at the National Security Council, Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs Elliott Abrams. Prominent neoconservative guru and former Reagan administration assistant secretary of defense Richard Perle wielded influence as chairman of the Defense Policy Board.2
Intensely intellectual, these second- and third-tier policy makers were hardly of one mind about the priorities in the neoconservative agenda. But sensing that their time had finally come to decisively set the course of post–Cold War U.S. foreign policy, they were able to push aside their doctrinal differences and wage a concerted campaign across agency lines to move the top policy makers—crucially the president—to embrace the set of core beliefs that they did share.
REAGANISM REDUX?
The worldview now being pushed on their bosses in the Bush administration by the neoconservatives had been evolving over decades, shaped largely through out-of-power debates among some of the most articulate public intellectuals on the American scene. The activist political orientation that they shared, despite their differences, found potent expression in the 1970s alliance between Democrats in the camp of Senator Henry Jackson and Republicans in the camp of Ronald Reagan in opposition to the détente and arms control policies of Nixon and Kissinger. A proud result of this trans-party alliance of Cold War hawks had been the Jackson-Vanick Amendment denying normal trading relations with the USSR on grounds of its poor human rights performance.
During the 1970s, the Jacksonians and the Reaganites continued to see the Cold War as a global struggle for ascendancy between the forces of good and the forces of evil: democratic capitalism versus Marxist-Leninist (and Maoist) socialism. Anything that added to the strength of the Marxist side was therefore to be resisted, and anything that weakened them supported. The supposed mutually beneficial commerce and technological cooperation that the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations had been fostering across the global ideological divide was in the eyes of the neoconservatives a naïve apolitical “realism” masquerading as sophisticated geopolitics. The communists had no intention of terminating the global struggle, and neither should we. The overall game, at least as being played by Moscow and Beijing, was still zero-sum: as Lenin put it, “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” And the growing penchant in the Politburo and the Soviet Ministry of Defense for strategic arms control agreements? An easy way to get the West to let down its guard, while the revolutionary forces husbanded and grew their capabilities for the ultimate showdown. Besides, there was no way to adequately verify the Soviet military’s adherence to the negotiated agreements without a degree of intrusive inspection the Kremlin would never accept.
Accordingly, coming after the Carter administration’s further elaboration of relations with the Soviet Union and China, the neoconservatives were euphoric over the election of Ronald Reagan and happy to accept appointments in an administration unapologetic about reviving the Cold War. In Reagan, finally, they had a president willing to brand the Soviet sphere of control an “evil empire” and to pledge interventionist help to anti-Marxists (whether in power or fighting to gain power) all around the world—a president committed to regaining and maintaining across-the-board military superiority, not just parity, vis-à-vis the rival superpower. Although disappointed in the final years of the Reagan era by their hero’s political love affair with Mikhail Gorbachev and the couple’s pas de deux around nuclear disarmament, and chagrined at Reagan’s backing away from unequivocal support for Israel, the neoconservatives continued to look back nostalgically to the 1980s as their decade of creative influence—in contrast to their subsequent marginalization in the administration of the elder Bush and their exile in conservative think tanks during the Clinton era.
MARGINALIZED AND PUT OUT TO PASTURE
The neoconservatives were to be hugely frustrated in the “realist” interregnum between the Reagan and Clinton administrations under the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush, whom many of them nonetheless continued to serve. Their strongest grievance had been with the way President Bush, the national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, and even Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney managed the endgame of the Gulf War in 1991. Instead of capitalizing on the momentum of the coalition’s decisive defeat of the Iraqi forces in Kuwait and rolling on to Baghdad to liberate the country from Saddam’s brutal regime, the president ordered U.S. forces to stop at the Kuwait-Iraq border—this despite the calls by President Bush during Operation Desert Storm for the Shiites in southern Iraq and the Kurds in the north to revolt against the oppression of Saddam’s Sunni-run dictatorship. Undersecretary of Defense Wolfowitz and his neoconservative cohorts were not at that time, or ever, convinced by the Bush-Scowcroft-Powell position that a regime-change invasion of Iraq would be neither strategically warranted nor feasible at acceptable cost. The cabinet-level consensus that a militarily intact Iraq would still be important for balancing the power of the even more dangerous Iran and that moreover, a U.S. military intervention into the Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish cauldron could turn into an uncontrollably messy imperial adventure, was seen by the neoconservatives as a cop-out, one they vowed to rectify if ever given the chance.
Especially during the Clinton years, the exiled neoconservatives, now heavily populating Washington’s right-of-center think tanks and consulting firms, made it their business to further develop a shared agenda, a compelling philosophical rationale for it, and a network of influential supporters through whom they would be able to determine the direction of U.S. policy when the Republicans next gained control of the White House.3
THE NEOCONSERVATIVE WELTANSCHAUUNG
The neoconservative worldview that set the tone and largely defined the substance of U.S. grand strategy between 9/11 and the last half of George W. Bush’s second term as president was more an orientation toward the role the United States should play in the world than a self-consistent philosophy of politics and statecraft. Indeed, the influential keepers of the neoconservative flame, both inside and outside the government, regarded their vocation as public policy more than political philosophy. While differing among themselves on the details of particular policies, these post–Cold War neoconservatives constituted a rather solid phalanx in support of the following objectives and strategies—championed as mutually supportive:
1. Doing whatever is necessary to protect the homeland against terrorist attacks
2. Maintaining across-the-board decisive U.S. military superiority over all other countries or plausible coalitions
3. Being ready to use force as a normal, not exceptional, instrument of policy and, when strategically useful, to employ it early in a conflict, even preventively, not just as a last resort
4. Proactively supporting political and economic freedom (democracy and free market capitalism) as universal goods, including intervening to effectuate regime change in other countries where feasible
5. Freeing the United States from multilateral constraints on counterterrorist and military intervention decisions and operations
Notably, all but the fourth of these could readily be embraced by geopolitical realists—at least by hawkish realists. Did this mean that the distinguishing characteristic and essence of the neoconservative foreign policy was democratization and the spread of free markets, what the Bush administration often called “the Freedom Agenda”? Not entirely. For this commitment to democracy and freedom, although very strongly asserted as general doctrine, became subordinated in practice to the perceived need to enlist allies—some of whom were autocratic and had dismal human rights records—in the war against terrorism. The “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” posture toward human rights abuses in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, for example, are cases in point. When faced with this apparent contradiction at the heart of their core values, the neoconservatives granted that there needed to be some here-and-now tactical trade-offs but insisted the larger objective of transforming the world into a system of peacefully interacting democratic republics remained an overarching goal.
George W. Bush’s persistent commitment to the neoconservative Freedom Agenda as the centerpiece of his foreign policy, despite the complexities, was nowhere more passionately expressed than in his second inaugural address. While granting almost routinely that “my most solemn duty is to protect this nation and people against further attacks and emerging threats,” his rhetoric was devoted mainly to affirming that
America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. … So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.4
Ideally, the president’s “right brain” passion for universalizing democracy and the free market was consistent his “left brain” calculus for effectively prosecuting the so-called war on terrorism. And at times the subjective commitment and the rational strategic calculus did reinforce one another. But as often as not the president’s felt need to convert others to the presumed good and righteous political and economic life resulted in policies that contradicted his administration’s counterterrorism policies and vice versa.
Ultimately, according to neoconservative Freedom Agenda advocates, these temporal contradictions would be transcended as the spread of democracy and economic prosperity removed the sources of alienation of peoples from their governments and between communities—the fodder of extremist movements. Similarly, Bush administration officials responsible for the military aspects of the war on terrorism were apparently able to convince the president that alliances of convenience with various dictators and autocrats were an unavoidable requirement for the eventual triumph of virtue. Accordingly, as put by Bush, “we would advocate for freedom while maintaining strategic relationships with nations like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Russia, and China.”5
When the here-and-now contradictions between democracy promotion and the pursuit of the wide range of U.S. geopolitical interests became increasingly evident and embarrassing during the final years of the Bush presidency, it fell to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s successor—a reputed realist—to provide the needed public rationale. “It is neither hypocrisy nor cynicism,” explained Secretary Robert Gates, “to believe fervently in freedom while adopting different approaches to advancing freedom at different times along the way—including temporarily making common cause with despots to defeat greater or more urgent threats to our freedom or interests.” Moreover, it was important to realize that implementation of the Freedom Agenda would require patience. “When we discuss openly our desire for democratic values to take hold across the globe, we are describing a world that may be many years or decades off. Though achievement of this ideal may be limited by time, space, resources, or human nature, we must not allow ourselves to discard or disparage the ideal itself.” But neither should the pursuit of this ideal prevent the sometimes “grubby compromises and marriages of convenience” that are necessary in the short term. An underlying theme of American history, insisted Gates, has been “that we are compelled to defend our security and our interests in ways that, in the long run, lead to the spread of democratic values and institutions.”6 By the time the prudential Gates line (echoed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and national security adviser Stephen Hadley) became the dominant definition of the evolving foreign policy of the Bush administration, most of the previously influential, and more impatient, neoconservatives—such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Bolton—had left the government. For the previous six years, however, their impact on policy, detailed in the subsequent pages, had been substantial.
Yet even during his first term, George W. Bush could not be pigeonholed into either the neoconservative or “realist” camp or a synthesis of the two. He, like the country, was more complex than that—or than the stereotype popular among critics as “Joe Six-Pack” devoid of any deep reflection and capacity to deal with the nuances of international politics in the post-Cold War era.
As recounted in his memoir, “I considered America a generous nation with a moral responsibility to do our part to relieve poverty and despair. The problem was how to do it effectively.” Highly critical of existing foreign aid programs that were designed during the Cold War to keep anticommunist regimes in power but “had a lousy track record” and “didn’t do much to improve the lives of ordinary people,” Bush directed his subordinates to reform the system to make it more efficient, not to junk it. The economic development needs of Africa, more severe than on any other continent, became his principal humanitarian focus, with a greater proportion of U.S. foreign aid going there than had been the case previously. He was particularly moved by the HIV/AIDS crisis. “The statistics were horrifying. Some ten million people in sub-Sahara Africa had died. … The total number infected was expected to exceed one hundred million by 2010.” Yet when he took office, the United States was spending only a “paltry” $500 million a year. Overriding the objections of the neoconservatives to working through multilateral institutions, Bush, upon the urging of Secretary of State Colin Powell, funneled a substantial augmentation of U.S. support to the new Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, being organized by UN secretary general Kofi Annan.7
This, the more compassionate face of George W. Bush, although obscured from public view after 9/11 by the nation’s preoccupation with terrorism, was frequently on display to members of his administration and was reflected in his refusal to cut development assistance even as the costs of the war on terror abroad and at home skyrocketed. Similarly, he was more troubled than some members of his administration, most notably Vice President Dick Cheney, by the dilemmas thrust upon the nation by the war on terror: the apparent need to make at least temporary alliances abroad with tyrants, and to countenance methods of surveillance of U.S. citizens and interrogation of detainees in violation of U.S. traditions of civil liberty, in the name of national security.