Jeremi Suri: The Promise and Failure of American Grand Strategy after the Cold War
[Jeremi Suri is E. Gordon Fox Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This essay is condensed from the Fall 2009 issue of Orbis, which featured five papers on American Grand Strategy originally prepared for the 50th anniversary of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies in cooperation with Duke University’s Program in American Grand Strategy and the Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College.]
Like so many things, it began and it ended in New York. In December 1988, the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union flew into the city amidst great fanfare and anticipation. President Ronald Reagan, President-elect George H.W. Bush, and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met on Governors Island, off the southern tip of Manhattan. They were to celebrate how they had, through unprecedented arms reduction agreements and credible personal commitments to cooperation, built what Reagan called “a strong foundation for the future.” Conversing casually and strolling “as friends” in Gorbachev’s words, almost no one could deny that the international system had entered a new, post-Cold War era. The fall of the Berlin Wall less than a year later – and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years after that – were surely not inevitable, but they were no longer unthinkable. The New York Times echoed popular sentiments, evidenced by the enthusiastic crowds on the streets of Manhattan (soon Budapest, Prague, Beijing, and Berlin, too), when it looked forward in late 1988 to the “basic restructuring of international politics—for the rule of law, not force; for multilateralism, not unilateralism; and for economic as well as political freedoms.”
By September 2001, nearly everyone recognized that the terrain of international politics had changed fundamentally. The hopes embodied by the December 1988 superpower summit in New York, however, turned to unmistakable horror as a new group of actors left their indelible mark on the city. The two hijacked aircraft that destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and killed more than 2,500 civilians announced a new era of fear, violence, and extended conflict. A global “War on Terror”—including American-led military attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as fundamental transformations in the treatment of prisoners and domestic law enforcement —was not inevitable. Yet, it became almost irresistible as Americans grappled with the damage inflicted by a gang of well-organized Islamic extremists.
Scholars have begun to write about the years, bracketed by these two New York moments, as an “interwar” period—a time when Americans became convinced of their “exceptional” ability to both transcend the hard choices of international politics and to pursue an expansive agenda at low domestic cost. Apparent safety and freedom encouraged indiscipline and wishful thinking. Even self-identified hardliners in the early 1990s adopted this point of view. Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby described an abstract and self-reinforcing “democratic ‘zone of peace’” in the post-Cold War Defense Planning Guideline, released to the public in January 1993. They claimed that: “This zone of peace offers a framework for security not through competitive rivalries in arms, but through cooperative approaches and collective security institutions. The combination of these trends has given our nation and our alliances great depth for our strategic position.”
In a context of perceived “strategic depth,” the rapid policy transformations of the late 1980s, surrounding big issues like the nature of the Soviet threat and the prospects of German unification, gave way to slow, tentative, and agonizing decision making about American interventions in strategically less significant places: Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Rwanda. This was the “regional defense strategy” of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Libby, and their Democratic successors in action. The 1990s did not witness a return of classic great power politics (“back to the future”), as one political scientist famously predicted. Instead, the decade was dominated by small policy decisions, misguided political controversies, and half measures.
Sophisticated strategic thinkers like George Kennan, Dean Acheson, and Henry Kissinger gave way to the more technocratic inclinations of James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, Anthony Lake, and even Colin Powell. The “wise men” of the Cold War had defined clear national interests, identified pressing threats (foreign and domestic), and devised policies that promised to secure interests from threats at manageable cost. Their successors did not do any of these things consistently. What were American national interests after the Cold War? What were the key threats? Which policies promised the greatest security and prosperity to the nation? None of the leading figures in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton answered these questions coherently. None of the strategic documents they produced articulated a political-military architecture beyond vague claims about democracy, markets, stability, and American primacy...
Read entire article at Orbis
Like so many things, it began and it ended in New York. In December 1988, the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union flew into the city amidst great fanfare and anticipation. President Ronald Reagan, President-elect George H.W. Bush, and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met on Governors Island, off the southern tip of Manhattan. They were to celebrate how they had, through unprecedented arms reduction agreements and credible personal commitments to cooperation, built what Reagan called “a strong foundation for the future.” Conversing casually and strolling “as friends” in Gorbachev’s words, almost no one could deny that the international system had entered a new, post-Cold War era. The fall of the Berlin Wall less than a year later – and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years after that – were surely not inevitable, but they were no longer unthinkable. The New York Times echoed popular sentiments, evidenced by the enthusiastic crowds on the streets of Manhattan (soon Budapest, Prague, Beijing, and Berlin, too), when it looked forward in late 1988 to the “basic restructuring of international politics—for the rule of law, not force; for multilateralism, not unilateralism; and for economic as well as political freedoms.”
By September 2001, nearly everyone recognized that the terrain of international politics had changed fundamentally. The hopes embodied by the December 1988 superpower summit in New York, however, turned to unmistakable horror as a new group of actors left their indelible mark on the city. The two hijacked aircraft that destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and killed more than 2,500 civilians announced a new era of fear, violence, and extended conflict. A global “War on Terror”—including American-led military attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as fundamental transformations in the treatment of prisoners and domestic law enforcement —was not inevitable. Yet, it became almost irresistible as Americans grappled with the damage inflicted by a gang of well-organized Islamic extremists.
Scholars have begun to write about the years, bracketed by these two New York moments, as an “interwar” period—a time when Americans became convinced of their “exceptional” ability to both transcend the hard choices of international politics and to pursue an expansive agenda at low domestic cost. Apparent safety and freedom encouraged indiscipline and wishful thinking. Even self-identified hardliners in the early 1990s adopted this point of view. Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby described an abstract and self-reinforcing “democratic ‘zone of peace’” in the post-Cold War Defense Planning Guideline, released to the public in January 1993. They claimed that: “This zone of peace offers a framework for security not through competitive rivalries in arms, but through cooperative approaches and collective security institutions. The combination of these trends has given our nation and our alliances great depth for our strategic position.”
In a context of perceived “strategic depth,” the rapid policy transformations of the late 1980s, surrounding big issues like the nature of the Soviet threat and the prospects of German unification, gave way to slow, tentative, and agonizing decision making about American interventions in strategically less significant places: Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Rwanda. This was the “regional defense strategy” of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Libby, and their Democratic successors in action. The 1990s did not witness a return of classic great power politics (“back to the future”), as one political scientist famously predicted. Instead, the decade was dominated by small policy decisions, misguided political controversies, and half measures.
Sophisticated strategic thinkers like George Kennan, Dean Acheson, and Henry Kissinger gave way to the more technocratic inclinations of James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, Anthony Lake, and even Colin Powell. The “wise men” of the Cold War had defined clear national interests, identified pressing threats (foreign and domestic), and devised policies that promised to secure interests from threats at manageable cost. Their successors did not do any of these things consistently. What were American national interests after the Cold War? What were the key threats? Which policies promised the greatest security and prosperity to the nation? None of the leading figures in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton answered these questions coherently. None of the strategic documents they produced articulated a political-military architecture beyond vague claims about democracy, markets, stability, and American primacy...