From the issue dated January 11, 2002
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Setting Right a Dangerous WorldBy JOHN LEWIS GADDISWe've never had a good name for it, and now it's over. The post-cold-war era -- let us call it that for want of any better term -- began with the collapse of one structure, the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and ended with the collapse of another, the World Trade Center's twin towers on September 11, 2001. No one, apart from the few people who plotted and carried out those events, could have anticipated that they were going to happen. But from the moment they did, everyone acknowledged that everything had changed. It's characteristic of such turning points that they shed more light on the history that preceded them than on what's to come. The fall of the Berlin Wall didn't tell us much about the post-cold-war world, but it told us a lot about the cold war. It suddenly became clear that East Germany, the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet Union itself had long since lost the authority with which the United States and its NATO allies had continued to credit them right up to the day the wall came down. The whole history of the cold war looked different as a result. Having witnessed the end, historians could never again see the middle, or even the beginning, in the same way they once had. Something similar seems likely to happen now to the post-cold-war era. For whatever we eventually settle on calling the events of September 11 -- the Attack on America, Black Tuesday, 9/11 -- they've already forced a reconsideration, not only of where we are as a nation and where we may be going, but also of where we've been, even of who we are. Our recent past, all at once, has been thrown into sharp relief, even as our future remains obscure. To paraphrase an old prayer, it's obvious now that we have done some things that we ought not to have done, and that we have not done other things that we ought to have done. How much health there is in us will depend, to a considerable degree, on how we sort this out. But first things first. No acts of commission or omission by the United States can have justified what happened on September 11. Few if any moral standards have deeper roots than the prohibition against taking innocent life in peacetime. Whatever differences may exist in culture, religion, race, class, or any of the other categories by which human beings seek to establish their identities, that rule transcends them. The September 11 attacks violated it in ways that go well beyond all other terrorist attacks in the past: first, by the absence of any stated cause to be served; second, by the failure to provide warning; and finally, by the obvious intent to time and configure the attack in such a manner as to take as many lives as possible -- even to the point, some have suggested, of the airplanes' angle of approach, which seemed calculated to devastate as many floors of the twin towers as they could. Let there be no mistake: This was evil, and no set of grievances real or imagined, however strongly felt or widely held, can excuse it. At the same time, though, neither our outrage nor the patriotic unity that is arising from it relieves us of the obligation to think critically. Would anyone claim, in the aftermath of September 11, that the United States can continue the policies it was following with respect to its national defense, or toward the world, before September 11? Americans were not responsible for what happened at Pearl Harbor, but they would have been irresponsible in the extreme if they had not, as a consequence of that attack, dramatically altered their policies. Nobody given the opportunity to rerun the events leading up to that catastrophe would have handled things again in just the same way. It's in that spirit, I think, that we need a reconsideration of how the United States has managed its responsibilities in the decade since the cold war ended, not with a view to assigning blame, indulging in recrimination, or wallowing in self-pity, but rather for the purpose -- now urgent -- of determining where we go from here. Patriotism demands nothing less. The clearest conclusion to emerge from the events of September 11 is that the geographical position and the military power of the United States are no longer sufficient to ensure its security. Americans have known insecurity before in their homeland, but not in a very long time. Except for Pearl Harbor and a few isolated pinpricks like Japanese attempts to start forest fires with incendiary bombs in the Pacific Northwest in 1944 and 1945, or the Mexican guerrilla leader Pancho Villa's raid on Columbus, N.M., in 1916, the United States has suffered no foreign attack on its soil since British troops captured Washington and burned the White House and the Capitol in 1814. There's a macabre symmetry in the possibility that the fourth plane hijacked on September 11 -- which crashed presumably after an uprising among the passengers -- probably had one of those buildings as its target. Few other nations have worried so little for so long about what is coming to be called "homeland security." The late Yale historian C. Vann Woodward even went so far as to define this lack of concern as a central feature of the American character. "Free security," he insisted, had done as much to shape Americans' view of themselves as had the availability of free, or almost free, land. The 20th century, to be sure, eroded that sense of safety, but that happened as a result of the larger role the United States had assigned itself in world affairs, together with ominous shifts in the European balance of power. It did not arise from any sense of domestic insecurity. We entered World War I to ensure that Germany did not wind up dominating Europe, and we were preparing to do the same thing again in World War II when the Japanese attack, followed by Hitler's own declaration of war, removed from us any choice in the matter. Even so, the continental United States remained secure throughout the long and bloody conflict that followed. Neither the Germans nor the Japanese could bomb our cities or occupy our territory, as we eventually would do to them. And despite the incarceration of some 120,000 Japanese-Americans during the war, the only significant fifth-column network operating within the United States at the time was that of an ally, the Soviet Union -- a fact not discovered until after the war had ended. The world might be unsafe, but in America, homeland security could be taken for granted almost as easily during the total wars of the 20th century as it had been throughout most of the 19th century. The cold war made the American homeland seem less secure in two ways: When spies working on behalf of the Soviet Union were shown to have betrayed the country; and as the prospect arose that Soviet long-range bombers and, later, intercontinental ballistic missiles might soon be capable of reaching American soil. The spies were mostly rounded up by the time McCarthyism reached its peak in the early 1950s, a fact that helps to account for why that season of paranoia went away as quickly as it did. The nuclear danger never entirely went away, and for a while it was a palpable presence for Americans who saw their public buildings designated as fallout shelters even as they were being encouraged, for a while, to build their own in their own backyards. Despite moments of genuine fear, however, as during the Berlin and Cuban crises, the only images we had of destroyed American cities were those constructed by the makers of apocalypse films and the authors of science-fiction novels. Real danger remained remote. We had adversaries, but we also had the means of deterring them. Even cold-war insecurities, therefore, never meant that Americans, while living, working, and traveling within their country, had to fear for their lives. Dangers to the American homeland were always vague and distant, however clear and present the overseas dangers may have been. The very term "national security," invented during World War II and put to such frequent use during the cold war, always implied that both threats and vulnerabilities lay outside the country. Our military and intelligence forces were configured accordingly. That's why the United States Commission on National Security in the 21st Century -- often known, for its co-chairs Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, as the Hart-Rudman Commission -- distinguished between "national" and "homeland" security when it warned of our domestic vulnerabilities, with uncanny prescience, in March 2001. In the aftermath of September 11, we have not only adopted the concept of "homeland security" -- it has become synonymous with national security. Such is the revolution in our thinking forced upon us by the events of that day. It means that Americans have entered a new stage in their history, in which they can no longer take security for granted: It is no longer free -- anywhere, or at any time. What was striking about September 11 was the success with which the terrorists transformed objects we had never before regarded as dangerous into weapons of lethal potency. There was nothing exotic here like bombs or even firearms. They used instead the objects of everyday life: pocket knives, twine, box cutters and, of course, commercial aircraft. The terrorists also combined what may seem to us to be a primitive belief in the rewards of martyrdom with the most modern methods of planning, coordination, and execution. We confront, therefore, not only a new category of easily available weaponry, but also a new combination of skill and will in using it. The attacks' cost-effectiveness was equally striking. No previous act of terrorism came close to this one in lives lost and damage inflicted. The dead approximate the number killed in some three decades of violence in Northern Ireland. They are three times the toll on both sides in the most recent round of the Palestinian intifada. They come close, in deaths suffered on a single day, to the most violent battles of the Civil War. The operation required the lives of 19 terrorists and expenditures of about $500,000. The "payoff," if we can use such a term for such a brutal transaction, was approximately 3,300 dead and perhaps as much as $100-billion in recovery costs. Ratios like these -- some 174 victims for every terrorist, and $200,000 in damages for every dollar expended -- cannot help but set a standard to which future terrorists will aspire. The whole point of terrorism is leverage: to accomplish a lot with a little. This operation, in that sense, succeeded brilliantly -- even allowing for the fact that one of the four planes failed to reach its target, and that more planes may have been in danger of being hijacked. As a consequence, the images of terrified New Yorkers running through the streets of their city to escape great billowing clouds of ash, dust, and building fragments; of the government in Washington forced to seek shelter; of several days of skies devoid of the contrails we have come to expect passenger aircraft to add to the atmosphere over our heads -- those memories will remain in our minds just as vividly as the images, from six decades earlier, of American naval vessels aflame, sinking at their own docks within an American naval base on American territory. Security, therefore, has a new meaning, for which little in our history and even less in our planning has prepared us. That leads to a second conclusion, which is that our foreign policy since the cold war ended has insufficiently served our interests. National security requires more than just military deployments or intelligence operations. It depends ultimately upon creating an international environment congenial to the nation's interests. That's the role of foreign policy. Despite many mistakes and diversions along the way, the United States managed to build such an environment during the second half of the 20th century. The Soviet Union's collapse stemmed, in no small measure, from its failure to do the same. As a consequence, the world at the end of the cold war was closer to a consensus in favor of American values -- collective security, democracy, capitalism -- than it had ever been before. President George H.W. Bush's talk of a "new world order" reflected a convergence of interests among the great powers that, while imperfect, was nonetheless unprecedented. Differences remained with the European Union, Russia, China, and Japan over such issues as international trade, the handling of regional conflicts, the management of national economies, the definition and hence the protection of human rights; but those were minor compared with issues that had produced two world wars and perpetuated the cold war. Americans, it seemed, had finally found a congenial world. What's happened since, though? Can anyone claim that the world of 2001 -- even before September 11 -- was as friendly to American interests as it had been in 1991? It would be silly to blame the United States alone for the disappointments of the past decade. Too many other actors, from Saddam Hussein to Slobodan Milosevic to Osama bin Laden, have helped to bring them about. But the question that haunted Americans after Pearl Harbor is still worth asking: Given the opportunity to rerun the sequence, what would we want to change in our foreign policy, and what would we leave the same? The question is not at all hypothetical. The administration of George W. Bush has already undertaken, in the wake of September 11, the most sweeping reassessment of foreign-policy priorities since the cold war ended. Its results are not yet clear, but the tilt is far more toward change than continuity. That is an implicit acknowledgment of deficiencies in the American approach to the world during the post-cold-war era that are clearer now than they were then. One of those, it seems, was unilateralism, an occupational hazard of sole surviving superpowers. With so little countervailing power in sight, such states tend to lead without listening, a habit that can cause resistance even among those otherwise disposed to follow. The United States managed to avoid that outcome after its victory in World War II because we had, in the Soviet Union, a superpower competitor. Our allies, and even our former adversaries, tolerated a certain amount of arrogance on our part because there was always "something worse" out there; we, in turn, fearing their defection or collapse, treated them with greater deference and respect than they might have expected given the power imbalances of the time. With our victory in the cold war, though, we lost the "something worse." American ideas, institutions, and culture remained as attractive as ever throughout much of the world, but American policies began to come across as overbearing, self-indulgent, and insensitive to the interests of others. Our own domestic politics made things worse: With the White House in the control of one party and the Congress in the hands of another during most of this period, it was difficult to get a consensus on such matters as paying United Nations dues, participating in the International Criminal Court, or ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Land Mines Convention, or the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. During most of the cold war, knowing what our enemies would make of our failure to do those things, a consensus would have been easy. A second problem, too, arose largely as a result of unilateralism: We neglected the cultivation of great-power relationships. We seemed to have assumed, perhaps because we were the greatest of the great powers, that we no longer needed the cooperation of the others to promote our interests. We therefore allowed our relations with the Russians and the Chinese to deteriorate to the point that by the end of the 1990s we were barely on speaking terms with Moscow and Beijing. We failed to sustain one of the most remarkable achievements of American foreign policy during the cold war -- the success of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in creating a situation in which our adversaries feared each other more than they feared us. It was as if we had switched our source of geopolitical inspiration from Otto von Bismarck to Kaiser Wilhelm II. That happened chiefly as the result of a third characteristic of our post-cold-war foreign policy: a preference for justice at the expense of order. We had never entirely neglected the demands of justice during the cold war, but we did tend to pursue those goals by working with the powerful to get them to improve their treatment of the powerless. We sought to promote human rights from the inside out rather than from the outside in: Sometimes we succeeded, sometimes we did not. With the end of the cold war, however, we changed our approach. We enlarged NATO against the wishes of the Russians, not because the Poles, the Czechs, and the Hungarians added significantly to the alliance's military capabilities, but rather because those states had suffered past injustices and therefore "deserved" membership. We then used the expanded alliance to rescue the Kosovars and bomb the Serbs, despite the fact that in doing so we were violating the sovereignty of an internationally recognized state without explicit United Nations approval. Unsurprisingly, that angered not just the Russians but also the Chinese, both of whom had discontented minorities of their own to worry about. Our intentions were praiseworthy in both of those episodes, but our attention to the larger geopolitical implications was not what it might have been. A fourth aspect of our post-cold-war foreign policy followed from the third: It was the inconsistency with which we pursued regional justice. We were, as it turned out, by no means as adamant in seeking justice for the Chechens or the Tibetans as we were for the Kosovars; Moscow and Beijing, despite their nervousness, had little to fear. But by applying universal principles on a less than universal basis, Washington did open itself to the charge of hypocrisy. It was worse elsewhere, as in Somalia, where our reluctance to take casualties of our own revealed how little we were prepared to sacrifice for the rights of others, or in Rwanda, where we responded to the greatest atrocities of the decade by simply averting our eyes. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, we tolerated the continuing Israeli dispossession and repression of Palestinians, even as we were seeking to secure the rights of the Palestinians; and we did nothing to adjust policy in response to the fact that an old adversary, Iran, was moving toward free elections and a parliamentary system, even as old allies like Saudi Arabia were shunning such innovations. There was, in short, a gap between our principles and our practices: We proclaimed the former without linking them to the latter, and that invited disillusionment. There are several reasons that the rantings of bin Laden resonate to the extent that they do in so many parts of North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia; surely that is one of them. A fifth problem was our tendency to regard our economic system as a model to be applied throughout the world, without regard to differences in local conditions and with little sense of the effects it would have in generating inequality. This was particularly evident in Russia, where we too easily assumed a smooth transition to market capitalism. Our efforts to help came nowhere near the scope and the seriousness of the programs we'd launched to rebuild the economies of our defeated adversaries after World War II. Meanwhile, Washington officials were less sensitive than they should have been to the extent to which American wealth and power were being blamed, throughout much of the world, for the inequities that the globalization of capitalism was generating. Capitalism would have expanded after the cold war regardless of what the United States did. By linking that expansion so explicitly to our foreign-policy objectives, however, we associated ourselves with something abroad that we would never have tolerated at home: the workings of an unregulated market devoid of a social safety net. Adam Smith was right in arguing that the pursuit of self-interest ultimately benefits the collective interest; but Karl Marx was right when he pointed out that wealth is not distributed to everyone equally at the same time, and that alienation arises as a result. The United States and most other advanced societies found ways to reconcile those competing truths with the emergence of the regulatory state during the first half of the 20th century. Capitalism might not have survived had that not happened. No such reconciliation was sought, however, as a foreign-policy priority during the post-cold-war era. Finally, and largely as a consequence, the United States emphasized the advantages, while neglecting the dangers, of globalization. There was a great deal of talk after the cold war ended of the extent to which that process had blurred the boundary between the domestic and the international: It was held to be a good thing that capital, commodities, ideas, and people could move more freely across boundaries. There was little talk, though, of an alternative possibility: that danger might move just as freely. That's a major lesson of September 11: The very instruments of the new world order -- airplanes, liberal policies on immigration and money transfers, multiculturalism itself, in the sense that there seemed nothing odd about the hijackers when they were taking their flight training -- can be turned horribly against it. It was as if we had convinced ourselves that the new world of global communications had somehow transformed an old aspect of human nature: the tendency to harbor grievances and sometimes to act upon them. What connects these shortcomings is a failure of strategic vision: the ability to see how the parts of one's policy combine to form the whole, and to avoid the illusion that one can pursue particular policies in particular places without their interacting with one another. It means remembering that actions have consequences: that for every action there will be a reaction, the nature of which won't always be predictable. It means accepting the fact that there's not always a linear relationship between input and output: that vast efforts can produce minimal results in some situations, and that minimal efforts can produce vast consequences in others. It means thinking about the implications of such asymmetries for the relationship between ends and means, always the central problem of strategy. Leverage is important, and our adversaries have so far proved more successful than we in using it. Finally, it requires effective national leadership, a quality for which American foreign policy during the post-cold-war era is unlikely to be remembered. Where do we go from here? Will the events of September 11 bring our policies back into line with our interests? Can we regain the clarity of strategic vision that served us well during the cold war, and that seemed to desert us during its aftermath? Shocks like this do have the advantage of concentrating the mind. Those of us who worried, during the 1990s, about the difficulty of thinking strategically in an age of apparent safety need no longer do so. As was the case with Pearl Harbor, a confusing world has suddenly become less so, even if at horrendous cost. What's emerging is the prospect, once again, of "something worse" than an American-dominated world -- perhaps something much worse. The appalling nature of the attacks on New York and Washington forged a new coalition against terrorism overnight. The great-power consensus that withered after 1991 is back in place in expanded form: The United States, the European Union, Russia, China, and Japan are all on the same side now -- at least on the issue of terrorism -- and they've been joined by unexpected allies like Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and perhaps even, very discreetly, Iran. Terrorism can hardly flourish without some state support; but September 11 brought home the fact that terrorism challenges the authority of all states. Everybody has airplanes, and everything that lies below them must now be considered a potential target. So just as fear of the Soviet Union built and sustained an American coalition during the cold war -- and just the prospect of nuclear annihilation caused the Soviets themselves ultimately to begin cooperating with it -- so the sudden appearance of "something much worse" is a paradoxical but powerful ally in the new war that now confronts us. Maintaining this coalition, however, will require tolerating diversity within it. That was one of our strengths during the cold war: The United States was far more successful than the Soviet Union in leading while listening, so that those whom we led felt that they had an interest in being led. NATO survived, as a consequence, while the Sino-Soviet alliance and the Warsaw Pact did not. If the global coalition against terrorism is to survive, it will demand even greater flexibility on the part of Americans than our cold-war coalition did. We'll have to give up the unilateralism we indulged in during the post-cold-war era. The Bush administration, prior to September 11, had seemed particularly to relish that bad habit. We'll have to define our allies more in terms of shared interests and less in terms of shared values. We'll have to compromise more than we might like in promoting human rights, open markets, and the scrupulous observance of democratic procedures. We'll have to concentrate more than we have in the past on getting whatever help we can in the war against terrorism, wherever we can find it. Our concerns with regional justice may suffer as a result: We're not likely to return soon to rescuing Kosovars, or to condemning oppression against Chechens and Tibetans. The compensation, one hopes, will be to secure justice on a broader scale, for terrorism will offer little justice for anyone. Even as we pursue that path, we'll need to address the grievances that fuel terrorism in the first place. Once again, there are cold-war precedents: With the rehabilitation of Germany and Japan after World War II, together with the Marshall Plan, we fought the conditions that made the Soviet alternative attractive even as we sought to contain the Soviets themselves. We launched our own form of asymmetrical warfare against Communism. Our "leverage" was to deploy our strengths imaginatively against its weaknesses, and the "payoff" was easily as disproportionate as anything the terrorists achieved on September 11. A relatively small investment of resources and intelligence secured for the United States and its allies, during the second half of the 20th century, a far more congenial world than what they had had to live through during its first half. Can we apply the same strategy now against the conditions that breed terrorists in so many parts of what we used to call the "third world"? We'd better try, for some of those regions are at least as much at risk now as Europe and Japan were half a century ago. The era we've just entered -- whatever we decide to call it -- is bound to be more painful than the one we've just left. The antiterrorist coalition is sure to undergo strains as its priorities shift from recovery to retaliation. Defections will doubtless occur. Further terrorist attacks are unavoidable, and are certain to produce demoralization as well as greater resolve. But it does seem likely, even at this early stage in the war they have provoked, that the terrorists have got more than they bargained for. "What kind of a people do they think we are?" Winston Churchill asked of the Japanese in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. It's worth asking the same of our new enemies, because it can hardly have been their purpose to give the United States yet another chance to lead the world into a new era, together with the opportunity to do it, this time, more wisely. John Lewis Gaddis is a professor of history at Yale University and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution. This essay is excerpted from the book The Age of Terror and the World After September 11, edited by Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda, being published this month by Basic Books. Copyright © 2002 by Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B7
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education