WORLD POLICY JOURNAL

BOOKS: Volume XXI,  No 1, Spring 2004	Print
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America Unlimited
The Radical Sources of the Bush Doctrine
Karl E. Meyer*

I.The year 2003 was for many Americans a time of wonder and worry, and for some of us, consternation. Its events confirmed that the winds of a radical new doctrine had swept through Washington, a doctrine that has yet to find a suitable name but whose effects can be clearly discerned in the war in Iraq and its aftermath. For the first time, the United States claimed the self-validating right to wage wars of choice, not only on grounds of potential future threats to national security, but as well to promote, even implant, a political and economic system deemed a universal template.

Paradoxically, the president who dispatched U.S. forces across the globe was a Texan who had shown scant interest in foreign affairs prior to his inauguration in 2001. Eight months after assuming office, propelled by the terrorist attacks on September 11, George W. Bush had metamorphosed into an avenging warrior. He next assumed an even bolder role, as high pontiff of an ideological campaign to democratize Islamic lands.

Encouraging this transformation was a close-knit group of advisors who had vainly pressed a similar forward policy while serving the elder George Bush during the first Gulf War a decade earlier. Prominent in this camarilla were the vice president and the secretary of defense and their like-minded senior aides, all of whom were broadly agreed on the flabbiness of multilateral diplomacy and in their conviction that America possessed the means and moral authority to behead its adversaries, with allies if possible but alone if necessary.

The new outlook was formally enshrined in a robust state paper, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, promulgated on September 19, 2002. Notable both for its global aspirations and its absence of any sense of limits, its tone was established in President George W. Bush’s prefatory sentences: “The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single, sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise.” The paper maintained that America’s unparalleled supremacy had to be sustained beyond challenge to counter the terrorist threat and to expand democracy and free markets. Most striking was the president’s affirmation of America’s right to wage preventive or preemptive war. In his words: “We will cooperate with other nations to deny, contain and curtail our enemies’ efforts to acquire dangerous technologies. And as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed [because] the only path to peace and security is the path of action.”

Hence the consternation among those, like myself, who supported President Bush’s justifiable intervention in Afghanistan against Osama bin Laden and his Taliban protectors. Iraq was a different matter. It was different because Washington failed to establish a credible casus belli; because having prevailed in Afghanistan, the Bush team showed perfunctory concern with rebuilding a shattered country; and because the United Nations and its inspectors in Iraq were not merely bypassed but scorned. Finally, because a war launched to forestall a hypothetical threat provided a dangerous precedent for others.

Indeed the assertion of a presidential right to determine when a future peril justifies armed intervention has an unhappy modern parallel. From 1939 to 1979, Soviet leaders advanced similar reasoning to sanction assaults on other nominally independent states, repeatedly conjuring hostile plots that had to be foiled. To forestall these malignant designs, Stalin and his successors annexed the Baltic republics, attacked Finland, suppressed the Hungarian revolution, extinguished Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring, and invaded Afghanistan. This, for example, was how Leonid Brezhnev explained Soviet policy to the Prague party leader Alexander Dubcek, who along with other reformers had been abducted to Moscow and held incommunicado as Warsaw Pact forces without warning overwhelmed Czechoslovakia in August 1968:

The working class will understand that, behind the backs of the [Czechoslovak] Central Committee and the government leadership, right-wingers were prepared to transform Czechoslovakia from a socialist into a bourgeois republic. All that is clear now. Talks on economic and other matters will begin. The departure of troops, etcetera, will begin according to material principles. We have not occupied Czechoslovakia, we do not intend to keep it under “occupation,” but we hope for her to be free and to undertake the socialist cooperation we have agreed upon in Bratislava. It is on that basis we want to talk with you and find a workable solution.¹

Thus speaketh the Leviathan to its prey.

II It is not the purpose of this essay to berate President Bush or to inveigh against his senior advisors. My aim instead is first, to examine why important voices on the center and left supported the Iraq War, voices like those of the Harvard scholar Michael Ignatieff, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the socialist writer Paul Berman, the British author William Shawcross, and the gifted polemicist Christopher Hitchens. Along with other liberals and moderates, they joined in endorsing the war for the worthiest of reasons. Thus a proper response requires judging Iraq in the round, against the broad screen of history. Who cannot lament the inability of the grandly miscalled “international community” to rid itself of despots like Saddam Hussein? One can share the understandable anger over the West’s past indulgence of the Iraqi dictator; and one can agree and regret that “Arab democracy” remains an oxymoron, not least because Americans have preferred doing business with feudal autocrats. Moreover, it is neither irrational nor paranoid to fear the transfer of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to religious zealots claiming divine license for mass murder.

What underlies my own dissent is not the new doctrine’s declared goals but the absence of any harness on America’s interventions and the shallow reasoning put forward to justify unilateral resort to force. Set aside the post-invasion dispute over the exaggerated intelligence reckoning of Iraq’s arms program cited by President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. Ignore the embarrassing inability of coalition forces to discover the weapons of mass destruction whose imminent deployment was the ostensible casus belli. More interesting and significant for this analysis was the overall tone of political rhetoric that pervaded the war’s approving chorus: the caustic dismissal of valid reservations and the unabashed assertion of imperial entitlement.

This rhetoric too had an interesting antecedent. During the fifth year of the Peloponnesian War, a similar revolutionary fervor spread through Greek city-states. In the reproving account of Thucydides, the very meaning of words seemed to change: “Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man.... The cause of all these was the love of power, originating in avarice and ambition, and the party-spirit which is engendered by them when men are fairly embarked on a contest.”²

A similar infectious extremism seemed to pervade Washington before and after Baghdad’s unexpectedly swift fall on April 10, 2003. “Axis of Evil,” “Let’s Roll,” “Wanted Dead or Alive,” “Shock and Awe,” “Bring ’em On,” “Mission Accomplished,” “Top Gun,” and “Stuff Happens” became headline catchwords. “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad, real men want to go to Tehran” was the inside-the-Beltway aphorism of the hour. Going further, Michael Ledeen, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, called for regime change in Syria and Iran as well. As he wrote in the London Spectator: “We should now pull the political lanyards and unleash democratic revolutions in Damascus and Tehran.”³

Before the fighting began, Kenneth Adelman, a former assistant to the secretary of defense, predicted that liberating Iraq would prove “a cakewalk.” As sanguine was a sentence attributed to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz: “The road to peace in Jerusalem leads through Baghdad.” Still, in this writer’s view, nothing better expressed the moment’s radical rapture than the acclaim greeting a short, pithy best-seller, Of Paradise and Power, by Robert Kagan.

A well-respected writer on foreign affairs (and son of Yale’s Donald Kagan, a leading authority on Thucydides), Kagan compressed his book’s thesis in a brilliant opening paragraph. On essential matters of power, he writes, the United States is mired in history, exercising authority in a Hobbesian world where laws and rules are unreliable, while Europeans are turning from power and entering a post-historical paradise of peace and comparative prosperity: “That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus. They agree on little and understand one another less and less.”⁴

Kagan, a longtime political comrade-in-arms of William Kristol, editor of the forward-school organ, the Weekly Standard, then offered a parable to illustrate his thesis: “A man armed only with a knife may decide that a bear prowling in the forest is a tolerable danger, inasmuch as the alternative— hunting the bear only with a knife—is actually riskier than lying low and hoping the bear never attacks. The same man armed with a rifle, however, will likely make a different calculation of what constitutes a tolerable risk. Why should he risk being mauled to death if he doesn’t have to? This perfectly normal human psychology has driven a wedge between the United States and Europe.”⁵

It is wonderfully clear, outwardly reasonable, and wholly misleading. A moment’s thought reveals the flaw in Kagan’s parable. In our polity at least, a bear has no standing in human law, and its violent demise can have no reverberation beyond the forest. But imagine that the creature in the woods is a fellow human, with friends and kinfolk in an adjacent wood. By what right could a hunter armed with a rifle slay a stranger on sight without sanction of law or, absent that, without prior agreement among neighbors on the pressing need to act? A nation, even a rogue nation, is not a bear; it enjoys rights under existing international usage. And unlike the bear, a slain stranger is likely to have armed human allies elsewhere who may seize on his death as justification for vengeance. Even a Martian should grant a certain cogency to this objection.

III. Still, on this count, advocates of radical intervention have an impressive rejoinder— that the amoral state system itself provides a sanctuary for monsters like Saddam, and has done so for scores of tyrants since 1648, the year the rising potentates of Europe agreed to the Treaty of Westphalia. It was this pragmatic pact that ended the Thirty Years’ War and foreshadowed today’s state system. Under the Westphalian code, a country’s internal affairs are the lawful concern only of its rulers. The code still prevails at the United Nations under a charter that enshrines the sovereign inviolability of its members, effectively undermining the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Save in extraordinary circumstances, i.e., Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait in 1991, the United Nations has avoided military confrontation with sovereign evildoers. On the rare occasions the organization has acted, its forces have been constrained by cautious rules of engagement and by the failure of its members to honor nonbinding pledges of support. Yet this suits most members, most of the time.

Hence the frustration that impels the liberal-minded to welcome an assertive American policy, an example being William Shawcross. Only America was able to stop the bloodletting in Bosnia and Kosovo, he contended in a London lecture in 2003, shortly before the Iraq war, and only America could have liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban: “The results in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan today are not perfect. But all those countries are better off than they were, and only America could make those changes. American participation is essential to the world. American power is often the only thing that stands between civility and genocide, order and mayhem.”⁶

It is a powerful argument, and in Shaw-cross’s case there is a personal resonance. His father, Sir Hartley Shawcross, was chief British prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, and the son is proudly conscious of this legacy, as related in The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience. Whatever the imperfections of Nuremberg, and of the legal precedents that grew out of the Second World War, he writes, they were designed “to rescue us from our own frailty, to bind the self-inflicted wounds of the world.”⁷ More recently, in Deliver Us From Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict (2000), Shawcross lauds the United Nations and its peacekeepers, argues for arming the world organization with a real club to replace its toothpick, deplores the failure of major powers (notably the United States) to support its humanitarian missions, and approves the establishment of a new International Criminal Court. (His father had appealed vainly a half century earlier for the creation of just such a permanent war crimes tribunal.)

The problem for William Shawcross, and for many of us, is that senior officials in the Bush administration oppose or belittle every suggestion on his list. Their attitude at its bluntest is personified by John Bolton, the too-little-known under secretary of state for arms control and international security. Sending Bolton, with his white walrus mustache and assertive forefinger, to any global meeting, a friend of mine remarked, is like sending an arsonist to a conference on fireworks. A Yale-educated lawyer who doubts the reality of world law, Bolton has led the Bush offensive against any treaty, compact, protocol, or convention that in his view might in any way limit America’s freedom of action. With his zealous concurrence, the administration has withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, rejected the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, excised the inspection provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention (which the senior George Bush originally helped negotiate), and deleted the requirement for verified destruction of strategic nuclear missiles from the 2002 pact on U.S.-Russian Strategic Offensive Reductions.⁸ Instructively, Bolton’s most heartfelt fan in the U.S. Senate was North Carolina’s Jesse Helms, former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who peculiarly acclaimed him as “the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon.”

Like Helms, Bolton views with wary animus the entire edifice of internationalism, sometimes literally. He once remarked of the United Nations that if its Secretariat building lost ten stories “it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” Moving well ahead of the Bush team’s consensus, he has called for regime change rather than negotiations with North Korea, and favors recognition of Taiwan as an independent sovereignty. He startled delegates at the 2001 U.N. Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons by saying he would oppose any international effort to regulate the light arms trade, or any measures that would “abrogate the constitutional right to bear arms.”

Yet perhaps his most determined campaign has been to strangle in its cradle the International Criminal Court (ICC) modeled on the American-inspired Nuremberg tribunal. The court’s creation was authorized in a 1998 Rome Statute approved by 96 delegates, including a U.S. legal team that had won agreement on amendments to protect Americans from frivolous suits. The ICC is meant to come into existence at The Hague when 60 countries ratify the Rome Statute (less than a score had completed the process as of summer 2003). Its creation has commanded wide support in the American legal profession and on editorial boards of mainstream U.S. newspapers.⁹

Bolton and his allies contend that Americans will be invidiously singled out for harassment, despite the Rome safeguards. Acting on Bolton’s impassioned brief (though the ICC is not formally within his jurisdiction), President Bush in May 2002 took the unprecedented step of “unsigning” the Rome Statute, which had already been signed, though not submitted to the Senate, by President Clinton. More drastically a year later, Washington suspended its military assistance to 35 countries for failing to immunize Americans from prosecution by the court. On the list were Brazil, Colombia, and South Africa, as well as smaller nations supporting the war in Iraq, like the Baltic republics. “What have we done wrong?” a Latvian delegate asked me at a meeting of NATO parliamentarians. “We’ve offered to send soldiers to help in the occupation, we’ve been praised by Donald Rumsfeld, yet we were brusquely notified that U.S. military aid would cease because we supported the ICC.” As Richard Dicker, a director of Humans Rights Watch in New York, remarked to a news agency, “I’ve never seen a sanctions regime aimed at countries that believe in the rule of law rather than ones that commit human rights abuses.”

The ICC episode is emblematic of the radical turn in American foreign policy. Rather than being a reformer of the state system, the United States seeks to retain in toto the Westphalian prerogatives it denies to others. Global collaboration on all fronts has remained a one-way street. The prevailing attitude became apparent in the president’s 2002 State of the Union address, in which virtually nothing was said about the aid given the Bush administration in its war on terror by NATO and European allies. Eventually, when President Bush sought to make partial amends in a March 11, 2002 speech, he notably failed to mention the United Nations.¹⁰

Still, a hardheaded reader might reasonably ask, So what? In the cold coin of power, America now exercises military and economic preponderance without parallel, and lesser states must accommodate to that reality. In any case, to quote a question thrown at this writer following a lecture at the San Francisco Council on World Affairs: “It’s an evolutionary imperative that the strong survive and the weak perish. At this time, we’re the most powerful and the richest organism around. I like it that way. Why should I feel guilty?”

IV. My anonymous questioner has had ample company in the modern era. From the eighteenth to the present century, leaders of rising powers have shared his belief that their nations were somehow favored by natural selection to become global colossi. Interestingly, these moments of euphoria have alternated with shudders of gloom and despair over possible setbacks due to compromise or perceived timidity, especially in the years before and after a new century. Erratic fin-de-siècle mood swings in popular and high culture seemingly have their counterpart in politics. At turns buoyed by visions of global triumph, or pricked by agonized fears that their moment may too swiftly fade, evangelists of national greatness forfeit all sense of limits.

This was notably true in France during the revolutionary and Bonapartist years. From the moment in 1789 that the old order so suddenly and unexpectedly collapsed, as Alexis de Tocqueville remarked, “No one doubted that the fate of mankind was involved in what was about to be done.”¹¹ Confident that they spoke for all humanity in a dawning age of reason, France’s new rulers decreed the abolition of feudalism, adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, threw open the doors of prisons, recruited a peoples’ army to combat counterrevolutionaries at home and abroad, and enthroned Reason in all its aspects, including the calendrical. Young William Wordsworth was then in France, blissfully alive when “Reason most seemed to assert her rights,” and in his enthusiasm the way seemed open to the very bowers of Eden.

However, in a cycle that would recur elsewhere, exhilaration gave way to the Terror, which in turn provoked revulsion and despair, disorder and resistance, culminating in the rise of Napoleon as first consul and then as emperor. The belief in France’s universal mission was now backed by armed might. To his adulators, Bonaparte was anointed by destiny to unite Europe, unshackle its serfs, and spread the enlightened blessings of the Code Napoleon. To that end, French armies thrust into Italy, Egypt, the Levant, Austria, Spain, Germany, and the Low Countries. To impel Russian compliance with his Continental System, Bonaparte mobilized Europe’s largest army under a single command, comprising 600,000 French and allied troops. Yet once the Grande Armée crossed the river Nieman, it proved unable to master either the Russians or their land; Napoleon retreated with less than a fifth of his force. He had disregarded one of his shrewdest maxims: that you can do anything with a bayonet but sit on it.

Less commonly recalled is the case of Germany. In the 1880s, key indices of national power favored Germany: its swift victories in three European wars, its awesome military machine, its vigorous economy, and its fertility rate. The Reich boasted Europe’s ablest engineers, its finest scientific institutes, and its most literate populace. Germany led the world in manufacturing weapons, in shipbuilding, in the optical, chemical, and electro-technical industries. Its scientists swept the field when Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901, beginning what was supposed to be Germany’s century.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, who succeeded to the throne in 1888 at age 29, personified Germany’s aspirations. He impressed with his range of interests, his air of martial certitude. His grandmother was Queen Victoria, his uncle the future Edward VII, and every monarch in Europe was either his kin or favor-seeker. Yet as the Austrian scholar Egon Friedell remarks in his fascinating A Cultural History of the Modern Age: “This post was the biggest that Germany had to offer, and Wilhelm II was unfortunately not the biggest man she had to offer.... He set Germany’s future on the water, and the water became the grave of Germany’s future.... He wanted to create a world-empire, and what he achieved was the World War.”¹²

From the outset the Kaiser bridled at his reliance on Bismarck, and on the complex alliances the Iron Chancellor had devised during his 28-year service. In 1890, seizing on a minor dispute, Wilhelm rid himself of the prince and let his system lapse. Historians differ as to whether the Bismarckian order was too dependent on the personal ties of a tiny ruling elite to survive its maker. But for sure what Bismarck long feared materialized in 1894 as Russia, no longer tied to Germany, found a new strategic partner in France, a realignment that came fatally into play in July 1914.

This did not cool the emperor’s aggressive ardor. A policy of placating Great Britain gave way to an escalating naval rivalry. Reaching far into Asia, Germany secured a foothold in China at Shantung, the northern enclave in which the fanatic Boxers first rose up against “foreign devils” in 1899. The Kaiser toured the Middle East, courted the Ottomans, proposed a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway, entered Jerusalem on horseback, and proclaimed himself champion of 300 million Muslims. German traders spread through east, west, and southern Africa, a forward policy underscored in 1895 by the famous “Kruger telegram” in which Wilhelm II implied he would back the Boer president Paul Kruger against Britain.

Germany’s imperious pursuit of Weltmacht or world power found its musical analogue in the ecstatic tone poems of Richard Strauss. In the 1890s, Strauss confirmed his status as Wagner’s heir with Don Juan, Thus Sprach Zarathustra, and Ein Heldenleben (“A Hero’s Life”). The restless, sensuous belligerence in Strauss’s work was presciently appraised by the French novelist and Beethoven biographer Romain Rolland. He had heard Strauss conduct at Bayreuth, and was present in Paris in 1899 when the composer introduced Zarathustra. To Rolland, it was Nietzsche scored by Dionysus. “Aha!” he wrote. “Germany as the All-Powerful will not keep her balance for long. Neitzsche, Strauss, the Kaiser—giddiness blows through her brain. Neroism is in the air!”¹³ Within a generation, Nero abdicated his throne, his empire had evaporated, his country was dismembered, and Caligula was waiting in the wings.

V. For their part, the masters of the British Empire were as certain of history’s, even of Providence’s, approbation. Late Victorian euphoria attained its zenith in the pageantry of two great Jubilee Celebrations, in 1887 and 1897, marking the fiftieth and sixtieth year of the queen’s reign. As in France and Germany, popular enthusiasm for expansion coincided with the rise of a breezy penny press. When Lord Alfred Harmsworth in 1896 founded the Daily Mail, then as now the voice of Britain’s stolid middle class, his announcement caught the mood: “The Daily Mail is the embodiment and mouthpiece of the imperial idea. Those who launched this journal had one definite aim in view...to be the articulate voice of British progress and domination. We believe in England. We know that the advance of the Union Jack means protection for weaker races, justice for the oppressed, liberty for the down-trod-den. Our Empire has not exhausted itself.”¹⁴

Victoria’s empire encompassed a quarter of the world’s territory, and a fourth of its population; it had grown by 4 million square miles during her reign and was wired together by newly embedded British telegraph cables and steel rails, its sea lanes safeguarded by a Royal Navy bigger than any two rivals combined. This expansion was promoted by an illustrious cadre of proconsuls: Curzon and Milner, Cromer and Kitchener, Lugard and Rhodes. “I remember the atmosphere,” wrote Arnold J. Toynbee, recalling the time when as a youngster he perched on his uncle’s shoulders to watch the Diamond Jubilee procession. “It was: Well, here we are on top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there— forever! There is of course a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people.”¹⁵

History’s first knock was the Boer War, a war of choice, begun in October 1899 at the urgent initiative of Joseph Chamberlain, the colonial secretary. Its avowed purpose was to defend British paramountcy in southern Africa, a concern quickened by the recent discovery of gold and diamond fields in the Transvaal. Crack regiments were expected to overwhelm Boer farmers by Christmas, but instead December brought news of “Black Week,” as Afrikaner sharpshooters decimated British forces. The war stretched on until 1903, dividing and demoralizing Britain’s erstwhile enthusiasts for liberal imperialism, and it ended in a compromise that effectively empowered the Afrikaners who had nominally been the losers.

Britain’s Boer setback presaged the incalculably greater disasters of the Great War, and the flawed settlement that followed. Today’s Middle East persists as a dubious memorial to European imperialism, mitigated by pro forma concessions to Woodrow Wilson’s high-minded Fourteen Points. The region’s present-day fault lines remain those demarcated at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. For much of six months, the Big Three—President Wilson, Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Premier Georges Clemenceau—met daily to parcel the spoils of three crumbled empires, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman. Records kept by interpreters were hit-or-miss, as described by Margaret MacMillan in her lively account, Paris 1919. Frequently the Big Three’s principals could not remember what they had already decided, or promised.

It was in this makeshift fashion that today’s Iraq was created by Lloyd George, with the passive assent of Wilson and the mild objections of Clemenceau. The British endorsed the unification of three antagonistic Ottoman provinces—Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra—as promoted by Col. Arnold Wilson, the civil commissioner of British-occupied Mesopotamia. He realized his wishes, and it thus came about that the three provinces were stapled together. This happened in part because the aging French premier failed to grasp the importance of Mosul oil, and in part because the British misjudged their skills as nation-builders.

It did not seem critically important to Wilson that uniting the fractious provinces was beyond the wit of infidel outsiders. He proposed making Mesopotamia a formal protectorate, under direct British rule, but his superiors opted instead for governing through proxies, as practiced in the princely states of India and in Egypt. “What we want,” candidly counseled a ranking India Office official in London, in a memo unearthed by MacMillan, “is some administration with Arab institutions which we can safely leave while pulling the strings ourselves; something that won’t cost very much, which Labour can swallow consistent with its principles, but under which our economic and political institutions will be secure.”¹⁶

Colonel Wilson’s optimism soon proved unfounded. By 1920, Iraq, as the new country was now called, boiled over with rebellion from the Kurdish areas around Mosul in the north to the Shiite strongholds in the south. Wilson appealed for more troops, but a hard-pressed British government and its new colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, preferred instead to rely on the Royal Air Force, using more cost-effective bombs or even employing chemical weapons to subdue rebel villages. In an improvised climax, stage managed by Churchill, the seasoned and emollient Sir Percy Cox replaced Wilson as civil commissioner, and a throne was contrived for a Hashemite claimant, Prince Feisal, whom the French had just deposed as king of Syria. The gifted Arabist Gertrude Bell (the only woman to play a serious role in remaking the Middle East) helped introduce Feisal to his new subjects; she designed his coronation and a new flag, and worked on an Iraqi constitution that specified basic civil and political rights.

Yet the colonial stigma was never expunged, and by designating the minority Sunni Muslims as their ruling partners, the British estranged the Shiite majority and alienated the mountain Kurds who had been promised a state of their own. Iraqis of all persuasions contested a treaty that embedded British bases and British tutelage in an ostensibly sovereign state. So hostile was the Iraqi military that the British had to deploy scarce troops to occupy Iraq during the Second World War and forestall a pro-German takeover. Finally, in 1958, an officers’ coup claimed the lives of King Feisal’s grandson and the pro-British prime minister, Nuri al-Said, opening the way to the Baathist despotism of Saddam Hussein. To this day, Iraq remains a confederacy of angry beehives, ready to swarm afresh when poked.

VI. As this survey suggests, the shelf-life of seemingly impregnable new world orders is shorter than either their makers or adversaries believe. In the 1980s, the Soviet system was perceived as immortal by many American conservatives, whose gloomy judgments inspired a network television miniseries, “Amerika,” depicting a United States under Soviet occupation. In a 1984 book titled How Democracies Perish, the influential French journalist Jean-François Revel feared that democracy would prove only a parenthesis in human history. To have suggested then that in less than a decade the Soviet empire would vanish altogether would have seemed delusional, even insane. Yet once the unthinkable occurred, the American foreign policy expert Francis Fukuyama turned Revel on his head in a 1990 essay proclaiming that history had ended with the victory of democracy and the market economy.

It is therefore not irrational to remark that America’s status as sole superpower, or what conservatives call the world’s unipolar moment, can also be transient. Still, one can anticipate an obvious objection. Past history can be misleading if not irrelevant, because America is a colossus without real parallel, whether judged by its military spending, its economic reach, or its cultural penetration. And the world is menaced by a deadly danger also without parallel, the death of millions caused by terrorist or rogue state use of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Why wait until the smoking gun becomes a mushroom cloud? Or, as a liberal supporter of the Iraq war could sensibly add: if only America can depose monsters like Saddam Hussein, why should it turn to the dithering Security Council with its track record of delay and indecision?

One answer is that since the terror targets are global, America can count on finding partners in world and regional organizations that can legitimize intervention, where justified. In the case of Iraq, the unfairly maligned Security Council and its inspectors managed (we now know) to destroy Saddam Hussein’s arsenal in the 1990s, and the unjustly derided U.N. team led by Hans Blix (we also now know) more accurately assessed Iraq’s weaponry than did the White House and the Pentagon. In short, the system worked. Given a modicum of intelligence, goodwill, and willingness to admit error, there is little reason why the system cannot become more responsive.

Besides, by its own example, the United States can send a message more powerful than that of any expeditionary army. A half-forgotten chapter in Franklin Roosevelt’s career makes the point. From 1913 to 1920, the young Roosevelt served as Woodrow Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy. (Not by accident, this was the same post held by Cousin Theodore during the Spanish-American War.) FDR was thus directly responsible for overseeing the intervention and occupation by U.S. Marines of Haiti in 1915 and of the Dominican Republic a year later. Indeed, as Democratic nominee for vice president in 1920, Roosevelt thus bragged of his feats while whistle-stopping in Butte, Montana: “You know I had something to do with running a couple of little republics. The facts are that I wrote Haiti’s Constitution myself, and, if I do say it, I think it a pretty good constitution.” Roosevelt later tried to deny this statement, but as documented in FDR: A Biography by the indefatigable Ted Morgan, witnesses present confirmed the contrary.¹⁷

What’s interesting was the sequel to Roosevelt’s foolish boast. Years later, a soberer FDR, disabled by polio, reemerged as Democratic candidate for governor of New York. He had second thoughts not just about Haiti, but about unilateral U.S. intervention, about Washington’s inglorious “small wars,” and especially about the risks of scorning allies and neighbors. He now believed that “single-handed intervention by us in the internal affairs of other nations must end; with the cooperation of others we shall have more order in this hemisphere and less dislike.”

His reflections appeared in an essay written in 1928, but its words seem as applicable to an America as dominant on the world stage as it was in hemisphere affairs then. Titled “Our Foreign Policy: A Democratic View” and published in Foreign Affairs, it was above all an appeal to fashion practical machinery to eliminate the sources of inter-American dispute. As for Haiti in 1915, he recalled what prompted intervention:

That Republic was in chronic trouble, and as it is close to Cuba the bad influence was felt across the water. Presidents were murdered, governments fled, several times a year. We landed our marines and sailors only when the unfortunate Chief Magistrate of the moment was dragged out of the French Legation, cut into six pieces and thrown to the mob. Here again we cleaned house, restored order, built public works and put government operation on a sound and honest basis. We are still there. It is true, however, that in Santo Domingo and especially Haiti we seemed to have paid too little attention to making citizens of these states more capable of control of their own governments.¹⁸

Roosevelt by 1928 concluded that unilateral intervention, illustrated afresh by the dispatch of Marines to Nicaragua to crush a peasant rebellion, had a baleful impact on hemisphere relations. In all 16 Latin American republics, Washington “by its recent policies has allowed a dislike and mistrust of long-standing to grow into positive hate and fear.” He went on, “We are exceedingly jealous of our own sovereignty and it is only right we should respect a similar feeling among other nations.” Moreover, he learned through experience that written constitutions, even “pretty good ones,” could dwindle into scraps of paper.¹⁹

In Haiti’s case, in reality, the key document was not a Washington-approved constitution but a treaty with the United States stipulating that only American citizens could be appointed to collect customs, advise the treasury, head the constabulary, and direct public works. The fruit of this paternalist peonage was fierce popular resentment, the stunting of Haitian democracy and unacceptable servitude in the form of forced labor to build roads. To the Haitian mind, all these evils were attributable to white intruders, who lived in their own world apart, where even the local elite was barred from the best hotels, clubs and restaurants.

On assuming the presidency, Roosevelt put into effect reforms foreshadowed in his essay. “I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor,” he proclaimed in the 1933 Inaugural Address, “the neighbor who respects himself, and because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of agreements in and with the world of neighbors.” That year Washington accepted as binding the principle of nonintervention at a Pan American conference in Montevideo, and it subsequently pledged itself to consultation and collective action in hemisphere affairs. The Marines came home from Nicaragua, ending decades of occupation. A long-standing Cuban grievance was addressed when the United States abrogated the so-called Platt Amendment that gave Washington the right to veto Cuba’s national legislation. In a gesture rich in resonance, FDR named Josephus Daniels, his old chief as secretary of the navy, as U.S. envoy to revolutionary Mexico, easing a potential crisis over oil nationalization. And on July 5, 1934, Roosevelt became the first American president to visit Haiti, where he met with President Stenio Vincent and signed an agreement to withdraw U.S. forces.

In short, FDR treated neighbors with respect, acknowledged past American blunders, saw that constitutions alone did not guarantee a democratic outcome, and developed a multilateral structure that still matters in hemisphere affairs. In October 1962, at a moment of supreme peril, the Organization of American States gave John F. Kennedy unanimous approval for the high-risk embargo he had just imposed on Cuba, a vote that palpably abetted a nonviolent resolution to a crisis resulting from the stealthy deployment of Soviet missiles. Allowing for Cold War interventions by the United States in Central America, Chile, and the Caribbean, few of them glorious, the essential system shaped by Franklin Roosevelt remains whole and effective. Half the globe has thus been spared the specter of war between neighboring republics, a benison scarcely ever mentioned since it is taken for granted.

And the genius of the system has been its reciprocity. Washington has had to comply or justify breaching the rules its expects others to honor, the highest form of legitimacy. Which is the right point to return to Robert Kagan, and his thesis that Europe is mired in a love-feast of appeasement. It is an old taunt. Americans of the hard-shell school like to point out that Europeans were wrong about the Soviet reaction to deploying medium-range nuclear missiles in the 1980s; that they were wrong again about Moscow’s reaction to enlarging NATO eastward, or to the scrapping of the ABM Treaty. They note, accurately, that when genocidal slaughter broke out in the Balkans, Europe proved impotent and it took U.S. leadership acting through NATO to stop the killings in Kosovo.

These are points in the Martian court. Yet invariably overlooked in such reckonings are instances in which the European faith in diplomacy was vindicated. This was true of West German chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, the gradualist process of opening chinks in the wall dividing West and East Germany. Yet by common agreement, Brandt’s opening to the east proved an essential precursor to the peaceful unification of Germany.

As consequential was the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, signed by 34 nations ranging from the Holy See to the United States and the Soviet Union. Hardliners in unison scoffed that the Helsinki Accords amounted to Western recognition of the postwar boundaries of Europe, thus legally validating Stalin’s conquests, in return for worthless promises on human rights. Yet today few deny that Helsinki’s provisions in fact armed dissenters within the Soviet bloc with a moral authority that over time proved lethal. What gave leverage to Helsinki Watch groups was the act’s pivotal provision that all signatories had the right to monitor the compliance of every other party to the accord—meaning that the United States was as subject to inquiry and criticism at biennial review conferences as any other signer of the Final Act. It was this reciprocal abridgment of the Westphalian theory that crucially fortified the voices of Andrei Sakharov, Lech Walesa, and Vaclav Havel.

Indeed, the nonviolent end of the Cold War vindicated its initial and most influential American theorist. In his famous Long Cable from Moscow and his “Mr. X” essay in Foreign Affairs, George F. Kennan contended that the pressure of containment would ultimately transform Soviet society from within. For decades, successive American presidents withstood calls for “rollback,” the forcible liberation of Moscow’s captive nations. This was the course urged by liberationists like James Burnham, the brilliant former Trotskyite who is the true forebear of today’s radical theorists, and their allies on the center-left. With this in mind, can it be said that humbling of Saddam Hussein was impossible without a U.S. intervention unsanctioned by the Security Council? We cannot say for certain, but we do know that an impatient administration determined on war never really trusted or tried the whole panoply of alliance diplomacy that was available to it. It was shoot first, reason later, and we live with the results. In fact, if one were to choose a high-value test for nation building, it is difficult to conceive a worse candidate than Iraq.

None of the aforesaid is intended to belittle or ignore the need to put forward universal moral and political purposes on the global blackboard. How wonderful, for example, if an American president gave new life to Ronald Reagan’s vision of a nuclear-free world, building on FDR’s example of reciprocity by calling for abolition of all nuclear arsenals, including our own. A goal surely more relevant to our present plight than putting an astronaut on Mars, and more likely to be applauded by those abroad who now view with bafflement or hostility the country they not long ago admired._•