American Strategy Project -- Grand Strategy No.1

The United States is now more isolated from its major allies and more internally divided over foreign policy than at any time since 1945. The strategy of the Bush administration -- and not merely its style -- is to blame.

The grand strategy of the Bush administration rests on three axioms: American global hegemony; preventive war; and the so-called "war on terror." All three axioms are fallacies that inevitably produce counterproductive and misguided policies. What the great French diplomat Talleyrand said of Napoleon's execution of the Duc d'Enghien applies with equal force to Bush's grand strategy: "It is worse than a crime; it is a mistake."

American Global Hegemony. George W. Bush has adopted, as official U.S. policy, the grand strategy of unilateral American global hegemony or domination devised by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and other leading "neoconservatives" during the 1990s. The hegemonic strategy requires the conversion of America's temporary Cold War alliance system in Europe and East Asia into permanent American military supremacy within those regions, reinforced by American military domination of the Middle East.

As a vision for American national security, global hegemony is profoundly flawed. According to theorists of hegemony like Paul Wolfowitz, the U.S. should indefinitely dominate Europe and East Asia, in order to prevent Germany, Japan, France, and other allies from developing the capability to defend themselves independently of the U.S. This policy naively assumes that America's former Cold War allies will indefinitely tolerate the use of their countries as launching-pads for actions in the Middle East and elsewhere of which they disapprove. Equally nanve is the assumption that other major countries will defer to the U.S. in security matters-as the opposition of every significant great power except Britain to America's Iraq policy has now proven.

Preventive War. The Bush administration has announced that it reserves the right to invade countries and topple regimes that pose speculative-not imminent-threats to the United States. This repudiates centuries of international diplomatic and legal custom, which permit countries to pre-emptively defend themselves against imminent attacks, but not to attack other countries merely on the chance that they might be threats in the future.

It is not clear whether the Bush administration regards preventive war as a prerogative of the United States alone, or as a newly recognized right of all countries. If the former is the case, then the U.S. is claiming that it is exempt from the rules that govern other nations. If the latter is the case, then Pakistan could wage a preventive war against India today, on the grounds that India might be a greater threat in a decade or two. The distinction between wars of defense and aggression would collapse entirely, if the United States, alone or along with all other nations, had the right to wage war on the basis of speculative future threats. And it is deeply troubling that the Bush administration has now adopted, as its own strategy, a "Pearl Harbor" strategy for which Japanese war criminals were hanged by the U.S. after World War II.

"The War on Terror." The conceptual confusion of the Bush administration is at its worst and most dangerous in its approach to terrorism. This administration has used the vague term "the war on terror" to treat the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to "rogue states" like Iraq and North Korea and anti-American terrorism by non-state groups like al-Qaeda as one phenomenon instead of two. The argument that states might give terrorists weapons of mass destruction remains tenuous, despite many attempts by the Bush administration to connect Iraq and al-Qaeda.

In addition to lumping together a variety of anti-American states with different goals and capabilities, the Bush administration has used the trite phrase "the war on terror" to obscure the differences between al-Qaeda, a transnational Muslim terrorist group with members from many nations that targets the United States and Western European countries, and Hamas and Hezbollah, militant groups targeting Israel. If Hamas and Hezbollah are treated as America's enemies, even though their quarrel is not with the United States, why aren't the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Basque terrorists in Spain, Chechen terrorists in Russia and Tamil terrorists in Sri Lanka part of America's "war on terror," too?

The phrase "war on terror" produces a confusion of methods, as well as of alleged enemies. With the exception of the war to overthrow the Taliban regime that sheltered al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, most of the successes in the campaign against al-Qaeda have been the result of international police and intelligence efforts, not unilateral U.S. military action.

Beyond Bush's Blunders. The strategic fallacies of the Bush administration need to be replaced by strategic common sense. The United States can begin to recover from the self-inflicted disaster of the Bush administration by replacing the misguided policies of hegemony and preventive war, and ill-conceived rhetoric about the "war on terror" with sound policies based on sober analysis of America's national interest.

Repudiating the aberrant Wolfowitz-Bush Doctrine of quasi-imperial global hegemony, the United States should return to its post-1945 policy of leading consensual great-power alliances (not rag-tag collections of bribed and dependent satellite states) against genuine common threats. Repudiating the idea of preventive war, which undermines the very distinction between war and peace in the global state system, the United States should reassert the distinction it has long drawn between wars of defense and wars of aggression, while reserving the right for pre-emptive wars to forestall imminent attacks on the U.S. or its allies. Finally, the term "war on terror" should be abandoned, by policymakers and commentators alike. In the interest of moral clarity and intellectual rigor, different terms should be used for unrelated subjects, such as the campaign against al-Qaeda and the disarmament of Iraq. Then, and only then, will the United States once again have a national security strategy that protects American interests without subverting American ideals.