World Policy Journal

Will West Bank Settlements Continue to Frusterate a Two-State Solution? | World Policy Journal

Erin Drankoski — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:15:00 -0400

Daniel Levy of the New America Foundation says, "The most likely scenario, unfortunately, is the business as usual one which carries with it the attendant risks of possible escalation and deterioration that come with this unresolved conflict and will futher erode the viability of a two-state outcome (and would erode America's own security). ... But such bleak scenarios are not inevitable." ... Original Article

How to Save the World

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:53:00 -0500

Dear Mr. President:

An Unstoppable Arms Trade?

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:35:00 -0400

At first glance, the international arms trade seems to be one of those problems that will always be with us, like death and taxes. But just as life can be prolonged and tax rates can be reduced, the traffic in weapons can be reined in, given the political will to do so, as I first suggested in two contributions to World Policy Journal-- the first, "Curbing the Arms Trade: From Rhetoric to Restraint" in the spring of 1992, and "Why Sell Arms?" a year later.

Not much has changed in the ensuing years, alas. The will to control weapons transfers has been sorely lacking, as sales of military goods and services have mushroomed to $32 billion for 2008. That is triple the sales level reached during the first year of the George W. Bush administration. This astonishing increase in sales has been driven in part by the newfound buying power of oil-rich U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf, and in part by the availability of a dizzying array of new arms transfer subsidy programs that have been put into place during the Bush years.

Aside from providing a boon to the defense industry, what purpose do these weapons exports serve? If you asked a representative of the arms industry or the Pentagon, the answer would be something like the following: they help bolster friends and intimidate enemies; they serve as sweeteners for agreements allowing U.S. access to overseas military bases; they make it easier for our allies to operate in partnership with American forces; and they help sustain the U.S. defense industrial base by providing additional revenues to key contractors.

The downside of runaway arms sales usually receives less consideration from policymakers: the "boomerang" effect of American weapons and armsmaking technology falling into the hands of adversaries, as happened in Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq; the destabilizing effects of fueling conflicts from the Middle East to the Caucasus to South Asia; the enabling of human rights abuses; and the economic costs of subsidizing and maintaining expensive high-tech weapons systems.

Arms transfers are generally justified by a mix of strategic, political, and economic motives. The roots of current policy go back to the Nixon administration. As the Vietnam War was becoming increasingly unpopular, President Richard Nixon suggested that while the United States should continue to supply arms and military assistance to its major allies, "the objective of any American administration would be to avoid another war like Vietnam anywhere in the world." This resulted in a strategy of arming regional surrogates such as Iran, Indonesia, and Brazil to promote U.S. interests in their respective areas. The OPEC oil embargo of the early 1970s added a strong dose of economic motivation to Nixon's strategic and political concerns, as Persian Gulf nations used their newfound wealth to scoop up top-of-the-line U.S. armaments. The Shah of Iran was a particularly avid buyer, loading up on costly systems like F-14 and F-16 combat aircraft--weapons that fell into the hands of the Khomeini regime when the Shah was overthrown in January 1979.

The Ford administration followed Nixon's lead, even as the problems of increased arms sales began to become apparent in such cases as the war between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus, in which both sides used weapons made in the United States.

Then along came Jimmy Carter, who had the sensible notion that arms sales were by and large a bad thing. In a 1976 campaign speech, he argued that no one should "justify this unsavory business on the cynical ground that by rationing out the means of violence we can somehow control the world's violence." Unfortunately, the fall of the Shah of Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan killed any chances for arms trade controls during Carter's administration. In fact, by the end of his term, Carter was using arms transfers routinely in support of a variety of objectives, from helping to cement the Camp David agreements with a pledge of billions of dollars in military aid to Egypt and Israel, to bartering arms exports for access to military bases and weapons depots for his new Persian Gulf-focused Rapid Deployment Force (RDF), the forerunner of today's U.S. Central Command.

Ronald Reagan's greatest contribution to the annals of the arms trade was his doctrine of providing covert military aid to "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, and Nicaragua--a policy that inadvertently helped supply and train the very Islamic fundamentalist groups that later joined forces as part of the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

By 1992, economic motives had returned to the fore as President George H. W. Bush touted sales of F-16 combat aircraft to Taiwan and F-15s fighter jets to Saudi Arabia as evidence that "in these times of economic transition, I want to do everything I can to keep Americans at work." In the case of the F- 16 sale to Taiwan, Bush's domestic economic concerns came at a high price: the sale provoked China to pull out of talks among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council aimed at limiting weapons transfers to regions of conflict. China's reaction was tied to Washington's violation of a 1982 accord that was supposed to establish limits on the level of sophistication of weaponry that the United States could transfer to Taiwan. At the time, this development prompted the head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Morton Abramowitz, to observe that "for a President who was establishing a new world order to massively violate a written agreement is hardly conducive to world order."

President Clinton did Bush one better when he explicitly included concerns for the defense industrial base in his official arms sales policy directive. In keeping with this approach, his administration signed off on a then-record $28 billion in arms transfers in his first full year in office, mostly to the Middle East and East Asia. One of Clinton's most controversial moves was his lifting of a longstanding ban on the transfer of U.S. combat aircraft to LatinAmerica, caving in to pressure from the Pentagon and the arms industry to allow the sale of F-16 fighter planes to Chile.

All of the above seems to suggest that the arms trade is an intractable problem that is not amenable to public pressure--or presidential commitment. But there have been important successes in recent years that belie this pessimistic view.

At the international level, there have been a number of initiatives aimed at curbing some of the world's most dangerous weapons systems, driven by the energy and influence of non-governmental organizations. The list includes the global treaty against anti-personnel land mines, which was promoted by a coalition that included human rights, humanitarian, religious, and arms control groups; the recent establishment of a global ban on cluster bombs (weapons of indiscriminate effect that can leave behind thousand of unexploded "bomblets" that pose a threat to military personnel and civilians alike); and the continuing efforts at the United Nations and in key regions to place restrictions on the spread of small arms and light weapons, the primary tools used by governments and non-state actors in devastating wars such as the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

A common thread that unites these efforts is the demand that human rights and humanitarian concerns be placed front and center in decisions on what weapons are transferred, and how they are used. In addition, each campaign has made effective arguments suggesting that beyond the humanitarian benefits of curbing these weapons, there are national security and economic benefits as well--promoting stability, removing risks to traditional armed forces and peacekeeping operations, and making the nations of the global South safe for development.

Shamefully, another common thread uniting these recent arms control successes has been the failure of Washington to support them. The United States has failed to endorse the land mines and cluster bomb treaties, and has done far less than it could--and should--to support limits on the spread of small arms and light weapons. A new administration should endorse these three efforts, providing not only its assent but the energy and resources needed to fulfill their promise of a safer world.

A new administration should also support a global arms trade treaty that would codify existing commitments in international law aimed at restraining sales to human rights abusers and conflict regions. This initiative has already been endorsed by the United States' major NATO allies. Participation by Washington could help persuade other major suppliers like Russia and China to endorse the treaty.

Last but not least, a thorough review of the strategic, political, and human consequences of current U.S. arms sales policies is long overdue. Ideally, it should be carried out by a diverse panel of experts that is not weighted towards representatives of the Pentagon and the arms industry, as is all too often the case with bodies of this sort.

The arms trade is an area in which governments are far behind their own citizens in paving the way for more practical and more humane policies. The next administration in Washington should do everything it can to catch up.

Congress and the 'YouTube War'

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 07:14:00 -0500

The United States is “fighting a different kind of enemy” in its War on Terror, or so says President Bush. He’s right. For the first time since the days of the Barbary pirates, America is doing active battle not with a rival nation, but with a non-state actor (al Qaeda) that lacks a geographical home, is motivated by ideology more than territorial ambition, and whose victories are defined in non-military terms. It is an enemy that uses communication technology, public opinion, and the global 24-hour news cycle to wage its battles. It is, in a very real sense, the first “YouTube War” of the twenty-first century.

The rise of al Qaeda is a sign of the era in which we live. With the spread of economic and political liberalization, with the advent of new communication technology, and with the gradual erosion of state power and influence, individuals, organizations, and institutions are enjoying an unprecedented opportunity to affect international events. The rise of the non-state actor stands to become the most resonant characteristic of global affairs at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Yet the stateless nature of this different kind of enemy is not being reflected in America’s current anti-terrorism strategy. In fact, the United States is wielding a military approach against its jihadist foes that is straight out of a twentieth-century playbook. President Bush has chosen to wage this “different kind of war” in Iraq, in a manner reminiscent of the Balkan wars, the conflict in Rwanda, and even the Vietnam War -- a territorial, resource-based conflict between rival ethnic and religious groups competing for the spoils of political power.

The New Global Environment

Five years after the attacks of September 11, it is long overdue for the United States to factor this new global environment into its approach for fighting the War on Terror. For five years, Congress has followed the White House’s lead in fighting terrorism, with rather uncertain results. In recent congressional elections, the manner in which America is fighting the War on Terror was rarely debated. But, as the 110th Congress implements a legislative agenda for the next two years, it is of critical importance that it do more than simply articulate the fact that America is fighting a “different kind of war” -- and instead ensure that the United States fight that war differently.

To be sure, broader American success in the War on Terror can only come when the albatross of U.S. involvement in Iraq comes to an end. It has been, and will continue to be, near impossible to wage an effective war against a non-state actor so long as America is mired in a state-based civil war that is weakening its global credibility and diverting its attention and resources. The drawdown of American troops in Iraq would help to refocus America’s antiterrorism agenda on al Qaeda and remove from its jihadist enemies the rallying cry of opposition to the continued occupation. The president’s recent protestations notwithstanding, Iraq is not where the War on Terror will be won or lost. What happens in Iraq will not stop the jihadists from waging their civilizational struggle against the United States.

America is mired in a generation-long battle and what is needed today is a comprehensive antiterror strategy that takes into full account the attributes and characteristics of the enemy that America is facing. In the immediate term, that means re-calibrating the efficacy of military power in a war against non-state actors, focusing on the tools of public perception to win the war of ideas, and above all, utilizing the capabilities, knowledge, and resources of constructive non-state actors on behalf of U.S. foreign policy goals.

The Trap Called Iraq

There is probably no more venerated -- and well-funded -- public institution in American society than the U.S. military. Few in Congress have openly questioned the effectiveness of the military as a tool for fighting terrorism. But America’s military has significant limitations when it comes to defeating a non-state actor enemy such as al Qaeda. In the wake of September 11, the Bush administration (understandably) made military power the tip of the sword in America’s response and the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan remains the most effective tactic that has been employed against al Qaeda: removing the terrorists’ home base, dispersing their leaders, and severely degrading the group’s ability to wage attacks against America.

The war in Iraq, on the other hand, has tragically laid bare the limitations of using military force when fighting a non-state actor. Prior to September 11, Osama bin Laden and his top cohorts expressed a willingness, even desire, for the United States to invade and occupy a Muslim country. They saw the benefits of a long, protracted struggle between the United States and an Islamic enemy -- and they have reaped great rewards from the U.S. war in Iraq. Instead of focusing U.S. political, military, and economic power on fighting terrorism, preventing Afghanistan from again becoming a base of operations for al Qaeda, and organizing an antiterror coalition of like-minded nations, Washington has mired the nation in an internecine, sectarian conflict. Above all, the war in Iraq has shown the limitations of U.S. political will and military might. No longer is America perceived as the invincible, benevolent power that it was before it invaded Iraq. As a result, America’s deterrent power has been significantly and fundamentally eroded. It may be the ultimate irony of America’s post-9/11 warrior ethic that the law enforcement officials who prevented the bombing of trans-Atlantic flights to the United States last summer have done as much or more to directly protect the American people than the troops who have rotated through Iraq. This, of course, is not to impugn the soldiers who are fighting and dying in Iraq, but instead the leaders who sent them there. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Senator John Kerry was excoriated by the Bush camp for intimating that the War on Terror could be treated as a law enforcement matter. When one considers how easily the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented by effective coordination among America’s law enforcement agencies, one can’t help but wonder whether the senator was on to something. The reality is that, in an era of asymmetric threats and non-state actors, the sledgehammer of American military force is not necessarily the best means of protecting America’s interests -- sometimes, it’s just old-fashioned police work.

Winning the War of Ideas

In April 2003, it seemed for a moment that the dominant image of the Iraq war would be the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad’s Republic Square. Instead, it is likely to be the pathetic, hooded, and tortured Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison, the Internet videos of Iraqi insurgents attacking American troops, or a defiant Saddam at the gallows.

In the era of the non-state actor, public perception is crucial, but soldiers don’t do public relations. They fight wars and they kill their enemies -- and few have been more effective at this essential skill than the U.S. military. But few armies have been more unprepared for the public relations element of twenty-first century conflict. As Thomas Ricks’ recent book, Fiasco, makes clear, the U.S. military is unsuited for fighting counter-insurgencies. The rampant disclosures of abuse, which culminated in the Abu Ghraib scandal, were largely the result of sending well-trained military units into a guerrilla conflict in a strange land, where years of military training provided little preparation for the daily challenge of armed occupation. The result was a precipitous decline in America’s standing around the world, even among its allies. Recent polling data shows that strong majorities in Germany (78 percent) and Great Britain (56 percent) agreed that the United States was doing a “bad job” of promoting human rights. In a similar poll taken in 1998, fewer than one in four Germans (24 percent) and Britons (22 percent) held that view. ¹

The importance of public perceptions was not lost on America’s enemy. As former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) deputy director John E. McLaughlin has noted, al Qaeda today is driven primarily by “ideology and the Internet.” Right now, the morbidly curious can log onto YouTube.com and other viral video sites that popularize free content through the Internet or any number of jihadist websites to see videos of the killing of American soldiers and Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attacks against coalition troops. As disturbing as these images are, they provide graphic evidence of al Qaeda’s success in using Iraq to create a prime recruiting tool for the terrorists of tomorrow. As a recent memo by the director of strategic communications at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad points out, “Insurgents, sectarian elements, and others are taking control of the message at the public level.”

Congress and the 'YouTube War'

The level of sophistication from insurgent forces is extraordinary, attacks on U.S. forces are filmed from multiple angles with high-resolution optics. Footage is actually edited and soundtracks feature religious statements. According to a recent Newsweek article, “U.S. officials believe insurgents attack American forces primarily to generate fresh footage.” This contrasts greatly with the normal U.S. response to military actions taken in Iraq -- a press release.

However, the White House continues to blame public relations failures for undermining U.S. effectiveness in the War on Terror. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed in early 2006, former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld bragged about the new “strategic communications framework” put forward by the Pentagon to get out America’s story. This past October, word leaked that the Pentagon plans to ramp up its communications effort by creating a rapid response media unit. But even the best communications plan is mere window dressing if you don’t have a good story to tell. A November 2006 Atlantic Monthly profile of Karen Hughes was illuminating in this regard.

The top U.S. public diplomat noted how hard it was for her to “sell” America in the Arab world because of the conflict in Iraq. Iraq notwithstanding, recalibrating the public perception of U.S. foreign policy must be front and center in the minds of the new Congress. It is a great irony of the War on Terror that, while sizable percentages of Muslims are rejecting violence and, in particular, suicide bombings, this has not translated into a more positive view of the United States and its foreign policy objectives. In the five most predominately Muslim countries, sizable majorities continue to express markedly negative views of America and, in particular, the War on Terror.

Yet Washington’s public diplomacy efforts have sputtered. Since 2003, the State Department has been justly faulted for its lack of an overall strategy, qualified staff, and culturally sophisticated approach to public diplomacy -- and for not utilizing the lessons of private-sector campaigns more effectively. Reinvigorating the effort will require not only presidential involvement, but also genuine public measures to improve America’s image overseas.

These can run the gamut from small but meaningful initiatives such as the opening (rather than the closing) of American libraries in foreign locales, increased student exchange programs, foreign scholarships, and wide-ranging public health initiatives to the more vigorous engagement of American business, nonprofits, and even public relations firms in changing perceptions of the United States around the world. When fighting an enemy as media savvy as al Qaeda, Washington needs to take far more seriously the crucial importance of public perception in the YouTube era.

Utilizing Non-State Actors

The universal recognition of organizations like al Qaeda is a clear example of the success of non-state actors in placing themselves on the world’s radar screens. But just as terrorist groups have been able to project themselves, so too have individuals, organizations, and corporations shown the ways in which altruistically minded non-state actors can change the world for the better. In an era of growing privatization in foreign affairs, the United States needs to do more to use these influential non-state actors to further foreign policy objectives.

Take the example of Rita Katz, a freelance intelligence gatherer, whose company, the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute (SITE), provides some of the most up-to-date intelligence about terrorist organizations. Katz and others in the freelance intelligence field have been extraordinarily effective at ferreting out time-sensitive and actionable intelligence resources. At a time when only several dozen people in the FBI have proficiency in Arabic, policymakers should look more closely at individuals like Katz for clues that will uncover a terrorist attack before it occurs. Moreover, groups like SITE or the Investigative Project, headed by Steve Emerson, have shown an ability to harvest public sources of information in areas that traditional intelligence-gatherers eschew.

As Emerson notes, America’s intelligence agencies are hindered by a bureaucratic culture that is overly compartmentalized, resists information-sharing, and has an innate distrust of open source information, which is why outside groups “can do a lot more.” But private intelligence is but one piece of the puzzle. There are numerous other examples of non-state actors furthering national security by drawing on the work of political consultants who advise opposition movements in former Yugoslavia, Georgia, and Ukraine; of trial lawyers who seek to hold state sponsors of terrorists legally responsible; and military contractors who train modern armed forces.

The Bush administration has used some of these groups in isolated circumstances, but the practice of actively drawing on the know-how of non-state actors should become a fundamental element of foreign policy. With Congress’ urging, government agencies should be creating departmental liaisons specifically geared toward reaching non-state actors and utilizing their discrete expertise.

Regulating Military Contractors

Above all, Congress must draft commonsense guidelines for non-state actors to develop relationships that are based on transparency, accountability, and oversight. Consider the case of military contractors. In Bosnia, these groups provided essential security support for U.S. peacekeeping troops. In Afghanistan, private military contractors (PMCs) helped U.S. forces attack al Qaeda leaders and recruit proxy Afghan armies. In Iraq, PMCs are the backbone of the U.S. occupation, providing essential administrative and security services. According to recent Pentagon estimates, there are currently 25,000 private security contractors (PSCs) engaged in Iraq. This private army of contractors represents the second-largest contingent of armed personnel serving in Iraq who provide essential support to America’s overburdened military. Since April 2003, the Labor Department estimates that more than 670 contractors have been killed -- a total greater than all non-U.S. coalition fatalities combined.

Yet few are asking the difficult questions about their responsibilities. Many firms operate in a gray zone beyond congressional oversight, military codes of conduct, and even international law. For example, in the United States, only recently have legislative changes made it possible for PSCs to be held accountable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the legal code that applies to U.S. military personnel. This attempt at enhancing accountability on the battlefield is a step in the right direction, though it remains to be seen if it is actually implementable. While certain international conventions apply to armed civilians, enforcement of these rules is discretionary and has been generally non-existent. In Iraq, if a contractor kills an Iraqi civilian, there is virtually no legal recourse for the victim’s family. The involvement of civilian contractors in military roles also creates operational challenges. Private security contractors are outside the official chain of command and control. But, to the average Iraqi citizen, the actions of contractors are indistinguishable from those of soldiers. They are just more Americans carrying guns -- uniform or no uniform. As a result, illegal actions by PSCs reflect directly -- often negatively -- on their home country.

Clearly, America’s reliance on PSCs is growing faster than Washington’s ability or inclination to regulate them. Congressional action is long overdue.

Supporting Those 'Supporting Democracy'

In addition, Congress and the Bush administration need to do a better job of standing up for individuals and organizations that work to promote democracy overseas. For more than a decade, foreign funds, not only from sympathetic foreign governments, but from a number of non-state actors, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and wealthy individuals, have flowed freely into nascent democracies. This seed capital has paid for political expertise, civic organizing, and public relations programs that have helped propel democratic movements.

But in January 2006, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed legislation oppressively regulating non-governmental organizations in Russia. The bill created a government agency with a mandate to monitor more than 400,000 civil society groups now in existence and shut down those whose activities “contradict the constitution or the laws of the Russian Federation.” This effort was widely perceived as a direct attack on a fledgling Russian democracy.

Yet while the Bush administration protested, the complaints were half-hearted and lacking true diplomatic muscle. Restricting the work of NGOs is a shot across the bow to the administration’s stated policy of encouraging the spread of democracy. Moreover, when U.S. international credibility is in decline, NGOs and advocacy groups can play a unique role in circumventing diplomatic channels and promoting objectives fundamental to national interests. But they need diplomatic support. The success of President Vladimir Putin’s efforts at stifling democracy advocates may encourage emulation otherwise. Congress should take up the issue of NGOs operating freely in Russia today as it did the issue of Jewish refuseniks in the past.

Engaging the Business Community

Last November, a G-8 sponsored conference of global business leaders debated how they might help in the fight against terrorism. The results were achievable ideas for cross-border collaboration: improved monitoring of terrorist activity in the financial, telecommunications, and Internet sectors, and agreement to prioritize sectors that were potential targets of a terrorist attack, such as infrastructure, international trade supply chains, and centers of tourism. Heads of international transport unions, banks, agricultural and industry conglomerates, and even the World Diamond Council offered models of how new standards and information-sharing could help to expose havens of criminal activity. Above all, business leaders acknowledged that thus far their efforts have been reactive -- protecting employees and assets -- but precious little effort has been put toward proactively countering terrorist operations.

Initiatives to harness the resources and innovation of the private sector are encouraging. Collaboration between business and government to fight terrorism can be especially effective when implemented at the local and regional level. But this is no easy task. Government officials are often unable to speak the language of non-state actors and the communication gap has frustrated a number of well-intentioned proposals. Congress must ultimately ensure that the engagement of the private sector is abetted with incentives and leadership, so that segmented actions become a sum greater than their parts.

Congress, in short, has an opportunity to change the course of the War on Terror and ensure that America is fighting this “different kind of enemy” in a different and effective manner. To do so, Washington must recognize the changing nature of global relations, which offers greater opportunities for non-state actors, but also demands of them greater responsibilities. Doing so is a complicated endeavor, but it must become a defining feature of U.S. foreign policy. To successfully wage the War on Terror requires more than tough talk and the sword of military tactics -- it requires a fundamental rethinking of the forces driving global affairs in the twenty-first century.

¹.“American and International Opinion on the Rights of Terrorism Suspects,” Program on International Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland, July 17, 2006, at http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/

A Goldilocks World Economy?

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 09:22:00 -0500

Over the past decade and half, two developments in the world economy have come together to create conditions for what could be a new era of faster economic growth and rising prosperity. One development involves the integration of China, India and the former Soviet Union into the global economy. The inclusion of these three populous regions into the global economy has created what economists call positive supply-side shocks, resulting in surpluses in labor, capital, and productive capacity. The most obvious impact of China, India, and the former Soviet Union has been on the world's labor market. Their entry into the world economy has, in effect, doubled the global labor force in the course of a decade, raising the return on capital and dampening wages and inflation. Capital has also become plentiful because of the high-saving propensities of China and other Asian economies. In fact, Asia is producing more savings than the world can absorb. This glut of world savings, together with the increasing globalization of financial markets, has predictably driven down the cost of capital and has helped keep interest rates low worldwide.

The other development relates to the technological advancements and other changes associated with the new economy, which have substantially increased U.S. and world productivity growth. American productivity growth has risen to the pre-1973 levels that were responsible for the rapid improvements in American living standards, jumping from an average of 1.53 percent for the period 1973-95, to 2.6 percent in the period from 1996 to 2005. World productivity has shown a similarly impressive increase. This productivity acceleration is the product of three over-lapping revolutions: a technological revolution in data processing and communications; a related revolution in the production and distribution model made possible by globalization and these new techonologies; and an efficiency revolution in materials and energy.

The full text of this article can be downloaded below in PDF form.

The Road Not Taken in the Middle East

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 05:04:00 -0500

The Middle East diplomatic Quartet (composed of the United States, the European Union, the Russian Federation, and the Office of the Secretary General of the United Nation) authored and put forward its Road Map to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on April 30, 2003. The Road Map outlined steps to be taken by the parties. It was an ambitious plan that dealt with internal Palestinian security, humanitarian assistance, democratic reform, freedom of movement for Palestinians, Israeli military redeployment, and settlement freeze -- all culminating in a permanent status agreement by end of 2005.

Needless to say, none of the parties lived up to their sides of the bargain, the Quartet authors included. Implementation was all but nonexistent and the timetable lapsed, but the Quartet has not given up completely and international declarations still pay homage to the Road Map. This memo should be used as a guide for the Quartet on lessons learned and (if willing) the needed steps to see through the objective set forth three years ago.

The full text of this article is available below in PDF format.

Thinking Like a Jihadist

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 01 May 2006 16:20:02 -0400

Earlier this year, Muhammad Zaki Amawi and Marwan Othman el-Hindi, Jordanianborn U.S. citizens, and Wassim I. Mazloum, a Lebanese citizen, stood in a federal district court in Ohio, accused of conspiring to wage jihad against U.S. forces in Iraq. According to the indictment against them, Amawi had flown to Jordan last August carrying laptop computers that he intended to donate to the mujahidin in Iraq. Amawi, the indictment stated, had "unsuccessfully attempted to enter Iraq to wage violent jihad, or "holy war,' against the United States and coalition forces"...

The complete article is available below in PDF format.

Privatizing Foreign Policy

Ron Tang — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:00:00 -0400

In August 2000, a motley array of democracy activists, politicians, and fringe nationalists trudged into a hotel in Budapest. The assembled figures constituted the leading members of Serbia’s political opposition movement -- a fractured and increasingly desperate group. Only weeks earlier, Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, hoping to catch his erstwhile opposition off guard, had announced snap presidential elections. After watching his domestic opponents spend eight years repeatedly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Milosevic was confident. But this time, Serbia’s democratic leaders had a secret weapon -- a bespectacled, Harvard-educated political consultant armed with a PowerPoint presentation.

Doug E. Schoen, who had worked for Bill Clinton and numerous foreign political leaders, had spent several years polling the Serbian electorate. The results were always the same: Milosevic was deeply unpopular, but so too were the individuals gathered in Budapest. Their incessant infighting caused many to wonder whether these nascent democrats were truly serious about bringing political change, or simply wanted to further their own narrow political agendas. Zoran Djindjic, the nominal favorite to run against the Serbian strongman, was a highly flawed candidate. He had fled Serbia during the NATO bombing of Kosovo in 1999, and thus many Serbs viewed him as a coward. “I can’t win, can I?” he asked Schoen. “No,” Schoen responded.¹

After a pause, Djindjic asked, “What about Kostunica?” referring to Vojislav Kostunica, the leader of a minor opposition party and a former law professor. Schoen’s polls showed that of all Serbia’s opposition politicians, Kostunica was the best candidate -- combining strong nationalist credibility with low “unfavorability” ratings. With Schoen’s urging, the Serbian opposition united behind Kostunica’s candidacy, and within months a key element of U.S. foreign policy in the Balkans had been realized -- Slobodan Milosevic was out of power and headed to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
Was a political pollster single-handedly responsible for toppling Slobodan Milosevic? Not exactly, but after eight years of sanctions, smart bombs, and fervent, often fruitless, diplomacy, a new and unexpected weapon for defeating him had been found -- namely a non-state actor, working in concert with U.S officials but motivated as well by market-driven impulses and personal altruism.

This wasn’t the first time that non-state actors (or NSAs) had played a leading role in the Balkan conflict. In 1995, private military contractors -- with the active support of the Clinton administration -- trained the Croatian army for its military offensive against Serbian rebel-held positions in Croatia and Bosnia, which helped push the region’s warring parties toward peace talks.

This is one small example of what may be the most important yet misunderstood political and social developments of the post-Cold War era: the growing prominence and influence of NSAs in global affairs. Non-state institutions, corporations, and advocacy groups are playing an increasingly prominent role in nearly every aspect of foreign policy, from promoting democracy, providing humanitarian relief, and fighting international terrorism to propelling economic liberalization, curing disease, and even waging war. The international landscape abounds with examples:

•After more than a decade of international sanctions, Libya was finally forced to accept culpability in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in part due to a civil lawsuit initiated by the families of the victims and a group of enterprising trial lawyers.

•In 1997, a determined activist -- using email as her tool -- brought together an array of human rights advocates to lead a global campaign to ban landmines.

•Stretched thin by multiple conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military has increasingly relied on private military contractors. As a result, more than 20,000 unregulated military contractors, equivalent to a U.S. Army division, serve in Iraq alongside coalition forces.

•Contagious diseases that threaten millions are being attacked as never before by philanthropists and corporations with both the will and the pocketbooks to make a difference.

For more than three centuries, the nation-state has served as the foundation of the global political order -- hence the “international” system. Although the nation-state remains dominant, no longer can it necessarily be considered preeminent. With the fading of superpower rivalry, the advent of economic and political globalization, the diminished role of the state in economic affairs, the absence of strong supranational authorities, and the spread of new communication technologies, the role of the nation-state has dramatically eroded.

In 1997, Jessica Matthews, now president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a seminal article in Foreign Affairs, noted that the “end of the Cold War has brought about a novel redistribution of power among states, markets, and civil society. National governments are not simply losing autonomy in a globalizing economy. They are sharing powers... with businesses, international organizations, and a multitude of citizen groups known as nongovernmental organizations.”² The “power shift” that Matthews and others discerned has since gained momentum.

Over the past decade, the way we view foreign policy has fundamentally shifted. While the years from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the era of the nation-state, the period since may be viewed in a vastly different light as the era of the non-state actor. The challenge for policymakers is to comprehend the full panoply of NSAs, how states can most effectively engage them, and the partnerships that can be created in furtherance of foreign policy goals.

A New Foreign Policy Market

The role of non-state actors in international affairs is not a recent development. The United Fruit Company and the British East India Company virtually guided foreign policy in Central America and the subcontinent in their day. Organizations like the Red Cross and anti-slavery groups influenced international affairs in the past, as multinational corporations do today. In the waning years of the Cold War, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) pressed successfully to bring environmental issues and human rights concerns to the world’s attention. However, non-state actors largely operated within the framework of a state-centric system. What is most striking about NSAs today is that while some collaborate intimately with states, others tend to operate by their own rules, and are often guided by their own parochial interests -- interests that may run counter to those of their home governments. Moreover, NSAs are demonstrating a growing ability to project their power and influence across borders, often without regard to formerly sacrosanct notions of state sovereignty.

NSAs cannot function without the regulatory framework that states provide, but that does not mean that they are necessarily beholden to their home governments.³ If anything, there is increasing evidence that states themselves are in fact becoming more dependent on a whole host of non-state actors. Could the United States, for example, fight its war in Iraq without private military contractors? Could it promote democracy around the world without the involvement of NGOs, political consultants, and emerging civil society movements? Could economic liberalization have proceeded so quickly without the leverage of international investment and the prominence of global capital markets? Would efforts at AIDS prevention and education be as effective without the involvement of philanthropists like Bill Gates and private citizens like Bill Clinton? These codependent relationships reflect the new political dynamic of the era of the non-state actor. As NSAs continue to gain influence in global affairs, managing the state/non-state actor relationship will become one of the critical challenges facing policymakers.

To better manage that relationship it is essential to expand the definition of what constitutes a non-state actor. No longer can NSAs simply be characterized as traditional NGOs or civil society groups. A proper definition must be as elastic as possible to incorporate the full array of actors that are now able to make their voices heard, and their actions felt, in global affairs.⁴

Nor is it always accurate to assume that NSAs are motivated by altruism, or what might be considered public-sector concerns. An altogether different impulse is increasingly guiding many non-state actors: “foreign policy for profit.” As the state has retreated -- and the opportunity for non-state actors to flex their muscles has emerged -- a foreign policy “market” has been created, one that individuals and organizations motivated by the prospect of profit and influence have been happy to fill.

As state sovereignty erodes and the barriers to entry for new global actors continue to fall, policymakers are struggling to adjust to this new dynamic. For the most part, the Bush administration remains obstinately focused on a state-centric global model, particularly in its approach to fighting terrorism. As the French Islamic theorist Gilles Kepel points out, the Bush administration could not be dissuaded from waging war on Iraq as a means of countering terrorism because it was “culturally incapable of grasping an actor that was not, in the final analysis, a state.”⁵ Yet with an administration whose senior officials seem determined to “protect” American sovereignty against the United Nations, international institutions, and the amorphous notion of an international community, it seems hardly surprising that Washington would unilaterally pursue a state sponsor of international terrorism, no matter how marginal the link.

Among conservatives, there has been an abiding fear that the decline of state sovereignty would be matched by the rise of supranational institutions or a “world government,” as some have ominously warned. Instead, it may well be that the greatest challenge to state power is not international law or world government but a decentralized, diffuse, and more democratic global system in which even the most powerful actors are discovering significant limitations on their actions.

These limitations on state power are not being imposed from above. Instead, they reflect the dominant themes of political openness, economic integration, and technological change that define the post-Cold War era. In fact, it is these constraints on state power, and the subsequent opportunities provided to NSAs, that are most responsible for the dawn of this new era.

What Has Changed?

Technological advancement has become the one-size-fits-all explanation for myriad social, economic, and political changes. But there is little doubt that the development of communications technology has played a crucial role in diminishing state power. To be sure, the transformative impact of technology is not a new phenomenon. The roots of twentieth-century totalitarian rule derived in part from the ability of leaders to manipulate new forms of mass communication. Today, we are witnessing the reverse.

Information technology is slowly chipping away at the power of states to shape and create public opinion. Today, more than 100 million Chinese are surfing the Web, and China has more than 4 million blogs. As the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof argues, “The Chinese Communist Party survived a brutal civil war with the Nationalists, battles with American forces in Korea and massive pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. But now it may finally have met its match -- the Internet.”⁶ In fact, during the SARS epidemic, it was Chinese citizens, over the objections of government officials, who used the Internet to bring the issue to the fore.

More significantly, advances in technological penetration and the decreasing costs of cross-border communication also provide non-state actors with the ability to operate globally. Creating an overseas presence can be as simple nowadays as plugging in a broadband Internet connection or relocating a call center to a foreign locale.

The possibilities are not limited to for-profit institutions. Following the tsunami in the Indian Ocean last December, the Internet became an invaluable tool for raising money, helping families find missing relatives, providing news and information, and even serving as an early-warning tool. Online donations helped humanitarian agencies raise and distribute money, so much so that within ten days of the calamity, online donations almost matched the initial $350 million pledged by the U.S. government.⁷

As the tsunami disaster demonstrated, because non-state actors are generally less hierarchal and bureaucratic than their state counterparts, they are able to utilize new technologies far more efficiently. These technological changes, on their own, would be dramatic, but by combining technological advancements with new-found political and economic openness they appear downright revolutionary.

Over the past decade or so, we have witnessed an era of unprecedented political revolution. Much of the world is today living under elected regimes formally committed to economic liberalization, the rule of law, and respect for human rights. These positive developments have to a large extent fundamentally weakened state power by empowering non-state actors and providing them with the opportunity to operate across borders with relative impunity.

As seamlessly as individuals and networks travel across national boundaries so too do ideas. Earlier this year, the United State Supreme Court, in Roper v. Simmons, cited “international opinion” as a rationale for declaring an end to the death penalty for juveniles. Clearly, the flow in cultural norms is no longer a one-way process.

At the same time, while states must balance the concerns of domestic constituencies in addressing foreign policy challenges, NSAs are responsive to their stakeholders, providing them with needed flexibility for action. The Bush administration, in joining the fight against AIDS in Africa, has earmarked a third of its proposed $15 billion pledge for abstinence education and refuses to fund groups that support abortion, largely to placate its conservative political base. NSAs may or may not be bound by the same “political” constraints, but those that are act out of choice -- not obligation.

While states tend to respond to the current news cycle or latest cause célèbre, NSAs can take proactive positions well ahead of their counterparts in government. For example, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, U.S. war planners already had on their desks plans for removing Iraq’s thousands of deadly landmines. The initiative did not come from a Pentagon functionary but from a private firm in search of a lucrative government contract.⁸

For generations, international economics was a zero-sum game in which rival nations sought either control over territory or the resources crucial to economic superiority. Yet, as the British scholars John Stopford and Susan Strange point out, states “now compete more for wealth as a means to power -- but more for the power to maintain internal order and social cohesion than for the power to conduct foreign conquest or to defend themselves against attack.”⁹ For better or for worse, corporations are increasingly seen as essential providers of capital, technology, management skills, and even access to foreign markets in developing countries.¹⁰ In a sense, the world of global economic policy has become akin to owning a professional sports franchise. The states set the rules, and they may have some input into building and paying the team, but they are not necessarily the ones on the field playing the game.

Even the way we think about international economic policy is changing. On college campuses, students of international relations are being taught that a nation’s economic well-being can be judged in part by the measure of imports versus exports. But when one considers that the value of goods produced overseas by American transnational corporations is more than twice that of American exports, and that sales by foreign-owned companies inside the United States were nearly twice the value of imports, do classical trade measurements really give us a true sense of economic might, or even of the global economic landscape?¹¹

The new scale is not simply macroeconomic. On a day-to-day level, the notion of the “provisory” state has been radically changed. With the privatization of once exclusively governmental services in everything from transportation and financial services to health care and social welfare, coupled with the gradual erosion of respect for government, the state’s preeminence has been dramatically displaced. The concept of the state as the provider of public goods is challenged both by a greater reliance on free markets and by a lack of trust in government institutions.¹²

In poor countries, the shift is even more profound. Nongovernmental organizations, private charities, and even for-profit corporations are increasingly providing education and health care, supplanting governments too strapped or too inefficient to offer such basic services on their own. In the richer nations, too, private enterprise has become the conduit by which some citizens receive health care, retirement benefits, and, in some cases, personal security.

One might assume that national security would be the one sphere in which the state’s power remains unchallenged. But with the diminishing threat of interstate conflict, notions of national solidarity have been severely weakened. While President Kennedy could call upon Americans to “bear any burden” to prevail over the enemies of freedom, today the Bush White House urges Americans to help fight the war on terrorism by “going to the mall.” As the Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye puts it, “the absence of a warrior ethic in modern democracies,” limits the flexibility of nations not only to wage war, but even to justify it.¹³

Fundamentally, it has become more difficult to argue that issues of war and peace are still the primary concerns of international relations. As noted, the threat of interstate conflict has diminished, and intrastate conflict has become the primary cause of death from war. Moreover, since 1991, the number of armed conflicts has steadily declined. From a high of 51 wars in 1991, armed conflicts in the world have fallen by more than half. And although in the year 2000 alone 300,000 people were killed in war -- a grim toll -- this was surely a significant improvement over the twentieth century’s bloody legacy.¹⁴

Nobody could sensibly contend that national identity is no longer relevant -- in fact, in an increasingly globalized and fractured global environment, individuals may identify with the state more closely than ever. But that sense of recognition seems likely to become a symbolic relationship, with a diminished willingness of citizens to sacrifice and die for their country.

Finally, international legal precedents have also propelled the rise of non-state actors. In the mid-1970s, the Helsinki Accords provided a framework for human rights monitoring and gave impetus to NGOs concerned with human rights. Today, with a growing web of international agreements on everything from global warming and landmines to biodiversity and human rights, plus new global bodies like the International Criminal Court and a panoply of U.N.-based transnational organizations, virtual armies of NSAs have assembled to monitor, implement, and advocate. The result is a new mode of international behavior that is transnational in nature and constantly impinging on national sovereignty.

Of itself, the confluence of these factors does not fully explain the growing role of non-state actors. In fact, NSAs are not only filling a vacuum left by the retreat of the state but are also responding to a new set of challenges that seep across borders. It is that capability, bolstered by technology, political openness, and international law, that provides NSAs with an opportunity to influence global behavior.

Consider the issue of child labor, which gained prominence on the international agenda in the mid-1990s. NGOs and human rights advocates identified the problem but went beyond a state-based regulatory solution and directly targeted the source: manufacturers such as Nike. The result was progress on an international problem that scarcely involved traditional methods of statecraft.

Similar approaches can be seen in the international campaign to ban landmines, the debt relief movement (spearheaded by U2’s lead singer, Bono), and growing calls for corporate social responsibility, as well as advocacy efforts directed at creating international codes of conduct. Non-state actors have employed sophisticated public relations tactics to build awareness and put pressure on governments, global institutions, and for-profit companies. More and more, it is NSAs that are setting the global agenda and providing solutions to modern challenges such as terrorism, the AIDS crisis, global warming, environmental degradation, and corruption. In fact, it is hard to imagine a single bilateral relationship that enjoys the same importance as these multinational issues.

In reality, even states as powerful as the United States lack the necessary resources, bureaucratic interest, or even political motivation to address the ever increasing range of crises on the global agenda. As the French foreign policy analyst Dominique Moisi points out, “There is a race between the growing power of America and the growing complexity of the world. But it is a race that America cannot win.”¹⁵

Widespread Influence

In a real sense, the proliferation of non-state actors is hardly surprising, particularly when one considers the defining characteristics of the post-Cold War era: economic globalization and international terrorism. Both have been fundamentally influenced by the behavior of NSAs.

Before September 11, economic integration and trade liberalization defined the international agenda, a process largely driven by private actors. The World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank obviously played a role. The Clinton administration also pressed other countries to open their markets, build transparent regulatory regimes, and protect intellectual property.¹⁶ However, states like China, India, and the former members of the Warsaw Pact undertook the often painful process of economic liberalization not simply to please Washington or international financial institutions, but to gain access to global capital markets, attract foreign direct investment, and thereby achieve robust and sustainable economic growth.

In this process, the efficacy of foreign aid has diminished. Twenty years ago, government assistance was four times greater than that of private capital flows. Today the numbers are reversed: private investment is now six times greater than foreign aid, and charitable giving to international development is three times greater than the amount given by the U.S. government.¹⁷

Few would dispute that competitive markets, the flow of cross-border capital, and investment decisions by huge corporations are driving globalization. These corporate entities have become the most important economic and social actors on the world stage, rivaling and sometimes surpassing the influence of states. More than 50 of the world’s 100 largest economies are publicly owned companies with workforces in the hundreds of thousands and offices in every major region of the world.¹⁸

Mega-sized businesses can be as consequential to the world economy as even some medium-sized countries. To be sure, the influence of multinationals is hardly a new development. The difference is that in the past large conglomerates often operated in tandem with home governments, while today’s corporate behemoths are global actors in their own right.

According to Jeffrey Garten, former dean of the Yale School of Management, “The most important and enduring relationships between the United States and other countries are often based on the trade and investment of American businesses. Today, U.S firms have a significant presence in virtually every large country. They advise foreign governments. They are transmission belts for American culture and values. Indeed, U.S. businesses often surpass the influence of American embassies on the societies in which they have become rooted.”¹⁹

The influence of multinational firms can also be seen in the regulatory framework of international economics. Debt-rating agencies maintain enormous influence over fiscal policy, private arbitration services are supplanting the role of the judiciary, and corporate lobbyists have helped set new global rules on intellectual property rights.²⁰

While these economic players exert a critical and generally positive influence on international affairs, they are singular. On September 11, 2001, nineteen young men with an unwavering ideological fervor changed the course of history. Al-Qaeda and its subsidiary organizations are, tragically, the ultimate example of the ways in which non-state actors are transforming the international landscape. Terrorism previously was largely state-sponsored, or at the least maintained state-centric aspirations. Today, al-Qaeda operates outside the state system, and its “success” is due in large measure to its ability to use the mechanisms of globalization -- cross-border travel, advanced communications technology, and the international media -- to its advantage.

Al-Qaeda is not alone. The profits from global drug trafficking dwarf the economies of many countries. According to one estimate, the value of all the cocaine produced in Latin America in 2001 was approximately $93 billion -- an amount greater than the gross national income of three-quarters of the nations in the world. In the United States alone, the illegal narcotics trade is estimated to be a $60 billion industry.²¹ With their vast profits and global reach, the sophisticated criminal networks that control this narco-traffic are having a profound effect on the ability of some states to govern themselves. President Bush recently classified 22 countries as major drug-transit or major illicit drug-producing countries.²²

These examples illustrate how NSAs are creating new international realities. But the era of the non-state actor is defined as much by what is happening at the bottom of the global food chain as what is happening at the top. The diffusion and limitations of state power are creating new opportunities for private actors -- often in ways that are not readily apparent. Evidence of NSA influence may be seen in the complex and multifarious relationships that develop between states and non-state actors. Scholars have often focused on understanding the particular “typology” of NSAs -- defining them on the basis of their public, private, or civil society roots. But, policymakers must further their understanding of the dynamics of state/NSA relationships if they are to manage them successfully. State/NSA interaction can be broadly defined in five discrete categories: direct engagement between states and non-state actors; selective engagement, or episodic burden sharing; NSAs circumventing states; conflictual relations; and agenda setting.²³

Direct Engagement

In March 2004, Americans were shocked by images of charred and dismembered bodies being dragged through the streets of the Iraqi city of Fallujah and then hung in gruesome display. The scene brought back memories of another tragedy that deeply affected Americans and the conduct of U.S. foreign policy -- the killing of 19 Rangers in Somalia in 1993. But this time the corpses were not those of U.S. soldiers. These men were employees of Blackwater USA, a private military contractor. The U.S. war in Iraq has underscored one of the more profound examples of state/NSA cooperation -- the use of private military companies (PMCs), also known as private security companies. It is a relationship with visible implications for the way the U.S. government plans and manages global security operations.

Among the thousands of private contractors providing logistical support in Iraq, at least 20,000 employees from 60 different PMCs are under contract to the U.S. government to provide security services.²⁴ (Another 50-70,000 unarmed civilians are in Iraq to provide other services, from delivering mail to rebuilding essential infrastructure.) Armed civilians, many of them former Special Forces, handle an estimated 30 percent of essential security services, guarding reconstruction projects, escorting convoys through hostile areas, and defending strategic locations and individuals, among other things.²⁵ Even the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is protected by a private contractor, the U.S. firm, DynCorp.

The use of PMCs has grown steadily since the early 1990s. During the Gulf War, the ratio of soldiers to private security contractors was 50 to 1; today, it is closer to 7 to 1. Private military companies are not only supporting a shrinking U.S. force in Iraq; they are also playing critical roles for both state and non-state actors in stabilization, drug interdiction, and humanitarian operations around the world.

Mercenaries have long been a part of war, but as one of the fastest-growing sectors in the defense industry, some PMCs are shedding their “guns for hire” reputation for a more respectable, corporate image. Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, estimates that “the 1,000 or so companies that define the industry... currently rake in $100 billion per year for active operations in over 50 countries around the world, and the industry is expected to double in size to $200 billion by 2010.”²⁶ Sensing the business potential, large defense contractors have been buying up some of the oldest private firms -- MPRI, DynCorp, and Vinnell Corporation are now subsidiaries of L-3 Communications, Computer Sciences Corporation, and Northrup Grumman, respectively. Private military companies are increasingly part of larger conglomerates that offer a range of services from combat support to post-conflict reconstruction and provide governments with a virtual “one-stop” war-fighting shop.

The privatization of military operations reflects a government-wide emphasis on achieving greater cost-effectiveness and efficiency in public institutions. Testifying before Congress earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asserted that contracting civilians was “freeing up additional tens of thousands of military personnel for military responsibilities -- [resulting in] an increased usable military end strength without an increase in overall numbers.”²⁷ At the same time, however, the government’s reliance on PMCs has grown faster than its ability to monitor them, particularly since these firms largely operate in a gray zone beyond congressional oversight, military codes of conduct, and even international humanitarian law -- creating a host of legal, financial, and political concerns.

Still, it is exactly these “political” attributes that make PMCs so attractive to policymakers. In an era of the all-volunteer force, contracting can make it possible for policymakers to underplay the costs of war. For example, Singer notes that PMCs in Iraq have suffered more dead and injured than all non-U.S. coalition forces combined.²⁸ Hiring contractors can also give decision-makers the political breathing room to support military operations in response to national security interests that enjoy little public support. For example, in 1998, Nigerian peacekeepers were sent to reinforce Sierra Leonean troops fighting Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels. The U.S. contribution to ECOMOG, the West African peacekeeping force, was combat support from a private firm, International Charter Incorporated of Oregon.²⁹

The complexity surrounding the legal status of PMCs also points to the difficulty of defining appropriate state/NSA cooperation. As armed civilians working abroad for private firms, contractors may be governed by their company’s code of conduct, but not by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The resulting difficulties were painfully exposed in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. U.S. Army investigations determined that a third of the incidents there -- ranging from abuse to rape and assault -- involved private contractors (including translators and interrogators).³⁰ Thus far, none have been disciplined. Disturbingly, if a private contractor were to kill an Iraqi civilian, the victim’s family would have practically no legal recourse. In considering the dilemma of PMCs that may violate international humanitarian law while employed on a mission, an executive from Médecins Sans Frontières was prompted to ask, “Who can be held to account? The shareholders?”³¹

In addition to thorny political and legal issues, the increasing reliance on PMCs may also be eroding the capacity of the very states that employ them. If not properly managed, contracting can hamstring a government’s ability to innovate and also retain skilled individuals. An experienced Special Forces operative can earn up to $250,000 annually with a PMC -- two to ten times more than in the military -- plus benefits, vacation, and the choice to opt out of risky operations. The exodus of military personnel to the private sector has significant longterm implications for a military that has spent years and taxpayers’ money preparing highly trained soldiers. To take one example, there are more former members of Britain’s elite Special Air Service (SAS) serving with PMCs in Iraq than there are members of the SAS in the British force there.³²

Mixing public and private warriors in security operations is also affecting the morale of enlisted troops and is leading to practical dilemmas in the field. In Fallujah, the political ramifications of the violent deaths of Blackwater employees forced military planners to engage insurgents sooner than they would have preferred. The subsequent combat operations resulted in significant U.S. casualties and further strained relations between the military ranks and contractors.³³

Relying on PMCs may be militarily and politically expedient, but it challenges policymakers to consider the appropriate balance between public and private authority in foreign policy. In the scheme of state/NSA relations, privatizing military operations requires that governments become vigilant clients while at the same time retaining their role as regulators of the public interest.

Selective Engagement

While PMCs have become a virtual subsidiary of the U.S. military, in most cases the relationship between non-state actors and states is more improvised. A form of tentative, selective engagement in the so-called soft area of democratization provides a model for such cooperation. Since the end of the Cold War, democracy promotion has gained broad acceptance as a foreign policy goal. Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, notes that democracy assistance is a relatively new phenomenon that typically includes “helping to develop the formal political institutions of democracy; assisting the preparation, conduct, and monitoring of elections; and strengthening independent organizations in civil society.”³⁴ For decades, the United States has funded its own official programs and organizations (both covert and overt) and has contributed to a dense network of private NGOs whose philanthropic aim is to foster democratic practices at the grass roots. The explosion of young democracies emerging from the Cold War has only intensified these efforts.

In recent years, however, budget constraints and a disproportionate preoccupation with democracy promotion in Iraq and Afghanistan have constrained U.S. policymakers’ ability to match their rhetoric with adequate resources. At the same time, the growing influence of media and the emphasis on “image-based” elections has changed the business of politics, creating a lucrative market for communications and marketing professionals. American political consultants, working on their own abroad, are having a significant impact on democratization -- not only by changing the style of global electoral politics but also by promoting their own vision of democracy.

The fingerprints of consultants can be found on nearly every major campaign of the past two decades -- South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, Boris Yeltsin’s defeat of resurgent Communists in 1995, the crucial Israeli plebiscites in 1996 and 1999, in which Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak were the respective winners, the election of long-time dissident Kim Dae Jung in South Korea in 1997, the end of eight decades of PRI rule in Mexico in 2000, Tony Blair’s successful efforts in Britain, the unsuccessful campaigns to unseat Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe in 2002 and 2005, and even the defeat of Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia in 2004. In fact, almost 60 percent of U.S. political consulting firms report working overseas.³⁵

Their influence stretches beyond campaigns. Consultants with corporate experience have shown candidates and democracy movements how to adapt corporate marketing approaches for political ends. The Yugoslav student movement “Otpor” (“Resistance”) built support for its anti-Milosevic movement using a simple slogan, “Gotov Je!” (“It’s time for him to go”), and a compelling logo (a clenched fist in black and white). Both were plastered around the country on 1.8 million bumper stickers (paid for with U.S. help). “Our inspiration came from multinational companies and things like Coca-Cola and -- or Levi’s” said one of Otpor’s student leaders.³⁶ Using other well-established techniques, like door-to-door canvassing and the targeting of key groups, Otpor created momentum for the non-violent ouster of Slobodan Milosevic. With the help of the Internet and well funded NGOs, Otpor’s experience with Western campaign techniques has spread to nascent democratic movements from Ukraine and Zimbabwe to Iran and Egypt.

In addition, Western-style focus groups and public opinion surveys that test the potential effectiveness of campaign strategies and policy initiatives, and find an opponent’s weaknesses, have become de rigueur in developing democracies. In 2002, South Korean presidential candidate Roh Moo Hyun took the advice of consultants and political pollsters in employing anti-American rhetoric to mobilize a critical constituency of voters under the age of 35. The strategy paid off, despite the diplomatic ill-will it created, as Roh won the presidency by a slim 2 percentage points. The power of polling information is not lost even on those who fail to embrace democratic norms. In Nepal, Maoist rebels kidnapped a poll taker who was testing public opinion for an international polling firm. In the ensuing hostage negotiations, the pollster’s captors did not ask for money or the release of political prisoners -- they wanted the group’s survey results.

By taking on some of the most important international campaigns of the past ten years, political consultants have put an indelible stamp on democracy promotion. In fact, political consultants are in some respects running their own foreign policy by deciding who they will work with in the first place. Many say they do not choose clients according to the size of their wallets but look for candidates who embody a positive vision of democracy (and have the skills to realize that vision).

The unique capabilities of political consultants present genuine opportunities for U.S. policymakers to harness this expertise to foreign policy ends. The campaign that ultimately ousted Slobodan Milosevic from power in 2000 was a dramatic example of how the U.S. government can effectively work with private political consultants to advance specific policy objectives. Washington’s aid package to help Serbia’s democrats included funds to hire leading U.S. pollsters and political consultants. The United States also funded some NGOs, including the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, which organized voter education and political training for activists, citizens, students, and the media. To be sure, it was the courage of the Serbian opposition, and of voters who endured violence and intimidation, that brought Milosevic down. But political consultants provided the strategic insights and polling data that changed the course of the opposition’s flagging campaign and gave Serbians a true political alternative. Eight years earlier, in 1992, Doug Schoen had worked for the Yugoslav prime minister Milan Panic in his campaign to unseat Milosevic. Milosevic’s minions managed to steal that election and, in the absence of support from Washington, Panic’s protestations of electoral theft fell on deaf ears. In 2000, the close coordination between consultants and U.S. policymakers (along with the media spotlight) helped guarantee a different result.

The lesson for U.S. policymakers from the Serbian experience was clear: defeating dictators at the ballot box can often prove cheaper than trying to defeat them militarily. In 2000, Washington spent an estimated $40 million helping the Serbian opposition.³⁷ Conversely, the 78-day Kosovo bombing campaign in 1999 cost the United States between $1.8 and $3 billion.³⁸ Still, America treads carefully when contracting the services of “campaign warriors.” Often the government prefers to work through third parties, offering indirect guidance and coordinating official and private efforts. To be sure, there are critics who say that democracy assistance amounts to funding modern-day coups. The journalist Robert Bridge warns that when elections become an instrument of foreign policy “democracy becomes the unintended victim in this geopolitical game of charades.”³⁹

However, some techniques promoted by political consultants have more to do with enforcing simple respect for the will of people than with pushing a particular democratic model. Exit polls are but one example. Exit polling conducted by consultants in the 2000 Serbian election campaign played a critical role in keeping the election honest. With correct polling information leaked to the media early on Election Day, it became much harder for the governing clique to orchestrate voter fraud. Foreign governments and international organizations have repeatedly used this technique to counter electoral theft, replicating it with similarly positive results in Mexico (2000) and Ukraine (2004) where government efforts to steal elections were thwarted by savvy pollsters.

As American political consultants continue to work abroad, the ripple effects of their influence on the development of democracy will be felt globally. And, as knowledge about campaign techniques spreads, Western methods of electioneering are evolving to suit diverse historical and cultural contexts. Granted, in the wrong hands, modern political campaign techniques can be manipulated to consolidate an autocrat’s power and work against democratic forces. Nevertheless, as governments continue to foster democratization elsewhere, they should look for ways to harness the expertise of political consultants and other non-state actors through selective engagement and coordination of effort. Focusing expertise that is already in demand in the marketplace is one way of achieving foreign policy goals through private means.

Circumventing the State

Ministers gathering in May for the fifty-eighth annual World Health Assembly in Geneva anxiously awaited the conference’s keynote speaker -- a man whose efforts were radically changing how states grappled with health crises. But the headliner wasn’t a doctor or a politician. He was an American businessman whose personal billions were turning the global health community on its head.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates explained that his commitment to global health began after he learned that diseases that had largely been eradicated from the developed world -- tuberculosis, malaria, diphtheria, measles -- were still killing millions in the developing world. Vaccines existed, but the funds to buy them and the political will to distribute them were lacking. Moreover, there was no market incentive that would entice pharmaceutical firms to step forward. Millions were dying while life-saving vaccines sat on the shelves unused. Gates, among the world’s wealthiest men, decided to put his vast personal fortune to work to address an issue that states were unable to fully address on their own.

Ensuring public health is among the obvious ways that states safeguard their citizens. However, the ease of cross-border travel has helped to transform health care from a public good into a foreign policy issue. With epidemics like mad cow disease, SARS, and avian flu reaching beyond borders, states are compelled to reshuffle spending priorities. Fighting HIV/AIDS, particularly in the world’s least-developed nations, has become a U.S. priority, not simply for health reasons, but also because of the disease’s potential for undermining democracy and economic development, and its crippling effect on already meager national budgets.

Entities like the World Health Organization (WHO) play a critical role in setting priorities and coordinating policy at the global level. But follow-through is dependent on the stretched resources and uncertain will of states. As a result, non-state actors are starting to put their own money to work addressing problems that governments are barely able to tackle. For example, even though the U.S. Agency for International Development devotes approximately half of its annual budget to health issues, from 1985 to 2000, USAID spending on global health totaled only $13.8 billion.⁴⁰ In comparison, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given more than $4 billion to global health programs in the past five years alone.

That private funds can sometimes overmatch public resources is not new. What is new is that individuals are organizing to raise the profile of issues far down the list of state priorities. For instance, in January 2005 the Gates Foundation pledged $10 million to develop a vaccine that would eradicate the last pockets of polio from the globe. The pledge revived a WHO mission that states had largely left unfunded.

Bill Gates is not only giving money, he is also helping governments leverage their resources to tap into the power of the global capital markets. In 2000, he put up $750 million to kick off the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) -- a project to help low-income countries buy and deliver vaccines for children. Several nations followed with their own pledges. In just two years, GAVI’s efforts saved an estimated 670,000 children and strengthened poor countries’ ability to deliver vaccines on their own.

Gates pledged another $750 million in January 2005, and governments again followed suit. But this time Gates challenged the underlying economics that prevented vaccines from being made by urging states, corporations, and philanthropists to create an innovative partnership and raise $5 billion. With an investment of this size, he reckoned, basic economics would take over. A market that is large would signal to pharmaceutical firms that there would be stable demand for their products. The resulting competition among firms would, in turn, drive down drug prices and also spark renewed investment in the development of new vaccines. By leveraging the resources of non-state actors with those of states, Gates helped create a market incentive for providing a previously unprofitable social good.⁴¹

Not all global health problems can be made sufficiently attractive to the market, but such models of public-private partnership demonstrate that even the most difficult ones can be successfully addressed when NSAs and states collaborate creatively and use their respective advantages. For example, onchocerciasis, also known as “river blindness,” is the leading cause of blindness in the developing world. The parasitic disease afflicts an estimated 18 million people across sub-Saharan Africa and in Latin America, and another 90-120 million people are at risk. Merck, the New Jersey-based pharmaceutical giant, had been on the cutting edge of parasitic research since 1975, with the discovery of the veterinary drug Ivermectin. In 1980, Dr. Mohammed Aziz, a Merck scientist who had worked for the WHO, wondered if Ivermectin could be adapted to treat the river blindness he had seen devastating African communities. His trials produced astounding results. Not only did the drug attack the parasite in sick patients, it prevented healthy persons from becoming infected.

With one dose per year, at the cost of $1.50 per tablet, Mectizan (the human form of Ivermectin) had the power to save lives. But most affected patients lived in places where public health spending per person is about $1 a year.⁴² Even at pennies per tablet, the medicine would be too expensive. When Merck approached Washington and governments in Africa and Europe to buy the drug at cost and distribute it for free, it was rebuffed. Faced with the prospect of shelving a drug that could cure millions, Merck decided to donate Mectizan free of charge. The announcement of this socially responsible corporate act generated millions in free publicity for Merck and helped burnish the company’s corporate image.

In partnership with other non-state actors (NGOs, local community groups) and international organizations (WHO, the World Bank), Merck undertook the daunting task of getting the drug to some of the most destitute parts of the world. In 1988, the program treated 255,000 people. By 2002, the number had grown to 50 million, and it is projected to reach 90 million by 2010.⁴³ Merck’s 15-year public-private partnership is considered one of the leading models for corporate initiatives on global health.

As states find themselves challenged by the scope of transnational problems, NSAs are stepping in to contribute resources. While they are motivated by self-interest as well as altruism, it is clear that they are often freer than states to craft innovative approaches to global problems. The ability of NSAs to work outside the state apparatus and foster conditions for change can be a tremendous asset to resource-limited states. The challenge for states is to ensure the maintenance and continuation of public-private collaborations that benefit the public when some of their partners may be more accountable to shareholders than to those in need.

Conflictual Relations

While some NSAs are providing services, expertise, and resources to address global issues, others are challenging the very structure that underpins relations between states. For example, as globalization has advanced, U.S. courts are finding themselves increasingly involved in foreign policy issues as they adjudicate international commercial, environmental, and even human rights cases. Trial lawyers and their clients have been at the forefront of these changes, advancing cases that have ultimately challenged the authority of states as the sole determiners of foreign policy. Not surprisingly, it is a development that governments resist. The relationship between trial lawyers and Washington in cases involving human rights abuses highlights the tensions that can develop.

After the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, families of 270 victims filed suit against Libya in a U.S. civil court. A team of trial lawyers represented the families in their effort to punish a state sponsor of terrorism. It was a bold move. Historically, sovereign nations were legally immune from prosecution in U.S. courts without their consent under the doctrine of “sovereign immunity.” Congress reaffirmed this principle in 1976 by passing the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), though the act did include an exception for matters related to international trade. (The rapid growth in global commerce had given rise to a number of international trade disputes between companies and countries requiring adjudication in U.S. courts.) In the 1990s, however, U.S. courts began ruling in favor of victims of international terrorism, challenging the notion that state sponsors of terrorism were immune from prosecution in civil suits. In 1992, the courts found that victims of terrorism could sue for civil damages. By 1994, they had concluded that helping terrorists -- whether by providing housing, money, or other material support -- constituted a punishable offense.

In 1995, Alisa Flatow, a 20-year-old New Jersey student, was traveling in the Gaza Strip when she was killed by a suicide bomber, a member of the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad. Her family sued the government of Iran, and a U.S. court awarded it $247.5 million. As the plaintiffs quickly realized, however, collecting damages in such cases can prove virtually impossible. Not only was it difficult to “attach” assets belonging to foreign countries, there was an even more powerful barrier -- the State Department, which took sharp notice when the Flatow family asked the U.S. government to seize the former Iranian Embassy in Washington as a means of receiving its judicial award. In effect, the plaintiffs were trying to bend foreign policy to their personal interest. The State Department took a dim view of a practice derided by some as “U.S. diplomacy by contingency-fee lawyer.”⁴⁴

The department continues to argue vigorously that suing foreign countries severely complicates its ability to carry out an effective foreign policy. The power to freeze and release assets such as embassy property and bank accounts has long been a critical diplomatic lever.⁴⁵ The Iranian hostage crisis and the Vietnam POW/MIA issue were both resolved, in part, with the powerful stick of blocked financial assets. Second, resolving disputes with foreign countries through the courts, rather than embassies, will inevitably trigger a dangerous “tit-for-tat” against the United States. More importantly, however, the State Department worries about such suits as a frontal assault on the bedrock principle of sovereign immunity. Trial lawyers retort that governments must focus more on protecting victims of terrorism than on defending governments that promote international violence. Too often, commercial, economic, and political interests override the U.S. disapproval of bad behavior, as in the case of Saudi Arabia’s lack of forthrightness regarding the 15 out of 19 September 11 hijackers of Saudi origin.⁴⁶

The families of the Lockerbie victims ultimately took their case to Congress where, in 1996, the “Flatow Amendment” to the FSIA was passed, allowing civil suits against countries named on the State Department’s terrorism list. Still, in a last-minute effort to avoid a presidential veto of this bill, parties agreed to a provision allowing the president to waive a plaintiffs’ right to recovery on the grounds of “national interest.”⁴⁷ The Lockerbie plaintiffs had not only successfully challenged the principle of sovereign immunity but in doing so had opened a means of blending individual and national interests. Libya, eager to make the most of a diplomatic opportunity and wanting badly to regain its standing in the international community, negotiated a settlement of up to $10 million for each victim killed. But the negotiation was a unique, tripartite deal. Libya conditioned the payment on ending its pariah status. Each family would receive the first allotment of the settlement, $4 million, when the United Nations lifted its air and arms embargo against Libya, another $4 million when the United States lifted its sanctions against investment in the country, and the final $2 million when the United States removed Libya from its list of “state sponsors of terrorism.”⁴⁸ For about $3 billion, Libya was able to buy its way back into the global community. The unique bonds established over the years among the parties to the negotiations -- government officials, lawyers, and plaintiffs -- had created the possibility for a historic diplomatic and legal settlement.

The State Department still has sufficient power to delay and dismiss cases that threaten national security. In cases where the state sponsors of terrorism are U.S. allies, plaintiffs and lawyers have adopted a more nuanced approach. Since, for example, the families of the 9/11 victims cannot sue the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia directly (only countries named on the U.S. “state sponsors of terrorism” list are excepted from the sovereign immunity act, allies are not), they have adopted the strategy of naming various individuals (including members of the Saudi royal family), banks, and charitable organizations suspected of financing Islamic terrorist organizations. Their efforts thus far have been repeatedly thwarted by the courts on the basis of national security.

Yet states are not the only targets of trial lawyers and plaintiffs. U.S. multinationals are now on notice that they will be held directly responsible for business practices abroad that violate international human rights codes. An important legal precedent was set by a group of Burmese villagers suing the California energy giant, Unocal. Under the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789, victims of violations of international law may seek damages against U.S.based defendants in the U.S. civil courts. The 1996 suit, brought in Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleged that some of the soldiers Unocal hired to guard the construction of its Yadana pipeline project raped, tortured, and even murdered villagers. The brutal tactics of Myanmar’s military junta were amply documented, and the court found that Unocal, as a major investor, could be held responsible for the human rights violations of its contractors.⁴⁹

In March 2005, Unocal decided to settle a suit it felt it was likely to lose in the court of public opinion. The settlement was not disclosed publicly, but the outcome was not lost on other multinationals (Coca-Cola, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron Texaco) with similar pending cases. As the Unocal case affirmed, U.S. companies can now be held accountable in U.S. courts for human rights abuses that occur on their watch abroad.

The Lockerbie and Unocal cases are compelling examples of how NSAs are challenging states and forcing them to respond to powerful grass-roots constituencies. For now, the U.S. government has taken a wary, case-by-case approach to the legal advances of NSAs, often trying to repel and delay their efforts. Meanwhile, non-state actors remain undeterred in their pursuit of justice, despite the serious problems this may create for diplomats. Litigants and trial lawyers will likely continue to chip away at the legal and political obstacles in their path, and by so doing redefine the rules of global relations.

Agenda Setting

Non-state actors have often influenced the domestic policy agendas of states. Increasingly, however, their influence is being felt internationally. Through the use of the Internet, civil society groups are evolving into transnational coalitions whose shared vision and collective resources have mobilized citizens to force states to focus on a host of global issues. One of the clearest signs of this trend is that the organizers of nearly every major intergovernmental meeting now expect and prepare for protests. However, NSAs are going beyond mounting protests at the barricades and are infiltrating the policymaking process as well.

They are doing so by leveraging the will of the global public -- as exemplified by the work of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. In awarding the 1997 Peace Prize, the Nobel Committee praised Jody Williams and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) for creating a “process which in the space of a few years changed a ban on anti-personnel mines from a vision to a feasible reality.” Nongovernmental organizations had long protested the grievous humanitarian cost of landmines, but armed forces (and manufacturers) had staunchly defended these weapons as both efficient and cost-effective. In 1991, ICBL brought together a handful of dedicated NGOs to eradicate landmines globally. Using the Internet and gruesome images of landmine victims, Jody Williams and her team developed a powerful network of more than 1,400 groups in 90 countries.

Advocacy was only part of the network’s mission. It knew that if it could change international law, it could change global behavior. Public pressure encouraged the first group of states to support a treaty banning landmines. By December 1997, 122 governments had signed on. Fifteen months later, after the fortieth country had formally ratified the Mine Ban Treaty, it became international law.

In just six years, ICBL had accomplished what the United Nations had struggled to achieve for decades. The ICBL had formed its own “coalition of the willing,” whose efforts have resulted in a decrease in the number of landmine-producing countries to 14 today from 54 in the early 1990s.⁵⁰ Jody Williams noted that ICBL’s success pointed to “a whole new way of conducting diplomacy.”⁵¹ As the French ambassador in Oslo commented at the Nobel ceremony, “This is historic not just because of the treaty. This is historic because, for the first time, the leaders of states have come together to answer the will of civil society.”⁵²

As of December 2004, 152 countries had signed the Mine Ban Treaty. Still, 42 countries have yet to sign, including the United States. In Washington, successive administrations have refused to endorse the treaty, claiming that the United States is the biggest donor to landmine clearance programs, even as it possesses the third-largest stockpile of these weapons and reserves the right to use and manufacture them.

However, by raising public awareness, NGOs have put the landmines issue on the agenda, raising millions in private funds for eradication programs, and forcing governments to respond to public pressure. By mobilizing a transnational social movement, individuals and groups successfully pressured democratically elected governments to change their policies and comply with international law.

The Test Ahead

The examples cited above highlight the breadth and influence of non-state actors on foreign policy. Across the globe, NSAs are fundamentally changing state-to-state relations. Their ability to do so is a result of the deliberate and unintended weakening of state power in an international system buffeted by technological and political change.

In this new world, individuals and organizations can use communications technology to create powerful transnational networks, global commerce and investment trumps the fiscal and monetary levers of the past, and the removal of trade barriers is making it harder for nations to protect domestic industries. The challenge of adaptation applies to non-state actors as well. They are operating in a virtually unregulated political vacuum in which the constraints on their behavior are increasingly inadequate for coping with the challenge they pose to existing global norms.

But the greater burden is on states, which continue to lag in adjusting to the new NSA reality. This is scarcely surprising -- the doctrine of sovereign immunity has long served as the basis of legitimacy. It would be foolhardy to expect states willingly to surrender the power and influence conferred by the principle. However, the influence of non-state actors is only going to intensify, and finding the proper balance between the responsibilities and accountability of public and private actors may well become the foremost policy challenge of the twenty-first century.

Notes

1. Both of the authors of this article have worked for Doug Schoen at Penn, Schoen & Berland, Assoc., a polling and consulting firm: Michael A. Cohen, 2002-05, and Maria Figueroa Küpçü, 2000-03.

2. Jessica T. Matthews, “Power Shift,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 76 (January/February 1997), p. 50.

3. Daphne Josselin and William Wallace, eds., Non-State Actors in World Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 4.

4. Ibid., p. 5.

5. As quoted in Peter Bienart, “Backfire,” Atlantic Monthly, March 2005, p. 126.

6. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Death by a Thousand Blogs,” New York Times, May 24, 2005.

7. “Tsunami and the Web Special Report Update: v2.0,” January 13, 2005, http://www. politicsonline.com/content/main/specialreports/ 2005/tsunami2.

8. Author interview with Peter W. Singer, Washington, DC, June 2005.

9. John M. Stopford and Susan Strange, Rival States, Rival Firms: Competition for World Market Shares (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 1.

10. Ann Florini, The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running a New World (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), p. 99.

11. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 56.

12. Josselin and Wallace, Non-State Actors in World Politics, p. 9.

13. Nye, Paradox of American Power, p. 6.

14. Gregg Easterbrook, “The End of War,” New Republic, May 30, 2005, pp. 18-19.

15. As quoted in Jeffrey E. Garten, The Politics of Fortune: A New Agenda for Business Leaders (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002), p. 154.

16. Ibid., p. 156.

17. Ibid., p. 108.

18. Florini, Coming Democracy, p. 99.

19. Garten, Politics of Fortune, p. 154.

20. A. Claire Cutler, Virginia Haufler, and Tony Porter, eds., Private Authority and International Affairs (New York: SUNY Press, 1999), p. 16. For more information on intellectual property rights and the WTO, see Susan Sell, “Multinational Corporations as Agents of Change: The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights,” in this volume.

21. Lee Rensselaer and Raphael Perl, “Drug Control: International Policy and Options,” Congressional Research Service, Washington, DC, October 16, 2002.

22. U.S. Department of State, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, March 1, 2004.

23. This analysis is undertaken with particular emphasis on the implications of NSA/state cooperation for U.S. foreign policy.

24. Peter W. Singer, “Outsourcing War,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 84 (March/April 2005), p. 122.

25. Anthony Bianco and Stephanie Anderson Forest, “Outsourcing War,” Business Week International, September 15, 2003, p. 68.

26. Peter W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

27. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Budget testimony before the Senate-House Armed Services Committee, Washington, DC, February 17, 2005.

28. Singer, “Outsourcing War,” p. 122.

29. Linda Robinson, “America’s Secret Armies,” U.S. News & World Report, November 4, 2002, p. 38.

30. Renae Merle and Ellen McCarthy. “6 Employees from CACI International, Titan Referred for Prosecution,” Washington Post, August 26, 2004.

31. Kenny Gluck, director of operations for MSF, Holland, as quoted in Paul Keilthy, “Private Security Firms in War Zones Worry NGOs,” Reuters/AlertNet, August 11, 2004.

32. Peter W. Singer, “Warriors for Hire in Iraq,” Salon.com, April 15, 2004.

33. “Private Warriors,” Frontline, PBS, June 2005.

34. Larry Diamond, “Promoting Democracy in the 1990s: Actors and Instruments, Issues and Imperatives,” Report to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, Carnegie Corporation of New York, December 1995, p. 40.

35. For the results of the Global Political Consultancy Survey, see Fritz Plasser and Gunda Plasser, Global Political Campaigning: A Worldwide Analysis of Campaign Professionals and Their Practices (Westport, CT: Praeger , 2002).

36. “Revolution Inc,” On the Media, National Public Radio, December 3, 2004.

37. Ibid.

38. “Total Cost of Allied Force Air Campaign: Preliminary Estimate,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Washington, DC, June 1999, p. 1.

39. Robert Bridge, “Ukraine: Check or Checkmate?” Russia in Global Affairs, vol. 3 (JanuaryMarch 2005), p. 45.

40. Http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/global_ health/home/Funding/index.html.

41. Marilyn Chase, “Malaria Trial Could Set a Model for Financing of Costly Vaccines,” Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2005.

42. P. Roy Vagelos “Social Benefits of a Successful Biomedical Research Company: Merck,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 145 (December 2001), p. 577.

43. Gilbert Burnham and T. Mebrahtu, “The Delivery of Ivermectin Mectizan,” Tropical Medicine and International Health, vol. 9 (April 2004), p. A27.

44. Jennifer Senior, “A Nation Unto Himself,” New York Times Magazine, March 14, 2004.

45. Anthony J. Sebok, “Libya, Lockerbie, and the Long-Delayed Settlement Relating to Pan Am Flight 103,” FindLaw, September 8, 2003.

46. Interview with Allan Gerson, chairman, Gerson International Law Group, and one of the lawyers responsible for having brought the first suit against Libya on behalf of the families of the victims of Pan Am flight 103, Washington, DC, March 31, 2005.

47. Sebok, “Libya, Lockerbie, and the Long-Delayed Settlement Relating to Pan Am Flight 103.”

48. Anthony J. Sebok, “Libya, Lockerbie, and the Lawyers,” FindLaw, June 25, 2002.

49. Joanne Mariner, “Ashcroft's Justice, Burma's Crimes, and Bork’s Revenge,” FindLaw, May 26, 2003.

50. US Campaign to Ban Landmines, www.banminesusa.org.

51. Newshour, PBS, October 10, 1997.

52. Jody Williams, Nobel Lecture, Oslo, December 10, 1997.

Revamping American Grand Strategy

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 01 Nov 2003 00:00:00 -0500

Out of the national trauma of September 11 has emerged a new grand strategy for American foreign policy, comparable in scale and ambition to the strategy of containment that guided American foreign policy for much of the Cold War. Championed by neo-conservatives in and around the Bush administration, this grand strategy -- which I call muscular dominance -- has won the acceptance of neo-liberal hawks associated with the Democratic Party as well. The troubled occupation of Iraq, together with the unfolding drama over the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, may eventually force a rethinking of the emerging strategy, but for now there is more than a tentative bipartisan consensus on three fundamental tenets of America foreign policy.

First, terrorism and rogue states, especially those seeking weapons of mass destruction, constitute the greatest threat to American well-being and world order. These unconventional threats require going beyond our traditional reliance on deterrence and containment, and may in some cases warrant preventive military action, as in the case of Iraq. Second, the Middle East has replaced Europe and East Asia as the fulcrum of geopolitics, the zone wherein the shape of world order will be forged. Remaking the Middle East, above all by bringing democracy to the Arab and Islamic nations of the region, therefore, must be America's overriding mission, since it is only by remaking these societies that the United States can be secure. And third, the United States must remain the world's dominant military and economic power, not only to discourage the emergence of other rival powers but to maintain world order. As the world's dominant power, the United States has not only special responsibilities but also special rights that for the sake of world order should not be constrained by traditional alliances or multilateral institutions. In a unipolar world defined by American supremacy, the United States must have the flexibility to work through ad hoc coalitions and the freedom to use international institutions as it sees fit.

The bipartisan consensus that has formed around these fundamental tenets is important because grand strategy does matter. Grand strategy represents a road map delineating our most important foreign policy goals and the most effective instruments and policies for achieving those goals. It contains a vision for America's role in the world based in part on America's domestic needs and in part on the international challenges the country faces. It thus establishes priorities and gives focus to an otherwise volatile foreign policymaking process that can be driven by national mood swings and the CNN effect. In this sense, it also adds an important element of predictability and stability for other countries. But these virtues can also be vices if they lock the country into misguided actions and the misallocation of scarce diplomatic and foreign policy resources.

Despite the occasional excesses carried out in its name, the postwar grand strategy of containment on balance served America and the world well. It helped build a community of democratic nations, provided a framework for common security, and established the political and diplomatic underpinnings for a world economy that spread middleclass prosperity to North America, Europe, and parts of East Asia. But the same positive attributes are absent from muscular dominance, for it threatens to divide us from the rest of the West, insert us more deeply into an Islamic civil war, and exhaust the United States politically and economically, all the while distracting us from ensuring the economic foundations of world order.

The Chimera of Terrorism & Rogue States

As the evil genius behind September 11, Osama bin Laden deserves some acknowledgment for today's bilateral consensus in favor of the war on terrorism. But it is just as possible to argue that Osama bin Laden, whether wittingly or not, has set a strategic trap for the United States that emotionally, and indeed morally, has been very difficult to resist. After September 11, no politician or strategic thinker could be or would want to be considered soft on terrorism. Terrorism easily lends itself to worst-case thinking, which explains why it was so easy for the Bush administration to paint Saddam Hussein as part of the terrorist threat, even though it was not at all plausible that he would give weapons of mass destruction he probably did not possess to a group of terrorists that he himself despised and distrusted. It also lends itself to the blame game -- no government official could survive blame for having failed to protect the country from a terrorist attack.

Thus it was understandable that in response to September 11, the Bush administration would eagerly and the Democrats somewhat more reluctantly embrace the war on terrorism. But it is one thing to be vigilant against terrorism and to expand international intelligence, police, and military cooperation to counter it, and quite another to make it the overriding preoccupation of American grand strategy and to redeploy American military, diplomatic, and economic resources accordingly.

The power of terrorism is just that: its ability to provoke disproportionately counterproductive and irrational responses that only make one less secure or less free in the long run. It is nearly impossible not to give into the temptation, but it is strategically wise not to do so. By virtually any rational standard, terrorism does not warrant a full-scale war, let alone to be the defining feature of American grand strategy.

In its annual report to Congress on terrorism, the State Department has acknowledged that terrorism is at its lowest level since 1969. In 2002, there were just 199 recorded terrorist incidents, none of which took place on American soil. In fact, as foreign policy columnist William Pfaff has noted, the overwhelming majority of the incidents occurred in four places: in Colombia, where the target was usually a U.S. owned oil pipeline; in Chechnya, the site of a longstanding separatist war; in Afghanistan, where a low-scale war continues; and in Israel and the occupied territories, the result of the second Palestinian intifada and the Israeli crackdown. Even the classification of these incidents is subject to question, since they appear to be more the product of nationalist and separatist violence than they do the work of a global network of terrorists.¹

An independent study of cross-border terrorism by Todd Sandler of the University of Southern California comes to similar conclusions. According to his study, the number of terrorist incidents has fallen markedly from the 1980s, from an average of more than 500 per year to fewer than 400 per year on average in the last decade. Indeed, only 29 percent of all terrorist attacks since 1968 have occurred since 1990. And while terrorism has become somewhat more deadly, it still causes far fewer deaths or casualties than other international phenomena, such as disease, famine, or war. Even including September 11, the average number of casualties per incident was just 3.6, while the average number of deaths was below 1.0.²

In short, the specter of a growing global terrorist threat that has been the central motivating force behind muscular dominance does not square with the facts. Yet since September 11, these widely divergent terrorist acts have become the rationale for a vast expansion of American military power as well as the war in Iraq, including the establishment of new bases across the arc of crisis from Central Asia to Southeast Asia. The central purpose of these new military operations has been, in the president's words, "to take the battle to the terrorists," to create a "forward defense" even more ambitious than the one devised against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The ultimate effect on American security of this new forward defense is open to debate. But it can be reasonably argued that by increasing the American military footprint in a number of traditional yet troubled regions it will only expand the threat to American interests and American personnel. That in any case has been the lesson of American bases in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, and seems to be the case in Iraq too, where attacks on American soldiers continue to grow from a variety of sources. Ironically, one of the rationales for the Iraq war was to be able to move American bases from Saudi soil, in part because of their increasing vulnerability to terrorist attack. But Iraq may become the ultimate destination of choice for Islamic jihadists because it offers a target rich environment in an Arab country where law and order is lacking. Thus, the end result of America's war on terrorism may be to increase the range of threats to American lives and interests well beyond the alQaeda network, almost ensuring that the number of terrorist acts will increase in the year ahead.

This is not to say that September 11 did not call for a forceful response against the alQaeda network. But the nature of the threat did not warrant reshaping American foreign policy priorities or expanding American military power in the Islamic world. As William Pfaff has argued, it is not clear how expanding America's already extensive system of bases will prevent the kind of terrorist attacks that were made against the United States, or might be made again. These attacks were carried out by small groups of highly motivated, politicized, and radicalized young men, living and operating mainly in Western urban settings. While they have had some logistical support from al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, such groups, as Pfaff points out, are not vulnerable to military attack from bases in Central Asia, or even Iraq. ³

Before embarking on the war in Iraq, American policymakers would have done better to have recalled the old Confucious-like saying, "Never use a cannon to kill a mosquito." The most successful efforts to reign in the terrorists trying to attack American interests have resulted not from the projection of American military power but from cooperation among U.S., German, French, and British police and intelligence agencies, and from collaboration with local police and security forces in countries like Pakistan and Thailand. It is by expanding these forms of cooperation and by shutting down the financing for terrorist networks that we will increase our security. It is not by occupying Arab societies, or by establishing a larger military presence in the Islamic world.

Terrorism per se is not the only threat of concern to a grand strategy of muscular dominance. The threat posed by "rogue states" also figures heavily into the calculations of American policymakers. Indeed, it is the hypothesized convergence of rogue states with weapons of mass destruction and terrorist groups like al-Qaeda that gave real impetus to the Bush doctrine of preventive war and helped secure bipartisan support for the war in Iraq. The risk that terrorists might acquire nuclear materials does require heightened security precautions, but that risk is less connected to possible future weapons states like Iran than to the inadequate security safeguards of existing nuclear armed states like Russia and Pakistan. Yet the White House and Congress have repeatedly shortchanged programs to lock down fissionable materials and secure "loose nukes."

The prospect of the further spread of nuclear weapons does pose difficult questions for world order, particularly in the Persian Gulf and East Asia. Yet it is not clear that a strategy of muscular dominance offers an effective response to this problem. The war against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq was meant in part as a warning to both Iran and North Korea to give up their programs to acquire nuclear weapons. But the war seems to have had the opposite effect, as there is evidence that in the face of American threats they have accelerated their nuclear programs as the best way to deter American actions aimed against them.

In neither case is the use of force a plausible policy option for the United States. Any American attack, even a surgical attack, on North Korea's suspected nuclear facilities, could provoke a North Korean counterattack on Seoul, with devastating consequences for the people of South Korea. Nor can the United States afford another war against an Islamic nation, certainly not one of the size and importance of Iran. If U.S. forces are having trouble subduing Iraq, a country of 23 million people, many of whom initially welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, it is not reasonable to believe that it could successfully occupy Iran, a country of 60 million that has an even prouder tradition of national independence and still blames the United States for the restoration of the Pahlavi monarchy in 1953, notwithstanding the more pro-American attitudes of many younger Iranians.

The Bush administration seems to believe that if coercive diplomacy fails it can further isolate and punish both Iran and North Korea. But there are two problems with such a strategy. First, it requires the full support of Europe and Russia in the case of Iran, and of South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia in the case of North Korea. While the European Union has moved somewhat closer to American policy with respect to Iran, it is not clear that it would be willing to risk strengthening Iranian hardliners, thus giving up the fruits of its decade-long policy of constructive dialogue. Second, such a strategy of punishing and isolating North Korea and Iran may only further accelerate their efforts to secure nuclear weapons in the hope of not only deterring the United States but also gaining the cooperation of other countries. In short, one of the dangers of muscular dominance is not just an increase in terrorism but also an increase in the number of potentially hostile countries determined to acquire nuclear weapons.

It is quite possible to manage the threat posed by states like Iran and North Korea, but it would require a much different mix of policies -- more carrots, fewer sticks, more confidence in the conflict management and regime reform skills of our allies in Europe and East Asia, and ultimately a willingness to fall back on established notions of deterrence should those efforts fail. But a grand strategy of muscular dominance virtually precludes this possibility. Indeed, it has set us on a reckless course not only of military confrontation that may actually expand the threats to American interests but, in the case of the Middle East, of trying to remake an entire region.

The Misuse of American Idealism

One reason for the bipartisan appeal of muscular dominance is the way that it combines American idealism and power in the service of American security. For many neo-conservative as well as neo-liberal advocates of muscular dominance, regime change and democracy are more than an idealistic project. They are the key to American security. The best way -- indeed, the only way, in their view -- to make us safe is to remake the Arab world by bringing democracy to Arab societies.

If terrorism and rogue states constitute the greatest threat to world order, and if democracy is the answer, then almost naturally the Middle East assumes central importance in American grand strategy. The Middle East is home to what the administration considers the majority of rogue states -- Iran, Iraq (before the war), Libya, and Syria. It also includes such troubled allies as Saudi Arabia and Egypt and, of course, Israel, with which the United States has a special moral relationship. It is the source of many of the al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked the United States. And finally, of course, the region has oil, lots of oil, upon which the world economy is still dependent.

The Bush administration is correct to argue that the current order in the Middle East is both unhealthy and ultimately unsustainable. But it is wrong to assume that a more heavy-handed American dominance of the Middle East will produce democratic reform or a more stable order. In fact, a deeper American engagement may only cause greater upheaval and further radicalization of the region.

There are three reasons to question the bipartisan emphasis on an American mission in the Middle East. The first relates to whether the United States can overcome the deep legacy of distrust and even hatred that past American policies have created in the region. Neo-conservatives in and around the administration like to believe the United States is a different kind of hegemonic power, one that does not seek imperial advantages and that uses its power on behalf of the common good. And, in some parts of the world, the United States has acted in such a farsighted manner. But in the Middle East, the United States has fallen short of that standard, succumbing to the temptations of raw economic interest (oil) and to the narrow agendas of key ethnic and business groups. Indeed, the very essence of American policy over the last three decades has been antithetical to Arab democracy and self-determination.

For more than three decades, American policy has been driven by two at times incompatible goals: the support of Israel and (indirect) control over the world's oil market. Managing the tension between these two goals has been one of the most important and difficult foreign policy challenges of every president since Lyndon Johnson. And every president up to George W. Bush has followed essentially the same three-part strategy: the subsidization of the defense of Israel and the promotion of some kind of peace process between Israel and its neighbors, and more recently between Israel and the Palestinians; the encouragement of pro-American governments in Egypt and Jordan, removing them from the ranks of hostile frontline states; and the nurturing of a close alliance relationship with the ruling families of the Persian Gulf oil-producing states, especially with the royal family of Saudi Arabia. The first two pillars of this strategy were seen as critical to the defense of Israel, and the third to America's world oil policy goals.

Each of these pillars, however, has deeply alienated the Arab people: American support for Israel because U.S. policymakers have not in practice been able to distinguish between the legitimate defense of Israel and tacit support for its illegal occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and its overly aggressive military policy; American help for Egypt and Jordan because it has led to these governments' perceived betrayal of the Palestinian people as well as to the suppression of democracy; and the cozy relationship with the Gulf royal families because it has confirmed their suspicions that the United States only cares about oil. America's relationship with the Gulf sheikdoms has been particularly malignant because it has aligned the United States with the most backward feudal governments of the region and made Washington complicit in the export of Islamic fundamentalism. In order to maintain some semblance of legitimacy with the Arab masses, the ruling elites in Saudi Arabia have generously funded Islamic reactionaries while producing homegrown radicals bent on the destruction of the United States and the West.

The war in Iraq was in part meant to change this dynamic -- to allow the United States to distance itself from Saudi Arabia and to convince the Arab world that it cared about democracy. Yet the occupation of Iraq has only compounded America's legitimacy problems. To most people of the region, it has only reinforced their view that the United States is more interested in oil and its dominant military position than it is in the welfare of the Iraqi people. Otherwise, why would Washington be so reluctant to turn over power and authority to the United Nations or to the Iraqi people?

Moreover, to most Arabs on the street, the true test of the American commitment to democracy is not Iraq but a Palestinian state. If the United States really cared about Arab self-determination and democracy, why has it been so slow in coming to the aid of the Palestinian people? And why has it allowed Ariel Sharon to undermine the Palestinian Authority, the only elected government in the Arab world?

Given this deep-seated mistrust and bitterness toward the U.S. government, and absent a satisfactory settlement of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, it is likely that in the near term any democratic impulse in most of the leading Arab states will take an anti-American direction. This is amply illustrated by the recent elections in Kuwait, where Islamic fundamentalists hostile to the United States swept pro-American liberals, and by the growing number of Saudi, Egyptian, and even Jordanian young men who openly sympathize with Osama bin Laden. The fear that democracy may produce Islamic governments in itself should not be a reason not to support democracy in the Arab world. But it does mean that Washington may in the future face a difficult dilemma of either accepting an Islamicist government or turning its back on democracy, which would only further damage America's legitimacy.

A Poor Record of Nation Building

As a way to avoid this dilemma, the Bush administration has begun to put less emphasis on free elections and more on building the essential institutions of liberal democracy in the Middle East. The wisdom of this approach is well argued by Fareed Zakaria in his new book, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. This approach would seem to make a lot of sense, since Arab societies lack many of the necessary institutions of democracy, such as a workable judicial system, and the state in many Arab countries has failed in the administration of many basic government functions, such as the provision of social services, creating a vacuum filled by Islamicist organizations. Rebuilding the Arab state, then, would be a wise first step toward democracy.

But this would require an even greater level of intimacy between the United States and Arab societies, as well as a much greater commitment of American resources. Which raises a second question about a grand strategy that would have the remaking of the Middle East as its overriding mission: does the United States have the necessary tools, let alone the staying power, to bring about democracy there even if it could overcome its legitimacy problems? The recent American record of nation building in places as diverse as Haiti and Afghanistan is not very reassuring on this score. And if the first months of the effort in Iraq tell us anything, it is that the United States has neither the skills nor the resources needed for the task in the somewhat more advanced Arab societies.

As we have seen, American military power has very limited utility: the U.S. military is designed for fighting, not for peacekeeping or police work, and thus the United States has struggled even to provide basic security in Iraq. Beyond that, it has virtually no organized capacity for nation building of the kind needed by the Arab world in particular. It has no reserve of Arab-speaking administrators, advisors, or civil engineers to aid in the effort to build civil society institutions in Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, and other Arab countries. Meanwhile, the costs of the occupation and the reconstruction of Iraq are creating an enormous financial burden. The costs of the occupation keep rising, and some private estimates of the cost of the war and the occupation now run to over $100 billion a year. And this is just for one small country of 23 million people. Indeed, by choosing war in Iraq as the first step toward remaking the Middle East, the administration may have bankrupted the project from the beginning.

The American formula for remaking the Middle East, however, does not seem to contemplate large sums of new money, except for the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, and even there the $21 billion the Bush administration has recently earmarked for reconstruction will prove wholly inadequate. Instead, the administration seems to believe that American ideas and free trade as well as American military power are enough to change entrenched societies, and that we will simply commandeer other people's money if we need it. But democracy building cannot be done on the cheap in the Middle East. Free trade is an attractive and relatively inexpensive foreign policy idea (which is why it is so frequently invoked), but opening America's markets to their goods is virtually irrelevant to most Arab countries, notwithstanding the anecdotal evidence of some small-scale benefit to a few Jordanian textile plants. An effort at liberalizing the market and streamlining government bureaucracy is bound to fail unless it is accompanied by more public investment, more institution building, and stronger social safety nets (now provided by Islamicist groups) in order to soften the disruptive effects. And this requires money. The United States does provide substantial foreign assistance to Egypt and, to a lesser extent, to Jordan. But the redirection of that aid could have serious destabilizing effects in the short term.

What is worrying is that the advocates of remaking the Middle East have not thought through these many intricate dilemmas involving America's legitimacy and the tools and resources the United States can bring to the task. Either they seem to hope that they can do it on the cheap or that they will be able to direct the project while our partners in Europe and Asia pay for it. The strategic dilemma for the Bush administration, or for that matter for any future American administration, is that it needs the full cooperation and support of Europe and the United Nations if it is to succeed in remaking the Middle East. But the main European powers, particularly France and Germany, are not likely to commit forces and money -- at least forces and money of any real significance -- to an American project they believe is founded on bad policies. The Europeans, including the British, have a different view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of how to deal with Iran and Syria, and of the best ways to promote democratic and economic reform in other Arab states. Indeed, this is one of the reasons the neo-conservative architects of the Bush program have wanted to limit European influence in the Middle East, which they see as too heavily tilted toward the Palestinians and constructive engagement with Iran.

Faced with the choice of falling in line behind a misguided American policy over which they have little or no control and putting some distance between themselves and Washington so as to avoid blame for some of the more destabilizing elements of American policy, many Europeans may choose the latter. In order to gain European cooperation, and the cooperation of other major powers, Washington would need to compromise on some key aspects of American policy and give Europe more say in the process. But this would undermine America's dominant position within the region. Indeed, one of the central contradictions of muscular dominance is that the countries that can most help the United States are those that are strong enough to say no.

A Wise Use of Power?

Finally, there is the question whether the region is so important to American interests that it should command a disproportionate share of American foreign policy resources at the expense of other international goals. At its best, grand strategy is a form of economics: a way of establishing priorities given competing international goals and thus of determining the best use of scarce resources. An American effort to remake the Middle East may be a noble project, but if it has so little chance of doing good and so much likelihood of causing harm, is it really a moral, let alone wise, use of American power?

There are arguably more important international goals than the reordering of the Middle East: ensuring the peaceful evolution of great power relations among China, Japan, and Korea; completing the process of integrating Russia, China, and India into a system of middleclass commerce and international law; extending the middleclass prosperity that underpins European and North American stability to the emerging economies of Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe; promoting economic development and democracy in our neighborhood; reducing poverty and stopping the spread of AIDS in Africa; and enlisting Europe as a partner in these efforts. All these warrant American effort and attention and arguably are more critical to world order and U.S. interests than is an American imperial project in the Middle East.

The notion that the United States can maintain its favorable position in the world by making the Middle East the centerpiece of American grand strategy is at best an illusion. After all, the foundations of American strength and influence do not rest on America's position in the Middle East or on the control of the world oil market but on the political and economic relationships it has established with Europe and East Asia. Yet these are the relationships that are most likely to suffer from a misguided neo-imperial venture in the Arab world.

The Limits of Dominance

The central idea underlying muscular dominance is that the United States is so powerful and virtuous that it can pretty much remake the world on its own terms without making choices about American foreign policy priorities. But this is a truly delusional idea that often results in bad, and sometimes even reckless, policies. There are two problems with dominance as the central guiding idea of American grand strategy. The first is that it does not reflect the realities of today's world. The second is that it does not work.

For most observers of American foreign policy, dominance is an inescapable fact given America's overwhelming military, economic, and cultural power. The only question is how the United States uses that power. But this triumphalist view of American dominance rests not only on a misunderstanding of power and influence in today's world, but also on a misconception of America's relative power position vis-a-vis other states. The United States may be the world's most powerful country, but that does not mean that American supremacy or unipolarity is the defining feature of international relations today.

As noted earlier, military power has limited utility with respect to most international problems and thus yields less influence than it once did. Unlike during the Cold War, America's wealthy allies in Europe and East Asia do not face a specific military threat. Nor do they see one on the horizon, residual worries about China in East Asia notwithstanding. Instead, their security problems arise from the disorder and violence that accompanies failed states and failed development, and from unsettled nationalist and separatist struggles. U.S. military power is largely irrelevant to most of these problems. To be sure, U.S military force was arguably helpful in restoring order in the Balkans in the late 1990s, but European countries have now assumed the overwhelming burden of peacekeeping and nation building in Bosnia, Serbia, and Macedonia.

The picture in East Asia is more complex in that the American military presence there arguably adds a dimension of security reassurance for China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea that still gives the United States leverage in that region. But even in East Asia, there is a growing sense that the United States may no longer be the stabilizing force it once was. China has abandoned its previously confrontational posture toward many of its neighbors, particularly over its territorial claims in the South China Sea (although its stance toward Taiwan still remains worrisome), and has generally assumed a more responsible role in the region, particularly with regard to North Korea. Meanwhile, Washington’s new emphasis on preventive war, with its on again/off again tough talk toward North Korea has made many East Asians uneasy.

While America’s allies see U.S. military power as less central to their own security, they have actually become more important to our own. Indeed, there has been something of a reversal of security roles over the past decade. The United States now needs the help and security cooperation of Europe, Russia, China, South Korea, and Japan more than they need our military protection. The noted foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan, in his book Of Paradise and Power, attributes the European preference for softer forms of power to Europe’s military weakness. That may be so, but it is also a product of two much larger trends. The first is the growing realization on the part of most Europeans that they are no longer vulnerable to any foreseeable conventional military threat and that they have a more than adequate military capability for achieving their principal regional security goals. To be sure, they could reorganize their militaries to project power better, but they have been reasonably successful in fulfilling their peacekeeping and nation-building missions in the Balkans and Afghanistan. Secondly, they believe, with some justification, that potential threats to European security are best handled by a combination of political, economic, and diplomatic measures tailored to each case: constructive engagement, as with Iran and Libya; conflict resolution and economic support with regard to the Palestinians and Israelis; nation building and peacekeeping, as in the former Yugoslavia; and economic development and political reform in Eastern Europe and North Africa.

If neo-conservative supporters of muscular dominance overstate the role of military power in securing world order, they also tend to discount American weaknesses. In addition to bearing burdens for world security, dominant great powers generally export capital, investing in the infrastructure and industries of less developed countries. At the height of its imperial power, in 1913, Britain exported capital on a scale equal to 9 percent of its GDP, financing much of the infrastructure of the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina. By contrast, the United States sucks in capital, not just from Europe and Japan but also from capital-poor emerging economies, to the tune of nearly 6 percent of GDP. Its international debt is approaching 30 percent of GDP, a level normally associated with developing economies and which will make it vulnerable to the political decisions as well as to the financial problems of other countries in the decades to come.

By investing so heavily in military power, the United States has undercut its international influence in other critical ways. Foreign assistance has been out of favor for years in nearly all political circles in the United States, but it still matters when it comes to building influence in many parts of the world. Washington’s spending on foreign assistance is just one-nineteenth of its military budget and ranks last among OECD countries as a percentage of GDP. And U.S. assistance is heavily concentrated in just a few countries: Israel, Egypt, Colombia, and Jordan. The United States does serve as a large market for many economies, which gives it leverage and influence, but it is constrained from using that leverage because it is dependent on the world market for so many essential goods as well as for financing its external deficit. More than 50 percent of the manufactured goods that Americans now buy are made outside the United States, up from 31 percent in 1987, and the United States needs to import nearly $600 billion in capital annually to cover its external deficit.

By virtue of its lopsided investment in military power, the United States does not have very much, in terms of financial assistance, to offer many countries in the world today, or, for that matter, very much to threaten them with either. This is one of the reasons why so many countries on the U.N. Security Council felt safe in defying the United States on the war against Iraq. Nothing exposed the myth of American dominance more than Washington’s inability to get the votes of countries like Chile and Mexico, not to mention Guinea and Cameroon.

Who Needs Whom?

A grand strategy of muscular dominance ultimately rests on the simple idea of a unipolar world, the notion that the United States is the only power that counts in the world today. That is why neo-conservative advocates of muscular dominance are so critical of France’s avowed goal of creating a multipolar world, attributing it to France’s superpower envy. Yet for all practical purposes, a multipolar world already exists. On a global plane, the United States may appear to be the world’s only superpower, spending more than the next 15 countries combined on military power. But viewed at the level of its key strategic relationships with Europe, Russia, China, and Japan, the United States in each case needs them to achieve its foreign policy goals as much or more than they need the United States. In other words, at the bilateral level, the other established and emerging powers of the world enjoy either strategic parity with the United States or a favorable balance of power and interest. And the balance is likely to tilt further in favor of Europe, Russia, Japan, and China in the future—in part because the American market will become less important to them and in part because America’s growing dependence on foreign capital will increase its international debt burden, making it more vulnerable to the policies and attitudes of its principal creditors.

Take the case of America’s relationship with the European Union. Unipolarists like to focus attention on Europe’s military weaknesses and the lack of a unified European foreign policy. But as suggested earlier, contrary to conventional wisdom, Europe enjoys an attractive position vis-à-vis the United States in that Washington needs the help and support of Europe more than Europe needs the United States. If looked at objectively, Europe is no longer dependent on the United States for any real security or defense needs. In fact, the European nations of NATO and the European Union now have primacy over their own security and over the security of the immediate European Rim region stretching from Ukraine in the north to the Balkans in the south. As much as certain Europeans might like the United States to do more to help create stability in Ukraine or maintain peace in Kosovo and Macedonia, Washington has essentially removed itself from these security-related concerns. Europe’s main security worry vis-à-vis the United States today is of an entirely different nature—not that Washington will abandon Europe, but that it will use its power in the Middle East in a way that will destabilize the region and create greater Western-Islamic tensions.

But even in this case, Europe may have more influence and leverage over the United States than has been commonly recognized. Even though Washington is trying to build a flexible military structure that is less dependent on its allies, the United States still relies on European bases and infrastructure for non-NATO missions, and it still needs a measure of European support and participation to gain domestic support for those missions. Beyond this, Washington depends upon European Union members for peacekeeping and nation-building tasks, not just in the Balkans but in Afghanistan and most likely soon in Iraq, and it benefits from European assistance for other U.S. security-related concerns, such as support for the Palestinian Authority. This is not to mention the importance of Europe’s active cooperation in stopping international terrorism and nuclear weapons proliferation.

In many ways, Europe is better positioned to pursue a project to build democracy in the Middle East than is the United States. While the United States has had very little success in helping create stable democracies in any part of the world over the last two decades, including in its own neighborhood, the European Union has a solid track record when it comes to democracy building, particularly as it relates to the candidate countries of Central and Eastern Europe, its earlier missteps in the Balkans notwithstanding. For much of the last decade, the world has heard repeatedly about the superiority of the American model. But it has been the European Union that has had the most success in exporting democracy and fostering economic reform.

Moreover, as a continent made up of several of the larger creditor economies, Europe has the financial wherewithal to do more in North Africa and the Middle East as well as in Eastern Europe. While the United States is dependent upon European as well as East Asian capital to fuel U.S. growth and to pay for its international policies, the nations of the European Union continue to export capital to the developing world as well as to the United states. In addition, the European Union now has as much or more influence with other key members of the international community— such as Brazil, Russia, and Turkey—than the United States does and often pursues policies that better reflect their interests than American policies do. It thus would be able to enlist them in European projects in a way that the United States has not been able to do.

What is true in the case of America’s relationship with Europe is true to a lesser degree with respect to its relationships with Russia, China, and Japan. The United States needs a reasonably strong Russia not just to maintain the safety of its nuclear weapons but to help balance an increasingly powerful China, check Taliban-like extremists and terrorists in Central Asia and the Caspian Sea, help stop nuclear proliferation in Iran, and help stabilize the world oil market. In return, Washington has very little to offer Moscow now that Russia has recovered its economic independence from the International Monetary Fund and has begun to repatriate substantial sums of capital, except possibly for its blessing of Moscow’s sometimes misguided effort to crush the Chechen separatists and support for Russia’s bid for membership in the World Trade Organization.

In recent years, the balance of interest and power with China has shifted to one of mutual dependence. China has neutralized American power in a number of ways: by modernizing its nuclear forces; by adopting a good neighbor policy in East Asia; by stepping up its diplomacy toward the resolution of the North Korea crisis; and by becoming both one of the largest suppliers of consumer goods to the United States as well as one of its biggest creditors. Over the past year, the central bank of China has become the largest purchaser of U.S. Treasury bills and, together with the Japanese central bank, funded 45 percent of the U.S. current account deficit in the second quarter of 2003. China has also become an increasingly important destination for Japanese goods and capital, including for Japanese companies relocating production abroad, and has taken the lead in establishing a free trade zone with the countries of Southeast Asia. This has reduced Japan’s dependence on the United States and strengthened the foundations of an emerging East Asian economic community that one day may represent yet another challenge to America’s international economic position.

Neo-conservative supporters of muscular dominance would prefer to ignore these developments because they contradict the appealing notion of a unipolar world. But viewed from the perspective of American strategic relations with Europe and Asia, the central feature of international relations today is not American unipolarity but the once popular notion of interdependence. Elsewhere, the troubled underdeveloped regions of the world, struggling with disorder, bad governance, and arrested development, if not outright poverty, do not seem to be the beneficiary of American dominance. In these regions, the central challenge is less any great power competition for influence than the collective weakness of the developed world to do anything about their problems.

A Failed Policy

The ultimate legitimating appeal of American dominance—of American empire, if you will—is that it is good for the world. Tellingly, however, two of the regions where the United States has enjoyed dominance over the last three decades—the Middle East and our own neighborhood—are two of the most troubled areas of the world. The problems of the Middle East are well known: an increasingly bloody war between the Palestinians and Israelis; authoritarian Arab governments that are afraid of greater democracy; its ranking near the bottom in regional lists of human development; feudal allies that fund Islamic fundamentalists and that breed bitter and disillusioned young men who dream of destroying the United States and establishing a single Islamic state.

The record of dominance in our neighborhood is no less discouraging. Colombia is the victim of a seemingly endless civil war fueled in part by America’s drug habit. Venezuela suffers from deep-seated civil strife and is unraveling economically. Fidel Castro continues to preside over a failed socialist experiment in Cuba, propped up in part by American hostility. Other countries in the Caribbean still struggle with underdevelopment and are too reliant on a shadow economy of drugs, arms, and money laundering. Haiti is one of the poorest and most miserable places on the planet. Mexico might seem to be one of the few bright spots in this picture in light of its progress toward democracy until one considers that the standard of living of 80 percent of its population has fallen over the last 15 years and that it survives only by exporting its people to the United States.

This points to the second problem with dominance as a strategic policy: that wherever it has been tried it has failed. Even the softer form of dominance practiced by the Clinton administration led to bad policies and overreaching. The Clinton administration thought it could remake the international economic order by pushing financial liberalization and other policies known as the Washington Consensus onto the emerging economies of Asia and Latin America. But that effort helped produce the Asian financial crisis, which almost brought down the global economy. As a result of this overzealous and misguided effort, the United States now has less influence in Asia than it did a decade ago and is more dependent on Japan and China for their capital, even though their financial markets remain largely closed to American financial institutions. Meanwhile, the Washington Consensus has been discredited in most parts of the world, especially in those Asian producer-oriented economies that would benefit from some liberal reforms.

The Bush administration has made a similar mistake in waging an unnecessary war in Iraq, tying down a significant portion of its military power and making American forces an easy target for Islamic extremists as well as disgruntled Iraqis. The United States may ultimately pay a heavy financial price, as the costs of the occupation will be a drain on American finances for years to come. This will not only constrain needed investments at home but undermine America’s ability to finance other important foreign policy goals.

Over the last decade, the United States has benefited from a "foreign policy bubble"— from an exaggerated sense not only of its power and influence but of its contribution to international peace and security. The Clinton and Bush administrations alike fueled that bubble with endless spin about America’s foreign policy accomplishments and the superiority of the American way. But with the Clinton administration’s ill-fated program of international financial liberalization, followed by the NASDAQ crash and the revelations of corporate governance scandals, the bubble of American economic dominance burst. And now by showing the limitations of American military power, and its dependence upon other countries to secure Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush administration may have pricked the bubble of American military dominance as well.

A New Grand Strategy

The neo-conservative architects of muscular dominance are correct that American foreign policy works best when it combines high moral goals with real world national interests. But, as we have seen, they are wrong to make military dominance, the war on terrorism, and the Middle East the centerpieces of American grand strategy. In doing so, they are ignoring the foundations of world order that enabled the United States to become a secure and prosperous society while establishing the basis for a lasting peace among the great powers of North America, Europe, and East Asia. The generally peaceful orientation of the foreign policies of today’s China, India, and Russia as well as of Europe, Japan, and South Korea is the product not of American military dominance (although America’s military power played a role) but of the pull of a global economy and a system of commerce that offered their people middleclass prosperity. These countries have for the most part subordinated ideology and great power ambition to economic development and commercial prosperity, and emerging powers—including middle-level powers like Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, and even Iran—are beginning to follow suit.

The greatest accomplishment of American foreign policy has been the creation of a system of political and economic cooperation that tied together Europe, East Asia, and the United States into a growing world economy and that has acted as a magnetic pull for other countries. This system, of course, has not been perfect, but it has created the conditions for a great power entente— a global concert of powers committed to creating wealth and managing international conflict. The central overarching challenge of the early twenty-first century is how to update the foundations of this system so that it offers a secure place not just for the already prosperous countries of Europe, North America, and East Asia but for emerging powers and struggling developing countries as well.

For more than five decades, the United States has been the linchpin of this system— forging cooperation between itself, Europe, and Japan, building institutions of both common security and prosperity, and serving as a locomotive for world economic growth. The original principles of this system— common security, shared prosperity, and global governance—are still largely valid, but the role the United States needs to play within it must by necessity change, as must the institutions needed to sustain it. Muscular dominance threatens this system in three ways—by dividing the West, by exacerbating America’s economic weaknesses, and by undercutting the international institutions of global governance needed to govern an increasingly complex world economy.

If the overarching challenge is how to deepen and expand the American-inspired system for common security and middleclass prosperity, then the United States needs to give priority not to an endless war on terrorism or to the preservation of an elusive American dominance, but to four interrelated challenges.

Promoting Middle-Class Prosperity

The first challenge relates to the successful management of the world economy and America’s role within it. The first principle of American grand strategy ought to be that the foundation of a stable world order lies with an international economic system that offers the prospect of middleclass prosperity to more and more nations. America’s principal role in the world, then, is not one of fighting evil or even of remaking bad societies but of ensuring the political and economic foundations of such a system. Over the last several decades, the United States has acted as a Keynesian locomotive and stabilizer for the world economy—providing growing demand for the emerging export-oriented economies of East Asia as well as for the advanced industrialized world. But America’s growing international debt problem, combined with the increasing export capacity of East Asia, will make it more difficult for the United States to continue to play this role indefinitely.

The U.S. international debt problem is in part a product of America’s high-consumption society (including its high levels of military spending) and in part a product of the production bias of many of our closest allies and trading partners in Asia and, to a lesser degree, in Europe. As a result of these respective consumer and production biases, the United States and East Asia are locked into a codependency relationship that in the short term has worked reasonably well. We have been the beneficiary of something like a reverse Marshall Plan, whereby our Asian (and to a lesser extent, European) allies have been willing to save and produce more than they consume, and then lend us money to buy their cheaper goods with a strong dollar. And they in turn have found a stable market in which to sell their products, enabling them to industrialize at an impressive rate.

But this relationship has begun to have an unpleasant downside for both the United States and the U.S.-inspired international system. In particular, it has contributed to the undermining of our productive capacity (by pricing out certain goods and service-producing industries) while saddling us with a growing international debt burden, now close to $3 trillion, or, as noted earlier, nearly 30 percent of GDP. At some point, as our international debt grows and as foreign investors accumulate more American IOUs, they will become more reluctant to fund our current account deficit by lending us more money or buying more U.S. assets. As a consequence, the dollar will fall, driving up the cost of living for most Americans and reducing our ability to finance an activist international policy. (Even now, our ability to pursue our objectives abroad is subject to a Japanese and Chinese willingness to continue to fund our external deficit.) As important for American grand strategy, it would put into question the very foundations not only of American influence but of the U.S.-inspired international system that has created great power entente.

All this suggests that one of the great challenges of American grand strategy over the next decade will be to manage a successful transition away from the current unhealthy codependency relationship to a more balanced world economy that can further expand the reach of middleclass prosperity. One part of the transition will require a very active international economic diplomacy to ensure that Europe and the strong Asian economies will prefer to cooperate with the United States in managing the dollar than to go their own way. Until recently, the dollar has benefited from the fact that there was no alternative for investors to turn to in times of crisis. But with the maturing of the euro, there now is. And with the euro’s success, there is a growing interest in East Asia as well as South America to try to replicate its success. This ultimately may be good for the world economy, but in the near term, if the United States is to maintain its power and prosperity, Washington will have to manage carefully this movement toward a multipolar financial order.

A second and equally important part of managing this transition entails the need to reverse the pattern of consumption and production that now characterize the U.S.-Asian relationship. For much of the last two decades, we have been living beyond our means, consuming more than we produced, and borrowing the balance from abroad. To avoid the accumulation of more international debt and more claims on the dollar, we will over the next decade need to begin to produce more than we consume by saving and investing more. But in order to do that without causing a crisis in the world economy, we will also have to encourage other societies to begin to consume more American goods and services. In short, we will need to increase our productive capacity at home while working with other countries to expand markets for American goods and services abroad.

There are limits to how much the slow-growing economies of Europe and Japan will be able to contribute to the correction of America’s current account deficit. The solution therefore must also lie in a major new effort to build a bigger middle class of consumers in the large, more developed emerging economies of Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. The challenge is how to redirect savings and investment from savers in Europe and Japan to countries like Korea, China, Taiwan, Brazil, Malaysia, Turkey, and Mexico to increase both consumption and investment. The focus of this effort should be to promote what might be called middleclass oriented development in these large emerging economies. Rather than depending on the export of manufactured goods and their component parts, these economies should aim to expand domestic consumption in such areas as home ownership, the start up of small and medium-size businesses, and public infrastructure, much as the United States did in the last century. Middle-class-oriented development would help ensure future world economic growth by tapping pent-up demand in emerging economies. It would also have a beneficial effect on the social orders of many emerging economies, creating both greater equity and more jobs. In this respect, it may be seen as an important reform program, applicable to troubled countries in the Middle East as well as to Asian, African, and Latin American emerging economies. Indeed, building a large and sustainable middle class by extending the system of mass affluence found in the United States and Europe to the developing world is the key to both world economic growth and global political stability in the decades ahead.

Creating a New Security Order

If the first challenge for American grand strategy is to extend the system of shared prosperity to the large emerging economies of the developing world, then the second challenge is to extend the great power entente to encompass rising and aspiring powers. Just as containment and political and economic engagement brought about peace between Europe, Russia, China, Japan, and the United States, a new grand strategy must manage potentially revisionist powers by embedding them in regional security orders that constrain them while offering them the stability and encouragement needed for successful economic development. The most pressing challenges in this regard relate to the suspected nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, and the need for new security arrangements in the Persian Gulf and East Asia.

There are no easy answers for dealing with the nuclear aspirations of these vastly different countries. A rogue-state strategy aimed at isolating and pressuring North Korea and Iran is likely to be counterproductive and ultimately destabilizing for the regions concerned. On the other hand, a policy of engagement would require us to overlook some unpleasant features of both regimes, and in the case of North Korea would smack of giving in to blackmail. The way out of this seeming dilemma is to think of engagement as a part of a larger multilateral process of establishing a new security order involving great power cooperation in each region. The eventual reunification of Korea must be at the core of a regional security order that further cements cooperation between China, South Korea, Japan, Russia, and the United States. And the peaceful evolution of Iran is central to a new security order for developing the oil resources of the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, and for curbing Taliban extremists in the region. Such a security order in turn requires the cooperation and support of the European Union, Turkey, Russia, the United States, India, and China.

Each region, of course, has its own unique challenges. But in each case American policy should be guided by three overriding ideas. The first is to elevate common economic development objectives over geopolitical rivalry. The second is to create common security arrangements that reduce the relevance of military power and nuclear weapons to each country’s security. And the third is to create a true concert of regional powers by internationalizing the American leadership role, by sharing responsibility with Europe and Russia in the Persian Gulf, and with Japan, China, South Korea, and Russia in East Asia.

In the case of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea region, the United States needs to see a reforming and modernizing Iran as part of the solution to regional instability, despite some differences over Tehran’s support for Hezbollah and other aspects of Iranian policy. It needs to understand that Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons is not mainly an anti-American act but a much more complex response to regional relations: a mixture of a desire for greater regional influence; worries about a resurgent and U.S.-allied Iraq, which after all invaded Iran in the 1980s; and concerns about the other nuclear powers that surround it. Finally, it also must understand that an effort to establish a new set of security understandings between Iraq and Iran and their neighbors cannot be an American project but must be a regional effort that is supported by the European Union and Russia.

In East Asia, the challenge facing the United States and its regional partners is how to simultaneously manage the nuclear weapons ambitions of North Korea and its possible economic and social implosion. The Bush administration has been correct to address the question of North Korea by means of a multilateral process, but wrong in refusing to offer the kind of security guarantees that a paranoid North Korean leadership may feel it needs to give up its nuclear weapons program, and wrong not to support a broader program of economic and political engagement that Seoul and Beijing have suggested. The principal elements of a new framework for the Korean peninsula would entail both a Korean peace agreement with security guarantees for both North Korea and South Korea, and an economic program aimed at opening up North Korea to trade and investment. This in turn would create the foundation for a broader regional security order that would eventually include multilateral arms control and other common security understandings that would constrain future geopolitical rivalry in the region.

Countering Arab/Islamic Rejectionism

The third challenge for American grand strategy involves how best to counter the growing rejectionism of the Arab and Islamic worlds to an American-inspired international system of entente and middleclass prosperity. The United States has a very large stake in the outcome of the struggle within many Arab and Islamic societies between the modernists, on the one hand, and the reactionaries (those who oppose modernization) and the revolutionaries (the Osama bin Ladens, who want to create a single theocratic state), on the other. But, as noted earlier, an American project to democratize and remake the Middle East is likely to be counterproductive and possibly even ca

The challenge, then, is how to support and encourage the modernists without making the United States the issue in such a way that strengthens the reactionaries and the revolutionaries instead. Even under the best circumstances, this will be difficult to achieve. The answer broadly is for the United States to internationalize its Middle East policy—to reduce America’s dominant, in-your-face presence in the region by sharing responsibility with the European Union, NATO, Russia, and the United Nations. In fact, American policy in the Middle East has been most successful when Washington has actively involved its European partners and the United Nations. Such was the case with the progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the Madrid conference in 1991 to the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, and with the substantial disarmament of Iraq that occurred in the early years of the U.N. containment and inspections regime.

The first step in this process of internationalization, of course, must involve an early and successful end to the American occupation of Iraq. Any effort to create a stable Iraq faces overwhelming odds, but it would have a somewhat better chance under U.N. leadership, with more international forces. It is therefore in our own best interest to compromise with our principal European and Russian partners on this question now, rather than suffer a humiliating retreat down the road.

An equally important step is to turn the current road map for peace, which began as the European-inspired Quartet Plan, into a real solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Under Washington’s leadership, the road map has unfortunately begun to replicate all the problems of the American-sponsored Oslo process, enabling Israel to concoct endless excuses for delaying the dismantling of settlements and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. A better approach would be to turn over the occupied territories, including the Israeli settlements within them, to a U.N.NATO trusteeship and to establish an American-led NATO peace force for ensuring security, with the goal of establishing a recognized Palestinian state within six to eighteen months. Only such a bold internationalist approach is likely to break the grip extremists on both sides have over the current peace process and to ensure Israel’s long-term security. There is no way to overstate the importance of a viable Palestinian state to the political future of the Arab world, or to America’s hope for normalizing its relationship with the Islamic world. If in two years, there are still Israeli tanks in Hebron, Ramallah, and other Palestinian towns, any modernization or democratization that occurs in the Arab world will take a decidedly anti-American direction. The United States needs to help Israel understand, by pressure if necessary, that its future lies not with the subjugation of Palestinians in the occupied territories, but as the engine for commerce and economic growth in the Middle East.

This raises the final dimension of internationalizing American policy in the Middle East—namely, joining forces with the European Union and the world’s financial institutions in putting together a program for regional economic development that would take priority over an American effort to democratize Arab societies. As suggested earlier, an American effort at democratization may only further radicalize the region, and force painful policy choices on future administrations. The current deplorable state of democracy in the region is less a function of Arab political culture than of failed development, and thus our first priority must be development and jobs as well as free elections.

Here again the idea of middle-class-oriented development should figure into American and European thinking, because it is a program not just for economic growth but ultimately for democratic reform. Indeed, the attractiveness of middleclass development is that it offers immediate popular rewards—greater home ownership, more small businesses, better schools—for otherwise painful institutional and societal reforms. Putting the promotion of middleclass oriented economic development on the American foreign policy agenda, in general, and with respect to the Middle East, in particular, can provide policymakers with better alternatives than either punitive sanctions or irritating but ultimately empty lectures about the benefits of democracy. Middle-class-oriented development is not a panacea for the many deep-seated problems of Arab societies, but it is likely to be more productive than an American crusade to democratize the Arab world.

The idea of internationalizing American policy in the Middle East will be bitterly resisted by powerful figures in and around the Bush administration. But many of these same figures are responsible for the current failed order in the region. Americans not concerned solely with recycling Saudi petrodollars into arms sales or with perpetuating Israel’s occupation of the West Bank should welcome this effort because it would serve American interests better than does the current American monopoly. The United States needs a Europe and Russia that can act as a check on America’s worst tendencies in this part of the world. For more than three decades now, American policy has been its own worst enemy—embracing the shah of Iran in a misguided authoritarian effort at modernization, befriending and building up a power-hungry Saddam Hussein, arming the Afghan mujahidin and Arab Afghanis, cozying up to Central Asian dictators in a failed bid for control of Caspian Sea oil, stroking a calcified and repressive Saudi royal family even as it exports Islamic extremism to other parts of the region, and tolerating, if not giving aid and comfort to, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This is not to mention the utter failure of the United States to advance democracy and economic development—despite billions of dollars of aid to Egypt and billions of dollars of arms sales to the Saudi, Jordanian, and Kuwaiti governments. In short, the burden of proof should be on those who resist internationalization and continue to insist on the United States having a free hand in the Middle East.

Closing the Governance Gap

The final challenge that needs to inform American grand strategy relates to the growing international governance gap that is at the heart of the specter of disorder and failed development in the world today. This governance gap is the result of the growing complexity of world affairs and the global economy, on the one hand, and the weakness of existing international and regional institutions, including such informal organizations as the G8, on the other. Everywhere one looks there are problems that call out not just for international cooperation but for more collective action and resources: failed states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; separatist conflicts in Central and South Asia, including one that could lead to nuclear war between Pakistan and India; AIDS and other epidemics; pollution and global warming; energy shortages; underdevelopment and recurrent financial crises in the developing world; and global criminal gangs trafficking in arms, drugs, and women. Indeed, the principal problem of world order is the huge gap between the demand for international public goods (from military protection to international development assistance) to help rectify these problems and their supply.

The agenda of muscular dominance has exacerbated this gap in two ways: by denigrating international law and many international institutions and by discouraging the emergence of other responsible powers willing to bear a greater share of the burden for order keeping and the management of the world economy. As outlined earlier, the defining feature of the international system is not American dominance but multipolarity and the collective weakness of the great powers to deal with the many transnational problems of failed development and failed states enumerated above. Washington’s insistence upon American dominance has provoked two counterproductive reactions on the part of the potential contributors to world order. It has either caused countries to resist American power or to free ride on it— or, even worse, to both resist and free ride. Neo-conservatives in the Bush administration do not seem to understand that Europe and, to a lesser degree, Japan, Korea, and Russia are powerful enough to resist many American initiatives that threaten their interests and strong enough to go it alone in their own regions if need be. This is why the United States has lost influence in the two regions that matter most—in Europe and East Asia—even as it flexes its military muscles in Iraq, and why the governance gap will grow wider if the United States continues to insist on dominance.

If anything, the troubled American occupation should underscore the fact the United States lacks the resources and order-keeping capabilities to deal with the problems of disorder and failed governance alone or in a sustained way. One of the main goals of American foreign policy, therefore, should be to encourage the development of other responsible centers of power and authority capable of working together to expand zones of peace and prosperity and to manage the instability caused by failed governance in the developing world. This, in turn, means harnessing the efforts of the world’s other great and regional powers—the European Union, Russia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Brazil. Many of these efforts will be regional in scope, but they would be part of a larger system of international governance committed to common world-order goals. Indeed, it is only by sharing power and building international institutions, not by insisting on American dominance, that we can hope to close the international governance gap.

The first step in meeting the challenge of international governance in the early twenty-first century is to accept the realities of a multipolar world, to recommit the United States to the vision of the world that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his advisers had when they proposed the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions. Neo-conservatives bitterly oppose the idea of a multipolar world, citing multipolarity as the cause of war and conflict in earlier periods of international relations. This is not just a selective reading of history but ignores America’s own interests. In a multipolar world in which the United States may actually suffer from an unfavorable balance of power in each of its key bilateral relationships, it is in America’s interest to try to constrain the freedom of other powers with international law and institutions. Indeed, the United States, being the most global power of all, has the greatest interest in a system of global governance. If forced to, Europe and Japan could do just fine in their own regions.

An appreciation of the importance of global governance to a world order favorable to American interests also requires a renewed commitment on the part of the United States to the institutional architecture of world order. The United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank are all still essential, but they are badly in need of updating to reflect today’s power relations and to meet today’s international challenges. Given the growth of the world economy, the IMF has barely a fraction of the resources it had at its beginning, which helps explain why it has been so ineffective in dealing with the frequent financial crises of emerging economies. The World Bank has become a hodgepodge of feel-good development programs, rather than the catalyst for public investment it was meant to be. Both institutions need to be reshaped to be able to support the extension of middleclass prosperity in the developing world. Meanwhile, the United Nations struggles with the growing demand for the international community to take on the task of nation building in countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia, Cambodia, and Congo. These institutions will not be reinvented overnight, but the United States needs to devote more time to the questions of global architecture and less time trying to micromanage the remaking of countries that will only resent America’s overbearing presence.

Together, the foreign policy priorities suggested by these four challenges would constitute a grand strategy of great power entente aimed at enlarging the world of middleclass prosperity and common security. Admittedly, such an approach would find few true believers in the American polity today, dominated as it by the new creed of neo-conservative and neo-liberal triumphalists. Yet it may still represent the best way to secure a world favorable to American interests and values.

Notes

The author would like to thank Ben Vershbow for his invaluable research assistance on this article.

1. William Pfaff, "Scaring America Half to Death," International Herald Tribune, May 8, 2003.

2. See Martin Wolf, "The Frightening Flexibility of International Terrorism," Financial Times, June 4, 2003.

3. William Pfaff, "More Bases Won’t Curb Terrorism," International Herald Tribune, August 2, 2003.

The End of Alliances

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 00:00:00 -0400

As the Cold War came to an end, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama heralded the "End of History." Decades earlier, the sociologist Daniel Bell had predicted the "End of Ideology." While we wait for these grand visions to be universalized in practice, we can anticipate a change that, although more mundane, is more likely to occur sooner: the end of alliances. Military alliances, multilateral and bilateral, have been central to the diplomacy and national security strategy of the United States for more than 50 years -- so much so that most Americans will find it hard to imagine a world without them. But such a world is coming, and as with all big changes, it will bring both new opportunities and new vulnerabilities.

Yet the United States is hardly unfamiliar with such a world. In fact, the Cold War era in which such alliances were the pillars of American strategy was an exception and a stark departure for a country that has traditionally been chary of long-term military commitments. The aversion to binding military ties with other countries was true from the outset (the 1778 alliance with France being the exception that proves the rule); the young American republic arose determined to blaze a new trail and regarded alliances with distaste -- as pathways to debilitating entanglements and entrapment in the sordid politics of (to quote our current secretary of defense) "old Europe." This sentiment ran through George Washington's Farewell Address (as well as Thomas Jefferson's own subsequent warning against "entangling alliances") and defined America's worldview for some 150 years. Conveniently, the physical separation offered by two oceans enabled idealism and pragmatism to blend in an appealing design.

As the Industrial Revolution created weapons and modes of transportation that extended the reach and lethality of military threats, Americans were forced to reconsider the utility of alliances. And so we entered into them to fight the two World Wars -- although eagerly discarding them after World War I, as if they were strange and illfitting clothes. The retrenchment could not be repeated after World War II; once Germany and Japan were defeated, our erstwhile Soviet partner quickly became our new security problem, and we decided we needed long-term allies to help deal with it. Mindful of the lessons of the interwar years, American strategists also feared that disorder would result from an abrupt departure by the United States from Europe. They believed, furthermore, that the balance of forces would tilt sharply against the United States if Soviet influence, let alone control, were to extend to Western Europe and Japan, which, despite their devastation by war, were expected to emerge again as centers of wealth and industry.1

Western Europe, for its part, welcomed American protection. World War II had been another sobering lesson about the perils of not counterbalancing German power. An American military presence on the continent -- permanent, substantial, visible, and codified by treaty -- was, therefore, reassuring. These were the circumstances that produced the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), whose purpose Lord Ismay, its first secretary general, famously characterized as "keeping the Russians out, the Germans down, and the Americans in."

NATO proved to be a harbinger of a wider transformation -- one that would have global ramifications -- in the theory and practice of American statecraft. The logic that gave rise to the Atlantic alliance produced an array of other military pacts that spanned the globe. The United States did not, therefore, merely shed its animus toward alliances; it set about forming them with the fervor of a new convert.

The zeal produced a chain of alliances that included NATO; the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO); ANZUS, our partnership with Australia and New Zealand; and bilateral treaties with Japan and South Korea. The Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) -- formed by Britain, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, and (until 1958, when its monarchy was overthrown) Iraq -- benefited from our blessing, though not our participation.2

"Containment," America's strategy during the Cold War, yielded what is arguably its greatest foreign policy triumph -- the collapse of the Soviet-led communist system -- and it rested on this network of anticommunist alliances planted around the Soviet Union's periphery. The ubiquity of alliances assembled or approved of by Washington during the Cold War prompted observers to describe this phase of American foreign policy as "pactomania."

Since the Cold War lasted for nearly half a century, most Americans cannot remember a time when alliances were not an essential component in our strategic toolkit. The demise of this familiar institution will therefore necessitate big changes in the ways we think about, and act in, the world. The changes are unlikely to be welcomed -- perhaps even acknowledged, until the evidence becomes overwhelming -- by academic experts and bureaucracies "specializing" in national security issues. Their theories, policy prescriptions, reputations, influence, and rewards have, for decades, derived from this earlier, more familiar world. The prospect of entering into unknown terrain can hardly be welcome. Yet alliances have always been contextual and contingent. Pageantry and proclamations accompany their creation, and permanent interests and eternal principles are invoked hopefully, but change over time eventually corrodes such institutions, which ultimately are rooted in particular historical circumstances.

The transience of alliances -- think of SEATO and CENTO, for example -- is worth remembering as the debate about the utility of our Cold War partnerships gains momentum. This debate is still at an early stage, and those who question the rationale for maintaining our current alliances in a post