Henry Kissinger
world order
Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History
Contents
INTRODUCTION: The Question of World Order
Varieties of World Order
Legitimacy and Power
CHAPTER 1: Europe: The Pluralistic International Order
The Uniqueness of the European Order
The Thirty Years’ War: What Is Legitimacy?
The Peace of Westphalia
The Operation of the Westphalian System
The French Revolution and Its Aftermath
CHAPTER 2: The European Balance-of-Power System and Its End
The Russian Enigma
The Congress of Vienna
The Premises of International Order
Metternich and Bismarck
The Dilemmas of the Balance of Power
Legitimacy and Power Between the World Wars
The Postwar European Order
The Future of Europe
CHAPTER 3: Islamism and the Middle East: A World in Disorder
The Islamic World Order
The Ottoman Empire: The Sick Man of Europe
The Westphalian System and the Islamic World
Islamism: The Revolutionary Tide—Two Philosophical Interpretations
The Arab Spring and the Syrian Cataclysm
The Palestinian Issue and International Order
Saudi Arabia
The Decline of the State?
CHAPTER 4: The United States and Iran: Approaches to Order
The Tradition of Iranian Statecraft
The Khomeini Revolution
Nuclear Proliferation and Iran
Vision and Reality
CHAPTER 5: The Multiplicity of Asia
Asia and Europe: Different Concepts of Balance of Power
Japan
India
What Is an Asian Regional Order?
CHAPTER 6: Toward an Asian Order: Confrontation or Partnership?
Asia’s International Order and China
China and World Order
A Longer Perspective
CHAPTER 7: “Acting for All Mankind”: The United States and Its Concept of Order
America on the World Stage
Theodore Roosevelt: America as a World Power
Woodrow Wilson: America as the World’s Conscience
Franklin Roosevelt and the New World Order
CHAPTER 8: The United States: Ambivalent Superpower
The Beginning of the Cold War
Strategies of a Cold War Order
The Korean War
Vietnam and the Breakdown of the National Consensus
Richard Nixon and International Order
The Beginning of Renewal
Ronald Reagan and the End of the Cold War
The Afghanistan and Iraq Wars
The Purpose and the Possible
CHAPTER 9: Technology, Equilibrium, and Human Consciousness
World Order in the Nuclear Age
The Challenge of Nuclear Proliferation
Cyber Technology and World Order
The Human Factor
Foreign Policy in the Digital Era
CONCLUSION: World Order in Our Time?
The Evolution of International Order
Where Do We Go from Here?
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOLLOW PENGUIN
To Nancy
Introduction
The Question of World Order
IN 1961, as a young academic, I called on President Harry S. Truman when I found
myself in Kansas City delivering a speech. To the question of what in his presidency
had made him most proud, Truman replied, “That we totally defeated our enemies and
then brought them back to the community of nations. I would like to think that only
America would have done this.” Conscious of America’s vast power, Truman took
pride above all in its humane and democratic values. He wanted to be remembered not
so much for America’s victories as for its conciliations.
All of Truman’s successors have followed some version of this narrative and have
taken pride in similar attributes of the American experience. And for most of this
period, the community of nations that they aimed to uphold reflected an American
consensus—an inexorably expanding cooperative order of states observing common
rules and norms, embracing liberal economic systems, forswearing territorial
conquest, respecting national sovereignty, and adopting participatory and democratic
systems of governance. American presidents of both parties have continued to urge
other governments, often with great vehemence and eloquence, to embrace the
preservation and enhancement of human rights. In many instances, the defense of
these values by the United States and its allies has ushered in important changes in the
human condition.
Yet today this “rules-based” system faces challenges. The frequent exhortations for
countries to “do their fair share,” play by “twenty-first-century rules,” or be
“responsible stakeholders” in a common system reflect the fact that there is no shared
definition of the system or understanding of what a “fair” contribution would be.
Outside the Western world, regions that have played a minimal role in these rules’
original formulation question their validity in their present form and have made clear
that they would work to modify them. Thus while “the international community” is
invoked perhaps more insistently now than in any other era, it presents no clear or
agreed set of goals, methods, or limits.
Our age is insistently, at times almost desperately, in pursuit of a concept of world
order. Chaos threatens side by side with unprecedented interdependence: in the spread
of weapons of mass destruction, the disintegration of states, the impact of
environmental depredations, the persistence of genocidal practices, and the spread of
new technologies threatening to drive conflict beyond human control or
comprehension. New methods of accessing and communicating information unite
regions as never before and project events globally—but in a manner that inhibits
reflection, demanding of leaders that they register instantaneous reactions in a form
expressible in slogans. Are we facing a period in which forces beyond the restraints of
any order determine the future?
VARIETIES OF WORLD ORDER
No truly global “world order” has ever existed. What passes for order in our time
was devised in Western Europe nearly four centuries ago, at a peace conference in the
German region of Westphalia, conducted without the involvement or even the
awareness of most other continents or civilizations. A century of sectarian conflict and
political upheaval across Central Europe had culminated in the Thirty Years’ War of
1618–48—a conflagration in which political and religious disputes commingled,
combatants resorted to “total war” against population centers, and nearly a quarter of
the population of Central Europe died from combat, disease, or starvation. The
exhausted participants met to define a set of arrangements that would stanch the
bloodletting. Religious unity had fractured with the survival and spread of
Protestantism; political diversity was inherent in the number of autonomous political
units that had fought to a draw. So it was that in Europe the conditions of the
contemporary world were approximated: a multiplicity of political units, none
powerful enough to defeat all others, many adhering to contradictory philosophies and
internal practices, in search of neutral rules to regulate their conduct and mitigate
conflict.
The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique
moral insight. It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference
in each other’s domestic affairs and checking each other’s ambitions through a general
equilibrium of power. No single claim to truth or universal rule had prevailed in
Europe’s contests. Instead, each state was assigned the attribute of sovereign power
over its territory. Each would acknowledge the domestic structures and religious
vocations of its fellow states as realities and refrain from challenging their existence.
With a balance of power now perceived as natural and desirable, the ambitions of
rulers would be set in counterpoise against each other, at least in theory curtailing the
scope of conflicts. Division and multiplicity, an accident of Europe’s history, became
the hallmarks of a new system of international order with its own distinct
philosophical outlook. In this sense the European effort to end its conflagration
shaped and prefigured the modern sensibility: it reserved judgment on the absolute in
favor of the practical and ecumenical; it sought to distill order from multiplicity and
restraint.
The seventeenth-century negotiators who crafted the Peace of Westphalia did not
think they were laying the foundation for a globally applicable system. They made no
attempt to include neighboring Russia, which was then reconsolidating its own order
after the nightmarish “Time of Troubles” by enshrining principles distinctly at odds
with Westphalian balance: a single absolute ruler, a unified religious orthodoxy, and a
program of territorial expansion in all directions. Nor did the other major power
centers regard the Westphalian settlement (to the extent they learned of it at all) as
relevant to their own regions.
The idea of world order was applied to the geographic extent known to the
statesmen of the time—a pattern repeated in other regions. This was largely because
the then-prevailing technology did not encourage or even permit the operation of a
single global system. With no means of interacting with each other on a sustained
basis and no framework for measuring the power of one region against another, each
region viewed its own order as unique and defined the others as “barbarians”—
governed in a manner incomprehensible to the established system and irrelevant to its
designs except as a threat. Each defined itself as a template for the legitimate
organization of all humanity, imagining that in governing what lay before it, it was
ordering the world.
At the opposite end of the Eurasian landmass from Europe, China was the center of
its own hierarchical and theoretically universal concept of order. This system had
operated for millennia—it had been in place when the Roman Empire governed
Europe as a unity—basing itself not on the sovereign equality of states but on the
presumed boundlessness of the Emperor’s reach. In this concept, sovereignty in the
European sense did not exist, because the Emperor held sway over “All Under
Heaven.” He was the pinnacle of a political and cultural hierarchy, distinct and
universal, radiating from the center of the world in the Chinese capital outward to all
the rest of humankind. The latter were classified as various degrees of barbarians
depending in part on their mastery of Chinese writing and cultural institutions (a
cosmography that endured well into the modern era). China, in this view, would order
the world primarily by awing other societies with its cultural magnificence and
economic bounty, drawing them into relationships that could be managed to produce
the aim of “harmony under heaven.”
In much of the region between Europe and China, Islam’s different universal
concept of world order held sway, with its own vision of a single divinely sanctioned
governance uniting and pacifying the world. In the seventh century, Islam had
launched itself across three continents in an unprecedented wave of religious
exaltation and imperial expansion. After unifying the Arab world, taking over
remnants of the Roman Empire, and subsuming the Persian Empire, Islam came to
govern the Middle East, North Africa, large swaths of Asia, and portions of Europe.
Its version of universal order considered Islam destined to expand over the “realm of
war,” as it called all regions populated by unbelievers, until the whole world was a
unitary system brought into harmony by the message of the Prophet Muhammad. As
Europe built its multistate order, the Turkish-based Ottoman Empire revived this
claim to a single legitimate governance and spread its supremacy through the Arab
heartland, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. It was aware of
Europe’s nascent interstate order; it considered it not a model but a source of division
to be exploited for westward Ottoman expansion. As Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror
admonished the Italian city-states practicing an early version of multipolarity in the
fifteenth century, “You are 20 states … you are in disagreement among
yourselves … There must be only one empire, one faith, and one sovereignty in the
world.”
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic the foundations of a distinct vision of world order
were being laid in the “New World.” As Europe’s seventeenth-century political and
sectarian conflicts raged, Puritan settlers had set out to redeem God’s plan with an
“errand in the wilderness” that would free them from adherence to established (and in
their view corrupted) structures of authority. There they would build, as Governor
John Winthrop preached in 1630 aboard a ship bound for the Massachusetts
settlement, a “city upon a hill,” inspiring the world through the justness of its
principles and the power of its example. In the American view of world order, peace
and balance would occur naturally, and ancient enmities would be set aside—once
other nations were given the same principled say in their own governance that
Americans had in theirs. The task of foreign policy was thus not so much the pursuit
of a specifically American interest as the cultivation of shared principles. In time, the
United States would become the indispensable defender of the order Europe designed.
Yet even as the United States lent its weight to the effort, an ambivalence endured—
for the American vision rested not on an embrace of the European balance-of-power
system but on the achievement of peace through the spread of democratic principles.
Of all these concepts of order, Westphalian principles are, at this writing, the sole
generally recognized basis of what exists of a world order. The Westphalian system
spread around the world as the framework for a state-based international order
spanning multiple civilizations and regions because, as the European nations
expanded, they carried the blueprint of their international order with them. While they
often neglected to apply concepts of sovereignty to the colonies and colonized
peoples, when these peoples began to demand their independence, they did so in the
name of Westphalian concepts. The principles of national independence, sovereign
statehood, national interest, and noninterference proved effective arguments against
the colonizers themselves during the struggles for independence and protection for
their newly formed states afterward.
The contemporary, now global Westphalian system—what colloquially is called the
world community—has striven to curtail the anarchical nature of the world with an
extensive network of international legal and organizational structures designed to
foster open trade and a stable international financial system, establish accepted
principles of resolving international disputes, and set limits on the conduct of wars
when they do occur. This system of states now encompasses every culture and region.
Its institutions have provided the neutral framework for the interactions of diverse
societies—to a large extent independent of their respective values.
Yet Westphalian principles are being challenged on all sides, sometimes in the
name of world order itself. Europe has set out to depart from the state system it
designed and to transcend it through a concept of pooled sovereignty. And ironically,
though Europe invented the balance-of-power concept, it has consciously and
severely limited the element of power in its new institutions. Having downgraded its
military capacities, Europe has little scope to respond when universal norms are
flouted.
In the Middle East, jihadists on both sides of the Sunni-Shia divide tear at societies
and dismantle states in quest of visions of global revolution based on the
fundamentalist version of their religion. The state itself—as well as the regional
system based on it—is in jeopardy, assaulted by ideologies rejecting its constraints as
illegitimate and by terrorist militias that, in several countries, are stronger than the
armed forces of the government.
Asia, in some ways the most strikingly successful of the regions to adopt concepts
of sovereign statehood, still recalls alternative concepts of order with nostalgia and
churns with rivalries and historical claims of the kind that dashed Europe’s order a
century ago. Nearly every country considers itself to be “rising,” driving
disagreements to the edge of confrontation.
The United States has alternated between defending the Westphalian system and
castigating its premises of balance of power and noninterference in domestic affairs as
immoral and outmoded, and sometimes both at once. It continues to assert the
universal relevance of its values in building a peaceful world order and reserves the
right to support them globally. Yet after withdrawing from three wars in two
generations—each begun with idealistic aspirations and widespread public support
but ending in national trauma—America struggles to define the relationship between
its power (still vast) and its principles.
All of the major centers of power practice elements of Westphalian order to some
degree, but none considers itself the natural defender of the system. All are
undergoing significant internal shifts. Can regions with such divergent cultures,
histories, and traditional theories of order vindicate the legitimacy of any common
system?
Success in such an effort will require an approach that respects both the
multifariousness of the human condition and the ingrained human quest for freedom.
Order in this sense must be cultivated; it cannot be imposed. This is particularly so in
an age of instantaneous communication and revolutionary political flux. Any system
of world order, to be sustainable, must be accepted as just—not only by leaders, but
also by citizens. It must reflect two truths: order without freedom, even if sustained by
momentary exaltation, eventually creates its own counterpoise; yet freedom cannot be
secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace. Order and
freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience,
should instead be understood as interdependent. Can today’s leaders rise above the
urgency of day-to-day events to achieve this balance?
LEGITIMACY AND POWER
An answer to these questions must deal with three levels of order. World order
describes the concept held by a region or civilization about the nature of just
arrangements and the distribution of power thought to be applicable to the entire
world. An international order is the practical application of these concepts to a
substantial part of the globe—large enough to affect the global balance of power.
Regional orders involve the same principles applied to a defined geographic area.
Any one of these systems of order bases itself on two components: a set of
commonly accepted rules that define the limits of permissible action and a balance of
power that enforces restraint where rules break down, preventing one political unit
from subjugating all others. A consensus on the legitimacy of existing arrangements
does not—now or in the past—foreclose competitions or confrontations, but it helps
ensure that they will occur as adjustments within the existing order rather than as
fundamental challenges to it. A balance of forces does not in itself secure peace, but if
thoughtfully assembled and invoked, it can limit the scope and frequency of
fundamental challenges and curtail their chance of succeeding when they do occur.
No book can hope to address every historic approach to international order or every
country now active in shaping world affairs. This volume attempts to deal with the
regions whose concepts of order have most shaped the evolution of the modern era.
The balance between legitimacy and power is extremely complex; the smaller the
geographic area to which it applies and the more coherent the cultural convictions
within it, the easier it is to distill a workable consensus. But in the modern world the
need is for a global world order. An array of entities unrelated to each other by history
or values (except at arm’s length), and defining themselves essentially by the limit of
their capabilities, is likely to generate conflict, not order.
During my first visit to Beijing, undertaken in 1971 to reestablish contact with
China after two decades of hostility, I mentioned that to the American delegation,
China was a “land of mystery.” Premier Zhou Enlai responded, “You will find it not
mysterious. When you have become familiar with it, it will not seem so mysterious as
before.” There were 900 million Chinese, he observed, and it seemed perfectly normal
to them. In our time, the quest for world order will require relating the perceptions of
societies whose realities have largely been self-contained. The mystery to be
overcome is one all peoples share—how divergent historic experiences and values can
be shaped into a common order.
chapter 1
Europe: The Pluralistic International Order
THE UNIQUENESS OF THE EUROPEAN ORDER
The history of most civilizations is a tale of the rise and fall of empires. Order was
established by their internal governance, not through an equilibrium among states:
strong when the central authority was cohesive, more haphazard under weaker rulers.
In imperial systems, wars generally took place at the frontiers of the empire or as civil
wars. Peace was identified with the reach of imperial power.
In China and Islam, political contests were fought for control of an established
framework of order. Dynasties changed, but each new ruling group portrayed itself as
restoring a legitimate system that had fallen into disrepair. In Europe, no such
evolution took hold. With the end of Roman rule, pluralism became the defining
characteristic of the European order. The idea of Europe loomed as a geographic
designation, as an expression of Christianity or of court society, or as the center of
enlightenment of a community of the educated and of modernity. Yet although it was
comprehensible as a single civilization, Europe never had a single governance, or a
united, fixed identity. It changed the principles in the name of which its various units
governed themselves at frequent intervals, experimenting with a new concept of
political legitimacy or international order.
In other regions of the world, a period of competing rulers came by posterity to be
regarded as a “time of troubles,” a civil war, or a “warlord period”—a lamented
interlude of disunity that had been transcended. Europe thrived on fragmentation and
embraced its own divisions. Distinct competing dynasties and nationalities were
perceived not as a form of “chaos” to be expunged but, in the idealized view of
Europe’s statesmen—sometimes conscious, sometimes not—as an intricate
mechanism tending toward a balance that preserved each people’s interests, integrity,
and autonomy. For more than a thousand years, in the mainstream of modern
European statecraft order has derived from equilibrium, and identity from resistance
to universal rule. It is not that European monarchs were more immune to the glories of
conquest than their counterparts in other civilizations or more committed to an ideal
of diversity in the abstract. Rather, they lacked the strength to impose their will on
each other decisively. In time, pluralism took on the characteristics of a model of
world order. Has Europe in our time transcended this pluralistic tendency—or do the
internal struggles of the European Union affirm it?
For five hundred years, Rome’s imperial rule had ensured a single set of laws, a
common defense, and an extraordinary level of civilization. With the fall of Rome,
conventionally dated in 476, the empire disintegrated. In what historians have called
the Dark Ages, nostalgia for the lost universality flourished. The vision of harmony
and unity focused increasingly on the Church. In that worldview, Christendom was a
single society administered by two complementary authorities: civil government, the
“successors of Caesar” maintaining order in the temporal sphere; and the Church, the
successors of Peter tending to universal and absolute principles of salvation.
Augustine of Hippo, writing in North Africa as Roman rule crumbled, theologically
concluded that temporal political authority was legitimate to the extent that it
furthered the pursuit of a God-fearing life and with it man’s salvation. “There are two
systems,” Pope Gelasius I wrote to the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius in A.D. 494,
“under which this world is governed, the sacred authority of the priests and the royal
power. Of these, the greater weight is with the priests in so far as they will answer to
the Lord, even for kings, in the Last Judgment.” The real world order was in this
sense not in this world.
This all-encompassing concept of world order had to contend with an anomaly
from the start: in the post–Roman Europe, dozens of political rulers exercised
sovereignty with no clear hierarchy among them; all invoked fealty to Christ, but their
link to the Church and its authority was ambiguous. Fierce debates attended the
delineation of Church authority, while kingdoms with separate militaries and
independent policies maneuvered for advantage in a manner that bore no apparent
relationship to Augustine’s City of God.
Aspirations to unity were briefly realized on Christmas Day 800, when Pope Leo
III crowned Charlemagne, the Frankish King and conqueror of much of present-day
France and Germany, as Imperator Romanorum (Emperor of the Romans), and
awarded him theoretical title to the former eastern half of the erstwhile Roman
Empire, at that point the lands of Byzantium. The Emperor pledged to the Pope “to
defend on all sides the holy church of Christ from pagan incursion and infidel
devastation abroad, and within to add strength to the Catholic faith by our recognition
of it.”
But Charlemagne’s empire did not fulfill its aspirations: in fact it began to crumble
almost as soon as it was inaugurated. Charlemagne, beset by tasks closer to home,
never attempted to rule the lands of the erstwhile Eastern Roman Empire the Pope had
allotted him. In the west, he made little progress in recapturing Spain from its
Moorish conquerors. After Charlemagne’s death, his successors sought to reinforce
his position by appeal to tradition, by naming his possessions the Holy Roman
Empire. But debilitated by civil wars, less than a century after its founding,
Charlemagne’s empire passed from the scene as a coherent political entity (though its
name remained in use throughout a shifting series of territories until 1806).
China had its Emperor; Islam had its Caliph—the recognized leader of the lands of
Islam. Europe had the Holy Roman Emperor. But the Holy Roman Emperor operated
from a much weaker base than his confreres in other civilizations. He had no imperial
bureaucracy at his disposal. His authority depended on his strength in the regions he
governed in his dynastic capacity, essentially his family holdings. His position was
not formally hereditary and depended on election by a franchise of seven, later nine,
princes; these elections were generally decided by a mixture of political maneuvering,
assessments of religious piety, and vast financial payoffs. The Emperor theoretically
owed his authority to his investiture by the Pope, but political and logistical
considerations often excluded it, leaving him to rule for years as “Emperor-Elect.”
Religion and politics never merged into a single construct, leading to Voltaire’s
truthful jest that the Holy Roman Empire was “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an
Empire.” Medieval Europe’s concept of international order reflected a case-by-case
accommodation between the Pope and the Emperor and a host of other feudal rulers.
A universal order based on the possibility of a single reign and a single set of
legitimating principles was increasingly drained of any practicality.
A full flowering of the medieval concept of world order was envisioned only
briefly with the rise of the sixteenth-century Habsburg prince Charles (1500–1558);
his rule also ushered in its irrevocable decay. The stern and pious Flemish-born prince
was born to rule; except for a widely noted taste for spiced food, he was generally
perceived to be without vices and immune to distraction. He inherited the crown of
the Netherlands as a child and that of Spain—with its vast and expanding array of
colonies in Asia and the Americas—at sixteen. Shortly after, in 1519, he prevailed in
the election for the post of Holy Roman Emperor, making him Charlemagne’s formal
successor. The coincidence of these titles meant that the medieval vision seemed
poised to be fulfilled. A single, pious ruler now governed territories approximately
equivalent to today’s Austria, Germany, northern Italy, Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Hungary, eastern France, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, and much of the Americas.
(This massive agglomeration of political power was accomplished almost entirely
through strategic marriages and gave rise to the Habsburg saying “Bella gerant alii; tu,
felix Austria, nube!”—“Leave the waging of wars to others; you, happy Austria,
marry!”) Spanish explorers and conquistadores—Magellan and Cortés sailed under
Charles’s auspices—were in the process of destroying the ancient empires of the
Americas and carrying the sacraments together with European political power across
the New World. Charles’s armies and navies were engaged in the defense of
Christendom against a new wave of invasions, by the Ottoman Turks and their
surrogates in southeastern Europe and North Africa. Charles personally led a
counterattack in Tunisia, with a fleet funded by gold from the New World. Caught up
in these heady developments, Charles was hailed by his contemporaries as the
“greatest emperor since the division of the empire in 843,” destined to return the
world to “a single shepherd.”
In the tradition of Charlemagne, at his coronation Charles vowed to be “the
protector and defender of the Holy Roman Church,” and crowds paid him obeisance
as “Caesare” and “Imperio”; Pope Clement affirmed Charles as the temporal force for
“seeing peace and order reestablished” in Christendom.
A Chinese or Turkish visitor to Europe at that time might well have perceived a
seemingly familiar political system: a continent presided over by a single dynasty
imbued with a sense of divine mandate. If Charles had been able to consolidate his
authority and manage an orderly succession in the vast Habsburg territorial
conglomerate, Europe would have been shaped by a dominant central authority like
the Chinese Empire or the Islamic caliphate.
It did not happen; nor did Charles try. In the end, he was satisfied to base order on
equilibrium. Hegemony might be his inheritance but not his objective, as he proved
when, after capturing his temporal political rival the French King Francis I in the
Battle of Pavia in 1525, he released him—freeing France to resume a separate and
adversarial foreign policy at the heart of Europe. The French King repudiated
Charles’s grand gesture by taking the remarkable step—so at odds with the medieval
concept of Christian statecraft—of proposing military cooperation to the Ottoman
Sultan Suleiman, who was then invading Eastern Europe and challenging Habsburg
power from the east.
The universality of the Church Charles sought to vindicate was not to be had. He
proved unable to prevent the new doctrine of Protestantism from spreading through
the lands that were the principal base of his power. Both religious and political unity
were fracturing. The effort to fulfill his aspirations inherent in his office was beyond
the capabilities of a single individual. A haunting portrait by Titian from 1548 at
Munich’s Alte Pinakothek reveals the torment of an eminence who cannot reach
spiritual fulfillment or manipulate the, to him, ultimately secondary levers of
hegemonic rule. Charles resolved to abdicate his dynastic titles and divide his vast
empire, and did so in a manner reflecting the pluralism that had defeated his quest for
unity. To his son Philip, he bequeathed the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, then the
crown of Spain and its global empire. In an emotional 1555 ceremony in Brussels, he
reviewed the record of his reign, attested to the diligence with which he had fulfilled
his duties, and in the process handed the States-General of the Netherlands to Philip
as well. The same year, Charles concluded a landmark treaty, the Peace of Augsburg,
which recognized Protestantism within the Holy Roman Empire. Abandoning the
spiritual foundation of his empire, Charles afforded princes the right to choose the
confessional orientation of their territory. Shortly afterward, he resigned his title as
Holy Roman Emperor, passing responsibility for the empire, its upheavals, and its
external challenges to his brother Ferdinand. Charles retired to a monastery in a rural
region of Spain, to a life of seclusion. He spent his last days in the company of his
confessor and of an Italian clock maker, whose works lined the walls and whose trade
Charles attempted to learn. When Charles died in 1558, his will expressed regret for
the fracturing of doctrine that had taken place during his reign and charged his son to
redouble the Inquisition.
Three events completed the disintegration of the old ideal of unity. By the time
Charles V died, revolutionary changes had raised Europe’s sights from a regional to a
global enterprise while fragmenting the medieval political and religious order: the
beginning of the age of discovery, the invention of printing, and the schism in the
Church.
A map depicting the universe, as comprehended by educated Europeans in the
medieval age, would have shown Northern and Southern Hemispheres stretching from
India in the east to Iberia and the islands of Britain in the west, with Jerusalem in the
center. In the medieval perception, this was not a map for travelers but a stage
divinely ordained for the drama of human redemption. The world, it was believed on
biblical authority, was six-sevenths land and one-seventh water. Because the
principles of salvation were fixed and could be cultivated through efforts in the lands
known to Christendom, there was no reward for venturing past the fringes of
civilization. In the Inferno, Dante described Ulysses’ sailing out through the Pillars of
Hercules (the Rock of Gibraltar and the adjacent heights of North Africa, at the
western edge of the Mediterranean Sea) in search of knowledge, and being punished
for his transgression against God’s plan by a whirlwind that dooms his ship and all its
crew.
The modern era announced itself when enterprising societies sought glory and
wealth by exploring the oceans and whatever lay beyond them. In the fifteenth
century, Europe and China ventured forth almost contemporaneously. Chinese ships,
then the world’s largest and technologically most advanced, undertook journeys of
exploration reaching Southeast Asia, India, and the east coast of Africa. They
exchanged presents with local dignitaries, enrolled princes in China’s imperial
“tribute system,” and brought home with them cultural and zoological curiosities. Yet
following the head navigator Zheng He’s death in 1433, the Chinese Emperor put an
end to overseas adventures, and the fleet was abandoned. China continued to insist on
the universal relevance of its principles of world order, but it would henceforth
cultivate them at home and with the peoples along its borders. It never again
attempted a comparable naval effort—until perhaps our own time.
Sixty years later, the European powers sailed from a continent of competing
sovereign authorities; each monarch sponsored naval exploration largely in the hope
of achieving a commercial or strategic edge over his rivals. Portuguese, Dutch, and
English ships ventured to India; Spanish and English ships journeyed to the Western
Hemisphere. Both began to displace the existing trade monopolies and political
structures. The age of three centuries of preponderant European influence in world
affairs had been launched. International relations, once a regional enterprise, would
henceforth be geographically global, with the center of gravity in Europe, in which
the concept of world order was defined and its implementation determined.
A revolution of thinking about the nature of the political universe followed. How
was one to conceive of the inhabitants of regions no one had known existed? How did
they fit into the medieval cosmology of empire and papacy? A council of theologians
summoned by Charles V in 1550–51 in the Spanish city of Valladolid had concluded
that the people living in the Western Hemisphere were human beings with souls—
hence eligible for salvation. This theological conclusion was, of course, also a maxim
justifying conquest and conversion. Europeans were enabled to increase their wealth
and salve their consciences simultaneously. Their global competition for territorial
control changed the nature of international order. Europe’s perspective expanded—
until successive colonial efforts by various European states covered most of the globe
and concepts of world order merged with the operation of the balance of power in
Europe.
The second seminal event was the invention of movable-type printing in the middle
of the fifteenth century, which made it possible to share knowledge on a hithertounimaginable scale. Medieval society had stored knowledge by memorizing or
laboriously hand-copying religious texts or by understanding history through epic
poetry. In the age of exploration, what was being discovered needed to be understood,
and printing permitted accounts to be disseminated. The exploration of new worlds
inspired as well a quest to rediscover the ancient world and its verities, with special
emphasis on the centrality of the individual. The growing embrace of reason as an
objective force of illumination and explication began to shake existing institutions,
including the hitherto-unassailable Catholic Church.
The third revolutionary upheaval, that of the Protestant Reformation, was initiated
when Martin Luther posted ninety-five theses on the door of the Wittenberg Castle
Church in 1517, insisting on the individual’s direct relationship with God; hence
individual conscience—not established orthodoxy—was put forward as the key to
salvation. A number of feudal rulers seized the opportunity to enhance their authority
by embracing Protestantism, imposing it on their populations, and enriching
themselves by seizing Church lands. Each side regarded the other as heretical, and
disagreements turned into life-or-death struggles as political and sectarian disputes
commingled. The barrier separating domestic and foreign disputes collapsed as
sovereigns backed rival factions in their neighbors’ domestic, often bloody, religious
struggles. The Protestant Reformation destroyed the concept of a world order
sustained by the “two swords” of papacy and empire. Christianity was split and at war
with itself.
THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR: WHAT IS LEGITIMACY?
A century of intermittent wars attended the rise and spread of the Protestant critique
of Church supremacy: the Habsburg Empire and the papacy both sought to stamp out
the challenge to their authority, and Protestants resisted in defense of their new faith.
The period labeled by posterity as the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) brought this
turmoil to a climax. With an imperial succession looming and the Catholic King of
Bohemia, the Habsburg Ferdinand, emerging as the most plausible candidate, the
Protestant Bohemian nobility attempted an act of “regime change,” offering their
crown—and its decisive electoral vote—to a Protestant German prince, an outcome in
which the Holy Roman Empire would have ceased to be a Catholic institution.
Imperial forces moved to crush the Bohemian rebellion and then pressed their
advantage against Protestantism generally, triggering a war that devastated Central
Europe. (The Protestant princes were generally located in the north of Germany,
including the then relatively insignificant Prussia; the Catholic heartland was the
south of Germany and Austria.)
In theory, the Emperor’s fellow Catholic sovereigns were obliged to unite in
opposition to the new heresies. Yet faced with a choice between spiritual unity and
strategic advantage, more than a few chose the latter. Foremost among them was
France.
In a period of general upheaval, a country that maintains domestic authority is in a
position to exploit chaos in neighboring states for larger international objectives. A
cadre of sophisticated and ruthless French ministers saw their opportunity and moved
decisively. The Kingdom of France began the process by giving itself a new
governance. In feudal systems, authority was personal; governance reflected the
ruler’s will but was also circumscribed by tradition, limiting the resources available
for a country’s national or international actions. France’s chief minister from 1624 to
1642, Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu, was the first statesman to
overcome these limitations.
A man of the cloth steeped in court intrigue, Richelieu was well adapted to a period
of religious upheaval and crumbling established structures. As the youngest of three
sons from a minor noble family, he embarked on a military career but then switched to
theology after his brother’s unexpected resignation from the bishopric of Luçon,
considered a family birthright. Lore holds that Richelieu completed his religious
studies so swiftly that he was below the normal minimum age for a clerical
appointment; he resolved this obstacle by traveling to Rome and personally lying to
the Pope about his age. His credentials obtained, he launched himself into factional
politics at the French royal court, becoming first a close aide to the queen mother,
Marie de’ Medici, and then a trusted advisor to her chief political rival, her minor son
King Louis XIII. Both evinced a strong distrust of Richelieu, but wracked by internal
conflicts with France’s Huguenot Protestants, they could not bring themselves to
forgo his political and administrative genius. The young cleric’s mediation between
these contending royals won him a recommendation to Rome for a cardinal’s hat;
when given it, he became the highest-ranking member of the King’s privy council.
Maintaining the role for nearly two decades, the “red eminence” (so called because of
his flowing red cardinal’s robes) became France’s chief minister, the power behind the
throne, and the charting genius of a new concept of centralized statecraft and foreign
policy based on the balance of power.
When Richelieu conducted the policies of his country, Machiavelli’s treatises on
statesmanship circulated. It is not known whether Richelieu was familiar with these
texts on the politics of power. He surely practiced their essential principles. Richelieu
developed a radical approach to international order. He invented the idea that the state
was an abstract and permanent entity existing in its own right. Its requirements were
not determined by the ruler’s personality, family interests, or the universal demands of
religion. Its lodestar was the national interest following calculable principles—what
later came to be known as raison d’état. Hence it should be the basic unit of
international relations.
Richelieu commandeered the incipient state as an instrument of high policy. He
centralized authority in Paris, created so-called intendants or professional stewards to
project the government’s authority into every district of the kingdom, brought
efficiency to the gathering of taxes, and decisively challenged traditional local
authorities of the old nobility. Royal power would continue to be exercised by the
King as the symbol of the sovereign state and an expression of the national interest.
Richelieu saw the turmoil in Central Europe not as a call to arms to defend the
Church but as a means to check imperial Habsburg preeminence. Though France’s
King had been styled as the Rex Catholicissimus, or the “Most Catholic King,” since
the fourteenth century, France moved—at first unobtrusively, then openly—to support
the Protestant coalition (of Sweden, Prussia, and the North German princes) on the
basis of cold national-interest calculation.
To outraged complaints that, as a cardinal, he owed a duty to the universal and
eternal Catholic Church—which would imply an alignment against the rebellious
Protestant princes of Northern and Central Europe—Richelieu cited his duties as a
minister to a temporal, yet vulnerable, political entity. Salvation might be his personal
objective, but as a statesman he was responsible for a political entity that did not have
an eternal soul to be redeemed. “Man is immortal, his salvation is hereafter,” he said.
“The state has no immortality, its salvation is now or never.”
The fragmentation of Central Europe was perceived by Richelieu as a political and
military necessity. The basic threat to France was strategic, not metaphysical or
religious: a united Central Europe would be in a position to dominate the rest of the
Continent. Hence it was in France’s national interest to prevent the consolidation of
Central Europe: “If the [Protestant] party is entirely ruined, the brunt of the power of
the House of Austria will fall on France.” France, by supporting a plethora of small
states in Central Europe and weakening Austria, achieved its strategic objective.
Richelieu’s design would endure through vast upheavals. For two and a half
centuries—from the emergence of Richelieu in 1624 to Bismarck’s proclamation of
the German Empire in 1871—the aim of keeping Central Europe (more or less the
territory of contemporary Germany, Austria, and northern Italy) divided remained the
guiding principle of French foreign policy. For as long as this concept served as the
essence of the European order, France was preeminent on the Continent. When it
collapsed, so did France’s dominant role.
Three conclusions emerge from Richelieu’s career. First, the indispensable element
of a successful foreign policy is a long-term strategic concept based on a careful
analysis of all relevant factors. Second, the statesman must distill that vision by
analyzing and shaping an array of ambiguous, often conflicting pressures into a
coherent and purposeful direction. He (or she) must know where this strategy is
leading and why. And, third, he must act at the outer edge of the possible, bridging the
gap between his society’s experiences and its aspirations. Because repetition of the
familiar leads to stagnation, no little daring is required.
THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA
In our time, the Peace of Westphalia has acquired a special resonance as the path
breaker of a new concept of international order that has spread around the world. The
representatives meeting to negotiate it were more focused at the time on
considerations of protocol and status.
By the time representatives of the Holy Roman Empire and its two main
adversaries, France and Sweden, agreed in principle to convene a peace conference,
the conflict had ground on for twenty-three years. Another two years of battle
transpired before the delegations actually met; in the meantime, each side maneuvered
to strengthen its allies and internal constituencies.
Unlike other landmark agreements such as the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 or
the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the Peace of Westphalia did not emerge from a single
conference, and the setting was not one generally associated with a gathering of
statesmen pondering transcendent questions of world order. Mirroring the variety of
contenders in a war that had ranged from Spain to Sweden, the peace emerged from a
series of separate arrangements made in two different Westphalian towns. Catholic
powers, including 178 separate participants from the different states constituting the
Holy Roman Empire, gathered in the Catholic city of Münster. Protestant powers
gathered in the mixed Lutheran and Catholic city of Osnabrück, roughly thirty miles
away. The 235 official envoys and their staffs took up residence in whatever rooms
they could find in the two small cities, neither of which had ever been considered
suitable for a large-scale event, let alone a congress of all European powers. The
Swiss envoy “lodged above a wool weaver’s shop in a room that stank of sausage and
fish oil,” while the Bavarian delegation secured eighteen beds for its twenty-nine
members. With no official conference head or mediator and no plenary sessions,
representatives met on an ad hoc basis and traveled in a neutral zone between the two
cities to coordinate positions, sometimes meeting informally in towns in the middle.
Some of the major powers stationed representatives in both cities. Combat continued
in various parts of Europe throughout the talks, with shifting military dynamics
affecting the course of the negotiations.
Most representatives had come with eminently practical instructions based on
strategic interests. While they employed almost identical high-minded phrases about
achieving a “peace for Christendom,” too much blood had been spilled to conceive of
reaching this lofty goal through doctrinal or political unity. It was now taken for
granted that peace would be built, if at all, through balancing rivalries.
The Peace of Westphalia that emerged from these convoluted discussions is
probably the most frequently cited diplomatic document in European history, though
in fact no single treaty exists to embody its terms. Nor did the delegates ever meet in a
single plenary session to adopt it. The peace is in reality the sum of three separate
complementary agreements signed at different times in different cities. In the January
1648 Peace of Münster, Spain recognized the independence of the Dutch Republic,
capping an eight-decades-long Dutch revolt that had merged with the Thirty Years’
War. In October 1648, separate groupings of powers signed the Treaty of Münster and
the Treaty of Osnabrück, with terms mirroring each other and incorporating key
provisions by reference.
Both of the main multilateral treaties proclaimed their intent as “a Christian,
universal, perpetual, true, and sincere peace and friendship” for “the glory of God and
the security of Christendom.” The operative terms were not substantially different
from other documents of the period. Yet the mechanisms through which they were to
be reached were unprecedented. The war had shattered pretensions to universality or
confessional solidarity. Begun as a struggle of Catholics against Protestants,
particularly after France’s entry against the Catholic Holy Roman Empire it had
turned into a free-for-all of shifting and conflicting alliances. Much like the Middle
Eastern conflagrations of our own period, sectarian alignments were invoked for
solidarity and motivation in battle but were just as often discarded, trumped by
clashes of geopolitical interests or simply the ambitions of outsized personalities.
Every party had been abandoned at some point during the war by its “natural” allies;
none signed the documents under the illusion that it was doing anything but
advancing its own interests and prestige.
Paradoxically, this general exhaustion and cynicism allowed the participants to
transform the practical means of ending a particular war into general concepts of
world order. With dozens of battle-hardened parties meeting to secure hard-won gains,
old forms of hierarchical deference were quietly discarded. The inherent equality of
sovereign states, regardless of their power or domestic system, was instituted. Newly
arrived powers, such as Sweden and the Dutch Republic, were granted protocol
treatment equal to that of established great powers like France and Austria. All kings
were referred to as “majesty” and all ambassadors “excellency.” This novel concept
was carried so far that the delegations, demanding absolute equality, devised a process
of entering the sites of negotiations through individual doors, requiring the
construction of many entrances, and advancing to their seats at equal speed so that
none would suffer the ignominy of waiting for the other to arrive at his convenience.
The Peace of Westphalia became a turning point in the history of nations because
the elements it set in place were as uncomplicated as they were sweeping. The state,
not the empire, dynasty, or religious confession, was affirmed as the building block of
European order. The concept of state sovereignty was established. The right of each
signatory to choose its own domestic structure and religious orientation free from
intervention was affirmed, while novel clauses ensured that minority sects could
practice their faith in peace and be free from the prospect of forced conversion.
Beyond the immediate demands of the moment, the principles of a system of
“international relations” were taking shape, motivated by the common desire to avoid
a recurrence of total war on the Continent. Diplomatic exchanges, including the
stationing of resident representatives in the capitals of fellow states (a practice
followed before then generally only by Venetians), were designed to regulate relations
and promote the arts of peace. The parties envisioned future conferences and
consultations on the Westphalian model as forums for settling disputes before they led
to conflict. International law, developed by traveling scholar-advisors such as Hugo de
Groot (Grotius) during the war, was treated as an expandable body of agreed doctrine
aimed at the cultivation of harmony, with the Westphalian treaties themselves at its
heart.
The genius of this system, and the reason it spread across the world, was that its
provisions were procedural, not substantive. If a state would accept these basic
requirements, it could be recognized as an international citizen able to maintain its
own culture, politics, religion, and internal policies, shielded by the international
system from outside intervention. The ideal of imperial or religious unity—the
operating premise of Europe’s and most other regions’ historical orders—had implied
that in theory only one center of power could be fully legitimate. The Westphalian
concept took multiplicity as its starting point and drew a variety of multiple societies,
each accepted as a reality, into a common search for order. By the mid-twentieth
century, this international system was in place on every continent; it remains the
scaffolding of international order such as it now exists.
The Peace of Westphalia did not mandate a specific arrangement of alliances or a
permanent European political structure. With the end of the universal Church as the
ultimate source of legitimacy, and the weakening of the Holy Roman Emperor, the
ordering concept for Europe became the balance of power—which, by definition,
involves ideological neutrality and adjustment to evolving circumstances. The
nineteenth-century British statesman Lord Palmerston expressed its basic principle as
follows: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests
are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Asked to define
these interests more specifically in the form of an official “foreign policy,” the
acclaimed steward of British power professed, “When people ask me … for what is
called a policy, the only answer is that we mean to do what may seem to be best, upon
each occasion as it arises, making the Interests of Our Country one’s guiding
principle.” (Of course this deceptively simple concept worked for Britain in part
because its ruling class was trained in a common, almost intuitive sense of what the
country’s enduring interests were.)
Today these Westphalian concepts are often maligned as a system of cynical power
manipulation, indifferent to moral claims. Yet the structure established in the Peace of
Westphalia represented the first attempt to institutionalize an international order on
the basis of agreed rules and limits and to base it on a multiplicity of powers rather
than the dominance of a single country. The concepts of raison d’état and the
“national interest” made their first appearance, representing not an exaltation of power
but an attempt to rationalize and limit its use. Armies had marched across Europe for
generations under the banner of universal (and contradictory) moral claims; prophets
and conquerors had unleashed total war in pursuit of a mixture of personal, dynastic,
imperial, and religious ambitions. The theoretically logical and predictable
intermeshing of state interests was intended to overcome the disorder unfolding in
every corner of the Continent. Limited wars over calculable issues would replace the
era of contending universalisms, with its forced expulsions and conversions and
general war consuming civilian populations.
With all its ambiguities, the balancing of power was thought an improvement over
the exactions of religious wars. But how was the balance of power to be established?
In theory, it was based on realities; hence every participant in it should see it alike.
But each society’s perceptions are affected by its domestic structure, culture, and
history and by the overriding reality that the elements of power—however objective
—are in constant flux. Hence the balance of power needs to be recalibrated from time
to time. It produces the wars whose extent it also limits.
THE OPERATION OF THE WESTPHALIAN SYSTEM
With the Treaty of Westphalia, the papacy had been confined to ecclesiastical
functions, and the doctrine of sovereign equality reigned. What political theory could
then explain the origin and justify the functions of secular political order? In his
Leviathan, published in 1651, three years after the Peace of Westphalia, Thomas
Hobbes provided such a theory. He imagined a “state of nature” in the past when the
absence of authority produced a “war of all against all.” To escape such intolerable
insecurity, he theorized, people delivered their rights to a sovereign power in return
for the sovereign’s provision of security for all within the state’s borders. The
sovereign state’s monopoly on power was established as the only way to overcome
the perpetual fear of violent death and war.
This social contract in Hobbes’s analysis did not apply beyond the borders of states,
for no supranational sovereign existed to impose order. Therefore:
Concerning the offices of one sovereign to another, which are comprehended in that law which is
commonly called the law of nations, I need not say anything in this place, because the law of nations
and the law of nature is the same thing. And every sovereign hath the same right, in procuring the
safety of his people, that any particular man can have, in procuring the safety of his own body.
The international arena remained in the state of nature and was anarchical because
there was no world sovereign available to make it secure and none could be
practically constituted. Thus each state would have to place its own national interest
above all in a world where power was the paramount factor. Cardinal Richelieu would
have emphatically agreed.
The Peace of Westphalia in its early practice implemented a Hobbesian world. How
was this new balance of power to be calibrated? A distinction must be made between
the balance of power as a fact and the balance of power as a system. Any international
order—to be worthy of that name—must sooner or later reach an equilibrium, or else
it will be in a constant state of warfare. Because the medieval world contained dozens
of principalities, a practical balance of power frequently existed in fact. After the
Peace of Westphalia, the balance of power made its appearance as a system; that is to
say, bringing it about was accepted as one of the key purposes of foreign policy;
disturbing it would evoke a coalition on behalf of equilibrium.
The rise of Britain as a major naval power by early in the eighteenth century made
it possible to turn the facts of the balance of power into a system. Control of the seas
enabled Britain to choose the timing and scale of its involvement on the Continent to
act as the arbiter of the balance of power, indeed the guarantor that Europe would
have a balance of power at all. So long as England assessed its strategic requirements
correctly, it would be able to back the weaker side on the Continent against the
stronger, preventing any single country from achieving hegemony in Europe and
thereby mobilizing the resources of the Continent to challenge Britain’s control of the
seas. Until the outbreak of World War I, England acted as the balancer of the
equilibrium. It fought in European wars but with shifting alliances—not in pursuit of
specific, purely national goals, but by identifying the national interest with the
preservation of the balance of power. Many of these principles apply to America’s
role in the contemporary world, as will be discussed later.
There were in fact two balances of power being conducted in Europe after the
Westphalian settlement: The overall balance, of which England acted as a guardian,
was the protector of general stability. A Central European balance essentially
manipulated by France aimed to prevent the emergence of a unified Germany in a
position to become the most powerful country on the Continent. For more than two
hundred years, these balances kept Europe from tearing itself to pieces as it had
during the Thirty Years’ War; they did not prevent war, but they limited its impact
because equilibrium, not total conquest, was the goal.
The balance of power can be challenged in at least two ways: The first is if a major
country augments its strength to a point where it threatens to achieve hegemony. The
second occurs when a heretofore-secondary state seeks to enter the ranks of the major
powers and sets off a series of compensating adjustments by the other powers until a
new equilibrium is established or a general conflagration takes place. The
Westphalian system met both tests in the eighteenth century, first by thwarting the
thrust for hegemony by France’s Louis XIV, then by adjusting the system to the
insistence of Prussia’s Frederick the Great for equal status.
Louis XIV took full control of the French crown in 1661 and developed Richelieu’s
concept of governance to unprecedented levels. The French King had in the past ruled
through feudal lords with their own autonomous claims to authority based on heredity.
Louis governed through a royal bureaucracy dependent entirely on him. He
downgraded courtiers of noble blood and ennobled bureaucrats. What counted was
service to the King, not rank of birth. The brilliant Finance Minister Jean-Baptiste
Colbert, son of a provincial draper, was charged with unifying the tax administration
and financing constant war. The memoirs of Saint-Simon, a duke by inheritance and
man of letters, bear bitter witness to the social transformation:
He [Louis] was well aware that though he might crush a nobleman with the weight of his displeasure,
he could not destroy him or his line, whereas a secretary of state or other such minister could be
reduced together with his whole family to those depths of nothingness from which he had been
elevated. No amount of wealth or possessions would avail him then. That was one reason why he liked
to give his ministers authority over the highest in the Land, even over the Princes of the Blood.
In 1680, Louis symbolized the nature of his all-embracing rule by assuming the title
“the Great” to go with his earlier self-granted appellation as “the Sun King.” In 1682,
France’s North American territories were named “Louisiana.” The same year, Louis’s
court moved to Versailles, where the King oversaw in elaborate detail a “theater
monarchy” dedicated, above all, to the performance of his own majesty.
With a unified kingdom spared the ravages of internal war, possessing a skilled
bureaucracy and a military surpassing that of any neighboring state, France was for a
while in a position to seek dominance in Europe. Louis’s reign resolved itself into a
series of almost continuous wars. In the end, as was the case with all later aspirants to
European hegemony, each new conquest galvanized an opposing coalition of nations.
At first, Louis’s generals won battles everywhere; ultimately, they were defeated or
checked everywhere, most signally in the first decade of the eighteenth century by
John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough and forebear of the great twentieth-century
Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Louis’s legions could not overcome the basic
resilience of the Westphalian system.
Decades after Richelieu’s death, the demonstrated effectiveness of a consolidated,
centralized state pursuing a secular foreign policy and centralized administration
inspired imitators that united to counterbalance French power. England, Holland, and
Austria created the Grand Alliance, joined later by Spain, Prussia, Denmark, and
several German principalities. The opposition to Louis was not ideological or
religious in nature: French remained the language of diplomacy and high culture
through much of Europe, and the Catholic-Protestant divide ran through the allied
camp. Rather, it was inherent in the Westphalian system and indispensable to preserve
the pluralism of the European order. Its character was defined in the name
contemporary observers gave it: the Great Moderation. Louis sought what amounted
to hegemony in the name of the glory of France. He was defeated by a Europe that
sought its order in diversity.
THE FIRST HALF of the eighteenth century was dominated by the quest to contain
France; the second was shaped by Prussia’s effort to find a place for itself among the
major powers. Where Louis had fought wars to translate power into hegemony,
Prussia’s Frederick II went to war to transmute latent weakness into great-power
status. Situated on the harsh North German plain and extending from the Vistula
across Germany, Prussia cultivated discipline and public service to substitute for the
larger population and greater resources of better-endowed countries. Split into two
noncontiguous pieces, it jutted precariously into the Austrian, Swedish, Russian, and
Polish spheres of influence. It was relatively sparsely populated; its strength was the
discipline with which it marshaled its limited resources. Its greatest assets were civicmindedness, an efficient bureaucracy, and a well-trained army.
When Frederick II ascended the throne in 1740, he seemed an unlikely contender
for the greatness history has vouchsafed him. Finding the dour discipline of the
position of Crown Prince oppressive, he had attempted to flee to England
accompanied by a friend, Hans Hermann von Katte. They were apprehended. The
King ordered von Katte decapitated in front of Frederick, whom he submitted to a
court-martial headed by himself. He cross-examined his son with 178 questions,
which Frederick answered so deftly that he was reinstated.
Surviving this searing experience was possible only by adopting his father’s austere
sense of duty and developing a general misanthropic attitude toward his fellow man.
Frederick saw his personal authority as absolute but his policies as limited rigidly by
the principles of raison d’état Richelieu had put forward a century earlier. “Rulers are
the slaves of their resources,” his credo held, “the interest of the State is their law, and
this law may not be infringed.” Courageous and cosmopolitan (Frederick spoke and
wrote French and composed sentimental French poetry even on military campaigns,
subtitling one of his literary efforts “Pas trop mal pour la veille d’une grande
bataille”), he embodied the new era of Enlightenment governance by benevolent
despotism, which was legitimized by its effectiveness, not ideology.
Frederick concluded that great-power status required territorial contiguity for
Prussia, hence expansion. There was no need for any other political or moral
justification. “The superiority of our troops, the promptitude with which we can set
them in motion, in a word the clear advantage we have over our neighbors” was all
the justification Frederick required to seize the wealthy and traditionally Austrian
province of Silesia in 1740. Treating the issue as a geopolitical, not a legal or moral,
one, Frederick aligned himself with France (which saw in Prussia a counter to
Austria) and retained Silesia in the peace settlement of 1742, nearly doubling
Prussia’s territory and population.
In the process, Frederick brought war back to the European system, which had been
at peace since 1713 when the Treaty of Utrecht had put an end to the ambitions of
Louis XIV. The challenge to the established balance of power caused the Westphalian
system to begin to function. The price for being admitted as a new member to the
European order turned out to be seven years of near-disastrous battle. Now the
alliances were reversed, as Frederick’s previous allies sought to quash his operations
and their rivals tried to harness Prussia’s disciplined fighting force for their own aims.
Russia, remote and mysterious, for the first time entered a contest over the European
balance of power. At the edge of defeat, with Russian armies at the gates of Berlin,
Frederick was saved by the sudden death of Catherine the Great. The new Czar, a
longtime admirer of Frederick, withdrew from the war. (Hitler, besieged in encircled
Berlin in April 1945, waited for an event comparable to the so-called Miracle of the
House of Brandenburg and was told by Joseph Goebbels that it had happened when
President Franklin D. Roosevelt died.)
The Holy Roman Empire had become a facade; no rival European claimant to
universal authority had arisen. Almost all rulers asserted that they ruled by divine
right—a claim not challenged by any major power—but they accepted that God had
similarly endowed many other monarchs. Wars were therefore fought for limited
territorial objectives, not to overthrow existing governments and institutions, nor to
impose a new system of relations between states. Tradition prevented rulers from
conscripting their subjects and severely constrained their ability to raise taxes. The
impact of wars on civilian populations was in no way comparable to the horrors of the
Thirty Years’ War or what technology and ideology would produce two centuries later.
In the eighteenth century, the balance of power operated as a theater in which “lives
and values were put on display, amid splendor, polish, gallantry, and shows of utter
self-assurance.” The exercise of that power was constrained by the recognition that
the system would not tolerate hegemonic aspirations.
International orders that have been the most stable have had the advantage of
uniform perceptions. The statesmen who operated the eighteenth-century European
order were aristocrats who interpreted intangibles like honor and duty in the same
way and agreed on fundamentals. They represented a single elite society that spoke
the same language (French), frequented the same salons, and pursued romantic
liaisons in each other’s capitals. National interests of course varied, but in a world
where a foreign minister could serve a monarch of another nationality (every Russian
foreign minister until 1820 was recruited abroad), or when a territory could change its
national affiliation as the result of a marriage pact or a fortuitous inheritance, a sense
of overarching common purpose was inherent. Power calculations in the eighteenth
century took place against this ameliorating background of a shared sense of
legitimacy and unspoken rules of international conduct.
This consensus was not only a matter of decorum; it reflected the moral convictions
of a common European outlook. Europe was never more united or more spontaneous
than during what came to be perceived as the age of enlightenment. New triumphs in
science and philosophy began to displace the fracturing European certainties of
tradition and faith. The swift advance of the mind on multiple fronts—physics,
chemistry, astronomy, history, archaeology, cartography, rationality—bolstered a new
spirit of secular illumination auguring that the revelation of all of nature’s hidden
mechanisms was only a question of time. “The true system of the world has been
recognized, developed, and perfected,” wrote the brilliant French polymath Jean Le
Rond d’Alembert in 1759, embodying the spirit of the age:
In short, from the earth to Saturn, from the history of the heavens to that of insects, natural philosophy
has been revolutionized; and nearly all other fields of knowledge have assumed new forms … [T]he
discovery and application of a new method of philosophizing, the kind of enthusiasm which
accompanies discoveries, a certain exaltation of ideas which the spectacle of the universe produces in
us—all these causes have brought about a lively fermentation of minds. Spreading through nature in all
directions like a river which has burst its dams, this fermentation has swept with a sort of violence
everything along with it which stood in its way.
This “fermentation” based itself on a new spirit of analysis and a rigorous testing of
all premises. The exploration and systematization of all knowledge—an endeavor
symbolized by the twenty-eight-volume Encyclopédie that d’Alembert co-edited
between 1751 and 1772—proclaimed a knowable, demystified universe with man as
its central actor and explicator. Prodigious learning would be combined, d’Alembert’s
colleague Denis Diderot wrote, with a “zeal for the best interests of the human race.”
Reason would confront falsehoods with “solid principles [to] serve as the foundation
for diametrically opposed truths,” whereby “we shall be able to throw down the whole
edifice of mud and scatter the idle heap of dust” and instead “put men on the right
path.”
Inevitably, this new way of thinking and analysis was applied to concepts of
governance, political legitimacy, and international order. The political philosopher
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron of Montesquieu, applied the principles of the
balance of power to domestic policy by describing a concept of checks and balances
later institutionalized in the American Constitution. He went on from there into a
philosophy of history and of the mechanisms of societal change. Surveying the
histories of various societies, Montesquieu concluded that events were never caused
by accident. There was always an underlying cause that reason could discover and
then shape to the common good:
It is not fortune which rules the world … There are general intellectual as well as physical causes
active in every monarchy which bring about its rise, preservation, and fall. All [seeming] accidents are
subject to these causes, and whenever an accidental battle, that is, a particular cause, has destroyed a
state, a general cause also existed which led to the fall of this state as a result of a single battle. In short,
it is the general pace of things which draws all particular events along with it.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, probably the greatest philosopher of the
Enlightenment period, took Montesquieu a step further by developing a concept for a
permanent peaceful world order. Pondering the world from the former Prussian capital
of Königsberg, casting his gaze on the period of the Seven Years’ War, the American
Revolutionary War, and the French Revolution, Kant dared to see in the general
upheaval the faint beginnings of a new, more peaceful international order.
Humanity, Kant reasoned, was characterized by a distinctive “unsocial sociability”:
the “tendency to come together in society, coupled, however, with a continual
resistance which constantly threatens to break this society up.” The problem of order,
particularly international order, was “the most difficult and the last to be solved by the
human race.” Men formed states to constrain their passions, but like individuals in the
state of nature each state sought to preserve its absolute freedom, even at the cost of
“a lawless state of savagery.” But the “devastations, upheavals and even complete
inner exhaustion of their powers” arising from interstate clashes would in time oblige
men to contemplate an alternative. Humanity faced either the peace of “the vast
graveyard of the human race” or peace by reasoned design.
The answer, Kant held, was a voluntary federation of republics pledged to nonhostility and transparent domestic and international conduct. Their citizens would
cultivate peace because, unlike despotic rulers, when considering hostilities, they
would be deliberating about “calling down on themselves all the miseries of war.”
Over time the attractions of this compact would become apparent, opening the way
toward its gradual expansion into a peaceful world order. It was Nature’s purpose that
humanity eventually reason its way toward “a system of united power, hence a
cosmopolitan system of general political security” and “a perfect civil union of
mankind.”
The confidence, verging on brashness, in the power of reason reflected in part a
species of what the Greeks called hubris—a kind of spiritual pride that bore the seeds
of its own destruction within itself. The Enlightenment philosophers ignored a key
issue: Can governmental orders be invented from scratch by intelligent thinkers, or is
the range of choice limited by underlying organic and cultural realities (the Burkean
view)? Is there a single concept and mechanism logically uniting all things, in a way
that can be discovered and explicated (as d’Alembert and Montesquieu argued), or is
the world too complicated and humanity too diverse to approach these questions
through logic alone, requiring a kind of intuition and an almost esoteric element of
statecraft?
The Enlightenment philosophers on the Continent generally opted for the rationalist
rather than the organic view of political evolution. In the process, they contributed—
unintentionally, indeed contrary to their intention—to an upheaval that rent Europe for
decades and whose aftereffects reach to this day.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND ITS AFTERMATH
Revolutions are most unsettling when least expected. So it was with the French
Revolution, which proclaimed a domestic and world order as different from the
Westphalian system as it was possible to be. Abandoning the separation between
domestic and foreign policy, it resurrected—and perhaps exceeded—the passions of
the Thirty Years’ War, substituting a secular crusade for the religious impulse of the
seventeenth century. It demonstrated how internal changes within societies are able to
shake the international equilibrium more profoundly than aggression from abroad—a
lesson that would be driven home by the upheavals of the twentieth century, many of
which drew explicitly on the concepts first advanced by the French Revolution.
Revolutions erupt when a variety of often different resentments merge to assault an
unsuspecting regime. The broader the revolutionary coalition, the greater its ability to
destroy existing patterns of authority. But the more sweeping the change, the more
violence is needed to reconstruct authority, without which society will disintegrate.
Reigns of terror are not an accident; they are inherent in the scope of revolution.
The French Revolution occurred in the richest country of Europe, even though its
government was temporarily bankrupt. Its original impetus is traceable to leaders—
mostly aristocrats and upper bourgeoisie—who sought to bring the governance of
their country into conformity with the principles of the Enlightenment. It gained a
momentum not foreseen by those who made the Revolution and inconceivable to the
prevailing ruling elite.
At its heart was a reordering on a scale that had not been seen in Europe since the
end of the religious wars. For the revolutionaries, human order was the reflection of
neither the divine plan of the medieval world, nor the intermeshing of grand dynastic
interests of the eighteenth century. Like their progeny in the totalitarian movements of
the twentieth century, the philosophers of the French Revolution equated the
mechanism of history with the unadulterated operation of the popular will, which by
definition could accept no inherent or constitutional limitation—and which they
reserved to themselves the monopoly to identify. The popular will, as conceived in
that manner, was altogether distinct from the concept of majority rule prevalent in
England or of checks and balances embedded in a written constitution as in the United
States. The claims of the French revolutionaries far exceeded Richelieu’s concept of
the authority of the state by vesting sovereignty in an abstraction—not individuals but
entire peoples as indivisible entities requiring uniformity of thought and action—and
then designating themselves the people’s spokesmen and indeed embodiment.
The Revolution’s intellectual godfather, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, formulated this
universal claim in a series of writings whose erudition and charm obscured their
sweeping implications. Walking readers step by step through a “rational” dissection of
human society, Rousseau condemned all existing institutions—property, religion,
social classes, government authority, civil society—as illusory and fraudulent. Their
replacement was to be a new “rule of administration in the social order.” The
populace was to submit totally to it—with an obedience that no ruler by divine right
had ever imagined, except the Russian Czar, whose entire populace outside the
nobility and the communities on the harsh frontiers beyond the Urals had the status of
serfs. These theories prefigured the modern totalitarian regime, in which the popular
will ratifies decisions that have already been announced by means of staged mass
demonstrations.
In pursuit of this ideology, all monarchies were by definition treated as enemies;
because they would not give up power without resisting, the Revolution, to prevail,
had to turn itself into a crusading international movement to achieve world peace by
imposing its principles. In order to propel the new dispensation across Europe,
France’s entire adult male population was made subject to conscription. The
Revolution based itself on a proposition similar to that made by Islam a millennium
before, and Communism in the twentieth century: the impossibility of permanent
coexistence between countries of different religious or political conceptions of truth,
and the transformation of international affairs into a global contest of ideologies to be
fought by any available means and by mobilizing all elements of society. In doing so,
the Revolution again merged domestic and foreign policy, legitimacy and power,
whose decoupling by the Westphalian settlement had limited the scope and intensity
of Europe’s wars. The concept of an international order with prescribed limits of state
action was overthrown in favor of a permanent revolution that knew only total victory
or defeat.
In November 1792, the French National Assembly threw down the gauntlet to
Europe with a pair of extraordinary decrees. The first expressed an open-ended
commitment to extend French military support to popular revolution anywhere.
France, it announced, having liberated itself, “will accord fraternity and assistance to
all peoples who shall wish to recover their liberty.” The National Assembly gave
added weight to this decree and obliged itself to give it force in the proviso that the
document be “translated and printed in all languages.” The National Assembly made
the break with the eighteenth-century order irrevocable by guillotining France’s
deposed King several weeks later. It also declared war on Austria and invaded the
Netherlands.
In December 1792, an even more radical decree was issued with an even more
universal application. Any revolutionary movement that thought the decree applied to
it was invited to “fill in the blank” of a document reading, “The French People to the
____ People,” which applauded in advance the next fraternal revolution and pledged
support to “the suppression of all the civil and military authorities which have
governed you up to this day.” This process, whose scope was implicitly limitless, was
also irreversible: “The French nation declares that it will treat as enemies the people
who, refusing liberty and equality, or renouncing them, may wish to preserve, recall,
or treat with the prince and the privileged castes.” Rousseau had written that
“whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be forced to do so by the whole
body … [H]e will be forced to be free.” The Revolution undertook to expand this
definition of legitimacy to all humanity.
To achieve such vast and universal objectives, the leaders of the French Revolution
strove to cleanse their country of all possibility of domestic opposition. “The Terror”
killed thousands of the former ruling classes and all suspected domestic opponents,
even those who supported the Revolution’s goals while questioning some of its
methods. Two centuries later, comparable motivations underlay the Russian purges of
the 1930s and the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s.
Eventually, order was restored, as it must be if a state is not to disintegrate. The
model once again came from Rousseau’s “great legislator.” Louis XIV had
appropriated the state in the service of royal power; the Revolution commandeered the
people to underwrite its design. Napoleon, who proclaimed himself “First Consul for
Life,” later Emperor, represented a new type: the “Great Man” swaying the world by
the force of his will, legitimized by charismatic magnetism and personal success in
military command. The essence of the Great Man was his refusal to acknowledge
traditional limits and his insistence on reordering the world by his own authority. At
the climactic moment of his coronation as Emperor in 1804, Napoleon, unlike
Charlemagne, refusing to be legitimized by a power other than his own, took the
imperial crown from the Pope’s hands and crowned himself Emperor.
The Revolution no longer made the leader; the leader defined the Revolution. As he
tamed the Revolution, Napoleon also made himself its guarantor. But he also saw
himself—and not without reason—as the capstone of the Enlightenment. He
rationalized France’s system of government, establishing the system of prefectures
through which, even at this writing, the French system of administration operates. He
created the Napoleonic Code, on which the laws that still prevail in France and other
European countries are based. He was tolerant of religious diversity and encouraged
rationalism in government, with the end of improving the lot of the French people.
It was as the simultaneous incarnation of the Revolution and expression of the
Enlightenment that Napoleon set about to achieve the domination and unification of
Europe. By 1809, under his brilliant military leadership, his armies crushed all
opposition in Western and Central Europe, enabling him to redraw the map of the
Continent as a geopolitical design. He annexed key territories to France and
established satellite republics in others, many of them governed by relatives or French
marshals. A uniform legal code was established throughout Europe. Thousands of
instructions on matters economic and social were issued. Would Napoleon become the
unifier of a continent divided since the fall of Rome?
Two obstacles remained: England and Russia. England, in command of the seas
after Nelson’s crushing victory at Trafalgar in 1805, was for the moment invulnerable
but not strong enough to launch a significant invasion across the English Channel. As
it would a century and a half later, England stood alone in Western Europe, aware that
a peace with the conqueror would make it possible for a single power to organize the
resources of the entire Continent and, sooner or later, overcome its rule of the oceans.
England waited behind the channel for Napoleon (and a century and a half later, for
Hitler) to make a mistake that would enable it to reappear on the Continent militarily
as a defender of the balance of power. (In World War II, Britain was also waiting for
the United States to enter the lists.)
Napoleon had grown up under the eighteenth-century dynastic system and, in a
strange way, accepted its legitimacy. In it, as a Corsican of minor standing even in his
hometown, he was illegitimate by definition, which meant that, at least in his own
mind, the legitimacy of his rule depended on the permanence—and, indeed, the extent
—of his conquests. Whenever there remained a ruler independent of his will,
Napoleon felt obliged to pursue him. Incapable of restraint by concept, temperament,
or experience, he launched his forces into Spain and Russia, neither of them essential
to a geopolitical design. Napoleon could not live in an international order; his
ambition required an empire over at least the length and breadth of Europe, and for
that his power fell just barely too short.
With the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the age of total war—the
mobilization of a nation’s entire resources—had arrived. The scale of bloodshed and
devastation harked back to the Thirty Years’ War. Napoleon’s Grande Armée—now
manned through conscription, including even in annexed territories—supplied and
maintained itself on the assets of the conquered enemy and population, including
gigantic financial “tributes.” The results were an enormous increase in the size of the
army and the subjection of entire regions. Not until Napoleon succumbed to the
temptation to enter territories where local resources were insufficient for the support
of a huge army—Spain and Russia—would he face defeat, first by overreaching
himself, above all in Russia in 1812, and then as the rest of Europe united against him
in a belated vindication of Westphalian principles. At the Battle of the Nations in
Leipzig in 1813, the joint armies of the surviving European states inflicted Napoleon’s
first major, and ultimately decisive, defeat in a battle. (The defeat in Russia was by
attrition.) After the Battle of the Nations, Napoleon refused settlements that would
have enabled him to keep some of his conquests. He feared that any formal
acceptance of limits would destroy his only claim to legitimacy. In this way, he was
overthrown as much by his own insecurity as by Westphalian principles. Europe’s
strongest conqueror since Charlemagne was defeated not only by an international
order that rose up against him, but by himself.
The Napoleonic period marked the apotheosis of the Enlightenment. Inspired by the
examples of Greece and Rome, its thinkers had equated enlightenment with the power
of reason, which implied a diffusion of authority from the Church to secular elites.
Now these aspirations had been distilled further and concentrated on one leader as the
expression of global power. An illustration of Napoleon’s impact occurred on October
13, 1806, one day before the Battle of Jena, where the Prussian army was decisively
defeated. As he left to reconnoiter the battlefield with his general staff, Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, then a university lecturer (he would later write The
Philosophy of History, which inspired Marx’s doctrine), described the scene in
panegyrical terms as he heard the clatter of horses’ hooves on the cobblestones:
I saw the Emperor—this world-soul—riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful
sensation to see such an individual who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out
over the world and masters it.
But in the end, this world spirit had drawn into Europe an immense new power—of
Europe and yet with three-quarters of its vast territory in Asia: imperial Russia, whose
armies pursued Napoleon’s decimated force back across the Continent and were
occupying Paris at war’s end. Its strength raised fundamental issues for the balance of
power in Europe, and its aspirations threatened to make impossible a return to the
prerevolutionary equilibrium.
chapter 2
The European Balance-of-Power System and Its
End
THE RUSSIAN ENIGMA
When the era of the French Revolution and Napoleon ended, Russian troops were
occupying Paris in a stunning display of history’s reversals. A half century earlier,
Russia had for the first time entered the balance of power in Western Europe by
participating in the Seven Years’ War and demonstrated the arbitrary nature of czarist
rule when it suddenly declared its neutrality and withdrew from the war because of a
newly crowned Czar’s admiration for Frederick the Great. At the end of the
Napoleonic period, another Czar, Alexander, proceeded to prescribe Europe’s future.
The liberties of Europe and its concomitant system of order required the participation
of an empire far larger than the rest of Europe together and autocratic to a degree
without precedent in European history.
Since then, Russia has played a unique role in international affairs: part of the
balance of power in both Europe and Asia but contributing to the equilibrium of the
international order only fitfully. It has started more wars than any other contemporary
major power, but it has also thwarted dominion of Europe by a single power, holding
fast against Charles XII of Sweden, Napoleon, and Hitler when key continental
elements of the balance had been overrun. Its policy has pursued a special rhythm of
its own over the centuries, expanding over a landmass spanning nearly every climate
and civilization, interrupted occasionally for a time by the need to adjust its domestic
structure to the vastness of the enterprise—only to return again, like a tide crossing a
beach. From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, circumstances have changed, but the
rhythm has remained extraordinarily consistent.
Western Europeans emerging from the Napoleonic upheavals viewed with awe and
apprehension a country whose territory and military forces dwarfed those of the rest
of the Continent combined and whose elites’ polished manners seemed barely able to
conceal a primitive force from before and beyond Western civilization. Russia, the
French traveler the Marquis de Custine claimed in 1843—from the perspective of a
France restrained and a Europe reshaped by Russian power—was a hybrid bringing
the vitality of the steppe to the heart of Europe:
A monstrous compound of the petty refinements of Byzantium, and the ferocity of the desert horde, a
struggle between the etiquette of the Lower [Byzantine] Empire, and the savage virtues of Asia, have
produced the mighty state which Europe now beholds, and the influence of which she will probably
feel hereafter, without being able to understand its operation.
Everything about Russia—its absolutism, its size, its globe-spanning ambitions and
insecurities—stood as an implicit challenge to the traditional European concept of
international order built on equilibrium and restraint.
Russia’s position in and toward Europe had long been ambiguous. As
Charlemagne’s empire had fractured in the ninth century into what would become the
modern nations of France and Germany, Slavic tribes more than a thousand miles to
their east had coalesced in a confederation based around the city of Kiev (now the
capital and geographic center of the state of Ukraine, though perceived almost
universally by Russians as simultaneously an inextricable part of their own
patrimony). This “land of the Rus” stood at the fraught intersections of civilizations
and trade routes. With Vikings to its north, the expanding Arab empire to its south,
and raiding Turkic tribes to its east, Russia was permanently in the grip of conflating
temptations and fears. Too far to the east to have experienced the Roman Empire
(though “czars” claimed the “Caesars” as their political and etymological forebears),
Christian but looking to the Orthodox Church in Constantinople rather than Rome for
spiritual authority, Russia was close enough to Europe to share a common cultural
vocabulary yet perpetually out of phase with the Continent’s historical trends. The
experience would leave Russia a uniquely “Eurasian” power, sprawling across two
continents but never entirely at home in either.
The most profound disjunction had come with the Mongol invasions of the
thirteenth century, which subdued a politically divided Russia and razed Kiev. Two
and a half centuries of Mongol suzerainty (1237–1480) and the subsequent struggle to
restore a coherent state based around the Duchy of Moscow imposed on Russia an
eastward orientation just as Western Europe was charting the new technological and
intellectual vistas that would create the modern era. During Europe’s era of seaborne
discovery, Russia was laboring to reconstitute itself as an independent nation and
shore up its borders against threats from all directions. As the Protestant Reformation
impelled political and religious diversity in Europe, Russia translated the fall of its
own religious lodestar, Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire, to Muslim
invaders in 1453 into an almost mystical conviction that Russia’s Czar was now (as
the monk Filofei wrote to Ivan III around 1500) “the sole Emperor of all the
Christians in the whole universe,” with a messianic calling to regain the fallen
Byzantine capital for Christendom.
Europe was coming to embrace its multipolarity as a mechanism tending toward
balance, but Russia was learning its sense of geopolitics from the hard school of the
steppe, where an array of nomadic hordes contended for resources on an open terrain
with few fixed borders. There raids for plunder and the enslavement of foreign
civilians were regular occurrences, for some a way of life; independence was
coterminous with the territory a people could physically defend. Russia affirmed its
tie to Western culture but—even as it grew exponentially in size—came to see itself
as a beleaguered outpost of civilization for which security could be found only
through exerting its absolute will over its neighbors.
In the Westphalian concept of order, European statesmen came to identify security
with a balance of power and with restraints on its exercise. In Russia’s experience of
history, restraints on power spelled catastrophe: Russia’s failure to dominate its
surroundings, in this view, had exposed it to the Mongol invasions and plunged it into
its nightmarish “Time of Troubles” (a fifteen-year dynastic interregnum before the
founding of the Romanov Dynasty in 1613, in which invasions, civil wars, and famine
claimed a third of Russia’s population). The Peace of Westphalia saw international
order as an intricate balancing mechanism; the Russian view cast it as a perpetual
contest of wills, with Russia extending its domain at each phase to the absolute limit
of its material resources. Thus, when asked to define Russia’s foreign policy, the midseventeenth-century Czar Alexei’s minister Nashchokin offered a straightforward
description: “expanding the state in every direction, and this is the business of the
Department of Foreign Affairs.”
This process developed into a national outlook and propelled the onetime Duchy of
Moscow across the Eurasian landmass to become the world’s territorially largest
empire, in a slow, seemingly irresistible expansionist urge that would remain unabated
until 1917. Thus the American man of letters Henry Adams recorded the outlook of
the Russian ambassador in Washington in 1903 (by which point Russia had reached
Korea):
His political philosophy, like that of all Russians, seemed fixed on the single idea that Russia must roll
—must, by her irresistible inertia, crush whatever stood in her way … When Russia rolled over a
neighboring people, she absorbed their energies in her own movement of custom and race which
neither Czar nor peasant could convert, or wished to convert, into any Western equivalent.
With no natural borders save the Arctic and Pacific oceans, Russia was in a position
to gratify this impulse for several centuries—marching alternately into Central Asia,
then the Caucasus, then the Balkans, then Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and the Baltic
Sea, to the Pacific Ocean and the Chinese and Japanese frontiers (and for a time
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across the Pacific into Alaskan and
Californian settlements). It expanded each year by an amount larger than the entire
territory of many European states (on average, 100,000 square kilometers annually
from 1552 to 1917).
When it was strong, Russia conducted itself with the domineering certainty of a
superior power and insisted on formal shows of deference to its status. When it was
weak, it masked its vulnerability through brooding invocations of vast inner reserves
of strength. In either case, it was a special challenge for Western capitals used to
dealing with a somewhat more genteel style.
At the same time, Russia’s awesome feats of expansion took place from a
demographic and economic base that, by Western standards, was not advanced—with
many regions thinly populated and seemingly untouched by modern culture and
technology. Thus the world-conquering imperialism remained paired with a
paradoxical sense of vulnerability—as if marching halfway across the world had
generated more potential foes than additional security. From that perspective, the
Czar’s empire can be said to have expanded because it proved easier to keep going
than to stop.
In this context, a distinctive Russian concept of political legitimacy took hold.
While Renaissance Europe rediscovered its classical humanist past and refined new
concepts of individualism and freedom, Russia sought its resurgence in its undiluted
faith and in the coherence of a single, divinely sanctioned authority overpowering all
divisions—the Czar as “the living icon of God,” whose commands were irresistible
and inherently just. A common Christian faith and a shared elite language (French)
underscored a commonality of perspective with the West. Yet early European visitors
to czarist Russia found themselves in a land of almost surreal extremes and thought
they saw, beneath the veneer of a modern Western monarchy, a despotism modeled on
Mongol and Tartar practices—“European discipline supporting the tyranny of Asia,”
in the uncharitable phrase of the Marquis de Custine.
Russia had joined the modern European state system under Czar Peter the Great in
a manner unlike any other society. On both sides, it proved a wary embrace. Peter had
been born in 1672 into a still essentially medieval Russia. By then, Western Europe
had evolved through the age of discovery, the Renaissance, and the Reformation; it
stood at the threshold of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. A gigantic
(at six feet eight inches), intensely energetic figure, the young Czar set out to
transform his empire in a reign that expressed the extremes of Russia’s many traits
and aspirations.
Determined to explore the fruits of modernity and measure Russia’s achievements
against them, Peter was a frequent visitor in the shops and factories of Moscow’s
émigré German quarter. As a young ruler, he toured Western capitals, where he tested
modern techniques and professional disciplines personally. Having found Russia
backward compared with the West, Peter announced his aim: “to sever the people
from their former Asiatic customs and instruct them how all Christian peoples in
Europe comport themselves.”
A series of ukases issued forth: Russia would adopt Western manners and
hairstyles, seek out foreign technological expertise, build a modern army and navy,
round out its borders with wars against nearly every neighboring state, break through
to the Baltic Sea, and construct a new capital city of St. Petersburg. The last, Russia’s
“window to the West,” was built by hand, by a casualty-wracked conscripted labor
force, on a marshy wilderness chosen at Peter’s personal command, when he put his
sword into the ground and announced: “Here shall be a town.” When traditionalists
rebelled, Peter crushed them and, at least according to the accounts that reached the
West, took personal charge of the torture and decapitation of the uprising’s leaders.
Peter’s tour de force transformed Russian society and vaulted his empire into the
first rank of Western great powers. Yet the suddenness of the transformation left
Russia with the insecurities of a parvenu. In no other empire would the absolute ruler
have felt it necessary to remind her subjects in writing, as Peter’s successor Catherine
the Great did half a century later, that “Russia is a European State. This is clearly
demonstrated by the following Observations.”
Russia’s reforms were invariably carried out by ruthless autocrats on a population
docile in its desire to overcome its past rather than energized by confidence in its
future. Nevertheless, like his successor reformers and revolutionaries, when his reign
was over, his subjects and their descendants credited him for having driven them,
however mercilessly, to achievements they had shown little evidence of seeking.
(According to recent polls, Stalin too has acquired some of this recognition in
contemporary Russian thinking.)
Catherine the Great, Russia’s autocratic reformist ruler from 1762 to 1796 and
overseer of a historic period of cultural achievement and territorial expansion
(including Russia’s conquest of the Khanate of Crimea and its laying low of the
Zaporizhian Host, the onetime autonomous Cossack realm in what is today central
Ukraine), justified Russia’s extreme autocracy as the only system of government that
could hold together such a gigantic territory:
The Extent of the Dominion requires an absolute Power to be vested in that Person who rules over it. It
is expedient so to be that the quick Dispatch of Affairs, sent from distant Parts, might make ample
Amends for the Delay occasioned by the great Distance of the Places.
Every other Form of Government whatsoever would not only have been prejudicial to Russia, but
would even have proved its entire Ruin.
Thus what in the West was regarded as arbitrary authoritarianism was presented in
Russia as an elemental necessity, the precondition for functioning governance.
The Czar, like the Chinese Emperor, was an absolute ruler endowed by tradition
with mystical powers and overseeing a territory of continental expanse. Yet the
position of the Czar differed from that of his Chinese counterpart in one important
respect. In the Chinese view, the Emperor ruled wherever possible through the
serenity of his conduct; in the Russian view, the leadership of the Czar prevailed
through his ability to impose his will by unchallengeable assertions of authority and to
impress on all onlookers the Russian state’s overwhelmingly vast power. The Chinese
Emperor was conceived of as the embodiment of the superiority of Chinese
civilization, inspiring other peoples to “come and be transformed.” The Czar was seen
as the embodiment of the defense of Russia against enemies surrounding it on all
sides. Thus while the emperors were lauded for their impartial, aloof benevolence, the
nineteenth-century historian Nikolai Karamzin saw in a Czar’s harshness a sign that
he was fulfilling his true calling:
In Russia, the sovereign is the living law. He favors the good and punishes the bad … [A] soft heart in
a monarch is counted as a virtue only when it is tempered with the sense of duty to use sensible
severity.
Not unlike the United States in its own drive westward, Russia had imbued its
conquests with the moral justification that it was spreading order and enlightenment
into heathen lands (with a lucrative trade in furs and minerals an incidental benefit).
Yet where the American vision inspired boundless optimism, the Russian experience
ultimately based itself on stoic endurance. Stranded “at the interface of two vast and
irreconcilable worlds,” Russia saw itself as endowed with a special mission to bridge
them but exposed on all sides to threatening forces that failed to comprehend its
calling. The great Russian novelist and passionate nationalist Fyodor Dostoevsky
cited “this ceaseless longing, which has always been inherent in the Russian people,
for a great universal church on earth.” The exaltation over Russia’s world-spanning
synthesis of civilizations evoked a corresponding despair over Russia’s status as (in
the words of an influential nineteenth-century critique) an “orphan cut off from the
human family … For people to notice us, we have had to stretch from the Bering
Straits to the Oder.”
A conviction lingered in the expansive, brooding “Russian soul” (as Russian
thinkers would come to call it) that someday all of Russia’s vast exertions and
contradictions would come to fruition: its journey would be vindicated; its
achievements would be lauded, and the disdain of the West would transform into awe
and admiration; Russia would combine the power and vastness of the East with the
refinements of the West and the moral force of true religion; and Moscow, the “Third
Rome” inheriting fallen Byzantium’s mantle, with its Czar “the successor of the
caesars of Eastern Rome, of the organizers of the church and of its councils which
established the very creed of the Christian faith,” would play the decisive role in
ushering in a new era of global justice and fraternity.
It was this Russia, in Europe but not quite of it, that had tempted Napoleon with its
expanse and mystique; it was his ruin (just as it was Hitler’s a century and a half later)
when Russia’s people, steeled to great feats of endurance, proved capable of
weathering deeper privation than Napoleon’s Grande Armée (or Hitler’s legions).
When Russians burned down four-fifths of Moscow to deny Napoleon the conquest
and his troops’ sustenance, Napoleon, his epic strategy thus doomed, is said to have
exclaimed, “What a people! They are Scythians! What resoluteness! The barbarians!”
Now with Cossack horsemen drinking champagne in Paris, this massive autocratic
entity loomed over a Europe that struggled to comprehend its ambitions and its
method of operation.
By the time the Congress of Vienna took place, Russia was arguably the most
powerful country on the Continent. Its Czar Alexander, representing Russia
personally at the Vienna peace conference, was unquestionably its most absolute ruler.
A man of deep, if changing, convictions, he had recently renewed his religious faith
with a course of intensive Bible readings and spiritual consultations. He was
convinced, as he wrote to a confidante in 1812, that triumph over Napoleon would
usher in a new and harmonious world based on religious principles, and he pledged:
“It is to the cause of hastening the true reign of Jesus Christ that I devote all my
earthly glory.” Conceiving of himself as an instrument of divine will, the Czar arrived
in Vienna in 1814 with a design for a new world order in some ways even more
radical than Napoleon’s in its universality: a “Holy Alliance” of princes sublimating
their national interests into a common search for peace and justice, forswearing the
balance of power for Christian principles of brotherhood. As Alexander told
Chateaubriand, the French royalist intellectual and diplomat, “There no longer exists
an English policy, a French, Russian, Prussian, or Austrian policy; there is now only
one common policy, which, for the welfare of all, ought to be adopted in common by
all states and all peoples.” It was a forerunner of the American Wilsonian conception
of the nature of world order, albeit on behalf of principles dramatically the opposite of
the Wilsonian vision.
Needless to say, such a design, advanced by a victorious military power whose
divisions now bestrode the Continent, posed a challenge to Europe’s concept of a
Westphalian equilibrium of sovereign states. For on behalf of its new vision of
legitimacy, Russia brought a surfeit of power. Czar Alexander ended the Napoleonic
Wars by marching to Paris at the head of his armies, and in celebration of victory he
oversaw an unprecedented review of 160,000 Russian troops on the plains outside the
French capital—a demonstration that could not fail to disquiet even allied nations.
After consultation with his spiritual advisor, Alexander proposed a draft joint
declaration in which the victorious sovereigns would proclaim their agreement that
“the course, formerly adopted by the powers in their mutual relations, had to be
fundamentally changed and that it was urgent to replace it with an order of things
based on the exalted truths of the eternal religion of our Savior.”
The task of the negotiators at Vienna would be to transform Alexander’s messianic
vision into something compatible with the continued independent existence of their
states, to welcome Russia into the international order without being crushed by its
embrace.
THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA
The statesmen who assembled in Vienna to discuss how to design a peaceful order
had been through a whirlwind of upheavals overturning nearly every established
structure of authority. In the space of twenty-five years, they had seen the rationality
of the Enlightenment replaced by the passions of the Reign of Terror; the missionary
spirit of the French Revolution transformed by the discipline of the conquering
Bonapartist empire. French power had waxed and waned. It had spilled across
France’s ancient frontiers to conquer almost all of the European continent, only to be
nearly extinguished in the vastness of Russia.
The French envoy at the Congress of Vienna represented in his person a metaphor
of the era’s seemingly boundless upheavals. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
(or Talleyrand, as he was known) was ubiquitous. He started his career as Bishop of
Autun, left the Church to support the Revolution, abandoned the Revolution to serve
as Napoleon’s Foreign Minister, abandoned Napoleon to negotiate the restoration of
the French monarch, and appeared in Vienna as Louis XVIII’s Foreign Minister.
Many called Talleyrand an opportunist. Talleyrand would have argued that his goals
were stability within France and peace in Europe and that he had taken whatever
opportunities were available to achieve these goals. He had surely striven for
positions to study the various elements of power and legitimacy at close hand without
being unduly constrained by any of them. Only a formidable personality could have
projected himself into the center of so many great and conflicting events.
At Vienna, Talleyrand’s contribution was to achieve for France a peace that
preserved the “ancient frontiers,” which existed when it had started its foreign
adventures. And within less than three years—in 1818—he managed France’s entry
into the Quadruple Alliance. The vanquished enemy would become an ally in the
preservation of the European order in an alliance originally designed to contain it—a
precedent followed at the end of World War II, when Germany was admitted to the
Atlantic Alliance.
The order established at the Congress of Vienna was the closest that Europe has
come to universal governance since the collapse of Charlemagne’s empire. It
produced a consensus that peaceful evolutions within the existing order were
preferable to alternatives; that the preservation of the system was more important than
any single dispute that might arise within it; that differences should be settled by
consultation rather than by war.
After World War I ended this vision, it became fashionable to attack the Congress
of Vienna order as being excessively based on the balance of power, which by its
inherent dynamic of cynical maneuvers drove the world into war. (The British
delegation asked the diplomatic historian C. K. Webster, who had written on the
Congress of Vienna, to produce a treatise on how to avoid its mistakes.) But that was
true, if at all, only in the decade prior to World War I. The period between 1815 and
the turn of the century was modern Europe’s most peaceful, and the decades
immediately following the Congress of Vienna were characterized by an extraordinary
balance between legitimacy and power.
The statesmen who assembled in Vienna in 1814 were in a radically different
situation from their predecessors who drafted the Peace of Westphalia. A century and
a half earlier, a series of settlements of the various wars that made up the Thirty Years’
War was conjoined with a set of principles for the general conduct of foreign policy.
The European order that emerged took as its point of departure the political entities
that existed, now separated from their religious impetus. The application of
Westphalian principles was then expected to produce a balance of power to prevent,
or at least mitigate, conflict. Over the course of the next nearly century and a half, this
system had managed to constrain challengers to the equilibrium through the more or
less spontaneous alignment of countervailing coalitions.
The negotiators at the Congress of Vienna faced the wreckage of this order. The
balance of power had not been able to arrest the military momentum of the Revolution
or of Napoleon. The dynastic legitimacy of government had been overwhelmed by
Napoleon’s revolutionary élan and skilled generalship.
A new balance of power had to be constructed from the wreckage of the state
system and of the Holy Roman Empire—whose remnants Napoleon had dissolved in
1806, bringing to a close a thousand years of institutional continuity—and amidst new
currents of nationalism unleashed by the occupation of most of the Continent by
French armies. That balance had to be capable of preventing a recurrence of the
French expansionism that had produced near hegemony for France in Europe, even as
the advent of Russia had brought a similar danger from the east.
Hence the Central European balance also had to be reconstructed. The Habsburgs,
once the Continent’s dominant dynasty, were now ruling only in their ancestral
territories from Vienna. These were large and polyglot (roughly present-day Austria,
Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, and southern Poland), and now of uncertain political
cohesion. Several of the smaller German states whose opportunism had provided a
certain elasticity to the diplomacy of the Westphalian system in the eighteenth century
had been obliterated by the Napoleonic conquests. Their territory had to be
redistributed in a manner compatible with a refound equilibrium.
The conduct of diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna was fundamentally different
from twenty-first-century practice. Contemporary diplomats are in immediate realtime contact with their capitals. They receive minutely detailed instructions down to
the texts of their presentations; their advice is sought on local conditions, much less
frequently on matters of grand strategy. The diplomats at Vienna were weeks away
from their capitals. It took four days for a message from Vienna to reach Berlin (so at
least eight days to receive a reply to any request for guidance), three weeks for a
message to reach Paris; London took a little longer. Instructions therefore had to be
drafted in language general enough to cover changes in the situation, so the diplomats
were instructed primarily on general concepts and long-term interests; with respect to
day-to-day tactics, they were largely on their own. Czar Alexander I was two months
from his capital, but he needed no instructions; his whims were Russia’s commands,
and he kept the Congress of Vienna occupied with the fertility of his imagination. The
Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich, perhaps the shrewdest and most
experienced statesman at Vienna, said of Alexander that he was “too weak for true
ambition, but too strong for pure vanity.” Napoleon said of Alexander that he had
great abilities but that “something” was always missing in whatever he did. And
because one could never foresee which particular piece would be missing in any given
instance, he was totally unpredictable. Talleyrand was more blunt: “He was not for
nothing the son of [the mad] Czar Paul.”
The other participants at the Congress of Vienna agreed on the general principles of
international order and on the imperative of bringing Europe back into some form of
equilibrium. But they did not have congruent perceptions of what this would mean in
practice. Their task was to achieve some reconciliation of perspectives shaped by
substantially different historical experiences.
Britain, safe from invasion behind the English Channel and with unique domestic
institutions essentially impervious to developments on the Continent, defined order in
terms of threats of hegemony on the Continent. But the continental countries had a
lower threshold for threats; their security could be impaired by territorial adjustments
short of continental hegemony. Above all, unlike Britain, they felt vulnerable to
domestic transformations in neighboring countries.
The Congress of Vienna found it relatively easy to agree on a definition of the
overall balance. Already during the war—in 1804—then British Prime Minister
William Pitt had put forward a plan to rectify what he considered the weaknesses of
the Westphalian settlement. The Westphalian treaties had kept Central Europe divided
as a way to enhance French influence. To foreclose temptations, Pitt reasoned, “great
masses” had to be created in Central Europe to consolidate the region by merging
some of its smaller states. (“Consolidation” was a relative term, as it still left thirtyseven states in the area covered by today’s Germany.) The obvious candidate to
absorb these abolished principalities was Prussia, which originally preferred to annex
contiguous Saxony but yielded to the entreaties of Austria and Britain to accept the
Rhineland instead. This enlargement of Prussia placed a significant power on the
border of France, creating a geostrategic reality that had not existed since the Peace of
Westphalia.
The remaining thirty-seven German states were grouped in an entity called the
German Confederation, which would provide an answer to Europe’s perennial
German dilemma: when Germany was weak, it tempted foreign (mostly French)
interventions; when unified, it became strong enough to defeat its neighbors single-
handedly, tempting them to combine against the danger. In that sense Germany has for
much of history been either too weak or too strong for the peace of Europe.
The German Confederation was too divided to take offensive action yet cohesive
enough to resist foreign invasions into its territory. This arrangement provided an
obstacle to the invasion of Central Europe without constituting a threat to the two
major powers on its flanks, Russia to the east and France to the west.
To protect the new overall territorial settlement, the Quadruple Alliance of Britain,
Prussia, Austria, and Russia was formed. A territorial guarantee—which was what the
Quadruple Alliance amounted to—did not have the same significance for each of the
signatories. The level of urgency with which threats were perceived varied
significantly. Britain, protected by its command of the seas, felt confident in
withholding definite commitments to contingencies and preferred waiting until a
major threat from Europe took specific shape. The continental countries had a
narrower margin of safety, assessing that their survival might be at stake from actions
far less dramatic than those causing Britain to take alarm.
This was particularly the case in the face of revolution—that is, when the threat
involved the issue of legitimacy. The conservative states sought to build bulwarks
against a new wave of revolution; they aimed to include mechanisms for the
preservation of legitimate order—by which they meant monarchical rule. The Czar’s
proposed Holy Alliance provided a mechanism for protecting the domestic status quo
throughout Europe. His partners saw in the Holy Alliance—subtly redesigned—a way
to curb Russian exuberance. The right of intervention was limited because, as the
eventual terms stipulated, it could be exercised only in concert; in this manner,
Austria and Prussia retained a veto over the more exalted schemes of the Czar.
Three tiers of institutions buttressed the Vienna system: the Quadruple Alliance to
defeat challenges to the territorial order; the Holy Alliance to overcome threats to
domestic institutions; and a concert of powers institutionalized through periodic
diplomatic conferences of the heads of government of the alliances to define their
common purposes or to deal with emerging crises. This concert mechanism
functioned like a precursor of the United Nations Security Council. Its conferences
acted on a series of crises, attempting to distill a common course: the revolutions in
Naples in 1820 and in Spain in 1820–23 (quelled by the Holy Alliance and France,
respectively) and the Greek revolution and war of independence of 1821–32
(ultimately supported by Britain, France, and Russia). The Concert of Powers did not
guarantee a unanimity of outlook, yet in each case a potentially explosive crisis was
resolved without a major-power war.
A good example of the efficacy of the Vienna system was its reaction to the Belgian
revolution of 1830, which sought to separate today’s Belgium from the United
Kingdom of the Netherlands. For most of the eighteenth century, armies had marched
across that then-province of the Netherlands, in quest of the domination of Europe.
For Britain, whose global strategy was based on control of the oceans, the Scheldt
River estuary, at the mouth of which lay the port of Antwerp across the channel from
England, needed to be in the hands of a friendly country and under no circumstances
of a major European state. In the event, a London conference of European powers
developed a new approach, recognizing Belgian independence while declaring the
new nation “neutral,” a heretofore-unknown concept in the relations of major powers,
except as a unilateral declaration of intent. The new state agreed not to join military
alliances or permit the stationing of foreign troops on its territory. This pledge in turn
was guaranteed by the major powers, which thereby undertook the obligation to resist
violations of Belgian neutrality. The internationally guaranteed status lasted for nearly
a century; it was the trigger that brought England into World War I, when German
troops forced a passage to France through Belgian territory.
The vitality of an international order is reflected in the balance it strikes between
legitimacy and power and the relative emphasis given to each. Neither aspect is
intended to arrest change; rather, in combination they seek to ensure that it occurs as a
matter of evolution, not a raw contest of wills. If the balance between power and
legitimacy is properly managed, actions will acquire a degree of spontaneity.
Demonstrations of power will be peripheral and largely symbolic; because the
configuration of forces will be generally understood, no side will feel the need to call
forth its full reserves. When that balance is destroyed, restraints disappear, and the
field is open to the most expansive claims and the most implacable actors; chaos
follows until a new system of order is established.
That balance was the signal achievement of the Congress of Vienna. The Quadruple
Alliance deterred challenges to the territorial balance, and the memory of Napoleon
kept France—suffering from revolutionary exhaustion—quiescent. At the same time,
a judicious attitude toward the peace led to France’s swift reincorporation into the
concert of powers originally formed to thwart its ambitions. And Austria, Prussia, and
Russia, which on the principles of the balance of power should have been rivals, were
in fact pursuing common policies: Austria and Russia in effect postponed their
looming geopolitical conflict in the name of their shared fears of domestic upheaval.
It was only after the element of legitimacy in this international order was shaken by
the failed revolutions of 1848 that balance was interpreted less as an equilibrium
subject to common adjustments and increasingly as a condition in which to prepare
for a contest over preeminence.
As the emphasis began to shift more and more to the power element of the
equation, Britain’s role as a balancer became increasingly important. The hallmarks of
Britain’s balancing role were its freedom of action and its proven determination to act.
Britain’s Foreign Minister (later Prime Minister) Lord Palmerston offered a classic
illustration when, in 1841, he learned of a message from the Czar seeking a definitive
British commitment to resist “the contingency of an attack by France on the liberties
of Europe.” Britain, Palmerston replied, regarded “an attempt of one Nation to seize
and to appropriate to itself territory which belongs to another Nation” as a threat,
because “such an attempt leads to a derangement of the existing Balance of Power,
and by altering the relative strength of States, may tend to create danger to other
Powers.” However, Palmerston’s Cabinet could enter no formal alliance against
France because “it is not usual for England to enter into engagements with reference
to cases which have not actually arisen, or which are not immediately in prospect.” In
other words, neither Russia nor France could count on British support as a certainty
against the other; neither could write off the possibility of British armed opposition if
it carried matters to the point of threatening the European equilibrium.
THE PREMISES OF INTERNATIONAL ORDER
The subtle equilibrium of the Congress of Vienna system began to fray in the
middle of the nineteenth century under the impact of three events: the rise of
nationalism, the revolutions of 1848, and the Crimean War.
Under the impact of Napoleon’s conquests, multiple nationalities that had lived
together for centuries began to treat their rulers as “foreign.” The German philosopher
Johann Gottfried von Herder became an apostle of this trend and argued that each
people, defined by language, motherland, and folk culture, had an original genius and
was therefore entitled to self-government. The historian Jacques Barzun has described
it another way:
Underlying the theory was fact: the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies had redrawn the mental map
of Europe. In place of the eighteenth century horizontal world of dynasties and cosmopolite upper
classes, the West now consisted of vertical unities—nations, not wholly separate but unlike.
Linguistic nationalisms made traditional empires—especially the Austro-Hungarian
Empire—vulnerable to internal pressure as well as to the resentments of neighbors
claiming national links with subjects of the empire.
The emergence of nationalism also subtly affected the relationship between Prussia
and Austria after the creation of the “great masses” of the Congress of Vienna. The
competition of the two great German powers in Central Europe for the allegiance of
some thirty-five smaller states of the German Confederation was originally held in
check by the need to defend Central Europe. Also, tradition generated a certain
deference to the country whose ruler had been Holy Roman Emperor for half a
millennium. The Assembly of the German Confederation (the combined ambassadors
to the confederation of its thirty-seven members) met in the Austrian Embassy in
Frankfurt, and the Austrian ambassador acted as chairman.
At the same time, Prussia was developing its own claim to eminence. Setting out to
overcome the handicaps inherent in its sparse population and extended frontiers,
Prussia emerged as a major European state because of its leaders’ ability to operate on
the margin of their state’s capabilities for more than a century—what Otto von
Bismarck (the Prussian leader who brought this process to its culmination) called a
series of “powerful, decisive and wise regents who carefully husbanded the military
and financial resources of the state and kept them together in their own hands in order
to throw them with ruthless courage into the scale of European politics as soon as a
favorable opportunity presented itself.”
The Vienna settlement had reinforced Prussia’s strong social and political structure
with geographic opportunity. Stretched from the Vistula to the Rhine, Prussia became
the repository of Germans’ hopes for the unity of their country—for the first time in
history. With the passage of decades, the relative subordination of Prussian to
Austrian policy became too chafing, and Prussia began to pursue a more
confrontational course.
The revolutions of 1848 were a Europe-wide conflagration affecting every major
city. As a rising middle class sought to force recalcitrant governments to accept liberal
reform, the old aristocratic order felt the power of accelerating nationalisms. At first,
the uprisings swept all before them, stretching from Poland in the east as far west as
Colombia and Brazil (an empire that had recently won its independence from
Portugal, after serving as the seat of its exile government during the Napoleonic
Wars). In France, history seemed to repeat itself when Napoleon’s nephew achieved
power as Napoleon III, first as President on the basis of a plebiscite and then as
Emperor.
The Holy Alliance had been designed to deal precisely with upheavals such as
these. But the position of the rulers in Berlin and Vienna had grown too precarious—
and the upheavals had been too broad and their implications too varied—to make a
joint enterprise possible. Russia in its national capacity intervened against the
revolution in Hungary, salvaging Austria’s rule there. For the rest, the old order
proved just strong enough to overcome the revolutionary challenge. But it never
regained the self-confidence of the previous period.
Finally, the Crimean War of 1853–56 broke up the unity of the conservative states
—Austria, Prussia, and Russia—which had been one of the two key pillars of the
Vienna international order. This combination had defended the existing institutions in
revolutions; it had isolated France, the previous disturber of the peace. Now another
Napoleon was probing for opportunities to assert himself in multiple directions. In the
Crimean War, Napoleon saw the device to end his isolation by allying himself with
Britain’s historic effort to prevent the Russian reach for Constantinople and access to
the Mediterranean. The alignment indeed checked the Russian advance, but at the cost
of increasingly brittle diplomacy.
The conflict had begun not over the Crimea—which Russia had conquered from an
Ottoman vassal in the eighteenth century—but over competing French and Russian
claims to advance the rights of favored Christian communities in Jerusalem, then
within Ottoman jurisdiction. During a dispute over which denomination, Catholic or
Orthodox, would have principal access to holy sites, Czar Nicholas I demanded
recognition of his right to act as “protector” of all Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman
Empire, a significant population stretching across strategic territories. The demand—
which amounted to a right of intervention in the affairs of a foreign state—was
couched in the terms of universal moral principles but cut to the heart of Ottoman
sovereignty. Ottoman refusal prompted a Russian military advance into the Balkans
and naval hostilities in the Black Sea. After six months Britain and France, fearing the
collapse of the Ottoman Empire and with it the European balance, entered the war on
the Ottoman side.
The alliance systems of the Congress of Vienna were shattered as a consequence.
The war received its name because a Franco-British force landed in the Crimea to
seize the city of Sevastopol, home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet; Russian forces held out
against a siege of eleven months before sinking their ships. Prussia stayed neutral.
Austria foolishly decided to take advantage of Russia’s isolation to improve its
position in the Balkans, mobilizing Austrian troops there. “We will astonish the world
by the magnitude of our ingratitude,” commented Austria’s Minister-President and
Foreign Minister Prince Schwarzenberg when presented with a Russian request for
assistance. Instead, Austria’s diplomacy supported the British and French war effort
diplomatically, with measures approaching the character of an ultimatum.
The effort to isolate Russia concluded by isolating Austria. Within two years,
Napoleon invaded the Austrian possessions in Italy in support of Italian unification
while Russia stood by. Within Germany, Prussia gained freedom of maneuver. Within
a decade Otto von Bismarck started Germany on the road to unification, excluding
Austria from what had been its historical role as the standard-bearer of German
statehood—again with Russian acquiescence. Austria learned too late that in
international affairs a reputation for reliability is a more important asset than
demonstrations of tactical cleverness.
METTERNICH AND BISMARCK
Two statesmen served as the fulcrums of these vast shifts in Germany and in
Europe: the Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich and the Prussian
Minister-President—later German Chancellor—Otto von Bismarck. The contrast
between the legacies of the century’s two principal Central European statesmen
illustrates the shift in emphasis of the European international order from legitimacy to
power in the second half of the nineteenth century. Both have been viewed as
archetypal conservatives. Both have been recorded as master manipulators of the
balance of power, which they were. But their fundamental concepts of international
order were nearly opposite, and they manipulated the balance of power to vastly
different ends and with significantly contrasting implications for the peace of Europe
and the world.
Metternich’s very appointment had testified to the cosmopolitan nature of the
eighteenth-century society. He was born in the Rhineland, near the border of France,
educated in Strasbourg and Mainz. Metternich did not see Austria until his thirteenth
year and did not live there until his seventeenth. He was appointed Foreign Minister
in 1809 and Chancellor in 1821, serving until 1848. Fate had placed him in the top
civilian position in an ancient empire at the beginning of its decline. Once considered
among the strongest and best-governed countries in Europe, Austria was now
vulnerable because its central location meant that every European tremor made the
earth move there. Its polyglot nature made it vulnerable to the emerging wave of
nationalism—a force practically unknown a generation earlier. For Metternich,
steadiness and reliability became the lodestar of his policy:
Where everything is tottering it is above all necessary that something, no matter what, remain steadfast
so that the lost can find a connection and the strayed a refuge.
A product of the Enlightenment, Metternich was shaped more by philosophers of
the power of reason than by the proponents of the power of arms. Metternich rejected
the restless search for presumed remedies to the immediate; he considered the search
for truth the most important task of the statesman. In his view, the belief that whatever
was imaginable was also achievable was an illusion. Truth had to reflect an
underlying reality of human nature and of the structure of society. Anything more
sweeping in fact did violence to the ideals it claimed to fulfill. In this sense,
“invention is the enemy of history, which knows only discoveries, and only that
which exists can be discovered.”
For Metternich, the national interest of Austria was a metaphor for the overall
interest of Europe—how to hold together many races and peoples and languages in a
structure at once respectful of diversity and of a common heritage, faith, and custom.
In that perspective, Austria’s historical role was to vindicate the pluralism and, hence,
the peace of Europe.
Bismarck, by comparison, was a scion of the provincial Prussian aristocracy, which
was far poorer than its counterparts in the west of Germany and considerably less
cosmopolitan. While Metternich tried to vindicate continuity and to restore a universal
idea, that of a European society, Bismarck challenged all the established wisdom of
his period. Until he appeared on the scene, it had been taken for granted that German
unity would come about—if at all—through a combination of nationalism and
liberalism. Bismarck set about to demonstrate that these strands could be separated—
that the principles of the Holy Alliance were not needed to preserve order, that a new
order could be built by conservatives’ appealing to nationalism, and that a concept of
European order could be based entirely on an assessment of power.
The divergence in these two seminal figures’ views of the nature of international
order is poignantly reflected in their definitions of the national interest. To Metternich,
order arose not so much from the pursuit of national interest as from the ability to
connect it with that of other states:
The great axioms of political science derive from the recognition of the true interests of all states; it is
in the general interest that the guarantee of existence is to be found, while particular interests—the
cultivation of which is considered political wisdom by restless and short-sighted men—have only a
secondary importance. Modern history demonstrates the application of the principle of solidarity and
equilibrium … and of the united efforts of states … to force a return to the common law.
Bismarck rejected the proposition that power could be restrained by superior
principle. His famous maxims gave voice to the conviction that security could be
achieved only by the correct evaluation of the components of power:
A sentimental policy knows no reciprocity … Every other government seeks the criteria for its actions
solely in its interests, however it may cloak them with legal deductions … For heaven’s sake no
sentimental alliances in which the consciousness of having performed a good deed furnishes the sole
reward for our sacrifice … The only healthy basis of policy for a great power … is egotism and not
romanticism … Gratitude and confidence will not bring a single man into the field on our side; only
fear will do that, if we use it cautiously and skillfully … Policy is the art of the possible, the science of
the relative.
Ultimate decisions would depend strictly on considerations of utility. The European
order as seen in the eighteenth century, as a great Newtonian clockwork of
interlocking parts, had been replaced by the Darwinian world of the survival of the
fittest.
THE DILEMMAS OF THE BALANCE OF POWER
With his appointment as Prussian Minister-President in 1862, Bismarck set about to
implement his principles and to transform the European order. With the conservative
monarchies of the East divided in the aftermath of the Crimean War, France isolated
on the Continent because of the memories evoked by its ruler, and Austria wavering
between its national and its European roles, Bismarck saw an opportunity to bring
about a German national state for the first time in history. With a few daring strokes
between 1862 and 1870, he placed Prussia at the head of a united Germany and
Germany in the center of a new system of order.
Disraeli called the unification of Germany in 1871 “a greater political event than
the French Revolution” and concluded that “the balance of power has been entirely
destroyed.” The Westphalian and the Vienna European orders had been based on a
divided Central Europe whose competing pressures—between the plethora of German
states in the Westphalian settlement, and Austria and Prussia in the Vienna outcome—
would balance each other out. What emerged after the unification of Germany was a
dominant country, strong enough to defeat each neighbor individually and perhaps all
the continental countries together. The bond of legitimacy had disappeared.
Everything now depended on calculations of power.
The greatest triumph of Bismarck’s career had also made more difficult—perhaps
impossible—the operation of a flexible balance of power. The crushing defeat of
France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, which Bismarck had adroitly
provoked France into declaring, was attended by the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, a
retributive indemnity, and the tactless proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall
of Mirrors of Versailles in 1871. Europe’s new order was reduced to five major
powers, two of which (France and Germany) were irrevocably estranged from each
other.
Bismarck understood that a potentially dominant power at the center of Europe
faced the constant risk of inducing a coalition of all others, much like the coalition
against Louis XIV in the eighteenth century and Napoleon in the early nineteenth.
Only the most restrained conduct could avoid incurring the collective antagonism of
its neighbors. All of Bismarck’s efforts thereafter would be devoted to an elaborate
series of maneuvers to forestall this “cauchemar des coalitions” (nightmare of
coalitions), as he called it, using the French phrase. In a world of five, Bismarck
counseled, it was always better to be in the party of three. This involved a dizzying
series of partly overlapping, partly conflicting alliances (for example, an alliance with
Austria and a Reinsurance Treaty with Russia) with the aim of giving the other great
powers—except the irreconcilable France—a greater interest to work with Germany
than to coalesce against it.
The genius of the Westphalian system as adapted by the Congress of Vienna had
been its fluidity and its pragmatism; ecumenical in its calculations, it was theoretically
expandable to any region and could incorporate any combination of states. With
Germany unified and France a fixed adversary, the system lost its flexibility. It took a
genius like Bismarck to sustain the web of counterbalancing commitments keeping
the equilibrium in place by a virtuoso performance that forestalled general conflict
during his tenure. But a country whose security depends on producing a genius in
each generation sets itself a task no society has ever met.
After Bismarck’s forced departure in 1890 (after a clash with the new Kaiser
Wilhelm II over the scope of his authority), his system of overlapping alliances was
maintained only tenuously. Leo von Caprivi, the next Chancellor, complained that
while Bismarck had been able to keep five balls in the air simultaneously, he had
difficulty controlling two. The Reinsurance Treaty with Russia was not renewed in
1891 on the ground that it was partly incompatible with the Austrian alliance—which,
in Bismarck’s view, had been precisely its utility. Almost inevitably, France and
Russia began exploring an alliance. Such realignments had happened several times
before in the European kaleidoscope of shifting orders. The novelty now was its
institutionalized permanence. Diplomacy had lost its resilience; it had become a
matter of life and death rather than incremental adjustment. Because a switch in
alliances might spell national disaster for the abandoned side, each ally was able to
extort support from its partner regardless of its best convictions, thereby escalating all
crises and linking them to each other. Diplomacy became an effort to tighten the
internal bonds of each camp, leading to the perpetuation and reinforcement of all
grievances.
The last element of flexibility was lost when Britain abandoned its “splendid
isolation” and joined the Entente Cordiale of France and Russia after 1904. It did so
not formally but de facto via staff talks, creating a moral obligation to fight at the side
of the counterpart countries. Britain set aside its settled policy of acting as balancer—
partly because of a German diplomacy that, in a series of crises over Morocco and
Bosnia, had sought to break up the Franco-Russian alliance by humiliating each of its
members in turn (France over Morocco in 1905 and 1911, Russia over Bosnia in
1908) in the hopes of impressing on the other its ally’s unreliability. Finally, the
German military programs introduced a large and growing navy challenging Britain’s
command of the seas.
Military planning compounded the rigidity. Since the Congress of Vienna, there had
been only one general European war—the Crimean War. (The Franco-Prussian War
was confined to the two adversaries.) It had been conducted about a specific issue and
served limited aims. By the turn of the twentieth century, military planners—drawing
on what they took to be the lessons of mechanization and new methods of
mobilization—began to aim for total victory in all-out war. A system of railways
permitted the rapid movement of military forces. With large reserve forces on all
sides, speed of mobilization became of the essence. German strategy, the famous
Schlieffen Plan, was based on the assessment that Germany needed to defeat one of its
neighbors before it could combine with others to attack from east and west.
Preemption was thereby built into its military planning. Germany’s neighbors were
under the converse imperative; they had to accelerate their mobilization and concerted
action to reduce the impact of possible German preemption. Mobilization schedules
dominated diplomacy; if political leaders wanted to control military considerations, it
should have been the other way around.
Diplomacy, which still worked by traditional—somewhat leisurely—methods, lost
touch with the emerging technology and its corollary warfare. Europe’s diplomats
continued to assume that they were engaged in a common enterprise. They were
reinforced in that approach because none of the many previous diplomatic crises of
the new century had brought matters to the breaking point. In two crises over
Morocco and one over Bosnia, the mobilization schedules had no operational impact
because, however intense the posturing, events never escalated to the point of
imminent confrontation. Paradoxically, the very success in resolving these crises bred
a myopic form of risk-taking unmoored from any of the interests actually at stake. It
came to be taken for granted that maneuvering for tactical victories to be cheered in
the nationalist press was a normal method of conducting policy—that major powers
could dare each other to back down in a succession of standoffs over tangential
disputes without ever producing a showdown.
But history punishes strategic frivolity sooner or later. World War I broke out
because political leaders lost control over their own tactics. For nearly a month after
the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince in June 1914 by a Serbian nationalist,
diplomacy was conducted on the dilatory model of many other crises surmounted in
recent decades. Four weeks elapsed while Austria prepared an ultimatum.
Consultations took place; because it was high summer, statesmen took vacations. But
once the Austrian ultimatum was submitted in July 1914, its deadline imposed a great
urgency on decision making, and within less than two weeks, Europe moved to a war
from which it never recovered.
All these decisions were made when the differences between the major powers
were in inverse proportion to their posturing. A new concept of legitimacy—a meld of
state and empire—had emerged so that none of the powers considered the institutions
of the others a basic threat to their existence. The balance of power as it existed was
rigid but not oppressive. Relations between the crowned heads were cordial, even
social and familial. Except for France’s commitment to regain Alsace-Lorraine, no
major country had claims against the territory of its neighbor. Legitimacy and power
were in substantial balance. But in the Balkans among the remnants of the Ottoman
possessions, there were countries, Serbia in the forefront, threatening Austria with
unsatisfied claims of national self-determination. If any major country supported such
a claim, a general war was probable because Austria was linked by alliance to
Germany as Russia was to France. A war whose consequences had not been
considered descended on Western civilization over the essentially parochial issue of
the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince by a Serb nationalist, giving Europe a
blow that obliterated a century of peace and order.
In the forty years following the Vienna settlement, the European order buffered
conflicts. In the forty years following the unification of Germany, the system
aggravated all disputes. None of the leaders foresaw the scope of the looming
catastrophe that their system of routinized confrontation backed by modern military
machines was making almost certain sooner or later. And they all contributed to it,
oblivious to the fact that they were dismantling an international order: France by its
implacable commitment to regain Alsace-Lorraine, requiring war; Austria by its
ambivalence between its national and its Central European responsibilities; Germany
by attempting to overcome its fear of encirclement by serially staring down France
and Russia side by side with a buildup of naval forces, seemingly blind to the lessons
of history that Britain would surely oppose the largest land power on the Continent if
it simultaneously acted as if it meant to threaten Britain’s naval preeminence. Russia,
by its constant probing in all directions, threatened Austria and the remnants of the
Ottoman Empire simultaneously. And Britain, by its ambiguity obscuring the degree
of its growing commitment to the Allied side, combined the disadvantage of every
course. Its support made France and Russia adamant; its aloof posture confused some
German leaders into believing that Britain might remain neutral in a European war.
Reflecting on what might have occurred in alternative historical scenarios is usually
a futile exercise. But the war that overturned Western civilization had no inevitable
necessity. It arose from a series of miscalculations made by serious leaders who did
not understand the consequences of their planning, and a final maelstrom triggered by
a terrorist attack occurring in a year generally believed to be a tranquil period. In the
end, the military planning ran away with diplomacy. It is a lesson subsequent
generations must not forget.
LEGITIMACY AND POWER BETWEEN THE WORLD WARS
World War I was welcomed by enthusiastic publics and euphoric leaders who
envisioned a short, glorious war for limited aims. In the event, it killed more than
twenty-five million and shipwrecked the prevailing international order. The European
balance’s subtle calculus of shifting interests had been abandoned for the
confrontational diplomacy of two rigid alliances and was then consumed by trench
warfare, producing heretofore-inconceivable casualties. In the ordeal, the Russian,
Austrian, and Ottoman Empires perished entirely. In Russia, a popular uprising on
behalf of modernization and liberal reform was seized by an armed elite proclaiming a
universal revolutionary doctrine. After a descent into famine and civil war, Russia and
its possessions emerged as the Soviet Union, and Dostoevsky’s yearning for “a great
universal church on earth” transmogrified into a Moscow-directed world Communist
movement rejecting all existing concepts of order. “Woe to the statesman whose
arguments for entering a war are not as convincing at its end as they were at the
beginning,” Bismarck had cautioned. None of the leaders who drifted into war in
August 1914 would have done so could they have foreseen the world of 1918.
Stunned by the carnage, Europe’s statesmen tried to forge a postwar period that
would be as different as possible from the crisis that they thought had produced the
Great War, as it was then called. They blotted from their minds nearly every lesson of
previous attempts to forge an international order, especially of the Congress of
Vienna. It was not a happy decision. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 refused to
accept Germany back into the European order as the Congress of Vienna had included
acceptance of a defeated France. The new revolutionary Marxist-Leninist government
of the Soviet Union declared itself not bound by the concepts or restraints of an
international order whose overthrow it prophesied; participating at the fringes of
European diplomacy, it was recognized only slowly and reluctantly by the Western
powers. Of the five states that had constituted the European balance, the Austrian
Empire had disappeared; Russia and Germany were excluded, or had excluded
themselves; and Britain was beginning to return to its historical attitude of involving
itself in European affairs primarily to resist an actual threat to the balance of power
rather than to preempt a potential threat.
Traditional diplomacy had brought about a century of peace in Europe by an
international order subtly balancing elements of power and of legitimacy. In the last
quarter of that century, the balance had shifted to relying on the power element. The
drafters of the Versailles settlement veered back to the legitimacy component by
creating an international order that could be maintained, if at all, only by appeals to
shared principles—because the elements of power were ignored or left in disarray.
The belt of states emerging from the principle of self-determination located between
Germany and the Soviet Union proved too weak to resist either, inviting collusion
between them. Britain was increasingly withdrawn. The United States, having entered
the war decisively in 1917 despite initial public reluctance, had grown disillusioned
by the outcome and withdrawn into relative isolation. The responsibility for supplying
the elements of power therefore fell largely on France, which was exhausted by the
war, drained by it of human resources and psychological stamina, and increasingly
aware that the disparity in strength between it and Germany threatened to become
congenital.
Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of
Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from
recovering, the Treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to constant
vigilance against an irreconcilable and revanchist Germany as well as a revolutionary
Soviet Union.
With Germany neither morally invested in the Versailles settlement nor confronted
with a clear balance of forces preventing its challenges, the Versailles order all but
dared German revisionism. Germany could be prevented from asserting its potential
strategic superiority only by discriminatory clauses, which challenged the moral
convictions of the United States and, to an increasing degree, Great Britain. And once
Germany began to challenge the settlement, its terms were maintainable only by the
ruthless application of French arms or a permanent American involvement in
continental affairs. Neither was forthcoming.
France had spent three centuries keeping Central Europe at first divided and then
contained—at first by itself, then in alliance with Russia. But after Versailles, it lost
this option. France was too drained by the war to play the role of Europe’s policeman,
and Central and Eastern Europe were seized by political currents beyond France’s
capacity to manipulate. Left alone to balance a unified Germany, it made halting
efforts to guard the settlement by force but became demoralized when its historical
nightmare reappeared with the advent of Hitler.
The major powers attempted to institutionalize their revulsion to war into a new
form of peaceful international order. A vague formula for international disarmament
was put forward, though the implementation was deferred for later negotiations. The
League of Nations and a series of arbitration treaties set out to replace power contests
with legal mechanisms for the resolution of disputes. Yet while membership in these
new structures was nearly universal and every form of violation of the peace formally
banned, no country proved willing to enforce the terms. Powers with grievances or
expansionist goals—Germany, imperial Japan, Mussolini’s Italy—soon learned that
there were no serious consequences for violating the terms of membership of the
League of Nations or for simply withdrawing. Two overlapping and contradictory
postwar orders were coming into being: the world of rules and international law,
inhabited primarily by the Western democracies in their interactions with each other;
and an unconstrained zone appropriated by the powers that had withdrawn from this
system of limits to achieve greater freedom of action. Looming beyond both and
opportunistically maneuvering between them lay the Soviet Union—with its own
revolutionary concept of world order threatening to submerge them all.
In the end the Versailles order achieved neither legitimacy nor equilibrium. Its
almost pathetic frailty was demonstrated by the Locarno Pact of 1925, in which
Germany “accepted” the western frontiers and the demilitarization of the Rhineland to
which it had already agreed at Versailles but explicitly refused to extend the same
assurance to its borders with Poland and Czechoslovakia—making explicit its
ambitions and underlying resentments. Amazingly, France completed the Locarno
agreement even though it left France’s allies in Eastern Europe formally exposed to
eventual German revanchism—a hint of what it would do a decade later in the face of
an actual challenge.
In the 1920s, the Germany of the Weimar Republic appealed to Western
consciences by contrasting the inconsistencies and punitiveness of the Versailles
settlement with the League of Nations’ more idealistic principles of international
order. Hitler, who came to power in 1933 by the popular vote of a resentful German
people, abandoned all restraints. He rearmed in violation of the Versailles peace terms
and overthrew the Locarno settlement by reoccupying the Rhineland. When his
challenges failed to encounter a significant response, Hitler began to dismantle the
states of Central and Eastern Europe one by one: Austria first, followed by
Czechoslovakia, and finally Poland.
The nature of these challenges was not singular to the 1930s. In every era,
humanity produces demonic individuals and seductive ideas of repression. The task of
statesmanship is to prevent their rise to power and sustain an international order
capable of deterring them if they do achieve it. The interwar years’ toxic mixture of
facile pacifism, geopolitical imbalance, and allied disunity allowed these forces a free
hand.
Europe had constructed an international order from three hundred years of conflict.
It threw it away because its leaders did not understand the consequences when they
entered World War I—and though they did understand the consequences of another
conflagration, they recoiled before the implications of acting on their foresight. The
collapse of international order was essentially a tale of abdication, even suicide.
Having abandoned the principles of the Westphalian settlement and reluctant to
exercise the force required to vindicate its proclaimed moral alternative, Europe was
now consumed by another war that, at its end, brought with it once more the need to
recast the European order.
THE POSTWAR EUROPEAN ORDER
As a result of two world wars, the concept of Westphalian sovereignty and the
principles of the balance of power were greatly diminished in the contemporary order
of the Continent that spawned them. Their residue would continue, perhaps most
consequentially in some of the countries to which they were brought in the age of
discovery and expansion.
By the end of World War II, Europe’s world-ordering material and psychological
capacity had all but vanished. Every continental European country with the exception
of Switzerland and Sweden had been occupied by foreign troops at one time or
another. Every country’s economy was in shambles. It became obvious that no
European country (including Switzerland and Sweden) was able any longer to shape
its own future by itself.
That Western Europe found the moral strength to launch itself on the road to a new
approach to order was the work of three great men: Konrad Adenauer in Germany,
Robert Schuman in France, and Alcide de Gasperi in Italy. Born and educated before
World War I, they retained some of an older Europe’s philosophical certitudes about
the conditions for human betterment, and this endowed them with the vision and
fortitude to overcome the causes of Europe’s tragedies. At a moment of greatest
weakness, they preserved some of the concepts of order of their youth. Their most
important conviction was that if they were to bring succor to their people and prevent
a recurrence of Europe’s tragedies, they needed to overcome Europe’s historical
divisions and on that basis create a new European order.
They had to cope first with another division of Europe. In 1949, the Western allies
combined their three occupation zones to create the Federal Republic of Germany.
Russia turned its occupation zone into a socialist state tied to it by the Warsaw Pact.
Germany was back to its position three hundred years earlier after the Peace of
Westphalia: its division had become the key element of the emerging international
structure.
France and Germany, the two countries whose rivalry had been at the heart of every
European war for three centuries, began the process of transcending European history
by merging the key elements of their remaining economic power. In 1952, they
formed the Coal and Steel Community as a first step toward an “ever closer union” of
Europe’s constituent peoples and a keystone of a new European order.
For decades, Germany had posed the principal challenge to Europe’s stability. For
the first decade of the postwar period, the course of its national leadership would be
crucial. Konrad Adenauer became Chancellor of the new Federal Republic of
Germany at the age of seventy-three, an age by which Bismarck’s career was nearing
its end. Patrician in style, suspicious of populism, he created a political party, the
Christian Democratic Union, which for the first time in German parliamentary history
governed as a moderate party with a majority mandate. With this mandate, Adenauer
committed himself to regaining the confidence of Germany’s recent victims. In 1955,
he brought West Germany into the Atlantic Alliance. So committed was Adenauer to
the unification of Europe that he rejected, in the 1950s, Soviet proposals hinting that
Germany might be unified if the Federal Republic abandoned the Western alliance.
This decision surely reflected a shrewd judgment on the reliability of Soviet offers but
also a severe doubt about the capacity of his own society to repeat a solitary journey
as a national state in the center of the Continent. It nevertheless took a leader of
enormous moral strength to base a new international order on the partition of his own
country.
The partition of Germany was not a new event in European history; it had been the
basis of both the Westphalian and the Vienna settlements. What was new was that the
emerging Germany explicitly cast itself as a component of the West in a contest over
the nature of international political order. This was all the more important because the
balance of power was largely being shaped outside the European continent. For one
thousand years, the peoples of Europe had taken for granted that whatever the
fluctuations in the balance of power, its constituent elements resided in Europe. The
world of the emerging Cold War sought its balances in the conduct and armament of
two superpowers: the United States across the Atlantic and the Soviet Union at the
geographic fringes of Europe. America had helped restart the European economy with
the Greek-Turkish aid program of 1947 and the Marshall Plan of 1948. In 1949, the
United States for the first time in its history undertook a peacetime alliance, through
the North Atlantic Treaty.
The European equilibrium, historically authored by the states of Europe, had turned
into an aspect of the strategy of outside powers. The North Atlantic Alliance
established a regular framework for consultation between the United States and
Europe and a degree of coherence in the conduct of foreign policy. But in its essence,
the European balance of power shifted from internal European arrangements to the
containment of the Soviet Union globally, largely by way of the nuclear capability of
the United States. After the shock of two devastating wars, the Western European
countries were confronted by a change in geopolitical perspective that challenged
their sense of historical identity.
The international order during the first phase of the Cold War was in effect bipolar,
with the operation of the Western alliance conducted essentially by America as the
principal and guiding partner. What the United States understood by alliance was not
so much countries acting congruently to preserve equilibrium as America as the
managing director of a joint enterprise.
The traditional European balance of power had been based on the equality of its
members; each partner contributed an aspect of its power in quest of a common and
basically limited goal, which was equilibrium. But the Atlantic Alliance, while it
combined the military forces of the allies in a common structure, was sustained
largely by unilateral American military power—especially so with respect to
America’s nuclear deterrent. So long as strategic nuclear weapons were the principal
element of Europe’s defense, the objective of European policy was primarily
psychological: to oblige the United States to treat Europe as an extension of itself in
case of an emergency.
The Cold War international order reflected two sets of balances, which for the first
time in history were largely independent of each other: the nuclear balance between
the Soviet Union and the United States, and the internal balance within the Atlantic
Alliance, whose operation was, in important ways, psychological. U.S. preeminence
was conceded in return for giving Europe access to American nuclear protection.
European countries built up their own military forces not so much to create additional
strength as to have a voice in the decisions of the ally—as an admission ticket, as it
were, to discussions regarding the use of the American deterrent. France and Britain
developed small nuclear forces that were irrelevant to the overall balance of power
but created an additional claim to a seat at the table of major-power decisions.
The realities of the nuclear age and the geographic proximity of the Soviet Union
sustained the alliance for a generation. But the underlying difference in perspective
was bound to reappear with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
After four decades of Cold War, NATO had achieved the vision of the Cold War’s
end that its founders had proclaimed. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led rapidly to
the unification of Germany, together with the collapse of the Soviet satellite orbit, the
belt of states in Eastern Europe with an imposed Soviet control system. In a testament
to the vision of the allied leaders who had designed the Atlantic Alliance and to the
subtle performance of those who oversaw the denouement, the century’s third contest
over Europe ended peacefully. Germany achieved unification as an affirmation of
liberal democracy; it reaffirmed its commitment to European unity as a project of
common values and shared development. The nations of Eastern Europe, suppressed
for forty years (some longer), began to reemerge into independence and to regain their
personalities.
The collapse of the Soviet Union changed the emphasis of diplomacy. The
geopolitical nature of the European order was fundamentally transformed when there
no longer existed a substantial military threat from within Europe. In the exultant
atmosphere that followed, traditional problems of equilibrium were dismissed as
“old” diplomacy, to be replaced by the spread of shared ideals. The Atlantic Alliance,
it was now professed, should be concerned less about security and more about its
political reach. The expansion of NATO up to the borders of Russia—even perhaps
including it—was now broached as a serious prospect. The projection of a military
alliance into historically contested territory within several hundred miles of Moscow
was proposed not primarily on security grounds but as a sensible method of “locking
in” democratic gains.
In the face of a direct threat, international order had been conceived of as the
confrontation of two adversarial blocs dominated by the United States and the Soviet
Union, respectively. As Soviet power declined, the world became to some extent
multipolar, and Europe strove to define an independent identity.
THE FUTURE OF EUROPE
What a journey Europe had undertaken to reach this point. It had launched itself on
global explorations and spread its practices and values around the world. It had in
every century changed its internal structure and invented new ways of thinking about
the nature of international order. Now at the culmination of an era, Europe, in order to
participate in it, felt obliged to set aside the political mechanisms through which it had
conducted its affairs for three and a half centuries. Impelled also by the desire to
cushion the emergent unification of Germany, the new European Union established a
common currency in 2002 and a formal political structure in 2004. It proclaimed a
Europe united, whole, and free, adjusting its differences by peaceful mechanisms.
German unification altered the equilibrium of Europe because no constitutional
arrangement could change the reality that Germany alone was again the strongest
European state. The single currency produced a degree of unity that had not been seen
in Europe since the Holy Roman Empire. Would the EU achieve the global role its
charter proclaimed, or would it, like Charles V’s empire, prove incapable of holding
itself together?
The new structure represented in some sense a renunciation of Westphalia. Yet the
EU can also be interpreted as Europe’s return to the Westphalian international state
system that it created, spread across the globe, defended, and exemplified through
much of the modern age—this time as a regional, not a national, power, as a new unit
in a now global version of the Westphalian system.
The outcome has combined aspects of both the national and the regional
approaches without, as yet, securing the full benefits of either. The European Union
diminishes its member states’ sovereignty and traditional government functions, such
as control of their currency and borders. On the other hand, European politics remains
primarily national, and in many countries, objections to EU policy have become the
central domestic issue. The result is a hybrid, constitutionally something between a
state and a confederation, operating through ministerial meetings and a common
bureaucracy—more like the Holy Roman Empire than the Europe of the nineteenth
century. But unlike the Holy Roman Empire (for most of its history, at least), the EU
struggles to resolve its internal tensions in the quest for the principles and goals by
which it is guided. In the process, it pursues monetary union side by side with fiscal
dispersion and bureaucracy at odds with democracy. In foreign policy it embraces
universal ideals without the means to enforce them, and cosmopolitan identity in
contention with national loyalties—with European unity accompanied by east-west
and north-south divides and an ecumenical attitude toward autonomy movements
(Catalan, Bavarian, Scot) challenging the integrity of states. The European “social
model” is dependent upon yet discomforted by market dynamism. EU policies
enshrine tolerant inclusiveness, approaching unwillingness to assert distinctive
Western values, even as member states practice politics driven by fears of nonEuropean influxes.
The result is a cycle testing the popular legitimacy of the EU itself. European states
have surrendered significant portions of what was once deemed their sovereign
authority. Because Europe’s leaders are still validated, or rejected, by national
democratic processes, they are tempted to conduct policies of national advantage and,
in consequence, disputes persist between the various regions of Europe—usually over
economic issues. Especially in crises such as that which began in 2009, the European
structure is then driven toward increasingly intrusive emergency measures simply to
survive. Yet when publics are asked to make sacrifices on behalf of “the European
project,” a clear understanding of its obligations may not exist. Leaders then face the
choice of disregarding the will of their people or following it in opposition to
Brussels.
Europe has returned to the question with which it started, except now it has a global
sweep. What international order can be distilled from contending aspirations and
contradictory trends? Which countries will be the components of the order, and in
what manner will they relate their policies? How much unity does Europe need, and
how much diversity can it endure? But the converse issue is in the long run perhaps
even more fundamental: Given its history, how much diversity must Europe preserve
to achieve a meaningful unity?
When it maintained a global system, Europe represented the dominant concept of
world order. Its statesmen designed international structures and prescribed them to the
rest of the world. Today the nature of the emergent world order is itself in dispute, and
regions beyond Europe will play a major role in defining its attributes. Is the world
moving toward regional blocs that perform the role of states in the Westphalian
system? If so, will balance follow, or will this reduce the number of key players to so
few that rigidity becomes inevitable and the perils of the early twentieth century
return, with inflexibly constructed blocs attempting to face one another down? In a
world where continental structures like America, China, and maybe India and Brazil
have already reached critical mass, how will Europe handle its transition to a regional
unit? So far the process of integration has been dealt with as an essentially
bureaucratic problem of increasing the competence of various European
administrative bodies, in other words an elaboration of the familiar. Where will the
impetus for charting the inward commitment to these goals emerge? European history
has shown that unification has never been achieved by primarily administrative
procedures. It has required a unifier—Prussia in Germany, Piedmont in Italy—without
whose leadership (and willingness to create faits accomplis) unification would have
remained stillborn. What country or institution will play that role? Or will some new
institution or inner group have to be devised for charting the road?
And if Europe should achieve unity, by whatever road, how will it define its global
role? It has three choices: to foster Atlantic partnership; to adopt an ever-more-neutral
position; or to move toward a tacit compact with an extra-European power or
grouping of them. Does it envisage shifting coalitions, or does it see itself as a
member of a North Atlantic bloc that generally adopts compatible positions? To
which of its pasts will Europe relate itself: to its recent past of Atlantic cohesion or to
its longer-term history of maneuvering for maximum advantage on the basis of
national interest? In short, will there still be an Atlantic community, and if so, as I
fervently hope, how will it define itself?
It is a question both sides of the Atlantic must ask themselves. The Atlantic
community cannot remain relevant by simply projecting the familiar forward.
Cooperating to shape strategic affairs globally, the European members of the Atlantic
Alliance in many cases have described their policies as those of neutral administrators
of rules and distributors of aid. But they have often been uncertain about what to do
when this model was rejected or its implementation went awry. A more specific
meaning needs to be given to the often-invoked “Atlantic partnership” by a new
generation shaped by a set of experiences other than the Soviet challenge of the Cold
War.
The political evolution of Europe is essentially for Europeans to decide. But its
Atlantic partners have an important stake in it. Will the emerging Europe become an
active participant in the construction of a new international order, or will it consume
itself on its own internal issues? The pure balance-of-power strategy of the traditional
European great powers is precluded by contemporary geopolitical and strategic
realities. But nor will the nascent organization of “rules and norms” by a PanEuropean elite prove a sufficient vehicle for global strategy unless accompanied by
some accounting for geopolitical realities.
The United States has every reason from history and geopolitics to bolster the
European Union and prevent its drifting off into a geopolitical vacuum; the United
States, if separated from Europe in politics, economics, and defense, would become
geopolitically an island off the shores of Eurasia, and Europe itself could turn into an
appendage to the reaches of Asia and the Middle East.
Europe, which had a near monopoly in the design of global order less than a
century ago, is in danger of cutting itself off from the contemporary quest for world
order by identifying its internal construction with its ultimate geopolitical purpose.
For many, the outcome represents the culmination of the dreams of generations—a
continent united in peace and forswearing power contests. Yet while the values
espoused in Europe’s soft-power approach have often been inspiring, few of the other
regions have shown such overriding dedication to this single style of policy, raising
the prospects of imbalance. Europe turns inward just as the quest for a world order it
significantly designed faces a fraught juncture whose outcome could engulf any
region that fails to help shape it. Europe thus finds itself suspended between a past it
seeks to overcome and a future it has not yet defined.
chapter 3
Islamism and the Middle East: A World in
Disorder
THE MIDDLE EAST has been the chrysalis of three of the world’s great religions. From
its stern landscape have issued conquerors and prophets holding aloft banners of
universal aspirations. Across its seemingly limitless horizons, empires have been
established and fallen; absolute rulers have proclaimed themselves the embodiment of
all power, only to disappear as if they had been mirages. Here every form of domestic
and international order has existed, and been rejected, at one time or another.
The world has become accustomed to calls from the Middle East urging the
overthrow of regional and world order in the service of a universal vision. A profusion
of prophetic absolutisms has been the hallmark of a region suspended between a
dream of its former glory and its contemporary inability to unify around common
principles of domestic or international legitimacy. Nowhere is the challenge of
international order more complex—in terms of both organizing regional order and
ensuring the compatibility of that order with peace and stability in the rest of the
world.
In our own time, the Middle East seems destined to experiment with all of its
historical experiences simultaneously—empire, holy war, foreign domination, a
sectarian war of all against all—before it arrives (if it ever does) at a settled concept
of international order. Until it does so, the region will remain pulled alternately
toward joining the world community and struggling against it.
THE ISLAMIC WORLD ORDER
The early organization of the Middle East and North Africa developed from a
succession of empires. Each considered itself the center of civilized life; each arose
around unifying geographic features and then expanded into the unincorporated zones
between them. In the third millennium B.C., Egypt expanded its influence along the
Nile and into present-day Sudan. Beginning in the same period, the empires of
Mesopotamia, Sumer, and Babylon consolidated their rule among peoples along the
Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In the sixth century B.C., the Persian Empire rose on the
Iranian plateau and developed a system of rule that has been described as “the first
deliberate attempt in history to unite heterogeneous African, Asian and European
communities into a single, organized international society,” with a ruler styling
himself the Shahanshah, or “King of Kings.”
By the end of the sixth century A.D., two great empires dominated much of the
Middle East: the Byzantine (or Eastern Roman) Empire with its capital in
Constantinople and professing the Christian religion (Greek Orthodox), and the
Sassanid Persian Empire with its capital in Ctesiphon, near modern-day Baghdad,
which practiced Zoroastrianism. Conflicts between them had occurred sporadically
for centuries. In 602, not long after a plague had wracked both, a Persian invasion of
Byzantine territories led to a twenty-five-year-long war in which the two empires
tested what remained of their strength. After an eventual Byzantine victory,
exhaustion produced the peace that statesmanship had failed to achieve. It also opened
the way for the ultimate victory of Islam. For in western Arabia, in a forbidding desert
outside the control of any empire, the Prophet Muhammad and his followers were
gathering strength, impelled by a new vision of world order.
Few events in world history equal the drama of the early spread of Islam. The
Muslim tradition relates that Muhammad, born in Mecca in the year 570, received at
the age of forty a revelation that continued for approximately twenty-three years and,
when written down, became known as the Quran. As the Byzantine and Persian
empires disabled each other, Muhammad and his community of believers organized a
polity, unified the Arabian Peninsula, and set out to replace the prevailing faiths of the
region—primarily Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism—with the religion of his
received vision.
An unprecedented wave of expansion turned the rise of Islam into one of the most
consequential events in history. In the century following the death of Muhammad in
632, Arab armies brought the new religion as far as the Atlantic coast of Africa, to
most of Spain, into central France, and as far east as northern India. Stretches of
Central Asia and Russia, parts of China, and most of the East Indies followed over the
subsequent centuries, where Islam, carried alternately by merchants and conquerors,
established itself as the dominant religious presence.
That a small group of Arab confederates could inspire a movement that would lay
low the great empires that had dominated the region for centuries would have seemed
inconceivable a few decades earlier. How was it possible for so much imperial thrust
and such omnidirectional, all-engulfing fervor to be assembled so unnoticed? The
records of neighboring societies had not, until then, regarded the Arabian Peninsula as
an imperial force. For centuries, the Arabs had lived a tribal, pastoral, seminomadic
existence in the desert and its fertile fringes. Until this point, though they had made a
handful of evanescent challenges to Roman rule, they had founded no great states or
empires. Their historical memory was encapsulated in an oral tradition of epic poetry.
They figured into the consciousness of the Greeks, Romans, and Persians mainly as
occasional raiders of trade routes and settled populations. To the extent they had been
brought into these cultures’ visions of world order, it was through ad hoc
arrangements to purchase the loyalty of a tribe and charge it with enforcing security
along the imperial frontiers.
In a century of remarkable exertions, this world was overturned. Expansionist and
in some respects radically egalitarian, Islam was unlike any other society in history.
Its requirement of frequent daily prayers made faith a way of life; its emphasis on the
identity of religious and political power transformed the expansion of Islam from an
imperial enterprise into a sacred obligation. Each of the peoples the advancing
Muslims encountered was offered the same choice: conversion, adoption of
protectorate status, or conquest. As an Arab Muslim envoy, sent to negotiate with the
besieged Persian Empire, declared on the eve of a climactic seventh-century battle, “If
you embrace Islam, we will leave you alone, if you agree to pay the poll tax, we will
protect you if you need our protection. Otherwise it is war.” Arab cavalry, combining
religious conviction, military skill, and a disdain for the luxuries they encountered in
conquered lands, backed up the threat. Observing the dynamism and achievements of
the Islamic enterprise and threatened with extinction, societies chose to adopt the new
religion and its vision.
Islam’s rapid advance across three continents provided proof to the faithful of its
divine mission. Impelled by the conviction that its spread would unite and bring peace
to all humanity, Islam was at once a religion, a multiethnic superstate, and a new
world order.
THE AREAS ISLAM had conquered or where it held sway over tribute-paying nonMuslims were conceived as a single political unit: dar al-Islam, the “House of Islam,”
or the realm of peace. It would be governed by the caliphate, an institution defined by
rightful succession to the earthly political authority that the Prophet had exercised.
The lands beyond were dar al-harb, the realm of war; Islam’s mission was to
incorporate these regions into its own world order and thereby bring universal peace:
The dar al-Islam, in theory, was in a state of war with the dar al-harb, because the ultimate objective of
Islam was the whole world. If the dar al-harb were reduced by Islam, the public order of Pax Islamica
would supersede all others, and non-Muslim communities would either become part of the Islamic
community or submit to its sovereignty as tolerated religious communities or as autonomous entities
possessing treaty relations with it.
The strategy to bring about this universal system would be named jihad, an
obligation binding on believers to expand their faith through struggle. “Jihad”
encompassed warfare, but it was not limited to a military strategy; the term also
included other means of exerting one’s full power to redeem and spread the message
of Islam, such as spiritual striving or great deeds glorifying the religion’s principles.
Depending on the circumstances—and in various eras and regions, the relative
emphasis has differed widely—the believer might fulfill jihad “by his heart; his
tongue; his hands; or by the sword.”
Circumstances have, of course, changed greatly since the early Islamic state set out
to expand its creed in all directions or when it ruled the entire community of the
faithful as a single political entity in a condition of latent challenge to the rest of the
world. Interactions between Muslim and non-Muslim societies have gone through
periods of often fruitful coexistence as well as stretches of antagonism. Trade patterns
have tied Muslim and non-Muslim worlds more closely together, and diplomatic
alignments have frequently been based on Muslim and non-Muslim states working
together toward significant shared aims. Still, the binary concept of world order
remains the official state doctrine of Iran, embedded in its constitution; the rallying
cry of armed minorities in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan; and the ideology of several terrorist groups active across the world,
including the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Other religions—especially Christianity—have had their own crusading phases, at
times exalting their universal mission with comparable fervor and resorting to
analogous methods of conquest and forced conversions. (Spanish conquistadores
abolished ancient civilizations in Central and South America in the sixteenth century
in a similar spirit of world-conquering finality.) The difference is that the crusading
spirit subsided in the Western world or took the form of secular concepts that proved
less absolute (or less enduring) than religious imperatives. Over time, Christendom
became a philosophical and historical concept, not an operational principle of strategy
or international order. That process was facilitated because the Christian world had
originated a distinction between “the things which are Caesar’s” and “the things that
are God’s,” permitting an eventual evolution toward pluralistic, secular-based foreign
policies within a state-based international system, as we have seen in the previous two
chapters. It was also driven by contingent circumstances, among them the relative
unattractiveness of some of the modern crusading concepts called on to replace
religious fervor—militant Soviet Communism preaching world revolution, or racebased imperialisms.
The evolution in the Muslim world has been more complex. Certain periods have
inspired hopes for a convergence of approaches. On the other hand, as recently as the
1920s, a direct line of political succession from the Prophet Muhammad was still
asserted as a practical reality of Middle Eastern statecraft, by the Ottoman Empire.
Since this empire collapsed, the response in key Muslim countries has been divided
between those who have sought to enter the new state-based, ecumenical international
order as significant members—adhering to deeply felt religious beliefs but separating
them from questions of foreign policy—and those who see themselves as engaged in a
battle over succession to universal authority within a stringent interpretation of the
traditional Islamic concept of world order.
Over the past ninety years, the exponents of each view have represented some of
the outstanding figures of the era; among them are counted some of the century’s most
farsighted statesmen and most formidable religious absolutists. The contest between
them is not concluded; under some Middle Eastern governments, believers in state-
based and faith-based universal orders coexist, if occasionally uneasily. To many of its
faithful, especially in a period of resurgent Islamism—the modern ideology seeking to
enforce Muslim scripture as the central arbiter of personal, political, and international
life—the Islamic world remains in a condition of inescapable confrontation with the
outside world.
In the early Islamic system, nonaggression treaties with non-Muslim societies were
permissible. According to traditional jurisprudence, these were pragmatic
arrangements of limited duration, allowing the Islamic party to secure itself from
threats while gathering strength and cohesion. Based on a precedent set by the early
Islamic state in entering truces with foes it eventually vanquished, they were limited
to terms of specific duration, up to ten years, that could be renewed as needed: in this
spirit, in the early centuries of Muslim history, “Islamic legal rulings stipulate that a
treaty cannot be forever, since it must be immediately void should the Muslims
become capable of fighting them.”
What these treaties did not imply was a permanent system in which the Islamic
state would interact on equal terms with sovereign non-Muslim states: “The
communities of the dar al-harb were regarded as being in a ‘state of nature,’ for they
lacked legal competence to enter into intercourse with Islam on the basis of equality
and reciprocity because they failed to conform to its ethical and legal standards.”
Because in this view the domestic principles of an Islamic state were divinely
ordained, non-Muslim political entities were illegitimate; they could never be
accepted by Muslim states as truly equal counterparts. A peaceful world order
depended on the ability to forge and expand a unitary Islamic entity, not on an
equilibrium of competing parts.
In the idealized version of this worldview, the spread of peace and justice under
Islam was a unidirectional and irreversible process. The loss of land that had been
brought into dar al-Islam could never be accepted as permanent, as this would
effectively repudiate the legacy of the universal faith. Indeed history records no other
political enterprise that spread with such inexorable results. In time, a portion of the
territories reached in Islam’s periods of expansion would in fact exit Muslim political
control, including Spain, Portugal, Sicily, southern Italy, the Balkans (now a
patchwork of Muslim and mainly Orthodox Christian enclaves), Greece, Armenia,
Georgia, Israel, India, southern Russia, and parts of western China. Yet of the
territories incorporated in Islam’s initial wave of expansion, the significant majority
remain Muslim today.
NO SINGLE SOCIETY has ever had the power, no leadership the resilience, and no faith
the dynamism to impose its writ enduringly throughout the world. Universality has
proved elusive for any conqueror, including Islam. As the early Islamic Empire
expanded, it eventually fragmented into multiple centers of power. A succession crisis
following Muhammad’s death led to a split between Sunni and Shia branches of
Islam, a defining division in the contemporary Islamic world. In any new political
enterprise, the question of succession is fraught; where the founding leader is also
regarded as the “Seal of the Prophets,” the final messenger of God, the debate
becomes at once political and theological. Following Muhammad’s passing in 632, a
council of tribal elders selected his father-in-law Abu Bakr as his successor, or caliph,
as the figure best able to maintain consensus and harmony in the fledgling Muslim
community. A minority believed that the matter should not have been put to a vote,
which implied human fallibility, and that power should have passed automatically to
the Prophet’s closest blood relation, his cousin Ali—an instrumental early convert to
Islam and heroic warrior whom Muhammad was held to have personally selected.
These factions eventually formed themselves into the two main branches of Islam.
For the proponents of Abu Bakr and his immediate successors, Muhammad’s
relationship with God was unique and final; the caliphate’s primary task was to
preserve what Muhammad had revealed and built. They became the Sunnis, short for
the “people of tradition and consensus.” For the Party of Ali—Shiite-Ali (or Shia)—
governance of the new Islamic society was also a spiritual task involving an esoteric
element. In their view, Muslims could be brought into the correct relationship with
Muhammad’s revelation only if they were guided by spiritually gifted individuals
directly descended from the Prophet and Ali, who were the “trustees” of the religion’s
hidden inner meanings. When Ali, eventually coming to power as the fourth caliph,
was challenged by rebellion and murdered by a mob, the Sunnis treated the central
task as the restoration of order in Islam and backed the faction that reestablished
stability. The Shias decried the new authorities as illegitimate usurpers and lionized
the martyrs who had died in resistance. These general attitudes would prevail for
centuries.
Geopolitical rivalries compounded doctrinal differences. In time, separate Arab,
Persian, Turkish, and Mughal spheres arose, each theoretically adhering to the same
global Muslim order but increasingly conducting themselves as rival monarchies with
distinct interests and distinct interpretations of their faith. In some cases, including
much of the Mughal period in India, these included a relatively ecumenical and even
syncretic approach stressing tolerance of other faiths and privileging practical foreign
policy over sectarian imperatives. When beseeched to wage jihad against Shia Iran by
fellow Sunni powers, Mughal India demurred, citing traditional amity and an absence
of casus belli.
Eventually, the momentum of the world project of Islam faltered as the first wave
of Muslim expansion was reversed in Europe. Battles at Poitiers and Tours in France
in 732 ended an unbroken string of advances by Arab and North African Muslim
forces. The Byzantine defense of Asia Minor and Eastern Europe maintained, for four
centuries, a line behind which the West began developing its own post-Roman ideas
of world order. Western concepts began to be projected into Muslim-administered
territories as the Byzantines marched back, temporarily, into the Middle East. The
Crusades—forays led by orders of Christian knights into the historic Holy Land that
Islam had incorporated in the seventh century—took Jerusalem in 1099, establishing a
kingdom there that endured for roughly two centuries. The Christian reconquista of
Spain ended with the fall of Granada, the last Muslim foothold on the peninsula, in
1492, pushing Islam’s western boundary back into North Africa.
In the thirteenth century, the dream of universal order reappeared. A new Muslim
empire led by the Ottoman Turks, followers of the conqueror Osman, expanded their
once-minor Anatolian state into a formidable power capable of challenging, and
eventually displacing, the last vestiges of the Byzantine Empire. They began to
construct a successor to the great Islamic caliphates of earlier centuries. Styling
themselves the leaders of a unified Islamic world, they expanded in all directions by
conflicts cast as holy wars, first into the Balkans. In 1453, they conquered
Constantinople (Istanbul), the capital of Byzantium, geostrategically astride the
Bosphorus Strait; next they moved south and west into the Arabian Peninsula,
Mesopotamia, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Caucasus, becoming the
dominant littoral power in the eastern Mediterranean. Like the early Islamic Empire,
the Ottomans conceived of their political mission as universal, upholding “the order
of the world”; sultans proclaimed themselves “the Shadow of God on Earth” and “the
universal ruler who protects the world.”
As its predecessors had a half millennium earlier, the Ottoman Empire came into
contact with the states of Western Europe as it expanded westward. The divergence
between what was later institutionalized as the multipolar European system and the
Ottomans’ concept of a single universal empire conferred a complex character on their
interactions. The Ottomans refused to accept the European states as either legitimate
or equal. This was not simply a matter of Islamic doctrine; it reflected as well a
judgment about the reality of power relations, for the Ottoman Empire was
territorially larger than all of the Western European states combined and for many
decades militarily stronger than any conceivable coalition of them.
In this context, formal Ottoman documents afforded European monarchs a protocol
rank below the Sultan, the ruler of the Ottoman Empire; it was equivalent to his vizier,
or chief minister. By the same token, the European ambassadors permitted by the
Ottomans to reside in Constantinople were cast in the status of supplicants. Compacts
negotiated with these envoys were drafted not as bilateral treaties but as unilateral and
freely revocable grants of privilege by a magnanimous Sultan.
When the Ottomans had reached the limits of their military capabilities, both sides
occasionally found themselves drawn into alignments with each other for tactical
advantage. Strategic and commercial interests occasionally circumvented religious
doctrine.
In 1526, France, considering itself surrounded by Habsburg power in Spain to its
south and the Habsburg-led Holy Roman Empire to its east, proposed a military
alliance to the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. It was the same strategic
concept that caused Catholic France a hundred years later to align itself with the
Protestant cause in the Thirty Years’ War. Suleiman, viewing Habsburg power as the
principal obstacle to Ottoman ambitions in Eastern Europe, responded favorably,
though he treated France’s King Francis I as an unmistakably junior partner. He did
not agree to an alliance, which would have implied moral equality; instead, he
bestowed his support as a unilateral act from on high:
I who am the Sultan of Sultans, the sovereign of sovereigns, the dispenser of crowns to the monarchs
on the face of the earth, the shadow of God on earth, the Sultan and sovereign lord of the White Sea
and of the Black Sea, of Rumelia and of Anatolia, of Karamania … To thee who art Francis, king of the
land of France.
You have sent to my Porte, refuge of sovereigns, a letter … you have here asked aid and succors for
your deliverance … Take courage then, and be not dismayed. Our glorious predecessors and our
illustrious ancestors (may God light up their tombs!) have never ceased to make war to repel the foe
and conquer his lands. We ourselves have followed in their footsteps, and have at all times conquered
provinces and citadels of great strength and difficult of approach. Night and day our horse is saddled
and our sabre is girt.
A working military cooperation emerged, including joint Ottoman-French naval
operations against Spain and the Italian peninsula. Playing by the same rules, the
Habsburgs leapfrogged the Ottomans to solicit an alliance with the Shia Safavid
Dynasty in Persia. Geopolitical imperatives, for a time at least, overrode ideology.
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE
Ottoman assaults on the European order resumed, the most significant of which
reached Vienna in 1683. The siege of Vienna, broken that year by a European army
led by Eugene of Savoy, marked the high point of Ottoman expansion.
In the late eighteenth and, with increasing momentum, throughout the nineteenth
century, European states began to reverse the process. The Ottoman Empire had
gradually become sclerotic when orthodox religious factions at the court resisted
modernization. Russia pressed against the empire from the north, marching toward the
Black Sea and into the Caucasus. Russia and Austria moved into the Balkans from
east and west, while France and Britain competed for influence in Egypt—a crown
jewel of the Ottoman Empire—which in the nineteenth century achieved various
degrees of national autonomy.
Convulsed by internal disturbances, the Ottoman Empire was treated by the
Western powers as “the Sick Man of Europe.” The fate of its vast holdings in the
Balkans and the Middle East, among them significant Christian communities with
historical links to the West, became “the Eastern Question,” and for much of the
nineteenth century the major European powers tried to divide up the Ottoman
possessions without upsetting the European balance of power. On their part, the
Ottomans had the recourse of the weak; they tried to manipulate the contending forces
to achieve a maximum of freedom of action.
In this manner, in the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire entered the
European balance as a provisional member of Westphalian international order, but as
a declining power not entirely in control of its fate—a “weight” to be considered in
establishing the European equilibrium but not a full partner in designing it. Britain
used the Ottoman Empire to block Russian advances toward the straits; Austria allied
itself alternately with Russia and the Ottomans in dealing with Balkan issues.
World War I ended the wary maneuvering. Allied with Germany, the Ottomans
entered the war with arguments drawn from both international systems—the
Westphalian and the Islamic. The Sultan accused Russia of violating the empire’s
“armed neutrality” by committing an “unjustified attack, contrary to international
law,” and pledged to “turn to arms in order to safeguard our lawful interests” (a
quintessentially Westphalian casus belli). Simultaneously, the chief Ottoman religious
official declared “jihad,” accusing Russia, France, and Britain of “attacks dealt against
the Caliphate for the purpose of annihilating Islam” and proclaiming a religious duty
for “Mohammedans of all countries” (including those under British, French, or
Russian administration) to “hasten with their bodies and possessions to the Djat
[jihad]” or face “the wrath of God.”
Holy war occasionally moves the already powerful to even greater efforts; it is
doomed, however, whenever it flouts strategic or political realities. And the impetus
of the age was national identity and national interests, not global jihad. Muslims in the
British Empire ignored the declaration of jihad; key Muslim leaders in British India
focused instead on independence movement activities, often ecumenical in nature and
in partnership with Hindu compatriots. In the Arabian Peninsula, national aspirations
—inherently anti-Ottoman—awakened. German hopes for pan-Islamic backing in the
war proved a chimera. Following the war’s end in 1918, the former Ottoman
territories were drawn into the Westphalian international system by a variety of
imposed mechanisms.
THE WESTPHALIAN SYSTEM AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD
The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, signed with what was left of the Ottoman Empire after
World War I, reconceived the Middle East as a patchwork of states—a concept
heretofore not part of its political vocabulary. Some, like Egypt and non-Arab Iran,
had had earlier historical experiences as empires and cultural entities. Others were
invented as British or French “mandates,” variously a subterfuge of colonialism or a
paternalistic attempt to define them as incipient states in need of tutelage. The SykesPicot Agreement of 1916 (named after its British and French negotiators) had divided
the Middle East into what were in effect spheres of influence. The mandate system, as
ratified by the League of Nations, put this division into effect: Syria and Lebanon
were assigned to France; Mesopotamia, later Iraq, was placed under British influence;
and Palestine and Transjordan became the British “mandate for Palestine,” stretching
from the Mediterranean coast to Iraq. Each of these entities contained multiple
sectarian and ethnic groups, some of which had a history of conflict with each other.
This allowed the mandating power to rule in part by manipulating tensions, in the
process laying the foundation for later wars and civil wars.
With respect to burgeoning Zionism (the Jewish nationalist movement to establish a
state in the Land of Israel, a cause that had predated the war but gained force in its
wake), the British government’s 1917 Balfour Declaration—a letter from Britain’s
Foreign Secretary to Lord Rothschild—announced that it favored “the establishment
in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” while offering the reassurance
that it was “clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the
civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.” Britain compounded
the ambiguity of this formulation by seemingly promising the same territory as well to
the Sharif of Mecca.
These formal rearrangements of power propelled vast upheavals. In 1924, the
secular-nationalist leaders of the newly proclaimed Republic of Turkey abolished the
principal institution of pan-Islamic unity, the caliphate, and declared a secular state.
Henceforth the Muslim world was stranded between the victorious Westphalian
international order and the now-unrealizable concept of dar al-Islam. With scant
experience, the societies of the Middle East set out to redefine themselves as modern
states, within borders that for the most part had no historical roots.
The emergence of the European-style secular state had no precedent in Arab
history. The Arabs’ first response was to adapt the concepts of sovereignty and
statehood to their own ends. The established commercial and political elites began to
operate within the Westphalian framework of order and a global economy; what they
demanded was their peoples’ right to join as equal members. Their rallying cry was
genuine independence for established political units, even those recently constructed,
not an overthrow of the Westphalian order. In pursuit of these objectives, a
secularizing current gained momentum. But it did not, as in Europe, culminate in a
pluralistic order.
Two opposing trends appeared. “Pan-Arabists” accepted the premise of a statebased system. But the state they sought was a united Arab nation, a single ethnic,
linguistic, and cultural entity. By contrast, “political Islam” insisted on reliance on the
common religion as the best vehicle for a modern Arab identity. The Islamists—of
which the Muslim Brotherhood is now the most familiar expression—were often
drawn from highly educated members of the new middle class. Many considered
Islamism as a way to join the postwar era without having to abandon their values, to
be modern without having to become Western.
Until World War II, the European powers were sufficiently strong to maintain the
regional order they had designed for the Middle East in the aftermath of World War I.
Afterward the European powers’ capacity to control increasingly restive populations
disappeared. The United States emerged as the principal outside influence. In the
1950s and 1960s, the more or less feudal and monarchical governments in Egypt,
Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya were overthrown by their military leaders, who
proceeded to establish secular governance.
The new rulers, generally recruited from segments of the population heretofore
excluded from the political process, proceeded to broaden their popular support by
appeals to nationalism. Populist, though not democratic, political cultures took root in
the region: Gamal Abdel Nasser—the charismatic populist leader of Egypt from 1954
to 1970—and his successor, Anwar al-Sadat, rose through the ranks from provincial
backgrounds. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein, of comparable humble origins, practiced a
more extreme version of secular military governance: ruling by intimidation and
brutality from the early 1970s (at first as de facto strongman, then as President
beginning in 1979) to 2003, he sought to overawe the region with his bellicosity. Both
Hussein and his ideological ally, Syria’s shrewd and ruthless Hafez al-Assad,
entrenched their sectarian minorities over far-larger majority populations (ironically,
of opposite orientations—with Sunnis governing majority Shias in Iraq, and the quasiShia Alawites governing majority Sunnis in Syria) by avowing pan-Arab nationalism.
A sense of common national destiny developed as a substitute for the Islamic vision.
But the Islamic legacy soon reasserted itself. Islamist parties merging a critique of
the excesses and failures of secular rulers with scriptural arguments about the need for
divinely inspired governance advocated the formation of a pan-Islamic theocracy
superseding the existing states. They vilified the West and the Soviet Union alike;
many backed their vision by opportunistic terrorist acts. The military rulers reacted
harshly, suppressing Islamist political movements, which they charged with
undermining modernization and national unity.
This era is, with reason, not idealized today. The military, monarchical, and other
autocratic governments in the Middle East treated dissent as sedition, leaving little
space for the development of civil society or pluralistic cultures—a lacuna that would
haunt the region into the twenty-first century. Still, within the context of autocratic
nationalism, a tentative accommodation with contemporary international order was
taking shape. Some of the more ambitious rulers such as Nasser and Saddam Hussein
attempted to enlarge their territorial reach—either through force or by means of
demagogic appeals to Arab unity. The short-lived confederation between Egypt and
Syria from 1958 to 1961 reflected such an attempt. But these efforts failed because the
Arab states were becoming too protective of their own patrimony to submerge it into a
broader project of political amalgamation. Thus the eventual common basis of policy
for the military rulers was the state and a nationalism that was, for the most part,
coterminous with established borders.
Within this context, they sought to exploit the rivalry of the Cold War powers to
enhance their own influence. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, the Soviet Union
was their vehicle to pressure the United States. It became the principal arms supplier
and diplomatic advocate for the nationalist Arab states, which in turn generally
supported Soviet international objectives. The military autocrats professed a general
allegiance to “Arab socialism” and admiration of the Soviet economic model, yet in
most cases economies remained traditionally patriarchal and focused on single
industries run by technocrats. The overriding impetus was national interest, as the
regimes conceived it, not political or religious ideology.
Cold War–era relations between the Islamic and the non-Islamic worlds, on the
whole, followed this essentially Westphalian, balance-of-power-based approach.
Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Iraq generally supported Soviet policies and followed the
Soviet lead. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Morocco were friendly to the United
States and were relying on U.S. support for their security. All of these countries, with
the exception of Saudi Arabia, were run as secular states—though several drew on
religion-tinged traditional forms of monarchy for political legitimacy—ostensibly
following principles of statecraft based on the national interest. The basic distinction
was which countries saw their interests served by alignment with which particular
superpower.
In 1973–74, this alignment shifted. Convinced that the Soviet Union could supply
arms but not diplomatic progress toward recovering the Sinai Peninsula from Israeli
occupation (Israel had taken the peninsula during 1967’s Six-Day War), Egyptian
President Anwar al-Sadat switched sides. Henceforth Egypt would operate as a de
facto American ally; its security would be based on American, rather than Soviet,
weapons. Syria and Algeria moved to a position more equidistant between the two
sides in the Cold War. The regional role of the Soviet Union was severely reduced.
The one ideological issue uniting Arab views was the emergence of Israel as a
sovereign state and internationally recognized homeland for the Jewish people. Arab
resistance to that prospect led to four wars: in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. In each,
Israeli arms prevailed.
Sadat’s national-interest-based switch to, in effect, the anti-Soviet orbit inaugurated
a period of intense diplomacy that led to two disengagement agreements between
Egypt and Israel and a peace agreement with Israel in 1979. Egypt was expelled from
the Arab League. Sadat was vilified and ultimately assassinated. Yet his courageous
actions found imitators willing to reach comparable accommodations with the Jewish
state. In 1974, Syria and Israel concluded a disengagement agreement to define and
protect the military front lines between the two countries. This arrangement has been
maintained for four decades, through wars and terrorism and even during the chaos of
the Syrian civil war. Jordan and Israel practiced a mutual restraint that eventually
culminated in a peace agreement. Internationally, Syria’s and Iraq’s authoritarian
regimes continued to lean toward the Soviet Union but remained open—case by case
—to supporting other policies. By the end of the 1970s, Middle East crises began to
look more and more like the Balkan crises of the nineteenth century—an effort by
secondary states to manipulate the rivalries of dominant powers on behalf of their
own national objectives.
Diplomatic association with the United States was not, however, ultimately able to
solve the conundrum faced by the nationalist military autocracies. Association with
the Soviet Union had not advanced political goals; association with the United States
had not defused social challenges. The authoritarian regimes had substantially
achieved independence from colonial rule and provided an ability to maneuver
between the major power centers of the Cold War. But their economic advance had
been too slow and the access to its benefits too uneven to be responsive to their
peoples’ needs—problems exacerbated in many cases where their wealth of energy
resources fostered a near-exclusive reliance on oil for national revenues, and an
economic culture unfavorable to innovation and diversification. Above all, the abrupt
end of the Cold War weakened their bargaining position and made them more
politically dispensable. They had not learned how, in the absence of a foreign enemy
or international crisis, to mobilize populations that increasingly regarded the state not
as an end in itself but as having an obligation to improve their well-being.
As a result, these elites found themselves obliged to contend with a rising tide of
domestic discontent generating challenges to their legitimacy. Radical groups
promised to replace the existing system in the Middle East with a religiously based
Middle East order reflecting two distinct universalist approaches to world order: the
Sunni version by way of the regionally extensive Muslim Brotherhood founded in
1928, Hamas, the radical movement that gained power in Gaza in 2007, and the
global terrorist movement al-Qaeda; and the Shia version through the Khomeini
revolution and its offshoot, the Lebanese “state within a state” Hezbollah. In violent
conflict with each other, they were united in their commitment to dismantle the
existing regional order and rebuild it as a divinely inspired system.
ISLAMISM: THE REVOLUTIONARY TIDE—TWO PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATIONS*
In the spring of 1947, Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian watchmaker, schoolteacher,
and widely read self-taught religious activist, addressed a critique of Egyptian
institutions to Egypt’s King Farouk titled “Toward the Light.” It offered an Islamic
alternative to the secular national state. In studiedly polite yet sweeping language, alBanna outlined the principles and aspirations of the Egyptian Society of Muslim
Brothers (known colloquially as the Muslim Brotherhood), the organization he had
founded in 1928 to combat what he saw as the degrading effects of foreign influence
and secular ways of life.
From its early days as an informal gathering of religious Muslims repelled by
British domination of Egypt’s Suez Canal Zone, al-Banna’s Brotherhood had grown to
a nationwide network of social and political activity, with tens of thousands of
members, cells in every Egyptian city, and an influential propaganda network
distributing his commentaries on current events. It had won regional respect with its
support for the failed 1937–39 anti-British, anti-Zionist Arab Revolt in the British
mandate for Palestine. It had also attracted scrutiny from Egyptian authorities.
Barred from direct participation in Egyptian politics but nevertheless among
Egypt’s most influential political figures, al-Banna now sought to vindicate the
Muslim Brotherhood’s vision with a public statement addressed to Egypt’s monarch.
Lamenting that Egypt and the region had fallen prey to foreign domination and
internal moral decay, he proclaimed that the time for renewal had arrived.
The West, al-Banna asserted, “which was brilliant by virtue of its scientific
perfection for a long time … is now bankrupt and in decline. Its foundations are
crumbling, and its institutions and guiding principles are falling apart.” The Western
powers had lost control of their own world order: “Their congresses are failures, their
treaties are broken, and their covenants torn to pieces.” The League of Nations,
intended to keep the peace, was “a phantasm.” Though he did not use the terms, alBanna was arguing that the Westphalian world order had lost both its legitimacy and
its power. And he was explicitly announcing that the opportunity to create a new
world order based on Islam had arrived. “The Islamic way has been tried before,” he
argued, and “history has testified as to its soundness.” If a society were to dedicate
itself to a “complete and all-encompassing” course of restoring the original principles
of Islam and building the social order the Quran prescribes, the “Islamic nation in its
entirety”—that is, all Muslims globally—“will support us”; “Arab unity” and
eventually “Islamic unity” would result.
How would a restored Islamic world order relate to the modern international
system, built around states? A true Muslim’s loyalty, al-Banna argued, was to
multiple, overlapping spheres, at the apex of which stood a unified Islamic system
whose purview would eventually embrace the entire world. His homeland was first a
“particular country”; “then it extends to the other Islamic countries, for all of them are
a fatherland and an abode for the Muslim”; then it proceeds to an “Islamic Empire” on
the model of that erected by the pious ancestors, for “the Muslim will be asked before
God” what he had done “to restore it.” The final circle was global: “Then the
fatherland of the Muslim expands to encompass the entire world. Do you not hear the
words of God (Blessed and Almighty is He!): ‘Fight them until there is no more
persecution, and worship is devoted to God’?”
Where possible, this fight would be gradualist and peaceful. Toward non-Muslims,
so long as they did not oppose the movement and paid it adequate respect, the early
Muslim Brotherhood counseled “protection,” “moderation and deep-rooted equity.”
Foreigners were to be treated with “peacefulness and sympathy, so long as they
behave with rectitude and sincerity.” Therefore, it was “pure fantasy” to suggest that
the implementation of “Islamic institutions in our modern life would create
estrangement between us and the Western nations.”
How much of al-Banna’s counseled moderation was tactical and an attempt to find
acceptance in a world still dominated by Western powers? How much of the jihadist
rhetoric was designed to garner support in traditional Islamist quarters? Assassinated
in 1949, al-Banna was not vouchsafed time to explain in detail how to reconcile the
revolutionary ambition of his project of world transformation with the principles of
tolerance and cross-civilizational amity that he espoused.
These ambiguities lingered in al-Banna’s text, but the record of many Islamist
thinkers and movements since then has resolved them in favor of a fundamental
rejection of pluralism and secular international order. The religious scholar and
Muslim Brotherhood ideologist Sayyid Qutb articulated perhaps the most learned and
influential version of this view. In 1964, while imprisoned on charges of participating
in a plot to assassinate Egyptian President Nasser, Qutb wrote Milestones, a
declaration of war against the existing world order that became a foundational text of
modern Islamism.
In Qutb’s view, Islam was a universal system offering the only true form of
freedom: freedom from governance by other men, man-made doctrines, or “low
associations based on race and color, language and country, regional and national
interests” (that is, all other modern forms of governance and loyalty and some of the
building blocks of Westphalian order). Islam’s modern mission, in Qutb’s view, was to
overthrow them all and replace them with what he took to be a literal, eventually
global implementation of the Quran.
The culmination of this process would be “the achievement of the freedom of man
on earth—of all mankind throughout the earth.” This would complete the process
begun by the initial wave of Islamic expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries,
“which is then to be carried throughout the earth to the whole of mankind, as the
object of this religion is all humanity and its sphere of action is the whole earth.” Like
all utopian projects, this one would require extreme measures to implement. These
Qutb assigned to an ideologically pure vanguard, who would reject the governments
and societies prevailing in the region—all of which Qutb branded “unIslamic and
illegal”—and seize the initiative in bringing about the new order.
Qutb, with vast learning and passionate intensity, had declared war on a state of
affairs—brashly secular modernity and Muslim disunity, as ratified by the post–World
War I territorial settlement in the Middle East—that many Muslims had privately
lamented. While most of his contemporaries recoiled from the violent methods he
advocated, a core of committed followers—like the vanguard he had envisioned—
began to form.
To a globalized, largely secular world judging itself to have transcended the
ideological clashes of “History,” Qutb and his followers’ views long appeared so
extreme as to merit no serious attention. In a failure of imagination, many Western
elites find revolutionaries’ passions inexplicable and assume that their extreme
statements must be metaphorical or advanced merely as bargaining chips. Yet for
Islamic fundamentalists, these views represent truths overriding the rules and norms
of the Westphalian—or indeed any other—international order. They have been the
rallying cry of radicals and jihadists in the Middle East and beyond for decades—
echoed by al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, Iran’s clerical regime, Hizb utTahrir (the Party of Liberation, active in the West and openly advocating the
reestablishment of the caliphate in a world dominated by Islam), Nigeria’s Boko
Haram, Syria’s extremist militia Jabhat al-Nusrah, and the Islamic State of Iraq and
the Levant, which erupted in a major military assault in mid-2014. They were the
militant doctrine of the Egyptian radicals who assassinated Anwar al-Sadat in 1981,
proclaiming the “neglected duty” of jihad and branding their President an apostate for
making peace with Israel. They accused him of two heresies: recognizing the legal
existence of the Jewish state, and (in their view) thereby agreeing to cede land
deemed historically Muslim to a non-Muslim people.
This body of thought represents an almost total inversion of Westphalian world
order. In the purist version of Islamism, the state cannot be the point of departure for
an international system because states are secular, hence illegitimate; at best they may
achieve a kind of provisional status en route to a religious entity on a larger scale.
Noninterference in other countries’ domestic affairs cannot serve as a governing
principle, because national loyalties represent deviations from the true faith and
because jihadists have a duty to transform dar al-harb, the world of unbelievers.
Purity, not stability, is the guiding principle of this conception of world order.
THE ARAB SPRING AND THE SYRIAN CATACLYSM
For a fleeting moment, the Arab Spring that began in late 2010 raised hopes that the
region’s contending forces of autocracy and jihad had been turned irrelevant by a new
wave of reform. Upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt were greeted exuberantly by Western
political leaders and media as a regional, youth-led revolution on behalf of liberal
democratic principles. The United States officially endorsed the protesters’ demands,
backing them as undeniable cries for “freedom,” “free and fair elections,”
“representative government,” and “genuine democracy,” which should not be
permitted to fail. Yet the road to democracy was to be tortuous and anguishing, as
became obvious in the aftermath of the collapse of the autocratic regimes.
Many in the West interpreted the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt as a vindication
of the argument that an alternative to autocracy should have been promoted much
earlier. The real problem had been, however, that the United States found it difficult to
discover elements from which pluralistic institutions could be composed or leaders
committed to their practice. (This is why some drew the line as between civilian and
military rule and supported the anything-but-democratic Muslim Brotherhood.)
America’s democratic aspirations for the region, embraced by administrations of
both parties, have led to eloquent expressions of the country’s idealism. But
conceptions of security necessities and of democracy promotion have often clashed.
Those committed to democratization have found it difficult to discover leaders who
recognize the importance of democracy other than as a means to achieve their own
dominance. At the same time, the advocates of strategic necessity have not been able
to show how the established regimes will ever evolve in a democratic or even
reformist manner. The democratization approach could not remedy the vacuum
looming in pursuit of its objectives; the strategic approach was handicapped by the
rigidity of available institutions.
The Arab Spring started as a new generation’s uprising for liberal democracy. It
was soon shouldered aside, disrupted, or crushed. Exhilaration turned into paralysis.
The existing political forces, embedded in the military and in religion in the
countryside, proved stronger and better organized than the middle-class element
demonstrating for democratic principles in Tahrir Square. In practice, the Arab Spring
has exhibited rather than overcome the internal contradictions of the Arab-Islamic
world and of the policies designed to resolve them.
The oft-repeated early slogan of the Arab Spring, “The people want the downfall of
the regime,” left open the question of how the people are defined and what will take
the place of the supplanted authorities. The original Arab Spring demonstrators’ calls
for an open political and economic life have been overwhelmed by a violent contest
between military-backed authoritarianism and Islamist ideology.
In Egypt, the original exultant demonstrators professing values of cosmopolitanism
and democracy in Tahrir Square have not turned out to be the revolution’s heirs.
Electronic social media facilitate demonstrations capable of toppling regimes, but the
ability to enable people to gather in a square differs from building new institutions of
state. In the vacuum of authority following the demonstrations’ initial success,
factions from the pre-uprising period are often in a position to shape the outcome. The
temptation to foster unity by merging nationalism and fundamentalism overwhelmed
the original slogans of the uprising.
Mohammed Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood backed by a coalition of
even more radical fundamentalist groups, was elected in 2012 to a presidency that the
Muslim Brotherhood had pledged in the heady days of the Tahrir Square
demonstrations not to seek. In power, the Islamist government concentrated on
institutionalizing its authority by looking the other way while its supporters mounted a
campaign of intimidation and harassment of women, minorities, and dissidents. The
military’s decision to oust this government and declare a new start to the political
process was, in the end, welcomed even among the now marginalized, secular
democratic element.
This experience raises the issue of humanitarian foreign policy. It distinguishes
itself from traditional foreign policy by criticizing national interest or balance-ofpower concepts as lacking a moral dimension. It justifies itself not by overcoming a
strategic threat but by removing conditions deemed a violation of universal principles
of justice. The values and goals of this style of foreign policy reflect a vital aspect of
the American tradition. If practiced as the central operating concept of American
strategy, however, they raise their own dilemmas: Does America consider itself
obliged to support every popular uprising against any nondemocratic government,
including those heretofore considered important in sustaining the international
system? Is every demonstration democratic by definition? Is Saudi Arabia an ally only
until public demonstrations develop on its territory? Among America’s principal
contributions to the Arab Spring was to condemn, oppose, or work to remove
governments it judged autocratic, including the government of Egypt, heretofore a
valued ally. For some traditionally friendly governments like Saudi Arabia, however,
the central message came to be seen as the threat of American abandonment, not the
benefits of liberal reform.
Western tradition requires support for democratic institutions and free elections. No
American president who ignores this ingrained aspect of the American moral
enterprise can count on the sustained support of the American people. But applied on
behalf of parties who identify democracy with a plebiscite on the implementation of
religious domination that they then treat as irrevocable, the advocacy of elections may
result in only one democratic exercise of them. As a military regime has again been
established in Cairo, it reproduces one more time for the United States the as yet
unsolved debate between security interests and the importance of promoting humane
and legitimate governance. And it appears also as a question of timing: To what extent
should security interests be risked for the outcome of a theoretical evolution? Both
elements are important. Neglecting a democratic future—assuming we know how to
shape its direction—involves long-term risks. Neglecting the present by ignoring the
security element risks immediate catastrophe. The difference between traditionalists
and activists hinges on that distinction. The statesman has to balance it each time the
issue arises. Events can occur whose consequences—such as genocide—are so
horrendous that they tilt the scale toward intervention beyond considerations of
strategy. But as a general rule, the most sustainable course will involve a blend of the
realism and idealism too often held out in the American debate as incompatible
opposites.
The Syrian revolution at its beginning appeared like a replay of the Egyptian one at
Tahrir Square. But while the Egyptian upheaval unified the underlying forces, in Syria
age-old tensions broke out to reawaken the millennial conflict between Shia and
Sunni. Given the demographic complexity of Syria, the civil war drew in additional
ethnic or religious groups, none of which, based on historical experience, was
prepared to entrust its fate to the decisions of the others. Outside powers entered the
conflict; atrocities proliferated as survivors sheltered in ethnic and sectarian enclaves.
In the American public debate, the uprising against Bashar al-Assad was dealt with
by analogy to the removal of Mubarak and described as a struggle for democracy. Its
culmination was expected to be the removal of Assad’s government and its
replacement with a democratic, inclusive coalition government. President Obama
articulated this position in August 2011, when he publicly called on Assad to “step
aside” so that the Syrian people could vindicate their universal rights:
The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their
way. His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing, and
slaughtering his own people. We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic
transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for
President Assad to step aside.
The statement was expected to mobilize domestic opposition to Assad and lead to
international support for his removal.
This is why the United States pressed for a “political solution” through the United
Nations predicated on removing Assad from power and establishing a coalition
government. Consternation resulted when other veto-wielding members of the
Security Council declined to endorse either this step or military measures, and when
the armed opposition that ultimately appeared inside Syria had few elements that
could be described as democratic, much less moderate.
By then the conflict had gone beyond the issue of Assad. For the main actors, the
issues were substantially different from the focus of the American debate. The
principal Syrian and regional players saw the war as not about democracy but about
prevailing. They were interested in democracy only if it installed their own group;
none favored a system that did not guarantee its own party’s control of the political
system. A war conducted solely to enforce human rights norms and without concern
for the geostrategic or georeligious outcome was inconceivable to the overwhelming
majority of the contestants. The conflict, as they perceived it, was not between a
dictator and the forces of democracy but between Syria’s contending sects and their
regional backers. The war, in this view, would decide which of Syria’s major sects
would succeed in dominating the others and controlling what remained of the Syrian
state. Regional powers poured arms, money, and logistical support into Syria on
behalf of their preferred sectarian candidates: Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states for the
Sunni groups; Iran supporting Assad via Hezbollah. As the combat approached a
stalemate, it turned to increasingly radical groups and tactics, fighting a war of
encompassing brutality, oblivious on all sides to human rights.
The contest, meanwhile, had begun to redraw the political configuration of Syria,
perhaps of the region. The Syrian Kurds created an autonomous unit along the
Turkish border that may in time merge with the Kurdish autonomous unit in Iraq. The
Druze and Christian communities, fearing a repetition of the conduct of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt toward its minorities, have been reluctant to embrace regime
change in Syria or have seceded into autonomous communities. The jihadist ISIL set
out to build a caliphate in territory seized from Syria and western Iraq, where
Damascus and Baghdad proved no longer able to impose their writ.
The main parties thought themselves in a battle for survival or, in the view of some
jihadist forces, a conflict presaging the apocalypse. When the United States declined
to tip the balance, they judged that it either had an ulterior motive that it was skillfully
concealing—perhaps an ultimate deal with Iran—or was not attuned to the
imperatives of the Middle East balance of power. This disagreement culminated in
2013 when Saudi Arabia refused a rotating seat on the UN Security Council—
explaining that because the traditional arbiters of order had failed to act, it would
pursue its own methods.
As America called on the world to honor aspirations to democracy and enforce the
international legal ban on chemical weapons, other great powers such as Russia and
China resisted by invoking the Westphalian principle of noninterference. They had
viewed the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Bahrain, and Syria principally
through the lens of their own regional stability and the attitudes of their own restive
Muslim populations. Aware that the most skilled and dedicated Sunni fighters were
avowed jihadists in league with al-Qaeda (or, in the case of ISIL, disowned by it for
tactics that even al-Qaeda considered too extreme), they were wary of an outright
victory by Assad’s opponents. China suggested it had no particular stake in the
outcome in Syria, except that it be determined by “the Syrian people” and not foreign
forces. Russia, a formal ally of Syria, was interested in the continuance of the Assad
government and to some extent in Syria’s survival as a unitary state. With an
international consensus lacking and the Syrian opposition fractured, an uprising begun
on behalf of democratic values degenerated into one of the major humanitarian
disasters of the young twenty-first century and into an imploding regional order.
A working regional or international security system might have averted, or at least
contained, the catastrophe. But the perceptions of national interest proved to be too
different, and the costs of stabilization too daunting. Massive outside intervention at
an early stage might have squelched the contending forces but would have required a
long-term, substantial military presence to be sustained. In the wake of Iraq and
Afghanistan, this was not feasible for the United States, at least not alone. An Iraqi
political consensus might have halted the conflict at the Syrian border, but the
sectarian impulses of the Baghdad government and its regional affiliates were in the
way. Alternatively, the international community could have imposed an arms embargo
on Syria and the jihadist militias. That was made impossible by the incompatible aims
of the permanent members of the Security Council. If order cannot be achieved by
consensus or imposed by force, it will be wrought, at disastrous and dehumanizing
cost, from the experience of chaos.
THE PALESTINIAN ISSUE AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER
Amidst all these upheavals in the Middle East, a peace process has been going on—
sometimes fitfully, occasionally intensely—to bring about an end to the Arab-Israeli
conflict, which for decades has resulted in an explosive standoff. Four conventional
wars and numerous unconventional military engagements have taken place; every
Islamist and jihadist group invokes the conflict as a call to arms. Israel’s existence and
military prowess have been felt throughout the Arab world as a humiliation. The
doctrinal commitment never to give up territory has, for some, turned coexistence
with Israel from an acceptance of reality into a denial of faith.
Few topics have inspired more passion than how to reconcile Israel’s quest for
security and identity, the Palestinians’ aspirations toward self-governance, and the
neighboring Arab governments’ search for a policy compatible with their perception
of their historic and religious imperatives. The parties involved have traveled an
anguished road—from rejection and war to halting acceptance of coexistence, mostly
on the basis of armistices—toward an uncertain future. Few international issues have
occupied such intense concern in the United States or commanded so much of the
attention of American presidents.
A series of issues are involved, each having developed its own extensive literature.
The parties have elaborated them in decades of fitful negotiations. These pages deal
with only one aspect of them: the conflicting concepts of peaceful order expressed by
the negotiators.
Two generations of Arabs have been raised on the conviction that the State of Israel
is an illegitimate usurper of Muslim patrimony. In 1947, the Arab countries rejected a
UN plan for a partition of the British mandate in Palestine into separate Arab and
Jewish states; they believed themselves in a position to triumph militarily and claim
the entire territory. Failure of the attempt to extinguish the newly declared State of
Israel did not lead to a political settlement and the opening of state-to-state relations,
as happened in most other postcolonial conflicts in Asia and Africa. Instead, it
ushered in a protracted period of political rejection and reluctant armistice agreement
against the background of radical groups seeking to force Israel into submission
through terrorist campaigns.
Great leaders have attempted to transcend the conceptual aspect of the conflict by
negotiating for peace based on Westphalian principles—that is, between peoples
organized as sovereign states, each driven by a realistic assessment of its national
interests and capabilities, not absolutes of religious imperatives. Anwar al-Sadat of
Egypt dared to look beyond this confrontation and make peace with Israel on the basis
of Egypt’s national interests in 1979; he paid for his statesmanship with his life,
assassinated two years later by radicalized Islamists in the Egyptian military. The
same fate befell Yitzhak Rabin, the first Israeli Prime Minister to sign an agreement
with the Palestine Liberation Organization, assassinated by a radical Israeli student
fourteen years after Sadat’s death.
Within Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian territories—especially in Gaza—
considerable military and political power is now held by radical Islamists—Hezbollah
and Hamas—proclaiming jihad as a religious duty to end what is usually denounced
as the “Zionist occupation.” The ayatollahs’ regime in Iran regularly challenges the
very existence of Israel; its erstwhile President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for its
extirpation.
At least three viewpoints are identifiable in Arab attitudes: a small, dedicated, but
not very vocal group accepting genuine coexistence with Israel and prepared to work
for it; a much larger group seeking to destroy Israel by permanent confrontation; and
those willing to negotiate with Israel but justifying negotiations, at least domestically,
in part as a means to overcome the Jewish state in stages.
Israel, with a small population (compared with its neighbors) and territory and a
width of just 9.3 miles at its narrowest point and some sixty miles at its widest, has
hesitated to cede territory, particularly in areas adjoining major population centers, on
behalf of what may turn into a revocable document. Its negotiating positions therefore
tend to be legalistic, elaborating definitions of security and political assurances that
have a combination of theoretical sweep and occasionally grating detail, with a
tendency to reinforce the very passions a peace process is designed to overcome.
In the Arab world, the Palestinian issue has lost some of its urgency, though not its
importance. The key participants of the peace process have diverted energies and
reflection to dealing with the emergence of a possibly nuclear Iran and its regional
proxies. This affects the peace process in two ways: in the diplomatic role major
countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia can play in shaping the peace process; and,
even more important, in their ability to act as guarantors of a resulting agreement. The
Palestinian leaders cannot by themselves sustain the result of the peace process unless
it is endorsed not just in the toleration but in the active support of an agreement by
other regional governments. At this writing, the major Arab states are either torn by
civil war or preoccupied with the Sunni-Shia conflict and an increasingly powerful
Iran. Nevertheless, the Palestinian issue will have to be faced sooner or later as an
essential element of regional and, ultimately, world order.
Some Arab leaders have proposed to make an Arab-Israeli peace that reconciles
Israel’s security concerns with Arab emotions by conceding the State of Israel as a
reality without formally granting it legitimate existence in the Islamic Middle East.
Israel’s basic demand is for binding assurance that peace will involve a kind of moral
and legal recognition translated into concrete acts. Thus Israel, going beyond
Westphalian practices, demands to be certified as a Jewish state, an attribute difficult
for most Muslims to accept in a formal sense, for it implies a religious as well as a
territorial endorsement.
Several Arab states have declared their willingness to establish diplomatic relations
with Israel if it returns to the 1967 borders—a cease-fire line in a war that ended half
a century ago. But the real issue is what diplomatic relations imply in terms of
concrete actions. Will diplomatic recognition of Israel bring an end to the media,
governmental, and educational campaign in Arab countries that presents Israel as an
illegitimate, imperialist, almost criminal interloper in the region? What Arab
government, wracked by pressures ignited in the Arab Spring, will be willing and able
to publicly endorse and guarantee a peace that accepts Israel’s existence by a precise
set of operational commitments? That, rather than the label given to the State of
Israel, will determine the prospects of peace.
The conflict of two concepts of world order is embedded in the Israeli-Palestinian
issue. Israel is by definition a Westphalian state, founded as such in 1947; the United
States, its principal ally, has been a steward and key defender of the Westphalian
international order. But the core countries and factions in the Middle East view
international order to a greater or lesser degree through an Islamic consciousness.
Israel and its neighbors have differences inseparable from geography and history:
access to water, resources, specific arrangements for security, refugees. In other
regions, comparable challenges are generally solved by diplomacy. In that sense, the
issue comes down to the possibility of coexistence between two concepts of world
order, through two states—Israel and Palestine—in the relatively narrow space
between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Since every square mile is
invested by both sides with profound significance, success may in turn require testing
whether some interim arrangements can be devised that, at a minimum, enhance the
possibility of a practical coexistence in which part of the West Bank is granted the
attributes of sovereignty pending a final agreement.
As these negotiations have been pursued, the political and philosophical evolution
of the Middle East has produced in the Western world a study in contradictions. The
United States has had close associations with parties along the entire spectrum of
Middle East options: an alliance with Israel, an association with Egypt, a partnership
with Saudi Arabia. A regional order evolves when the principal parties take congruent
approaches on issues that affect them. That degree of coherence has proved elusive in
the Middle East. The principal parties differ with respect to three major issues:
domestic evolution; the political future of the Palestinian Arabs; and the future of the
Iranian military nuclear program. Some parties that do agree on objectives are not in a
position to avow it. For example, Saudi Arabia and Israel share the same general
objective with respect to Iran: to prevent the emergence of an Iranian military nuclear
capability and to contain it if it becomes unavoidable. But their perception of
legitimacy—and Saudi sensitivity to an Arab consensus—inhibit the promulgation of
such a view or even very explicit articulation of it. This is why too much of the region
remains torn between fear of jihad and fear of dealing with some of its causes.
The consequences of the religious and political conflict described in this chapter
present themselves as seemingly distinct issues. In fact, they represent an underlying
quest for a new definition of political and international legitimacy.
SAUDI ARABIA
With some historical irony, among the Western democracies’ most important allies
through all of these upheavals has been a country whose internal practices diverge
almost completely from theirs—the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has been
a partner, at times quietly but decisively behind the scenes, in most of the major
regional security endeavors since World War II, when it aligned itself with the Allies.
It has been an association demonstrating the special character of the Westphalian state
system, which has permitted such distinct societies to cooperate on shared aims
through formal mechanisms, generally to their significant mutual benefit. Conversely,
its strains have touched on some of the main challenges of the search for
contemporary world order.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a traditional Arab-Islamic realm: both a tribal
monarchy and an Islamic theocracy. Two leading families, united in mutual support
since the eighteenth century, form the core of its governance. The political hierarchy
is headed by a monarch of the Al Saud family, who serves as the head of a complex
network of tribal relationships based on ancient ties of mutual loyalty and obligation
and controls the kingdom’s internal and foreign affairs. The religious hierarchy is
headed by the Grand Mufti and the Council of Senior Scholars, drawn largely from
the Aal al-Shaykh family. The King endeavors to bridge the gap between these two
branches of power by fulfilling the role of “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”
(Mecca and Medina), reminiscent of the Holy Roman Emperor as “Fidei defensor.”
Zeal and purity of religious expression are embedded in the Saudi historical
experience. Three times in as many centuries (in the 1740s, the 1820s, and the early
twentieth century) the Saudi state has been founded or reunified by the same two
leading families, in each case affirming their commitment to govern Islam’s birthplace
and holiest shrines by upholding the most austere interpretation of the religion’s
principles. In each case, Saudi armies fanned out to unify the deserts and mountains of
the peninsula in waves of conquest strikingly similar to the original sacred exaltation
and holy war that produced the first Islamic state, and in the same territory. Religious
absolutism, military daring, and shrewd modern statesmanship have produced the
kingdom at the heart of the Muslim world and central to its fate.
What is today Saudi Arabia emerged from Turkish rule after World War I, when Ibn
Saud reunified the various feudal principalities scattered across the Arabian Peninsula
and held them together by patriarchal allegiance and religious devotion. The royal
family has since faced daunting tasks. It governs tribes living in the traditional
nomadism and fiercely loyal to the crown, as well as urban concentrations
approaching—in some cases surpassing—those of Western metropoles, though placed
like mirages across otherwise barren plateaus. An emerging middle class exists in the
context of an age-old, semifeudal sense of reciprocal obligation. Within the limits of
an extremely conservative political culture, the ruling princes have combined a
monarchy with a system of consensus by which the far-flung members of the
extended royal family have some share in decisions, and ordinary citizens have
gradually been granted a degree of participation in public life.
Millions of foreign workers—Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Egyptians,
Pakistanis, and Yemenis—combine in a mosaic held together by the bond of Islam
and respect for traditional authority. Every year several million Muslim travelers from
across the world arrive in Saudi Arabia simultaneously to perform the hajj—a
pilgrimage to Mecca to perform rites sanctified by the Prophet Muhammad in his own
lifetime. This affirmation of faith, obligatory for able-bodied believers to perform at
least once in their life, confers on Saudi Arabia a unique religious significance as well
as an annual logistical challenge undertaken by no other state. Meanwhile, the
discovery of vast oil reserves has made Saudi Arabia wealthy almost without parallel
in the region, generating an implicit challenge to the security of a country with a
sparse population, no natural land borders, and a politically detached Shia minority
living in one of its key oil-producing regions.
Saudi rulers live with the awareness that the covetousness of their neighbors might
translate itself into attempted conquest—or, in an era of revolution, potential
sponsorship of political or sectarian agitation. Conscious of the fate of nearby nations,
they are inevitably ambivalent about economic and social modernization—knowing
that an absence of reform may alienate their youthful population, while reform
undertaken too rapidly may develop its own momentum and ultimately endanger the
cohesion of a country that has known only conservative monarchy. The dynasty has
tried to lead the process of social and economic change—within the pattern of its
society—precisely in order to control its pace and content. This tactic has allowed the
Al Saud to produce just enough change to prevent the accumulation of potentially
explosive social tensions while avoiding the destabilizing effects of overly rapid
change.
Saudi foreign policy, for most of the existence of the modern Saudi state, has been
characterized by a caution that has elevated indirectness into a special art form. For if
the kingdom pursued a very forward policy, if it made itself the focal point of all
disputes, it would be subjected to entreaties, threats, and blandishments by far more
powerful countries, the cumulative impact of which could endanger either
independence or coherence. Instead, its authorities achieved security and authority by
remoteness; even in the midst of crises—sometimes while carrying out bold changes
of course that would reverberate globally—they were almost invariably publicly
withdrawn and detached. Saudi Arabia has obscured its vulnerability by opaqueness,
masking uncertainty about the motivations of outsiders by a remoteness equally
impervious to eloquence and to threats.
The kingdom maneuvered to keep itself out of the forefront of confrontation even
when its resources sustained it, as was the case in the oil embargo in 1973, as well as
the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan of 1979–89. It facilitated the peace process in the
Middle East but left the actual negotiations to others. In this manner, the kingdom has
navigated among the fixed poles of friendship for the United States, Arab loyalty, a
puritanical interpretation of Islam, and consciousness of internal and external danger.
In an age of jihad, revolutionary upheavals, and a perceived American regional
withdrawal, some of the obliqueness has been set aside in favor of a more direct
approach, making its hostility and fear of Shiite Iran explicit.
No state in the Middle East has been more torn by the Islamist upheaval and the
rise of revolutionary Iran than Saudi Arabia, divided between its formal allegiance to
the Westphalian concepts that underpin its security and international recognition as a
legitimate sovereign state, the religious purism that informs its history, and the
appeals of radical Islamism that impair its domestic cohesion (and indeed threatened
the kingdom’s survival during the seizure of the Grand Mosque of Mecca by fanatic
Salafis in 1979).
In 1989, one of the kingdom’s disaffected sons, Osama bin Laden, returned from
the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and proclaimed a new struggle. Tracking Qutb’s
script, he and his followers founded a vanguard organization, al-Qaeda (the Base),
from which to mount an omnidirectional jihad. Its “near” targets were the Saudi
government and its regional partner states; its “far” enemy was the United States,
which al-Qaeda reviled for supporting non-sharia-based state governments in the
Middle East and for supposedly defiling Islam by deploying military personnel to
Saudi Arabia during the 1990–91 Gulf War. In bin Laden’s analysis, the struggle
between the true faith and the infidel world was existential and already well under
way. World injustice had reached a point where peaceful methods were useless; the
required tactic would be assassination and terrorism, which would strike fear into alQaeda’s enemies both near and far and sap their will to resist.
Al-Qaeda’s ambitious campaign began with attacks on American and allied
facilities in the Middle East and Africa. A 1993 attack on the World Trade Center
displayed the organization’s global ambitions. On September 11, 2001, the offensive
reached its apogee by striking New York, the hub of the world financial system, and
Washington, the political hub of American power. The deadliest terrorist attack yet
experienced, the 9/11 assault killed 2,977 within minutes, nearly all civilians;
thousands of others were injured in the attacks or suffered severe health
complications. Osama bin Laden had preceded the attack with a proclamation of alQaeda’s aims: The West and its influence were to be expelled from the Middle East.
Governments in cooperative partnership with America were to be overthrown and
their political structures—derided as illegitimate “paper statelets” formed for the
convenience of Western powers—dissolved. A new Islamic caliphate would take their
place, restoring Islam to its seventh-century glory. A war of world orders was
declared.
The battlefield of that conflict ran through the heart of Saudi Arabia, which
eventually—after al-Qaeda mounted a failed attempt to overthrow the Al Saud
dynasty in 2003—became one of the organization’s fiercest opponents. The attempt to
find security within both the Westphalian and the Islamist orders worked for a time.
Yet the great strategic error of the Saudi dynasty was to suppose, from roughly the
1960s until 2003, that it could support and even manipulate radical Islamism abroad
without threatening its own position at home. The outbreak of a serious, sustained alQaeda insurgency in the kingdom in 2003 revealed the fatal flaw in this strategy,
which the dynasty jettisoned in favor of an effective counterinsurgency campaign led
by a prince of the younger generation, Prince Muhammad bin Nayif, now Saudi
Interior Minister. Even so, the dynasty was at risk of being overthrown. With the
surge of jihadist currents in Iraq and Syria, the acumen displayed in this campaign
may again be tested.
Saudi Arabia has adopted a course as complex as the challenges facing it. The royal
family has judged Saudi security and national interests to lie with constructive
relations with the West and participation in the global economy. Yet as the birthplace
of Islam and protector of Islam’s holiest places, Saudi Arabia cannot afford deviation
from Islamic orthodoxy. It has attempted to co-opt radically resurgent Islamist
universalism by a tenuous amalgam of modern statehood and Westphalian
international relations grafted onto the practice of Wahhabism, perhaps the most
fundamentalist version of the faith, and of subsidizing it internationally. The outcome
has at times been internally contradictory. Diplomatically Saudi Arabia has largely
aligned itself with the United States while spiritually propagating a form of Islam at
odds with modernity and implying a clash with the non-Muslim world. By financing
madrassas (religious schools) preaching the austere Wahhabist creed throughout the
world, the Saudis have not only carried out their Muslim duties but also taken a
defensive measure by making its advocates act as missionaries abroad rather than
within the kingdom. The project has had the unintended consequence of nurturing a
jihadist fervor that would eventually menace the Saudi state itself and its allies.
The kingdom’s strategy of principled ambiguity worked so long as the Sunni states
were largely governed by military regimes. But once al-Qaeda appeared on the scene,
the ayatollahs’ Iran established its leadership over a militant revolutionary camp
across the region, and the Muslim Brotherhood threatened to take power in Egypt and
elsewhere, Saudi Arabia found itself facing two forms of civil war in the Middle East,
which its own proselytizing efforts had (however inadvertently) helped to inflame:
one between Muslim regimes that were members of the Westphalian state system and
Islamists who considered statehood and the prevailing institutions of international
order an abomination to the Quran; and another between Shias and Sunnis across the
region, with Iran and Saudi Arabia seen as leaders of the two opposing sides.
This contest would unfold against the backdrop of two others, each posing its own
tests for regional order: American military actions to oust the odious dictatorships in
Iraq and Libya, accompanied by U.S. political pressures to bring about “the
transformation of the Greater Middle East”; and the resurgence of Sunni-Shia rivalry,
most devastatingly during the Iraq War and the Syrian conflict. In each of these, the
parallel interests of Saudi Arabia and the United States have proved difficult to distill.
As a matter of regional leadership, balance of power, and doctrinal contention,
Saudi Arabia considers itself threatened by Shia Iran, as both a religious and an
imperial phenomenon. Saudi Arabia sees a Tehran-led archipelago of rising Shia
power and influence running from Iran’s Afghan border through Iraq, Syria, and
Lebanon to the Mediterranean in confrontation with a Saudi-led Sunni order
composed of Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states, and the Arabian Peninsula, all in a wary
partnership with Turkey.
The American attitude toward Iran and Saudi Arabia therefore cannot be simply a
balance-of-power calculation or a democratization issue; it must be shaped in the
context of what is above all a religious struggle, already lasting a millennium,
between two wings of Islam. The United States and its allies have to calibrate their
conduct with care. For pressures unleashed in the region will affect the delicate
latticework of relationships underpinning the kingdom at its heart and administering
Islam’s holiest places. An upheaval in Saudi Arabia would carry profound
repercussions for the world economy, the future of the Muslim world, and world
peace. In light of the experience with revolutions elsewhere in the Arab world, the
United States cannot assume that a democratic opposition is waiting in the wings to
govern Saudi Arabia by principles more congenial to Western sensibilities. America
must distill a common understanding with a country that is the central eventual prize
targeted by both the Sunni and the Shia versions of jihad and whose efforts, however
circuitous, will be essential in fostering a constructive regional evolution.
To Saudi Arabia, the conflict with Iran is existential. It involves the survival of the
monarchy, the legitimacy of the state, and indeed the future of Islam. To the extent
that Iran continues to emerge as a potentially dominant power, Saudi Arabia at a
minimum will seek to enhance its own power position to maintain the balance. Given
the elemental issues involved, verbal reassurances will not suffice. Depending on the
outcome of the Iranian nuclear negotiations, Saudi Arabia is likely to seek access to
its own nuclear capability in some form—either by acquiring warheads from an
existing nuclear power, preferably Islamic (like Pakistan), or by financing their
development in some other country as an insurance policy. To the extent that Saudi
Arabia judges America to be withdrawing from the region, it may well seek a regional
order involving another outside power, perhaps China, India, or even Russia. The
tensions, turmoil, and violence wracking the Middle East in the first two decades of
the twenty-first century should therefore be understood as layers of civil and religious
strife carried out in a contest to determine whether and how the region will relate to
any larger concept of world order. Much depends on the United States’ capacity, skill,
and will to help shape an outcome that fulfills American interests and that Saudi
Arabia and its allies consider compatible with their security and their principles.
THE DECLINE OF THE STATE?
Syria and Iraq—once beacons of nationalism for Arab countries—may lose their
capacity to reconstitute themselves as unified Westphalian states. As their warring
factions seek support from affiliated communities across the region and beyond, their
strife jeopardizes the coherence of all neighboring countries. If multiple contiguous
states at the heart of the Arab world are unable to establish legitimate governance and
consistent control over their territories, the post–World War I Middle East territorial
settlement will have reached a terminal phase.
The conflict in Syria and Iraq and the surrounding areas has thus become the
symbol of an ominous new trend: the disintegration of statehood into tribal and
sectarian units, some of them cutting across existing borders, in violent conflict with
each other or manipulated by competing outside factions, observing no common rules
other than the law of superior force—what Hobbes might have called the state of
nature.
In the wake of revolution or regime change, absent the establishment of a new
authority accepted as legitimate by a decisive majority of the population, a
multiplicity of disparate factions will continue to engage in open conflicts with
perceived rivals for power; portions of the state may drift into anarchy or permanent
rebellion, or merge with parts of another disintegrating state. The existing central
government may prove unwilling or unable to reestablish authority over border
regions or non-state entities such as Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, ISIL, and the Taliban. This
has happened in Iraq, Libya, and, to a dangerous extent, Pakistan.
Some states as presently constituted may not be governable in full except through
methods of governance or social cohesion that Americans reject as illegitimate. These
limitations can be overcome, in some cases, through evolutions toward a more liberal
domestic system. Yet where factions within a state adhere to different concepts of
world order or consider themselves in an existential struggle for survival, American
demands to call off the fight and assemble a democratic coalition government tend
either to paralyze the incumbent government (as in the Shah’s Iran) or to fall on deaf
ears (the Egyptian government led by General Sisi—now heeding the lessons of its
predecessors’ overthrow by tacking away from a historic American alliance in favor
of greater freedom of maneuver). In such conditions, America has to make the
decision on the basis of what achieves the best combination of security and morality,
recognizing that both will be imperfect.
In Iraq, the dissolution of Saddam Hussein’s brutal Sunni-dominated dictatorship
generated pressures less for democracy than for revenge—which the various factions
sought through the consolidation of their disparate forms of religion into autonomous
units in effect at war with each other. In Libya, a vast country relatively thinly
populated and riven by sectarian divisions and feuding tribal groups—with no
common history except Italian colonialism—the overthrow of the murderous dictator
Qaddafi has had the practical effect of removing any semblance of national
governance. Tribes and regions have armed themselves to secure self-rule or
domination via autonomous militias. A provisional government in Tripoli has gained
international recognition but cannot exercise practical authority beyond city limits, if
even that. Extremist groups have proliferated, propelling jihad into neighboring states
—especially in Africa—armed with weapons from Qaddafi’s arsenals.
When states are not governed in their entirety, the international or regional order
itself begins to disintegrate. Blank spaces denoting lawlessness come to dominate
parts of the map. The collapse of a state may turn its territory into a base for terrorism,
arms supply, or sectarian agitation against neighbors. Zones of non-governance or
jihad now stretch across the Muslim world, affecting Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Gaza,
Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mali, Sudan, and Somalia.
When one also takes into account the agonies of Central Africa—where a generationslong Congolese civil war has drawn in all neighboring states, and conflicts in the
Central African Republic and South Sudan threaten to metastasize similarly—a
significant portion of the world’s territory and population is on the verge of effectively
falling out of the international state system altogether.
As this void looms, the Middle East is caught in a confrontation akin to—but
broader than—Europe’s pre-Westphalian wars of religion. Domestic and international
conflicts reinforce each other. Political, sectarian, tribal, territorial, ideological, and
traditional national-interest disputes merge. Religion is “weaponized” in the service of
geopolitical objectives; civilians are marked for extermination based on their sectarian
affiliation. Where states are able to preserve their authority, they consider their
authority without limits, justified by the necessities of survival; where states
disintegrate, they become fields for the contests of surrounding powers in which
authority too often is achieved through total disregard for human well-being and
dignity.
The conflict now unfolding is both religious and geopolitical. A Sunni bloc
consisting of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and to some extent Egypt and Turkey
confronts a bloc led by Shia Iran, which backs Bashar al-Assad’s portion of Syria,
Nuri al-Maliki’s central and southern Iraq, and the militias of Hezbollah in Lebanon
and Hamas in Gaza. The Sunni bloc supports uprisings in Syria against Assad and in
Iraq against Maliki; Iran aims for regional dominance by employing non-state actors
tied to Tehran ideologically in order to undermine the domestic legitimacy of its
regional rivals.
Participants in the contests search for outside support, particularly from Russia and
the United States, in turn shaping the relations between them. Russia’s goals are
largely strategic, at a minimum to prevent Syrian and Iraqi jihadist groups from
spreading into its Muslim territories and, on the larger global scale, to enhance its
position vis-à-vis the United States (thereby reversing the results of the 1973 war
described earlier in this chapter). America’s quandary is that it condemns Assad on
moral grounds—correctly—but the largest contingent of his opponents are al-Qaeda
and more extreme groups, which the United States needs to oppose strategically.
Neither Russia nor the United States has been able to decide whether to cooperate or
to maneuver against each other—though events in Ukraine may resolve this
ambivalence in the direction of Cold War attitudes. Iraq is contested between multiple
camps—this time Iran, the West, and a variety of revanchist Sunni factions—as it has
been many times in its history, with the same script played by different actors.
After America’s bitter experiences and under conditions so inhospitable to
pluralism, it is tempting to let these upheavals run their course and concentrate on
dealing with the successor states. But several of the potential successors have declared
America and the Westphalian world order as principal enemies.
In an era of suicide terrorism and proliferating weapons of mass destruction, the
drift toward pan-regional sectarian confrontations must be deemed a threat to world
stability warranting cooperative effort by all responsible powers, expressed in some
acceptable definition of at least regional order. If order cannot be established, vast
areas risk being opened to anarchy and to forms of extremism that will spread
organically into other regions. From this stark pattern the world awaits the distillation
of a new regional order by America and other countries in a position to take a global
view.
chapter 4
The United States and Iran: Approaches to Order
IN THE SPRING OF 2013, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic
Republic of Iran—the figure then and now outranking all Iranian government
ministers, including Iran’s President and Foreign Minister—delivered a speech to an
international conference of Muslim clerics, lauding the onset of a new global
revolution. What elsewhere was called the “Arab Spring,” he declared, was in fact an
“Islamic Awakening” of world-spanning consequence. The West erred in assessing
that the crowds of demonstrators represented the triumph of liberal democracy,
Khamenei explained. The demonstrators would reject the “bitter and horrifying
experience of following the West in politics, behavior and lifestyle” because they
embodied the “miraculous fulfillment of divine promises”:
Today what lies in front of our eyes and cannot be denied by any informed and intelligent individual is
that the world of Islam has now emerged out of the sidelines of social and political equations of the
world, that it has found a prominent and outstanding position at the center of decisive global events,
and that it offers a fresh outlook on life, politics, government and social developments.
In Khamenei’s analysis, this reawakening of Islamic consciousness was opening the
door to a global religious revolution that would finally vanquish the overbearing
influence of the United States and its allies and bring an end to three centuries of
Western primacy:
Islamic Awakening, which speakers in the arrogant and reactionary camp do not even dare to mention
in words, is a truth whose signs can be witnessed in almost all parts of the world of Islam. The most
obvious sign of it is the enthusiasm of public opinion, especially among young people, to revive the
glory and greatness of Islam, to become aware of the nature of the international order of domination
and to remove the mask from the shameless, oppressive and arrogant face of the governments and
centers that have been pressuring the Islamic and non-Islamic East.
Following “the failure of communism and liberalism” and with the power and
confidence of the West crumbling, the Islamic Awakening would reverberate across
the world, Khamenei pledged, unifying the global Muslim ummah (the transnational
community of believers) and restoring it to world centrality:
This final goal cannot be anything less than creating a brilliant Islamic civilization. All parts of the
Islamic Ummah—in the form of different nations and countries—should achieve the civilizational
position that has been specified in the Holy Quran … Through religious faith, knowledge, ethics and
constant struggle, Islamic civilization can gift advanced thought and noble codes of behavior to the
Islamic Ummah and to the entire humanity, and it can be the point of liberation from materialistic and
oppressive outlooks and corrupt codes of behavior that form the pillars of current Western civilization.
Khamenei had expatiated upon this topic previously. As he remarked to an
audience of Iranian paramilitary forces in 2011, popular protests in the West spoke to
a global hunger for spirituality and legitimacy as exemplified by Iran’s theocracy. A
world revolution awaited:
The developments in the U.S. and Europe suggest a massive change that the world will witness in the
future … Today the slogans of Egyptians and the Tunisians are being repeated in New York and
California … The Islamic Republic is currently the focal point of the awakening movement of nations
and this reality is what has upset the enemies.
In any other region, such declarations would have been treated as a major
revolutionary challenge: a theocratic figure wielding supreme spiritual and temporal
power was, in a significant country, publicly embracing a project of constructing an
alternative world order in opposition to the one being practiced by the world
community. The Supreme Leader of contemporary Iran was declaring that universal
religious principles, not national interests or liberal internationalism, would dominate
the new world he prophesied. Had such sentiments been voiced by an Asian or a
European leader, they would have been interpreted as a shocking global challenge.
Yet thirty-five years of repetition had all but inured the world to the radicalism of
these sentiments and the actions backing them. On its part, Iran combined its
challenge to modernity with a millennial tradition of a statecraft of exceptional
subtlety.
THE TRADITION OF IRANIAN STATECRAFT
The first implementation of radical Islamist principles as a doctrine of state power
occurred in 1979, in a capital where it was least expected—in a country unlike the
majority of Middle Eastern states, with a long and distinguished national history and a
long-established reverence for its pre-Islamic past. So when Iran, an accepted state in
the Westphalian system, turned itself into an advocate for radical Islam after the
Ayatollah Khomeini revolution, the Middle East regional order was turned upside
down.
Of all the countries of the region, Iran has perhaps the most coherent sense of
nationhood and the most elaborated tradition of national-interest-based statecraft. At
the same time, Iran’s leaders have traditionally reached far beyond the modern
borders of Iran and have rarely had occasion to adhere to Westphalian concepts of
statehood and sovereign equality. Iran’s founding tradition was that of the Persian
Empire, which, in a series of incarnations from the seventh century B.C. to the seventh
century A.D., established its rule across much of the contemporary Middle East and
portions of Central Asia, Southwest Asia, and North Africa. With resplendent art and
culture, a sophisticated bureaucracy experienced in administering far-flung provinces,
and a vast multiethnic military steeled by successful campaigns in every direction,
Persia saw itself as far more than one society among many. The Persian ideal of
monarchy elevated its sovereign to quasi-divine status as a magnanimous overlord of
peoples—the “King of Kings” dispensing justice and decreeing tolerance in exchange
for peaceful political submission.
The Persian imperial project, like classical China’s, represented a form of world
ordering in which cultural and political achievements and psychological assurance
played as great a role as traditional military conquests. The fifth-century B.C. Greek
historian Herodotus described the self-confidence of a people that had absorbed the
finest of all foreign customs—Median dress, Egyptian armor—and now regarded
itself as the center of human achievement:
Most of all they hold in honor themselves, then those who dwell next to themselves, and then those
next to them, and so on, so that there is a progression in honor in relation to the distance. They hold
least in honor those whose habitation is furthest from their own. This is because they think themselves
to be the best of mankind in everything and that others have a hold on virtue in proportion to their
nearness; those that live furthest away are the most base.
Roughly twenty-five hundred years later this sense of serene self-confidence had
endured, as manifested in the text of an 1850 trade agreement between the United
States and the Safavid Dynasty—which governed a curtailed but still expansive
version of the Persian Empire consisting of Iran and significant portions of presentday Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Turkmenistan. Even
after the recent loss of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, and eastern Georgia in two
wars with the expanding Russian Empire, the Shah projected the assurance of the heir
of Xerxes and Cyrus:
The President of the United States of North America, and his Majesty as exalted as the Planet Saturn;
the Sovereign to whom the Sun serves as a standard; whose splendor and magnificence are equal to
that of the Skies; the Sublime Sovereign, the Monarch whose armies are as numerous as the Stars;
whose greatness calls to mind that of Jeinshid; whose magnificence equals that of Darius; the Heir of
the Crown and Throne of the Kayanians, the Sublime Emperor of all Persia, being both equally and
sincerely desirous of establishing relations of Friendship between the two Governments, which they
wish to strengthen by a Treaty of Friendship and Commerce, reciprocally advantageous and useful to
the Citizens and subjects of the two High contracting parties, have for this purpose named for their
Plenipotentiaries …
At the intersection of East and West and administering provinces and dependencies
stretching at their widest extent from modern-day Libya to Kyrgyzstan and India,
Persia was either the starting point or the eventual target of nearly every major
conqueror on the Eurasian landmass from antiquity to the Cold War. Through all these
upheavals, Persia—like China under roughly comparable circumstances—retained its
distinct sense of identity. Expanding across vastly diverse cultures and regions, the
Persian Empire adopted and synthesized their achievements into its own distinct
concept of order. Submerged in waves of conquest by Alexander the Great, the early
Islamic armies, and later the Mongols—shocks that all but erased the historical
memory and political autonomy of other peoples—Persia retained its confidence in its
cultural superiority. It bowed to its conquerors as a temporary concession but retained
its independence through its worldview, charting “great interior spaces” in poetry and
mysticism and revering its connection with the heroic ancient rulers recounted in its
epic Book of Kings. Meanwhile, Persia distilled its experience managing all manner of
territories and political challenges into a sophisticated canon of diplomacy placing a
premium on endurance, shrewd analysis of geopolitical realities, and the
psychological manipulation of adversaries.
This sense of distinctness and adroit maneuver endured in the Islamic era, when
Persia adopted the religion of its Arab conquerors but, alone among the first wave of
conquered peoples, insisted on retaining its language and infusing the new order with
the cultural legacies of the empire that Islam had just overthrown. Eventually, Persia
became the demographic and cultural center of Shiism—first as a dissenting tradition
under Arab rule, later as the state religion starting in the sixteenth century (adopted
partly as a way to distinguish itself from and defy the growing Ottoman Empire at its
borders, which was Sunni). In contrast to the majority Sunni interpretation, this
branch of Islam stressed the mystical and ineffable qualities of religious truth and
authorized “prudential dissimulation” in the service of the interests of the faithful. In
its culture, religion, and geopolitical outlook, Iran (as it called itself officially after
1935) had preserved the distinctiveness of its tradition and the special character of its
regional role.
THE KHOMEINI REVOLUTION
The revolution against Iran’s twentieth-century Shah Reza Pahlavi had begun (or at
least had been portrayed to the West) as an antimonarchical movement demanding
democracy and economic redistribution. Many of its grievances were real, caused by
the dislocations imposed by the Shah’s modernization programs and the heavy-handed
and arbitrary tactics with which the government attempted to control dissent. But
when, in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in Paris and Iraq to
claim the role of the revolution’s “Supreme Leader,” he did so not on behalf of social
programs or of democratic governance but in the name of an assault against the entire
regional order and indeed the institutional arrangements of modernity.
The doctrine that took root in Iran under Khomeini was unlike anything that had
been practiced in the West since the religious wars of the pre-Westphalian era. It
conceived of the state not as a legitimate entity in its own right but as a weapon of
convenience in a broader religious struggle. The twentieth-century map of the Middle
East, Khomeini announced, was a false and un-Islamic creation of “imperialists” and
“tyrannical self-seeking rulers” who had “separated the various segments of the
Islamic umma [community] from each other and artificially created separate nations.”
All contemporary political institutions in the Middle East and beyond were
“illegitimate” because they “do not base themselves on divine law.” Modern
international relations based on procedural Westphalian principles rested on a false
foundation because “the relations between nations should be based on spiritual
grounds” and not on principles of national interest.
In Khomeini’s view—paralleling that of Qutb—an ideologically expansionist
reading of the Quran pointed the way from these blasphemies and toward the creation
of a genuinely legitimate world order. The first step would be the overthrow of all the
governments in the Muslim world and their replacement by “an Islamic government.”
Traditional national loyalties would be overridden because “it is the duty of all of us
to overthrow the taghut; i.e., the illegitimate political powers that now rule the entire
Islamic world.” The founding of a truly Islamic political system in Iran would mark,
as Khomeini declared upon the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran on April 1,
1979, “the First Day of God’s Government.”
This entity would not be comparable to any other modern state. As Mehdi
Bazargan, Khomeini’s first appointee for the post of Prime Minister, told the New
York Times, “What was wanted … was a government of the type seen during the 10
years of the rule of the Prophet Mohammed and the five years under his son-in-law,
Ali, the first Shiite Imam.” When government is conceived of as divine, dissent will
be treated as blasphemy, not political opposition. Under Khomeini, the Islamic
Republic carried out those principles, beginning with a wave of trials and executions
and a systematic repression of minority faiths far exceeding what had occurred under
the Shah’s authoritarian regime.
Amidst these upheavals a new paradox took shape, in the form of a dualistic
challenge to international order. With Iran’s revolution, an Islamist movement
dedicated to overthrowing the Westphalian system gained control over a modern state
and asserted its “Westphalian” rights and privileges—taking up its seat at the United
Nations, conducting its trade, and operating its diplomatic apparatus. Iran’s clerical
regime thus placed itself at the intersection of two world orders, arrogating the formal
protections of the Westphalian system even while repeatedly proclaiming that it did
not believe in it, would not be bound by it, and intended ultimately to replace it.
This duality has been ingrained in Iran’s governing doctrine. Iran styles itself as
“the Islamic Republic,” implying an entity whose authority transcends territorial
demarcations, and the Ayatollah heading the Iranian power structure (first Khomeini,
then his successor, Ali Khamenei) is conceived of not simply as an Iranian political
figure but as a global authority—“the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution” and
“the Leader of the Islamic Ummah and Oppressed People.”
The Islamic Republic announced itself on the world stage with a massive violation
of a core principle of the Westphalian international system—diplomatic immunity—
by storming the American Embassy in Tehran and holding its staff hostage for 444
days (an act affirmed by the current Iranian government, which in 2014 appointed the
hostage takers’ translator to serve as its ambassador at the United Nations). In a
similar spirit, in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini claimed global juridical authority in
issuing a fatwa (religious proscription) pronouncing a death sentence on Salman
Rushdie, a British citizen of Indian Muslim descent, for his publication of a book in
Britain and the United States deemed offensive to Muslims.
Even while simultaneously conducting normal diplomatic relations with the
countries whose territory these groups have in part arrogated, Iran in its Islamist
aspect has supported organizations such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Mahdi
Army in Iraq—non-state militias challenging established authorities and employing
terror attacks as part of their strategy. Tehran’s imperative of Islamic revolution has
been interpreted to permit cooperation across the Sunni-Shia divide to advance
broader anti-Western interests, including Iran’s arming of the Sunni jihadist group
Hamas against Israel and, according to some reports, the Taliban in Afghanistan; the
report of the 9/11 Commission and investigations of a 2013 terrorist plot in Canada
suggested that al-Qaeda operatives had found scope to operate from Iran as well.
On the subject of the need to overthrow the existing world order, Islamists on both
sides—Sunni and Shia—have been in general agreement. However intense the SunniShia doctrinal divide erupting across the Middle East in the early twenty-first century,
Sayyid Qutb’s views were essentially identical to those put forward by Iran’s political
ayatollahs. Qutb’s premise that Islam would reorder and eventually dominate the
world struck a chord with the men who recast Iran into the fount of religious
revolution. Qutb’s works circulate widely in Iran, some personally translated by
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As Khamenei wrote in his 1967 introduction to Qutb’s work,
The Future of This Religion:
This lofty and great author has tried in the course of the chapters of this book … to first introduce the
essence of the faith as it is and then, after showing that it is a program of living … [to confirm] with his
eloquent words and his particular world outlook that ultimately world government shall be in the hands
of our school and “the future belongs to Islam.”
For Iran, representing the minority Shia branch of this endeavor, victory could be
envisioned through the sublimation of doctrinal differences for shared aims. Toward
this end, the Iranian constitution proclaims the goal of the unification of all Muslims
as a national obligation:
In accordance with the sacred verse of the Qur’an (“This your community is a single community, and I
am your Lord, so worship Me” [21:92]), all Muslims form a single nation, and the government of the
Islamic Republic of Iran has the duty of formulating its general policies with a view to cultivating the
friendship and unity of all Muslim peoples, and it must constantly strive to bring about the political,
economic, and cultural unity of the Islamic world.
The emphasis would be not on theological disputes but on ideological conquest. As
Khomeini elaborated, “We must strive to export our Revolution throughout the world,
and must abandon all idea of not doing so, for not only does Islam refuse to recognize
any difference between Muslim countries, it is the champion of all oppressed people.”
This would require an epic struggle against “America, the global plunderer,” and the
Communist materialist societies of Russia and Asia, as well as “Zionism, and Israel.”
Khomeini and his fellow Shia revolutionaries have differed from Sunni Islamists,
however—and this is the essence of their fratricidal rivalry—in proclaiming that
global upheaval would be capped with the coming of the Mahdi, who would return
from “occultation” (being present though not visible) to assume the sovereign powers
that the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic temporarily exercises in the Mahdi’s
place. Iranian then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad considered this principle
sufficiently settled to put it before the United Nations in an address on September 27,
2007:
Without any doubt, the Promised One who is the ultimate Savior, will come. In the company of all
believers, justice-seekers and benefactors, he will establish a bright future and fill the world with
justice and beauty. This is the promise of God; therefore it will be fulfilled.
The peace envisaged by such a concept has as its prerequisite, as President
Ahmadinejad wrote to President George W. Bush in 2006, a global submission to
correct religious doctrine. Ahmadinejad’s letter (widely interpreted in the West as an
overture to negotiations) concluded with “Vasalam Ala Man Ataba’al hoda,” a phrase
left untranslated in the version released to the public: “Peace only unto those who
follow the true path.” This was the identical admonition sent in the seventh century by
the Prophet Muhammad to the emperors of Byzantium and Persia, soon to be attacked
by the Islamic holy war.
For decades Western observers have sought to pinpoint the “root causes” of such
sentiments, convincing themselves that the more extreme statements are partly
metaphorical and that a renunciation of policy or of past Western conduct—such as
American and British interference in Iranian domestic politics in the 1950s—might
open the door to reconciliation. Yet revolutionary Islamism has not, up to now,
manifested itself as a quest for international cooperation as the West understands the
term; nor is the Iranian clerical regime best interpreted as an aggrieved postcolonial
independence movement waiting hopefully for demonstrations of American goodwill.
Under the ayatollahs’ concept of policy, the dispute with the West is not a matter of
specific technical concessions or negotiating formulas but a contest over the nature of
world order.
Even at a moment hailed in the West as auguring a new spirit of conciliation—after
the completion of an interim agreement on Iran’s nuclear program with the five
permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany—the Iranian Supreme
Leader, Khamenei, declared in January 2014:
By dressing up America’s face, some individuals are trying to remove the ugliness, the violence and
terror from this face and introduce America’s government to the Iranian people as being affectionate
and humanitarian … How can you change such an ugly and criminal face in front of the Iranian people
with makeup? … Iran will not violate what it agreed to. But the Americans are enemies of the Islamic
Revolution, they are enemies of the Islamic Republic, they are enemies of this flag that you have
raised.
Or, as Khamenei put it somewhat more delicately in a speech to Iran’s Guardian
Council in September 2013, “When a wrestler is wrestling with an opponent and in
places shows flexibility for technical reasons, let him not forget who his opponent is.”
THIS STATE OF AFFAIRS is not inevitably permanent. Among the states in the Middle
East, Iran has perhaps the most coherent experience of national greatness and the
longest and subtlest strategic tradition. It has preserved its essential culture for three
thousand years, sometimes as an expanding empire, for many centuries by the skilled
manipulation of surrounding elements. Before the ayatollahs’ revolution, the West’s
interaction with Iran had been cordial and cooperative on both sides, based on a
perceived parallelism of national interests. (Ironically, the ayatollahs’ ascent to power
was aided in its last stages by America’s dissociation from the existing regime, on the
mistaken belief that the looming change would accelerate the advent of democracy
and strengthen U.S.-Iranian ties.)
The United States and the Western democracies should be open to fostering
cooperative relations with Iran. What they must not do is base such a policy on
projecting their own domestic experience as inevitably or automatically relevant to
other societies’, especially Iran’s. They must allow for the possibility that the
unchanged rhetoric of a generation is based on conviction rather than posturing and
will have had an impact on a significant number of the Iranian people. A change of
tone is not necessarily a return to normalcy, especially where definitions of normalcy
differ so fundamentally. It includes as well—and more likely—the possibility of a
change in tactics to reach essentially unchanged goals. The United States should be
open to a genuine reconciliation and make substantial efforts to facilitate it. Yet for
such an effort to succeed, a clear sense of direction is essential, especially on the key
issue of Iran’s nuclear program.
NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION AND IRAN
The future of Iranian-American relations will—at least in the short run—depend on
the resolution of an ostensibly technical military issue. As these pages are being
written, a potentially epochal shift in the region’s military balance and its
psychological equilibrium may be taking place. It has been ushered in by Iran’s rapid
progress toward the status of a nuclear weapons state amidst a negotiation between it
and the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (the P5+1).
Though couched in terms of technical and scientific capabilities, the issue is at heart
about international order—about the ability of the international community to enforce
its demands against sophisticated forms of rejection, the permeability of the global
nonproliferation regime, and the prospects for a nuclear arms race in the world’s most
volatile region.
The traditional balance of power emphasized military and industrial capacity. A
change in it could be achieved only gradually or by conquest. The modern balance of
power reflects the level of a society’s scientific development and can be threatened
dramatically by developments entirely within the territory of a state. No conquest
could have increased Soviet military capacity as much as the breaking of the
American nuclear monopoly in 1949. Similarly, the spread of deliverable nuclear
weapons is bound to affect regional balances—and the international order—
dramatically and to evoke a series of escalating counteractions.
All Cold War American administrations were obliged to design their international
strategies in the context of the awe-inspiring calculus of deterrence: the knowledge
that nuclear war would involve casualties of a scale capable of threatening civilized
life. They were haunted as well by the awareness that a demonstrated willingness to
run the risk—at least up to a point—was essential if the world was not to be turned
over to ruthless totalitarians. Deterrence held in the face of these parallel nightmares
because only two nuclear superpowers existed. Each made comparable assessments of
the perils to it from the use of nuclear weapons. But as nuclear weapons spread into
more and more hands, the calculus of deterrence grows increasingly ephemeral and
deterrence less and less reliable. In a widely proliferated world, it becomes ever more
difficult to decide who is deterring whom and by what calculations.
Even if it is assumed that proliferating nuclear countries make the same calculus of
survival as the established ones with respect to initiating hostilities against each other
—an extremely dubious judgment—new nuclear weapons states may undermine
international order in several ways. The complexity of protecting nuclear arsenals and
installations (and building the sophisticated warning systems possessed by the
advanced nuclear states) may increase the risk of preemption by tilting incentives
toward a surprise attack. They can also be used as a shield to deter retaliation against
the militant actions of non-state groups. Nor could nuclear powers ignore nuclear war
on their doorsteps. Finally, the experience with the “private” proliferation network of
technically friendly Pakistan with North Korea, Libya, and Iran demonstrates the vast
consequences to international order of the spread of nuclear weapons, even when the
proliferating country does not meet the formal criteria of a rogue state.
Three hurdles have to be overcome in acquiring a deployable nuclear weapons
capability: the acquisition of delivery systems, the production of fissile material, and
the building of warheads. For delivery systems, there exists a substantially open
market in France, Russia, and to some extent China; it requires primarily financial
resources. Iran has already acquired the nucleus of a delivery system and can add to it
at its discretion. The knowledge of how to build warheads is not esoteric or difficult to
discover, and their construction is relatively easy to hide. The best—perhaps the only
—way to prevent the emergence of a nuclear weapons capability is to inhibit the
development of a uranium-enrichment process. The indispensable component for this
process is the device of centrifuges—the machines that produce enriched uranium.
(Plutonium enrichment must also be prevented and is part of the same negotiation.)
The United States and the other permanent members of the UN Security Council
have been negotiating for over ten years through two administrations of both parties
to prevent the emergence of such a capability in Iran. Six UN Security Council
resolutions since 2006 have insisted that Iran suspend its nuclear-enrichment program.
Three American presidents of both parties, every permanent member of the UN
Security Council (including China and Russia) plus Germany, and multiple
International Atomic Energy Agency reports and resolutions have all declared an
Iranian nuclear weapon unacceptable and demanded an unconditional halt to Iranian
nuclear enrichment. No option was to be “off the table”—in the words of at least two
American presidents—in pursuit of that goal.
The record shows steadily advancing Iranian nuclear capabilities taking place while
the Western position has been progressively softened. As Iran has ignored UN
resolutions and built centrifuges, the West has put forward a series of proposals of
increasing permissiveness—from insisting that Iran terminate its uranium enrichment
permanently (2004); to allowing that Iran might continue some enrichment at lowenriched uranium (LEU) levels, less than 20 percent (2005); to proposing that Iran
ship the majority of its LEU out of the country so that France and Russia could turn it
into fuel rods with 20 percent enriched uranium (2009); to a proposal allowing Iran to
keep enough of its own 20 percent enriched uranium to run a research reactor while
suspending operations at its Fordow facility of centrifuges capable of making more
(2013). Fordow itself was once a secret site; when discovered, it became the subject
of Western demands that it close entirely. Now Western proposals suggest that activity
at it be suspended, with safeguards making it difficult to restart. When the P5+1 first
formed in 2006 to coordinate the positions of the international community, its
negotiators insisted that Iran halt fuel-cycle activities before negotiations could
proceed; in 2009, this condition was dropped. Faced with this record, Iran has had
little incentive to treat any proposal as final. With subtlety and no little daring, it has
at each stage cast itself as less interested in a solution than the world’s combined
major powers and invited them to make new concessions.
When the negotiations started in 2003, Iran had 130 centrifuges. At this writing, it
has deployed approximately 19,000 (though only half are in use). At the beginning of
the negotiations, Iran was not able to produce any fissile material; in the November
2013 interim agreement, Iran acknowledged that it possessed seven tons of low-grade
enriched uranium that, with the numbers of centrifuges Iran possesses, can be
transformed into weapons-grade material in a number of months (enough for seven to
ten Hiroshima-type bombs). In the interim agreement, Iran promised to give up about
half of its 20 percent enriched uranium but through a circuitous route; it pledged to
convert it into a form from which it can easily be reconverted to its original status,
and it has retained the means to do so. In any event, with the number of centrifuges
now in Iran’s possession, the 20 percent stage is less significant because uranium
enriched to 5 percent (the threshold claimed to be a negotiations achievement) can be
enriched to weapons grade in a matter of months.
The attitude of the negotiators of the two sides reflected different perceptions of
world order. The Iranian negotiators conveyed to their opposite numbers that they
would not be deterred from pursuing their course even at the risk of an attack on
Iran’s nuclear facilities. The Western negotiators were convinced (and, underscoring
their commitment to peace and diplomacy, periodically referred to this conviction)
that the consequences of a military attack on Iran dwarfed the risks of a growth in the
Iranian nuclear capability. They were reinforced in their calculations by the mantra of
professionals: that every deadlock needs to be broken by a new proposal, the
responsibility for which they assumed. For the West, the central question was whether
a diplomatic solution could be found or whether military measures would be
necessary. In Iran, the nuclear issue was treated as one aspect of a general struggle
over regional order and ideological supremacy, fought in a range of arenas and
territories with methods spanning the spectrum of war and peace—military and
paramilitary operations, diplomacy, formal negotiation, propaganda, political
subversion—in fluid and mutually reinforcing combination. In this context, the quest
for an agreement must contend with the prospect that Tehran will be at least exploring
a strategy of relaxing tensions just enough to break the sanctions regime but retaining
a substantial nuclear infrastructure and a maximum freedom of action to turn it into a
weapons program later.
The process resulted in the November 2013 interim agreement, in which Iran
agreed to a qualified, temporary suspension of enrichment in return for a lifting of
some of the international sanctions imposed on it for its defiance of UN Security
Council demands. But because Iranian enrichment was permitted to continue for the
six months of the interim agreement, its continuation as well as the implementation of
more comprehensive restrictions will merge with the deadline to complete the overall
agreement. The practical consequence has been the de facto acceptance of an Iranian
enrichment program, leaving unresolved (but only on the Western side) its scale.
Negotiations for a permanent agreement are in process at this writing. While the
terms—or whether any are achievable—are not yet known, it is clear that they will be,
like so many issues in the Middle East, about “red lines.” Will the Western negotiators
(operating via the P5+1) insist that the red line be at the enrichment capability, as the
UN resolutions have insisted? This would be a formidable task. Iran would need to
reduce its centrifuges to a level consistent with the plausible requirements of a civilian
nuclear program, as well as destroy or mothball the remainder. Such an outcome,
whose practical effect is the abandonment of a military nuclear program by Iran,
would open the prospect of a fundamental change in the West’s relationship with Iran,
particularly if it was linked to a consensus that the two sides would work to curtail
both the Sunni and Shia waves of militant extremism now threatening the region.
In view of the Iranian Supreme Leader’s repeated declarations that Iran would give
up no capability it already possesses—statements reiterated by a panoply of senior
Iranian officials—the Iranian emphasis seems to have shifted to moving the red line to
the production of warheads, or to curtailing its centrifuges to a level that still leaves a
substantial margin for a military nuclear program. Under such a scheme Iran would
enshrine in an international agreement its Supreme Leader’s alleged fatwa against
building nuclear weapons (a ruling that has never been published or seen by anyone
outside the Iranian power structure); it would pledge to the P5+1 not to build nuclear
weapons, and grant inspection rights to observe compliance. The practical effect of
such undertakings would depend on the amount of time it would take Iran to build a
weapon after it abrogated or broke such an agreement. In view of the fact that Iran
managed to build two secret enrichment plants while under international inspection,
this breakout estimate would have to consider the possibility of undisclosed
violations. An agreement must not leave Iran as a “virtual” nuclear power—a country
that can become a military nuclear power in a time frame shorter than any non-nuclear
neighbor could match or any nuclear power could reliably prevent.
Iran has brought exceptional skill and consistency to bear on its proclaimed goal of
undermining the Middle East state system and ejecting Western influence from the
region. Whether Iran were to build and test a nuclear weapon in the near term or
“merely” retain the capability to do so within months of choosing to do so, the
implications on regional and global order will be comparable. Even if Iran were to
stop at a virtual nuclear weapons capability, it will be seen to have achieved this level
in defiance of the most comprehensive international sanctions ever imposed on any
country. The temptations of Iran’s geostrategic rivals—such as Turkey, Egypt, and
Saudi Arabia—to develop or purchase their own nuclear programs to match the
Iranian capability will become irresistible. The risk of an Israeli preemptive attack
would rise significantly. As for Iran, having withstood sanctions in developing a
nuclear weapons capability, it will gain prestige, new powers of intimidation, and
enhanced capacity to act with conventional weapons or non-nuclear forms of
unconventional war.
It has been argued that a new approach to U.S.-Iranian relations will develop out of
the nuclear negotiations, which will compensate for the abandonment of historic
Western positions. The example of America’s relationship with China is often cited to
this effect, because it moved from hostility to mutual acceptance and even cooperation
in a relatively short period of time in the 1970s. Iran may be prepared, it is sometimes
said, to constrain the diplomatic use of its virtual nuclear military program in
exchange for the goodwill and strategic cooperation of the United States.
The comparison is not apt. China was facing forty-two Soviet divisions on its
northern border after a decade of escalating mutual hostility and Chinese internal
turmoil. It had every reason to explore an alternative international system in which to
anchor itself. No such incentive is self-evident in Iranian-Western relations. In the
past decade, Iran has witnessed the removal of two of its most significant adversaries,
the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—ironically by
American action—and it has deepened its influence and its military role in Lebanon,
Syria, and Iraq. Two of its principal competitors for regional influence, Egypt and
Saudi Arabia, have been preoccupied by internal challenges even as Iran has moved
swiftly and apparently successfully to crush its internal opposition following a 2009
pro-democracy uprising. Its leaders have largely been welcomed into international
respectability without committing to any major substantive change in policy and
courted by Western companies for investment opportunities even while sanctions are
still in place. Ironically, the rise of Sunni jihadism along Iran’s frontiers may produce
second thoughts in Iran. But it is equally plausible that Tehran regards the strategic
landscape as shifting in its favor and its revolutionary course as being vindicated.
Which option Iran chooses will be determined by its own calculations, not American
preconceptions.
Until this writing, Iran and the West have attached different meanings to the
concept of negotiation. While American and European negotiators were speaking with
cautious optimism about prospects for a nuclear agreement and exercising utmost
restraint in their public statements in hopes of fostering a favorable atmosphere,
Ayatollah Khamenei described the nuclear talks as part of an eternal religious struggle
in which negotiation was a form of combat and compromise was forbidden. As late as
May 2014, with six weeks remaining in the interim agreement period, the Iranian
Supreme Leader was reported to have described the nuclear talks as follows:
The reason for the emphasis placed on the continuation of combat, is not because of the war-mongering
of the Islamic establishment. It is only rational that for crossing a region filled with pirates, one should
fully equip themselves and be motivated and capable of defending themselves.
Under such circumstances, we have no option but to continue combat and allow the idea of combat
to rule all domestic and foreign affairs of the country. Those who seek to promote concession-making
and surrendering to bullies and accuse the Islamic establishment of warmongering are indeed
committing treason.
All the officials in the country in the field of economy, science, culture, policy-making, lawmaking
and foreign negotiations should be aware that they are fighting and are continuing the combat for the
establishment and survival of the Islamic system … Jihad is never-ending because Satan and the
satanic front will exist eternally.
For nations, history plays the role that character confers on human beings. In Iran’s
proud and rich history, one can distinguish three different approaches to international
order. There was the policy of the state preceding the Khomeini revolution: vigilant in
protecting its borders, respectful of other nations’ sovereignties, willing to participate
in alliances—in effect, pursuing its national interests by Westphalian principles. There
is also the tradition of empire, which viewed Iran as the center of the civilized world
and which sought to eliminate the autonomy of its surrounding countries as far as its
power could reach. Finally, there is the Iran of jihad described in the preceding pages.
From which of these traditions does the changed comportment of some high-ranking
Iranian officials draw its inspiration? If we assume a fundamental change, what
brought it about? Is the conflict psychological or strategic? Will it be resolved by a
change in attitude or a modification of policy? And if the latter, what is the
modification that should be sought? Can the two countries’ views of world order be
reconciled? Or will the world have to wait until jihadist pressures fade, as they
disappeared earlier in the Ottoman Empire as a result of a change in power dynamics
and domestic priorities? On the answer to these questions depends the future of U.S.Iranian relations and perhaps the peace of the world.
In principle, the United States should be prepared to reach a geopolitical
understanding with Iran on the basis of Westphalian principles of nonintervention and
develop a compatible concept of regional order. Until the Khomeini revolution, Iran
and the United States had been de facto allies based on a hard-nosed assessment of the
national interest by American presidents from both parties. Iranian and American
national interests were treated by both sides as parallel. Both opposed the domination
of the region by a superpower, which during that period was the Soviet Union. Both
were prepared to rely on principles of respect for other sovereignties in their policy
toward the region. Both favored the economic development of the region—even when
it did not proceed on an adequately broad front. From the American point of view,
there is every reason to reestablish such a relationship. The tension in IranianAmerican relations has resulted from Tehran’s adoption of jihadist principles and
rhetoric together with direct assaults on American interests and views of international
order.
How Iran synthesizes its complex legacies will be driven in large part by internal
dynamics; in a country of such cultural and political intricacy, these may be
unpredictable to outside observers and not subject to direct influence by foreign
threats or blandishments. But whatever face Iran presents to the outside world, it does
not alter the reality that Iran needs to make a choice. It must decide whether it is a
country or a cause. The United States should be open to a cooperative course and
encourage it. Yet the ingenuity and determination of Western negotiators, while a
necessary component of this evolution, will not be sufficient to secure it.
Abandonment by Iran of support for such groups as Hezbollah would be an important
and necessary step in reestablishing a constructive pattern of bilateral relations. The
test will be whether Iran interprets the chaos along its frontiers as a threat or as an
opportunity to fulfill millennial hopes.
The United States needs to develop a strategic view of the process in which it is
engaged. Administration spokesmen explaining the reduced American role in the
Middle East have described a vision of an equilibrium of Sunni states (and perhaps
Israel) balancing Iran. Even were such a constellation to come to pass, it could only
be sustained by an active American foreign policy. For the balance of power is never
static; its components are in constant flux. The United States would be needed as a
balancer for the foreseeable future. The role of balancer is best carried out if America
is closer to each of the contending forces than they are to each other, and does not let
itself be lured into underwriting either side’s strategy, particularly at the extremes.
Pursuing its own strategic objectives, the United States can be a crucial factor—
perhaps the crucial factor—in determining whether Iran pursues the path of
revolutionary Islam or that of a great nation legitimately and importantly lodged in the
Westphalian system of states. But America can fulfill that role only on the basis of
involvement, not of withdrawal.
VISION AND REALITY
The issue of peace in the Middle East has, in recent years, focused on the highly
technical subject of nuclear weapons in Iran. There is no shortcut around the
imperative of preventing their appearance. But it is well to recall periods when other
seemingly intractable crises in the Middle East were given a new dimension by
fortitude and vision.
Between 1967 and 1973, there had been two Arab-Israeli wars, two American
military alerts, an invasion of Jordan by Syria, a massive American airlift into a war
zone, multiple hijackings of airliners, and the breaking of diplomatic relations with
the United States by most Arab countries. Yet it was followed by a peace process that
yielded three Egyptian-Israeli agreements (culminating in a peace treaty in 1979); a
disengagement agreement with Syria in 1974 (which has lasted four decades, despite
the Syrian civil war); the Madrid Conference in 1991, which restarted the peace
process; the Oslo agreement between the PLO and Israel in 1993; and a peace treaty
between Jordan and Israel in 1994.
These goals were reached because three conditions were met: an active American
policy; the thwarting of designs seeking to establish a regional order by imposing
universalist principles through violence; and the emergence of leaders with a vision of
peace.
Two events in my experience symbolize that vision. In 1981, during his last visit to
Washington, President Sadat invited me to come to Egypt the following spring for the
celebration when the Sinai Peninsula would be returned to Egypt by Israel. Then he
paused for a moment and said, “Don’t come for the celebration—it would be too
hurtful to Israel. Come six months later, and you and I will drive to the top of Mount
Sinai together, where I plan to build a mosque, a church, and a synagogue, to
symbolize the need for peace.”
Yitzhak Rabin, once chief of staff of the Israeli army, was Prime Minister during
the first political agreement ever between Israel and Egypt in 1975, and then again
when he and former Defense Minister, now Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres
negotiated a peace agreement with Jordan in 1994. On the occasion of the IsraeliJordanian peace agreement, in July 1994 Rabin spoke at a joint session of the U.S.
Congress together with King Hussein of Jordan:
Today we are embarking on a battle which has no dead and no wounded, no blood and no anguish. This
is the only battle which is a pleasure to wage: the battle of peace …
In the Bible, our Book of Books, peace is mentioned in its various idioms, two hundred and thirtyseven times. In the Bible, from which we draw our values and our strength, in the Book of Jeremiah,
we find a lamentation for Rachel the Matriarch. It reads:
“Refrain your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears: for their work shall be rewarded, says the
Lord.”
I will not refrain from weeping for those who are gone. But on this summer day in Washington, far
from home, we sense that our work will be rewarded, as the Prophet foretold.
Both Sadat and Rabin were assassinated. But their achievements and inspiration are
inextinguishable.
Once again, doctrines of violent intimidation challenge the hopes for world order.
But when they are thwarted—and nothing less will do—there may come a moment
similar to what led to the breakthroughs recounted here, when vision overcame reality.
chapter 5
The Multiplicity of Asia
ASIA AND EUROPE: DIFFERENT CONCEPTS OF BALANCE OF POWER
The term “Asia” ascribes a deceptive coherence to a disparate region. Until the
arrival of modern Western powers, no Asian language had a word for “Asia”; none of
the peoples of what are now Asia’s nearly fifty sovereign states conceived of
themselves as inhabiting a single “continent” or region requiring solidarity with all the
others. As “the East,” it has never been clearly parallel to “the West.” There has been
no common religion, not even one splintered into different branches as is Christianity
in the West. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity all thrive in different parts
of Asia. There is no memory of a common empire comparable to that of Rome.
Across Northeast, East, Southeast, South, and Central Asia, prevailing major ethnic,
linguistic, religious, social, and cultural differences have been deepened, often
bitterly, by the wars of modern history.
The political and economic map of Asia illustrates the region’s complex tapestry. It
comprises industrially and technologically advanced countries in Japan, the Republic
of Korea, and Singapore, with economies and standards of living rivaling those of
Europe; three countries of continental scale in China, India, and Russia; two large
archipelagoes (in addition to Japan), the Philippines and Indonesia, composed of
thousands of islands and standing astride the main sea-lanes; three ancient nations
with populations approximating those of France or Italy in Thailand, Vietnam, and
Myanmar; huge Australia and pastoral New Zealand, with largely Europeandescended populations; and North Korea, a Stalinist family dictatorship bereft of
industry and technology except for a nuclear weapons program. A large Muslimmajority population prevails across Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh,
Malaysia, and Indonesia, and sizeable Muslim minorities exist in India, China,
Myanmar, Thailand, and the Philippines.
The global order during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth
century was predominantly European, designed to maintain a rough balance of power
between the major European countries. Outside their own continent, the European
states built colonies and justified their actions under various versions of their so-called
civilizing mission. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, in which Asian
nations are rising in wealth, power, and confidence, it may seem improbable that
colonialism gained such force or that its institutions were treated as a normal
mechanism of international life. Material factors alone cannot explain it; a sense of
mission and intangible psychological momentum also played a role.
The pamphlets and treatises of the colonial powers from the dawn of the twentieth
century reveal a remarkable arrogance, to the effect that they were entitled to shape a
world order by their maxims. Accounts of China or India condescendingly defined a
European mission to educate traditional cultures to higher levels of civilization.
European administrators with relatively small staffs redrew the borders of ancient
nations, oblivious that this might be an abnormal, unwelcome, or illegitimate
development.
At the dawn of what is now called the modern age in the fifteenth century, a
confident, fractious, territorially divided West had set sail to reconnoiter the globe and
to improve, exploit, and “civilize” the lands it came upon. It impressed upon the
peoples it encountered views of religion, science, commerce, governance, and
diplomacy shaped by the Western historical experience, which it took to be the
capstone of human achievement.
The West expanded with the familiar hallmarks of colonialism—avariciousness,
cultural chauvinism, lust for glory. But it is also true that its better elements tried to
lead a kind of global tutorial in an intellectual method that encouraged skepticism and
a body of political and diplomatic practices ultimately including democracy. It all but
ensured that, after long periods of subjugation, the colonized peoples would
eventually demand—and achieve—self-determination. Even during their most brutal
depredations, the expansionist powers put forth, especially in Britain, a vision that at
some point conquered peoples would begin to participate in the fruits of a common
global system. Finally recoiling from the sordid practice of slavery, the West produced
what no other slaveholding civilization had: a global abolition movement based on a
conviction of common humanity and the inherent dignity of the individual. Britain,
rejecting its previous embrace of the despicable trade, took the lead in enforcing a
new norm of human dignity, abolishing slavery in its empire and interdicting slavetrading ships on the high seas. The distinctive combination of overbearing conduct,
technological prowess, idealistic humanitarianism, and revolutionary intellectual
ferment proved one of the shaping factors of the modern world.
With the exception of Japan, Asia was a victim of the international order imposed
by colonialism, not an actor in it. Thailand sustained its independence but, unlike
Japan, was too weak to participate in the balance of power as a system of regional
order. China’s size prevented it from full colonization, but it lost control over key
aspects of its domestic affairs. Until the end of World War II, most of Asia conducted
its policies as an adjunct of European powers or, in the case of the Philippines, of the
United States. The conditions for Westphalian-style diplomacy only began to emerge
with the decolonization that followed the devastation of the European order by two
world wars.
The process of emancipation from the prevalent regional order was violent and
bloody: the Chinese civil war (1927–49), the Korean War (1950–53), a Sino-Soviet
confrontation (roughly 1955–80), revolutionary guerrilla insurgencies all across
Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War (1961–75), four India-Pakistan wars (1947, 1965,
1971, and 1999), a Chinese-Indian war (1962), a Chinese-Vietnamese war (1979), and
the depredations of the genocidal Khmer Rouge (1975–79).
After decades of war and revolutionary turmoil, Asia has transformed itself
dramatically. The rise of the “Asian Tigers,” evident from 1970, involving Hong
Kong, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand, brought prosperity
and economic dynamism into view. Japan adopted democratic institutions and built an
economy rivaling and in some cases surpassing those of Western nations. In 1979,
China changed course and, under Deng Xiaoping, proclaimed a nonideological
foreign policy and a policy of economic reforms that, continued and accelerated under
his successors, have had a profound transformative effect on China and the world.
As these changes unfolded, national-interest-based foreign policy premised on
Westphalian principles seemed to have prevailed in Asia. Unlike in the Middle East,
where almost all the states are threatened by militant challenges to their legitimacy, in
Asia the state is treated as the basic unit of international and domestic politics. The
various nations emerging from the colonial period generally affirmed one another’s
sovereignty and committed to noninterference in one another’s domestic affairs; they
followed the norms of international organizations and built regional or interregional
economic and social organizations. In this vein a top Chinese military official, the
Chinese People’s Liberation Army Deputy Chief of General Staff Qi Jianguo, wrote in
a major January 2013 policy review that one of the primary challenges of the
contemporary era is to uphold “the basic principle of modern international relations
firmly established in the 1648 ‘Treaty of Westphalia,’ especially the principles of
sovereignty and equality.”
Asia has emerged as among the Westphalian system’s most significant legacies:
historic, and often historically antagonistic, peoples are organizing themselves as
sovereign states and their states as regional groupings. In Asia, far more than in
Europe, not to speak of the Middle East, the maxims of the Westphalian model of
international order find their contemporary expression—including doctrines since
questioned by many in the West as excessively focused on the national interest or
insufficiently protective of human rights. Sovereignty, in many cases wrought only
recently from colonial rule, is treated as having an absolute character. The goal of
state policy is not to transcend the national interest—as in the fashionable concepts in
Europe or the United States—but to pursue it energetically and with conviction. Every
government dismisses foreign criticism of its internal practices as a symptom of justsurmounted colonial tutelage. Thus even when neighboring states’ domestic actions
are perceived as excesses—as they have been, for example, in Myanmar—they are
treated as an occasion for quiet diplomatic intercession, not overt pressure, much less
forcible intervention.
At the same time, an element of implicit threat is ever present. China affirms
explicitly, and all other key players implicitly, the option of military force in the
pursuit of core national interests. Military budgets are rising. National rivalries, as in
the South China Sea and Northeast Asian waters, have generally been conducted with
the methods of nineteenth-century European diplomacy; force has not been excluded,
though its application has been restrained, if tenuously, as the years go by.
Hierarchy, not sovereign equality, was the organizing principle of Asia’s historical
international systems. Power was demonstrated by the deference shown to a ruler and
the structures of authority that recognized his overlordship, not the delineation of
specific borders on a map. Empires spread their trade and their political writ,
soliciting the alignment of smaller political units. For the peoples who existed at the
intersection of two or more imperial orders, the path to independence was often to
enroll as a nominal subordinate in more than one sphere (an art still remembered and
practiced today in some quarters).
In Asia’s historical diplomatic systems, whether based on Chinese or Hindu
models, monarchy was considered an expression of divinity or, at the very least, a
kind of paternal authority; tangible expressions of tribute were thought to be owed to
superior countries by their inferiors. This theoretically left no room for ambiguity as
to the nature of regional power relationships, leading to a series of rigid alignments. In
practice, however, these principles were applied with remarkable creativity and
fluidity. In Northeast Asia, the Ryukyu Kingdom for a time paid tribute to both Japan
and China. In the northern hills of Burma, tribes secured a form of de facto autonomy
by pledging their loyalty simultaneously to the Burmese royal court and the Chinese
Emperor (and generally not straining to follow the dictates of either). For centuries,
Nepal skillfully balanced its diplomatic posture between the ruling dynasties in China
and those in India—offering letters and gifts that were interpreted as tribute in China
but recorded as evidence of equal exchanges in Nepal, then holding out a special tie
with China as a guarantee of Nepal’s independence vis-à-vis India. Thailand, eyed as
a strategic target by expanding Western empires in the nineteenth century, avoided
colonization altogether through an even more elaborate strategy of affirming cordial
ties with all foreign powers at once—welcoming foreign advisors from multiple
competing Western states into its court even while sending tribute missions to China
and retaining Hindu priests of Indian descent for the royal household. (The
intellectual suppleness and emotional forbearance demanded by this balancing
strategy were all the more remarkable given that the Thai King was himself regarded
as a divine figure.) Any concept of a regional order was considered too inhibiting of
the flexibility demanded from diplomacy.
Against this backdrop of subtle and diverse legacies, the grid of Westphalian
sovereign states on a map of Asia presents an oversimplified picture of regional
realities. It cannot capture the diversity of aspirations that leaders bring to their tasks
or the combination of punctilious attention to hierarchy and protocol with adroit
maneuver that characterizes much of Asian diplomacy. It is the fundamental
framework of international life in Asia. But statehood there is also infused with a set
of cultural legacies of a greater diversity and immediacy than perhaps any other
region. This is underscored by the experiences of two of Asia’s major nations, Japan
and India.
JAPAN
Of all of Asia’s historical political and cultural entities, Japan reacted the earliest
and by far the most decisively to the Western irruption across the world. Situated on
an archipelago some one hundred miles off the Asian mainland at the closest crossing,
Japan long cultivated its traditions and distinctive culture in isolation. Possessed of
ethnic and linguistic near homogeneity and an official ideology that stressed the
Japanese people’s divine ancestry, Japan turned conviction of its unique identity into a
kind of near-religious commitment. This sense of distinctness gave it great flexibility
in adjusting its policies to its conception of national strategic necessity. Within the
space of little more than a century after 1868, Japan moved from total isolation to
extensive borrowing from the apparently most modern states in the West (for the army
from Germany, for parliamentary institutions and for the navy from Britain); from
audacious attempts at empire building to pacifism and thence to a reemergence of a
new kind of major-power stance; from feudalism to varieties of Western
authoritarianism and from that to embracing democracy; and in and out of world
orders (first Western, then Asian, now global). Throughout, it was convinced that its
national mission could not be diluted by adjusting to the techniques and institutions of
other societies; it would only be enhanced by successful adaptation.
Japan for centuries existed at the fringe of the Chinese world, borrowing heavily
from Sinic religion and culture. But unlike most societies in the Chinese cultural
sphere, it transformed the borrowed forms into Japanese patterns and never conflated
them with a hierarchical obligation to China. Japan’s resilient position was at times a
source of consternation for the Chinese court. Other Asian peoples accepted the
premises and protocol of the tribute system—a symbolic subordination to the Chinese
Emperor by which Chinese protocol ordered the universe—labeling their trade as
“tribute” to gain access to Chinese markets. They respected (at least in their
exchanges with the Chinese court) the Confucian concept of international order as a
familial hierarchy with China as the patriarch. Japan was geographically close enough
to understand this vocabulary intimately and generally made tacit allowance for the
Chinese world order as a regional reality. In quest of trade or cultural exchange,
Japanese missions followed etiquette close enough to established forms that Chinese
officials could interpret it as evidence of Japan’s aspiration to membership in a
common hierarchy. Yet in a region carefully attuned to the gradations of status
implied in minute protocol decisions—such as the single word used to refer to a ruler,
the mode in which a formal letter was delivered, or the style of calendar date on a
formal document—Japan consistently refused to take up a formal role in the
Sinocentric tribute system. It hovered at the edge of a hierarchical Chinese world
order, periodically insisting on its equality and, at some points, its own superiority.
At the apex of Japan’s society and its own view of world order stood the Japanese
Emperor, a figure conceived, like the Chinese Emperor, as the Son of Heaven, an
intermediary between the human and the divine. This title—insistently displayed on
Japanese diplomatic dispatches to the Chinese court—was a direct challenge to the
cosmology of the Chinese world order, which posited China’s Emperor as the single
pinnacle of human hierarchy. In addition to this status (which carried a transcendent
import above and beyond what would have been claimed by any Holy Roman
Emperor in Europe), Japan’s traditional political philosophy posited another
distinction, that Japanese emperors were deities descended from the Sun Goddess,
who gave birth to the first Emperor and endowed his successors with an eternal right
to rule. According to the fourteenth-century “Records of the Legitimate Succession of
the Divine Sovereigns,”
Japan is the divine country. The heavenly ancestor it was who first laid its foundations, and the Sun
Goddess left her descendants to reign over it forever and ever. This is true only of our country, and
nothing similar may be found in foreign lands. That is why it is called the divine country.
Japan’s insular position allowed it wide latitude about whether to participate in
international affairs at all. For many centuries, it remained on the outer boundaries of
Asian affairs, cultivating its military traditions through internal contests and admitting
foreign trade and culture at its discretion. At the close of the sixteenth century, Japan
attempted to recast its role with an abruptness and sweep of ambition that its
neighbors at first dismissed as implausible. The result was one of Asia’s major
military conflicts—whose regional legacies remain the subject of vivid remembrance
and dispute and whose lessons, if heeded, might have changed America’s conduct in
the twentieth-century Korean War.
In 1590, the warrior Toyotomi Hideyoshi—having bested his rivals, unified Japan,
and brought more than a century of civil conflict to a close—announced a grander
vision: he would raise the world’s largest army, march it up the Korean Peninsula,
conquer China, and subdue the world. He dispatched a letter to the Korean King
announcing his intent to “proceed to the country of the Great Ming and compel the
people there to adopt our customs and manners” and inviting his assistance. After the
King demurred and warned him against the endeavor (citing an “inseparable
relationship between the Middle Kingdom and our kingdom” and the Confucian
principle that “to invade another state is an act of which men of culture and
intellectual attainments should feel ashamed”), Hideyoshi launched an invasion of
160,000 men and roughly seven hundred ships. This massive force overwhelmed
initial defenses and at first marched swiftly up the peninsula. Its progress slowed as
Korea’s Admiral Yi Sun-sin organized a determined naval resistance, harrying
Hideyoshi’s supply lines and deflecting the invading armies to battles along the coast.
When Japanese forces reached Pyongyang, near the narrow northern neck of the
peninsula (and now North Korea’s capital), China intervened in force, unwilling to
allow its tribute state to be overrun. A Chinese expeditionary army estimated between
40,000 and 100,000 strong crossed the Yalu River and pushed Japanese forces back as
far as Seoul. After five years of inconclusive negotiations and devastating combat,
Hideyoshi died, the invasion force withdrew, and the status quo ante was restored.
Those who argue that history never repeats itself should ponder the comparability of
China’s resistance to Hideyoshi’s enterprise with that encountered by America in the
Korean War nearly four hundred years later.
On the failure of this venture, Japan changed course, turning to ever-increasing
seclusion. Under the “locked country” policy lasting over two centuries, Japan all but
absented itself from participating in any world order. Comprehensive state-to-state
relations on conditions of strict diplomatic equality existed only with Korea. Chinese
traders were permitted to operate in select locations, though no official Sino-Japanese
relations existed because no protocol could be worked out that satisfied both sides’
amour propre. Foreign trade with European countries was restricted to a few specified
coastal cities; by 1673, all but the Dutch had been expelled, and they were confined to
a single artificial island off the port of Nagasaki. By 1825, suspicion of the seafaring
Western powers had become so great that Japan’s ruling military authorities
promulgated an “edict to expel foreigners at all cost”—declaring that any foreign
vessel approaching Japanese shores was to be driven away unconditionally, by force if
necessary.
All this was, however, prelude to another dramatic shift, under which Japan
ultimately vaulted itself into the global order—for two centuries largely Western—and
became a modern great power on Westphalian principles. The decisive catalyst came
when Japan was confronted, in 1853, by four American naval vessels dispatched from
Norfolk, Virginia, on an expedition to flout deliberately the seclusion edicts by
entering Tokyo Bay. Their commanding officer, Commodore Matthew Perry, bore a
letter from President Millard Fillmore to the Emperor of Japan, which he insisted on
delivering directly to imperial representatives in the Japanese capital (a breach of two
centuries of Japanese law and diplomatic protocol). Japan, which held foreign trade in
as little esteem as China, cannot have been particularly reassured by the President’s
letter, which informed the Emperor (whom Fillmore addressed as his “Great and
Good Friend!”) that the American people “think that if your imperial majesty were so
far to change the ancient laws as to allow a free trade between the two countries it
would be extremely beneficial to both.” Fillmore clothed the de facto ultimatum into a
classically American pragmatic proposal to the effect that the established seclusion
laws, heretofore described as immutable, might be loosened on a trial basis:
If your imperial majesty is not satisfied that it would be safe altogether to abrogate the ancient laws
which forbid foreign trade, they might be suspended for five or ten years, so as to try the experiment. If
it does not prove as beneficial as was hoped, the ancient laws can be restored. The United States often
limit their treaties with foreign States to a few years, and then renew them or not, as they please.
The Japanese recipients of the message recognized it as a challenge to their concept
of political and international order. Yet they reacted with the reserved composure of a
society that had experienced and studied the transitoriness of human endeavors for
centuries while retaining its essential nature. Surveying Perry’s far superior firepower
(Japanese cannons and firearms had barely advanced in two centuries, while Perry’s
vessels were equipped with state-of-the-art naval gunnery capable, as he demonstrated
along the Japanese coast, of firing explosive shells), Japan’s leaders concluded that
direct resistance to the “black ships” would be futile. They relied on the cohesion of
their society to absorb the shock and maintain their independence by that cohesion.
They prepared an exquisitely courteous reply explaining that although the changes
America sought were “most positively forbidden by the laws of our Imperial
ancestors,” nonetheless, “for us to continue attached to ancient laws, seems to
misunderstand the spirit of the age.” Allowing that “we are governed now by
imperative necessity,” Japanese representatives assured Perry that they were prepared
to satisfy nearly all of the American demands, including constructing a new harbor
capable of accommodating American ships.
Japan drew from the Western challenge a conclusion contrary to that of China after
the appearance of a British envoy in 1793 (discussed in the next chapter). China
reaffirmed its traditional stance of dismissing the intruder with aloof indifference
while cultivating China’s distinctive virtues, confident that the vast extent of its
population and territory and the refinement of its culture would in the end prevail.
Japan set out, with studious attention to detail and subtle analysis of the balance of
material and psychological forces, to enter the international order based on Western
concepts of sovereignty, free trade, international law, technology, and military power
—albeit for the purpose of expelling the foreign domination. After a new faction came
to power in 1868 promising to “revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians,” they
announced that they would do so by mastering the barbarians’ concepts and
technologies and joining the Westphalian world order as an equal member. The new
Meiji Emperor’s coronation was marked with the Charter Oath signed by the nobility,
promising a sweeping program of reform, which included provisions that all social
classes should be encouraged to participate. It provided for deliberative assemblies in
all provinces, an affirmation of due process, and a commitment to fulfill the
aspirations of the population. It relied on the national consensus, which has been one
of the principal strengths—perhaps the most distinctive feature—of Japanese society:
1. By this oath, we set up as our aim the establishment of the national wealth on
a broad basis and the framing of a constitution and laws.
2. Deliberative assemblies shall be widely established and all matters decided by
open discussion.
3. All classes, high and low, shall be united in vigorously carrying out the
administration of affairs of state.
4. The common people, no less than the civil and military officials, shall all be
allowed to pursue their own calling so that there may be no discontent.
5. Evil customs of the past shall be broken off and everything based upon the just
laws of Nature.
6. Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the
foundation of imperial rule.
Japan would henceforth embark on the systematic construction of railways, modern
industry, an export-oriented economy, and a modern military. Amidst all these
transformations, the uniqueness of Japanese culture and society would preserve
Japanese identity.
The results of this dramatic change of course would, within a few decades, vault
Japan into the ranks of global powers. In 1886, after a brawl between Chinese sailors
and Nagasaki police, a modern German-built Chinese warship sailed toward Japan,
compelling a resolution. By the next decade, intensive naval construction and training
had given Japan the upper hand. When an 1894 dispute over relative Japanese and
Chinese influence in Korea culminated in war, Japan prevailed decisively. The peace
terms included an end of Chinese suzerainty over Korea (giving way to new contests
between Japan and Russia) and the cession of Taiwan, which Japan governed as a
colony.
Japan’s reforms were pursued with such vigor that the Western powers were soon
obliged to abandon the model of “extraterritoriality”—their “right” to try their own
citizens in Japan by their own, not local, laws—which they had first applied in China.
In a landmark trade treaty Britain, the preeminent Western power, committed British
subjects in Japan to abide by Japanese jurisdiction. In 1902, the British treaty was
transformed into a military alliance, the first formal strategic alignment between an
Asian and a Western power. Britain sought the alliance to balance Russian pressures
on India. Japan’s goal was to defeat Russian aspirations to dominate Korea and
Manchuria and to establish its own freedom of maneuver for later designs there. Three
years later, Japan stunned the world by defeating the Russian Empire in a war, the first
defeat of a Western country by an Asian country in the modern period. In World War
I, Japan joined the Entente powers and seized German bases in China and the South
Pacific.
Japan had “arrived” as the first non-Western great power in the contemporary age,
accepted as a military, economic, and diplomatic equal by the countries that had
heretofore shaped the international order. There was one important difference: on the
Japanese side, the alliances with Western countries were not based on common
strategic objectives but to expel its European allies from Asia.
After the exhaustion of Europe in World War I, Japan’s leaders concluded that a
world beset by conflict, financial crisis, and American isolationism favored imperial
expansion aimed at imposing hegemony on Asia. Imperial Japan detached Manchuria
from China in 1931 and established it as a Japanese satellite state under the exiled
Chinese Emperor. In 1937, Japan declared war on China in order to subjugate
additional Chinese territory. In the name of a “New Order in Asia” and then an “East
Asian Co-prosperity Sphere,” Japan strove to organize its own anti-Westphalian
sphere of influence—a “bloc of Asian nations led by the Japanese and free of Western
powers,” arranged hierarchically to “thereby enable all nations to find each its proper
place in the world.” In this new order, other Asian states’ sovereignty would be elided
into a form of Japanese tutelage.
The members of the established international order were too exhausted by World
War I and too preoccupied with the mounting European crisis to resist. Only one
Western country remained in the way of this design: the United States, the country
that had forcibly opened up Japan less than a century earlier. As though history
contained a narrative, the first bombs of a war between the two countries fell on
American territory in 1941, when the Japanese launched a surprise attack on Pearl
Harbor. American mobilization in the Pacific eventually culminated in the use of two
nuclear weapons (the sole military use of these weapons to date), bringing about
Japan’s unconditional surrender.
Japan adjusted to the debacle by methods similar to its response to Commodore
Perry: resilience sustained by an indomitable national spirit based on a distinctive
national culture. To restore the Japanese nation, Japan’s postwar leaders (almost all of
whom had been in the public service in the 1930s and 1940s) portrayed surrender as
adaptation to American priorities; indeed, Japan used the authority of the American
occupation regime to modernize more fully and to recover more rapidly than it could
have by purely national efforts. It renounced war as an instrument of national policy,
affirmed principles of constitutional democracy, and reentered the international state
system as an American ally—though a low-key one more visibly concerned with
economic revival than with participation in grand strategy. For nearly seven decades,
this new orientation has proved an important anchor of Asian stability and global
peace and prosperity.
Japan’s postwar posture was frequently described as a new pacifism; in fact it was
considerably more complex. Above all, it reflected an acquiescence in American
predominance and an assessment of the strategic landscape and the imperatives of
Japan’s survival and long-term success. Japan’s postwar governing class accepted the
constitution drafted by American occupying authorities—with its stringent
prohibitions on military action—as a necessity of their immediate circumstances.
They avowed its liberal-democratic orientation as their own; they affirmed principles
of democracy and international community akin to those embraced in Western
capitals.
At the same time, Japan’s leaders adapted their country’s unique demilitarized role
to Japanese long-term strategic purposes. They transformed the pacifist aspects of the
postwar order from a prohibition against military action to an imperative to focus on
other key elements of national strategy, including economic revitalization. American
forces were invited to remain deployed in Japan in substantial numbers, and the
defense commitment was solidified into a mutual security treaty, deterring potentially
antagonistic powers (including a Soviet Union expanding its Pacific presence) from
viewing Japan as a target for strategic action. Having established the framework of the
relationship, Japan’s Cold War leaders proceeded to reinforce their country’s
capacities by developing an independent military capability.
The effect of the first stage of Japan’s postwar evolution was to take its strategic
orientation out of Cold War contests, freeing it to focus on a transformative program
of economic development. Japan placed itself legally in the camp of the developed
democracies but—citing its pacifist orientation and commitment to world community
—declined to join the ideological struggles of the age. The result of this subtle
strategy was a period of concerted economic growth paralleled only by that following
the 1868 Meiji Revolution. Within two decades of its wartime devastation, Japan had
rebuilt itself as a major global economic power. The Japanese miracle was soon after
invoked as a potential challenge to American economic preeminence, though it began
to level off in the last decade of the twentieth century.
The social cohesion and sense of national commitment that enabled this remarkable
transformation has been called forth in response to contemporary challenges. It
enabled the Japanese people to respond to a devastating 2011 earthquake, tsunami,
and nuclear crisis in Japan’s northeast—by World Bank estimates, the costliest natural
disaster in world history—with an astonishing display of mutual assistance and
national solidarity. Financial and demographic challenges have been the subject of
searching internal assessment and, in some aspects, equally bold measures. In each
endeavor, Japan has called forth its resources with its traditional confidence that its
national essence and culture could be maintained through almost any adjustments.
Dramatic changes in the balance of power will inevitably be translated by Japan’s
establishment into a new adaptation of Japanese foreign policy. The return of strong
national leadership under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gives Tokyo new latitude to act
on its assessments. A December 2013 Japanese government white paper concluded
that “as Japan’s security environment becomes ever more severe … it has become
indispensable for Japan to make more proactive efforts in line with the principle of
international cooperation,” including strengthening Japan’s capacity to “deter” and, if
needed, “defeat” threats. Surveying a changing Asian landscape, Japan increasingly
articulates a desire to become a “normal country” with a military not constitutionally
barred from war and an active alliance policy. The issue for Asian regional order will
be the definition of “normality.”
As at other pivotal moments in its history, Japan is moving toward a redefinition of
its broader role in international order, sure to have far-reaching consequences in its
region and beyond. Searching for a new role, it will assess once again, carefully,
unsentimentally, and unobtrusively, the balance of material and psychological forces
in light of the rise of China, Korean developments, and their impact on Japan’s
security. It will examine the utility and record of the American alliance and its
considerable success in serving wide-ranging mutual interests; it will also consider
America’s withdrawal from three military conflicts. Japan will conduct this analysis in
terms of three broad options: continued emphasis on the American alliance;
adaptation to China’s rise; and reliance on an increasingly national foreign policy.
Which of them will emerge as dominant, or whether the choice is for a mix of them,
depends on Japan’s calculations of the global balance of power—not formal American
assurances—and how it perceives underlying trends. Should Japan perceive a new
configuration of power unfolding in its region or the world, it will base its security on
its judgment of reality, not on traditional alignments. The outcome therefore depends
on how credible the Japanese establishment judges American policy in Asia to be and
how they assess the overall balance of forces. The long-term direction of U.S. foreign
policy is as much at issue as Japan’s analysis.
INDIA
In Japan, the impetus of Western intrusion changed the course of a historic nation;
in India it reshaped a great civilization into a modern state. India has long developed
its qualities at the intersection of world orders, shaping and being shaped by their
rhythms. It has been defined less by its political borders than by a shared spectrum of
cultural traditions. No mythic founder has been credited with promulgating the Hindu
tradition, India’s majority faith and the wellspring of several others. History has traced
its evolution, dimly and incompletely, through a synthesis of traditional hymns,
legends, and rituals from cultures along the Indus and Ganges rivers and plateaus and
uplands north and west. In the Hindu tradition, however, these specific forms were the
diverse articulations of underlying principles that predated any written text. In its
diversity and resistance to definition—encompassing distinct gods and philosophical
traditions, the analogues of which would likely have been defined as separate
religions in Europe—Hinduism was said to approximate and prove the ultimate
oneness of manifold creation, reflecting “the long and diversified history of man’s
quest for reality … at once all-embracing and infinite.”
When united—as during the fourth through second centuries B.C. and the fourth
through seventh centuries A.D.—India generated currents of vast cultural influence:
Buddhism spread from India to Burma, Ceylon, China, and Indonesia, and Hindu art
and statecraft influenced Thailand, Indochina, and beyond. When divided—as it often
was—into competing kingdoms, India was a lure for invaders, traders, and spiritual
seekers (some fulfilling multiple roles at once, such as the Portuguese, who arrived in
1498 “in search of Christians and spices”), whose depredations it endured and whose
cultures it eventually absorbed and mixed with its own.
China, until the modern age, imposed its own matrix of customs and culture on
invaders so successfully that they grew indistinguishable from the Chinese people. By
contrast, India transcended foreigners not by converting them to Indian religion or
culture but by treating their ambitions with supreme equanimity; it integrated their
achievements and their diverse doctrines into the fabric of Indian life without ever
professing to be especially awed by any of them. Invaders might raise extraordinary
monuments to their own importance, as if to reassure themselves of their greatness in
the face of so much aloofness, but the Indian peoples endured by a core culture
defiantly impervious to alien influence. India’s foundational religions are inspired not
by prophetic visions of messianic fulfillment; rather, they bear witness to the fragility
of human existence. They offer not personal salvation but the solace of an inextricable
destiny.
World order in Hindu cosmology was governed by immutable cycles of an almost
inconceivably vast scale—millions of years long. Kingdoms would fall, and the
universe would be destroyed, but it would be re-created, and new kingdoms would
rise again. When each wave of invaders arrived (Persians in the sixth century B.C.;
Alexander and his Bactrian Greeks in the fourth century B.C.; Arabs in the eighth
century; Turks and Afghans in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; Mongols in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; Mughals in the sixteenth century; and various
European nations following shortly after), they were fitted into this timeless matrix.
Their efforts might disrupt, but measured against the perspective of the infinite, they
were irrelevant. The true nature of human experience was known only to those who
endured and transcended these temporal upheavals.
The Hindu classic the Bhagavad Gita framed these spirited tests in terms of the
relationship between morality and power. The work, an episode within the
Mahabharata (the ancient Sanskrit epic poem sometimes likened in its influence to the
Bible or the Homeric epics), takes the form of a dialogue between the warrior-prince
Arjuna and his charioteer, a manifestation of the god Lord Krishna. Arjuna,
“overwhelmed by sorrow” on the eve of battle at the horrors he is about to unleash,
wonders what can justify the terrible consequences of war. This is the wrong question,
Krishna rejoins. Because life is eternal and cyclical and the essence of the universe is
indestructible, “the wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead. There has never
been a time when you and I and the kings gathered here have not existed, nor will
there be a time when we will cease to exist.” Redemption will come through the
fulfillment of a preassigned duty, paired with a recognition that its outward
manifestations are illusory because “the impermanent has no reality; reality lies in the
eternal.” Arjuna, a warrior, has been presented with a war he did not seek. He should
accept the circumstances with equanimity and fulfill his role with honor, and must
strive to kill and prevail and “should not grieve.”
While Lord Krishna’s appeal to duty prevails and Arjuna professes himself freed
from doubt, the cataclysms of the war—described in detail in the rest of the epic—add
resonance to his earlier qualms. This central work of Hindu thought embodied both an
exhortation to war and the importance not so much of avoiding but of transcending it.
Morality was not rejected, but in any given situation the immediate considerations
were dominant, while eternity provided a curative perspective. What some readers
lauded as a call to fearlessness in battle, Gandhi would praise as his “spiritual
dictionary.”
Against the background of the eternal verities of a religion preaching the
elusiveness of any single earthly endeavor, the temporal ruler was in fact afforded a
wide berth for practical necessities. The pioneering exemplar of this school was the
fourth-century B.C. minister Kautilya, credited with engineering the rise of India’s
Maurya Dynasty, which expelled Alexander the Great’s successors from northern
India and unified the subcontinent for the first time under a single rule.
Kautilya wrote about an India comparable in structure to Europe before the Peace
of Westphalia. He describes a collection of states potentially in permanent conflict
with each other. Like Machiavelli’s, his is an analysis of the world as he found it; it
offers a practical, not a normative, guide to action. And its moral basis is identical
with that of Richelieu, who lived nearly two thousand years later: the state is a fragile
organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on
ethical restraint.
Tradition holds that at some point during or after completing his endeavors,
Kautilya recorded the strategic and foreign policy practices he had observed in a
comprehensive manual of statecraft, the Arthashastra. This work sets out, with
dispassionate clarity, a vision of how to establish and guard a state while neutralizing,
subverting, and (when opportune conditions have been established) conquering its
neighbors. The Arthashastra encompasses a world of practical statecraft, not
philosophical disputation. For Kautilya, power was the dominant reality. It was
multidimensional, and its factors were interdependent. All elements in a given
situation were relevant, calculable, and amenable to manipulation toward a leader’s
strategic aims. Geography, finance, military strength, diplomacy, espionage, law,
agriculture, cultural traditions, morale and popular opinion, rumors and legends, and
men’s vices and weaknesses needed to be shaped as a unit by a wise king to
strengthen and expand his realm—much as a modern orchestra conductor shapes the
instruments in his charge into a coherent tune. It was a combination of Machiavelli
and Clausewitz.
Millennia before European thinkers translated their facts on the ground into a
theory of balance of power, the Arthashastra set out an analogous, if more elaborate,
system termed the “circle of states.” Contiguous polities, in Kautilya’s analysis,
existed in a state of latent hostility. Whatever professions of amity he might make, any
ruler whose power grew significantly would eventually find that it was in his interest
to subvert his neighbor’s realm. This was an inherent dynamic of self-preservation to
which morality was irrelevant. Much like Frederick the Great two thousand years
later, Kautilya concluded that the ruthless logic of competition allowed no deviation:
“The conqueror shall [always] endeavor to add to his own power and increase his own
happiness.” The imperative was clear: “If … the conqueror is superior, the campaign
shall be undertaken; otherwise not.”
European theorists proclaimed the balance of power as a goal of foreign policy and
envisaged a world order based on the equilibrium of states. In the Arthashastra, the
purpose of strategy was to conquer all other states and to overcome such equilibrium
as existed on the road to victory. In that respect, Kautilya was more comparable to
Napoleon and Qin Shi Huang (the Emperor who unified China) than to Machiavelli.
In Kautilya’s view, states had an obligation to pursue self-interest even more than
glory. The wise ruler would seek his allies from among his neighbors’ neighbors. The
goal would be an alliance system with the conqueror at the center: “The Conqueror
shall think of the circle of states as a wheel—himself at the hub and his allies, drawn
to him by the spokes though separated by intervening territory, as its rim. The enemy,
however strong he may be, becomes vulnerable when he is squeezed between the
conqueror and his allies.” No alliance is conceived as permanent, however. Even
within his own alliance system, the King should “undertake such works as would
increase his own power” and maneuver to strengthen his state’s position and prevent
neighboring states from aligning against it.
Like the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, Kautilya held that the least direct course was
often the wisest: to foment dissension between neighbors or potential allies, to “make
one neighboring king fight another neighbor and having thus prevented the neighbors
from getting together, proceed to overrun the territory of his own enemy.” The
strategic effort is unending. When the strategy prevails, the King’s territory expands,
and the borders are redrawn, the circle of states would need to be recalibrated. New
calculations of power would have to be undertaken; some allies would now become
enemies and vice versa.
What our time has labeled covert intelligence operations were described in the
Arthashastra as an important tool. Operating in “all states of the circle” (that is,
friends and adversaries alike) and drawn from the ranks of “holy ascetics, wandering
monks, cart-drivers, wandering minstrels, jugglers, tramps, [and] fortune-tellers,”
these agents would spread rumors to foment discord within and between other states,
subvert enemy armies, and “destroy” the King’s opponents at opportune moments.
To be sure, Kautilya insisted that the purpose of the ruthlessness was to build a
harmonious universal empire and uphold the dharma—the timeless moral order whose
principles were handed down by the gods. But the appeal to morality and religion was
more in the name of practical operational purposes than of principle in its own right—
as elements of a conqueror’s strategy and tactics, not imperatives of a unifying
concept of order. The Arthashastra advised that restrained and humanitarian conduct
was under most circumstances strategically useful: a king who abused his subjects
would forfeit their support and would be vulnerable to rebellion or invasion; a
conqueror who needlessly violated a subdued people’s customs or moral sensibilities
risked catalyzing resistance.
The Arthashastra’s exhaustive and matter-of-fact catalogue of the imperatives of
success led the distinguished twentieth-century political theorist Max Weber to
conclude that the Arthashastra exemplified “truly radical
‘Machiavellianism’ … compared to it, Machiavelli’s The Prince is harmless.” Unlike
Machiavelli, Kautilya exhibits no nostalgia for the virtues of a better age. The only
criterion of virtue he would accept was whether his analysis of the road to victory was
accurate or not. Did he describe the way policy was, in fact, being conducted? In
Kautilya’s counsel, equilibrium, if it ever came about, was the temporary result of an
interaction of self-serving motives; it was not, as in European concepts after
Westphalia, the strategic aim of foreign policy. The Arthashastra was a guide to
conquest, not to the construction of an international order.
Whether following the Arthashastra’s prescriptions or not, India reached its highwater mark of territorial extent in the third century B.C., when its revered Emperor
Asoka governed a territory comprising all of today’s India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and
part of Afghanistan and Iran. Then, about the time when China was being unified by
its founding Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, in 221 B.C., India split into competing
kingdoms. Reunified several centuries later, India fractured again in the seventh
century, as Islam was beginning to mount its challenge to the empires of Europe and
Asia.
For nearly a millennium, India—with its fertile soil, wealthy cities, and resplendent
intellectual and technological achievements—became a target for conquest and
conversion. Waves of conquerors and adventurers—Turks, Afghans, Parthians,
Mongols—descended each century from Central and Southwest Asia into the Indian
plains, establishing a patchwork of smaller principalities. The subcontinent was thus
“grafted to the Greater Middle East,” with ties of religion and ethnicity and strategic
sensitivities that endure to this day. For most of this period, the conquerors were too
hostile toward each other to permit any one to control the entire region or to
extinguish the power of Hindu dynasties in the south. Then, in the sixteenth century,
the most skillful of these invaders from the northwest, the Mughals, succeeded in
uniting most of the subcontinent under a single rule. The Mughal Empire embodied
India’s diverse influences: Muslim in faith, Turkic and Mongol in ethnicity, Persian in
elite culture, the Mughals ruled over a Hindu majority fragmented by regional
identities.
In this vortex of languages, cultures, and creeds, the appearance of yet another
wave of foreign adventurers in the sixteenth century did not at first seem to be an
epochal event. Setting out to profit from an expanding trade with the wealthy Mughal
Empire, private British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese companies vied with one
another to establish footholds on land in friendly princely states. Britain’s Indian
realm grew the most, if initially without a fixed design (prompting the Regius
Professor of Modern History at Cambridge to say, “We seem, as it were, to have
conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind”). Once a base of
British power and commerce was established in the eastern region of Bengal, it found
itself surrounded by competitors, European and Asian. With each war in Europe and
the Americas, the British in India clashed with rivals’ colonies and allies; with each
victory, they acquired the adversary’s Indian assets. As Britain’s possessions—
technically the holdings of the East India Company, not the British state itself—
expanded, it considered itself threatened by Russia looming to the north, by Burma by
turns militant and fragmented, and by ambitious and increasingly autonomous Mughal
rulers, thus justifying (in British eyes) further annexations.
Ultimately, Britain found itself conceiving of an Indian entity whose unity was
based on the security of a continental swath of territories encompassing the
contemporary states of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. Something akin to
an Indian national interest was defined, ascribed to a geographic unit that was, in fact,
run as a state even in the absence (it was assumed) of an Indian nation. That policy
based the security of India on British naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean; on
friendly, or at least nonthreatening, regimes as far-flung as Singapore and Aden; and
on a nonhostile regime at the Khyber Pass and the Himalayas. In the north, Britain
fended off czarist Russia’s advances through the complex forays of spies, explorers,
and indigenous surrogates backed up by small contingents of British forces, in what
came to be known as the “Great Game” of Himalayan geostrategy. It also edged
India’s borders with China north toward Tibet—an issue that arose again in China’s
war with India in 1962. Contemporary analogues to these policies have been taken
over as key elements of the foreign policy of postindependence India. They amount to
a regional order for South Asia, whose linchpin would be India, and the opposition of
any country’s attempts, regardless of its domestic structure, to achieve a threatening
concentration of power in the neighboring territories.
When London responded to the 1857 mutiny of Muslim and Hindu soldiers in the
East India Company’s army by declaring direct British rule, it did not conceive of this
act as establishing British governance over a foreign nation. Rather, it saw itself as a
neutral overseer and civilizing uplifter of multifarious peoples and states. As late as
1888, a leading British administrator could declare,
There is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India possessing, according to any
European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious … You might with as much
reason and probability look forward to a time when a single nation will have taken the place of the
various nations of Europe.
By deciding after the mutiny to administer India as a single imperial unit, Britain
did much to bring such an India into being. The diverse regions were connected by
rail lines and a common language, English. The glories of India’s ancient civilization
were researched and catalogued and India’s elite trained in British thought and
institutions. In the process, Britain reawakened in India the consciousness that it was a
single entity under foreign rule and inspired a sentiment that to defeat the foreign
influence it had to constitute itself as a nation. Britain’s impact on India was thus
similar to Napoleon’s on a Germany whose multiple states had been treated
previously only as a geographic, not a national, entity.
The manner in which India achieved its independence and charted its world role
reflected these diverse legacies. India had survived through the centuries by
combining cultural imperviousness with extraordinary psychological skill in dealing
with occupiers. Mohandas Gandhi’s passive resistance to British rule was made
possible in the first instance by the spiritual uplift of the Mahatma, but it also proved
to be the most effective way to fight the imperial power because of its appeal to the
core values of freedom of liberal British society. Like Americans two centuries earlier,
Indians vindicated their independence by invoking against their colonial rulers
concepts of liberty they had studied in British schools (including at the London
School of Economics, where India’s future leaders absorbed many of their quasisocialist ideas).
Modern India conceived of its independence as a triumph not only of a nation but
of universal moral principles. And like America’s Founding Fathers, India’s early
leaders equated the national interest with moral rectitude. But India’s leaders have
acted on Westphalian principles with respect to spreading their domestic institutions,
with little interest in promoting democracy and human rights practices internationally.
As Prime Minister of a newly independent state, Jawaharlal Nehru argued that the
basis of India’s foreign policy would be India’s national interests, not international
amity per se or the cultivation of compatible domestic systems. In a speech in 1947,
shortly after independence, he explained,
Whatever policy you may lay down, the art of conducting the foreign affairs of a country lies in finding
out what is most advantageous to the country. We may talk about international goodwill and mean what
we say. But in the ultimate analysis, a government functions for the good of the country it governs and
no government dare do anything which in the short or long run is manifestly to the disadvantage of that
country.
Kautilya (and Machiavelli) could not have said it better.
Nehru and subsequent prime ministers, including his daughter, the formidable
Indira Gandhi, proceeded to buttress India’s position as part of the global equilibrium
by elevating their foreign policy into an expression of India’s superior moral
authority. India presented the vindication of its own national interest as a uniquely
enlightened enterprise—much as America had nearly two centuries earlier. And
Nehru and later Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977 and 1980 to 1984,
succeeded in establishing their fledgling nation as one of the principal elements of the
post–World War II international order.
The content of nonalignment was different from the policy undertaken by a
“balancer” in a balance-of-power system. India was not prepared to move toward the
weaker side—as a balancer would. It was not interested in operating an international
system. Its overriding impulse was not to be found formally in either camp, and it
measured its success by not being drawn into conflicts that did not affect its national
interests.
Emerging into a world of established powers and the Cold War, independent India
subtly elevated freedom of maneuver from a bargaining tactic into an ethical
principle. Blending righteous moralism with a shrewd assessment of the balance of
forces and the major powers’ psychologies, Nehru announced India to be a global
power that would chart a course maneuvering between the major blocs. In 1947, he
stated in a message to the New Republic,
We propose to avoid entanglement in any blocs or groups of Powers realizing that only thus can we
serve not only [the] cause of India but of world peace. This policy sometimes leads partisans of one
group to imagine that we are supporting the other group. Every nation places its own interests first in
developing foreign policy. Fortunately India’s interests coincide with peaceful foreign policy and cooperation with all progressive nations. Inevitably India will be drawn closer to those countries which
are friendly and cooperative to her.
In other words, India was neutral and above power politics, partly as a matter of
principle in the interest of world peace, but equally on the grounds of national interest.
During the Soviet ultimatums on Berlin between 1957 and 1962, two American
administrations, especially John F. Kennedy’s, had sought Indian support on behalf of
an isolated city seeking to maintain its free status. But India took the position that any
attempt to impose on it the norms of a Cold War bloc would deprive it of its freedom
of action and therefore of its bargaining position. Short-term moral neutrality would
be the means toward long-term moral influence. As Nehru told his aides,
It would have been absurd and impolitic for the Indian delegation to avoid the Soviet bloc for fear of
irritating the Americans. A time may come when we may say clearly and definitely to the Americans or
others that if their attitude continues to be unfriendly we shall necessarily seek friends elsewhere.
The essence of this strategy was that it allowed India to draw support from both
Cold War camps—securing the military aid and diplomatic cooperation of the Soviet
bloc, even while courting American development assistance and the moral support of
the U.S. intellectual establishment. However irritating to Cold War America, it was a
wise course for an emerging nation. With a then-nascent military establishment and
underdeveloped economy, India would have been a respected but secondary ally. As a
free agent, it could exercise a much-wider-reaching influence.
In pursuit of such a role, India set out to build a bloc of like-minded states—in
effect, an alignment of the nonaligned. As Nehru told the delegates of the 1955 AfroAsian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia,
Are we, the countries of Asia and Africa, devoid of any positive position except being pro-communist
or anti-communist? Has it come to this, that the leaders of thought who have given religions and all
kinds of things to the world have to tag on to this kind of group or that and be hangers-on of this party
or the other carrying out their wishes and occasionally giving an idea? It is most degrading and
humiliating to any self-respecting people or nation. It is an intolerable thought to me that the great
countries of Asia and Africa should come out of bondage into freedom only to degrade themselves or
humiliate themselves in this way.
The ultimate rationale for India’s rejection of what it described as the power
politics of the Cold War was that it saw no national interest in the disputes at issue.
For the sake of disputes along the dividing lines in Europe, India would not challenge
the Soviet Union only a few hundred miles away, which it wished to give no incentive
to join up with Pakistan. Nor would it risk Muslim hostility on behalf of Middle East
controversies. India refrained from judgment of North Korea’s invasion of South
Korea and North Vietnam’s subversion of South Vietnam. India’s leaders were
determined not to isolate themselves from what they identified as the progressive
trends in the developing world or risk the hostility of the Soviet superpower.
Nevertheless, India found itself involved in a war with China in 1962 and four wars
with Pakistan (one of which, in 1971, was carried out under the protection of a freshly
signed Soviet defense treaty and ended with the division of India’s principal adversary
into two separate states, Pakistan and Bangladesh—greatly improving India’s overall
strategic position).
In quest of a leading role among the nonaligned, India was adhering to a concept of
international order compatible with the inherited one on both the global and regional
level. Its formal articulation was classically Westphalian and congruent with historical
European analyses of the balance of power. Nehru defined India’s approach in terms
of “five principles of peaceful coexistence.” Though given the name of an Indian
philosophical concept, Pancha Shila (Five Principles of Coexistence), these were in
effect a more high-minded recapitulation of the Westphalian model for a multipolar
order of sovereign states:
(1) mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty,
(2) mutual non-aggression,
(3) mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs,
(4) equality and mutual benefit, and
(5) peaceful co-existence.
India’s advocacy of abstract principles of world order was accompanied by a
doctrine for Indian security on the regional level. Just as the early American leaders
developed in the Monroe Doctrine a concept for America’s special role in the Western
Hemisphere, so India has established in practice a special position in the Indian Ocean
region between the East Indies and the Horn of Africa. Like Britain with respect to
Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, India strives to prevent the
emergence of a dominant power in this vast portion of the globe. Just as early
American leaders did not seek the approval of the countries of the Western
Hemisphere with respect to the Monroe Doctrine, so India in the region of its special
strategic interests conducts its policy on the basis of its own definition of a South
Asian order. And while American and Indian views often clashed on the conduct of
the Cold War, they have, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, been largely parallel
for the Indian Ocean region and its peripheries.
With the end of the Cold War, India was freed from many conflicting pressures and
some of its socialist infatuations. It engaged in economic reform, triggered by a
balance-of-payments crisis in 1991 and assisted by an IMF program. Indian
companies now lead some of the world’s major industries. This new direction is
reflected in India’s diplomatic posture, with new partnerships globally and in
particular throughout Africa and Asia and with a heightened regard around the world
for India’s role in multilateral economic and financial institutions. In addition to its
growing economic and diplomatic influence, India has considerably enhanced its
military power, including its navy and stockpile of nuclear weapons. And in a few
decades, it will surpass China as Asia’s most populous country.
India’s role in world order is complicated by structural factors related to its
founding. Among the most complex will be its relations with its closest neighbors,
particularly Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and China. Their ambivalent ties and
antagonisms reflect a legacy of a millennium of competing invasions and migrations
into the subcontinent, of Britain’s forays on the fringes of its Indian realm, and of the
rapid end of British colonial rule in the immediate aftermath of World War II. No
successor state has accepted the boundaries of the 1947 partition of the subcontinent
in full. Treated as provisional by one party or another, the disputed borders have ever
since been the cause of sporadic communal violence, military clashes, and terrorist
infiltration.
The borders with Pakistan, which roughly traced the concentrations of Islam on the
subcontinent, cut across ethnic boundaries. They brought into being a state based on
the Muslim religion in two noncontiguous parts of what had been British India
divided by thousands of miles of Indian territory, setting the stage for multiple
subsequent wars. Borders with Afghanistan and China were proclaimed based on lines
drawn by nineteenth-century British colonial administrators, later disclaimed by the
opposite parties and to this day disputed. India and Pakistan have each invested
heavily in a nuclear weapons arsenal and regional military postures. Pakistan also
tolerates, when it does not abet, violent extremism, including terrorism in Afghanistan
and in India itself.
A particular complicating factor will be India’s relations with the larger Muslim
world, of which it forms an integral part. India is often classified as an East Asian or
South Asian country. But it has deeper historical links with the Middle East and a
larger Muslim population than Pakistan itself, indeed than any Muslim country except
Indonesia. India has thus far been able to wall itself off from the harshest currents of
political turmoil and sectarian violence, partly through enlightened treatment of its
minorities and a fostering of common Indian domestic principles—including
democracy and nationalism—transcending communal differences. Yet this outcome is
not foreordained, and maintaining it will require concerted efforts. A further
radicalization of the Arab world or heightened civil conflict in Pakistan could expose
India to significant internal pressures.
Today India pursues a foreign policy in many ways similar to the quest of the
former British Raj as it seeks to base a regional order on a balance of power in an arc
stretching halfway across the world, from the Middle East to Singapore, and then
north to Afghanistan. Its relations with China, Japan, and Southeast Asia follow a
pattern akin to the nineteenth-century European equilibrium. Like China, it does not
hesitate to use distant “barbarians” like the United States to help achieve its regional
aims—though in describing their policies, both countries would use more elegant
terms. In the administration of George W. Bush, a strategic coordination between
India and America on a global scale was occasionally discussed. It remained confined
to the South Asia region because India’s traditional nonalignment stood in the way of
a global arrangement and because neither country was willing to adopt confrontation
with China as a permanent principle of national policy.
Like the nineteenth-century British who were driven to deepen their global
involvement to protect strategic routes to India, over the course of the twenty-first
century India has felt obliged to play a growing strategic role in Asia and the Muslim
world to prevent these regions’ domination by countries or ideologies it considers
hostile. In pursuing this course, India has had natural ties to the countries of the
English-speaking “Anglosphere.” Yet it will likely continue to honor the legacy of
Nehru by preserving freedom of maneuver in its Asian and Middle Eastern relations
and in its policies toward key autocratic countries, access to whose resources India
will require to maintain its expansive economic plans. These priorities will create
their own imperatives transcending historical attitudes. With the reconfiguration of the
American position in the Middle East, the various regional countries will seek new
partners to buttress their positions and to develop some kind of regional order. And
India’s own strategic analysis will not permit a vacuum in Afghanistan or the
hegemony in Asia of another power.
Under a Hindu nationalist-led government elected by decisive margins in May
2014 on a platform of reform and economic growth, India can be expected to pursue
its traditional foreign policy goals with added vigor. With a firm mandate and
charismatic leadership, the administration of Narendra Modi may consider itself in a
position to chart new directions on historic issues like the conflict with Pakistan or the
relationship with China. With India, Japan, and China all led by strong and
strategically oriented administrations, the scope both for intensified rivalries and for
potential bold resolutions will expand.
In any of these evolutions, India will be a fulcrum of twenty-first-century order: an
indispensable element, based on its geography, resources, and tradition of
sophisticated leadership, in the strategic and ideological evolution of the regions and
the concepts of order at whose intersection it stands.
WHAT IS AN ASIAN REGIONAL ORDER?
The historical European order had been self-contained. England was, until the early
twentieth century, able to preserve the balance through its insular position and naval
supremacy. Occasionally, European powers enlisted outside countries to strengthen
their positions temporarily—for example, France courting the Ottoman Empire in the
sixteenth century or Britain’s early-twentieth-century alliance with Japan—but nonWestern powers, other than occasional surges from the Middle East or North Africa,
had few interests in Europe and were not called on to intervene in European conflicts.
By contrast, the contemporary Asian order includes outside powers as an integral
feature: the United States, whose role as an Asia-Pacific power was explicitly
affirmed in joint statements by U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President
Hu Jintao in January 2011, and Chinese President Xi Jinping in June 2013; and
Russia, geographically an Asian power and participant in Asian groupings such as the
Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, even if over three-quarters of its population lives
in the European portion of Russian territory.
The United States in modern times has occasionally been invited to act as a
balancer of power. In the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905, it mediated the war between
Russia and Japan; in World War II, it defeated Japan’s quest for Asian hegemony. The
United States played a comparable Asian role during the Cold War when it sought to
balance the Soviet Union through a network of alliances stretching from Pakistan to
the Philippines.
The evolving Asian structure will have to take into account a plethora of states not
dealt with in the preceding pages. Indonesia, anchoring Southeast Asia while
affirming an Islamic orientation, plays an increasingly influential role and has thus far
managed a delicate balancing act between China, the United States, and the Muslim
world. With Japan, Russia, and China as neighbors, the Republic of Korea has
achieved a vibrant democracy bolstered by a globally competitive economy, including
leadership in strategic industries such as telecommunications and shipbuilding. Many
Asian countries—including China—view North Korea’s policies as destabilizing but
regard a collapse of North Korea as a greater danger. South Korea on its part will have
to deal with increasing domestic pressures for unification.
In the face of Asia’s vast scale and the scope of its diversity, its nations have
fashioned a dazzling array of multilateral groupings and bilateral mechanisms. In
contrast to the European Union, NATO, and the Commission on Security and
Cooperation in Europe, these institutions deal with security and economic issues on a
case-by-case basis, not as an expression of formal rules of regional order. Some of the
key groupings include the United States, and some, including economic ones, are
Asian only, of which the most elaborated and significant is ASEAN, the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations. The core principle is to welcome those nations most
directly involved with the issues at hand.
But does all this amount to an Asian system of order? In Europe’s equilibrium, the
interests of the main parties were comparable, if not congruent. A balance of power
could be developed not only in practice—as is inevitable in the absence of hegemony
—but as a system of legitimacy that facilitated decisions and moderated policies.
Such a congruence does not exist in Asia, as is shown by the priorities the major
countries have assigned to themselves. While India appears mostly concerned with
China as a peer competitor, in large measure a legacy of the 1962 border war, China
sees its peer rivals in Japan and the United States. India has devoted fewer military
resources to China than to Pakistan, which, if not a peer competitor, has been a
strategic preoccupation for New Delhi.
The amorphous nature of Asian groupings is partly because geography has dictated
a sharp dividing line between East Asia and South Asia throughout history. Cultural,
philosophical, and religious influences have transcended the geographic dividing
lines, and Hindu and Confucian concepts of governance have coexisted in Southeast
Asia. But the mountain and jungle barriers were too impenetrable to permit military
interaction between the great empires of East Asia and South Asia until the twentieth
century. The Mongols and their successors entered the Indian subcontinent from
Central Asia, not through the Himalayan high passes, and they failed to reach the
southern parts of India. The various regions of Asia have geopolitically and
historically pursued distinct courses.
The regional orders constructed during these periods included none based on
Westphalian premises. Where the European order embraced an equilibrium of
territorially defined “sovereign states” recognizing each other’s legal equality,
traditional Asian political powers operated by more ambiguous criteria. Until well
into the modern era, an “inner Asian” world influenced by the Mongol Empire,
Russia, and Islam coexisted with a Chinese imperial tribute system; the latter reached
outward to the kingdoms of Southeast Asia, which entertained China’s claims of
universality even as they practiced a form of statecraft deeply influenced by Hindu
principles received from India that posited a form of divinity for monarchs.
Now these legacies are meeting, and there is far from a consensus among the
various countries about the meaning of the journey they have taken or its lessons for
twenty-first-century world order. Under contemporary conditions, essentially two
balances of power are emerging: one in South Asia, the other in East Asia. Neither
possesses the characteristic integral to the European balance of power: a balancer, a
country capable of establishing an equilibrium by shifting its weight to the weaker
side. The United States (after its withdrawal from Afghanistan) has refrained from
treating the contemporary internal South Asian balance primarily as a military
problem. But it will have to be active in the diplomacy over reestablishing a regional
order lest a vacuum is created, which would inevitably draw all surrounding countries
into a regional confrontation.
chapter 6
Toward an Asian Order: Confrontation or
Partnership?
THE MOST COMMON FEATURE of Asian states is their sense of representing “emerging”
or “postcolonial” countries. All have sought to overcome the legacy of colonial rule
by asserting a strong national identity. They share a conviction that world order is
now rebalancing after an unnatural Western irruption over the past several centuries,
but they have drawn vastly different lessons from their historical journeys. When top
officials seek to evoke core interests, many of them look to a different cultural
tradition and idealize a different golden age.
In Europe’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century systems, the preservation of the
equilibrium—and by implication the status quo—was seen as a positive virtue. In
Asia, almost every state is impelled by its own dynamism. Convinced that it is
“rising,” it operates with the conviction that the world has yet to affirm its full
deserved role. Even while no state questions the others’ sovereignty and dignity and
all affirm a dedication to “non-zero-sum” diplomacy, the simultaneous pursuit of so
many programs of national prestige building introduces a measure of volatility to the
regional order. With the evolution of modern technology, the major powers of Asia
have armed themselves with far more destructive military arsenals than even the
strongest nineteenth-century European state possessed, compounding the risks of
miscalculation.
The organization of Asia is thus an inherent challenge for world order. Major
countries’ perception and pursuit of their national interests, rather than the balance of
power as a system, have shaped the mechanisms of order that have developed. Their
test will be whether a transpacific partnership, providing a peaceful framework for the
interplay of many established interests, will be possible.
ASIA’S INTERNATIONAL ORDER AND CHINA
Of all conceptions of world order in Asia, China operated the longest lasting, the
most clearly defined, and the one furthest from Westphalian ideas. China has also
taken the most complex journey, from ancient civilization through classical empire, to
Communist revolution, to modern great-power status—a course which will have a
profound impact on mankind.
From its unification as a single political entity in 221 B.C. through the early
twentieth century, China’s position at the center of world order was so ingrained in its
elite thinking that in the Chinese language there was no word for it. Only
retrospectively did scholars define the “Sinocentric” tribute system. In this traditional
concept, China considered itself, in a sense, the sole sovereign government of the
world. Its Emperor was treated as a figure of cosmic dimensions and the linchpin
between the human and the divine. His purview was not a sovereign state of
“China”—that is, the territories immediately under his rule—but “All Under Heaven,”
of which China formed the central, civilized part: “the Middle Kingdom,” inspiring
and uplifting the rest of humanity.
In this view, world order reflected a universal hierarchy, not an equilibrium of
competing sovereign states. Every known society was conceived of as being in some
kind of tributary relationship with China, based in part on its approximation of
Chinese culture; none could reach equality with it. Other monarchs were not fellow
sovereigns but earnest pupils in the art of governance, striving toward civilization.
Diplomacy was not a bargaining process between multiple sovereign interests but a
series of carefully contrived ceremonies in which foreign societies were given the
opportunity to affirm their assigned place in the global hierarchy. In keeping with this
perspective, in classical China what would now be called “foreign policy” was the
province of the Ministry of Rituals, which determined the shades of the tributary
relationship, and the Office of Border Affairs, charged with managing relations with
nomadic tribes. A Chinese foreign ministry was not established until the midnineteenth century, and then perforce to deal with intruders from the West. Even then,
officials considered their task the traditional practice of barbarian management, not
anything that might be regarded as Westphalian diplomacy. The new ministry carried
the telling title of the “Office for the Management of the Affairs of All Nations,”
implying that China was not engaging in interstate diplomacy at all.
The goal of the tribute system was to foster deference, not to extract economic
benefit or to dominate foreign societies militarily. China’s most imposing architectural
achievement, the Great Wall eventually extending over roughly five thousand miles,
was begun by the Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who had just defeated all rivals militarily,
ending the period of Warring States and unifying China. It was a grandiose testimony
to military victory but also to its inherent limits, denoting vast power coupled with a
consciousness of vulnerability. For millennia, China sought to beguile and entice its
adversaries more often than it attempted to defeat them by force of arms. Thus a
minister in the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220) described the “five baits” with which
he proposed to manage the mounted Xiongnu tribes to China’s northwestern frontier,
though by conventional analysis China was the superior military power:
To give them … elaborate clothes and carriages in order to corrupt their eyes; to give them fine food in
order to corrupt their mouth; to give them music and women in order to corrupt their ears; to provide
them with lofty buildings, granaries and slaves in order to corrupt their stomach … and, as for those
who come to surrender, the emperor [should] show them favor by honoring them with an imperial
reception party in which the emperor should personally serve them wine and food so as to corrupt their
mind. These are what may be called the five baits.
The hallmark of China’s diplomatic rituals, the kowtow—kneeling and touching
one’s head to the ground to acknowledge the Emperor’s superior authority—was an
abasement, to be sure, and proved a stumbling block to relations with modern Western
states. But the kowtow was symbolically voluntary: it was the representative
deference of a people that had been not so much conquered as awed. The tribute
presented to China on such occasions was often exceeded in value by the Emperor’s
return gifts.
Traditionally, China sought to dominate psychologically by its achievements and its
conduct—interspersed with occasional military excursions to teach recalcitrant
barbarians a “lesson” and to induce respect. Both these strategic goals and this
fundamentally psychological approach to armed conflict were in evidence as recently
as China’s wars with India in 1962 and Vietnam in 1979, as well as in the manner in
which core interests vis-à-vis other neighbors are affirmed.
Still, China was not a missionary society in the Western sense of the term. It sought
to induce respect, not conversion; that subtle line could never be crossed. Its mission
was its performance, which foreign societies were expected to recognize and
acknowledge. It was possible for another country to become a friend, even an old
friend, but it could never be treated as China’s peer. Ironically, the only foreigners
who achieved something akin to this status were conquerors. In one of history’s most
amazing feats of cultural imperialism, two peoples that conquered China—the
Mongols in the thirteenth century and the Manchus in the seventeenth—were induced
to adopt core elements of Chinese culture to facilitate the administration of a people
so numerous and so obdurate in its assumption of cultural superiority. The conquerors
were significantly assimilated by the defeated Chinese society, to a point where
substantial parts of their home territory came to be treated as traditionally Chinese.
China had not sought to export its political system; rather, it had seen others come to
it. In that sense, it has expanded not by conquest but by osmosis.
In the modern era, Western representatives with their own sense of cultural
superiority set out to enroll China in the European world system, which was becoming
the basic structure of international order. They pressured China to cultivate ties with
the rest of the world through exchanges of ambassadors and free trade and to uplift its
people through a modernizing economy and a society open to Christian proselytizing.
What the West conceived of as a process of enlightenment and engagement was
treated in China as an assault. China tried at first to parry it and then to resist outright.
When the first British envoy, George Macartney, arrived in the late eighteenth century,
bringing with him some early products of the Industrial Revolution and a letter from
King George III proposing free trade and the establishment of reciprocal resident
embassies in Beijing and London, the Chinese boat that carried him from Guangzhou
to Beijing was festooned with a banner that identified him as “The English
ambassador bringing tribute to the Emperor of China.” He was dismissed with a letter
to the King of England explaining that no ambassador could be permitted to reside in
Beijing because “Europe consists of many other nations besides your own: if each and
all demanded to be represented at our Court, how could we possibly consent? The
thing is utterly impracticable.” The Emperor saw no need for trade beyond what was
already occurring in limited, tightly regulated amounts, because Britain had no goods
China desired:
Swaying the wide world, I have but one aim in view, namely, to maintain a perfect governance and to
fulfil the duties of the State; strange and costly objects do not interest me. If I have commanded that the
tribute offerings sent by you, O King, are to be accepted, this was solely in consideration for the spirit
which prompted you to dispatch them from afar … As your Ambassador can see for himself, we
possess all things.
After the defeat of Napoleon, as its mercantile expansion gathered pace, Britain
attempted another overture, dispatching a second envoy with a similar proposal.
Britain’s display of naval power during the Napoleonic Wars had done little to change
China’s estimate of the desirability of diplomatic relations. When William Amherst,
the envoy, declined to attend the kowtow ceremony, offering the excuse that his dress
uniform had been delayed, his mission was dismissed, and any further attempt at
diplomacy was explicitly discouraged. The Emperor dispatched a message to
England’s Prince Regent, explaining that as “overlord of all under Heaven,” China
could not be troubled to walk each barbarian envoy through the correct protocol. The
imperial records would duly acknowledge that “thy kingdom far away across the
oceans proffers its loyalty and yearns for civilization,” but (as a nineteenth-century
Western missionary publication translated the edict):
henceforward no more envoys need be sent over this distant route, as the result is but a vain waste of
travelling energy. If thou canst but incline thine heart to submissive service, thou mayest dispense with
sending missions to court at certain periods; that is the true way to turn toward civilization. That thou
mayest for ever obey We now issue this mandate.
Though such admonitions seem presumptuous by today’s standards—and were
deeply offensive to the country that had just maintained the European equilibrium and
could count itself Europe’s most advanced naval, economic, and industrial power—
the Emperor was expressing himself in a manner consistent with the ideas about his
place in the world that had prevailed for millennia, and that many neighboring peoples
had been induced to at least indulge.
The Western powers, to their shame, eventually brought matters to a head over the
issue of free trade in the most self-evidently harmful product they sold, insisting on
the right to the unrestricted importation of—from all the fruits of Western progress—
opium. China in the late Qing Dynasty had neglected its military technology partly
because it had been unchallenged for so long but largely because of the low status of
the military in China’s Confucian social hierarchy, expressed in the saying “Good iron
is not used for nails. Good men do not become soldiers.” Even when under assault by
Western forces, the Qing Dynasty diverted military funds in 1893 to restore a
resplendent marble boat in the imperial Summer Palace.
Temporarily overwhelmed by military pressure in 1842, China signed treaties
conceding Western demands. But it did not abandon its sense of uniqueness and
fought a tenacious rearguard action. After scoring a decisive victory in an 1856–58
war (fought over an alleged improper impoundment of a British-registered ship in
Guangzhou), Britain insisted on a treaty enshrining its long-sought right to station a
resident minister in Beijing. Arriving the next year to take up his post with a
triumphal retinue, the British envoy found the main river route to the capital blocked
with chains and spikes. When he ordered a contingent of British marines to clear the
obstacles, Chinese forces opened fire; 519 British troops died and another 456 were
wounded in the ensuing battle. Britain then dispatched a military force under Lord
Elgin that stormed Beijing and burned the Summer Palace as the Qing court fled. This
brutal intervention compelled the ruling dynasty’s grudging acceptance of a “legation
quarter” to house the diplomatic representatives. China’s acquiescence in the concept
of reciprocal diplomacy within a Westphalian system of sovereign states was reluctant
and resentful.
At the heart of these disputes was a larger question: Was China a world order entire
unto itself or a state like others that was part of a wider international system? China
clung to the traditional premise. As late as 1863, after two military defeats by
“barbarian” powers and a massive domestic uprising (the Taiping Rebellion) quelled
only by calling in foreign troops, the Emperor dispatched a letter to Abraham Lincoln
assuring him of China’s benign favor: “Having, with reverence, received the
commission from Heaven to rule the universe, we regard both the middle empire
[China] and the outside countries as constituting one family, without any distinction.”
In 1872, the eminent Scottish Sinologist James Legge phrased the issue pointedly
and with his era’s characteristic confidence in the self-evident superiority of the
Western concept of world order:
During the past forty years her [China’s] position with regard to the more advanced nations of the
world has been entirely changed. She has entered into treaties with them upon equal terms; but I do not
think her ministers and people have yet looked this truth fairly in the face, so as to realize the fact that
China is only one of many independent nations in the world, and that the “beneath the sky,” over which
her emperor has rule, is not all beneath the sky, but only a certain portion of it which is defined on the
earth’s surface and can be pointed out upon the map.
With technology and trade impelling contradictory systems into closer contact, which
world order’s norms would prevail?
In Europe, the Westphalian system was an outgrowth of a plethora of de facto
independent states at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Asia entered the modern era
without such a distinct apparatus of national and international organization. It
possessed several civilizational centers surrounded by smaller kingdoms, with a subtle
and shifting set of mechanisms for interactions between them.
The rich fertility of China’s plains and a culture of uncommon resilience and
political acumen had enabled China to remain unified over much of a two-millennia
period and to exercise considerable political, economic, and cultural influence—even
when it was militarily weak by conventional standards. Its comparative advantage
resided in the wealth of its economy, which produced goods that all of its neighbors
desired. Shaped by these elements, the Chinese idea of world order differed markedly
from the European experience based on a multiplicity of co-equal states.
The drama of China’s encounter with the developed West and Japan was the impact
of great powers, organized as expansionist states, on a civilization that initially saw
the trappings of modern statehood as an abasement. The “rise” of China to eminence
in the twenty-first century is not new, but reestablishes historic patterns. What is
distinctive is that China has returned as both the inheritor of an ancient civilization
and as a contemporary great power on the Westphalian model. It combines the
legacies of “All Under Heaven,” technocratic modernization, and an unusually
turbulent twentieth-century national quest for a synthesis between the two.
CHINA AND WORLD ORDER
The imperial dynasty collapsed in 1911, and the foundation of a Chinese republic
under Sun Yat-sen in 1912 left China with a weak central government and ushered in
a decade of warlordism. A stronger central government under Chiang Kai-shek
emerged in 1928 and sought to enable China to assume a place in the Westphalian
concept of world order and in the global economic system. Seeking to be both modern
and traditionally Chinese, it attempted to fit into an international system that was itself
in upheaval. Yet at that point, Japan, which had launched its modernization drive half
a century earlier, began a bid for Asian hegemony. The occupation of Manchuria in
1931 was followed by Japan’s invasion of large stretches of central and eastern China
in 1937. The Nationalist government was prevented from consolidating its position,
and the Communist insurgency was given breathing space. Though emerging as one
of the victorious Allied powers with the end of World War II in 1945, China was torn
apart by civil war and revolutionary turmoil that challenged all relationships and
legacies.
On October 1, 1949, in Beijing, the victorious Communist Party leader Mao
Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China with the
words “The Chinese people have stood up.” Mao elaborated this slogan as a China
purifying and strengthening itself through a doctrine of “continuous revolution” and
proceeded to dismantle established concepts of domestic and international order. The
entire institutional spectrum came under attack: Western democracy, Soviet leadership
of the Communist world, and the legacy of the Chinese past. Art and monuments,
holidays and traditions, vocabulary and dress, fell under various forms of interdict—
blamed for bringing about the passivity that had rendered China unprepared in the
face of foreign intrusions. In Mao’s concept of order—which he called the “great
harmony,” echoing classical Chinese philosophy—a new China would emerge out of
the destruction of traditional Confucian culture emphasizing harmony. Each wave of
revolutionary exertion, he proclaimed, would serve as a precursor to the next. The
process of revolution must be ever accelerated, Mao held, lest the revolutionaries
become complacent and indolent. “Disequilibrium is a general, objective rule,” wrote
Mao:
The cycle, which is endless, evolves from disequilibrium to equilibrium and then to disequilibrium
again. Each cycle, however, brings us to a higher level of development. Disequilibrium is normal and
absolute whereas equilibrium is temporary and relative.
In the end, this upheaval was designed to produce a kind of traditional Chinese
outcome: a form of Communism intrinsic to China, setting itself apart by a distinctive
form of conduct that swayed by its achievements, with China’s unique and now
revolutionary moral authority again swaying “All Under Heaven.”
Mao conducted international affairs by the same reliance on the unique nature of
China. Though China was objectively weak by the way the rest of the world measured
strength, Mao insisted on its central role via psychological and ideological superiority,
to be demonstrated by defying rather than conciliating a world emphasizing superior
physical power. When speaking in Moscow to an international conference of
Communist Party leaders in 1957, Mao shocked fellow delegates by predicting that in
the event of nuclear war China’s more numerous population and hardier culture would
be the ultimate victor, and that even casualties of hundreds of millions would not
deflect China from its revolutionary course. While this might have been partly bluff to
discourage countries with vastly superior nuclear arsenals, Mao wanted the world to
believe that he contemplated nuclear war with equanimity. In July 1971—during my
secret visit to Beijing—Zhou Enlai summed up Mao’s conception of world order by
invoking the Chairman’s claimed purview of Chinese emperors with a sardonic twist:
“All under heaven is in chaos, the situation is excellent.” From a world of chaos, the
People’s Republic, hardened by years of struggle, would ultimately emerge
triumphant not just in China but everywhere “under heaven.” The Communist world
order would merge with the traditional view of the Imperial Court.
Like the founder of China’s first all-powerful dynasty (221–207 B.C.), the Emperor
Qin Shi Huang, Mao sought to unify China while also striving to destroy the ancient
culture that he blamed for China’s weakness and humiliation. He governed in a style
as remote as that of any Emperor (though the emperors would not have convened
mass rallies), and he combined it with the practices of Lenin and Stalin. Mao’s rule
embodied the revolutionary’s dilemma. The more sweeping the changes the
revolutionary seeks to bring about, the more he encounters resistance, not necessarily
from ideological and political opponents but from the inertia of the familiar. The
revolutionary prophet is ever tempted to defy his mortality by speeding up his
timetable and multiplying the means of enforcing his vision. Mao launched his
disastrous Great Leap Forward in 1958 to compel breakneck industrialization and the
Cultural Revolution in 1966 to purge the ruling group to prevent its
institutionalization in a decade-long ideological campaign that exiled a generation of
educated youth to the countryside. Tens of millions died in pursuit of Mao’s goals—
most eliminated without love or hatred, mobilized to foreshorten into one lifetime
what had heretofore been considered a historical process.
Revolutionaries prevail when their achievements come to be taken for granted and
the price paid for them is treated as inevitable. Some of China’s contemporary leaders
suffered grievously during the Cultural Revolution, but they now present that
suffering as having given them the strength and self-discovery to steel themselves for
the daunting tasks of leading another period of vast transformation. And the Chinese
public, especially those too young to have experienced the travail directly, seems to
accept the depiction of Mao as primarily a unifier on behalf of Chinese dignity. Which
aspect of this legacy prevails—the taunting Maoist challenge to the world or the quiet
resolve gained through weathering Mao’s upheavals—will do much to determine
China’s relationship with twenty-first-century world order.
In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, China by its own choice had only
four ambassadors around the world and was in confrontation with both nuclear
superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. By the end of the 1960s, Mao
recognized that the Cultural Revolution had exhausted even the Chinese people’s
millennially tested capacity for endurance and that China’s isolation might tempt the
foreign interventions he had sought to overcome by ideological rigor and defiance. In
1969, the Soviet Union seemed on the verge of attacking China to a point that caused
Mao to disperse all ministries to the provinces, with only Premier Zhou Enlai
remaining in Beijing. To this crisis, Mao reacted with a characteristically unexpected
reversal of direction. He ended the most anarchical aspects of the Cultural Revolution
by using the armed forces to put an end to the Red Guards, who had been his shock
troops—sending them to the countryside, where they joined their erstwhile victims at,
in effect, forced labor. And he strove to checkmate the Soviet Union by moving
toward the heretofore-vilified adversary: the United States.
Mao calculated that the opening with the United States would end China’s isolation
and provide other countries that were holding back with a justification for recognizing
the People’s Republic of China. (Interestingly, a CIA analysis, written as I was
preparing for my first trip, held that Sino-Soviet tensions were so great as to make a
U.S.-China rapprochement possible but that Mao’s ideological fervor would prevent it
in his lifetime.)
Revolutions, no matter how sweeping, need to be consolidated and, in the end,
adapted from a moment of exaltation to what is sustainable over a period of time. That
was the historic role played by Deng Xiaoping. Although he had been twice purged
by Mao, he became the effective ruler two years after Mao’s death in 1976. He
quickly undertook to reform the economy and open up the society. Pursuing what he
defined as “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” he liberated the latent energies of
the Chinese people. Within less than a generation, China advanced to become the
second-largest economy in the world. To speed up this dramatic transformation—if
not necessarily by conviction—China entered international institutions and accepted
the established rules of world order.
Yet China’s participation in aspects of the Westphalian structure carried with it an
ambivalence born of the history that brought it to enter into the international state
system. China has not forgotten that it was originally forced to engage with the
existing international order in a manner utterly at odds with its historical image of
itself or, for that matter, with the avowed principles of the Westphalian system. When
urged to adhere to the international system’s “rules of the game” and
“responsibilities,” the visceral reaction of many Chinese—including senior leaders—
has been profoundly affected by the awareness that China has not participated in
making the rules of the system. They are asked—and, as a matter of prudence, have
agreed—to adhere to rules they had had no part in making. But they expect—and
sooner or later will act on this expectation—the international order to evolve in a way
that enables China to become centrally involved in further international rule making,
even to the point of revising some of the rules that prevail.
While waiting for this to transpire, Beijing has become much more active on the
world scene. With China’s emergence as potentially the world’s largest economy, its
views and support are now sought in every international forum. China has participated
in many of the prestige aspects of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western
orders: hosting the Olympics; addresses by its presidents before the United Nations;
reciprocal visits with heads of state and governments from leading countries around
the world. By any standard, China has regained the stature by which it was known in
the centuries of its most far-reaching influence. The question now is how it will relate
to the contemporary search for world order, particularly in its relations with the
United States.
THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA are both indispensable pillars of world order.
Remarkably, both have historically exhibited an ambivalent attitude toward the
international system they now anchor, affirming their commitment to it even as they
reserve judgment on aspects of its design. China has no precedent for the role it is
asked to play in twenty-first-century order, as one major state among others. Nor does
the United States have experience interacting on a sustained basis with a country of
comparable size, reach, and economic performance embracing a distinctly different
model of domestic order.
The cultural and political backgrounds of the two sides diverge in important
aspects. The American approach to policy is pragmatic; China’s is conceptual.
America has never had a powerful threatening neighbor; China has never been
without a powerful adversary on its borders. Americans hold that every problem has a
solution; Chinese think that each solution is an admission ticket to a new set of
problems. Americans seek an outcome responding to immediate circumstances;
Chinese concentrate on evolutionary change. Americans outline an agenda of
practical “deliverable” items; Chinese set out general principles and analyze where
they will lead. Chinese thinking is shaped in part by Communism but embraces a
traditionally Chinese way of thought to an increasing extent; neither is intuitively
familiar to Americans.
China and the United States have, in their histories, only recently fully participated
in an international system of sovereign states. China has believed that it was unique
and largely contained within its own reality. America also considers itself unique—
that is, “exceptional”—but with a moral obligation to support its values around the
world for reasons beyond raison d’état. Two great societies of different cultures and
different premises are both undergoing fundamental domestic adjustments; whether
this translates into rivalry or into a new form of partnership will importantly shape
prospects for twenty-first-century world order.
China is now governed by the fifth generation of leaders since the revolution. Each
previous leader distilled his generation’s particular vision of China’s needs. Mao
Zedong was determined to uproot established institutions, even those he had built in
the original phase of his victory, lest they stagnate under China’s bureaucratic
propensities. Deng Xiaoping understood that China could not maintain its historic role
unless it became internationally engaged. Deng’s style was sharply focused: not to
boast—lest foreign countries become disquieted—not to claim to lead but to extend
China’s influence by modernizing both the society and the economy. On that basis,
starting in 1989, Jiang Zemin, appointed during the Tiananmen Square crisis,
overcame its aftermath with his personal diplomacy internationally and by broadening
the base of the Communist Party domestically. He led the PRC into the international
state and trading system as a full member. Hu Jintao, selected by Deng, skillfully
assuaged concerns about China’s growing power and laid the basis for the concept of
the new type of major-power relationship enunciated by Xi Jinping.
The Xi Jinping leadership has sought to build on these legacies by undertaking a
massive reform program of the Deng scale. It has projected a system that, while
eschewing democracy, would be made more transparent and in which outcomes
would be determined more by legal procedures than by the established pattern of
personal and family relationships. It has announced challenges to many established
institutions and practices—state-run enterprises, fiefdoms of regional officials, and
large-scale corruption—in a manner that combines vision with courage but is certain
to bring in its train a period of flux and some uncertainty.
The composition of the Chinese leadership reflects China’s evolution toward
participating in—and even shaping—global affairs. In 1982, not a single member of
the Politburo had a college degree. At this writing, almost all of them are college
educated, and a significant number have advanced degrees. A college degree in China
is based on a Western-style curriculum, not a legacy of the old mandarin system (or
the subsequent Communist Party curriculum, which imposed its own form of
intellectual inbreeding). This represents a sharp break with China’s past, when the
Chinese were intensely and proudly parochial in their perception of the world outside
their immediate sphere. Contemporary Chinese leaders are influenced by their
knowledge of China’s history but are not captured by it.
A LONGER PERSPECTIVE
Potential tensions between an established and a rising power are not new.
Inevitably, the rising power impinges on some spheres heretofore treated as the
exclusive preserve of the established power. By the same token, the rising power
suspects that its rival may seek to quash its growth before it is too late. A Harvard
study has shown that in fifteen cases in history where a rising and an established
power interacted, ten ended in war.
It is therefore not surprising that significant strategic thinkers on both sides invoke
patterns of behavior and historical experience to predict the inevitability of conflict
between the two societies. On the Chinese side, many American actions are
interpreted as a design to thwart China’s rise, and the American promotion of human
rights is seen as a project to undermine China’s domestic political structure. Some
major figures describe America’s so-called pivot policy as the forerunner of an
ultimate showdown designed to keep China permanently in a secondary position—an
attitude all the more remarkable because it has not involved any significant military
redeployments at this writing.
On the American side, the fear is that a growing China will systematically
undermine American preeminence and thus American security. Significant groups
view China, by analogy to the Soviet Union in the Cold War, as determined to achieve
military as well as economic dominance in all surrounding regions and hence,
ultimately, hegemony.
Both sides are reinforced in their suspicions by the military maneuvers and defense
programs of the other. Even when they are “normal”—that is, composed of measures
a country would reasonably take in defense of national interest as it is generally
understood—they are interpreted in terms of worst-case scenarios. Each side has a
responsibility for taking care lest its unilateral deployments and conduct escalate into
an arms race.
The two sides need to absorb the history of the decade before World War I, when
the gradual emergence of an atmosphere of suspicion and latent confrontation
escalated into catastrophe. The leaders of Europe trapped themselves by their military
planning and inability to separate the tactical from the strategic.
Two other issues are contributing to tension in Sino-American relations. China
rejects the proposition that international order is fostered by the spread of liberal
democracy and that the international community has an obligation to bring this about,
and especially to achieve its perception of human rights by international action. The
United States may be able to adjust the application of its views on human rights in
relation to strategic priorities. But in light of its history and the convictions of its
people, America can never abandon these principles altogether. On the Chinese side,
the dominant elite view on this subject was expressed by Deng Xiaoping:
Actually, national sovereignty is far more important than human rights, but the Group of Seven (or
Eight) often infringe upon the sovereignty of poor, weak countries of the Third World. Their talk about
human rights, freedom and democracy is designed only to safeguard the interests of the strong, rich
countries, which take advantage of their strength to bully weak countries, and which pursue hegemony
and practice power politics.
No formal compromise is possible between these views; to keep the disagreement
from spiraling into conflict is one of the principal obligations of the leaders of both
sides.
A more immediate issue concerns North Korea, to which Bismarck’s nineteenthcentury aphorism surely applies: “We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is
weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.”
North Korea is ruled under no accepted principle of legitimacy, not even its claimed
Communist one. Its principal achievement has been to build a few nuclear devices. It
has no military capability to engage in war with the United States. But the existence
of these weapons has a political impact far exceeding their military utility. They
provide an incentive for Japan and South Korea to create a nuclear military capability.
They embolden Pyongyang into risk-taking disproportionate to its capabilities, raising
the danger of another war on the Korean Peninsula.
For China, North Korea embodies complex legacies. In many Chinese eyes, the
Korean War is seen as a symbol of China’s determination to end its “century of
humiliation” and “stand up” on the world stage, but also as a warning against
becoming involved in wars whose origins China does not control and whose
repercussions may have serious long-range, unintended consequences. This is why
China and the United States have taken parallel positions in the UN Security Council
in demanding that North Korea abandon—not curtail—its nuclear program.
For the Pyongyang regime, abandoning nuclear weapons may well involve political
disintegration. But abandonment is precisely what the United States and China have
publicly demanded in the UN resolutions that they have fostered. The two countries
need to coordinate their policies for the contingency that their stated objectives are
realized. Will it be possible to merge the concerns and goals of the two sides over
Korea? Are China and the United States able to work out a collaborative strategy for a
denuclearized, unified Korea that leaves all parties more secure and more free? It
would be a big step toward the “new type of great-power relations” so often invoked
and so slow in emerging.
China’s new leaders will recognize that the reaction of the Chinese population to
their vast agenda cannot be known; they are sailing into uncharted waters. They
cannot want to seek foreign adventures, but they will resist intrusions on what they
define as their core interests with perhaps greater insistence than their predecessors,
precisely because they feel obliged to explain the adjustments inseparable from
reform by a reinforced emphasis on the national interest. Any international order
comprising both the United States and China must involve a balance of power, but the
traditional management of the balance needs to be mitigated by agreement on norms
and reinforced by elements of cooperation.
The leaders of China and the United States have publicly recognized the two
countries’ common interest in charting a constructive outcome. Two American
presidents (Barack Obama and George W. Bush) have agreed with their Chinese
counterparts (Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao) to create a strategic partnership in the Pacific
region, which is a way to preserve a balance of power while reducing the military
threat inherent in it. So far the proclamations of intent have not been matched by
specific steps in the agreed direction.
Partnership cannot be achieved by proclamation. No agreement can guarantee a
specific international status for the United States. If the United States comes to be
perceived as a declining power—a matter of choice, not destiny—China and other
countries will succeed to much of the world leadership that America exercised for
most of the period following World War II, after an interlude of turmoil and upheaval.
Many Chinese may see the United States as a superpower past its peak. Yet among
China’s leadership, there is also a demonstrated recognition that the United States will
sustain a significant leadership capacity for the foreseeable future. The essence of
building a constructive world order is that no single country, neither China nor the
United States, is in a position to fill by itself the world leadership role of the sort that
the United States occupied in the immediate post–Cold War period, when it was
materially and psychologically preeminent.
In East Asia, the United States is not so much a balancer as an integral part of the
balance. Previous chapters have shown the precariousness of the balance when the
number of players is small and a shift of allegiance can become decisive. A purely
military approach to the East Asian balance is likely to lead to alignments even more
rigid than those that produced World War I.
In East Asia, something approaching a balance of power exists between China,
Korea, Japan, and the United States, with Russia and Vietnam peripheral participants.
But it differs from the historical balances of power in that one of the key participants,
the United States, has its center of gravity located far from the geographic center of
East Asia—and, above all, because the leaders of both countries whose military forces
conceive themselves as adversaries in their military journals and pronouncements also
proclaim partnership as a goal on political and economic issues. So it comes about
that the United States is an ally of Japan and a proclaimed partner of China—a
situation comparable to Bismarck’s when he made an alliance with Austria balanced
by a treaty with Russia. Paradoxically, it was precisely that ambiguity which
preserved the flexibility of the European equilibrium. And its abandonment—in the
name of transparency—started a sequence of increasing confrontations, culminating
in World War I.
For over a century—since the Open Door policy and Theodore Roosevelt’s
mediation of the Russo-Japanese War—it has been a fixed American policy to prevent
hegemony in Asia. Under contemporary conditions, it is an inevitable policy in China
to keep potentially adversarial forces as far from its borders as possible. The two
countries navigate in that space. The preservation of peace depends on the restraint
with which they pursue their objectives and on their ability to ensure that competition
remains political and diplomatic.
In the Cold War, the dividing lines were defined by military forces. In the
contemporary period, the lines should not be defined primarily by military
deployment. The military component should not be conceived as the only, or even the
principal, definition of the equilibrium. Concepts of partnership need to become,
paradoxically, elements of the modern balance of power, especially in Asia—an
approach that, if implemented as an overarching principle, would be as unprecedented
as it is important. The combination of balance-of-power strategy with partnership
diplomacy will not be able to remove all adversarial aspects, but it can mitigate their
impact. Above all, it can give Chinese and American leaders experiences in
constructive cooperation, and convey to their two societies a way of building toward a
more peaceful future.
Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy. In Asia, it
must combine a balance of power with a concept of partnership. A purely military
definition of the balance will shade into confrontation. A purely psychological
approach to partnership will raise fears of hegemony. Wise statesmanship must try to
find that balance. For outside it, disaster beckons.
chapter 7
“Acting for All Mankind”: The United States and
Its Concept of Order
NO COUNTRY HAS PLAYED such a decisive role in shaping contemporary world order as
the United States, nor professed such ambivalence about participation in it. Imbued
with the conviction that its course would shape the destiny of mankind, America has,
over its history, played a paradoxical role in world order: it expanded across a
continent in the name of Manifest Destiny while abjuring any imperial designs;
exerted a decisive influence on momentous events while disclaiming any motivation
of national interest; and became a superpower while disavowing any intention to
conduct power politics. America’s foreign policy has reflected the conviction that its
domestic principles were self-evidently universal and their application at all times
salutary; that the real challenge of American engagement abroad was not foreign
policy in the traditional sense but a project of spreading values that it believed all
other peoples aspired to replicate.
Inherent in this doctrine was a vision of extraordinary originality and allure. While
the Old World considered the New an arena for conquest to amass wealth and power,
in America a new nation arose affirming freedom of belief, expression, and action as
the essence of its national experience and character.
In Europe, a system of order had been founded on the careful sequestration of
moral absolutes from political endeavors—if only because attempts to impose one
faith or system of morality on the Continent’s diverse peoples had ended so
disastrously. In America, the proselytizing spirit was infused with an ingrained
distrust of established institutions and hierarchies. Thus the British philosopher and
Member of Parliament Edmund Burke would recall to his colleagues that the colonists
had exported “liberty according to English ideas” along with diverse dissenting
religious sects constrained in Europe (“the protestantism of the protestant religion”)
and “agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty.” These forces,
intermingling across an ocean, had produced a distinct national outlook: “In this
character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which
marks and distinguishes the whole.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who came to the United States in 1831
and wrote what remains one of the most perceptive books about the spirit and
attitudes of its people, traced the American character similarly to what he called its
“point of departure.” In New England, “we see the birth and growth of that local
independence which is still the mainspring and life blood of American freedom.”
Puritanism, he wrote, “was not just a religious doctrine; in many respects it shared the
most absolute democratic and republican theories.” This, he concluded, was the
product “of two perfectly distinct elements which elsewhere have often been at war
with one another but which in America it was somehow possible to incorporate with
each other, forming a marvelous combination. I mean the Spirit of Religion and the
Spirit of Freedom.”
The openness of American culture and its democratic principles made the United
States a model and a refuge for millions. At the same time, the conviction that
American principles are universal has introduced a challenging element into the
international system because it implies that governments not practicing them are less
than fully legitimate. This tenet—so ingrained in American thinking that it is only
occasionally put forward as official policy—suggests that a significant portion of the
world lives under a kind of unsatisfactory, probationary arrangement, and will one day
be redeemed; in the meantime, their relations with the world’s strongest power must
have some latent adversarial element to them.
These tensions have been inherent since the beginning of the American experience.
For Thomas Jefferson, America was not only a great power in the making but an
“empire for liberty”—an ever-expanding force acting on behalf of all humanity to
vindicate principles of good governance. As Jefferson wrote during his presidency:
We feel that we are acting under obligations not confined to the limits of our own society. It is
impossible not to be sensible that we are acting for all mankind; that circumstances denied to others,
but indulged to us, have imposed on us the duty of proving what is the degree of freedom and selfgovernment in which a society may venture to leave its individual members.
So defined, the spread of the United States and the success of its endeavors was
coterminous with the interests of humanity. Having doubled the size of the new
country through his shrewd engineering of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, in
retirement Jefferson “candidly confess[ed]” to President Monroe, “I have ever looked
on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of
States.” And to James Madison, Jefferson wrote, “We should then have only to
include the North [Canada] in our confederacy … and we should have such an empire
for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation: & I am persuaded no
constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self
government.” The empire envisaged by Jefferson and his colleagues differed, in their
minds, from the European empires, which they considered based on the subjugation
and oppression of foreign peoples. The empire imagined by Jefferson was in essence
North American and conceived as the extension of liberty. (And, in fact, whatever
may be said about the contradictions in this project or of the personal lives of its
Founders, as the United States expanded and thrived, so too did democracy, and the
aspiration toward it spread and took root across the hemisphere and the world.)
Despite such soaring ambitions, America’s favorable geography and vast resources
facilitated a perception that foreign policy was an optional activity. Secure behind two
great oceans, the United States was in a position to treat foreign policy as a series of
episodic challenges rather than as a permanent enterprise. Diplomacy and force, in
this conception, were distinct stages of activity, each following its own autonomous
rules. A doctrine of universal sweep was paired with an ambivalent attitude toward
countries—necessarily less fortunate than the United States—that felt the compulsion
to conduct foreign policy as a permanent exercise based on the elaboration of the
national interest and the balance of power.
Even after the United States assumed great-power status in the course of the
nineteenth century, these habits endured. Three times in as many generations, in the
two world wars and the Cold War, the United States took decisive action to shore up
international order against hostile and potentially terminal threats. In each case,
America preserved the Westphalian state system and the balance of power while
blaming the very institutions of that system for the outbreak of hostilities and
proclaiming a desire to construct an entirely new world. For much of this period, the
implicit goal of American strategy beyond the Western Hemisphere was to transform
the world in a manner that would make an American strategic role unnecessary.
From the beginning, America’s intrusion into European consciousness had forced a
reexamination of received wisdom; its settlement would open new vistas for
individuals promising to fundamentally reinvent world order. For the early settlers of
the New World, the Americas were a frontier of a Western civilization whose unity
was fracturing, a new stage on which to dramatize the possibility of a moral order.
These settlers left Europe not because they no longer believed in its centrality but
because they thought it had fallen short of its calling. As religious disputes and bloody
wars drove Europe in the Peace of Westphalia to the painful conclusion that its ideal
of a continent unified by a single divine governance would never be achieved,
America provided a place to do so on distant shores. Where Europe reconciled itself
to achieving security through equilibrium, Americans (as they began to think of
themselves) entertained dreams of unity and governance enabling a redeemed
purpose. The early Puritans spoke of demonstrating their virtue on the new continent
as the way to transform the lands of which they had taken leave. As John Winthrop, a
Puritan lawyer who left East Anglia to escape religious suppression, preached aboard
the Arbella in 1630, bound for New England, God intended America as an example
for “all people”:
We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our
enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may
the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.
The eyes of all people are upon us.
None doubted that humanity and its purpose would in some way be revealed and
fulfilled in America.
AMERICA ON THE WORLD STAGE
Setting out to affirm its independence, the United States defined itself as a new kind
of power. The Declaration of Independence put forth its principles and assumed as its
audience “the opinions of mankind.” In the opening essay of The Federalist Papers,
published in 1787, Alexander Hamilton described the new republic as “an empire in
many respects the most interesting in the world” whose success or failure would
prove the viability of self-governance anywhere. He treated this proposition not as a
novel interpretation but as a matter of common knowledge that “has been frequently
remarked”—an assertion all the more notable considering that the United States at the
time comprised only the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Georgia.
Even while propounding these doctrines, the Founders were sophisticated men who
understood the European balance of power and manipulated it to the new country’s
advantage. An alliance with France was enlisted in the war for independence from
Britain, then loosened in the aftermath, as France undertook revolution and embarked
on a European crusade in which the United States had no direct interest. When
President Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address—delivered in the midst of the
French revolutionary wars—counseled that the United States “steer clear of
permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world” and instead “safely trust to
temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies,” he was issuing not so much a
moral pronouncement as a canny judgment about how to exploit America’s
comparative advantage: the United States, a fledgling power safe behind oceans, did
not have the need or the resources to embroil itself in continental controversies over
the balance of power. It joined alliances not to protect a concept of international order
but simply to serve its national interests strictly defined. As long as the European
balance held, America was better served by a strategy of preserving its freedom of
maneuver and consolidating at home—a course of conduct substantially followed by
former colonial countries (for example, India) after their independence a century and
a half later.
This strategy prevailed for a century, following the last short war with Britain in
1812, allowing the United States to accomplish what no other country was in a
position to conceive: it became a great power and a nation of continental scope
through the sheer accumulation of domestic power, with a foreign policy focused
almost entirely on the negative goal of keeping foreign developments as far at bay as
possible.
The United States soon set out to expand this maxim to all of the Americas. A tacit
accommodation with Britain, the premier naval power, allowed the United States to
declare in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 its entire hemisphere off-limits for foreign
colonization, decades before it had anything close to the power to enforce so
sweeping a pronouncement. In the United States, the Monroe Doctrine was
interpreted as the extension of the War of Independence, sheltering the Western
Hemisphere from the operation of the European balance of power. No Latin American
countries were consulted (not least because few existed at the time). As the frontiers
of the nation crept across the continent, the expansion of America was seen as the
operation of a kind of law of nature. When the United States practiced what elsewhere
was defined as imperialism, Americans gave it another name: “the fulfillment of our
manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free
development of our yearly multiplying millions.” The acquisition of vast tracts of
territory was treated as a commercial transaction in the purchase of the Louisiana
Territory from France and as the inevitable consequence of this Manifest Destiny in
the case of Mexico. It was not until the close of the nineteenth century, in the SpanishAmerican War of 1898, that the United States engaged in full-scale hostilities
overseas with another major power.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States had the good fortune of being
able to address its challenges sequentially, and frequently to the point of definitive
resolution. The drive to the Pacific and the establishment of favorable northern and
southern borders; the vindication of the Union in the Civil War; the projection of
power against the Spanish Empire and the inheritance of many of its possessions:
each took place as a discrete phase of activity, after which Americans returned to the
task of building prosperity and refining democracy. The American experience
supported the assumption that peace was the natural condition of humanity, prevented
only by other countries’ unreasonableness or ill will. The European style of statecraft,
with its shifting alliances and elastic maneuvers on the spectrum between peace and
hostility, seemed to the American mind a perverse departure from common sense. In
this view, the Old World’s entire system of foreign policy and international order was
an outgrowth of despotic caprice or a malignant cultural penchant for aristocratic
ceremony and secretive maneuver. America would forgo these practices, disclaiming
colonial interests, remaining warily at arm’s length from the European-designed
international system, and relating to other countries on the basis of mutual interests
and fair dealing.
John Quincy Adams summed up these sentiments in 1821, in a tone verging on
exasperation at other countries’ determination to pursue more complicated and
devious courses:
America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often
fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.
She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the
language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a
century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and
maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict
has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.
Because America sought “not dominion, but liberty,” it should avoid, Adams argued,
involvement in all the contests of the European world. America would maintain its
uniquely reasonable and disinterested stance, seeking freedom and human dignity by
offering moral sympathy from afar. The assertion of the universality of American
principles was coupled with the refusal to vindicate them outside the Western (that is,
American) Hemisphere:
[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and
independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
In the Western Hemisphere, no such restraint prevailed. As early as 1792, the
Massachusetts minister and geographer Jedidiah Morse argued that the United States
—whose existence had been internationally recognized for less than a decade and
whose Constitution was only four years old—marked the apogee of history. The new
country, he predicted, would expand westward, spread principles of liberty throughout
the Americas, and become the crowning achievement of human civilization:
Besides, it is well known that empire has been travelling from east to west. Probably her last and
broadest feat will be America … [W]e cannot but anticipate the period, as not far distant, when the
AMERICAN EMPIRE will comprehend millions of souls, west of the Mississippi.
All the while America ardently maintained that the endeavor was not territorial
expansion in the traditional sense but the divinely ordained spread of principles of
liberty. In 1839, as the official United States Exploring Expedition reconnoitered the
far reaches of the hemisphere and the South Pacific, the United States Magazine and
Democratic Review published an article heralding the United States as “the great
nation of futurity,” disconnected from and superior to everything in history that had
preceded it:
The American people having derived their origin from many other nations, and the Declaration of
National Independence being entirely based on the great principle of human equality, these facts
demonstrate at once our disconnected position as regards any other nation; that we have, in reality, but
little connection with the past history of any of them, and still less with all antiquity, its glories, or its
crimes. On the contrary, our national birth was the beginning of a new history.
The success of the United States, the author confidently predicted, would serve as a
standing rebuke to all other forms of government, ushering in a future democratic age.
A great, free union, divinely sanctioned and towering above all other states, would
spread its principles throughout the Western Hemisphere—a power destined to
become greater in scope and in moral purpose than any previous human endeavor:
We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march?
Providence is with us, and no earthly power can.
The United States was thus not simply a country but an engine of God’s plan and the
epitome of world order.
In 1845, when American westward expansion embroiled the country in a dispute
with Britain over the Oregon Territory and with Mexico over the Republic of Texas
(which had seceded from Mexico and declared its intent to join the United States), the
magazine concluded that the annexation of Texas was a defensive measure against the
foes of liberty. The author reasoned that “California will probably, next fall away”
from Mexico, and an American sweep north into Canada would likely follow. The
continental force of America, he reasoned, would eventually render Europe’s balance
of power inconsequential by its sheer countervailing weight. Indeed the author of the
Democratic Review article foresaw a day, one hundred years hence—that is, 1945—
when the United States would outweigh even a unified, hostile Europe:
Though they should cast into the opposite scale all the bayonets and cannon, not only of France and
England, but of Europe entire, how would it kick the beam against the simple, solid weight of the two
hundred and fifty, or three hundred millions—and American millions—destined to gather beneath the
flutter of the stripes and stars, in the fast hastening year of the Lord 1945!
This is, in fact, what transpired (except that the Canadian border was peacefully
demarcated, and England was not part of a hostile Europe in 1945, but rather an ally).
Bombastic and prophetic, the vision of America transcending and counterbalancing
the harsh doctrines of the Old World would inspire a nation—often while being
largely ignored elsewhere or prompting consternation—and reshape the course of
history.
As the United States experienced total war—unseen in Europe for half a century—
in the Civil War, with stakes so desperate that both North and South breached the
principle of hemispheric isolation to involve especially France and Britain in their war
efforts, Americans interpreted their conflict as a singular event of transcendent moral
significance. Reflecting the view of that conflict as a terminal endeavor, the
vindication of “the last best hope of earth,” the United States built up by far the
world’s largest and most formidable army and used it to wage total war, then, within a
year and a half of the end of the war, all but disbanded it, reducing a force of more
than one million men to roughly 65,000. In 1890, the American army ranked
fourteenth in the world, after Bulgaria’s, and the American navy was smaller than
Italy’s, a country with one-thirteenth of America’s industrial strength. As late as the
presidential inaugural of 1885, President Grover Cleveland described American
foreign policy in terms of detached neutrality and as entirely different from the selfinterested policies pursued by older, less enlightened states. He rejected
any departure from that foreign policy commended by the history, the traditions, and the prosperity of
our Republic. It is the policy of independence, favored by our position and defended by our known
love of justice and by our power. It is the policy of peace suitable to our interests. It is the policy of
neutrality, rejecting any share in foreign broils and ambitions upon other continents and repelling their
intrusion here.
A decade later, America’s world role having expanded, the tone had become more
insistent and considerations of power loomed larger. In a border dispute in 1895
between Venezuela and British Guiana, Secretary of State Richard Olney warned
Great Britain—then still considered the premier world power—of the inequality of
military strength in the Western Hemisphere: “To-day the United States is practically
sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law.” America’s “infinite resources
combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically
invulnerable as against any or all other powers.”
America was now a major power, no longer a fledgling republic on the fringes of
world affairs. American policy no longer limited itself to neutrality; it felt obliged to
translate its long-proclaimed universal moral relevance into a broader geopolitical
role. When, later that year, the Spanish Empire’s colonial subjects in Cuba rose in
revolt, a reluctance to see an anti-imperial rebellion crushed on America’s doorstep
mingled with the conviction that the time had come for the United States to
demonstrate its ability and will to act as a great power, at a time when the importance
of European nations was in part judged by the extent of their overseas empires. When
the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor in 1898 under unexplained
circumstances, widespread popular demand for military intervention led President
McKinley to declare war on Spain, the first military engagement by the United States
with another major power overseas.
Few Americans imagined how different the world order would be after this
“splendid little war,” as John Hay, then the American ambassador in London,
described it in a letter to Theodore Roosevelt, at that time a rising political reformer in
New York City. After just three and a half months of military conflict, the United
States had ejected the Spanish Empire from the Caribbean, occupied Cuba, and
annexed Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines. President McKinley stuck
to established verities in justifying the enterprise. With no trace of self-consciousness,
he presented the war that had established America as a great power in two oceans as a
uniquely unselfish mission. “The American flag has not been planted in foreign soil to
acquire more territory,” he explained in a remark emblazoned on his reelection poster
of 1900, “but for humanity’s sake.”
The Spanish-American War marked America’s entry into great-power politics and
into the contests it had so long disdained. The American presence was intercontinental
in extent, stretching from the Caribbean to the maritime waters of Southeast Asia. By
virtue of its size, its location, and its resources, the United States would be among the
most consequential global players. Its actions would now be scrutinized, tested, and,
on occasion, resisted by the more traditional powers already sparring over the
territories and sea-lanes into which American interests now protruded.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT: AMERICA AS A WORLD POWER
The first President to grapple systematically with the implications of America’s
world role was Theodore Roosevelt, who succeeded in 1901 upon McKinley’s
assassination, after a remarkably rapid political ascent culminating in the vice
presidency. Hard-driving, ferociously ambitious, highly educated, and widely read, a
brilliant cosmopolitan cultivating the air of a ranch hand and subtle far beyond the
estimation of his contemporaries, Roosevelt saw the United States as potentially the
greatest power—called by its fortuitous political, geographic, and cultural inheritance
to an essential world role. He pursued a foreign policy concept that, unprecedentedly
for America, based itself largely on geopolitical considerations. According to it,
America as the twentieth century progressed would play a global version of the role
Britain had performed in Europe in the nineteenth century: maintaining peace by
guaranteeing equilibrium, hovering offshore of Eurasia, and tilting the balance against
any power threatening to dominate a strategic region. As he declared in his 1905
inaugural address,
To us as a people it has been granted to lay the foundations of our national life in a new
continent … Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from us. We have duties to
others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk neither. We have become a great nation, forced by the
fact of its greatness into relations with the other nations of the earth, and we must behave as beseems a
people with such responsibilities.
Educated partly in Europe and knowledgeable about its history (he wrote a
definitive account of the naval component of the War of 1812 while still in his
twenties), Roosevelt was on cordial terms with prominent “Old World” elites and was
well versed in traditional principles of strategy, including the balance of power.
Roosevelt shared his compatriots’ assessment of America’s special character. Yet he
was convinced that to fulfill its calling, the United States would need to enter a world
in which power, and not only principle, shared in governing the course of events.
In Roosevelt’s view, the international system was in constant flux. Ambition, selfinterest, and war were not simply the products of foolish misconceptions of which
Americans could disabuse traditional rulers; they were a natural human condition that
required purposeful American engagement in international affairs. International
society was like a frontier settlement without an effective police force:
In new and wild communities where there is violence, an honest man must protect himself; and until
other means of securing his safety are devised, it is both foolish and wicked to persuade him to
surrender his arms while the men who are dangerous to the community retain theirs.
This essentially Hobbesian analysis delivered in, of all occasions, a Nobel Peace
Prize lecture, marked America’s departure from the proposition that neutrality and
pacific intent were adequate to serve the peace. For Roosevelt, if a nation was unable
or unwilling to act to defend its own interests, it could not expect others to respect
them.
Inevitably, Roosevelt was impatient with many of the pieties that dominated
American thinking on foreign policy. The newly emerging extension of international
law could not be efficacious unless backed by force, he concluded, and disarmament,
emerging as an international topic, was an illusion:
As yet there is no likelihood of establishing any kind of international power … which can effectively
check wrong-doing, and in these circumstances it would be both foolish and an evil thing for a great
and free nation to deprive itself of the power to protect its own rights and even in exceptional cases to
stand up for the rights of others. Nothing would more promote iniquity … than for the free and
enlightened peoples … deliberately to render themselves powerless while leaving every despotism and
barbarism armed.
Liberal societies, Roosevelt believed, tended to underestimate the elements of
antagonism and strife in international affairs. Implying a Darwinian concept of the
survival of the fittest, Roosevelt wrote to the British diplomat Cecil Spring Rice,
It is … a melancholy fact that the countries which are most humanitarian, which are most interested in
internal improvement, tend to grow weaker compared with the other countries which possess a less
altruistic civilization …
I abhor and despise that pseudo-humanitarianism which treats advance of civilization as necessarily
and rightfully implying a weakening of the fighting spirit and which therefore invites destruction of the
advanced civilization by some less-advanced type.
If America disclaimed strategic interests, this only meant that more aggressive powers
would overrun the world, eventually undermining the foundations of American
prosperity. Therefore, “we need a large navy, composed not merely of cruisers, but
containing also a full proportion of powerful battle-ships, able to meet those of any
other nation,” as well as a demonstrated willingness to use it.
In Roosevelt’s view, foreign policy was the art of adapting American policy to
balance global power discreetly and resolutely, tilting events in the direction of the
national interest. He saw the United States—economically vibrant, the only country
without threatening regional competitors, and distinctively both an Atlantic and a
Pacific power—as in a unique position to “grasp the points of vantage which will
enable us to have our say in deciding the destiny of the oceans of the East and the
West.” Shielding the Western Hemisphere from outside powers and intervening to
preserve an equilibrium of forces in every other strategic region, America would
emerge as the decisive guardian of the global balance and, through this, international
peace.
This was an astonishingly ambitious vision for a country that had heretofore viewed
its isolation as its defining characteristic and that had conceived of its navy as
primarily an instrument of coastal defense. But through a remarkable foreign policy
performance, Roosevelt succeeded—at least temporarily—in redefining America’s
international role. In the Americas, he went beyond the Monroe Doctrine’s wellestablished opposition to foreign intervention. He pledged the United States not only
to repel foreign colonial designs in the Western Hemisphere—personally threatening
war to deter an impending German encroachment on Venezuela—but also, in effect,
to preempt them. Thus he proclaimed the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe
Doctrine, to the effect that the United States had the right to intervene preemptively in
the domestic affairs of other Western Hemisphere nations to remedy flagrant cases of
“wrongdoing or impotence.” Roosevelt described the principle as follows:
All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any
country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows
that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it
keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic
wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may
in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western
Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States,
however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an
international police power.
As in the original Monroe Doctrine, no Latin American countries were consulted. The
corollary also amounted to a U.S. security umbrella for the Western Hemisphere.
Henceforth no outside power would be able to use force to redress its grievances in
the Americas; it would be obliged to work through the United States, which assigned
itself the task of maintaining order.
Backing up this ambitious concept was the new Panama Canal, which enabled the
United States to shift its navy between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans without the
long circumnavigations of Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. Begun in
1904 with American funds and engineering expertise on territory seized from
Colombia by means of a local rebellion supported by the United States, and controlled
by a long-term American lease of the Canal Zone, the Panama Canal, officially
opened in 1914, would stimulate trade while affording the United States a decisive
advantage in any military conflict in the region. (It would also bar any foreign navy
from using a similar route except with U.S. permission.) Hemispheric security was to
be the linchpin of an American world role based on the muscular assertion of
America’s national interest.
So long as Britain’s naval power remained dominant, it would see to the
equilibrium in Europe. During the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1904–5, Roosevelt
demonstrated how he would apply his concept of diplomacy to the Asian equilibrium
and, if necessary, globally. For Roosevelt, the issue was the balance of power in the
Pacific, not flaws in Russia’s czarist autocracy (though he had no illusions about
these). Because the unchecked eastward advance into Manchuria and Korea of Russia
—a country that, in Roosevelt’s words, “pursued a policy of consistent opposition to
us in the East, and of literally fathomless mendacity”—was inimical to American
interests, Roosevelt at first welcomed the Japanese military victories. He described
the total destruction of the Russian fleet, which had sailed around the world to its
demise in the Battle of Tsushima, as Japan “playing our game.” But when the scale of
Japan’s victories threatened to overwhelm the Russian position in Asia entirely,
Roosevelt had second thoughts. Though he admired Japan’s modernization—and
perhaps because of it—he began to treat an expansionist Japanese Empire as a
potential threat to the American position in Southeast Asia and concluded that it
might someday “make demands on [the] Hawaiian Islands.”
Roosevelt, though in essence a partisan of Russia, undertook a mediation of a
conflict in distant Asia underlining America’s role as an Asian power. The Treaty of
Portsmouth in 1905 was a quintessential expression of Roosevelt’s balance-of-power
diplomacy. It limited Japanese expansion, prevented a Russian collapse, and achieved
an outcome in which Russia, as he described it, “should be left face to face with Japan
so that each may have a moderative action on the other.” For his mediation, Roosevelt
was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American to be so honored.
Roosevelt treated the achievement not as ushering in a static condition of peace but
as the beginning of an American role in managing the Asia-Pacific equilibrium. When
Roosevelt began to receive threatening intelligence about Japan’s “war party,” he set
out to bring America’s resolve to its attention, but with exquisite subtlety. He
dispatched sixteen battleships painted white to signify a peaceful mission—called the
Great White Fleet—on a “practice cruise around the world,” paying friendly visits to
foreign ports and serving as a reminder that the United States could now deploy
overwhelming naval power to any region. As he wrote to his son, the show of force
was intended to warn the aggressive faction in Japan, thus achieving peace through
strength: “I do not believe there will be war with Japan, but I do believe that there is
enough chance of war to make it eminently wise to insure against it by building such a
navy as to forbid Japan’s hoping for success.”
Japan, while afforded a massive display of American naval power, was at the same
time to be treated with utmost courtesy. Roosevelt cautioned the Admiral leading the
fleet that he was to go to the limit to avoid offending the sensibilities of the country he
was deterring:
I wish to impress upon you, what I do not suppose is necessary, to see to it that none of our men does
anything out of the way while in Japan. If you give the enlisted men leave while at Tokyo or anywhere
else in Japan be careful to choose only those upon whom you can absolutely depend. There must be no
suspicion of insolence or rudeness on our part … Aside from the loss of a ship I had far rather that we
were insulted than that we insult anybody under these peculiar conditions.
America would, in the words of Roosevelt’s favorite proverb, “speak softly and carry
a big stick.”
In the Atlantic, Roosevelt’s apprehensions were primarily directed at Germany’s
increasing power and ambitions, especially its large naval building program. If British
command of the seas was upset, so would be Britain’s ability to maintain the
European equilibrium. He saw Germany as gradually overwhelming its neighbors’
countervailing force. At the outbreak of World War I, Roosevelt from his retirement
called on America to increase its military spending and enter the conflict early on the
side of the Triple Entente—Britain, France, and Russia—lest the threat spread to the
Western Hemisphere. As he wrote in 1914 to an American German sympathizer:
Do you not believe that if Germany won in this war, smashed the English Fleet and destroyed the
British Empire, within a year or two she would insist upon taking a dominant position in South
America …? I believe so. Indeed I know so. For the Germans with whom I have talked, when once we
could talk intimately, accepted this view with a frankness that bordered on the cynical.
It was through the contending ambitions of major powers, Roosevelt believed, that
the ultimate nature of world order would be decided. Humane values would be best
preserved by the geopolitical success of liberal countries in pursuing their interests
and maintaining the credibility of their threats. Where they prevailed in the strife of
international competition, civilization would spread and be strengthened, with
salutary effects.
Roosevelt adopted a generally skeptical view of abstract invocations of
international goodwill. He averred that it did no good, and often active harm, for
America to make grand pronouncements of principle if it was not in a position to
enforce them against determined opposition. “Our words must be judged by our
deeds.” When the industrialist Andrew Carnegie urged Roosevelt to commit the
United States more fully to disarmament and international human rights, Roosevelt
replied, invoking some principles of which Kautilya would have approved,
We must always remember that it would be a fatal thing for the great free peoples to reduce themselves
to impotence and leave the despotisms and barbarisms armed. It would be safe to do so if there was
some system of international police; but there is now no such system … The one thing I won’t do is to
bluff when I cannot make good; to bluster and threaten and then fail to take the action if my words
need to be backed up.
Had Roosevelt been succeeded by a disciple—or perhaps had he won the election
of 1912—he might have introduced America into the Westphalian system of world
order or an adaptation of it. In this course of events, America almost certainly would
have sought an earlier conclusion to World War I compatible with the European
balance of power—along the lines of the Russo-Japanese Treaty—that left Germany
defeated but indebted to American restraint and surrounded by sufficient force to
deter future adventurism. Such an outcome, before the bloodletting had assumed
nihilistic dimensions, would have changed the course of history and forestalled the
devastation of Europe’s culture and political self-confidence.
In the event, Roosevelt died a respected statesman and conservationist but founded
no foreign policy school of thought. He had no major disciple, among either the
public or his successors as President. And Roosevelt did not win the 1912 election,
because he split the conservative vote with William Howard Taft, the incumbent
President.
It was probably inevitable that Roosevelt’s attempt to preserve his legacy by
running for a third term would destroy any chance for it. Tradition matters because it
is not given to societies to proceed through history as if they had no past and as if
every course of action were available to them. They may deviate from the previous
trajectory only within a finite margin. The great statesmen act at the outer limit of that
margin. If they fall short, the society stagnates. If they exceed it, they lose the capacity
to shape posterity. Theodore Roosevelt was operating at the absolute margin of his
society’s capabilities. Without him, American foreign policy returned to the vision of
the shining city on a hill—not participation in, much less domination of, a geopolitical
equilibrium. Nevertheless, America paradoxically fulfilled the leading role Roosevelt
had envisioned for it, and within his lifetime. But it did so on behalf of principles
Roosevelt derided and under the guidance of a president whom Roosevelt despised.
WOODROW WILSON: AMERICA AS THE WORLD’S CONSCIENCE
Emerging victorious in the 1912 election with just 42 percent of the popular vote
and only two years after his transition from academia to national politics, Woodrow
Wilson turned the vision America had asserted largely for itself into an operational
program applicable to the entire world. The world was sometimes inspired,
occasionally puzzled, yet always obliged to pay attention, both by the power of
America and by the scope of his vision.
When America entered World War I, a conflict which started a process that would
destroy the European state system, it did so not on the basis of Roosevelt’s
geopolitical vision but under a banner of moral universality not seen in Europe since
the religious wars three centuries before. This new universality proclaimed by the
American President sought to universalize a system of governance that existed only in
the North Atlantic countries and, in the form heralded by Wilson, only in the United
States. Imbued by America’s historic sense of moral mission, Wilson proclaimed that
America had intervened not to restore the European balance of power but to “make
the world safe for democracy”—in other words, to base world order on the
compatibility of domestic institutions reflecting the American example. Though this
concept ran counter to their tradition, Europe’s leaders accepted it as the price of
America’s entry into the war.
Setting out his vision of the peace, Wilson denounced the balance of power for the
preservation of which his new allies had originally entered the war. He rejected
established diplomatic methods (decried as “secret diplomacy”) as having been a
major contributing cause of the conflict. In their place he put forward, in a series of
visionary speeches, a new concept of international peace based on a mixture of
traditional American assumptions and a new insistence on pushing them toward a
definitive and global implementation. This has been, with minor variations, the
American program for world order ever since.
Like many American leaders before him, Wilson asserted that a divine dispensation
had made the United States a different kind of nation. “It was as if,” Wilson told the
graduating class at West Point in 1916, “in the Providence of God a continent had
been kept unused and waiting for a peaceful people who loved liberty and the rights
of men more than they loved anything else, to come and set up an unselfish
commonwealth.”
Nearly all of Wilson’s predecessors in the presidency would have subscribed to
such a belief. Where Wilson differed was in his assertion that an international order
based on it could be achieved within a single lifetime, even a single administration.
John Quincy Adams had lauded the special American commitment to self-government
and international fair play but warned his countrymen against seeking to impose these
virtues outside the Western Hemisphere among other powers not similarly inclined.
Wilson was playing for higher stakes and set a more urgent objective. The Great War,
he told Congress, would be “the culminating and final war for human liberty.”
When Wilson took the oath of office, he had sought for America to remain neutral
in international affairs, offering its services as disinterested mediator and promoting a
system of international arbitration meant to forestall war. On assuming the presidency
in 1913, Woodrow Wilson had launched a “new diplomacy,” authorizing his Secretary
of State, William Jennings Bryan, to negotiate an array of international arbitration
treaties. Bryan’s efforts produced thirty-some such treaties in 1913 and 1914. In
general, they provided that every otherwise insoluble dispute should be submitted to a
disinterested commission for investigation; there would be no resort to arms until a
recommendation had been submitted to the parties. A “cooling off” period was to be
established in which diplomatic solutions could prevail over nationalist passions.
There is no record that any such treaty was ever applied to a concrete issue. By July
1914, Europe and much of the rest of the world were at war.
When, in 1917, Wilson declared that the grave outrages of one party, Germany, had
obliged the United States to join the war in “association” with the belligerents of the
other side (Wilson declined to contemplate an “alliance”), he maintained that
America’s purposes were not self-interested but universal:
We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for
ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the
champions of the rights of mankind.
The premise of Wilson’s grand strategy was that all peoples around the world were
motivated by the same values as America:
These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others. And they are also the
principles and policies of forward looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of
every enlightened community.
It was the scheming of autocracies, not any inherent contradiction between differing
national interests or aspirations, that caused conflict. If all facts were made openly
available and publics were offered a choice, ordinary people would opt for peace—a
view also held by the Enlightenment philosopher Kant (described earlier) and by the
contemporary advocates of an open Internet. As Wilson told Congress in April 1917,
in his request for a declaration of war against Germany:
Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies or set the course of intrigue to bring
about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an opportunity to strike and make conquest.
Such designs can be successfully worked only under cover and where no one has the right to ask
questions. Cunningly contrived plans of deception or aggression, carried, it may be, from generation to
generation, can be worked out and kept from the light only within the privacy of courts or behind the
carefully guarded confidences of a narrow and privileged class. They are happily impossible where
public opinion commands and insists upon full information concerning all the nation’s affairs.
The procedural aspect of the balance of power, its neutrality as to the moral merit
of contending parties, was therefore immoral as well as dangerous. Not only was
democracy the best form of governance; it was also the sole guarantee for permanent
peace. As such, American intervention was intended not simply to thwart Germany’s
war aims but, Wilson explained in a subsequent speech, to alter Germany’s system of
government. The goal was not primarily strategic, for strategy was an expression of
governance:
The worst that can happen to the detriment of the German people is this, that if they should still, after
the war is over, continue to be obliged to live under ambitious and intriguing masters interested to
disturb the peace of the world, men or classes of men whom the other peoples of the world could not
trust, it might be impossible to admit them to the partnership of nations which must henceforth
guarantee the world’s peace.
In keeping with this view, when Germany declared itself ready to discuss an
armistice, Wilson refused to negotiate until the Kaiser abdicated. International peace
required “the destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can separately,
secretly and of its single choice disturb the peace of the world; or, if it cannot be
presently destroyed, at the least its reduction to virtual impotence.” A rules-based,
peaceful international order was achievable, but because “no autocratic government
could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants,” peace required “that
autocracy must first be shown the utter futility of its claims to power or leadership in
the modern world.”
The spread of democracy, in Wilson’s view, would be an automatic consequence of
implementing the principle of self-determination. Since the Congress of Vienna, wars
had ended with an agreement on the restoration of the balance of power by territorial
adjustments. Wilson’s concept of world order called instead for “selfdetermination”—for each nation, defined by ethnic and linguistic unity, to be given a
state. Only through self-government, he assessed, could peoples express their
underlying will toward international harmony. And once they had achieved
independence and national unity, Wilson argued, they would no longer have an
incentive to practice aggressive or self-interested policies. Statesmen following the
principle of self-determination would not “dare … attempting any such covenants of
selfishness and compromise as were entered into at the Congress of Vienna,” where
elite representatives of the great powers had redrawn international borders in secret,
favoring equilibrium over popular aspirations. The world would thus enter
an age … which rejects the standards of national selfishness that once governed the counsels of nations
and demands that they shall give way to a new order of things in which the only questions will be: “Is
it right?” “Is it just?” “Is it in the interest of mankind?”
Scant evidence supported the Wilsonian premise that public opinion was more
attuned to the overall “interest of mankind” than the traditional statesmen whom
Wilson castigated. The European countries that entered the war in 1914 all had
representative institutions of various influence. (The German parliament was elected
by universal suffrage.) In every country, the war was greeted by universal enthusiasm
with nary even token opposition in any of the elected bodies. After the war, the
publics of democratic France and Britain demanded a punitive peace, ignoring their
own historical experience that a stable European order had never come about except
through an ultimate reconciliation of victor and defeated. Restraint was much more
the attribute of the aristocrats who negotiated at the Congress of Vienna, if only
because they shared common values and experiences. Leaders who had been shaped
by a domestic policy of balancing a multitude of pressure groups were arguably more
attuned to the moods of the moment or to the dictates of national dignity than to
abstract principles of the benefit of humanity.
The concept of transcending war by giving each nation a state, similarly admirable
as a general concept, faced analogous difficulties in practice. Ironically, the redrawing
of Europe’s map on the new principle of linguistically based national selfdetermination, largely at Wilson’s behest, enhanced Germany’s geopolitical prospects.
Before the war, Germany was surrounded by three major powers (France, Russia, and
Austria-Hungary), constraining any territorial expansion. Now it faced a collection of
small states built on the principle of self-determination—only partially applied,
because in Eastern Europe and the Balkans the nationalities were so jumbled that each
new state included other nationalities, compounding their strategic weakness with
ideological vulnerability. On the eastern flank of Europe’s disaffected central power
were no longer great masses—which at the Congress of Vienna had been deemed
essential to restrain the then-aggressor France—but, as Britain’s Prime Minister Lloyd
George ruefully assessed, “a number of small states, many of them consisting of
people who have never previously set up a stable government for themselves, but each
of them containing large masses of Germans clamoring for reunion with their native
land.”
The implementation of Wilson’s vision was to be fostered by the construction of
new international institutions and practices allowing for the peaceful resolution of
disputes. The League of Nations would replace the previous concert of powers.
Forswearing the traditional concept of an equilibrium of competing interests, League
members would implement “not a balance of power, but a community of power; not
organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.” It was understandable that after
a war that had been caused by the confrontation of two rigid alliance systems,
statesmen might seek a better alternative. But the “community of power” of which
Wilson was speaking replaced rigidity with unpredictability.
What Wilson meant by community of power was a new concept that later became
known as “collective security.” In traditional international policy, states with
congruent interests or similar apprehensions might assign themselves a special role in
guaranteeing the peace and form an alliance—as they had, for example, after the
defeat of Napoleon. Such arrangements were always designed to deal with specific
strategic threats, either named or implied: for example, a revanchist France after the
Congress of Vienna. The League of Nations, by contrast, would be founded on a
moral principle, the universal opposition to military aggression as such, whatever its
source, its target, or its proclaimed justification. It was aimed not at a specific issue
but at the violation of norms. Because the definition of norms has proved to be subject
to divergent interpretations, the operation of collective security is, in that sense,
unpredictable.
All states, in the League of Nations concept, would pledge themselves to the
peaceful resolution of disputes and would subordinate themselves to the neutral
application of a shared set of rules of fair conduct. If states differed in their view as to
their rights or duties, they would submit their claims to arbitration by a panel of
disinterested parties. If a country violated this principle and used force to press its
claims, it would be labeled an aggressor. League members would then unite to resist
the belligerent party as a violator of the general peace. No alliances, “separate
interests,” secret agreements, or “plottings of inner circles” would be permitted within
the League, because this would obstruct the neutral application of the system’s rules.
International order would be refounded instead on “open covenants of peace, openly
arrived at.”
The distinction Wilson made between alliances and collective security—the key
element of the League of Nations system—was central to dilemmas that have
followed ever since. An alliance comes about as an agreement on specific facts or
expectations. It creates a formal obligation to act in a precise way in defined
contingencies. It brings about a strategic obligation fulfillable in an agreed manner. It
arises out of a consciousness of shared interests, and the more parallel those interests
are, the more cohesive the alliance will be. Collective security, by contrast, is a legal
construct addressed to no specific contingency. It defines no particular obligations
except joint action of some kind when the rules of peaceful international order are
violated. In practice, action must be negotiated from case to case.
Alliances grow out of a consciousness of a defined common interest identified in
advance. Collective security declares itself opposed to any aggressive conduct
anywhere within the purview of the participating states that, in the proposed League
of Nations, involved every recognized state. In the event of a violation, such a
collective security system must distill its common purpose after the fact, out of
variegated national interests. Yet the idea that in such situations countries will identify
violations of peace identically and be prepared to act in common against them is
belied by the experience of history. From Wilson to the present, in the League of
Nations or its successor, the United Nations, the military actions that can be classed as
collective security in the conceptual sense were the Korean War and the first Iraq War,
and came about in both cases because the United States had made clear that it would
act unilaterally if necessary (in fact, it had in both cases started deployments before
there was a formal UN decision). Rather than inspire an American decision, the
United Nations decision ratified it. The commitment to support the United States was
more a means to gain influence over American actions—already in train—than the
expression of a moral consensus.
The balance-of-power system collapsed with the outbreak of World War I because
the alliances it spawned had no flexibility, and it was indiscriminately applied to
peripheral issues, thereby exacerbating all conflicts. The system of collective security
demonstrated the opposite failing when confronted by the initial steps toward World
War II. The League of Nations was impotent in the face of the dismemberment of
Czechoslovakia, the Italian attack on Abyssinia, the German derogation of the
Locarno Treaty, and the Japanese invasion of China. Its definition of aggression was
so vague, the reluctance to undertake common action so deep, that it proved
inoperative even against flagrant threats to peace. Collective security has repeatedly
revealed itself to be unworkable in situations that most seriously threaten international
peace and security. (For example, during the Middle East war of 1973, the UN
Security Council did not meet, by collusion among the permanent members, until a
ceasefire had been negotiated between Washington and Moscow.)
Nevertheless, Wilson’s legacy has so shaped American thinking that American
leaders have conflated collective security with alliances. When explaining the nascent
Atlantic Alliance system after World War II to a wary Congress, administration
spokesmen insisted on describing the NATO alliance as the pure implementation of
the doctrine of collective security. They submitted an analysis to the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee tracing the difference between historic alliances and the NATO
treaty, which held that NATO was not concerned with the defense of territory (surely
news to America’s European allies). Its conclusion was that the North Atlantic Treaty
“is directed against no one; it is directed solely against aggression. It seeks not to
influence any shifting ‘balance of power’ but to strengthen the ‘balance of principle.’”
(One can imagine the gleam in Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s eyes—an astute
student of history, he knew far better—when he presented a treaty designed to get
around the weaknesses of the doctrine of collective security to Congress as a measure
to implement them.)
In retirement, Theodore Roosevelt deplored Wilson’s attempts at the beginning of
World War I to remain aloof from the unfolding conflict in Europe. He then, at its end,
questioned the claims made on behalf of the League of Nations. After armistice was
declared in November 1918, Roosevelt wrote,
I am for such a League provided we don’t expect too much from it … I am not willing to play the part
which even Aesop held up to derision when he wrote of how the wolves and the sheep agreed to
disarm, and how the sheep as a guarantee of good faith sent away the watchdogs, and were then
forthwith eaten by the wolves.
The test of Wilsonianism has never been whether the world has managed to
enshrine peace through sufficiently detailed rules with a broad enough base of
signatories. The essential question has been what to do when these rules were violated
or, more challengingly, manipulated to ends contrary to their spirit. If international
order was a legal system operating before the jury of public opinion, what if an
aggressor chose conflict on an issue that the democratic publics regarded as too
obscure to warrant involvement—for example, a border dispute between Italy’s
colonies in East Africa and the independent Empire of Abyssinia? If two sides
violated the proscription against force and the international community cut off arms
shipments to both parties as a result, this would often allow the stronger party to
prevail. If a party “legally” withdrew from the mechanism of peaceful international
order and declared itself no longer bound by its strictures—as with Germany’s,
Japan’s, and Italy’s eventual withdrawal from the League of Nations, the Washington
Naval Treaty in 1922, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928, or in our own day the
defiance of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty by proliferating countries—were the
status quo powers authorized to use force to punish this defiance, or should they
attempt to coax the renegade power back into the system? Or simply ignore the
challenge? And would a course of appeasement not then provide rewards for
defiance? Above all, were there “legal” outcomes that should nonetheless be resisted
because they violated other principles of military or political equilibrium—for
example, the popularly ratified “self-determination” of Austria and the Germanspeaking communities of the Czechoslovak Republic to merge with Nazi Germany in
1938, or Japan’s concoction of a supposedly self-determining Manchukuo (“Manchu
Country”) in 1932 carved from northeastern China? Were the rules and principles
themselves the international order, or were they a scaffolding on top of a geopolitical
structure capable of—indeed requiring—more sophisticated management?
THE “OLD DIPLOMACY” had sought to counterbalance the interests of rival states and the
passions of antagonistic nationalisms in an equilibrium of contending forces. In that
spirit, it had brought France back into the European order after the defeat of
Napoleon, inviting it to participate in the Congress of Vienna even while ensuring that
it would be surrounded by great masses to contain any future temptations to
aggrandizement. For the new diplomacy, which promised to reorder international
affairs on moral and not strategic principles, no such calculations were permissible.
This placed the statesmen of 1919 in a precarious position. Germany was not
invited to the peace conference and in the resulting treaty was labeled the war’s sole
aggressor and assigned the entire financial and moral burden of the conflict. To
Germany’s east, however, the statesmen at Versailles struggled to mediate between the
multiple peoples who claimed a right to determine themselves on the same territories.
This placed a score of weak, ethnically fragmented states between two potentially
great powers, Germany and Russia. In any event, there were too many nations to
make independence for all realistic or secure; instead, a wavering effort to draft
minority rights was begun. The nascent Soviet Union, also not represented at
Versailles, was antagonized but not destroyed by an abortive Allied intervention in
northern Russia and afterward isolated. And to cap these shortcomings, the U.S.
Senate rejected America’s accession to the League of Nations, to Wilson’s shattering
disappointment.
In the years since Wilson’s presidency, his failures have generally been ascribed not
to shortcomings in his conception of international relations but to contingent
circumstances—an isolationist Congress (whose reservations Wilson made little
attempt to address or assuage)—or to the stroke that debilitated him during his
nationwide speaking tour in support of the League.
As humanly tragic as these events were, it must be said that the failure of Wilson’s
vision was not due to America’s insufficient commitment to Wilsonianism. Wilson’s
successors tried to implement his visionary program through other complementary
and essentially Wilsonian means. In the 1920s and 1930s, America and its democratic
partners made a major commitment to a diplomacy of disarmament and peaceful
arbitration. At the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22, the United States
attempted to forestall an arms race by offering to scrap thirty naval vessels in order to
achieve proportionate limitations of the American, British, French, Italian, and
Japanese fleets. In 1928, Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of State Frank Kellogg
pioneered the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which purported to outlaw war entirely as “an
instrument of national policy”; signatories, who included the vast majority of the
world’s independent states, all of the belligerents of World War I, and all of the
eventual Axis powers, promised to peacefully arbitrate “all disputes or conflicts of
whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them.”
No significant element of these initiatives survived.
And yet Woodrow Wilson, whose career would appear more the stuff of
Shakespearean tragedy than of foreign policy textbooks, had touched an essential
chord in the American soul. Though far from being the most geopolitically astute or
diplomatically skillful American foreign policy figure of the twentieth century, he
consistently ranks among the “greatest” presidents in contemporary polls. It is the
measure of Wilson’s intellectual triumph that even Richard Nixon, whose foreign
policy in fact embodied most of Theodore Roosevelt’s precepts, considered himself a
disciple of Wilson’s internationalism and hung a portrait of the wartime President in
the Cabinet room.
Woodrow Wilson’s ultimate greatness must be measured by the degree to which he
rallied the tradition of American exceptionalism behind a vision that outlasted these
shortcomings. He has been revered as a prophet toward whose vision America has
judged itself obliged to aspire. Whenever America has been tested by crisis or conflict
—in World War II, the Cold War, and our own era’s upheavals in the Islamic world—
it has returned in one way or another to Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a world order
that secures peace through democracy, open diplomacy, and the cultivation of shared
rules and standards.
The genius of this vision has been its ability to harness American idealism in the
service of great foreign policy undertakings in peacemaking, human rights, and
cooperative problem-solving, and to imbue the exercise of American power with the
hope for a better and more peaceful world. Its influence has been in no small way
responsible for the spread of participatory governance throughout the world in the
past century and for the extraordinary conviction and optimism that America has
brought to its engagement with world affairs. The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it
bequeathed to the twentieth century’s decisive power an elevated foreign policy
doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER
Wilson’s principles were so pervasive, so deeply related to the American perception
of itself, that when two decades later the issue of world order came up again, the
failure of the interwar period did not obstruct their triumphal return. Amidst another
world war, America turned once more to the challenge of building a new world order
essentially on Wilsonian principles.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt’s and by now a
historic third-term President) and Winston Churchill met for the first time as leaders
in Newfoundland aboard HMS Prince of Wales in August 1941, they expressed what
they described as their common vision in the Atlantic Charter of eight “common
principles”—all of which Wilson would have endorsed, while no previous British
Prime Minister would have been comfortable with all of them. They included “the
right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live”; the
end of territorial acquisitions against the will of subject populations; “freedom from
fear and want”; and a program of international disarmament, to precede the eventual
“abandonment of the use of force” and “establishment of a wider and permanent
system of general security.” Not all of this—especially the point on decolonization—
would have been initiated by Winston Churchill, nor would he have accepted it had he
not thought it essential to win an American partnership that was Britain’s best,
perhaps only, hope to avoid defeat.
Roosevelt even went beyond Wilson in spelling out his ideas of the foundation of
international peace. Coming from the academy, Wilson had relied on building an
international order on essentially philosophical principles. Having emerged from the
manipulatory maelstrom of American politics, Roosevelt placed great reliance on the
management of personalities.
Thus Roosevelt expressed the conviction that the new international order would be
built on the basis of personal trust:
The kind of world order which we the peace-loving Nations must achieve, must depend essentially on
friendly human relations, on acquaintance, on tolerance, on unassailable sincerity and good will and
good faith.
Roosevelt returned to this theme in his fourth inaugural address in 1945:
We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that “The only way to have a friend is to be one.”
We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust or with fear.
When Roosevelt dealt with Stalin during the war, he implemented these
convictions. Confronted with evidence of the Soviet Union’s record of broken
agreements and anti-Western hostility, Roosevelt is reported to have assured the
former U.S. ambassador in Moscow William C. Bullitt:
Bill, I don’t dispute your facts; they are accurate. I don’t dispute the logic of your reasoning. I just have
a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man … I think if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask
nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world
of democracy and peace.
During the first encounter of the two leaders at Tehran for a summit in 1943,
Roosevelt’s conduct was in keeping with his pronouncements. Upon arrival, the
Soviet leader warned Roosevelt that Soviet intelligence had discovered a Nazi plot
threatening the President’s safety and offered him hospitality in the heavily fortified
Soviet compound, arguing that the American Embassy was less secure and too distant
from the projected meeting place. Roosevelt accepted the Soviet offer and rejected the
nearby British Embassy to avoid the impression that the Anglo-Saxon leaders were
ganging up against Stalin. Going further at joint meetings with Stalin, Roosevelt
ostentatiously teased Churchill and generally sought to create the impression of
dissociation from Britain’s wartime leader.
The immediate challenge was to define a concept of peace. What principles would
guide the relations of the world’s powers? What contribution was required from the
United States in designing and securing an international order? Should the Soviet
Union be conciliated or confronted? And if these tasks were carried out successfully,
what type of world would result? Would peace be a document or a process?
The geopolitical challenge in 1945 was as complex as any confronted by an
American president. Even in its war-ravaged condition, the Soviet Union posed two
obstacles to the construction of a postwar international order. Its size and the scope of
its conquests overthrew the balance of power in Europe. And its ideological thrust
challenged the legitimacy of any Western institutional structure: rejecting all existing
institutions as forms of illegitimate exploitation, Communism had called for a world
revolution to overthrow the ruling classes and restore power to what Karl Marx had
called the “workers of the world.”
When in the 1920s the majority of the first wave of European Communist uprisings
were crushed or withered for lack of support among the anointed proletariat, Joseph
Stalin, implacable and ruthless, promulgated the doctrine of consolidating “socialism
in one country.” He eliminated all of the other original revolutionary leaders in a
decade of purges, and deployed a largely conscripted labor force to build up Russia’s
industrial capacity. Seeking to deflect the Nazi storm to the west, in 1939 he entered a
neutrality pact with Hitler, dividing northern and eastern Europe into Soviet and
German spheres of influence. When in June 1941 Hitler invaded Russia anyway,
Stalin recalled Russian nationalism from its ideological internment and declared the
“Great Patriotic War,” imbuing Communist ideology with an opportunistic appeal to
Russian imperial feeling. For the first time in Communist rule, Stalin evoked the
Russian psyche that had called the Russian state into being and defended it over the
centuries through domestic tyrannies and foreign invasions and depredations.
Victory in the war confronted the world with a Russian challenge analogous to that
at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, only more acute. How would this wounded giant—
having lost at least twenty million lives and with the western third of its vast territory
devastated—react to the vacuum opening before it? Attention to Stalin’s
pronouncements could have provided the answer but for the conventional wartime
illusion, which Stalin had carefully cultivated, that he was moderating Communist
ideologues rather than instigating them.
Stalin’s global strategy was complex. He was convinced that the capitalist system
inevitably produced wars; hence the end of World War II would at best be an
armistice. He considered Hitler a sui generis representative of the capitalist system,
not an aberration from it. The capitalist states remained adversaries after Hitler’s
defeat, no matter what their leaders said or even thought. As he had said with scorn of
the British and French leaders of the 1920s,
They talk about pacifism; they speak about peace among European states. Briand and Chamberlain are
embracing each other … All this is nonsense. From European history we know that every time treaties
envisaging a new arrangement of forces for new wars have been signed, these treaties have been called
treaties of peace … [although] they were signed for the purpose of depicting new elements of the
coming war.
In Stalin’s worldview, decisions were determined by objective factors, not personal
relationships. Thus the goodwill of wartime alliance was “subjective” and superseded
by the new circumstances of victory. The goal of Soviet strategy would be to achieve
the maximum security for the inevitable showdown. This meant pushing the security
borders of Russia as far west as possible and weakening the countries beyond these
security borders through Communist parties and covert operations.
While the war was going on, Western leaders resisted acknowledging assessments
of this kind: Churchill because of his need to stay in step with America; Roosevelt
because he was advocating a “master plan” to secure a just and lasting peace, which
was in effect a reversal of what had been the European international order—he would
countenance neither a balance of power nor a restoration of empires. His public
progam called for rules for the peaceful resolution of disputes and parallel efforts of
the major powers, the so-called Four Policemen: the United States, the Soviet Union,
Britain, and China. The United States and the Soviet Union especially were expected
to take the lead in checking violations of peace.
Charles Bohlen, then a young Foreign Service officer working as Roosevelt’s
Russian-language translator and later an architect of the Cold War U.S. policy
relationship, faulted Roosevelt’s “American conviction that the other fellow is a ‘good
guy’ who will respond properly and decently if you treat him right”:
He [Roosevelt] felt that Stalin viewed the world somewhat in the same light as he did, and that Stalin’s
hostility and distrust … were due to the neglect that Soviet Russia had suffered at the hands of other
countries for years after the Revolution. What he did not understand was that Stalin’s enmity was based
on profound ideological convictions.
Another view holds that Roosevelt, who had demonstrated his subtlety in the often
ruthless way in which he maneuvered the essentially neutralist American people
toward a war that few contemporaries considered necessary, was beyond being
deceived by a leader even as wily as Stalin. According to this interpretation,
Roosevelt was biding his time and humoring the Soviet leader to keep him from
making a separate deal with Hitler. He must have known—or would soon discover—
that the Soviet view of world order was antithetical to the American one; invocations
of democracy and self-determination would serve to rally the American public but
must eventually prove unacceptable to Moscow. Once Germany’s unconditional
surrender had been achieved and Soviet intransigence had been demonstrated,
according to this view, Roosevelt would have rallied the democracies with the same
determination he had shown in opposition to Hitler.
Great leaders often embody great ambiguities. When he was assassinated, was
President John F. Kennedy on the verge of expanding America’s commitment to
Vietnam or withdrawing from it? Naïveté was not, generally speaking, a charge
Roosevelt’s critics made against him. Probably the answer is that Roosevelt, like his
people, was ambivalent about the two sides of international order. He hoped for a
peace based on legitimacy, that is, trust between individuals, respect for international
law, humanitarian objectives, and goodwill. But confronted with the Soviet Union’s
insistently power-based approach, he would likely have reverted to the Machiavellian
side that had brought him to leadership and made him the dominant figure of his
period. The question of what balance he would have struck was preempted by his
death in the fourth month of his fourth presidential term, before his design for dealing
with the Soviet Union could be completed. Harry S. Truman, excluded by Roosevelt
from any decision making, was suddenly catapulted into that role.
chapter 8
The United States: Ambivalent Superpower
ALL TWELVE POSTWAR presidents have passionately affirmed an exceptional role for
America in the world. Each has treated it as axiomatic that the United States was
embarked on an unselfish quest for the resolution of conflicts and the equality of all
nations, in which the ultimate benchmark for success would be world peace and
universal harmony.
All presidents from both political parties have proclaimed the applicability of
American principles to the entire world, of which perhaps the most eloquent
articulation (though in no sense unique) was President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural
address on January 20, 1961. Kennedy called on his country to “pay any price, bear
any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure
the survival and the success of liberty.” He made no distinction between threats; he
established no priorities for American engagement. He specifically rejected the
shifting calculations of the traditional balance of power. What he called for was a
“new endeavor”—“not a balance of power, but a new world of law.” It would be a
“grand and global alliance” against the “common enemies of mankind.” What in other
countries would have been treated as a rhetorical flourish has, in American discourse,
been presented as a specific blueprint for global action. Speaking to the UN General
Assembly one month after President Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson
affirmed the same unconditional global commitment:
Any man and any nation that seeks peace, and hates war, and is willing to fight the good fight against
hunger and disease and misery, will find the United States of America by their side, willing to walk
with them, walk with them every step of the way.
That sense of responsibility for world order and of the indispensability of American
power, buttressed by a consensus that based the moral universalism of the leaders on
the American people’s dedication to freedom and democracy, led to the extraordinary
achievements of the Cold War period and beyond. America helped rebuild the
devastated European economies, created the Atlantic Alliance, and formed a global
network of security and economic partnerships. It moved from the isolation of China
to a policy of cooperation with it. It designed a system of open world trade that has
fueled productivity and prosperity, and was (as it has been over the past century) at
the cutting edge of almost all of the technological revolutions of the period. It
supported participatory governance in both friendly and adversarial countries; it
played a leading role in articulating new humanitarian principles, and since 1945 it
has, in five wars and on several other occasions, spent American blood to redeem
them in distant corners of the world. No other country would have had the idealism
and the resources to take on such a range of challenges or the capacity to succeed in
so many of them. American idealism and exceptionalism were the driving forces
behind the building of a new international order.
For a few decades, there was an extraordinary correspondence between America’s
traditional beliefs and historical experience and the world in which it found itself. For
the generation of leaders who assumed the responsibility for constructing the postwar
order, the two great experiences had been surmounting the recession of the 1930s and
victory over aggression in the 1940s. Both tasks lent themselves to definite solutions:
in the economic field, the restoration of growth and the inauguration of new socialwelfare programs; in the war, unconditional surrender of the enemy.
At the end of the war, the United States, as the only major country to emerge
essentially undamaged, produced about 60 percent of the world’s GNP. It was thereby
able to define leadership as essentially practical progress along lines modeled on the
American domestic experience; alliances as Wilsonian concepts of collective security;
and governance as programs of economic recovery and democratic reform. America’s
Cold War undertaking began as a defense of countries that shared the American view
of world order. The adversary, the Soviet Union, was conceived as having strayed
from the international community to which it would eventually return.
On the journey toward that vision, America began to encounter other historic views
of world order. New nations with different histories and cultures appeared on the
scene as colonialism ended. The nature of Communism became more complex and its
impact more ambiguous. Governments and armed doctrines rejecting American
concepts of domestic and international order mounted tenacious challenges. Limits to
American capabilities, however vast, became apparent. Priorities needed to be set.
America’s encounters with these realities raised a new question that had not
heretofore been put to the United States: Is American foreign policy a story with a
beginning and an end, in which final victories are possible? Or is it a process of
managing and tempering ever-recurring challenges? Does foreign policy have a
destination, or is it a process of never-completed fulfillment?
In answering these questions, America put itself through anguishing debates and
domestic divisions about the nature of its world role. They were the reverse side of its
historic idealism. By framing the issue of America’s world role as a test of moral
perfection, it castigated itself—sometimes to profound effect—for falling short. In
expectation of a final culmination to its efforts—the peaceful, democratic, rules-based
world that Wilson prophesied—it was often uncomfortable with the prospect of
foreign policy as a permanent endeavor for contingent aims. With nearly every
president insisting that America had universal principles while other countries merely
had national interests, the United States has risked extremes of overextension and
disillusioned withdrawal.
Since the end of World War II, in quest of its vision of world order, America has
embarked on five wars on behalf of expansive goals initially embraced with nearuniversal public support, which then turned into public discord—often on the brink of
violence. In three of these wars, the Establishment consensus shifted abruptly to
embrace a program of effectively unconditional unilateral withdrawal. Three times in
two generations, the United States abandoned wars midstream as inadequately
transformative or as misconceived—in Vietnam as a result of congressional decisions,
in Iraq and Afghanistan by choice of the President.
Victory in the Cold War has been accompanied by congenital ambivalence.
America has been searching its soul about the moral worth of its efforts to a degree
for which it is difficult to find historical parallels. Either American objectives had
been unfulfillable, or America did not pursue a strategy compatible with reaching
these objectives. Critics will ascribe these setbacks to the deficiencies, moral and
intellectual, of America’s leaders. Historians will probably conclude that they derived
from the inability to resolve an ambivalence about force and diplomacy, realism and
idealism, power and legitimacy, cutting across the entire society.
THE BEGINNING OF THE COLD WAR
Nothing in Harry S. Truman’s career would have suggested that he would become
President, even less that he would preside over the creation of a structure of
international order that would last through the Cold War and help decide it. Yet this
quintessentially American “common man” would emerge as one of the seminal
American presidents.
No president has faced a more daunting task. The war had ended without any
attempt by the powers to redefine international order as in the Westphalian settlement
of 1648 and at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Therefore, Truman’s first task was to
make concrete Roosevelt’s vision of a realistically conceived international
organization, named the United Nations. Signed in San Francisco in 1945, its charter
merged two forms of international decision making. The General Assembly would be
universal in membership and based upon the doctrine of the equality of states—“one
state, one vote.” At the same time, the United Nations would implement collective
security via a global concert, the Security Council, designating five major powers (the
United States, Britain, France, the U.S.S.R., and China) as “permanent members”
wielding veto power. (Britain, France, and China were included as much in homage to
their record of great achievements as in reflection of their current capacities.)
Together with a rotating group of nine additional countries, the Security Council was
vested with special responsibility “to maintain international peace and security.”
The United Nations could achieve its designated purpose only if the permanent
members shared a conception of world order. On issues where they disagreed, the
world organization might enshrine, rather than assuage, their differences. The last
summit meeting of the wartime allies at Potsdam in July and August 1945 of Truman,
Winston Churchill, and Stalin established the zones of occupation of Germany.
(Churchill was replaced as the result of electoral defeat halfway through by Clement
Attlee, his wartime deputy.) It also put Berlin under joint administration by the four
victorious powers, with guaranteed access to the Western zones of occupation through
Soviet-occupied territory. It turned out to be the last significant agreement between
the wartime allies.
In the negotiations to implement the accords, the Western allies and the Soviet
Union found themselves in mounting deadlock. The Soviet Union insisted on shaping
a new international, social, and political structure of Eastern Europe on a principle
laid down by Stalin in 1945: “Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own
social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It
cannot be otherwise.” Abandoning any notion of Westphalian principles in favor of
“objective factors,” Stalin now imposed Moscow’s Marxist-Leninist system
ruthlessly, though gradually, across Eastern Europe.
The first direct military confrontation between the wartime allies occurred over
access routes to the capital of the erstwhile enemy, Berlin. In 1948, Stalin, in response
to the merging of the three occupation zones of the Western allies, cut the access
routes to Berlin, which until the end of the blockade was sustained by a largely
American airlift.
How Stalin analyzed “objective” factors is illustrated by a conversation in 1989 I
had with Andrei Gromyko, Soviet Foreign Minister for twenty-eight years until he
was kicked upstairs by the newly installed Mikhail Gorbachev into the largely
ceremonial office of President. He therefore had much time for discussions about
what he had observed of Russian history and no future to protect by discretion. I
raised a question of how, in light of the vast casualties and devastation it had suffered
in the war, the Soviet Union could have dealt with an American military response to
the Berlin blockade. Gromyko replied that Stalin had answered similar questions from
subordinates to this effect: he doubted the United States would use nuclear weapons
on so local an issue. If the Western allies undertook a conventional ground force probe
along the access routes to Berlin, Soviet forces were ordered to resist without
referring the decision to Stalin. If American forces were mobilizing along the entire
front, Stalin said, “Come to me.” In other words, Stalin felt strong enough for a local
war but would not risk general war with the United States.
Henceforth two power blocs were seeking to stare each other down, without
resolving the causes of the underlying crisis. Europe, liberated from Nazism, stood in
danger of falling under the sway of a new hegemonic power. The newly independent
states in Asia, with fragile institutions and deep domestic and often ethnic divisions,
might be delivered to self-government only to be confronted by a doctrine hostile to
the West and inimical to pluralism domestically or internationally.
At this juncture, Truman made a strategic choice fundamental for American history
and the evolution of the international order. He put an end to the historical temptation
of “going it alone” by committing America to the permanent shaping of a new
international order. He advanced a series of crucial initiatives. The Greek-Turkish aid
program of 1947 replaced the subsidies with which Britain had sustained these pivotal
Mediterranean countries and which Britain could no longer afford; the Marshall Plan
in 1948 put forward a recovery plan that in time restored Europe’s economic health.
In 1949, Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, presided over a ceremony
marking the creation of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) as the
capstone of the American-sponsored new international order.
NATO was a new departure in the establishment of European security. The
international order no longer was characterized by the traditional European balance of
power distilled from shifting coalitions of multiple states. Rather, whatever
equilibrium prevailed had been reduced to that existing between the two nuclear
superpowers. If either disappeared or failed to engage, the equilibrium would be lost,
and its opponent would become dominant. The first was what happened in 1990 with
the collapse of the Soviet Union; the second was the perennial fear of America’s allies
during the Cold War that America might lose interest in the defense of Europe. The
nations joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization provided some military forces
but more in the nature of an admission ticket for a shelter under America’s nuclear
umbrella than as an instrument of local defense. What America was constructing in
the Truman era was a unilateral guarantee in the form of a traditional alliance.
With the structure in place, the historical debates about the ultimate purpose of
American foreign policy reemerged. Were the goals of the new alliance moral or
strategic? Coexistence or the adversary’s collapse? Did America seek conversion of
the adversary or evolution? Conversion entails inducing an adversary to break with its
past in one comprehensive act or gesture. Evolution involves a gradual process, a
willingness to pursue ultimate foreign policy goals in imperfect stages and to deal
with the adversary as a reality while this process is going on. What course would
America choose? Exhibiting its historical ambivalence on the subject, America chose
both.
STRATEGIES OF A COLD WAR ORDER
The most comprehensive American strategic design in the Cold War was put
forward by a then-obscure Foreign Service officer, George Kennan, serving as head of
the Political Section of the American Embassy in Moscow. No Foreign Service officer
has ever shaped the U.S. debate over America’s world role to such an extent. While
Washington was still basking in the wartime euphoria based on belief in Stalin’s
goodwill, Kennan predicted a looming confrontation. The United States, he asserted
in a personal letter to a colleague in 1945, needed to face the fact that its Soviet ally
would, at the conclusion of the war, turn into an adversary:
A basic conflict is thus arising over Europe between the interests of Atlantic sea-power, which demand
the preservation of vigorous and independent political life on the European peninsula, and the interests
of the jealous Eurasian land power, which must always seek to extend itself to the west and will never
find a place, short of the Atlantic Ocean, where it can from its own standpoint safely stop.
Kennan proposed an explicitly strategic response: to “gather together at once into
our hands all the cards we hold and begin to play them for their full value.” Eastern
Europe, Kennan concluded, would be dominated by Moscow: it stood closer to
Russian centers of power than it did to Washington and, however regrettably, Soviet
troops had reached it first. Hence the United States should consolidate a sphere in
Western Europe under American protection—with the dividing line running through
Germany—and endow its sphere with sufficient strength and cohesion to maintain the
geopolitical balance.
This prescient prediction of the postwar outcome was rejected by Kennan’s
colleague Charles “Chip” Bohlen on Wilsonian grounds that “foreign policy of that
kind cannot be made in a democracy. Only totalitarian states can make and carry out
such policies.” Washington might accept a balance of power as a fact; it could not
adopt it as a policy.
In February 1946, the American Embassy in Moscow received a query from
Washington as to whether a doctrinaire speech by Stalin inaugurated a change in the
Soviet commitment to a harmonious international order. Kennan, at that time deputy
chief of mission, was given an opportunity many Foreign Service officers dream of: to
present their views directly to high levels without requiring ambassadorial approval.
Kennan replied in a five-part telegram of nineteen single-spaced pages. The essence
of the so-called Long Telegram was that the entire American debate over Soviet
intentions needed to be reconceived. Soviet leaders saw East-West relations as a
contest between antithetical concepts of world order. They had taken a “traditional
and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity” and grafted onto it a revolutionary
doctrine of global sweep. The Kremlin would interpret every aspect of international
affairs in light of Soviet doctrine about a battle for advantage between what Stalin had
called the “two centers of world significance,” capitalism and Communism, whose
global contest was inevitable and could end with only one winner. They thought the
battle was inevitable, and thus made it so.
The next year, Kennan, now head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State
Department, went public in an article in Foreign Affairs published anonymously by
“X.” On the surface, the article made the same point as the Long Telegram: Soviet
pressure on the West was real and inherent, but it could be “contained by the adroit
and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical
and political points.”
Theodore Roosevelt would have had no difficulty endorsing this analysis. But when
outlining his idea of how the conflict might end, Kennan reentered Wilsonian
territory. At some point in Moscow’s futile confrontations with the outside world, he
predicted, some Soviet leader would feel the need to achieve additional support by
reaching out beyond the Party apparatus to the general public, which was immature
and inexperienced, having never been permitted to develop an independent political
sense. But if “the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument” was ever so
disrupted, “Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one
of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.” This prediction—essentially
correct—was Wilsonian in the belief that at the end of the process democratic
principles would prevail, that legitimacy would trump power.
This belief is what Dean Acheson, the model and seminal Secretary of State to
many of his successors (including me), practiced. From 1949 to 1953 he concentrated
on building what he called “situations of strength” via NATO; East-West diplomacy
would more or less automatically reflect the balance of power. During the Eisenhower
administration, his successor, John Foster Dulles, extended the alliance system
through SEATO for Southeast Asia (1954) and the Baghdad Pact for the Middle East
(1955). In effect, containment came to be equated with the construction of military
alliances around the entire Soviet periphery over two continents. World order would
consist of the confrontation of two incongruent superpowers—each of which
organized an international order within its sphere.
Both secretaries of state viewed power and diplomacy as successive stages:
America would first consolidate and demonstrate its power; then the Soviet Union
would be obliged to cease its challenges and arrive at a reasonable accommodation
with the non-Communist world. Yet if diplomacy was to be based on positions of
military strength, why was it necessary to suspend it in the formative stages of the
Atlantic relationship? And how was the strength of the free world to be conveyed to
the other side? For in fact, America’s nuclear monopoly coupled with the war’s
devastating impact on the Soviet Union ensured that the actual balance of power was
uniquely favorable to the West at the beginning of the Cold War. A situation of
strength did not need to be built; it already existed.
Winston Churchill recognized this in a speech in October 1948, when he argued
that the West’s bargaining position would never be stronger than it was at that
moment. Negotiations should be pressed, not suspended:
The question is asked: What will happen when they get the atomic bomb themselves and have
accumulated a large store? You can judge yourselves what will happen then by what is happening now.
If these things are done in the green wood, what will be done in the dry? … No one in his senses can
believe that we have a limitless period of time before us. We ought to bring matters to a head and make
a final settlement … The Western Nations will be far more likely to reach a lasting settlement, without
bloodshed, if they formulate their just demands while they have the atomic power and before the
Russian Communists have got it too.
Truman and Acheson undoubtedly considered the risk too great and resisted a
grand negotiation for fear that it might undermine Allied cohesion. Above all,
Churchill was leader of the opposition, not Prime Minister, when he urged an at least
diplomatic showdown, and the incumbent Clement Attlee and his Foreign Secretary,
Ernest Bevin, would surely have resisted a design invoking the threat of war.
In this context, the United States assumed leadership of the global effort to contain
Soviet expansionism—but as a primarily moral, not geopolitical, endeavor. Valid
interests existed in both spheres, yet the manner in which they were described tended
to obscure attempts to define strategic priorities. Even NSC-68, which codified
Truman’s national security policy as a classified document and was largely written by
the hard-line Paul Nitze, avoided the concept of national interest and placed the
conflict into traditional moral, almost lyrical, categories. The struggle was between
the forces of “freedom under a government of laws” (which entailed “marvelous
diversity, the deep tolerance, the lawfulness of the free society … in which every
individual has the opportunity to realize his creative powers”) and forces of “slavery
under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin.” By its own lights, America was joining the
Cold War struggle not as a geopolitical contest over the limits of Russian power but as
a moral crusade for the free world.
In such an endeavor, American policies were presented as a disinterested effort to
advance the general interests of humanity. John Foster Dulles, a shrewd operator in
crises and tough exponent of American power, nonetheless described American
foreign policy as a kind of global volunteer effort guided by principles totally
different from any other historic state’s approach. He observed that though it was
“difficult for many to understand,” the United States was “really … motivated by
considerations other than short-range expediency.” America’s influence would not
restore the geopolitical balance, in this view, but transcend it: “It has been customary,
for so many centuries, for nations to act merely to promote their own immediate selfinterest, to hurt their rivals, that it is not readily accepted that there can be a new era
when nations will be guided by principle.”
The implication that other nations had “selfish interests” while America had
“principles” and “destiny” was as old as the Republic. What was new was that a
global geopolitical contest in which the United States was the leader, not a bystander,
was justified primarily on moral grounds, and the American national interest was
disavowed. This call to universal responsibility underpinned the decisive American
commitment to restoring a devastated postwar world holding the line against Soviet
expansion. Yet when it came time to fighting “hot” wars on the periphery of the
Communist world, it proved a less certain guide.
THE KOREAN WAR
The Korean War ended inconclusively. But the debates it generated foreshadowed
issues that tore the country apart a decade later.
In 1945, Korea, until then a Japanese colony, had been liberated by the victorious
Allies. The northern half of the Korean Peninsula was occupied by the Soviet Union,
the southern half by the United States. Each established its form of government in its
zone before it withdrew, in 1948 and 1949, respectively. In June 1950, the North
Korean army invaded South Korea. The Truman administration considered it a classic
case of Soviet-Chinese aggression on the model of the German and Japanese
challenges preceding World War II. Although U.S. armed forces had been drastically
reduced in the previous years, Truman took the courageous decision to resist, largely
with American forces based in Japan.
Contemporary research has shown that the motivation on the Communist side was
complex. When the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung asked Stalin’s approval for the
invasion in April 1950, the Soviet dictator encouraged him. He had learned from the
defection of Tito two years earlier that first-generation Communist leaders were
especially difficult to fit into the Soviet satellite system that he thought imperative for
Russia’s national interest. Starting with Mao’s visit to Moscow in late 1949—less than
three months after the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed—Stalin had been
uneasy about the looming potential of China led by a man of Mao’s dominating
attributes. An invasion of South Korea might divert China into a crisis on its borders,
deflect America’s attention from Europe to Asia, and, in any event, absorb some of
America’s resources in that effort. If achieved with Soviet support, Pyongyang’s
unification project might give the Soviet Union a dominant position in Korea and, in
view of the historical suspicions of these countries for each other, create a kind of
counterbalance to China in Asia. Mao followed Stalin’s lead—conveyed to him by
Kim Il-sung in almost certainly exaggerated terms—for the converse reason; he
feared encirclement by the Soviet Union, whose acquisitive interest in Korea had been
demonstrated over the centuries and was even then displayed in the demands for
ideological subservience Stalin was making as a price for the Sino-Soviet alliance.
On one occasion, an eminent Chinese told me that letting Stalin lead Mao into
authorizing the Korean War was the only strategic mistake Mao ever made because, in
the end, the Korean War delayed Chinese unification by a century in that it led to
America’s commitment to Taiwan. Be that as it may, the origin of the Korean War was
less a Sino-Soviet conspiracy against America than a three-cornered maneuver for
dominance within the Communist international order, with Kim Il-sung driving up the
bidding to gain support for a program of conquest whose global consequences in the
end surprised all of the main participants.
The complex strategic considerations of the Communist world were not matched on
the American side. In effect, the United States was fighting for a principle, defeating
aggression, and a method of implementing it, via the United Nations. America could
gain UN approval because the Soviet ambassador to the UN, in a continuing protest
over the exclusion of Communist China from the UN, had absented himself from the
crucial vote of the Security Council. There was less clarity about what was meant by
the phrase “defeating aggression.” Was it total victory? If less, what was it? How, in
short, was the war supposed to end?
As it happened, experience outran theory. General Douglas MacArthur’s surprise
landing at Inchon in September 1950 trapped the North Korean army in the South and
brought about its substantial defeat. Should the victorious army cross the previous
dividing line along the 38th parallel into North Korea and achieve unification? If it
did so, it would exceed the literal interpretation of collective security principles
because the legal concept of defeating aggression had been achieved. But from a
geopolitical point of view, what would have been the lesson? If an aggressor need fear
no consequence other than a return to the status quo ante, would a recurrence
somewhere else not be likely?
Several alternatives presented themselves—for example, holding the advance at the
narrow neck of the peninsula on a line from the cities of Pyongyang to Wonsan, a line
roughly 150 miles short of the Chinese frontier. This would have destroyed most of
the North’s war-making capacity and brought nine-tenths of the North Korean
population into a unified Korea while staying well clear of the Chinese border.
We now know that even before American planners had broached the topic of where
to arrest their advance, China was preparing for a possible intervention. As early as
July 1950, China had concentrated 250,000 troops on its border with Korea. By
August, top Chinese planners were operating on the premise that their still-advancing
North Korean ally would collapse once superior American forces were fully deployed
to the theater (indeed, they accurately predicted MacArthur’s surprise landing at
Inchon). On August 4—while the front was still deep in South Korea, along the socalled Pusan perimeter—Mao told the Politburo, “If the American imperialists are
victorious, they will become dizzy with success, and then be in a position to threaten
us. We have to help Korea; we have to assist them. This can be in the form of a
volunteer force, and be at a time of our choosing, but we must start to prepare.”
However, he had told Zhou Enlai that if the United States remained along the
Pyongyang to Wonsan line, Chinese forces did not need to attack immediately and
should pause for intensified training. What would have happened during or after such
a pause must be left to speculation.
But the American forces did not pause; Washington ratified MacArthur’s crossing
of the 38th parallel and set no limit to his advance other than the Chinese border.
For Mao, the American movement to the Chinese border involved more than
Korean stakes. Truman had, on the outbreak of the Korean War, placed the Seventh
Fleet between the combatants in the Taiwan Strait on the argument that protecting
both sides of the Chinese civil war from each other demonstrated American
commitment to peace in Asia. It was less than nine months since Mao had proclaimed
the People’s Republic of China. If the final outcome of the Korean War was the
presence of largely American military forces along the Chinese border, and an
American fleet interposed between Taiwan and the mainland, approving the North
Korean invasion of South Korea would have turned into a strategic disaster.
In an encounter between two different conceptions of world order, America sought
to protect the status quo following Westphalian and international legal principles.
Nothing ran more counter to Mao’s perceptions of his revolutionary mission than the
protection of the status quo. Chinese history taught him the many times Korea had
been used as an invasion route into China. His own revolutionary experience had been
based on the proposition that civil wars ended with victory or defeat, not stalemate.
And he convinced himself that America, once ensconced along the Yalu River
separating China from Korea, would as a next step complete the encirclement of
China by moving into Vietnam. (This was four years before America’s actual
involvement in Indochina.) Zhou Enlai gave voice to this analysis, and demonstrated
the outsized role Korea plays in Chinese strategic thinking, when he told an August
26, 1950, meeting of the Central Military Commission that Korea was “indeed the
focus of the struggles in the world … After conquering Korea, the United States will
certainly turn to Vietnam and other colonial countries. Therefore the Korean problem
is at least the key to the East.”
Considerations such as these induced Mao to repeat the strategy pursued by
Chinese leaders in 1593 against the Japanese invasion led by Toyotomi Hideyoshi.
Fighting a war with a superpower was a daunting proposition; at least two Chinese
field marshals refused to command the units destined for battle with American forces.
Mao insisted, and the Chinese surprise attack drove back the American deployments
from the Yalu River.
But after the Chinese intervention, what was now the purpose of the war, and which
strategy would implement it? These questions produced an intense American debate
foreshadowing far more bitter controversies in later American wars. (The difference
was that, in contrast to the opponents of the Vietnam War, the critics of the Korean
War accused the Truman administration of using not enough force; they sought
victory, not withdrawal.)
The public controversy took place between the theater commander Douglas
MacArthur and the Truman administration backed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
MacArthur argued the traditional case that had been the basis of every previous
American military involvement: the purpose of war was victory to be achieved by
whatever means required, including aerial attacks on China itself; stalemate was a
strategic setback; Communist aggression had to be defeated where it was occurring,
which was in Asia; American military capacity needed to be used to the extent
necessary, not conserved for hypothetical contingencies in distant geographic regions,
meaning Western Europe.
The Truman administration responded in two ways: In a demonstration of civilian
control over the American military, on April 11, 1951, President Truman relieved
MacArthur of his military command for making statements contradicting the
administration’s policy. On substance, Truman stressed the containment concept: the
major threat was the Soviet Union, whose strategic goal was the domination of
Europe. Hence fighting the Korean War to a military conclusion, even more extending
it into China, was, in the words of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General
Omar Bradley, a combat leader in the war against Germany, “the wrong war, at the
wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”
After some months, the battlefront settled near the 38th parallel in June 1951,
where the war had started—just as it had half a millennium earlier. At that point, the
Chinese offered negotiations, which the United States accepted. A settlement was
reached two years later that has, with some intense but short interruptions, lasted more
than sixty years to this writing.
In the negotiations, as in the origins of the war, two different approaches to strategy
confronted each other. The Truman administration expressed the American view
about the relationship of power and legitimacy. According to it, war and peace were
distinct phases of policy; when negotiations started, the application of force ceased,
and diplomacy took over. Each activity was thought to operate by its own rules. Force
was needed to produce the negotiation, then it had to stand aside; the outcome of the
negotiation would depend on an atmosphere of goodwill, which would be destroyed
by military pressure. In that spirit, American forces were ordered to confine
themselves to essentially defensive measures during the talks and avoid initiating
large-scale offensive measures.
The Chinese view was the exact opposite. War and peace were two sides of the
same coin. Negotiations were an extension of the battlefield. In accordance with
China’s ancient strategist Sun Tzu in his Art of War, the essential contest would be
psychological—to affect the adversary’s calculations and degrade his confidence in
success. De-escalation by the adversary was a sign of weakness to be exploited by
pressing one’s own military advantage. The Communist side used the stalemate to
enhance the discomfort of the American public with an inconclusive war. In fact,
during the negotiations, America suffered as many casualties as it had during the
offensive phase of the war.
In the end, each side achieved its objective: America had upheld the doctrine of
containment and preserved the territorial integrity of an ally that has since evolved
into one of the key countries of Asia; China vindicated its determination to defend the
approaches to its borders, and demonstrated its disdain of international rules it had
had no voice in creating. The outcome was a draw. But it revealed a potential
vulnerability in America’s ability to relate strategy to diplomacy, power to legitimacy,
and to define its essential aims. Korea, in the end, drew a line across the century. It
was the first war in which America specifically renounced victory as an objective, and
in that was an augur of things to come.
The biggest loser, as it turned out, was the Soviet Union. It had encouraged the
original decision to invade and sustained its consequences by providing large stores of
supplies to its allies. But it lost their trust. The seeds of the Sino-Soviet split were
sown in the Korean War because the Soviets insisted on payment for their assistance
and refused to give combat support. The war also triggered a rapid and vast American
rearmament, which restored the imbalance in Western Europe in a big step toward the
situation of strength that the American containment doctrine demanded.
Each side suffered setbacks. Some Chinese historians hold that China lost an
opportunity to unify Taiwan with the mainland in order to sustain an unreliable ally;
the United States lost its aura of invincibility that had attached to it since World War II
and some of its sense of direction. Other Asian revolutionaries learned the lesson of
drawing America into an inconclusive war that might outrun the American public’s
willingness to support it. America was left with the gap in its thinking on strategy and
international order that was to haunt it in the jungles of Vietnam.
VIETNAM AND THE BREAKDOWN OF THE NATIONAL CONSENSUS
Even amidst the hardships of the Korean War, a combination of Wilsonian
principles and Rooseveltian geostrategy produced an extraordinary momentum behind
the first decade and a half of Cold War policy. Despite the incipient domestic debate,
it saw America through the 1948–49 American airlift to thwart Soviet ultimatums on
access to Berlin, the Korean War, and the defeat of the Soviet effort to place
intermediate-range nuclear ballistic missiles in Cuba in 1962. This was followed by
the 1963 treaty with the Soviet Union renouncing nuclear testing in the atmosphere—
a symbol of the need for the superpowers to discuss and limit their capability to
destroy humanity. The containment policy was supported by an essentially bipartisan
consensus in Congress. Relations between the policymaking and the intellectual
communities were professional, assumed to be based on shared long-term goals.
But roughly coincident with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the
national consensus began to break down. Part of the reason was the shock of the
assassination of a young President who had called on America to fulfill its idealistic
traditions. Though the assailant was a Communist who had sojourned in the Soviet
Union, among many of the younger generation the loss raised questions about the
moral validity of the American enterprise.
The Cold War had begun with a call to support democracy and liberty across the
world, reinforced by Kennedy at his inauguration. Yet over a period of time, the
military doctrines that sustained the strategy of containment began to have a blighting
effect on public perceptions. The gap between the destructiveness of the weapons and
the purposes for which they might be used proved unbridgeable. All theories for the
limited use of military nuclear technology proved infeasible. The reigning strategy
was based on the ability to inflict a level of civilian casualties judged unbearable but
surely involving tens of millions on both sides in a matter of days. This calculus
constrained the self-confidence of national leaders and the public’s faith in their
leadership.
Besides this, as the containment policy migrated into the fringes of Asia, it
encountered conditions quite opposite of those in Europe. The Marshall Plan and
NATO succeeded because a political tradition of government remained in Europe,
even if impaired. Economic recovery could restore political vitality. But in much of
the underdeveloped world, the political framework was fragile or new, and economic
aid led to corruption as frequently as to stability.
These dilemmas came to a head in the Vietnam War. Truman had sent civilian
advisors to South Vietnam to resist a guerrilla war in 1951; Eisenhower had added
military advisors in 1954; Kennedy authorized combat troops as auxiliaries in 1962;
Johnson deployed an expeditionary force in 1965 that eventually rose to more than
half a million. The Kennedy administration had gone to the edge of participating in
the war, and the Johnson administration made it its own because it was convinced that
the North Vietnamese assault into South Vietnam was the spearhead of a Sino-Soviet
drive for global domination and that it needed to be resisted by American forces lest
all of Southeast Asia fall under Communist control.
In defending Asia, America proposed to proceed as it had in Western Europe. In
accord with President Eisenhower’s “domino theory,” in which the fall of one country
to Communism would cause others to fall, it applied the doctrine of containment to
thwart the aggressor (on the model of NATO) and economic and political
rehabilitation (as in the Marshall Plan). At the same time, to avoid “widening the
war,” the United States refrained from targeting sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos
from which Hanoi’s forces launched attacks to inflict thousands of casualties and to
which they withdrew to thwart pursuit.
None of these administrations had vouchsafed a plan for ending the war other than
preserving the independence of South Vietnam, destroying the forces armed and
deployed by Hanoi to subvert it, and bombing North Vietnam with sufficient force to
cause Hanoi to reconsider its policy of conquest and begin negotiations. This had not
been treated as a remarkable or controversial program until the middle of the Johnson
administration. Then a wave of protests and media critiques—culminating after the
1968 Tet Offensive, in conventional military terms a devastating defeat for North
Vietnam but treated in the Western press as a stunning victory and evidence of
American failure—struck a chord with administration officials.
Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of the Singapore state and perhaps the wisest Asian
leader of his period, was vocal in his firm belief, maintained to this writing, that
American intervention was indispensable to preserve the possibility of an independent
Southeast Asia. The analysis of the consequences for the region of a Communist
victory in Vietnam was largely correct. But by the time of America’s full-scale
participation in Vietnam, Sino-Soviet unity no longer existed, having been in
perceptible crisis throughout the 1960s. China, wracked by the Great Leap Forward
and the Cultural Revolution, increasingly regarded the Soviet Union as a dangerous
and threatening adversary.
The containment principles employed in Europe proved much less applicable in
Asia. European instability came about when the economic crisis caused by the war
threatened to undermine traditional domestic political institutions. In Southeast Asia,
after a century of colonization, these institutions had yet to be created—especially in
South Vietnam, which had never existed as a state in history.
America attempted to close the gap through a campaign of political construction
side by side with the military effort. While simultaneously fighting a conventional war
against North Vietnamese divisions and a jungle war against Vietcong guerrillas,
America threw itself into political engineering in a region that had not known selfgovernment for centuries or democracy ever.
After a series of coups (the first of which, in November 1963, was actually
encouraged by the American Embassy and acquiesced in by the White House in the
expectation that military rule would produce more liberal institutions), General
Nguyen Van Thieu emerged as the South Vietnamese President. At the outset of the
Cold War, the non-Communist orientation of a government had been taken—perhaps
overly expansively—as proof that it was worth preserving against Soviet designs.
Now, in the emerging atmosphere of recrimination, the inability of South Vietnam to
emerge as a fully operational democracy (amidst a bloody civil war) led to bitter
denunciation. A war initially supported by a considerable majority and raised to its
existing dimensions by a president citing universal principles of liberty and human
rights was now decried as evidence of a unique American moral obtuseness. Charges
of immorality and deception were used with abandon; “barbaric” was a favorite
adjective. American military involvement was described as a form of “insanity”
revealing profound flaws in the American way of life; accusations of wanton
slaughter of civilians became routine.
The domestic debate over the Vietnam War proved to be one of the most scarring in
American history. The administrations that had involved America in Indochina were
staffed by individuals of substantial intelligence and probity who suddenly found
themselves accused of near-criminal folly and deliberate deception. What had started
as a reasonable debate about feasibility and strategy turned into street demonstrations,
invective, and violence.
The critics were right in pointing out that American strategy, particularly in the
opening phases of the war, was ill suited to the realities of asymmetric conflict.
Bombing campaigns alternating with “pauses” to test Hanoi’s readiness for
negotiation tended to produce stalemate—bringing to bear enough power to incur
denunciation and resistance, but not enough to secure the adversary’s readiness for
serious negotiations. The dilemmas of Vietnam were very much the consequence of
academic theories regarding graduated escalation that had sustained the Cold War;
while conceptually coherent in terms of a standoff between nuclear superpowers, they
were less applicable to an asymmetric conflict fought against an adversary pursuing a
guerrilla strategy. Some of the expectations for the relationship of economic reform to
political evolution proved unfeasible in Asia. But these were subjects appropriate for
serious debate, not vilification and, at the fringes of the protest movement, assaults on
university and government buildings.
The collapse of high aspirations shattered the self-confidence without which
establishments flounder. The leaders who had previously sustained American foreign
policy were particularly anguished by the rage of the students. The insecurity of their
elders turned the normal grievances of maturing youth into an institutionalized rage
and a national trauma. Public demonstrations reached dimensions obliging President
Johnson—who continued to describe the war in traditional terms of defending a free
people against the advance of totalitarianism—to confine his public appearances in
his last year in office largely to military bases.
In the months following the end of Johnson’s presidency in 1969, a number of the
war’s key architects renounced their positions publicly and called for an end to
military operations and an American withdrawal. These themes were elaborated until
the Establishment view settled on a program to “end the war” by means of a unilateral
American withdrawal in exchange only for the return of prisoners.
Richard Nixon became President at a time when 500,000 American troops were in
combat—and the number was still increasing, on a schedule established by the
Johnson administration—in Vietnam, as far from the U.S. borders as the globe allows.
From the beginning, Nixon was committed to ending the war. But he also thought it
his responsibility to do so in the context of America’s global commitments for
sustaining the postwar international order. Nixon took office five months after the
Soviet military occupation of Czechoslovakia, while the Soviet Union was building
intercontinental missiles at a rate threatening—and, some argued, surpassing—
America’s deterrent forces, and China remained adamantly and truculently hostile.
America could not jettison its security commitments in one part of the world without
provoking challenges to its resolve in others. The preservation of American credibility
in defense of allies and the global system of order—a role the United States had
performed for two decades— remained an integral part of Nixon’s calculations.
Nixon withdrew American forces at the rate of 150,000 per year and ended
participation in ground combat in 1971. He authorized negotiations subject to one
irreducible condition: he never accepted Hanoi’s demand that the peace process begin
with the replacement of the government of South Vietnam—America’s ally—by a socalled coalition government in effect staffed by figures put forward by Hanoi. This
was adamantly rejected for four years until after a failed North Vietnamese offensive
(defeated without American ground forces) in 1972 finally induced Hanoi to agree to
a cease-fire and political settlement it had consistently rejected over the years.
In the United States debate focused on a widespread desire to end the trauma
wrought by the war on the populations of Indochina, as if America was the cause of
their travail. Yet Hanoi had insisted on continued battle—not because it was
unconvinced of the American commitment to peace, but because it counted on it to
exhaust American willingness to sustain the sacrifices. Fighting a psychological war,
it ruthlessly exploited America’s quest for compromise on behalf of a program of
domination with which, it turned out, there was no splitting the difference.
The military actions that President Nixon ordered, and that as his National Security
Advisor I supported, together with the policy of diplomatic flexibility, brought about a
settlement in 1973. The Nixon administration was convinced that Saigon would be
able to overcome ordinary violations of the agreement with its own forces; that the
United States would assist with air and naval power against an all-out attack; and that
over time the South Vietnamese government would be able, with American economic
assistance, to build a functioning society and undergo an evolution toward more
transparent institutions (as would in fact occur in South Korea).
Whether this process could have been accelerated and whether another definition
could have been given to American credibility will remain the subject of heated
debate. The chief obstacle was the difficulty Americans had understanding Hanoi’s
way of thinking. The Johnson administration overestimated the impact of American
military power. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Nixon administration
overestimated the scope for negotiation. For the battle-hardened leadership in Hanoi,
having spent their lives fighting for victory, compromise was the same as defeat, and a
pluralistic society near inconceivable.
A resolution of this debate is beyond the scope of this volume; it was a painful
process for all involved. Nixon managed a complete withdrawal and a settlement he
was convinced gave the South Vietnamese a decent opportunity to shape their own
fate. However, having traversed a decade of controversy and in the highly charged
aftermath of the Watergate crisis, Congress severely restricted aid in 1973 and cut off
all aid in 1975. North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam by sending almost its entire
army across the international border. The international community remained silent,
and Congress had proscribed American military intervention. The governments of
Laos and Cambodia fell shortly after to Communist insurgencies, and in the latter the
Khmer Rouge imposed a reckoning of almost unimaginable brutality.
America had lost its first war and also the thread to its concept of world order.
RICHARD NIXON AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER
After the carnage of the 1960s with its assassinations, civil riots, and inconclusive
wars, Richard Nixon inherited in 1969 the task of restoring cohesion to the American
body politic and coherence to American foreign policy. Highly intelligent, with a level
of personal insecurity unexpected in such an experienced public figure, Nixon was not
the ideal leader for the restoration of domestic peace. But it must also be remembered
that the tactics of mass demonstrations, intimidation, and civil disobedience at the
outer limit of peaceful protests had been well established by the time Nixon took his
oath of office on January 20, 1969.
Nevertheless, for the task of redefining the substance of American foreign policy,
Nixon was extraordinarily well prepared. As Senator from California, Vice President
under Dwight D. Eisenhower, and perennial presidential candidate, he had traveled
widely. The foreign leaders Nixon encountered would spare him the personal
confrontations that made him uncomfortable and engage him in substantive dialogue
at which he excelled. Because his solitary nature gave him more free time than
ordinary political aspirants, he found extensive reading congenial. This combination
made him the best prepared incoming president on foreign policy since Theodore
Roosevelt.
No president since Theodore Roosevelt had addressed international order as a
global concept in such a systematic and conceptual manner. In speaking with the
editors of Time in 1971, Nixon articulated such a concept. In his vision, five major
centers of political and economic power would operate on the basis of an informal
commitment by each to pursue its interests with restraint. The outcome of their
interlocking ambitions and inhibitions would be equilibrium:
We must remember the only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended period of
peace is when there has been balance of power. It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful
in relation to its potential competitor that the danger of war arises. So I believe in a world in which the
United States is powerful. I think it will be a safer world and a better world if we have a strong, healthy
United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other, not playing one against
the other, an even balance.
What was remarkable in this presentation was that two of the countries listed as
part of a concert of powers were in fact adversaries: the U.S.S.R., with which
America was engaged in a cold war, and China, with which it had just resumed
diplomatic contact after a hiatus of over two decades and where the United States had
no embassy or formal diplomatic relations. Theodore Roosevelt had articulated an
idea of world order in which the United States was the guardian of the global
equilibrium. Nixon went further in arguing that the United States should be an integral
part of an ever-changing, fluid balance, not as the balancer, but as a component.
The passage also displayed Nixon’s tactical skill, as when he renounced any
intention of playing off one of the components of the balance against another. A subtle
way of warning a potential adversary is to renounce a capability he knows one
possesses and that will not be altered by the renunciation. Nixon made these remarks
as he was about to leave for Beijing, marking a dramatic improvement in relations and
the first time a sitting American president had visited China. Balancing China against
the Soviet Union from a position in which America was closer to each Communist
giant than they were to each other was, of course, exactly the design of the evolving
strategy. In February 1971, Nixon’s annual foreign policy report referred to China as
the People’s Republic of China—the first time an official American document had
accorded it that degree of recognition—and stated that the United States was
“prepared to establish a dialogue with Peking” on the basis of national interest.
Nixon made a related point regarding Chinese domestic policies while I was on the
way to China on the so-called secret trip in July 1971. Addressing an audience in
Kansas City, Nixon argued that “Chinese domestic travail”—that is, the Cultural
Revolution—should not confer
any sense of satisfaction that it will always be that way. Because when we see the Chinese as people—
and I have seen them all over the world …—they are creative, they are productive, they are one of the
most capable people in the world. And 800 million Chinese are going to be, inevitably, an enormous
economic power, with all that that means in terms of what they could be in other areas if they move in
that direction.
These phrases, commonplace today, were revolutionary at that time. Because they
were delivered extemporaneously—and I was out of communication with Washington
—it was Zhou Enlai who brought them to my attention as I started the first dialogue
with Beijing in more than twenty years. Nixon, inveterate anti-Communist, had
decided that the imperatives of geopolitical equilibrium overrode the demands of
ideological purity—as, fortuitously, had his counterparts in China.
In the presidential election campaign of 1972, Nixon’s opponent, George
McGovern, had taunted, “Come home, America!” Nixon replied in effect that if
America shirked its international responsibility, it would surely fail at home. He
declared that “only if we act greatly in meeting our responsibilities abroad will we
remain a great nation, and only if we remain a great nation will we act greatly in
meeting our challenges at home.” At the same time, he sought to temper “our instinct
that we knew what was best for others,” which in turn brought on “their temptation to
lean on our prescriptions.”
To this end, Nixon established a practice of annual reports on the state of the world.
Like all presidential documents, these were drafted by White House associates, in this
case the National Security Council staff under my direction. But Nixon set the general
strategic tone of the documents and reviewed them as they were being completed.
They were used as guidance to the governmental agencies dealing with foreign policy
and, more important, as an indication to foreign countries of the direction of
American strategy.
Nixon was enough of a realist to stress that the United States could not entrust its
destiny entirely or even largely to the goodwill of others. As his 1970 report
underscored, peace required a willingness to negotiate and seek new forms of
partnership, but these alone would not suffice: “The second element of a durable
peace must be America’s strength. Peace, we have learned, cannot be gained by
goodwill alone.” Peace would be strengthened, not obstructed, he assessed, by
continued demonstrations of American power and a proven willingness to act globally
—which evoked shades of Theodore Roosevelt sending the Great White Fleet to
circumnavigate the globe in 1907–9. Neither could the United States expect other
countries to mortgage their future by basing their foreign policy primarily on the
goodwill of others. The guiding principle was the effort to build an international order
that related power to legitimacy—in the sense that all its key members considered the
arrangement just:
All nations, adversaries and friends alike, must have a stake in preserving the international system.
They must feel that their principles are being respected and their national interests secured … If the
international environment meets their vital concerns, they will work to maintain it.
It was the vision of such an international order that provided the first impetus for
the opening to China, which Nixon considered an indispensable component of it. One
facet of the opening to China was the attempt to transcend the domestic strife of the
past decade. Nixon became President of a nation shaken by a decade of domestic and
international upheaval and an inconclusive war. It was important to convey to it a
vision of peace and international comity to lift it toward visions worthy of its history
and its values. Equally significant was a redefinition of America’s concept of world
order. An improved relationship with China would gradually isolate the Soviet Union
or impel it to seek better relations with the United States. As long as the United States
took care to remain closer to each of the Communist superpowers than they were to
each other, the specter of the Sino-Soviet cooperative quest for world hegemony that
had haunted American foreign policy for two decades would be stifled. (In time, the
Soviet Union found itself unable to sustain this insoluble, largely self-created
dilemma of facing adversaries in both Europe and Asia, including within its own
ostensible ideological camp.)
Nixon’s attempt to make American idealism practical and American pragmatism
long-range was attacked by both sides, reflecting the American ambivalence between
power and principle. Idealists criticized Nixon for conducting foreign policy by
geopolitical principles. Conservatives challenged him on the ground that a relaxation
of tensions with the Soviet Union was a form of abdication vis-à-vis the Communist
challenge to Western civilization. Both types of critics overlooked that Nixon
undertook a tenacious defense along the Soviet periphery, that he was the first
American President to visit Eastern Europe (Yugoslavia, Poland, and Romania),
symbolically challenging Soviet control, and that he saw the United States through
several crises with the Soviet Union, during two of which (in October 1970 and
October 1973) he did not flinch from putting American military forces on alert.
Nixon had shown unusual skill in the geopolitical aspect of building a world order.
He patiently linked the various components of strategy to each other, and he showed
extraordinary courage in withstanding crises and great persistence in pursuing longrange aims in foreign policy. One of his oft-repeated operating principles was as
follows: “You pay the same price for doing something halfway as for doing it
completely. So you might as well do it completely.” As a result, in one eighteenmonth period, during 1972–73, he brought about the end of the Vietnam War, an
opening to China, a summit with the Soviet Union even while escalating the military
effort in response to a North Vietnamese offensive, the switch of Egypt from a Soviet
ally to close cooperation with the United States, two disengagement agreements in the
Middle East—one between Israel and Egypt, the other with Syria (lasting to this
writing, even amidst a brutal civil war)—and the start of the European Security
Conference, whose outcome over the long term severely weakened Soviet control of
Eastern Europe.
But at the juncture when tactical achievement might have been translated into a
permanent concept of world order linking inspirational vision to a workable
equilibrium, tragedy supervened. The Vietnam War had exhausted energies on all
sides. The Watergate debacle, foolishly self-inflicted and ruthlessly exploited by
Nixon’s longtime critics, paralyzed executive authority. In a normal period, the
various strands of Nixon’s policy would have been consolidated into a new long-term
American strategy. Nixon had a glimpse of the promised land, where hope and reality
conjoined—the end of the Cold War, a redefinition of the Atlantic Alliance, a genuine
partnership with China, a major step toward Middle East peace, the beginning of
Russia’s reintegration into an international order—but he did not have time to merge
his geopolitical vision with the occasion. It was left to others to undertake that
journey.
THE BEGINNING OF RENEWAL
After the anguish of the 1960s and the collapse of a presidency, America needed
above all to restore its cohesion. It was fortunate that the man called to this
unprecedented task was Gerald Ford.
Propelled into an office he had not sought, Ford had never been involved in the
complex gyrations of presidential politics. For that reason, freed from obsession with
focus groups and public relations, he could practice in the presidency the values of
goodwill and faith in his country on which he had been brought up. His long service
in the House, where he sat on key defense and intelligence subcommittees, gave him
an overview of foreign policy challenges.
Ford’s historic service was to overcome America’s divisions. In his foreign policy,
he strove—and largely succeeded—to relate power to principle. His administration
witnessed the completion of the first agreement between Israel and an Arab state—in
this case, Egypt—whose provisions were largely political. The second Sinai
disengagement agreement marked Egypt’s irrevocable turning toward a peace
agreement. Ford initiated an active diplomacy to bring about majority rule in southern
Africa—the first American President to do so explicitly. In the face of strong domestic
opposition, he supervised the conclusion of the European Security Conference.
Among its many provisions were clauses that enshrined human rights as one of the
European security principles. These terms were used by heroic individuals such as
Lech Walesa in Poland and Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia to bring democracy to
their countries and start the downfall of Communism.
I introduced my eulogy at President Ford’s funeral with the following sentences:
According to an ancient tradition, God preserves humanity despite its many transgressions because, at
any one period, there exist ten just individuals who, without being aware of their role, redeem mankind.
Gerald Ford was such a man.
Jimmy Carter became President when the impact of America’s defeat in Indochina
began to be translated into challenges inconceivable while America still had the aura
of invincibility. Iran, heretofore a pillar of the regional Middle East order, was taken
over by a group of ayatollahs, who in effect declared political and ideological war on
the United States, overturning the prevailing balance of power in the Middle East. A
symbol of it was the incarceration of the American diplomatic mission in Tehran for
more than four hundred days. Nearly concurrently, the Soviet Union felt itself in a
position to invade and occupy Afghanistan.
Amidst all this turmoil, Carter had the fortitude to move the Middle East peace
process toward a signing ceremony at the White House. The peace treaty between
Israel and Egypt was a historic event. Though its origin lay in the elimination of
Soviet influence and the start of a peace process by previous administrations, its
conclusion under Carter was the culmination of persistent and determined diplomacy.
Carter solidified the opening to China by establishing full diplomatic relations with it,
cementing a bipartisan consensus behind the new direction. And he reacted strongly
to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by supporting those who resisted the Soviet
takeover. In an anguished period, Carter reaffirmed values of human dignity essential
to America’s image of itself even while he hesitated before the new strategic
challenges—to find the appropriate balance between power and legitimacy—toward
the end of his term.
RONALD REAGAN AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR
Rarely has America produced a president so suited to his time and so attuned to it
as Ronald Reagan. A decade earlier, Reagan had seemed too militant to be realistic; a
decade later, his convictions might have appeared too one-dimensional. But faced
with a Soviet Union whose economy was stagnating and whose gerontocratic
leadership was quite literally perishing serially, and supported by an American public
opinion eager to shed a period of disillusionments, Reagan combined America’s
latent, sometimes seemingly discordant strengths: its idealism, its resilience, its
creativity, and its economic vitality.
Sensing potential Soviet weakness and deeply confident in the superiority of the
American system (he had read more deeply in American political philosophy than his
domestic critics credited), Reagan blended the two elements—power and legitimacy
—that had in the previous decade produced American ambivalence. He challenged the
Soviet Union to a race in arms and technology that it could not win, based on
programs long stymied in Congress. What came to be known as the Strategic Defense
Initiative—a defensive shield against missile attack—was largely derided in Congress
and the media when Reagan put it forward. Today it is widely credited with
convincing the Soviet leadership of the futility of its arms race with the United States.
At the same time, Reagan generated psychological momentum with
pronouncements at the outer edge of Wilsonian moralism. Perhaps the most poignant
example is his farewell address as he left office in 1989, in which he described his
vision of America as the shining city on a hill:
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what
I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind
swept, God blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace—a city with
free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had
doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it,
and see it still.
America as a shining city on a hill was not a metaphor for Reagan; it actually existed
for him because he willed it to exist.
This was the important difference between Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon,
whose actual policies were quite parallel and not rarely identical. Nixon treated
foreign policy as an endeavor with no end, as a set of rhythms to be managed. He
dealt with its intricacies and contradictions like school assignments by an especially
demanding teacher. He expected America to prevail but in a long, joyless enterprise,
perhaps after he left office. Reagan, by contrast, summed up his Cold War strategy to
an aide in 1977 in a characteristically optimistic epigram: “We win, they lose.” The
Nixon style of policymaking was important to restore fluidity to the diplomacy of the
Cold War; the Reagan style was indispensable for the diplomacy of ending it.
On one level, Reagan’s rhetoric—including his March 1983 speech referring to the
Soviet Union as the Evil Empire—might have spelled the end of any prospect of EastWest diplomacy. On a deeper level, it symbolized a period of transition, as the Soviet
Union became aware of the futility of an arms race while its aging leadership was
facing issues of succession. Hiding complexity behind a veneer of simplicity, Reagan
also put forward a vision of reconciliation with the Soviet Union beyond what Nixon
would ever have been willing to articulate.
Reagan was convinced that Communist intransigence was based more on ignorance
than on ill will, more on misunderstanding than on hostility. Unlike Nixon, who
thought that a calculation of self-interest could bring about accommodation between
the United States and the Soviet Union, Reagan believed the conflict was likely to end
with the realization by the adversary of the superiority of American principles. In
1984, on the appointment of the Communist Party veteran Konstantin Chernenko as
top Soviet leader, Reagan confided to his diary, “I have a gut feeling I’d like to talk to
him about our problems man to man and see if I could convince him there would be a
material benefit to the Soviets if they’d join the family of nations, etc.”
When Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Chernenko one year later, Reagan’s optimism
mounted. He told associates of his dream to escort the new Soviet leader on a tour of a
working-class American neighborhood. As a biographer recounted, Reagan
envisioned that “the helicopter would descend, and Reagan would invite Gorbachev to
knock on doors and ask the residents ‘what they think of our system.’ The workers
would tell him how wonderful it was to live in America.” All this would persuade the
Soviet Union to join the global move toward democracy, and this in turn would
produce peace—because “governments which rest upon the consent of the governed
do not wage war on their neighbors”—a core principle of Wilson’s view of
international order.
Applying his vision to the control of nuclear weapons, Reagan, at the Reykjavík
summit with Gorbachev in 1986, proposed to eliminate all nuclear delivery systems
while retaining and building up antimissile systems. Such an outcome would achieve
one of Reagan’s oft-proclaimed goals to eliminate the prospect of nuclear war by
doing away with the offensive capability for it and containing violators of the
agreement by missile defense systems. The idea went beyond the scope of
Gorbachev’s imagination, which is why he bargained strenuously over a niggling
reservation about confining missile defense system tests “to the laboratory.” (The
proposal to eliminate nuclear delivery systems was in any event beyond practicality in
that it would have been bitterly opposed by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
and French President François Mitterrand, who were convinced that Europe could not
be defended without nuclear weapons and who treated their independent deterrents as
an ultimate insurance policy.) Years later, I asked the Soviet ambassador Anatoly
Dobrynin why the Soviets had not offered a compromise on the testing issue. He
replied, “Because it never occurred to us that Reagan would simply walk out.”
Gorbachev sought to counter Reagan’s vision with a concept of Soviet reform. But
by the 1980s, the “balance of forces,” which Soviet leaders had never tired of
invoking over the decades of their rule, had turned against them. Four decades of
imperial expansion in all directions could not be sustained on the basis of an
unworkable economic model. The United States, despite its divisions and vacillations,
had preserved the essential elements of a situation of strength; over two generations it
had built an informal anti-Soviet coalition of every other major industrial center and
most of the developing world. Gorbachev realized that the Soviet Union could not
sustain its prevailing course, but he underestimated the fragility of the Soviet system.
His calls for reform—glasnost (publicity) and perestroika (restructuring)—unleashed
forces too disorganized for genuine reform and too demoralized to continue
totalitarian leadership, much as Kennan had predicted half a century earlier.
Reagan’s idealistic commitment to democracy alone could not have produced such
an outcome; strong defense and economic policies, a shrewd analysis of Soviet
weaknesses, and an unusually favorable alignment of external circumstances all
played a role in the success of his policies. Yet without Reagan’s idealism—bordering
sometimes on a repudiation of history—the end of the Soviet challenge could not
have occurred amidst such a global affirmation of a democratic future.
Forty years earlier and for the decades since, it was thought that the principal
obstacle to a peaceful world order was the Soviet Union. The corollary was that the
collapse of Communism—imagined, if at all, in some distant future—would bring
with it an era of stability and goodwill. It soon became apparent that history generally
operates in longer cycles. Before a new international order could be constructed, it
was necessary to deal with the debris of the Cold War.
THIS TASK FELL TO GEORGE H. W. BUSH, who managed America’s predominance with
moderation and wisdom. Patrician in upbringing in Connecticut, yet choosing to make
his fortune in Texas, the more elemental, entrepreneurial part of the United States, and
with wide experience in all levels of government, Bush dealt with great skill with a
stunning succession of crises testing both the application of America’s values and the
reach of its vast power. Within months of his taking office, the Tiananmen upheaval in
China challenged America’s basic values but also the importance for the global
equilibrium of preserving the U.S.-China relationship. Having been head of the
American liaison office in Beijing (before the establishment of formal relations), Bush
navigated in a manner that maintained America’s principles while retaining the
prospect of ultimate cooperation. He managed the unification of Germany—
heretofore considered a probable cause of war—by a skillful diplomacy facilitated by
his decision not to exploit Soviet embarrassment at the collapse of its empire. In that
spirit, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Bush rejected all proposals to fly to Berlin to
celebrate this demonstration of the collapse of Soviet policy.
The adroit manner in which Bush brought the Cold War to a close obscured the
domestic disputes through which the U.S. effort had been sustained and which would
characterize the challenges of the next stage. As the Cold War receded, the American
consensus held that the main work of conversion had been achieved. A peaceful world
order would now unfold, so long as the democracies took care to assist in the final
wave of democratic transformations in countries still under authoritarian rule. The
ultimate Wilsonian vision would be fulfilled. Free political and economic institutions
would spread and eventually submerge outdated antagonisms in a broader harmony.
In that spirit, Bush defeated Iraqi aggression in Kuwait during the first Gulf War by
forging a coalition of the willing through the UN, the first joint action involving great
powers since the Korean War; he stopped military operations when the limit that had
been authorized by UN resolutions had been reached (perhaps, as former ambassador
to the UN, he sought to apply the lesson of General MacArthur’s decision to cross the
dividing line between the two Koreas after his victory at Inchon).
For a brief period, the global consensus behind the American-led defeat of Saddam
Hussein’s military conquest of Kuwait in 1991 seemed to vindicate the perennial
American hope for a rules-based international order. In Prague in November 1990,
Bush invoked a “commonwealth of freedom,” which would be governed by the rule
of law; it would be “a moral community united in its dedication to free ideals.”
Membership in this commonwealth would be open to all; it might someday become
universal. As such the “great and growing strength of the commonwealth of freedom”
would “forge for all nations a new world order far more stable and secure than any we
have known.” The United States and its allies would move “beyond containment and
to a policy of active engagement.”
Bush’s term was cut short by electoral defeat in 1992, in some sense because he ran
as a foreign policy president while his opponent, Bill Clinton, appealed to a warweary public, promising to focus on America’s domestic agenda. Nonetheless, the
newly elected President rapidly reasserted a foreign policy vocation comparable to
that of Bush. Clinton expressed the confidence of the era when, in a 1993 address to
the UN General Assembly, he described his foreign policy concept as not containment
but “enlargement.” “Our overriding purpose,” he announced, “must be to expand and
strengthen the world’s community of market-based democracies.” In this view,
because the principles of political and economic liberty were universal “from Poland
to Eritrea, from Guatemala to South Korea,” their spread would require no force.
Describing an enterprise consisting of enabling an inevitable historical evolution,
Clinton pledged that American policy would aspire to “a world of thriving
democracies that cooperate with each other and live in peace.”
When Secretary of State Warren Christopher attempted to apply the enlargement
theory to the People’s Republic of China by making economic ties conditional on
modifications within the Chinese system, he encountered a sharp rebuff. The Chinese
leaders insisted that relations with the United States could only be conducted on a
geostrategic basis, not (as had been proposed) on the basis of China’s progress toward
political liberalization. By the third year of his presidency, the Clinton approach to
world order reverted to less insistent practice.
Meanwhile, the enlargement concept encountered a much more militant adversary.
Jihadism sought to spread its message and assaulted Western values and institutions,
particularly those of the United States, as the principal obstacle. A few months before
Clinton’s General Assembly speech, an international group of extremists, including
one American citizen, bombed the World Trade Center in New York City. Their
secondary target, had the first been thwarted, was the United Nations Secretariat
building. The Westphalian concept of the state and international law, because it was
based on rules not explicitly prescribed in the Quran, was an abomination to this
movement. Similarly objectionable was democracy for its capacity to legislate
separately from sharia law. America, in the view of the jihadist forces, was an
oppressor of Muslims seeking to implement their own universal mission. The
challenge broke into the open with the attacks on New York and Washington on
September 11, 2001. In the Middle East, at least, the end of the Cold War ushered in
not a hoped-for time of democratic consensus but a new age of ideological and
military confrontation.
THE AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ WARS
After an anguishing discussion of the “lessons of Vietnam,” equally intense
dilemmas recapitulated themselves three decades later with wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq. Both conflicts had their origins in a breakdown of international order. For
America, both ended in withdrawal.
AFGHANISTAN
Al-Qaeda, having issued a fatwa in 1998 calling for the indiscriminate killing of
Americans and Jews everywhere, enjoyed a sanctuary in Afghanistan, whose
governing authorities, the Taliban, refused to expel the group’s leadership and
fighters. An American response to the attack on American territory was inevitable and
widely so understood around the world.
A new challenge opened up almost immediately: how to establish international
order when the principal adversaries are non-state organizations that defend no
specific territory and reject established principles of legitimacy.
The Afghan war began on a note of national unanimity and international consensus.
Prospects for a rules-based international order seemed vindicated when NATO, for the
first time in its history, applied Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty—stipulating that
“an armed attack against one or more [NATO ally] in Europe or North America shall
be considered an attack against them all.” Nine days after the September 11 attacks,
President George W. Bush dispatched an ultimatum to the Taliban authorities of
Afghanistan, then harboring al-Qaeda: “Deliver to United States authorities all the
leaders of al Qaeda who hide in your land … Give the United States full access to
terrorist training camps, so we can make sure they are no longer operating.” When the
Taliban failed to comply, the United States and its allies launched a war whose aims
Bush described, on October 7, in similarly limited terms: “These carefully targeted
actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations,
and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.”
Initial warnings about Afghanistan’s history as the “graveyard of empires”
appeared unfounded. After a rapid effort led by American, British, and allied Afghan
forces, the Taliban were deposed from power. In December 2001, an international
conference in Bonn, Germany, proclaimed a provisional Afghan government with
Hamid Karzai as its head and set up a process for convening a loya jirga (a traditional
tribal council) to design and ratify postwar Afghan institutions. The allied war aims
seemed achieved.
The participants in the Bonn negotiations optimistically asserted a vast vision: “the
establishment of a broad-based, gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic and fully representative
government.” In 2003, a UN Security Council resolution authorized the expansion of
the NATO International Security Assistance Force
to support the Afghan Transitional Authority and its successors in the maintenance of security in areas
of Afghanistan outside of Kabul and its environs, so that the Afghan Authorities as well as the
personnel of the United Nations … can operate in a secure environment.
The central premise of the American and allied effort became “rebuilding
Afghanistan” by means of a democratic, pluralistic, transparent Afghan government
whose writ ran across the entire country and an Afghan national army capable of
assuming responsibility for security on a national basis. With a striking idealism,
these efforts were imagined to be comparable to the construction of democracy in
Germany and Japan after World War II.
No institutions in the history of Afghanistan or of any part of it provided a
precedent for such a broad-based effort. Traditionally, Afghanistan has been less a
state in the conventional sense than a geographic expression for an area never brought
under the consistent administration of any single authority. For most of recorded
history, Afghan tribes and sects have been at war with each other, briefly uniting to
resist invasion or to launch marauding raids against their neighbors. Elites in Kabul
might undertake periodic experiments with parliamentary institutions, but outside the
capital an ancient tribal code of honor predominated. Unification of Afghanistan has
been achieved by foreigners only unintentionally, when the tribes and sects coalesce
in opposition to an invader.
Thus what American and NATO forces met in the early twenty-first century was
not radically different from the scene encountered by a young Winston Churchill in
1897:
Except at harvest-time, when self-preservation enjoins a temporary truce, the Pathan [Pashtun] tribes
are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician, and a theologian.
Every large house is a real feudal fortress … Every village has its defence. Every family cultivates its
vendetta; every clan, its feud. The numerous tribes and combinations of tribes all have their accounts to
settle with one another. Nothing is ever forgotten, and very few debts are left unpaid.
In this context, the proclaimed coalition and UN goals of a transparent, democratic
Afghan central government operating in a secure environment amounted to a radical
reinvention of Afghan history. It effectively elevated one clan above all others—
Hamid Karzai’s Pashtun Popalzai tribe—and required it to establish itself across the
country either through force (its own or that of the international coalition) or through
distribution of the spoils of foreign aid, or both. Inevitably, the efforts required to
impose such institutions trampled on age-old prerogatives, reshuffling the
kaleidoscope of tribal alliances in ways that were difficult for any outside force to
understand or control.
The American election of 2008 compounded complexity with ambivalence. The
new President, Barack Obama, had campaigned on the proposition that he would
restore to the “necessary” war in Afghanistan the forces drained by the “dumb” war in
Iraq, which he intended to end. But in office, he was determined to bring about a
peacetime focus on transformational domestic priorities. The outcome was a
reemergence of the ambivalence that has accompanied American military campaigns
in the post–World War II period: the dispatch of thirty thousand additional troops for a
“surge” in Afghanistan coupled, in the same announcement, with a public deadline of
eighteen months for the beginning of their withdrawal. The purpose of the deadline, it
was argued, was to provide an incentive to the Karzai government to accelerate its
effort to build a modern central government and army to replace Americans. Yet, in
essence, the objective of a guerrilla strategy like the Taliban’s is to outlast the
defending forces. For the Kabul leadership, the announcement of a fixed date for
losing its outside support set off a process of factional maneuvering, including with
the Taliban.
The strides made by Afghanistan during this period have been significant and hardwon. The population has adopted electoral institutions with no little daring—because
the Taliban continues to threaten death to those participating in democratic structures.
The United States also succeeded in its objective of locating and eliminating Osama
bin Laden, sending a powerful message about the country’s global reach and
determination to avenge atrocities.
Nevertheless, the regional prospects remain challenging. In the period following the
American withdrawal (imminent as of this writing), the writ of the Afghan
government is likely to run in Kabul and its environs but not uniformly in the rest of
the country. There a confederation of semiautonomous, feudal regions is likely to
prevail on an ethnic basis, influenced substantially by competing foreign powers. The
challenge will return to where it began—the compatibility of an independent
Afghanistan with a regional political order.
Afghanistan’s neighbors should have at least as much of a national interest as the
United States—and, in the long run, a far greater one—in defining and bringing about
a coherent, non-jihadist outcome in Afghanistan. Each of Afghanistan’s neighbors
would risk turmoil within its own borders if Afghanistan returns to its prewar status as
a base for jihadist non-state organizations or as a state dedicated to jihadist policies:
Pakistan above all in its entire domestic structure, Russia in its partly Muslim south
and west, China with a significantly Muslim Xinjiang, and even Shiite Iran from
fundamentalist Sunni trends. All of them, from a strategic point of view, are more
threatened by an Afghanistan hospitable to terrorism than the United States is (except
perhaps Iran, which may calculate, as it has in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, that a chaotic
situation beyond its borders enables it to manipulate the contending factions).
The ultimate irony may be that Afghanistan, torn by war, may be a test case of
whether a regional order can be distilled from divergent security interests and
historical perspectives. Without a sustainable international program regarding
Afghanistan’s security, each major neighbor will support rival factions across ancient
ethnic and sectarian lines. The likely outcome would be a de facto partition, with
Pakistan controlling the Pashtun south, and India, Russia, and perhaps China favoring
the ethnically mixed north. To avoid a vacuum, a major diplomatic effort is needed to
define a regional order to deal with the possible reemergence of Afghanistan as a
jihadist center. In the nineteenth century, the major powers guaranteed Belgian
neutrality, a guarantee that, in the event, lasted nearly one hundred years. Is an
equivalent, with appropriate redefinitions, possible? If such a concept—or a
comparable one—is evaded, Afghanistan is likely to drag the world back into its
perennial warfare.
IRAQ
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush articulated a global
strategy to counter jihadist extremism and to shore up the established international
order by infusing it with a commitment to democratic transformation. The “great
struggles of the twentieth century,” the White House’s National Security Strategy of
2002 argued, had demonstrated that there was “a single sustainable model for national
success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.”
The present moment, the National Security Strategy document stressed, saw a
world shocked by an unprecedented terrorist atrocity and the great powers “on the
same side—united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos.” The
encouragement of free institutions and cooperative major-power relations offered “the
best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a
world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war.”
The centerpiece of what came to be called the Freedom Agenda was to be a
transformation of Iraq from among the Middle East’s most repressive states to a
multiparty democracy, which would in turn inspire a regional democratic
transformation: “Iraqi democracy will succeed—and that success will send forth the
news, from Damascus to Teheran—that freedom can be the future of every nation.”
The Freedom Agenda was not, as was later alleged, the arbitrary invention of a
single president and his entourage. Its basic premise was an elaboration of
quintessentially American themes. The 2002 National Security Strategy document—
which first announced the policy—repeated the arguments of NSC-68 that, in 1950,
had defined America’s mission in the Cold War, albeit with one decisive difference.
The 1950 document had enlisted America’s values in defense of the free world. The
2002 document argued for the ending of tyranny everywhere on behalf of universal
values of freedom.
UN Security Council Resolution 687 of 1991 had required Iraq to destroy all
stockpiles of its weapons of mass destruction and commit never to develop such
weapons again. Ten Security Council resolutions since then had held Iraq in
substantial violation.
What was distinctive—and traditionally American—about the military effort in Iraq
was the decision to cast this, in effect, enforcement action as an aspect of a project to
spread freedom and democracy. America reacted to the mounting tide of radical
Islamist universalism by reaffirming the universality of its own values and concept of
world order.
The basic premise began with significant public support, especially extending to the
removal of Saddam Hussein. In 1998, the U.S. Congress passed the Iraq Liberation
Act with overwhelming bipartisan support (360–38 in the House and unanimously in
the Senate), declaring that “it should be the policy of the United States to support
efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to
promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.” Signing
the bill into law on October 31, the same day as its passage in the Senate, President
Clinton expressed the consensus of both parties:
The United States wants Iraq to rejoin the family of nations as a freedom-loving and law-abiding
member. This is in our interest and that of our allies within the region … The United States is providing
support to opposition groups from all sectors of the Iraqi community that could lead to a popularly
supported government.
Because no political parties were permitted in Iraq except the governing Baath Party,
which Saddam Hussein ran with an iron fist, and therefore no formal opposition
parties existed, the President’s phrase had to mean that the United States would
generate a covert program to overthrow the Iraqi dictator.
After the military intervention in Iraq, Bush elaborated broader implications in a
November 2003 speech marking the twentieth anniversary of the National
Endowment for Democracy. Bush condemned past U.S. policies in the region for
having sought stability at the price of liberty:
Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East
did nothing to make us safe—because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of
liberty.
In the changed circumstances of the twenty-first century, traditional policy approaches
posed unacceptable risks. The administration was therefore shifting from a policy of
stability to “a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.” American experience
in Europe and Asia demonstrated that “the advance of freedom leads to peace.”
I supported the decision to undertake regime change in Iraq. I had doubts,
expressed in public and governmental forums, about expanding it to nation building
and giving it such universal scope. But before recording my reservations, I want to
express here my continuing respect and personal affection for President George W.
Bush, who guided America with courage, dignity, and conviction in an unsteady time.
His objectives and dedication honored his country even when in some cases they
proved unattainable within the American political cycle. It is a symbol of his devotion
to the Freedom Agenda that Bush is now pursuing it in his postpresidential life and
made it the key theme of his presidential library in Dallas.
Having spent my childhood as a member of a discriminated minority in a
totalitarian system and then as an immigrant to the United States, I have experienced
the liberating aspects of American values. Spreading them by example and civil
assistance as in the Marshall Plan and economic aid programs is an honored and
important part of the American tradition. But to seek to achieve them by military
occupation in a part of the world where they had no historical roots, and to expect
fundamental change in a politically relevant period of time—the standard set by many
supporters and critics of the Iraq effort alike—proved beyond what the American
public would support and what Iraqi society could accommodate.
Given the ethnic divisions in Iraq and the millennial conflict between Sunni and
Shia, the dividing line of which ran through the center of Baghdad, the attempt to
reverse historical legacies under combat conditions, amidst divisive American
domestic debates, imbued the American endeavor in Iraq with a Sisyphean quality.
The determined opposition of neighboring regimes compounded the difficulties. It
became an endless effort always just short of success.
Implementing a pluralist democracy in place of Saddam Hussein’s brutal rule
proved infinitely more difficult than the overthrow of the dictator. The Shias, long
disenfranchised and hardened by decades of oppression under Hussein, tended to
equate democracy with a ratification of their numeric dominance. The Sunnis treated
democracy as a foreign plot to repress them; on this basis, most Sunnis boycotted the
2004 elections, instrumental in defining the postwar constitutional order. The Kurds in
the north, with memories of murderous onslaughts by Baghdad, enhanced their
separate military capabilities and strove for control of oil fields to provide themselves
with revenue not dependent on the national treasury. They defined autonomy in terms
minutely different, if at all, from national independence.
Passions, already high in an atmosphere of revolution and foreign occupation, were
ruthlessly inflamed and exploited after 2003 by outside forces: Iran, which backed
Shia groups subverting the nascent government’s independence; Syria, which abetted
the transfer of arms and jihadists through its territory (ultimately with devastating
consequences for its own cohesion); and al-Qaeda, which began a campaign of
systematic slaughter against the Shias. Each community increasingly treated the
postwar order as a zero-sum battle for power, territory, and oil revenues.
In this atmosphere, Bush’s courageous January 2007 decision to deploy a “surge”
of additional troops to quell violence was met with a nonbinding resolution of
disapproval supported by 246 members of the House; though it failed on procedural
grounds in the Senate, 56 Senators joined in opposition to the surge. The Senate
majority leader soon declared that “this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing
anything.” The same month, the House and the Senate passed bills, vetoed by the
President, mandating that American withdrawal start within a year.
Bush, it has been reported, closed a 2007 planning session with the question “If
we’re not there to win, why are we there?” The remark embodied the resoluteness of
the President’s character as well as the tragedy of a country whose people have been
prepared for more than half a century to send its sons and daughters to remote corners
of the world in defense of freedom but whose political system has not been able to
muster the same unified and persistent purpose. For while the surge, daringly ordered
by Bush and brilliantly executed by General David Petraeus, succeeded in wresting an
honorable outcome from looming collapse, the American mood had shifted by this
point. Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination in part on the strength of his
opposition to the Iraq War. On taking office, he continued his public critiques of his
predecessor, and undertook an “exit strategy” with greater emphasis on exit than on
strategy. As of this writing, Iraq functions as a central battlefield in an unfolding
regional sectarian contest—its government leaning toward Iran, elements of its Sunni
population in military opposition to the government, members of both sides of its
sectarian divide supporting the contending jihadist efforts in Syria, and the terrorist
group ISIL attempting to build a caliphate across half of its territory.
The issue transcends political debates about its antecedents. The consolidation of a
jihadist entity at the heart of the Arab world, equipped with substantial captured
weaponry and a transnational fighting force, engaged in religious war with radical
Iranian and Iraqi Shia groups, calls for a concerted and forceful international response
or it will metastasize. A sustained strategic effort by America, the other permanent
members of the Security Council, and potentially its regional adversaries will be
needed.
THE PURPOSE AND THE POSSIBLE
The nature of the international order was at issue when the Soviet Union emerged
as a challenge to the Westphalian state system. With decades of hindsight, one can
debate whether the balance sought by America was always the optimum. But it is hard
to gainsay that the United States, in a world of weapons of mass destruction and
political and social upheaval, preserved the peace, helped restore Europe’s vitality,
and provided crucial economic aid to emerging countries.
It was in the conduct of its “hot” wars that America found it difficult to relate
purpose to possibility. In only one of the five wars America fought after World War II
(Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan), the first Gulf War under
President George H. W. Bush, did America achieve the goals it had put forward for
entering it without intense domestic division. When the outcomes of the other
conflicts—ranging from stalemate to unilateral withdrawal—became foreordained is a
subject for another debate. For present purposes, it is sufficient to state that a country
that has to play an indispensable role in the search for world order needs to begin that
task by coming to terms with that role and with itself.
The essence of historical events is rarely fully apparent to those living through
them. The Iraq War may be seen as a catalyzing event in a larger transformation of the
region—the fundamental character of which is as yet unknown and awaits the longterm outcome of the Arab Spring, the Iranian nuclear and geopolitical challenge, and
the jihadist assault on Iraq and Syria. The advent of electoral politics in Iraq in 2004
almost certainly inspired demands for participatory institutions elsewhere in the
region; what is yet to be seen is whether they can be combined with a spirit of
tolerance and peaceful compromise.
As America examines the lessons of its twenty-first-century wars, it is important to
remember that no other major power has brought to its strategic efforts such deeply
felt aspirations for human betterment. There is a special character to a nation that
proclaims as war aims not only to punish its enemies but to improve the lives of their
people—that has sought victory not in domination but in sharing the fruits of liberty.
America would not be true to itself if it abandoned this essential idealism. Nor would
it reassure friends (or win over adversaries) by setting aside such a core aspect of its
national experience. But to be effective, these aspirational aspects of policy must be
paired with an unsentimental analysis of underlying factors, including the cultural and
geopolitical configuration of other regions and the dedication and resourcefulness of
adversaries opposing American interests and values. America’s moral aspirations need
to be combined with an approach that takes into account the strategic element of
policy in terms the American people can support and sustain through multiple
political cycles.
Former Secretary of State George Shultz has articulated the American ambivalence
wisely:
Americans, being a moral people, want their foreign policy to reflect the values we espouse as a nation.
But Americans, being a practical people, also want their foreign policy to be effective.
The American domestic debate is frequently described as a contest between
idealism and realism. It may turn out—for America and the rest of the world—that if
America cannot act in both modes, it will not be able to fulfill either.
chapter 9
Technology, Equilibrium, and Human
Consciousness
EVERY AGE HAS ITS LEITMOTIF, a set of beliefs that explains the universe, that inspires or
consoles the individual by providing an explanation for the multiplicity of events
impinging on him. In the medieval period, it was religion; in the Enlightenment, it
was Reason; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was nationalism combined
with a view of history as a motivating force. Science and technology are the
governing concepts of our age. They have brought about advances in human wellbeing unprecedented in history. Their evolution transcends traditional cultural
constraints. Yet they have also produced weapons capable of destroying mankind.
Technology has brought about a means of communication permitting instantaneous
contact between individuals or institutions in every part of the globe as well as the
storage and retrieval of vast quantities of information at the touch of a button. Yet by
what purposes is this technology informed? What happens to international order if
technology has become such a part of everyday life that it defines its own universe as
the sole relevant one? Is the destructiveness of modern weapons technology so vast
that a common fear may unite mankind in order to eliminate the scourge of war? Or
will possession of these weapons create a permanent foreboding? Will the rapidity
and scope of communication break down barriers between societies and individuals
and provide transparency of such magnitude that the age-old dreams of a human
community will come into being? Or will the opposite happen: Will mankind, amidst
weapons of mass destruction, networked transparency, and the absence of privacy,
propel itself into a world without limits or order, careening through crises without
comprehending them?
The author claims no competence in the more advanced forms of technology; his
concern is with its implications.
WORLD ORDER IN THE NUCLEAR AGE
Since history began to be recorded, political units—whether described as states or
not—had at their disposal war as the ultimate recourse. Yet the technology that made
war possible also limited its scope. The most powerful and well-equipped states could
only project force over limited distances, in certain quantities, and against so many
targets. Ambitious leaders were constrained, both by convention and by the state of
communications technology. Radical courses of action were inhibited by the pace at
which they unfolded. Diplomatic instructions were obliged to take into account
contingencies that might occur in the time in which a message could make a round
trip. This imposed a built-in pause for reflection and acknowledged a distinction
between what leaders could and could not control.
Whether a balance of power between states operated as a formal principle or was
simply practiced without theoretical elaboration, equilibrium of some kind was an
essential component of any international order—either at the periphery, as with the
Roman and Chinese empires, or as a core operating principle, as in Europe.
With the Industrial Revolution, the pace of change quickened, and the power
projected by modern militaries grew more devastating. When the technological gap
was great, even rudimentary technology—by present standards—could be genocidal
in effect. European technology and European diseases did much to wipe out existing
civilizations in the Americas. With the promise of new efficiencies came new
potentials for destruction, as the impact of mass conscription multiplied the
compounding effect of technology.
The advent of nuclear weapons brought this process to a culmination. In World War
II, scientists from the major powers labored to achieve mastery of the atom and with it
the ability to release its energy. The American effort, known as the Manhattan Project
and drawing on the best minds from the United States, Britain, and the European
diaspora, prevailed. After the first successful atomic test in July 1945 in the deserts of
New Mexico, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who headed the secret
weapons-development effort, awed by his triumph, recalled a verse from the
Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
In earlier periods, wars had an implicit calculus: the benefits of victory outweighed
its cost, and the weaker fought to impose such costs on the stronger as to disturb this
equation. Alliances were formed to augment power, to leave no doubt about the
alignment of forces, to define the casus belli (insofar as the removal of doubt about
ultimate intentions is possible in a society of sovereign states). The penalties of
military conflict were considered less than the penalties of defeat. By contrast, the
nuclear age based itself on a weapon whose use would impose costs out of proportion
to any conceivable benefit.
The nuclear age posed the dilemma of how to bring the destructiveness of modern
weapons into some moral or political relationship with the objectives that were being
pursued. Prospects for any kind of international order—indeed, for human survival—
now urgently required the amelioration, if not elimination, of major-power conflict. A
theoretical limit was sought—short of the point of either superpower using the
entirety of its military capabilities.
Strategic stability was defined as a balance in which neither side would use its
weapons of mass destruction because the adversary was always able to inflict an
unacceptable level of destruction in retaliation. In a series of seminars at Harvard,
Caltech, MIT, and the Rand Corporation among others in the 1950s and 1960s, a
doctrine of “limited use” explored confining nuclear weapons to the battlefield or to
military targets. All such theoretical efforts failed; whatever limits were imagined,
once the threshold to nuclear warfare was crossed, modern technology overrode
observable limits and always enabled the adversary to escalate. Ultimately, strategists
on both sides coalesced, at least tacitly, on the concept of a mutual assured destruction
as the mechanism of nuclear peace. Based on the premise that both sides possessed a
nuclear arsenal capable of surviving an initial assault, the objective was to
counterbalance threats sufficiently terrifying that neither side would conceive of
actually invoking them.
By the end of the 1960s, the prevailing strategic doctrine of each superpower relied
on the ability to inflict an “unacceptable” level of damage on the presumed adversary.
What the adversary would consider unacceptable was, of course, unknowable; nor
was this judgment communicated.
A surreal quality haunted this calculus of deterrence, which relied on “logical”
equations of scenarios positing a level of the casualties exceeding that suffered in four
years of world wars and occurring in a matter of days or hours. Because there was no
prior experience with the weapons underpinning these threats, deterrence depended in
large part on the ability to affect the adversary psychologically. When, in the 1950s,
Mao spoke of China’s willingness to accept sacrifices of hundreds of millions in a
nuclear war, it was widely treated in the West as a symptom of emotional or
ideological derangement. It was, in fact, probably the consequence of a sober
calculation that to withstand military capacities beyond previous human experience, a
country needed to demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice beyond human
comprehension. In any case, the shock in Western and Warsaw Pact capitals at these
statements ignored that the superpowers’ own concepts of deterrence rested on
apocalyptic risks. Even if more urbanely expressed, the doctrine of mutual assured
destruction relied on the proposition that leaders were acting in the interest of peace
by deliberately exposing their civilian populations to the threat of annihilation.
Many efforts were undertaken to avoid the dilemma of possessing a huge arsenal
that could not be used and whose use could not even plausibly be threatened.
Complicated war scenarios were devised. But neither side, to the best of my
knowledge—and for some of this period I was in a position to know—ever
approached the point of actually using nuclear weapons in a specific crisis between
the two superpowers. Except for the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when a Soviet
combat division was initially authorized to use its nuclear weapons to defend itself,
neither side approached their use, either against each other or in wars against nonnuclear third countries.
In this manner, the most fearsome weapons, commanding large shares of each
superpower’s defense budget, lost their relevance to the actual crises facing leaders.
Mutual suicide became the mechanism of international order. When, during the Cold
War, the two sides, Washington and Moscow, challenged each other, it was through
proxy wars. At the pinnacle of the nuclear era, it was conventional forces that
assumed pivotal importance. The military struggles of the time were taking place on
the far-flung periphery—Inchon, the Mekong River delta, Luanda, Iraq, and
Afghanistan. The measure of success was effectiveness in supporting local allies in
the developing world. In short, the strategic arsenals of the major powers,
incommensurable with conceivable political objectives, created an illusion of
omnipotence belied by the actual evolution of events.
It was in this context that in 1969 President Nixon started formal talks with the
Soviets on the limitation of strategic arms (with the acronym SALT). They resulted in
a 1972 agreement that established a ceiling for the offensive buildup and limited each
superpower’s antiballistic missile sites to one (in effect turning them into training sites
because a full ABM deployment for the United States under an original Nixon
proposal in 1969 would have required twelve sites). The reasoning was that since the
U.S. Congress refused to approbate missile defense beyond two sites, deterrence
needed to be based on mutual assured destruction. For that strategy, the offensive
nuclear weapons on each side were sufficient—in fact, more than sufficient—to
produce an unacceptable level of casualties. The absence of missile defense would
remove any uncertainty from that calculation, guaranteeing mutual deterrence—but
also the destruction of the society, should deterrence fail.
At the Reykjavík summit in 1986, Reagan reversed the mutual assured destruction
approach. He proposed the abolition of all offensive weapons by both sides and the
scrapping of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, thereby allowing a defensive system.
His intent was to do away with the concept of mutual assured destruction by
proscribing offensive systems and keeping defense systems as a hedge against
violations. But Gorbachev, believing—mistakenly—that the U.S. missile defense
program was well under way while the Soviet Union, lacking an equivalent
technological-economic base, could not keep up, insisted on maintaining the ABM
Treaty. The Soviets in effect gave up the race in strategic weapons three years later,
ending the Cold War.
Since then, the number of strategic nuclear offensive warheads has been reduced,
first under President George W. Bush and then under President Obama, by agreement
with Russia to about fifteen hundred warheads for each side—approximately 10
percent of the number of warheads that existed at the high point of the mutual assured
destruction strategy. (The reduced number is more than enough to implement a mutual
assured destruction strategy.)
The nuclear balance has produced a paradoxical impact on the international order.
The historic balance of power had facilitated the Western domination of the thencolonial world; by contrast, the nuclear order—the West’s own creation—had the
opposite effect. The margin of military superiority of advanced countries over the
developing countries has been incomparably larger than at any previous period in
history. But because so much of their military effort has been devoted to nuclear
weapons, whose use in anything but the gravest crisis was implicitly discounted,
regional powers could redress the overall military balance by a strategy geared to
prolonging any war beyond the willingness of the “advanced” country’s public to
sustain it—as France experienced in Algeria and Vietnam; the United States in Korea,
Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. (All except
Korea resulted in, in effect, a unilateral withdrawal by the formally much stronger
power after protracted conflict with conventional forces.) Asymmetric warfare
operated in the interstices of traditional doctrines of linear operations against an
enemy’s territory. Guerrilla forces, which defend no territory, could concentrate on
inflicting casualties and eroding the public’s political will to continue the conflict. In
this sense, technological supremacy turned into geopolitical impotence.
THE CHALLENGE OF NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION
With the end of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war between the existing
nuclear superpowers has essentially disappeared. But the spread of technology—
especially the technology to produce peaceful nuclear energy—has vastly increased
the feasibility of acquiring a nuclear-weapons capability. The sharpening of
ideological dividing lines and the persistence of unresolved regional conflicts have
magnified the incentives to acquire nuclear weapons, including for rogue states or
non-state actors. The calculations of mutual insecurity that produced restraint during
the Cold War do not apply with anything like the same degree—if at all—to the new
entrants in the nuclear field, and even less so to the non-state actors. Proliferation of
nuclear weapons has become an overarching strategic problem for the contemporary
international order.
In response to these perils, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United
Kingdom negotiated a Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and opened it for
signature in 1968. It proposed to prevent any further spread of nuclear weapons (the
United States, the U.S.S.R., and the U.K. signed in 1968, and France and China
signed in 1992). Non-nuclear-weapons states were to be given assistance by the
nuclear states in the peaceful utilization of nuclear technology provided they accepted
safeguards to guarantee their nuclear programs remained purely nonmilitary
endeavors. At this writing, there are 189 signatories of the nonproliferation
agreement.
Yet the global nonproliferation regime has had difficulty embedding itself as a true
international norm. Assailed by some as a form of “nuclear apartheid” and treated by
many states as a rich-country fixation, the NPT’s restrictions have often functioned as
a set of aspirations that countries must be cajoled to implement rather than as a
binding legal obligation. Illicit progress toward nuclear weapons has proved difficult
to discover and resist, for its initial steps are identical with the development of
peaceful uses of nuclear energy specifically authorized by the NPT. The treaty
proscribed but did not prevent signatories such as Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Iran from
maintaining covert nuclear programs in violation of NPT safeguards or, in the case of
North Korea, withdrawing from the NPT in 2003 and testing and proliferating nuclear
technology without international control.
Where a state has violated or repudiated the terms of the NPT, hovered on the edge
of compliance, or simply declined to recognize the legitimacy of nonproliferation as
an international norm, there exists no defined international mechanism for enforcing
it. So far preemptive action has been taken by the United States only against Iraq—a
contributing motive for the war against Saddam Hussein—and by Israel against Iraq
and Syria; the Soviet Union considered it against China in the 1960s, though
ultimately refrained.
The nonproliferation regime has scored a few significant successes in bringing
about the negotiated dismantlement of nuclear programs. South Africa, Brazil,
Argentina, and several “post-Soviet” republics have abandoned nuclear weapons
programs that had either come to fruition or made significant technical progress. At
the same time, since the end of the American monopoly in 1949, nuclear weapons
have been acquired by the Soviet Union/Russia, Britain, France, Israel, China, India,
Pakistan, North Korea, and at a threshold level by Iran. Moreover, Pakistan and North
Korea have proliferated their nuclear know-how widely.
Proliferation has had an impact on the nuclear equilibrium in a differential way,
depending on the perceived willingness of the new nuclear country to use its weapons.
British and French nuclear capabilities add to the NATO arsenal only marginally.
They are conceived primarily as a last resort, as a safety net in case of abandonment
by the United States, if some major power were to threaten British and French
perceptions of their basic national interest, or as a means to stay apart from a nuclear
war between superpowers—all essentially remote contingencies. The Indian and
Pakistani nuclear establishments are, in the first instance, directed against each other,
affecting the strategic equilibrium in two ways. The risks of escalation may reduce the
likelihood of full-scale conventional war on the subcontinent. But because the weapon
systems are so vulnerable and technically so difficult to protect against short-range
attack, the temptation for preemption is inherent in the technology, especially in
situations when emotions are already running high. In short, proliferation generates
the classic nuclear dilemma: even when nuclear weapons reduce the likelihood of war,
they would gigantically magnify its ferocity were war to occur.
India’s nuclear relations with China are likely to approximate the deterrent posture
that existed between the adversaries in the Cold War; that is, they will tend toward
preventing their use. Pakistan’s nuclear establishment impinges on wider regional and
global issues. Abutting the Middle East and with a significant domestic Islamist
presence at home, Pakistan has occasionally hinted at the role of nuclear protector or
of nuclear armorer. The impact of the proliferation of nuclear weapons to Iran would
compound all these issues—as discussed in Chapter 4.
Over time, the continued proliferation of nuclear weapons will affect even the
overall nuclear balance between the nuclear superpowers. Leaders of the established
nuclear powers are obliged to prepare for the worst contingency. This involves the
possibility of nuclear threats posed not only by the other superpower but also by
proliferating countries. Their arsenals will reflect the conviction that they need,
beyond deterrence of the principal potential adversary, a residual force to cope with
the proliferated part of the rest of the world. If each major nuclear power calculates in
this manner, proliferation will impel a proportional increase in these residual forces,
straining or exceeding existing limits. Further, these overlapping nuclear balances will
grow more complicated as proliferation proceeds. The relatively stable nuclear order
of the Cold War will be superseded by an international order in which projection by a
state possessing nuclear weapons of an image of a willingness to take apocalyptic
decisions may offer it a perverse advantage over rivals.
To provide themselves a safety net against nuclear superpowers, even countries
with nuclear capabilities have an incentive to nestle under the tacit or overt support of
a superpower (examples are Israel, the European nuclear forces, Japan with its
threshold nuclear capability, other proliferating or near-proliferating states in the
Middle East). So it may transpire that the proliferation of weapons will lead to
alliance systems comparable in their rigidity to the alliances that led to World War I,
though far exceeding them in global reach and destructive power.
A particularly serious imbalance may arise if a proliferated country approaches the
military offensive capability of the two nuclear superpowers (a task which for both
China and India seems attainable). Any major nuclear country, if it succeeds in
staying out of a nuclear conflict between the others, would emerge as potentially
dominant. In a multipolar nuclear world, that too could occur if such a country aligns
with one of the superpowers because the combined forces might then have a strategic
advantage. The rough nuclear balance that exists between current superpowers may
then tilt away from strategic stability; the lower the agreed level of offensive forces
between Russia and the United States, the more this will be true.
Any further spread of nuclear weapons multiplies the possibilities of nuclear
confrontation; it magnifies the danger of diversion, deliberate or unauthorized. It will
eventually affect the balance between nuclear superpowers. And as the development
of nuclear weapons spreads into Iran and continues in North Korea—in defiance of all
ongoing negotiations—the incentives for other countries to follow the same path
could become overwhelming.
In the face of these trends, the United States needs to constantly review its own
technology. During the Cold War, nuclear technology was broadly recognized as the
forefront of American scientific achievements—a frontier of knowledge then posing
the most important and strategic challenges. Now the best technical minds are
encouraged to devote efforts instead to projects seen as more publicly relevant.
Perhaps partly as a result, inhibitions on the elaboration of nuclear technology are
treated as inexorable even as proliferating countries arm and other countries enhance
their technology. The United States must remain at the frontier of nuclear technology,
even while it negotiates about restraint in its use.
From the perspective of the past half century’s absence of a major-power conflict, it
could be argued that nuclear weapons have made the world less prone to war. But the
decrease in the number of wars has been accompanied by a vast increase in violence
carried out by non-state groups or by states under some label other than war. A
combination of extraordinary risk and ideological radicalism has opened up the
possibilities for asymmetric war and for challenges by non-state groups that
undermine long-term restraint.
Perhaps the most important challenge to the established nuclear powers is for them
to determine their reaction if nuclear weapons were actually used by proliferating
countries against each other. First, what must be done to prevent the use of nuclear
weapons beyond existing agreements? If they should nonetheless be used, what
immediate steps must be taken to stop such a war? How can the human and social
damage be addressed? What can be done to prevent retaliatory escalation while still
upholding the validity of deterrence and imposing appropriate consequences should
deterrence fail? The march of technological progress must not obscure the
fearsomeness of the capabilities humanity has invented and the relative fragility of the
balances restraining their use. Nuclear weapons must not be permitted to turn into
conventional arms. At that juncture, international order will require an understanding
between the existing major nuclear countries to insist on nonproliferation, or order
will be imposed by the calamities of nuclear war.
CYBER TECHNOLOGY AND WORLD ORDER
For most of history, technological change unfolded over decades and centuries of
incremental advances that refined and combined existing technologies. Even radical
innovations could over time be fitted within previous tactical and strategic doctrines:
tanks were considered in terms of precedents drawn from centuries of cavalry
warfare; airplanes could be conceptualized as another form of artillery, battleships as
mobile forts, and aircraft carriers as airstrips. For all their magnification of destructive
power, even nuclear weapons are in some respects an extrapolation from previous
experience.
What is new in the present era is the rate of change of computing power and the
expansion of information technology into every sphere of existence. Reflecting in the
1960s on his experiences as an engineer at the Intel Corporation, Gordon Moore
concluded that the trend he had observed would continue at regular intervals to double
the capacity of computer processing units every two years. “Moore’s Law” has proved
astoundingly prophetic. Computers have shrunk in size, declined in cost, and grown
exponentially faster to the point where advanced computer processing units can now
be embedded in almost any object—phones, watches, cars, home appliances, weapons
systems, unmanned aircraft, and the human body itself.
The revolution in computing is the first to bring so many individuals and processes
into the same medium of communication and to translate and track their actions in a
single technological language. Cyberspace—a word coined, at that point as an
essentially hypothetical concept, only in the 1980s—has colonized physical space
and, at least in major urban centers, is beginning to merge with it. Communication
across it, and between its exponentially proliferating nodes, is near instantaneous. As
tasks that were primarily manual or paper based a generation ago—reading, shopping,
education, friendship, industrial and scientific research, political campaigns, finance,
government record keeping, surveillance, military strategy—are filtered through the
computing realm, human activity becomes increasingly “datafied” and part of a single
“quantifiable, analyzable” system.
This is all the more so as, with the number of devices connected to the Internet now
roughly ten billion and projected to rise to fifty billion by 2020, an “Internet of
Things” or an “Internet of Everything” looms. Innovators now forecast a world of
ubiquitous computing, with miniature data-processing devices embedded in everyday
objects—“smart door locks, toothbrushes, wristwatches, fitness trackers, smoke
detectors, surveillance cameras, ovens, toys and robots”—or floating through the air,
surveying and shaping their environment in the form of “smart dust.” Each object is to
be connected to the Internet and programmed to communicate with a central server or
other networked devices.
The revolution’s effects extend to every level of human organization. Individuals
wielding smartphones (and currently an estimated one billion people do) now possess
information and analytical capabilities beyond the range of many intelligence
agencies a generation ago. Corporations aggregating and monitoring the data
exchanged by these individuals wield powers of influence and surveillance exceeding
those of many contemporary states and of even more traditional powers. And
governments, wary of ceding the new field to rivals, are propelled outward into a
cyber realm with as yet few guidelines or restraints. As with any technological
innovation, the temptation will be to see this new realm as a field for strategic
advantage.
These changes have occurred so rapidly as to outstrip most attempts by those
without technological expertise to comprehend their broader consequences. They
draw humanity into regions hitherto unexplained, indeed unconceived. As a result,
many of the most revolutionary technologies and techniques are currently limited in
their use only by the capability and the discretion of the most technologically
advanced.
No government, even the most totalitarian, has been able to arrest the flow or to
resist the trend to push ever more of its operations into the digital domain. Most of the
democracies have an ingrained instinct that an attempt to curtail the effects of an
information revolution would be impossible and perhaps also immoral. Most of the
countries outside the liberal-democratic world have set aside attempts to shut out
these changes and turned instead to mastering them. Every country, company, and
individual is now being enlisted in the technological revolution as either a subject or
an object. What matters for the purpose of this book is the effect on prospects for
international order.
The contemporary world inherits the legacy of nuclear weapons capable of
destroying civilized life. But as catastrophic as their implications were, their
significance and use could still be analyzed in terms of separable cycles of war and
peace. The new technology of the Internet opens up entirely new vistas. Cyberspace
challenges all historical experience. It is ubiquitous but not threatening in itself; its
menace depends on its use. The threats emerging from cyberspace are nebulous and
undefined and may be difficult to attribute. The pervasiveness of networked
communications in the social, financial, industrial, and military sectors has vast
beneficial aspects; it has also revolutionized vulnerabilities. Outpacing most rules and
regulations (and indeed the technical comprehension of many regulators), it has, in
some respects, created the state of nature about which philosophers have speculated
and the escape from which, according to Hobbes, provided the motivating force for
creating a political order.
Before the cyber age, nations’ capabilities could still be assessed through an
amalgam of manpower, equipment, geography, economics, and morale. There was a
clear distinction between periods of peace and war. Hostilities were triggered by
defined events and carried out with strategies for which some intelligible doctrine had
been formulated. Intelligence services played a role mainly in assessing, and
occasionally in disrupting, adversaries’ capabilities; their activities were limited by
implicit common standards of conduct or, at a minimum, by common experiences
evolved over decades.
Internet technology has outstripped strategy or doctrine—at least for the time being.
In the new era, capabilities exist for which there is as yet no common interpretation—
or even understanding. Few if any limits exist among those wielding them to define
either explicit or tacit restraints. When individuals of ambiguous affiliation are
capable of undertaking actions of increasing ambition and intrusiveness, the very
definition of state authority may turn ambiguous. The complexity is compounded by
the fact that it is easier to mount cyberattacks than to defend against them, possibly
encouraging an offensive bias in the construction of new capabilities.
The danger is compounded by the plausible deniability of those suspected of such
actions and by the lack of international agreements for which, even if reached, there is
no present system of enforcement. A laptop can produce global consequences. A
solitary actor with enough computing power is able to access the cyber domain to
disable and potentially destroy critical infrastructure from a position of near-complete
anonymity. Electric grids could be surged and power plants disabled through actions
undertaken exclusively outside a nation’s physical territory (or at least its territory as
traditionally conceived). Already, an underground hacker syndicate has proved
capable of penetrating government networks and disseminating classified information
on a scale sufficient to affect diplomatic conduct. Stuxnet, an example of a statebacked cyberattack, succeeded in disrupting and delaying Iranian nuclear efforts, by
some accounts to an extent rivaling the effects of a limited military strike. The botnet
attack from Russia on Estonia in 2007 paralyzed communications for days.
Such a state of affairs, even if temporarily advantageous to the advanced countries,
cannot continue indefinitely. The road to a world order may be long and uncertain, but
no meaningful progress can be made if one of the most pervasive elements of
international life is excluded from serious dialogue. It is highly improbable that all
parties, especially those shaped by different cultural traditions, will arrive
independently at the same conclusions about the nature and permissible uses of their
new intrusive capacities. Some attempt at charting a common perception of our new
condition is essential. In its absence, the parties will continue to operate on the basis
of separate intuitions, magnifying the prospects of a chaotic outcome. For actions
undertaken in the virtual, networked world are capable of generating pressures for
countermeasures in physical reality, especially when they have the potential to inflict
damage of a nature previously associated with armed attack. Absent some articulation
of limits and agreement on mutual rules of restraint, a crisis situation is likely to arise,
even unintentionally; the very concept of international order may be subject to
mounting strains.
In other categories of strategic capabilities, governments have come to recognize
the self-defeating nature of unconstrained national conduct. The more sustainable
course is to pursue, even among potential adversaries, a mixture of deterrence and
mutual restraint, coupled with measures to prevent a crisis arising from
misinterpretation or miscommunication.
Cyberspace has become strategically indispensable. At this writing, users, whether
individuals, corporations, or states, rely on their own judgment in conducting their
activities. The Commander of U.S. Cyber Command has predicted that “the next war
will begin in cyberspace.” It will not be possible to conceive of international order
when the region through which states’ survival and progress are taking place remains
without any international standards of conduct and is left to unilateral decisions.
The history of warfare shows that every technological offensive capability will
eventually be matched and offset by defensive measures, although not every country
will be equally able to afford them. Does this mean that technologically less advanced
countries must shelter under the protection of high-tech societies? Is the outcome to
be a plethora of tense power balances? Deterrence, which, in the case of nuclear
weapons, took the form of balancing destructive powers, cannot be applied by direct
analogy, because the biggest danger is an attack without warning that may not reveal
itself until the threat has already been implemented.
Nor is it possible to base deterrence in cyberspace on symmetrical retaliation, as is
the case with nuclear weapons. If a cyberattack is limited to a particular function or
extent, a “response in kind” may have totally different implications for the United
States and for the aggressor. For example, if the financial architecture of a major
industrialized economy is undermined, is the victim entitled only to counterattack
against the potentially negligible comparable assets of its attacker? Or only against the
computers engaged in the attack? Because neither of these is likely to be a sufficient
deterrent, the question then turns to whether “virtual” aggression warrants “kinetic”
force in response—and to what degree and by what equations of equivalence. A new
world of deterrence theory and strategic doctrine now in its infancy requires urgent
elaboration.
In the end, a framework for organizing the global cyber environment will be
imperative. It may not keep pace with the technology itself, but the process of
defining it will serve to educate leaders of its dangers and the consequences. Even if
agreements carry little weight in the event of a confrontation, they may at least
prevent sliding into an irretrievable conflict produced by misunderstanding.
The dilemma of such technologies is that it is impossible to establish rules of
conduct unless a common understanding of at least some of the key capabilities exists.
But these are precisely the capabilities the major actors will be reluctant to disclose.
The United States has appealed to China for restraint in purloining trade secrets via
cyber intrusions, arguing that the scale of activity is unprecedented. Yet to what extent
is the United States prepared to disclose its own cyber intelligence efforts?
In this manner, asymmetry and a kind of congenital world disorder are built into
relations between cyber powers both in diplomacy and in strategy. The emphasis of
many strategic rivalries is shifting from the physical to the information realm, in the
collection and processing of data, the penetration of networks, and the manipulation
of psychology. Absent articulation of some rules of international conduct, a crisis will
arise from the inner dynamics of the system.
THE HUMAN FACTOR
From the opening of the modern era in the sixteenth century, political philosophers
have debated the issue of the relationship of the human being to the circumstances in
which he finds himself. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau advanced a biologicalpsychological portrait of human consciousness and derived their political positions
from this starting point. The American Founders, notably Madison in Federalist 10,
did the same. They traced the evolution of society through factors that were “sown in
the nature of man”: each individual’s powerful yet fallible faculty of reason and his
inherent “self-love,” from the interaction of which “different opinions will be
formed”; and humanity’s diversity of capabilities, from which “the possession of
different degrees and kinds of property immediately results” and with them a
“division of the society into different interests and parties.” Though these thinkers
differed in their analyses of specific factors and in the conclusions they drew, all
framed their concepts in terms of a humanity whose inherent nature and experience of
reality were timeless and unchanging.
In the contemporary world, human consciousness is shaped through an
unprecedented filter. Television, computers, and smartphones compose a trifecta
offering nearly constant interaction with a screen throughout the day. Human
interactions in the physical world are now pushed relentlessly into the virtual world of
networked devices. Recent studies suggest that adult Americans spend on average
roughly half of their waking hours in front of a screen, and the figure continues to
grow.
What is the impact of this cultural upheaval on relations between states? The
policymaker undertakes multiple tasks, many of them shaped by his society’s history
and culture. He must first of all make an analysis of where his society finds itself.
This is inherently where the past meets the future; therefore such a judgment cannot
be made without an instinct for both of these elements. He must then try to understand
where that trajectory will take him and his society. He must resist the temptation to
identify policymaking with projecting the familiar into the future, for on that road lies
stagnation and then decline. Increasingly in a time of technological and political
upheaval, wisdom counsels that a different path must be chosen. By definition, in
leading a society from where it is to where it has never been, a new course presents
advantages and disadvantages that will always seem closely balanced. To undertake a
journey on a road never before traveled requires character and courage: character
because the choice is not obvious; courage because the road will be lonely at first.
And the statesman must then inspire his people to persist in the endeavor. Great
statesmen (Churchill, both Roosevelts, de Gaulle, and Adenauer) had these qualities
of vision and determination; in today’s society, it is increasingly difficult to develop
them.
For all the great and indispensable achievements the Internet has brought to our era,
its emphasis is on the actual more than the contingent, on the factual rather than the
conceptual, on values shaped by consensus rather than by introspection. Knowledge
of history and geography is not essential for those who can evoke their data with the
touch of a button. The mindset for walking lonely political paths may not be selfevident to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends
on Facebook.
In the Internet age, world order has often been equated with the proposition that if
people have the ability to freely know and exchange the world’s information, the
natural human drive toward freedom will take root and fulfill itself, and history will
run on autopilot, as it were. But philosophers and poets have long separated the
mind’s purview into three components: information, knowledge, and wisdom. The
Internet focuses on the realm of information, whose spread it facilitates exponentially.
Ever-more-complex functions are devised, particularly capable of responding to
questions of fact, which are not themselves altered by the passage of time. Search
engines are able to handle increasingly complex questions with increasing speed. Yet
a surfeit of information may paradoxically inhibit the acquisition of knowledge and
push wisdom even further away than it was before.
The poet T. S. Eliot captured this in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”:
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation—at
least in the foreign policy world—depend on context and relevance. As ever more
issues are treated as if of a factual nature, the premise becomes established that for
every question there must be a researchable answer, that problems and solutions are
not so much to be thought through as to be “looked up.” But in the relations between
states—and in many other fields—information, to be truly useful, must be placed
within a broader context of history and experience to emerge as actual knowledge.
And a society is fortunate if its leaders can occasionally rise to the level of wisdom.
The acquisition of knowledge from books provides an experience different from the
Internet. Reading is relatively time-consuming; to ease the process, style is important.
Because it is not possible to read all books on a given subject, much less the totality of
all books, or to organize easily everything one has read, learning from books places a
premium on conceptual thinking—the ability to recognize comparable data and events
and project patterns into the future. And style propels the reader into a relationship
with the author, or with the subject matter, by fusing substance and aesthetics.
Traditionally, another way of acquiring knowledge has been through personal
conversations. The discussion and exchange of ideas has for millennia provided an
emotional and psychological dimension in addition to the factual content of the
information exchanged. It supplies intangibles of conviction and personality. Now the
culture of texting produces a curious reluctance to engage in face-to-face interaction,
especially on a one-to-one basis.
The computer has, to a considerable extent, solved the problem of acquiring,
preserving, and retrieving information. Data can be stored in effectively unlimited
quantities and in manageable form. The computer makes available a range of data
unattainable in the age of books. It packages it effectively; style is no longer needed to
make it accessible, nor is memorization. In dealing with a single decision separated
from its context, the computer supplies tools unimaginable even a decade ago. But it
also shrinks perspective. Because information is so accessible and communication
instantaneous, there is a diminution of focus on its significance, or even on the
definition of what is significant. This dynamic may encourage policymakers to wait
for an issue to arise rather than anticipate it, and to regard moments of decision as a
series of isolated events rather than part of a historical continuum. When this happens,
manipulation of information replaces reflection as the principal policy tool.
In the same way, the Internet has a tendency to diminish historical memory. The
phenomenon has been described as follows: “People forget items they think will be
available externally and remember items they think will not be available.” By moving
so many items into the realm of the available, the Internet reduces the impulse to
remember them. Communications technology threatens to diminish the individual’s
capacity for an inward quest by increasing his reliance on technology as a facilitator
and mediator of thought. Information at one’s fingertips encourages the mindset of a
researcher but may diminish the mindset of a leader. A shift in human consciousness
may change the character of individuals and the nature of their interactions, and so
begin to alter the human condition itself. Did people in the age of printing see the
same world as their medieval forefathers? Is the optical perception of the world
altered in the age of the computer?
Western history and psychology have heretofore treated truth as independent of the
personality and prior experience of the observer. Yet our age is on the verge of a
changed conception of the nature of truth. Nearly every website contains some kind of
customization function based on Internet tracing codes designed to ascertain a user’s
background and preferences. These methods are intended to encourage users “to
consume more content” and, in so doing, be exposed to more advertising, which
ultimately drives the Internet economy. These subtle directions are in accordance with
a broader trend to manage the traditional understanding of human choice. Goods are
sorted and prioritized to present those “which you would like,” and online news is
presented as “news which will best suit you.” Two different people appealing to a
search engine with the same question do not necessarily receive the same answers.
The concept of truth is being relativized and individualized—losing its universal
character. Information is presented as being free. In fact, the recipient pays for it by
supplying data to be exploited by persons unknown to him, in ways that further shape
the information being offered to him.
Whatever the utility of this approach in the realm of consumption, its effect on
policymaking may prove transformative. The difficult choices of policymaking are
always close. Where, in a world of ubiquitous social networks, does the individual
find the space to develop the fortitude to make decisions that, by definition, cannot be
based on a consensus? The adage that prophets are not recognized in their own time is
true in that they operate beyond conventional conception—that is what made them
prophets. In our era, the lead time for prophets might have disappeared altogether. The
pursuit of transparency and connectivity in all aspects of existence, by destroying
privacy, inhibits the development of personalities with the strength to take lonely
decisions.
American elections—especially presidential elections—represent another aspect of
this evolution. It has been reported that in 2012 the election campaigns had files on
some tens of millions of potentially independent voters. Drawn from research in
social networks, open public files, and medical records, these files amounted to a
profile for each, probably more precise than the target person would have been
capable of doing from his own memory. This permitted the campaigns to choose the
technology of their appeals—whether to rely on personal visits by committed friends
(also discovered via the Internet), personalized letters (drawn from social network
research), or group meetings.
Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between
master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the
content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing
effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a
generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The candidates’ main role may become
fund-raising rather than the elaboration of issues. Is the marketing effort designed to
convey the candidate’s convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate
the reflections of a “big data” research effort into individuals’ likely preferences and
prejudices? Can democracy avoid an evolution toward a demagogic outcome based on
emotional mass appeal rather than the reasoned process the Founding Fathers
imagined? If the gap between the qualities required for election and those essential for
the conduct of office becomes too wide, the conceptual grasp and sense of history that
should be part of foreign policy may be lost—or else the cultivation of these qualities
may take so much of a president’s first term in office as to inhibit a leading role for
the United States.
FOREIGN POLICY IN THE DIGITAL ERA
Thoughtful observers have viewed the globalizing transformations ushered in by
the rise of the Internet and advanced computing technology as the beginning of a new
era of popular empowerment and progress toward peace. They hail the ability of new
technologies to enable the individual and to propel transparency—whether through
the publicizing of abuses by authorities or the erosion of cultural barriers of
misunderstanding. Optimists point, with some justification, to the startling new
powers of communication gained through instantaneous global networks. They stress
the ability of computer networks and “smart” devices to create new social, economic,
and environmental efficiencies. They look forward to unlocking previously insoluble
technical problems by harnessing the brainpower of networked multitudes.
One line of thinking holds that similar principles of networked communication, if
applied correctly to the realm of international affairs, could help solve age-old
problems of violent conflict. Traditional ethnic and sectarian rivalries may be muted
in the Internet age, this theory posits, because “people who try to perpetuate myths
about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will struggle to keep their narratives
afloat amid a sea of newly informed listeners. With more data, everyone gains a better
frame of reference.” It will be possible to temper national rivalries and resolve
historical disputes because “with the technological devices, platforms and databases
we have today, it will be much more difficult for governments in the future to argue
over claims like these, not just because of permanent evidence but because everyone
else will have access to the same source material.” In this view, the spread of
networked digital devices will become a positive engine of history: new networks of
communication will curtail abuses, soften social and political contradictions, and help
heretofore-disunited parts cohere into a more harmonious global system.
The optimism of this perspective replicates the best aspects of Woodrow Wilson’s
prophecy of a world united by democracy, open diplomacy, and common rules. As a
blueprint for political or social order, it also raises some of the same questions as
Wilson’s original vision about the distinction between the practical and the
aspirational.
Conflicts within and between societies have occurred since the dawn of civilization.
The causes of these conflicts have not been limited to an absence of information or an
insufficient ability to share it. They have arisen not only between societies that do not
understand each other but between those that understand each other only too well.
Even with the same source material to examine, individuals have disagreed about its
meaning or the subjective value of what it depicts. Where values, ideals, or strategic
objectives are in fundamental contradiction, exposure and connectivity may on
occasion fuel confrontations as much as assuage them.
New social and information networks spur growth and creativity. They allow
individuals to express views and report injustices that might otherwise go unheeded.
In crisis situations, they offer a crucial ability to communicate quickly and to
publicize events and policies reliably—potentially preventing the outbreak of a
conflict through misunderstanding.
Yet they also bring conflicting, occasionally incompatible value systems into ever
closer contact. The advent of Internet news and commentary and data-driven election
strategies has not noticeably softened the partisan aspect of American politics; if
anything, it has provided a larger audience to the extremes. Internationally, some
expressions that once passed unknown and unremarked are now publicized worldwide
and used as pretexts for violent agitation—as occurred in parts of the Muslim world in
reaction to an inflammatory fringe cartoon in a Danish newspaper or a marginal
American homemade movie. Meanwhile, in conflict situations, social networking may
serve as a platform to reinforce traditional social fissures as much as it dispels them.
The widespread sharing of videotaped atrocities in the Syrian civil war appears to
have done more to harden the resolve of the warring parties than to stop the killing,
while the notorious ISIL has used social media to declare a caliphate and exhort holy
war.
Some authoritarian structures may fall as a result of information spread online or
protests convened via social networking; they may in time be replaced by more open
and participatory systems elaborating humane and inclusive values. Elsewhere other
authorities will gain exponentially more powerful means of repression. The
proliferation of ubiquitous sensors tracking and analyzing individuals, recording and
transmitting their every experience (in some cases now, essentially from birth), and (at
the forefront of computing) anticipating their thoughts opens up repressive as well as
liberating possibilities. In this respect, among the new technology’s most radical
aspects may be the power it vests in small groups, at the pinnacle of political and
economic structures, to process and monitor information, shape debate, and to some
extent define truth.
The West lauded the “Facebook” and “Twitter” aspects of the Arab Spring
revolutions. Yet where the digitally equipped crowd succeeds in its initial
demonstrations, the use of new technology does not guarantee that the values that
prevail will be those of the devices’ inventors, or even those of the majority of the
crowd. Moreover, the same technologies used to convene demonstrations can also be
used to track and suppress them. Today most public squares in any major city are
subject to constant video surveillance, and any smartphone owner can be tracked
electronically in real time. As one recent survey concluded, “The Internet has made
tracking easier, cheaper, and more useful.”
The global scope and speed of communication erode the distinction between
domestic and international upheavals, and between leaders and the immediate
demands of the most vocal groups. Events whose effects once would have taken
months to unfold ricochet globally within seconds. Policymakers are expected to have
formulated a position within several hours and to interject it into the course of events
—where its effects will be broadcast globally by the same instantaneous networks.
The temptation to cater to the demands of the digitally reflected multitude may
override the judgment required to chart a complex course in harmony with long-term
purposes. The distinction between information, knowledge, and wisdom is weakened.
The new diplomacy asserts that if a sufficiently large number of people gather to
publicly call for the resignation of a government and broadcast their demands
digitally, they constitute a democratic expression obliging Western moral and even
material support. This approach calls on Western leaders (and particularly American
ones) to communicate their endorsement immediately and in unambiguous terms by
the same social-networking methods so that their rejection of the government will be
rebroadcast on the Internet and achieve further promulgation and affirmation.
If the old diplomacy sometimes failed to extend support to morally deserving
political forces, the new diplomacy risks indiscriminate intervention disconnected
from strategy. It declares moral absolutes to a global audience before it has become
possible to assess the long-term intentions of the central actors, their prospects for
success, or the ability to carry out a long-term policy. The motives of the principal
groups, their capacity for concerted leadership, the underlying strategic and political
factors in the country, and their relation to other strategic priorities are treated as
secondary to the overriding imperative of endorsing a mood of the moment.
Order should not have priority over freedom. But the affirmation of freedom should
be elevated from a mood to a strategy. In the quest for humane values, the expression
of elevated principles is a first step; they must then be carried through the inherent
ambiguities and contradictions of all human affairs, which is the task of policy. In this
process, the sharing of information and the public support of free institutions are
important new aspects of our era. On their own, absent attention to underlying
strategic and political factors, they will have difficulty fulfilling their promise.
Great statesmen, however different as personalities, almost invariably had an
instinctive feeling for the history of their societies. As Edmund Burke wrote, “People
will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” What
will be the attitudes of those who aspire to be great statesmen in the Internet age? A
combination of chronic insecurity and insistent self-assertion threatens both leaders
and the public in the Internet age. Leaders, because they are less and less the
originators of their programs, seek to dominate by willpower or charisma. The general
public’s access to the intangibles of the public debate is ever more constrained. Major
pieces of legislation in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere often contain
thousands of pages of text whose precise meaning is elusive even to those legislators
who voted for them.
Previous generations of Western leaders performed their democratic role while
recognizing that leadership did not consist of simply executing the results of public
polls on a day-to-day basis. Tomorrow’s generations may prove reluctant to exercise
leadership independent of data-mining techniques—even as their mastery of the
information environment may reward them with reelection for pursuing cleverly
targeted, short-term policies.
In such an environment, the participants in the public debate risk being driven less
by reasoned arguments than by what catches the mood of the moment. The immediate
focus is pounded daily into the public consciousness by advocates whose status is
generated by the ability to dramatize. Participants at public demonstrations are rarely
assembled around a specific program. Rather, many seek the uplift of a moment of
exaltation, treating their role in the event primarily as participation in an emotional
experience.
These attitudes reflect in part the complexity of defining an identity in the age of
social media. Hailed as a breakthrough in human relations, social media encourage the
sharing of the maximum amount of information, personal or political. People are
encouraged—and solicited—to post their most intimate acts and thoughts on public
websites run by companies whose internal policies are, even when public, largely
incomprehensible to the ordinary user. The most sensitive of this information is to be
made available only to “friends” who, in practice, can run into the thousands.
Approbation is the goal; were it not the objective, the sharing of personal information
would not be so widespread and sometimes so jarring. Only very strong personalities
are able to resist the digitally aggregated and magnified unfavorable judgments of
their peers. The quest is for consensus, less by the exchange of ideas than by a sharing
of emotions. Nor can participants fail to be affected by the exaltation of fulfillment by
membership in a crowd of ostensibly like-minded people. And are these networks
going to be the first institutions in human history liberated from occasional abuse and
therefore relieved of the traditional checks and balances?
Side by side with the limitless possibilities opened up by the new technologies,
reflection about international order must include the internal dangers of societies
driven by mass consensus, deprived of the context and foresight needed on terms
compatible with their historical character. In every other era, this has been considered
the essence of leadership; in our own, it risks being reduced to a series of slogans
designed to capture immediate short-term approbation. Foreign policy is in danger of
turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the
future. If the major countries conduct their policies in this manner internally, their
relations on the international stage will suffer concomitant distortions. The search for
perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of differences, statesmanship by
posturing. As diplomacy is transformed into gestures geared toward passions, the
search for equilibrium risks giving way to a testing of limits.
Wisdom and foresight will be needed to avoid these hazards and ensure that the
technological era fulfills its vast promise. It needs to deepen its preoccupation with
the immediate through a better understanding of history and geography. That task is
not only—or even primarily—an issue for technology. Society needs to adapt its
education policy to ultimate imperatives in the long-term direction of the country and
in the cultivation of its values. The inventors of the devices that have so
revolutionized the collection and sharing of information can make an equal if not
greater contribution by devising means to deepen its conceptual foundation. On the
way to the first truly global world order, the great human achievements of technology
must be fused with enhanced powers of humane, transcendent, and moral judgment.
Conclusion
World Order in Our Time?
IN THE DECADES FOLLOWING WORLD WAR II, a sense of world community seemed on
the verge of arising. The industrially advanced regions of the world were exhausted
from war; the underdeveloped parts were beginning their process of decolonization
and redefining their identities. All needed cooperation rather than confrontation. And
the United States, preserved from the ravages of war—indeed, strengthened by the
conflict in its economy and national confidence—launched itself on implementing
ideals and practices it considered applicable to the entire world.
When the United States began to take up the torch of international leadership, it
added a new dimension to the quest for world order. A nation founded explicitly on an
idea of free and representative governance, it identified its own rise with the spread of
liberty and democracy and credited these forces with an ability to achieve the just and
lasting peace that had thus far eluded the world. The traditional European approach to
order had viewed peoples and states as inherently competitive; to constrain the effects
of their clashing ambitions, it relied on a balance of power and a concert of
enlightened statesmen. The prevalent American view considered people inherently
reasonable and inclined toward peaceful compromise, common sense, and fair
dealing; the spread of democracy was therefore the overarching goal for international
order. Free markets would uplift individuals, enrich societies, and substitute economic
interdependence for traditional international rivalries. In this view, the Cold War was
caused by the aberrations of Communism; sooner or later, the Soviet Union would
return to the community of nations. Then a new world order would encompass all
regions of the globe; shared values and goals would render conditions within states
more humane and conflicts between states less likely.
The multigenerational enterprise of world ordering has in many ways come to
fruition. Its success finds expression in the plethora of independent sovereign states
governing most of the world’s territory. The spread of democracy and participatory
governance has become a shared aspiration, if not a universal reality; global
communications and financial networks operate in real time, making possible a scale
of human interactions beyond the imagination of previous generations; common
efforts on environmental problems, or at least an impetus to undertake them, exist;
and an international scientific, medical, and philanthropic community focuses its
attention on diseases and health scourges once assumed to be the intractable ravages
of fate.
The United States has made a significant contribution to this evolution. American
military power provided a security shield for the rest of the world, whether its
beneficiaries asked for it or not. Under the umbrella of an essentially unilateral
American military guarantee, much of the developed world rallied into a system of
alliances; the developing countries were protected against a threat they sometimes did
not recognize, even less admit. A global economy developed to which America
contributed financing, markets, and a profusion of innovations. From perhaps 1948 to
the turn of the century marked a brief moment in human history when one could
speak of an incipient global world order composed of an amalgam of American
idealism and traditional concepts of balance of power.
Yet its very success made it inevitable that the entire enterprise would eventually be
challenged, sometimes in the name of world order itself. The universal relevance of
the Westphalian system derived from its procedural—that is, value-neutral—nature.
Its rules were accessible to any country: noninterference in domestic affairs of other
states; inviolability of borders; sovereignty of states; encouragements of international
law. The weakness of the Westphalian system has been the reverse side of its strength.
Designed as it was by states exhausted from their bloodletting, it did not supply a
sense of direction. It dealt with methods of allocating and preserving power; it gave
no answer to the problem of how to generate legitimacy.
In building a world order, a key question inevitably concerns the substance of its
unifying principles—in which resides a cardinal distinction between Western and nonWestern approaches to order. Since the Renaissance the West has been deeply
committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge
consists of recording and classifying data—the more accurately the better—and that
foreign policy success depends on assessing existing realities and trends. The
Westphalian peace represented a judgment of reality—particularly realities of power
and territory—as a temporal ordering concept over the demands of religion.
In the other great contemporary civilizations, reality was conceived as internal to
the observer, defined by psychological, philosophical, or religious convictions.
Confucianism ordered the world into tributaries in a hierarchy defined by
approximations of Chinese culture. Islam divided the world order into a world of
peace, that of Islam, and a world of war, inhabited by unbelievers. Thus China felt no
need to go abroad to discover a world it considered already ordered, or best ordered
by the cultivation of morality internally, while Islam could achieve the theoretical
fulfillment of world order only by conquest or global proselytization, for which the
objective conditions did not exist. Hinduism, which perceived cycles of history and
metaphysical reality transcending temporal experience, treated its world of faith as a
complete system not open to new entrants by either conquest or conversion.
That same distinction governed the attitude toward science and technology. The
West, which saw fulfillment in mastering empirical reality, explored the far reaches of
the world and fostered science and technology. The other traditional civilizations,
each of which had considered itself the center of a world order in its own right, did
not have the same impetus and fell behind technologically.
That period has now ended. The rest of the world is pursuing science and
technology and, because unencumbered by established patterns, with perhaps more
energy and flexibility than the West, at least in countries like China and the “Asian
Tigers.”
In the world of geopolitics, the order established and proclaimed as universal by the
Western countries stands at a turning point. Its nostrums are understood globally, but
there is no consensus about their application; indeed, concepts such as democracy,
human rights, and international law are given such divergent interpretations that
warring parties regularly invoke them against each other as battle cries. The system’s
rules have been promulgated but have proven ineffective absent active enforcement.
The pledge of partnership and community has in some regions been replaced, or at
least accompanied, by a harder-edged testing of limits.
A quarter century of political and economic crises perceived as produced, or at least
abetted, by Western admonitions and practices—along with imploding regional
orders, sectarian bloodbaths, terrorism, and wars ended on terms short of victory—has
thrown into question the optimistic assumptions of the immediate post–Cold War era:
that the spread of democracy and free markets would automatically create a just,
peaceful, and inclusive world.
A countervailing impetus has arisen in several parts of the world to construct
bulwarks against what are seen as the crisis-inducing policies of the developed West,
including aspects of globalization. Security commitments that have stood as bedrock
assumptions are being questioned, sometimes by the country whose defense they seek
to foster. As the Western countries sharply reduce their nuclear arsenals or downgrade
the role of nuclear weapons in their strategic doctrine, countries in the so-called
developing world pursue them with great energy. Governments that once embraced
(even while occasionally being perplexed by) the American commitment to its version
of world order have begun to ask whether it leads to enterprises that the United States
is in the end not sufficiently patient to see to their conclusion. In this view, acceptance
of the Western “rules” of world order is laced with elements of unpredictable liability
—an interpretation driving the conspicuous dissociation of some traditional allies
from the United States. Indeed, in some quarters, the flouting of universal norms
(such as human rights, due process, or equality for women) as distinctly North
Atlantic preferences is treated as a positive virtue and the heart of alternative value
systems. More elemental forms of identity are celebrated as the basis for exclusionary
spheres of interest.
The result is not simply a multipolarity of power but a world of increasingly
contradictory realities. It must not be assumed that, left unattended, these trends will
at some point reconcile automatically to a world of balance and cooperation—or even
any order at all.
THE EVOLUTION OF INTERNATIONAL ORDER
Every international order must sooner or later face the impact of two tendencies
challenging its cohesion: either a redefinition of legitimacy or a significant shift in the
balance of power. The first tendency occurs when the values underlying international
arrangements are fundamentally altered—abandoned by those charged with
maintaining them or overturned by revolutionary imposition of an alternative concept
of legitimacy. This was the impact of the ascendant West on many traditional orders in
the non-Western world; of Islam in its initial wave of expansion in the seventh and
eighth centuries; of the French Revolution on European diplomacy in the eighteenth
century; of Communist and fascist totalitarianism in the twentieth; and of the Islamist
assaults on the fragile state structure of the Middle East in our time.
The essence of such upheavals is that while they are usually underpinned by force,
their overriding thrust is psychological. Those under assault are challenged to defend
not only their territory but the basic assumptions of their way of life, their moral right
to exist and to act in a manner that, until the challenge, had been treated as beyond
question. The natural inclination, particularly of leaders from pluralistic societies, is to
engage with the representatives of the revolution, expecting that what they really want
is to negotiate in good faith on the premises of the existing order and arrive at a
reasonable solution. The order is submerged not primarily from military defeat or an
imbalance in resources (though this often follows) but from a failure to understand the
nature and scope of the challenge arrayed against it. In this sense, the ultimate test of
the Iranian nuclear negotiations is whether the Iranian professions of a willingness to
resolve the issue through talks are a strategic shift or a tactical device—in pursuit of
long-prevailing policy—and whether the West deals with the tactical as if it were a
strategic change of direction.
The second cause of an international order’s crisis is when it proves unable to
accommodate a major change in power relations. In some cases, the order collapses
because one of its major components ceases to play its role or ceases to exist—as
happened to the Communist international order near the end of the twentieth century
when the Soviet Union dissolved. Or else a rising power may reject the role allotted to
it by a system it did not design, and the established powers may prove unable to adapt
the system’s equilibrium to incorporate its rise. Germany’s emergence posed such a
challenge to the system in the twentieth century in Europe, triggering two catastrophic
wars from which Europe has never fully recovered. The emergence of China poses a
comparable structural challenge in the twenty-first century. The presidents of the
major twenty-first-century competitors—the United States and China—have vowed to
avoid repeating Europe’s tragedy through a “new type of great power relations.” The
concept awaits joint elaboration. It might have been put forward by either or both of
these powers as a tactical maneuver. Nevertheless, it remains the only road to avoid a
repetition of previous tragedies.
To strike a balance between the two aspects of order—power and legitimacy—is
the essence of statesmanship. Calculations of power without a moral dimension will
turn every disagreement into a test of strength; ambition will know no resting place;
countries will be propelled into unsustainable tours de force of elusive calculations
regarding the shifting configuration of power. Moral proscriptions without concern for
equilibrium, on the other hand, tend toward either crusades or an impotent policy
tempting challenges; either extreme risks endangering the coherence of the
international order itself.
In our time—in part for the technological reasons discussed in Chapter 9—power is
in unprecedented flux, while claims to legitimacy every decade multiply their scope in
hitherto-inconceivable ways. When weapons have become capable of obliterating
civilization and the interactions between value systems are rendered instantaneous and
unprecedentedly intrusive, the established calculations for maintaining the balance of
power or a community of values may become obsolete.
As these imbalances have grown, the structure of the twenty-first-century world
order has been revealed as lacking in four important dimensions.
First, the nature of the state itself—the basic formal unit of international life—has
been subjected to a multitude of pressures: attacked and dismantled by design, in
some regions corroded from neglect, often submerged by the sheer rush of events.
Europe has set out to transcend the state and to craft a foreign policy based principally
on soft power and humanitarian values. But it is doubtful that claims to legitimacy
separated from any concept of strategy can sustain a world order. And Europe has not
yet given itself attributes of statehood, tempting a vacuum of authority internally and
an imbalance of power along its borders. Parts of the Middle East have dissolved into
sectarian and ethnic components in conflict with each other; religious militias and the
powers backing them violate borders and sovereignty at will. The challenge in Asia is
the opposite of Europe’s. Westphalian balance-of-power principles prevail unrelated
to an agreed concept of legitimacy.
And in several parts of the world we have witnessed, since the end of the Cold War,
the phenomenon of “failed states,” of “ungoverned spaces,” or of states that hardly
merit the term, having no monopoly on the use of force or effective central authority.
If the major powers come to practice foreign policies of manipulating a multiplicity of
subsovereign units observing ambiguous and often violent rules of conduct, many
based on extreme articulations of divergent cultural experiences, anarchy is certain.
Second, the political and the economic organizations of the world are at variance
with each other. The international economic system has become global, while the
political structure of the world has remained based on the nation-state. The global
economic impetus is on removing obstacles to the flow of goods and capital. The
international political system is still largely based on contrasting ideas of world order
and the reconciliation of concepts of national interest. Economic globalization, in its
essence, ignores national frontiers. International policy emphasizes the importance of
frontiers even as it seeks to reconcile conflicting national aims.
This dynamic has produced decades of sustained economic growth punctuated by
periodic financial crises of seemingly escalating intensity: in Latin America in the
1980s; in Asia in 1997; in Russia in 1998; in the United States in 2001 and then again
starting in 2007; in Europe after 2010. The winners—those who can weather the
storm within a reasonable period and go forward—have few reservations about the
system. But the losers—such as those stuck in structural misdesigns, as has been the
case with the European Union’s southern tier—seek their remedies by solutions that
negate, or at least obstruct, the functioning of the global economic system.
While each of those crises has had a different cause, their common feature has been
profligate speculation and systemic underappreciation of risk. Financial instruments
have been invented that obscure the nature of the relevant transactions. Lenders have
found it difficult to estimate the extent of their commitments and borrowers, including
major nations, to understand the implications of their indebtedness.
The international order thus faces a paradox: its prosperity is dependent on the
success of globalization, but the process produces a political reaction that often works
counter to its aspirations. The economic managers of globalization have few
occasions to engage with its political processes. The managers of the political
processes have few incentives to risk their domestic support on anticipating economic
or financial problems whose complexity eludes the understanding of all but experts.
In these conditions, the challenge becomes governance itself. Governments are
subjected to pressures seeking to tip the process of globalization in the direction of
national advantage or mercantilism. In the West, the issues of globalization thus
merge with the issues of the conduct of democratic foreign policy. Harmonizing
political and economic international orders challenges vested views: the quest for
world order because it requires an enlargement of the national framework; the
disciplining of globalization because sustainable practices imply a modification of the
conventional patterns.
Third is the absence of an effective mechanism for the great powers to consult and
possibly cooperate on the most consequential issues. This may seem an odd criticism
in light of the plethora of multilateral forums that exist—more by far than at any other
time in history. The UN Security Council—of compelling formal authority but
deadlocked on the most important issues—is joined by regular summits for Atlantic
leaders in NATO and the European Union, for Asia-Pacific leaders in APEC and the
East Asia Summit, for developed countries in the G7 or G8, and for major economies
in the G20. The United States is a key participant in all of these forums. Yet the nature
and frequency of these meetings work against elaboration of long-range strategy.
Discussions of schedules and negotiations over formal agendas arrogate the majority
of preparation time; some forums effectively co-orbit on the calendars of leaders
because of the difficulty of gathering principals in any one place on a regular basis.
Participant heads of state, by the nature of their positions, focus on the public impact
of their actions at the meeting; they are tempted to emphasize the tactical implications
or the public relations aspect. This process permits little beyond designing a formal
communiqué—at best, a discussion of pending tactical issues, and, at worst, a new
form of summitry as “social media” event. A contemporary structure of international
rules and norms, if it is to prove relevant, cannot merely be affirmed by joint
declarations; it must be fostered as a matter of common conviction.
Throughout, American leadership has been indispensable, even when it has been
exercised ambivalently. It has sought a balance between stability and advocacy of
universal principles not always reconcilable with principles of sovereign
noninterference or other nations’ historical experience. The quest for that balance,
between the uniqueness of the American experience and the idealistic confidence in
its universality, between the poles of overconfidence and introspection, is inherently
unending. What it does not permit is withdrawal.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
A reconstruction of the international system is the ultimate challenge to
statesmanship in our time. The penalty for failing will be not so much a major war
between states (though in some regions this is not foreclosed) as an evolution into
spheres of influence identified with particular domestic structures and forms of
governance—for example, the Westphalian model as against the radical Islamist
version. At its edges each sphere would be tempted to test its strength against other
entities of orders deemed illegitimate. They would be networked for instantaneous
communication and impinging on one another constantly. In time the tensions of this
process would degenerate into maneuvers for status or advantage on a continental
scale or even worldwide. A struggle between regions could be even more debilitating
than the struggle between nations has been.
The contemporary quest for world order will require a coherent strategy to establish
a concept of order within the various regions, and to relate these regional orders to one
another. These goals are not necessarily identical or self-reconciling: the triumph of a
radical movement might bring order to one region while setting the stage for turmoil
in and with all others. The domination of a region by one country militarily, even if it
brings the appearance of order, could produce a crisis for the rest of the world.
A reassessment of the concept of balance of power is in order. In theory, the
balance of power should be quite calculable; in practice, it has proved extremely
difficult to harmonize a country’s calculations with those of other states and achieve a
common recognition of limits. The conjectural element of foreign policy—the need to
gear actions to an assessment that cannot be proved when it is made—is never more
true than in a period of upheaval. Then, the old order is in flux while the shape of the
replacement is highly uncertain. Everything depends, therefore, on some conception
of the future. But varying internal structures can produce different assessments of the
significance of existing trends and, more important, clashing criteria for resolving
these differences. This is the dilemma of our time.
A world order of states affirming individual dignity and participatory governance,
and cooperating internationally in accordance with agreed-upon rules, can be our hope
and should be our inspiration. But progress toward it will need to be sustained through
a series of intermediary stages. At any given interval, we will usually be better served,
as Edmund Burke once wrote, “to acquiesce in some qualified plan that does not
come up to the full perfection of the abstract idea, than to push for the more perfect,”
and risk crisis or disillusionment by insisting on the ultimate immediately. The United
States needs a strategy and diplomacy that allow for the complexity of the journey—
the loftiness of the goal, as well as the inherent incompleteness of the human
endeavors through which it will be approached.
To play a responsible role in the evolution of a twenty-first-century world order, the
United States must be prepared to answer a number of questions for itself:
What do we seek to prevent, no matter how it happens, and if necessary alone? The
answer defines the minimum condition of the survival of the society.
What do we seek to achieve, even if not supported by any multilateral effort? These
goals define the minimum objectives of the national strategy.
What do we seek to achieve, or prevent, only if supported by an alliance? This
defines the outer limits of the country’s strategic aspirations as part of a global
system.
What should we not engage in, even if urged by a multilateral group or an alliance?
This defines the limiting condition of the American participation in world order.
Above all, what is the nature of the values that we seek to advance? What
applications depend in part on circumstance?
The same questions apply in principle to other societies.
For the United States, the quest for world order functions on two levels: the
celebration of universal principles needs to be paired with a recognition of the reality
of other regions’ histories and cultures. Even as the lessons of challenging decades are
examined, the affirmation of America’s exceptional nature must be sustained. History
offers no respite to countries that set aside their commitments or sense of identity in
favor of a seemingly less arduous course. America—as the modern world’s decisive
articulation of the human quest for freedom, and an indispensable geopolitical force
for the vindication of humane values—must retain its sense of direction.
A purposeful American role will be philosophically and geopolitically imperative
for the challenges of our period. Yet world order cannot be achieved by any one
country acting alone. To achieve a genuine world order, its components, while
maintaining their own values, need to acquire a second culture that is global,
structural, and juridical—a concept of order that transcends the perspective and ideals
of any one region or nation. At this moment in history, this would be a modernization
of the Westphalian system informed by contemporary realities.
Is it possible to translate divergent cultures into a common system? The
Westphalian system was drafted by some two hundred delegates, none of whom has
entered the annals of history as a major figure, who met in two provincial German
towns forty miles apart (a significant distance in the seventeenth century) in two
separate groups. They overcame their obstacles because they shared the devastating
experience of the Thirty Years’ War, and they were determined to prevent its
recurrence. Our time, facing even graver prospects, needs to act on its necessities
before it is engulfed by them.
Cryptic fragments from remote antiquity reveal a view of the human condition as
irremediably marked by change and strife. “World-order” was fire-like, “kindling in
measure and going out in measure,” with war “the Father and King of all” creating
change in the world. But “the unity of things lies beneath the surface; it depends upon
a balanced reaction between opposites.” The goal of our era must be to achieve that
equilibrium while restraining the dogs of war. And we have to do so among the
rushing stream of history. The well-known metaphor for this is in the fragment
conveying that “one cannot step twice in the same river.” History may be thought of
as a river, but its waters will be ever changing.
Long ago, in youth, I was brash enough to think myself able to pronounce on “The
Meaning of History.” I now know that history’s meaning is a matter to be discovered,
not declared. It is a question we must attempt to answer as best we can in recognition
that it will remain open to debate; that each generation will be judged by whether the
greatest, most consequential issues of the human condition have been faced, and that
decisions to meet these challenges must be taken by statesmen before it is possible to
know what the outcome may be.
Notes
INTRODUCTION: THE QUESTION OF WORLD ORDER
“You are 20 states”: Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1978), as quoted in Antony Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2011), 207.
CHAPTER 1: EUROPE: THE PLURALISTIC INTERNATIONAL ORDER
The idea of Europe loomed: Kevin Wilson and Jan van der Dussen, The History of the Idea of Europe (London:
Routledge, 1993).
In that worldview Christendom: Frederick B. Artz, The Mind of the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1953), 275–80.
Aspirations to unity were briefly realized: Heinrich Fichtenau, The Carolingian Empire: The Age of
Charlemagne, trans. Peter Munz (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 60.
Charles was hailed: Hugh Thomas, The Golden Age: The Spanish Empire of Charles V (London: Allen Lane,
2010), 23.
In the tradition of Charlemagne: James Reston Jr., Defenders of the Faith: Charles V, Suleyman the Magnificent,
and the Battle for Europe, 1520–1536 (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 40, 294–95.
The French King repudiated: See Chapter 3.
The universality of the Church Charles sought: See Edgar Sanderson, J. P. Lamberton, and John McGovern, Six
Thousand Years of History, vol. 7, Famous Foreign Statesmen (Philadelphia: E. R. DuMont, 1900), 246–50;
Reston, Defenders of the Faith, 384–89. To a later Europe fractious and skeptical of universalistic claims,
Charles’s rule appeared less like a near deliverance into desired unity than an overbearing threat. As the Scottish
philosopher David Hume, a product of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, would later write, “Mankind were
anew alarmed by the danger of universal monarchy, from the union of so many kingdoms and principalities in
the person of the Emperor Charles.” David Hume, “On the Balance of Power,” in Essays, Moral, Political, and
Literary (1742), 2.7.13.
A map depicting the universe: See Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps (London: Penguin
Books, 2013), 82–113 (discussion of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, ca. 1300); 4 Ezra 6:42; Dante Alighieri, The
Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (London: Bantam, 1982), 342; and Osip Mandelstam, “Conversation
About Dante,” in The Poet’s Dante, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2001), 67.
“red eminence”: Richelieu himself had a “grey eminence,” his confidential advisor and agent François Leclerc du
Tremblay, whose robes as Père Joseph of the Capuchin order led him to be called Richelieu’s éminence grise, a
label ever thereafter applied to shadowy figures of influence in the history of diplomacy. Aldous Huxley, Grey
Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941).
Machiavelli’s treatises on statesmanship: See, for example, Niccolò Machiavelli, The Art of War (1521),
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy (1531), The Prince (1532).
To outraged complaints: Joseph Strayer, Hans Gatzke, and E. Harris Harbison, The Mainstream of Civilization
Since 1500 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 420.
The fragmentation of Central Europe: Richelieu, “Advis donné au roy sur le sujet de la bataille de Nordlingen,”
in The Thirty Years War: A Documentary History, ed. and trans. Tryntje Helfferich (Indianapolis: Hackett,
2009), 151.
The 235 official envoys: Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2009), 673.
Most representatives had come with eminently practical instructions: Ibid., 676.
Both the main multilateral treaties: Instrumentum pacis Osnabrugensis (1648) and Instrumentum pacis
Monsteriensis (1648), in Helfferich, Thirty Years War, 255, 271.
Paradoxically, this general exhaustion and cynicism: Wilson, Thirty Years War, 672.
novel clauses: These formal provisions of tolerance were extended only to the three recognized Christian
confessions: Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism.
“We have no eternal allies”: Palmerston, Speech to the House of Commons, March 1, 1848. This spirit was also
expressed by Prince William III of Orange, who fought against French hegemony for a generation (first as
Dutch stadtholder and then as King of England, Ireland, and Scotland), when he confided to an aide that, had he
lived in the 1550s, when the Habsburgs were on the verge of becoming dominant, he would have been “as much
a Frenchman as he was now a Spaniard” (Habsburg)—and later by Winston Churchill, replying in the 1930s to
the charge that he was anti-German: “If the circumstances were reversed, we could equally be pro-German and
anti-French.”
“When people ask me”: Palmerston to Clarendon, July 20, 1856, quoted in Harold Temperley and Lillian M.
Penson, Foundations of British Foreign Policy from Pitt (1792) to Salisbury (1902) (Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press, 1938), 88.
In his Leviathan: The experience that brought Hobbes to write Leviathan was principally that of the English Civil
Wars, whose impact on England, though less physically devastating than that of the Thirty Years’ War on the
Continent, was still very great.
“Concerning the offices of one sovereign to another”: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1994), 233.
There were in fact two balances of power: It is important to keep in mind that only one major power existed in
Central Europe at the time: Austria and its dominions. Prussia was still a secondary state at the eastern fringes of
Germany. Germany was a geographic concept, not a state. Dozens of small, some minuscule, states made up a
mosaic of governance.
“He [Louis] was well aware”: Lucy Norton, ed., Saint-Simon at Versailles (London: Hamilton, 1958), 217–30.
Split into two: Until ruthless diplomacy led to three successive partitions of Poland, the eastern half of Frederick’s
territory was surrounded by Poland on three sides and the Baltic Sea on the other.
When Frederick II ascended the throne in 1740: Gerhard Ritter, Frederick the Great: A Historical Profile, trans.
Peter Paret (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 29–30.
“Rulers are”: Frederick II of Prussia, Oeuvres, 2, XXV (1775), as quoted in Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism:
The Doctrine of Raison d’État and Its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1957) (originally published in German, 1925), 304.
“Pas trop mal pour la veille d’une grande bataille”: “Not so bad for the eve of a great battle.” Frederick II, as
quoted in Otto von Bismarck, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1899),
316; and Otto von Bismarck, The Kaiser vs. Bismarck: Suppressed Letters by the Kaiser and New Chapters from
the Autobiography of the Iron Chancellor (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1921), 144–45.
Enlightment governance: As Alexander Pope remarked in 1734, “For forms of government let fools contest; /
Whatever is best administered is best.” Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1734), epistle iii, lines 303–4.
“The superiority of our troops”: As quoted in G. P. Gooch, Frederick the Great (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1947), 4–5.
“lives and values were put on display”: David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of
Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 5.
a single elite society: For lively accounts of this social aspect, see Susan Mary Alsop, The Congress Dances:
Vienna, 1814–1815 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984); Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon
and the Congress of Vienna (London: HarperPress, 2007).
“In short, from the earth to Saturn”: Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, “Éléments de Philosophie” (1759), as quoted in
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove,
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951), 3.
“zeal for the best interests of the human race”: Denis Diderot, “The Encyclopedia” (1755), in Rameau’s Nephew
and Other Works, trans. Jacques Barzun and Ralph H. Bowen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 283.
“solid principles [to] serve as the foundation”: Ibid., 296.
“It is not fortune which rules the world”: Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des
Romains et de leur décadence (1734), as quoted in Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 213.
“unsocial sociability”: Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1784), in
Kant: Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 44.
“the most difficult and the last”: Ibid., 46.
“devastations, upheavals and even”: Ibid., 47.
“the vast graveyard of the human race”: Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795),” in
Reiss, Kant, 96.
The answer, Kant held, was a voluntary federation of republics: That is, states with participatory forms of
government, ruled by a system of laws applied equally to all citizens. “Perpetual Peace” has since been enlisted
on behalf of the contemporary era’s “democratic peace theory.” Yet in the essay Kant drew a distinction between
republics, which he described as representative political structures in which “the executive power (the
government) is separated from the legislative power,” and democracies. “Democracy, in the truest sense of the
word,” he argued—that is, a direct democracy such as late ancient Athens in which all matters of state are
submitted to a mass vote—“is necessarily a despotism.” Ibid., 101.
“calling down on themselves all the miseries of war”: Ibid., 100. Emphasis added. Operating on the plane of
abstract reason, Kant sidestepped the example of republican France, which had gone to war against all of its
neighbors to great popular acclaim.
“a system of united power”: Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,” 49.
The Revolution’s intellectual godfather: In Rousseau’s famous analysis, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is
in chains.” The course of human development had gone wrong with “the first person who, having enclosed a
plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine.” Thus only when private property is abolished by being
held communally and artificial gradations of social status are eliminated can justice be achieved. And because
those with property or status will resist the reintroduction of absolute equality, this can only come about by
violent revolution. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and The Social Contract, in
The Basic Political Writings (1755; 1762) (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 61, 141.
“rule of administration in the social order”: Legitimate governance, Rousseau had reasoned, would come only
when “each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will,
and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.” Dissent was to be
eradicated: since in a world of rational and egalitarian social structures, divergences within the popular will
would reflect illegitimate opposition to the principle of popular empowerment, “whoever refuses to obey the
general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced
to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal
dependence.” Rousseau, Social Contract, in The Basic Political Writings, 150.
“will accord fraternity and assistance”: “Declaration for Assistance and Fraternity to Foreign Peoples”
(November 19, 1792), in The Constitutions and Other Select Documents Illustrative of the History of France,
1789–1907 (London: H. W. Wilson, 1908), 130.
“The French nation declares”: “Decree for Proclaiming the Liberty and Sovereignty of All Peoples” (December
15, 1792), in ibid., 132–33.
“I saw the Emperor—this world-soul”: Hegel to Friedrich Niethammer, October 13, 1806, in Hegel: The Letters,
trans. Clark Butler and Christine Seiler with commentary by Clark Butler (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1985).
CHAPTER 2: THE EUROPEAN BALANCE-OF-POWER SYSTEM AND ITS END
“A monstrous compound of the petty refinements”: Marquis de Custine, Empire of the Czar: A Journey
Through Eternal Russia (1843; New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 69.
“the sole Emperor of all the Christians”: Epistle of Filofei of Pskov, 1500 or 1501, as quoted in Geoffrey
Hosking, Russia: People and Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 5–6. Ivan’s
successors would give this philosophical conviction a geopolitical thrust. Catherine the Great conceived of a
“Greek Project,” which was to culminate in the conquest of Constantinople and the crowning of Catherine’s
fittingly named grandson Constantine as its ruler. Her courtier Potemkin even placed (in addition to fake
villages) a sign along his patroness’s Crimean route that read, “This way to Byzantium.” For Russia, the
reattachment of the lost capital of Orthodox Christendom became an objective of profound spiritual and (for an
empire lacking warm-water ports) strategic significance. The nineteenth-century Pan-Slavist intellectual Nikolai
Danilevskii summed up a long tradition of thought with his ringing assessment: “[Constantinople has been] the
aim of the aspirations of the Russian people from the dawn of our statehood, the ideal of our enlightenment; the
glory, splendor and greatness of our ancestors, the center of Orthodoxy, and the bone of contention between
Europe and ourselves. What historical significance Constantinople would have for us if we could wrest her away
from the Turks regardless of Europe! What delight would our hearts feel from the radiance of the cross that we
would raise atop the dome of St. Sophia! Add to this all the other advantages of Constantinople …, her world
significance, her commercial significance, her exquisite location, and all the charms of the south.” Nikolai
Danilevskii, Russia and Europe: A View on Cultural and Political Relations Between the Slavic and GermanRoman Worlds (St. Petersburg, 1871), as translated and excerpted in Imperial Russia: A Source Book, 1700–
1917, ed. Basil Dmytryshyn (Gulf Breeze, Fla: Academic International Press, 1999), 373.
“expanding the state in every direction”: Vasili O. Kliuchevsky, A Course in Russian History: The Seventeenth
Century (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 366. See also Hosking, Russia, 4.
This process developed: John P. LeDonne, The Russian Empire and the World, 1700–1917: The Geopolitics of
Expansion and Containment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 348.
“His political philosophy, like that of all Russians”: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907; New
York: Modern Library, 1931), 439.
It expanded each year: Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Picador,
2002), 376–77.
From that perspective: As Russian troops marched in 1864 into the territory now known as Uzbekistan,
Chancellor Aleksandr Gorchakov defined Russia’s expansion in terms of a permanent obligation to pacify its
periphery driven forward by sheer momentum:
The state [Russia] therefore must make a choice: either to give up this continuous effort and doom its borders
to constant unrest which would make prosperity, safety, and cultural progress impossible here; or else to
advance farther and farther into the heart of the savage lands, where the vast distances, with every step
forward, increase the difficulties and hardships it incurs … not so much from ambition as from dire necessity,
where the greatest difficulty lies in being able to stop.
George Verdansky, ed., A Source Book for Russian History: From Early Times to 1917 (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1972), 3:610.
Yet early European visitors: Marquis de Custine, Empire of the Czar, 230. Modern scholars continued to wonder.
See, for example, Charles J. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian
History (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1985); Paul Harrison Silfen, The Influence of the Mongols on
Russia: A Dimensional History (Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1974).
Determined to explore the fruits of modernity: With a domineering hands-on approach that prompted
amazement in Western European nations, Peter enrolled as a carpenter on the docks of Holland, deconstructed
and repaired watches in London, and unsettled his retinue by trying his hand at new innovations in dentistry and
anatomical dissection. See Virginia Cowles, The Romanovs (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 33–37; Robert K.
Massie, Peter the Great (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980), 188–89, 208.
“to sever the people from their former Asiatic customs”: B. H. Sumner, Peter the Great and the Emergence of
Russia (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 45.
A series of ukases issued forth: Cowles, Romanovs, 26–28; Sumner, Peter the Great and the Emergence of
Russia, 27; Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 4–6.
“Russia is a European State”: Catherine II, Nakaz (Instruction) to the Legislative Commission of 1767–68, in
Dmytryshyn, Imperial Russia, 80.
Stalin too has acquired: Maria Lipman, Lev Gudkov, Lasha Bakradze, and Thomas de Waal, The Stalin Puzzle:
Deciphering Post-Soviet Public Opinion (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
2013) (reporting polls of contemporary Russians showing 47 percent agreement with the statement “Stalin was a
wise leader who brought the Soviet Union to might and prosperity” and 30 percent agreement with the statement
“Our people will always have need of a leader like Stalin, who will come and restore order”).
“The Extent of the Dominion requires”: Catherine II, Nakaz (Instruction) to the Legislative Commission of
1767–68, 80.
“In Russia, the sovereign is the living law”: Nikolai Karamzin on Czar Alexander I, as quoted in W. Bruce
Lincoln, The Romanovs: Autocrats of All the Russias (New York: Anchor Books, 1981), 489.
“at the interface of two vast and irreconcilable worlds”: Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde, 126.
“this ceaseless longing”: Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary (1881), as quoted in Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 308.
“orphan cut off from the human family”: Pyotr Chaadaev, “Philosophical Letter” (1829, published 1836), as
quoted in Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 132, and Dmytryshyn, Imperial Russia, 251. Chaadaev’s commentary struck
a nerve and circulated widely, even though the publication was immediately suppressed and the author was
declared insane and placed under police supervision.
“Third Rome”: Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov, May 24, 1882, editorial in Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow News),
as excerpted in Verdansky, A Source Book for Russian History, 3:676.
“What a people! They are Scythians!”: Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 150.
“It is to the cause of hastening the true reign”: Lincoln, The Romanovs, 404–5.
“There no longer exists an English policy”: Ibid., 405.
“the course, formerly adopted by the powers”: Wilhelm Schwarz, Die Heilige Allianz (Stuttgart, 1935), 52.
The vanquished enemy would become: It was analogous to the decision in 1954 of (West) Germany to join the
Atlantic Alliance, less than a decade after its unconditional surrender at the end of a murderous war against its
newfound partners.
“too weak for true ambition”: Klemens von Metternich, Aus Metternich’s nachgelassenen Papieren, ed. Alfons v.
Klinkowstroem (Vienna, 1881), 1:316.
“the contingency of an attack by France”: Palmerston’s dispatch no. 6 to the Marquess of Clanricarde
(ambassador in St. Petersburg), January 11, 1841, in The Foreign Policy of Victorian England, ed. Kenneth
Bourne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 252–53.
The German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder: See Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the
History of Ideas (New York: Viking, 1976), 158, 204.
“Underlying the theory was fact”: Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural
Life (New York: Perennial, 2000), 482.
Linguistic nationalisms made traditional empires: Sir Lewis Namier, Vanished Supremacies: Essays on
European History, 1812–1918 (New York: Penguin Books, 1958), 203.
“powerful, decisive and wise regents”: Otto von Bismarck, Die gesammelten Werke, 3rd ed. (Berlin, 1924), 1:
375.
The war received its name: The battle was memorialized in classic literature on both sides, including Alfred
Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” and Leo Tolstoy’s Tales of Sevastopol. See Nicholas V. Riasanovsky,
A History of Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 336–39.
“We will astonish the world by the magnitude of our ingratitude”: Allgemeine deutsche Biographie 33
(Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1891), 266. Metternich left office in 1848.
“Where everything is tottering”: Heinrich Sbrik, Metternich, der Staatsmann und der Mensch, 2 vols. (Munich,
1925), 1:354, as cited in Henry A. Kissinger, “The Conservative Dilemma: Reflections on the Political Thought
of Metternich,” American Political Science Review 48, no. 4 (December 1954): 1027.
“invention is the enemy of history”: Metternich, Aus Metternich’s nachgelassenen Papieren, 1:33, 8:184.
For Metternich, the national interest of Austria: Algernon Cecil, Metternich, 1773–1859 (London: Eyre and
Spottiswood, 1947), 52.
“The great axioms of political science”: Metternich, Aus Metternich’s nachgelassenen Papieren, 1:334.
“A sentimental policy knows no reciprocity”: Briefwechsel des Generals Leopold von Gerlach mit dem
Bundestags-Gesandten Otto von Bismarck (Berlin, 1893), 334.
“For heaven’s sake no sentimental alliances”: Ibid. (February 20, 1854), 130.
“The only healthy basis of policy”: Horst Kohl, Die politischen Reden des Fursten Bismarck (Stuttgart, 1892),
264.
“Gratitude and confidence will not bring”: Bismarck, Die gesammelten Werke (November 14, 1833), vol. 14,
nos. 1, 3.
“Policy is the art of the possible”: Ibid. (September 29, 1851), 1:62.
“a greater political event than the French Revolution”: Speech of February 9, 1871, in Hansard, Parliamentary
Debates, ser. 3, vol. 204 (February–March 1871), 82.
German strategy: By contrast, Moltke, the architect of Prussian victories in the wars that led to unification, had in
his day planned a defense on both fronts.
World War I broke out: For stimulating accounts of these developments, see Christopher Clark, The
Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: HarperCollins, 2013) and Margaret MacMillan,
The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (New York: Random House, 2013).
In the 1920s, the Germany of the Weimar Republic: See John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences
of the Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1920), Chapter 5.
Their residue would continue: See Chapters 6 and 7.
CHAPTER 3: ISLAMISM AND THE MIDDLE EAST
“the first deliberate attempt”: Adda B. Bozeman, “Iran: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Tradition of Persian
Statecraft,” Orbis 23, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 397.
That a small group of Arab confederates: See Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of
Islam Changed the World We Live In (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2007), 34–40.
“If you embrace Islam”: Kennedy, Great Arab Conquests, 113.
Islam’s rapid advance: See generally Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a
World Civilization, vol. 1, The Classical Age of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
“The dar al-Islam”: Majid Khadduri, The Islamic Law of Nations: Shaybani’s Siyar (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1966), 13.
“by his heart; his tongue”: Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1955), 56. See also Kennedy, Great Arab Conquests, 48–51; Bernard Lewis, The Middle East:
A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 233–38.
Other religions—especially Christianity: To the extent that democracy and human rights now serve to inspire
actions in the service of global transformation, their content and applicability have proven far more flexible than
the previous dictates of scripture proselytized in the wake of advancing armies. After all, the democratic will of
different peoples can call forth vastly different outcomes.
“Islamic legal rulings stipulate”: Labeeb Ahmed Bsoul, International Treaties (Mu‘āhadāt) in Islam: Theory and
Practice in the Light of Islamic International Law (Siyar) According to Orthodox Schools (Lanham, Md.:
University Press of America, 2008), 117.
“The communities of the dar al-harb”: Khadduri, Islamic Law of Nations, 12. See also Bsoul, International
Treaties, 108–9.
In the idealized version of this worldview: See James Piscatori, “Islam in the International Order,” in The
Expansion of International Society, ed. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (New York: Oxford University Press,
1985), 318–19; Lewis, Middle East, 305; Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 112 (on contemporary Islamist views); Efraim Karsh, Islamic
Imperialism: A History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 230–31. But see Khadduri, War and
Peace in the Law of Islam, 156–57 (on the traditional conditions under which territory captured by non-Muslims
might revert to being part of dar al-harb).
These factions eventually formed: An analysis of this schism and its modern implications may be found in Vali
Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
“the order of the world”: Brendan Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy from 1453 to the Present (New
York: Basic Books, 2013), 9–10; Black, History of Islamic Political Thought, 206–7.
In this context, formal Ottoman documents: These were called, misleadingly in English, “capitulations”—not
because the Ottoman Empire had “capitulated” on any point, but because they were divided into chapters or
articles (capitula in Latin).
“I who am the Sultan of Sultans”: Answer from Suleiman I to Francis I of France, February 1526, as quoted in
Roger Bigelow Merriman, Suleiman the Magnificent, 1520–1566 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1944), 130. See also Halil Inalcik, “The Turkish Impact on the Development of Modern Europe,” in The
Ottoman State and Its Place in World History, ed. Kemal H. Karpat (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), 51–53; Garrett
Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (New York: Penguin Books, 1955), 152. Roughly five hundred years later,
during a period of strained bilateral relations, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan presented a
ceremonial copy of the letter to French President Nicolas Sarkozy but complained, “I think he did not read it.”
“Turkey’s Erdoǧan: French Vote Reveals Gravity of Hostility Towards Muslims,” Today’s Zaman, December 23,
2011.
“the Sick Man of Europe”: In 1853, Czar Nicholas I of Russia was reputed to have told the British ambassador,
“We have a sick man on our hands, a man gravely ill, it will be a great misfortune if one of these days he slips
through our hands, especially before the necessary arrangements are made.” Harold Temperley, England and the
Near East (London: Longmans, Green, 1936), 272.
“attacks dealt against the Caliphate”: Sultan Mehmed-Rashad, “Proclamation,” and Sheik-ul-Islam, “Fetva,” in
Source Records of the Great War, ed. Charles F. Horne and Walter F. Austin (Indianapolis: American Legion,
1930), 2:398–401. See also Hew Strachan, The First World War (New York: Viking, 2003), 100–101.
“the establishment in Palestine”: Arthur James Balfour to Walter Rothschild, November 2, 1917, in Malcolm
Yapp, The Making of the Modern Near East, 1792–1923 (Harlow: Longmans, Green), 290.
Two opposing trends appeared: See Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the
International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, 1917–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
From its early days as an informal gathering: See Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds.,
Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2009), 49–53.
“which was brilliant”: Hassan al-Banna, “Toward the Light,” in ibid., 58–59.
“Then the fatherland of the Muslim expands”: Ibid., 61–62.
Where possible, this fight would be gradualist: Ibid., 68–70.
“low associations based on race”: Sayyid Qutb, Milestones, 2nd rev. English ed. (Damascus, Syria: Dar al-Ilm,
n.d.), 49–51.
“the achievement of the freedom of man”: Ibid., 59–60, 72, 84, 137.
core of committed followers: For a discussion of the evolution from Qutb to bin Laden, see Lawrence Wright,
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Random House, 2006).
“freedom”: Barack Obama, Remarks by the President in Joint Press Conference with Prime Minister Harper of
Canada, February 4, 2011; interview with Fox News, February 6, 2011; Statement by President Barack Obama
on Egypt; February 10, 2011; “Remarks by the President on Egypt” February 11, 2011.
“The future of Syria”: Statement by the President on the Situation in Syria, August 18, 2011,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/08/18/statement-president-obama-situation-syria.
The main parties thought themselves: Mariam Karouny, “Apocalyptic Prophecies Drive Both Sides to Syrian
Battle for End of Time,” Reuters, April 1, 2014.
deploying military personnel to Saudi Arabia: On Riyadh’s request, to deter any attempt by Saddam Hussein to
seize Saudi oil fields.
Osama bin Laden had preceded the attack: See “Message from Usama Bin-Muhammad Bin Ladin to His
Muslim Brothers in the Whole World and Especially in the Arabian Peninsula: Declaration of Jihad Against the
Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Mosques; Expel the Heretics from the Arabian Peninsula,” in
FBIS Report, “Compilation of Usama bin Ladin Statements, 1994–January 2004,” 13; Piscatori, “Order, Justice,
and Global Islam,” 279–80.
When states are not governed: For an exposition of this phenomenon, see David Danelo, “Anarchy Is the New
Normal: Unconventional Governance and 21st Century Statecraft” (Foreign Policy Research Institute, October
2013).
CHAPTER 4: THE UNITED STATES AND IRAN
“Today what lies in front of our eyes”: Ali Khamenei, “Leader’s Speech at Inauguration of Islamic Awakening
and Ulama Conference” (April 29, 2013), Islamic Awakening 1, no. 7 (Spring 2013).
“This final goal cannot be anything”: Ibid.
“The developments in the U.S.”: Islamic Invitation Turkey, “The Leader of Islamic Ummah and Oppressed
People Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei: Islamic Awakening Inspires Intl. Events,” November 27, 2011.
The Persian ideal of monarchy: Among the most famous instances of this tradition was the sixth-century B.C.
liberation of captive peoples, including the Jews, from Babylon by the Persian Emperor Cyrus, founder of the
Achaemenid Empire. After entering Babylon and displacing its ruler, the self-proclaimed “king of the four
quarters of the world” decreed that all Babylonian captives would be free to return home and that all religions
would be tolerated. With his pioneering embrace of religious pluralism, Cyrus is believed to have been an
inspiration over two millennia later for Thomas Jefferson, who read an account in Xenophon’s Cyropedia and
commented favorably. See “The Cyrus Cylinder: Diplomatic Whirl,” Economist, March 23, 2013.
“Most of all they hold in honor”: Herodotus, The History, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), 1.131–135, pp. 95–97.
“The President of the United States”: Kenneth M. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and
America (New York: Random House, 2004), 18–19. See also John Garver, China and Iran: Ancient Partners in
a Post-imperial World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).
“great interior spaces”: See Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (Oxford:
Oneworld, 2002), 144; Reza Aslan, “The Epic of Iran,” New York Times, April 30, 2006. Abolqasem Ferdowsi’s
epic Book of Kings, composed two centuries after the arrival of Islam in Persia, recounted the legendary glories
of Persia’s pre-Muslim past. Ferdowsi, a Shia Muslim, captured the complex Persian attitude by penning a
lament spoken by one of his characters at the end of an era: “Damn this world, damn this time, damn this fate, /
That uncivilized Arabs have come to make me Muslim.”
“prudential dissimulation”: See Sandra Mackey, The Iranians: Persia, Islam, and the Soul of a Nation (New
York: Plume, 1998), 109n1.
“imperialists”: Ruhollah Khomeini, “Islamic Government,” in Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations
of Imam Khomeini (1941–1980), trans. Hamid Algar (North Haledon, N.J.: Mizan Press, 1981), 48–49.
“the relations between nations”: As quoted in David Armstrong, Revolution and World Order: The Revolutionary
State in International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 192.
“an Islamic government”: Khomeini, “Islamic Government,” “The First Day of God’s Government,” and “The
Religious Scholars Led the Revolt,” in Islam and Revolution, 147, 265, 330–31.
“What was wanted”: R. W. Apple Jr., “Will Khomeini Turn Iran’s Clock Back 1,300 Years?,” New York Times,
February 4, 1979.
Amidst these upheavals a new paradox: See Charles Hill, Trial of a Thousand Years: World Order and Islamism
(Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2011), 89–91.
Tehran’s imperative: Accounts of this phenomenon, carried out largely covertly, are necessarily incomplete.
Some have suggested limited cooperation, or at least tacit accommodations, between Tehran and the Taliban and
al-Qaeda. See, for example, Thomas Kean, Lee Hamilton, et al., The 9/11 Commission Report (New York: W.
W. Norton, 2004), 61, 128, 240–41, 468, 529; Seth G. Jones, “Al Qaeda in Iran,” Foreign Affairs, January 29,
2012, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137061/seth-g-jones/al-qaeda-in-iran.
“This lofty and great author”: Akbar Ganji, “Who Is Ali Khamenei: The Worldview of Iran’s Supreme Leader,”
Foreign Affairs, September/October 2013. See also Thomas Joscelyn, “Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and
Revolution,” Longwarjournal.org, January 28, 2011.
“In accordance with the sacred verse”: Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran (October 24, 1979), as
amended, Section I, Article 11.
“We must strive to export our Revolution”: Khomeini, “New Year’s Message” (March 21, 1980), in Islam and
Revolution, 286.
temporarily exercises: This status is set out in Iran’s constitution: “During the occultation of the Wali al-’Asr [the
Guardian of the Era, the Hidden Imam] (may God hasten his reappearance), the leadership of the Ummah
[Muslim community] devolves upon the just and pious person, who is fully aware of the circumstances of his
age, courageous, resourceful, and possessed of administrative ability, will assume the responsibilities of this
office in accordance with Article 107.” Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran (October 24, 1979), as
amended, Section I, Article 5. In the Iranian revolution’s climactic phases, Khomeini did not discourage
suggestions that he was the Mahdi returned from occultation, or at least the forerunner of this phenomenon. See
Milton Viorst, In the Shadow of the Prophet: The Struggle for the Soul of Islam (Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press, 2001), 192.
“Without any doubt”: “Address by H.E. Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran,
Before the Sixty-second Session of the United Nations General Assembly” (New York: Permanent Mission of
the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations, September 25, 2007), 10.
“Vasalam Ala Man Ataba’al hoda”: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to George W. Bush, May 7, 2006, Council on
Foreign Relations online library; “Iran Declares War,” New York Sun, May 11, 2006.
“By dressing up America’s face”: As quoted in Arash Karami, “Ayatollah Khamenei: Nuclear Negotiations
Won’t Resolve US-Iran Differences,” Al-Monitor.com Iran Pulse, February 17, 2014, http://iranpulse.almonitor.com/index.php/2014/02/3917/ayatollah-khamenei-nuclear-negotiations-wont-resolve-us-irandifferences/.
“When a wrestler is wrestling”: As quoted in Akbar Ganji, “Frenemies Forever: The Real Meaning of Iran’s
‘Heroic Flexibility,’” Foreign Affairs, September 24, 2013,
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139953/akbar-ganji/frenemies-forever.
Plutonium enrichment: Two types of material have been used to drive nuclear explosions—enriched uranium and
plutonium. Because the control of a plutonium reaction is generally seen as a technically more complex task
than the equivalent work required to produce an explosion using enriched uranium, most attempts to prevent a
breakout capability have focused on closing the route to uranium enrichment. (Plutonium reactors are also
fueled by uranium, requiring some access to uranium and familiarity with uranium-processing technology.) Iran
has moved toward both a uranium-enrichment and a plutonium-production capability, both of which have been
the subject of negotiations.
The process resulted in the November 2013: This account of the negotiating record makes reference to events
and proposals described in a number of sources, including the Arms Control Association, “History of Official
Proposals on the Iranian Nuclear Issue,” January 2013; Lyse Doucet, “Nuclear Talks: New Approach for Iran at
Almaty,” BBC.co.uk, February 28, 2013; David Feith, “How Iran Went Nuclear,” Wall Street Journal, March 2,
2013; Lara Jakes and Peter Leonard, “World Powers Coax Iran into Saving Nuclear Talks,” Miami Herald,
February 27, 2013; Semira N. Nikou, “Timeline of Iran’s Nuclear Activities” (United States Institute of Peace,
2014); “Timeline: Iranian Nuclear Dispute,” Reuters, June 17, 2012; Hassan Rohani, “Beyond the Challenges
Facing Iran and the IAEA Concerning the Nuclear Dossier” (speech to the Supreme Cultural Revolution
Council), Rahbord, September 30, 2005, 7–38, FBIS-IAP20060113336001; Steve Rosen, “Did Iran Offer a
‘Grand Bargain’ in 2003?,” American Thinker, November 16, 2008; and Joby Warrick and Jason Rezaian, “Iran
Nuclear Talks End on Upbeat Note,” Washington Post, February 27, 2013.
“The reason for the emphasis”: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, remarks to members of the Iranian Majles (Parliament),
Fars News Agency, as translated and excerpted in KGS NightWatch news report, May 26, 2014.
Administration spokesmen: David Remnick, “Going the Distance,” New Yorker, January 27, 2014.
“Today we are embarking”: Address by Yitzhak Rabin to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, July 26, 1994,
online archive of the Yitzhak Rabin Center.
CHAPTER 5: THE MULTIPLICITY OF ASIA
Until the arrival: Philip Bowring, “What Is ‘Asia’?,” Far Eastern Economic Review, February 12, 1987.
“the basic principle of modern international relations”: Qi Jianguo, “An Unprecedented Great Changing
Situation: Understanding and Thoughts on the Global Strategic Situation and Our Country’s National Security
Environment,” Xuexi shibao [Study Times], January 21, 2013, trans. James A. Bellacqua and Daniel M. Hartnett
(Washington, D.C.: CNA, April 2013).
In Asia’s historical diplomatic systems: See Immanuel C. Y. Hsu, The Rise of Modern China (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 315–17; Thant Myint-U, Where China Meets India (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2011), 77–78; John W. Garver, Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 138–40; Lucian W. Pye, Asian Power and Politics (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 95–99; Brotton, History of the World in Twelve Maps, chap. 4.
Yet in a region: See, for example, David C. Kang, East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 77–81.
At the apex of Japan’s society: Kenneth B. Pyle, Japan Rising (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), 37.
“Japan is the divine country”: John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New
York: Pantheon, 1986), 222.
In 1590, the warrior Toyotomi Hideyoshi: See Samuel Hawley, The Imjin War: Japan’s Sixteenth-Century
Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China (Seoul: Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch, 2005).
After five years of inconclusive negotiations: Kang, East Asia Before the West, 1–2, 93–97.
strict diplomatic equality: Hidemi Suganami, “Japan’s Entry into International Society,” in Bull and Watson,
Expansion of International Society, 187.
Chinese traders were permitted to operate: Marius Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 87.
“edict to expel foreigners”: Suganami, “Japan’s Entry into International Society,” 186–89.
“If your imperial majesty”: President Millard Fillmore to the Emperor of Japan (presented by Commodore Perry
on July 14, 1853), in Francis Hawks and Matthew Perry, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron
to the China Seas and Japan, Performed in the Years 1852, 1853, and 1854, Under the Command of
Commodore M. C. Perry, United States Navy, by Order of the Government of the United States (Washington,
D.C.: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1856), 256–57.
“most positively forbidden by the laws”: Translation of the Japanese reply to President Fillmore’s letter, in ibid.,
349–50.
“1. By this oath”: Meiji Charter Oath, in Japanese Government Documents, ed. W. W. McLaren (Bethesda, Md.:
University Publications of America, 1979), 8.
“New Order in Asia”: Japanese memorandum delivered to the American Secretary of State Cordell Hull,
December 7, 1941, as quoted in Pyle, Japan Rising, 207.
Having established: See, for example, Yasuhiro Nakasone, “A Critical View of the Postwar Constitution” (1953),
in Sources of Japanese Tradition, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur E. Tiedemann (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 2:1088–89. Nakasone delivered the speech while sojourning at
Harvard as a member of the International Seminar, a program for young leaders seeking exposure to an
American academic environment. He argued that in the interest of “accelerating permanent friendship between
Japan and the United States,” Japan’s independent defense capability should be strengthened and its relations
with its American partner put on a more equal footing. When Nakasone became Prime Minister three decades
later, he pursued these policies to great effect with his counterpart Ronald Reagan.
“as Japan’s security environment”: National Security Strategy (Provisional Translation) (Tokyo: Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, December 17, 2013), 1–3. The document, adopted by Japan’s Cabinet, stated that its principles
“will guide Japan’s national security policy over the next decade.”
“the long and diversified history”: S. Radhakrishnan, “Hinduism,” in A Cultural History of India, ed. A. L.
Basham (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 60–82.
“in search of Christians and spices”: Such was the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s explanation to the King
of Calicut (the present-day Kozhikode, India, then a center of the global spice trade). Da Gama and his crew
rejoiced at the opportunity to profit from the thriving Indian trade in spices and precious stones. They were also
influenced by the legend of the lost realm of “Prester John,” a powerful Christian king believed by many
medieval and early-modern Europeans to reside somewhere in Africa or Asia. See Daniel Boorstin, The
Discoverers (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 104–6, 176–77.
The Hindu classic: The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Tomales, Calif.: Nilgiri Press, 2007), 82–91;
Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture, and Identity (New York: Picador,
2005), 3–6.
Against the background of the eternal: See Pye, Asian Power and Politics, 137–41.
“The conqueror shall [always]”: Kautilya, Arthashastra, trans. L. N. Rangarajan (New Delhi: Penguin Books
India, 1992), 6.2.35–37, p. 525.
“If … the conqueror is superior”: Ibid., 9.1.1, p. 588. Prussia’s Frederick the Great, on the eve of his seizure of
the wealthy Austrian province of Silesia roughly two thousand years later, made a similar assessment. See
Chapter 1.
“The Conqueror shall think of the circle”: Ibid., 6.2.39–40, p. 526.
“undertake such works as would”: Ibid., 9.1.21, p. 589.
“make one neighboring king fight”: Ibid., 7.6.14, 15, p. 544.
“all states of the circle”: See Roger Boesche, The First Great Political Realist: Kautilya and His “Arthashastra”
(Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002), 46; Kautilya, Arthashastra, 7.13.43, 7.2.16, 9.1.1–16, pp. 526, 538,
588–89.
To be sure, Kautilya insisted: In Kautilya’s concept, the realm of a universal conqueror was “the area extending
from the Himalayas in the north to the sea in the south and a thousand yojanas wide from east to west”—
effectively modern-day Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Kautilya, Arthashastra, 9.1.17, p. 589.
The Arthashastra advised: See Boesche, First Great Political Realist, 38–42, 51–54, 88–89.
“truly radical ‘Machiavellianism’”: Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” as quoted in ibid., 7.
Whether following the Arthashastra’s prescriptions: Asoka is today revered for his preaching of Buddhism and
nonviolence; he adopted these only after his conquests were complete, and they served to buttress his rule.
“grafted to the Greater Middle East”: Robert Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About
Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (New York: Random House, 2012), 237.
“We seem, as it were, to have conquered”: John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of
Lectures (London: Macmillan, 1891), 8.
“There is not, and never was an India”: Sir John Strachey, India (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, 1888), as quoted
in Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (New York: Ecco,
2007), 3.
“Whatever policy you may lay down”: Jawaharlal Nehru, “India’s Foreign Policy” (speech delivered at the
Constituent Assembly, New Delhi, December 4, 1947), in Independence and After: A Collection of Speeches,
1946–1949 (New York: John Day, 1950), 204–5.
“We propose to avoid entanglement”: As quoted in Baldev Raj Nayar and T. V. Paul, India in the World Order:
Searching for Major-Power Status (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 124–25.
“It would have been absurd”: As quoted in ibid., 125.
“Are we, the countries of Asia and Africa”: Jawaharlal Nehru, “Speech to the Bandung Conference Political
Committee” (1955), as printed in G. M. Kahin, The Asian-African Conference (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1956), 70.
“(1) mutual respect”: “Agreement (with Exchange of Notes) on Trade and Intercourse Between Tibet Region of
China and India, Signed at Peking, on 29 April 1954,” United Nations Treaty Series, vol. 299 (1958), 70.
Treated as provisional: As of this writing, Afghanistan does not officially recognize any territorial border with
Pakistan; India and Pakistan dispute the Kashmir region; India and China dispute Aksai Chin and Arunachal
Pradesh and fought a war over these territories in 1962; India and Bangladesh have expressed a commitment to
negotiate a resolution of the dozens of exclaves in each other’s territory but have not ratified an agreement
resolving the issue and have clashed over the patrol of these territories.
the larger Muslim world: See Pew Research Center Forum on Religion and Public Life, The Global Religious
Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Major Religious Groups as of 2010
(Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2012), 22.
geographically an Asian power: “European Russia,” or Russia west of the Ural Mountains, constitutes roughly
the westernmost quarter of Russia’s landmass.
CHAPTER 6: TOWARD AN ASIAN ORDER
“Sinocentric”: See Mark Mancall, “The Ch’ing Tribute System: An Interpretive Essay,” in The Chinese World
Order, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 63.
A Chinese foreign ministry: See Mark Mancall, China at the Center: 300 Years of Foreign Policy (New York:
Free Press, 1984), 16–20; Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton,
1999), 197–202.
“To give them … elaborate clothes”: Ying-shih Yü, Trade and Expansion in Han China: A Study in the Structure
of Sino-Barbarian Economic Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 37.
“Swaying the wide world”: Qianlong’s First Edict to King George III (September 1793), in The Search for
Modern China: A Documentary Collection, ed. Pei-kai Cheng, Michael Lestz, and Jonathan Spence (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1999), 105.
England’s Prince Regent: Governing in the place of King George III, whose mental faculties had deteriorated.
“henceforward no more envoys”: “The Emperor of China,” Chinese Recorder 29, no. 10 (1898): 471–73.
“Having, with reverence, received”: Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs Accompanying the Annual Message of
the President to the First Session of the Thirty-eighth Congress (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1864), Document No. 33 (“Mr. Burlingame to Mr. Seward, Peking, January 29, 1863”), 2:846–48.
“During the past forty years”: James Legge, The Chinese Classics; with a Translation, Critical and Exegetical
Notes, Prolegomena, and Copious Indexes, vol. 5, pt. 1 (Hong Kong: Lane, Crawford, 1872), 52–53.
Though emerging as one of the victorious: See Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).
“The cycle, which is endless”: “Sixty Points on Working Methods—a Draft Resolution from the Office of the
Centre of the CPC: 19.2.1958,” in Mao Papers: Anthology and Bibliography, ed. Jerome Ch’en (London:
Oxford University Press, 1970), 63–66.
Interestingly, a CIA analysis: “National Intelligence Estimate 13-7-70: Communist China’s International Posture”
(November 12, 1970), in Tracking the Dragon: National Intelligence Estimates on China During the Era of
Mao, 1948–1976, ed. John Allen, John Carver, and Tom Elmore (Pittsburgh: Government Printing Office,
2004), 593–94.
A Harvard study: See Graham Allison, “Obama and Xi Must Think Broadly to Avoid a Classic Trap,” New York
Times, June 6, 2013; Richard Rosecrance, The Resurgence of the West: How a Transatlantic Union Can Prevent
War and Restore the United States and Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013).
America’s so-called pivot policy: In a speech of February 13, 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced
the Obama administration’s “Pivot to East Asia” regional strategy, the extent of which has yet to be fully
elaborated.
“Actually, national sovereignty”: As quoted in Zhu Majie, “Deng Xiaoping’s Human Rights Theory,” in Cultural
Impact on International Relations, ed. Yu Xintian, Chinese Philosophical Studies (Washington, D.C.: Council
for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2002), 81.
number of players is small: Europe before World War I was reduced to five players by the unification of
Germany; see Chapter 2.
CHAPTER 7: “ACTING FOR ALL MANKIND”
“liberty according to English ideas”: “Speech on Conciliation with America” (1775), in Edmund Burke, On
Empire, Liberty, and Reform: Speeches and Letters, ed. David Bromwich (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 2000), 81–83. Burke sympathized with the American Revolution because he considered it a natural
evolution of English liberties. He opposed the French Revolution, which he believed wrecked what generations
had wrought and, with it, the prospect of organic growth.
In New England: Alexis de Tocqueville, “Concerning Their Point of Departure,” in Democracy in America, trans.
George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 46–47.
“We feel that we are acting”: Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1892–99), 8:158–59, quoted in Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty:
The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 11.
“candidly confess[ed]: Jefferson to Monroe, October 24, 1823, as excerpted in “Continental Policy of the United
States: The Acquisition of Cuba,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review, April 1859, 23.
“We should then have only to include the North”: Jefferson to Madison, April 27, 1809, in ibid.
For the early settlers: This was largely true for settlers from England and Northern Europe. Those from Spain
largely saw it as a territory to be exploited and inhabited by natives to be converted to Christianity.
“We shall find that the God of Israel”: John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630). See Brendan
Simms, Europe, 36.
“an empire in many respects”: Publius [Alexander Hamilton], The Federalist 1, in Alexander Hamilton, James
Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (New York: Mentor, 1961), 1–2. The use of “empire” here
denoted a totally sovereign independent entity.
“our manifest destiny”: John O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review, July–
August 1845, 5.
“America, in the assembly of nations”: John Quincy Adams, “An Address Delivered at the Request of the
Committee of Citizens of Washington, 4 July 1821” (Washington, D.C.: Davis and Force, 1821), 28–29.
“[America] goes not abroad”: Ibid.
“Besides, it is well known”: Jedidiah Morse, The American Geography; or, A View of the Present Situation of the
United States of America, 2nd ed. (London: John Stockdale, 1792), 468–69, as excerpted in Manifest Destiny
and American Territorial Expansion: A Brief History with Documents, ed. Amy S. Greenberg (Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012), 53.
“travelling from east to west”: That is, the “translatio imperii mundi”—transfer of the rule of the world—that had
theoretically seen the seat of paramount political power travel across time and space: from Babylon and Persia,
to Greece, to Rome, to France or Germany, thence to Britain, and, Morse supposed, to America. Also the
famous line of George Berkeley in his “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America”:
Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The four first Acts already past,
A fifth shall close the Drama with the day;
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.
“The American people having derived”: John O’Sullivan, “The Great Nation of Futurity,” United States
Magazine and Democratic Review, November 1839, 426–27.
“Though they should cast into the opposite”: O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” 9–10.
As the United States experienced total war: See Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in
the American Civil War (New York: Random House, 2011); Howard Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A
History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
all but disbanded it: Foreman, World on Fire, 784. The U.S. Army went from 1,034,064 men at arms at the close
of the Civil War to 54,302 regular troops and 11,000 volunteers eighteen months later.
In 1890, the American army ranked: Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s
World Role (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 47.
“any departure from that foreign policy”: Grover Cleveland, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1885, in The
Public Papers of Grover Cleveland (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1889), 8.
“To-day the United States is practically”: Thomas G. Paterson, J. Garry Clifford, and Kenneth J. Hagan,
American Foreign Policy: A History (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1977), 189.
“To us as a people”: Theodore Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1905, in United States Congressional
Serial Set 484 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1905), 559.
“In new and wild communities”: Theodore Roosevelt, “International Peace,” Nobel lecture, May 5, 1910, in
Peace: 1901–1925: Nobel Lectures (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1999), 106.
“As yet there is no likelihood”: Roosevelt’s statement to Congress, 1902, quoted in John Morton Blum, The
Republican Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 137.
“It is … a melancholy fact”: Roosevelt to Spring Rice, December 21, 1907, in The Selected Letters of Theodore
Roosevelt, ed. H. W. Brands (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 465.
“we need a large navy”: Theodore Roosevelt, review of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, by Alfred
Thayer Mahan, Atlantic Monthly, October 1890.
“grasp the points of vantage”: Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” in The Strenuous Life: Essays and
Addresses (New York: Century, 1905), 9.
This was an astonishingly ambitious: When German and British warships cruised toward chronically indebted
Venezuela in 1902 to enforce a long-overdue loan, Roosevelt demanded assurances that they would seek no
territorial or political aggrandizement by way of repayment. When the German representative promised only to
forgo “permanent” territorial acquisitions (leaving open the possibility of a ninety-nine-year concession, as
Britain had achieved under similar circumstances in Egypt, and Britain and Germany had in China), Roosevelt
threatened war. Thereupon he ordered an American fleet south and distributed maps of the Venezuelan harbor to
the media. The gambit worked. While Roosevelt remained silent to allow Kaiser Wilhelm a face-saving way out
of the crisis, imperial Germany’s ambitions in Venezuela were given a decisive rebuke. See Edmund Morris,
Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001), 176–82.
“wrongdoing or impotence”: Theodore Roosevelt’s Annual Message to Congress for 1904, HR 58A-K2, Records
of the U.S. House of Representatives, RG 233, Center for Legislative Archives, National Archives.
“All that this country desires”: Ibid.
Backing up this ambitious concept: To demonstrate the strength of the American commitment, Roosevelt
personally visited the Canal Zone construction project, the first time a sitting president had left the continental
United States.
“pursued a policy of consistent opposition”: Morris, Theodore Rex, 389.
“make demands on [the] Hawaiian Islands”: Ibid., 397.
“should be left face to face with Japan”: Roosevelt’s statement to Congress, 1904, quoted in Blum, Republican
Roosevelt, 134.
“practice cruise around the world”: Morris, Theodore Rex, 495.
“I do not believe there will be war with Japan”: Letter to Kermit Roosevelt, April 19, 1908, in Brands, Selected
Letters, 482–83.
“I wish to impress upon you”: Roosevelt to Admiral Charles S. Sperry, March 21, 1908, in ibid., 479.
“Do you not believe that if Germany”: Roosevelt to Hugo Munsterberg, October 3, 1914, in ibid., 823.
civilization would spread: See James R. Holmes, Theodore Roosevelt and World Order: Police Power in
International Relations (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2007), 10–13, 68–74.
“Our words must be judged by our deeds”: Roosevelt, “International Peace,” 103.
“We must always remember”: Roosevelt to Carnegie, August 6, 1906, in Brands, Selected Letters, 423.
“It was as if”: Woodrow Wilson, Commencement Address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (June 13,
1916), in Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982),
37:212.
“the culminating and final war”: Woodrow Wilson, Address to a Joint Session of Congress on the Conditions of
Peace (January 8, 1918) (“Fourteen Points”), as quoted in A. Scott Berg, Wilson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s
Sons, 2013), 471.
“cooling off”: In all, the United States entered such arbitration compacts with Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Costa
Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Great Britain, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal,
Russia, and Spain. It began negotiations with Sweden, Uruguay, the Argentine Republic, the Dominican
Republic, Greece, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Panama, Persia, Salvador, Switzerland, and Venezuela. Treaties
for the Advancement of Peace Between the United States and Other Powers Negotiated by the Honorable
William J. Bryan, Secretary of State of the United States, with an Introduction by James Brown Scott (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1920).
“We have no selfish ends”: Woodrow Wilson, Message to Congress, April 2, 1917, in U.S. Presidents and
Foreign Policy from 1789 to the Present, ed. Carl C. Hodge and Cathal J. Nolan (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABCCLIO, 2007), 396.
“These are American principles”: “Peace Without Victory,” January 22, 1917, in supplement to American
Journal of International Law 11 (1917): 323.
“Self-governed nations do not”: Wilson, Message to Congress, April 2, 1917, in President Wilson’s Great
Speeches, and Other History Making Documents (Chicago: Stanton and Van Vliet, 1917), 17–18.
“The worst that can happen”: Woodrow Wilson, Fifth Annual Message, December 4, 1917, in United States
Congressional Serial Set 7443 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917), 41.
“the destruction of every arbitrary power”: Woodrow Wilson, “An Address at Mount Vernon,” July 4, 1918, in
Link, Papers, 48:516.
“no autocratic government could be trusted”: Wilson, Message to Congress, April 2, 1917, President Wilson’s
Great Speeches, 18.
“that autocracy must first be shown”: Wilson, Fifth Annual Message, December 4, 1917, in The Foreign Policy
of President Woodrow Wilson: Messages, Addresses and Papers, ed. James Brown Scott (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1918), 306.
“dare … attempting any such covenants”: Ibid. See also Berg, Wilson, 472–73.
“an age … which rejects”: Woodrow Wilson, Remarks at Suresnes Cemetery on Memorial Day, May 30, 1919, in
Link, Papers, 59:608–9.
“a number of small states”: Lloyd George, Wilson memorandum, March 25, 1919, in Ray Stannard Baker, ed.,
Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1922), 2:450. For a conference
participant’s account of the sometimes less than idealistic process by which the new national borders were
drawn, see Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking, 1919 (1933; London: Faber & Faber, 2009). For a contemporary
analysis, see Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random
House, 2002).
“not a balance of power, but a community of power”: Address, January 22, 1917, in Link, Papers, 40:536–37.
All states, in the League of Nations concept: Wilson, Message to Congress, April 2, 1917, President Wilson’s
Great Speeches, 18.
“open covenants of peace”: Wilson, Address to a Joint Session of Congress on the Conditions of Peace (January
8, 1918) (“Fourteen Points”), in President Wilson’s Great Speeches, 18. See also Berg, Wilson, 469–72.
Rather than inspire: The United Nations has provided useful mechanisms for peacekeeping operations—
generally when the major powers have already agreed on the need to monitor an agreement between them in
regions where their own forces are not directly involved. The UN—much more than the League—has performed
important functions: as a forum for otherwise difficult diplomatic encounters; several peacekeeping functions of
consequence; and a host of humanitarian initiatives. What these international institutions have failed to do—and
were incapable of accomplishing—was to sit in judgment of what specific acts constituted aggression or
prescribe the means to resist when the major powers disagreed.
They submitted an analysis: “Differences Between the North Atlantic Treaty and Traditional Military Alliances,”
appendix to the testimony of Ambassador Warren Austin, April 28, 1949, in U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign
Relations, The North Atlantic Treaty, hearings, 81st Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1949), pt. I.
“I am for such a League provided”: Roosevelt to James Bryce, November 19, 1918, in The Letters of Theodore
Roosevelt, ed. Elting E. Morrison (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), 8:1400.
what if an aggressor: Seeking to crush resistance to Italy’s colonial expansion, Mussolini ordered Italian troops to
invade what is today’s Ethiopia in 1935. Despite international condemnation, the League of Nations took no
collective security counteractions. Using indiscriminate bombing and poison gas, Italy took occupation of
Abyssinia. The nascent international community’s failure to act, coming after a similar failure to confront
imperial Japan’s invasion of China’s Manchuria, led to the collapse of the League of Nations.
“an instrument of national policy”: Treaty between the United States and other powers providing for the
renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy. Signed at Paris, August 27, 1928; ratification advised by
the Senate, January 16, 1929; ratified by the President, January 17, 1929; instruments of ratification deposited at
Washington by the United States of America, Australia, Dominion of Canada, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Great
Britain, India, Irish Free State, Italy, New Zealand, and Union of South Africa, March 2, 1929; by Poland,
March 26, 1929; by Belgium, March 27, 1929; by France, April 22, 1929; by Japan, July 24, 1929; proclaimed,
July 24, 1929.
Not all of this—especially the point on decolonization: See Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British
Empire: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Birth of the Pax Americana (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009).
“The kind of world order”: Radio Address at Dinner of Foreign Policy Association, New York, October 21,
1944, in Presidential Profiles: The FDR Years, ed. William D. Peterson (New York: Facts on File, 2006), 429.
“We have learned the simple truth”: Fourth Inaugural Address, January 20, 1945, in My Fellow Americans:
Presidential Inaugural Addresses from George Washington to Barack Obama (St. Petersburg, Fla.: Red and
Black Publishers, 2009).
“Bill, I don’t dispute your facts”: William C. Bullitt, “How We Won the War and Lost the Peace,” Life, August
30, 1948, as quoted in Arnold Beichman, “Roosevelt’s Failure at Yalta,” Humanitas 16, no. 1 (2003): 104.
During the first encounter of the two leaders: On Roosevelt’s arrival in Tehran, Stalin claimed that Soviet
intelligence had identified a Nazi plot, Operation Long Jump, to assassinate Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin
together at the summit. Members of the American delegation harbored serious doubts about the Soviet report.
Keith Eubank, Summit at Teheran: The Untold Story (New York: William Morrow, 1985), 188–96.
“They talk about pacifism”: As quoted in T. A. Taracouzio, War and Peace in Soviet Diplomacy (New York:
Macmillan, 1940), 139–40.
“He [Roosevelt] felt that Stalin”: Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: W. W. Norton,
1973), 211. See also Beichman, “Roosevelt’s Failure at Yalta,” 210–11.
Another view holds that Roosevelt: Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (New
York: PublicAffairs, 2003). Roosevelt was enough of a sphinx to prevent an unambiguous answer, though I lean
toward the Black interpretation. Winston Churchill is easier to sum up. During the war, he mused that all would
be well if he could have a weekly dinner at the Kremlin. As the end of the war was approaching, he ordered his
chief of staff to prepare for war with the Soviet Union.
CHAPTER 8: THE UNITED STATES
All twelve postwar presidents: As Truman, the first postwar President, explained it, “The foreign policy of the
United States is based firmly on fundamental principles of righteousness and justice” and “our efforts to bring
the Golden Rule into the international affairs of this world.” Eisenhower, tough soldier that he was, as President
described the objective in almost identical terms: “We seek peace … rooted in the lives of nations. There must
be justice, sensed and shared by all peoples … There must be law, steadily invoked and respected by all
nations.” Thus, as Gerald Ford stated in a 1974 joint session of Congress, “Successful foreign policy is an
extension of the hopes of the whole American people for a world of peace and orderly reform and orderly
freedom.” Harry S. Truman, Address on Foreign Policy at the Navy Day Celebration in New York City, October
27, 1945; Dwight D. Eisenhower, Second Inaugural Address (“The Price of Peace”), January 21, 1957, in Public
Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957–1961, 62–63. Gerald Ford, Address to a Joint Session of
Congress, August 12, 1974, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Gerald R. Ford (1974–1977), 6.
“Any man and any nation”: Lyndon B. Johnson, Address to the United Nations General Assembly, December 17,
1963.
a new international order: For an eloquent exposition, see Robert Kagan, The World America Made (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).
“Whoever occupies a territory also imposes”: Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, trans. Michael B.
Petrovich (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1962), 114.
“A basic conflict is thus arising”: Kennan to Charles Bohlen, January 26, 1945, as quoted in John Lewis Gaddis,
George Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 188.
“foreign policy of that kind”: Bohlen, Witness to History, 176.
without requiring ambassadorial approval: The American Embassy was then, briefly, without an ambassador:
W. Averell Harriman had left the post while Walter Bedell Smith had yet to arrive.
“contained by the adroit and vigilant application”: “X” [George F. Kennan], “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,”
Foreign Affairs 25, no. 4 (July 1947).
“the unity and efficacy of the Party”: Ibid.
“The question is asked”: Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963
(New York: Chelsea House, 1974), 7:7710.
“freedom under a government of laws”: A Report to the National Security Council by the Executive Secretary on
United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, NSC-68 (April 14, 1950), 7.
“difficult for many to understand”: John Foster Dulles, “Foundations of Peace” (address to the Veterans of
Foreign Wars, New York, August 18, 1958).
Should the victorious army cross: George H. W. Bush faced a similar issue after Saddam Hussein’s forces had
been expelled from Kuwait in 1991.
“If the American imperialists are victorious”: Shen Zhihua, Mao, Stalin, and the Korean War: Trilateral
Communist Relations in the 1950s, trans. Neil Silver (London: Routledge, 2012), 140.
“indeed the focus of the struggles in the world”: Chen Jian, China’s Road to the Korean War: The Making of the
Sino-American Confrontation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 149–50. On the Chinese
leadership’s analysis of the war and its regional implications, see also Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and
Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1993); Henry Kissinger, On China (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), chap. 5; Shen, Mao, Stalin, and the
Korean War; and Shu Guang Zhang, Mao’s Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950–1953
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).
Considerations such as these induced Mao: See Chapter 5.
“the wrong war, at the wrong place”: General Omar N. Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testimony
before the Senate Committees on Armed Services and Foreign Relations, May 15, 1951, in Military Situation in
the Far East, hearings, 82nd Cong., 1st sess., pt. 2, 732 (1951).
Charges of immorality: See Peter Braestrup, Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and
Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1977); Robert
Elegant, “How to Lose a War: The Press and Viet Nam,” Encounter (London), August 1981, 73–90; Guenter
Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 272–79, 311–24.
“We must remember the only time”: “An Interview with the President: The Jury Is Out,” Time, January 3, 1972.
“prepared to establish a dialogue with Peking”: Richard Nixon, U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1970’s: Building for
Peace: A Report to the Congress, by Richard Nixon, President of the United States, February 25, 1971, 107. To
this point, American government documents had referred to “Communist China” or had spoken generally of
authorities in Beijing or (the Nationalist name for the city) Beiping.
“any sense of satisfaction”: Richard Nixon, Remarks to Midwestern News Media Executives Attending a Briefing
on Domestic Policy in Kansas City, Missouri, July 6, 1971, in Public Papers of the Presidents, 805–6.
These phrases, commonplace today: See Kissinger, On China, chap. 9.
“only if we act greatly”: Richard Nixon, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1973, in My Fellow Americans,
333.
“our instinct that we knew what was best for others”: Richard Nixon, U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1970’s:
Building for Peace, 10.
“The second element of a durable peace”: Richard Nixon, U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1970’s: A New Strategy
for Peace, February 18, 1970, 9.
“All nations, adversaries and friends”: Richard Nixon, U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1970’s: Shaping a Durable
Peace, May 3, 1973, 232–33.
“I’ve spoken of the shining city”: Ronald Reagan, Farewell Address to the American People, January 11, 1989, in
In the Words of Ronald Reagan: The Wit, Wisdom, and Eternal Optimism of America’s 40th President, ed.
Michael Reagan (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004), 34.
“I have a gut feeling I’d like to talk”: Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990),
592.
“the helicopter would descend”: Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1990), 792.
“governments which rest upon the consent”: Ronald Reagan, Address Before a Joint Session of Congress on the
State of the Union, January 25, 1984, in The Public Papers of President Ronald W. Reagan, Ronald Reagan
Presidential Library.
“commonwealth of freedom”: George H. W. Bush, Remarks to the Federal Assembly in Prague, Czechoslovakia,
November 17, 1990, accessed online at Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, eds., The American Presidency
Project.
“great and growing strength”: Ibid.
“beyond containment and to a policy”: George H. W. Bush, Remarks at Maxwell Air Force Base War College,
Montgomery, Alabama, April 13, 1991, in Michael D. Gambone, Small Wars: Low-Intensity Threats and the
American Response Since Vietnam (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012), 121.
“enlargement”: “Confronting the Challenges of a Broader World,” President Clinton Address to the UN General
Assembly, New York City, September 27, 1993, in Department of State Dispatch 4, no. 39 (September 27,
1993).
“a world of thriving democracies”: Ibid.
“Deliver to United States authorities”: George W. Bush, Presidential Address to a Joint Session of Congress,
September 20, 2001, in We Will Prevail: President George W. Bush on War, Terrorism, and Freedom (New York:
Continuum, 2003), 13.
“These carefully targeted actions”: George W. Bush, Presidential Address to the Nation, October 7, 2001, in
ibid., 33.
“the establishment of a broad-based”: “Agreement on Provisional Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending the Reestablishment of Permanent Government Institutions,” December 5, 2001, UN Peacemaker online archive.
“to support the Afghan Transitional Authority”: UN Security Council Resolution 1510 (October 2003).
No institutions in the history: Surely it was telling that even while calling for gender sensitivity in the new
regime, the drafters at Bonn felt obliged to praise the “Afghan mujahidin … heroes of jihad.”
“Except at harvest-time”: Winston Churchill, My Early Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 134.
Belgian neutrality: See Chapter 2.
“on the same side—united by common dangers”: The National Security Strategy of the United States of America
(2002).
“Iraqi democracy will succeed”: George W. Bush, Remarks by the President at the 20th Anniversary of the
National Endowment for Democracy, United States Chamber of Commerce, Washington, D.C. (November 6,
2003).
UN Security Council Resolution 687 of 1991: UN Security Council Resolution 687 of 1991 made the end of
hostilities in the first Gulf War conditional on the immediate destruction by Iraq of its stock of weapons of mass
destruction and a commitment never to develop such weapons again. Iraq did not comply with Resolution 687.
As early as August 1991, the Security Council declared Iraq in “material breach” of its obligations. In the years
following the Gulf War, ten more Security Council resolutions would attempt to bring Iraq into compliance with
the cease-fire terms. The Security Council found in later resolutions that Saddam Hussein “ultimately ceased all
cooperation with UNSCOM [the UN Special Commission charged with weapons inspections] and the IAEA
[International Atomic Energy Agency] in 1998,” expelling the UN inspectors the cease-fire had obliged him to
accept.
In November 2002, the Security Council passed Resolution 1441, “deploring” Iraq’s decade of
noncompliance, deciding that “Iraq has been and remains in material breach of its obligations under relevant
resolutions.” Chief inspector Hans Blix, not an advocate for war, reported to the Security Council in January
2003 that Baghdad had failed to resolve outstanding questions and inconsistencies.
The world will long debate the implications of this military action and the strategy pursued in the
subsequent effort to bring about democratic governance in Iraq. Yet this debate, and its implications for future
violations of international nonproliferation principles, will remain distorted so long as the multilateral
background is omitted.
“The United States wants Iraq”: William J. Clinton, Statement on Signing the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998,
October 31, 1998.
“a forward strategy of freedom”: Remarks by the President at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment
for Democracy, Washington, D.C., November 6, 2003.
“this war is lost and the surge”: Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (New York:
Doubleday, 2013), 542.
“If we’re not there to win”: Ibid., 523.
“Americans, being a moral people”: George Shultz, “Power and Diplomacy in the 1980s,” Washington, D.C.,
April 3, 1984, Department of State Bulletin, vol. 84, no. 2086 (May 1984), 13.
CHAPTER 9: TECHNOLOGY, EQUILIBRIUM, AND HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS
Strategic stability was defined: For a review of these theoretical explorations, see Michael Gerson, “The Origins
of Strategic Stability: The United States and the Threat of Surprise Attack,” in Strategic Stability: Contending
Interpretations, ed. Elbridge Colby and Michael Gerson (Carlisle, Pa: Strategic Studies Institute and U.S. Army
War College Press, 2013); Michael Quinlan, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems, Prospects
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
When, in the 1950s, Mao spoke: See Chapter 6.
But neither side: Much has since been written about the U.S. “nuclear alert” during the 1973 Middle East crisis.
In fact, its principal purpose was to alert conventional forces—the Sixth Fleet and an airborne division—to deter
a Brezhnev threat in a letter to Nixon that he might send Soviet divisions to the Middle East. The increase in the
readiness of strategic forces was marginal and probably not noticed in Moscow.
Reflecting in the 1960s: C. A. Mack, “Fifty Years of Moore’s Law,” IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor
Manufacturing 24, no. 2 (May 2011): 202–7.
The revolution in computing: For mostly optimistic reviews of these developments, see Rick Smolan and
Jennifer Erwitt, eds., The Human Face of Big Data (Sausalito, Calif.: Against All Odds, 2013); and Eric
Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). For more critical perspectives, see Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2013); Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New
York: PublicAffairs, 2011); and To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New
York: PublicAffairs, 2013).
Cyberspace—a word coined: Norbert Wiener introduced the term “cyber” in his 1948 book, Cybernetics, though
in reference to human beings rather than computers as nodes of communication. The word “cyberspace” in
something approaching its current usage came about in the work of several science fiction authors in the 1980s.
As tasks that were primarily manual: Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution
That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 73–97.
“smart door locks, toothbrushes”: Don Clark, “ ‘Internet of Things’ in Reach,” Wall Street Journal, January 5,
2014.
(and currently an estimated one billion people do): Smolan and Erwitt, Human Face of Big Data, 135.
The complexity is compounded: See David C. Gompert and Phillip Saunders, The Paradox of Power: SinoAmerican Strategic Relations in an Age of Vulnerability (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, 2011).
Stuxnet: Ralph Langer, “Stuxnet: Dissecting a Cyberwarfare Weapon,” IEEE Security and Privacy 9, no. 3 (2011):
49–52.
“the next war will begin”: Rex Hughes, quoting General Keith Alexander, in “A Treaty for Cyberspace,”
International Affairs 86, no. 2 (2010): 523–41.
“sown in the nature of man”: Publius [James Madison], The Federalist 10, in Hamilton, Madison, and Jay,
Federalist Papers, 46–47.
Recent studies suggest: See “Digital Set to Surpass TV in Time Spent with US Media: Mobile Helps Propel
Digital Time Spent,” eMarketer.com, August 1, 2013 (reporting that the average American adult spends “5 hours
per day online, on nonvoice mobile activities or with other digital media” and 4.5 hours per day watching
television); Brian Stelter, “8 Hours a Day Spent on Screens, Study Finds,” New York Times, March 26, 2009
(reporting that “adults are exposed to screens … for about 8.5 hours on any given day”).
“Where is the Life”: T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (Boston: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), 147.
“People forget items they think”: Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner, “Google Effects on
Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips,” Science 333, no. 6043 (2011):
776–78.
Information at one’s fingertips: See Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).
“to consume more content”: Erik Brynjolfsson and Michael D. Smith, “The Great Equalizer? Consumer Choice
Behavior at Internet Shopbots” (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Sloan School of Management, 2001).
“which you would like”: Neal Leavitt, “Recommendation Technology: Will It Boost E-commerce?,” Computer
39, no. 5 (2006): 13–16.
They look forward: See Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for
the Better (New York: Penguin Press, 2013).
“people who try to perpetuate myths”: Schmidt and Cohen, New Digital Age, 35, 198–99.
Yet they also bring conflicting: See, for example, Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, “Text Messages Used to Incite Violence
in Kenya,” National Public Radio, February 20, 2008, and “When SMS Messages Incite Violence in Kenya,”
Harvard Law School Internet & Democracy Blog, February 21, 2008. For a discussion of this and other
examples, see Morozov, Net Delusion, 256–61.
anticipating their thoughts: That is, the burgeoning field of “predictive analytics,” with uses expanding in both
commercial and governmental spheres to anticipate thoughts and actions at both the societal and the individual
level. See Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die (Hoboken,
N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2013).
In this respect, among the new technology’s: For an exploration of this concept, particularly as applied to the
commercial realm, see Lanier, Who Owns the Future?
The West lauded the “Facebook”: See Chapter 3.
“The Internet has made tracking”: Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, Big Data, 150.
“People will not look forward”: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1987), 29.
CONCLUSION: WORLD ORDER IN OUR TIME?
In the world of geopolitics: For a compelling exploration of this shift and its possible implications, see Charles
Kupchan, No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012).
More elemental forms of identity: The seminal work about prospects for a world ordered on such a basis is
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1996).
particular domestic structures: On the evolution and appeal of different models, see John Micklethwait and
Adrian Wooldridge, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State (New York: Penguin Press,
2014).
“to acquiesce in some qualified plan”: Edmund Burke to Charles-Jean-François Depont, November 1789, in On
Empire, Liberty, and Reform, 412–13.
Cryptic fragments from remote antiquity: G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical
History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 193, 195, 199 (on
Heraclitus); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, trans. with commentary by Greg Whitlock
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).
“The Meaning of History”: Henry A. Kissinger, “The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and
Kant” (undergraduate thesis, Department of Government, Harvard University, 1950).
Acknowledgments
This book grew out of a dinner conversation with Charles Hill, Distinguished Fellow
of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and senior lecturer in the
Humanities Program at Yale University. Charlie was a valued member of the Policy
Planning Staff when I served as Secretary of State a lifetime ago. We have been
friends and occasional collaborators ever since.
At that dinner, we concluded that the crisis in the concept of world order was the
ultimate international problem of our day. When I decided to write a book on the
subject, Charlie offered advice and assistance. It proved invaluable. Charlie gave me
the benefit of several essays he had written on various aspects of the subject, reviewed
chapters in the process of drafting, was always available for discussions, and helped
edit the entire manuscript upon its completion.
Schuyler Schouten was indispensable and indefatigable—adjectives I already
applied to his contribution in the preparation of On China three years ago. Technically
my research associate, he functions on my intellectual pursuits as a kind of alter ego.
He undertook most of the research, collected it in thoughtful summaries, reviewed the
manuscript several times, and accompanied me on many discussions on the subject.
His contribution to this book was seminal; that he unfailingly maintained his
composure amidst all these pressures is a tribute to his human qualities.
The editorial role of my publisher, Penguin Press, was exceptional. I have never
worked with two editors simultaneously, and they complemented each other superbly.
Ann Godoff added to her responsibilities as president and editor in chief by
volunteering to edit this book. With penetrating intelligence and great common sense,
she obliged me to elucidate obscure phrasing and historical references unfamiliar to
the nonacademic reader. She also made essential structural suggestions. I do not know
how she found time for her extensive and incisive comments, for which I am deeply
grateful.
As a nearly obsessive history scholar, her colleague Stuart Proffitt, publisher of
Penguin’s U.K. imprint, volunteered to read each chapter, made meticulous and
thoughtful comments, and called my attention to essential references. Working with
Stuart was like a tutorial from an exceptionally learned, patient, and kind mentor at a
university.
I have never written on Internet matters. I am also essentially ignorant of their
technical side. But I have reflected a great deal about the impact of the new
technology on policymaking. Eric Schmidt patiently and thoughtfully agreed to
expose me to his world. We met many times for extensive and extremely stimulating
conversations on both coasts. Jared Cohen participated in a few of the meetings and
contributed significantly to this process. On two occasions, Eric invited me to visit
Google to exchange ideas with a few of his fascinating and brilliant colleagues.
A number of friends and acquaintances permitted me to impose on their good
nature to read and comment on sections of this manuscript. They were J. Stapleton
Roy and Winston Lord (on Asia); Michael Gfoeller and Emma Sky (on the Middle
East); and Professor Rana Mitter of Oxford University (on the entire manuscript).
Several chapters benefited from the insight of my friends Les Gelb, Michael Korda,
Peggy Noonan, and Robert Kaplan.
Collaborating with me on a sixth book, Theresa Amantea supervised the typing,
fact-checking, and all other technical problems in my office with her customary
organizational skill and enthusiasm. Theresa also did much of the typing, assisted by
Jody Williams, who pitched in to help meet impending deadlines. Both have worked
with me for many decades. I thank them for their efficiency, even more for their
dedication.
Louise Kushner is a more recent addition to my staff, but she matched her
colleagues’ commitment. She contributed efficiently to the collation of editorial
comments. At the same time firm and urbane, she kept my overall schedule under
control while I concentrated on writing.
Jessee LePorin and Katherine Earle each provided valuable assistance.
Ingrid Sterner, Bruce Giffords, and Noirin Lucas of Penguin Press copyedited the
manuscript and performed related tasks with great skill, bringing a special patience
and attention to detail to the editorial production phase.
Andrew Wylie represented me in dealings with publishers around the world, as he
had with On China, with his usual intelligence, tenacity, and ferocity. I am deeply
grateful to him.
I have dedicated this book to my wife, Nancy, who has been my life. As always,
she read the entire manuscript and made extraordinarily sensitive comments.
Needless to say, the shortcomings of this book are my own.
ALLEN LANE
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BRIAN GREENE, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos
THE BEGINNING
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First published in the United States of America by Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC 2014
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2014
Copyright © Henry A. Kissinger, 2014
All rights reserved
Cover: World map from ‘Theatrum orbis terrarium’ by Abraham Ortelius (Antwerp, 1603) © Royal Geographical
Society
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-00427-2
CHAPTER 3: ISLAMISM AND THE MIDDLE EAST: A WORLD IN DISORDER
* Author’s note: The author does not assert any standing to define the core truths of
the doctrines and sects whose passionate strivings are now reordering the Muslim
world. Many Muslims, in many countries the majority, have arrived at less
confrontational and more pluralistic interpretations of their faith than the ones
quoted in these pages. Yet the views represented here now exert a significant, often
decisive influence in the direction of many of the key Middle Eastern states and
almost all non-state organizations. These views represent an assertion of a separate
world order by definition superior to and incompatible with the Westphalian system
or the values of liberal internationalism. When one seeks to understand them, some
recourse must be made to the vocabulary of religion invoked by the contending
parties.