In an encounter with Ezzat Ibrahim, historian John Lewis Gaddis discusses US grand strategy and where it has gone awry under Bush At an important juncture of America's foreign policy in the Middle East and internationally, Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University John Lewis Gaddis, also dubbed 'the Dean of cold war historians' gives his insights on the future course that US policy will adopt, regarding several global hot spots. Based on his long-standing study of US national security policy, Gaddis spoke to Al-Ahram Weekly of the contentious questions related to the fight against terrorism, America's spreading of democracy post-September11, and the influence of the neo-cons within the Bush, Administration. He also elaborated on the new emerging world order, and religion's re-birth as a driving force in politics and society How do you characterise current American grand strategy -- if there is any? And from your experience reading history, what would be the best strategy to deal with the challenges of terrorism and an open world society? I think we are at a turning point. Of course, there is a fundamental redefinition of American grand strategy in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, within which the Bush administration is committed more formally to spreading democracy throughout the world, not simply as an idealistic enterprise but as a national security imperative for the United States, and for the existence of democracies. This strategy has been in effect since the fall of 2001. In some ways it has succeeded, in the sense that we had no recurrence of 11 September or any attack on the same scale. But in other ways the project to try to bring democracy to Iraq through military intervention -- even if we may not have failed, because in my opinion it is too early to say that -- certainly has run into so many difficulties and has been conducted with such incompetence that there are, now, serious questions being raised about the entire strategy. What did the Baker-Hamilton report add to the debate on US grand strategy? The Iraq Study Group report was meant to confront the problem that has been encountered in Iraq sufficiently and seriously; that it demands a fundamental review, and perhaps rejection, of the grand strategy that the Bush administration put into effect after 11 September 2001. That is the unresolved question and I am not sure that the question will be resolved until we know the outcome of the 2008 presidential elections. It is very likely that this debate will continue for the next couple of years. Paul Wolfowitz appears to have had a great influence on defining US national security policy, or what academicians call grand strategy. How can it happen that one person has such influence in a vast political system like the United States? Paul Wolfowitz is someone whose ideas influenced the strategy and that influence goes back to the report he compiled within the Pentagon during the George Bush administration in 1992. But no one person can bring about a shift in American grand strategy, even if we go back to the early Cold War period and look at the strategy of containment. George Kennan is most clearly associated, in the mind of most people, with the idea of containment but it required an entire administration -- the Truman administration -- to accept Kennan's formulation to implement it and win support for it. It seems to me the same had happened to George W Bush's grand strategy, which had several architects and had came from especially dramatic circumstances after the 11 September attacks. It would never have come into effect unless the president himself embraced it. So, ultimately it is the George W Bush grand strategy. Are you still pessimistic about the challenges and disadvantages of an open world society, given that some forces take advantage of it? It seems to me that we are still facing tension between traditional states, which have existed in one form or another under what people called the "Westphalia System" for up to 500 years, and in which most of the attributes of sovereignty (political control, military control, control over the economy, and the control of the movement of people) resides within states. What happened since the end of the World War II, and especially in the 1970s, is that the authority of the state, historically, is being eroded. This began before the war on terrorism as part of the process of globalisation. As the global economy becomes more integrated the capacity of individual states to control their citizens becomes less. There is also global awareness of the concept of human rights. It becomes much more difficult for dictatorial states to abuse human rights and keep such abuses covered up. The world becomes more transparent because of many things; fax machines, the Internet, and cheap air travel, and in a way this all eroded the authority of the state. At the top of that development came terrorism. What we discovered on 11 September was how easy it was for people to move from country to country without being tracked carefully by states or intelligence agencies; also, the vulnerabilities of high-tech societies, which rely on air travel and on concentrating people in big buildings. These developments have empowered certain people to take advantage of and exploit the situation. These new vulnerabilities are completely different from the national security vulnerabilities that used to preoccupy us during the Cold War period. We face new realities. Where is religion in such new realities? These new kinds of dangers pose new kind of threats that, in turn, require new kinds of strategy. If you look at the entire period of the second half of 20th century, from roughly 1951, you have say that the authority of the state, in general, has weakened because of economic forces, technological forces, and the vulnerability that has been created by terrorism. One might add to the list religion as a transnational force that, of course, is extraordinarily important in the Middle East. If you had asked anyone in 1970, "will religion be a major force in global politics at the end of the 20th century?" the answer of most people would be "No". Religion, as a transnational force, has eroded the traditional authority of the state. How do you characterise the long-term goals of terrorist networks? The actions of terrorists are a war against the international system. It seems to me that the actions of those who seek to restore the "Caliphate" is waging a war of that kind, and the Middle East is the primary arena where this war is being fought, though it is not the only stage. The conflict is between those who want to preserve the international system and those who challenge it. The difference between the confrontation in the Middle East and outside it is that the conflict is increasingly more violent in the Middle East. You have been critical of the Bush administration and were called, somewhat to your own surprise, into the White House to give constructive advice directly to President Bush. What happened in that meeting? I went to the White House on one or two occasions and the meetings with President Bush were off-the-record, so I cannot comment in detail, but I would say two things. First, the Bush administration has been more active than many people realise in seeking off-the-record advice from academics that teach and write on these topics. Second, President Bush is quite interested in history and likes to talk to historians, not just about current issues but also past historical moments. And one example is mentioned in my book, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience. I note that Bush was eager to know more about the great German leader Bismarck. What has Bush sought to learn from Bismarck? First, Bush read my observations that one thing distinctive about Bismarck was that he did not only know the advantages of "shock and awe," but also how to manage it. I cannot say why President Bush was interested in Bismarck, but I can say why I mentioned him in my book. Bismarck shocked the European system -- the post-1815 international system -- in a way that gave Germany many advantages. Bismarck was the architect of German reunification. He started three brief wars and achieved the recreation of the German empire. Then, he became the statesman of the "status-quo", concentrating his efforts on not upsetting the international system but reassuring Germany's neighbours and getting them to accept the idea of a reunified Germany. Bismarck is an example of someone who understood the use of force, power, and shock and surprise to achieve certain political objectives, and understood the advantages of no longer using those tactics when those objectives were achieved. Bismarck is the most famous, among other grand strategists, of those who sought both to upset the status quo and successfully rebuild it in his advantage. Will the grand strategy of the early 21st century -- democratisation that can accommodate the desires of differing groups, especially focused on Islamic and despotic regimes -- fail to achieve its goals after Iraq? As a historian, I take a long view and am impressed by the early argument of Francis Fukuyama where he talked about democratisation as a historical global trend that can extend over 200 years. Given that fact, it is unrealistic to expect that the trend towards democratisation is going to come to a halt simply because there is a setback in one country, or one part of the world. I expect that in 50 or 100 years from now -- in other words, over the long run -- we will see more democracies in the world, and it is very likely that some of these democracies will be in the Middle East. I think nothing in Islamic culture or Middle East culture prevents the building of democratic institutions. Some of the largest democracies in the world are Islamic: Indonesia, Turkey, and even India with its large Muslim population. So, the democratic trend will continue, and no trend proceeds in history without setbacks. The movement towards democracy that got started in the 18th and 19th century suffered huge setbacks in the 20th century with the outbreak of the Great War -- World War I -- and emergence of totalitarian governments in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Of course, for many years and decades the future of democracy looked unstable and problematic. Such pessimism is epitomised in George Orwell's famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The setbacks can be serious and can last for a long time. I would bet on more democracy in the long run, rather than an authoritarian direction, because it seems to me that the benefits democracy offers to people are huge. True, people will choose authoritarian governments, but they tend to do it when times are desperate and when failure has taken hold -- the collapse of the economy, or in a period of social upheaval or civil war. I know very few instances when people have chosen dictatorships when things are going well. Unpopular US foreign policy makes people in different parts of the world consider that American values, and even Western democracy, are against their own progress. It appears that the US cannot share properly in the global democratic quest because of its stalled foreign policy. Do you agree? Yes, in the Middle East and parts of Latin America and Asia people perceive that the US is working against the interests of people of these regions, or that the United States is taking actions without being sufficiently sensitive to the impact of these actions on the people of these regions. I think there are some reasons for that. First, the US is by far the most powerful nation on earth and there is no way the US can do anything without affecting somebody's interests. If you are a citizen of Andorra or Liechtenstein, perhaps you can get by in the world without affecting the interests of others, but once you become a great power, and particularly when you become a "hyper-power", there is simply no way that you can act without adversely affecting interests somewhere. That will occur even if there is no terrorism, Arab-Israeli conflict, or war in Iraq. Second, the US has taken upon itself to intervene in the international affairs of other countries, and it has done so because it takes a view, which is also consistent with the evolution of international law in the last 50 years, that sovereignty does not shield brutality and states no longer have the right to abuse their own populations without the international community taking note and moving to prevent abuses. These are the principles that came out of World War II, the holocaust, and recently from Rwanda and Bosnia. The fact is that any great nation intervening in the internal affairs of other nations is going to generate resentment as a result of doing so. The third cause is, without question, American support for Israel. Because Washington is the biggest supporter of Israel, that surely generates hostility in the Middle East and will continue to do so as long as the Israeli-Palestinian issue remains unresolved. The US has tried to resolve the issue, and came close many times, but part of the problem is that the United States cannot completely control either side in the conflict. The attention span of the US also waxes and wanes. There was a period when we gave affirmative attention to the problem, as we did during the Carter administration or at the end of Clinton administration. On the other hand, there are periods when we neglected the issue; as to some extent we have during this Bush administration. The fourth cause of this negative perception of the US is the war in Iraq. The war was not popular in the Middle East, partly because of resistance to humiliation; that the US can come in and defeat the army of a major Arab state within two or three weeks. Such humiliation is similar to what President Nasser suffered in 1967. But there is resentment also because while the military operation was a success, the occupation was a disaster, and the Americans have bungled the job in terms of running Iraq. If the Americans had taken over the country and then, very quickly, turned it into stable, peaceful, and prosperous society, then the US would be more popular in the region. But in fact the Americans screwed it up. The result of US incompetence is that a lot of people died and a lot of people saw their lives become worse -- maybe worse, even, than before the occupation. It is perfectly natural that hostility would develop as a result. What if the US totally withdrew from the Middle East? Would the people of the region be better off? I am not persuaded the answer is yes, because first who would restrain the Israelis if not the Americans, or who would restrain the Iranians if not the Americans? Not everyone in the Middle East will welcome the expansion of Iranian influence, and for many reasons. Who would offer protection to certain states in the Middle East that do not have the capacity to protect themselves? It is very popular in the Middle East to criticise the US, but it is also the case that there are states in the region that rely on the US for their military security, just as is the case in Europe now. For these reasons, we are in a situation where, of course, the United States is unpopular in many parts of the Middle East, yet if the US announces tomorrow that it is totally withdrawing from the region I think many people would say, "Please don't!" Initially you supported the Iraq war but afterwards criticised the "pre-emptive doctrine" although pre-emptive action was since the beginning at the heart of US policy. Can you explain? I did support the war in Iraq for many reasons; above all, the fear of weapons of mass destruction, and also that Saddam Hussein was one of the worst despots anywhere. In retrospect, it was wise for the US and the UN to take action in Bosnia, and for NATO to act in Kosovo, and it was unwise for the international community not to get involved in Rwanda. It is the responsibility of the international community to liberate those who live under a tyrant who has a track record of attacking his own people and other countries. We were taken by surprise that the Bush administration mismanaged the occupation and the administration of Iraq as badly as it did. One of the things you always have to do when you go to war is know what to do after victory. This what the US did not know, and it is inexcusable for this kind of planning not to have taken place. There appears a grey area between Wilsonian liberalism, which concerns building institutions and democracy, and Reaganite neo-conservatism, which is concerned with national security and power. To what extent does the Iraq quagmire expose a fissure and inconsistency within US foreign policy? Every great nation's foreign policy has elements of inconsistency. I would defy you to find any example of a great power that has a completely consistent foreign policy. There are always compromises that have to be made, and there are always contradictions, in particular in a democracy, where one has to win support from domestic constituencies. Such contradictions are all the more clearer in constitutional states that are founded on the idea of the division of government, the sharing of power and consequently the existence of contradictions. What is new is that some of these old categories -- liberalism or conservatism -- are used as a substitute for thought, or for not thinking or not being more precise. These categories have lost their meaning. They do not mean now the same thing that they used to mean. For example, the word "liberal" in the 19th century meant, in British politics, someone who favoured small, laissez faire, market-oriented government with minimum control. In the 20th century, liberal came to mean someone who favoured big government, major social projects, the New Deal, etc. I think something similar has happened to "conservatism" as well. Conservatism used to mean small government and isolationism. Under the George W Bush administration it has come to mean "big government", as government has not shrunk under the current administration anymore than it did under President Reagan. Conservatism used also to mean if not an isolationist foreign policy, then surely a foreign policy that gives priority to national interests; not one seeking to change the internal makeup of other governments, and not undertaking to rebuild other governments or nations. Such notions started to change with Reagan when the United States made it its business to be concerned about the internal situation in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Philippines. That shift has been carried on by the present Bush administration. The big difference is that what Bush confronted on 11 September 2001 was the most painful possible demonstration that the internal conditions of a government half way around the world and that appeared to have no connection, whatever, to the United States -- that is, Afghanistan under the Taliban's rule -- led to a situation that resulted in more Americans killed on American soil than in Pearl Harbour. That was a new situation and a totally different kind of threat. Suddenly, it became a matter of the most basic fundamental national security to change that government that had made possible such attacks on America. The old idea that you can simply deal with countries regardless of what their internal make-up is was no longer feasible. Both liberals and conservatives have got to confront this now, and that is one of the points Woodrow Wilson made: that the internal make-up of governments determines their external behaviour in the international arena. In a sense, everybody now has become Wilsonian, liberals and conservatives. This is nothing new because the meaning of concepts and ideas changes overtime. The danger comes when we lock ourselves behind such established intellectual categories without recognising that the world has changed, and that these categories may no longer be applicable in their traditional sense. What future do you think the neo-conservative movement in American foreign policy has in the Middle East? We are at the point where the choice is going to have be made between continuing the democratisation project on a large scale or cutting back to more modest objectives in which we pay much less attention to the promotion of democracy or postpone it for the future. Some cutting back is appropriate because the US allowed itself to be bogged down in Iraq, turning Iraq into the most important problem in the world. I think Iraq was not the most important problem, and there are other problems that deserve our attention, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Putting Iraq into a larger perspective is very important. The debate in Washington tells us a lot about the struggle that will be fought over American foreign policy right through to the 2008 elections. I do not agree that the neo-conservative movement is dead, and in my opinion the movement is reasserting itself against the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report. The current debate is healthy, and I wish we had a thorough debate like it a couple of years ago. One thing to remember in the wake of current developments and debate is that the US cannot completely control what happens in the Middle East, and the choices the people of the region make, in the final analysis, are going to be more important than what the United States does. The people of Iraq and people in the Middle East have got to make their own choices. One thing that worries me about American foreign policy is that it is too heavy-handed and too visible. I think it sometimes removes or delays the pressure on Middle Eastern people to resolve their own tough questions. So if I have one wish for the direction of US foreign policy in the Middle East, it would be that we move in a direction of encouraging people to take greater responsibility for their own affairs. If that happens, then the world that will result from such a new approach is going to one that the United States can live with. If you were asked to design US grand strategy for the Middle East, what would you do and where would you start? I would start from a fundamental reassessment, top to bottom and bottom to top, and then move to the question of what is feasible and what can the US hope to achieve in the short, medium, and long run. I'd try to be a realist about it. I would certainly look at what level of support the US can expect from the American people, and from its allies, for that helps in defining what the US can and cannot do. It does not look good to try to set goals that go beyond the willingness of the American people and its allies. I would focus on the fundamental conflict in the Middle East between those who wish to preserve the international state system and those who want to destroy it. In that respect, the US has many allies in the region who support the state system. Part of the failure of American policy is a failure to frame the issue in these terms. On the other hand, part of the failure of other states in the region -- America's allies -- has been their unwillingness to see the issue in these terms too. Does the United States think that it can dominate and run the world alone? Can it be a hegemonic and multilateral power at the same time? I do not think the US can run the world alone, but it can be hegemonic because it has been playing that role since the Great War. A hegemon is not the same thing as an empire, as the latter is something like the British Empire, or the Soviet Union, that attempted to maintain political and military control. A hegemon operates with power and with consent. Britain was the hegemonic power of the 19th century and set the rules for the international system and international economy, and the US did nearly the same in the 20th century. If you do not have such hegemony, you will probably have to invent it. The hegemonic power should have certain limits, and a strategy that does not generate unnecessary friction. There is no question that US strategy in the last 20 years has created tension in trying to minimise friction and rebuild the multilateral consensus that lagged behind during the Cold War.
