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Abstract

By adopting a bold and ambitious strategy and pursuing it aggressively, the Bush administration has divided the Western alliance; altered the nature of international politics in the Gulf, South Asia, and the Middle East; and crystallized popular opposition to the U.S. in many countries. The new Bush strategy impinges on a number of critical social and military issues for the U.S., its allies, and the rest of the world: the suitability of a small, expensive, all-volunteer force for repeated interventions aimed at regime change; the character of relations between the military and society as a whole under the stress of repeated interventions; the tension between a strategy of aggressive, unilateral regime change and an increasingly interdependent global economic and technological order; the clash between unilateral realpolitik, constitutional obligations, and the separation of powers; and the growing contradiction between a conservative domestic political outlook—with its uncompromising insistence on small, weak government—and the vast governmental structures and expenditures necessary to sustain a strategy of global preventive war. Most critics argue that the Bush strategy will fail for political, economic, and strategic reasons: because it needlessly alienates allies; ignores the need of even a hegemonic state for reciprocity, international law, and mutual restraint; overlooks the importance of international assistance in achieving U.S. goals, such as eliminating terrorism; underestimates what will prove to be very heavy long-run costs of nation building; and encourages other governments to wage preventive war and acquire weapons of mass destruction. But there are other and, in the end, more persuasive reasons for opposing the strategy, having to do with domestic as well as international effects. This article develops those reasons and proposes an alternative grand strategy for the U.S., a grand strategy rooted in the defensive rather than the offensive use of a nation’s resources.

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References

Karl von Clausewitz , On War, VI:1,619-620 in The Book of War: Sun-Tzu The Art of Warfare; Karl von Clausewitz On War (New York: The Modern Library, 2000). All citations to On War refer to this edition and are given by book in Roman numerals followed by section, then page number.

and U.S. Department of Defense , “Quadrennial Defense Review Report,” www.defenselink.gov, September 30, 2001.

“Shaping the environment” in the 1990s appears to have meant a combination of forward deployment, military exercises with friendly governments, and establishing cooperative military-to-military relations with as many foreign militaries as possible, including China.

For an excellent discussion of these and related issues, see the articles by Don M. Snider , Andrew J. Kelly , Paul K. Davis , William M. Arkin , Michael J. Mazarr , Linda P. Brady , Donald M. Snow , Sam C. Sarkesian , John C. Baker , Paul R. Viotti , and Stephen J. Cimbala in Stephen J. Cimbala , ed., Clinton and Post-Cold War Defense (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996).

A good summary of the divisions among President Bush’s advisors may be found in William Safire , “The Inside Skinny,” New York Times, April 25, 2002, A35.

A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement, quoted in The New York Times, September 20, 2002, A10.

See also “National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction” at www.whitehouse.gov/2002.

“President Bush Speaks on War Effort to Citadel Cadets,” December 11, 2002, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001.

See also “President Delivers State of the Union Address,” January 29, 2002, at www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01.

10.

See Glenn Kessler , “U.S. Decision on Iraq Has Puzzling Past: Opponents of War Wonder When, How Policy Was Set,” www.washingtonpost.com, January 12, 2003, A01.

11.

see Evan Thomas and John Barry . “Target Iraq: Donald Rumsfeld Reshapes the Pentagon’s Approach to War,” Newsweek, March 3, 2003, pp. 28-32.

12.

National Security Strategy of the United States 2002, 3.

13.

Ibid, 5.

14.

For a more favorable view of Bush’s strategy, see John Lewis Gaddis , “A Grand Strategy of Transformation,” Foreign Policy (Nov-Dec 2002): 50-57.

15.

The problem with the most prevalent criticisms of Bush’s strategy is that they haven’t come to pass; no balancers have emerged to counter the power of the United States. China and Japan are cooperating with the United States regarding North Korea. Relations between the United States and India are better than at any time in recent memory. With sixteen of the twenty-five present and future members of the European Union supporting the war in Iraq, Germany and France are isolated rather than the United States. Only Belgium and Luxembourg, not notable international powerhouses, have publicly joined with Germany and France in overt opposition to the United States since the Iraq war began. The Arab and Muslim “streets” have not risen up to overthrow friendly governments, which are too capably repressive to allow it. And in any case, the Arab and Muslim worlds are diverse, not monolithic, and not susceptible to such simple-minded predictions. The national interests of most governments often coincide with those of the United States; combating terrorism is an example, making a policy of sustained opposition to the United States at least irrational—if not impossible. On the costs of the Iraq war, the occupation, and peacekeeping operations, see William D. Nordhaus , “Iraq: The Economic Consequences of War,” New York Review of Books 49, 19 (December 5, 2002) at www.nybooks.com.

16.

Also see Pericles’ speeches at 1.140-1.143; 2.35-2.46; and 2.60 - 2.64.

17.

Winston S. Churchill , World War II: The Gathering Storm (New York: Bantam Books, 1961), 186-187.

18.

George F. Kennan , American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (New York: Mentor, 1951), 73, 77.

19.

See especially John Lewis Gaddis , Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

20.

See also Scott D. Sagan , Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

21.

Interview with senior official, Department of Defense, September 2002.

22.

See especially Clausewitz’s discussion of the history of warfare and, in particular, his description of European warfare in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in On War, VIII:3.

23.

See especially George F. Kennan , Memoirs 1925-1950 (Boston: Little Brown, 1967).

24.

For a fascinating analysis of the relationship between political and military factors see the chapters on the German strategists von Moltke , Schlieffen , and Delbruck in Peter Paret , ed., with the collaboration of Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert , Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), chs. 7, 10-12.

25.

In an interview with a U.S. official at the Department of State, the author was told that the White House was repeatedly advised this would happen before the first revelations of North Korean intentions in October 2002.

26.

Interviews with State Department and U.S. intelligence officials.

27.

Thomas L. Friedman , “The Long Bomb,” March 2, 2003, The New York Times, www.nytimes.com.

28.

See Colin Powell , “U.S.Forces: Challenges Ahead; Enormous Power, Sobering Responsibility,” Foreign Affairs (Winter 1992), www.lexisnexis.com.

29.

and revised as recently as October 2002, in “In Rumsfeld’s Words: Guidelines for Committing Forces,” www.nytimes.com, October 14, 2002.

30.

Hans Delbruck , quoted by Gordon A. Craig in “Delbruck: The Military Historian,” in Peter Paret (ed.) with Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert , Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 341-342.

31.

Amy Waldman and Dexter Filkin , “2 U.S. Fronts: Quick Wars, but Bloody Peace,” New York Times, September 19, 2003, www.nytimes.com.

32.

For additional information on the difficulties of sustaining a long-term deployment in Iraq along with the capability to go to war in Korea, see the Congressional Budget Office report, An Analysis of the U.S. Military’s Ability to Sustain an Occupation of Iraq (Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office, September 3, 2003), available at www.cbo.gov.

33.

The State Department budget may be found at www.state.gov. The budget for the Defense Department is available at www.defenselink.gov: National Defense Budget Summary, Table 1-1.

34.

According to Gordon A. Craig, Delbruck identified Pericles, Belisarius, Wallenstein, Gustavus Adolphus, and Frederick the Great as practitioners of Ermattungsstrategie, and Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon as practitioners of Niederwerfungsstrategie. See Craig , “Delbruck,” in Makers of Modern Strategy, 342.

35.

Other organizations Bell had in mind include NATO, the G-7, the WTO, World Bank, IMF, OSCE, etc.

36.

quoted in Gordon A. Craig , “Delbruck,” in Makers of Modern Strategy, 348.

37.

Because we know the outcome was tragic and world destroying, the attempts by German strategists and military leaders to find a purely military solution to Germany’s two-front problem are deeply moving. The fatal intellectual and strategic dance that culminated in the embrace of a strategy of annihilation is exceptionally well-described by Hajo Holborn in “The Prussian-German School: Moltke and the Rise of the General Staff”; by Gunther E. Rothenberg in “Moltke, Schleiffen, and the Doctrine of Strategic Envelopment”; and by Craig in “Delbruck”; all articles are found in Paret, Modern Military Strategy, pages 281-295, 296-325, and 326-353 respectively.

A Defensive Grand Strategy for the United States

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