Abstract
The president's national security adviser believes the United States should use “anticipatory defense” against any country it thinks might attack.
Ever since the Berlin Wall fell, analysts and pundits have been vying to define the post-Cold War era, and incidentally to become the next George Kennan–invoking “the end of history,” “back to the future,” “the clash of civilizations,” “Jihad v. McWorld,” and so on.
Instead, the cunning of history has dashed their ambitions and given us an unexpectedly muscle-bound and imperial “Mr. X”: George W. Bush. No passive containment or pusillanimous deterrence for this president. His new doctrine calls for preemptive attacks; “counterproliferation” instead of nonproliferation, for everyone except the United States and its allies; untold billions for the Pentagon to dissuade any and all comers from “a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States”; and endless wars into the disappearing and newly darkening future to “rid the world of evil.”
The “National Security Strategy of the United States,” according to press reports, came from the shop of National Security Council (NSC) Director Condoleezza Rice, which perhaps accounts for the breathless and quasi-academic quality of the paper, as if this former political scientist were teaching a class instead of framing a new doctrine. Some of the logic in the paper would flunk even a freshman class, however: as in, preemptive attacks are fine for us, but other nations “should [not] use preemption as a pretext for aggression.” Preemption, Rice later told reporters, is “anticipatory self-defense.” In other words, the United States has the right to attack a country that it thinks could attack it first.
After spending many years reading declassified NSC papers from the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, I find it hard to believe that the State Department actually signed off on this document. It fails the usual tests of logic, seriousness, and even sobriety. But Rice is right that it's not new: It's just been kept secret for decades. Los Angeles Times reporter James Mann reported on September 27, 1998, that he had found documents proving that Lyndon Johnson agonized, in “the utmost secrecy,” over a single issue in the early months of 1964: whether to take out China's Lop Nur nuclear facilities in a preemptive strike before that country produced a bomb. “I'm for this,” National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy had scribbled in the margins. But it never happened.
What is perhaps more surprising about the National Security Strategy, though, is that it might well have been written even if the September 11 terrorist attacks had not occurred.
The paper does open with September 11, and those attacks did indeed come from an implacable and uncontainable enemy: Nothing will deter it, and it passionately loves suicide. But little can be done about that threat, the past year of the “war on terrorism” notwithstanding; it is still child's play to conjure up variations on what calamity Al Qaeda might think of next.
Instead, the doctrine addresses a lover of homicide, Saddam Hussein; the other charter members of the “axis of evil”; and anyone else who might dare to threaten American might and power–anywhere and for eternity. So far most attention has focused on how the new doctrine affects Iraq and the war in the name of nonproliferation that the Bush administration has prepared for many months.
But a restive world may present an unavoidable crisis in which containment and deterrence abruptly give way to preemption and catastrophic war. The most likely place for that to happen is Korea. Sometime in 1998, we are told by the Bush administration, the North Koreans made a deal with our longtime ally in Islamabad: their missiles for Pakistan's uranium enrichment technology. Sometime last summer, we are again told, evidence that they are manufacturing enriched uranium came to light.
The most likely place for deterrence to give way to preemption: North Korea.
That this was a calamity just waiting to happen is small comfort. In this very dangerous game, Pyongyang has dropped the fat into a fire fanned by an administration that listens to no one, that completely dropped the ball on Bill Clinton's nearly successful attempt to buy out North Korea's medium- and long-range missiles, but that lacks the wherewithal to fight major wars on more than one front. Also lost in most of the commentary on North Korea's presumed act of perfidy are the longstanding U.S. war plans to use nuclear weapons in the earliest stages of any new Korean War (as described in “Preemptive Posturing,” Hans Kristensen's article in the September/October 2002 Bulletin).
Bush's new preemptive war doctrine thus conflates existing plans for nuclear preemption in a crisis initiated by North Korea, with an apparent determination to attack North Korea simply because it has or would like to have the weapons of mass destruction that we have been targeting that country with for nearly 50 years.
In 1996 the International Court of Justice at the Hague stated that the use or threat of nuclear weapons should be outlawed as “the ultimate evil.” It could not decide, however, whether the use of nuclear weapons for self-defense was justified: “The Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a state would be at stake.” By this standard, North Korea is more justified in developing nuclear weapons than the United States is in threatening a non-nuclear North Korea with annihilation.
What can be done to stop the momentum toward one, two, or many new wars? George Kennan, now 98 but feisty as ever, gave a little-noticed interview to Albert Eisele just after Bush tabled his new doctrine. The strategy represented “a great mistake in principle,” Kennan said; anyone who has studied history “knows that you might start a war with certain things in your mind,” but you end up fighting for things “never thought of before.” Launching another war with Iraq “bears no relation to the first war against terrorism,” he thought, and anyway a decision for war “should really rest with Congress.” (But not with congressional Democrats, who have been “shameful and shabby,” not to mention “timid,” in their reaction to Bush's war plans.)
If only we really could go back to the future, and put Kennan back in charge.
“He's such a pleasure to travel with.”
