Social Science Research Council

It is my contention that we already have the tools to deal with terrorism without having to resort to drastic, if not illegal, new policies like preventive action. What Bush is doing to US foreign policy is equivalent to what he is doing to Social Security -- attempting to save something which does not have to be saved. We should heed the old adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Preemption is only justifiable if there is a clear and immediate threat to a country's national security. The theory behind preemption is that it is possible to foresee what is to come, which is an illusion. Nobody can know the future and whenever actions are taken, there are always vast and unintended consequences. Both the first and the second world war began with preemptive strikes. In my view, so far there has been no convincing demonstration that Iraq fits into the category of a immediate threat to US security. If there is not a certain and verifiable imminent threat, yet a state attacks another anyway, then this constitutes a form of preventive war which is against international law and violates the UN Charter. Once this is allowed, then the international order breaks down and we descend into a lawless world.

The major oddity about the Bush policy is that it shows such scant knowledge of its own country's history. We won two world wars and the Cold War with our allies not alone. It does not seem to recognize that, over the past sixty or so years in the postwar era, it is the intricate and integrative obligations and legal frameworks, forged mainly by the United States and its allies, that have led to global stability and world-wide prosperity and have eliminated world war. "The United States," as John Ikenberry has written in a recent article in Foreign Affairs," made its power safe for the world, and in return the world agreed to live within the U.S. system... The result has been the most stable and prosperous international system in world history." Bush's gratuitous maneuvers now are disrupting, if not shattering, all these achievements.

For example, he now proposes to abandon the reliable and successful strategies of deterrence and containment as regards how to treat rogue states. Lest he forget, containment and deterrence worked against two far more threatening nations, China and the Soviet Union. One of those nations has already imploded, and the other one may eventually collapse. These measures are also working against Iraq. That nation for the past eleven years has not invaded another country and it has not constructed an atomic bomb. The sanctions may be porous and need fixing, but at least on the most important issues, they are working.

We have the resources to hunt down the Al Qaeda murderers and isolate rogue nations like Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Burma. Clinton's military buildup put us in the position to destroy the Taliban and Al Qeada in Afghanistan with ease. In his first two years, Bush backed up Clinton's policies with a series of significant moves to enhance our military. First, he boosted U.S. defense spending 13% in the 2003 budget, the largest increase since the Reagan era. The U.S. currently outspends more than the next fifteen industrialized nations combined, and, while the world spends about $800 billion a year for defense today, America accounts for almost half of that. Under the Bush proposal, the U.S. would count for an even larger share of the global budget. In furtherance of his fight against terrorism, Bush, too, has dispatched American special forces to various countries to combat terrorism - including Yemen, the Philippines, Georgia, Pakistan, Colombia, and many of the former states of the Soviet Union. By the Fall of 2002, the Bush Administration had constructed, renovated or added onto military facilities in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bulgaria, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman; planned training missions, including some placement of U.S. forces on an open-ended basis, in Georgia, Djibouti and the Philippines; won airfield landing rights in Kazakhstan; and undertook major military exercises that involved thousands of American soldiers in India, Jordan and Kuwait. In addition, the Pentagon stockpiled thousands of tons of military equipment in Middle Eastern and Persian Gulf states, including Jordan, Israel, Qatar and Kuwait. Finally it had ongoing talks with the governments of Yemen to install intelligence-gathering stations to monitor suspicious operations in Sudan and Somalia.

But the US has gone beyond proper emergency military measures. Viewing America has the world's greatest victim, on September 20, 2002, Bush now elevated his thinking to official doctrine when he offered to Congress a thirty-three page policy document, "The National Security Strategy of the United States". It spelled out his administration's full agenda on global security. Bush said that, as a part of this new strategy, America would no longer permit "any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened up since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago." This was a form of preemptive dissausion. Washington's new policy seemed to be one of military supremacy over the entire earth -- a more ambitious endeavor than that sought by ancient Rome which merely confined itself to the Mediterranean and Europe or even by 19th century Great Britain which only claimed a fifth of the globe. Given this massive use of US resources, one might ask: why do we need preemptive or preventive action?

Fundamentally, this version of foreign affairs is an outgrowth of the viewpoint that we live in a Hobbesian universe, in which no nation can be ruled out as a possible adversary, international laws are unreliable, and military power exercised by a single nation alone can bring order and sustain democratic systems. International affairs columnist William Pfaff put it somewhat differently: "This is their version of American Manifest Destiny. Its authors themselves describe it as a tough version of Wilsonianism, created in the higher interest of all." It is a form of extreme nationalism that far exceeds what popular opinion will support.

Yet America is a superpower not by its military and economic power alone, but by virtue of sustaining permanent alliances, affirming collective security, upholding democratic values and spreading wealth around the globe. We used to believe that the world can eventually be governed by social contracts rather than the threats of force. There are limits on American power: we still need the military bases, ports, airfields, fuel depots, and overflight rights which only our allies can grant us. The more we get involved in global treaties and organizations, the more we can control them and shape what they do. It is costly to our taxpayers to try to go it alone around the planet.

The salient dangers of such an over-weaning approach of global dominance are manifold. The primary one -- historically the most perilous -- is that other nations eventually will resent the primary power and create alliances against it. Already the European Union and the United Nations are beginning to constitute countervailing powers. America's kind of domination can spur further terrorism and trigger disorder rather than bring order. And, in any case, predominance of power alone has proven in the past to be unable to run the planet. America or any other great power always needs other countries to help bring peace. If the US insists on acting alone, it will lose the legitimacy of our authority and diminish our capacity to act as a role model to the rest of the planet.

We should return to the Lockean philosophy of governance and drop our Hobbesian views toward international affairs. Thus we should look again at international treaties as extension of our national security -- not a diminishment of it. We should seek to reinforce our global system of pacts and accords rather than run away from them. We should approach the international system on the understanding that we can improve those pacts we don't like and strengthen those we do by abiding by them and making them effective and verifiable with all nations. I am speaking here of such agreements as: the Kyoto Treaty; the International Criminal Court; the proposal to add a system of monitoring and verification to the 1972 treaty banning the production of biological weapons, a pact which the U.S. had ratified. We should strengthen, not weaken as Bush emissaries did, the draft U.N. accord to curb illicit small arms traffic. Nor should we unilaterally cut off all U.S. assistance to foreign private organizations which provided legal abortion services, counseling and referrals.

In addition, the START 2 treaty reducing nuclear weapons which President George W. Bush's father negotiated; to the United Nations Convention on the Laws of the Seas which 133 nations ratified; and the Biodiversity Convention supported by 168 states; and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that the U.N. General Assembly adopted 158-3 in 1996 and which Republicans in the U.S. Senate defeated during the Clinton Administration in 1999; as well as the 1997 convention banning anti-personnel landmines; and the Conventions on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on Discrimination Against Women; and the Nunn-Lugar initiative which helped dismantle Russia's' weapons of mass destruction but which required a boost in funding by Congress. George Bush boycotted the August 2002 U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development, too, held in South Africa, attended by most other leaders of the world.