Social Science Research Council

THE NEW COLD WAR THAT VANISHED - AN INTERVIEW WITH RANDALL FORSBERG
By Alexander Glaser

Alexander Glaser: Dr. Forsberg, for more than three decades, you have been working on issues related to global security, in particular focused on nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation. In 1980, you started the "Nuclear Freeze Campaign" that became the single most important part of the peace movement. As an "insider" you have been involved in arms-control-related activities from the height of the Cold War to the disintegration of the Soviet Union; and from there to where we stand today.

In your opinion, looking back over the last twelve months: Did the events of 9/11 and the reaction to these events transform the field of security studies in a way relevant to your work - or did they rather emphasize a "trend" that was already unfolding?

Randall Forsberg: The answer depends partly on how you define "the field:" the disarmament and nonproliferation efforts that have been my focus represent a small subset of the field; more broadly it covers military policy, security policy, and overall concepts of security. In my view, both the field more broadly and the area of disarmament and nonproliferation have been affected, but in different ways.

There's no question that before 9/11 there was concern about terrorism and there was concern about proliferation. Both of those have now been amplified and more directly linked. Previously, the nonproliferation concern was probably at least as much focused on governments as on terrorists, whereas now there's much more concern with leakage from governments to terrorists. That is the main impact of "amplification" for the traditional field of security studies by 9/11. In that respect, recent developments heightened some trends that were already underway.

There is, however, another area in which 9/11 had a qualitatively transforming effect. There has been a radical transformation of the official US perspective on the primary role of the Department of Defense (DoD) and US military forces. This is a very significant change, which I don't think has been noticed very much.

Before 9/11, the primary role of the US DoD was in transition. It was shifting from focusing on Europe and a potential confrontation with Russia in Europe to focusing on the Pacific and a potential confrontation with China, overlapping with concerns about North Korea. All things that had to do with security in the Pacific region were in the process of becoming the foremost interest of the US Defense Department - starting in 1998-99, towards the end of the Clinton administration, and growing slowly but steadily thereafter.

In 2000-2001, pre-9/11, the shift from Europe to the Pacific is reflected in the annual report of the Secretary of Defense, in the studies of the RAND corporation and other Defense Department think tanks, in Foreign Affairs magazine and other published sources, in the themes of major conferences, etc. There was a great intensity of new interest and new learning around Chinese security policy, the growth of Chinese military forces, North Korea, and naval deployments in the Pacific.

In fact, the attention given to Asia extended into South Asia and the Indian Ocean area. There was, for example, a Bush Administration initiative to reach out to India in August 2001 (again, before 9/11) to relax the sanctions imposed when India tested nuclear weapons in May 1998, so that the United States could begin developing better military-to-military contacts with India and building up a friendly relationship. New Indo-US military cooperation would complete the encirclement of China in a pattern surprisingly similar to the Cold War "containment" of the former Soviet Union.

After 9/11, China and the arc reaching from the Persian Gulf across the Indian Ocean and up through the Western Pacific to North Korea abruptly disappeared as the Pentagon's main raison d'être. Suddenly, the Bush administration was stressing the importance of cooperating with China (as well as Russia) in the "war" against terrorism. China responded immediately, seizing the opportunity to improve and pacify its relations with the United States. (Like Russia, China undoubtedly viewed the West's concern with terrorism as a basis for muting Western criticism of China's handling of domestic dissent.) After 9/11, international terrorists replaced China as the rationale for huge and growing US military budgets in a new era with no threat of global war, and scarcely any risks of a major regional war that would involve US troops.

AG: Where would you locate the main reasons for the evolving US military posture emphasizing Asia and the Pacific? Was it rooted in an "inevitable" US attempt to reformulate its national interests and the search for a new, post-Cold War identity?

RF: Until recently, I've bent over backwards to put the best interpretation on mainstream assessments of military threats, to find the grain of truth in them. "Even if threats are overstated, let's not say there's nothing there. Instead, let's try and develop a more reasonable response." That was my view of Cold War threat scenarios involving the former Soviet Union and the possibility of war in Europe. Even if the USSR was not planning a deliberate attack on the West, there was a certain possibility of war in Europe, and we simply needed to deal with that in a more reasonable way.

In the Asia-Pacific region, too, the problem is not that there is no possibility of war. There is a possibility of war between China and Taiwan - although I think it is very remote - and there is a remote possibility of war between North Korea and South Korea. There are risks of war. But the risks are low, and they could be made much lower by good policy choices on the part of the United States.

In the late 1990s instead of pursuing avenues to reduce the relatively low risks of war between China and Taiwan and between North and South Korea through confidence-building measures and reciprocal arms limits and reductions, the United States started treating the risks as much greater than they are and it rejected new confidence-building measures. So the degree of military threat from China that the Pentagon presented before 9/11 was greatly exaggerated, and at the same time the response was over-militarized, and lacking in appropriate arms control and confidence-building measures.

This sounds a lot like what happened during the Cold War. The important difference between the US approach to the USSR in earlier decades and the approach to China more recently involves the military threats in the two cases. Even though the former Soviet Union was extremely unlikely to attack Western Europe, it did have very large, very powerful conventional military forces, as well as a huge nuclear arsenal. China has neither. It is a developing country, with modest forces for conventional war, a small nuclear arsenal, and only 20 missiles capable of reaching US territory.

So the recent exaggeration of Chinese military potential in Asia and the Pacific, and the rejection of steps to reduce the already low risks of war cannot, in my view, be attributed to errors in judgment or analysis: it can be interpreted only as part of a deliberate effort to justify the size of the military forces that the United States is trying to maintain after the Cold War. This is true both for US conventional forces and for the US missile defense program. The missile threat outside of China was vastly exaggerated while the implications of missile defense for arms race with China have been greatly understated.

In sum, over the four or five years before 9/11, we had seen a move toward creating a new Cold War based in Asia instead of in Europe, with China replacing Russia as the enemy. Virtually all of that vanished in the wake of 9/11. That's an extremely important impact; from that viewpoint, 9/11 may have already changed the course of history.

AG: If we look at this post-9/11 development with its focus on the "war on terrorism" from a more long-term perspective, do you expect the current new direction of US military policy to be permanent, or a temporary diversion that might ultimately lose its momentum, so that the United States will swing back to "traditional" military-threat scenarios?

RF: If we had been limited to 9/11 and the war on terrorism, I think it might have been a temporary diversion. But now that the possibility of pre-emptive war has been introduced in the wake of 9/11, the trend in a new direction is deepening. We are moving more and more away from an old Cold-War-style military.

The events of 9/11 provided a new justification for the immense US military budget which, even more than before, is dissociated from the scale of the conventional military threats facing the United States. After the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact collapsed, there was no commensurate enemy to justify the size of the US conventional military forces (which account for 90 percent of the budget). The China threat had to be inflated to do that. With the new focus on terrorists, we've gone down by another order of magnitude in terms of the relationship between the threatening forces, their cost and scale, and the size and cost of US military. Where the ratio of US military spending-to-China threat was, say, 10:1, the ratio for the terrorist threat is more like 100:1 or possibly even 1000:1.

In other words, in the post-Cold War period, the United States was already moving in the direction of supporting a large military without needing a threat from a commensurate military opponent. Now, having set aside the China-threat-scenario (a traditional military opponent, just greatly inflated) and having gone in a completely different direction, it will be difficult to go back to the traditional calculus of needing armed forces because of battles we can foresee waging with them.

One other impact of 9/11 that bridges areas where the ongoing trends were amplified and areas where they changed is the relationship with Russia. Before 9/11, there was a trend toward gradually and slowly developing a friendship or ally-type relationship with Russia. This process was sped-up in the wake of 9/11 because of the immediate need to create a coalition to fight terrorism. But that change, in turn, will make it difficult to go back to a Cold War-type paradigm with China as a way of justifying the size and cost of US armed forces. The reason is that closer ties with Russia are lending credence to the idea that you can have a global security system in which countries cooperate on security issues and a zero-sum game is not inevitable.

AG: Since the traditional arms control and disarmament themes central to the work of "disarmament NGOs" dropped from the agenda of major players in world politics, will NGOs be able to easily re-position themselves in this emerging security context?

RF: In my own case, the agenda of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS) has changed. Because the Pentagon's rhetoric of a new Cold War in Asia was suddenly removed, the major project that I had been planning to work on - a study of the potential for a cooperative security regime in North-East Asia- has been shelved for a few years. I still think, it's important, and needed, and useful; but it's certainly much less urgently needed than it was. [Editorial note: Following the surprising revelation in mid-October of North Korea's on-going nuclear program, RF noted that security arrangements in North-East Asia are again an urgent issue, though for different reasons.]

Instead, I and others who I have been working with have switched to two other topics. One of them is related to 9/11, focusing not on terrorism per se, but on nuclear proliferation and the means of stopping nuclear proliferation. In the wake of 9/11, the single most acute security concern-both for general audiences and for the security, peace, and disarmament community-has been the idea that a terrorist would get hold of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and attack major cities in the United States or elsewhere. In response to this heightened concern, work by many NGO research centers has increasingly stressed the choice between the "go-it-alone" unilateralist approach taken in recent years by the United States and the series of arms control agreements built up over many decades along with the potential for further advances in arms control.

As part of the "war" on terrorism, the United States is claiming that this country, unilaterally, has the right to try to seize and secure weapons of mass destruction and fissile materials regardless of who is in control of them, as in Iraq (accused of developing weapons of mass destruction) or the former Yugoslavia, where highly enriched uranium from a research reactor was seized in August 2002.

The alternative to unilateral military intervention as a response to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is to expand the existing system of overlapping arms control agreements, adding on more far-reaching international agreements: the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, fissile material cut-off and reduction, strong verification protocols for the bans on chemical and biological weapons, combined with much deeper real cuts in US and Russian nuclear weapons, a halt in any further production of nuclear weapons, and the explicit renunciation of first use of nuclear weapons by the United States and other Western countries.

This combination of much stronger arms control measures could create an international regime in which the norms against the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction were much stronger. In such an environment, the moral justification for a powerful international reaction to Iraq's defiance of the United Nations, would be much stronger. As soon as there is an extremely stringent nuclear arms reduction regime, with nearly all countries participating fully, the conditions for preventing proliferation will be radically transformed.

That's where I feel that the agenda of the NGO community has changed-and it has changed in an effective and in a responsive way. The new sense of danger relating to WMDs after 9/11 has reinvigorated the commitment to arms control and disarmament that was there before-and to efforts to try to reach the general public with the message that arms control is likely to be far more effective than war in preventing the spread and potential use of WMDs.

A second area where the NGO agenda has been affected involves concern with the "Rule of Law" and the need for the international community to work cooperatively on security matters. Many peace groups that never had the phrase "Rule of Law" in their rhetoric are now focusing on the systematic US rejection, blocking, and violation of treaties that are part of the international arms-control regime built up over decades.

AG: In addition to Cold War-era arms control agreements to "manage" the nuclear threat, cooperative efforts were initiated in the early 1990s, which required joint action on the part of the USA and Russia. The effort regarding the disposition of excess weapons plutonium is one example. Recently it has been argued (although this view is not unanimous among experts) that this was an unwise use of resources, detracting from more important issues. The argument is that domestic disarmament efforts in nuclear weapon states are of secondary importance, and that we should focus almost exclusively on the diversion or theft of nuclear materials in third countries, with the ultimate objective of a "global clean-out and securing" of these materials. These efforts are, of course, very important, and they enjoy nearly universal support. But there is the question of how this approach might interfere in the long-term with nuclear disarmament and its irreversibility, and how it might create an increasing chasm between nuclear haves and nuclear have-nots.

RF: I agree that there is a danger that nonproliferation will replace disarmament as the primary goal. As one example of this danger, I would cite the work of the large new NGO created a few years ago with Ted Turner's backing, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI). NTI has chosen to focus on nonproliferation, which is the least politically controversial aspect of the problem because it has no impact whatsoever on military forces and spending in the United States; it does not have any disarmament implications. It focuses almost exclusively on terrorist and loss-of-control-type concerns. Although, these activities started much earlier, 9/11 has reinforced that particular approach. It is more or less the only form of arms control that is supported and can get a majority vote on both sides of the aisle in the Congress. It's not surprising that it's gotten a lot of attention lately.

The reason that US and other Western nonproliferation and threat reduction programs have succeeded even though they increase the have/have-not gap is that the single most important nonproliferation program of this kind, financially, has been aid to Russia and other FSU countries for securing fissile material and related projects. Increasing the gap wasn't an issue in these cases where the nonproliferation emphasis had an operative character; getting financial resources do something which would help with their own security was the issue. The nonproliferation effort was able to go forward because it was perceived as an interest in the specific countries concerned.

But there is another way of proceeding with the nonproliferation agenda, which is not discriminatory: that is for the Conference on Disarmament (CD) to have negotiations on a global fissile material regime with accountability, secured holdings, ban on production, and reductions. Those talks have been stalled by the standoff between the United States and China on preventing an arms race in space.

AG: In November 2001, as a response to the debate about early US post-9/11 policies, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) released a controversial report arguing that academia showed a lack of patriotism and support for military action. ACTA supported its argument by citing isolated statements from various US university professors. It seems that it was - and arguably still is - difficult to articulate non-mainstream opinions in the US without running the risk of being blacklisted. Would you agree that dissenting today, in the wake of 9/11, is more difficult?

RF: The first half of the 1980s, during the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, was really unusual in that the predominant public opinion and media interest shifted from favoring pro-arms and pro-military solutions to being worried about arms and pro-arms control. But most of the time, there is no marked, visible dissent in the United States on matters of military policy. So I think that what has changed in the wake of 9/11 is not the difficulty of dissent, just the degree of dissent!

By the way, the Freeze movement itself developed, in part, in response to the lack of national debate on nuclear issues. In 1979, the so-called "Team B" people said that the CIA was underestimating military advances in Russia, that the situation was much worse than the CIA was claiming, and that the President [Carter] wasn't getting good advice. There was a scare regarding military unpreparedness in the United States, which ultimately helped Reagan get elected. Most people in the Carter administration had just the opposite view. But their voices didn't get heard while Carter was in power, or during the Carter-Reagan election campaign in 1980. They didn't get heard until during the Freeze campaign. What created the opening for dissent to be heard was not the logic of the issue, but the mass of the people demanding an opening.

AG: What happened to the Nuclear Freeze Movement? Why did it begin to decline in the mid 1980s before the Cold War actually ended?

RF: I had hope that the Nuclear Freeze Campaign would lead to and only be the first step towards a more enduring movement. I didn't have any idea of how to organize a popular campaign that would be capable of doing that. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I worked with people who were used to participating in episodic campaigns.

As a result, the Freeze Campaign didn't constitute itself so as to become an organization with tens of millions of members that would last and grow and influence. It was never set up that way. It was organized as a much more radical organization by people on the left, many of whom were pacifists.

I left the Nuclear Freeze in 1985, after having headed the Freeze PAC (political action committee) in 1984 (when Mondale lost to Reagan) and begun looking for a way for us to grow and be more effective the next time around. But I resigned because I concluded that the Campaign's leadership had been captured by people who were more concerned with their personal positioning and power internally than they were with the goal of creating a membership group of millions. As a national force, the Freeze Campaign was already lost then, and gradually shrank after that.

AG: How do you organize your work today and how is it different from what you did in the 1980s?

RF: Recently, in collaboration with Jonathan Schell and David Cortright I launched the Urgent Call website, an internet-based grassroots campaign. We are trying to repeat some of the successes of the Nuclear Freeze, but also avoid some the failures. The Freeze was very broad, but it wasn't very deep in terms of the understanding that was mobilized of the issues and the responses.

This time, we hope to create very large, national coalition with members and groups that are prepared to pursue arms control and disarmament consistently and persistently, for years and years. The peace movement has never had that before. It's always been expressed in surges of temporary pressure in times of crisis. That's what we saw in the early 1960s, when they moved nuclear testing underground, and during the Vietnam War. But these large protest movements didn't effectively oppose the underlying longer-term policies; they opposed only a particular war or a particularly military action, like nuclear weapon tests in the atmosphere, releasing radioactive fallout that was getting into milk. Similarly, the Freeze Movement opposed the development of new types of nuclear weapons for nuclear war-fighting scenarios-and these weapons were stopped, in my opinion, by the anti-nuclear movements in the US and Europe.

Each time there was a crisis and a response-and the response ended the crisis. But the response was never directed at creating a sustained movement for moving towards a new foreign and military policy, which would be based on the original UN principles of collective security and disarmament.

This time, we are trying to do that more consciously: a broadly based, systemic movement that mobilizes on a scale where you can make a difference politically.

The key questions are: How can you make a coalition campaign that strengthens the coalition groups instead of replacing them? And give them an incentive to work on a common campaign? How do you evoke committed support?

AG: What kind of peace movement do we need for the 21st century?

RF: I think we need a new kind of peace movement that is designed to work at a fundamental level. One of the reasons that we haven't seen such a movement before is that throughout the 20th century, when people tried to organize a long-term movement for peace, they were pacifists. They treated pacifism as the right way to mobilize a movement for peace. But war is a particularly difficult problem because it affects people's sense of security. This means that on the one hand, to have a long-term movement for peace, you have to have a profound commitment to ending war; on the other hand, you have to somehow get there without being a pacifist. Because if you are a pacifist, then you lose the majority. But if you don't have a commitment to ending war or to creating a global security system that works, then you don't have a long-term agenda for peace.

AG: Dr. Forsberg, on behalf of the entire editorial team of the next GSC Newsletter, I'd like to thank you very much for this interview.

____________

NOTES:

1. American Council of Trustees and Alumni: Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It (November 2001; revised and expanded February 2002). The names of the cited persons were removed in the revised version of the report, but position, department, and affiliation are still given.


Randall Forsberg holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and directs the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS), a Cambridge-based nonprofit center that she founded in 1980. That same year, Forsberg wrote the "Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race," the four-page manifesto that launched the national Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. After founding the Freeze Clearinghouse, she co-chaired of the Freeze Campaign's National Advisory Board from 1980 through 1984. In 1983 Forsberg received a five-year MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the so-called "genius award"). In 1989 Forsberg briefed President Bush and his Cabinet officials on US-Soviet arms control issues, and in 1995 she was appointed by President Clinton to the Advisory Committee of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. This interview was conducted in Cambridge, MA, on September 19th, 2002.