Archive for December, 2004

Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, reviewed by Max Boot

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 12/8/2004
in Foreign Policy
. 0 Comments

Max Boot is Olin senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and well-qualified to review the Gaddis book. This review is available from the CFR archives:

A great many books analyzing the recent shifts in American foreign policy have appeared since September 11, 2001. Most are harshly critical of President Bush and all his works. Their tenor can be judged by some of their titles: Rogue Nation, The Bubble of American Supremacy, The Sorrows of Empire, Superpower Syndrome. The more scabrous among them do not hesitate to compare George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler and America to Nazi Germany. And that is to say nothing of the books, which have become bestsellers in Europe, claiming that the CIA (or was it the Mossad?) was actually behind the 9/11 attacks. In response, some on the Right have produced equally histrionic screeds, like Ann Coulter’s Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism and Sean Hannity’s Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism–books that, in essence, accuse Bush’s critics of being fifth columnists.

It is a relief, therefore, to pick up Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, a sober attempt to analyze Bush’s foreign policy in historical context and without partisan rancor. Its author is John Lewis Gaddis, our most eminent historian of the cold war, who taught for many years at Ohio University and now holds the Robert A. Lovett chair in military and naval history at Yale.

Gaddis first rose to prominence with the publication in 1972 of The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947, which rejected revisionist attempts to pin the blame for that conflict on the U.S. To Gaddis, the Soviet Union was at least equally responsible. Then, following the release in the 1990’s of new documents from the Soviet archives, Gaddis revised this position, concluding that Stalin was solely responsible for the post-World War II break with the West. He also disavowed his earlier view that the cold war was largely governed by geopolitical rivalries. His 1997 book We Now Know argued that Communist ideology had played a bigger role than realpolitik in motivating Soviet conduct.

Though he has long outraged New Left historians, Gaddis is hardly known as a conservative. His reputation is that of a moderately liberal scholar–which makes the assessment of Bush’s foreign policy that he offers in this slender volume all the more interesting and all the more likely to discomfit the administration’s critics.

Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, CFR Seminar

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 12/8/2004
in Foreign Policy
. 1 Comment

May 14, 2004, the Council on Foreign Relations held a seminar in NYTC on the book featuring the author John Lewis Gaddis, Robert A. Lovett professor of history, Yale University, and Moderator James M. Lindsay, VP of CFR.

I found the transcript very worthwhile - together with Max Boot’s review it motivated my to order the book. The seminar begins with a Q&A by Lindsay/Gaddis, and ends with a number of questions from the audience. E.g., Gaddis answers the final set of questions:

GADDIS: Well, three good questions. Let me take the last one first. Are we in the business of overthrowing dictators everywhere? Obviously not. This is an administration that is selective in the dictators that it chooses to take on–thank goodness, because it has quite enough to do with the one that it’s after right now. I think, on this score, the administration has gotten a bad rap, because it seems to me that the–although it confused the issue itself with the unfortunate axis of evil speech, which I saw no purpose for whatever–but this is an administration which is nuanced and selective, at least in terms of the way that it is dealing with dangerous states and its policy toward Iraq–not its policy toward Iran, and it is not its policy toward North Korea. So I don’t have a lot to criticize apart from simply the careless rhetoric of the axis of evil speech in this regard.

With regard to the larger question of multilateralism and pre-emption, and how one deals with these kinds of problems, it seems to me we did confront with the Iraq situation something that we are likely to run into in other situations as well, and that is, quite simply, the inadequacy of our current multilateral institutions to deal with major problems that are out there. This is nothing new. We’ve seen this before. We saw it in Bosnia. We’ve seen it in Rwanda. We’ve seen it in other places. The international institutions that were created half a century ago for this purpose simply are not up to the task. With the United Nations, the Security Council reflects the configuration of the world as it was half a century ago. That is a great dilemma that, I think, we have to take seriously. I do not think we can seriously look to the United Nations for actions on these issues under these circumstances, because it’s an unrepresentative institution in that regard.

I think that there are going to be times when we’re going to have to have coalitions of the willing to deal with this. I want these coalitions to be as broad as possible, obviously, but we have had coalitions of the willing. Basically that was Kosovo, which took place without United Nations’ approval, as you recall. We had an interesting small coalition of the willing in support of pre-emptive action, although hardly anybody has treated it this way, in Haiti just earlier this year, in which we cooperated with France to take pre-emptive action against a regime that looked like it was going to perpetrate a bloodbath. So these things are happening, and they are happening outside of the framework of the United Nations. And it seems to me that trend is surely going to continue. And I think the operative principle here would simply be to have these coalitions be as broad as possible. I’m not holding my breath for the reform of the Security Council of the U.N.

Back to your first question: Are we dealing with the terrorist threat to ourselves or to the world? I would hope that it would be to the world, because it seems to me this is the way that we must think about it, that this is a threat. What was demonstrated on September 11th was a point of vulnerability for the entire world. The very fact that 19 terrorists expending half a million dollars do that much damage, that level of asymmetrical warfare–the level of vulnerabilities that was demonstrated in that attack is totally unprecedented. There’s never been anything like that degree of asymmetrical damage done. That’s just a point of vulnerability, a condition of vulnerability. It is not just American, but it is there for any society. This could have happened in any society. Any society could be subject to this. It seems to me this provides the strongest of all reasons why the international community has got to take this problem extremely seriously. And it seems to me this problem, the problem of terrorism, really cannot be separated from the problem of tyrants, because I don’t think terrorism exists independent of tyrants who support them. And on that score, I think the national strategy statement has got it right. But I think this has to be treated as a danger to the entire global community. And this does get back then to the importance of tact and sensitivity and diplomacy and multilateralism, federalism, lack of arrogance, all of these things that we have all been talking about here today, it seems to me.

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