The foreign policy architecture of the Clinton and Bush administrations

James K. Oliver

ABSTRACT

The modalities of foreign policy provide a useful dimension by which the two post-Cold War foreign policy presidencies can be compared. This research also considers the substantive policy dimensions of the Clinton and Bush foreign policy records. Thus the two presidencies' strategic assessments of the position of the United States are a second important point of comparison. How a president understands the structure and dynamics of the world constrains their sense of limits and opportunities as they engage the international system, i.e. whether one acts as a "grand designer" ("architect") or "manager" ("general contractor").

INTRODUCTION

The years following the demise of the Soviet Union and the Cold War have been a far more frustrating period of foreign policy and policy making than some anticipated in the early 1990s. (1) Only two presidents--Bill Clinton and George W. Bush--have had to deal with the challenges resulting from the onset of American primacy within a context of globalization. Though it is very early in the day to be comparing the two administrations, there are points of comparison allowing an interim overview of their foreign policy. Both administrations undertook strategic assessments of the international position of the United States and both administrations revealed their operational modalities for engaging the international system quite early in their tenures. Indeed, in the case of the Bush administration, it has been the operational style of the administration that has drawn the most attention. Thus "unilateralism" became the defining characteristic of the Bush administration for most observers before the catastrophic events of 9/11 and the descriptor stuck even as the administration defined its substantive focus in terms of wars on terrorism and Iraq, both fought by means of an international "coalition."

The modalities of foreign policy provide, therefore, a first dimension along which the two post-Cold War foreign policy presidencies can be compared. But there are substantive policy dimensions as well. Thus the two presidencies' strategic assessments of the position of the United States are a second important point of comparison. How a president understands the structure and dynamics of the world constrains their sense of limits and opportunities as they engage the international system, i.e. whether one acts as a "grand designer" ("architect") or "manager" ("general contractor").

Finally, there are the goals and objectives that an administration sets: the purposes for which the instrumentalities of power are developed, mobilized, and applied. Identifying the purposes for which power is exercised is one of the great challenges for foreign policy analysis for often these purposes are articulated by an administration retrospectively as a justification for its actions. In still other cases, administrations never really define a grand design or "doctrine" that guides their policy-making sometimes arguing that the very character of the system--e.g. unprecedented conditions such as globalization and/or the end of the Cold War--preclude such formulations or their application. In both administrations, attempts were made to define overarching frameworks for their foreign policy although in the case of the Clinton administration the "strategy" was never advanced as a "doctrine." In contrast, Richard Haass, the former Director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff for the Bush administration, insisted that such a doctrine is essential to any administration's foreign policy if it is to be informed by "strategic clarity." (2) The content and clarity of the strategic visions of the two administrations will constitute a third point of comparison in the analysis.

SURVEYING THE LAY OF THE LAND U.S. POWER IN THE POST-COLD WAR LANDSCAPE

The campaign for the White House produced the predictable statements of what a "Republican foreign policy" would consist of once a Bush reoccupied the White House. (3) Nonetheless, when one strips away the campaign posturing and straining to define "differences," the Clinton and second Bush administrations arrived at quite similar views of the contours of the international system. But if they were in basic agreement as to the lay of the land, there were nonetheless fundamental disagreements as to the foreign policy architecture appropriate to the environment. Clinton and Bush entered office lacking foreign policy blueprints. But within a year, both experienced brutal international engagements--Mogadishu in the case of Clinton and for Bush, the terrorist attack on the New York World Trade Center--that compelled them to more clearly articulate their foreign policy designs.

In late September 1993, Anthony Lake, Clinton's first Security Advisor laid out what the Clinton Administration saw as the salient characteristics of the new era. "[T]he pulse of the planet has accelerated dramatically and with it the pace of change in human events," (4) Lake observed, and this contributed to a dynamic and complexly interdependent globalization of human affairs. Moreover, among the major changes affecting the system was "an explosion of ethnic conflicts" giving to the system a dangerous and destabilizing source of dynamism, notwithstanding the end of the dreadful Cold War era. Nonetheless, there was little reason for anxiety for even as unsettling change was cascading through the system "America's core concepts--democracy and market economics--are more broadly accepted than ever." Furthermore, by any conventional measure the United States was the world's dominant power: "The fact is, we have the world's strongest military, its largest economy and its most dynamic, multiethnic society ... Moreover, absent a reversal in Russia, there is now no credible near-term threat to America's existence." (5)

In sum, the central strategic reality for the foreseeable future was understood to be the surfeit of what Joseph Nye has termed U.S. "hard" and "soft" power. (6) No one could remotely challenge U.S. military and economic capacity and insofar as America's "core concepts" were driving the technological, social, and cultural dimensions of globalization American values were deemed ascendant as well. Under these circumstances, U.S. foreign policy should not only be "engaged" but it should lead." The "successor doctrine" to containment should be "a strategy of enlargement"--"enlargement of the world's free community of market economies." (7)

Eight years later, the new Bush administration arrived at a similar assessment of the strategic position of the United States vis-a-vis the international system. Moreover, this conclusion was reached notwithstanding the calamitous events of 9/11, events which in Secretary of State Colin Powell's words ushered in the "Post-post-Cold War era." (8) Thus in the spring of 2002, then Director of Policy Planning Richard Haass observed that the United States "is--and will remain into the foreseeable future--the world's preeminent power according to every metric--military, economic, political, or cultural. The United States will continue to affect the shape of international relations and their trajectory more than any other country."

   This is an era defined by a number of realities, foremost among
   them American primacy, the low probability of great power conflict,
   and the spread of democracy and free market economics. But it is
   also a time of continuing regional threats, persisting widespread
   poverty and the exclusion of too many people from the benefits of
   globalization, and increasing transnational challenges. (9)

And like Lake, Haass insisted that the United States has unique responsibilities with respect to leadership in the new era. (10)

THE APPROACH TO ENGAGEMENT

If the assumption of American primacy on the part of the Bush administration was not distinctive, their modalities of engagement have been the focus of much commentary. Most commonly the contrast has been drawn in terms of the "multilateralism" of the Clinton Administration vs. the "unilateralism" of the early Bush administration. Clinton seemed willing to undertake multilateral negotiations and commitments across the full range of international and transnational issues and issue areas. Thus, the early months of the Clinton administration, involvement in United Nations peacekeeping were characterized as "assertive multilateralism" by U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright. (11) In contrast, the hallmark of the early Bush administration was its unilateralism in dealing with allies and adversaries. Whether the issue was ballistic missile defense, enhancing UN capacity for monitoring agreements banning chemical and biological weapons, controlling the spread of small arms, population programs, global warming, or a UN conference on racism, the Bush administration pointedly asserted U.S. "national interest" as something apart from and in opposition to the Clinton administration's more enthusiastic globalism. Indeed, Bush seemed to relish the opportunity to reverse prior agreements and commitments entered into by his predecessor.

Much of Bush's early unilateralism might be attributed to the seemingly inevitable inclination of new administrations--especially those representing a shift in partisan control of the White House--to distinguish themselves and their policies from the previous occupants. In this case, there was perhaps an even more intense desire to do so insofar as George W. Bush and his administration saw represented a restoration of the truncated term of Mr. Bush's father. Virtually all of the top level foreign and defense policy administrators in George W. Bush's administration had served together in similar capacities in the previous Bush years (and before in the Ford and Reagan Administrations). But there is both more and less here than meets the eye. Clinton was more unilateralist and Bush upon occasion more multilateralist than the conventional wisdom conveys.

After Mogadishu, the Clinton administration's enthusiasm for assertive multilateralism evaporated and the term was never used again. Indeed, even before the disastrous firefight that led to the deaths of 18 U.S. Rangers and hundreds of Somalis on October 3, 1993, a divided Clinton administration, its campaign rhetoric aside, was unable to muster any enthusiasm for a leadership role in the Balkans. They, therefore, promoted a UN weapons embargo on all parties, which, to the extent it was enforced, worked to the advantage of the Serbs who already controlled most of the assets of the former Yugoslav federal army. Diplomatically, they deferred to European and UN diplomatic initiatives, though criticizing the results for ratifying the results of Serb aggression.

During the summer of 1993, Clinton and Albright had already qualified and distanced the United States from unequivocal support for UN peacekeeping operations. (12) Though there was a substantial UN peacekeeping mission underway in Somalia under retired U.S. Navy Admiral Jonathan Howe's leadership, the U.S. military operation in Somalia had never been under UN command and control, and the disastrous October 3 operation was a largely U.S. planned and implemented mission. (13) The subsequent attacks from the political right wing in the United States blaming the UN for failure in Mogadishu were not rebutted by the administration. Further, the withdrawal from Somalia was soon followed by a new U.S. doctrine concerning U.S. approval of or involvement in multilateral operations, Presidential Decision Directive 25, The Clinton Administration's Policy on Reforming Multilateral Peace Operations made public May 3, 1994, that codified the previous year's incremental abandonment of multilateralism.

A detailed examination of PDD-25 is beyond the scope of this discussion, (14) but the preconditions established for U.S. involvement in multilateral peacekeeping operations were stringent and seemed to insure that few if any such operations would proceed in the future without a priori U.S. support. Moreover, Albright, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee immediately after the Mogadishu catastrophe, explicitly diminished multilateralism as a policy mode for pursuing U.S. interests. Multilateral peace-keeping remained "potentially" important,

   but it cannot serve as a guarantor of our own vital interests, nor
   should it lessen our resolve to maintain vigorous regional
   alliances and a strong national defense. We want a stronger UN, but
   we are not about to substitute elusive notions of global collective
   security for battle-proven and time-tested concepts of unilateral
   and allied defense.

UN missions were now in a category that "may not impinge directly on the national security interests of America or its allies." (15) Furthermore, the subsequent denial of a second term as Secretary General to Boutros Boutros-Ghali was in part a Clinton administration action driven by the perceived domestic political advantage of distancing the administration from the kind of "multilateral engagement and U.S. leadership within collective bodies" (16) that had characterized the Clinton administration's early months in the White House.

The refusal by the United States to support decisive multilateral intervention in Rwanda and the vacillating and dilatory response of the Clinton administration to the disastrously deteriorating European and UN operations in Bosnia were consistent with this posture. When decisive intervention came to the Balkans in 1995 and again in Kosovo in 1999, it was in the form of U.S.-led and implemented air wars against Slobodan Milosevic's forces. Indeed, in Kosovo, the Clinton administration explicitly rejected trying to obtain United Nations Security Council authorization arguing that such a step would be vetoed by the Russians. Instead the Clinton administration prepared for essentially American action by gaining a priori NATO commitment to act without UN authorization in the event of the presumed refusal of Milosevic to restore Kosovo's autonomy and stop his refugee generating ethnic cleansing of the province. It mattered little to Clinton that the resulting intervention was widely regarded as a violation of the international law concerning the me of force embodied in the Charter. (17)

In retrospect, this outcome is not surprising. Very early in the Clinton administration, Anthony Lake had explicitly refused to adopt a rigidly multilateralist posture. In the same speech in which he laid out the fundamentals of the Clinton administration's strategy of engagement through enlargement, he stated "my personal hope is that the habits of multilateralism may one day enable the rule of law to play a more civilizing role in the conduct of nations, as envisioned by the founders of the United Nations." (18) However, regarding the appropriate "mode of engagement," he concluded:

   But for any official with responsibilities for our security
   policies, only one overriding factor can determine whether the
   U.S. should act multilaterally or unilaterally, and that is
   America's interests. We should act multilaterally where doing so
   advances our interests--and we should act unilaterally when that
   will serve our purpose. The simple question in each instance is
   this: what works best? (19)

Bush's foreign policy, vexed as it is by an on-going war and nation-building exercises in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine, is quite obviously very much under construction. However, the enthusiastic unilateralism that marked the early months of the administration was at least marginally tempered in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The response to the attacks was essentially American conceived and executed, but the Bush administration found that it could more effectively respond with international support and assistance. Thus NATO's unprecedented invocation of Article 5 of the treaty and offer of material assistance were welcomed and accepted as European piloted AWACs command and control aircraft exercised tactical control of the augmented air combat patrols over American cities during late 2001 and early 2002. U.S. assets were thus freed for use in Southwest Asia. United Nations Security Council resolutions were sought and provided as the United States and the international community undertook more extensive and intensive exchanges of intelligence and enhanced surveillance of the international financial system so as to thwart al Qaeda financial transactions. Bilateral and multilateral contacts throughout the world were stepped up as the United States and its allies sought to identify and then destroy Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda networks. Afghan, British, German, and Canadian troops participated in the fighting in Afghanistan which destroyed the Taliban and seemingly shattered the al Qaeda presence, albeit much of the leadership and significant operational elements of both remained unaccounted for in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Pakistan and other regional governments contributed to the American conceived and led operation by providing basing, over flight rights, and intelligence.

Similarly, the war in Iraq, though very much an American affair, nonetheless took on a multilateral dimension out of necessity. In the run-up to the war, the Bush administration assumed the initiative in framing the case for going to war with Saddam Hussein's regime, drove the ultimately unsuccessful diplomatic effort to gain UN Security Council approval for war, and established the strategic framework within which war would be prosecuted. When war came in the spring of 2003, the Administration characterized the forces arrayed against Iraq as an "international Coalition." The exercise was, however, with the notable exception of a British theater in the extreme south of Iraq, an American war. The 423,998 US personnel deployed for Operation Iraqi Freedom constituted 91 percent of the forces engaged. Fully 93 percent of the air sorties in the war were flown by U.S. aircraft. (20)

Prior to the war, however, Prime Minister Tony Blair served as an articulate advocate of war and a consistent ally of the Bush administration. And, of course, the British did contribute 40,906 troops, carded the brunt of the fighting in the south, and maintained a major presence in the area around Basra. In addition, the administration had sought and failed to obtain Turkish support so as to establish a base for a northern invasion to complement the major thrust out of Kuwait. Other symbolic contributions were made by the Australians, Canadians, and the Poles. (21)

The "international coalition" aside, the more important of the administration's ultimate concessions to the necessities of multilateralism came after Bush declared an end to major military operations on April 3. In the face of miscalculations concerning the likely course of combat, a botched initial post-war occupation administration, (22) persistent insecurity, violence, and almost daily casualties inflicted on U.S. forces, the administration was forced to seek assistance, often from the very countries that had opposed US policy in the months before the war. Thus, the administration--with almost half of U.S. active duty Army brigades committed to Iraq--found itself soliciting peacekeeping forces and assistance from Turkey, India, Russia, Romania, and even the French and Germans who had led the opposition to Security Council support of the war. Most of the countries set as a precondition of their assistance, a United Nations Security Council resolution legitimizing the peacekeeping and reconstruction effort. As the recognized occupying force in Iraq the United States seemed likely to maintain the administrative initiative for the reconstruction, but negotiating some sort of UN cover for the multilateral effort was anything but appealing to an administration that had walked away from multilateral legitimization of its war four months earlier.

Neither Clinton nor Bush has been, therefore, the consistent multilateralists or unilateralists respectively that journalistic accounts and op-ed writers might suggest. But it would be inaccurate to conclude that their operational modalities are indistinguishable. Clinton's penchant for personal involvement in bilateral and multilateral negotiations grew during his eight years in office and his administration embraced an extensive array of international agreements and governance arrangements. The Bush administration on the other hand, illuminated its early months in office with a series of withdrawals from and rejections of bilateral and multilateral agreements and arrangements. Moreover, complaints, protests, or advice offered by others were often treated with indifference or curtly dismissed as wishful thinking.

Arguably, Clinton was less a multilateralist than Bush a unilateralist, but to focus analysis of their foreign policies on these distinctions is to risk mistaking a house's wallpaper and landscaping for its underlying architecture. There is substantively more to distinguish these administrations than the weighting of multilateralism and unilateralism in their respective efforts to utilize America's strategic position at the turn of the new millennium. We can, in short, move beyond a comparison of the modalities of these first administrations to operate in an era of conjoined globalization and American primacy. In doing so we might better understand how it is that while understanding the position of American power in the world similarly--the lay of the land as it were--they nevertheless undertook quite different foreign policy projects. And in comparing the architecture of the projects we might also be in a better position to consider the future of American foreign policy in the midst of the turbulence and cascading change that is the essence of globalization.

ENLARGEMENT AND ITS LIMITS

   As Clinton began his second term he asserted:

   ... The once bright line between domestic and foreign policy is
   blurring. If I could do anything to change the speech patterns of
   those of us in public life, I would almost like to stop hearing
   people talk about foreign policy and domestic policy and, instead,
   start discussing economic policy, security policy, environmental
   policy--you name it. (23)

Insofar as an administration that seemed, initially at least, to view foreign policy as a distraction sought to establish a coherent foreign policy framework, the interpenetration of foreign and domestic policy was a, perhaps the central assumption. "It's the economy, stupid," had been the Clinton campaign mantra in 1992 and something like it carried over into the administration's foreign policy thinking. At the center of the strategy of enlargement was the strengthening and consolidation of the democratic capitalist core--the world's liberal market political economies the center of gravity of which was understood to be the U.S. economy. The domestic and international economic linkage with trade as the nexus was in turn, equated with security policy. (24)

The substantive focus of American foreign policy was to be, therefore, on the North American-European-Japanese core and the international economic regimes, institutions, and arrangements designed to foster trade. This was necessary because at the heart of the Clinton administration's strategic assessment and response was the assumption that American economic recovery and long-term prosperity were inextricably intertwined with global economic growth and especially that of the democratic capitalist core. The "domestic" and the "foreign" were co-constitutive. Further, this political-economic nexus was now understood to be the essence of U.S. security policy in an international system in which there were no plausible challengers to American security traditionally conceived.

Operationally, therefore, the administration tried to hand-off the Balkans crisis to the Europeans and the UN, scuttle away from the multilateral engagement symbolized by Mogadishu, and disingenuously duck altogether the horrendous unraveling of Rwanda. Simultaneously, Clinton was personally and successfully engaged with bringing the North American Free Trade Agreement through the Congress, advancing the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Trade Organization, and energizing the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. In contrast with the lurching course of U.S. policy in the Balkans from 1993 through 1995, the Administration effectively mobilized a U.S.-led response to the Mexican economic and financial crisis of 1994-1995 in spite of vocal opposition from the Republican majorities in the House and Senate. Throughout 1993-1995, the Administration fashioned a strong and coordinated negotiating position for the United States vis-a-vis Japan as Clinton sought to force a Japanese leadership weakened by a slow-motion implosion of the Japanese economy into fundamental restructuring of their domestic economy and the broader U.S.-Japanese trade relationship. Within the policy making core of the administration, the leadership of the traditionally dominant State Department-National Security Council-Defense Department triad of agencies drew generally lower marks than Treasury, Commerce, the Office of Trade Representative, and especially the new National Economic Council under the leadership of Robert Rubin. (25)

Enlargement beyond the Democratic Capitalist Core

When, however, the Clinton administration engaged beyond the democratic capitalist core, the strategy began to loose its clarity. The geostrategic areas of greatest concern were Russia, the remnants of the old Soviet empire, and China. Economic engagement was a part of Clinton's approach, but the parlous state of the Russian and central European economies and political institutions precluded their rapid incorporation into the core. Rather, the administration had to deal immediately with problems and opportunities presented by the collapse of communism in central and Eastern Europe as well as the complexities of the Chinese-Taiwan-U.S. triangular relationship in Asia. Inasmuch as Russia and China had been the focus of containment, the residua of the Cold War remained and demanded attention. Not surprisingly, therefore, the approach to enlargement here was weighted towards more traditional political and strategic issues of arms control, nonproliferation, and shoring up the ever dodgy and often inebriated Yeltsin presidency in Russia. (26)

The relationship with China was especially vexing. Trade and economic engagement were central elements of the Clinton Administration's approach to Beijing. However, the longstanding commitment to Taiwan provoked a nasty military confrontation involving Chinese missile tests off Taiwan answered by the movement of U.S. Navy carrier battlegroups into the waters between Taiwan and the mainland. Likewise, revelations of Chinese interference in U.S. elections as well as alleged espionage regarding U.S. nuclear warhead technology contributed to bilateral tension and domestic debates redolent of the 1950s. On the other hand, the Administration quickly severed its initial linking of human rights and trade, aggressively moved to expand U.S. trade in technologies with dual civilian and military use, and ultimately supported Chinese entry into the WTO after negotiating an agreement with Beijing concerning opening its internal markets. The effort to sustain and expand economic engagement with the Chinese occasioned some of Clinton's most eloquent advocacy of his econocentric strategic notions. (27) Nonetheless, at the end of his term, Clinton could not claim that enlargement extended to China anymore than he could with respect to the Russians.

With respect to what Lake termed the "backlash" states of Iraq, [ran, North Korea, Libya, and Cuba, the administration's policy adopted the language and instrumentalities of Cold War containment, not the modalities of economic engagement. U.S.-Iraq relations, for example, remained frozen in economic sanctions and a low intensity air war of attrition punctuated by brief spikes of intense cruise missile and air attacks. Elsewhere in the Middle East, Clinton found himself personally, intensely, and ultimately unsuccessfully engaged diplomatically in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict working the same agenda as his predecessors for more than 20 years.

Humanitarian intervention was conceived as a tertiary priority in the original conceptions of enlargement. However, the complex political and humanitarian disaster of Balkan disintegration persisted at the top of the administration's agenda throughout both terms and led to the first military action by NATO in its history. Moreover, U.S. policy was anything but "strategic" in conception and implementation. The administration attempted initially to disengage through a policy of skeptical support for European and UN diplomacy and peacekeeping in Bosnia during 1993 and 1994. By the late summer of 1995 that policy had failed catastrophically as the Serbs overran the UN protected safe area in and around Srebrenica, massacred its male inhabitants, and tightened their brutal siege of Sarajevo. Only after the Administration led a UN sanctioned NATO air campaign in support of a Croatian-Bosnian land offensive in September of 1995 was there a cease-fire, negotiations at Dayton in November, and, finally, a NATO-based peacekeeping force under UN mandate on the ground.

But the Balkan Wars persisted. Within a year Kosovo Liberation Army insurgents had increased their activity across the Albanian border into the province of Kosovo. Milosevic, for his part, had earlier revoked the autonomous status of Kosovo and now escalated the expulsion of ethnic Albanians, destruction of Albanian villages, and egregious and massive human rights violations against the majority Albanian Kosavars. The massive flow of refugees into neighboring Albania and Macedonia threatened their stability and the credibility of NATO as a guarantor of stability in the region.

Significantly, the Clinton administration rejected European appeals to seek UN Security Council legitimization of military action in Kosovo arguing that the Soviets would veto such a course. Instead, Clinton pushed for and received on January 30, 1999, authorization for NATO air strikes against Serbia if Milosevic did not honor a commitment to restore autonomy to Kosovo and cease the ethnic cleansing within the province. On March 24, NATO launched an air war against Serbia--without United Nations sanction--and conducted overwhelmingly by American forces. The air campaign lasted for almost three months before Milosevic capitulated and a NATO manned peacekeeping force was inserted to initiate the as yet incomplete task of reconstructing another part of the Balkans.

Despite its early reluctance, the Clinton administration ultimately engaged and enlarged the U.S. presence in the Balkans. And though there was much multilateralism operating throughout the messy course of that engagement, neither the process nor the outcome bore much resemblance to the strategic concepts advanced by the administration throughout its tenure. The U.S.-led NATO intervention in Bosnia bore the legitimacy of UN Security Council sanction; the Kosovo intervention did not and is, therefore, an unsettlingly ambiguous marker in the Post-Cold War period. The Clinton administration had repeated throughout the 1990s its commitment to engagement and enlargement through multilateral modalities so as to construct a liberal international order. However, Operation Allied Force, although cloaked in the moral imperatives of humanitarian intervention by a NATO coalition of the willing, was essentially an American led intervention against a sovereign state without UN Security Council authorization.

By the end of the 1990s, therefore, the strategy of engagement and enlargement had lost its focus. Moreover, although NATO, the very institutionalization of the liberal democratic core, had enlarged to include Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, its internal balance, mission, and purpose had become problematic. Over the course of the interventions in the Balkan wars and especially in Kosovo, the radical asymmetry of military capability between the United States and the Europeans had become obvious and undeniable. In addition, there were accumulating instances of American impatience with European multilateral diplomacy in the Balkans, enthusiasm for an international landmine treaty, and the International Criminal Court. At the same time, the Europeans frequently found themselves at odds with the United States on matters ranging from the refusal of the United States to meet its financial obligations to the UN or support for various international agreements on the rights of children and women. Thus, within the liberal democratic core of the post-Cold War world, there were fissures.

The Clinton administration's vision and the President's personal diplomacy bespoke multilateralism, engagement, and enlargement across an international system within which American ideas and ideals were more widely accepted than ever before. The sometimes scary ride with Boris Yeltsin through a decade of Russian transition and the rocky path to strategic partnership with the Chinese suggested a less benign or malleable global environment than might have been inferred originally. Mogadishu, the prolonged and brutal struggle in the Balkans, the collapse of negotiations in the Middle East, the containment of backlash states, and by the end of Clinton's day, the emergence of an al Qaeda capable of bombing the World Trade Center, American embassies, and successfully disabling American warships indicated that there were large parts of the world far less receptive to American ideas of market economics and liberal democracy than assumed by the first post-cold war presidency.

From Liberal International Engagement to Primacy

As noted previously, the Bush administration's fundamental assumptions concerning the position of the United States within the international system are similar to those of Clinton. But there are fundamental differences between the two administrations rooted in quite distinct notions of what can and must be done with the singular power and position of the United States in the contemporary system. And these contrasting policy prescriptions are based on different conceptions of security and what is necessary to preserve security in the early Twenty-First Century. In effect, though Clinton and Bush would build on similar terrain with similar tools, they nonetheless, construct quite different structures based on contrasting architectural principles.

Clinton's construction of the post-Cold War world was one in which multidimensional interdependence and globalization are the dominant constitutive dynamics of an emergent global system or society. Traditional security concerns persist, but insofar as economic forces of globalization are of ascending and ultimately transcendent importance, security becomes redefined in terms of trade and economics. From Clinton's perspective, however, the proper strategic response to this new world is not disengagement and/or defensiveness. Rather, because these forces of globalization are in fact derived form America's most fundamental values and strengths; indeed, U.S. policy since the end of the Second World War, the United States ought to embrace interdependence and globalization. In so doing, globalization becomes both end and instrumentality of American foreign and national security policy. Insofar as U.S. strategy is based on engaging these forces and strengthening the institutions for regulating and fostering liberal globalization, the sphere of liberal democratic capitalism is expanded and American strategic interests are advanced.

Bush's advisers would not necessarily disagree with the general thrust of this strategic analysis. Richard Haass, for example, has asserted that "In the 21st century, the principal aim of American foreign policy is to integrate other countries and organizations into arrangements that will sustain a world consistent with U.S. interests and values, and thereby promote peace, prosperity, and justice as widely as possible." (28) Vice President Dick Cheney, when he was Secretary of Defense in 1992 advanced the concept of a "Democratic Zone of Peace," (29) the boundaries of which were coterminous with Lake and Clinton's "Community of Major Market Democracies"--the liberal democratic capitalist core--the expansion of which was the vehicle of the strategy of enlargement. However, while accepting the central importance of this zone of peace and prosperity there is a clear inclination of the Bush administration to emphasize a darker side of the changes and forces that the Clinton administration seemed inclined to embrace in principle, if not always at the level of operational policy outside the core.

Mid-way through the 1990s, Zalmay Khalilzad, now Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan and Iraqi opposition, identified seven aspects of the international system all rooted in the dynamics of globalization and interdependence that might have appeared in any Clinton administration appraisal of the forces at work in world politics. In every instance, however, Khalilzad perceives negative or threatening implications: (30) Economic growth in Asia, even it does not slow down, will produce relative power differentials with military implications. (31) "Some" countries in areas outside the core will achieve market democracies, but the implication is that many will fail. Much of the word lies outside the zone of peace and will remain there even as they seek weapons of mass destruction. Increasing ethnic and other forms of subnational conflict will eventuate in more small wars. Technological change will produce dramatic effects on military and economic power. Competition within the zone of peace will increase. Finally, the backlash or rogue states will become increasingly revisionist and more important, Khalilzad foresaw the possibility of China and Russia trying to balance the power of the United States.

Under this less sanguine globalization scenario, reconceptualizing security in terms of economics and trade are insufficient and even dangerous. Riding the forces of economic globalization as a vehicle of enlargement does not constitute a grand strategy for engagement and advancing the national interests of the United States. "Transnational" forces are indeed salient in the system. In that respect, the strategic assessments of the 1990s got it right. However, the world is now seen as having entered

   a period when increasingly potent transnational challenges
   intersect with still important traditional concerns. The [September
   11] attacks were a grim reminder of how the march of globalization
   has raised the stakes from transnational threats. The murderers
   used cell phones, email and the Internet to communicate. They moved
   money via wire. And they turned civilian airliners into flying
   missiles that killed 3,000 unsuspecting people right here in our
   homeland. (32)

Furthermore, traditional challenges including the Middle East, the threat of nuclear war in South Asia, and the danger of Iraqi, Iranian, or North Korean weapons of mass destruction--all these persist and grow.

Faced with what Haass referred to as the "intersection of the transnational and the traditional," members of the Bush Administration insisted upon the necessity of a coherent foreign policy or "doctrine." Prior to 9/11 however, it was difficult to determine the shape of this strategy. The unilateralism of the administration was already evident, but pre-election and early post-inaugural efforts to define a "Republican" foreign policy suggest more posture than policy. Condoleezza Rice and Robert Zoellick advanced an "alternative" that bundled together enhanced military capability to ensure deterrence, free trade and stable global finances, strong alliances, "comprehensive relationships" (33) with Russia and China, and dealing forcefully with rogue states--all elements present in the Clinton administration's first national security strategy document in 1994.

If there was a distinctive note, it emanated from the assertion that the Clinton administration had lost sight of the fact that "power matters" and that the "national interest" and not '"humanitarian interests' or the interests of 'the international community'" should be determinative in American foreign policy. Rice continues:

   The belief that the United States is exercising power legitimately
   only when it is doing so on behalf of someone or something else was
   deeply rooted in Wilsonian thought, and there are strong echoes of
   it in the Clinton Administration. To be sure, there is nothing
   wrong with doing something that benefits all humanity, but that is,
   in a sense, a second-order effect. America's pursuit of the
   national interest will create conditions that promote freedom,
   markets, and peace.... So multilateral agreements and institutions
   should not be ends in themselves. (34)

Others in the administration put an even harder edge on these arguments. The Vice President, his Chief of Staff, Lewis Libby, the Secretary of Defense and the Under Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Khalilzad at the National Security Council, John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, and Richard Perle, Chair of the civilian Defense Advisory Board all Advanced (35) a view that privileged traditional power-based considerations of national interest. But they went further in that they seized on what they saw as the fundamental structural condition of the post-Cold War period as the crux of their strategic vision: the historically unique preponderance of structural power held by the United States, i.e. its military primacy.

This notion actually goes back to the end of the first Bush administration and was revealed in one of the last strategic planning documents produced in 1992 and 1993 by then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Wolfowitz, also in the elder Bush's Defense Department. Libby, a member of Secretary of Defense Cheney's staff has been identified as the drafter of the Cheney document. (36) As in the contemporary formulation, the central idea was that the unchallenged superiority of U.S. power globally presented the United States with the opportunity to "shape" the international environment in such a way as to preserve for the foreseeable future, U.S. primacy. Or, as Khalilzad, a member of Cheney's staff in 1991 subsequently paraphrased the argument, "Precluding the rise of a hostile global rival is a good guide for defining what interests the United States should regard as vital.... It is a vital U.S. interest to preclude such a development--i.e., to be willing to use force if necessary for the purpose." (37)

Before 9/11, the ABM Treaty renunciation, the rejection of Kyoto, and persistent public criticism of treaty initiatives undertaken by Clinton administration concerning the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), international conventions on land mines, small arms trafficking, biological weapons, and the treaty establishing an International Criminal Court signaled an intention to set a course for American foreign policy that would be only minimally constrained if at all by the views of others in the system including U.S. allies in Europe and elsewhere. While these actions were criticized for their unilateralism, they stemmed from the logic of primacy as a basic strategic framework. After 9/11 the "Primacists" within the administration became increasingly forceful and open in their advocacy and rapidly filled in the operational and geostrategic details. Most significantly, the "War on Terrorism" has proved to be but one and perhaps not the central element in the strategy.

Beginning with his 2002 State of the Union Address, Mr. Bush made it clear that U.S. strategic concerns extended far beyond Osama bin Ladin and al Qaeda. In addition, the United States would "prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction." (38) Specifically, he singled out Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. He continued:

   States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis
   of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking
   weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and
   growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists,
   giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our
   allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of
   these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic....
   America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation's security.
   We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait
   on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril
   draws closer and closer. (39)

Thus Bush conflated the war on terrorism and the states that constituted the "axis of evil." They could provide material assistance to terrorists (40) and/or attack the United States and its allies--and that was enough. Moreover, the President indicated that his administration would not adopt a reactive posture to the threats he outlined. The operational details and geostrategic foci of the American policy towards terrorism and the axis of evil emerged incrementally throughout the spring and summer of 2002.

Early in 2002, the administration completed a Nuclear Posture Review that identified the new center of gravity of foreign and national security policy. The NPR envisions a far-reaching reconstitution of U.S. national security policy away from deterrence and towards the "conventionalizing" of nuclear weapons within a newly conceived triad of "useable" American military instruments including: "offensive strike weapons" among which the line between conventional and nuclear weapons is blurred if not erased, "active and passive defenses" including BMD, and a "responsive defense infrastructure" that encompasses the production of new, smaller, precision guided nuclear weapons with low collateral damage potential, and the resumption of nuclear testing. (41) In sum, the new NPR is infused with a forward leaning "strike" element that departs from the traditional paradigm of deterrence. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton among others, reiterated this theme publicly throughout the first half of 2002.

By mid-2002 if there was any doubt that the administration was prepared to move unilaterally and preemptively beyond the strategic paradigm of the Cold War, it was removed as Bush delivered a commencement address at the Military Academy in which he said:

      For much of the last century, America's defense relied on the
   Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment. In some cases,
   those strategies still apply. But new threats also require new
   thinking. Deterrence--the promise of massive retaliation against
   nations--means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no
   nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when
   unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver
   those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist
   allies.

      ... If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have
   waited too long.

      ... [T]he war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must
   take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the
   worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered,
   the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation
   will act.

      Our security will require transforming the military ... a
   military that must be ready to strike at a moment's notice in any
   dark corner of the world. And our security will require all
   Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for
   preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to
   defend our lives. (42)

Subsequently, the framework of the administration's "National Security Strategy" was previewed by "senior officials" of the administration to the Washington Post. The traditonal reliance upon containment, deterrence, and retaliation as the basis of U.S. policy would now give way to preemption. Though justified as necessary to deal with terrorists who "have no territory to defend," states possessing or aspiring to possess weapons of mass destruction, i.e. those operating along the axis of evil, were clearly at the top of the administration's preemptive first-strike list. (43) The axis of evil countries in general and Iraq in particular were now in the cross hairs of the Bush adminsitration.

Further, during the spring and summer of 2002, alternative approaches to attacking Saddam Hussein's regime ranging from an invasion involving 250,000 American troops to an airpower heavy attack on Baghdad designed to precipitate a rapid collapse of the Iraqi government and military were laid out in successive articles in The New York Times. (44) In addition there was an almost daily run of administration spokespersons emphasizing the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime, claiming Iraqi support for al Qaeda including harboring of former al Qaeda leaders, asserting the necessity of regime change in Iraq, and the moral basis for removing Saddam by force. More concretely, the Defense Department initiated a buildup of materiel in Qatar necessary to support a strike against Iraq thereby circumventing Saudi refusal to allow the United States to use their territory in such a conflict.

The public campaign culminated in a speech delivered by Vice President Cheney before the Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002 in which he made it abundantly clear that "the challenges to our country involve more than just tracking down a single person or one small group." (45) Saddam Hussein was portrayed as a far greater threat for:

   Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop
   ten percent of the world's oil reserves, Hussein could then be
   expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take
   control of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten
   America's friends throughout the region, and subject the United
   States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail. Simply stated,
   there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass
   destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against
   our friends, our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt
   that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future
   confrontations with his neighbors--confrontations that will
   involve both the weapons he has and the ones he will continue to
   develop with his oil wealth.

The prospect was not unlike that portrayed by members of the Truman Administration 50 years earlier at the onset of the Cold War. This time, however, there was a fundamental difference:

   As we face this prospect, old doctrines of security do not apply.
   In the days of the Cold War, we were able to manage the threat
   with strategies of deterrence and containment. But it's a lot
   tougher to deter enemies who have no country to defend. And
   containment is not possible when dictators obtain weapons of mass
   destruction, and are prepared to share them with terrorist who
   intend to inflict catastrophic casualties on the United States.

Rather, there was in Henry Kissinger's words approvingly quoted by Cheney: "an imperative for preemptive action."

The "imperative" did not, however, evoke consensus. It was widely speculated that within the administration only Secretary of State Colin Powell was opposed to unilateral preemptive action. Speculation aside, Powell's position, though nuanced, was that preemption

   is not an entirely new concept. Preemption has always been
   available as a tool of foreign policy and military doctrine....
   So pre-emption, or another way of putting it is prevention, is
   that when you see something coming at you, when it is such a clear
   and present danger, and you know what is going to happen, and you
   believe that you can make the case that it is going to happen, it
   is an option that is available to a president or to a leader....
   It must be used with great care and judiciousness.

Accordingly he preferred that the ground be prepared by consultation with Congress and trying yet again to reintroduce UN arms inspectors in Iraq. (46) Outside the inner circle of the Administration, however, there was much unease and even opposition.

Whereas the response to 9/11 within the United States and across Europe and beyond had been strong support for the Administration's "War on Terrorism," the call for war on Iraq generated some skepticism among both Republican and Democratic Party leaders in the Senate and beyond. These doubts found voice through former top officials of the elder Bush's administration, including former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and former Secretary of State James Baker who publicly counseled caution, consultation, and a more explicit effort by the administration to make the case to the Congress, the American people, and U.S. allies for an attack on Iraq. And after the Bush Administration opined that it did not need congressional approval to launch a preemptive war congressional unease changed to demands for consultation. A majority of the public agreed that Iraq was a sufficient threat to warrant a war, but only a quarter of Americans believed that the threat was serious enough to require an immediate strike. Furthermore, majority support disappeared if the war were undertaken without Congressional or allied support. (47)

Abroad, only British Prime Minister Tony Blair offered support and he did so in the face of considerable Labor Party skepticism and popular opposition in the United Kingdom. Otherwise, the administration's seeming fixation on war opened up transatlantic cleavages with the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder taking the lead in harshly criticizing U.S. policy. French President Jacques Chirac insisted that any war with Iraq should be launched only after UN Security Council debate and approval and only after Saddam Hussein flaunted UN inspection again. Vladimir Putin had been the first foreign leader to voice solidarity with the administration's War on Terrorism and in the process reoriented Russian foreign policy much closer to the United States. But he joined other European leaders in opposing an American preemptive strike. The Arab states, already furious with the United States over its support of Israel as the latter sought to crush the Palestinian Intifada on the West Bank and remove Yasser Arafat as the leader of the Palestinian Authority, expressed virtual unanimous opposition to the United States. Little enthusiasm was expressed elsewhere in the world.

Faced with this measure of doubt and outright opposition, the President insisted that he looked forward to a debate and then agreed to congressional hearings and some sort of congressional resolution expressing the sense of the Congress. In the meantime Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard B. Meyers were all on the weekend public affairs interview shows reiterating the Administration's gloomy assessment of Saddam Hussein's capabilities and intentions. Powell restated his position that preemption was a legal and necessary option, though he did not seem enthusiastic about that course of action. He was not optimistic about reintroducing arms inspectors, but indicated satisfaction that the President would be making his case before the United Nations and challenging the UN to take action against Iraq.

The President's September 12 address to the General Assembly broke no new ground concerning evidence for the Administration's case for early action against Iraq. However, the President did commit the United States to working with and through the Security Council in developing new resolutions designed to force compliance by Iraq with the weapons inspection regime originally established in 1991 at the end of the Gulf War. (48) This apparent commitment to a diplomatic track proved, however, illusory.

The fall and winter were characterized by intense and extensive diplomacy as the United States and Britain sought a Security Council Resolution authorizing military action against Iraq, and the French, Russians, and Germans rejected any resolution constituting a priori and automatic use of force in response to Iraqi non-compliance. Resolution 1441 was unanimously passed on November 8, 2002, finding Iraq in material breach of its obligations concerning inspections. The resolution did not, however, commit the Council to any enforcement action, should Iraq not comply with the Security Council's demand that inspectors be reintroduced and a full accounting of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction forthcoming. (49) Inspections were resumed by mid-November and an Iraqi report produced. By year's end, however, it was clear that the multilateral initiative had lost momentum and the administration's commitment to diminished, especially as it became clear that the UN inspectors were not finding evidence of continuing weapons of mass destruction programs. Indeed, Dr. Hans Blix, the UN's chief arms inspector and International Atomic Energy Agency Director Mohamed El Baradei rejected most of the U.S.-U.K. arguments and claims concerning Iraqi WMD by the end of January 2003. Nonetheless, ten days later on February 6th, Powell presented the U.S. case for war to enforce the UN resolution and remove the regime of Saddam Hussein.

By the end of February negotiations within the Security Council had reached an impasse as the United States and Britain circulated a draft resolution that would commit the Council to war and the French, Russians, and Germans countered with a memorandum urging prolonging the inspections and yet more Council deliberation before a commitment to force was undertaken. In the meantime, the U.S. and British defense establishments systematically increased operational capability around Iraq and escalated the enforcement of the post-1991 no-fly zones over Iraq as a cover for extensive air strikes against Iraqi air defense and its strategic communications infrastructure. (50) On March 17, 2003 the United States and Britain withdrew their Security Council draft resolution while reiterating their position that the UN Security Council Resolution and prior resolutions gave them sufficient justification for the use of force against Iraq. Three days later war began.

FOREIGN POLICY IN THE POST-9/11 WORLD

The question remains, however, whether there is anything to the Bush administration's strategy beyond preemptive action along the axis of evil and a global rolling-up of al Qaeda and terrorism in general. Richard Haass tried to argue that there was as he sought to frame the Bush Administration's foreign policy in terms of a doctrine that he called "Integration." This notion of integration was seen as encompassing a "consistent body of ideas and policies that guides the Bush administration's foreign policy." (51) The description of integration developed by Haass sounded, however, quite similar to the core concepts of the strategy of enlargement articulated by the Clinton administration:

   The best way to describe this ... is as a process of integration
   in which the United State works with others to promote ends that
   benefit everyone. Integration is the old balance of power turned
   on its head. It is an inclusive approach to international relations
   that involves creating ties between and among countries at all
   levels, from individuals to institutions to governments to
   multinational organizations. These ties link integrated countries
   in arrangements that help create and sustain a world consistent
   with the interests and values we share with our partners--such as
   the rule of law, open trade, the peaceful settlement of
   conflicts--and in which these values and their benefits are
   enjoyed as widely as possible. (52)

Haass's description of the implementation of the doctrine was no less Clintonesque in that it anticipated "multilateral initiatives" and "new partnerships" involving bilateral relations with specific countries, international institutions, the promotion of free trade, and development. U.S. policy "must continue to try to integrate Russia, China, India, the Arab world, African countries, and others into our efforts to create a better future based on our common values." (53) Furthermore, when it came to the limits of multilateralism, Haass took another page from Tony Lake's strategy of enlargement.

   [O]ur desire to work cooperatively with others does not imply a
   willingness on our part to agree to unsound efforts just because
   they are popular.... Nor can we forget that the United States has
   unique global responsibilities. If we are to meet them effectively,
   we may not always be able to go along with measures that many or
   even most others support. We will listen, learn, and modify
   policies when we hear compelling arguments. [But w]e will not go
   along simply to get along.

   [W]e have demonstrated that we can and will act alone when
   necessary. Our right to self-defense is unquestioned. (54)

Notwithstanding occasional echoes of the doctrine in the public statements of the Secretary of State, the doctrine of integration did not gain currency in the early Bush administration. Perhaps it was the extent to which integration echoed enlargement that led to its never gaining traction in the upper level bureaucratic struggle to define American foreign policy in the early months of the Bush administration. More likely, however, 9/11 had the same effect on the internal foreign policy discourse of the Bush administration, as did the Korean War on debates within the Truman administration at the dawn of the Cold War. The advocates of a more moderate containment lost out then to the global and militarized containment and rollback urged in NSC 68. The urgency and impetus for a less nuanced response was even greater after 9/11, for unlike the North Korean advance across the 38th parallel, the attack was on the homeland resulting in the bloodiest day on American soil since the Civil War. (55)

It became a commonplace after 9/11 to argue that it had changed everything. However, the elements of strategic thinking that dominated public discourse on foreign policy a year after those events were not born out of the catastrophe. Both the proponents and their arguments had been firmly ensconced at the upper levels of the Republican Party since the 1980s and more specifically, the first Bush administration. 9/11 changed the environment and context within which foreign policy debate within the administration proceeded and that policy presented to the American public and the world. But even before 9/11 those who held a harder and more traditional view of the world were dominant. The conflation of the War on Terrorism and the war in Iraq confirmed their dominance.

George W. Bush may not have been inclined or capable of articulating conceptually elegant strategic doctrines, but he gathered around him men and women who almost without exception held a darker view of the world than Bill Clinton. They may have agreed with their counterparts in the Clinton administration that the world was now characterized by a degree of globalization and interdependence that was unprecedented. They would certainly agree that the United States occupied a position of primacy within that structure given its military, technological, and economic superiority. Moreover, they would accept the idea that especially the latter economic superiority meant that American ideas about how best to organize political economies had gained a position of primacy as well.

Clinton's administration was inclined to see in this constellation of forces and conditions, opportunities--especially in the new salience of economic and trade relations--for enlargement, albeit residual problems of transition from the Cold War to Post-Cold War persisted and would require attention. In contrast, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and even Powell were inclined to see threats in the form of potential competitors--both state and non-state--who might gain or already had access to weapons of mass destruction. Opportunities did indeed exist to pursue the expanding integration of the world, but in the meantime, traditional considerations of national interest continued to operate throughout the international system. Under this view of global circumstances, the instrumentalities of American primacy should be employed--unilaterally if necessary--to preclude the emergence of competitors and to chasten those "rogue states" and terrorists who challenged and would attack their neighbors, America's allies, and the United States itself. The goal was to preserve the "unipolar moment." (56)

If these latter ideas were somewhat inchoate and lacking conceptual structure before the attacks of 9/11, they quickly crystallized in the necessities of the War on Terrorism. The Bush presidency immediately took on a definition and profile lacking before 9/11 and a president whose frequent malapropisms were fodder for late night comedy shows, morphed into a "wartime leader." A man who failed to gain a majority of the popular vote in his campaign and could claim the White House only at the behest of five justices of the Supreme Court appointed by his father, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon was suddenly the beneficiary of stratospheric approval ratings. The tortured verbalizations remained, but now they were glossed as evidence of his populist touch. (57)

More important, the prosecution of the War on Terrorism produced quick victories with relatively little exertion in Afghanistan during the fall and winter of 2001-2002. With the Taliban quickly defeated, al Qaeda dislodged, and the War on Terrorism taking on the attributes of a tedious, though dangerous manhunt, the President and his policy advisers shifted the focus to the Axis of Evil and the self-evident necessities of regime change including preemptive war in Iraq. The conflation of complex threats was thereby reduced to a focussed Manichean political and military struggle along the Axis of Evil. Foreign policy and strategic policy were, therefore, elaborated and re-centered within a policy space defined by the darker and more ominous view of the Primacists. Within that space, primacy was the reservoir of instrumentalities essential to the pursuit of the national interest and the preservation of primacy was the core element of that national interest.

The first month of the Iraq War proved to be a triumphant display of U.S. military operational virtuosity and Bush was able to declare that major combat was over on May 2, 2003. The ensuing weeks suggested, however, that the application of military power was not sufficient for the achievement of the Primacist vision of an American dominated world order. The Administration's rosy projections for the "liberation" and rapid transformation of post-Saddam Iraq into a democratic Arab state that would serve as a launch point for the democratization of the rest of the region proved to be a desert chimera. Rather, as guerilla-style resistance emerged and the summer heat set in, the administration's forecast was increasingly framed in terms of years of occupation and reconstruction of the crushed Iraqi economic infrastructure and reconstitution of a political culture roiling with ethnic and religious conflict.

The administration was not prepared to discuss, however, costs which were already running at $3-4 billion per month and a daily butcher's bill of one or two American military personnel killed by sniper attacks, rocket-propelled grenades, and explosions. (58) Moreover, weeks of searching for weapons of mass destruction failed to produce anything thereby opening the administration to persistent domestic criticism--as the 2004 election season opened--that the Bush administration had consciously distorted or even lied about the evidence of an immediate threat of WMD in the run-up to the war. The administration's response was to try and reframe the justification for the war in terms of human rights, i.e. the removal of a brutal regime--an odd argument, indeed, and one condescendingly discounted by the administration's National Security Advisor, when she had previously critiqued the Clinton administration's foreign policy as Wilsonian.

It remained to be seen whether the imperatives of nation building and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, the demands of Middle East peacemaking belatedly undertaken via the "roadmap" to peace, and yet another bloodbath in a failed African state--Liberia--would shake the realist world view and unilateralist impulses of the Bush administration. By mid-2003, the administration was openly calling for greater multilateral support and assistance in all these areas.

Bill Clinton had applied liberal internationalist architectural principles as he tried to open the walls of a Doge's palace onto the marketplace of the city. Initially, George W. Bush seemed intent on relocating the palace to an impregnable fortress on a new building site above the city. But once construction was underway, difficulties with the site--ignored or discounted when plans were drawn up--imposed serious and perhaps intractable constraints, costs began to escalate, and the number of carpenters and masons assigned the job proved insufficient. A call for help and financial support was hastily issued to other contractors who had been summarily dismissed during the planning phase of the project. It seemed likely that they would demand changes in the plans before accepting sub-contracts. In sum, mid-way through Bush's lease on the property, the schedule had begun to slip and the erasures and emendations to the blueprints threatened to render the original design unrecognizable and incoherent. The integrity of whatever structure eventually emerged was increasingly problematic.

NOTES

(1) See, for example the euphoric proclamations of a "new world order" during the first Bush Administration.

(2) Richard Haass, "Defining U.S. Foreign Policy in a Post-Post-Cold War World, April 22, 2002. Department of State. http://www.state.gov/s/p/rem/9632.htm.

(3) See Condoleezza Rice, "Promoting the National Interest," Foreign Affairs 79(2000): 45-62 and Robert B. Zoellick, "A Republican Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs 79 (2000): 63-78.

(4) Anthony Lake, "From Containment to Enlargement," Speech given at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, September 21, 1993 and reprinted in Alvin Z. Rubinstein, et al, eds., The Clinton Foreign Policy Reader: Presidential Speeches with Commentary (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000): 20-27.

(5) "From Containment to Enlargement."

(6) Nye first made an argument for the ascendancy of American "soft power" in Bound to Lead." The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990) in response to the "declinist" arguments of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The character of fully dimensionalized American hard and soft power ascendancy is most recently explored by Nye in The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

(7) Lake, "From Containment to Enlargement." The position was predicated on what Lake calls "pragmatic Neo-Wilsonianism": "... our goal in the era is to expand democracy and take advantage of the democratic tide running in the world. I believe that you best promote general goals not through absolute doctrines, but through a determined pragmatism that then can give substance to the general principles. Principles without pragmatism is posturing, and pragmatism without principles becomes rudderless opportunism." Ibid.

(8) Quoted by Richard Haass, Director of Policy Planning for the Department of State in several speeches in early 2002. See, for example, Haass, "Defining U.S. Foreign Policy in a Post-Post-Cold War World."

(9) Haass, U.S. "Russian Relations in the Post-Post-Cold War World," June 1, 2002. http://www.state.gov/s/p/rem/10643.htm

(10) Haass, ibid.

(11) "Myths of Peace-keeping," Statement before the Subcommittee on International Security, International Organizations, and Human Rights of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, June 24, 1993. Dispatch. 4: 464-467.

(12) William J. Clinton, "Confronting the Challenges of a Broader World," Address to the General Assembly of the United Nations, September 27, 1993, Dispatch, September 27, 1993, 4:652 and especially Albright, "Use of Force in a Post-Cold War World," Address at the National War College, National Defense University, September 23, 1993, Dispatch, September 27, 1993, 4: 667.

(13) Michael R. Gordon and Thomas L. Friedman, "Details of U.S. Raid in Somalia: Success So Near, a Loss So Deep." The New York Times 25 Oct. 1993, late ed.: A1.

(14) For a more detailed discussion of PDD-25's genesis and content, See "Multilateralism Abandoned? The US, the UN, and Peace Operations After the Cold War" by James K. Oliver and Joann Kingsley, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association Toronto, Canada, March 19, 1997.

(15) Albright, "Building a Consensus on International Peace-keeping," Statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, October 20, 1993, Dispatch, November 15, 1993, 4: 790-791.

(16) Albright, "Myths of Peace-Keeping."

(17) See "Special Supplement: opinions on the legality of NATO's attack against the FRY," in United Nations Law Reports, 1 May 1999, 33:9, 112-124 and also, "Editorial Comment: new international law norms sought in light of NATO actions," United Nations Law Reports, 1 April 1999, 33:8, 109-110.

(18) "From Containment to Enlargement," p. 26.

(19) Ibid.

(20) US Air Force, CENTAF, Assessment and Analysis Division, "Operation Iraqi Freedom--By the Numbers," Unclassified Version, 30 April 2003, pp. 3 and 7-8.

(21) Ibid.

(22) See Eric Schmitt, "U.S. to Outline 60-Day Plan for Iraq Rebuilding Projects," The New York Times, July 23, 2003: A10

(23) "Clinton's Opening Statement and Responses at His News Conference," The New York Times, March 8, 1997: 10.

(24) See Lake's linkage of economics and trade with security in "From Containment to Enlargement" and even earlier, Clinton's speech at American University, February 26, 1993, "Liberal Internationalism: America and the Global Economy," in Rubinstein, et al, eds., The Clinton Foreign Policy Reader: Presidential Speeches with Commentary, 8-14, esp. 12-13.

(25) Compare for example David Halberstam's assessment of the "thin" foreign policy "bench" of the Clinton Administration in War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals, New York: Scribner, 2001 and I.M. Destler's analysis of the economic team assembled by Clinton in "Foreign Economic Policy Making under Bill Clinton," in James M. Scott, editor, After the End: Making U.S. Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War World, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998: 89-107.

(26) For a superb overview of the Clinton's difficult relationship with Yeltsin and the Russians, see Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy, New York: Random House, 2002.

(27) See for example, "Speech by the President on the Eve of President Jiang Zemin's State Visit," October 1997; "On US-China Relations in the Twenty-First Century," June 11, 1998; and "Troublesome Times: Staying the Course," April 7, 1999, all in Rubinstein, et al: 119-138.

(28) Haass, "Defining U.S. Foreign Policy in a Post-Post-Cold War World."

(29) See Report of the Secretary of Defense to the President and the Congress, Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 1992: 1-19 and The Regional Defense Strategy, Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 1993.

(30) See Zalmay Khalilzad, From Containment to Global Leadership? America & the World After the Cold War (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1995): 6-7. Khalilzad is now a senior member of the Bush Administration's National Security Council and Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan and to the Iraqi opposition.

(31) Khalilzad echoes here at a policy level, the theoretical arguments of the neo-realists such as Joseph M. Greicco, "Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperation: A Realist Critique of the Newest Liberal Institutionalism," International Organization, 1988, 42:485-507 and Greicco, "The Relative Gains Problem for International Cooperation: Comment," American Political

Science Review, 1993, 87: 729-735.

(32) Haass, "Defining U.S. Foreign Policy in a Post-Post-Cold War Era."

(33) Rice's term in "Promoting the National Interest": 47.

(34) Ibid.

(35) Nicholas Lemann, "The Next World Order," The New Yorker, April 1, 2002: 42-48. Lemann's piece is an invaluable survey of thinking in the Bush Administration as of spring, 2002.

(36) The Regional Defense Strategy. An account of the drafting and content of the document is available in Lemann, "The Next World Order," 42-48.

(37) Khalilzad, From Containment to Global Leadership? : 21 and 25.

(38) "The President's State of the Union Address," January 29, 2002 at http://www.whitehouse. gov/news/releases/2002/01/print/20020129-11. html.

(39) Ibid.

(40) Though the extent--if any--of this assistance remained a matter of dispute at the time of this writing.

(41) See William M. Arkin, "Secret Plan Outlines the Unthinkable," Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2002, www.latimes.com/news. Accessed March 10, 2002.

(42) Remarks by the President at 2002 Graduation Exercise of the United States Military Academy West Point, New York, June 1, 2002. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html.

(43) Quoted in Thomas E. Ricks and Vernon Loeb, "Bush Developing Military Policy of Striking First: New Doctrine Addresses Terrorism," Washington Post, June 10, 2002, p. AI at http:///www.washingtonpost.com. Accessed, June 10, 2002.

(44) Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld claimed annoyance at the leaks, but seemed to enter into the public discussion by criticizing the air weighted option.

(45) All quotes from: "Remarks by the Vice President to the Veterans of Foreign Wars 103rd Convention," August 26, 2002. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/08/print/20020826.html.

(46) Excerpts from an interview with Secretary of State Colin Powell in The New York Times, September 8, 2002:18 and James Dao, "Powell Defends a First Strike As Iraq Option," The New York Times, September 8, 2002:1.

(47) See Adam Clymer and Janet Elder, "Poll Finds Unease on Terror Fight and Concerns About War on Iraq," The New York Times, September 8, 2002: A1.

(48) Department of State, E-mail Listserve, "The President's Remarks before the United Nations General Assembly," September 12, 2002.

(49) The United States and the United Kingdom would subsequently argue that 1441 was itself a sufficient warrant for the use of force--a position rejected by the French and Russians.

(50) The attacks had been expanded in mid-2002 and continued throughout the run-up to the war. Michael R. Gordon, "U.S. Air Raids in '02 Prepared for War In Iraq," The New York Times, July 20, 2003: 1, 12.

(51) Haass, "Defining U.S. Foreign Policy in a Post-Post-Cold War World."

(52) Haass, "US-Russian Relations in the Post-Post-Cold War World."

(53) Haass, "Defining U.S. Foreign Policy in a Post-Post-Cold War World."

(54) Ibid.

(55) As the initial roll-up of conventional Iraqi military forces proceeded throughout April of 2003, Richard Haass left the Administration to accept a position at the centrist Council on Foreign Relations.

(56) For an academic presentation of the argument, see Michael Mastanduno, "Preserving the Unipolar Moment: Realist Theories and U.S. Grand Strategy after the Cold War," International Security, (Spring 1997), 21:4, 49-88 and reprinted in Michael E.Brown, et al, editors, America's Strategic Choices, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1997.

(57) For a skeptical European view of this process, see Gerard Baker, "Bush the Weak Turns into Global Commander," Financial Times, September 6, 2002: 6.

(58) Indeed, the Administration's stonewalling of the question of costs and the extent of US commitment led, in late July, to a testy exchange between members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and representatives of the Administration including Wolfowitz, Joshua Bolten, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and General John Keane, the acting chief of staff of the Army. See Eric Schmitt, "Senators Assail 2 Officials for Lack of Postwar Details," The New York Times, July 30, 2003: A9.

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