Remarks by
Brent Scowcroft,
Forum for International Security
9/11 a Year On: America's Challenges in a Changed World
United States Institute of Peace Conference
September 5, 2002
Thank
you very much, Dick. I want to congratulate you and Chet in
steering this wonderful institute into the more vital issues of
the day. I'm proud to be associated with you in any
respect.
It's a great pleasure to kick off this conference on America's challenges in a changed world after 9/11. It's a huge topic and as keynoter I will not attempt to cover everything.
In fact, it reminds me of the story of the couple who had taken a vacation in Scotland and they landed and rented a car, drove out into
the countryside and promptly got lost. After driving around for some time they saw this little old man sitting at an intersection whittling on a piece of wood. So they said, "Excuse me, sir. Could you tell us the shortest way to Aberdeen?" He whittled a minute, looked up, and said, "Folks, if you want the shortest way to Aberdeen you wouldn't start from here."
Anyway, I propose this morning to be something of a scene-setter for the great program that you have in front of you today. To set the scene of a changed world we must ask at least two questions. The first is change from what? The second is how much is the change in the world and how much of the change is in us?
In the first decade after the Cold War, relieved from the awesome pressure of nuclear holocaust, we tended to treat foreign policy sort of like a charity—something we could engage in or not as the whim struck us. We were no longer threatened, even remotely, and we essentially drifted without any deep inquisition into what might be going on in the world. Indeed Frank Fukiyama published a book during this period, "The End of History", in which he forecast the triumph of liberal democracy, market economies, and the absence of conflict.
What was going on in this period before 9/11? In particular, I want to mention two phenomenon developing contrarily but in some respects interactively. The first was globalization, primarily the facts rather than the policy of globalization but both are involved.
Borders are becoming porous. The old notion of the Treaty of Westphalia in which national borders are an absolute barrier to the outside world from what goes on inside, that notion is crumbling under the pressure of international capital flows, communication—not only press, but television and all those kinds of things, environment, and conscious developments such as Kyoto, International Criminal Court and things like that, are changing our world dramatically.
In the United States and Western Europe and other developed countries, globalization was broadly seen as a good, enabling progress and prosperity in an integrating world. But the world was very different from the earlier world say in 1945 when the United Nations was founded. It had 51 members. It now has 190. The bulk of these new members are poor and weak, and for them globalization is the onslaught of a bewilderingly mélange of forces disrupting their lives, their culture, their values, and the ability of their poor governments to provide for them in the way that Westphalia assumed.
For many of the people for whom globalism is seen as a threat, the term globalism is synonymous with the United States because we're the ones who are carrying the flag. The McDonalds, the movies, the television. It is the onslaught of American culture which is taken to be globalism.
The contrary and yet associated phenomenon which is going on is the political tendency in some societies to break up into ever-smaller, more homogenous, more intolerant political entities. Perhaps the connection here is groups seeking purity against the onslaught of alien forces. In any case, this has been going on during this period and these, I believe, are a breeding ground, especially globalization, for terrorism.
We didn't see it, partly because we tended to see terrorism as regional or a response to specific grievances, not existential.
During this period, however, we did see the dynamism of Asia during the 1990s and its vulnerability to globalization in the form of the extreme of capital flows in the crisis of '97-'98. What we have not really noticed, however, is a growing ability of China as it modernized to turn out quality industrial products, coupled with the lowest wage rate almost anywhere in the world. This is a phenomenon which would dramatically change Asia and threaten the economies even of the Asia Tigers. On the other hand, of course, with WTO the Chinese market may finally come to be highly attractive. This is a dramatic change.
Our gradual estrangement with Europe continued during the '90s as the Europeans became more intent on integration, turned their gaze primarily inward, and the United States reacted by tending to favor unilateral approaches.
During the '90s we began increasingly to ignore Russia unless we wanted something from them.
Then there were the holdover issues. The two Koreas, Taiwan, India-Pakistan, and the Middle East conflict, which threatened during this period as they have before and since.
Into this world first came the Bush Administration and then 9/11. The great change of 9/11 I believe was in the U.S. rather than in the world.
For us, it was a huge discontinuity, partly because we didn't see it coming and partly because it was a huge departure. It was the first time in generations that Americans have felt vulnerable. It was new for us. Even in World War II, while Pearl Harbor was a horror, Hawaii was a long ways away, it wasn't a state yet, and for most Americans there was not the personal sense of vulnerability. That vunerability is new to us, almost uniquely in the world.
In addition, the perpetrators were non-state actors for whom the traditional notions of deterrence and retaliation either didn't apply or took very different forms.
Finally, there was the suicidal component which, in addition to the horror of it, is very difficult to combat.
The change in the United States was immediate. First the last vestiges of what we call the Vietnam Syndrome disappeared. There was virtually no objection to our sending forces into Afghanistan. We see American flags everywhere now, and none of them are burning. That is a dramatic change over the previous 30 years.
Our hero now is no longer the Wall Street hotshot who makes his first million long before he's 30 years old but the policemen, the firemen who go back into the burning buildings one more time.
After 9/11 there was a great coming together in the world. In Europe the French, of all people, said "now we are all Americans." NATO invoked Article 5 for the first time. The Russians, Chinese, Pakistan, Iran, Sudan—indications of cooperation came from around the world. This spirit helped us to get through phase one of the war on terrorism, which I think was a great military success. It is probably the only military phase in this war on terrorism—which is part of the problem that we face. Because we've also been engaging in military transformation, and the Afghan war showed the awesomeness of that transformation. But it is unlikely to be applicable to subsequent phases because they are unlikely to be military in the sense Afghanistan was. There are not going to be many more volunteers to be the next Taliban. The war is going to be primarily a war of intelligence and we're not nearly as high tech in the area of human intelligence as we are in our military.
This is a war, now in the intelligence phase, which we cannot win by ourselves. We cannot do it. We have to have the cooperation of friends and allies, in capital flows, in terrorist flows. We need the help of every service because our enemy is shadowy, elusive, not playing by any of the rules that we know how to utilize so well.
The nature of our intelligence task in this part of the war is conceptually simple but high tech in a new way. Whenever terrorists talk, whenever they move, whenever they spend money, whenever they get money they leave traces, and theoretically we ought to be able to pick up those traces.
There are several problems. How do you pick them up? Then how do you separate those from the millions of other traces from people going about their daily lives? And how do you do all of that while respecting the privacy of the other millions? That is a problem, partly of technology, and we need to focus on it very deeply.
I'm not going to talk about homeland security, but it is interesting that for the first time in 200 years we now are setting up a Department of Homeland Security. We've never had one before. Why? Because early on we were protected by two great oceans, and lately by our power projection capabilities and we have assumed we could keep conflict away from the United States.
Several problems are beginning to arise in the war on terrorism. Cooperation is waning. The Europeans charge that in essence we stiffed them in Afghanistan, did not accept or utilize the forces they offered until much of the conflict had been completed. We said thanks, we could do it by ourselves. Likewise with other issues, whether it's the conflict in the Middle East, a second Intafada; whether it is Iraq. These frictions are interfering with the concentration on the war on al Qaeda.
Phase one is virtually over, although mopping up in Afghanistan will take a long time and nationbuilding, an essential part of it, will take even longer. The Administration has not explained the strategy for phase two the way it did for the Afghan phase. Last week there was a cartoon in the Financial Times which showed a billboard saying "America's Most Wanted". On the billboard was Osama bin Laden, which a workman was pasting over with a picture of Saddam Hussein.
The Administration is no longer talking about terrorism with a global reach. That's important in several respects. There are all kinds of terrorists. They're all repugnant and we need to deal with them all. But we cannot deal with them all at once. By dropping the phrase that the President began with, terrorism with a global reach, we make all terrorism equal, and dissipate our ability to concentrate. It makes the problem, if we take it seriously, almost unmanageable.
Finally, except on the East Coast, 9/11 is fading as a galvanizing concept.
Can we win the war on terrorism? Yes, I think we can, in the sense that we can win the war on organized crime. There is going to be no peace treaty on the battleship Missouri in the war on terrorism, but we can break its back so that it is only a horrible nuisance and not a paralyzing influence on our societies.
But to win it, will require close cooperation in a worldwide campaign and it will require perseverance, patience, and focus. In the mean time, of course, the world goes on. All of the other problems which preceded 9/11 have not gone away, threatening to divert our attention to what is clearly the predominant problem we face. We must learn to walk and chew gum at the same time.
The longstanding conflicts—the two Koreas, Taiwan, Israel-Palestine—they all are as threatening as they have ever been to disrupt this world of ours. India-Pakistan came very close to hostilities recently and the notion that all terrorists are equal, together with the focus on preemption could play into the hands of the Indians.
Incidentally, just as an aside, it is interesting to compare Kashmir and the West Bank. In many respects the conflicts have a great deal in common. The Indians and the Israelis are status quo powers on the territory in question. They want the violence to stop and, if it does, they're quite happy with the situation the way it is. It is the Palestinians and the Pakistanis who resent the status quo and want to overturn it. That makes for a very, very difficult conflict.
There's a new element in the Middle East and that's Al Jazeera television. The Arab world has complained for over a decade about its "street," and now they must be careful about how it reacts to events. It very well may be real now because Al Jazeera plays night after night, day after day, pictures of Israeli tanks smashing Palestinian homes and so on. So there may really be building a "street" reaction in the region which is to be feared.
In Europe, after the surge of 9/11, relations have resumed their decline. There's a book which will be out this fall which discusses what it argues is a return to great power politics of the late 19th and 20th Century and that one of the fundamental conflicts is likely to be between the U.S. and Europe. I think that's probably extreme, but not impossible. What to me this world demands is U.S.-European cooperation, close cooperation. Simply assuming it is not nearly enough.
After a very bad first year with the Bush Administration China is beginning to be viewed with more balance. The transition of leadership seems to be going okay and the Olympics should be a very positive influence over the next several years. There will always be rocks in the road but that relationship looks better than it did a year ago.
Russia is a bright spot and I think it shows the value of personal politics. The improvement in Russian relations is largely a result of a personal rapport between President Bush and President Putin, and in fact it has not fully penetrated the bureaucracy on either side. It's not clear to me exactly who Putin is but it appears we have an opportunity to attract Russia toward the West.
There are a great many issues that I have not discussed, such as Japan, NATO, Latin America. Latin America in the early '90s seemed to be the model for Fukiyama's book about the triumph of democracy and market economies. The outlook, of late, does not look nearly so bright.
One last word on terrorism. We can only win the war on terrorism on the offensive. Homeland security can reduce the impact of terrorism, but winning requires us to take the war to the terrorists.
We need also to work on the predisposing factors that I alluded to behind the terrorist organizations themselves. We need to help those countries and peoples still struggling to find their way in what for many of them is an alien world. Just more economic aid will not suffice.
We have to try to find new ways to reach out a hand to help these peoples and small countries into the 21st Century so that the promise of technology and an integrated world can become a blessing for all rather than a curse for most.
Thank you very much.
