Chester A. Crocker
Chairman
USIP Board of Directors

August 20, 1998

Introduction

It has become commonplace to bemoan a sense of disorientation in US foreign policy ever since Mikhail Gorbachev 'took away our enemy', as he said he would. We have a position of power and influence in world affairs that--as James Schlesinger recently put it--has no historic parallel. No one can come close to our assets of "hard power", the military reach and technological mastery so vividly displayed in Desert Storm. And, no one approaches our assets of so-called "soft power", including the standing of American ideals, civilian technologies, culture, business entrepreneurship and organizational know-how.

As a result, the opportunities open to us are simply stunning:

• opportunities to use the current period of U.S. preponderance to lay the foundations for the next phase of global politics when U.S. relative power advantages may have shrunk;
• opportunities to build global institutions and regimes compatible with U.S./Western values and interests;
• opportunities to engage former adversaries, helping them succeed as societies based on law, and integrating them into the global network of obligations and responsibilities;
• opportunities to enlarge the sphere of successful market democracies;
• opportunities to remove long-standing bleeding wounds and old sores from the agenda, as in Ireland and the Mideast.

Yet this exciting strategic landscape appears to bore us. As a government and a society, we do not seem to get the point. Examples abound: the agony of getting funding for our beleaguered foreign affairs agencies (whose budgets in real terms are 50% below where they were in the mid- 1980s), the closing of diplomatic and intelligence posts, the petty battles over adequate support for the International Monetary Fund, our overdue bills from--and declining clout in-- the UN, our wobbly posture on Kosovo, our inept management of the South Asian balance where two new nuclear powers just emerged, and the near collapse of US policy in the Middle East.

Popular explanations for this state of affairs point to the peculiar qualities of this Administration, this Congress, the turned-off state of public opinion, our country's historic, cultural need for a threatening enemy or an enticing frontier, the global decline of governments (including ours) and the rise of non-state actors in the private and non-governmental sectors. Certainly, there is something volatile about public opinion. House Speaker Newt Gingrich captured it well at a speech at Georgetown University last fall when he described Americans as "a romantic and often dangerous people who are sometimes confused but have an enormous reservoir of energy and drive." Continuing, he said, "when we get excited, we rush around with more energy than any other people on the planet, and when we are not excited, we all go to the lake. Just when you get used to the fact that we are at the lake, we come rushing back over something."

I will come back to some of these explanations later. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that as we approach the end of the bloodiest century in human history, we are missing the chance to build a better and more durable global order. Rather than institutionalizing our vision, we too often act on narrow, parochial grounds--giving sermons to all, urging others to play roles and run risks we prefer to avoid, hectoring and intervening in the affairs of others, but not leading, not paying, and not listening. Before a hostile backlash against US policies and interests becomes firmly established (it is already visible in the Middle East and the Balkans), we should examine what can be done to get America's hands back on the steering wheel. The real question is whether a great nation enjoying primacy is capable of behaving strategically, thinking and acting as if its performance mattered. I want to explore that question with you, identify some of the obstacles to strategic thinking, review whether strategies are even possible or desirable, and conclude with my case for a new kind of strategic thinking.

The Modern Meaning of Strategy

The place to start is by examining the very concept of

. In origin, of course, strategy is about war and military campaigns. The term itself comes from the Greek word for "army", but Martin van Creveld reminds us that it is also the basis for our modern word "stratagem." Strategies are what you need when you are conducting one side of a conflict. Since the other side also has a brain, strategies interact in what van Creveld calls "a complex, dynamic interaction between two opposing minds."

This requires a particular way of thinking, a talent for deceit, surprise, maneuver, feints, and often unexpected or indirect approaches to the objective at hand. Napoleon's dispersed marches and concentrated battles made him a champion of the strategic art.

Strategy, as discussed by von Bulow and von Clausewitz, became the province of general staffs. During the Cold War, it was the province of defense and foreign policy intellectuals. Kissinger did strategy. When he asked his staff his favorite question--"what is your conceptual framework"?--he was asking, what is the strategy? Today, the term is used loosely. People talk of their strategy for losing weight, catching trout, planning retirement, and reducing taxes. I will stick to the place of strategy in international politics.

Some would say that strategy is to war what foreign policy is to diplomacy. I use the term "strategy" more broadly as the overall game plan for achieving goals through the coherent use of all available resources and delivery systems. Strategies are built around a clear sense of priorities, a careful analysis of the time and place for using power and influence, and a laser-like focus on getting the job done. As on the battlefield, the point is to bring overwhelming influence to bear at the crucial point so that we shape events. We have learned once again this year in the showdown with Saddam Hussein, that even when diplomacy is backed by power it is unlikely to be effective unless there is an overarching strategic framework. Foreign policy is effective when (a) power in all its forms is (b) harnessed to a good strategy and (c) translated into action by creative diplomacy. You need all three--power, diplomacy and a strategy for harnessing them together and putting them in motion. Otherwise, our efforts are just motion, words, pressures, threats--in sum, power without context.

You may be wondering why I am going through all this. The role of strategy is obvious to anyone born before 1989. But ever since the end of the Cold War removed our old strategic paradigm, we have sometimes acted as if it is possible to have foreign policies and diplomatic initiatives without first identifying the external challenges and opportunities we face and developing strategies to meet them. Neither a basketball coach nor a chess master would do that.

Let me be more concrete. During the Cold War, "containment" of the USSR served as an over- arching strategic framework - a defensive one--incorporating specific, operational strategies: e.g., intermediate-range missile deployment in Western Europe, naval presence in the Indian Ocean, support for anti-communist freedom fighters in places like Afghanistan (the so-called 'Reagan Doctrine' which actually began under Jimmy Carter), backing the Helsinki process for promotion of human rights in eastern Europe and the USSR, bolstering friendly governments with targeted economic and security assistance, and maintaining US leadership of the Middle East peace process.

During the Cold War, the task of our strategists was to integrate these individual strategies into a coherent, mutually-reinforcing framework. We grappled, sometimes battling, over this question of coherence. How, for example, should we think about regional conflicts in places like Southern Africa, Central America, Cyprus or Kashmir? Was the basic problem in Moscow or in local and regional political dynamics? The answer to these questions had profound consequences for our diplomacy and our resource allocation decisions.

Having a clearly established strategic doctrine did not mean an end to debates about our foreign policy. Rather, it framed those debates and channeled them into discrete pathways. Strategy, after all, is about resources: goals and objectives must bear some relationship to the resources made available. Once again, this is a fairly obvious point. But perhaps because of our unique global standing--as well as our post-Cold War hubris--we sometimes behave as if the law of gravity no longer affects us. Well, it still does. The question is, why have we stopped thinking strategically?

Obstacles to Strategic Thinking

Today, we have stopped thinking strategically because we perceive that there is (a) no unifying challenge or threat, (b) no self-evident basis for establishing priorities amongst objectives, (c) no focus for mobilizing resources, and (d) no discipline for deciding on where and how to deploy them. Instead, we appear to

priorities much as we might select a sport utility vehicle, without the complicating presence of an adversary intellect. The wars and conflicts we consider engaging in are

matters, and the challenges we prepare for are the ones we choose the contest at the places where we want to contest them.

Gorbachev really left us rudderless. Some foreign policy pundits, in their quest for functional substitutes for the evil empire, seek civilizational adversaries--Islamic ones, for example, or the more generic ethnic warlords, or rogue state leaders ... ideally, perhaps, some mediagenic blend as in Muslim, ethnic rogue! The loss of any Eurasian geopolitical hegemony has persuaded some to assign this role to China, but this remains a minority view and so far the Chinese have been too smart to fall into the trap of provoking an American 'containment' strategy.

It is instructive also to look at the trend among military and defense intellectuals writing enthusiastically about the so-called "revolution in military affairs" where we see another example of our strategic disorientation. This "revolution" is about the uniquely American mastery of sensors and information and communication technologies that give us potential control of every battle space where an enemy might concentrate his forces into identifiable platforms, systems, and formations. These are the high tech wars we apparently want to plan for, to buy hardware for, to fight and to win.

Now, I like to win as much as the next guy. And, it is reassuring to have the prospect that we can deter or defeat large-scale, conventional aggression. But, strategically speaking, who are the primary bad guys out there? Can we expect that serious rivals, at least in a regional sense, will agree to fight us on our preferred electronic battlefield? British scholar Lawrence Freedman points to the risk that the US will well-prepared for the wars we want to fight and ill-equipped for the most likely challenges. Freedman warns of a coming "asymmetry" between the strategy of the strong and that of the weak (terrorists, rogues, proliferators of WMD, guerrillas, criminal mafias, warlords tearing states apart so they can live off the pieces). Can we deter or defeat the most likely threats if we concentrate only on what George Shultz once called "the fun wars"? A recent study of the threat and use of force since 1989 by the Washington-based Henry Stimson Center and the National Research Council concluded that our leaders rarely make potent and credible threats without losing public support. That is especially the case where there are no precedents for US action, where perceived interests are abstract rather than tangible, and where uncertainty prevails about battle lines and local actors. We are seeing it right now in Kosovo, despite the lessons one might have thought we learned in Bosnia during the first half of the 1990s. The bottom line of this reasoning is that the US still needs to decide whether it wishes to be a participant or an observer in shaping a global order.

But there are even more obstacles to strategic thinking, as I noted earlier. One of those, clearly, is the lack of sustained leadership from the executive branch. If we wish to shape events in overseas problem areas, leadership is required to generate and sustain the political will to make the case domestically and, then, see the job through. This means grasping the nettle of providing hands-on coordination and coherence of action among the multiplicity of actors and parties (governmental, inter-governmental, NGOs, and so on) which are often present in contemporary problems. Much depends on sustained, competent leadership and a determination to translate words and hopes into reality. In other words, the key is a reputation for accepting the burdens of leadership. This is why it is somewhat unsettling to hear our president imply that we will not tolerate further horrendous violence in Central Africa: our performance there during the 1994-97 years is a case study of how not to lead. The problem, however, in this post-Soviet age is that it is hard to put a price on failures of leadership. Accountability and discipline have gone.

Another obstacle is public opinion. According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, in 1997 only two of the top fifty stories followed "very closely" by the general public concerned foreign affairs (Iraq and the Japanese hostages in Peru) - unless you consider that the exploration of Mars, foreign campaign contributions to the Democratic Party, sexual harassment in the Army, the murder of Gianni Versace, or the death of Princess Diana represent "foreign affairs." Longitudinally, over the 1986-97 period, only one out of the top ten news stories followed very closely was foreign affairs--the War in the Gulf. The others? Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, trials, domestic disasters and riots, and gas prices. Even for the serious news consumer, we are seeing a relative rise in the salience of personal and local issue politics: multiculturalism, bioethical dilemmas, Internet censorship, and smoking regulations. The other morning, I listened in on a 15-minute National Public Radio special about the growth of local campaigns to ban ice cream trucks from quiet, upscale suburban streets. The threat? Strangers (pedophiles) and electronic jingles (noise pollution) in our backyard. The trivialization of American public opinion is at hand.

The third challenge to strategic thinking is the mounting complexity of the global arena and of our own political structure. Consider a few examples. The IMF and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta conduct more foreign policy than the State Department on certain issues. California, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont are conducting "U.S. foreign policy" through state and local government sanctions campaigns directed toward Indonesia, Burma, Nigeria, and Switzerland. In response, U.S. firms have hired non-governmental organizations to go into court in hopes of obtaining a ruling upholding Federal primacy in foreign policy under the Constitution. Neither the Executive Branch nor Congress is eager to touch it. Information technology-empowered activist networks are poised to launch fresh campaigns bridging NGO constituencies across a wide range of fields: human rights, labor, environment, peace and conflict, and development issues. A widely cited example is the Brazil-headquartered Association for Progressive Communication comprising 25 member networks to over 50,000 NGOs and individuals in 133 countries.

Or, to take another illustration, consider the role of some 38 NGO's as well as 6 special governmental and inter-governmental envoys seeking through different channels and methods to promote conflict resolution and peace in Burundi. Well-meaning people are tripping over one another, but one wonders if they are not also letting serious governments off the hook. Who leads? Who legitimizes or screens third-party interventions and who organizes physical intervention if diplomacy requires backing with coercive force?

The information technology revolution is, in itself, a complicating factor for strategy, and not only in the military sphere. Is information technology a neutral factor which empowers equally all who use it: terrorists and governments, narcotraffickers and the Drug Enforcement Administration, good guys and bad guys, civil society activists and major financial institutions as well as governments? Probably not. Walter Wriston was more likely right when he observed at an April 1997 conference on "virtual diplomacy" sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Peace: "Information technology is profoundly disturbing to power structures everywhere. Information technology breaks the power of literate classes just as Gutenberg broke the power of the monks."

If we combine this powerful notion with an analysis of who is best placed to exploit the resulting vacuum and fill the space vacated by more traditional, hierarchically-organized entities, we are on the road to exploring the real strategic impact of information technology. The campaign to ban the use of anti-personnel land mines is Exhibit A in this regard. But the phenomenon has redefined the playing field for the dispute in Chiapas, it is transforming the process by which international financial agencies such as the World Bank or the Overseas Private Investment Corporation approve loans to developing countries, and it empowers activists everywhere to conduct their strategies. Consider the example of women's groups mobilizing against foreign investment or lending in Taliban-governed Afghanistan in protest against that group's policies. Can sanctions against Saudi Arabia be far away?

Is it Still Possible and Desirable for America to Have Strategies?

Maybe all these obstacles should tell us something. Maybe the moment has come to look at the alternative proposition that it is no longer either

or

to have national strategies conducted by our national government. Martin van Creveld takes the rather extreme position that strategy, like war and the state itself, is becoming obsolete due to the factor of military technology and the rise of new, non-state actors fighting on terrain and in ways that can only destroy a conventional army from within. War itself, in this scenario, is replaced by massacres, bombings, and terror. Moreover, one is entitled to ask,

? Without an "other side", what are we worried about? Rivals are not logically the same as enemies: whether in football or chess, you need an adversary against whom to concentrate power at the decisive point.

This boils down in the end to a discussion of whether it is really true that we have no adversaries. The real problem is that today's enemies are often generic, rather than specific. Of course, it is so much easier to get Washington pundits breathing heavily about Saddam or Kim Jong Il or Qadafi or Suharto or the Taliban. But it is harder to get people focused on generic, abstract adversaries like the threat of failure in transitional societies and the risk of more failed states, the menace of criminal mafias and illegal enterprises which subvert legitimate order, Colombianizing their societies, and the threat posed by bad leaders who exploit fear and ethnicity to wage war on neighbors while lining their own pockets. Harder to make the case ... but given concerted effort it ought not to be so hard to persuade people of how much our society has at stake in the health of our own global community.

In addition to a host of generic, post-Cold War adversaries, there are also the unfamiliar strategic challenges, challenges which we resist defining in strategic and foreign policy terms. Of these, few will be more important in the 21st century than the environmental challenge. We are not organized for it. Interestingly much of the leadership we see is coming from the private and non- governmental sectors. But we will need strategies at all levels for dealing with environmental challenges, whether this be at the level of the local community or the incremental building of regional and global norms and procedures.

Another skeptical question is whether it is desirable to think strategically in an age of extreme issue complexity and decentralization of authority. In a recent article touting the virtues of what he calls "incoherent foreign policy", Ed Luttwak--a scholar of grand strategy--argues that there are virtues to muddle and confusion in US policies. Taking the example of China, he argues that the single-minded, coherent pursuit of either partnership or containment would be worse than the confused babble of factions and activists tussling for control of our policy. On the one hand, it could distort our global priorities, damaging other interests. On the other, a globally coherent grand strategy could produce a backlash of concerted hostility to American pre-eminence. Accordingly, we should recognize that we may have already reached "a culminating point of success in maximizing the leverage of the US on the world scene", and to attempt to push even further could result in a decline in our influence.

An interesting argument. But the real problem is not over-reach; it is incoherence, the absence of focus and a lack of staying power. Our problem has more to do with hubris, sermonizing arrogance, a tinny triumphalism which persuades us that we have a lock on virtue and truth even while we break our own rules. The American tendency to impose sanctions on nearly anyone whose practices and policies we disapprove of places us at risk of taking on too many issues with too many other societies.

Toward a New Kind of Strategic Thinking in Foreign Policy

My proposal is that we not jettison strategic thinking quite yet. Instead, we should adapt it to the age, extrapolating freely from the military origins of the term, but applying its enduring inner logic. The point is worth illustrating.

First, while there is no single, geopolitical adversary, there is no shortage of generic ones. Failed states, failed transitions, societal collapse, massive migrations, criminalized politics-- all these are near the top of my list. This sounds a little abstract until you start attaching potential names to the places: names such as Russia, Mexico, Nigeria, or Indonesia. We have been living in prosperous and stable times in the West, and are inevitably somewhat less conscious of how close to the edge people are in other places. Under some (admittedly gloomy) scenarios, much of Asia, the former Soviet Union, Middle East and Africa represents potential failure--with all the obvious economic and security implications. That is exactly the point: we do not know. Uncertainty itself is our contemporary adversary, and our strategy should be based on that premise. Second, we are still capable as a nation of that relentless strategic intensity and laser-like focus that enables us to bring our various resources to bear on the "decisive point" in confronting an objective or an adversary. Just consider what our private sector has accomplished when strong firms set their collective energies in motion. Granted that it is more complex and challenging to achieve such focus and coherence among our varied foreign policy institutions. Nonetheless, the aim should be to assure that our actions--whether financial, diplomatic, military, overt or covert--are strategic. In the contemporary global landscape, this means that our actions should be pre-emptive (not reactive), purposeful (seeing the job through rather than going through the motions or acting in order to be seen acting), decisive (not half-heartedly or easily blown off course), and calculated to give us the initiative (playing our game on terrain we choose). Examples of the presence or absence of such strategic action are all around us:

• If there is such a thing as the "war on drugs", it is half-hearted and we are not winning. If we became serious, bringing all relevant resources to bear at decisive points as we did in Desert Storm, we could be more effective. We would be targeting our action against individuals, their intelligence and communications systems, and their money. It is not credible to argue that the US and its willing partners cannot break this business, if we set our minds to it.
• In South Asia, we have aggressively focused on containing the risks of nuclear proliferation, but failed to engage in addressing the underlying geopolitical factors and systemic changes which have impelled India and Pakistan to test. The basic problem is not nukes; it is unresolved regional conflicts, the lost credibility of external security guarantees, the rise of China, and the domestic pressures unleashed by nationalism and democratization. A strategic approach to the matter might start by asking what can be done to encourage Sino-Indian security dialogue and to build broadened security arrangements for the region.
• In the more successful developing states of Africa, strategic action includes backing winners by strengthening trade and investment linkages, providing access to developed markets, assisting the process financial sector liberalization and regional integration, and focused training and exchange programs. We are doing some of these things quite creatively. But it also means containing the zone of failure and instability, engaging in peacemaking where appropriate (the use of force may be a central ingredient), and bolstering African capabilities for concerted action. In this arena, we have not performed nearly as well.

My third conclusion is that we should think more strategically about the way we target our objectives. The American tendency is toward directness and openness. Look at the way our leaders have endorsed the doctrine of "Enlargement" of the sphere of market democracies in the world. On one level, it is hard to argue against. Of course, we should seek to strengthen democratization and economic liberalization, just like we should try to fight against proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. But does the direct approach work? Everyone knows what we want and where we are going, and they adapt to us, sing our song back to us, attempt to play by new rules to please us without sacrificing their real core values and interests. Strategy is about indirection, unexpected lines of attack, and avoiding the obvious course. A less linear mode of thought would recognize that warlords and rogues create conflicts in order to live off them, entrapping their own civilian societies and economies as hostages to conflict. Rather than simply isolating and containing rogues--as in our so-called "dual containment" posture toward Iraq and Iran--it could be productive to engage with societies in turmoil and engage with their neighbors, build linkages offering hope to their civil society institutions, break the monopoly of media power in the hands of regimes, attack the iron grip of the siege economy, and target the conflicts themselves which sustain the bad guys. In the Gulf, we appear almost to have adopted an anti-strategy, one whose main effect is to weaken and isolate ourselves.

An indirect approach recognizes the paradox that democratization (as distinct from democracy) can be a destabilizing experience capable of impelling a society toward strife under certain circumstances. Wise strategy seeks to understand those circumstances and prevent them. The indirect approach understands that weapons proliferation is a symptom of conflict, seldom its cause. The indirect logic of the strategist obliges us to think about the links between these things, to see the big picture, and to get the sequences right.

These ideas all point toward the cardinal importance of conflict management, mediation, and creative interventions in a range of fields to shape the kind of world we would live in. Conflict management itself has become a strategic issue for the US as we enter the next millennium. Viewed strategically - seizing the initiative in order to shape the situation - conflict management can become a primary tool for building regional security in troubled or unstable zones. Enhanced security, in turn, is the precondition of progress toward our other goals such as open economies, democratization, and control of the transfer of dangerous technologies.

Some will argue that the zones of conflict in the post-Cold War order are essentially geopolitical and economic backwaters unworthy of being a major focus of US interest. It depends on one's definition of our national interest and on one's view of the "contagion effect" of local and regional conflicts. Such thinking has become less sustainable in any event in light of the dramatic events of 1997-8: it is patently no longer possible to argue that conflict occurs only within weak, insignificant societies after the dramas of Southeast and South Asia.

Others have argued that we must stick to our global knitting and play those unique leadership roles which only we can play, not fritter away our resources and political capital on various forms of interventionism and Mother Teresa-type activism in places of limited importance. It is true that there is a need for focus and selectivity. But doing nothing, "going through the motions" of leadership and undercutting the chances for coherent action can have real consequences. It cannot be wise to act in ways that simply empower the bad guys and encourage more of them to seek power. Northern Ireland and Mozambique represent what can be achieved when there is a strategic focus on conflict management. Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, the South Asian bombs, and Central Africa suggest what happens when there is not.

 

Conclusion

I have argued for the continuing importance and relevance of strategic thinking, and suggested that we Americans are still capable of concentrating our resources at decisive points. After exploring some of the daunting obstacles we face in thinking and acting strategically, I conclude that it remains both possible and desirable to have this capability. Finally, I argue that an adapted, political way of thinking strategically can work, especially if we assign a higher priority to conflict management. The case for doing so rests on the premise that foreign policy is still a high stakes game, about life and death issues for other lands and, therefore, for ours.