THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (49 page)

Brzezinski believes that international society will sort itself into six power centers: America, Europe, East Asia, South Asia, the Muslim crescent, and a Eurasian black hole created by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Conflicts among these clusters are likely to be economic in nature, with violent conflict occurring within
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some of the unstable clusters. A trilateral alliance of Japan, Europe, and the United States is the collective security arrangement he prefers, operating within the larger framework of a strengthened U.N., with a somewhat larger Security Council.

The nationalist and internationalist models have ambitious goals for U.S. policy though they differ as to how these goals are to be accomplished. The New Nationalism seeks to improve the position of the United States vis-á-vis other states, by exploiting the natural advantages we enjoy in a chaotic environment; the New Internationalism seeks to improve the U.S. position absolutely (if not relatively), while improving the position of others also, so that U.S. dominance can be extended through multilateral institutions that provide security and prosperity to all.

Proponents of the compensating system, or balance of power, have no such illusions (as they regard them) about U.S. influence. The goal of these “New Realists” is less ambitious, or perhaps less starry-eyed. They aim merely to prevent the primacy of any other state. If the nationalist's fundamental objective is making the United States the fittest for survival, and the internationalist's the achievement of world peace, then the principal goal of the new realist is achieving world stability.

“Vital interests” are at the core of all these strategies, but what is really
vital
seems to vary with each perspective. The nationalist judges what is vital by its relationship to freedom of action, for only when the United States possesses such freedom can it use its power to protect itself from threats to its survival. The internationalist holds that the welfare of other states is vital, for only then will the world present a benign environment within which the United States can ultimately survive and prosper. Otherwise, the neglect of other states will turn the international environment into a cesspool of environmental and human rights degradation, out of which will emerge predators armed with weapons of mass destruction from whom there is, on our planet, no place to hide. New Realists—of whom former U.S. national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger is rightly the most celebrated—tend to define “vital interests” in terms of the stability of the state system. For the New Realist, our vital interests are only threatened when a state, or coalition of states, is powerful enough to successfully destabilize that system.

The differences among these varying definitions of the “vital,” however, are largely apparent only, and can be attributed to differing attitudes about means, not ends. The balance-of-power realist simply doesn't believe that calls for peace and justice can unite the world community, or deter a predator (who perhaps has unfurled the banner “No Justice, No Peace” and believes the status quo to be fundamentally inequitable). Nor does the balance-of-power proponent quite believe the machismo rhetoric of the nationalist: it strikes him as adolescent, unrealistic, exaggerated. To maintain that one state—the United States—will be able to coerce all the others into participating in a system that perpetually keeps them at a disadvantage is wishful thinking. The international system may be chaotic, or anarchic, but even criminals can conspire.

Rather, the proponents of compensating balances believe that technique, rather than natural advantage or procedural perfection, will best ensure vital U.S. interests. It is a philosophy for the Talleyrand in every statesman, and it requires an adroitness and coolness of calculation, to say nothing of a dispassion toward the problems of other states, that the American public has seldom exhibited. A history written by such a realist is a history of great men, just as a history written by the Hobbesian chaoticist is a history of impersonal forces, and a history by the internationalist the
account of treaties and resolutions and minutes of the meetings of multilateral institutions.

What are the elements of the New Realism, a paradigm that is based on a balance of power? If we assume that the goal of ensuring world stability is sought in order to achieve the same objectives as the various other paradigms—protecting American territory, armed forces, and citizens from attack or coercion, and providing for the continued growth and prosperity of the American market economy—how does this archetypal approach plan to achieve these objectives?

The New Realist takes a severe view of those threats that actually strike at our vital interests but is disinclined to see every atrocity as a threat to our security. Accordingly, a state (or alliance of states) would have to do more than simply kidnap an American citizen or massacre an African village in order to pose a mortal threat to the American state. The New Realist assumes that America's current position is both too weak to impose world peace and too strong to have to content itself with passively waiting for hostile forces outside our control to coalesce against us. In order to prevent a state from becoming powerful enough to menace us, the New Realist takes as the first imperative the prevention of the emergence of any state (or alliance of states) that could dominate the Eurasian landmass. This principle plays itself out differently with respect to different potential adversaries.

With regard to China, the United States should seek to encourage it to develop as a trading state, because this development is both salutary—in that it will, over time, loosen the grip of the totalitarian party and armed forces that currently rule the country and have in the past been tempted to seek hegemony in the region—and possible, because the United States represents a rich market for Chinese goods, one capable of improving the standard of living for hundreds of millions of persons.

With respect to the states of the former Soviet Union, the United States ought to encourage devolution and democratization, not so much because these are good in themselves, but because they are the best hedge against the re-emergence of a state with ambitions of world dominion. A broken-up Soviet Union is less likely to be able to mount a challenge against the United States; a democratized Russian state is less likely to threaten the other former republics, and also less likely to be able to re-emerge as a militant superpower.

The states posing the greatest potential threat, however, are not the collapsing red dwarfs of communism, the supernovas that are already imploding, but rather Germany and Japan and the productive countries that surround them in some anxiety. Whereas the New Internationalist seeks to extend the U.N.'s mission and NATO's to accomplish the agenda of a world order based on collective security, the New Realist wants to
strengthen NATO to keep Germany anchored to the United States. The differing approaches imply different policies for the widening of NATO membership and the deepening of its portfolio of missions. NATO enlargement, to include Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and perhaps the Baltic states, is the preferred realist proposal, not the expansion of NATO's missions out-of-area. While NATO remains the preferred institution for a German-American alliance, just as important is German membership in the E.U., which also ties German policy to its neighbors. Even a revived Western European Union (WEU)
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would be preferable to a Germany looking eastward, with the potential to become a strategic superpower and the revived ambitions that would exploit that potential.

Japanese democracy is usually thought not to have achieved a very deep root structure, and thus to be even more at risk than the German democratic state. Moreover, Japan lies proximate to two potentially unstable, highly armed states—China and North Korea—and depends at present on U.S. forward forces and the U.S. nuclear deterrent for its safety. As I have written elsewhere, American policy to denuclearize North Korea or to induce respect for human rights in China must paramountly consider whether our steps are likely to bring the Japanese closer to nuclear and military self-reliance. It would be a tragedy for the world if, in order to extirpate a North Korean nuclear force with which Japan has learned to live, we plunged the Korean peninsula into a war that led to the mobilization of Japan's energy and wealth on behalf of its armed forces. Already the Japanese, with less than one and one-half percent of GNP, field the world's third largest defense establishment, and there is no NATO-like institution that links this establishment with the forces of surrounding states. It is probably far more important that the United States maintain forces in Korea than any other forward basing because Japan must be persuaded that the threats it faces—now that the Soviet Union is no longer among them—both require an alliance with the United States and yet will not lead to war owing to American unilateral action.

The New Nationalist strategy of closing American markets to East Asian competitors in a trade confrontation is precisely the sort of maladroit move that the New Realist seeks to avoid. Economic competition is doubtless the one area of interaction with the United States that could detonate Asian antagonism and anti-Western unity, particularly if it is sharpened by heightened trade exclusion on the part of the E.U. By treating each of the states of East Asia as a separate entrant into the U.S. market, the New Realist would balance one against another so that a coalition of East Asia states does not form, and no single state can dominate the others.

The same defensive posture dominates the New Realist calculus for American intervention: the United States should never intervene when its
own vital interests are not at stake, and then only to prevent others from achieving a dominant position from which it can be threatened. Just as importantly, this principle should control our relationships with the internal forces at play within a foreign state. The Persian Gulf provides one example. The economic vitality of the G-7 states is linked to the flow of oil from the gulf; any state that controlled that flow would be in a dominant position vis-à-vis the United States, Japan, and Europe, who are all, to varying degrees, dependent on that oil. The states of this region to whom the United States gave security guarantees under the Carter Doctrine can be protected against local predators; the Gulf War and the earlier reflagging of Kuwaiti vessels showed as much. Accordingly the independence of the gulf states is of crucial importance and can and should be protected. It is far from clear, however, that these states are good bets for the long run. Modernization, democratization, and pan-Islamic movements stimulate internal threats that U.S. military intervention is powerless to deflect, and may even excite. Within such states the United States cannot afford to abandon the regimes on whose stability the economic life of the northern tier, postindustrial states of the world depends. But neither can the United States be so closely identified with those regimes that we, as well as they, become the target of revolution, as happened in Iran. This observation counsels that U.S. policy, perhaps through diplomatic or even clandestine contacts, must maintain a supple posture with respect to the internal dynamics at work in these states. Such a complex policy has strengths and weaknesses. It provides flexibility and avoids the rigid commitments of collective security that inevitably fail to reflect shifts in the politics and power relationships among and within states. It leverages American influence by linking it to coalitions of states that share America's interest in preventing a hegemonical threat from arising, rather than merely hoping to defeat such a threat once it becomes lethal. At the same time it is ineluctably linked to the status quo and thus makes the United States a locus of animosity among reformers whose values we may in fact share. Most important, it requires intimate knowledge of the political locale and a surefootedness in dealing with subtle and sometimes surprising shifts. It is one thing to muster the ruthlessness to abandon the Kurds in order to strengthen the shah of Iran for geopolitical reasons; it is quite another to predict the shah's replacement by the Ayatollah Khomeini, as so few analysts did. Yet without such accurate but difficult forecasting, the mere willingness to take cold-blooded decisions can amount to little more than a declarative pose.

Nationalists are inclined to downplay the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Most of these weapons, now that the Cold War has ended, are not trained on the United States—it is said—and, to the extent
that they tie down our international competitors, relatively improve our position. So long as America is able to defend against the modest forces likely to be available to the current (and anticipated) generation of proliferatees, it is not crucial to us whether, for example, Iraq uses poison gas against Iran.
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Internationalists, by contrast, seek a full court press against proliferation and even hope for cancellations of nuclear programs that have been pursued by states that are now willing to abandon them, for example, South Africa. With some exceptions, notably Kenneth Waltz,
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internationalists tend to view any proliferation as inimical to world peace.

The realist view is more nuanced and more pessimistic. It seeks nonproliferation mainly of nuclear delivery systems, which are easier to detect and to destroy than fissile material. But the realist's position is essentially fatalistic and does not wish to waste diplomatic assets pursuing the fruitless goal of convincing Pakistan and India that nuclear weapons do not really enhance their security or that the threats each faces from the other are not mortal. Rather the realist accepts some proliferation as inevitable, and tries to mitigate its impact on the stability of the international system.

With respect to achieving American goals in the international economy, the balance-of-power approach shows the same watermark of maneuver and irony, and the same disdain for impractical programs (whether they spring from romantic idealism or sullen paranoia). This approach accepts that America's share of the world economic product has dramatically fallen since the end of the Second World War and is likely to fall still further as hitherto unproductive economies industrialize. Proponents of this view do not waste time lamenting this change or trying to recapture the past by withdrawing from these emerging states the markets they must have to thrive. But neither does the New Realism sacrifice American competitiveness simply to increase the world's wealth. Rather here, as with political competition, it seeks a certain relationship for the United States with other states that is relatively advantageous. Just as the New Realism seeks to prevent a situation whereby any state (or coalition) dominates the Eurasian landmass or crucial global sea lanes, so it seeks here to prevent the United States from slipping into an inferior position in the terms of trade with any state (or bloc of states) for much the same reason: in either case, the continued wealth and power of the United States become hostage to the policies of another state. For the New Internationalist, potato chip production is just as valuable as computer chip production: in a world market, the important thing is that every state produce what it has a comparative advantage in. This leads to the greatest efficiency and the maximization of international wealth. For the New Realist, however, this phenomenon is exactly what is to be deplored: the potato chip manufacturer, whose products have easy substitutes and for whom there is an
infinite number of potential competitors because the human capital and the technology required for farm production are so modest and so widely distributed, will always be at the mercy of value-added products like the computer chip that enable so many other kinds of productivity, and can themselves only be made more efficient by the most sophisticated technology and the most competitive firms. Given a choice between a free market worldwide and a system that established favorable terms for trade for the United States, the New Realist would only smile: it is not a realistic choice. States will never permit a universal free market so long as they have the political power to engineer favorable terms for themselves through various anticompetitive tactics, including exploiting the free rider phenomenon,
²⁰
and as long as domestic political groups can protect themselves from foreign competition at the expense of the larger society, as farmers have so successfully done in Japan, France, and elsewhere. Nor is any system that attempts to enshrine favorable terms of trade for the United States likely to endure for long, not least because the U.S. consumer would not tolerate the rise in prices such an imperial system would require. Competitiveness must be won. But through the adept use of retaliatory threats, state – private sector collaboration, and regional groupings like NAFTA that, for historic and cultural reasons, enshrine a favored U.S. position, it may be that the terms of trade can be successfully manipulated, at least to mitigate the effects of declining U.S competitiveness.