Worldmaking (72 page)

Drawn in by the clarity of his worldview and seductiveness of his classroom technique, and of course by Bloom's endorsement, Wolfowitz took two classes with Strauss at Chicago—on Plato and Montesquieu. Wolfowitz gained much insight from both courses and found that Strauss lived up to his laudatory advance billing. Yet Wolfowitz was later dismissive of those scholars who drew linkages between Strauss and his subsequent foreign-policy views: “It's a product of fevered minds … I mean I took two terrific courses from Leo Strauss as a graduate student. One was on Montesquieu's spirit of the laws, which did help me understand our Constitution better. And one was on Plato's laws. The idea that this has anything to do with U.S. foreign policy is just laughable.”
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Of course Strauss did not have to write on U.S. foreign policy—and, indeed, he wrote nothing on this subject—to exert an influence on its makers. Strauss's idealization of the strong leader—Churchill was a hero of his—and firm moral convictions were certainly present in Wolfowitz's subsequent career. But the professor at Chicago whom Wolfowitz cited as his true mentor was his Ph.D. supervisor, Albert Wohlstetter.

The urbane, whip-smart Wohlstetter worked at the RAND Corporation throughout the 1950s, where he developed a global reputation in the field of nuclear strategy.
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He and Paul Nitze were close; both were alarmed by U.S. vulnerability to the Soviet Union's fast-improving nuclear capabilities and believed that the Eisenhower administration was recklessly sanguine on this point. Wohlstetter moved to the University of Chicago in the 1960s, where he taught political science. Here he developed a strong focus, which remained throughout his career, on the best means to forestall the proliferation of nuclear weapons. A visit to Israel in the late 1960s left him fearful that its hostile neighbors were hell-bent on acquiring a nuclear capability, and that America's duty to Israel (and the world) was to use whatever means necessary to prevent this from happening.
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Wohlstetter's influence was clearly evident in Wolfowitz's doctoral dissertation, which examined and critiqued Israel's desire to develop nuclear-powered desalination stations near its borders with Egypt and Jordan.

Desalination served a laudable function, Wolfowitz conceded, but he also feared that the plutonium by-product of such plants could find its way into the wrong hands and eventually pose an existential threat to Israel itself. The dissertation warned of these dire consequences and emphasized the difficulties of instituting an international nuclear inspection regime truly capable of assuring the technology remained devoted to peaceful purposes. While Woodrow Wilson's idealism inspired Wolfowitz, he found the former president's views on the peacemaking potential and capabilities of multilateral institutions and international law far less persuasive.

Wolfowitz's thesis criticized not only the wisdom of building these desalination plants but also the very notion of Israel acquiring a nuclear weapons capability:

The fundamental point is that any Israeli nuclear force would have to depend on relatively simple delivery systems, which would be vulnerable even to conventional attack … An Israeli nuclear threat against Arab cities would weaken Israel's conventional military position by cutting her off from friendly countries in the West, and by encouraging, if not forcing, the Soviet Union to intervene more actively on behalf of the Arabs … Israeli nuclear weapons would push the Arabs into a desperate attempt to acquire nuclear weapons, if not from the Soviet Union, then at a later date from China or on their own.
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We know that Wolfowitz's nuclear-free Middle East did not come to pass. Israel developed an atomic weapon capability during the 1970s, while adhering to a stance of so-called nuclear ambiguity—also known as keeping schtum.
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Just as Wolfowitz predicted, other regional powers, such as Saddam Hussein's Iraq, laid plans to counterbalance Israel's advantage and develop a nuclear insurance policy. Whether declared or not, the new reality of a nuclear-armed Israel was never likely to go unchallenged by its hostile neighbors. Wolfowitz could scarcely have realized this at the time, but issues of nuclear proliferation—and “weapons of mass destruction” more broadly—in the Middle East would dominate much of his subsequent career. Whether events would have turned out differently if Israel had followed Wolfowitz's cautionary advice is impossible to know. What we do know is that Wolfowitz produced a fine dissertation that was grounded in multiple Hebrew-language sources and propelled by nuanced and sharp analysis.
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Wolfowitz cut a fascinating figure during his time at Cornell and Chicago, alternating between civil rights–inspired liberalism and hawkish iconoclasm through the upheavals of the 1960s. In August 1963, Wolfowitz hitched a ride with some Ithaca church congregations that had chartered buses to Washington to attend a major civil rights demonstration. Wolfowitz thus became one of a quarter of a million people on the National Mall who witnessed Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This road trip was no one-time progressive aberration. Wolfowitz was a strong supporter of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and of the civil rights movement more generally. Indeed, throughout his career, he shared little with the Republican Party on domestic politics. “The most surprising thing about Wolfowitz,” Christopher Hitchens said of his frequent dinner companion, “is that he's a bleeding heart. His instincts are those of a liberal democrat, apart from on national security.”
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But Wolfowitz also supported Kennedy and Johnson's foreign policies, and this is where he departed company with the civil rights movement and indeed the mainstream left. During his final year at Cornell, for example, Wolfowitz was one member of a three-person demonstration (if this designation can be applied to a trio) supporting U.S. intervention in the Vietnam War. A founder member of Cornell's Committee for Critical Support of the United States in Vietnam, Wolfowitz fully agreed with President Johnson's logic for escalating the conflict. Following the fall of Saigon in 1975, Wolfowitz was not dispirited, believing that America's military effort had served an important function, even when the immediate objective had not been met. He agreed with Singapore's president Lee Kuan Yew and Walt Rostow that fighting communism in Vietnam ultimately saved its neighbors from Marxist-Leninist revolutions.
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Wolfowitz was clearly an atypical college student in that volatile and socially experimental era when political differences burned with uncommon intensity. Yet in the midst of this tumult, Wolfowitz was incapable of making enemies; he was as gracious to his ideological opponents as he was to his (fewer) like-minded allies. As George Packer observes in
The Assassins' Gate
, Wolfowitz was “always a good boy, the kind on whom adults fasten their dreams, with a yeshiva student's purity about him, though his education was entirely secular.” One of Wolfowitz's fellow students at Telluride observed that there was “a certain public-spirited prudery about him. Paul is sort of the good citizen.”
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Wolfowitz may have chosen the wrong subject, in his father's estimation, but any parent would have been proud of the dedication with which he pursued those studies, his active political life, and the easy way he interacted with others.

In 1969, as Wolfowitz was working on his dissertation in Chicago, Wohlstetter invited him to set it aside for a while and take a job with him in Washington, D.C., conducting research for the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, a pressure group established by Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson to protect the development of an antiballistic missile system from congressional sequestration. Wolfowitz was more than willing to put his dissertation on ice. Indeed, he soon found himself hooked on real-world politics. Nitze and Acheson were inspirational figures, and both warmed to the idealistic and energetic Wolfowitz. The Safeguard ABM program was saved by a vote of 51 to 50 in the Senate (as the vote was tied, the extra vote came from Vice President Spiro Agnew). Wolfowitz's return to Chicago and his doctoral research was something of a comedown. After Wolfowitz accepted the lottery win that was a tenure-track position at Yale in 1970, his default career focus tended toward job opportunities in Washington rather than journal articles, promising doctoral students, and grant applications. In 1973, he joined the Nixon administration and remained there through Nixon's protracted waltz with oblivion, Gerald Ford's ascension to the Oval Office, and Ford's defeat in 1976 to Jimmy Carter. At that point Wolfowitz faced a stark choice: Leave with Ford, or remain in post and work for Carter?

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Jimmy Carter rose to political prominence as the governor of rural Georgia—he made his wealth as the owner of a peanut-warehousing business—and his presidential campaign was driven by this well-cultivated outsider status, by the purity that supposedly accrues through avoiding direct contact with Washington, D.C.
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Carter was a born-again Christian, and while he did not lead with his religiosity, there is little doubt that a clear sense of right and wrong informed his worldview. Carter lambasted Kissinger, Nixon, and Ford for too narrowly defining America's national interests and insisted that the nation's foreign policy should pay greater heed to human rights. Carter pointedly exchanged warm letters with Andrei Sakharov, encouraged post-Helsinki dissidents across the Soviet Bloc, and established a Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs at the State Department that graded each nation on how well it treated its citizens. During his inaugural address in 1977, Carter declared, “Our commitment to human rights must be absolute.”
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The new president's words and actions reassured an admiring Wolfowitz, who accepted the position of deputy assistant secretary for defense for regional programs. It was a midlevel job that invited Wolfowitz to contemplate and identify future trends, a function he was pleased to perform. But there was no job in the Carter administration for Paul Nitze, who had reason to expect better. In the summer of 1976, Nitze met and unnerved Carter—one witness described the meeting as “a disaster”—with his dark warnings about Soviet nuclear intentions and American vulnerability.
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Carter described Nitze as “typically know-it-all. He was arrogant and inflexible. His own ideas were sacred to him. He didn't seem to listen to others, and he had a doomsday approach.”
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That the two men did not hit it off was not all that surprising. A few months previously, Nitze had written to Zbigniew Brzezinski that Carter's human rights emphasis was “based upon a Wilsonian approach, an approach that was impracticable even in Wilson's day, and which seems even more out of tune with today's realities. I further question whether
mea culpas
about the United States as a nation are helpful. We have not, as a nation, ignored Latin America or the third world or engaged in military adventurism; we acted imprudently in Vietnam, but not from evil motives.”
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Not a man to be slighted without consequence, Nitze became one of Carter's fiercest critics. (Nitze was generally more hawkish when unemployed.)

Wolfowitz's new job at the Pentagon required him to identify parts of the world where American interests were present, to a hitherto underestimated extent, and threatened. Broadening the geographical remit of his doctoral studies, Wolfowitz identified the Persian Gulf as a particularly nettlesome region for Washington, and Baathist Iraq—the pan-Arab Baathist movement was driven by nationalism and a variant on socialism, dedicated to achieving an Arab renaissance, thus reducing the region's susceptibility to the whims of larger nations—as a likely future threat. The vast oil reserves in the region, combined with dwindling U.S. domestic capacity, made the Persian Gulf an economically vital region, one where Wolfowitz suspected the Soviet Union would attempt to make mischief. Yet even without direct adventurism on the part of Moscow, an assertive and nationalist Iraq—implacably opposed to Israel, flush with high-tech Soviet weaponry—posed a clear threat to regional stability.

Wolfowitz presented his report—titled “Capabilities for Limited Contingencies in the Persian Gulf,” more commonly known as the “Limited Contingency Study”—to Secretary of Defense Harold Brown in 1979. It was a fascinating and accurate piece of futurology:

The emerging Iraqi threat has two dimensions. On the one hand, Iraq may in the future use her military forces against such states as Kuwait or Saudi Arabia (as in the 1961 Kuwait crisis that was resolved by timely British intervention with force). On the other hand, the more serious problem may be that Iraq's
implicit
power will cause currently moderate local powers to accommodate themselves to Iraq without being overtly coerced. The latter problem suggests that we must not only be able to defend the interests of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and ourselves against an Iraqi invasion or show of force, we should also make manifest our capabilities and commitments to balance Iraq's power—and this may require an increased visibility for U.S. power.
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What looks farsighted today, however, appeared quirky in 1979. The military brass did not favor a partial redeployment of its assets to the Persian Gulf; Harold Brown worried that Wolfowitz had created a threat where none existed. A confident young Baathist named Saddam Hussein was at that juncture outmaneuvering his rivals to consolidate power at the apex of Iraqi politics. Fearful that Wolfowitz's report might be leaked, and Saddam recklessly and needlessly antagonized, Brown ordered that the study be buried deep in the Pentagon's archive. Iran was America's primary regional ally in the Middle East, and the Nixon Doctrine held that surrogates such as the shah should bear the preponderant burden of safeguarding the region. Farther down the line, Wolfowitz could not resist a little sarcasm: “Well, we don't plan forces for the Persian Gulf. The Shah [of] Iran takes care of the Persian Gulf for us.”
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