FEAR OF FENWICK (via Randal Verbrugge)

Rage, Hubris, and Regime Change (Ken Jowitt, April 2003, Policy Review)

Throughout the 1990s, intellectuals and journalists, partly in response to the proliferation of prefixes ? post-Cold War, post-communist, even postmodern ? engaged in a competitive and seemingly imperative quest to name an era. The results of this effort at authoritative naming were phrases like the ?end of history,? the ?clash of civilizations,? an ?age of anarchy,? and, of course, ?globalization? ? none of which, to the authors? undoubted frustration, swept the field. I saw the 1990s as a ?Genesis age,? a period of history when the world was not biblically ?void? but was most assuredly beginning to see its ?form,? i.e. its shaping institutions (the nuclear family, nuclear deterrence, the nation-state), begin to lose their unchallenged status. Lacking the parsimonious elegance and dogmatism of many others, I also saw the 90s as a ?Toga period,? a decade when the world responded to the unique reality of American global dominance by imitating ? not assimilating ? everything from legislative democracy to golf (the American ?toga?).

With al Qaeda?s attack on the U.S. in September 2001, the competitive scholastic exercise over naming was replaced by a more momentous political effort by the Bush administration to identify the threatening, and to author the defining, features of our age. The result is novel to the point of being radical and, unlike academic exercises, consequential.

According to the administration, the essential element of our era is the threat emanating from a combination of tyrannical states and what I have called ?movements of rage,? a malignant political coalition that relentlessly pursues and may succeed in possessing and using weapons of mass destruction (wmd) against the United States and its allies. The Bush national security doctrine is a response to the likely proliferation of horrendous ?wildcat violence? when state disintegration and/or the covert actions of tyrannical regimes offer movements of rage access to insidious weapons whose advanced technology demands only global reach, not global power. Largely in response to this possibility, the Bush doctrine stresses American military predominance, military preemption, and political transformation. From an historical point of view, these are extraordinary ambitions. More, they represent the practical (not necessarily successful) integration of international relations with non-Western political development in the form of an American foreign policy based on the ideological concept, and political-military pursuit, of democratic regime change.

The first ?person? in the new Bush ?trinitarian? doctrine is military predominance ? or, if you like, dominance. In the administration?s words, ?our [military] forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build up in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States.?3 This tenet has no immediate bearing on the international issues facing the United States because it will most likely take at least a decade for any imaginable nation to be taken seriously as a military competitor (unless, of course, Japan undergoes radical regime change on its own nationalistic terms).

But if the administration is looking at the long term, so will I. Suppose, for example, the European Union becomes a stable, effective, legitimate political entity in world affairs. As such, its expanding population would be greater than ours, its economic power nearly equal, and its military potential the same. [...]

Preemption, the second ?person? in the trinitarian doctrine, is indeed a radical departure from deterrence as a strategy against hostile regimes. The difference between preemption and deterrence is simple: In the former case, you attack first. You don?t wait for an attack and then counter-attack. However, both deterrence and preemption rely on evidence of a hostile power?s weapons capacity, not simply its desire or search for such. The Bush doctrine rests on something much more radical (though, if Thucydides is correct, not historically unprecedented) than preemption: anticipation. The logic behind an anticipatory attack against a country like Iraq is that its leader will never cease in his search for military weapons of unprecedented destructiveness, and that once he possesses them, he will certainly use them against us in the form of blackmail, veto, or aggression. As I see it, the dangers of wmd in the hands of such a regime are threefold. First, the United States would suffer very high casualties trying to destroy a hostile regime that develops both wmd and the means to deploy and whose only restraint against using them is self-imposed. Second, a hostile regime with wmd would be more willing to harbor and sponsor stateless ?movements of rage? and add to the latter?s global reach insidious types of violent and traumatizing weapons. Third, the success of any single regime of rage would encourage the emergence of replica regimes of rage in other parts of the world--exactly the role Mussolini played for Hitler.

So the logic behind an anticipatory strategy is powerful. However, its strategic application demands the combined wisdom of Pericles and Solomon. To begin with, the premise for an anticipatory attack posits a hostile leader and regime platonically impervious to any environmental changes whether domestic or international. This is not always a mistaken premise--Hitler and Pol Pot are cases in point--but it is almost always mistaken. Over time, most regimes do change substantially if not essentially. One has only to look at the Soviet Union after 1956 and China after 1978.

An anticipatory strategy also relies on American presidential administrations with an unerring ability to identify which leaders and regimes are impervious to environmental changes. Any mistake in identification would result not in preemption or anticipation, but in a war that could have been avoided.

Finally, adoption by the United States of an anticipatory strategy creates the possibility that other nations will justify military action against their existing or potential enemies on the same hard-to-prove assumption that their adversaries, when and if they possess wmd, will use these weapons against them. When Australia declares its right to preempt, it is only a bit more serious than Peter Sellers?s Duchy of Grand Fenwick in The Mouse that Roared. China, however, might very well use the Bush security doctrine?s logic to launch an anticipatory attack on Japan and/or a united Korea before they too ?go nuclear.?

In the third section, on the unlikelihood of democratic revolution sweeping the Middle East and actually creating stable democracies, Mr. Jowitt begins to make more sense, but as to dominance and pre-emption he makes little. Beginning an argument with a hypothetical about Europe not only becoming a unified and coherent rival but one with a growing population, ranks right up there with, "Suppose the Red Sox win the World Series against the Cubs this Fall..."

As far as pre-emption is concerned, his objections don't seem terribly serious. Sure we might end up fighting a war we need not have--so what? All wars are avoidable, so long as you're willing to live with the alternative. Would not the world be better off today had we attacked the Soviet Union in 1955? or China in 1977? or kept going in Korea and Vietnam? or taken out Castro in the Cuban Missile Crisis? What exactly is there to recommend "peace" when confonting terror regimes?

Even more dubious is the idea that we need worry that enemies will choose pre-emption as a strategy. Let 'em. A pretext to destroy the Chinese communist government and its nuclear capability would even save us the trouble of justifying pre-emption. One assumes the Chinese actually recognize that fact and this alone will keep them in their box. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 19, 2003 11:36 AM