From the issue dated September 28, 2001
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Finding a Middle RoadBy TERRY L. DEIBEL
The first casualty is the centrality of an esoteric, national missile-defense system, which could only have worked at exorbitant cost against the most deterrable (and therefore least likely) of threats. In its place will be homeland defense, a niche market for some time within the defense community that will now become a very significant part of military missions, budgets, and procurement. Serious homeland defense, along with the war-on-terrorism offense, will further erode the separation between outwardly directed military power and inwardly directed police power, another instance of globalization's relentless merging of all things foreign and domestic. Intelligence assets, too, will be redirected toward the new threat, both in and outside the country. One can expect a long-term, significant expansion of the human-intelligence assets that are necessary to penetrate terrorist networks. Second, and more broadly, the attacks will probably force the choice President Bush must eventually make between two very different sorts of Republican foreign policy. Up to now, this president has largely eschewed the cooperative foreign policies of his father's administration in favor of the unilateralist policies championed by most Republican conservatives since they took over Congress in 1995. Building a national missile-defense system, whether allies or adversaries liked it or not, was just one element of the Bush unilateralism. The administration has also all but denounced the antiballistic-missile treaty, pulled out of the Kyoto agreements on global warming without offering anything in their place, and actively opposed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the International Criminal Court. It has labeled China a competitor and rival, undercut its South Korean ally by suspending missile talks with North Korea under the 1994 Agreed Framework, and stepped back from peace efforts in Colombia and Northern Ireland. Most strikingly in the current context, it drastically curtailed American mediation efforts in the Middle Eastern conflict, even as American military equipment was being used by the Israelis to decimate their Palestinian foes. But as the energies of conservative officials closest to the president become absorbed in the new war on terrorism, they will find that active overseas support is essential to the task. Internationalists like Secretary of State Powell will see their influence within the administration rise, as it becomes more and more evident that only international cooperation is capable of furnishing the data and even the means of action that are needed to, as Powell put it, get terrorism by its branch and root. It will be a difficult balancing act to use retaliatory military power in a way that does not poison the possibilities of international collaboration. But if that balancing is skillfully done, this national tragedy will help clear the road that all ideological administrations travel as they face the realities of governing -- the road back to the foreign-policy center. Terry L. Deibel is a professor of national strategy at the National War College. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B7
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Reflections on the Fractured Landscape |
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