A number of folks

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A number of folks have noted an underlying <$Ad$>disagreement that came up several times in last night’s debate. Namely, that in President Bush’s worldview states remain central. Once terrorists are separated from their state sponsors — as al Qaida was from the Taliban after the Afghan War — the danger they pose diminishes dramatically.

Kerry, meanwhile, disagrees, believing that what is genuinely novel and dangerous about the post-Cold War world is the breakdown of sovereignty itself, which allows terrorist networks to practice catastrophic violence with little or no support from states.

The issue is discussed in an article in The Atlantic Monthly from this summer …

From its inception the Bush Administration has viewed states as the key actors on the world stage, and relations among them as the primary concern of U.S. foreign policy. It is a mindset rooted in the realities of the Cold War, which defined U.S. foreign policy at the time when most of the president’s key advisers gained their formative experience in government. The fixity of this mindset also explains why the Bush Administration spent its first months so heavily focused on the issue of national missile defense, and seemed so surprised by al-Qaeda’s transnational terrorism. The Bush team didn’t discount the problem of weapons of mass destruction; it simply expected trouble to come from an ICBM-wielding “rogue state” like Iraq or North Korea rather than from Islamic terrorist groups.

Viewed through this lens, the Administration’s fixation on Iraq after 9/11 becomes somewhat easier to understand. As Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith explained to Nicholas Lemann, of The New Yorker, on the eve of the Iraq War, “One of the principal strategic thoughts underlying our strategy in the war on terrorism is the importance of the connection between terrorist organizations and their state sponsors. Terrorist organizations cannot be effective in sustaining themselves over long periods of time to do large-scale operations if they don’t have support from states.”

To the Democrats ha Kerry’s orbit, this approach is at best inefficient and at worst akin to fighting fire with gasoline–for example, it has created terrorism in Iraq where little or none previously existed. Last fall, when I asked the presidential candidate General Wesley Clark about Feith’s characterization of the threat, he said it was the “principal strategic mistake behind the Administration’s policy.” Clark went on, “If you look at all the states that were named as the principal adversaries, they’re on the periphery of international terrorism today.”

First as a military negotiator in Bosnia and later as NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during the second Clinton Administration, Clark was one of the figures at the center of the process that shaped current Democratic foreign-policy views. In its early years, rhetoric aside, the Clinton Administration hewed closely to George H.W. Bush’s policy of studied non-involvement in the Balkans, even as Yugoslavia slid into chaos. But over time that region became a forcing ground for re-evaluating Democratic beliefs about foreign policy. The Balkans proved that soft-sounding concerns like human-rights abuses, ethnic slaughter, lawlessness, and ideological extremism could quickly mount into first-order geopolitical crises.

By the mid-1990s this had led the Clinton Administration to focus on terrorism, failed states, and weapons proliferation, and as it did, its foreign-policy outlook changed. The key threats to the United States came to be seen less in terms of traditional conflicts between states and more in terms of endemic regional turmoil of the sort found in the Balkans. “The Clinton Administration,” says Jonathan Winer, “started out with a very traditional Democratic or even mainstream approach to foreign policy: big-power politics, Russia being in the most important role; a critical relationship with China; European cooperation; and some multilateralism.” But over the years, he went on, “they moved much more to a failed-state, global-affairs kind of approach, recognizing that the trends established by globalization required you to think about foreign policy in a more synthetic and integrated fashion than nation-state to nation-state”

As Winer argues, the threats were less from Russia or China, or even from the rogue states, than from the breakdown of sovereignty and authority in a broad geographic arc that stretched from West Africa through the Middle East, down through the lands of Islam, and into Southeast Asia. In this part of the world poverty, disease, ignorance, fanaticism, and autocracy frequently combined in a self-reinforcing tangle, fostering constant turmoil. Home to many failed or failing states, this area bred money laundering, waves of refugees, drug production, gunrunning, and terrorist networks–the cancers of the twenty-first-century world order.

In the Balkans, Holbrooke, Clark, and other leading figures found themselves confronting problems that required not only American military force but also a careful synthesis of armed power, peacekeeping capacity, international institutions, and nongovernmental organizations to stabilize the region and maintain some kind of order. Though the former Yogoslavia has continued to experience strife, the settlement in the Balkans remains the most successful one in recent memory, and offers the model on which a Kerry Administration would probably build. As Holbrooke told me, the Bush Administration’s actions in Iraq have shown that the Administration understands only the military component of this model: “Most of them don’t have a real understanding of what it takes to do nation-building, which is an important part of the overall democratic process.”

A key assumption shared by almost all Democratic foreign-policy hands is that by themselves the violent overthrow of a government and the initiation of radical change from above almost never foster democracy, an expanded civil society, or greater openness. “If you have too much change too quickly,” Winer says, “you have violence and repression. We don’t want to see violence and repression in [the Middle East]. We want to see a greater zone for civilization–a greater zone fur personal and private-sector activity and for governmental activity that is not an enactment of violence.” Bush and his advisers have spoken eloquently about democratization. But in the view of their Democratic counterparts, their means of pursuing it are plainly counterproductive. It is here, Holbrooke says, that the Administration’s alleged belief in the stabilizing role of liberal democracy and open society collides with its belief in the need to rule by force and, if necessary, violence: “The neoconservatives and the conservatives–and they both exist in uneasy tension within this Administration–shift unpredictably between advocacy of democratization and advocacy of neo-imperialism without any coherent intellectual position, except the importance of the use of force.”

Because Afghanistan was the Bush Administration’s first order of business following the 9/11 attacks, the results of this policy have advanced the furthest there. And because Kerry is on record as saying he would increase the number of U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan, it’s probably the clearest measure of how a Kerry Administration would differ from Bush’s. Afghanistan is a subject that Kerry’s advisers and other senior Democrats turn to again and again. When I interviewed Joseph Biden in late March, he recounted a conversation he’d had with Condoleezza Rice in the spring of 2002 about the growing instability that had taken hold after the Taliban was defeated, in late 2001. Biden told Rice he believed that the United States was on the verge of squandering its military victory by allowing the country to slip back into the corruption, tyranny, and chaos that had originally paved the way for Taliban rule. Rice was uncomprehending. “What do you mean?” he remembers her asking. Biden pointed to the re-emergence in western Afghanistan of Ismail Khan, the pre-Taliban warlord in Herat who quickly reclaimed power after the American victory. He told me: “She said, ‘Look, al-Qaeda’s not there. The Taliban’s not there. There’s security there: I said, ‘You mean turning it over to the warlords?’ She said, “Yeah, it’s always been that way.'”

Biden was seeking to illustrate the blind spot that Democratic foreign-policy types see in Bush officials like Rice, who believe that if a rogue state has been lid of its hostile government (in this case the Taliban), its threat has therefore been neutralized. Democrats see Afghanistan as an affirmation of their own view of modern terrorism. As Fareed Zakaria noted recently in Newsweek, the Taliban regime was not so much a state sponsoring and directing a terrorist organization (the Republican view) as a terrorist organization sponsoring, guiding, and even hijacking a state (the Democratic view). Overthrowing regimes like that is at best only the first step in denying safe haven to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Equally important is creating the institutional bases of stability and liberalization that will prevent another descent into lawlessness and terror–in a word, nation-building.

For all those who say there’s no difference between the candidates on foreign policy, this is a critical one.

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