posted 09-24-2002 10:36 AM
Truman-era blueprint for a new world order By James Harding
Published: September 20 2002 22:41 | Last Updated: September 20 2002 22:41
When Dean Acheson, secretary of state to President Harry S. Truman, sought a title for his memoirs, he hit upon a quote from the 13th century Spanish king Alfonso The Wise: "Had I been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe."
It provided an apt name - Present at the Creation - for a book about a small group of policy-makers who, in the aftermath of the second world war, became midwives to a new world order.
The Truman administration was witness to the creation of the state of Israel, an independent India and the new nation of Pakistan. It backed the infant Bretton Woods institutions designed to create a new world financial order.
And, having watched China "fall" into communist hands, it decided to fight the spread of communism on the Korean peninsula and elsewhere.
The sweeping foreign affairs of the Truman administration, fuelled by the growing anxieties about Soviet Russia, a destitute Europe and the collapse of colonialism at the onset of the nuclear age, were ultimately condensed into a single strategy: NSC 68.
It contained the central idea of "coercion", demanding an increase in military spending, an expansion of US military forces overseas and the tightening of western alliances to contain and deter the communist threat.
Rather self-consciously, policy-makers in Washington have spent the past summer months drafting and re-drafting what they like to think of as a successor document for a different age.
The National Security Strategy, published on Friday, is designed to articulate America's plans in an age of "shadowy networks" of extremists and unpredictable tyrant regimes."
America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones," the 33-page paper said.
"In the cold war. . . we faced a generally status quo, risk averse adversary. . . Traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist enemy whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the targeting of innocents."
The events of September 11 last year set the tone of the strategy. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser who pulled together the strategy, likes to refer to the fall of the Berlin wall and 9/11 as "book-ends" on a chapter of uncertainty in US foreign policy.
September 11 made clear a new kind of threat to the US.
And the terrorist attacks, which came without warning, underpin the most contentious, ground-breaking proposal: the use of pre-emptive military action as a measure of self-defence.
The administration's argument is that in an age of imminent, but unpredictable danger, it does not want to wait for proof of a threat to its interests.
At the centre of the strategy is America's belief in the triumph of democracy and free markets and its sense of its own responsibility as the sole military superpower to "defend the peace".
Just as NSC 68 grew out of the Truman doctrine - "the support of free peoples who are resisting subjugation" which he promised before Congress in 1947 - so too this strategy is the extension of a Bush formula.
"We will defend the peace against the threats from terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. And we will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent," Mr Bush said in a speech at West Point in June.
In its fine print, though, the document is the distillation of thinking which dates back well before September 11 and which stretches far beyond Mr Bush and his national security adviser.
The Defense Planning Guidance papers drawn up by Dick Cheney, now vice-president, when he was defence secretary in the administration of George Bush senior have been filtered into Friday's strategy paper.
Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, has been a public advocate of pre-emption. Administration officials have insisted in recent weeks that there is ample precedent for a doctrine of pre-emption, in spite of previous administrations - including the Reagan White House - opposing any pre-emptive strike as outside the norms of international law.
Well before September 11 and the deployment of the US military in Afghanistan, Mr Rumsfeld had set to work on what had long been called "the revolution in military affairs".
There was input from some of the other ideologues who staff the upper echelons of the Bush administration - notably the deputies: Paul Wolfowitz, number two to Mr Rumsfeld, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Mr Cheney.
The reference in the strategy paper to "supporting moderate and modern government, especially in the Muslim world", echoes some of what Mr Wolfowitz said in his academic spells out of government when he focused, among other things, on America's relationship with the Islamic world.
In the final version, Ms Rice's hand was clear. The call to "expand the circle of development" through democratisation, free markets and free trade carried on themes she made public when she was Mr Bush's foreign policy adviser in the 2000 election campaign.
And the development of a new strategy of "co-operative action" with the centres of global power - if you like, the beginnings of a new "great powers" theory - had the mark of a former academic who now sits a few doors down from the president.
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com /StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1031119530526&p=1012571727162
[Edited 1 times, lastly by Dan Rockwell on 09-24-2002]
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posted 09-24-2002 10:36 AM
