Harvey Simmons, expertise on Le Pen and French Politics

The Preemptive Paradigm and Iraq: U.S. Foreign Policy since Containment

(May 12, 2003)

Two years after the end of World War II, in a speech called "The Sinews of Peace, and delivered in the United States, a world leader stated: "The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American democracy. For with primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability for the future."

The speaker went on to talk about the importance of the United Nations, "[T]he old doctrine of balance of power is unsound," he said, but if "the Western Democracies stand together in strict adherence to the principles of the United Nations Charter, their influence for furthering those principles will be immense and no one is likely to molest them." And, he continued,.... , If however they become divided or falter in their duty and if these all-important years are allowed to slip away, then indeed catastrophe may overwhelm us all."

The United Nations Organization," he said, "must immediately begin to be equipped with an international armed force," beginning with air squadrons delegated by individual countries to the UN. Apparently Churchill believed that the end of World War II, the inception of atomic weapons and the establishment of the United Nations had created the grounds of a new kind of international relations, one where conflicts could be resolved in a peaceful fashion through the UN within which, what Churchill called, called the Soviet desire for "the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines," could be worked out.

The speaker contrasted an international politics based on a balance of power with an international politics that sought the "permanent prevention of war and the establishment of freedom and democracy as rapidly as possible in all countries..What is needed is a settlement..."

In other words, rather than an international politics characterized by mutual shoving and pushing, and occasional armed conflicts between, a multiplicity of international actors, now, in an age of atomic weapons, the speaker hoped for "a good understanding on all points with Russia under the general authority of the United Nations Organization."

The date of this speech was March 5, 1946; the venue was the campus of Westminster College in Missouri and the speaker was, of course, Winston Churchill.

Churchill's reference to the unsoundness of the balance of power doctrine and his emphasis on the importance of the United Nations are now largely forgotten; what is remembered is the reference to an "iron curtain that has descended across the Continent."

And ther reason is that instead of the world powers coming together in a "settlement" after World War II, during the latter part of 1946 and into 1947, the Soviet Union tightened its grip on its satellites in Eastern Europe and tried to subvert the democracies of western Europe through domestic communist parties. And, in China and in Indo-China, communist parties were on the march..

It soon became clear that, whatever hopes had been vested in the United Nations, Soviet expansionism would continue apace unless the United States, the other superpower, developed a strategy to deal with it.

The question was how to deal with this new threat to world order? In the late 1940s, three options were available: first, to preemptively attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons while the U.S. still had a monopoly on atomic warfare; the second was to establish some kind of world government under the auspices of the United Nations, and the third was to retreat into isolationism.

However, in July 1947, an outline of what was to become the ruling foreign policy paradigm of the next half-century appeared in the journal Foreign Affairs in "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," by "X," quickly identified as George Kennan a senior official in the U.S. State Department and an expert on the Soviet Union.

In a wide-ranging analysis of Soviet society and the nature of Communism, Kennan put forth the doctrine of "containment," arguing that "the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of expansive tendencies." Kennan proposed that "Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world [could be] contained by adroit and vigilant application of counterforce" wherever necessary.

Kennan's ideas on containment quickly adopted by the Truman Administration and then, for forty years until the collapse of Communism in 1989, lay at the heart of U.S. foreign policy toward the Communist regimes of the world.

Containment meant that the United States would accept the contemporaneous boundaries of, and not try to roll back, the Soviet empire. However, if at any time Communist regimes attempted to expand their influence beyond their postwar borders, the U.S. would intervene. This was the case in 1950, when a North Korean attack on South Korea was met by the United Nations force, led by the United States.

The policy of containment was strongly affirmed when General Douglas MacArthur urged President Truman to allow U.N. forces to pursue fleeing Chinese forces across the 38th parallel, beyond the Yalu river into China. However, President Truman rejected the idea and, when MacArthur resisted, forced him to resign his command and return to the U.S.

President Eisenhower too, was guided by the policy of containment for, when, in 1954 the French asked for American air strikes to help rescue French troops under siege at Dien Bien Phu in Indo-China, President Eisenhower first consulted key allies and then refused to commit U.S. troops to the area. Even when the, when the Americans themselves became mired in Vietnam, in the 1970s, there was never any question that the U.S. would move across the 17th parallel to re-conquer North Vietnam from the Communists

All during the Cold War, therefore, whether in Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Nicaragua or elsewhere in the world, containment was rigidly adhered to, and only when the forces of Communism threatened to overflow their borders, did the U.S. use "counterforce," to quote Kennan, to force them back.

Of course, whether the U.S. was really under threat from Communism when it invaded tiny Grenada in 1983 is another question. But the fact is that containment was the guiding light of U.S. foreign policy during this period.

After 1989, however, containment became a term without meaning and a policy without content: the Soviet Empire had collapsed; the United States was the only remaining superpower and apparently immune to any threat from abroad. In these circumstances, a new era of peace and prosperity seemed at hand. But what was to be the governing paradigm of foreign policy?

This question was broached in early 1992 when The New York Times obtained a copy of a classified Defense Planning Guidance document drafted under the supervision of Paul Wolfowitz, at that time undersecretary for policy under Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney in the Bush Sr. administration. In many ways, this draft set forth the outlines of what was to become U.S. foreign and defense policy after 9/11.

First, the document states that the U.S. should "establish and protect a new order," one that would "discourage" any other nation from challenging the leadership role of the United States.

Second, the document set forth the possibility of unilateral action by the U.S. in order to protect national interests. "While the U.S. cannot become the world's 'policeman,' by assuming responsibility for righting every wrong, we will retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations." Among those interests were, "access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism...."

Third, as Patrick Tyler of The New York Times (March 8, 1992) pointed out, "the document is conspicuously devoid of reference to collective action through the United Nations."

Fourth, the draft document proposed as well that "we should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted, and in many cases carrying only general agreement over the objectives to be accomplished." By the time of the Iraq war, this principle was defined and sharpened to mean that rather than the coalition defining the mission, the mission would define the coalition.

Fifth, little noticed at the time, was a nod in the direction of preemption. The U.S., it was noted, "may be faced with the question of whether to take military steps to prevent the development or use of weapons of mass destruction."

The Defense Planning Guidance document was attacked by Democratic Senators Joseph Biden and Paul Tsongas as leading to what they called a "Pax Americana," one which moved the U.S. away from conflict resolution within the U.N. and toward U.S. unilateral action. In March 1992 The New York Times called it "the clearest rejection to date of internationalism." As a result of the criticism and because of indecision within the Defense Department itself, The New York Times reported in May 1992, that a revised document used "far more diplomatic language" than the earlier draft, that the document "sharpens the American commitment to collective military action as a 'key' feature of United States strategy," and mentioned "new or revitalized international organizations, including the United Nations."

But, despite the Times's assurances, the unilateralist inclination was still present in the revised document which referred to a commitment to "act independently, as necessary, to protect our critical interests." In the event, the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992 meant that the planning document was shelved and did not serve as a guide to foreign policy during the Clinton administration.

However, during the Clinton years, the neo-conservatives continued to press their case for a more activist, unilateralist foreign policy, and a number of important articles appeared in the popular and scholarly press.

In 1996, for example, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, two prominent neo-conservatives, co-authored an article in Foreign Affairs, entitled "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy." The first sentence of the article read: "In foreign policy, conservatives are adrift." Bemoaning the fact that the United States was drifting into "the Wilsonian multilateralism of the Clinton administration," they complained that, "[today's] lukewarm consensus about America's reduced role in a post-Cold War world is wrong;" and as an alternative they offered, "Benevolent global hegemony....The first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance [its] predominance by strengthening America's security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests, and standing up for its principles around the world."

But, anticipating that their critics might ask "where is the threat," Kristol and Kagan answered that "the main threat the United States faces now and in the future is its own weakness. American hegemony is the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international order."

Coming as it did, in 1996, this call to arms sounds rather odd. Odd because traditionally the Republicans have been opposed to internationalism, inclined toward isolationism and respectful of George Washington's question: "Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?"

Odd because, in 1996, there seemed no good reason for any American government to divert vast sums into a military that had no specific mission to fulfill in a world unthreatened by another super-power..

But Kristol and Kagan's arguments were, if anything, audacious, for they were not merely urging the U.S. to rearm in order to protect the U.S.'s position as top dog; rather the new mission was for the U.S. to remake the world in its own image. With the Soviet threat gone, the U.S. could "actively [pursue] policies in Iran, Cuba or China, for instance--ultimately intended to bring about a change of regime." Ultimately, the United States should seek "to change the regime in Peking." The United States would now promote "American principles of governance abroad -- democracy, free markets, respect for liberty."

In early January 1998 a number of leading conservatives in the so-called "Project for the New American Century," sent an open letter to President Clinton (PNAC, 26 January 1998). They warned President Clinton that Iraq posed a "threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War," and they urged him to adopt a strategy aimed at removing Saddam Hussein's regime from power. They warned as well that if the Iraqi regime did acquire weapons of mass destruction, it would threaten "the safety of American troops in the region,...our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world's supply of oil all will be put at hazard." This meant, the letter continued, "a willingness to take military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy." And, in hints of things to come, the letter noted that, "American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the U.N. Security Council." Amongst the signatories to the letter were people who would later join the Defense Advisory Board, and advisory arm to the U.S. Defense Department, and chaired by leading hawk Richard Perle. Under President Bush, the DAB was to lead the fight for an armed intervention in Iraq, and to provide the ideological underpinnings for U.S. tactics in the U.N. debate over Iraq, and a justification for the war.[1]

By the time of the 2000 presidential campaign, a new, somewhat more moderate, tone in foreign policy advice was struck by Condoleeza Rice, George W. Bush's adviser on foreign policy and later to become his National Security Adviser. ("Campaign 2000--Promoting the National Interest," in Foreign Affairs, January/February 2000).

Like Kristol and Kagan, Rice noted that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was at sea about foreign policy. But Rice saw this as an "opportunity" (a word that appears often in the mouths of the Bush administration with regard to foreign policy) for America to exert its strength in the world by deterring war, promoting "economic growth and political openness by extending free trade," renewing ties with allies, focusing on relations with China and Russia and dealing with what were then called "rogue states," namely, Iraq, Iran and North Korea. And all this would take place with the help of allies if possible, but alone if necessary. "[M]ultilateral agreements and institutions should not be ends in themselves." However, Rice was vague about what specific actions a new Republican administration might undertake toward the rogue states of the world.

The clarion calls to action coming from the neo-conservatives and neo-hawks had, during the presidential campaign, at least, little impact on their intended recipient. Indeed, he seemed to be barely listening.

In an October 2000 presidential debate, candidate George W. Bush stated: "I don't want to be the world's policeman," and he criticized the Clinton administration's penchant for nation-building, stating, "I think we ought to convince the people who live in their own lands to build their nations."

So, when George Bush took office in 2001 it appeared to the world that the United States would begin a slow process of disengagement from the world scene, not abandoning international politics entirely, but calling on America's allies to share the burdens of international diplomacy and economic aid, and saying to those nations asking for help, "physician, heal thyself."

But then came 9/11 and everything changed. The bloody tableau of the collapsing World Trade Center towers had given the neo-cons what they had previously lacked, a new, definable and hated enemy--international terrorism and rogue states. Whereas before 9/11 the neo-cons had a foreign policy in search of a goal, 9/11 brought them a goal for their foreign policy.

Suddenly, the United States was propelled front and center onto the world stage and the Bush administration in an astounding and skilful about face, strode manfully onto the stage of international politics.

Moreover, there was hardly any hesitation in announcing a radically new foreign policy paradigm. Barely three days after 9/11 President Bush stated, "Our immediate focus will be those terrorist organizations of global reach and any terrorist or state sponsor of terrorism which attempts to gain or use weapons of mass destruction..... While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively against .... terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country."[2]

How was it possible for a new administration to turn on a dime, and, in the face of international terrorism, to announce what appeared to be, on the face of it, an entirely new, coherent and aggressive foreign policy. The answer is clear: the new foreign policy of preemption had been sitting on the shelf for years just waiting to be taken down, dusted off, and put into operation.

Only a few months prior to 9/11, conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer asserted that, "after a decade of Prometheus playing pygmy, the first taks of the new administration is to reassert American freedom of action," the U.S. should no longer be the "docile international citizen. . . . The new unilateralism recognizes the uniqueness of the unipolar world we now inhabit and thus marks the real beginning of American post-Cold War foreign policy."[3]

After all, the neo-cons had been working on foreign policy for years; it was already there, bookmarked in the pages of Foreign Affairs magazine, polished and honed in the numerous and well-endowed think tanks of the American far right, and ready to be articulated by the iron circle of conservatives who now surrounded the President, namely Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, assistant secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, presidential advisor Condoleeza Rice and the so-called chicken hawks in the Defense Policy Board including Richard Perle and former CIA director James Woolsey.

All that remained was to flesh out the details. And very quickly it became apparent that, for the Bush administration, preemption meant: 1) if necessary, the United States would act alone, without allies and outside international organizations to protect its vital interests; 2) the United States would not wait for an attack to become imminent or for a threat to materialize before attacking potential enemies; and 3), little noticed and little commented on at the time, tied to pre-emption was the idea that a "time of adversity offers a unique moment of opportunity -- a moment we must seize to change our culture. Through the gathering momentum of millions of acts of service and decency and kindness, I know we can overcome evil with greater good. And we have a great opportunity during this time of war to lead the world toward the values that will bring lasting peace." In other words, the United States was now engaged in the kind of liberal imperialism set forth by Kristol, Kagan, Perle, Rice, and Wolfowitz.[4]

It had now become clear who America's enemies were and what had to be done to counter them. In his January 2002 State of the Union address to the U.S. Congress, President Bush upgraded Iran, Iraq and North Korea from the status of mere criminal, "rogue states," to their roles as actors in a great Manichean drama; they now formed "an axis of evil."

Thus, the road ahead was clear: 9/11 had prepared the ground for everything the neo-cons had wished for. The United States would now confront and defeat terrorist organizations and states, it would measure up to the grand task of building democracy and economic freedom in the world and it would, if necessary, undertake this task alone.

In theory, of course, the doctrine of preemption sounds fine; in fact it turns out to be remarkably hard to put into practice. And if lawyers say that hard cases make bad law, they don't have to look any farther than the complications surrounding the case of Iraq to prove the adage.

The problem has to do with the built-in bias of preemption toward unilateralism, for preemption means that one attacks before the traditional casus belli is present. After all, in international law, war is justified on the grounds of self-defense against an armed attack, in the face of an immediate threat of attack or, under the UN Charter, when the Security Council feels a state threatens peace and international security.

But preemption provides additional grounds for an attack as described in a June 1, 2002 talk at West Point by President Bush: "For centuries," he said, "international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against force that present an imminent danger of attack. Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threat--most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies and air force preparing to attack."

The trouble was, President Bush noted, that "rogue states and terrorists" don't use conventional means. Therefore, the U.S. "has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security... [although] the United States will not use force in all cases to preempt emerging threats. [all my italics]."

Note the language here: "imminent danger," "imminent threat," "sufficient threat."

And of the states that composed the axis of evil, for the Bush administration, Iraq clearly posed a dasnger to the United States. In a speech delivered on October 7, 2002, President Bush told the American people that Iraq "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. It has given shelter and support to terrorism, and practices terror against its own people. The entire world has witnessed Iraq's eleven-year history of defiance, deception and bad faith."

The question was, however, how was the United States to precede? Should it follow the preemption model and attack Iraq as soon as it could? Should it follow the containment model and, working with U.S. allies and the United Nations, try to deter Iraq and force it to "disarm?"

In a January 31, 2003 joint press conference with British prime minister Tony Blair, President Bush explained why containment apparently hadn't worked, "[P]rior to September the 11th, we were discussing smart sanctions. We were trying to fashion a sanction regime that would make it more likely to be able to contain somebody like Saddam Hussein. After September the 11th, the doctrine of containment just doesn't hold any water, as far as I'm concerned. I've told you the strategic vision of our country shifted dramatically, and it shifted dramatically because we now recognize that oceans no longer protect us, that we're vulnerable to attack. And the worst form of attack could come from somebody acquiring weapons of mass destruction and using them on the American people..."

But President Bush's announcement of the death of containment was premature, mainly because, after a struggle in the administration between the preemption hawks centered around Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and his policy advisers, and the containment crowd around Secretary of State Colin Powell and the State Department, containment won out, at least for a little while.

Powell convinced the President to follow the traditional, multilateral route of working through the United Nations to see if pressure from the world community would force Iraq to disarm. Resolutions were duly passed, inspectors were sent to Iraq and everyone sat back to wait. Shortly afterward, however, everything fell apart. While France, Germany, Canada and a majority of the Security Council wanted to give containment another chance; the Bush administration decided it could wait no longer and that, regardless of the Security Council, the General Assembly or some of its major allies, the Iraqis would have to be immediately and forcibly disarmed.

In a March 18, 2003 speech to the House of Commons, delivered on the eve of the attack on Iraq, British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Jack Straw said that, in the case of Iraq, containment had not worked. For Jack Straw, the resort to force proved that containment was dead.

But this was wrong; after all, containment was always premised on the threat of, and occasionally, the actual use of force. This was the case when force was used against the North Korean invasion of South Korea and the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam.

So it wasn't the use of force that signalled the death of containment, because containment always posited the use of force when communism tried to expand beyond the lines of the postwar settlement. Rather, the end of containment was signalled by the fact that the United States abandoned the search for consensus in the United Nations and amongst its major allies and, in coalition with Great Britain decided to attack Iraq. In other words, the multilateralism inherent in containment is absent from preemption. Moreover, in deciding on a preemptive attack, even before solid evidence had been produced attesting to the reality of a threat from Iraq, the Bush administration deviated from the second principle of containment which was to wait until there was a clear and present danger before resorting to armed force.

Whatever may happen in Iraq, however, it is now clear that following the doctrine of preemption raises a number of problems.

For example, relying on preemption to justify future attacks on sovereign nations, no matter how vicious their regimes, could have a disastrous effect on the world community. After all, based on the precedent of the U.S. attack on Iraq, what objections could one raise to a preemptive Pakistani attack on India? To a preemptive attack by North Korea on South Korea, or vice versa? Or to any other future nuclear power which reserved the right to a preemptive attack on a presumed enemy? And if unilateralism wins the day, then what will be the future of the United Nations, let alone of regional alliances all over the world?

Another problem with preemption is that it must rely heavily on intelligence in order to properly assess the gravity of a threat any group or nation poses to the United States. Indeed, the U.S. preemptive attack on Iraq was justified in terms of intelligence information that Iraq's putative possession of weapons of mass destruction posed a mortal danger to the United States.[5] However, when, by the middle of May 2003 at least, no evidence had yet turned up of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction, then the justification for the attack on Iraq was called into question, as well as raising important issues about whether the preemptive doctrine should rest so heavily on intelligence information that might turn out to be faulty or incomplete.[6]

But the containment paradigm has its problems as well. For it is ill-suited to deal with international terrorists who attack without warning, or genocidal murderers who may never violate national boundaries, but wreak havoc within their own states, or brutal tyrants who threaten no one until the fateful day they have acquired weapons of mass destruction.

Whatever the ultimate fallout of the Iraq war, therefore, the deep gulf between former friends and allies has demonstrated that neither containment nor preemption is an acceptable way to approach the problem of international order.

Clearly, the United Nations as an institution and the dominant powers within it will have to formulate a new foreign policy paradigm to deal with the radical changes in international relations which have taken place since September 11, 2001. ٱ

[1] Amongst the letter's signatories were: Elliot Abrams, Richard L. Armitage, William J. Bennett, Jeffrey Bergner, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Pete W. Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, William Schneider, Jr., Vin Weber, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey and Robert B. Zoeillick.

[2] This speech of 14 September 2002, along with President Bush's speeches of 20 September 2001, 14 March 2002, 22 March 2002, 23 May 2002 and 1 June 2002 were brought together and published as a single document, "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America," on 20 September 2002.

[3] Charles Krauthammer, "The New Unilateralism," Washington Post, 8 June 2001, quoted in Joseph S. Nye, Jr., " Limits of American Power," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 117, (4), 2002-2003.

[4] The U.S. does not have a good track record when it comes to building democracies in the world. See Minxin Pei and Sara Kaspar, "Lessons from the Past: The American Record on Nation Building," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, no 24, May 2003.

[5] In his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, President Bush told Congress that "

U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents," that "[t]he United Nations concluded that Saddam Hussein had materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin," that is "enough to subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure."

[6] A New York Times article from May 5, 2003 quoted some government sources who accused intelligence experts in the Defense Department of having cooked or manipulated intelligence before the attack on Iraq in order to support the case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.