Cornell Studies in Security Affairs

Robert J. Art

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780801468438
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The United States today is the most powerful nation in the world, perhaps even stronger than Rome was during its heyday. It is likely to remain the world's preeminent power for at least several decades to come. What behavior is appropriate for such a powerful state? To answer this question, Robert J. Art concentrates on "grand strategy"—the deployment of military power in both peace and war to support foreign policy goals.He first defines America's contemporary national interests and the specific threats they face, then identifies seven grand strategies that the United States might contemplate, examining each in relation to America's interests. The seven are: • dominion—forcibly trying to remake the world in America's own image;• global collective security—attempting to keep the peace everywhere;• regional collective security—confining peacekeeping efforts to Europe;• cooperative security—seeking to reduce the occurrence of war by limiting other states' offensive capabilities;• isolationism—withdrawing from all military involvement beyond U.S. borders;• containment—holding the line against aggressor states; and• selective engagement—choosing to prevent or to become involved only in those conflicts that pose a threat to the country's long-term interests.Art makes a strong case for selective engagement as the most desirable strategy for contemporary America. It is the one that seeks to forestall dangers, not simply react to them; that is politically viable, at home and abroad; and that protects all U.S. interests, both essential and desirable. Art concludes that "selective engagement is not a strategy for all times, but it is the best grand strategy for these times."

ONE

The International Setting

To develop a grand strategy for the United States, we must begin with the international environment and America’s place in it. International conditions alone do not, and should not, wholly determine a state’s foreign policy, but they do impose constraints on state action, as well as offering opportunities to exploit. Our initial task, then, is to delineate those features of the contemporary environment that most directly affect America’s security and prosperity and the quality of life of its citizenry.

Five features stand out: the absence of a peer state military competitor; the rise of grand terrorism; the deepening economic interdependence among Western Europe, North America, and Japan and, through the forces of globalization, the gradual incorporation of some Third World states into this interdependent arena; the growing appeal and expansion of democratic governance beyond the core zone of Western Europe, North America, and Japan; and the continuing degradation of the global environment, especially the increase in global warming and the threat of climate change associated with it. These five features capture the military, economic, political, and environmental developments of greatest significance for America’s national interests. The first two features are new; they appeared only with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The last three are not new, having become manifest during the latter half of the Cold War, but their magnitude has grown enough since then that they can be considered distinctive features of this era. Old and new, all five factors have great influence on the United States, its role in the world, and its strategic options.

In this chapter I describe each of these features in turn and show why they are the ones with the most bearing on the United States. I make the case for focusing on these five and not others that are commonly cited. Finally, I show how America’s fundamental national interests in the contemporary era are shaped by these salient features. Chapter 2 then provides the full justification for these interests.

ABSENCE OF A COMPETITOR STATE

The United States currently faces no peer state competitor that can pose a compelling and immediate military threat to its homeland. No great power threatens to harness the resources of Eurasia to project military power into the Western Hemisphere or against the United States; no mighty state is targeting its military forces on America’s territory with aggressive intent; no hostile coalitions are planning to move against the United States; and no great-power war looms in Eurasia to drag the United States into its maelstrom. For these reasons, the United States faces no threat of large-scale attack, wholesale destruction, military invasion, or outright conquest from state actors.

Indeed, the United States today is stronger now, relative to all other states, than at any time in its history, except for the brief period at the end of World War II when the United States enjoyed an atomic monopoly, had an army of several million, and an air force and navy second to none. Today, America’s military might dwarfs that of any potential competitor, and this condition is likely to hold for a considerable time. Although no one can say for certain how long America’s military dominance will last, the Pentagon made an estimate in 1998:

The security environment between now and 2015 will…likely be marked by the absence of a ‘global peer competitor’ able to challenge the United States militarily around the world as the Soviet Union did during the Cold War…. The United States is the world’s only superpower today, and it is expected to remain so through at least 2015.

The Pentagon reaffirmed this view in 2001:

The United States faces no global rival today, nor is one likely to emerge for the foreseeable future.1

A quick look at the possible competitors demonstrates the point. Russia poses no formidable danger. Between 1992 and 1997, the Pentagon estimate of how long it would take Russia to reconstitute a major conventional threat in Eurasia was modified, from about two years to somewhere between ten and fifteen.2 Russia’s military problems are legion. In August 2001, General Anatoly Kornukov, one of Russia’s military leaders, said that “air force units have practically ceased to be ready for combat” and that “the proportion of state-of-the-art planes is less than five percent.”3 The Air Force is critically short of repairs; training time for pilots is now below basic safety levels, let alone combat standards; and only 46 percent of its 2,000 aircraft are serviceable. Russia’s ground forces have not trained in division-level exercises for years, and its surface and submarine crews receive inadequate training at sea. Russia’s procurement budget is so low that at present levels only 10 percent of its equipment will be relatively modern by the year 2005.4 As a consequence, “The overall state of operational readiness of all except the nuclear forces remains low due to lack of resources for training, maintenance, and new equipment.”5 In late 2000 President Putin began a serious program to reform Russia’s armed forces, calling for a modern, professional, smaller, well-equipped, and well-paid military, but these reforms will take time to implement; moreover, “the fortunes of Russia’s armed forces necessarily hinge on the performance of the Russian economy.”6 Although Russia’s nuclear forces remain formidable, the danger to the United States is not one of deliberate attack, but rather poorly guarded nuclear weapons (“loose nukes”) that could be seized by the Russia “mafia” or terrorists; rogue nuclear scientists who could sell their expertise to terrorists or states hostile to the United States; or unauthorized launch of its ballistic missiles. None of these threats is to be dismissed, but all three are qualitatively different from the one posed by the Soviet Union. Consequently, they do not demand the same urgency, resources, and attention that the Soviet threat did.

William Odom, a close analyst of Russia, sums it up: “Russia is no longer a great power and is unlikely again to become one over the next several decades.”7 This conclusion is reinforced when we take into account the relative economic power of the United States and Russia. During the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had a gross domestic product (GDP) approximately half that of the United States. In 2001, the GDP of Russia was about one-thirtieth the size of America’s GDP ($10 trillion for the United States, $310 billion for Russia.)8 Even if Russia’s economy does well over the next several decades, it will be a long, long time before Russia could challenge the United States as a military competitor.

The other great power best positioned to challenge overall U.S. military predominance is China. Yet China remains a regional power, with a large but still poorly equipped army, a navy that, if no longer simply coastal, is clearly not yet blue-water, and an air force that still has thousands of obsolete first- and second-generation jet aircraft based on 1950s Soviet designs. China is engaged in a modernization effort whose first priority is to create “pockets of excellence,” that is, to make small portions of its forces fully modernized. However, a comprehensive modernization program will take somewhere between twenty-five and forty years.9 China deploys a small nuclear force of twenty liquid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and a larger number of medium-range ballistic missiles. It is in the process of modernizing these forces with submarine-launched missiles and second-generation ICBMs, but its nuclear forces are likely to remain small and useful primarily for homeland deterrence. Thus, although its military power will increase as its rapid economic growth continues, analysts concur that “China’s military remains at least 20 years out of date”; that “China does not have the resources to project a major conventional force beyond its territory”; that its “power-projection capability is limited at present”; and that it “will not represent a serious strategic threat to the United States for at least twenty years.”10 Indeed, as Robert Ross concludes: “There is no false optimism in the PLA [the People’s Liberation Army] that it could survive a war with the United States.”11

The other great military powers of the world—Britain, France, Germany, and Japan—all remain allies of the United States and closely coordinate their military planning with it. None would be able singly to challenge America’s military predominance. Apart from Russia, China, and these four great powers, only one other potential military competitor to the United States exists: the European Union. At present, however, the European Union, although an economic giant, remains a military pygmy. It plans to have a rapid reaction force of 60,000 troops ready in 2003, but most analysts do not believe that it will be able to meet its goals—being able to deploy such a force within sixty days and to sustain it in the field—until 2012 at the earliest.12 Even then, the European force will represent only a fraction of America’s power-projection capability. Thus, the United States today stands militarily preeminent.

Britain once deliberately maintained a “two-power” standard for her navy: the Royal Navy had to be equal in strength, and preferably superior to, the next two navies combined. In similar terms, the United States today appears to be following, by accident or by design, a six-to-nine power standard. Its defense budget in 1996—$266 billion—almost exactly equaled the combined total of the next six largest defense budgets, those of Russia, China, Japan, France, Britain, and Germany. By 1999, its defense budget of $283 billion exceeded the combined total of the next seven largest defense budgets—those six states plus Italy. By 2000, its defense budget of $295 billion exceeded the combined total of the next nine largest defense budgets—the aforementioned seven states, plus Saudi Arabia and India. The increases projected after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks promise to widen the gap even more.13 Measured by the traditional standard of security—America’s military power relative to other states’ military power—the United States today is quite secure. However, measured by another standard—the threat of terrorist attack—the United States does not look so secure.

EMERGENCE OF GRAND TERRORISM

The terrorist threat that the United States now faces is different from anything that it has ever experienced before. In the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, over 3000 people were killed.14 This threat could grow even more severe, perhaps catastrophic, unless strong measures are taken to counteract it. “Grand terror”—attacks against the American homeland that could kill thousands if conventional and radiological weapons are used, or hundreds of thousands, even millions, if nuclear, biological, or chemical (NBC) weapons are used—is the prime military threat the United States confronts today.

Until the early 1990s, the terrorist acts that the United States and other countries faced were “traditional.” The goals of traditional terrorists were strictly political, precisely defined, and directed toward specific goals such as ending political repression and economic injustice for a group, or attaining statehood for an ethnic minority. The groups executing such attacks usually took public credit for them in order to dramatize their causes and to produce the desired political effects. Most important, these terrorist attacks were limited in scope. Traditional terrorists fine-tuned their killing and pulled their punches, limiting the carnage they inflicted because, in the words of the terrorism expert Brian Jenkins, they wanted “a lot of people watching and a lot of people listening, and not a lot of people dead.”15 The aim of the traditional terrorists was to cause enough death to rivet attention to their political cause, but not so much death as to cause a political backlash that would hurt that cause.

Under traditional terrorism, the number of people killed worldwide was small. Using U.S. State Department data from 1968–2000, Audrey Cronin has shown that the total number of deaths worldwide from terrorist attacks ranged from a low of thirty-four in 1968, when there were 124 separate terrorist incidents, to a high of 816 in 1985, when there were 635 separate incidents. In more than half of the years, deaths from all terrorist attacks worldwide averaged fewer than four hundred.16 Even more important, as Brian Jenkins notes, only fourteen of the more than ten thousand recorded acts of international terrorism since 1968 (and prior to September 11, 2001) had resulted in deaths of one hundred or more.17 In the year 2000, 405 people worldwide were killed in terrorist attacks, of whom nineteen were Americans; all but two were sailors killed in the attack against the USS Cole while it was stationed in the Yemeni port of Aden.18 Indeed, during most of the years between 1968 and the early 1990s, international terrorism was so limited in scope and killing that Thomas Schelling, accurately reflecting the times, could write in 1991: “I am…led to speculate on why international political terrorism is such an infinitesimal activity on the world scene when measured not in audience appeal but in damage actually accomplished or even attempted.”19 Traditional terror, although heinous, was limited and predictable.

Matters began to change in the 1990s, especially for the United States. Even though the worldwide total of terrorist incidents declined in the 1990s from what it had been in the 1980s, the attacks were increasingly directed against Americans, and the lethality of each attack increased. Throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s, about one-third of the terrorists incidents each year involved the United States. Between 1990 and 1992, however, the percentage rose to between 39 percent and 55 percent; it dipped to a low of 20 percent in 1994, but then climbed again to 40 percent in 1997, reaching 47 percent in 2000.20 Moreover, according to State Department records, between 1968 and 2000, the three years of greatest casualties (dead and wounded) for both the United States and the world all occurred in the 1990s.21 Because of the September 11 al Qaeda attacks in the United States, 2001 is the year in which the most Americans were killed in terrorist attacks—3,235 in the United States and 8 others abroad—and in which the largest number of people worldwide were killed, an estimated total of 3,547.22

Terrorists are focusing more and more on Americans because, as Paul Pillar notes, the United States is the world’s “sole superpower, the leader of the West, and the only country with truly global impact and presence.”23 Terrorism is the weapon of the weak against the strong;...

Table of contents

• Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The International Setting
• 2 America’s National Interests
• 3 Dominion, Collective Security, and Containment
• 4 Selective Engagement
• 5 Isolationism and Offshore Balancing
• 6 Selective Engagement and the Free Hand Strategies
• 7 Implementing Selective Engagement
• Appendix A. Civil Wars Active between 1991 and 2000
• Appendix B. International Wars Active between 1991 and 2000
• Notes