How Did We Lose Them? Bush Wanted His Doctrine And the Allies, Too
By James Mann
Sunday, March 16, 2003
We are witnessing a major intellectual failure by the Bush administration.
For more than two years, indeed even before President Bush took office, the members of his foreign policy team have repeatedly advanced a series of optimistic, self-justifying ideas about America's relationship with its friends and allies -- namely, that these nations' growing estrangement from U.S. foreign policy wasn't real, wasn't serious or wouldn't last. Now, the administration is belatedly discovering that both its beliefs and its underlying assumptions were wrong.
... Administration officials persuaded themselves that the allies and other major powers would ultimately support the United States. They did this by holding to two fallacious assumptions about the nature and behavior of America's friends and allies. We can call these the Strength Hypothesis and the Follower Hypothesis.
These assumptions about allies, too, date back several years. The best way to see how they evolved is to look at the intellectual history of Paul Wolfowitz, now the deputy secretary of defense. In the late 1990s, when Bill Clinton was in his second term and Saddam Hussein was becoming increasingly defiant of U.N. weapons inspectors, Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives came to the conclusion that a policy of containment in Iraq wouldn't work.
Wolfowitz, then dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, faced a conundrum. He had repeatedly emphasized the importance of the Gulf War coalition put together by the first Bush administration, in which he had served. However, some of the European and Middle Eastern governments that had been part of that coalition were, by the late 1990s, voicing increasing opposition to tough action by the United Nations against Iraq. How could one call for stronger action against Iraq and still adhere to the belief in a coalition, while the coalition seemed to be growing ever weaker? Wolfowitz put forward a cluster of ideas to explain why the opposition by other nations could be discounted.
One of these was the Strength Hypothesis: America's friends and allies were afraid to support the United States on Iraq because the Clinton administration's policy was too weak. They were said to be afraid we would wimp out. "[Other nations] do not wish to be associated with a U.S. military effort that is ineffective and that leaves them alone to face Iraq," wrote Wolfowitz in a 1997 commentary in the Wall Street Journal, headlined "Rebuilding the Anti-Saddam Coalition." The more strength the United States displayed, Wolfowitz suggested, the more support it would have from other governments.
The second, related idea was the Follower Hypothesis. In propounding it, Wolfowitz was echoing thoughts voiced by many others after the end of the Cold War, including Democratic Party leaders who spoke of America as the "indispensable nation." The theory was that if America led, its friends and allies would inevitably follow. "A willingness to act unilaterally can be the most effective way of securing effective collective action," concluded Wolfowitz in that 1997 article.
Others on Bush's team may not have put their names behind those exact words, but over the past two years the administration has operated on similar assumptions. It has pressed forward with its new doctrines, initiatives and policies, continuing to maintain that America's allies were important but expecting all the while that the allies' reservations would evaporate. The insidious nature of these expectations was that they caused the administration to fail to recognize what was happening overseas until too late.
And so we have heard, over the past six months, a succession of prophecies that turned out to be illusions: Sure, the Germans were opposed to war with Iraq, we were told, but they would be alone in their opposition, because the French would come around. Sure, the French were against U.S. policy, but their opposition wasn't significant because the administration would win over the Russians. Wrong and wrong -- and on and on, to the point where the United States has jeopardized the leader of the British government, its closest ally in the world. This, presumably, was not the regime change the administration had in mind.
It turns out that the underlying assumptions, coherent as they sounded, weren't valid. The Strength Hypothesis failed, because displays of power by the United States seemed to worry or even frighten America's friends and allies rather than winning them over. The Follower Hypothesis didn't work out because other nations were discomfited or downright insulted by being treated as though they were expected to simply get in line. ...
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27756-2003Mar14.html>
Carl
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