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The
World After Iraq
Robert
L. Hutchings
Chairman, National Intelligence Council
Princeton University Washington
Seminar
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Washington, DC
8 April 2003
A
couple of weeks ago the National Intelligence Council
– all twelve National Intelligence Officers together with
their deputies – convened for a half-day conference devoted
to the world after Iraq.
It is the kind of thing the NIC does well, bringing
a diverse group of senior experts together to look over
the horizon at a focused agenda of critical issues.
I cannot share all of the findings, some of which
are classified, but I will try to summarize parts of the
discussion and offer my own take on some of the issues. So these remarks reflect my own views, not the
official views of the National Intelligence Council or
of the Intelligence Community as a whole.
As we were trying to peer into the future, we began
by looking back at some of our earlier forecasts to see
how well they stood up – and what lessons we might draw
from them. It has
been shown empirically, by the way, that those who are
most successful thinking about the future also spend a
lot of time thinking about the past.
Just after the terrorist attacks September 11, 2001,
the NIC undertook a similar stocktaking and forecast. Most of the conclusions in the published report hold up pretty well.
What that report aptly termed a “clash of civilizations
within Muslim countries” has been manifest in both
anti-American violence and new pressures within moderate
Arab regimes. The
report noted laconically that “consensus among the United
States and its international allies about the best means
to deter asymmetric threats from nontraditional adversaries
is not likely to be achieved soon” – another judgment
that has proved all too accurate.
Perhaps the most important judgment concerned the potentially
historic shift in Russian foreign policy toward strategic
alignment with the United States.
This assessment, together with the forecast of
a domestically preoccupied, less confrontational China,
hinted at but did not explicitly forecast a realignment
of the international system.
So let me pick up the story there.
The
International System
I launched our conference two weeks ago by posing the
following question: Was
the breakdown of international consensus over Iraq a temporary
phenomenon or the beginning of a fundamental restructuring
of the global order, in which the other powers align themselves
to counter-balance U.S. “hyper-power”? In other words, was this episode attributable
to personalities and domestic politics, or was something
deeper at work?
To be sure, there have been prior crises in transatlantic
relations. Antipathies
in Europe toward the United States were at least as great
during the Vietnam War or at the beginning of the first
Reagan term, and the personal chemistry between Helmut
Schmidt and Jimmy Carter was as bad as anything we see
now.
The idea of allies conspiring against one another is
not new, either. The
Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow recently released a formerly
classified memorandum of conversation between Mikhail
Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher from the fall of 1989,
in which Thatcher told Gorbachev to pay no attention to
the just-issued NATO communiqué supporting German unification.
Here we had our closest ally conspiring with the
Soviet leader about the most vital interests of another
close ally, the Federal Republic of Germany.
So one needs a certain perspective lest we succumb
to a counter-productive Franco-Germano-Russo-phobia. As that eminent political theorist Don Corleone put it, “It’s not
personal; it’s just business.”
But the present crisis goes
deeper than personalities and politics.
Its roots are structural, having to do with the
distribution of power in the international system, and
the crisis is unfolding without the galvanizing element
of a common threat. Structural
Realists – in academia as well as in government – have
been arguing since the end of the Cold War that it is
an immutable law of nature that when one state acquires
preponderant (or hyper-) power, other states will make
common cause to balance that power.
There have been foreshadowings of this already;
Iraq brought it into full view.
What does it all mean? Tim Garton Ash wrote in the New York
Times on March 20, “Over the last few weeks, the
geopolitical West of the cold war has collapsed before
our eyes.” That
judgment strikes me as too stark.
An editorial (by Jean Marie
Colombai) in Le Monde a few days later (March 25)
came closer to the mark in characterizing this crisis
as “a question of redefining the balance of power in the
world.” The editorial
continued: “We have entered a lasting era of conflicts
and repeated crises” between former allies in NATO and
the EU. It pointed
in particular to the damage to the Franco-British relationship,
which should have been the pillar of a European defense. The editorial concluded: “These are not temporary parameters that will
disappear once the war is over, when the United States
needs its allies for the reconstruction.”
“A whole system is at stake here.”
All
this leads me to the conclusion that we are facing a more
fluid and complicated set of alignments than anything
we have seen since the formation of the Atlantic alliance
in 1949. At a practical level, this will mean that the
longstanding pattern of regular and close coordination
via NATO and especially among the four key western allies
– the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany
– will give way to an ad hoc “coalition of the willing”
on most issues. Of
course, NATO had already been receding as an instrument
of American diplomacy because of the European Union’s
common foreign and security policy and the growing disparity
between U.S. global interests and Europe’s continental
focus. But the transatlantic conflict over Iraq marks
a turning point.
Now, having made a bold case,
let me temper these judgments.
First, the pattern of Franco-German-Russian collaboration
that we saw over Iraq will be episodic, not permanent.
France and Germany will continue to align themselves
periodically against what they would depict as U.S. unilateralism,
but it is doubtful that this united front will extend
to other issues such as trade and counterterrorist cooperation.
Second, Russia’s orientation is still in flux. Having made a strategic decision to align Russian
foreign policy with the United States, President Putin
faces a growing backlash from Russia’s security elites.
Putin navigated the diplomatic storm over Iraq
rather well, but Russia’s future course is in question.
Third, China’s evenhandedness through all this was
notable. From the
Chinese perspective, the split among the principal Western
allies was a welcome development. Although China will remain wary of U.S. global
power, its leaders would prefer to avoid confrontation
with the United States while they focus on domestic challenges
and regional concerns.
Finally, much will depend on U.S. actions after hostilities
in Iraq. Let me
turn briefly to some of the critical issues that we will
face.
Regional
Issues
Within the region, we can expect a near-term spike
in anti-American terrorist activity and an expansion of
the recruitment pool of extremist groups and would-be
terrorists. Over
the longer term, there will be two kinds of effects: those
springing from regime change in Iraq, and those coming
from the U.S. military action and occupation.
A prolonged U.S. military presence would evoke in Arab
minds the 13th century Mongol occupation of
Baghdad. These effects would be mitigated by “nativization”
via a swift transfer to Iraqi authority or by “internationalization”
via the visible presence of UN and NGO representatives.
The Administration has already made clear its determination
to hand over power as quickly as possible to an Iraqi
interim authority, and President Bush affirmed a “vital
role” for the UN at his press conference this morning.
Democratic change within the region will not come quickly.
In Iraq itself, it is not unreasonable to hope
that an interim authority together with a stabilizing
U.S. security presence will enable the country to move
toward an open and participatory political system governed
by the rule of law and pursuing cooperative relations
with its neighbors. Stable
democracy, as we know from many examples, will not be
achieved overnight, however.
In Iraq and elsewhere in the region, progress will
be constrained by enduring realities unrelated this conflict:
lack of democratic political culture, weak civil society,
and strong vested interests against reform.
However, one should not undervalue the removal of a
despotic and threatening regime and its replacement with
one that is more open, lawful, and cooperative.
This will enhance the security environment for
moderate Arab states like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia,
though it may be unsettling internally at least in the
near term. How
it plays in Syria and Iran is harder to gauge.
One hopes those regimes will conclude they should
cease supporting terrorists and pursuing weapons of mass
destruction, but it is an open question whether they will
draw those lessons.
Regional attitudes will turn in large measure on the state of Arab-Israeli
relations. Positive
developments in the Palestinian leadership run up against
a continuing climate of bitter hostility that militates
against a breakthrough, but the perception that the United
States was making a strong effort to broker a settlement
would itself help to temper anti-American suspicions and
animosities in the Arab world. At their joint press conference this morning,
President Bush and Prime Minister Blair reaffirmed their
determination to do so.
Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation
Let me say a few words about counter-terrorist and counter-proliferation
cooperation. In
the struggle against terrorism, some countries will be
more cautious about publicly supporting U.S. efforts,
but most see this cooperation as a shared priority and
will not allow differences over Iraq to interfere. (The French in particular have a high capacity
for cooperating in one arena and confronting us in others.)
As to what to do about weapons of mass destruction,
one of the few things on which the international community
might agree is that the international nonproliferation
regime has broken down. Some states may look to North Korea and Iraq and conclude that swift acquisition of nuclear
weapons preempts U.S. action whereas mere development
invites it. Meanwhile,
we could be faced at any time with crises between India
and Pakistan or with North Korea, as well as with other
countries that may seek swift acquisition of nuclear weapons.
On the positive side, there may be an opportunity to
fashion a new international consensus around the dangers
of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons proliferation. There may also be ways to create more effective linkages among the
various elements of counterproliferation strategy: preventing
or slowing acquisition, rolling back or deterring use
of existing programs, and dealing with the consequences
of acquisition via regional security arrangements.
Transatlantic
Relations
As to transatlantic relations, our differences with France and Germany
are matched by major rifts within Europe, with
the paradoxical result that the United States will be
needed even more as a European power – hardly the outcome
the French had in mind.
At NATO, the Prague agenda of enlargement, command restructuring, and
the capabilities commitment should be within our reach
so long as we take the lead, but NATO’s role out of area
has obviously been severely compromised. Within the EU, France and Germany have lost
credibility as reliable partners, at least for now. In the end, the rest of Europe has nowhere else to go, but this rift
will slow down the development of political Union,particularly
efforts to develop a common foreign and security policy.
Conclusion
A decade ago, I was involved
in a project on “2010” organized by one of my predecessors
as Chairman of the NIC, Joe Nye, now dean of the Kennedy
School at Harvard. We tried to look ahead fifteen years to imagine
the shape of the world to come.
In an essay that I wrote for the project (and later
published in a book of mine called At the End of the
American Century), I described a world that would
remain militarily unipolar, with no power or group of
powers capable of matching the global reach of the United
States, but with a tripolar distribution of economic power
among North America, Europe, and East Asia. Beneath the level of these familiar yardsticks
of national power, moreover, I saw not the concentration
of power but its diffusion among supranational,
subnational, and transnational actors beyond the control
of any government.
Some of my judgments were overtaken
by events; others were just plain wrong. The military preponderance of the United States has become even more
profound than we anticipated, and the shock of 9/11 (which
my essay did not predict) caused us to go on the
offensive against international terrorism in ways that
I did not anticipate.
Yet the core argument, I would
contend, remains valid.
At a time when the spectacular performance of our
armed forces in Iraq may tempt us to see power in predominantly
military terms, it is worth recalling that our preponderance
is not so great in other areas and that we continue to
live in an interdependent world.
We can’t wage the war on terrorism by ourselves,
and we can’t bomb the global economy into submission. Our smart bombs aren’t that smart.
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