CHAPTER TWELVE

Strategy and the Market-State

If we are to create historical art, it is not enough to look back on history; we must be able to live history, to take part in public life.

—Jacob Burckhardt, “Bericht uber die Kunstausstellung

zu Berlin im Herbste 1842.”

MARKET-STATES:

MERCANTILE, ENTREPRENEURIAL, MANAGERIAL

The fundamental choice for every market-state is whether to be (1) a mercantile state—i.e., one that endeavors to improve its relative position vis-à-vis all other states by competitive means, or (2) an entrepreneurial state, one that attempts to improve its absoluteposition while mitigating the competitive values of the market through cooperative means, or (3) a managerial market-state, one that tries to maximize its position both absolutely and relatively by regional, formal means (trading blocs, etc.). This choice will have both constitutional and strategic implications.

The mercantile state seeks market share above all else, in order to gain relative dominance in the international market; the entrepreneurial state seeks leadership through the production of collective goods that the world's states want; the managerial state seeks power through its hegemony within a regional economic zone. One is not more moral or necessarily more benign than another. There are pitfalls in each position: the entrepreneurial state may be tempted to abdicate its leadership and initiative out of mingled pique and national self-absorption, as the American nation-state did after World War I; the managerial state always risks the dilution of responsibility that goes with cooperative systems—by just such means did the society of nation-states watch as genocidal campaigns proceeded in Libya, in Rwanda, in Cambodia, in Bosnia, in the Sudan; the mercantile state risks retributive reactions of the kind practiced by nation-states that so greatly worsened the depression of the 1930s. The entrepreneurial state may become so intoxicated with its own absolute position that it fails to prepare itself—by not deferring consumption in order to invest in infrastructure—for relative challenges from states whose competitive drive is masked by the improved wealth positions of all major players; by just such developments have great states routinely been displaced by hungrier antagonists. The mercantile state is subject to an analogous fate, however; Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is largely devoted to documenting the fall of mercantile states whose balance sheets between economic reinvestment and military expenditure tipped them into relative, and eventually absolute, decline. The mercantile state may also forgo the benefits of cultural and political cooperation that eras of peace can bring. Like the famous, faceless player in the Prisoner's Dilemma,1 the mercantile state will routinely make suboptimal competitive choices out of the fear and suspicion that is conditioned in a society that has accustomed itself to long periods of conflict and is inept at collaboration. The managerial state will inevitably resort to re-regulation as a means of dampening conflict within its regional institutional group, and this is likely to lead to suboptimal economic performance.

One market-state already appears to have opted for the role of mercantile state: Japan. With its literate and educated people, largely devoid of ethnic conflict and possessing the most restrictive immigration laws of any major state, Japan is well placed to conduct a campaign of relative increase in enrichment at the expense of its trading partners. With a history of high savings rates, Japan can avoid some of the intergenerational conflict that otherwise accompanies state borrowing. Japan can also avoid the public order problems that seem to dog every multiethnic society, including the problems associated with immigration that are tolerated by societies that depend on a fresh source of cheap labor that Japan does not yet need owing to its practice of rigorous self-denial in personal consumption.* A mercantile trading policy depends on control of one's currency, which is supported by strictly enforced limits on public spending, and the presence of value-added industries that dominate the terms of trade. Japan has to a large degree been able to pursue such a policy. The difficulty with this course, as Japan's experience shows, is the rigidity and self-dealing that infest a mercantile state, transforming its markets by secretive, deceptive, and even corrupt practices. An entire banking sector run on the model of the military-industrial complex, for example, is unlikely to be the most efficient agent of domestic growth.

Is the mercantile role an appropriate choice for the United States? There is some doubt, in any case, whether the United States will be able to maintain a workforce capable of successfully operating in the high-technology industries that give a state favorable terms of trade. With the most relaxed immigration laws of any major state, the United States both adds to its welfare expenses and fragments its cultural unity.* Because of its decentralized social and political structures, the United States is unable to curtail individual consumption, leaving it with a high trade deficit (which results from lowering the costs of goods to the consumer through imports), a decade of high budget deficits (which results from lowering the costs of government to the taxpayer through borrowing), and a high national debt3 that will have to be repaid even if, as some predict, the budget deficits might cease (the result of the interaction of the first two phenomena as money from imported capital and tax rebates fueled a period of rapid growth). There is little prospect for a change in course: indeed, if the market-state is constituted to enrich the opportunities of individuals (and not simply to enrich the people as a whole) why should a multicultural, multiethnic state like the United States impose austerity measures that address these problems? Most individuals, including especially the children of the poor, are far better off under current U.S. policies than they would be under taxes and monetary rules that penalized borrowing and importing. Only the children of the future are penalized, and multicultural market-states appear to feel somewhat less responsibility toward the unborn. In this way the market-state plays to American weaknesses as well as to our strengths.

In one respect, however, those particular weaknesses tend to undermine the maneuverability so crucial to the market-state. That weakness has to do with the “followership” traits of the American people at this time, traits that are indispensable to a successful mercantile state. An August 1995 poll of Americans revealed that 59 percent said that there was not a single elected official that they admired. Of the 36 percent who said they could think of one, the president was named by 6 percent, his then opponent the majority leader was named by 5 percent, and the new Speaker of the House by 4 percent.⁴ Such coolness toward authority does not evidence the sort of social adhesion to the State that wins multistate conflicts.

But to say that the United States is not well situated, considered in the abstract, to be a mercantile state in the era of market-states, is not to say it could not prevail in this role. It need only be relatively well situated, vis-à-vis its competitors, and here the size of the American market, its role as currency provider for the developed world, and its abundant natural resources still ensure that, should it choose, it could dominate Japan or the E.U. or any other such competitor in a mercantile competition (so long as it could prevent the formation of an anti-American cartel, such as might occur between the E.U. and Japan). Precisely because we were so unsuccessful at developing exports—which account for less than 25 percent5 of GNP—the United States has far less to suffer, in relative terms, from a decline in world trade and retaliation against American mercantile practices. We could be a successful mercantile state, as a market-state, as we were, despite our many shortcomings, a successful mercantile state as a state-nation.

That does not, however, decide the matter. Should the United States choose this option? What are the costs and benefits (for that is how the market-state will measure things) of being an entrepreneurial state? The entrepreneurial state would pursue the enhancement of universal opportunity through a nonmercantile, free-trade policy. An entrepreneurial state would allow for relatively free immigration so long as the costs imposed by immigrants did not significantly affect the wealth and wealth creation of those taxpayers already present. It would seek environmental protection and nuclear nonproliferation through any effective means, collective or unilateral—by force if necessary in extreme cases—because the general enrichment of mankind is a consequence of success, even if a single hostile state loses as a result. It would employ multilateral alliance systems, of which NATO is an example, ⁶ to expand collective security but be prepared to join ad hoc “coalitions of the willing”⁷ when collective security institutions are stymied. Paradoxically, such a state would be more prone to intervention—in cases of ethnic cleansing, humanitarian relief, support for the peoples of hijacked democracies, the destruction of terror networks— than the mercantile state, which husbands its violence to pursue more directly mercantile goals. If being an entrepreneurial state leads to more absolute wealth, does it actually encourage reinvestment of that wealth, or is this wealth frittered away in various adventures? Even more important, can the entrepreneurial state avoid cataclysmic war more successfully because it can remain armed without the constant friction of strategic competition inherent in a system of mercantile states? Is the aggressive mercantile state in fact more likely to be weak militarily because it is so desperate to throw its resources into economic competition, while at the same time it fails to develop the cooperative practices that can ameliorate crises and conflicts? And if it is, and the choice of the mercantile option by other competitive states actually becomes a source of comparative advantage to the United States, should we continue to produce collective security goods, like the creation of the coalition that fought the Gulf War?

And what about the option of the managerial market-state? The United States is poorly situated geographically to lead a regional trading bloc. Canada represents a small market, Latin America an uncertain one, separated by language and culture from the United States. It is true that there is a large and rapidly growing Hispanic minority in the United States, but this pool of talented persons is not necessarily making the United States more congruent with the places they left. The day is far off when North Americans will grow up as bilingual as, say, people in Belgium or Denmark, where more than one ethnic community coexist.

And why, in the age of the Internet, should physical proximity dictate the boundaries of regional trading blocs whose trade will be mainly in nonphysical items? Suppose the United States were part of a “virtual” region, composed of the United Kingdom, Singapore, India, the Philippines, and Canada. This might make the managerial model more palatable. The real question then becomes: Should the United States take the fateful step of creating a second E.U.—an “Economic Union” like the European Union—knowing that by so doing it hardens the lines of world competition and forfeits its unique, even transcendent role? If, as appears likely, the world will have an E.U. for the indefinite future, having two seems to be a step in the wrong direction that we should only take if we are compelled to do so.

One proto-market-state that appears to be heading toward the role of managerial market-state is the new state of Germany. Although more truly multicultural than before, owing to the amalgamation of capitalist and socialist societies and the most open immigration policy of any E.U. member, Germany possesses a common language and a highly educated workforce. Germany's crucial roles in the E.U. and in NATO—linking economic and security interests, Atlantic and continental—give her the collaborative position that might have been Britain's (and under Tony Blair may still be). Unlike the United States, Germany has managed to maintain a strong currency and strong exports. Germany's venture into high debt is a model of imaginative investment in infrastructure because the proceeds of the borrowing went into the acquisition of East Germany and not into mere consumption. A collaborative foreign policy depends on refusing to tolerate or to become a free rider (that is, a mercantile state within a free trading system) and the willingness to use force to maintain world order and the ability to do so without exciting fear in other states. Germany has the self-discipline and the wealth to do both. Although Germany has been made the diplomatic scapegoat by her allies over Yugoslavia for her early recognition of Slovenia and Croatia, and although she has hitherto refused to take up security responsibilities outside the NATO area (as in Kuwait), it is noteworthy that she has since modified this policy and offered air force assets to protect the “safe areas” of Bosnia at a time when other NATO states were dithering. More recently, Germany offered military assistance to the coalition effort in Afghanistan. It remains to be seen whether Germany's wretched twentieth century history will be redeemed by her commitment to human rights in the twenty-first century or will cripple her altogether, making France's enforcer in Germany's more submissive periods and Eastern Europe's neocolonialist when German self-confidence asserts itself. NATO enlargement is one way the United States has encouraged the healthy development of the new German state.

Absent an acute threat to American survival, the United States may simply lack the sense of purpose to be an effective entrepreneurial state. Perhaps more than at any time since the civil rights revolution, the United States needs political leadership to re-establish a national history that reflects our strengths of character, our inventiveness, our talents for cooperation and our benign ambition, and above all, our confidence in a common enterprise.⁸ President Clinton moved the United States far toward the market-state. President George W. Bush has entered office at a crucial time, and appears to be equally committed to this new constitutional order.

The very nature of the entrepreneurial state, however, with its decentralization, its economic evaluation of all policy, its meritocratic competitiveness, and, above all, its taste for irony and amusement, will not make either leading or following easy. It is, however, a sense of purpose that is most required by the entrepreneurial state, because only such a sense—cultural, intellectual, artistic, as well as political—can endow a national history sufficient to move our distracted people to take up the distant and abstract burdens of such a state. We usually imagine leadership to be concerned with the future, but in fact it is the shaping of the past in the crucible of the present that empowers leadership because it gives an identity and a common perspective to those who would follow. We must feel that we are the heirs to the responsibilities the entrepreneurial state would impose on us, that they are our natural inheritance. Only history can do this, for it unites strategy and law by telling a story that provides us with a basis for legitimacy, that is, with some other self-image than the one in the narcissistic mirror of the present.

Finally, we must determine which of these three choices, managerial, entrepreneurial, or mercantile, better reflects our role in the world, as it is and as we wish it to be. Which method of pursuing the goals we have embraced will evoke from our people those resources of will and unity and common enterprise that enabled us to prevail in the Long War? A mercantile state can unite us against a common foe and give us a central purpose, but it turns our people into an instrument. Education is undertaken for the enrichment of the business enterprise, not the intellect. Defense is belabored because it cannot show a bottom line, while our streets and our cities become more precarious than many theatres of war, and security itself becomes privatized by house alarms and psychiatrists. A movement toward a mercantile market-state by the United States will effect a decline in interstate cooperation at the very time when successfully opposing terrorism, international crime cartels, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction requires international collaboration.

On the other hand, an entrepreneurial state is not without its risks. Constitutionally, such an American state would reverse two of the impor-tant developments of late twentieth century American jurisprudence: the weakening of the executive and the decline of state and local government. An entrepreneurial state must have the executive authority to use force expeditiously and to keep its security secrets, two things an American president is hard-pressed to do today. The transparency in governmental affairs that is demanded by the citizens and the media of the market-state make its entrepreneurial form especially difficult to achieve. Yet such capabilities for secrecy are crucial for the entrepreneurial state because it is committed to enhancing world stability and thus even relatively abstract challenges—nuclear proliferation, ethnic cleansing in remote regions, international terrorism, environmental depredation—must nevertheless be dealt with decisively, which often means without previous public exposure of operations and plans.

At the same time, the experimentation and innovation so dear to the market-state may thrive more abundantly under the federalism of the entrepreneurial state than under an omnicompetent government characteristic of managerial market-states. An entrepreneurial state might encourage the locality as a laboratory and even tolerate wide variations in, for example, welfare benefits and criminal sanctions that would be inimical to the managerial state. But simply increasing the authority of local governments, which will be whipsawed by corporations demanding tax and environmental concessions, on the one hand, and special-interest groups attempting to heighten regulation, on the other, is no answer. The smaller the jurisdiction, the greater its vulnerability. Perhaps only a managerial, continent-sized state like the United States can withstand the alternating threats to relocate (by the corporation) or frustrate (by the special-interest groups). In an entrepreneurial state, invariably there will be wide differences in local laws. In a country as tormented by race as ours, such variations are bound to produce invidious inequalities and discrimination. Can we afford to sacrifice the unity that a managerial state provides, even in peacetime? An entrepreneurial state, which we have so richly earned, could be an era of renewal for the United States in which enrichment means more than positive trade flows. But it could also lead to the disintegration of the State into regional, quasi-racial, and religious enclaves, devoid of any sense of overarching identity.

Of course no state in the real world will embody 100 percent of any of these caricatures. Some states seem historically tilted toward one model: France, for example, appears to want to lead the E.U. into becoming a managerial superstate. Others, Britain and the United States for example, incline toward the entrepreneurial model. Still others, notably Japan and China, seem to have thrown their futures in with a more mercantile approach. Whatever choice we make, we will have to find a way to compensate for the market-state's inherent weaknesses—its lack of community, its extreme meritocracy, its essential materialism and indifference to heroism, spirituality, and tradition. The entrepreneurial state attempts to ameliorate the effects of the market through ad hoc institutions of maximum flexibility; the mercantile state compensates for the market by calling on national elements of competitiveness and achievement. The managerial state falls back on regulation to achieve stability and the ever-elusive “level playing field” so beloved of lobbyists who seek advantage, not neutrality, for their clients. All three models must cope with citizenries that are increasingly alienated from the State itself, indeed from the very societies that share the scope of the modern state—too large to comport with postmodern identities, too small to be viable on their own. There is a direct, although often obscured, line between the ever-presence of the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the immediacy of television images everywhere on the globe, and the very immanence of economic vulnerability, on the one hand, and the constitutional evolution of the State from a state focused on the people as a whole to one focused on persons, on the other.

This need not be a cause for despair. American society has much less invested in its identity as an ethnic group,* if indeed it has had such an identity since the Civil War; it has less to lose by shedding this constitutional form.† It is well placed to make the transition from nation-state to market-state. In the passage to a legitimacy conveyed by assuring opportunity—with its need for transparency in government operations, its enhanced possibilities for enrichment, its meritocratic egalitarianism—the United States could develop a more responsive government, acting in fewer areas with greater confidence.

STRATEGY AND THE ENTREPRENEURIAL MARKET-STATE:

A SECURITY PARADIGM FOR THE UNITED STATES

Many conflicts may lead states to war, but when these disputes implicate the basic legitimacy of states, we are led into the strategic whirlwinds that finally change the state system and its constituent constitutional archetypal orders. There are present in the current context three possibilities for this sort of conflict: wars between nation-states and market-states in which an exemplar of one of these forms challenges the other's assumptions about sovereignty, because these assumptions are not shared by the two orders; wars between one market-state and another, because the various forms of the market also differ with respect to fundamental ideas of sovereignty;* and war that spreads to the society of states from a civil war in one state where the partisans of the nation-state confront the partisans of the new market-state.

As an example of the first contingency, consider the possibility that a nation-state's nuclear testing program so endangered the global atmosphere that another state, a market-state or proto-market-state, assumed it had the right forcibly to halt the testing program, even though the tests were conducted solely on national territory. What is appropriate for the market-state—with its porous territorial concepts and its responsibility to preserve the opportunities for personal development, including, of course, access to a safe environment—seems to clash with the absolute sovereignty of a nation-state taking steps it alone can determine are necessary, within its territory, to protect the nation. Similarly, a war between the United States and China over Taiwan would present classic nation-state claims to territorial integrity and antisecession versus internationalist market-state claims that no state can be absorbed without its consent, and that its “national” ethnic basis is not conclusive as to statehood.

As an example of wars that might arise among or within market-states, consider three different sorts of such states—roughly characterized earlier as one working within traditions of individual rights, laissez-faire trading, and personal freedom, versus one coming from a tradition of group responsibility, state-managed trading, and rigid social stability, versus one within a communitarian tradition oriented to interest groups and social justice. Suppose these traditions came into conflict within a single great market-state, precipitating a revolutionary situation? Analogously this happened to some degree in all the great nation-states, but especially of course in Russia and Germany. Or suppose great powers, representing these three different approaches to the market-state, found themselves in conflict over an as-yet-undecided great power's constitutional valence, that is, the sort of market-state to emerge there? This also happened to the great nation-states; indeed I argued earlier that the Cold War, the last phase of the Long War, was fought by great powers representing different ideological approaches to the nation-state, over the constitutional destiny of the divided states of World War II—Korea, Viet Nam, and supremely, Germany. Political ideology determined the valence of the nation-state; with the market state, the valence is determined by differing views of retained* sovereignty—that sovereignty reserved to the People that is not delegated to government. An analogous sort of conflict might occur in the twenty-first century between different forms of market-states over the future of a divided state—China or Russia, for example—whose orientation toward these forms was undecided.

One object of a security paradigm to accompany the constitutional archetype that will take us into the twenty-first century is to avoid such a cataclysm. If we are to avoid another world-rending war, then my hopes lie with the entrepreneurial state. Only it offers the chance, through constant and costly vigilance, steadily to release the pressures attendant in the shifting distributions of global power among competitive states. Such a model increases the likelihood that the United States will share its technology and information resources, and it is by sharing rather than hoarding that we stave off competition. On the other hand, it must be noted that a mercantile market-state offers a better chance of enduring such an apocalypse should it come, because such states cultivate self-sufficiency. And the managerial state promises the greatest likelihood of recovering from such a conflict, because it strengthens the institutional basis necessary for reconstitution.

Most important, however, the entrepreneurial model offers the United States the best chance of developing, marketing, and “selling” the collective goods that will maintain American influence in the world. We have been powerful and wealthy in eras past and have had little influence on world events; this might well be the case again should we decide for a mercantile market-state. I believe an entrepreneurial state can provide the structure and the new point of view we will need in order to prevent superpower nuclear proliferation (to states like Germany and Japan) and protect the global environment (from states like Russia and China) and to avoid a coming cataclysm. If this is wishful thinking, let me put my conclusion another way: should the entrepreneurial state be unable to avoid such a cataclysm, the United States would have to shift its purposes entirely and concentrate on how to survive and prevail in such a terrible conflict. Mercantilism might offer a better chance of buying off conflict, at the expense of allies, than would cooperative, collective defense systems. Unlike the members of the great alliances forged by nation-states to win the Long War, market-states can act with greater tactical flexibility and the most (not the least) successful of them will do so, changing partners, bluffing, using nonstate actors as agents of compromise and deception, much as a contemporary corporation sometimes behaves. But for that reason, mercantile market-states will be vulnerable to the same sort of tactics that Napoleon trained on the coalitions of territorial states, picking each one off from the group and either coopting or destroying it. For most of us, except the most pessimistic, a safer ground surely lies in trying to avoid such a conflict, rather than in contorting our natural traditions in anticipation of such a catastrophe should it come.

If the United States, in the new context in which it finds itself, is to maintain its leadership in order to thrive as an entrepreneurial state, it will endeavor to do two things: to preserve its freedom of action abroad by limiting, to the greatest degree possible, the coercive harm other states can do to it; and to act consistently with its traditional moral aspirations but prudently within its means to “make the world available,” that is, to maximize the degree to which the persons of the world are able to choose their own destinies. If the security paradigm for the American nation-state was to make the world safe for democracy, then the paradigm of the American market-state must be to make a world that is hospitable to the individual conscience, that is, available. Individual goods, like economic opportunity and freedom of religion, do not exist in the world without nurturing practices. They are linked to “collective goods,” that is, things of benefit to the world as a whole.

STRATEGY AND THE ENTREPRENEURIAL MARKET-STATE: PROBLEMS

What security policies flow from this paradigm, in the way that interven-ion in World War I and containment in the Cold War flowed from Wilsonianism? This question can be broken down into four: (1) what technology should the U.S. exploit; (2) what force structure should we deploy; (3) what criteria do we apply to potential cases for intervention; and (4) to what threats do we give priority?

(1)

The superior U.S. technology that won the Gulf War and defeated the Serbian army and the Taliban is the fruit of a revolution in military affairs that has been underway for twenty years, and which was presciently anticipated by Marshal Ogarkov and played a decisive role in the Soviet military's support for Gorbachev's reforms. The U.S. military is currently pursuing what is sometimes termed “a military-technical revolution,”⁹ an extrapolation of the computational, communications, and weapons innovations that won the Long War and brought us the market-state. These extrapolations would utilize various advanced technologies to enable the U.S. armed forces to see the entire battlefield¹⁰ and transmit information quickly to commanders in order to guide attacks more precisely as well as to detect and respond quickly to attacks by an enemy.

Further progress in the microminiaturization of electronics promise ever “smarter,” meaning more autonomous and precise, weapons…. Exploited in combination, these technological advances hold the promise of replacing many of the functions that heretofore required the presence of human beings.¹¹

The driver of change behind radically new military capabilities is the rapid advance in computers operating in coordination with communications technology and the equally rapid declining cost of their synergy.¹² The military-technical revolution promises a transparent battlefield, where commanders view operations on television screens and direct individual units (or nonmanned weapons) from remote locations and where helicopters launch missiles at tanks twenty miles away based on information from preplanted acoustic devices and airborne radar and satellite imagery, all operating in coordination.¹³ Intelligent weapons would take real-time information and guide themselves to their targets. Miniaturized aerial weapons would replace fighter planes and tanks.

As previously noted, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov anticipated much of this discussion when, as chief of the Soviet general staff, he warned of an imminent technology-driven revolution that would give conventional weapons a level of lethality comparable to that of tactical nuclear weapons. “Armor on the march might find itself detected and attacked by conventional missiles showering self-guided anti-tank weapons, in an operation conducted from a distance of several hundred miles and with as little as 30 minutes between detection and assault.”¹⁴ This was profoundly disquieting to the Soviets, as their strategic plans depended upon massed tank assaults across the central front in Germany. The arrival of parity between the superpowers in some central nuclear systems (long-range ballistic missiles) and the collapse of escalation dominance by NATO at the subcentral level had for the first time in three decades made a Soviet assault across the central front of Europe a plausible scenario in some circumstances.¹⁵ There was always a significant chance that, no matter what the American rhetoric, Washington (and Bonn) would decline to “go nuclear” in a conventional war when doing so invited Soviet retaliation in kind. In the early 1980s this doubt may have crested; by the 1990s the rapid yet inexorable developments of high technology had brought about a nonnuclear stalemate in the field, and thus many years of Russian planning and expense were rendered pointless. Moreover, some Soviet leaders were well aware of the large gap between American and Russian computer development and the increasing speed with which developments were occurring in the West. In part because these developments were stimulated by research in the private sector, the Soviet Union was poorly placed to compete.

Reviewing this history, we now ask: What technology ought we to adopt presently to ensure victory twenty or thirty years hence? Another way of asking this: which revolution in military affairs (RMA) ought we to pursue, because there are several different possibilities.

One such option is basically the extension of current capabilities—stealth, precision guidance, advanced sensors, and reliance upon satellite systems. Extending this approach would rely on the information aspects of the RMA to inform long-range fire with more advanced target acquisition and more controlled execution. This option pursues the integration of advanced sensors, brilliant weapons, robotic craft, and simulation. This would allow the United States to destroy virtually any battlefield targets that possess a perceptible signature. Proponents of this approach hold that the pursuit and enhancement of these technical advantages will allow the United States to win large-scale, high-intensity conventional conflicts that are fought with large armored and mechanized forces.

If, however, one believes that the least likely eventuality in twenty years is that the United States will be forced to confront heavily armored and mechanized regional powers—like North Korea, Iraq, Iran—then one is compelled to rethink the RMA question. Jeffrey Cooper captures this well:

New opponents may decide… to pose… challenges that an RMA narrowly focused on the DESERT STORM scenario and based on technologies demonstrated in that conflict may be less capable of addressing. [O]ur next opponent [might try to prevent our force deployment—as Saddam Hussein did not—and] possess nuclear or other WMD and long range delivery systems capable of threatening not only U.S. forces but allies and third countries who control essential transit and staging facilities…. Alternatively, an enemy may also decide to pursue a different set of strategic objectives—damage, disruption to civil society, or interference with key global links and use different strategic concepts—long range attack, clandestine forces, urban warfare… terrorism, or subornation and blackmail of civilian populations, using modern communications to bypass government itself.¹⁶

Current U.S. strategic planning largely ignores these possibilities in exploiting the RMA, in part because U.S. intervention doctrine is in such disarray. One question with which this book began—what are the appropriate criteria for the use of force—like the question “Which RMA?” can-not be answered in the absence of general strategic plan. The plan we currently employ is the product of a classic nation-state confrontation, the Gulf War that occurred just as the market-state was beginning to stir.

(2)

Since 1991, the United States has undertaken three major defense policy reviews: the Bush Base Force Review (1991), the Clinton administration's Bottom-Up Review (1993), and the congressionally mandated Quadrennial Defense Review (1997). Despite their advertising, these reviews were little more than budget drills, rationalizing an ever smaller force structure to the same roles and missions. The Bottom-Up Review, for example, postulated that the United States should focus on combat readiness to face threats of major regional conflicts such as those that might occur in Korea or the Persian Gulf. The Quadrennial Defense Review retained the two-major-regional-conflicts scenario, though adding the need to prepare for smaller scale contingencies (while cutting the total force by 115,000 uniformed personnel).¹⁷ There was little in either report addressing the future absence of access to forward bases (or their vulnerability), critical infrastructure and computer attacks, attacks to space-based systems, urban operations, deep inland operations, or new forms of attack against the U.S. homeland.*

During the same period U.S. strategic planning for intervention moved from the well-defined but limited strictures of the Weinberger Doctrine to the somewhat muddier—but therefore less limiting—policies of the Clinton administration. If the Weinberger Doctrine can be said to have taken concrete shape with the U.S. experience in the Gulf War, then it is easy to see why it is harmoniously consistent with the two-major-regional-war strategy that governs U.S. force structure. On the other hand, because U.S. forces have been frequently deployed since the Gulf War in numerous nontraditional, interventionist roles, it is harder to explain why the Clinton administration neither changed its general concepts for the force structure nor articulated a new doctrine for intervention. Harder to explain, but not impossible. The administration did make, as we shall see, several early efforts to redefine a doctrine for intervention that was better suited to the realities of 1990s conflicts; in the end, it was determined to maximize flexibility by simply not committing the United States to any particular doctrine. For much the same sort of reasons, the Clinton administration clung to the two-regional-war scenario because it believed it could perform smaller operations (like Bosnia and Kosovo) out of a force structure configured for but not limited to major operations.

(3)

Although Weinberger proposed his criteria for U.S. intervention following the debacle in Lebanon in 1982 – 1983, the six requirements of which it is composed more obviously reflect conventional criticism of the U.S. intervention in Viet Nam. Weinberger's requirements for intervention were (1) vital American interests were at stake; (2) there was a clear intention to seek military victory; (3) the intervention was in pursuit of precisely defined political and military objectives; (4) there was a reasonable assurance of support by Congress and the American people; (5) there was a continual reassessment of the relationship between objectives and the size, composition, and disposition of U.S. forces; and (6) force was only undertaken as a last resort. By the time the Congress pushed President Ford to abandon Viet Nam, the intervention there had indeed failed each of these criteria, as the Nixon and Ford administrations flailed about in their search for a mission statement that could be said to have been fulfilled and as the members of both parties in Congress coalesced around an account of the initial U.S. intervention that would justify their withdrawal of support. According to this agreed-upon account, the United States failed to consider other, nonmilitary alternatives to intervention in Viet Nam or (its twin criticism) did not truly seek military victory; nor was there a discernible national interest at stake; nor did the public and the Congress overwhelmingly perceive and verify that interest. Frankly, I do not believe the facts will sustain this characterization of our experience in Viet Nam, however frequently or tenaciously it is asserted.

Therefore, whether the Weinberger criteria would have prevented American intervention in Viet Nam is a debatable question. What is indisputable is that the Gulf War gave the doctrine a firm foundation because to many it showed that there were in fact some interventions that did fit the doctrine, and that success would rapidly follow if the criteria were met. General Colin Powell, who had been a young infantry officer in Viet Nam, endorsed the Weinberger Doctrine while serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Indeed Powell gave an Army spin to the criteria Weinberger had offered, emphasizing that the clear intention of winning should be manifested by the use of overwhelming force and that Weinberger's precisely defined political and military objectives should be clearly linked.

The Clinton administration's first secretary of defense, Les Aspin, had been critical of the Weinberger Doctrine as a congressman. He and others complained that the criteria left the president with only two options: total force or nothing. And he argued that a more flexible doctrine, with more options, was required.¹⁸ The new administration, however, was initially attracted to “assertive multilateralism” as a way of finessing the issue: acting through the United Nations and other formal institutions, the United States would avoid confronting the problem of unilateral intervention that must be justified on the basis of unilaterally determined interests. The widespread perception that the U.N. mission to Somalia was a failure, however, resulted in Presidential Decision Directive 25 in May 1994, which simply grafted the key criteria of the Weinberger Doctrine on to the decision of whether to support multilateral action.*

Nevertheless, PDD-25 has had little discernible impact on U.S. policy and its criteria have never been included in the National Security Strategy, nor did they appear to have been applied regarding U.S. missions to Haiti, Bosnia, or Kosovo. Aspin's successor, William Perry, was more influential when, also in 1994, he provided various criteria that have since rationalized U.S. action (and have been incorporated in every subsequent edition of the National Security Strategy).¹⁹ Perry distinguished between three sorts of American interests—vital, important, and humanitarian—and argued that different uses of limited, not necessarily overwhelming, force were appropriate to protect those interests. The selective use of force was to be commensurate with limited objectives. This description was further elaborated by national security advisor Anthony Lake in a speech at George Washington University in 1996 in which he described seven broad circumstances that “may call for the use of our military forces.”†

These general descriptions were intended to modify the exclusivity—amounting almost to a doctrine of massive retaliation in the intervention sphere—of the Weinberger ideas, but they did not accomplish the objective of actually telling anyone what criteria had to be met before American troops would be sent abroad. General Powell himself recognized both the feint in this direction as well as its vagueness when he stated just before retiring:

We can modify our doctrine, we can modify our strategy, we can modify our structure, our equipment, our training, our leadership techniques, everything else we do these other missions, but we never want to do it in such a way that we lose sight of the focus of why have armed forces—to fight and win the nation's wars.²⁰

To some, Powell's words appear to assume a certain contingency for which we must prepare—the two-major-regional-war scenario—for if our strategic objectives were otherwise, fighting to achieve those objectives would compel, not guardedly permit, some important modifications. Conversely, we cannot bring about any effective modifications unless we have a clear idea of what sort of wars we expect to undertake.

(4)

In other words, we cannot decide which RMA to pursue, what force structure to provide, or what criteria to set for intervention until we have a clear idea of the threats we will face. Trying to answer these questions separately leads either to unstated assumptions that are not examined and debated or to ad hockery, where the decisions in each arena are taken as a matter of temporary expediency and a comprehensive strategy is replaced by rules sufficiently flexible always to permit citation but never to enable guidance. What is required is some explicit confrontation of what might be called the “ABC” problem.

“ABC” refers to the classification of potential competitors of the United States by a scheme that would be familiar to any society hostess. States belong to either an “A” list of peers such as Germany, Japan, France, or Russia, a “B” list that includes mid-level developing states with modernized conventional forces and primitive weapons of mass destruction such as Iraq, Iran, India, Pakistan, or North Korea, or a “C” list composed of militarily modest states—such as Libya, Serbia, Cuba—and nonstate actors, such as various terrorist, criminal, or insurgent groups that often pose threats to American national interests.²¹ The ABC problem may be stated as follows: should the United States focus on outdistancing potential peer competitors to such a degree that the position we now enjoy—of having no hostile peers—can be indefinitely extended; or should we instead focus on those states and conflicts that might threaten our vital interests in theatres of traditional importance to us such as Europe, Pacific Asia, and the Persian Gulf; or realign our thinking to focus less on conflicts like the Gulf War and more on conflicts like that in Yugoslavia, as well as economic, developmental, and nontraditional threats including terrorism and disease. (That is, which threats should drive U.S. policies— A, B, or C?)

The choices appear rather stark, so much so that thinking about U.S. policy in this way has inevitably tended to coalesce behind the “B” option on the theory that the forces required to defeat “B” list adversaries are so substantial that they can always be made available for “C” type expeditions while, through constant modernization, presenting an imposing threat to any ambitious peers. The B choice seems less a total commitment than the others, which almost seem reckless if their bets about the future turn out to be wrong.

For example, an “A” threat strategy seeks an innovative, high-tech military using all the potential of the RMA's systems of space-, sea-, air-, and ground-based networks of sensors. These sensors would identify, track, target, and destroy enemy forces, putting the United States so far in advance of other states technologically that cooperation from our peers is almost their only rational strategy. The money for all this comes from a downsized force structure and a degree of specialization that may make the military almost irrelevant to low-intensity conflicts, however.

But what if this implicit guess about the future—that current threats like those posed by North Korea or Iraq are diminishing—is wrong? Are we really prepared to scrap the reliance on battle platforms (aircraft carriers, fighter jets) and combat manpower that has thus far been supremely successful? Can we afford to decommission whole armies, collapse traditional service distinctions, and give up forward bases on an assumption about future technologies? And what if allies and multilateral institutions will not take up the slack in handling humanitarian and peace-keeping operations? Then the “A” list strategy begins to look exceedingly narrow, even disabling. As the historian T.R. Fehrenbach remarks, “You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.”²²

To an even greater degree, a strategy that focuses primarily on “C” type threats is highly limiting. At the moment, none of the world's international institutions is capable of taking responsibility for world order, yet the threats to world order—as in Yugoslavia and Rwanda—typically arise within states, in contexts where the United States is loath to act alone. Moreover, “C” type threats are, by definition, those that least engage our national interest. To build an entire defense posture around them seems foolhardy.

So we muddle on, having settled on a strategy built around outdated concepts of conflict between nation-states, maintaining highly expensive conventional forces that are nevertheless not really capable of handling two major regional contingencies simultaneously, putting our resources into incremental modernization that increases readiness but does not really exploit the potential of the RMA, repeatedly stripping forces configured for major conventional conflicts in order to use them—very expensively— in low-intensity conflicts for which they are not trained or equipped, refusing to look ahead to the day when a peer competitor leapfrogs our current technological advantage while we sink more and more funds into refurbishing plant and equipment that soon will be obsolete.

Although one could say with much justification that our current strategy owes more to General Ulysses S. Grant than to General Colin Powell, let's go back and look at the Viet Nam and Gulf War conflicts that were so fruitful for current doctrine. I propose that the “lesson” of Viet Nam was not that the war effort was insufficiently supported, used too modest means, etc., but that the United States had difficulty fighting an opponent who was hard to isolate from the civilian population and therefore difficult to target and track, whose shoestring logistics were hard to interdict, and whose political elites were far more disciplined than our own (perhaps owing to the greater centrality of the conflict for them than for us). Suppose that is the lesson of Viet Nam.

And imagine, too, that there is a lesson from the Gulf War, but not one for us so much as for our adversaries. The lesson is this: On behalf of nakedly aggressive territorial seizure, do not attack the United States with conventional armies, invitingly massed for an assault from a force you have permitted to project itself many thousands of miles to your frontier. Do not fight the United States, in other words, without weapons of mass destruction, without plausible political pretexts, without disguised forces, and without maintaining the initiative.

If these are appropriate lessons from the Gulf and from Southeast Asia, then the strategic doctrines we have derived from our experiences there are almost precisely wrong. Not only are we untrained for low-intensity conflicts, and heedless of the necessity to maintain our current military dominance over potential peer competitors, we are not even well configured to fight the “B” list adversaries who will adopt tactics we are unprepared for and shun the tactics against which we train. On the other hand, if we drastically reduce our forces in pursuit of either “A” list or “C” list objectives, doesn't that send an inviting message to those states like North Korea and Iraq, which continue to put enormous funds into the maintenance of large conventional forces, that perhaps this time a conventional confrontation with the United States can be won?

Book I has argued that periodic revolutions in military affairs bring about changes in the constitutional order and that this relationship is mutually affecting, that is, innovations in the constitutional order can also bring changes in strategy. Perhaps if we focus on the nature of the market-state, we may find some guidance as to which strategy to pursue.

The characteristics of a market-state may make it possible for the United States to devise a strategy of long-term dominance over peer competitors that will enable it to prevail in conventional confrontations as well as to field expeditionary forces. In 1992 a U.S. Defense Planning Guidance was leaked²³ that called for the United States to prevent any military superpower from emerging anywhere in Eurasia. This objective—an “A” list strategy—was to be achieved through U.S.-led alliances and coalitions. Interestingly, the Guidance proposed that this could be accomplished with a Gulf War military, a highly dubious proposition.²⁴ But the Guidance also suggested that the United States should aggressively pursue the enabling technologies of the RMA as a political deterrent to the emergence of a peer challenger in the next two decades.

Within this time frame, the United States may well face a challenger of significant economic, industrial, and technological potential, one that can also exploit the advantages of the information age for military purposes. A number of states are currently working in this direction, pursuing their own [military] revolutions based on, among other things, the acquisition and integration into their military establishments of long-range strike systems; weapons of mass destruction; space-based surveillance, targeting, and communications; and precision-strike munitions.²⁵

The unique strategic demands of the market-state—especially its requirement to project overwhelming force without risking lives, and to exit dangerous involvements quickly—put a premium on the development of high technology as an arbitrageur of, and even a substitute for, human risk. This was clearly evident in NATO's air campaign in Kosovo, which could not have been executed successfully even a decade ago.* The pursuit of these enabling technologies will face two hurdles: the reluctance to put money into research and development while downsizing the force structure; and the inertial tendency to invest in technical fixes for the tactics and organization of the present.†

Instead, the United States should use the RMA as a basis for changing its forces' roles and missions, leveraging from the promise of technology a rational basis for reorganizing the services. The RMA should not be treated as merely a happy event that is useful to our current strategic planning but rather as both a driver and a reflection of the broad period of change in strategy and the international order that we are now entering. As Jeffrey Cooper has written:

The “Information Revolution” and the change to postindustrial economies… presage significant changes not only for the means of warfare, but also for the objectives of war. Increasing near-real-time global telecommunications, the rise of centrifugal forces within the [State], all raise questions as to the future objectives of interstate conflict, the appropriate strategies for pursuing national objectives under these conditions, and the operational means for conducting war.²⁶

The nation-state's strategic objectives of total war against the opposing nation, destroying its mass armies and its industrial base, terrorizing its civilian population, and forcing capitulation should give way to more precise and limited objectives. With the decreasing importance of territory and raw materials, and the increasing role of knowledge and computation/ communications infrastructure, attacks will require more sophisticated weapons and forces and will aim at critical nodes—including leadership cadres—rather than the seizure and holding of territory. Indigenous mercenary forces can be used where ground action is necessary. At the same time, new peer competitors will be able to leapfrog the former superpowers tethered to vast, fixed, capital investments that require long periods of amortization, and instead more quickly acquire the power to strike with means that are more nimble and versatile.

This menacing fact also holds the most promise for an American RMA because it points the way to a solution to the underlying strategic dilemma. A forward-looking RMA can create the ability to strike at “C” list targets (as in the precision-bombing campaigns against terrorists like Osama bin Laden and states like Serbia) as well as “B” list forces because the “B” list competitors do not actually threaten the American homeland and therefore can be ceded the temporary territorial victories their large forces can seize while these forces are punished into political submission.

Some of the funds for this change can come from force downsizing. Once the two-major-regional-conflicts scenario is abandoned, it ought to be possible to maintain substantial forces abroad—100,000 in Europe, 100,000 in Asia, 20,000 in the Gulf—far more cheaply, while reducing the overall number of troops. Nevertheless, an RMA initiative (for these purposes) would probably augment the Pentagon's research and development funding by about 20 percent.²⁷

The emergence of the market-state and the technology it has spawned can provide new incentives in international security affairs. These new incentives will, however, depend upon developing more effective means of power projection (in the absence of secure foreign bases, for example) and framework intervention forces.

STRATEGY AND THE ENTREPRENEURIAL MARKET-STATE: POLICIES

Just as the “revolution” in the constitutional order of the State will have an impact on national security policy, the RMA will bring changes in the operations and structure of states, in the mutual, two-way process we have observed in Part II.

The universal trend in market-states away from conscription toward a professionalized army (even if it sometimes exists side-by-side with a conscripted reserve force) is another feature of what is, in this case, misleadingly called “privatization” by the market-state.* The “short-service conscripts… equipped with the products of a high-volume military [industrial] manufacturing”²⁸ that were a notable innovation of the state-nation and whose use was intensified by the nation-state in the Long War are passing from the scene to be replaced with more educated, more highly trained professionals.

The market-state does not so clearly demark the military from the commercial as did the nation-state. In market-states around the world, government-owned defense industries are being sold, and tasks that were once the exclusive prerogative of military institutions are being privatized. Private contractors handled much of the logistical support for the U.S. interventions in Haiti and Somalia. Privately owned satellites are leased out for military and intelligence functions, to say nothing of the reliance of government on CNN and other news-gathering organizations. Today, almost all of U.S. Department of Defense communications go across the public switched network. The other side of this blurring of lines between the commercial and the governmental is that governments now can purchase weapons—perhaps fissile material, military expertise, and strategic planning—from a wide range of private sources, some of which, in a further blurring, are linked to corruption within governments. Thus the possibility exists that market-states that had been relegated to the second rank strategically by events in the Long War will be able to catapult into competition with the United States if they can generate the wealth to do so. Those market-states whose economies are technologically sophisticated will be able to quickly convert that sophistication into military power.²⁹

The new market-states are transforming themselves by replacing economies and cultures that were formed by the Industrial Revolution with new forms arising from the Information Revolution. The latter promotes the creation and use of knowledge, just as industrial machines enhanced the use of physical power and production. Market-states provide ideas and services—ideas about society and the development and use of technology, and services like education, medical care, and investment allocation—to each other and to the rest of the world. The United States has already found itself, in the Gulf War, in the position of providing intelligence and information to other states and selling its services as a war-making state. If it can maintain its legitimacy as a provider of collective goods to the community of market-states; maintain its lead in the development of new strategic technologies and learn to apply these new techniques to the problems of international security; and, most important, enhance its reputation as a legitimate and benign broker of those services, it will provide the model that other states, in the mimetic way we have studied thus far in this volume, will copy or, if they cannot copy, will react against with innovations of their own. Such a state sets the terms of competition.

Innovative leadership, like that which brought us the Nunn-Lugar legislation in 1992, can deploy the techniques of the market-state in a strategically significant way. As of mid-1998, Nunn-Lugar funds had provided $2.4 billion to destroy or convert Soviet weaponry. More than 4,800 nuclear weapons have been eliminated; more than forty large engineering projects have been undertaken to safeguard or dismantle Soviet weapons.³⁰ Funds were provided to find new jobs for former Soviet nuclear scientists and engineers. Housing for former Soviet military personnel was subsidized so that they could oversee this effort. But while Nunn-Lugar is a shining example of what can be done, it is pathetically insufficient. Russia still possesses enough plutonium for 25,000 to 50,000 weapons and enough highly enriched uranium for 40,000 to 80,000 weapons, ³¹ to say nothing of its immense biological weapons stocks. What is needed is a vastly enlarged program that pays Russian officials to quarantine weapons under U.S.-Russian supervisory auspices. Congressional efforts to impose careful auditing procedures, to prevent graft or unlawful diversions, should not distract us from the main objective. The market-state can—relatively cheaply—have far more impact, far more quickly than arms control agreements. On the other hand, if the United States doesn't buy these goods, some other state may.

The American military structure, however, is at present poorly organized to fully innovate in the direction of the change in constitutional order experienced by the State. As Eliot Cohen observed:

The United States may drive the revolution in military affairs, but only if it has a clear conception of what it wants military power for—which it does not now have. Indeed when the Clinton administration formulated its defense policy in 1993 it came up with the Bottom-Up Review, which provided for a force capable of fighting simultaneously two regional wars assumed to resemble the Gulf War of 1991. By structuring this analysis around enemy forces similar to those of Iraq in that year—armor-heavy, with a relatively large conventional but third-rate air force—it guaranteed a conservatism in military thought…³²

The current unwillingness of the United States to consider real challenges to its primacy from advanced market-states that may employ these strategic innovations is of course troubling. Current American deployments overseas are ludicrously low and in any case will be increasingly vulnerable to missile attack. They could not possibly serve any military function in a large conflict other than as a nuclear tripwire whose activation would immediately drive states within its theatre into major-state proliferation—that is, the proliferation of nuclear weapons to states such as Germany or Japan. The real function of such forces ought to be as expeditionary units configured for small scale, rapid interventions.

Should the United States direct the technological promise of an RMA to “A” list objectives? First, these new technologies may make possible the preemption of nascent programs of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction. Precisely because the U.S. nuclear arsenal is effectively out of bounds for use, only very precise integration of intelligence and precision destruction could enable American conventional forces to destroy a hostile power's potential industrial development of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. Second, although we mustn't minimize the single terrorist attack sponsored by a state that disguises its role—imagine if the World Trade Center bombing had occurred with a nuclear device*—the threat to a benign world order or to U.S. primacy within it is unlikely to come from the “rogue” nations of the Third World, but from stiff competitors who have the technology, technocracy, wealth, and world-dominating ambitions of the most (not the least) successful states. Several states are at work on applying the technologies of the information revolution to military affairs, just as earlier generations applied the machines of the Industrial Revolution to the making of war. Third, the RMA can lead to a complete recasting of the force structure,† reshaping old forms of organization, using machines in place of men and women who currently perform strictly mechanical tasks (a holdover from conscription when commanders thought labor was cheap), and stimulating investment in research and development. Fourth, technology and tactics appropriate to “A” list objectives can be adapted, as was seen in Kosovo and Afghanistan, to “C” list wars, so long as the capability for the projection of a land force with close air support capabilities is not entirely scrapped.

The fruits of the information revolution, however, will not be automatically transferred from the private sector to the very different applications required by the security needs of the market-state. To realize their full potential, these technologies must be combined with new tactics executed by new organizational structures. A military establishment content to fine-tune existing operating strategies, enhancing them only with superaccurate weapons of somewhat greater range and making these weapons smaller, cheaper, and more manageable, will scarcely reap the benefits of the developments that are underway.³³

Not every application of the RMA is suitable to a market-state strategy for the United States. As Richard Betts has pointed out, the RMA runs the risk of reinforcing a high-tech, large-unit way of thinking in the armed services that was given such impressive validation in the Gulf War but which is less useful in unconventional conflicts saturated with civilians, and which invites asymmetrical attack. Most terrifyingly, because the United States is so well placed to exploit a high-tech RMA, conflict with a power such as Russia (over a dispute in Eastern Europe or one of the states of the former Soviet Union) or China (over Taiwan)—that is, with a great power whose vital interests are at stake in a territorial conflict—invites resort to nuclear weapons on the part of the American adversary, because almost no other option would be effective against a United States armed with advanced twenty-first-century technology. Considerations such as these prompted Eliot Cohen to observe, “the revolution in military affairs may bring a kind of tactical clarity to the battlefield, but at the price of strategic obscurity.”³⁴

In the present, post – Cold War period, the enhanced power of conventional weapons—that is, nonnuclear weapons—will be of paramount importance, and indeed it is striking how little discussion there is in the RMA debate about the role of nuclear weapons. I believe this aversion to nuclear warfare has to do with the nature of the market-state and its evolution in response to the strategic innovations, including the use and threat of use of nuclear weapons, that won the Long War. We can anticipate that

the post cold war era… is likely to put a political (and military) premium on such non-nuclear means. Only further progress in integrating advanced technologies will provide the strategic reach, striking power, and maneuverability necessary to address the theater level of war without resort to nuclear weapons…³⁵

The market-state, with its emphasis on efficiency and economy, demands that the military act within tight budgets, accept fewer casualties (even among enemy civilians), and not involve itself in potentially recrim-inative hostilities. Nuclear weapons haunt such a state because they are too devastating, and too imprecise; kill too many civilians; and, above all, because of their genetic and environmental consequences, make war into the state-destructive, revanchism-creating sort of conflict from which there is no return and, ironically in light of their lethality, no end. A state struck with nuclear weapons will never get over it, whereas the market-state wants to conduct a transaction and then to move on. The market-state depends upon bargaining, which an actual nuclear attack renders almost impossible. There is an apocalyptic savagery about a nuclear attack that calls forth all the atavistic bitterness that the cosmopolitan market-state wishes to be free of. These factors drive the market-state toward new technologies that promise an escape from the reliance on nuclear weapons.

Moreover, the market itself, from which much innovation derives, enhances the drive for technological advancement. While there is ample scope for U.S. defense expenditures on research, the market-state is nevertheless dependent on the private sector to create these technologies; this dependence will accelerate the pace of the RMA³⁶ because the marketplace will quickly make obsolete communications technologies for which the U.S. government is the only purchaser.

The arrival of the market-state has imposed severe budget restraints on defense expenditures. The result is that the United States is tempted to simply define away the problems of a large conflict (and of small interventions) in favor of conflicts with states that greatly resemble Iraq. One wonders how many defense intellectuals and planners are thinking about major-state competition and conflict.³⁷ If the United States is to sustain its competitive advantage, to put this in market-state terms, it will have to determine how best to reinvent a force structure that has hitherto been supremely successful—a difficult assignment. Yet this must be done in order to take advantage most efficiently of the options that new technology and the market are making available to that force structure and to its competitors. A radical restructuring of the armed forces may well prove to be our best means of sustaining its current primacy because the United States, as a culture, is relatively adaptable to change (even if the military subculture is less so). Doubtless it is also true that U.S.-led alliances and coalitions can prevent another military superpower from emerging in Europe or Asia, but it is unlikely that the United States will be called to such leadership unless it is clear that we are fitted by a wide margin, militarily and in other ways, for the role. In an era in which our marginal economic advantage may be increasing but our share of world GDP is declining, this will require astute strategic planning. It is the very antithesis of this planning to assume that our main competitors in the world are Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Libya.

Many states will strive for primacy in their regions or in the world at large in the coming period. Some will do so pursuing the strategy of nation-states, like France, whose policies sometimes appear driven by a mixture of hauteur and reactionary anti-Americanism. Some will pursue the strategies of market-states, which can vary greatly. I believe the successful market-state strategy for the United States will be one that studiedly avoids both mercantile and managerial market approaches, which have the potential for alienating trading partners and heightening xenophobia, in favor of pursuing a goal of providing “collective goods” to the world. Joseph Joffe has prescribed this course with great insight:

The United States must produce three types of collective goods: First, act as regional protector by underwriting the security of those potential rivals—Japan, China, Western Europe—who would otherwise have to produce security on their own by converting their economic strength into military assets; [s]econd, act as a regional pacifier; [t]hird, universalize [security] architecture [by which the United States acts with various regional players in concert against regional threats].³⁸

As long as the U.S. provides precious collective goods the Europeans or Asians cannot or will not produce for themselves—building coalitions and acting universally through regional cooperation, implementing anti-missile, anti-proliferation, and pro-environmental regimes, organizing humanitarian intervention—there will remain an important demand for U.S. leadership.³⁹

Joffe contrasts this course favorably with a balance-of-power approach that I would be inclined to describe, in market terms, as a mixture of the managerial and the mercantile. These approaches are not well-suited to producing collective goods, such as mutual security, political unity within an alliance in the face of external threats, or stability in environmental and economic relations beyond the state or regional group. There is an intense debate within the United States, however, about whether the United States should become a more mercantile market-state and avoid some of the costs of producing collective goods. And there has always been a strong lobby in the United States for the beguiling prospects of burden sharing available to managerial market-states.

What would such a policy of producing collective goods look like? What programs serve that policy?

Consider the following seven possible programs to enhance the security of the United States in a world of market-states. These seven are analogous to the various programs that served the policy of containment (intervention in the Third World, nuclear deterrence at the central level, etc.) that applied the American paradigm in the context of the Soviet threat. They are examples of how, through the means of exercising leadership—for which the experience of the Long War has capitalized the United States with a reputation for relatively benign intent—the United States could be the principal provider of the most significant collective goods to the world community and in so doing, resolve its current intellectual stalemate over strategy.

(1)

The United States can take the lead in reforming NATO to give it a mission relevant to the twenty-first century. The North Atlantic Council, the decision-making body in NATO, would provide the framework within which intervention forces will be mustered. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry and Assistant Secretary Ashton Carter make this proposal:

NATO's principal strategic and military purpose in the post–cold war era is to provide a mechanism for the rapid formation of militarily potent “coalitions of the willing” able to project power beyond [Europe. These] “coalitions of the willing”… will include some—but not necessarily all—NATO members, and will generally include nonmembers drawn from the Partnership for Peace [former Warsaw Pact states].⁴⁰

This is not to suggest that NATO fundamentally change its national command protocols, but it does imply that member states would be able to organize peacekeeping forces without a unanimous vote in the North Atlantic Council. Perhaps the most promising objective of such a NATO-plus coalition is a low-intensity, high-intelligence war against international terrorism.

The United States should also take the lead in organizing G-8 activities that go beyond the mere conferencing of its members (e.g., providing aid to stricken countries, mustering coalition-supported U.S. forces to resist aggression and to halt campaigns of ethnic cleansing). In organizing “coalitions of the willing,” the United States should place great emphasis on linking up with Russian forces. Joint professional activities with the Russian military should be given the highest priority. Russian units should be trained in NATO tactics, which include the use of nonlethal means for coping with contending local parties, ⁴¹ how to secure a town with a minimum use of force, how to man a checkpoint as part of a multinational force, even how to deal with the press.⁴²* Russia has the potential to be a uniquely valuable security partner and, moreover, the experience of military-to-military cooperation in joint peacemaking enterprises could pay dividends in a more cooperative political relationship.

(2)

The United States could manage the world community's efforts to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of hostile powers—either by maintaining nonhostile relations with those powers (like China) that have nuclear weapons, or by preventing hostile states (like Iraq) from acquiring them, or by inducing friendly states (like Japan and Germany) to rely on the United States rather than set in motion regional competitions to acquire nuclear arms, or by bribing hostile states (like North Korea) that have nuclear weapons programs to give them up. This role implies that the United States should not constantly reassess its demands for internal liberalization in China, but at the same time should continue to protect Taiwan, which will otherwise go nuclear itself, setting off chain reactions in Australia and Indonesia; and that it should take especial care to maintain the security guarantees with Japan and South Korea—and not press its trade disputes with these states so aggressively as to arm anti-U.S. parties in those states; that it should use intensified covert means to sabotage the weapons programs of “rogue states” and insist on the continuing sanctions against Iraqi rearmament (even while setting up generous infrastructure funds from the controlled sale of Iraqi oil to pay off Russian and French creditors and revive the Iraqi middle class); that it should proceed with NATO expansion as a way of maintaining the importance of the security guarantee to Germany; and purchase outright intact nuclear weapons from Russia, a more effective market-state method than the legally negotiated, treaty-mandated handover of dangerous and negotiable fissile material favored by nation-states; and fully implement the North Korean reactor exchange (to take a few contemporary examples).

(3)

The United States could organize a North Asia Security Council, anchored in Tokyo and including Japan, Russia, China, and South Korea. This Council would provide a forum for regional discussions, joint military exercises, and information sharing. It would emphasize that the United States is a Pacific power and offer a framework for our nonproliferation efforts. No two states have as great an interest in preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as do Russia and China. If the Chechens, for example, who have bloodied the Russian army with little more than small arms and antitank weapons, were to acquire such weapons, then surely the Tajiks and Azeris would not be far behind, with incalculable risks for the survival of the Russian state as it is now constituted. If Taiwan were to acquire nuclear weapons and thus force a stalemate, China would be hard pressed to maintain the threat that conventional force could mount a successful amphibious invasion. Yet without the incentive of this tacit threat, unification may be decades away. In these efforts the United States can find no more potentially helpful partner than China. China is a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (in 1992). It has signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (in 1996) and has affirmed (in 1992) and reaffirmed (in 1994) its commitment to abide by the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). Yet there is ample evidence that China sold Pakistan ring magnets for use in a gas centrifuge to enrich uranium (for a nuclear weapon), and, despite the MTCR, transferred M-11 short-range missiles to Pakistan. There is further evidence that China has passed materials and equipment for uranium enrichment to Iran, as well as cruise missiles, ballistic missile technology, and chemical weapons precursors.⁴⁴ Why should we try to enlist such a partner?

China has more recently undertaken to halt this trade. More than any other state in the world, it has grounds for alarm at the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Only by enlisting U.S. cooperation in a nonproliferation regime can China ensure itself against this possibility. China is increasingly dependent on Middle East oil, and is at least partly responsible for provoking India's weaponizing its nuclear technology. Yet China ought to move to the forefront of enforcing a nonproliferation regime.

(4)

The United States might resist the regionalization of trade because it is a global power with global interests. No other power can speak for world trade cooperation with the legitimacy of the United States so long as the latter pursues free trade convincingly and exercises leadership in pursuit of international financial stability. This suggests that the United States should attempt to gain access to the markets of more than one regional trading pact; that it should resist efforts to have the euro replace or augment the dollar as the world's common currency; that it should tolerate wider swings in its currency than other states wish to permit; and, finally, that it should prefer virtual regional trading groups, which are united by cultural and business attitudes rather than by mere physical proximity. There is no reason why Sweden would not be a more appropriate partner in such a virtual union than, say, Guatemala. Proximity and contiguity should not be the decisive determinants of the perimeters of an economic union when the perimeters of economic life are unbounded on the World Wide Web. A nonexclusive free-trade zone between the United States and the United Kingdom makes far better sense than an anti-competitive hemispheric fortress for either state.

(5)

The United States could provide warranties for the security of important regional states vis-à-vis each other by offering an open bargain to aid any state that is attacked—bearing in mind, of course, that American assistance can take the many forms discussed above that are appropriate to a market-state—and to mediate any significant dispute. Warranties could even be brokered or factored by various state guarantors. This implies that the ongoing and costly role of American diplomacy in brokering foreign disputes is a good investment of time and energy. (For such a course to succeed, Congress would have to resist adopting measures like the Pressler Amendment, which embargoed Pakistani arms purchases, and the Glenn Amendment, which requires economic sanctions against a nuclear India, with no provision for a national security waiver. Taken together such laws can paralyze U.S. action on the subcontinent, to take one example.)

(6)

The United States could develop an action program of lease-hire security insurance, licensing some forms of defense technology and emphasizing the U.S. role in providing information, missile defense, and even intervention for hire.

Consider, therefore, a vertical coalition in which the United States supplies intelligence and systems assistance to a beleaguered [state], which in turn, uses such help to organize its own sources of information, increase its battlespace illumination and support its own command-and-control, operational planning and rapid reaction… Vertical coalitions have several uses. In October 1994, Iraq massed its tanks looking southward to Kuwait, and the United States responded by shipping over 35,000 troops at a cost of nearly a billion dollars. What if Kuwait could have defended itself in the first crucial week with medium-range point-guided PGMs [precision-guided munitions] guided by the System (with in-place sensors) so that assault forces could be converted into real-time aimpoints? By revealing, for instance, precisely where opposing artillery is firing from, illumination could help one side (e.g., Bosnian Muslims) without risking American troops or impelling powerful countries to intervene on behalf of others (e.g., Bosnian Serbs). Border illumination could dissuade a U.S. ally from feeling the need to undertake problematic cross-border actions (e.g., Turkey's 1995 pursuit of Kurdish rebels into Iraq). Unlike a formal alliance, illumination could be offered in finely graded doses depending on the degree of trust between the United States and others. Such applications could increase countries' confidence in their ability to see across their borders even without formal alliance commitments.⁴⁵

Again, it must be emphasized that by sharing technology and information, the United States enhances its power; a failure to develop modalities of sharing will induce competitors to develop and provide similar services and products.⁴⁶

(7)

Apart from these specific proposals, I will offer one suggestion that goes to the process of U.S. decision making. It is important that the United States, at the highest levels, create a strategic planning group analogous to the “vision teams” used by private industry. At this moment more than at any other time since Colonel E. M. House set up The Inquiry in 1918,* the United States needs to find the resources and commitment to engage in a strategic planning process.

As Kees van der Heijden has recently observed,

[t]he need for efficient strategic thinking is most obvious in times of accelerated change when the reaction time of the organization becomes crucial to survival and growth…. The problem is that such periods of change alternate with periods of relative stability, when organizations often get stuck into established ways of doing things, making them ill-prepared for when the change comes.⁴⁷

This is precisely the situation I have described with respect to the proposed “paradigms” for U.S. policy currently in play. But not just any process will do. One important element of such a process in an age of uncertainty is scenario planning.

The traditional approach [to planning] tries to eliminate uncertainty from the strategic equation, by the assumption of the existence of “experts” who have privileged knowledge about the “most likely future,” and who can assess the probabilities of specific outcomes. [By contrast] [s]cenario planning assumes that there is irreducible uncertainty and ambiguity in any situation faced by the strategist, and that successful strategy can only be developed in full view of this…. The most fundamental aspect of introducing uncertainty in the strategic equation is that it turns planning for the future from a once-off episodic activity into an ongoing learning proposition.⁴⁸

Appropriate scenario planning can create an institutionalized learning system. I will have more to say about the scenario process in Chapter 26. For the time being, let me simply urge that a true strategic planning group be created linking the National Security Council, the National Intelligence Council, and the Policy Planning Staff and that a true “vision team” be simultaneously convened, in secret, encompassing a broad range of opinions to aid that planning group. Such a team, in contrast to House's Inquiry—which was composed mainly of lawyers and academics—should include business executives, not necessarily only American, as well as scientists, technologists, and editors from the news media. In other words, this team ought to be different in composition from the think tanks that are a prominent source of ideas in Washington.

It would be absurd to make long-term forecasts about future security environments that would aim to offer guidance for force planning, force sizing, and force structure. No one scenario about the future is certain enough to justify this. Rather, what I am urging is more thought about how our present decisions are likely to play out in bringing about different worlds. As Paul Bracken has written:

It is not common to think about national security in such terms. Usually, policy goals are formulated and then force structure implications derived from them. History is not so clear in its causal relationships, however, and radically new improvements in military capacities can have their own impact on international relations.⁴⁹

Let me be clear about the purpose of the seven proposals thus far canvassed. I am not proposing that the main force of the United States be converted from a large conventional army into a boutique force, capable only of high-tech special operations and humanitarian interventions. I strongly believe the greatest threats to American security in the early twenty-first century will come from powerful, technologically sophisticated states—not from “rogues,” whether they be small states or large groups of bandits. And I believe that large defense budgets will be required to deter or, if necessary, meet these threats without resort to nuclear weapons. I have stressed the innovations just discussed rather as a way of coping with the fact that the United States is often ill equipped to act within the confines of the market-state, with its aversion to casualties and its sensitivity to events in remote theaters that do not impinge upon U.S. vital interests. The current U.S. force posture tends to lock it into a two-major-war contingency—the least likely of eventualities—and thus constrains the United States from using force appropriately in the battles it does fight.⁵⁰ And the U.S. emphasis on large platforms tends to lock in American budget commitments for decades at a time, precisely when new technological developments demand nimble, flexible procurement policies.

There are other proposals that would doubtless also serve this model—a robust debate within the parameters of the market-state will surely ensue. These seven are offered as exemplary only. What is important is that the United States adapt its leadership to the new society of market-states, and that it gradually abandon those attitudes and proposals (for a “new” Bretton Woods, or for a rapid reaction force for the U.N., or for enlarging the responsibilities of the World Trade Organization [WTO], to take three popular proposals) that arise from a mentality geared to the society of nation-states that is already decaying.

STRATEGY AND THE ENTREPRENEURIAL MARKET-STATE: PROGRAMS

Experienced diplomats and military leaders are creatures of the dominant strategic rules of the nation-state, but are soon to be called upon to make decisions in a world—and before the publics—of market-states. The demands upon these decision makers by their publics, who are sensitive to the sufferings of others and to those of their own armed forces in a way that is quite distinct from earlier generations, are met with a mixture of cynical deflection or perplexed frustration. The professionals knew, for example, that it would have taken at least 100,000 troops to pacify Bosnia, and they knew the public would never stand for such a massive deployment, but they were under great pressure from that public, and from politicians responsive to that public, to do something that would stop the ethnic cleansing in that region. So decisions oscillated between the public declaration of “safe areas” and private decisions to abandon their safety, between—to take another example—the highly publicized hunt for a Somali warlord and the humiliating scampering off when this hunt ended with the deaths of seventeen American soldiers. Two scholars writing in International Security summed up the Clinton administration's performance at this time by saying this:

The accommodations that the Clinton administration strategy [of the first term] has made with the obstacles it has encountered have been incremental, rhetorical, disjointed, and incomplete. In theory, the incoherence of the current strategy could produce a series of new difficulties for the administration, and conceivably a disaster.⁵¹

And another writer asked, “What might explain this failure to define a grand strategy?… Is the failure due to Clinton, the person? Or to America, a society that is exceptional in its assets, aspirations and afflictions? Or to the post-bipolar setting?”⁵²

This author concludes that it is all of the above; I think it is none. Rather, the Clinton administration, like its predecessor, was attempting to apply the policy tools of a mentality that was inappropriate to the context within which it had to operate. The Somalia misadventure provides a good example of this.

The Somalia intervention came to a sudden end after the bloody failure of a daring helicopter raid in true commando style—a normal occupational hazard of high-risk, high-payoff commando operations. But given the context at hand—a highly discretionary intervention in a country of the most marginal significance for American interests—any high-risk methods at all were completely inappropriate in principle.⁵³

Many factors, including the immediacy and power of televised images, drastically lowered birth rates, the sense of heightened opportunities forgone by the wounded and killed, account for the public's increased sensitivity to humanitarian issues—including, of course, its sensitivity to casualties in the armed forces. But whatever its cause, the effect has been a drastic shift in the appropriateness of military means, accompanied, paradoxically, by increasing demands for its use as an instrument of humane intervention.

It is true that we can avoid flip-flops like the Somali embarrassment by setting criteria so confining that force is only used in situations that threaten our vital interests, have overwhelming public support, can be exited quickly, and so on, as former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger has proposed. But this is simply to apply the strategic mentality of the nation-state so thoroughly that problems with which it cannot deal are no longer to be treated as susceptible to the use of force at all. The Weinberger Doctrine is not so much a remedy as it is a symptom of the military's inability to deal with the shifted context.⁵⁴ There are casualties, however, attendant to this approach, too, among them the defense budget (for why should the public pay for a force structure that is so unresponsive to the public's perceived needs?) and the moral leadership of the world community (for why should the world defer to the richest and most powerful state in history when that state demands to sit passively by and expects other states to run the risks and bear the costs of humanitarian intervention?).

There are other alternatives. In an essay in Foreign Affairs, Edward Luttwak argued that the concept of war that governed American action had much to learn from the cabinet warfare of the territorial state. Eighteenth century wars, Luttwak noted, were characterized by

[d]emonstrative maneuvers meant to induce enemy withdrawals without firing a shot [and were] readily called off if serious fighting ensued. Superior forces avoided battle if there was risk of heavy casualties even in victory…. [E]laborately prepared offensives had unambitious objectives, promising campaigns were interrupted by early retreats into winter quarters merely to avoid further losses, and offensive performance was routinely sacrificed to the overriding priority of avoiding casualties…⁵⁵

Luttwak's essay is perhaps most helpful not as a recommendation that the strategic style of territorial states provides a model for use today, but rather as a reminder that that style was superseded when state-nations achieved ascendancy. Indeed Luttwak lamented that the current American military establishment is so thoroughly imbued with the nineteenth century Clausewitzian criticism of eighteenth century thought. It is the grip of such criticism—and its affirmative ideas about the overwhelming use of force, the necessity of great battles and decisive conflicts, etc.—that has made American power so helpless in the face of post – Long War crises both before and since the Gulf War.

Luttwak realizes that adapting to this new historical context will require not only a change in outlook as regards the means to be applied to military situations but also a greater modesty as to the objectives sought by these means. This insight is indispensable if we are not to dismiss some of the most useful of market-state military and nonmilitary strategic alternatives as merely ineffectual. By such alternatives, I have in mind economic sanctions, covert action, bribes and financial incentives, sustained campaigns of precision air strikes, novel military and political uses of intelligence products, information warfare, missile defense, simulation, the use of proxy forces, and the entire range of new technologies and tactics discussed earlier as the revolution in military affairs.

If economy in lives risked and efficiency in resources used to accomplish the goals of the public are the two guideposts of the market-state, then let us see how we might judge some of these seven programs.

(1)

Economic sanctions include a wide range of economic and financial measures—asset freezes, trade embargoes, expropriations, the withholding of credit, boycotts, and the like—that have become more difficult to maintain as the market has become globalized. Economic sanctions were not unknown to the state-nation—Napoleon's “continental system” is one famous example—but the sharp distinction between the operations of the market and the operations of government often made such sanctions hard to enforce. It was not thought unseemly that throughout the Napoleonic Wars, British bankers continued to finance French enterprises. The nation-state has not been so detached: with the coming of total war there arose also an intensified economic warfare against the civilian society.

The collective organizations of the society of nation-states have had a mixed record with such sanctions, however. The League of Nations was first called upon to apply economic sanctions to Japan following her invasion of Manchuria and the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo. The League condemned Japan's actions as unlawful, but drew back from invoking economic sanctions for fear of provoking a Japanese attack on colonies in the Far East belonging to the League's European members. When Italy attacked Ethiopia, the League called for an embargo on arms, bans on loans and credits, the boycott of Italian imports, and an embargo on the export of key raw materials to Italy. All this failed to stop the Italian conquest, and when Ethiopia sued for peace, the sanctions were withdrawn. When Germany invaded Poland three years later, the Western powers simply declared war; the League's elaborate peacekeeping machinery, with its emphasis on economic sanctions, was completely bypassed.

Nor has the United Nations's record, until recently, been much better. As with the League, collective economic sanctions were given a key role in international peacekeeping, but because action by the Security Council requires a unanimous vote of the permanent members, such sanctions could never be invoked against a great power or against a protégé of such a power. Even when a great power allows the Council to condemn the actions of a friendly state, it usually vetoes economic sanctions, as the United States has done for Israel and the Soviet Union did for Iran. From 1945 to 1990, economic sanctions were invoked only once, against the white government of Rhodesia, which was in revolt against a permanent member of the Security Council, the United Kingdom.

The coming together of the great powers at the time of the Gulf War, however, allowed the U.N. to impose economic sanctions on Iraq. Oil exports have been barred, with limited exceptions to pay for Iraqi imports of food and medicines. Since 1990 these sanctions have been the principal means by which the coalition states that fought the Gulf War have controlled what would otherwise have been the rapid recovery of Iraq's military forces. It is estimated that during the first seven years following the Gulf War, sanctions have kept $110 billion out of the Iraqi treasury. Similarly, though less dramatically, the denial of Serbian imports and exports eroded the political base of the Serbian leader, Milosevic, and doubtless played an important role in his extradition to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

As in other matters at the time, this represented an Americanization of the U.N., though one of uncertain duration. For the Americans have relied on the economic weapon to a greater degree than any other state: since World War II, we have invoked economic sanctions against China, Cuba, Viet Nam, Iran, the Soviet Union, Libya, India, Pakistan, and Poland, among others. Indeed there has hardly been a time in which the United States was not applying economic sanctions against at least one foreign state. Partly this is owed to the important economic position of the United States in the world, and our crucial assets, a vast and lucrative market coupled with a self-sufficient economy. States that are vulnerable to retorsion are seldom enthusiasts for sanctions. Partly also the use of this instrument is a function of the gradual emergence in the United States of a market-state, and that sort of state's emphasis on market tools and its aversion to risking lives.

Despite this reliance, however, there is a consensus that economic sanctions do not “work,” and they are seldom studied by military strategists. This conclusion is the result of a profound misunderstanding about the role of such sanctions. Economic sanctions are used precisely because they are unlikely to result in the kind of change of constitutional regime sought by nation-states in war. If such sanctions really could drive another state to total collapse, they would just as surely lead to armed conflict, and it is the avoidance of armed conflict that gave sanctions their unique role in the post–World War II environment. If the grain embargo imposed on the Soviet Union by the United States at the time of the invasion of Afghanistan really had starved Russia into famine, it would not have driven that country into political submission but rather into a war for food.⁵⁶Sanctions are useful when conventional war is against one's own interests and therefore the relative costs of going to war, which are usually very high, must be kept high. Sanctions so powerful that they gravely weaken the opposing state quickly—as a decisive battle or military campaign can—would just as greatly lower the relative costs of war. It may be that this is what happened to the Japanese as a result of the U.S. oil embargo in 1941; the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor moved from being a clever theoretical possibility to a daring course of action acceptable to Japanese political authorities when the relative costs of war plummeted owing to the threatened imposition of a stringent oil embargo.⁵⁷

Sanctions work by raising the cost of pursuing a particular political path—for both parties. (Thus they are especially useful to a rich power, like the United States, who can afford to play for “table stakes.”) Sanctions can help to discredit a policy—again in both states, the applying and the applied-to—and are therefore most useful where there is an active opposition party in the state to which the sanctions are applied, and no powerful interest group that is forced to bear the cost in the applying state. Even against a dictatorial government, sanctions can have a useful effect because such regimes are no less rational for being authoritarian. The crucial points to bear in mind are that sanctions' true utility lies in the modesty of their impact, a useful thing for the market-state that tries to shun warfare where possible, and that only an internationally coordinated effort, as exemplified by the sanctions against Iraq and Serbia, can be effective in an era of globalized markets and transient capital.

(2)

The utility of the strategic alternative of covert action is also not widely appreciated. Even sophisticated commentators persist in thinking that covert action involves any clandestine action by a state's secret services. In fact, “covert action” is a term of art in intelligence operations, referring to those operations by a state that are intended to influence the politics and policies of a target state without the hand of the acting state being disclosed. Thus covert action includes the training provided by the United States to the Philippine anti-insurgency forces, requested by the Aquino government but denied by both the United States and the Philippines at the time; and the provision of radio transmitters to the mujahedin attempting to destabilize the Iranian regime; and the cash contributions to the Christian Democratic Party in Italy after World War II, and the subsidies to Encounter magazine at the same time. Covert action must therefore be distinguished from intelligence collection, counterespionage, and intelligence analysis and forecasting.

Of late, covert action has been generally held in low esteem in the United States. Writing in Foreign Affairs, former American official Roger Hilsman concluded that “covert political action is not only something the United States can do without in the post–cold war world, it was something the United States could well have done without during the cold war as well.”⁵⁸ Such an observation, whatever its historical merits, is a revealing example of how disputes and positions taken during the Cold War tend to hang over into the new market-state context. In this new context, however, covert action is a far more viable and potentially useful tool. The most discrediting example of covert action—the Iran-Contra fiasco—was a fumbling attempt to privatize covert action, an objective consistent with the methods of the emerging market-state. A brief study of that affair provides an excellent object lesson in the home truth that all government acts must be consistent, however, with the constitutional law of the State, regardless of its constitutional order.

In the aftermath of the 1976 revelations of the Church Committee, which had convened to investigate whether the CIA had been involved in the Watergate Affair, various statutory and regulatory rules were promulgated that sought to limit U.S. covert action. The Reagan administration came into office in 1981 believing that the Carter and Ford administrations had been far too restrictive of CIA operations, and it wished to use covert action programs in Central America to challenge the new Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. A skeptical Congress cut back financing for such operations, and in 1983 adopted a complete ban on CIA operations against the Nicaraguan government. Moreover, thoughout this period it had become increasingly difficult to plan and execute covert operations without their exposure to the press—sometimes, it was said, by members of the oversight committees in Congress that the post-Watergate statutes had put in place.

Thus in the early 1980s CIA operations in Central America were imperiled by a statutory cutoff in funding, and the Reagan Administration believed that it risked exposure of these operations and others by compliance with the statutory requirements to fully inform Congressional committees, some of whose members were hostile to the very idea of covert action. This picture was made more troubling by a rise in anti-American terrorism and the apparent inability of U.S. agents to penetrate and neutralize the groups responsible. Throughout 1984, the United States was the target of a wave of bombings, assassinations, hijackings, and kidnappings in Lebanon. The stateless chaos that reigned in that country provided the perfect milieu for such crimes because the traditional methods of counterterrorism depend upon careful and experienced police work backed by firm legal authority.

In this situation, the director of the CIA proposed the development of a quasi-private covert action agency. This scheme offered several important advantages to the administration: (1) using private persons as liaisons, the new agency could manage the Contra insurgency against the Sandinista government, providing the tactical and operational guidance that had been coming from CIA before its funding and participation were cut off by Congress; (2) it would avoid the unwelcome scrutiny of Congress because it would not be a government operation, dependent on government funding, and thus would not come within the provisions of various statutes that imposed congressional oversight; (3) a private agency could act more daringly, avoiding the legal prohibitions contained in prior Executive Orders (against assassination, for example) that it would have been embarrassing to repeal, and in defiance of international norms against violent reprisals; thus it was hoped the United States might recapture the initiative that seemed to have been surrendered to the terrorist groups; (4) because of the agency's dissociation with official government, it would provide the president with the option of “plausible denial” should the private agency's operations be exposed. Statutes adopted in the late 1970s had greatly increased the political costs of maintaining such presidential denials because these laws required that the chief executive actually sign a written verification of the necessity for each covert operation and report this “finding” to Congress; therefore there always hovered the possibility that such written authorization might be discovered by the press after an official denial had been made.

The plan of using a privately funded agency to provide, in the words of one of the conspirators, “a self-sustaining, stand-alone, off-the-shelf covert action capability” was a natural market response to the problem of overregulation. In many ways it resembles the legal schemes by which multinational corporations take their enterprises offshore to escape onerous regulations by the state in which their operations are resident. Major General Richard Secord, the chief operating officer of the new covert action entity, called it simply “the Enterprise,” a very apt term. Although the public's understanding of this agency appears to be that it was created to manage the American arms-for-hostages deal with Iran, and then expanded its portfolio by diverting black-market profits from those arms deals to the Contras, in fact the chronology is the other way around. The agency was set up to manage the Contra account that Congress had taken away from the CIA; as the agency grew, it took up other accounts, conducting covert operations in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and the Near East. It was intended to be staffed and available for use for any covert operation that needed its special scope and freedom from legal restraints. Had “Enterprise” operations in Iran not been exposed by the Iranians themselves, its executives believed that it would have taken on further assignments, in Angola and elsewhere.

This agency ultimately collapsed because it was fundamentally incompatible with American constitutional law. The exposure of the “Enterprise,” in a different political climate, could well have led to the impeachment of the U.S. president. Unlike other states—unlike even other representative democracies—the United States does not permit the private funding of federal operations because this would evade the legitimating check of representative government. Only when the persons for whom the electorate has voted require the taxpayers to pay money for government acts is there a direct link between voting and government operations. Otherwise, the framers thought, and our constitutional structure and practice reflect, the link between citizen responsibility and governmental authorization is broken. It is a very pleasing thing to have others pay for the operations of the State, but even gifts to the U.S. government cannot be accepted without statutory authorization. To do otherwise allows the government to undertake functions for which it has no authorization from the people.

But if the Iran-Contra Affair was a textbook case of how not to conduct a covert action, there is nevertheless an important role for such activity in the arsenal of the market-state. Usually such operations amount to the financial and technical support of local elements in foreign countries with whom the United States is in some sympathy, or at least with whom we are willing to cooperate for a common goal. Rarely, arms may be provided. Paramilitary forces may be supported by the provision of intelligence, logistical support, or financing. It is doubtful the Russian defeat in Afghanistan would have occurred absent U.S. support for the mujahedin. The key elements are strict accountability of funding; careful professionalism and planning; and setting achievable goals. With the multiplication of entities operating in the international environment, and the increasing sensitivity of most governments to public opinion, the potential usefulness of covert action increases with the emergence of the market state, as do the costs of exposure.

The Iran-Contra Affair was the result of a government that in some respects anticipated the new market-state and was eager to use its tools, but was insufficiently attentive to the rules of the American constitution into which the norms of the new constitutional order must be translated. Far from discrediting covert action, the affair should enable us to use this instrument with more care in the future by emphasizing the crucial role of the legal setting of the market-state. A deregulated state does not mean an unregulated state; indeed, the legal rules that remain after deregulation have an importance that is, if anything, more salient than under the ends-justify-the-means ideology of the nation-state. The Russian state has been imperiled by its involvement in black-market activities, precisely because it has been unable to heed this rule. Whether the United States can marshal the imagination and daring to execute significant covert actions in the new politically fraught context of the market-state remains to be seen.

(3)

Sustained precision bombing: In Operation Linebacker, conducted in Southeast Asia in 1972, some nine thousand laser-guided bombs were fruitlessly dropped near Hanoi and Haiphong over eleven days—roughly the same number as were dropped with far greater effect during the entire Gulf War. So-called surgical strikes are among the most desired, and most elusive, options in the military handbook. Three difficulties have thwarted their promise of low-risk, low-collateral damage and high destruction: (1) air crews are inevitably put at risk because precision bombing requires low-release altitudes, and the very technology that enables target acquisition and homing for the bombardier is also used by antiaircraft missiles with integral radar systems; enhancing bombing accuracy also usually means employing air crews more intensively—the “smartest” of smart weapons was, after all, the kamikaze; (2) precision-bombing campaigns require enormous quantities of real-time intelligence to locate targets and track them; this intelligence relies both on satellite tracking, which is only now becoming achievable, and on highly efficient collection methods; (3) such bombing campaigns require patience—which the publics of market-states, fed as they are by hyperbolic media and sensitized to the suffering of civilians who are harmed by the bombing, will seldom tolerate—and modest goals. Contradicting the promises of early strategic bombing theorists, like Douhet and Billy Mitchell, it is extremely difficult for strategic bombing alone to effect a constitutional change in a hostile regime.

All of these perceived shortcomings were in the minds of U.S. planners when they considered the problem of attempting to lift the Serbian siege of Sarajevo. Despite intense pressure from the public and Congress, senior military officials refused to carry out bombing raids against the Serbs in Bosnia on grounds that strikingly reflect the interplay between market-state constraints and nation-state military mentalities. These officials forcefully rejected any area-bombing campaign on the grounds that too many civilians would be killed, reports of which would horrify the American public, and they rejected precision bombing on the ground that the public would not tolerate a long-drawn-out campaign. Given the rugged terrain in Bosnia and the fact that Serbian mortars and even howitzers could be quickly moved and easily camouflaged, any air operation short of a long campaign or area carpet bombing would be ineffective. In any case, it was reasoned, air strikes alone could not resolve the political conflict in Bosnia, or even safeguard civilians from the campaign of massacres, rapes, and deportations. Indeed, any bombing by the United States risked retaliation by the Serbs, who might take hostages from locally deployed U.N. forces, which, if withdrawn, would only lead to a demand for American ground troops, something else the public would not support.⁵⁹

In the end, it was the insistence by military and diplomatic officials in many countries that bombing could not be decisive that was itself decisive. Military moves that could win the war and force the Serbs to surrender their goals required tactics that the public would reject; anything else was futile and risky. In these two demands—the insistence by the public on quickly terminated action, and by security personnel on achieving total objectives—we see the intersection between market-state and nation-state, between, that is, the new role of media-driven public sensitivities and the military demand for definitive state action.

In the event, an extremely modest bombing campaign conducted over a series of days without any obvious stopping point in fact lifted the siege of Sarajevo—the longest siege of the century, longer than Verdun or Stalingrad. As the memoirs of the American negotiator Richard Holbrooke wholly demonstrate, it was in fact this open-ended bombing campaign— over the strenuous objections of the British and French—that brought the siege to an end and, with the Croatian ground campaign, brought the Serbs to the negotiating table.⁶⁰

By contrast the NATO campaign against Serbia to force acceptance of an international protectorate for Kosovo relied on aerial bombing from the outset.⁶¹ During the course of the campaign, nearly 40,000 sorties were flown with virtually no losses.⁶² When Slobodan Milosevic acceded to alliance demands, delivered by Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin and Finnish president and E.U. special representative Martti Ahtisaari on June 3, not a single NATO ground troop had entered Serbia.⁶³ How was this possible and what lessons are there for the future use of this arm for the market-state? Each of the three vulnerabilities of precision-guided attacks that had been used to forestall NATO action in Bosnia had been blunted. First, stealth aircraft—aircraft whose radar profiles are so attenuated as to render them invisible to radar-guided attack—had taken out anti-aircraft missile sites that would otherwise have posed lethal risks to American pilots. Second, new technology had allowed for more accurate target acquisition, and the targets themselves were not confined to tactical strikes against Serb forces but included strategic strikes against Belgrade and the Serbian infrastructure. Third, NATO's political objectives were sufficiently modest and did not require a change of regime in Belgrade.

More important for our study, each of these three potential shortenings of precision-guided attack is likely to be even further ameliorated. In the past, precision-guided munitions depended upon some sort of homing technology—relying on either guidance from a command operator, or using emissions from the munition itself, or homing in on energy bounced off the target by an external transmitter or energy emitted by the target. Currently, however, the United States has the capability to use radar onboard the munition to generate midcourse corrections for an inertial guidance system or to fly to a precise set of coordinates using a guidance system updated by a Global Positioning Satellite system. Naval vessels lying offshore or aircraft distant from the target can launch these pilotless munitions with an accuracy that even the kamikaze would be hard-pressed to match. This, plus the introduction of Stealth technology, can greatly lower the risk to pilots and the likelihood of collateral damage to civilians.

Just as significantly, however, the United States set modest, achievable goals in the Yugoslav campaigns. NATO was willing to settle for something far less than victory; this did not prevent “ethnic cleansing,” but it did enforce an end to the Serbian armed presence in the provinces where Serbs had conducted their ethnic campaigns.

(4)

The term information warfare usually* refers to the capacity both to penetrate and degrade an adversary's electronic communications and to protect one's own communications from interference. Such warfare played an important role in the Gulf War and doubtless will play an even larger role in future conflicts as electronic monitoring and control becomes more extensive, and the links to commanders more numerous.

This use of information technologies is potentially a highly valuable strategic option for the market-state. More important, however, the United States can also use information as a diplomatic and strategic commodity with which to create incentives and deterrents affecting the political behavior of other states. Of course it has long been true that the United States has shared information with allies—using satellites to aid Britain in the Falklands War, or forwarding decrypts to Stalin that revealed the impending Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union—but this was undertaken as an adjunct to military activities and not something that was pursued as a strategic alternative in itself. Now, however, dramatic developments in information technologies—the increased capabilities of intelligence gathering combined with the enormous synthesizing powers of computers—have made possible for the first time a truly global system of near-real-time monitoring.⁶⁴

It is already the case that weather satellites, medium-resolution imaging systems, worldwide air traffic control networks, television links, and the like are being used by civilian corporations, while the U.S. military can rely on extensive photo reconnaissance abilities, infrared missile launch detectors, radar satellites, unmanned aerial sensors, remotely planted acoustic devices, and various military guidance tools. The United States could undertake to expand this technology in order to achieve a complete system of satellite sensors that would provide real-time monitoring on many wavelengths.⁶⁵ The architecture for such a space-based information system is new, but the necessary communications technology is already emerging from the private sector. The entire system, however, depends upon affordable space lift, and this is something the U.S. government must undertake.

Such a system would provide the United States with the ability to detect, identify, track, and engage far more targets with a higher degree of lethality and precision, over a global area, than ever before. Knowing which subset of targets to strike serves as an enormous force multiplier, greatly reducing the number of weapons and strikes necessary to prevail over an enemy force.⁶⁶ In addition, there are real benefits to the market-state to be found in information sharing (and withholding) beyond what can be achieved by weapons strikes.

At Sandia National Laboratories, an experiment has been undertaken in which a cooperative monitoring center acted as a confidence-building measure in much the same way that negotiated troop positioning, missile constraints, and transparency were used during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Mutual monitoring between two hostile states can reduce the chances of war by preventing successful pre-emption. Setting up such a center is an example of producing the collective goods that can maintain U.S. leadership. Indeed, as we shall see, the concept of collective goods is especially crucial to the market-state because the functions of that state do not replicate but supplement the market, which is astringently economical with public goods.

At present, the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) network established by the United States is used by any country with the capability to access it. Foreign nations have previously utilized the GPS system to direct missile attacks against U.S. interests; indeed, GPS-guided weaponry could be used to destroy U.S. satellites in orbit.⁶⁷ Access to a truly global monitoring system, however, could be limited by the United States and bartered to licensee states either for fees or for political cooperation. In addition to its crucial contribution to warfare, such a system would be integral to weather control, asteroid defense, solar flare warnings, commodity planning, environmental monitoring, and the sustainable exploitation of natural resources, all collective goods for the society of states.

(5)

By providing licensed states with the protection of a missile defense⁶⁸ system, the United States could provide an effective and trustworthy strategic umbrella analogous to that it provided during the Cold War through extended nuclear deterrence. Moreover, without such defensive systems the vulnerability of U.S. forces to missile attack abroad will be an increasing deterrent to U.S. force projections in aid of allies or for humanitarian missions. Thus what positive effect still remains as a result of U.S. extended deterrence could be sharply eroded in the absence of a credible U.S. ballistic missile defense.

“Central deterrence” is a function of the threat to target a national homeland in order to protect the homeland of the threatening, deterring party.* For example, the U.S. central deterrent consisted of the threat to attack the Soviet homeland in order to protect the American homeland from attack. The term denotes a relationship between vital objectives whose very centrality to the State gives them the highest value to the deterrer and thus assures both the willingness to run the highest risks of retaliation or pre-emption and the will to inflict a level of harm commensurate with the necessity to protect “central” objectives. “Extended deterrence,” by contrast, projects nuclear deterrence beyond the absolutely central, into other geographical, nonhomeland theatres or for other, nonvital interests. Extended deterrence was the objective of the policy according to which the United States promised to retaliate with nuclear weapons if the states of Western Europe or Japan were attacked. Sometimes this threat of retaliation is called the nuclear “umbrella.” Extended deterrence is the single most effective instrument the United States has to prevent major-state proliferation because it permits these states to develop their economies without diverting vast resources to the nuclear arms competition, and yet remain relatively safe from nuclear attack.

It would be a grave mistake to assume that the threat of missile attack has receded worldwide as a result of the end of the Cold War. In the Gulf War, Iraq launched almost ninety missiles against targets in Israel and Saudi Arabia; 25 percent of all U.S. combat fatalities from that war were the result of a single Scud missile strike. Moreover, missile technology is quickly spreading to many states. North Korea, China, and other states have played major roles in this export trade. When North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and the North African countries ultimately possess the 1,300-kilometer-range No-Dong I missile, or something like it, the capitals of Japan, France, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, and Italy will all be within range of potentially hostile states.⁶⁹

Since the end of the Cold War, the American program for ballistic missile defense (BMD) has been redirected away from the effort to achieve a comprehensive shield against a massive Soviet attack and toward theatre nuclear defense systems. The Clinton administration endorsed a program that included an upgrade to the Patriot systems used in the Gulf War; a Theater High Altitude Area Defense system that would supplement short-range point-defense systems like Patriot; and a sea-based system using the AEGIS ships.⁷⁰ The enthusiasm with which these systems have been pursued, however, has been diminished by the intellectual residue of the Cold War: during the Soviet-American confrontation, many persons felt that BMD was essentially destabilizing to the deterrence relationship because it promised—a promise it could not possibly fulfill—to prevent the USSR from being able to destroy the United States in a retaliatory strike, thus potentially tempting both sides into pre-emptive moves.

It would reflect a considerable misunderstanding if these opinions, whatever their merits in context of the Long War, were to prevent the most rapid feasible deployment of BMD by the United States today. This deployment would enable the United States to protect many countries—perhaps for a fee—including states that would be hard-pressed to deploy their own defensive systems and that therefore might otherwise be tempted to develop other, far cheaper, deterrent systems of mass destruction. Moreover, the deployment of a theater BMD system would cast doubt upon potentially preclusive moves by other states to prevent the United States from projecting power abroad through conventional forces. For example, the six-month buildup of coalition forces in the Saudi desert would have been far too risky for a market-state like the United States if Iraq had possessed adequate offensive missiles. Even for a nation-state acting to protect its survival, such a threat to an expeditionary force can be preclusive: with respect to the Normandy invasion, General Eisenhower wrote that “if the German had succeeded in perfecting and using [the V-1 and V-2 missiles] six months earlier than he did our invasion of Europe would have proved exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible.”⁷¹ A theatre BMD might be able to rehabilitate future regional military operations similar to the coalition offensive in the Gulf War despite hostile missile proliferation that it is evident is very difficult for market-states to prevent. As an aside, I should add that it is not necessarily a decisive argument against BMD to say that it would be ineffectual against nuclear threats delivered by other means—the so-called suitcase bomb, for example. These devices are extremely difficult to manufacture and, more important, are as much a threat as an asset to an authoritarian state because, unlike missile systems, they do not require elaborate control procedures and technologies and are thus potential tools for insurrection.

(6)

As noted above, computer-assisted design and manufacturing, training simulators, and virtual-reality environments will doubtless shape the military planning process of the twenty-first century. Simulation might, however, play an even more ambitious role in the hands of a market-state arbiter, such as the United States, or an ad hoc group of such states. With global monitoring, it ought to be possible in principle to simulate battles and then assess costs and damages afterwards. No lives need be lost in such conflicts. The role of individual heroism, of unit esprit, and sheer good luck will be less perhaps in future wars where combat is mainly fought by machines against machines—or against defenseless persons once their machines fail. In a transparent environment without tactical surprise, it may well be possible to arbitrate disputes not so much on the basis of international law as on a simulated competition run by computers. Recalcitrant losers would face coercive measures as penalties. The American legal practice of plea bargaining is an analogous example of such simulation in a different context. Based on the likely assessment of what would happen if the defendant went to trial, the prosecution and the defense barter within a range of likely outcomes, each preferring to avoid the risks and costs of trial if possible.

(7)

Mercenary forces were once the dominant armed instrument of the State because they were an economical alternative to more expensive standing armies. In the future, the use of local proxy armies can offer a similar efficiency. Backed by the information and intelligence collection, the air power and the strategic direction of United States – led coalitions, such forces could provide the indispensable element of ground control without risking American lives to the same degree as U.S. ground forces. The risks attendant to the use of proxies—as Rome discovered—is that they are unreliable allies; the weapons and information they are provided must be carefully calibrated and the technological support given must be carefully weighed.

The present volume began with this question: why is it so difficult for contemporary leaders to determine when to use force in international affairs? Now, I believe, we are in a position to answer this question. If the American state—and many other states also—is in the midst of a transition from one form of constitutional order to another, then states are also in the midst of a change in their strategic relationships vis-à-vis one another that is related to this change in constitutional order. The difficulty lies in the fact that we have yet to appreciate the nature and implications of this transformation. We are quickly becoming a market-state. Yet we still cling to a strategic mentality that was formed within the constitutional order of the nation-state and its Long War for survival. It's not so much a matter of finding a new strategic paradigm as it is of acquiring the habits of thinking that are compatible with the character of the new constitutional order; then the paradigm will follow.

The United States's world role as protector of free states and our domestic constitutional institutions of liberty and equality are linked together by our history. Any set of rules that forbids the use of American force in virtually all the contexts in which the United States is likely to find itself moved by moral considerations in the current era will forfeit its claim on our moral sense. Then when those situations arise that do threaten our vital interests and call for a supreme national effort, we shall regret having ignored the cardinal historical lesson of American war making: that it is never done wholly on a moral or an expedient basis, but always and only when both are present. For two hundred years, U.S. foreign policy has been to offer assistance, where our assistance was sought and where it would be efficacious, to peoples who wanted free institutions and peaceful lives, and to oppose aggressors who threatened the constitutional way of life that is our greatest legacy to mankind. In service of the former objective we fought the warrior tribes of the Plains, the Mexican dictator Santa Anna, the German empire, the Spanish empire, and the Asian totalitarians Kim Il Sung, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh, and sent forces to many places around the world where the collapse of the legal order brought great suffering. To defend our constitutional form of life, we fought both Britain and France in the nineteenth century, and defeated fascism and communism in the twentieth. We have seldom sought territorial cessions by conquest and have largely grown our continental state by the wishes of the pioneer inhabitants of the territories we protected or purchased. This history must be qualified by the wrongs we have committed, including those against Native Americans and the preservation of slavery and the slave trade for half a century after it had been outlawed in Europe. Yet it is our history that gives us a consistent sense of our achievements and of our wrongdoings.

It is important for the United States and its leaders to remember that Thucydides concluded that the “truest reason” for the Peloponnesian War was Sparta's fear of the growing strength of Athens. Not simply increasing American power, but persuading others of our modesty, our benign intent, our deference to the preferences of other societies will be an indispensable element in maintaining peace. American references to “the sole, remaining superpower” are scarcely helpful but the label “hyperpower” comes from abroad.

For history is not made within the State alone. Indeed I have argued that the State depends upon conflict with other states—the object of strategy— in order to establish itself as the legitimate guardian of a legal order. What of the society of states? How does its constitutional order come about, and what legitimates that order? This is the subject of Book II.

All wars are so many attempts to bring about new relations among the states and to form new bodies by the break-up of the old states to the point where they cannot again maintain themselves alongside each other and must therefore suffer revolutions until finally, partly through the best possible arrangement of the civic constitution internally, and partly through common agreement and legislation externally, there is created a state that, like a civic commonwealth, can maintain itself automatically.

—Kant, Idea for a Universal

History with Cosmopolitan Intent (1784)