Divided We War

GEORGE W. BUSH entered office committed to a realist foreign policy that would focus on great powers like China and Russia, eschewing nation-building in failed states. China, for example, was "a strategic competitor" (not the "strategic partner" of Bill Clinton's foreign policy).

Sept. 11, 2001, changed U.S. foreign policy. By September, 2002, Mr. Bush had issued a new national security strategy declaring: "We are menaced less by fleets and armies than by catastrophic technologies falling into the hands of the embittered few." Instead of strategic rivalry, "today, the world's great powers find ourselves on the same side -- united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos."

The distinguished Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis has compared the new strategy to the seminal days that redefined U.S. foreign policy in the 1940s. The new strategy responds to deep trends in world politics that were illuminated by the events of Sept. 11.

Globalization has been shrinking the natural buffers that distance and two oceans provided to North America. Sept. 11 dramatized how dreadful conditions in poor, weak countries half way around the world could have terrible consequences for the United States.

Most worryingly, the information revolution and technological change have elevated the importance of transnational issues and empowered non-state actors to play a larger role in world politics. The "democratization of technology" -- low costs, increasing accessibility -- means terrorists can be more agile and more lethal than before. In the 20th century, a malevolent individual like Hitler or Stalin needed the power of a government to kill millions of people; if 21st-century terrorists get hold of weapons of mass destruction, that power will for the first time be available to deviant groups and individuals. This  "privatization of war" is not only a major change in world politics, but the potential impact on our cities could drastically alter the nature of our civilization.

Hence the fear that certain deviant states like Iraq and North Korea might become enablers of such terrorist groups. Although the U.S. administration never produced strong evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 attacks, there has never been any doubt about Mr. Hussein's intention to develop weapons of mass destruction. This is what the new Bush strategy got right.

What the administration did not get right was how to go about implementing its new approach. The Bush administration has been deeply divided between neoconservative and assertively imperial unilateralists on the one hand, and more multilateral and cautious traditional realists on the other. Sept. 11 initially led toward more multilateral approaches. Congress finally paid America's UN dues, and the President turned his efforts to building a coalition against terrorism.

But the rapid success of the military campaign in Afghanistan led some in the administration and some commentators to conclude that unilateralism works.The columnist Charles Krauthammer, for example, argued that the success against the Taliban government proved the success of what he called the "new unilateralism," through which the U.S. refuses to play the role of "docile international citizen" and unashamedly pursues its own ends.

Policy toward Iraq revealed the tug of war between different strands of opinion in the administration. Last August, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld made statements disparaging the role of the United Nations and warning that the return of UN inspectors to Iraq would give "false comfort."

Traditional realist Republicans like Brent Scowcroft and James Baker weighed in publicly in support of Secretary of State Colin Powell's multilateral approach. President Bush's Sept. 12 speech to the UN, and Security Council Resolution 1441, represented a victory for Mr. Powell, but his diplomatic efforts were complicated by contradictory messages from the administration and by the rapidity of the defence buildup in the region. The threat of force was necessary to the work of the UN inspectors, but administration speeches about regime change convinced many countries that the United States was not serious about inspection. In the end, the question of U.S. power rather than Mr. Hussein's weapons became the issue that dominated the UN.

Ironically, French President Jacques Chirac and Mr. Rumsfeld combined to undercut Mr. Powell. It is a pity that the Canadian proposal of more time in return for clear benchmarks was not accepted. With more time, it might have been possible to build a broader coalition for the legitimacy of the war.

Nonetheless, those of us who criticize the handling and timing of the war must admit that indefinite containment was unlikely to succeed. Enforcing UN Security Council resolutions 687 and 1441, which prevent Saddam Hussein from possessing weapons of mass destruction, is better than returning to the evasive politics of the 1990s when Mr. Hussein successfully defied a divided United Nations.

Multilateralists must now hope that the war is brief, that the Iraqi people will visibly welcome the removal of a tyrant, and that the reconstruction of Iraq will involve many countries and a role for the United Nations. If the United States turns to its allies and international institutions in the reconstruction of Iraq, it may help to recapture some of the soft power it wasted in the clumsy way it went to war.