DoD News Briefing
Douglas J. Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
Thursday, February 17, 2005
I appreciate the opportunity to address the Council on Foreign
Relations, this productive and influential body. The Council has many claims to
fame, including its having been featured in a diverse set of inane conspiracy
theories – figments of the fevers of both the left wing and the right. I can now
empathize. As one bugbear to another, I say: It’s good to be here with you.
The Policy organization, my office at the Pentagon, is now doing its
part in the Quadrennial Defense Review – the QDR – which the Congress has
mandated. The review requires organizations throughout the Defense Department to consider which capabilities we’ll need in coming years. The foundation of the QDR is a *defense* strategy which is nested within our *national security* strategy. So we’ve been obliged to think and re-think our most wide-ranging and basic ideas. It’s a healthy practice to review the basics – to question the formulation of our national security aims and re-chew our policy assumptions. Stale thought makes for bad strategy.
A key element of the President’s strategy is the interest that the
United States has in seeing freedom and democracy gain ground in the world.
President Bush, as you may have noticed, had something to say on this point in both his inaugural and State of the Union speeches recently. Under his direction,
Administration officials are considering how best to increase safety and secure
civil liberties at home by, among other means, supporting freedom abroad. As we do this work, we’re paying particular attention to four phenomena in the world: the
spread of weapons of mass destruction, terrorist extremism, the risks posed by
failed or failing states, and the strategic choices facing important powers in the
world, especially countries like China that are growing rapidly.
Our nation’s most basic interest is to protect the freedom of the
American people—our ability to govern ourselves under the Constitution. The
sovereignty of the United States is another way of referring to this freedom. The
United States strengthens its national security when it promotes a well-ordered
world of sovereign states: a world in which states respect one another’s rights to
choose how they want to live; a world in which states do not commit aggression and have governments that can and do control their own territory; a world in which
states have governments that are responsible and obey, as it were, the rules of the road.
Now, if the essence of sovereignty is that no state dictates how
another organizes itself, how can respect for sovereignty be squared with President
Bush’s promotion of democracy?
I believe President Bush has answered this question by explaining that
promoting democracy is not the same thing as asserting a right to impose
governments on other states that are simply minding their own business. It would
be a contradiction in terms to push democracy down the throats of people.
Democracy means self-government and people can have it only if they choose it for themselves.
Over the years, U.S. presidents have encouraged democracy. And after
wars, the United States has laid the foundation for democracy in countries like
Japan, Germany, Afghanistan and Iraq. But democracy can’t be sustained as an
imposition. It requires that the people not only want it, but are willing to do
the hard work to create and preserve the institutions important or necessary for
democracy such as: multiple centers of power; a culture of compromise; basic
freedoms – of conscience, religion and speech; an independent judiciary; private
property; a free press; and fair elections.
Democratic institutions have proliferated around the world in recent
decades, including in places with non-Western traditions and without a history of
democratic politics. These institutions spread because they succeed. In liberal
democratic countries people enjoy greater freedom, prosperity and domestic
tranquility than in non-democratic countries. That’s what I mean by “success.”
One can make this observation and encourage countries to adopt democracy without offending the principle of sovereignty.
Nor does respect for sovereignty require us to ignore the depredations
of tyrannical regimes. As President Bush has said, “America will not pretend that
jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and
servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.” Even
if the United States at a given moment is not in a position to help relieve such
misery, Americans associate themselves with other peoples’ aspirations for
freedom. President Bush has often said, most recently to the citizens of Iran,
that where people stand for their own liberty, America will stand with them.
Promoting democracy marries pragmatism and humane principle. Hence the President’s declaration that “America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” The safety and civil liberties of Americans are more secure in a world rich in countries that respect the rights of their citizens. Skeptics (undoubtedly well represented here, in so sophisticated an audience) are naturally suspicious of claims that principle coincides with advantage. But is it not the task of statesmanship to harmonize, to the extent possible, what is right with what is
beneficial?
Since the colonial era, Americans have seen our country as a “light
unto the nations” – an exemplar of freedom through self-government. Even those who have argued most forcefully that America ought not go abroad looking for dragons to slay have recognized that the American *example* of self-government is a powerful force in the world.
The United States carries out its policy of promoting democracy not in
a simple, black-and-white morality tale, but in the real world, a sphere of moral
complexity and life-and-death challenges. Despite the preeminent position of the
United States in the world, we are not all-powerful. We don’t have the luxury of
restricting our cooperation in national security affairs exclusively to states with
political arrangements of which we approve, any more than Franklin Roosevelt and
Winston Churchill could afford to be overly delicate about the nature of Stalin’s
regime. Indeed, as Churchill remarked, “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at
least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” But the United
States can boast that our influence on our non-democratic partners has tended over time to broaden the domain of human freedom.
Consider the historical record. The governments of South Korea and
Taiwan, for example, were non-democratic, even at times repressive, yet the U.S.,
for practical reasons, maintained close ties with them during the Cold War. Both
were cited as instances of American inconsistency – and both are now vigorous
democracies. A similar point could be made about the Philippines, Indonesia, El
Salvador and others.
U.S. devotion to a well-ordered world of sovereign states has been
called into question also because of our warnings about the threat of weapons of
mass destruction in the hands of bad actors. In his State of the Union message in
2002, President Bush said: “We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I
will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws
closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most
dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons.” Now, some criticized those words as a repudiation of classic notions of sovereignty.
It’s instructive to reflect, however, on how the concept of sovereignty
has evolved over the years. The traditional idea was that governments should be
immune from interference as to actions at home short of actual aggression against
another state. But in the mid-20th Century, for example, the civilized world
modified the concept of sovereignty in light of the Nazis’ crimes against
humanity. Genocide is now widely recognized as a matter of international concern
and, despite the importance of sovereignty, governments are deemed outlaws if they commit genocide, even against their own people.
Then, in the 1990s, notwithstanding that Kosovo belonged to Serbia, the
United States and our NATO allies did not permit the Milosevic regime to use the
concept of sovereignty to shield its gross mistreatment of the Kosovars against
international intervention. So, even without an authorizing resolution from the UN
Security Council, NATO took action against Serbia.
As the enormities of genocide and other acts of gross inhumanity
perturbed established ideas about international law, weapons of mass destruction
now challenge statesmen of the civilized world. Even a small and poor state may
now be in a position to produce the means to cause devastation to other people –
damage far beyond the ability of such a state ever to remedy or recompense. The
world has decided that sovereignty shouldn’t protect a government perpetrating
large-scale crimes against humanity within its own borders. Before us all now
hangs the question of how long-standing ideas about sovereignty can be squared with the dangers of biological or nuclear weapons. Should governments with troubling records of aggression, support for terrorism, human rights abuses and the like be allowed to invoke sovereign rights to protect their development of catastrophic weapons that threaten the sovereign rights of others in the world? This is a question for which there is no simple, objective answer.
The importance of promoting a well-ordered world of sovereign states
was brought home to Americans by 9/11, when terrorists enjoying safe haven in
remote Afghanistan exploited “globalization” and the free and open nature of
various Western countries to attack us disastrously here at home. Sovereignty
means not just a country’s right to command respect for its independence, but also
the duty to take responsibility for what occurs on one’s territory, and, in
particular, to do what it takes to prevent one’s territory from being used as a
base for attacks against others.
In the war on terrorism, one of the key strategic challenges is this:
How can we fight a global war against enemies who are present in so many countries with whom we are not at war? Indeed, many of these countries are friends of ours.
To contemplate that question is to come to understand why the United
States cannot possibly win the war on terrorism by military means alone – or by
itself alone. The United States can win the war – it can defeat terrorist
extremism as a threat to our way of life as a free and open society – only through
cooperation with allies and partners around the world.
Now, this may strike you as a shockingly non-unilateralist
pronouncement. Perhaps you will conclude that it represents the new diplomatic
tone of the new term of this Bush presidency. In fact, recognition that allies and
partners are indispensable to the war effort has animated U.S. strategy since
9/11. Top U.S. officials have said so for years, though statements to this effect
tended to be ignored or underplayed by folks wedded to the thesis, as common as it is false, that the administration is run by fools committed to go-it-alone-ism in
national security affairs. But I digress.
Let’s get back to the key question: How can we fight a global war
against enemies who are present in so many countries with whom we are not at war?
A key part of the answer is cooperation with partner countries. As a
practical matter in most cases, only they can act as required against the
terrorists on their territory. The required action may be law enforcement; it may
be intelligence work; it may be a military operation; or it may be the development
of an educational system that can compete with extremist madrassa schools.
We’re working with allies and partners to develop common views on the
nature of the threat of terrorist extremism. We’re assessing with them the
capabilities needed to confront it. We urge our partners to do their duty as
sovereign states to regulate their borders and otherwise control their territories.
And we’re working to build their capacity to perform that duty. So the
United States not only encourages partner action, but helps to enable it. This
accounts for such various, not obviously related projects as:
+ the training and equipping of the Afghan and Iraqi security forces, military
and police;
+ counter-terrorist train-and-equip efforts in Pakistan, Yemen, the Philippines,
Georgia and elsewhere;
+ educational assistance programs in various countries;
+ the President’s Global Peace Operations Initiative, to help train, sustain and
rapidly deploy forces (initially mainly in Africa) for peacekeeping and for the
more difficult missions known as “peace enforcement;” and
+ the establishment of the new Reconstruction and Stabilization Office at the
State Department to help countries develop the tools they need for civil
administration.
The main elements of U.S. strategy in the war on terrorism are: one,
protecting the homeland; two, disrupting and attacking terrorist networks; and
three, countering ideological support for terrorism. The third – the ideological
fight – we see as the key to victory.
We have overthrown two regimes that supported terrorists – that of the
Taliban in Afghanistan and of Saddam Hussein in Iraq – and induced a third –
Qaddafi’s in Libya – to change its policies. All of this has contributed to
forcing our extremist enemies to shift some of their attention from offense to
defense. All of this has helped interfere with their communications, planning,
weapons programs, training and operations, as have our disruptions of terrorist
financial flows and the capture or killing of approximately two-thirds of the known
leadership of al Qaida. But we recognize that, if all we do is disrupt and attack
terrorist networks, we’ll not defeat our enemies.
Our goal is not only to deny the terrorists what they need to operate,
but ultimately to deny them what they need to survive. This is why it is crucial
to counter ideological support for terrorism.
As we see it, this effort, a long-term undertaking, has two
components. First, we have to de-legitimate terrorism. As the President has said,
we intend to make terrorism like the slave trade, piracy, or genocide – activities
that nobody who aspires to respectability can condone, much less support. It will
take a lot of work to change the way millions of people think, and to undo the
effects of decades in which terrorism was tolerated and even, on occasion, rewarded.
The second component of our effort to counter ideological support for
terrorism is support for models of moderation, democracy, sound economics and
healthy civil society that can compete with the bloody blandishments of the
extremists. As President Bush, referring to the Greater Middle East, has
explained, “As long as that region is a place of tyranny and despair and anger, it
will produce men and movements that threaten the safety of Americans and our
friends. We seek the advance of democracy for the most practical of reasons:
because democracies do not support terrorists or threaten the world with weapons of mass murder.” This is why the political and economic reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq are crucial to success in the war on terrorism.
The problems that I’ve been discussing thus far are by no means the
sole focus of folks in the Defense Department. As important as are the war on
terrorism and WMD proliferation, we retain our interest in relationships among the
world’s major powers.
Throughout history, regulating such relationships has tested the skills
of statesmen. The test gets especially tough as it becomes necessary to
accommodate the shifts in relative strength among those states, especially the rise
of new powers. A failing grade has all too frequently come in the form of war,
when the international system proved unable to balance the demands of the rising
powers and the interests of the older ones.
Over the last ten to twenty years, the world’s state system has managed
a number of grand adjustments gracefully and pacifically, including the
disintegration of the Soviet empire, the unification of Germany, the blossoming of
India and the enlargement of NATO.
Of the new powers that are rising – developing economic strength and
willing to engage in the world, through trade and otherwise – the country that can
be expected to have the greatest effect on international relations is China.
As in India and other rapidly developing countries, the people in China
have benefited palpably from their government’s economic liberalization and from
the world’s general willingness to accommodate their rise by, for example,
admitting them into the global trading system. China has cultivated confidence on
the part of international business people that it will remain stable and hospitable
to them for trade and investment.
As is the case with other major players too – Russia, India, Japan, the
European Union and, I would say, the United States – China can be seen as facing a strategic crossroads. The world is in rather high flux, international relations
don’t now have the structure and the alignments that existed during the Cold War,
or even in the decade preceding 9/11. Countries are making choices that will
determine what kind of world they want to live in. These countries have to define
their aspirations for the future, what in the past might have been called their
conception of “national greatness.”
For a country like China, the fundamental choice is whether it wishes
to join the group of advanced economies whose relationships are governed by “rules of the road” of the international state system and who define their national purpose with reference to the freedom, well-being and prosperity of their
citizens.
As the U.S. record makes clear, we don’t see the world economic system
as a zero-sum game – we envision the possibility of rising economic tides, as the
saying goes, that lift all boats. China, for its part, was able to develop rapidly
because it abandoned the radicalism of the Mao years. If it wants to continue to
prosper, it will choose a benign path that will allow the world to accommodate
its rise peacefully. The question is: do its leaders see that China’s long-term
interests – including its opportunities to profit from foreign investment and trade
– hinge on its becoming a respected and responsible member of an international
community, and that this will in turn require that it forego the threat or use of
force to pursue reunification? Sensitive and explosive issues, such as relations
between China and Taiwan, should be addressed within the existing diplomatic
framework, the essence of which is that all matters be resolved consensually and
peacefully.
Other key players in the world can help the Chinese leadership
understand that China’s future prosperity, stability, and dignity depend to a
significant degree on China’s continued political development toward a freer
society governed by a more representative political system. Such a society would
be less likely to see military force as useful, and more likely to seek
international influence through the attractiveness of the society it builds at home.
The world’s recent successes in managing great power relationships are
a credit to the flexibility of the state system and the vitality of the
conflict-averting “rules of the road” that I have referred to. Rising powers have
understood that their worthy hopes can be realized within a well-ordered system of
sovereign states. The United States and our allies and partners have an interest
in fostering an environment in which China comes progressively to share that
understanding.
Conclusion
This discussion of U.S. policy has been, I realize, a bit abstract.
Some of what we do in the Defense Department is like that, and some is more down to earth. I would like to conclude by mentioning the people in the Department who are not only down to earth, but the earth they are down to is in Afghanostan and Iraq.
The men and women of the U.S. armed forces serving in combat abroad are contributing bravely and brilliantly to achieving the national purposes I have been outlining. They are disrupting terrorist networks, helping set the conditions for the Afghans and Iraqis to create their own democratic institutions and helping
shape the global environment so that Americans can enjoy safety and civil liberties
and continue to serve their historical role in the world as supporters of freedom.
They make us proud and deserve our grateful recognition. We should all thank
them. And I thank you.
[Web Version:
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