Introduction by John Feffer,
How Things Have Changed by Tom Barry,
The People by Tom Barry and Jim Lobe

excerpted from the book

Power Trip

U.S. Unilateralism and Global Strategy After September 11

edited by John Feffer

Seven Stories Press, 2003, paper

Introduction
by John Feffer

p9
We Americans [have] been lazy, willfully ignorant, and self-involved ... If there was an outside world, we didn't want to know about it ...

p11
As for Afghanistan, it is in little better shape today than it was before the Taliban's fall, with hunger rampant, war lords riding high in the countryside, and most women still too fearful to emerge from their burkas. An unknown number of civilians-somewhere between five hundred and three thousand-managed to get in the way of our bombs and the bullets, winning us the lasting enmity of their survivors.

p16
In the wake of the terrible events of September 11, the hardliners in the Bush administration suddenly felt a wind at their backs in their efforts to implement globe-transforming policies. The more conventional track of coalitional politics veered off into a siding, and U.S. policy powered along in the hard-line direction.

... [the Bush team] pushed through huge budget increases for military spending and military supplies for allies old and new. The Bush team used the fight against terrorism as a justification for everything from cracking down on civil liberties and reorganizing intelligence-gathering operations under the new Homeland Security bureau to expanding presidential authority to negotiate free trade and threatening to withdraw U.S. peacekeepers if countries didn't grant them immunity from the International Criminal Court.

p18
By forsaking a multilateral approach to addressing Iraq's actual or potential weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration has managed to alienate key European allies, most Arab countries, large swaths of the developing world, and even North American neighbors Canada and Mexico. The big stick the U.S. deployed after September 11 with devastating consequences in Afghanistan and Iraq has stirred up a global hornet's nest.

A year and a half after September 11, the Bush administration has a clearly established foreign policy doctrine-summarized in a thirty-one-page position paper;5 embraced by a political party that has regained control of both houses of Congress; and implemented by U.S. soldiers, diplomats, and trade representatives throughout the world. The war on terrorism, like the war on Communism before it, serves as an organizing principle, combining with a zeal for military preeminence and a drive to secure more foreign oil to form a threefold path to global dominance. While the Bush administration did not conceal its preference for military solutions to the Gordian knots of international relations prior to September 11, the new military policy recognizes few limits, emphasizes rollback over containment, and breaks taboos on the role of preemptive strikes and the use of nuclear weapons. This new military doctrine fits tongue-and-groove with a rigid unilateralism that threatens to unravel the international system of institutions and legal precedents built up over fifty years.

p21
During the Cold War, the isolationist and internationalist tendencies in U.S. policy coalesced into a liberal-conservative consensus on countering Communism on the battlefield and in the marketplace. Although liberal internationalists managed to win approval for U.S. participation in a new global political and economic architecture (the UN, World Bank), the face-off with the Soviet Union dictated that multilateralism be subordinated to the larger anti-Communist struggle. Key institutions such as the Alliance for Progress, NATO, and the European Community were designed to contain Soviet influence. The national security state, the military-industrial complex, a succession of military interventions-these did not arise because one political party imposed its agenda on the country. Democrats and Republicans joined hands in this enterprise until U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War drove a wedge into this consensus.

After Jimmy Carter briefly flirted with a more moral foreign policy, the Reagan administration irrevocably altered the way the United States interacted with the world. The Reagan years represented a surge in unilateralism, as the United States flouted international law, undermined treaties, and consistently stood outside of consensus at the UN. Not content to contain the rival superpower and clearly opposed to détente, the Reagan team sought to roll back Communism at the very borders of the Soviet Union, through support of the mujahedin in Afghanistan and covert funding of the opposition in Poland. The military budget ballooned; interventions in the Third World continued directly or through proxies. Many of the hard-liners in the current Bush team cut their teeth in the Reagan years, as their preferences for unilateralism and militarism would indicate.

How Things Have Changed
by Tom Barry

p31
The threat of global governance, blue-helmeted peacekeepers, multilateralism, and international rules and treaties has always featured prominently in right-wing agendas. In the Reagan administration, this anti-multilateralism agenda came thundering out of the White House's bully pulpit. Deprived of anticommunism as the belief holding disparate right-wing forces together, the populist right in the mid-1990s found that attacks on the UN and all forms of global governance resonated with an economically and culturally more insecure America. Rejecting as liberal hogwash the "assertive multilateralism" of Madeleine Albright, the Republican Congress appealed to the individualism of Americans, making simultaneous cases against big government and for U.S. unilateralism. The team around George W. Bush, departing from the internationalism and moderate conservatism of the Bush Sr. administration, steadily chipped away at a target list of international treaties and conventions that constrained U.S. freedom of action, while at the same time ensuring that the officials appointed to UN agencies and commissions would do the U.S. bidding.

p32
Hardliners such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Dick Cheney hold a very traditional view of national security that leaves little or no room for inclusion of threats to "human security," let alone for consideration of proposals for new forms of global governance to address these nontraditional yet very real threats.

Ironically, since the end of the Cold War the influence of the Pentagon has increased while the State Department control over foreign policy has steadily diminished. In the l990s, foreign economic policy trumped traditional diplomacy, giving the imperatives of the Commerce and Treasury Departments a central place in U.S. international affairs. While the State Department and its Agency for International Development were being downsized, the power and responsibilities of the regional commands of the Pentagon deepened as training programs, joint military exercises, and U.S. military presence expanded around the globe-particularly in Africa, Latin America, and Eurasia. It was a decade framed by two post-Cold War wars, starting with the massive Persian Gulf deployment and ending with the bombing of Yugoslavia. In this new era, the U.S. military found new freedom to act without fear of Soviet reaction while at the same time largely free from anti-interventionist backlash at home.

... From this base, the national security militarists have seized control of the Bush administration's foreign and military policy. Strategic outlooks, doctrinal changes, vast increases in military/homeland defense budgets, and dismissive treatment of the traditionalists and soft-power advocates-all summarized in the administration's "National Security Strategy of the United States" released in September 2002- constitute the rise of a new warlordism in the U.S. government.

p35
Our leaders have invariably couched U.S. foreign and military initiatives in the rhetoric of political idealism. This practice of dressing U.S. international engagement in the values of freedom, democracy, and rights came to be known as "liberal internationalism." Bush's foreign policy explicitly rejects the imperatives of liberal internationalism, but it is nonetheless heavily value-laden. The new supremacy agenda taps America's deep moral roots and sense of messianic mission. Instead of liberal political values, the supremacists driving U.S. foreign policy are more comfortable with stark moral contrasts, linking America's foreign policy mission to the apocalyptic conflict between good and evil.

p37
America is suffering from a power complex that is distorting national priorities. So wrapped up in its conviction of supremacy and will to dominate, the U.S. government forges ahead with its new foreign policy directions while ignoring the mounting global outrage, blowback, and impact of its aggressive unilateralism.

The People
by Tom Barry and Jim Lobe

p39
When he first saw the excerpts leaked to the New York: Times in spring 1992, Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) was horrified and denounced the document as a prescription for "literally a Pax Americana." The leak, a draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) on U.S. grand strategy through the 1990s, was stunning in the clarity and ambition of its vision for a new U.S. foreign and military policy. Written in the aftermath of the Gulf War by two relatively obscure political appointees in the Pentagon's policy department of the Bush Sr. administration, the draft DPG called for U.S. military preeminence over Eurasia by preventing the rise of any potentially hostile power and a policy of preemption against states suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction. It foretold a world in which U.S. military intervention overseas would become "a constant feature" and failed to even mention the United Nations.

Although softened in its final form at the insistence of then National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of State James Baker, the draft DPG occupied a central place in the hearts and minds of its two authors, Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and their boss, then Pentagon chief Dick Cheney.

p40
In engineering the radical break in U.S. foreign policy, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Cheney relied on a handful of think tanks and front groups that have closely interlocking directorates and shared origins in the right-wing and neoconservative organizations of the 1970s. Organizations such as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), the Center for Security Policy (CSP), and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have supplied the administration with a steady stream of policy advice and also with the men- and they are virtually all men-to steer the ship of state on its radical new course. These men are by no means new recruits to the foreign policy elite. They cut their teeth on some of the most fateful foreign policy debates of the last thirty years. Their motto was "peace through strength," and they took great pride in their credentials as militant anticommunists and champions of U.S. military power.

p42

FOCUSING ON THE "NEW AMERICAN CENTURY"

In 1997, an influential group of neoconservatives, social conservatives, and representatives of what Eisenhower referred to as the military-industrial complex came together to form Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Conservatives had failed to "confidently advance a strategic vision for America's role in the world," the group lamented in its statement of principles. It continued, "We aim to change this. We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership." Noting what they called "the essential elements of the Reagan administration's success," namely "a strong military" ready to meet "present and future challenges," they proudly declared: "A Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the U.S. is to build on the success of this past century and ensure our security and greatness in the next." Among the twenty-five signers were Wolfowitz, Libby, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, and other right-wing figures who five years later would use the September 11 outrage to realize their long-held dreams of a new American empire.

Not a think tank like the Heritage Foundation or AEI with the capacity to develop detailed policy recommendations, PNAC has acted as a front group that issues timely statements, often in the form of open letters to the president. Its influence signals the degree to which neoconservatives have charted the main outlines and trajectory of the Bush foreign policy. Founded by Weekly Standard pundits William Kristol and Robert Kagan, PNAC is the latest incarnation of a series of predominantly neoconservative groups such as the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) and the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). In the 1970s, these groups played key roles in helping to marshal diverse right-wing constituencies around a common foreign and defense policy and organize highly sophisticated public and media campaigns in pursuit of their goals. Their main targets of the time were Jimmy Carter, détente, and arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, but they also used their zest for ideological combat, their political savvy, and their propaganda skills to prepare the ground for and later oversee the more radical policies pursued by the incoming Reagan administration, including Star Wars, the anticommunist crusades in Central America, southern Africa, and Afghanistan, and the creation of a "strategic alliance" with Israel. Largely sidelined under the elder Bush and under Clinton, these same forces-in many cases, the same individuals-who served under Reagan and then again under the younger Bush spent much of the 1990s trying to reconstitute a new coalition of the kind that dominated Reagan's first term.

Much as its forebears did twenty-five years ago, PNAC in the late 1990s successfully rallied key right-wing personalities-men from the Christian Right, including Gary Bauer and other social conservatives, among them William Bennett-behind their imperial vision of U.S. supremacy. This was no small achievement, for the Christian Right was far more interested in moral and cultural issues than in foreign policy during the 1980s and early 1990s. Moreover, much of that constituency had been attracted to right-wing gadfly Patrick Buchanan, who shared its "traditional values" but who also strongly opposed the Gulf War and has long deplored the more imperial, neoconservative influence in the Republican Party. Two other groups, the Center for Security Policy and Empower America, played a similar role with respect to forging a new coalition behind the goal of U.S. military and cultural supremacy.

Whatever the validity of U.S. military supremacy theory as a legitimate or effective defense posture, the ideology has immediate rewards for U.S. weapons manufacturers. This nexus of military strategists and the military industry is epitomized by the right-wing Center for Security Policy, with its close connections to both military contractors and the Pentagon. The Center's director, Frank Gaffney, one of the original signatories of the PNAC statement in 1997, rejoiced that his group's "peace through strength" principles have once again found a place in U.S. government. Like the Reagan years, when many of the center's current associates directed U.S. military policy, the present administration includes a large number of members of the Center's National Security Advisory Council. An early member of the Center's board, Dick Cheney, is now vice president, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a recipient of the Center's Keeper of the Flame award.

Since the 1970s, neoconservatives had been exploring the global-local links of the "culture war." In the view of the Christian Right, core American values were under attack by a liberal cultural elite that espoused secular humanism and ethical relativism. For neoconservatives, however, the culture war was an international one that threatened the entire Judeo-Christian culture. One of the earliest groups taking this position was the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which was established in 1976 "to clarify and reinforce the bond between Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public policy debate over domestic and foreign policy issues." The Ethics and Public Policy Center, where Elliott Abrams was an associate in the 1990s before he joined the Bush administration, explored the common moral ground (and common concerns) that Jewish and Catholic conservatives shared with the Christian Right. Long a theme in American politics, the idea of America's cultural supremacy and the need to defend it against mounting international attack had by the late 1990s become a powerful theme in the U.S. political debate. Neoconservative historian Samuel Huntington provided theoretical cover for this paranoid sense of cultural supremacy in his influential The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

Former "drug czar" and education secretary William J. Bennett, another signatory of the PNAC 1997 statement, has had the most success in making the local-global links in the culture war. Together with Jack Kemp, Bennett in 1999 founded Empower America, a right-wing policy group that argues for domestic and foreign policies informed by conservative moral values. Since September 11, Bennett's Empower America, together with subsidiary groups, has propagated the Bush administration's own message of a moral and military crusade against evil. As part of its campaign to highlight the moral character of Bush's foreign policy, Empower America formed a new group called Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT). In a full page ad in the New York Times, AVOT chairman Bennett warned: "The threats we face are both external and internal." Within the United States are "those who are attempting to use this opportunity [9/11] to promulgate their agenda of 'blame America first."' In its pronouncement, AVOT identified U.S. public opinion as the key battleground in the war against America's external and internal threats. "Our goal," declared AVOT, "is to address the present threats so as to eradicate future terrorism and defeat ideologies that support it." Also in the forefront of focusing attention on internal threats has been Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice president and an associate at the American Enterprise Institute, who played a lead role in founding the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), which singled out professors deemed not sufficiently patriotic.

Under the tutelage of neoconservatives like Elliott Abrams and under the guiding hand of William Bennett, social conservatives, particularly those associated with the Christian Right, have become new internationalists. Looking beyond the culture wars at home, they found new reasons for a rightist internationalism abroad. Building on the Biblical foundations for an apocalyptic confrontation in the Middle East, the Christian Right has fully supported the neoconservative agenda on U.S.-Israel relations. In their literature and Internet presence, socially conservative groups such as Empower America and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy place special emphasis on the righteousness of the military campaign against the Palestinians by the Likud Party of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Other galvanizing issues for social conservatives are the persecution of Christians abroad, especially in Islamic countries and China, sex trafficking, and "yellow peril" threat of Communist China.

For critics, the administration's willingness to hire a handful of Reagan-era officials tainted by their illegal dealings with the Nicaraguan contras amply illustrated its moral hypocrisy, undermining any valid claim to moral clarity. These included such figures as Otto Reich, former chief of Reagan's Office of Public Diplomacy, who was appointed the State Department's chief Latin America officer despite findings that he had lied to Congress and the American public.

Other rogue officials from the Reagan administration's illegal programs to aid the contras include Elliott Abrams, John Poindexter, and John Negroponte. The Bush administration, whose moral compass is officially declared to have an undeviating good-evil orientation, instead responds to a Machiavellian logic in which even the means-no matter if they violate international law and ignore human rights-justify the ends sought by an America-centric foreign policy.

... As during the Reagan administration, the right-wing think tanks have played a key role in shaping the new policy framework. Especially important has been the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, whose most prominent member of the Bush administration is Richard Perle, the chair of Rumsfeld's Defense Planning Board. Perle, a supporter of PNAC, helped establish the Center for Security Policy and the increasingly influential Jewish Institute for National Security (JINSA). Over the years, AEI has been in the forefront of calling for preemptive military attacks against rogue states and has denounced as "appeasement" all efforts by Washington and its European allies to "engage" North Korea, Iran, or Iraq. The Bush administration has embraced virtually all of the policy positions that the AEI has promoted on the Middle East. Coursing through AEI policy analysis-and now through the Bush administration-is a profound belief in the inherent goodness and redemptive mission of the United States, criticism of the moral cowardice of "liberals" and "European elites," an imperative to support Israel against the "implacable hatred" of Muslims, and a conviction in the primacy of military power in an essentially Hobbesian world. Although not yet part of the official rhetoric, AEI's belief that a conflict with China is inevitable is also one held by the hawks in the administration.

On the editorial pages of the Weekly Standard (published by PNAC cofounder William Kristol), the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Commentary Magazine, and the Washington Times, as well as in the nationally syndicated columns by William Safire, Michael Kelly, and Charles Krauthammer, the State Department (particularly its Near East bureau) came under steady attack. But even within the State Department, the new foreign policy radicals had set up camp. Over Powell's objections, Bush appointed John Bolton, an ultra-unilateralist ideologue and former vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.

For the most part, the political right led by the neoconservatives has focused on the need for America to assert its military and diplomatic power-a focus underscored by the war on terrorism. In marked contrast to the Clinton years, the neoconservative strategists together with the hawks have sidelined the public debate about globalization. Instead of fretting over social and environmental standards in the global economy, the economic focus is on securing U.S. national interests, particularly energy resources, and thereby ensuring continued U.S. economic supremacy. A continued weakening of the U.S. economy and a rising concern of U.S. military overreach is contributing to some fracturing of the right.

This small group of right-wing strategists, ideologues, and operatives in right-wing think tanks, advocacy groups, and the news media has captured U.S. foreign and military policy. The neoconservatives and hawks set the Bush administration's foreign policy agenda-an agenda of supremacy that moderate conservatives and realists came to share, for the most part, although differences remained over how this supremacy should be maintained. At issue is not so much that this shift in foreign policy has been engineered by a narrow elite-given that foreign policy has traditionally been the province of conservative and liberal elites-but rather the implications of this sharp turn to the right.

Power Trip

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