Masters of Illusion American Leadership in the Media Age Phần 7 pptx

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Strategic Independence: An Ounce of Prevention 313

The secret of the American missile defense shield proposal is that it’s aimed

at China and Russia and that it’s part of a major shift in overall U.S. defense

policy. Reagan introduced the concept this way, but each president since has

found it expedient to mislead the public about the shield, insisting that it is

aimed at terrorist states and that it is a minor part of existing U.S. strategy.

Whatever the reasons for the deception, the media and the public have been

smart enough to recognize that the implications of the shield go far beyond

terrorism, and that if the shield is to be justified, it must be on another basis.

Honesty about this has become crucial because the clumsy deception is now

so confusing the international security environment that America’s attempt

to build the shield and change it’s defense strategy may cause us to stumble

into a serious war. The secret is becoming dangerous in itself.

Nuclear arms control and national missile defense are the joint response to

the emerging dangers of nuclear war. But we must recognize that the nuclear

non-proliferation effort is in tatters. According to the Director General of

the International Atomic Energy Agency, nearly forty countries are now

familiar enough with nuclear technology to make bombs (although only

about nine are thought to have done so), and the non-proliferation treaty

itself is fundamentally flawed in its provisions because it permits countries

to enrich uranium to make reactor fuel and to reprocess fuel rods once

they’ve been used – both techniques being not essential for an electric power

program, but both essential to bomb making.5

We have been relying on Mutual Assured Destruction to deter nuclear

war. But this is a strategy best suited to a bipolar confrontation – like the

Cold War – and increasingly risky in today’s different environment. Nuclear

proliferation diminishes the credibility of MAD because we cannot be sure

whom to counter-attack, and credibility is the essence of MAD – otherwise

a potential aggressor is not deterred. That Russia continues to modernize its

nuclear striking forces despite national hardship demonstrates that it has no

intention of relying instead on conventional weapons and the abolition of

weapons of mass destruction. China makes no bones about its commitment

to becoming a nuclear superpower and has devised a market communist eco￾nomic system that can support its ambitions. With even less of a foundation

than Russia’s or China’s, other nations are building nuclear weapons. There

are certain to be more nuclear weapons in more unstable hands tomorrow

than today and our past reliance on MAD is no longer credible in deterring

their employment.

In the summer of 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld justi￾fied the building of an American national missile defense shield as follows:

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314 The American Response

“Imagine what would happen if a rogue state were to demonstrate the

capability to strike U.S. or European populations with ...weapons of mass

destruction. A policy of intentional vulnerability ... could give this state the

power to hold us hostage.”6

The Bush administration here followed the same path of political least

resistance that its predecessor did, tying a national missile defense shield

toarogue-state justification. In doing so it risked the same appearance of

inconsistency that bedeviled the Clinton approach. For a national defense

shield cannot be justified on rogue-state grounds.

Why, then, is it done? Clinton may have had adopted this justification

knowing that it was inadequate, and in the ill-disguised hope that the shield

would be discredited and abandoned.

This was not Bush’s motivation, however. Probably the administration

feared that it could not win enough liberal support for the shield if China and

Russia were revealed as the targets of the shield, and hoped that conservatives

would see the intended threat while liberals could be won over by the rogue

state argument.

But the weakness of the justification for the shield was quickly perceived.

For example, commentators abroad objected to the junking of the Anti￾Ballistics Missile Treaty (ABM) that necessarily accompanied the plan to

build an antiballistics missile shield. “The ABM Treaty ... has been the set￾tled policy of the US for nearly 30 years...” wrote an Australian commenta￾tor, adding, “One US commentator likens the US to a ‘blind Samson, tearing

down the very arms-control temple it built.”7 The argument was well made –

why should a treaty with Russia, a cornerstone of MAD, be junked just to

build a defense against a possible attack by a few missiles from rogue states in

the Crescent of Fire? Where was the evidence of capability by North Korea,

Iraq, or Iran to make such an attack on the United States or Europe? There

was little or none. And if there was so little threat, why junk MAD, a policy

designed to prevent a really big threat – that of a nuclear exchange between

Russia and America?

The rogue state argument was disingenuous, hinted the press. For

example, an editorial in The Economist, appears to accept the rogue state

argument, speaking of “rogue rockets... ,” but then adds that “America’s

hopes... must rest on preferring honest arguments... over specious ones.”

The editorialist suspects that the rogue state argument is specious, and says

so.8 The story then became more bizarre. The Bush administration, stung

by criticisms of its justification of NMD as a response to rogue states, sought

to shore up support for NMD by the strangest of political tactics. It seems

to have gotten turned around on its basic strategy. According to a report in

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Strategic Independence: An Ounce of Prevention 315

The New York Times, “The Bush administration, seeking to overcome Chi￾nese opposition to its missile defense program, intends to tell leaders in

Beijing that it has no objections to the country’s plans to build up its small

fleet of nuclear missiles, according to senior administration officials.”9

One senior official said that in the future, the United States and China

might also discuss resuming underground nuclear tests if they are needed

to assure the safety and reliability of their arsenals. Such a move, however,

might allow China to improve its nuclear warheads and lead to the end

of a worldwide moratorium on nuclear testing. Both messages appear to

mark a significant change in American policy. For years the United States

has discouraged China and all other nations from increasing the size or

quality of their nuclear arsenals, and from nuclear tests of any kind. The

purpose of the new approach, some administration officials say, is to con￾vince China that the administration’s plans for a missile shield are not aimed

at undercutting China’s arsenal, but rather at countering threats from so￾called rogue states.” Soon thereafter, still trying to salvage its justification of

NMD as aimed at rogue states, American officials told reporters “that once

China has more missiles in its arsenal, it should be less concerned about

Mr. Bush’s missile defense system – because China would have a sufficient

number of missiles to overwhelm any American missile defense now being

contemplated.”10

This is the topsy-turvy world of political diplomacy. The American gov￾ernment, seeking to avoid the increasing Chinese buildup of nuclear missile

capability, sets out to dissuade the Chinese from this course by building a

national missile defense. But out government fears it will not gather enough

political support and so it disguises the intent of NMD as being directed at

rogue states.

When commentators challenge this fairly obvious deception, the Ameri￾can government refuses to admit its subterfuge, but instead tries to shore it

up by, of all things, encouraging the Chinese to build their nuclear missile

arsenal better and faster in order that our missile shield would not be a

deterrent to them! Somehow, from trying to deter the Chinese from build￾ing more missiles aimed at us, our government found itself doing exactly

the opposite.

Here, in a witches’ brew, two factors combined to put our government in

a backwards posture – first, the political necessity of defending a falsehood

tempted our political leaders to abandon our own real purposes; and second,

the logic of MAD – to strengthen your enemies to parity of weaponry with

you – reasserted itself in the ensuring confusion about the real aims of our

NMD policy.

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316 The American Response

This was not the first time that politically motivated deception about

strategic purposes tripped up our government; and it was not to be the last,

as we saw in our discussion of the confusion of objectives in the aftermath

of the Second Gulf War. But stumbling into urging China to increase more

rapidly its ability to attack America with nuclear missiles must be a high

point of confusion into which deception has led our government.

The vibrant and much-needed debate – over national missile defense

and its advisability as part of a strategy to displace MAD in dealing with

the changing nuclear arms balance – that was occurring in the summer of

2001 in the press, in the halls of Congress and in the recesses of the defense

agencies of Washington was ended suddenly on September 11, 2001, and

has not been resumed. Thus, terrorist attacks derailed for years the most

important public discussion being conducted in the world.

Meanwhile, the need for a missile defense shield is rapidly growing. With￾out a missile defense shield the United States has no effective means of

persuading China to direct its rising aspirations into peaceful channels.

Without a shield, we have only MAD – an increasingly flawed policy ill￾suited to changing conditions in the world and therefore likely to result in

an unwanted war.

THE BUSH DOCTRINE

In September 2002, the White House issued a document entitled “ The

National Security Strategy of the United States.”11 It expressed in simple and

direct language what has come to be called the Bush Doctrine – preemption

and military supremacy:

“To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries the United

States will, if necessary, act pre-emptively...
“Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from

pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power

of the United States.”12

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has elaborated on the document

several times, saying at the time of its issuance, “if it comes to allowing

another adversary to reach military parity with the United States in the way

that the Soviet Union did, no, the United States does not intend to allow

that to happen.”

But military supremacy and preemptive war are not the only very signifi￾cant elements of this document. In fact, it is not a national security strategy

at all, but rather an entire statement of American foreign policy.

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Strategic Independence: An Ounce of Prevention 317

For example, its first section is not titled “ The National Security Strategy

of the United States,” as a reader would expect from the title of the document,

but rather, “Overview of America’s International Strategy. The second and

third sections discuss defense policy, but the following sections go much

further. Section VI is titled “Ignite a New Era of Global Economic Growth

through Free Markets and Free Trade.” Section VII is titled “Expand the

Circle of Development by Opening Societies and Building the Infrastructure

of Democracy.”

Here we have the full Bush Doctrine, the full foreign policy of America:

to defend our country via military superiority and preemptive war, when

necessary, and

to rebuild the world, or as much of it as we can, in our own image – as a

free enterprise democracy.

Defense Policy Should Not Be Tied to an Overreaching Foreign Policy

In a very significant way, the Bush Doctrine is a mistaken policy. It’s a danger￾ous overreach, as we demonstrate in later chapters. America has the opportu￾nity to adopt Strategic Independence – a coherent, forward-looking, sensible

defense policy stressing military strength and independence of action. But it

is important is that we not let a poorly developed, inconsistent and utopian

foreign policy interfere. We recognize that this is the opposite of what most

specialists and analysts argue should be the case. The position they advocate

has a distinguished lineage, since the Renaissance, and is that the geopolitical

strategy of the nation should direct its defense strategy – that war should

be an instrument of foreign policy. In our view, in the instance of America

today, this is clearly wrong.13 When a country has the sort of foreign policy

our leaders ordinarily articulate – full of high-sounding phrases and imprac￾tical objectives drawn from our public culture, then foreign policy cannot

be a secure guide to anything. But at least we can defend ourselves effec￾tively, so long as we don’t let the confusions of our foreign policy disrupt

our thinking about defense.

A better response than the administration’s would be to focus on our

defense alone, leaving broader goals to persuasion and support, rather than

to force and direction – we call this approach Strategic Independence, a

return to a policy followed successfully for two decades by our country

between the end of World War II and the development by the Soviet Union of

a full-range nuclear missile capability in the mid-1960s. A special issue arises

with respect to the administration’s call for preemptive war; something that