Nation
March 4, 2002
Reflections On
'Containment'
By Bruce Cumings
When
Bush the Younger adds a new phrase to the English language, questions assault
the mind: Did he mean to say it? Does he understand what he said? Is an allusion
intended, or just plucked from the flotsam and jetsam floating around in his
head? By the time the United States finally got off its duff and entered World
War II, Hitler had unified his control of continental Europe and Tojo's forces
had command of most of East and Southeast Asia. Thus the Axis had transformed
the global balance of power in both East and West. Today the Bush
Administration, fresh from chasing callow Taliban youths from power, restoring
Afghanistan's politics to the warlord era circa 1995 and failing to find Osama
bin Laden or root out Al Qaeda's terror network (except in Afghanistan, maybe),
leaps forward with new demons: an axis of evil running from Pyongyang to Baghdad
to Teheran.
Some axis: Iraq and Iran hate each other, the legacy of
their war in the 1980s (recall the towering cynicism of Henry Kissinger, who
thought the best outcome would be for them both to lose--and they did, with
appalling slaughter on both sides). North Korea has barely any relationship with
Iraq. It has sold missile and other military technology to Iran, but a piddling
amount compared with what Washington sold to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, or
sells to South Korea today. In short, the wheels of this axis are falling off in
every direction. North Korea has the added attraction that its jerry-built
missiles are the primary public targets of America's National Missile Defense.
Today South Korea's military budget is greater than the North's gross national
product, but the North must still play the Great Satan in the Bush Doctrine,
enunciated with consummate diplomatic artfulness just in advance of the
President's trip to Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing. Even the tepid New York Times
editors denounced this doctrine of blunt threats and implied pre-emptive
military action as a radical departure toward the promiscuous brandishing of
American might.
Remember how Black September led just about everyone to
imagine that the world would never be the same? Everything had changed, a
caesura had opened in world history. For a while after September 11 an
administration that had come in with a sweeping and assertive unilateralism
seemed to have learned just how many friends it had in the world, as a
collegial, multilateral diplomacy quickly unfolded. NATO resolved that the
attacks on the United States were also attacks against NATO itself. Prime
Minister Tony Blair gave new vigor to the special relationship between London
and Washington. Various countries pledged soldiers, bases and funds to the war
in Afghanistan. It looked like Russia and China had joined the United States and
its allies in the common task of a global struggle against terrorism, and that a
rare unity had cut across the old divisions of world politics.
But then
the war in Afghanistan went quickly to its denouement, with little allied
involvement--by and large the Pentagon seemed not to want it--and the inherent
unilateralism of the Bush Administration reasserted itself. If, in the early
going, Blair acted like a President and Bush like a prime minister, Blair's
ringing condemnations of the terrorists did not bring him closer to the inner
circle of Bush's decision-making. Likewise, there was little consultation with
European allies on the future of Afghanistan, except that Washington wants them
to shoulder the burden of peacekeeping and nation-building in that benighted
country. In December the United States announced its withdrawal from the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, over Russia's opposition (and later, pained
acquiescence), thus to get on with building its pet missile defense, bringing
great domestic pressures on Russian leader Vladimir Putin and a dire threat to
China's modest nuclear deterrent (which missile defense would neutralize). Then
Chinese leader Jiang Zemin found listening bugs crawling all over his new Boeing
767, but chose to turn the other cheek and welcome Bush's visit.
Jiang
and Bush will have plenty to talk about at the Beijing summit: America's new
alliance with China's traditional ally Pakistan, the near-war in December on
China's southern border between India and Pakistan (some reports had China
moving as many as fifteen new divisions of troops to the border area, while
others applauded China's calming role in defusing the crisis), and new American
bases ringing its southwestern flanks, thus negating joint Russian-Chinese
attempts to cooperate in the security of Central Asia. This will do nothing to
quiet China's fears of American encirclement, but China also has its own
problems with terrorism in the region, and reportedly shared important
intelligence with Washington during the Afghan war. It clearly hopes to be
rewarded with a new start in relations with Washington, but don't bet on it.
China is the biggest bogyman on the Bush Administration's block; it's just too
important as a vast Rorschach inkblot, absorbing even the wildest Republican
charges. (Remember how Wen Ho Lee supposedly stole our entire nuclear
arsenal?)
Like China, old allies and previous enemies have shown
remarkable forbearance since Bush came into office, which has done exactly
nothing to alter Donald Rumsfeld's belief that American superiority in high-tech
weaponry, combined with the unipolar world that resulted from the collapse of
the USSR, enable the United States to have its cake and eat it, too--to impose
its will where it wants, when it wants, regardless of allied or world opinion.
Rumsfeld's success in boosting the military budget by more than 40 percent since
Clinton's final year in office is testimony to his influence, and to the
emptiness of his vaunted revolution in military affairs. The Pentagon's yawning
maw gobbles up everything it wants, like the V-22 Osprey and the F-22 fighter
jet, but defense reform is dead (in the words of one expert). Secretary of State
Colin Powell is an exception in his continued pursuit of diplomacy, but his
plodding and lackluster attempt to bring new momentum to the Middle East peace
process was an abject failure, and Rumsfeld has been much more prominent in
defending the Bush foreign policy to the public.
Evildoer Kim Jong Il's
long-range missile is Rumsfeld's poster child for missile defense, but it needs
a shot of Don's Viagra. It has insufficient lift capacity to carry a nuclear
warhead because the North lacks the technology either to lighten missile
throw-weight (by using aluminum alloys) or to manufacture a sufficiently small
warhead (which would require high-speed X-ray cameras that it doesn't have).
Even if lighter chemical or biological warheads were installed, it is unclear
that its first stage has the thrust to lift that payload fast enough and far
enough to reach any part of the United States. Nor does North Korea appear to
have heat-resistant technologies that would keep the warhead from burning up
upon re-entry into the atmosphere--it would turn into a charcoal briquette,
which happens to be what Colin Powell wants to turn North Korea into should it
launch a missile at the United States [see Cumings, "The Emperor's Old Clothes,"
February 19, 2001].
Kim's missiles are commodities for sale, and Bill
Clinton nearly succeeded in buying them out before leaving office. In a fateful
month--November 2000--everything was poised for a Clinton visit to Pyongyang:
The North had already agreed to forgo construction, deployment and international
sales of all missiles with a range of more than 300 miles. If Clinton did Kim
Jong Il the favor of a presidential visit, negotiators believed, Kim would also
agree to enter the Missile Technology Control Regime, which would limit North
Korean missiles to an upper range of 180 miles. In return, Washington would have
provided $1 billion in food aid, presumably for several years. Clinton wanted to
go to Pyongyang, and his negotiators had their bags packed for weeks in
November--but as Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, later put
it, it wasn't a good idea for the President to leave the country when they
didn't know whether there would be a major constitutional crisis. After five
Supreme Court votes gave the election to Bush, it was too late. Now more than a
year has passed, and this remarkable progress was left to twist slowly in the
wind by Bush's extraordinary diplomacy-by-dereliction, his bellicose threats and
his callous disregard for South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, winner of the
2000 Nobel Peace Prize. This past January Lockheed Martin sold 111 missiles of
186-mile range to South Korea, a $307 million deal that will only stoke the arms
race in the region.
Afghanistan: Victory for Smart Weapons, or for
Containment?
Rumsfeld and the Pentagon believe that a novel combination
of high-tech or smart weapons and mobile special forces combined to energize
local allies (the Northern Alliance) and quickly dispatch a Taliban army that
nearly all observers had thought to be formidable and resilient. But the primary
long-term effect of the war in Afghanistan is likely to be a permanent US
commitment to stabilize the most unstable region in the world: the belt of
populous and mostly Muslim countries stretching westward from Indonesia all the
way to Algeria, and northward to Central Asia, into the former Soviet republics
and the Muslim populations of China's western reaches.
Clearly Taliban
and Al Qaeda military prowess was vastly exaggerated; American special forces
with every high-tech accoutrement confronted threadbare teenagers challenged by
a flat tire on their Toyotas, and even Al Qaeda's fight-to-the-death bravado
often gave way to a pragmatic decision to live (and fight?) another day. But the
mainstream media's verdict on the great success of this war will only bolster
claims of an insurmountable American advantage in the effective use of military
force--the world's policeman as Robocop. I'll put my money on a different
metaphor: the Pentagon making its own Procrustean bed.
Last month the
Pentagon announced a new commitment to lay down a long-term footprint in Central
Asia, as reporters put it: an air base near Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan,
that would hold up to 3,000 troops; massive upgrading of existing military bases
and facilities in Uzbekistan (like the former Soviet base at Khanabad) and
Pakistan (where several bases now house US forces, with next to no media access
or scrutiny); creation and expansion of remnant military bases in Afghanistan;
and the replacement of Marine expeditionary forces sent into Afghanistan during
the war with Army regulars settling in for the long haul (Army units tend to
establish more permanent bases, reporters said, with considerable
understatement). The spokesman for the US Central Command told reporters that in
the future the United States "will find great value in continuing to build
airfields in locations on the perimeter of Afghanistan" that will be able to
carry out "a variety of functions, like combat operations, medical evacuation
and delivery of humanitarian assistance."
Most analysts will see in this
permanent footprint a desire to enter a strategic area long ceded to Russia or
China, or to siphon off a large American share of the new oil wealth coming on
stream in Central Asia. No doubt this is part of it, but a different picture
emerges when we direct attention to the politically shaped containment
compromises that have characterized America's wars since 1941. World War II was
the clearest kind of military victory, but it still didn't bring the troops
home. They remain on the territory of their defeated enemies, Japan and Germany,
and exercise a lingering constraint on their autonomy. However many
justifications come and go for that remarkable and unprecedented situation (in
that the leading global power stations its forces on the territory of the
second- and third-largest economies), the fact remains that it has persisted for
fifty-seven years and shows no signs of ending.
American combat troops
first landed in Korea not in 1950, but on a pristine September day five years
earlier. On another beautiful September day in 2001, the eleventh day, 37,000 of
them were still in South Korea. Korea is the best example in modern history of
how easy it is to get into a war, and how hard it is to get out. Vietnam would
have been the same--and indeed was essentially the same from the mid-1950s, when
Washington committed its prestige to the Saigon government, to the mid-1970s,
when the war concluded with a US defeat because the United States could sustain
neither a stable Saigon regime nor a divided Vietnam. If it could have done so
we would still be there, stuck in the aspic of another Korea. The Gulf War came
to an end when Bush the Elder and his advisers, pre-eminently Brent Scowcroft,
kicked on the brakes well short of Baghdad and thus spawned the newest
containment system, leaving upwards of 5,000 US troops in Saudi Arabia a decade
later and several new military bases there and elsewhere in the Middle
East.
Bush is sending some 600 troops to help combat Islamic guerrillas
in the Philippines, exactly a century after the United States created its colony
there by fighting a dirty and bloody three-year war against guerrillas. American
advisers will also work with the Indonesian military (which ruled the country
for thirty years until Suharto was overthrown in 1998) in antiterrorism
operations, which could easily embroil the United States in trying to maintain
the precarious integrity of that far-flung island nation. The only places Bush
wants to leave are Kosovo and Bosnia, because he and his aides derogate
peacekeeping as using our troops for social work. Otherwise it is (containment)
business as usual.
An administration that began with talk about bringing
troops home from Clinton's ill-advised adventures now asks taxpayers to
underwrite "an aleatory expedition in the management of the world's affairs," in
the prescient words of historian Charles Beard's original critique of
containment. Vital interests are proclaimed where none existed before, temporary
expedients become institutional commitments and a thick web of military and
bureaucratic interests comes to dominate strategy. Then the Pentagon bean
counters take over, with every new appropriations season in Congress an occasion
for defending this or that outpost (new or old, vital or marginal), and American
power is mired in works of its own doing.
Among the services, the US Army
finds its permanent mission in garrisoning various elaborately developed bases
around the world; there officers confront real enemies (as in Korea) or command
important posts (as in Japan or Germany), and thus gain experience essential to
promotion. The massive US encampment in and near Yongsan in Seoul (a base first
built by the Japanese in 1894) has for decades offered a virtual country-club
environment for Army folks (golf course, swimming pools, movie theaters,
suburban-style homes for the officers). In December 2000 I visited Panmunjom
once again, this time courtesy of the US Army. Our hosts gave us the Army's
construction of the history of the Korean War (a version that could not have
changed since 1953) and a menu of rib-eye steak and french fries of similar
vintage, offered in a cafe that had a country music poster on the wall
advertising Hank Williams's 1955 tour of Atlanta. The Marines join with the Army
in loving Okinawa, the only place in the world where the Marines permanently
station a large expeditionary force. And in both places, established
institutional practice assures a steady supply of thousands of poor young women
to sate the sexual appetites of the troops, as a new book by Northwestern
University scholar Ji-Yeon Yuh demonstrates.
If containment remains the
standard operating procedure for American strategy and Pentagon largesse, George
Kennan would barely recognize his doctrine today. He first laid it out in 1947
as a limited and temporary means of stanching the expansion of the Soviet bloc.
But that was also the year when the United States finally inherited the mantle
of Britain's global leadership. Subsequently the United States became the power
of last resort for just about everything, particularly for the maintenance and
good functioning of the world economy. It remains so today. Yet this hegemonic
role, which statesmen like Henry Stimson and Dean Acheson understood well, was
masked from the American people by a march outward characterized as defensive
and unwanted--containment--and that strategic cover lasted until the cold war
ended and the USSR collapsed.
Time and again the Communist threat was
invoked to get the American people to support an unprecedented role for their
country in the world, but at least since the Gulf War (more likely since
Vietnam), the justifications have worn thin. September 11 has temporarily masked
sharp differences between the American people, who in public opinion polls can
barely muster a coherent justification for why we retain such large
expeditionary forces abroad, and successive administrations in Washington that
invent new perils and enemies from year to year: Saddam was another Hitler,
North Korea is the CIA's favorite rogue state and in 2001 China was to be our
new enemy--until Osama bin Laden came along.
That is, Osama came along
and kept on going, and where he landed nobody knows: a stark symbol of the
catastrophic intelligence failure produced by our $30-billion-a-year
intelligence community, before and after September 11. Soon we learned that the
CIA harbors not a single employee fluent in Pashto, according to Robert Baer (a
former CIA station chief in Tajikistan), while the National Security Agency has
a grand total of one--and so, in another brilliant maneuver, Pashto intelligence
intercepts were sent for translation to the Pakistani intelligence service, an
agency known to be riddled with Taliban and Al Qaeda supporters. Veteran CIA
watcher Thomas Powers finds a general decline in CIA morale, a structural
failure to crawl out of the well-worn but now obsolescent tracks of cold war
intelligence, a risk-averse bureaucratic culture of featherbedding and
back-scratching, which fears that anyone who really knows a country or region
will fall victim to the sin of "going native" or "falling in love." Better to
let someone who has never visited the region be the CIA's deputy chief for what
it still calls the Near East. Better to let North Korea be handled for two
decades by a CIA officer who doesn't know the first word of Korean. The only
intelligence failure comparable to this one was Pearl Harbor, which led to the
sacking of those responsible and a major Congressional investigation. So far,
the response to September 11 has been to boost the intelligence
budget.
For the containment system and the clueless intelligence groups
to conquer a new Central Asian front will be easy in the short run; in the
aftermath of such horrific attacks the American people have supported whatever
measures the Bush team desires, at home or abroad. In the longer run, however, a
failure to roll up bin Laden's terror network, to replace the Taliban with a
broad-based and self-sustaining Afghan government, and an inability to prevent
US forces from becoming the policemen of Central Asia (and much of the Middle
East), will tend to jeopardize the country's other wide-ranging security
commitments.
The Garrison State
For more than a decade since
the USSR collapsed, Americans have watched the Pentagon and its many garrisons
abroad continue to soak up their tax dollars, spending more than all our
conceivable enemies combined; here is a perpetual-motion machine of ravenous
appetite. Any administration would have responded forcefully to the tragic
attacks on September 11, but Bush and his allies have vastly expanded the
Pentagon budget, added another zone of containment (Central Asia), put yet more
billions into Homeland Defense. They have shown a callous disregard for civil
liberties, the rights of the accused and the views of our traditional allies.
The news media and Hollywood fawn on the military and take jingoism to an
embarrassing extreme (the worst failing of Steven Spielberg's sidekick Stephen
Ambrose is not his plagiarism but his patriotic puffery). Major outlets like Fox
News cater exclusively to an imagined audience from the red states of the 2000
election (or the 70 percent of the armed forces who voted for Bush).
In a
classic article in 1941, Harold Lasswell defined the garrison state as one in
which "the specialists on violence are the most powerful group in society." We
are well advanced on that path today, yet this is hardly a country with a strong
military tradition; you can count on the fingers of one hand the decades since
1789 when the military has been a powerful and respected factor in national
life. Nor is the military the basic source of US influence in the world. There
is a stronger countervailing tendency, hard to define but deeply influential in
our history. The first thought that struck me after witnessing (on television)
thousands of casualties resulting from an attack on the mainland, for the first
time since 1812, was that over the long haul the American people may exercise
their longstanding tendency to withdraw from a world deemed recalcitrant to
their ministering and present Washington with a much different and eminently
more difficult dilemma than the here-today, gone-tomorrow axis of evil: how to
rally the citizens for a long twilight struggle to maintain an ill-understood
American hegemony in a vastly changed world.
Bruce Cumings, who
teaches at the University of Chicago, is working on a book titled The American
Ascendancy. The paperback edition of his Parallax Visions: Making Sense of
American-East Asian Relations will be published by Duke later this year
(2001).
BA Hons. Political Science & International
Relations
Universidade Nova de Lisboa