As if to compensate for the modesty of his domestic agenda, President
Bush has ambitious plans to remake U.S. foreign policy. Exhibit A is his
new doctrine of pre-emption, which asserts a unilateral American right
to attack countries we think may threaten us. It's big, bold, and dangerously
wrong.
The administration rightly argues that America needs new strategies for
dealing with a new web of interlacing threats: terrorism, ethnic and communal
violence, and the potential spread of nuclear weapons to outlaw regimes
like those in Iraq and North Korea. There's also no doubt that the United
States has every right to attack al Qaeda and other stateless terrorist
networks before they strike us.
Attacking sovereign nations, however, is a more complicated matter. According
to the White House's new strategy document, pre-emption is necessary because
the United States can no longer rely on deterrence -- the threat of
a massive retaliatory strike -- to defend itself. What worked against
the "risk-averse" Soviet Union, says the Bush administration,
won't work against "leaders of rogue states more willing to take
risks, gambling with the lives of their people, and the wealth of their
nations."
But is this sweeping claim true? For the Taliban, maybe, but they were
a special case. Even the charter members of the "axis of evil" -- Saddam
Hussein, Kim Jong Il, and Iran's ruling mullahs -- have shown no inclination
to commit regime suicide by directly attacking America. Unlike terror
groups, rogue states have return addresses and can't evade the logic of
deterrence.
Might they be more aggressive if they acquired nuclear weapons? Saddam
has said his one regret in attacking Kuwait is that he didn't wait until
he had the Bomb, presumably because he believes it would have deterred
the United States from launching the 1991 Gulf War. And might unfriendly
regimes secretly aid and encourage terrorists, even giving them nuclear,
biological, or chemical weapons to use against us? These fears are certainly
plausible, but the United States can't go around knocking off regimes
on the basis of worst-case scenarios and speculative dangers. The answer
to the vexing problem of rogue states shouldn't be to make America a rogue
superpower.
This doesn't mean that pre-emptive strikes are always, like Pearl Harbor,
dastardly and infamous. In 1967, Israel wisely decided not to wait for
its Arab neighbors to strike the first blow as they mobilized for an attack
on the Jewish state. In fact, it's a settled principle of international
law that nations can act in self-defense when they are in imminent danger
of being attacked.
But what if we aren't sure? The Bush doctrine would substitute a new
standard -- the gravity of the potential threat to the United States -- for
actual evidence that an attack is imminent. "The greater the threat,
the greater is the risk of inaction -- and the more compelling the case
for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty
remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack," it says.
Since America has always had, and sometimes exercised, the option of
striking pre-emptively (even when the "threat" seemed pretty
remote -- think Grenada and Panama), it's not clear what purpose is
served by declaring it the new organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy.
Such a shift carries three clear dangers:
First, it would be profoundly destabilizing, because other countries
would surely follow America's lead. In India's eyes, neighboring Pakistan
poses a graver and more immediate threat than Iraq does to us. And suppose
China chooses to interpret some future U.S. arms sale to Taiwan as an
"imminent threat" to its security? It's naive to think other
countries will cede America an exclusive right to pre-empt.
Second, the threat of pre-emption seems more likely to rattle its presumed
targets than to make them more tractable. North Korea's isolated and paranoid
regime, for example, has cited Bush's inflammatory "axis of evil"
rhetoric in refusing to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
Third, the White House strategy reinforces growing fears around the world
of unbridled American power. Indeed, its unspoken premise seems to be
that America has now grown so disproportionately powerful that it no longer
needs to cooperate with other countries on security. It reflects the administration's
abiding urge to trade the constraints of U.S. global leadership -- all
those tiresome alliances, world bodies, and treaties that we, more than
any nation, willed into creation -- for the freedom of action the United
States would supposedly gain by going it alone.
More likely, unilateralism would isolate our country and even conjure
up an anti-American alliance determined to restore a global balance of
power. Democrats should expose the Bush doctrine for what it is -- the
right's old isolationist illusion in a new guise -- and seize the opportunity
it presents to challenge the GOP's supposed mastery of national security.
