[UPDATE 12-17-04 11:30PM] New time for Barnett's show is now Monday, Dec 20, at 8PM with a live call-in segment from 9:30-11PM , and then re-run. (all times EST)   more »

This is a draft I wrote for praktike's TerrorWiki on the need for a different view of the terrorism threat and a new strategy to combat it. As a wiki contribution, the draft will go through innumerable changes offered by innumerable editors. So I thought it best to capture my original thoughts here. Not that the final product of the wiki collaboration won't be superior -- I have every expectation it will in both substance and style. But this version's the way, today, I'm thinking about the long and arduous challenges that face America and its future leaders.

Terrorism is fast becoming one of the defining features of the world we live in. Although Americans naturally associate terrorism with the events of 9/11 and Al Qaeda, terrorism is rapidly evolving into a much wider and longer-term threat.

• Terrorism has become the preferred weapon of international groups who would destroy the existing order, represented by America and other wealthy Western countries. It is increasingly used as the tactic of choice in local civil wars, sectarian or ethnic conflict, or revolts against vulnerable political and social institutions. Like the communists, fascists and preachers of third-world liberation before them, the terrorists offer nothing in place of what they destroy but chaos or a harsh, exclusionary utopia.
  
  
• Terrorism is made increasingly dangerous by the ability of terrorist entrepreneurs to tap into a metastasizing international support network -- people, expertise, financing, weapons, training -- all too often connected to international crime.
  
  
• Terrorism sustains its energy, like a hurricane over open warm waters, with the failings and corruption of weak or despotic states. On the moral level, it is fueled by repressive regimes and the angers and resentments those states breed. On the physical level, it finds refuge and bases of operation in countrysides and cities. It taps into the capacities of government officials and agencies with tragic results, whether by petty bribery of Russian airport security or the close connections of the mujahadeen with Pakistani intelligence.
  
  
• Terrorism flourishes in a global environment of interconnectedness, of open physical and virtual borders, of the explosion of information instantaneously available, of literacy and education reaching a larger and larger number of people. Yet the environment that amplifies the reach and destructive power of terrorists is the same environment that offers the potential of the 21st century as an era of greater personal freedom, growth and prosperity -- both for Americans and for an expanding portion of peoples around the world.

America needs a clear, comprehensive strategy for combating terrorism that leverages our strengths, protects American interests and promotes global security and prosperity. Our strategy must be realistic, sustainable and adaptable as the nature of the enemy and threat continue to evolve. America's strategy must also fit within a broad, coherent US foreign policy that is true to American values, institutions and the rule of law, and that honestly confronts the lessons of the past three years.
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This cri de coeur from the editors of the Daily Star in Beirut underlines how the Bush Doctrine has left the post-WWII international order in tatters, in the ways described by John Ikenberry and Andrew Bachevich.

Iraq beyond tragedy: A country gripped in the twin jaws of absurdity

What is happening in Iraq today and that is presently epitomized by the American-led coalition's assault against Fallujah is beyond sad. It is a tragedy, yes, but it goes beyond tragedy: it is an absurdity.

American conduct in Iraq has been characterized by a brutality and blundering that have not even been vaguely disguised by the mask of democracy and by the rhetoric of bringing democracy to that war-shattered country. [...]

However, in Iraq, what are the alternatives? [...]

On the one hand there are the remnants of Saddam's power base and, on the other hand, there are the representatives of a fundamentalist, militant Islamist international. [...]

What program do they offer other than killing? How can anyone support their cause without becoming a killer or without in some implicit way condoning their killing? [...] Quite simply, in the course of trying to oust America from their country, these terrorists and thugs are, in fact, killing Iraq. [...]

It is time for the broader international community to step in and impose the sanity that is necessary to end the absurdity.

Although I have great sympathy for the views expressed above, the call for internationalization is all well and good, but who will lead, and with what will they impose sanity?

The Europeans and Asians, with Russia in the middle, are surely as or more threatened as the US by interminable chaos in Iraq and the spilling over of Islamist radicalism across the Crescent of Instability. But they will not, and as the system stands now, cannot come together to act in the absence of US leadership.

This is the profound hole that the Bush Doctrine has punched in the international order. Without the "indispensable nation," the dynamics of collaboration for broader public goods are simply short-circuited. 

You may have wondered why in my prior post I insisted that the most urgent agenda item for the Democrats is to articulate a strong, clear, disciplined alternative vision to the Bush Admin in foreign policy. I would enlarge that claim to include like-thinkiing Republicans (both traditional internationalists and traditional conservatives).

I draw your attention to the post-election checklist for the foreign policies of Bush II. Prepared by one of the more enthusiastic supporters of the neo-conservative vision and agenda, and appearing in Friday's National Review Online, it merits careful study. The list, part of an article by Frank Graffney, is published in its entirety below. Since the purpose of its original publication was undoubtedly to maximize its broad dissemination, we will assist Mr Gaffney in his distribution efforts.

The important thing now, of course, is not simply to acknowledge past achievements [sic], but to build upon them. This will require, among other things:

• The reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens utilized by freedom's enemies in Iraq � a necessary precondition not only to holding elections there next year, but to the establishment of institutions essential to a functioning and stable democracy;
• Regime change � one way or another � in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing these remaining "Axis of Evil" states from fully realizing their terrorist and nuclear ambitions;
• Providing the substantially increased resources needed to re-equip a transforming military and rebuild human-intelligence capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts of intelligence "reforms" contemplated pre-election that would make matters worse on this and other scores) while we fight World War IV;
• Providing, to the fullest extent possible, for the protection of our homeland � including the adoption of sensible policies on securing our borders and contending with illegal aliens, and by deploying effective missile defenses at sea and in space, as well as ashore;
• Keeping faith with Israel, whose destruction remains a priority for the same people who want to destroy us (and for the same reasons � i.e., our shared, "moral values") � especially in the face of Yasser Arafat's demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to "solve" the Mideast problem by forcing the Israelis to abandon defensible boundaries;
• Contending with the underlying dynamic that made France and Germany so problematic in the first term: namely, their willingness to make common cause with our enemies for profit, and their desire to employ a united Europe and its new constitution � as well as other international institutions and mechanisms � to thwart the expansion and application of American power where deemed necessary by Washington;
• Adapting appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America.

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One of America's increasingly prominent scholars in the fields of international relations and national security is none other than MC MasterChef's own professor at BU, Andrew Bacevich (specialty American military affairs). His op-ed today in the LATimes, "Unsafe for Democracy," is a timely reminder of a dimension of the recent election that has not received enough attention. With most post-mortems focusing on why Kerry came up short -- why Bush voters didn't pull the lever for Kerry, rather than an assessment of why Kerry voters rejected Bush -- no serious appraisal of the foreign policy voting patterns has received any prominence so far.

The President and his supporters have claimed bluntly that because he won, the Democrats should be expected to "stop campaigning" and support his foreign policies to promote "healing" and "national unity." All well and good from a "rally 'round the troops" standpoint, especially as serious fighting has just been launched in Fallujah. But in terms of how America should position itself in the world going forward, a substantial portion of Democrats and independents who voted for Kerry believe continuing down the road that the Bush Doctrine has placed us on would be a profoundly dangerous mistake.

Although a large portion of the electorate has begun to feel that the US got off was unwise to invade Iraq, a fundamental debate about the role of the US in a unipolar world has not yet been joined. During the election campaign, most of the pointed critique of Bush Admin policies and actions -- from either Democrats or the press -- involved relatively narrow issues, such as the feebleness of the grounds for the invasion of Iraq or the lack of competence in planning and execution of the post-invasion phase. Even those claims didn't receive a great deal of public attention until late in the campaign because of the slow process by which concrete evidence emerged that countered the Admin's fantastically rosy pictures of reality. (See discussions in "Media Tipping-Point " and "What will those dumb Americans do next?"

Bacevich argues, along the same lines as John Ikenberry's "Liberal Leviathan" analysis, that the witches brew of traditional conservative US foreign policy principles with Wilsonian idealism is neither sustainable at home nor acceptable abroad. Bacevich does not outline his preferred approach -- whether to shift from conservative to liberal traditional principles and/or to jettison Wilsonianism in favor of some version of realism or a new idealism . But that political elites must recast the discussion in terms other than the "false coinage" of "freedom" and "democracy" cannot be disputed.    more »

[UPDATE] This essay is one of three on the recommended reading list of the "Grand Strategic Choices Working Group" of the Princeton Project on National Security (Woodrow Wilson School). The group is one of seven organized for the academic year 2004-05. John Ikenberry is co-chair of this working group along with Francis Fukuyama. The other two recommended essays are Fukuyama's article from the Summer 2004 issue of National Interest, "The Neoconservative Moment," (sub reqd) and "Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World" by Charles Krauthammer (Speech to American Enterprise Institute, February 12, 2004) .

See praktike's Democratic Realism is a Joke, which discusses this debate.

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John Ikenberry's piece from Britain's Prospect magazine, written prior to the election, sets out the case for liberal hegemony. It is a vision in sharp distinction to the conservative hegemony that the Bush Administration has been pursuing, especially since 9/11, and which Ikenberry explains will lead to tears. The shape of his overall argument, reflected in the excerpts selected below, is of more interest than his descriptions of the familiar set of actions and attitudes of the Bush Admin that he uses to illustrate and reinforce his analysis. We

Let's start with his conclusion, also the title of the piece.

A traditional realist strategy of reconstructing a Westphalian balance of power order that reaffirms state sovereignty is quite unrealistic, particularly given unipolarity and the character of the new security threats. There is no going back.

What the world needs is an order where the US continues to underwrite global security but does so within a framework of rules and bargains that render the resulting system legitimate and sustainable. We need to move beyond balance of power and empire towards an international order that combines American unipolar power with widely agreed upon rules and institutions. The world needs a liberal leviathan.

His conclusion is not surprising -- it reflects the basic premises of those who set the grand strategy for the US, and therefore defined the key structures of the liberal international system in the West, during and after WWII. With the interim Cold War brought to an end, there is a return to the logic of the system that was installed by the Western allies and elaborated through building regional and international institutions and arrangements.

As such, his analysis is part of the overall "empire" debates that have sprung up, especially post 9-11. Falling in the camp of "in a unipolar system the world needs a hegemon" he takes the argument further beyond debates that view the world through the US perspective -- type of empire, whether empire is the right term, whether managing an empire is consistent with other key features of the American character or system -- and instead discusses the US role within the context of a new and challenging international system.

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Although Senator Kerry deserves to be excoriated for allowing himself to be politically pressured into semi-supporting invasion with a force authorization vote, invading Iraq was nowhere near the political radar screen until Bush gave his disastrous Axis of Evil speech, the speech that set the wrong course for his Presidency and should set your lever-pulling course on Tuesday. The decision to invade and conquer Iraq was and is entirely the property of George W. Bush. It was probably the most disastrous foreign policy decision in our nation's history, and its author should not be given the opportunity to strike again.   more »

Von at Obsidian Wings highlights the ongoing kerfuffle within the neoconservative foreign policy apparatus. Pointing to this Danny Postel summary of the debate between Charles Krauthammer and Francis Fukuyama on the pages of The National Interest, Von declares himself a foreign policy realist who, because no WMDs were actually found in Iraq, now views the invasion as a mistake. (The text of Fukuyama's critque is here, along with a solid discussion).   more »

praktike's response to Arjun on "freedom and Kerry," got me putting some long-time thoughts down in writing. Though part of the comments to praktike's piece, I'm posting this comment to Arjun under "Scribbles & Musings" as well.

Arjun -- Your basic premises aren't the least bit "unrealistic" First of all, the use of the network of international organizations (IOs) -- which has been constructed with significant efforts by the US itself -- doesn't strike me as unrealistic. "Multilateralism" is part of the international reality within which we operate.

What strikes me as unrealistic is to expect that we can treat IOs as mere instruments of our own power, resent any modest limits they may place on our scope of options, and blame the organizations themselves as somehow at fault when they don't deliver what we want. But equally unrealistic is to expect IOs to be independent actors in an international governance system.   more »

Guess the date of this article by WINEP fellow Ray Takeyh, entitled "The Rogue Who Came in From the Cold":

What should the United States do when its long-standing policy toward a maverick country such as Libya starts to pay off -- and that country finally begins to clean up its act? The question has recently become a pressing one as, in a surprising twist of events, the often and justifiably maligned Libyan regime of Colonel Mu'ammar Qaddafi has started to meet international demands and redress its past crimes. How the United States responds will serve as a test of Washington's ability to reintegrate a reforming "rogue" into the community of nations.

Answer below the jump.   more »