To the Editor:

Robert Kagan’s excellent survey of 20th-century American foreign policy [“The Case for Global Activism,” September] presents an accurate picture of the dangers the country will face if it now attempts to withdraw from world politics. Mr. Kagan, however, underestimates the significance of one phenomenon whose role he does mention. “Americans did not shun international involvement in the interwar years,” he writes. “Rather, they tried to enjoy the benefits of such involvement while hoping to avoid its inevitable costs.”

I would suggest that this effort to avoid paying the “inevitable costs” of intervention, which started long before the cold war, has been especially visible since it began. Thus did the electorate throw the Democrats out of the White House when the Republican candidate in 1952 promised to end the Korean war, and when the Republican in 1968 promised to end American involvement in the war in Vietnam. Thus did the “Nixon Doctrine” suggest that with proxies like the Shah of Iran American security could be protected without sending any more boys overseas, and the “Reagan Doctrine” tried to do the job with proxy guerrilla armies.

Why did these internationalist Presidents feel the need to avoid American casualties? Because they understood that the American people were willing to go along with an interventionist foreign policy only so long as the cost was low. Several of Mr. Kagan’s examples—Panama and Grenada are the most striking—demonstrate only that any military action will gain public support if it is announced when it is, in essence, over. Public reaction to the deaths of American Marines in Lebanon and Rangers later in Somalia suggests that the Presidents who postulated a low public tolerance for the shedding of American blood were not far off the mark.

Or, to be more precise, they were not far off the mark when it came to American casualties incurred in actions apparently peripheral to the national interest. I believe there would have been considerable tolerance for casualties in the Gulf war, for most Americans came to be persuaded that that battle involved key American political and economic interests.

Here there are two points worth remembering. First, American interests in each potential intervention need to be explained and people need to be persuaded. This calls for presidential leadership, and strong leadership can expand the public’s willingness to intervene overseas. An administration that cannot seem to make up its mind what America’s interests are, and where they require military action, will never persuade a reluctant public to support action that may cause American deaths.

Second, while Mr. Kagan is right to argue for American “confidence and determination” and to defend the proposition that early action will often prevent much more bloodshed later, some matters are truly peripheral to American national-security interests. Acting to prevent nuclear proliferation is one thing; sending troops on “nation-building” missions whenever there is a humanitarian crisis is another. Intervention in the Caribbean, where American interests have been clear since this country was founded, is a lot easier to defend than intervention in areas where American economic and political interests are nonexistent.

Mr. Kagan is right to push the pendulum back now toward American involvement in world affairs. He should, however, acknowledge that it can swing too far in that direction. Intervention when American national interests are not at stake—when United Nations resolutions become a substitute for the careful calculation of where tangible and intangible U.S. interests lie—will eventually undercut the willingness of Americans to meet even essential national responsibilities.

Elliott Abrams
Washington, D.C.

[Mr. Abrams served as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs from 1985 to 1989. He is currently with the Hudson Institute.]

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To the Editor:

Robert Kagan tries to make the case not for intervening here rather than there, in this or that circumstance, to do this or that, but for intervening as opposed to not doing so. Mission: impossible. The core of his argument is that refusal to exercise power anywhere becomes habitual, and debilitates the country’s capacity for self-defense even in the most obvious cases. In fact, however, leaders who commit lives and treasure unwisely debilitate the country’s capacity for self-defense even more directly. So the case for any action must be made in terms relevant to that action. Mr. Kagan’s argument has two corollaries: “The big threats and vital interests” are “no less debatable than the small and lesser interests,” and it is not really necessary to tie the use of force to narrowly defined security interests. It is difficult to imagine a more direct incitement to irresponsibility.

Mr. Kagan is correct that great power and widespread interests imply much responsibility. But because his reading of history turns up no case of unwise intervention or wise restraint, he does not help us distinguish worthwhile actions from errors. That reading of history is debatable, at the very least.

Mr. Kagan says that the U.S. had to enter World War I to preserve a benign British-dominated world order against the possibility of a German-dominated one. But in 1917 the world’s order was not at stake because neither side could have won a lopsided victory. Such a victory became possible only when the United States entered the war. The results of World War I are indefensible. If the U.S. had not intervened, the seeds of World War II would not have been sown, and the American people would have faced later developments without the burden of their understandable reaction to 126,000 lives having been thrown away.

The very concept of “intervention” beclouds the real questions: For what purpose should we kill and die? Is this purpose worthy? What do we have to do to achieve it? Will the results be worth the effort? Are we willing and able to do what it takes? Mr. Kagan discounts the necessity of clear objectives clearly related to the means to be employed. But the concatenation of ends and means is the very essence of policy. Our intervention in Vietnam was the very negation of policy. In the name of noble purposes, the U.S. government disrupted tens of millions of lives, and spent hundreds of billions of dollars. But our leaders thought that the enemies were hunger and disease, and were full of contempt for the idea of victory. By similar lights, the U.S. government dispatched Marines to Beirut in 1982 and a variety of troops to Somalia in 1992. These troops had no enemy to defeat—only blood to shed. By contrast, consider the common sense of Douglas Mac-Arthur’s paraphrase of Aristotle: in war there is no substitute for victory.

Consider also that, willy-nilly, to use force is to assume responsibility for the outcome. The U.S. government decided to intervene against Iraq to remove Iraq as a threat to the Gulf states. But since Iraq is an empire, to break the power of the regime is to dismember the country. The U.S. government seemed to realize this only when the defeated Iraqi army’s disarray was making it happen. Unwilling to take responsibility for victory, the U.S. government then acted to ensure the survival of Saddam’s regime. Now America’s bolt is shot, and Saddam’s power looms over the region. So, because blather about a new world order helped U.S. officials forget the fundamentals, our mighty war machine killed tens of thousands of people whose death made no difference, while sparing a few whose death would have accomplished our long-range purposes.

The real lesson of history is that any attempt to establish a “world order” is chimerical. The best we can do is to follow the example of the Founding Fathers, pay attention to the fundamentals, and let the world order take care of itself. The Monroe Doctrine, which puts friendly borders at the top of our priorities, makes as much sense today as it did 170 years ago. As ever, our location amid oceans is a source either of security or insecurity depending on the capacity of our Navy to control them. To the extent that any mission weakens our Navy’s supremacy in mid-ocean, it is a potentially fatal diversion. Equally important in our time is defense of the air-and-space approaches to our country against aircraft and missiles.

It is very important to us that the Western Pacific rim and Atlantic Europe be friendly, or at least not under the influence of major enemies of ours. But guaranteeing that was, is, and always will be beyond us. Control of the ocean and of space is the one factor bearing on such friendship that we can come closest to guaranteeing. Our air and ground forces can never make more than a contribution to big battles in Europe or Asia. Because we cannot make a future for ourselves on the land mass of Eurasia, only lose it, we should never try to substitute ourselves for shaky allies. Which country may be willing to do what for us depends primarily on our power. Hence it De-hooves U.S. officials to husband that power.

Lest we cease to be ourselves, we must always and everywhere be on the side of those who believe that “all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. . . .” But prudence rather than principle must dictate what, if anything, we do about it. Who among us is willing to impose civilization on the Somalis or Rwandans? Are we willing to police the streets of Sarajevo? On the other hand, there is every reason to call the Milosevics of this world the names they deserve. One might make a case for putting cruise missiles into their bedrooms. A case can be made for guaranteeing Poland et al. against eventual Russian aggression. The case for making war to destroy North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and regime—and thus to preserve the current orientation of Japan—is clear enough to me. But remember, if the U.S. government does any of these things, all of us who must bear the consequences must decide. The Constitution specifies how: Congress must vote on a declaration of war. The debate should clarify the relationship between ends and means.

Mr. Kagan asks, “Who among us . . . is prepared to rise to the challenge of global activism?” I would ask in turn: who among those who pretend to lead the United States in the world is prepared to serve in the armed forces and submit his body to the blood tax? Today only one-third of Congressmen and fewer than a tenth of executive appointees, professors, journalists, and executives of major corporations have ever served in the armed forces. Nor do their families serve. Nor, by and large, are they personally acquainted with those who do. There is a great and growing gap between those sectors of society that contribute to the armed forces and those whose personal remoteness emboldens them to play global chess.

Finally, leadership requires a little humility. Mr. Kagan writes that “Victory in the cold war came when Republicans. . . .” I wish! In fact, it came with the declaration of independence by the Baltic Republics on August 25, 1991, just three weeks after George Bush, culminating a long and increasingly lonely effort to help Gorbachev save the Soviet Union, told the Ukrainian people to be good little Soviet citizens. Today, U.S. global activism means, in part, giving smoke-and-mirrors guarantees to the Ukrainians to induce them to render themselves naked to Russian nuclear blackmail. It means helping to weaken the northern border of Israel, and then guaranteeing it. And it means a lot of other silly things, like invading Haiti.

In sum, it is easy to make the case for going to war where we should, for worthy purposes, in well-calculated ways, and under wise leadership. And it is just as easy to make the case against the wrong wars in the wrong places, for the wrong purposes, badly waged. The trick is to tell the difference.

Angelo M. Codevilla
Stanford, California

[Mr. Codevilla, formerly a professional staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is a fellow of the Hoover Institution.]

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To the Editor:

Like the realists with whom he takes issue in his thoughtful and provocative essay, Robert Kagan seeks to ensure that, in the wake of the cold war, the United States will continue to play the part of a world power. But, where the realists urge modesty in the selection of ends and caution and discrimination in the application of means, Mr. Kagan prefers boldness and “global activism.” As it has done throughout this century, he argues, the United States must use “its influence to promote a world order consistent with its material needs and philosophical predilections.”

Mr. Kagan is surely right that an excessively narrow definition of the nation’s interests, and undue timidity in the application of its power, will increase the likelihood of paralysis, disengagement, and the eventual emergence of fundamental new threats. Given the nature of its domestic regime, America cannot be concerned only with the preservation of its physical security; if it tries to be a “traditional” power, it will end up by not being much of a power at all. Moreover, as Mr. Kagan reminds us, great-power status is a state of mind as well as the product of a mere accumulation of material resources. Once unlearned, the habits of engagement and action may not be so easy to reacquire. Having defeated its long-time foe, the United States should therefore set itself appropriately ambitious goals and act in ways intended to achieve them. But there are serious difficulties and dangers with the course that Mr. Kagan appears to be proposing.

To begin with, he is overly optimistic (and, yes, unrealistic) in his assessment of American power. One need not accept the notion that the United States is in a state of terminal decline to recognize that, despite our continuing preponderance in most important measures of capability, our relative power has diminished in recent decades and is likely to decline still further in the years immediately ahead. The margin of U.S. economic, technological, and, in some respects (such as the more widespread possession of nuclear weapons), military advantage over all other nations will not be as great at the end of this century as it was at its midpoint. Not surprisingly, our capacity to remake the world in our own image will also be diminished. Whether or not God truly does look after “children, drunkards, and the United States,” for most of the past century the rising curve of American power has helped to compensate for a multitude of strategic sins and blunders. In the 21st century the diffusion of capabilities will impose greater burdens on our collective capacity for strategic thought and action.

Even if the U.S. share of world-power resources were to remain unchanged, the character of many of the situations that matter most to our future security will make them highly resistant to our influence (or to any other outsider’s for that matter). Whether militant Islamic fundamentalism spreads and becomes more virulent, for example, or Russia and China become more liberal and democratic (and presumably peaceful) are matters of enormous importance, but they are also beyond our capacity for direct control. These observations should not be taken as an argument for fatalism or passivity. There is every reason for the United States to try to propagate its values and to do what it can to mold the post-cold-war international order; but good reason, too, for being restrained in our expectations of what we can achieve.

Regarding means: Mr. Kagan places a great deal of emphasis on the use of American military power. Indeed, at times, his “global activism” appears to consist of little more than a willingness to intervene in a series of what realists are inclined to regard as “peripheral” conflicts. Although armed force will surely remain an important tool of American foreign policy, it would be a mistake to concentrate every ounce of analytical energy on only one of the instruments at our disposal. With the end of the cold war, the utility of everything from foreign aid to covert operations needs to be reexamined.

Moreover, if only because the number of potential trouble spots is likely to increase, while the old constraints on American action remain low, the need for discrimination in the future will be even greater than in the past. Saying, in effect, that we ought to be willing to “bear any burden and oppose any foe” does not get us very far in sorting out the costs, benefits, and risks of military action, or inaction, in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Cuba, the Persian Gulf, the South China Sea, the Baltic, and so on.

What we need are not ironclad rules (“avoid the periphery” or “intervene everywhere”), but better and clearer ways of analyzing and debating each new situation as it arises. Every conflict on the periphery may not be peripheral to American national interests properly understood, but some conflicts will surely be more important (and some will, in any case, be more promising candidates for military intervention) than others.

The problem with departing from a strict “clear and present danger” test for intervention is, of course, that looser guidelines risk becoming formulas for overextension and exhaustion. The American people may, indeed, be appalled by evidence of “aggression, political illegitimacy, genocide, mass starvation, nuclear proliferation, [and] violations of international agreements.” But this does not mean that they are willing to expend American lives to deal with these problems wherever and whenever they occur, nor should they be. The early returns on patterns of post-cold-war public support for intervention are far more mixed, and the future trends much less certain, than Mr. Kagan lets on. Hesitation regarding the use of force in Bosnia (and, for that matter, the Persian Gulf) and the strong reaction to the loss of a comparatively small number of American lives in Somalia suggest that popular enthusiasm for foreign military adventures is limited and potentially fragile.

To date we have been extraordinarily lucky. It would be doubly tragic if a future military debacle (or even a string of more costly successes) were to undermine support, not only for intervention but also for the less dramatic forms of American activism. Especially in an era when direct security threats will seem remote, public support for continued engagement is a resource to be husbanded.

Mr. Kagan’s article closes with what is, in effect, a Republican call to arms. If Republicans do not advocate “global activism,” he suggests, then no one else will. Whether or not this is the case, there is no question that, as the cold war fades, renewed partisan divisions could distort and eventually cripple American foreign policy. Because of the way power is divided and distributed within it, our system works best when there is debate but also, ultimately, a considerable degree of consensus. Agreement on the broad outlines of the strategy of containment did not emerge immediately in the years after World War II, but, once it had, it held for nearly a half-century. We should hope that the new debate in which we are engaged, and to which Mr. Kagan has made an important and valuable contribution, leads to a consensus as solid and a policy as successful.

Aaron L. Friedberg
Princeton, New Jersey

[Mr. Friedberg is director of the research program in international security at the Center of International Studies, Princeton University.]

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To the Editor:

There is a great deal I find appealing about Robert Kagan’s argument. I believe that the United States should be unafraid to apply its power in the world, and that there is need for a kind of world order which only a militarily dominant great power can provide. I am not a hard-core realist and do not believe that the U.S. should construe its interests narrowly: support for ideological and moral causes is also important to America’s sense of itself as a democracy. Furthermore, I do not believe that we are nearly as constrained economically as many argue: the country has never been richer or more productive, and despite the budget deficit, resources remain much more a matter of will than of fiscal constraints.

Nevertheless, I find I like the “Kagan Doctrine” much more in the abstract than when I try to apply it to any present-day, real-world foreign-policy problems. Apart from purely humanitarian cases, it is hard to be enthusiastic about intervention in Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, or any of the myriad ethnic conflicts in the former Communist world. These kinds of civil wars are inherently intractable, and do not easily submit to influence by outside powers. In the absence of a larger great-power rivalry, their outcome is in virtually all cases not important to U.S. strategic or ideological interests.

As Mr. Kagan himself acknowledges, there are a number of serious foreign-policy challenges looming on the horizon, such as a revived Russia and an ambitious China. He is quite correct in asserting that the chief task of foreign policy at the present moment is to keep alive the practice of and capability for activism until such time as it becomes truly criticial to core U.S. interests. He is of the “use-it-or-lose-it” school, as are many former NATO specialists who have been searching desperately for something useful for that institution to do.

In my opinion, the much greater danger at present is “use-it-and-lose it,” that is, intervening for secondary and poorly-thought-out objectives, and therefore wasting the political capital we have for large interventions later. For while our financial capital is enormous, the political capital available for international involvement at this point in our national history is small and relatively inelastic. The most important issue we are going to face down the road is NATO expansion to include the new democracies of Eastern Europe, though there can be tactical differences on the speed and manner with which this is to be done. NATO would be far more endangered were it to try to solve ethnic conflicts like Bosnia, which it cannot properly do, than were it simply “freeze-dried” and reconstituted later if and when a real threat from Russia emerges. Like instant coffee, a reconstituted NATO won’t look or taste as good as the original, but it will be better than nothing at all.

In my view, Americans should be prepared, when the time comes, to have their young people die for Poland. I think they will be less inclined to make the proper decision then if their young people have been dying on behalf of unfamiliar causes in places like Sarajevo and Kigali along the way. If the political vision and leadership to make the right case for a big commitment later are not forthcoming, then we will have a serious problem. But we cannot sneak in this kind of decision under the guise of doing something less ambitious, nor can we work our way up to it by swatting flies in anticipation.

In a larger sense, I do not think it is inappropriate for the United States to concentrate on domestic problems right now when the foreign environment is relatively benign. There is a genuine crisis in American civil society today, from the family to public education to crime, race, and a variety of related problems which, if not thought through, will undermine our position abroad surely but steadily in the long run. Bill Clinton’s election was a manifestation that many Americans feel this way as well. Though Clinton’s solutions are not the right ones, there is a certain wisdom in that emphasis. In this respect, an activist foreign policy in the absence of real foreign-policy problems will only be a distraction.

Francis Fukuyama
Washington, D.C.

[Mr. Fukuyama, the author of The End of History and The Last Man, served as deputy director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in 1989.]

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To the Editor:

To promote democracy, human rights, market economies, and peace throughout the world makes good sense for the United States—as it does for Germany, Canada, Sweden. Yet, for all these worthy goals, the United States will not, cannot, and should not pay any price, bear any burden. Global activism, as advocated by Robert Kagan, recalls Napoleon’s grand strategy: “on s’engage et puis on voit”; first “one becomes engaged” (in Egypt, Spain, Russia) “and then one shall see” (at Waterloo). To be sure, American global activism has many lasting achievements to its credit. So did Napoleon Bonaparte with his enduring improvements of administration and laws, not only for France but for much of continental Europe.

Mr. Kagan criticizes those who express concern about an American “Waterloo.” In a revealing aside, he writes that the American intervention in World War I was not due to “national interest narrowly conceived,” but that the United States had an interest in intervening because it had the power to intervene.

My point is not that Mr. Kagan’s interpretation here is wrong. On the contrary, he is right in a larger sense than he spells out. The United States had the power to intervene yet used its power unwisely. A credible case can be made that the United States should have used all its influence to end World War I in 1916 (as many leading Europeans advocated at that time). If successful, such a compromise peace might have led to a gradual democratization of Imperial Germany and a gradual break-up of the Hapsburg empire, a sequel that would have prevented many of the disasters that are now cited (by Mr. Kagan and others) as reasons why the United States should engage in global activism.

To intervene just because we have the power to do so is not a strategy that will build a world order consistent with our “economic, political, and ideological aspirations.” It did not work in World War I. And recently, it did not work in Somalia. Even the 1989 intervention in Panama produced rather dubious results. The drug trafficking through Panama has not been greatly reduced and the legal implications of dragging Noriega into U.S. courts may yet come to haunt us. The U.S. Justice Department’s global activism might be imitated—say, by Iran kidnapping “blasphemers” in the United States and bringing them to “justice” in Teheran.

In choosing among different foreign policies we should not mislead ourselves by using obsolete labels. Isolationism is not an option today since U.S. territory is no longer isolated by geography from devastating attacks. At the other extreme, a policy of Manifest Destiny—that is to say, establishing U.S. dominion over foreign lands—is also no longer an option; even though in some cases it might make a lot more sense than current versions of interventionism. The significant, hard choices today are between tilting in favor of intervention or tilting in favor of staying disengaged when the pros and cons are nearly balanced—as they usually are.

Contrary to the global activists, I believe a strong case can be made today for tilting in favor of staying disengaged in nearly all those instances where the need for intervention is not overwhelmingly compelling. My reasons are both military and political.

To clarify matters, let us first set aside interventions for charity. Charity has its own transcendental reasons and need not be justified in strategic terms. About charity it can be said: it is better to have tried and failed than not to have tried at all. About strategy, the opposite normally holds true. Sentiments of charity may even be mixed with patriotic pride. We feel good seeing our military forces, with their splendid dedication and efficiency, provide humanitarian assistance in Rwanda, Somalia, Bangladesh. Although the American people know that charity begins at home, they support charity abroad. Up to a point.

In my view, the main reason for a noninterventionist tilt today is the new asymmetry in the tools of intervention. The dreadful truth is that for many of the contingencies now mentioned by the pundits, our potential enemy could marshal more effective tools than we could. Of course, this is something every American wishes to see corrected—in theory. In practice, political disagreements at home make it well-nigh impossible to correct these asymmetries. Clearly, the problem would not be fixed by merely adding 10 or 30 percent to the U.S. defense budget (even if that were as easy as Mr. Kagan intimates).

For example, if American forces in the Caribbean were doubled, the U.S. government would not gain the tools to depose Fidel Castro or to clean up the mess in Haiti. Or, when North Korea brandishes a nuclear capability that could destroy South Korean or Japanese cities, we will not keep Seoul or Tokyo from propitiating North Korea merely by a 30-percent increase in the present types of U.S. forces in the Pacific. Or, if U.S. intelligence suspected that Iran was acquiring an enormously potent biological-warfare capability, the asymmetry in threats and counterthreats between the United States and a fanatical Iranian leadership could not be remedied without major structural changes in our intervention capabilities. In sum, for contingencies where the potential enemy is willing to run the highest risks and accept massive losses, the U.S. ability to intervene has been greatly weakened over the last few decades.

Two developments account for this deterioration, whose profound impact many American experts (including, it seems, Mr. Kagan) fail to appreciate. One is the appalling increase in the vulnerability of the United States to but a single weapon of mass destruction. Much is being written about the fact that access to such weapons is spreading. What has been less noticed is the increased vulnerability of our economy: delicate computer networks, fragile power grids, total dependence on computers and electricity for most commercial activities, and porous borders plus almost no air defenses (not to mention the absence of any missile defenses).

The second of these developments is the political hobbling of a whole range of nonmilitary (paramilitary) means that the U.S. government in the past could use to intervene against a dangerous enemy. Prior to the 1970’s, U.S. national-security policy could use military-assistance programs in ways that are now precluded. It could mount covert actions far more freely than today. It could generously allocate foreign “assistance” to buy friends and weaken enemies. It could rely on a worldwide support system, now largely dismantled, that comprised hundreds of military bases, several global airlines and communications carriers totally responsive to official requests, a worldwide oil-production and -distribution system largely U.S.-controlled, and easy options to deploy America’s then-dominant financial power. Last but not least, the President could count on a sense of discipline throughout the government bureaucracy that today would be regarded as authoritarian.

We may not regret the loss of these policy tools; many Americans, in fact, welcome the change as some kind of moral cleansing. But in arguing for global activism, it behooves us to keep in mind that the President today cannot use the tools—even if he wanted to—that Franklin D. Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy could so easily employ to intervene abroad.

Fred Charles Iklé
Washington, D.C.

[Mr. Iklé was director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1973 to 1977 and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 1981 to 1988. He is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).]

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To the Editor:

I salute Robert Kagan for the core of his argument but not its periphery. I agree that it is usually foolish to ignore small problems on the grounds of husbanding energies for larger ones. First, small problems, unattended, may feed or grow into big ones. Second, a nation’s ability to respond effectively to paramount challenges may depend on habits and character developed in confronting less decisive ones. Third, a nation’s pattern of behavior will shape the anticipations of others. This does not mean, however, that all small problems are equal. Some are threats to the peace, while others are tragedies confined within the borders of a single state. Bosnia and Korea are examples of the former; Haiti and Somalia, the latter. Yet Mr. Kagan lumps all four together.

I also find strained and unconvincing Mr. Kagan’s claim that American policy since the cold war has been dramatically internationalist. He goes on to argue that America’s behavior in the 1920’s and 1930’s should not properly be called “isolationalist.” Well, by that standard, perhaps today’s policy currents are not “isolationist,” either. Whatever you want to call them, however, they smack of flight from burdens. Mr. Kagan offers U.S. efforts in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda as evidence of “worldwide engagement and armed intervention unprecedented in scope.” But if our flight from Somalia, abdication in Bosnia, and fly-by of Rwanda constitute robust internationalism, then many of our realist/isolationists will rest easy. The real point is that since America stumbled into the unprecedented status of sole superpower, it has engaged the world only in a patchwork and irresolute way, concentrating instead (to no good effect) on domestic issues.

I fear that Mr. Kagan is trying to turn back on the realists their own stratagem of conflating the “is” and the “ought.” Nations necessarily behave “realistically,” they say; therefore, America must do so too—ignoring the obvious point that if the first clause is true, the second is superfluous. Mr. Kagan seems to be on his way to saying that America should be internationalist because it is bound to be internationalist. Alas, it is not so easy.

Joshua Muravchik
Washington, D.C.

[Mr. Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America’s Destiny.]

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To the Editor:

Robert Kagan’s case for activism is compelling in many ways, and tempting, but in the end his approach is no substitute for a more sober strategic judgment.

It is healthy that this discussion could take place at all. Two decades ago, the United States was mired in a Vietnam-era funk and was disarming unilaterally. We have recovered; the West’s triumph in the cold war has vindicated American internationalism. The country’s willingness to engage in a series of interventions—most particularly Desert Storm—is the mark of a body politic that is capable of sustaining a significant international role.

While Mr. Kagan thus probably exaggerates the continuity in postwar American policy, he is certainly right that the current domestic support for our international leadership is a refutation of the theories of American decline. He also makes the correct observation that, in the absence of serious rivals, the pivotal U.S. role in many international issues is more decisive than before. All this is to the good.

None of it, however, obviates the need for strategy. No country is omnipotent. Our goals may be expansive—and there are many humanitarian goals now open to us—but some principle of selectivity is unavoidable. There are, believe it or not, a few recent upheavals we have kept our forces out of (Liberia, Sudan, Algeria) and others we have been hesitant to plunge more deeply into (Bosnia). Rightly or wrongly, explicitly or implicitly, we choose where we go. But what are our criteria? What priorities are guiding us?

Mr. Kagan makes another important point: that abdication is a bad habit to get into and that credibility can be lost (or won) in the little conflicts as well as in the big ones. (Every President needs some air-traffic controllers on whom to prove his mettle early in his term.) This has been a big part of Bill Clinton’s problem. The string of mishaps in 1993 in Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia undermined the U.S. position generally. No doubt the North Koreans and other big-leaguers were watching and drawing their conclusions.

Now, some of this was just a question of competence in execution. In the real world there is a premium on well-thought-out military plans that aim at a decisive result. Interventions cannot be sustained by good intentions alone, and the new era of limited interventions has revived some (I thought) discredited notions about incremental uses of force.

But beyond this question of tactics, some principle of strategic selection is also needed, for two reasons. One is that the body politic cannot be strained without limit. Whatever the fundamental health of our society, the quality of our political leadership is still a contingent variable. On the Democratic side, there is good news and bad news: the good news is the apparent end of the recent liberal taboo against any use of force; the bad news is that this liberal epiphany is still divorced from rigorous analysis of strategic and military realities. Some on the liberal side (Anthony Lewis et al.) will almost certainly revert to their anti-interventionism in any case where the goals are not purely humanitarian. On the Republican side, we have seen in the past year how politically tempting it has been to revive the whole war-powers case against presidential authority as botched interventions have multiplied. The congressional war-powers apparatus is by definition an anti-interventionist cause.

In the post-cold-war era, the public’s judgments (as well as those of our political elite) are clearly still unformed; the President’s margin for error is not all that great. As Somalia and Rwanda together demonstrate, the American people gladly support humanitarian engagements if the costs are not high; once the casualties mount, then the public’s tolerance does not seem to be sustainable if no showing of a more concrete national interest can be made.

Second, a sensible national strategy for the United States has to give priority attention—inescapably—to maintaining the basic structure of international order. This means maintaining the balance of power in Europe and the Far East; it means keeping the newly-powerful Germany and Japan firmly anchored to the international-security structure; it means shielding the world community against what Charles Krauthammer calls the Radical Weapons States (Iran, North Korea, Iraq). How can these not be the fundamental tasks of our national-security policy? The more exalted humanitarian goals are fine—so long as the military forces will still be available to meet the strategic tasks when a threat comes.

The gutting of our defense capabilities must, of course, be reversed. One of the extraordinary anomalies of our current national debate is, indeed, how the proliferation of missions for our troops grows while our capabilities are rapidly shrinking. The timidity so far of both Democratic and Republican leaders on the question of the necessary rearmament is not only a national disgrace; it is also an obvious weakness of any doctrine or aspiration of global activism such as the one Mr. Kagan espouses.

His enthusiasm, to repeat, is the sign of a healthy America. But someone still has to be around to ask the tough questions, case by case, about strategic necessities and military realities.

Peter W. Rodman
Washington, D.C.

[Mr. Rodman served as deputy assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (1987-89) and director of the Policy Planning Staff, State Department (1984-86). He is now director of Middle East Studies at CSIS.]

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To the Editor:

As the single most powerful and influential power to emerge from the cold war, the United States cannot avoid involvements around the globe even if that were the preference of large portions of the American public. In that sense, Robert Kagan’s plea for “global activism” is a case for the obvious.

There are, of course, voices among us that call for retrenchment. There are those who worry about overextension. There are those who would like to use—and have to some extent succeeded in using—the defense budget as a cash cow for a host of other purposes. There are efforts to establish “core” or “vital interests” as the only ones warranting the use of military force and the loss of American lives. But even among these groups there are few who would contend that the U.S. should or could now return to its continental shell.

I am in substantial sympathy with Mr. Kagan’s essential argument. But as he himself notes, in a “world where opposing power is more diffuse,” the choices we must confront have increased in number. Moreover, it is not only power in its various forms that is more diffuse. Without the disciplining effects of large-scale hot and cold wars, the international system as a whole is more complex and diffuse. American power to influence the shape of an eventual new world order is enormous. But it does have limits. And so does America’s wisdom and skill in wielding that power. And even American power and determination cannot repeal the effects of the law of unintended consequences.

So I would hope that our debate about the American role in the post-cold-war world will not degenerate into one between minimalists and maximalists or, even worse, between those who see America tending toward either impotence or omnipotence.

We do need to come to grips with choices, especially where the use of military power is involved. (Vocabulary, incidentally, is not trivial. Activism should not be confused with interventionism. Involvement and engagement are not synonymous with commitment. Leadership does not, or at least not necessarily, mean unilateralism.)

Mr. Kagan generally tends to address the issue of choice as if it were settled. Yet he also says: “Only if [the U.S.] is ready to engage its power when and as needed [emphasis added] can the United States hope to shape the character and direction of the forces of change rather than be overwhelmed by them.” But the “when and as needed” is precisely what serious debate turns on and what, ultimately, affects not only the amount but the content of the defense budget.

Intellectual or even political debate cannot be expected to settle this issue definitively. The Clinton administration almost certainly had no intention on January 20, 1993, of finding itself eighteen months later militarily engaged in the Caribbean, central Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East, and, potentially, Korea. And it seems unlikely that the highly professional leadership of the Clinton Pentagon expected that its Bottom-Up Review, promulgating defense programs to cope with two major regional crises and providing for advanced-technology equipment for the decades ahead, would quickly become financially insupportable.

Mr. Kagan compliments Theodore Roosevelt for being the first to graft “principled ends to the exercise of power.” But Roosevelt also sensed the dangers of extravagant interventionism. “We would interfere” with countries in the Caribbean, he said in his annual message to Congress in December 1904, “only in the last resort, and then only if it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.”

I would guess that many internationalists who opposed invading Haiti might have supported doing so if the present administration came closer to Roosevelt in the precision of its purpose. Even then, it is worth recalling that the admonition of Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, that the U.S. should “aid the people of the [Caribbean Repubics] in establishing and maintaining honest and responsible governments to such extent as may be necessary in each particular case” [emphasis added] did not prevent a bloody and ultimately ineffectual U.S. occupation of Haiti that lasted nineteen years.

It is not clear where Mr. Kagan would have come out on the issue of invading Haiti in order to dislodge the illegal military regime and restore and maintain the democratically-elected—but not notably democratically-inclined—Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The administration, of course, compounded the problem by its demonstrative assembly of naval and ground forces around Haiti, thereby raising serious questions about the credibility of its threats if no invasion had taken place despite the continued sway of the military regime.

Mr. Kagan is silent about the use of American ground forces to help bring order, justice, and a civilized society (to use Theodore Roosevelt’s terminology) to Bosnia. Nor does he address the vexing question of how long and at what level of effort the U.S. should have continued its humanitarian operations in Rwanda since their termination without the establishment of a reasonably stable and humane government could well lead to renewed catastrophe. How many Somalias, in short, would Mr. Kagan accept? Would he extend NATO (i.e., U.S.) commitments eastward and with what kind of force?

This is not meant to criticize Mr. Kagan for lack of specifics in his relatively brief article. It is, rather, to point out that his “when and as needed” criterion for the use of U. S. power is the beginning of the debate, not its end.

Mr. Kagan’s point that American defense spending has become “too low to allow the United States to carry out the many new tasks it will face in the post-cold-war era” is incontestable. So is the proposition that “the increases that will be necessary will hardly bankrupt the country.” But where does this leave us?

If the numbers and types of military operations already undertaken by an administration whose officials “find it hard to overcome the instinctive aversion to the use of power” are anywhere near the norm for the years ahead, would he make any trade-offs with the other capabilities needed to “move America through this next, dangerous phase of history”?

In sum, Mr. Kagan’s next article should start where his last one left off.

Helmut Sonnenfeldt
Washington, D.C.

[Mr. Sonnenfeldt, now at the Brookings Institution, served in the State Department from 1952 to 1977 in a variety of positions, including director of the Office of Research and Analysis for the USSR and Eastern Europe, and counselor.]

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To the Editor:

Robert Kagan correctly emphasizes the difficulty of making any simple distinctions between core interests and peripheral ones. The Sudetenland (or, more precisely, stopping Hitler from dismembering Czechoslovakia) turned out to be a core interest of the Western powers in 1938, although it was peripheral geographically and its importance was not seen clearly at the time.

To be fair, the so-called realists do not deny that small threats can eventually become large ones. That consummate realist, Henry Kissinger, has often commented on the dilemma that frequently confronts statesmen-when problems are easiest to handle, the need to act is usually less obvious; by the time the urgency is clear, the range of options available is much narrower. Serious realists thus acknowledge the difficulty of distinguishing core interests from peripheral ones.

However, true realism also must come to terms with another point that Mr. Kagan emphasizes: the distinction between core interests and peripheral ones must ultimately be the result of a political process, rather than the conclusion of some splendid Metternichian calculation. For the United States that political process will necessarily reflect the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of American democracy, so that the determination of our core interests cannot realistically be based solely on hard-headed calculation, divorced from the characteristic American insistence on an idealistic basis for international action. Paradoxically, hard-headed realism is finally unrealistic.

Mr. Kagan is also right in saying that the real limitations on America’s role in this historical moment are limitations of will rather than of power. The collapse of the Soviet Union has left us with no powerful enemies, with the world’s strongest economic powers as our allies. The problem is not that the relative power of the United States has declined but more nearly the opposite: there appears to be so little power opposing us that there are possibilities of getting involved almost everywhere.

Mr. Kagan seems to feel that this is not a problem. The best way to counter threats to our national existence, he asserts, is not by keeping our “powder dry for the really serious threats,” but instead by resisting “all those who oppose America’s view of world order.” Mr. Kagan argues that the way we handle small threats will determine the way we handle the larger ones, because “once appeasing adversaries and wishing away problems becomes a habit, it will be a hard habit to break.” While acknowledging that “we cannot plug every breach in the world order,” he seems to propose doing almost exactly that: even Haiti and Somalia appear as tests of American will that we cannot afford to fail.

But the choice is not so starkly between either responding to all threats to “world order” or responding only to threats to our national existence. There really is no way to escape the need for some degree of selectivity about where we intervene, particularly if it is a question of intervening with American force.

The need for selectivity arises less from the limitations on American power—although that power is not unlimited—than from the same concern about America’s long-term will power that Mr. Kagan proposes to deal with by making intervention a habit. While it is true, as he says, that the use of force need not be tied to “unmistakable and narrowly defined security interests” in order to gain public support, support for the use of force is not likely to last long—particularly not in the face of American casualties—if it is based solely on an appeal to American idealism, and all the less if such an appeal is itself based on the abstraction of a commitment to “world order.”

During my visits with troops preceding the Persian Gulf war, what impressed me about the young men and women who were prepared to face death for their country was that they seemed to be moved by the thought that “if we don’t do it now, some other Americans will have to do it later, at much higher cost.” Is this an appeal to American self-interest or to our idealism—or both?

If Americans need both a sense of interest and a sense of duty to sustain the use of force, they also need two other things which Mr. Kagan’s argument tends to neglect. They need to believe that others are doing their share; and they don’t like failure (the damage to American will, as well as credibility, from Vietnam and Lebanon are reminders of the price that failure can extract). All of this argues for much greater caution than Mr. Kagan advocates when it comes to putting American servicemen and women in harm’s way in a place, such as Haiti, that is peripheral to American interests and where the chances of success are problematic.

Paul Wolfowitz
Washington, D.C.

[Mr. Wolfowitz, dean of Johns Hopkins’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, was Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, 1989-93, and United States Ambassador to Indonesia, 1986-89.]

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To the Editor:

Robert Kagan and I agree that America should exercise its power “in pursuit of a broad definition of interests—in pursuit, that is, of a more decent world order.” We disagree on two counts: first, whether my agenda for the United States—securing its core interests—is skimpy; and second, whether instability in peripheral areas of the world matters much.

In my article, “The Core vs. the Periphery” (COMMENTARY, December 1993), I argued that American foreign policy during the cold war helped create peace and prosperity among most of the major powers of the world. American leadership, I wrote, “created an open world economy that, more than any other single factor, explains the extraordinary progress toward peace, democracy, and civilized conduct in the industrial nations over the last half-century.”

This represents a massive accomplishment for America’s interests and ideals. It is also a fragile one. If strains in the central balances of power in Europe and East Asia were to deepen, if mercantilist pressures among the great industrial states were to increase, the consequences could be catastrophic.

Power imbalances and economic crises were important ingredients in the collapse of the international system during the 1930’s. Hence I proposed a foreign policy that is highly internationalist and expansive; one that commits the United States to secure its achievements during the cold war and to consolidate the benefits gained by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Such a policy requires the Unites States aggressively to consolidate free trade, capitalism, and constitutional government abroad, providing political and economic assistance to friendly governments and groups. It commits America to be actively engaged in—in many cases formally committed to defend—several major countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Central and Latin America. It requires a formidable military capability, some of which will need to be permanently stationed in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. This is an agenda worthy of the Roman empire at its peak. It is not enough for Robert Kagan.

He wishes that the United States involve itself in peripheral areas of the world, taking up the old imperial quest for order. He points out that during the cold war the United States intervened in the periphery many times, even fought a war in Vietnam, where American interests were “debatable.” Precisely. What did the United States gain from that noble but unwise course? Nothing: the loss of Vietnam was supposed to make all the dominoes of Southeast Asia fall; instead, those countries allied ever more closely with the United States. What did Britain gain from acquiring millions of square miles in the hinterlands of Africa and Asia? What did France gain from its ruinous defense of Algeria? What did the Soviet Union gain from its bloody efforts in Afghanistan?

Mr. Kagan does not seem to deny that crises on the periphery are “low-stakes issues.” His rationale for universal activism is different: since we really cannot distinguish between important and peripheral interests, we should intervene everywhere. This startling assertion would seem to preclude the need for any strategic analysis whatsoever. It is true that international relations is not an exact science and serious people can, have, and will disagree over what constitutes an important American interest—Bosnia is an example of a country that is “on the cusp” in such debates—but surely the answer is not to throw up one’s hands and intervene everywhere just to be safe.

In fact, Mr. Kagan himself seems quite able to distinguish between “high-stakes” and “small-stakes” issues; almost all the potential problems he lists as worrisome—which would, I agreee, require an American response—involve a resurgent threat from a great power: Russia, China, Japan, and Germany. On the other hand, almost all the current crises he lists—Somalia Haiti, Serbia—involve small, dysfunctional countries that can cause trouble, even bloodshed, in their neighborhoods, but do not pose a serious threat to the broader region. There will always be points of instability in the world; to see all of them, indiscriminately, as “tests of American strength, character, and endurance essential to the preservation of a more stable world order” is to invite the United States to engage in the limitless and futile business of ordering the world. This is a task for world federalism, not American foreign policy.

Finally, Mr. Kagan asserts that his vision of the world should find a natural home in the Republican party. History suggests otherwise. From Versailles to Haiti, the Republican party has always been the party of prudence in foreign policy. Theodore Roosevelt, whom Mr. Kagan cites approvingly, was once asked what he thought of Wood-row Wilson’s belief that America should be willing to intervene in Europe if rules of “world order” were violated. He scornfully inquired whether this meant that the United States should go to war “every time a Jugoslav wishes to slap a Czechoslav in the face.” TR believed in, and spoke the language of, spheres of influence and national interests, rather than world order and global activism. With the end of the cold war—in which ideological and strategic lines crisscrossed—the Republican party will return to its internationalist, but realist, roots.

William F. Buckley, Jr. once said that the defining element of conservatism is realism: realism about the limits of state power, the malleability of human beings and societies, the intractable nature of a world of nation-states. Mr. Kagan has a Wilsonian vision that sees governmental power as omnipotent, rejects the need to set priorities, advocates the social engineering of complex and ancient societies, and expects that these good intentions coupled with state power can transform the world. Sounds like a job for the Democrats.

Fareed Zakaria
New York City

[Mr. Zakaria is managing editor of Foreign Affairs.]

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Robert Kagan writes:

My goal in making a case for global activism was, as Elliott Abrams notes, to push against what seemed to me an increasing drift, especially among conservatives and Republicans, away from what over the last twenty years had been an expansive view of America’s role in the world. My main point was that the end of the cold war, and the collapse of our long-time foe, had neither ended the requirement for an active, vigilant foreign and defense policy nor deprived the American people of an important goal in foreign affairs: the maintenance of a decent world order conducive to American material and philosophical interests. I thus argued against the idea that only vital, core interests were worth engaging our attention and our power, and I questioned whether the divide between core and periphery was as clear and determinative as some have claimed.

Helmut Sonnenfeldt says I have made a case for the obvious. I agree. Most of those who have been kind enough to respond to my article share the conviction, as Francis Fukuyama eloquently puts it, “that the United States should be unafraid to apply its power in the world, and that there is need for a kind of world order which only a militarily dominant great power can provide.” But I am less sure than Mr. Sonnenfeldt that such an expansive view of America’s role dominates the current discussion.

The case for a more limited set of goals—tied to the defense of identifiable vital interests—has been powerfully made by leading conservative foreign-policy theorists from Owen Harries to Henry Kissinger to Jeane Kirkpatrick. Neither isolationists nor neo-isolationists, they have simply opposed shouldering the burden of promoting an American-style world order except against those threats which rather directly imperil American security. The very idea of the United States as “the sole remaining superpower,” Harries has recently written, is an anachronism in the post-cold-war era. The United States has ceased to be such a power “because its circumstances and its interests no longer require or permit it to be one.” Kissinger advises us, as he did in the 1970’s, to “learn the limits of our capacities.” Jeane Kirkpatrick has suggested that “with ‘normal’ times, we can again become a normal nation.”

Such arguments have force and appeal. The difference between their view and mine is not the difference between isolationism and crusading idealism, but, as Aaron L. Friedberg points out, between two different perspectives on what it means to be a world power. I think most of my respondents agree with Mr. Friedberg and Peter W. Rodman that this is a debate worth having, even if they do not fully share my perspective.

Some of my respondents have criticized me for apparently advocating constant intervention everywhere and at all times. I did not intend to suggest any such thing, but I obviously erred in not making it clear that a policy of global activism can and should be conducted with as much prudence as any other kind of policy. Let me now say what I had thought it unnecessary to have to say in my article. I, too, believe the United States cannot intervene any time

¹ It will not do to argue that the United States moved against Manuel Noriega because he sold drugs, or threatened the Canal, or harmed Americans in Panama. Efforts to oust Noriega began when he refused to turn over power to elected democratic presidents in the early and mid-1980’s. The indictment against Noriega for narcotics trafficking actually worked against efforts to remove him in 1988—as Elliott Abrams knows better than anyone. As for the Canal, Noriega consistently went out of his way to declare that he would not threaten it, which was one reason the American military, especially in Panama, opposed any efforts to remove him. The harming of Americans in Panama came only after the United States had launched a campaign to force Noriega from power.