Review Essay

Samson or Goliath? Gulliver After Iraq

Linda B.Miller
Wellesley College/Brown University/USA
E-mail Linda_Miller@brown.edu

The Opportunity
Richard Haass
New York: Public Affairs, 2005, 242 pp.
$25.00 hardcover

The New American Militarism

Andrew J. Bacevich
New York: Oxford, 2005, 270 pp.
$28.00 hardcover

Taming American Power

Stephen M. Walt
New York: W.W. Norton, 2005, 303 pp.
$27.95 hardcover

The Case for Goliath

Michael Mandelbaum
New York: Public Affairs, 2005, 283 pp.
$26.00 hardcover

International Politics (2006)

Introduction

In the long run, will the Iraq war, regardless of its outcome, lead to
more opportunities for the U.S. to exercise its unprecedented power
at home and abroad? Or will the protracted war lead to a set of a more
modest foreign policy goals for Washington, one more in keeping with
the domestic roots of isolationism in American political history? These
are among the provocative questions several new books on U.S.
foreign policy pose as the war grinds on with no exit strategy evident.
 For those who see “opportunity”, the fact that the U.S. is “the
sole remaining superpower”, a “benevolent hegemon”, one destined
to exert control in all spheres of global politics, economics, culture and
military affairs remains valid for the forseeable future. “Opportunity”
exists for institutionalizing American advantages with proper
leadership. For those who see Iraq as constituting enduring
constraints on American power, the insurgent phase of the war has put
paid to extravangant notions of “empire”. No amount of sustained
nuanced diplomatic practice now can rescue Washington from facing
the international consequences of having embarked on the ill fated war
of choice in the first place. Damage control has replaced more
innovative postures, at least for now.

This debate plays out with authors producing some of the same
evidence to reach opposite conclusions. Rarely do writers confront
each other directly, so that obervers must be the ones to point out
their differences and possible agreement, as I will do in this essay.

Optimism and Pessimism

Richard Haass, former government official and policy planner in the

State Department and current President of the Council on Foreign
Relations, is the leading exponent of “opportunity” in the aftermath
of the Iraq war. In an extended essay entitled The Opportunity, he
argues convincingly that tradditional ad hoc approaches to a multitude
of global problems ranging from HIV/AIDS to terrorism is unworthy of
a superpower. With sterling Republican credentials and a straight-
forward writing style, Haass is well-positioned to have his suggestions
received appreciatively in Washington, at least in the State
Department where longer range thinking is more likely than in the
Bush White House. He moves methodically from outlining the
collection of challenges or threats including terrorism and proliferation
of nuclear weapons to advocating a diplomatic strategy based largely
on persuasion. He believes that this approach might work in the
absence of great power animosities and in the presence of a growing
number of democratic governments all over the globe, but only if U.S.
leadership is imaginative as well as consistent.

While there is little that is new here, Haass’s call for

“integration”, which would replace his earlier preference for
“disaggregation”, could be appealing to domestic elites who would like
to think that an overall strategic vision would bring together the
disparate strands of foreign policy that seem to be working at cross
purposes recently or perhaps chronically.Yet this difference in time
perspective is critical to evaluating whether Haass’s appeal has staying
power. If, in fact, U.S. foreign policy is reactive rather than proactive
by habit, then the idea of sustaining “integration” when it bumps up
against the reality of anti-Americanism is doomed to irrelevance.
Moreover, rival policy goals, even if they do not rise to the level or
war-fighting are another obstacle. Why, given the mistakes of the Iraq
war, should political leaders in other societies find America’s grand
designs persuasive?

Why, given their own domestic pressures and historical

experiences, should Chinese, Indian, Russian, French, German,
Japanese, or Brazlian leaders look to Washington for leadership when
the U.S. foreign policy agenda still downgrades international
institutions where these figures have sought to attain their own goals?
When internal disarray in U.S. government agencies dooms many
worthwhile actions in economic and social policy, why should foreign
leaders believe that either the U.S. executive or legislative branches
share the perspectives of others beyond America’s porous geographical
borders? Does diminished sovereignty really offer any solutions to
those who think that their own internal challenges are so
preoccupying that bandwagoning with or against the U.S. is simply a
waste of time and effort? Haass acknowledges the new importance of
non-state actors in world politics but his revised realist agenda rests
primarily on his assessment of government to government relations in
the next decade. In projecting a more tolerable future, Haass is
looking back at a seemingly well-organized past, but he tends to
downplay the conflicts that took their toll then, despite the U.S.
victory in the cold war.(1) In particular, he has little to say about
executive power and its abuses, an increasingly important irritant in
America’s potential hard and soft power projection.

Andrew Bacevich, a former military official turned academic,

provides a rationale for remedying what has gone wrong in American
political life before even tackling Haass’s agenda. He finds the roots
of current aimlessness in foreign policy in the destructive residue of
the 1960s culture wars. In The New American Militarism, he argues
that the roots of the phenomenon lie in the Vietnam era, not only in
the war itself, but also in domestic reactions to the war, especially in
its class and race bases. For Bacevich, Haass’s call for American-led
“integration” smacks too much of revived Wilsonianism, especially the
tendency to certainty and American exceptionalism. Despite his
avowed conservative leanings, Bacevich argues that remaking the
world in the America image could be dangerous if it were to rest on
American military power, on coercion rather than persuasion,
especially in circumstances of undeclared wars and never-ending
threats. Yet in the absence of other all-encompassing theories, he
explains why the new militarism succeeded in joining the disparate
strands of domestic and foreign policy from the 1960s onwards. This
alone makes his book original and required reading.

Bacevich’s military background provides other insights often

overlooked. For example. he demonstrates the paradoxes that
overtook the conclusions highly placed military personnel drew from
the Vietnam debacle. Determined never to go to war again without
popular support, the generals made sure that reserve forces would
have to participate in order to bring the U.S. public along, yet decades
later such reserves were hardly a brake on civilian executive action in
Iraq. Quite the reverse. Similarly, mllitary authorites stopped teaching
and researching counter-insurgency tactics and strategy after Vietnam
only to find themselves needing this expertise after the Iraq invasion.
Who is at fault? Civilians? Generals? Bacevich explains that the failure
to prepare for ethnic strife, genocide, failed states, civil war, torture,
injustice and terror abroad cannot be laid at the foot of any single
group in American society at home but must be seen as a collective
failure.

The neoconservative project that culminated and crashed in

Iraq was not the result of some deviant strand in political culture but
a logical outgrowth of earlier nationalist thrusts that were thought to
have ended the Cold War on favorable terms for the U.S. Added to the
emotional mix was the religious element evangelicals imparted to
politics in the American South and West as the population shifted to
those warmer regions in the 1980s in the Reagan era. The appeal of
mlitarism to these patriots cannot be overstated. The Bush Doctrine
brought together seemingly disparate American cultural streams into a
coherent action plan, one clearly forward looking until its
confrontation with reality in the Middle East. If Bacevich is right, the
world will be dealing with the messy aftermath for some years to
come. This could be an opportunity, as Haass insists, or it could mean
statis, as Bacevich thinks. Turmoil is likely in the short run at least.

For optimists who think that the Iraq war will not detract from
American power and influence globally in the long term, Haass’s sense
of opportunity makes considerable sense. For pessimists who think the
Iraq war is the culmination of decades of U.S. arrogance and
ignorance, reinforced by the Vietnam residue, Bacevich’s warnings
speak volumes.

Practice and Theory

Stephen Walt, with academic and policy advising credentials of a

somewhat a different sort, finds that neither Haass’s optimism nor
Bacevich’s pessism captures the past, present or future of U.S. foreign
policy because their analyses begin and end at home primarily, rather
than in the convulted arenas abroad where supporters and opponents
of America reside. His principal aim in Taming American Power is to
uncover how and why other governments and individuals seek to
circumscibe or thwart Washington’s initiatives. He also explains what,
if anything, may be done about it.

Iraq is a key example throughout the book which ranges far and
wide over familiar terrain. Well-written and researched, Walt’s analysis
never veers far from his central concern which is the lack of connection
between ends and means. For this critical failing, he blames U.S.
political leaders primarily but not exclusively, as he depicts the often
clumsy yet successful efforts of other leaders who try to exploit U.S.
preferences, especially successive Israeli governments. Walt is
skeptical of the assertion that the U.S. in an empire, formal or
informal, because that formulation obscures the ways in which
resistance to Washington’s suggestions or dictates develops and
metasizes with advanced communications. (2)

Walt’s careful depiction of balancing, balking, binding, bonding,

bandwagoning or blackmail as commonly employed strategies
demonstrates how realism needs updating as an explanation of
state behavior, one deeply embedded in both U.S. policymaking and
academic institutions. He does not ignore the growing influence of
non-state actors but chooses to concentrate on state behavior since he
argues that state agents still constitute the major players in the U.S.
foreign policy drama. In fact, non-state actors could and do employ
some of the same tactics as states in their complicated relations with
Washington. (3) More to the point is his argument that lobbies now
penetrate the U.S. political system, though Israel’s success in this
respect is often exaggerated. His idea that Indian and Armenian
lobbies might follow is a bit premature, to say the least, given their
present numbers and level of organization in their American disasporas
vis a vis American Jews.
 At bottom, Walt agrees with Haass and Bacevich that leadership
could be the variable that determines whether American power is seen
as overbearing and threatening or benign and stabilizing for the
international system as a whole. He is less optimistic than Haass and
less pessimistic than Bacevich. None of the three knows the timeline
for repairing bilateral relationships after Iraq and therefore they do not
speculate about it. Implicit in their books is the sense that something
is amiss, if not rotten, in the state of U.S. foreign policy and something
more is required to get things back on track in the early 21st century.

For now, as Walt writes, opportunity consists of correctly

identifying and rectifying the problems. Among the most pressing,
he insists, are re-funding the international affairs budget, re-
energizing the study of foreign languages and cultures, and revitalizing
the corps of foreign affairs specialists in government. These practical
steps must precede any rearrangement of global relationships if
American primacy is to continue and be welcomed or at least tolerated
by others. This recipe is obvious, but no less important than other
more grandiose schemes of rehabilitation for U.S. foreign policy.

By contrast, Michael Mandelbaum, in The Case for Goliath thinks

that other scholars ignore an important reality which transcends
worries about U.S. hegemony and its discontents. He argues that
American foreign policy, however clumsy, allows the U.S. to perform
tasks in world politics that others require in both the security and
economic realms. Quite the opposite of imperial rule, American
behavior furnishes global public goods in places like the Balkans and
the Middle East. Is this assertion convincing when China and others
are underwriting the financial costs of U.S. interventions? Is it possible
that the cold war impoverished the U.S.in the long term even though
the short term outcome was “victory’? Are the rise of India and China
via globalization compatible with American dominance? Is the
economic sphere an arena where Washington has wanted less
unilateral control since 1945 rather than more? To be sure,
institutional multilateralism lags behind in the security domain,
but it is not entirely absent. Indeed, it has flourished in global
economic affairs through organizations like the WTO and the EU. (4)

Mandelbaum sees parallels between the humanitarian

focus of U.S. foreign policy in the 1990s and the preventive war
focus of the 2001-2006 era. He calls both practices “radical
innovations” and notes that both brought the U.S. direct and
unwelcome responsibilty for nation or state building. This is a
worthwhile insight because it indicates more continuity in outcomes
than many other observers accept when they strive to contrast the
Clinton and Bush presidencies. What stands out from his analysis is
the conclusion that false analogies have played too important a role,
especially in the suggestions that post conflict Iraq would resemble
Germany and Japan in their reconstruction phases after World War II.

Mandelbaum acknowleges that many of America’s recent

exertions have lacked international legitimacy. He finds this
lacunae “puzzling and ominous” (p.145). Yet Walt’s findings help
explain this dilemma. When American policymakers fail to
explain their goals and means, when they fail to restrain their
darker impulses or respond to others’ anxieties, reactions are often
swift and hostile given advance communications. As American political
leaders continue to learn, lesser players in traditional pecking orders
are not without resources to impede or frustrate Washington’s grand
designs. This is true not just for those with impressive resident lobbies
in Washington.

America’s capacity to serve as the world’s government,

Mandelbaum’s definition of the present U.S. role, will depend largely
on American public opinion, a notoriously fragmented factor. Elite
turf battles, such as those that still afflict the Iraq conflict, will
continue under the watchful gaze of the attentive public. Yet the
larger population also shapes the contours within which elites
operate. Once aroused, often in war, this unpredictable group will also
demand its due in electoral contests. Interests will still prevail over
values, despite President Bush’s confident assessment that these two
are now inseparable.

Like Haass, Mandelbaum relishes a sweeping review of the

recent past and likely future of American foreign policy, one that leaps
over the inconvenient present Bacevich and Walt dissect more
patiently. By suggesting that only a true world government could
replace American power (p.196), Mandelbaum sets the bar high,
perhaps too high. Of course, serious students of world politics are right
to be scornful of simply “muddling through” as a foreign policy stance.
But governments often do precisely that, no matter how elevated
their rhetoric. Perhaps the answer for the seeming conundrum is the
hope that “international society”, expressed in evolving global norms,
will pick up some of the slack. In his discussion of this desirable
progression, Mandelbaum thinks that solutions to nuclear profileration
or poverty could start here and then move to the governmental level
over the decades. In the interim, he asserts that others may criticize
American’s role but will miss it when and if it is gone. It is possible to
agree with the second assertion about the U.S. while suspending
judgement on the likelihood of the first coming to pass in the broader
international society.

Conclusion

The outpouring of new works on American foreign policy is

understandable as the cold war and its messy aftermath recedes
from scrutiny. As always, the need to make sense of the fateful
choices American leaders make that affect the rest of the world is
urgent. The frequent declaration of obervers that the U.S. is uniquely
powerful is not productive unless it is acommpanied by thorough going
critiques of the day to day implementation of those choices like that
Walt and Bacevich provide. Understanding the larger setting within
which both policy formulation and execution take place is also critical
as Haass and Mandelbaum demonstrate. Will any of these analyses
be read then years from now? If their main points reflect U.S.
foreign policy on the ground as well as in the heads of theorists
the answer is yes. If, in fact, future U.S. leaders return to a more
modest set of attainable goals and less frequently used coercive
means, these books will assist in the enlargement of the attentive
public that demands more accountability and less deniability from its
political leadership.

Here American domestic politics will be as critical as the

reactions of publics in other countries. As well, the growing
universe of non-state actors with their own agendas and procedures
will find more space in popular and scholarly texts as befits their
growing importance in delivering public goods, along with states.
Indeed, the search for Big Ideas in U.S. foreign policy, ther quest for
master narratives, will be deficient if it does not include these new
agents.

What the end of the cold war and 9/11 has permitted is a more
expansive canvas on which to paint the light and shadow of
globalization and terrorism as they affect different players differently.
These four authors offer important guideposts, if not roadmaps, in
these interesting times. Wisely, they avoid the trap of “empire versus
republic” as a starting point for their critiques, one that has attracted
many writers since 1989. Even more sagely, they realize that this
discussion has led to dead ends analytically. Facile but misleading
comparisons with Britain and Rome have obscured the more important
demographic and technological advantages that give the U.S. its
stature but also perhaps its vulnerability. As a result, Gulliver remains
Goliath for now.In Iraq, though, Samson is still a possible fate.

Notes

1. See, for a revised estimation, John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War,
New York, The Penguin Press, 2005. See also Tony Judt, “A Story Still
To Be Told”, The New York Review of Books, March 23, 2006, pp.11-
15.

2. Among several cogent treatments, see David C. Hendrickson,”The

Curious Case of American Hegemony: Imperial Ambitions and National
Decline”, World Policy Journal, Vol. XXII, No. 2, Summer, 2005, pp.1-
22.

3. Michael A.Cohen and Maria Figueroa Kupcu, “Privatizing Foreign

Policy”, World Policy Journal, Vol. XXII, No. 3, Fall. 2005, pp. 34-52.

4. John Gray, “The Mirage of Empire”, The New York Review of Books,
January 12, 2006, pp. 4-8.

References

Anonymous. (2004) Imperial Hubris, Washington, D.C.:Brassey’s Inc.

Cox, M., et.al. (eds) (2000) American Democracy Promotion, New
York: Oxford.
Feldman, N. (2004) What We Owe Iraq, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press
Ferguson, N. (2004) Colossus, New York: Penguin Press
Hoffmann, S. (2004) Gulliver Unbound, Boulder, Co: Rowman and
Littlefield
Mann, J. (2004) The Rise of the Vulcans, New York: The Penguin Press
Nye, J. (2004) Soft Power, New York: Public Affairs
Packer, G. (2005) The Assassins’ Gate, New York: Free Press
Todd, E. (2003) After the Empire, New York: Columbia University
Press
About the Author

Linda B. Miller (Ph.D., Columbia University) is Professor of Political

Science, Emerita, at Wellesley College and Adjunct Professor of
International Studies (Research) at the Watson Institute of Brown
University. From 1999-2002, she edited International Studies Review.
She has research interests in American foreign policy, world politics,
European affairs and the Middle East. Widely published, her articles
and reviews have appeared in International Affairs, Review of
International Studies, World Politics, American Journal of International
Law, International History Review, Brown Journal of World Affairs,
Survival, Ethics and International Affairs, The World Today, The
Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, Daedalus, International
Security, Journal of Common Market Studies, Millennium, Middle East
Review, and Polity, among others. Her books include World Order and
Local Disorder, published by Princeton University Press in 1967. With
Michael J. Smith, she co-authored and co-edited Ideas and Ideals:
Essays in Honor of Stanley Hoffmann, published by Westview Press in
1993.