The transformation of national security

National Interest, The, Spring, 2003 by Philip Zelikow

Five Redefinitions

PERHAPS THE key question of international politics and U.S. national security policy today is whether a genuinely new era has dawned since the end of the Cold War. It has. The attacks of September 11, 2001 did not create the new era, but they were a catalytic moment in our recognition of it. Like previous shocks to the United States in June 1940, December 1941 or June 1950, this shock gave emerging trends a form, brought them into mass consciousness, and forced upon us the task of defining a comprehensive national response.

Such a definition appears in the Bush Administration's recently published National Security Strategy of the United States. (1) This essay draws out some of the ideas that appear to undergird the administration's emerging strategy. It focuses on five essential redefinitions of what national security means for the United States in the 21St century--but first a note about the rhetoric of empire that has come to dominate much current discussion.

The Distraction of Empire

ALL NATIONAL security strategies start with a mental image of the world. The image of the new era is properly that of a modern and truly pluralistic international system. In the traditional world, populations, governance, commerce, culture and habits of life evolved slowly and changed gradually. The break point between this traditional world and that of modernity arrives, at different times for different societies, when social and technological change severs the links that had defined the relationships between humanity and the physical resources of the earth; shatters the hitherto ageless ceilings on productivity enforced by the physical limits of humans, animals, wind and water; and transforms our ability to communicate across distances, communities and nations.

These transformations acquired momentum in the 18th century and spread in the 19th until, by the year 1900, the modern world extended to Europe, North America and to their limited veins of settlement and commerce stretched out over the rest of the planet. The 20th century saw the further, nearly global extension of modernity and wrenching, worldwide efforts to adjust to its impact. Indeed, such has been the shock to many societies that the last century has been dominated by great contests over how to conceive, organize and provide moral justification and political order for modern industrial nations.

Those great contests have now subsided. The world is no longer so broken and divided. The militant utopias of class, nation and race have been defeated and discredited. Modernity means that change itself becomes the constant, and the challenge of change has not disappeared. Its pressures have instead been internalized within every society trying to adapt to a quickening pace of change. In other words, today's battle lines are less international and more transnational.

In dealing with these pressures, some see the United States as a new source of world order--fearing or welcoming that prospect. This accounts in part for the current popularity of "empire" as a reigning metaphor for America's ambitions. The metaphor is seductive, yet vicious.

What is an empire? Once upon a time, "empire" was casually applied as a positive expression, as with Jefferson's "empire of liberty." In recent years "empire" has been used to describe--often with an edge--any circumstance where a powerful country exerts influence over lesser powers, whether direct or indirect, physical, cultural or commercial. This shallow equation of all sorts of economic and cultural influences with "imperialism" was first popularized about a hundred years ago by writers reacting to Britain's war against the Boers in South Africa. John Atkinson Hobson, for example, who had an immense influence on Vladimir Lenin, condemned economic imperialism as a ruling force in the world. Hobson also worked a strong element of his anti-Semitism into his theories, seeing a cabal of Jewish bankers and merchants lurking behind Britain's excesses.

The same distasteful mixture of bad thinking was prominent after World War I. Many writers in Europe, especially in the defeated nations, decried the new "Anglo-Saxon empire" that they accused Britain and America--and the Jews, of course--of having created. (2) The same fetid intellectual waters seep from this old gutter into much anti-American commentary today.

Sadly, even some American conservatives have joined the new anti-imperialists in seeing the United States as the metro-pole of a world empire. The appeal is understandable. After all, there is a certain gratification in imagining that one is the successor to emperors and proconsuls of past ages, a certain pleasure in opening such a dusty, venerable chest of ideas about how to sort out the affairs of faraway peoples.

But these imperial metaphors, of whatever provenance, do not enrich our understanding; they impoverish it. They use a metaphor of how to rule others when the problem is how to persuade and lead them. Real imperial power is sovereign power. Sovereigns rule, and a ruler is not just the most powerful among diverse interest groups. Sovereignty means a direct monopoly control over the organization and use of armed might. It means direct control over the administration of justice and the definition thereof. It means control over what is bought and sold, the terms of trade and the permission to trade, to the limit of the ruler's desires and capacities.