W: Grand Strategist?

John Lewis Gaddis has proclaimed W a grand strategist in the company of John Quicy Adams and Franklin D. Roosevelt. That is quite a stretch. Gaddis' dismissal of the reconstruction of Germany and Japan following WWII as "badly planned" does not hold up. The jury is still out on the reconstruction of Iraq. The verdict of history on the reconstruction of Germany and Japan is that the United States (and the Allies) were the most successful victors ever in the aftermath of war. Nonetheless, Gaddis is audacious. If this is (fair & balanced) revisionism, so be it.

[The Boston Globe]
Grand old policy
A scholar argues that Bush's doctrine of preemption has deep roots in American history
By Laura Secor

EVERY PRESIDENT makes foreign policy. Only a select few, over the sweep of history, design what scholars term grand strategy.

Grand strategy is the blueprint from which policy follows. It envisions a country's mission, defines its interests, and sets its priorities. Part of grand strategy's grandeur lies in its durability: A single grand strategy can shape decades, even centuries, of policy.

Who, then, have been the great grand strategists among American statesmen? According to a slim forthcoming volume by John Lewis Gaddis, the Yale historian whom many describe as the dean of Cold War studies and one of the nation's most eminent diplomatic historians, they are John Quincy Adams, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and George W. Bush.

Gaddis knows the latter name may bring a number of his colleagues up short. Critics charge that President Bush is a lightweight, Gaddis laments, and they do so because the president is a generalist who prefers the big picture to its details. Over lunch at Mory's, Yale's tweedy private dining club, Gaddis suggests that academics underrate Bush because they overvalue specialized knowledge. In reality, as his new book asserts, after Sept. 11, 2001, Bush underwent "one of the most surprising transformations of an underrated national leader since Prince Hal became Henry V."

The Bush doctrine is more serious and sophisticated than its critics acknowledge -- but it is also less novel, Gaddis maintains. Three of its core principles -- preemptive war, unilateralism, and American hegemony -- actually hark back to the early 19th century, to the time of John Quincy Adams.

. . .

Gaddis begins Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Harvard, March) with the observation that thanks to its geographical isolation, the United States has experienced only three surprise attacks on its soil: the British burning of Washington in 1814, Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the terrorist attacks in 2001. Each time, American leaders responded by rethinking grand strategy.

After the British attack on Washington, Gaddis recounts, John Quincy Adams, then secretary of state to James Monroe, perceived that weakly governed states along US borders invited dangers, whether from marauding bands of Native Americans, pirates, and escaped slaves in Florida (before General Andrew Jackson invaded it in 1817), or from European powers who might seize vulnerable territories such as California as staging grounds from which to threaten the United States. And so America achieved its security through territorial expansion -- by filling a perceived power vacuum before hostile powers could do so. Gaddis describes the invasions of such territories as "preemptive."

Adams's grand strategy remained in force throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. But its emphasis on preemption and unilateralism (the dictate that the United States had best avoid "entangling alliances") fell by the wayside after World War II. These were not doctrines fitting to the new position the United States occupied in the postwar world -- one where the European powers had been decimated, America possessed a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and the Soviet Union, an erstwhile ally, had become a powerful new adversary.

Franklin D. Roosevelt's grand strategy for the postwar era was to secure the United States by securing the world. Free markets and self-determination would safeguard against future European wars. But FDR was also a hardheaded strategist who never intended to relinquish the United States' new hold on power. He imagined that the world's strongest states -- the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China -- would function as "four policemen" to maintain the peace. The United Nations Security Council made that arrangement, as Gaddis wrote in 1972, "less repugnant to internationalists."

The postwar United States extended its sphere of influence partly through generous economic aid, partly through the alliance system, and largely by the consent of the states in its orbit. So long as the Soviet Union was around, small states always knew that there was something worse than American domination.

The end of the Cold War changed all that -- and found the United States without a grand strategy. President Bill Clinton, says Gaddis, thought that "globalization and democratization were irreversible processes, therefore we didn't need a grand strategy. Clinton said as much at one point. I think that was shallow. I think they were asleep at the switch."

Enter Prince Hal. The Bush administration, marvels Gaddis, undertook a decisive and courageous reassessment of American grand strategy following the shock of the 9/11 attacks. At his doctrine's center, Bush placed the democratization of the Middle East and the urgent need to prevent terrorists and rogue states from getting nuclear weapons. Bush also boldly rejected the constraints of an outmoded international system that was really nothing more than a "snapshot of the configuration of power that existed in 1945," Gaddis says.

Despite the dark predictions of critics, Gaddis writes, so far the military action in Iraq has produced "a modest improvement in American and global economic conditions; an intensified dialogue within the Arab world about political reform; a withdrawal of American forces from Saudi Arabia . . .; and an increasing nervousness on the part of the Syrian and Iranian governments as they contemplated the consequences of being surrounded by American clients or surrogates." Indeed, Gaddis writes, the United States has emerged "as a more powerful and purposeful actor within the international system than it had been on Sept. 11, 2001."

That's not to say that the Bush administration has behaved flawlessly. Gaddis says, "They don't give enough weight to how frightening it can be if you have that much power and then you deploy it, and you deploy language foolishly." Nonetheless, he stresses, "I do take them very seriously. I do think Bush is in charge himself, and has been very underrated as a leader in all of this just as Ronald Reagan was underrated."

. . .

In defending the soundness and wisdom of a foreign policy vision many academics decry, Gaddis finds himself in a familiar position. He has long taken what is known as the orthodox position in his native field of Cold War studies, arguing that the Soviet Union's rapacious expansionism rendered the Cold War inevitable. Starting as early as the 1950s, revisionist historians, including William Appleman Williams, Walter Lafeber, Gabriel Kolko, and others offered the countervailing view that the United States, too, had something to gain from extending its dominion over half the world: namely, access to markets. And in pursuing such interests, the United States often trod upon legitimate Soviet security concerns.

Gaddis's first book, published in 1972, considered the revisionist perspective but ended by rejecting it. The focus on economic motives for American behavior was reductive, he argued then. And if anything, FDR had overestimated Josef Stalin's goodwill, leading him to respond too weakly to Soviet expansion.

Revisionists bristled at Gaddis's critique, while hardline orthodox historians faulted Gaddis for speculating, at the book's end, that "leaders of both superpowers sought peace, but in doing so yielded to considerations which . . . made a resolution of differences impossible."

When the end of the Cold War opened up a trove of new documents from the Eastern bloc, Gaddis found himself reevaluating such conclusions. He repudiated his earlier assumption, typical of the "realist" school of political science, that the internal nature of states had little effect on how they behaved in the world. "I think that's dead wrong, in the light of new evidence," he says today.

In his 1997 book We Now Know, Gaddis argued that the Cold War emanated from the very nature of the Soviet Union: from the way it coerced satellite states into its orbit; from its brittle, inflexible alliances; from Stalin's paranoid and confrontational personality; from the "geriatric over-exertion" of aging Kremlin bureaucrats who fancied themselves great friends of Latin American revolutionaries; and from genuine ideological romanticism that blinded Soviet leaders to their own interests.

Meanwhile, Gaddis recounted, American-style democracy proved magnetic. The United States dominated its sphere by consent and established enduring alliances the Soviets hadn't foreseen.

Hailed as "brilliant" by reviewer David Hendrickson in Foreign Affairs, We Now Know also met with criticism among Cold War historians who felt Gaddis had overreached. (One reviewer said the book would've been more aptly titled "What I Now Think.") The documents, after all, were still pouring out, many of them untranslated.

. . .

If feelings ran strong about the Cold War in `97, Gaddis can expect an even more intense response to his defense of the Bush doctrine.

Is the sort of 19th-century preemption Gaddis describes really comparable to the Bush policies of today? Bard College historian James Chace, author of an acclaimed biography of Dean Acheson, suggests that the 19th-century wars of expansion are only loosely classifiable as preemption. A more apposite comparison to the Bush policies would be President Woodrow Wilson's incursions into Mexico in 1914 and `16, when Mexican revolutionaries were breaching the US border. Wilson sought to teach the Mexicans to "elect good men" -- in other words, he hoped to effect regime change. The project failed.

Chace notes that the United States explicitly rejected striking preemptively both times it was considered during the Cold War: when the Soviets first tested an atomic bomb in 1949, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis in `62. In the latter case it was decided, recalls Chace, that "we just don't do that."

Gaddis agrees that preemption was considered uncivilized during the Cold War. But today, the United States enjoys unchallenged global supremacy. Policies that were risky when the Soviets were around are now thinkable.

According to Gaddis, then, the big innovations of the Bush doctrine are the ones most reminiscent of the 19th century: Bush has revived preemption and backed away from institutional alliance structures. Everything old is new again.

Or not quite. What is perhaps most important about the Bush doctrine is also very specific to its era, says Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the forthcoming "Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk" (Knopf, April): It shifts the geographical center of American strategy.

"The Cold War was fundamentally about Europe," says Mead. "Whatever happened anywhere in the world, the basic question was how it would affect the standoff with the Soviets in Europe. Now the Bush people are saying that whatever happens anywhere in the world, the question is, how will it affect the Middle East and the war on terror?"

In putting so much emphasis on what's old in the Bush doctrine, does Gaddis risk losing sight of what's new? Historical analogies, after all, can obscure as much as they illuminate. So it seems when I ask Gaddis why, if democratization is central to the Bush doctrine, the administration failed to plan for the occupation and transition to democratic sovereignty in Iraq.

That's "not surprising," says Gaddis insouciantly. After all, he notes, the reconstruction efforts in Japan and Germany were badly planned as well.

Laura Secor is the staff writer for Ideas.

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