We have seen five proposals for a new strategic paradigm for the United States—the New Nationalism, the New Internationalism, the New Evangelism, the New Realism, the New Leadership. None has yet captured a consensus. This failure has prompted some to suggest that the world is simply too complicated now for a single paradigm.* “No doctrine,” Richard Haass has written in a wittily titled article, “Paradigm Lost,” “can hope to provide a lens through which to view most events.”32
The first thing to be said about these proffered “new paradigms,” however, is that they are not paradigms at all. In fact, the entire intellectual enterprise that has yielded these proposals has been triggered by a profound misunderstanding as to what has been lost and what can serve to replace it. The source of this misunderstanding may perhaps be traced, ironically, to the idea that the world inherited by U.S. administrations after the Long War is “a more complex place than what came before.” According to this account presidents from Truman to Reagan had the comforting stability of the Cold War to provide a consistent and continuous context for foreign policy, but the aftermath of that war has not yet yielded a similar clarity. In the place of containment—the old “paradigm” through which all political events were mediated—there is only confusion, because the antinomies on which containment depended (the global competition of the West and the Soviet Union, the totalitarian ambition of communist ideology versus the pluralistic vision of the West) have also collapsed.33 Perhaps until new threats against which the United States must contend are themselves clarified, its political class will be unable to decide what paradigm is to replace containment—or perhaps the threats are so diffuse that, as Haass suggests, no single paradigm will do.
What is wrong with this account? First, it confuses paradigms with policies. A paradigm is a worldview that members of a political community share; a policy is what some portion of them put into place in pursuit of the goals of that paradigm. Of course no single policy will do; indeed the history of the Cold War itself shows an enormous variation in policies, depending on the time, place, and manner of the campaign being waged. But without a shared paradigm, it's hard to know whether the proposed policy is effective when implemented. Without a shared paradigm, the United States is condemned to adopt that most seductive of strategies, the case-by-case approach. This approach is appealing to a powerful state because it obviates the need to make some crucial choices and comforts the decision maker that no precedent is created that will come back to embarrass him. The more powerful the state, the more appealing is this approach, because that state will always appear to prevail. It will always appear to get its way, if it is powerful enough to bring the other states into line. I say “appear to prevail” because it is not so clear what “way” the state, acting on a case-by-case basis, is actually getting when it gets its way. Any road seems like the right one if you don't know where you're going, because if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. So the United States may be said to have had its way when it persuaded the U.N. Security Council to adopt resolutions condemning the Serbs for war crimes, and when it led the Council in declining to prosecute those indicted, when it initially led humanitarian forces into Somalia and when it was the first to evacuate its own troops.
Second, the history of the account given above is saturated with presentism, the view that things have never been quite so much the way they are as they are right now. I doubt the world is, as is so often said, “more complicated, more complex,” because the “world” in that sentence is not the teeming globe whose problems increase as our appreciation of them increases, but instead is the set of values that, problematically, collide in the attempt to allocate our power wisely. Such a world was hardly more complex for President George W. Bush, with vastly more resources, than it was for, say, John Quincy Adams, who was compelled to factor in the consequences of his foreign policy for the domestic crisis caused by slavery and also for our exceedingly precarious international position. President Bush's predecessor had to decide whether to intervene in Kosovo to halt a campaign of ethnic cleansing; Adams had to decide whether to give aid to the South American revolts against the Spanish empire. The decisions are no less complex in either case. Nor was the American position in the Cold War particularly simple either. As I wrote at the time:
No effective American policy can be either pacifist or militaristic: for the U.S. must pursue an accommodation with the Russians in which we do not wholly believe, and at the same time, arm to prevent a conflict in which we do not truly wish to participate.34
Moreover, it is not the end of the Cold War that has transformed the world and left the United States without an objective. Our objective never was simply to defeat the Soviet Union. Georgiy Arbatov's cynical remark, “We have done our worst to you: we have deprived you of an enemy,” is far more reflective of Soviet culture than American. Rather it is the end of the Long War, which was fought over the legitimacy of the democratic system itself and that of its competitors, that has quite appropriately left us with the slight puzzlement one feels after recovery from a long and life-threatening illness. What now?
Finally, it is not “containment” that is the paradigm that has been lost. Containment, composed of that set of policies that sought by defensive alliances to prevent the aggrandizement of the Soviet empire and, where possible, the avoidance of armed conflict in order to enable the internal contradictions of the communist system to manifest themselves and to be contrasted with the marked success of the Western states, was not a paradigm at all. Containment did not provide us with a way of understanding the conflict, but rather with a guiding set of tactics for winning it.
The paradigm by means of which Western statesmen and their publics have understood this century-long struggle is a picture of the State. That paradigm depicts the legitimate state as one that exists to better the welfare of its people. This paradigm distinguishes the nation-state from the state-nation that preceded it, the paradigm of which was a State that existed to mobilize the people for whom it was the sovereign; the state-nation was the state of empires. The nation-state is the state of nationalities.
For most of the twentieth century the picture shared by the American political community has been that of a State created by the self-determination of peoples. This paradigm has not been lost; indeed it is flourishing in many parts of the globe. It fails to provide guidance for U.S. policy because the problems that the American state faces now are not problems of the Long War, whose inception marked the beginning of the widespread transition to the modern nation-state. That paradigm continues to provide the requisite ability to see resemblances, to enable analogies, to structure consensus—if it didn't, then the fruits of the Long War would be incomprehensible to us. But as a consequence of that war, the American state has changed and is changing to reflect those innovations that brought victory. Part of that change, which is already well underway in the United States, will be a paradigm shift in our expectations of the State.
If the Wilsonian paradigm pictured a state that existed in order to better the welfare of its nation, the twenty-first century American state will exist to reflect, implement, inform, and diversify individual choice. It is tempting to say that this is a change from a democratic political matrix of ideas to a capitalist market matrix. But this would mistake the way we deal with problems for the problems themselves: there will always be a political and a market mechanism working in tandem because the kinds of problems states must solve cannot be wholly assimilated into one or the other approach.35 Briefly put, systems for allocation that use political means (like the Selective Service Act) call on a different view of egalitarianism (one man, one vote, for example) than do market systems (like the All-Volunteer Force) with their distinctive view of equal treatment (to each according to his means and ability). One can never be wholly sacrificed to the other in a civilized society. Indeed one might go so far as to say that it is a distinguishing mark of a civilized society that it struggles to maintain many-valued forms of life despite the human condition of scarcity that compels choice among these forms.
What the proffered candidates for the new paradigm in fact offer are policies. Indeed they are the same policies we have more or less been recycling throughout the Cold War, and all sit quite comfortably within the Wilsonian paradigm for the nation-state. All five programs (the New Nationalism, the New Internationalism, etc.) have been, at various times, the implementing techniques for the Cold War policy of containment. Each has risen to temporary ascendancy at the time of a particular Cold War crisis the collapse of the Congo (internationalism), the Cuban Missile Crisis (nationalism), German unification (realism), the war in South Viet Nam (evangelism), the Arab-Israeli War in 1967 (leadership). The reason they are so very unhelpful—ask former President Clinton whether “the New Evangelism” actually helped him decide whether to use force to disarm North Korea's nuclear weapons capability or ask his successor, President Bush, whether “the New Nationalism” has helped him persuade our allies to support missile defense—is precisely because they are representative of a debate whose reason for being has ceased. If we are truly to imagine what a new paradigm might look like, we have to look at the State and the strategic challenges it faces, and determine how it itself has changed. Each of the current elements in the policy portfolio was once a paradigm of statecraft. When the sort of state for which it was essential changed, the paradigm ceased to have the force of a consensus worldview. Paradigms decay into policies.
The security paradigms—the worldviews of statecraft—of any particular era follow the constitutional makeup and outlook of the states of that era. As each form of the state underwent a transition from one constitutional order to another, it added an accompanying paradigmatic outlook. Thus we find in the political papers during the transition from the reign of feudal princes to that of the princely state, a refined and sophisticated development of the balance of power. Machiavelli speaks the idiom of realism. His city-state has his love, “more than his soul,” he once wrote, not his ethnic group, which he seems to pity and even disdain. There is little, if anything, of nationalism in his papers, though he calls upon a “redeemer” for Italy. And there is nothing of praise for internationalist institutions—the Church—nor, of course, for democratic enlargement. The transition to the kingly state retains the concept of the balance of power among its lexicon of policies, but its outlook is one that we would associate today with hegemony. One does not negotiate the compensating system of balances when one hopes to overpower all the competing states. The count-duke Olivares wrote Philip IV:
You should not be content to be king of Portugal, of Aragon and of Valencia and Count of Barcelona, but you should direct all your work and thought… to reduce the realms to the same order and legal systems as Castile. If your majesty succeeds in this you will be the most powerful prince in the world.36
Leadership and dominance are the language of Olivares and Richelieu, just as they are the animating ambitions of the Habsburg emperors, who shattered the princely states of Italy, and the French kings who, in turn, destroyed the hegemonical dreams of imperial Catholicism and whose model inspired Olivares. It would have been idle of Charles V or Maximilian to think in nationalist terms; what nation—Spanish, Austrian, Italian, Burgundian—would it have been? Nor did the great alliance structures of the period presage a system of collective security, precisely because these structures were not institutional in nature, and spawned no congresses or conventions that outlived the conflicts that gave them birth. Even shared religious allegiances could not create an alliance structure that outlasted a particular conflict and placed the security of the whole as its highest responsibility. In the Thirty Years' War, Catholic France proved Catholic Spain's decisive enemy.
It was the transition from kingly states to territorial states that introduced the paradigm of nationalism, as German princes became tied to particular peoples, in the slow working out of the consequences of the principle of cuius regio eius religio. Of course there persisted the continuing policies of the balance of power and of ideological hegemonism: the Treaty of Utrecht specifically cites the balance of power as its goal, and it was the thwarted ambitions of France to achieve hegemony that led to that treaty. But the “anarchic society” is a term one associates with Hobbes, not with his predecessors. It is he who insists that no individual is strong enough to guarantee his own security unaided, and that governments are required to do so in order to settle disputes that are not amenable to direct compromise or agreement among the parties. Conflict among states is the natural environment.
When Rousseau argues that moral rule, in order to be moral, must be self-imposed and thus that the State must originate in self-government, he writes words that to us suggest popular sovereignty, but to his contemporaries would have suggested the transition to the state-nation. For he also writes that the good of each citizen must be distinguished from his temporary desires. The permanent aim of the citizen—the product of his rational, true, higher self—s distinguished from his passing impulses. Thus obedience to the state is an act of allegiance to the true self-will; by this means, in Rousseau's word, “I am forced to be free.” Because this higher good is the same for all rational citizens, their permanent selves are identical and can thus have a single will that is manifested in the State. Although it may shock us to think so, the view that would organize the powers of Europe on precisely the same bases that individual governments are constituted leads directly to Hegel and the deified State. For if states, collectively, are the only means of assuring security and concert, then is not the State the only vehicle for a realization of the nation, its protection and order?
Because these transitions occur in the nature of the State itself, it is hardly surprising that the paradigms of statecraft to which they give birth should reflect ideas about the legitimate constitutional makeup of the State.
Finally we come to the transition from state-nation to nation-state, which gave us the paradigm within which we currently strive. This may be stated thus: The State is constituted to improve the material well-being of the nation. Thus the nation-state bears within its legitimacy the problem of nationalities. Who can claim a state? What is a national people? Suppose the nation is itself divided—what means are permissible to coerce and legitimate unification? This is the program of the evangelist of democracy, and it is rightly associated with Lincoln and Wilson, but also with Otto von Bismarck and Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin and Mikhail Gorbachev. Each of the three political philosophies that contested the Long War had a differ-ent answer to this issue, but for each it was the issue, whether it proposed submerging nationalism in the larger good owed to the international proletariat, or worshipping the nation as the authentic legatee of the volk, or placing at its disposal the procedures of legal process and representation. The United States has lived within a Wilsonian paradigm because that is the American understanding of the basis for the nation-state, but all the Great Powers lived within variations of the nation-state paradigm, whether Hitler's formulation or Stalin's. If, as I argued above, this paradigm has not withered away or been lost with the end of the Long War, why should we expect, much less search for, a new paradigm?
It could be that the vacillation of American foreign policy has no deeper cause than the poverty of its leadership; it may be that the prevailing paradigm is sturdy enough to provide a basis for choosing among competing policies in the various contexts that current affairs bring forth, if only leaders of a higher caliber were doing the choosing. I doubt this: the predecessor to the Clinton administration had no better answers to Haiti, North Korea, Somalia, Yugoslavia, or Ukraine, all of which it made modestly worse by not having a policy and bequeathing acute problems that became chronic to its successor. If, as I believe, President George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker will stand high in America's history for their contributions to unifying Germany and expelling Iraq from Kuwait, it can be seen already that the former was a problem in the endgame of the Long War, and that the latter did not even serve as a precedent for great power action a few months after Baghdad was surrounded when, for only the second time in the history of the U.N., a member state invaded another member state and annexed its territory. Virtually all of the Clinton administration's important achievements in foreign security policy—in China, Haiti, North Korea, Russia, Israel, Ireland, the former state of Yugoslavia—were at a tentative stage when the new Bush administration took office. The best that can be said of the Clinton initiatives is that they promised success even without a shared vision of the American role; the worst, that having lived by the expedient and the impromptu, we will find all these problems so much more troublesome when the arrangements that temporarily quieted them unravel.
I am inclined to believe, however, that it is not simply the absence of a structuring idea, a shared way of understanding the challenges we face, that pervades all the current proposals and disquieting performances, but rather the clinging to a paradigm that has lost its usefulness. The Wilsonian pledge—to make the world safe for democracy—and the Wilsonian understanding—that national democracies offered the best chance to benefit the people of the world—have not failed us; they have succeeded beyond what Wilson would have dared attempt in parts of the globe untouched by the Fourteen Points. They have succeeded in providing political principles that could guide our strategic policies during the Long War in which those principles were contested and sorely tried. Now, with the Long War over, we are so sunk in the habits of strategic thinking that we ceaselessly bat about alternative security policies at a time when we are unable to make the simplest decision when to use force. We have lived in a state of war for so long that, paradoxically, we are unable to make appropriate security plans for peace. The noteworthy feature of the policies that bid to succeed containment is that they, like that policy, assume a certain frame of reference for strategic conflict. Because the roles of history and law have been so well defined during the Long War— indeed they set its terms, because the establishment of legitimacy for state regimes after the collapse of the nineteenth century system was what the Long War sought, by strategic means, to determine—we have become accustomed to think within the context of that war.
In the next chapter I will offer some speculation as to what such a successor paradigm might look like, by examining current contexts analogous to those that provided paradigms to states in the past: the contexts of strategic innovation and constitutional change. Then it may be possible to answer the question posed in the Introduction: How ought the United States and its allies decide when to use force in the international arena?
Preliminarily, however, the first thing one ought to observe about a new archetype is that it will not be something wholly new in form. For the United States, for example, there will be no new constitution. Americans will still be called “Americans,” though what image that word conjures up in their minds may not be the same as came to my father and his contemporaries. Indeed, perhaps the most serious impediment to creative thinking in this area has been our automatic impulse to assume that the next paradigm will involve something like a new kind of state, that is, a reiteration of the European state on a different scale. Articles such as “After the Nation-State, What?” capture this reaction, for they invariably posit a “superstate” or no state at all.37 Moreover, because so many of the challenges facing the nation-state are supranational in character—environmental threats, mass migration, capital speculation, terrorism, and cyber interference, to name just five—and because supranational solutions will be required, many assume that delegations of sovereignty must and will occur. This is a profound misreading of how such integration as has occurred in Europe came about. It is American involvement in Europe, through NATO and the Marshall Plan, that has, paradoxically, provided Western Europe with such capacity as it currently possesses to act as a unified political entity. It is difficult to imagine Britain ever delegating such a role to the bureaucratic machinery of Brussels or to the one state capable of dominating that machinery by virtue of its military and economic potential, Germany. The unification of the German state has, for the foreseeable future, put an end to the unification of Western Europe by creating a power that is actually capable of managing an integrated E.U.
What critics writing in the security area have not contemplated is a change in the constitutional structures of the European (and other) states that does not surrender sovereignty to yet another state, but returns it even more radically to the people themselves.