Security Without War a Post-Cold War Foreign Policy
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SECURITY WITHOUT WAR A POST-COLD WAR FOREIGN POLICY Michael H. Shuman and Hal Harvey With a Foreward by Senator Paul Simon Westview Press Boulder • San Francisco • Oxford You will say at once that although the abolition of war has been the dream of man for centuries, every proposition to that end has been promptly discarded as impossible and fantastic. Every cynic, every pessimist, every adventurer, every swashbuckler in the world has always disclaimed its feasibility....But now the tremendous and present evolution of nuclear and other potentials of destruction has suddenly taken the problem away from its primary consideration as a moral and spiritual question and brought it abreast of scientific realism. It is no longer an ethical equation to be pondered solely by learned philosophers and ecclesiastics but a hard core one for the decision of the masses whose survival is the issue. – General Douglas MacArthur, 1955 CONTENTS Foreward, Senator Paul Simon Acknowledgments Introduction (n/a) Cold War Policies in a Post-Cold-War World Toward a New View of Security Organization of the Book Part I. Redefining Security 1. New Security Threats Military Threats Political Threats Economic Threats Environmental Threats A Comprehensive Policy 2. Limits to Force The Folly of U.S. Intervention The Recent Record for Other Users of Force Force as a Last Resort 3. Dangers of Arms Racing The Controlled Arms Race The War Risks of the Controlled Arms Race Political Insecurity Economic Security Environmental Security Security Without Arms Races Part II. Preventing and Resolving Conflicts 4. Political Roots of Conflict Strong Democracy and Interstate Peace Strong Democracy and Intrastate Peace Promoting Strong Democracy Abroad Promoting Strong Democracy at Home Perpetual Peace 5. Resource Roots of Conflict The Connections Between Resources and Conflict Alternative Resource Policies Security Through Sustainability 6. Economic Roots of Conflict The Bretton Woods Economic Order The Insecurities of Cold War Liberalism Security Through Development Conversion Planning 7. Conflict Resolution Bilateral Cooperation International Norms International Regimes Global Institutions The End of History? Part III. Military Defense Against Aggression 8. Nonprovocative Defense TheEuropean Offensive Arms Race The Advantages of NPD Components of NPD Criticisms of NPD NPD Today 9. Collective Security UN Collective Security Defensive Collective Security 10. Control of Nuclear Weapons Deep Arms Control Denuclearization Making Disarmament Possible Part IV. Implementation 11. Grassroots Participation What Citizens Can Do for Peace Municipal Foreign Policies 12. A Genuine New World Order A Practical Vision A Resilient Security System National and International Savings Other Security Threats Choices for the Future Notes Annotated Bibliography List of Acronyms About the Book and Authors Index ACKNOWLEDGMENTS What should America's security policies look like in the 21st Century? When the three of us came together in the summer of 1986 to address this question, we were struck by the persistence of Cold War thinking. Even though a new, dynamic leader in the Kremlin was beginning to speak about disengagement from Afghanistan, demilitarization of Europe, deep cuts in nuclear weapons arsenals, and a new openness in Soviet life, U.S. security planners continued to assume that the Soviet Union was an expansionist "evil empire" bent on exploiting the Third World and conquering Western Europe. The Cold War was on the verge of ending, and yet the architects of U.S. foreign policy were completely unprepared for change. We set out to examine what this new world might look like. This book was originally scheduled for publication in early 1990. None of us, however, foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rapid toppling of communist dictators in Eastern Europe. By the time the book was about to go to press, our first four chapters had become obsolete. Over the following two years, Michael Shuman reworked, reorganized, and updated the manuscript – not an easy task given the dizzying rate of global change. Germany reunified. The Warsaw Pact dissolved. Iraq took over Kuwait but was ejected by a U.S.- led multinational force. The Soviet Union fragmented into fifteen new nations. Old conflicts in El Salvador, Mozambique, and Cambodia neared settlement, while new wars engulfed former Yugoslavia and Somalia. Today, one fact is finally settled: The Cold War is over. And the United States now has no choice but to formulate a security policy that takes full account of the changed circumstances. What follows are recommendations for a fundamentally new set of principles and policies for U.S. security planners. We owe special thanks to members of the staff and the board of the Rocky Mountain Institute for sponsoring this endeavor long past its initial deadline, for critiquing our work in several invaluable roundtables, and for overseeing the accounting, fund-raising, and other logistics. We are particularly grateful to Amory Lovins, director of RMI, for two careful readings, each of which produced detailed suggestions and questions. We also thank the staff and board of the Center for Innovative Diplomacy for allowing Michael Shuman to spend more than a year transforming the second draft into the completed book, and to the Institute for Policy Studies for providing him with office space and collegial support during this period. We have been fortunate to receive comments and suggestions from dozens of readers. Foremost among them was Ronnie Dugger, publisher of The Texas Observer, who helped to harmonize our three disparate writing styles. Dugger's incisive but polite manner continually helped us to sharpen our arguments without compromising our views. Others who provided especially valuable comments were Len Ackland, Gina Adams, Ruth Adams, Larry Agran, Richard Barnet, John Cavanagh, Daniel Deudney, Daniel Ellsberg, Gordon Feller, Dietrich Fischer, Paul Golob, Mark Harvey, Richard Healey, John Holdren, Gregory Kats, Dominic Kulik, Michael Nagler, Averill Powers, Marcus Raskin, Mark Sommer, Will Swaim, Betsy Taylor, Yevgeni Velikov, Frank von Hippel, Victor Wallis, Barbara Wein, and David Yaskulka. Some of the research for this book would have been impossible without the skilled assistance of Bill Keepin, Rick Heede, and Terry Sabonis-Chafee. Jenny Kassan, Lynda Liu, Michelle Rinker, Leslie Rose, and Anne Wilkas each provided several weeks of essential copy editing and cite-checking. And Ginni Galicinao overcame computer breakdowns, deciphered our hieroglyphic handwritings, and integrated several rounds of changes into the evolving manuscript. Funding for our work was generously provided by the CS Fund (Marty Teitel), the Mertz-Gilmore Fund (Larry Condon and Robert Crane), the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (William Deitel), the General Service Foundation (Marcie and Robert Musser), the Ploughshares Fund (Sally Lilienthal, Wayne Jaquith, and Michael McCally), and Steven Hyde. During the workshops in Aspen, Connie Harvey also generously donated working space and provided comments well beyond the call of her duties as our host. Our deepest thanks go to Carol Bernstein Ferry and W. H. Ferry, to whom we have dedicated our book. When we began this book we were all in our twenties; Carol and Ping convinced us to set aside our doubts caused by our relative youthfulness and take our idealism seriously enough to produce this book. At critical moments, they provided encouragement, sponsored a review forum for our New York funders, and goaded us to wrap up our work and publish it. We have been privileged over the years to share our ideas and engage in sharp dialogues with many hundreds of scholars, military analysts, politicians, journalists, and activists, many of whom we cite in the end notes. We thank them for providing the threads of this tapestry, and we of course absolve them of any responsibility for our own shortfalls or oversights. M.H.S. H.H. D.J.A. PART ONE RETHINKING SECURITY CHAPTER 1: NEW SECURITY THREATS Throughout the Cold War the architects of U.S. foreign policy were able to justify ever greater arms budgets by pointing to the "Soviet threat." The threat of a Soviet first strike against the mainland United States required the continual buildup and modernization of the strategic nuclear arsenal. The threat of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe had to be met through a massive mobilization of infantry, tanks, planes, and tactical nuclear warheads by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And the threat of Soviet subversion in the Third World demanded aid, covert actions, and wars in support of anti-communist governments. Today, however, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rise of a friendlier Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place has thrown U.S. security policy into turmoil. Opinion leaders across the political spectrum -- from Pat Buchanan to SANE/Freeze – are now calling for reduced spending by the Departments of Defense and State.1 Some of the most vociferous anti-Soviet hardliners now believe that the United States has overspent on foreign commitments and underspent on domestic problems. Edward N. Luttwak, who argued for more defense spending in a 1982 article entitled "Why We Need More 'Waste, Fraud & Mismanagement' in the Pentagon,"2 now decries the "Third- Worldization" of the American economy and contends that "the U.S. is wrongly equipped for the new era, with altogether too much of its talent and capital absorbed by the armed forces and military industries."3 But