THE BEST DEFENSE
PRE-EMPTION, UNILATERALISM, HEGEMONY? THERE'S NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN.

 Artículo de  CHRISTIAN D. BROSE  en “The Wall Street Journal” del 31/03/2004

Por su interés y relevancia, he seleccionado el artículo que sigue para incluirlo en este sitio web. (L. B.-B.)

 We all remember hearing it said that the 9/11 attacks had "changed everything," and so it seemed to nearly everyone at the time. Such a consensus guided the Bush administration's bold response to that horrible day.

But ever since--and not least in recent weeks--critics have seized on exactly this consensus-logic to fault the administration for its supposedly callous disregard of sound tradition. The Bush strategy of pre-emption, unilateralism and hegemony--the critics declared--was a radical departure from the policies of deterrence, multilateralism and collective security that had once wisely guided America's foreign relations.

Is this claim true? John Lewis Gaddis, the distinguished Yale historian, had the good idea of asking the question--and answering it with scholarly care. In "Surprise, Security and the American Experience," he offers a judicious mix of analysis and history to argue that, although the Bush administration's response to the terrorist attacks was indeed bold, it was hardly unprecedented.

In fact, the U.S. reacted similarly to the two other major violations of its homeland security: Britain's burning of the Capitol in 1814 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. In these cases, as with the attacks of 9/11, the American response grew out of an innate national belief that, as Mr. Gaddis puts it, "safety comes from enlarging, rather than contracting, its sphere of responsibilities."

John Quincy Adams, as secretary of state under President James Monroe, articulated precisely a strategy of pre-emption, unilateralism and hegemony, culminating in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Britain's attack on Washington nine years earlier had given the young nation a brutal reminder of its own vulnerability. The fundamental threat came from European powers encroaching on America's promised land--not to mention its sphere of influence.

Adams was convinced that, if a power vacuum were to exist along the country's periphery, Europe would fill it if America did not. Thus he defended a pre-emptive invasion by Gen. Andrew Jackson, in 1818, of the "failed state" of Spanish Florida, for its having been the origin of some cross-border Indian raids. Spain was upset, and Britain too, since two of its subjects had been executed by Jackson in the process. But Adams, Mr. Gaddis notes, persuaded the Monroe cabinet "not to apologize for what had happened but rather take advantage of it by claiming the right to act preemptively in such situations." He adds that the annexation of Texas in 1845 and, soon after, the Mexican-American War followed a similar logic, of expanding to incorporate "states that might fail."

The Monroe Doctrine itself--a claim of American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere--was an explicit rejection of balance-of-power politics, and it sheltered America from Old World influences for many decades. To those who interpret the doctrine as a kind of isolationism, Mr. Gaddis responds by noting that Adams was more than willing to slay monsters abroad if the doctrine's claims of hegemony failed.

A century later, Pearl Harbor revealed the U.S. to be again disturbingly vulnerable to the aggression of foreign powers. And again America's natural reaction was to expand its frontiers--by asserting U.S. hegemony from the Pacific to Germany's Fulda Gap. But such an effort required, this time around, that the U.S. compromise some of its unilateral and pre-emptive instincts.

President Roosevelt and America's early Cold War strategists, Mr. Gaddis argues, realized that U.S. power alone, stretched as it was across half the globe, was insufficient to ensure the nation's safety. Raw power had to be transformed into legitimacy and consensus, which meant convincing the world that there were alternatives worse than a partnership in which the U.S. would be dominant. "The American rejection of unilateralism and preemption," Mr. Gaddis writes, was "crucial to bringing about that outcome."

Mr. Gaddis concludes his short book by meditating on a pressing question: Is the Cold War approach to America's interests still relevant in a post-9/11 world? The Bush administration's foreign policy, Mr. Gaddis contends, is closer to Adams's. It seeks a preponderance of power, not a balance of it, and it does not rule out unilateral, or even pre-emptive, means of achieving it. Mr. Gaddis is clearly impressed by the Bush administration's post-9/11 strategy, although he faults its execution and acknowledges that "the grandness of a strategy by no means ensures its success."

It is true that the U.S. can now project its power to Central America, Central Europe and Central Asia with equal effectiveness. But can it transform its surplus of power into a legitimate international order that other states will support for fear of worse alternatives? Mr. Gaddis concludes, logically if disappointingly, that it is simply too early to know.

Mr. Brose is assistant managing editor of The Public Interest. You can buy "Surprise, Security and the American Experience" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.